Religion in Philosophy and Theology
Edited by
AGATA BIELIK-ROBSON (Nottingham)
HELEN DE CRUZ (St. Louis, MO) · ASLE EIKREM (Oslo)
HARTMUT VON SASS (Berlin) · HEIKO SCHULZ (Frankfurt a.M.)
130
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The Unthinkable Body
Challenges of Embodiment in Religion,
Politics, and Ethics
Edited by
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
Mohr Siebeck
© 2024 Mohr Siebeck.
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Rebekka A. Klein is Professor of Systematic Theology with a focus on Ethics at Goethe
University in Frankfurt am Main.
orcid.org/0000-0002-9665-4759
Calvin D. Ullrich is Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Theology at the Department of
Historical and Constructive Theology, University of the Free State, South Africa.
orcid.org/0000-0002-7129-1488
ISBN 978-3-16-163754-4 / eISBN 978-3-16-163755-1
DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-163755-1
ISSN 1616-346X / eISSN 2568-7425 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology)
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at https://dnb.dnb.de.
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Table of Contents
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
Introduction......................................................................................................... 1
Mediums of Transgression
Emmanuel Falque
The Death of God and the Death of Man
Along the Guiding Thread of the Body............................................................. 19
Donovan O. Schaefer
The Poverty of Excess
Religion, Affect, and the Unthinkable .............................................................. 43
Mathias Wirth
When Substantial and Accidental Bodies Differ
The Case of Eucharistic Transubstantiation and Gender Transition from
the Perspective of Reformed Ethics .................................................................. 61
Aaron Looney
Two-in-One
Shame, Personhood, and the Creation of Eve ................................................... 79
Theresia Heimerl
Bodies of Salvation and Bodies of Damnation
The Body as A Tool of Ecclesiastical Power Through the Centuries ............. 107
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VI
Table of Contents
Tensions of the Material
Burkhard Liebsch
Being Exposed and Delivered – A Generative Perspective
Thoughts on Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus .......................................................... 119
Rebekka A. Klein
Antiseptic Bodies
Disembodiment, Immunization, and the ‘Absolute Body’ of Jesus Christ ..... 135
Espen Dahl
The Nature of the Body and the Body of Nature............................................. 153
Calvin D. Ullrich
The Eclipse of the Body?
Flesh and Materiality in French Phenomenology ............................................ 171
Kurt Appel
Hegel’s Concept of the Cosmic Body and the Absolute
Reflections on the Written and Unwritten Body based on
the Science of Logic ........................................................................................ 195
Touch and Affectivity
Tobias Friesen
Ricoeur’s Early Philosophy of the Will and its Contribution to
the Discourses on Body, Affect, and Emotion ................................................ 223
Thomas Fuchs
The Intercorporeality of Touch ....................................................................... 243
Rachel Aumiller
Before the Caress
The Expansion of Intimacy in Suspension ...................................................... 257
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Table of Contents
VII
Bodies as Languages and Texts
Reinhold Esterbauer
Talking About the Lived Body
Some Remarks on a Special Type of Linguistics ............................................ 277
Ulrich H.J. Körtner
Body and Language
Outlines of a Hermeneutics of the Body ......................................................... 293
Markus Mühling
The Body
Post-Systematic Theological Reflections ........................................................ 313
Gregor Etzelmüller
The Embodied Image of God
The Anthropology of Embodiment in Theological Perspective ...................... 323
Index of Names ............................................................................................... 337
Index of Subjects ............................................................................................ 339
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Introduction
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
1. The Body Unthinkable
In our unprecedented times, the body as a phenomenon has issued its own cri de
cœur for the fragility and vulnerability of life. No longer is the body a topos for
thought within the confines of the academy only; not least, our pandemic age has
created a fissure, impressing itself with a force of an opening in a continuous line
from nature to politics, the religious, and onto our very own bodies. Indeed, we
have grown accustomed over the last several years to projections of sickly bodies
in hospital beds or body-bags and have read the numbered bodies and the bodycounts. Many have encountered what seems like an infinite loneliness, cut-off in
longing for the touch of bodily intimacy. The symptoms of other viruses have
rendered the body politic transparent to the spectres of racism and homophobia
but also of the governmentality over bodies. For the devout, the digitalization of
the body has confounded attempts to obediently share and participate in the
fleshly body. And although thinking the communal as a social body is rightly
contested, it has become equally clear that community is not possible without the
being-with of bodies; without their ‘inter-passion’1 as that which moves beyond
the mere calculability of physical coexistence. Moreover, the continual worsening of the ecological crisis also raises an awareness of the extent to which connectedness with our natural environment and all living things on this earth is a
condition humaine. To perceive this earth again as a common and shared living
world, one must develop an attentiveness to what it means to live as a bodily
creature. In this respect, the phenomenological study of the body as a phenomenon of lived experience, in its being of ownness as well as alterity, appears as an
essential issue for our present moment. The corporeality of human existence has
therefore to be depicted in an ambivalent phenomenality: metaphorically speaking, the body can be portrayed as an open window and at the same time as a
terminus for a culture of fluidity and dispersal of life’s fundamental sense. These
provocations require, therefore, a yet more urgent thinking of the body as well as
a thinking of its unthinkability and alienness.
