FFF Seminar: A Plea for Eco-Somaesthetics

Abstract:

A Plea for Eco-Somaesthetics

Pragmatist aesthetics in general, and somaesthetics in particular have insisted on the fact that the field of aesthetics covers all the faculties of sensibility, and is not restricted solely to the realm of the arts. From this perspective, aesthetic experience covers not just how we think and imagine but also how we inhabit the world. Yet the pragmatist focus on sensibility and the senses should not be restricted by a predetermined concept of the body, in particular the human body taken as an individual.

With the idea of ecosomaesthetics, I intend to extend the field of somaesthetics into ecological thinking. To do that we need to reframe the idea of the body as a sphere of collective relationships. Ecosomaesthetics would then provide an approach for redefining the soma from the standpoint of ecosystems, and for enhancing its aesthetic qualities by introducing categories that are not human and not intentional. I will be drawing some lines of argument from Shusterman’s work but also from Thomas Alexander’s research in The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence (2013).

Bio:

Barbara Formis

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Barbara Formis has obtained PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne University, is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the School of Arts of the University Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne. She is a member of the ACTE Institute (EA 7539). Mainly influenced by pragmatism, Barbara works in the interdisciplinary field between philosophy and performance. Her research concerns the aesthetics and philosophy of the body, ordinary language, gestures and expression with a particular focus on dance, happenings, performing events and their relationship to social phenomena and everyday practices. She has been a dancer and has also worked as a dramaturge.

She is the co-founder and co-director, with choreographer Melanie Perrier, of the Laboratoire du Geste (The Gesture Laboratory), a platform that promotes research, publication and experimental research in the interdisciplinary field between performance the visual arts. In 2010, she published Esthétique de la vie ordinaire, Aesthetics of Ordinary Life with Presses Universitaires de France. She has also edited two anthologies: Gestes à l’oeuvre (Gestures at Work) published by L’Incidence éditions in 2008 (republished in 2015) and Penser en Corps (Thinking through the Body) L’Harmattan, 2009.