Nancy on Women and Freedom
From The Muses and “Corpus” in Corpus:
How does Nancy’s Corpus help us understand Nancy’s references to women’s bodies in The Muses?
In The Muses Nancy gives a history of art written upon the bodies of women:
The Muses are the daughters of Zeus; they become the commodified Roman girl who bears (dead) fruit as an offering to the museum; the Virgin Mary and prostitute Mary Magdalene exhibit the threshold (If the Virgin’s vertical mouth does not speak and yet sits on the threshold of life and death, who could doubt that such a mouth is the vagina dentata?); Nancy’s anthropology is gendered, as the self-knowledge of the human (seeing itself see) is described in a scene wherein “the gaze sees there the Idea, the (feminine) stranger, the figure: it is opened by and in this figure, its rhythm is set by ‘her,’ and it is ‘she,’ the Monster that it is itself” (Muses 79).
In the final section of The Muses there is perhaps only a ‘vestige’ of women’s bodies. Perhaps the use of the image of women’s bodies has set us up for understanding the process of ‘self-exhaustion’ which leaves behind a ‘vestige’ - the fire burns itself into smoke just as, for Nancy, the bodies of women are historically consolidated, stripped, split, and idealized. Secularized, ‘artistic’ art, if it is the vestige of art - the smoke beyond fire - is the nude body of a woman, perhaps not unlike the nude woman drawn upon the cover of our copy of Corpus.
This may suggest that the arts, for Nancy and his own arts, are basically misogynistic - depriving women of individuality, agency, community, and expression. However, Corpus may prevent such a reading of The Muses. We can read Corpus as conceptually blocking misogyny by insisting on the autonomy of the body, bodily autonomy.
If misogyny relies on the objectification of women as naked bodies, Nancy protests - with feminists, as a feminist - that the nude is never naked, since there is “No secret of the body to be communicated to us, no secret body to be revealed to us. ‘Revealed’ [révélé] is the fact that bodies are more visible than any revelation” (Corpus 59). Nancy has no fantasy of ‘peering behind the veil.’ For Nancy the attempt to approach nakedness is exhausted because the nude is the impasse of the imperialist desire to unveil, “To see bodies is not to unveil a mystery; it is seeing what is there to be seen, an image, the crowd of images that the body is, the naked image, stripping areality [l’aréalité] bare... There is nothing to decipher in a body” (47). Nancy’s sartorial theory, his theory of dress or - what must be the same thing for Nancy - ontology of autonomy, operates as a topology of excess; the logic of bodies is an ontology which exceeds itself. For Nancy the nude body is always in excess of itself, always saying too much or too little to be simply naked. This is the body as freedom, “the body has the structure of freedom” (103).
As soon as we begin “Corpus” we are in the question of bodily autonomy, as Nancy explores the phrase, “this is my body” (3). And the most unconcerned glance at Corpus tells us that Nancy is invested in the body as a matter of limits - approachings, straddlings, defendings against going beyond (jouissance), fantasies of exceedings, bodies being always already excess as limit.
I offer three ‘examples’ by which we can further understand Nancy’s sartorial theory:
Example 1: When Marilyn Monroe was asked what she wore to bed, she replied, “Five drops of Chanel Number 5.”
There is no nakedness because “body is the word without employment part excellence... in any language, it’s the word in excess,” even the olfactory body (21). Skin - the showing of skin - is a presentation of nudity which defies nakedness; skin is too alive to be the dead object of a gaze which desires nakedness. Bodies have stench. For Nancy the gaze does not penetrate bodies - bodies are “impenetrable” - but the gaze testifies to the distortion or “swerve” of bodies themselves (57, 45). The nude cannot be naked because an element of it is excessive as pornographic, wearing the marks of violence (81).
Example 2: Freud claims in Civilization and Its Discontents that “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God” (Ch.3).
Nancy invokes Freud and Lacan to claim that the psyche is bodily, and the psyche is a woman (21, 95). So we must read Nancy’s claim - “Yes, what civilization could have invented it? Such a naked [nu] body” - as a mocking of the notion of the pre-civilized, ‘naked’ body (italics in original 7). There is no naked body, the body is the placing/ground which always already intersects with civilization as figure. The nude, with its body of excess, is a real which neither precedes culture nor is absorbed by culture. We know this is true for Nancy because, when Nancy is invoking the raciality of bodily alterity, Nancy declares, “We didn’t lay the body bare: we invented the body, and nudity [nudité] is what it is; there isn’t anything else, and what it its is something stranger than any strange foreign body” (9). For Nancy’s ontology nakedness, an idealization of the body minus its sartorial excess, is the body of God; the human body is in excess of itself even in wearing its gods, in being the god of the prosthesis.
