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Abstract
Kathy Acker’s work has been praised for the way it highlights the transformative potential of the body in contact with the world. Often, however, such contact also reminds us of the danger involved in the use of the body to disrupt social convention. “Bodies at Liberty” mines this tension, considering Acker alongside three contemporary theorists – Michel Serres, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Mari Ruti – whose disparate theories of embodiment each offer accounts of exposure, vulnerability, and relation as strategies for envisioning human frailty as grounds for meaning-making in our lives. Read together, these texts become examples of the body’s ways of guiding our attention toward new paradigms for thriving and bonding in precarious times.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
This work is stronger for the insight of Angelaki’s reviewers and clearer for the meticulous eye of my colleague and friend, Emily Hipchen.
1 This epigraph, from a cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’aime Moi Non Plus,” reflects the liberties that Marshall and Elson take with the lyrics in an Acker-esque act of piracy. In their version, the experience of penetration described in the original (Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins) becomes available to more combinations of bodies and other iterations of the physical.
2 There are but a few recuperations of the aggressive interactions between bodies in Acker’s work: among them Arthur Redding’s classic insight that sadomasochistic sex play offers provisional emancipation from “the strictures of conscribed identity” (284). Noteworthy as well is Chris Kocela’s reading of the piratical fantasies of raping and plundering that characterize Acker’s late work as “an evolving response to the psychoanalytic construction of female sexuality that proceeds” toward “something on the order of creative rebuilding” (96). Additionally, Miranda Rose’s account of Acker’s intertextuality fits this bill to some degree. Though the body is not the focus of her argument, Rose offers Acker’s cut-up style as an outlet for the “the expression of a corporeality containing within it a plurality of bodies and desires that work together to co-create the text” (115).
3 An example of such scholarship, most of it dated now, is Naomi Jacobs’ argument that “[t]hrough semantic and stylistic crudeness, pastiche-appropriations of famous literary texts, and outrageous manipulations of historical and literary figures, Acker attempts” merely “to deconstruct the tyrannical structures of official culture” in order to, then, “plagiarize an identity, constructing a self from salvaged fragments of those very structures she has dismantled.” Such an identity is problematic for Jacobs because it suggests “an unwillingness to own her work,” including the work of agential self-authorship, and also because it grants authority to regressive representations of disempowered persons even as Acker deconstructs the texts in which those representations appear (50–51).
4 She also remediates to some degree the failure to consider inequality and privilege that, for Berlant, exposes a weakness in contemporary affect theory, which has a tendency to “fix on the senses as a revitalizing domain with which to chart theories and concepts of history, aesthetics, and experience” without making enough of “the words power and ideology” (“Critical” 445).
5 Resonances between my reading of this opening scene and Judith Butler’s theorizations of vulnerability and precarity merit some fleshing out here. In recent work, Butler claims that it is not possible to discern “I” from “you,” or an “us” from a “them,” without rendering ourselves only more “inscrutable” to ourselves as we try. Nevertheless, she argues, we resort to this binarism, at great cost, for false comfort when we cannot inhabit a decentered position that also wounds and confuses, and so Butler’s account of the subject is also largely a critique of its/our collective failings. Butler’s subject (or anti-subject) must, in order to understand itself, come to embrace social and physical vulnerability, desire, risk, and public exposure in ways Acker’s Quixote – as I will argue – seems to grasp intuitively, find absolutely necessary, and thus model (Butler, Precarious 21–22).
6 Recall the central quest in Empire of the Senseless, which is to figure out how to “eat” the “mind” to prevent it from becoming the “nightmare that [ … ] eat[s] you” (38). The trick to this involves converting to physical energy the mental energy that would otherwise consume physical energy and render one inert.
7 Phillips describes the fort-da game this way:
[As] Freud describes this scene [ … ] it is not as though the child is merely making a choice to manage his suffering, but rather that the mother’s absence is an opportunity for the child to find another pleasure [ … ] All Freud’s language – the child “very skillfully” throwing the reel, his “expressive,” “joyful” sounds, the child’s “great cultural achievement” – celebrates the child as artist discovering his artistry; and not merely (or bitterly) actively re-enacting with his toys what he has had unavoidably inflicted on him. (120–21)
8 There are precedents for reading “fish” as “vagina” in Acker’s writing. In “Seeing Gender,” for instance, she quotes the Red Queen’s question to Alice about “un-dish-covering the fish” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, imploring readers to “[r]emember a joke in poor taste about smell and women” (84).
9 A challenging and improbable materiality distinguishes Acker’s pirate penis from Judith Butler’s “lesbian phallus,” especially in early conceptions. Where Butler critiques the subversive potential of miming phallic symbolic gestures, for instance, Acker aims to exceed penetration, not to undermine it, as Quixote continues to stab away at the ubiquitous windmills of male-authored texts. Chris Kocela stresses the importance of this distinction:
Acker’s citational practice is no straightforward employment of Butler’s theories. Rather, Acker’s relationship with Butler might best be termed sightational for its invasive insistence on making visible or seeing that which [ … ] remains [ … ] barred from representation in Butler’s work. (78)
10 In Bataille’s work, the image of the headless man represents the subject who sacrifices his own sovereignty and rationality in order to live. Without a head, Acéphale is characterized by his ability to “know” only what can be known in and through bodily sensation and in the kind of excess described by Sade – excess enough, he jokes in Erotism, “to make our heads reel” (192).
11 One might compare the sort of “poverty” described here to Berlant’s “crisis ordinariness,” as it pertains to the common psychic experience of precariousness and not to the traumatic experience of extreme material poverty (Cruel 10).
12 In “Geography,” Brennan also argues that Acker’s fiction seeks to locate, where it cannot actively create, physical spaces beyond the “borders of dominant discourse systems” (248).
13 El Moncef describes the precision of Abhor’s quest, noting, “Empire’s futurism resides in the tropology of [ … ] passages, particularly the figural linkages they weave between Abhor’s nomadic impulse, the fluid landscape of her ‘open’ self, and the chaotic flows of a planetary, public sphere.” He goes on to extrapolate from the “mixed-up” landscape of Abhor’s subjectivity its political stakes: “It is in this sphere that she envisions the drama of her self-realization, projecting her dream on a world scene beyond ethnic moorings and geopolitical borders” in what he calls “an atopian setting” (140–41).