Performance Philosophies – serie

Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona (1871–1946) was a prominent, eccentric and influential figure in late Imperial Germany, Expressionism, Dadaism, and the Weimar Republic. He wrote and published works of philosophy, novels, parodies and satirical so-called grotesque tales, which he wrote under the pseudonym “Mynona”—the German word for anonymous, anonym, spelled backwards. Currently being rediscovered in his native language, F/M and his work are still generally unknown, and none of his philosophical texts have been translated.The Critical Introduction to Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona: Twentieth-Century Performance Philosopher is the first English book introducing F/M’s philosophical works. The volume includes three introductory framing chapters of historical context, contemporary relevance and pertinence to the performance philosophy of F/M. The book also contains original translations of select passages from his most significant philosophical texts: Schöpferische Indifferenz/Creative Indifference, (first published in 1918), the later Das magische Ich/The Magic I (1935) and his very last essay Ideenmagie/Idea Magic (1945/46), as well as translations of select correspondence with well-known cultural personalities of the time.Recognised as having inspired Walter Benjamin, F/M was also a forerunner of both performance philosophy and gender theory, and a major influence in the development of Gestalt therapy. Furthermore, not only did F/M belong to the first generation of avid Nietzsche readers, but he was also a lifelong tireless interpreter of Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer. F/M’s extraordinary voice is of significant interest to Nietzsche and Kant Studies and sheds light on their respective relevance for a performance-oriented approach to philosophy.

What meaning and potential could be offered by performance in the age of ecological crises, climatic change and the sixth extinction? Tuija Kokkonen responds to this core question from various perspectives with particular inspiration from Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies (1989) and the author’s artistic work on ecology and performance. Ecological crises are understood and explored as wider phenomena emerging in three ecological levels – the mental, the social and the environmental – cohering with and affecting each other.Cutting across areas of artistic research and performance philosophy, as well as engaging in post-humanism, animal studies, and plant philosophy, the central concern of the book is our relationship to the non-human and what it means to our understanding of performance and subjectivity if the agency of performance and its social area are opened to non-human co-actors, to beings of other species, to animals, plants and weather. These performances as well as the concepts and thoughts arise from a performance practice described – echoing Michal Marder’s plant thinking (2013) – as performance-thinking, partly a non-cognitive, embodied way of thinking about and with performance. Through agencies of animals, plants and weather, the book also explores the borders of performance, and of human being.In this book, five key performance studies terms and questions are addressed – human centeredness, liveness, spectatorship, event and performance – and are rethought in the context of posthuman performance practice and theories. Furthermore, some unknown or less familiar philosophers, especially in the field of environmental philosophy are introduced, such as the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák, Finnish philosophers Yrjö Haila and Ville Lähde, and Hans Jonas as a philosopher of environment ethics.

Non-philosophy poses a challenge to philosophical thought, inspired by the work of François Laruelle. It questions the idea that philosophy, or other disciplines, can tell us what it means to think. This edited collection brings together an internationally known and interdisciplinary group of scholars, including a major new essay by Laruelle himself. Together they use non-philosophy to cross the boundaries between philosophy and performance.Philosophers have been busy for centuries looking for the foundations of truth, value, and reality. They try to say what it all means and how it all fits together. Areas of life like science and art have to wait for the philosopher to show up to tell them what they are really about. Theory dictates meaning: performance just puts it into effect. Non-philosophy is different. It says that reality is not an object out there that we can think and understand. The Real is the place we stand: it is where we think from. Crucially, non-philosophy understands philosophy itself to be performative. It enacts modes of thinking that do not dominate the material of thought and do not capture the Real in concepts. Philosophy is mutated by its performances; and performances themselves think, are modes of theory. What happens when we bring philosophy, art, and performance together, without hierarchy? How can they get inside and change one another? The thinkers in this collection answer these pressing questions.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger developed a way of considering human existence as ‘being there’, a process of interrelationships with aspects of the environment in which the very process itself constitutes the essence of human being. From Heidegger to Performance engages with this radical perspective and consider Heidegger’s thinking in relation to different senses of performance, from the familiar, such as theatrical contexts of dance, live art and theatre, to explorations of modes of being within these performative situations. The contributors engage with a wide variety of topics from clowning to questions of linguistic construction; from the phenomenology of objects in stage space to the ephemerality of performance; from the performance of personal memory to the anxiety of the moment of choice in performing a complex movement. This book explores the ways in which Heidegger’s work and ideas of performance and performativity intersect, across their various senses and usages and will be useful to scholars, teachers and students who are interested in thinking about performance, and themselves as performative, in new ways.

