Beyond the Flesh : Rethinking the Body through Phenomenology in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Waltz’s Körper and noBody
Eger Journal of English Studies January 1, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.33035/egerjes.2025.25.101 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
The body's boundaries are not fixed but can be dissolved and reconfigured through performance. Analyzing Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis and Sasha Waltz's dance pieces Körper and noBody through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodied perception, the paper argues that both works challenge distinctions between self and world, subject and object. Kane portrays psychosis as an intensified mode of being-in-the-world, while Waltz's choreography reveals the reversibility of perception. Both show perception as participatory and entangled with the world's becoming, using bodily disappearance as a form of transcendence.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Theatre and dance can enact phenomenological principles, blurring boundaries between physicality and abstraction to redefine corporeal experience. |
Abstract
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological framework of embodied perception, this paper examines Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000) and Sasha Waltz’s Körper and noBody (early 2000s), focusing on how they destabilise the body’s ontological boundaries. By employing Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the lived body, the study explores how both works challenge conventional binaries between self/world and subject/object. Kane’s text reconfigures psychosis as an alternative mode of being-in-the-world, where hallucinatory visions intensify the body–world dialectic rather than rupturing it. In contrast, Waltz’s choreography dissolves corporeal boundaries, revealing the reversibility of perception and the intersubjective nature of embodiment. Despite their divergent media – textbased theatre and movement-based dance – both Kane and Waltz converge on a foundational proposition: perception is inherently participatory, perpetually entangled with the world’s Becoming. The paper also integrates Drew Leder’s concept of the absent body to analyse how both artists explore the ecstatic dissolution of the body, where disappearance becomes a mode of transcendence and reconfiguration. Through phenomenological analysis, this study demonstrates how theatre and dance enact phenomenological principles, blurring the boundaries between physicality and abstraction to redefine corporeal experience.