Despite criticising the disembodied thought of Cartesian idealism, it must be
acknowledged that Descartes himself was certainly on the right track with his
1
Bernhard Waldenfels, Idiome des Denkens. Deutsche-Französische Gedankengänge II
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2005).
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2
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
fundamental gesture that consciousness must admit of being (cogito ergo sum).
Thus, the subsequent phenomenological distinction between noesis and noema
declares the sheer ‘impossibility’ of thinking nothingness or non-being, as Derrida frequently recognized.2 But if the act of thinking (noesis) about the body
(noema) always already contains the body, then ‘unthinkability’ extends not only
to one’s own death, but also to this body which is yet always receding from
thought but ultimately ‘guiding’ it. With the ‘unthinkable body’ we thus reach a
phenomenological limit, as several of the essays in this volume will attest, where
the body as a power dynamic of reality both precedes but also reaches beyond
embodied reason. It is in negotiating this limit and establishing an epistemic
contact with this body that the contributions to The Unthinkable Body: Challenges of Embodiment in Religion, Politics, and Ethics variously respond.
Indeed, to respond in our times to the body’s presence and absence means to
answer again, which is to say, to answer from a distance and in a (miss-)recognition of the thing itself. It is to admit the tensity of what has been, and what still
needs to be (un-)said; for it is not only the case that much Christian theology,
continental philosophy, feminist, psychoanalytic, and political philosophy, have
concerned their insights with the conditions which make thinking the body possible, but also in their various iterations, have delivered intuitions from which the
body seems epiphenomenal, ‘senseless,’ and foreign – moving in resistance to the
purview of thought or succumbing to a logic of marginalization. As Jean-Luc
Nancy has shown, the body is always present in Christian metaphysics only as a
body of meaning.3 It is a body that is always already sacrificed and ‘crossedout’/‘crucified’ in the quest for its meaning, to constitute the mystical body for
consecration and sharing. The thinking of the body can only be renewed by
overcoming this fear of the meaningless body inscribed into the hermeneutics of
the flesh, which paves the way for modern culture. Therefore, what is calling is a
body not only exceeding thought or escaping its confines, but also a body which
presents an impossibility or even a monstrous gravity for thought: an unthinkable
body that might open alternative ways to articulate its relation to the challenges
of embodiment in religion, politics, and ethics. But here we should clarify even
further the ‘radicality’ of the unthinkable body. The phenomenology of embodiment in the continental tradition, from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, to Straus, and
Jonas, but also in theology by virtue of the logic of incarnation into flesh (construed as Leib) has by and large become the dominant paradigm; content to view
the body as co-determining with reason, in the particular terms of embodied
‘perception’ and ‘motility.’ Even in the unfinished project of Merleau-Ponty, the
invisible is always an aspect of the visible, a connection which retrieves the Leib-
2
See inter alia Jacques Derrida, Aporia, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 22–23; Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 1995).
3
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (New York, NY: Fordham, 2008).
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Introduction
3
Körper distinction treated in the literature with an almost ontologizing status.4 To
avoid this updated dualism, authors in this volume sympathetic to this phenomenology of ‘incarnate givenness,’ tend to avoid placing emphasis on the firstperson perspective alone, acknowledging that the role of the physiological-objective body is not a different body to the one that is lived, but merely one manner in
which it shows itself. However, even if Körper is manifested through the gaze of
Other as Sartre popularized,5 inter-subjectivity as the deus ex machina of phenomenology is still unable to extricate phenomenology from its grounding principle, namely, that its field of study extends only to what is lived as my own in
consciousness. The body-as-body remains phenomenologically ‘absent’6 and
strictly unthinkable, or ‘outside-the-flesh’ (hors-chair), as Didier Franck described, since it does not appear as a phenomenon.7 This methodological preparation necessarily opens the ‘thinking’ of the body to other theoretical discourses
‘outside’ of traditional phenomenology, with greater proximity to the affective
sciences, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of emotion, all united in their attempt to think the bodily forces which precede and extend beyond conscious
reflection.
2. Ways to Think the Unthinkable
It is to the tensity between the thinking of the body and the body as ‘unthinkable’ that the collection of articles in this volume is addressed. Given the limits
described above, a constellation of possibilities comes to the fore: approaches to
the body that emphasize its material, affective, and vulnerable dimensions. The
contestation of these designations might be seen as the first arena to be investigated: i.e., on the one hand, the relation between the body’s biological being-there without a reduction to determinist essentialism, and on the other, the
discursive production of forms which produce and sediment bodies in particular
ways. Beyond furnishing debates between nature/nurture, materiality/culture, or
epistemological versus ontological primacies, the articles in this volume explore
how the cultural and biological are mutually implicated, shaping and forming
one another.
In this direction the recent work of neo or new materialist ontologies (coined
already in the nineties by Braidotti and DeLanda) is instructive;8 seeking to over4
See Claude Romano’s, “The Mirror of Narcissus,” in There Is. The Event and the Finitude of Appearing, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York, NY: Fordham University Press,
2016), 114–48.
5
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans.
Hazel E. Barnes (New York, NY: Pocket Books, 1956), pt. 3, ch. 2.
6
See Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990).
7
Didier Franck, Flesh and Body. On the Phenomenology of Husserl, trans. Joseph Rivera
and Scott Davidson (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014), 84.
