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Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard On The Speaking Embodied Subject
Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard On The Speaking Embodied Subject
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Veronica Vasterling
Radboud University
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To cite this Article Vasterling, Veronica(2003)'Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on the Speaking Embodied
Subject',International Journal of Philosophical Studies,11:2,205 — 223
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0967255032000074190
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0967255032000074190
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.11(2), 205–223
For two decades continental philosophy has been dominated by the two
related tendencies of poststructuralism to foreground questions of lan-
guage and to deconstruct the subject. But since the 1990s the philosophical
landscape has changed. Partly maybe because of the poststructuralist
neglect of the more tangible dimensions of reality, partly because of a
general shift from questions of nurture to questions of nature, the attention
of contemporary continental philosophers appears to have switched to
questions of the body and embodied subjectivity.1 It seems as if language
and body are in the process of trading places as leading paradigm and the
poststructuralist theoretical framework is being replaced by a rediscovered
phenomenological tradition in general, and Merleau-Ponty’s work on the
body in particular.
Probably this diagnosis is too hasty and too general. What strikes me,
however, is that one finds few attempts to combine the insights of
poststructuralism and phenomenology. Even rarer are explicit discussions
of the relation of body and language, despite the recent plethora of books
on the body and embodiment.2 This may have to do with the fact that many
poststructuralist philosophers – Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Lyotard – are
critical of phenomenology even though, or maybe exactly because, they
have their roots in the phenomenological tradition. But there is no reason
to follow this example. Why throw out the baby of poststructuralist insight
in the phenomenon of language with the bathwater of its one-sided view or
neglect of questions of embodiment?
In this article I make a start with filling in the lacuna. I will discuss three
viewpoints on the relation of body and language, i.e. Judith Butler’s
poststructuralist viewpoint, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
viewpoint and Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern viewpoint. The reason
for juxtaposing precisely these three viewpoints is that the three accounts
are supplementary: what is missing in one is provided by another. Butler’s
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the linguistic context in which they occur, then language does not mirror
the reality we perceive. Rather, it is the other way around: language
semantically constructs the reality (including the body) we perceive and
sense.
Butler’s claim that reality and, hence, the body is linguistically
constructed is part of the more general, epistemological argument that
language conditions the accessibility and intelligibility of reality. Percep-
tion, experience and understanding of reality are enabled and mediated by
language. As speaking beings we are inserted in a symbolical order, and it
is this insertion in a world of significations which enables and informs
perception, experience and understanding of our body, and of reality in
general. That this argument is really a postlinguistic turn reformulation of
Kantian epistemology is made clear by Butler’s own comment on her
position:
the ontological claim can never fully capture its object, and this view
makes me somewhat different from Foucault and aligns me tempo-
rarily with the Kantian tradition as it has been taken up by Derrida.
The ‘there is’ gestures toward a referent it cannot capture, because
the referent is not fully built up in language, is not the same as the
linguistic effect. There is no access to it outside of the linguistic effect,
but the linguistic effect is not the same as the referent it fails to
capture. This is what allows for a variety of ways of making reference
to something, none of which can claim to be that to which reference
is made.
(Butler, 1998: p. 279)
In this quotation the distinction between referent and linguistic effect is the
linguistic equivalent of Kant’s distinction between Ding an sich and
phenomena, i.e. the thing as it is in itself and the thing as it appears to us.
Kant introduced this distinction to make an epistemological point, namely
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I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F P H I L O S O P H I CA L S T U D I E S
instead of conforming to set rules it tries to find its rule and to leave space
for what is un(re)presentable.10 Like ‘speaking speech’ authentic articula-
tion is inseparable from the body, but in Lyotard’s case this means that it
requires suffering:
Authentic articulation and ‘speaking speech’ are both creative, but whereas
the potential of the latter arises from the body’s indefinite power of
expression, the former has the body’s vulnerable affectability as its source.
Not the capacities of a body-subject in tune with the surrounding world but
rather the receptivity of a body-soul forever haunted by the ‘sublime
breakdowns’ resulting from an excess of affection is what conditions
authentic articulation. The suffering authentic articulation requires may be
described as the endurance of patient irresoluteness, waiting till ‘what
doesn’t yet exist, a word, a phrase, will emerge’ (Lyotard, 1991: p. 19); or as
the pain of lacking the means of articulation to express what urges,
demands, needs to be expressed, a pain that inhabits us since infancy.
perceived object stands out. The field embracing perceiving subject and
perceived object delimits the horizon that opens up a perceptual field. It
enables perception and cannot itself be the object of perception. Hence the
subject–object dichotomy is transformed into a distinction that pre-
supposes the existence of a field (a world) within which the distinction
becomes possible at all.
Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitation of the sensible body is ontologically
relevant as well. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty distances himself from the
idealism of Husserlian and Kantian philosophy because it reduces the
world to the work of the constituting subject. Replacing the constituting
subject by the body-subject has the very important ontological implication
that perceived objects lose the status of appearances. According to
Merleau-Ponty, embodied perception reaches a reality beyond appear-
ances. Because we always already move around in an environment with
which we are in constant pre-reflective contact, embodied perception
opens up a world we spontaneously and without doubt consider real. The
ontological turn that phenomenology takes with Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty consists in the acceptance of a necessary ontological presupposition,
i.e. the reality or givenness of the world. From the outset the body-subject
is a subject situated in the world.
This ontological turn is in a sense radicalized in Lyotard’s anthropology
of finitude. His notion of affectability suggests that the existence of the
embodied subject is not so much co-extensive with the existence of the
world – no subject without world and no world without subject – but rather
totally dependent on a violently affecting exteriority that forces it into life.
