Bodies’ Touch: The Poetics of Writing and/on the Body in Jean Luc Nancy’s Corpus

Through the ages, and more significantly during the modern and postmodern eras, the human body has relentlessly been the source of inspiration, amazement, repulsion etc. for both philosophers and writers, all currents confounded. From Merleau-Ponty to Bakhtin, Bataille and others, thinkers and artists’ approaches to the body abounded from different perspectives. J. L. Nancy’s envisionment of the notion of the body, which he compellingly expounds in his essay-book Corpus, remains largely overlooked in comparison with other mainstream phenomenological approaches, such as, Merleau-Ponty’s. The present essay seeks, through a close reading of Nancy’s philosophical oeuvre, Corpus, to identify the main characteristics of Nancy’s thought pertaining to the body, his ‘corporeal’ philosophy foregrounding “excription” while writing (on) the body, which originates in a writing that “touches” (upon) both the body and the other.