The Body in Biography

Abstract

This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which subjectivity, language and body are related, the paper examines the writing of the body in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, drawing attention to the stylistic means by which bodily drives are configured. It concludes by suggesting that because the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of articulation, the only way in which the biographer is able to convey the embodied life of the subject is through what Nietzsche calls the ‘felt text’.