Moved in Spite of Ourselves: The Place and Process of the Body in Redistributing the Sensible

Abstract

“I’m not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.” – Pina Bausch In a recent lecture and essay published online, French philosopher Jacques Rancière addressed the aesthetics and politics of dance. And yet his initial foray into this aesthetic form – limited to images of dancing bodies, and in so doing treating image and performance as equivalent – left many questions unanswered, many of which gesture to an aporia within his broader theory of aesthetics and politics. What is the role and experience of the body during the process of ‘redistributing the sensible’? How do embodied aesthetic practices such as theatre, dance, and music festivals work to provoke reflexivity and transform perceptions and relationships? And how might a study of such practices enrich an account of such theory, in their move beyond mediating artefacts such as film and photography to draw directly from live performances as Rancière himself rarely does? Thus the panel has a twofold objective. On the one hand, it seeks to explore the distinct characteristics of embodied aesthetic experience that challenge the terms of Rancière’s aesthetic theory; on the other, it will examine the rich potential of embodied practices to re-partition the sensible in profound ways, and the implications this presents to both theory and practice.

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