El giro del cuerpo: historia y política de los corpóreo

Roger Cooter

doi:10.3989/arbor.2010.743n1204

Authors

Roger Cooter Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. University College London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2010.743n1204

Keywords:

Foucault, biopower, history of medicine, cultural history, representations, presentationalism, politics of life, biologization

Abstract

This paper reviews the encounter of the body in historical scholarship from the recent Foucaultian past to the present. The “somatic turn”, it argues, did more than merely render the body temporarily fashionable in history writing; it fundamentally challenged the nature of history as a form of inquiry. The paper outlines Foucault’s anti-essentialist understanding of the body as developed through his concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics”, before discussing how the somatic turn impacted on the new cultural history. The latter’s representationalist mode of expression is discussed in relation to the “experiential” reactions to it and the space these open for a new and politically worrying kind of essentialism, “presentationalism”. Two other possible directions for the body in history writing today are considered, one radically neo-essentialist, the other not, in its effort to lay bare the politics of contemporary biologized life.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Ankersmit, Frank (2006): “‘Presence’ and Myth”, History and Theory, vol. 45, pp. 328-336. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00368.x

Bencard, Adam (2007): “History in the Flesh: Investigating The Historicized Body”, PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen.

Bashford, Alison (2004): Imperial Hygiene: a critical history of colonialism, nationalism and public health, London: Palgrave.

Bentley, Michael (2006): “Past and ‘presence’: revisiting historical ontology”, History and Theory, vol. 45, pp. 349- 361. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00370.x

Butler, Judith (1993): Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York, Routledge.

Bynum, Caroline Walker (1995): “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, pp. 1-33. doi:10.1086/448780

Cooter, Roger (2004): “‘Framing’ the End of the Social History of Medicine”, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds.), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 309-37.

Cooter, Roger (2007): “After Death/After- ‘Life’: The Social History of Medicine in Post-Postmodernity”, Social History of Medicine, vol. 20, pp. 441-464. doi:10.1093/shm/hkm074

Cooter, Roger (2008): “Historical Keyword: Biocitizenship”, Lancet, vol. 372, p. 1725. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61719-5

Cooter, Roger and Stein, Claudia (2007): “Coming Into Focus: Posters, Power, and Visual Culture in the History of Medicine”, Medizinhistorisches Journal, vol. 42, pp. 180-209. PMid:18019225

Cooter, Roger and Stein, Claudia (forthcoming): “Visual Things and Universal Meanings: Aids Posters and the Politics of Globalisation” in Cook, Harold (ed.), Medicine and the Global, Yale University Press.

Crawford, Matthew B. (2008): “The Limits of Neuro-Talk”, The New Atlantis, Winter, pp. 65-78.

Davis, Mike (1990): City of Quartz. Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Verso.

Davidson, A. (2001): “On Epistemology and Archaeology: From Canguilhem to Foucault”, in his The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 192-206.

Desrosières, Alain (1998): The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trs Camille Naish, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Douglas, Mary (1966): Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. doi:10.4324/9780203361832

Douglas, Mary (1973): Natural Symbols: explorations in cosmology, New York: Vintage.

Douglas, Mary (1975): Implicit Meanings: essays in anthropology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Duden, Barbara (1991): The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

During, Simon (1992): Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing, London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203358917

Ernst, Waltraud (2006): “The Normal and the Abnormal: Reflections on Norms and normativity” in Ernst (ed.), Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal: Social and Cultural Histories of Norms and Normativity, London: Routledge, pp. 1-25.

Fissell, Mary (2004): “Making Meaning from the Margins: The New Cultural History of Medicine”, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds.), Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 364-89.

Foucault, Michel (1977): Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trs A. Sheridan, New York, Random.

Foucault, Michel (1980): “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century”, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, Harvester Press; Brighton, pp. 166-82.

Foucault, Michel (1981): The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trs Robert Hurley, London: Pelican.

