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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Representations of the body depend on a social framework, a vision of the world and a definition of the person. The body is a symbolic construction and not a reality in its own right. A priori, its characterization seems to be self-evident, but ultimately nothing is less comprehensible. Far from being unanimously accepted by human societies, making the body stand out as a reality in some way distinct from man seems an uneasy effort, contradictory between one time and place and another. Many societies do not retain it as part of their vision of the world. They do not detach man from his body in the dualist fashion so common to Western man. We might recall here the incident recounted by Maurice Leenhardt, who asked an elderly Kanak what the West had contributed to Melanesia. The answer surprised him. “What you brought us is the body”. With the intrusion of cultural and social values and forms from the Western world that tend to individualism, there came an awareness of the body as a barrier and a boundary distinguishing each person from every other person. In the societies to which we refer, the components of a person include the flesh without setting this off separately. The body itself is an abstraction. On the phenomenological level, only a person whose body gives him a face and establishes his presence in the world can exist. Man is indiscernible from the flesh that models him.
1 Cf. Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo, Paris Gallimard 1947, p. 263.
2 Cf. Claude Tresmontant, Essai sur la pensée hébraïque, Paris, Cerf 1953, p. 53. See also Michel Legrain, Le Corps humain, du soupçon à l'évangélisation, Paris, le Centurion 1978.
3 Here we extend a reflection begun in a previous issue. D. Le Breton, "Corps et individualism," Diogène. No. 131, 1985.
4 Louis Dumont, Essais sur l'individualisme. Paris, Seuil 1983, p. 79.
5 Jacob Burckhardt, La Civilisation de la Renaissance en Italie, Vol. I, Paris, Denoël 1958, Col 1. Médiations, p. 9.
6 André Chastel, Le Grand Atelier d'Italie (1500-1640), Paris, Gallimard 1965, p. 177 sq.
7 On popular humor see Mikhaïl Bakhtin, L'Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, Paris, Gallimard 1970; on mockery see J. Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 118 ff.
8 David Le Breton, Corps et sociétés, essai de sociologie et d'anthropologie du corps, Paris, Méridiens-Klincksieck 1985.
9 Marked in particular by the construction of the first anatomy theatres. The one built by Rondelet at the University of Montpellier dates from 1556; the one in Padua also dates from the middle of the 16th century.
10 Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, Paris, Gallimard 1977, p. 93. Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l'apogée du Moyen Age, Paris, Flammarion 1983, p. 119 ff.
11 Cf. for example Danièle Jaquard, Le Milieu médical du XIIe au XVe siècle. Geneva, Droz 1981.
12 Emile Durkheim, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris P.U.F., 1968, p. 368 ff.
13 Roger Caillois, "Au coeur du fantastique," in Cohérences aventureuses. Paris, Gallimard 1965, coll. Idées No. 359, p. 166.
14 A. Vesalius, La Fabrique du corps humain. Arles, Actes Sud-INSERM 1987. This little two-language book (Latin-French) unfortunately presents only the preface to Vesalius' great work. The preface, however, is fascinating for a history of anatomy and of ideas concerning the body in the Western world.
15 Georges Sarton, "Léonard de Vinci, ingénieur et savant," in Colloque du C.N.R.S., Léonard de Vinci et l'expérience scientifique du XVIe, P.U.F. 1953; see also in the same volume Elmer Belt, "Les dissections anatomiques de Léonard de Vinci," p. 189-224.
16 Marie-Christine Pouchelle, op. cit., p. 137.
17 Seeking an unusual definition of fantastic, one that would go beyond the intentional research of writers or artists, Roger Caillois devoted fine pages to these anatomy treatises. R. Caillois, "Au coeur du fantastique," op. cit., p. 165-174. Mentioning above images filled with anguish, we are thinking of certain illustrations of Vesalius, of T. Bertholin (the frontispiece of his Anatomia Reformata (1651) is a model of this type), of G. Bidlos, of Albinus (with his meditating skeletons, suddenly confronted by hippopotamuses in his Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani); as for tranquil horror, there are numerous examples: Gauthier d'Agauty, for example, with his famous "Angel of Anatomy", quite loved by the Surrealists, or still other illustrations in which he "opens wide the back or the chest of smiling young women, admirably coiffed and painted, in order to expose the inner tissues of their bodies" (R. Caillois, op. cit., p. 172) or Juan Valverde (1563), Charles Estienne (1546), etc. For a survey of anatomy treatises, see Jacques-Louis Binet and Pierre Descargues, Dessins et traités d'anatomie, Paris, Chêne 1980.
18 Georges Canguilhem, "L'homme de Vésale dans le monde de Copemic, 1543," in Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris, Vrin 1983.
19 Georges Canguilhem notes that the Vesalian man appears to belong to a world that, in many respects, is pre-Copernican. G. Canguilhem, op. cit., p. 29.
20 Mary Douglas, De la souillure (French translation), Paris, Maspéro p. 131.
21 Cf. David Le Breton, "Les yeux du dedans: imagerie médicale et imaginaire," in Au doigt et à l'œil, l'imaginaire des nouvelles technologies, (under the direction of Alain Gras and Sophie Poirot-Delpech, to be published by L'Harmattan).
22 Marguerite Yourcenar, L'Œuvre au noir, Paris, Gallimard, p. 118.
23 It should be noted that the struggle between these different Weltanschauungen continue even in our own days. Proof of this can be found in legal proceedings against "illegal practice of medicine" that are brought against even those healers whose abilities to heal are unanimously recognized. The "official" vision of the body, based on anatomy-physiology, is far from having achieved a consensus.
24 Cf. David Le Breton, Corps et Sociétés, op. cit., chap. 5: "Images du corps et sociétés".
