ABSTRACT
“Framing Embodiment in Violent Narratives” examines the ways our mutual embodied vulnerability is framed in different types of written narratives portraying political violence. Falke’s inquiry begins from the phenomenological premise that the body is neither an object nor a tool for transparently mediating the outer world to subjectivity. Rather acts of consciousness are born from and within experiences of the body and constantly have the body as a first language. Also, because of the absolutely essential role other people play in the mediation of the world by our bodies and the mediation of our bodies by the world, we cannot say that we live in our flesh independently of other people. After discussing these two premises with reference to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Marion, Falke explores three violent narratives in terms of their portrayal of embodiment and relationality: an article from ISIS’s magazine Dabiq, which is designed to encourage violence; Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which promotes non-violent resistance; and the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Falke analyzes the means through which these different narratives enliven or deaden readers’ awareness of vulnerability and intersubjective connectedness through their framing of the bodies of perpetrators, witnesses and victims.
