Book Review: Overcoming the Onto-Theology of the Body?

Abstract

Let me begin with a moment of vacillation between the body and the flesh. What is a body, of itself and for itself? What is the flesh, of itself and for itself? Whence and how does this differentiation arise? Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy, two philosophers whose thinking has intersected previously around the overcoming of metaphysics and the possibility of radical freedom, would seem to meet once again as they seek to address this difficult cluster of questions (see Agamben, 1993, 1998; Nancy, 1991; see also Elliott, 2011). Since, in recent years, collections of their occasional writings seem to have proliferated, sometimes combining the most disparate essays, I will focus primarily on just two of these, Nancy’s ‘Noli me tangere’ and Agamben’s ‘Nudities’. What these two very substantial essays – which lend their titles to the collections in which each is found – share is the juxtaposition of bodies and words, one seeking to advance thereby a deconstruction of Christianity and the other the stripping of the body bare of all remaining Christian cloak.

The body has long been a subject of philosophical reflection, but, over the century between the announcements of the death of God and the death of Man, it has become a more visible matter of philosophical concern and equally important to social and political theory. The reasons for such intensification are complex and, as Agamben’s and Nancy’s two essays illustrate, coming to terms with such complexity is fraught with difficulties. On the one hand, the body seems to have become an increasingly important site in the organization and deployment of power, social and political, but it would seem that the condition of possibility for such organization and deployment is inseparable from Christianity and its diremption of the biblical ‘dust of the ground’ into the body and the soul. On the other hand, to the extent that this Christian heritage is omnipresent and inescapable, it is not clear how such a historical situation can ever be overcome, to reveal something called the flesh as that which lies beyond the body and is neither spiritual nor material.

Nature, Grace and the Body

Vanessa Beecroft’s exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, of 100 virtually nude women, standing impassibly as clothed viewers mingle among them, occasions Agamben’s endeavour to articulate the difficulties involved in seeing the body for what it is, seeing ‘beyond the prestige of grace and the chimeras of corrupt nature’ and so glimpsing ‘a simple, inapparent human body’ (Nudities, p. 90). Agamben then offers a genealogy of the nude body. Mobilizing methodological precepts which he has developed more fully elsewhere, he begins by noting how the question of nudity ‘is inseparable from a theological signature’ (Nudities, p. 57) and then proceeds to explicate the complex operation of the ‘theological apparatus’ correlating sin, nature and grace (Nudities, p. 59). Briefly, while an apparatus is that assembly of the diverse powers which serves to produce, and sometimes to destroy, a subject, a signature is that site where sign and signified, semiology and hermeneutics, blur into one another, the space of sovereign decision (see Agamben, 2009a, 2009b). As Agamben puts it, most readers will be used to thinking that Adam and Eve sinned and, as a consequence, discovered that they were naked. He quotes Erik Peterson, the troublesome theologian who once wrote that:

through sin, man loses the glory of God, and so in his nature a body without glory becomes visible: the nakedness of pure corporeality, the denudation resulting in pure functionality, a body that lacks all nobility since its ultimate dignity lay in the divine glory now lost. (Peterson, as quoted in Nudities, p. 59; see also Agamben, 2009c)

