Tattooing terminable interminable: psychoanalysis, corporeal marking and literature

Abstract

The chapter uses a Lacanian lens to approach corporeal marking as tattooing in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. Kafka and Beckett metaphorize tattooing to depict the inter-subjective dimension of torture. The punitive machine in Kafka’s parabolic narrative tattoos the name of the law, the subject has transgressed, on their body. The automaton finally acquires its own agency and tattoos death on the body of the Officer—the last defendant of the apparatus. The irony of writing justice on the body connects Kafka’s text with How It Is which uses corporeal inscription as species-level inter-generational communication. In Beckett’s infinite world of crawlers in the mud, each Bom torments his Pim by writing on their body. The tormentor’s nails make the victim’s body bleed. I read this corporeal marking as tattoo formation and ground Kafka and Beckett’s texts as literary instances of political tattooing. These literary texts draw attention to the violence that underwrites the jouissance of the tattoo and generate a proclivity toward death drive. The end of the tattoo is death. Tattooing is terminable as well as interminable. Only death can put an end to it.