there is nothing to decipher in a body, dixit nancy

To see bodies is not
to unveil a mystery; it is seeing what is there to be seen, an image, the crowd
of images that the body is, the naked
image, stripping areality bare. Images of this kind are foreign to any
imagining and any appearance—and any interpretation as well, any deciphering.
There is nothing to decipher in a body—except for the fact that the body's
cipher is the body itself, not ciphered, just extended. The sight of bodies
does not penetrate anything invisible: it is the accomplice of the visible—of the
ostentation and extension that the visible is.
Complicity, consent: the one who sees compears
with what he sees. That is how they can be discerned, according to the
infinitely finite measure of just clarity.




Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Richard A. Rand.