334 RüdigerKunow
semantics that American culture (at least in the South) either did not
possessorcouldnottolerate:thedehumanized,ravagedbodymarksthe
commonhumanityofallpeople.Certainly,thefactthatafterthemurder
Till's case became the object of intense media coverage in which Till
was represented as an innocent child added to the sacrificial status. In
thisway,thesomaticdimensionofhumanexistencecouldanddidattain
a historical dimension, representing the context and the level at which
the historical constellation of racism manifested itself in the everyday
world of people. The current debate around "black lives matter" insists
onthatpointevenmoreforcefully.
While bodily appearances often occur "in discourse and display"
(Mitchell 57), this appearance is—as the Emmett Till case
demonstrates—not exhausted by their discursive dimension. His body
merges uneasily with the public domain of significations but emerges
uneasily from the motley crowd of its public significations and
attributions. It is more than an idle word-play to suggest here the close
association between emergence and emergency,^16 because the meanings
attributed to a body like Emmett Till's are conditioned by anemphatic
Nowwhentheseattributionsoccurandwhichbringtogetherpowerfully,
ifonlyforamoment,somaandseme.
In mosthistoricalaccounts,the sacrificial body bears signsof social
and cultural marginalization. In U.S.-American contexts, not only
African Americans but also Native Americans, immigrants of various
backgrounds, women, LGBTQA persons, and people from the working
class have had bodies which time and again were the unlucky hosts to
such surfeits of signification. The very concept of a sacrificial body is,
inWesterncontextsatleast,religiousinorigin:itsur-sceneisofcourse
the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which, as Fredric Jameson has shown,
creates "an ideological opening... for the affirmative content of even
the most unnoble bodies and bodily states" (Ancients 18), if by
"affirmative" we mean its ability to affirm, i.e., emphasize the vicious
praxis of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other marginalized positions.
The religious reference is often overlooked in debates about somatics
and semantics but, in the United States at least, religion has re-asserted
(^16) This association has been explored at length by Brian Massumi ("National
Enterprise"34-41).