8
See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contempo-
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4
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
come these dualities particularly, though not exclusively, as an extension and
internal critique of feminist theory and practice. Though differing in their proposals – from the stronger ontologization of bodies and matter in Deleuzian
neo-vitalism,9 to the co-constitution of matter and thought in so-called performative materialism10 – new materialist feminist ontologies share in their radical
critique of anthropocentrism, humanism, idealist metaphysics, and constructivist approaches, while offering a ‘new’ philosophical orientation to matter that is
dynamic, ‘agentive,’ and ‘vital.’ These feminist materialist ontologies and a concomitant turn to theories of ‘affect’ thus produce powerful theoretical resources
for the body that pose a serious challenge to both religious and philosophical
‘matriphobia’/‘materiphobia,’11 which traditional accounts of embodiment tend
to eschew. How is this challenge of embodiment to be conceived and received?
Might it not expand the still relatively unexplored terrain of a ‘materialist’ religion, politics, and ethics? How should bodies inflected by complex processual
ontology, develop the material sites of divine unfolding or place into question
categories of political theory or the nature of the political itself? Several of the
essays collected here begin to reflect on these challenges.
However, a potentially unwanted consequence of emphases that elevate the
materiality of the body as such, could be that the thinking of the body recedes into
the background altogether; a confusion which can be mischaracterized in terms
of the advance of scientism. This is why several chapters in this volume will
continue to stress the necessity of bodily textuality, linguistics, and discursive
power. While the incredulity of post-Kantian philosophy is well-known from the
perspective of new materialism (with its citational cues taken from Deleuze et al.),
consigning the former to supposedly subjectivist, correlationist epistemologies,
or the intersubjective practices of rational communication serving only to recentre the human subject, it is still a question insofar as the body is concerned,
whether a hard demarcation-line should be drawn here. Indeed, on the one hand,
there is an emerging cross-fertilization with the recent ‘neo-Romantic turn’ in
critical theory and new materialist approaches,12 and on the other, phenomeno-
rary Feminist Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994); Rick Dolphijn and
Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism. Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open
Humanities Press, 2012).
9
See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010); Erin Manning, Relationscapes. Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), and Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual. Movement,
Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
10
See Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), and Karen Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
11
See Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, eds., Entangled Worlds. Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017).
12
See Hartmut Rosa, Christoph Henning, and Arthur Bueno, eds., Critical Theory and
New Materialisms (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021).
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Introduction
5
logical contributions in dialogue with hermeneutics which, in the wake of Heidegger and especially Merleau-Pontian revisions and recoveries of Husserl himself, have sought ‘orientations’ of the body in space and time dovetailing with the
‘materialist’ and ‘affective’ developments aforementioned.13 Furthermore, despite a justifiable discomfort of a reduction of the world to our conscious experience, such a position need not preclude the fact that the world still nonetheless
relates to us. Thus, on phenomenological and hermeneutic grounds, the growing
emphasis in recent literature on the body, its corporeality, and the medium of
touch, is taken in this volume in tandem with ‘thinking’ the body in terms of its
unthinkability, alterity, and passivity.
In this direction, it will also be important to note the recent developments in
the so-called ‘theological turn.’14 The interests of Richard Kearney’s ‘carnal hermeneutics,’15 as well as the theologically inflected phenomenology of Michel
Henry16 and represented in this volume by Emmanuel Falque,17 have begun to
build on the former generation of thinkers including Merleau-Ponty, Levinas,
and Nietzsche, to represent a critical correction to theological phenomenology’s
excesses of transcendence and raise further questions about the potentials for
theological and phenomenological dialogue, which has as its focus explicitly the
dynamism of affectivity, organicity, and the drive function of bodily forces.
Finally, to think the radical unthinkability of the body one can further extend
into the arena of psychoanalysis, as recent scholarship from the Ljubljana school
has demonstrated.18 In the Lacanian account of language, the Symbolic is never
simply given but constituted through that which eludes and exceeds it. This nonlinguistic materiality (the ‘Real’), which precedes the Symbolic functions as an
incontestable limit from which we derive our biological bodies, and as such its
wholeness and plenitude come to be only in virtue of its absence or lack of meaning. Seen in this way, the body or matter as an absent but enabling condition for
13
See Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006); Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects. Animality, Evolution,
and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), and Brian Onishi, Weird Wonder in
Merleau-Ponty. Object Orientated Ontology, New Materialism (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
14
See Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn.’ The French
Debate (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2000).
15
See Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics (New York, NY:
Fordham University Press, 2015).
16
See Michel Henry, Incarnation. A Philosophy of Flesh, trans. Karl Hefty (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2015).
17
Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb. Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist,
trans. George Hughes (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016).
18
See respectively, Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies. On Deleuze and Consequences
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2018), Mirt Komel, ed., The Language of Touch. Philosophical Examinations in Linguistics and Haptic Studies (London, NY: Bloomsbury, 2019), and Rachel Aumiller, ed., A
Touch of Doubt. On Haptic Scepticism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).
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6
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
discourse formation, vulnerable yet powerful, asks whether a turn to a certain
‘haptic scepticism’19 (in both the philosophical and theological traditions) becomes generative for revisable possibilities for religious and political formations.
