Abstract
In this paper I examine two limit cases in which the body is threatened: the experience of emergency as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras, and the experience of illness as described by Jean-Luc Nancy in his autobiographical essay The Intruder. In the first case, the everyday relationship to the body is revealed to be illusionary; the body becomes a powerful yet obedient machine. In the second case, the everyday relationship to the body is also suspended, but this time in favor of a weak and objectified body. I argue that these apparently opposite experiences actually presuppose a similar notion of the everyday body, which I further conceptualize, through Merleau-Ponty and his analysis of the body, as deficient and therefore inherently repressed. The paper concludes with the suggestion that writing about one’s own body may be seen as a way to fight the everyday tendency towards repression, and I propose overwriting as a term that can capture this process.
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Notes
See Jean-Luc Nancy: “Writing: touching upon extremity. How, then, are we to touch upon the body, rather than signify it or make it signify?” Nancy (2008, p. 12). Nancy’s answer consists in his notion of writing as touching which he names “exscription”: “We have to begin by getting through, and by means of, the exscription of our body: its being inscribed-outside, its being placed outside the text as the most proper movement of its text; the text itself being abandoned, left at its limit” Nancy (2008, p. 14). Nancy consequently defines the body as the “being-exscribed” Nancy (2008, p. 19), but he does not say what makes the body exscribed more than any other object of writing. I will return to this point at the end of the paper, and will argue that the term “overwriting” is more appropriate than “exscription.”
It is important, however, to note that whereas the meeting point between life and death necessarily takes place at the boundary of life (for nobody has yet come back from the dead), the encounter between the body and its writing seems to be more egalitarian: On the one hand the body in it is necessarily still alive, but on the other hand it undergoes a process of abstraction (or, as we will see, annihilation) through the power of language and words.
The book was first published in English translation in the United States and then in France under the Vichy regime, where it was soon banned but became popular underground reading.
Saint Exupéry (1975, p. 108). The English translation of the text is very remote from the French original, and I have therefore modified it in practically all the citations which appear in this paper.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid., p. 110. Saint-Exupéry refers here to his brother’s illness rather than to the experience of emergency, but what interests him in this situation is the imminent approach of death and the consequent abandonment of the body, rather than the slow degradation of the body, as I will describe it in the next section of the paper. It is interesting to note that here, as well as in the two previous citations, the body is not considered as an essential part of oneself, but as oneself. The ecstatic moments deriving from the approach of death thus prepare one to cease to be oneself, and the question I will try to tackle is what, then, one becomes.
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 483).
Saint Exupéry (1975, p. 112).
See Merleau-Ponty (1968).
Saint Exupéry (1975, p. 108).
This machine, however, is not desiring, as in Deleuze and Guattari, but on the contrary: Its only desire, if it has one, is to obey.
As it has been shown ever since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 Bomber Enola Gay, the powerful position of the pilot detaches him or her from the down-to-earth consequences of the mission, that is, its impact on other bodies.
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 514n24).
The term “repression” in this context is inspired by Paul Schilder and his notion of “organic repression,” caused by an injury or bodily disability which is not acknowledged. Like Merleau-Ponty, Schilder tried to connect the psychoanalytical understanding of repression with a more physiological level, showing the intertwining of “body” and “soul.” See Schilder (1950, esp. pp. 29–39). For a more contemporary analysis of this phenomenon, see Dolto (1984).
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 86).
Ibid., pp. 85–86.
Ibid., p. 73.
Merleau-Ponty (2012, pp. 83–84).
“[I]t is as though our body comprises two distinct layers, that of the habitual body and that of the actual body. Gestures of manipulation that appear in the first have disappeared in the second, and the problem of how I can feel endowed with a limb that I no longer have in fact comes down to knowing how the habitual body can act as a guarantee for the actual body” (Ibid, p. 84).
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes, though not systematically, between the “pre-personal” and the “impersonal” aspect of the body and existence. He tends to present the first as that from which one emerges (the pre-objective) and the latter as that into which one falls (the objective). The impersonal, according to my interpretation, is already the result of repression through an over-objectification of the body.
Although the gender of the subject is never mentioned by Merleau-Ponty or Saint-Exupéry, it is quite clear that the heroic subject and the heroic body are masculine. For an analysis of this aspect in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and the relationship between the masculine corps and the feminine chair, see Butler (2006). Butler’s text is a reply to Irigaray’s more critical approach towards Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the Flesh. See Irigaray (1993). The gender of writing about one’s body has been further explored by Hélène Cixous and her notion of écriture féminine.
As a matter of fact there is a third option, which is to accept the deficiency of the body and to see it as a source of renewal rather than a problem. This will be my point at the conclusion of this paper.
In this regard, the amputated person is not exactly ill, since his or her situation is rather stable. As such, the amputated body is closer to the everyday body as deficient and repressed. On a chronic illness as a stable state see Carel (2008).
Nancy (2008, pp. 161–73). This text has been analyzed from multiple perspectives in the special issue of The New Centennial Review 2:3 (2002), which included its first English translation. The emphasis, however, has been put more on the ethical, political or ontological dimensions of such notions as otherness, singularity and the béance, and less on the bodily function of writing itself. See in particular Egginton (2002), Palumbo-Liu (2002), Kamuf (2002). For a more recent text on the political implications of L’Intrus see Blacker (2010).
“Thus, the multiple stranger intruding into my life […] is nothing other than death, or rather life/death: a suspension of the continuum of being, a scansion in which ‘I’ has/have nothing important to do” Nancy (2008, p. 165). For Nancy the threat of death and the discovery of the heart’s intrusion are thus intimately linked.
Nancy (2008, p. 163).
This idea has its origin, of course, in the works of thinkers of otherness such as Derrida, Lacan, Ricœur and Kristeva.
Ibid., pp. 164–165.
Ibid., p. 166.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 170.
For a feminist analysis of Corpus in light of The Intruder see Perpich (2005).
Nancy (2000, pp. 83–93).
Indeed, the different temporality of the two experiences—immediate ecstasy versus slow degradation—entails other differences, such as in the relationship of the body with other bodies and beings. But what interests me here is less the limit experiences themselves and more the way they regard and transform the everyday situations which have preceded or followed them. On the temporal dialectics between the everyday and extraordinary situations see Dorfman (2014).
This is why I cannot follow Nancy’s own solution to the dilemma of how to write (about) the body (see above, footnote 1). Nancy’s term exscription implies that writing cannot touch the body itself, which remains outside the text, whereas I suggest, on the contrary, that the body, as deficient, finds its appropriate place in the writing which over-writes it.
For the notion of plasticity see Malabou (2008). Malabou, however, considers plasticity as a self-sufficient concept that combines negativity with positivity in the act of creation, whereas I propose that the everyday, at least in its modern form, needs to be reminded of its negativity precisely through limit situations and overwriting.
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Dorfman, E. Overwriting the body: Saint-Exupéry, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy. Cont Philos Rev 49, 293–308 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9344-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9344-2