Abstract
Early Chinese philosophical, historiographic, and divinatory texts point to a common anxiety regarding the maintenance of the wholeness of the body. Mutilating punishments served as indices that signified the crimes and criminal status of those affected. They effectively destroyed their de (character, power, or charisma). Yet, texts from a variety of genres and philosophical positions subverted the conventional signification of the amputation of the foot. Narrative accounts about Sun Bin, Yu Quan, and Bian He invert the signification of mutilation, presenting exemplary figures whose amputated feet become indices of talent, loyalty, or self-sacrifice. Three stories of amputees from the Zhuangzi go further still in undermining this conventional signification. While the rare wholeness of character of such exemplary figures in the “De chong fu” chapter is put into sharp relief against the unwhole state of their disfigured bodies, their mutilations — as signs — are themselves defaced and unreadable. It shows that mutilation means little or nothing to those who understand people: those who read unwhole bodies in the conventional manner prove to be poor judges of character.
Keywords
Zhuangzi; law; punishment; signs; mutilation; de
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