The Speaking Body

Abstract More than any other biblical book, the Song of Songs has over the centuries generated a tumultuous conflict of interpretations, which divide between an overly sacred allegorism and an excessive profane materialism of the text. This article addresses the hermeneutical question of the Canticle and considers the corporeality of its language, in which the question of meaning cannot be separated from the question of the body and its affections. The philosophical categories of Platonic chora in Julia Kristeva’s reception and Lacanian lalangue will be examined, each of which stands at the crossroads between biology and sense, libido and signifiers, and affect and meaning. Within this horizon, the woman who is the speaking subject of this biblical text becomes a witness to the powerful yet ambivalent experience of eros, of a desire characterised by a dialectic of presence and absence, but above all of a word inhabited by the body.