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UNDRESSING AND UNION

Rushmir Mahmutćehajić

in On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

What is lowered down must also be raised up. Descent includes also ascent. So it is also with separation and unification. Clothes confirm separateness, but also the return to oneness, which is the ... More

What is lowered down must also be raised up. Descent includes also ascent. So it is also with separation and unification. Clothes confirm separateness, but also the return to oneness, which is the source of love. As long as the world is a veil in which everything is acknowledged as a sign, man does not know his nakedness. But as soon as that transparency disappeared in the first man, the acknowledgement of the world as createdness began to demand clothing and a turning to inwardness as one and outwardness as the other side of the self. By increasing the distance and forgetfulness of original unity, clothing and veiling become decisive forms of the revelation of reality. Separation is at the same time also the possibility of unclothing in fullness before it. Separateness and distance aim, in different ways, toward closeness and unity. Unity presupposes undressing and union. It confirms that it is they, rather than anything else in the world, who make manifest all God's names.Less

Introduction

David. Cressy

in Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension

This book narrates some of the strangest and most troubling incidents from the sideroads of Tudor and Stuart England. Through a series of linked stories and close readings of local texts and ... More

This book narrates some of the strangest and most troubling incidents from the sideroads of Tudor and Stuart England. Through a series of linked stories and close readings of local texts and narratives, it examines the ways in which early modern society coped with cultural difficulties and dealt with bewildering phenomena. It includes a variety of topics such as bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, ridicule and paranoia, mockery and invective, symbolic violence and iconoclasm, atheism, excommunication and irregular burial, nakedness and cross-dressing. These were issues that challenged the orderly, Protestant, hierarchical society of post-Reformation England. The stories examined highlight the tendencies of discord and dissension in early modern society.Less

Sex and the Sexes

John Leonard

in Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970: Volume I: Style and Genre; Volume II: Interpretative Issues

Milton has been both deplored as a misogynist and acclaimed as the pre-eminent poet of companionate marriage. This chapter traces the emergence and development of both of these views, as well as ... More

Milton has been both deplored as a misogynist and acclaimed as the pre-eminent poet of companionate marriage. This chapter traces the emergence and development of both of these views, as well as critical responses to prelapsarian lovemaking. Many critics have discussed Milton’s eroticism separately from his sexual politics, but it is a curious fact that the poem’s most bitter or offensive passages are juxtaposed with its most tender professions of love. This chapter asks why this should be so, and argues that critics on both sides of the ‘misogyny’ question have obscured the real issue by either emphasizing or denying Milton’s supposed ‘grudge’ against women. Mary Wollstonecraft offered a more searching criticism when she argued that it is Milton’s love, not hatred, that poses the real threat. The chapter also asks what Milton meant by ‘cheerful conversation’ (in Paradise and the divorce pamphlets), and examines the history of critical responses to angelic lovemaking.Less

Naked natives and noble savages: the cultural work of nakedness in imperial Britain

Philippa Levine

in The Cultural Construction of the British World

By the middle of the eighteenth century, and as European colonialism became a dominating political force, the naked body had come to represent the savagery and backwardness of colonized and ... More

By the middle of the eighteenth century, and as European colonialism became a dominating political force, the naked body had come to represent the savagery and backwardness of colonized and colonisable peoples. Whether depicted as noble savages attuned to the natural world or as wild peoples beyond the remit of civilization, to Britons the state of nakedness increasingly signified distance from civilization and reason. This chapter explores that linkage, firstly through eighteenth-century British representations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, and then through an examination of British discourse concerning dance, where an explicit and often alarmed sexualization of the state of undress was paramount well into the twentieth century. This essay proposes, above all, that nakedness is not a simple description nor a state of being but a contested historical marker with very particular and peculiar ties to the generation of ideas regarding the British self and the foreign or colonial other in the British imperial context.Less

Innocence

John Leonard

in Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970: Volume I: Style and Genre; Volume II: Interpretative Issues

This chapter traces the development of two very different critical responses to innocence in Paradise Lost. One response (traced back to Addison’s remark that Paradise consists of ‘Pictures of ... More

This chapter traces the development of two very different critical responses to innocence in Paradise Lost. One response (traced back to Addison’s remark that Paradise consists of ‘Pictures of Still-Life’, and to Johnson’s claim that Paradise lacks ‘human interest’) holds that innocence is boring. The other response (traced back to Johnson’s criticism that Milton’s Paradise shows ‘something of anticipation’) offers the opposite conclusion that Adam and Eve are all too recognizably human. The first tradition culminates in E. M. W. Tillyard’s quip that Adam and Eve are ‘Old Age Pensioners enjoying eternal youth’; the second culminates Millicent Bell’s view that Adam and Eve are fallen before the Fall. Most Miltonists now reconcile the two traditions by arguing for prelapsarian trial and growth, but this chapter asks whether the existence of the two traditions reveals an unresolved tension in the poem.Less

