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21 pages
The concept of vital force - the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life in the body and in nature - has proved a source of endless fascination and controversy. Indeed, the question of what vitalizes the body has haunted humanity since antiquity, and became even more pressing during the Scientific Revolution and beyond.Examining the complexities and theories about vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina’s Life Embodied offers a novel and provocative assessment of the question of bodily life in Spain. Starting with Juan de Cabriada’s landmark Carta filosófica, médico-chymica of 1687 and ending with Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s avant-gardism of the 1910s, Fernández-Medina incorporates discussions of anatomy, philosophy, science, critical theory, history of medicine, and literary studies to argue that concepts of vital force served as powerful vehicles to interrogate the possibilities and limits of corporeality. Paying close attention to how the body’s capabilities were conceived and strategically woven into critiques of modernity, Fernández-Medina engages the work of Miguel Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, Diego de Torres Villarroel, Sebastián Guerrero Herreros, Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Pedro Mata y Fontanet, Ángela Grassi, Julián Sanz del Río, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja, among others. Drawing on extensive research and analysis, Life Embodied breaks new ground as the first book to address the question of vital force in Spanish modernity.
2025
AMOR SANTOS, Ana (2025) – Em busca de “body worlds”: representação (e evocação) do corpo humano em objetos pré e proto-históricos da Península Ibérica. Lisboa: Associação dos Arqueólogos Portugueses (Monografias AAP, 16). Translation: A. Lucena. [Complete digital bilingual version, available @ https://www.museuarqueologicodocarmo.pt/monografia16.html ] Abstract: This monograph summarises the homonymous Master’s dissertation aiming to understand the representation of the body on pre and protohistoric objects from the Iberian Peninsula, using an innovative approach that could contribute to a valorisation of the significant contribution of representations to studies on the Archaeology of the Body. A new study of these representations was achieved, not only by analysing materials from different chronologies – never before approached together – but also by focusing on the represented bodies instead of their possible meaning. For this purpose, a theoretical framework was established, inspired by John Robb and Oliver Harris’ (2013) body worlds model, according to which there are multiple different bodies, both socially and biologically differentiated, and that all elements of corporeal life are (un)consciously mirrored in representations and in the treatment of death. This was achieved by addressing a broad study area, the Iberian Peninsula, along with a multiple chronological scale and a long diachrony (covering around five millennia): smaller in terms of the study of materials but broader in their discussion. Thus, representations of the body from the Neolithic to the Iron Age were discussed, based on portable objects bearing direct anthropomorphic references (e.g. ceramic decorations, metal objects and figurines), and indirect or evoked ones (such as twin forms and ‘feeding-bottles’). We tried to avoid the dangers of generalisation by focusing on materials with long operating diachronies, some hitherto overlooked, along with a variety of materials and different territorial areas. With this approach it was possible to verify that the pre- and protohistoric moments of transition are mirrored in the representations of the body. The possibility of some representations having corresponded to identity and territorial markers was also explored, questioning the relationship between portable objects and the territory. Moreover, the need to question and review some of the interpretive axioms of archaeological tradition was pointed out, particularly with regard to its relationship with the feminine and the sacred. Finally, an initial proposal for the pre- and protohistoric ‘body worlds’ of the Iberian Peninsula has been put forward. Keywords: Body; Objects; Pre- and Protohistory; Iberian Peninsula; Body worlds.
2024
This work investigates the representations of the body in the theme of the imaginary of technological immortality with the possible virtualization of life, resulting in a process of regression of consciousness. As a question we chose: does the body represented in the imaginary of technological immortality, especially in the transhumanist movement, indicate a process of regression of consciousness, given the possibility of its virtualization? We selected the Altered Carbon series as an object for developing the theme. In the series, the body, which is called the cape, can be represented from an organic form to a virtual, hologrammatic form, making it possible for the individual to have an immortal “life” in an illusory environment, dispensing with any physicality, physicality necessary for the process of development of consciousness. For analysis, we used Bardin's qualitative research method of content analysis, using Edgar Morin's complexity method as a scientific paradigm. The complexity method is applied to this research as a hypothesis that immortality comprises an archaic content of humanity's imagination, which was co-opted by techno-scientific capital, reduced to a product and exterminator of the body.
A Scholiast’s Quill: New Critical Essays on Alfonso Reyes, edited by Roberto Cantu
We propose an exploration of Alfonso Reyes’ affinities with Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time and intuition, a topic raised by previous critics. Sheldon Penn, for instance, describes Reyes’ literary essay as “an aesthetic experiment in the virtuality of the ‘living’ image” (142), arguing against interpretations that insist either on Reyes’ idealist depiction of culture, or in his Hegelian inclination to overcome the contradictions of Mexican history.1 We endorse this view, but with a different approach. Through a reading of Visión de Anáhuac, we relate Reyes’ views of Mexican history to the impact of technology on human perception of time and space at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hence, we investigate Reyes’ approach to these technological transformations by reading Visión de Anáhuac (1917) against the background of Bergson’s notions of intuition and duration
1990
This is a study of how sixteenth-century Spaniards used fundcunental aspects of material culture, and the ideas and attitudes surrounding them, to subjugate the Aztec empire of Mexico. Edicts, relaciones, court decisions, letters and chronicles have been employed to discern the attitudes of the time. Those attitudes reveal that food, clothing and shelter were used both to distinguish Spaniards from Amerindians and to bind conquerors and conquered to the same social system. Principles of hierarchy and reciprocity were employed by Spaniards and Amerindians to define the appropriate customs and means of exchange in a new, syncretic culture of conquest. Together, Spaniards and Amerindians created a sixteenth-century body politic and organic society in what Europeans deemed a "New World.
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Philosophy Study, 2014
We intend to get a close look at Foucault's work on biopolitics with the aim of contrasting some of its aspects with the developments linked to the emancipatory and liberating potential of the notion of life (living corporeality) within the framework of Enrique Dussel's Latin American Political Philosophy. We are interested in these theoretical approaches (Foucault's biopolitics and Dussel's Liberation Politics) given the political implications and prominence they grant to the notions of body and life in contemporary societies. The works we are interested in to contrast present different standpoints: In the first one, life is related to the exercise of political power, whereas in the second one its approach concentrates on political emancipation processes. We believe, however, that it is possible to find convergence points between them that allow us to explain, to a certain extent, the importance of the notion of life in contemporary societies. For this purpose, we will carry out an analysis of the notion of "counter behaviors," a concept that Foucault briefly develops to explain how life has not been thoroughly integrated to technologies that dominate or run it but instead escape them ceaselessly.
We intend to get a close look at Foucault's work on biopolitics with the aim of contrasting some of its aspects with the developments linked to the emancipatory and liberating potential of the notion of life (living corporeality) within the framework of Enrique Dussel's Latin American Political Philosophy. We are interested in these theoretical approaches (Foucault's biopolitics and Dussel's Liberation Politics) given the political implications and prominence they grant to the notions of body and life in contemporary societies. The works we are interested in to contrast present different standpoints: In the first one, life is related to the exercise of political power, whereas in the second one its approach concentrates on political emancipation processes. We believe, however, that it is possible to find convergence points between them that allow us to explain, to a certain extent, the importance of the notion of life in contemporary societies. For this purpose, we will carry out an analysis of the notion of "counter behaviors," a concept that Foucault briefly develops to explain how life has not been thoroughly integrated to technologies that dominate or run it but instead escape them ceaselessly.
Journal of Italian Philosophy, 2024
The body, its materiality, and the images through which we apprehend them have been a constant concern in Adriana Cavarero's philosophy. The contention of this paper is that her work on this topic lays out the foundations for (1) an understanding of the relationship between the imaginary and the corporeal as one of entanglement and inseparability; and (2) responding to the questions of what an image and a body can do. To develop this, this paper focuses on two texts, Stately Bodies and Inclinations, that provide, respectively, (1) an account of the assemblages and frictions between images and bodies through an analysis of the metaphor of the body politic in Western thought; and (2) an ontology of bodily images. Although both texts critically engage with Western hegemonic images of the body, I argue that the presence of the body as a powerful physical givenness articulates the narrative of Stately Bodies, while Inclinations is rather focused on the capacity of images to constitute different subjects and different worlds. These two perspectives are complementary rather than contradictory. Reading them together allows for the distillation
Bulletin of Spanish Studies , 2020
Thus our body proceeds through history, evolving and struggling. 1 José de Letamendi y Manjarrés (1828-1897) remained a towering figure in Spain's intellectual culture throughout the better part of the nineteenth century. Often remembered as the physician of life narrativized in Pío Baroja's popular novel El árbol de la ciencia (1911), his interests were varied and extended well beyond the medical field. 2 Indeed, Letamendi served as Professor of Anatomy in Barcelona (1857-1878), and then as Professor of General Pathology in Madrid (1878-1897), yet his professional obligations in no way interfered with his aspirations of becoming an accomplished academic, artist, composer, philosopher and social theorist. 3 A number of
Philippine Studies Historical & Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2020
The most recent Latin American narratives feature the inadequacy of the body to its environment and vice verse. By doing so, it not only questions normalcy, but also enables a manner of resistance and flight. Through a constellation of amorphous bodies these narratives echo the traditional setbacks of the heroic figure, in perpetual conflict with its colonial past or its historical failure to meet modernity's expectations. While these distorted bodies bring into question the unique and standardized construction of national identities, they are also bizarre and strange to themselves by means of contagion and occupation. This paper reads the latest narrative of Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico); Lucia Puenzo (Argentina) and Alvaro Enrigue (Mexico). Placed in the intersection of bio politics and post humanism, they expose the rebellion of deformity that accentuates its own aberration so as to gain abject agency charged with unpredictable power.
Senza Cornice - Rivista online di arte contemporanea e critica, 2017
cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body.
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 2016
This paper traces the fragility of the subject in the period extending from the aftermath of the Sexenio through to the early twentieth century. In particular, two case studies are focused upon: the question of gender "deviance" and the figure of the genius, in order to understand how medicine participated in the construction of "outsider" identities within the context of the emerging liberal order. How did liberal rationales exclude or curtail certain wayward expressions of identity and subjectivity? What consequences did the marking of "excessive" figures or outsiders have for notions of inclusiveness and citizenship within the late-nineteenth-century liberal order? By concentrating primarily on medical texts and journals published during the period, this study builds on existing research to tease out answers to these questions.
Grand Valley Journal of History, 2020
This essay analyzes poetry and other writing by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the context of themes from Greco-Roman antiquity and the historical development of medicine in seventeenth century New Spain, now Mexico. Sor Juana’s El Primero Sueño, a Spanish language poetic silva, exhibits copious references to writers from classical antiquity, including Aristotle and Ovid. Establishing a context steeped in ideas from Greco-Roman antiquity, Sor Juana invokes the medical and philosophical legacy of foundational physician Galen of Pergamon. She also expands upon his ideas into the human anatomical realm, reflecting the increased early modern prominence of the writings of Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Sor Juana’s ideas on medicine and anatomy, particularly within the wider context of seventeenth century New Spain, provide useful context for the final, controversial period of her life. An investigation into Sor Juana’s classical learning and literary conception of medicine, alongside her biography and eventual work as a healer, are used as the basis for a novel framework for better understanding the inscrutable, penitent last years of her life.
Nicolás Fernández-Medina