Gesellschaft im Excess

Since 1973 and the publication of Natalie Zemon Davis’ ‘Rites of Violence’, historians of early modern Europe have been preoccupied in many different ways by the question of ‘excess’. Understood variously as symbolic, performative and ritualistic, excess is usually presented in a functional sense as fundamentally political, strategic and temporary. Summoned most perfectly in the controlled world of carnival, excess appears as the by-product of controlled subversion, to ensure and streamline social order. Historians interested in the body and in gender have probed at the embodied dimensions of the carnivalesque, from a focus on disciplining the body, to a drawing out of the inability of discipline to structure the imagination. However, throughout such work, excess remains juxtaposed to order. It is therefore an important scholarly feat that in her first book, Gesellschaft im Exzess, Sarah-Maria Schober brilliantly melds social, cultural and medical approaches to produce a new interpretation of excess. According to Schober excess was not juxtaposed to order, nor was it experienced as temporary, or controlled, or externally produced outside the body. Rather excess and order were coproduced in a constant dialectic. Excess was corporal and embodied, and thus it was always, at least in part, medical—although, of course, just as the body was political, so too was the expression of excess.

Aesthetics · Art history · Carnivalesque · Dialectic · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Iconoclasm · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Social order · Sociology · Subversion · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity