CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 377
of poststructuralism, is now directed against this form of critique,
moreover in a crucial field. What would testify more to the
precariousness of the body, even of human life, than the experience of
suffering, pain, or outright agony? To speak about extreme states of
embodiment and their representation would in this perspective amount
toarestorationofthebodyasthegroundofexperience,community,but
also communication: a non-trivial relation between language and
experience.Ihavenointerestherein thematerialism vs.constructivism
debateassuch; it is important for my present concerns only because it
highlightshowmuchisatstake,conceptuallyaswellasethically,inthe
question of the relation between the somatic and the semantic in
moments of corporeal crisis. Extreme bodily states and sensations can
thusserveassomethinglikeaprovinggroundwhereassumptionsabout
possible relations between soma and seme can be tested, where "la
grandeoppositionmythiqueduvécu(duvivant)etdel'intelligible"(the
great mythical opposition between what is vital and what intellegible;
Barthes485)re-surfacesonceagain,andwithgreatintensity.
One such assumption that I would like to begin with is the
hypothesis that pain—real or imagined, inside a person or observed in
another person—marks an emphatic Now, an absolute presence of the
sensate human body, when the body's elementary physiological
functions or rather malfunctions constitute the"corpo-reality" of that
body and bring it to the forefront of attention (of the person afflicted or
others around him or her). Improved technologies of medical imaging
are capable of visualizing at least some such conditions, for which the
modernist vocabulary of "moments of being" or "moments of intensity"
seemscuriouslyappropriate.
To be sure, the emphatic Now of anguish is not only a test case for
thetoolsofrepresentation;inmanyinstances,thecompellingintensities
of pain are also the impetus for using and perhaps even improving on
thesetoolsin"communicativeaction"intheHabermasiansense,thatis,
when people coordinate their action on the basis of a shared
understandingofagivenobjective,inthiscasegivinghelptoasufferer
critiquepointstoageneralcontroversyaboutthevalidityofdiscursivecritiques.
As such it has been understood by Sarah Ahmed in her spirited defense of
constructivistapproaches("OpenForum,"esp.25-31).