Reconstituting The Body Politic

The concept that art must have no instrumental function is a doctrine traditionally traced back to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Jonathan Hess proposes that this concept of autonomous art marks not a withdrawal from the political realm but the ultimate embodiment of Enlightenment political culture, a response to a crisis in the institution idealized by Jurgen Habermas as the bourgeois public sphere. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Hess explores the moment in late eighteenth-century Germany that witnessed the emergence of two concepts that marked the modern era: the political concept of the public sphere and the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. By considering the extent to which, at its very inception, the concept of aesthetic autonomy is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of the concept of the public sphere, he offers both a historical study of the political conditions that produced this concept and a contribution to contemporary literary and political theory. Reading texts by Kant alongside the writings of contemporaries like Karl Philipp Moritz, Hess examines a wide variety of eighteenth-century texts, discourses, and institutions. He then enters into a critical dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jurgen Habermas to articulate a political critique of this aesthetic. The aesthetic theory of Kant's Critique emerges not as a mere defense of the "disinterestedness" of aesthetic pleasure but as an engaged response to the political limitations of public culture during the Enlightenment. Hess argues for an understanding of these concepts as functionally interdependent, and he reflects on what this interdependence mightmean for the practice of literary and cultural criticism today. His work will interest not only Germanists and critical theorists but also art historians and historians of philosophy and political thought.

"Healing the Body Politic" examines the contested place of health and development in El Salvador over the last two decades. It recounts the dramatic story of radical health activism from its origins in liberation theology and guerrilla medicine during the third-world country's twelve-year civil war, through development of a remarkable "popular health system," administered by lay providers in a former war zone controlled by leftist rebels. The ethnography contributes to the integration of medical and political anthropology by bringing the semiotics of health and the body to bear on cultural understandings of warfare, the state, and globalization.

A reflection on the metaphor of the body politic throughout American history

This work advances an original thesis that challenges the dominant schools of thought concerning the liberal tradition in the US.

“This is an excellent study… a valuable asset for anyone teaching or studying political theory or political sociology.” Network "Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine *What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head? *Why are weather maps profoundly ideological? *How do corporations get away with murder? *Who are the scum of the earth? In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination - the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws out some telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.

In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home.

Rethinking the Political demonstrates that the Collège de Sociologie's quest to create a new place for the sacred in modern collective life ostensibly entailed avoiding the theorization of both aesthetics and politics. While the Collège condemned manipulation by totalitarian regimes, its understanding of community also led to a rejection of democratic and communist forms of political organization, leaving the group open to accusations of flirting with fascism. Acknowledging these political ambiguities, the author goes beyond a narrow ideological reading to reveal the Collège's important contribution to our thinking about the relationships between community formation, politics, aesthetics, and the sacred in the modern world. She expands her historical account of the members' thought, including their relationship to Surrealism, beyond the group's dissolution, and shows how the work of Claude Lefort extends, but also resolves, many of the Collège's key theoretical insights. A fascinating study of some of the twentieth-century's most daring thinkers, Rethinking the Political offers crucial insights into the contradictions at play in modern notions of community that still resonate today.

An analytical account of the experiences of American soldiers in World War 1 drawing on a wide range of sources in France and the United States. Since American forces did not appear on the Western Front in substantial numbers until the summer of 1918, their experiences of the war were short and less devastating than those of their Allied comrades. Thus surviving American troops emerged from the experience in a rather more upbeat mood about the war than the Allies. This is a fascinating and ground-breaking work as few other military historians have attempted to deal with the US army of 1918 in depth.