Thinking the body as a basis, provocation and burden of life: Studies in intercultural and historical contexts 9783110407389, 9783110407310

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Thinking the Body as a Basis, Provocation, and Burden of Life

Challenges of Life

Essays on philosophical and cultural anthropology Edited by Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta

Volume 2

Thinking the Body as a Basis, Provocation, and Burden of Life Studies in Intercultural and Historical Contexts Edited by Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta Editorial Manager Laura S. Carugati

ISBN 978-3-11-040731-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-040738-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-040747-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Dr. Rainer Ostermann, München Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta

Preface

This volume harkens back to a symposium that took place in Buenos Aires from 8 to 10 April in 2014 under the academic supervision of Carlos Ruta, President of the National University of San Martín, and of Gert Melville, Director of the “Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte (FOVOG)” at the University of Dresden, Germany. Following upon its predecessor dedicated to the topic of “Life Configurations”, this symposium was the second in a series of international meetings with the title “Challenges of Life”. Throughout these meetings, specialists with different scientific horizons have been invited from all over the world to reflect upon problems and topics considered essential for a manifold understanding of the human being, of its place in the world, and of the fundamental challenges that life presents in various forms. It lies in the nature of the human being to be aware of his or her existential limitations, to recognise him or herself as a deficient being. Of course, one instinctively senses that life holds many challenges. Yet, more importantly, one also reflectively accepts one’s life as a challenge in itself, seeking to discern the conditions and to devise the means with which to tackle it. The spirit of the meetings is decidedly interdisciplinary und cross-cultural. The topics will be approached from different perspectives of knowledge such as, among others, anthropological, philosophical, historical, sociological, politological, legal, medical, and biological ones. The core topics will be examined by looking at different civilizations, which will make it possible to achieve results by means of a comparison and to become receptive to the diversity of world cultures. At the same time, the lack of chronological limits should also allow access to a range of periods and to the corresponding changes and transformations. The symposium of 2014 attempted to determine more closely the place, role, and connection – or lack of connection – of the body with social, political, and cultural transformations. The starting point was the assumption that the body is indeed the basis and power source of human life as well as a decisive source of identity, but that it also provokes psychologically in many ways. It thus binds powers and constitutes a burden that creates vulnerabilities and imposes limits. In this volume, the contributions have been structured into four clusters. The first cluster with the title “Basic perspectives” deals with general observations concerning the philosophical, sociological, aesthetical, performative, and psychological dimensions of the body in partly comprehensive epochal surveys. The second cluster is dedicated to “pre-modern aspects” ranging from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages and clarifies that that period of history by no means attributed

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the highest value to the body and always judged it by its relation to the soul. Under the title of „Cultural identities“, the third cluster seeks to determine positions of the body in the thinking and acting of civilizations beyond the Euro-American cultural sphere. To that end, it assesses conditions in India and China as well as in the Himalayan “Na” culture and in the “Samo” culture of Burkina Faso. Finally, the fourth cluster is dedicated to the most provocative, the most bodily - as it were - dimensions of the body: “gender, sexuality, and violence” with special emphasis on feminism, male chauvinism, “pornification,” and taboos. The underlying systematical conception of the volume allows a varying illumination of aspects that concern the essential intercultural facets of the body. Among the volume’s many thematic focal points are: –– concerning the treatment of the body – contempt for or socialization, moralization, care, punishment, and domination of the body –– vis-à-vis the habitus of the body – vulnerability, nakedness and clothing, performances, rituals and magic, the moving and the fixed body, sexual reproduction, and social integration –– with regard to the metaphors of the body – microcosm and macrocosm, corpus and corporation, the social body, body as language, body as a tomb of the soul.

Contents Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta Preface    V Basic Perspectives Sandro Chignola Body Factories  

 3

Karl-Siegbert Rehberg Self-reference and Sociality The Differentiation of “Perceived Body“ and “Corpus” in Philosophical Anthropology    19 Ariel Wilkis Thinking the Body Durkheim, Mauss, Bourdieu: The Agreements and Disagreements of a Tradition    33 Walter Cenci Representation and Scene Mimesis and Vertigo of the Body   Alexandre Roig The Headless Body  

 45

 55

Francisco-Hugo Freda The Body in Psychoanalysis  

 62

Premodern Aspects Gert Melville The Body between Creation, Fall, Death, and Resurrection The Human Being and Corporal Life in the View of St. Augustine   Jean-Claude Schmitt Thinking the Body in the Middle Ages  

 89

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Cultural Identities Karin Preisendanz Between Affirmation and Rejection Attitudes towards the Body in Ancient South Asia from the Ṛgveda to Early Classical Medicine    113 Achim Mittag Body – State – Cosmos Random Notes on the Thinking of the Body in China  

 145

Hua Cai Belief – Institution – Behavior A Comparison of Four Systems of Representation of the Body  

 169

Gender, Sexuality, and Violence Vanesa Vazquez Laba and Cecilia Rugna Is My Body My Own? Reflecting on the Indeterminate Body and Livable Life   Paula Sibilia The “Pornification” of the Gaze A Genealogy of the Nude Breast  

 195

 205

Karina Bidaseca Feminicide and the Pedagogy of Violence An Essay on Exile, Coloniality and Nature in Third Feminism  

 224

José Antonio Garriga Zucal Use and Representations of the Body among Police Officers in the Province of Buenos Aires    235 About the Authors 

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Basic Perspectives

Sandro Chignola

Body Factories For Rob and Khaled

Let me take it from a distance. Both the term corpus and the Greek word σῶμα have a quite clouded origin. Corpus, it is supposed, might be the lengthening of the root *krp-, certified in Indo-iranian, where it means ‘form’ or ‘beauty’. What is more evident is the symmetry of its usage in Latin and in Greek. In Homer σῶμα always refers to an inanimate body, to the corpse. But when it is about a living body, he uses δέμας. Δέμας is an interesting term: as Benveniste explains, it is a development of the ancient verbal root *dem- that means ‘to build’, from which derive both the ‘political’ terms related to the house (the Iranian form –dam; the Latin domus), for example δεσπότης (master), δμώς (servant) o δμωή (handmaid), and the very word δέμας, that designates the form or the visible and bodily appearance, the ‘building’, of an animate living being. In Latin such terminological opposition – between σῶμα and δέμας – is expressed by opposing corpus and anima, the principle that moulds inert matter. Thence another consideration. Corpus is not only the corpse, a man’s or an animal’s dead body, in analogy to σῶμα, but also the Latin word for any material object in a much larger sense – “omnes quod potest uideri corpus dicitur”1 –, as well as any aggregate of parts, by extension, once it has taken shape2. Corporo means in the first place: I kill, I make or I supply a corpse. But if conjugated in the passive voice, the verb corporare – that means to take on the appearance, the form corporis – stands for incarnating, embodying, materializing. Hence derive the political terms corporatus, corporatio and the verbal forms concorporo, incorporo, which refer not only to the compound in which the parts are summed up, but also to the vital principle that animates them. Anima, animal: another semantics, on which I cannot focus now. Let us simply point out that the lexicon of the organic and of the organism, to which the metaphorical and conceptual field of ‘political life’3 goes back, stems from the opposition between inanimate and animate matter – in other words, it is activated by the breath (ψυχή in Greek, that means ‘blow’ and ‘wind’, earlier that ‘soul’), by an 1 Maurus Servius Honoratus, Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil, 6, 303. 2 See Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étimologique de la langue grecque, vol. I, 1083–1084; Alfred Ernout, Alfred Meillet, Dictionaire étimologique de la langue latine, 144–146; Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. I warmly thank Lorenzo Rustighi, Girolamo De Michele, Sandro Mezzadra. 3 It is enough the reference to Aristotle, Politics, 1253a, 1281b.

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animator that gives life to it – where it is a directive element, a motional principle, somewhat exceeding the inertia of the latter, that bestows ‘organicity’ upon the body4. Soul: ἀρχή of the living beings, for Aristotle5. I begin to get closer. In Elizabethan England, the jurists of the Crown found the best formula to solve the problem of the body politic’s continuity. It is the theory of the King’s two bodies. “The King has in himself two bodies”, they agreed in a declaration made at Serjeant’s Inn to justify the king’s full power even when he has not yet reached maturity, “a Body natural and a Body politic”. The king’s natural body is a mortal body, “subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident”; his political body, instead, “consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public Weal”, is incorruptible, not subject to imperfection, nor can it be affected by decay or infirmity. It is perfectly separated from the natural body6. It is well known that such juridical construction has been achieved in particular conditions, namely in order to legitimize the full exercise of regal power by Henry VIII’s successors: Edward, who was minor, Mary and Elizabeth, who were women. On the basis of the Christological paradigm, that is Christ’s double nature, the jurists of the Crown resolved the dualism between the doctrine of the corporatio – the political community’s supertemporal corpus mysticum – and the doctrine of the king’s maiestas, embodied time by time in a mortal body and in a physical person. To our purposes, it is important to note the theory of ‘migration’, by virtue of which the jurists carried out the body politic’s continuity after the king’s death. In English common law, the king’s death is not called ‘Death’, they remark according to the Plowden Reports, but “Demise”, because the monarchy’s political body does not die, and what the decease of the monarch’s physical person separates is just the king’s two bodies: the buried corpse belongs to the natural king, while his ‘Dignity’, the institution’s immortal ‘Soul’ transmigrates into his successor without interruption, thus reincarnating the body politic in a man of flesh and bone: “dignitas non moritur” (dignity does not die). Then again the kingdom’s anima and corpus. This is not the place to follow the long story and all the implicit elements of such theory of the monarchic institution. As everybody knows, Ernst Kantorowicz has analysed its rituals, iconography and textual sources7. What interests me is rather the way Pierre Rosanvallon has referred to the same theory by studying another institution, namely the history of universal suffrage in France. Here we 4 See Adriana Cavarero, “Il corpo politico come organismo”. 5 Aristotle, On the Soul, 402 a7. 6 See Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports, 21–23. 7 Cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies.



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take a third step closer to the topic on which I intend to focus on this occasion. There is a theological mechanism working in democratic elections too. Thomas Hobbes has expressed it quite clearly when in chapter XVI of Leviathan he introduced the modern concept of political representation, thus solving the dualism of corporative representation that up to then had permitted to figure the relationship between the Prince and the classes as a relationship of confrontation and resistance between distinct petitions8. The sovereign represents the people’s unity, and through his ‘person’ – a theatrical term, as Hobbes points out, that in Latin means ‘mask’ – he bestows upon it an existence that it does not have in itself. It is exactly in this sense that the sovereign makes the people and not the other way around, as it might appear according to the social pact’s authorizing fictio9. The ‘people’’s unity is achieved, on the scene of the political theatre, through the representative act that gathers the scattered ‘multitude’ of individual wills where the corps and classes of the medieval societas civilis sive politica are dissolved; a dissolution that Hobbes equalizes to a pre-political state of nature. The ‘Commonwealth’ is a mystic body organized by the law, as the unique expression of the sovereign’s representative will. This complex changeover does not solely concern the absolutist political theology of sovereignty. On the contrary, such conversion, that in Hobbes opposes two terms – ‘people’ and ‘multitude’ – in order to dissociate the two stages of the pact for legitimation purposes, is reproduced and maintained throughout the history of democratic institutions. Pierre Rosanvallon, who finds in the universal suffrage the operator that accomplishes the progressive political integration of society, employs the metaphor of the king’s two bodies to retrace the procedures through which the inequality that marks the raw materiality of social processes can be overtaken in the immaterial temporality of juridical equivalence. There are two bodies of the people all over the constitutional history of the nineteenth century, and the history of suffrage – a true technology of transformation of the people’s body (filthy, indomitable, undisciplined body, to which between the 18th and 19th century the liberal and conservative political rhetoric refers with denigrating terms such as ‘populace’, ‘plebe’, ‘mob’, ‘swinish multitude’) into the nation’s glorious body (‘populus’, ‘people’, ‘peuple’) – coincides with the transmutation of the first one into the second. Suffrage: the downright “Adelbrief des Volkes”, as Heinrich von Treitschke calls it, highlighting its functions of ‘ennoblement’10. 8 See Otto von Gierke, Johannes Althusius; Werner Näf, “Die Frühformen des modernen Staa­ tes im Spätmittelalter”; Hasso Hofmann, Repräsentation. 9 See Giuseppe Duso, La rappresentanza politica. 10 Heinrich von Treitschke, “Frankreichs Staatsleben und der Bonapartismus“, 226.

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It is not important here the fact that Rosanvallon’s book represents a sort of specular reversal of young Marx’s positions (Zur Judenfrage, 1844)11. Nor the fact that he makes the apology of the process of de-politicization that during the long French Revolution drove the proletarians to lay down their arms by integrating themselves into the democratic play of elections and into the framework of equivalence, though merely formal, in order to ransom the imbalance of social processes by virtue of the voting right. What I find interesting here is rather how the metaphor of the people’s two bodies – the ‘citoyen’’s collective body and the ‘prolétaire’’s natural and savage body – is reactivated in order to point out the opposition between ‘form’ and ‘matter’ of subjectivity, only seemingly resolved and redeemed in the inclusiveness of universal citizenship. I shall finally get to the point. In this occasion I am interested in analysing another kind of opposition between the people’s two bodies. Namely, what in the 19th century has been mostly brought back to the opposition between barbarians and workers, between the ‘dangerous class’ and the ‘working class’12. In other words, I am less interested in the political and constitutional register where this opposition has been worked out than in the preliminary way the body has been ‘conceived’ as a docile and useful body – that is to say designed, manufactured, outside of any mystique or juridical fictio. In book one of Capital a series of expressions recurs that are relevant for the path we are following. The first one concerns Marx’s use of Hobbes’ terminology. The final point of Marx’s ‘Darstellung’ is commodities. And it is for this reason that owners of commodities, in the market, make the scene as ‘persons’ who bring to life the network of contracts and juridical relationships that constitute the sphere of circulation. Marx employs Hobbes’ expression to the letter. However the ‘person’, here, does not merely represent juridical equivalences, but the direct personification – the Charaktermaske, Marx writes – of capitalist economic processes13. This consequently means that anybody, not only the owner of commodities – the private will expressed by the contract – appears on the scene as the mirror of the productive relations that penetrate him14. The second expression refers to the commodity form. Of course, it is no natural entity. Products only take the commodity form on the basis of a very specific mode or production, namely the capitalist mode of production. Commodities absorb a quite significant part of the history of capital. In order to have a 11 Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacré du citoyen. 12 See Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses; as for the metaphorical field of the ‘barbarian’ or the ‘savage’ see: Pierre Michel, Les barbares, 1789–1848. 13 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 2, Ware und Geld. 14 See Luca Basso, Agire in comune, 47; Sandro Mezzadra, Nei cantieri marxiani.



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commodity form, the product is required not to be produced “as direct means of subsistence for the producers themselves”, and a strict division of labour must be already established15. The third expression refers to the fact that the conditions of existence of capital are not limited to the simple circulation of commodities and money. It only comes to life, thus marking an era of social production, when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free wage-labourer as the seller of his own labour-power on the market. Marx defines labour-power as “a capacity, or power of the living individual” (that is to say something that “nur in seiner lebendigen Leiblichkeit existiert”)16. “Lebendige Leiblichkeit”, Marx writes. ‘Leib’ in German is one of the two terms employed to identify the body. The other one is obviously ‘Körper’, whose Latin semantics is well known. ‘Leib’ on the contrary refers to the Gothic root *leif, from which stem both the German ‘Leben’, and the English ‘life’17. Man has a ‘congenital’ labour-power, that allows him not only to produce what he needs for living, but also what makes it possible to restore the waste of “muscle, nerve, brain” that occurs in the process of production and that must be recovered in order that the labour cycle may restart the next moment. Labour-power here evidently means something that comes before the organization of the working day and before it is ‘bought’ by the capitalist. As long as it is an aptitude implicit in the individual’s “lebendige Leiblichkeit”, it does not at all refer to a specific class of work activities (this or that work), but to a generic productive faculty that belongs to the human nature. Labour-power is therefore understood by Marx in the sense of Aristotle’s dynamis: as a potency or as a capability18. More precisely, as the “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being” (“Inbegriff der physischen und geistigen Fähigkeiten, die in der Leiblichkeit, der lebendigen Persönlichkeit eines Menschen existieren”, he writes)19. This point seems decisive to me. Here the question is about the specific human nature as a potency of relation as well as a potency of production. Marx properly uses the term “lebendige Leiblichkeit” to refer to that plastic tangle of forces that identifies the human being as a system of anatomic structures (“muscle, nerve”) and as a bundle of linguistic and cognitive dispositions (“brain”, Marx says). What 15 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 4, Verwandlung von Geld in Kapital. 16 Ibid., 183. 17 Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 565, 568; cf. Rehberg’s contribution in this volume. 18 See Paolo Virno, Grammatica della moltitudine, 82; Michel Vadée, Marx penseur du possible. 19 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 2, 181.

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precedes the employment of the worker’s body is the subjection of labour-power to capital, that means the achievement of the commanded conditions thanks to which that potentiality is turned into actuality. Then the capitalist does not buy this or that performance. He rather buys the indeterminate productiveness that is inscribed in human nature as a potency. The faculty to produce as such, not yet applied, is therefore the core of the exchange between the capitalist and the worker20. As a matter of fact, the buying and selling activity does not concern an accomplished work – the actuality that fulfils the potentiality – but the generic productive dynamis that is immanent in life (Leben) and that the capitalist is able to put to work in order to extract a surplus value as long as it is held back in its own generality. The material substratum to which such potency belongs is man’s living nature: that is to say what his body ‘can’ do – understood here as ‘Leib’ and not as ‘Körper’. Hence comes a series of relevant consequences. The first one is that what matters for the capitalist is not merely the labourer’s ‘body’: his muscles or arms, the mere effort of which his body is capable. The body does not become an object to dominate for its intrinsic value – here lies part of the difference between the old economics of slavery and the the capitalist form of production – but exactly because it is the substratum of something immaterial, the labour-power, that coincides with the specific quality of human nature. As part of the critics has recently acknowledged, if the term bio-politics makes sense and can assume a ‘categorical’ value outside of Foucault’s textual canon, it is properly in this direction that it takes on this task21. The potency to work, bought and sold like any other commodity, is a labour that has not yet been objectified but is nonetheless inseparable from the worker’s immediate bodily existence, which is the second consequence. The third one is that throughout this connection Marx achieves a decisive stage of his ‘Darstellung’ – his ‘exposition’, according to Hegel’s system – of the process of capital. The energetic expense that Marx refers to the body – “muscle, nerve and brain”, the ‘consumption’ of labour-power that must be continuously restored in order for the process of reproduction to function – is at the same time the “process of production”. In particular, it is about a production that does not peter out with the produced commodity but is ceaselessly valorised as surplus-labour supply, and therefore as a source of surplus-value (“Der Konsum-

20 See Paolo Virno, Grammatica della moltitudine, 83. 21 See for example Paolo Virno, Grammatica della moltitudine, 84; Maurizio Lazzarato, “Biopolitique / Bioéconomie”; Carlo Vercellone, ed., Capitalismo cognitivo; Andrea Fumagalli, Bioeconomia e capitalismo cognitivo; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth.



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tionsprozeß der Arbeitskraft ist zugleich der Produktionsprozeß von Ware und von Mehrwert”, Marx writes)22. A crucial transition is carried out here. From Hobbes’ theatre of circulation – the theatre where the buyer and the seller of commodities, even that particular commodity represented by labour-power, meet on the scene as Charaktermasken of the contract and of the exchange – we enter what Marx calls the “secret laboratory of production” (die verborgene Stätte der Produktion). Here, far below the sparkling sphere of simple circulation, where the premise of a perfect representative transparency prevails, as long as law translates the symmetry of will into the legitimate petition of exchange and the “innate rights of man” seem to enmesh and guarantee the entire process of negotiation, the “physiognomy of the ‘dramatis personae’” that had animated the first four chapters of Capital changes radically. The owner of money now comes forth as a capitalist, while the bare possessor of his own labour-power follows him as his labourer (folgt ihm nach als sein Arbeiter), and if the former smiles, the latter appears rather timid and holding back, “like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but a hiding”23. One’s hide. One’s body, then. But on what conditions? What interests me now is this transition – that is not merely logic nor totally reducible to Marx’s ‘Darstellung’ of the process of accumulation, but takes places in ‘historical’ terms, namely as the subjection of society to capital. A transition that subdues the generic labour-power implicit in the human “lebendige Leiblichkeit” and turns it into the factory worker’s useful, docile and productive “Körper”. In order to get to this point, though, another conceptual stage is required. The transition beyond the sphere of circulation (and beyond the contractual dynamics of the exchange of performances) opens up the way to the process of production. What means for Marx the valorisation that is achieved inside it. The capitalist transforms money into value by incorporating the living labour (lebendige Arbeitskraft) into the dead labour (tote Arbeit), that has been objectified in the factors of production which he deploys in order to produce surplus value. What is introduced into the process of production is therefore the potency of valorisation that is immanent in labour-power and allows the capitalist to profit on the invested capital, right because it is defined by the faculty to supply unpaid surplus labour. Dead labour brought to life: “ein beseeltes Ungeheuer”, as Marx calls it. Capital is like a “live monster that is fruitful and multiplies”24.

22 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 2, 189. 23 Ibid., 191. 24 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 5, 209.

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It is known that Marx has often used metaphors like this in his writings. Capital as a vampire or as a werewolf. Necropolitical figures, we may say, retrieving an expression that Achille Mbembe has forged for a different purpose25. What Marx intends to highlight, as the reality that tears apart the mirror game produced by the fetishism of commodities, is the series originated by the inversion from which stems the capitalist process of production in its historical determination. The labourer, in flesh and bone, forced to sell “his own hide” to the capitalist through the buying and selling of performances, is subjected to the capitalist’s control, to whom belongs everything he produces, exactly like the time of production that exceeds the working day established by the salary. It is not the labourer who employs the objective factors of production, as it may appear in a naïve definition of labour; it is rather the dead labour, “crystallised” in capital, that “sucks living labour” by seizing its power of valorisation. Here does not only emerge the metaphorical field of the monstrous, but recurs the semantic field of the body from which we have started: the cadaverous ‘corpus’ of the factors of production gets ‘animated’ and in front of the worker – namely, the socialized worker whose life is subjected to the great factory system – raises the “productive organism that is purely objective” (einen ganz objektiven Produktionsorganismus26) by virtue of which the class domination is reproduced – with the same tension that qualifies the living organism in Aristotle’s physics (matter, form, movement). The machinery system is an “Automat” for Marx. But this machinery is ‘animated’; the productive body, that the labourer discovers (vorfindet) as the bond that submits him, literally comes to life. I intend to linger over this sequence. Because it displays a decisive problem for my argument. What interests me is how this changeover is accomplished and what it manifests. We have previously met the figure of the people’s two bodies, somewhat the ‘mean’ equivalent to the political theology of the king’s sovereignty and of the kingdom’s mystical body. In democracy, the electoral machinery achieves a similar welding by transforming the ‘populace’ of the streets – the gangs that haunted the nightmares of the 19th century bourgeois literature – into the bright sovereign ‘peuple’, in whose name laws are made and judgements are given. Such transformation was conceived by the 19th century liberalism – particularly in France – as the the French Revolution’s ἔσχατον. Ἔσχατον: what is at the far end, in ancient Greek. Culmination and solution of the tragedy, in Aristotle’s Poetics (1449a, 10). Nevertheless, no tragedy ends here. For Tocqueville, for Guizot, for Lorenz von Stein – just to mention some 25 Cf. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”. 26 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 13, 404. Cf., generally, Ahlrich Meyer, “Mechanische und organische Metaphorik politischer Philosophie”.



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of the authors who dealt with the politicization of the social question at that time – the Revolution doesn’t ‘end’ with the constitutional achievements but is diverted precisely to the questions of property and work. It turns from political into social27. For this reason, to govern means henceforth to develop technologies of intervention on and in the social body. Social assistance and security technologies, hygienic and sanitary technologies, pedagogical and responsibility technologies28. The main of which is maybe the labour discipline, capable of turning the lazy and idle proletarian body into the worker’s productive body. When Marx starts talking about the process of production and the process of valorisation – that is to say the enlivenment of the body of production of commodities – he evokes the sphere of circulation (the contract as the buying and selling of labour-power), since it represents the necessary mediation in order to enter the “secrete laboratory” of production, as we have seen. It clearly comes to light here that the apparent symmetry between the will of the buyer and that of the seller of labour-power is merely illusory: what the capitalist acquires is not the finished ‘labour’, objectified in a product that closes the trajectory of production, but a potency, a “living ferment”, that ceaselessly valorises capital, once it has been integrated in the process29. What the labourer alienates is less his own individual aptitude (his capability, his peculiar talent, the strength of his body) than a generic faculty that can be externalized and organized according to norms of subjection and conditions of allocation, thus turning it into social labour, supervised cooperation “in-corporated” into capital (dem Kapital einverleibt)30. In the planned cooperation with others, the labourer dismisses his own individual limits and develops the faculty of his species (im planmäßigen Zusammenwirken mit andern streift der Arbeiter seine individuellen Schranken ab und entwickelt sein Gattungsvermögen), Marx writes31. However, how is such “in-corporation” accomplished, in terms that do not belong to the sole configuration of abstract labour? It is well known that in his great book devoted to the development of the English working class Edward P. Thompson has focused on a crucial fact: the working class is not a subject that appears at a given moment in history, it is rather “a fluency”, a relation, whose composition escapes whenever we try to

27 See Sandro Chignola, Fragile cristallo. More in general: Werner Conze, “Vom ‘Pöbel’ zum ‘Proletariat’“; Eckart Pankoke, Die Arbeitsfrage. 28 See for example François Ewald, L’État providence; Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misère. 29 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 5, 200. 30 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 11, 352. 31 Ibid., 349.

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seize it in order to study its anatomy32. The first moment of this relation, we may say, is the fabrication of the worker’s body as a productive body, as regards both the individual and the cooperation. Such transformation – certainly neither pacific nor appeasing – takes place in history as a procedure of subjugation of the individual’s habits, rhythms and vital acts in the discipline of labour. Stabilizing the vagabond, training the minor or organizing collective movements are some of the strategic coordinates of a social disciplinary process flowing across a series of institutions (punitive, pedagogical, military) that work on the production of modern subjectivity33. When Marx analyses the so called primitive accumulation and deals with the ‘naturalisation’ of the capitalist code of production, he refers to this complex phenomenology of extra-economic coercion. According to his system, neither is it enough to consider the ‘persons’ of the buyer and seller of labour-power, on the two poles of simple circulation, nor, from a genetic point of view, the pure act of domination by virtue of which the latter, forcibly expropriated from his own means of subsistence (the commons, the earth, the forms of community solidarity), is obliged to voluntarily sell himself and to get “whipped, branded, tortured into the discipline necessary for the wage system” (in eine dem System der Lohnarbeit notwendige Disziplin hineingepeitscht, -gebrandmarkt, -gefolgert). What is necessary is rather the process that articulates – and redoubles – the development of the system of production connected to wage labour. In other words, the system of practices reproducing an “Arbeiterklasse” that “by education, tradition, habit” – Marx writes – looks upon the conditions of the capitalist mode of production “as self-evident laws of Nature” (selbstverständliche Naturgesetze)34. The process of incorporation of the labourer’s cooperation is achieved as a ‘naturalisation’ of exploitation and command, that means a subjugation of the social body under the discipline of forced labour. A process that engenders a full contact between disciplinary technologies and the resistance of the working class, as long as it deeply takes root in bare life – muscle, nerve and brain, the nexus of repetition and habit. The fabrication of the useful body is a strongly hindered process. It is inside this factory of Marx’s analytics that Michel Foucault works in the mid-1970s. The recent publication of the Course he held at the Collège de France in the first semester 1973 solves many hermeneutic ambiguities as regards 32 Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9: “the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure”. 33 On the category of social discipline see at least Gerhard Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates. 34 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 24, 765.



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his analytics of power35. The domination of capital over the labourer, on which “the dull compulsion of economic relations” places its seal, in Marx words (der stumme Zwang der ökonomischen Verhältnisse36), is achieved over a centuries-old battle that displays the fundamental warlike structure of social relationships. As I mentioned before, the fabrication of the docile – and therefore useful – body, that is the disciplinary strategy’s goal, is neither unidirectional nor pacific. Nevertheless, the worker’s body must be subjugated by discipline in order for the labour-power that belongs to it, as its dynamis, to be transformed into productive power37. As for the last case, it is about the twofold process which constitutes the core of Foucault’s Course dedicated to the ‘Société punitive’, that offers a sharp perspective on the analytics of law and penalty that he was developing in those years. Human nature is not labour, he remarks in the last lesson. It is “plaisirs, discontinuités, fête, repos, besoins, instants, harsards, violence”38 what articulates man’s indisciplined life and the stages of its development as a plea for savage relation, capable of creating relationships and collective dimensions outside of the subjection to the productive regime: basically, it is the ceaseless flow of demands and aptitudes that capital will strive to bring under its control – the smooth chronometric temporality of the productive process – and through which the working class will rather meet the concrete subjective forms of its own composition, thus exploiting them as a chance for resistance and organisation. What Foucault brings to light here is two things that mark his closest point of approach to Marx and, at the same time, his estrangement from Althusser: the first one is the importance of conflict as a moment of tension in the analytics of power; the second is the process by virtue of which disciplinary technologies – and penalty among them – come to perform a function of insurance as regards the organisation of the productive dispositions to which the worker’s body must be subjugated, even before safeguarding the reproduction of the capitalistic relationship of valorisation (namely, through the repression of proletarian illegality)39. On the one hand, the punitive system must seize the conditions of its own existence with strategies of requisition and segregation and with techniques of stabilisation of mobility, that violently strike the mobile and elusive body of a ‘populace’ made of vagabonds and truants, thus micro-physically spreading inside it – hence Foucault’s first radical statement: the ‘guerre civile’ as the 35 Cf. Michel Foucault, La société punitive. 36 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 24, 765. 37 On this topic, see the remarkable work by Pierre Macherey, Il soggetto produttivo. 38 Michel Foucault, La société punitive, 235. 39 See Stéphane Legrand, “Le marxisme oublié de Foucault”.

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general pattern to which the punitive rationality must be brought back, as long as its purpose is not, as it was for Hobbes and Rousseau, the imposition of peace over structurally conflictual relationships, but rather the ceaseless continuation of a war of conquest40; on the other hand, just like in Marx, the definition of a perpetually hindered strategic field where both social relationships and subjectivation processes must be devised, once it is clear that the decisive problem of capitalism’s origin coincides with the transformation/constitution of life into labour-power41. The target of Foucault’s research is the overall process of fabrication of labour-power as a subjective disposition that is objectively adapted to the productive conditions, to say it with Stéphane Legrand’s incisive formulation. In other words, given Marx’s analysis of the genesis of capital, it is about the operation of actual subjection by virtue of which labour is incorporated into the valorisation process. The fact that such process can be objectified in a system of ‘natural laws’ of economics – that is not merely an ideological veil but a truth effect of the fetishism of commodities, we may say – depends both on the planning of the body and on the discipline of the soul. The unruly and useless body of the truant is transformed into the useful and docile body of the worker – life’s plasticity bridled and drilled by the cycles and actions of production – thanks to the mobilisation of series of knowledges that are heterogeneous with respect to economics but strongly affect its processes. Jurisprudence, ethics, pedagogy, military sciences are profitably summoned up – just to mention some of those which play a decisive role in piercing the muddy multitude in order to separate the dangerous classes from the productive ones, and then again blend them together in the disciplinary project: not only do they dissect, subdue to an efficiency calculus and recompose the anatomo-politics of the body, but also correlate to the soul the endeavour of normalisation (juridical but mostly extra-juridical) which objectifies and reproduces the capitalistic relation. It is on such Marxist background that Michel Foucault develops his analysis of penal systems and his radical reversal of the platonic tradition: at the threshold of modern age, as a constitutive break that establishes new programmatic functions for knowledge, it is not the body that represents the prison of the soul but the soul becomes the prison of the body42. The transformation of multitudes into labour-power is the result of a sort of transcendental schematism of discipline. It redraws and appropriates space as well as it reorganises and records time. The 40 In the course of 1976 at the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société, Michel Foucault will define this perspective “rétournement de la présupposition de Clausewitz”. 41 See Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom: Karl, 202. 42 Cf. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 34.



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so called primitive accumulation is on one hand the effect of the fabrication of docile bodies – “the human body gets into a power machinery that inspects, dismembers and recomposes it”, Foucault writes, since it segregates it and ties it to the repetitiveness of an action, to a functional location, to a performance hierarchy – and on the other hand the effect of the constitution of time’s integral usefulness, by ensuring its quality and continuous control43. Within such double constituent process the expression that Marx takes from Fourier comes true: the factory is a mitigated life sentence44. For Foucault it is about the twin relationship between prison-form and the wage-form, that is genealogically inferable45. Turning life time into labour time means arranging the body. In other words, installing the operativeness of a power device inside it. ‘Power’, here, does not mean a ‘thing’ that belongs or might belong to somebody, but rather the reversible trajectory where emerges a battle between a resistance and what has succeeded in defeating and dominating it46. In Marx the incorporation of labour-power into capital – subjection of life to control and valorisation – is achieved as a rigid extraction of absolute surplus value thanks to the institution of the working day. Indefinitely extending the working time, however, means finding an invincible resistance in the worker’s physical corporeality – in his very anatomical composition. Combining the working day with the technical organisation of production means intensifying productive processes and valorising relative surplus value. But it also means, as well as for Marx, concentrating and enhancing the subjectivity and counter-power of the working class; its potential political composition. The working body, understood both as individual and as collective, is the stake of the constant reorganisation of powers and knowledges that keep confronting it as a mobile, irreducible and literally dynamic call. By the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s, the governmental functions of such irreducibility, tied to the wage-form and to the prison-form – understood as the factory’s orderly enclosure and as the discipline of the working day – undergo a definitive crisis, at least in the western experience to which Foucault’s direct experience is connected. One of the reasons that bring his philosophy back to the top is his radical questioning of his own categories in a direction that we may define ultra-Marxist rather than post-Marxist47. What is now directly put to work and exploited by the increasingly ‘extractive’ functions of capital is less the human body, along with its disciplined usefulness, 43 Ibid., 139 sq.; 152. 44 Cf. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, 13, 450. 45 Cf. Michel Foucault, La société punitive, 72. 46 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?“. 47 See Antonio Negri, Marx oltre Marx.

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than the human nature, understood according to the species-specific qualities that are immanent in it as a linguistic and relational animal: emotionality, cooperation skills, potential of sociability48. Labour is no longer directly organised, reduced to a unitary command and locked inside the perimeter of the working day, but rather diffused, set ‘free’, made precarious. Its model is that of autonomous enterprising. What happens then to the body in the general social factory of post-industrial society? There may be something even more invasive than the discipline that had intersected the body through the series of extra-economic devices of the capitalist machinery between the 18th and 19th century. In the planning of the new-liberal society of individuals, it is the sort of discipline that goes along with the rhetoric about human capital and about the individual as a self-entrepreneur subject49. Here the body – performing, hyper-connected, cyborg – is not at all captured by a directive and governmental function in sight of dictated accumulation, but by the subject himself, who finds and recognizes in it the substratum of his own valorisation as an individual enterprise. And this is not all. The body – marked, inspected by the border guards’ infrareds, digitalized and scanned in every airport – is governed, filtered, slowed down, but not tied in its mobility, which becomes itself a function of capital valorisation. What gets moving is more and more ‘Leiber’, and less and less ‘Körpern’, we might say. In the history of the working class, the resistance of individual and collective bodies has achieved extraordinary subjectivation processes. Counter-conducts, as Foucault calls them. Today – right on the level of mobile, flexible, precarious, global and half-cast corporeality, confronted to governmental devices of control and valorisation – it is once again a matter of conceiving tactics of resistance and escape.

Bibliography Aristotle, Politics, with an Engl. trans. by H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, 264). Cambridge Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1998. Aristotle, Poetics, with an Engl. trans. by S. Halliwell (Loeb Classical Library, 199). Cambridge Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1995. Aristotle, On the Soul, with an Engl. trans. by W. S. Hett (Loeb Classical Library, 288). Cambridge Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1957.

48 Cf. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics, Finance”. 49 Cf. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde.



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Basso, Luca, Agire in comune. Antropologia e politica nell’ultimo Marx. Verona, ombre corte, 2012. Benveniste, Émile, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, I. Economie, parenté, société. Paris, Minuit, 1969. Cavarero, Adriana, “Il corpo politico come organismo”, Filosofia politica 6 (1993), 391–414. Chantraine, Pierre, Dictionnaire étimologique de la langue grecque. Paris, Klincksieck, 2009. Chevalier, Louis, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Paris, Plon, 1958. Chignola, Sandro, Fragile cristallo. Per la storia del concetto di società. Napoli, Editoriale Scientifica, 2004. Conze, Werner, “Vom ‘Pöbel’ zum ‘Proletariat’. Sozialgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen für den Sozialismus in Deutschland”, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 41 (1954), 333–364. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société neolibérale. Paris, La Decouverte, 2009. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom: Karl. Paris, Gallimard, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles, “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?“. In Michel Foucault philosophe. Paris, Seuil, 1989, 185–195. Duso, Giuseppe, La rappresentanza politica. Genesi e crisi del concetto. Milano, Angeli, 2003. Ernout, Alfred, and Alfred Meillet, Dictionaire étimologique de la langue latine. Paris, Klincksieck, 2001. Ewald, François, L’État providence. Paris, Grasset, 2006. Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Paris, Gallimard, 1975. Foucault, Michel, Il faut défendre la société. Cours au Collège de France, 1975–76, edited by François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Mauro Bertani. Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 1997. Foucault, Michel, La société punitive. Cours au Collège de France 1972–73, edited by François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Bernard E. Harcourt. Paris, EHESS/Gallimard-Seuil, 2013. Fumagalli, Andrea, Bioeconomia e capitalismo cognitivo. Verso un nuovo paradigma di accumulazione. Roma, Carocci, 22009. Gierke, Otto von, Johannes Althusius und die Entwicklung der naturrechtlichen Staatstheorie (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, 7). repr. Aalen, Scientia, 7 1981. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth. Cambridge Mass., the Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2011. Hofmann, Hasso, Repräsentation. Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Schriften zur Verfassungsgeschichte, 22). Berlin, Dunker & Humblot, 4 2003. Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 71997. Kluge, Friedrich, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Berlin, De Gruyter, 252011. Lazzarato, Maurizio, “Biopolitique / Bioéconomie”, Multitudes 22 (2005), 51–62. Legrand, Stéphane, “Le marxisme oublié de Foucault”, Actuel Marx 36 (2004), 27–43. Macherey, Pierre, Il soggetto produttivo. Da Foucault a Marx. Verona, ombre corte, 2013. Marx, Karl, Das Kapital, edited by the institute for Marxism-Leninism on the ZK of the SED (Marx Engels Werke, 23). Berlin, Dietz, 1962 Maurus Servius Honoratus, Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil, edited by Georgius Thilo and Hermannus Hagen, 3 vols. Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1881–1902.

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Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15 (2003), 11–40. Meyer, Ahlrich, “Mechanische und organische Metaphorik politischer Philosophie”, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 13 (1969), 128–199. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics, Finance. Global Crisis and the Politics of Operations”, Radical Philosophy 178 (2013), 8–18. Mezzadra, Sandro, Nei cantieri marxiani. Il soggetto e la sua produzione. Roma, manifestolibri, 2014. Michel, Pierre, Les barbares, 1789–1848: un mythe romantique. Lyon, Presses Universitaires, 1981. Näf, Werner, “Die Frühformen des modernen Staates im Spätmittelater”, Historische Zeitschrift 172 (1951), 225–243. Negri, Antonio, Marx oltre Marx. Quaderno di lavoro sui Grundrisse. Milano, Feltrinelli, 21979. Oestreich, Gerhard, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates. Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Berlin, Dunker & Humblot, 1969. Pankoke, Eckart, Die Arbeitsfrage. Arbeitsmoral, Beschäftigungskrisen und Wohlfahrtspolitik im Industriezeitalter. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1990. Plowden, Edmund, Commentaries or Reports (1571), London, Brooke, 1816. Procacci, Giovanna, Gouverner la misère. La question sociale en France (1789–1848). Paris, Seuil, 1993. Rosanvallon, Pierre, Le sacré du citoyen. Du suffrage universel en France. Paris, Gallimard, 2008. Thompson, Edward P., The Making of the English Working Class. New York, Vintage, 1966. Treitschke, Heinrich von, “Frankreichs Staatsleben und der Bonapartismus, III Die goldenen Tage der Bourgeoisie (1868)“. In Historische und politische Aufsätze von Heinrich von Treitschke, vol. 3: Freiheit und Königtum. Leipzig, Hirzel, 41871, 162–235. Vadée, Michel, Marx penseur du possible. Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998. Vercellone, Carlo, ed., Capitalismo cognitivo. Conoscenza e finanza nell’epoca postfordista. Roma, manifestolibri, 2007. Virno, Paolo, Grammatica della moltitudine. Per un’analisi delle forme di vita contemporanee. Roma, DeriveApprodi, 2002.

Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

Self-reference and Sociality The Differentiation of “Perceived Body“ and “Corpus” in Philosophical Anthropology*

I. Philosophical Anthropology and its initial I. questions In April 2012, when I participated in the previous conference “Life Configurations”, I spoke about the school of thought called “Philosophical Anthropology”1, which in its modern form was established in Germany around 1920. On that occasion I only mentioned briefly one of its pivotal problems which I am going to elaborate on today. My focus lies on the difference between “corpus” or “physical” respectively “objective” body (in German: Körper) and “perceived body”, often called “lived” or “subjective” body (in German: Leib). As you see the German language has two different words for “body”. To use this differentiation might appear a little bewildering in international scientific communication, it could be dismissed as linguistic regionalism, as speciality of the German language. It is true: None of the Romance languages nor the standard English that is beyond its Anglo-Saxon roots strongly influenced by French and Latin makes this distinction. We have to paraphrase as I did just now in order to express the difference of the two phenomena or, to be more precise, in order to make expressible and explicable a specific view on ourselves as a species. In fact, this differentiation is not about two peculiar German words but it focusses on a highly important phenomenon in the quest for determining human life. As we all know language is more than a medium for communication, it is – as the German scholar, diplomat and politician Wilhelm von Humboldt put it – a medium to conceptualize the world and thereby different world views as well.2 * I cordially thank Heike Friauf for her translation, which is conceptually so well thought out that she even found for “Leib” (in English normally “subjected body” or “lived body”) as a key word of this article with “perceived body” a new apt translation. Likewise, the work on this essays has been funded by the thinking and the support of Stefan Wagner; I also thank Hans Joas for his careful corrections and drafting suggestions. 1 Cf. Joachim Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie. 2 Wilhelm von Humboldt in a letter to Friedrich Schiller on September 1800 in: Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 5: Kleine Schriften, Autobiographisches, Dichtungen, Briefe.

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What differentiates the human from other life forms, especially animals, has been subject of discourse from the very beginning of occidental philosophy (and maybe even longer). Philosophical Anthropology reacted to Charles Darwin’s revolutionizing findings in biology and to all the subsequent advances in life sciences. Since then the human/non-human-distinction has been one of its crucial subjects. Furthermore we have come to realize that the human being has to be regarded and analyzed in all distinguishable aspects as more than simply of biological origin. As a consequence of the progresses in the field of informatics, artificial intelligence and machine theory (although these progresses did not live up to the preceding expectations in this field) we now have to study the specific characteristics of humans in two separate, in fact opposite directions: towards the ‘first nature’ of Man and towards the technically induced artificiality. Both of these challenges, the evolutionary and biological (including neurobiological) and the information-technological, deal with central dimensions of anthropology, because they immerse in human self-reference, human relatedness to the world and human sociality. In the core of this comparative conception there is the normative idea of the human being as being self-related in the sense of being the centre of his or her relations with the world and having to actively create these relations. All technical improvements of human life have to be evaluated on these premises. In the debate on technological enhancement of the human body which reaches far beyond therapeutic support for diseased organs – partially, but not entirely a science-fiction-debate – the question arises whether or how far natural features, for example the allocative function of the brain, should remain untouchable by human intervention. From this perspective new problems arise, that to some extent are being discussed in bioethical and theological reasoning, in the search for normative limits to human genetics, prenatal diagnosis or “anti-aging” medication. Those areas of health research where effective replacements of organs and technical extensions might lead to cyborgs (the common abbreviation of “cybernetic organisms”), creatures which today are still unconceivable. However they are already a matter of public interest. German author Sibylle Lewitscharoff in her “Dresden Speech” in March 2014 entitled “About feasibility. The scientific determination of birth and death”, mentioned children who had been fathered by artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood as “dubious beings” and “half-creatures”. After this a public debate aroused. She later excused for these excessive phrasings – but the writing on the wall of a feasibility that demolishes all moral limits (the signum of the technical era) had been painted on the wall of feuilletons.3 3 Cf. the critical reporting in The Guardian of 28 March 2014: Philip Oltermann, “Why Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s case”.



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As determinations of limits all turn out to be fluid and horizons of feasibility can be stretched to ever new possibilities and problems. Ethical considerations and limitations have to be negotiated again and again as it already happens today. In the present state of debate we might pragmatically agree with the enhancement of Man taking into consideration the artificiality of humans as an all-time given; yet the distinction between the therapeutic sphere of activity and the none-medical sphere becomes increasingly more and more difficult.4 But it is far too early to speak of a “post-human” or “trans-human” age, as is implied in postmodernist assumptions of the “End of the subject” or “End of Man”, assumptions now fueled by technoid model fantasies. Nonetheless entirely new problems of human existence arise with this maybe third “absolute cultural threshold” (as Arnold Gehlen phrased it, meaning an extremely rare, high and nonreversible step in the history of humanity): the first decisive step: humans becoming sedentary, the second threshold: industrialization. As we are about to cross another threshold, an overall judgement is difficult, but a permanent reflection all the more urgent.5 It is safe to say that artificial technological systems lack one basic quality all living creatures possess: self-sensitivity and repercussion of outer physical conditions onto inner moulding processes; with technical implants not being able to modify this. And with this we come back to the core question of Philosophical Anthropology: the bodily perception of humans and their “Leib” – “perceived” or “subjective body”. On the one hand the Man can be observed as a being distant from his or her environment that includes not only the natural environment but the “world”, as considered Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, the most prominent contributors to Philosophical Anthropology.6 On the other hand the suchness of humans is determined by a distinct dissociation from their own self. Experiencing self and experiencing experiences are determining factors of the “person”. Reflexivity requires disruption and fracture, and these breakings are fundamentally and radically given with the “positionality” (Positionalität) of the human being, positioned in her or his environment.

4 Cf. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Menschliche Plastizität versus gesteuerte perfectibilité?“. 5 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, 116–125. 6 Cf. Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos; Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch; Arnold Gehlen, Man. His Nature and Place in the World.

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II. Max Scheler (1874–1928) and II. Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) In his summarizing paper „The Human Place in the Cosmos“ (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos), Max Scheler postulated that we have to assume animals “inability” to make its ‘lived body’ and its movements into an object, so that it could incorporate its own locations […] as changing factors in its spatial vision; for if it could do this”, an animal would instinctively learn how to reckon with fortuitous locations as humans can […] In so far [Man] is a ‘person’, only the human being is able to soar far above his status as a living entity and, from a center beyond this spatio-temporal world, make everything the object of his knowledge, including himself. It is in this sense that the human being as spirit is superior to both himself and to the world”.7 Concurrently Helmuth Plessner in his studies, especially in his Aesthesiology, his study of the human senses that circles specifically around the question of bodily perception, published in 1923 entitled “The unity of senses” (Die Einheit der Sinne)8, concentrates on the particular form of bodily reflexivity. The human according to Plessner does not only “have” a body, but experiences this body as coordinate system of all of his actions, reactions, behaviour patterns and relations with the world. In this respect he perceives himself as “subject body” (Leib).9 Later Plessner characterized this relation between corpus and “perceived body” more in detail. He positioned himself as well against the “Cartesian prejudice“ of dualism between body as “machine“, being subject to the laws of nature, and „soul“, separate from body, as against any romantic „body-and-soul-unity“. In Plessners words: Incarnation or being-in-the-body does not simply imply being-body, but also having-body, that means a behavior of and towards embodiment, a behaviour to obtain body and its matter by action, language and figuration […] This can be illustrated with the configuration for example of the general feeling and mood by the help of kinaesthetic, haptic-tactile, gustatory-olfactory and thermic modes or modes of pain, vibration and lust, senses of condition that are contrasted with senses of matter.10

In Plessner’s Anthropology the central formula to define the human is named “excentricity” defining the “essence” of human existence and contrasting it with levels of positionality which characterize the other life-forms. Plessner character7 Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, 33. 8 Cf. Helmuth Plessner, “Die Einheit der Sinne“. 9 Cf. ibid., 302–305, and id., Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, esp. 367–369. 10 Cf. Helmuth Plessner, “Anthropologie der Sinne“, esp. 383.



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izes the life-forms of plants and animals as “centric”, whereas for “human beings, excentricity is the characteristic form in which they are directly exposed to the environing world.”11 By introducing a category grounded in the self-reflexive character of human existence into the center of his anthropological analysis, Plessner is able to adopt and develop many insights. This model also furnishes a plausible anthropological foundation for interactionist types of analyses, for the theory of social roles, and for theories of acting in sociology which emphasize the reciprocal character of human social relations. Parallel to “positional excentricity” the social field or “contemporaries” is being determined as “sphere of other humans being perceived by Man as form of his own position”.12 With this Plessner does not regard the social sphere as just culturally shaped outer frame which includes and environs the individual, nor as mere inner world being projected onto the outside – rather in a very stringent way as “world in between”. Those argumentations comes close to George Herbert Mead’s category of “intersubjectivity”, with Mead wanting to show how humans always interpret and define themselves from the perspective of the others, how their becoming subjects and maintaining their subjectivity always occurs in the reflection of the other’s mirror.13 Additionally we reflect and judge ourselves always in the mirror of our conception of our own person or activity. The “look” by the others can even become the medium of existential threat, as Jean-Paul Sartre very dramatically highlighted.14 The connection between realization of the outer world and the inner experience and simultaneous feeling of one’s own body can be illustrated sensory-theoretically with the basal experiences of a newborn: “The surface of the skin is the spatial border of experiencing the own body […]. If someone touches my skin, he at the same time touches ‘me’ as a subject”.15 Five years later ins his major work “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch” (The levels of the organic and the human) we find also the phrase: „My own ‘being a body‘16 appears as a conflict to me […], whose unresolvability results from the division of subject and object“.17 Herein lies according to Plessner the main difference between human activity and animal behaviour. And „the irrevocable dual aspect“ of human „existence as corpus and perceived body“: 11 Cf. Id., Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 364. 12 Ibid., 375. 13 Cf. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. 14 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 252–302 and to this existentialistic concept also Jean-Paul Sartre, The words. 15 Cf. Helmuth Plessner, “Anthropologie der Sinne“, 367. 16 Cf. id., “Lachen und Weinen“, esp. 242. 17 Cf. id., “Anthropologie der Sinne“, 369.

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 Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

For this reason both world views are necessary: the human being as ‘perceived body’ in the middle of a sphere, that according to its empirical form implies an absolute top, bottom, front, back, right, left, earlier and later […]. ‘Perceived body’ and corpus, in spite of being materially non-separable systems […], do not coincide.18

Plessner elaborated on this constellation exemplarily in his study “Laughing and Crying”, published in 1941. He then wanted these fundamental ways of expressing to be understood not as being expression of emotions but in a more complex sense as expression of the whole human being strangely connecting corpus and “perceived body”, that is to say in overwhelming moments of shock such as unexpected experience of pain or stirring joy, moments there is no adequate or rehearsed reaction to, but only unleashing of inner tension on an almost archaic level of despair or laughter, existential borderline-moments the human being “surrenders to”, “although he does not give up his entity as a person”.19 We can observe the closeness of laughing and crying in the not yet conventionally regulated reactions or states of exhaustion of little children. “Laughing and crying are neither hand signs nor gestures but they do comport as ways of expression”, even when they are exaggerated to the edge of senselessness. From this point of observation we can develop a phenomenology of cultural ways of expression, such as joy, playing, humour, joke (compare e.g. Henri Bergson’s essay about the subject or the theory of Sigmund Freud20), being in love, embarrassment or despair. Similar to Plessner but twenty years later and without any knowledge of Plessner’s study, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the same actors-metaphor as Plessner: Acting on a stage is about making the consciousness visible, that presents itself to the world.21 By all means Plessner sees the “interior” becoming visible in all ways of expression of the “perceived body”: “greed, fear, fright, astonishment, contentment, depression, joy, discomposure and calmness, anger, hesitation, lurking” etc.22 All these are sense-related interpretations of human states, and at the same time inner grades of agitation and ways of expression definitely meet with those of animals.

18 Cf. id., Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 367. 19 Cf. id., “Lachen und Weinen“, 276. 20 Cf. Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique, and Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. 21 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 221–222, and Helmuth Plessner, “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers”. 22 Helmuth Plessner, “Lachen und Weinen“, 249.



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III. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Together with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir Maurice Merleau-Ponty founded in 1945 the periodical Les temps modernes, he influenced many politicizing intellectuals such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard, Herbert Marcuse or Günter Stern-Anders and some of the HeideggerMarxists. Merleau-Ponty adds two major drafts for a philosophy of “perceived bodyness” to our topic: in 1942 he published “La structure du comportement” (The Structure of Behaviour) and in 1945 “Phénoménologie de la perception” (Phenomenology of Perception).23 Both books were also used to “explain” and sometimes justify political courses of action (for example Stalin’s state terrorism) – but that is another topic. Based on Husserl’s (ego-logical) phenomenology also his aim was to override the Cartesian dualism of subject and object, spirit and matter, by referring back to “perceived body”, language and history as media of intermediation. A first answer to this problem is to be found in Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology in which he assumes a relation between perception and practice. He regards practice not simply as possibility but as basic condition of perception in which the human “Being-to-the-World” or existence is being expressed. Perception can neither be reduced to a subjective finding nor an objective process. “Being-to-theWorld” means: There is no pure self that approaches the world, but a self, that has always been incarnated. I only become conscious of the world through instrumentality of the “perceived body” – this “subject body” is the vehicle of “Beingto-the-World”. As for the process of perception the result is that the human being accesses the world based on his or her bodily behaviour.24 Merleau-Ponty only knew one of Plessner’s papers, the essay “Physiological Explanation of Behaviour. A Critique of Pawlow’s Theory”, co-authored with Frederik J. J. Buytendijk and published in 1935.25 In spite of many analogies there is no direct influence of Plessner’s earlier argumentation on Merleau-Ponty’s works. The French phenomenologist created a number of artificial words in order to take into consideration the differentiation between corpus and “perceived body”, the topic of this speech. To distinguish the “perceived body” from the physical body or corpus he formulated in French corps propre – proper body, proper not in the sense of clean, but of actually; maybe we could translate the term as “actual 23 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, and id., Phenomenology of Perception, 272. 24 Cf. e.g. id., Phenomenology of Perception, 225. 25 Cf. Frederik J. J.Buytendijk and Helmuth Plessner, “Die physiologische Erklärung des Verhaltens“.

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body”. Corps propre expresses the self-related existence of the body as well as the formation of a habitus (habitus having become a focal category in Pierre Bourdieu’s work) or corps-sujet versus corps-objet (body-subject versus body-object). Additionally Merleau-Ponty developed the contrasting pair: corps-pour-soi and corps-pour-autrui (one’s own body seen by oneself and one’s own body seen by others).26 Merleau-Ponty describes the function of the „perceived body“ mainly in relation to outer objects. Infants who have to undergo a long learning process communicate with objects in a very original, native way; they attribute the status of subject to objects, for example when they bump into a chair and shout “evil chair!” Merleau-Ponty calls this behaviour “infantile animism“.27 This argument has a certain relevance to the current debate. After in postmodern discourses having been talked into thinking for more than a quarter of a century that everything is “virtual”, today objects, things and their legitimacy, come back into consideration. Especially theses associated with Bruno Latour and his thinking based on the pathos of overriding the difference between “culture” and “nature” that has been predominant in occidental thinking. Rethinking seems likely, if you think for example of gradualism prevailing now in biology. The question gains importance whether a “capacity to act” or at least close to acting the role of an “actant” if not actor can be attributed to plants and animals (the latter making it easier) and even to inanimate things. But not in the slightest did the authors I discuss here reason in this way. And I believe that this re-enchantment of the world results in a mystification – now in an opposite exaggeration, away from textualizing realities (which of course are always construed) now towards over-determined objects.28 Similar to Plessner also Merleau-Ponty formulated an analysis of senses and their unity in his “Phenomenology of Perception”, published in 1945. He stated: “it is one and the same thing for us to perceive our body and to perceive our situation in a certain physical and human setting, for our body is nothing but that very situation in so far as it is realized and actualized”.29 The “syntheses of the ‘actual body’” (corps propre) in relation to spatiality and appropriation of the world stands in the focus of attention. My body is the seat or rather the very actuality of the phenomenon of expression (Ausdruck), and there the visual and auditory experiences, for example, are pregnant one with the other, and their expressive value is the ground 26 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 82 sq. 27 Cf. ibid., 157. 28 Cf. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Reassembling the Social, and Bruno Latour, Making things public. 29 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 396.



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of the antepredicative unity of the perceived world, and, through it, of verbal expression (Darstellung) and intellectual significance (Bedeutung).30 The modes of expression of the perceived body, especially the linguistic modes, and the connection between thinking and language are also being discussed; finally we find a theory of perception and human “acts”. Merleau-Ponty’s argumentation joins in a reflection on social and political conditions, especially focusing – implicitly disputing Sartre – on the relation between determination and freedom of action.31 The success of the French analyst of the “perceived body” made Plessner bring forward his theory of human senses from 1923 again in 1970 with the title “Anthropology of Senses”, hoping that this revised work would be better understandable than the original one – but he was not destined to have great and international success.32

IV. Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) Arnold Gehlen did not work on the apperception of the corpus/perceived-body-difference to the same extend as Plessner and Merleau-Ponty. But he developed a particular mode to describe the phenomena, a phenomenology of sensory-motor achievements in human actions.33 According to Gehlen self-reference only follows via a detour. Without denying the self-sensation of one’s own body he sees specific self-feelings arousing especially through contact with things outside the own corporal sphere or through self-produced objectivations. To understand the dynamic and versatile nature of human achievements, Gehlen discussed different “roots of language”.34 The fundamental model is that of a “circular process“, wherein functions direct their relations back to themselves. It is in language that this results in an increasing intensity of human capabilities, based on their reciprocity and self-motivated reinforcement. Lallation monologues of babies are an example with the children learning to detect themselves as producers of the sounds (independently from linguistic background music by other persons).35 In this sense Gehlen regards all human motivations as – with an expression by Johann Gottlieb Herder – “analogous to language” (sprachmäßig).36 30 Cf. ibid., 273. 31 Cf. ibid., 504–530. 32 Cf. Helmuth Plessner, “Die Einheit der Sinne“, and id., “Anthropologie der Sinne“. 33 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man. His Nature and Place in the World, 119–326. 34 Cf. ibid., 181–221. 35 Cf. ibid., 119–128, esp. 123. 36 Cf. ibid., 189.

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For him all human performances have to do with “a great sensitivity towards things” (Sachempfindlichkeit), but also with a sensitivity “towards oneself in human actions” while acting resulting in „all human sensory-motor output being self-perceived, self-sensed“.37 From this idea Gehlen derived the human “ability to imagine movements” (Bewegungsphantasie). He took this latter concept from Melchior Palágyi and his lectures on the philosophy of nature in Vienna 1909.38 Gehlen wrote: This facilitates the forming of an ‘inner world‘, composed of imagined interactions and movements, ideas of possible outcomes, and participated impressions. This world can be constructed and developed independently of the actual situation and represents a high, but by no means the ultimate, level of relief.39

As a basic principle the inner ability to fantasize becomes a medium to capture the outer world and to create it. Like Plessner and Merleau-Ponty also Gehlen regards all dimensions of corpus and “perceived body” as interrelated. But this interrelation is only valid in relation to things, objects (and in analogy to other living creatures); the psycho-mental processing of the symbolically perceived world can only take place through outer contacts of the human individual and the resulting encounters. Since Wilhelm Dilthey the process of realization is seen in close connection with the opposition of things. We all know that an unexpected outcome of a routine matter suddenly provokes our attention and causes all kinds of expectations from the expected to the opposite to the “impossible” including feelings of anxiety and hope.40 Gehlen especially described the sensory-motor reflections and their influence on new behavior, routine and intended actions as a cycle (Handlungskreis), as reciprocal intensification, “that is, the cooperation of action, perception, thought, etc”.41 He was proud, by the way, of having found this recursivity and the principle of feedback parallel to Norbert Wiener’s model of cybernetics: He published his fundamental anthropology, entitled “Man”, in 1940; Wiener’s machine-technological and system-theoretical formulation of this principle was published eight years later.42 The motif of reinforcement of actions is important, for example by success, as we have to admit. Anyhow there is something “experimental” in the human condition and this derives from trying different possible actions. 37 Cf. ibid., 34. 38 Cf. ibid., 308–309. 39 Ibid., 35. 40 Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens”, esp. 98–105. 41 Arnold Gehlen, Man. His Nature and Place in the World, 46. 42 Cf. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication.



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Plessner can be regarded as scientist of the perception, comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s “Ethos of Perception”43, as scientist of sense-directed passivity as foundation of the human position, so to speak, whereas Gehlen’s concepts are always action-based. Plessner’s most important point of view is the inter-subjectivity of humans, while Gehlen emphasizes an inter-facticity (both aspects traceable in George Herbert Mead’s work).44

V. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and V. Hermann Schmitz (geb. 1828) The most profound analyses of the bodily state of the human being proceed phenomenologically (as did Plessner and Gehlen). The observable facts are being structured and the underlying forms determined. As a result the corporal and bodily functions can be diligently described. In Germany this has been achieved by philosopher Hermann Schmitz (born in 1928) in his remarkably extensive Oeuvre with a “Philosophy of the perceived body” which unfortunately still lacks its proper resonance.45 Schmitz also tries to formulate precisely the “sensing with the own perceived body (Leiblichkeit) and the feeling” in order to overcome thousands of years of “psychologism” with the help of a “New Phenomenology”. His major theoretical concept is that of the “perceived body”; he recurs to Ludwig Klages, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Plessner and others: “When speaking of the perceived body, I don’t think of the human or animal body that can be looked at or touched, but of what can be felt in its vicinity without using ‘senses’ like eye or hand.”46 Taking the perceived body as focal point of his analysis Schmitz reaches his “System of Philosophy”. Martin Heidegger began his existentialist-philosophical exploration into this field with the description of moods, underlining this with the fundamental question of human existence. Although strongly influenced by Christian belief but in a secular way he grounded his reflection with the Kierkegaard pathos of being “thrown” into a world of unavoidable pain and death. His metaphors of existence were meant to dig deeper than anthropological arguments – as a result two competing schools of thought developed from similar questions: Philosophical Anthropology and Existentialism or Existentialist Philosophy.

