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Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh
Today, body and language are prominent themes throughout philosophy. Each is strange enough on its own; this book asks what sense we might make of them together. Words reach out. Hands pick up books; eyes or fingertips scan text. But just where, if at all, do words and bodies touch?
In a trio of paired chapters, each juxtaposing an illustrative story or case study to a theoretical exploration, MacKendrick examines three somatic figures of the touch, the fold, and the cut. In the first pairing, resurrection stories in the Gospel of John are set against a chapter on touch, which draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory modes in which the resurrected body is presented.
T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an intriguing set of devotees-medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and tattooed punks-in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea of inscribed bodies, of the cut.
Theologically and philosophically sophisticated, indeed masterly, the book never loses its ground in real, specific bodily experience, performing both at the highest levels of abstraction and at the most quotidian levels of everyday life.
In a trio of paired chapters, each juxtaposing an illustrative story or case study to a theoretical exploration, MacKendrick examines three somatic figures of the touch, the fold, and the cut. In the first pairing, resurrection stories in the Gospel of John are set against a chapter on touch, which draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory modes in which the resurrected body is presented.
T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an intriguing set of devotees-medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and tattooed punks-in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea of inscribed bodies, of the cut.
Theologically and philosophically sophisticated, indeed masterly, the book never loses its ground in real, specific bodily experience, performing both at the highest levels of abstraction and at the most quotidian levels of everyday life.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
216 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2004
About the author
Karmen MacKendrick
20 books5 followersKarmen MacKendrick is a professor of philosophy with a love for theology, dance, music, and just about all things made of words.
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November 18, 2024
Introduction
Two themes prominently recurrent in Continental and analytic philosophy–body “the body” and language. How to write them together. Here she is sorting out his singular obsession in terms of word and flesh.
Her writing always about pleasures, desires, intensities, limits.
She hates the refusal of the “I” in academia, a stylistic ideal. Clarity is not the virtue here.
I want my prose to reach toward “an approachable you, perhaps.” Celan says of poetry, as I say of writing, that it is lonely.
The possibility of touch is there but not, I shall argue, the possibility of grasping.
And so to speak of language and body is also to speak of ourselves, with the strong suspicion that we are not there where we had expected to find us. This is the final thing that I have tried to do here—to show how thinking desire and limit in the relation of body and language must affect how we think, and think of, our own selves.
Serious Superficiality
Questions about body and language are caught up in nature of philosophical pursuit. They are superficial questions in a discipline that has long been in love with depth. The figures with which I work here–the touch, the fold, the cut–are all figures of surfaces.
Irigaray: What might happen if the meaning of the word philosophy remained plural: the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love
[Centuries of mythical eternal universals underlying philosophy’s question WHAT IS] She names Kant, Nietszhe, Socrates, Plato, Deleuze
These are my suspicions: that the question “What is” is a prehensile ques- tion, a question seeking to grasp. It touches—tracing out an often-broken path across a surface. It folds—back upon itself to multiply the questions, unfolding new questions with every seeming answer. It cuts—it intersects, it fragments, it opens possibilities. It does not grasp.
Her method is aimed at a philosophy of touches and folds and scars, surfaces marked with- out depths revealed; a philosophy of the touch that does not grasp, the fold that does not close up, the cut that reveals the complexities of surface, cut- ting across questioner, listener, question; a philosophy of surfaces and multiplicities, of openings, of the constitutive incision.
Surfaces have gotten a bad name. We cannot dwell in surface as if it were the Heideggerian depths of Being, but it is nonetheless worth dwelling upon, worth lingering over.
On the contrary, dealing with surfaces we never do find the complete satisfac- tion of in-depth exploration; the surface is inexhaustible, the cuts and folds infinitely multipliable; there is always one more limit toward which word and flesh reach, at which they approach one another. There are infinite questions left over; to leave them unasked is to deny the pleasure inherent in seeking— the peculiar pleasure/pain of desire, where the questions of body and lan- guage may most readily, perhaps most interestingly, be asked.
Source Material: Theories of Desire
She’s working with many scholars on inscribed bodies–MP, Fucko, Deleuze. Nietszhe.
Words do not merely express desire into the world, as if from the interior of an individual, but draw desire to themselves. In the exploration of desire and power, body and language are once again brought together
There is no exchanging word for body, discourse for physicality. Not an abandonment but an expansion.
I am concerned with desires as a question of reach and contact, overlap nad intersection, not of grasp–desire as a question of distance and limit, with which it is always implicated.
THESIS: that word and flesh are with one another in a curious liminal relation of contact, implication, and incision, each in its own odd way a relation of desire and drawing, seduction and delight. Flesh is drawn to language, and words in return to flesh.
On the Limits of Desire
Plato.
Has no theory of desire singular. Symposium has accounts, though. The missing half. And, the desire as lack model.
Lacan
My desire, as Lacan will later have it, is the desire of the other. Flesh and word, as I shall try to indicate, have for one another this kind of seductive otherness; the desire of and for the other is at the same time, in the Platonic (and, as we shall see, Freudian) manner, a desire for an impossible self.
Hegel
Selfhood emerges in the struggle by which I seek the desire of the other while withholding my own–impossibly, of course, since my seeking manifest desire already
Only when we acknowledge our mutual lack of self-sufficiency, acknowledge that we desire mutually the very desire that only another can give us, can we become selves, can each of us, in embod- ied and intelligible speech, say “I.”
Desire demands limit bc it exists as the urge to exceed limit.
Desire seeks to assimilate
Freud
Self comes about in difference and desire–ego emerges into infantile consciousness at just the moment when an unsatisfied impulse lingers
Desire here is linked to lack in two distinct, though not unrelated, ways: it comes about first as the subject is born from the realization of its own lack (the lack of completeness and of the ability to satisfy itself ), its finitude. And it seeks what the desiring subject does not have.
Annihilating impulse of desire-as-lack aimed at self
Desire seeks to eliminate
Freud, too, recognizing the object of desire, sees that object as external; desire’s discharge demands what the desiring subject lacks, demands an other. That desire, being about limits, must also be about oth- erness is central to the largely Freudian but more overtly linguistic and struc- tural psychoanalysis of Lacan.
Lacan
Lacan lacks Freud’s emphasis on the somatic. He replaces that with language–the other half of a psychoanalytic pair, with the desire between body and language demanding a synthesis of the two. In fact though, neither sorts matters out quite so neatly
For Lacan as for Freud, desire arises in an originary experience that is at once lack and separation, absence and the seed of identity.
Need is not linked to language; it expresses itself, as Luce Irigaray puts it, in “somatic pain, . . . screams and demands.”54 The body, not yet reaching toward, implicated within, nor entered into language, is not yet self.
The sense of self for Lacan derives from that which is outside self, first through the famous mirror stage, in which a child (mis)recognizes her own image—that is, takes it for herself, which seems sensible enough, save that it is, in fact, only an image of her, and a too neatly unified image at that. Lacan insists upon disruption in subjectivity; as Stephen Moore points out, “Lacan holds Freud to his unsettling early vision of the human subject as split or profoundly disunified, even to the point of accusing the later Freud of backing away from his early insights.”
“The radical heteronomy that Freud’s discovery shows gaping within man can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest. MIRROR STAGE as imagistic sense of self that falsely covers over the fissures of selfhood
Follows by stage of entry into language. Also unavoidable fragmentary
Language here exceeds anyone who speaks it.
Though language exceeds, it cannot capture the fullness that psychoanalysis supposes to precede the subject
Like the subject, it takes its meaning from difference, from absence, from what is not in a given place. And so the subject, made by seeing itself on the outside and by saying “I” in words, is always divided, always differentiated, and always in some pecu- liar sense elsewhere—and always, returning us to Plato’s Aristophanes, in search of an impossible return to a never-present wholeness.
Divided and, desiring, incomplete. For Freud, gratification is inevitably partial because drives are both partial and renewable. For Lacan, satisfactions are metonymic, incomplete, always striving toward a wholeness that is incompatible with the very existence of the desiring subject.
