Suchergebnisse

This paper reviews the encounter of the body in historical scholarship from the recent Foucaultian past to the present. The "somatic turn", it argues, did more than merely render the body temporarily fashionable in history writing; it fundamentally challenged the nature of history as a form of inquiry. The paper outlines Foucault's anti-essentialist understanding of the body as developed through his concepts of "biopower" and "biopolitics", before discussing how the somatic turn impacted on the new cultural history. The latter's representationalist mode of expression is discussed in relation to the "experiential" reactions to it and the space these open for a new and politically worrying kind of essentialism, "presentationalism". Two other possible directions for the body in history writing today are considered, one radically neo-essentialist, the other not, in its effort to lay bare the politics of contemporary biologized life. ; En este artículo se evalúa el tratamiento de lo corporal en la historia desde un reciente pasado foucaultiano hasta el presente. El "giro somático", se argumenta, no sólo puso de moda el cuerpo en los textos de historia sino que cuestionó de manera fundamental la naturaleza misma de la historia como forma de investigación. En este trabajo resumimos primero la concepción anti-esencialista del cuerpo que Foucault desarrolla a través de sus conceptos de "biopoder" y "biopolítica", para después discutir el impacto del giro somático en la nueva historia cultural. Se discute el modo representacionalista de expresión foucaultiano en relación con las reacciones "experienciales" que ha suscitado así como el espacio que se abre para un nuevo y políticamente alarmante tipo de esencialismo, el "presentacionalismo". Se discuten otras dos alternativas posibles para el tratamiento del cuerpo en la historia hoy en día, una radicalmente neo-esencialista y la otra no, dado su esfuerzo por sacar a la luz los aspectos políticos en torno a la contemporánea vida biologizada.

Drawing on recent visual and spatial turns in history writing, this paper considers AIDS posters from the perspective of their museum 'afterlife' as collected material objects. Museum spaces serve changing political and epistemological projects, and the visual objects they house are not immune from them. A recent globally themed exhibition of AIDS posters at an arts and crafts museum in Hamburg is cited in illustration. The exhibition also serves to draw attention to institutional continuities in collecting agendas. Revealed, contrary to postmodernist expectations, is how today's application of aesthetic display for the purpose of making 'global connections' does not radically break with the virtues and morals attached to the visual at the end of the nineteenth century. The historicisation of such objects needs to take into account this complicated mix of change and continuity in aesthetic concepts and political inscriptions. Otherwise, historians fall prey to seductive aesthetics without being aware of the politics of them. This article submits that aesthetics is politics.