Today, as persistently for many decades, two themes prominently recurrent in both Continental and analytic philosophy—indeed in theory throughout the humanities—are body (often “the” body) and language. Each is strange enough on its own. I have written before of bodies and of words, and these in conjunction with pleasures and desires, and limits kept and broken. But I have found myself increasingly preoccupied, as well, with how (indeed whether) these two might be written together. What senses might we possibly make of them; what are their modes of repulsion and resistance, of mutuality and attraction? Such an undertaking...

En archē, it begins;in the beginning; ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos. . . .As Jerome translates it in the fourth century,in principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum,rendering the polysemousLogosmore nearlyWord, as we have it:In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And so we find ourselves in the delightfully peculiar fourth gospel, attributed to the name of John.

We may be tempted by long familiarity into an...

Here we may begin in a manner distinctly nonscriptural. I travel, rather more often than I would really prefer, by Greyhound bus. On one such occasion, in the seat beside me a large woman with vividly pink finger-nails and a bright orange shawl stroked, it seemed compulsively, a small and rather unattractive toy gorilla. Drawn at first by her vivid colors, I soon became intrigued by her fondling of this toy. I confess that for a few minutes I wondered if perhaps she suffered from a diminished mental capacity or exceptionally severe travel anxiety, but there was no other evidence...

My first ideas do not always lead me in useful directions. Seeking a figure of the fold, a story from which to unfold the theory, I entered first into the image of the labyrinth. A well-placed conference brought me to the labyrinth at St. Martin’s in Lancaster (U.K.); the patience of a friend willing to drive the French countryside brought me to the more famous instance at Chartres, where the roped-off floor helped aid my resistance to making of myself the spectacle of a labyrinth-crawler, but could do nothing for my obvious tourist status as I took fascinated photos. I...

As words touch the skin, so too do bodies enfold language, and vice versa; as tactility may be found in both word and flesh, so too may the figure of the fold. Several writers have hinted at the continuity of thought between touch and fold. Irigaray writes, “Touching must remain sensuous, join the near, without dissolving it in the surroundings. Touching must reach it and, as a result, close it again, withdrawn. Enfolded in a proper, which does not make it imperceptible to the other but reveals it to the other, while preparing a proximity between us.”¹ For her the...

As both touch and fold evoke particular stories and images, so too does the linguistic figure of the cut. When I tried to think of stories that made sense of the cut between and across language and body, the first vague thought to come to mind was that the story for this figure should have something to do with tattooing. This literal form of writing on the skin is an inscription created by a series of minute incisions, using an electrical stylus (or, in the most traditional forms, a small hammer and a pointed stick) to slice and stab ink...

The final figure of speech to be explored here feels at first somewhat out of place. To begin with, the connotations of the cut, in word and flesh alike, are largely negative. Touch can make us flinch, enfolding can suffocate, but most of us have a sense too of the touch of word or flesh that pleases, arouses, or reassures; of the pleasures of a minute’s skillful articulation or (even if we must go back to childhood for the memories) the securities of wrapture. It is far easier, more nearly automatic, to see either in a positive light than it...

I have attempted in this series of reflections a pair of movements, two kinds of choreography set in a juxtaposition that is not, I hope, an opposition (though certainly the two are in tension). First is the movement of the corps or chorus, a corporeality of bodies or voicesen masse. That is: I have tried to trace in word and flesh what is in some manner thesamemovement, in a series of parallel structures. Here the relation is one of amplification by synchronous repetition, as of voices lifted in tones sustained, or of movement when it is performed...