43 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 504–530. 44 Cf. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “The Theory of Intersubjectivity as a Theory of the Human Being”. 45 Cf. Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie. vol. 2, part 1: Der Leib. 46 Cf. id., Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand, 115.

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Heidegger also refers to human activity. But he concentrates on the function of the hand and connects it with the human “existing-in-order-to” instead of questions about creating or mastering the world. In doing so he talks about the “ecstatic residence” of everything that is bodily and about the forms in which we remember, as they are real “realizations” of what we experienced in the past.47 I am not going to elaborate further on these metaphors; this is only a brief remark on the points of contact between different analyses of the “perceived body”, all of which follow an initial phenomenological idea by Edmund Husserl. The Freiburg philosopher makes many observations on the problem of self-perception that are close to Plessner’s analyses and Gehlen’s research. Gehlen wrote his existentialistic basic concept “Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist”48 without having recognized Heidegger’s major work “Being and Time“ (Sein und Zeit), first published in 1927.49 Disregarding the tensions of competition the similarities in points of view and conception of terms prevail. *** Let me conclude my plea for a conceptual differentiation between corpus/physical body and “perceived body”, a differentiation difficult to make in most languages, but plausible once the phenomenon is being described, with an oppressive life story: The Frankfurt philosopher Andreas Kuhlmann (1959–2009) who since childhood fought against a spastic paralysis, defied “his disabled, insubordinate and tyrannic body” and reached “a level of mental flexibility and freedom that could only be met with […] admiration”, as Axel Honneth formulated sympathetically in his necrology. Kuhlmann enthusiastically discovered Helmuth Plessner’s version of Philosophical Anthropology precisely because of its distinction between corpus and “perceived body”. In this way he was able to express “in systematic self-determination” how an “immutable ‘difference’” separates the bodily handicapped from the “normality” of other people’s lives50 and how the suffering body became overpowering to an extend that all degrees of freedom of bodily self-determination were being demolished – as he disclosed as motif for his suicide on February 5th 2009. (Translation into English by Heike Friauf)

47 Cf. Cathrin Nielsen, “Pathos und Leiblichkeit. Heidegger in den Zollikoner Seminaren“, and Hans-Gustav von Campe, Tägliche Technik. Studien zur Gestik der Verrichtungen. 48 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, “Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist“. 49 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. 50 Axel Honneth, “An der Peripherie unserer Lebensform“.



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Bibliography Bergson, Henri, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris, Alcan, 1924. Buytendijk, Frederik J. J. and Helmuth Plessner, “Die physiologische Erklärung des Verhaltens. Eine Kritik an der Theorie Pawlows“. In Acta Biotheoretica, series A, vol. 1, Leiden, Brill, 1935, 151–171. Campe, Hans-Gustav von, Tägliche Technik. Studien zur Gestik der Verrichtungen (PhD thesis, University of Bielefeld, 1982) (Kassler Philosophische Schriften, 21). Kassel, Kassel Univ. Press, 1987. Dilthey, Wilhelm, “Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht”. In Id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5: Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Erste Hälfte: Abhandlungen zu Grundlegungen der Geisteswissenschaften. Stuttgart, Teubner/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 8 1990, 90–240. Fischer, Joachim, Philosophische Anthropologie. Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts. München, Alber, 2008. Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. New York, Norton, 1960 (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. Leipzig/Wien, Franz Deuticke, first 1905). Gehlen, Arnold, “Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist. Eine philosophische Untersuchung in der Methode absoluter Phänomenologie“. In id., Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1: Philosophische Schriften I (1925–1933), edited by Lothar Samson. Frankfurt a. M., Klostermann, 1978, 113–381. Gehlen, Arnold, Man in the Age of Technology, transl. by Patricia Lipscomb with a foreword by Peter L. Berger. New York, Columbia University Press, 1980 (Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter. Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft. (Rowohlts deutsche Enzyklopädie, 53). Reinbek, Rowohlt, first 1957). Gehlen, Arnold, Man. His Nature and Place in the World. New York, Columbia University Press, 1988 (Der Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Berlin, Junker und Dünnhaupt, first 1940/1950). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. transl. by Joan Stambaugh, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996 (Sein und Zeit. Erste Hälfte. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. 8, edited by Edmund Husserl, Halle, Niemeyer, first 1927, 1–438). Honneth, Axel, “An der Peripherie unserer Lebensform. Zur Erinnerung an Andreas Kuhlmann“, WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1/2009), 3–12. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 5: Kleine Schriften, Autobiographisches, Dichtungen, Briefe, edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel. Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1981. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. Latour, Bruno, Making things public. Atmospheres of democracy. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 2005. Mead, George H., Mind, Self, and Society. From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago/London, Chicago University Press, 1934. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2005 (Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris, Gallimard, first 1945).

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Structure of Behavior. Boston, Beacon Press, 1963 (La Structure du comportement. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, first 1942). Nielsen, Cathrin, “Pathos und Leiblichkeit. Heidegger in den Zollikoner Seminaren“, Jahrbuch für phänomenologische Forschungen (2003), 149–169. Oltermann, Philip, “Why Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s case for a new puritanism lacks substance”. In The Guardian, March 28, 2014. Accessed March 19, 2015. http://www.theguardian. com/books/2014/mar/28/sibylle-lewitscharoff-new-puritanism-substance-artificialinsemination. Plessner, Helmuth, “Anthropologie der Sinne“. In Id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1980, 317–393. Plessner, Helmuth, “Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes“. In Id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1980, 7–315. Plessner, Helmuth, “Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung der Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens“. In Id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1982, 201–387. Plessner, Helmuth, “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers”. In Id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1982, 399–418. Plessner, Helmuth, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt a. M (Gesammelte Schriften, 4). Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1981. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, “Menschliche Plastizität versus gesteuerte perfectibilité? Philosophische Anthropologie und Human Enhancement“. In Ebert, Udo, Ortrun Riha, and Lutz Zerling, eds., Der Mensch der Zukunft. Hintergründe, Ziele und Probleme des Human Enhancement. Tagung der Kommission „Wissenschaft & Werte“ in Leipzig 17/18.2.2012 (Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 82). Leipzig/ Stuttgart, Hirzel, 2013, 46–61. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, “The Theory of Intersubjectivity as a Theory of the Human Being. George Herbert Mead and the German Tradition of Philosophical Anthropology”. In Hans Joas and Daniel Huebner, eds., The Timeliness of George H. Mead. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015 [in print] (“Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der ‘Philosophischen Anthropologie’”. In Das Problem der Intersubjektivität. Beiträge zum Werk G. H. Meads, edited by Hans Joas. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, first 1985, 60–92). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, New York, Pocket Books, 1978 (L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Bibliothèque des idées). Paris, Gallimard, first 1943). Sartre, Jean-Paul, The words, New York, Braziller, 1964 (Les mots. Paris, Gallimard, first 1964). Scheler, Max, The Human Place in the Cosmos. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009 (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. Darmstadt, Reichl, first 1928). Schmitz, Hermann, Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand. Bonn, Bouvier, 32007. Schmitz, Hermann, System der Philosophie, vol. 2, part 1: Der Leib. Bonn, Bouvier, 2005. Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass., MIT-Press, 1948.

Ariel Wilkis

Thinking the Body Durkheim, Mauss, Bourdieu: The Agreements and Disagreements of a Tradition

Introduction In this article, I would like to reflect on the place of the body in the sociological tradition whose main precursor is Durkheim. I will focus on observing how the body becomes central to the concerns of this tradition. This brief history starts with a bodiless sociological theory (represented by Emile Durkheim) and reaches a sociological theory based on the body (represented by Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu). The body becomes the privileged place from which to substantiate an understanding of the persistence of the social world, its consistency and its durability. In the first section of the article, I reveal the connections between Durkheim’s main ideas and the place of the body within his reflections. After concentrating in the second section on how Mauss’s thoughts vary from Durkheim’s, I then analyze how these shifts alter the status of the body as a sociological object in section three. Moving on to the fourth section, I outline the connections between Bourdieu’s work with that of Durkheim and Mauss. Finally, in section five, I examine the place of the body within the Bourdieusian sociology of domination. Based on this narrative, I will try to draw some conclusions about the place of the body in the way we, as academics, relate to knowledge.

I. Durkheim: the Body as a Metaphor and I. as a Symbol We all know that Emile Durkheim’s grand interrogation is about the basis of social cohesion. My aim is to reflect on the place of the body in this theory. I would like to start with a paradox. The body is central to Durkheim’s sociology, but in a very precise sense. Not as a sociological object but as a metaphor. Reflecting on society as a biological body is constant in Durkheim. It appears in the use of the function category or the distinction between normal/pathological.

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Without the metaphorical support of the body, sociological explanation is dissolved in vague pre-scientific notions. This centrality, however, contrasts with the subordinate position of the body as a sociological object. The narrative that I propose helps us understand the following. In Durkheim’s work, social cohesion based on the body is socio-historically determined: it is a historical contingency. In contrast, social cohesion based on collective representations is socio-genetic, it defines the very nature of membership in any collective institution. Let us take a closer look. In The Social Division of Labor (1893) Durkheim shows two sources of social cohesion: the collective consciousness of poorly differentiated (traditional) societies and the social division of labor in differentiated (modern) societies. The body appears in the first type of source as an inscription of repressive punishment. Traditional societies are societies of peers, those who act differently with regard to common thoughts and feelings are punished. Corporal punishment allows the projection of the power of the collective consciousness in order to maintain the cohesiveness of society. But the sociological positivity of the body is temporary: it lasts as the basis for social cohesion only as long as the collective consciousness lasts. A society with a different foundation does not need the body. In these societies, based on the social division of labor, a willingness to cooperate is required, which in the event of a breach of an established rule accepts a compensatory penalty. The body is not at the center of the punitive device. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim discusses how collective memberships are based on systems of beliefs and feelings. These need to be symbolized to have existence. Tattoos are among the main symbols that Durkheim examines. Social organization in clans considers the body a territory of symbolic inscription. In contrast, modern societies have more abstract symbols detached from the body to symbolize collective belonging (flags, for example). We can imagine that in his work Suicide (1895) Durkheim finds himself “face to face” with the body. However, the sociological explanation of suicide is perfected as it moves farther from the body. Societies differentiate themselves every year because each one of them tends to produce the same number of violent deaths. The sociological object is the variation in the social rates of suicide. This numeric abstraction replaces the materiality of the body. The suicide rate captures the state of the collective representations that drive people to commit suicide. For a conceptual framing of the abandonment of the body, I would like to appeal here to a central Durkheimian figure: “Homo Dupleix.” In Durkheim’s thought, the individual is determined by opposing forces: a collective force and an individual force. In both cases, it is a matter of representations. Collective rep-



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resentations persist through an “intellectualistic” memory. Durkheim explains it as follows. In Individual Representations and Collective Representations (1898), he states: “A representation does not occur without acting on the body and the spirit.”1 But he then clarifies: “However real the relationship between the movement and the ideas, the same system of movements can be used for different ideas.”2 For Durkheim, the body has an irreducible arbitrariness. Collective representations produce a relatively autonomous mental memory of all bodily substrates.

II. Durkheim and Mauss: Redefining tradition3 Marcel Israël Mauss studied philosophy in Bordeaux with his uncle, Emile Durk­ heim, serving as his assistant in different investigations (like the one that led Durkheim to write Suicide). Mauss was entrusted with the section on the sociology of religion in L’Année Sociologique (religion had been a key theme in Durkheim’s research since 1895). Together, Mauss and Durkheim wrote two articles, including the well-known “Primitive Classification” (1903). Mauss’s first investigations focused on religious phenomena such as magic, sacrifice and prayer. In 1901, Mauss began teaching “primitive religion” at the Ecóle Practiques des Hautes Etudes. After Durkheim’s death, Mauss took over as the editor of L’Année Sociologique. It is often said that although Mauss is a familiar name in sociology, little is known about his work. Nonetheless, in the past few years there has been a return to Mauss in French and British academia and, albeit to a lesser extent, in Latin America as well. Some have argued that his proximity to Durkheim cast a shadow over Mauss’s own career. Thus Mauss is often considered a keeper of the Durkheim legacy, though without attributing any innovation to Mauss that would allow him to be viewed as an original thinker. However, new readings of Mauss reveal just the opposite i.e. the influence of Mauss’s works on Durkheim’s ideas4. Positioned at a midpoint between continuity and rupture, Mauss’s work redefines the parameters of a tradition and makes a specific shift with regards to Durkheim’s thought. This redefinition mainly involves a reorganization of knowl1 Emile Durkheim, Sociologie et Philosophie, Puf, Paris, 2004, 22. 2 Ibidem, 23. 3 Robert Hertz is another Durkheim disciple who has worked analyzed the connections between the body and social integration. His text “The pre-eminence of the right hand: A study in religious polarity” reveals a clear preoccupation with corporality as a social fact. His theories are very close to what Mauss will later develop. 4 Cf. Camille Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, l’invention du symbolique.

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edge (anthropological, ethnological, sociological, psychological and linguistic knowledge, among others) in favor of a plan for the social sciences in which the texture of the social is no longer interpreted through the individual vs. the collective and is instead read within its own symbolic parameters5. Bruno Karsenti argues that the object that has classically been associated with Mauss’s name – the gift – is fundamentally a sociological anomaly. This rarity develops within a line of thought in which the definition of social acts as things, external from the individual but acting upon him, became widely accepted. Karsenti reflects on how the gift opposes this criterion, demanding that Mauss redefine the sociological object, moving from the social fact to the total social fact. As part of the methodological requirements of researching the concrete in order to arrive at a whole, social life as a whole is an epistemological possibility that is realized through the gift. If the gift is, in Karsenti’s words, “a carrier of symbolic matter,”6 it is because it forms a system whose parts – the obligations of giving, receiving and returning – have no autonomous meaning. Instead, meaning is produced by the way each of these obligations relates to the others. Human sociability is deciphered through the gift in its role as a symbolic operator that channels the social into a dynamic of symbolization integrated into the system of obligations. The concrete level of the phenomenon of the gift creates an obstacle to conceiving of the system of obligations as a set of abstract regulations – though here the counterpart in Durkheim is not so much Suicide as his first book, The Division of Labour in Society, where law is presented as a symbol of collective living. Society cannot be broken down into institutions or understood without taking into account the concrete reality of the people who integrate that society. The system of the gift, though a continuous cycle of giving-receiving-returning, reveals a social whole inherent to the bonds that people form with one another. From this perspective, the life of the group and the life of men express a single unique reality. The discovery of the gift as a social baseboard was only possible by following the total social fact as a criterion that reconciles the concrete and the whole. For this reason, the total social fact is also an opening towards the knowledge of the “archaic” level of human sociability and an invaluable test for initiating a new project of social science that brings together different knowledge on the concrete existence of men and of societies. 5 Cf. Bruno Karsenti, L’homme total; cf. Camille Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, l’invention du sym­bolique. 6 Bruno Karsenti, L’homme total, 408.



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I would now like to explore how Mauss’s shift mainly affects the place of the body in the sociological knowledge inaugurated by Durkheim.

III. Marcel Mauss: the Body as a Whole As we have seen, the entire Durkheimian sociological construct is based on the escape from the arbitrariness of the sensitive/bodily. For this reason, it leaves the body at the periphery of the theory of social cohesion. Marcel Mauss, in contrast, sets out on an inverse path: the sociological challenge is to restore arbitrariness as a strategy of knowledge construction. Let us look at a quote: “Every social phenomenon has an essential attribute: either a symbol, a word, an instrument, an institution… (they) are always arbitrary…”7. It is no longer obligation that defines a social fact, as Durkheim proposed. In Mauss, it is arbitrariness. Along with this attribute, another appears that simultaneously challenges and complements the previous one: totality. “Everything in society is relationships,”8 says Mauss. The arbitrariness of social facts leads to building their relationships as a totality. A connectionist type of knowledge appears, seeking to reconstruct connections where the understanding of a social fact circulates. Durkheim’s maneuvering to avoid confrontation with the centrality of the sociological body has no room under this perspective. The place of the body will be redefined based on the figure of the total social man. The connections that envelop the reality of men are not interrupted by the watertight divisions between sociology, biology or psychology. They can be known only by acquiring complete knowledge. Another significant blow to Durkheim: it is through the connections between the parts that complete understanding circulates. Specialized knowledge is the haven of ignorance. “Body, soul and society mingle,”9 declares Mauss. The body acquires a positive position for sociological knowledge. Moreover, it is one of the main operators of complete knowledge, to which the science of modern man can aspire. This conception structures the argument in Techniques of the Body (1934). In its pages, Mauss lists movements, gestures and bodily attitudes. Its purpose is to show that there is no gap between the biological, the psychological and the sociological, but rather they are united by a circular causality. 7 Marcel Mauss, Essais de Sociologie, 244. 8 Id., Mauss Marcel, “La Prière”, in Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, vol. l, 401. 9 Id., “Rapports Réels et pratiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie”, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, 303.

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In relation to Durkheim, Mauss’s shift is threefold: an epistemological hierarchy (the body allows access to total knowledge), a methodological hierarchy (the body allows a concrete starting point), and a third element: Mauss gives the body the status of a crucial sociological object. The body is man’s first instrument. Like every instrument, it has technical, or, better said, techno-symbolic efficiency. Uses of the body are “signs, understood expressions,” they are a language through which participation in a collective reality is communicated. This interpretation invites us to reexamine The Gift (1925). Remember that, in this text, Mauss interprets human sociability through the sequence of obligations to give/receive/return. Mauss’s tour of diverse historical and geographical provinces allows him to assert that the gift completely deciphers the social bond. My interpretation at this point is that the gift and the body belong to the same symbolic reality. The first exists through the second, and vice versa. To use a wording that is a running thread throughout the entire argument of The Gift: body and gift are mixed in a symbolic effectiveness that describes participation in collective life. The mix body/gift is found in an extreme figure (such as sacrifice), but also in less deadly forms, such as the compliance with ceremonial etiquette, in the geographical travels that accompany goods, etc… Mauss, unlike Durkheim, places the body at the heart of his sociological theory and as a basis for participation in collective life. Bourdieu comes closer to the nephew than to the uncle on this point.

IV. Bourdieu: a Supporter of Tradition Pierre Bourdieu made a conscious effort to avoid being pigeonholed in a single intellectual tradition. His influence has been widespread and eclectic in terms of combining ideas. However, there are many elements that allow us to situate Bourdieu within this tradition and associated him with Durkheim and Mauss. Bourdieu often utilized a formula to speak of his relationship with classic sociologists: “for and against” (“for and against Marx,” “for and against Weber,”). This relationship of agreement and opposition also applied to Durkheim’s work. However, there is a difference with the other classic thinkers in the discipline. Bourdieu’s attraction to Durkheim went beyond following some of his predecessor’s ideas or redefining his concepts. Instead, Durkheim’s work provided Bourdieu with a model of sociology that aspired to reach the highest rung on the hierarchy of knowledge (above even philosophy). This was a model that was epistemological (sociology as a break with common knowledge) and method-



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ological (thinking in terms of a unified social science that combined sociology with history and anthropology) while also representing an intellectual enterprise (taking the lead in refounding a discipline, transforming institutional positions, organizing teams, starting journals, etc.). However, Marcel Mauss’s influence on Bourdieu has been less evident. I would like to examine this influence in detail. Pierre Bourdieu played a decisive role in disseminating the work of Marcel Mauss. I would like to position this role within Bourdieu’s broader project and his sociological enterprise. In 1968, Victor Karády compiled all of Mauss’s work in Oeuvres, a collection supervised by Pierre Bourdieu. Written by Karády, the introduction is filled with Bourdieusian topics such as the notion of the intellectual field and the critique of the idea of the intellectual as the creator of a work. For Karády, the publication of Sociologie et Anthropologie under George Gurevitch and Claude Lévi-Strauss must be interpreted with regards to the state of the intellectual field. The selection of texts published in 1950 represents an attempt to separate Mauss from Durkheim. From this perspective, the publication of works such as The Gift, “involved reintroducing and renovating the teachings of the School of Sociology, taking the most favorable aspects that were fashionable in the period. In the anti-positivist climate of 1950, Mauss was ‘better company’ than Durkheim.”10. In turn, the publication of Oeuvres established Mauss as one of the most important members of the school of French sociology and as a proponent of Durkheim’s scientific project. In the acknowledgements Karády lists at the end of the introduction, he thanks Bourdieu and recognizes the intellectual’s crucial contributions to compiling the collection. In 1997, a colloquium was organized at the Collège de France in homage to Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu gave a brief talk in which he discussed quotes taken from Mauss’s work. Against his own teachings on how to read sociological texts, Bourdieu dares to shift the analysis on the historic conditions in which Mauss’s texts were produced, thus intentionally mixing them with the speaker’s own works and words. While in Karády’s text, we see Bourdieu as a supporter of the publication of Oeuvres in an aim to restore the close connection between Mauss’s and Durkheim’s work and their dedication to a single sociological project, things come full circle at this talk: Bourdieu positions himself as part of this project by appropriating Mauss’s own words.

10 Victor Karády, “Presentación”, 15.

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The way in which Bourdieu associates with Mauss’s work also has a conceptual side. It would be nearly impossible to reconstruct the principal ideas of his sociology of domination without considering his novel interpretations of The Gift. In general, the symbolic component of domination is attributed to Weber’s influence on the work of Bourdieu. Without denying this hypothesis, I nonetheless posit that Mauss’s work may have also influenced Bourdieu’s conception of domination. From Bourdieu’s first texts through those published three decades later (in the 1990s), his reinterpretations of The Gift continue. The elaboration of the concept of symbolic capital evolves slowly and is nourished by his readings of the exchange of gifts and their role in “economies of honor.” The evolution of this concept in Bourdieu’s work suggests that, far from being a crucial concept for certain societies, it becomes the concept that is present in all social relations within every society. In Pascalian Meditations (1997), Bourdieu offers his last reading of the concept: he no longer considers it a type of capital and instead posits it as the symbolic effect of all capitals. This tendency towards the universalization of symbolic capital can be compared to Mauss’s tendency towards universalizing the gift. As we have seen, Mauss had methodologically and conceptually redefined the status of the body in sociological knowledge in relation to Durkheim. The body had become a technical-symbolic base for social bonds. Now we will see how the sociological status of the body maintained the alteration brought about by Mauss but defined by a sociology of domination.

V. Bourdieu: the Body as Domination Let me begin by setting a scene. It is found in the text The Bachelors’ Ball (2002). It is Christmas night. There is a party in the village. Men and women gather in a hall. The ballroom is in the center. Song after song is played. There is one constant during the night: the village’s firstborn males, old enough to marry, gaze upon the couples who are moving to the rhythm of modern music. They are the bachelors. And they will remain unmarried. They represent the crisis of the reproduction of a social world that is decomposing: the universe of a peasant society in the process of modernization. They are unmarriable in the face of an expanded and modern marriage market. Competitors that come from the city are better positioned to marry their women. The scene at the ball is dramatic. Men want and need to meet women, but dance, and with it their bodies, comes in between



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them. Intentions and words are held back by the failed meeting of the bodies. It is a micro bodily order resulting from the coordination of rhythms and movements. Bourdieu reaches the body through dance. In one of his first uses, he suggests the concept of habitus to explain this failure. This Latin concept is cited from Mauss’s text Techniques of the Body. The farmers do not possess the techniques of the body to meet the women who dance to modern rhythms, their movements are clumsy, and their postures are not seductive. The men suffer because of what their body cannot do. The women reject what those bodies do. Bourdieu builds this scene on a hypothesis that is to be central to his sociology, distancing himself from Durkheim and moving towards Mauss. The patterns of action, thinking and feeling that Durkheim set outside the individual to define a social fact are, in light of Bourdieu, in-corporated, motor inscriptions in hands, arms, feet, heads, etc… This assumption is clearly based on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Although a genealogy of habitus exceeds our purposes here11, the notion captures the temporality of people’s lives through the body, turning an abstract notion into a very material one. The body as potentiality and duration, as leaning towards the future while retaining experiences of the past, are phenomenological ideas that are added to Bourdieusian sociology through the concept of habitus. The body is temporal and time is corporal. Bourdieu would continue to construct the relationship between the two for the rest of his life. The scene of the bachelors dancing is particularly illustrative: if the French villagers fail in their encounters with women, it is because they can’t keep up with the rhythm. They are off-time with regards to a dance that requires modern body movements. Through these concepts, the body is thought of as a reservoir of knowledge at hand that allows the strange to become familiar, in Husserl’s view. This idea has also been very important in the work of sociologist Alfred Schultz. “Social subjects comprehend the social world which comprehends them,”12 was Bourdieu’s summary of this manner of turning the social world into the right universe through knowledge stored in the body. The body is a guarantee that people move “like a duck takes to water”13. Throughout his work, Bourdieu shows different types of temporal discordances in social and subjective structures, such as the one exemplified by the bachelors 11 Cf. François Héran, “La seconde nature de l’habitus”. 12 Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations Pascaliennes, 189. 13 Loic J. D. Wacquant, “Toward a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu”. In Stefen P. Turner, ed., Social theory and sociology: The classics and beyond (p. 213–229). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell., 220.

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at the Christmas ball, but also those of classless peasants and capitalist modernization in Algeria14 and of excluded workers and the context of unemployment in France in the 1990s.15 He always insists on the following interpretation: conditions for participation in social life are “deposited” in the body. In all these cases, we find the persistence of action, thinking and feeling in transformed social contexts. The speed of these changes is in stark contrast with the bodily scheme’s tendency to endure. A kind of immanent endurance that escapes the domain of consciousness and speech, a preservation of being itself through the body: Spinoza’s conatus. For Bourdieu, his sociology of the body is a central chapter of his sociology of domination. If Max Weber based the types of domination on different beliefs, Pierre Bourdieu bases them on bodily schemes, transforming a theory based on the legitimacy of power into one based on symbolic violence. The body is not just another piece in this sociology but instead a pillar of his mechanism of interpretation: Adapting a phrase of Proust’s, one might say that legs and arms are filled with numb imperatives. One could endless enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instill a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as trivial as ‘stand up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand’, and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement.16

Ultimately, for Bourdieu, the hardness of the social world finds its sociological reason in the body. This hardness has a twofold sense, due to its tendency to persist and to the fact that domination is naturalized through it. The differences between the sexes or between classes are mainly located in the body. Inequalities go unnoticed by agents and are considered a part of their asocial nature, as are, for example, the more personal “tastes” or “gifts”.

Final Thoughts In Durkheim’s work, social cohesion based on the body is socio-historically determined: it is a historical contingency. In contrast, social cohesion based on collective representations is socio-genetic. Leaving aside the body means shifting away

14 See Pierre Bourdieu, Algérie, 60. 15 See id., The Weight of the World. 16 Pierre Bourdieu, El sentido práctico, 112.



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from its undeniable arbitrariness. In relation to Durkheim, Mauss’s shift is threefold: an epistemological hierarchy (the body allows access to total knowledge), a methodological hierarchy (the body allows a concrete starting point), and a third element: Mauss gives the body the status of a crucial sociological object. Uses of the body are a language through which participation in a collective reality is communicated. Finally, Pierre Bourdieu redefines this focus within a sociology of domination. The body becomes a pillar for analyzing the persistence of social and mental structures, a trend that will become widespread in the social sciences. I have tried to transmit this idea throughout this article: this tradition’s encounter with the body did not just imply the incorporation of an empirical object or the delimitation of a new subdiscipline (the sociology or anthropology of the body), it implied the transformation of the gaze on the very nature of the social that redefined a new epistemological and methodological configuration. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize three consequences that we could draw from this placement of the body to think about our relationship with knowledge. First, this placement of the body was a cause and a consequence of a project seeking a rearrangement of knowledge and its limits. For this reason, through it, a proposal for a unified social science was founded, which mobilizes a continuous dialog between history, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Second, the recognition of the connections of meaning that the body sets in motion rattles the scholastic relationship of knowledge. There is a fascinating quote from Bourdieu: “Teaching sociology is more similar to the job of a soccer coach than to that of a professor at the Sorbonne.” The transmission of our knowledge requires a pedagogy of the body that is not found in the manuals that we usually use in sociology or anthropology. Finally, recognizing that the social world acquires meaning through the body necessarily leads to a decentralization of the focus on intellectual-centrism, the tendency to assume that knowledge is only intellectual which is so dear to our own benefits as a social group. In short, I wanted to share with you what it means to take the body seriously in order to think sociologically, as well as to consider its implications for an intellectual project and an ethics of knowledge. I think that these are the deep discussions that are the body and soul of our meetings.

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Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre, Algérie 60. Structures économiques et structures temporelles. Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1977. Bourdieu, Pierre, El sentido práctico. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI editores, 2007 (Le sens pratique [Collection “Le sens commun”]. Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, first 1980). Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations Pascaliennes. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1997. Bourdieu, Pierre, ed., The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999 (La misère du monde (Libre examen politique). Paris, Éd. du Seuil, first 1993). Durkheim, Emile, Sociologie et Philosophie. Paris, Puf, 2004. Heran, François, “La seconde nature de l’habitus. Tradition philosophique et sens commun dans le langage sociologique”, Revue française de sociologie 28/3 (1987), 385–416. Karády, Victor, “Presentación”. In Marcel Mauss, ed., Obras Completas de Marcel Mauss. Barcelona, Barral, 1970, 1–31 (Œuvres. 1. les fonctions sociales du sacré. Présentation de Victor Karády (Collection “Le sens commun”). Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1968. Karsenti, Bruno, L’homme total. Sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss. Paris, PUF, 1997. Mauss, Marcel, Essais de Sociologie. Paris, Points, 1971. Mauss, Marcel, Œuvres, vol. l: Les fonctions sociales du sacré, edited by Viktor Karády. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1968 Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris PUF, 112004. Tarot, Camille, De Durkheim à Mauss, l’invention du symbolique : sociologie et sciences des religions (Collection “Recherches”). Paris, La Découverte/M.A.U.S.S.,‎ 1999. Wacquant, Loic J. D., “Toward a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu”. In Stefen P. Turner, ed., Social theory and sociology: The classics and beyond. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 213–229.

Walter Cenci

Representation and Scene Mimesis and Vertigo of the Body In an author’s lexicon, will there not always be a word-as-mana, a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that by this word one might answer for everything? Such a word is neither eccentric nor central; it is motionless and carried, floating, never pigeonholed, always atopic (escaping any topic), at once remainder and supplement, signifier that occupies the place of all signified. This word appeared in his work little by little; at first hidden behind the instance of the Truth (that of History), then by Validity (of systems and structures); now, it sprouts and expands; this word-as-mana is the word “body”. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes The distance of language, of scene, of reflection, is bearable by the body: and it is in this that it remains human and is given to change. Jean Baudrillard: Videosphere and the fractal subject

Abstract The presence of the body in the arts has various implications for creative, interpretive, and receptive aspects of the aesthetic phenomenon. In the case of scenic arts, it holds a unique place: the body carries out the drama of the scene, transports to the scene the conceptual, emotional, valuable and symbolic aspects that inhabit it. Following Roger Caillois’ contribution to the theory of play and the theoretical configurations of Jean Baudrillard, we are able to explore the unique condition of the body on stage. We can pose many questions regarding the rules of the body under a variety of perspectives. Therefore, any initial selection for study can be used as a starting off point. In our case we will start by trying to understand it through the concept of the scene: the scene in which the body moves as well as the body itself understood as scene, with its scope and limits, carrying out a specific drama. And from this point of departure Baudrillard’s quote operates as a catalyzing reference to determine the ways in which we can consider the body as it is linked to the arts. Four aspects can be highlighted: distance, the overcoming of distance, the human, and the (inter)change. If we wish to define what a scene is, first of all it is the effect of distance and separation, an alterity between a space

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where something happens, either in reality or in fiction and a visual focus point, of expectation, of reception. In relation to the scene Baudrillard places language and reflections, since, in effect, language is a scene since a scene can include the dimension of language as well, with its idioms and patterns of speech, but language and the scene are also mirrors, reflections at times, forms of duplication, of representation. And what is represented there? The human, the limit of the human with that which is not, with the inhuman that replicates it, and with which a link is established for exchange. Within this framework we can conceive the body, the scene defines it but is able to be overcome by the body in some way and especially through art: there the body finds a limit and a way to overcome and exchange, lending itself to all kinds of metamorphosis, in a unique game of mimesis and vertigo. In line with the exchange and the scene we find the vision of the game presented by Roger Caillois which links to the presence of the body as a vehicle for art: alea, agon, mimicry, and ilinx are the variants and the body vector and stage, participants and possible screen for the different possibilities. The types of scenes that can be established and the ways we move through them can be found in Baudrillard: the initial scene of metamorphosis, the metaphysical scene of the metaphor, and the third type, a cancelation of the scene itself, metastasis, where representation yields to reproduction. For our purposes here, we will focus on the first two, leaving the third type for another study.

Metamorphasis: The Body as Expression Where is the body of the fable, the body of metamorphosis, the pure chain of expression of an extemporal and asexual fluidity of forms, the ceremonial body that brings mythologies to life, or the Peking Opera, and the theaters of the Orient, or also dance: non-individual, dual and fluid body – body without desire, but capable of all metamorphoses, body liberated from the reflection of itself, but given in to all seductions?1

As a fractal corpuscle, this quote condenses, in a dizzying and exemplifying way, the definition of the body in the context of metamorphosis, the presence of the body in the unfolding of the fable, in the original fiction, that does not know the identity that comes from the difference of the sexes or the identity of chronological time. With this question Baudrillard introduces the mythical condition of the body, not in the trivial sense that is attributed to the myth contemporarily, but in the sense that implies the myth as a fable, the articulation of the story, the forms 1 Jean Baudrillard, L’autre par lui-même, 39.



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and expressions linked not under the rationality of sense but to a primordial order of ceremonial fluidity. It is the body of expression, the body as expressions, and as such, detached from any depth, from any seriousness that impedes the flow of the enchanted flotation. Although this body does not admit introspection, because it is not a subjective or individual body that holds rationality, it is not given over at random, its movement responds to a need more supreme than reason: ceremony. The ritual body lives in mythologies, part of a world fascinated by stories, and at the same time, agitated by the enchanted game of expressions which is, according to Baudrillard, the game of seduction. Metamorphosis of the body does not understand alienation, because it does not know itself. It surrenders to expression, to ceremony, understood as an ineluctable process that governs each of its movements without supposing individual acceptance of the participants since they do not operate under will, but under the greater obligation which is participation in the ritual. Ceremony offers no chance for law or desire. Everything is carried out in the realm of superior need which holds a dual opposition of adherence to the rules irrespective of desire which requires a retreat into the self, under the shadow of alienation and law. In the ceremony one is always another without feeling alienated due to the contradictory opposition that does not search for identity. The appropriation of the self as it occurs in the order of the law of desire for recognition. For Baudrillard the body is freed from itself, searching not for its own image, but for evolution through a double connection. Identity is a wager on the uniqueness of movement of alienation in universality and its recuperation in individual recognition. Baudrillard opposes this identity, the singularity which is the expression of radical alterity, the eternally other in dual movement and never in individuality, logically identical to itself through universality. The force of metamorphosis is at the root of all seduction, including the easiest forms of substitution of faces, of roles, masks. We surround each seduction of a metamorphosis, and we surround each metamorphosis of a ceremony. This is the law of expression, and the body is the first object trapped in this game.2

In effect, in dance, in physical theater and in all types of scenes that a body in motion expresses rhythmically, interpreting some form of theater art can highlight this type of condition indicated by Baudrillard: the body in the dynamic of metamorphosis, of the multiplicity of masks, of appearances, assuming a role and a uniqueness that can connect a game of constant of seduction, of multiple exchanges. With this understanding the question we might ask ourselves is what 2 Ibid., 39–40.

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happens to meaning, to the signifier of movements, to the identities that may be assumed. The compositions of Pina Bausch are a good example of this development, any part of the body, but also any object, circumstance, or space may enter metamorphosis along with the body, even any part of the body itself, may become part of the choreographic process without having to conform to the conventional sense of traditional dance, if it finds in a disquieting way, a combination, a trajectory of subtle and intense beauty. And what makes this condition disquieting is that although many meanings may be attached to it, it doesn’t automatically remit to any, it holds back its potential for expression without being a metaphor of any signifier in particular, beyond belonging to the dance itself. The body of the metamorphosis does not know the metaphor or the operation of meaning. Meaning does not move from one form to another, the forms move directly from one to another, like in the movements of dance in masked offerings.3

The movement and substitution of ritual expression, in which the body is “trapped,” does not appear under the operation of meaning, that is to say, by the application of a profound significance that is reached through a field of meaning, by a symbolic framework external to the process. Expressions move directly, without rational mediation, without logical meaning, but as dance or masked offerings, inherent to action, in a movement that is not metaphysical, and does not seek an external meaning or express an external meaning. Like all expressions, the body of the metamorphosis moves directly with them, respecting the secret connections that order them. Now, this order of movements of expressions does not imply a superficial level with another depth that lies in opposition. The limit between bodies, even between that which is not corporeal but remits to a form, goes beyond the limit of the superficial. As Deleuze says: “Tracing the limit, bordering the surface, is the way bodies transcend the corporeal.”4 This border is never a limit determined by subjectivity, but a singularity; the border of expression does not define geometric figures, but lack angles and are therefore any separation of internal and external is purely metaphysical; they are defined as expressions based on their formal limit and never by the determination of their interior of substance. Since it does not register introspection, the body is not determined by the metaphysical characteristics, especially the condition of subject. “Non-psychological, non-sexual body, liberated from any subjectivity

3 Ibid., 40. 4 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens, 33.



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recovers the animal feline quality of the pure object, of pure movement, of a gestural transparency.”5 This would be classified not as the subjective body, but the objective, linked to a game of expressions, this is not a body as object in subordination to another, but in opposition to it. Here is where we may find a connection to the perspective of Caillois on the possible dimensions of play. Caillois says: Only one category play is truly creative: mimicry, the conjunction of mask and vertigo; agon, in competition and chance. The rest are quickly devastating. They manifest a disproportionate solicitude, inhumane and incurable, a kind of horrible and disastrous attraction whose seduction should be neutralized.6

This conceptualization of metamorphosis proposed by Baudrillard supposes a constant seduction that operates like a conjunction of a disproportionate and incurable demand that allows no return from the Other. From there, reversibility is a condition of the metamorphosis itself, at least proposed as a dual exercise, of attraction and reciprocity, but which does not have one of the parts as a singular reference, whose attraction will be devastating and must be neutralized. Maybe this is art, the form of neutralizing the terrifying seduction of the inhuman. Among the types of play the one that best expresses this exorcism is mimicry: the game of imitation, of masked representation, veiling the power that unbalances reciprocity, but this ludic action must be creative, not a competition but an agon or an action left to fate. In any case, factors of skill and chance must be added to the dynamic of mimicry forming part of creative play. This is found frequently, although not always achieved, in forms of dance, but also in the circus arts, in dramatic representations of objects in their different versions. Mimicry takes vertigo beyond vortex to an exploration of the limits of the body and the scene; ensures that fate is not purely the speculation of chance, but the dynamic of the unknown and the possibility to work with it. Agon becomes not just competition but a game of dual potential. In societies where simulation and hypnosis rule, sometimes a solution is found in the moment that the show prevails over the trance, that is to say, when the mask of the magician becomes the mask of the theater. In societies based on a combination of merit and chance, an incessant force also exists, unequally happy and quick, to increase the participation of justice to the detriment of chance. This force is called progress.7

5 Jean Baudrillard, L’autre par lui-même, 40. 6 Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 136. 7 Jean Baudrillard, L’autre par lui-même, 40.

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Following this quote that complements what was previously expressed by Caillois, we find the author’s extension of his theory of play to other areas. This is meant to achieve, in part, an understanding of how the theories may give way to uses of objects and practices between different types of play, as indicated in the example of the transference of the mask of the magician to the theater. The extension also helps to understand the broader social dynamics beyond play such as the global knowledge of societies. This falls within a framework that is part anthropological, part sociological, since the social scene is considered to be made up of relations of imitation, competition, vertigo and chance, and the diverse mechanisms of association. Baudrillard continues this reflection in the chapter titled Metamorphosis Metaphor Metastasis which deals with the link between the body and the symbolic order: The body of metamorphosis does not know the symbolic order, only a dizzying succession in which the subject loses itself in the ritual connections. Seduction does not know the symbolic order either. Only when this transfiguration of the forms among themselves halts does the symbolic order appear, an instance like any other is established and meaning becomes metaphor in accordance with the law.8

The scene of metamorphosis is ruled by ritual connections, not by the dependence on a symbolic order, which Baudrillard understands as limited to the establishment of a transcendent law that orders the processes externally, leaving to one side the internal evolution, the process of vertigo, the ilinx, inherent to all forms when they connect to each other, defined by Baudrillard as transfiguration. Now, this enchanted scene of metamorphosis, of an anthropological nature, privileged place for art, myths, rituals, where transfiguration and antagonistic evolution resolves the links and possible experiences, where all seductions of the game in their contradictory, competitive, and dizzying forms, are resolved in an inherent way. They lose their condition when an external order tries to organize, regulate and give meaning to the process of metamorphosis. Baudrillard says: “Only then, once the Great Game of the Fable, Vertigo, and Metamorphosis have been fulfilled, with the appearance of sexuality and desire, the body becomes a metaphor, a metaphoric scene of sexual reality, with its courting of desire and inhibitions.” 9 Metamorphosis places the body in the order of vertigo and the fable that corresponds to the ritual assignation. The metaphor, as a metaphysical sign, is the scene of the body under the surface of sexual reality. Now the body, instead 8 Ibid., 40–41. 9 Ibid. 41.



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of changing into each type or form, in the cycle of appearance and disappearance, is converted into a complex of inhibition and desire, under the drama of the unconscious. The metaphor initiates the truth of the unconscious as the reality of the body and its sexual inscription. The body leaves the cycle of change, and becomes a place where the unconscious and its sexual connection are projected.

The Metaphor and the Metaphysical Reality of the Body This shift from metamorphosis to metaphor that Baudrillard exemplifies with the body, fundamentally implies a change in the register of the order of the world, in the way in which signs and expressions are processed and organized. Although there is no history of this movement, Baudrillard does not even offer a chronology, we may correlate this movement to the advent of metaphysics in modernity, and in the case of the body it is in psychoanalysis that this metaphysical determination unfolds fully, the psychological consummation of subjectivity through its inscription under sexual difference. This is where an extraordinary impoverishment appears: instead of the luxurious theater of many initial forms, of cruelty and versatility of expression, location of the phantasmagoria of the species, of the sexes and the many ways to die, the body is nothing more than an example of the only mark among them all: sexual difference, and the scene of a singular script, the fantastical sexual unconscious. It is no longer the fabled surface of dreams and divinities, but merely the scene of the fantasy and the metaphor of the subject.10

The condition of the body as metaphor of the subject is for Baudrillard an effect of the supposition of a singular mark among which the body moves in the game of expressions: it becomes the stage of sexual distinction under the organization of the unconscious fantasies. These are the psychic productions that measure the relationship between subject and object and therefore sexual difference will be determined by its articulation through them: sexual difference is the articulator of the identifying assignations for the subject and the condition of possibility of the object. Now, this implication of the body as sexual difference is, according to Baudrillard, an impoverishment, related to the reduction that the metaphysical order means for metamorphosis. Metaphysics is the centralization of the inscription of man at the level of subjectivity, but this is one of the many possibilities

10 Ibid.

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that transform the human in the metamorphic realm. In this sense Baudrillard is very explicit. Perhaps man, in effect, forms part of the connection between things. There are no specifications like species; there are no definitions of this type, or above all, of subject. It is trapped in a cycle of metamorphosis, of masks, where the name ‘man’ is a kind of sacred reference similar to others but not greater than others.11

The position of the subject becomes characteristic of man in his metaphysical characterization, which inscribes him in a supersensitive order outside the cycle of appearances, of connection between masks. When the metaphysical instance dominates, man loses his sacred reference and becomes only the subject, which is one way to define man but not greater than others. This metaphysical position of the subject defines the body in terms of sexual body, metaphor for the rationality of the unconscious process and scene for the fantasy of desire. There is no sacred inscription in dreams, together with gods, in a permanent game of masks that installs a rationality of desire, a non-oracular fantasy of desire that is not in dialogue with expression. In this sense we may comprehend Lacan’s words on the fantasy as the grammar of impulse: the order of passion, appetites, the erogenous relationship weaves itself in linguistically rationality, that is to say, the fantasy integrates the body with the psychic order of the representation, to the extent that it gives erogenous support to impulse, through fantasies that are unconscious logos. In this weaving the unconscious fantasy shapes passion, however, it is necessary that language be determined linguistically, that it become the instance that condenses and displaces the unconscious affections, therefore, the libidinal economy weaves linguistically in the search for a representation that satisfies the demand of the impulse, that it so say, that finds the object of satisfaction through a significant representation. It is in psychoanalysis that the body of the metaphor finds its metaphysical definition, which implies, at the same time, a particular relationship to language. Body and language articulate under the dialectic of desire and libidinal economy, where impulse becomes the hinge of the corporeal order, as erogenous zone, as source of impulse integrates the symbolic order through the psychic representation of the object of the impulse. The four elements of impulse proposed by Freud, source, drive, object, and objective, are components of the articulation of the body, which like source and drive combine linguistically with the psyche through the assignation of an object that meets the objective of satisfaction of impulse, 11 Dialogue between Luis Jalfen and Baudrillard published in Luis J. Jalfen, El mundo como diálogo, 133.



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the decrease of erogenous tension. The erogenous and sexualized body, language as symbolic organizer under the precedence of meaning. Body traversed by signifier, language libidinized under the fantasy of impulse. “The ceremonial body is not transparent to a truth, not even a metaphoric truth, which the Fable has not heard, although it always pretends to refer to it, and remains incapable of forming an opinion about the dizzying being free from desire, that is metamorphosis.”12 When the body is the stage of the unconscious, that is to say, when the register of the metaphor determines it, becomes the place where truth resides, the sexual truth of the unconscious, and as such, the possibility of knowing this truth that will be of the order of the subjective desire. But in the Fable there is no truth, there is no metaphoric duplication, and therefore, there is no illusion of truth, of decoding or interpreting the desire and its truth. Psychological body, inhibited body, neuroticized body, space of the fantasy, reflection of alterity, place of the subject trapped by its own image and by its own desire, our body is no longer pagan and mythical, but Christian and metaphorical; body of desire, and not of the fable.13

The condition that makes the expression of the body as metaphor possible is the constitution of interiority, of depth and in this sense of psychology. This is how psychology encompasses a material (of affections, passions, thoughts, etc.) within man, which remains trapped within the imagination and fantasy, unable to evolve in the game of appearances. For this reason Baudrillard describes the body that arises as metaphoric as a body that distances itself from the exchange and the metamorphosis and moves towards signification and inhibition. It becomes a secondary stage, outside the great theater of the appearances of the world, to show through itself, the drama of the unconscious, the impossibility of the meeting of desire and object, of body and its image: a neuroticized and distanced body, within the space of the fantasy that regulates the alienation of the subject. Alienation is here the figure of alterity, no longer the radical alterity of appearances, but the alienation of nostalgia that seeks to reunite with itself in reasoning with the Other. This reasoning makes up the logic of desire and the body trapped in its image in the reflection of the Other. Definitive end to the fable of the body, its metaphoric connection, its initiating dance and its ritual challenge to appear as in the prison of the soul, like residual confinement of the spirit (but what is the spirit but that which makes metamorphosis possible, the inherent movement of expressions; initial logos of the fable, radical illusion of the world?). 12 Jean Baudrillard, L’autre par lui-même, 41 sq. 13 Ibid., 42.

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It is also the beginning of the nihilism of the body, since it is no longer ritual material, element of the fable, but is ordered to express the psychic complexes, the condescension of the unconscious dynamic, therefore, it becomes anchored to the neurotic condition, fetishist or psychotic under the supremacy of the meaningful structure. Now, this nascent nihilism is not related to the fact that no reality is recognized, it is only nihilist to the extent that it begins to be a reference and at the same time exists thanks to the meaningful determination, therefore its disappearance as form and sacred appearance. The greatest nihilism is abandoning the realm of metamorphosis.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, L’autre par lui-même (Habilitation). Paris, Editions Galilée, 1987 (El otro por sí mismo. Barcelona, Ed. Anagrama, 1988). Caillois, Roger, Les Jeux et les hommes. Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1958 (El hombre y los juegos. Buenos Aires, Ed. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986). Deleuze, Gilles, Logique du sens (Collection “Critique”). Paris, Editions De Minuit, 1969 (Lógica del sentido. Madrid, Ed. Planeta, 1995). Jalfen, Luis J., El mundo como diálogo. Buenos Aires, Catálogos, 1991.

Alexandre Roig

The Headless Body1 The ablation of the head is evident, almost a triviality. André Masson is thus convinced when, in April 1936 in front of Georges Bataille, he draws the first lines of Acéphale, an illustration from the homonymous magazine. But, where do we put this uncomfortable and painful head? Irresistibly, it finds its place over the genitals (masking them) as a skull2. This slide, this downward displacement that reduces the capita to a skull and a mask, it is not an absence, but a vacancy: the vacancy of the self, as Klossowski would say responding to the vacancy of God, it would constitute the sovereign moment. Free space is subjected to the possibility of return. Bataille likes to disrupt the concepts and escape the limits of language, playing the symbols like musical notes on the strings of experience. Concentrating on a thought that escapes all attempts at systematization, the drawing of Acéphale is a map without cardinal points which allows us to be duly disoriented in our inseparable understanding of body and sovereignty. In fact, this other of reason, this being who aspires to be a thinking body released from the idea of a project is a unfinished thoughts. Masson thus continues the description of his drawing: Automatically one hand (the left!) raises a dagger; the other kneads a flaming heart (this is not the heart of the crucified one), but ake of the womb? So be it; it will be the receptacle of the Labyrinth, which became in fact our sign of3. Let us follow suit in the symbolic game. The Labyrinth represents the animality at the center of which the Minotaur is found; the dagger and the flaming heart represent the sacred and the tragic; the genitals covered by a skull synthesizes eroticism, all fall under the scope of the vacancy of the self. Intensely living this set of symbols means precisely accessing the sovereign moments and being nothing more than body. However, this reflection about the body exceeds the limits of the flesh: it proposes a reflection about limits (in relation to evil and animality that we will first explore), as well as about community (which we will explore second). The Acéphale is at once the anarchistic utopia of a society founded on the vacancy of God and a paradoxical theory of the social cohesion that contemplates sovereignty based on a double body, the social and the carnal.

1 I am grateful to A.D.C. who unknowingly has allowed me write this text. 2 Cf. André Masson, “Le soc de la Charrue”, 702. 3 Cf. ibid.

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Beyond limits: evil and the maze Bataille, in reference to Michelet, emphasizes that mankind is pursuing two purposes. The first, negative, is to preserve life (to avoid death), the second to increase) Value stands beyond the realm of Good and Evil, but under two opposing forms: one linked to the principle of Good, the other to the principle of Evil. The desire for Good limits the movement that pushes us to seek value. In terms of freedom toward Evil, to the contrary, it opens the access to as possible. In this sense, the association at the beginning of Good measures the farthest distance from the social body (the end point beyond which the constituted society cannot move forward); the association to the principle of Evil, refers to the farthest that individuals or minorities may temporarily reach: no one can go further4. Indeed, it is in this reflection on Good and Evil that the relationship between the individual and society becomes explicit. Good appears at the level of the social body and poses an insurmountable limit. Evil appears at the level of the dominated: those bodies, which seek go as far as possible against the Good. Evil marks the boundary that the bodies (understood in their variety) seek to exceed and raises the issues of emancipation and transgression. It is in this sense that Bataille believes that Sade is the great revolutionary. Not due to large heroic deeds, but for literarily expanding the possible. He allowed everyone to go further. The same idea is also to be found in William Blake, in a text central for Bataille, which is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circum­ference of Energy. Energy is eternal delight.5

The transparency of this text is evident to Bataille. Reason is a limit, and the Acéphale is sovereign to the extent that he is released from Reason, which does not mean freedom from thought, but its return to the level of the Energy, that is to say, of the body, of life. It is the moral relation and the historical forms of construction of Good and Evil that allow us to understand the relationship between 4 Cf. ibid., 57 sq. 5 William Blake, quoted in Bataille, La Literatura, 69.



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the individual and society; it is not a relationship of opposition or essentialist distinction, but a relationship of composition between two bodies that relate to the limit in different ways. The Good is the unsurpassable limit of the social, Evil is the reachable limit until the death of the flesh. This perspective sheds new light on Bataille’s famous phrase about eroticism: of eroticism, it is possible to say that it is the validation of life until death. La petite mort expresses the paradox of enjoyment even in death, where the being loses itself, where, for an instant, it abandons the consciousness of its discontinuity and finds itself, as in the religious bond, in a sense of boundless continuity. It is in this ruin of the subject, finally diluted, that the return to the body is experienced, that sovereignty is expressed for a moment in the continuity. The Energy is then deployed even in death; the body experiences sovereignty. For Bataille, the being is not sovereign. Only in the unmeasured expense, beyond what is useful, when it gets lost in the moment, when it does not have any project, the being accesses the sovereign moment. Its interest? Dissolving the ego, it disappears into the Other, reuniting with its lost continuity. It is in eroticism, in the idea of death, in literature, in these few moments where the being lives beyond its needs that it is realized; sovereignty is found in excess and the unproductive expense. The sovereign is what escapes, for a moment, reason, modernity. For Bataille, sovereignty is not an essence; it is an experience of the thinking body whose boundaries are not necessarily the epidermal border; rather, they are the shapes of the continuities between the bodies, which may be two or may be many. It is, to the contrary, when the body becomes once again a reasonable individual, when it is limited and discontinuous, that it ceases to be sovereign. In this sense, the body, as a locus of individual and utilitarian pleasure, deepens anguish, instead of emancipating the subject. It paradoxically refers the subject back to the experience of discontinuity, enclosing it again in the reason that it tries to escape, as if from a prison. Contrary to the interpretations of Bataille that perceive a call to emancipation through an individual transgression attentive to the needs of the body, this is an invitation to free oneself from the very logic of transgression. To go beyond means to displace the limit in the continuity, to end the Taboo, to bring eroticism to the religious order rather than to the order of pornography, to the meanders of the maze instead of to the imposing and clear summits. The dagger and the kneaded heart, the skull that hides the sex, the vacancy of the selfare found in the labyrinth. “Not the work, nor the mother’s womb (neither human, nor natural), the labyrinth is firstly the space where the oppositions are broken up and complicated, where diacritical pairs are thrown off balance, are

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perverted”6. His logic questions the man/animal pair because the Minotaur is at the center of the Labyrinth. Similar to the Sphinx, this hybrid being represents the animality of the human that a King kills in order to ensure the birth of humanity from this death. One sovereign logic pitted against another, the ruler against the Man-animal. André Masson creates a few Acéphale drawings with a bull head. Beyond the fascination with Spain and bullfighting lies the idea of releasing man from reason, releasing the animality in that humanity which is at stake, against the King, against Theseus. Sovereignty is in the Labyrinth, without entrance or exit, where the thread of Ariadne communicates with those who, like Bataille, abandon the idea of wanting to see where the maze winds up and enjoy getting lost. It is true that you can die when faced with the Minotaur. Like the toreador, before killing the bull or ending up pierced on the tip of its horn, one must feel the movement of the animal, as well as its moments, sense its identity, a continuity that the human sword tragically separates with its edge, returning the man to his discontinuity and the loss of his animality which, however, had for a moment made him sovereign. In the Arena, the human tragedy of the relationship between death and animality plays out. There, the death of the bull separates the two bodies from the human. Thus, Bataille’s political community is dramatized.

The body and the community “I reveal myself, therefore we are”, said Camus 7, in support of Bataille. Sovereign moments are actually revolts against the Good, Evil, and God, in this beyond Evil where the body is a thinking animal, in these acts where we are, where we found a community. To clarify this transition between the person and ordinary life, we must go back to the interpretation of Nietzsche. In the July 1937 issue of Acéphale, Bataille expounds upon his analysis of the fascist phenomenon, which is also a proposal to fight. In what he calls The Nietzschean Chronicles, he argues that Nazism is a solution to the terrible problems posed by the disenchantment of the modern and individualistic world. Indeed, Nazism, for Bataille, recomposes the sacred values8, by mobilizing the presence of death in the whole of society around the BOSS. When the common passion is not large enough to knit together the human forces, it is necessary to

6 Denis Hollier, La prise de la Concorde, 110. 7 Albert Camus, l’homme révolté, 30. 8 Cf. Georges Bataille, Acéphale, 121.



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resort to constriction and develop combinations, transactions, and falsifications that are called politics. Human beings, as they become autonomous, discover around them a false and empty world9. In this process of the crisis of civilization, the need for the recovery of a lost world appears. The movement of recomposition that fascism proposes is then, for Bataille, “the return to the past that will allow the existence of walking upright again under the whip of harsh necessity and will initiate the recomposition of the sacred values”10. The latter are materialized in the re-creation of the Roman Caesars, who manage to polarize the collective fascination of a glorious community, finally found again around the BOSS and what, in this case, racial superiority represents. This is what Bataille called the Caesarean sky: “a composition of forces attached to a narrow tradition – parental or racial – that constitutes a monarchical authority and establishes itself as stagnation and as an absolute limit to life”11. As he recognizes the need to undertake a return to the sacred values in order to fight against fascism with its own weapons, Bataille proposes an interpretation contrary to this manner of re-establish the social. To that end, he also relies on Nietzsche: at the opposite pole, a fraternal tie that may be alien to the blood tie links men who decide amongst them the necessary consecrations; and this meeting does not have as its objective a defined action, but the very existence, EXISTENCE, WHICH IS TO SAY TRAGEDY. Thus, Bataille heads for the Dionysian land that is opposed to the Caesarean sky, two conflicting ways of re-sacralizing the social. The first mobilizes warrior values, dominating reason, the acting leader. The second is not based on any object except living together, existing together around the tragedy of the existence of death. The expression of this common tragedy, the inevitability of the death of the members of Everything, is materialized in the Dionysian virtues, through the feast, the communion with nature, the unproductive expense, the orgy. To elaborate upon his position, Bataille then introduces in his reflection an event that takes place during the writing of the text. In May of 1937, a dramatization of Cervantes’s The Siege of Numantia is presented in Paris. This work stages the history of this Iberian people, who when faced with the Roman army decide collectively to commit suicide and destroy the city. In the last scene, the last child still alive climbs on the last remaining tower. The capture of a single Numantine would have meant for Scipion, the Roman general, victory in war. The child jumps from the height, and the BOSS is forced to admit defeat in the face of the inert body. 9 Cf. ibid., 118. 10 Ibid., 118. 11 Ibid., 121.

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Take, then, child, Take the victory. And the glory that the sky prepares for you. For having, by destroying yourself, defeated Him, who, by climbing, is even more fallen.12

Bataille sees represented in this work the confrontation between the Caesarean sky (the Good, the dominating reason) and the Dionysian land (Evil, the body). The Caesarean unity that the BOSS founds is opposed to the leaderless community, united by the obsessive image of a tragedy. Life requires that men come together, and men come together, thanks to a BOSS or thanks to the TRAGEDY13. Further, Bataille adds, in order to clarify the anti-fascist position of the Acéphale: to seek the human community without head, is to seek tragedy: the execution of the leader is a tragedy in itself; it is always a requirement of the tragedy14. Here, we see that the Acéphale assumes its full meaning as a social and carnal body. The vacancy of the self is a form of subversion that releases the animal, while simultaneously it founds the community. The Nietzschean superman is not a controlling being, but one who faces the sun and death, the one who expends in the present time, who is released from the idea of reason and the idea of project. What is central to the two bodies is then intensity, value, energy, and life beyond their limits. In this sense for Bataille, the political community is already in us, the social body in our carnal body. The Good, the Reason, the profane and the prose distract us from the consciousness of this presence, or at least from the experience of its existence. Sovereignty is strong connective communication: this is expressed in the sacred, in Evil, in poetry, which connects the two bodies, and leads to the fullness of life. The body becomes sovereign once again; it returns to being him-self.

Bibliography Bataille, Georges, Acéphale. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra Editores, 2005. Bataille, Georges, El erotismo. Buenos Aires, Tusquets Editores, 2006. Bataille, Georges, El Estado y el problema del fascismo. Valencia, Pre-Textos/Universidad de Murcia, 1993. Bataille, Georges and Michel Leiris, Intercambios y correspondencias 1924–1982. Buenos Aires, El cuenco de plata, 2008. Bataille, Georges, La conjuración sagrada. Ensayos 1929–1939. Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2003. 12 Ibid., 129. 13 Cf. ibid., 130. 14 Cf. ibid., 131.



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Bataille, Georges, La experiencia interior. Madrid, Taurus Ediciones, 1973. Bataille, Georges, La felicidad, el erotismo y la literatura. Ensayos 1944–1961. Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2008. Bataille, Georges, La Literatura y el Mal. Madrid, Taurus Ediciones, 1971. Bataille, Georges, La oscuridad no miente. Textos y apuntes para la continuación de la Summa ateológica. México, Taurus, 2001. Bataille, Georges, La Parte Maldita. Buenos Aires, Editorial Las Cuarenta, 2007. Bataille, Georges, Lo que entiendo por soberanía. Barcelona, Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, 1996. Bataille, Georges, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, and Alexandre-Frédéric-Jacques Masson, Acéphale. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2008. Bataille, Georges, Sobre Nietzsche. Voluntad de suerte. Madrid, Taurus Ediciones, 1979. Bataille, Georges, Teoría de la religión. Madrid, Taurus Humanidades, 1998. Besnier, Jean-Michel, “Georges Bataille et la modernité: ‘la politique de ‘impossible’”, Revue du MAUSS 25 (2005), 190–206. Blanchot, Maurice, El espacio literario. Barcelona, Paidós, 1992. Blanchot, Maurice, La comunidad inconfesable. Madrid, Editora Nacional, 2002. Camus, Albert, El hombre rebelde. Buenos Aires, Losada, 2007 (L’homme révolté. Paris, Gallimard, first 1951). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Mil Mesetas. Capitalismo y Esquizofrenia. Madrid, Pre-Textos, 2006. Hollier, Denis, Georges Bataille après tout. Paris, Belin, 1995. Hollier, Denis, La prise de la Concorde; suivi de, Les Dimanches de la vie: Essais sur Georges Bataille. Paris, Gallimard, 1974. Masson, André, “Le soc de la Charrue », Critique 195–196 (1963) (= Hommage à Georges Bataille), 701–705. Nancy, Jean-Luc, La comunidad inoperante. Santiago de Chile, Escuela de Filosofía Universidad ARCIS, 2000.

