The emerging field of the philosophy of dance, as suggested by Aili Bresnahan, increasingly recognizes the problem that (especially pre‐modern) dance has historically focused on bodily perfection, which privileges abled bodies as those that can best make and perform dance as art. One might expect that the philosophy of dance, given the critical and analytical powers of philosophy, might be helpful in illuminating and suggesting ameliorations for this tendency in dance. But this (...) is particularly a difficult task since the analytic philosophy of dance is too young to have achieved a comprehensive treatment of dance per se, let alone to update such a treatment in line with the demands of social justice. As a step in that direction, the present article (a) summarizes dance theorists on disabled dance (as opposed to the dance of the temporarily able‐bodied, or TAB) and then applies (b) the philosophy of art and dance to disability, (c) the philosophy of disability to dance, (d) interdisciplinary disability theory to dance, and (e) my own Figuration philosophy of dance to disability, as inspired in part by John Dewey. (shrink)

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; (...) “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead and Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes wonder whether academic work can ever be truly interdisciplinary. Whether true interdisciplinarity is possible is an open question, but given current trends in higher education, it seems that at least gesturing toward such work is increasingly important. This volume serves as a testament to the fact that such work can be done. Of course, while it is the case that high-level theoretical work can flourish at the intersection of dance and philosophy, it remains to be seen (...) how we might share this with undergraduate students. For many of us in philosophy and dance, a large number of the students we teach are neither philosophy nor dance majors. As such, we are familiar with the challenge of convincing our students to care about our fields. Both philosophy and dance, qua disciplines on a college campus, face similar challenges. These disciplines are often deeply misunderstood, frequently presumed to be “impractical” (a powerful, but confused objection), intimidating, and frivolous. In this chapter, we offer an account of the course we co-taught at Southern Utah University in the Spring of 2016 titled “Movement and Space” as a rough framework for how to introduce the intersection between philosophy and dance to students. We simultaneously attempted to break students of their misconceptions about philosophy and dance, and worked to engage students and professors alike in a truly interdisciplinary educational experience. Treating philosophy as an embodied endeavor, and employing philosophical concepts through the act of dance encouraged students and faculty alike to rethink the fundamental nature of aesthetics. (shrink)

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter (...) in the dance studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today. (shrink)

According to the “Embodied Cognition” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark’s Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science’s (...) overemphasis on cognition to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists (including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Fanon), I channel this tension in 4E cognitive science into a dancing partnership with human science psychology, suggesting three “choreographic provocations” for therapeutic practice and psychological research, namely (1) treating clients/subjects as dancers, (2) reimagining research and therapy as improvised duets between practitioners and clients/subjects, and (3) pursuing an ideal of freer movement and an emergent flourishing singularity for clients/subjects. Finally, I reformulate these three choreographic provocations in terms of my new theoretical method of “dancing-with,” as well as the four psychological prerequisites for flourishing posited by my figuration philosophy of dance. (shrink)

How partners encounter each other plays a role in whether they will be able to sustain their interaction. How partners go about maintaining their interaction reveals features of their epistemological system, particularly with respect to factors like what they know, what they take to be relevant to the interpretation, and what they value. In this way, the value system (what partners want) and the epistemological system (what partners know) intersect. By focusing on the role of reasoning and understanding, I believe (...) we stand to gain a clearer picture of how expectations about interactions inform the dynamics between partners. This, in turn, affords a picture of what partners can actually achieve in and through their connection. I am particularly interested in considering what features of interaction are necessary for maximizing the affordances of the partnership. I say this not as a utilitarian interested in maximizing good simpliciter, but as a social epistemologist thinking about the contingent goods that are present in relation (e.g. care). The epistemic picture assumes that there are things that are knowable in dancing together, while the ethical picture assumes that partners are responsible for the things they ought to know. -/- . (shrink)

This article attempts to answer a question that many dancers and non-dancers may have. What is dance according to the media? Furthermore, how does the written word portray dance in the media? To answer these ques-tions, this research focuses on the role that the discourse of dance in media plays in the public sphere’s knowledge construction of dance. This is impor-tant to study because the public sphere’s meaning of dance will determine whether dance education (...) is promoted or banned in schools and in society. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature of dance in the media. One limitation of this contribution is that the research uses only newspaper articles as a source of analysis. Future research should include an analysis of visual and audio clips of dance as portrayed in the media. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark’s theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world. I claim here that while a dance performer’s improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and (...) nervous system that this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how this agency acquires its artistic nature. This account thus contributes to the philosophy of improvisation in dance performance in a way that includes motor as well as cognized intentions. (shrink)

Dance can be appreciated from all sorts of perspectives: For instance, by the dancer while dancing, by the choreographer while watching in the wings, by the musician in the orchestra pit who accompanies the dance, or by the loved-one of a dancer who watches while hoping that the dancer performs well and avoids injury. This essay will consider what it takes to appreciate dance from the perspective of a seated, non-moving audience member. A dance appreciator in (...) this position is typically someone who can hear and see, who can feel vibrations of sound through their skin, and who can have other human, kinaesthetic responses and perceptions as well as the cognitive ability to process them. This appreciator is also someone who is a person with a history that may or may not include experiences of dance that have conditioned his or her responses to watching dance. Based on both this experience, and the skill and capacity to focus, pay attention, make judgments, and convey those judgments, there are different types and levels of audience appreciation. This essay will consider three: 1. Innocent Eye Appreciation, 2. Dance-Trained Appreciation, and 3. Critical Appreciation. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new theoretical method, which I call “dancing-with,” emerging from the process of writing my dissertation and the book manuscript that followed it. Defined formally, a given theorist X can be said to “dance-with” with a second theorist Y insofar as X “choreographs” an interpretation of Y which is both true to Y and Y’s historical communities, and also meaningful and actionable (i.e. facilitating social justice) for X and X’s historical communities. In this pursuit, the method (...) of dancing-with involves both (1) a creative “torsion” of Y’s thought (particularly in the direction of unconscious, embodied and political factors at work in Y’ texts), and (2) a resultant, sympathetic torsion of X’s thought toward Y. In other words, X and Y “meet in the middle,” like two dancers walking onto the dance floor, to explore the promise of a flourishing artistic partnership. In this partnership, each must attend to the way that political meanings are inscribed on the other’s raced/sexed/etc. body, both to react maximally justly, and to maximize the aesthetic movement options that can be brought into play. As the method of dancing-with is thus modeled on an ideal comportment for improvisational social dance (such as the contemporary Latin dance called “salsa”), I envision the end-goal of dancing-with as what I call “poetic social justice.” By this, I mean the “poetic justice” of two theorists’ mutually empowering each other for maximal social good. Though this process is admittedly more difficult between some theorists, in part as a function of their respective embodiments and sociohistorical positions, at least a move or two together is always possible. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: This article is part of a larger project in which I suggest a historically informed philosophy of dance, called “figuration,” consisting of new interpretations of canonical philosophers. Figuration consists of two major parts, comprising (a) four basic concepts, or “moves”—namely, “positure,” “gesture,” “grace,” and “resilience”—and (b) seven types, or “families” of dance—namely, “concert,” “folk,” “societal,” “agonistic,” “animal,” “astronomical,” and “discursive.” This article is devoted to the first of these four moves, as illustrated by both its (...) importance for Aristotle and also its applicability to these seven families of dance. One goal of figuration as a whole, and the central goal of this excerpt from that larger project, is to model and justify a dancing aesthetic education pursuant to psychological and political flourishing. (shrink)

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

Part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves,” this essay concerns the third Move, “grace.” The etymology of the word “grace” reveals the entwined meanings of pleasing quality and authoritative power, which may be combined as “beautiful force.” I examine the treatments of grace in German philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who understands it as playful, naive transformation of matter; and in American philosopher John Dewey, (...) for whom it represents rhythmic organism/environment reversal. I conclude by showing how “grace” can be used in analyzing various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

I argue that when we use email, text messaging, or social media websites such as Facebook to interact, rather than communicating face-to-face, we do not experience the best kind of empathy, which is most conducive to experiencing benevolence for others. My arguments rely on drawing interdisciplinary connections between sources: early modern accounts of sympathy, dance theory, philosophy of technology, and neuroscience/psychology. I reflect on theories from these disciplines which, taken together, suggest that to empathize optimally, we must see (...) or hear each other’s bodily gestures, vocal intonations, and facial expressions. (shrink)

In the present article, the first section recapitulates my “figuration” philosophy of dance, the “dancing-with” interpretive method derived therefrom, and my previous application of figuration to salsa dance as a decolonizing gestural discourse. The second section deepens and modifies this analysis through a reinterpretation of Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau’s concept of hegemony and his dance-resonant interpretations of Derrida. And the final section offers a template for this hegemonic dancing-with in the Birmingham, Alabama Latin dance troupe, (...) Corazon de Alabama (Heart of Alabama), as a new strategy for decolonizing and reconstructing social justice. (shrink)

Though Arthur Danto has long been engaged with issues of embodiment in art and beyond, neither he nor most of his interlocutors have devoted significant attention to the art form in which art and embodiment most vividly intersect, namely dance. This article, first, considers Danto’s brief references to dance in his early magnum opus, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Second, it tracks the changes in Danto’s philosophy of art as evidenced in his later After the End of (...) Art and The Abuse of Beauty. And finally, it utilizes Danto’s most recent work on the philosophy of action to suggest a new Danto-inspired definition of art, namely "apposite bodies.". (shrink)

This essay—part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves”—concerns the second Move, “gesture,” the etymology of which reveals its close connection to the Greek word “metaphor.” More specifically, I examine the treatments of gesture by the philosophers George Herbert Mead and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, both of whom view it as the foundation of language. I conclude by showing how gesture can be used (...) in analyzing various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

This article is part of a larger project that explores how to channel people’s passion for popular arts into legal social justice by reconceiving law as a kind of poetry and justice as dance, and exploring different possible relationships between said legal poetry and dancing justice. I begin by rehearsing my previous new conception of social justice as organismic empowerment, and my interpretive method of dancing-with. I then apply this method to the following four “ethico-political choreographies of justice”: the (...) choral dance of souls qua winged chariot-teams, a dancingly beautiful friendship with the community, a tightrope-dance of the cool, and humans dancingly reimagined as positioned actors in fluidly moving groups. I then synthesize these analyses into “dancing justice,” defined as the dynamic equilibrium sustained by a critical mass of a community’s members comporting themselves like social dancers. (shrink)

The structure of my investigation is as follows. I will begin with Schopenhauer’s very brief explicit mention of dance, and then try to understand the exclusion of dance from his extended discussion of the individual arts. Toward this latter end I will then turn to Francis Sparshott essay, which situates Schopenhauer’s thought in terms of Plato’s privileging of dance (in the Laws) as the consummate participatory art, and which observes that Schopenhauer’s dance is that of Shiva, (...) lord of death. In light of these two moments, I will then offer a brief examination of the Laws’ account of dance, and two essays by Avanthi Meduri’s on classical Indian dance. Next, to help explain Schopenhauer’s negative position vis-à-vis Plato and Vedantic thought, I will invoke Schopenhauer’s own conception of madness qua disconnection. Finally, I will attempt to cure this “madness” in Schopenhauer—as Wendy did for Peter Pan when he lost his shadow and could not reattach it himself—by sewing together Schopenhauer’s conceptions of embodiment and music, and in effect reattaching the shadow to the body of Schopenhauer’s position on dance using the thread of his own philosophy. In short, I will show how even a thought as life-denying as Schopenhauer’s can—with the help of dance—overcome itself into life-affirmation. (shrink)

In this article the author concentrates on the use of Indigenous Religion among the Akuapem in Ghana for the construction of their group identity. She discusses the way in which the Akuapem make use of the celebration of an annual indigenous religious festival (Odwira) to strengthen their group identity by self-identification, differentiation and the perception of other cultural groups. Her specific focus is on the common Asante-Akuapem history, the foundation of the Akan Golden Stools, akom dancing and the Odwira festival (...) procession and Durbars. She concludes that Indigenous Religion should not be left out in the study of the construction of group identities in the social sciences. (shrink)

Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, first published in French in 2011, the present essay turns to another book originally published in the same year, The Intervals of Cinema. Having previously established that the core of Rancière’s philosophical method is an analysis of philosophical homonyms into figurative dancing conceptual partners, I begin by applying that method to the first chapter (...) of Intervals, “Cinematic Vertigo: Hitchcock to Vertov and Back.” There I identify two series of such dancing partners, as follows: Hitchcock’s image-controlling, capitalist vertiginous fall, and Vertov’s movement-equalizing, communist balanced dance. I then critique the implicit marginalizing of women and female bodies in the films and chapter, including Hitchcock’s protagonist’s best friend and ex-fiancé, and Vertov’s cosmetologists and switchboard operators. Finally, I offer a corrective from the proto-feminist life of my grandmother, a onetime cosmetologist, switchboard operator, and Glamour Shots amateur model, my grandmother, Louise Nunnelley, or “Mamaw.” Such are the unacknowledged material basis of Rancière’s radical democratic philosophy, the specifically-embodied and positioned female dancers who continue to get lost in his figurative dance. (shrink)

Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality vis-à-vis Appadurai’s “global ethnoscapes” as frames, I argue for a techno-cultural dimension which brought forth the phenomenon of the “dancing inmates,” an argument against the charge of Filipino colonial mimicry of a Hollywood popular entertainment. Albeit the inmates’ dance routines indeed depict Foucault’s “docile bodies” in his analysis of the modern prison, as pointed out by critics, I am inclined to show how the internet mediation through social media networks awakened a culturally imbibed (...) class='Hi'>dance and musical character trait vis-à-vis the jolly cultural disposition of Filipinos. Thus, I view these characteristics as existential responses, hence, ‘creative resilience,’ to the inhuman incarcerating conditions of the prison life through using the art of dance with the aid of media technology. I argue on the role of the internet as the prisoners’ avenue to the outside world that was strategically deprived of them as a form of punishment, and the role of the internet as their last frontier to freedom and to realize their human potentials. (shrink)

This essay is part of a larger project in which I construct a new, historically-informed, social justice-centered philosophy of dance, centered on four central phenomenological constructs, or “Moves.” This essay in particular is about the fourth Move, “resilience.” More specifically, I explore how Judith Butler engages with the etymological aspects of this word, suggesting that resilience involves a productive form of madness and a healthy form of compulsion, respectively. I then conclude by showing how “resilience” can be used (...) in the analysis of various Wittgensteinian “families” of dance, which in turn could facilitate positive educational changes in philosophy, dance and society, with particular efficacy on the axis of gender. In brief, by teaching a conception of strength as vulnerability (instead of machismo’s view of strength as apathetic “toughness”), a pedagogy of dancing resilience provides additional support for feminists (including Anzaldúa, Haraway, Butler and Concepción) who advocate a cautious openness toward seemingly-unlikely resources and allies (including analytic methodologies, Machiavellian politics, and the discourses of the natural sciences). (shrink)

The upshot of this article is that dance functions in Irigaray’s work in the following three ways: as (1) a symbol of a more positive comportment for heterosexual relationships; (2) an indication that the ambivalence in Irigaray’s work is self-consciously strategic; and (3) an example that teases apart the concepts of negative and positive mimesis, specifically by fleshing out the latter. More concisely, dance constitutes a figure of positive ambivalence (whether between heterosexual lovers, participants in a philosophical dialogue, (...) or aspects of a concept) as self-mimetic, curved silvering in the pursuit of social justice. (shrink)

Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field to support the alignment and retrieval of data of distributed provenance. Here we focus on new ontological work on dance and on related cultural phenomena belonging to what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage.” Currently data and information about dance, including video data, are stored in an uncontrolled variety of ad hoc ways. This serves not only to prevent retrieval, comparison and analysis of the data, but may also impinge on (...) our ability to preserve the data that already exists. Here we explore recent technological developments that are designed to counteract such problems by allowing information to be retrieved across disciplinary, cultural, linguistic and technological boundaries. Software applications such as the ones envisaged here will enable speedier recovery of data and facilitate its analysis in ways that will assist both archiving of and research on dance. (shrink)

In recent years, the notion of the body schema has been widely discussed, in particular in fields connecting philosophy, cognitive science, and dance studies, as it seems to have bearing across disciplines in a fruitful way. A main source in this literature is Shaun Gallagher’s distinction between the body schema – the “pre-noetic” conditions of bodily performance – and the body image – the body as intentional object –, another is Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the living body, that Gallagher (...) often draws upon. In this paper, I will first discuss Gallagher’s presumed clarification of body schema–body image, and discuss a recent critique by Saint Aubert (2013), who evaluates it against the backdrop of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on this issue. While I believe that Saint Aubert’s criticism overshoots the mark, it is useful for a clarification of Gallagher’s analysis and points to a problematic feature, namely the alleged inscrutability of the body schema to phenomenological reflection. This is particularly interesting in relation to contemporary dance and performance practice, where working with – and against – habitual structures is a core element. Certain contemporary training techniques are explicitly aimed at raising awareness of those bodily aspects that condition movement and expression – that Gallagher sees as pertaining to the body schema – and that in ordinary activities often remain hidden. In order to clarify the role that reflection on our own body and its habitual patterns plays in contemporary dance practice, I will examine the movement language and improvisation practice “Gaga”, where this aspect is arguably fundamental. (shrink)

This paper argues that twentieth-century philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’ innovative concept of imagination is closely related to his treatments of dance. More specifically, it revolves around his concept of “figure,” which thereby suggests a productive partnership with my own philosophy of dance, which I call “Figuration.” The first and second sections below review the interpretations of Castoriadis’ imagination in the two book manuscripts on him in English, Jeff Klooger’s Psyche, Society Autonomy (which supplements Castoriadis with Fichte) and Suzi (...) Adams’ Castoriadis’ Ontology (which supplements him with hermeneutics). My final section defends Castoriadis against these two critical supplements through a close reading of his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society. There I re-choreograph Castoriadis’ use of the Freudian concept of “leaning on” (Anlehnung, from the Greek anaclisis) as “bending back” (anaclasis, following Klooger’s misspelling of anaclisis). In short, the imagination is like a dancer, bending back to nature understood as “the region which resists” (to varying degrees) the social. (shrink)

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations constitutes an important source and subject for Michel Foucault’s 1981 lectures at the Collège de France, translated into English as Hermeneutics of the Subject. One recurring theme in these lectures is the deployment by Hellenistic/Roman philosophers such as Aurelius of the practice and figure of dance. Inspired by this discussion, the present essay offers a close reading of dance in the Meditations, followed by a survey of the secondary literature on this subject. Overall, I will (...) attempt to show that, despite Aurelius’s self-consciously critical comportment toward dance, dance nevertheless performs a critical function in the construction of what I will term his “political ethics.” This political ethics, I will argue, is composed of an ethics of patient tolerance funded by the generosity that flows from the micro-political power generated by cultivating the god that Aurelius identifies within each of us. (shrink)

In the first section of this essay, I offer a brief overview of Hegel’s dozen or so mentions of dance in his Lectures on Aesthetics, focusing on the tension between Hegel’s denigration of dance as an “imperfect art” and his characterization of dance as a potential threat to the other arts. In the second section, I turn to an insightful essay from Hans-Christian Lucas on Hegel’s “Anthropology,” focusing on his argument that the Anthropology’s crucial final sections threaten (...) to undermine Hegel’s entire philosophy. And in the final section, I offer my own reading of the Anthropology, connecting the threads of my previous two sections. More specifically, I attempt to show that Hegel has in effect quarantined dance in what he terms “the dark regions” of madness in “The Feeling Soul.” Overall, I suggest that this quarantining is ultimately as problematic for Hegel as it has been for dance. Because without dance, complete with its associations with people disempowered in their embodiment, this crucial transitional section in the Anthropology remains burdened with a corporeal remainder that problematizes the entire system. Put simply, Hegel must – by his own logic – learn to dance gracefully with those he would rather shun. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha, a postcolonial scholar influenced by the work of Franz Fanon and Edward Said, indicates that identities stimulate a need to negotiate in spaces that result in the remaking of boundaries. There is a call to expose the limitations of the East and the West in an effort to acknowledge the space in-between that interconnects the past traditions and history, with the present and the future. This study applies Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to determine whether the term liturgical (...) is appropriate to describe Kuchipudi Indian classical Hindu dance. Presented are the elements of Kuchipudi dance and liturgical dance, and then contemplative dance is discussed as an appropriate medium in the space of hybridity between Kuchipudi dance and liturgical dance. (shrink)

Contemplative pedagogy is necessary in the dance world because it can be a very dangerous place without it. Dance students who aim to sustain the so-called “right”body image too often develop a physical obsession that leads to dangers like bulimia and anorexia. Moreover, the stresses of performing on stage, combined with other pressures of daily life, may overwhelm dancers to the point where they might feel depressed or even suicidal. Thus, it is vital to develop a pedagogy that (...) thinks about not only the physical but also the spiritual well-being of dancers. The application of mindfulness as a pedagogical tool that focuses on physical and spiritual wellness is ideal in this regard. (shrink)

A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an interpretive duet (...) between Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies. (shrink)

In this article, I build on my recent conceptions of law as poetry and of justice as dance by articulating three new conceptions of the relationship between law and justice. In the first, “poetry-based justice”, justice consists of a rigid choreography to a kind of musical recitation of the law’s poetry. In the second, “dancing-based law”, justice consists of spontaneous, freely improvised movement patterns that the poetry of the law tries to capture in a kind of musical notation. And (...) in the third, “reciprocal-legal justice”, justice and law consist of a reciprocally determining artistic collaboration between the democratic dancing masses and the aristocratic poetising elites. Given that each of these predominates in one of three types of community, I then present a reclassification of right-leaning, centrist and leftist societies as dominated by “literalist”, “kinetic” and “mutualist” communities (respectively), and offer suggestions for legislators and activists working in each type. In conclusion, law and justice, qua poetry and dance, become more flexible, inclusive and open to creative improvising and collaboration, a new form that I name, after Astraea, Greek goddess of divine justice, “astral legal justice”. (shrink)

A World of Muscle, Bone & Organs: Research and Scholarship in Dance is an e-book exploring contemporary ideas and themes in the research and practice of dance. It contains 23 chapters written by researchers at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, and is divided into six sections: Spaces of Practice, Philosophy, Communities, Politics, Data and Thinking, and Epistemology.

The central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student’s seeing beyond the finger to its gesture. Gesture’s role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance (...) of the Mani Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice. (shrink)

I argue that in Sheridan Hough's book Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector, the distinctive and novelistic literary form is not a playful, whimsical, or otherwise contingent feature, but a structure that's needed to convey the account of Kierkegaardian faith as practical in nature.

