Reviews for The king who never was

The average rating for The king who never was based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-08 00:00:00 Toney Casey Daniel Arasse seeks to interpret the guillotine as a cultural artifact. During the Reign of Terror (1792-1794), Arasse explains, execution by guillotine was a sort of political portraiture. Jacobins used it with the intention of altering public consciousness. The visuality of the guillotine and its accompanying ceremony allowed the Jacobins to appropriate an icon onto themselves. The public’s identification of the guillotine with revolutionary Jacobinism helps explain the almost religious enthusiasm rendered onto the killing mechanism. What had originally been a device inspired by rationalistic enlightened medicine and intended for humanitarian ends (that is, a simple mechanism of death that might minimize human suffering), quickly became an instrument of political terror as the Revolution passed through its most radical phase. The guillotine, as a device for decapitation, came to symbolize the new body politic inaugurated by the Revolution. Through quite literally severing the head of the body royal, the guillotine thereby symbolically ended the political and social inequality of the ancien regime, replacing in its stead the sovereignty of the people, that is, the body politic, which took on the mystique of Rousseau’s General Will. As an icon, this killing machine provided substance and form to the revolutionary rhetoric of Robespierre and Saint Just. But in the hands of its administrators, the guillotine was transformed from something resembling a humanitarian impulse into something much more macabre. In this sense, enemies of the Revolution were disrupting the health of the nation. Hence, the “relation of the guillotine to the bodies of its victims mirrored the surgical operation that the revolutionary government was performing upon the body politic in order to regenerate it.” (77) In what is probably the most fascinating section of his book, Arasse notes that the supporters of the guillotine had supposed that a victim’s death would be instantaneous and painless. But witnesses of the execution began to wonder whether consciousness might persist after decapitation: might the severed head be able to comprehend its own demise? If so, what a strange Cartesian inversion! -- “I think, but I am not.” Rationalistic doctors and anatomists rejected such fantastic claims, deeming them an unwelcome return to obscurantist metaphysics, a subject from which any reasonable philosophe had moved away. Nevertheless, this debate about the possibility of consciousness after decapitation highlights the primacy revolutionaries afforded to the body at the expense of the head: political representation found a concomitant in physical anatomy. The head, it was argued, only possessed consciousness because of various somatic and coordinating functions of the body; without the body, the head became worthless. It is easy to see how such an analogy would resonate with the large, democratically-minded Parisian crowds that came to witness the executions. This is a valuable book, but Arasse, at times, comes off as a bit of an art snob, especially in the latter pages. Take, for instance, his observations that “The severed head, generally given a rictus and expression that the convention of the engraving would have us believe is ‘taken from life’, belongs or belonged to a man whose immolation tended towards the abolition of a system of power . . . . [and that:] On the scaffold, at the height of the ritual, the gesture of the executioner evoked that of Perseus presenting the head of Medusa to Polydectes.” … This is all well and good, but the analogy might be lost upon those of us who are unfamiliar with Polydectes, an unfamiliarity which, alas, this current author must betray. (135) And, for good measure, here is Arasse explaining an artistic engraving of a guillotine execution: "The guillotined head appears, moreover, at the centre of a network of inscriptions whose interactions generates meanings the more precise for their being the product of a system of transformations. The various titles used are based on the ideological relations between singular and plural, which reflect, on the lexical plane, the very fundamental political distinction between individual and People. The two main inscriptions outside the frame of the image relate chiastically through their plurals and singulars …within the frame, within the field of the image, the possessive adjectives again take up the theme and relate the theory of its figuration …, while the reference to the future national anthem in ‘his blood slaked our soil’ matches the allusive style of the parody of the Gospel in Ecce Custine. But even here a change has occurred, and the present tense of the Ecce Custine, that present of the head held up to the gaze of the spectator by the forearm of the executioner, has, transforming the optative of the ‘Marseillaise’ … become the past ‘slaked’, a past in which the triumph of the homeland over the traitor is historic." (136-137) On the positive side, I can now add the word “rictus” to my own personal “lexical plane.”… which is only to say that Arasse’s book is not as democratized as the killing machine about which he writes; rather inaccessible, parts of it might only be useful to academics and other parts still only to art historians. But these are small criticisms, for they do nothing to contradict Arasse’s (albeit rather priggish) accomplishment.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-01 00:00:00 Erin E Nowjack If I wasn't skimming parts of this I would not have got through this. I almost feel bad writing it, but this book was fantastically boring. I've learned a thing or two about the Guillotine as an object, tool, and cultural artefact from this book - but I guess I am not the intended reader. The writing style is too dry, maybe something was lost in translation. Why was this book translated?