Beyond the Flesh : Rethinking the Body through Phenomenology in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Waltz’s Körper and noBody
Hadeel Ramez Endewy
Eger Journal of English Studies 2025 DOI: 10.33035/egerjes.2025.25.101 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | Argues that Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis and Sasha Waltz's Körper and noBody destabilise the body's ontological boundaries and demonstrate that perception is inherently participatory. |
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.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: a framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. | 2003 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From dopamine to salience to psychosis--linking biology, pharmacology and phenomenology of psychosis. | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How do the brain's time and space mediate consciousness and its different dimensions? Temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC). | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The phenomenology of deep brain stimulation-induced changes in OCD: an enactive affordance-based model. | 2013 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Looking for the Self: Phenomenology, Neurophysiology and Philosophical Significance of Drug-induced Ego Dissolution | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |