BY EMANUELE COCCIA
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher. Since 2011 he has been Associate Professor at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia and Harvard. He is the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018; first published in French as La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Rivages, 2016), Le Bien dans les choses (Rivages, 2013) and La Vie sensible (Rivages, 2010). He also was involved in the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s exhibition Trees (2019).
BY EMANUELE COCCIA
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher. Since 2011 he has been Associate Professor at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia and Harvard. He is the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018; first published in French as La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Rivages, 2016), Le Bien dans les choses (Rivages, 2013) and La Vie sensible (Rivages, 2010). He also was involved in the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s exhibition Trees (2019).
BY EMANUELE COCCIA
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher. Since 2011 he has been Associate Professor at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia and Harvard. He is the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018; first published in French as La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Rivages, 2016), Le Bien dans les choses (Rivages, 2013) and La Vie sensible (Rivages, 2010). He also was involved in the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s exhibition Trees (2019).
BY EMANUELE COCCIA
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Alchemy is the attempt to build a world in which everything is the mind and the hand of something other. A world where everything breathes and yearns in unison. From this point of view, from the inside of matter, time and the world take on a different appearance. History in the proper sense no longer exists. Neither does the idea of one unique planet, one true planet. There is only desire.
These words were made with my own two hands.
For all words are artifacts. Literally. I had to scribble in ink every single one of these strange shapes, which are unlike any other shapes I see in the world. I had to trace with a pen these jumbled, confusing lines across many sheets of paper, in the margins of books often, and on dirty, crinkled scraps sometimes. Their facture, however, was still imperfect. I had to keep using my hands so that the words would actually come into being. Keep typing characters on an extremely complex material object made of rare-earth metals and powered by an energy I cannot provide myself. These actions, though, are not enough by themselves. They have to be interpreted and translated by other manufactured devices so that words can appear on the screen.
This was not sufficient. The words that appeared on the screen had to be transmitted to another device, they had to be translated and physically transformed into electrical impulses running through silver and copper cables. The device transforms these words/signals into printed characters: dark silhouettes standing out against the whitish cellulose surface. We tend to see them as immaterial entities magically popping out of our brains, in a spiritual flux capable of magically transporting them from one place to the other, from one subject to the other, without ever touching, not even superficially, the flesh of the world. Nonetheless, words are also bits of matter, each and every time. They are statuettes, aniconic sculptures we carry with – and within – us, and trade among ourselves. They might be constituted of very different elements and molecules; ultimately, they all amount to shapes, formed out of some of the elements that make up the Earth.
Producing words is therefore always akin to modifying the state of things, manipulating the world, transforming the world beyond any possibility of restoration. There is absolutely no difference between writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, building a computer, cooking, assembling wine, playing a musical instrument or handling a shovel. We seldom remember that speaking always means that we have to use our hands.
This is not only true of the written word. The spoken word is no less a production than its counterpart: it is also made and manufactured. And it is equally grounded in materiality, for speaking with our tongues relies above all on activating parts of our bodies, on using them to modify air flow and pressure so as to produce actual sounds. Tongues are merely unrefined hands, equipping oral cavities. It must be said once more that to speak is to act; to speak is to do something with the matter of the world, even if the resulting artifacts are not very durable and seem to vanish after a few seconds. As would lines drawn in the air, ripples on the surface of a pond caused by stones thrown by unknown hands, or sandcastles overrun by the silence of the sea. We only started speaking after making our tongues appendages to our hands.
Each word spoken is made by hand. Each word spoken alchemises the world.
We forget the hand.
The hand is omnipresent in what we do—in what we are as well. Exactly like the brain, no less than it. We divide the body into separate areas, each one invested with distinct power and value. Dividing the body, we unjustly divided life into forces that in our eyes seem incompatible; knowledge on one side and action on the other. But our bodies are not really made of organs. Living bodies are built up according to geographical divides that do not follow anatomical continuity and its connections: bodies only become visible through use. It is impossible to understand what an eye is if the foot remains out of sight: both exist in relation to the other, in service to the other. We only have eyes because we can move around on our feet. It is impossible to think about an ear without thinking about the back: half of our body is lacking any kind of perceptual instrument precisely because our ears allow us to anticipate and imagine what is happening behind our backs. It would be absurd to think about the mouth without considering the hand: both the internal and the external structures of the former presuppose the existence of something else to help us grab and process food.
Body parts are very much interdependent, and inseparable one from the other; explanations for these facts lie both within personal histories and evolutionary history. Our whole body—including our brain—is the result of one unique cell first chiseling out of itself a shape, giving form by its own means to the tiniest part: each section of our body stems from this primary unity. This is entirely sufficient to show how ludicrous if not fantastical it would be to posit that human intelligence is circumscribed to one specific location in the body at the expense of all others. Indeed, since the initial organism took the decision to use part of its body to think, it already revealed itself as intelligent, conscious, thoughtful. In creating and constructing the brain, the embryo (and therefore the entire body) proves to be more intelligent than the brain.
The hand and the brain are simply two pieces of the same whole; this is even more convincingly demonstrated by the evolution of human bodies through time. As André Leroi-Gourhan explains, “At the level where the divide between the animal and vegetal realms remains unclear, at the level of urchins and holothurians, beings have to choose between two modes of relating to their external environment; some stay still and watch the eatable universe gravitate around them, waiting for chance to put part of it in range of their buccal orifice: their structure is not far from those of wheels or thickets; others actively go toward their feed, searching, hunting, probing: their inner organism is built round a longitudinal axis. Axial symmetry is present in the lower stages of invertebrates and remains the exclusive structural scheme of vertebrates” (André Leroi-Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris, no. 32, 1956).
However, establishing such an axis presupposes dividing functional responsibilities according to two distinct poles, in other words a “double technical field”: “That of snouts and that of hands. Throughout the history of mammals, who started developing at the end of the secondary era, a remarkable proportional balance can be observed, swinging from the technical field of the face to that of the hand, as if the equilibrium between the needs of each species and the technical means required to fulfill those needs had to be reached in-between the two poles of the anterior field” (ibid.).
The hand and the face are parts of the same whole, within which they were both able to liberate each other: the hand has been freed of its main task of being a driving force, and in turn has freed the face of having to grasp reality in an instant. This is precisely the reason they must both be addressed in the same breath. To simultaneously reflect upon the hand and the notion of sensibility, however, does entail relinquishing the dichotomies of thought versus technique, action versus contemplation, speech versus the material transformation of the world. As Leroi-Gourhan explains it, “This relationship between manual technicality and language—somewhat caused by an evolutionary process that can be traced back to the first vertebrates—is definitely one of the most satisfying aspects of paleontology and psychology, for they both reestablish the profound connections between gesture and speech, between communicable thought and the creative activity of the hand” (ibid.). We must transform reality in order to reflect upon it—each thought being a chemical reaction that irrevocably changes both the shape and the flesh of the Earth. The phenomenon we call “consciousness” is not strictly mental or internal. It is a vortex rising in the actual space in-between our hands and our brains: a whirlpool turning the world into something knowable and putting all knowledge within reach of our hands.
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher. Since 2011 he has been Associate Professor at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia and Harvard. He is the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018; first published in French as La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Rivages, 2016), Le Bien dans les choses (Rivages, 2013) and La Vie sensible (Rivages, 2010). He also was involved in the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s exhibition Trees (2019).