LINGUISTIC COUSINS OF THE ENGLISH BODY POLITIC: CORPS POLITIqUE

AND CORPS SOCIAL, STAATSKöRPER – VOLKSKöRPER, NATIONALER KöRPER

Linguistic expressions of the metaphorical concept of the state as a (human) body are in principle “translatable” across all languages in the sense that they can be paraphrased if necessary but the respective lexical units do not stand in a 1:1 rela-tionship. French and German, for instance, each have several terms or phrases instead of one idiomatically fixed construction such as body politic. In present-day French political discourse we find two lexical variants of the nation-body metaphor, i.e. corps politique and corps social:

(2) Mitterrand à Sarkozy: une irrésistible érosion de la fonction présidentielle et du corps politique (Le Monde, 5 March 2011) [‘From Mitterrand to Sarkozy – an unstoppable decline of the presidential office and the body politic (= ‘political system’)’; headline of an article on the alleged loss of significance of republican institutions in France, translation of this and following examples by AM, unless otherwise indicated]

(3) La classe politique, droite libérale et gauche socialiste confondues, a mal-mené depuis plus de vingt-cinq ans le vieux corps social français. (Le Figaro, 9 November 2010) [‘The political classes, both the (neo-)liberal right and the socialist left, have mismanaged the ageing body politic of French society’]

The meanings of corps politique and corps social are evidently closely related: in the cited texts the social and political systems are thought of as interactive categories;

however, they are not identical. Both (2) and (3) have politics as their topic, and the political agents/institutions in France as the target referent of the state-as-body metaphor, but example (4) also hints at a kind of responsibility of the corps politique for the larger corps social (i.e., the whole of society).

In German, on the other hand, there are not two but at least three terminological and semantic variants:

(4) So wie es den Körper des Staates à la longue zu bessern galt, galt es über den individuellen Körper zu triumphieren. (Die Zeit, 1 September 2009) [‘Just as it was necessary to improve the body of the state/body politic in the long term, the individual body needed reforming.’]

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(5) [Theaterkritiker] sprechen vom „Bühnenkörper” und vom „nationalen Körper” – Gesellschaft ist der große Leib, über den sich das Theater beugt. (Die Zeit, 19 May 2005) [‘Theatre critics speak of the “stage body” and the “national body” – society’s great body is being scrutinised by theatre’]

(6) Kein Atom im Volkskörper [headline] Die Anti-AKW-Bewegung in österreich streitet derzeit heftig. Denn einige Gruppen und die Landesregierung pflegen einen unkritischen Umgang mit rechtsextremen Umweltschützern.

(Jungle World, Austrian magazine, 25 August 2011) [‘No nuclear pollution of the people’s body! The anti-nuclear movement in Austria is divided on account of some of its members befriending right-wing extremists; the headline indicates the latter’s stance’]

Körper des Staates (state body), nationaler Körper (national body) and Volkskörper (people’s body) are, of course, etymologically, morphologically and semantically closely related but by no means exchangeable. The first phrase, Körper des Staates, which dates back to the 17th century, seems to be the most “neutral”, ideologically unmarked expression that targets any kind of political (state) entity, as does its morphological variant, Staatskörper.4 The second variant, „nationaler Körper”, appears to be rare (just one occurrence in a German sample of 154 texts) and its meaning comes close to that of French corps social. Volkskörper, on the other hand, is a highly marked form: 90% of its occurrences in the German sample refer to extreme right-wing discourses, i.e. either topical ones as in (6) or, historically, to Nazi-jargon, in which the term was of central importance for the ‘justification’

of genocidal anti-Semitic ideology and policy (by depicting Jews as parasites on the German people’s body).5 In several cases, the mention of the term Volkskörper is used to suggest that those who use the term currently in an affirmative sense are at least comparable, if not politically and ethically equivalent, to the Nazis.6 Volkskörper is thus not at all a semantic equivalent to body politic or corps politique, and its uncommented translation into these English and French terms would be misleading. Rather, the corpus evidence suggests that its meaning in current-day

4 Musolff 2010a: 122–128. Staatskörper seems to be used more frequently than the phrase Körper des Staates; the magazine Der Spiegel (11/2007), described ancient Germanic tribes as ‘tumors on the state body of the Roman Empire’ (“Geschwüre im Staatskörper von Rom”).