Francisco-Hugo Freda

The Body in Psychoanalysis The analysis experience begins with an encounter, the encounter of two bodies. There is the body of the analyst and the body of the patient. At least up till now, we cannot conceive the psychoanalytical practice outside this encounter. This encounter of bodies produces what, in Freud’s terms, constitutes the axis around which the entire analysis is arranged, in other words, transference. According to Lacan, this constitutes one of the four fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis1. Freud accepted the consequences of this encounter, as well as what it could awaken, that is to say, love2. The fact that it has been called transference love neither eliminates it nor reduces its significance. This is true love, complete with its implications of disappointment and creation. Disappointment arises from the fact that it is forbidden, and creation results from the emergence of the unconscious as possible. Freud was sought out by certain patients suffering from bodily symptoms who were resisting any kind of intervention, any attempt at recovery. Freud described such bodily manifestations as substitutive gratifications whose significance escaped his patients3. That is to say, the symptoms created a knowledge gap. The patients did not know why they suffered from such bodily manifestations. In addition to experiencing the symptom, there was a lack of knowledge, which thus produced a separation of subject and being. The Freudian position was to consider that such bodily manifestations had a meaning, and that the subject could not grasp it. In the search for truth about symptoms, Freud used a procedure that we already know, namely making his patients talk. We know the results of this process: on the one hand, symptoms disappear and, on the other hand, they show that the human body is a place of inscription; the place where rejected ideas are inscribed through symptoms. Freud thus redefined the body. The body as a place of inscription is a recurring theme throughout Freud’s work. It would be fair to review his entire work and emphasize that the different moments in its conceptualization are marked by what I would call “the different moments of the body.” Let us look at some milestones: The first example is the child defined as a “polymorphous pervert.”4 The child’s entire body and, especially, his or her erogenous zones, underscore the 1 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, vol. 11: Les quatre concepts. 2 Cf. Sigmund Freud, “Further Recommendations in the Technique”. 3 Cf. Id. and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria. 4 Sigmund Freud, Three essays on the theory of sexuality.



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importance that Freud gave to the body surface area and its holes. That the polymorphous pervert is civilized is simply the consequence of the effects of a threat of castration, a threat to a body part. For girls, the discovery of the absence of a penis determines their subjectivity. Later in his work, Freud defines the “ego” based on the body surface5. The ego is not self-consciousness; rather, it is the unified reflection of the body, which allows one to create the image of his or her ego. Another important milestone is to be found in the case of Little Hans, where the emergence of an erection threatens the idea of the self, to the point of not being able to recognize himself in his own body. Freud called this the castration of being6. When attempting to foray into the enigma of femininity, Freud referred first to the subjective consequences of the anatomical difference between the sexes7. In his attempt to sort out the avatars of drive and its destiny, he did not for an instant waver in tightly linking drive and body, making the body the receptacle of the world of drives8. For Freud, the body was a place of inscription of what today we call “goce”9 and the unconscious. In order to distinguish between the psychoanalytical body and the biological body, in 1915, he stated that it is absolutely impossible to locate the unconscious in the brain or in “traditional” biology10. The body, for Freud, is a body that has been scarred, stigmatized due to the substitutive satisfaction and the effects of language on it. It is on the body and its destiny that Freud inscribed the reality of death. On the one hand, he proposed that there was no representation of death11 in the unconscious and that the temporal dimension did not operate at the level of representation. However, time and death are inscribed on the body independently

5 Cf. Id., The Ego and the Id, 12–66. 6 Cf. Id., “Analysis of a phobia”. 7 Cf. Id., “Some Psychological Consequences”. 8 Cf. Id., “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”. 9 We would like to emphasize the problematic concerning the impossibility of translating this term “goce” into English. In English there is no translation for the word “goce” within the meaning of Lacanian concept – Is the French term jouissance. The official translation of the texts of Lacan and Lacanian English choose to keep the word “jouissance” which is in the Spanish language translates to “goce”. In Spanish there is a conceptual difference between “goce” and “pleasure” in the sense that the “goce” is what is inscribed in the logic beyond the pleasure principle, i.e. the principle of the death drive, the repetition of the symptom, etc. It is for this reason that we keep in the text the word “goce” without translation. 10 Cf. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious”. 11 Cf. Id., “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”.

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of any illusion of infinity, as shown by Signorelli’s analysis12. The sense of life, linked to the decline of the sexual function, is inscribed on the body in such a way that it is the very order of the sense that is altered by this event. The question regarding the body and the end of analysis acquires full importance through this quick review of the leading ideas of Freudian thought. Contemplating the body at the end of the analysis imposes such prior considerations, without forgetting that we are talking of two bodies, or at least two realities of the body: one at the beginning of the analysis and another at the end of the analysis. We are no longer Freudian; however, starting today, we can trace a line of thought that would allow us to think in terms of what I will call “an ethics for the end of analysis based on Freud.” There are therapeutic effects – the body freed of symptoms, – and there are analytical effects, in other words, the fate of satisfaction, of the force of pulsion, of the name of pulsion, which entails the impossible within itself. The fulfillment of the pulsion-driven subject finds its limits in what cannot be inscribed. The body and its avatars put an end, an unsurpassable point, to the endless sliding of sense. Sublimation does not resolve the reality of finitude, nor completely reduce it. If Freud made religion into an illusion13, he did so in order to point out that, on both sides of an order of determination, the subject is always responsible for his destiny. His programmed and expected death proves it. If we read carefully, we will find that Freud does not want to release the subject from the unconscious. Rather, he transforms the unconscious into a place where the subject can write his name, a name different from that which he inherited, a name resulting from analysis. This name, according to Freud, takes shape under the qualification, “you already knew this.” Undoubtedly, the subject must take responsibility for this already-known knowledge. I have said before that we no longer are Freudian, in the sense that the reality at stake is not the same. Lacan expanded on this topic14. There is a theory of the body and its avatars in Lacan since the beginning of his teaching, as shown in his 1936 text The Mirror Stage, republished in 1949 under the title The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience15. This text highlights – as he indicates – the path from the perception of one’s own body to the constitution of the self. The subject does not forget this path, 12 Cf. Id., Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 13 Cf. Id., The Future of an Illusion. 14 Cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Real in the 21st Century”. 15 Cf. Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur”.



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since it is revealed to us in the analytical experience itself. It highlights the subjective events of discovery, not only of the body image, but also of the libidinal attachment that secretly accompanied the discovery. Lacan made the mirror stage and its final constitution into the basic and fixed register of what I will call Lacanian topology, that is to say: real, symbolic and imaginary16. The imaginary register, that today I limit – for the purposes of this work – to the relationship of the subject with his body, did not undergo any modifications in Lacan. Throughout his work, he maintained the form of the imaginary register as he considered it at the beginning, but he did not do so with the real and symbolic registers, which underwent multiple redefinitions throughout his teachings. The fundamental attribute that characterizes the imaginary register is its consistency17, its strength, so much so that at a certain point Lacan considered that the goal of analysis was the absorption of the imaginary by the symbolic. Furthermore, analytic work was considered to be the attempt to break the consistency of the imaginary through the symbolic for the purposes of bringing forth the unconscious; the so-called L scheme proves it. The L scheme highlights the need to break through that register in order for the subject to emerge as a product of significant determination18. This proposition is reduced in the face of the fact that the signifier cannot absorb totality, that consistency cannot be completely reduced, that not everything can pass into the signifier, that there is a leftover which escapes signification19. This observation is the first step towards the reduction of the importance of the symbolic register, which, throughout his teaching, is going to be translated through the pluralization of the signifier of the Name of the Father20, and later through the homogenization of the three registers: real, symbolic and imaginary, that is to say, by ascribing the same value to the three21. During the first period, what we today call the register of the real tended to be confused with reality, but as he progresses in his teaching it gradually and definitively approaches that which cannot be signified.22 Through these conceptual movements, as a result of practice, Lacan transitions from a body defined by its relationship with the signifier, that is to say, the

16 Cf. Id., “Le symbolique, l’imaginaire et le reel”. 17 Cf. Id., Le séminaire, vol. 23: Le sinthome. 18 Cf. Id., Le séminaire, vol. 2: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud. 19 Cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Six Paradigms of Jouissance”. 20 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Des Noms-Du-Père. 21 Cf. Id., “Le Séminaire R.S.I.: leçon du 15 avril 1975”. 22 Cf. Ibid.

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mark of the signifier on the body23, to a body not only marked by the signifier, but a body that is a surface for the inscription of “goce”24. That is to say, in Lacan we have two ideas or notions of the body. Regardless of the manifestations of this observation, the problem lies in the consequences of this fact. While the imaginary consistency of the L scheme allowed one to guarantee, by passing through it, the advent of the order of determination of the subject, that is to say, of the unconscious, the problem that we have already raised long ago is the advent of the unconscious when imaginary inconsistency is obvious, that is to say, when the subject’s relationship with the body is not subjected to the laws of the signifier. In other words, when we are faced with “goce” that is inscribed on the body and has no history; that is to say, a “goce” without first and last name, a pure “goce” whose existence the subject can only witness. Witnessing the existence of a nameless “goce” has led us, many years ago25, to consider what we call “the new forms of symptoms,”26 whose main characteristic was to highlight the nature of the solution that the subject found in his behavior when faced with the onslaught of nameless “goce” 27. “Goce” without name leads Lacan to reconsider the relationship between sign and signifier28. On the one hand, we have the disorderly signs of “goce” and, on the other hand, we have the signifier as something that allows us to arrange these signs. It is no longer a question of the signifier that reduces the imaginary register, but of the signifier that arranges and names these signs. The analytic process, from this perspective, with this outlook, consists of making “goce” symptomatic, that is to say, introducing a division. In other words, it means introducing into the unique architecture of “goce” the inconsistency that the signifier produces. The Borromean topology is Lacan’s attempt to build an Other where the Other does not exist. Above, we described the signs of “goce”29 at their most extreme, that is to say, beyond any subjectivation. However, such a phenomenon exists, manifests itself, and appears in any analysis.

23 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, vol. 8: Le transfert. 24 Id., Le séminaire, vol. 23: Le sinthome. 25 Cf. Francisco-Hugo Freda, Las nuevas formas del síntoma. 26 Id., “Les nouvelles formes du symptôme”, 85. 27 Cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, Cosas de finura en psicoanálisis. 28 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, vol. 2: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud. 29 Cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, Los signos del goce.



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What does analysis imply today? It implies taking into account that the signs of “goce” are inherent in the signifier structure, that is to say, that they constitute the subject itself. We start from this premise: all analysis begins with a symptom, there is no possible analysis without it. In his lectures in the United States, Lacan emphasized that the role of interviews before analysis was to name the symptom; he forced things in order to make this possible as a condition for analysis, and never changed this position30. However, we know very well that today the analyst is often faced with cases which can be included in the category that has been named “the veiled forms of request.” This does not mean that we have to renounce the symptom. Why? Because without a symptom there is no possible analysis. Initially, there is necessarily a symptom. Moreover, beyond the particularities of each symptom, the body, in analysis, suffers the encounter with the analytical signifier, that is, with the signifier produced within transference love. There is an illusion, the illusion of a body drained of “goce”. This illusion is not just contemporary. Lacan condemned this when he referred to Platonic enthusiasm, insofar as it considers a subject drained of “goce”, that is to say, an undivided subject. This is not the analytical proposal, quite the opposite. The current analytical proposal, our own, is based on a principle: not everything can be reduced to the signifier, there is an irreducible element. This irreducible element is present both at the beginning and at the end of the analysis. The essential difference lies in the place it holds in the real, symbolic, imaginary triad. That is to say, it matters whether it holds the first, second or third place, given that the order of the three registers matters, and the one that holds the second position operates as an agent that supports the other two. If, at the beginning of the analysis, the imaginary consistency sustained the real and the symbolic, we hope that at the end this consistency will move right or left. That is to say, it should not change its value but its position, given that it is position that determines significance. At the end of the analysis, a redefinition of the body may take place, no longer as the name of “goce” but as a definition of being. There is being that manifests itself in the body as not knowing, as in the case of Little Hans; and there is being at the end of the analysis that can extract a name from the modality of the signs of “goce”. That is to say, the passage from the unprecedented “goce” of the body to something edited as a new name.

30 Cf. Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens”.

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In 1975, Lacan encouraged us to re-read the case of Little Hans31 for the purposes of learning all the lessons it holds32. This text, which has been produced by our work group, tries to follow this advice as far as possible.

Bibliography Freda, Francisco-Hugo, “Les nouvelles formes du symptôme”, Revue de l’ECF 21 (1992), 50–52. Freda, Francisco-Hugo, Las nuevas formas del síntoma. Publicación del Seminario Hispanoparlante de París, 1994. Freud, Sigmund and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria (1893–1895). New York, Harmonsworth Penguin, 1974. Freud, Sigmund, “Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy (1922)”. In Id., Collected papers, vol. 3. London, Hogarth Press, 1925, 149–289. Freud, Sigmund, “Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: Observations on Transference-love (1915)”. In Id., Collected Papers, vol. 2. New York, Basic Books, 1959, 377–392. Freud, Sigmund, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915)”. In Id., Collected papers, vol. 4. London, Hogarth Press, 1925, 69–83. Freud, Sigmund, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes (1925)”. In Id., Collected papers, vol. 5. London, Hogarth Press, 1950, 186–197. Freud, Sigmund, “The Unconscious (1915)”. In Id., Collected papers, vol. 4. London, Hogarth Press, 1925, 98–136. Freud, Sigmund, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)”. In Id., Collected papers, vol. IV. London, Hogarth Press, 1925, 288–317. Freud, Sigmund, Psychopathology of Everyday Life. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1914. Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id (The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 19). London, Hogarth Press, 1927. Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion. Londres, Hogarth Press, 1928. Freud, Sigmund, Three essays on the theory of sexuality (The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 7). London, Hogarth Press, 1953. Lacan, Jacques, “Conférences et entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines”, Scilicet 6/7 (1975), 42–45. Lacan, Jacques, “Le Séminaire R.S.I.: leçon du 15 avril 1975: Trou du réel, trou du symbolique”, Revue Ornicar 5 (1976), 47–56. Lacan, Jacques, “Le Séminaire R.S.I.: leçons des 10 et 17 décembre (1974)”, Revue Ornicar 2 (1975), 87–108. Lacan, Jacques, “Le symbolique, l’imaginaire et le reel”. In Id., Des Noms-Du-Père. Paris, Seuil, 2005, 9–63. Lacan, Jacques, Des Noms-Du-Père. Paris, Seuil, 2005. Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire, vol. 11: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964), Paris, Seuil, 1973. 31 Cf. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a phobia”. 32 Cf. Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire R.S.I.: leçons des 10 et 17 décembre”.



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Lacan, Jacques, Le séminaire, vol. 2: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (1954–1955). Paris, Seuil, 1978. Lacan, Jacques, Le séminaire, vol. 23: Le sinthome (1975–1976). Paris, Seuil, 2005. Lacan, Jacques, Le séminaire, vol. 8: Le transfert (1960–1961). Paris, Seuil, 2001. Lacan, Jacques, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique”. In Id., Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, 93–100. Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Six Paradigms of Jouissance”, Lacanian Ink 17 (2000), 8–47. Miller, Jacques-Alain, “The Real in the 21st Century”, Hurly-Burly. The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (2013), 199–206. Miller, Jacques-Alain, Cosas de finura en psicoanálisis. Course on framing the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University, lesson of May 6, 2009, unpublished. Miller, Jacques-Alain, Los signos del goce. Buenos Aires/Barcelona, Paidós, 1998.

Premodern Aspects

Gert Melville

The Body between Creation, Fall, Death, and Resurrection The Human Being and Corporal Life in the View of St. Augustine Those who wish to learn something about the human body find remarkable information on it in the First Book of Moses. They can draw their conclusions from this, as innumerable generations before them have done with varying results. Yet they will probably be unable to escape the realization that the impressiveness of the anthropology of the body formulated there is hardly exceeded by any other myth of the creation of man. After God had created the entire world out of nothingness within six days, had ordered it according to light and darkness, land and sea, and had adorned it with plants, animals and stars on the firmament, He spoke (Genesis 1: 26, 27, 28, 31): Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. [...] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [...] And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” [...] And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

This creation account – handed down in Genesis, 1:1–2:4a – is followed by a second account of significantly older origin that commences at the beginning of creation again – Genesis 2:4–3:24. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. (Genesis 2:4a[5]–7)

After this deed, God planted the Garden of Eden, Paradise, with all manner of trees and put the man into it. In the middle of the garden, he planted two particu-

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lar trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.1 Whereas the first bestowed immortality, God forbade the man to eat from the latter, for he would die of it. Then God saw that it was not good if the man lived alone, and He formed land animals and birds out of the soil. Thereupon, the man named these animals at the behest of God. Yet this was no help to the man, and so God removed a single rib from the man and formed a woman out of it. Both were naked but they were not ashamed. With the promise that they would become like God, the woman was seduced by a snake to eat from the forbidden tree soon afterwards. Her husband, seduced in turn by his wife, did the same. Both realized thereupon that they were naked, and they covered their shame. When they heard God approach, they hid. Yet God found them, and they confessed to Him that they had violated His commandment. He punished them by cursing the soil they would have to eat from in toil in the future and by inflicting on the woman great pain in giving birth, – what is more: by announcing them their death, the return to the soil the man had been taken from, and, finally, by driving them out of the Garden of Eden, which was tightly locked henceforth. The differences between the two versions are considerable. In the first and younger version, God created the man through His word; in the latter, by an act of handicraft, as it were.2 In the first account, God initially created everything – the universe and the world as living environment – and then, from nothingness, humankind in his image and of both sexes at once. In the latter version, he first created the heavens and the bare earth, then, from the earth, the body of the male human being, into which he breathed a soul afterwards. Only after this did he create the remaining animated nature in the enclosure of a perfect garden and, finally, the woman out of the man. In the first version, God made humankind the unconditional master of the earthly world, in which they were to multiply and which they could subdue including all animals. In the second version, he gave the humans only the garden of Paradise they were to cultivate and keep. And He subjected them to conditions which, according to the free will of the human couple, decided about immortality or mortality and ultimately also caused this couple to fail.

1 On the reception of this concept in the Middle Ages, see Ute Dercks, “Two Trees in Paradise? A Case Study on the Iconography of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life”. 2 This dual form of creation – via the word and via the moulding of hands – is already found in conjunction with a divine entity in the case of the Egyptian deity Ptah; cf. Maj Sandman Holmberg, The God Ptah.



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The disparity of the versions is attributable to the history of tradition. The first version originated from the 6th century, the second one presumably from the 7th century before Christ.3 However, in the time after Christ this was not known any more. Thus, the text was incorporated into the religion of Christianity as one whole. The early Christian exegetes (as well as their medieval successors) already treated it in an entirely synthetic manner, albeit with particular emphasis on the second version.4 In this, they saw the implicit inconsistency of the anthropology presented there significantly more clearly and obviously than the preceding Jewish scribes had been able to. In particular, what seemed incompatible was the evident fact that the human being was constituted from an immortal soul bestowed by God as well as from a mortal body inflicted by God subsequently.5 Yet the Christian exegetes knew that there would be a salvation from this fatal conditio humana, as their belief in the revelation of the recovery of physical immortality confirmed. For them, it was possible to recognize the extraordinary arch of an anthropology determined by salvation history in the text of the Bible, an arch leading from the physically immortal human before the Fall of Man via the physically dying human during the entire world history up to the “Consummation of Ages”, in which the Resurrection of the Flesh will take place and the human bodies will be in the quite material state of hellish agony or of celestial transfiguration.6 One thing, however, remained the same in this: the immortality of the soul. With this exegetic concept,7 the Church Fathers of early Christianity used the Old Testament and the Gospels as a basis to present an anthropology that at first shaped the religious coordinates of Christianity directly for centuries and now even determines them indirectly up to our time. This ‘historical’ anthropology produced existential fear as well as hope, it comprised sin and sanctification in equal measure, but – including the parts where it concerned the soul and the reference to God at the same time – it always centered on the body and its materiality. The corporeality of the human being has become a precarious guiding theme of European civilization. In this, there was a controversial struggle over the practical function of the body, over its quality as divine creation, over its role as the

3 For an overview of the secondary literature, see: Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien, Sources of the pentateuch. 4 Cf. Henning von Reventlow, History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 1 and 2. 5 For illustrative aspects in that regard, see in this volume: Barbara Feichtinger, Stephen Lake, and Helmut Seng, eds., Körper und Seele. Aspekte spätantiker Anthropologie. 6 Cf. Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung; Gert Melville, „Wege zum Heil in der christlichen Kultur des Mittelalters“. 7 Cf. Jörg Frey, Stefan Krauter, and Hermann Lichtenberger, eds., Heil und Geschichte.

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locus of sin8, over the possibility of its mortification9, over its imperishability in memory10, over its preservation in an adverse environment, over coping with the factual dying by means of an ars moriendi11 or in chosen martyrdom12. In the following, I would like to introduce to you some considerations of St. Augustine (354–430) – likely the greatest theologian of the patristic age.13 The influence he exerted on the discussion about the corporeality of man was decisive for centuries.14 This is particularly due to the brilliant way he managed to place this phenomenon into the context of that great arch from creation to the eschaton and, with that, struck the decisive aspect – namely, the fact that the Christian anthropology of the body can only be grasped through the analysis of a great, self-contained narrative that spanned teleologically from a beginning to an end. The current article will only treat this aspect; in light of the allotted length of the treatment, a further expansion of the topic would be presumptuous.15 The textual basis for our study is provided by key passages from, above all, the quasi-‘historical’ work “The City of God” (De civitate Dei)16 from the time period of 413–427. Additionally, another source will be consulted: “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” (De Genesi ad litteram)17 from the years 401–414. Here, I can

8 Cf. Francesco Mosetti Casaretto, ed., Il corpo impuro e le sue rappresentazioni nelle letterature medievali. 9 Cf. Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutilation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore; David Jasper, The Sacred Body: Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture. 10 Cf. e.g. Giles Constable, “The Commemoration of the Dead in the Early Middle Ages”. 11 Cf. Fidel Rädle, “‘Ars moriendi’. Sterben und Sterbebeistand im späten Mittelalter und im Humanismus”. 12 Cf. Peter Gemeinhardt, Christian Martyrdom in Late antiquity. 13 From the plethora of literature, let the following comprehensive overviews be mentioned: Kurt Flasch, Augustin. Einführung in sein Denken; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo; Miles Hollingworth, Saint Augustine of Hippo; David Vincent Meconi and Eleonore Stump, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine. On the persisting influence of Augustinian concepts, see: Henri-Xavier Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique; Henri-Irénée Marrou, St Augustin et l’augustinisme; Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten, eds., The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine. 14 On the continued discourse regarding the thematic of the body in the Middle Ages, see: cf. Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps; above all see Schmitt’s contribution in the present volume. 15 Particularly the state of research is unsatisfactory. So far as I am aware, there is but a single, somewhat extensive monography on the issue of “Augustine and the Human Body” – Margaret R. Miles, Augustine on the Body –, which was conceived along different lines than the present study. 16 Augustinus, De civitate dei, edited by Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb. 17 Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram libri XII, edited by Joseph Zycha.



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only dwell on ancient contexts of tradition in a rather general way; a text-immanent interpretation is bound to be in the foreground. At first, some remarks on the definition of the basic components of man according to the act of creation. Basing himself on the patristic tradition hitherto, Augustine said succinctly: This, indeed, is true, that the soul is not the whole man, but the better part of man; the body not the whole, but the inferior part of man; and that then, when both are joined, they receive the name of man.18

The explanation of this gradation immediately makes obvious that the issue is not an anthropology of the absolutely human but an anthropology of the creatural. To be a human being means – as Augustine emphasizes time and again – to be created human. And, thus, he apodictically holds forth that the circumstance of having been made in the image of God only refers to the soul: ... even while a man is alive, and body and soul are united, it [sc. the Holy Scripture] calls each of them singly by the name “man,” speaking of the soul as the “inward man,” and of the body as the “outward man,” as if there were two men, though both together are indeed but one. But we must understand in what sense man is said to be in the image of God, and is yet dust, and to return to the dust. The former is spoken of the rational soul, which God by His breathing, or, to speak more appropriately, by His inspiration, conveyed to man, that is, to his body; but the latter refers to his body, which God formed of the dust, and to which a soul was given, that it might become an ensouled body, that is, that man might become a living soul.19

Or, compositely expressed in another passage: God made the human being after His own image, not as regards the possession of a body and of mortal life, but as regards the rational mind with the power of knowing God and ruling brute animals.20

Yet there is not only, as it were, a hierarchical difference between the two elements of the human being but also a functional, almost pragmatic one. With reference to the life in the earthly world, the body renders the soul mobile and capable of acting and communicating. For this, Augustine uses an ostensive image that had already been applied by Platonism:21 18 Augustinus, De civitate Dei XIII:24 (p. 409). 19 Ibidem, XIII:24 (p. 410). On comparable conceptions, see: Bernard McGinn, “The human person as image of God, II: Western Christianity”. 20 Augustinus, Contra Faustum Manicheum, 24 :2 (p. 721). 21 Cf. Eric Dubreucq, “Chair, corps et âme. Les formulations de l’âme chez s. Augustin”. On the relationship of the soul and the body with particular regard for the issue of the constitution of

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You have a body and you have a soul. The body is visible, the soul invisible. The body is a dwelling, the soul the dweller. The body is the craft; the soul is the user of the craft. The body is, in a manner of speaking, the craft that must be steered; the soul is the charioteer of your body.22

However, it also becomes clear that the immaterial soul does not only use the material body but also has to master, to steer it at the same time. This is a structure that will yet be of great importance in the course of the narrative about the human body – as we are about to see. Notwithstanding this different valuation, Augustine – who has long since overcome his initial Manichaeism23 – concedes the human body an entirely independent symbolic relationship with its creator and, thus, places him into a position in analogy to that of the soul: Nevertheless, man possesses something in his body that appertains to him alone – namely, that he has been created in an upright posture. To him, this is the exhortation not to be a slave to earthly things like the cattle whose entire well-being originates from the earth. Thus, the body of man is also in analogy to the reasonable soul – namely, with regard to its being directed towards the heavens in order to have a view of the things that are above the corporeal world.24

In any case, Augustine’s view of the body is more positive and respectful than that of many contemporary representatives of Christian theology on principle.25 He emphasizes, as a matter of principle, the validity of what was said about the creation of man – particularly also the corporeal one – in the Book of Genesis, namely: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). The human body is a product created by God, which is why one must take good care of it. So, he concludes literally: He is to be taught, too, in what measure to love his body, so as to care for it wisely and within due limits. For it is equally manifest that he loves his body also, and desires to keep it safe and sound. And yet a man may have something that he loves better than the safety and soundness of his body. For many have been found voluntarily to suffer both pains and

the human personality, see: Anton Maxsein, Philosophia cordis. Das Wesen der Personalität bei Augustinus. 22 Augustinus, Sermo de principio genesis, in vigiliis paschae, ed. Morin, 15. 23 Cf. Johannes van Oort, “Augustine and Manichaeism: New Discoveries, New Perspectives”; Concetta Giuffrè Scibona, “The Doctrine of the Soul in Manichaeism and Augustine”; Kurt Flasch, Augustin. Einführung in sein Denken, 27–35. 24 Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram, VI:12 (p. 187). 25 Here, I concur with the study of Kelly E. Arenson, “Augustine’s Defense and Redemption of the Body”.



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amputations of some of their limbs that they might obtain other objects which they valued more highly. But no one is to be told not to desire the safety and health of his body [...].26

Originally, the body of Adam was even meant to be as immortal as the soul, which would have raised him out of the state of all other earthly creatures for eternity. Yet this was not in the nature of that body itself but had been granted to it by divine privilege from outside, so that it was mortal without dying. Literally, this read: Before sin, the body of Adam could be called mortal with one certain justification and immortal with another one: mortal because he was capable of dying; immortal because he possessed the ability not to die. ... The guarantee not to die had been given to him by the “tree of life” but not out of his natural condition. … Thus, he was mortal through the condition of his animal body; yet he was immortal through his creator’s privilege.27

Through the original sin, this privilege was lost;28 the access to the “tree of life” was barred once and for all. The conditions of the body had changed fundamentally. The body became the place of punishment and of further sins, it became transient and vulnerable, was exposed to a hostile environment that was depicted by Augustine with the following, drastic words – cited as an excerpt: What numberless casualties threaten our bodies from without – extremes of heat and cold, storms, floods, inundations, lightning, thunder, hail, earthquakes, houses falling; or from the stumbling, or shying, or vice of horses; from countless poisons in fruits, water, air, animals; from the painful or even deadly bites of wild animals.29

In view of the extent of such disastrous inconveniences and in view of the fact that the guilt of original sin had been passed on through human semen from generation to generation up to his own present time (an assumption whose propagation he had very essentially contributed to, by the way), Augustine asked himself the question as to which part of man had caused the Fall. The general assertion of his time was – as he states – to blame the body. Saint Paul (cf. Gal. 5:19) had already seen the genuine locus of sin in the flesh when he said:

26 Augustinus, De doctrina christiana I:26 (p. 20 sq.). 27 Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram, VI:25 (p. 197). On the medieval soteriological interpretation of the “Tree of Life” as the Cross of Christ, see: Rab Hatfield, “The Tree of Life and the Holy Cross. Franciscan spirituality in the Trecento and the Quattrocento”; cf. also Donald F. Duclow, “Denial or promise of the Tree of Life? Eriugena, Augustine and Genesis 3:22b”. 28 Cf. Jesse Couenhoven, “St. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin”. 29 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XXII:22 (p. 843).

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Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.30

Yet Augustine expresses doubts in favour of the body: For among the works of the flesh which he – Paul – said were manifest, and which he cited for condemnation, we find not only those which concern the pleasure of the flesh, as fornications, uncleanness, lasciviousness, drunkenness, revellings, but also those which, though they be remote from fleshly pleasure, reveal the vices of the soul. For who does not see that idolatries, witchcrafts, hatreds, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, heresies, envyings, are vices rather of the soul than of the flesh?31

Then, Augustine reverses the relations and names the true instance of man that caused the original sin: For the corruption of the body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of the first sin; and it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful, but the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. And though from this corruption of the flesh there arise certain incitements to vice, and indeed vicious desires, yet we must not attribute to the flesh all the vices of a wicked life, in case we thereby clear the devil of all these, for he has no flesh.32

It was pride that induced the soul to want to be like God – as Augustine further states – and, consequently, to be a creature that detached itself from its creator. Yet this also severed a bond that was marked as fundamental above: the hierarchic bond between soul and body.33 The soul – separated from God as its source of strength – was not able to control the body any more. Augustine puts this in the following words: For the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body. And because it had willfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh

30 Ibidem, XIV:2 (p. 416). 31 Ibidem, XIV:2 (p. 415); cf. Karla Pollmann, “Human Sin and Natural Environment: Augustine’s Two Positions on Genesis 3:18”. 32 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XIV:3 (p. 417). 33 Cf. also on the broader historical context of this perspective Kevin Corrigan, “The soul-body relation in and before Augustine”.



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subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit.34

Augustine further remarks that it was possible to recognize this in particularly clear fashion by means of a distinctive change in the approach to the naked body: For as it is written, They were naked and were not ashamed [Gen. 2, 25], – not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.35

Augustine emphasized that, initially, the soul had dominion over the body and the soul was with God. This structure of a double relation was then destroyed after the Fall. Man had broken the order of creation that God had prescribed to him, and the body gained an autonomy it had not been allowed before. This autonomy, however, now expressed itself solely through the unbridled demand for the satisfaction of entirely independent needs of the body that indeed bore no reference to God any more. The humans felt this new and completely unfamiliar force in their bodies and were confused – and ashamed: As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore they took figleaves (which were possibly the first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind), and covered their shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before. They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God.36

Augustine then drastically describes the mighty consequences when the body’s needs seek to satisfy themselves: Although, therefore, lust may have many objects, yet when no object is specified, the word lust usually suggests to the mind the lustful excitement of the organs of generation. And this lust not only takes possession of the whole body and outward members, but also makes itself felt within, and moves the whole man with a passion in which mental emotion is mingled with bodily appetite, so that the pleasure which results is the greatest of all bodily pleasures. So possessing indeed is this pleasure that at the moment of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is suspended.37 34 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XIII:13 (p. 395). 35 Ibidem, XIV:17 (p.439). 36 Ibidem, XIII:13 (p. 395). 37 Ibidem, XIV:16. (p. 438 sq.). Cf. Johannes van Oort, “Augustine on Sexual Concupiscence and Original Sin”; Timo Nisula, Augustine and the functions of concupiscence.

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Now, after the original sin and the expulsion from Paradise, the body is absolutely capable of gaining dominion over the soul throughout the entire history of mankind – thus, to reverse the protological relations – if the soul of the human was weak and permitted it. However, it is astonishing that this new power of the body is now faced with an equally new powerlessness that has existential consequences. A powerful and, at the same time, powerless body is in the focus of the new anthropology of the earthly living. Because now the body cannot escape death, decay and decomposition any more, it will inevitably turn to dust again. It was the sin caused by the soul and not a law of nature that led to this mortality, as Augustine points out: And therefore it is agreed among all Christians, who truthfully hold to the Catholic faith, that we are subject to the death of the body, not by the law of nature, by which God ordained no death for man, but by His righteous infliction on account of sin; for God, taking vengeance on sin, said to the man, in whom we all then were, “Dust you are, and unto dust shall you return”.38

The death of the body is man’s punishment – for all people, sinful as well as pure. For the ripping apart of the two elements of man – the soul and the body – causes pain, as Augustine emphasizes: Wherefore, as regards bodily death, that is, the separation of the soul from the body, it is good unto none while it is being endured by those whom we say are in the article of death. For the very violence with which body and soul are wrenched asunder, which in the living had been conjoined and closely intertwined, brings with it a harsh experience, jarring horridly on nature so long as it continues, till there comes a total loss of sensation, which arose from the very interpenetration of spirit and flesh.39

However, this earthly death that threatens terror on the one hand but also promises a transcendent life of salvation on the other hand is not yet the last station of human existence. For Augustine, it is certain that earthly life leads to a forking, namely, either to a path to perdition or to one to beatitude. And on this path, it is not the body but the soul that has to lead, provided it was still able to do this after the Fall. It is left with the choice to accept the divine offers of salvation, suppress its own sinfulness and regain dominion over the sinful body – or not, and then to fall victim to a genuinely spiritual death. The one path entails a blessed life in heaven, the other one a ‘second death’ in hell, as it were. Augustine describes this in the following way:

38 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XIII:15 (p. 396). 39 Ibidem, XIII:6 (p. 389).



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For the soul is therefore called immortal, because, in a sense, it does not cease to live and to feel; while the body is called mortal, because it can be forsaken of all life, and cannot by itself live at all. The death, then, of the soul takes place when God forsakes it, as the death of the body when the soul forsakes it. Therefore the death of both – that is, of the whole man – occurs when the soul, forsaken by God, forsakes the body. For, in this case, neither is God the life of the soul, nor the soul the life of the body. And this death of the whole man is followed by that which, on the authority of the divine oracles, we call the second death.40

Nonetheless, this ‘second death’ involves a corporeal life – a life in which the body is only a coarse object of agonizing punishments: For the wicked man’s life in the body is a life not of the soul, but of the body, which even dead souls – that is, souls forsaken of God – can confer upon bodies, how little so-ever of their own proper life, by which they are immortal, they retain. But in the last damnation, though man does not cease to feel, yet because this feeling of his is neither sweet with pleasure nor wholesome with repose, but painfully penal, it is not without reason called death rather than life.41

However, in order to provide the possibility to imagine the results of that dichotomy of good and bad conduct as something real, Christianity had to embrace a long-established conception in the ancient Koiné of the religious and to bring it to perfection: the Resurrection of the Flesh at the end of time.42 As we can see in his writings time and again, Augustine struggles with this phenomenon,43 yet he devoutly follows the authority of the biblical text: For that there shall be a bodily resurrection of the dead when Christ comes to judge quick and dead, we must believe if we would be Christians. But if we are unable perfectly to comprehend the manner in which it shall take place, our faith is not on this account vain.44

Elaborately, even meticulously, he discusses the biological possibilities and hindrances of such an occurrence and, in so doing, delves into the last recesses of the corporeal states of the living and the dead – for instance, when he contemplates how a man who has been eaten by other men and been absorbed by their bodies, in a manner of speaking, can be resurrected without endangering the resurgent 40 Ibidem, XIII:2 (p. 385). 41 Ibidem, XIII:2 (p. 386). 42 On the broad cultural-historical significance of this phenomenon, see: Caroline W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in the Western Christianity. 43 Cf. Margaret R. Miles, Augustine on the body, 99–125; Henri-Irénée Marrou, “Le dogme de la résurrection des corps et la théologie des valeurs humaines selon l’enseignement de saint Augustin”; Gerald O’Collins, “Augustine on the resurrection“. 44 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XX:20 (p. 736).

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Fig. 1: “The resurrection of the flesh” – Luca Signorelli (about 1499), cathedral of Orvieto (Italy)

bodies of the persons who had eaten him. He also poses the question of whether a fetus that has died together with its mother can be resurrected independently. Yet he is concerned most of all with drawing a last stage of anthropology, as it were: the forms of corporeality after the Last Judgment, upon the completion of the arch that had its beginning in creation. The tortured body in hell is the medium for the pain of the failed soul. Thus, the punishment for the sins is a psychological phenomenon whose signals are sent by the body, which is now again a servant entirely – centuries later, Dante will put into verse45 what is succinctly noted by Augustine: If we attend to the matter a little more closely, we see that what is called bodily pain is rather to be referred to the soul. For it is the soul not the body, which is pained, even when the pain originates with the body – the soul feeling pain at the point where the body is hurt. As then

45 See Dante Alighieri, La Divina commedia: Inferno; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.



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we speak of bodies feeling and living, though the feeling and life of the body are from the soul, so also we speak of bodies being pained, though no pain can be suffered by the body apart from the soul.46

In heaven, however, the blessed among the resurrected will receive a body that is superior to that of Adam in Paradise – a spiritual body47 that, like the soul, now approaches the image of God and does not require anything of the earthly goods any more: The former animal body of Adam will not be returned to us but we will receive a better one, a spiritual body, as we will be made equal to the angels of God and prepared for the heavenly abode. There, we shall not any more require food that perishes. We shall thus be renewed in the spirit of our mind, in keeping with the image of the one who created us, the image that Adam had lost through sin.48

Thus, after an incessant competitive struggle between soul and body that characterized the entire earthly existence of man, this dually determined anthropology will reach its accomplishment in a distinctive way: After the body, subsequent to a hierarchical-functional harmony between soul and body in Paradise, then has had to suffer due to the Fall of Man and through the sin of the soul, and after the body has been able to annihilate the soul through the seduction to sin at the same time, a new bivalent form of harmony will now be established at the end of the great narrative arch. Augustine49 refers to it as the “justice” we will then be given back after the long journey after expulsion from Paradise. There will be two bodies: the body in hell, through which the soul will experience the greatest agony, and the body in heaven, which will experience the highest accomplishment through the soul. The projection of that beginning, which was accepted as certain, and that future, which was considered equally certain, mirrored the possibilities, opportunities, and failures of present ages. The Augustinian theology of the human body between creation and the Eschaton provided an anthropology of hope, pleasure, and joy as well as of despair, terror, and pain – and, thus, was certainly not devoid of the realistic assessment of the concrete existence of us all, during which the last justice indeed cannot be realized in this world.

46 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XXI:3 (p. 760). 47 Cf. Brian Schmisek, “Augustine’s use of “spiritual body”. 48 Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram, VI:24 (p. 196). 49 Ibidem.

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Bibliography Arenson, Kelly E., “Augustine’s Defense and Redemption of the Body“, Studia Patristica 70 (2013), 529–537. Arquillière, Henri-Xavier, L’Augustinisme politique: Essai sur la formation des théories politiques du Moyen-Âge. Paris, Vrin, 1955. Augustinus, Contra Faustum libri XXXIII, edited by Joseph Zycha (Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 25/1). Wien, Verl. der Österreichischen Akad. der Wiss., 249–797. Augustinus, De civitate dei, edited by Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47 and 48). Turnhout, Brepols, 1955. Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram libri XII, edited by Joseph Zycha (Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 28/1). Wien, Verl. der Österreichischen Akad. der Wiss., 1894, 1–503. Augustinus, Sermo de principio genesis, in vigiliis paschae, edited by Germain Morin, Sancti Augustini Sermones (post Maurinos reperti). Roma, Typis Polygl. Vaticanis, 1930. Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo: a Biography. London, Faber, 22000. Bynum, Caroline W., The Resurrection of the Body in the Western Christianity 200 – 1336. New York, Columbia University Press, 1995. Campbell, Antony F. and Mark A. O’Brien, Sources of the pentateuch. Texts, Introductions, Annotations. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1993. Camporesi, Piero, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutilation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988. Constable, Giles, “The Commemoration of the Dead in the Early Middle Ages”. In Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, edited by Julia Mary Howard Smith. Leiden, Brill, 2000, 169–195. Corrigan, Kevin, “The soul-body relation in and before Augustine”. In Id., Reason, Faith and Otherness in Neoplatonic and Early Christian Thought, part X. Farnham, Ashgate Variorum, 2013, 59–80. Couenhoven, Jesse, “St. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin”, Augustinian studies 36, (2005), 359–396. Dante Alighieri, La Divina commedia: Inferno, edited by Umberto Bosco and Michela Volante. Milano, Mondadori, 2005; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, transl. by Henry Francis Cary. Hertfordshire, Wirdsworth, 2009. Dercks, Ute, “Two Trees in Paradise? A Case Study on the Iconography of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life in Italian Romanesque Sculpture”. In The Tree: Symbol, Allegory, and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought, edited by Pippa Salonius and Andrea Worm. Turnhout, Brepols, 2014, 143–158. Dubreucq, Eric, “Chair, corps et âme. Les formulations de l’âme chez s. Augustin”, Recherches de science religieuse 84 (1996), 351–372. Duclow, Donald F., “Denial or promise of the Tree of Life? Eriugena, Augustine and Genesis 3:22b”. In Iohannes Scottus Eriugena. The Bible and Hermeneutics, edited by Gerd van Riel, Carlos Steel, and Michael Richter. Leuven, Leuven Univ. Press, 1996, 221–238. Feichtinger, Barbara, Stephen Lake, and Helmut Seng, eds., Körper und Seele. Aspekte spätantiker Anthropologie. München, K.G. Saur, 2006. Flasch, Kurt, Augustin. Einführung in sein Denken. Stuttgart, Reclam, 42013.



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Frey, Jörg, Stefan Krauter, and Hermann Lichtenberger, eds., Heil und Geschichte. Die Geschichtsbezogenheit des Heils und das Problem der Heilsgeschichte in der biblischen Tradition und in der theologischen Deutung. Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Funkenstein, Amos, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung. Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters. München, Nymphenburger Verlag, 1965. Gemeinhardt, Peter, Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity (300–450 AD). History and Discourse, Tradition and Religious Identity. Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2012. Giuffrè Scibona, Concetta, “The Doctrine of the Soul in Manichaeism and Augustine” In In Search of Truth: Augustine, Manichaeism, and Other Gnosticism. Studies for Johannes van Oort at Sixty, edited by Jacob Albert Van den Berg. Leiden, Brill, 2011, 377–418. Hatfield, Rab, “The Tree of Life and the Holy Cross. Franciscan spirituality in the Trecento and the Quattrocento”. In Christianity and the Renaissance. Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, edited by Timothy G. Verdon and John Henderson. Syracuse, NY, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1990, 132–160. Hollingworth, Miles, Saint Augustine of Hippo: an Intellectual Biography. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 2013. Hunt, Patrick, ed., The Inferno by Dante. Pasadena, CA, Salem Press, 2012. Jasper, David, The Sacred Body: Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture. Waco, Tx., Baylor University Press, 2009. Le Goff, Jacques and Nicolas Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge. Paris, Liana Levi, 2003. Marrou, Henri-Irénée, “Le dogme de la résurrection des corps et la théologie des valeurs humaines selon l’enseignement de saint Augustin”, Revue des études augustiniennes 12 (1966), 111–136. Marrou, Henri-Irénée, St Augustin et l’augustinisme. Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1983. Maxsein, Anton, Philosophia cordis. Das Wesen der Personalität bei Augustinus, Salzburg, Otto Müller Verlag, 1966. McGinn, Bernard, “The human person as image of God, II: Western Christianity”. In Christian spirituality. Vol. 1: Origins to the 12th century, edited by Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff. London, Routledge & Paul, 1989, 312–330. Meconi, David Vincent, and Eleonore Stump, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 22014. Melville, Gert, „Wege zum Heil in der christlichen Kultur des Mittelalters“. In Johannes Fried and Ernst-Dieter Hehl, eds., WBG Weltgeschichte: vol. III. Weltdeutungen und Weltreligionen, 600 bis 1500, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010, 388–409, 480–481. Miles, Margaret R., Augustine on the Body. Eugene, Or., Wipp & Stock, 1979. Mosetti Casaretto, Francesco, ed., Il corpo impuro e le sue rappresentazioni nelle letterature medievali. Alessandria, Ed. dell’Orso, 2012. Nisula, Timo, Augustine and the functions of concupiscence, Leiden, Brill, 2012. O’Collins, Gerald, “Augustine on the resurrection”. In Saint Augustine the Bishop: A Book of Essays, edited by Fanny J. Le Moine and Christopher Kleinhenz. New York, NY, Garland Publ., 1994, 65–75. Pollmann, Karla, “Human Sin and Natural Environment: Augustine’s Two Positions on Genesis 3:18”, Augustinian studies (2010), 69–85. Pollmann, Karla, and Willemien Otten, eds., The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 2013.

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Rädle, Fidel, “‘Ars moriendi’. Sterben und Sterbebeistand im späten Mittelalter und im Humanismus“, Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (2003), 177–188. Reventlow, Henning von, History of Biblical interpretation, vol. 1 and 2. Atlanta, Ga., Scholars Press 2010. Sandman Holmberg, Maj, The God Ptah. Lund, Gleerup, 1946. Schmisek, Brian, “Augustine’s use of “spiritual body”, Augustinian studies 35 (2004), 237–252. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps. Essais d’anthropologie médiévale. Paris, Gallimard, 2001. van Oort, Johannes, “Augustine and Manichaeism: New Discoveries, New Perspectives”, Verbum et ecclesia 27 (2006), 709–728. van Oort, Johannes, “Augustine on Sexual Concupiscence and Original Sin”, Studia patristica 22 (1989), 382–386.

Jean-Claude Schmitt

Thinking the Body in the Middle Ages The body is not an a priori and immutable given object. In close relationship with the personal individuation process, it never ceases to construct itself: it transforms, it grows and it strengthens, it undergoes the process of illness and age, it dies and erodes. It also has a social life that can never be separated from its physiological development: it is watched, touched, loved or rejected, clothed or undressed, adorned or tortured, valued or despised. It is rarely alone, rather it communicates with other bodies through the eyes, the voice, through gestures: it is a social being. Finally, it is the subject of figural representations, painted or carved images or, nowadays, photographs: the portrait is the body’s double. Thus, I will speak not only of the body but of bodies: each body is multiplied in the variety of its social occurrences, finding on its way, during its socialized exchanges, countless other bodies that are both similar and different. However, the body, the bodies, can only be understood through history. Our own society and Western culture seem ever more conscious of physical appearance, as evidenced by the sensationalist abundance of images of young and dynamic bodies in commercial advertising and the categorical imperative according to which one must “feel good in his or her body” to be truly oneself. In medieval culture, it is different: there, the body has no market value and it is not the object of narcissistic contemplation. As the dominant documentation of ecclesiastical origin indicates, it seems to even want to reduce itself to religious and moral values. It touches the sacred par excellence, it becomes Corpus Christi. In any event, the medieval body defies all individualistic interpretation. It is used to build social ties, for example, between the lord and the vassal, who calls himself “homme de bouche” (mouth’s man), referring to the ritual of the kiss of the vassal. The body is displayed through its sartorial appearance, its gestures and adornments, not so much as a result of the singular ambition of an individual, but rather because it belongs to a lineage and it defends dignity in a society of orders.

The Body as Ideology and as Practice Since it is the first given of each experience for everyone, the body is for the whole of society the most powerful resource of symbolic language and its metaphors1. Thus, this is an organismic pattern, which is the foundation of what in the Middle 1 For a general approach: Peter Brown, The Body and Society; Caroline W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in the Western Christianity 200 – 1336; Id., Fragmentation and Redemption;

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Ages was called the corpus mysticum, that is to say, the ecclesia in its totality as Christian society, what today we call, disregarding the transcendental dimension that was essential in the Middle Ages, the “social body”: during medieval times, it is conceived with a “head” (the king), a “heart” (the clergy), “arms” (the aristocracy), “legs” (laborers). In any field, the human body allows us to think about the unitary coherence of everything, along with the diversity and hierarchy of functions, whose legitimacy is rooted in the will and the omnipotence of God. When using the metaphors of the body, we must pay as much attention to the parts as to the whole: the soft tissue (flesh), the hard parts (bones), the liquids (humors, blood, semen, breast milk, tears)2. These are physical realities, but also, and perhaps even more so, symbolic realities. Its physical realities are: bodies are struggling, at a time when infant mortality is considerable (only between one third and half of the children survive past their first year), where many young women die in childbirth, where life expectancy is very low, where epidemics and famines regularly ravage, etc. Its symbolic realities are: body components contribute significantly to provide language with its images and to give consistency to the distinctions of ideology. The qualities we attribute to them organize a discourse based on nature’s authority in ordering the therapeutic practices of physicians, but also in fixing social hierarchies and assigning an unchanging position to everyone: women in relation to men, Jews in relation to Christians, poor lepers in relation to healthy and wealthy men, whereas representations of blood and semen are called upon to explain evil and its transmission. It is, therefore, needless to attempt to distinguish the biological from the moral or the ideological: because talking about the body means immediately entering the field of culture and ideology. The physical body, its parts (head, limbs), its components (flesh, bones and humors), can never be isolated from their “representations,” in every sense of the word: language designations, plastic representations, ideological value judgments. Better yet, in a world that largely meets the criteria of a culture based on analogism, according to the definitions of anthropologist Philippe Descola,3 the human body is the echo of the great cosmic harmonies that influence its fate and which require paying undivided attention to the movements of the moon, as well as to the convergence of celestial bodies, before initiating an action, and especially to act on the body in order to care for it: no bleeding and no invigorating bath can take place without consulting the stars to ensure a favorId., Christian Materiality; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps; Id., “Le corps en Chrétienté“; Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge. 2 Cf. Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du Moyen Âge; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, La pelle umana; Piroschka Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge. 3 Cf. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture.



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able combination. Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber Scivias and Liber divinorum officiorum miniatures present a microcosm body at the center of the macrocosm, and subject to the influences of the stars and planets4. The Kalendrier et compost des bergers shows even more precisely on which parts and organs of the body these influences are exerted, in order to facilitate medical care. In the long tradition of ancient philosophy and Christianity, up to our most common contemporary representations, the body cannot be isolated from representations of the person as a whole: to put it simply, we cannot speak about the body without also speaking about the soul. It is through its association with a rational soul that the body of man differs from that of an animal. Here, the historian opens the immense fields of theology and ethics, starting with the fundamental question in Christianity, the relationship between the body and sin: sin, which is to say firstly original sin, that of the “first parents,” which through the Mistake discovered that their bodies were naked: a fantasy act of the birth of bodily shame, as well as of sexuality’s association with sin. In addition, Adam and Eve and their descendants, the human race, were sentenced to the double punishment of physical labor and of pain during childbirth. We do not pay enough attention to it, but it is remarkable that, in Western art, the first representations of working the fields or caring for new children are present in the Christian iconography of Original Sin and Nativity. We speak today of the labor of childbirth. The laborious body, in both senses of the term labor, is a body that can only produce, shape material, by experiencing pain, suffering and fatigue. Through sexuality and suffering, the human body is always targeted, justifying a little more its subordination to the soul. Sexuality, in particular, must, in Christian morality, be lived as a social necessity and not as a source of pleasure. Asceticism, chastity, physical mortifications are the remedies that Christian morality opposes to the impulses of the body. The vow of virginity deserves special consideration, as a voluntary and sublimated deprivation of an essential potentiality of the body, sexuality. The virginal model is at the origin of the Christian myth, since those who embody it first are none other than the Virgin Mary (who as the story tells was a virgin before, during and after the Nativity) and Jesus, paradoxical “Son of Man,” who never fathered a child. The hagiography undertook the task of infinitely multiplying these original examples, for example, through the collective figure of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. In moral discourse, quite the opposite, bodily vices are organized around luxuria, starting with gula, gluttony, but also pigritia, laziness, or accedia, deleterious boredom. Because of lust and drunkenness, man is prone to evil temptations, to vain dreams (vana 4 Cf. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Quand la lune nourrissait le temps avec du lait. Le temps du cosmos et des images chez Hildegarde de Bingen (1098–1179)”.

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somnia, illusiones, phantasmata), which inscribe the revenge of the flesh on the mind and trigger, for example, nocturnal emissions, for which the monks must make honorable amends. If the body has a central place in the representation of human destiny, it is also the foundation for the deeply anthropomorphic Christian representation of the divine. More generally, the body is for Christians – unlike for the Hebrews of the Old Testament – what is at stake in the encounter of God and men. Indeed, the whole concept of Christian history, since the Fall until the Resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, and including the Crucifixion, can be read in the holy books and be seen in images as a long adventure of the body. The divine itself is not immune to this deeply bodily conception of time and history: for Christianity, the central node of the story is in fact the Incarnation, the Son of God “taking bodily shape,” which Christians ritually remember everyday through the Eucharistic sacrifice: “This is my body, this is my blood.” This is the formula that priests, replacing Christ himself, repeat daily when celebrating mass. It is a sacrifice, that is to say, a bodily manipulation, but one whose bloody nature Christianity has “euphemized”: there was no way for Christians to kill a real lamb, like the Hebrews did before the destruction of the Temple and pagans continued to do under their eyes drawing the bull under the knife of sacrifice. Only the “species” of bread and wine are placed on the altar, where they maintain their appearance even as the mystery of “transubstantiation” takes place. However, during the Middle Ages, in view of strengthening the dogma that was brought about by debates with Jews and heretics, the apologetic discourse was enriched with legends and images that gave carnal content to the abstract formulas of dogma. The theme of the Mystical Winepress depicts the Father turning the screw of an enormous press that crushes his Son to bring forth, as if it were wine, healthy blood. Christ’s Wine Fountain, represented on a fresco at the castle of Dissey (France, Indre department),is based on this theme. As for the Host, the “body of Christ,” they wanted to convince the sceptics saying that the Child Jesus appeared fully formed and alive in the hands of a priest during the Elevation (of the host). A miraculous, widely peddled and illustrated story reported how that host stolen for magical purposes and placed in a hive deserted by its swarm had not only immediately incited the bees to return, but also inspired them to construct a small wax church in which the Child Jesus appeared. The body, simultaneously divine and human, was the language par excellence of Christianity, the religion of Incarnation. In this context, we must understand the unprecedented event of the stigmatization of St. Francis in 1223, when he experienced a vision of the Seraphim carrying the Crucified Man on Mount Alvernia: according to his first biographer, Thomas of Celano, who writes just after the death of Francis in 1226, it is “because the love of the Lord’s Passion burned brightly in the heart of St.



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Francis, [that] he produced wonderful effects on the flesh.” The stigmata are first conceived as a rash of the flesh and blood in the form of nails under the influence of the love of Christ. Around 1260, the official Vita of St. Bonaventure changed the interpretation, inversely presenting stigmata as a miraculous printing of the injuries of the Passion on the flesh of the saint as a result of the vision. Giotto painted them as rays connecting each of Christ’s wounds with the saint’s corresponding stigmata, and they intersect between the two figures.5 The body could be the issue, not just the means of expression, in religious and political rituals. This is the case, we have just seen, in the Eucharist and the belief in “Real Presence” in the consecrated Host. This Host, designated as Corpus Christi, received starting in 1264 the honor of a universal celebration, decided by the Pope, with a solemn procession, where it was exhibited on the streets under a canopy, and contained in a monstrance or an ostensory that the priest or bishop carried at arm’s length.6 One of the oldest representations of the procession shows Parisian schoolchildren following the Body of Christ on the streets of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève around 1346–1349.7 The body is also central to many other rituals that can be categorized as initiations: this is the case of baptismal anointing, when the body of the child is anointed with water and salt, symbols of the infusion of the Holy Spirit; it is also the case of the sacred anointing and coronation of kings; in France, the anointing and coronation of kings took place at Reims, with the holy chrism that tradition associated with the baptism of Clovis and which was kept in the Holy Ampulla. A manuscript of the ordo of the anointing and coronation of the kings of France, written during the reign of Saint Louis around 1260, shows among other things how the king, partially naked during the ceremony, was anointed on the shoulders, chest, hands by the Archbishop of Reims8. Afterwards, the king touched scrofula, in accordance with the tradition of the “royal miracle,” 9 thus appearing as the guarantor of the physical integrity of his subjects in a society whose thinking was deeply ambivalent about disease: on the one hand, helping the sick, feeding them, clothing them, caring for them, giving them shelter, giving alms, were the works of mercy through which the Christian could earn salvation, but on the other hand, lepers were excluded from 5 Cf. Klaus Krüger, Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien; Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate; André Vauchez, François d’Assise. Entre histoire et mémoire, 202–213. 6 Cf. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi. 7 Cf. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “La procession d’un collège universitaire parisien (vers 1346–1349)”. 8 Cf. Jacques Le Goff, Eric Palazzo, Jean-Claude Bonne, Marie-Noël Colette and Monique Goulet, Le Sacre royal à l’époque de Saint Louis d’après le manuscrit 1246 de la BNF. For the images of the rite in the 14th century, see: Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image. Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France. 9 Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges.

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the social body and considered dead to the world. Beggars were at the end of the Middle Ages increasingly suspected with refusing to work despite having the physical capacity to do so. They were treated as “able-bodied beggars.” As for the infirm, the Regula pastoralis of Gregory the Great already prohibited their access to holy orders and in the 14th century the doors of university colleges were closed to them: “hunchbacks, the club-footed, the blind, the contagiously ill and epileptic lepers are deprived of the noble acquisition of letters,” enact the statutes of the Ave Maria College of Paris in 1339. Because of its “incarnational” nature, so strong in its fundamental rituals, as well as in its representation of history, medieval Christian culture did not take long, against the biblical tradition and in an ambiguous relationship with pagan culture, to promote anthropomorphic images, which gave bodies not only to men, dead or alive, but also to the invisible powers beyond (God, the saints, the angels, the devil and demons) and to souls, represented at the hour of death as a small man, a homunculus, which arises from the mouth of the deceased and for which angels and demons compete.10 When Judas hanged himself, his damned soul could not escape through the mouth: his stomach broke and his viscera spilled out, as seen on the tympanum of the Cathedral of Freiburg/Breisgau or a fresco at La Brigue (Alpes-Maritimes). Of all these figures, the devil was the most carnal, through his outrageous nudity, through growths appearing all over his body, particularly at the joints, where devilish masks budded multiplying his power of terror, though his hybrid character, which combined human traits and multiple affinities with all kinds of horned creatures and reptiles, or through his ability to transform into a cat, a dog, a bull, a wild boar, and even lice and fleas. The Saints also had a strong physical presence, but to the contrary, theirs was valued: had the first among them, the martyrs, not experienced in their bodies up to their bloody deaths, the most refined tortures, whose instruments had become their attributes, their recognizable signs, the brand of their individuation? This is reflected in St. Lawrence’s grill, St. Catherine’s wheel, St. Denis’s severed head, the burst belly of St. Margaret’s dragon, Saint Bartholomew’s flayed flesh, the breasts of St. Livrade or Liberata, patron saint of governesses, nursing two grand-children, the knife in the skull of Dominican St. Peter, Martyr of Verona, or the viscera of Saint Erasmus winding around a pulley (as shown in Dieric Bouts’s altarpiece at St. Peter’s Church in Leuven). Two essential bodily facts structured the veneration of saints: relics and images. 10 Cf. Katrin Kröll and Hugo Steger, eds., Mein ganzer Körper ist Gesicht; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps des images. Hans Belting, Dietmar Kamper and Martin Schulz, eds., Quel corps?; Kris­ tin Marek, Raphaele Preisinger and Marius Rimmele, eds., Bild und Körper im Mittelalter; Jean Wirth, L’image du corps au Moyen Âge.



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The relics of saints were duly authenticated by ecclesiastical authorities and offered to devotion in a reliquary, which sometimes had the shape of the head, chest, arm or foot of the saint, even if only a tiny part of the body was kept there. The “majesty” of St. Faith of Conques (11th century) contains at the belly a fragment of the skull of the saint. Beyond the external appearance of holy bodies represented in three dimensions, a growing fascination with the inside of the body and uncovering what it contains can be noted. The developments of Christian iconography bear witness: the Visitation, that is to say, the meeting of the Virgin Mary pregnant with the Child Jesus and her cousin Saint Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, produced paintings where the embryos were represented on the belly of the two mothers, and similarly statues where a rock crystal gave the illusion of a transparency of the bodies11. The statues of the Opening Virgin go further, since they open like a cabinet, revealing in the womb of the Virgin the entire Trinity. However, they were condemned by Jean Gerson in the early 15th century: he thought it indecent to open the belly of the Virgin Mary, and this bad taste also came with a doctrinal error because Mary had carried only Christ in her womb, not the other two persons of the Trinity.12 The relics also draw attention to a fundamental practice of medieval Christianity: the dismemberment of the dead body.13 This practice involves holy bodies, whose relics were sought and venerated from the very early Middle Ages at the scene of martyrdom and in the Roman catacombs. The division of these bodily remains, the donations, the exchanges and the theft of relics were proportional to the reputation of each saint, the recognition of the miraculous virtus of his or her body, and they permitted the construction of church and monastery networks that informed the space of the Church and Christianity. Using the logic of metonymic thought, which, it should be noted, can also be used in the breaking of the host for communion of the faithful, a tiny portion of the holy body is as good as the entire body. The division and distribution of the relics in space infinitely multiply the power of the miraculous body. They are in the Middle Ages even more important than in churches, each altar contains a relic, carefully enclosed in a cavity. The physical presence of a witness of Christ is necessary for the celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The dismemberment of the body was also a common practice amongst those who, without being saints, occupied high social rank. When kings, nobles, university teachers, popes and cardinals died, they were simply butchered. This 11 Cf. Anne Marie Velu, La Visitation dans l’art. Orient et Occident. 12 Cf. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “‘Unorthodox’ images? The 2006 Neale Lecture”. 13 Cf. Edina Bozóky and Anne-Marie Helvetius, Les reliques. Objets, cultes, symboles; Edina Bozóky, La politique des reliques de Constantin à Saint Louis.

