3.23.2006
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
These three are going to be tough to summarize, but let's try. "The history recorded by the following collection of essays is the history of that area where life and thought intersect." (11) "The history of the human body is not so much the history of its representations as of its modes of construction...the history of its modes of construction can, since it avoids the overly massive oppositions of science and ideology or of authenticity and alienation, turn the body into a thoroughly historicized and completely problematic issue." (ibid) The first volume is concerned with myth, theology - "the first approach, which may be regarded as a vertical axis, begins at the 'top' and measures the distance and proximity between divinity and the human body." (13) Ok, let's do a rundown of the essays / fragments:
"Dim Body, Dazzling Body" Jean-Pierre Vernant: Looks at the ways the Greeks conceived of the body of the Gods. "What was the body for the Greeks? Today the concept of the body gives us the illusion of self evidence for essentially two reasons: first, because of the difinitive opposition between soul and body, spiritual and material, that has established itself in Western tradition. And consequently and correspondingly, because the body, reduced entirely to matter, depends on a positivistic study; in other words, it has acquired the status of a scientific object defined in anatomical and physiological terms." (20) The corporeality of the gods, unlike that of men, is eternally beautiful and they are immortal for that reason. The god's body, unlike man's, is not individual in space - it can be everywhere at once. "In many ways, the divine super-body evokes and touched upon the non-body. It points to it; it never merges with it." (43)
"The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah" Charles Mopsik: This essay is about the Jewish body, Kabbalah traditions and reproduction. "What is transmitted is nothing other than the power to transmit. The power to adhere to the text, the power to engender: tradition, like the body of engenderment, is the point of passage through which the invisible allows itself to be glimpsed, through which the unspeakable allows itself to be spoken, through which the flux issuing from the infinite takes form, link by link." (63) "The genealogy of bodies makes manifest an invisible chain whose first links constitute the divine order itself, the creative activity brought forth in human procreative activity." (68)
"Indian Speculations about the Sex of the Sacrifice" Charles Malamoud: This essay is on Tantra and the Goddess who copulates with Death and sacrifices and consumes herself. "The assemblage of objects, characters, gestures and speech which composes the Indian sacrifice derives its form and intelligibility from the metaphor of the body. Because it is described as a body itself made up of conjunctions of many bodies indefinately rearranged, the sacrifice provides both the prime locus and the material for sexual symbolism...The aim and purpose of the sacrifice is to reconstitute the image of this original, precreation body." (96) "The body of Man is the model for, and origin of, the sacrifice and is therefore both its departure point and its effect. But the sacrifice, for its part, in the guise of Speech - which is its final form - is what gives the body its ultimate substance." (97)
"The Body: The Daoist's Coat of Arms" Jean Levi: This essay considers the Daoist conception of the Body as container of the universe (body as both metaphor for universe and as container of the universe). "The gods only acquire substance and form in the movement that makes them present, through the melting of the humors, just as the latter can only be decanted because the substance from which they are produced is of the same kind as the symbols or the coats of arms expressing configuration in the cosmos. In other words, the crudest physiological substance assumes a heraldic value because its secretions are integrated into a symbolic form in which they correspond to divine effigies." (123)
