Strip-tease
Réginald Blanchet
The first bodily effect of language, its constitutive effect, is, one might say, "the body one has", that is to say that one veils. A civilisational invariant, clothing is the sign par excellence of humanity just as language and the prohibition of incest. Dress makes the speaking being : nudity is impossible. Laying bare [a mise à nu] is itself still a clothing, a covering of veils. In revealing itself, the speaking body can only ever veil itself again and again. It can only be nude, it is never naked.[1] Whether the nude is that of the athlete, that of the erotic invitation, that of the artistic achievement, or that of the naturist ecology or of pornographic gestures, it is in fact always discourse. As a social marker of his condition as a full citizen in Ancient Greece, the athlete's complete nudity in the palestra is the costume he wears as his adornment. The naked body here is synonymous with a properly shaped body. It is a garment custom-made from the flesh according to a precise pattern. It is the musculature, the stature and the harmony of the body's forms. The nude is thus always and everywhere in some way covered.
But by veiling itself, the speaking body reveals itself. What the garment conceals is also what it gives to be seen: whether it heavily exhibits or barely insinuates. The garment leads the gaze. It calls and forbids it, lures or gratifies it. The ultimate covering of the speaking body, nudity is therefore coextensive with the gaze. It is the function of the gaze. It is in this way the drive jouissance of the object gaze. The speaking body is, strictly speaking, only ever concerned with its nudity, that is to say, with the putting into play of its being-seen. It is a comic destiny, one might say, that of the speaking body caught from the start in the whirling "dance of the seven veils" that mythology tells us about and that is constantly renewed by the continual strip-tease to which its condition subjects it. He draws his jouissance from it. It is the drive, precisely the effect of saying in the body.
Translated by Linda Clarke
Reviewed by Eva-Sophie Reinhofer
References
[1] TN: Italicised words in English in the original.