There was never a state in our lived-experience of familiarity where that which-is has not been given to us. The givenness of that which-is maintains itself because of the position it occupies in assigning itself to the extended chain of discursive world as the always-already and the not-yet. That is, whether in the business of analysis or that of everyday casual going about, the point of departure has always been the background of the-given which neither require proof nor is in need of an explicit encounter rather has an already-been-there structure that make up our intelligibility. Intelligibility that which is in demand for something to be or make sense to us has also a peculiar underside where it folds upon itself making way to the emergence of the estranging of the strange. The not-yet of intelligibility that negates the-given with its constant deferral is the strange in its pure form. It is long held tradition solidified in common sense parlance to locate the real in what is immediately “present” to perception with a little mediation as possible, which is undertaken in its purest fashion by the function of the mind. This longing for the unfallen world, which tragically led to privileging things directly perceived over the words that presumably stands for them, rendered the mediating system of language irrelevant, reducing it to a mere tool of communication of ideas. But the ever staring gap announced by the insistence of the word resists and at the same time displaces the transparent immediacy of a thing or its meaning. That which inhabits the space of this abyss is the strange.
Intelligibility, discursively constructed, far from being innate, is precisely the opposite in the sense that it is something we are thought, assimilated or rather to which we belong-in so far as we understand and make sense. We are given away or delivered to the pervasive ways of understanding things as if we already find ourselves having the competence to make sense. To even go further, we never really do encounter entities so much as they encounter us in our being-structured-ness in such a way as to be affected by them. There is a sense of belongingness, a feeling of at home-ness that we enjoy in everything we do and with everything we use. We are attuned or configured in such a manner that affectivity in the form of rhythm and discordance is made possible. The strange, however, is that which doesn’t squarely fit into the system or, to put it differently, resists appropriation in the order of things. The strange is not the result of forces that impinge upon our “sacred reality” from outside rather an immanent distancing, an opaqueness which threatens to disintegrate our reality from within. It is the result of the structure of the familiar itself.
But what is that which is thrown into the world of discourse? Or rather where does this all-encompassing, pervading, inescapable milieu which embodies the familiar and the strange resides? In the body of course! The body, not in the sense of bone structure or the organization involved in the nervous system, but in the sense of that the body is contorted and subdued to be at the mercy of language, at the disposal of signification. The body I live as my own and through which I have a world, is situated in the horizon which serves as a kind of background, rich beyond bounds and cannot be fully brought to fore, for it retreats to supply the absent groundless field through which the present is. It is precisely the body which is articulated and symbolized to the point of acquiring a kind of competence and malleability imbued with skills and ways of behaving. Such activities should be granted the status of self-interpretative enterprise or taking a stand on ourselves and who we are, ushering a sort of familiarity with the structure that constitute us.
The body functions in accordance with a pattern, an ordered sequence which dates back before the coming into existence of the body as such. Thus, the order or rather the Symbolic Other structures or naturalizes the booming-buzzing-confusion into the body and its parts, and it is precisely because of such assimilation that we get to articulate a “chaotic” state prior to such molding, which further affirms the notion that we are in language even in the failed attempt to leave its presence. Dialectically put, our body is our own and at the same time, even radically, not our own to begin with. The ultimate tragedy is realizing that even our body which we call our own in our relentless endeavor to familiarize its strangeness doesn’t belong to us and will never truly be ours. The continuation of a linear progression of familiarity is interrupted by the abrupt blockage of the strange.