Hypatia, Inc.

Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity

Author(s): Diane Perpich
Source: Hypatia, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 75-91
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.
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Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies
and the Ideal of Integrity

DIANE PERPICH

This essay shows that Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeal

texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theor
I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified
body of humanist discourses in favor of dis-integrated bodies constituted
alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a "being-exscr
the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahis
rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential criticisms of Na
and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in ad
framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to
prevailing forms of gender normativity.

Quel etrange moil

-Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus

In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz outlines several general criteria t

ideally govern feminist theoretical approaches to the body. Most im
any notion of the body must be rejected: "Indeed, there is no body as
are only bodies-male or female, black, brown, white, large or sma
the gradations in between" (1994, 19). The notion of gradations inv
should not suggest a linear continuum organized according to polar
(male vs. female, black vs. white) with each body finding its place
in between. Instead of a dichotomous, linear organization, Grosz a
a greater possibility of affirming a multiplicity of bodies and bo
bodies are conceived as existing within a multidimensional field d

Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005) ? by Diane Perpich

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76 Hypatia

"discontinuous, nonhomogeneous, nonsingular" space constructed through mul-

tiple and potentially incommensurable differences, perspectives, and interests
(23). Grosz's insistence on a field over a continuum has to do with her convic-
tion that the linearly organized continuum is still too likely to be co-opted
or recuperated within a schema that reproduces mind-body dualisms and the
hierarchically organized binaries traditionally associated with them.
While as yet no terminology avoids binaries and their attendant problems
altogether, Grosz argues that feminist approaches must nonetheless strive to
develop "some kind of understanding of embodied subjectivity, of psychical
corporeality" (22). This essay contends that Jean-Luc Nancy's rethinking of
body in recent texts such as L'Intrus and Corpus could be an ally in this project.
In particular, Nancy's rejection of the unified, integrated body (the body) of
humanist discourses in favor of a dis-integrated body constituted by multiple
alterities and his reinterpretation of body as a "being-exscribed" begin the
task of thinking the notion of bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their
ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. In what follows, I first elucidate the
ontological underpinnings of Nancy's notion of body (first section), then turn
to the development and defense of this conception of body in two central
texts, L'Intrus (second section) and Corpus (third section). Finally, I consider
the impact of Nancy's conception specifically for feminist approaches to the
question of body (fourth section).

ONTOLOGY OF THE BODY: BEING SINGULAR PLURAL

Nancy's 1996 text, Being Singular Plural, develops an ontology explicitly Hei-
deggerian in inspiration, taking its point of departure from the question about
the meaning of being, but going further than Heidegger in thinking being as
co-existing and co-appearance. For Nancy, "the givenness of being, the given-
ness that is given with the very fact that we understand something (whatever
it may be and however confused) when we say 'being' ... can be summarized
as follows: being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning,
but being itself, the phenomenon of being, is meaning" (2000a, 2). Thus, the
question put by Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as Nancy understands it, is
a quite ordinary one about meaning, though it may no longer be posed in the
ordinary way. Both Heidegger and Nancy explicitly reject traditional forms that
the question of being or meaning might take, since to ask "What is meaning?"
or "What is being?" is to ask after the sort of thing that meaning or being is and
thus presupposes that meaning and being are in essential respects thing-like or
are qualities or states belonging to things. As Heidegger emphasizes repeatedly
in the opening sections of Being and Time, being (Sein) itself is not a being (ein
Seiendes), nor is it a predicate that qualifies beings in the usual sense. For both
theorists, the categories appropriate for and applicable to things are not so for

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 Diane Perpich 77

meaning or being in general. Thus customary formulations of the question of

meaning that ask what it is are considered maladroit. By contrast, the question
that needs to be investigated by fundamental ontology is something like how
is meaning, or how does it stand with meaning. That is to say, for Nancy, the
problem concerns how it is that the world and we ourselves as part of the world
are accessible and available as meaningful.
For Heidegger, as is well known, the answer to this question involves an
elucidation of the notion of worldhood and more specifically an elaboration of
a set of structures that he terms being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein).' Nancy's
answer does not employ the Heideggerian notion of a world directly, though
the latter is implied in his response when he claims: "There is no meaning if
meaning is not shared (partage)" (2000a, 2). The French term partage can mean
that which is shared in common but also that which is divided or shared out
among a number of different parties. For Nancy, both meanings are operative:
meaning is inextricably part of a "we-world," a space socially constituted and
maintained, but never a homogenous world: meaning is never monolithic or
totalizing but always shared out or divided between different subjects, between
subjects and things, and between one thing and another.
Following Heidegger, Nancy links meaning to apophansis, exemplified gram-
matically by the as: "Meaning begins where presence is not pure presence but
where presence comes apart (se disjoint) in order to be itself as such. This 'as'
presupposes the distancing, spacing, division of presence" (2). Meaning happens
or takes place when something appears as something, which is to say appears
as this and not that. Meaning is thus plural and determinate at the same time:
plural insofar as meaning could not exist were it a single or total meaning
attached to a thing or to all of existence as a pure presence, and determinate
in so far as the articulated structure or network in which meaning occurs
entails always the existence of both sameness and difference-identity and
singularity, alterity and plurality. For Nancy as for Heidegger, the possibility of
identity-of a thing's being itself-depends on the co-originary possibility of
its being different from other things, and thereby also related to multiple others
and to the world.2 Meaning does not attach to a thing like a label or price tag
hanging on an item in a shop: one tag, one meaning per item. Nor is the world
as an intelligible whole pieced together item by item in an aggregative fashion,
as if intelligibility were nothing more than an inventory of available items or
meanings. For Nancy, meaning exists only in the "circulation" of meanings
reticulated through a weblike structure always already plural even as it is shared
and shared out among singular beings. He remarks, "If one can put it like this,
there is no other meaning than the meaning of circulation" (3).
While circulation is only a quasi-technical term for Nancy and is not
elaborated with anything like the systematic care that Heidegger devotes to
terms such as worldhood, equipmentality, referential totality, and the like, one