"Divine Image - Prison of Flesh: Perceptions of the Body in Ancient Gnosticism" Michael A. Williams: This essay examines the Gnostic conception of the soul as needing to escape the body. However, it is more complicated than that. "Gnostic perceptions of the body in late Antiquity manifested a certain ambivalence that is not often appreciated. On the one hand, the human self is quite completely distinguished from the physical body, and ultimately must be rescued from it; but on the other hand, according to many Gnostic sources, precisely in the human body is to be found the best visible trace of the divine in the material world." (130) "Whatever we imagine when we speak of Gnostics renouncing their bodies, or despising the flesh, we should not ignore how intrigued they seemed to have been with their own anatomy, how often they seemed convinced that truths, both pleasant and unpleasant, about their origin and their destiny could be traced within its form and functions." (143)
"The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church" Marie-Jose Baudinet: This essay is about the iconoclasts in Byzantium and concerns "the legitamacy of the iconic representation of Christ's face - the face of God's son, also known as the Father's Economy." (149)
"The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages" Caroline Walker Bynum: This essay examines the role of the (female) body in medieval piety. "Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than fertility and decay. Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it - a horrible yet delicious elevation - into a means of access of the divine...Compared to other periods of Christian history and other world religions, medieval spirituality - especially female spirituality - was particularly bodily; this was so not only because medieval assumptions associated female with flesh, but also because theology and natural philosophy saw persons as in some real sense body as well as soul." (162)
"The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess" Piero Camporesi: As obvious from the title, this essay is concerned with transubstantiation and the consumption of Christ's body through the host in the 18th C, when the actual eating of the body of Christ was a big deal. "Both the sensibility of believers and ecclesiastic doctrine...have over time nearly obliterated this bloody offering, anesthetizing and reducing it to little more than a symbolic act. They have edulcorated and disincarnated it, reinterpreted it as merely a trope. In other words, they have unconsciouslu rejected the awesome notion of transubstantiation, and have refused its intolerable weight." (234)
"Holbein's Dead Christ" Julia Kristeva: Kristeva looks ath Holbein's paiting of the Dead Christ, which is incredibly lifelike and hopeless. "It would seem, on the basis of [Holbein's] oeuvre...that a melancholy moment (an actual or imaginary loss of meaning, an actual or imaginary despair, an actual or imaginary razing of symbolic values including the value of life) summoned up his aesthetic activity, which overcame the melancholy latency while retaining its trace." (258)
"Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval Japan" William R. LaFleur: Here the author looks at gaki, ghosts that were important figures in medieval Japanese Buddhism that are often dismissed by modern Buddhism for their un-Buddhist occult obession with eating poop (and other shitty stuff). "Hungry ghosts, as beings with bodies, were - at least for medieval Japn - an important reed that was woven into many places in a cognitive basket that was used to try to hold a lot of things together. To play a role in a synthesis intended to satisfy philosophers, ecclesiastics, a privileged aristocracy, a wary government and a vast 'folk' - this was what the concept of the hungry ghost was expected to do." (273)
"Metamorphoses and Lycanthropy in Franche-Compte, 1521-1643" Carline Oates: A legal history of werewolves in 16th/17th C France.
"The Chimera Herself" Ginevra Bompiani:An essay on the Chimera, the mythic monster that is both an excess of appearance but also can never really appear. Kinda a genealogy of the beast.
"The Inanimate Incarnate" Roman Paska: This essay is about puppets and it's first sentence says something like "puppet theorists disagree..etc." That made me laugh. I guess the next time my relatives ask me what I am studying I can say, well, I am not a well respected puppet theorist. It is about how in the Western tradition of puppetry, while mimesis of life is important, what is more important that the formal appearance of the puppet mimicing the body, what matters more is the gesture of the puppet, it's ability to mimic human movement, emotion, etc. It has a lot of neat pictures of puppets that are kinda freaky if you are freaked out by that kind of thing. Actually, this whole ZONE series freaks me out. I feel like I am on Buffy researching Werewolves and shit-eating ghosts and puppets that have human emotions, all that stuff.
"The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century" Jean-Claude Beaune: "An automaton is a machine that contains its own principle of motion." (431) As title suggests, this is a survey, mostly pictoral, of the automaton. "Before the automaton became a high-performance machine, an automaton was primarily a techno-mythological idea, or more precisely, a mythic distillation of technical processes and machines and, by extension, of tools or instruments." (431) "The automaton is both individual and totality, the extreme of artifice and image of recreated, revitalized nature...it has a quality of maintaining a special relationship with death - which is itself the most singular and most contingent moment of our lives, yet also the most universal, the one we know we cannot escape." (479)
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
These three are going to be tough to summarize, but let's try. "The history recorded by the following collection of essays is the history of that area where life and thought intersect." (11) "The history of the human body is not so much the history of its representations as of its modes of construction...the history of its modes of construction can, since it avoids the overly massive oppositions of science and ideology or of authenticity and alienation, turn the body into a thoroughly historicized and completely problematic issue." (ibid) The first volume is concerned with myth, theology - "the first approach, which may be regarded as a vertical axis, begins at the 'top' and measures the distance and proximity between divinity and the human body." (13) Ok, let's do a rundown of the essays / fragments:
"Dim Body, Dazzling Body" Jean-Pierre Vernant: Looks at the ways the Greeks conceived of the body of the Gods. "What was the body for the Greeks? Today the concept of the body gives us the illusion of self evidence for essentially two reasons: first, because of the difinitive opposition between soul and body, spiritual and material, that has established itself in Western tradition. And consequently and correspondingly, because the body, reduced entirely to matter, depends on a positivistic study; in other words, it has acquired the status of a scientific object defined in anatomical and physiological terms." (20) The corporeality of the gods, unlike that of men, is eternally beautiful and they are immortal for that reason. The god's body, unlike man's, is not individual in space - it can be everywhere at once. "In many ways, the divine super-body evokes and touched upon the non-body. It points to it; it never merges with it." (43)
"The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah" Charles Mopsik: This essay is about the Jewish body, Kabbalah traditions and reproduction. "What is transmitted is nothing other than the power to transmit. The power to adhere to the text, the power to engender: tradition, like the body of engenderment, is the point of passage through which the invisible allows itself to be glimpsed, through which the unspeakable allows itself to be spoken, through which the flux issuing from the infinite takes form, link by link." (63) "The genealogy of bodies makes manifest an invisible chain whose first links constitute the divine order itself, the creative activity brought forth in human procreative activity." (68)
"Indian Speculations about the Sex of the Sacrifice" Charles Malamoud: This essay is on Tantra and the Goddess who copulates with Death and sacrifices and consumes herself. "The assemblage of objects, characters, gestures and speech which composes the Indian sacrifice derives its form and intelligibility from the metaphor of the body. Because it is described as a body itself made up of conjunctions of many bodies indefinately rearranged, the sacrifice provides both the prime locus and the material for sexual symbolism...The aim and purpose of the sacrifice is to reconstitute the image of this original, precreation body." (96) "The body of Man is the model for, and origin of, the sacrifice and is therefore both its departure point and its effect. But the sacrifice, for its part, in the guise of Speech - which is its final form - is what gives the body its ultimate substance." (97)
"The Body: The Daoist's Coat of Arms" Jean Levi: This essay considers the Daoist conception of the Body as container of the universe (body as both metaphor for universe and as container of the universe). "The gods only acquire substance and form in the movement that makes them present, through the melting of the humors, just as the latter can only be decanted because the substance from which they are produced is of the same kind as the symbols or the coats of arms expressing configuration in the cosmos. In other words, the crudest physiological substance assumes a heraldic value because its secretions are integrated into a symbolic form in which they correspond to divine effigies." (123)
