The body’s felt mediation with itself is the prototype of every relation to alterity

Evidence

In this examination [i.e. in that discrimination which is the act of sensation or feeling], we do not relate ourselves directly to the Other, but mediately. Thus, for example, touch is the mediation between myself and the Other, since though it is distinct from these two sides of the opposition, yet at the same time it unites them… . This linking of the soul with itself is the progress made by the soul, which in waking had divided itself, by its transition to sensation. … The relation between the soul and its corporeality, posited here, now appears to be the prototype of all relation to alterity: What the sentient self finds within it is, on the one hand, the naturally immediate, as ‘ideally’ in it and made its own. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Sensation as mediation defines the primary template of self-other relations — directly relevant to how enmity could be read as an interiorized, bodily-feeling structure rather than an external social target.