Abstract
The question of the body spans across the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me tangere, to Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy in On Touching. In constant conversation with Christianity (“This is my body” or Dis-Enclosure), corporeality in Nancy can be summarised using the figure of the “exposed body (corps ex-peausé)”: a demonstration of the surface of the skin (peau) and an exposition of the self to the other in the sense of a “staging” (Corpus). In my work, the concept of the “spread body,” situated between Descartes’ “extended body” and Husserl’s “lived body,” is also one of a confrontation with the “This is my body” of Christianity (The Wedding Feast of the Lamb). In confronting one with the other, it is a matter of seeing how my expansion of the body, says something different than, or articulates differently, Jean-Luc Nancy’s exposition of the body, this time drawn from the biological side though nevertheless without ceasing to be intentional. It is certainly a matter of philosophy, but also of ethics, in the possibility of describing such a body, especially in the suffering situation of palliative care (Ethics of the Spread Body).
Keywords:
I introduction
Two small books, light in their weight but heavy in their common gravity, confront one another: Corpus (Jean-Luc Nancy) and Ethics of the Spread Body (Emmanuel Falque). Written more than twenty years apart from one another, both put an experience into language. The former – Corpus – precedes the author’s own arresting experience of the transplanted heart, related in “The Intruder,” and attempts to speak “starting from the body.”Footnote1 The latter – Ethics of the Spread Body – follows an experience in palliative care, this time not from the side of the patient, but that of the team of carers.Footnote2 Better still, the concept of the spread body (corps épandu), which first appeared in The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, comes from a corporeal and medical experience in the world of surgery and anaesthesia as well. In short, there is something that intersects, if not meets, in experiences that are certainly different, but that both try to speak of our true corporeality, underneath the abstraction of the “lived-experience of the flesh” or the “ownmost body” (corps propre) (Leib) that phenomenology never ceases to deploy, whilst the materiality of the body (Körper), in illness at least, cannot be forgotten.
So it goes, and in an identical reaction or an identical leap, at the opening of Corpus and Ethics of the Spread Body. Starting with Corpus: Hoc est enim corpus – “this is indeed a body.”
Instantly, always, it is a foreign body that demonstrates itself, a monster impossible to swallow […] And all thoughts of the “ownmost body” (corps propre), laborious efforts at reappropriating what we used to consider, impatiently, as “objectified” or “reified,” all such thoughts about the ownmost body are comparably contorted: they amount only to the expulsion of what we desired. (5; my emphasis, trans. mod.)
The human body always remains animal, even manipulable, in the medical context – as the clinical or reclining (klinein) body, on the hospital bed more so than anywhere else. However, whereas we once feared the positivism of the body-object; we will today rather, and by way of a backlash, fear the excess of concern (soin) taken in, or attention paid to, the body-subject. For, by dint of holding forth on the “carnal lived-experience” of the patient (leiblichkeit), we have nevertheless forgotten their bodily mass (körperlichkeit). (18)
(b) Second aim: returning to Christianity as a particular determination of the body according to an urgency that is first of all cultural – never mind the lure of the single carnal lived experience (the proper) or the invasion of the virtual (the projected). Christianity, “deconstructed or not,” establishes itself on a single word that makes of corporeality, even its objectivation or its “this” (“ceci”), the source of the West in all its articulations: “Hoc est corpus meum,” Nancy emphasises,
we come from a culture where this cult phrase will have been tirelessly uttered by millions of people officiating in millions of rites. Everyone in this culture, Christian or otherwise, (re)cognizes it […] It is our Om mani padne … , our Allah ill’Allah, our Schema Israel.
Christianity is not, for the believer and even less so for the philosopher, a simple matter of certitude, be it negative or positive. It is also a question of culture and not merely of faith, of a vision for all and not merely of a privilege for oneself. There is not, on the one hand, “those that see,” and, on the other, “those that do not see” – whether it is a question of phenomenology or theology. It is first of all through an “in common,” to speak in line with Nancy, or in a “community of being,” to speak in line with Merleau-Ponty, that the Christian message must introduce itself or at least take shape. Against the illusion of the leap, or against the wrong or misunderstood separation of orders (order of the flesh, order of the spirit, order of charity), I will advocate here the “tilling” or “overlaying” of the disciplines of philosophy and theology, but this time first from a cultural point of view. Although I have operated it in the other direction as well, by accepting the point of view of what is revealed; it is precisely Jean-Luc Nancy whom I’ve learned this from, who himself cited it many years ago – it is on a basis provided by Nancy that I have forged the distinction that is important to me today between the “believable” (croyable) (adherence to faith) and the “credible” (credible) (comprehension of faith): “Arriving, thus, and certainly, at some form of confessionalism,” suggests The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, there where the Eucharist must also, and first of all, be understood as “a matter of culture” (§8),
we had better take care, however, that the hoc est corpus meum is not solely the domain of Christianity. As I said, the Eucharistic dogma is not only “believable” (by giving faith), it is also “credible” (with a universalisable rationality) – in which the present works maintains the pretention of addressing itself to all.Footnote4 (43; trans. mod.)