Philosophy has long either dismissed or paid only minimal attention to creativity, and even with the rise of research on imagination, the creative imagination has largely been ignored as well. The aim of this volume is to correct this neglect. By bringing together existing research in various sub-disciplines, we also aim to open up new avenues of research. The chapters in Part I provide some framing and history on the philosophical study of imagination and creativity, along with an overview (...) of the empirical literature. Part II explores imagination and creativity as they manifest in, and in turn shape, the individual. Part III surveys the role of imagination and creativity across a wide variety of artistic domains, and the chapters of Part IV turn to societal domains. Part V focuses on the interplay of imagination and creativity with regard to particular features of creative subjects and different kinds of creative subjects. *** -/- Part I: Theories and Approaches 1. Theories of Imagination (Peter Kung) 2. Theories of Creativity (Julia Langkau) 3. Historical Treatments of Imagination in the Western Tradition (Lucia Oliveri) 4. Historical Treatments of Creativity in the Western Tradition (Elliot Paul) 5. Non-Western Treatments of Imagination (Reza Hadisi and Jing Iris Hu) 6. Non-Western Treatments of Creativity (Nicolas B. Verger and Vlad Glăveanu) 7. Empirical Treatments of Imagination and Creativity (Dustin Stokes) 8. Experimental Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (Michael T. Stuart) 9. The Relationship between Imagination and Creativity (Margherita Arcangeli) -/- Part II: Imagination and Creativity in Mind and Action 10. Imagination, Creativity, and Skill (Amy Kind) 11. Imagination, Creativity, and Attention (Bence Nanay) 12. Imagination, Creativity, and Agency (Caterina Moruzzi) 13. Imagination, Creativity, and Emotion (Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni) 14. Imagination, Creativity, and Embodiment (Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and María Jimena Clavel Vázquez) 15. Imagination, Creativity, and Gender (Luke Roelofs) 16. Imagination, Creativity, and Race (Nicholas Whittaker) 17. Imagination, Creativity, and Child Development (Thalia Goldstein, Anna Sofia Caruso, Darian Stapleton, and Lamin Fatty) -/- Part III: Imagination and Creativity in the Arts 18. Imagination, Creativity, and the Visual Arts (Claire Anscomb) 19. Imagination, Creativity, and Music (Matteo Ravasio) 20. Imagination, Creativity, and Fiction (Hannah H. Kim) 21. Imagination, Creativity, and Dance (David Davies and Anna Pakes) 22. Imagination, Creativity, and the Culinary Arts (Patrik Engisch) 23. Imagination, Creativity, and Film (Murray Smith) 24. Imagination, Creativity, and Acting (Tzachi Zamir) 25. Imagination, creativity, and fashion (Laura T. Di Summa) -/- Part IV: Imagination and Creativity in Society 26. Imagination and Creativity in the Scientific Realm (Alice Murphy) 27. Imagination and Creativity in the Moral Realm (Tim Mulgan) 28. Imagination and Creativity in the Political Realm (Avshalom Schwartz) 29. Imagination and Creativity in the Law (Maksymilian Del Mar) 30. Imagination and Creativity in the Religious Realm (Neil Van Leeuwen) 31. Imagination and Creativity in Business (Eric Peterson) 32. Imagination and Creativity in Times of Crisis (Jennifer Fraser and Noah Stemeroff) Part V: Emerging Issues in Imagination and Creativity Research 33. Imagination, Creativity, and Aphantasia (Andrea Blomkvist) 34. Imagination, Creativity, and Neurodivergence (Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa) 35. Imagination, Creativity, and Non-Human Animals (Henry Shevlin) 36. Imagination, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence (Peter Langland-Hassan) 37. Collective Imagination and Collective Creativity (Nick Wiltsher) . (shrink)