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practice sometimes had a practical purpose: if the death occurred far away from the place of final burial, the body was boiled to remove the flesh, which stayed behind, and only the bones were solemnly transported, for example to Saint Denis if it was a king of France (as was the case of St. Louis, who died in Tunis). More commonly, the divisio, or separation of the viscera, heart, bones, allowed them to be buried and honored in multiple churches and chapels where the deceased had founded perpetual masses for his salvation. Here are some cases recalled by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani:14 on December 6th, 1268, Peter of Vico, podestà of Viterbo, made his will in favor of a church in the city. He ordered that his body be divided into seven parts to redeem the seven capital vices into which he fell during his lifetime. On November 4th, 1284, a Valais knight ordered that upon his death his flesh be separated from his bones “in the most appropriate way possible” and buried at the church of Anniviers, while half his bones were to be buried in Cistercian Hauterive and half in the Cistercian Maigrauge in Freiburg. Yet, at the same time, some testators expressed their hostility to a decoction and future division of their bodies: they prescribed that they be buried entirely at the place of death, to avoid a partial repatriation of remains. In 1299, Pope Boniface VIII promulgated the decretal Detestande feritatis, where he denounced the “appalling ferocity” of mos teutonicum – the dismemberment of the corpse, a practice whose origin is attributed to the Germans – and prescribed, under pain of excommunication, a burial of the entire Corpse ad tempus, to allow the natural decomposition of the flesh before transporting the remains to the place of final burial elected by the deceased. According to a contemporary witness, the Pope may have prohibited dismemberment “because the human body, whose face (facies) is represented as a likeness to heavenly beauty, cannot be stained or disfigured.” The papal ban makes sense if one remembers that Boniface VIII had multiplied “his image, representing him alive,”(ymago sicut esse viva),in the form of larger than life size statues, which are among the earliest authentic portraits of the Middle Age (statue of Boniface VIII at the Museum of Bologna). He was also particularly attentive to the ideas developed by the learned Franciscan Roger Bacon regarding the possibilities offered by medicine, astronomy, astrology and alchemy, to extend life: in order to avoid senescence, Bacon recommended ingesting gold in a beverage prepared under the sun and the stars, whose beneficial influences were thus captured. The goal was to restore as much as possible the balance of qualities and humors in the body – hot and cold, dry and wet – to get closer to the equalis complexion of the body of Adam before the Fall and of the glorified bodies resurrected at the end of time. 14 Cf. Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, Il corpo del papa. See also: Id., I discorsi dei corpi; Id., Il cadavre.



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Beyond relics, saints were also venerated through their image. Such anthropomorphic images match the accepted types, passed down by a tradition which has often evolved: thus, it was only in the 14th century that Saint Sebastian exhibited ambiguous charms on his young body pierced by arrows. Images of ordinary men had also transformed, with a transition in the late Middle Ages from the representation of conventional human types to real portraits.15 Funerary sculpture of the 12th–13th centuries still consisted of male or female effigies, lay or clerical, at best identified by an inscription and a coat of arms, but under no circumstances did they pretend to physically resemble the deceased buried in that place.16 The imitation of the body, mimesis, which in the beginning appeared in ancient, Hellenistic and Roman funerary portraits, was banished by Christianity, because the image of God –imago Dei– which is in every man, concerns his soul, not his face. It was not until the late 13th century that new attitudes emerged, first in funerary art, and then in the painted portraits of sovereigns: one of the first portraits was that of the King of France Jean le Bon, around 1350; about a century later, Jean Fouquet created the portrait of King Charles VII, whose face we can also recognize painted by the same painter In Hours of Etienne Chevalier: the king and his two sons, the future Louis XI and Charles VIII, play the role of the Magi. Meanwhile, painters from Italy and Flanders – such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Robert Campin, Petrus Christus – multiplied the portraits of more or less important characters. One of the decisive factors for the appearance of the portrait at the turn of the 14th century was the concern for remembering the dead, not only in the traditional sense of the liturgical memoria, which aimed to ensure the salvation of the deceased in the afterlife through prayer, but also, and increasingly, in the sense of social memory that seeks to keep alive the true memory, which is the likeness of the elder who has disappeared but is worthy of posthumous fame.

The Body in Motion One cannot speak of the body as an inert object. The body breathes; the pulse reflects the heartbeat, the eyes open and close according to the alternation of waking and sleeping. The body also knows the struggles against disease and suffering. For example, we have a German Cistercian monk from the early 13th century, Richalm von Schöntal, who is the author of a largely autobiographical

15 Cf. Dominic Olariu, Le portrait individuel; Id., La genèse de la représentation ressemblante de l’homme. 16 Cf. Wilhelm Maier, Wolfgang Schmid, and Michael V. Schwarz, eds., Grabmäler.

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Liber revelationum. 17 According to its publisher Paul-Gerhard Schmidt, “no medieval writer informs his readers more about the state of his health;” toothache, cough, trouble breathing, cold sweats, irregular heartbeat, abdominal pain (he claimed to have a toad in his belly: bufo in ventre),stomachache (he must loosen his belt to relieve the stomach), itchy legs (he scratches till he bleeds). For Richalm, his physical ailments have no other explanation than the assaults of demons, of which a multitude constantly assails the monastery. They are the ones who make him cough, spit, belch, yawn and sleep when he should be awake. He relieves his pain by eating liquorice, and above all he throws salt and holy water at the demons, he multiplies the signs of the cross on his body (up to “thirty signs of the cross over the flesh underneath clothing”), he also uses the sacraments and pious reading, starting with the Moralia in Job by Gregory the Great, to free himself from them. However, he refuses to use the carmina of an old witch woman, who was recommended to him by the stabularius Rüdiger, a layman no doubt. The power of demons on the body is considerable, since they have the power to move the dead even several days after death. The body moves, it walks, it talks, it gestures18. Through the voice and gestures, the body expresses itself and communicates, and it contributes to animating the scene where social codes are embodied and engage in interpersonal relationships. In his study of the ritual gestures of friendship in the duchy of Burgundy in the late Middle Ages, Klaus Oschema rightly cites a fundamental text by Gregory of Nyssa from the 4th century. Thinking about God’s creation, the Greek theologian beautifully expresses the link, which is specific to man, between reason, language and bodily gestures: “If the human body had no hand, how could the voice arise in it? All the parts of the body around the mouth could not adapt to the demands of language. Man would roar, cry, bark, moo like oxen, bray like donkeys or howl like wild beasts. But because the hand was given to the body, the mouth can easily be at the service of words. The hands are a clear sign of the rational nature of man.”19 In the Middle Ages, gestures are subject to value judgments, to prescriptions and condemnations, which value virtuous and modest gestures (for example, the “shameful parts” of the body should be hidden), which control the expression of feelings and emotions (the kiss also has a history), which determine the actions that are appropriate to the social role 17 Richalm of Schöntal, Liber revelationum. 18 Cf. Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval; Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, A Cultural History of Gesture; John A. Burrow, Gestures and Look in Medieval Narrative. 19 Gregory of Nyssa, La Création de l’homme, 113, quoted by Klaus Oschema, Freundschaft und Nähe im spätmittelalterlichen Burgund, 399.



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each must play: gestures of courtesy, honor, majesty. Gestures provide a bridge between the invisible inside of the person (that which is intus: the soul, emotions, feelings) and the visible outside of the body (that which is foris). The “techniques of the body” – in the words of Marcel Mauss 20– vary in space and time, even in the case of actions that seem most “natural,” such as how to walk or run. Finally, circumstances, times and places, public or private occasions, impose their own rhythm on the body (at a procession or a royal hearing, slowness and restraint are most appropriate, as they express the solemnity of the moment, the exceptional and maybe sacred nature of the place, the dignity of the people: there is nothing like it in everyday ordinary social relations). Starting in the 12th century, in the favorable context of the Gregorian reform, urban development and intellectual renaissance, a fine and systematic reflection on the ideal gesture develops: the treaty that Hugh de Saint-Victor dedicated to the teaching of disciplina, intended for novices (De institutione novitiorum), set the “middle ground” as the absolute rule for any physical behavior – language, walking, “table manners” and all other actions – employing a conception of balance that, one might say, is in line with Gothic harmony.21 This model is also political, insofar as it is based on a conception of the government of the body, which is expressed in the words used in those days to talk about the government of the kingdom. It also reflects the interests of the Church in the acculturation of the body, because novices necessarily came from a secular world. At the same time, the confrontation of ecclesiastical culture and secular culture is staged by courtly literature, which presents its own rules of behavior. The work of Jacques Le Goff on the gestures of vassalage showed the logic and values inherent to these aristocratic gestures.22 The compromise between laity and clergy is also present in all the ritual actions which aim to entrench the power of the emperor, as Gerd Althoff has shown regarding “symbolic communication” in the Ottonian era.23 Closely related to social structures and value systems, gestures evolved throughout history, thus helping to trace a long history of bodies in society. We can all see today that, in order to greet someone, the handshake is neither uniform nor universal. The English, for example, employ the hand shake less commonly than the French. Elsewhere, a warm hug is required. The Greeks express negation by pushing the head back, not swinging it from left to right as it is done elsewhere in Europe. Differences also affect age groups, with, for example, kisses being a 20 Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps”. 21 Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 173 – 200. 22 Cf. Jacques Le Goff, “Le rituel symbolique de la vassalité”. 23 Cf. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter; Id., Die Macht der Rituale; Id., Inszenierte Herrschaft.

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practice of youth with two, three or four kisses alternating on each cheek... If we go back to the texts and images of the Middle Ages, we realize that other forms of greeting were in force. The handshake seems to have been first employed by the populace, scorned by the elite, and it was still rare in the 14th century, having become more common in the 16th century. But rather than a greeting gesture, it was primarily a sign of peace, friendship, good neighborliness, reconciliation after a quarrel: we stretch out the “hand of friendship” and we raise a “glass to friendship” to toast together. The gesture has a medieval and religious archeology: the dextrarum junctio of Christian marriage, where the officiating priest joins the hands of husband and wife in his own hands, as shown in miniatures in many liturgical, legal (Gratian’s Decree) or historical manuscripts, for example, Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg’s Romfahrt relationship, one of the prerequisites for which was the marriage of his son John of Luxembourg to the heir of the kingdom of Bohemia, Elizabeth.24 Going back earlier, Roman legal practices are likely the background of the handshake. This form of greeting is probably no stranger to the feudal gesture of homage in which the vassal placed his hands in those of the lord, but in this case, the gesture was unequal, while the gesture of friendship and greeting aims to be egalitarian. It would therefore be wrong to postulate a direct link between the two actions. Consider the slow evolution of this gesture that today is taken for granted: even in 1808, the handshake was difficult to define as a greeting gesture, when the tilt of the head and taking off one’s hat still prevailed. It seems that the Quakers, who refused conventional gestures, promoted it for the sake of egalitarianism. However, it is older, since another rebel, Watt Tyler, in 1381, openly challenged the gestures of the aristocracy by shaking the hand of the king – “shaka sa brace”– which was interpreted as an affront and led to his execution25. In the Middle Ages, the handshake was only appropriate for equals and it implied, through bodily contact, mutual commitment with a strong symbolic value in a ritual. Inequality of status imposed other gestures, such as the inclination of the head or torso, kneeling, or more commonly the ceremonial raising or removing of the hat, as shown in a miniature by Jean Fouquet, in the middle of the 15th century, representing the Solemn Entrance of Emperor Charles IV in the city of Cambrai, on imperial land, at Christmas 1377, and the friendly welcome of the city’s aldermen. On the other hand, the kiss on the lips between two men was common in the Middle Ages26. The word osculum should be understood in its etymological sense. There was also basium and suavium, but preferably in the context of a romantic relationship, no doubt. Because of forms 24 Cf. Michel Margue, Michel Pauly, and Wolfgang Schmid, eds., Der Weg zur Kaiserkrone, 42. 25 Cf. John A. Burrow, Gestures and Look, 37. 26 Cf. Yannick Carre, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Âge.



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and functions, recipients of the kiss were very varied, and they should not be confused: kissing on the mouth, cheek, hand, foot; kisses exchanged by people of the same sex or opposite sex; egalitarian kisses such as the feudal osculum, or expressing a hierarchy between people (when kissing the foot of a high dignitary), kisses with sound or silent kisses, single or repeated, etc. The history of the kiss is not linear: in the 15th–16th centuries, according to the manuals of civility, it was good to maintain bodies at a certain distance. Erasmus was shocked to see the keeper of an inn in England “kiss his guest,” and he lamented that “the world [is] full of kisses.”27

The Nude and Clothed Body In life as in images, bodies in the Middle Ages were rarely seen nude, and this was another important difference with antiquity and, to some extent, compared to our time. The justification for this attitude was first of all based on the story of original sin and its consequences: man discovered he was naked through sin and immediately concealed his sex under clothing. So through the garment, the body carries meanings that it manifests and respects social hierarchies (think of the sumptuary laws of the cities of Germany and Italy in the late Middle Ages), or it becomes the focus of political rituals and codes of civility. Peter von Moos has been noted that, during the Middle Ages, clothing and its components had been more important identity indicators than physiognomy.28 Physiognomy exists since the late Middle Ages, but it developed as a science for deducing a person’s character from their facial features especially starting with the Renaissance, which was also the age of the portrait. We can see which individualistic concerns, and they were not medieval, would support such knowledge, creating a fundamental shift from identification through clothing to identification through the body itself. This attention to physical characteristics has been taking on more precise and binding forms ever since: think of photo identification, fingerprints, biometric information and, currently, the genetic code (DNA). If, in the Middle Ages, the body was not measured, examined, mapped and stored in this way, however, it did happen to it to be paired and even marked on the flesh. By comparison with other cultures where body painting and scarification inscribe social classifications and clan or lineage membership on the surface of the body, and with our own contemporary culture where tattoos and other “piercings” have acquired in recent years increas27 See: Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love; Jacques Rossiaud, La prostitution médiévale. 28 Peter von Moos, “Das mittelalterliche Kleid”, 130.

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ing visibility, becoming a fairly common individual mode of asserting one’s identity and affinities, medieval Christian culture remained reserved against modes of irreversible intervention on the body. Saint Paul compared Christian baptism, whose action is spiritual, to Jewish circumcision, which marks the male body in its intimacy. The ambiguity of the body in Christianity is found here: the body is essential in a culture based on the Incarnation of the Son of God, yet it is subject to the spirit, to the intangible, to grace. The body is perishable, the spirit is eternal. For Saint Paul it is a matter of opposing to the alleged carnal ritualism of the Jews and Gentiles, the truth and the primacy of the Spirit, which is the prerogative of Christians. The baptized is not marked on the flesh, but on the soul. What sets him apart is visible only to God, it is the grace received through Baptism. However, in the Christian society of the Middle Ages, there was one essential physical mark, but it is true that it had to be renewed periodically: the tonsure of the clergy, a sign of their spiritual preeminence, if not social, and in any case a sign of their legal privileges. The tonsure or corona guaranteed that, in case of a crime or offense, they were brought before an ecclesiastical court, which did not give out blood sentences, unlike the secular courts. This meant that there was a great temptation to attempt to impersonate a cleric in marginal locations. The control of the hair system also had a fundamental discriminatory role within the ecclesiastical world itself, which became more diversified in the Middle Ages, exacerbating the desire to distinguish between white and black monks, canons, Mendicant orders, secular clergy, etc. In the 12th century, a Treatise on beards used this criterion to distinguish between the various religious orders, hermits with long beards, smooth-faced and tonsured clerics, and the lay compelled by less stringent observances29. Tonsure had to be periodically refreshed and the schedule was carefully fixed. Among the lay, physical marks had a bad reputation: they were the ones that justice imposed on outlaws when they were banished after being branded with a flower- or cross-shaped hot iron. This was both a degrading punishment and a means to single them out. The Empire’s urban leagues developed in the 15th century a mutual information system about highway thieves identified by their nicknames and their physical marks (scars, disabilities, blemishes).30 In representations of the Passion, Christ’s executioners wore earrings, rings piercing their nostrils, chains that blocked their faces, as shown in a detail from an altarpiece depicting the Passion attributed to Jerome Bosch, now preserved at Princeton.31 These were derogatory signs, which were consistent with striped clothes, twocolor hosen and violent combinations of negative colors, such as yellow and 29 Cf. Robert B. C. Huygens, Burchardi, ut videtur, Abbatis Bellevallis, Apologia de Barbis. 30 Cf. Hanna Zaremska, Les bannis au Moyen Âge; Valentin Groebner, Ungestalten. 31 Cf. Denis Bruna, Piercing.



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green. Clothing plays a more important discriminatory role than the body itself.32 “[The] cultural body is necessarily clothed [....] and clothing, not skin, is the frontier of the self.” wrote a historian of medieval clothing, Susan Crane.33 It was not a neutral and protective casing. It had a share of the qualities lent to the body of the person; it expressed status and dignity, somehow embodying its moral and social value. For starters, clothing discriminates gender. This function has become even clearer since approximately 1330, when men, who up to then also wore long clothing, adopted short garments, the doublet revealing legs encased in tight and colored breeches. This change was rapid and widespread in the West, and historians continue wonder what the reasons were. They probably reflected changes in the hierarchy of social status, but also and at the same time, with regards to what concerns us here, they reflected a change in the perception of “gender”: in the attitude of men towards their body, their manhood, their prominence in the family and in society, in contrast to the female body and its moral and aesthetic values, as well as the social roles assigned to women. It is remarkable that the first fundamental change in men’s clothing paved the way for further transformations, at least in aristocratic circles: the diversification of garments, the combination of materials and of various colors, and perhaps especially the socially discriminating belt usage: tightened around a noble’s waist, it makes the bust, which tends to expand upward with shoulder pads, stand out; looser, to the contrary, it permits the bouncing villain’s belly. Another essential feature: noblemen’s claim of their manhood, which became even more evident at the turn of the 16th century by wearing padded trousers. Practices of seduction were obviously not new, but they mostly concerned the female body: in courtly literature, the evocation of the inexhaustible physical charms of the mistress did not fail to mention her small and firm breasts. The novelty of the late Middle Ages for women was cleavage, all the more marked, given that the bust was enhanced by a very tight bodice. Provocation was at its peak, as in the altarpiece of Melun, where Jean Fouquet made the Virgin resemble Agnes Sorel, the mistress of King Charles VII (1456). The bodies of men and women, each with its own attractions, were part of the same movement which increasingly focused on sexual characteristics. Note however that the intimacy of the body was rarely unveiled, displayed before the eyes and before lust. Only prostitutes in steam rooms took their clothes off before their customers, who also appeared naked to bathe, eat and drink with them. In a German miniature of the 15th century, the canonical age madam hastens to serve them drink, while her servant modestly averts her eyes. How can we measure the modesty of an era? Mélusine had demanded of her husband that 32 Cf. Odile Blanc, Parades et parures; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Le corps et sa parure. 33 Cf. Susan Crane, The performance of self, 6.

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he never see her naked in the bath, and it was because he had not controlled his snake that he and his descendants were cursed forever. But that is only a story. After forever leaving the time of innocence of our first parents, wonderfully portrayed by the brothers van Eyck in the altarpiece of the Mystic Lamb in Ghent, to truly enter the time of human history, the nude body can sometimes be featured in the grip of desire, but most often it is a suffering and tortured body. Firstly, there is the body of Christ, who suffered the ravages of flogging and then the infamous punishment of crucifixion.34 But since he is the Son of God, his human body is not fully comparable to that of ordinary men. If the Child Jesus is gendered, painters represent the Christ of the Passion with a cloth around his waist, they are careful to veil the sex whose presence we can intuit, but whose shape is lost in a flood of blood – true red humor of the spiritual generation – as in Jean Malouel’s tondo at the Louvre; or they suggest the mystery of God made into a man by indistinct shadows, as in Jan Van Eyck’s diptych at the Metropolitan Museum in New York or in Hours of Etienne Chevalier by Jean Fouquet.35 In contrast, the nude and broken bodies of the condemned to the wheel are displayed on the gallows for looks of contempt or pity. With the progression of macabre themes, the naked corpse imposes itself in funeral representations, such as the famous worm-invaded, naked and half-decomposed body of Cardinal La Grange at Avignon (1394) or the contemporary one of Francis La Sarraz, whose abdomen and face are lost in a swarm of toads. The “Skeleton” (actually a cutaway) of the tomb of René of Chalon (1519–1544), in the Saint-Maxence Collegiate of Bar-leDuc, was meanwhile intended to contain the heart and entrails of the deceased. In the scenes of the Resurrection of the dead and of the Last Judgment, the damned are thrown naked and tortured into hell, whereas to the right of the Judge, the angels take care to clothe the chosen before they enter paradise. Their white garment is a sign of their status as chosen and the symbolic form of the “glorious body,” which they were promised for eternity.36 The contrast between the dressed chosen and the naked damned is sharper on Hans Memling’s altarpiece of the Last Judgment in Gdansk. The garment, said Erasmus, is “the body of the body.” Nudity is a priori associated with sin, sexuality, the most physical bodily functions of humanity, that which brings him closest to an animal. Hence its place in the marginal images of manuscripts or under the misericord (a small wooden shelf on the underside of a folding seat in the choir stalls); these are places where this “culture of the low body” is expressed in the words of Mikhaïl Bakhtine.37 But 34 Cf. Marie-Christine Sepiere, L’image d’un Dieu souffrant. 35 Cf. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ. 36 Cf. Jérôme Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà. 37 Cf. Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L’œuvre de François Rabelais.



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it should not necessarily be identified with a “popular culture” distinct from the official or academic culture: the grotesque, the obscene, operate within the ecclesiastical culture itself, because nobody escaped the dialectic of vice and virtue, of the illicit and the licit, of the body and soul. Under any clothing, there is necessarily a naked body, as the stalls of Rodez Cathedral and a small marginal image of the Macclesfield Psalter remind us.38 The costumes book of banker Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg in the first half of the 16th century beautifully expresses this complex interplay of the concealment and unveiling of the body. Born in 1497, deceased in 1567, Matthäus Schwarz wrote a Trachtenbuch, a sort of sartorial autobiography with pictures between 1520, at the age of 23, and 1560, at the age of 63-and-a-half.39 This book contains 137 fully painted portraits of himself, with the precise date and commented by him; each picture shows him in a different garment. Over the years, the creation of a new image by his painter friend Narziss Renner was justified as he acquired a new habit, usually during a significant event in his own life or the life of his city. The first image shows him before birth, when he is still in his mother’s womb, calling it his “first garment.” Diapers are the second habit. His clothing changes appearance when he begins school, then over the years and during his professional life. He portrays himself as an elegant young man, sensitive to bright and varied colors and finery – ribbons, gashes, rich lining – of the new fashions of the Italian Renaissance, before the black of Spanish fashion spread, which better fit his age and the painful experience of grieving for his parents and his two successive masters, Jakob and Anton Fugger. It is concern for garments that drives this extraordinary series. But, under clothing, attention to the body is not absent. It culminates in the two most singular images in the book. Placed side by side, they bear the same date: July 1st, 1526, the exact age of “29 1/3 and 8 days,” that is a little over 29 years and four months. These two images come after two others, the first dated January 3rd, 1526, the day Jakob Fugger died, and the second from May 1st, 1526, where he remained dressed in black as a sign of mourning. The master’s death may contribute to explaining the following two images, two months later: Matthäus Schwarz is not shown wearing a particular garment there as in the rest of the book, but rather he appears naked, first back and then front. His comment is laconic: “July first 1526, that was my real figure from behind because I had become plump and fat,” and then about the second image: “July first 1526, that was my true form as before, but from the front. The portrait is accurate.” The 38 Cf. The Macclesfield Psalter. 39 Cf. August Fink, Die Schwarzschen Trachtenbücher; Philippe Braunstein, Un banquier mis à nu; Valentin Groebner, “Die Kleider des Körpers des Kaufmanns”; Jean-Claude Schmitt, L’invention de l’anniversaire.

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Fig. 1: Matthäus Schwarz, Trachtenbuch (Ph. Braunstein, 60–61)

death of Jakob Fugger seven months earlier inspired the author’s desire to give up the illusory vanity of clothing fashion for a moment: it was time for solemnity and the search for “truth.” This is what the two images claim: they are the “true face” and a “true portrait,” as they reveal without modesty a “plump and fat” body and none of its imperfections are hidden by flattering clothing. The sartorial autobiography reaches its endpoint here, at the moment where it abandons the logic of fashion to focus on the truth of the body and the person. A truth which suddenly escapes time and becomes universal: this nude, notes Philippe Braunstein, is one of the first nudes in Western art which does not represent the nakedness of Adam in paradise or of the damned in hell. A nude whose model is, if not the artist himself, as in the case of the famous nude self portrait drawn by an aging Dürer, at least the immediate sponsor of the work. Painting a nude body, being painted naked, painting a nude of oneself, is the response to a demand for truth. The body does not lie: once the clothes, ornaments and cosmetics are removed, it appears as it is, with its faults, the stigma of age and the effects of time which bring it inexorably closer to death.



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Bibliography Althoff, Gerd, Die Macht der Rituale. Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter. Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 22013. Althoff, Gerd, Inszenierte Herrschaft. Geschichtsschreibung und politisches Handeln im Mittelalter. Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 2003. Althoff, Gerd, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde. Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1997. Bakhtine, Mikhaïl, L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Paris, Gallimard, 1970. Baschet, Jérôme, Les justices de l’au-delà. Les représentations de l’enfer en France et en Italie, XIIe–XVe siècle. Rome, Ecole Française de Rome, 1993. Belting, Hans, Dietmar Kamper, and Martin Schulz, eds., Quel corps ? Eine Frage der Repräsentation. München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002. Blanc, Odile, Parades et parures. L’invention du corps de mode à la fin du Moyen Âge. Paris, Gallimard, 1997. Bloch, Marc, Les rois thaumaturges. Etude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924), with a foreword by Jacques Le Goff, Paris, Gallimard, 21983. Bozóky, Edina, and Anne-Marie Helvétius, eds., Les reliques. Objets, cultes, symbols. Turnhout, Brepols, 1999. Bozóky, Edina, La politique des reliques de Constantin à Saint Louis, with a foreword by Jean-Claude Schmitt. Paris, Beauchesne, 2007. Braunstein, Philippe, Un banquier mis à nu. Autobiographie de Matthäus Schwarz, bourgeois d’Augsbourg. Paris, Gallimard, 1992. Bremmer, Jan, and Herman Roodenburg. A Cultural History of Gesture. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. Brown, Peter, The Body and Society. Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York, Columbia University Press, 1988 (French transl. Le renoncement à la chair. Virginité, célibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif. Paris, Gallimard, 1995). Bruna, Denis, Piercing. Sur les traces d’une infamie médiévale, Paris, Textuel, 2001. Burrow, John A., Gestures and Look in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bynum, Caroline W., Christian Materiality. An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York, Zone Books, 2001. Bynum, Caroline W., Fragmentation and Redemption: essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion. New York, Zone Books, 52002. Bynum, Caroline W., The Resurrection of the Body in the Western Christianity 200 – 1336. New York, Columbia University Press, 1995. Camille, Michael, The Medieval Art of Love. Objects and Subjects of Desire. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Carre, Yannick, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Âge. Rites, symboles, mentalités, XIe–XVe siècles. Paris, Le Léopard d’Or, 1993. Crane, Susan, The performance of self: ritual, clothing, and identity during the Hundred Years War. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Descola, Philippe, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris, Gallimard, 2005.

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Fink, August, Die Schwarzschen Trachtenbücher. Berlin, Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1963. Frugoni, Chiara, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto. Torino, Einaudi, 2010. Gregory of Nyssa, La Création de l’homme (De hominis opificio), edited by Jean Laplace (Sources Chrétiennes, 6). Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1943, 22002. Groebner, Valentin, “Die Kleider des Körpers des Kaufmanns. Zum ‘Trachtenbuch’ eines Augsburger Bürgers im 16. Jahrhundert”, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 25 (1998), 323 – 358. Groebner, Valentin, Ungestalten. Die visuelle Kultur der Gewalt im Mittelalter. München/Wien, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Hedeman, Anne D., The Royal Image. Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274 – 1422, Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California press, 1991. Huygens, Robert B. C., ed., Apologiae Duae: Gozechini, Epistola ad Walcherum; Burchardi, ut videtur, Abbatis Bellevallis, Apologia de Barbis (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, 62). Turnhout, Brepols, 1985. Kröll, Katrin, and Hugo Steger, eds., Mein ganzer Körper ist Gesicht. Groteske Darstellungen in der europäischen Kunst und Literatur des Mittelalters. Freiburg/Breisgau, Rombach, 1994. Krüger, Klaus, Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien. Berlin, Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992. Le Goff, Jacques, “Le rituel symbolique de la vassalité” (1976). In Pour un autre Moyen Âge. Temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essais. Paris, Gallimard, 2004, 349–420. Le Goff, Jacques, and Nicolas Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge. Paris, Liana Levi, 2003. Le Goff, Jacques, Eric Palazzo, Jean-Claude Bonne, Marie-Noël Colette, and Monique Goulet, Le Sacre royal à l’époque de Saint Louis d’après le manuscrit 1246 de la BNF. Paris, Gallimard, 2001. Maier, Wilhelm, Wolfgang Schmid, and Michael V. Schwarz, eds., Grabmäler. Tendenzen der Forschung an Beispielen aus Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Berlin, Gbr. Mann Verlag, 2000. Marek, Kristin, Raphaele Preisinger, Marius Rimmele, and Katrin Kärcher, eds., Bild und Körper im Mittelalter. München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006. Margue, Michel, Michel Pauly, and Wolfgang Schmid, eds., Der Weg zur Kaiserkrone. Der Romzug Heinrich VII. in der Darstellung Erzbischof Balduins von Trier. Trier, Kliomedia, 2009. Mauss, Marcel, “Les techniques du corps” (1935). In Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris, PUF, 1968, 363–386. Moos, Peter von, “Das mittelalterliche Kleid als Identitätssymbol und Identifikationsmittel”. In Unverwechselbarkeit. Persönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormodernen Gesellschaft (Norm und Struktur, 23), edited by Peter von Moos. Köln/Weimar/Wien, Böhlau Verlag, 2004, 123–146. Nagy, Piroschka, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution, Ve – XIIIe siècle. Paris, Albin Michel, 2000. Olariu, Dominic, ed., Le portrait individuel. Réflexions autour d’une forme de représentation, XIIIe–XVe siècle. Bern, Peter Lang, 2009. Olariu, Dominic, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante de l’homme. Reconsidérations du portrait à partir du XIIIe siècle. Bern, Peter Lang, 2014.



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Oschema, Klaus, Freundschaft und Nähe im spätmittelalterlichen Burgund. Studien zum Spannungsfeld von Emotion und Institution (Norm und Struktur, 26). Köln, Böhlau Verlag, 2006. The Macclesfield Psalter, edited by Stella Panayotova (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum). London, Thames & Hudson, 2008. Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, ed., La pelle umana. The Human Skin, edited by Thalia Brero (Micrologus, 13). Florence, SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005. Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, ed., I discorsi dei corpi. Discourses of the Body, edited by Véronique Pasche (Micrologus, 1). Turnhout, Brepols, 1993. Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, ed., l cadavere. The Corpse, edited by Catherine Chéne (Micrologus, 7). Florence, SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999. Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, Il corpo del papa (Biblioteca di cultura storica, 204). Turin, Einaudi, 1994 (French transl. Le corps du pape, Paris, Seuil, 1997). Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, ed., Le corps et sa parure. The Body ad its Adornment, edited by Thalia Brero (Micrologus, 15). Florence, SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007. Pouchelle, Marie-Christine, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du Moyen Âge. Savoir et imaginaire du corps chez Henri de Mondeville, chirurgien de Philippe le Bel. Paris, Flammarion, 1983. Richalm of Schöntal, Liber revelationum, edited by Paul Gerhard Schmidt. Hannover, Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2009. Rossiaud, Jacques, La prostitution médiévale, with a foreword by Georges Duby. Paris, Flammarion, 1988. Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, “Le corps en Chrétienté“. In La Production du corps. Approches anthropologiques et historiques, texts collected and edited by Maurice Godelier and Michel Panoff. Amsterdam, Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1998, 339–355. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, “‘Unorthodox’ images? The 2006 Neale Lecture”, In The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain, edited by Sophie Page. Manchester/New York, Manchester University Press, 2010, 9–38. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, “La processions d’un collège universitaire parisien (vers 1346–1349)”. In Medialität der Prozession. Performanz ritueller Bewegung in Texten und Bildern der Vormoderne / Médialité de la procession. Performance du mouvement rituel en textes et en images à l’époque prémoderne, edited by Katja Gvozdeva and Hans R. Velten (Germanischromanische Monatsschrift 39). Heidelberg, Winter, 2011, 127–140. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, “Quand la lune nourrissait le temps avec du lait. Le temps du cosmos et des images chez Hildegarde de Bingen (1098–1179)”. In Traditions et temporalités des images, edited by Giovanni Careri, François Lissarrague, Jean-Claude Schmitt, and Carlo Severi. Paris, Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2009, 73–87 (Ill. 33–36). Schmitt, Jean-Claude, L’invention de l’anniversaire, Paris, Arkhé, 2009. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval. Paris, Gallimard, 1990. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Le corps des images. Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge. Paris, Gallimard, 2002. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps. Essais d’anthropologie médiévale. Paris, Gallimard, 2001. Sepiere, Marie-Christine, L’image d’un Dieu souffrant. Aux origines du crucifix. Paris, Cerf, 1994.

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Steinberg, Leo, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. Chicago/ London, University of Chicago Press, 22006 (French transl. La sexualité du Christ dans l’art de la Renaissance et son refoulement moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 1987). Vauchez, André, François d’Assise. Entre histoire et mémoire. Paris, Fayard, 2009. Velu, Anne Marie, La Visitation dans l’art. Orient et Occident, Ve–XVIe siècle. Paris, Cerf, 2012. Wirth, Jean, L’image du corps au Moyen Âge. Firenze, SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013. Zaremska, Hanna, Les bannis au Moyen Âge. Paris, Aubier, 1996.

Cultural Identities

Karin Preisendanz

Between Affirmation and Rejection Attitudes towards the Body in Ancient South Asia from the Ṛgveda to Early Classical Medicine 0 The Sanskritic culture of pre-modern South Asia is characterized by two widely diverging attitudes towards the body, which can be characterized succinctly as positive, i.e., affirmative, appreciative, supportive, and caring, and negative, i.e., rejecting, contemptuous, suppressive, and abusive. In the following essay, I will first sketch these two attitudes – together with their distinctive nuances and manifestations as well as their mutual intersection and tension – historically, with reference to some of the most important literary genres and religious traditions, up to the early classical period, in order to prepare the historical and ideological background for a highly condensed case study, namely, that of the positive attitude towards the body as a means of the perfection of man, as it is expressed in one of the foundational treatises of classical Indian medicine (Āyurveda). 1.1 The earliest phase of South Asian culture is mainly documented by the corpus of Vedic literature written in so-called Vedic Sanskrit, which constitutes one of the earliest literary monuments in an Indo-European language. The oldest works within this corpus of religious, ritual, exegetical and proto-philosophical literature, which was preserved and transmitted orally until the modern period, are the four Vedas which were compiled and composed from approximately 1200 BCE onwards.1 Among them, the Ṛgveda, the “Knowledge (veda) of the Stanzas of Praise (ṛc)”, is the oldest and largest one and consists in a systematical collection of altogether 1.028 religious hymns (sūkta)2 with 10.462 stanzas of praise. Most of these hymns may have been in existence and transmitted for several centuries before they were finally organized in the ten “cycles” (maṇḍala) of hymns of the Ṛgveda towards the end of the second millennium BCE.3 Composed by poet– priests belonging to different prominent families, the songs of praise address a multitude of divine powers, which include archaic nature deities, liturgical 1 For a comprehensive seminal study on the dialects, chronology and geography of the Vedic literature, see Michael Witzel, “Tracing the Vedic Dialects”. 2 Literally: “something well/beautifully spoken”. Unless otherwise stated, all italicized foreignlanguage terms used in the running text and provided in brackets are (Vedic) Sanskrit words. 3 Oberlies considers 1800 BCE as the upper time limit for individual hymns of the Ṛgveda. See Thomas Oberlies, “Ṛgveda”, 628a.

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deities, and personified and deified concretizations of abstract notions and concepts, such as of power and strength, of youthful impetuousness, of law and order, rightfulness and truth, of the creation, expansion and maintenance of space for human life, and of the wildness and danger of untamed nature; furthermore, ethical and moral concepts that were important to the authors of the hymns, such as the notion of the contract or covenant, and the notion of hospitality, and concepts relating to the ritual and its performance, such as the notion of ritual dexterity, are considered divine forces.4 In their conception by the poet–priests, these divine forces were subjected to various degrees of anthropomorphization. 1.2 The hymns provide us with precious information not only on religious concepts – theological as well as mythological – and the rituals that were accompanied by the hymns, but also on the general world view of the Vedic people and on the Vedic culture as such. This culture of originally nomadic pastoralists was characterized by a positive and optimistic world view, and by an affirmation of life, which find expression in the high appreciation of worldly goods, such as cattle and horses, plenty of food, treasures, and grazing grounds, of physical strength and prowess, of offspring, especially male offspring, and of lasting good reputation and fame, and in prayers for an extended life-span (āyus).5 All this indicates a positive attitude towards life in this world, as opposed to any state or mode of existence after death, and implies an affirmative view of the body as the means and vehicle for the enjoyment of the things that make up a good life here. This view is also reflected in the physical descriptions of some highly anthropomorphized deities, especially of Indra, the divine concretization and manifestation of power and strength, including physical potency.6 God Indra, the epitome of a hero, is said to have beautiful lips7 and teeth,8 and radiant9 or golden10 skin;

4 On the Vedic gods from the point of view of history of religion, on their mythology and on their cult, see Thomas Oberlies, Der Rigveda und seine Religion, Chapters 5–7. For a more extensive exposition, see Die Religion des Ṛgveda by the same author. 5 See, e.g., Ṛgveda (RV) 1.10.11. For complete translations of the Ṛgveda, the reader is referred to Karl Friedrich Geldner, Der Rig-Veda, and to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda. 6 For a translation of the Indra hymns of the Ṛgveda, up to RV 3.53, see Louis Renou, Études védiques et pāṇinéennes, vol. 17. 7 See RV 1.9.3; 2.12.6; 3.30.3; 3.32.3; 3.50.2; 5.36.5; 6.46.5; 7.24.4. See also RV 3.36.10, where he is said to have the lips of a drinker (see below, n. 24, for Indra’s favorite drink), RV 5.36.2 and 6.44.14. See further RV 7.25.3. 8 See RV 1.101.10. 9 See RV 2.11.4 where Indra is called “radiant”. See also RV 3.38.4. 10 See RV 5.38.2.



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he has cheeks11 and wears a mustache.12 He is equipped with strong13 and broad14 arms in order to wield his formidable club15 and protect his devotees16; his limbs in general are said to be strong17 and he is of tall build.18 His fists are bringing good luck, and his hands are well formed,19 big,20 and sturdy.21 His voluminous belly22 and well fashioned gorge23 expand when he drinks the stimulating soma juice24 that provides him with increased strength to perform his mighty heroic deeds. Indra’s manly strength and fertility are expressed with the epithet “having a thousand testicles”.25 In his own way, Indra, although he has a stout body,26 is said to be as handsome as Uṣas, deified dawn,27 who is herself described in a pronounced physical manner, as a radiantly beautiful young woman with a golden28 or light complexion29 and flawless body,30 who bares her breasts31 and puts on 11 See RV 5.36.2. 12 See RV 2.11.17. 13 See, e.g., RV 1.80.8. 14 See RV 6.19.3. 15 There are numerous references to Indra’s arms thanks to which he receives, holds and hurls his club. 16 See RV 6.47.8. 17 See RV 3.36.2. 18 See RV 7.31.10. 19 See RV 4.22.9. 20 See RV 6.18.3. 21 See RV 6.29.2. Indra’s hands are also mentioned with reference to his grasping and wielding his club (e.g., RV 6.22.9), and in connection with his handing out what is best to his devotees (RV 7.24.6). More metaphorically, all goods are said to be in his hands; see RV 6.45.8. 22 See RV 1.104.9. 23 See RV 6.41.2. 24 See RV 1.8.7. Indra’s belly is frequently addressed in connection with his drinking of soma; see, e.g., RV 3.35.6; 3.41.5; 3.42.5; 3.47.1; 5.34.2. The identity of the plant from which soma was ritually pressed, mainly for consumption and offering to the gods in the context of the ritual, at the time when the hymns of the Ṛgveda were composed, as well as the identity of the plant thus in use during the subsequent stages of the Vedic period, is highly contested. Therefore, its qualities and the effects of drinking its juice are also interpreted differently. From various points of view, the identification with a stimulating plant belonging to the genus Ephedra seems most probable. See especially Harry Falk, “Soma I and II”, Chintaman G. Kashikar, Identification of Soma, and Jan E.M. Houben, “The Soma–Haoma problem”, all with rich bibliographical references. 25 See RV 6.46.3. 26 See RV 6.47.8. 27 See RV 1.57.2. 28 See RV 3.61.2 and 7.77.2. 29 See RV 1.113.2. 30 See RV 1.124.6. 31 See RV 1.92.4; 1.123.10; 1.124.4 and 7; 5.82.6; 6.64.2.

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make-up to enhance her beauty;32 self-consciously, she presents her body for all to see when she appears on the sky in early morning.33 Further, some of the so-called dialogue hymns contained in the Ṛgveda more or less explicitly address sexual desire and the joy of bodily intercourse, between human or divine husband and wife,34 or groom and bride,35 but also between siblings,36 and between humans and superhuman beings,37 gods38 and animals.39 Even though the incestuous sexual relationship between brother and sister, which is the topic of one such dialogue hymn, eventually remains unrealized and is implicitly rejected as illicit, here and elsewhere bodily desire is not looked upon frowningly or with disapproval, even when it merely serves the end of pure bodily pleasure and is disconnected from the wish for progeny, which is so prominently expressed in the Vedic hymns in general. And when a wife out of overwhelming desire manages to seduce her husband who has taken a vow to observe chastity, this is not condemned by the poet–priest in his final remarks on this story as told by him; he rather speaks of two mutually opposed and competing forces,40 through which the husband throve, namely, sexual desire resulting in offspring, and ascetic practice resulting in the attainment of heaven and of all his wishes. 1.3 As a prerequisite for the enjoyment of worldly life, the human body needs to be protected, cared for and properly maintained, to be treated in case of illness, and to be rescued in emergencies. Furthermore, it has to be strengthened when it has become feeble, because of disease or old age, and in general the maintenance of a healthy and able body amounts to the desired enjoyment of the full human life-span. The hymns give expression to these requirements, inasmuch as the poet–priests entreat various gods, among them powerful Indra, to provide them

32 See, e.g., RV 1.92.4 and 1.124.8. 33 See RV 5.82.5. The lovely hymns addressed to Uṣas have been beautifully translated in Louis Renou, Études védiques et pāṇinéennes, vol. 3, 1–104. 34 See the dialogue between the human couple Agastya and Lopāmudrā (RV 1.179). 35 See the hymn on the divine marriage of Soma and Sūryā, as the prototype of a human marriage, put into the mouth of a human groom (RV 10.85). 36 See the dialogue between Yama and Yamī, the primordial twins (RV 10.10). 37 See the dialogue between Purūravas and the nymph Urvaśī (RV 10.95). 38 See the dialogue between Apālā and god Indra (RV 8.91). 39 See the slightly bawdy, humoristic conversation between Indra and his spouse, and the monkey Vṛṣākapi and his wife (RV 10.86). On the dialogue hymns of the Ṛgveda, see Satya Dev Choudhary, Dialogue Hymns of Ṛgveda. 40 See Paul Thieme, Gedichte aus dem Rigveda, 77.



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with protection,41 to heal42 and strengthen them,43 and to grant them a long life.44 Especially the Aśvin-s, who are twin gods historically related to the two Dioscuri,45 are depicted and praised as healers and physicians par excellence;46 they are also capable to restore their aged devotees to renewed youth, vigor and potency. Above all, they are miraculous saviors and protectors of humans.47 In the hymns addressed to them, the poet–priests briefly refer to legends connected with them, e.g., how they restored youth and sexual potency to an aged man by name of Cyavāna/Cyavana48 and how they strengthened a certain Krivi,49 how they saved Paura who was swimming in the water50 and the son of somebody named Tugra from distress at sea,51 and how they released Atri from hardship in the darkness, which may also be interpreted as healing him from blindness.52 Similarly, the divine body, although not in need of protection, rejuvenation or rescue, nevertheless requires care and healing, and thus the Aśvin-s are also conceived as physicians of the gods, who, for example, heal Indra when he becomes sick from drinking too much soma.53 1.4 The tenth and last “cycle” of the Ṛgveda contains the historically latest hymns in which the poet–priests formulate new ideas and touch upon topics and contexts not addressed in the bulk of the earlier hymns; thus, in the context of cos41 See, e.g., RV 4.3.14 (addressed to Agni, the deified ritual fire), 4.16.17–18 and 20 (addressed to Indra), 4.43.7 (addressed to the Aśvin-s, see below), 5.2.12 (addressed to Agni), and 5.38.5 (addressed to Indra). 42 See, e.g., RV 2.33.2, 4, 7 and 12 (to Rudra, the divine concretization of wild and dangerous nature), and 5.73.9 (to the Aśvin-s). 43 See, e.g., RV 1.183.2 (to the Aśvin-s). 44 See, e.g., RV 3.36.10 (to Indra) and 4.15. 9–10 (to the Aśvin-s). 45 For a comprehensive historical study on the Aśvin-s, see Gabriele Zeller, Die vedischen Zwillingsgötter. 46 See, e.g., RV 8.9.5–6; 8.22.10; 8.35.16; 8.86.1. 47 See, e.g., RV 8.9.11 and 15; 8.22.10. 48 See RV 5.74.5; 7.68.6; 7.71.5. 49 See RV 8.22.12. 50 See RV 5.74.4. 51 See RV 1.182.5–7, 6.62.6, 7.68.7, 8.5.22. 52 See RV 7.71.5. In RV 8.73.3 and 7–8 there is also reference to their saving Atri from fire. Sometimes we just learn about the names of the persons who were assisted by the Aśvin-s, without further details; see, e.g., RV 8.8.20. For a study of the passages dealing with the assistance provided by the Aśvin-s to men, see Gabriele Zeller, Die vedischen Zwillingsgötter, Chapter 3; see also briefly Thomas Oberlies, Das religiöse System des Ṛgveda, 179. 53 See Thomas Oberlies, Das religiöse System des Ṛgveda, 182, note 157, for references in the Ṛgveda. For the later integration and re-working of this motif in the mythology of the sautrāmaṇī ritual, see below, n. 99.

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mogony and ritual they give expression to proto-philosophical, that is, metaphysically and theologically speculative thoughts and reflections. Furthermore, the hymns of this “cycle” inter alia throw light on facets of popular religious practice and belief. Here, we learn more about the Vedic concept of the human body and the affirmative attitude towards it. In a highly complex and informative cremation hymn,54 which combines reference to various conceptions of the afterlife,55 affirmation of the body is expressed through the archaic notion of immortality as reconstitution, inclusive of the body:56 in the case of persons who have accumulated special merit, e.g., if the deceased belonged to a small elite of especially praiseworthy sacrificers or heroic warriors, it was believed that one would be transferred to heaven, to enjoy all kinds of physical pleasures there, together with the gods or one’s equally deserving forefathers.57 The enjoyment of heavenly pleasures may have been imagined to take place by means of one’s present body in a somehow reconstituted form, or even by means of one’s very same unscathed body which was only seemingly harmed by the funeral fire:58 on the one hand, Agni, the deified cremation fire, is requested to heal the damage already inflicted upon the corpse by birds, insects and beasts of prey,59 which may point to a reconstitution of the body through the very act of cremation, on the other hand, the funeral fire is implored – against all evidence – not to burn the body, not even to scorch the skin together with the solid body underneath,60 which may point at the idea that the body may actually remain intact for transfer to heaven by the funeral fire. This latter interpretation is supported by the fact that the hymn also refers to some ritual substitutes which are offered at the occasion or cremated along with 54 See RV 10.16. 55 For a detailed discussion of some of them, see Karin Preisendanz, “Soul, Body and Person”, 151–158. 56 See Antony Flew, “Immortality”, 140. 57 See Hermann Oldenberg, Religion des Veda, 530–535, to be modified by the observations in Ernst Arbman, “Tod und Unsterblichkeit”, 339–341, 345–349 and 361–368. See Henk W. Bodewitz, “Life after Death”, 26–27 and 33–38, on the late appearance of this positive idea about life after death in the Ṛgveda (pace Paul Horsch, “Vorstufen”, 106), and Lambert Schmithausen, “Mensch, Tier und Pflanze”, 47. One may take RV 10.16.3 to allude to this variant of immortality because elsewhere in the hymn there is more explicit evidence for this belief, namely, in stanza 5. See also Ernst Arbman, “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 36, where Arbman refers to this rare, but nevertheless hoped-for situation. 58 See Ernst Arbman, “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 75, 90, 93–94 and 173. 59 See RV 10.16.6. See also Ernst Arbman, “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 36 and 93. 60 See RV 10.16.1; see also Hermann Oldenberg, Religion des Veda, 585, Ernst Arbman, “Unter­ suchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 37 and 93, and Paul Horsch, “Vorstufen”, 112.



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the corpse; these substitutes have the form of entire sacrificial animals, such as a ram tied onto the funeral pyre,61 parts of such animals, such as cuts of beef, or the most tasty bodily components of sacrificial animals, such as muscle and kidney fat, which are simultaneously offered on the pyre and highly recommended to the funeral fire for consumption.62 The former interpretation is supported by the fact that even though the incineration of the body must have been a matter of observation, it is reinterpreted here as an act of “cooking”, that is, as a positive constructive, and not destructive, act; “cooking” causes the body of the deceased to attain a “well done” state, in the sense of a mature, perfected and purified state, ready to be handed over to the forefathers by the ascending funeral fire itself.63 Subsequently, it is the responsibility of the bereaved relatives to ritually ensure the completeness of the bodies of their ancestors:64 they may even have to participate in a ritual manner in the reconstitution of the body of a recently deceased relative.65 1.5 We can thus note that cremation as a mode of disposal of the dead, which had been introduced by the time of the composition of the hymn, gave rise to various concepts – explicitly and implicitly referred to in the cremation hymn – that underline the affirmative attitude towards the body. This attitude also finds diverse expression in the fourth Veda, the Atharvaveda, which is a compilation of hymns addressed to deities and divine forces, and hymns with proto-philosophical and mystical content. Inasmuch as it also contains many prayers, invocations, spells and maledictions, it furthermore testifies to the popular religion of the Vedic period and its magical components, a feature which is at the root of its contested status.66 Here, several contexts give rise to ideas about the constituents of the empirical person that associate these personal, microcosmic elements with macrocosmic elements, a pattern of relationship that can also be observed in the discussed cremation hymn of the Ṛgveda.67 61 See the note on stanza 4 in Karl Friedrich Geldner, Der Rig-Veda, vol. 3, 148. 62 See RV 10.16.4 and 7; see also Hermann Oldenberg, Religion des Veda, 577–578 and 587. 63 See RV 10.16.1–2 and 11; see also Ernst Arbman, “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 37 and 93. On the conflicting statements in RV 10.16, see also Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rigveda, 48–49. For another interpretation, which is based above all on RV 10.16.5, namely, that out of the buried bones the same body arises anew in perfect form in the other world and that the other bodily factors will unite with it there, see Thomas Oberlies, Die Religion des Ṛgveda, 501. 64 See Ernst Arbman, “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 37–39 and 126. 65 See Ernst Arbman, “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 91–92. 66 For a succinct characterization of the Atharvaveda, mainly from a historical and literary point of view, see Thomas Oberlies, “Atharvaveda”. For a complete translation of the Śaunaka version of the Atharvaveda, see William Dwight Whitney, Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā. 67 See RV 10.16.3, treated in Karin Preisendanz, “Soul, Body and Person”, especially 151–155.

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For example, in an Atharvavedic prayer for protection directed at the three “worlds” or realms of the Vedic universe, i.e., heaven, earth and intermediate space,68 the praying person entrusts him/herself to Heaven and Earth,69 equating (1) his/her “eye” with the sun, which belongs to heaven, (2) his/her “breath” (prāṇá) with the wind, which is related to intermediate space in which it moves back and forth, (3) his/her “Self” (ātmán) directly with intermediate space, and (4) his/her solid body with the earth. After these identifications, the word “Self” (ātmán) is used again, but in an obviously different sense, in the concluding phrase “I lay down the ‘Self’ (ātmán) for Heaven and Earth, for protection”.70 We thus get the following scheme: microcosmic element

corresponding macrocosmic element

realm

“eye” “breath” “Self” (1) solid body “Self” (2)

sun wind intermediate space earth (entrusted to) heaven and earth

(heaven) (intermediate space) (intermediate space) (earth) (the whole world)

“Self” (ātmán) in the conclusion of the prayer probably refers to the totality of the four listed entities, from the “eye” to the solid body, i.e., to the psycho-physical whole of the praying person,71 his/her total “Self”; thus the usage of the word ātmán as a reflexive pronoun and therefore the meaning “myself” may also 68 That the three realms, actually cosmic layers, are the addressees of the prayer becomes evident from the introductory invocations and the macrocosmic correspondences essential to the inner logic of the prayer. See Atharvaveda (AV) 5.9 which was translated already in Albrecht Weber, “Fünftes Buch der Atharva-Saṃhitā”, 197–199; see also Helena Willman-Grabowska, “L’idée de l’ātmán”, 17. The prayer is not part of the fifth book of the Paippalāda version of the Atharvaveda (see the edition and translation in Alexander Lubotsky, Atharvaveda-Paippalāda Kāṇḍa Five). The following is a slightly modified version of Karin Preisendanz, “Soul, Body and Person”, 159–160, to which the reader is referred for further details. 69 Although intermediate space is also invoked in AV 5.9.3 and mentioned in 5.9.7, the praying person entrusts him/herself only to Heaven and Earth, presumably because they are understood as a divine parental couple who grants protection (5.9.7) and the full life-span (āyuṣkṛt, āyuṣpátnī) (see 5.9.8); the empty intermediate space between them, although essential for life, obviously possesses only a faint imaginary character, or even no special character at all, and is not personified. 70 See AV 5.9.7. Albrecht Weber (“Fünftes Buch der Atharva-Saṃhitā”, 198) suggests that this stanza is an evening prayer, followed by a morning prayer in the subsequent stanza (AV 5.9.8). 71 See also Helena Willman-Grabowska, “L’idée de l’ātmán”, 17, on the usage of the word ātmán in AV 11.8.31. Paul Horsch (“Buddhismus und Upanishaden”, 470) may have had this or a similar passage in mind when he speaks of the employment of the word ātmán to denote the person as a “more or less substantial entity”.



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resound in this passage. What, then, about ātmán in the preceding part of the prayer that establishes microcosmic–macrocosmic correspondences? Because the whole person (ātmán), when submitted for protection, should also include the individuating “free soul”,72 it could well be that the term ātmán refers to it here; on the evidence of its correlation with intermediate space, and not with wind, it seems to have been conceived as something practically immaterial or non-substantial.73 “Breath” and “eye”, for their part, may refer to two specialized “body-souls”, the “breathing-soul” and the “perceptive soul”, or to the breathlike “vital soul” in general and to sight, the most important sensory vital faculty. What is important to note here, is the fact that the gross body is quite naturally included in the scheme of the microcosmic–macrocosmic relations pertaining to the human individual or empirical person, as an integral constituent besides more subtle constituents, which are the multiple “souls” and vital faculties that inhabit the body. This general constellation or pattern can also be observed in the Brāhmaṇa-s, the extensive proto-scientific74 exegetical works historically following as a genre upon the four Vedas75 and attached to either of them, which are devoted to the explication and interpretation of the solemn Vedic rituals in all their details. There, the sketched pattern, with further extensions, is also applied to animal individuals in the context of animal sacrifice, where it figures in a formula addressed to the sacrificial victim at the time of its ritual strangulation.76 1.6 The relation of microcosmic and macrocosmic elements and the identification of all world constituents and systems of world constituents at different levels are the focal concern of the authors of the Brāhmaṇa-s. In this, the many increasingly complex solemn rituals they describe and subtly interpret occupy 72 This interpretation is supported by Albrecht Weber’s assumption that the prayer is an evening prayer (cf. note 68), because during dreams and deep sleep the “free soul” leaves the body. On the interpretation of the term ātmán as referring to the notion of a “free soul”, see Karin Preisendanz, “Soul, Body and Person”, 160 sq. 73 Ernst Arbman (see “Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 81) supposes such a development only for later times. Thomas Oberlies (Die Religion des Ṛigveda, 502–503) refers to AV 5.9.7 in connection with the microcosmic–macrocosmic correlations in the hymn about Puruṣa (RV 10.90.13) and refers also to RV 10.16.3, but does not attempt to unravel the details, similar to Arbman (“Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung”, 10, n. 2). 74 See Hermann Oldenberg, Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft. 75 By consensus, the period of the Brāhmaṇa-s is considered to have started around 800 BCE, with some overlap with the period of the four Vedas. See Thomas Oberlies, Brāhmaṇas, 52a. That is, some Brāhmaṇa-s are older than particular parts of the Vedas. 76 On this aspect of the animal sacrifice (paśubandha), see further Karin Preisendanz, “Soul, Body and Person”, 161–163.

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the central position; in their ritualistic cosmogonic and cosmological reflections, the rest of the world so to say revolves around the rituals that provide in a constitutive manner the objective as well as subjective order of the world and enjoy an existence by themselves, even though they require man for their concrete enactment in compliance with the norm. Through this enactment and on the ideological basis of the identification of constituent elements of the rituals with cosmic entities, events, states and processes, the perfect order of the world constituted by the rituals is recreated and thus maintained; in the final analysis, each ritual act thus becomes a cosmic creative act. The identificatory reasoning of the learned exegetes of the Brāhmaṇa-s presupposes a principle of actual equivalence, not of mere metaphorical equivalence, equivalence by way of poetic comparison, or symbolic equivalence. In exegesis, this equivalence is worked out in accordance with a number of implicit principles and encompasses – in our present-day analysis – diverse identity relations between the identified things, events, states and processes. The modes of the identificatory habitus expressed in this way have been typologized by Axel Michaels as follows: (definining) identification or equivalence, analogy, cryptic identification, serial identification, inclusivist identification, substitutive identification, expanded (i.e., stretched) identification, compressed identification, paired identification, hierarchical identification and dismembered (i.e., fragmented) identification.77 In their application by the Brāhmaṇa exegetes, they testify to a profound knowledge of the rituals and their context, a wide-ranging familiarity with mythology, great interest in cosmology, and proficiency in the special ritualistic–speculative etymological method of identification. In this way, the exegetes explore and work out the numerous identity relations obtaining between the enactment of a particular ritual on the one hand, and fundamental primordial creation, as well as the primordial creation of the particulars of this world, on the other. 1.7 However, the individual elements of a ritual are not only identified with fundamental elements of primordial creation and thus essentially related to the origin and construction of the macrocosm; the exegetes of the Brāhmaṇa-s also make out relations of identity between the ritual and the microcosm, that is, the body of the sacrificer. In the case of the solemn new and full moon rituals as described and interpreted in the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa (“The Brāhmaṇa of the Hundred Paths”), for example, sixteen vital and sensory faculties and body parts78 are determined 77 See Axel Michaels, Hinduism, 335. 78 These are (5) five sensory faculties (prāṇá-s), (2) the two eyes, (1) breathing downwards (inward breathing, i.e., inhalation), (3) the three male organs, (4) the four limbs, and (1) breathing upwards (outward breathing, i.e., exhalation).



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to be identical with the sixteen offerings of the new and full moon rituals. Furthermore, the bones and flesh of the sacrificer are identical with the sacrificial formula and further material employed in the ritual.79 The inner order of a particular ritual thus not only corresponds to the order of the natural world and recreates it perfectly whenever it is performed; it also corresponds to the order of the human body, inclusive of its psychical apparatus (which was conceived as subtly material), and maintains this order through repeated renewal whenever the ritual is enacted. This means, as the author stresses, that nothing may be left out in the regular course of the ritual; otherwise, it would be as if one broke off a limb or chipped off a vital faculty.80 The offerings of the new and full moon ritual are sixteen; man has sixteen parts. The ritual is man; therefore there are sixteen offerings to it.81 There is thus a reciprocal relationship between man and ritual, a mutual correspondence through essential identity. Furthermore, through serial identification82 the order of the human body thus also corresponds to the perfect order of the world. The above should clearly illustrate the affirmative and highly positive attitude of the ritualists and exegetes of the Brāhmaṇa period towards the human body in their sophisticated deliberations on the ritualistic order of the world. This attitude is also impressively evidenced by the voluminous and sophisticated exegesis of the construction of the large sacrificial altar in the ritual called “the piling up of the fire (altar)” (agnicayana) according to the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa.83 The year-long extremely complicated procedure by which the sacrificer actually reconstructs the cosmos is at the same time the reconstruction of the creator god Prajāpati,84 who had physically fallen apart out of exhaustion when he created the world in the beginning; his joints became loose and his vital faculties left

79 See Śatapathabrāhmaṇa (ŚPBr) 11.1.6.29–36, translated in Julius Eggeling, The Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa, vol. 5, 19–20. The particular etiology and explanation of the new and full moon rituals of which this interpretation “with regard to the Self” (i.e., the bodily empirical person) is the conclusion, starts at ŚPBr 11.1.6.1 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 5, p. 12) with a grand cosmogony with the creator god Prajāpati as the main agent. The latter events of this cosmogony, where various gods are the actors, are then related to the performance of the constituent elements of these periodical rituals, which is the so-called interpretation “with regard to the gods” (ŚPBr 11.1.6.25–28, Eggeling’s translation, vol. 5, p. 18–19). 80 See ŚPBr 11.1.6.35 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 5, p. 20). 81 See the conclusion in ŚPBr 11.1.6.36 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 5, p. 20). 82 That is, A = B = C …; see again Axel Michaels, Hinduismus, 335. 83 See ŚPBr 6–8 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 3, p. 143 – vol. 4, 149). 84 On Prajāpati as a creator god and further aspects of this fatherly divine figure which emerges at the time of the Brāhmaṇa-s, see Jan Gonda, Prajāpati’s Rise to Higher Rank.

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him.85 In a first mythological reconstitution, the bodily Prajāpati was put together by the deified, personified ritual fire and fire ritual (Agni) itself, which he had created earlier.86 Having in this way been “piled up”, Prajāpati is identified with the fire altar (agni), and thus, in the present, the human sacrificer also restores Prajāpati’s complete divine body when he piles up the bricks of the various layers of the fire altar which is the macrocosm in all its spatial and temporal completeness.87 Furthermore, the sacrificer is restoring himself, putting together his own body, when he reconstructs the world, inasmuch as he functions as Prajāpati and at the same time restores Prajāpati, thus again himself.88 That is, through the reconstitution of the body of the divine Prajāpati, the human Prajāpati reconstitutes and perfects himself. The affirmation and estimation of the worldly, human body is thus mirrored by the affirmation of the divine, primordial body, and vice versa, in the ritualistic–cosmological speculations of the Brāhmaṇa-s. Restoring or “healing”89 the body of Prajāpati, as it is put in an alternative account of an initial restoration of Prajāpati by the gods, with the help of the personified ritual fire and fire ritual,90 is an essential momentous activity and expresses great concern and respect for it; the same presumably applies to the human body. 2. In spite of this and other modes of affirmation of the body for which evidence may be adduced from the Brāhmaṇa-s, a negative perception of the body also begins to emerge during the Vedic period and eventually comes to form a diametrically opposed strand of thought and practice, consisting of various modes of rejection that are not necessarily related to each other in a direct historical sense, but rather complement each other or add up to form such a heterogeneous strand. In a way typical of the intellectual history of South Asia, both attitudes coexist next to each other. 2.1 There are indications already in the Yajurveda that dealing with the human body directly and in a concrete manner in the worldly, practical everyday context 85 See the conclusion of the cosmogony at the beginning of the treatment of the agnicayana in ŚPBr 6.1.2.12 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 3, p. 150–151). 86 See ŚPBr 6.1.2.13 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 3, p. 151). 87 See ŚPBr 6.1.2.16–20 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 3, p. 151–152). 88 See furthermore the interpretation “with regard to the Self” in ŚPBr 8.7.4.19–21 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 4, p. 148–149). 89 The verbal forms bhiṣajyāma (“let us heal”) and abhiṣajyan (“they healed”) used in this context are clearly related to the noun bhiṣáj (“healer”), which is the word for a physician already in the Ṛgveda where it is applied to the Aśvin-s. 90 See ŚPBr 6.1.2.21–22 (Eggeling’s translation, vol. 3, p. 152–153).



