On the Knees of the Body Politic

2020 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
Lorna Hutson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Legal Proof ◽  
Foreign Birth ◽  
Two Bodies

This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King’s Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden’s sacralizing metaphors of embodiment transform the highly contentious English claim of Scotland’s historic vassalage into the indisputable and timeless truth of political theology.

The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
The Body ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
American Nation

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

scholarly journals Monarch’s Multiple Bodies: Implementing Body Politic Metaphor on Present-Day North American Stages

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
Natalia Vysotska
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Passion Play ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Two Bodies

The paper seeks to explore the strategies instrumental for the implementation of the body politic metaphor that had been active in Western culture since classical antiquity in the plays authored by present-day North American dramatists (Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, USA, 2010, and Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex, Canada, 2000). Drawing upon the concept of the “king’s two bodies” (E. Plowden, E. Кantorowicz, М. Аxton, А. Мusolff, L. Montrose and other New Historicists), the author sets out to demonstrate that in S. Ruhl’s dramatic cycle the metaphor serves to indicate the inextricable links between the concepts of power, the sacred, and the theatrical, whereas Т. Findley uses it to study the ontology of sex and gender in political and theatrical contexts. It is argued that the age-old somatic metaphor conceived in the archaic layers of human psyche manifests its viable receptive potential through its efficient functioning in the early 21st century cultural artifacts.

scholarly journals From the King’s Two Bodies to the People’s Two Bodies: Spinoza on the Body Politic

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Marin Terpstra
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Composite Body ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Traditional Representation

Abstract In this article, using Spinoza’s treatment of the image of the political body, I aim to show what happens to the concept of a healthy commonwealth linked to a monarchist model of political order when transformed into a new context: the emergence of a democratic political order. The traditional representation of the body politic becomes problematic when people, understood as individual natural bodies, are taken as the starting point in political theory. Spinoza’s understanding of the composite body, and the assumption that each body is composed, raises the question of the stability or instability of this composition. This has implications for the way one looks at the political order’s conditions of possibility, I argue, and at the same time reveals the imaginary nature of the political body.

Henry V and the fruits of legitimacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Two Bodies

This chapter argues that from the outset of Henry V, the transformation of both the king and the polity consequent upon Henry's accession is figured as almost complete. In the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare had put a great deal of energy into showing that the miracle of the king's two bodies portrayed in the Famous victories had been no such thing; not a sudden transformation but a long-planned, and entirely calculated performance or facsimile of such a transformation. However, at the start of Henry V, Shakespeare went out of his way to show both that that was precisely how the transformation of Hal into Henry was perceived by even the most learned and eminent of his new subjects and that that perception had worked an almost miraculous transformation on the condition of the body politic.

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back

2021 ◽  
pp. 560-576
Author(s):  
Julia Peetz
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
National Body ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Power And Influence

In politics, embodiment, figured as a literal connection between a national leader’s body and the nation as a whole, implies that the fates of leader and nation are linked; a decline in the leader’s body signals a corresponding decline in the national body politic. This concrete, physical idea of embodiment emerged from a context of absolutist monarchical power and has been most influentially described in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies as both theological and premodern. Nevertheless the temptation persists to describe the power and influence populists hold over their followers in the contemporary moment in just this way. Focusing on the specific context of US presidential politics, this chapter questions whether ideas of literal embodiment can usefully explain how populist politics operates through performance. With regard to the ways in which we interpret the significance of politicians’ bodies in twenty-first-century US politics, the chapter explores the process through which premodern political embodiment was supplanted by more abstractly conceived political representation. It is argued that, rather than postulating a radical break between mainstream politics and the mode of representation that is enacted by populists, explorations of embodiment need to take into account historical continuities as politicians’ embodied performances engage with the collective memory of political audiences and thereby complicate processes of political representation. As such, embodiment must be understood as one of the central repertoires of affective, metalingual engagement through which performances in contemporary politics act upon political audiences.

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

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