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  • Bodies Abounding
  • Jeffrey Barnouw
Erec R. Koch. The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: Univ. of Delaware, 2008). Pp. 390. $75
Ann Thomson. Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2008). Pp. viii + 293. $120

An exhilarating study of how views of the human body were transformed in early seventeenth-century France, Erec Koch’s The Aesthetic Body shows that the body in effect supplants the soul as source and site of passions and sensibility. The emergent mechanistic conception of the body is topped (completed and exceeded) by an “aesthetic” understanding of the generation of feelings (Greek, aistheseis) that promote the body’s vital functioning.

Chapter 1, “Physiology: Corporeality and Descartes’ Aesth[Ethics],” is succeeded by chapters 2, “Sight: Theatrical Spectacle in Corneille, Nicole, and Malebranche”; 3, “Hearing: Rhetoric, Voice, and Aurality from Mersenne to Lamy”; 4, “Taste: Corporeal Delectation, and Judgment—La Mothe Le Vayer, Méré, and Morvan de Bellegarde”; and 5, “Touch, Contact, and the Politics of Fear—Hobbes, Nicole, and Pascal.” A rich cast of characters, nice variety of literary and philosophical genres, and complexly interrelated set of themes makes this a challenging and exciting work. [End Page 103]

At the outset, Gassendi provides a foil for Descartes. Gassendi holds with “the organicist tradition of mind and body that marks their convergence and fundamental unity in all of their shared processes,” drawing on Aristotle and Galen as well as Gassendi’s mainstay, Epicurean mechanistic atomism and sensualism. Koch provides a fine, nuanced overview of this tradition (25–31). Descartes claims greater autonomy not only for the mind, but for the body, “while still maintaining their causal and interactive linkage rather than their organic unity” (23). For Descartes, the body “is first and foremost a sensory substance and the source of passions and sensory representations. . . . The recuperation of sensation in Meditations 6 [after the isolation of res cogitans] also reappropriates the body for the individual” (24). The body is a machine “whose laws can be determined by the principles of physics,” and its main function “is to effect sensation and passion by interaction with the world, that is, to serve as a form of mediation between the [reclusive, as Koch says in a parallel passage] subject and the outside world” (35). Throughout, Koch relies on copious, carefully analyzed passages, quoted in French with translations following. It is a shame that space limitations prevent going into much of the fascinating detail.

Koch follows Cartesian physiology through the various senses (including smell), stressing the physicality of the causal processes, for example, particles of light act on the body, like fingers on a keyboard, constituting a material impression (not a spiritual reception) that produces further action. In the seven-year correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia as well as Les Passions de l’Ame, Descartes turns this physiology toward a therapeutics of the passions, which Koch sees as an incipient ethics.

Corneille expressed doubts that catharsis takes place in most tragic works; in his plays it occurs not in the plot’s concluding reversal of fortune, but rather in the nexus preceding the final act such that he manages providential outcomes evoking admiration. Producing pity and fear subserves this end, but at least equally important is the spectacle. Characteristically, this is a matter of displaying (and effecting anagnorisis of ) the king as lawgiver. Analogously, the “dramatic display of the corporeal production and control of passion through vision is analyzed by” Nicole and Malebranche (23).

From Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636–37) to Lamy’s De l’art de parler (1675), “Hearing becomes the product of material forces working on the ear that are capable of producing a passionate response” (140). Here, as in various earlier junctures, one has the feeling that impact and import are being conflated (not to say that import is smuggled in), but this is only registered, not practiced, by Koch. In Mersenne, “Mechanics, the science that subtends sound, converges with the mathematization of music” (141).

The metaphoric extension implicit in “taste” comes into its own in this period. Here Koch makes good use of Kant and ranges from the delights of [End Page...

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