The Speculative Body





Can a concept of "meaning" exist outside the dichotomy of either the indeterminate play of signifiers (dissemination) or the magisterial bondage of the transcendental signified (assimilation)? Is metaphor a two-way, or one-way street between material and ideal realms? Does metaphor "go both ways," in both directions at the same time? If there are such things (concepts) as "physical ideality", on the one hand, and "speculative corporeality" on the other, can there be a kind of meaning that crosses that chiasmus (and crosses out the tautologies of "physical corporeality" and "speculative ideality") without losing contact with either side of its own oxymoron -- a "physiology of spirit"[NOTE 37] that appears in the guise of Geist in the Phenomenology of Spirit, or a spiritual digestion that surfaces (Geist Who's Coming to Dinner) in the Philosophy of Nature, a nothingness in the Logic, a sense of a sensuous object that disappears (thus, again the paradoxical notion of the work (labor) of art versus the artwork, the process over the product which must lead, for Hegel, to religion and Philosophy) in the Aesthetics? Can the spirit be incorporated in the body (body of the word) or does it merely pass through like a metaphor of pure disappearance? "What is at issue here is the body of spirit, the incarnation of spirit in a living organism, the privileged organ and the privileged organic system in which spirit remains closest to itself, in which it finds its way back to itself with greatest ease. At issue also the body of the word in which the spirit incarnates itself, in which meaning seeks its 'expression' (Hamacher 231). And if one had written it down would it have spelled disaster for the presence of its nonappearance in the singularity of the flesh? Could there be a sense of meaning (both sensory and intelligible), as opposed to being preoccupied with the meaning of sense (intelligible), or making sense (sensory) of intelligible meaning, as a sensuous ending where meaning no longer means what it was meant to mean before it acquired a new sense (sensory) of which to make sense (intelligible)?[NOTE 38] Not just a means to an end, but a literal document that doctors its own letters and litters the spirit over and through a text that does not recover itself by disappearing on the road to the good old theological sense of teleological self-presence in absentia. Must the work of idealization necessarily erase the trace of the signifier, the materiality of the inscription, the substance of the self? Does it come down to the difference between the concepts of philosophy and the sensuous particulars of art? Hence, the necessity of some adequate notion of aesthetics. A sense of the work of art, of artworks, and the work of art.





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