D(en)ying narratives: death, identity and the body politic

Legal Studies ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Hanafin
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
The Body ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Imagined Nation ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Individual Body

One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic.

The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Sacrifice

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.

Light Dance

Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-91
Author(s):  
Seth Riskin
Keyword(s):  
Simple Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Speed Of Light ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Room Light ◽  
Shared Space ◽  
Surrounding Space ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body ◽  
Movement Expression

The author discusses the origin and meaning of his Light Dance artwork. The simple approach—placing a source of light on the body and thereby manipulating the illumination of the surrounding space through body movements—alters the viewer’s perception of space and time. Architecture appears malleable as the performer affects the size, shape and speed of light forms that reach from the body to the boundaries of the room. Light, in this perceptual environment, is not a mere transmitter of information between the invariant material surroundings and the eye of the viewer; light is a space-defining extension of the performer’s body that transposes movement expression from the individual body to the shared space. An inversion of subjective and objective “spaces” is realized in the experience of Light Dance wherein the prevailing conceptual hierarchy of light and vision is overcome.

scholarly journals Molecular Politics, Wearables, and the Aretaic Shift in Biopolitical Governance

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-96
Author(s):  
Peter Lindner
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

Since the publication of Nikolas Rose’s ‘The Politics of Life Itself’ (2001) there has been vivid discussion about how biopolitical governance has changed over the last decades. This article uses what Rose terms ‘molecular politics’, a new socio-technical grip on the human body, as a contrasting background to ask anew his question ‘What, then, of biopolitics today?’ – albeit focusing not on advances in genetics, microbiology, and pharmaceutics, as he does, but on the rapid proliferation of wearables and other sensor-software gadgets. In both cases, new technologies providing information about the individual body are the common ground for governance and optimization, yet for the latter, the target is habits of moving, eating and drinking, sleeping, working and relaxing. The resulting profound differences are carved out along four lines: ‘somatic identities’ and a modified understanding of the body; the role of ‘expert knowledge’ compared to that of networks of peers and self-experimentation; the ‘types of intervention’ by which new technologies become effective in our everyday life; and the ‘post-discipline character’ of molecular biopolitics. It is argued that, taken together, these differences indicate a remarkable shift which could be termed aretaic: its focus is not ‘life itself’ but ‘life as it is lived’, and its modality are new everyday socio-technical entanglements and their more-than-human rationalities of (self-)governance.

Life After Life: Bioarchaeology and Post-mortem Agency

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
The Body ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Select Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Anxious Group

In the alternative fairy tale The Princess Bride, as William Goldman's character Miracle Max reanimates the apparent corpse of the hero Westley, he tells the anxious group observing the procedure: ‘There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive’ (Goldman 2007, 313). Only a select group of the dead can be characterized as being ‘slightly alive’, in the post-mortem agency sense, however, and the case studies presented here explore the many ways in which this subcategory of mostly dead individuals have engaged with and continue to impact the living in the past as well as today. Several themes emerge as especially salient: the iteration in the death-scape of the dynamic tension between the individual and the social group, which can result in transgression as well as conformity in the disposition of the body and its effects on the living; the symbolic capital represented by some dead bodies and the ways in which their potency may be affected by various forms of contextual association; and the ways in which the manipulation of the dead for political purposes is subject to constraints specific to the cultural contexts in which these interactions take place.

scholarly journals Ekploitasi Tubuh Aktivis Perempuan Pengurus Cabang Pergerakan Mahasiswa Islam Indonesia Kabupaten Malang

AL-HUKAMA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-171
Author(s):  
Ahmad Zainuri
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Normal State ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Development Program ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Development ◽  
Job Descriptions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Interesting Event ◽  
Individual Body

In implementing the works program of the Branch Management of Indonesian Islamic Students Movement of Malang Regency, for the sake of a good and interesting event, the owners of power use female activists to become workers. Women activists must carry out tasks that are not in accordance with their job descriptions, get coercion from fellow activists to carry out tasks that they themselves have not yet experienced and only try first, and the most striking is when female activists are not happy if there is a women's development program. The practice of exploitation of these women activists, seen in this article, uses Michel Foucault's body discipline theory. The body's discipline works as a normalization of behavior designed by utilizing the productive and reproductive abilities of the human body. The practice of power through disciplining the body, creates a situation where the individual body can internalize submission and make it look like a normal state. This practice is what Foucault calls the normalization of power over the individual body. Individuals will never feel that they are being used and subjugated because they already consider it to be within reasonable limits. It can also be said that this is a veiled exploitation.

scholarly journals El cuerpo desde una subjetividad de progreso en la ‘nueva’ época antropocena

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Ricardo Iglesias García
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Current Implementation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Nuevas Tecnologías ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

