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Hypatia 17.4 (2002) 244-247



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Review

Telling Flesh:
The Substance of the Corporeal


Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal by Vicki Kirby New York: Routledge, 1997.

Upon reading Telling Flesh, I was most impressed by Vicki Kirby's sophisticated critical analysis of some of the most widely used but least understood concepts in deconstruction, psychoanalysis, linguistics, poststructuralism, phenomenology, and feminist theory. Focusing on the interconnections among such diverse phenomena as iterability (Jacques Derrida), ego-formation (Jacques Lacan), the identity of the sign (Ferdinand de Saussure), becoming-woman (Gilles Deleuze), the generative dimensions of power (Michel Foucault), the chiasm (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), performativity (Judith Butler), the limit (Drucilla Cornell), the cyborg (Donna Haraway), the abject (Julia Kristeva), absence of the referent (Jane Gallop), and the body "as such" (Gayatri Spivak), Kirby offers us a wonderful model of rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship at its best.

Telling Flesh begins with a long chapter on Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory. In this chapter, Kirby lays the groundwork for the "corporeography" that she seeks to develop throughout the text. She offers an extremely lucid, complex analysis of Saussure's well-known distinction between the signifier and the signified, and extends Saussurian scholarship in an innovative direction. Kirby's main concern in this chapter is to lay the foundation for a key claim of the book as a whole, namely, that identity can only be understood in and through (corporeal) difference. She shows how for Saussure "identity and difference are profoundly implicated notions," (20) and she painstakingly points out how some of the best interpretations of Saussure fail to do justice to his sophisticated understanding of the value of the sign. For readers unfamiliar with Saussure's influence in poststructuralist theorizing about the body, language, and identity, this chapter provides a close analysis of his work and of its broader import. While the in-depth discussion of such issues as interpretative closure, the langue and parole distinction, and the circulation of value are very informative, it is also possible for the reader to get somewhat "bogged down" in the subtleties of Kirby's thought and to lose sight of the larger points she is trying to make. The places where Kirby steps back to sum up her views help to get the reader back on track and reveal Kirby's primary concern with the interrelationship between identity and difference: "Identity," she tells us, "is always divided from itself, constituted from a difference within (and between) itself; a difference that at the same time determines its difference from another, supposedly outside itself" (30).

The second chapter shows how Saussure's emphasis on "the excessive identity of the sign" is taken up in Jacques Derrida's work and directly confronts [End Page 244] the stakes involved in the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate. Recognizing that "essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology," (71) Kirby rejects simple-minded dismissals of essentialism and argues that essentialism and anti-essentialism inhabit a "strange abode in which their contradictions cohabit" (72). In one of many clever passages in the text, Kirby argues: "This abode recalls a body that demonstrates its anti-essentialism by pinching its essentialism, a body that denies the violence of identity on the one hand by violently grasping its identity with the other" (72). With this provocative image, Kirby turns to the work of feminist theorists such as Irigaray and Gallop to explore further the relationship between the body and language. She concludes this chapter by suggesting that "re-thinking 'language' and 'textuality' can materially effect/rewrite the notions 'essence,' 'origin,' and 'body'" (83-84). At this point this claim is more of a promissory note, one that the reader hopes will be paid off as she reads on.

Chapters three and four offer close readings of Drucilla Cornell's and Judith Butler's work respectively. What interests Kirby about Cornell's work, in particular, is Cornell's emphasis on the alterity of the other, an alterity that establishes the ground for an ethical relation to the other even as it articulates the limits of intelligibility. The alterity...

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