For a long time in history since Platonic dualism, the “body” has been a site of oppression, a symbol of individual social status, and a metaphor for social concord or hierarchical unity. [1] In the Roman Empire, for example, sexuality is controlled with concerns about social order: “Stoic attitudes to marital intercourse deliberately stared past the possibility of erotic satisfaction to the grave and purposive gestures of the public man. . . . Even the marriage chamber was to be ‘a school of orderly behavior.’” [2] In addition, the bodies of the slaves in the Greco-Roman world became objects of economic property and of public execution. A discovery of a wall inscription from Puteoli suggests how the execution of slaves took place at the price of almost nothing. [3] This advertisement hints that slave bodies are at the mercy of masters and executed like waste in society. [4]

As Martin observed, the body has also played a role in determining individual social status in the ideology of the upper class in the Greco-Roman society. [5] The strong and healthy body is a symbol and an ideology for the upper class’ glorification and social control. [6] The other side of that ideology points to the oppression of the weaker bodies, who are mainly slaves or women. [7] Likewise, the use of the body as a strong metaphor for social body (social concord) was very popular in high culture in the Greco-Roman world as discussed earlier. [8] This metaphoric use of social body and its subsequent emphasis on “unity” or “concord” is a ruling ideology that cements the hierarchical social body. [9] A majority of scholars today read this dominant voice of hierarchical ideology as the background for Paul’s theology and ethics. [10] However, I will argue throughout my dissertation that Paul opposes this dominant, hierarchical voice by the counter-image of Christ crucified. Are slaves not humans – voiceless and invisible? Nevertheless, if we can read the Aesop traditions freshly, while keeping in mind this critiquing spirit, there is a voice of silence, a silent philosophy. [11] There are certain voices that call for change as we will see from popular or low culture and resistant Cynic philosophers such as Diogenes of Sinope (412-323 BCE). [12]

Given the intellectual history that I mentioned above, including both text (Greco-Roman world) and interpreters in history, our first postmodern figure, Derrida, arrives to critique logocentrism and a singular construction of meaning that fails to account for multiple contexts and an interaction of signifiers. [13] Meaning is not a given in the text but is negotiated, as he says: interpretation is “a knot of negotiation” full of “different rhythms, different forces, different differential vibrations of time and rhythm.” [14] Meaning is “technical and representative” as Derrida continues: [15]

All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself…….The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning…...This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and ideality of meaning.

Therefore, rejecting a singular notion of the body and the text, [16] Derrida introduces a différance connoting two things: to defer or to differ. Meaning should not be taken as permanent and each meaning should be different in contexts. Derrida states that “différance is the name we might give to the ‘active,’ moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science.” [17]

For Derrida deconstruction is possible because the written text is not a correct or genuine mirror of reality. Therefore, the search for a fixed meaning is an illusion. Rather, meaning, in its most faithful form that allows for a self-critical, humbling spirit, is a negotiation between readers, signifiers and contexts. [18] Derrida does not believe in one, fixed, universal meaning in any written text. [19] This critique is twofold. One is to deconstruct the text. Another is to revolutionize the concept of text, the boundary of the text, which includes written and unwritten texts such as cultural location. Not only is the written text deconstructed but its readers as well. The best term to account for his meaning search can be found in the neologism “différance.” [20] Hermeneutically, it is possible to pursue a multiple, complex meaning without claiming to have a single, universal truth/knowledge about the body. [21] More importantly, deconstruction itself is not a method but a spirit or meta-critique of logo-centrism. [22] In the end, deconstruction itself is not a purpose; Derrida’s ultimate interests lie in the vision for a just world, and the reconstruction of such a world based on more diversified views and contexts. [23]

Foucault, our second postmodern figure, is the first person to place the body at the center of our intellectual inquiry. [24] The old paradigm that Foucault rejects is the mechanical or dualistic, hierarchical view of the body based on unified, transcendental subjectivity. [25] With this old paradigm, science-driven Enlightenment establishes the body as an object while Platonic hierarchical dualism posits the body as a heavy burden and prison cell. However, Foucault, seeing the body as connected to a wide web of political and personal struggle, deplores the manipulation and oppression of human bodies by the hegemonic power of society. [26] For him, as McLaren points out, the body is “more than the locus of subjectivity; it is the very condition of subjectivity.” [27] In other words, his hermeneutic of body aims at re-covering the body from social control. For this goal, Foucault centers on knowledge, power and subjectivity. [28] His first period works show that knowledge is not neutral; production of knowledge becomes a tool for social control and legitimation: “the exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power.” [29] Then, in his second period works, Foucault turns to “power,” which he understands as a network operating through discourses, institutions, and other practices in culture. [30] Power exercises on human bodies: “What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act on the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it…Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.” [31] In his last period works, he moves to the question of subjectivity, and ethics. In the last works such as in “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” Foucault focuses on subjectivity that individuals may alter power relationships with the spirit of resistance against society’s unitary, hegemonic, disciplinary practices of power on individual bodies. [32] McLaren rightly points out Foucault’s hermeneutical shift to the importance of the human body as a site for resistance, transformation, and agency. [33]   