The relationship between the One and the Multiple in mystic philosophy is a profound and central theme that explores the nature of existence, the cosmos, and the divine. This theme is present in various mystical traditions, including those of the East and West, and it addresses the paradoxical coexistence of the unity and multiplicity of all things. -/- In mystic philosophy, the **One** often represents the ultimate reality, the source from which all things emanate and to which all (...) things return. It is the absolute, the infinite, and the unchanging. The One is beyond all attributes and is often associated with the divine or the absolute truth. -/- The **Multiple**, on the other hand, represents the manifest world, the diversity of forms, and the realm of change and plurality. It is the world we experience through our senses, the domain of time and space, where differentiation and individuality are apparent. -/- The relationship between the One and the Multiple is not one of opposition but of emanation and unity. The Multiple is seen as a reflection, expression, or manifestation of the One. In this sense, the diversity of the world doesn’t contradict the unity of the One but rather demonstrates it in a myriad of forms. -/- Mystics seek to understand and experience this relationship through various practices and insights. They aim to transcend the illusion of separation and duality to experience the non-dual reality where the One and the Multiple are recognized as inseparable. -/- This concept can be illustrated by the metaphor of the ocean and its waves. The ocean represents the One—vast, deep, and all-encompassing—while the waves represent the Multiple—distinct, diverse, and ever-changing. Each wave is unique, yet it is not separate from the ocean. The wave’s existence is dependent on and made of the same substance as the ocean. In the same way, each individual entity in the Multiple is an expression of the One. -/- In summary, the relationship between the One and the Multiple in mystic philosophy is a dynamic interplay that challenges the conventional understanding of separation. It invites a deeper exploration of reality, where the apparent multiplicity of the world is a direct expression of the singular, underlying essence of all that is. -/- The relationship between the One and the Multiple in the context of mathematical philosophy is a profound topic that touches upon the very foundations of existence and knowledge. It’s a theme that has been explored by philosophers and mathematicians alike, often leading to the contemplation of unity and diversity within the structures of reality. -/- In mathematics, the concept of the One can be seen as the basis of unity from which all numbers derive. It’s the identity element in multiplication, the starting point in counting, and the foundation of dimension in geometry. The One is often associated with the concept of monism in philosophy, which posits that there is a single, underlying substance or principle that constitutes reality. -/- On the other hand, the Multiple represents the infinite variety and diversity of forms and numbers that arise from the One. It’s the embodiment of plurality and the complex interplay of different entities that mathematics seeks to understand and describe. This reflects the philosophical stance of pluralism, which acknowledges the existence of multiple realities or truths. -/- The interplay between the One and the Multiple can be seen in the mathematical concept of sets. A set can be thought of as a unity, a whole composed of distinct elements. Yet, each element within the set also retains its individuality, contributing to the diversity of the set’s composition. This duality is mirrored in the philosophical exploration of the universal and the particular, where the universal represents the One, and the particulars represent the Multiple. -/- In the realm of mathematical philosophy, this relationship often leads to questions about the nature of mathematical objects: Are they discovered as part of an objective reality (the One), or are they constructed by the human mind from a multitude of experiences (the Multiple)? This debate resonates with the philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth and reality. -/- Reflecting on the One and the Multiple can also lead to a deeper understanding of the self and the cosmos. Just as the number one is integral to the existence of all other numbers, the individual self can be seen as a unique expression of the universal whole. Similarly, the cosmos can be viewed as a grand unity composed of a multiplicity of forms and phenomena. -/- Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have a fascinating connection to the philosophical concepts of the One and the Multiple. These theorems, which are pivotal in mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics, articulate the inherent limitations of formal axiomatic systems, particularly those sufficient to express the arithmetic of natural numbers. -/- Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have a fascinating connection to the philosophical concepts of the One and the Multiple. These theorems, which are pivotal in mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics, articulate the inherent limitations of formal axiomatic systems, particularly those sufficient to express the arithmetic of natural numbers⁴. -/- The **first incompleteness theorem** reveals that within any such consistent system, there are propositions that are true but cannot be proven within the system itself. This reflects the idea of the Multiple in that there is an abundance of mathematical truths, a multiplicity that exceeds the unifying framework of any one system. It suggests that the realm of mathematical truth is more extensive than any single formal system can fully capture. -/- The **second incompleteness theorem** extends this by showing that a system cannot prove its own consistency. This relates to the concept of the One, as it implies that a system’s complete self-understanding, its unity and coherence, is unattainable from within. It must look beyond itself, to an external vantage point, to ascertain its consistency. -/- In the context of the One and the Multiple, Gödel’s theorems imply that the One (a consistent formal system) is inherently incomplete and cannot encompass the Multiple (the totality of mathematical truths). This resonates with philosophical discussions about the relationship between unity and plurality. Just as a single philosophical system cannot capture the entirety of truth, a single formal mathematical system cannot encapsulate all mathematical truths. -/- Moreover, Gödel’s work suggests that the pursuit of a single, unified theory of everything in mathematics—a One that encompasses all Multiples—is an inherently Sisyphean task. There will always be more truths (Multiples) than can be derived from any given set of axioms (the One). -/- In essence, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems provide a formal underpinning to the philosophical notion that the One cannot exist without the Multiple, and vice versa. They are interdependent, with the One giving rise to the Multiple, and the Multiple necessitating the One for its expression and comprehension. This interplay is a dance of limitations and possibilities, where the boundaries of logic, mathematics, and philosophy blur into one another. -/- The relationship between the One and the Multiple in the context of the mathematics of zero is a deeply philosophical inquiry that bridges the abstract world of numbers with the existential questions of being and non-being. -/- Zero, in mathematics, is a symbol of absence, a representation of nothingness, yet it holds a pivotal position as a number. It is the void from which all things emerge and to which they return. In the philosophy of mathematics, zero is the paradoxical junction where the One and the Multiple converge and diverge. -/- From the perspective of the One, zero can be seen as the origin—the singular point that precedes the existence of numbers. It is the empty set, the foundation upon which the edifice of mathematics is constructed. As the identity element in addition, zero maintains the integrity of numbers, for adding zero to any number leaves it unchanged, reflecting the immutable nature of the One. -/- Conversely, when we consider the Multiple, zero represents the infinite potentiality of creation. It is the canvas upon which the integers, both positive and negative, express their multitude. Zero is the balance point, the fulcrum around which the symphony of numbers dances. It embodies the plurality of possibilities, the beginning of the number line that stretches infinitely in both directions. -/- Philosophically, zero challenges our understanding of existence. It is both something and nothing—a number that quantifies the absence of quantity. This duality echoes the philosophical struggle to comprehend how the One gives rise to the Multiple. How does the unity of being manifest the diversity of the cosmos? Zero offers a mathematical metaphor for this mystery, as it encapsulates the transition from non-existence to existence, from the undifferentiated One to the differentiated Multiple. -/- In the realm of set theory, zero corresponds to the empty set—a set with no elements. This set is unique in that it is the only set that contains nothing, yet it is the foundation upon which all other sets are built. The empty set is the mathematical embodiment of the One, and all other sets, containing multiple elements, arise from it. -/- Reflecting on zero in the context of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, we find a resonance with the idea that the One (a consistent formal system) cannot capture the entirety of the Multiple (the totality of mathematical truths). Zero, as the foundation of numbers, similarly suggests that from the nothingness of the One, the infinite complexity of the Multiple emerges—yet it can never be fully encompassed or expressed by any single system. -/- In conclusion, the mathematics of zero offers a profound reflection on the relationship between the One and the Multiple. It serves as a bridge between the abstract and the concrete, the known and the unknowable, challenging us to ponder the origins of existence and the nature of reality itself. -/- . (shrink)

[First paragraph]: Believe it or not, it’s no exaggeration to say that Ender’s Game has been the most transformative book of my life. In fact, when I first read it, at the age of fifteen, it almost single-handedly initiated a crisis of faith in me that ended up lasting for eight long years. The reason that it was able to do so is that it is positively full of important philosophical ideas (a fact attested to by the very existence of (...) this volume and its many essays). It should come as no surprise to fellow science fiction fans—and especially fans of Ender’s Game in particular—that science fiction is full to bursting with philosophical ideas. But the skeptical reader need not fear; in this case, at least, you don’t have to take my word for it. Orson Scott Card’s 1991 edition of Ender’s Game mentions his master’s degree in literature, and that all “the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism.” So if you think you might have found a hidden layer of meaning in Ender’s Game, it’s a lot less likely that he or she is just crazy, and a lot more likely that there really is some hidden meaning there—and maybe even one that Card himself consciously put there to be found! (shrink)

