Original scientific paper
TITO'S BODIES IN WORD AND IMAGE
Maja Brkljačić
; Central European University, Budapest
Abstract
According to Milovan Đilas, already during the years of World War
Two, Josip Broz Tito was perceived as standing for the constitutive
concept (brotherhood and unity) of the second Yugoslavia, then
only a state-to-be. Ultimately though he came to personify the
country itself. In order to understand what this means and what the
consequence of such developments were, the author uses the concept
of the king's two bodies as explained by Ernst Kantorowicz: king's
Body Natural and thus mortal and king's super-body or his Body
Politic. The working hypothesis of this article is that Tito stood
with his body natural for the body politic of Yugoslavia. There is a
strong case to be made that he was the only truly Yugoslav
institution. But this was not body made incorporeal, quite the
contrary: it was Tito's real, natural body that was not only the
embodiment of central power, but that, paradoxically, was the name
and the face of what was supposed to be the continuous Yugoslav
social body. Using Louis Marin's theory of representations, the
author investigates Tito's representations in several shorter
narrative segments and one pictorial image (a relief by Želimir
Janeš).
Keywords
Josip Broz Tito; history of socialism; symbolic anthropology
Hrčak ID:
33093
URI
Publication date:
9.6.2003.
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