The Symptom and the Subject

by Holmes, Brooke

• ISBN13: 9780691138992
• ISBN10: 0691138990
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-19
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

The Symptom and the Subjecttakes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (socirc;ma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self.The Symptom and the Subjecthighlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	p. ix
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Note on Transliterations and Translations	p. xxiii
Introduction	p. 1
Symptoms and Subjects	p. 1
Seeing through Symptoms	p. 9
The Physical Imagination	p. 19
Rethinking Soma and Psukhe	p. 29
Telling Stories	p. 37
Before the Physical Body	p. 41
Daemonic Violence	p. 48
The Seen and the Felt	p. 58
The Boundaries of the Felt	p. 64
Fear and the Visual Field of the Self	p. 69
How Gods Act	p. 73
The Seen Body and Social Agency	p. 76
Interpreting Disease and Practices of Healing	p. 79
The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination	p. 84
Depersonalizing Causes	p. 90
Natural Justice	p. 95
Melissus and the Denial of Body	p. 101
A Community of Objects	p. 108
Bodies, Persons, Knowledge	p. 116
Incorporating the Daemonic	p. 121
Symptoms at the Threshold of Seen and Unseen	p. 126
The Interval	p. 130
Explaining Disease	p. 133
The Dynamics of the Cavity	p. 138
The Automatic Body	p. 142
Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care	p. 148
The Prognostic Symptom: Forces of Life and Death	p. 150
Fragile Life	p. 156
On Ancient Medicine and the Discovery of Human Nature	p. 162
Embodiment, Knowledge, and Technical Agency	p. 171
Taking Care	p. 177
Shoring Up the Self	p. 182
Beyond the Soma: Therapies of the Psukhe	p. 192
Bodily Needs	p. 196
Psychic Desires	p. 202
Gorgias's Encomium to Helen and Human Diseases	p. 211
Psychic Disorder in Democritus	p. 216
Forces of Nature, Acts of Gods: Euripides' Symptoms	p. 228
The Polysemy of the Symptom	p. 233
Tragedy and the Interval	p. 239
Euripides' Causes: The Madness of Heracles	p. 242
Euripides' Causes: The Madness of Orestes	p. 246
Realizing Disease in the Hippolytus	p. 252
Daemonic Phusis	p. 260
The Semantics of Suffering	p. 265
Conclusion	p. 275
Bibliography	p. 281
Index Locorum	p. 325
General Index	p. 349
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