Taken together, therefore, the contributions in this volume read the unthinkable body primarily as a challenge of embodiment. That is, their reflections tend
to see the body either as indicative of a certain excess or gap which infiltrates
religious, political, and ethical sensibilities, and which is visited upon the embodiment paradigm, or, the unthinkable body is read as something immanent within
embodiment itself to be neither extricated nor ignored, but rather incorporated
into the life of embodied reasoning. In the space of this tension, whereby the
philosophical and theological desire for a disembodied and timeless truth is dispelled, the body which cannot be ‘grasped’ within the parameters of the prevailing orders of thought, as it were ‘placeless,’ eluding comprehension, is nevertheless not without significance in the places and times of thought and understanding. But how and where it shows itself – whether in affective excess, in the transition of bodies, in death or after death, in its generative dissemination, or in its
symbolic or metaphorical embodiment – is considered in different ways in the
various contributions to this volume. In order to makes sense of these various
responses, we offer a loose grouping, motived not so much by disciplinary boundaries but more by what one might call a ‘thematic of thinking and unthinkability’ of the body, i.e. as mediums of transgression, tensions of materiality, touch
and affectivity, and finally the body as language and text.
3. Summaries of the Articles
Part I – Mediums of Transgression: A first group of contributions in the volume
deals with the perception of bodies as mediums of transgression – mediating
between life and death, thought and affect, between the sexes and between humanity and animality. The contributions discuss this view of the ‘transgressing’
body affirmatively and critically, illuminating it in light of modern and premodern perspectives and show the extent to which the modality and materiality
of the body expands the horizons of human and religious understanding.
Appearing here for the first time in translation, Emmanuel Falque’s chapter
“The Death of God and the Death of Man” continues the theme of embodiment
that has characterized his unique contribution to recent continental philosophy
of religion. In this essay he argues that the ‘death of Man,’ which follows from its
framework in the ‘death of God,’ should not so easily allow us to proclaim the
death of the subject in toto. Rather what emerges in the wake of the ‘death of
Man’ is a plural subject which follows the ‘guiding thread of the body.’ In discussion primarily with Nietzsche, Falque re-poses the question of Dietrich Bon-
19
See Aumiller, A Touch of Doubt.
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Introduction
7
hoeffer, ‘etsi Deus non daretur?’ and reformulates it as ‘etsi homo non daretur?’ In
today’s contemporary aesthetic superman and technical transhumanist discourses, the challenge is to confront what a renewed invention of humanity might
consist of when the human as we know it seems to be at an end, or rather, no
longer given. Following a distinctly Deleuzian path from Nietzsche which reinterprets the ‘Overman,’ Falque posits that to follow the new ‘power relation’
today is not to renounce strength but to descend into the finitude of the human.
Thus, Nietzsche, far from being simply the thinker of the ‘death of God’ or even
the thinker after the ‘death of Man,’ provides for Falque the thought of ‘the after
the after’ which is corporeality – a beginning again of the subject which starts this
time with ‘the guiding thread of the body.’ Crucially for Falque, it is not enough
to think this ‘subject body’ in typical phenomenological language as Leib, but
rather as a resistant ‘field of forces’ of a ‘pulsional neutrality’ that struggles for
life before it even contemplates its meaning.
In his chapter, “The Poverty of Excess. Religion, Affect, and the Unthinkable,” Donovan O. Schaefer turns critically to a philosophy of excess as it has
been represented by Bataille, for example, but also by feminist theorists such as
Cixous, Irigaray, or Kristeva, and finally by Deleuze. At the core of the notion of
what Schaefer refers to as the ‘excess paradigm’ is a transgression of all form and
order and, for example, also of conscious subjectivity, which occurs to achieve
liberatory effects. The diagnosis of the excessive paradigm under the influence of
this philosophy is to be registered in theology and religious studies, but it is
especially in the field of affect theory, where this characterization of affects leads
to a diffuse paradigm and furthermore fosters dualized thinking. Thus, the conception of affects as excessive reproduces the thinking/feeling binary and the
notion that within human subjectivity a clear distinction can be made between
conscious and unconscious regions. Thinking excess excessively, therefore, is not
without its political implications since it prescribes a romanticization of both an
emancipatory as well as reactionary politics. For Schaefer the erection of hard
analytical boundaries with respect to the body and mind thus must be rejected in
favor of the more modest capacities of the mundane.
In his chapter, “When Substantial and Accidental Bodies Differ,” Mathias
Wirth posits that the Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper offers potential for
interpreting processes of natural transubstantiation at the site of the physical
body. Contrary to the prejudice that this doctrine fails to recognize the material
reality of a transubstantiation of the natural elements and is hostile to locating
salvation in the body in general, Wirth demonstrates that the Reformed view of
the body can instead be treated by analogy with recent discourses on bodies and
gender that render them re-readable as transitory and queer. Following Jennifer
Boylan’s interpretation of her own body transition from male to female, Wirth
shows that for transgender persons, the ‘transubstantiation’ of their bodies is in
the service of an inward, spiritual reorientation towards their ‘true’ selves. In this
sense, trans persons practice an open approach to their bodies, which is exemplary in that it always already transcends any form of naturalism. This coincides
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8
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
with the core of the Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, at the heart of which
Wirth reconstructs a specific ethics of the body: Eucharistic worship refers to a
future transformation of hearts, which entails a transformation of the present
body. In the Lord’s Supper, from the Reformed point of view, a not yet visible
future of the embodied person is staged and put into the picture by giving the
body spiritual food in material form. Thus, the body of the believer becomes a
transgressive body that testifies to a future bodily reality. The gender transition
shows a structurally analogous event and is therefore not to be marginalized
theologically, but to be understood as part of a futural implementation of Christian practice in culture.
The hermeneutical and phenomenological focus of Aaron Looney’s contribution is the female body, particularly its structured and differentiated meanings
that are specific and concrete for it. With the title “Two-in-One. Shame, Personhood, and the Creation of Eve,” Looney identifies the core experience of the
emotion of shame, in both the construction of personhood and in the biblical
Creation myth as that which originarily constitutes the bifurcation between male
and female attributions of bodily existence. “In accordance with their respective
beings, her shame [Eve] is corporeal and specifically sexual, while his [Adam] is
rational and spiritual.” If the experience of shame is ubiquitous, but its bodily
awareness is primarily identified with the feminine, then the projection of shame
in this way immunizes the masculine against denigrated bodily experience. This
logic of the two-in-one, Looney demonstrates, is consistent with modern readings
of personhood which attempt its reconciliation, but which ultimately fail. Following Roberto Esposito’s concept of the dispositif – the splitting of humanity in
a disjunctive union as that which holds together what it keeps apart – there is a
theological heritage which attempts to unite persons in their equality before God
(imago Dei) but simultaneously subordinates the shame of nature (feminine).
Looney argues, in a subsequent close reading, that this analytical structure of
equivalence and subordination is problematically present in both the respective
interpretations of the Genesis myths produced by Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas.
Theresia Heimerl interprets the body in her contribution “Bodies of Salvation
and Bodies of Damnation. The Body as A Tool of Ecclesiastical Power Through
the Centuries” as a narrative and visual medium and examines its development in
the Christian religion. Already in the first centuries of Christianity, she argues,
the body was the focus of interest in its dual guise, as the saved body and the
rejected body. The early Christian focus on the resurrection of the body and its
otherworldly imagination continued in the religiosity of the Middle Ages, which
practiced a piety of the body in a particular way. Heimerl demonstrates how the
relation of this-worldly and other-worldly bodies to each other becomes an important element of ecclesial pastoral power. In the modern church and theology,
however, there is a silence regarding the eschatological body. Although the body
continues to play a prominent role in Catholic sexual ethics, it is normatively
brought into play only from the point of view of its being created and its purpose
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Introduction
9
according to creation. Its eschatological dimension, on the other hand, is no
longer taken up theologically. In this way, however, the Christian religion –
according to Heimerl – loses its competence to address the whole person or the
whole human being since the transcendence of the body as other-worldly will
always be part of it.
Part II – Tensions of the Material: A second field of research in this volume is
dedicated to the question of what tensions the materiality of the body creates in
social practices and in the perception of the self. How does the materiality of the
body manifest itself and what is its ‘nature’? The articles in this section show the
ecological, intergenerational, and political dimensions of such tensions generated
by incommensurable bodily materiality.
Burkhard Liebsch’s essay, “Being Exposed and Delivered – A Generative
Perspective. Thoughts on Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus,” re-produces the fine experiences of infantile life, by arguing with Jean-Luc Nancy, for what one might
call a ‘philosophy of generativity’ that thinks not only the physicality of one’s
existence but of a bodily exposition that is at once also ‘received’ by Others.
Liebsch affirms Nancy’s claim in his famous text Corpus, that the uniquely exposed conditions of birth manifest an embodied presence that is ‘other’ as well as
being handed-over to ‘others.’ The social space of life which is created in the
interstices of this being-with-others and being delivered over to them, is always at
risk of collapse in the bio-political paradigm, especially if the unsubstitutability
of bodily alterity is expelled. However, at issue for Liebsch is that Nancy’s ‘fundamental ontological determination of embodied life,’ that is, as exposed, is not
enough for a sustained social and political orientation, since it ignores a factual
embodied dwelling in which bodies as belonging to someone can relate to their
exposedness and be authenticated in it. Thus, ‘exposedness,’ while ensuring the
utter singular exceptionality of every person, or child, must also be ‘received’
through the social mechanisms of security, norms, and respect. This has implications for what Liebsch calls ‘generative difference’ – the productive regeneration of diachronic human relations that attempts to steer a middle path between
refusing the economisation of these relations on the one hand, and of allowing
the false benevolence of identitarian difference to run wild on the other.
Rebekka Klein’s chapter, “Antiseptic Bodies,” focuses on one of the central
theses of this volume; that the body follows an intrinsic logic and momentum of
felt presence, but which nevertheless falls outside the structures of conceptual
correlation and productive meaning. This bodily awareness, particularly its social dimension, becomes intensified in the ambivalences of (post-)pandemic interactions, revealing our common vulnerability inscribed into corporeal being. Even
if a ‘phenomenology of the pandemic’ rightly problematizes the transhumanist
fantasy of a life ‘without a body,’ it also encounters a limit to its enclosed humanbody materiality, and thus opens to an excess of the ‘more than material’ inhuman resistance of the body. Klein importantly examines the cultural and theo-political implications of this phenomenon, by demonstrating that to live in renouncement of the body is first of all to (self-)govern it, rehearsing a logic of
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10
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
immunization against dysfunction which paradoxically only suggests the modern
subject’s inner antagonism. Following Reckwitz and Santner, capitalist late-modernity has characteristically ‘colonized’ this irrational remainder for cultural
economy and harnessed affective attachments to create new sites of ‘excarnated’ flesh. Klein further develops the notion of what she calls the ‘aseptic body’
and its ‘antiseptic’ measures as a primary response to the hostility of viral infectious contacts which precedes the immunized body. In its obsessive suspension of
all touchability the ‘aseptic body’ still cannot abolish its materiality, and the
‘absoluteness’ of the measures instituted to protect and edify it as the highest
social good, are suspiciously located for Klein, not necessarily in modern medicine but in a theo-political paradigm whose genealogy can be traced to Reformation views of the relation between Christ’s ascended body and the Church,
particularly in the writings of John Calvin.
In “The Nature of the Body and the Body of Nature,” Espen Dahl articulates
a three-levelled phenomenology of the body that seeks to interrogate the tensions
of the body, insofar as it is undeniably an organism and thus a part of nature but
also our very opening to nature. This tension is further explored in lucid discussions with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Hans Jonas, respectively. Dahl returns
to Husserl’s ground-breaking work in Ideas II by beginning with our experience
of nature. In a critical discussion with Claude Romano, he arrives at the conclusion that nature is for Husserl ‘in front of us,’ subordinated to the transcendental ego within the personalistic attitude. Consequently, Dahl moves to Merleau-Ponty to revive the sense in which nature precedes, grounds, and intimately
intertwines our bodies with it. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Dahl, the dominant
spatial metaphor here is nature’s ‘depth,’ which acts as a groundless ground for
both pre-given and pre-reflexive life, and thus extends this nature in and beneath
us to all ‘things’ that are ‘other’ to consciousness. With nature now ‘beneath us’
the body no longer occupies different constitutive levels as in Husserl but is
instead a part of one ontological ‘flesh.’ Respecting the ontological anchoring of
this common alterity, Dahl finally turns to Hans Jonas. Keenly aware of the
charges of anthropomorphic thinking in Jonas’s philosophical biology, Dahl
argues that this does not mean we are unable to access our organic body, as its
breakdown through illness or pain phenomenologically demonstrates. Rather,
we must concede that our organic nature ‘within us’ is always to some extent
withdrawn, and this is precisely the nature of our body’s givenness.
Calvin Ullrich’s chapter traces the notion of the flesh and embodiment as it
appears in French phenomenology after Husserl, by reviewing the three key
contributors to the phenomenology of the body in the twentieth century: JeanPaul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas. With the title,
“The Eclipse of the Body? Flesh and Materiality in French Phenomenology,”
Ullrich, apart from simply revising some of their central statements, asks the
question whether through the concept of ‘flesh’ (Leib) the body in its raw materiality has come to be eclipsed. The clear egoism of the Husserl of Ideas II was not
able to vindicate the elaborate demarcation of kinaesthetic sensations which
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Introduction
11
make up the Leibkörper dynamic. The Ego-like character of the Body is merely
incidental to an overwhelming sense of property granted to it by the Ego proper.
Critical of this structure, the French thinkers would attempt to re-centre thebody-I-am as opposed to the body-I-have. In doing so, Ullrich demonstrates
something of an over-compensation, whereby Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, each in their own way ontologize the ‘lived-body’ in phenomenology. In his
discussion with Merleau-Ponty and Levinas in particular, however, Ullrich argues that there is an ambivalence between the flesh and materiality, one which
allows for a greater recognition of the organic and elemental conditions of material life which precede the lived-body understood as flesh. Thus, contrary to
charges that phenomenology’s concept of the flesh incorporates the body as an
organ of perception at the expense of the dynamism of organic viscerality, the
shadow of the body in phenomenology is always cast, felt in its material depths
just as it is hidden.
Concluding this section on the tensions of materiality is Kurt Appel’s chapter
entitled, “Hegel’s Concept of the Cosmic Body and the Absolute.” Here Appel
offers a close reading, almost in the form of a commentary, of crucial passages in
Hegel’s Science of Logic, to refute the idealist claim that Hegel is exclusively
focused on the human mind and of representing a disembodied transcendental
ego. By contrast, Hegel’s philosophy of freedom can only exist as embodied; it is
neither restricted to the freedom of humanity nor incorporeal spirit but exists in
the freedom of the organic body and in the ‘textual body’ of the Science of Logic
itself. Through an evolving philosophy of the body, Appel considers Hegel’s
Absolute as the unity of being and reflection, akin to a cosmic body of pantheism,
and one in which identity dissolves totality and opens onto radical alterity. The
body, however, does not merge into the cosmic body, it contains its own difference within itself, its own moment of reflection that is intrinsic to it. This is,
moreover, represented in the ‘actuality’ of the body which consists in its possibilities constantly folding and unfolding anew as something truly other in-itself.
Appel emphasizes Hegel’s remarks on the absolute mechanism of the body,
which is not to be understood as merely the body in mechanical process, instead
the spatialization that externalizes the body in this way is also an expression of
the body’s specific freedom, which comes to mean for Hegel that the mechanical
body always contains the non-mechanical. Appel describes how this logic comes
to influence other stages of the Hegel’s dialect with respect to the body, including
its relation to teleology, cognition, and the linguistic elucidation of the Science of
Logic.
