The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection

By Francis Barker

Book Overview

This ambitious and immensely readable study helped establish Francis Barker's reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, . Now available in paperback with a revised preface from the author, The Tremulous Private Body studies several seventeenth-century texts to document the birth of the modern, self-possessed subject and the consequent waning of the modern body. Francis Barker draws on the theoretical work of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan and the Marxism of Louis Althusser to interpret the works of Pepys, Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, Marvell, and Rembrandt.

The Tremulous Private Body engages the central themes of postmodernism--discourse, sexuality, textuality, and power--but it is not a poststructuralist work, rejecting many of the positions characteristic of poststructuralism, particularly its tendency to depoliticize discourse. The book's intense and challenging style weaves together its contemporary theoretical preoccupations and its reflection on historical material into a single, penetrating analysis of the structure of modern culture. It suggests how discourse today is complicit in the wider forms of dominance that define our world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472065521
• ISBN13: 9780472065523
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

demi-plenum or demi-vacuum?

an exquisite and inadvertent disquisition on the atopical nugatoriality of peri-contemporaneous aca-discourse not unanimadverted by the acolytes of pellucidity, even in their most unguarded phase. it is in the very tension between the prefigurations of inner and alienate subjectivity and innate and alien subjectivity that the significurition of the textuality can be impounded and critically uningested; not merely a structure of plus and minus in the complex plane, but at once a set of negative imaginary diodes that dip into singularity via a reductionist yet bourgeois espoused multipolarity, a kind of exogeneity of inhibitive re-embourgeoisement transposed from the complex into the real plenum during a subduct inversion sequence tendentially dominatory of its own meretriciousness, if you get my drift. and anyone who can explain what is meant by 'the inevitable slippage between evinced bipolarity and the decentration itself' gets this week's 'prolixity buster' award of five plenums to spend on something nice for dinner.

Brilliant

Francis Barker elucidates in clear, beautiful prose how the "modern" body came into being with the Enlightenment and brought along with it the idea of individual subjectivity. It is easily the best written book on the subject in terms of style alone; I was absolutely won over by Barker's compelling prose style and argument formation. Recommended read to students of literature, art and philosophy. Indeed, a recommended read to everyone!