Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

scholarly journals The Persistence of Character in Twentieth-century British Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942092258
Author(s):  
Jeremy Nuttall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Moral Politics ◽  
State Expansion ◽  
Moral Growth

Politicians across parties repeatedly agreed that their visions of social improvement rested as much on the promotion of character virtues as on the efficacy of economic systems. Character posed recurring political dilemmas. Ideological dispute over character, as to whether it is formed best through individual exertion or collective support, lies at the heart of the division of politics between right and left. Further, the limits to the people’s character were seen as a constraint upon social progress. Yet, contrary to much historiography, this is not a story of decline from a supposed Victorian heyday of ‘moral politics’. British politics proved notably adaptive in forging updated, optimistic visions, in which the forces of modernity which might have seemed to threaten the moral calibre of the body politic, or of society, whether democracy, state expansion, or, later, ‘individualism’, were recast instead as supportive foundations for the people’s moral growth. If the century has seen a steadily ‘quieter’, less loudly moralizing, more nurturing approach to the encouragement of character, this reflected a growth in the sophistication of the method of advancing character, not a decline in either the political importance accorded to it, or the people’s possession of it.

Flawed Saviours: the Myths of Hindenburg and Pétain

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna von der Goltz ◽  
Robert Gildea
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Spectrum

Although Hindenburg and Pétain emerged from very different historical traditions, one monarchical and authoritarian, the other democratic and republican, their trajectories and cults in the twentieth century in fact had much in common. Both emerged as military heroes, saving the fatherland in 1914 in iconic victories, and both were subsequently called back as political saviours as the Weimar and Third Republics ran into difficulties and collapsed. The status and reputation of each was enhanced by a cult that was both manufactured and spontaneous, ranging widely across the political spectrum and reaching deep into the body politic. The cults drew on powerful images of solidity and ancient heroes. Both leaders were, however, flawed, compromising with Nazi power, and they were buried far from the sites of their victories. In spite of these flaws, however, the cults of Hindenburg and Pétain have been remarkably adaptable and enduring.

Basel Mission and Revolutions in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century China: Debating Societal Renewal

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Tobias Brandner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Taiping Rebellion ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Basel Mission

Abstract This article analyzes how the Basel missionaries interpreted the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary changes in China. After a short historical overview, it assesses the different aspects and roots of what implicitly constituted the political theology of the Basel Mission. In the body part of the essay it analyzes documents written by missionaries (letters, reports written to the home committee) to understand how the missionaries saw the epochal changes that they witnessed: the Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century and the political changes taking place between 1911–1949. A final section considers how timely the past Basel missionaries’ political views are in present-day China and how they are reflected in parts of recent Chinese political theology.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

scholarly journals Sorismo en el contexto del geunismo

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Sánchez-Seco López
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Efficient Markets ◽  
Efficient Markets Hypothesis ◽  
Economic Philosophy ◽  
The One ◽  
Regulatory Proposals ◽  
Economic Globalisation

En el contexto de una obra mucho más amplia y en ciernes, que propone como único sistema plenamente legítimo aquél cuyo cuerpo político viene constituido por la totalidad de habitantes del planeta, es conveniente traer a colación la filosofía política y económica de George Soros, porque aporta una visión muy diferente a la aplicada por los endiosados economistas que no supieron ver con antelación la Gran Recesión global en la que seguimos inmersos. La relación entre la realidad y el pensamiento es clave en el sorismo, como también lo es la distinción entre los diversos tipos de ciencias. La hipótesis de la eficiencia en los mercados también es cuestionada, junto con el concepto de equilibrio en economía, la incertidumbre y la falibilidad. También se acomete la crítica del fundamentalismo de mercado y a las propuestas regulatorias. Y todo en el contexto de una globalización económica poco política.Within the context of a much wider and developing piece proposing as only fully legitimate system the one the body politic of which is composed of the totality of inhabitants on the planet, it is convenient to bring to us the political and economic philosophy of George Soros for it adds a very different vision to that applied by the deified economists who could not in advance see the global Great Recession in which we keep on living. The relation between reality and thought is key within Sorism, as it is the distinction amongst the several kinds of sciences. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is also put into question side by side with the concept of equilibrium in Economics, uncertainty, and fallibility. The critique of market fundamentalism is also implemented as well as the regulatory proposals. And all of it taking place within the context of a scarcely political but very economic globalisation.

The Poetic and the Political in Valery Podoroga’s Analytical Anthropology

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Oleg Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Analytical Tools

The article is devoted to an analysis of the creative work of the Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga. It focuses on the special discipline he created, namely, “analytical anthropology”, and the book “Anthropograms”, in which Valery Podoroga sets out the basic principles and analytical tools of his philosophical work. Examining the books of the philosopher that preceded the creation of analytical anthropology and those that were written later, it is possible to single out two important lines of his research. First, the philosophy of literature and second, research in the field of the political. Podoroga’s understanding of literature is broader than that of a cultural practice or a social institution. For him, it is the space of the corporal experience of contact with the world, in which the affective aspect of thinking is realized. This line of analysis points to the “poetic” dimension of the experience of thinking, since the emphasis here is on what Jakobson called the “poetic function of language”, its orientation toward itself. It is precisely the literary aspect that becomes important when analyzing the texts of philosophers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger); however, what is even more important is that in the very experience of fiction Podoroga is trying to find new means for philosophy. His “poetic line” is closely connected with the poetics of space (Bachelard) and the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, Henry). It is the combination of poetics and phenomenology that allows Podoroga to overcome both the orientation of poetics exclusively toward language and the categorical apparatus of philosophy. The main result of Valery Podoroga’s work is the creation of an “anthropogram”, a special kind of scheme in which the action of the Work (a literary work, but not only) is immanent to the dynamics of the world. Is it possible to create such anthropograms outside the field of literature? Podoroga does not specify. The article attempts to show how Podoroga’s ways of working with literary texts correlate with his works dealing with the technologies of power and violence, transforming separate political and ethical terms into anthropograms, that is, forms of thought immanent to life itself.

Outliving the Republic

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Republic

Chapter 4 examines claims in republican oratory and letters that the body politic was dead, dying, or would have died, if not for some timely intervention. To some degree, invocations of the republic’s death overlap with the images of wounding and disease explored in earlier chapters, to which at least a few are directly connected. The suggestion of urgency and permanence and the complex emotional resonances evoked by death, however, also often impart meanings of their own. References to the body politic’s demise are particularly common not only in invective but also in consolatory contexts, as Cicero’s letters to and from friends in the period of the civil wars (from 49 to 45 BCE) and Caesar’s dictatorship poignantly show. Common assumptions that Rome’s republic ought to have been undying lent further significance to statements about the political body’s death.

Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

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