Marie Antoinette / Bronson

In Discipline and Punish stelt Foucault dat het lichaam van de veroordeelde gedacht moet worden als het diametraal tegenovergestelde van het dubbele lichaam van de koning: als puur lichaam.

Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette (2006) toont het hoofdpersonage niet alleen als koningin en als veroordeelde, maar via de soundtrack, fotografie en mise-en-scene roept ze ook een derde 'sublieme' lichaam op, namelijk het lichaam van de ster: popster, filmster, model.

Coppola laat mooi zien hoe Versailles een 'apparaat' is dat het lichaam van Marie Antoinette niet alleen constant 'tentoonstelt' en theatraliseert, maar dat haar lichaam daardoor a.h.w. 'verdubbelt': d.w.z. het sublieme, koninklijke lichaam wordt a.h.w. gedestilleerd van het biologische lichaam.

Het paleis is daardoor het symmetrisch-tegenovergestelde van de gevangenis, deze, zo stelt Foucault, reduceert lichamen van gevangenen tot pure lichamen

Nicholas Refn's Bronson (2008) uit grofweg dezelfde periode (en net als MA een 'Pomo-light' film) is de perfecte tegenhanger van MA. Het gaat hier om een gevangene, maar zijn 'lichaam' wordt door de muziek, editing, cinematografie etc vereenzelvigd met het lichaam van een rockster. 

Beide films draaien ook om cinema. Of liever, het draait om de relatie tussen 'cinema' als apparaat en twee andere apparaten (de gevangenis en het paleis). Het kinematische apparaat is enerzijds juist 'humaniserend' - het draait om mensen (via pov shots, suture, etc) (en beide lijken dit te benadrukken door het gebruik van dezelfde troop: het doorbreken van de vierde muur, het direct aanspreken, een face-to-face met het publiek): tegelijkertijd 'produceert' cinema ook 'sublieme lichamen': projecties van glamoureuze lichamen die (letterlijk) afgescheiden zijn van hun drager, en al even onsterfelijk zijn als het sublieme lichaam van de koning.

Foucault notes 1

In the chapter "The Body of the Condemned," Foucault cites Kantorowitz's notion of the King's two bodies and adds:

"At the opposite pole one might imagine placing the body of the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical discourse, not in order to ground the 'surplus power' possessed by the person of the sovereign but in order to code the 'lack of power' with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field, the condemned man represents the symmetrical inverted figure of the king...... "

And he then formulates the puzzling question:

"If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the surplus power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given riste to another type of duplication? That of a 'non corporal,' a 'soul' as Mably called it." (Foucault Reader, 176)

In his book on Pierre Riviere a similar question was posed, when he discusses the tradition of the ballads that were printed and handed out at executions in England. What we see there, he argues, is the emergence of the 'condemned as a Lyrical Subject.'

What does he mean here?

Legal Bodies!

CFP

Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas

CFP

15-16-17 May 2014

LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference on the various ways in which literary texts and art works have represented, interrogated or challenged juridical notions of ‘personhood’.  The guiding assumption behind this conference is that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically) given, stable property of human beings (which precedes their interaction with the law), but that ‘personhood’ is assigned to selected (and historically varying) ‘bodies’ by discursive regimes, such as those of law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. During the conference we will study how literature, art and culture form domains in which the implications and scope of legal, political or medical conceptualizations of personhood can be dramatized and thought through, and in which alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed and disseminated.

The symposium broaches the question of personhood on three different levels: those of the body, the individual and the community. Questions to be addressed include (but are not limited to), firstly: From which discourses did notions of bodily integrity historically emerge? Which social, political and medical developments are currently challenging these notions? How do artistic, cultural and socio-political phenomena (such as bio-art, body horror, the right-to-die movement, etc.) invite us to rethink our notion of the human body?

             Second, what literary and rhetorical figures made it possible to think of legal personhood in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern era? What is the legal status of ‘not-quite persons,’ such as children, illegal immigrants, the mentally disabled, the unborn and the undead? What could ‘animal personhood’ entail?

            Finally: how do collective bodies acquire personhood? How did art and literature represent legal entities such as the medieval city, the seventeenth century trade company or the nineteenth century corporation? Or what is the legally defined status of sects, networks, conspiracies, and resistance movements?

The conference is organized in cooperation with NICA (the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis) and is made possible by LUCAS, the Leiden University Fund and NICA.

400-word proposals for 20-minute papers can be send to Frans-Willem Korsten, Nanne Timmer and Yasco Horsman (LUCAS, Leiden) at legalbodies@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Deadline: 14 February 2014

See: http://hum.leiden.edu/lucas/news-events/legal-bodies-corpus-persona-communitas.html

For more information on LUCAS and NICA, see

http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/

http://www.nica-institute.com/