Whether one is a Christian or not, and perhaps all the more so when one is a Christian than when one isn’t, we can and must read Nancy. For, in principle, the “deconstruction” and “dis-enclosure” of Christianity are in no way an attack, hence it has led Martin Heidegger, more or less explicitly, towards a form of paganism or neutrality. It is, on the contrary, a matter of making evident the internal process of deconstruction inherent to Christianity itself, and to make emerge from this and in its dis-enclosure (déclosion) a kind of “extra-Christian” space that would be “something different from the space of a transfigured Christian thinking,” that would be “an exterior or outside of Christianity itself” (Manchev 172–73). Far from recuperating (Christianity), or being recuperated (by Christianity), Nancy’s thought must remain thus: an outside (dehors) of Christianity that certainly interrogates the cultural ground of Christianity, but at the same time stands out (hors) from it, not in order to cleverly or violently rid itself of it, but to think oneself “before” Christianity. It is not a question of incomplete possibilities of Christianity, or of a transfigured or otherwise dressed Christian thinking; but of being human today on the basis of the alterity and the foreign element that Christianity has introduced:
the thesis of the dis-enclosure is radical: it is not merely a question of undertaking a deconstruction of Christianity […], but additionally to conceive of Christianity as such as deconstruction […] Christianity “as such” is (on the contrary) not the principal question. Thinking religion, from a point of view that is philosophical, historical, anthropological, sociological or political, is certainly a task of the highest importance. But, beyond that, thinking is confronted with the metacritical imperative: thinking thinking itself, its own becoming and movement. To experience the experience (faire l’expérience de l’expérience) of thinking. (Manchev 170)
As I have shown elsewhere, to say that “there is no drama of atheist humanism,” is of course not to say that Christianity is doing better today than it was yesterday, nor even that its future is assured when the horizon seems blocked to many. Believing that it could be that easy would probably amount to keeping one’s eyes shut, and to stand in an overhang that makes us leave behind our common humanity would amount to properly refusing to enter into dialogue. To the contrary, however, it simply entails suggesting that “times have changed”: what Henri de Lubac rightly accomplished in his era – The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1950) – , we need to articulate and think today as well, but in a different way. Today, not believing in God, and even not invoking God, is not or no longer necessarily being against God. Not all “non-theism” is necessarily an “a-theism” or “anti-theism,” emphasises Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, entitled In Praise of Philosophy. In a phrase directed precisely to de Lubac’s approach, he says: “one misses the point of philosophy when one defines it as atheism. This is philosophy as it is seen by the theologian” (Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy 46; my emphasis, trans. mod.).Footnote5
To reread Nancy today, or rather to think “with” or “on the basis of” him, is thus to think the body, for sure – whether it be spread-out (my position) or exposed (Nancy’s) – , but also to think it insofar as it is rooted in a so-called Christian “culture,” which we cannot legitimately avoid interrogating. What is an issue for atheism (not ignoring the Christian culture from which it stems), is also an issue for Christianity (interrogating the body so as to avoid enclosing it, today, in a straightforward conceptuality of the past). The Wedding Feast of the Lamb responds to Ethics of the Spread Body, like The Deconstruction of Christianity responds to Corpus. In both cases it is a matter of setting up a dialogue, between different works, between “Christianity” (christianité) and “corporeality,” but according to different points of view and inverse end-points: on the one hand, starting from something credible that may still become believable (my perspective), and, on the other, starting from something credible in which it has become properly unbelievable to believe (Nancy). However, in both cases there is an identical point of departure, or a common pedestal: the “credibility” of Christianity as such – and here of the statement “this is my body” (hoc est enim corpus meum) – , i.e., its cultural importance, whether one stands “inside” (myself) or “outside” of it (Nancy). There is thus debate (débat) but no combat (combat), except in the precise sense of a loving struggle (combat amoureux): “In the field of essential thinking,” emphasises Martin Heidegger, “all refutation is foolish. Strife among thinkers is the ‘loving struggle’ concerning the matter itself” (256; trans. mod.).Footnote6
