3.27.2006
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (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
"The second approach, represented by the present volume, covers the various junctures between the body's 'outside' and 'inside': it can therefore be called a 'psychosomatic' appraoch, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death." (11)
"Therefore, Socrates is Immortal" Nicole Loraux: This essay is on the Phaedo and what this dialogue does in terms of inauguarating a particular discourse on the soul, immortality and the body into western philosophy. "By irreversibly separating the soul from the body, Plato once and for all detaches the idea of immortality from the civic glory with which it has hitherto been associated." (30) "To use the body to banish the body is not as unjustifiable as it may appear. The body, it could be said, is simply an image used to speak of the soul; and how can one possibly speak of the soul without resorting to imagry?" (38) but..."the soul is immortal, but that immortality is upheld cheifly by the memorial that was Socrates' unforgettable body." (39)
"Reflections of a Soul" Eric Alliez and Michel Feher: This essay is on Plotinus' conception of the body and soul: "Plotinus regarded the human body as a degradation of the soul but also as a reflection of it; and his philosophy was not so much the occasion of a synthesis as a crossroad between two different worlds." (47) "When a human soul turns away from its body to convert itself to the Intellect from which it proceeds, it is launching itelf not toward something other than itself - even something superior - but toward the very Spirit that shines brightly within it...the internal coherence of Plotinus's theory can thus not be faulted, since the only otherness that it attributes to the human soul is the matter of which the body that the soul illuminates is composed." (63)
"The Face and the Soul" Patrizia Magli: This essay examines the ways in which, hisorically, the face is seen as the signifier for the soul. "Identifying the body has always appeared to waver between two opposing approaches to interpretation: between what we might call natural inferences, on the one hand, and arbitrary equivalences, on the other. At times, facial traits are interpreted as symptoms, vague indicaions of something secret, or else as transparent symbols, a univocal text for the owning the key to its deciphering." (89) "Physiognomics continues to rely, instead, on an inductive method that attempts to reduce the infinite variety of individuals and of facial configurations to a standardized state through drastic schematization and abstraction processes...Although by different methods and approaches, anthropologists and psychiatrists, writers and policemen, suspicious lovers and amateur painters, are all taking up and developing anew the ancient idea of a close intermingling of forms, characters, abilities and passions within the living world."(126)
"The Ethics of Gesture" Jean-Claude Schmitt: This essay looks at the generally immutable nature of gesture over time starting with the Roman Empire (Cicero, really). Regarding the visible expression of ideological codes in the West that remain pretty much the same, "the justification of 'bearing' and 'manners'...cannot be external to the code itself, whether God, the soul, reason or chivalric virtue are invoked as its foundation. Just as, in fact, it could not be seriously argued today that the only reason for social conventions is that they exist." (143)
"The Upward Training o the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility" Georges Vigarello: Want to know a brief performative history for why people had to sit up straight in the middle ages - read this essay! "The body's microcosm must evoke, by the subtleties and wealth of measures and relationships of its parts, those of the world at large." (154) "The fact is that the body, just like its uprightness, is 'caught' in a web of categories dominated by moral expectations. Deportment corresponds to the great polarities in behavior, where respect for physical bearing has the same psychological basis as knowing how to be polite." (157) "The upright body is the one that mimics and adopts the positions required by decorum. It must offer a performance, and it is shaped through the performance. Court society imposes a code of posture as its very specific pedagogical requirement." (189)
"Geerewol: The Art of Seduction" Carol Beckwith: A photo essay on series of courtship dances (the Geerewol) performed by the Wodaabe nomads of Niger, in which women judge men for their beauty in performance.
