Archival Bodies — Christina Tudor-Sideri

“Who reflects me if not you I see myself so little.” With these words, belonging to Paul Éluard, words that I sometimes read as a love letter from the inside to the outside, from the soul to the body, from me to you, I draft the beginning of a text that I cannot yet write. My hands are bandaged and my voice is broken, but in my head, I crave and I carve the outline of a new body. Not for myself, but for the in-between which all bodies inhabit, the in-between that we call life and which we must fill with as many images of the real and the imagined as our bodies and our minds will grant us.  

“Let there be writing,” urges Jean-Luc Nancy in Corpus. “Not about the body, but the body itself.” How does such writing occur in the mind that is body and in the body that is mind? What form should it be given as text? Textual body or embodied text? To be a body. To have a body. To think anew the body. The Proustian body, for instance, the instrument through which Time manifests itself; the Flaubertian body, with its gaze turned inward; the Celanian body, alive at the heart of the paradox of communion; the Cixousian body, a silent stream with no sense of distance; the Merleau-Pontian body, a thing among things; the Nancian body, the very act of existence: like bone, like pebble, like stone. The noumenal and the phenomenal body. Body that is and body that is experienced. Your body. How do I write it? Through repetition? Incantation? Imploration? From memory? From the act to come? On the ruins of theory, of discourse, of textualized flesh? Further, what is the significance of this distinction? How can the presence or absence of a mere preposition change what we call body? Does it alter how dew clothes the skin on early summer mornings? In winter, when the outside contracts and time stretches inward, when light is scarcely there, does it make for a different embrace of the body? Does it know, this absent/present preposition, why you draw breath from the lungs of another, and why that breath sustains not just one life, but all possible lives? When the body stands in the pouring rain, when it lies awake at night; in waiting rooms, in narrow rooms, before the freshly-dug grave; before new paths and new beginnings; at the death of a self and the birth of another, does it matter how or why or whether we write the body or about the body?

“There is, for every work, an infinity of possible variants,” says Maurice Blanchot. There is, for each body, an infinity of possible representations. Ways of seeing, ways of depicting, ways of addressing, ways of touching. For the body itself, at the root, all ways are simply ways of being. Before changing how and why we write the body, it is required to change thought itself, at least the direction of thinking the corporeal. To think anew the body that has risen together with other bodies from original excess—an idea in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty grounds the primordial we, the we in continual becoming, the we that is being addressed when saying, We must recast the body. But is it not that the body recasts itself? Whether the existence of this primordial we can uncover if the body that I am distinguishes both semblance and difference in the body that you are—whether it can provide, or even just contribute to the creation of a theoretical framework of the body—while reason enough for its presence, is not why one turns to it. Rather, we is present and addressed because it absorbs and reflects back the whole of you, and I, and you and I. And so, as I go on, as I becomes we, and we go on, we reach the question of the why, the question of whether enough writing about the body already exists, writing that, even if it might invite confusion in matters of what is to come, as there are no clear paths, nor can there be, it exists and we reference it, in continental philosophy, in medical humanities, in carnal hermeneutics. Yet does it know why and how to recast the body?

A little further on, we say: There is sufficient writing about the body. There is never enough writing the body. The body itself swings like a pendulum between these two realities. Two modes of being [text] akin to temptations that urge us to abandon and carry the self as body in the same arms; to abandon it at the place of knowledge, where the idea of a soul first penetrated our brains; to carry it through the archives of the world, because without it, there can be no other selves. At the same time, often in the same thought, in the same breath, we brush away excess and crave a reshaping of the never-enough. What can we use as foundational stone for the written body? The body in pain, the absent body, the body of the Other, the phantom body, the second body, the third, the fourth. Perhaps phenomenology can provide an answer. If we were to tug at Heidegger’s guiding thread, if we were to unravel the structures of consciousness that is body and of body that is consciousness from a first-person point of view, one of the things we might come across, often the only thing that makes itself visible, is that, as long as there is Time, there will be thinking about the Body. And writing the body is the same as writing time: there is no writing but from within. Yet here we are, falling into the same trap, the preposition has once again lured us into shallow but dangerous waters, where we might even drown, we who come from primordial excess. For it is a constant reality that phenomenology too can fall into the trap of the theoretical, of that striving which encloses everything in the excess-scarcity circle; an analysis of experience that takes place precisely upon the erasure of said experience. 