II the foreign body
“How, then, are we to touch upon the body, rather than signify it or making it signify?” At least as concerns the excesses of signification (phenomenology) and interpretation (hermeneutics), this declaration from Corpus (9), leads us – or returns us, I would say – to what I have elsewhere called the “true body,” or better, the “shock of the body,” in that it is or sometimes becomes “foreign” to myself:
It is a shock of the body, what the philosopher sometimes forgets by dint of either referring himself to a phenomenon that is always ready to show itself or by thinking too often that it can always signify. The a priori of manifestation in phenomenology, like that of interpretation in hermeneutics, has destroyed in ovo the fright of the exposed body, at least in that it is always believed able to be received, whilst to the contrary, and most often, it is but “unassimilable matter” that repels us. (Falque, Ethics of the Spread Body 15)
That same intention can be read, first of all, in a search for a body that is truly of the body. Nancy’s entire perspective, in Corpus as well as in “The Intruder,” indeed boils down to recognising that what might at first appear to me as “my ownmost body,” i.e., “own” (propre) or “mine,” most often articulates itself to me as a “foreign body” – “of the body” (hoc est corpus) more so than “my body” (corpus meum): “If my own heart was failing me,” the philosopher asks himself, “to what degree was it ‘mine,’ my ‘own’ organ? Was it even an organ?” (Corpus 162). The experience of the transplant brings to experience (fait vivre) what is foreign (l’étranger) in me, or rather lets it be experienced in me – an “intruder that is no longer in me,” to follow the confession of the post-scriptum to the French edition of L’Intrus a few years later, but “the intruder that I have become” (47). Where we could have wrongly believed in an incorporation, not just carnal but also psychical, by force of carrying or assimilating the organ; the confession is made that it becomes less who I am than that I do not become who it is, not so much that it is appropriated by me than that I am not it in being assimilated to it. It is not the other that becomes mine, but me that becomes other, or “of the other,” for myself: “That ‘the body’ names the Stranger absolutely, is an idea we’ve pursued to its successful conclusion,” Corpus confesses (9; my emphasis, trans. mod.).
However, what seems at least of the order of an experience of the extra-ordinary, in the sense that it exits from the ordinary; in what way does the presence of the stranger as such in the “grafted body” say something other, but to a lesser extent, than what is ordinary in corporeality? In other words, is there not also in the transplant what constitutes the most common aspect of our corporeality – the impossibility of recognising my own body as “mine,” to the point that it sometimes becomes, to me and for myself, foreign? “Must one thus render everything subjective in order to recognise oneself in one’s identity?” I asked in “Résistence de la présence”:
There is, indeed, the beautiful description of the phantom limb as an absent part of the body that we nevertheless feel (ressent) (Merleau-Ponty).Footnote7 However, there is also the numbness or at least local anaesthesia in that part of the body that we no longer feel (my perspective). To the absence of the body felt as present (the phantom limb related to the ownmost body), I oppose the presence of the body experienced (éprouvé) as absent (the tumour or the anesthetised body experienced (vécus) as totally foreign (étranger) to oneself). It will not do to always refer the “foreign body” (corps étranger) to the “ownmost body” (corps propre), or the “body” to the “flesh.” Turned on its head, relating the flesh (Leib) to the body (Körper), or experiencing (éprouver) the “ownmost body” also as a “foreign body” – in the French sense of the unassimilable and non-incorporable – , this is, in my opinion, the common experience of the sufferer in illness and the insomniac in health. Both suffer (subissent) the same weight of materiality, in the mode of reclining, on the one hand, and in the mode of standing upright, on the other. (114–15)
“One cannot reduce the body.”Footnote8 This is what the two approaches considered here hold most in common. To say that the body is “irreducible” and “uncompressible” is to recognise it for others, of course, but also for oneself, my own body (propre corps) as foreign (étranger), or as “a” stranger (“un” étranger). Not “my other self” (alter ego), but an “other than myself” (ego alter): “Corpus ego has no propriety, no ‘ego-ness’ (still less any ‘egotism’),” for “ego-ness is [still] a […] signification” (Nancy, Corpus 26).
III outside-sense
This body, that of Corpus, certainly, but also that of Ethics of the Spread Body, does not maintain itself in signification – breaking definitively with all the lures of philosophical idealism, but also with a certain form of “descriptivity of the flesh” (Leib) or a “hypertrophy of interpretation” (Verstehen). Phenomenology and hermeneutics are partly related and are here questioned in their constant and implicit searching for the sensible, or rather how they remain stuck in what I have called the a priori of phenomenality. If it is appropriate to return to “the pure, and, so to speak, still mute experience,” to follow Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations, one wonders why, and to what extent, it must still and always “be made to utter its own sense with no adulteration” (77; trans. mod.). Otherwise put, below (en deçà) sense, but also below non-sense, there is what I call “the extra-phenomenal” (Hors phénomène) and what Nancy calls “a-significance”:
I would prefer to take hysteria as the body’s becoming totally parasitical upon the incorporeality of sense, to the point that it mutes incorporeality, thereby showing, in its stead, a piece, a zone, of a-significance […] At the outset, there is no signification, translation, or interpretation: there is this limit, this edge, this contour, this extremity, this outline of exposition […] This alone can close or release space for “interpretations.” (Corpus 23; trans. mod.)
Let’s say it outright: we find “a-significance” in Nancy, like we find the “outside” in Blanchot, the “Il y a” in Levinas, “Chaos” in Nietzsche and the “heterogenous” in Bataille; or that which I have called, for my part, the “extra-phenomenal.” No longer the “possibility of the impossibility of the phenomenon,” which still leaves in place the horizon of signification, even in a phenomenology of the night (the act of suffering, for example, still requires us to be sufficiently alive in order to feel it); but “the impossibility of the possibility of the phenomenon,” this time in a night of phenomenology (the very impossibility of suffering, the very conditions of the taking place of the event having disappeared with the trauma that suppresses any horizon, and thus the very possibility of appearing or taking place). “To speak of the night of phenomenology is not to speak of non-appearance in the possible horizon of appearing but of the suppression of appearing itself – the very conditions of appearance,” I write in “The Extra-Phenomenal”:
If the possibility of appearing itself were to disappear, then it is not “non-manifestation” which would be in question but, rather, the non-possibility of “manifesting.” In contrast to the possibility of the impossibility of the phenomenon – the non-appearance of a phenomenon that could appear or that remains withdrawn – there exists (or rather doesn’t) the impossibility of the possibility of the phenomenon. (9–10)
In the frame of this “outside-sense,” Nancy’s “exposed body,” though it nevertheless figures in the title of the present essay, does not give out unto an exposition that would be a manifestation, or even an expression, rather the contrary. Like the spread body, it is not here to manifest, yet neither to hide; but rather to “self-pose” itself (s’“auto-poser”) in its very existence: “Exposed, therefore: but this does not mean putting something on view that would have previously been hidden or shut in” (Nancy, Corpus 35).
IV expansion and exposition
“Spread body,” on the one hand, “exposed body,” on the other: such is thus, not the opposition, but the common ground of the inquiry; on which, as I will show, a differentiation nevertheless outlines itself concerning the means of transcription (“describing” (décrire) and “writing” (écrire)) and its aim (possibly “theological” or “a-theological”). The gap between the two is all the more distinct because a same groundswell cuts across Corpus and Ethics of the Spread Body, and thus the difference cannot be made evident but on the basis of a common belonging. So, what about the “spread body,” on the one hand, and the “exposed body,” on the other? Spreading-oneself-out (s’épandre) and exposing oneself (s’exposer), are they the same thing? To be there in situ, on an operating table, on a hospital bed, asleep or on the cross; is that the same as the exposed body, the body showing-its-skin (ex-peausé) – I will come back to this – , not in the sense of a manifestation, but at least in the sense of an outside of my ownmost body that has become strange to me?
Starting with the spread body. “Between the extended body (corps étendu) (Descartes) and the lived body (corps vécu) (Husserl),” as I noted by way of the opening to Ethics of the Spread Body,
there is thus and by way of hypothesis a third type of body – which I am calling here the spread body (corps épandu) – a kind of border zone or intermediate body between the objective body and the subjective body. Extended, the body on the hospital bed is first of all as an animal, or an ever-manipulable object. Lived, however, that same body is envisioned (visé) as human, surrounded by proper care in a shared community in search of a sensible world (monde sensé). Between the two, or rather, in this between, what I have called the “spread body” emerges – extended in its materiality and lived in its intentionality […] For, by dint of holding forth on the “carnal lived-experience” (“vécu charnel”) of the patient (leiblichkeit), we have nevertheless forgotten their bodily mass (körperlichkeit). (17–18)
The “spread body” is thus for me a concept, like the “exposed body” in Nancy. Better still, the expansion of the body seeks something other, or an other-than (un autrement), that is not simply “body” (Körper) nor simply “flesh” (Leib). Whether it is in palliative care, or by way of the experience of the transplant of the intruder, what is observed (le constat) is the same, even though the lived experiences (les vécus) certainly differ. In a play on words that surely only works in French: the “ills” (maux) of the body never let themselves be reduced to the “words” (mots) of the body (Falque, Ethics of the Spread Body 29–33). In suffering, the body is “fall,” “disaster,” “weight,” “its own weight of water and bone” – “‘the body’ is our anxiety stripped bare” (Nancy, Corpus 7; trans. mod.). Here, the homology of Ethics of the Spread Body and Corpus thus requires that the “ills” (maux) of the body be said with the “words” (mots) of language, a discontinuation of the gap of the “re-presented,” which, according to Nancy, makes the body “constructed” rather than “described” (décrit), or better, “constructed” rather than “written” (écrit): “The body: that’s how we invented it […] It’s our old culture’s latest, most worked over, sifted, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed product” (Corpus 5–7).
Let it be clear here. According to Nancy, there are thus two types of bodies: no longer “flesh” (Leib) and “body” (Körper), as in phenomenology; but “constructed body” and “written” or “ex-scribed” body – I will return to this. For the “spread body” and the “exposed body” search for different things, or the same thing differently. Neither is it simply a third term, but rather what we could call, in French, an “extra-terminal” (Hors terme) – in the triple sense where, in French, it is not a middle between two extremes, nor a word of language sufficient for signifying, nor what would have an end or a goal as if one day we’d have gotten on top of it. On my account, the body is “extra-terminal” in virtue of the fact that it does not connect, does not signify, neither completes nor accomplishes.
“Describing before constructing,” is what Ethics of the Spread Body seeks to do. “Writing,” or rather, “ex-scribing” rather than “representing,” is what Corpus aims for. To describe the body, at least as concerns palliative care, is to accept to hear and to see what articulates itself and lives itself out on a hospital bed – the so-called “clinical” body in that it is reclining. So it goes with the “words” used by nursing teams to transmit, or rather to passing along, the “ills” observed or even experienced during treatment: “nausea,” “vomiting,” “asthenia,” “soiled,” “redness,” “headache,” “convulsions,” “pulmonary aspiration,” “ulcers,” “embedded tumour,” “swollen tongue,” “pus,” “infection,” “obstruction,” “secretions,” etc. (Falque, Ethics of the Spread Body 34–38). Here, the description struggles with, or at least warns us against, signification and interpretation. The expansion or spreading-out of the body is the “reclining” (klinein), neither extended as reduced to the state of a thing, nor lived as experiencing what is own rather than foreign.