"Love's Rewards" Rene Nelli: An essay on the Asag, one aspect of courtley love in which an elaborate affair between a lady and her suitor involved a test of the suitor not getting aroused in her semi-clothed presence (among other weird tests). "No matter how one views the asag - as the natural expression of passionate love between a man and a woman, as a lover's hypocritcal ruse (despite the fact that he wa forced to excercise self-control), or even as an expression of feminine wiles - one cannot dispute the fact that, beyond its function a a kind of regulator of desire that tended to keep outright libertinism at bay, it was also an hommage to spiritual love. It was an homage founded on the idea that lovers have a need for a communion of pure feeling, and that without this communion, their physical coupling is nothing more than lewdness." (233)
"Between Clothing and Nudity" Mario Perniola: This essay looks at the history of representing the unclothed female body. "We have not left the world of metaphysical thoguth when we think of the trance as a mystical unity of man and god, finally reconciled to each other in an environment of spiritual superelevation. On the contrary, the fleshy garment associates itself with the body's otherness. Under the circumstances, the body is not a mere instrument of the subjective will; it becomes an element of ceremonial ritual which is finally free from subordination to myth." (263)
"Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years: This essay looks at the connection of Shen (Body-Person) and Xin (Heart Mind) in China over the past 150 years. "If there is a constant theme, and on that will presumably continue to be central in the future, it lies in the multidimensional tensions between xin, the heart-mind that is both individual and, simultaneously, part of a collective social heart-mind, and shen, the demanding, egotistic body-person." (346)
"The Natural Literary History of Bodily Sensation" Jean Starobinski: This essay examines literary expressions of somatic sensations. "Where do we draw the line between cenesthesia, which must be a basic assumption of every human existencce, and body awareness, which would be the hypochondriacal or perverse consequence of a narcissitic or autoerotic investment?" (369) "The field of consciousness is occupied by the participal redoubling of the I am, which becomes fixed for an instant in a being, to be suceeded by another momentary state, seeing myself: the I of "I am" is no longer more that myself as object of the act of seeing, itself supplanted by a new act of seeing, which, in turn, makes it an object. The infinite reflexivity thus initiated liberates a series of visions, each of which reduces the preceding vision to the state of an object."(390)
"The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World" Hillel Schwartz: "We have before us the Three Bodies. The first is the substantial body of middle age: fat and present. The second is the sweet body of youth: thin and past. The third is the phantom body of death: streamlined and futuristic...The Three-Body Problem is the problem of being at home in one's body through time. It is a problem posed in the modern West as a problem of fatness, thinness, streamlining. That the end of the world and the contours of the body should be so closely configured, that a machine that weighs us should also be the machine that tells our fortunes, that we should so consistently confuse pounds (or stones) with the passage of time, such must give us pause. And cause. Cause enough for a cultural history of the thin body inside the fat body, and of a third body beyond, dangerous, and possibly explosive." (411) "Slimming is an alarming solution to the Three-Body Problem not because it is selfish but becase it leads to an obsessive, delusive search for the Other. It is not becoming ourselves but becoming Other. The culture of slimming is hazardous, for it offers to put us at home in our bodies only in exchange for a denial of the passage of time. Such bodies may be houses but they are not homes." (452)
"The Ghost in the Machine: Religious Healing and Representations of the Body in Japan" Mary Picone:This essay looks at the Japanese form of Kanpo (Chinese Medicine). "Illness, in this ordering of things, does not exist as a separate nameabe condition deriving from a cause, nor can it be diagnosed objectively in different individuals and cured in each one in approximately the same way." (469) "For a number of Japanese today, the 'ghost in the machine' does not refer to the duality between soul and body. The concepts underlying karmic causation and kampo...give a very different sence to these entities and effectively dissolve the individual, both as a body and as the source of intention." (482)
"The End of the Body" Jonathan Parry: This essay is on the peculiar spatial proximity between body builders and the funeral pyres of Benares and what this might mean to bodily perfection and bodily cessation. "A whole and perfect body is both a sign of one's moral state and a prerequisite for making sacrificial offerings to the gods and ancestors."(502) "The general scenario, then, is one in which the human body exists in a state of precarious and constantly threatened equilibrium. It is nevertheless capable of transformation and refinement; and it is to be perfected by a good life in preparation for a good death, which is in turn a precondition for a more refined state of embodiment - until at last a real 'end of the body' is achieved."(511)
"Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven" Nadia Tazi: This essay examines the virtuality of heaven and its construction within the human mind. "[The] intent is to sketch the main theological obsession of those [late Antiquity]: the will to repeal or to absolve matter, to alleviate the weight of the world." (523) "Heaven is not a circle but an infinity of circles that can change, move and intersect since they coincide in their centers, that is, in God, and since they are the place of the soul, the intensive space of a spiritual continuity sponsored by the One and the Same...In every anthropological doctrine, the body (in itself as well as in its affects) is always the 'other' that must submit to the 'same,' a temporary, secondary part which, in order to complete the whole, must be dominated, vanquished or at least nuetralized so as not to be in the soul's way. It never exists on its own, neither in process of elevation or in Heaven; it is never an agent nor a free principle of life. Its virtures lie elsewhere, in alio: it is created, it is taken on by Christ, it serves and supports all that is in the image of God, it is united with the soul and it introduced into the ethereal regions and so on. The soul can anticipate future life only through continuous askesis of the body." (547) "Whereas the heavenly future of the soul lens itself to all sorts of evaluations, the glorious body truly possesses the dimension of a miracle." (548)
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
"The second approach, represented by the present volume, covers the various junctures between the body's 'outside' and 'inside': it can therefore be called a 'psychosomatic' appraoch, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death." (11)
"Therefore, Socrates is Immortal" Nicole Loraux: This essay is on the Phaedo and what this dialogue does in terms of inauguarating a particular discourse on the soul, immortality and the body into western philosophy. "By irreversibly separating the soul from the body, Plato once and for all detaches the idea of immortality from the civic glory with which it has hitherto been associated." (30) "To use the body to banish the body is not as unjustifiable as it may appear. The body, it could be said, is simply an image used to speak of the soul; and how can one possibly speak of the soul without resorting to imagry?" (38) but..."the soul is immortal, but that immortality is upheld cheifly by the memorial that was Socrates' unforgettable body." (39)
"Reflections of a Soul" Eric Alliez and Michel Feher: This essay is on Plotinus' conception of the body and soul: "Plotinus regarded the human body as a degradation of the soul but also as a reflection of it; and his philosophy was not so much the occasion of a synthesis as a crossroad between two different worlds." (47) "When a human soul turns away from its body to convert itself to the Intellect from which it proceeds, it is launching itelf not toward something other than itself - even something superior - but toward the very Spirit that shines brightly within it...the internal coherence of Plotinus's theory can thus not be faulted, since the only otherness that it attributes to the human soul is the matter of which the body that the soul illuminates is composed." (63)
"The Face and the Soul" Patrizia Magli: This essay examines the ways in which, hisorically, the face is seen as the signifier for the soul. "Identifying the body has always appeared to waver between two opposing approaches to interpretation: between what we might call natural inferences, on the one hand, and arbitrary equivalences, on the other. At times, facial traits are interpreted as symptoms, vague indicaions of something secret, or else as transparent symbols, a univocal text for the owning the key to its deciphering." (89) "Physiognomics continues to rely, instead, on an inductive method that attempts to reduce the infinite variety of individuals and of facial configurations to a standardized state through drastic schematization and abstraction processes...Although by different methods and approaches, anthropologists and psychiatrists, writers and policemen, suspicious lovers and amateur painters, are all taking up and developing anew the ancient idea of a close intermingling of forms, characters, abilities and passions within the living world."(126)
"The Ethics of Gesture" Jean-Claude Schmitt: This essay looks at the generally immutable nature of gesture over time starting with the Roman Empire (Cicero, really). Regarding the visible expression of ideological codes in the West that remain pretty much the same, "the justification of 'bearing' and 'manners'...cannot be external to the code itself, whether God, the soul, reason or chivalric virtue are invoked as its foundation. Just as, in fact, it could not be seriously argued today that the only reason for social conventions is that they exist." (143)
"The Upward Training o the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility" Georges Vigarello: Want to know a brief performative history for why people had to sit up straight in the middle ages - read this essay! "The body's microcosm must evoke, by the subtleties and wealth of measures and relationships of its parts, those of the world at large." (154) "The fact is that the body, just like its uprightness, is 'caught' in a web of categories dominated by moral expectations. Deportment corresponds to the great polarities in behavior, where respect for physical bearing has the same psychological basis as knowing how to be polite." (157) "The upright body is the one that mimics and adopts the positions required by decorum. It must offer a performance, and it is shaped through the performance. Court society imposes a code of posture as its very specific pedagogical requirement." (189)
"Geerewol: The Art of Seduction" Carol Beckwith: A photo essay on series of courtship dances (the Geerewol) performed by the Wodaabe nomads of Niger, in which women judge men for their beauty in performance.
