J S P

Wounds of Self: Experience, Word,

Image, and Identity
MARIANA ORTEGA
John Carroll University

As spectator I was interested in Photography only for sentimental reasons.

I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound. I see, I feel,
hence I notice, I observe, and I think.
—Roland Barthes

1,950 mile-long open wound

dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
—Gloria Anzaldúa

I would like to look into the relationship among experience, image, word, and
time in order to disclose the one who experiences, sees the image, says the word,
and remembers. And I am inspired by the photographic image that was once
considered merely the mirror of nature but is now a broken mirror in which life,
context, and interpretation reside. I am also inspired by the way in which experi-
ence, image, word, memory, and self come together in Susan Brison’s and Gloria
Anzaldúa’s powerful words.1
In the following, I attempt to bring together the image and the word or
ways of knowing by understanding those words through the ways we see images.
Thus, here I discuss a wound, but not the wounded attachment that according to
Wendy Brown makes us merely react to the powers that undermine our freedom,
wounded attachments that make us reify ourselves and rename ourselves with the
very name given to us by those powers that be, the very name that unnames us.2
I would like to expose a different kind of wound, one that in my view informs our
words, our projects to seek, to produce, and to maintain our ways of knowing of
the world and of ourselves—we women of color who have been and continue to be
silenced by flesh and blood bodies as well as by bodies of ideas that intentionally

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2008.

Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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or unintentionally obscure, undermine, assault, or disappear us. This wound is the

punctum, as it is named by Barthes in his musings on photography, the sting, the
speck, the cut that wakes us and alerts us to look further, to investigate, to under-
stand, to care.3 For me, war is this punctum; living in-betweenness is this punctum.
For other multiplicitous selves like me it is liminality, oppression, colonization,
erasure, a mix of all these4—and our words bleed just like our bodies do.
Here I propose that when we put words together, when we create ways
of knowing, we follow the phenomenological insight that such theories be
informed by and do justice to our lived experience. Yet not all experiences are
the same—there is the quotidian, the habitual, the commonplace, the exceptional,
the transforming, the traumatic, and more. The type of experience that I would
like to think about is the one that, although it may be part of our everydayness,
“pricks” us, just like Barthes says a detail in a photograph may prick, wound,
attract, overwhelm, or produce a tiny shock in me. The wound in the photograph
is what leads him to see, feel, hence notice, observe, and think (21). Our lives,
our experience, also have this/these wound(s); they inform the way in which we
live and the way in which we think about life and explore the ways to know life.
Barthes himself saw photographs as capable of doing much more than words.
For example, he says that writing can in no way show the kind of certainty that a
photograph shows (85). He also points out that, unlike photographs, words “fail”
to capture the “air” of a person, “a kind of intractable supplement of identity,
what is given as an act of grace, stripped of any importance” (109). However,
while I recognize the important differences between words and images, I wish to
explore their similarities as I appeal that our words be informed by our life, by
our lived experience.
In the following, I first explain what Barthes means by a photographic
punctum and subsequently analyze the way in which words can be said to have
a punctum as well. I use the work of both Susan Brison and Gloria Anzaldúa as
exemplary of wounded and wounding words. Finally, after considering why it is
that we must pay attention to experience, and in particular to the experience of
the wound, I explore how such a wound both calls forth our present and future
death and disrupts our sense of temporality, and how it may thus serve to open
possibilities for the self’s transformation and communication with others.

The Photograph That Wounds

Let us then look at this curious punctum that Barthes offers in his Camera Lucida,
his attempt to arrive at the eidetic science of photography as well as to provide
an homage to his mother. While in this text he desires to find the meaning of
Photography “in itself, by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from
the community of images” (3), he is overcome by this community of images,
especially the ones he loves. He finds that photography as such is unclassifiable (6).

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So his method is to give in to those photographs he loves, to immerse himself in

them so that they can perhaps lead him to some universal feature “without which
there would not be photography” (8). He is phenomenological in his approach
then, following the Husserlian quest for the things themselves. Yet what makes
his analysis rich is precisely its remaining in the sentimental mode—in its attempt
to understand the photograph not as a theme but as a wound or as that object that
can turn us, subjects, into objects and as that object that can prick us. He even
says that ultimately, photography turns us into “specters”; it is a microversion of
death (14), but more on that later. Barthes’s initial investigation into the nature
of photography turns out to be an exercise in self-discovery and in the nature of
interpersonal life. It is a disclosure of self with others. What he calls his ontologi-
cal desire to expose photography as such turns into an existential excursion into
what it means to be, to be as other (since the camera turns me into an object),
and to be with others (as a photograph reconnects him to his mother). It is this
existential aspect of his analysis that prompts me to see how elements found in
an image may be found in words. Ultimately, what I see and what I read take me
back to the self who I am, was, and will be.
While Barthes recognizes that he likes certain photographs because of
what he calls the studium, a taste for something, “a kind of general enthusiastic
commitment” (26), it is the punctum in a photograph that calls his attention; it is
also his analysis of punctum that calls my attention as I try to discover the inter-
relatedness between what is seen and what is heard or read. While the studium
is an “unconcerned desire” and “mobilizes a half-desire” (Barthes, 26–27), the
punctum in a photograph is that cut, that little hole in the image that calls for your
participation and engagement, what stops a photograph from simply being inert in
our gaze (Barthes, 27); it is the “element that rises from the scene, shoots out of it
like an arrow, and pierces me”; it is a mark made by a pointed instrument (Barthes,
26). That is, the punctum is that detail in the photograph that calls me forth and
invites me to engage with the image more fully and to even go beyond the image
to other possible interpretations. It is what makes me care about the image.
Three important features characterize this powerful cut or rupture that calls
us forth: its unintentional nature, its power of expansion, and its temporality. That
a detail may affect us in the way that Barthes describes when he describes the
punctum is not a matter of intentional action on the part of what Barthes calls the
operator or photographer. Indeed, there is much that the photographer can plan
and intend in the photograph, but the punctum is that which comes out in my own
reading and experiencing of the image. It is brief and active; it “occurs in the
field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and
delightful” (Barthes, 47). It is a consequence of my looking at the photograph, not
of what the photographer wanted me to see: “A detail overwhelms the entirety of
my reading; it is an intense mutation of my interest, a fulguration” (Barthes, 49).
Consequently, this detail expands my reading and understanding of the image, and
it may thus “fill the whole picture” (Barthes, 45). The image takes on a different

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life because of this detail, and I find other possibilities of reading and interpreting
what is in front of me. But what is in front of me is also beyond me and carries
me forward and backward. Sometimes the punctum is best revealed after the
fact, in a memory of the photograph: when I shut my eyes and the punctum is
disclosed or the “detail arises of its own accord” (Barthes, 53). This rupture also
carries with it a certain futuricity, “a subtle beyond” (Barthes, 59) as it moves me
forward. Ultimately, this punctum is of me but beyond me: “it is what I add to the
photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (Barthes, 55). It is what pricks
me in Barthes’s discussion of the beautiful science of writing with light.

Piercing Words

And thus, Barthes’s analysis of the wound, the cut, the rupture in an image leads
me to wonder: Is there a punctum in the word, in a group of words, just as there
is in the image? This is a question that leads me to a punctum in my own self,
in my own experience. The intermingling of image, word, and self is revealed.
I would like to propose that the punctum in our words, in our theories, is that
wound that makes us create knowledge informed by that very wound. It is what
calls us to theorize from experience (from the inside even though the inside is no
longer the inside from the traditional subject/object, inside/outside) and to demand
that our thoughts, our theories, our ways of knowing, what fancily we call our
epistemologies, do justice to the lives we live. It is also what calls us to regard
our pain as well as the pain of others, not to call ourselves victims and to demand
what others have been given but to fuse what is already fused and we greedily
want to separate, our thought and our lives. The words I write are informed by
my experience, an experience that itself has cuts, tears that color the way I see
and the words I produce.
So, I would like to think of the self not in terms of its “identity,” not as a
mere metaphysical problem (what is the criterion that explains same-selfness over
time), but as an existential problem, an existential dilemma that always involves
the personal, the political, the theoretical—all intertwined in ways that I still do
not know and cannot fully explain. But who is this “who” that exists as a whole, a
tenuous whole that has many different parts, a whole that wants to think together
with all its differences? What does this who say? What are her words, and do
we find a punctum in them? Will that punctum lead us somewhere that is deeply
personal but that can also be shared, that can also spark, inspire, new modes
of resistance as well as a move beyond resistance, oppositional consciousness,
dissident citizenships, non-vanilla social erotics, non-master tools?5 And finally,
will and how will this who remember what is said and what has passed?—we
know that the scent of memory may be very faint.6 All of these are difficult but
important questions. Let us look at an example of words informed by a punctum,
in this case a traumatic punctum, that themselves open the possibility for the

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further understanding of someone else’s experience, Susan Brison’s powerful

discussion of self.
In a powerful critique against the philosophical tendency to answer the
famous/infamous question of personal identity, of finding the criteria to explain
selfhood over time, by way of an appeal to thought experiments, Brison asks, Why
resort to “fusion, fission, freezing dissolution, reconstitution and/or teletransporta-
tion” (Brison, 13) when we can use our own experience to understand who we are?
Despite Scott’s and others’ critiques of the concept of experience, I take Brison’s
point seriously, not because I think that the notion of personal experience is the
most important and all theory should bow to it but because her poignant analysis
of trauma reveals the intermingling of embodiment, narrativity, relationality, and
agency and provides a phenomenologically rich account of self.7
While Brison concentrates on the trauma to her body and to her self due
to a sexual assault, she also discusses the trauma of those who have suffered
from imprisonment in a concentration camp, torture, and forced relocations. She
discusses the actual and metaphorical wounds that are left after such experiences
in which one survives but it is no longer clear who one is. She quotes Charlotte
Delbo,
Life was returned to me
And I am here in front of life
As though facing a dress
I cannot wear. (Brison, 19)

One cannot wear that dress because one is no longer sure of who one is: the frag-
mentation, confusion, pain, and sadness transform and remake who we are; they
might even destroy our sense of self. If we only remembered to look at each body,
at each self, that is touched by war, perhaps then we would not be so seduced by
it—here I am reminded of James’s surprising claim that no one denies that “war
is the romance of history”—even a pacifist such as William James admired the
“martial virtues,” the “good energies and hardinesss” of war, intrepidity, contempt
for softness, surrender of private interest, and obedience to command.8 Forgotten
is each struggle of each fragmented self that experiences and survives war. Not
forgotten, though, is the trauma on the body. The body, and not just conscious-
ness, as thinkers such as John Locke would have it, remembers, and it remembers
well. The bodily memory that sometimes appears and reappears in the form of
post-traumatic stress disorder is one that cannot be ignored. It is one that also
points to the close connection between self and embodiment. Brison emphasizes
this ability of our bodies to remember and the role that these memories play in
our sense of self.
Our bodies preserve memories of difficult experiences, and we are periodi-
cally assaulted by them, and yet sometimes we cannot find either the words to
describe the experience or the ears that will listen to it. Words cannot approximate
the actual fear felt; some ears are not ready to hear a story of pain and sorrow. In
this case it is not the Zarathustrian claim that “I am not the mouth for these ears”;9

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we might not find the words or the ears to disclose what we have been through.
If we find listeners, it might be as a form of amusement, historical interest, or
voyeurism. How is one to remake oneself without telling, without using the word?
According to Brison, one might not be able to bring oneself back or remake oneself
without the ability to tell one’s story and to have a brave, sympathetic audience.
As she states, “In order to construct self-narratives, then, we need not only the
words with which to tell our stories but also an audience able and willing to hear
us and to understand our words as we intended them. This aspect of remaking a
self in the aftermath of trauma highlights the dependency of the self on others
and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are
unwilling to listen to what they endured” (22). It is disconcerting to think what
would happen to the wounded self that cannot tell his or her story. As Charlotte
Delbo says, “I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it” (Brison, 13).
While Brison’s words contain what I would call a traumatic punctum, a cut
that is so powerful that it threatens to annihilate the self or to fragment so deeply
as to change it forever, Gloria Anzaldúa’s words give us a glimpse into a punctum
that is not necessarily traumatic but nevertheless is powerful in its effect on the
self. Her words regarding life in the borderlands constitute another example of the
kind of theorizing that opens up possibilities precisely because of its treatment of
the relationship between life and word, word and wound. She experiences the life
of in-betweenness as one filled with psychic unrest and in which her body senses
the experience of being pricked by cactus needles—it is not easy to be liminal,
not belonging to either here or there, feeling neither female nor male, Mexican
nor American. She exposes not only actual wounds but metaphorical ones as well.
Yet, with what she calls the “path of red and black ink,” she transforms herself
and her audience. She writes,
From the fingers, my feathers, black and red ink drips across the page. Escribo
con la tinta de mi sangre. I write in red. Ink. . . . When I write it feels like I’m
carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart—a Nahuatl
concept. My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remak-
ing and giving birth to itself through my body. It is this learning to live with
la Coatlicue that transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a
numinous experience. It is always a path/state to something else. (71, 73)

The key to the power of Anzaldúa’s words is that she writes from her lived
experience, from her own struggle in the borderlands. As she says, “Living in
a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists
create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh” (73). But she also admits
that those cactus needles might not always lead to creative excursions; they also
lead to intolerable blocks where the self freezes and is unable to move forward.
She, however, is strong and is capable of overcoming those blocks, of developing
what she famously called the consciousness of the New Mestiza, a being that has
a tolerance for ambiguity and is capable of transformation. In her words, image,
memory, and wound meet, a meeting that prompts us, the readers, to engage

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fully and to investigate further. Those who do not know the wound might get a
glimpse into the lives of countless people who reside in the borderlands; those
who understand, have felt what she vividly describes, see themselves in her work
and find solace and strength in knowing that they are not alone. It is thus that her
words create community, point us toward others, thereby undermining the solus
ipse that remains in some accounts of subjectivity.
Although Brison’s and Anzaldúa’s words tell us very different stories and
have different aims, they intersect in the fact that both women provide powerful
accounts based on their lived experience. That lived experience that they bring
forth, one to elaborate a new, more holistic account of self, the other to describe
the difficulty of living in the borderlands, contains ruptures, some more traumatic
than others, cuts that have moved them to explore their experiences further and
to thematize them through the word. In so doing they both reveal the importance
of embodiment, narrativity, and relationality for the self. Ultimately they both
disclose a punctum, an opening for further engagement. In their case though,
and thus moving beyond Barthes, it is a double punctum, one that comes from
ruptures in their own experience and that also provides a rupture for those who
read their words.

Sharing Wounds

Considering highly personal, intimate works such as Brison’s and Anzaldúa’s

leads us to two important related questions: (1) To what extent should we theorize
from lived experience? and (2) To what extent can lived experience that has a
punctum, whether traumatic or transforming, really be shared? What are we to
make of the wound or these wounds, especially when not all of us have them,
when so many might not have a clue about what they are, what they mean, the
chaos they bring? Should they be left, as some will surely claim, for our excur-
sions into literature, our analyses of psychological disturbances, or better yet, to
the confines of private experience, away from “objective” analyses of word and
thought? In his essay “Philosophy and Literature,” Italo Calvino reminds us how
for some the eyes of philosophers “see through the opaqueness of the world,
eliminate the flesh of it, reduce the variety of existing things to a spider’s web of
relationships between general ideas, and fix the rules according to which a finite
number of pawns moving on a chessboard exhaust a number of combinations
that may even be infinite,” while writers “replace the abstract chessmen with
kings and queens, knights and castles, all with a name, a particular shape, and a
series of attributes royal, equine, or ecclesiastical; instead of a chessboard they
roll out great dusty battlefields or stormy seas.” But in the end he urges us to see
how some works open up a new relationship between “the phantom lightness
of ideas and the heavy weight of the world.” He states, “When we speak of the
relationship between literature and philosophy we must not forget that the whole

