Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity

by Nicolás Fernández-Medina

Overview

The concept of vital force – the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life in the body and in nature – has proved a source of endless fascination and controversy. Indeed, the question of what vitalizes the body has haunted humanity since antiquity, and became even more pressing during the Scientific Revolution and beyond. Examining the complexities and theories about vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina's Life Embodied offers a novel and provocative assessment of the question of bodily life in Spain. Starting with Juan de Cabriada's landmark Carta filosófica, médico-chymica of 1687 and ending with Ramón Gómez de la Serna's avant-gardism of the 1910s, Fernández-Medina incorporates discussions of anatomy, philosophy, science, critical theory, history of medicine, and literary studies to argue that concepts of vital force served as powerful vehicles to interrogate the possibilities and limits of corporeality. Paying close attention to how the body's capabilities were conceived and strategically woven into critiques of modernity, Fernández-Medina engages the work of Miguel Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, Diego de Torres Villarroel, Sebastián Guerrero Herreros, Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Pedro Mata y Fontanet, Ángela Grassi, Julián Sanz del Río, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja, among others. Drawing on extensive research and analysis, Life Embodied breaks new ground as the first book to address the question of vital force in Spanish modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773553378
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	05/30/2018
Series:	McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas , #77
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Nicolás Fernández-Medina is associate professor of Spanish and philosophy and co-director of the Spanish and Italian Modernist Studies Forum at Pennsylvania State University.

Table of Contents

Figures xi

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xxxiii

Introduction: Life, Critique, Modernity: Vital Force and the (Un)certainty of Science 3

Part 1 Blood, Circulation, and the Soul

1 The Heart of the Matter: Remapping the Body Economy in Juan de Cabriada's Philosophical Medico-Chemical Letter 43

2 Cartesianism and Its Discontents: Marcelino Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, and Diego de Torres Villarroel 80

Part 2 Political Reform and the Order of Nature

3 Vitalizing the Medical Revolution in Spain; or, How Sebastián Miguel Guerrero Herreros and Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga Theorized Life, Death, and Everything in Between 119

4 The Subjective Self and the Sublimity of Nature's Vital Force in Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos 158

Part 3 From Neo-Hippocratism to the Avant-Garde

5 Pursuing the Modern at the End of an Age: Positivist Materialism and the Krausist Ideal in Pedro Mata y Fontanet and Julián Sanz del Río 199

6 Degeneration, Regeneration, Corporealization: What the Lived Body Can Do According to Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna 232

Conclusion 296

Bibliography 305

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

"Life Embodied examines a variety of texts – philosophical and medical treatises, poems, novels – in great detail and navigates between discussions of Hippocratism, Cartesianism, Montpellier vitalism, Romanticism, and Avant-gardism ... Life Embodied represents a major contribution to scholarship on Spanish modernity ... It is an excellent piece of scholarship." Dale Joseph Pratt, Brigham Young University


"Life Embodied examines a variety of texts – philosophical and medical treatises, poems, novels – in great detail and navigates between discussions of Hippocratism, Cartesianism, Montpellier vitalism, Romanticism, and Avant-gardism ... Life Embodied represents a major contribution to scholarship on Spanish modernity ... It is an excellent piece of scholarship." Dale Joseph Pratt, Brigham Young University


In his fascinating diachronic interdisciplinary study of the theories of vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina revisits forgotten texts on vital force—the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life and growth in the body a


Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity es una obra sumamente recomendable para todos aquellos interesados en la historia de la ciencia, la historia de la literatura, las relaciones entre filosofía, ciencia y poder, y el desarrollo$$Nicolás Fernández-Medina's ambitious tome breaks new ground as the first monograph to examine the history of vital force in Spain. It successfully demonstrates that theories of vital force – broadly defined as 'the immanent energy that promotes the proce

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