Corpus corporum (Nancy)

Latin: "corpus of corpora"; literally "body of bodies" but operatively "a collection of collections." Nancy's name (Corpus 155) for the body without organic-functional unity — zoned, acephalic and aphallic, "discontinuous, fragmentary, part of the logic of a non-unity" (C II 100). The body is "a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions. Heads, hands and cartilage, burnings, smoothnesses, spurts, sleep, digestion, goose-bumps, excitation, breathing, digesting, reproducing, mending, saliva, synovia, twists, cramps, and beauty spots. . . a corpus corporum, whose unity remains a question for itself" (C 155).

Key Points

  • Deliberate category-mixing: the canonical enumeration at C 155 mixes nouns (heads, hands) and verbs (burning, digesting), anatomical parts and first-person activities, third-person observables and first-person experiences. Per Morin Ch 3 §2 (p. 91), this is not a confusion but a deliberate strategy: Nancy is refusing to grant Leib / Körper a stable distinction because the body is neither living-as-Husserlian-Leib (which would give it organic unity) nor extended-as-Cartesian-Körper (which would give it strict delimitation).
  • Acephalic and aphallic: C 15 — the body is "acephalic and aphallic in every sense [or direction]." No head as centre of organisation; no phallus as principle of difference / signification. The body has no totality, no functions in the Aristotelian sense, no finality.
  • Zoned, not organised (C II 100; Rethinking Corpus 83): the zones of the body are "distinctions, differentiations" — not coherent assemblage but "chaotic heaping up." Freud's erogenous zones (Three Essays on Sexuality) provide the model: any region of skin or mucous membrane can become a zone; the body is zoned through and through.
  • Refusal of corps propre: per Morin Ch 3 §2 (p. 92), Nancy refuses the phenomenological notion of body proper (corps propre) as the locus of "Property itself" — a substance that belongs only to itself. The body proper, for Nancy, "expel[s] the thing we desired" (C 5). The corpus is "always an 'object,' a body ob-jected precisely against the claim of being a body-subject" (C 29).
  • The radical Leib / Körper blurring: Morin's diagnostic in Ch 3 §2 — Nancy deliberately blurs the phenomenological distinction between the living body (Leib) and the body as observable extension (Körper). This is "completely foreign to phenomenological analyses." Ian James's reading that "Nancy's thinking 'cannot be understood without reference to' phenomenology" is, per Morin (Ch 3 fn 10), wrong; the corpus is structurally non-phenomenological.

Details

Why the radical reading matters

Per Morin Ch 3, the corpus corporum is the consequence of Nancy's redeployment of partes extra partes (the extra as place-of-differentiation, not Cartesian void). If bodies are partes extra partes through and through, then "the body" is not a unified organism but a collection of collections — and this deliberately refuses the phenomenological Leib-structure.

The radicality is precisely what marks Nancy's distance from MP. MP keeps the lived body as the third irreducible notion (the unum-quid); Nancy refuses even this third-notion as still too unified. The corpus corporum is body-as-corpus-without-third-notion — body as the literal collection.

Connection to L'intrus

Nancy's L'intrus (2000) — the account of his heart transplant — is the autobiographical anchor for the corpus corporum reading. Per Morin Ch 3 §1, L'intrus shows that the body is always already stranger to itself; the intruder (illness, organ-graft, screws-in-the-hip, plates-in-the-groin) is not an event befalling a previously-whole body but the most proper state of the body. Nancy's enumerative "I am" at C 170 — "I am the illness . . . I am the cancerous cell and the grafted organ . . . I am these screws in my hip . . . I am becoming like a science-fiction android" — is the literary performance of the corpus corporum.

Connection to thinking

Per Morin Ch 6 §4 and the weight-of-thought reading, thinking itself is a "thing among things" — a quelconque in Nancy's sense. So thought belongs to the corpus corporum as one of its zones. This is what makes Nancy's materialism radical: not a reduction of thinking to matter, but the inclusion of thinking within the corpus as one of its singular events.

Connections

  • follows from Nancy's redeployment of partes extra partes (the extra as place-of-differentiation).
  • deliberately refuses phenomenological body schema / corps propre / Leib-as-living-unity.
  • contrasted with MP's lived body / unum-quid — both refuse Cartesian dualism, but MP keeps the third-notion-as-unity; Nancy refuses.
  • autobiographical anchor at L'intrus (Nancy 2000) — see Diane Perpich, "Corpus Meum" (Hypatia 20.3, 2005, 83).
  • connected to whateverness-quelconque — each zone of the corpus is quelconque (indeterminate-but-concrete).
  • connected to inorganic-body-of-sense — the corpus is the body of which the body of sense is the broader articulation.
  • connected to melee-nancy — the corpus is the figure that holds together (without unifying) the mêlée of zones.
  • refuses anthropologism's body-as-organism (Brunschvicg / Sartre / Kant-as-Brunschvicg).
  • deployed at C 5, 15, 27, 29, 39–41, 91–93, 97, 101, 132–33, 143, 155, 170, 199; C II 100; MM 33, 79.

Open Questions

  • Is the deliberate category-mixing at C 155 sustainable across the philosophical literature? Most commentators (Ian James included) read Nancy's corpus as still recoverable within a phenomenological frame. Morin's reading (Ch 3 fn 10) explicitly disagrees.
  • What is the relation between the corpus corporum and Deleuze-Guattari's "body without organs" (BwO)? Both refuse the organic functional whole; the structural overlap is significant but the philosophical underpinnings (Spinozistic for D-G; partes extra partes + Derridean différance for Nancy) differ.
  • Does the corpus corporum underwrite a politics of les gens (singular plurality) rather than das Volk (people-as-one)? Per Ch 7 §1 of Morin, yes; the connection to Being Singular Plural is direct.

World-Scaled Extension (Nancy 2020)

In *The Fragile Skin of the World* VII (the title essay), Nancy extends the corpus corporum figure to the world-scale: the world is "the factorial of all of our skins" (VII §5). The figural-architectonic move makes three connected claims:

  • The world is a world-scaled corpus corporum: the world's "body" — to the extent it has one — is not a unified animal-body (Stoic Zoon) nor a machined body (mechanist) but a collection-of-collections-of-skins. The figure scales the corpus-as-collection-of-zones (C 155) up from the individual body to the world.
  • The skin is the organ of heteronomy: where the individual corpus is acephalic and aphallic (no centre, no principle of difference-as-totalization), the world-scaled corpus has no skin of its own — only the interlacing of all individual skins. See fragile-skin-of-the-world for the full figure.
  • Fragility as positive structural feature: the corpus corporum at world-scale is more fragile than skins because it has no skin of its own. Sealing the pores (a world-machine closure) would asphyxiate the world.

The 2020 deployment confirms that the corpus corporum is not exclusively an individual-body concept; it is a figural-architectonic whose proper scale ranges from the individual to the world. The same operational features — acephalic/aphallic, zoned-not-organised, non-Cartesian extra-as-place-of-differentiation — extend to the world-scale.

Sources