Abstract

This article deals with voice and bodily deixis as manifestations of performativity in written texts. A speech act of origin presents as both vocal and performative events. Ritual matrixes of culture contain performative complexes, as suggested by Austin. Such performative nuclei are neither true nor false, that is, their negation cannot be logically inferred from true premises. The term deixis describes the performative moment of the utterance, its active and transformative force. The first embodied deictic utterance in Western history would be the biblical phrase “And the word made flesh.” It is the first mythopoetical performative denoting the bodily incarnation of logos. In the article, the term bodily deixis is considered against the background of experimental poetry of E.E. Cummings.