GREAT SUMMARY FREUD AND LACAN HERE O NDESIRE
Deleuze
Desire is not lack. There is no desirous subject or desirable object that pre-exists the force of desire. Desire is not internal to a subject. It is a deployment of a particular field. Desire is constructive: it does not lack, and it is is not lack. The subject is lacking, absent, at the very point where desire is.
Desire belongs to no one; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject.
The subject, who is lacking, is drawn by that desire/desirable object outside herself, but the desire is that drawing power, not the lack within the one drawn.
Nietszhe
Will to power is indefinable but like desire. This is a creative urgency linked to destructiveness. Linked to limit.
The will to power is, fundamentally, the will to overcome—that is, necessarily, to cross some limit.
Not just about urge to conquer and dominate.
The self is constituted by relations of forces (interactions of wills to power) including and above all the desire for self-overcoming. It is our own limits we seek to break.
Desire is constituted by limit but is itself power, a transformative power that makes the world in its image
Desire forms, seeks limits, breaks them, forms anew. There is, as Bataille later realizes, a contradiction within the subject, which pushes beyond itself to a destruction it cannot will, to the loss of any sense of will as its own: the necessary consequence of rupturing limits. That the I of language is never entirely one’s own we have known for quite some time; that the I of flesh is also not quite one’s own we are learn- ing to imagine.
Bataille
Follows N’s sense of subject as complex and impermanent. Attuned both to the power of desire to undo subjectivity and to the complicity of the subject in that power.
If desire is lack, it is also productive; lack itself constitutes the subject, a being who is only by virtue of limits that desire will push toward rupture. And in think- ing these themes I find I can also think flesh together with word.
Desire and communication are for him mutual laceration.
2. Word Made Flesh
Insufficient attentiveness, from familiarity with Word was God Jn opening.
Attention here won’t be dogma. Something interesting is happening.
John’s carnal emphasis recurs–somatic acts such as eating, resurrected body.
SUMMARY Chapter starts with emph on The aural and luminous and tactile imagery for Christ in this gospel. Chapter will end with Nietzschean reading in which Christ’s will is responsive to the combination of desire and faith in those who encounter him in this story. Rather than a promise of endurance, the transfigurative element of the story is a transformation in what passes. The aural and luminous and tactile imagery for Christ in this gospel.
Word and flesh and light interleaved, infolded, neither distinct nor identical.
Light in the gospel: goodness (opposed to evil of dark); associated with truth and with life.
Christ works synaesthetically
Hearing. Dead will hear. Christ calling Lazarus. Father always listening. Voice associated with light.
Sight and sound routes to truth before during and after crucifixion. Each modality appears singly as well as synaethsetically.
Rabbouni event. Touch and hold. Noli me tangere: what is forbidden is not only the tangible but the prehensible; it warns against a touch that would grasp rather than brush across the surface.
Peculiarities of the body in Jn 20. Multiplicity of persuasive modes (not just vision which is elsewhere sufficient evidence)
There is a delay in tangibility.
Is it from a mendin of the body? No–resurrection isn’t a healing process. Side wound still there. This body is not less but more material
A solution? A reading that emphasizes the “fullness of life” and the intensity of living in eternity.
HER ISSUE IN JOHN IS The puzzles of multiple modes of presentation and sometimes-permit- ted touch remain.
A better solution: it’s a desire to know Christ. WIll and knowing aren’t separated by them. the will is inseparable from a sense of freedom, and freedom, in fact, from autonomy.
[Kantian autonomy and Aristotle summary ew] We manifest autonomy when we act on motives that are purely rational. Reason gives to the will the laws that it rightly obeys or wrongly breaks
in the person of Christ as presented in the fourth gospel the puzzles of will and freedom are the very puzzles we have already found. Each disciple, and Mary Magdalene, too, gets exactly what she or he needs to compel belief, and to hold faith firm. Yet Christ’s responses seem equally compelled, drawn by this very need.
E.g. Mary needs the sound of Christ’s voice, needs to hear the Word spoken, but in that speaking she knows Christ as her teacher. Thus she does not need to touch him, and though Christ will give her all that she needs, he will not exaggerate that need. And, acting in time, he cautions that his resurrection is temporal, though eternally accomplished, emphasizing for the reader the peculiarity of this double nature.
