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International Journal of Philosophical Studies

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Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on the Speaking

Embodied Subject
Veronica Vasterling
Online Publication Date: 01 June 2003
To cite this Article Vasterling, Veronica(2003)'Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on the Speaking Embodied
Subject',International Journal of Philosophical Studies,11:2,205 — 223
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.11(2), 205–223
Body and Language: Butler,

Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on
the Speaking Embodied Subject
Veronica Vasterling
Abstract
In this article three viewpoints on the relation of body and language are
discussed: the poststructuralist viewpoint of Judith Butler, the phenomeno-
Downloaded By: [Radboud University Nijmegen] At: 10:21 22 October 2009
logical viewpoint of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the postmodernist view-

point of Jean-François Lyotard. The reason juxtaposing for these three
accounts is twofold. First, the topic requires a combination of post-
structuralist and phenomenological insights, and second, the accounts are
supplementary. Butler’s account raises questions that can be answered with
the help of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Lyotard’s anthropology of the inhuman
offers a perspective of finitude that is missing in the other two. The aim of the
article is to outline the necessary ingredients of an adequate conception of
the speaking embodied subject.
Keywords: phenomenology; constructivism; body; language
For two decades continental philosophy has been dominated by the two
related tendencies of poststructuralism to foreground questions of lan-
guage and to deconstruct the subject. But since the 1990s the philosophical
landscape has changed. Partly maybe because of the poststructuralist
neglect of the more tangible dimensions of reality, partly because of a
general shift from questions of nurture to questions of nature, the attention
of contemporary continental philosophers appears to have switched to
questions of the body and embodied subjectivity.1 It seems as if language
and body are in the process of trading places as leading paradigm and the
poststructuralist theoretical framework is being replaced by a rediscovered
phenomenological tradition in general, and Merleau-Ponty’s work on the
body in particular.
Probably this diagnosis is too hasty and too general. What strikes me,
however, is that one finds few attempts to combine the insights of
poststructuralism and phenomenology. Even rarer are explicit discussions
of the relation of body and language, despite the recent plethora of books
International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0967255032000074190
I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F P H I L O S O P H I CA L S T U D I E S
on the body and embodiment.2 This may have to do with the fact that many
poststructuralist philosophers – Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Lyotard – are
critical of phenomenology even though, or maybe exactly because, they
have their roots in the phenomenological tradition. But there is no reason
to follow this example. Why throw out the baby of poststructuralist insight
in the phenomenon of language with the bathwater of its one-sided view or
neglect of questions of embodiment?
In this article I make a start with filling in the lacuna. I will discuss three
viewpoints on the relation of body and language, i.e. Judith Butler’s
poststructuralist viewpoint, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
viewpoint and Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern viewpoint. The reason
for juxtaposing precisely these three viewpoints is that the three accounts
are supplementary: what is missing in one is provided by another. Butler’s
work seemed the natural starting-point not only because it combines a

thoroughly poststructuralist linguistic perspective with an intense interest
in body politics, but also because of the kind of questions it raises with
respect to the relation of body and language. The questions concern
epistemological and ontological issues of embodiment which Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenological account is eminently suited to answer. In
addition to Butler’s and Merleau-Ponty’s account Lyotard’s work provides
a perspective that is missing in both, namely the finiteness of the speaking
embodied subject. The overall aim of discussing these three accounts is to
collect the necessary ingredients of an adequate conception of the speaking
embodied subject.
The Poststructuralist Viewpoint of Butler

Butler’s viewpoint on the relation of language and body can be summed up
in the claim that the body is linguistically or – as Butler often puts it –
discursively constructed. Despite the widespread assumption that sex and
sexuality are natural features of human bodies, Butler maintains that
bodies are constructed as male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, in
and through the reiteration of certain discursive practices. There are
basically two arguments in Butler’s work which underpin the constructivist
claim. Both arguments concern the status of language. I will first outline
the two arguments and then discuss the questions they raise.3
The first argument concerns the relation of language and reality
(including the body). Like all poststructuralists and most contemparary
philosophers Butler rejects the representationalist view according to which
language re-presents a reality which is presented in perception. She rejects
the representationalist view in favour of a constructivist view. This switch
can be described in general terms as the switch from a conception of
language as instrument with the help of which we articulate our
perceptions of reality to a conception of language as medium through
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B O DY A N D L A N G UAG E
which we perceive and understand reality. In more specific terms, the

switch pertains to the question of the origin of meaning. The representa-
tionalist conception is based on the assumption that meaning originates in
pre- or extra-linguistic sense experience or consciousness in general and is
subsequently articulated in words. In contemporary philosophy one finds
many different arguments, from Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ argument
to Derrida’s deconstruction of meaning-intention, which prove this
assumption to be untenable. If meaning originated in private sense
experience or individual consciousness, how would we ever be able to
communicate with and understand other people? Butler aligns herself with
the poststructuralist argument that meaning is generated within language.
And from this argument it is only one step to the constructivist claim. If
words do not derive their meaning from the reality we perceive but from
the linguistic context in which they occur, then language does not mirror
the reality we perceive. Rather, it is the other way around: language
semantically constructs the reality (including the body) we perceive and
sense.
Butler’s claim that reality and, hence, the body is linguistically
constructed is part of the more general, epistemological argument that
language conditions the accessibility and intelligibility of reality. Percep-
tion, experience and understanding of reality are enabled and mediated by
language. As speaking beings we are inserted in a symbolical order, and it
is this insertion in a world of significations which enables and informs
perception, experience and understanding of our body, and of reality in
general. That this argument is really a postlinguistic turn reformulation of
Kantian epistemology is made clear by Butler’s own comment on her
position:
the ontological claim can never fully capture its object, and this view
makes me somewhat different from Foucault and aligns me tempo-
rarily with the Kantian tradition as it has been taken up by Derrida.
The ‘there is’ gestures toward a referent it cannot capture, because
the referent is not fully built up in language, is not the same as the
linguistic effect. There is no access to it outside of the linguistic effect,
but the linguistic effect is not the same as the referent it fails to
capture. This is what allows for a variety of ways of making reference
to something, none of which can claim to be that to which reference
is made.
(Butler, 1998: p. 279)
In this quotation the distinction between referent and linguistic effect is the
linguistic equivalent of Kant’s distinction between Ding an sich and
phenomena, i.e. the thing as it is in itself and the thing as it appears to us.
Kant introduced this distinction to make an epistemological point, namely
207
that we cannot know reality as it is in itself: we can only know it as it

appears to us. In Kant’s case it is the transcendental subject, in Butler’s case
it is language which enables and at the same time constrains access to and
understanding of reality. Language refers to reality, but that does not mean
that language captures reality as it is in itself; on the contrary, what is
captured is only linguistically constructed reality. The signifying effects of
language enable access to and understanding of reality, but at the same
time they cannot but constrain accessibility and intelligibility: we can have
no access to or any understanding of reality outside the signifying effects of
language.
The second argument underpinning the constructivist claim concerns the
relation of language and subject. It follows the general line of the first
argument to the extent that, according to Butler, the subject as well as any
other entity in reality is constructed by language. But matters are more

complicated here because the subject is not like any other entity: it is a
speaking subject. Despite its linguistic capacities, however, the subject is
the product rather than the producer of linguistic construction. This
familiar (post-)structuralist tenet is based on a conception of language as
(process of) reiteration or citation. Every word we utter is, quite literally, a
citation from an already-existing vocabulary. But intelligible language
requires more than the citing of (random) words. It involves the ability to
apply the rules or conventions which govern the use, that is, the meaning,
of words. Intelligible speech and writing consists of words cited in such a
way that the citation complies with the conventions that regulate the use of
those words. On the basis of this reconceptualization of what it means to
speak and write, Butler’s claim that the subject is linguistically constructed
comes down to the following. In speaking and writing we comply with
already-existing meaning conventions or discursive practices which effect a
certain semantical construction of, among other things, the speaking
subject itself. In short, the subject does not produce, invent or create the
meaning of the words s/he cites; s/he is an effect of, or constructed by the
meaning conventions and the discursive practices s/he complies with while
speaking and writing.
Butler’s conception of language as a process of citation does not
preclude the possibility of new meaning or transformation of existing
meaning conventions. On the contrary. Far from being a process of simple
repetition, the process of citation as such implies contextual shifts. The
words I am citing here and now are cited in a specific combination and in
a temporal and spatial setting that is necessarily different from former or
later citations elsewhere of the same words. These inevitable contextual
shifts are at the same time shifts of meaning. The citation of the word ‘body’
in one context can signify something completely different, or slightly
different, or anything in between, but never exactly the same as the citation
of the same word in another context. Because of these continuous
208
contextual shifts of meaning, the process of citation is a process which

slowly but surely transforms meaning conventions, resulting, in the long
run, in the erosion of some and the emergence of new ones. That is why, for
example, dictionaries have to be updated every now and then.
With respect to the second argument, the most important point to be
noted is that the relation of language and subject is more or less unilateral.
The signifying conventions of language affect (construct) the subject, but
the subject is not the agent who transforms these conventions. The
possibility of transformation inheres in the very iterability of the
conventions themselves, that is, in the temporal and spatial movement of
language that is carried forward but not controlled by the citations of
subjects. Even though we may intend to transform the meaning conven-
tions of the words we cite, our intentions, by themselves, cannot establish
the desired transformation because we do not control the future course of

the signifying chain of cited words. Transformation is a process in time and
therefore at the mercy of an always unforeseeable future. Thus contingency
rather than intentionality is the decisive factor in the transformation of
meaning conventions.
From the two arguments I have summarized one can infer that Butler’s
poststructuralist viewpoint on the relation of body and language is based
on a radical linguistic epistemology or, if you will, epistemological
linguisticism. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this approach?
Apart from the fact that Butler’s linguistic turn of (Kantian) epistemology
is very consistent and quite convincing, political effectiveness is undoubt-
edly the greatest strength of Butler’s approach. It allows a thorough
denaturalization of the categories of sex and sexuality, undermining the
widespread assumption that human bodies are heterosexual by nature and
come in two natural kinds, male and female.4 Epistemological linguisticism
is politically effective in that it opens up the ontological domain, that is, the
domain of what is considered to be natural or real, to questions of power.
If the ontological status of bodies is the product of signifying practices and
conventions, then the political question can be raised whether there are
hegemonic conventions which legitimize some bodies as essentially or
naturally human, thereby explicitly or implicitly delegitimizing other
bodies as unnatural and subhuman.
Butler’s radical linguistic epistemology has two weaknesses. The claim
that language enables not only the intelligibility of reality but also its
accessibility is not very convincing. The first part of the claim is, I think,
uncontroversial. Understanding, whether it is understanding the world
around us or understanding ourselves, always requires the mediation of
language, that is, the capacity at least to name, refer to or, in general,
articulate the phenomena we are trying to understand. The second part of
Butler’s claim is quite a different matter. It is not obvious that accessibility
depends on linguistic mediation in the same way as intelligibility, namely as
209
its necessary condition. The equation of accessibility with intelligibility has

the counterfactual implication that it is impossible to have access to
phenomena we don’t understand or, to put it differently, to phenomena
that escape or disrupt our linguistic capacities. But isn’t our access to reality
wider than the scope of our understanding? And isn’t the equation of
accessibility and intelligibility a symptom of Butler’s rather one-sided
conceptualization of the subject as a speaking subject, leaving out
embodiedness? I will return to these questions in the section on Merleau-
Ponty, but in the mean time the latter suspicion is confirmed by a closer
inspection of the consequences of Butler’s radical linguistic
epistemology.
The second weakness of radical linguistic epistemology is something it
has in common with Kant’s epistemology. Both in Butler and Kant the
epistemological argument is ontologically reductive in that it results in a

too generalized and abstract ontological scheme. If Kant’s transcendental
philosophy fits everything in the subject–object scheme, then Butler’s
linguisticism tends to reduce everything, including the body, to the
ontological status of constructed entities. From an epistemological per-
spective it may be correct to emphasize the fact that everything we are
aware of is discursively constructed. From an ontological perspective,
however, there is an enormous difference between, say, a chair and a
human being. By ontology I understand the phenomenological approach
elaborated by the young Heidegger of Being and Time, an approach that is
taken up and transformed by, among others, Merleau-Ponty.5 Though
Butler’s work shows some affinity with this phenomenological-ontological
approach,6 on the whole she tends to ignore pertinent questions concerning
the ontological status of human beings.
With respect to the two arguments I presented it is relatively easy to see
which ontological questions are ignored. Each of the arguments skips over
a terrain that should have been covered. The topic skipped over in the first
argument is the topic of embodiment. Butler neglects the fact that the body
is not like any other entity in reality. As embodied beings we happen to be
this ‘thing’ called a body. The ontological status of human beings is not only
that of speaking beings but that of embodied speaking beings. The question
what the implications of this combination are seems quite pertinent. The
topic that is skipped over in the second argument is the topic of
intentionality and agency. I do not disagree with Butler’s conception of
language as a process of reiteration or citation, but I do not think that this
conception necessitates a delimitation of the role of the subject as merely
citing, that is, as merely the carrier of the linguistic process. The subject also
participates in this process: s/he is not only a carrier but also an actor, that
is, intentionally involved in the process. Though Butler at some point
admits that intentionality is a factor, she nowhere specifies what the role of
intentionality might be.7
210
The Phenomenological Viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty
If we want to fill in the ontological gaps in the poststructuralist viewpoint,

the first candidate who comes to mind is Merleau-Ponty. A large part of his
work is dedicated to the explication of embodied subjectivity, including a
reinterpretation of the phenomenological category of intentionality.
As in the case of Butler, I would like to summarize Merleau-Ponty’s
viewpoint on the relation of language and body in one statement. In
Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty says that ‘it is the body which
speaks’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 197). This statement does not refer to the
fact that speaking requires physical equipment like vocal chords. What
Merleau-Ponty means to say is that the body is an expressive and
intentional body and, as such, a source of meaning. Although the body is a
biological entity, the biological dimension is transcended by the intention-

ality characteristic of the body. Merleau-Ponty describes the intentionality
of the body as a way of being in the world, of a relating to and shaping of
the world. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of human existence as being-
in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty explicates the bodily dimension that Heideg-
ger overlooks despite his focus on praxis and disposition (Stimmung).
According to Merleau-Ponty, it is the body’s perceptions and capacities
that open up the world and enable us to move around in it with
confidence.
The body’s intentionality is linked to the body’s expressiveness. That is,
bodily intentionality expresses itself in gestures of, for instance, anger or
love. In Part I, Chapter 6 of Phenomenology of Perception, entitled ‘The
Body as Expression and Speech’, Merleau-Ponty analyses bodily gestures
as the primary form of language. Bodily and more specifically emotional
gestures express possible ways of encountering and living the world; they
give shape to stimuli and situations. As such they create and convey
meaning. According to Merleau-Ponty ‘behaviour creates meanings which
are transcendent in relation to the anatomical apparatus, and yet immanent
to the behaviour as such, since it communicates itself and is understood’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 189). Bodily gestures cannot be reduced to purely
natural signs emanating from a body that is equipped or programmed to
produce these signs. Even if human beings share the same psycho-
physiological equipment, this equipment ‘leaves a great variety of
possibilities open’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 189). As Merleau-Ponty puts it:
‘It is no more natural, nor less conventional, to shout in anger or to kiss in
love than to call a table “a table”. Feelings and passional conduct are
invented like words’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 189).
Language is rooted in corporeality, in the signifying powers of the body.
Linguistic signification, that is, the expression of meaning in speech,
prolongs and accomplishes the gestural signification that is deployed in
bodily forms of behaviour. Speech does not consist of verbal signs
211
representing a meaning external to them. Speech consists of linguistic

gestures which, like bodily gestures in general, express and hence contain
their meaning. Instead of the usual distinction between a bodily language
consisting of natural expressive signs on the one hand and a verbal
language consisting of conventional referential signs on the other,
Merleau-Ponty posits a continuity of expressive gestures which are neither
natural nor purely conventional, a continuity of expression starting with
bodily gestures and ending with spoken (and written) words. Yet, if the
intentional and expressive body is the source of meaning or, to put it
another way, if the body is the source of an open and indefinite power of
giving significance, how does Merleau-Ponty explain the fact that we are
able to understand each other’s bodily and linguistic gestures? Expressive
gestures do create meaning, but they do not create meaning ex nihilo, as it
were from scratch. Expressive gestures presuppose and make use of an

