“Rude Uncivill Blood”
The Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23467689 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jean E Feerick (Bridge University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Pages | 65-83 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900 (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9781137338211_4 |
| OpenAlex | W2495126798 |
| ISBN | 9781137338211 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
In his exposition on modern sexuality, Foucault famously emphasizes the uniqueness of modern cultural forms by seizing on the Renaissance as a point of contrast. This earlier era, he avers, was defined by a distinctly pre-modern episteme in being riveted not by sex but by “the blood relation.” In that period, he maintains, “the value of descent lines were predominant” and “blood constituted one of the fundamental values.”1 Foucault was right to draw attention to the signifier of blood for the pre-modern world. At once a material substance—one of the four humors that flowed beneath the skin—blood was also a signifier infused with metaphysical properties, a conduit of quasi-immaterial essences transmitting lineal identity from one generation to the next. In the absence of a theory of genetic transmission, the mechanisms understood to govern the exchange of attributes carrying degrees of gentility were diffuse, thought to be mediated by airy animal spirits that conjoined the material body with a transcendent order. But they nonetheless held a powerful grip on the period and would cast a long shadow over subsequent race systems, which bore the imprint of this pre-modern hereditary order in granting the signifier of blood a position of primacy.
Aesthetics · Art · Biopower · Episteme · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Literature · Metaphysics · Order (exchange) · Period (music) · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database) · Shadow (psychology) · Value (mathematics) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |