Abstract
Classically the tattoo disrupts the bodily economy. Existing on the side of death, and therefore being un-economical (economy derives from Oikos/household), Leviticus 19:28 cautions against the tattoo, and so situates the tattoo as nothing but a tattoomb. Our cinematic exemplar Tattoo bears witness to tattooed cadaverous canvasses economically circulating within unheimlich cyberspace as the body is broken into salable tattooed pieces and the newly police graduated character is himself marineated as the tattoo soaks through layers of his own being. Against this incorporation of the tattoo, the clean pre-tattooed body provides a fantasy of clear introjection.
You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the LORD.
—Leviticus, 19:28 (New King James Version)
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Notes
- 1.
Oikos derives from Greek for household and is the root of economy.
- 2.
Pharmakon comes from the Greek and denotes both medicine and poison.
- 3.
Marineated is coined to combine the lost-at-sea signage of tattoos and the marination of the tattoo into the skin.
- 4.
We cannot forget that the raising of the hand is the key performative exemplar, accompanied by lines such as “I hereby swear that…” that then marks one’s punctual crossing of lines and of entries into key new positions, that are “herein” demarcated from “the previous.”
- 5.
And, strangely, almost all the rows of right handraising graduates do seem to be composed of men, marking this uncannily uniform mise-en-scene. See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005) for a deconstruction of this masculinist fraternal guardhouse.
- 6.
“False family.”
- 7.
“The ‘indelible mark’ (a mark that is first prelinguistic) left by the incorporation […] is a parasitic inclusion,” Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xvi.
- 8.
See Tony Richards, “Take a Wander in My Shoes: Of Zombeing, Twombs, and Equipmentality,” in We Need to Talk About Heidegger: Essays Situating Martin Heidegger in Contemporary Media Studies, edited by Justin Battin and German Duarte (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), 185–210.
- 9.
I.e. representations “occupied” by repression, and so engaged with on the basis of containing what they wish to decontaminate themselves of.
- 10.
See also as reference Torok’s “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse,” also her “A Remembrance of Things Deleted” and Abraham’s “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” and Abraham and Torok’s “Mourning Or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” all in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
- 11.
Aufhebung is Hegelian progress of thesis-antithesis-synthesis
- 12.
“Mortgage” derives from death pledge that closes house.
- 13.
Soliloquy split by another “talking through,” as in ventriloquy.
- 14.
“[S]ome people are completely detached from their libidinal roots and only produce puppet emotions” (Abraham and Torok, 1994, 178–9). Torok talks also of “Ventriloquy” and of a stranger, a parasitic inclusion, a prosthetic unconscious, housed within the subject’s “own” mental topography.
- 15.
Hauntology is Derrida’s neologistic play on ontology.
- 16.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 80–81.
- 17.
The 1966 Japanese film titled Irezumi (the Japanese word for tattoo, thus also itself naming that which is its key dangerous narratological totem) tells the story of a woman possessed, and whose fate is henceforth hardwired and written out by the tattoo. As sign and energizer of danger, the tattoo, here in the form of a spider, possesses or takes over, takes hostage, the bodily host and prevents it from securing itself or setting sail for the future. The tattoo enslaves and possesses its possessor and conscripts “it” to speak within an empty tongue it never signed up with. The spider, formed with blood red lips, becomes the possessive tattoo in Irezumi . The possessive skin-seeking specter codenamed “Irezumi” in Tattoo herself bears the tattoo of the famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa forming something of a figure of “marineation” to wholly swallow Marc so that he never makes port. Webs and seas equally swallow. In Tattoo “Irezumi” begins to reveal herself to Marc within a pool of light erupting within the darkness outside his house, as fogged-heavy rain falls over her white high polo neck dress to slowly reveal, as invisible ink made visible, a body composed of intricate tattooing of The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It is a moment of great cinematic pregnancy in drowning out the futurial. Falling rain becomes drowning water and, at this coordinate, we see him submerged, inkorporated, within her revelatory tattoo that merges him within her pierced skin, that does not form a womb but a tattoomb. His DJ girlfriend, who (“will they/won’t they?”) might have become mother to offspring, retreats now at the sight of “Irezumi” swallowing Marc within her deathly “seabed.” Marc tattoombs himself within that watery seabed; and drowns never to sew offspring, and give himself to the greater good.
- 18.
“Introjection speaks; “denomination” is its “privileged” medium,” Abraham & Torok, (1994, pp. xvii).
- 19.
Jacques Derrida, Life Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 6.
- 20.
Autoimmunity is an entity attacking its own defenses in mistaking elements of self for other.
- 21.
Life-death is Derrida’s assertion that death infuses life and is not opposed.
- 22.
Derrida often underlines and appends terms with an “an.” Archives become an-archives.
- 23.
These three “necro-” terms clearly, as neologisms, aim at denoting a turn from economies of life toward “other” economies able to deal with death or bodies as parts. We have seen Oikos as the etymological root of household, and thus of furthering the economy and life of the family, but now we see “economy” as able to turn and monetize more flatlining spaces. Entrepreneurs, biopolitical and bioeconomics thus get transformed into their seeming opposites. Tattoo revolves around the economic extraction of value from dead flesh as emblematic of a larger economic turn. We coin these neologisms to denote that marked change of economic course toward the an-economic. See Richards 2018.
- 24.
One such character has, in his internationalist-modernist non-Germanic home, an “installation” of purchased decadaverised-tattoos and we meet him earlier lounging within a dark underground Romanesque bathhouse without a care for the world.
- 25.
For this stripping of territory and simultaneous replacing-restructuring power akin to glocalization, here with the cryptcurrency refractively “echoing back” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
- 26.
https://deutsche-emark.org/faq-question-list/?l=2, accessed November 23rd 2020.
- 27.
See note 14.
- 28.
I have not properly justified this quasi-pun on Derrida’s “Limited Inc.: a b c ….” In cryptic justification, there is an analogous problem of undecidable-dating that Derrida points out very early on regarding John Searle’s “copyright,” where Derrida points out the problem of dating, without using his own undecidability as clear problematizing algorithm. There is a similar overflow here that we wish to hyperlink. See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 30.
- 29.
See Gabrielle Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
- 30.
Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 73.
- 31.
See Xenophon, Oeconomicus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
- 32.
Jacques Derrida, “La Parole Soufflee,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 188.
Bibliography
Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
———. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, & Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
———. “La Parole Soufflee.” In Writing and Differencei. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
———. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
———. The Politics of Friendship. London: Verso, 2005.
———. Life Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020a.
———. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020b.
Deutche emark, https://deutsche-emark.org/faq-question-list/?l=2. Accessed November 23rd 2020.
Masumuram, Yasuzô, dir. Irezumi. 1966; Tokyo; Daiei Motion Picture Company.
Richards, Tony. “Take a Wander in My Shoes: Of Zombeing, Twombs, and Equipmentality,” In We Need to Talk About Heidegger: Essays Situating Martin Heidegger in Contemporary Media Studies, edited by Justin Battin and German Duarte, 185–210. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018.
Schwab, Gabrielle. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Schwentke, Robert, dir. Tattoo. 2002; Berlin: Studio Canal.
Xenophon. Oeconomicus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
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Richards, T. (2022). Limited Ink: Of Repressence, Inkorporation, and Marineation. In: Martell, J., Larsen, E. (eds) Tattooed Bodies. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86566-5_14
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