I am terrified your body could fall apart at any second    

– Car Seat Headrest


Spinoza famously lamented that we do not even know what bodies can do. Our seminar rephrases this concern to ask: Do we even know what bodies can say? In Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy wonders if “perhaps body is the word without employment par excellence. Perhaps, in any language, it’s the word in excess.”  If the body is a word, it belongs to language and is subject to what John Hamilton has called the “philology of the flesh”; yet, if it is a word “in excess,” this suggests that the body signifies everything that is not, not yet, or may never become language. We propose to further explore this double bind that recognizes the language of the body but struggles to locate the body within language. Recalling Nietzsche and Foucault, Judith Butler reminds us that “history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body.” It would be a fallacy to assume that the body merely offers a pre-discursive materiality open to acts of signification. Rather, these acts that take place on the body’s surface simultaneously shape the body—through the language of the law—and render it culturally intelligible. In our seminar, we plan to examine these violent practices of linguistic subjection and probe the subversive potential of the various languages of the body. What other forms of bodily signification can we imagine?


Possible bodies to discuss include:


•    Animal Bodies (Kafka, Deleuze)

•    Ascetic Bodies (Nietzsche)

•    Gendered, Sexed, Queer, and Trans Bodies (Butler, Preciado, Halberstam)

•    Dancing Bodies (Badiou)

•    Desiring Bodies, Bodies of Pleasure (Bataille, Barthes, Lacan)

•    Ill and Ailing Bodies (Tolstoy, Woolf, Th. Bernhard)

•    Oppressed Bodies (Spillers)

•    Scandalously Speaking Bodies (Felman)

•    Tortured and Incarcerated Bodies, Bodies in Pain (Foucault, Scarry)

•    Written and Inscribed Bodies (Derrida, Nancy)

•    Posthuman Techno-Bodies (Haraway, Braidotti)


We are interested in critical reflections of no more than 20 minutes in length. Proposals for contributions to our seminar must be submitted between September 13 and October 14, 2024, directly through https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting


Please feel free to contact the organizers with your questions at
serena_luckhoff@brown.edu and dominik.zechner@rutgers.edu