Edited by Daniel N. Silva and Jacob L. Mey
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 319] 2021
► pp. 171–188
This chapter draws upon Karina Buhr’s image of becoming-junglehood in order to contribute to a discussion of the pragmatics of adaptability. Buhr is a Brazilian feminist singer who is interested in recontextualizing terms of a male-dominated tradition on more affirmative grounds. She thus adapts semiotic forms – verbal language and her bodily performance – as disruptive forms, and thereby looks for more liberating grounds of language use. Theoretically, the chapter nuances Buhr’s rationalizations by engaging with Walter Benjamin’s formulations about art and its mechanical reproducibility; with Derrida’s iterability of language; and with Deleuze and Guattari’s articulations of assemblage, subjectivation, and becoming. The paper finally critiques a metaphysics of unity by identifying processes of rupture and adaptability in Buhr’s discursive practices of becoming-junglehood.