Embodiment, Relation, Community

Book excerpt: In this volume, Garnet C. Butchart shows how human communication can be understood as embodied relations and not merely as a mechanical process of transmission. Expanding on contemporary philosophies of speech and language, self and other, and community and immunity, this book challenges many common assumptions, constructs, and problems of communication theory while offering compelling new resources for future study. Human communication has long been characterized as a problem of transmitting information, or the “outward” sharing of “inner thought” through mediated channels of exchange. Butchart questions that model and the various theories to which it gives rise. Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Lacan—thinkers who, along with Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, have critiqued the modern notion of a rational subject—Butchart shows that the subject is shaped by language rather than preformed, and that humans embody, and not just use, the signs and contexts of interaction that form what he calls a “communication community.” Accessibly written and engagingly researched, Embodiment, Relation, Community is relevant for researchers and advanced students of communication, cultural studies, translation, and rhetorical studies, especially those who work with a humanistic or interpretive paradigm.