Page 146 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 137
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“There is no meaning if meaning is not shared (partagé).” And so too, as
we will explore in more detail, there is no unified, integrated a priori “body”
only bodiliness as shared, as being-with, and as exscribed.
In “Corpus,” “Exscription” and “Being Singular Plural” especially,
Nancy sets out to develop the relationship of embodiment to meaning and
ethical obligation. In order to think the body not as an object of knowledge
(acknowledging the irony and difficulty of this task), Nancy re-conceives of
embodiment in terms of “tact,” “touch,” “spacing,” and “being-with.”
However, even in the face of his own endeavours, Nancy reminds us that we
are always faced with a double failure: “a failure to produce a discourse on
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the body, also the failure not to produce discourse on it.”
Despite the series of changing metaphors and figures by which the
body has been explored (for example: plague, machine, flesh) the Western
“philosophico-theological corpus of bodies” is still supported by “the spine of
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mimesis, of representation, and of the sign.” The body as sign (as thing) is
grasped as an instrument or mechanism or expression of meaning, as
something that attaches itself to sense rather than as sense. Because,
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Heidegger asserts, “…we do not ‘have’ a body; rather, we ‘are’ bodily.”
According to Nancy, “body” can, and has been,
represented/signified in discourse but it has never been written as “neither
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substance, nor phenomenon, nor flesh, nor signification.” Nancy’s
“corpus” is one attempt to catalogue different modes of bodiliness and being
in the world and with others in such a way that the body “implicitly
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emerges.” This “body” is “affected in and through the other, responds to
the call of the other, is exposed to the other, as something (no-thing)
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unfinished and unaccomplished.” An implicit body, perhaps? A body not
of essence or substance but as series? A series or multiplicity of contiguous
states that is neither fullness nor nothingness, outside nor inside, part nor
whole, function nor totality, but is rather “folded, refolded, unfolded,
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multiplied … “
Touch is principal to Nancy’s thinking/writing of the ways in which
bodies are meaning - the ways in which they are the limit and expression of
meaning. Derrida tells us that for Nancy, “touch” is multivalent,
incorporating both of the senses of the “sense of touch” and the sense of “to
touch someone” - to come into contact with, to move, or affect. And, as we
shall discuss in more detail below, touch here incorporates a paradoxical
intangibility at the very heart of tactility.
For Derrida, the “corpus” of Jean-Luc Nancy both explicitly and
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implicitly, revisits and challenges the “haptocentric tradition” within
Western philosophy. This tradition, which has attempted to retain touch
within sight and (as so many commentators have pointed out) asserts the
supremacy of the visible - the incorporeal gaze and the disembodied knower -
“obeys the eye only to the extent that a haptic intuitionism comes to