Abstract
In this paper, an attempt has been made to uncover the problem of metaphorical language in its relation to fleshliness and embodiedness as found in the critical reading of the texts of Derrida. The fleshliness of metaphorical language is embodied in our bodily activity in such a manner that sensible writing in the Derridean sense and corporeal body become intertwined notions. Metaphor and metaphorical language is a point of intersection between the body and sensible writing. This materiality/corporeality/fleshiness of metaphorical language can be understood as text. According to Derrida, writing and body have been viewed by the western philosophical tradition as exterior to speech and mind respectively, and he wants to deconstruct such hierarchical binaries. With this, writing (as archi-écriture) is no more a literary notion, but the generic form of symbolic practice, always already metaphorical and embodied. This paper is centered on the oeuvre of Derrida to uncover the thinking for the fleshliness of metaphorical language from within the texts of western philosophical tradition.
Highlights
The problem of language is of importance to contemporary Continental thinkers
The fleshliness of metaphorical language is embodied in our bodily activity in such a manner that sensible writing in the Derridean sense and corporeal body become intertwined notions
Metaphor and metaphorical language is a point of intersection between the body and sensible writing
Summary
The problem of language is of importance to contemporary Continental thinkers. Echoing this, Jacques Derrida writes that “the problem of language has never been one problem among others, but the problem itself. As Christina Howells observes, for Derrida, “language is precisely the differential systems which masks absence with the illusion of presence, and whose mobility depends on its lack of centre” (Howells, 1998) It was the centerless, heterogeneous, differential, infinitely excessive character of the signs that allows language to be viewed as always already metaphorical rather than as fixed, literal, permanent, and fully and infinitely present. The first section will discuss the Derridean notion of writing, and the second section will show writing and the body as intertwined notions in Derrida and how both these notions can be viewed as “text” Considering this entanglement of writing, body and/as text, an argument is developed in the third section of this paper regarding the embodiment of metaphorical language
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