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question begins there.”10 Brison’s and Anzaldúa’s works open up this relationship
between lightness and heaviness. Words that do not forget the wounds that the
self carries have much to say. Theories that take into consideration such wounds
pierce us and thus offer a punctum, a possibility for further exploration, further
questioning, and further understanding.
However, we are confronted with the familiar and powerful critiques of
appealing to personal experience to forge our theories. Most famously, Joan Scott
reminds us of the dangers of relying heavily on the concept of experience to the
point where experiences become facts. What happens to us is not just facts but
is mediated and constituted through discursive practices. How might we have a
critical stance, then, when experience loses its discursive and ideological underpin-
nings and becomes the fact of the matter? Sandra Harding makes a similar point
when she reminds us that experience may lie to us when it presents as natural that
which is culturally and historically constructed. And then there is the most obvious
problem: Is it not the case that relying in one’s own experience, especially wounded
experience, closes us off from others, literally encapsulating us not in our own
minds but in our own pain? Some wounds work deeply within and, rather than
moving us close to others that are and are not like us, move us away. What does
one do with Brison’s words if one has never been sexually assaulted or suffered
from the consequences of war? What does one do with Anzaldúa’s words if one
does not live at the borders, if one does not experience a liminal existence?
There is no quick, easy answer to these challenges. In fact, people who
rely heavily on their experience sometimes do end up naturalizing it or making it
inaccessible to others. We might get stuck in our own wounds. Yet what interests
me are those instances in which, through the word, wounded experience can be
revealed and shared with others. This is not an easy task but one that is certainly
possible, as Brison’s and Anzaldúa’s works demonstrate. Here we can appeal
to the writing in red and black ink, to words that stay close to who we are and
how we live our lives rather than words that impose who we ought to be from
without, to words that reveal a punctum. It is not surprising to see the reception
that Brison has had from many women and Anzaldúa has had especially from
women of color.
The wound in words may give us a clue here. The question is whether words
that later become theories and ways of knowing depart from or are informed by
wounds—oppressions, erasures, violations, colonizations, appropriations. There
are those wounds that hurt our very skin and whose sting is vivid in us, in me,
but there are also those wounds we share, the collective wounds that are owed to
historical, political, economic events beyond us, beyond the limits of my body.
If our words, our theories, carry with them those wounds, and we can recognize,
uncover, thematize, and problematize them, might our theories not be more
meaningful? And might I not be more prepared to try to see the wound in your
words? The point of the wound, of the punctum, is not merely to show and to point
to that which can be easily understood (ah, she is interested in the decolonizing

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project because she is a woman of color); it is also a rupture that points to other
possibilities of seeing, other frames of reference or openings from which to see.
It is not sufficient that there be a punctum in our words, but it is necessary if we
are to write words that can capture our lived experience and that may carry us to
the possibility of better understanding ourselves and ourselves with others.
The task then is to look at the sharedness, the translatability of a wounded
experience, how to reach others with my words (and, of course, not just written
words but brushstrokes, light, and tone, but this is for another time). We are clearly
moved by some words more than others; there are works that reach us in ways that are
deep—in the same way that there is a community of photographs that Barthes loves.
There are also experiences and words that take us further in the sense that they lead
to reconfigurations. Thus, I would like to add a further element to the punctum, its
transformative power. It is not just that some detail in the image or the word pierces
us or cuts us, alerts us to go further; sometimes the wound can be transformative for
me as well as for others as I narrate and share my experience with you.
I do not think that it is presumptuous to claim that this is clear, that probably
most of us have been moved by a work in such a way that we may feel possibilities
for transformation or reconfigurations of our selves. Hence our love and fear of
expression in all their forms—words, images, sounds. Yet it does not explain how
such an experience happens. It is not enough to say that one has experienced a
wound that is traumatic. Trauma does not necessarily lead to transformation or
more knowledge; it could just leave us fragmented and dead. It is not enough to
claim marginalization, oppression, in-betweenness, or pain in its various forms
to be transformed in constructive ways. Perhaps we can appeal to time to get a
glimpse at the transformative potential of the wound.

In and Out of Time

In thinking about the way in which time is involved in the transformative potential
of the wound, I am taken back to Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but only for a brief
moment, as I want to leave him behind and move the wound beyond his analy-
sis. As mentioned above, the punctum in a photograph carries with it a certain
futuricity, what Barthes describes as a “subtle beyond.” Yet the photograph itself
maintains presence, and in so doing it transforms subject into object. I stand in
front of the camera; the photographer takes my picture; the photograph reveals
me at a specific moment, with a specific gesture, and I become a “Total Image,
which is to say, Death in person; others—the Other—do not dispossess me of
myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at
their disposal, classified in a file” (Barthes, 14). For Barthes, this is in a sense a
microversion of death; I am no longer a subject full of possibilities. I am frozen
in time, with others to interpret me as they wish given how they read that slice of
time. In Sartrean terms, I have become an “in-itself.”