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78 Hypatia

significant point of difference between their views can be noted. Whereas for
Heidegger meaning is tied to a quasi-teleological structure-there is no final
telos-for Nancy, circulation goes in all directions at once, "essentially acci-
dentally" (5). Heidegger argues that before any individual item of equipment
can show itself, the unity of an "equipmental whole" must already have been
disclosed. Each item has a specific assignment to the other items with which it
forms such a whole and is meaningful in terms of its belonging together with
these other items. Moreover, the logic of an equipmental whole is such that
the whole and each item in it is what it is and is intelligible as such because of
its place in a system of practical assignments. We understand a particular tool
(and for Heidegger all things are tools in a broad sense) in terms of the other
tools alongside of which it is used, and we understand the equipmental whole
in virtue of the various purposes or ends that it may be used to achieve. The
hammer can be understood only insofar as we have an involvement with ham-
mering, and hammering likewise entails an involvement in making something
fast, which in turn might involve constructing a house to protect one against
bad weather. Thus, Heidegger concludes that every "for the sake of' ultimately
refers to a possibility of Dasein's being (1962, 116).
For Nancy, by contrast, circulation "goes in all directions ... From place to
place, and from moment to moment, without any progression or linear path,
bit by bit and case by case, essentially accidentally, it is singular and plural in
its very principle. It does not have a final fulfillment any more than it has a
point of origin" (2000a, 4-5). Whereas intelligibility under the Heideggerian
schema is ultimately ordered by and subordinated to some possibility of Dasein,
Nancy's view of the relation between singular beings in the world is that "from
one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity" (5). There is no
whole ordered and articulated according to our own self-understandings and
human possibilities, there is only the "touching" or "contact" that goes from
one being to the other in a singular plural existing: "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 inter-mediate and mediating 'milieu'. Meaning is not a milieu in
which we are immersed" (5).
The difference between the Heideggerian and Nancyean manners of con-
struing meaning is, in large measure, a function of the very different place
accorded to bodies in their respective accounts. Despite the advances made by
Heidegger in dismantling Cartesian dualism, meaning is still by and a large a
nonmaterial phenomenon in his thought. This does not imply that meaning
is in some way subjective or mentalistic, rather it indicates the dependence of
meaning on structures decidedly nonmaterial, such as Dasein's possibilities or
modes of existing. For Nancy, by contrast, one might say that bodies make the

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 Diane Perpich 79

world go round. Meanings, for Nancy, are the points of contiguity or contact
between heterogeneous bodily surfaces: at its base, the tree touches the grass,
which borders the sidewalk, which is pelted by the rain, and so on. The intel-
ligibility of any singular being is not necessarily a function of an equipmental
whole or a possibility of Dasein. Indeed, it would seem forced to subordinate this
particular collection-tree, grass, sidewalk, rain-to an explicitly equipmental
model in which these "tools" are understood by virtue of their serving some
purpose or possibility of Dasein; and it would be even more artificial to do so
with other contiguous collectivities that one could imagine.
Although Nancy develops an account of meaning that does not rely on a
form of intentionality or human aims and possibilities as its primary motor,
humans as language users play a distinctive role in the account: "The speaker
speaks for the world, which means the speaker speaks to it, on behalf of it, in order
to make it a 'world'. As such, the speaker ... occurs as its representative but also,
at the same time ... in anticipation of it, before it, exposed to it as to its own most
intimate consideration" (Nancy 2000a, 3, emphasis in original). Language is
world-making on this account, but it is not therefore outside of the world as
something that exists apart. The speaker represents the world, both in the sense
of serving as its representative and in the usual sense of portraying and giving a
sense to the world, but the speaker can do so only because she or he is already
exposed to the world. Human existence or human being may be qualitatively
different from the being of things within the world, but what distinguishes it
is not an essence of some sort nor its status as superior or primary in relation
to the derivative existence of things: "The difference between humanity and
the rest of being (which is not a concern to be denied .. .), while itself being
inseparable from other differences within being (since man [sic] is 'also' animal,
'also' living, 'also' physio-chemical), does not distinguish true existence from
a sort of subexistence. Instead, this difference forms the concrete condition of
singularity" (18).
Humanity or humanness is not an essence on this view but the product of
difference, and it is a difference not just of linguistic signifiers but of hetero-
geneous bodies. As Nancy points out, we would not be humans if there were
not by contrast stones, and at the same time "I would no longer be a 'human'
if I did not have this exteriority 'in me,' in the form of the quasi-minerality
of bone" (Nancy 2000a, 18). It is not only the signifier human that has its
meaning through a difference from other signifiers-dog, apple, stone-it is
by virtue of being a body that differs from other bodies even as it is in contact
and contiguous with them that one is human. In other words, it is in virtue
of being a body and not just a set of possibilities or purposes that I am both
exposed to the world and the one who exposes or represents it: "A singularity
is always a body, and all bodies are singularities (the bodies, their states, their
movements, their transformations)" (18). The world, then, is not set over against

