Anna Petronella Foultier - 'Aesthetic spatiality and dance in Merleau-Ponty’s thought'

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Anna Petronella Foultier Abstract: In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of “anthropological spatiality” – various spatial levels related to the manner that we project the world, and that are not connected through geometrical space where each part is interchangeable, but rather through a more primordial, existential space where we are anchored as natural subjects. The experience of the dreamer, the schizophrenic or the person under influence from mescaline give examples of anthropological spatialities. Another such spatiality is said to be opened by “aesthetic perception” (1945, 333) – such as that of painting or of dance – and I will accordingly term it aesthetic spatiality. The spatiality of dance is “without goals or directions … the subject and its world are no longer opposed” (1945, 333), in a similar way that a painting is not “at the same place” as the canvas or the cracks on the wall of the cave. Now, the spatiality of a hallucinating or schizophrenic person seems available only to the subject doing the projection, while an aesthetic spatiality must be intersubjectively available: art only makes sense a cultural and shareable phenomenon. How, then, does the dancer, for example, constitute a form of spatiality that is valid for others? To resolve this problem, I will first appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the body is “the first cultural object” (1945, 401) and thus already in itself intersubjectively given with cultural meanings. Our body has, moreover, an “emblematic value”, so that our bodily positions, emotions and desires have a symbolic relation to one another (1945, 329). Finally, the characterisation of the spatiality of dance will be amended, and described, not as being “without goals or directions”, but with often unpredictable direction and as its own goal: one of the tasks of dance is to understand the very dynamics of bodily movement itself.

Biography: Anna Petronella Foultier is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Umeå University. Her present research is focused on the dancer’s experience and aesthetic know-how. She has published in journals such as Hypatia, JSBP, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Chiasmi international and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and coedited the anthology Material of Movement and Thought: Reflections on the Dancer’s Practice and Corporeality, with Cecilia Roos (2013). Foultier also works as a translator of philosophy and fiction, and has translated Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Kundera, Merleau-Ponty, Nora and many others into Swedish. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/