Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal

by Vicki Kirby

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Gender

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a decade after the death of Jacques Derrida, the insights of deconstruction have now been said to be digested and assimilated. Ubiquitous across the academe, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ is everywhere decried, while the ‘play of différance’ is everywhere affirmed. Yet Vicki Kirby is not so convinced of this apparently happy state affairs. Citing Ferdinand de Saussure’s dictum that “it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign to it its proper place”, Kirby broaches the question of just where deconstruction’s ‘proper place’ resides, especially with respect to the question of the body. According to Kirby, despite the widespread uptake of deconstructive methods across the varied terrain of today’s critical theory, many of these appropriations nonetheless surreptitiously and even unthinkingly blunt the full effect of deconstruction’s ramifications by instituting a divide between nature and culture – and hence between the body and the sign – that doubles down on the very sins they aim to quell.

Turning in particular to the work of post-structuralist feminists like Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Jane Gallop – all of whom have in some manner or another attempted to marinate questions of corporeality in the broth of deconstruction – Kirby argues that for each, the body always ultimately remains a site of unintelligibly and exteriority; an ‘outside’ of brute, material nature set over and against an ‘inside’ of articulate nurture. Yet for Kirby, taking seriously Derrida’s adage that ‘there is no outside [the] text’ (il n’y pas de hors-texte), would require nothing less than a reassessment of the very nature of textuality itself, one which can’t simply be circumscribed within a self-enclosed sphere of ‘culture’ or ‘language’. Against the pervasive ‘linguistic’ reception of Derrida then, Kirby argues that to appreciate the true radicality and strangeness of deconstructive thought, one ought to include the very stuff of matter – the body in all its visceral, substantive, biological dampness – into the ambit of its operations. Kirby's Derrida is thus the Derrida for whom 'writing' extends right down into "the most elementary processes within the living cell".

In so pursuing the consequences of a philosophy of différance in the flesh, Kirby charts an anomalous path towards something like a 'bio-deconstruction', one in which "the differential of language is articulate in/as blood, cells, breathing." Kirby's own preferred term for this is a "corporeography", a writing of the body in which corporeality and textuality are interwoven and equally subject to the contrivances of différance. Interestingly, it's from her magisterial reading of Saussure in particular that Kirby establishes her position, wherein she attempts to demonstrate that his lifelong struggle with the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in his notion of the 'sign' are less issues to be 'resolved' - as the linguistic heirs of Saussure endeavored to do - so much as they attest to an inability to contain those paradoxes within a horizon of language. Which is once again to say that not only language, but the very substance of matter is shot through with the generative paradoxes whose status Saussure so mightily wrestled with without success.

Given the longstanding popular depiction of deconstruction as some sort of linguistic idealism or ‘semiological reductionism’, Kirby’s reevaluation of the deconstructive enterprise as bearing without reserve on the very flesh of things is, depending on where one stands, either refreshingly welcome, tantalizingly provocative, searingly obvious, or - more likely - a blend of all three. And indeed, throughout its pages, Telling Flesh exhibits a clear-eyed intellectual courage which unflinchingly works to stir up philosophical dust long since considered settled. On the pervasive, post-structuralist reflex to decry any and all sort of essentialism in favor of an all-too-easy advocacy of anti-essentialism for example, Kirby instead demands that we confront the necessity of a critical essentialism which asks after the way in which essentialisms are engendered, sustained, and reimagined. While Telling Flesh's engagement with biology takes place firmly on the side of philosophy - and perhaps misses the opportunity to engage the scientific literature to shore up its claims - its vision of a naturalized deconstruction is not one to be missed.

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book with still significant relevance today and that Kirby follows up with Quantum Anthropology. Definitely a very dense, but fulfilling read.