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it cannot be spoken, emerges on the surface of the body; it
is a written language. Put in a more straightforward way 
one needs to examine  pathology as embodied protest
 unconscious, inchoate, and counterproductive protest
without an effective language, voice, or politics, but protest
nonetheless .17
The problem of women s inability to express themselves
without being operated by the oppressive system of signification
and representation causes women to unconsciously resort
to speech-unmediated communication, to a language
which finds it hard even to be called a language  to bodily
inscription. The body-text manifests messages impossible
to correctly state linguistically. The most radical in its direct
instant violence and the most visibly surface-inscriptive
self-harm phenomenon is cutting in which the wounds
 speak, re-entering the social nexus from they first arose .18
sophical Reader, ed. D. Welton, Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford 1998,
p. 300.
17
S. Bordo,  The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity , [in:]
Writing on the Body. Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. K. Con-
boy, N. Medina and S. Stanbury, New York 1997, p. 97.
18
E. Casey,  The Ghost of Embodiment; On Bodily Habitudes ,
[in:] Body and Flesh. A Philosophical Reader, ed. D. Welton, Malden,
Massachusetts and Oxford 1998, p. 218.
At the cutting edge of language&
213
The act of harming oneself in which one is both the
passive object to be harmed, to be cut, and the one who
cuts, the one who looks and controls, confuses those very
positions and the categories they represent in their structural
contradictoriness. The status of self-harm as such is ambiguous
and contradictory as it is undeniably  simultaneously deadly
and life-giving .19 The processes of renewal, redemption
and healing as understood in our culture and within the
Christian heritage require violence, torture, suffering, direct
bodily invasions  the most potent example being Christ s
passion resulting in resurrection and redemption. The flow of
blood is symbolically related to purification. One needs also
remember the obvious yet important analogy of the outward
flow of blood and release of the tension, of bleeding s power
to visualize mental and emotional states with all its healing
clarity and symbolism.
As opposed to a harmful and victimizing popular
conviction that self-mutilation is a suicidal act, it is in fact
rather  a reentrance into a state of normality and  a morbid
act of regeneration .20 Rather than striving to destroy oneself
 the person who self-mutilates can be said in some ways to
be carrying out the very reverse of self-destructiveness .21
What self-mutilation brings about is the flow, the release,
in other words an expression into the outside; it breaks the
isolation of anxiety and exposes it in broad daylight still
19
M.J. Reineke, op. cit., p. 90.
20
A.R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modifi-
cation in Culture and Psychiatry, Baltimore and London 1996, p. 271.
21
G. Babiker and L. Arnold, The Language of Injury: Comprehending
Self-Mutilation, Malden and Oxford 1997, p. 7.
Michał Abel Pelczar
214
without verbalization. In this very breach, in the opening of
the inside to the outside, the subjects assert themselves and
 attempt to differentiate the self from the object world .22
This precisely might be the most appealing aspect of cutting
for women due to their object status within patriarchal
cultures and their frequent sense of alienation from the
cultural representation of a woman and a female body. The
feelings of powerlessness, numbness of depersonalization, the
sense of self-alienation, anxiety and anger23 often admitted
by women-cutters are vented in the act of self-mutilation.
The self-harmed body brings pleasure and solace as it
succumbs to cutting; it evokes a sense of a re-established
self, even if only fleetingly it  enables the person to reclaim
something of themselves .24 Self-mutilation might be an
embodied rebellion against the alienating (abstract and
unattainable) representation of femininity imposed on one s
experience of being a woman. As such it is an instance of
critique of the oppressive politics of male-defined femininity
by exposing the discontents of which it is symptomatic.
Cutting defies the patriarchal expectations towards femininity
as the
mutilation of the body is absolutely the opposite of what an
idealized woman is supposed to do: to make great efforts to be
attractive and perfect. In injuring her own body, a woman spoils
the thing which society both values and despises. Perhaps this
 spoiling expresses not just her self-hatred and despair, but also
22
A.R. Favazza, op. cit., p. 270.
23
As cutting is also a  way of releasing anger without hurting others ;
G. Babiker and L. Arnold, op. cit., p. 76.
24
Ibidem, p. 77.
At the cutting edge of language&
215
her protests at the contradictory expectations and perceptions
placed upon her, and so contains deliberately proud and angry
elements.25
Woman slashes the fetishized object of the male gaze; she
spoils it and she does it herself while she is not symbolically
legitimized to decide on her body and control it in any way
as the one symbolically endowed with power to leave the
mark, to punish and harm is male. The functionality and
therapeutic value of self-harm for the cutter might be lying
in the attempt to reclaim oneself, one s body. Self-mutilation
might be or seem effective when trying to re-define one s
body/self, to visualize one s own unease  the unease which
might not be fully conscious.
One more essential factor in this discussion needs
emphasizing  the effect of cutting, that is, the scar. Favazza
relates the functionality of cutting precisely to scars which
are its effect:
[s]elf-mutilation may also be therapeutic because of the
symbolism associated with the formation of scar tissue; scar
tissue indicates that healing has occurred. Thus, with a few
strokes of a razor the self-cutter may unleash a symbolic process
in which the sickness within is removed and the stage is set for
healing as evidenced by a scar.26
Scar is a visible sign of both the non-verbalized/unutterable
problem and of a healing one longs for. Scars manifest both
25
Ibidem, p. 40.
26
A.R. Favazza, op. cit., p. 280.
Michał Abel Pelczar
216
the violence of the healing process and the potential victory
as they
signify an ongoing battle and that all is not lost. As befits one
of nature s greatest triumphs, scar tissue is a magical substance,
a physiological and psychological mortar that holds flesh and
spirit together when a difficult world threatens to tear both
apart.27
Scars thus have a great positive potential as they undermine
the status of a woman as primarily a pleasure-giving esthetic
object for the male viewers but also as they
may provide  evidence to the person themselves that they can [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]