Embodied reading. The problem of environment in analytical anthropology by Valery Podoroga

Abstract

The article explores the theme of environment in Valeriy Podoroga’s analytical anthropo­logy, offering an enactivist reading of his “The Metaphysics of Landscape”. The analyti­cal strategy of “The Metaphysics of Landscape” is contrasted with that of later works such as “Mimesis” and “Anthropograms”. Whereas in the later works the analytical tech­niques are set by a variety of optical concepts, metaphors and images, thus representing a strategy of “exclusionary observation”, in “The Metaphysics of Landscape” the analysis follows rather the movement of observer’s body included in the environment and aims at the reconstruction of an integrated, sensorimotor, yet imaginary experience. Three frag­ments of Podoroga’s text, reconstructing imaginary bodies and landscapes embedded in the works of Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, are interpreted as three different ways of coupling body and environment, generating three different models of bodily-environmental experience. Finding the correspondence of the fragments of the descrip­tion of this experience to some key points of enactivist epistemology and aesthetics, the author shows that the enactivist approach makes it possible to formalize those tech­niques of analysis that allow us to discover the rules of dependence between some im­plicit modus of writing and the bodily experience of reading.