Spectres of the Body

Maine: Spectres of the Body is a digital painting (original is 12” x 12” at 1200 dpi, printed on Moab Entrada Rag Bright).



Judith Butler, in her essay “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine,” writes:

Language itself cannot proceed without positing the body, and when it tries to proceed without positing the body, and when it tries to proceed as if the body were not essential to its own operation, figures of the body reappear in spectral and partial form within the very language that seeks to perform their denial. Thus, language cannot escape the way in which it is implicated in bodily life, and when it attempts such an escape, the body returns in the form of spectral figures whose semantic implications undermine the explicit claims of disembodiment made within language itself.