Fragments for a history of the human body

Ed. by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi.

Part 1.
Introduction - Michel Feher.
Dim body, dazzling body - Jean-Pierre Vernant.
The body of engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic tradition and the Kabbalah - Charles Malamoud.
Indian speculations about the sex of the sacrifice - Charles Malamoud.
The body: the Daoists' coat of arms - Jean Levi.
Divine image - prison of flesh: perceptions of the body in ancient Gnosticism - Michael A. Williams.
The face of Christ, the form of the church - Marie-Jose Baudinet.
Antirrhetic II - Nicephorus the patriarch.
The female body and religious practice in the later Middle Ages - Caroline Walker Bynum.
The consecrated host: a wondrous excess - Piero Camporesi.
Holbein's dead Christ - Julia Kristeva.
Hungry ghosts and hungry people: somaticity and rationality in medieval Japan - William R. LaFleur.
Metamorphosis and lycanthropy in Franche-Comte, 1521-1643 - Caroline Oates.
The chimera herself - Ginevra Bompiani.
The inanimate incarnate - Roman Paska.
On the marionette theater - Heinrich von Kleist.
The classical age of automata: an impressionistic survey from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century - Jean-Claude Beaune.

Part 2. Foreword.
Therefore, Socrates is immortal - Nicole Loraux.
Reflections of a soul - Eric Alliez and Michel Feher.
The face and the soul - Patrizia Magli.
The ethics of gesture - Jean-Claude Schmitt.
The upward training of the body from the age of chivalry to courtly civility - Georges Vigarello.
Geerewol: the art of seduction - Carol Beckwith.
Love's rewards - Rene Nelli.
Between clothing and nudity - Mario Perniola.
Tales of Shen and Xin: body-person and heart-mind in China during the last 150 years - Mark Elvin.
The natural and literary history of bodily sensation - Jean Starobinski.
Some simple reflections on the body - Paul Valery.
The three-body problem and the end of the world - Hillel Schwartz.
The ghost in the machine: religious healing and representations of the body in Japan - Mary Picone.
The end of the body - Jonathan Parry. Celestial bodies: a few stops on the way to heaven - Nadia Tazi.

Part 3. Foreword. Head or heart? The political use of body metaphors in the Middle Ages - Jacques Le Goff.
The art of pulling teeth in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries - David Kunzle.
"Amor veneris, vel dulcedo appeletur" - Thomas W. Laqueur.
Subtle bodies - Giulia Sissa.
Semen and blood: some ancient theories concerning their genesis and relationship - Francoise Heritier-Auge.
Upanisad of the embryo; note on the Garbha-Upanisad - Lakshmi Kapani.
Bodily images in Melanesia: cultural substances and natural metaphors - Bruce M. Knauft with photographs by Eileen M. Cantrell.
Older women, stout-hearted women, women of substance - Francoise Heritier-Auge.
Personal status and sexual practice in the Roman Empire - Aline Rousselle.
The social evil, the solitary vice and pouring tea - Thomas W. Laqueur.
The bio-economics of Our Mutual Friend - Catherine Gallagher.
The meaning of sacrifice - Christian Duverger.
The sacrificial body of the king - Luc de Heusch.
The emperor-god's other body - Florence Dupont.
The body-of-power and incarnation at Port Royal and in Pascal or Of the figurability of the political absolute - Louis Marin.
Mapping the body - Kark Kidel and Susan Rowe-Leete.
A repertory of body history - Barbara Duden

'The history recorded by the following collection of essays is the history of that area where life and thought intersect. This intersection is complex, often turbulent....[We] opted for identifying three main approaches and devoting one volume to each. The first approach...measures the distance and proximity between divinity and the human body....The second axis of this exploration...concentrates on psychosomatic relations, how the "inside" relates to the "outside."...Finally, the last approach...plays on the classical distinction between organ and function....This tortuous, fragmented and open-ended progress of essays ends...with a catalogue--itself necessarily still "in progress"--of works devoted to the history of the human body.' --Introduction

Paperback