Part III – Touch and Affectivity: The third section of the volume contains three
contributions in which the phenomena of affect, touch, and caress are explored as
concrete manifestations of embodiment. The articles acknowledge the touchable
and affectable body as an indispensable and irreplaceable force in the formation
of subjectivity and humanity, but also emphasize the ambivalence and fragility of
intercorporeal encounters. They thus accentuate the dynamic of the boundary
that is opened by being a body as a challenge for ethical subjectivity.
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12
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
In Tobias Friesen’s chapter, “Ricœur’s Early Philosophy of the Will and Its
Contribution to the Discourses on Body, Affect, and Emotion,” he directs us to
the early work, Freedom and Nature, somewhat eclipsed by Ricœur’s later hermeneutical turn. In a differentiated parsing between the voluntary and the involuntary – the twin poles of Ricœur’s philosophy of will and action – Friesen not
only uncovers the latter’s rich and multi-layered theory of embodiment but accomplishes this in relation to other contemporary discussions in the field of affect
theory and the philosophy of emotion. In a first section, the article traces the
dynamic interplay of freedom and necessity in the constitution of the Cogito with
respect to corporeal decision-making. Friesen illustrates the way in which Ricœur
holds together yet keeps apart these limit ideas in his conceptual rendering of the
embodied subject. With Ricœur’s recovery of the ‘I’ that is nonetheless made
fragile through its inclusion of the bodily motivations of the ‘I will,’ Friesen
argues that there is a retained ‘mystic unity’ of subject and world. In a second
move, Friesen analyses, interprets, and criticizes Ricœur’s phenomenology of
bodily affect. Terminologically distinct from emotion, affects describe the bodily
motivations which precede decision and consenting. They are therefore seen as
‘pre-subjective forces’ of the body that challenges the phenomenological understanding of the primacy of pre-reflective self-awareness in a so-called ‘minimal
self.’ Such a conglomerate of pre-subjective forces has the moral-ethical character of a ‘gift’ to which the ‘I’ relates and is called to respond, while at the same time
not ignoring the disruptive nature and opacity of affectivity.
The chapter by Thomas Fuchs entitled “The Intercorporeality of Touch” is
dedicated to touch as a phenomenon of intercorporeality and argues from a
phenomenological and psychological perspective. Fuchs substantiates his phenomenological descriptions and the thesis that without touch there can be no real
sense of a constitutively shared sociality, with reference to findings in early developmental psychology and touch research in social psychology. He points out in
detail that the sense of touch is the first sense with which the newborn encounters
the world and that it begins to develop this sense in the womb. This initially
confirms Aristotle’s insight that the sense of touch is the most primal of the
senses. But that is not all: according to Fuchs, touch is not only of great factual
importance, but also of great anthropological significance. Against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also the ‘MeToo’-movement, Fuchs vehemently opposes the assumption that humans can permanently exist and ‘mature’ in virtual distance to each other. Rather, it can be shown that without
touching each other, human beings cannot develop an awareness of the reality of
themselves and the reality of others. As Fuchs argues, physical contact through
the skin is the only way to have a so-called ‘bipolar’ experience, an experience of
the boundary between self and other which is highly ambivalent in its nature: it
allows us to experience nearness and connection to others but also opens the door
to boundary transgression and intrusion on the other.
From affectivity to touch, we then move to the caress in Rachel Aumiller’s
chapter “Before the Caress. The Expansion of Intimacy in Suspension.” Borne
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Introduction
13
out of pandemic isolation and the ambivalences of returning to being-together,
Aumiller’s reflections respond to a call for a renewed envisioning of our haptic
relations in the midst of ‘haptic disruption’: “The disruption of touch creates a
hesitancy at the beginning of each new touch … and this very same hesitancy
creates new possibilities for desire, intimacy, and transformative haptic
relations.” Aumiller builds on Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the caress: a
form of touching that oscillates between erotic sensation and its own suspension,
as well as Luce Irigaray, for whom there is a “caress before the caress.” While
both these traditional phenomenological accounts of inter-corporeal touching
locate the scope of intimacy between two – lover and loved/caresser and caressed
– Aumiller argues for an ‘expanded ethical mode’ that aims at transforming not
only inter-personal relations, but also demands a radical questioning of our
‘global cultures of touch.’ The ‘caress before the caress’ evokes the phenomenological sense of epoché, but in the original sense of suspension that derives from
the ancient sceptics. For Aumiller, phenomenology’s own fantasy of subjective
self-description from isolation must be coupled with the psychoanalytic concept
of eros or desire to which, accordingly, she defends the notion of a queer experience of ‘erotic suspension’ and a ‘haptic scepticism’ as the desire for relation
enters a new ethical mode of vulnerability between touching bodies.
Part IV – Bodies as Languages and Texts: In the concluding section, the contributions localize the basic theme of the volume within the horizon of a hermeneutics oriented towards language and the word. They outline a corporeal
grammar and hermeneutics that is particularly responsive to the vitality and
dynamics of human corporeal being. In doing so, they show the extent to which
spiritualist and mentalist views of hermeneutics and linguistic theory can be overcome by the paradigm of embodiment.
