WR I T I N G T H E BO D Y:KA F K A , TE X T U A L I T Y,

A N D CO N T E M P O R A R Y TH E O R I E S

O F EM B O D I M E N T

Akiva Steinmetz-SilberSubmitted for the Capstone Seminar

and partial completion of a B.A. Degree in Interdisciplinary Studiesfrom Naropa University

April 15, 2010

The martyrs do not underestimate the body; they cause it to be elevated on the cross. In that they are at one with their enemies.

There exist in the same human being varying perceptions of one and the same object which differ so completely from each other that one can only deduce the exstence of different

subjects in the same human being.

We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us possesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the

child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply

bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation

of suffering as a merit.

Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way”

By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which

is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found

wanting. In this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the impossible (the impossible being both that which we experience and that which constitutes the experience).

Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. 1

“EXQUISITE TORTURE”: KAFKA'S WRITING-APPARATUS. 9

“TOTALLY IMPRINTED BY HISTORY”: FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICS OF THE BODY. 16

FREUD AND LACAN: THE BODILY EGO, THE MIRROR STAGE, AND THE FRACTURED SUBJECT. 22

CONCLUSION: IMPOSSIBILITY AND THE SELF-REPRESENTATION OF THE BODY. 27

BIBLIOGRAPHY. 34

1

INTRODUCTION

The theme of this paper has to do with the role textuality plays in our understanding of

the body. What connections can be established between the lived experience of the body and

textual representations of embodiment? How can the framework of writing and of language help

us understand how the body produces its own meaning, and how such meaning-making

processes and projects are mediated and conditioned by socially constructed markers of identity

(including class, race, gender, ethnic and religious identity, and others)?

This paper explores the body's textuality as realized in Kafka's story “In the Penal

Colony” and considers theoretical formulations of the body as a form of writing or textuality in

relation to Kafka's narrative. The theme of the body's textuality invites reflection upon the

possibility of questions about bodily experience and the body's role in processes of meaning-

making that are fundamentally unanswerable. While implicitly positing the body as

comprehensible or interpretable, textual constructions of the body also paradoxically mark the

limits to such possibilities of meaning, comprehension, and interpretability. In other words, when

the body is conceptualized in terms of writing and textuality, such conceptualizations signify not

only the desire to comprehend the body, but the intrinsic limits of such comprehension as well,

threatening to undermine the completeness of any truth claims about the body.

The process of inquiry this paper reflects may be of special interest for interdisciplinary

scholars working in fields of study that necessitate a rich, non-reductive theoretical

understanding of embodiment. Interdisciplinary studies is particularly well-suited for inquiry

about the body, both because of the inherent complexity of embodiment and because of the

interconnectivity of the body and notions of identity, agency, individuality, and community. This

paper integrates insights and methodologies from religious studies, literary and critical theory,

2

and gender studies / queer theory to address a common-ground question or problem: what does

textuality tell us about the body, and how can it help us locate transformative potential in

liminality and transgression? Where are the boundaries of the body and its identity?

My interest in the body, textuality, and the “limit-experience” arises from my personal

background, especially my upbringing in an observant Jewish family and my reflections on the

complexities of the body, identity, and the enigmatic, hard-to-define qualities of religious

experience. My choice of thesis topic and research project stems not only from my exposure to

the rich traditions of textual engagement within Judaism, but also from my reading of Kafka,

“post-structuralist” philosophy and theory, and my fascination with the idiosyncrasies and

complexities of bodily experience. My engagement with notions of liminality, impossibility, and

the importance of limit-experiences is indebted to my reading of Georges Bataille, who

celebrated transgression, rupture, and what he called “a voyage to the end of the possible.”1

It is my conviction that the measure of success of any theory of the body will be its

ability to address the ethical problems that arise in relation to embodiment and, in particular, to

confront manifestations of violence, abjection, and oppression wherever they arise. We need new

ways of framing the question: what do we learn from marginalized bodies (for example, from

historically oppressed and marginalized groups), and how can such knowledge help us confront

acts of violence committed against these bodies and persons (or others)? By framing

embodiment in terms of textuality, we can begin to understand the centrality of experiences of

discontinuity and liminality, as well as to problematize processes by which bodies are defined.

This theoretical stance problematizes reductionist politics of identity by complicating questions

of identity and shifting our attention toward the self-representation of bodies, and thus

encourages the development of honest, ethical relationships with body, self, and other.

1 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, 7.

3

In this paper, while I will attempt to evaluate both the benefits and the shortcomings to

textual approaches to embodiment, I take the position that despite (or perhaps because) it is

disconcerting, the idea of the body as textuality is of critical importance because of the way it

draws our attention to the reflexive character of embodiment—and thus to the constitutive limits

to the experience of embodiment. Framing the body in terms of its textuality enables us to

identify where concepts of the body involve binary thinking, and draws attention to the limits

inherent in such concepts. The framework of textuality evokes the possibility of uninterpretablity

—the possibility that understanding the body is impossible. I would argue that, in an important

sense, the textuality of the body is a failed notion, for it does not resolve the disjunction between

the body as lived (as subject) and as perceived by others (as object), but leads to indecision and

ambiguity. I argue that this failure is felicitous, for by challenging the certainty of our knowledge

about the body, limit-experiences introduce to us new ways of thinking, and offer temporal and

spatial possibilities within which a new experience of and relationship with the body can emerge.

What exactly do I mean by the phrase “textuality of the body”? The notion of “writing the

body,” while it might seem strictly metaphorical on first glance, becomes significant precisely in

relation to the instability of the disctinction between “metaphorical” and “literal.” To investigate

the idea of the body as writing, I will be drawing on insights from poststructuralist theory—in

particular, the deconstructionist approach of identifying and exploiting the operations of binary

oppositions and exposing the play of differences within text, as well as the more general insight

that all knowledge is situated (and hence “limited”) knowledge. Kafka's story “In the Penal

Colony” will be the point of departure for exploring Foucault's “political technologies of the

body,” Freud's theory of the bodily ego, Lacan's mirror stage, and, briefly, some contemporary

issues in gender studies and queer theory relating to the phenomenology of the body and gender.

4

However, the body's textuality is operative in other contexts not addressed at length in

this paper. One of the most important of these is the movement of l'écriture féminine, associated

with French poststructuralist feminists like Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous. Influenced by

Lacan, such theorists sought to locate within writing a space for subverting or circumventing the

phallogocentric structure of language. L'écriture féminine involves “writing the body,” a practice

of “re-inscribing” and affirming the difference of the female body within language, thus defying

the hegemonic normativity of phallogocentric discourse by posing its own alternatives.

