Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (review)

Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York/London: Routledge, 1997. 198 pp. $19.99.

Here is my bottom line on book reviews: Reading a review should produce a stand-alone feeling of accomplishment; it should never provoke anxiety about skipping out on the book in question. That being said, if you decide to forgo Telling Flesh, be anxious, be very anxious. Vicky Kirby reengages poststructuralist feminist grapplings with the imbrication of language and matter, of textuality and the annoyingly persistent extratextual. In a series of clairvoyant close readings of Saussure and feminist scholars Jane Gallop, Drucilla Cornell, and Judith Butler, Kirby reveals how the "how" of matter's life within and without the text has produced a reservoir of metaphysical, and hence political, conservatism in even the most steadily progressive thinkers. Her exquisitely wrought argument loops through the insight that when we limit attributions of writing to human domains, we necessarily produce an outside that breaches the inside of language as the unacknowledged condition of its possibility. This is true, she argues, even for a theorist like Judith Butler, who, cognizant of the long association of woman/nature/ dumb matter, is intent on granting a modicum of agency to bodies at the same time that she still retains a residue: the unable-to-be-thought-of matter as such.

Admittedly, intellectual numbing may have set in with regard to the familiar deconstructionist argument that "X necessarily reproduces and relies on precisely what it seeks to eject"--or some version of that. However, Kirby takes herself and her readers on a trip where even Derrida only sometimes dares to go. Pushing Derrida's famous and infamously misunderstood "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" to extremes, and compounding it with her own correlative antidictum that "nothing is exempt," she proposes (or as she says, "conjures") an ontology of becoming worlds in which writing and worlding are inextricable, in which matter and matterings incarnate each other across fields of differentiations that are not the exclusive province of human actors. The implications of Kirby's "corporeography"--the landscape of everything writing everything else--are manifold. At the furthest reach, a reach that is largely left for others (or Kirby herself at some later time) to execute, is nothing less than the involution of the notion of writing and its absorption by processes that, dare I say, may be those of a general consciousness rearticulated and thus reexperienced through the last fifty years of theorizing about culture, bodies, and language.

Kirby begins with the linguistic sign's very own Frankenstein effect. That is, with Saussure's on-again-off-again conflation of the signified and the referent. Tracing the convoluted history of attempts to clean up the sign, to close off the discipline and the objects of linguistics from the messy material world, she rides Saussure's confusion through the limit that he and his successors would have erected between the sign and everything else. Rather than offering further clarification, Kirby's text poses what is perhaps the most pressing question for cultural theorists: How do bodies respond to cultural "inscription" if the relationship between language and matter is arbitrary? She goes on to propose the consubstantiation of the sign and the referent. Here, language and matter are not separated by the gap of representation or adjoined only at a surface open to inscription. Instead, they make and mark each other through comparable processes of interdependent differentiation, to wit: an expanded notion of languaging. The world, Kirby claims, must be text all the way down if we expect to get serious about the referent not preceding language--but more importantly, if we expect to move past the dangerous political consequences of not asking hard questions about matter, agency, and ontology, precisely those hard questions for which informatic sciences such as molecular biology and nanotechnology claim to have operative answers. As long as we deem the faculty of languaging an exclusively human function, nature/culture...