Rethinking Presence as a Thinking Body: Intra-Active Relationality and Animate Form

This dissertation investigates presence as a guarantee or promise for enabling shared meaningfulness. Prompted by Jacques Derrida's argument that the last two millennia of Western philosophy constitute a metaphysics of presence, this careful working-through rethinks presence as a transversal concept from a multidisciplinary perspective. Following Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari's contention that philosophy, science, and art constitute three distinct ways of thinking, the study integrates insights from phenomenology, neuroscience and performance art to untangle the human tendency to treat body and consciousness as distinct and mutually alien entities. Consciousness and thought are explored as phenomena that encompass percept, affect, and concept as expressions of a thinking body's animate form. When we understand our being as thinking bodies, presence no longer poses the problem of representing materiality to an immaterial consciousness. Redefined as the enacting and enacted agency of intra-active relationality, presence is refigured as the facilitator of a mutual intelligibility among entities and agencies that are co-determined through their knotted involvement. The concept of relationality replaces the conundrum of metaphoricity. Three philosophers who guided Derrida's early inquiries—Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas—are revisited by reading some of their key ideas against three notional instantiations of presence—self, world, and other—as manifested in works by three contemporary performance artists. Marilyn Arsem's Meridian, Adina Bar-On's Disposition, and Elvira Santamara's Everyday life words in progress are approached as instances of enacted philosophy, framed as practice in the flesh of theory. Three additional interlocutors provide essential concepts for this rethinking of presence: Maxine Sheets-Johnston, whose careful explorations of how we think through movement extend Husserl's phenomenological insights and challenge the artificial divide between materiality and immateriality; Karen Barad, whose agential realist ontology provides a model for the reimagining of presence as the enacting and enacted agency of intra-active relationality; and Hannah Arendt, whose schema of the vita activa is employed as an apparatus for considering the notions of self, world and others. Twelve emergent propositions offer a new framework for approaching the agencies we as thinking bodies bring to our own and the world's becoming.