Trinh T. Minh-ha reflects upon these themes in a short essay entitled “Write Your Body:”

Who can endure constant open-endedness? Who can keep on living completely exposed? We write—think and feel—(with) our entire bodies rather than only (with) our minds and hearts. It is a perversion to consider thought the product of one specialized organ, the brain, and feeling, that of the heart. The past convention was that we desire because we are incomplete, that we are always searching for that other missing half. More recently, we no longer desire-because, we simply desire, and we desire as we are. 'I am a being on desire, therefore a being of words', said Nicole Brossard, 'a being who looks for her body and looks for the body of the other: for me, this is the whole history of writing.' Gathering the fragments of a divided, repressed body and reaching out to the other does not necessarily imply a lack or a deficiency. In writing themselves, women have attempted to render noisy and audible all that had been silenced in phallocentric discourse. 'Your body must be heard,' Helene Cixous insists, '[Women] must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes.' Touch me and let me touch you, for the private is political. Language wavers with desire. It is 'the language of my entrails', a skin with which I caress and feel the other, a body capable of receiving as well as giving: nurturing and procreating.2

The revaluation or reclamation of the body also entails a reclamation of language, but

even more than this, the body and language are more than adjacent—they seem to slide into one

another. This slippage establishes the body as a site of importance but also ambiguity, and thus a

crucial space for the subversion of norms, a space pregnant with possibilities for re-inscribing

difference. I believe it is the ambiguous positioning of the body in relation to language that is

evident when Minh-ha speaks of writing that is “organic,” “resisting separation”3. This

2 Ibid., 260.3 Ibid.

5

affirmation of the body and of corporeal difference is, of course, an endorsement for a (self-)

transformation that takes place through textuality, through “writing the body.” But what is the

relationship between body and text? Surely these are discrete, distinct notions?

In the most “literal” sense, the body's textuality appears when its surface is transformed

into a surface for writing, as in Peter Greenaway's film The Pillow Book, in which the

protagonist, Nagiko, seeks out a lover who will fulfill her desire of having calligraphy written on

her body. As we will see, Kafka's story “In the Penal Colony” describes a similarly literal process

of inscription, in which the physical surface of a prisoner's body is transformed into a surface for

the mechanical inscription of a sentence of the law, and thus comes to signify the total force of

the law's sovereignty. Here, despite the materiality of the inscription (which actually culminates

in the destruction of the body of the prisoner), there is the hint of a metaphorical dimension as

well, since the bodily experience of the prisoner is subordinated by the operation that forces it to

signify the totality of the Law’s power.

Binary oppositions, such as the divisions between body and psyche, subject and object, or

materiality and signification, will become increasingly problematic as we explore the complex

relationship between language and the body articulated by Foucault and Lacan. While Foucault

and Lacan approach questions of the body, language, and subjectivity in very different ways, we

will find that each tends to complicate simplistic conceptions of the interplay of opposites,

including subject and object, physical and psychical, individual and social, and “inner” and

“outer.” When Foucault speaks of the production of docile bodies by means of disciplinary

apparatuses, or Lacan addresses how bodily experience is overwritten or introjected with

signifiers, the distinction between what “is” and “is not” the body begins to be blurred. We are

provoked to skepticism, to question our ability to speak of the body as a clearly definable or

6

locatable entity distinct from what lies outside its boundaries, and this experence of skepticism

casts doubt on our ability to find a stable foundation or referent for epistomelogical claims about

the body. By juxtaposing the work of Foucault and Lacan, as well as other theoretical

approaches, we will have the opportunity to consider how division, rupture, and binary

opposition are operative in our experience of the body, and to explore how such problematics can

be productive for generating new interdisciplinary understanding of embodiment, especially in

relation to complex areas of research such as trauma, violence, gender, and community.

Initially, we might be tempted to understand Foucault and Lacan as addressing the body's

textuality in a strictly metaphorical sence, since their work seems not to deal overtly with the

phenomenonon of visible inscription upon the material body. Or does it? Part of my goal is to

argue that there is simply no easy way to draw the line between “literal” and “metaphor.” Textual

understandings of the body point to the tenuousness of our understanding of just where the

boundaries of the body are, and consequently problematize the division between self and other.

How do we know where the (subjectively) lived body ends and the (objectively) material body

begins? How can we differentiate between the body as lived and the body as image manifested in

the social order, as it appears to and becomes available for others?

This question brings into relief the distinction between what we might call, to borrow

terminology used by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “experience-near” and “experience-distant”

concepts of the body. This distinction analogizes the difference between relating to the body as

“self”—the body as a space that one occupies and thus affirms the self-identification with the

body—and as “other,” as a person we meet in the world in an encounter mediated through

discourse, relationship, and power relations (in the sense I am using these words, one's “self” can

also be experienced as “other”). Textual approaches to embodiment offer to open up productive

7

new spaces and possibilities by negotiating a relationship toward the body that is founded upon

non-knowledge, the limit-experience, and an awareness of the tenuousness of the body's

boundaries, and hence affirmative of difference.

The notion of the body's textuality is not without risk, for it would seem to objectify the

body in the very attempt to understand it—not only to introduce distance between the materiality

of the body and the subjectivity of its experience, but also to posit the body as itself an “other”.

Critically, we need to attend to the possibility that the attempt to arrive at a “textual”

understanding of bodily experience might involve misrepresenting or marginalizing other bodies.

However, I would argue that it is precisely the issue of representation which the textuality of the

body renders problematic. The framework of textuality allows us to ponder the vexing status of a

body that refers to and reflects upon its own being and experience. Such an experience might

provoke us, as “readers,” to become actively engaged in authoring our own versions of bodily

text. Again, I am struck by the ways in which the productive tension between “opposites” come

into play when we wrestle with such questions. The textuality of the body might turn out not so

much to objectify the body as to humanize the idea of text, offering a richer and more immediate

basis for interpreting the meaningfulness of textuality in terms of bodily experience itself. When

our ideas about the body are radically destabilized, in other words, “body” and “text” are no

longer distinct notions, but blur into one another, allowing us to envision new ways of being in

relationship both with bodies and with the social “texts” in which our bodies participate.

In the next section, I look at Kafka's “In the Penal Colony,” which will serve as a

departure point for my inquiry into the idea of bodily textuality. Kafka's story addresses the

complexities of bodily identity, inscription, and the complex interactions between embodiment

and textuality in ways that problematize our understanding of agency, identity, and power. My

8

choice to ground my thesis on a story by Kafka reflects my desire to convey the questions that

intrigue me about the body in a way that engages my readers' imaginations. Susan Sontag

famously wrote that “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”4 I want to extend a

challenge to my readers, as well as to myself: to consider—especially when looking at Kafka's

writing—the difference between these. When are we interpreting and when are we imagining,

and how do we tell the difference? In choosing Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” as a springboard

for exploring theoretical constructions of the body as text, a crucial challenge will be to evaluate

the proximity of these theoretical positions to the experience of the body. Does theory take up a

critical distance from the body (experience-distant), or focus instead on the subject who is

immersed in bodily practice (experience-near), on the level of discourse, ritualization, and the

lived experience of the body?

