°Habeas Corpus
This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a week or so, but since Matt astutely picks up a thread from the Tocqueville post below, xposted to Long Sunday, I’ll post it now - as fragmentary and allusive as it is. I’d hoped to work it up as an elaboration of the second note on Schmitt, but also by way of eventually connecting this up with the question of the political and, as it pertains to the organisation of borders and law, habeas corpus. In any event, some fragments from Derrida and J-L Nancy for your perusal:
On J-L Nancy’s Corpus, Derrida writes, remarking on the non-tactility of tact (or the law of tact) that, in Christianity, conjoins Hoc est enim corpus meum (Here is my body) to Noli me tangere (Don’t touch me):
In order to describe the idealisation that keeps the body from touching, in order to see to the sublimating subterfuge or the magical sleight of hand that makes the tangible disappear, Nancy resorts to the pictorial figure of the touch (la touche). The magician’s finger, which makes the tangible untouchable - this is a painter’s paintbrush. He must know how to put the finishing ‘touch’ to his simulacrum so as to make the body vanish in producing it, and so as to reduce it in affecting its production.
In Corpus, J-L Nancy had written, in part:
‘Hoc est enim … ‘ defies, appeases all our doubts about mere illusions, giving to the real the true finishing touch of it pure Idea, that is, it reality, its existence. One would never be done with modulating the variants of these words (randomly listed: ego sum, nudes in paintings, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Nietzsche’s madness, Montaigne’s Essais, Antonin Artaud’s ‘nerve-meter’ …
Here, of course, is the question of Plato and mimesis, and it’s to recall something of Lucretius’ simulacra of alma Venus > natura. But it’s also a question of the political as the idealised political body that keeps one from the touch of the political, or of the polis - the street? - as the risk of touch, of perturbation. Nancy, further along:
As soon as it is touched, sense certainty turns to chaos, to tempest, and every sense to disarray. Body is certainty startled and shattered. Nothing is more properly of our old world, nothing more foreign to it.
One might note here that the text of Corinthians reads: hoc est enim corpus meum is written as et gratias agens fregit et dixit hoc est corpus meum pro vobis hoc facite in meam commemorationem. That is, in part: “this is my body, which is broken [fregit] for you”.
Obviously, the ongoing reading of Lucretius has some bearing here, for me. And, a return to Agamben is indicated, of course.
