Disintegrating Identities: Bodily Presence in Contemporary Writing

Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the transcendental subject, Roland Barthes' views about the death of the author and the theme of the end of Literature represent a breakup of new approaches to literary theory in the second half of the 20th century. This literary and theoretical 'complex'-in both senses of the word, as structural complication and as obstruction to critical reflection-reflected on the experience of historical traumatisation and the subsequent radical contestation of traditions of authoritative thought and autonomous aesthetics. The "Poetics of the Body," as suggested here, is an approach to describe and analyse contemporary ways which resist the paralysing effects of this global complex in literary criticism and cultural theory. The crucial question is here: "What configuration of human subjectivity is yet possible in the space between historical annihilation and literary self-assertion?" Taking J.M. Coetzee's Elisabeth Costello fictions as an example, we search for figures of the corporeal feeding into an on-going stream of "subjectivity" which does not depend on conceptual identity pools but rather expands into an ever growing human experience of exposedness to something outside the sphere of cognitive identification.