EMBODIED PHILOSOPHY

EMBODIED PHILOSOPHY — ADDITIONS

The category remains philosophy done as and through the body, not philosophy applied to the body. Foucault, Hadot, Despina Zacharopoulou and existing thinkers remain central.

JUDITH BUTLER — PERFORMATIVITY, MATERIALISATION & BODILY NORMS

Performativity ≠ performance. Butler does not mean that a person freely acts a gender role like an actor choosing a costume. Performativity describes repeated citation, iteration and enforcement through which identities become socially intelligible.

Power does not simply operate on a pre-existing neutral body. Norms participate in determining what counts as a viable body; materiality and discourse cannot be cleanly separated.

Move beyond “this body expresses identity” and ask: which norms made this body legible in the first place? Performance can repeat, exaggerate, misquote and interrupt norms through which gender, sex, race, ability and desirability become naturalised.

Butler’s work on public assembly shows that bodies gathered together can make political claims before or without fully articulated common speech. Presence demonstrates precarity, dependency and collective demand.

SUELY ROLNIK — THE KNOWING-BODY / MICROPOLITICAL AFFECTABILITY

Rolnik offers a political account of sensitivity to forces. The colonial-capitalistic unconscious involves disconnection from the knowing-body, which registers forces, tensions, affects and environmental change before stable image or idea.

This disconnection is not merely personal alienation but micropolitical violence. Artistic practice can reactivate affectability.

Relation to Paula: her body does not master the world; magnetism, sound, matter, weight and audience produce a body that cannot remain closed. Radical corporeality can be read as an experiment in knowing through affectability.

MERLEAU-PONTY

If already present elsewhere, connect rather than duplicate. The body is not simply an object inside the world; it is the condition through which a world becomes perceptible. Fundamental to physical theatre, visual perception and body-environment relation.

DESPINA ZACHAROPOULOU

Do not let new thinkers displace Despina. Her work bridges performance and philosophy: performance becomes surface occupied by intensities. Trauma can circulate as trace/excess rather than fixed wound in the past. Repetition can become transmutation rather than therapeutic recovery. This remains one of the clearest foundations of Clarisse’s Embodied Philosophy.