Body and Cosmos: Pasolini, Mishima, Foucault

“The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it.”—

On March 2, 1757, Robert-François Damiens, who attempted to kill King Louis XV with a penknife, was condemned as a regicide “to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris,” where he was to be “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax.” Then, “the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers … and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses” (qtd. in Foucault 1975a, 3).1

But the horses did not succeed in pulling Damiens apart:

Finally, the executioner, Samson, said to Monsieur Le Breton that there was no way or hope of succeeding, and told him to ask their Lordships if they wished him to have the prisoner cut into pieces.…

After two or three attempts, the executioner Samson and he who had used the pincers each drew out a knife from his pocket and cut the thighs where the trunk of the body ends instead of severing the legs at the joints; the four horses … carried off the two thighs after them, namely, that of the right side first, the other following;

This paper condenses parts of a book, Le corps comme miroir du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), which will be published in English translation by Free Association Books. It was written after September 11, 2001, with the hope of better understanding the minds of those who made their bodies explode, in order to shatter other bodies and change the order of the world, in the name of God.

Page 201

then the same was done to the arms, the shoulders, the arm-pits and the four limbs; the flesh had to be cut almost to the bone.…

One of the executioners … said shortly afterwards that when they had lifted the trunk to