LAUSR

C an a book about bodies also be about interpretation? This, I want to argue, is the principal wager of Isaac Reed’s new book Power in Modernity and its effort to make a theoretical case for nonmechanistic action and agency and its creative reappropriation of a classical argument for the purposes of fundamentally reframing what modernity can mean. Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (orig. published 1957) is among the best known works of medieval scholarship ever published, in part because it bridges boundaries. The history profession came to be in no small part under the auspices of the state and its enlistment of historians (first in Germany) to tell its institutional history and the mythology of its personages. The 1960s revolts, among other things, proved a decisive challenge to this exclusive and exclusionary orientation, and in the intellectual efflorescence that followed, “the body” ascended to a position of importance inconceivable for historians in the 1940s and 1950s. Kantorowicz’s book remains a remarkable (and prescient) analysis, because it comprises institutional history as a history of bodies. Importantly, however, “Kantorowicz bodies” (to coin a phrase) remain distinguishable from the embodied bodies that have become a familiar point of reference for scholars in the human sciences today. Not only are Kantorowicz bodies collective bodies, they are tokens of meaning rather than materiality, though they remain material. Paradoxically, the presence of a Kantorowicz body is also less than metaphysical. Abiding in some in-between purgatory, Kantorowicz bodies remain immediately present and immediately absent, a corpus mysticum, abounding in (political) theological subtlety. Reed’s book draws from Kantorowicz’s analysis for both titular purposes (catchy wordsmithing) and also to make a theoretical intervention into a basic conceptual problem: namely, how can collective formations form without relying