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80 Hypatia

the human subject or singularity, but neither is humanity "in" the world as it
would be in a surrounding milieu. The world is humanity's exterior, but it is
an exteriority also in me and to which I am exposed. For Nancy, we might say,
humanity is not the end of nature, but neither is nature the end of humanity:
"One could try to formulate it in the following way: humanity is the exposing of
the world; it is neither the end nor the ground of the world; the world is the exposure
of humanity; it is neither the environment nor the representation of humanity" (18,
emphasis in original).
Again and again, it is the space or spacing between that is the hallmark
of the ontology Nancy develops and defends. To be a singularity (and as the
quote above makes clear, states of bodies are singularities as much as bodies
themselves) is to be with other singularities, to touch on them and come into
contact with them, to be exposed and to expose in the same breath. The plural-
ity of "being-with" is neither an aggregate nor a totality, but a coexistence and
co-appearance of singularities. Singularities are neither self-identical monads
nor self-same substances. Nancy uses the term singularity to refer primarily to
persons, but it is not meant to express what is unique or ineffable in each of
us, but rather that each of us is, as he puts it, an origin of the world.3 A sin-
gularity "is not individuality; it is, each time, the punctuality of a 'with' that
establishes a certain origin of meaning and connects it to an infinity of other
possible origins [and hence meanings]. Therefore, it is, at one and the same
time, infra-/intraindividual and transindividual, and always the two together"
(Nancy 2000a, 85). The coexistence of singularity and plurality, identity and
alterity, in every term is categorical for Nancy. The word people, to take his
own example, expresses that we are all of a similar kind: we are precisely people,
human beings with such and such common attributes. But at the same time,
this kind does not exist in the sense that some one person or each person could
be said to be the whole of what it is to be a person. The kind exists only as
"numerous, dispersed, and indeterminate in its generality. This existence can
only be grasped in the paradoxical simultaneity of togetherness (anonymous,
confused, and indeed massive) and disseminated singularity (these or those
'people(s)', or 'a guy', 'a girl', 'a kid')" (7). The meaning of the term people does
not exist anywhere or have its origin anywhere other than in this coexisting
collection, this being-with, of plural singularities.

DIS-INTEGRATING BODIES: L'INTRUS

In L'Intrus-Nancy's recently published account of his heart transplant and its

aftermath-the human body is disclosed as a being singular plural through a
process of denaturing and defamiliarization that weans us from an humanistic
conception of body as a unified whole or integrum and thus as one's own in a
way that would link identity to this wholeness and integrity. The undoing of
body and identity begins in the opening pages of this small but powerful text

