On the Object of Figuration

Someday, I would like to start writing a history of the body in Europe since the end of Rome. To be more precise, it would be a history of the representation of the body, of the rules of representation and of the limits of figuration. Of course, such a project cannot be restricted to the domain of art history alone. Mainly because the question of meaning in the figure should, first of all, break away from a mechanistic type of representation, and redefine a field of the historical expansion of the symptom. We propose substituting the notion of symptom for that of sign in the construction of an historical field, because it allows us to articulate, as an open question, what the signifying process is, understood as a change of levels, a shifting between domains of signification. The idea that signifying practices attest to a division of language based on a division of social labor calls to mind a nineteenth-century notion. And this idea is not relevant as long as social practice is determined by two instances, allegorical thought and legal thought (besides, they are also conventional signifying networks). This also means that the beginning of Western Christianity is not a legacy of Greek philosophy: in Rome there was only legal thought based on a Latin version of stoicism

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Object (grammar) · Political science · Representation (politics) · Sign (mathematics) · Sociology · Stoicism · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy