Thinking Bodies 9781503622326

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THINKING BODIES

+

Irvine Studies in the Humanities Robert Folkenflik, General Editor

CONTRIBUTORS

+ Peter Brunette Peter Canning Frieda Ekotto Mira Kamdar Jeffrey S. Librett Juliet Flower MacCannell Jean-Luc Nancy Dorothea Olkowski Avital Ronell Benigno Sanchez-Eppler Greg Sarris Peter Schwenger Gary Shapiro Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Anne Tomiche Laura Zakarin Slavoj Zizek

+ Edited by

Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California

1994

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America An earlier version of "Hiroshima in the Morning" by Peter Schwenger appeared in Chapter 3 of his Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, ©The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. CIP data appears at the end of the book

A Note on This Series

This is the seventh in a series of volumes on topics in the humanities and the second in the new series published by Stanford University Press. This volume originated in the April 26-28, 1990, meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature held at the University of California at Irvine on the subject "Bodies: Image, Writing, Technology." For help with a broad range of problems, I am indebted to the Editorial Board of Irvine Studies in the Humanities: Ellen Burt, Lucia GuerraCunningham, Anne Friedberg, William J. Lillyman, J. Hillis Miller, Spencer Olin, John Carlos Rowe, and Jon Wiener. Joann McLean and Nancy Tablyn provided secretarial help for Irvine Studies. Robert Folkenflik, General Editor

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the following people, and also the offices they represent, who made this volume possible: the Vice Chancellor and Associate Vice Chancellor of the Office of Graduate Studies and Research, the Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; the Organized Research Initiative in Women and the Image funded by the President's Office of the University of California; Professor Robert Folkenflik, general editor of the Irvine Series, and the Board of Irvine Studies in the Humanities; and Helen Tartar, editor at Stanford Press. All of these offered us not only approval but encouragement. Our thanks also to Nancy Atkinson, our copyeditor, and John Ziemer, who has seen this volume through production. We are ultimately most grateful to the authors who have lent their minds and talents to this crucially important concern. We gratefully acknowledge permission from the Cumberland Packing Corporation for use of their logo and material for "Sugar in the Raw." Finally, infinite thanks go to the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, for providing Juliet MacCannell space, time, and atmosphere to accomplish the final editing. J.F.M. L.Z.

Contents

Contributors

x1

Introduction Juliet Flower MacCannell

I

Corpus ]ean-Luc Nancy

17

Response to Jean-Luc Nancy Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

32

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Corpus of Philosophy Gary Shapiro

52

How to Give Body to a Deadlock? Slavoj Zizek

63

Por causa mecanica: The Coupling of Bodies and Machines and the Production and Reproduction of Whiteness in Cecilia Valdes and Nineteenth-Century Cuba Benigno Sanchez-Eppler Finitude's Score Avital Ronell Hiroshima in the Morning Peter Schwenger

78 87

109

X

Contents

Writing the Body: The Rhetoric of Mutilation in Marguerite Duras's L'amante anglaise Anne Tomiche Writing (as) the Perverse Body in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde jeffrey S. Librett

I 20

132

American Indian Lives and Others' Selves: The Invention of Indian Selves in Autobiography Greg Sarris

141

How to Reinvent Your Body in Cameroonian Women's Writing Frieda Ekotto

149

Corporal Politics: Diderot's Body of Representation MiraKamdar

156

Bodies in the Light: Relaxing the Imaginary in Video Dorothea Olkowski

165

Electronic Bodies I Real Bodies: Reading the Evening News Peter Brunette

181

Transcendental Narcissism Meets the Multiplicity (Lacan: Deleuze) Peter Canning

195

God(')s Wink: The Book of Job, the University's Concern for Its Students, and Other Parables Laura Zakarin

215

Notes

229

Index

259

Contributors

PETER BRUNETTE is Professor of English at George Mason University. He is author of four books on film and visual art: Roberto Rossellini; Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory (with David Wills); Shoot the Piano Player; and Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Arts, Media, Architecture. He is working on books on Michelangelo Antonioni, and on the visual representation of bodies. PETER CANNING is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Author of articles on Deleuze, fabulation, Nietzsche, and the Holocaust, he is completing a book on libidinal time and event. FRIEDA EKOTTO is currently completing a study entitled The Relationship of Law and Literature: jean Genet's Melancholic Writing and Legal Discourse. She is at the University of Minnesota. MIRA KAMDAR is Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, working on international and domestic policy issues with regard to race and gender; and on cultural issues, especially the conflicts between women's rights and community rights. JEFFREY s. LIBRETT is Assistant Professor of German at Loyola University of Chicago. He has published essays on Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and de Man and translated, among other critical works, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, by Jean-Fran