The Embodying of the Linguistic Turn

Abstract

The title of this paper plays on words which outline two things: firstly, that the paper finds itself within a series of proposals which seek to revise the linguistic turn in history, and secondly the paper proposes a revision based on the paradigm of embodiment, which means establishing the analysis on the concepts of body and emotion. The main objective of this paper is to promote a material turn in social sciences and, particularly, in gender history. In order to justify this, the paper carries out a revision of the linguistic turn, by analysing the theoretical needs which promoted the evolution of thought, and secondly, another revision of what has become to be called the linguistic post-turn. From this evolution the paper finds that the fundamental content to preserve is the post-metaphysical dimension that the linguistic turn introduced into the knowledge of the social, while the dependence that critical theory has on language, understood as a differential system of meaning is also questioned.