Finally, can we move beyond conceptualizing the body in terms of surface or interiority,

and posit instead a dynamically complex phenomenon of embodiment that eludes interpretation,

situated in the productively discordant, chaotic interplay between “inside” and “outside”? In

what follows, I hope to demonstrate that textual formulations of embodiment offer new and

unique perspectives on the perplexing phenomena of embodiment. I hope that my readers will

agree, and that the experience of uncertainty will give rise not only to discomforting realities, but

also to new ways of being in relationship with others, the world, and, of course, the body.

4 Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, (New York: Picador, 1961), 14.

9

“EXQUISITE TORTURE”: KAFKA'S WRITING-APPARATUS

“Does he know his sentence?” “No,” said the officer, eager to continue his explanations, but the traveler interrupted him: “He doesn't know his own sentence?” “No,” repeated the officer, and paused for a moment as if he were waiting for the traveler to elaborate on the reason for his question, then said: “It would be pointless to tell him. He'll come to know it on his body.”5

Kafka's story “In the Penal Colony” was published in 1919, the year the Nazi party was

founded in Germany. The story's protagonist is a “traveler” (no names are used in the story),

evidently a person of some prestige who is visiting the colony and has been invited to witness an

execution. Much of the story is comprised of discourse between the traveler and the officer, in

which the latter explains to the traveler, at great length, the workings of an unusual device of

machine to be used in carrying out the sentence.

At least initially, the traveler has little interest in the execution, and “appeared to have

accepted purely out of politeness” (95) the invitation to attend it. Similarly, there is little interest

in the execution in the penal colony itself; the traveler is in fact the only spectator present, as

well as the only outsider (the only others present are the condemned man, the soldier, and the

officer). However, the officer more than overcompensates for this apparent apathy by his own

enthusiasm for what he calls, in the story's opening line, “an exceptional apparatus.” Via the

officer's explanation, the reader is able to learn, along with the traveler, how the device works.

The “apparatus” is composed of three parts: the “bed,” the “designer,” which is the same

size and shape as the bed and hangs two meters above it, attached to it by four brass rods, and the

“harrow,” which hangs from a steel band in between the bed and the designer, made of glass in

which are mounted needles. The condemned man is strapped naked on the bed, and the harrow is

made to inscribe onto his body, its movements determined (in effect, programmed) by the

designer. The apparatus is powered by electric batteries, one for the bed and one for the harrow.

5 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, 99.

10

When turned on, both the bed and the harrow are set into motion, moving with “tiny, rapid

vibrations” (98). However, “'it is the harrow that actually carries out the sentence'” (Ibid.).

At this point in the officer's explanation, the reader feels impelled, like the traveler, to

inquire, “'And just what is the sentence?'” The officer is astonished at his ignorance, but relishes

the opportunity to rectify it, stating that he is the person “best equipped to explain the

sentencing.” He shows the traveler a folder containing drawings made by the former

commandant—the man who invented the apparatus—in order better to explain the machine's

operation: “'The sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the condemned man

has transgressed is engraved on his body by the harrow. This man, for example'—the officer

indicated the man—'will have inscribed on his body: “Honor thy superiors!”'” (99)

The traveler examines the drawings of the former commandant, but cannot decipher the

text. Yes, the officer acknowledges, “it's not calligraphy for schoolchildren. It must be carefully

studied” (103). Let us pause here to take note of the indecipherability of this bodily writing,

which is one of its significant features, as the officer himself goes on to elaborate:

Of course, the script can't be too simple: It's not meant to kill on first contact, but only after twelve hours, on average; but the turning point is calculated to come at the sixth hour. So the lettering itself must be surrounded by lots and lots of flourishes; the actual wording runs around the body only in a narrow strip, and the rest of the body is reserved for the ornamentation. (103)

In addition to being lethal, then, the writing is necessarily elaborate, in order to allow

sufficient time for it to be received or interpreted in an unusual way—directly via the skin, or

surface of the body. Furthermore, the amount of time it will take is rather long—12 hours, during

which the body of the condemned person will undoubtedly suffer unimaginable agony. Let us

take special note of the events that take place in the sixth hour, however, for the fact that they

merit special mention by the officer suggests they play a crucial role in the process of bodily

11

inscription to which the story refers variously as “sentence,” “judgment,” and “execution”:

But how still the man becomes in the sixth hour! Enlightenment usually comes to even the dimmest. It begins around the eyes, and it spreads outward from there—a sight that might tempt one to lie down under the harrow oneself. Nothing more happens, just that the man starts to interpret the writing, he screws up his mouth as if he were listening. You've seen yourself how difficult the writing is to decipher with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds. Of course it is hard work and it takes him six hours to accomplish it, but then the harrow pierces him clean through and throws him into the pit, where he's flung down onto the cotton wool and bloody water. This concludes the sentence and we, the soldier and I, bury him. (104; italics added)

Let us pause to recount a few relevant themes thus far from “In the Penal Colony” that

might offer insight into the significance of writing as a metaphor for the body. First, of course,

we must acknowledge the overwhelmingly troubling fact that the writing process kills. The

sentence—however glorious it is deemed to be by the officer, tireless advocate of the former

commandant—can not be complete, it would seem, without the ultimate destruction of the body

upon which it is inscribed.

It seems significant, too, that the writing starts at the surface and gradually works its way

deeper beneath the skin, as well as returning again and again to inscribe more and more

elaborately at the surface of the skin. While the sentence the traveler is unable to decipher from

the drawings—“Honor thy superiors!”—is made up of simple words, it is inscribed in a way that

is anything but simple. The role the body plays in the operation is particularly curious, though,

for rather than reading the sentence in the usual way, it will come to interpret the writing by

receiving its meaning through the surface of the skin. Thus the body, curiously, plays both an

active and a passive role in the operation.

This contrast may explain the somewhat contradictory treatment the body receives during

the writing process. The cotton-wool on which the bloodied portion of the skin rests is “specially

prepared” for drying the bloodied, wounded skin and allowing it to rest. After two hours, the

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prisoner is given food—warm rice pudding—which is put into an electrically heated bowl, from

which he can lap it up with his tongue. While hardly the epitome of compassion, the prisoner's

body, at least while it is still living, is not subjected to needlessly cruel or excessively violent

treatment beyond what is required in order to subject it to the workings of the apparatus. Once

the moment of realization has come, however—once the prisoner has deciphered the sentence—

the machine pierces the body “clean through” and hurls it into the pit. The body, having served

its prescribed purpose as medium for the inscription of the law, can now be killed with impunity,

for it is now no more than an lifeless—and useless—object.