SUMMARY OF HOW WE DEAL W MESS OF JOHN: Each of the faithful is drawn into a curious combination of presence and absence: the sight of an empty tomb, the speaker who speaks to forbid tactile contact, the visible man who nonetheless passes through walls, the touch that touches only what is torn away already. No one comprehends Christ, no one has proof; each has exactly enough to sustain faith. Knowledge of the divine is faith alone; not grasp, but touch.
Faith here has an odd sense, transfigurative or transformative, a redemptive sense best understood in conjunction with desire, the desire to know, under- stood in near-Deleuzean terms, not along the Platonic model of lack but as its own form of fullness.
In John, the desire to know is at once satisfied and sustained, and precisely in this the world is transformed
Desire is not lack, not annihilating, but creative force. It is not that desire exists, and then creates, but that it is created with creation.
As I have already indicated, desire in the gospel of John is linked to knowledge—the will to know God in the person of Christ. But just as desire for reverses its customary sense to become at the same time creation of, so too knowing God reverses into God’s knowing us.
To love: to be wholly attuned to, to respond precisely to need, to give what is needed without overwhelming the gracefulness of desire. The will of John’s Christ is a will so perfectly attuned to this blessed world that deliberation makes no sense. The will of God the Father creates the world in an overflow of desire; the will of God the Son redeems the world in a return of desire. And, if we are good Trinitarians, we find once more that the emanation is the return, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Both the visuality of light and the aurality of speech appeal to well-devel- oped senses of the Word—the former read, the latter heard. But where the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, we face a third and less expected modality, that of touch. Perhaps, in fact, Word is the difference between body and flesh, between will-less corpse and the responsivity of flesh in motion. Flesh is body that hears and reads the call to touch.
The meaning of the Word is not eternal in the static, still sense, but in the sense that each of those touched by it in this gospel feels the strength of faith rather than proof, the memory of contact rather than the grasp of vision. It is an eternity in time of blessed transformation—as if it were a touch that could last without grasping.
3. Touch
SUMMARY In what follows, then, I want to explore the tactility of language as both word and touch manifest and demand repetition, as both hint toward a peculiar synaesthesia, as both remind us of the importance of limit for expression and desire alike, and finally as both evidence communication not merely in the mundane but also in the abstract philosophical senses, the communication of the tangible yet ungraspable, the knowledge of desire which never gives us facts.
Repetition
Poetry of all language is most attuned to repetition. REpetition, per Stein, is the language of sexual love
Repetition is characteristic too of sense of touch. THATS THE TLDR OF THIS SECTION.
To touch (I shall say it again) is not to grasp; the knowledge given us by touch is always partial, and passes over, and returns. It always leaves more to be desired.
Rhythm DEF: repeating patterns of temporality. Rhythm ensnares
Language demands tactility.
[She’s surveying poetry here]
Touch, though, draws us toward synaesthesia. Thus, interestingly, the eroticized gaze becomes more synaesthetically tactile; it slides, it lingers, it repeats its movements
Touch, I want to say, is the most nearly multiple of our single senses.
Synaethesia
It’s touch-sound that stands out here. Words-as-sound slide by, sibilant and glottal, buzz and consonants. Sound is more mobile than sight. Taste and scent may linger but they too move within the arrow of time.
It will take touch to hint to us that time perhaps s not straight.
Again, repetition lurks in all of language, where its peculiar effects have been explored by any number of philosophers and literary theorists. But the language of Eros is of all speaking and writing most conspicuously repeti- tive—most overtly demanding of repetition.
THESIS As erotic language is repetitious not only in structure but in sound and recurrent rhythm, poetic image and alliteration, so too does touch in desire repeat, recurring to the same surface with delight or aston- ishment, whether taking comfort in the deep familiarity of a well-known body or recurring incredulously to a pleasure always new, as if one certainly could not have remembered it rightly, not even in the instant since one felt it last.
We come back to the divide between touch and grasp
Moving to the Limit
Derrida: to touch is to touch a border. Touch and language cannot stay in the text. The sacred can’t either. Neither can love. It’s all about limits.