In the experience of palliative care, of course, but also asleep or on the cross, the spread body is “spread-out on the hospital bed” – “thing” or “animal” nailed to the bed like one is also nailed to the cross. However, it is also “envisioned” (visé) or “experienced” (vécu) by the other as human, and this is its originality. In my view, it is less the materiality of the body that constitutes its humanity, than our way of intending it: “the ‘spread body,’ between the extended body of Descartes and the lived body of Husserl,” as I have already noted elsewhere,
preserves extension’s resistance and lived experience’s intentionality. It is at the same time “body” in its absolutely irreducible materiality and “flesh” in its lived experience, yet the synthesis of which is impossible. The anesthetised, sleepy, or crucified body, appears and appears to itself first of all as “body” (Körper) in an organicity sometimes so invasive and suffering that one must silence the pain that it causes, and subsequently as “flesh” (Leib) in the way of envisioning that I myself, or someone else, unceasingly assign to it (the way the physician, for example, envisions the human body he is operating on). (“Le fou désincarné” 333)
Moving onto the exposed body. Nancy’s “exposed body,” meanwhile, is not “described” (se “décrit”), it is rather “written” (s’“écrit”) or “ex-scribed” (s’“ex-crit”). To be written or ex-scribed, rather than described – that is what Corpus aims at:
I am addressed to my body from my body – or rather, the writing “I” is being sent from bodies to bodies […] “Writing” remains a deceptive word. Anything so addressed to the body-outside is exscribed, as I try to write it, right alongside this outside, or as this outside. (19)
Thus, in Corpus, but also in Ethics of the Spread Body, there is an emergence of bodies, or rather “bodily tissues” (des “chairs”), that exhibit themselves each day to those who know how to see them – or, rather, that one cannot not see, but nevertheless recognising that that they are camouflaged under the representations of the body:
in a quarter or third of the world very few bodies circulate (only flesh, skin, faces, muscles – bodies that are more or less hidden: in hospitals, cemeteries, factories, beds from time to time), while everywhere else in the world bodies multiply more and more, the body endlessly multiplied (frequently starved, beaten, murdered, restless, sometimes even laughing or dancing). (Nancy, Corpus 9)
Rather than speaking about the body, we should speak of the “flesh” (la chair), or rather “bodily tissues” (des chairs) – but in the common French sense of the word, as I explained in Ethics of the Spread Body. There is, of course, the “flesh” (la chair) of phenomenology (Leib), or the “body” (le corps) of scientific objectivity (Körper); but there is also the “flesh” (la chair), or the “bodily tissues” (les chairs), of which we are made up – not simply the “meat” or “butchery” (Deleuze), but the “shreds” in which we can still discern our common humanity: “Between flesh and body, between the lived experience of the body and its extension, between Leib and Körper,” as I noted in Ethics of the Spread Body,
one would thus have to return to the “flesh” or rather the flesh of many. The plural “flesh” or bodily tissues are here understood as those shreds of the body that are impossible to separate from myself, tumours that are not me and even so progressively invade me; they flood me in invasive fashion and soon become me entirely. In medicine one speaks of “flesh” being cicatrized, in cooking of “flesh” being “firmed up,” in prisons of “flesh” that is tortured, or in war of “flesh” being crushed as “cannon fodder” (chairs à canon). Between Leib and Körper, between body as subject and body as object, stands caro (in Latin), Fleisch (in German), flesh (in English), which one had better retrieve today, including in palliative care, which is directly exposed to it. (60–61)
However, the “bodily tissues” have in a way, to follow Nancy here, “given way” underneath the “bodies.” Or rather, let’s say that the construction of the body (hoc est corpus meum) has killed its exposition. Everything here is a matter of determination – of culture, first of all, and of manifestation and exhibition, subsequently. (a) As far as culture is concerned, first of all, it is clear that in Corpus, as well as in Ethics of the Spread Body, the constructed body is certainly not the lived body (Leib), but neither is it the manifested body (epiphany). It is the merit of Nancy that he breaks, and definitively so, with all antecedents or “pre-”s – whether the pre-reflexive or the pre-linguistical (pré-langagier) – as if an originary corporeality has but to “prepare” what it isn’t: thought or language. (b) As far as manifestation or exhibition is concerned, then, if the body is “exposed,” to put it in the word of Corpus, that does not mean that the exposition signifies some “intimacy that is extracted from its withdrawal, and carried outside, put on display.” In which case, “the body would be an exposition of the ‘self,’ in the sense of a translation, an interpretation, or a staging” (Nancy, Corpus 33; trans. mod.). There is not an inside and an outside, and the body is not the outside of an inside, an inside we call soul, flesh or spirit. The exposed body does not articulate a model of expressivity, always remaining in the construction or at least in the sensible; it rather articulates a model of self-positing (auto-position), by which it presents itself there in reality without signifying anything, if not the fact of maintaining itself (se tenir) in being, and thus of existing:
Exposition, here, is the very being (what’s called “existing”). Or better yet: where the being, as a subject, has for its essence self-positing; self-positing here is exposition itself, in and of itself, in essence and structure. Auto = ex = body. The body is the being-exposed of being. (Corpus 35)
As in Ethics of the Spread Body, the “nausea,” “redness,” “headache” or “convulsion,” we find here, and this time in Corpus, what I call the “true body”: not its representation (Körper or hoc est corpus), nor the flesh (Leib or corpus meum); but its exposition, not so much as exhibition or expression, but as the “there” (là) of its properties by way of which it is also said to exist “within itself”:
Its members – phallus and cephale – its parts – cells, membranes, tissues, excrescences, parasites – its teguments, its sweating, features, colors, all its local colors […] Decomposition everywhere, not confined to a pure and unexposed self (death), but spreading all the way to the worst rotting, yes, spreads even there. (Corpus 35; trans. mod.)
