Bodies beyond transcendences: can we situate ourselves in a partial way?

Abstract

In "The Order of Things", Foucault (2000) mentions that the tripartite knowledge of the Renaissance leads to the binary knowledge of modernity, from the 17th century onwards. Such binarism is constituted by the perception of a subject and what is perceived by him. The third part, the world, has no place in this type of knowledge, except as an object to be justified by perception. Being an object among others in perceptual analysis, the world bows to the subject, so that the subject's body is nothing more than a support for rationality. As Foucault (2000) states in his book, the constitution of this knowledge impacted all subsequent centuries, and continues to do so. If it is reason that must constitute the world as if it were outside it, then it stands as a transcendence, that is, the sui generis property of a subject that seems to be beyond this world. How can we dilute such transcendence? How does the notion of a situated body constrain such a disposition?