Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics by Jung Hwa Yol;

Author:Jung, Hwa Yol;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Bakhtin’s dialogical principle is quintessentially a linguistic principle with an ethical overtone. The anatomy of his “translinguistics” (metalingvistika ) is unmistakably the heart of his seminal contribution to carnal hermeneutics as social discourse. In it the utterance is a molecular segment, and the word is an atomic unit, of the dialogue. It dialogizes mind and body: the uttered word becomes flesh. Because it is conceived of as verbal acts, embodied acts, which are concerned with pragmatic rather than theoretic results, Bakhtin’s translinguistics may be defined as performative utterances or a parley of performances. Language is never a “prison house,” but an “ecosystem” precisely because it is defined in terms of utterance as a happening of social praxis. Utterance as performance is a boundless ecology of relationships both communicative and grammatological. More importantly, in the grammatological trilogy of the author, the text, and the reader, the reader precedes in importance the author in the understanding of the text.

Moreover, Bakhtin’s translinguistics is a nexus of doing things with words with others or in the copresence of others. Here it—his Slavic Tantrism, for that matter—cannot escape from but must confront Freud’s psychoanalysis with its psychologism notwithstanding. Shoshana Felman evokes the psychoanalytical sense of corporeality or the carnal dimension of language when she views speech (parole) as “corporeal promise” (promesse corporelle), which beckons a conjugal relationship between Austin’s philosophy of language as speech acts and Freudian/Lacanian psychotherapeutic discourse as the “talking cure.”[33] The originality of Jacques Lacan, according to Felman, lies in his dis/covery of an “irreducibly dialogic” structure in psychotherapeutic discourse and knowledge: structured like language, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.[34] Speaking of his psychoanalytic theory, Felman stresses the fact that the “true thrust” of the psychoanalytic dialogue between the therapist and the client as “talking bodies” is illocutionary: “fundamentally, the dialogic psychoanalytic discourse is not so much informative as it is performative” (italics added for emphasis), and thus is necessarily ethical as well.[35]

Performance is already a postmodern concept.[36] It is no less than theatrical/dramaturgical and psychoanalytical. For Roland Barthes, too, writing (as well as reading) triggers and produces textual bliss (jouissance), because it is performance.[37] Richard Schechner goes so far as to say, though somewhat prematurely, that a linguistic model as applied to theatrical performance is suspect because language is “head learning,” whereas performance is “body learning.”[38] Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theatre” emulates pantomime as its paradigm with minimal clothing (i.e., minimal masking) and the maximal economy of verbalism: “The costumes are bags full of holes covering naked bodies (i.e., “holy bodies”); through the holes one looks directly into a torn body.”[39]

At this point we would be remiss if we fail to recognize an affinity between the structural requirement of “answerability” (“response-ability”) in Bakhtin’s dialogical principle and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of proximity, which privileges the face and epitomizes human copresence or interhuman presence in terms of the structural primacy of the Other (l’autrui).[40] The face is indeed, according to Francis Jacques, “the most fascinating surface on earth.”[41] It is the most expressive theater of the body’s performance.

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