NULLpunkt

Not so much a starting point as a zero-point...

Further texts on Nullpunkt

For Husserl, the body is the zero-point, or nullpunkt, through which all spatial orientations are understood and, indeed, the null point of all experiential orientations, including the spatial and the temporal, as Leder, cited by Laughlin and Throop (2009: 140), indicates:

"Working with Husserl’s notion of the lived body as an experiential ‘‘null-point’’ (nullpunkt), Leder points out that the body and its various sensory modalities always holds the preeminent status of ‘‘an absolute ‘here’ around which all ‘theres’ are arrayed’’ (1990: 13)."

Furthermore, such embodiment is intercorporeal, following the philosopher Gail Weiss’ explanation of ‘‘intercorporeality’’, as quoted by Sigurdson (2008: 27):

‘‘To describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies.’’

In other words, the intercorporeal is always already intersubjective; and the world to which that embodiment (human-human, human-nonhuman, human-other-than-human, human-more-than-human) belongs is animic.

In short, it is not a subjective idealism which is being proposed through the use of the term nullpunkt, or zero point.

The work begun by Husserl in understanding the role of the body in human lived experience, perception and consciousness is continued by Merleau-Ponty, for whom,

"...the body brings me into a spatial world in a special way. I discover things as left and right, tall and small, etc., all on the basis of my orientation wherein my body occupies the 'zero point', as Husserl had already described in Ideas II." (Moran, 2000: 424)

References

Laughlin, C. D. and Throop, C. J. (2009). Husserlian meditations and anthropological reflections: toward a cultural neurophenomenology of experience and reality. Anthropology of Consciousness, 20 (2), pp. 130–170.

Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology, London: Routledge. Sigurdson, O. (2008).

Sigurdson (2008). How to speak of the body. Studia Theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology, 62 (1), pp.25-43.

Weiss, G. (1999). Body images: embodiment and intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, p.5.