Hopefully, this brief synopsis has been extensive enough at least to offer the reader a taste

of the richly detailed world in which the drama of Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” unfolds, and

hint at how Kafka's narrative subversively collapses body and text into one another. While we

will have occasion to return to “In the Penal Colony” again throughout this paper, I want briefly

first to summarize what happens in the remainder of the narrative.

After lengthy explanation the officer beseeches the traveler, whom he views as a highly

distinguished foreign guest of the colony, to speak openly and positively about the “process and

execution” in the presence of the new commandant, who seems not to approve highly of it (the

traveler hesitates but then openly refuses, since he is horrified by the operation and thus strongly

opposed to it on ethical grounds). What is the significance of the insistence that the traveler use

his influence in this way, such that the apparatus—the old commandant's “life work”—receives

the approval of the new commandant's administration, and why is the apparatus and its procedure

not met with more open support within the penal colony? In other words, why is the machine's

process of writing not a system sufficient unto itself?

After being rebuffed by the traveler, the officer, apparently realizing that such broader

13

support for the execution process conceived by the former commandant will never be

forthcoming, sets the prisoner free and prepares himself to enter the machine instead. When he

does, however, the machine—already in a state of disrepair, due to the neglect of the new penal

administration—begins to malfunction horribly.

Instead of the “exquisite torture” the officer had desired, the harrow pierces all the way

through his skull almost immediately after the machine begins its operation—instead of at the

twelfth hour, when it should have. Realizing that the officer is dead, the traveler looks, “almost

against his will,” at the face of the corpse. “It was as it had been in life (no sign of the promised

deliverance could be detected). What all the others had found in the machine, the officer had not;

his lips were clamped together, the eyes were open and bore the same expression as in life, a

quiet, convinced look; and through the forehead was the point of the great iron spike.”6

Rather than the machine beginning its inscription at the surface of the skin, the officer's

body is pierced all the way through, and instead of the transcendence the officer had longed for

in the inscription of the law on his body, he meets almost instant death. Seemingly for no reason,

the machine breaks down, and in a surreal moment gears roll out of the designer and clatter to

the ground as the machine vibrates and lurches out of control. It is as though the officer's act of

submitting himself to the harrow is itself part of the process that contributes to the breakdown of

the machine, as though the officer's transgression itself (on the assumption that his self-sacrifice

is itself a violation of the law) undermines the very foundation of the structured order of the

penal colony. It is as though the machine cannot function without the unshakable sovereignty of

the Law, and in some way, the officer's actions have violated this sovereginty and unleashed the

lethal force of the machine.

Kafka's story is disturbing, I would suggest, for several reasons. The most evident of

6 “IPC,” 118-119.

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these is the excessive display of violence, and along with it, the double-edged relationship

toward the body defined by the operation of the machine and its inscription. One one hand, the

body is objectified, made into something useful—a medium for the transmission of the Law—

and on the other hand, this usefulness is simultaneously disavowed, for once the body has been

inscribed upon it is useful only insofar as the bodily text can be recognized—read—by the

prisoner. Much like in George Orwell's novel 1984, in which the protagonist, Winston, must first

submit to the hegemonic power of the regime before it consents summarily to assassinate him,

the condemned subject of “In the Penal Colony” must come to understand the Law by means of

its inscription upon the skin—but once the prisoner deciphers the text, his life is no longer

deemed valuable, and so the body can be destroyed, discarded and buried.

In addition to violence and the paradoxical juxtaposition of the body's subjectification /

objectification in Kafka's narrative, there is another theme that emerges which is especially

interesting to consider in relation to Foucault's conception of power: the theme of complicity.

The traveler, for instance, while unfamiliar with the practices of the penal colony, nevertheless is

called upon to speak and to pass judgment about it by virtue of his presence and his authority.

Arguing for a reader-response approach to Kafka that takes note of the “external plot” (the plot

that unfolds between the reader and the text), Yoseph Milman has pointed out that the

juxtaposition of the traveler's perspective and the point-of-view Kafka offers the reader leads to

an identification that leads to internal conflict for the reader:

The reader, whose attitude by now [i.e. as the machine breaks down, killing the officer horrifically] has become identical with the explorer's, finds himself [sic] involved too, like him torn between the normative starting point, by which he has condemned the officer in the beginning of the story, and the feelings of uncertainty, moral embarrassment, and guilt, which ultimately fill him.7

7 Yoseph Milman, “The Ambiguous Point of View and Reader Involvement in Kafka: A Reader Oriented Approach to The Castle and 'In the Penal Colony,'” 268.

15

An important question to ask, then, is how to come to terms with our complicity with

power. If we are forced to witness the spectacle of bodily inscription, and cannot adopt a neutral

stance toward it, how can we at least formulate a clear understanding of and ethical relation

toward the phenomenon of bodily inscription and its attendant violence and destruction?

“In the Penal Colony” invites us to explore the parallels between Kafka's graphically

realized apparatus for bodily inscription and Foucault's notion of a “political technology of the

body.” Foucault's approach will then be contrasted with the relationship between the body and

language as formulated within psychoanalytic theories of embodiment, after which we will

return again to Kafka’s story in order to explore the potential advantages and limits inherent in

each of these theoretical positions. Are there ways in which Foucault's power / knowledge

paradigm cannot fully account for the role the body plays in processes through which discourse

is constructed? Are there ways in which the body, notwithstanding persistent efforts by

psychoanalytic theorists to understand it, ultimately lies beyond the comprehension of analysis

and theories of subject formation articulated by Freud and Lacan? Through an exploration of

Foucault's approach, as well as a look at the role the body plays for Freud and Lacan, we may

acquire a broader vocabulary, greater context, and new possible frames of reference for some of

the problematic dimensions of bodily inscription we encounter in the penal colony.

16

“TOTALLY IMPRINTED BY HISTORY”: FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICS OF THE BODY

This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated, and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.8

How are we to understand the elaborate ceremony of “In the Penal Colony,” which at

once amalgamates judgment, sentencing, and execution? What do we make of the total passivity

conferred upon the body, so that the sentence of the law may be inscribed upon it? What

questions are raised by this total transformation, a process that culminates in the total destruction

of the body by the writing inscribed upon it, and how can we make sense of the terrifying

dehumanization of the body depicted in the story?

Such questions overlap considerably with theoretical concerns about the body in much of

Foucault's work that will be important for us to consider here. In the essay “Nietzsche,

Genealogy, History,” which reflects Foucault's own methodological understanding of

genealogical analysis, he uses the language of “bodily inscription” to describe how values

emerge from history and take shape within the body itself:

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.9

The body upon which genealogical inquiry focuses its attention can be read as “totally

imprinted” by the force of historical events, its surface signifying the trace of the power that

inscribes upon its skin. The body is in an antagonistic relationship to history, a force that will

8 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977, 26.

