Creating and unmaking the 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.

Corps de femmes et maisons d’enfants dans Enfants du diable de Liliana Lazăr

Women Bodies and Children’s Homes in Liliana Lazar’s Enfants du diable [The Devil’s Children]. Many contemporary Romanian writers who chose French as a literary language seem to share a common interest in revisiting through fiction Romania’s relatively recent communist past, thus exposing the dysfunctionalities of the ‘multilaterally developed socialist society’ during the last years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In her novel, Enfants du diable (2016), Liliana Lazar’s merit is to emphasize the abusive nature of the Romanian totalitarian regime by exploring a topic which is normally less taken into account by post-communist Romanian fiction, namely the private body of women transformed into a public, even political body after the implementation of the Anti-abortion Decree 770/1966. Our aim is to examine the way in which Lazar’s book deals with this topic and its social and personal consequences, as well as its denunciation of a less evident form of the communist carceral system, namely the institutionalization of orphaned children. Keywords: communism, totalitarian regime, women’s body, orphanage, carceral system, Liliana Lazar, Nicolae Ceaușescu

Imperial Identity Seen Through Art. The Case of Maria Theresa – Considerations

During the reign of Maria Theresa (1740-1780) a reassessment of the role women played in a closed society occurred. The main question this article aims to answer is how one can identify these changes by analysing images with high symbolic value, which celebrated and presented Maria Theresa in instances of official relevance, images produced in a period when nations were designing themselves. The present article seeks to underline some of the most representative ideas on how the monarchical identity of Maria Theresa was constructed in art to serve political and propagandistic functions, in an age considered the richest in formal expressions, that is the Baroque, or the ‘Late Baroque’. Hereditary successor to a long line of Holy Roman emperors, Maria Theresa changed the perspective on monarchy and constructed a different identity, that of female agency. Metaphorical images and realism define the analysed portraits in order to demonstrate how the political and the natural body of the monarch combined to illustrate power and aristocratic descent. In my study, the theoretical works on the role Maria Theresa played as female heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire (rex femineus) are to be viewed as main sources of the imagery surrounding her natural and political body. What I propose is an inquiry into the iconographic representations of Maria Theresa’s body of state, which was public and eternal, and thus privileged as a site of discourse for absolutist statehood.

A Special Category of Migrants: The Romanian Exile During the Communist Period

The Romanian exile, an important category of political opponents to the Romanian Communist regime, constituted a social and intellectual category which has been investigated by researchers who edited their diaries, memoirs, or letters and published studies regarding their works and lives. Nonetheless, there are some aspects still to be revealed regarding this sociopolitical category of individuals and their work. Thus, we will try to fit the exile within the category of migrants – and examine how the Romanian Securitate regarded them from this perspective. We will therefore resort to their works, studies, and articles, and also to documents found in the Securitate Archives, in an attempt to present their perception by the repressive political body which forced them into migration/exile.

The constitutional and legal framework for the institutionalization of the Kurdistan Regional Parliament

This research is discussing on the institutionalizing case of Kurdistan Region entity and Kurdistan Parliament as the primary power in its parliamentary political system in the state institutionalizing framework. This insight gives us the opportunity that institutionalization case through state forming module, development and dissolving based on the institutionalization theory should be considered. In this situation, we need to fcus on the most powerful political body in the Region which is the. parliament and its institutionalization framework. The research discusses power and its role with duties to achieve the obligations through the constitutional law and its norms with the tools to facilitate and run its duties. Thus, the main obstacles facing the institutionalization of the Parliament will be known, while the parliament is highly considered by civilians and people of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Minhocão: affective re-territorializations in contemporary urban disputes

This paper presents a case of urban dispute to show how a new political body has been affectively occupying the spheres of participation since the uprisings that occurred in Brazil in June 2013. Minhocão, the target of this urban dispute, is an elevated highway located in the city of São Paulo. Inaugurated in 1970, it has been informally occupied by the inhabitants of its surroundings since the 1980s. Using the notion of “affective re-territorializations” (Hutta, 2019), the article analyses how the rise of conservative and progressive affective fields are reshaping spaces in the contemporary city and, ultimately, influencing urban projects and public policies. Through the analysis of primary and secondary data, the article demonstrates that this space, which used to be the target of informal appropriations, has become the symbol of an affective dispute, being constantly re--signified, alternating progressive and reactionary ideologies.

Marginalizing the Victim and the Political Body of the People

The article examines Judith Butler’s performative approach to the concept of the people, which allows to not only outline the boundaries of a certain model of political theology, so important for conservative political thought, but to also see the significance born by the acts of entry by collective bodies into public space. In this context, the figure of the victim can have a consolidating function, being the potentially affectively condensed point of the collective body’s assembling. The marginalization of the victim’s body is analyzed through the concept of the politics of grief and that of ungrievable lives. The victim’s marginalization is shown to be a multidimensional phenomenon. Not only the victim, but also the criminal can be marginalized, as well as various circumstances of catastrophic events and acts of violence. Examples taken from the Russian news in recent years illustrate how important the independent media audience’s perception of victims are: whether they perceive the victims they are informed about as marginal or as pertinent to their own lives and identities, whether the audience is ready to shift the boundaries toward greater inclusivity and to reinstate

Machiavelli and republicanism in Elizabethan England

The purpose of this succinct work is to present N. Machiavelli's classic republican view from his proposition of an inevitable paradox, the founding of an expansionist republic, difficult to govern, or the founding of a stable, but small and weak republic. Such a paradox, according to Machiavelli, should direct and condition all the constitutive devices of the republic when choosing what will be its destiny as a political body. The model of republic preferred by the Florentine will be the expansionist model of Rome, leading him to assume all the devices that gave this republic its power. From this presentation of the Machiavellian proposition, we will analyse the assimilation of republican thought in England from the Elizabethan period, as well as the political-social scenario that exists there. This itinerary will allow us to understand, in general, why classical republicanism was received on English soil from the perspective of establishing a mixed, stable government, thus favouring the spread of the Venice myth as a serene republic and delaying the use, even that mitigated, of the republican presuppositions expressed in the Machiavellian work that directed towards a Roman model.

Democracy

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.