known as Heebi
based in Rotterdam, NL
Projects
Drawings
Writings
CV
Information
known as Heebi
based in Rotterdam, NL
Projects
Drawings
Writings
CV
Information
Becoming a Watery Body
I. The Uncontrollable Death
II. The Uncontrollable Flow
III. The Uncontrollable Becoming
IV. The Uncontrollable Connection
— Bibliography / List of Figures
II. The Uncontrollable Flow
FIG 2.
Explosions, large and small, erupt across the space.
Water surges upward, while blood, urine,
amniotic fluid, and other liquids leak and spill.
Particles from the explosions gather and settle into soil.
From the mingled fluids, plants begin to grow.
Water surges upward, while blood, urine,
amniotic fluid, and other liquids leak and spill.
Particles from the explosions gather and settle into soil.
From the mingled fluids, plants begin to grow.
I have been hesitating for a long time to tell this story. I felt something like a moral unease, or almost a sense of guilt about saying that I sensed the energy of life in my mom’s death. Part of this hesitation is also from the feeling that what I had experienced was difficult to explain. Death is easily understood as the absence of life. To say that I felt the energy of life while witnessing someone’s death may sound inappropriate. Yet what I felt in my mom’s death is not entirely without sense.
This chapter turns to Drew Leder’s The Absent Body to reflect on why I found a certain vitality in the process of my mom’s body becoming ill, and why the moments I had previously passed by without much thought began to feel strangely unfamiliar to me. It also draws on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to explore how things often experienced as repulsive, such as urine, blood, sweat, saliva, and even the corpse, for example, came to evoke in me an intense sensation of life.
1) The Absent Body
The experiences I described can be understood as phenomenological. In witnessing my mom’s body and observing its transformation, I became acutely aware of bodily sensations that I had previously not consciously noticed. In this sense, my experience resonates with a phenomenological perspective that considers how the world is perceived through the body.
In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the body is the central medium through which the world is perceived and constituted. The world is constructed by sensations such as seeing, hearing, touching, and moving through a body.1 Yet in this process, the body operates transparently. The body is “used” in order to experience the world, but is not attended to as an object of perception. The body recedes into the background, functioning as a conduit for engagement with the world.²
However, Drew Leder describes another layer of the body. He argues that the body does not exist only as the conscious subject of perception, but also operates continuously at a level beyond awareness. When the body breathes, its heart beats, digestion takes place, and even when it is sleeping, it continues to function. Yet these processes are rarely sensed. The body is always moving, but much of this activity occurs beyond conscious awareness.³ In this sense, the “body” cannot be reduced simply to the perceiving subject. It is at once a being that reaches out towards the world from the centre of consciousness, and a material process that sustains and transforms itself at a deeper, unperceived level. Because these two dimensions usually operate together seamlessly, it is easy to perceive the body as a unified whole. ⁴
My mom’s body, however, disrupted this balance. As the illness progressed, layers of the body that had previously remained unseen began to emerge in unfamiliar ways. Bodily fluids are produced within the body, accumulating and leaking out. Through the tube inserted into her chest, pleural fluid dripped into a plastic container. No matter how many times the container was replaced, the fluid kept forming, accumulating, and distorting her body. Medically, this was the progression of disease, or a movement towards death. But what I saw was something else. An energy within the body that continued to generate and move. To suffer is also to be alive.
Watching her body, I began to experience my own body differently. I felt the sensation of warm liquid against my skin, such as urination and when menstrual blood gushes out, strangely unfamiliar. The body was no longer a transparent medium. It became something huge, revealing itself and moving towards me. Through my mom’s body, I came to recognise the body that had once existed merely as a conduit of perception as the restless, stirring, alive body itself. And this recognition was not a matter of knowledge, but an embodied encounter with the body’s aliveness.
2) Abject Fluid
The moment in which I experienced the vitality of life most strongly and directly was the release of bodily fluids. When urine leaves the body. When menstrual blood flows out. When saliva spills from the mouth. Moments of excretion or discharge such as these are often regarded as disgusting. In the encounter with blood, saliva, vomit, or excrement, it is not unusual to feel that they are dirty, to recoil with nausea, or to experience a sense of repulsion. In reflecting on the disgust that arises when what belongs inside the body becomes visible, Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of abjection. Kristeva explains that certain substances or situations appear repulsive because they threaten the boundaries of being.⁵ Bodily fluids that leave the body blur the boundary between inside and outside.⁶ These substances are not really noticed when they remain in the body, but once they come out, they suddenly become strange and uncomfortable.
According to Kristeva, the abject belongs to a level that is not explained, named, or processed through language. It exists before language, like convulsion, explosion, sobbing, or violence.⁷ I sense a vital energy in this absence of language. It feels like the emergence of a primal and turbulent stirring of the body, prior to logic. Therefore, the sensations of bodily fluids I experienced in moments of excretion were not merely sensations of disgust. Each time I felt fluids flowing from my body, I sensed an intense aliveness. Urine or menstrual blood can easily be regarded as something that must be quickly wiped away or washed off. But at the same time, these are moments in which swirling liquids, which are impossible to define or explain in words, are seen with the eyes and felt through the skin. In these moments, the boundary that separates the inside from the outside of the body begins to tremble. What is felt is the body itself.
Kristeva presents the corpse as the most direct and powerful example of abjection. The corpse reveals the boundary between life and death. As Kristeva writes, “a wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat or decay” provokes a reflexive nausea.⁸ Kristeva explains that this nausea is a response that arises when one confronts the presence of death within the body that one believes to be alive.⁹ Yet the death I encountered may be somewhat different from the death revealed through abjection. The corpse I witnessed was my mom. There was foam in her mouth, and her eyes did not fully close. She did not resemble the peaceful, sleeping figures so often depicted in films. There was certainly something abject in the image of her death. However, even there, I saw beauty. I did not see the death that resides within my own living body. Like the quiet feels more intense after a noisy party, I saw complete peace when the restless vitality and the pain that had continuously tormented my mom left her body.
3) Watery Vitality
This thesis argues that the leakage of bodily fluids collapses the concept of the autonomous subject. Water flows. It cannot be held. When I try to grasp water with my hands, it slips through the gaps between the fingers. As Astrida Neimanis writes in Bodies of Water, “dissolution of knowability, or containability, or mastery, is part of water’s ontology.”¹⁰ Water is uncontrollable. Bodily fluids as well. Nothing can stop the leakage of blood, sweat, saliva, tears, urine, and menstrual blood. Even after death, bodily fluids continue to seep out through the processes of decomposition.
The generation and release of bodily fluids unsettles the traditional philosophical idea of the subject as independent, complete, rational, and capable of autonomous judgement and responsibility. It underlies images such as Leonardo da Vinci’s ideal of bodily perfection: the body imagined as a fully self-contained entity, perfectly proportioned and complete.¹¹ An independent and complete entity, endowed with rational reason.
FIG.3. Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490. FIG.4. Part of FIG.2.
However, the figures in my drawings destabilise the assumptions of this ideal model of the human. When compared with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the figure in Fig.2 collapses out of the perfect proportions of da Vinci’s image. Unlike the Vitruvian Man, which exists as an independent entity separated from the outside world, the figures in my drawings are penetrated by other materials and forces, distorted, and parasitised by other bodies. Liquids that leak from the body attract insects, and from these fluids new forms of life begin
to grow.
The expulsion of bodily fluids makes this collapse more apparent. The skin appears to function as a boundary separating the body from the outside. Yet the moment fluids flow over that boundary, the distinction between inside and outside can no longer be sustained. The body no longer appears as a closed entity, but as a flow that continuously leaks, seeps, and entangles with other forms. The uncontrollability of this fluid movement dismantles the notion of the body as something that can be governed by rational reason. And it reveals vitality beyond logic.
Feminist theory and posthuman thought have emphasised this shift. For example, Rosi Braidotti argues that life should not be understood through the framework of a human-centred autonomous subject, but rather as a flow of life that is constantly becoming and transforming.¹² And Donna Haraway proposes that the human should not be conceived as an isolated individual, but as a relational being entangled with many other forms of non-human bodies.¹³ However, I do not read this theoretical shift as purely emancipatory. The recognition that the body is in the flow that cannot be fully controlled also entails a certain sense of powerlessness. The subject cannot fully govern its own body, and life always flows in unpredictable directions. The helplessness I felt while witnessing my mom’s death emerged precisely from here. The body continues to change, move, and flow. No matter if I want it to or not.
In my drawings, the image of water shows this ambivalence. It is not simply an enchanting image of flourishing life. As in FIG.1, water drags the figure downward, causing it to drown. Vertical images of descent, such as raindrops falling, forms being pulled down and absorbed, recur often. Within this uncontrollable watery vitality, I sense both an intense force of life and an endless powerlessness. This is expressed through figures who must vomit when they do not wish to, and who happen to die when they do not want to.
For this reason, the watery vitality in this thesis is a force that dissolves the boundaries of the body, rendering the notion of an autonomous subject impossible. The body no longer exists as an independent entity. This force exceeds the subject and carries with it a sense of powerlessness. Watery vitality is a figure of living matter that operates within this very paradox.
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 247.
2 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 4.
5 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
6 Ibid., 70.
7 Ibid., 3.
8 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.
9 Ibid., 4.
10 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 22.
11 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 13.
12 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 197, ebook.
13 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 4.