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came to be considered a potentially problematic undertaking from the ritualistic point of view. That is, in the period of the Yajurveda, the “Knowledge (veda) of the Sacrificial Formulae (yajus)”, which precedes and in its later strata partially overlaps with the period of the Brāhmaṇa-s,91 a first shadow is thrown onto the overall positive significance of the body during the Vedic period. In a well-known passage in the etiological exposition of the soma ritual in the Taittirīyasaṃhitā, the youngest recension of the Black Yajurveda, a myth explains why the Aśvin-s, who were not drinkers of soma, are after all entitled to a libation in this specific ritual context, and are therefore pure and worthy of the sacrifice. This myth manifests an ambiguous attitude towards healers, here in the form of the two prominent divine healers, which vacillates between two extremes: (1) the acknowledgement of the undeniable need of their services and the implied positive, caring attitude towards the body on the one hand, and (2) contempt for the activity of healing and the healing profession on the other hand, and with it an implied negative attitude towards the body. At the same time, a solution to the dilemma is suggested by the ritual exegetes. Let me briefly paraphrase the passage:92 For some unstated reason, when the gods once wanted to perform a soma ritual, the head of the sacrifice had been cut off.93 They called the two Aśvin-s, the healers of the gods,94 and asked them to put it back again because they are healers. The Aśvin-s complied, under the condition that they also receive a soma libation in the context of the ritual. This is why the libation for the Aśvin-s, as part of the soma ritual, serves to restore the sacrifice. At this point, the reason why they did not partake of soma earlier on, is explicitly addressed, namely, their impurity:

91 For a succinct characterization of the Yajurveda from the point of view of its literary history and composition, see Thomas Oberlies, “Yajurveda”. 92 Taittirīyasaṃhitā (TS) 6.4.9; for a translation see Arthur Berriedale Keith, The Veda of the Black Yajus School, vol. 2, 535–536. See further Ganesh U. Thite, Medicine, 181 (also referring to the version of the myth as told in the epic Mahābhārata [3.124.7ff.]) and Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing, 22–23 (also referring to the purāṇic version of the myth in which god Śiva is the central figure). 93 Inasmuch as it evokes a body of the sacrifice, this image actually testifies to a continuing positive evaluation of the body in the context of ritualistic–mythological reflections, be it anthropomorphic (which I would consider more probable in the present case) or theriomorphic, because one would not expect that a sacrifice of central importance, or the sacrifice in general, would be conceived as, or equated with, something exclusively evaluated in a negative way. 94 For further references to this phrase, see Ganesh U. Thite, Medicine, 180–181.

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The gods said about them: “These two are impure, inasmuch as they are healers who move around among men.”95 Therefore a Brahmin should not practice healing. For somebody who is a healer is impure, is not worthy of the sacrifice.96

Upon this condemning statement, the author of the passage continues to relate that the gods, before preparing the soma libation for the Aśvin-s, purified them by means of a certain litany of praise called bahiṣpavamāna, which explains why the soma cup for the Aśvin-s is drawn only after this litany has been sung.97 This procedure certainly expresses a compromise, first on the ritualistic– mythological level, between the conflicting demands of ritual purity and care for the physical body, of the personified sacrifice in this particular case. The divine healers, the Aśvin-s, would obviously not be affected by impurity if they were merely physicians of the gods, whose bodies may be afflicted by ailments and require treatment, but are not impure. It is their “moving around among men”,

95 Cp. ŚPBr 4.1.5.14 (translation in Julius Eggeling, The Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa, vol. 2, 275): “… ye have wandered and mixed much among men, performing cures” (… bahú manuṣyèṣu sáṃsṛṣṭam acāriṣṭaṃ bhiṣajyántāv iti). See also the reference in Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing, 23. In the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa, the story about the Aśvin-s’ exclusion from a ritual performed by the gods and their invitation to it, together with the offering of a cup of soma to them, because of their healing skills applied to the headless sacrifice (ŚPBr 4.1.5.1–15, Eggeling’s translation p. 373–276), is told in the context of (sage) Cyavāna/Cyavana’s miraculous rejuvenation by the Aśvin-s; see above, p. 117. On the story in the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa see also Gabriele Zeller, Die vedischen Zwillingsgötter, 126. 96 TS 6.4.9.1–2 (ed. Albrecht Weber, Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1872 [Indische Studien 12]): … táu dev abruvann ápūtau v imáu manuṣyacaraú (1) bhiṣájāv íti. tásmād brāhmaṇéna bheṣajáṃ ná kāryàm. ápūto hy èṣo ʼmedhyó yó bhiṣák … (2). 97 The exposition is slightly disrupted here; in my paraphrase, I attempt to provide the narrative with some coherence. After all, the Aśvin-s had already received their cup of soma without any preparatory purificatory ritual. Following the regular sequence of the narrative, one would have to understand that the thought that they were impure occurred to the gods only after they had given the libation to the Aśvin-s and therefore let them participate in the ritual, and that they then recited the bahiṣpavamāna and offered them a second cup of soma. This indicates the possibility that the passage starting with the discriminating statement by the gods and ending with the solution they found to the problem addressed in their statement was interpolated at this point, with the intention to effect an overall understanding as expressed in my paraphrase. That is, the discriminating statement of the gods and their subsequent purificatory action are to be understood as some kind of afterthought to the narrative. For a different solution, namely, that the author of the passage meant to say that the thought about the Aśvin-s’ impurity occurred to the gods only afterwards and that the Aśvin-s should have been purified first by means of the bahiṣpavamāna, see Gabriele Zeller, Die vedischen Zwillingsgötter, 126. However, from the point of view of the text’s wording, which does not have any verbal forms that would express a conditional perfect, this seems improbable.



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their healing and rescuing activity in this human world98 that causes them trouble and excludes them from partaking of the offerings made in a soma ritual, because of their contact with impure bodies. Even so, their special services are required for the successful performance of the soma ritual. For the gods, who act as sacrificers here, the problem is solved by a ritual purification of the Aśvin-s; at the same time, for the Aśvin-s, as acknowledged healers, the problem of their exclusion from the soma ritual is solved. The compromise also applies on the ritualistic level here in this world, whenever a human sacrificer performs a soma ritual: in this case, too, first the special litany that purifies the Aśvin-s has to be sung; subsequently, the sacrificer offers the special libation to the Aśvin-s, which serves to heal the body of the sacrifice.99 2.2 The author of the passage in the Taittirīyasaṃhitā extends the compromise even further into practical everyday life in this world, by his subsequent statement: The gods deposited the healing skill of the Aśvin-s in three ways: one third in fire, one third in water, and one third in the Brahmin class. Therefore, when somebody practices healing, he should place a vessel with water on the ground and sit to the right of a Brahmin. Inasmuch as he practices healing by this method, what he does becomes successful.100

The healing profession as such is thus generally acknowledged, together with the importance of the success of its practice. To account for its aspired successfulness, in spite of the general impurity of the human body and thus of the activity of healing itself, the legendary healing skill of the Aśvin-s also receives some purificatory treatment by the gods: inasmuch as they deposit it in three exemplarily pure receptacles that also serve as purifying agents, the healing skill becomes something pure itself and may thus be successful and beneficial. Fire and water are pure and therefore the main purifying substances in orthodox–Brahminical ritualistic theory and practice, and the Brahmin class, the highest class in the hierarchical socio-religious order propagated by the Brahmins, is the human 98 See also, e.g., ŚPBr 4.1.5.8 (in the story of Cyavana’s rejuvenation): “Now the Aśvins then wandered about here on earth, performing cures” (Eggeling’s translation p. 274). 99 On the “head of the sacrifice”, the pravargya ritual and the healing function of the Aśvin-s, see Gabriele Zeller, Die vedischen Zwillingsgötter, 123 and 127–129; on the sautrāmaṇī ritual and healing of Indra by the Aśvin-s, and for an interpretation of the eventual function of the latter, see p. 123–124 and 129–149. 100 TS 6.4.9.2–3: … táyos tredh bháiṣayjaṃ ví ny àdadhuḥ: agnáu tṛ ́tīyam apsú tṛ ́tīyaṃ brāhmaṇé tṛ ́tīyam. tásmād udapātrám (2) upanidhya brāhmaṇáṃ dakṣiṇató niṣdya bheṣajáṃ kuryāt. yvad evá bheṣajáṃ téna karoti samárdhukam asya kṛtáṃ bhavati … (3).

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equivalent of a pure and purifying agent. In this way, the healing activity is not substantially marred by the impurity of the human bodies at which it is directed. If, therefore, a human healer avails himself of a vessel with water and the presence of a Brahmin, his healing efforts will be successful. In the final analysis, the attempt at reconciliation of the conflict described above thus also results in an ideological appropriation of the practice of healing on the part of Brahminical orthodoxy, in the sense of exerting ideological and possibly actual ritual control over it and its effectiveness.101 Even so, in spite of all this one should not forget the statement that a Brahmin should not practice healing, that is, that the medical profession is not sanctioned for members of the Brahmin class. The impurity of the human body, especially the diseased body, with which the healer has to come into close contact, remains, in spite of the ritual purification of the healing skill and thus of the act of healing itself. 2.3 Surprisingly, and historically highly significant, however, the above-translated section of the Taittirīyasaṃhitā with the denigrating remark on the Aśvin-s and the prohibition of healing as the activity of a Brahmin, is not found in the parallel versions of the Black Yajurveda, that is, in its older recensions, the Maitrāyaṇīsaṃhitā and the Kāṭhaka.102 These recensions were transmitted in Yajurvedic schools opposed to that of the Taittirīyaka-s and are closely related to the only fragmentarily preserved Caraka branch of the Black Yajurveda.103 In their versions of the passage, it is furthermore stressed that after the purification with the bahiṣpavamāna litany the Aśvin-s had become pure and worthy of the sacrifice.104 We can thus see that the negative attitude in orthodox-Brahminical circles towards the human body because of its impurity from the ritual point of view, an attitude that will become more and more pronounced and is accompanied by 101 See also Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing, 23. Zysk furthermore interprets the passage to the effect that after being purified by the bahiṣpavamāna litany human healers could participate in rituals and practice medicine in the Brahminical setting (ibid.). 102 See Jean Filliozat, The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine, 19–21. 103 See Michael Witzel, “Materialien zu den vedischen Schulen”. 104 See Maitrāyaṇīsaṃhitā 4.6.2 (ed. Leopold von Schroeder, new impression, Leipzig, Otto Har­rassowitz / Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft / F. A. Brockhaus, 1923, vol. 2, 80): … táu vái bahiṣpavamānénaivá pāvayitv tbhyāṃ pūtbhyāṃ yajñíyābhyāṃ bhūtbhyāṃ gráham agṛhṇan. … and Kāṭhaka 27.4 (ed. Leopold von Schroeder, Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1909, 143): … táu dev bahiṣpavamānéna pāvayitv tbhyāṃ śúcibhyāṃ médhyābhyāṃ bhūtbhyāṃ gráham agṛhṇan. …. See also Kapiṣṭhalakaṭhasaṃhitā 42.4 (ed. Raghu Vira [Meharchand Lachhman Das Sanskrit and Prakrit Series, 1], Lahore, Mehar Chand Lachhman Das, 1932, 251), referred to in Jean Filliozat, The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine, 20, n. 1, and G. U. Thite, Medicine, 185, n. 14.



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the denigration of the medical profession, was not yet completely pervasive at an earlier historical stage of the Black Yajurveda. It may even be that medicine as a rational science and practice developed among adherents of the Caraka branch of the Black Yajurveda during the “dark” centuries of the medical science, until it emerged in an advanced theoretical and practical form in the first two centuries of our time reckoning, in a foundational medical work called the Carakasaṃhitā.105 In any case, the negative image of healers with the mainstream Brahminical priesthood because of the growing concern with ritual purity and the conception of the human body as ritually impure, must have marginalized those who promoted and developed the medical science in spite of its repudiation by the Brahminical establishment and a possibly bad reputation of the healing profession among the upper ranks of society in general. As has been forcibly argued by Kenneth G. Zysk, this situation resulted in the association of theoreticians and practitioners of medicine with heterodox circles, where ritual purity was not an issue.106 2.4 Which were these heterodox circles? In the present context, the adherents of Buddhism – monks, lay followers and sympathizers alike –, which developed from the fifth century BCE onwards in the north-eastern region of the Indian sub-continent. Opposed to the highly ritualized Vedic religion firmly in the hands of the Brahminical elite, and dissatisfied with the perspectives offered by them, many seekers for truth, personal ethical and spiritual perfection, and a way out of what they considered an unsatisfactory existence in this world, to be followed at most by an also eventually unsatisfactory or only intermittent existence in some more pleasant afterworld, renounced the established religion of the Brahmins and the mainstream society shaped by it, and adopted a homeless ascetic life style away from the developing urban centres of the small kingdoms of this area. Wandering about or living in a solitary way, but also congregating in small loosely-knit groups and communicating with each other, these persons, called śramaṇa-s (“those who exert themselves”), formed the ambience out of which, inter alia, Buddhism arose.107 In this ambience in general, ritual purity along the lines of the Brahminical establishment did not matter any longer; most śramaṇa-s probably completely abandoned ritual as a means in their search for alternative ways towards perfection and fulfilment. Later on, when the first monastic communities were formed by followers of prominent śramaṇa-s who had become successful teachers, such 105 See below, section 3.1. 106 See Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing. 107 Further see, e.g., Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism, 9–13.

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as the historical Buddha and Mahāvīra Jina, admission to them was not dependent on any particular ritual purity or rank within the socio-religious order conceived and upheld the Brahmins; we can also assume that there was no physical segregation among the monks along the lines of their former states of purity. From this point of view, and because in the orthodox perception ritual purity and impurity were conceived and concretized in a very physical way, it is correct to say that in the heterodox Buddhist view the body was not considered impure. 2.5 If we believe the later hagiographies of the Buddha, he objected to the extreme asceticism that was practised by other śramaṇa-s and that he himself had practised to the limit, fasting up to the point that all his ribs and sinews stood out and his vertebrae became visible in the cavity of his emaciated stomach.108 However, mortification of the body by this and other methods proved unsuccessful for him in his endeavour to find a way to escape from suffering in the form of repeated existence in this world.109 The code of conduct developed for the early Buddhist monastic communities makes it clear that the body, although it exemplifies in a most tangible way universal suffering, has to be well maintained and regularly cared for as the vehicle of the mind that aspires to release from suffering. It also has to be medically treated in case of sickness or accidents. Among the very few possessions that were allowed to a Buddhist monk, there was a small medical kit, for self-treatment and for the treatment of fellow monks in cases of emergency.110 It appears that the monks also cared for lay people who were in need of medical treatment;111 compassion towards other living beings, although not yet as pronounced as in the later development of Buddhism, already played a role in Buddhist ethical and spiritual theory and in Buddhist practice. Furthermore, when they roamed the countryside during the time of the year when they were supposed to be homeless wanderers, that is, outside the rainy season, Buddhist monks may have become familiar with folk and tribal remedies, especially herbal

108 See the famous sculpture of the fasting Buddha from Gandhāra, preserved in the Lahore Museum, whose upper part is shown, e.g., in Étienne Lamotte, “The Buddha, His Teachings and His Sangha”, 42; for a full image, see, e.g., the front cover of Johannes Bronkhorst, The Two Sources of Indian Asceticism, and Kazi K. Ashraf, The Hermit’s Hut, 131, fig. 5.3. 109 For canonical sources on the Buddha’s practice of austerities and his decision to abandon them, see André Bareau, Recherches sur la biographie du Buddha, 45–55. For a poetic treatment of this episode of the Buddha’s vita, see the Buddhacarita by the first or second-century poet Aśvaghoṣa, Chapter 12, stanzas 94–107, translated in Edward H. Johnston, The Buddhacarita, 183–185, and, more recently, in Patrick Olivelle, Life of the Buddha, 359–365. 110 See Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing, 39–40. 111 See Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing, 41–42.



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medicine.112 There are many further intriguing and significant associations, also in the context of the Buddha’s teachings, between the early Buddhist tradition and medical theory and practice. From this perspective, one may consider the early Buddhist attitude towards the human body a positive, affirmative one. 2.6 The body, one of the five constituents that make up a person according to Buddhist doctrine,113 frequently serves as an object of mental exercises or meditative practices where it has great didactic value for the attainment and cultivation of soteriologically relevant insights and attitudes. In this basically positive role from a pragmatic point of view, it figures for example as an important object and focus of guided contemplation114 in a set of four types of exercises meant to direct the mindfulness of a practitioner.115 For the focus of the first type of these exercises, one may direct one’s mind towards the process of breathing, physical postures of the body, and various bodily functions and processes.116 Furthermore, the body may be mentally dissected into the four material elements earth, etc., of which it is eventually made up.117 This particular dissection reveals that the human body 112 In his Asceticism and Healing, Kenneth G. Zysk treats the materia medica, including concrete recipes of remedies, used by monks and specific cures by prominent physicians documented in some stories in the Pali canon. For a comprehensive survey of all information relating to medicine in theory and practice in the Pali canon and its commentarial literature, see Jyotir Mitra, A Critical Appraisal. 113 The five constituents of a person (skandha, Pali khandha) are form or matter, emotions, the linguistically shaped cognition of objects, volitional–affective impulses, and awareness or perception of objects. For a penetrating study of the notion of khandha and its development in early Buddhism, see Tilmann Vetter, The ‘Khandha Passages’. 114 Literally: “tracking observation” (Pali anupassanā). 115 These exercises are called “Directing Mindfulness” or “Applying Mindfulness” (Pali satipaṭṭhāna). For a masterful analysis and historical interpretation of the various versions of the “Sermon on Directing Mindfulness” (Satipaṭṭhānasutta) and the further development of this central Buddhist practice, see Lambert Schmithausen, “Die vier Konzentrationen der Aufmerksamkeit”. For a concise exposition based on the versions found in the Pali canon, together with translated excerpts, see Dieter Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus, vol. 1, 73–84. 116 See Edward Conze, Buddhist Meditation, 62–70, for commented excerpts from the exposition on the mindful awareness of the body – bodily postures, attitudes and behavior, and breathing – by the Pali commentator Buddhagosa (ca. 400 CE) in his Papañcasūdanī (on the Majjhimanikāya) and Visuddhimagga. 117 This exercise is called dhātuvavatthāna, “Taking Apart / Distinguishing the Elements”, in Pali. See Majjhimanikāya (MN) 28 (“Greater Discourse on the Simile of the Elephant’s Footprint”), 62 (“Greater Discourse on an Exhortation to Rāhula”), and 140 (“Discourse on the Analysis of the Elements”), translated in I. B. Horner, The Collection of the Middle Length Sayings, vol. 1, 230–238, vol. 2, 91–97, and vol. 3, 285–294. See also the summaries in the Satipaṭṭhānasutta (MN 10, “Discourse on the Applications of Mindfulness”, Horner’s translation vol. 1, 70–82) and the Mahāsatipaṭṭhānasuttanta (Dīghanikāya 22, translated in Thomas W. and Caroline A. F.

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is something composite, and therefore impermanent and devoid of an essence, with the result that the practitioner gets rid of the persistent wrong notion of a substantial, permanent living being, person or individual, which is responsible for one’s attachment to the body and the arising of all kinds of desires and other soteriologically harmful emotions, and thus obstructs the practitioner’s spiritual progress towards liberation. The exercise thus reflects the basic negative attitude of early Buddhism towards the body from the metaphysical, spiritual and soteriological points of view. This attitude becomes even clearer and more differentiated in other exercises of this type where the body is mentally dissected in a more graphic way. One of them is the contemplation of the thirty-two constituent parts of the body. These constituents range from appendages like hair, bodily hair and nails, over structural elements, like flesh and bones, and the most important organs, to bodily fluids, such as lachrymal fluid, blood, spittle and mucus, and various bodily excretions, like urine, pus, sweat and faeces. This is, all in all, not a very pleasant picture, and the introductory statements to this part of the “Sermon on Directing Mindfulness”118 emphasize this assessment and prepare the audience for what is to come: Furthermore, oh monks, the monk contemplates his body from the soles of his feet upwards and from the hair of his head downwards, enclosed by skin, filled with all kinds of filth.119

The immediate function of this analytical contemplation of the living human body is clearly to arouse disgust and revulsion in the monk, and thus to make him realize the true impure and repugnant nature of his own body and of others’ bodies, with the aim to get rid of any body-related attachment and desires, which are at the basis of the individual’s entanglement in this world and its inherent suffering, and which are all detrimental to one’s spiritual progress towards enlightenment and ultimate liberation.120

Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, 327–346; see also the reprint in Ten Suttas from the Dīgha Nikāya, 307–344). 118 See I. B. Horner, The Middle Length Sayings, vol. 1, 73–74; for Buddhaghosa’s comments see Edward Conze, Buddhist Meditation, 95–100. See also Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers, 46–48. 119 Puna ca paraṁ bhikkhave bhikkhu imam ̄eva kāyaṁ uddhaṁ pādatalā adho kesamatthakā tacapariyantaṁ pūran ̄ nānappakārassa asucino paccavekkhati (MN 10, ed. V. Trenckner [Pali Text Society Text Series, 60], vol. 1, London, Pali Text Society / Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979 [reprint of 1888], 57). 120 Further on the practices of mentally dissecting one’s body and the contemplation of the disgusting components of the human body (aśubhabhāvanā) in Mahāyāna didactic literature, see Karin Preisendanz, “Zu einer zentralen philosophischen Kontroverse”.



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This graphic illustration of the decidedly negative Buddhist attitude towards the body from the spiritual and soteriological points of view is topped by the sixth and last kind of the body-related practice of directing mindfulness according to the “Sermon on Directing Mindfulness”, that is, the analytical contemplation of corpses on a burial ground. The monk is encouraged to contemplate corpses in numerous gruesome states of decomposition – bloated, bluish and festering corpses in the first and subsequent days, and bloody skeletons merely held together by tendons at a later stage of decay –, corpses devastated by crows and vultures, dogs and jackals, or eaten up by worms, dismembered skeletons, and individual bones in the final stage of decay. With each contemplated state, the monk should realize that his own body will also undergo the same fate and therefore apprehend its impermanence and thus worthlessness; this recognition will help him to distance himself from his body, and to abandon the erroneous notion that it may be his own permanent Self which keeps him from advancing on the path towards release. Thus, in spite of the striking emphasis on the disgusting states of the dead body, the main attitude towards the body expressed through this mental exercise is its rejection on metaphysical and eventually soteriological grounds.121 3. To sum up, if considered in isolation, the decidedly negative and depreciating Buddhist attitude towards the human body from the metaphysical, spiritual and soteriological perspectives outlined above would definitely not provide a suitable basis for the association of medical men with the early Buddhist monastic environment. Nevertheless, one can also find there the affirmative and caring attitude towards the body briefly addressed above,122 and the lack of concern about ritual purity and impurity from the orthodox–Brahminical point of view,123 an issue that becomes most prominently reified in the physical body. Furthermore, as already

121 On further imagery in the Buddha’s sermons and further South Asian Buddhist literature, aimed at arousing disgust with the human (and especially female) body, and on the Buddhist construction of the body from a feminist point of view, see Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers. For an insightful examination of the deconstruction of the body in Indian asceticism from the points of view of the physical body, sexuality, food and hair see Patrick Olivelle, Ascetics and Brahmins, Chapter 7 (“Deconstruction of the Body in Indian Asceticism”). 122 See section 2.5. The notion of caring for the bodily well-being of others finds its most extreme expression in the Buddhist idea of the compassionate gift of one’s own body, which takes a prominent position in Buddhist didactic narrative literature, such as the stories on earlier lives of the future Buddha. In this genre, the attitudes of affirmation and rejection of the body meet in a striking manner. For a penetrating study of the gift of one’s body in South Asian Buddhist literature, see Reiko Ohnuma, Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood. 123 See section 2.4 above.

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mentioned, there are numerous contexts in which medical issues and topics become apparent in the Buddhist canon, in various forms in the basic doctrinal context, but also in the narrative context of the Buddha’s vita and in a number of legendary accounts: all of this indicates an affinity of the early Buddhist tradition with ideas and concepts relating to medical theory and practice. Conversely, the two oldest foundational works on the medical science in South Asia do not only provide us with rich information on a fully developed science and a glimpse of its pre-classical doctrinal diversity, but also exhibit numerous resonances with Buddhist religious, ethical, philosophical and psychological concepts, and use some specific Buddhist terminology. Even though their authors, compilers and redactors fully place the mentioned works into the orthodox–Brahminical religious, philosophical and cultural context and present them as propounding a Brahminical science, these resonances and usages point at an earlier historical phase in the development of the medical science during which there must have been close intellectual interaction between medical men and the heterodox Buddhist tradition epitomized by the monastic community and prominent lay followers. As can be expected, these relics of the past found in the early-classical foundational works on medicine do not relate to the negative, depreciating and rejecting attitude towards the human body in early Buddhism, but rather to aspects of its affirmative attitude towards it. Furthermore, they relate to Buddhist psychological and spiritual concepts that could retain their place in the conceptual framework of the medical tradition even after it had presumably been “Brahmanized”, that is, made to fit the wider religious, philosophical and cultural framework of orthodox Brahmanism in the early-classical period – a development that can be inferred especially from the evidence of the older of the two foundational medical works. 3.1 It is to this work, called the Carakasaṃhitā, whose core may be dated to the first two centuries of the Common Era, with some portions possibly going back to the first century BCE, that I would like to turn to in conclusion, to sketch the specifically medical conception of the body and its care and treatment that becomes apparent in it, not so much from the point of view of its material composition, anatomy and physiology, or from the therapeutic point of view, but rather from the cultural, socio-religious and soteriological points of view. Already the Carakasaṃhitā’s own account of the origin and transmission of the medical knowledge propounded in it reveals much about its concept of the human body from these perspectives. The account furthermore places the medical tradition firmly into an orthodox–Brahminical framework, while it retains some traces of the medical tradition’s earlier interaction and involvement with a Buddhist ambience.



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As in many other foundational works of Brahminical science, or in commentaries written on them, the account of the genesis of the respective traditional body of expert knowledge is placed at the very beginning of the Carakasaṃhitā.124 Here we learn that Āyurveda, the eternal “Knowledge (veda) of the Human Life Span / Life Force (āyus)”, presented in it was first proclaimed by god Brahmā, a major deity who emerged at the time of the late Brāhmaṇa-s and holds a prominent position among the orthodox–Brahminical gods who feature in the Buddhist canon.125 Brahmā transmitted this body of knowledge to Prajāpati, the creator god, culture hero, and father of all creatures according to the Brāhmaṇa-s;126 Prajāpati transmitted it to the Aśvin-s,127 and the Aśvin-s to Indra.128 In this mythological narrative of the origin of Āyurveda in general, we thus reencounter precisely those divine figures who stand out in connection with the positive, affirmative conceptualization of the body in earlier Vedic religion and culture, whereas Brahmā, from whom the transmission starts, strongly connects the “genealogy” of Āyurveda with a later period, namely, the period of the formation of the Buddhist canon where gods Brahmā and Indra appear as the two most important representatives of the pantheon of the Brahmins in the Buddhist imagination. The narrative of the Carakasaṃhitā continues with its own legendary origin, turning at some point into a semi-historical and historical account. Once the sages of yore observed that diseases had befallen the human beings and kept them from meritorious activities, namely, ascetic practices, fasting, memorizing, reciting and studying the orally transmitted revealed Vedic literature, leading a lifestyle devoted to and in consonance with the true and penetrating linguistic expression of reality by the poet–priests and the potency inherent in it (bráhman),129 and special religious observances; the diseases also impeded the human life-force in general.130 124 For some other examples, see the contributions in Walter Slaje, Śāstrārambha. 125 For a survey of the worship and status of god Brahmā from the Brāhmaṇa-s onwards up to the sixth century CE, see Greg Bailey, The Mythology of Brahmā, Chapter 1. 126 See above, section 1.7. 127 See above, section 1.3. 128 See above, section 1.2. 129 The translation of the word bráhman in the compound brahmacārya, which is adopted here, instead of, e.g., the commonly found “Absolute”, reflects the word’s original meaning of a true formulation of reality in all its interrelatedness by a poet–priest to whom this reality revealed itself; subsequently, the inherent cosmic potency of such formulations was also referred to with this word, which lead to its denotation of an all-creative and supportive, omnipresent potent entity, the “Absolute”. See Paul Thieme, “Bráhman”. The very common translation of the term brahmacārya as “celibacy” or “celibatory lifestyle” is highly misleading and reductive. 130 See Carakasaṃhitā (CS) Sūtrasthāna (Sū) 1.6, translated, together with a close paraphrase, sometimes practically translation, of Cakrapāṇidatta’s eleventh-century commentary Āyurveda­ dīpikā in Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash, Agniveśa’s Caraka Saṃhitā, vol. 1, 16–18.

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Upon this, the sages felt commiseration towards the creatures and assembled to discuss the situation. They then sent Bharadvāja as an envoy to approach Indra from whom he indeed obtained the medical knowledge which he imparted to his assembled co-sages upon his return.131 The sage and physician Punarvasu of the Ātreya clan was one among the crowd of sages who were instructed by Bharadvāja at the time, and he subsequently taught the “knowledge of the human life span / life force” to six disciples. Agniveśa, the most outstanding among them, first composed a fundamental systematic scholarly treatise (tantra) on the basis of his teacher’s instructions.132 The medical teachings contained in the Carakasaṃhitā are said to be those of Agniveśa’s treatise, of which an early redaction was accomplished by a physician–scholar named Caraka;133 this explains from the emic point of view the name Carakasaṃhitā, generally understood to mean “Caraka’s Collection”.134 3.2 The important point in the programmatic part of this narrative of origin is, inter alia, the idea of disease as an obstacle to various meritorious religious activities. The fact that humans are unable to perform these activities when their body is afflicted by disease actually motivates the sages to dispatch Bharadvāja, in order to learn from Indra about a means of appeasement or pacification of disease.135 This reveals a fundamentally affirmative attitude towards the human body, inasmuch as it is the instrument and substratum of salvific religious practice as prescribed or recommended in the orthodox–Brahminical tradition, and thus its indispensible prerequisite. Such being the case, the body requires ade-

131 See CS Sū 1.18cd–26 (vol. 1, p. 20–22 in the translation by Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash). 132 See CS Sū 1.30–32 (vol. 1, p. 23–24 in the translation by Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash). The other disciples were Bhela, Jatūkarṇa, Parāśara, Hārīta and Kṣārapāṇi. 133 The tradition that the word caraka, the first component of the work’s title, relates to an important redactor of Agniveśa’s treatise called Caraka, appears rather late in medical literature; for details see G. Jan Meulenbeld, A History of Indian Medical Literature, 106 and 109. 134 At the end of the work, the job done by this extremely wise redactor is briefly characterized: he expanded on what had been only partially said and summarized what had been said in too much detail, and thus made the old treatise practically a brand-new one; see CS Siddhisthāna (Si) 12.36ab–37. Reference to Caraka the redactor is also found in stanzas that conclude the books (literally: “place”, “locality”), i.e., major parts, of the work. For example, at the end of the first book, the Sūtrasthāna, it is stated that this entire book within the treatise produced by Agniveśa and redacted by Caraka is concluded, with an extent as outlined in the immediately preceding summarizing stanzas; see CS Sū 1.30.90, together with 86–89 (vol. 1, p. 618–619 in the translation by Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash). See also stanzas CS Si 12.54cd–55, which are not transmitted in all manuscripts of the text. For a possible connection with the Caraka branch of the Black Yajurveda see above, section 2.3. 135 See CS Sū 1.17cd–18ab (vol. 1, p. 19–20 in the translation by Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash).



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quate care and treatment, which are the subject matter of the medical science and the concrete task of the physician. Moreover, another major point is put here into the mouths of the sages when they convene to discuss the unfortunate situation: Freedom from disease is the ultimate basis for religious merit, material well-being, emotional well-being, and liberation. Diseases take it away, and they also take away a superior life.136

This is an explicit reference to the classical orthodox–Brahminical ideology of four goals of man (puruṣārtha). They comprise (1) religious merit, resulting from compliance with the orthodox–Brahminical socio-religious norms, (2) material well-being, epitomized by material possessions and wealth, (3) emotional satisfaction, which includes sexual gratification, and (4) liberation, that is, final release from the round of repeated births.137 With physical health at the very basis of achieving these four goals, with the fourth and last one as the ultimate goal that supersedes the earlier ones as lower, preliminary goals and prerequisites at the same time, we may thus understand by implication another decidedly affirmative attitude towards the human body, from the point of view of the graded perfection of man which culminates in liberation from further rebirth. The accumulation of merit, by means of meritorious religious practices, is not possible without a body in healthy condition, as was already stressed earlier in the second part of the narrative. Material well-being and emotional satisfaction can also not be achieved and experienced without a healthy body. And even though the body may stand in the way of liberating insight because of all its desires and the metaphysically erroneous and soteriologically harmful conceptions attached to it, which are addressed in other contexts in the Carakasaṃhitā, and even though it will be obliterated in the state of final release, in its healthy state it is the indispensable presupposition for all successful physical and mental efforts aimed at this ultimate goal. A further context for the expression of such an affirmative attitude towards the human body is provided by a large text section on the topic of three human

136 dharmārthakāmamokṣāṇām ārogyaṃ mūlam uttamam / rogās tasyāpahartaraḥ śreyaso jīvitasya ca // (CS Sū 1.15cd–16ab, ed. Jadavaji Trikamji, Bombay, Nirnay Sagar Press, 31941). See also Henry R. Zimmer, Hindu Medicine, 47 and Arion Roşu, “Le Trivarga dans l’Āyurveda”, 256. 137 For a philosophical and historical study of this concept, see Wilhelm Halbfass, “Mensch­ sein und Lebensziele”, with further literature; for an anthropological and structuralistic analysis and interpretation, see Madeleine Biardeau, Hinduism, Chapter 2.

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pursuits in a later chapter of the first book of the Carakasaṃhitā.138 These are the pursuit of life (prāṇaiṣaṇā),139 that is, of an undiminished vital force and exhaustion of the full life span, the pursuit of wealth,140 and the pursuit of the so-called other world,141 that is, purposeful activity in view of a renewed existence after death in another setting,142 especially and foremost a heavenly existence.143 This triad may be an adaptation of an older orthodox–Brahminical concept of three human pursuits mentioned in a revealed text of the Vedic tradition, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad,144 namely, the pursuit of male offspring, the pursuit of property, and the pursuit of (this) world.145 Arion Roşu speaks of a “résonance upaniṣadique”146 when he discusses the integration of the three human goals (trivarga), a predecessor of the notion of the four goals of man (puruṣārtha) without the inclusion of liberation, into the three human pursuits, which he considers the 138 CS Sū 11.1–33. See the cursory exposition in Surendranath Dasgupta , A History of Indian Philosophy, 405–408, and the structural survey as well as detailed paraphrase and treatment, with consideration of Cakrapāṇidatta’s commentary, in Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, “Caraka’s Proof of Rebirth”. Tabe E. Meindersma (“Paralokasiddhi in Carakasaṃhitā”, 266–267) also provides a brief analysis of CS Sū 11.2–33. His hypothesis and conclusion that the whole section constitutes a “quite separate” treatise on the proof of rebirth (paralokasiddhi) inserted here (pp. 266 and 271–273), however, is not convincing because the section is well embedded in the chapter and connects with other sections of the core books of the Carakasaṃhitā from a terminological, stylistic and conceptual point of view. Arion Roşu rightly characterizes the examination of the “other world” as an exemplary expression of the rational attitude of the Indian medical scientists applied here to substantiate a doctrine that was not developed on rational grounds (Les conceptions psychologiques, 79); see similarly Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, “Yukti, le quatrième pramāṇa des médecins”, 34. 139 On the derivation and meaning of the word eṣaṇā (“pursuit”), see Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, “Caraka’s Proof of Rebirth”, 94–95. 140 dhanaiṣaṇā. 141 paralokaiṣaṇā. See CS Sū 11.3 (vol. 1, p. 202–203 in the translation by Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash). The pursuit of life is treated in CS Sū 11.4, the pursuit of wealth in 11.5. 142 See also Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat’s remarks on the usage of paraloka in the present context (“Yukti, le quatrième pramāṇa des médecins”, 34). See further Ernst Steinkellner, “Anmerkungen zu einer buddhistischen Texttradition”, 87, on the term paraloka, as used in Buddhist literature, from a historical perspective that can also be applied with slight adjustment to its usage in the non-Buddhist traditions. 143 For a discussion of the meaning of paraloka in the context of CS Sū 11.3 in combination with 11.33, see Rahul Peter Das, “Heilskonzepte”, 35–36. 144 See Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad 3.5.1 and 4.4.22 (translated in Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads, 83 and 125). See also Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, “Caraka’s Proof of Rebirth”, 96 and, though inconclusive, Rahul Peter Das, “Heilskonzepte”, 36–38. 145 The terms are putreṣaṇā, vitteṣaṇā and lokeṣaṇā. 146 See Arion Roşu, “Le Trivarga dans l’Āyurveda”, 258–259.



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basic values of medical philosophy. The continuing importance of the concept of the three Upanishadic pursuits in the early modern period is documented by the fact that in a formula employed in the ritual of undertaking complete world renunciation (saṃnyāsa), the renouncer states that he has “risen from” these three pursuits, i.e., distanced and emancipated himself from them.147 It is in the exposition on the first pursuit, the pursuit of life (prāṇa), that the affirmative attitude towards the human body is expressed from the medical point of view. Here, again, I would like to quote the text itself: Among these pursuits, one should first turn to the pursuit of life. Why? Because when life is lost, everything is lost. It is protected in the case of a healthy person through following a healthy lifestyle, in the case of a sick person through being not neglectful with regard to the pacification of the disease;148 both aspects have been taught here and will be taught in the following. That is to say, somebody who follows what has been taught here obtains a long life span because of the protection of his life. Thus, the pursuit of life has been explained.149

The fundamental importance of the human body is nicely worked out here. Only a healthy body allows the pursuit of wealth, that is, the obtainment of a sufficient livelihood, which again contributes to a long life span during which man may pursue the “other world”, that is, exert himself in various religious practices, strive for moral and spiritual perfection, and cultivate the soteriologically relevant attitudes, with the aim not only of a good life in this present world, but especially of a better rebirth in this world in the future, or even in heaven.150 Attentiveness with regard to these “doors towards merit” would again not be possible without the body being in a healthy condition. 3.3 By emphasizing in these ways the important role of the body within the framework of the orthodox–Brahminical ideology of human perfection, the Carakasaṃhitā not merely expresses the positive and affirmative attitude towards the body in the medical tradition, but also seeks to promote such an attitude 147 See, e.g., the two quotations from the Viśveśvarapaddhati and Kapila in the early-modern manual for world renunciation entitled Yatidharmaprakāśa (edited in Patrick Olivelle, Vāsudevāśrama Yatidharmaprakāśa, vol. 1, p. 46,1–2 and 19–20, translated vol. 2, p. 95). 148 The word used to refer to disease here, vikāra, literally means „unnatural/unwholesome/ unhealthy transformation“. 149 āsāṃ tu khalv eṣaṇānāṃ prāṇaiṣaṇāṃ tāvat pūrvataram āpadyeta. kasmāt? prāṇaparityāge hi sarvatyāgaḥ. tasyānupālanaṃ svasthasya svasthavṛttānuvṛttiḥ, āturasya vikārapraśamane ’pramādaḥ; tadubhayam etad uktaṃ vakṣyate ca. tad yathā – uktam anuvartamānaḥ prāṇānupālanād dīrgham āyur avāpnotīti prathamaiṣaṇā vyākhyātā bhavati (CS Sū 11.4, ed. Jadavaji Trikamji, p. 68). 150 See the conclusion of the treatment of the pursuit of the “other world” in CS Sū 11.33 (vol. 1, p. 218–219 in the translation by Ram Karan Sharma and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash).

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among orthodox–Brahminical circles and the society ideologically guided and influenced by them, and in this way to counteract the prevalent solidified notions of the ritual impurity of the human body. In the final analysis, this emphasis can also be seen as an apologetic manoeuvre, inasmuch as it amounts to an attempt at ideological justification of the medical profession and exculpation of its practitioners, and thus to a Brahmanization of the medical science, an attempt in which well-designed reference is made to some of the earliest concepts of the body and affirmative attitudes towards it in the Brahminical tradition, supported by aspects of the positive attitude towards the body adopted from the Buddhist tradition.

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Roşu, Arion, “Études āyurvédiques. Le Trivarga dans l’Āyurveda”, Indologica Taurinensia 6 (1978) 255–260. Id., Les conceptions psychologiques dans les textes médicaux indiens (Publications de l’Institut de civilisation indienne, 43). Paris, Collège de France, Institut de civilisation indienne, Diffusion E. de Boccard, 1978. Schlingloff, Dieter, Die Religion des Buddhismus, 2 vols. (Sammlung Göschen, 174, 770). Berlin, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1962, 1963. Schmithausen, Lambert, “Die vier Konzentrationen der Aufmerksamkeit: Zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung einer spirituellen Praxis des Buddhismus”, Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft 4 (1976), 241–266. Id., “Mensch, Tier und Pflanze und der Tod in den älteren Upaniṣaden”. In Im Tod gewinnt der Mensch sein Selbst. Das Phänomen des Todes in asiatischer und abendländischer Religionstradition (Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, 14 = Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 624), edited by Gerhard Oberhammer. Wien, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1995, 43–74. Sharma, Ram Karan and Vaidya Bhagwan Dash, Agniveśa’s Caraka Saṃhitā (Text with English Translation & Critical Exposition Based on Cakrapāṇidatta’s Āyurveda Dīpikā), 7 vols. (Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies, 94). Varanasi, Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 31992, 3 1994, 1988, 1997, 1999, 2001, 22005. Slaje, Walter, ed., Śāstrārambha. Inquiries into the Preamble in Sanskrit (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 6). Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2008. Steinkellner, Ernst, “Anmerkungen zu einer buddhistischen Texttradition: Paralokasiddhi” Anzeiger der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 121 (1984), 79–94. Ten Suttas from the Dīgha Nikāya. Long Discourses of the Buddha (Bibliotheca Indo-Tibetica Series, 12). Sarnath, Varanasi, Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1987 (originally published by the Burma Pitaka Association, Rangoon, 1984). Thieme, Paul, “Bráhman”, Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 102 (Neue Folge 27) (1952), 91–129. Reprinted in Paul Thieme, Kleine Schriften (Glasenapp-Stiftung, 5), edited by Georg Buddruss. Wiesbaden, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 21984, 100–138. Id., Gedichte aus dem Rigveda. Stuttgart, Reclam, 1964. Thite, Ganesh U., Medicine. Its Magico–Religious Aspects According to the Vedic and Later Literature. Poona, Continental Prakashan, 1982. Vetter, Tilmann, The ‘Khandha Passages’ in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas (Veröffentlichungen zu den Sprachen und Kulturen Südasiens, 33 = Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 682). Wien, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2000. Weber, Albrecht, “Fünftes Buch der Atharva-Saṃhitā” Indische Studien 18 (1898), 154–288. Whitney, William Dwight, Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā, 2 vols. (Harvard Oriental Series, 7), edited by Charles Rockwell Lanman. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, 1905. Willman-Grabowska, Helena, “L’idée de l’ātmán du Rig-Veda aux Brāhmaṇa” Rocznik Orientalisticzny 7 (1929–1930), 10–25. Wilson, Liz, Charming Cadavers. Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature (Women in Culture and Society). Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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Witzel, Michael, “Materialien zu den vedischen Schulen. I. Über die Caraka-Śākhā”. Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 7 (1981), 109–131, and 8–9 (1982), 171–240. Id., “Tracing the Vedic Dialects”. In: Dialectes dans les littératures indo-aryennes. Actes du Colloque International organisé par l’UA 1058 sous les auspices du C.N.R.S … Paris (Fondation Hugot), 16–18 septembre 1986 (Publications de l’Institut de civilisation indienne, 55), edited by Collette Caillat. Paris, Collège de France – Diffusion de Boccard, 1989, 97–265. Zeller, Gabriele, Die vedischen Zwillingsgötter. Untersuchungen zur Genese ihres Kultes (Freiburger Beiträge zur Indologie, 24). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990. Zimmer, Henry R., Hindu Medicine (Publications of the Institute of the History of Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University, Third Series: The Hideyo Noguchi Lectures, 6), edited by Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1948. Zysk, Kenneth G., Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India. Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery. Delhi etc., Oxford University Press, 1991.

Achim Mittag

Body – State – Cosmos Random Notes on the Thinking of the Body in China The reason why we have terrible vexations is that we have a body. 吾所以有大患者，爲吾有身。 Daodejing 道德經 (c. late fifth century BCE), section 13

Introduction More than twenty years ago, in 1994, an essay volume was published unter the title “Body, Subject and Power in China”. This rich and thought-provoking volume with a wide range of topics opened up a new field of study revolving around experiences of the body specific to Chinese history, engendered subjectivities, and other issues of bodiliness in China’s past and present. As the two editors, Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow explain, the volume intended to “encourage scholars to avoid making broad generalizations about China and to rethink traditional notions of power, subject, and bodiliness in light of actual Chinese practices”1. The reader of the present article must be cautioned against expecting what Zito and Barlow envisioned. In fact, Section 1 will not rise beyond some general observations concerning the conception of the body in Chinese history. The two Chinese characters of the term ‘body’ (shenti 身體) in present-day language, shen 身 and ti 體, will serve as the starting points of two subsections, which primarily deal with three topics; first, the conception of the body as a single manifold; second, the postulate to preserve one’s body unmutilated; and third, the body as tied to a changing identity. In Section 2 the focus will be more concentrated, yet not upon the “actual Chinese practices” but rather upon three historical phases of two hundred fifty years each, namely the periods from about 1250 to 1000 BCE, 300 to 50 BCE, and 1040–1290 CE. These phases were periods of transition, seeing the formation of the conception of the body prevalent in ancient, medieval, and early modern China, respectively.

1 Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power, backside of cover.

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1 We begin our mini-tour d’horizon round the Chinese conception of the human body with some random remarks concerning the two characters which constitute the modern Chinese term ‘body’, shenti, i.e. shen and ti. Since shen includes words on a level of higher degree of abstraction, we first glance at the second character ti.

1.1 ti 體 As most Chinese characters, ti consists of two elements, one semantic and one phonetic element. The semantic element to the left is gu 骨, ‘bone; skeleton’, the phonetic element to the right is li 豊; its meaning is irrelevant in our context. Ti refers to the physical body in its entirety, but also to its limbs,2 or, to be more precise, to the body’s functions of spatial movement. Similarly, in a figurative sense, ti takes on the meaning of ‘entity; system; class’ as well as its respective parts. An example of the latter meaning is found in the Book of Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), where three main disciples of Confucius are referred to as each being “one quintessential part” (yi ti 一體) of “the Sage” (i.e. Confucius), and three other, less prominent disciples as each being “one quintessential part”, but to “a lesser degree”.3 This notion of the body as a single whole consisting of a number of suborganisms evokes the resonating notion of ‘ten thousand things’ (wanwu 萬物), which relates to all things of the animate and inanimate world as well as to ‘nature’ or ‘the material world’ as such. The eminent Chinese art historian Lothar Ledderose has used this very notion as the title of his great book Ten Thousand Things to investigate the principle of modularization in Chinese art.4 The use of standardized, identical or nearly identical modules, assembled and reassembled in slight yet endless variations, allowed for a production in huge quantities. One of Ledderose’s primary examples is the terracotta army buried in the tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shihuangdi 秦始皇帝 (r. 247–210 BCE). All the terracotta statues of officers and soldiers, numbering more than 7,200, were produced by 2 E.g. si ti 四體 ‘the four limbs’ (Lunyu 論語 18.7). 3 Mengzi 孟子 2A.2. – It should be noted that ti can also be used verbally in the sense of ‘to embody’. An example is found in the “Wenyan” 文言 commentary to the first two hexagrams of the Book of Changes (Zhou Yi 周易): “The superior man, embodying humaness (ti ren 體仁), is fit to preside over men”. 4 Cf. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things.



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assembling manufactured modules in a way that not one statue is identical with another one. I venture to suggest that the same idea – the idea of a single manifold consisting of modularized components and yet having its own characteristics – is fundamental to the Chinese conception of the body. As in Chinese art, the subtly nuanced variations of the facial complexion or other bodily features were valorized and conceived as signs of outstanding personalities. Early Chinese literature abounds with examples; among the mythical thearchs, the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝) is said to have a dragon-shaped face, Zhuanxu 顓頊 a shield-like forehead, Diku 帝嚳 teeth lined up like fish scales, Yao 堯 eyebrows glittering in eight colors, Shun 舜 double pupils, and the Great Yu 大禹 ears with three auditory canals. Similarly, the great historical kings, emperors, and founders of dynasties, from the three regents of the early Zhou 周 dynasty, King Wen, King Wu and the Duke of Zhou (Wenwang 文王, Wuwang 武王, Zhougong 周公, all 11th cent. BCE) up to Mao Zedong 毛澤東, are all said to have such bodily signs – Mao’s mole on his chin is being regarded as highly auspicious and hence may not be missing on official portraits. The idea of ti as an assemble of modules (or functions as in Chinese Traditional Medicine, see below under 2.2.) implied a strong sense for the wholeness of the body. Since one’s body as a whole was given to each person by his or her parents, to preserve this body as a whole was a primary obligation of ‘filial piety’ (xiao 孝), which lay at the heart of Confucian ethics. As Tu Wei-ming 杜維 明, herald of a ‘New Confucianism’, has pointed out, “Our bodies … are not our own possessions pure and simple; they are sacred gifts from our parents and thus laden with deep ethico-regious significance”5. This brings to mind the beginning of the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing 孝經; c. 3rd cent. BCE), where it is said: “Filial piety is the basis of virtue and the source of the teachings. We receive our body, our hair, and skin from our parents, and we dare not destroy them. This is the beginning of filial piety”. The postulate to preserve one’s body implied its preservation in unmutilated form. This was especially important in the context of the funeral rites, which were central to Confucian ritualism. For only the unmutilated body was believed to be fit to receive the wandering spirit again, thereby preventing its incessant roaming around and wreaking havoc among the descendants.6 This accounts for the instruction to place the teeth and hair which have dropped out during the life of the deceased, in his or her coffin, as well as for the exclusion of those

5 Wei-ming Tu, “Selfhood and Otherness in Confucian Thought”, 237. 6 Cf. Jan J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, vol. 1, 348 sq. and 342–347.

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who had died from wounds inflicted by weapons from usual graveyards.7 Further, the conviction to keep one’s body unmutilated after death shaped the culturally accepted ways of committing suicide and explains why decapitation was always considered a serverer punishment than strangulation8 and why mangling of the remains of an enemy was regarded as the most rigorous form of revenge. From the perspective of the obligation to preserve one’s body, we can estimate the challenge that the Daoist philosopher Yang Zhu 楊朱 and his teachings posed to the early Confucian ‘school’ in the third century BCE. Yang Zhu’s most famous dictum was that he would not give away a single hair of his, even if by that the world could be saved.9 That infringing upon keeping one’s hair as one pleases could become a powder keg can be seen from the first years of Manchu rule (mid-seventeenth century) when in various regions of the conquered Ming 明 empire fierce resistance flared up again after the newly installed Manchu regime had commanded that all male grown-ups must wear the hair according to Manchu hairstyle – the hair shaved off above the temples and the rest braided into a queue.

1.2 shen 身 I now revert to the character shen. Its earliest occurrences on oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions from c. the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE show from the side the shape of a human person with a belly, which in some instances is quite pronounced, suggesting a pregnant woman. In fact, ‘to be pregnant’ seems to be the original meaning of shen.10 We can further speculate that in the next stage, in reference to the still unborn child in its mother’s womb, shen was used as a diminutive self-reference – a usage which is attested in bronze inscriptions.11 It seems reasonable to assume that from this usage the meanings of ‘life’ and ‘person; personality’ were derived.12 The latter meaning became dominant in the transmitted texts of the classical period (c. 320 BCE–320 CE). A case in point is the notion of ‘cultivating one’s self’ (xiushen 修身). Originally, this notion encompassed body and mind, thus evoking the image of Chinese ordinary people grouping every morning in public parks to do Tai Chi exercises

7 Cf. ibid., 343. 8 Cf. Silvia Freiin Ebner von Eschenbach, “Selbsttötung in China”, 200–201. 9 Cf. Liä Dsi, 147. 10 First attested in oracle-bone inscriptions, but also later still used (Shijing 詩經; Shi ji 史記); for references, cf. Shanggu Hanyu cidian, 110b. 11 Attested in bronze inscriptions; cf. ibid. 12 For references to the meaning of “life” in bronze inscriptions, see Jianming jinwen cidian, 167.



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or the image of sitting quiescent in a room to practise meditation. However, as we will see below, this changed with the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song 宋 dynasty (960–1279) when the focus of ‘cultivating one’s self’ was shifted to character formation through book learning. Accordingly, the connotation of shen as referring to the concrete body retreated more and more throughout late imperial China (i.e. fourteenth to early twentieth centuries). At this junction of our discussion, two points need further elaboration, with an eye turned toward the notion of ‘body’ in the Western tradition. These two points concern a conspicious unspecificity of the Chinese notion of ‘body’, shen, not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of the dichotomy of body and spirit, which had had such a tremendous influence upon the Western conception of the body. As to the first point, the fact that the graph shen originally showed a woman’s body but that the term’s later use referred indiscriminately to a male or female person can be taken as a hint to the limited significance of gender with regard to the Chinese conception of the body, which to a remarkably large extent allowed for interchangeability of the two sexes. There are many facets to this phenomenon. To begin with, it should be pointed out that the Chinese language makes no grammatical difference in respect of gender. Hence, unsurprisingly, it occurs that in conversations in English Chinese occasionally mix up ‘he’ and ‘she’. More important is the plane of culture, in particular literature, especially poetry, and religion. From the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經; c. 10th cent.–3rd cent. BCE) – not only China’s first anthology of poetry, but also one of the ‘Confucian Classics’ – originates the rhetorical figure of an official’s or minister’s self-depiction as a chaste woman disfavored or rejected by her beloved – the ruler – and in the Songs of the South (Chuci 楚辭; c. 3rd cent.–1st cent. BCE) – China’s second oldest anthology of poetry – the official or minister acts the role of the passionate lover’s wooing the ‘Fair One’ (meiren 美人), an expression which came to be understood as referring to the ruler. Here mention must also be made of the legend of Mulan 木蘭 and the popularity that the plot of Mulan enjoyed. The daughter of an elderly and sickly father without a grown-up son, Mulan disguised herself as a man, joined the army and for twelve years fought the enemy with bravado.13

13 It is commonly believed that the original ballad by an anonymous author originated against the backdrop of the Northern Wei 北魏 dynasty (386–534) and probably dates from the sixth century CE; cf. Shiami Kwa, and Wilt L. Idema, Mulan, xiii. For a translation of the original ballad, see ibid., 1–3.

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Reversely, the caizi 才子, the young talented examination candidate and the male lead of the late imperial romantic novel, comes to mind. Feminization of the caizi is clear for all to see. Due to his facial complexion – white with rosy lips – and his girlish body – “narrow shoulders, frail physique, slim waist, and tender gesture” – the caizi can hardly be distinguished “from the lady when their hat and hair are covered”14. In the sphere of religion, the phenomenon of gender reassignment was not uncommon. A foremost example of this phenomenon is the male bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara who during the Song dynasty transformed into the goddess Guanyin 觀音, the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion, worship of whom became widespread in late imperial China. Second, as the notion of xiushen, ‘cultivating one’s self’, indicates, in Chinese culture the body was not conceptualized as the counterpart of the ‘spirit’, but rather as encompassing both realms, that of the physical body as well as that of the spiritual power vested in the ‘heart-and-mind’ (xin 心). In his droll exposition of the Chinese view of life Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976), agile intellectual and great communicator of things Chinese in the West, this conception is depicted as follows.15 Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body. … It was very unfortuanate that our teachers and philosophers belonged to the so-called intellectual class, with a characteristic professional pride of intellect. … The human body was distilled in this scholastic machine into a spirit, and the spirit was further concentrated into a kind of essence, forgetting that even alcoholic drinks must have a ‘body’ – mixed with plain water – if they are to be palatable at all. And we poor laymen were supposed to drink that concentrated quintessence of spirit. This over-emphasis on the spirit was fatal. … Man is made of flesh and spirit both, and it should be philosophy’s business to see that the mind and body live harmoniously together, that there be a reconciliation between the two. … All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony. That is the Confucianist view, which believes that by living in harmony with this human nature given us, we can become the equals of heaven and earth … .

Witty as Lin Yutang’s disquisition on the harmony of body and spirit is, it presents a quite unique position, which was primarily pitted against the Christian theologoical view.16 Not a few contemporary Chinese intellectuals would have felt 14 Geng Song, The Fragile Scholar, 69. 15 Lin Yuang, The Importance of Living, 21 and 17–18. 16 Lin Yutang was the son of a Chinese Presbyterian minister and studied at the theological institute of the presitigious St. John’s University at Shanghai, yet became increasingly frustrated



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uneasy with Lin’s romaniticized view of Confucianism. Under the influence of the May Fourth or New Culture Movement (1919–1923) with its anti-traditional and anti-Confucianist overtones, the Confucian tradition was widely held responsible for China’s misery, including deficiencies in public hygiene, the practice of footbinding, the abusive employment of corporal punishments, the practice of growing lengthy fingernails (to show one’s status of not being a manual laborer), etc. Clearly, Lin Yutang’s characterization of a balanced equilibrium of body and spirit was shaped against the backdrop of the Western cultural tradition with its notion of body as an unchanging entity being variously opposed to spirit, individual, subject, or role. The essay volume referred to at the outset of the present article has questioned this specific Western notion of body and its applicability to China because it presumes “a unified, unchanging ‘self’ behind and anchoring the masks of social role playing”17. For the study of bodiliness in China, Zito and Barlow thus suggest to systematically take into account not only that “one person can simultaneously occupy many ‘subject positions’ (woman, female, mother, daughter, wife, reader, consumer); and that these dynamics are constructed within an ensemble of social relations”, but also that “selves are processual and that they change over a lifetime of experiences”18. These suggestions are well-taken. For this ‘ensemble of social relations’ was indeed a principal matter throughout Chinese history from early on until the present. To give just one example, I refer to the nuanced differentations of kinship relations; thus, for the single English term ‘cousin’, there exists eight different terms in Chinese, differentiating male/female and older or younger brother viz. older or younger sister on the side of one’s father and on the side of one’s mother, respectively. In fact, the term shen, which is often used to indicate a partial, socially or judically defined, identity (shenfen 身份), conveys the notion of a person whose identity is flexibly determined within this ensemble of social relations; in short, a fluid identity. In Chinese philosophy, the idea of humans’ having a fluid identity and the underlying – and eventually insolvable – problem of determining which of the multiple identities is one’s true identity was charmingly addressed in Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly episode. It tells of Zhuangzi 莊子 (c. 3rd cent. BCE) who once dreamt of being a butterfly, unaware of being Zhuangzi. When he awoke again he

with his studies and finally renounced Christianity; see Howard L. Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2, 387a–389b; here 387b. 17 Angela Zito, and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power, 9. 18 Ibid., 9–10.

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could not tell whether it was Zhuangzi who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was Zhuangzi.19 This may prompt one to inquire what this means with respect to the Chinese conception of the body. I am inclined to assume that, in the Chinese tradition, similarly the body was conceived as one and many at the same time and as something which keeps changing over time. To illustrate these two points and thereby to conclude this section, I refer, first, to a Daoist diagram showing the body as a landscape, and second, to a colophon on a self-portrait of the famous poet, calligrapher and painter Xu Wei 徐渭 (1521–1593). As to the ‘inner landscape’ diagram (neijing tu 内經圖 or 內景圖), suffice it here to notice that the earliest extant versions date not prior to the late nineteenth century, yet the idea to visualize the human body as a landscape can be traced to the first centuries of the common era.20 What we see is the human body in the shape of a foetus with head, heart, and spinal column as its most pronounced features. There is a mountain with crags on top of the skull – supposedly the sacred Kunlun 昆侖 Mountain – and the spinal column is depicted as a mighty river enclosed by cliffs on the banks to the left and the right, which evokes the scenery of the Yangtze River at the Three Gorges. At closer sight we see the sun, the moon, stars and other stellar constellations, a lake, but also features of the inhabited world, a twelve-story pagoda, a man leading a water-buffalo ploughing (which is meant to symbolize the workings of the intestines), etc. We need not to go into further details of this fanciful image. Important is that the pictured body consists of three distinctive parts – head, thorax, and abdomen, which represent the three worlds of Heaven, Earth, and Water, respectively – and that each part is a self-contained entity comprising a same set of essential elements such as e.g. the sun and the moon;21 with the words of Kristofer Schipper, “At the same time, each section retains its own essence and together the three form a complete landscape”22. As to the second aspect of the changing body over time, Xu Wei’s colophon needs no further comment. It reads, When I was born, I was rather plump. Yet when I came of age [at the age of nineteen], I had grown so thin that I almost could not even bear my own clothes. Now that I have become a man of standing I have grown plump again so that my facial expression has this bored 19 Cf. Zhuangzi, 2/92. 20 In particular to the two Daoist texts Laozi zhongjing 老子中經 (Book of the Center of Laozi) and Huangting jing 黃庭徑 (Book of the Yellow Court), Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, 103– 108; especially 105. 21 See Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, 107–108. 22 Ibid., 108.



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saturation as depicted in this portrait. However, in the years to come, we will see whether I will continue to have fortune on my side. For how shall we know whether my today’s bored saturation will not again be replaced by haggardness, just like in the way of a hill being turned into a swamp? … Ha! Am I now a dragon? Or a crane? Or a mandarin duck? Or a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither? Or am I Zhuangzi enjoying being a butterfly? Who really knows who we are?23

2 We continue our mini-tour d’horizon by glancing at three crucial phases of the Chinese history of over 3,000 years of conceiving and thinking the body.