‘alphabet of already acquired meanings’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 194). The
world we live in is a linguistic world ‘where speech is an institution’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 184). The linguistic world consists of standard
ways of expression, standard meanings, which we acquire in the course of
our lives. The intelligibility of expressive gestures is assured because
language, for Merleau-Ponty, is never purely creative expression; it is also,
at the same time, inscribed in established systems of expression, of
vocabulary and syntax.
This explanation of the intelligibility of expressive gestures is based on
Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between what he calls ‘spoken speech’ (parole
parlée) and ‘speaking speech’ (parole parlante). The latter refers to
language or expression at its primary stage, where the signifying intention
is ‘at the stage of coming into being’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: p. 197). The
former refers to the linguistic world of sedimented expressions, a world
that is constituted by acts of expression. In other words, ‘spoken speech’ is
a sedimentation of ‘speaking speech’. The distinction between ‘speaking
speech’ and ‘spoken speech’ explains why and how expressive gestures can
be both creative, in the sense of constituting new meaning, and intelligible.
Expressive gestures are intelligible but not creative if they only make use
of ‘spoken speech’, of sedimented systems of expression. But they are
creative as well as intelligible if they consist of ‘speaking speech’, of a
signifying intention which inscribes itself in ‘spoken speech’, in an
established system of expression. For it is only through such an inscription
that ‘speaking speech’, the signifying intention, can accomplish the
constitution of new meaning.
Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relation of body and language provides
satisfactory answers to the questions Butler’s account raised. Butler’s
argument concerning the constructedness of the body was inadequate in
that it failed to account for embodiment and intentionality. This failure is
mainly due to Butler’s one-sided focus on language as ‘spoken speech’, as
212
a system of sedimented and, hence, iterable signifying conventions and

practices. What is missing from her account is a conception of language as
‘speaking speech’, as the expression of signifying intentions. It is this
dimension of language which reveals the subject not only as a carrier of
citations but, first and foremost, as an intentional and expressive body-
subject. Because of her one-sided conception of language Butler fails to see
that the emergence of new meaning is not only due to the unintended
contextual shifts that inevitably take place whenever we speak or write,
that is, reiterate sedimented signifying conventions and practices. New
meaning may also emerge when the subject takes up and expresses a
certain position with respect to the world of sedimented meanings in bodily
and/or linguistic gestures.
Butler’s claim that language conditions the intelligibility and accessibility
of reality needs to be amended as well. According to Butler, language as the

realm of iterable conventions and practices is a realm we enter once we learn
to speak early in life. Once inside this realm, there is no absolute outside any
more, for every outside is constituted by language (Butler, 1993: p. 8). In
other words, once we have become speaking beings, language conditions the
accessibility of reality, including the body’s access to reality. Perception and
other capacities of the body do not access a pristine world. The world opened
up by the body is a world that is always already permeated by sedimented
meanings. And it is these sedimented meanings or, in Butler’s words, the
signifying conventions and practices of language that determine what we see
and understand. But again, this is only partly true. The intelligibility and
accessibility of reality are indeed dependent on, but not completely
determined by, language as ‘spoken speech’. What we see and understand
depends also on the body’s passage through the world, a passage that is
different for every individual, for nobody occupies and traverses exactly the
same space and time as somebody else. Even though the world is thoroughly
permeated by sedimented meanings, the individual’s specific passage
through the world cannot but inflect the meaning of what s/he sees and
understands. In short, what we see and understand is not only a reflection of
‘spoken speech’; it is also a result of the body’s intentionality.
The Postmodern Viewpoint of Lyotard

However, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account raises questions as
well. His account of the intentional and expressive body tends to neglect
the ambivalence of sensibility. Sensibility is not only an enabling condition
of the body; it is also a constraining condition. It enables perception and
emotion, intentional and expressive conduct, attunement to and commu-
nication with the world and others. But sensibility also constrains the body,
for a sentient body is an affectable body, that is, a body capable of being
affected and moved by its surroundings. Sensibility in the sense of
213
affectability is a condition of non-intentional, heteronomous and more or

less vulnerable openness to the surrounding world. Affectability implies
vulnerability because the body may be overwhelmed by what affects it.
And this vulnerability of the body in turn implies that the capacity of
expression may break down. To be overwhelmed by what affects me more
often than not means that I am incapable of expressing or articulating what
affects me.
Because of his focus on the intentional and expressive body Merleau-
Ponty neglects the other side of sensibility, that is, sensibility as a condition
of affectability. His phenomenological account of the body in a sense
overestimates those aspects of embodied existence that Butler under-
estimates, namely intentionality and expression. In order to redress this
inbalance I will turn to Lyotard’s account of the body.
In his later work, especially The Inhuman and Postmodern Fables,