In the opening chapter of this section, “Talking About the Lived Body. Some
Remarks on a Special Type of Linguistics,” Reinhold Esterbauer argues that
there is a distinct grammar of corporeal language peculiarly applying to the lived
body. The phenomenological analysis of this grammar must consider especially
the fact that the lived body is never only an object of speech, but always also a
medium of self-expression of myself or others. If one can first speak about the
body of another, or secondly about one’s own body as a self-expression, then
thirdly, one can also speak of a purely present bodily self-expression. In his
article, Esterbauer undertakes the task of describing these three paradigmatic
situations of speaking about the body and points out that the third one is the most
crucial one concerning an ‘unthinkable body’: the language in which one’s own
self-expression takes place or in which the self-expression of others is understood
has to be defined as pre-positional language. It has no symbolic form, i.e., it does
not refer to something external but is the immediate realization of the meaning of
a person with the temporal character, therefore, of an absolute presence. Hence,
it cannot produce either linguistic past or future. Further, it does not know the
genus verbi, that is, the difference between the active, the passive, or the medial
form of events. The meaning produced in self-expression is thus not to be trans-
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14
Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
ferred into propositional content by others because – although it is generated
directly in bodily self-performance – it is accessible for others through intercorporeal encounters.
The chapter of Ulrich H.J. Körtner, “Body and Language. Outlines of a
Hermeneutics of the Body,” establishes – in response to a hyper-materialisation
of the body on the one hand, and a total virtualization on the other – a general
hermeneutics of the body, according to which human reason is incarnated in a
body (Merleau-Ponty). Without playing the senses off each other, Körtner claims
in a Protestant theological perspective that a more primordial sense of bodily
perception precedes ‘touch,’ namely, the phenomenological insight that ‘hearing’ (already occurring prenatally) is just as significant for what constitutes the
human person and is especially central under a Protestant theological hermeneutic. The incarnation of reason in this general hermeneutics comes also to be
defined historically, linguistically, and socially, in such a way that the body as text
and language is bound to our corporeality even as we are not reducible to it. The
body is thus, for Körtner, a site of unity that extends from a natural basis to a
carrier of meaningful content within a system of signs and must be ‘read’ and
‘interpreted’ in a hermeneutical way between the dialect of being and having a
body. The theological-anthropological foundation of this philosophical insight
can be seen moreover in Reformation theology. Proclaiming the word of the
Cross as the incarnated Word of God that is bodily crucified and resurrected,
Körtner argues it can thus be read as the multifaceted ‘body language’ of God
that communicates the Gospel via ‘bodily media’ which includes the whole of
creation.
In his contribution “The Body: Post-Systematic Theological Reflections”
Markus Mühling takes up insights from his recent book series on Post-Systematic Theology and applies them to build a theological concept of the body which
does not see it as a theological object among others but as the central topic of
theology becoming post-systematic, i.e., a theology that builds on a relational
and dynamic ontology instead of an ontology of substance or being in the sense of
a static existence. Mühling unfolds the thesis that the body is, contrary to what is
assumed, not only relevant for (theological) anthropology but more fundamental
in the theological development of reality as such. In the horizon of a narrative
ontology, Mühling interprets the body in contrast to reductionist monisms as a
communicative reality of ‘inter-indexical’ reference to one another, where such
individuation is phenomenologically possible only through the body’s anchoring. While the body has no materiality of any kind, and is primarily potentiality,
namely the potentiality of concrete possibilities that have become contingent in
relationships, it is also constituted by a ‘myness’ and ‘yourness.’ The seeming
paradox does not require a resolution for Mühling, but simply shifts into a secondary narrativity of the body in the terms of metereological metaphor. The
theological potency offered by this approach to the body as a phenomenon of
narrative-communicative becoming is demonstrated in the conclusion of the ar-
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Introduction
15
ticle: the incarnation of God and his Trinitarian being can also interpreted as
‘bodily becoming.’
In the concluding theological article to this volume, Gregor Etzelmüller shows
that the shift to an embodied cognition and a ‘carnal hermeneutics’ in anthropology can be reconciled with the religious language of the Holy Spirit and theological thinking about God’s presence. In his article “The Embodied Image of God,”
he develops a hermeneutics of the embodiment of the spirit starting from the
prologue of the Gospel of John. There it can be shown that the Christian faith
sees the living body of the human being as a dignified place of God’s presence. In
Christian terms, ‘flesh’ is therefore not to be associated with sin as has been done
repetitively in church tradition, but rather with God’s self-revelation through his
incarnation in Jesus Christ. According to the Gospel of John, God’s ‘light,’ which
illuminates this world as his good creation, was made present in the place of the
body. In this sense, the body is always to be addressed theologically as a privileged medium of God’s presence. This, however, had long been overlooked in
Christianity by the prevailing dualistic view of the person and a devaluation of
the body in relation to the spirit – especially in Protestantism. Yet the biblical
texts and the anthropologies implicit in them could be taken as an effective
correction here. Etzelmüller therefore explores how, in conversation with these
texts, a wisdom of the body that conceives of it as soma pneumatikon, a spiritfilled body, can become the locus of God’s revelation and thus a testimony of the
transformative destiny of the life of faith lived in Jesus Christ. He shows that the
biblical insights here conform to the newer philosophy of embodiment and that
their insights can mutually enrich each other.
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