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CARNAL HERMENEUTICS AND POLITICAL THEORY
Body am I entirely and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the
body.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
The problem of the reality of the body is shown to be the central problem and upon its
solution everything else depends.
-- Gabriel Marcel
Words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the
institutions of the mind and spirit.
-- Giambattista Vico
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
-- T. S. Eliot
I. PROLOGUE
Carnal
hermeneutics
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has come of age. By making and cultivating the body as the socio-
political inter(dis)course, its arrival posts a sharp turning point in our thinking. As the body is
our familiar and primordial way of inhabiting and mediating the “parliament of things” both
human and nonhuman in the world, carnal hermeneutics celebrates what Pierre Bourdieu calls
“the performative magic of the social.”
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Ironically, however, the body has been an
“untouchable” and an abject subject in philosophy precisely because it is familiar and primordial.