Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
The fragment in Le Ballet de Madame (1615) is the Androgyne ballet in which a young Louis XIII on the verge of his majority performs the role of a Hermaphrodite. The analysis reveals the complex iconography of this role with respect to the recent erasure of his succession to kingship after the death of Henri IV in 1610. The presence to social memory of the king's unmourned corpse is relived in the Hermaphrodite figure, which is also a phoenix. But, this is only possible through the sexual imbroglio of the incorporation of the patriarch's body in that of his successor, a veritable figure of melancholy in psychoanalytic terms. Hence, the hermaphrodite fragment proves important to the political imaginary of absolutism in that we can perceive that the body natural of the king is brought to the fore at the expense of the body politic. The analysis is carried forth through the study of a series of contemporary texts devoted to this ballet and the theoretical background provided by twentieth-century interpretations of baroque power: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Georgio Agamben. The king as Hermaphrodite shows the bare life of sovereignty and the embodiment of the exception, which is Carl Schmidt's answer to Benjamin's notion of allegory. Hence, the essay brings extensive historical research into dialogue with contemporary theory at the level of the analysis of theatricality as a mode of symbolic action.
Dance Research – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Oct 1, 2007
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.