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narrator glimpses in the eyes of the dying men wounded by the writing of the Other. At least
the analysis of the system allows us to determine the variants and the different speeds and
rates of the machine that makes bodies the inscription of a text, and to ask ourselves for what
eye this writing, which cannot be read by its supports, is intended.
((144))
Mechanisms of incarnation
From the seventeenth-century movement that attracted Puritan reformers as well as jurists to
the medical theorists of the doctors who were known precisely as Physicians, a great ambition
arose: to produce a new history on the basis of a text." The myth of the Reformation is that the
Scriptures provide, in the midst of a corrupt society and a decadent Church, a model one can
use to re-form both society and the Church. A return to the origins, not only those of the
Christian West, but also that of the universe itself, to find a genesis giving a body to the
Logos and incarnating it so that it can once again but in a different way "become flesh." The
variants of this myth are found everywhere, in this time of Renascences, along with the
utopian, philosophical, scientific, political or religious conviction that Reason must be able to
establish or restore a world, and that it is no longer a matter of deciphering the secrets of an
order or a hidden Author, but of producing an order so that it can be written on the body of an
uncivilized or depraved society. Writing acquires the right to reclaim, subdue or educate
history.'2 It becomes a power in the hands of a "bourgeoisie" that substitutes the
instrumentality of the letter for the privilege of birth, a privilege linked to the hypothesis that
the world as it is, is right. Writing becomes science and politics, with the assurance, soon
transformed into an axiom of Enlightenment or revolution, that theory must transform nature
by inscribing itself on it. It becomes violence, cutting its way through the irrationality of
superstitious peoples or regions still under the spell of sorcery.
Printing represents this articulation of the text on the body through writing. The order thought
(the text conceived) produces itself as a body (books) which repeats it, forming paving stones
and paths, networks of rationality through the incoherence of the universe. The process later
becomes more widespread and diverse. At this point it is only the metaphor of the more
successfully rationalized techniques that later transform living beings themselves into the
printed texts of an order. But the fundamental idea is already present in this logos that
becomes books and in these books which the Age of Enlightenment thought would produce a
new history. It could also have as its symbol the "constitutions" that proliferate in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: they give the text the status of being "applicable" to
public or private bodies, of defining them and thus finding its effectiveness.
((145))
This grand mythical and reforming passion functions on the basis of three terms that
characterize it: first, a model or "fiction," i.e., a text; second, the instruments of its application
or writing, i.e., tools; third, the material which is both the support and the incarnation of the
model, i.e., a nature, essentially a flesh, which writing changes into a body. Using tools to
make a body conform to its definition in a social discourse: that is the movement. It sets out
from a normative idea whose vehicles are a code of economic exchanges or the variants of
this code presented by stories from the common legendary lore and by the new products of
scientific knowledge. At the beginning, there is a fiction determined by a "symbolic" system
that acts as a law, and thus a representation (a theater) or a fable (a "saying") of the body. That
is to say, a body is postulated as the signifier (the term) in a contract. This discursive image is
sup-posed to inform an unknown "reality" formerly designated as "flesh." The transition from
the fiction to the unknown that will give it a body is made by means of instruments that
multiply and diversify the unpredictable resistances of the body to be (con)formed. An
indefinite fragmentation of the apparatus is necessary in order to adjust and apply each of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]