This book brings together key essays from the career of social theorist John O’Neill, including his uncollected later writings, focusing on embodiment to explore the different ways in which the body trope informs visions of familial, economic, personal, and communal life.
Beginning with an exploration of O’Neill’s work on the construction of the biobody and the ways in which corporeality is sutured into social systems through regimes of power and familial socialisation, the book then moves to concentrate on O’Neill’s career-long studies of the productive body and the ways in which the working body is caught in and resists disciplinary systems that seek to rationalise natural functions and control social relations. The third section considers O’Neill’s concern with the ancient, early modern, and psychoanalytic sources of the post-modern libidinal body, and a final section on the civic body focuses specifically on the ways in which principles of reciprocity and generosity exceed the capitalist, individualist body of (neo)liberal political theory. The volume also includes an interview with O’Neill addressing many of the key themes of his work, a biographical note with an autobiographical postscript, a select bibliography of O’Neill’s many publications, and an extensive introduction by the editors.
A challenging and innovative collection, Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader will appeal to critical social theorists and sociologists with interests in the work of one of sociology’s great critical readers of classical and contemporary texts.
Author(s): Mark Featherstone, Thomas Kemple
Series: Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 284
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Appendices
Acknowledgements
Editors’ introduction: Writing and reading the body politic
O’Neill’s ‘other’ sociology
O’Neill’s two Bodies
Reading/writing the body politic
Biobodies: the infant gaze after phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and medical science
Productive bodies: alienation and discipline in the media age
Libidinal bodies: inscriptions of desire in the utopian imagination
Civic bodies: reciprocity and generosity against the capitalist rule of exchange
References
Part 1: The biobody
Chapter 1: Foucault’s optics: The (in)vision of mortality and modernity
References
Chapter 2: The specular body: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on infant self and other
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Note
References
Chapter 3: Childhood and embodiment
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Infant theory
References
Part 2: The productive body
Chapter 5: The disciplinary society: From Weber to Foucault
State power, bureaucracy and biopolitics
The rise of industrial discipline
The prison and the factory
Behind the state: bureaucracy and the disciplinary society
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Orphic Marxism
References
Chapter 7: Televideo ergo sum: Some hypotheses on the specular functions of the media
The dream of things
The specular function of things
Conclusion: some hypothesis on the specular function of the media
References
Chapter 8: Empire versus empire: A post-communist manifesto
References
Part 3: The libidinal body
Chapter 9: Marcuse’s maternal ethic: Myths of narcissism and maternalism in utopian critical memory
The myth of politics
The politics of myth
References
Chapter 10: Structure, flow, and balance in Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Idleness’
Appendix
Of idleness
De l’oisiveté
References
Chapter 11: Mecum meditari: Descartes demolishing doubt, building a prayer
References
Chapter 12: Psychoanalysis and sociology: From Freudo-Marxism to Freudo-feminism
Reception contexts
Socialization theory
Civilization theory
Post-oedipalism
Conclusion
References
Part 4: The civic body
Chapter 13: Vico’s arborescence
References
Chapter 14: Oh, my others, there is no other!: Capital culture, class, and Hegelian other-wiseness
Capital culture
Capital class
Hegelian otherwise-ness not post-political alienation
Post-script: Hegel in a bottle
References
Chapter 15: Ecce homo: The political theology of good and evil
Ecce homo: behold the man!
Otherwise than the law
The divine economy of love and forgiveness
Civic theology
References
Chapter 16: The circle and the line: Kinship, vanishment, and globalization narratives in a rich/poor world
Re-shaping the world narrative
Civic futures
Concluding sociological prayer
Post script
References
Appendix A: Body politics, civic schooling, and alien-nation: An interview with John O’Neill
Appendix B: Biographical notes on John O’Neill, with an autobiographical postscript
Autobiographical postscript
Appendix C: Selected works by John O’Neill
Books
Index
