Flesh and Body in the Deconstruction of Christianity

Condensing into a single formula a more complex argument already presented elsewhere, in The Sense of the World Jean-Luc Nancy clearly distances himself from all philosophy of the flesh by opposing to it the urgency of a new thought of the body. "In this sense, the 'passion' of the 'flesh,' is finished—and this is why the word body ought to succeed on the word flesh, which was always overabundant, nourished by sense, and egological" (149). This is not to say that this "anti-carnist" stance has isolated him in today's philosophical landscape. In France alone, for example, Nancy's position is not far from that articulated by Lyotard, Deleuze, and Derrida, albeit in different registers. I would say that, despite the obvious heterogeneity of their philosophical presuppositions and intentions, these authors share a certain mistrust of the modality in which phenomenology—from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and up to Didier Franck on the one hand and Michel Henry on the other—has dealt with the question of flesh. While for Lyotard the phenomenological perspective, despite or even because of the declared reversibility between sensing and sensed, comes down to a "philosophy of intelligent flesh" closed to the eruption of the event (22), Deleuze perceives phenomenological carnism not only as a deviant path in relation to that which he defines as "logic of sensation," but also as "both a pious and a sensual notion, a mixture of sensuality and religion" (178).

But in the very book he dedicated to Nancy, Derrida gives the anti-carnist position its most solid philosophical support. This support strikes neither at phenomenology as such (which on the contrary Derrida recognizes as playing a decisive role in the genealogy of touch) nor at the Christian religion, but rather at the point or line of their tangency. In its most intimate essence, the notion of flesh is the directional vector through which Christianity penetrates modern philosophy and is contemporaneously the linguistic symptom through which phenomenology reveals an unavowed Christian ascendance. In his long and erudite critical study of Franck's proposed translation of Leib by "flesh" and its derivatives and independently of the indisputable accuracy of his observations, Derrida reveals a sort of antipathy or allergy to the vocabulary of flesh, such that in the end the study takes a tone of true annoyance. He concludes that "By making flesh ubiquitous, one runs the risk of vitalizing, psychologizing, spiritualizing, interiorizing, or even reappropriating everything, in the very places where one might still speak of the nonproperness or alterity of flesh" (238). One could say that it begins to make sense that Derrida accords extraordinary importance to Nancy's work, at the summit but also beyond the phenomenologically derived haptic tradition, precisely because he places it at a distance from the carnal or "carnist" semantics which, in contrast, characterizes all of the other authors he discusses.

On his part, Nancy seems to allow such an interpretation. Even more explicitly than for Derrida, for Nancy also the vocabulary of flesh (in its double meaning, Christian and phonological, the one in the other) constitutes the semantic burden from which the new thought of the body must liberate itself. It is only in this way, emancipated from the spiritualist debt of flesh, that the analytic of the body can escape from a certain appropriative tendency or temptation that, even where it purports to alter it, winds up identifying the body as without deviation from itself. For Nancy this closure inevitably results from the logic of this presupposed signification that locates in the spirit incarnate the point of metaphysical chance encounter between the sense of the body and the body of sense. Just as the divine enters the body of mankind [l'homme] through the figure of the incarnation, the former becomes the absolute sign of itself, the signifier of its own signified and the signified of its own signifier. This dialectic set in motion by the carnalization of the body results in its infinite disincorporation. Reduced to signifying only its own organic figure and turned toward its own interiority as toward...