participants & abstracts

Urszula CHOWANIEC, the Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University & SSEES, UCLThe ruined migrating bodies: the overview of literary manifestations in the Polish women's fiction writingIn my paper I will present various representations of body in women’s fiction writing (1989-2010) which can be connected to the notion of melancholy and interpreted as a way of diagnosis of contemporaneity.

Probably the most important themes among those connected with social melancholy are the notions of physical pain and bodily suffering. The main literary device employed in pursuing this theme is the various metaphors, comparisons and epithets (“pins and needles of pain”, “my feet are hurting so much”, “a hand inside my brain”, “a dull pain, killing me”) that draw readers’ attention to the problem of language. Poetic language tries to get across that which is unnameable, by which I mean physical pain. Pain is beyond language, and though it exists it cannot be fathomed, for in the words of Elaine Scarry, it is “vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of object such as subterranean plater, Sayfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in the other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear” (Scarry 1987, 4). Language, capable of expressing the most complicated moral dilemmas, such as Hamlet’s, collapses, “dries up” in Virginia Woolf’s words, when the suffering wants to describe their suffering, even a simple headache. “Physical pain not only resists language, it actively seeks to destroy it, in almost an instant returning us to a pre-linguistic stage of being, to sounds, screams, which human beings emit before they learn to speak” (Scarry 1987, 4).

Literature attempts to deal with this pre-language, inarticulate, hence para-symbolic, state using figurative tools or exclamations: “ah, oh, oh,” just the ersatz of human pain. Sophocles, in portraying the pains of the dying Philoklotes, records them in long phrases, words and syllables cascading. In this way, the inexpressibility of suffering is camouflaged with an excess of description. Halina Poświatowska frames this in an ironic fashion, being the writer who is famously concerned with the suffering body: “To create a verse—once upon a time all that was needed was a vibrating pain in the cells and a range of words no richer than the screams of a beast. Today, one needs concepts and arguments, comparative explorations into the depths of dictionaries”. Here, the poet creates an intuitive mini-history of poetry, of the primal scream of pain, the sign of our original union with fathomless nature, replaced with conceptuality, the scream of unarticulated semiotics replaced with concepts.

Sanjukta DASGUPTA, University of CalcuttaThe embodied self: representations of gendered silent bodies in Bengali literatureRepresentations of gendered bodies in Bengali literary texts during the colonial period have foregrounded the maternal nation and the entrapped plight of colonized women caught in the triple bind of sex, caste and class. The impact of Victorianism in British occupied India affected not just society and culture, but also played a powerful role in compelling creative writers to use evasive textual strategies in addressing the politics of the sexualized body as desirable object and desiring subject. In my paper I will focus on selected fiction and poetry of the first Asian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore where he has addressed issues of sexual desire and embodied subjectivity in a nuanced aesthetic mode, which have nevertheless created an impression that is remarkably powerful in its explorations of the female body, as biological sex and as cultural construct. Also, a significant aspect of the Tagorean discourse of the embodied self points at the consciousness of the self in its strategic use of the desirable allurement of the female body.

Tadeusz GADACZ, Pedagogical University of CracowBody: a problem or a mystery? Gabriel Marcel's perspectiveFor Gabriel Marcel a man is incorporated existence. Therefore, already in The Metaphysical Journal (1928-1933) he dealt with the issue of the ratio to the body. According to the French existentialist my body is not given to me as an object. Neither can I say "I have a body". Between me and my body there is an intimate relationship which can hardly be called a "relation". About the body I cannot say "it is me", neither is "not me". At once we are beyond the opposition of the subject and object. Thus, a fundamental question arises: How a discourse upon the corporeality is possible, since it is not and cannot be given to me, nor can be thought of. When it is thought of it becomes some-body in general, rather than my own body. The body is non-penetrating. In order to solve this riddle Marcel distinguished a problem from a mystery. Only a body of another can become a problem, whereas my own body remains a mystery, that is something in which I am involved. In the zone of mystery there is no distinction between "in me" and "before me". However, didn’t Marcel appoint a border for philosophy of the body in this way? I can understand my body only as the measuring cup in which I am acting and I am experiencing objects, through the mediating function of the body, but I cannot get to know my body and talk about it, because then I reduce the mystery to a problem. But doesn’t this aporia result from the fact that our discourse involves the metaphor of space? When distinguishing a problem from a mystery, Marcel tries to free himself of this metaphorical trap. However, the language he uses himself seems to imply the metaphors after all. An "incarnation" is pointing at this word. Being "in-body" means that against Marcel’s declarations my body becomes an object in which I abide and of which I make use.

Akiko KASUYA, Kyoto City University of ArtsArt and the body: Tatsuno Art Project 2013Last autumn the Tatsuno Art Project 2013 Arts and Memories was held with the generous support of the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. This project has aimed to present exciting contemporary art to people from across Japan and around the globe, capitalize on the region’s unique cultural heritage, and create opportunities for people from throughout the nation and the world to communicate with local residents so as to make Tatsuno a more dynamic and popular place to visit. In this lecture, I would like to consider various connections between art and the body by focusing on some of the works in the Tatsuno Art Project 2013.Known in centuries past as the “little Kyoto” of Harima Province (today, the south-western part of Hyogo Prefecture), Tatsuno is an atmospheric old castle town. It is mild and relatively warm year round, with the climate of the nearby Seto Inland Sea region, said to be similar to that of the Mediterranean. The pleasant Ibo River flows through the historic community, and the town is encircled by mountains such as Mt. Keiro and Mt. Matoba, and is the subject of much interest for its many historic buildings and well-preserved streets. This year the residence of the Hori family, prominent local farmers, was designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan, and six buildings in the vicinity of the former Higashimaru Soy Sauce Co. offices and plant were registered as Tangible Cultural Properties amid an ongoing historical survey of the district, as described in detail in “The Restoration and Utilization of Soy Sauce Warehouses.”

Thanks to the support of numerous people we have been able to hold the event in 2011 and 2012, and the 2013 event represented the culmination of our efforts over the past few years, being the largest ever in scale with nine invited artists, 11 other participating artists, and one contemporary musician for a total of 21 creators contributing works. With new spaces added for a total of 16 venues, the community-wide project truly achieved its goal of presenting “a historic castle town as a museum.” We were also able to strengthen Tatsuno’s international ties further, inviting artists from France and Poland as well as Japanese artists residing in the UK and Spain. At this point, I would like to discuss the relationship between art and the body, as exemplified by the similarities and differences in works by the Japanese artists Matsui Chie and Higashikage Tomohiro, and the Polish artist Mirosław Bałka.

Ian W. KING, London College of Fashion and University of the Arts

Expression and the stylised clothed body

Here we suggest that the body provides rich opportunities for conveying expression; either: verbally, physically or via appearance. In this paper we propose to focus on appearance, and in particular, clothing. Here we suggest that the body provides rich opportunities for conveying expression; either: verbally, physically or via appearance. In this paper we propose to focus on appearance, and in particular, clothing.

In the paper we will suggest that when we wear clothes on our bodies-this is something intended to fulfil something greater than simply preserving our modesty! That is, our choice of clothing, and the manner in which we wear them, relates to both intentionality and identity. In other words, when we wear certain clothes, in a particular way, this produces an intended means of communication that mediates between the actual physicality of the individual and the ideal/image that they are striving to convey to audiences. In these circumstances, this objective might raise at least one question, that is: how effective can clothing be to articulate this objective?

The manner of our response to this fundamental question will start from an important historical argument suggesting that clothing low (in semantic terms) in conveying specific meaning. Fred Davis argues in his seminal text, this does not suggest our choice of clothing (or the style we might employ) cannot communicate rather he labels them ‘quasi-­code’ (in semiotics terms) (Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity, University of Chicago Press, 1993). Davis elaborates on his label when he suggests “that although it draws on the conventional visual and tactile symbols of culture it does so allusively, ambiguously, and inchoately so that the meanings evoked by the combinations and permutations of the code’s keys (i.e. fabric, texture, colour, pattern, volume, silhouette and occasion) are forever shifting and in process” (Davis 1993, s. 5). Yet amongst the arguments we will rehearse whether Davis’s interpretation unintentionally conflates his under standings of ‘clothing’ with ‘fashion’? This blurring of understandings of these distinct items might be significant – as this may reveal an alternate, but related, position? One that suggests that our style of wearing (if employed in particular manner – see below) might provide opportunities for an original act of expression that intentionally generates ambiguity for audiences in terms of meaning. As Cor Baervedt enlarges this is “because we can never be certain that our expression will be anything more than symptom of our individual lives, that is, we can never be sure that our expression will take root in the consciousness of others" (Davis 1993, s. 2; Cor Baervedt, Merleau–Ponty and Saussure: situating the subject of perception in history, internal seminar, University of Alberta, 2007. Found at: http://www.ualberta.ca/~cor/Documents/Merleau-Ponty-situating_the_subject.pdf).

Blanka KNOTKOVÁ-ČAPKOVÁ, MUP & Charles University

Embodiment and disembodiment of the female in three Tagore's poems

This paper will be a case study of three Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore)'s poems, read through the lens of gender and archetypal analysis. The selected texts represent various conceptualizations of femininity, depicting (1) imaginary ideal Femaleness (Nārī), (2) a real black poor young woman whom the narrator is attracted by (Kriṣṇakali) and (3) a girl resembling the poet's deceased daughter who transcends into a celestial image (Hāriye yāoyā). In all the three, in a way, the images of embodied real woman and disembodied imaginary woman blend together – a figuration to be found in many Tagore's poems. I will try to explore the dynamics of various positions between which the discourses oscillate: construct and essence, reality and image, physicality and etherality, hierarchy and equality, objectification and sharing, transcendence and immanence, Creator and created, and – male and female. Are they to represent binary opposites, or fluid identities? Or both?

Maria POPCZYK, University of SilesiaThe image of the body-face: the case of Franz X. Messerschmidt and Bill Viola

The face, the exposed part of the body, finds its most complete expression in the art of portrait, in particular when it displays emotions. What I am concerned with is the interpretation of the body-face and emotions based on Franz X. Messerschmidt’s collection of busts and Bill Viola’s video art projects. My aim is to analyse the link between the image of the face and the views on emotions in traditional aesthetics, physiognomy, psychoanalysis and Hans Belting’s image theory.

Physiognomy allows me to examine how the notion of the link between the soul and the body is translated into the practice of reading emotions from the face, and how this knowledge provides artists with a means to present the body moved by emotions in a convincing way. However, the loss of popularity suffered by physiognomy due to Cartesian dualism and empirical sciences deprived the face of its role as the mirror of the soul and what remains is merely facial expressions manifesting passing emotions. The aesthetics of expression offers an explanation of the fascination for viewing expressive faces shared by people of every historical period. The connection between the body and soul is no longer the focus of the studies. The stress in on a special type of effect such images have on the viewer: the fact that viewing emotions represented in an artwork gives the viewer a special kind of insight, expands their own inner lives. Anthropologically-oriented image theories place the emphasis on the relationship between the image and the body. They claim that the reason why we create images of emotions is not the fact that we have souls but that we have bodies, whose stories we want to record and communicate. The shift of focus towards expressions of the face makes it possible to pass on and strengthen the knowledge of emotions, non-discursive and yet existing beyond an individual, which in turn creates the community space. Viewing pictures in the museum rooms allows us to distance ourselves from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and to contemplate faces moved with passions. One of the interesting themes recurring both in theoretical thought and in artistic practice is searching for resemblance between the image of a human face and the body of an animal. Emotions are identified with the animal aspect of human condition, and psychoanalysis links it with the energy of id.

While selecting the interpretational and illustrative material I was mainly interested in the theme of departure and continuity in both content and manners of representation, as well as the manifestation of the continually renewed need to depict and view the expression of the face. Seen from this perspective artistic images of emotions become events in the cognitive, visual and communal dimensions.

Beata ROMANOWICZ, National Museum in KrakówManifestation of the Kabuki actor’s sex on the woodblock prints in Edo Period

The connection between the Kabuki theater and Japanese woodblock prints of Edo period (1603-1868), especially portraits of actors called yakusha-e, gives an exceptional opportunity to analyze a perception of the sex of the actor, the hero of the drama as well as the character performed on the stage. Both phenomena flourished in Edo period and had crucial impact on visual art of the time inspiring pictures of the Floating World (Jap. Ukiyo-e).

The images on Ukiyo-e woodblock prints serve as a pretext for approaching the matter of portraying an actor as a performer (a man) and as a character performed by him (which could be a woman as well; the case of the actor onnagata). I would like to emphasize consciousness of the actor’s own sex (only men on the Kabuki stage) with special attention paid to the drama character and breaking the convention between the real actor and his stage emploi.

First, I am going to discuss the historical background of the Kabuki theatre invented by a woman Izumo-no Okuni, and then, by a few government’s edicts, allowed to be performed on the stage by the adult men only. The tradition has been successfully continued till today.

The paper is supported by research on the Kabuki theatre, especially in relation to onnagata actors, and by the experience of watching Kabuki performances in Japan in various theatres, such as Kabuki-za, Minami-za, the National Theatre in Tokyo, Zenshin-za (Tokyo), as well as some interviews with actors and people of the theatre, and my research in theatrical archives. Parallelly, Ukiyo-e images of the Edo period were studied with the core of research in the National Museum in Krakow and its collection of Japanese woodblock prints (over 4600 originals of Edo Period), with the special attention paid to yakusha-e portrait by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Studying the above issues, one can realize that although Japanese culture recognizes two sexes it is clearly aware of diversity of gender problems, which are implied whenever one performs his or her sex identity.

As the result of research, I would like to present an interpenetration of the sex ideas of the actor, stage character and drama hero/character with affects the posthumous portraits of the actors. Woodblock prints, very strongly connected with the Kabuki world, serve as the visual evidence of social affairs that bothered the particular epoch.