Lescarbot's Noble Savage and Anthropological Science

Ter Ellingson

in The Myth of the Noble Savage

The Noble Savage is obviously a legal concept, a technical analysis of the legal status of “savage” peoples from the standpoint of comparative law. For those conditioned by folklore and more than a ... More

The Noble Savage is obviously a legal concept, a technical analysis of the legal status of “savage” peoples from the standpoint of comparative law. For those conditioned by folklore and more than a century of professional polemic masquerading as history, the blatant contradiction between this historical evidence and the myth of Rousseauian “romantic naturalism” must give rise to feelings of shock and denial. However, Lescarbot's construction of the Noble Savage offered at least a partial solution to the greatest ethnological problem of the age of discovery, that of comparative negation, often expressed through the metaphor of savage nakedness. This chapter argues that the concept of the Noble Savage did indeed exist, and in fact was brought into existence together with the call for the foundation of an anthropological science.Less

‘And what about the spiritual life itself?’, distraction, transcendence and redemption: the intuitionist realist tradition in the work of John Grierson, André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer

Ian Aitken

in Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-century Lukacsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions

This chapter attempts to define three of the central components of the intuitionist-realist tradition: tradition's conceptualisation of the ‘problem’ of modernity; the proposed ‘solution’ to that ... More

This chapter attempts to define three of the central components of the intuitionist-realist tradition: tradition's conceptualisation of the ‘problem’ of modernity; the proposed ‘solution’ to that problem; and the elaboration of an aesthetic vehicle through which such a solution can be realised. It explores the intuitionist realism in the work of Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer, in relation to the ‘problem of modernity’ and ‘totality’. All of them insisted that realist films should place the portrayal of social reality over formal or overly rhetorical experimentation. Grierson's primary concern was for ‘modern industrial society’, whereas Kracauer argues that the way to escape from ‘spiritual nakedness’ is through transcending the abstract relation to one's own experience of the world. The model of cinematic realism developed by Bazin can be differentiated from the Kracauer model in the sense that Bazin was more antipathetic to modernist or formalist art than Kracauer.Less

The Importance of Being Dressed

Alva Noë

in Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World

This chapter focuses on a church in Florence where women and girls wearing shorts or other summer garb are made to don a blue gown upon entering. In her book on dress in Western painting, art ... More

This chapter focuses on a church in Florence where women and girls wearing shorts or other summer garb are made to don a blue gown upon entering. In her book on dress in Western painting, art historian Anne Hollander notices that when it comes to human beings, it is not nakedness that is the norm, but the clothed body. Nakedness is the absence of clothing, or its removal. The politics of dress, in Europe and elsewhere, is not always so benevolent. In Florence, they made women cover up. But sometimes women—for example, Muslim women—are forced to uncover; their insistence on covering up is a perceived threat.Less

Metaphorically Speaking

Stephen R. L. Clark

in Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice

I consider a set of common metaphors from the Enneads, with a view to seeing what they would mean to readers of the time, with additional evidence from Philo of Alexandria and other Platonists. These ... More

I consider a set of common metaphors from the Enneads, with a view to seeing what they would mean to readers of the time, with additional evidence from Philo of Alexandria and other Platonists. These images and metaphorical procedures do not depend for their usefulness on any particular view of the universe at large, whatever mistakes Plotinus and his contemporaries may have made about the way things are. We can realize for ourselves what it is to be “drunk” with beauty, or “strip naked”. We can acknowledge the influence that familiar images and stories have on us, and even seek to rewrite or polish them. They still need to be read carefully: we may think we understand their roots, but be misled about the detail: what was understood by ‘nakedness’, ‘drunkenness’, ‘reflection’ and the like? What is ‘love’? What sort of dancing is intended in describing either the work of nature or the hoped-for escape from present trouble? What sort of mirrors were available, and what would it mean to think of nature or the soul as ‘mirroring’ reality? How shall we ‘stand up to the blows of fortune’? Plotinus often seems to be subverting common contemporary attitudes to the states he uses to describe intellectual progress.Less

The Erotics of the Body in the Tale of Genji

Rajyashree Pandey

in Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives

The body seems curiously absent in the Tale of Genji, despite the fact that this is a romance narrative about amorous entanglement and erotic desire. It is only when the body is conceived of as an ... More

