Oda Davanger - Tracing Inscriptions: Can Signs be Embodied?

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Oda Davanger Abstract: The paper, “Tracing Inscriptions: Can Signs be Embodied?” analyzes the linguistic implications of what it means to theorize bodies as inscripted, particularly in relation to intentionality. In critical phenomenology, the notion of embodied inscription has been important to investigate the effects of agency on gendered and racialized bodies, as theorized by Young and Fanon in pointing out the shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The author identifies structuralist tendencies in Merleau-Ponty that has survived critical phenomenology’s double critique and appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s texts. The author does so by invoking Jacques Derrida’s critique of Saussurian structuralism, by positing inscription as a form of Althusserian interpellation, and analyzing the body as trace instead of sign. The author asks, if there are strucutralist premises in critical phenomenology, what might the critique of such structuralism provoke in terms of its analysis of otherness? For it is not inscription alone that leads to inhibited intentionality, for as black existentialism and feminist phenomenology has pointed out, whiteness and maleness are likewise inscriptions. Analyzing the body as trace rather than sign interestingly reinvigorates Derrida’s critique of Saussure’s privileging of speech over writing, and presence over absence, in new gendered terms. Furthermore, this analysis of inscription opens the door to historicity, to a combined notion of language, temporality and otherness that expands the Saussurian structuralism within Merleau-Ponty’s already temporal notion of habit. This paper provides an opportunity to find approaches to the ambiguity of embodied otherness and its effects as inhibited bodily and political movement. The alterity easily distinguishable in gender and race potentially reveals something about the human condition as inscribed altogether. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/