Proximity and distance infold and unfold in the same space
Derrida: Touch is the sense most affected by its object. Whatever we touch, it touches us back. And if it does not, weh ave failed to touch it. Same with language. Tactility is inseparable from witness.
Desire, like both word and touch, is never precisely locatable. It is, like the active force of which Barthes speaks, always between. It draws, as the par- ticular need of each follower’s faith drew Christ’s response in the previous chapter, where the love that this faith manifests is a force sufficient to draw forth the response it requires in order to go on
Communication
Neither you, nor I, language and touch reach, always between. One surface approaches another, touches perhaps if we
Two themes prominently recurrent in Continental and analytic philosophy–body “the body” and language. How to write them together. Here she is sorting out his singular obsession in terms of word and flesh.
Her writing always about pleasures, desires, intensities, limits.
She hates the refusal of the “I” in academia, a stylistic ideal. Clarity is not the virtue here.
I want my prose to reach toward “an approachable you, perhaps.” Celan says of poetry, as I say of writing, that it is lonely.
The possibility of touch is there but not, I shall argue, the possibility of grasping.
And so to speak of language and body is also to speak of ourselves, with the strong suspicion that we are not there where we had expected to find us. This is the final thing that I have tried to do here—to show how thinking desire and limit in the relation of body and language must affect how we think, and think of, our own selves.
Serious Superficiality
Questions about body and language are caught up in nature of philosophical pursuit. They are superficial questions in a discipline that has long been in love with depth. The figures with which I work here–the touch, the fold, the cut–are all figures of surfaces.
Irigaray: What might happen if the meaning of the word philosophy remained plural: the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love
[Centuries of mythical eternal universals underlying philosophy’s question WHAT IS] She names Kant, Nietszhe, Socrates, Plato, Deleuze
These are my suspicions: that the question “What is” is a prehensile ques- tion, a question seeking to grasp. It touches—tracing out an often-broken path across a surface. It folds—back upon itself to multiply the questions, unfolding new questions with every seeming answer. It cuts—it intersects, it fragments, it opens possibilities. It does not grasp.
Her method is aimed at a philosophy of touches and folds and scars, surfaces marked with- out depths revealed; a philosophy of the touch that does not grasp, the fold that does not close up, the cut that reveals the complexities of surface, cut- ting across questioner, listener, question; a philosophy of surfaces and multiplicities, of openings, of the constitutive incision.
Surfaces have gotten a bad name. We cannot dwell in surface as if it were the Heideggerian depths of Being, but it is nonetheless worth dwelling upon, worth lingering over.
On the contrary, dealing with surfaces we never do find the complete satisfac- tion of in-depth exploration; the surface is inexhaustible, the cuts and folds infinitely multipliable; there is always one more limit toward which word and flesh reach, at which they approach one another. There are infinite questions left over; to leave them unasked is to deny the pleasure inherent in seeking— the peculiar pleasure/pain of desire, where the questions of body and lan- guage may most readily, perhaps most interestingly, be asked.
Source Material: Theories of Desire
She’s working with many scholars on inscribed bodies–MP, Fucko, Deleuze. Nietszhe.
Words do not merely express desire into the world, as if from the interior of an individual, but draw desire to themselves. In the exploration of desire and power, body and language are once again brought together
There is no exchanging word for body, discourse for physicality. Not an abandonment but an expansion.
I am concerned with desires as a question of reach and contact, overlap nad intersection, not of grasp–desire as a question of distance and limit, with which it is always implicated.
THESIS: that word and flesh are with one another in a curious liminal relation of contact, implication, and incision, each in its own odd way a relation of desire and drawing, seduction and delight. Flesh is drawn to language, and words in return to flesh.
On the Limits of Desire
Plato.
Has no theory of desire singular. Symposium has accounts, though. The missing half. And, the desire as lack model.
Lacan
My desire, as Lacan will later have it, is the desire of the other. Flesh and word, as I shall try to indicate, have for one another this kind of seductive otherness; the desire of and for the other is at the same time, in the Platonic (and, as we shall see, Freudian) manner, a desire for an impossible self.
