Through the Body: Narrative, Vulnerability, and the Virtual Potential of Lived Experience

Abstract

Narrative is often said to be reparative, yet this claim remains conceptually unstable so long as narration is treated as a post-hoc representation of an already constituted experience. Drawing on a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of the lived body, this article argues that narrative is better understood as an embodied practice of expression through which temporal and affective orientations are rearticulated from within lived experience itself. To substantiate this view, I develop an account of embodiment in terms of virtuality, understood as the body’s structural openness and non-coincidence with itself across time. On this basis, I show that vulnerability is not a contingent disturbance but a constitutive exposure of embodied life, while fracture names one possible configuration of this openness when habitual orientations collapse. Narrative repair, accordingly, is neither the restoration of an original wholeness nor the closure of vulnerability, but the situated emergence of a renewed practical, temporal, and relational orientation. Finally, I argue that reparative rearticulation is intrinsically intercorporeal: because narrative expression is addressed and received within shared worlds, its transformative force depends on fragile and contestable conditions of recognition and response.