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

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dc.contributor.advisorTschofen, Monique
dc.contributor.authorCouillard, Paul Rene
dc.date.accessioned2021-11-15T15:32:11Z
dc.date.available2021-11-15T15:32:11Z
dc.date.copyright2021-07
dc.date.issued2021-11-15
dc.date.updated2021-11-15T15:32:11Z
dc.degree.disciplineCommunication & Culture, Joint Program with Ryerson University
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/38721
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectLanguage
dc.subject.keywordsAdina Bar-On
dc.subject.keywordsAffect
dc.subject.keywordsAgential realism
dc.subject.keywordsAnimate form
dc.subject.keywordsBecoming
dc.subject.keywordsBeing
dc.subject.keywordsConcept
dc.subject.keywordsConsciousness
dc.subject.keywordsDeleuze and Guattari
dc.subject.keywordsDerrida
dc.subject.keywordsDualism
dc.subject.keywordsElvira Santamaría
dc.subject.keywordsEmmanuel Levinas
dc.subject.keywordsEnacted philosophy
dc.subject.keywordsHannah Arendt
dc.subject.keywordsHeidegger
dc.subject.keywordsHusserl
dc.subject.keywordsIntra-active relationality
dc.subject.keywordsKaren Barad
dc.subject.keywordsMarilyn Arsem
dc.subject.keywordsMaxine Sheets-Johnston
dc.subject.keywordsMerleau-Ponty
dc.subject.keywordsMetaphoricity
dc.subject.keywordsNeuroscience
dc.subject.keywordsOntology
dc.subject.keywordsOthers
dc.subject.keywordsPercept
dc.subject.keywordsPerformance art
dc.subject.keywordsPhenomenology
dc.subject.keywordsPhilosophy
dc.subject.keywordsPractice in the flesh of theory
dc.subject.keywordsPresence
dc.subject.keywordsRitual communication
dc.subject.keywordsShared meaningfulness
dc.subject.keywordsSelf
dc.subject.keywordsSite-specific performance
dc.subject.keywordsThinking bodies
dc.subject.keywordsTransversality
dc.subject.keywordsVita activa
dc.subject.keywordsWorld
dc.titleRethinking Presence as a Thinking Body: Intra-Active Relationality and Animate Form
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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