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 Diane Perpich 81

when the straightforwardly narrative sentences that introduce the biological

facts of Nancy's heart transplant are deflected by interruptions that occur in
each case before the sentence can tell its tale, which is to say before the integrity
or self-sameness of the narrator can be established. For example, in the course
of explaining that his own heart was failing for reasons that were never fully
discovered, the narrative is suspended after the words my own heart to remind
the reader that it will be a question here of what is one's own (propre), of the
sense in which one can say my own heart.4 Indeed, as Nancy asks later, in what
sense was his heart his own if it could give up or give out on him, simply quit
on him without his permission and against his desire?
As this memoir circles around the question of the I and what is proper to
it or is its own, it is rarely directly a question of property or of a proprietary
relation to one's own body, though certainly the history of human bodies in
the modern period is deeply intertwined with the history of European concep-
tions of ownership and property, and elsewhere Nancy has thought body more
explicitly in its relation to capital and labor. Nor is the puzzle here quite like
those thought experiments by which freshmen are introduced to the problem
of personal identity: how much of X's body, or memory, or personality would
have to be replaced before we would say that X is no longer "the same" person?
Nancy's question is not whether he is the same after the transplant as before,
but whether he was ever "the same" in any sense to begin with. How is the
identity of a subject constituted? And in what sense is this identity dependent
upon the notion of body as one's own body?
What do we mean when we say "here is my body"? What, after all, is a body?
Are bodies (human bodies, for example) natural kinds? Are they substances?
Organic wholes? Or is the unity that we accord to the body conventional,
arbitrary, and linguistic in nature? And in what sense can a body be said to be
mine? Where exactly are its limits? How or in what sense does it belong to me,
and who is this me that would be in some sense other than my body? Moreover,
how is body and how am I related to a here, this spacing or taking place that
marks the coming to presence of things, myself and my body included?
In unfolding the story of his transplant, Nancy reflects first on the way in
which the failure of his heart disrupted his familiar sense of self in quite specific
ways. It was not just that the failing heart disturbed the rhythm of his everyday
life, or even more literally, interrupted the rhythms of his body; what was rup-
tured or disrupted was his very sense of being on intimate terms with himself.
The healthy, working heart that one lives with intimately is normally "as absent
as the soles of [one's] walking feet" (2000b, 15-16). But where before there was
my heart, with all that this symbolizes of one's emotional center, life force, and
so on, the disease renders the heart an intrusive organ, as crude as a broken
part that must be replaced. As he begins thus to become strange to himself,
Nancy speaks of "something ... detaching itself." The selfs proper immersion
or submersion in itself-its mindless, easy relation to itself-is interrupted as it

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82 Hypatia

is forced to identify itself materially and thus in ways it never had before with
this body and this organ (16).
Nancy reports that at first the transplant presented itself as the possibility of
a restitution of the body's integrity and wholeness (Nancy 2000b, 29). But this
fantasy of being restored to one's former condition is dispelled and forgotten
as the transplant is followed by a series of new intrusions and illnesses caused
by the patient's now severely compromised immune system. Nancy suffers from
several serious viral infections because of his lowered immunity and ultimately
develops a cancerous lymphoma. Identity, Nancy concludes, is immunity and
vice versa-"to lower the one, is to lower the other" (33). Contrary to what one
might expect, Nancy suggests that this dissolution of bodily integrity is less a
function of having been opened up than it is due to the fact "that this gaping
open cannot be closed" (35). Nancy rejects the possibility of understanding
the transplant as a restoration of the wholeness and integrity of self or body,
not because the wound created by the transplant is too deep or too severe, but
because there is no end to the intrusions suffered by his body-each intrusion
is contiguous with multiple others-and likewise there is no discrete and identifi-
able beginning to the series. The cause of his heart failure remains unknown,
making it impossible to say exactly when his heart began to go bad; moreover,
the viruses that cause some of the most intense suffering he undergoes have
been dormant in his body, as they are in all of us, for many years. Reflecting on
this situation, Nancy suggests that the "general law of intrusion" is that "there
was never only one: as soon as intrusion occurs, it multiplies, identifying itself
through its internally renewed differences" (31-2).
On the view developed in L'Intrus, the self-enunciative I is nothing more
than the formal index of an iterative chain of intrusions, and the body exists as
a series of contiguous states or points of contact between various sites and situa-
tions. By the end of the text, Nancy no longer identifies himself with a healthy,
integrated, whole body and no longer casts the transplant and its attendant
diseases in the role of other: "I am the illness and the medical intervention; I
am the cancerous cell and the grafted organ; I am the immunodepressive agents
and their palliatives; I am the bits of wire holding together my sternum; and
I am this injection site permanently sewn into me below my clavicle; just as I
was, for that matter, already these screws in my hip and this plate in my groin.
I am becoming like a science-fiction android, or the living-dead, as one day my
youngest son says to me" (Nancy 2000b, 42-43).
The opening lines of L'Intrus remind us that it belongs to the definition of
the term that an intruder is one who breaks in by force or ruse. If the intruder
were welcome, if it (or she or he) were not a stranger, alien to the self or home
taken by surprise, it would perforce no longer be an intruder but a friend or a
guest. Who, then, or what is the intruder named in the title of this text? Is it,
as one might expect, the new heart whose origin and history are unknown to

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 Diane Perpich 83

its new recipient? Or is the stranger more surprisingly the original heart, Nancy's
own heart, which after fifty years inexplicably begins to fail? Is it his immune
system, or the relentless regime of medical intrusions, a network of observations,
measurements, machines, chemicals, institutions, individuals, and decisions? In
the final paragraph of this slender text, Nancy remarks that the intruder is none
other than he himself or man, a humankind that ceaselessly alters itself and is
altered, intrudes on the world and is invaded by it in the same moment. L'Intrus
ultimately suggests that there is never a single moment when the body falls to
pieces and is no longer one's own; that is, there is no threshold that the body
approaches and having crossed over it is no longer recognizably one's own body.
Rather, the law of intrusion is that the alterities of the body are always multiple
and multiplying. Moreover, the pathos of Nancy's story lies not in the elements
of intrusion-the failed heart, the transplant, the viruses, the cancer-but in
the way such intrusions become the new intimacies of the body even as they
disrupt and banish Nancy's former sense of self. It is the strangeness "at the heart
of the most familiar," as he says, that gives his narrative its unique texture.

