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January 08, 2007
As we have seen in Telling Flesh Vicki Kirby is dissatisfied with what she holds to be the postmodern refusal to consider the question of the body, and she seeks to transplant, with slight variations, certain post-structuralist insights regarding language onto the contours of the body. One of her claims is the viability of an embodied deconstruction. In his review of Telling Flesh in Contretemps Jack Reynolds responds to this claim in a way that links with my understanding of deconstruction:
It might be worth suggesting instead that deconstruction prepares for such a conception of the body, and I emphasize prepares, because literally taken, deconstruction can do little more than deconstruct. By insisting on this apparent tautology, I mean that deconstruction reveals how oppositions are always already breached; more often than not it doesn’t concern itself with positively framing a new and original way of thinking about the mind-body relation. This is not to suggest that deconstruction is purely negative and that its interventions have no enabling or restructuring component. It is also not to suggest that deconstruction is irrelevant to questions concerning embodiment--on the contrary, it has been illustrated just how provocative and helpful it can be.
Reynolds argues that the work of Merleau-Ponty would seem to be one such resource, given that a new and positive conception of what it is to be embodied is something that his philosophy clearly does want to achieve. It has already been shown how The Visible and the Invisible was capable of shedding some substantial light on Kirby’s interesting, but ultimately unfulfilled suggestion, that matter was generative through differentiation
with itself.
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