V this is my body
Should we then end with the “this is my body” – hoc est corpus meum? This is the great question that a reader so imbued with theology or the Christian tradition cannot but ask himself. For, as I indicated in the introduction, “credible” Christianity is as important, if not more so, as “believable” Christianity, in that its articulation in culture forms the condition for its extension in faith: one cannot but ask oneself whether phrases like “this is my body” or the act of “transubstantiation,” for example, have today been surpassed once and for all, unless they are assigned a content that no longer has anything to do with the act of theologising. As I announced in the introduction: it is no longer, or at least not merely, Ethics of the Spread Body confronting Corpus; but also The Wedding Feast of the Lamb confronting The Deconstruction of Christianity. For, precisely in this work, “transubstantiation,” “incorporation” and “institution” are all variations of one of its chapters, which is entitled, precisely, “This Is My Body.”Footnote9
At the very least, and already in Corpus, it is clear where the dialogue with Christianity, if not engaged in fully, at least serves as a point of departure for discussing corporeality: hoc est corpus meum – “this is my body” as the central formula, not just of a religion, but also of what makes up so-called “representative” thinking, or the thought “of representation,” of the West. Hence, without any violence, it is a matter of “de-theologising,” not against Christianity – deconstruction is here in no way a destruction – but to let open-up (éclore), or dis-enclose (déclore), another or new form of corporeality. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, of which one wonders if Nancy is here claiming the paternity, it is a matter of deploying “possible forms of the body” that have not yet been produced nor engendered by culture.
The construct is therefore prosecuted, confronted with the described or rather what “ex-scribes itself.” For, if there is an obsession at the beginning of Corpus, it is less with the body itself (corpus) or my ownmost body (corpus meum), than with the loss of the “this” (hoc) that is (fait) my body: “Hoc est enim … challenges, allays all our doubts about appearances, conferring, on the real, the true final touch of its pure Idea: its reality, its existence.” That is, the text continues, “how we invented the body” (Nancy, Corpus 5; trans. mod.). The “body of that (God, or the absolute, if you prefer),” the “‘that’ has a body” and the “‘that’ is a body (and so we might think that ‘that’ is the body, absolutely)” (3), constitutes the essence of Christianity (christianité), and thus of the West in its entirety, in the hoc est corpus meum – that is to say, the “This is my body.” We can thus say that the opening of Corpus is harsh, to say the least, for those who believe it, or believe it still.
When it comes to “transubstantiation,” perhaps it would be better (though not in my opinion) to rid oneself of it (s’en defaire) than to re-establish it (refaire) differently. The act of “transubstantiation” would belong to a bygone and outdated world, caught in the representation to which the showing of skin (expeausition) is opposed. What is coming “now that the world of bodies comes,” Corpus explains,
is not at all what a weak discourse about appearance and spectacle would have us presume (a world of appearances, simulacra, and phantasms, lacking flesh and presence). This kind of weak discourse is only a Christian discourse on transubstantiation, but a hollowed-out substance (and also Christianity, no doubt …). (39; trans. mod.)
