The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

Erec R. Koch. The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 390. The title of Erec R. Koch's stimulating and erudite work puts the problem front and center by bringing back together two words that history has driven apart. For since Kant and Hegel, aesthetic appreciation, disinterested and spiritualized, has been construed as the very opposite of bodily experience; art for the senses might as well be pornography. Following in the footsteps of Ernst Cassirer, many scholars have tried to uncover the early modern roots of aesthetic disinterestedness. Koch proposes something more like the contrary--to examine the aesthetic that lost out, one that, true to the word's etymological origins, proposed a science of sensation that linked all manner of external stimuli (artworks among them) to the production of embodied passions. Just as we have five senses, The Aesthetic Body has five chapters, each devoted to seventeenth-century speculation regarding sight, hearing, taste, touch, and--smell having apparently attracted little philosophical interest--Cartesian physiology. This last subject is where Koch begins, as he must: in displacing classical physiology, which insisted on the body's organic unity with the soul, in favor of a mechanical model, Descartes effectively sets the stage for the century's contributions to discourse on the senses and the passions. The author returns throughout the study to the link between the new physiology and passion: thinking of the body as a machine (as opposed to a site where spiritual or occult forces play themselves out) does not imply that it is somehow robotic or unfeeling. On the contrary, the innovation consists in considering how passions are produced in the body, how they affect the mind, and how the mind in turn might alter--but not exactly master--them. Koch does a marvelous job elucidating the stakes of the new physiology, while along the way firmly refuting ill-informed but common attacks on Descartes's denial of the body. Two additional chapters follow the Cartesian body, mechanical but feeling, into other domains. New views on the workings of sound on the ear alter traditional rhetorical theory by providing, in the work of Mersenne and Lamy, an account of the material efficacy of the voice's communication of passion; Hobbes, Nicole, and Pascal all think of the civil and political sphere as a place where bodies collide, and where order is achieved through the power of custom and ceremony to modify behavior. The two remaining chapters concern subjects that while less explicitly Cartesian in their underpinnings nevertheless share the concern with the sensitive body. In a chapter on taste, Koch emphasizes the extent to which the oft-remarked shift from a literal (i.e., culinary) to a figurative (socially distinguishing) understanding of the term does not imply an eclipse of the body; on the contrary, in Mere or Morvan de Bellegarde, le bon gout is never divorced from a superior disposition of the organs. Finally, in the only chapter to concern art specifically, the author offers a persuasive reading of Corneille's Cinna, a tragedy that displays the ability of political authority to produce affective response in its subjects; the implication is that the theater at the time could not be a space of aesthetically pure enjoyment, but instead was necessarily part of a political program (Richelieu's) that put the spectacle's manipulation of bodily passion in the service of power. …