Lyotard develops an anthropology of finitude in which the notion of
affectability – he also uses the neologism passibility (passibilité) – plays a
central role. His anthropology starts from the standard observation that
humans are not born human as, for instance, cats are born cats (Lyotard,
1991: p. 3). Infants lack language, common reason, locomotion. In fact, they
lack almost everything that is considered to be typically or essentially
human. From Aristotle onwards, this initial inhumanness or lack of
humanness has mostly been interpreted either as a potentiality which will
develop into human maturity, or as a first nature which will be
compensated or superseded by a second acquired nature, i.e. culture.
Though these teleological interpretations are still popular, twentieth-
century continental philosophy has supplied a more sophisticated inter-
pretation along dialectical or hermeneutical lines. Instead of the essential-
ism inherent in the developmental models which take humanness as their
telos, it reminds us ‘that what is proper to humankind is its absence of
defining property, its nothingness, or its transcendence’ (Lyotard, 1991: p.
4). However, essentialist and non-essentialist anthropology have the
humanistic gesture of ‘reconciliatory speculation’ in common: the hetero-
geneity of the inhuman and human is harmonized without leaving any
remainder (Lyotard, 1991: p. 4). Resisting the harmonizing gesture of
humanism, Lyotard’s anthropology of finitude starts from the hypothesis,
reminiscent of the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan, that the
initial inhumanness persists in adulthood as an unharmonizable remainder
haunting and agitating the soul.8
What does that mean? In order to understand Lyotard’s anthropology of
finitude we have to take a closer look at his account of sensibility, which in
turn is based on an analysis of the sublime. The latter is a privileged topos
or even paradigm of Lyotard’s conception of sensibility. As Lyotard draws
on Kant’s exposition of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment I will
summarize first Kant’s conception of the sublime.
214
Kants defines the sublime as ‘the absolutely great’, as that which is in

every respect and ‘beyond every comparison great’ (Kant, 1974: p. 91).
Perception of something sublime, for instance the overpowering greatness
of nature, gives rise to ambivalent, contradictory feelings. That is because,
according to Kant, we are capable of an idea but not of a representation of
the absolute. Perception of something sublime arouses on the one hand a
feeling of pain because the faculty of imagination (Einbildungskraft) is
incapable of rendering a representation (Darstellung) of the sublime and
on the other hand also a feeling of pleasure because the sublime reminds
us of the limitless power of reason (Vernunft), that is, the faculty of ideas.
We are incapable of providing a representation of the absolute (the
sublime), but we do have the capacity to think the absolute, in other words,
to have an idea of the absolute. Hence the sublime in Kant is a sign of what
traditionally is considered to be the quintessence of human existence,

namely the combination of finitude and infinitude, of an animal nature and
a godlike nature. As creatures who are dependent on the senses we are
finite, while as creatures of reason we are capable of absolute freedom and
independence.
In his reading of Kant Lyotard prefers to stress the critical aspect of
Kant’s philosophy as opposed to the systematic aspect. Not the Kant who
lays out his philosophy as an integrated system but the Kant who
radicalizes duality to heterogeneity is the Kant Lyotard sympathizes with.
From the latter viewpoint the experience of the sublime indicates not so
much the classic dualism of finite sensibility and infinite reason as the
irreducible heterogeneity of human faculties. The shift from dualism to
heterogeneity implies the relinquishment of unifying or reconciliatory
strategies. In The Inhuman and Postmodern Fables Lyotard draws two
related consequences from this reading of the sublime. First, the faculty of
reason should not be interpreted any more as the faculty which overcomes
or compensates the finiteness of the senses, of embodiment in general.
What the senses – in collaboration with imagination – fail to grasp or
conceive is not recuperated in thought; rather, it is registered as an
irrecoverable, inarticulable feeling which precisely for that reason incites us
to think. Second, the failure of the senses and imagination attests to fact
that the body is not necessarily attuned to what affects it. Lyotard takes his
distance from the romantic belief in nature that has dominated Western
tradition from Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty and beyond, for it pictures
nature as ‘the congruence of mind and things’ or, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms,
‘the chiasmus of the eye and the horizon, a fluid in which the mind floats’
(Lyotard, 1991: p. 11), resulting in the one-sided conception of sensibility as
attunement.
It is along these lines that Lyotard, in the books mentioned above,
outlines an anthropology of finitude. The basic insight of this anthropology
is the ambivalence of sensibility. Sensibility not only means the attunement
215
of body and environment; on a more ‘secret’ (Lyotard, 1997: p. 242) and

primordial level it means affectability to the point of violation:
Sensation makes a break in an inert nonexistence. . . . What we call

life proceeds from a violence exerted from the outside on a lethargy.
The anima exists only as forced. The aistheton tears the inanimate
from the limbo in which it inexists, it pierces its vacuity with its
thunderbolt, it makes a soul emerge out of it.
(Lyotard, 1997: p. 243)
Lyotard conceives of the human condition as, primordially, a condition of

not being adapted to nature and not being at home in the world. This is the
condition of infancy: as infants we are helplessly exposed to a strange and
overwhelming environment while lacking the medium to articulate what

affects us. As noted before, according to Lyotard the condition of infancy
is a lasting one that is never integrated or overcome by the acquired
adaptation, articulateness and rational composure of maturity.
What are the consequences of this conception of sensibility with respect
to the relation of body and language? Lyotard’s anthropology of finitude
radicalizes Merleau-Ponty’s account of this relation. Like Merleau-Ponty,
Lyotard argues for the inseparability of body and language, but whereas
the former stresses the body’s capacity of expression, the latter emphasizes
the significance of its breakdown.9 For if sensibility is also, and primor-
dially, a condition of unmasterable and vulnerable openness to excesses of
affection, then the passage from sensation to articulation is not guaranteed.
The excess of affection, the ‘too much’ of input, causes a short circuit of the
passage. The capacity to process and articulate what affects me breaks
down. This state of affairs is comparable to what Freud calls primary
repression. Something has happened, but the event has not been processed
and integrated in the framework of experience. The feeling of pain and
confusion evoked by the event is repressed and its cause – the event – is
forgotten or, rather, remains unknown because it never became part of
one’s knowledge or experience in the first place. But what is repressed
returns to haunt us: the soul remains hostage to the irrecoverable and
hence inarticulable feelings evoked by the ‘too much’ of affection.
According to Lyotard it is ‘the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to
venture to bear witness’ to this anguish of the soul (Lyotard, 1991: p. 7).
Lyotard distinguishes between what one could call authentic articulation
– where the term ‘articulation’ refers to what happens in writing, thinking,
literature and the arts – and ordinary or inauthentic articulation; a
distinction that is not unlike Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between ‘speaking
speech’ and ‘spoken speech’. Ordinary articulation conforms to established
rules and concepts on the basis of which representations of reality are
constructed, whereas authentic articulation is experimental and receptive:
216
instead of conforming to set rules it tries to find its rule and to leave space
for what is un(re)presentable.10 Like ‘speaking speech’ authentic articula-
tion is inseparable from the body, but in Lyotard’s case this means that it
requires suffering:
Thinking and suffering overlap. Words, phrases in the act of writing,

