The multipliable body

Abstract

In the modern understanding of the living body, bodily division is both fatal and distinctive; in the contemporary, the body is biologically and technologically multiple. Four premodern religious phenomena suggest yet another, much more fluid and multiple, conception of the living, spirited body. In relics, the divided body of the saint retains its miraculous vitality across its scattered locations, even restoring wholeness to other bodies. In transubstantiation, the host multiplies, according to the Eucharistic formula, ‘the body of Christ’ in all its specificity. Stigmata multiply the wounds of that body onto those of devout believers, yet retain the identity of these wounds as Christ's. The development of wound imagery furthers this curious multiplying of the nonetheless carefully numbered wounds; they may appear arrayed behind the body of Christ or even heraldically arranged on their own. The very ontology of the body is different here.