Jean Sta­robinski: the history of medicine and the reasons of the body

Abstract

This article sketches Jean Sta­robinski’s thought on the “reasons of the body” and asks what it may say concerning certain contemporary fields of research and the history of medicine. Current “turns” – the “interoceptive”, and the “affective” or “emotional” – claim to reintegrate the body into history, the humanities, and the neurocognitive sciences. Sta­robinski’s perspective helps understand their limits. Conversely, approaching his œuvre from the vantage point of those “turns” highlights the link his critical enterprise operates between history and phenomenology, its sustained attention to the experience of the self and the consciousness of the body, and its demonstration of the inherent link between the “reasons of the body” and the expression that embodies them.