Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Filming Dance: Embodied Syntax In Sasha Waltz’S ‘S’, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts …

Cultivating Perception: Phenomenological Encounters With Artworks, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

Phenomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in the world and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter the world and others. In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, grounding our thinking in embodied experience opens it up to difference and helps us to resist the colonization …

The Poetry Of Habit: Beauvoir And Merleau-Ponty On Aging Embodiment, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

As people age their actions often become entrenched—we might say they are not open to the new; they are less able to adapt; they are stuck in a rut. Indeed, in The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) Simone de Beauvoir writes that to be old is to be condemned neither to freedom nor to meaning, but rather to boredom (Beauvoir 1996, 461; 486). While in many ways a very pessimistic account of ageing, the text does provide promising moments where her descriptions do capture other possibilities for aged existence. In particular, I turn to Beauvoir’s suggestion that habit can take …

A Phenomenology Of ‘The Other World’: On Irigaray’S ‘To Paint The Invisible', Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

This Body Of Art: The Singular Plural Of The Feminine, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

I explore the possibility that the feminine, like art, can be thought in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural. In Les Muses, Nancy claims that art provides for the rethinking of a technë not ruled by instrumentality. Specifically, in rethinking aesthetics in terms of the debates laid out by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, he resituates the ontological in terms of the specificity of the techniques of each particular artwork; each artwork establishes relations particular to its world or worlds. What is at stake in the singular plural is the multiplicity of relations that are lost in the …

Only Blood Would Be More Red: Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty And The Ethics Of Sexual Difference, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

Irigaray turns to Merleau-Ponty's intuitions about the perception of color to develop her own insights into the creative emergence of sexuate identity. As a quality of the flesh, color cannot be reduced to formal codes. The privileging of word and text inherent to Western culture suppresses the coming into being of the embodied subject in his or her own situated context. Color, tied as it is to a corporeal creativity could provide an important link since it facilitates reflection, and a re-enfleshing through color of a differentiated sexuate identity tied to the imagination as well as to genetic identity.