Providing a solid media-philosophical groundwork, Beyond Mimesis contributes to the theory of mimesis and alterity in performance philosophy while serving to stimulate and inspire future inquiries where studies in media and art intersect with philosophy. It collects a wide range of philosophical and artistic thinkers'' work to develop an exacting framework with clear movement beyond mimesis in aesthetic experiences in uncanny valleys. Together, the chapters ask if intersubjective acts of relating that are defined by alterity, responsivity or witness and trust can be transferred to artificial beings without remainder. The proposed framework uses a particularly fruitful theoretical model for this inquiry known as the “uncanny valley”—a fictitious schema developed in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. According to Mori, artificial beings or animated dolls become more eerie to us the more “humanlike” they appear. The model’s utility requires distinguishing between visual media and real life, but in general, it suggests that there is a fundamental incommensurability between people and artificial beings that cannot be ignored. This necessitates that all-too realistic representations as well as fictional encounters with artificial beings do not transgress certain limits. According to Mori, it is an ethical imperative of their design that they evidence a certain degree of dissimilarity with people. This notion seems especially applicable to artistic projects in which animated dolls or robots make explicit their “doll-ness” or “robot-ness” and thus inscribe a moment of reflexivity into the relations they establish.With contributions by Elena Dorfman, Jörg Sternagel, Dieter Mersch, Allison de Fren, Nadja Ben Khelifa, James Tobias, Grant Palmer, Stephan Günzel, Nicole Ku?uleinapuananioliko?awapuhimelemeleolani Furtado, Misha Choudhry and a conversation between Carolin Bebek, Simon Makhali, and Anna Suchard.

Embodying Wittgenstein’s own aphorism of “you’d be surprised,” this collection of original essays by both artists and academics explores the significance of Wittgenstein’s writings across a diverse field of performance practices, including poetics and choreography, theatre, and psychotherapy, as well as reflections on political thought and ChatGPT. Fundamentally, the collection shifts the discussion of philosophy and performance away from the well-established distinction between Analytic and Continental traditions to offer examples of Wittgenstein’s inspiration in and for the different practices that are explored in each essay. Between Wittgenstein’s proposals in the Tractatus that “the world is all that is the case” and in the Philosophical Investigations that “words are also deeds,” how might the thought of philosophical questions already inform those of and for performance? How do conceptions of the limits of the one articulate those of the other? And how might such questions be not simply a matter of philosophy or performance alone, but indeed of and for performance philosophy? Contributors: Né Barros, Charles Bernstein, Simon Bowes, Jonathan Burrows, Miles Champion, Will Daddario, Veronika Darida, Françoise Davoine, Peter S. Dillard, Signe Gjessing, Kenneth Goldsmith, Derek Gottlieb, Anthony Howell, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Alice Lagaay, Sue MacLaine, Ray Monk, Bernard Müller, Marjorie Perloff, Tom Raworth, Max Richter, Bo Tarenskeen, The Aesthetics Group (Dublin), Mischa Twitchin, Lukas M. Verburgt, Peter Verburgt.

Providing a solid media-philosophical groundwork, the book contributes to the theory of alterity in Performance Philosophy, while stimulating and inspiring future inquiries where studies in media, art, and literature intersect with philosophy. It collects a selective as well as productive diversity of philosophical, literary, and artistic figures of thought, attaining an exacting framework as a result of a clearly elaborated ethics of alterity, innovatively opened up by way of an aisthetics of existence: Touching upon the Aristotelian concept of aisthesis, the material, perceptual and sensory dimensions of everyday bodily existence are highlighted to move beyond what aesthetics in Modern Philosophy just specializes in, namely art and the beautiful. The notion of existence is therefore borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who understands it as something concrete and richly interrelated, so as to avoid the dualisms both of psychological processes of consciousness and of physiological mechanisms. It is thus made explicit such that the unity of body and soul is not any arbitrarily arranged connection between “subject” and “object” but, rather, that it is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. Imaginatively then, the book puts into writing how alterity not only can be treated theoretically but can be also made accessible through writing as well as rendered relatable through reading. That is why it deals with exemplary interpersonal encounters in the lifeworld, in the arts, and in the media, which are initially thematized as intercorporeal experiences, so as to enable an approach for an ethics of alterity by way of, in particular, sites located within a phenomenology of perception oriented towards the lived body.

This book unfolds the theory of enduramorphosis, an emergent strangeness that arises in an endurance performance when the body is pushed to its limit and reacts. Artist Chelsea Coon works across performance and lens-based extensions in photography, video, livestream, digital arts, and new media. Through her work, Coon explores how enduramorphosis is manifested differently across divergent performances. Written from a first-person perspective, this book presents an accessible intellectual exploration of the process and conceptualization of provocative and profound performances. Chelsea Coon combines powerful emotional resonance with physical and psychological extremes, giving the reader insights into the phenomenon of enduramorphosis and a rare glimpse into the motivations, feelings, desires and visceral excesses experienced by the performing body as it undergoes a transformation that lasts.