Chakravarthi RAM-PRASAD, Lancaster UniversityPhenomenology from the outside: bodily being in the earliest Indian medical compendium (Caraka Samhita)The earliest Indian medical compendium, the Caraka Saṃhitā, not only offers extensive guidance on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and on various surgical procedures, but also a complex conceptualization of the body in illness and health. This conceptualization is structured by discussion of the physician’s epistemology and conduct in relationship to the patient; but also by extensive analysis of the patient’s subjectivity and guidance on human flourishing. Crucially, I argue that it offers a ‘phenomenology from the outside’, the co-constitution of the experience of bodily being through diagnostic grasp – by physician and patient – of what it is to be (ill/well). The starting point of the idea of the body is as the physical field of the human ‘situation’. This empirical ‘given’ is a richly presented idea of the human as bodily being, in which the psychosomatic and the social - intersubjective are presented complementarily, to develop a vision of illness and health that conceives the sharply agentive individual at the nexus of a moral ecology.

Elżbieta STANISZEWSKA, Kazimierz Pulaski University of Technology & Humanities in RadomFrom mortification of the body to the comfort of contemporary design?

Heidegger’s notion of handiness combines two meanings, which in my view should be separated. They both refer to characterizing tools in a given culture. Every culture uses tools, they are all used so they are handy. The question is: handy with regard to what? Two answers come to mind.

The first one suggests that the handiness is typical of aims achieved in a given culture, which, as everybody knows, are linked with the system of values. Having been fulfilled, the aims seem to disappear but new ones emerge and cultural values are all the time appreciated. They constitute a part of the vision of the world accepted by the members of a given cultural community. In such a context we can understand the handiness of tools as their optimum quality facilitating the achievement of aims which maintain the current cultural values and so the existence of a given culture.

The second answer would link handiness with fulfilling the requirements of the human body. When considering the body in biological categories (as an organism) we bear in mind its universal characteristics such as limbs, height, differences in body measurements etc. In such a context Heidegger’s handiness is understood pragmatically, as a feature of a tool adjusting it to the human body.

In my paper I propose a thesis that contemporary design is losing the handiness of the first type concentrating on making tools more and more comfortable for the human body. Cultural aims and values existing and recognized in a given culture have lost their importance or been completely forgotten. At the same time every tool user is given a chance of developing the handiness of the first type. Whether we use this opportunity or not is another problem.

Maria VENIERI, University of CreteEmbodied mind and phenomenal consciousness

In recent years a central debate in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science concerns the role of the body in perception and cognition. While for many contemporary philosophers not only cognition but also perception is connected mainly with the brain, where the processing of the input from the senses takes place, for the proponents of embodied cognition other aspects of the body beyond the brain as well as the environment play a constitutive role in cognitive processes. In perception a new theory has emerged, which stresses its active character and claims that the embodied subject and the environment, with which it interacts, form a dynamic system. Supporters of enactive perception such as Susan Hurley, Alva Noë and Evan Thompson are externalists and believe that perceptual content is not determined solely by internal states but also by the world and not only causally but essentially: The content would not have the features it has, if the subject was not embedded in this specific environment. Yet, it will be argued that the interaction between the subject and the environment forms a system of causal relations, so we could theoretically interfere in the causal chains and create matching hallucinations or a virtual reality as in the film Matrix, which the subject could not distinguish from veridical perception. This kind of argument and the related thought experiments aim to show the primacy of the brain in determining phenomenal states and that the body and its interactions with the environment have a causal but not a constitutive or essential role in forming phenomenal consciousness.

Dagmar WUJASTYK, University of ZurichTreating cough and becoming immortal: Rasāyana in Sanskrit medical literatureIn this presentation, I will discuss a branch of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda) that is dedicated to promoting health, rejuvenation and longevity. This branch of medicine, and the treatments associated with it, is already described in the earliest ayurvedic works, where it is called rasāyana ("the science of essences"). Later literature refers to these kinds of treatment as kāyakalpa ("the treatment of the body"). Rasāyana therapy was aimed at restoring or even creating youthfulness, but could also be used against specific diseases, like cough (understood to be a category of disease rather than a symptom). Certain formulations were even credited with giving the consumer superhuman powers. In these more dramatically transformative treatments, patients were supposed to undergo a process of bodily disintegration, a shedding of impurities and of old layers of the body, to then begin the renewal of the body. To achieve this, complicated procedures had to be followed, and particularly potent medicines imbibed. Simpler treatments would have gentler effects, but also rather less spectacular results.

Rasāyana continues to be an important part of modern Ayurveda. While most modern interventions are based on simplified versions of the classical therapies and their recipes, there are even some examples of modern treatments that follow the more elaborate procedures described in the ancient texts. I will describe several instances in which full rasāyana treatments were undertaken in the 20th and 21st centuries, discussing the reasons for their undertaking and the alleged results of treatments. I will also relate these modern-day treatments to the instructions given for them in the classical ayurvedic texts, and will compare the modern discourses of rasāyana treatment with those of the ancient ayurvedic authors.