CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 331
poststructuralism.To the contrary, this insight can be traced as far back
asHegel(atleast;leavingasideheresomerelatedreflectionsbythepre-
Socratics).Above,Ihaveonseveraloccasionsreferredtothechapterin
thePhenomenologywhere as was shown in the previous chapter he
offersanelaborateargumentdemonstratingthatthesomaticexistenceof
an individual stands in a necessary but also troubled relationship to the
semanticuniverseofthecollectivityofwhichheorsheisapart.Hegel's
dialectics ("externalization"and"vanishing") does not allow us to think
thattheentryoftheselfintothelinguisticuniverseor,closertoHegel's
thought, the public sphere, amounts to its total cancellation (as
deconstruction wants us to think), nor that it can fully find its place
there. Rather, and this matters much for our inquiry here, the self is
presentinthatuniverseasnevercompletelyitself.^10 Asimilarmediation
between individual and collective, I would argue, plays itself out also
withregardtothebiologyofhumanbeings.Hereagain,therelationship
between the somatic and the semantic is such that neither does the
formerfoldneatlyintothelatternorisittotallycontingent.
As the evidence presented in this book so far has shown, and as the
following argument will demonstrate from still other perspectives,
human life cannot ever be fully contained by the available semantic
systems,norisitscorporealityitsonlyreality.Themismatchoftextand
lifethatIamspeakingofhereisparticularlyacuteinmomentsinwhich
the usual functionality of the body is suspended, in moments of disease
and acute misery. In dialogue with Athena Athanasiou, Butler has
recently spoken of "the challenge of conveying broken human
corporeality into the body of the text" (132). I will in the argument
unfolded below pursue some of the challenges she is speaking of. As I
haverepeatedlysignaled,Iwilldothisinadialecticalfashionbecausein
my view the dualism between the somatic and the semantic, seen as
dialectical, offers the best method for de-reifying the inveterate
difference between soma and seme and recalibrating it as a
(^10) Timothy Brennan's notion of language as "material exchange" (10 et passim)
goesintoasimilardirection.