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A short history of bodily sensation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Jean Starobinski
Jean Starobinski*
Affiliation:
Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genéve, Switzerland
*
1Address for correspondence: Dr Jean Starobinski, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genéve, 3, Place de l' Université, 1211 Genéve 4, Switzerland.
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Extract

In one of his Cahiers, Paul Valéry has the note. Somatism (heresy of the end of time),

Adoration, cult of the machine for living.† Have we come to the end of time? The heresy anticipated by Valéry has almost become the official religion. Everything is related to the body, as if it had just been rediscovered after being long forgotten; body image, body language, body consciousness, liberation of the body are the passwords. Historians, prey to the same infection, have begun inquiring into what previous cultures have done with the body, in way of tattooing, mutilation, celebration all the rituals related to the various bodily functions.2 Past writers from Rabelais to Flaubert are ransacked for evidence, and immediately it becomes apparent that we are far from being the first discoverers of bodily reality. That reality was the first knowledge to enter human understanding: ‘They knew that they were naked’ (Genesis 3.7). From then on, it has impossible to ignore the body.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , February 1990 , pp. 23 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

This article first appeared in Humanities in Review, vol. I, 1982, published by the New York Institute for the Humanities, and translated by Sarah Matthews.

References

Notes

1 Valéry, Paul, Cahiers (Paris: Pléiade, 1973), vol. 1. p. 1126.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Brain, Robert, The Decorated Body (New York: Harper & Row, 1979)Google Scholar; Ebin, Victoria, The Body Decorated (Thames and Hudson, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Cicero, Academica 2.24.

4 Montaigne, , Essais (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), p. 587.Google Scholar

5 Aristotle, De anima 3.2.

6 Descartes, , Traité des passions de I'âme, in Descartes' Philosophical Writings, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp (London: Macmillan, 1953), p. 290.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Gusdorf, Georges, Naissance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1976), pp. 285–316.Google Scholar

8 'Coenasthesis, dissertatio […] quam praeside Reil, J. C., pro gradu doctoris defendit Chr. Friedr. Hübner' (Halle, 1974).Google Scholar

9 On the history of the concept of cenesthesia in the nineteenth century, cf. Starobinski, Jean, ‘Le Concept de cénestheśie et les idées neuropsychologiques de Moritz Schiff,’ Genserus 34 (1977), fasc. 1/2. pp. 2–20.Google Scholar

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13 Ibid., p. 30.

14 Taine, Hippolyte, De I'intelligence, 12th ed. (Paris, 1911), vol. 2. p. 474.Google Scholar

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31 Ibid., p 122.

32 Ibid., pp. 122–123.

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