Body Subject Research Articles

The body of the other: intercorporeality and the phenomenology of agoraphobia

How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the intersubjective formation of the world, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. I will be making two key claims. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, a point I shall explore with recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the prepersonal body. The implication of this claim is that evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects. Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others. Each of these claims is demonstrated via a phenomenological analysis of the agoraphobe’s interaction with others. From this analysis, I conclude that our experience of the world is affected by our experience of others precisely because we are in a bodily relation with others. Such a relation is not causally linked, as though first there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other, and world are each intertwined in a single unity and cannot be considered apart.

Allowing One’s Own Bodily Experience to “Count”: Elaborating on Inter-subjectivity and Subjectivity in Phenomenological Studies

Phenomenology, according to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, looks at human beings <em>in</em> the world. Drawing on their perspective, one could argue that inter-subjectivity, like a researcher's subjectivity, should be explicitly acknowledged in phenomenological studies. In the following pages we explore how using this approach can make findings more transparent and trustworthy. This study is based on a review of five articles focused on subjectivity and inter-subjectivity in phenomenological studies. In addition, we draw on the first author's experiences as a PhD candidate studying to become a "phenomenological" researcher.<br /> Our findings reveal that reflecting explicitly on bodily subjectivity during the research process can reveal connections between the context of the interview, how the material is created socially and textually and how the researcher utilized information from her own body in the interpretation of the material. This, in turn, is likely to make the findings more inter-subjective and transparent, and thus more trustworthy and valid. Our findings point to the value of letting one's own bodily experiences "count" in the process of determining how to explore the phenomena in question. Although the literature offers guidelines, each project and each researcher is unique. In this light, personal reflections are likely to highlight the value of critically engaging – and making explicit – the researcher's own experiences, both during and after the interview process.

Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe

This article is an attempt to demonstrate the basic weakness of gender as a theoretical concept when studying prehistoric embodiment. ‘Gender ‘is theoretically linked to ‘sex’, known as the ‘sex–gender system’. The study of past genders, in the sense of prehistoric normative roles and symbols, has decreased in interest among archaeologists, in favor of studying sex, i.e., sexual practice and orientation. This switch to sex is part of archaeologists’ endeavors to understand prehistoric bodily subjects. I will here recapitulate on the concept of gender and its serious limitations. I will furthermore try to shed light on how the turn to sex involves an encounter with almost exactly the same fallacies as did the focus on gender. As an alternative for the future, I suggest social identity and embodiment be studied under the theoretical label of ‘sexe’.

Dimensions of bodily subjectivity

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the body both within philosophical as well as cognitive scientific approaches to consciousness and cognition. An abundance of body-centric alliterative characterizations now abound throughout the literature. It is widely argued, for instance, that mind is only to be understood once we take seriously its fundamentally ecological, or situated, character. From this general orientation, we then encounter further claims: mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, and, most radically of all, extended. However, at the heart of these approaches lies the embodiment thesis. In its leanest formulation, this is the thesis that mental activity depends essentially not just on the brain but on the body as well. There is an emerging consensus that philosophical and empirical investigations of cognition must therefore begin with a consideration of the contribution of the body to our interactions with the world. But what sort of body are we talking about, exactly? If mind is essentially embodied, how are we to understand the nature of this “body” and its central role in driving mental activity? There are multiple ways of approaching this question. For instance, one may talk about the physiological body, while another may be interested in the experiential body; one may consider the functional body while Phenom Cogn Sci (2009) 8:279–283 DOI 10.1007/s11097-009-9142-6

Fenomenología y realidad virtual: el reto de un nuevo mundo

I try to study in this paper the virtual reality called SecondLife making use of the phenomenological method. For this purpose I analyze what happens in the natural attitude where reality is the factual existence here-and-now, and against which the virtual reality bears a duplication of planes: the real-real thing and my digital copy. To analyze what sustains the concept of reality it is necessary to make use of the epokhe. By means of it, we find out the relation of a bodily subject to the world, in a sense that is not given in SecondLife, a virtual universe whose zero-point is just my avatar, that is, the physical object that represents me. The paper unfolds of the consequences of this contrast.

