Carcass and cross: Discovering the sacred in the secular

The body is a dialogical, incarnational and sacramental entity. But how may the Christian imagination conceptualize and depict this fact? This contribution uses a provocative piece of art as a modern framing of the constant intersection of the sacred and secular. It starts by looking at Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, continues to discuss Luce Irigaray’s notion of the sensible transcendental and then concludes by way of feminist metaphysics. It is argued that these three schools of thinking provide a helpful framework with which to unpack the theological nuances in Pyotr Pavlensky’s Carcass (2013). Towards the end of the contribution it is shown that Carcass is in fact cruciform when read through the doctrine of the incarnation and that one need not look far to see the Word made flesh in the everydayness of life