9 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148; emphasis added.

17

ultimately destroy it. The task of the genealogist is thus to “expose” a body totally imprinted by

history, to document the inscription of historical values upon the body.

In Foucault's analytic framework of genealogy, the body is described as “surface of

events,” “locus of a dissociated Self,” and “a volume in perpetual disintegration.” These choices

of predicates are striking, for they seem to relate to the body most crucially as space—as a site,

boundary, or, perhaps, as text (“a volume in perpetual disintegration”). While the textuality of the

body alluded here is circumscribed not only by its own boundaries, but also by the destructive

power of history over the body, Foucault's language suggests a conceptualization of embodiment

that both resists and takes advantage of the play of opposites. Thus the body is inscribed surface

“traced” but also “dissolved” by language; it is the location of a Self, but a Self that is

“dissociated,” “illusion,” and the body is a volume, a text, but one in perpetual disintegration.

Foucault's approach is to examine the effects of historical events upon the body, the

recapitulation or reiteration of the body through language, and the body's dissolution as effected

in and through ideas. For Foucault, play of forces that characterizes the relationship between the

body and the world is overwhelmingly defined in terms of power. However, if the focus of

inquiry is the body as object acted upon by the world, then the significance of this “object,”

acquired in part through techniques of inhabiting and identifying with the body produced and

discursively mediated by power, also reflects upon the world that imprints it and bestows it with

meaning as a bodily subject. The body is complex, not “merely” object or subject, and it is this

complexity to which I believe Foucault is alluding when he refers to the power of history over

the body and the totality of the body's destruction to which the imprinting of values gives rise.

Part of the benefit of Foucault's approach is that he conceptualizes power not as

prohibition or injunction, but as positivity, in terms of its productivity. The idea of positivity is

18

important for Foucault; as Giorgio Agamben points out in his essay “What Is An Apparatus?”,

the word positivité (positivity) is related to another important word for Foucault, dispositif

(apparatus).10 Agamben proposes a model that includes living beings, apparatuses, and, where

these overlap, subjects. Apparatuses crucially shape the way subjectivity is lived and embodied

by means of the way in which they make themselves available to living beings.

Anything can be an apparatus. Agamben gives the example of mobile telephones (which

he personally hates with a passion yet unfortunately for him were quite popular in Italy), a device

which, by means of the material effects and social phenomena it produces, actively shapes the

subject's interactions with it, and with the world. The seemingly innocent mobile phone thus has

the power to shape the self-conception of subjects within a social order. The point here is that if

apparatuses play an important role in the field of social relations, they do so not through the

(negative) force of constraint or prohibition, but productively, by means of the idiosyncratic

(positive) characteristics they manifest for and make available to the human subject.

How would we apply a Foucauldian approach to “In the Penal Colony”? One fairly

straightforward reading would attempt to situate itself within the scene of the narrative as an

expression of the historical context in which Kafka was writing. The penal colony would be

Devil's Island, an infamous prison colony controlled by the French, where the indigenous native

population comprised part of the special terror of incarceration on the island.11 The body of the

condemned might refer to Alfred Dreyfus, a Alsatian (French) Jewish military officer who was

framed and incarcerated on Devil's Island for treason at the end of the 19th century, in one of the

most charged political controversies of Europe at the time.

10 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Note that the German word Kafka uses to denote the writing-machine of the penal colony is Apparat.

11 I thank Jeremy Lowry for bringing to my attention the resemblance between Kafka's penal colony and Devil's Island.

19

If this reading is accurate, then the “apparatus” of “In the Penal Colony” can be

understood as a symbol of totalizing forms of power—for example, as the discursive force of the

law as articulated by colonial regimes like that of modern France. The apparatus is deployed as

an equalizing force that counteracts the destabilizing effects of human differences by reducing

the body to a homogenous surface for inscription. By rendering the body as surface, this

equalizing force that dehumanizes the body allows the Law (and with it, the discursive

construction of the state, the nation, and tradition as sovereign) to be reaffirmed. The machine

thus symbolically assimilates and incorporates any threat that might threaten the sovereign self-

identity of power. The coinciding of the body's imprinting and of its destruction demonstrates the

need to reduce the bodily agent must be reduced to the mute facticity of its material presence, for

this bodily presence will serve as raw material for the ongoing inscription of the sovereignty of

the Law's power—a process of writing that can only culminate in the death of the subject.

The death of the subject will be crucial to our understanding of “In the Penal Colony.”

What is the significance of the officer's self-sacrifice? Why does the unmaking of the machine

coincide with his transgressive decision to abandon the execution of the condemned soldier and

submit his own body to the workings of the apparatus? Clearly, the operating of the machine is

for the officer a positive force—there is something to be desired therein, though unfortunately for

him, he encounters “not the exquisite torture [he] had wished for; this was out-and-out murder.”12

Just as power for Foucault is conceptualized as positivity, he addresses the body not simply in

terms of its objectification, deployment in the social order, and destruction, but rather in terms of

how power relations work upon bodies to transform them into particular kinds of subjects.

This point is crucial if we are to address the textuality of the body with nuance and

complexity, for the body must be more than merely object or surface. As Judith Butler asserts in

12 Kafka, “IPC,” 118.

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relation to the performative enactment of gender norms, power is not “passively scripted upon

the body”13; rather, it is imperative to theorize the body in terms of its subjectivity, to offer some

account for agency. Alternatively, however, can we identify zones of ambiguity or liminality

where subjectivity and passivity blur together, where body and text collide in such a way as to

undermine such binary distinctions (subject/object, power/body, language/materiality)? The

question is how to understand the formation of bodily subjects performed by power/knowledge

(the apparatus) in a way that does justice to our experience of embodiment in all its complexity.

Let us turn to the introduction to Discipline and Punish, where Foucault outlines his

research on the modern history of the penitentiary. Here Foucault states that to write a history of

modern punishment is also to write a history of the body: “Historians long ago began to write the

history of the body....But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations

have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out

tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”14 Properly understood, the body is an area of great

political concern. This understanding, for Foucault, comes “not so much from history as from the

present,” from the prison revolts that had “in recent years...occurred throughout the world.”15

Both these uprisings (to which Foucault would lend his support through his establishment

of the Prison Information Group, or GIP—groupe d'information sur le prisons), as well as his

understanding of the historical development of the modern disciplinary institution (with its roots

in the legal reforms that took place in the wake of the French Revolution), reinforce Foucault's

conviction in the crucial role played by the body as both object of knowledge, and as human

subject produced and transformed by the workings of modern disciplinary society. For Foucault,

the idea of prison “reform” deserves close scrutiny, for far from being merely a humanistic move

13 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” 417.

