“Not Physical Enough”: Corporeal Writing in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Abstract

This essay reads Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982) through Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of re-mark and shibboleth, arguing that the text’s formal anarchy constitutes a sustained challenge to the hierarchical binaries—speech and writing, original and copy, history and literature—that structure Western metaphysics. Tracing the diseuse’s aim to imbue corporeality into words, I argue that Cha’s juxtapositions of photographs, handwritten notes, and untranslated words stage Derridean “re-mark”: the reader is conscripted as witness, translator, and live speaker. Extending previous scholarship on Cha’s subversive aesthetics and challenging assumed identificatory bearings, the essay foregrounds the hitherto under-analyzed interplay of writing and live speech as the formal labor through which Dictée refuses to let meaning settle.