Contenu du sommaire : Le corps à l'épreuve

Through the exemple of Mrs Necker, wife of King Louis XVI's principal minister, mother of Germaine de Staël and founder of an hospital that still wears her name, this text aims at showing how, at the end of the 18th century, a toppling-over from science to fantasy, from medical language to a language to a language of morbid imagination could occur. All along, Mrs Necker imposed stern behaviour on herself, keeping a diary of her misdeeds and duties. She pushes that corporal study to the point of facing in advance with her own death, her own dead body. She organizes with the ceremony of her funerals and the conservation of her body, in every detail, as to postpone, to the point of insanity, the attacks of time on her dead body.

This article is part of a series of studies about self-confession forms. Tatoo is a self writing on oneself and also an extreme means of imposing the other in one' s own body. In this regard, it is close to manuscript writting which, in its materiality, can be considered as a –often unvolontary– means of revealing one' s intimacy. In this sense, with the increasing number of instances socially-legitimated to decypher manuscript forms of self-expression, one can come to the conclusion that we are witnessing the developping of a society that would fonction in the same way as a « panoptikon without walls » if the means of controlling individuals were graphological.

The different ordeals of the body in « Body Art » and « Land Art » in the Sixties and their evolution today. Parallelism and mutations. Does the enthropy of the plastic game apply to the psychic game?

For transvestites, the “deconstruction” of the sexes is not a theoritical question, but an actual practice: they decompose the social représentation of feminity and of the woman' s body into signs which they make their own and which they use in their everyday behaviour. This behaviour invites us to take a new look at the process of the social construction of the sexes and of the individual construction of a sexual appearance and identity. The body is the vehicle for these constructions. And even if transvestism is a case of “deviation”, in the sense that there is a contradiction between biology and appearance, it should, in a more general way, enable us to State the importance of the body in the make up of identity.

Eugenism in France is already a concern for medicine at the beginning of the 19th century. Between a private eugenism, incentive and pedagogical, and an authoritarian eugenism, public and elitist, doctors seem, in the anxious context of the end of the century, to choose the second solution, advocating the necessity to sterelize or deny bad procreators the right to get married. The human cost of the war, the uncertainties of medical knowledge, the defence of the profession' s interests, force them however, to discard these solutions, and to prone a simple prenuptial appointment, made mandatory in 1942.

December 1846. The introduction of anesthesia ushers in a new era for french surgery. Along with this transistion, surgeons start to express themselves about the conditions of their practice. They don't deny the existence or the intensity of the physical pain they inflict, nor the violence of their art, nor the savage fight against their patient. But surgical pain is never in the foreground, never stated as the prototype of great pains, always kept in the background. Surgeons can't cope with the excess of pain that makes it intolerable, and, rather than admit their responsibility, choose to put the blame on an excessive pusillanimity on their patients' part. They conceal their own sensitivity behind a mask of impassibility. Anesthesia will, at last, reveal it and bring an outstanding denial to the legendary image of the surgeon-tormentor.

The author looks back on certain surgical techniques of skull-opening at the turn of the century (trepanning, craniectomies) and wonders, by means of a few films sequences, about their possible durability in the field of representations.

Anatomical science, which developped at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century and reached its peak during the 17th century, rendered the human body an object of study. But, if the positive knowledge built up during these centuries is presented as its official argument, the anatomical enterprise has a cultural significance which encompasses far more than the scientific field. Based on the practice of dissection, anatomy specifically implies a reconsideration of the generally admitted cultural notion of the body as the site of personal identification. It is from such a perspective that this article analyses a collection of images showing anatomy demonstrations (Dutch anatomical paintings from the 17th century and frontispieces from anatomical treatises). In this iconographical series, the practice of anatomy appears as something which is intimately linked to the exercise of the gaze, but also to philosophical, social and judicial questions.

In the last twenty five years, gore cinema has produced an original representation of a classic character in the fantastic mythology: the living-dead. Taking distances with the traditional concepts of the ghost and breaking with voodoo-inspired origins, the living-dead is now represented as a body void of a consciousness, immune to physical pain and perhaps even immortal. Here is the modernity of this new representation; in gore films, consciousness is the sole element that distinguishes the human-being from the monster. The only pain therefore dwells in the soul. Why not draw the conclusion that this genre is a sign of a certain spirituality in the materialism of everyday life in western societies?

A few figures show a slow change in attitude in this second half of the eigteenth century, figures for judgments in appeal at the Parliament in Paris for instance, the systematic census of which from 1725 to 1790 allows a few comparisons: a single one of these judgments concerns child rape between 1725 and 1730, six between 1760 and 1765, ten between 1780 and 1785. This text attempts to interpret this transformation.

Focusing on the character of the alcoholic's spouse, the author studies the pain felt by someone who is not the one usually considered ill, and the meaning of his or her behaviour. This question, documented by a thorough study of an A. A. association, underlines the sociological aspect of the fact that alcoholics' spouses consider themselves as sick as their alcoholic companion, observing on their own body the effects of the other's intoxication. Experienced as a collective disease, alcoholism affects the non-drinker in a contagious way.

This text proposes a part of an interview with a woman who became tetraplegic because of an accident. This piece focuses on the work about affective break-up.

This paper presents an interview with a young woman infected with AIDS. Her statements seem to reveal that she experiences the affections of her body as a sign of social desintegration, beyond the physical aspect. For a woman with Catherine's characteristics, a sick body is synonymous with “social death”, Furthermore, the “biographical rupture” initiated by the HIV makes her face an identity that she had always tried to deny while climbing the social ladder. She now has the feeling that her disease traps her in a form of « biographical fatalism »: a precarity induced by the disease.

This parallel between two authors whose « epistemologic profiles » are so different, but who both got involved into the politics of their time, aims at showing the evolution of the connexion between the philosophical field and the politcial power, in France, since the beginning of the 20th century. Even though they stand relatively at the margin of their science, their respective works can be considered as typical of the relationship between universitarians and the State. This comparison is, therefore, dedicated to this aspect of their analysis and of their practice.