Theory is shot through with scenes of inscription: the stylus of discourse incises a body's surface, the psyche becomes a writing pad, gender manifests itself as a corporeal mark, culture asserts its realm by breaking paths through the wilderness. Why do theoretical texts stage corpographies, why do they highlight moments in which writing takes place on a body and in which corporeality and textuality become intertwined? Paradoxical Corpographies: Towards an Ethics of Inscription proposes an answer to this question through a contrapuntal reading of theoretical reflections on inscription and of late postmodern texts from different cultural and linguistic contexts. It brings theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, or Jean-Luc Nancy--analyzed here in terms of an "inscriptive turn" in theory--into dialogue with literary discourses on the body in German-language texts (Thomas Hettche, Elfriede Jelinek), Spanish-language (post)dictatorship literature and performance art (Diamela Eltit), and writings of the Malaysian-Chinese diaspora (Zhang Guixing, Huang Jinshu).

The theoretical and literary texts under analysis use inscription to negotiate crucial differences: between materiality and signification, between agency and determinism, between cultural sameness and alterity. Inscription as a complex scene is paradoxical in that it admits different truths and roles at the same time. Consequently, it enables a more flexible and dynamic reformulation of difference, as well as a meta-reflection on how difference is constructed in the first place. Ultimately, scenes of inscription, read as paradoxical corpographies, can become the basis for an ethics, understood as a responsible way of writing, as well as of reading difference.