PHILOSOPHERS WITH MICROSCOPES,
CHILDREN WITH KALEIDOSCOPES, AND THE
NOSTALGIA FOR THE FLESHY PARAPHRAGM

Zelia Gregoriou
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana

Thursday afternoon. Around a round table in a square, two by two meter room. At the third, the highest floor of the Education building. Wizards and apprentice wizards of philosophy of education are sitting around the table trying to understand intuitional thought, gestalt, fantasy, as alternatives to linear/logical models of knowledge. The discussion has stuck at the old-age Platonic epistemological enigma: How can we teach what we do not know? Or, if we do not know the nature of intuition how can we suggest that it is teachable, or even if teachable, educationally important? We all have dreams, fantasies, but we do not talk about them in school. She (author of this text) abstains from the discussion. A note she passed around in advance announced the raison d’ etre of this absentia, withdrawal: I can’t talk. My throat is anesthetized. (I am having a therapy). Her withdrawal from dialogue and the denial of an intersubjective understanding is announced, imposed on them. There is no need to explain, justify, legitimate. The mute statement and the freezing of communication is received before and prior to questions. Received, not just understood or accepted by others because the latter would presuppose the mediation of a judgment, a conscious articulation. The passivity of the listener to this mute statement is already an effect prior to the subject’s enunciation or agency. The others read the note, seem worried, they already know, they do not know why…but they do not ask either. The note/writing/body is received with a “stupidity,” an anesthetization of judgments, reasons, and at the same time with an affective aporia, a worry; the writing is received with a non-transitive responsibility, a responsibility that has no history and does not need a story to explain or justify itself.

My throat is anesthetized. The message comes as an enunciation that dissolves its own enunciating structure, authority, primacy. This writing dissolves the originality of the speaker as the locus of the enunciation/agency, dissolves subjectivity. This anesthetization is located in the passive voice of the announcement, in the writing of the note, and in her actual physical condition. What anesthetizes the others’ intellectual questioning is “my throat” rather than a speaking subject stating “I have an anesthetized throat,” “I” inform you about this. The subject is decentered from the active, transparent “I,” to a passive, dark, indefinable, mute “my throat” which is already a writing, a trace of what is not present, a subjectivity already passed. My throat, my body; it hurts, it bleeds, it trembles under a caressing hand. Which is this it, impossible to be articulated as the grammatical “I” or gazing “Eye,” that escapes the grasp of the analytic mind or everyday discussion? Which is this that disrupts dialogue and the dialectics of intersubjectivity, that alerts us to something different and incites a response not through its manifestation/thematization but rather through defying manifestation, that incites a response not as the agency of another corporeal subjectivity but rather as the dispersion of subjectivity and the anesthetization of intelligibility? How can I talk about what is not intelligible to the mind, what blurs the hierarchical binary between critical and passive as it blinds consciousness? How can I talk about that which affects me through its silences?

Can fantasies and imagination be of any educational importance if they do not fit into logical language/dialectics? My throat is anesthetized. For the first time in this seminar my language stops being this projecting forward to appropriate the edges of other’s arguments, to make those interesting intellectual twists. I just watch the others’ projecting forward, analyzing, marching. Fantasy is already paralyzed, blocked into conceptual orthopedics. I do not have an opinion. I listen. Suddenly a ghostly figure of a three year old child passes by the door. I just have a glimpse of this strange “passenger”; I do not know his story or history. He walks slowly along the corridor, outside the philosophers’ cave, stumbling. His body is twisted in an upward fashion, his head moves like a pendulum that has just escaped the law of gravity, his mouth, his eyes seem to gravitate around the tube he holds up in the air, a tube that devours, engulfs him, rather than being a scopic hole to the “real.” He is looking through a kaleidoscope, surprised by the kaleidoscope’s magic sights. He dwells in fantasy and imagination as images that overflow his expectations take him by surprise, sights disrupt his familiar space before he is able to name and articulate them. The sights are already there disrupting causality, presence and synchrony. Magic and fantasy means to be disturbed by what comes from a different time. It means to establish proximity to what remains other and surprises us beyond fear or guilt. Fantasy is seduction by a kaleidoscope rather than articulation of arguments under the microscope. In this response I want to suggest that an author can establish proximity to the body through the way of the kaleidoscope rather than through the way of the microscope, through a writing that in its own physicality surprises and creates blind spots in a logical/predictable reading, creates silences and discontinuities in dialogue. A writing that does not talk about the body but rather is itself corporeal and brings the reader to an affective aporia/confusion, a responsiveness to a corporeality that does not have to justify itself. A writing that creates rather than represents/designates the body, a writing that devours the reader and disrupts the synchrony of self and understanding. This is the type of writing that Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous have introduced. As Gert Biesta has already categorized Derrida’s project under the umbrella of postmodernism and particularly what he calls the “textualizaion of the body” — which he identifies with the “disappearance” of the body, with passivity and political paralysis— he fails to see how Deriddean writing not only does not efface the body but rather re-invents corporeality in the temporalizing effects of writing.