Hegel
Selfhood emerges in the struggle by which I seek the desire of the other while withholding my own–impossibly, of course, since my seeking manifest desire already
Only when we acknowledge our mutual lack of self-sufficiency, acknowledge that we desire mutually the very desire that only another can give us, can we become selves, can each of us, in embod- ied and intelligible speech, say “I.”
Desire demands limit bc it exists as the urge to exceed limit.
Desire seeks to assimilate
Freud
Self comes about in difference and desire–ego emerges into infantile consciousness at just the moment when an unsatisfied impulse lingers
Desire here is linked to lack in two distinct, though not unrelated, ways: it comes about first as the subject is born from the realization of its own lack (the lack of completeness and of the ability to satisfy itself ), its finitude. And it seeks what the desiring subject does not have.
Annihilating impulse of desire-as-lack aimed at self
Desire seeks to eliminate
Freud, too, recognizing the object of desire, sees that object as external; desire’s discharge demands what the desiring subject lacks, demands an other. That desire, being about limits, must also be about oth- erness is central to the largely Freudian but more overtly linguistic and struc- tural psychoanalysis of Lacan.
Lacan
Lacan lacks Freud’s emphasis on the somatic. He replaces that with language–the other half of a psychoanalytic pair, with the desire between body and language demanding a synthesis of the two. In fact though, neither sorts matters out quite so neatly
For Lacan as for Freud, desire arises in an originary experience that is at once lack and separation, absence and the seed of identity.
Need is not linked to language; it expresses itself, as Luce Irigaray puts it, in “somatic pain, . . . screams and demands.”54 The body, not yet reaching toward, implicated within, nor entered into language, is not yet self.
The sense of self for Lacan derives from that which is outside self, first through the famous mirror stage, in which a child (mis)recognizes her own image—that is, takes it for herself, which seems sensible enough, save that it is, in fact, only an image of her, and a too neatly unified image at that. Lacan insists upon disruption in subjectivity; as Stephen Moore points out, “Lacan holds Freud to his unsettling early vision of the human subject as split or profoundly disunified, even to the point of accusing the later Freud of backing away from his early insights.”
“The radical heteronomy that Freud’s discovery shows gaping within man can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest. MIRROR STAGE as imagistic sense of self that falsely covers over the fissures of selfhood
Follows by stage of entry into language. Also unavoidable fragmentary
Language here exceeds anyone who speaks it.
Though language exceeds, it cannot capture the fullness that psychoanalysis supposes to precede the subject
Like the subject, it takes its meaning from difference, from absence, from what is not in a given place. And so the subject, made by seeing itself on the outside and by saying “I” in words, is always divided, always differentiated, and always in some pecu- liar sense elsewhere—and always, returning us to Plato’s Aristophanes, in search of an impossible return to a never-present wholeness.
Divided and, desiring, incomplete. For Freud, gratification is inevitably partial because drives are both partial and renewable. For Lacan, satisfactions are metonymic, incomplete, always striving toward a wholeness that is incompatible with the very existence of the desiring subject.
GREAT SUMMARY FREUD AND LACAN HERE O NDESIRE
Deleuze
Desire is not lack. There is no desirous subject or desirable object that pre-exists the force of desire. Desire is not internal to a subject. It is a deployment of a particular field. Desire is constructive: it does not lack, and it is is not lack. The subject is lacking, absent, at the very point where desire is.
Desire belongs to no one; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject.
The subject, who is lacking, is drawn by that desire/desirable object outside herself, but the desire is that drawing power, not the lack within the one drawn.
Nietszhe
Will to power is indefinable but like desire. This is a creative urgency linked to destructiveness. Linked to limit.
The will to power is, fundamentally, the will to overcome—that is, necessarily, to cross some limit.
Not just about urge to conquer and dominate.
The self is constituted by relations of forces (interactions of wills to power) including and above all the desire for self-overcoming. It is our own limits we seek to break.
Desire is constituted by limit but is itself power, a transformative power that makes the world in its image
Desire forms, seeks limits, breaks them, forms anew. There is, as Bataille later realizes, a contradiction within the subject, which pushes beyond itself to a destruction it cannot will, to the loss of any sense of will as its own: the necessary consequence of rupturing limits. That the I of language is never entirely one’s own we have known for quite some time; that the I of flesh is also not quite one’s own we are learn- ing to imagine.