Our last postmodern figure, Ricoeur, advocating the hermeneutics of “balance, others, and intersubjectivity,” emphasizes the dialogical nature of text and reader in terms of balance, asserting that both text and reader play together in the making of meaning. [34] The text does not lose its intrinsic value or essence while the readers sit idly; but the reader must interact with the text because, for Ricoeur, “the task of philosophy is to avoid the skepticism that doubts everything while at the same time abandoning the ideal of total certainty.” [35] For Ricoeur, an important hermeneutical question concerns the question of “who: who speaks? Who acts? Who tells a story? And who is the subject of moral imputation?” [36] This is a mutual process between the text and reader. Neither dominates.

In this kind of creative tense-full relationship between the text and the reader, the centerpiece of hermeneutical process is the role of “others”: [37]

“The polysemy of otherness, . . . will imprint upon the entire ontology of acting the seal of the diversity of sense that foils the ambition of arriving at an ultimate foundation, characteristic of the cogito philosophies.” 

The role of “others” can be found in narrative, which is broadly defined to include discourses, personal stories, and others’ stories. [38] One’s identity or story is never one’s own; it is co-dependent and interrelated with that of others. This thought is made possible when Ricoeur conceives two sides of identity: an idem-identity (sameness, character) and an ipse-identity (self-affirmed identities, sense of selfhood, promise keeping). [39] Because personal identity is never one’s own but a mutual business, a narrative identity is formed from the dynamic relationship between an idem-identity and an ipse-identity. As Cohen succinctly put it: “So the dialectic of sameness and selfhood has two poles: character, where sameness and permanence of dispositions constitute selfhood; and promising, where selfhood is maintained in spite of change, or in the absence of sameness.” [40] An idem-identity is genetic and distinguishable over time, like character. However, in situations like a quagmire in life, Ricoeur introduces another aspect of identity by asking questions such as “Who am I?” (an ipse-identity, affirmed selfhood), “what should I do?” or “how can I be faithful or committed to a life of us and you?” The essential question is, Who am I in relation to you? Through this question, intersubjectivity comes in one’s own identity. Because of his balanced, others-oriented hermeneutics, Ricoeur’s ethics of “lived body” (corps propre) stands out as he put it: [41]  

“That is, of a body which is also my body and which, by its double allegiance to the order of physical bodies and to that of persons, therefore lies at the point of articulation of the power to act which is ours and of the course of things which belongs to the world order.”

In summary, each “postmodern” scholar has different hermeneutical or contextual concerns. Derrida is more concerned about the abusive use of the text as a weapon for imperial, dominant, hegemonic control of human life; Foucault throws sharp light on the condition of the body, analyzing social, political, philosophical control of the body in history. Ricoeur, dissatisfied with a single/narrow sense of discourse divided between the text and the reader, tries to overcome that gap both through a more balanced understanding of the text and through intersubjectivity. These three figures together shed new light on the body hermeneutics. First, they all critique a narrow sense of the community and of ethics by deconstructing the written text (Derrida), by de(re)constructing the body (Foucault) and by emphasizing the role of otherness in a narrative identity (Ricoeur).

However, Ricoeur, with his focus on “narrative” text, does not fully account for the voice of “others” from the marginalized or for unequal relationships in society. He considers somewhat naively “others” and personal identity as an individual level of reciprocity in human relationship, resembling the Aristotelian ethics of reciprocity. In other words, Ricoeur does not seriously analyze socio-economic, political or cultural aspects of identity and subjectivity, as contrasted with Foucault’s extensive analysis of the body and society. With this limit, however, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic anthropology based on the narrative identity awakens our sense of responsible ethics to the degree that human existence is never complete without others. Together with Derrida and Foucault, Ricoeur gives us a new eye to analyze the community, history, the text, and readers from a marginalized perspective. Often, the hermeneutical problem is that interpreters do not easily recognize the hidden, marginalized voice.