In my introduction, I wrote about the crucial contribution that the space in-between has to offer. In addition, in leaving the term “Leib” un-translated, somewhat stranded without a companion, I move from being primarily the researcher and writer of this study to being a translator, a position that Jacques Derrida describes as “beautiful and terrifying responsibility” (Derrida 20l3: 350). In doing so, I yield transparent the power writers in any language hold, as they utilize words and thus create and support certain readings and interpretations of realities (Venuti 1998).
[49] Taking a lead from Manzei’s remarkable work on the relationship between body and Leib, as it came to matter within her analyses of medical interventions (such as those involved in organ transfers); a theoretical approach to the understanding of bodies in biomedicine must pay attention to the non-comparable fabric of individual experiences and be adaptable to this premise (Manzei 2003). Out of these thoughts, questions that arose for me included: How should I work with the spoken data I have collected? How can I read and work with texts written or translated into two different languages in different cultural and disciplinary contexts and possibly times, yet which are all concerned with what is referred to when using the term body?
As the reference to the composition of the conversation guidelines in the methodology chapter of this study will illustrate, the development of the theoretical matrix that surrounds and grounds this study is not only linked to my own observations of public reflections as presented above, but furthermore to the content of the conversations carried out for this project. In my conversations, what (amongst other things) became interesting to me were narratively structured explanations, used to explain the stream of thought referred to in answers. In asking about the (term) body (most of the times at the start of a conversation), I placed the reflections of my conversational partners into the historical situatedness or context of the present. What does “body” mean (that is, here and now, referred to in our conversation)? Working with bilingual material has, from my point of view, the potential to bring yet a different awareness of the inability to ask identical questions even when using identical words (with the additional complexity that different cultural and social meanings may be embedded in the same word). Hence, even if questions are translated, cultural and social translations vary, with cultural referring more to culturally specific notions of terms, the historicity of the same, and taboos related to them, and with social referring to the social embeddedness of terms, that is, the kind of relationship between different conversational actors which is created through the use of specific terms, the possible social rules being expressed using a term, and so forth.
Conversation partners’ reflections in response to the introductory question (used to open the conversations), allowed, in my understanding, insights into culturally informed processes of understanding, categorizing, and using the word “body,” which, referring to Emily Martin, can be seen as allowing an for an initial idea about the individual experience of the body (Martin 1989). Martin emphasizes the circularity and co-constitutiveness of language and experience, making it possible to think about language as having the potential to change experience (ibid). Hence, even if asked about the terms “body” or “Körper,” following Martin, the reflection on language concerning body or Körper and the individual or social experience of the same can been seen to be reciprocal activities.
[50] Writing about the interdependent relationship between language, meaning and experience, philosopher Paul Ricoeur underlines that “to bring it [experience] to language is not to change it into something else but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become itself’ (Ricoeur 1981: 115). Language co-constitutes experience in that it is dynamic in the sense that it generates “making of the world” to one’s self and to others. Promoting the idea of the intertwining of language and experience into research as it relates to motherhood, Maria Wolf states that: “[…] die Mutter als lebendiges Subjekt, bleibt in Bezug auf die Subjektentwicklung bis heute Kreuzungspunkt zwischen Körper und Sprache”35 (Wolf 2008: 741). As will be explained further in the methodology chapter of this study, becoming or being a mother also refers, in my work, to women’s capacities to reproduce and to intimate states in (for the most part) women’s lives as these states relate to reproduce and to mother. In this sense, Wolf’s statement, in my reading of it, can be opened up to speak to (not only) women, rather than to a limiting sense of “mother.”
2.3 Body/Körper and Leib – Historical Connections – Philosophical and Religious Framings
“So what is Leib?
What is this
concept,
which has not entered our language or thinking?"
(MacDonald 2007: online source).
“The (untranslated) term Leib
opens up a hidden dimension
of the body as individual.
It invites us to keep an awareness of life
in which perceptions, feelings, emotions and
the evolving thoughts and considerations are all
intimately grounded; it is through my Leib36 that I am inserted into this world; I am Leib-in-the-world” (Ots 1994: 117).
A number of scholars have worked on distinguishing between constructions and historical connections of the Leib and/or Körper (Turner 2006, Ots 1994, [51] Schaufler 2002, Alloa et al 2019). When examining the linguistic etymology of the terminology, one can see the relation between Leib and the momentum of life. The word “Leib” can be traced back to the (“middle high”) German word “lip,” which is closely related to the Dutch word “lijt,” the Swedish word “liv,” and the English word “life” (Hauser-Schäublin et.al 2001, Radvila 2000). Leib, therefore, belongs to the semantic field of “life.” In the German language, this meaning is still embedded within the word. As a German midwife I spoke with pointed out to me, the circumference of the female body during pregnancy is called “Leibesumfang,” although the word “Leib” from her perspective is used less and less in prenatal care. The “Leibesumfang” is measured at the area of the female body where new life “is growing” and it is as such subject to processual change.
The word “Körper” is only provable in Germany in the thirteenth century. Its root is the Latin word “corpus,” which meant body, mass or corporate body (Hauser-Schäublin et al. 2001). The German Leib-Philosopher Hermann Schmitz explains Leib and Körper by stating that leiblich is that which locality is absolute, whereas körperlich is that which locality is relative, and mental is that which is unlocatable (Schmitz 1965). Following Schmitz, Merleau-Ponty, points out that one is “its” Leib; the Leib is the viewpoint of the subject (Gesichtspunkt) to the world (Merleau-Ponty 1966). Every apperception moves outwards from a Leib, which is a verleiblichtes subject and, thus, has its own accommodation (Räumlichkeit) (Merleau-Ponty 1966).37 Understanding that body is, according to Hermann Schmitz, what I can experience as my body using my senses (like with other objects), in contrast, Leib is what I can feel about myself without using my senses, one example being pain (Schmitz 1967). Many phenomenological approaches foreground the relation of the self to its Umwelt (Environment). Edmund Husserl, recognized as the founder of phenomenology, summarizes that Körper belongs to a concept of the world (Weltbegriff) that includes the universe as something that can be objectified through science (Husserl 1946, 1998). Körper, thus, constitutes the opposite concept to the Lebenswelt (experienced world of the individual), the core of which is the subjective existential orientation (Befindlichkeit) and the Leiblichkeit (ibid). Thus, Körper can be understood as being part of the world of things, but not of the primary world of experience, which constitutes Leib. As Richard Zaner puts it: “The body-proper38 is the matrix of concrete human existence; it is the ‘center of actions’, that which places me ‘at’ or ‘in’ the midst of things; it is that ‘by means of which’ there is a ‘world’ at all for me; […] as such, my [52] body proper at once exposes me to my Umwelt39 and opens up my Umwelt to me as a complex concatenation (Verkettung) of possible ways of acting, doing and being” (Zaner 2012: 240).
Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin et al. offer a number