Foucault, Michel (2003): “The Birth of Biopower”, in Rabinow, P. and Rose, N. (eds.), The Essential Foucault, New York: The New Press, 202-07.

Gallagher, Catherine and Laqueur, Thomas, eds. (1987): The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Gastaldo, Denise (1997): “Is Health Education Good for You? Re-thinking health education through the concept of bio-power” in Petersen, Alan and Bunton, Robin (eds.), Foucault Health and Medicine, London: Routledge, pp. 113-133.

Geertz, Clifford (1973): “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-33.

Gray, Chris Hables (2001): Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age, New York: Routledge.

Grosz, Elisabeth (1994): Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford University Press.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2006): “Presence achieved in language (with special attention given to the presence of the past)”, History and Theory, vol. 45 (2006), pp. 317-327. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00367.x

Hacking, Ian (2002): Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hacking, Ian (1982): “Bio-power and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers”, Humanities in Society, vol. 5, pp. 279- 95.

Hacking, Ian (1990): The Taming of Chance, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hess, Volker (2005): “Standardizing BodyTemperature: Quantification in Hospitals and Daily Life, 1850-1900”, in Jorland, Gérard, Opinel, Annick and Weisz, George (eds.), Body Counts: Medical Qualtification in Historical and Sociological Perspective, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 109-26.

Illich, Ivan (1976): Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, London: Marian Boyars.

Joyce, P. (1995): “The End of Social History?”, Social History, vol. 20, pp. 73-91. doi:10.1080/03071029508567926

Judovitz, Dalia (2001): The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kemp, Martin (2006): Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Laqueur, Thomas (1990): Making Sex: Gender and Sex from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Long, L. (2004): Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

O’Connor, E. (2000): Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Peters, Rik (2006): “Actes de presence: presence in fascist political culture”, History and Theory, vol. 45, pp. 362-374. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00371.x

Porter, Roy (1985): “The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History From Below”, Theory and Society, vol. 14, pp. 175- 198. doi:10.1007/BF00157532 PMid:11618212

Porter, Roy (1991): “History of the Body”, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 206-232.

Porter, Roy (2001): “History of the Body Reconsidered”, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 232-260.

Porter, T. M. (1995): Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rabinow, Paul and Rose, N. eds. (2003): The Essential Foucault, New York: The New Press.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (2000): “Beyond Nature and Culture: Modes of Reasoning in the Age of Molecular Biology and Medicine”, in Margaret M. Lock, Allan Young, and Alberto Cambrosio (eds.), Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19-30. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511621765.002

Rose, Nikolas (1985): The Psychological Complex: psychology, politics and society in England, 1869-1939, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rose, Nikolas (2007): The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Rose, Nikolas, and Rabinow, P. (2006): “Biopower Today”, Biosocieties, vol. 1, pp. 195-218.

Rosenberg, C. (1988): “Holism in Twentieth- Century Medicine” in Lawrence, C. and Weisz, G. (eds.), Greater Than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 335-355.

Runia, Eelco (2006): “Presence”, History and Theory, vol. 45, pp. 1-29. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00346.x

Sinding, Christiane (2004): “The Power of Norms: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and the History of Medicine”, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds.), Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 262-84.

Smith, Roger (1992): Inhibition; history and meaning in the sciences of mind and brain, Berkeley: Universiy of California Press.

Smith, Roger (2007): Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Stafford, Barbara Marie (1991): Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stafford, Barbara Marie (2001): Visual Analogy: consciousness as the art of connecting, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Stafford, Barbara Marie (2007): Echo Objects: the cognitive work of images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, E. P. (1963): The Making of the English Working Class, London: Gollanz.

Treichler, Paula A. (1987): “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: an epidemic of signification”, Cultural Studies, vol. 1, pp. 263-305, reprinted (1999) in her How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 31-70.

Watney, Simon (1987): Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, London: Cassell.