Customer Reviews

The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

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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!

It takes a very clever person to write a book this stupid. There is no real argument here, just a string of hyperbolic and oracular assertions. If we try charitably to reconstruct his argument, we come up with something like: *In Pepys' Diary we find represented a private and interiorized sense of self. Shakespeare is not Pepys. Therefore there is no representation of a private self in Shakespeare's plays.* As they say in logic, the undistributed middle is glaring. All Hamlet's talk of "having that within which passeth show" is explained away as gestures toward that which does not yet exist. At the heart of Hamlet's mystery is . . . "nothing" (37). And not just Hamlet, but Renaissance England as a whole does not have any concept of a private self, according to Barker! He completely ignores an enormous body of evidence that contradicts his thesis. Renaissance/medieval confessional literature, spiritual autobiography, lyric poetry, etc. etc. etc. -all simply disregarded. His writing is so bad that it would be laughable if not that people actually take this nonsense seriously.

For example, Barker writes, "The split subject is designed at an abject inner distance from itself and from the ambivalent supplementary body which has been exiled, in one of its aspects, from the interior consistency of the subject's discourse to a ghostly, insubstantial place at the margins, and in its other phase, to a location outside discourse as one amongst its objects in the world" (67).

Notice the passive voice: who, pray God, has designed such a diabolical "split subject"?

There are important cultural differences between the early and late seventeenth century, but Barker comes nowhere near to identifying those differences.

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.