Editors' Preface: Discursive Bodies, Embodied Text

Eventually we will understand how grave a lesion in human consciousness was committed by René Descartes. To have sectioned off the body from the self has obscured a primary source of wisdom about individuals, about earthly events, and about the so-called human condition. A middle-aged woman patient remarked to me [Rita] about her depression: "It all feels so biological," meaning, I assumed, that it felt like the kind of depression that should be treated with Zoloft. When I countered with the bid that, indeed, her biology—menopause, the aging of her body, the thinning of her bones, the glimmer of mortality as seen from one's mid-fifties—was the deep source of her depression and that that fact did not absolve her from the need to struggle toward analytic insight, she agreed. The body is not merely the window into or a trope for this patient's loss and mourning; in both a metaphorical and practical sense, it is the body's temporal horizon, its functional imperatives, its imperfect imitation of the ideal that move one to emotions, to attachment, to regrets; it is our common fate that we must go where our bodies take us.

We have been led to believe that, because our bodies are objects (in a manner of speaking, anyway), they can be consigned to instrumental thinking. The authors we publish in this issue make a high-stakes counterbid. We have all read enough pathographies and phenomenology and autobiographical theory to accept that we don't have bodies but live in them. More, say our authors: what happens in or to or by virtue of our bodies confers upon us our individuality, our personhood, and even the grounds for relation with others. That this comes as news can be explained by the relative recency of our ability to translate into language that which the body tells. It took the deconstructive insights of Derrida and Barthes and the mirrors of Lacan for us to recognize (if only in reverse) jouissance and to bridge the aporia from brain to mind or from hand to text; it took the other end of the speculum of Irigaray to envision fully our interiors; it took Levinas's notion of the face to embody the self. We could go on, but we want to establish that our contemporary understanding of the relation of body to self via text springs from contemporary literary studies, philosophy, and also present-day medicine and nursing.

One can travel in either direction between body and text. Bodies can speak, as long as we develop the interpretive fluency to comprehend what they say. Beyond, of course, the fluttering of the vocal cords and the borborygmi of the intestines, bodies weave plot, develop character, and offer metaphor for complex and otherwise unutterable thoughts. Texts can be seen as organic creatures, equipped with organ systems, genetic codes, digestive tracts, and the like. Texts hunger, appease, engulf, inhale, and exhale, and they do all these things like good biological mortals in order to reproduce themselves, to influence offspring, to compete for niches, and to forage for nourishment.

Once bodies are recognized as discursive and texts are read as embodied, we are freer (than Descartes was, anyway) to enlarge the grounds of personal and cultural meaning to encompass not only what might be written but also what might be endured. The contemporary fields of body theory, queer theory, feminist studies, disability studies, trauma studies, medical anthropology, narrative ethics, and the study of mourning and loss offer many ways to contemplate the relations between texts and bodies. How uncannily central to literary studies and cultural studies have become these various ways of contemplating what the body demands, and what it feels. Eve Sedgwick, in theorizing queer, writes Touching Feeling, finding insight not only through words but through texture, gesture, and shame. ¹ Elaine Scarry edits a collection called Literature and the Body, including an essay by Christopher Ricks on the postcoital Donne and...