2.1 First Phase: c. 1250–1000 BCE We begin with the last stage of the Shang 商 dynasty (c. 16–11th cent. BCE; traditionally, 1766–1122 BCE), the first historically verifiable Chinese dynasty, which in the mid-eleventh century BCE (c. 1046 BCE) was conquered by the Zhou, a vasall people from the western fringes of the Shang ecumene. The Zhou conquest of the Shang and the subsequent consolidation of the Zhou dynasty was a huge drama of unprecedented magnitude. New archaelogocial evidence, which was brought to light in the course of the twentieth century, has provided us with radically new insights. Among the newly discovered source materials, the so-called oracle-bone inscriptions from the site of the last Shang capital at Anyang 安陽 (Henan Province) and a number of inscribed Western Zhou bronzes must be mentioned in the first place. Owing to these new source materials, some observations concerning the conception of the body in this formative period can possibly be made. However, here I want to address just one question – when and under which circumstances did the body begin to exercise the Chinese mind? As far as we can tell from the oracle-bones, the answer is that it was the concern about and the care of the Shang king’s body, and the bodies of his closest relatives, which set the thinking of the body in motion. Actually, this comes to no surprise since the oracle-bone inscriptions, mostly on bovid scapulas and turtle plastrons, were a divinatory communication between 23 Adopted from the German translation by Wolfgang Bauer, Das Antlitz Chinas, 383. – ‘Dragon’ stands here for a statesman; ‘crane’ for an outstanding scholar; ‘mandarin duck’ for a devoted and faithful husband.

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the royal family and the gods, deities, and demons, including the deceased and deified royal ancestors. To give some examples:24 “The king’s ears are ringing. Will he be greatly suffering? Has Grandma Ji put a curse on him?” – “The (king’s) tooth aches. Has someone put a curse (on the king)? Is (the one who put a curse on the king) Father Yi [Xiaoyi 小乙]? Will the aches cease?” – “Crack-making on the day dinghai 丁亥 [day 24]. (The oracle priest) Zheng 爭 divined: ‘The king was haunted by a nightmare. Will he be suffering from toothache?’” – “The (king’s) tooth aches. Will it get worse? Shall we offer to Father Geng [i.e. Pangeng 盤庚] a dog and slice a sheap?”. There is one aspect which interests us here – the role of the body in China’s political culture. As to this aspect, the reader might think of Ernst Kantorowicz’ famous distinction between the two bodies of the king, his mortal body and his immortal body as a judicial and theological construction, as the embodiment of the state. Kantorowicz made this distinction with regard to medieval and early modern political theology, yet it is safe to say that the king’s ‘transcendental’ body was rooted in the conception of the monarch as it was developed in the Roman and Byzantine Empire. When we now turn to the Chinese conception of the monarch and his role in public, we notice a striking difference in that that in ancient and early imperial China (c. 320 BCE–320 CE), the monarch – and alongside the monarch’s body – was essentially invisible to the public. There were no images, nor statues, of the king or emperor and, contrary to Roman coins, Chinese coins did not show the monarch’s portrait, but had instead a rectangular hole in their center, which symbolizes the Earth as opposed to the circular Heaven. Moreover, in premodern China imperial tombs were always located at a most secret site and there were cases of the construction laborers being killed and buried together with the deceased emperor to keep the secret of the imperial tomb’s location – a stark contrast to the Augustan mausoleum in the center of Rome.25 In his article on the representation of the body in Chinese art, John Hay has contemplated the conspicious absence of the ‘nude’ in Chinese art – “no Chinese painter ever produced a ‘nude’ in the sense of that cluster of culturally defined anatomical shapes and surfaces so prominent in Western art”26. It occurs to me that the restraint in respect of presenting and representing the body in Chinese 24 Tsung-Tung Chang, Der Kult der Shang-Dynastie im Spiegel der Orakelinschriften, 37 (two instances), 48, and 69. 25 On this point, see Achim Mittag and Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, “Epilogue”, especially 436 sq. (with references to articles in the respective volume, which discuss the mentioned phenomena in greater detail). 26 John Hay, “The Body Invisble in Chinese Art?”, 43.



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art and culture was not limited to the female body; it encompassed the male body as well. Illustrations of the Jesuit missionaries showing scenes of the cruxification of Jesus caused a scandalon in seventeenth-century China, for one because they were taken as proof that Jesus had really rebelled against the imperial order (and hence was executed rightfully),27 but also – as I am inclined to assert – because of the sensed outrageousness of displaying a human’s body in an unveiled manner. The Chinese ruler’s invisibility did not develop arbitrarily; it rather was conceptualized and advocated by various philosophical ‘schools’ of the Warring States period (403–221 BCE), in particular by the Daoist and the Legalist Schools, which in certain other respects held diametrically opposed views. The public absence of the king’s body in early China implied that the forms of political negotiations at the center were quite different to those in Rome. One phenomenon relevant in this context concerns political martyrdom with its manifold references to the body. Political martyrdom as an urban phenomenon was unknown in premodern China. It developed as a phenomenon clearly connected to the periphery of the realm. The Chinese tradition of political martyrdom begins with Boyi 伯夷 and Shuqi 叔齊, two brothers at the end of the Shang dynasty, who fled their princedom to live as hermits in the wilderness and who died of famine because of their refusal to accept alimony from the newly established Zhou dynasty (11st cent. BCE). However, more important to the political discourse throughout premodern China was Qu Yuan 屈原 (c. 340–278 BCE), the first Chinese poet for whom we have some biographical information. Protesting against the intrigues of and the corruption among the ruling elite in the state of Chu, Qu Yuan threw himself into the Miluo River 汨羅江 (Hunan Province), far away from the Chu capital. Since the early Han 漢 dynasty, Qu Yuan became subject of a steadily growing lore and an ethico-political debate. At the core of this debate lay the question whether or not it is morally acceptable to cast aside one’s body. This underlying question is captured in a metaphor, which was created in the first poem remembering Qu Yuan – the metaphor of ‘the stranded whale upon whom ants and crickets are fed’.28

2.2 Second Phase: c. 300–50 BCE Our second phase of two and a half centuries from about 300 to 50 BCE encompasses the second half of the Warring States period (403–221 BCE), the founding of the empire under the First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, the short-lived Qin 秦 27 David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter, 32–33 (figures 2.4 and 2.5). 28 “Lament for Qu Yuan” (“Diao Qu Yuan wen” 弔屈原文) by Jia Yi 賈誼 (c. 201–169 BCE).

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dynasty (221–207 BCE) and the largest part of the succeeding Western Han 西漢 dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE). It is a great formative period, which first and foremost saw the founding of the unified and centralized state, the inauguration of ‘All-under-Heaven’ (tianxia 天下), which was more than a political and social order, or, if political and social, was always part of a larger cosmic order. Now this idea of the state as an orderly and harmonious system consonant with the cosmos was expanded and applied to the human body. As Nathan Sivin has put it succinctly, “[T]he structure of heaven and earth, and that of the human body, [were bound] to that of the state. … Cosmos, body, and state were shaped in a single process, as a result of changing circumstances that the new ideas in turn shaped”.29 The creation of this all-pervasive order must be credited to the Hundred Schools (baijia 百家), a collective designation of the manifold intellectual networks and textual traditions that arose against the backdrop of a world in turmoil and a fundamental crisis that shattered the norms and values as associated with Zhou kingship. Among the Hundred Schools, the Confucian, the Daoist, and the Legalist Schools have been mentioned. All three ‘schools’, in fact all major ‘schools’ of the Warring States period, were orientated in their teachings toward the ‘Way’ (Dao 道), the quintessence of All-under-Heaven. Originally, dao denoted a road, perhaps specifically a road for the advance and supply of an army such as was built under King Zhao of Zhou (Zhaowang 昭王, r. 977/75–957 BCE) for his huge military campaign into the south.30 By the Warring States period, Dao had become the most comprehensive philosophical concept, simultaneously referring to the celestial motions, the harmonious order established by the first three rulers of the Zhou dynasty – King Wen, King Wu, and the Duke of Zhou – the eternal process of growing and dying in nature, and the right path of a morally decent life.31 29 Nathan Sivin, “State, Cosmos, and Body”, 6–7. 30 Cf. Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Western Zhou History”, 322–323. 31 Here I deliberately pass over the dramatic changes in philosophy, which took place in the age of Confucius and thereafter (5th–3trd cent. BCE) and by which new territory was entered in respect of what has been termed ‘material virtue’ – the view that virtues have quasi-material correlates in the body; cf. Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Material Virtue. Being part and parcel of the breakthrough in China’s ‘axial age’, the evolving virtue discourse relied on three innovations in philosophy; first, the expansion of the focus of moral ethics from junzi 君子, ‘the lord; the ruler’, to junzi, ‘the superior man; the gentleman’; second, the discovery of ‘emotions’ (qing 情), which broadened the scope of the discourse revolving about ‘human nature’ (xing 性) immensely; and third, the idea of reaching perfection through attaining an equilirium. As to music, this equilibrium was seen, and came to be defined, in the “intermediate” or modulated sounds (zhongsheng 中聲). In turn, this notion inspired a conception of harmony that synchronized the three dimensions of body, state, and cosmos. It is Xunzi 荀子 (313?–238 BCE), next to Mencius the most



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In the course of the period considered here, the various planes of heaven, earth, and human, to which Dao referred, became mutually connected to each other by a network of ubiquituous correspondences. Depicted as a ‘correlative cosmology’, this network of correspondences was developed and attained its consummate articulation by Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (c. 179–104 BCE). Without a doubt, correlative cosmology provided the basis of an “increasingly reasoned understanding of natural phenomena”32, in particular it largely contributed to the flourishing of astronomy, calendarical computation, and medicine. Further, correlative cosmology espoused a theory which explained the succession of dynasties in accordance with the Five Phases and facilitated the conception of history as flowing in large cycles. Entering the political discourse in the last decades of the Western Han (c. 50 BCE–8 CE), this new theory became influential through the brief Xin 新 dynasty (9–23 CE), which was traditionally regarded as an ‘interregnum’ in between the Western and the Eastern Han dynasties. The basis of correlative cosmology rested on three pillars; first, the notion of ‘vapor’ (Qi 氣), the omnipresent ‘ether stuff’ whose circulation in the cosmos as well as in the body was thought to be life-giving; second, the Five Phases (wuxing 五行), each of which being dominated by one of five ‘elements’ (Soil, Wood, Metal, Fire, Water)33; and third, the binary scheme of Yin–Yang. Referring to the bright, heaven, male, and hard (Yang 陽) and to the dark, earth, female, and soft (Yin 陰), respectively, this binary scheme lay at the core of the Book of Changes (Yijing 易經), which attained supreme stature among the Six Canons (liujing 六經) and, consequently, in ‘canonical learning’ (jingxue 經學), which emerged as an imperially patronized scholarship in the reign of Han Wudi 漢武帝 (141–87 BCE). Our main source of the new conception of the body framed according to correlative cosmology is the medical classic with the title of Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing 黃帝内經). The textual history of the Inner Canon is a problematic issue. Suffices it here to say that it consists of four books, each of which being a collection of short texts styled as dialogs between the Yellow Emperor and one of six ministers; all figures are legendary. The original version of the Inner Canon probably dates from the first century BCE, but there are indi-

eminent philosopher of the early Confucian ‘school’, who has made the greatest contribution in this context. Robin Yates, “Body, Space, Time and Bureaucracy”, 72–73, also refers to Xunzi’s importance in respect of the evolving conception of the body in Chinese philosophy. I gratefully acknowledge my owing inspiration to this article. 32 Donald J. Harper, “Warring States Natural Philosophy and Occult Thought”, 826. 33 This is the sequence of ‘conquest’ (xiangsheng xu 相勝序), as opposed to the sequence of ‘production’ (xiangsheng xu* 相生序; Wood – Fire – Soil – Metal – Water), which was developed later, as the basis of the Five Phases theory of correlative cosmology.

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cations of later revisions of varying degree by editors from Tang 唐 (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties.34 In addition, our knowledge of early Chinese medicine has considerably been expanded by excavated manusripts written on silk and bamboo or wooden slips since the 1970’s. In particular, mention must be made of fourteen medical texts (written on seven manuscripts), which were excavated from Tomb no. 3 at Mawangdui 馬王堆, Hunan Province, in 1973. Since the tomb occupant was buried in 168 BCE, these texts have a certain date ante quem.35 As to their contents, they show a broad range of topics, including magical recipes, macrobiotic hygiene, dietics, breath techniques, and last but not least expositions of ‘vessel’ (mai 脈) theory.36 The concept of vessel made the adoption of the correlative cosmology and its incorporation into medicine possible. As stated by Donald Harper, “Vessel theory was the key to the new Warring States connection of the body, its health, and its ailments”.37 In the Inner Canon the vessels are conceived as a system of twelve circulation tracts (jingmai 經脈, ‘conduit vessels’) which traverse the body and carry vapor and blood to the interconnected and mutually dependent organs. Referred to as the ‘twelve officers’ (shi’er guan 十二官), the organs were distinguished by two sets of six organs each, being referred to as ‘depots’ (cang 藏) and ‘palaces’ (fu 府) respectively. These designations evoke the association of the administrative and bureaucratic institutions of the Qin and Han dynasties. The ‘depots’ bring to mind the state granaries, which were set up to stabilize grain prices, provision the capital, and supply direct relief when famine struck after natural desasters, whereas the ‘palaces’ hint to the seats of the provincial governments in the ‘commanderies’ (jun 郡), which were newly established under Qin Shihuangdi.38 That the organs of the human body and their functions were conceived in analogy to institutions of the central state is further illustrated by a catalogue of the twelve organs, which assigns to each organ a governmental office. Contained in the Inner Canon, this catalogue makes the following juxtapositions.39 heart – the Ruler – Chancellor and Mentor lung liver – General

34 Cf. Nathan Sivin, in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts, 196–215; Paul U. Unschuld, Huang Di nei jing su wen, 1–75. 35 Cf. Donald J. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 14–21. 36 Cf. ibid., sections 3–5 (pp. 68–183). 37 Donald J. Harper, “Warring States Natural Philosophy and Occult Thought”, 876–877. 38 Cf. Paul U. Unschuld, Medizin in China, 1980, 63–64. 39 Cf. Paul U. Unschuld, Huang Di nei jing su wen, 133.



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gallbladder pericardium spleen and stomach large intestine small intestine kidneys triple burner40 urinary bladder

– – – – – – – –

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Rectifier Minister and Envoy Officials in charge of the granary Transmitter along the Way Recipient of what has been Perfected Operator with Force Opener of Channels Regional Rectifier

Under the conceptual framework of correlative cosmology, the body was not only conceived as a replica of the state, but reversely also the state was regularly described in analogy to the body. The juxtaposition of body and state, of healing a sick person with prescribing a therapy of the body politic, became a commonly used figure of speech in political discourse. The synchronization of the body and the state as two microcosms which both resonate with the universe was facilitated by the paramount idea of the circulating ‘vapor’ (Qi) as being the condition of all that follows. This idea, in turn, brought about a radically new understanding of illness and decease. In contrast to the traditional demonically inspired understanding of illness, correlative cosmology held that illness is a physiological dysfunctioning of vapor circulation, caused by a stockage or stasis. The Spring and Autumn of Lü Buwei (Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, c. 230 BCE) makes this explicit. When [in human beings] illness lasts and pathology develops, it is because the essential vapor (Qi) has become static. Analogously, water when stagnant becomes foul; a tree when [the circulation of its vapor is] stagnant becomes worm-eaten; grasses when [the circulation of their vapor is] stagnant become withered. States too have their stases. When the ruler’s virtue does not flow freely [i.e., when he is out of touch with his subjects], and the wishes of his people do not reach him, this is the stasis of a state. When the stasis of a state abides for a long time, a hundred pathologies arise in concert, and a myriad catastrophes swarm in.41

Acupuncture was the great invention to remedy the stases of vapor in the human body. The Inner Canon is the earliest source to describe acupuncture with metal needles and it consistently argues in favor of acupuncture as the only effective therapy. 40 The ‘triple burner’ (san jiao 三焦) is not an anatomically identifiable organ. The notion refers to the passages of vapor and heat in the upper, middle, and lower part of the body, each of which encompasses three or four organs as follows; upper part: heart, lung, pericardium; middle part: spleen, stomach, gall bladder, liver; lower part: small and large intestines, kidneys, urinary bladder. 41 Translation adopted from Nathan Sivin, “State, Cosmos, and Body”, 20.

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Yet, correlative cosmology and its paradigm of the body as being a somatic microcosm in or out of step with the cyclical movements of the macrocosm was only one among a number of approaches to treating ailment. Magico-religious treatment, based on the belief in baneful spirits and demons who cause disease and need to be exorcised, remained dominant throughout premodern China.42 Moreover, toward the end of the Han dynasty and especially in the third and fourth centuries, against the backdrop of disorder and turmoil surrounding the disintegration and collapse of the Han empire and spurred on by the cult of immortality (xian 仙) and Daoist-inspired search for longevity, experimentation with drugs and alchemical elixirs broadened the scope of bodily and mind-expanding experiences.43 These new experiences found rich expression in poetry, in particular in poems of the thematic genre of ‘roaming into immortality’ (youxian shi 游仙詩).44 Poetry as such was regarded as being imbued with magic power which could effect catharsis and cure an illness. The most celebrated and later variously emulated example is Mei Sheng’s 枚乘 (died 141 BCE) “The Seven Stimuli” (“Qi fa” 七 發). Just by the persuasive force of his verse, the poet, acting as a sort of witch doctor, is able to expel the illness of his interlocutor, the heir apparent of the kingdom of Chu, who suffered from indulgences in “the desires of ear and eye” and “the comforts of body and limbs”.45

2.3 Third Phase: c. 1040–1290 Our third and last phase from 1040–1290 covers almost the entire Song dynasty (960–1279), the Jin 金 dynasty (1115–1234), established by the semi-nomadic Jurchen in northern China, and the first decades of the Mongolian Yuan 元 dynasty, the first non-Chinese dynasty which ruled over all of China (since 1279). The importance of the Song dynasty in Chinese history in general has long been acknowledged. It was the Japanese historian and intellectual Naitō Torajirō 内藤虎次郎 (1866–1934) who pioneered modern Song Studies by depicting the 42 Paul U. Unschuld, Medizin in China, 33–47 (on ‘demonic medicine’) and 175–187. 43 For the widespread use of drugs, in particular the so-called ‘frosted food powder’ (hanshi san 寒食散), among the ruling elite in the third and fourth centuries, see Rudolf G. Wagner, “Lebensstil und Drogen im chinesischen Mittelalter”. For the ideas about the after-life and immortality, macrobiotics, and the beginnings of alchemy in China, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.2, 71–154. 44 See Zornica Kirkova, “Roaming into the Beyond”. 45 Hans H. Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 186–211 (with a translation of the fu 賦 poem, 186–202).



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Tang–Song transition (ninth and tenth centuries) as a breakthrough toward early modernity. Innovations such as the wooden block printing process, the compass, gunpowder, and new sorts of early-ripening rice were put to use; commercialization and an incipient urbanization provided the basis of a sustained growth of prosperity. A key-factor behind the transformative dynamics in society must be seen in the setting up of the thoroughly restructured civil examination system, by which the state recruited its officials. As a consequence, the aristocratic Tang ruling elite, trained for horse-riding and devoted to playing polo, was supplanted by a class of scholar-officials (shidafu 士大夫), who were commended by imperial decree to travel by sedan-chair and, bent to make a career by sitting for the exams, gave up on horse-riding, hunting, and polo.46 The resulting change of the conception of the body was enormous. It is highlighted by a concurrent change of the ideal of womanly beauty. The Tang dynasty’s esteem for the rotund, round-faced and chubby-cheeked woman gave way to the esteem for the slender, gracile woman with delicately chiseled facial features during the Song dynasty. In later literature, notably in the eighteenth-century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢), celebrated as Chinese greatest novel, these two archetypes of womanly beauty were simultaneously employed and worked into two opposing types of personalities. To perceive the full scope of this change in the outlook on life and the world, we must deal with Neo-Confucianism. From a rather insignificant intellectual movement in the early twelfth century, Neo-Confucianism rose to become the state orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. This rise was facilitated by the metaphysical void which remained after the coherence of correlative cosmology had been threatened. However, with regard to the body and its medical treatment, correlative cosmology not only continued to widely enjoy trust and appreciation but also achieved an unprecendet apogee. This needs some brief explanations. As to the first aspect – the prestige of correlative cosmology in the field of medicine, health care, macrobiotic hygiene –, our principle witness is no less authority than Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), who has been hailed as the one scholar who brought about a ‘great synthesis’ of Neo-Confucian teachings. In one of his learned and later recorded conversations with students, Zhu Xi was asked how to deal with popular theories about anomalies and demons. In his answer Zhu Xi made full use of terms and concepts of correlative cosmology, saying:47 46 See James T. C. Liu, “Polo and Cultural Change: From T’ang to Sung China”. 47 Zhuzi yulei 63/1551. In his final statement Zhu Xi alluded to a phrase in the Book of Changes (Zhou Yi 周易, “Xici zhuan” 繫辭傳 A.4). Translation adopted, with some changes, from Patricia Buckley Ebrey, ed., Chinese Civilization, 174.

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In most of these cases, the person’s life span was not used up when he or she was drowned, or murdered, or fell victim to a violent illness. Since this person’s vapor (Qi) had not been exhausted, (his or her wandering spirit), in using it up, caused such (anomalies or demonic incidents). It also happens with people who die suddenly and whose vapor has not yet completely dispersed because of the richness of their original endowment. Yet eventually the vapor does disperse, for when particulate matter (jing 精) combines with vapor then things of the animate and inanimate nature come to life. But once the wandering spirit has played havoc (enough), there will be no more vapor left.

As to the second aspect – a further expansion of the correlative paradigm in the field of medicine – we refer to the inclusion of pharmacology. It was only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that drugs and individual substances in the human organism were systematically identified and its effects interpreted on the basis of vessel theory and the doctrines of systematic correspondence. In the history of Chinese medicine, this breakthrough is commonly being discussed under the label of ‘Jin–Yuan Medicine’, but this label is somewhat misleading as the principal contributions in this respect were made in the Song period.48 It was on the macrocosmic plane that correlative cosmology did not work any more. To explain, we must refer to the period between the Han and the Tang dynasties, which often is labeled as China’s ‘medieval age’ (c. 200–750 CE). In this period, the theory of the Five Phases became a sort of a superstructure to explain historical change and to legitimize each of the dynasties which succeeded to each other in rather short intervals. This implied the importance of omina and portents, unusual phenomena and strange events, which were conceived as signs of the health and illness of the body politic.49 The three main reasons why trust in the Five Phases theory declined were, first, the growing insight in the fact that omens and portents were prone to manipulation; second, the appeal enjoyed by Buddhist universalistic political ideology, under the aegis of which unification of all China was achieved in 589 CE,50 and third, the Tang dynasty’s need of a legitimizing ideology which was not focused on change but rather on continuity – a need which grew proportionately to the increasing duration of the dynasty. In short, Song intellecutals were confronted with the task of devising a new cosmology to explain the nature of Dao and the natural processes. They did so by having recourse to the Book of Changes.51 At the end of the day the ultimate answer attained was the identification of the human heart-and-mind (xin 心) as 48 Cf. Paul U. Unschuld, “Therapie der Welt und ihrer Krankheiten”, especially 184–185. 49 Tiziana Lippiello, Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China. 50 Cf. Arthur Wright, “The Formation of Sui Ideology”. 51 Kidder Smith, Peter K. Bol, Joseph A. Adler, and Don J. Wyatt, Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, especially chapter 2 (pp. 26–55).



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the nodal point of the universe, binding together all the ‘ten thousand things’ and linking Heaven and Earth. The perfect epitome of the heart-and-mind as the focal point of Neo-Confucian philosophy is a diagram (tu 圖), which is found in a work printed in 1172.52 Being entitled “The Ten Thousand Things of the Universe Are All Made From the Same Vapor” (“Tiandi wanwu yi Qi ye” 天地萬物一 氣也), this diagram shows the character xin 心, ‘heart-and-mind’, as the main element within a circle, which can be interpreted as indicating the confines of the Dao. The space within these confines is further structured by various pairs of notions – each notion being presented by its character: Heaven and Earth, Yin and Yang, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – which serve to determine the positions of the realms of human affairs and of the supernatural as well as the realms of ‘the correspondences of favorable Qi’ and the ‘correspondences of pernicious Qi’; each of the four indicated realms being connected to the ‘heart-and-mind’ by a sort of umbiblical chord. From the centrality of the heart-and-mind the thinking of the body took its course in late imperial China. As this topic goes well beyond the time frame of the present section, I limit myself to some scanty remarks. First, emphasis on the heart-and-mind implied an ethics which defined virtuous conduct in terms of one’s proper intentions – the ‘way of applying one’s heart-and-mind’ (xinshu 心術), i.e. one’s right-mindedness (Gesinnung), began to play an enormous role. This demanded to self-critically inquire about one’s true motives in the way of the daily self-examination practised by Zengzi 曾子, one of Confucius’ main disciples (Lunyu 論語 1.4); the supreme moral standard of any self-examination being the ‘heavenly pattern’ (tianli 天理), a synonym of the ‘Five Human Relationships’ (wugang 五綱), the relationships between ruler and ruled, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, and finally between friends. Moral conduct according to the ‘Five Human Relationships’ primarily meant, for a man, loyalty to the dynasty and the emperor; for a woman, chastity; and for the children, filial piety and respect of the elders. Now from the Yuan dynasty onward (thirteenth century), Neo-Confucian ethics exhibited a general drift of growing rigidity. Mongol ‘barbarian’ rule, which impelled the nucleus of Han Chinese literati to distinguish themselves by their effort to reach out towards moral perfection, and later, in the second half of the Ming dynasty (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) the renewal of Buddhism53 certainly were factors which contributed to this general trend. It entailed some practices harmful to the body, in particular to the bodies of women and children, or adverse to one’s bodily needs. 52 Cf. Shengmen shiye tu, diagram no. 9. 53 Cf. Chün-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism.

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Here mention must be made of two issues. First, the cult of female marital fidelity, which, at the end of Ming dynasty, is related to an enormous increase in suicide by women at the death of a husband or fiancé.54 Second, at the same time filial piety witnessed extreme forms of childrens’ devotion to their parents, in particular the practice of gegu 割股 – children cut their flesh from their ribs, arms, and tighs to prepare a soup, for the purpose of healing their parents.55 Footbinding is yet another issue which comes to mind in the context of Neo-Confucian ethics and its implications to the body. Yet more recent research has shown that there is much more to this topic than aspects of Neo-Confucian morality.56 Nevertheless, it can be observed that, from late Southern Song (thirteenth century) onward the spread of the footbinding practice went hand in hand with a tendency toward prudery, especially under Manchu rule, which parallels the general trend of constraining the body. This general picture, scanty as it is, would be incomplete without giving notice of the exceptions, in theory and practice. An exception in theory is, for example, the doctrine of ‘preserving one’s body’ (baoshen 保身) espoused by the late Ming scholar Wang Gen 王根 (1483–1541).57 An example of an exception in practice is provided by Yan Yuan 顔元 (1635–1704) who emphasized physical health and physical activities and set up a curriculum which included military training, archery, riding and boxing.58 As has been mentioned above, under Neo-Confucian auspices, the focus of ‘cultivating one’s self’ (xiushen) shifted towards character formation, prioritizing book learning in preparation for the exams in an extremely competitive examination system. As a result, physical education and activities fostering bodily fitness receded into this and that citadel of late imperial society. In particular, reference must here be made of secret societies, which mushroomed in the Ming-Qing transitional period, in face of, and to compensate for, the Ming military weakness vis-à-vis the tough Manchu armies, secret societies became the hotbed of Chinese martial arts. Hence, the Qing state grew suspicious not only of secret societies, but also of sports and physical activities among the common people. It therefore comes to no surprise that, with the intrusion of Western culture from the Opium War (1839–1842) onward, the Chinese ruling elite saw itself

54 See Ju-k’ang T’ien, Male Anxiety and Female Chastity. 55 Cf. ibid., 149–161. 56 Cf. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters. 57 Monika Übelhör, Wang Gen, 45–67. 58 Cf. Mansfield Freeman, Yen Yüan, 23–34 passim. The mentioned curriculum was prepared for an academy (shuyuan 書院) at Feixiang 肥鄉 (Hubei Province), to which Yan Yuan had been invited to be director in 1694; see ibid., 21.



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haplessly confronted with an aggressive nationalism, which ostensibly drew its strength, among other factors, from the physical fitness of its citizens. This new experience resulted in the view that China not only suffered from the fragility of the her body politic in general, but also that bodily fitness among the Chinese people was deficient. This view was exemplarily expressed in the inaugural editorial address of the Physcial Culture Tribune (Tiyujie 體育界), the first Chinese physical culture periodical, in 1909: The people of our nation are weary and spiritless, our bodies emaciated by disease. … Alas! These deficient, weak, exhausted bodies – what in the world would happen if they were pushed into the unforgiving competition of men in this evolutionary world of strong countries and strong physiques?59

We have here en nuce the stereotype of the Chinaman – old, weak, and lethargic – which became greatly influential throughout the Republican era (1912–1949). In the wake of the Fourth May Movement and in ensuing debates revolving around the differences and specifities of Eastern and Western cultures this stereotype was time and again pitted against the stereotype of the Westerner – young, vigorous, and dynamic.60 These two stereotypes are affirmed by an episode of a Western visitor to China, none other than Bertrand Russell, whose visits to China in 1920 and 1921 created a sensation among Chinese intellectuals. It is fitting to conclude this section and the present article with this lovely episode, not because to conclude on a cheerful tone, but to remind the reader of the fact that everything has its time and even stereotypes become dated. The episode is found in Russell’s autobiography and reads, The Chinese have (or had) a sense of humour which I found very congenial. ... One hot day two fat middle-aged business men invited me to motor into the country to see a certain very famous half-ruined pagoda. When we reached it, I climbed the spiral staircase, expecting them to follow, but on arriving at the top I saw them still on the ground. I asked why they had not come up, and with pretentious gravity they replied: ‘We thought of coming up, and debated whether we should do so. Many weighty arguments were advanced on both sides, but at last there was one which decided us. The pagoda might crumble at any moment, and we felt that, if it did, it would be well there should be those who could bear witness as to how the philosopher died.’

59 Cited from Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation, 2. 60 A case in point is Liu Renhang’s 劉仁航 Intellectual Survey of the Great Harmony in the Eastern Civilization (Dongfang datong xue’an 東方大同學案), published in 1926; cf. Wolfgang Bauer, China und die Hoffnung auf Glück, 454–463 and 465.

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Bibliography Bauer, Wolfgang, China und die Hoffnung auf Glück. Paradiese, Utopien, Idealvorstellungen in der Geistesgeschichte Chinas. München, dtv, 1974. Bauer, Wolfgang, Das Antlitz Chinas. Die autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chinesischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis heute. München/Wien, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990. Boorman, Howard L., ed., and Richard C. Howard, associate editor, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 4 vols. New York/London, Columbia University Press, 1967–1971. Chang, Tsung-Tung, Der Kult der Shang-Dynastie im Spiegel der Orakelinschriften: Eine paläographische Studie zur Religion im archaischen China. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1970. Csikszentmihalyi, Mark, Material Virtue, Ethics and the Body in Early China. Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2004. Ebner von Eschenbach, Silvia Freiin, “Selbsttötung in China – eine ehrenvolle Todesart”, Saeculum 52 (2001), 193–216. Ebrey, Patricia B., ed., Chinese Civilization. A Sourcebook. New York, The Free Press, 21993. Frankel, Hans H., The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady. Interpretations of Chinese Poetry. New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1976. Freeman Mansfield, Yen Yüan. Preservation of Learning. With an Introduction on his Life and Thought (Monumenta serica monograph series, 16). Los Angeles, Monumenta Serica at the University of California, 1972. de Groot, Jan J. M., The Religious System of China. Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect. Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith, 6 vols. Leyden, Brill, 1892–1910, reprt. Taipei, Southern Materials Center, 1982. Harper, Donald J., Early Chinese Medical Literature. The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. London/New York, Kegan Paul International, 1998. Harper, Donald J., “Warring States Natural Philosophy and Occult Thought”. In The Cambridge History of Ancient China. From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 813–884. Hay, John, “The Body Invisble in Chinese Art?” In Body, Subject and Power in China, edited by Angela Zito, and Tania E. Barlow. Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 1994, 42–77. Jianming jinwen cidian 簡明金文詞典, edited by Wang Wenyao 王文耀. Shanghai, Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1998. Kirkova, Zornica, Roaming into the Beyond. The Theme of Immortality in Early Medieval Chinese Verse. PhD diss. Charles University Prague, 2007. Ko, Dorothy, Cinderella’s Sisters. A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005. Kwa, Shiamin and Wilt L. Idema, Mulan. Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend, with Related Texts. Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Co., 2010. Ledderose, Lothar, Ten Thousand Things. Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. Liä Dsi. Das wahre Buch vom quellenden Urgrund, transl. by Richard Wilhelm. Düsseldorf/Köln, Diederichs, 31987.



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Lin, Yutang, The Importance of Living. London/Toronto, William Heinemann Ltd., 1951. Lippiello, Tiziana, Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China: Han, Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties. Nettetal, Steyler Verlag, 2001. Liu, James T. C., “Polo and Cultural Change: From T’ang to Sung China”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45 (1985), 203–224. Loewe, Michael, ed., Early Chinese Texts. A Bibliographical Guide. Berkeley, The Society for the Sudy of Early China, The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993. Mittag, Achim and Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, “Epilogue”. In Conceiving the “Empire”. China and Rome Compared, edited by Fritz-Heiner Mutschler and Achim Mittag. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, 421–447. Morris, Andrew D., Marrow of the Nation, a History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 2004. Mungello, David E., The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Needham, Joseph, with the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, part 2 (Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974. Russel, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2: 1914–1944. London, Allen and Unwin, 1968. Shaughnessy, Edward L., “Western Zhou History”. In The Cambridge History of Ancient China. From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 292–351. Schipper, Kristofer, The Taoist Body. French original 1982, translated by Karen C. Duval, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. Shanggu Hanyu cidian 上古漢語詞典, edited by Zhong Xuyuan 鍾旭元 and Xu Weijian 許偉建. Shenzhen, Haitian chubanshe, 1987. Shengmen shiye tu 聖門事業圖, by Li Yuangang 李元綱 (fl. 1170), edn. Baibu congshu 白部叢書 (Baichuan xuehai 百川學海). Sivin, Nathan, “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries B.C.”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55 (1995), 5–37. Smith, Kidder, Peter K. Bol, Joseph A. Adler, and Don J. Wyatt, Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990. Song, Geng, The Fragile Scholar. Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2004. T’ien, Ju-k’ang, Male Anxiety and Female Chastity. A Comparative Study of Chinese Ethical Values in Ming–Ch’ing Times. Leiden, Brill, 1988. Tu, Wei-ming, “Selfhood and Otherness in Confucian Thought”. In Culture and Self. Asian and Western Perspectives, edited by Marsella, Anthony J., George DeVos, and Francis L. K. Hsu. New York/London, Tavistock Publication, 1985, 231–251. Übelhör, Monika, Wang Gen, 1483–1541 und seine Lehre. Eine kritische Position im späten Konfuzianismus. Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1986. Unschuld, Paul U., Medizin in China. Eine Ideengeschichte. München, Beck, 1980. Unschuld, Paul U., “Therapie der Welt und ihrer Krankheiten. Heilkundliche Tendenzen zur Zeit der Sung”. In Lebenswelt und Weltanschauung im frühneuzeitlichen China, edited by Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990, 177–187. Unschuld, Paul U., Huang Di nei jing su wen. Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 2003.

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Wagner, Rudolf G., “Lebensstil und Drogen im chinesischen Mittelalter”, T’oung Pao 59 (1973), 79–178. Wright, Arthur, “The Formation of Sui Ideology, 581–604”. In Chinese Thought and Institutions, edited by John K. Fairbank. Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 1957, 71–104. Yates, Robin D. S., “Body, Space, Time and Bureaucracy, Boundary Creation and Control Mechanisms in Early China”. In Boundaries in China, edited by Jonathan Hay. London, Reaktion, 1994, 56–80. Zhuangzi 莊子. Zhuangzi jinzhu jinyi 莊子今注今譯, by Chen Guying 陳鼓應. Peking, Zhonghua shuju, 11983, 31988. Yü, Chün-fang, The Renewal of Buddhism in China. Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis. New York, Columbia University Press, 1981. Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類, punctuated and collated by Wang Xingxian 王星賢. 8 vols., Peking, Zhonghua, 1986. Zito, Angela and Tania E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China. Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Hua Cai

Belief – Institution – Behavior A Comparison of Four Systems of Representation of the Body Before medically assisted procreation and cloning, the fact that the birth of a child results from coupling between two sexes seemed evident to all ethnic groups on our planet, regardless of their cultural differences and geographical situations. Coupling is widely recognized as necessary for reproduction. However, based on this sexual act which seemed to be an obligatory rite of passage, man has invented various systems: matrilineal, patrilineal, of cognation, etc. What is the basis of this institutional diversity? Is it biological realities? Is it social facts? Is it psychological facts? Others? Or a combination of two or more of these? To decode this riddle, many anthropologists have succeeded one another in a long relay race that has lasted more than a century and a half and still continues today. Up to the end of last century, the main steps in this journey can be illustrated by some of its most representative figures. First, there is H. Morgan, who favored the biological explanation.1 Then, E. Durkheim seems to firmly support the social interpretation.2 Afterwards, Arnold Van Gennep goes back to the biological explanation.3 Next, Lévi-Strauss opens another path based on the biological and the psychological.4 Finally, D. Schneider, who, disheartened by the fact that all interpretations of kinship (affinity not included), including his own, seemed ultimately based on the biological, categorically states that the concepts used in anthropology do not correspond to empirical fact, that interpretations are only “fiction” created by Western culture, and therefore must be abandoned, and we should no longer speak of them.5 Given the existence of family and marriage, considered, at the time, as universal, or almost, Lévi-Strauss reiterates that Radcliff-Brown’s unilineal theory and his theory of the covenant of marriage remain valid despite all criticism.6 Very different visions, even opposing ones, and fierce controversy is what we inherit today in this field. And certainly, the situation will not change, for the

1 Cf. Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society; Id., Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. 2 Cf. Émile Durkheim, Le suicide: Étude de sociologie. 3 Cf. Arnold van Gennep, Mythes et legends d’Australie. 4 Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. 5 Cf. David M. Schneider, “What is Kinship all about?”; Id., A Critique of the Study of Kinship. 6 Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Préface”.

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love of truth is a passion for all. Progress in knowledge is achieved through the confrontation of different ideas. Only large hypotheses require refutation. In order for this endless discussion, born almost at the same time as the discipline, to end with a plausible conclusion, it should, in our opinion, ask some fundamental questions: from the anthropological point of view, and not from the biological one, are there really different kinship systems? If yes, how can the same process, that is to say coupling/generation, give rise to different systems? Is there a common basis for these systems? If so, what has prevented us from seeing it? Let us begin with an analytical comparison of four cases: the Na of China, the Han, the French and the Samo of Burkina Faso, which respectively represent the matrilineal, patrilineal, the cognation and the Omaha systems.

The Na Case The system of representation of the body in the Na culture, an ethnic minority in China, is the product of legendary tales and metaphors. According to tradition, Abodgu, a good spirit, decides the sex of the fetus.7 He places the embryo in the womb of the young girl five months after her birth, then he feeds it during pregnancy. Coupling is considered necessary for reproduction as the man plays a secondary role, that of the “sprinkler,” given that “if the rain does not fall from the sky, the grass does not grow from the earth.” Ong (the bone) is considered the bearer of individual and hereditary characteristics. Each individual has received the “bone” exclusively from their mother.8 He is ong hing (bone-person) of the mother. All those who are descended from the same real female ancestor share the same “bone;” they definitively consider themselves as “bone-people” and form a group. Such a group is delimited only through the links, with and through the mother, of each of its members. Neither the notion of collaterality, nor that of degree, are taken into account. The identity of “bone-people” for an individual, as well as for a group, is immutable. This type of “bone-people” group can be symbolized in its most reduced form with the following diagram (see Figure 1). This system of representation of the body is thus the source of an individual identification institution for any member of this society. The Na people have not only a positive institution – which is “bone-people” – but also a negative rule – which is that coupling amongst the “bone-people” is not allowed. The circle of 7 This detail was collected during my 1997 research. See Hua Cai, Une société sans père ni mari: Les Na de Chine. 8 According to a Na legend, the fetus was first conceived by Abodgu, then implanted into the womb of the woman.



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“bone-people” and the scope of people affected by the coupling ban coincide fully both in fact and in speech, and are therefore coextensive. There is a coherent correlation between their identification institution and their sexual prohibition rule. In this society, two individuals, or two groups, who are not descended from the same real female ancestor do not have the same “bone.” They are not “bone-people” in relation to each other. They are mutually foreign and sexual commerce between them is permitted.

The Han Case Unlike the Na, the Han,9 the majority ethnic group in China, have described a different scene, where the man plays the role of the master. In their traditional society, jing (semen) is considered to be xie (blood) resulting from gu (bone). This “white blood” is considered a vector of individual and hereditary traits. The man puts into the belly of the woman, the er wo (child nest), the jing which consequently becomes the fetal skeleton to which flesh is added by the mother during pregnancy. All who are descended from the same real male ancestor and who are related through their father and his brothers are considered to have the same “bone” and regard each other as zong-qin (literally, qin means “relative”; zong, sharing the same male ancestor, and zong-qin, “relatives from the same male ancestor”), and so on up to infinity. This is the han system of representation of the body, from which the identification institution arises: an individual is zong-qin only by virtue of his father (or his progenitor, if marriage did not take place), by virtue of his brothers and sisters and his paternal uncle and the descendants of the latter, that is to say, his parallel patrilateral collaterals, but not his mother (or his female progenitor). The crossed matrilateral and patrilateral collaterals, as well as parallel matrilateral collaterals, are excluded from this circle. The zong-qin therefore constitute an explicitly defined group. The zong-qin identity of an individual and his group is immutable. Here is the smallest diagram expressing such a zong-qin group (see Figure 1 b). Coupling within such a group is forbidden. Therefore, all those who are identified as “zong-qin” are affected by the copulation ban. Therefore, the “zong-qin”

9 I have taken here traditional Chinese society as a point of reference. The data used here were collected in 1998 during my fieldwork in Liangjiahe, a distict in the west of Kunming (Yunnan).

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circle and the sphere of people affected by the coupling prohibition coincide. Here also, there is a perfect correlation. In this society, two individuals or two groups, who do not have the same “bone” are not “zong-qin” in relation to each other. They are mutual strangers, therefore sexual commerce is allowed between them.10 Explanation of symbols used in following figures Male Female Male or female or or

Ego Marital bond Generation link Brother/sister link

a

b

Fig. 1: a: – Na genealogy; b: Han genealogy.

10 Based on biology, marriage laws in the People’s Republic of China prohibit marriage between collaterals to the sixth degree. However, this does not preclude that even today we sometimes encounter marriages between parallel matrilateral collaterals, since the authorities of the district do not really try to verify the identity of the concerned parties in this regard. Thus, when the concerned parties are determined, it is easy for them to circumvent these regulations.



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 173

b

A

B C Fig. 2: French genealogy. a: Antinomy in the rules of personal identification. b: Prohibited sphere under the rule of French collaterality.

Fig. 3: Intrinsic paradox of the rule of French consanguinity. a

b

11

2 2

33

44

5 6 56

c

77 88

9 9

Fig. 4: Samo genealogy. a.1, Paternal line Samo genealogy. a 2,3,4, b & c, Maternal line Samo genealogy (the squares and the last circle of diagram C each respectively represent a lineage).

The French Case In Europe, the French, as well as most European ethnicities, portrayed a scene where both sexes are represented as two equal protagonists. From antiquity until the 19th century, Europeans thought that human conception took place through coupling, where the male seed met the blood (or seed) of the woman. Regarding the understanding of the conception process, there was also a metaphor, but a metaphor of milk, according to which the action of male semen on a woman’s period (or the action of the male seed and of the female seed on the menses) is

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similar to that of the rennet on milk, which coagulates it and transforms it from a liquid state to a solid state.11 Thus, for Aristotle: The male provides the form and the principle of movement, the female the body and the matter. It is like in the coagulation of milk: milk is the body, and the juice of fig or the rennet provides the coagulant, what comes from the male produces the same action by fragmenting inside the female. [...] When the secretion of the female, contained in the uterus, coagulates under the influence of the seed of the male, its action is similar to that exerted by the rennet on the milk. Indeed, the rennet is milk that has a kind of vital heat and which brings together the identical parts and coagulates them: the seed is in the same situation with respect to the substance of the menses. Because the nature of the milk is the same as that of the menses.12

As for the Bible, it tells us: Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay; and thou wilt bring me into dust again! Hast thou not poured me out as milk? And curdled me like cheese? Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews.13

In the early 19th century, Lamarck still speaks of the “ethereal fire” of semen. Doctors evoke the power of “emanation” of the spermatic product or even its “fragrant atmosphere.”14 If thoughts in this part of the world differ because of their explanations of the role played by the respective male and female liqueurs and the uterus, they often agree, however, to take the same element as a basis and say that it comes from both sexes and, after various transformations, it will develop the body of a new being and nourish the embryo and child. This is the “blood.” For French society, for example, this “blood” as a “saying” refers to the social fact: “blood ties,” “blood relationship,” “brothers of the same blood,” etc. Vernacular dictionaries confirm this agreement. For example, according to Le Petit Robert, “Le sang, traditionnellement considéré come porteur des caractères 11 See Nicole Belmon, “L’Enfant et le fromage”, 24–25. 12 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 729a and 739b. 13 The Bible, The Book of Job. X, 9–11, 1246. 14 Nicole Belmon, “L’Enfant et le fromage”, 24–25. In this regard, see Pierre Darmon, Le mythe de la procréation à l’âge baroque. Albert Le Grand (1206–1280) is a disciple of Aristotle’s work. However, with regards to procreation, he considers that the woman possesses a seed which, however, has no active virtue. This seed is coagulated like cheese by the seed of the male, these two humidities are joined by a third, the menstrual blood. “When these three humidities are in place, all members, except blood and fat, are formed from two humidities, of which one begets actively, and the other passively”, Nicole Belmon, “L’Enfant et le fromage”, 18.



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raciaux et héréditaires” (“Blood, traditionally regarded as the bearer of racial and hereditary traits.”)15 Based on this system of representation of the body, canon law as well as the Civil Code have established the following identification: for Ego, in a direct line, all those who come from the same ancestor, male or female, or the same real ancestral couple, which can be linked to these through the male or female progenitor of each, or one of the parents, or both parents at the same time, share the same blood and are considered blood relatives to infinity. This is the first rule, a positive rule of individual identification. It is also true in this society that coupling between members of the direct line is forbidden. In other words, all blood relatives are affected by this negative rule. Then there is another rule, which states that only some members of the collateral line of the Ego are concerned by the coupling prohibition. The limit is at a given level, which varies according to canon law and civil codes of different times and in different calculations, Roman and canonical.16 This second rule thus excludes a portion of blood relatives, considered by the first rule as part of the forbidden field of copulation. Finally, a third rule is added, that of exemption. It is clear that the last two rules are in conflict with the first and constitute major disharmonies, which are not necessary in the two types of examples given above. According to this system of representation of the body, here too the identity of “blood relative” for an individual, as well as his group, is considered immutable. Like for the Na and the Han, this identification institution admittedly works. However, there is a problem in reality. Under the rule of the direct line, B and C respectively equal A, therefore B must equal C. But according to the rules of collaterality and calculation, B does not equal C (see Figure 2). Coupling and therefore marriage are allowed. Where does this contradiction arise from? In other words, in practice, it appears that the sphere of “blood relatives” defined by the rule of the direct line does not apply to people actually affected by the coupling ban. Here there is also grosso modo a correlation, but it is not consistent in practice. Why? And what do the last two rules actually mean, as counter-rules of the first? Answering these questions requires an examination, in greater depth, of all the elements of this identification institution. First, according to this system of representation of the body, every individual is considered to have received both the blood of his father and his mother, and thus an individual is only half identical to each parent and a quarter to each grandparent, and so on. In this perspec15 Paul Robert, Le petit Robert, Paris, 31989, 1760. 16 In this regard, see Adhémar Esmein, Le mariage en droit canonique, 371–393, and Françoise Héritier, Les deux soeurs et leur mere, chapter 3.

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tive, people, each of whom is part of a different generation, are related by blood through parents, grandparents, and so on, but, strictly speaking, they are not completely identical to each other from the point of view of the common blood. Thus we see that the rule of the direct line, based on blood relationships, does not reflect this difference. Therefore, based on this system of representation of the body, if we only wish to consider those who are one hundred percent identical, then only brothers and sisters remain. Based on the blood relationship and based on the difference in the proportion of identical blood between two individuals in any pair of successive generations involved in this system of representation of the body, there arises a dilemma for the West. Denying the difference through the direct line rule has the effect of circumventing this dilemma. At first glance, it seems that the focus has been on the blood tie, and that the decrease in common blood is completely neglected, if not erased. Secondly, in turn, the rule of the direct line also comprises, in itself, a problem. It is decreed that the blood tie is infinitely counted in a direct line. But if the direct line rule is applied, we should take both parents into account in each generation. In fact, starting with the Ego, going back several generations, for example, among the living members of this group, you will not get one (!) direct line, but several (!) direct lines. The farther back we look, the more direct lines there are. Amongst the lines of grandparents and great-grandparents, etc., all direct for Ego, which is “the direct line”? Should we then count the blood tie of Ego in all the direct lines? Here is the diagram showing this configuration (see Figure 2 b). Finally, with regards to how this operates, it is the rules of collaterality and calculation that are, in fact, the keystone. Moreover, the latter has had a very interesting development. In the book Marriage in Canon Law,17 A. Esmein recounts: [...] marriage should be banned as far as kinship extends. This principle, of which we already find some traces in the Council of Toledo in the year 527 or 531, was legislatively proclaimed at the Council of Rome in 721, under the pontificate of Gregory II.18 [...] But this doctrine necessarily raised a question: was there a legal limit to kinship, or did it extend indefinitely, so that its recognition implied a simple de facto difficulty? Roman law, in the middle of which the Church lived, provided a simple solution, and, in some respects, it would be decisive. In the law before Justinian, the cognatio, kinship resulting from blood links, was restricted to the seventh degree of computation (Roman), in the sense that, to that extent only, each of the parents was designated by a particular name, and relatives called to bonorum possessio unde cognati by the praetor were all included in the first six degrees, except for two people belonging to the seventh degree. Jurists, exposing the stemmata cognationum, found that sometimes the praetor stopped there because, practically, the succession was not conceived beyond that point. This is what we find in a 17 Cf. Adhémar Esmein, Le mariage en droit canonique. 18 Ibid., 376.



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passage of the Sentences of Paul, and the Visigoth Interpretatio even expanded this idea by giving it a general scope, not limited to the edictum successorium.19

This moment in the evolution of canon law gave us the necessary and sufficient elements to analyze this type of representation of conception and its implications. First, as Esmein presented it, the extent of the relationship represents a problem. Indeed, insofar as, from an individual (Ego) we can trace back to infinity. If, going back, we stop somewhere, for example twenty generations back, and we trace back down, those who can be identified as blood relatives of Ego will then be innumerable. It would also be so in twenty generations, if we apply this rule starting at any particular point. As a result of mixing, everyone would become a blood relative in any given area. It follows that, under the rule of the prohibition of copulation between blood relatives, coupling, and therefore marriage, would no longer be possible. It is only a matter of time depending on the number of inhabitants in each region and each country. From the foregoing, we can conclude that all ideas stemming from this type of system of representation of the body, alone, cannot be used directly to identify blood relatives, and neither can they be used to determine how coupling and therefore marriage should operate, unlike in the other two cases that we have already examined. Thus, in order for society to function, it is imperative to set a limit. Thus, in this case, we have the invention of collaterality and time calculation. Let us consider the example of the seventh degree calculation of Roman times to continue our analysis. Here, what we call the rule of collaterality reflects both collaterality and degree (see Figure 3). Under the rule of the direct line, the common ancestor A (male or female) is simultaneously identical to B (male or female) and C (male or female), since it is simultaneously in direct line with B and C. Thus, if A equals B and C, B must equal C. While under the rule of collaterality (and in practice), B became different from C. Thus, we see that what really governs the game in this example is not the direct line rule counted to infinity but that of collaterality. The latter, instead of conforming to the idea of blood relationship as the direct line rule might have us believe, shows that this society actually adopts the idea of the reduction in each generation of the proportion of blood in common, since B and C are equipped with a small portion of blood in common. Rabanus Maurus, in a letter from 842 to the Abbot Hatton of Fulda seems to also think in this manner: “Recommend

19 Ibid., 376–377.

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abstention until the sixth and seventh generation because the more distant the relationship, the safer we are in this area”20 (my emphasis). Thus, at the same time, the rule of collaterality no longer literally recognizes, or rather, cannot absolutely respect this system of representation of the body. At the same time, however, it is the only rule that coherently represents the system. Since the logical reduction of blood by half with each generation embraces the idea of blood ties, and the rule of collaterality implies the existence of the direct line for the Ego, as this rule takes into account the idea of a decrease in the proportion of blood, it also necessarily takes into account the idea of blood ties. It thus overcomes the famous dilemma implied by this system. At the end of this analysis, it is clear that the rule of the direct line, considered as the first rule, is no more than empty words, logically impassable and historically not applied in social life. Thus, we understand that the fact that A equals B and C, while B is not identical to C, is not a contradiction, but appears to be quite logical and consistent with the system of representation of the body. In addition, we must add that, since the rule of collaterality aims to operate jointly and in parallel with the ban on coupling in this type of society, on the one hand, individuals within the field it has positively identified are no longer considered, in fact, as partial blood relatives, but rather as completely identical to each other as brothers and sisters born of the same parents, and on the other hand, those who are excluded are not actually considered as partially different, but rather as entirely different, as strangers with regard to those who are included (this interpretation is supported, moreover, by the belief of the Church, as mentioned above). Copulation cannot be partially prohibited, or take place partially: either it happens or it does not. It follows that between blood relatives and strangers sexual commerce is allowed. Under the rule of collaterality and that of exemption, the manner in which this kind of society actually sorts its members can be expressed by the principle of change from quantitative to qualitative. Thus, contrary to the appearance of this identification institution, finally, here again the circle of blood relatives which are definitively identified and those affected by the coupling prohibition overlap in an integral way; there is a coherent and perfect correlation. Here is a diagram showing those actually considered as blood relatives in social life (see Figure V). Regarding the establishment of a border, in fact, it is no more legitimate to set it at this or that degree, for example between the seventh and eighth degrees. A decision of this kind can only be arbitrary, and therefore cultural and social.

20 Jean Chélini, L’aube du moyen âge, 186.



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Having agreed upon a system of representation of the body, the problems may not yet be ruled out by the calculation rule which, in turn, is violated by the addition of a counter-rule of exemption. In addition, it was frequently used by the Church, and even today, it is possible that it may be used, for example, by the President of the French Republic. Decidedly, by inventing this system of representation of the body, Westerners constantly create problems, particularly in History, of course, but even today. Finally, it should be noted that with regard to the chosen degree and calculation, despite the variations in different periods established in canon law or in the civil code, the character of this identification institution remains the same. With, and only with the calculation rule, this type of society has managed to build an institution of identification, that is to say, to divide, in relation to Ego, all individuals into two kinds – those who are identical to him or his blood relatives, and those who are different or strangers, as in other types of society, – and thus to make coupling possible. Overall, we have to deal first with a system of representation of the body whose ideas cause an immediate malfunction once they are implemented, and then an incoherent identification institution composed of an antimony between the rule of the direct line and that of computation, as well as a counter-rule. It differs from other institutions that we have just explained, because it is composed of a mixture of two orders of facts, instead of being constituted, like the others, simply by the same kind of facts, namely, the intrinsic rules of the systems of representation of the body.

The Samo Case In Burkina Faso, the Samo adopted another type of behavior: a duet, where the male voice is heard eternally and the feminine voice only for a time. Thus: “the blood of the mother is used to make the body and the skeleton of the child; the father gives him all his primitive blood supply through repeated inputs of seed.21 [...] Throughout his life based on the sticky content of his bones,” an individual produces his share of blood in addition to the “initial supply” that came from his father. Starting with the fourth generation, the share of blood that came from his maternal great-great-grandparents has disappeared, “while that from the direct line of paternal ancestors is always present.”22 21 Marc Augé and Françoise Héritier, “La génétique sauvage”, 130. 22 Ibid.

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Thus, the (living and dead) blood relatives of Ego are divided into nine groups. They are those of the father (1), of the mother (2), of the paternal grandmother (FM, 3)23, of the paternal great-grandmother (FMM, 4), of the maternal great-grandmother (MMM, 5), of the maternal grandmother (MM, 6), of the maternal grandfather (MF, 7), of the maternal great-grandfather (MMF, 8) and the maternal great-grandfather (MFF, 9).24 If we go into detail, if every marriage produces a son and a daughter, in principle, they could, it seems to me, be dispersed into 54 lines. This complex configuration can be depicted by the following figures (see Figures 4 a, b, and c, the square and the last circle in Figure 4 c each represent a lineage).25 The particularity of this example lies in the idea of a regression of blood from the mother: within three generations (the third included), this blood is considered attenuated, but still present and significant in the blood of Ego, while beyond that point, it is considered absent, whereas the blood of the father remains indefinitely significant. Since this system of representation of the body is characterized by the constancy of paternal blood and regression of maternal blood, I propose to describe the Samo identification institution as “asymmetric bilateral”. In this institution, we also notice the phenomenon: A=B, A=C, however B does not equal C. But this is only true in the female line, and it is a direct consequence of their system of representation of the body. Clearly, here too, a principle of change from quantitative to qualitative operates. Furthermore, taken as a kind, the blood relatives are fully identical to each other. We also see that, among the Samo, “blood” is considered a vector of individual and hereditary traits, and the identity of a blood relative of Ego, as well as the group identity, remain immutable. Similarly, blood relatives are a clearly determined sphere within which coupling is forbidden, two individuals who do not have the same blood are strangers to each other, and coupling between them is not prohibited. Since all blood relatives perfectly fall under the field of the ban on coupling, we again have a consistent correlation here. The Samo identification institution is composed of three rules: the rule of blood as a vector of individual and hereditary traits, the rule of blood counted to infinity in the male line, and the rule of fading maternal blood beyond three generations.

23 The Anglo-Saxon abbreviation of kinship terminology is generally adopted by Francophone anthropology because of its ease of use. The following abbreviations are used in this work: Ego means the person of reference, F = father, M = mother. For exemple, FMM = Father’s mother’s mother. 24 Françoise Héritier, Les deux sœurs et leur mère, 150. 25 Ibid., 152.



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Given that, as of the cognition of procreation, each ethnic group establishes its own relative identification institution going back very far, if not to the origin of the culture, we propose to designate this kind of relative as a “meta-relative”, and this kind of kinship link as a “meta-kinship”. It is needless to point out that we are talking of the meta-relative or meta-kinship of each ethnic group, and not those of all mankind. Thus, in all these types of cultures, for Ego, the members of the society are characterized by meta-relative identity of two opposite kinds: meta-relatives of Ego and non-meta-relatives of Ego, namely, those who are identical to and those who are different from Ego. Here, there is a constant, that meta-kinship is determined by the system of representation of the body alone or by this system and also by ecclesiastical or civil rules, as in the case of the French,26 for example. Based on the foregoing, one of my arguments is that at the basis of the system of representation of the body, each of these four types of society has established its own individual identification institution which, undoubtedly, is the cultural foundation of the kinship system.27 Once stated, the cultural foundation of kinship seems obvious and simple. We must therefore ask why, so far, it has been so persistently difficult for anthropology to grasp it.

Equivalence of the Various Systems of Representation of the Body The preceding analysis undeniably negates that the “natural,” “universal” and “unchangeable” kinship system alleged by Morgan28 does not exist, and cannot exist anywhere. Indeed, various systems of representation of the body and various identification institutions have taken shape since ancient times, and it seems certain that they each played a role for centuries until today, without (or without any need for) 26 The situation is similar in the case of the system of kinship in Arab marriage: it is the system of representation of the body (milk kinship, as the experts say) and the rules set by the Koran which jointly determine the identical and different kinds of Ego. 27 It should be noted, for ease of exposition, I will for now put it simply in this equation: kinship (cultural) = consanguinity (cultural) + affinity. As I cite the authors in the following discussion, I will use quotes to mark the terms kinship and consanguinity that they use in order to direct the reader’s attention to the biological sense they give to each of these terms, and to avoid potential misunderstanding. 28 Lewis H. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, 11.

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true and accurate knowledge of reproduction. They belong to the order of cultural rules and not to that of natural rules, before and after the discovery of genetic law. It is quite true that all human groups have noticed the following facts: human beings are divided into two sexes; they have blood, bones, flesh, milk, semen (or liquid), etc.; copulation, pregnancy and childbirth are correlated. However, the various explanations of reproduction are not due to differences in intelligence, or to a difference in the level of knowledge, as Morgan believes. The difference between these systems of representation of the body is simply the result of the following fact: each ethnic group considered different body parts and sometimes a good spirit or god as determinant of reproduction. In other words, this is simply so because the decision on the issue of which is the generation which gave rise to different ethnic groups is not based on the same factors, nor the same combinations of elements that they could understand and imagine. An ethnic group does not need exceptionally developed intelligence or particularly sophisticated knowledge to have an idea of what reproduction is. It is also true that, if you compare the elements taken into account by these ethnic groups, it becomes apparent that they are of different orders. Coincidence, or rather similarity between the Western system of representation of the body and the mechanism proven by biology does not alter the cultural character of this system. Moreover, as we noted above, the ideas included in the Western system cannot be used as basic rules that could work in a society, if they are applied as they are. It is therefore needless to reiterate; it is clearly obvious that the genetic system cannot and can never become a cultural rule without causing malfunction. Without cultural intervention (between successive degrees, for example, the seventh and the eighth degrees, there is no difference in nature) or without setting an appropriate prohibited degree, the Western system of kinship would quickly become unfeasible. The Roman system, except for the malfunction that it may cause, is just like the others, although it is closer to what was discovered in biology. Nothing is therefore more erroneous than identifying the Western system of representation of the body with the genetic rule. Regarding the anthropological understanding of the foundations of the kinship, it is, it seems to me, in this erroneous genetic vision that the crucial obstacle lies, the one that confines others beyond Morgan to this day. The system’s elements and the relationships between the elements thus gathered vary according to ethnicity; any explanation makes sense within the cultural logic of the ethnic group in question, and therefore there is no judgment that is more arbitrary than the other. Anthropologically speaking, all the systems of representation of the body and all the individual identification institutions that function as well as the others are equally valid.



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Prohibition of Incest Through induction and from the anthropological point of view, the four types of examples we analyzed show that there is another type of incest, which it would seem is universally prohibited. Its essence lies in exclusively cultural and social facts. This incest occurs, always and everywhere, as coupling between meta-relatives of any ethnicity. As we have demonstrated, the field implied by the prohibition of this incest and the circle of meta-relatives are perfectly coextensive and in coherent correlation in all four types of societies. Based on these four types of systems of representation of the body and four types of individual identification institutions, we learned, again by induction, the definition of incest (of course, this is a developing definition until proven otherwise). Thus, this hypothesis becomes highly testable, simple, greatly explicative, and fully, coherently beautiful (manifested in the symmetry of coextension and the perfectly coherent correlation between the sphere of the meta-relatives defined by the positive rule and the circle of meta-relatives affected by the negative rule, which bans this incest). Thus, the prohibition of this incest is only cultural and, as per our current knowledge, universal. In addition, this universality that we discovered does not imply, indeed, the problem of the tie, nor that of the union, or that of transformation (or transition) between nature and culture, as Lévi-Strauss believed, but rather it is cultural coherence. We can thus build an anthropological explanation of incest based solely on what man does, without resorting to what primates do. The preceding analysis shows that the anthropological hypotheses on kinship were formed considering Western ethnoepistemology as the only reference point, since it is in the West that anthropology was born and that throughout its history many theoretical reflections were made, often unconsciously, in the vocabulary of this culture only. So considering that meta-kinship is cultural and affinity is also cultural, can we now envisage the construction of a truly general theory of kinship? To answer this question, let us push the analysis of our four types of cases to its limit.