14 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.15 Ibid., 30.

21

toward more “just” (or less brutal and excessive) forms of punishment, such reform must be

understood in relation to the particular needs and concerns of the society that produced it: “What

was emerging no doubt was not so much a new respect for the humanity of the condemned—

torture was still frequent in the execution of even minor criminals—as a tendency towards a

more finely tuned justice, towards a closer penal mapping of the social body.”16

This analysis is grounded in Foucault's conviction that “to analyze the political

investment of the body and the microphysics of power,” means to relate the emergence of these

political practices of the body back to the body, to try to ascertain how power is invested in the

body and works to form particular kinds of bodily subjectivities. The question is not, then,

whether punishment is carried out either through the public display of excessive punitive force,

or by quiet (if forced) seclusion, but rather, how new modes of punishment bring about new

kinds of apparatuses for conditioning the body. Foucault's task is to “imagine a political

anatomy” concerned with “the 'body politic,' as a set of material elements and techniques that

serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge

relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of

knowledge.” Or, in more Kafkaesque terms, perhaps the task at hand is to understand how the

textuality of the body points to the ever-present demand for the development of new (conceptual)

machines—that is, for new ways of understanding, constructing, and interpreting the meaning of

bodily experience, and the sources of such meaning. Yet I fear even this rich understanding of

subject formation as arising from the productive effects of power, while giving us a clearer sense

of the proximity between notions of power-knowledge and the discursive production of the self,

still does not satisfy the desire to comprehend the disquieting violence that attends the inscription

of the body in Kafka's “In the Penal Colony.”

16 Ibid, 78.

22

FREUD AND LACAN: THE BODILY EGO, THE MIRROR STAGE, AND THE FRACTURED SUBJECT

A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.17

Can psychoanalytic theory help us make sense of the shattering force of violence in

Kafka's story? In this section, I aim to bring attention to the importance of division, ambiguity,

and fragmentation for the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and to locate the body

within the ambiguity and uncertainty of psychoanalytic discourse. Such ambiguity seems

especially evident in Freud's statement that “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not

merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”18

What does it mean that the ego is a “bodily ego”? That the structural development of the

ego is radically contingent upon bodily experience? What is the special significance of the body's

surface, and of the careful distinction between a “surface entity” and “the projection of a surface?

I will try to show that Freud's conception of a “bodily ego” (or, perhaps better-stated, his attempt

to formulate this conception) draws heavily on notions of textuality.

For Freud, the surface of the body is of interest because of its liminality; it is a zone of

contact with what lies outside, with what the subject is not. The surface of the body thus

epitomizes the body's uniqueness: although it is an object (and “seen like any other object”), it is

an object of a special kind, for it is subject to both internal and external perceptions (and it thus

17 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, 15-16.18 Ibid.

23

“yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception” when

it is touched). It should not then be surprising that the body marks the occasion of an important

self-identification that takes place in subject formation; the bodily ego is not “merely a surface

entity” but the “projection of a surface,” which is to say, it is representational, a text that reflects

upon the experiences that take place at the body's surface. The boundaries of the body mark the

limit of its semi-autonomous existence within the larger context of the world at large, of other

people, and of experiences beyond its own control. We should not overlook the importance of the

fact that the transformative experiences of pain and illness provide Freud with a frame of

reference, “perhaps a model,” of how we arrive at an idea of embodiment. Experience of pain

and suffering are often identified with the “outside” of the body, towards which “the ego seems

to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation,”19 separating off from itself that which lies

outside, which is not itself. Thus, the identity of the bodily ego is formed in part through the play

of differences at the surface of the body, within the relational zone or frontier between “inner”

and “outer,” between “self” and “other.”

By re-positioning the question of the body within the framework of textuality, the radical

division which appears so central to psychoanalytic constructions of the self can be understood in

new and different ways. Psychoanalysis has often been understood as a profoundly discouraging

attitude toward life and the self, and its emphasis on division, rupture, separation, castration, and

alienation criticized as crude, unsophisticated thinking, a simplistic holdover from Cartesian

dualism. However, I am suggesting that the psychoanalytic preoccupation with the division of

the subject can be understood more positively if considered in terms of textuality—as a

productive space of possibility immanent in the experience of bodily subjects moving through

time and space.

19 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York and London: Norton, 1961), 13.

24

Because the totality of psychic phenomena cannot, according to Freud, be reduced to

consciousness, the fundamental approach of psychoanalysis must be to go beyond the conscious:

to look beyond the surfaces of things, to use language carefully and methodically, and above all,

perhaps, to question rigorously, explore, and contemplate the meaning of the limits of its own

knowledge. The recognition of the need to think beyond (or perhaps more accurately, think

through) surface appearances should be considered in relation not only to the persistence of

epistemological uncertainties that pervade Freud's work; also, in particular, we should take note

of the complexities questions of dualism pose for Freud. Elizabeth Grosz elaborates: “Freud does

not assume a givenness or naturalness for the body: on his understanding, the biological body is

rapidly overlaid with psychical and social significance, which displaces what may once

(mythically) have been a natural body.”20

This interplay between materiality and the imprinting of law, myth, culture, and meaning

—in short, text—as reflected in Freud's “bodily ego” and Lacan's “mirror stage” alludes to the

fundamentally open character of the meaning we ascribe to embodiment:

Both Freud and Lacan link the genesis of the ego in primary narcissism—the mirror stage—to two distinct but complementary processes. First, the ego is the product of a series of identifications with and introjections of the image of others, most especially the mother. These images are introjected into the incipient ego as part of its ego-ideal (the ego-ideal always being a residue of the subject's identificatory idealizations of the other). Second, the ego is an effect of a re-channeling of libidinal impulses in the subject's own body. The body is thus the point of junction of the social and the individual, the hinge which divides one from the other.21

Lacan's “mirror stage” is the scene in which what he calls the “imaginary” relation is

formed with the ego, due to the subject's mis-identifying its specular image in the mirror as itself.

The imaginary order is a part of the tripartite division in Lacan's work into the Real (that which

resists being signified, the overflowing excess of materiality), the Imaginary (the world as split

20 Elizabeth Grosz, Psychoanalysis and the Body, in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, 267-268.21 Ibid, 268.

