Self-Bounding

A Selfbound Mode of BecomingAs pointed out in chapter 1, I coin the term selfbound to articulate the mode of becoming constrained by the awareness that experiential occurrences are personal-that is, they are bound to a living body in a self-specifying sense, a sense that matters to the constitution of self-identity.This self-specifying awareness, the product of self-bounding, is a distinctive characteristic of the modes of becoming we call human.As we discussed, no other animal, or form of organized matter, can be argued to be aware of itself as a living occurrence in such a self-bounding way-which is why I suggested that human self-becoming pre sents us with an anomaly in the evolutionary continuity of consciousness (see also chapters 1 and 3).It is common, especially in the modern world, to identify and designate those bounding living occurrences as selves or persons and try to posit them (when the necessary linguistic means are available) through the use of personal and possessive pronouns such as "I," "me," and "mine."It is also customary to think of the human body, which enacts our unique sensorimotor experiential perspective on the world, as the locus of self-that is, to think that we are a body and that we have a body and to see the self as something located within that body, or to describe this intimate association between the self and the body (especially the brain) as an identity.Indeed, under normal conditions, human subjective experience of the lived body (Leib) is perceived as being coextensive with the organic body (Körper).The borders of the lived body and the physical body spatially correspond. 1 Contrary to this view, the main argument of this chapter is that human subjectivity, as the product of enactive in/dividuation, cannot be enclosed 8 Self-Bounding