Distinction Between the Naked and the Nude in Robert Graves's The Naked and the Nude - Essay Example

Michelangelo's David Anthropologists logically presume that humans originally lived without clothing as their natural state. They postulate the adaptation of animal skins and vegetation into coverings to protect the wearer from cold, heat, and rain, especially as humans migrated to new climates; alternatively, covering may have been invented first for other purposes, such as magic, cult, and prestige, and later found to be practical as well. "Adam and Eve", 1543. Engraving, by Hans Sebald BehamSome religious cosmogonies, exhibit analogous constructs; e.g. the story of Adam and Eve describes the alleged first humans after they transgress against God's rules (the original sin), being ashamed of their nakedness and making aprons of fig leaves.

Nudity itself was not the original sin, but some people take it so, perhaps explaining the taboo against it. Similar images occur on many bas-reliefs, also from other empires. In the exploration of the connotative distinctions between "naked" and "nude" in Graves' poem are buried some interesting oppositions that fit into discussions of Plato and the sophists. With each successive reading of this poem, I become more aware of the way Graves exalts a Platonic framework and yet uses sophisticated methods to make his "art.

" The oppositions for naked/nude are love/lies, truth/art, lover/traitor, medicine/showmanship, science/rhetoric, Goddess/mock-religion. So then, love and lovers, truth, medicine, science, and the gods go together (reminiscent of Phaedrus), while on the other side are those sly showmen, rhetoricians, and traitors who use lies, art, and mock religion. The sophists' "art of persuasion" takes on a decidedly deceptive tone in this reading. This description of deceptive, artistic rhetoricians (the negative connotations most of the public, most of our students, have for "rhetoric") needs to be further addressed, as does Jarratt's discussion of Nietzsche, Derrida, and women.

As she continues to create bonds between the exclusion of women and rhetoric, Jarratt said in words: For Nietzsche, Derrida observes, a woman is the figure of falsehood; we see rhetoric holding the same place for Plato. Second, for Nietzsche, a woman is a handler of truth, and as such still at a distance from the truth. Rhetoric functions similarly in Bacon (146). Third, Nietzsche affirms women herself as a power for overthrowing philosophic, hierarchical Truth. In his work on rhetoric, Nietzsche attributes to it the same capacity for overturning Truth (Blair 106-07).

Has Derrida, then, in this reading of Nietzsche, "feminized" philosophy (Spivak, "Displacement" 184) in such a way as to undo the exclusions of a woman and the sophistic earlier outlined And does rhetoric line up with "woman" as the instrument of deconstruction After posing these intriguing parallels and questions, Jarratt leaves them without an answer, moving on to how some feminists have "sought to move outside the realm of undesirability circumscribed by deconstruction" (67). More important than arguing with undesirability here is to look closely at the very place "woman" holds in the Derridean (and Nietzschean) economy and at the nature of that "woman" as an abstract that has nothing to do with the material life of a "real" woman.