Does Bolsonaro Have a Point? (Or Does He Have a Semicolon?)

摘要

In Opening Up a Few Corpses, Michel Foucault describes a historical threshold in sixteenth-century medical surgery, a point at which "sovereignty emerges through organic space." As Foucault insists, more important than an inventory of bodily contents was the theatrical spectacle of the cutting of bodies. The incisions made on the body articulated the relation between infinite and finite, metaphysical and anatomical, wherein corpse, surgeons, and spectators all participated. The more focus given to the incision, Foucault suggests, the more the corpse conveyed the transgression of boundedness. The cut suspended the idea of a carnal limit by drawing attention to itself. The relation between finite and infinite proper to the theatrum anatomicum would, in its exposure of viscera behind curtains of flesh and nerve, be one of many elements animating the explosion of the baroque around the same time in Europe and the Americas. And perhaps it is to the baroque one must turn to better grasp the comedic playwrights of the hiccup shaping the political field, globally, across regimes.