With a Heideggerian play on words, one might say that we are disposed because we are exposed. It is because the body is (to unequal degrees) exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death, and therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and nothing is more serious than emotion, which touches the depths of our organic being) that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of which they are the incorporated form.

The relation to the world is a relation of presence in the world, of being in the world, in the sense of belonging to the world, possessed by it, in which neither the agent nor the object is posited as such. The degree to which the body is invested in this relation is no doubt one of the main determinants of the interest and attention that are involved in it and of the importance - measurable by their duration, intensity, etc. of the bodily modifications that result from it. (This is what is forgotten by the intellectualist vision, a vision directly linked to the fact that scholastic universes treat the body and everything connected with it, in particular the urgency of the satisfaction of needs and physical violence, actual or potential, in such a way that the body is in a sense excluded from the game.)

We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this permanent confrontation, which may be more or less dramatic but is always largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions with the environment. One thinks, obviously, especially after the work of Michel Foucault, of the normalization exerted through the discipline of institutions. But it would be wrong to underestimate the pressure or oppression, continuous and often unnoticed, of the ordinary order of things, the conditionings imposed by the material conditions of existence, by the insidious injunctions and ‘inert violence’ (as Sartre puts it) of economic and social structures and of the mechanisms through which they are reproduced.