Abstract
This article examines the possibility of feeling the body’s deadly touch via speech. Beginning with my own experiences as a hospital chaplain, the article explores psychological and political theories of the separation between the ego and the body and the collapse between the two in death. The final two sections examine contrasting theories that seek to bring bodily dissolution to speech. I contrast theorists Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani with the formulations of religious language by Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy to examine faith’s ambiguous potential to bring death to speech amidst the realities of dying bodies.
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Notes
I use “touch” to refer to the experience of sensing the depth, weight, and fragmentation of the body cast as life’s other in subjection, as formulated below.
This mirrors the haunting by the social abject as the “constitute outside” of normativity as Butler (1993/2011) outlines in Bodies that Matter (pp. xi–xxiv). However, here Butler’s structural critique of social normativity works on the level of the body and the subject, the body now being that which is constituted as abject, the constitutive outside of the normative subject. For a psychoanalytic critique of the body as abject, see Julia Kristeva (1982, pp. 1–31).
See Giorgio Agamben (1995). For Agamben, the constitutive division of subject formation always leaves behind a contrast of social death. Biopolitics must continually rest on delineating norms of what/who is a subject and, conversely, what constitutes bare life. Thanatopolitics is then the correlate of biopolitics, the appearance of “life lacking every political value,” the constructed body that fails the operative norms and is cast into the precariousness of life without the protections of society (p. 132). Yet the fluidity between the subject and bare life, the ease in which the former slides into the latter, proves the point that the fundamental division between the two is only an illusion, that bio- and thanatopolitics are not separating life and death but only casting themselves into both domains, regulating life and death as well as the transition between the two. See also Judith Butler’s (2009) analysis of grief and bare life in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (pp. 1–32).
See, for example, the descriptions of bodily disintegration in Sherwin Nuland (1995).
One can align the Child as psychical object with the images of normativity outlined above in which the ego casts itself.
Sara Ahmed (2010) picks up on this mobilization in Edelman when she notes, “I find something rather optimistic and hopeful about Edelman’s polemic, where hope rests on the possibility opened up by inhabiting the negative” (p. 161). A similar observation differentiating Edelman’s antisocial platform from “failed sociality” is found in Heather Love (2007, pp. 22–23).
See Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere’s Love, Hate and Reparation (1964) for a substantial psychoanalytic account of aggressive displacement.
Bersani (1987) says earlier, “For it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relation that condemns sexuality to becoming a struggle for power. As soon as persons are posited, the war begins” (p. 218).
Note that here Kristeva subtly breaks with Freud (1930), who theorized religion’s “oceanic feeling” as a psychic remainder of the undifferentiated ego.
In this section, I am tracing both a continuity and a change in Kristeva’s thought. In her early work, Kristeva identifies Christianity solely with psychic and institutional rigidity opposed to semiotic motility. This changes in her later work, as recounted below. However, throughout, Christianity remains ambiguous in its way of both mediating bodily resonance but also stopping the drive before psychic collapse. This ambiguity then allows for a continuity in Kristeva’s work, even as the exact function of Christianity in her thought changes.
Many of the connections outlined below can also be found in Kristeva’s earlier work, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987, pp. 23–27).
Nancy’s formulation of parousia echoes his earlier work with community in that, like the divine, the exposure that makes community between singular beings possible only happens as community itself, as a self-enclosed “organic communion with its own essence,” withdraws. See Jean-Luc Nancy (1991, pp. 9–10).
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Acknowledgments
This article was presented to the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in May 2014. I am indebted to the helpful feedback from the group. I am also thankful to Kathryn Schwarz for directing the study under which this article was produced and for offering feedback on several drafts of this work.
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Coble, R. The Body as Touch: Speaking Death and Dying in Queer Theory and Religion. Pastoral Psychol 64, 621–634 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-014-0630-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-014-0630-4