Why this preamble through thought that situates itself not in opposition but neither in the direction of what is needed in order to write not about the body but the body itself? From Michel Serres, we know this: “She who writes immerses her hands in the soft sign.” Looking at the act of writing, all we see is the hand. We see hands, and we think of touch. But, to paraphrase Nancy, a writer does not touch by grasping, she touches by way of addressing herself; she touches by sending herself to the touch of something. “Something hidden, something on the outside, something displaced.” Thus, a journey toward the touch of something must exist; a journey that nonetheless cuts its path through thinking before writing, through being before experiencing, through body before text, through text before body. For that is how one writes more about the body than the body itself, by placing text before body. And yes, also through the already-written, the theoretical, the structure that houses the archives of what already is considered body. Often, when we think of our own corporeality, when we search for representations in philosophy, literature, or poetry, we do not seek the body as a whole, but rather its parts. We seek the hands in Rilke, we gaze to meet the eyes in Celan’s eternity. We seek the body in fragments, for it is in fragments that we gaze upon it ourselves, and it is in fragments that we discover that the body has limbs reaching beyond the biological. The body has arms that branch into all which depicts it: text, film, sound. It has legs that are rooted into what it was before it became this body; its very existence is entwined with images of itself. What we are is body. Matter. What must be written is body. Not just as it is thought and scrutinized, but also as is. And yet—We course through time, and time courses through us, and from this rivering, from the interconnection of time and matter, a simple truth emerges: the ink that writes the body draws itself from the vessel of context. 

A Certain Manner of Being Flesh 

Naked before an accumulation of water, the body is seized by the compulsion to seek its own reflection. Like a veil from the beyond, a veil you do not see but which nonetheless obscures your gaze, the liquid skin becomes your own, and, for a solitary moment, whether it is body that you see, or something brought forth from the depths of water by imagination becomes of no concern. It is not even there, this thought, as if it never existed, that you can imagine yourself as reflection upon the surface of the water. In that simple moment, the existence of the body in the world is body of water. And it contains everything: body that is and body that was. Yet, to be a body in the world is never just this: body-existing, body-imagined, body-reflected. To be a body in the world is both a narrowing and a widening of contours, a darkening and a lighting of the corporeal along with its image. 

While delving into what context is and how it touches upon every aspect of existence would be a Sisyphean endeavor, it is important to note that bodies exist inscribed in a tradition that is often beyond their physical reach, and of utmost importance in times when there are bodies being tortured and killed simply because of their geographical positioning. To be a body in the world is not the same for all bodies; bodies here and bodies there are not subjected to the same treatment, nor are they sheltered from harm in the same way. What remains a common factor is that bodies here and bodies there and bodies everywhere are less themselves and more the products of something. We could even speak of an impossibility in terms of knowing what the body is, the body stripped of what shaped it and of how it is seen. Of course, this can be said about all objects and ideas in the world, since everything that exists does so from and inside a certain manner of being. But when thinking the body, we do so from an inside that often does not know itself as shaped by hands that are not its own, while about ideas and objects we already speak of as something on the outside. 

Imagine standing before a painting of yourself. Not a self-portrait, not painted by someone who knew you enough as to create it, and not some image that bears a coincidental resemblance to your physical features. A painting of your actual body. An old painting, from a time you did not live in. Imagine walking into the museum one day and seeing a canvas of yourself. A museum that is familiar: you embrace it like a place of worship, you have walked its corridors, you know its rooms by heart, like the rooms of a childhood home. Whether it was not there before, whether it appeared by some act of magic, is irrelevant. It is there now. You see yourself, illustrated by another. Imagine the first thought that comes to mind: is the painting a depiction of you or are you a depiction of the painting? This is how bodies exist in the world. They are formed and situated and touched by the before, and often, also by what it is laid before them in the present. By tradition, religion, geography. Paul Valéry writes that the body “belongs to us a little less than we belong to it;” yet we speak of the body as if it were our own. And in many aspects, it is our own. And when it is not, the urge is to reclaim it. But there are certain manners of being that are significantly, if not wholly, the result of the outside. And here, if we were to return marginally to Nancy, we could say that the body itself is on the outside. But who we are, we cannot be without it. And for this, independent of our grasp, who we are is who we have been shaped by context. If the body was conceived in darkness, as again Nancy states, if it was “shaped in Plato’s cave, and as the cave itself,” then both writing about the body and the body itself need to address this darkness and make the body a part of itself; the body, not just its representation. To reclaim the body, to recast the body, to think anew the body can only be done in the presence of the contextual that birthed both the body and the need for reconsidering it.  

Living now in the place of my birth, I have learned to move through images of myself, images that the world projects incessantly; images that follow me like ghosts, like shadows, like other lives—I move through and amidst them as if I were swimming in cold water at night, swimming to reach the shore, to find and touch with my feet a ground I recognize as my own, and not this quicksand of expectations. It has been granted me to have a vision of these images that goes beyond the narrow gaze of representation that is already an image of something else. To see them beyond images of who I am supposed to be. Yet I do see them as myself, too, the self that I am expected to be, yes, the self that my past and the past of those before me formed like an eroded stone. In the world, in the body, throughout the whole of what we call history, the body and its images are engaged in this continuous movement, this dance where sometimes you no longer make sense of what is self and what is projection, what is body and what is the history that shaped it. Here, on the banks of the same rivers, at the feet of the same mountains, before the doors of the same houses, anamnesis replaces flesh, and being-in-the-world becomes being-as-projection-of-the-world.

In your bed, away from prying eyes, away from its own history and from the history of all others, the body recreates the moment of wonder. It is in wonder that it finds itself; in wonder that it sheds all skins. To not know an existence without the touch of wonder. In her novel about the fragility of memory, Maria Stepanova calls the body essential material. The essential material. For poet and philosopher Chantal Maillard, the body is condition of flight. “One can only fly with the body.” The body as is; the body as is experienced; the body that shelters the context which wounds it. That is how we see ourselves, how we see our bodies, in intimacy or in crowds, regardless of what philosophical theory about corporeality we might ascribe to: we see the body as essential to the here and now; as condition of living. As for the shadows of context and history and tradition projected upon it, they can only be understood through a symbiosis of about the body and the body itself. One has to course through the veins of the other, same as matter and time—ink through arteries and blood on paper. That is the essential material of the body’s essentiality. When it comes to recording, rewording, recasting, reconsidering, when it comes to the archives we create and preserve about all matters corporeal, our essential material is this never-ending entwining of what is being and what is sense. 

The Object of the Soul/The Idea of the Body

A brush against another on a summer afternoon. Contact. The skin is first to remember: other bodies exist. Your body exists. The swarming city respins this tale: neuron endings, stimulus, movement. From the skin to the spinal cord. Warmth. A response to touch. Collision, tremor, sense. Ephemeral. Here is time passing. Here is another body. For a moment, you wonder, you fall prey to confusion, you can no longer decipher it—body, or soul? Perhaps you never could. Perhaps there is no such distinction. The urge to untangle consciousness in the movements of the body has once again replaced all other beliefs. 

In 1643, Elisabeth of Bohemia writes to René Descartes: “I find [from your letter] that the senses show me how the soul moves the body, but they do not teach me the manner in which it does so.” Further, she says: “I do not excuse myself for confusing the notion of the soul with that of the body.” What is soul and what is body. Fundamentally etched upon the fabric of time. While this might invite a detour through the history of mind-body dualism, or at least a leafing through the correspondence of Elisabeth with Descartes, it is not what most confuses us, certainly not in matters of depicting the body, nor is it the reason for which it becomes essential to grasp an answer by the end of one’s life. We speak often about this absent knowledge: can the soul live, travel, rest outside the body? If it were to travel, how would it do so? From body to body? From body to celestial realms? But this outside is itself only made possible by the passage of time, thus, it is time that we must reckon with; it is time that carries the body in its passage, time that will gently caress the hand in the final hour, time that will witness the body no longer be body. The skin itself is time, Elias Canetti writes in one of his notes. “His skin is time.” The question of what happens to the soul exists with this solitary purpose; the texts, the stories, everything, for this: can the soul be soul without the body? Outside of time? Can it be anything at all? If time carries the death of the body in its passage, if death has already happened, in the moment of birth, how can the soul find its way around its own obliteration? If we rush to understand, to make sense of what and who we are, what is our inside, what is our outside, what are the conditions of life for both, we do so in order to carry by ourselves what time has already placed in our arms at the moment of birth: our death. 

I do not know what my soul is. I remember variations of my soul from childhood, yes, but I do not know, I never knew, how to say what my soul is or what its journey could be. Growing up in a religious community, the journey of the soul after death was something that was discussed almost every evening at the dinner table. In fact, we talked about the soul everywhere and at all times. While ploughing the fields, while spinning wool, while skipping stones on the surface of the lake. There were, for children, stories about the soul that grownups had invented as to mimic those from our beloved books. In winter, leaning against the hearth for warmth, we were told fairy tales about the soul’s journey through the afterlife, we were made to learn them by heart. Later, they became poems, and after that, biblical passages. Throughout the whole of childhood, we lived and ate and slept with the soul by our side, almost as if it were another person, someone we had to care for, someone we had to accompany in their journey, making sure every single step they were taking was the right one—a step toward eternal life. 

In one of her poems, Anna de Noailles speaks about the invention of the soul as meant to diminish the body. Valéry makes a similar point. This concern is something that cuts through poetry and literature, and sometimes philosophy, with more precision than the blade of a knife. Yet, excising the soul from the body, at this point in time and history, at this point in knowledge, would have an opposite effect to what might be expected from it. The erasure of the soul will not return the body to itself, and it will not return the body to the being that inhabits it. “The body knows itself as a soul,” writes Nancy. A reality impossible to brush aside. When writing the noumenal body, it is still a body that knows itself as a soul. When writing the phenomenal body, still soul. The heart beats in the body, but it is the soul that knows how to measure its rhythm. When you place your hand on the heart of another being, on the outside of the heart, it is the soul that demands it. Soul, mind, spirit, what is alive and thinking and feeling inside of you, in the silence of the inside, by way of the body’s connections, by way of its flesh and blood and bone. One could suggest that it should carry a different name; a name that divorces it from its history. But a new name will have its own history, and soon there will be a need for another, and another. Even if no name were given—flesh that does not name itself will still know itself as a soul. The body is soul; the soul is body. That we call one object and the other idea is rather a matter of hermeneutics.

She Who Touches You/She Through Whom You Touch

For many years, I have interpreted the world through my body; and my body through desire, reading the senses akin to how I would read the lines of the palm. As the granddaughter of a fortuneteller, in spite of all my skepticism, I could never resist the lure of the sign. But, for me, the sign had to pass like lightning bolt through the body or else it wasn’t worthy of being called sign. Little by little, I became dependent on the invisible that I could feel. It was in my body that all mysteries occurred, it was through my body that I could feel the touch of other realms; through my body that I strived to make sense of the world that might exist in the darkness of the visible. Desire and its fulfillment become the two faces with which I could see in the dark, in the before, in the beyond. 

In fragile words, with simple hands, with brimming eyes, a mirroring of Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, the body turns itself into text. On the threshold between two worlds, flesh and bone become page and infinity. Coming-into-being, the continual text, like a roll of parchment, desires its own connective tissues. It demands to be. The desire of the physical world becomes the desire of the paragraph, the desire of the fragment that asks to be birthed and named. If, as again Nancy writes, “touch begins when two bodies distinguish themselves from one another,” the text desires and demands its separation from the body in order to rebecome body through the touch of the writing hand. 

But “desire is no light thing,” as we already know from Anne Carson. In the absence of the body, yes, as it gains mythical and metaphorical features, some of that weight can be relived. The carnal becomes the tale. The only tale. Something forever connected to the life of the mind, something that your soul, your spirit, your intellect, together with dreams and imagination, yielded from the void. Even so, everything takes place in the body. “The soul is the body that is touched,” Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us. Desire demands to be body. To grow lungs and breathe. To grow eyes and see. To grow skin and feel. Desire demands to be someone. She. Robert Pogue Harrison has titled his book on Dante’s Vita Nuova The Body of Beatrice. And one cannot help but think of Dante himself: “She was called Beatrice by many who did not know what it meant to call her this.” We all have our Beatrice. Stéphane Mallarmé—destruction is his Beatrice. Virgil Mazilescu, the oneiric poet, who in one of his poems repeats incessantly: Beatrice, I beg of you. Gérard de Nerval, who in Aurélia writes about making a Beatrice for oneself from a contemporary person. Who has not been at least tempted by the latter? Often we give names where perhaps no name should exist. But how to resist the pull? A brush against a contemporary person, an everyday person, a stranger in a crowd, might be just that, an accidental trace left by bodies walking by. A brush against Beatrice, your Beatrice, is life itself. Life that reproduces itself in the split of a second and becomes body; the second body that is needed in order for touch to be touch. The body of Beatrice. The Body of Eurydice. The body of Albertine. She who touches you. She through whom you touch. She to whom you say: I love your darkness. I love the body imagined by this darkness more than the real body. I am one with this imagined body. I love trembling and arousal and fire that washes over me like the waves of a sea that has yet to be formed. A sea that has yet to form the encounter. I love what is tender in my words more than what remains unfelt. I love what remains unfelt more than what is tender. Between, the two, the body of your Beatrice returns to its swing—like a pendulum around the throat of a dying world. She to whom you say: I love the body of the God only I believe in, a God mutilated by the desire for the eternal of the many other imagined gods. I love what keeps me alive. I love that I am body, and you are body, and together can make it so that writing carries itself through the passage of time in the arms of this conjoined form that lives in the invisible. Imagination is possibility. While in your body, while alive, while walking, while sleeping, you dream of union and division, of the body that creates another for itself; you dream of the mind, traveling to the outside, not far, not far at all—across the table from flesh and bone. You dream of this: you sit at the table with the desired body and say: I love your darkness. I love my darkness. You are the desired body, and the desired body is the I that carries you. She who touches you. When you awake, you are left with longing, with melancholia, with a sense of nostalgia for which no definition has been given. To touch. To care for. To abandon. To return. And you rise from the bed to write: everything contains you. The you in the mind is desire. The you that marks the body is desire. The you in the text is desire. Desire for you. Everywhere there are things that are not things. There are doors that never open. Darkness, chiaroscuro, brine. As if on film, before your eyes, a body, and then another, their hands wrapped on whatever they were able to seize in their passage. It is so that passage lures and carries the body: by allowing it to grasp. Whatever it can, for however long. It is so that time sustains life: through desire. 

I open the door to the room and see him standing close to the window, a vision made more real by what connects it to the fictional than by his presence here, now, in this space with me. Outside, in the windows of neighboring buildings, I see a forest of lighted candles. I think of François Truffaut’s La Chambre verte, of chapels in ruin and altars to the dead. 

In Je t’aime, je t’aime, Alain Resnais gifts to the audience one of the most beautiful depictions of what it means to desire an absent body, to relive distant embraces; of how past and present entangle themselves with longing, and how they impose their subjectivity upon the body that travels in search of the body of the lover. Faced with a past he can relive but not change, same as Tarkovksy’s Kelvin, Claude goes back and forth between moments of his life, back and forth between embrace and despondence, between the body of Catrine and her absence. Through a fragmentary narrative, the film does away with the usual stories of changing the past, cementing itself, and Claude, in a rather addictive impossibility. It is not as much a film about time travel as it is a film about time itself, and how it imposes itself on the body and on the senses, how it can carry one through its passage, and even offer a delusional return to a moment of happiness. While in the same room with Catrine, in the same time with the body of Catrine, Claude relives the kind of ordinary days that one can only grasp in retrospect. His desire, the desire to once again embrace the woman he loves, is entangled with the quotidian they once experienced, becoming itself a journey rather than just catalyst—a journey through the interiority of the body at the mercy of the exteriority of time. In the realm of the purely symbolic, contemplating a physical presence, however longed for, however desired, takes second place to chasing the sign, to pulling the thread that wraps around the chambers of the mind. In the realm of the purely symbolic, the fulfilment of desire takes second place to desire forever on the edge of coming-into-being. It is in a way similar to the vivification of the dead; something that thrives solely in the what if. But the body of the lover is also a body that contains all other bodies, even the bodies of the dead. In the body of the loved one, the bodies of the world have made a home for themselves with the help of imagination. We see everything in this body. We desire everything for this body. We fear everything. The sexual entwines with the mundane; illness entwines with eternity; desire manifests itself both as craving and present. You desire and you demand; you desire and you offer yourself. You desire and you seize whatever circumstances make possible. Jean Sprackland, in These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards, evokes the desire to lie with a lover on a flat tomb, to seize life from death. What we seize in our passage through time we see as life seized from the hands of death. Primal desire, she calls it. And it is. It is primal in each of us, in all bodies, to pluck life from death, to feel alive where no human life exists. To know the taste, the voice, the smell of another living being in the resting place of the dead—We are guided by primality. It glistens on our skin; it swells up inside our bodies; it is the rain that falls from the sky, the glass flower of winter, the change of season. The look on your face.

Autoimmunity/Conditions of the Body

On the hallway of a hospital basement, artificial light enshrouds the body in waiting. In archives, crammed together on worn-out paper, catalogued in digital records, the conditions of the body await themselves for new companions. The span of a life contains so many tales of illness and pain that no collection could possibly hold it. And the medical archive does not even try. Often, what the medical archive houses is the universal body, from which all other bodies must be healed. “To have great pain is to have certainty,” writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. Yet many are the times when pain in the body brings anything but certainty. When in pain, the body knows that it is body, yes; it knows about the senses, about the ways of the brain and those of the flesh and their entanglement; it knows language and can utter aspects related to its pain, though that might not always be possible. Contrary to where we find ourselves, knowledge-wise—medically, scientifically, philosophically, literary—pain in the body is often a mystery. And it wasn’t until recent years, with the development of narrative medicine and medical humanities, that bridges were built between the body in physical pain and its interpretations. If we were to think of illness, of conditions present in the body, more so of genetic ones, we could say that they are perhaps among the few realities of the body that can now be easily charted, and also, among the few certain and singular characteristics of the body, same as with its physical features. We know now how to map the body, there is no need to wait for the cuts of the pathologist in order to discover what pained it. That is what the theory tells us. And yet, there are bodies, and there is pain, and a great mystery lies at the heart of what and how moves this pain. Very little is known today about autoimmunity, for instance, a concept that has been borrowed by philosophy and used rather as a metaphor for the body of the world than a process of the actual body. It might seem like a wide array of knowledge exists in medicine, and it does, if one dedicates the time to research it, but in terms of what bodies need, individual bodies—in terms of what autoimmunity does to the body, of what it makes the body do to itself—it is in fact not enough. Not enough in contrast with the damage that it causes. And it is perhaps here where writing about the body and writing the body are most entwined, here where both should exist, still, with a prevalence toward the body itself, toward sense and experience and how it shapes what pains and wounds it. To assign the wound as the site of knowledge in the case of the self-attacking body is, however, to walk the path of uncertainty. The body in pain, the body that inflicts pain on itself—to write this body is as primordial as the desire to pluck life from the hands of death. The about is too general, too encircled around the universal in order to provide relief. Between chronology and chronicity, the self-attacking body finds no shelter for itself but in the certain-uncertainty that plagues it. Philosophy does not concern itself with bodies, says Jean-Luc Nancy, “there are no bodies in philosophy,” at least not as the bodies we encounter in literature. And while this too has changed to some degree in recent years, it remains true that philosophy does not concern itself with the body, more so with the body that attacks itself, perhaps because one would struggle to speak of a self whose only preoccupation is burning down its own home. There is writing about intolerant bodies and autoimmunity at the intersection of disciplines, and there is, of course, writing that comes from the bodies themselves, from beings experiencing life and illness and autoimmunity in these bodies—their bodies—individual writing that we fail to consider to the extent that we must consider.  

The trigeminal neuralgia diagnosis came after more than ten years of wandering lost through medical labyrinths. It was the same with the other diagnoses, before and after; even more years, even more wandering. Autoimmunity is slowly robbing me of the ability to use my hands without pain. But the neuralgia—nine years since it became a recognized reality and the body still does not know how to live with it. One summer morning, while running in the park, a sharp pained passed through the left side of my head making me collapse. Nauseated and dizzy, I made it home and slowly began to feel better once hot water touched my skin. I brushed it aside as a consequence of physical exertion and thought nothing of it until the next week when, seconds after a breeze of cool air brushed the hair from my eyes, the same pain happened, this time leaving me unconscious. By the next morning, after a night spent in the emergency room, I had an explanation: tic douloureux. In my naiveté, I thought: how apt. At home, I wrote a short text about being well, and spent the rest of my day avoiding any interactions with what the digital space had to offer as information. I had received, after all, something conclusive, something comforting. Worse days were coming. 

Hélène Cixous writes that “all literature is scarry,” that “all literature celebrates the wound and repeats the lesion.” And it is close to impossible not to think of wounds and wounding when pondering on the diseased body; of scars and scarring; of the body marked by illness and of how the soul mirrors every single one of these markings. It is indeed in literature that we find a reflection of the body in pain, almost like reciprocity, like a hand reaching out from inside the book; a hand to guide us, to caress us, to speak how a mouth would, and say that your body is not alone in its pain. For as much as one might desire silence and solitude when hurting, to know that the hurt itself is real, to know the experience of other bodies reflects your own, to know of other worlds created by the same conditions, is to know that reality remains something within grasp. Too many times have bodies in pain been seen as imagining minds, too many times have they been discarded, deprived, and dishonored due to a lack of representation. But it is not abstract representation that should take the stage, and while it is important that it exists, important that there are texts and there is knowledge that offers a general view of the body in pain, what matters most is to give it the benefit of remaining body. And yet, writing the body, listening to the body, treating the individual body and not the universal one remains an extraordinary measure that is taken, if it is taken, after generalizations have failed. In philosophy, for instance, unveiling the self-attacking body goes hand in hand with a need for a comprehensive philosophy of autoimmunity, and, perhaps with a study of being and becoming through the lens of phenomenology, that is, through the personal experience of the body affected by this condition, or any other, through experiences that take place in the body, within, but which inform the outside. Alexandru Dragomir writes that “philosophy is the trap we live in.” As for the body—“the body is our general medium for having a world,” writes Merleau-Ponty. Let us allow the body to shape the world it lives in same as the world it lives in has always shaped it. Perhaps a way into new thought. For now, it is thus: If literature celebrates the wound and repeats the lesion, one could say that reality and the disciplines that concern themselves with it prefer to worship the commonly agreed upon interpretation of the wound.

Bodies Ephemeral / The Void We Become

Warming myself by the fire of five notebooks, I feel not the heat but something like a second flow of blood through my veins. Not a doubling of my actual blood, something that is both mine and coming from another world, still liquid, and similar enough to sustain life. This second river of blood through the body brings with its flow images of death as something more than the end of carnal existence. In those moments, with the pages still burning, their light illuminating lines everywhere, on my face and in the trees, as if forming a grid of closeness, in those moments, I think about the death of the living who go on living, I think about those who pass through our lives never to return. I think about time and voids to come.  

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time is a dedication to the instant—instant past, instant here, instant to come; one can read on almost every page a thought that connects the mind and the body with the passage of time. “The most extraordinary discoveries await us in the sphere of time,” he writes. That is, we must spend our life exploring its intervals. Mircea Eliade urges us to escape it. To escape time. In between these two visions, resides the whole memory of the world, of a world eternally in passage. Everything that has been thought and written and archived, everything that the human body and the human mind as one and the same dedicated to the matter of understanding time with its passage and ecstasies and intervals. Think of the simplest creation, of the smallest trace, and it is there, archived within the body, whether flesh or structure, whether memory or ocean of forgetting. Discussing Henri Bergson’s perception of time, Merleau-Ponty gives us an incantation to repeat to ourselves in the dark hours of the night: “Time is myself; I am the duration I grasp, and time is duration grasped in me.”

I have been taught to think of death as the visible body of time. Later, from Proust, I learned to think of the body as that which makes time visible. In death and in the body, in life and in the passage of time, I count scars and markings and folds as if I were counting the rings of trees. In the body, I feel the death of the other not as my own, but as something infinitely worse. If I were to know my own death, if I were to know how it feels, I would say with all my being what Cioran already said: my death is nothing; the death of another is everything.  

There is a reality of the body as flesh and a reality of the body as experience, yes, but there is also a reality of the body as void. She whom time no longer caresses. That is how we like to think of the touch of time: a caress while we are alive; a nothingness in death, even though time does not stop touching us in the moment of our death. We carry on through its passage, in our post-carnal reality, we go on being, as we slowly decay, as ashes carried away by the elements. There are possibilities after death that we only care for if they appear to us in the form of another life, another existence. We care for life after death if there is such a thing as heaven, such a thing as metempsychosis, but not if this life is rot and decay, not if the possibility is to become not another body, but part of what feeds the earth, or ruin upon its surface. Also, rarely do we think of death as the incessantly touched limit, as the limit of Heidegger’s Being-with—and why should we? For the body that is mind, for the mind that is body, death is simply an end. The end. That we live in intimacy with it from the moment of birth is something we brush aside for the duration of life, perhaps as survival instinct, precisely not to spent our hours and our years touching that which will erase all touch. “We must not isolate death from life,” writes Nancy. “This we must never do.” Death is intimately entwined with life, yes, perhaps to an extent even beyond what we know as intimacy, but does life recognize itself as being intimately entwined with death? How does the distinction form? Death cannot happen in the absence of life, but we have yet to give up on the thought that life can exist in the absence of death, and for this we perpetuate the illusion that death is not present in life, but solely at its ending. That death is not the trace that passes through the whole of life. “I live my death in writing,” says Jacques Derrida, he, who is on the side of death, for whom death counts the hours and minutes of life. Death and life; life and death. One the reminder of the other. To feel joy and think about mortality; to find oneself in the presence of death and from this to feel that there is no possibility of life without the possibility of death. Yes, as body in the world, as body through the passage of time, as body that senses, the presence of death is impossible to ignore, the most we can do is to give it other names. We take neardeathness and veil it in the silk of the hope for immortality, those of us who long to be immortal. But is it immortality that one seeks or rather the lack of pain? Is leaning toward survival a denial of death or a denial of pain? Whom are we addressing, we who come from primordial excess, when we speak of the void to come? If the trace in the text of life is death, what is the trace in the text of the body? In ephemerality and in forgetting, in memory that does not remember itself, in body that decomposes without mind, without soul, without spirit; in body whose soul is now the course of all things, the ways of nature, and time and all that connects in the postexistence of the human body, the we becomes that of archival attempts, it becomes the we of context, the we of philosophy, history, literature, poetry, all that we have created as to remain bodies-in-the-world. But such a presence cannot speak for us, we who have become void, it cannot write neither about nor the body, not our body, all it can do is retell, respin, rebecome; all it can do is entangle itself with other bodies and make from the mortality of flesh an immortal body of text. In archives, in libraries, material now in a new way, the flesh of the desired body becomes the celluloid body of the story.  The care with which we held the being-toward-the-end is now tradition for those we have left behind. The real death takes the hand of the death one has lived in writing, and together life-death as trace in the world, they become words of the story. As dead bodies, as dead minds, as dead souls, if language were still possible, that is how we would perhaps think of the living: those we have left behind. Belonging now to an eternity no living mind wants to envision for herself, the body draws itself from the embrace of the earth, from the warmth of the last fire, from full presence and implied absence, and collapses into the void. If, as Blanchot writes, “we are constituted on the inside by exteriority”—since, even when we write, we do so from the exteriority of writing—and if death and the other are just different names for this exteriority, the solitude of the body-in-death becomes the sole impossibility of the living. Not immortality, not life without pain, but this: to know the solitude of flesh when it is no longer flesh. 

“The dead are who we are no longer with,” writes Nancy. Those for whom we built altars, cenotaphs, statues, tombstones. Those for whom we write poems, elegies, epitaphs. Those for whom the beauty of the word is no longer resonant. Those for whom the beauty of the word will always be resonant. Those who can never return to nonexistence. They were; and will forever be. Those who will always be, for there is no return to the before; no return to the before of the body, no return to the before of death. In one of her poems, Susan Stewart offers a wonderful glimpse into how the dead might be living: “the dead are lit by candlelight / around a gleaming table / their books lie open […] read to me tonight / tell me what they want to say.” We write the living and read the dead. We write the dead and read the living. Between the two, the chasm opened by death at the moment of birth. We walk its edges; we taunt its limits. From time to time, we fall impulsively into its depths. Because death is there. Pierre Fédida, in speaking of Maurice Blanchot, says that this is why a connection forms between nighttime writing and touching the dead. It forms because death is there, in darkness. We fall prematurely, because death is there, in the darkness of the abyss opened before us simply because we are bodies through the passage of time. Bodies that have the right to collapse. Elias Canetti, whose stance against death is a remarkable one, in that it allows for no lenience, writes that “only the dead have lost one another completely.” His vision of postexistence is indeed one of loss. Even one death is one too many. There is no togetherness among the dead. They are lost to themselves and to the living. But returning to Derrida for a brief moment—What can one do but return to the change that takes place in the soul upon the death of another?—death is neither denial of life nor its fulfilment. Death is engraved in the reality of life. And if one death is one too many, as Canetti says, we should take from this not a striving for immortality, but a reckoning with the ontology and reality of this impossibility—to recognize the loss that death causes is a question of life. 

Upon the Page/A Rare and Precious Body

Eros and Thanatos in the body—as lived and sensed by the body, as desired by the body—it is perhaps between the two, in relation to the two, that we always think the corporeal. In fact, it is in relation to the two that we think not just carnal matters, but, of course, also aspects of human behavior. Making sense of the body with the body, living in the flesh as a continual encounter with its lineage, a continual reading of the palm—from this we aim to write the body. “Before words, we are flesh,” writes Richard Kearney. On the other side, beyond words, beyond flesh, what remains is the text, a rare body upon the page, a body that encrypts individual existence into the perpetuity of time. Held together as if with knotted strings, the body and the soul inhabit all these realities: the reality of desire, the reality of death, the reality of life itself, the reality of the text that demands to be read same as the body demands to be touched. From all this, with all of this, we gathered possibilities of being. We gather words and limbs and fragments of soul; we gather mortality, impermanence, and the seconds of the hour; we gather necessity, and movement, and ourselves, and, while there is still time passing through us, we built archives, museums, and temples in honor of the body and its interpretation. If, as Merleau-Ponty states, “our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us;” if, as per Derrida and The Post Card, what matters is “what we do to each other, how we again touch each other,” the writing of the body is also the writing of this foundational principle between flesh and word, between body and soul, between body and another body. “What counts is what we do while speaking.” In the in-between, in the space traversed by the trace, in the time swept by the movement of the writing hand, what counts is that “it is still up to us to exhaust language.” The postal principle, applied to the body, to writing the body: every (auto)biography. Every body. Every address. From the we of primordial excess to the you and I of the written void.  

Circling back to how the body should be written, how it should exist on paper and as paper, there are still questions that linger. How does the written body, the archival body, the preserved body look like? And, could it be that it is easier to depict it in art, through painting, for instance, or through film, or song? That even though we speak of the textual body, of bodies of work, there is in fact no true way to write the body? How does the body rest upon the page? Instead of falling into a repeating of the idea that theory about the body must reside somewhere in the realm of a universal that never touches us, theory about a return to things themselves that is in fact more of a return to thinking about returning, instead of doing it all with the purpose of creating a structure that might perhaps unveil the gaze for all to see, let us allow the body to be body. And from there, the text will be whatever it will be. Let us return the gesture to itself, not so that we have a return to write about, not so we can have the means to define theoretical curves and edges, but simply for the gesture to be gesture. For the body to be body. And from this the text will be text. When the book falls to the floor, there is still the hand that held it. There are still the eyes that gazed upon it. If we are to write it—if we are to write the hand and the eyes and the body to which they belong, let it be simply this: writing the hand, writing the eyes, writing the body. 

The blue of the arm is bluer with each passing year. In writing this, I have returned to the words of other texts, to when I first wrote myself as body on page. I am once again wandering through the labyrinth, this time one of my own making. I am happy here, in the labyrinth. So happy here, I repeat to myself, echoing Hélène Cixous, “in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth.” So happy here, in the absence of happiness. As textual body, I stretch out my hand to an invisible other, and let the lines of my palm become the writing in which he recognizes himself. As physical body, I rely upon the blue to recognize signs of life. Sinking into warm water still turns my body into a map. From year to year, this arterial mapping becomes more and more pronounced. From year to year, the possibilities of other paths become more and more erased. 

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Author’s Note: Leaning on and drawing primarily from the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also from that of Spinoza, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Serres, Anne Dufourmantelle, and others; leaning on continental philosophy and the phenomenological tradition; on bodies and bodies of work from literature, poetry, and film, this essay is nonetheless an attempt at archiving the passage of the body through time and that of time through the body. Any repetition, misattribution, or misunderstanding, is either intentional, or the product of a memory error. The essay should not be seen as a critical or philosophical text. It is, in itself, a body. 

***

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue, and the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca. Currently, she is writing about the myth of the self; about time, ephemerality, and forgetting; and translating the critical writings of Mihail Sebastian.

WORKS REFERENCED

Paul Éluard, Last Love Poems of Paul Éluard. Translated by Marilyn Kallet.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand.

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure. Translated by Robert Lamberton. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary.

Michel Serres, The Five Senses. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley.

Paul Valéry, “Some Simple Reflections on the Body” in Aesthetics, Vol. 13 of The Collected Works. Translated by Ralph Manheim.

Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory. Translated by Sasha Dugdale.

Chantal Maillard, Filosofía en los días críticos. (Philosophy in Critical Days)

Spinoza, The Collected Works.

René Descartes, Correspondance avec Élisabeth et autres lettres. (Correspondence with Elisabeth and Other Letters)

Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock. Translated by Joel Agee. 

Anna de Noailles, L’honneur de souffrir. (The Honor of Suffering)

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Rethinking Corpus” in Carnal Hermeneutics. Translated by Carlie Angelmire and Roxanne Lapidus. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies. Translated by Edward Snow.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. 

Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice. 

Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova. Translated by Barbara Reynolds.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Letters. Translated by Rosemary Lloyd.

Virgil Mazilescu, Poezii. (Poems)

Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia.

Jean Sprackland, These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.

Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Time within Time. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair.

Hélène Cixous, Stigmata. Translated by Susan Sellers. 

Alexandru Dragomir, Crase banalităţi metafizice. (Utter Metaphysical Banalities)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes.

Mircea Eliade, Noaptea de Sânziene. (The Forbidden Forest)

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. 

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural. Translated by R. D. Richardson and A. E. Byrne.

Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.

Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say.... Translated by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter.

Jacques Derrida, Work of Mourning. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.

Susan Stewart, Columbarium. 

Pierre Fédida, “Blanchot pose cette question de la mémoire,” in Ralentir Travaux 7.

Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death. Translated by Peter Filkins. 

Richard Kearney. “What Is Carnal Hermeneutics?” in New Literary History 46, no. 1.

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card. Translated by Alan Baas. 

Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea. Translated by Betsy Wing.