Creating and unmaking the political body

2022 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-91
Author(s):  
Thomas Balfe
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Political Body

The shared embodiment of humans and animals, and the notion of the ‘creaturely’ human influentially discussed by Anat Pick, have recently emerged as vital concerns within Animal Studies. Aligning its critical stance with these perspectives, this article analyses the small painting in the Rijksmuseum, traditionally attributed to Jan de Baen, which depicts the 1672 murder of the Dutch politicians Johan and Cornelis de Witt. Pamphlets, broadsheets and other contemporary responses to the murder frequently compare the bodies of the De Witts – which were eviscerated, hung upside-down, shorn of body parts and allegedly partially eaten – to animal carcasses. Drawing on these contextual sources, the essay explores how the painting works with and against period constructions of the killing in terms of inter-species violence. It uncovers tentative admissions of human creatureliness in the painting’s representation of the murdered body as a temporal, material and fragile entity.

Property in Human Body Parts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Body ◽  
First Principles ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Regulatory Approach ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
The Law

This chapter surveys the current legal position concerning property in bodies and bodily materials. Of especial relevance in the current age of advanced genetic and other bio technologies, it looks beyond property in bodies and their materials ‘as such’ to consider also (a) the availability of rights of personal and intellectual property in objects incorporating or derived from them, and (b) the reliance on quasi-property rights of possession and consent to regulate the storage and use of corpses and detached bodily materials, including so-called ‘bio-specimens’. Reasoning from first principles, it highlights the practical and conceptual, as well as the political and philosophical, difficulties in this area, along with certain differences in the regulatory approach of European and US authorities. By way of conclusion, it proposes the law of authors’ and inventors’ rights as simultaneously offering a cautionary tale to those who would extend the reach of property even further than it extends currently and ideas for exploiting the malleability of the ‘property’ concept to manage the risks of extending it.

The Abolition of Slavery

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-203
Author(s):  
Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
French History ◽  
Political Body ◽  
High Iron ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Power Strategies ◽  
Culture Of Silence ◽  
The City

April 24th 1998, a two-meter-high iron statue of a slave, arms raised towards the sky, breaking free from his/her chains, was erected clandestinely in Nantes, the primary French slave port of the eighteenth century. Faced with the local government’s refusal to erect a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer association decided, in secret, to commission a sculpture. Following the organization’s initial success of hijacking the inauguration, the statue was vandalized. It soon became a performative monument, a memorial palimpsest, and a centre stage of a symbolic combat where opponents and supporters clashed. This essay reveals the democratic praxis at the heart of this commemoration debate. With both the pressure of citizens on the political body, and the triple practice of diversion, subversion, and taking hostage of (public) space, the association thwarts the writing and power strategies of the city of Nantes and its culture of silence. Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer not only resists official discourse but subsequently imposes its own version of French history on the whitened pages of France’s colonial narrative, thus reclaiming a past, a story, an identity, by bringing to light existences and testimonies, and defining new lieux de parole.

Essential tremor: genetic update

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Deng ◽  
Shan Wu ◽  
Joseph Jankovic
Keyword(s):  
Essential Tremor ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Genetic Factors ◽  
Small Sample Size ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Lower Limbs ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Genetic Analyses ◽  
Disease Definition ◽  
Neurological Movement Disorder

Abstract Essential tremor (ET) is a neurological movement disorder characterised by bilateral limb kinetic/postural tremor, with or without tremor in other body parts including head, voice and lower limbs. Since no causative genes for ET have been identified, it is likely that the disorder occurs as a result of complex genetic factors interacting with various cellular and environmental factors that can result in abnormal function of circuitry involving the cerebello–thalamo–cortical pathway. Genetic analyses have uncovered at least 14 loci and 11 genes that are related to ET, as well as various risk or protective genetic factors. Limitations in ET genetic analyses include inconsistent disease definition, small sample size, varied ethnic backgrounds and many other factors that may contribute to paucity of relevant genetic data in ET. Genetic analyses, coupled with functional and animal studies, have led to better insights into possible pathogenic mechanisms underlying ET. These genetic studies may guide the future development of genetic testing and counselling, and specific, pathogenesis-targeted, therapeutic strategies.

scholarly journals Liberalism, commodification, and justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82
Author(s):  
Vida Panitch
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Bargaining Power ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
The Face ◽  
Market Transaction ◽  
Political Liberal

Anti-commodification theorists condemn liberal political philosophers for not being able to justify restricting a market transaction on the basis of what is sold, but only on the basis of how it is sold. The anti-commodification theorist is correct that if this were all the liberal had to say in the face of noxious markets, it would be inadequate: even if everyone has equal bargaining power and no one is misled, there are some goods that should not go to the highest bidder. In this paper, I respond to the anti-commodification critique of liberalism by arguing that the political liberal has the wherewithal to account not only for the conditions under which goods should not be sold, but also for what kinds of goods should not be for sale in a market economy. The political liberal can appeal to a principle of equal basic rights, and to one of sufficiency in basic needs and the social bases of self-respect, I argue, to account for what’s problematic about markets in civic goods, necessary goods, and physical goods including body parts and intimate services.

Raw, roast or half-baked? Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piers Beirne
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Art History ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Species ◽  
The Political ◽  
Green Criminology ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
Roast Beef

Scholars of human–animal studies, literary criticism and art history have paid considerable attention of late to how the visual representation of nonhuman animals has often and sometimes to great effect been used in the imagining of national identity. It is from the scrutinies of these several disciplines that the broad backcloth of this article is woven. Its focus is the neglected coupling of patriotism and carnism, instantiated here by its deployment in William Hogarth’s painting Calais Gate (1749). A pro-animal reading is offered of the English artist’s exhortation that it is in the nature of ‘true-born Britons’ to consume a daily dish of roast beef served with lashings of francophobia and anti-popery. The article suggests that alert contemporary viewers of Calais Gate would nevertheless have noticed that Hogarth’s painterly triumphalism ironically rekindles the repressed memory of English military defeat and territorial loss. Because the political and religious borders between England and France were so easily defaced and refaced, the accompanying air of uncertainty over national identity would also have infiltrated the perceived authenticity of English roast beef. The article draws on animal rights theory, on nonspeciesist green criminology and on green visual criminology in order to oppose the historical dominance of human interests over those of other animal species in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.

scholarly journals War, Disease and Aesthesis.

TECHNOLOGOS ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 75-87
Author(s):  
Myshkin Oleg
Keyword(s):  
Space Time ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Autoimmune Reaction ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Biological Analogy ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Type ◽  
Definition Of

Instead of a critical attitude of Modernity this article establishes naivety as a means to describe transformations that human experience is forced to undergo being affected by hybrid (in Latour’s terms) and nonhuman agencies. To compare the image of the modern war with a new type of conflict that has developed over the past decades in terms of space-time it attracts allies such as Gilles Deleuze, оbject-oriented ontologists, S. Shaviro and Alfred Whitehead. The new type of conflict in question is the terrorist activity guided by the doctrine of Taqiyya, or strategic (dis)simulation, described by Reza Negarestany in his essay The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of Absence? The reason for this choice of objects for comparison is the fact that this new wave of terrorism decomoses the space-time framework of war established by Modernity proliferating like a virus and functioning according to the “bottom up” principle. That’s why it is potentially the most successful – and therefore dangerous – for it actively exploits the “biological” analogy of society and the tree internalizing itself into the structure of the political body and causing an excessive allergic autoimmune reaction on its part and then destroying the political body from the inside. In this respect the logic of its unfolding repeats at the macro-level of society the logic of spreading the virus at the micro-level of the individual's body, as described by Eugene Tucker in the essay Nosos, nomos, and bios. In the face of these threats, definition of the spatial and temporal framework for the functioning of terror and viral infection becomes a necessary condition for survival. Such a definition, in turn, requires a revision of the modern concept of space-time with it’s notions of the fundamental locality of actual entities, the linearity/discreteness of time and the relations of internal/external. In other words, it requires a revision of our concept of aesthesis.

The Ideology of the Regional State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Regional State ◽  
Political Justification ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
The Way

This chapter analyses the way in which the Visconti justified their seigneury and their expansionist policies on an ethical and political level. They attempted to set themselves up as paladins in the war against tyranny—now seen not in its traditional sense as one of the degenerate forms of government, but as a division of the political body, a prime cause of war and an obstacle to peace. Through this intrepid conceptual twist, pro-Visconti circles were thus notably successful in deflecting any delegitimizing accusation away from their masters, while at the same time elaborating an ethico-political justification for their expansionism: a first glimpse, here, of the ideological foundations of the regional state.

The Experience of Personal Government between the Factions and the Popolo

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The City

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, two new actors made their appearance in the political life of the communes: the factions and the Societas Populi. This chapter focuses on the political language and culture of these two elements, highlighting the tendency of various social actors to consistently represent the unity of the political body. This was the supreme value which neither the factions nor the Popolo would renounce, even when they were alone in power: on the contrary, in fact, it was very much in that kind of situation that the parties tended to represent themselves as ‘the whole’. The chapter then goes on to examine the role that both the factions and the Societas Populi played in fostering the first experiences of lordly government in the city.

The Political Body

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marli F. Weiner ◽  
Mazie Hough
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Financial Investment ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Lay Perspectives ◽  
Health And Sickness

This book investigates how slaves experienced illness and the practice of medicine, as well as the ways in which physicians sought to understand race and sex, in the antebellum South. It shows that doctors who tried to define health and sickness for men and women, black and white, also had to contend with the realities of a slaveholding society. Slaveholders often defined slaves as healthy enough to work when the slaves considered themselves to be sick. At the same time, slaveholders wanted to protect their financial investment in the bodies of slaves and so had incentive to provide medical care for them. Slaves had their own beliefs about bodily differences and the causes of sickness as well as how to cure them, but their beliefs were seldom validated or their practices respected by slaveholders and doctors. In order to elucidate medical and lay perspectives on the political body in the antebellum old South, the book draws on evidence from a variety of sources, including medical journals and texts, physicians' diaries, and slave narratives and folklore for slaves.

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