Identity of the Diverse Cultural Identities of Humans In ethnographic literature, we have found that the elements considered important in reproduction vary according to ethnicity. They can be, amongst others, woman, man, spirit, soul, name of a deceased, etc. And likewise the vectors of individual and hereditary traits by ethnicity may be bone, blood, milk, and other

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“bodily” substances, as well as god and spirit. But regardless of the vector, of the involvement or not of a spirit, of the decision on whether or not to take the name of a deceased, each ethnic group assigns a cultural identity to each member of the society. And this identity refers to and is assimilated to either the one of the mother or that of the father or both parents, either for a specified time or forever, but never only the one of the deceased whose name is adopted by the person in question. As for the god or spirit involved in conception, ethnography is divided into two types. For example, although Abodgu for the Na, Nuiwa29 for the Han, demiurges such as God for the Christians, or even the creators of man according to the culture, intervene, this is not a reference point to define this identity, precisely because, as the creator of all individuals, it is considered the reference point of an ethnic group, but not of the meta-kinship of a domestic group. To consider it a reference of collective identity implies that all individuals of an ethnic group are identical to each other, and this would cause, therefore, a malfunction in the entire kinship group. This is the first type. The second, meanwhile, is one in which the spirit or god is taken as the reference for individual identification. It can be illustrated by the regime of representation of reproduction of the Arunta.30 The spirit-child is a stakeholder in reproduction and is not only a vector for individual and hereditary traits, but also a reference point for individual identity. This is because the spirit-children are already divided into various totemic groups whose identities differ from each other. Obviously, completely different from biological identity, this identity is cultural. And however different the references are in the various ethnic groups and therefore in the different cultures, all forms of individual identity are, from an anthropological point of view, equally valid. Thus, under the great diversity of cultural identities, one identity is concealed: the cultural quality of the individual. Defined at the birth of every person, this identity is the first cultural quality of every man.

Four Types of Cultural Meta-kinship Based on the distinction between meta-relatives and non-meta-relatives, we propose the following hypothesis: cultural meta-kinship is universally invariant. When the cultural identity of Ego is identified with that of the mother in an ethnic group, the meta-kinship rule is matrilineal. Then we can speak of “matri29 The creator of the human being. 30 Cf. Hua Cai, L’homme pensé par l’homme, chapter 4.



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lineality” (or matri-unilinearity) and we are dealing with a matrilineal society. When the cultural identity of Ego depends on that of his father, we have patrilineal meta-kinship or “patrilineality” (or patri-unilinearity), so we are in the presence of a patrilineal society. When the identity of Ego depends, infinitely and simultaneously, on the father and mother, we get a bilateral meta-kinship, or what we usually call “cognate” or “undifferentiated.” In this case, we call this meta-kinship “symmetric bilinearity.” Thus, we are faced with a symmetrical bilateral society. When cultural identity is identified with that of both parents, infinitely with that of one parent and for a limited time with that of the other (what experts in the jargon call “craw or Omaha system”), or with that of both parents, but for a limited time each, for example, five generations on one side, and three generations on the other, the meta-kinship is also bilateral, but asymmetric with regard to time. Here we are dealing with “asymmetric bilinearity,” so we call this kind of society “asymmetrically bilateral society.”

Two Generalizations of Deep Structure Given the current state of our ethnographic knowledge, it seems that we can identify these four archetypes of meta-kinship. The cultural meta-kinship rule is a positive rule, since it asserts that within a society an individual is identical to another. The prohibition of coupling between cultural meta-relatives, as a negative rule, is perfectly correlated with the rule of cultural meta-kinship, and their spheres of applications are coextensive. Thus we see that the cultural meta-kinship and coupling ban between meta-relatives are not only two constants, but two invariants. They reflect, therefore, that “the theorem of sexual exclusion between cultural meta-relatives” advanced in “a society without a father or husband The Na of China”, is not the product of the Na case alone (even if only one particular case is sufficient to relativize all of the same kind), but it is also illustrated by and therefore based on these four archetypes. Thus, our hypothesis is that the cultural meta-kinship and coupling ban between meta-relatives are universal.

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Pharaoh Marriage between Brother/Sister as an Exceptional Type When we speak of the universality of this prohibition, an objection may immediately come to mind. Before continuing our demonstration, let us rapidly dismiss it. We may wonder about the famous “consanguine marriage of the Pharaohs” in Egypt.31 Is it not a counter-example of the theorem of sexual exclusion between cultural meta-relatives? According to the magisterial study of Pascal Vernus and Jean Yoyotte, exogamy was the rule for the Pharaoh. In the Hellenistic period, the consanguine marriage of the king became common. The monarch, however, was superhuman. His marital status and the status of his women were affected by this situation. He had several wives, one titled the “great king’s wife” (starting with the twenty-second dynasty). His wife was frequently chosen amongst his subjects, and sometimes amongst the daughters of an allied sovereign. But the Pharaoh, and only he, could also marry his sisters. It was a common practice in the first half of the eighteenth dynasty that the “great wife” was the consanguine sister of the king (and this was almost the rule in the Macedonian Ptolemaic family).32 Thus, the existence of marriage between brother and sister is reported with certainty. But were the Pharaoh and his sisters of the same cultural identity? To answer this question, let us see what these two authors tell us: “The Pharaonic matriarchy and the principle of the necessary solar consanguinity are speculative models that we can no longer believe. The role of the womb in the transmission of legitimacy was passive, doctrinally limited to mythical ‘“theogamy’”: the king’s mother is supposed to have conceived a baby predestined to carry out the works of the supreme god incarnated in the body of the carnal father.”33 Here, the message is loud and clear. The system of representation of the body with regard to the pharaoh is a type of theogamy. When it came to making the baby who would become king, it was not the king himself, but the demiurge, who impregnated. In contrast, the other children were born of the king himself. The king was superhuman, created by god, but he himself was only able to reproduce humans. Thus, derived directly from the supreme god, the king was of a different substance than his brothers and sisters in terms of his cultural identity and social quality: he was superhuman, and the others human. Indeed, this was a “consan-

31 Cf. Pascal Vernus and Jean Yoyotte, Dictionnaire des Pharaons, 144–146. 32 Cf. Ibid., 144–146. 33 Ibid., 145.



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guine marriage,” if you prefer the term, but only biologically speaking (which is not our preoccupation). However, obviously and unquestionably, this was not a marriage between cultural meta-relatives, but rather a marriage between non-meta-relatives. Exceptionally, this system of representation of the body is characterized by the transmission of only the theo-masculine individual identity, that is to say, only from the supreme god (the father) to the Pharaoh-superhuman (the son). This can be depicted by the following figure:

Supreme god Superhumans Male and female humans the making of the king by the supreme god Fig. 5: Pharaoh Marriage

Thus the theogamous justification of the marriage between the Pharaoh and one of his sisters is easily explained by our theorem, or rather, the cultural explanation of theogamy perfectly supports our theorem. From the point of view of the brother/sister, it is indeed an exception, but an exception that proves the rule.

Belief As you can see, humans have affirmative opinions and believe that a proposition or a set of propositions correspond to reality. Whether an opinion is called a belief because it is based on a proposition that is false or impossible to test, or it is called a conviction because it is based on knowledge or a hypothesis that is to be proven, it governs behavior as long as it is accepted as positive. For example, when an opinion regarding a proposition is accepted by a scientist, even if, for want of technical means, it is yet to be tested, this opinion, namely the belief of the scientist in question, already exerts influence on his behavior, that is to say, it directs his research. However, if propositions are presented as knowledge, thought, morality, values, aesthetics or religious doctrine, etc., and an individual or a group does not have a favorable opinion of them for whatever reason, they have no effect on their behavior. Similarly, we often see that a proposition is

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proved completely absurd, yet when it is accepted by someone or by a group, it affects the behavior of the latter. The belief’s specificity lies within itself, instead of within a physical being, a conceptual existence, or a neural product. As an assertion of a product of cognition, hypothetical or not, belief is subjective. It therefore, by definition, belongs to the subjective. Belief in the representation of physical existence and that of order gives rise in each ethnic group to a range of norms, and therefore institutions. By assigning a series of non-material qualities (cultural identity and social qualities) to each individual, such as cultural meta-kinship, and non-meta-kinship, the son, maternal uncle and/or father, maternal great-uncle and/or grandfather, daughter, mother, grandmother, peasant, worker, public servant, creditor and debtor, cleric and believer, king and subject, citizen and president, etc., institutions make the individuals in a group socially different from each other, and prescribe, at the same time, rights and duties for each type of individual. That is to say, an individual with a kind of moral attribute has such rights and such duties vis-à-vis individuals with the same cultural or social quality, and other rights and duties vis-à-vis those bearing a different quality. Linking individuals across different types of rights and duties, institutions determine different types of structures for social organization, and therefore behaviors. So we see that belief is the individual identity’s entity and directs, through institutions, the behavior of individuals. Thus, social fact turns out to be the work of belief, which in turn manifests as having one property, the force that determines the structure of cultural and social facts and the relationships between them. We call this force the “structuring force of belief”. If we recognize that, as a result of cognition, the representation of reproduction and that of order are identified, in fact, as what we call hypothetical-deductive propositions, then the effects of beliefs embodied in kinship, political, economic and religious systems form a force field. There is a correlation among belief, institution, social organization and, finally, behavior. Therefore the social functioning of any ethnic group depends on the belief in cultural identities, individual social behavior, and social relations between individuals, and not on the physical relationships between them. Thus we note that this causality and correlation between belief and behavior demonstrates that, through its subjective existence, belief has objectivity, the objectivity of the subjective. Belief, as a conceptual substance, can only be detected by the verifiable effects of its structuring force. In other words, this virtual existence can be tested by measuring the correlation between thinking (that is, propositions) and doing (behavior) that we can obtain through interviewing and observation.



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Moreover, it should be noted that, due to its structuring force, belief has another property, exclusivity, which, like a “standard load,” attracts what is similar and repels what is different and which we call “belief load”.

A Theoretical Hypothesis as a Conclusion The ideal universe seems to be divided into three categories of facts: propositions embodied in all sorts of norms (including the propositions in the concepts connoted by the vocabulary of an ethnic group, literature and art), propositions of the natural sciences and of different technologies, including traditional technologies, and those in the social and human sciences. Man is always seeking more knowledge about the past and the present and seeks to continually improve the conditions of his material and social life. Thus, throughout history, we often see that, on any given subject, a new belief replaces the old one, and the change in belief redirects the behavior of a community. The propositions included in a belief that we no longer share are therefore no longer part of the living culture. For example, when the cognate rule replaces the patrilineal rule in an ethnic group, Ego will have a cultural identity derived from both his mother and his father. He will behave differently: he can no longer marry the daughter of his maternal uncle nor his aunt, maternal or paternal, as before. This is the case of the Han in the city today. In the natural sciences, when a new postulate on a given topic replaces the old one, or a hypothesis has been invalidated, scientific activities take a different direction. Similarly, when a new technology replaces an old one, production activities follow suit. For example, iron was a step forward compared to stone, electric traction an improvement over steam traction, the digital over the mechanical, etc. All hypotheses considered as true consist only of propositions that have already been proven by experimentation and implemented as technology, or are yet to be tested. This also applies to the social and human sciences. Regarding social management, when we believe that the market economy will better support development, we abandon the planned economy. Similarly, despotism is replaced with democracy (beyond the aspiration to freedom) when a community believes it is the only way to provide continuous legitimacy to power and prevent more social disasters and therefore better ensure social harmony. In the field of literature and art, new works imply new designs proven or invented by the author. These designs may influence individual behavior. Here again, these designs can be reduced to propositions. All beliefs are only convic-

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tions expressed as propositions. As for the evolution of beliefs, it is the origin of the change in the mechanism of society. Indeed, originating from propositions, these three categories of facts are homogeneous. In the social and human sciences, belief is at the heart of the issues that are to be addressed. Because of it or thanks to it, diversity of cultures flourished on our globe. Given that representing a phenomenon that one has perceived is the only necessary and sufficient way to organize the thinking of humans, hence the principle of representation, that believing in judgments, as a primitive act of the brain, is the only necessary and sufficient way to assert hypotheses, hence the principle of belief, and that various norms, various institutions and various behaviors are all conditioned by belief, we find that it is the principle of belief which governs the entire social field and, consequently, determines its operation. Simply put, the social is the work of belief. Based on the concepts and propositions founded in the preceding demonstration, the hypothesis that I advance here as a general theory for the anthropology of kinship, as well as the social and human sciences, is “the theory of belief”. The conclusion that this comparative study has reached allows us to radically separate the cultural and social from the biological, and thus make the social and human sciences completely independent from natural science.

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Needham, Rodney, Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford, Blackwell, 1972. Needham, Rodney, La parenté en question. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1977 (Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, London, Tavistock, 1971). Parsons, Talcott, “Clyde Kluckhohn and the Integration of the Social Sciences”. In Culture and Life: Essays in Memory of Clyde Kluckhohn, edited by Walter W. Taylor, John L. Fischer, and Evon Z. Vogt. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1973, 30–57. Parsons, Talcott, “Culture and Social System Revisited”. In The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences, edited by Louis Schneider and Charles M. Bonjean. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973, 33–46. Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York, Free Press, 1937. Radciffe-Brown, Alfred R. and Daryll Forde, eds., African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, London, Oxford University Press, 1950. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R., “Etude des systèmes de parenté”. In Structure et fonction dans la société primitive. edited by Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Louis Marin. Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1968, 113–157. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R., “Succession patrilinéaire et matrilinéaire”. In Structure et fonction dans la société primitive, edited by Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Louis Marin. Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1968, 93–112 (Structure and function in Primitive Society. London, Cohen & West, 1950). Schneider, David M., “What is Kinship all about?”. In Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year, edited by Priscilla Reining. Washington, DC, The Anthropological Society of Washington, 1972. Schneider, David M., A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1984. Van Gennep, Arnold, Mythes et legends d’Australie. Paris, E. Guilmoto, 1906. Vernus, Pascal and Jean Yoyotte, Dictionnaire des Pharaons. Paris, Editions Noêsis, 1998.

Gender, Sexuality, and Violence

Vanesa Vazquez Laba and Cecilia Rugna1

Is My Body My Own?

Reflecting on the Indeterminate Body and Livable Life Mi cuerpo se inventa en la noche con palabras que cuestan. Alejandra Pizarnik2 Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. Judith Butler3 … De pronto, para ser alguien es imprescindible encarnar un género absoluto en la reducida superficie de la entrepierna–… Mauro Cabral4

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler suggests: If a sperm and egg are necessary for reproduction (and remain so) – and in that sense sexual difference is an essential part of any account a human may come up with about his or her origin – does it follow that this difference shapes the individual more profoundly than other constituting social forces, such as the economic or racial conditions by which one comes into being, the conditions of one’s adoption, the sojourn at the orphanage? Is there very much that follows from the fact of an originating sexual difference?5

1 Further cooperators are Catalina Arango, Silvana Mondino, Pamela Sánchez, and Cintia Orellana. 2 “My body invents itself in the nighttime with costly words.” Alejandra Pizarnik, Poesía complete. 3 Judith Butler, El género en disputa. El feminismo y la subversión de la identidad. Barcelona, Paidós, 2014. – Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of Judith Butler’s works are not back-translations, but have been retrieved from: Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender. New York, Routledge, 2004; Id., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, Routledge, 2011. It should be noted, however, that in-text references have not been modified: the year of publication and page number in each reference are the ones originally used by the authors of this article. See Bibliographical references. 4 “... Suddenly, embodying an absolute gender in the limited surface of one’s crotch is indispensable to become somebody...” Mauro Cabral, “Los géneros de la noticia”, Página 12. http:// www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/las12/13-7857-2013-02-22.html. 5 Judith Butler, Deshacer el género, 26.

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The discussion on sexuality, the body and desire has been at the core of feminist debates for four decades. First, by disassembling biologicist arguments into sex and gender; then, by including desire and fantasies to transform compulsory heterosexuality; and more recently, by discussing permitted bodies and livable existence6. It is on this last point that we will focus in the present article. Butler begins her book by posing the following questions: “what makes for a livable world?” and “what makes my own life bearable?” In answering these questions, we cannot help but reexamine the ontological principles regarding what life is and what it should be and, above all, what being human and what the human life itself comprise. In this sense, the idea of ‘survival’ promotes critical analysis both of ‘norms’ and the idea of ‘norm’ in itself. Normalization and normativity are connected; norms bind us but they also bring us together in situations of exclusion (ties in common, the way we talk and think are what make us human). As regards gender, however, which of the norms governing gender designate what is and is not a livable life? It is known that norms can become fissured and can lay themselves open to resignification. To posit different possibilities is part of the work of fantasy; and if we consider the body as a point of departure for our games, desires and hopes, we will most likely produce forms and images that will not be constrained to the body ‘just as it is’. Fantasy is what allows a woman or a man to imagine her/ himself and other ‘women’ or ‘men’ differently; fantasy points to another place and when it incorporates this other place, the latter becomes possible/familiar. Before moving forward, however, it is necessary to recall Butler’s starting point regarding the production of sexual identity or, to paraphrase her, of sex/ gender subjectivities. We know that in Gender Trouble, her first book, the author reflects back on Simone de Beauvoir’s famous slogan “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” and consequently asks: “Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal? [...]”7. The Butlerian review is anchored in the Nietzschean manifesto “there are no facts, only interpretations,” which is then translated into the sex-gendered signifier: there is no sex, but there is gender. This means that one should not understand ‘sex’ as a natural fact, for there is no such thing. ‘Sex’ is always mediated by a ‘gendered’ interpretation.

6 Cf. ibid.; Beatriz Preciado, Testo yonqui. Sexo, drogas y biopolítica. 7 Judith Butler, El género en disputa, 55.



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Gender is thus presented as the discursive medium that interprets sex and constitutes it as something prediscursive. This strategy ensures a binary framework for gender: a continuity between sex and gender, resulting in two possible gender modalities – masculine and feminine –, is conceived under the hypothesis that sex is something natural and that there are only two sexes – male and female.8

The disciplinary and regulatory system of gender is the heteronormative, by which the causal link between sex/body, binary gender and desire is defined in advance as natural and normal. This discursive construction establishes identities based on the apparently biological ‘datum’. Beyond the dichotomous pair, everything is incoherent, discontinuous, unnecessary, and disrupts the gender norm; and although these ‘discontinuous identities’ cannot exist within the social, cultural and historical sex/gender constructions, they do exist and these same laws are the ones that bring them into existence, that is to say, said identities can only be conceived in relation to norms of continuity and coherence. Lives that fall outside this regulatory ideal become intelligible (or less intelligible) and are considered ‘nonhuman’ or ‘dehumanized’ (‘or less human’), as opposed to ‘human lives’, meaning, those which respond to regulatory ideals. In this way, the norm produces both its inside and its outside, the latter being constitutive of the former: the dehumanized is that which the human is configured in opposition to.9

Other possible bodies; a world that would make it possible to live with other bodies: this is the current feminist discussion. But where should one begin in order to understand and build the possibility of indeterminate and livable bodies? According to Butler, the answer lies in rethinking the idea of norm as associated to the idea of normalization. The norm is intelligible, it creates social parameters, and one can be inside or outside of it, which means that the definition builds on the norm. In other words, it’s possible to define in terms of feminine and masculine, but that which departs from this binarism – from the norm, the gender norm here – also entails becoming part of that norm. Despite the fact that gender validates and produces the masculine/feminine binary, it can also serve to prompt its deconstruction and denaturalization. Discussing gender allows for the concept of gender10 itself to be expanded and changed in order to dispute the regulatory power. 8 Malena Nijensohn, “Sujetos sin sustancia”, 33. 9 Judith Butler, Deshacer el género, 35 sq. T.N. This excerpt has been translated from the Spanish quote provided by the authors of the present article. 10 The author criticizes psychoanalysis for establishing the rules that regulate desire based on unalterable assumptions, through which understanding the transformation of gender is not possible. Due to the fact that the prohibition of incest can encourage its own transgression, a queer

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In regards to the body, Butler states: The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The paradox appears when the bodies we struggle with are not quite ever only our own. The body has a public dimension; the body is a social phenomenon.11

“My body is and is not mine;” it is produced in the melting pot of social life; it bears the imprint of the social world. The fact that our lives are dependent on others can become the basis of claims for nonmilitaristic political solutions, one which we cannot will away, one which we must attend to, even abide by, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself.12

In Undoing Gender, Butler begins the third chapter, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality,” by reflecting on the relevance of power13 – a power that has implications for the juridical and conditions gender decisions – both in life and in relationships between genders. The author also refers to Foucault and his notion of politics of truth12: those assumptions that are ‘permitted’ or ‘accepted’ and those that are not. Ultimately, the real question will be/is about the conditions of possibility of the person, the gender, the citizen, but also of norms and discourses that limit in advance gender decisions. In other words, these decisions take place within a certain field12 and, as Butler explains, one should question the current state of said field, that is, the possibilities that people have to disclose, choose or conceive their sexual identity. Moreover, it is an attempt to obtain recognition by the general public, but also by the medical community, since it questions sexual difference that is based on genitalia.

structuralism of the psyche arising from the radical reformulation of kinship is suggested. As regards the symbolic position of the masculine and the feminine, Butler’s criticism is rooted in the irrefutability of this standpoint, seeing as it is defined in terms of the masculine and the feminine itself and appeals to its own theoretical prestige, which makes it immutable. There is a sociological recovery of the notion of gender in that it overcomes the Lacanian view that was influenced by the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. 11 Judith Butler, Deshacer el género, 41. 12 Ibid., 42. 13 T.N. ‘Power,’ ‘politics of truth’ and ‘field’ were originally emphasized by the authors of this article.



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It is on the basis of this reflection, therefore, that we wonder about the impact of the Gender Identity Law14, passed by the Argentine Senate on May 9th, 2012, which grants people who feel or experience their body on a personal level rather than a gender-normative one the right: a) To the recognition of their gender identity; b) To the free development of their person according to their gender identity; c) To be treated according to their gender identity and, particularly, to be identified in that way in the documents proving their identity in terms of the first name/s, image and sex recorded there.15 The granting of identity under the Gender Identity Law is defined as follows: Gender identity is understood as the internal and individual way in which gender is perceived by persons, that can correspond or not to the gender assigned at birth, including the personal experience of the body. This can involve modifying bodily appearance or functions through pharmacological, surgical or other means, provided it is freely chosen. It also includes other expressions of gender such as dress, ways of speaking and gestures.16

The aforementioned law is informed by the sex/gender/sexuality debates that feminism and postfeminism have been promoting in the academic and political field. It regards the construction of gender identity as a personal and individual experience, which may or may not correspond to the gender assigned at birth. Moreover, this law provides for the right to modify one’s appearance – dress, ways of speaking, etc. – body and bodily functions through pharmacological, surgical or other means, as long as the decision to undergo modification is made by the individual in question. There are, in some European countries, laws that allow for the amendment of documentation and body modifications to match the self-perceived identity – for the Spanish case, see Preciado17. These legislation, however, depart from the Argentinian law, since the latter assumes criteria of demedicalization, dejuridicalization, decriminalization and destigmatization. Consequently, the Argentinian law guarantees gender identity by granting the following rights: 1. All persons who so desire can request that the recorded sex, name and image be changed whenever they perceive themselves differently. 2. All persons who so desire will be able access total and partial surgical interventions and/or comprehensive hormonal treatments to adjust their bodies, 14 Ley 26.743 “Identidad de Género”. 15 Ibid., Article 1. 16 Ibid., Article 2. 17 Beatriz Preciado, Testo yonqui. Sexo, drogas y biopolítica.

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including their genitalia, to their self-perceived gender identity, without requiring any judicial or administrative authorization. 3. All persons have the right to be treated with dignity, which means that the chosen gender identity must be respected (i.e. calling individuals by the name that corresponds to their self-perceived gender). In Butlerian terms, we can reflect on the social, cultural and political transformations, as well as those affecting the personal life of individuals – transformations caused by a law that contemplates identity change, physical modifications and respect for the adopted identity and that is the result of the historic and constant struggle of social movements, especially the LGBTTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer), the human rights movement and the women’s and feminist movement linked to gender, desire, sexuality and the body, by which ‘indeterminate bodies’ and ‘bodies of the future’ were vindicated. This new law led us to question, from a Butlerian perspective, the function of the ‘norm’ in terms of regulation. As regards the liberties granted by the Gender Identity Law to change one’s identity, body and genitalia, are they producing a subject whom the normative power does not regulate? Is this new norm18 subverting the existent normativity to make the life of people livable and habitable? Is this a norm17 that gives rise to the imaginary and real transformation of a world in which those who experience gender confusion/oppression could conceive of themselves as beings living a livable existence and receive recognition? Celebrating the enactment of this law, Lohana Berkins19 and Marlene Wayar wrote for the “Soy” supplement of the newspaper Página/12, delivering a harangue that emphasized the transvestite identity, that is to say, that eluded the binary classification male/female. This evinces the power of laws to regulate and control. In Wayar’s words: “This law is intended for those who want to maintain the normality of the male/female binary, leaving those of us who transcend it exactly where we are or, more precisely, extorting normalization under these exclusive categories.”20 In short, even when the purpose of the Gender Identity Law is to acknowledge the he/she individual by allowing said individual to answer for her/himself the F/M question in accordance with his/her bodily experience, this law does not, paradoxically, cease to reproduce a dichotomous and limiting gender.

18 T.N. ‘Norm’ was emphasized in the source text. 19 Cf. Lohana Berkins, “Las travestis siempre estuvimos aquí”. 20 Marlene Wayar, “¿Qué pasó con la T?”.



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The receptiveness implied by the possibility to mark with a cross the F category if one is born a male excludes numerous vital experiences. For example, the transvestite identity... a purely female correspondence? Neither feminine nor masculine account for this particular expression. In this case, normative subjection operates through the few possibilities of sexual-gender expression. The correspondence of how we name ourselves, which should not be equivalent to whether one feels male or female, would come hand in hand with sexual and/or genital reassignment. How should sexual reassignments be read? Also, as ‘aligning’ bodily identity with name. In the case of the intersex individual, it would be impossible to assert whether he/she is born either a male or a female, so how would it be expressed in the National Identity Document?21 Sexual difference and the feminine/masculine binarism continue to be reproduced in the change of gender identity. A problem then arises: this new, progressive law is assuming the perpetuation of sexual difference, as was initially the case of academic and political feminist debates, but, returning to Judith Butler, gender trouble is the contestation of sexual difference itself. In this rift between high structuralist feminist theory and post-structuralist gender trouble, that is, from sexual difference to queer theory, “there is a slippage between sexual difference as a category that conditions the emergence into language and culture, and gender as a sociological concept, figured as a norm”22. In the last chapter of Undoing Gender, Butler uses the example of drag not to indicate that it subverts gender norms, but to highlight that “we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts of ontology, which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be considered real and true, and which kind will not”23. The idea that supports the question of who and what is considered real and true is clear, and it is apparently a question of knowledge, but also, drawing from Foucault, a question of power. “Having or bearing ‘truth’

21 T.N. National Identity Document: (D.N.I.) Documento Nacional de Identidad. See “Derecho a la identidad y diversidad sexual”. Material de la Coordinación de Articulación Estratégica Programa de Fortalecimiento de Derechos y participación de las Mujeres Juana Azurduy. Jefatura de Gabinetes de Ministro, Presidencia de la Nación. 22 Judith Butler, Deshacer el género, 298. It is important to distinguish three types of theorists: theorists of sexual difference who argue on biological grounds that the distinction between the sexes is necessary; those who argue that sexual difference is a fundamental nexus through which language and culture emerge; and those for whom the structuralist paradigm is useful because it charts the continuing power differential between men and women and society. Among the latter, there is yet another distinction to be made between those who consider that this symbolic order is inevitable and those who think that sexual difference is inevitable but contestable. 23 Ibid., 214.

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and ‘reality’ is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social world, one way in which power dissimulates as ontology”24. Consequently, we consider that, as Butler claims, “no one achieves autonomy without the assistance or support of a community”25, especially in the transition to trans autonomy, just because it is engaged in the practice of self-determination and of the exercise of people’s autonomy. This practice, however, requires a norm: how is it that the drag or, in fact, much more than the drag, the transgender itself, enters the political field? And the author brilliantly replies: It does this, I would suggest, by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted. Fantasy is not simply a cognitive exercise, an internal film that we project inside the interior theater of the mind. Fantasy structures relationality and it comes into play in the stylization of embodiment itself. Bodies are not inhabited as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signification – depending on their interactions – and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constitutive past, present, and future.26

And she continues: As a consequence of being in the mode of becoming, and in always living with the constitutive possibility of becoming otherwise, the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation. These corporeal realities are actively inhabited, and this activity is not fully constrained by the norm.27

Becoming a body and making it livable inevitably lead to the idea of human life; the imminent challenge consists in building recognition as well as the conditions of a person’s livability. As a final point, we consider worth mentioning an article by Mauro Cabral, “Genders of the News”28, in which he asserts the following: The imaginarily spectacular nature of hermaphroditism hides, for instance, two major questions. Firstly, the question about the need for one or more medical interventions. The repetition, somewhere between incredulous and joyful, of body parts (‘a penis a vagina, a penis and a vagina, a penis... and a vagina!’) seems to justify in itself the need to operate as soon as possible in order to eradicate the evil presence of that which is unnecessary. And in that way, the need to evaluate if there’s any concrete risk of gonadal malignancy disap24 Ibid., 303. 25 Ibid., 115. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 307. This quote was originally emphasized by the authors of this article. 28 T.N. The original title of the article in Spanish is “Los géneros de la noticia.”



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pears from public consideration and understanding. Secondly, the question about the consequences of the medical intervention, where the need to anchor identity to the mono-sexed body prevails over any interest in investigating the disastrous effects of the intervention. Every time intersexuality appears on the horizon of the registrable, a register crisis, precisely, arises – and soon a human body becomes painfully unclassifiable flesh. The register crisis produces, as in a domino effect, a bioethical crisis, and that which would be a crime in the context of other lives and other bodies becomes protocol to be obeyed in the context of our lives and our bodies. The relationship between genitals and register becomes besotted with literalness – suddenly, embodying an absolute gender in the limited surface of one’s crotch is indispensable to become somebody...29

In Germany, the enactment (November, 2013) of a law that grants little girls/boys the formal right to have their sex registered as indeterminate on their birth certificates could be considered a more significant development. This is the first step toward recognizing human beings as not necessarily male or a female. What is more, the idea of gender as experienced and the choice of gender as a basic human right become a reality. People who are registered as ‘indeterminate’, if they so desire, will be able in the future to change their sex on their birth certificates. The question is real, not rhetorical or fantastic: will all those non-hegemonic genders with which transsexual people are identified nowadays be included in that possibility? Will their lives be respected on the basis of that identity ‘indeterminateness’, when identity is naming to quantify? Will we be able to build social representations around variability of gender, sex and sexuality? Challenges.

Bibliography Butler, Judith, Deshacer el género. Barcelona, Paidós, 2004 (Undoing Gender. New York, Routledge, 2004). Butler, Judith, El género en disputa. El feminismo y la subversión de la identidad. Barcelona, Paidós, 2014 (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, Routledge, 2011). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 (Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, first 1949). Nijensohn, Malena, “Sujetos sin sustancia. De la crítica a la metafísica de la sustancia de Nietzsche a la producción de subjetividades sexo-generizadas de Butler”. In Femenías, Maria L., Virginia Cano, and Paula Torricella, eds., Judith Butler, su filosofía a debate. Buenos Aires, Editorial FFyL-UBA, C.A.B.A., 2014. Pizarnik, Alejandra, Poesia complete. Buenos Aires, Editorial Lumen, 2007. Preciado, Beatriz, Testo yonqui. Sexo, drogas y biopolítica. Barcelona, Paidós, 2014 (Testo yonqui. Sexe, drogue et biopolitique. Paris, Grasset, first 2008). 29 Mauro Cabral, “Los géneros de la noticia”, Página 12 (22/02/2013).

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Other sources Berkins, Lohana, “Las travestis siempre estuvimos aquí”, Página 12, Suplemento “Soy” (11/05/2012). http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/soy/1-2444-2012-05-12. html Cabral, Mauro, “Los géneros de la noticia”, Página 12 (22/02/2013). http://www.pagina12.com. ar/diario/suplementos/las12/13-7857-2013-02-22.html “Derecho a la identidad y diversidad sexual”. Material de la Coordinación de Articulación Estratégica Programa de Fortalecimiento de Derechos y participación de las Mujeres Juana Azurduy. Jefatura de Gabinetes de Ministro, Presidencia de la Nacíon. Wayar, Marlene, “¿Qué pasó con la T?”, Página 12, Suplemento “Soy” (11/05/2012). http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/soy/1-2436-2012-05-11.html Ley 26.743 “Identidad de Género”. http://www.diputados.gov.ar/leyes/ley.jsp?num=26743.

Paula Sibilia

The “Pornification” of the Gaze A Genealogy of the Nude Breast [Forbidden is] painting Our Lady and the saints with profane cleavages and garments that they never wore, with their uncovered breasts, in provocative poses, or with adornments of the secular women. IV Mexican Provincial Council (1771) Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content in which a minor is involved. We also impose limitations on the display of nudity. Facebook community standards (2012)

This essay was motivated by something that happened in January of 2012, when a young Canadian mother was suspended from the world’s most popular social network, Facebook, after she posted on her personal profile some pictures in which she was shown breastfeeding her children. “We have removed sexually explicit content from your account”, said the official message that justified such act, but what’s interesting is that the “sexually explicit content” that was censored consisted in a set of photographs from the girl’s family album, which “pornographic” character is far from being evident for our culture’s standards. Outraged with what she considered an abuse and an act of discrimination, the woman decided to speak out publicly through interviews given to local newspapers. As a consequence of this outburst and all of the reactions that were risen throughout the internet and the world media, Facebook apologized to her through e-mail; but she didn’t accept the company’s apologies, at least not until they promised to train their staff to no longer remove pictures of this kind. In fact, according to the statements of the same representatives of the social network to the press, the images in which a “completely exposed breast” is shown are considered “nudity” and, therefore, are “prone to be removed if reported”1. But the company’s discourse is rather ambiguous: while it claims to support the sharing of such photographs between mothers who use the social media, “thousands of women had their pictures deleted”, according to the complaint from the same Canadian user, who a few weeks later said to know of at least a dozen cases posterior to hers, with

1 Jace Shoemaker-Galloway, “Facebook Deletes Emma”.

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account suspensions in countries like New Zealand and the United States2. That, besides her own history: “since 2008, I had over twenty deleted photos and my account was deactivated four times, one of them during thirty days”3. Even after the negative repercussion that the public discussion of this case generated, the practice persisted. In November of the same year, an American user posted a picture of herself breastfeeding her one-year-old daughter and, immediately after, her Facebook account was suspended for two days. In the image, the girl was shown suckling while holding a piece of bacon stolen from her mother’s plate, with the following playful subtitle: “between breast milk and bacon, she chose the latter”. According to the protagonist and author of the photo, “over fifteen hundred people liked it and forty people shared it”. Someone did not like it though, and left the following comment: “these are the kids that grow up to become sex criminals”. The young mother reproduced this message on her blog and, as a response, was effectively reported on Facebook. As angry as her Canadian colleague for what she considered a censoring and unfitting reaction on account of the company, the woman announced that she’d protest against it by posting as many pictured as possible of women breastfeeding their children, which motivated another suspension of her account4. Cases like this continued to multiply along the course of 2013, affecting women of various parts of the world and not only in the prudish domains of Facebook. A yoga practitioner from Hawaii, for example, starred in a similar experience, although a somewhat more acrobatic or exotic version: in her case, censorship targeted a picture in which she was fully nude, in profile, standing on her head in a garden, while her baby was suckling on one of her breasts. After the invasion of comments claiming outrage for the “shocking content” of this image, the network Instagram – dedicated to online photo-sharing – decided to suppress this user’s account, declaring that the negative comments “have gone too far, just like the picture”5.

An anachronistic censorship? The events reported above are very curious, especially because there isn’t the involvement of an obscure cult that defends backwards dogmas and traditions in them: they are decision taken by two bulwarks of the still incipient 21st 2 Cf. Kim Pemberton, “Facebook clarifies breastfeeding photo policy”. 3 Jace Shoemaker-Galloway, “Facebook Deletes Emma”. 4 Cf. “Usuária é suspensa do Facebook”. 5 “Une maman allaite son bébé”.



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century. After all, with less than a decade of existence, internet’s social networks are captivating hundreds of millions of users thanks to its online sociability offer, contributing to transforming the ways in which we live and interact with one another. Because of that, something seems to be out of order in this news: would they be isolated misunderstandings, some kind of mistake soon clarified and repaired, maybe a prank or, perhaps, an audacious marketing strategy like those so common in these arenas? No, apparently it wasn’t anything like that, but something much more atavistic: the simple application of good old censorship triggered by the exposure of female nudity considered “indecent”. However, the gesture seems anachronistic: how is it possible for something like that to happen, in a time that seems to be so open to all kinds of body images and habits? It’s known that Facebook and Instagram, as well as YouTube and other companies of the genre, do not allow the publication of pornographic material within the online space administered by them and freely offered to their millions of users. According to the Facebook community standards, for example, a kind of statute presented on a page within the website, there are certain expressions considered “acceptable” for publication on the social network, while others aren’t. In consequence, is stipulated that the latter can be “reported or removed”. The same is true with Instagram and it’s terms of usage, which are unappealable: “You may not post violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive photos or other content via the service”6. In turn, Facebook stresses it’s “strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved”, adding “we also impose limitations on the display of nudity”. Later on, the text also adds the following: “We aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo’s David or family photos of a child breastfeeding”7. This last clarification seems to have been added after the several criticisms Facebook received in virtue of the episodes herein discussed – which, however and despite everything, continue to proliferate. Leaving aside the contradictions and controversies of the case, it serves to imagine how difficult must be to enforce such policies in such a multiple, immense and mutant environment that is the Internet, where pornography corresponds to 30% of its traffic8. But both Facebook and Instagram and other similar companies keep permanent surveillance mechanisms to make sure these rules are followed by its millions of users. Who are encouraged to collaborate in the 6 Instagram, “Terms of use”. 7 “Padrões da Comunidade do Facebook”. 8 Cf. Charles Nisz, “Pornografia responde por 30%”.

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task of maintaining the order, moreover, by “reporting abuse”, as the companies themselves call it. “If you see something on Facebook that you believe violates our terms, you should report it to us” it prompts, clarifying that, “reporting a piece of content does not guarantee that it will be removed from the site”9.Users usually abide by these norms voluntarily, knowing that any “inappropriate” material risks being reported and deactivated, the motivation of possible account suspensions also helps. But self-control and vigilantism are not the only things that operate here: there is also the active action of informatics systems and of the employees of these companies, which occupy themselves with erasing everything that exceeds their moral and legal standards. The zeal on this enterprise is such, that it comes up to prohibiting the exhibition of images such as the ones commented here, even if they are of the kind we all are accustomed to see – or, even being part of–in public places nowadays, without anyone lamenting it’s indecency or filing reports for obscenity. It’s for all of this that this curious high-tech crusade surprises us. What are the motivations of this apparently unreasonable censorship, which ignited countless protests and have gotten really close to pushing these highly trendy companies to the edge of complete ridicule? In other words, what does all of this suggest about our culture, particularly about our morality and the relationships we are capable of having with ours and other’s bodies? What is considered obscene nowadays, and for what reasons? What kind of images can be shown in this era of saturation of visibility, and under what conditions? It’s impossible to ignore that all of the above events happened in a cultural environment where nudity no longer seems to be capable to scandalize anyone anymore. Even less the naked breast of a mother that nurtures her child, reproducing with that gesture a kind of ancestral scene with a certain aura of sanctity and virginal reminiscence, which invokes one of the most prolific topics of our iconographic tradition: the Madonna. It was precisely this extensively and deeply rooted image, moreover, one of the most quoted and reproduced by those who protested, both in traditional media and on the internet, in order to stand in particular against the measures taken by Facebook. It’s worthwhile to deepen that association here, exploring some of its ridges and forcing through the limits of comparison parting from a genealogic perspective that can explain its apparent anachronism. Up to where both kinds of images are comparable, taking in consideration the many centuries that stand between them and the divergences in the religious, spiritual, erotic and moral values that surround them, both the images as well as us, their active spectators or even producers and protagonists? What

9 “Padrões da Comunidade do Facebook”.



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are the tensions they carry and the effects they are capable of producing, both now as well as then? Aiming towards those questions, it’s appropriate here to scrutinize some of the filigree that compose this peculiar historic fabric, to try and discover if such ties persist and if they remain significant, analyzing in which extent and in what ways they have reformulated themselves in the last centuries. After all, the brief genealogy hereby proposed points out something fascinating: the mutant forms and scars of the nude human body, the one that knew how to provoke a vast diversity of scandals, shames, taboos and censorships throughout time. The intention of this survey consists of detecting what is considered obscene in different historical contexts, with the particular objective of understanding the current situation and, especially, the complex senses of the occurrences described on the previous pages. With such purpose, in the first place, we will shift the attention to certain creations from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in which the association with the banned images from the social networks are immediate and even seemingly obvious. However, they also exude their own specificities, buried in religious devotion and in the evangelizing vocation of the Christian culture that engendered them, and also directed a very peculiar gaze to both human bodies as well as their representations. In principle, all of this seems to be quite distant of the tendencies in vogue nowadays, even if they are multiple and contradictory, which only stimulates even more the inquiry about what these continuities, in conflict, hide or reveal.

Carnality infused with spirituality As a first instance, we focus on the case of the Virgin of the Milk, a pictorial motif with an extensive tradition in various European countries in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This is an image of Our Lady breastfeeding her son, in a pose that frequently implied the ostentation of a bosom in which the nipple was offered to the open mouth of the holy infant. The lineage of this iconography dates back to the second century A.D., for it was already present on the paleo-christian frescoes of the roman cemetery known as the Catacomb of Priscilla, but had its apogee between the XIII and XVII centuries and throughout all Christianity, irradiated from the Italian artistic effervescence. In the Latin-American colonies, especially in those of Hispanic domain, its presence got expanded with much fervor and was kept active for even longer, shining mostly between the end of the XVI and beginning of the XVIII centuries.

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On certain occasions, this motherly milk exalted on the images doesn’t nurture only the baby Jesus, but it also feeds certain fully-grown adult men. It’s what happens on the motif dedicated to The Lactation of Saint Bernard, for example, which portrays the miracle that happened to the French-origin saint in the XII century, or similar episodes experienced by other illustrious figures of the sainthood, such as Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Dominic, Saint Cajetan, Saint Augustine or Saint Vincent. In those cases, a milk stream flows out of the Virgin’s breast and lands in the men’s mouth or, the saint in question suckles directly from the breast that was left available by the son of God. These images come as a surprise today, given the complex mixture between the religious symbolism connected to the physical and spiritual nurture in a way, and the erotic connotations that also pulsate in them at least in the contemporary perspective. “It is clear that the erotic dimension that we can find today on the lactation of those adults were completely absent from the mentalities of the men and women of erstwhile”10, assets the historian Marie-France Morel on her article dedicated to the exam of some “extraordinary lactations” of the western tradition. An event reported by the Benedictine monk and troubadour Gautier de Coinci in the beginning of the XIII century and recovered, in this case, by the historian Didier Lett in his article about the saints who were breastfed by the Virgin, may help to strengthen the difficult denaturalization of our most ingrained beliefs. The protagonist in this story is a deacon that suffered “great difficulties in maintaining his chastity vow”11, to whom, one day “while asleep, the Virgin appeared and allowed him to drink her milk”12; as consequence, the cleric “felt satisfied”13 and was then able to win his fight against the demons of the flesh. For as odd as it may sound in our contemporary perspective, in cases like these, “all carnal fruition disappeared, since that would be of the domain of the other woman, the perverse”14, affirms the specialist in religious matters Louis Cardaillac, and concludes by saying: “in this spiritual world, all possible relationship with eroticism was vanished”15. With the support of such strong reflections, it’s our role here to suggest that it was probably some other class of eroticism, certainly not the modern, which is so familiar to us, as we will attempt to argue on the next pages. The fact is, that despite the intense bodily charge that haunts all of the Christian imagery – and of the traps that this characteristic implies for its interpretation 10 Marie F. Morel, “De quelques allaitements ‘extraordinaires’”, 160. 11 Didier Lett, “L’allaitement des saints au Moyen Âge”. 171. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Louis Cardaillac, “Erotismo y santidad”, 20. 15 Ibid.



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in the actuality –rare are the images in which we see a pregnant Virgin Mary or, for example, her giving birth, although we know only the conception was “immaculate”. In a similar way, on one side we have an abundance of annunciations and levitations, profuse martyrdoms and self-inflicted penances, the ascensions and the descents, and even lactations, on the other, little or nothing was ever registered on the visual plane about menstruations and contractions, or about orgasms, erections or ejaculations, which also may have happened with a daily regularity in those times. And, why not, as is the case in countless other cultures, they could’ve also been the object of miraculous adoration16. However, there are certain images proceeding from that universe that produce quite a shock, even today, due to their brutal carnality or to their uncommon erotic connotations, and that were not only frequent and even “trivial” some of centuries ago, in a cultural atmosphere usually considered less permissive on those aspects, but that were commonly venerated in temples and other equally public or sacred spaces. Among them, certain variations of the Virgin of the Milk stand out, particularly those involving lactating saints. There is also a Christian legend that refers to a martyr from the III century, Saint Mammant or Saint Mammès, worshiped since the VIII century at the French cathedral of Langres, where his relics are stored, and who is also known in other languages as San Mamante or Mamete, São Mamede or Saint Mamas. In other words, this is a “lactating saint”, reason for which he came to be known as the protector of breastfeeding. According to traditional accounts, this young Christian fed off milk provided by various animals when he had to escape roman persecution on the outskirts of Caesarea. Some versions assert that, under those circumstances, he had found an abandoned baby and “being all alone and not having the means to feed it, he received from God the grace to produce milk to feed the poor child and save it from certain death”17. This is a typical Christian appropriation from popular folklore that was abundant in medieval Europe, as the Italian anthropologist Roberto Lionetti points out in his book Le lait du père, dedicated to exploring this and other cases of “male breast feeding”. Among them, there is a vision from Saint Clare of Assisi, in which no one other than Saint Francis himself breastfed her. The episode is included in the minutes of the canonization process of the renowned Italian saint, which occurred only two years after her death in 1253, and it’s based off of the depositions of a nun called Filippa, to whom Clare herself told the story of the 16 Worth of mention, is the book entitled The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Painting and in Modern Oblivion, in which Leo Steinberg analyses a series of images from the XV and XVI centuries, that refer to the childhood, crucifixion, deposition and resurrection of Christ, in which the focus would persistently fall on His penis and, in certain cases, in its erect state. 17 Gilza Sandre-Pereira, “Amamentação e sexualidade”.

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vision. According to the account, the saint dreamt that she climbed a very high stairway with astonishing lightness, carrying with her a bowl of warm water so Saint Francis could wash his hands. When she found him, he exposed one side of his breast and pronounced the following phrase: “Come, receive and suckle”18. She obeyed, and afterwards, Saint Francis asked her to do it once more. The tasted elixir “was so sweet and delicious that it could not be expressed in any way”19, says Sister Filippa, whose narration continues as follows: “after sucking, that extremity or orifice of the bosom from where the milk came out remained between the lips of the blissful Clare”20, whom “took with her hands what was left in her mouth, and it seemed to her like gold so clear and brilliant that she could see herself in it like a mirror”21. In his article entitled Erotismo y Santidad, the already here quoted Louis Cardaillac extracts the following conclusion from this same episode: “Clare’s dream, that in another context could even be considered very erotic, is here transposed to another plane: the spiritual”22. Howsoever, according to Lionetti himself, the hagiographer named by Pope Innocent IV would have considered the scene “too embarrassing” and, because of that, decided to omit it from the official biography Legenda Sanctae Clarae Virginis, “a piece destined to the education of the ladies”23. Despite these scruples, the American researcher Marilyn Yalom, author of a book called A History of the Breast24, tells that the church once sanctified a young woman that breastfed a lamb, for incarnating with her gesture the theological virtue of charity while alluding to the Lamb of God. According to the same author, there was a depiction of this episode on a choir’s bench in the Spanish cathedral of León. The human-animal lactation reappears in other examples revered by the ecclesiastic tradition, especially of saints that have been breastfed by animals, as is the case of Saint Mammant himself. On the same note, it’s good to remember that the mythical founders of Rome, birthplace of Christianity, were breastfed by a she-wolf, a deed that has generated quite a copious iconography. Another topic worth revisiting is, precisely, the images referring to the Roman Charity. According to this Latin legend, a young woman called Pero quenched her old father’s hunger with her own breast milk, when he was condemned to death by starvation in the Forum Holitorium’s prison, which was very close to

18 Roberto Lionetti, Le lait du père, 90. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Louis Cardaillac, “Erotismo y santidad”, 9. 23 Roberto Lionetti, Le lait du père, 90. 24 Cf. Marilyn Yalom, História do seio, 62.



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the ruins where, later, the church of San Nicola in Carcere would be built and dedicated to nothing other than filial mercy. Several authors recovered this old tale and shaped it into texts: among them, Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia, in which it was the mother of the young woman who was in prison, not the father. Indeed, the story also harkens back to Latin writer Valerius Maximus, who included it in his book Facta et dicta memorabilia, dating back to the first decades of the Christian era, as an example of filial devotion. This author tells two versions of the same story, one with the mother and other with the father, granting that in his own time there already were pictorial representations of the theme. The story that transcended at the pinnacle of the Renaissance, however, is the one with the male parent of the young lady as protagonist, a vastly recreated motif in paintings and sculptures from the XVI and XVII centuries; a universe going through intense transformations but that was, without a doubt, pre-Freudian. Lastly, we need to allude to the pictures that refer to the martyrdoms; especially, to those where the saint who underwent torture had their breasts amputated, as happened to Saint Barbara and Saint Agatha of Sicily. It’s important to stress that nudity was very common in this kind of work; they were not under a risk of censorship because of that style. However, the pictorial territories where naked bodies more notably proliferate, in religious art, are in those marked by evil: like the damned in the countless Final Judgment pictures, for example, or in representations of figures like Eve, Luxury, the witches of even Satan and other demons. But what’s interesting to underline here is that all of those topics were profusely portrayed in the western Christian world, at least between the XIII and XVII centuries, and that nudity used to be one of its ingredients.

Disillusionment, guilt and decorum What made this kind of image be, not only perfectly exposable to all spectators from that period – including children, of course – but, also be considered exemplary for exhibiting virtuous scenes, with didactic potential on the moral and religious plane? These works that today we would call artistic – painted canvases, illuminations, stained glasses and sculptures – were displayed in churches, hospitals and other public places, while in some way they were still somewhat disturbing to the XXI century spectator. Why? Something seems to have changed in the way we look at such images. Going back to the case of the impugned photographs on Facebook, for example, it behooves us to suppose that these medieval, renaissance and colonial creations wouldn’t be easily digested in some instances of the actual world, while the images that are questioned today would have been

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easily assimilated into the repertoire of those periods. Even without motivating extreme actions such as censorship, there is something in the imprints of other times that shocks the contemporary gaze, despite of the immense liberties that are in effect today and of the amplitude of the spectrum of images we have available. So, to what can we attribute these transformations and what do they consist of exactly? The knot of the conflict seems to rest in certain changes that occurred in the modes of looking, that are historically constituted and that develop themselves inside of determined “regimes of visibility”. Human bodies constitute key pieces in these mutations, especially when they are presented partially or fully nude, they give the intense symbolic and emotional radiation that such sights use to expel. In the case of the female breasts, the historian Margareth Miles conducted a study on the “secularization of the breast” in the western culture, and noted that “in 1350, the breast was a religious symbol; around 1750, it was eroticized and medicalized, in a way that it would no longer be usable, and indeed it was no longer used, as a religious symbol”25. For that reason, if the medieval devotees saw in those paintings and sculptures – that show the naked breast nursing – the live incarnation of the divine miracle of physical and spiritual nurturing, the XVIII century observers were already seeing something else in those images. Such conclusions coincide with the genealogic perspective proposed here: the eroticization of female breasts isn’t a universal fact, written in the mere biology of the human species; neither manifests itself identically in every culture, nor remained stable in our own tradition. The Brazilian researcher Gilza Sandre-Pereira, in her article entitled “Amamentação e Sexualidade”, quotes a classic book from the comparative anthropology field called Patterns of Sexual Behavior, published in 1951 by the anthropologist Clellan Ford and the psychologist Frank Beach. According to the authors, who studied the sexual practices in approximately two hundred different cultures, “only thirteen among them attributed an erotic value to breasts, giving to their physical aspect an important role to male sexual attraction and having the stimulation of the organs as a part of the sexual act”26. Under this perspective, it doesn’t seem so surprising that western culture had relegated female breasts to their nurturing function, for a long time, in demerit of their other uses or values. In his book entitled Histoire de la Pudeur27, the French author Jean Claude Bologne studies this transformation: it was only at the end of Middle Ages that the vision of the naked body would have started to acquire the erotic connotations we see so commonly today. But the female bosom remained oblivious to that mutation until the XVIII century, 25 Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight, IX. 26 Gilza Sandre-Pereira, “Amamentação e sexualidade”. 27 Cf. Jean Claude Bologne, História do pudor.



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precisely, with the appearance of “romantic love” and the development of the modern forms of conjugal emotion. In these new rites of seduction, the breasts started to play a primordial role, attracting stares and gaining other meanings. With the passage of time, “the aesthetic function of the body, and of the breasts in particular, was hypertrophied”28, adds Sandre-Pereira, in a way that the female breast started to be perceived “first and foremost as a sexual organ, of great erotic appeal”29. Even disillusioned of its old religious potencies, however, there is no doubt that the sightings of this part of female anatomy remained fertile in signification. But those gradually became of another order: while its mystical charge agonized and its moving potencies on the spiritual plane were deactivated, the anatomical knowledge and the pornographic industry slowly captured it until they got it involved in their own logic. Thus, with the world’s modernization advancements and its laic impulses, it was impossible to not see in those images something of the sexual order, be it through the bias of medical instrumentalisation referring to reproduction or disease, or be it through the ways of eroticism and lust, including obscenity. By identifying the female breast as something that should not be exposed for its capacity to offend the current basic premises of moral and hygiene, which became each time less Christian and more bourgeois. However, if that was the trajectory traced by this image lineage until the unleashing of the modern era, what does a contemporary spectator sees in those images? What do we see in the medieval imprints and what do we see in the banned Facebook photos, for example? And by observing what only the contemporary perspective can see, what are the reactions and moralizations that such visions arouse? These are questions that don’t admit quick or univocal answers, but it is worth exploring some of its strands in order to deepen the question. It was in the mid XV century when nudity became officially “indecent”, in a long and complex route that would ultimately lead to its expulsion from religious art. The Council of Trent propelled this movement, acting at the same time as cause and effect of the secularization process – and, along with them, the eroticization or pornification – which started to sway a world already in the course of modernization. This initiative from the Catholic hierarchy to react to the Lutheran Reform, as is known, ended up reaffirming the more conservative tendencies of the old church. The marriage of priests was vetoed and a list of forbidden books was published, for example, as well as a decree about the sacred images that would define how the divine should be represented from then on. Along with this last edict, images that “for their physical or carnal excesses could incite desire in 28 Gilza Sandre-Pereira, “Amamentação e sexualidade”. 29 Ibid.

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whoever would contemplate them” were ordered to be repressed, while also recommending that religious images were not ornamented “with scandalous beauteousness”30. In one of the provincial councils that took place on the American continent echoing this ecclesiastic turn – like the one in Santo Domingo, in 1622 – it was determined that “all lasciviousness should be avoided in sacred paintings and turn away all superstition”31, and that all representation as well as the saints relics “are not to be adorned, neither sculpted nor painted with stunning or brazen beauty”32. In its turn, the IV Provincial Mexican Council, of 1771, forbid “painting Our Lady and the saints with profane cleavages and garments that they never wore, with their uncovered breasts, in provocative poses, or with the adornments of secular women”33. Since nudity started being eroticized in modern ways and, at the same time, the ongoing moral reformulation filled it with negative connotations, the Virgin changed her habits: from then on, she would only show herself in prudish ways and fully clothed. It’s not hard to associate these displacements with the advances of capitalism, which is anchored in the reformulations of certain protestant ethics. Because “if in the Middle Ages, the most fought off sin by the Catholic church was avarice”34, as explains the Venezuelan historian Janeth Rodríguez Nóbrega, “as of the XVI century we find a bigger concern with luxury and offenses of a sexual nature”35. The images of the Virgin of the Milk did not walk away unscathed from this reformulation: while before they were customary and highly venerated in their purity without suspicion, they then started being questioned by their inadmissible “lack of decorum”. In countries where the Reform triumphed, they were especially attacked for being “overly mundane and generous”, and were even criticized with certain sarcasm. Meanwhile, the Catholics also started judging them as inconvenient, not so much for their futile or earthly ostentation but mostly, for their erotic insinuation and to the fact that they were “indecent and dishonest”36.

30 Janeth Rodriguez Nóbrega, “En torno a la recepción”, 12. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 15. 34 Ibid., 14. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 13.



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Paradoxes of the modernization of the gaze The Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, one of the grimmest faces of the Inquisition, carries among his prowess responsibility for burning in Public Square a great number of images of naked bodies that arose with the Renaissance ebullition. This, along with many works considered classic that, up to then, had paid service to Christian devotion but that, according to the catholic reaction, also incarnated the total demise of the values that put the Middle Ages to its end. This occurred shortly before the monk himself was incinerated at Florence’s central square, in 1498. But the flame had already been sparked and had expanded all over: under the obscure influences of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, in the “enlightened” XVIII century some of these works became the target of discussion and polemic in the Latin-American colonies. Many canvases were destroyed, hidden or it was decided to conceal the body’s nudity with the painting of veils and overlapping garments. Rodríguez Nóbrega analyzes, in the article quoted earlier, a painting of the Virgin of the Milk that was censored this way, in Caracas, with the confusing overlapping of a flower. Also, in the Museum of Colonial Art of Bogotá a painting of this kind is exposed, in which the breast of the Virgin – visible before – was chastely covered with laces that were sketched around the same time, as a response to the erotic connotations that started to disturb the sights of the believers. The curators of the museum assume that certain orifices in the canvas were for the same reason, because is likely that a physical veil had been added to the painting with the purpose of prudishly hiding the virginal breast. Likewise, in the Museum of Religious Art of the city of Popayán, also in southern Colombia, there is a piece that seem to be part of the Virgin of the Milk tradition, especially given the position of Maria’s fingers of her left hand over her right breast, insinuating the typical gesture of breastfeeding. The whole breast, thought, was thoroughly painted with the same color brown of her dress, although it’s still possible to glimpse traces of the nipple under the adjustment. However, in this much more traditional museum, which is also administered by the church, nothing is said to the visitor regarding the censorship, there is not even a mention of the fact that the painting was retouched. Despite of the pre-eminence of this phenomenon in Hispanic-American territories, its known that this attitude adjustment didn’t limit itself to the New World: for example, the Venezuelan researcher herein quoted recovered an episode featuring Giacomo Casanova in Europe, also in the XVIII century. During a stroll across Madrid, the famous Venetian lover had the occasion to see, in a local church, a painting of the Virgin of the Milk that “inflamed the imagination” and that, therefore, used to attract an extraordinary presence of male devotees to the

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temple. However, when he came back to the Spanish city a few years later, in 1768, Casanova discovered that the “breast of the Holy Virgin was no longer visible”37, since “a scarf painted by the most perverted of the painters had ruined this superb painting”38. With grief and even indignation, the adventurous writer recognized that “nothing was visible anymore, not the nipple, nor baby Jesus’s mouth, not even the relief of the bosom”39. In a similar way to what happened to the rectified breasts of these colonial and Hispanic Virgins, nothing less than the Final Judgment, painted in 1541by Michelangelo Buonarroti on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, was considered indecent by the new moral currents, due to the excess of naked bodies and to the almost anatomical naturalism of his style. It is not surprising that Pietro Arientino, considered the founder of pornography as a genre, is among the many critics that were scandalized with the erotic content of the frescoes, insinuating that they were maybe appropriate to decorate “a voluptuous public bathroom, but not the choir of the most sacred of chapels”40. As result of these effusions, we do not know the original version painted by the Tuscan artist, since five years later after its conclusion several retouches were commissioned with the intention of clothing the nude figures and, two centuries later, more and more decorous fabrics were added repeatedly41. It was required, then, to dress the bodies whose nudity exuded divine and spiritual connotations, this way covering the shame spilled on them by the gazes that were being modernized and secularized, just as it would happen later with the Caribbean Virgins who would have also suddenly become obscene. Margareth Miles42 compares such rejections with the admirable acceptance that was received, four decades before the Vatican scandals, by the painting The Resurrection of the Flesh, by Luca Signorelli, in which several nude bodies were exposed without the spectators of the time seeing any sign of shame, perhaps because the gazes over nudity had not been pornified yet, accompanying the secularization that would engender a new regime of visuality. But as its religious charge was loosing breath, these images began to irradiate other connotations, associated with the medical domain and the erotic universe. Along with these shifts in sig-

37 Ibid., 23. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight, 123. 41 The history of those retouches is very eloquent: Pierluigi De Vecchi, The Sistine Chapel; and Karim Ressouni-Demigneux, “Des nus inconvenants”. 42 Cf. Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight, 30.



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nificance, there were also changes in the moral valuations and the resulting condemnations that such images incite. “No other type of figuration is possible in the representation of resurrected creatures”43, expressed Michelangelo in defense of his masterpiece, adding that “we have no other proof, no other fruit of heaven on earth”44. But such argumentative effort was in vain: nudity was already loosing its old religious innocence and soon it would fall in the era of its secular curse. All of this sounds rather paradoxical: with the collapse of the medieval world vision, the naked bodies became “damned” in a whole new way. Its exposition was condemned to darkness under the argument of being “sexually explicit”, in a rage that has a much more bourgeois profile than Christian, and that incredibly, seems to last even nowadays. The attitudes and actions taken by Facebook and Instagram mentioned in the beginning of this essay illustrate the persistence of this rage or this fume, albeit, the repulse reactions that such gestures provoked are perhaps much more interesting, for insinuating that something might be changing again on this important battlefield.