"Love's Rewards" Rene Nelli: An essay on the Asag, one aspect of courtley love in which an elaborate affair between a lady and her suitor involved a test of the suitor not getting aroused in her semi-clothed presence (among other weird tests). "No matter how one views the asag - as the natural expression of passionate love between a man and a woman, as a lover's hypocritcal ruse (despite the fact that he wa forced to excercise self-control), or even as an expression of feminine wiles - one cannot dispute the fact that, beyond its function a a kind of regulator of desire that tended to keep outright libertinism at bay, it was also an hommage to spiritual love. It was an homage founded on the idea that lovers have a need for a communion of pure feeling, and that without this communion, their physical coupling is nothing more than lewdness." (233)
"Between Clothing and Nudity" Mario Perniola: This essay looks at the history of representing the unclothed female body. "We have not left the world of metaphysical thoguth when we think of the trance as a mystical unity of man and god, finally reconciled to each other in an environment of spiritual superelevation. On the contrary, the fleshy garment associates itself with the body's otherness. Under the circumstances, the body is not a mere instrument of the subjective will; it becomes an element of ceremonial ritual which is finally free from subordination to myth." (263)
"Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years: This essay looks at the connection of Shen (Body-Person) and Xin (Heart Mind) in China over the past 150 years. "If there is a constant theme, and on that will presumably continue to be central in the future, it lies in the multidimensional tensions between xin, the heart-mind that is both individual and, simultaneously, part of a collective social heart-mind, and shen, the demanding, egotistic body-person." (346)
"The Natural Literary History of Bodily Sensation" Jean Starobinski: This essay examines literary expressions of somatic sensations. "Where do we draw the line between cenesthesia, which must be a basic assumption of every human existencce, and body awareness, which would be the hypochondriacal or perverse consequence of a narcissitic or autoerotic investment?" (369) "The field of consciousness is occupied by the participal redoubling of the I am, which becomes fixed for an instant in a being, to be suceeded by another momentary state, seeing myself: the I of "I am" is no longer more that myself as object of the act of seeing, itself supplanted by a new act of seeing, which, in turn, makes it an object. The infinite reflexivity thus initiated liberates a series of visions, each of which reduces the preceding vision to the state of an object."(390)
"The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World" Hillel Schwartz: "We have before us the Three Bodies. The first is the substantial body of middle age: fat and present. The second is the sweet body of youth: thin and past. The third is the phantom body of death: streamlined and futuristic...The Three-Body Problem is the problem of being at home in one's body through time. It is a problem posed in the modern West as a problem of fatness, thinness, streamlining. That the end of the world and the contours of the body should be so closely configured, that a machine that weighs us should also be the machine that tells our fortunes, that we should so consistently confuse pounds (or stones) with the passage of time, such must give us pause. And cause. Cause enough for a cultural history of the thin body inside the fat body, and of a third body beyond, dangerous, and possibly explosive." (411) "Slimming is an alarming solution to the Three-Body Problem not because it is selfish but becase it leads to an obsessive, delusive search for the Other. It is not becoming ourselves but becoming Other. The culture of slimming is hazardous, for it offers to put us at home in our bodies only in exchange for a denial of the passage of time. Such bodies may be houses but they are not homes." (452)
"The Ghost in the Machine: Religious Healing and Representations of the Body in Japan" Mary Picone:This essay looks at the Japanese form of Kanpo (Chinese Medicine). "Illness, in this ordering of things, does not exist as a separate nameabe condition deriving from a cause, nor can it be diagnosed objectively in different individuals and cured in each one in approximately the same way." (469) "For a number of Japanese today, the 'ghost in the machine' does not refer to the duality between soul and body. The concepts underlying karmic causation and kampo...give a very different sence to these entities and effectively dissolve the individual, both as a body and as the source of intention." (482)
"The End of the Body" Jonathan Parry: This essay is on the peculiar spatial proximity between body builders and the funeral pyres of Benares and what this might mean to bodily perfection and bodily cessation. "A whole and perfect body is both a sign of one's moral state and a prerequisite for making sacrificial offerings to the gods and ancestors."(502) "The general scenario, then, is one in which the human body exists in a state of precarious and constantly threatened equilibrium. It is nevertheless capable of transformation and refinement; and it is to be perfected by a good life in preparation for a good death, which is in turn a precondition for a more refined state of embodiment - until at last a real 'end of the body' is achieved."(511)
"Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven" Nadia Tazi: This essay examines the virtuality of heaven and its construction within the human mind. "[The] intent is to sketch the main theological obsession of those [late Antiquity]: the will to repeal or to absolve matter, to alleviate the weight of the world." (523) "Heaven is not a circle but an infinity of circles that can change, move and intersect since they coincide in their centers, that is, in God, and since they are the place of the soul, the intensive space of a spiritual continuity sponsored by the One and the Same...In every anthropological doctrine, the body (in itself as well as in its affects) is always the 'other' that must submit to the 'same,' a temporary, secondary part which, in order to complete the whole, must be dominated, vanquished or at least nuetralized so as not to be in the soul's way. It never exists on its own, neither in process of elevation or in Heaven; it is never an agent nor a free principle of life. Its virtures lie elsewhere, in alio: it is created, it is taken on by Christ, it serves and supports all that is in the image of God, it is united with the soul and it introduced into the ethereal regions and so on. The soul can anticipate future life only through continuous askesis of the body." (547) "Whereas the heavenly future of the soul lens itself to all sorts of evaluations, the glorious body truly possesses the dimension of a miracle." (548)
# posted by SMRT : 10:20 AM