The body seems curiously absent in the Tale of Genji, despite the fact that this is a romance narrative about amorous entanglement and erotic desire. It is only when the body is conceived of as an enfleshed entity, constituted through flesh and blood that it registers as an absence. The chapter argues that in the Genji the body is best apprehended through its metonymic connections with robes and hair. Robes are the repositories of both the material and psychic attributes of an individual, and closely tied to the generation of erotic desire. Likewise, women’s thoughts and feelings find expression through their hair. There are close connections between the spirit (tama) and robes and hair, which function as keepsakes (katami) of the person to whom they belong. Beauty in the Genji is not located in the physical features of the body but in the comportment of the body in performance.Less

the Father’s Imprisonment: Wilhelm Heinse

Laurence A. Rickels

in Aberrations of Mourning

This chapter focuses on Wilhelm Heinse, a popular writer who, in his own lifetime, became the widow of his own reputation and acclaim. Heinse’s conception of the arts can thus only begin to be ... More

This chapter focuses on Wilhelm Heinse, a popular writer who, in his own lifetime, became the widow of his own reputation and acclaim. Heinse’s conception of the arts can thus only begin to be received and find acknowledgement when the two German heralds of mass media culture, Richard Wagner and Ludwig II of Bavaria, come to read Heinse with great respect and interest. In the midst of everything good and beautiful, Heinse always evokes and privileges das Nackende, which covers, up front, nakedness as practiced by the ancient Greeks. Although the embodiment of das Nackende is hailed by Heinse as the highest degree of pleasure successfully attained and transmitted by painting and sculpture, it also doubles as the measure of his despair.Less

Dressing America: Clothing, nakedness, and the foundations of civility

Rachel Winchcombe

in Encountering Early America

This chapter examines the multi-faceted English understandings of both Indigenous clothing and nakedness, analysing the various ways that English explorers, writers, and translators described the ... More

This chapter examines the multi-faceted English understandings of both Indigenous clothing and nakedness, analysing the various ways that English explorers, writers, and translators described the appearances of the diverse groups of Indigenous people that they encountered. In doing so this chapter argues that descriptions of Indigenous clothing and nakedness in English print varied throughout the sixteenth century and performed a variety of functions, from shaping English approaches to trade and colonisation in the New World, to informing and framing moral and religious debates taking place back home, through reflecting shared European cultural values. Everyday practices of dressing, and English perceptions of Indigenous bodies, were thus central to the articulation of English colonialism in the sixteenth century.Less

“Are You a Man?”: Performing Naked Protest in India

Deepti Misri

in Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India

This chapter considers the use of nakedness both as a form of violence inflicted by the state, and as a form of resistance in women's naked protests that expose the gendered logics of this violence ... More

This chapter considers the use of nakedness both as a form of violence inflicted by the state, and as a form of resistance in women's naked protests that expose the gendered logics of this violence by the state. Naked protest as deployed by a range of actors mainly interrogates the violence sanctioned by the Indian state's discourses of “antinationalism” or sedition. The chapter analyzes Mahasweta's short story “Draupadi,” along with a range of naked performances by women, including a protest by a group of Manipuri women outside the Assam Rifles headquarters and a solo protest march by a Gujarati woman, Pooja Chauhan. These analyses illustrate the implications of naked protest as an unmanning challenge that tauntingly punctures the triumphalist structure of rape-as-power by recoding rape as an act of cowardice.Less

Disruptive protests

Alexandra Fanghanel

in Disrupting Rape Culture: Public Space, Sexuality and Revolt

This chapter builds on themes established in Chapter Two and considers the naked or nearly naked protest as a carnivalesque disruption in public space. Part One posits that these protests rely on ... More

This chapter builds on themes established in Chapter Two and considers the naked or nearly naked protest as a carnivalesque disruption in public space. Part One posits that these protests rely on spectacularisation (in the Debordian sense (1994 [1967]) of the naked body to function. We explore this in the context of so-called feminist anti-rape protests, such as SlutWalk or Femen. Part Two analyses these gendered dynamics in the context of non-human animal rights protests including those of PETA and Lush, One of these campaigns is analysed and I draw on the auto-ethnographic experience of participating in naked protest to explore the potentialities of this as a mode of forging a war machine. This chapter demonstrates how the eroticisation of sexual violence is mobilised as part of these politics.This chapter examines the interplay between smooth and striated space, rape culture and the capacity that protest harbours for revolution.Less

First Diary

in The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima

In this diary, the author reflects on the developments in Lima under the administration of Mayor Alberto Andrade. Waves of assaults, robberies, kidnappings, and rapes are once again sweeping through ... More

