Touched by Touching: Toward a Carnal Hermeneutics

This chapter studies the practice of carnal hermeneutics. A carnal hermeneutics would find ever new ways of showing how the imagination inhabits people's bodies, from the pores of their skin to the ways they schematize their dynamic corporeality and their engagements with others. The erotic spawns some of the most telling ways, but there is no place for correctness here. The flesh is equally a site of lawless excitation and incitement—pain as well as pleasure, excess, and violence. If it has a transcendental face, a carnal hermeneutics would ask the question: How is all this possible? Perhaps taking a cue from Sigmund Freud, it would ask about the drive to destruction, death, security, and release from stress in addition to the search for pleasure—Thanatos as well as Eros—and all that lies in between.