Organización y estructura de los ciclos Formativos

To look in order to know, to show in order to teach, is not this a tacit form of violence, all the more abusive for its silence, upon a sick body that demands to be comforted, not displayed? Can pain be a spectacle? Not only can it be, but it must be, by virtue of the subtle right that resides in the fact that no one is alone.

– Michel Foucault 138

In 1998 Julia Kristeva curated the exhibition Visions Capitales (Capital Visions) for the Louvre in Paris, as part of the Parti Pris series organised by the Department of Graphic Arts.139 _The

exhibition broadly traced the significance and diverse iconographic representations of the severed head in western visual culture. In her subsequent theoretical publication that followed the exhibition, Kristeva describes the decapitating cut as generative of a particular way of seeing, which leads her to dwell further on the multi faceted implications of this act:

How interesting it is to cut, how obvious, how amusing… And since political life is full of massacres of all kinds, let us wed historical or contemporary subjects with this way of seeing the established horror, increasingly conformist, affected, theatrical, museumized.140

The exhibition traversed a range of ancient, historic and twentieth century artefacts, including images from mythology, to the religious, biblical, and those with political resonance that responded to capital punishment and the practice of death by decapitation. Within the beheaded image is where Kristeva suggests that sacrificial terror and seduction have the ability to coexist, with “the artist and the viewer alternately playing the roles of the wound and the knife.”141

Kristeva’s intended anthropological approach towards curating the exhibition was in order to examine the role of representation, the image of the severed head and its ability to generate an affect of the sacred.142 _{For Kristeva, the sacred is not to be found in the sacrifice, but rather in its}

“capacity for representation.”143 _{Her proposal is to consider the image as the sole remaining link}

138 _{Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M Sheridan Smith} (New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc.,1994), 148.

139 _{Visions Capitales informed Kristeva’s subsequent theoretical publication The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2011).} The publication builds on the exhibition’s comprehensive catalogue essays that were previously only available in French. 140 _{Kristeva, Julia. The Severed Head: Capital Visions. Translated by Jody Gladding. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman,} European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Culutral Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 84.

141 _{Ibid. 84}

142 _{Kristeva discusses her curatorial approach to the exhibition and the theoretical underpinnings of key concepts} examined in Visions Capitales. See Louppe, Laurence. "Julia Kristeva: Capital Visions." Art Press (1998): 20-27. 143 _{“Because the sacred, or the nostalgia for it that remains, turns out to reside not in sacrifice after all, or in some} aesthetic or religious tradition, but in that specifically human, unique, and bitter experience that is the capacity for representation.” Op. cit. Kristeva, The Severed head: Captial Visions.130

to the sacred, yet the concept of sacred must not be defined or confined by religious systems of belief. Kristeva states:

As for the sacred, on the contrary, let us say that it is the emergence of representation, that alchemy that leads the pleasured and suffering body to symbolize, beyond and because of its confrontation with an impossibility of which separation is the everyday figure and death the absolute figure.144

Thinking about the severed head and its capacity to generate an affect of the sacred or a sense of the divine warrants further exploration in the context of this thesis, as it is only through the cut or act of cutting that the head can become severed from the body and come to exist as a synecdoche of the body whole. The image of the severed head conjures a number of associations, however it is first and foremost the resulting object of a truncating act. It can recall the visual language of classical portraiture, the lens of physiognomic surveillance, and exist as a poignant–albeit macabre–reminder of the barbarism of capital punishment. It is a form of representation that has long been inscribed in how we see the body and how governing systems exert power over the body politic.

In chapter 1 we undertook a return to theatre to examine cutting open the body for anatomical enquiry and how this has been subsequently represented. Looking at historical and contemporary sources, the enactment of a cutting spectacle came to be identified as a key characteristic contributing to past and present cultures of dissection. The sacred, the uncanny and the grotesque are also in the process of being revealed as coalescing affects that result when the cutting spectacle is applied to the body and its image. At this point in the thesis, my research has lead me to examine and analyse another series of cuts–truncations, decapitations–that have been inflicted on the body outside of the context of the anatomy theatre. My aim is to establish an awareness of alternate cutting spectacles imposed on the body, those that carry with them dissective modes of visual representation and that have the ability to evoke the partitioned body as an uncanny and sanctified site. The objective of this second chapter is then to demonstrate how the cutting spectacle employed to anatomise, dissect and examine the body interior, has the ability to transgress between other forms of incision; those employed to detach, demarcate and delineate the body exterior. Put simply, I intend to make explicit a relationship between cutting open and cutting out the body, how representations of the body’s fractured exterior remain significantly connected to modes of anatomical enquiry and the practice of dissection.

To briefly recall the introduction of this thesis, I responded to Foucault’s insistence that any knowledge of history should not be purposely constructed with the intent of establishing origins and continuity, instead it should be about identifying what he describes as its “oscillating reign.”145 _{In keeping with the overarching methodology of this study–cutting, as a way of taking}

apart, dismantling and piecing together–I have taken a genealogical approach towards examining what I have identified as significant historical cutting spectacles imposed on the body exterior: