El giro del cuerpo: Historia y política de los corpóreo

Abstract

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.