Heidegger’s emphasis on thinking in the middle voice carries significant possibilities for thinking beyond the subject–object distinction that has contributed to thinking in terms of a separation of the human subject and the world. It allows for a sense of the happening of things and events “in themselves.” It works powerfully in Heidegger’s attempt to think non-subjectively in the attuned exposure to what eventuates without having to reinstall a human subject either as the actor or as the passive recipient of an action. Heidegger’s discipline of thinking with or out of attunements in attentiveness to the arising of sense thus also is a discipline of thinking in the middle voice. It opens up venues for what one may crudely call a more “embodied” thinking, or perhaps better said, “bodily thinking.” Such a thinking does not take an observing or objective stance toward what it questions (which would imply thinking in terms of active or passive relations) but questions out of its attuned exposure to what is in question, such that attunements are like connective tissues through which we are bodily exposed and bound to what we question.
Heidegger himself famously wrote very little about the human body, a fact that has much to do with his effort to think human being not in terms of an entity but in terms of how it happens or how we find ourselves to be (ecstatically projected into possibilities of being into which we find ourselves always already thrown, always already being with others, things, and events in the openness of a world). In the Zollikon Seminars (1959–1969) Heidegger extends to the human body his effort to think human being not as an entity, by approaching the human body as lived body (Leib) (which is to be distinguished from Körper, the body understood as an object) in terms of its Leiben, its “bodying-forth.” This bodying-forth is fundamentally ecstatic, in Heidegger’s account. The limit of bodying-forth is not the skin, not even what lies within the scope of our senses, but rather the horizon of being in which I dwell (ZS 87). Heidegger develops bodying-forth in terms of the spatiality of our being and not by questioning further the relation between attunement and bodying-forth. He does, however, indicate that the way we “take place” or are spatial, the way we body-forth, is determined by language and that language is “also” a bodily phenomenon, for instance in hearing: “The listening to something is in itself the relation of bodying forth to what is heard” (ZS 96–97). If we consider the relation between language and attunement as indicated earlier, we can intuit how Heidegger opens a window to think (with and beyond what he writes) the relation between the lived body and language through the notion of attunement. We might explore how we find ourselves attuned not only in relation to how we find ourselves addressed or claimed by something or a sense of being, but also how this being claimed and being attuned configures our lived bodies, orients, and directs them, opens them up and lets them stay concealed; or—vice versa—how the dispositions of our