Page 158 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 149
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which is divided out or shared between. Here meanings (and/or bodies) are
never monolithic; they are not a priori or intermediate. Rather meaning is of
the relation between singular beings as a modality of “contiguity not
continuity” (JL Nancy, Being Singular Plural, RD Richardson and A
O’Byrne (trans), University of Stanford Press, Stanford, 2000, quoted in
Perpich, p. 76.) Before “touching” or partagé there is no ordered whole (and
touching is not the expression of a rational, intentional, self-reflexive
consciousness). “All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of
touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch
each other … If ‘to come into contact’ is to begin to make sense of one
another, then this ‘coming’ penetrates nothing; there is no intermediate and
mediating milieu. Meaning is not a milieu in which we are immersed” (Ibid).
136
Sorial, p. 78.
137
M Crowley, ‘Bataille’s Tacky Touch,’ MLN, Volume 119 Number 4,
September 2004, p. 777.
138
Ibid, p. 778.
139
JL Nancy, ‘Exscription,’ in Brian Holmes et al (trans), The Birth to
Presence, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993, p. 338.
140
Sullivan, p. 1.
141
Nancy, ‘Exscription,’ pp. 338-9.
142
Our emphasis. Nancy, Corpus, quoted in Perpich, p. 79. Perception, for
Nancy, not only opens onto the embodied (affectivity in Hansen’s sense) but
also to the reciprocal “of” of relation (in other words, an affect that traverses
the inside - outside binary, and one that is not only located within an extant/a
priori body).
143
Z Baross, ‘The (False) Gifts of Writing,’ New Literary History, Volume
31 Number 3, 2000, p. 437 quoted in Sullivan, p. 7.
144
Ibid.
145
Ibid.
146
While inscription and exscription are mutually constitutive they are also
incommensurable: Bodies are first “to be touched. Bodies are first masses,
masses offered without anything to articulate, without anything to discourse
about … discharges of writing rather than surfaces to be covered in writings.
Discharges, abandonments, retreats. No ‘written bodies,’ no writing on the
body, nor any of this graphosomatology into which the mystery of the
Incarnation and of the body as pure sign of itself is sometimes converted
‘modern style’. For indeed, the body is not a locus of writing … it is always
what writing exscribes. In all writing a body is traced, is the tracing and the
trace - is the letter, yet never the letter … a body is what cannot be read in
writing … it is by touching the Other that a body is a body …” (Nancy,
Corpus, p. 204).