The turn of the body: history and the politics of the corporeal (original) (raw)
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In Foucault’s later works, experience and embodiment become important for explaining the normative constitution of the subject: for norms to be effective, discourses are insufficient – they must be experienced and embodied. Practices of “discipline” inscribe power constellations and discourses into subjective experience and bodies. In his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, he turns this “violent” form of normative embodiment into an ethical perspective by referring to the Stoic tradition. Even though Foucault never developed a notion of experience and embodiment himself, his ideas can be re-read and complemented from a phenomenological perspective. The article tries to investigate the role of bodily experience and practice in Foucault’s Genealogy and to bring it into dialogue with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of the lived body. It will attempt to show that concepts like sedimentation and habituality can help to explain how cultural norms not only influence the way we think about, but also how we perceive and are affected by the world. This operation of norms happens already at the lowest stages of experience, where embodied experience leaves its traces, in sedimentation and habitualization. These passive layers of experience are permeable to historical discourses, so that norms are literally inscribed in the body. These are the foundations for what I seek to define as normative embodiment.
The Evolution of Foucault's Reasoning on Pathology
SOCIETY. INTEGRATION. EDUCATION. Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference
This paper is an attempt to theoretically describe the development and transformation of the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault whose work on body, disease and mental illness provide a basis for an advanced approach in the philosophy of medicine. The aim of the research is to understand on the basis of the theoretical review of Foucault’ s works and secondary literature the evolution of the reasoning on pathology in different works by the French author. In the first part of the paper we describe how Foucault came to the idea that psychiatric and organic must be treated as completely different. In the second part, we ad more sociocultural context and discuss Foucault’s ideas in the perspective of developing modernity.
The Body in History -- a summary
This article summarises the main themes of: J. Robb and O. Harris (2013), The Body in History: Europe from the Paleolithic to the Future. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Analyse Foucault's understanding of the body as captive to the political field.
The body: often central to our notions of self and yet elusive and ambiguous in precise definition has been an important object of study for many theorists. Social constructionists view the body as shaped, marked and essentially created through socio-cultural forms that surround us (race, gender etc.). Foucault expanded on this with a focus on power as the essence of human relations. This can be understood as fundamental to his understanding of the body. Power to Foucault, like language to structuralists such as Lacan, is what gives us meaning. In his argument, we cannot exist outside of power networks. Power is the signifier through which we seem to “at once recognise and lose ourselves” (Foucault 1980, 186). For Foucault, the political refers to the coordination and organisation of relations of power and force (Foucault 1980, 189). He understands the body as existing through power relations, as opposed to existing independent of power but ultimately captive to it, as assumed by this essay question. Embodied power “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes” (Foucault 1980, 39). Power is the driving force behind our actions, which complicates the notion of agency.
An unproblematized truth: Foucault, biopolitics, and the making of a sociological canon
Social Theory and Health, 2022
Foucault's argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century-an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics-has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault's periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body.
Foucault Studies, 2009
Edited by Michel Senellart (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 25]. Throughout the essay the English translations are consulted with-or, as in this case, modified with references to-the (more) original French text versions. References to the French original texts are provided in brackets after the reference to the English translations. 2 An informative overview of the editorial conditions of the lecture course is found in Mike Gane,