"Divine Image - Prison of Flesh: Perceptions of the Body in Ancient Gnosticism" Michael A. Williams: This essay examines the Gnostic conception of the soul as needing to escape the body. However, it is more complicated than that. "Gnostic perceptions of the body in late Antiquity manifested a certain ambivalence that is not often appreciated. On the one hand, the human self is quite completely distinguished from the physical body, and ultimately must be rescued from it; but on the other hand, according to many Gnostic sources, precisely in the human body is to be found the best visible trace of the divine in the material world." (130) "Whatever we imagine when we speak of Gnostics renouncing their bodies, or despising the flesh, we should not ignore how intrigued they seemed to have been with their own anatomy, how often they seemed convinced that truths, both pleasant and unpleasant, about their origin and their destiny could be traced within its form and functions." (143)
"The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church" Marie-Jose Baudinet: This essay is about the iconoclasts in Byzantium and concerns "the legitamacy of the iconic representation of Christ's face - the face of God's son, also known as the Father's Economy." (149)
"The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages" Caroline Walker Bynum: This essay examines the role of the (female) body in medieval piety. "Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than fertility and decay. Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it - a horrible yet delicious elevation - into a means of access of the divine...Compared to other periods of Christian history and other world religions, medieval spirituality - especially female spirituality - was particularly bodily; this was so not only because medieval assumptions associated female with flesh, but also because theology and natural philosophy saw persons as in some real sense body as well as soul." (162)
"The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess" Piero Camporesi: As obvious from the title, this essay is concerned with transubstantiation and the consumption of Christ's body through the host in the 18th C, when the actual eating of the body of Christ was a big deal. "Both the sensibility of believers and ecclesiastic doctrine...have over time nearly obliterated this bloody offering, anesthetizing and reducing it to little more than a symbolic act. They have edulcorated and disincarnated it, reinterpreted it as merely a trope. In other words, they have unconsciouslu rejected the awesome notion of transubstantiation, and have refused its intolerable weight." (234)
"Holbein's Dead Christ" Julia Kristeva: Kristeva looks ath Holbein's paiting of the Dead Christ, which is incredibly lifelike and hopeless. "It would seem, on the basis of [Holbein's] oeuvre...that a melancholy moment (an actual or imaginary loss of meaning, an actual or imaginary despair, an actual or imaginary razing of symbolic values including the value of life) summoned up his aesthetic activity, which overcame the melancholy latency while retaining its trace." (258)
"Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval Japan" William R. LaFleur: Here the author looks at gaki, ghosts that were important figures in medieval Japanese Buddhism that are often dismissed by modern Buddhism for their un-Buddhist occult obession with eating poop (and other shitty stuff). "Hungry ghosts, as beings with bodies, were - at least for medieval Japn - an important reed that was woven into many places in a cognitive basket that was used to try to hold a lot of things together. To play a role in a synthesis intended to satisfy philosophers, ecclesiastics, a privileged aristocracy, a wary government and a vast 'folk' - this was what the concept of the hungry ghost was expected to do." (273)
"Metamorphoses and Lycanthropy in Franche-Compte, 1521-1643" Carline Oates: A legal history of werewolves in 16th/17th C France.
"The Chimera Herself" Ginevra Bompiani:An essay on the Chimera, the mythic monster that is both an excess of appearance but also can never really appear. Kinda a genealogy of the beast.
"The Inanimate Incarnate" Roman Paska: This essay is about puppets and it's first sentence says something like "puppet theorists disagree..etc." That made me laugh. I guess the next time my relatives ask me what I am studying I can say, well, I am not a well respected puppet theorist. It is about how in the Western tradition of puppetry, while mimesis of life is important, what is more important that the formal appearance of the puppet mimicing the body, what matters more is the gesture of the puppet, it's ability to mimic human movement, emotion, etc. It has a lot of neat pictures of puppets that are kinda freaky if you are freaked out by that kind of thing. Actually, this whole ZONE series freaks me out. I feel like I am on Buffy researching Werewolves and shit-eating ghosts and puppets that have human emotions, all that stuff.
"The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century" Jean-Claude Beaune: "An automaton is a machine that contains its own principle of motion." (431) As title suggests, this is a survey, mostly pictoral, of the automaton. "Before the automaton became a high-performance machine, an automaton was primarily a techno-mythological idea, or more precisely, a mythic distillation of technical processes and machines and, by extension, of tools or instruments." (431) "The automaton is both individual and totality, the extreme of artifice and image of recreated, revitalized nature...it has a quality of maintaining a special relationship with death - which is itself the most singular and most contingent moment of our lives, yet also the most universal, the one we know we cannot escape." (479)
# posted by SMRT : 7:44 PM