BODIES OF WRITING: CORPUS

The thought of body as disintegrated and its reconceptualization as a series of

contiguous terms or states is a philosophical project already begun some ten
years earlier in Corpus.5 Here Nancy rejects the idea of "the" body-a single
entity defined, for example, by extension in space-substituting in place of ..le>
corps a corpus or catalogue of singularities that evoke bodies without essential-
izing them. Rather than being defined by means of an essence, what it means to
be a body is indicated through a plurality of catalogues or corpi whose singular
terms may be repeated from one list to the next, but always with new additions
and in different combinations. And if we insist on asking that old philosophi-
cal question, "But what is it? What is the (human) body?" Nancy replies that it
is neither fullness nor void, neither outside nor inside, neither part nor whole,
neither function nor finality. It is a skin "folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied,
invaginated, . . . orificed, evading, invading, stretched, relaxed, excited, shat-
tered, linked, unlinked" (1992, 16). But it is likewise more than this sack of
skin; it is "a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body: colors, local
shadows, fragments, grains, areolas, half-moons, fingernails, body hair, tendons,
skulls, ribs, pelvis, stomachs, meatuses, froths, tears, teeth, foams, clefts, blocks,
tongues, sweats, liquids, veins, pains, and joys, and me, and you" (104-105).6
Why substitute a corpus for le corps? The opening lines of the English ver-
sion of the text provide a clue: "A corpus is not a discourse: however, what we
need here is a corpus" (Nancy 1993, 189). The here in question is a conference
whose overall theme is the body, and having been asked to deliver a discourse
on the body, Nancy's first response-in good Derridean fashion-is to call into

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84 Hypatia

question the desirability and feasibility of the task so assigned. In the Western
philosophical tradition, the body has been construed in opposition to speech
and language: it is ineffable, passive, impenetrable, unintelligent, and as such
opposed to the intelligible articulations of discourse. Bodies and discourses
according to the tradition (or at least one major strain within the tradition)
would seem to be antipodal and mutually exclusive, the former belonging to
matter, the latter to mind and experience. How then can the body or bodies be
accessed by language? How can the incorporeal (language, sense) "touch" the
corporeal (bodies, matter)? Two difficulties present themselves here. In the first
place, any language (whether a discourse or a mere catalogue) seems bound to
fail in the sense that it may write about the body, but does not as such seem to
touch body itself. As the French text makes explicit, the problem Nancy has in
mind is not whether language or discourse can represent or signify the body,
that is, write of or about the body, but whether it can write the body (Nancy 1992,
12). And secondly, if one understands by a discourse an organized speech on
a particular topic or theme, and if one models such organization, as Plato does
in the Phaedrus, on the body itself, arguing that the well-ordered speech has a
head, trunk, and legs just as bodies do, then a discourse on body is precisely the
wrong sort of vehicle to convey the disintegrated corpus that interests Nancy.
The passages in Corpus devoted explicitly to the interrelation of body and
writing are extremely dense and difficult. His central claim, however, is quite
clear: body is "neither substance, nor phenomenon, nor flesh, nor signification.
But being-exscribed [l'tre-excrit]" (Nancy 1992, 20). In an essay on this notion
in The Birth to Presence, Nancy suggests that "writing exscribes meaning every
bit as much as it inscribes significations. It exscribes meaning or, in other words,
it shows that what matters ... is outside the text, takes place outside writing"
(Nancy 1993, 338). What is "outside" the text and thereby exscribed by writing
is neither a referent in the sense in which contemporary theory of language uses
this term nor a raw, material datum. Rather, exscription captures "the infinite
withdrawal of meaning by which each existence exists" (338). The idea is not
to invoke the ineffability or inexpressibility of the thing itself or of matter
generally, but to recognize an ambiguity at the heart of the relation between
writing and things, namely, that writing writes about that which cannot be
touched by writing, that is, about that which is present in writing only through
its absence. For Nancy, "the being of existence is not unpresentable: it presents
itself exscribed" (339).
To say that body is being-exscribed means that bodies "take place neither in
discourse nor in matter. They inhabit neither 'spirit' nor 'body'. They take place
at the limit, as the limit" (Nancy 1992, 18). If we recall the claim from Being
Singular Plural that the as of meaning entails spacing and separation, this claim
becomes clearer. In order for something to appear as a determinate something,
there must exist a limit or border by which both the identity and difference of