This paper aims at an analytical explanation of the distinctive nature of music, as it has been formulated in perhaps one of the world's very first works on the subject, namely the ‘Sangeet Ratnakar’ of Pandit Sarangadeva, a 13th century musicologist of India. He, in the first chapter of the work defines music ('sangeet' in Sanskrit and Hindi) as a composite of singing or 'Gita', instrumental music or 'vadan' and dancing or ‘nrittam’. In addition, he also holds singing to be (...) the most important component of music. These two ideas are not only unquestionably acceptable , as the analysis in the paper will show, but give to Indian music , in its difference from western music, its distinctively spiritual character, making it a path to liberation or Moksha (Muktidayakam na tu ranjakam). Sarangadeva's reason, here, is not rational but empirico-inductive. It is that mainly by virtue of its 'gitam’ (singing component), which, like the Yoga system of exercise, needing only one's body as its instrument, music too needing only one’s voice is as self-sufficient and autonomous as the ultimate Reality itself (Swayamev Rajate). In the hierarchy (a distinctively ancient Indian insistence) of arts, singing is the highest and unique because in spite of being heard by the auditory sense, it affects our 'reflective sensibility' and transports us to the virtual world of melodic and rhythmic forms. Forms, as against their particular illustrations, are abstract universals. Ultimate Reality is also a Form-all comprehensive and internally harmonious. However, pure Form, whether melodic or religious or even rational like that of triangularity, is almost impossible to concentrate on. Realizing this practical difficulty, Indian scriptures and the world's first Grammarian-linguist, Acharya Panini, framed a composite sound as the manifestation of the ultimate musical Form. This purely formal-because devoid of all meaning, sound is that of 'om', spelt, in Sanskrit as a conjunction (sandhi) of 'a'+'u'+'m'. For Indian musicologists and musicians, ‘om’ is the perfect manifestation of the Sound-God or ‘Nada-Brahman’ because, 1. Its composite nature resembles God, as a harmony of 'sat', 'chit', and 'ananda'; and 2. The composite sound is self-existent as its all three components-two vowels, i.e. ‘a’, ‘u’, and one consonant i.e. ‘m’, can be and are pronounced just as they originally are, -un-elongated and un-vitiated and therefore pure. This is the reason why every recital of Indian classical vocal music is begun with an elaborate rendering of 'om' as an invocation to Sound-God or ‘Nada-Brahman’. Scholarly and authentic, this ancient Indian approach to music, is undoubtedly the earliest and original. My observation is that its main contentions like Sharang Dev’s insistence that of the three components of music, ‘gitam’ or singing is the highest, have only been translated and never argued for. In this presentation my good intention is to provide much needed rational support for making these key statements in this unparalleled Indian text, indubitable and unquestionable. (shrink)

Having elsewhere connected Walter Otto’s interpretation of Dionysus as a politically progressive deity to Huey P. Newton’s vision for the Black Panthers, I here expand this inquiry to a line of Otto-inspired scholarship. First, Alain Daniélou identifies Dionysus and Shiva as the dancing god of a democratic/decolonizing cult oppressed by tyrannical patriarchies. Arthur Evans sharpens this critique of sexism and heteronormativity, concluding that, as Dionysus’s chorus is to Greek tragedy, so Socrates’s circle is to Western philosophy. I thus call (...) for the creation of a hybrid Dionysian-Socratic revolutionary philosophical chorus, modeled on Dionysus Lyseus, wielding philosophical analysis to loosen injustice’s bonds, as a vanguard of social justice. I find a handbook for this chorus’s creation in Euripides’s Bacchae, whose Dionysus is an ally of immigrant women, overthrower of Theban patriarchy, and international revolutionary. Finally, I offer a contemporary example of such a chorus that is based in my hometown in Alabama, namely, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild. (shrink)

Survival of the fittest is an over simplification because the creature is tuned to the value in the environment. All variation is constrained and sophistication emerges as a consequence of value. -/- If we could zoom out until the entire universe appeared as an infinitesimal point, then it becomes one thing, undifferentiated, a system in search of a narrative. The system is a form of a dance, without the dancers, there is no system. The narrative unfolds as an expression (...) in a context. The meaning branches out as an increasingly rich and complex expression where the dancers enrich the environment and the environment enriches the dancers. As the deeper layers are expressed, more and more subtlety and sophistication is created and the process continues ad infinitum... Value is the measure of an enriching principle of organization. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which (...) has followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Dance, as a mode of physical interaction, offers opportunities to care and be cared for, but this does not mean that dancers will, in fact, care. There may be no moral motivation underlying a lift, dip or intricate sequence of coordinated action. Choreographic scores may (knowingly or not) encourage merely perfunctory movements that are a poor simulacrum to care. Moreover, the caring that is expressed through dance need not transfer to other walks of life. I am not alone (...) in knowing spectacularly talented dancers whose behaviour off the dance floor is far from ethical – from the arrogant and petty to the flagrant abuse that plagues institutions of art and culture. This article considers how dance can illuminate both the acts and sentiments of care, conveying particular ethical orientations that trouble straightforward, absolute moral reasoning. The article frames an enquiry into the relation between ethics and aesthetics of care, drawn from feminist epistemologists Joan Tronto, Maurice Hamington, and Nel Noddings, as well as my own performance research on partnering. I frame a zone between technique and competence, foregrounding care in dance as both a technical and ethical issue. I will consider the necessary conditions by which dancing together can manifest care, rather than suggest blanketly that it always does or even that it should. To make this argument, I will describe and analyse Considered Care, a duet I created in the autumn of 2021 in collaboration with Boston Ballet. This performance research project provided the material from which to consider the concept of need, a condition of care in a dancing situation. I will conclude by considering the relationship between needs and trust in conceptualizing care within partnering. (shrink)

Every person is equipped with both the Dionysian or life force soul (in Greek Eros), and the Apollonian or death force soul (in GreekThanatos). Dionysus was a Greek fertility god from c. 580 BCE associated with wine, music, and choral dance (Csapso 2016). In Attic art, Dionysus was often depicted as a slumping god on a ship, which had a vineover laden with grapes as a mast, surrounded by a sea with a pod of dolphins; the dolphins being the (...) rescuers of sailors (life force) (Carpenter 1990). Dionysus, who was resurrected from death, repre- sented hedonism, happiness, and the good life that he celebrated with a glass of wine. His half-brother Apollo was in many respects his polar opposite. Apollo was a cerebral god associated with the sun, light, and intellectual pursuit. Dio- nysus symbolized the ability of (wo) man to submerge him- or herself in a greater whole, the ecstatic, and the chaotic emotions. Apollo, on the contrary, symbolised his or her formally rational and reasoning mind. The Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces are complementary and one needs both to be a balanced person; one needed to be capable of creating form and struc- ture as well as being passionate and vital. Brown believed that a utopian society would primarily consist of such balanced persons who are at home in both the world of rationality and logic and of symbols and emotions. (shrink)

