Making the Cut: Medical, Political, and Textual Bodies in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century France

Making the Cut: Medical, Political, and Textual Bodies in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century France

577 pages· 2006· ISBN 9780542905360
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In the years from Descartes' introduction of mechanized bodies in Le Monde et le traite de l'homme (1633) to the intersection of the human body and the machine in the guillotine at the time of the French Revolution, medical, political, and literary authors generated two radically different conceptualizations of corporeal figures. Whereas the characteristics of matter in Descartes allow for the generation of open, divisible bodies whose parts relate beyond their individual physical limits, the cut of the guillotine applies to a body that is otherwise ideally indivisible. Making the Cut explores the tension between understandings of bodies in the universe as indivisible or divisible, identical or different, and continuous or contiguous in select works from Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie, Maupertuis, Bordeu, Diderot, Rousseau, Marat, and Sade.

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