25

by the play of sameness/difference with/as the narcissistic identification with the phantasmatic

ego-ideal); and the Symbolic (the order of language and signification, inaugurated by the Name-

of-the-Father). This tripartite structure provides an interpretive framework that allows for

creatively dividing the phenomena of psychic experience along lines congruent or parallel to the

introjection of the subject into a discursively modulated and structured social reality.22

The textuality of the body enacted in Lacanian theory should perhaps emphasize above

all the psychoanalytic need to address the problematics and significance of language in relation

to the central role taken by the body in the experience of the self. However, to recognize this,

psychoanalytic theory must still address the problems posed by representation. It must avoid

relying on foundational thinking by creating its own space for the body to inhabit within its own

discourse and practice, making of language a doorway to an experience of a self obscured from

consciousness and thus crucially “other,” but nonetheless a possible self (or selves).

What are the implications of the textuality of the body enacted by psychoanalysis? If

bodily experience as a text to be interpreted, then psychoanalysis also “writes”--creates--its own

kind of body, since insofar as the body is interpretable, it is a site that can be not only “read” but

also “misread,” thereby eluding representation and, in effect, preserving its own agency and

autonomy. If the psychoanalytic encounter is understood dynamically in this way—in relation to

the elusive play of sameness and difference, presence and absence of bodily meaning—then the

body is not only read but also, more radically, creates its own meaning within the context of the

analytic encounter.23 Insofar as the body becomes a scene of reading in analysis, Freud and Lacan

each offer interpretive modes of understanding the body's textuality, of how the body is to be

22 For an excellent evaluation of Lacan's orders of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, see Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan, The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 75-115.

23 On Lacanian psychoanalysis as a practice of reading, see Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1998).

26

read.

If this is so, how can we psychoanalytic theory as not simply interpretive, but also as

producing its own subject, whose meaning arises from the interplay of presence and absence, of

the play of signification upon and within the body's surface and depth? Furthermore, how will

psychoanalysis account (or fail to account) for not only the constraints of language, but also the

disjunctive gap between language and what Gayle Salamon calls the “felt sense” of the body?

Perhaps uncertainty and ambiguity are not merely surface effects, but rather key to the

psychoanalytic engagement with self and body. Both Freud's conception of the “bodily ego,”

cited at the beginning of this section, and Lacan's formulation of the “mirror stage,” rely

crucially on the ambiguity of the body's status in relation to the unconscious and thus to notions

of the self. The acknowledgement of a fundamental uncertainty inherent within the subjective

experience of the body can be understood as revealing a shift away from the conviction of bodily

“wholeness.” Here, with the rejection of the identification of the conscious subject with selfhood,

the possibility arises that the very notion of bodily cohesiveness, of the self-identity of the

subject, is no longer fully tenable.

27

CONCLUSION: IMPOSSIBILITY AND THE SELF-REPRESENTATION OF THE BODY

What is so striking about Kafka's dystopic narrative of the penal colony and the bodily

inscription performed by the machine upon the body of the condemned prisoner? Personally,

while I find the imposed transformation of the body from agent (a soldier deployed on the penal

colony—a subordinate subject) to object (a peculiar kind of “text”) fascinating, I am moved even

more deeply by the horrifically excessive violence of the machine's operation. It is difficult to

ignore this spectacle of violence, particularly the excessive brutality of the officer's death. My

question, then, is why Kafka links together the transformation of the body into text with violence

that must culminate in death?

Throughout this paper, I have been emphasizing the importance of considering the ethical

implications of the body's textuality. Perhaps inasmuch as projections of the body already

involve socially mediated notions of selfhood, agency, and individuality, textualities of the body

invariably situate the body within a social landscape. That is, theories of the body's “textuality”

must presuppose a notion of clearly identifiable, coherent boundaries for the body—for without a

strategy for differentiating between what the body “is” from what it “is not,” how can “the” body

even be identified as such, let alone understood, interpreted, or “written”? The question of

boundaries is complicated, but it is also of critical importance.

Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” invites us to imagine the boundaries of the body

graphically, to seek to conceptualize the imaginary line that indicates where the body is located

in space, and separates the space of bodily subjectivity from the “outside”. If we cannot do

without boundaries, however, then any epistemological inquiry about the body necessarily has an

ethical dimension as well, for the presence of the body is never really given, but always

negotiated in relation to an outside, an “other”. Is the body another other?

28

If the body is always eluding definition yet always compelling or invoking the coherence

of boundaries, of its constituent limits, then there is no way of containing alterity, of separating

otherness from the lived experience of the body. If this is so, then questions about how we relate

to the body can never be easy ones, for there is no “answer” that does not give rise to further

uncertainties. If the body is “other,” then the apparent opposition of self and other, sameness and

difference, subject and object is never as simple as it may appear. From the perspective of my

body I can never really know that I, myself, am not an “other.”

The implications of the kinds of epistemological questions about the body I have raised in

this paper extend to politics as well as to ethics (although perhaps no clear division is possible

here). The constitutive paradoxes of embodiment compel us to consider the abjection and

marginalization that often go hand in hand with the delineation of bodies and their boundaries.

Why does violence seem so invariably to accompany the textual marking of bodies (by means of

categories of class, gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, age, religion, and so forth)?

The challenge that remains for us, both with respect to Kafka and to our experience of the

body, is to determine not only how our thinking is informed by theory, but just as importantly,

how theoretical understanding falls short and provokes us to consider the limits or shortcomings

of a textual model for embodiment. Can violence, prohibition, and the workings of power upon

the body be adequately conceptualized within a paradigm of textuality, or is this paradigm

radically insufficient for coming to terms with the idiosyncrasies of embodiment and the

transformation of the body into a signifying object? The question of discourse, perhaps, can be

pursued only so far before it returns to the body, and to the impossibility of representation.

At this point, I want to discuss briefly how my argument relates to a topic about which I

have said little thus far, but which has greatly informed my own research: namely, questions of

29

gender. Much feminist and queer theory has sought to identify ways in which the (female) body

becomes the site for socially inscribed values and norms, articulated by the hegemonic power of

phallogocentric discourse. However, as Vicky Kirby has pointed out, the anti-essentialist bent of

much post-structuralist feminist theory suggests a distancing from the “given” materiality of the

body, as though such “naturalness” or “innateness” must be disavowed to open up a space for the

rethinking of embodiment and gender.

It should be apparent by now that the persistent invocation of binary categories to make

sense of such vexing phenomena as the body and gender (male / female, sex / gender, straight /

queer) may be radically undermined when we encounter the body within the framework of its

textuality. Along these lines, I want to mention briefly the work of Gayle Salamon, a

contemporary theorist of transgender whose work has helped me to think through the apparently

disjunctive interplay between bodily “interiority” and “surface.”24 Salamon's recent book

Assuming A Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality engages in an interdisciplinary

reading of phenomenological and psychoanalytic accounts of embodiment in order to bring

attention to trans- and other non-normative gender experience, arguing for a theory of

embodiment “that is finally not reducible to the material:”25 “The relationship between the

material and phantasmatic in accounts of bodily being...can be characterized by a productive

tension that accounts for ways in which the materiality of the body is present to consciousness as

well as importantly, the ways it absents itself from consciousness.”26

This interplay of presence and absence is part of the ambiguity of embodiment, and

Salamon's strategy focuses in part on this constitutive difference inherent in our understanding of

24 See Gayle Salamon, “'The Place Where Life Hides Away': Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and the Location of Bodily Being.” in Differences 17, no. 2 (2006): 96-112.