Bataille
Follows N’s sense of subject as complex and impermanent. Attuned both to the power of desire to undo subjectivity and to the complicity of the subject in that power.
If desire is lack, it is also productive; lack itself constitutes the subject, a being who is only by virtue of limits that desire will push toward rupture. And in think- ing these themes I find I can also think flesh together with word.
Desire and communication are for him mutual laceration.
2. Word Made Flesh
Insufficient attentiveness, from familiarity with Word was God Jn opening.
Attention here won’t be dogma. Something interesting is happening.
John’s carnal emphasis recurs–somatic acts such as eating, resurrected body.
SUMMARY Chapter starts with emph on The aural and luminous and tactile imagery for Christ in this gospel. Chapter will end with Nietzschean reading in which Christ’s will is responsive to the combination of desire and faith in those who encounter him in this story. Rather than a promise of endurance, the transfigurative element of the story is a transformation in what passes. The aural and luminous and tactile imagery for Christ in this gospel.
Word and flesh and light interleaved, infolded, neither distinct nor identical.
Light in the gospel: goodness (opposed to evil of dark); associated with truth and with life.
Christ works synaesthetically
Hearing. Dead will hear. Christ calling Lazarus. Father always listening. Voice associated with light.
Sight and sound routes to truth before during and after crucifixion. Each modality appears singly as well as synaethsetically.
Rabbouni event. Touch and hold. Noli me tangere: what is forbidden is not only the tangible but the prehensible; it warns against a touch that would grasp rather than brush across the surface.
Peculiarities of the body in Jn 20. Multiplicity of persuasive modes (not just vision which is elsewhere sufficient evidence)
There is a delay in tangibility.
Is it from a mendin of the body? No–resurrection isn’t a healing process. Side wound still there. This body is not less but more material
A solution? A reading that emphasizes the “fullness of life” and the intensity of living in eternity.
HER ISSUE IN JOHN IS The puzzles of multiple modes of presentation and sometimes-permit- ted touch remain.
A better solution: it’s a desire to know Christ. WIll and knowing aren’t separated by them. the will is inseparable from a sense of freedom, and freedom, in fact, from autonomy.
[Kantian autonomy and Aristotle summary ew] We manifest autonomy when we act on motives that are purely rational. Reason gives to the will the laws that it rightly obeys or wrongly breaks
in the person of Christ as presented in the fourth gospel the puzzles of will and freedom are the very puzzles we have already found. Each disciple, and Mary Magdalene, too, gets exactly what she or he needs to compel belief, and to hold faith firm. Yet Christ’s responses seem equally compelled, drawn by this very need.
E.g. Mary needs the sound of Christ’s voice, needs to hear the Word spoken, but in that speaking she knows Christ as her teacher. Thus she does not need to touch him, and though Christ will give her all that she needs, he will not exaggerate that need. And, acting in time, he cautions that his resurrection is temporal, though eternally accomplished, emphasizing for the reader the peculiarity of this double nature.
SUMMARY OF HOW WE DEAL W MESS OF JOHN: Each of the faithful is drawn into a curious combination of presence and absence: the sight of an empty tomb, the speaker who speaks to forbid tactile contact, the visible man who nonetheless passes through walls, the touch that touches only what is torn away already. No one comprehends Christ, no one has proof; each has exactly enough to sustain faith. Knowledge of the divine is faith alone; not grasp, but touch.
Faith here has an odd sense, transfigurative or transformative, a redemptive sense best understood in conjunction with desire, the desire to know, under- stood in near-Deleuzean terms, not along the Platonic model of lack but as its own form of fullness.
In John, the desire to know is at once satisfied and sustained, and precisely in this the world is transformed
Desire is not lack, not annihilating, but creative force. It is not that desire exists, and then creates, but that it is created with creation.
As I have already indicated, desire in the gospel of John is linked to knowledge—the will to know God in the person of Christ. But just as desire for reverses its customary sense to become at the same time creation of, so too knowing God reverses into God’s knowing us.