Astutely, Agamben then observes how the ‘glory of God’ must have clothed something which is in fact conceptually prior to grace and is turned subsequently into something that ‘lacks all nobility’, nature, so calling for such glorious cloaking and the ‘glory of God’. Agamben writes that ‘this original nudity … disappears underneath the clothing of grace, to then reappear as natura lapsa only at the moment of sin, that is, at the moment of denudation’ (Nudities, p. 64). In other words, and repeating a conceptual manoeuvre familiar to readers of Agamben’s more famous tracts on the nature of political power, humanity’s fallen nature is not so much the consequence of sin but rather the result of the operation of a sovereign, constitutive power which here installs itself by separating nature and grace. The political task of insurgent powers, then, is to ‘comprehend and neutralize the apparatus that produced this separation’ (Nudities, p. 66). Agamben illustrates the difficulties involved in this task by turning to Jean-Paul Sartre and how his distinction between flesh and the body repeats the theological signature when he writes that ‘the most graceful body is the naked body whose acts surround it with an invisible garment, hiding its flesh entirely, though it is completely present to the spectators’ eyes’ (Sartre, as quoted in Nudities, p. 74). If, in so denigrating the flesh, Sartre repeats the opposition of grace and nature as foundational, Agamben discovers an alternative in the very ‘obscene’ incarnation produced by the sadist, to whom Sartre also refers, so reiterating instead the arguments about the liberating powers of pornography which he has advanced previously elsewhere (Agamben, 1995; see also Mills, 2008; Palladino, 2010). He refers the reader to a form of sadomasochistic pornography which operates on the contrast between images of women clad in elegant dress and the same women ‘undressed, tied up, and forced to assume the most unnatural and painful positions, removing all grace even from the lineaments of [their] face, which are deformed and contorted by special instruments’ (Nudities, p. 75). The sadist tries to capture something beyond the initial surrender which, as the subsequent escalation of violence attests, seems to elude him or her. Agamben proposes that the answer to the conundrum posed by this situation lies in Helmut Newton’s famous photographic diptych They Are Coming (1981). Here every detail of the four impassive and virtually nude women captured in one photograph is repeated in the next one, except that they are now fully clothed. Agamben’s point is that these women, just like those in Beecroft’s exhibition, sport both their clothing and their nudity equally and interchangeably. Clothing, whether of cloth or grace, is construed as hiding nothing, and, as such, the dialectic of nature and grace is brought to a standstill and the theological apparatus could be said to have thus been rendered inoperative. The ‘inapparent body’ is thus revealed as nothing and everything.

Agamben’s argument is exceptional because what is then on display in the Neue Nationalgalerie, at least to those viewers endowed with the ‘uncommon lucidity’ required to overcome any interest in why the women should still be wearing pantyhose, is nothing less than ‘the thing in itself’. As Agamben puts it:

There is nothing behind the presumed clothing of grace, and it is precisely this condition of not having anything behind it, this pure visibility and presence, that is nudity. To see a body naked means to perceive its pure knowability beyond every secret, beyond or before its objective predicates. (Nudities, p. 81)

It is not clear, however, why anyone should care about such an utterly denuded body, such display of the flesh and ‘dust of the ground’.

The Deconstruction of Christianity

Nancy’s ‘Noli me tangere’ is one of the later essays in a series of essays which seek to overturn the dominance of the word within philosophy, including phenomenology, and recover a world that is alive and meaningful, but does not operate on the model of language (see Nancy, 2005, 2007, 2008). Thus, if Agamben operates on the revelation of a secret, the secret relationship between sign and signified, semiology and hermeneutics, for Nancy there is no secret, and, where Agamben operates on the model of the signature, Nancy operates on the model of the parable, parables expressing ‘themselves and not something else’ (Noli Me Tangere, p. 9).

Nancy has claimed elsewhere that the injunction against graven images within the three monotheistic religions is not about secondary, false presentations, but about a power of the image to produce the experience of the sacred (Nancy, 2005: 27–50). If the word is powerful and persuasive, it is because it conjures images and is evocative, expressing itself in sound. Neither seeing nor listening operate according to grammar, their effects resting on altogether different modes of affecting one body’s disposition toward another. Yet, image, sound and word are too close to one another to overturn the linguistic model, especially its blindness to the finitude of sensual beings. Touch is better suited to an exploration of bodies, the senses and the meaning of being. Revisiting Christian iconography already considered in ‘Visitation’ (in 2005: 108–25), Nancy settles on pictorial depictions of the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Christ in the moment just before the Resurrection. As John would have it, Mary seeks to touch Christ, to hold on to what she thought she had lost, but it seems that Christ seeks to avoid such touch, wishing to be allowed to leave and so rejoin the Father. There is something at stake in this scene, Nancy suggests, to which its many painters would seem to have been more attuned than even the very authors of the Gospels. Reprising the model of community developed elsewhere, Nancy proceeds to develop a ‘singular-plural’ for the tactile sense (Nancy, 2001). Touch produces a sense of the world and its plenitude by interruption. If everything were in contact, there would be no sense of tact, no one body touching another. Sense of the one and the other arises in the loss of contact, in the instant of rupture, that ‘point or … space without dimension that separates the touching from the touched, and thus touch from itself’ (Noli Me Tangere, p. 13). This is no mere matter of mechanical causation, for the very sense of touch and consciousness is forged in this same moment. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that Nancy should regard touching as inseparable from the experience of the ‘sacred’ (Noli Me Tangere, p. 14). Indeed, as John says of this critical moment of uncertain contact, ‘Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God’ (John, as quoted in Noli Me Tangere, p. 21). Death is a similarly extraordinary interruption, lending meaning to life and opening up the world. In the moment of death, Christ’s tangible body ‘slips away from a contact that it could have allowed’, and, more importantly, because presence obtains in the moment of detachment, ‘its being and its truth as arisen are in [this] slipping away, in its withdrawal that alone gives the measure of the touch in question: not touching this body, to touch its eternity’ (Noli Me Tangere, p. 15). It is so momentous because, in this moment, the one body extends ‘to the measure of the world and of the space in which all bodies meet’ (Noli Me Tangere, p. 44). As Nancy notes elsewhere, such reunion is sometimes named ‘God’ (Nancy, 2008: 61; see also Noli Me Tangere, p. 48).