There we have everything. It is probably less Christianity itself that is rejected, or detheologised, by Nancy, than the act by which Christianity as such has let itself be emptied out, or exhausted, of its flesh (chair) or bodily tissues (chairs), and thus of its substance. The transubstantiation, as well in the sense of the quasi-transfusion of bodies, or exchange of substances, in a true kind of “bodily contact” (corps à corps).Footnote10 Such is, for us today, the meaning of the “wondrous exchange” of bodies, to use a phrase of Irenaeus, by which my life is shared in the act, including the Christian one, of “transubstantiating,” and not merely projected in an objectivised world or enclosed in my ego-ness:
The bread is consecrated bread, his body branched into ours so that we “become one body”; the wine is consecrated, his blood flowing in our veins. To be nourished with his body can and should be understood as a kind of organic transplant – a sharing of powers (the body) by which I live through his true corporal power, in the way of a community of life, even a transfusion of blood: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). (The Wedding Feast of the Lamb 109)
* * *
Hiding behind the “hoc est corpus meum” there is a quarrel that, at this point, and to conclude, it would be appropriate to re-examine. For, though the debate here is philosophical, it also has its roots in a theological controversy. “What the mouth of the faithful receives,” asked King Charles the Bald in the ninth century of the theologians of the time, is it “figurative” (in figura) or “real” (in re)? We know what happens in the terrible debate between, on one side, Paschasius Radbertus and Lanfranc (realism), and, on the other, Ratramnus and Berengar of Tours (symbolism). Though the outcome certainly matters – the victory of realism over symbolism, though mainly in the Catholic context – , only the philosophical aim counts for the purposes of this essay.Footnote11
“This is my body” – hoc est corpus meum – has it not indeed lost its cultural consistency by dint of being represented? If the true “obsession” is that of always finding a “this” (hoc) in order to “presentify the Absent” and to avoid sinking into an “anxiety without end,” would it not be the case that the body, within Christianity itself, allowed itself to be reified? Should not force be thought of as body, and not merely the body as force? Substance as “act of being” (Aquinas), or rather, as “agitating force” (Leibniz), or “substantial link” (Blondel); does that not say more than objectification, and representation as well?Footnote12 Such is the path I have sought to go down, in a time of a “deconstructed” Christianity, but of which the dis-enclosure will consist less in searching another form of corporeality outside of the tradition, than in articulating it at the heart of the latter as a “this is my body,” less represented than actually experienced (expérimenté): to conclude, we should say with Jean-Luc Nancy that “the body’s neither substance, phenomenon, flesh, nor signification. Just being-exscribed” (Corpus 19).
echo by jean-luc nancy
Spread (épandu), exposed – extended (étendu) in any case the body spreads us out (nous étale): it withdraws us from the assumption and subsumption in an interiority gathered up on itself.
In fact, it is perhaps above all a question of an effect in the order of representation and a certain diffuse ideological consciousness: we had become accustomed to thinking in words like “soul” or “spirit,” even “subject” or “person” (which have always had quite distinct technical meanings); a kind of immaterial entity supposed to constitute the identity of a human being and, moreover, depicted as immortal when operating a religious register.
In reality, this depiction was the projection of what we can today call the singularity of an existence. One could say that it was a popular version of what philosophy had thought of as the meaning of an individual existence without, however, stopping at the singular distinction of each existence. With Judeo-Christianity – and, no doubt, with a lateral Roman contribution, that of the legal subject – this distinction became essential because it is to each person that the so-called Word of God is addressed.
This means that existence is grasped on the basis of an address, an interpellation. The call (l’appel) comes from the outside. The outside implies an “inside” that is “inside” only insofar as it is turned to the outside. In a way, spiritual interiority immediately turns out to be exteriority as susceptibility for or possibility of receiving a call or encountering another in general.
The body is the other – as the separation from the child’s body shows … “This is my body” means: I am here (là). Or: there is an “I am here (là)” every time that this is a body.
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Notes
1 The two essays by Nancy that Falque is referring to were published together in English in a volume referred to here as Corpus (2008). However, in French, they are published separately as Corpus (1992) and L’Intrus (2000) – Trans.
2 An English translation is available, though it is merely a preparatory essay to this work: see my “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body.” [For clarity, the title of Falque’s Éthique du corps épandu is translated in the text; however, the reference is always to the French edition – Trans.]
3 See Falque, Éthique du corps épandu 38–40.
4 On this “tilling” and “overlaying” of philosophy and theology, rather than a leap, see Falque, Crossing the Rubicon §17 (“On ‘Tilling’ or Overlaying”) and §19 (“From the Threshold to the Leap”).
5 For a commentary on this passage and my own position, see Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude, chapter 3 (“Is There a Drama of Atheist Humanism?”), 30–40 (especially §11 (“Atheism From the Theologian’s Viewpoint”), 33–36).
6 I return to this point in my The Loving Struggle (Heidegger’s phrase is cited as epigraph to the book).
7 See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 93–94:
The man with one leg feels the missing limb in the same way as I feel keenly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not before my eyes; he has not lost it because he continues to allow for it, just as Proust can recognize the death of his grandmother, yet without losing her, as long as he can keep her on the horizon of his life.
8 See my “Peut-on réduire le corps?”
9 See Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb 199–217.
10 In French, corps à corps (literally, “body-to-body”) refers to a fistfight, some kind of hand-to-hand combat – Trans.
11 For a development of this debate, see my The Wedding Feast of the Lamb §27 (“The Dispute over Meat”), 188–95.
12 See my The Wedding Feast of the Lamb §29 (“Transubstantiation”), 200–05.
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