Die Sprache ist eine Haut : Subjektivierung entlang versehrter Körpergrenzen in der Gegenwartsliteratur

Abstract

The literature of the 90s confronts us with representations of maimed or injured human bodies and transgression at their boundaries. Although differing in style and subject, the works of Roes ( Haut des Südens ), Rabinovici ( Suche nach M. ), Hettche ( Nox ) and Beyer ( Das Menschenfleisch ) all share the topic of injured skin as a conceptual center of the narrative. As semiotic systems, fiction offers access to the phenomenon of altered reality and self-experience and the associated change of the body. My book combines Greimas structural text semiotics with Lacan's structural theory of the subject and its cultural implications (as developed by Waltz). This allows for a sound methodological approach to the texts and, thus, through the meta-semiotic detour of narrative discourse, for a cultural analysis. The research question addresses the relationship between the assumption of a genuinely contemporary constitution of the subjects and the current desire for crossing borders. The study demonstrates how the decline of the symbolic (Lacan) is tried to be expressed in the system of text / language.