The Politics of the Body

If Nancy could thus be said to overturn the onto-theology of the body, Jacques Derrida (2005) remained unconvinced that he has succeeded in escaping language and representation (see also Landes, 2007). There certainly is something very unsettling about an essay on the powers of touch, in itself and for itself, which focuses wholly on the visual representation of a parable about touch, and it could not be otherwise because touch is in fact the very condition of possibility of phenomenology (Derrida, 2005: 228–30). Arguably, however, the more troubling elision is that of the difference between faith and religion.

As Nancy himself acknowledges, the encounter between Christ and Mary Magdalene is not the scene of a miracle, but a parable about faith. As he puts it:

it is not a question here of seeing in the darkness, that is, in spite of it (as a dialectical or religious resource). It is a question of opening one’s eyes in the darkness and of their being overwhelmed by it, or it is a question of sensing the insensible and of being seized by it. (Noli Me Tangere, p. 42)

Further, if Mary Magdalene is so seized, it is because she loves that onto which she cannot hold. It does not seem wholly unreasonable to observe that this is faith that the loved one is not gone, not about the word and the law, so confusing Christology and Christianity (see also Caygill, 2005). This issue is not wholly unrelated to questions of gender and sexuality. Asking rhetorically why bodies matter, Nancy responds that:

only a body can be cut down or raised up … only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort. A ‘pure spirit’ gives only a formal and empty index of presence entirely closed in on itself. A body opens this presence; it presents it; it puts presence outside of itself; it moves presence away from itself, and, by that very fact, it brings others along with it: Mary Magdalene thus becomes the true body of the departed. (Noli Me Tangere, p. 42)

This equation of the body of Christ and the body of Mary Magdalene, the fallen, but redeemed, woman who is told to let go in the name of a greater love, is perhaps attuned to Luce Irigaray’s feminist theology, but it also rests on a further equation of woman and the body (see Irigaray, 1991: 164–90). Indeed, Nancy writes in a later essay that:

like an unstable gangway between the nihil and the something, between the abyss and existence, this woman (perhaps woman herself? but stretched into two, her unity withdrawn in the between-two) introduces the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness and, reciprocally, the eternal return of the nothing in everything. (Noli Me Tangere, p. 65, emphasis in the original)

One wonders what the cause of such instability is. Agamben is even more explicit, equating the figure of woman and not just the body, but the flesh. Referring to a medieval reliquary, on which is engraved a representation of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he observes how Eve will not be clothed and writes: ‘[this] silvery figure that desperately resists being clothed is an extraordinary symbol of femininity. This woman is the tenacious custodian of paradisiacal nudity’ (Nudities, p. 62). Recalling, however, how Beecroft’s nude women still wear their pantyhose and Newton’s their high heels, such ‘paradisiacal nudity’ is the stuff of fantasy and desire in the shadow of the law. Finally, given the extraordinary investment of not just Christianity, but the entire western tradition, in inscribing its truth and power upon the body of the woman as wholly other, one wonders how effectively Agamben and Nancy have overcome the onto-theology of the body (see Derrida, 2004; see also Dely, 2007).

References

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(1993) The Coming Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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(1995) Idea of Prose. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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(1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agamben

(2009a) The Signature of All Things: On Method. New York: Zone Books.

Agamben

(2009b) ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ and Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agamben

(2009c) Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una Genealogia Teologica dell’Economia e del Governo. Torino: Bollati.

Caygill

(2005) Bearing witness to the infinite: Nancy and Levinas. Journal for Cultural Research 9(4): 351–357.

Dely

(2007) Jacques Derrida: The perchance of a coming of the otherwoman. Sens-Public. Available at: http://www.sens-public.org/article.php3?id_article=312 (accessed July 2011).

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J-L

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