Example 3: An adult came upon a little, disrobed boy who was playing in a shallow pond with three little, disrobed girls. The adult told the little boy that he “should be ashamed” of playing naked with little girls. The little boy responded, “I did not know they were girls, they did not have any clothes on.”
This example helps us understand why Nancy expresses this sartorial theory by explaining his ethics of the Other [Alter] wherein “there is no ‘proper body,’ just a reconstruction,” a putting-on of clothes (29). Nancy’s notion of the autonomy of the corpus is an auto-nomy - law of the self - wherein the self is already grounded in its Other. It is only this, Nancy says, which will allow us to avoid the generalizations about bodies which suspend racism (35). The body is free insofar as it is in excess of discourse (which is itself a body), which Nancy figures as “What in Writing Is Not to Be Read,” whose “paradigm is probably the woman’s breast,” which we know from Freud is something the infant wears (wears-out) to figure out its world (85). For Nancy bodies are free from themselves, from the trap of self-identification, since, “There is not ‘the’ body” (119). The nude body is not one single body but changes itself, and so is the student body - the body makes itself autonomous by its educational work to go beyond itself. A naked body, on the other hand, would just be itself, like an object rather than a (free) subject.
Finally, Nancy wants to find autonomy as not just a predicate of bodies, but autonomy as embodiment, “material freedom... never stop being in-dividuated, differing ever more from themselves, hence being ever more alike” (35). Thus, “all of the ‘philosophy of nature’ has to be reworked... In other words: as freedom” (37). The communion of bodies in action - the practice of communion, ‘this is my body, take and eat’ - is the “experience of freedom” (101). So Nancy refuses simple possessiveness - commodification - and redefines bodily autonomy as “Not ‘my body,’ but: corpus ego,” which invokes the declaration of autonomy, ‘I am corpus,’ the body as a practice of freedom (25).
How does Nancy’s Corpus help us understand Nancy’s references to women’s bodies in The Muses?
In The Muses Nancy gives a history of art written upon the bodies of women:
The Muses are the daughters of Zeus; they become the commodified Roman girl who bears (dead) fruit as an offering to the museum; the Virgin Mary and prostitute Mary Magdalene exhibit the threshold (If the Virgin’s vertical mouth does not speak and yet sits on the threshold of life and death, who could doubt that such a mouth is the vagina dentata?); Nancy’s anthropology is gendered, as the self-knowledge of the human (seeing itself see) is described in a scene wherein “the gaze sees there the Idea, the (feminine) stranger, the figure: it is opened by and in this figure, its rhythm is set by ‘her,’ and it is ‘she,’ the Monster that it is itself” (Muses 79).
In the final section of The Muses there is perhaps only a ‘vestige’ of women’s bodies. Perhaps the use of the image of women’s bodies has set us up for understanding the process of ‘self-exhaustion’ which leaves behind a ‘vestige’ - the fire burns itself into smoke just as, for Nancy, the bodies of women are historically consolidated, stripped, split, and idealized. Secularized, ‘artistic’ art, if it is the vestige of art - the smoke beyond fire - is the nude body of a woman, perhaps not unlike the nude woman drawn upon the cover of our copy of Corpus.
This may suggest that the arts, for Nancy and his own arts, are basically misogynistic - depriving women of individuality, agency, community, and expression. However, Corpus may prevent such a reading of The Muses. We can read Corpus as conceptually blocking misogyny by insisting on the autonomy of the body, bodily autonomy.
If misogyny relies on the objectification of women as naked bodies, Nancy protests - with feminists, as a feminist - that the nude is never naked, since there is “No secret of the body to be communicated to us, no secret body to be revealed to us. ‘Revealed’ [révélé] is the fact that bodies are more visible than any revelation” (Corpus 59). Nancy has no fantasy of ‘peering behind the veil.’ For Nancy the attempt to approach nakedness is exhausted because the nude is the impasse of the imperialist desire to unveil, “To see bodies is not to unveil a mystery; it is seeing what is there to be seen, an image, the crowd of images that the body is, the naked image, stripping areality [l’aréalité] bare... There is nothing to decipher in a body” (47). Nancy’s sartorial theory, his theory of dress or - what must be the same thing for Nancy - ontology of autonomy, operates as a topology of excess; the logic of bodies is an ontology which exceeds itself. For Nancy the nude body is always in excess of itself, always saying too much or too little to be simply naked. This is the body as freedom, “the body has the structure of freedom” (103).
As soon as we begin “Corpus” we are in the question of bodily autonomy, as Nancy explores the phrase, “this is my body” (3). And the most unconcerned glance at Corpus tells us that Nancy is invested in the body as a matter of limits - approachings, straddlings, defendings against going beyond (jouissance), fantasies of exceedings, bodies being always already excess as limit.
I offer three ‘examples’ by which we can further understand Nancy’s sartorial theory:
Example 1: When Marilyn Monroe was asked what she wore to bed, she replied, “Five drops of Chanel Number 5.”
There is no nakedness because “body is the word without employment part excellence... in any language, it’s the word in excess,” even the olfactory body (21). Skin - the showing of skin - is a presentation of nudity which defies nakedness; skin is too alive to be the dead object of a gaze which desires nakedness. Bodies have stench. For Nancy the gaze does not penetrate bodies - bodies are “impenetrable” - but the gaze testifies to the distortion or “swerve” of bodies themselves (57, 45). The nude cannot be naked because an element of it is excessive as pornographic, wearing the marks of violence (81).
Example 2: Freud claims in Civilization and Its Discontents that “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God” (Ch.3).
Nancy invokes Freud and Lacan to claim that the psyche is bodily, and the psyche is a woman (21, 95). So we must read Nancy’s claim - “Yes, what civilization could have invented it? Such a naked [nu] body” - as a mocking of the notion of the pre-civilized, ‘naked’ body (italics in original 7). There is no naked body, the body is the placing/ground which always already intersects with civilization as figure. The nude, with its body of excess, is a real which neither precedes culture nor is absorbed by culture. We know this is true for Nancy because, when Nancy is invoking the raciality of bodily alterity, Nancy declares, “We didn’t lay the body bare: we invented the body, and nudity [nudité] is what it is; there isn’t anything else, and what it its is something stranger than any strange foreign body” (9). For Nancy’s ontology nakedness, an idealization of the body minus its sartorial excess, is the body of God; the human body is in excess of itself even in wearing its gods, in being the god of the prosthesis.
Example 3: An adult came upon a little, disrobed boy who was playing in a shallow pond with three little, disrobed girls. The adult told the little boy that he “should be ashamed” of playing naked with little girls. The little boy responded, “I did not know they were girls, they did not have any clothes on.”
This example helps us understand why Nancy expresses this sartorial theory by explaining his ethics of the Other [Alter] wherein “there is no ‘proper body,’ just a reconstruction,” a putting-on of clothes (29). Nancy’s notion of the autonomy of the corpus is an auto-nomy - law of the self - wherein the self is already grounded in its Other. It is only this, Nancy says, which will allow us to avoid the generalizations about bodies which suspend racism (35). The body is free insofar as it is in excess of discourse (which is itself a body), which Nancy figures as “What in Writing Is Not to Be Read,” whose “paradigm is probably the woman’s breast,” which we know from Freud is something the infant wears (wears-out) to figure out its world (85). For Nancy bodies are free from themselves, from the trap of self-identification, since, “There is not ‘the’ body” (119). The nude body is not one single body but changes itself, and so is the student body - the body makes itself autonomous by its educational work to go beyond itself. A naked body, on the other hand, would just be itself, like an object rather than a (free) subject.
Finally, Nancy wants to find autonomy as not just a predicate of bodies, but autonomy as embodiment, “material freedom... never stop being in-dividuated, differing ever more from themselves, hence being ever more alike” (35). Thus, “all of the ‘philosophy of nature’ has to be reworked... In other words: as freedom” (37). The communion of bodies in action - the practice of communion, ‘this is my body, take and eat’ - is the “experience of freedom” (101). So Nancy refuses simple possessiveness - commodification - and redefines bodily autonomy as “Not ‘my body,’ but: corpus ego,” which invokes the declaration of autonomy, ‘I am corpus,’ the body as a practice of freedom (25).