Open Bodies

In: Paragrana, Band 18, Heft 1, S. 119-131

Abstract

Abstract
On the basis of Patañjali′s classic definition of yoga in Yogasūtra 1.2 yoga usually has been interpreted as a practice to calm down the restless agitations of our embodied minds during their entanglement with the material world. A yoginī thus has to turn her senses away from the outside world in order to unite herself with the absolute that dwells in all of us. In line with David G. White one could call such a classic view of the Indian body a closed model of the same. It is the aim of this text to offer an alternative reading of the Indian body as an open system, in which a body is understood as an entity, always already ex-posed, substantially, toward the world it is surrounded by, so that it is impossible for it to hide itself from the environment it is embedded in and affected by. In the final part of my text I will compare this ancient Indian concept of an open model of bodies with contemporary efforts of Jean-Luc NANCY to induce such an idea in the West by interpreting bodies as a space of a world-wide being-with.