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In this tragic sense, Barthes goes so far as to say that the eidos of the
photograph is death, because “the photograph tells me death in the future” (96).
When he sees that photograph that moves him so of his mother as a child he
thinks, “She is going to die” (96). In fact, Barthes names a second, more intense
punctum in the photograph, time. He states,
This punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of
contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs; there
is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die. . . . At
the limit, there is no need to represent a body in order for me to experience this
vertigo of time defeated. . . . It is because each photograph always contains this
imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to
be to the excited world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside
of any generality. (96–97)
For Barthes, the photograph ultimately discloses his finitude, the certainty of
the death that awaits. I wonder if photography as such becomes a wound then, a
reminder of one’s fragility, of one’s eventual demise. But he resists generality; he
emphasizes the subjective experience—the fact of his own death, the punctum
pointing to the finitude of his own existence. The question is why it wounds him
so. Is it because, in a Heideggerian moment, he realizes the utter responsibility
he has for his choices as a being-toward-death even though in the image he has
become object? Or is it simply cold fear of the end and of the unknown?
Here we should move beyond Barthes and his emphasis on the death that
is to come and go back to Brison and Anzaldúa. There is death in them too, but
it is not one’s eventual, future death. Their concern is with a present and meta-
phorical death of the self that has undergone or is undergoing experiences that
are traumatic and hence have the possibility of fragmenting or even destroying
the self or a life that is filled with cactus needles that also leads to fragmentation,
ambivalence, and liminality. Of course, to speak of metaphorical death here does
not mean that the body does not hurt, that the body is not wounded. Both Brison’s
and Anzaldúa’s words cannot be separated from the mouth that speaks them, the
hand that writes them, and the body that feels them.
In Brison’s account, the body that remembers the pain inflicted has been
turned into object, this time not to congeal it or to possess it, as Susan Sontag would
say, for the purposes of photographic representation but to abuse it and regard it as
something to be injured. Hence the survivor’s sense of a loss of agency and subjec-
tivity. Not only does she experience the turning of her body into a thing, but she
also finds herself unable to walk alone at night, to be confident in her movements
and decisions. Brison’s analysis brings to the fore the utter disruption of time and
space that a traumatic experience inflicts on the self and thus the disruption of the
so-called unity of the self, if we, along with Heidegger, believe that the unity of
care lies in its temporality. Time is no longer the same; one does not want to look
at the past and is afraid to look at the future—here the Heideggerian temporality

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in which present, past, and future are interrelated seems to be ruptured;11 one feels
that one cannot or is afraid to project oneself toward the future.
Space is no longer the same either: that road is no longer the way home—it
is the space where snipers might hide; that room is no longer the parents’ com-
fortable bedroom but the bunker where one can be safe. And spaces that were
familiar and in a sense transparent become unfamiliar, even unwelcoming. What
Gertrude Stein cleverly calls “daily island life,” the familiar, the enjoyable because
it is familiar, is no longer so.12 Everydayness is disrupted, time and space are no
longer what we thought they were.
Even with experience that is not traumatic in the way that a sexual assault
or surviving war or a concentration camp is, temporal and spatial disruptions
appear. Consider the many disruptions of time and space that a multiplicitous
being that lives in in-betweenness experiences on a daily basis. Constantly travel-
ing worlds in the way that María Lugones suggests means that we will feel funny
in one world and very serious in another, as Lugones herself describes her own
experience.13 So it means that we might experience a sense of fragmentation or
even the feeling that our selves are very different in different worlds. For Lugones,
it also means that even a simple everyday gesture, moving forward to kiss some-
one when meeting her, is questioned or analyzed, if one is in the Anglo world.
The embodied self is constantly being stopped in its tracks, so to speak—having
to make various adjustments, reconfigurations, renarrations. Anzaldúa’s descrip-
tion of the New Mestiza is crucial here. While admittedly her work has become
overused and even misunderstood (as many interpreters forget the importance
of embodiment, materiality, spatiality, and cultural specificity in her work), her
account of this being that develops a new consciousness given her experience of
liminality is illustrative of the transformative power of the wound. And the words
that she writes in order to disclose such experience are themselves capable of
offering a punctum for us, the readers. In this sense her experience can become
shared, accessible to others. How accessible and whether it can be completely
shared are not things I can pretend to know, but I suspect that there might always
be certain elements of my experience that I cannot covey to you, no matter how
deeply my words move you and prick you.
Perhaps it is the nature of a powerful work, whether in words, images, or
sound, whether aesthetic or philosophical, their differences notwithstanding, that
it opens itself up for us to inhabit it and that it opens up our own selves for further
analysis and understanding. I cannot provide a theory of aesthetic judgment here
or a theory about what philosophical works are the ones that must count. But many
times, the works that achieve this connection to those who experience them are
wounded and wounding. They might bring forth the certainty of our death to come
(as Barthes sees it), or they disrupt time and even space. Temporality, although
always at work in our existence—to be a self is to be temporal, to project oneself
toward the future—is ruptured in the sense that we are taken back to mere presence,