What disturbs today, in the naked bodies imagery? Having in perspective the dense strain visited on the previous pages, the question that moved this survey returns once again, although reformulated and multiplied. What comes across as transgressive in the bodily exhibitions nowadays? When do we consider that a body is truly nude and what does that imply? What reactions does it cause or should it cause? What could possibly offend the current ambiguous morality? What has the capacity to cause scandals and its arising censoring urges, when the puritan ethic and the disciplinary production have ceased to constitute the main forces to boost capitalism, jeopardizing the old “bourgeois morals”? These are questions that do not accept simple or quick answers either, and that is where lies the source of their fascination, stimulating a genealogical perspective capable of shining a light on the complexities – and even on the many contradictions – of actuality. On one side, it seems to confirm a certain tendency towards bodily exposition increasingly wide and without hurdles: the contemporary bodies have acquired a certain freedom to show themselves without many barriers capable 43 Ibid., 31. 44 Ibid.

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of stopping them, covering them, shaming them or censoring them. But the episode recently led by Facebook and Instagram deny this argument, bringing to the surface certain moralizations that seem old fashioned: a laic censorship, non-religious, which crystallization refers to the dawn of the modern era. These events evoke the persistency of this movement consolidated in the XVIII century Illuminism: a symbolic displacement of nudity – and, particularly, of the female breast – towards something of the order of shame. The briefly traced genealogy in this essay suggests that, despite the constrictions that marked the medieval everyday life, the inhabitants of that universe didn’t judge with such moralizing rigor the exposed nudity in certain images that assisted them in their religious devotion. It may seem paradoxical, but it was with the secularization of the world that another kind of gaze was engendered, that started to refuse the exhibition of certain zones of the anatomy, condemning to infamy those images that exuded sexual insinuations considered excessive to a morality increasingly more modern and less medieval. But all of this happened a long time ago: several authors, like the ones quoted here, coincide to signal that such displacements would have settled around three hundred years ago. With the advancements of the XIX century and, overall, the multiple and fast XX century, the disturbance that results upon observation of nude or considerably undressed bodies could not remain unchanged. How were these transformations shaped, what forms did they adopt and why? If we inquire the present, it isn’t difficult to notice that certain bodily attributes – like wrinkles, body hair, flaccidity and the fat deposits, for example – became the target of “censoring” attitudes that unfolded in the last decades. It’s inevitable to allude to the celebrated Photoshop, with its task of purifying the images of bodies, as an emblem of the instrument that is each time more expanded and indispensable for the retouching of body images. Meanwhile, the open exposition of the genitals and the more explicit allusions to sexuality ended up gaining their respective rights to visibility in the most diverse areas: from political demonstrations out on the city streets to contemporary art and other broad sectors of the media range, not only those specific niches labeled as pornographic. It’s not the case of the highly in vogue social networks on the Internet, although, it configures a symptom that should not be undermined. It’s convenient to point out here that Facebook, for example, often censors other sort of images that it considers indecent45. From photographs of same sex couples kissing, up to reproductions of celebrated works of art such as L’Origine du Monde (1886), by 45 Welton Trindade, “Poder LGBT: Depois de protestos”; Id., “Ridículo: Facebook censura”; “Face­book exclui usuário”.



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Gustave Courbet. A case that generated a lot of criticism was of a picture of the tattooed chest of a woman that underwent a double mastectomy surgery, who, even then, did not escape the usual suspension46. But it’s exactly the repulsion to these actions that brings more clues about the ambiguous definitions of obscenity in the contemporary culture, since this opposition is plenty and very emphatic. It’s becoming more and more popular, indeed, to publish confusing images on the web, to test Facebook’s censoring apparatus, which many times ends up falling for the booby trap and gets exposed to ridicule by its own users. It so happens that, for a growing sector of the world population, in this globalized and multicultural XXI century, taboo’s stigma no longer points its accusing finger – and neither its recurrent veils or punishments – to the exposed nipple of a mother who breastfeeds her child, being it virginal or not, as it has been done since the process of secularization of the world displaced the symbolisms associated to this nudity, which pornified and moralized all the gazes in this sense. However, we hereby outline a suspicion: if this new displacement is ongoing, that does not imply that the freedom of body exposure is absolute, it doesn’t even mean that it’s growing, under the illusion of a linear progress that always pushes ahead. Quite the opposite, maybe because lately a new kind of “censorship” has emerged and directed itself to body images a lot more insidiously, to the point that it naturalized itself in the current moral code. This prohibition, associated to new shames and fears, doesn’t usually inspire many resistances because it’s believed to be justified: its that one that tends to smooth out the skins and thin out or adjust the carnal volumes, erasing everything that is now considered “indecent”. The genealogic course taken here suggests that this very current gesture, of retouching and correcting the contours of the human figure, done both in its two-dimensional image as on the very surface of the body – in this case, through plastic surgery, botox applications and esthetic treatments in vogue today – could be compared to that censoring modesty that befell the religious nudes when the secularization of the world and that of the gaze was deflagrated. Although the actual motives might be different, of course, since the world has changed as did both our bodies and our way of looking at things. In these new practices, some brand new and complex elements of medicalization and pornography intertwine together, while nothing else from the old religious connotations seem to have lasted. In order to try and better understand how and why this mutation in happening, we need to pay attention to the contemporary arts, in their tense and complex dialogue with those “purged” silhouettes that sprout out from the current media. In countless current manifestations of this area, the bodies that are shown belong 46 Charles Nisz, “Banida do Facebook”.

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to the very artists – in a lot of cases, contradicting strong traditions – and sometimes, it’s even the bodies of the spectators (either men or women) that conquer the scene, in a movement that implies both an expansion as a redefinition of the self-portrait. Perhaps there is an effort being made, in this field, to somehow “re-sanctify” bodily images, in active contact with the rich memory of images that constitute us, looking to “de-secularize” and even “de-pornify” their nudity to enrich them in other ways. Perhaps it’s about undressing nudity it in its turn, so it is possible to see it and experience it in other ways by allowing it to attract other significations. It is not accidental that the contemporary art field is in ebullition today, as it is trying to take care of an important dispute: maybe in that field they are gestating a new twist of the visibility regimes, a transition towards another ways of seeing, living and symbolizing our own and other’s nudity.

Bibliography Bologne, Jean Claude, História do pudor. Lisboa: Teorema, 1990 (Histoire de la pudeur. Paris, Orban, 1986). Cardaillac, Louis, “Erotismo y santidad”. In Intersticios Sociales, Colegio de Jalisco, México, No. 3, March–August 2012, 1–31. Accessed April 27, 2015. http://www.intersticiossociales. com/ediciones/numero_3.html. De Vecchi, Pierluigi, The Sistine Chapel: a Glorious Restoration. New York, Harry Abrams, 1994. Lett, Didier, “L’allaitement des saints au Moyen Âge. Un seul sein vénérable: Le sein de la Vierge”. In Bonnet, Doris, Catherine Le Grand-Sébille, and Marie-France Morel, eds., Allaitements en marge. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002, 163–173. Lionetti, Roberto, Le lait du père. Paris, Imago, 1988. Miles, Margaret R., A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008. Morel, Marie F., “De quelques allaitements ‘extraordinaires’ dans l’histoire occidentale”. In Bonnet, Doris, Catherine Le Grand-Sébille, and Marie-France Morel, eds., Allaitements en marge. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002, 141–161. Ressouni-Demigneux, Karim, “Des nus inconvenants; Michel Ange, Le Jugement Dernier”. In Id., ed., Les Grands Scandales de L’histoire de L’art. Paris, Beaux Arts, 2008, 22–25. Rodriguez Nóbrega, Janeth, “En torno a la recepción de la imagen sagrada en la época colonial: censura de una Virgen de la Leche”. In EscritoS en Arte, Estética y Cultura, III Etapa, No. 19–20, Caracas, January–December 2004, 3–26. Accessed April 27, 2015. http://pt.scribd. com/doc/44626573/VLeche-Janeth-Rodriguez. Sandre-Pereira, Gilza, “Amamentação e sexualidade”. In Revista de Estudos Feministas, Florianópolis, v. 11, n. 2, December 2003. Accessed April 27, 2015. http://dx.doi. org/10.1590/S0104-026X2003000200007. Steinberg, Leo, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Painting and in Modern Oblivion. New York, Pantheon, 1984. Yalom, Marilyn, História do seio. Lisboa, Teorema, 1998.



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Referred websites “Facebook exclui usuário que postou ‘A Origem do Mundo’, de Courbet”. In Exame, February 16, 2011. Accessed February 11, 2013. http://exame.abril.com.br/tecnologia/noticias/ facebook-exclui-usuario-que-postou-a-origem-do-mundo-de-courbet. Nisz, Charles, “Pornografia responde por 30% do tráfego da Internet”. In Yahoo! Notícias, Brasil, April 10, 2012. Accessed February 11, 2013. http://br.noticias.yahoo.com/blogs/ vi-na-internet/pornografia-responde-por-30-tr%C3%A1fego-da-internet-203930143.html. Nisz, Charles, “Banida do Facebook, imagem de mulher tatuada se torna viral”. In Yahoo! Notícias, Brasil, February 20, 2013. Accessed February 11, 2013. http://br.noticias. yahoo.com/blogs/vi-na-internet/banida-facebook-imagem-mulher-tatuada-se-torna-viral-000226219.html. Pemberton, Kim, “Facebook clarifies breastfeeding photo policy after Vancouver complaint”, In The Vancouver Sun, January 17, 2012. Accessed February 08, 2013. http://www. vancouversun.com/health/Facebook+clarifies+breastfeeding+photo+policy+after+Vancouver+complaint/6010467/story.html. Shoemaker-Galloway, Jace, “Facebook Deletes Emma Kwasnica’s ‘Sexually Explicit’ Breastfeeding Pics”. In Examiner, January 13, 2012. Accessed February 08, 2013. http://www. examiner.com/article/facebook-deletes-emma-kwasnica-s-sexually-explicit-breastfeeding-pics-update. Trindade, Welton, “Ridículo: Facebook censura beijo gay novamente”. In Parou tudo, March 23, 2013. Accessed February 11, 2013. http://paroutudo.com/2012/03/23/facebook-censurade-novo-beijo-gay. Trindade, Welton, “Poder LGBT: Depois de protestos, Facebook deixa de censurar foto gay”. In Parou tudo, April 20, 2011. Accessed February 11, 2013. http://paroutudo. com/2011/04/20/facebook-censura-foto-gay-mas-volta-atras-depois-de-protestos-deusuarios. “Une maman allaite son bébé et se fait censurer sur Instagram!”. In Famili, França, August 26, 2013. Accessed January 26, 2014. http://www.famili.fr/,une-maman-allaite-son-bebe-etse-fait-censurer-sur-instagram,407955.asp. “Usuária é suspensa do Facebook depois de colocar foto amamentando filha”. In IG São Paulo, November 20, 2012. Accessed February 08, 2013. http://delas.ig.com.br/ filhos/2012-11-20/usuaria-e-suspensa-do-facebook-depois-de-colocar-foto-amamentando-filha.html. “Padrões da Comunidade do Facebook”. Accessed February 08, 2013. https://www.facebook. com/communitystandards. Instagram, “Terms of use”. Accessed April 27, 2015. https://instagram.com/about/legal/terms.

Karina Bidaseca1

Feminicide and the Pedagogy of Violence An Essay on Exile, Coloniality and Nature in Third Feminism Our body, a territory free of violence Women Meeting in Medellin, 2013

I Introduction I’ve been driving a dialogue between landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I think this has been a direct result of having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been thrown from the womb (nature). My art is the way I reset the ties that bind me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my sculptures earth / body I become one with the earth. I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of asserting my ties to the land is actually a revival of primitive beliefs [...] [on] a pervasive feminine force, the after-image of being locked in the uterus; is a manifestation of my thirst to be.2

In our post-colonial world, the expressive relationship that exists between the plunder of nature and the violence unleashed on female and feminized bodies stands as a new language of communication. At this singular stage of capitalism by dispossession (Harvey), the dispute over territories, the model of agribusiness, extractive industries, maquiladoras, diffuse wars, and struggles for the control of drug trafficking, together with the mafia, inscribe real violence upon our every-

1 Conducted within the framework of the PIP CONICET Project: “Violencias en mujeres sub­alternas. Representaciones de la desigualdad de género en políticas culturales” (Violence against Subaltern Women. Representations of Gender Inequality in Cultural Policies) supervised by Karina Bidaseca at the UNSAM. I am grateful to the women of Medellin for the invitation to give this lecture on: “Día de la no violencia contra las mujeres. Presentación del feminismo decolonial” (Feminicide: Day against Violence against Women. Presentation of Decolonial Feminism), organized with the Women’s Department, Medellin Mayor’s Office, Colombia, 11/28/2013. Thanks to Petra Barreras del Rio for our conversation in the University of Puerto Rico, Recinto Rio Piedras, in june 2014. 2 Ana Mendieta, 1981. Unpublished statement. Quoted by John Perreault „Earth and Fire. Mendieta’s Body of Work“. In Ana Mendieta. A retrospective, edited by Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perreault. New York, 1987, 10–27.



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day lives. As the anthropologist Rita Segato claimed in a recent interview, the body of women is particularly affected by this territorial paradigm in politics3. The thesis I set forth in previous works on feminicide, femigenocide and gender-based violence4 proposed thinking – to paraphrase the South African post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe – that today the map of feminine movements marks the racial-sexualized map of the world.5 Feminicides in the Third World flaunt a highly obscene exhibition of fictional violence against our gender. The formulation that I proposed in a previous text6 was to take the non-hyphenated figure of “thethirdworldwoman” as the point where colonialism, imperialism, nationalism and fundamentalism intersect and as the point where globalized, racist and sexist capitalism is stitched together. In another article, I strove to tackle, from a legal perspective, the concept of feminicide in the light of the transcendence that its recognition as genocide under the crimes against humanity category would imply in remembrance struggles7. In another work, I focused on the global design that feminist maps trace on female bodies in their appeals to the political economy of abjection8. In this essay, I will stop to observe the relationship between the predatory practice on nature, where the body of the woman, the first of human colonies, is signified as an extension of territory and sovereignty9, and, therefore, conceived as nature. I am interested in observing it through the concept of ‘exile’ of the women of the world, inspired by the artistic works of a woman forced into exile, Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Con-fusing her body with nature, she managed to have an impact on the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate within the feminist movement, which took place in the 1970s and later in eco-feminism. I now seek to insert it into the paradigm of the coloniality of power10. The work of Ana Mendieta (November 18, 1948), a sculptor, painter and video artist who lived in the United States – and died tragically upon being thrown off the balcony of a building after a quarrel with her partner on September 8, 1985 – expresses this predatory and at the same time physical and spiritual relationship 3 Cf. Karina Bidaseca, “Mujer y cuerpo bajo control. Feminismo. En esta entrevista”. 4 Cf. Karina Bidaseca, “Feminicidio y políticas de la memoria”; Id., “Sitios liminales entre cordilleras invisibles”. 5 Achille Mbembe, “Del racismo como práctica de la imaginación”, 361–365. 6 Cf. Karina Bidaseca, “Mujeres blancas que buscan salvar a las mujeres color café de los hombres color café”. 7 Cf. Karina Bidaseca, “Feminicidio y políticas de la memoria”. 8 Cf. Karina Bidaseca, “Sitios liminales entre cordilleras invisibles”. 9 Cf. Rita L. Segato, La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juarez. 10 Cf. Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina”.

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with the Earth. The skewed reading of her own death, in anticipation of her series “Silueta”[i], (1973–1980), where she represented female silhouettes in nature – in mud, sand and grass – with natural materials such as leaves and branches including blood, pressing them on the body or painting her silhouette in the sea, or on the lawn. Through these interventions, Ana Mendieta was creating a new artistic genre, which she called “earth-body” sculptures. Mendieta was a Latina in the USA. She had arrived there at the age of 12, together with her sister Raquel, through the Peter Pan operation organized by the Roman Catholic Church to save children from communism [ii] – her father was a political prisoner under the Fidel Castro regime–. Her life is the product of the conflicting relations between the two countries. She worked with Afro-Cuban and Amerindian culture. She included in this series scenes of ritual sacrifices of animals and, also, representations of rape, thus showing her support for the feminist movement. Mendieta used her own body, the materials of nature, and Afro-Cuban religion to express her feminist political consciousness and poetic reading of the world. However, her work has been depoliticized through art criticism, which was at the time hegemonized by conceptual art11. I am interested in thinking about the language of her work in order to enrich the current debate in Latin American feminism with regard to gender and coloniality, from the place of enunciation that I call “Third Feminism”12. This debate in the field of de- and post-colonial feminisms will allow us to show the need to acknowledge the full complexity of gender and race as essentially subjective categories of analysis when thinking about race’s intersection with gender/sex/religion/locus of enunciation/nation (and not to understand race as superimposed on them).

II Racism, Nature, Coloniality and Pedagogy Segato masterfully interpreted expressive violence in her book The Elementary Structures of Violence13. Afterwards, in her invaluable contribution to the understanding of that emblematic place of economic globalization and of neoliberalism, she densely described “The Writing on the Bodies of the Women Murdered in Ciudad Juárez”14. Sexual violence has more expressive than instrumental components. It is not performed with a particular purpose; sexual violence expresses 11 Cf. Andrea Giunta, Escribir las imágenes. Ensayos sobre arte argentino y latinoamericano. 12 Karina Bidaseca and Marta Sierra, Postales femeninas desde el fin del mundo. 13 Cf. Rita L. Segato, Las estructuras elementales de la violencia. 14 Ibid., N° 3.



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domination, a territorial sovereignty, which is expressed in that territory-body as an emblem of the entire territory. “A woman’s body is emblematic of territorial hunger, of desperate territorial hunger, and it is pedagogical on the territory-body of the woman.”15. These are the women who die in informal wars, which is what the author, in her latest works, calls the “second reality,” where women are tortured, sexually abused, killed; to express and reveal sovereignty or turn it into a spectacle: who is winning and who is losing, who has territorial control in these wars that never start and never end, these continuous wars, since there is no armistice. The insignia of sovereignty is implanted in the bodies of these women. From the perspective of the coloniality of power, Segato16 (2011) inscribes the conception of gender in the dual world of the logic of the “pre-intrusion world,” where the grid of exclusive modernity challenges the community world, the protection of indigenous women before the kidnapping and the privatization of the home. Violence makes itself felt as a lingua franca and a pedagogy. Hence the importance of appreciating its expressiveness.

III “Third Feminism”: The Maps of Feminist Praxis We find ourselves at a moment in the evolution of the feminist movement when at least three positions are defined, including Eurocentric feminism, de-colonial feminism – represented by the work of María Lugones, on the one hand, and of Rita Segato, Julieta Paredes, Rosalva Aida Hernández, among others, on the other hand –, and the post-colonial feminism that we identify with two names of renowned Indian feminists, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Tapalde Chandra Mohanty. The latter are located in the South or Third World. Of course, “Third World,” “South,” “West,” “East,” are not monolithic entities, there is a Third World that exceeds the West. In other words, it is located inside and outside the West. We know from Edward Said’s great work Orientalism that the relationship between East and West is a relationship of power, and of complicated domination. We know how “East” and “West” are involved with each other and how they are accomplices in their fantasies and dreams of dominating one another, and vice versa. Post-colonial critique interprets history from another place, and also reviews the profound political implications of Western scholarship on the con15 Karina Bidaseca, “Mujer y cuerpo bajo control. Feminismo. En esta entrevista”. 16 Cf. Rita L. Segato, “Colonialidad y género. En busca de un nuevo vocabulario descolonial”.

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struction of otherness, where it provocatively positioned feminism analogously to imperialism, inspired by Said. In this way, our productions anticipate dialog with female authors from the South whose places of enunciation are found in different locations. Latin American feminists Rita Segato or Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Julieta Paredes in Bolivia; Clara Rojas Blanco, concerned with the horror of feminicide in Ciudad Juarez; Rosalava Aída Hernandez in Mexico, and indigenous activists such as Moira Millán in our country, the late Peruvian Rosalía Paiva, and other feminists such as Sueli Carneiro, whose motto is, “Blacken feminism,” or the Spanish collective Eskalera Karakola, and Sabah Mahmood from Eastern feminism; in all of them we find common problems with regard to the exploitation of women in global capitalism and the consensus that post-colonialism as a unique historic temporality has nothing to do with the end of colonialism. On the contrary, it is linked to the endurance of what Anibal Quijano called the coloniality of power. In other words, the prefix post-, as stated by the Spanish collective, is signifying “glolocal” domination relations that imprint coloniality on colonized countries as well as on the metropolis of the North that receive women from the diasporas of their old colonies, with all that this means when the North confirms that multiculturalism has failed. The case of the use of the veil, for example, or ablation, as salvationist rhetoric is, in my view, a paradigmatic example of this global discourse of war. At this intersection between global colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, the life of women in the third world is at stake. Post-colonial feminism is thinking precisely about those intersections, these “in-between” spaces where common differences and collective identity strategies are articulated, as Homi Bhabha said; but also “Nepantla,” in the Nahuatl language, that for Gloria Anzaldúa is situated at the border where it is possible to close the colonial wound in order for a “new metis” to be born, that scar on the soul, as Moira Millán tells us.17 In addition, criticism of the universal conception of patriarchy, that is called into question by the African-American bell hooks, and the invisibility of peasant and indigenous women, as well as women of African descent, whose voices are represented and translated by white feminism.

17 Artists, activists have a central place in this path of southern feminism, since it is necessary to construct a map of feminist praxis, a precarious map (Karina Bidaseca and Marta Sierra, Postales femeninas desde el fin del mundo) whose place of enunciation is the South, not the geographical South but the geopolitical one, and that is why I attempt to define this new practice as a Third Feminism that questions the monolithic conception of “woman” based on the ever-questioned model of the white, middle-class, university-educated, heterosexual woman; the “equality” of women.



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The black feminist Audre Lorde (1985), when she exhorts that “the house of the master is not undone with the master’s tools” and writes that our difference is the source of our power, urges us to think that the basis of this class difference is not simply the geopolitical North/South divide, but also the racism that seems to be an unstoppable force in a world that sadly throws itself into building walls, into the arms race and into violence against our gender, the brutality of humankind.18 Committed to emancipation, Third Feminism calls for the decolonization of feminism and for the articulation of the work of feminist transcultural translation, as Mohanty calls it. The works of those who preceded us and of those who today are still writing and acting are embedded in this path of recovery of memories and new pedagogies.

IV The Silhouettes of Ana Mendieta Colonization, by the way, was not a uniform process in the Americas. For slave women, the forms of coercion were settled in sexuality colonized by the white master. Sexual abuse, mutilation, and rape were the expression of the politics of control of the workers in a slave economy, the great African-American thinker and activist Angela Davis said in her book entitled Women, Race and Class19. The 1960 struggles of third world women had an impact on the symbolic imaginary of these women representing the otherness of white feminism; they questioned the hegemonic feminism that ignored the various divisions of race, social class, nation, etc. within the homogeneous category of “woman”20. The term “women of color” that identifies women of Asian, Latin American, Native American and African descent, the most important minority groups of color in the USA, encompassed many of the members of the civil rights movement who had participated in the nationalist struggles against colonialism in the “Third World.” The genesis of contemporary Black feminism finds its origins in the historical reality of African-American women situated in two oppressed 18 When we talk about the feminist movement, the racism of white women is equated with the sexism of black and white males, and Afro women occupy the lowest place of all, as bell hooks and Sueli Carneiro explain, and they destroy our cognitive matrix when they assert that the colonial rape perpetrated by white masters on black and indigenous women and the resulting mix is the source of all constructions about our national identity, structuring the myth of Latin American racial democracy. 19 Cf. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class, 7. 20 Cf. Karina Bidaseca, “Mujeres blancas”.

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castes – the racial caste and the sexual caste – (Rio Combahee Collective, 1988) and its questioning of the system of political representation. The Black Feminist Movement (among whose representatives we can mention Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Pat Parker, Barbara Christian) denounced the racism and elitism of second-wave white feminism and the absence of consideration for classism, sexism and racism as overlapping experiences. In 1971–72, a little more than a decade before the publication of the great anthology This Bridge My Back. Third World Women’s Voices in the United States (1988), some exhibitions were put together that showed the work of women of color. “Where We At: Black Women Artists” (New York) included the works of Faith Ringgold, Kay Brown, Pat Davis, Jerrolyn Crooks, Dindga McCannon and Mai Mai Leabua, among others21. In addition, there was the “Dialectics of Isolation: an Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the US,” curated by the African-American Howardena Pindell in 1980. In the Introduction to the catalog, Ana Mendieta stated without faltering: “North American feminism is essentially a white middle class movement”22. The debates about sexuality that started in the 1970s were added to this questioning. In 1980, The National Organization for Women (NOW) founded its platform on the rights of gays and lesbians. In this context, the novel study of the African-American thinker Kimberle W. Crenshaw (1991) provided an analysis of violence against Afro women, as well as of their disappearance from labor legislation, insofar as there is a hiatus between women and black women where black women disappear, and their rights disappear with them [iii]. The author proposes the epistemological, theoretical and political need for the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in order to understand the indifference that men show toward the violence that is systematically inflicted upon women of color, non-white women; women who are victims of the coloniality of power and gender; women of the third world. This debate was central to a large part of feminist theory and art criticism in the 1990s.[iv] The binary sexual difference, a node of psychoanalytic feminist thinking in 1990, was replaced by a discourse where the body, as in the 1970s, became once again central in the art of feminist artists such as Ana Mendieta. Ciudad Juarez represents a milestone on this path towards the formulation of feminicide, which is how the murder, mutilation and disappearances of young women are called in Latin America, and a new way of understanding politics today.

21 Cf. Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, eds., Kunst und Feminismus, 23. 22 Cited ibid.



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V Written on the Land. Nation and Exile I Ana saw herself as a person “of color” for the first time in Iowa – a place with intense racism where the Latino population was a minority. Her sister said once: “We had never seen ourselves as people of color before”. There, she was stereotyped as “a little whore, a little prostitute”23. Mendieta’s personal story is strongly related to her artistic work: Between 1972 and 1975 she created her first works of art. They had a feminist and provocative approach in tackling women issues, violence and the defense of new social structures. Her concern about women and the need to defend those who are at the margins of society were characteristic of her works until her death24.

In this regard, she used her naked body to explore a connection with the Earth, for example, in the work Image of Yagul – included in the “Siluetas Series” made in Mexico from 1973 to 1977. The link between the female body and nature in Mendieta’s work is a criticism to capitalism and its predatory practices. The exploitation of the female body and of nature is intrinsically connected because they speak the same language, a language of “dispossession”. The artist draws her silhouette on the Earth showing “this connection that is in danger of extinction”25. In other words, she related women and nature domestication anticipating what we witness currently: the destruction of nature and of the female body has turned into the distinctive feature of the world of today.

VI Written in Water I The performance where her body “dilutes” in the sea shows how she connects with the maternal body of the Earth: “My art is based on the belief that the Universal Energy exists in everything, from human beings to ghosts, from ghosts to plants, from plants to the galaxy.”26

23 Cited in Andrea Giunta, Escribir las imágenes. Ensayos sobre arte argentino y latinoameri­ cano, 43. 24 María del Mar López-Cabrales, “Laberintos corporales en la obra de Ana Mendieta”, http:// pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero33/laberint.html 25 Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, eds., Kunst und Feminismus, 32. 26 Ana Mendieta, “A Selecetion of Statements and Notes”, Sulfur 22 (1988), 70.

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VII Written on the Body I The first time Mendieta used blood to make art was in 1972, when she created the work Untitled (Death of a Chicken)27, where her naked body was in front of a white wall holding a freshly decapitated chicken by its legs, with blood splattered on her naked body. “Rape Scene” was presented in 1973. The performance, which had a more theatrical character than the artist’s previous works[v], was based on the real case of a nursing student at the University of Iowa who had been raped. Shocked by the brutal rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten, Ana covered herself in blood and strapped herself to a table in 1973, inviting the audience to bear witness. This performance was presented to a group of friends invited to have dinner at her apartment on the Iowa campus. Upon arrival, the door to the apartment was waiting, half-open, to allow a glimpse inside onto Mendieta’s body spread on a table, hands and feet tied up, naked from the waist down and with bloodstained legs. Blood is a “feminine” fluid generally linked to dirt and impurity. Feminist movements have shown opposition to this idea. Mendieta’s work is intrinsically tied to the “Anti-art gallery” movement (movimiento antigalería) which questioned and “dirtied” hegemonic conceptual art28. Art critics, who rooted for a “hygienic” abstract and conceptual art, depoliticized her work by undermining its meaning and by decontextualizing it from the Third World Feminist movement.

VIII “Where is Ana Mendieta?” Final Thoughts This essay tackles the relationship between body and language from a viewpoint not considered before. Most studies have criticized Mendieta’s work for being essentialist. Art curators and white feminist theory use the term “essentialism” as a criticism in order to devalue her great artistic contribution. In fact, the thin line between nature and women is questioned in Medieta’s performances; therefore, this debate is crucial in current poscolonial feminist theory. According to Helena Reckitt, Mendieta’s work was shown in photographs which capture the fleetingness of it. When questioned regarding the “essentialist” criticism, Ana Mendieta

27 Cf. http://blogs.uoregon.edu/anamendieta/2015/02/22/anamendieta/ 28 Cf. Perrault, in Ana Mendieta, Ana Mendieta, A retrospective, 17.



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answered: “My life work represents the primeval beliefs which are innate to human beings”29. Ana Mendieta’s work expresses women oppression and exploitation in global capitalism and the continuity of Quijano’s notion of “coloniality of power”. Feminine bodies, their reproductive organs and their sexuality are turned into a conquered territory. Rape is a form of demoralization and a rupture of the communitarian symbolic network. Extractivism, dispossession and necropolitics are the pillars of this new stage of capitalism. We are dealing with the dilemmas and challenges of a hostile era. Joshua Goldstein[ 1] can complement this analysis by describing conquest as an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in times of war. He argues that, in order to understand conquest, it is necessary to consider: 1) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence in the exploitation of women’s work. “Thinking from the territory-body of an indigenous woman means thinking from a body that has been doubly feminized: because it is a body with female genitalia and because it is an Indian body”30. For indigenous women, the relationship with the Pachamama is one of reciprocity. Without it, there is no possibility of life. Women cannot pay the debt owed to capital. “Where is Ana Mendieta?/ Where is Ana Mendieta?” Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) and the group of the Guerrilla Girls asked in front of the Guggenheim Museum at the opening of Carl Andre’s pictures. The signs read: “Carl Andre’s in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta?” This rhetorical question denounces the lack of women in museums and art centers. “Where is Ana Mendieta?” We ask again and again because she was found dead. Many women, like Mendieta, are permanently exiled from the world. It is a permanent exile that transforms us into stateless people. Thus, we are in constant movement which is a good starting point to rethink our reality in order to confront the violence perpetrated on women. The female body has been turned into a symbol of conquest, a territory to be marked, a language of violence that should be interrupted.

Bibliography Bidaseca, Karina and Marta Sierra, Postales femeninas desde el fin del mundo. El Sur y las políticas de la memoria. Buenos Aires, Godot, 2012. 29 Cited in Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, eds., Kunst und Feminismus, 32. 30 Francesca Gargallo, Feminismos desde Abya Ayala, 76.

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Bidaseca, Karina, « Sitios liminales entre cordilleras invisibles ». In Geografías imaginarias, edited by Marta Sierra. Santiago de Chile, Ed. Cuarto Propio, 2014, 109–138. Bidaseca, Karina, “Mujeres blancas que buscan salvar a las mujeres color café de los hombres color café. Desigualdad, colonialismo jurídico y feminismo postcolonial”. In Andamios. 8 (2011), 61–89. Accessed April 28, 2015. http://portal.uacm.edu.mx/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=F9CGivPuXgQ%3d&tabid=1906. Bidaseca, Karina, ”Feminicidio y políticas de la memoria. Exhalaciones sobre la abyección de la violencia contra las mujeres”. In Hegemonía cultural y políticas de la diferencia, edited by Alejandro Grimson and Karina Bidaseca. Buenos Aires, CLACSO, 2013, 79–101. Accessed April 28, 2013. http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/gt/20130513112051/HegemoniaCultural.pdf Davis, Angela Y., Women, Race and Class. New York, Random House, 1981. Gargallo, Francesca, Feminismos desde Abya Ayala. México, América Libre Chichimora, 2014. Giunta, Andrea, Escribir las imágenes. Ensayos sobre arte argentino y latinoamericano. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011. Mbembe, Achille, “Del racismo como práctica de la imaginación”. In Jérome Bindé, ed., ¿A dónde van los valores? Coloquios del siglo XXI. Sevilla, Ed. UNESCO, 2005, 361–365. Mendieta, Ana, Ana Mendieta, A Retrospective, edited by Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perreault. New York, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987. Ana Mendieta, “A Selecetion of Statements and Notes”, Sulfur 22 (1988), 70. Quijano, Aníbal, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina”. In La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, edited by Edgardo Lander. Buenos Aires, CLACSO, 2000, 201–246. Reckitt, Helena and Peggy Phelan, eds., Kunst und Feminismus. Berlin, Phaidon, 2005. Segato, Rita L., “Colonialidad y género. En busca de un nuevo vocabulario descolonial”. In Feminismos y Poscolonialidad. Descolonizando el feminismo desde y en América Latina, edited by Karina Bidaseca. Buenos Aires, Godot, 2011, 17–47. Segato, Rita L., La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juarez. México, Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, 2003. Segato, Rita L., Las estructuras elementales de la violencia. Buenos Aires, Ed. Prometeo, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri C., Outside in the teaching machine. New York, Routledge, 1993.

Other sources Bidaseca, Karina, “Mujer y cuerpo bajo control. Feminismo. En esta entrevista, la especialista argentina Rita Segato traza un mapa preocupante de la violencia de género en todo el suelo latinoamericano”. In Revista Ñ, February 10, 2014. Accessed April 28, 2015. http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/ideas/Rita-Segato-Mujer-cuerpocontrol_0_1081091894.html. Mar López-Cabrales, María del, Laberintos corporales en la obra de Ana Mendieta. http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero33/laberint.html Mendieta, Ana, Fire of Earth. A film by Kate Horsfield, Nereyda Garcia-Ferraz, and Branda Miller, 1987, 52 minutes, Color/BW, DVD, Order No. W99249.

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Use and Representations of the Body among Police Officers in the Province of Buenos Aires Introduction By means of an ethnographic study among officers of the Buenos Aires provincial police force, we will analyze the representations that our interlocutors make concerning their bodies and their contexts of action. There is among police officers in the province of Buenos Aires an ideal police officer, a model of the “true cop,” characterized by his courage, his bravery, and his absence of fear in the “fight against crime.” In this archetype, the body takes on a leading role, given that physical strength emerges as one of the required and distinctive features of police activity. This representation establishes a constant conversation with “what should be” for officers in everyday life. There is in the police world a plurality of different and distinctive ways of being a police officer. However, these multiple ways of being are confronted with a mandate that stipulates how police officers should be. An ideal police officer emerges among our informants, with a “true,” distinctive and characteristic style. For members of the force, the “true cop” is one guided by his bravery in fighting crime1, a police model with a bodily dimension. The imaginary profile, characterized by the use of force and courage, brings courage and bravery together with a specific type of body. We must mention that many of our interlocutors – we can notice in these pages the heterogeneity of the police universe – do not fit this mold, even though they (re)produce it. The link between police and physical strength gives rise to a distinctive feature of police activity. Police work is, for them, the dangerous fight against crime. Those who possess strong bodies able to deal with the mishaps of occupational hazards can face the everyday dangers of the fight against crime. These representations require police agents to “adjust” their body ideals to the legitimate mold of the “true cop.” It is therefore necessary to stage, to enact a body. The dramatization of physical strength builds an ideal police officer, a “true cop” 1 We know very little about how this model comes about, and even though it is a very interesting question and though we have some clues from Mariana Sirimarco, De civil a policía, we are for now more interested in knowing how it is used in daily work interactions.

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distinguished by courage, bravery and the absence of fear. The ideal police officer is put together through gestures, expressions, uses of the body relative to strength and courage. Even those who do not fit this mold stage this ideal of risky work in the search for dangerous miscreants and of the use of force. This is an ethnographic study of police officers in the province of Buenos Aires that began in 2009, and it aims to analyze police practices from their own perspective. Numerous interviews and hours of field observation at police stations of the Greater Buenos Aires Area allow us on this occasion to analyze the uses and representations of the police body.

Bodily Representations The police world contains a plurality of different and distinctive ways of being a police officer. However, these multiple ways are faced with a mandate that stipulates how police agents should be. An ideal police officer emerges among our informants, with a “true,” distinctive and characteristic style. For members of the force, the “true cop” is one guided by his bravery in fighting crime, a police model with a bodily dimension. The imaginary profile, characterized by the use of force and courage, connects courage and bravery with a specific type of body. We must mention that many of our interlocutors – we can notice in these pages the heterogeneity of the police universe – do not fit this mold, even though they (re)produce it. For many of our interlocutors, the “good cop” is someone who is not afraid of danger, who does not cower in the face of risk, who courageously handles conflict scenarios. A police officer that is not intimidated by criminals is called a “poronga”2 Police officers with these qualities seem to enjoy recognition from their peers. The opposite of a “poronga” is someone who hides away (“se acobacha”), a fearful officer who flees risky situations. A police officer who hides away is a coward; he does not have the characteristics of a “poronga.” Ariel3, a non-commissioned officer with six years in the force, was telling us that while responding to an emergency call he engaged in a chase that took him to the entrance to a “dangerous” slum (“villa miseria”) in the Dock Sud neighborhood. Thinking that his partner was backing him up, he ran inside the neighborhood, something which according to him is extremely risky. After two blocks, he turned around and saw that he was alone. He returned to the patrol 2 Translator’s note: literally, a cock. 3 The names of our informants are fictitious to preserve their anonymity.



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car, running, sweating, frightened, and found his partner inside the car, according to him, “comfortably seated.” His partner mentioned that he had been in the car in order to reiterate the call for reinforcements, but Ariel thought the reasons were different: “He was a chicken.” He told us that he preferred not to speak to his partner because he was afraid of not being able to control his anger, that he did not speak to him because “if I spoke to him, I would’ve had to kill him.”4 He recalls that, when he arrived at the police station, he went directly to discuss the matter with the commissioner, and he shouted that he would not go back out with that “chickenshit.” Ariel’s words demonstrate the difference between the brave police officer who is not frightened by risk and his colleague who fearfully “cowered” in the patrol car. Just like Ariel, there are numerous police officers who confirm these values, supporting the relevance of courage, of bravery. Cowardice is represented as the opposite of the distinctive signs of the “good cop.” Ariel told us, during the same conversation, that to confront risk one had to have “balls,” meaning testicles but referring above all to an attitude. In the police world, those who lose heart in dangerous situations lack “balls,” bravery and courage. Diego, a commissioner whom we will introduce later, said on several occasions that, in order to be a police officer, one had to “have balls,” because police work was, for him, highly risky and could only be performed with courage. “Balls” as a sign of bravery and courage metonymically demonstrate courage and masculinity, a point we will later address further. The ideal values of the “true cop” are built on a mold which refers to strength linked to the masculine, and this establishes a boundary. Among police officers, a hypothetical division is constructed which establishes in the imaginary that administrative tasks are linked to bodies with poor stamina and that working “on the street” is a sign of resilient bodies. This representation is questioned, challenged by those who endure it as a contestation of their work, which seems less like police work since it is administrative, but also by those who put forth such arguments, as they recount memories – stories of valiant administrative workers – that cast doubt on their own assertions. However, despite the challenges, these representations are reproduced and they frame the ideal of the “true cop.” Administrative tasks require, according to our informants, technical knowledge, bureaucratic knowledge, that is to say, a type of intellectual labor embodied in mundane, gentle and placid work. A non-commissioned officer whose everyday work was quite the opposite often repeated that administrative work was “quiet.” His words were not derogatory to his peers, but they revealed that, in the 4 Fieldwork notes 25/6/2009.

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division of labor, “the real police work” was performed by those who were “on the streets.” Working in a patrol car or on foot, doing a search or identifying a suspect are tasks that, in his eyes, demand physical abilities to be able to deal with everyday dangers. Placidity and risk are the two sides of police activity. These two sides cannot be embodied in the same officer, which gives rise to the need for two different types of social subjects for different tasks: intellectual or bodily. The intellectual side associated with administrative tasks and the physical side associated with “the street” establish a boundary based on the difference between passive and active roles, roles that reconstruct gender distinctions. Masculinity is associated with the active and femininity with the passive5. Several of our interlocutors claimed that a “true cop” is the one who faces the dangers of daily work with offenders. In contrast, for them, intellectual work is passive: “quiet.” Badinter argues that: the male identity is associated with the fact that they possess, take, penetrate, dominate and assert, if necessary by force. Female identity, with being possessed, docile, passive, submissive.6

The different police activities associated with roles are faced here with a contradiction. Those who claim to be “the true cops,” those who risk their integrity in everyday work, are subordinates to those that they themselves represent as feminine. Thus, they break the association between the pairs submission-femininity and freedom-masculinity. The formal structure of the force orders labor relations by imposing a hierarchical logic that distinguishes between those who give orders and those who obey, a distinction that is analogous to the one between higher-ranking officers and non-commissioned officers. Those who give orders are, within the role logic, the feminized ones who perform intellectual work. We are therefore faced with a contradiction that is temporarily solved by each side in a differential manner. Non-commissioned officers, who mostly work on the street, regardless of their gender, argue that the higher-ranking officers lack the knowledge of the true police officer. Administrative tasks distant from routine preventive actions and the fight against crime turn their knowledge into abstract entelechy. Therefore, because of this lack of knowledge, they question the higher-ranking officers’ ability to command. In addition, they argue that institutional deficiencies are the result of the fact that those who know nothing about everyday police work lead

5 Pierre Bourdieu, La dominación masculina. 6 Elizabeth Badinter, XY. La Identidad Masculina, 165.



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the force. This everyday reality, beyond hierarchical submission, reestablishes the dominated as dominant. Higher-ranking officers who primarily perform administrative tasks, regardless of their gender, argue that their subordinates do not have the institutional knowledge to lead the police. They insist that the “watchmen” (vigis) – a sometimes derogatory, sometimes affectionate name for police officers – are there to obey and not to think. Thinking and giving orders is a task incumbent upon higher-ranking officers, intellectual labor, even though it is not submissive. The command-obey dichotomy re-arranges the distinction between the masculine and the feminine. Those who order, lead, guide are masculinized and those who obey are feminized; the formal hierarchy reorders relationships within the world of work. The higher-ranking officers do not solely rely on formal hierarchies to establish or restore the order of domination within the world of work. On the one hand, many higher-ranking officers have work experiences on the “street” and/or in confrontational situations, experiences that they use to demonstrate that they belong in the universe of the “true cop.” On the other hand, to reconfigure the notion of risk, some higher-ranking officers establish differences between the different command duties and note that much of the administrative work can be categorized as “cowering” because it involves activities without a decision-making role. Thus, for example, a commissioner in charge of a police station renowned for its dangerousness claimed that he had many colleagues who would “take refuge” in “quiet” police stations, since they lacked the “balls” needed to take responsibility for “hot spots.” The “balls” (metonymy of masculinity) of decision-makers, of those who give orders, are a mark of manliness. Masculinity and domination emerge as an unbreakable duo. This same notion – which is socially disseminated7 – guides the relationship of the entire force with the community, replicating representations that associate the masculine with the dominant and the feminine with the dominated. The police regards itself as a masculine institution and therefore dominant in its relationship with civil society, which is idealized as feminine8. Gendered language represents police as male and society as female. This representation presupposes

7 Alejandro Isla, “Violencias públicas y privadas”, has studied gender relations and violence in families of the working-class areas of Tucuman. In his work, he has analyzed the native category “henpecked.” It refers to a man who allows his wife to “boss” him around; it is understood as a pejorative adjective, given that in these families it is considered “natural” for the man to lead domestic life. Masculinity is exercised by subordinating the woman and children to the authority of the man. This notion articulates domestic and public space. The man must lead and not be led; when power changes hands, social order, according to Isla’s work, is upset. 8 Mariana Sirimarco, De civil a policía.

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a symbolic expropriation of strength, building it as a male virtue and structuring it as a hierarchical distinction. Strength and weakness are the arguments that structure this language. Order that sustains dominion in command is linked to strength. There is a cultural matrix in our society that subordinates the feminine9; this matrix makes feminine “weakness” the core idea of this hierarchy. These hierarchies organize the relational world of labor. Police officers, both men and women, in their interactions, must show power as a distinctive sign of the “true cop.” This demonstration imposes differences depending on the gender of the person displaying it. An almost unchallenged representation is outlined by the idea that “the true cop” is characterized by physical strength. Three elements are combined to create a complement, a solid, almost unbreakable total: manliness, strength, police. Ariel, during a conversation in the police station kitchen, while he chopped some carrots to cook with lentils, stated that he preferred to go on patrol with male partners because he felt safer, better backed up. “When I go on patrol with a woman, I have to take care of myself and of her,”10 Ariel said, invoking the image of feminine weakness. This image expanded feminine fragility, because it had to be defended by a man. To be a good police officer, one must have courage and bravery. The association between masculinity and courage is constructed through the possession of strength as a distinctive police characteristic and a core idea of police work. The distinction is based on bodily ideas. It is for this reason that robust bodies are associated with strength and masculinity and weak bodies are associated with the feminine. A commissioner, pointing at a young and extremely thin girl, said he could not send her out to work on the street, since her frailty and weakness were such that “the wind would carry her away.” Suárez de Garay11, in an ethnographic study of police officers in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, claims that police work implies male tasks in the eyes of his informants. He shows how these Aztec policemen consent to the inclusion of women in the force only if they do not interfere with the policing tasks, which are considered strictly male due to the imaginary link between strength, police and bodily robustness. Bodily representations are privileged places where social groups can build the diacritic signs of gender. Mosse12 argues that, in the construction of modern masculinity, the body is the main place for connection between virtues and masculinity. Manliness and strength are bound by imposing upon women and men 9 Rita L. Segato, Las estructuras elementales. 10 Fieldwork notes 25/6/2009. 11 María E. Suárez de Garay, Los policías: una averiguación antropológica. 12 George Mosse, The Image of Man.



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a representation of the “true cop,” which stipulates ways of doing things. These representations are common among some civilian citizens, who feel that they are safer if they are protected by men rather than by women. To shed light on the relationship between strength, masculinity, and police, we will discuss an event that occurred during our fieldwork. On a quiet morning, I was chatting with the officer on duty about the quirks of the police world. Inés, a young, recently graduated non-commissioned officer, was recalling how she had chosen to become a policewoman when a woman interrupted our conversation to ask for help. She needed the assistance of a police officer because the old woman she was looking after had fallen and could not get up. Inés offered to help, but the woman replied that Inés would not be able to lift the woman, because she was very heavy. They both looked at me and the policewoman said, pointing at me: “The officer will help us.”13 The woman who had requested help seemed hesitant: she was distrustful of my civilian clothing, she said that the older person she looked after would only accept help from the police. She would nervously repeat that she could have asked the greengrocers before her house for help, but said that the elderly woman did not want to be helped and that only police authority would be able to convince her to accept help. In this situation, the woman was faced with a problem: those who could help her were a thin female police officer in uniform and a man without uniform. Those who represented the police through their uniform seemed to lack strength, and the one who possibly had strength was not wearing representative clothing. Inés tried to find a male colleague to help her, but no one at the police station was available. There were only two men there, and they were not available. She left the lieutenant in charge of judicial affairs in charge of guard duty, and we went off to lift the old woman. More than her anecdote, the attitude and the words of the woman highlight the logical link between masculinity and strength, as the opposite of femininity associated with weakness. That relationship can also be noticed in the attitude of the officer in uniform, who pointed me out as a man and sought out other men to do a task that required strength. Safety and protection are linked to the potential use of force. A policewoman was telling us about a neighbor’s disappointment when he saw two women getting out of the patrol car. She recalled that the outraged neighbor said: “I need the police, not two girls.”14 We also noted that the link between strength and masculinity is widespread in various social strata.15 13 Fieldwork notes 2/9/2010. 14 Fieldwork notes 25/11/2010 15 Rita L. Segato, Las estructuras elementales; Pierre Bourdieu, La dominación masculina; Eduardo P. Archetti, Masculinidades. Fútbol, tango y polo.

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Raquel, a lieutenant responsible for judicial proceedings at the police station, recalled that “sometimes people called the police station to ask for a reinforcement patrol car. Because they saw me. And that’s what people talked about at the station when I got back.”16 Raquel is thin, with delicate manners, feminine, she wears makeup and speaks slowly. Now she handles administrative tasks, but she fondly remembers her shifts in the patrol car and the work on the “street.” She mentioned that she preferred to go on patrol with other women, because with men she got bored and had little to talk about. Moreover, she said that she did not feel better protected with male colleagues: safety had nothing to do with gender, but rather with experience and attitude17. Similarly, Vanesa recalled that, when she started going on patrol, she noticed that the neighbors themselves would ask for patrols led by men and, when she got back to the station, her colleagues would point this out in order to undermine the value of her presence on the streets. Vanesa is a higher-ranking officer, a deputy inspector, she is robust, and her appearance, body shape and manners would be defined as masculine by several of her colleagues. She sadly recalls her efforts to be accepted as an equal among her peers. She claims to have earned that position, by virtue of “going out” onto the street; she argues that she had to fight for her place as a “cop” with those who ordered her to do administrative tasks. She recalled: “They always tried not to assign me male tasks, I mean… I said: ‘I am a cop and I am a cop everywhere and in all situations, I can do everything. That was my one goal, to outdo myself’.”18 Work on the “street,” the true task for police, seems out of bounds for women. Such a ban is imposed not only by their male colleagues, but also by gender representations that flow beyond the confines of the police force. The images and words that Raquel and Vanesa present allow us to observe how the representation of the “true cop” is constructed and reconstructed, but also how this model is manipulated, used. Vanesa’s desire to do “police” tasks rather than administrative work shows how some higher-ranking officers share the “watchmen’s” idea that “true” police work happens on the “street.” It thus undercuts the ideas that assume that higher-ranking officers do administrative tasks and non-commissioned officers work on the “street.” On the other hand, Raquel and Vanesa recalled that they had engaged in supposedly male tasks. Raquel argues that she performs these tasks better than some men and questions physical strength as a distinguishing characteristic of police activity. She says 16 Fieldwork notes 25/11/2010 17 Age emerges as a function of the idea of experience. Although it will not be analyzed here, it must be mentioned. 18 Interview, 7/8/2009, La Plata.



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that experience and attitude are more important than strength. Vanesa, on the contrary, links strength to police tasks but says it is not limited to the masculine world. Both agree that the “true cop” does not have to be a man; they disagree about the central role of physical strength in order to carry out police work. Two different femininities adapt themselves, with strategies of acceptance and challenge, to the police model. On the other hand, this model obscures the diversity of police work. Not only administrative tasks are obscured, but also many daily tasks that have nothing to do with the use of physical strength or with risky interventions. In fact, a large portion of police work is related to intervention in domestic problems and family conflicts. In the eyes of many of our interlocutors, these interventions distort the institution’s raison d’être, which, as we have already said, they insist is to fight crime. Interventions that are not related to this objective seem, to many, feminine, just like administrative tasks. Our male informants say that women, associated with maternity, are better suited to these tasks. Our female informants cast doubt on these statements, showing that their training as police officers does not instruct them in these matters. Policemen and – women say that there is an – informal – sexual division of labor, which requires females to respond to these episodes. Vanesa recalled that a partner faced with a fighting couple told her: “You go: it’s a family issue, they’ll listen to you more.”19 The ideal of the “true cop” hides other everyday work situations that coexist uneasily with the direct link between masculinity, physical strength, and police. But, since this relationship has a legitimacy that is relevant within the institution, there are many policewomen who restore the relationship by modifying one of its terms and showing that the “true cop” is characterized by a strength that can also be female. Carmen, an inspector with little work experience on “the street” but with many years of experience in the everyday work of a police station, redefined the relationship between “true cops” and strength. For her, being a police officer was a job that demanded immense psychological resilience to cope with the misery of society on a daily basis. Excited, she told the case of the rape of a female minor and of subsequent police action; strength, for her, means withstanding the emotional crises of these events and continuing to work in the institution. She repeated that one needed “a lot of balls” to be a police officer and that many were leaving the force because of a lack of mental strength. The appearance, one again, of “balls” as the distinctive mark of the “true cop,” now linked to emotional rather than physical strength, distant from masculinity, shows one of the many actions taken to conform with the ideal model from a multiplicity of

19 Interview, 7/8/2009, La Plata.

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gender configurations20. As Calandrón21 argues, given that there is no single conception of how women should act as police officers, there are multiple legitimate ways to exercise femininity. The same applies to men. It is thus that, in the police universe, there are multiple masculinities and femininities that interact with the “true cop” ideal depending on the context.

Bodies in Action Diego, a deputy commissioner responsible for transferring detainees, explained in a slow and deliberate tone and with a smile on his lips, sitting at his desk, that “women are useless because they have no strength, unless they are machos.”22 To prove his claim, he recalled an event where a young female non-commissioned officer had to knock down a door and failed because she lacked sufficient strength. To him, the useful policewoman is one who has sufficient strength and becomes masculinized in order to be recognized as a good professional. It seems necessary to appropriate, throughout one’s professional career, ways, gestures, manners and tones of voice which are linked to the concept of strength. Body strength should be exercised and displayed. Raquel told us that when she dealt with prisoners or identified citizens she had to project these manners. She argued that there were situations when she had to showcase masculine behavior in order to earn “the respect” of her interlocutors that way. Vanessa’s ex-husband Gabriel agreed. He told us that, depending on interactions, police officers had to perform different roles in order to attain compliance with authority. For Gabriel, as well as for Raquel, authority was respected when values linked to masculinity were showcased and when there was a latent possibility that physical force might be used. In fact, Gabriel commented several times that, in situations of disrespect, it is necessary to use physical force in order to bring a disorderly relationship under control, but prior to that interaction can be managed with changes in tone and gestures that reveal police potential. Diego argued that, when one gets out of the patrol car, one must have a bodily attitude that “imposes respect.” As he said this, he stopped his calm speech and acted out the scene: he inflated his chest and walked with an attitude as if he were ready to fight. He looked like a boxer willing to take on his rival with clenched fists. The bravery associated with

20 In addition, the meaning of “balls” changes, so that it is no longer a special feature of the male but a name for strength. 21 Sabrina Calandron, “Putas, monstruos y monjas”. 22 Fieldwork notes 3/12/2011



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a masculine manner is part of the dramatization that is popular among members of the force. As long as there is a direct association between masculinity and strength, appearing to be the “true cop” is more difficult for Raquel and Vanesa than for Gabriel and Diego. The projection is visibly evident when there are associations between strength and gender. Likewise, given that certain bodies are associated with strength and others with weakness, Diego, who is nearly 5 ft 11 in and has a robust body, has more elements to showcase bodily strength than Gabriel, who is short and extremely thin. Physical strength and the body create an imaginary link that provides Vanesa – with her broad shoulders and strong limbs – more tools to look like a “true cop” than Raquel – with her slight body. Corpulence and robustness appear as synonyms for strength and antonyms for the impotence associated with weakness. Suárez de Garay23 discusses how, amongst police officers in Guadalajara, Mexico, robust bodies are a necessary characteristic in order to perform police work correctly. This link shows that, amongst these officers in uniform, police work is strictly male, given that women lack the roughness necessary for these tasks. Body volume and strength are linked as inseparable synonyms. The equivalence becomes so strong that Suárez de Garay24, like Sirimarco25, ends up stating that the police have – or should have, according to the officers themselves – a virile nature. The association between masculinity and courage is constructed through the possession of strength as a distinctive police characteristic and a core idea of police work. The bodily representations of strength represent the limit. Therefore, robust bodies are associated with strength and masculinity, and weak bodies with the feminine. However, the body speaks not only through its size. Gestures, manners and tones link actors with masculinity, strength, and the ideal of the “true cop”. In this case, Diego’s body shape, refined, typical of a middle-class man who completed high school and who is currently a university student, seems to undermine his ability to appear strong. On the contrary, Gabriel, despite his thinness and his high-pitched voice, moves, gestures and speaks in ways that seem to show strength. Personal life paths and networks of social relationships through which the actors move sediment into their ability or inability to exhibit certain roles more or less successfully. Belonging socially becomes a significant element with regard to the ability to look strong. Working-class sectors, commonly associated with violence and the use of force, have more resources to boast about their strength and bravery – obviously, in accordance with the standards of our 23 Cf. María E. Suárez de Garay, Los policías: una averiguación antropológica. 24 Cf. ibid. 25 Cf. Mariana Sirimarco, De civil a policía.

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society. Míguez and Semán26 argue that strength has become a distinctive feature of working-class culture in contemporary Argentina. Strength – whether physical or mental – here signals forms of prestige that, in different ways depending on the context, highlight the disadvantaged sector’s system of values. Thus, working-class sectors have, according to the idiosyncrasy of our contemporary culture, a bonus, compared to the rest of society, in the effort to be perceived as strong. Raquel’s manner – she has completed high school and has been socialized in a normal middle class environment – can be understood as weak compared to Gabriel’s manner; he only finished primary school and lives and has lived in marginal neighborhoods in the province of Buenos Aires27. Raquel and Gabriel, both of them non-commissioned officers whose bodily structures can be slightly associated with weakness, differ profoundly insofar as their ways of doing things have different potential to demonstrate police potential physical strength. Obviously, belonging to a certain class is not the only core means through which one internalizes world views that materialize in manners, gestures, and tone of voice. Vanesa, who is not working-class, completed secondary school and has studied to be a higher-ranking officer, always sought to be recognized – and respected – by her peers as a “true cop.” Therefore, she sought to adapt to a manner that conforms with the ideal model28. It is in her, but not just in her, that the masculine mandate established as positive by the typical social relationships within the police institution – both in formal instruction29 and in daily work – emerges particularly strongly. All of our interlocutors highlight masculine manners associated with strength; they act out their gender status, which is adjusted to fit the ideal model. Some decide – like Gabriel, Ariel or Vanesa – to demonstrate in various interactions models that are closer to the ideal cop, such as when speaking to the researcher. Others – such as Diego, Carmen and Raquel – limit fiction to one type of interaction and behave differently in other contexts. Theatrical masculinity is a message of inward unity and outward differentiation. Showing a type of masculinity emerges as a requirement for being part of a world of peers (equal although hierarchical) differentiated from civilian citizens. Those who do not fit the mold accept these manners as a means of differentiation.

26 Daniel Míguez and Pablo Semán, Entre santos, cumbias y piquetes. Las culturas populares en la Argentina reciente. 27 Raquel lived in neighborhoods such as Martínez and Florida, known as middle- or upperclass, whereas Gabriel lives in Malvinas Argentinas and has lived in several remote and outlying neighborhoods in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. 28 In this work, we have not discussed age, an element that without a doubt also imposes limits on a show of strength. 29 Cf. Mariana Sirimarco, De civil a policía.



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By way of a conclusion The body, both as it is represented and as it is used, enables us to observe how the police seek to distinguish themselves from the rest of society. The distinctive principles of the police model lack originality and allow, once again, an account of the existing bridges between these institutions that are supposedly autonomous and the society that holds them30. The representation of the “true cop” is based on a symbolic economy – which associates positivity with the masculine and negativity with the feminine –; this is widespread in our society. This symbolic matrix creates unstable boundaries between civil society and the heterogeneous police world. Social relations within the police world – both internal and exogenous ones – impose an ideal of the “true cop” associated with masculinity and physical strength. This prescription forces members of the police force to adapt or relate to the model – partially accepting or challenging it, modifying it. The ideal police officer – despite partial criticism – is considered an example and “forces” police actors to play with this mold. Although everyone has difficulty adapting to this mold, it establishes the most legitimate modes of being a police officer. Each of the members that relate to this ideal have different tools – depending on gender, class, body, age, etc. – to enact it. This dramatization features, then, better and worse actors depending on the differential distribution of these tools. We must mention that these actors enact this relationship – between masculinity and strength – in this context of interaction, and that other forms will be considered more legitimate in other contexts. Furthermore, as we saw, not only in other contexts, but also within the police world, where there is a plurality of configurations. We said in the previous paragraphs, in accordance with Calandrón31, that varied forms of femininity and masculinity coexist within the lattices of the police world. Police heterogeneity is the result of the differential inclusion of actors who have gone through multiple relational frames. In this sense, it would be analytically shortsighted to deny that the police world’s forms of interaction – with the goal of legitimizing a model – sediment into world views and ways of acting in the world. The officers in uniform internalize everyday interactions, saturated with moral values, senses, and perception schemes. They interweave – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict – several world perception frameworks, which are enacted according to the different contexts and interactions.

30 Cf. Sabina Frederic, Los usos de la fuerza pública. 31 Cf. Sabrina Calandron, “Putas, monstruos y monjas”.

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On the other hand, the fluidity of the use of representation, in keeping with the heterogeneity of the police world, forces us to think about the reproduction of the model. The diversity of uses of this language allows us to see how the mold is manipulated without being changed. The uses of the model show us, on the one hand, how people are disciplined into the mold and, on the other hand, challenges, denials, contextual acceptances and situational rejections. The uses that police women and higher-ranking officers give this model can be understood as tactics of resistance, counter-spaces, that do not seek to change the logic of the representation but adapt it to its position in the field. They do not want to change this symbolic structure, so as not to blur the distinction between police and society, but they take advantage of the model’s ambiguities to position themselves in its diversity. The gender matrix, articulated with notions of strength, is reproduced because it is an effective tool for differentiation, which makes it possible to distinguish officers in uniform from civilians. Míguez and Isla argue that “only when a subject recognizes that his status or prestige in his peer group will be established based on his conduct’s compliance with a particular evaluative framework will this have an impact on his actions”32. As long as systems of police prestige conform with the ideal of the “true cop” as crucial for belonging and for distinction, this will continue to be the parameter based on which actors assess their forms of action.

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32 Daniel Míguez and Alejandro Isla, Entre la inseguridad y el temor, 71.



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About the Authors

About the Authors

Bidaseca, Karina Postcolonial & Feminist Studies Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Cai, Hua Anthropology Peking University Beijing, China Cenci, Walter Aesthetics, Psychology of Arts Institutos de Artes Mauricio Kagel UNSAM National Scientific and Technical Research Council / Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Chignola, Sandro Political philosophy Università degli Studi di Padova Padua, Italy Freda, Francisco-Hugo

 Psychoanalysis

 Universidad Nacional de San Martin Buenos Aires, Argentina Melville, Gert Medieval History Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Germany Mittag, Achim Sinology Universität Tübingen Tübingen, Germany Preisendanz, Karin South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies Universität Wien Vienna, Austria



About the Authors 

Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert Soziological Theory, Cultural Sociology Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Germany Roig, Alexandre Economic sociology Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Rugna, Cecilia History, Feminist Studies. Program against gender violence. Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Schmitt, Jean-Claude Historical Anthropology, Medieval History École pratique des hautes études Paris, France Sibilia, Paula Media Studies Universidade Federal Fluminense Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Vazquez Laba, Vanesa Sociology, Feminist Studies Program against gender violence Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Wilkis, Ariel Economic, Sociology, Social Theory National Scientific and Technical Research Council / Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Zucal, José Garriga Police anthropology Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina

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