An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art's shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, (...) this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period's exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind. (shrink)

Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a (...) new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies. (shrink)