25 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8.26 Ibid, 2.

30

the body. By bringing attention to the difference between a “material” body perceptible to others,

and the phenomenological, “felt sense” of the body, Salamon complicates the distinction between

“inside” and outside,” helping us to think beyond simplistic accounts of gender, and to move

toward a broader understanding of bodily materiality that goes beyond the mostly gender-

normative accounts offered by psychoanalysis and phenomenology.27

I want to suggest that this tension or disjunction between materiality and subjectivity,

identified and explored in Salamon's work, is of crucial importance if the textuality of

embodiment is to become both useful and transformative. Obviously, a comprehensive

exploration of the problematics of gender and the body was well beyond the intended scope of

this paper. However, I want to emphasize the extent to which my research has been aided by

perspectives on embodiment and subjectivity that have emerged from gender studies and queer

theory, and to underscore the importance of articulating new ways of thinking about the body

that do not implicitly do violence to the experience of non-normatively gendered subjects.

When the interplay of inside and outside is radically problematized, we are forced to ask:

who writes the body? Where is the author(ity) of the textual body to be located? In the space that

remains, I want to address the theme of self-representation: can the body write itself?

There is a wonderful essay by Michel Foucault called “Language to Infinity” that

addresses the relationship between language, death, and self-representation. Foucault describes

how, by means of self-representation, the subject confronts the imminence of death through

language (“writing so as not to die, as Blanchot said, or even speaking so as not to die”28), and

reduplicates itself in an attempt to defer death, to master death within the realm of language:

Before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpenetration might

27 Ibid, 8.28 Michel Foucault, “Language to Infinity,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 53.

31

never end. Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits.29

The relationship between the body, death, and the self-representation that takes place in

speech and writing is a theme I suspect will emerge again and again in interdisciplinary study of

the body, posing new problems for scholarship. There seems to be no easy shortcut for

circumventing the problems of posed by representation, for wherever we attempt to formulate an

account of the experience of embodiment, we seem to enter into relationship with the

paradoxical. We find ourselves facing a mirror, reflecting back the possibility of an infinite space

within language that knows no limits, where language is born and reduplicates itself endlessly, in

a movement that rushes toward infinity. What can theory hope to achieve in relation to this

paradox, other than to point again to the importance of the movement toward the reflexive?

Foucault alerts us to the possibility for self-representation within language, to turn back endlessly

to the self only to return again and again to language—to “give birth to its own image” and

discover a “possible and impossible infinity” beyond all possibilities of limits.

However much we may hope to bridge the gap between the body and language, then—to

find something in our experience that we can somehow express to others—does this desire to

communicate not reveal a fundamental division or gap within the experience of embodiment? Do

we encounter a paradox whenever we speak about the body? If so, what remains for the prospect

of making one's body one's own, of writing the body in a way that inscribes difference but also

preserves the uniqueness of personal experience? Does the paradoxical limit of the self that

arises within the textuality of the body signify a total impossibility of communication, a radical

failure to signify anything within our bodily experience?

The “mirror” for Foucault signifies the proliferation of discourse, whereas for Lacan it

29 Ibid., 54.

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marks the limits of discourse, or rather the limit where language must begin—the illusory

experience of self-recognition in the ego-ideal. The ego, for Lacan, is the recurrent symptom of a

disjunctive space within the experience of embodiment, and accordingly can be understood as

signifying a fundamental error in our understanding of the body: namely, the mis-identification

of the self (as the ego-ideal) that takes place in the “mirror stage.” While the figure of the mirror

works differently for Foucault and Lacan, insofar as the referent of this “metaphor” is ambiguous

for both—hard to point to—I would suggest that for both, the mirror traces the body's boundaries

or limits—the place where the self stands face to face with itself as an “other.”

If such an experience implies castration and alienation, a fracturing or deferral of the self,

then can an engagement with the body's textuality allow for reintegrating the experience of the

body within language, and enable the imagining of new possibilities for embodiment? My

research has led me to understand the question of the body's representability as crucially related

to the enigma of a disjunctive gap, distance, or fissure within the experience of the bodily

subject. Such phenomenological experiences of division seem particularly well-suited to

expression by means of textual narrative, discourse, or performance.

If the body is text, then who authors it? Is this a question that can be answered? The

relation of author(ity) to text(uality) is fundamentally characterized by absence. When I pick up a

book by Kafka and begin to read, I know that Kafka is no longer present among the living—but

his words are, and it is up to me to negotiate this distance, to imagine myself creatively within

the world of Kafka's discourse and re-invent the meaning I find in it, as though encountering

Kafka's textuality again for the first time. The provocative absence encountered within text is

dramatically enacted by the almost surrealist breakdown of the machine in the penal colony, but

more than this, I would suggest, the machine's demise indicates an equally total breakdown of

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meaning. If “In the Penal Colony” reflects Kafka's awareness of the Dreyfus affair, colonialism,

and the politics of industrialization and modernity, then the desire of the officer to submit himself

to the machine, the machine's self-destruction, and the traveler's escape from the colony are all,

in an important sense, part of a larger system or “machine.” If the sovereignty of the Law

depends on the continual inscription of bodies, then such bodies must be “others”--must have

transgressed the Law and thus necessitate the continuation of its inscription. But for the officer to

submit himself to the machine—such an action is unthinkable in terms of the Law's sovereignty,

and triggers the collapse of the system, an overflowing of power beyond the constraints of the

apparatus built to contain and direct it.

Inasmuch as the scene of Kafka's writing-machine provokes an encounter with the

adjacency of body and machine, writing and death, the Law and its subversion, this scene of

writing is both a writing of the body and a writing on the body. The “doubleness” of this writing

recalls again the “reduplication” of self-representation within language in Foucault's essay, but

also, once more, to the tenuousness of delineating the body's boundaries. Such fundamental

uncertainty may, I think, bear rich fruit for interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social

sciences interested in the puzzling complexities that attend the self-development of bodies in

relation to cultural and religious “texts” and socially mediated discursive and ritual practices. If

“body” and “text” cannot be completely differentiated, then the experience of the impossible can

offer especially productive possibilities: for new perspectives on the body, for more ethical ways

of relating to self and other, and for new spaces within which different ways of living and

experiencing one‘s body can emerge.

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