Kitaro Nishida's Philosophy of Emptiness and its Architectural Significance

In order to reconcile the breach between the “typologist” and the “populationist” in contemporary architecture, this article discusses Kitaro Nishida's philosophy of emptiness. The article first introduces Asian artistic examples to illustrate the significance of emptiness in art. It then discusses Nishida's emptiness as the ultimate foundation of reality from which being and nonbeing coemerge. The article also summarizes three interrelated lessons from Nishida's emptiness pertaining to architecture: the dialectic of opposites, the bodily subject of immersion, and the dialectic between the ideal and the real. The article finally explicates these concepts by discussing Asian and Western architectural examples.

Mouvement sensible et corps originaire

Abstract By describing body as original power identical to transcendentallife of ego, in accordance with radical or material phenomenology, we can establish that the phenomenological truth of a bodily subjectivity is the immanence of pure self-affection. From the perspective of Michel Henry’s view, the Maine Biran and Kandinsky’s analyses show clearly that body potentiality unveils pathos linked with the entire universe and turn it into a living cosmos. This cosmic life, visible in art in general and abstract art in particular, makes us aware that this subjective reality is similar to our own inner strength, as we can clearly demonstrate it by the movement of our hand. Thus, the body itself has access to the world without being reduced to a mere instrument or transcendental mean extraneous to our innermost life.

Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance

The final installment of a continuing series on choreography considering the mutual interrogation of philosophy and dance, the articles propose a tentative ethics of dance as a “practical philosophy” under the influence of Gilles Deleuze read through specific choreographic practices. Gerald Siegmund describes his private experience of Boris Charmatz's choreographic machine as a metaphor for the entrapment of theatre and as generative of new bodily subjectivities. Introducing anthropological applications of cognitive science to the particular strategies of choreographers working in Brazil, Christine Greiner argues for a political conception of self through dance. Examining the kinetics of the face in RoseAnne Spradlin's Survive Cycle, Victoria Anderson Davies meditates on the relationship of facial expression to language, to consciousness, and to movement.

Apparatus, Attention, and the Body: The Theatre Machines of Boris Charmatz

The final installment of a continuing series on choreography considering the mutual interrogation of philosophy and dance, the articles propose a tentative ethics of dance as a “practical philosophy” under the influence of Gilles Deleuze read through specific choreographic practices. Gerald Siegmund describes his private experience of Boris Charmatz's choreographic machine as a metaphor for the entrapment of theatre and as generative of new bodily subjectivities. Introducing anthropological applications of cognitive science to the particular strategies of choreographers working in Brazil, Christine Greiner argues for a political conception of self through dance. Examining the kinetics of the face in RoseAnne Spradlin's Survive Cycle, Victoria Anderson Davies meditates on the relationship of facial expression to language, to consciousness, and to movement.

Creative Endurance and the Face Machine: RoseAnne Spradlin's Survive Cycle

The final installment of a continuing series on choreography considering the mutual interrogation of philosophy and dance, the articles propose a tentative ethics of dance as a “practical philosophy” under the influence of Gilles Deleuze read through specific choreographic practices. Gerald Siegmund describes his private experience of Boris Charmatz's choreographic machine as a metaphor for the entrapment of theatre and as generative of new bodily subjectivities. Introducing anthropological applications of cognitive science to the particular strategies of choreographers working in Brazil, Christine Greiner argues for a political conception of self through dance. Examining the kinetics of the face in RoseAnne Spradlin's Survive Cycle, Victoria Anderson Davies meditates on the relationship of facial expression to language, to consciousness, and to movement.

Researching Dance in the Wild: Brazilian Experiences

The final installment of a continuing series on choreography considering the mutual interrogation of philosophy and dance, the articles propose a tentative ethics of dance as a “practical philosophy” under the influence of Gilles Deleuze read through specific choreographic practices. Gerald Siegmund describes his private experience of Boris Charmatz's choreographic machine as a metaphor for the entrapment of theatre and as generative of new bodily subjectivities. Introducing anthropological applications of cognitive science to the particular strategies of choreographers working in Brazil, Christine Greiner argues for a political conception of self through dance. Examining the kinetics of the face in RoseAnne Spradlin's Survive Cycle, Victoria Anderson Davies meditates on the relationship of facial expression to language, to consciousness, and to movement.

Merleau-Ponty and the Bodily Subject of Learning

Merleau-Ponty and the Bodily Subject of Learning

Northward, upward: stories of train travel, and the journey towards white South African nationhood, 1895–1950

Rhodes' ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ vision was more than a road, rail and telegraph route linking the two extremities of imperially-controlled Africa; it was also an imaginary axis that gathered around it a range of cultural ‘epiphenomena’ during the early twentieth century. This paper examines one of these, accounts of the Cape-to-Rand railway journey, which first appeared in the 1890s, and became a common trope in travel-writing about South Africa until after World War II. These accounts, which appeared in everything from personal memoirs to travel books and were written by visitors as well as South Africans, helped localize and naturalize the ‘spatial story’ of imperialism during the period when South Africa was emerging as a modern, autonomous nation. A recurring set of textual strategies in these accounts rehearsed a particular bodily subjectivity towards landscape, while at the same time incorporating the new nation's physiographic regions into a historically and geographically-legible whole. The Cape-to-Rand railway journey became a discursive trope in which culturally-constructed ideas about landscape and identity were protected and saved.

Berührung und Haut

Maine de Biran (1766-1824) has rarely been thought of as a forerunner of phenomenology in German speaking countries, although mere self-apperception, which follows the primacy of practical transcendentality, surfaces in his analysis. Examining the differential lecture of the sense of touch, as well as the ‚Metaphysics of the Hand‘ by J. Derrida, the author questions his monistic premises to perceive the immediacy of any initial endeavour as a motion, which originates in the possibility of life itself. This result in combination with the sensitivity of the skin leads to a radical phenomenological description of immanent self-manifestation in the flesh, bodily subjectivity and the visibility of flesh as body.

Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. —Ralph Ellison Blackness embodies the ostracized. Under the duress of racial domination, I undergo the now familiar two-pronged process of externally imposed inferiorization and subsequent internalization of that inferiority. It is thus probable that in my routine state, I carry White hatred of me within me as my own property. —Thomas F. Slaughter When you've made a man [woman] hate himself [herself], you've really got it and gone. —Malcolm X I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials. (1998, 6) To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body—in this case, the Black body—is capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis-à-vis white embodiment. The body's meaning—whether phenotypically white or black—its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks...

Kūniškasis subjektas: Aš kaip „mano skausmas“ ir kaip „mano meilė“

The key task of my text is the justification of the use of on phenomenological model of the subject designated as a “my pain and my love”. First, such subject is seen as an alternative to the transcendental subject of the classical philosophy, which is characterized first of all as a rational subject. This rational subject is capable to give himself a generally valid rule of knowledge and action. Second, the phenomenological understanding of the subject represents a certain version of the “false consciousness”, which was developed from the “masters of the suspicion” (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche). Philosophy of the “masters” was intended to criticize the autonomy and absolutely self-determination of the rational subject and show the different forms of the conditionality on the Reason. Thirdly, the phenomenological understanding of the subject is a response to the different forms of philosophical reduction of subjectivity and self-consciousness. This response is developed in this text as a discussion with Manfred Frank. The phenomenological subject is the embodied or bodily subject. This embodiment has three dimensions (B. Waldenfels): World-relation (Weltbezug), Self-relation (Selbstbezug) and Others-relation (Fremdbezug). These dimensions allow to speak about the bodily subject as a Self, which is interpreted as my embodiment to the Other. “The I as my pain and my love” is a metaphor of this form of the Self, which means, that self-comprehension originates in the feeling of the pain and of the love, that is, in the certain experience of own body and in the act of love for this concrete Other. Such experience can be designated as a process of identification. The bodily subject as my embodiment to the Other is strongly connected with different praxis of the “socialization of the body”, which are in need of the philosophical analyses and criticism. Phenomenology proposes its own direction of criticism, which intends to justify that difference of the social and cultural praxis themselves is based on the originality of my embodiment to the Other and not vice versa. Thus the explication of the originality of the Self must be connected with the analyses and criticism of the “socialization of the body”, which includes a new non-classical ethical dimension.

Technique and Theory in the Work of Kapila Vatsyayan

As a scholar and practitioner of Bharatanatyam I would like, foremost, to express my gratitude to Kapila Vatsyayan for her comprehensive, in-depth studies of Indian classical dance forms. Her work includes attention to both distant and recent epochs in the history of Indian dance as well as to current practice. Her analysis of many divergent sources has laid the groundwork for any academic study of classical Indian dance. She not only provides an exhaustive account of Indian dance in the past and present but also interprets the relationship among aesthetic theory texts, historical dance practice, and contemporary, classical Indian choreography in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.Because the strengths of Vatsyayan's research are manifold, I restrict my consideration here to a narrow focus. Specifically, this discussion focuses on her concept of dance technique as an integral part of her analytical framework. This essay also addresses the ramifications of her methodology for current and future work in the field of dance studies. In particular, I consider how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily subject offers an important paradigm for current writings within dance scholarship, especially those that interpret dance praxis in relation to social theory (1). Moreover, I limit my attention to two of Vatsyayan's major works: Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts and Indian Classical Dance.

Bioethical Troubles: Animal Individuals and Human Organisms

Despite the good efforts of philosophers and ethicists, many of us remain vexed by the morally complex and difficult issue of the human use of animals. We humans use animals in various contexts for diverse purposes and motives: in scientific and biomedical research; in practical therapeutic situations (medical, psychological, and social); as companions in our homes and recreational pursuits; as food on our tables and economic resources on farms; as objects of scientific, aesthetic, and practical interests in zoos and aquaria; as observed, studied, hunted, and fished in the wild; and more. We have a hard time coherently thinking through these different human-animal interactions and despair over finding any one grand ethical theory or perspective that will handle all the relevant situations and satisfy all those who recognize serious moral obligations to animals, but who are animated by different moral passions and visions.(1) Yet our ethical reflections, whatever our perspectives, are particularly bedeviled by a central and crucial issue: the nature and ethical significance of animals as genuine individuals or selves.(2) Moreover, before we can get things straight and make further progress in fixing our ethical obligations to animals and wider animate nature, we must squarely face an allied and equally elusive issue. We need to understand our own human status in the world as biological, animals organisms. Animals ethics, environmental ethics, if not human bioethics in general, await an adequate understanding of animals as individuals and humans as organisms. This is a crucial step in ethically "taking together" humans, animals, and nature, which increasingly is becoming a central task of practical ethics. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A foundation for fashioning broadly comprehensive, systematic, and coherent ethical perspectives that do justice to humans, animals, and animate nature as such lies in thinking clearly about animals as genuine individuals and valuable or ethically significant in their own right and in recognizing that human beings, no matter how sophisticated their "higher" capacities, are fundamentally animals, mammalian organisms, with all that this philosophically and ethically entails. To bring together and to elucidate our ethical responsibilities to humans, animals, and animate nature, we need a common philosophic understanding of "organic individuality": its nature and ethical significance. With respect to human and animal individuals, we need to understand morally significant differences amidst morally significant similarities or commonalities. This is a daunting task given the complexity of the issue and the strong philosophic and scientific currents against which we must swim. The task calls for renewed efforts in the philosophy of nature in general and a philosophy of organic life in particular.(3) Animal and human organisms as concrete individuals--as real bodily subjects, agents, or actors carrying out their lives within the world--have had a hard time of it in modern thought, at least since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As psychophysical "ones," with an individual integrity all their own, they have been theoretically written out of the universe. We have to jog old and fundamental philosophic habits to rehabilitate them. Yet in the name of philosophic and scientific understanding and practical ethical responsibility, this is precisely what we must do. I wish briefly to consider this rehabilitation, relying heavily on the philosophic reflections of Hans Jonas and more distantly Alfred North Whitehead,(4) and then to consider the ethical implications of this rehabilitation. Metaphysical Misadventures: The Eclipse of Organic Individuals Our modern troubles importantly began with the famous and fateful bifurcation of nature effected by the "genius" scientists and philosophers of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe--the Galileos, Descarteses, and Newtons--which has dominantly influenced our Western scientific, technological, and political culture ever since. …