More radical than Merleau-Ponty’s undermining of the epistemological
autonomy of the mind and ontological independence of the subject,
Lyotard’s anthropology points to an ontological heteronomy and finiteness
that may be compensated but never overcome by the speaking embodied
subject. In traditional philosophy, including Heidegger’s in this case,
finiteness has always been understood in reference to mortality. That
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B O DY A N D L A N G UAG E
human existence can only have an end if it has a beginning is an insight that
is either ignored, obscured or repressed. Lyotard’s work, however, can be
understood as one of the few philosophical reflections on the radical
finiteness entailed by natality. Keeping in mind the physical realities of
birth one can indeed say, with Lyotard, that ‘life proceeds from a violence
exerted from the outside on a lethargy’ (Lyotard, 1997: p. 243). The
traumatic beginning of human life entails a radical, that is, unmasterable
finiteness. Because of its excessiveness it does not and cannot become part
of our experience, but the heteronomy and violence of the beginning do
leave indelible traces in the body-subject: the susceptibility to over-
whelming ‘sublime’ affections. Whereas Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject
exemplifies the traditional notion of masterable finiteness – the limits of
perception (experience, knowledge) are transgressable till we die –
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of sense data but also the Kantian idea of a sensible manifold that has to
be given meaning by a disembodied consciousness. The world we have
access to is an already meaningful, that is, interpreted, world. Experience is
always mediated by the signifying conventions and practices of ‘spoken
speech’ that interpret the world. However, only Butler realizes that
language, exactly because it is a social institution, is a political force.
Butler’s account introduces the political viewpoint of discursive power that
is missing in the other two accounts.
Power is mostly attributed to people, individuals or groups, and
associated with the effects of prohibition and repression. Butler, however,
inspired by Foucault, introduces a more sophisticated and illuminating
notion of power. Power is discursive, that is, located in the conventions that
constitute and regulate discourses and discursive practices. Discursive
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would lack the critical perspective that enables the analysis of lived
experience as permeated by the exclusionary force of powerful signifying
conventions and practices.
Notes
1 I am referring to the enormous popularity of the research questions and findings
of the life sciences. There are many examples of research topics – the human
genome project, brain research, evolution theory – that not only incite the
popular imagination but also, increasingly, attract the attention of philosophers,
social scientists and psychologists.
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2 I will mention only two exemplary collections which prove my point. Both Body
and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (edited by Donn Welton, 1998) and
Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture (edited by
Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 1999), apart from being excellent collections,
are lacking in contributions which explicitly deal with the relation of body and
language. Maybe even more noteworthy is the same state of affairs in the many
books on the body from a feminist perspective which have appeared since
approximately 1990.
3 My discussion of Butler’s constructivism is mainly based on Bodies that Matter
because that book provides the most sophisticated and sustained argument for
the constructivist claim.
4 Butler is not alone in arguing against the assumption that binary sex/gender is
a natural given. Thomas Laqueur (1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) also
provide convincing arguments for the thesis that the binary view of sex/gender
is a construction from the viewpoint of, respectively, the history of science and
contemporary biological and medical research.
5 Whereas Husserl’s phenomenology continues the Kantian subject–object
dichotomy by taking pure consciousness as constitutive of the world, both
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty undermine this dichotomy by focussing their
attention on neglected questions concerning the ontological status of human
beings. Both deny the primacy and the constitutional function of (pure)
consciousness. Instead they emphasize practical engagement in everyday
existence (Heidegger) and embodied perception (Merleau-Pony) as the primary
form of human understanding and experience. In line with this transformation
they elaborate an ontological reinterpretation of the phenomenological key
concept of intentionality. Instead of intentional consciousness as a self-enclosed
sphere with objects within it, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty emphasize the
openness of human existence that is always already (engaged) in the world.
6 See Butler, 1988 and 1989.
7 In response to critical remarks concerning her concept of the subject, Butler
admits that ‘the category of “intention”, indeed, the notion of “the doer”, will
have its place, but this place will no longer be “behind” the deed as its enabling
source’ (in Benhabib et al., 1995: p. 134). Apart from stating that the intentional
subject is ‘neither fully determined nor radically free to instrumentalize
language as an external medium’ (in Benhabib et al., 1995: p. 135), she does not
explain, here or elsewhere, where and how we are to locate and understand the
(limited) place and function of intentionality within the context of her
conception of language.
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I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F P H I L O S O P H I CA L S T U D I E S
8 Lyotard’s anti-humanism is politically motivated. He considers the harmonizing
tendencies of humanism dangerous in so far as they neutralize and totalize the
contingent heterogeneity of the human world in a meaningful whole, thereby
opening the door to the closed systems of totalitarian politics we came to know
so well in twentieth-century Europe. Humanism was an active force in the
production of the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity, those utopian blueprints of a
better future that ended in Auschwitz and the Gulag. Lyotard’s apprehensions
with respect to dangers of a politically naive humanism may have some
application to Merleau-Ponty’s work. According to Fred Evans one can detect
a ‘teleological and totalizing (though open-ended) notion of unity in Phenomen-
ology of Perception’ (Evans, 2000: p. 258).
9 An extensive argument for the inseparability of body and language (or thought)
can be found in ‘Can Thought go on without a Body?’, in Lyotard, 1991: pp.
8–23.
10 An early discussion of this distinction can be found in ‘Réponse à la question:
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References
Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla and Fraser, Nancy (1995) Feminist
Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York/London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1988) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Yale French Studies 172: 519–31.
Butler, Judith (1989) ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A
Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’, in Jeffner
Allen and Iris Marion Young (eds) The Thinking Muse, Bloomington, Indian-
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Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New
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Butler, Judith (1998) ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith
Butler’ by Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins, Signs, 23 (2): 275–86.
Evans, Fred (2000) ‘Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, and the Basis of Political Judgment’,
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