Transcendence 'After the Body'?
A Deconstructive Perspective on Bodily Identity
Paulo F. M. Gonçalves

(Excerpt)

On another level, I would not recognise myself, nor would I recognise you, were it not for our bodies and their expressiveness - the transcendence they generate as part of my self-conception, and my conception of you, your distinctiveness. Your expressiveness is a bodily writing, assembling the letters of gestures, sounds, markings, modifications and clothing into bodily words. We may and do change. In these ways we are stabilised or destabilised, inscribed or erased, to-and-through ourselves and others, repeatedly, continuously. The body's transcendence, in this context, is not an autonomous and disembodied self, an essence or substance preserving our identity through time. As the body moves, speaks, overflows and grows; as it is disciplined, decorated, pierced, and marked; as it ages, withdraws, writes, bleeds, falls ill, unites and divides; its transcendence is dynamic and mediated, fragile and mutable, seductive and threatening - offering both opportunity and risk.

Without the body, there would be no transcendence. What might such a claim mean? I would hypothesise that any attempt to formulate identity as a transcendence without the body will inevitably and necessarily derive aspects of its description, its metaphorisation, from the expressiveness of the material body. The image of the Mobius strip employed by Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies, expresses this torsion into one another of transcendence and immanence. There is a mutual inheritance and torsion of one into the other which cannot be elided.

Like words, whose openness to repetition across contexts and in new combinations allows for the constitution of new meanings, the placing of bodies likewise has implications for their transcendent identity. Both this placing, and thus, the scope of this transcendence, are subject to diverse forces of varying intensity which give a subject its agency and likewise delimit the nature and scope of such agency. Certain places, and consequently, certain forms of transcendence may be ruled off limits. However, and this would very much depend on the nature of the constraints imposed on the body to keep it in its place, people can and have placed themselves in new bodily relations to each other, to technology and to their surroundings - politically, sexually etc. These new configurations alter and challenge received and dominant idealities, orthodoxies and conventions. They may be anomalous or revolutionary. As such, they may lack categories through which to conceptualise their new position. However, given the torsion of the body into transcendence which I am suggesting, these positionings themselves generate idealities and thus create moments of newness in the world which may have remained unthought, feared or proscribed.