To love: to be wholly attuned to, to respond precisely to need, to give what is needed without overwhelming the gracefulness of desire. The will of John’s Christ is a will so perfectly attuned to this blessed world that deliberation makes no sense. The will of God the Father creates the world in an overflow of desire; the will of God the Son redeems the world in a return of desire. And, if we are good Trinitarians, we find once more that the emanation is the return, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Both the visuality of light and the aurality of speech appeal to well-devel- oped senses of the Word—the former read, the latter heard. But where the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, we face a third and less expected modality, that of touch. Perhaps, in fact, Word is the difference between body and flesh, between will-less corpse and the responsivity of flesh in motion. Flesh is body that hears and reads the call to touch.
The meaning of the Word is not eternal in the static, still sense, but in the sense that each of those touched by it in this gospel feels the strength of faith rather than proof, the memory of contact rather than the grasp of vision. It is an eternity in time of blessed transformation—as if it were a touch that could last without grasping.
3. Touch
SUMMARY In what follows, then, I want to explore the tactility of language as both word and touch manifest and demand repetition, as both hint toward a peculiar synaesthesia, as both remind us of the importance of limit for expression and desire alike, and finally as both evidence communication not merely in the mundane but also in the abstract philosophical senses, the communication of the tangible yet ungraspable, the knowledge of desire which never gives us facts.
Repetition
Poetry of all language is most attuned to repetition. REpetition, per Stein, is the language of sexual love
Repetition is characteristic too of sense of touch. THATS THE TLDR OF THIS SECTION.
To touch (I shall say it again) is not to grasp; the knowledge given us by touch is always partial, and passes over, and returns. It always leaves more to be desired.
Rhythm DEF: repeating patterns of temporality. Rhythm ensnares
Language demands tactility.
[She’s surveying poetry here]
Touch, though, draws us toward synaesthesia. Thus, interestingly, the eroticized gaze becomes more synaesthetically tactile; it slides, it lingers, it repeats its movements
Touch, I want to say, is the most nearly multiple of our single senses.
Synaethesia
It’s touch-sound that stands out here. Words-as-sound slide by, sibilant and glottal, buzz and consonants. Sound is more mobile than sight. Taste and scent may linger but they too move within the arrow of time.
It will take touch to hint to us that time perhaps s not straight.
Again, repetition lurks in all of language, where its peculiar effects have been explored by any number of philosophers and literary theorists. But the language of Eros is of all speaking and writing most conspicuously repeti- tive—most overtly demanding of repetition.
THESIS As erotic language is repetitious not only in structure but in sound and recurrent rhythm, poetic image and alliteration, so too does touch in desire repeat, recurring to the same surface with delight or aston- ishment, whether taking comfort in the deep familiarity of a well-known body or recurring incredulously to a pleasure always new, as if one certainly could not have remembered it rightly, not even in the instant since one felt it last.
We come back to the divide between touch and grasp
Moving to the Limit
Derrida: to touch is to touch a border. Touch and language cannot stay in the text. The sacred can’t either. Neither can love. It’s all about limits.
Proximity and distance infold and unfold in the same space
Derrida: Touch is the sense most affected by its object. Whatever we touch, it touches us back. And if it does not, weh ave failed to touch it. Same with language. Tactility is inseparable from witness.
Desire, like both word and touch, is never precisely locatable. It is, like the active force of which Barthes speaks, always between. It draws, as the par- ticular need of each follower’s faith drew Christ’s response in the previous chapter, where the love that this faith manifests is a force sufficient to draw forth the response it requires in order to go on
Communication
Neither you, nor I, language and touch reach, always between. One surface approaches another, touches perhaps if we
November 14, 2016
Of those I have read so far, this is one of the most brilliant book on philosophical theology in terms of how the Continental philosophy could be interpreted with reference to Biblical studies, and vice versa. Absolutely outstanding work.
May 3, 2012
I probably need to read this again when I have read more Bataille, Foucault and Deleuze. There were sections that I really appreciated responding to different theories of language and what language can do and be and facilitate and function.
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