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Publisher description: In Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists provocative theorist Anne Norton presents an alternative narrative of the history of the world She starts by reminding us of the real interplay between words (laws, scriptures, myths, and history) and the world of flesh (of bloodties and bloodshed, skin color and sexuality). The seemingly precious and all too literary constructs of the poststructuralists really do act on the body politic. The book is written on three historical sites: the revolutions in England and France, the struggle against colonialism, and the modern liberal order. In this telling, we see liberal constitutions born in Terror and regicide, we see a word, a text, a document, write "slave" on the darkness of the body, we see the guillotine release the power in the blood, and we hear the words that declare a people free. Norton re-reads and re-writes foundational myths from Abraham and Isaac on the mountain top in the Bible to legends of the American Revolution. This lyrical and mesmerizingbook serves, in its way, as a catalog of oppressions, and a history of the justifications oppressors have made for injustices. It also makes clear that that these oppressions and justifications continue on today, as certainly as they did in any point in history. Defying easy categorization, Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists is the ultimate challenges to all those who claim that history has come to end, or that life is classifiable or uncomplex, or that we understand all we need to understand about the story of Western History

This article examines connections between ancient training of the mind and body to delineate a concept of phusiopoiesis, the production of one's nature. The category of nature (phusis) for the presocratics and sophists operates not as an essential and unchangeable state, but rather as a malleable disposition, one that can be altered through a process of production (poiesis). Such a configuration of phusis in pre-Socratic fragments, Hippocratic treatises, and philosophical discussions of the body, medicine, and training holds implications for ancient training practices, most especially challenging assumptions about the category of natural talent thought to be necessary for success as a rhetor or athlete. This bodily transformation entails at least three dynamics of phusiopoietic training: friendship, masochism, and erotics.

How do Goya's representations of the body disrupt the Enlightenment's configurations of the corporeal? If for 18th-century aesthetics the body is both the site of ideal beauty & the limit of what can & may be represented, then Goya's panoply of monsters provides a way of understanding other modes of reason(ing), other ways of representing the body & its functions within culture. In his work there is a recuperation of those elements that seem to lie outside the ken of the Enlightenment project: physicality, animality, hybridity, the grotesque, the popular; a recognition of the animal nature of the body & the products of bodily impulses & forces. A rethinking of the body would incorporate an understanding of its role as a physical & social phenomenon in the constitution of the subject. Following on from Paul Ilie's concept of counter-rational Reason, which he defines as the opposite of a uniform centre of rationality in representative thought, the first half of my paper will consider Goya's problematization of representation. My analysis of a selection of drawings from the collection Los Caprichos (1799) will focus not just on the representation of bodies in the painter's work but on his exploration of bodies in their material variety -- configurations of modes of constructing the body. This examination of Goya's prolific pictorial negotiations & adaptations of flesh & world will draw upon contemporary approaches to theorizing the body, namely the theories of Julia Kristeva & Elizabeth Grosz. 3 Figures. Adapted from the source document.

The evolution of information technology is likely to result in intimate
interdependence between humans and technology. This fusion has been
characterized in popular science fiction as chip implantation. It is,
however, more likely to take the form of biometric identification using
such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning.
Some applications of biometric identification technology are now
cost‐effective, reliable and highly accurate. As a result, biometric
systems are being developed in many countries for such purposes as
social security entitlement, payments, immigration control and election
management. Whether or not biometry delivers on its promise of
high‐quality identification, it will imperil individual autonomy.
Widespread application of the technologies would conflict with
contemporary values, and result in a class of outcasts.

This controversial book shows that there is more to economics than dry models and esoteric equations. By investigating the rise and fall of postwar Keynesianism and focusing on the experience of the United States, the author adopts an interdisciplinary approach to show that economics is rooted in the flesh and blood history of social conflict. This timely study concludes with a discussion of the viability of Keynesianism today, in the context of recurrent crisis in the global economy and the rise of new social movements.

In this article, we draw connections between notions of embodiment and conceptions of citizenship to provide insights into contemporary debates about desirable modes of governance. We suggest that there is a need to challenge the instrumental conception of bodies which informs much public policy (our examples are New Reproductive Technologies and cosmetic surgery in Australia), and which underlies much citizenship theory, both feminist and mainstream. We identify a demarcation in our selected policies between those presumed to have control over their bodies and those presumed to be controlled by their bodies. The former are designated `autonomous citizens' (with autonomous meaning distance from government oversight), while the latter are constituted as lesser citizens in need of forms of control. Women appear on both sides of the dichotomy, but in ways which leave them invisible as political subjects. We coin the term `social flesh' to capture a vision of interacting, material, embodied subjects and initiate consideration of the forms of governance that might be appropriate for embodied citizens.