Bozovic Miran - An utterly dark spot: gaze and body in early modern philosophy

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An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy
by Miran Boovi

The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and
Learning in the Ancient World
by Yun Lee Too

Gaze and Body
in Early
Modern Philosophy

BY
MIRAN BOOVI

Ann Arbor
The University
of Michigan
Press

Copyright by the University of Michigan 2000
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

2003 2002 2001 2000
4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
or otherwise, without the written permission
of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boovi, Miran.

An utterly dark spot : gaze and body in early modern
philosophy / Miran Boovi.
p. cm. (The body, in theory)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-472-11140-X (alk. paper)
1. Body, Human (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series.
B105.B64 B69 2000
128.6dc21 99-050665

The author wishes to
thank Carol Bartosiewicz for her help
in preparing the manuscript.

ISBN13 978-0-472-11140-4 (cloth)
ISBN13 978-0-472-02319-6 (electronic)

In our era, the Cartesian cogito definitely enjoys a bad press; in his public statements, Al Gore himself repeatedly blames it for all the woes of today's society from ecological crises to psychic distresses. Caught in this anti-Cartesian barrage, we tend to forget the extent to which the reference to the Cartesian cogito as the abstract thinking subject, capable of acquiring a distance towards all its particular features, serves as the foundation of our post-traditional society. Democracy itself, what Claude Lefort called the democratic invention, could have emerged only within the Cartesian space. This democratic legacy of the abstract Cartesian cogito can be best discerned apropos of the pseudofeminist argument for the greater role of women in public and political life: their role should be more prominent, since, due to natural or historical reason, their predominant stance is less individualistic, competitive, domination-oriented, and more cooperative and compassionate. The Cartesian democratic lesson is here that the moment one accepts the terms of such a discussion, one already concedes defeat and accepts the predemocratic meritocratic principle: there should be more women in public life not because of any of their particular positive psychosocial properties, but on account of the simple democratic-egalitarian principle (what Balibar called galibert) that women simply have the right to a more exposed role in public decision making because they form half of the population.

Miran Boovi's book focuses on the fate of the body in this reduction of the human being to the abstract subject. Critics of Cartesianism emphasize the body as the weak point of the whole Cartesian edifice. With Descartes, the Aristotelian organic unity in which form is immanent to matter, and soul to body, is broken; instead, we get a crude dualism, with the body reduced to the lifeless, cold mechanism of res extersa. The first thing to add to this commonplace is that the natural naked body itself appeared only within the space of the Cartesian modernity; nudism and other forms of the celebration of nakednessnot as part of secret initiatic transgressive rituals (as in premodern pagan societies), but as finding pleasure in asserting the innocent beauty of one's natural bodyare distinctly modern phenomena. What one has to do here is to repeat the gesture accomplished by Hegel apropos of the sudden rise of nature as the topos in seventeenth century art. Precisely because the Spirit has returned to itself and is able to grasp itself directly, bypassing nature as the medium of its symbolic expression, nature becomes perceptible in its innocence, as it is in itself, as a beautiful object of contemplation, not as a symbol of spiritual struggles. Along the same lines, with the advent of cogito as the pure thinking substance, the human body itself is redeemed, free to be celebrated as an object of pleasure and beauty. On the other hand, this appearance of the unmutilated naked bodyof the body that no longer has to be marked by scars, tattoos, etc., in order to assert the subject's belonging to some symbolic communityis strictly correlative to the imposition of the disciplinary procedures described in detail by Michel Foucault. With the advent of modernity, when the body is no longer marked or inscribed upon, it becomes the object of strict disciplinary regulations designed to make it fit.

Even more crucial than this appearance of the naked body is the fact that, in the Cartesian tradition itself, the reduction of the body to the transparent res extensa never succeeds without a certain remainderand it is the dark spot of this remainder that forms the proper topic of Boovi's book. This dimension of the body irreducible to res extensa appears in multiple guises, from the ethereal body that directly materializes spiritual energy (phlogiston, ether) to the sublime body of the political leader exempted from the corruption and natural decay of common bodies. In the political history of the twentieth century, the privileged case of the emergence of this sublime body occurs in the passage from Leninism to Stalinism.

Lenin as a person stood for a certain radical ethical attitude. After his first major stroke on 25 May 1922, which left his right This abstract character of the Lady points towards the abstraction that pertains to a cold, distanced, inhuman partner; the Lady is in no way a warm, compassionate, understanding fellow-creature.