Violence and Relational Existence: Its Significance for our Understanding of Trust as Fundamentally Intercorporeal

Abstract

While the subject of trust has received increased philosophical attention of late, and phenomenological accounts have been developed, what continues to be overlooked is the role of the lived body in our trusting behaviour. While approaches to trust that emphasize its intersubjectivity imply openness and what MerleauPonty understands as the reversibility of the lived body, this intercorporeal experience is not directly explored. In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body - in particular, his account of perception as embodied, and thus having motor-perceptual implications, and the body-subject as emerging through and remaining open to the dimension of depth - is crucial to understanding trust.