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 246 MARIANA ORTEGA

to the present moment, the way in which the camera turn us into an object that is
there, the “that it is” of Barthes. In that fixity of the present the “projectability”
of the self is covered up—the future becomes lost, clouded, or becomes only the
certainty of death. Paradoxically, this very move toward the congealed present,
an Anzaldúan Coatlicue state or block perhaps, is also an opening, an invitation
for transformation. The question is whether we will be able to get out of it and
move forward. For Anzaldúa, a Coatlicue state is one in which there is confusion
and stress due to cultural shifts and ambiguities; it is what blocks her but also
compels her to write. The block is a result of confusion, ambiguity, liminality.
But this block has to be recognized for what it is. She says,
As soon as this happens, the piercing light of awareness melts the block and
I accept the deep and the darkness. . . . And in descending to the depths I realize
that down is up, and I rise up from and into the deep. And once again I recognize
that the internal tension of oppositions can propel (if it doesn’t tear apart) the
mestiza writer out of the metate where she is being ground with corn and water,
eject her out as nahual, an agent of transformation, able to modify and shape
primordial energy and therefore able to change herself and others into turkey,
coyote, tree, or human. (74–75)

But becoming a nahual, an agent of transformation that is herself transformed,

is not an easy task. It is connected to the act of creation, which, according to
Anzaldúa, requires a “blood sacrifice.” As she says, “For only through the body,
through the pulling of flesh, can the human be transformed. And for images,
words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the
human body—flesh and bone—and from the Earth’s body—stone, sky, liquid,
soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle,
are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices” (75). In the end, the image
and word that pierce, that wound, are an offering of my self to yours, an invita-
tion to an intimate encounter, with the hope of communication and possibility
of transformation—for both you and me.

Notes
Special thanks go to Julia Sushytska and John T. Lysaker for their helpful, insightful comments on
an earlier version of this article.
1. Susan Brison, “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity,” in Feminists
Rethink the Self, ed. Diana T. Meyers (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 12–39; Gloria Anzaldúa,
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). Page citations
to both are made parenthetically in the text. See Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remak-
ing of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), for a fuller treatment of the relationship
among violence, trauma, narrativity, and personal identity.
2. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Power, and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995).
3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Page citations are made
parenthetically in the text.

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 WOUNDS OF SELF 247

4. Mariana Ortega, “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘World-Travelers,’ and Dasein: Phenomenology and the
Multivoiced Multicultural Self,” Hypatia, Summer 2001: 1–29.
5. On different modes of resistance, see Chela Sandolval, Methodology of the Oppressed
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); María Lugones, Pilgrimages/ Peregrinajes:
Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984).
6. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory,
and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
7. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17:773–97.
8. William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace
Psychology 1 (1995): 20, 24.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1961), 47.
10. Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1982), 39, 49.
11. I say that the temporality is disrupted and not completely shattered because for Heidegger
human beings are always temporal and are projecting themselves into the future. From the point of
view of the wounded person, there is no future, even though existentially to be human is to always
have a temporality in which the ecstasies of time are interrelated in the way that Heidegger describes
(Being and Time [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 374[326]). I thank John T. Lysaker for his
comments on the issue of temporality in my account.
12. Gertrude Stein, “What Is English Literature?” in Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon, 1935),
11–55.
13. María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘world’-traveling and loving perception,” Hypatia, Summer
1987: 3–19.

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