Dance is intimately connected to both Kierkegaard’s personal life and his life in writing, as exemplified in his famous nightly attendance at the dance-filled theater, and his invitation to the readers of “A First and Last Explanation” to “dance with” his pseudonyms. The present article’s acceptance of that dance invitation proceeds as follows: the first section surveys the limited secondary literature on dance in Kierkegaard, focusing on the work of M. Ferreira and Edward Mooney. The (...) second section explores the hidden dancing dimensions of Kierkegaard’s “leap” and “shadow-dance”. And the third section reinterprets the pseudonymous works richest in dance, Repetition and Postscript, concluding that the religious for him is the lighthearted dance of a comic actor through the everyday theater of the world. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to promote understanding and enjoyment of the arts. With this aim in mind, Lyas introduces the key issues of philosophical aesthetics through examples drawn from high and popular culture, and from a variety of art forms, from music and painting to literature and poetry. The book is pitched as a springboard into undergraduate courses in aesthetics and as an introduction to philosophical aesthetics for the general reader. It is refreshing to read a book on (...) aesthetics written by someone for whom problems in aesthetics are more than just grist for the academic mill. That this is the case shows not only in his choice of examples but also in the perspective he brings to them. Lyas argues, for example, that one must feel the merit of the work for oneself; rather then simply, as he puts it, assuming 'that certain things are worth studying ("in the canon" as they put it)' and then performing 'various classificatory dances round them' (p.75). The question for appreciation, he reminds us, is why those things in the canon deserve to be there. According to Lyas, teaching aesthetics is not simply a matter of imparting a body of knowledge to the student. Instead, the teacher's role is to develop capacities in the student for an appreciative experiencing (p.131). (shrink)

In this research clipping, we present aspects of the audio-visual research Aquilomba Filomove carried out as collaborative action research by the Research Group Filomove: Philosophy, Arts and Latin América Aesthetics in 2018, together with Maria de Tie and the Comunidade Quilombola de Souza, in Chapada of Araripe, Municipality of Porteiras in the south of Ceará, Brazil. The coconut as an intertwined dance, tambourine touch and singing show the body techniques, rhythmic cells and compositional strategies that were part of (...) the reconstruction process of Afro-descendant manifestations, producing spaces of identification for the group. We guide action research towards the critical-reflective rescue of Latin American African American material and immaterial cultural heritage. -/- Neste recorte de pesquisa, apresentamos aspectos da pesquisa audiovisual Aquilomba FiloMove: O processo de re(criar) a tradição na trajetória da Mestra Maria de Tie e a Comunidade Quilombola de Souza realizada como pesquisa ação colaborativa pelo Grupo de Pesquisa FiloMove: Filosofias, Artes e Estéticas da América Latina em 2018, em conjunto com Maria de Tie e a Comunidade Quilombola de Souza, na Chapada de Araripe, Município de Porteiras, no sul do Ceará. O coco, dança entrelaçada, toque do pandeiro e canto, mostra técnicas corporais, células rítmicas e estratégias composicionais que fizeram parte do processo de reconstrução das manifestações afrodescendentes, produzindo espaços de identificação e reconhecimento para o grupo. Orientamos a pesquisa-ação para o resgate crítico-reflexivo do patrimônio cultural material e imaterial afro latino americano. (shrink)

In this paper I will investigate Kristeva’s conception of dance in regard to the trope of the borderline. I will begin with her explicit treatments of dance, the earliest of which occurs in Revolution in Poetic Language, in terms of (a) her analogy between poetry and dance as practices erupting on the border of chora and society, (b) her presentation of dance as a phenomenon bordering art and religion in rituals, and (c) her brief remarks on (...) dance gesturality. I will then follow this latter movement to the 1969 essay “Gesturality,” to critically examine where Kristeva situates the powers and limits of gesture (and thereby dance) in relation to language. Next, I will move to the later text, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, where the image of dance figures prominently in what I will term Kristeva’s joyful re-choreographing of Freud’s text Totem and Taboo. I will also see how her treatment of dance links more directly to Kristeva’s feminist concerns, insofar as she understands the process of choreography as a kind of maternal function neglected in most psychoanalytic thought. (shrink)

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the word “consent” originally derives from the “Latin consentīre to feel together, agree, accord harmonize”, further broken down into “con- together + sentīre to feel, think, judge, etc.” Thus, consent is originally a matter of mutual activity and receptivity, specifically a co-creating co-creation based on shared, ongoing feeling. What this seems to imply – and this is certainly always been true in my experiences with social Latin dance – is that consent is not (...) a static thing, not an object or product that has been definitively produced and recorded. Instead, consent is an ongoing process, a reciprocating experiencing that is crucially both beyond one individual dancer, and also simultaneously active and receptive. Altogether, then, consent in social Latin dance emerges as a process of doing and undergoing together. Thus, if the connection of dancing consent is broken, for example if one partner shifts from the acting/receiving balance to a state of exclusive acting (with no receiving), then consent is no longer transpiring, which greatly increases the risk of unwanted touch beginning and continuing. Put simply, wanted touch is consensual touch, and consensual touch is touch that is supported by an ongoing activity and receptivity of consent. Wanted touch in dance is thus analogous to a “closed” electrical circuit. (In fact, at the cellular level of a dancer’s body this truth is literal rather than merely analogous, given the neurochemical dimension of the body’s activities). A closed circuit, in this technical sense, refers to a circuit in which there is no break in the path (for example between a device and an outlet), an unbrokenness that sustains a live current in the circuit. By contrast, unwanted touch in social Latin dance is like an open circuit, involving a break in the path between the partners, which entails the absence of the necessary current of consent. (shrink)