Abstract

Starting from Heidegger’s notion of deconstruction, understood as a critical operation aimed at questioning the origins of our most obvious philosophical concepts to free us from tradition in its solidified and fixed aspects and to pave new paths for thought, and by placing Heideggerian deconstruction in contrast with that proposed by Derrida, the author considers a concrete exercise in deconstruction concerning the notion of the body. At first glance, no one doubts that the human being possesses a body, as opposed to a soul or a spirit. However, if we go back to archaic Greek civilization, this apparent self-evidence dissipates, as the sôma there does not designate a part of the human being, ideally separable from another part, but rather the human being itself in its indivisible presence in the world. The question, therefore, is to determine through which stages the notion of the body, which has become central to our culture, took shape, and how this genealogy can, in turn, illuminate a phenomenology of the ‘body.’