the latent nuances and timbres at the horizon of a painting or a
musical composition as it’s being created (you’ve said this yourselves)
all lend themselves to us for the occasion and yet slip through our
fingers. . . . If you think you’re describing thought when you describe
a selecting and tabulating of data, you’re silencing truth. Because data
aren’t given, but giveable, and selection isn’t choice. Thinking, like
writing or painting, is almost no more than letting a giveable come
towards you. . . . If this suffering is the mark of true thought, it’s

because we think in the already-thought, in the inscribed. And
because it’s difficult to leave something hanging in abeyance or take
it up again in a different way so what hasn’t been thought yet can
emerge and what should be inscribed will be.
(Lyotard, 1991: pp. 18–20)
Authentic articulation and ‘speaking speech’ are both creative, but whereas
the potential of the latter arises from the body’s indefinite power of
expression, the former has the body’s vulnerable affectability as its source.
Not the capacities of a body-subject in tune with the surrounding world but
rather the receptivity of a body-soul forever haunted by the ‘sublime
breakdowns’ resulting from an excess of affection is what conditions
authentic articulation. The suffering authentic articulation requires may be
described as the endurance of patient irresoluteness, waiting till ‘what
doesn’t yet exist, a word, a phrase, will emerge’ (Lyotard, 1991: p. 19); or as
the pain of lacking the means of articulation to express what urges,
demands, needs to be expressed, a pain that inhabits us since infancy.
Conclusion: The Speaking Embodied Subject

What can be inferred from the three accounts with respect to the speaking
embodied subject? What are the ingredients of an adequate conception of
this subject? By way of conclusion I will discuss the most convincing
ingredients the three accounts provide. I will start with an outline of
Merleau-Ponty’s contribution as his work is the first groundbreaking
philosophical reflection on embodiment, preparing the way for others,
including Lyotard and Butler.
An abolutely indispensable ingredient is Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitation
of the sensible body. His conception of the body overcomes the one-
sidedness of traditional epistemology. Contra Descartes, Kant and Husserl,
217
Merleau-Ponty shows that the most primordial level of experience is

embodied perception and not pure consciousness. Instead of merely being
the fallible instrument which the mind makes use of in its quest for
knowledge, the sensible body is basic to all knowledge because it opens up
and familiarizes us with a meaningful world. Without the frames of
reference which bodily engagement with the world accords us the mind
would lose its orientation. Of course, the body can be instrumentalized and
objectified, but at the primordial level of our experience the body is not an
object or an instrument; it is a body-subject. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of
embodied perception also undermines the subject–object dichotomy of
traditional epistemology. Perception is not the act of a discrete subject
separated from the objects it perceives. The percipient and perceived are
together in the same field that forms the background against which the
perceived object stands out. The field embracing perceiving subject and
perceived object delimits the horizon that opens up a perceptual field. It
enables perception and cannot itself be the object of perception. Hence the
subject–object dichotomy is transformed into a distinction that pre-
supposes the existence of a field (a world) within which the distinction
becomes possible at all.
Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitation of the sensible body is ontologically
relevant as well. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty distances himself from the
idealism of Husserlian and Kantian philosophy because it reduces the
world to the work of the constituting subject. Replacing the constituting
subject by the body-subject has the very important ontological implication
that perceived objects lose the status of appearances. According to
Merleau-Ponty, embodied perception reaches a reality beyond appear-
ances. Because we always already move around in an environment with
which we are in constant pre-reflective contact, embodied perception
opens up a world we spontaneously and without doubt consider real. The
ontological turn that phenomenology takes with Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty consists in the acceptance of a necessary ontological presupposition,
i.e. the reality or givenness of the world. From the outset the body-subject
is a subject situated in the world.
This ontological turn is in a sense radicalized in Lyotard’s anthropology
of finitude. His notion of affectability suggests that the existence of the
embodied subject is not so much co-extensive with the existence of the
world – no subject without world and no world without subject – but rather
totally dependent on a violently affecting exteriority that forces it into life.
More radical than Merleau-Ponty’s undermining of the epistemological
autonomy of the mind and ontological independence of the subject,
Lyotard’s anthropology points to an ontological heteronomy and finiteness
that may be compensated but never overcome by the speaking embodied
subject. In traditional philosophy, including Heidegger’s in this case,
finiteness has always been understood in reference to mortality. That
218
human existence can only have an end if it has a beginning is an insight that
is either ignored, obscured or repressed. Lyotard’s work, however, can be
understood as one of the few philosophical reflections on the radical
finiteness entailed by natality. Keeping in mind the physical realities of
birth one can indeed say, with Lyotard, that ‘life proceeds from a violence
exerted from the outside on a lethargy’ (Lyotard, 1997: p. 243). The
traumatic beginning of human life entails a radical, that is, unmasterable
finiteness. Because of its excessiveness it does not and cannot become part
of our experience, but the heteronomy and violence of the beginning do
leave indelible traces in the body-subject: the susceptibility to over-
whelming ‘sublime’ affections. Whereas Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject
exemplifies the traditional notion of masterable finiteness – the limits of
perception (experience, knowledge) are transgressable till we die –
Lyotard’s notion of affectability implies an unmasterable finiteness.

