Repeated bodily practices form the self rather than merely express it

Evidence

The difference between these two views turns upon contrastive understandings of the relationship between bodily behavior and the pious self: for Amna, performative behavior may signify a pious self but does not necessarily form it. For the women I worked with, bodily acts (like weeping in prayer), when performed repeatedly, both in public and private, endowed the self with certain qualities: bodily behavior was therefore not so much a sign of interiority as it was a means of acquiring its potentiality. I use the term “potentiality” here in its Aristotelian meaning, in which it does not suggest a generic faculty or power, but is linked to the abilities one acquires through specifi kinds of training and knowledge. This usage of “potentiality” implies that in order to be good at something one undergoes a teleological program of volitional training that presupposes an exemplary path to knowledge-knowledge that one comes to acquire through assiduous schooling and practice. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1022

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Aristotle’s ‘potentiality’ as acquired through training, not a generic innate power — key to the whole theory of performativity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of sign vs. formation — bodily acts as a means of acquiring interiority rather than expressing it — reorients how one thinks about habit, ritual, and self-cultivation broadly.
• XREF: connects to: Repetition acts as the psyche’s default emergency homeostasis when pleasure alone cannot manage trauma — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4054; Every act expresses the totality of the self rather than prior causes; Everyday bodily actions resist full description yet come to us effortlessly — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 727 (+12 more)