This article lays the ground for a sensuous appreciation of both the human body and the physical world. Drawing on the biographical account of the climber's embodied reflection of rock-climbing, the `climbing body' highlights our overwhelming tactile and kinaesthetic engagement with the phenomenal world. I Begin by emphasizing the need to consider the organic nature of human being, that we should understand how the awareness of death and our consequent sense of mutability provide a significant moment to remember the body. (...) I highlight how this might be achieved through the practice of adventure climbing. The increasing denial of the body's organicity, its mutability - perhaps a key impulse of modernity - is thereby usurped. This is followed by a structure of thought, based around the work of Georg Simmel, conveying the radical materiality of the phenomenal world. In doing so, I highlight the propensity of the environment to inscribe itself upon the human body. This idea is brought alive during the second half of the article, which focuses upon the climbing body and, in particular, the hands of the climber. As they navigate vertical ground climbers are guided by the sense of touch in order to `make sense' of the world. The climbing body orientates itself through tactile navigation: by feeling or grasp-ing its way through the world. To engage with the world tactually is to situate oneself consciously in that world and to have a potentially unmediated relationship with it. In doing so, the climber opens up the possibility for a corporeal reconceptualization of modernity. (shrink)

According a to a certain position formulated within the philosophical school of post-structuralism, attempts to reconstruct forms of consciousness are themselves textual fabrications, and should be relinquished in favour of other, more 'textual' forms of analysis. This paper argues that phenomenologists should not reject this critique outright, for it compels them to think more carefully about the appropriateness of particular terminologies for the representation and comprehension of particular life-worlds. To this end, the vocabulary of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is delineated and considered (...) as to its appropriateness for the study of sportive lifeworlds in particular, and that of soccer play more particularly. A Merleau-Pontian analysis of the latter is offered, and it is contended that whilst certain problems are attendant upon its use, it nonetheless stands as a vital resource for understanding such a form of activity. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 2, Edition 2 September 2002. (shrink)