Punishment and the Political Body

2006 ◽  
pp. 186-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Pierce
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune

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.


TECHNOLOGOS ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 75-87
Author(s):  
Myshkin Oleg

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.


Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

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.


Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

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.


Author(s):  
Marli F. Weiner ◽  
Mazie Hough

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes

This chapter deals with democracy and Rousseau's participative polity. The demands of positive freedom are also those of the political body, constituted of citizens, to organize itself. The chapter explores this ever-important notion. No freedom can be complete without a fully democratized state — and this includes the subjection of the economy to public rule. The national dimension of the movement is clearly established. Although it is largely working class, it has involved many other segments of society and can best be described as a movement of the small-middle stratum of citizens — either lower-middle class or upper-working class — what is described as 'the small-mean class'. It has been foreshadowed by police tactics against the banlieues; it has involved the most modest parts of French society directly, who have largely contributed to the movement, the middle classes, who have been commenting on it and trying to portray it as a jacquerie, or peasant revolt, and the upper classes, who have seen their iconic boulevards closed off and vandalized.


philoSOPHIA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-297
Author(s):  
Jonathan Sinnreich
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 266-275
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Chachaj ◽  

In 1819, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz took a journey around Lithuania. It was the sixth of his historical trips. The author summed up his observations of the state of Lithuania in following words: “How many dangerous, contagious diseases affect this part of the political body of our homeland!” The „plague” metaphor is developed further in the discussion. Niemcewicz describes “epidemics” that destroy society and the state, causing effects that are equally or more dangerous than material losses visible at first glance. He points to “plagues” resulting from political oppression and violence of invader on various levels of social life, as well as unwanted changes that dependent on the will of a man who succumbs to destructive influences.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Pavel Bychkov

The article deals with the strategies used by French medieval authors of the 14th — 15th centuries to comprehend the state and society with the help of cognitive tools like metaphor and allegory. Writers and poets of that period, such as Nicolas Oresme, Eustache Deschamps, Jean Gerson, Christina de Pisan and others, use the same expressive means in their works, but the means themselves can be expressions of different, even opposite ideas. The article considers the metaphor of the political body and the allegorical figure of France, which French thinkers most frequently resorted to. The metaphor of the body expresses the idea of the integrity of the state, the harmonious combination and functionality of all parts of society, thus helping to form a political and philosophical doctrine of the state structure. Allegory, on the other hand, as a certain personification of this body, outlines the state as a female figure, becoming the archetypal “damsel in distress” in order to form an identity and loyal feelings in the reader. Thus, this or that trope dictated the model for describing the state, and vice versa-the choice of this or that trope signified the desire to convey certain ideas to potential recipients.


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