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 Diane Perpich 85

the thing are constituted. Meaning, on Nancy's view, is not created by the inten-
tion of a subject but through a context or network (a circulation) of contacts
and touches. To begin to make sense of something is to come into contact with
it, to touch it-literally-and thereby to produce a body.7
A double ambiguity prevails here. First, the ambiguity addressed by the
notion of exscription-namely, that which the message touches or touches on
is "outside" of writing and speech, present in it only as an absence. Second,
body does not belong to the order of knowledge, it does not itself "know," but
as Nancy remarks "it is not ignorant either" (Nancy 1993, 199). It is only by
being a body that one thinks, but thought itself is not a body, and yet it is noth-
ing else either. Part of the problem in this second case is no doubt due to an
ontology of substances inherited from the Western philosophical tradition and
still lingering in words like thought and body. If body is conceived of as "mere"
matter, then the question of how it thinks or knows is puzzling indeed. And if
thought is held to constitute a domain that by definition excludes matter and
body, then the problem arises as to how thought can be located "in" a body. A
philosophy of the thinking body or embodied knower needs to conceive both
thought and body in new ways.
In Corpus, it is the notion of corpus itself that is employed in an attempt to
overthrow the barriers that divide body and meaning, matter and mind. Nancy's
challenge to the pervasiveness of the holistic understanding of body is launched
in the name of showing us the alterity that inhabits every body "at its heart"
and of developing an ontology according to which bodies are conceived not as
objects or things in any of the usual senses. The ontology of being-with that
Nancy develops in Being Singular Plural (and is still on the way to developing
when Corpus is written) thinks bodies as the spacing between, the border or
line of separation that allows beings to appear as distinct from one another but
that equally serves as the point of their connection and contiguous existence.
Bodies, for Nancy, do not have limits, they are limits; and further, the general
law of intrusion might be adapted here to apply to this notion of limit: there
is never only one. Every body is multiple limits; every body divides and relates
to itself and to others along multiples borders. The self is flesh and bone and
mineral and water; it is healthy tissue and deadly viruses. Rather than defin-
ing a self, a corpus records the fault lines of the self's identity, lines that both
separate and join the self with itself and with the world.

BORDERLINE BODIES AND FEMINIST THEORIES

Nancy's ontology is seemingly at odds with a host of feminist discourses for

which bodily integrity is an almost unquestioned good. For example, arguments
aimed at limiting state intervention in women's reproductive lives draw heavily
on a discourse of women's right to bodily integrity as a basis for their right to

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86 Hypatia

unrestricted control over reproductive decisions and reproductive health. Simi-

larly, discussions of eating disorders and body image in young women emphasize
the need for an integrated conception of self and body as a means of combat-
ing the fragmented, distorting, and ultimately destructive self-images that are
reflected back to girls and women from billboards, television, and the pages of
magazines. The harms done to women by the sex industry, sexual abuse, and
individual and state-sponsored violence against women are again denounced
as a violation of bodily integrity and recovery is often couched in a language
of "becoming whole" again. Finally, the injuries done by racism to the psyches
of women and men alike has been powerfully rendered by Frantz Fanon in an
image that speaks of a body objectified and rejected, given back to its possessor
"sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning" (1967, 113). Given these
reflections, it is legitimate to wonder whether Nancy's conception of bodies as
subject to a law of inevitable, multiple intrusion is not in some ways a very white,
masculine move, attached to a horizon and history of privilege that should give
feminists and others pause.8 Feminist critics who accused poststructuralism of
having announced the death of the subject just as women were on the verge of
finally becoming subjects questioned whether the antihumanist philosophies
of theorists such as Foucault and Derrida were capable of yielding a robust
enough notion of agency and of 'woman' to accord well with emancipatory
political agendas. One can well imagine the same critics hesitating before an
antihumanist ontology that seems to ask women to forgo an ideal of bodily
integrity that may be crucial to their survival and to do so while that ideal is
still, lamentably, more of an academic than a practical reality.
Moreover, even from a perspective more sympathetic to poststructuralism,
limited common ground with the first objection can be found by asking what
happens to sexual difference and to the historical struggle for the recognition
of women's sexual specificity if one follows Nancy in replacing the body with
a corpus. Can women's bodies be invoked under Nancy's rubric in a politically
salient sense or does the notion of a corpus, with its dispersion of bodies into
a contiguous collection of singularities, neutralize sexual difference, making it
that much easier for male bodies once again to represent the universal norm
and to occupy the neutral position of being 'human' bodies? To put this another
way, what sort of sexual politics would Nancy's view yield and is it one that can
produce an account of the way in which women's bodies and the representa-
tion and control of those bodies remain a central stake of political discourse
and action?
Finally, if contact and contiguity are privileged in the making of meaning,
what sort of room does Nancy's theory leave for discussions of the psychic
formation and internalization of gender and sexual identity (in intersection
with race, class, ethnicity, and other categories crucial to identity formation)?9
In sum, is Nancy's ontology a theory practical only for bodies that enjoy the