In this response, first I want to problematize the easiness by which Gert Biesta, McLaren and others talk about the body, thematize and predicate this, as if the body were the corporeal analogue of the mind, as if articulating corporeal subjectivity by analogy to agency/consciousness is enough to resurrect corporeality, as if corporeal subjectivity were just another and not Other subjectivity. Second, I explain why Biesta’s isomorphic articulation of very different discourses/projects that question modernity (Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Baudrillard) is problematic — in many instances Biesta thematizes, predicates and delineates “Postmodernism” (and “postmodern ideas”) as if this were a uniform space of analogous narratives or a concise historical movement. Third, I suggest that to “insurrect the body” is not enough to lodge the body with agency but rather the whole question of subjectivity and agency needs to be reformulated as a question of effects of textuality and responsiveness.

Can we compensate for the historical censoring of the body in theory and philosophy by simply postulating a kind of corporeal subjectivity that is conceptualized by analogy to subjectivity as agency? Can we talk about the body as Other, as silencing and disruption of subjectivity when the language we use is already the language of an enunciating subject? Can we talk about a dialectical relation between mind and body when the discursive formulation of these terms already encompasses the binary and hierarchical structure of body/mind? Is it possible to articulate discursively a dialectical relation between mind and body if the order of language and subjectivity already signals the transgression from bodily wholeness (Imaginary) to the Symbolic, if language signifies through the endless displacement of an unattainable (inexistent) return to the body/mother (Lacan’s question)? Furthermore, how can we talk about what blurs the very distinction between matter and spirit, passive and active, about what we cannot know but paradoxically surprises us, when our audience is already armored with criteria of intelligibility and comprehensibility, when they wait to “understand,” to appropriate this promised land of “body identity?” How can we establish a proximity to what remains Other, to what manifests itself through its silences, to what is a blind spot in the text of dialogue, when our audience expects this text to represent and reflect an “idea of the body?”

Biesta seems to dismiss these questions/problems. Building on McLaren’s notion of “enfleshment,” he tries to articulate a notion of corporeal subjectivity that is resistant — which for him means non-textualized — in that it is lodged with desires which are not representable in the dominant discourse. In particular, he explores how the body is insurrected in “postmodern” understandings of subjectivity which, in his opinion, “link subjectivity with something that from a Kantian perspective is by definition excluded as a locus of subjectivity, namely: the body.” Biesta seems to agree with McLaren’s oversimplification that “Postmodernism” has radically textualized reality, that “nothing exists outside of [the text]” (a sin he attributes to Derrida) and that the consequence of the textualization of the subject and the body is political inertia. He grounds his fear of “postmodernim” in that “[r]eal people who really died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz or Treblinka become so much discourse [emphasis mine].”¹ What does it mean to suggest that “real people” become discourse? This is a point where Biesta’s isomorphic use of the term discourse used both by Derrida and Baudrillard will prove problematic. While Biesta seems to have in mind Derrida, McLaren in his polemic essay “Teaching the Postmodern Body” attacks Baudrillard’s view that the subject becomes absorbed in the media’s visual culture of “flying signifiers.” As Baudrillard has shown, visual culture is a culture of homogenization as the codes of signification and the codes of commodity partake of the same equivalence in media and advertising. Baudrillard’s question though is not whether bodies that bleed are not real but rather whether the image/signifier of the bleeding body has any original referent in the hyperreality of the media as its meaning is interchangeable in what McLaren calls “an apocalyptic hemorrhage of signifiers, thick with borrowed or rented meanings, all interchangeable, all bleeding into each other so profusely that any distinction between them is all but canceled out.”² The question we should ask is whether desire, pleasure, sexuality, or even confession can be processes of subjectification and signification as the world becomes saturated with “confessed truths,” when the traditional obscenity of what is hidden is replaced with the obscenity of the visible, as Baudrillard excessively puts it, “the all-too-visible.”³ I believe that the self-referentiality of the sign in a system of hyperreality that precludes any response by the recipient (as described by Baudrillard) should be distinguished from the self-referentiality of the text in Derrida’s discourse. The latter invokes the self-referentiality of the sign in order to dismantle logocentrism and the metaphysical hierarchies spirit/matter and speech/writing which are embedded in the master narratives (metanarratives) of modernity. The Derridean notion of différance, as temporalizing, spacing and dissemination of meaning, discards the metaphysics of meaning and the epistemological or ontological originality of the subject. Meaning and subject are the effects of différance, the effects of a writing that remains Other. While Biesta seems to read this as the “textualization of the subject” and subsequently as political passivity, I read this as a redefinition of subjectivity that resists the opposition between sensible and intelligible, passive and active (I have in mind here the work of Emmuel Lévinas).⁴

