Tito's Bodies in Word and Image
Tito's Bodies in Word and Image

Summary/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 Janeπ).

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