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 Diane Perpich 87

luxury of already being seen and treated as self-identical and whole? And is it,
as such, a luxury that feminist theory and women can ill afford?
The objections are serious, the more so because Nancy himself pays scant
attention to the implications of his position for questions of gender and race-to
mention only the areas that he is admittedly aware of neglecting. But with
respect to an analysis of bodies in particular, Nancy's thought does something
very well: it takes account of those bodies usually considered borderline without
having to position them at the outer limits (or, for that matter, at the center).
The bodies I have in mind here have all been marginalized in one respect or
another within traditional philosophical discourses, and in some cases fare only
slightly better in mainstream feminist discussions. They are bodies that defy
traditional categories, especially categories that depend for their operation on
a logic of binary opposition. Such are intersexed bodies that themselves come
in an amazing array and variety and that cannot be easily disambiguated into
the categories male and female; surrogate bodies and pregnant bodies more
generally neither one body nor two and especially troublesome for a tradition
that treats bodies as the property of minds or subjects; punk bodies covered
with tattoos, piercings, and scars in the name of a countercultural critique that
contests not just prevailing conceptions of beauty but larger social assumptions
about which bodies merit social protections and inclusion in the social com-
munity; and bodies like Nancy's own that have been altered by technology in
ways that blur the line between nature and culture, organism and machine.
To borrow a point that Grosz makes in the context of a defense of Deleuzian
feminism, Nancy's notion of a corpus like the Deleuzian body without organs
"de-massifies the entities that binary thought counterposes against each other"
(1994, 181). Individual (more properly termed dividual'0) beings, sociocultural
orders, and the natural world are given meaning in Nancy's view through
varied and multiple processes of historical contiguity and contingent contact
rather than through overarching systems organized according to a telos or other
structuring principle.
Early feminists whose principal aim was to dismantle ideologies according
to which "biology was destiny" eschewed any talk of the body, and perhaps
rightly so. But even as 1970s feminism battled to liberate women from the
tyranny of their bodies-or, more accurately, from the tyranny of systems that
reduced them to their bodies-the sex/gender distinction that was the legacy
of such struggles reproduced the very conception of bodies that it was meant to
attack. As Moira Gatens points out in her critique of the socialization theories
served by the sex/gender distinction, such views posit "a spurious neutrality of
both body and consciousness" (1996, 7). What Gatens calls the "degendering"
proposals of late 1970s feminism tacitly assume that the mind is a kind of blank
slate on which (patriarchal) society inscribes various lessons. The body, in these
accounts, is construed as the equally passive mediator of these inscriptions.

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88 Hypatia

Gatens argues that these rationalist and ahistorical views of mind and body
"result in a simplistic solution to female oppression: a programme of re-education
which involves the unlearning of patriarchy's arbitrary and oppressive codes
and the relearning of politically correct and equitable behaviors and traits"
(4). Gatens questions the explanatory value and theoretical underpinnings of
the sex/gender distinction and argues that programs based on it have tenuous
political value for women. Because they fail to accord the body an active role
in the formation of social consciousness (for example, as confirming or deny-
ing social significations) such programs tend to have limited impact against
entrenched views of the natural and such force as they do exert is all too easily
co-opted or recuperated by the status quo. Judith Butler (1990, 1993) arrives at
similar conclusions, arguing that the sex/gender distinction reproduces a binary
logic that effectively functions to naturalize such categories as male and female
and to reinforce a presumption of heterosexuality as an original, natural, and
normative sexual relationship from which homosexuality deviates.
The humanist ideal of bodily integrity, with what it connotes of the selfs
control over its "own" body and by extension over its own life and the mean-
ing of that life, seems to have investments in the rationalism and ahistoricism
that Gatens criticizes and to flirt with the naturalization of "whole" selves in
opposition to which fragmented selves would be causes for dismay and alarm.11
Moreover, from the point of view of gender politics, it is worth recognizing that
the notion of bodily integrity cuts two ways (at least). While it serves as an
ideal in the face of various levels of violence against women, it simultaneously
reinforces fantasies of women that underwrite the violence it seeks to address
and redress. Social myths surrounding women's virginity depend on a discourse
of unviolated integrity that works as surely to control women's sexuality as it
does to protect women from sexual violation. Likewise, the myth of a special
bond between mother and child valorizes motherhood but reinforces stereotypi-
cal views of women as closer to nature and as less than full participants in the
construction of social and cultural realms. Feminism has remained consistent
in its express opposition to a view that reduces women to nature or makes them
captives of their bodies, but has it been sufficiently critical of the ways in which
its own discourses may be complicit in such reductions or embedded in the same
theoretical frameworks that lent support to such reductive views?
It is beyond the scope of the present research to attempt to show more con-
cretely how Nancy's ontology might be used critically to intervene in contem-
porary debates about reproductive freedoms and technologies, about sexuality
and sex work, or more generally about gender identity and sexual difference. But
while there may be reason to move cautiously in adopting the full framework
Nancy's thought provides, there are nonetheless significant resources in his work
directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing gender norms and that permit us to
reconsider the theoretical adequacy and critical and political power of discourses

