This chapter analyzes how poststructuralist theory forgot, then rediscovered its roots in anthropology by investigating the conceptual genealogy of theories of subjection that imagine the production of the socialized subject as acts of inscription. It traces the obsession of poststructuralist theories with Kafka’s 1914 story “In the Penal Colony” and recontextualizes Kafka’s text in discourses on tattooing and body ornamentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The link between subjection and bodily inscription was first rooted in anthropological interest in tattooing, in the context of other, “primitive,” cultures then in the service of criminal anthropology, but, via Nietzsche and Foucault, became a universal theoretical imaginary. In a complementary move, theorists such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Lingis allowed themselves to be haunted by the specter of anthropology and rediscovered inscription as another technology of writing, exemplified by the practices of other cultures, often in the service of countering “western” theories of subjection.
The Laugh of the Medusa and the Ticks of Postmodern Feminism: Helen Cixous and the Poetics of Desire
