Fleshless Body: A Phenomenological Perspective on Bodily Extension in Digital Media

Body as a radical reality in human activity is a common thesis in the phenomenological thought, from its origin in the work of Edmund Husserl, in those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry, to postphenomenological currents, including Don Ihde and the American school. As a complementary thesis, they highlight the presence of the body in technologies: its deep interaction and integration, generating a certain bodily extension that makes the user-device an environment of intentional feedback through which flows the matter of the experienced. Through the synthesis of previous techniques, digital media have deepened this capacity for integration: through embodiment and representation, hardware and software, multiple forms of bodily extension can be experienced. From the construction of these alternative corporealities emerges the narrative of a digital body as a 'real body', controlled by us, fully equivalent and similar to our own bodies. In this text we propose a brief analysis of digital corporeality based on phenomenological reflections, especially those around tactile self-perception, as a foundation for a criterion of bodily identity applicable to these technologies and which reclaims the original and carnal experience of the user.