CONTRIBUTI / 7 / Igor Pelgreffi
In this essay the modification of the Habitus, understood as the transformation of our behaviors (individual and collective) will be inquired, where transformation corresponds to new relationships between repetition and difference and it could have both an ethical and a political significance. Habitus and its embodiment participate in both the social sphere and the physical-corporeal sphere: it seems therefore necessary to start from the philosophical analysis of this social-corporeal milieu, in order to investigate the forms of dis-automation in our behavior. After a reconnaissance of the philosophical foundations of Habitus in the Aristotelian notion of hexis, an analysis of Habits concept in Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and Mauss will be done. Social habits can change thanks to the interaction between pattern and corporeity, here in the sense of a pre-logical constitutive inter-corporeity capable to give shape and meaning to Habitus itself. From here, the topic of Second Nature and the transformative demand will be examined, in particular the feasibility of a form of change in the administered world through the thought of Herbert Marcuse. In particular, we will focus on the relations between biology and society, stressing, within an overall political view, how habits could be connected to emancipation’s processes. In the last part of the essay the concept of critical learning of a Habitus will be deepened. The theme of Learning and Dis-learning, understood in a broad sense, can go back to being the unifying centre of the theme of the transformation of the existent. In particular, attention will be paid not to the Habitus that has been already acquired and that is still acting in the bodies and in society, but to early learning phases of new Habitus, that is, to the process of their “incorporation”. The hypothesis is that if this process occurs in learning environments opened to corporeality and to the biological features of the bodies, but also opened with the relational and pre-social aspects – rather than individualizing and only self-performing or self-empowerment ways of being – perhaps it could be possible to find a key to differently think the forms of automation that nowadays deeply shape our lives, both individual then social.
