ANASTASIA SERGHIDOU
University of Crete
Strategies of monumentality , environmental controls and the challenge of imperial body politics.
R. Schuman in his study on ‘The Conscience of the Body’ introduces the concept of the ‘soma-aesthetic’ in order to formulate his arguments on the level of the ethico-political challenge of sensorial apprehension (aesthesis) and the metaphor of architectural construction.
This epistemological tool, helps us to decode the function of the body as a ‘signifier’ of aesthetic usages and a stylization of the self within a world of monumentality and architectural narrative. I mainly insist on the way the notion of movement (kinêsis) interplays with what F.Barker calls a ‘corporeal history’(1).
M. Merleau-Ponty’s concepts on the perception receive also a special treatment given they recognize to the body the value of an epicenter of aesthetic combination of gestures and a topos of ‘geomorphy’. By taking this epistemological approach we examine the notions of physis, morphè, ousia and the way they interfere with important ‘chronotopies’. The aim of this investigation constists of understanding the strategies of monumentality the hierarchies of the divine and the expanding power of body-identities.
I explore the metaphorical symmetries by which some authors such as Theophrastus or Epictitus promote images of the body-self and strategies of imperial monumentalities. At this point we may refer to the way Epictitus treats the Akropolis to promote a metaphorical continuum of the self (Epictitus, Entretiens, IV) and explore new ways of monumentalisation which forger important hegemonic models and consistent ontologies. By this we take the opportunity to investigate the opposite example of the suffering body as a locus of ideological discourse. By taking some examples from Antiquity such as the case of Pausanias’s Lepreus (I.V.2-5; I.V.8-VI.1 ) or the somatics in Ps-Longinus’.
The Sublime we go further to study the way classical reception influenced not only toponymics associated to the connection of disease, miraculous healings and local rituals in later times but also manners by which these issues have been reflected in later chroniquers such as Malalas. This diachronical examination leads us to the way some colonial strategies have been promoted in order to establish rationales of power, environmental controls and geographies of sanity.
Some metaphorical interconnexions existing between materiality and natural phenomena present in what Pierre Blanc calls ‘hydropolitics’(2) will also receive a special consideration.
A.D. Serghidou
(Ass. Scientific Member, AnHiMa, UMR 8210, Paris
1. F.Barker The Tremulous Private Body, AnnArbor, 1995
2. P.Blanc, Proche-Orient. Le pouvoir, la terre et l’ eau, Paris, 2012, p.197- 208.
This epistemological tool, helps us to decode the function of the body as a ‘signifier’ of aesthetic usages and a stylization of the self within a world of monumentality and architectural narrative. I mainly insist on the way the notion of movement (kinêsis) interplays with what F.Barker calls a ‘corporeal history’(1).
M. Merleau-Ponty’s concepts on the perception receive also a special treatment given they recognize to the body the value of an epicenter of aesthetic combination of gestures and a topos of ‘geomorphy’. By taking this epistemological approach we examine the notions of physis, morphè, ousia and the way they interfere with important ‘chronotopies’. The aim of this investigation constists of understanding the strategies of monumentality the hierarchies of the divine and the expanding power of body-identities.
I explore the metaphorical symmetries by which some authors such as Theophrastus or Epictitus promote images of the body-self and strategies of imperial monumentalities. At this point we may refer to the way Epictitus treats the Akropolis to promote a metaphorical continuum of the self (Epictitus, Entretiens, IV) and explore new ways of monumentalisation which forger important hegemonic models and consistent ontologies. By this we take the opportunity to investigate the opposite example of the suffering body as a locus of ideological discourse. By taking some examples from Antiquity such as the case of Pausanias’s Lepreus (I.V.2-5; I.V.8-VI.1 ) or the somatics in Ps-Longinus’.
The Sublime we go further to study the way classical reception influenced not only toponymics associated to the connection of disease, miraculous healings and local rituals in later times but also manners by which these issues have been reflected in later chroniquers such as Malalas. This diachronical examination leads us to the way some colonial strategies have been promoted in order to establish rationales of power, environmental controls and geographies of sanity.
Some metaphorical interconnexions existing between materiality and natural phenomena present in what Pierre Blanc calls ‘hydropolitics’(2) will also receive a special consideration.
A.D. Serghidou
(Ass. Scientific Member, AnHiMa, UMR 8210, Paris
1. F.Barker The Tremulous Private Body, AnnArbor, 1995
2. P.Blanc, Proche-Orient. Le pouvoir, la terre et l’ eau, Paris, 2012, p.197- 208.