5 Musolff 2010a: 23–68.

6 See for instance, K. Rutschky who characterized present-day German debates about demographic decline as echoing Nazi-propaganda, betraying an ‘injured soul in the sick people’s body’ (“Im kranken Volkskörper steckt eine verletzte Seele”, Die Welt, 11 April 2006) or the “Green” politician, D. Cohn-Bendit who criticized the conservative politician J. Schönbohm for holding up the ideal of an ‘homo-geneous people’s body’, as ‘kindling the fire of interethnic conflict’ (“Wer die Homogenität eines deut-schen Volkskörpers ins Feld führt, der gießt öl ins Feuer der Ghettos”, Die Zeit, 18 June 1998).

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German incorporates an historical index that links it to the public memory of Nazi language use.7

It could be argued that Volkskörper is a special case that relates to a unique historical event that is still to some extent in living memory, and that it is there-fore untypical for the historical development of metaphors. What one might call the “discourse history” of consciously known meaning changes may be assumed to persist for two-three generations at most, so that the “Nazi stigma” of some vocabulary would be expected to disappear over the coming decades (with differ-ences across specific discourse communities, e.g. it could be expected to persist longer in German-speaking communities and perhaps in Israel than elsewhere).

However, that still leaves the other differences in usage to explain. How should we motivate, for instance, the terminological bifurcation of corps social and corps politique in French and the close semantic relationship between the two? A fur-ther example of French discourse usage can perhaps help us here: in 2005, the newspaper Libération published an article by the writer Philippe Boisnard that highlighted the metaphor in its title: “Le corps politique, un malade à la recherche de sa thérapie” (‘The body politic: a sick man in search of a therapy’). The following text, “Il est urgent que l’État français comprenne la société qui s’est transformée et autonomisée” (‘It is of the greatest urgency that the French state understands the society which has transformed and become more autonomous’) indicates the target-topic, i.e. a perceived lack of reform in the political system that would match changes in modern French society. Later on, Boisnard indicates the origins of this conceptual link:

(7) Il est commun […] de penser la dimension politique à l’image d’un corps, il n’y aurait qu’à relire Rousseau, dans Du contrat social, […] Cette métaphore […] suppose que ce corps soit dirigé par une seule unité intentionnelle […]

et que tous les membres de la société ne soient plus considérés que comme organes de celui-ci (Libération, 8 May 2005) [‘It is usual to think of the political sphere in terms of the image of a body; you only have to re-read Rousseau’s Social Contract. This metaphor (pre-)supposes that the whole body is directed by one unity of intention and that all members of society are to be considered its organs.’]

It is impossible to provide a detailed discussion of Rousseau’s philosophy of state and society here but one quotation from his famous work of 1762 may be quoted that seems to support Boisnard’s interpretation:

7 For the enduring impact of such memory on public discourse in Germany and Austria see Eitz – Stötzel 2007.

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(8) Comme la nature donne à chaque homme un pouvoir absolu sur tous ses membres, le pacte social donne au corps politique un pouvoir absolu sur tous les siens, et c’est ce même pouvoir qui, dirigé par la volonté générale, porte […]

le nom de souveraineté. (Du Contrat social, Book 2, Chapter 3, [‘Just as nature gives each man absolute power over all his limbs, the social pact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members; and […] it is the same power, directed by the general will, that bears the name of sovereignty’]8

If we follow Boisnard’s interpretation, the relationship between ‘political’ and

‘social bodies’ that seems to underlie in the French examples (2) and (3) cited earlier may be viewed as being inherited historically from the theoretical framework of the great enlightenment thinker. Such an explication does not entail that every politician or journalist who uses corps politique or corps social today must be aware of the origin of these terms in Rousseau’s philosophy. However, it is still plausible to assume that thanks to Rousseau’s prominent role in French education and public discourse these terms and their conceptual relationship have become commonplace and may be seen as an extension of a discourse tradition that started in the Enlightenment.