Exposed body and the spectacle of virtuality

Philosophic technology of modernity turned the body into the animal-machine. In the world given to rationalistic thinking the body is still dead, as a mechanism is dead. This kind of death, however, no longer implicates any threat coming from beyond the body (as in the case of telluric and therefore “magical” powers). Rational training is supposed to make the body the perfect tool of reason and science begins to empower such a tool with extensions of which the telescope and the microscope can be seen as the most paradigmatic. But there is irony waiting at the end of this road pursued by modernity, whose project is to discipline the rational body and make its functioning strict: the servant of reason “magically” disappears on the way to its mastering - modern physics does not operate in the world analogous to the body of senses, most of the molecular processes can be described only mathematically, that is, by purely formal language of categories of the mind. Hence the famous question asked by some analytic philosophers about the relationship between the table (or the body) of our everyday experience and the table (or the body) of modem physics. But is it really an analytic question? Doesn’t it smack of some “tellurism”? Shouldn’t it be asked rather differently? [fragm. tekstu]