The blurring of the limits of the human being: liminal cartography of L'animal que parla by Josep-Anton Fernàndez

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the representation of the body in the poetry book L’animal que parla (2021) by Josep-Anton Fernàndez. The central theme of the collection is the experience of speech, and the effects of the word on the body and on the emotions, as well as the exploration of the limits of language. For our analysis, we start from the conceptual framework of affective theories and the understanding of the body as a culturally regulated variable and a permeable limit (Butler, 1999). Holes and surfaces are revealed in Fernandez’s poems as a means of relating to otherness and the blurring of boundaries, an unregulated permeability, becomes a space of enjoyment but also a place of pollution and danger. We propose, from a methodological point of view, to incorporate the body as a tool for academic research and as part of the research process we have developed body maps as a tool for data collection (Peluso, 2020). In the poems of L'animal que parla, «la passió desborda les paraules / i raja oberta contaminada de cos» (“passion overflows speech / and spills out openly it contaminates the body") and this same passion «reclama/un tall» («demands a a cut») where the same poetic text is written as a «document/ amb llenguatge de carn» (“a document / in a language of flesh”).