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Oracular and Death

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Michel Foucault suggests that the modern exalation of sight, the gaze, particularly the medical gaze, is associated with death: "That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body: obscure life, limpid death, the oldest imaginary values of the Western world are crossed here in a strange misconstruction that is the very meaning of pathological anatomy . . . . Nineteenth-century medicine was haunted by that absolute eye that cadaverizes life and rediscovers in the corpse the frail, broken nervure of life."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 05, 2005 at 05:00 PM

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