Unmasterable because we are never prepared for what overwhelms us; the
‘sublime event’ always overtakes us, disrupting the frames of reference
built by experience. Underneath the reliant composure and ‘at-home-ness’
of the embodied subject in the world lurks the vulnerable affectability of
the infant, thrown into a world that will never completely lose its
strangeness and forever incapable of expressing, that is, mastering, the
trauma of its beginning.
Lyotard’s anthropology of finitude draws attention to an aspect of the
relation of body and language that is overlooked by Merleau-Ponty and
Butler. Whereas the latter two tend to grant the processes of articulation a
certain infinity, Lyotard stresses the finiteness of (authentic) articulation.
In Merleau-Ponty it is the body’s indefinite power of expression that seems
to guarantee the never-ending and permanently available possibility of
articulation. In Butler the iterability of (institutionalized) language
performs the same function. In Lyotard as well, there is this possibility, but
only in so far as articulation conforms to the established rules and concepts
of (institutionalized) language. Authentic articulation, however, is finite.
Here again, it is important to note that the finiteness of articulation
Lyotard thematizes does not so much refer to certain limits or bounds as to
a certain unmasterability of the process of articulation. Authentic
articulation is not the will to express something but a patient irresoluteness,
not the searching for the right words but a waiting for a word or a phrase
to emerge, not so much the production as the reception of new meaning. It
is the persistent and painful frustration of failure, of lacking words, of not
being able to get to the heart of the matter, that underlies ordinary
articulation.
Last but not least, Butler’s account introduces a political perspective that
is missing in both Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body-subject and
Lyotard’s anthropology of finitude. Butler and Merleau-Ponty share a
sophisticated notion of experience that rejects not only the empiricist idea
219
of sense data but also the Kantian idea of a sensible manifold that has to
be given meaning by a disembodied consciousness. The world we have
access to is an already meaningful, that is, interpreted, world. Experience is
always mediated by the signifying conventions and practices of ‘spoken
speech’ that interpret the world. However, only Butler realizes that
language, exactly because it is a social institution, is a political force.
Butler’s account introduces the political viewpoint of discursive power that
is missing in the other two accounts.
Power is mostly attributed to people, individuals or groups, and
associated with the effects of prohibition and repression. Butler, however,
inspired by Foucault, introduces a more sophisticated and illuminating
notion of power. Power is discursive, that is, located in the conventions that
constitute and regulate discourses and discursive practices. Discursive
power is productive and exclusionary. It is productive in the sense that the

signifying conventions that interpret the world as it were produce reality.
The sedimented grid of signifying conventions mediates and partly enables
our sense of reality. Yet in so far as it is productive, discursive power is also
and at the same time exclusionary. The signifying conventions cannot but
introduce a specific interpretation, a specific semantic construction of
reality, thereby excluding other interpretations. As our sense of reality, of
what is meaningful, is connected with what we consider intelligible and
normal, the power inherent in signifyng conventions produces the
intelligible and the normal while excluding the unintelligible and
deviant.
The notion of discursive power illuminates a state of affairs that is often
not acknowledged in accounts working with the traditional notion of
power, namely that apparently neutral aspects of human life, i.e. our sense
of the real and the intelligible, are thoroughly permeated by power. In
Butler’s account the intelligibility of words and actions is not simply a
matter of making use of sedimented conventions and practices, but rather
of complying with more or less powerful conventions and practices. This
political perspective highlights the exclusionary force of, especially,
hegemonic conventions and practices. Failure to comply with hegemonic
conventions and practices results not only in unintelligibility but in social
exclusion, in what Butler calls ‘abjection’: the unlivable and uninhabitable
zones of social life populated by those who do not enjoy the status of
subject (Butler, 1993: p. 3) and do not qualify as ‘fully human’ (Butler,
1993: p. 16). Butler’s notion of discursive power elucidates how our sense
of the real may very well be an effect of compelling norms, as the binary
view of gender exemplifies. Those who fail to comply with the hegemonic
convention of binary gender and the underlying compelling practice of
heterosexuality are indeed victims of social exclusion in many parts of the
world. Thus, the notion of discursive power is an indispensable ingredient
of the conception of the speaking embodied subject. Without this notion it
220
would lack the critical perspective that enables the analysis of lived
experience as permeated by the exclusionary force of powerful signifying
conventions and practices.
University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Notes
1 I am referring to the enormous popularity of the research questions and findings
of the life sciences. There are many examples of research topics – the human
genome project, brain research, evolution theory – that not only incite the
popular imagination but also, increasingly, attract the attention of philosophers,
social scientists and psychologists.
2 I will mention only two exemplary collections which prove my point. Both Body
and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (edited by Donn Welton, 1998) and
Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture (edited by
Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 1999), apart from being excellent collections,
are lacking in contributions which explicitly deal with the relation of body and
language. Maybe even more noteworthy is the same state of affairs in the many
books on the body from a feminist perspective which have appeared since
approximately 1990.
3 My discussion of Butler’s constructivism is mainly based on Bodies that Matter
because that book provides the most sophisticated and sustained argument for
the constructivist claim.
4 Butler is not alone in arguing against the assumption that binary sex/gender is
a natural given. Thomas Laqueur (1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) also
provide convincing arguments for the thesis that the binary view of sex/gender
is a construction from the viewpoint of, respectively, the history of science and
contemporary biological and medical research.
5 Whereas Husserl’s phenomenology continues the Kantian subject–object
dichotomy by taking pure consciousness as constitutive of the world, both
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty undermine this dichotomy by focussing their
attention on neglected questions concerning the ontological status of human
beings. Both deny the primacy and the constitutional function of (pure)
consciousness. Instead they emphasize practical engagement in everyday
existence (Heidegger) and embodied perception (Merleau-Pony) as the primary
form of human understanding and experience. In line with this transformation
they elaborate an ontological reinterpretation of the phenomenological key
concept of intentionality. Instead of intentional consciousness as a self-enclosed
sphere with objects within it, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty emphasize the
openness of human existence that is always already (engaged) in the world.
6 See Butler, 1988 and 1989.
7 In response to critical remarks concerning her concept of the subject, Butler
admits that ‘the category of “intention”, indeed, the notion of “the doer”, will
have its place, but this place will no longer be “behind” the deed as its enabling
source’ (in Benhabib et al., 1995: p. 134). Apart from stating that the intentional
subject is ‘neither fully determined nor radically free to instrumentalize
language as an external medium’ (in Benhabib et al., 1995: p. 135), she does not
explain, here or elsewhere, where and how we are to locate and understand the
(limited) place and function of intentionality within the context of her
conception of language.
221
8 Lyotard’s anti-humanism is politically motivated. He considers the harmonizing
tendencies of humanism dangerous in so far as they neutralize and totalize the
contingent heterogeneity of the human world in a meaningful whole, thereby
opening the door to the closed systems of totalitarian politics we came to know
so well in twentieth-century Europe. Humanism was an active force in the
production of the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity, those utopian blueprints of a
better future that ended in Auschwitz and the Gulag. Lyotard’s apprehensions
with respect to dangers of a politically naive humanism may have some
application to Merleau-Ponty’s work. According to Fred Evans one can detect
a ‘teleological and totalizing (though open-ended) notion of unity in Phenomen-
ology of Perception’ (Evans, 2000: p. 258).
9 An extensive argument for the inseparability of body and language (or thought)
can be found in ‘Can Thought go on without a Body?’, in Lyotard, 1991: pp.
8–23.
10 An early discussion of this distinction can be found in ‘Réponse à la question:
qu’est-ce que le postmoderne?’, in Lyotard, 1988: pp. 9–28. The distinction