I am not sure though whether even this “postmodern” approach to subjectivity would satisfy either Biesta or McLaren as they are not willing to compromise their notion of subjectivity as self-reflective agency which they identify with political power. Biesta suggests that the “textualization of the subject results in a loss of power; a loss that manifests itself at the level of the body. The subject becomes powerless because her body no longer exists as a referent.” In his articulation of the body/subject, however, the body is insurrected only to be lodged with desires and inscribed with significations by the subject. The problem, though, does not lie in the passive inscription of the mind against the body but rather in just the reduction of any difference and temporality in this process of enfleshment. As agency and the signification (effects) of the flesh appear isomorphically interchangeable, the body/subject cannot be less totalized and less self-referential than Baudrillard’s universe of de-realized signifiers, the very totality Biesta and McLaren want to disrupt. Biesta and McLaren are not intimidated to open the bottle found at the sea-shore and liberate the amorphous, infinite body of the genie as they know in advance that the genie will obey; it will speak their language and thus, they will be able to control it: The incarcerated genie is liberated from the glass enclosure of the bottle to be incarcerated again in the looking glass of the self-reflecting subject: in its morphology, structure and language, the body is a mere reflection of its liberator. Its mode of existence cannot be different from the language that incubates and enframes it. We already know what the genie’s first elocution will be: “Yes master!”

If the subversive potential of the body lies in its margins of irrepresentability, then I cannot see how the dialectic of enfleshment can be subversive if it articulates the body only through representational illusions that perpetuate the metaphysical origin of the subject and reduce agency and politics to self-reflection. Biesta and McLaren have already exorcised the very quality of the body that subverts the optics of representation and the domination of the subject, that is, textuality. It seems to me that to question the subject and “turn to the body,” which is Biesta’s project, can be achieved in ways that do not first turn the body to the subject. To turn to the body is to use a language that blinds the eyes/I’s (of students and teachers) rather than turn them to truth, to the intelligible, a language that is not indebted to hierarchical dualisms (mind/body, spirit/matter). The turn to the body comes through a writing that “destroys” its own self, “destroys” the optics of representation and sedimentation of desire, a writing that is always incomplete. To make this more clear and, perhaps, less corporeal, I must add that the margin of corporeal resistance is not the erection of a resistant corporeal desire, but rather the very infusion of language and experience with events of textuality, what Hélène Cixous has called the “deserts” of the body, the “deserts” of écriture feminine. This resistance is not external to textuality but rather is the continuous writing and re-writing of the body as the snares of textuality obstruct the linearity of thought and subvert the originality and omniscience of the subject.

It flows. It flows blood. Red blood. This is Kyriake’s original reaction as she watches Panayiotes’ nose bleeding. She is not scared, she does not panic. She does not describe/report what happens. She is rather amazed, surprised by the extreme exposure of the other’s body. Panayiotes has been teasing his nose again, I comment. I am in the mode of teaching now. I designate, describe, explain, synchronize things. My throat is not anesthetized this time; I enunciate, I am in control. My language is ready at hand to explain, domesticate, make things understandable, logical. It bleeds because….This language leaves no space for surprises, Kaleidoscopes…I am active and take political decisions…I even start to question gender stereotypes: Why does she make so much fuss for a bleeding nose? Is her response more emotional than the boy’s response? My microscope is in place. I talk, I analyze; she is seduced, invaded. I speak; she listens. I am active; she is passive. This is not a question of “reality” (two different ways to describe a bleeding nose), but rather how the corporeality of bleeding comes through in textuality: It is through this irrational, inexplicable repetition of words, the illogicality of the tautology “red blood,” this drifting into an excessive language that responds with surprise rather than designating that an-Other proximity to the other’s body comes through. It is the other’s bleeding that takes her by surprise and reconstitutes her corporeal subjectivity as a passive, naïve response to the other’s exposure. It is this listening to what surprises us in its strangeness, the entrapment of the teacher in the language of silences, surprises and excesses, the flesh that can be more subversive than critical pedagogy, as it situates the political and signification in the events of responsiveness and responsibility. As it resists the closure of late capitalism. As it primarily responds to the heteronomous affectivity of the Other rather than retrospectively enfleshing a self-referential subject.

---

1. A. Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1985), 345; cited in Peter McLaren, “Schooling the Postmodern Body,” in Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics, ed. Henry A. Giroux (Albany: SUNY, 1991), 151.

2. Peter McLaren, “Schooling the Postmodern Body,” 146.

3. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 131.

4. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesn University Press, 1987).