Philipa Rothfield

This chapter offers an account of artistic agency as involving a struggle with the clichés that dominate the work. It acknowledges the importance of nonintentional forms of disruption as a means of countering cliché. The discussion draws upon Gilles Deleuze’s account of art-making within the work of the painter, Francis Bacon. For Deleuze, the act of painting begins with the destabilisation of cliché through the introduction of the nonintentional gesture. The role of the artist is to work with the “chaos-germ” inaugurated by nonintentional modes of disruption, a process which enlists the artist’s know-how.The ensuing discussion is corporeal in focus, asking after the clichés of dance-making, the place of know-how in their confrontation, and their means of resolution. The chapter utilises a collaborative dance work, The Durga Chronicles, in order to tease out these issues, concluding with reference to the work of Bruno Latour on agency as an assemblage of human and nonhuman factors. Artistic agency is thereby framed as a decentred process of creation, ever moderated by the forces of the nonhuman.

Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny takes the philosophy of the body into the field of dance, through the lens of subjectivity and via its critique. It draws on dance and performance as its dedicated field of practice to articulate a philosophy of agency and movement. It is organized around two conceptual paradigms - one phenomenological, the other an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy, mediated through the work of Deleuze. The book draws on dance studies, cultural critique, ethnography and postcolonial theory, seeking an interdisciplinary audience in philosophy, dance and cultural studies.

The paper builds an argument about empathy, kinesthesia, choreography, and power as they were constituted in early eighteenth century France. It examines the conditions under which one body could claim to know what another body was feeling, using two sets of documents – philosophical examinations of perception and kinesthesia by Condillac and notations of dances published by Feuillet. Reading these documents intertextually, I postulate a kind of corporeal episteme that grounds how the body is constructed. And I endeavor to situate this body within the colonial and expansionist politics of its historical moment.

This paper critically reviews phenomenological philosophy of the body in light of postmodern and postcolonial critiques of universalism. It aims to recast the notion of the lived body in plural rather than singular terms. It does so within the context of phenomenology and dance, using cultural anthropology to highlight the sense in which bodies are culturally and corporeally specific. The notion of corporeal specificity is applied to the perception of dance, paying particular attention to questions of power and hegemony. This is not to reject phenomenology, but to differentiate it according to its social, historical and kinaesthetic milieux.