330 RüdigerKunow
ofthesomaticandthesemanticnolongerasabsolutedichotomiesalong
the biology-culture divide but as meaningful, at the same time unstable
unity of opposites, constantly in struggle with one another so that in a
given constellation the corporeal dimensions of human existence seem
paramount, in another the cultural ones. This premise will then require
to trace the cultural in the corporeal and the corporeal in the cultural,
anddoingthiswillbetheobjectiveofthesectionsthatfollow.Whilethe
idea of the independence of the semantic is part of the generally
accepted cultural truths of the Global North, its opposite number,
liberating the body from its secondary conceptual status vis-à-vis the
mind, does require some elaboration—which this chapter is designed to
provide.
For such a project, help comes from an unexpected corner: Judith
Butler, often seen as one the paragons of an all-out constructivism, has
in fact quite early on in her career offered a rather cautionary reflection
on the text-body-relationship: "Although the body depends on language
to be known, the body also exceeds every possible linguistic effort of
capture. It would be tempting to conclude that this means that the body
exists outside of language.. ."—an assumption that Butler is,
unsurprisingly, not willing to grant. Instead, she settles for a double
negative: "The body escapes its linguistic grasp, but so too does it
escape the subsequent effort to determine ontologically that very
escape" ("These Hands" 2). But where to does the body escape? If her
usual panaceae, language or discourse, do not provide a safe haven,
what then does? In the texts from Butler that I am familiar with, she
does not give a clear-cut answer. And so I read her various figures of
speech—that the body "bears meaning" but is also a "[b]lindspot of
speech" (Excitable Speech 11)—as constituting a however silent
admittance that the body does in fact occupy a special, perhaps even an
ex-centric, space in the universes of discourse. This, in my view,
authorizes a critical perspective in which human life and the text, the
body and the word, somatics and semantics, will be understood as not
simply nor effortlessly coinciding with one another—leaving us instead
with the dialectical injunction to think the two as always present
togetherwithouttheluxuryofoptingfortheascendancyofone.
Therelatedideaofapossiblemismatchbetweenthecorporealitiesof
humanexistenceandtheuniverseofdiscourses—theincompleteproject
of which I have spoken above—is by no means an insight we owe to