Writing in the wake of movement: Deleuze, dance and life writing

Abstract

This article draws from the author’s dance practice to theorise embodied interventions in life writing. Through the experiments detailed in this article, a mode of memoiristic writing is found that combats challenges of eating disorder life writing with a shift toward recovering. Alongside a Groszian “new idealism”, which recognises ideality as a condition of the material and “refuses to separate materiality from or subordinate it to ideality” (2017, p. 13), this article considers the dancing body as a thinking body and follows its rhythms, forces and waves of thought. Through three “acts” of writing experimentation, the moving body intervenes in textual practice to allow a re-thinking of subjectivity and temporality in life writing. This article extends a Deleuzian account of perspective and organisation through dance, applying methods of movement to creative writing practice to offer creative intervention in the complex literary field of eating disorder life writing.