Many metaphors associate vulnerability, old age (Jean Améry), and suffering (Simone Weil) with gravity. In contrast, bodily ease seems to go hand in hand with grace (Henri Bergson, S. Weil), lightness, and everything that opposes the experience of gravity. I'll take this lexical and conceptual postulate in reverse, based on a specific dance practice: contact improvisation. In dealing with gravity, this somatic practice participates in embodied anchoring and in rooting (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, S. Weil, Jan Patocka). In so doing, this focus on the experience of gravity, falling, and supporting/carrying contributes precisely to an ontological lightening: in the movement made possible by the experience of gravity as well as the relationship between the performing bodies, the ego cogitans dissolves its totalizing claim in the experience of a body that is both limited and moved precisely in its performed boundaries. In other words, the limitation of the body, the experience of play with gravity instead of passive submission to heaviness, far from any moral degradation, reveals the primacy of the ethical over the ontological, in a sense akin to that of Emmanuel Levinas’s assumptions concerning the gaze of the other. In this context, I will argue that, far from the supposed vocation of care being to alleviate from the weight of gravity, a caring relationship can only be based on the experience of a kind of play together with gravity, a “humiliation”, in its very etymological sense — the Latin humus means “the earth”, “the ground” — which elevates us to a truly human ethic: an embodied care (Maurice Hamington).
Christine Leroy is a French philosopher (PhD, agrégée). She is associated with Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her phenomenological approach to the lived body is based on her experience of dance and performance. In the past, she mainly studied kinesthetic empathy and its ethical stakes, in terms of care. A professor of philosophy in classe préparatoire and a researcher based in Paris, she published three monographs: La Phénoménologie (Ellipses Publishers), Phénoménologie de la danse: De la chair à l'éthique (Hermann) and The Body (Atlande). She co-edited the collective book Pesanteur et Portance: Une éthique de la gravité with C. Palermo and published many articles, all about the experience of embodiment.
https://christineleroyplume.wordpress.com/
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman