Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

The Metaphysics of the Body

 The Metaphysics of the Body G R A H A M WA R D [To] be no part of any body, is to be nothing. . . . At most, the greatest persons, are but wrens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightfull conversation, but as moales for ornament, except they be incorporated into the body of the world, that they contribute something to the sustentation of the world. john donne, quoted in Donne: The Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs What I am intending in this essay is to make some moves toward the construction of a metaphysics of the body. I embark on such a venture rejecting the dualism of physical and metaphysical, materiality and spirituality , nature and culture. What I mean by metaphysical with respect to the body is the system of values pertaining to embodiment through which embodiment is viewed, shaped, and performed. These are moral values such as goodness, social values such as justice, aesthetic values such as beauty, and claims to truth or the way things are. There is no materiality as such, then; materiality is always imbricated in conceptual evaluations. That does not mean that there is no difference between matter and thought, only that they cannot be separated in any inquiry into either. As Judith Butler pointed out a number of years ago now, ‘‘matter matters .’’1 How matter matters is related to how it is made to speak, how it speaks, and what it speaks. Recently, we have been reminded that ‘‘[b]odies only speak if and when they are made heavy with meaning.’’2 To be made ‘‘heavy with meaning’’ concerns the events in which the body presents itself, announces itself, and performs its meaningfulness. This is 228 兩 t h e m e t ap h y si c s of t h e b o d y a series of operations that enacts a metaphysics. While one would have to admit that the dualism of matter and thought announces (rather than enacts) a metaphysics, it does so by creating a false clinical space in which materiality can appear as itself, shorn of any values, naked under the clinician’s objective gaze. The body becomes an object, and its nakedness announces a metaphysics of the unveiled real. This is how things are: the God’s-eye view. The creation of such a falsehood constitutes a bad rather than a good metaphysics. Ironically, the philosophical implications of this falsehood provide the foundations for a purely empirical view of any material object that deems itself anti-metaphysical! A good metaphysics, on the contrary, is one that avoids such falsehood-creating reductions, acknowledges the co-implication of meaning and matter, and recognizes that this co-implication is not epiphenomenal or a contamination of one by the other, but rather points to the necessary cohabitation of the material and the metaphysical. Why does it seem absolutely critical that we move toward constructing a good metaphysics of the body, and bodies made ‘‘heavy with meaning ’’? Because of a cultural devaluation of the body that is shockingly ironic given the attention to fitness and diets. It is a devaluation that parallels the plethora of material goods that flood our high streets and the attention to branding which idealistically elevates the name above any material content. But let Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho open up this contemporary phenomenon for us. This is not a novel for the squeamish, but to my mind it is a parable of the reductions brought about by rapacious free-market capitalism. Bateman, Ellis’s protagonist, is a high-earning young executive with a perfectly toned body who lives in New York. He is film-star handsome. He moves among a similar kind: people with what Ellis calls ‘‘hardbodies ,’’ clothed from socks to tie in designer-wear, continually on the lookout for new, expensive, and exclusive restaurants, people who look so alike and are so accustomed to using others that they frequently fail to identify each other. Bateman is also a sadistic killer who carves up and sometimes eats his victims with little show of emotion. ‘‘In my locker at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I attacked in the past week. Two of them are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied round my favorite.’’3 g r ah a m wa r...