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 Diane Perpich 89

of bodily integrity. Naomi Scheman has noted a tension within contemporary

activism and theorizing between a vision of liberation as securing for those
at the margins of society fair access to the center and a vision of liberation as
the disruption of the center in the name of being free of the stigmatizing and
normalizing apparatuses necessary to the maintenance of a center (Scheman
1997, 124). Nancy's ontology, which, after all, is not just one of disintegrated
bodies and fractured identities, but of a being singular plural that emphasizes
the possibility of new modes of connection and community even as it records
the fault lines within current historical configurations, falls to my mind squarely
within the second camp. This may well put it in tension with some feminist
and activist struggles that focus on securing access to the center for those at
its furthest limits, but as Scheman's own recent work reminds us, the best way
to queer the center may well be to put queer bodies and lives and their opaque
social and cultural intelligibility at the center of theorizing in order to disrupt
the seeming transparency and integrity of one's "own" body and modes of living
and containing its excesses.

NOTES

1. On being-in-the-world and the worldhood of the world see especially paragraphs

twelve through fourteen of Being and Time.
2. Nancy writes: "The plurality of beings is at the foundation of Being. A single being
is a contradiction in terms. Such a being, which would be its own foundation, origin,
and intimacy, would be incapable of Being, in every sense that this expression can have
here" (2000a, 12). Being, for Nancy, is always being-with-one-another; being cannot be
properly said in the singular alone. It is always the plurality of singular beings. Similarly,
for him a single meaning would also involve a contradiction or an impossibility and for
the same reasons.
3. Humans are those "who expose sharing and circulation" (2000a, 3) even as they
are submitted to these same processes themselves.
4. "Mon propre coeur (c'est toute l'affaire du 'propre', on la compris-ou bien ce n'est
pas du tout ca, et il n'y a proprement rien a comprendre, aucun mystere, aucune question
meme . . . )-mon coeur propre, donc, etait hors d'usage, pour une raison qui ne futjamais
eclaircie" (Nancy 2000b, 13).
5. This work appeared first in English as a talk delivered at the 1990 meeting of the
International Association for Philosophy and Literature and was subsequently collected
in The Birth to Presence (1993). In 1992, a significantly revised and expanded version of
the text, now book length, appeared in French.
6. I have followed Peggy Kamuf's translation of this passage as found in Derrida
(1993, 151).
7. For example, in order to understand an event happening on the other side of the
world, I need to see an image, hear an account of it, read (whether by sight or by touch)

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90 Hypatia

a report about it, and so on. In every case, my understanding is of bodies and is possible
only thanks to my being a body. For Nancy, writing and speech are ways in which one
body touches another: the reporter in the field puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard
and sends a message to other bodies in the world; that message can be received only
through contact with the bodies of those others to whom it is addressed.
8. Rosie Braidotti (1991, 120ff) expresses a similar point in relation to Deleuze's
philosophy.
9. On the positive benefits of moving away from notions of psychical depth, see
Grosz's limited defense of a Deleuzian feminism in the chapter "Intensities and Flows"
(Grosz 1994). My defense of Nancy here is indebted to Grosz's work and in particular
to her defense of Deleuze.
10. I borrow this term from Donna Haraway (2004, 2).
11. Drucilla Cornell's appeal to a conception of bodily integrity in the context of a
discussion of abortion rights is a partial exception to this rule. I am in agreement with
Cornell when she points out that our "bodies" (her quotation marks) are never really our
own and that bodily integrity "always remains imaginary" (1995 40, 46). However, I am
less convinced when she claims that the ability to project bodily integrity is a necessary
condition of selfhood tout court rather than one discursive form through which some
women in some situations and historical periods might seek to regain a certain power
of self-definition (see Cornell 1995, 47 and passim). The desirability of bodily integ-
rity seems to me, as Cornell's own analyses often indicate, a function of very specific
material and historical conditions in which women's bodies are forcibly degraded.

REFERENCES

Braidotti, Rosie. 1991. Patterns of dissonance. Oxford: Polity Press.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of 'sex.' New York:
Routledge.
. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York:
Routledge.
Cornell, Drucilla. 1995. The imaginary domain: Abortion, pornography & sexual harass-
ment. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Le toucher: Touch/to touch him. Paragraph 16 (2).
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New
York: Grove Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2004. The Haraway reader. New York: Routledge.
Gatens, Moira. 1996. Imaginary bodies. New York: Routledge.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
New York: Harper & Row.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000a. Being singular plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne
O'Byrne. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
.2000b. L'Intrus. Paris: Galilee.

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 Diane Perpich 91

. 1993. The birth to presence. Trans. Brian

University Press.
. 1992. Corpus. Paris: Metailie.
Scheman, Naomi. 1997. Queering the center b
the self, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers. Boulde

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