Notes
Introduction: Carnal Hermeneutics from Head to Foot
Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor
1. See Richard Kearney, âWhat Is Diacritical Hermeneutics?â in The Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, vol. 1, no. 1, ed. Nancy Moules (University of Calgary, 2011); âEros, Diacritical Hermeneutics, and the Maybeâ in Philosophical Thresholds: Philosophy Today, vol. 55, eds. Cynthia Willett and Leonard Lawlor (2001); and âDiacritical Hermeneuticsâ in Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalitĂ© hermĂ©neutique, eds. Andrew Wiercinski et al. (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2011).
2. See Anne Davenportâs âTranslatorâs Noteâ in the endnotes to ChrĂ©tienâs âFrom the Limbs of the Heart to the Soulâs Organs,â in this volume.
3. See Christina M. Gschwandtnerâs âTranslatorâs Noteâ in the endnotes to Falqueâs âThis Is My Body,â in this volume.
The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics
Richard Kearney
1. See our hermeneutic analysis of the other as alien, stranger and foreigner in our Introduction to Phenomenologies of the Stranger, eds. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011) and Hosting the Stranger, eds. Richard Kearney and James Taylor (New York: Continuum Press, 2011).
2. See Richard Kearney, âWhat Is Diacritical Hermeneutics?â in The Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, vol. 1, no. 1, especially notes 5 and 6. See also Paul Ricoeurâs hermeneutic analysis of Homeric recognition in The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
3. See Chapter 1, âIn the Moment: The Uninvited Guestâ in Richard Kearney, Anatheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). One might also mention here Jesusâ curing of the blind man where the senses of sight and touch are synesthetically crossed as well as his repeated post-resurrection acts of sharing food with his disciples, at Emmaus, at lake Galilee and Jerusalem, where his risen identity is revealed through âtasting and touching.â For a fuller treatment of the many literary and artistic renditions of Biblical and Gospel scenes of touching and tasting, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006) and Richard Kearney, Flesh: Recovering our Senses in an Age of Excarnation (forthcoming).
4. I am grateful to my brother Michael Kearney, for bringing this scene to my attention and the Buddhist image of the âco-arising of body and mindâ like âtwo sheaves of reeds.â See also Joanna Macy, in Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1991).
5. Aristotle, De Anima 2, 423. This references, as well as further citations of De Anima refer to the translation by J.A. Smith which is available both in print (London: Clarendon, 1931), and on the Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html. Citations include the book number (e.g., 2) and Bekker number (e.g., 423).
6. Aristotle, De Anima 2, 421.
7. Aristotle, De Anima 2, 418.
8. Aristotle, De Anima 2, 428.
9. See Jean-Louis ChrĂ©tienâs illuminating commentary on Aristotleâs claim that touch is the most universal of all the senses in an essay entitled âBody and Touchâ in The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 92â94. I am deeply indebted to ChrĂ©tienâs brilliant hermeneutic retrieval of Aristotleâs reading of the senses in De Anima, Book II, ch. 11, and also to John Panteleimon Manoussakis and Emmanuel Alloa for their recent innovative retrievals, both represented in this volume (see references in notes 10 and 21 below).
10. See commentary by ChrĂ©tien, âBody and Touch,â 95â96 and the fascinating reading by John Panteleimon Manoussakis of these same passages in the De Anima in âTouching,â part 3 of God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Aristotle notes that the fact that we perceive through the medium of touchânamely fleshââescapes usâ (Aristotle, De Anima 2, 423b) and this gives rise to various metaphorical readings of the fleshâas an air-envelope, membrane, watery second skin, etc. And, we might add, its very enigmatic character has provoked countless different philosophical readings including those cited and featured in this volume (see essays by ChrĂ©tien, Alloa, Manoussakis, Nancy, et al.). Given Aristotleâs revolutionary claim that âflesh is not the organ but the medium of touchâ (ibid.), and that all sensingâfrom top to bottomâis âmediated,â we have grounds for claiming that every act of human sensation, no matter how basic, is already an exercise in hermeneutic Verstehen-Befindlichket (to borrow Heideggerâs language from Being and Time). The hermeneutic as-structure is never absent. There is no escaping hermeneutics, even if one wanted to. Manoussakis develops Aristotleâs insight into touch in terms of a threefold distinction between âgrasp,â âcaress,â and âkissâ in line with contemporary phenomenological hermeneutics, while Alloa in his essay in this volumeââGetting into Touchââretraces the genealogical rapport between ancient Alexandrian hermeneutics and Aristotelian diagnostics.
11. ChrĂ©tien, âBody and Touch,â 85. It is also worth noting here that in a curiously enigmatic passage in the Metaphysics Theta, ch. 10, 1051b, 23â25, Aristotle speaks of apprehending the truth of something in terms of âtouchâ (thigein) and of ignorance in terms of a lack of âtouch,â or as we might say, being out of touch. And he goes on in Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072b, 21, to claim that âIt (mind) becomes thought by touching and thinking. . . .â It is important to note that the verb used for touching in the Metaphysics is thingangein while in the De Anima, it is haphĂȘ/haptesthai. I am grateful to my colleagues Thomas Sheehan, Arthur Madigan, and Erin Stackle for discussion of this passage.
12. ChrĂ©tien, âBody and Touch,â 87â90.
13. See the very insightful distinction between the infant mouth as os or as bucca in its first gestures of touching and tasting, Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2â122. Nancyâs phenomenological description of the bodyâs radical exposure to the other from birth is captured in his wonderful neologism âexpeausitionââthe exposition of skin to skin (ibid., 14 ff.). See also his essays in this volume, âMotion and Emotionâ and âEssential Skinâ in the chapter âRethinking Corpus,â where he speaks of the most basic epidermal responses of skin being, from the outset, both completely psychological and physiologicalâtwo forms of the same thing. It would be interesting to bring Nancyâs hermeneutics of âcorpusâ into dialogue with the recent work of philosophers engaged in more empirical-cognitive research, such as Catherine Malabou, Sean McGrath, and Evan Thompson, or with empirical psychologists like Matthew Fulkerson, The First Touch: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
14. Linguistics and psychoanalysis can also provide many interesting insights regarding the original relationship between proto-speech sensibility and speech proper. See in particular Roman Jacobsonâs intriguing analysis of the transition from infant âbabbleâ to speech (which influenced the hermeneutic phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Alloa) and Freudâs famous description of the childâs first acquisition of language as a synesthetic game of fort/da where the child touches a spool of cotton (pulling and pushing it out of vision) while pronouncing the words, âgone, back againâ (see Beyond the Pleasure Principle). It might be recalled here that Aristotle had already noted the proto-hermeneutic power of the voice in De Anima: âNot every sound made by an animal is voice . . . what produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughingâ (220b, 30).
15. Jean-Luc Nancy, âEssential Skin,â in this volume.
16. ChrĂ©tien, âBody and Touch,â 98.
17. Aristotle, De Anima 2, 428a.
18. ChrĂ©tien, âBody and Touch,â 98. On the question of hermeneutical...