(DOWNLOAD) "Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, And the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, And the Imaginary Early Modern Skin (Brief Article)" by English Studies in Canada ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, And the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, And the Imaginary Early Modern Skin (Brief Article)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 264 KB
Description
Reading Early Modern Skin In Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Selfand World, Claudia Benthien offers a history of skin as "the central metaphor for separateness; arguing that it is only at the boundary of the bodily integument that subjects are able to "encounter one other" (i). That the skin is or has been at various periods in Western history "the place where boundary negotiations take place" is indisputable; what constitutes the skin object and whether or not the skin has always been the site of boundary negotiations between bodies is a matter of greater historical complexity (xi). Benthien follows Dither Anzieu's reasoning that since the Renaissance, Western epistemology (modeled on the "penetration and uncovering" of bodies in Vesalian anatomy) has been predicated on the notion that "knowledge of what is essential means breaking through shells and walls in order to reach the core that lies in the innermost depths" (7). According to Benthien, it is only recently, with the development of modern psychoanalytic and medical discourse, that we have come to recognize the skin's ontological destabilization of the body's "inside" and "out:' Echoing Anzieu, Benthien writes that neurophysiology "has had to come to terms with the paradox that even the brain is a rind--and the human 'center' is actually situated at the periphery" (7). While I am sympathetic to Benthien's project, I take issue with the version of the skin to which she compares post-Renaissance ontologies of the body's surface. Benthien writes that in the pre-modern period skin "still constituted a structurally impenetrable boundary to the invisible and mysterious inside" (10). I aim to show that what Benthien regards as the modern re/invention of the skin as a porous ontological interface between bodies and subjects is forcefully present in early modern natural philosophy, medicine, and science. It goes, however, by different names and describes different functions than those we attribute to skin.