between ordinary and authentic articulation is discussed in terms of, respec-
tively, realism or an aesthetic of the beautiful versus avant-gardism or an
aesthetic of the sublime.
References
Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla and Fraser, Nancy (1995) Feminist
Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York/London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1988) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Yale French Studies 172: 519–31.
Butler, Judith (1989) ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A
Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’, in Jeffner
Allen and Iris Marion Young (eds) The Thinking Muse, Bloomington, Indian-
apolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New
York/London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1998) ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith
Butler’ by Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins, Signs, 23 (2): 275–86.
Evans, Fred (2000) ‘Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, and the Basis of Political Judgment’,
in Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowski (eds) Rereading Merleau-Ponty:
Essays Beyond the Continental–Analytic Divide, Amherst NY: Humanity
Books.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction
of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books.
Kant, Immanuel (1974 (1799)) Kritik der Urteilskraft, Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag.
Laqueur, Thomas (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1988) Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Paris:
Galilée.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991 (1988)) The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1997, (1993)) Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
222
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1995 (1945)) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith, New York/London: Routledge.
Weiss, Gail and Fern Haber, Honi (eds) (1999) Perspectives on Embodiment: The
Intersections of Nature and Culture, New York/London: Routledge.
Welton, Donn (ed.) (1998) Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Oxford/
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
223

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Body and Language: Butler,

logical viewpoint of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the postmodernist view-

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

work seemed the natural starting-point not only because it combines a

The Poststructuralist Viewpoint of Butler

which we perceive and understand reality. In more specific terms, the

that we cannot know reality as it is in itself: we can only know it as it

other entity in reality is constructed by language. But matters are more

contextual shifts of meaning, the process of citation is a process which

the desired transformation because we do not control the future course of

its necessary condition. The equation of accessibility with intelligibility has

epistemological argument is ontologically reductive in that it results in a

The Phenomenological Viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty

If we want to fill in the ontological gaps in the poststructuralist viewpoint,

biological entity, the biological dimension is transcended by the intention-

representing a meaning external to them. Speech consists of linguistic

were from scratch. Expressive gestures presuppose and make use of an

a system of sedimented and, hence, iterable signifying conventions and

of reality needs to be amended as well. According to Butler, language as the

The Postmodern Viewpoint of Lyotard

affectability is a condition of non-intentional, heteronomous and more or

In his later work, especially The Inhuman and Postmodern Fables,

Kants defines the sublime as ‘the absolutely great’, as that which is in

traditionally is considered to be the quintessence of human existence,

of body and environment; on a more ‘secret’ (Lyotard, 1997: p. 242) and

Sensation makes a break in an inert nonexistence. . . . What we call

Lyotard conceives of the human condition as, primordially, a condition of

overwhelming environment while lacking the medium to articulate what

Thinking and suffering overlap. Words, phrases in the act of writing,

towards you. . . . If this suffering is the mark of true thought, it’s

Conclusion: The Speaking Embodied Subject

Merleau-Ponty shows that the most primordial level of experience is

Lyotard’s notion of affectability implies an unmasterable finiteness.

power is productive and exclusionary. It is productive in the sense that the

University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

qu’est-ce que le postmoderne?’, in Lyotard, 1988: pp. 9–28. The distinction

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