Athikte's Voice: Listening to the Voice of the Dancer in Paul Valéry's “L'âme et la danse”

Abstract

”Dance, dear body, do not think,” the message attributed to the serpent in Paul Valéry's poem “La jeune parque,” lends biblical connotations to the duality between body and mind, between dance and philosophy. A similar duality between movement and thought is found in Valéry's “L'âme et la danse” (1921), a mock Platonic dialogue in which three Greek philosophers respond to a group of dancers performing in front of them. In “L'âme et la danse” the action unfolds between the eminent philosophical figures of Socrates, Eryximachus and Phaedrus, and Athikte, a young woman dancer. More than a dialogue; it is a drama through which philosophy confronts dance, in which the philosophers, who are men, confront the dancers, who are women, and across the course of which the dancers are voiceless.In this essay, I explore a confrontation between philosophy and dance through the tension between the roles Valéry accords to men and women in philosophical discourse. Women dance, men think. Freeing the dancer from the fetters of philosophical thought is akin to liberating women from the need to bother themselves with intellectual matters. Athikte, as the voice of dance, introduces an entirely different range of philosophical issues from those which, on the surface, animate the dialogue. But, above all, Athikte illustrates how an unproductive tension between philosophy and dance can be intensified through the uncritical preservation of gendered roles within philosophical discourse.