La evolución del concepto de cuerpo individual/cuerpo social, específicamente desde la modernidad, la industrialización y la actual implementación de las tecnologías nos conduce hacia una visión del sujeto humano en un continuo proceso de progreso ‘egoísta’, con sus correspondientes repercusiones en la totalidad del ecosistema terrestre. Según algunos científicos es necesario plantearnos la posibilidad de unanueva época geología: el antropoceno. La idea del cuerpo autómata persiste en nuestro imaginario occidental. Es notable, además, que el cuerpo se proponga como máquina y no como forma natural, cuestión que no dejará de traer consecuencias al momento de ejercer actividades con/sobre el cuerpo y sobre su espacio vital. Las nuevas tecnologías ofrecen la posibilidad de superar los límites impuestos por nuestra herencia biológica en una especie de deseo explícito de no aceptar nuestro pasado, ni nuestro origen natural-orgánico, frente a una automejora y modificación en un sistema de progreso ad infinitum. En este sentido, una serie importante de pensadores, científicos y artistas han generado relecturas el cuerpo como algo completamente obsoleto, como una cáscara vacía que debe ser abandonada paratecnológicamente dar paso al siguiente nivel en la evolución humana: el Techno Sapiens o el Cyborg. Seaboga para que el objeto de estudio de la antropología pase del ser humano al cyborg, considerado éste como un representante más idóneo de nuestro presente y, sobre todo, de nuestro futuro. Paralelamente en la esfera del arte aparecen figuras que buscan representar esta tecnoevolución como Stelar, Marcel·lí Antúnez, o Carlos Corpa, entre otros. The evolution of the concept of the individual body / social body, specifically from modernity, industrialization and the current implementation of technologies, leads us to a vision of the human subject in a continuum of ‘egotistic’ progress as well as its corresponding repercussions in the totality of its natural environment. According to some scientific, it is necessary to consider the possibility of a new geology era:the Anthropocene. The idea of the automaton body persists in our Western imaginary. It is also remarkable that the body is proposed as a machine and not as a natural object, an issue not without consequences, when exercising activities with / on the body and on its vital space. The new technologies offer the possibility of overcoming the limits imposed by our biological inheritance in a sort of explicit desire to accept neither our past, nor our natural-organic origin, in the face of self-improvement and modification in a system of progress Ad infinitum. In this sense, an important series of thinkers, scientists and artists have produced new approaches of the body as something completely obsolete, as an empty shell that must be abandoned to technologically give way to the next level in the human evolution: the Techno Sapiens or the Cyborg. It calls for the object of study of anthropology goes from human being to cyborg, considered as a more suitable representative of our present, and above all, of our future, with all its positive and negative consequences. At the same time in the realm of art, some figures who want to represent this techno-evolution have appeared such as Stelar, Marcel·lí Antúnez, Carlos Corpa, among others.

scholarly journals Kroppens komplekse videnskabelighed. Nye perspektiver på alternativ behandling

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helle Johannesen
Keyword(s):  
Healing Process ◽  
Alternative Therapies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Therapeutic Interventions ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Therapeutic Concepts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Patients Experience ◽  
Individual Body ◽  
Experience Effect

The numerous conceptions of the body exposed in alternative therapies challenge traditional, Western, biomedically dictated conceptions of the body, disease and healing. The apparent heterogenity could lead to a discharge of alternative body concepts and related therapeutic interventions, but as a large portion of patients experience effect of a variety of alternative treatments, the need for a conceptual framework encompassing heterogenity at several logical levels emerges. For this purpose the author proposes the concept of “the complex body”, in which cultural, social, and natural features are recognized as integral aspects of the individual body, treatment, and the healing process. The body is conceptualized as a complex field of potentials, to be explicated and unfolded in interaction with specific therapeutic concepts and techniques. Underlying the obvious variety within alternative therapies, a common focus on the body as structure, disease as de-structuration, and treatment as re-structuration is revealed. Treatments are rarely aimed at destruction of disease agents or pathologies, but most often aim at a general strengthening - re-structuring - of the patient, biochemically, physiologically, mentally, culturally or socially. Examples from reflexology, biopathy and kinesiology support the validity of a concept of the complex body, which leads to a reconsideration of scientific and scholarly approaches to evaluation of effects of alternative therapies.

Refashioning a Body Politic in Colonial Louisiana

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Visual Data ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
French Colonial

This article examines the boundaries of clothing and the body in constructions of political identity in French colonial Louisiana. The study situates constructions of political identity among regulatory demands over the bodies of colonial subjects and the practices of taste and social distinction. It is argued that dress allowed colonial subjects to move into political spaces usually occupied by European colonizers. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and visual data are used to investigate how French colonizers attempted to construct a body politic by regulating dress and the bodies of colonial subjects, while colonial ‘others’ attempted to constitute themselves as political bodies through self-fashioning.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

Surplus Repressive Punishment and Spirit’s Regressive (de-)Actualisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-240
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Objective ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a provoking claim: the real problem here is not the natural dimension involved in criminality. Instead, it argues that the real threat to freedom’s social actualization is the way in which the state’s disciplinary apparatus reacts to violations of right. It shows that if criminality needs to be framed in terms of nature then so does punishment. If punishment functions to (re-)habituate transgressive persons, then one of its inherent risks is that it might operate as a brute externality, a natural force. In functioning as an external natural force, punishment actively mutilates the freedom constitutive of juridical personhood. Not only does this mutilation undermine the individual it also actively undermines spirit’s social (objective) expression as freedom because such a practice serves to (a) fragment and alienate the person and (b) the totality constituting the body politic. This threat is what the chapter calls “surplus repressive punishment.” This problem as a whole is what the chapter denotes with “spirit’s regressive (de-)actualization.” Consequently, the problem nature poses in Hegel’s system is even more complex when considered in terms of how the polis’ institutions frame, understand, and react to that very same problem.

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