In this diary, the author reflects on the developments in Lima under the administration of Mayor Alberto Andrade. Waves of assaults, robberies, kidnappings, and rapes are once again sweeping through the city. An older woman, one of the street sweepers who staged demonstrations against the government, partially undresses to express her protest. The connection between nakedness and death, whether it is murder or suicide, is explicitly made by Georges Bataille. Bataille's most thorough examination of the relation between nakedness and death takes place in the context of what he calls eroticism. In Lima, Andrade's urban renewal campaign is quickly fizzling, mainly because President Alberto Fujimori has made it a priority to destroy him as a viable future presidential candidate.Less

Nakedness

in The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima

Lima features a cluster of lopsided streets and jirones, the core of what used to be known as the “Indian” pueblo of Santiago. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo introduced colonial legislation into the ... More

Lima features a cluster of lopsided streets and jirones, the core of what used to be known as the “Indian” pueblo of Santiago. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo introduced colonial legislation into the terrain of what, after Marcel Mauss, we call the “techniques of the body,” setting off the long and complex process that, in the centuries that followed, would definitively transform native people's attire and physical comportment. A quick survey of the literature on migration and mestizaje in Peru reveals the weight that is now assigned to clothing in effecting (or impeding) the emergence of new identities in the urban milieu. In Lima, as in most other urban centers, features of indigenous dress are generally met with ridicule and rejected by individuals of all social standings. In the context of Billie Jean Isbell's treatment of the incest taboo among Chuschinos, one gains insight into the place of nakedness in the enforcement of social rules and in the punishment of the transgression of these rules.Less

The Beast Without

Miranda Griffin

in Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature

While many investigations into narratives—both medieval and modern—of shape-shifting between animal and human form conclude that when humans become animals they reveal the beast within, this chapter ... More

While many investigations into narratives—both medieval and modern—of shape-shifting between animal and human form conclude that when humans become animals they reveal the beast within, this chapter argues that the configuration of inside and outside in stories of animal metamorphosis can be inverted, to think about the animal as being without—both in the sense of being outside, and lacking. The theoretical perspective in this chapter is provided by Agamben on the ‘intimate caesura’, Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis, and Lacan’s figure of the Möbius strip; the chapter also considers the role of clothes and manuscripts as cultural artefacts made of the skin of nonhuman animals, which are assembled in order to cover human nakedness. The chapter examines tales in which knights become stags, wolves, and bears, and suggests that the animals these characters come to embody are skin deep, but in no way superficial.Less

Dignity, Vile Bodies, and Nakedness: Giovanni Pico and Giannozzo Manetti

Brian Copenhaver

in Dignity: A History

Although Giovanni Pico della Mirandola has been called the most important voice for human dignity of postmedieval times, he had nothing to say about this concept—neither its ancient and medieval ... More

Although Giovanni Pico della Mirandola has been called the most important voice for human dignity of postmedieval times, he had nothing to say about this concept—neither its ancient and medieval versions nor, of course, the modern, post-Kantian notion. Pico’s celebrated Oration on the Dignity of Man was not given that title by its author. However, a near contemporary who revised older concepts of dignitas—like Cicero’s—was Giannozzo Manetti. Unlike Pico, Manetti also confronted the best-known medieval statement on the topic, by Cardinal Lothario dei Segni. From earlier Christian traditions, the cardinal inherited—and aggravated—a harshly ascetic view of the human condition. Although Manetti repeats some of this Christian pessimism, his attitudes toward the body and human agency are remarkably less dismal. Today, if we ignore Manetti and misread Pico, our philosophical understanding of dignitas and its progeny suffers.Less

“He would not goe naked like the Indians, but cloathed just as one of our selves”: Indian Disguise in The Historie of Orlando Furioso, The Fatal Marriage, and The City Madam

Gavin Hollis

in The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642

This chapter analyzes drama which employs the theatergram in which European males adopt alterity as a disguise and dress themselves as American Indians. Drawing on colonialist propaganda, that ... More

This chapter analyzes drama which employs the theatergram in which European males adopt alterity as a disguise and dress themselves as American Indians. Drawing on colonialist propaganda, that stressed the importance of clothing the Indian in Christian civility, this chapter argues that the Indian disguise drew attention to the colonial project of clothing while also stressing the impossibility of converting the infidel, because clothing was both a marker of identity and an index of the inscrutability of identity (because it was attachable and detachable). While Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso seems to suggest that the Indian could be co-opted by the English and become a civilized advocate for imperialism against the Spanish, Philip Massinger’s The City Madam and the anonymous The Fatal Marriage argue for the futility of this mission, because the Indian treated clothing to disguise their allegiance to the English rather than as a token of their allegiance.Less