Abstract
Proper attention to the theme of corporeality is crucial for understanding Derrida’s analysis of Hegel in “The Pit and the Pyramid.” This article argues that Derrida’s essay compels us to face the impossibility of giving a wholly coherent account of embodiment. The Aufhebung supposedly unites the exteriority of the corporeal with interiority in a higher unity that cancels and preserves them both; Hegel’s own text reveals, however, that meaning is primordially absent from the body that was thought to incarnate it. And it is this absence of ideal meaning that is originary: Differance conditions the body as it conditions speech, rendering the body other than itself such that it is not categorizable as flesh that is the self or as an object that is not the self. I am and am not my body because the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority breaks down even at the level of the body. Indeed, I am and am not my self; the embodied self is disrupted from the start, never self-contained. Thus embodiment always already testifies to the other.
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Notes
Heinemäa (2021, p. 254).
Moran (2013, p. 302).
Romano (2020, p. 141, my translation).
Given the brief reference to Merleau-Ponty, it is worth noting that Richard Kearney ably defends him from the Derridean suggestion that his work falls into haptocentric closure, denying alterity. See Kearney (2015, pp. 38–39). Kearney certainly does not suppose, moreover, that the sense of the body can ever be fully expressed or made present; quite the contrary. Opposing Derrida to the phenomenological hermeneutics of the body is too simplistic. I argue that the sense or senses of the body are undone from the start and that reckoning with this undoing is crucial for thinking the self, but the body is not senseless or non-sensical: Simply opposing Derrida to phenomenology or hermeneutics would amount to positing a dichotomy between sense and non-sense that, as the concluding section of this article will indicate, is also unsustainable.
Stähler (2003, p. 201) also raises this point, explaining that for Hegel, unlike for the Plato of the Republic, “being a ‘sign of a sign’ does not signal a double deficiency by way of being twice removed” from the truth. As will become clear later, however, I argue that Stähler misreads Derrida by finding in his text the misunderstanding of Hegel that she rightly criticizes.
For a valuable corrective to any misreading that would take Derrida’s essay as an attack on Hegel, see Catherine Kellogg’s (2005, p. 200) argument that “Derrida’s strategy in this regard is not to expose errors by writing about the gaps or discontinuities in the Hegelian system, but rather to inscribe the ‘remains’ that the Hegelian text reveals in the very gesture of covering them over.”
Stähler (2003, p. 203).
Stähler (2003, p. 201).
It is true that Stähler’s essay focuses chiefly on “The Pit and the Pyramid,” in which the words “differance” and “arche-writing” do not appear. The question of originarity is, however, entirely relevant to a discussion of what it means to privilege speech.
Stähler (2003, p. 201).
Hegel (1969, p. 373; 2010, p. 198, translation modified). Stähler’s citation (differently translated) stops just before “in that”: “‘What has been said shows the inestimable and not sufficiently appreciated educational value of learning to read and write an alphabetic character’” (cited in Stähler [2003, p. 200]).
Derrida (1972, p. 109; pp. 93–94).
For a more detailed examination of this question, see John McCumber’s (1980) analysis of Hegel’s understanding of the relation between mind and body. One of McCumber’s (1980, p. 49) conclusions is that the mind and body in Hegel should “be understood […] as poles of a continuum, rather than two entirely separate realms of being.”
Stähler (2003, p. 202).
McCumber (2003, p. 58).
McCumber (2003, p. 58).
Naas (2008, p. 191).
On illness as a disruption of the self and of the self’s relation to the body, see Falque (2016; 2019), an article that has influenced my approach to the question of embodiment here. While Falque does not reference Derrida and would not make the turn to alterity as quickly as I do at the end of this article, much interesting work could be done bringing Falque’s and Derrida’s analyses into dialogue.
See also Derrida’s statement, “I have never said that the subject should be dispensed with. Only that it should be deconstructed. To deconstruct the subject does not mean to deny its existence. There are subjects, ‘operations’ or
‘effects’ (effets) of subjectivity. This is an incontrovertible fact. To acknowledge this does not mean, however, that the subject is what it says it is. The subject is not some metalinguistic substance or identity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscribed in language” (Derrida and Kearney [1984, p. 125]). The self or I is neither a mere nonentity nor pure ipseity.
Derrida and Kearney (2004, p. 154).
See also Pleshette DeArmitt’s call for “a new understanding of self-relation in which to speak of and for oneself would, as Echo knew well, pass by way of and be indebted to the other” (2014, p. 140). To say I is to be indebted to the other, to affirm that indebtedness, and thereby to testify to the other. As Derrida puts it in Monolinguism of the Other, “My language, the only one I hear myself speak and agree to speak, is the language of the other” (1996, p. 47; 1998a, p. 25). Indebted from the start, I cannot but testify to the other—like Echo, as DeArmitt reminds us, who owed all her words to the other.
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Horton, S. Riddles of the body: Derrida and Hegel on corporeality and signs. Cont Philos Rev 56, 95–112 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09583-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09583-y