The Oneiric-Technical Chiasm. A Phenomenological Account of VR Embodiment

VR systems have often been accused of reinforcing «the rationalist dream of the disembodied mind, part of the long Western tradition of body denial» (Penny, 1994). Such a perspective precisely insists on the constitutive disembodiment of VR experience. Similarly, imagination and, even more radically, dreams have often been dismissed as disembodied experiences, even within the phenomenological tradition. Against this assumption and based on a confrontation with recent accounts of dreaming (Windt 2015) and VR experiences (Besmer 2015; Buongiorno 2019; Heft 2023), the paper argues for the embodied character of both experiences. Drawing on Husserl’s notion of Ichspaltung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insights on body-schema plasticity (2012; 2020), the contribution delves deeper into the peculiar modes of embodiment prompted by these experiences, uncovering unprecedented analogies. Considering the long-standing link between dreams and media (Morin 2005; Grossi 2021), the paper proposes to understand it as a chiasm, and as a theme accommodating multiple variations, not least that introduced by VR.