Monster in the Machine , livre ebook

288

pages

English

Ebooks

2000

Écrit par
Hanafi Zakiya Hanafi

Publié par
Duke University Press

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288

pages

English

Ebooks

2000

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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

25 octobre 2000

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822380351

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

The Monster in the Machine tracks the ways in which human beings were defined in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi recreates scenes of Italian life and culture from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries to show how monsters were conceptualized at this particular locale and historical juncture-a period when the sacred was being supplanted by a secular, decidedly nonmagical way of looking at the world.Noting that the word "monster" is derived from the Latin for "omen" or "warning," Hanafi explores the monster's early identity as a portent or messenger from God. Although monsters have always been considered "whatever we are not," they gradually were tranformed into mechanical devices when new discoveries in science and medicine revealed the mechanical nature of the human body. In analyzing the historical literature of monstrosity, magic, and museum collections, Hanafi uses contemporary theory and the philosophy of technology to illuminate the timeless significance of the monster theme. She elaborates the association between women and the monstrous in medical literature and sheds new light on the work of Vico-particularly his notion of the conatus-by relating it to Vico's own health. By explicating obscure and fascinating texts from such disciplines as medicine and poetics, she invites the reader to the piazzas and pulpits of seventeenth-century Naples, where poets, courtiers, and Jesuit preachers used grotesque figures of speech to captivate audiences with their monstrous wit.Drawing from a variety of texts from medicine, moral philosophy, and poetics, Hanafi's guided tour through this baroque museum of ideas will interest readers in comparative literature, Italian literature, history of ideas, history of science, art history, poetics, women's studies, and philosophy.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

25 octobre 2000

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822380351

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

T H E M O N S T E R I N T H E M A C H I N E

THE MONSTER IN THE MA-CHINE Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time

of the Scientiﬁc Revolution

Z A K I Y A H A N A F I

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 2000

∫2000 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Aldus by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To my mother

WINIFRED ELIZABETH HARRIS

and to my grandmother

DOROTHY DIXON WALL

(1900–1989)

great lovers & stewards of books

CONTENTS

Preface

viii

Acknowledgments

xiii

One: The Origins of Monsters

Two: Monstrous Matter

Three: Monstrous Machines

Four: Medicine and the Mechanized Body97

Five: Vico’s Monstrous Body135

Six: Monstrous Metaphor

Afterword

Notes

218

219

Bibliography253

Index 267

187

PREFACE

A monster is whatever we arenot,so as monsters change form so do we, by implication. The human and the monster vie for space between two thresholds of transformation: the upper limits are godhood, the lower limits are bestiality. We stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous, whether by deﬁning the criminal, the insane, or the merely inhumane. This book attempts to track the ways human beings were deﬁned in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the period of the Scientiﬁc Revolution. The advent of nonmagical or secular ways of looking at the world and its inhabitants turned the human being into a sort of creature quite distinct from animals and gods. Since the monster partakes of both animality and divinity, I have used monstrosity as a contrasting parameter in order to note the shifting place of humans in a newly secular world. Given the transformation that took place in seventeenth-century Eu-rope—call it ‘‘decontextualization of the world’’ if you are a historian of magic, or posit an enigmatic transition that cannot be explained, regard-less of its etiology, given the accelerated process of desacralization—what happened to the category of the monstrous when its association with the sacred became no longer credible? One answer to this question is that the sacred monster disappeared from the formaldehyde jars of the museum shelves, where its scientiﬁc counterpart became safely contained, in order to take up residence in the hidden recesses of the human heart. It was in the mirror, placed in museum collections along with scientiﬁc instru-ments and moving machines, that the scientist caught a reﬂection of the portentous monster once associated with terror and pollution, with pres-age and chaos. It is important to note, however, that the monster within became visible only by means of man’s own creations: by means of his own machines and his own new sciences. During the period 1550 to 1750

in Italy the sacred characteristics attributed to monsters shifted to prod-ucts of our own technologies. The monster became a machine. Chapters 2 and 3 establish this hypothesis. As we read some of the authors of the seventeenth century, we shall see that this shift was not uniform. It was not shared by everybody and was not spread out evenly over regions or periods. Not everybody believed the same things then, any more than they do now. Tides of thought present-ing opposing beliefs persisted and mingled with many archaic and seem-ingly anachronistic beliefs framed in an animistic or even pantheistic cosmogony. Tommaso Campanella was not the only philosopher to sub-scribe to a conception of a fully sensate universe, peopled by angels and demons who frequently communicated with humans in all sorts of con-texts and circumstances. Chapter 4 traces the effects of new mechanical sciences on medical models of the human body. Ifmachinelikeandmonstrousare synonymous in this period, then what was the effect of mechanization on the way we understood our bodies and our diseases, both mental and physical? The ancient precepts of physiognomy not only indicated how a man’s charac-ter could be read from his features but also taught that inside us lurk a range of bestial attributes. But we are the masters of our humanity: for every defect of beauty or character, the ancient medicine offered a cure based on sympathies and antipathies that linked all things by their corre-sponding qualities. The new medicine, in contrast, had no cure for the monster within because it denied the capacity to affect one’s defective body by curing one’s sinful soul. Just as the nonhuman, or the monstrous, became associated with autonomously powered machines, so the human body, likened to a machine, became monstrous in its own ey es. I argue that Giovanni Borelli’s application of physics to medicine was the ﬁrst true mechanization of the human body. By a paradoxical twist of history, the Italian ‘‘macchina del corpo’’ avoided seeing itself as mon-strous because it never admitted a purely materialist explanation for the movements of the passions. Body and soul were materially joined through the functioning of animal spirits, yet their source of animation as they coursed through the blood could never be a purely mechanical one. This was in direct response to René Descartes’s physiology that ﬁgured the human body as a wholly mechanical automaton. The advent of the mechanized body indicated a fundamental shift in Western thought that occurred in Naples with Borelli’s work on iatro-physics. Another Neapolitan, Giambattista Vico, was the only major thinker in Italy who clearly understood the negative moral implications of Cartesian automatism. He felt it was vitally important to defend the existence of the soul as an autonomous entity since the human spirit can

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