Kehnel, Annette (2015), “’Use my body like the pages of a book’ ...” in: Schriftträger– Textträger. Ed. A. Kehnel / D. Panagiotopoulos (Series: Materiale Textkulturen 6), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 245-66 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Cognitive Semiotics - How our bodies became us
In recent years, the body and the related notion of embodiment have become pervasive objects of inquiry in numerous disciplines, ranging from cognitive science to philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural anthropology, and so on. This article aims to investigate more closely the characteristics of the notion of 'body' presupposed by these different theories, which often naturalize the body by taking it as a non-gendered, pre-discursive phenomenon, and thus hiding the concrete reality of the many different bodies we all as persons possess, with all their specific social, cultural, and discursive determinations. The body is not an isolated entity, but the result of a complex set of interactions with the environment and with others, where intersubjectivity plays a crucial role. Much research over the last few years has focused on the ways in which the body has inscribed in itself a predisposition to intersubjectivity: this article discusses another, complementary, question: the way in which intersubjectivity itself shapes bodies. Here the body is seen as the result of a process that takes place in a socio-cultural environment and in intimate interaction with others, rather than the starting point for a process that, beginning from the single organism, expands and opens up towards a wider relational world. In this approach, intersubjectivity becomes a semiotic dimension of the social coconstruction and sharing of meaning. All forms of intersubjectivity imply, and at the same time produce, a work of continual interpretation and reinterpretation which lies at the very basis of the peircean concept of semiosis. Finally, to exemplify how intersubjectivity, semiosis, and embodiment intimately intertwine with one another, one particular field of investigation is considered: the very the first stages of human development, where it is shown how the body becomes a semiotic entity: something much more than -and very different from -a purely natural organism.
Embodiment theories and alternative perspectives on the body
«Studi di estetica», XLV, serie IV (8/2)(Sensibilia 10-2016-Embodiment), pp., 2017
Embodiment theories have overcome the doctrine of intellectus archetypus without ever discussing the notion of body on which that particular kind of intellect was based. Indeed, the model of the body underlying embodiment theories remains an a priori: anthropomorphic, independent and " self-contained ". This paper sheds light on the problematic points of this vision and explores the anthropology of the " ontological turn " , looking for alternative modes of body knowledge – seeing it as the result of " affects " , " affections " and habitus – more effective in justifying the corporeal dimension of cognition.
2022
Note: This syllabus is suitable for a graduate course or honors/upper level undergraduate seminar. DESCRIPTION - This course provides an in-depth introduction to historical and contemporary understandings of the body and embodiment in society. Drawing on a broad range of interdisciplinary literature and theoretical traditions from the social sciences, human geography, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy and the humanities, this course explores the symbolic and material horizons along and out of which bodies fashion—and are fashioned by—worlds, myth, societies, and selves. Part I of the course considers the cosmological and organizing principles of the body in myth and enlightenment thinking, bringing each into conversation with understandings of the body in early sociology. Part II introduces the phenomenological, post-structural, postmodern, and cultural theoretical perspectives vital to the “bodily turn” and thematization of the body in social thought that occurred in the late 20th century. Part III examines body and embodiment in relation to issues of identity, place, and the boundaries of the embodied self. Topics from this section include sex, gender, race, and class; health, medicine, ageing and the life course; and posthumanism. Part IV attends to the public-facing social body, exploring the body at worship and play, the body that witnesses and protests, and the aesthetic politics embodied in art and the built environment.
if the body is part of our discourse.pdf
Surprise: An Emotion?, 2018
Abstract Of the five perspectives set forth in this essay, four of them specify obstacles that block experiential understandings of emotions. The obstacles in one way and another subvert the living body, whether presenting it as a mere face or as an ahistorical adult body, as an embodied phenomenon or as a brain unattached to a whole-body nervous system. Such accounts bypass the affective dynamics that move through bodies and move them to move. Being true to the truths of experience, the fifth perspective, requires recognition of our infancy and even of our prenatal lives, both of which are tethered to developmental movement. It furthermore requires recognition of affective realties as subject-world relationships and recognition of the dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the perspectives lead us to inquire about “the things themselves.”
The Body as an Epistemological Metaphor1 of Modernism
Tekstualia, 2013
The article focuses on issues connected with literature and philosophy, and presents the body as an epistemological metaphor in modernism. The matter of corporeality in the prose of Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz is understood not just as a specifically developed literary motif and a potential object of scholarly research, but also as a philosophical category (the problem of materiality), and also an anthropological one.
The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field, 2020
The word embodiment represents how values, dispositions, and preferences from the world (re)make the body through practice and performance. The problem that presents itself when attempting to embody the past arises because one’s habitus is particular to a time, place, and social system. Embodied practices and an embodied engagement with objects help enliven the semiotics of the mise-en-scene: enhancing the what, where, and why, with how. The normative practices of any body are developed within a particular place and time. The body’s shape and actions are transfigured by what a culture considers to be natural, proper, and authentic in the world. To claim the body as archive and tool for research is to offer reenactment as a form of performance as research. Performance is meant in its widest sense, anything on a continuum from framed actions with witnesses, to staged fictions with audiences.
The Body as an Epistemological_Metaphor.pdf
The Body as an Epistemological Metaphor1 of Modernism, 2013
Interpréter -c'est avoir un corps, être perspective 2 . Éric Blondel 1. "The Eye of the Mind" and "The Eye of the Body". From Descartes to Nietzsche Refl ecting on the genesis of the crisis of the traditional power of vision, Martin Jay asserted that the epoch of modernism is distinguished by the phenomenon of "the return to the body" (Jay 295-330). His opinion corresponds with the perception that modernist literature and philosophy, by focusing on the problem of corporeality, simultaneously diagnose the discovery of chaos within human nature and beyond it, undertake refl ection on human cognitive capabilities, and recognize humanity's complicated situation in the world. However, Jay's enigmatic observation inclines one to refl ect on what this return consists of and how it came to take place. Richard Sheppard, referring to Hugo Ball's theoretical work, the pillars of which are ideas of Nietzsche's, has distinguished three aspects in which the modernist "transvaluation of all values" can be seen. These are: 1) a changing sense of reality; 2) a transformation of the understanding up to now of human nature; and 3) a transformation of the relations between reality and the human being (92). In Sheppard's view, the fi rst change was linked to the scientifi c revision of the convictions that applied to physical reality and remained in accordance with Newton's mechanistic picture of the world.