Barbara Duden
Barbara Duden is a German feminist and medical historian. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Hannover. Her work figures significantly in the currents that established the body as a site for historical inquiry. She is one of the founders of the journal Courage, which was in publication from 1976 to 1984. The journal circulated primarily in West Berlin, where it played an extensive role in informing the women's movement.
“Faith is the substance of things unseen. (Rom. 10:17). By faith, we hold as true those things that can in no way be visualized. But one cannot see all things that can be visualized in the same light. This is a statement that was firmly held by philosophers and theologians and subscribed to by popular culture long before the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum were known. A difference was recognized between those things that can be seen by the light of the sun or the flame of a candle and those things that can show themselves on rare occasions without losing their status as members of a class of invisible beings. Some such visions may be everyday occurrences. Others are exceptions- some dreaded, some desired.”
Barbara Duden
“Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities.”
Barbara Duden
“Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality...The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown.”
Barbara Duden