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body resourced by biotechnologies, I will insert a theoretical reflection
on the relationship of soma and seme, body and meaning, materiality
andculture,butalsoontheprocessesofconveyingthemintextualform.
The challenges involved here will be illustrated by a brief reflection on
pain experience and the difficulties of communicating it. After that, I
will turn to two constellations in the history of the United States in
which the human body functioned as a political text, namely the early
CivilRightsMovementandthecurrentPoliticsofLife.
It has become common usage to speak of "textual bodies," of
"reading" bodies;^5 but the relation of body and text, even though it is
prettymuchtakenforgrantedtoday,isbutasmaller,"regional"version
of a larger philosophical issue. This issue is so complicated, so vexing,
thatithasgivenrisetoasetoffundamentaldualisms:chiefamongthem
those of body and mind (Descartes), φύσει (nature) and θέσει
(construct—bothPlato's terms),natureandhistory (Kant),to nameonly
afew.Ignoringforamomentthepoststructuralistanathemaagainstsuch
dualisms and binary thinking in general, the following argument will
instead follow Adorno's advice "to grasp historic being in its utmost
historic definition... as natural being, or to grasp nature, in the place
whereitseemsmostdeeply,inertlynatural,ashistoricbeing"(Negative
Dialectics359). Translated into the present context, this dialectical
argument will mean two things: 1) to acknowledge that the body is
present(ed) mostly in culturally acceptable forms, visual or textual.^6
Concerningthelatter,PaulRicoeur'sideaofthehumanizingpotentialof
narrative(andthusofthetext)canbereadasatheoreticalelaborationof
cultural presence of the body.^7 2) To acknowledge at the same time the
(^5) A good example which illustrates moreover that this practice has by now a
history of its own are the edited collectionsTextualBodiesandWriting onthe
Body,bothpublishedin1997.
(^6) For a recent overview cf. Perloff, Marjorie. "Textuality and the Visual: A
Response."ModernandPostmodernPoetryandPoetics. MarjoriePerloff,2017.
Web.27Apr.2017.
(^7) Ricoeur's argument takes as its starting point human life as existence in time,
an existence which he characterizes as "confused, unformed, and at the time
mute;" its contingencies are in his view only made intelligible by subjecting
them to the configurational procedures of narrative (chief among them plot):
"timebecomeshumantimetotheextentthatitisarticulatedthroughanarrative