IntroductionPerforming EmbodimentAlberica Bazzoni and Federica Buongiorno

The paradigm of embodiment — which is today a broad concept around which various theoretical approaches revolve, from phenomenology11Beside Merleau-Ponty’s works, see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology [1931], trans. by Dorion Cairns (Springer, 2012); and Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology [1975], trans. by Albert Hofstadter (Indiana University Press, 1988). to embodied cognition,22See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding [1987], trans. by Robert Paolucci (Shambhala, 1998). and from cognitive sciences33See Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1992). to ethology44See Helen L. Ma and others, ‘Embodying Cognitive Ethology’, Theory & Psychology, 33.1 (2023), pp. 42–58 <https://doi.org/10.1177/09593543221126165>. and artificial intelligence55See Embodied Artificial Intelligence, ed. by Fumiya Iida and others (Springer, 2004). — should be primarily understood as a strong Beginning of page[p. 2] response to the mind–body problem. Beginning from the Cartesian legacy, this dualism has strongly influenced modern and contemporary theories of subjectivity and knowledge, both on a theoretical and practical-political level.66For a reconstruction of the mind–body problem with particular reference to phenomenological theory, see Federica Buongiorno, ‘Embodiment, Disembodiment, and Re-embodiment in the Construction of the Digital Self’, Humana.Mente, 12.36 (2019), pp. 310–30 <https://www.humanamente.eu/index.php/HM/article/view/290> [accessed 10 November 2025]. At the heart of Western metaphysics lies the idea — much older than Cartesian dualism — of a distinction (both ontological and epistemological) between corporeality — that is, extension (space, matter) — and spirituality — that is, thought (unextended and immaterial). Modern philosophy has been marked by the problem of dualism: ‘This idea that the mind was separate from the body was later dominant in the Christian metaphysical tradition in the form of a “soul”’, and the conception ‘of a mind–body split persisted into the 18th century through the works of Locke, Hume and Kant’.77William Farr, Sara Price, and Carey Jewitt, ‘An Introduction to Embodiment and Digital Technology Research: Interdisciplinary Themes and Perspectives’, National Centre for Research Methods Working Paper (2012) <https://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/id/eprint/2257/> [accessed 10 November 2025].

Against substantial dualism, the materialistic tradition — beginning in antiquity with Democritus — has rejected the conception of the soul as immaterial and separate from physical reality, and has argued for its reduction to the actual (material) components of reality. However, while this is an argument against dualism as the real distinction of the substances, it does not address the question of the connection of mind and body, as it is already presented by Descartes. In a letter to Princess Elizabeth (dated 28 June 1643), Descartes claims that as long as one does not do Beginning of page[p. 3] philosophy and relies ‘on life and ordinary conversations’, one learns ‘how to conceive the union of mind and body’. If one focuses on the union, rather than the distinction of body and mind, one can claim that the body and the soul are united as matter is to form. But what about the relation of mind and body? Is it of a mental nature, or is it itself material? Materialism avoids this question, which instead is fully addressed — in contemporary debates — by phenomenological philosophy. Phenomenology reacted to dualism by developing two specific and correlated notions: that of reduction (on the methodological level) and that of embodiment (on the ontological level). Husserl’s conception of Leib — or the living body as more than just a physical body (Körper) — is already meant to overcome substantial dualism: what makes a body a living body is the fact that it inhabits and experiences itself (and others) within a certain environment, and this experience is inseparable from the kinaesthetic processes performed by the body. Intentionality itself expresses the original correlation of mind (subject) and body (materiality): the starting point is precisely the relation of body and mind, and not their split. They constitute each other mutually from the very beginning. At the same time, the ontological primacy of relation can be sustained only by resorting to reduction as a method. Descartes claims that the union (relation) of mind and body could be conceived by subjects only by refraining from doing philosophy, that is, by simply living — this is the meaning of the well-known Cartesian motto: primum vivere, deinde philosophari. Reflection splits what life keeps united. Phenomenological reduction is a way to reconcile life and reflection: it is both a gesture, a bodily exercise — an effort to stop and focus not on the supposedly objective way things are, but on the way they manifest themselves and are subjectively apprehended —Beginning of page[p. 4] and a reflection, an abstraction from common-sense reality. It is an embodied view — a point of view, and not from nowhere, but from the specific, embodied, and situated experience that is lived. Reduction is performing embodiment — this is why phenomenology represents the main theoretical and methodological reference for the reflections gathered in this volume.

Combining the notions of performativity and embodiment, this volume situates the body in the realm of processes, movement, and poiesis. The notion of performativity addresses questions of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and politics, generating alternative configurations to the mind–body dualism while avoiding forms of essentialist and deterministic foundationalism. The contributions to this volume emphasize doing over being: the body does and is done; it is engaged in a movement of co-constitution with the world. It is an emplaced and kinaesthetic unit, which expresses itself within, and is shaped by, the constantly changing encounter with its physical and social environment. It is in doing that bodies produce knowledge and shared (or contested) social meaning. Embodiment is performed, in the sense that it is a process that manifests itself in the forms of its making, a process which is both passive and active, inscription of the world in the body and action of the body in and on the world.

It is Maurice Merleau-Ponty who best understood this sense of performing embodiment beyond substantial dualism:

If I find, while reflecting upon the essence of the body, that it is tied to the essence of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is identical with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because, ultimately, the subject that I am, understood concretely, is inseparable Beginning of page[p. 5] from this particular body and from this particular world. 88Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans. by Donald A. Landes (Routledge, 2012), p. 431.

In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty highlights the a priori coincidence of consciousness and the body, and argues that mind and body are not reducible to their parts, nor is the body simply to be conceived as either object or subject, since from the very beginning it is already a body-subject. As Russell Keat notes, ‘Merleau-Ponty implicitly challenges all philosophical positions which accept some basic dichotomy between subject and object […]. In particular, he rejects Cartesian dualism’,99Russell Keat, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of the Body’, unpublished paper delivered at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University (May 1982) <https://www.russellkeat.net/admin/papers/51.pdf> [accessed 10 November 2025]. especially the ontological principle of the real distinction of the substances. For Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, the human body is itself a ‘subject’, and the human subject is necessarily, not just contingently, embodied. Against the Cartesian assumption, he argues:

The motor experience of our body is not a particular case of knowledge; rather, it offers us a manner of reaching the world and the object, a ‘praktognosia’, that must be recognized as original, and perhaps as originary.1010Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 141.

In other words, as Keat writes:

[T]he body’s praktognosia, i.e. practical knowledge, cannot be analytically decomposed into more primitive concepts, such as ‘body’ and ‘mind’; […] this praktognostic body in Beginning of page[p. 6] some sense forms the basis for all other kinds of relationship between the human subject and the world.1111Keat, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of the Body’.

Not only is consciousness embodied; for Merleau-Ponty, the unconscious itself is nothing other than ‘a certain posture of my social body’.1212Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), trans. by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 193. Conversely, ‘to have a body is also to have a past of embodiment; there is a time of the body, a temporal structure of embodiment.’1313Ibid., p. 201.

Merleau-Ponty speaks of a ‘pressure of transformation’,1414Ibid., p. 131. whose centre is the body: to pressure is at the same time to be pressed, since perception always involves a chiasmatic relation that is active and passive at the same time. This evokes Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh as the tissue or texture connecting bodily parts, and as the founding bodily ability to experience the world — a notion that is at the core of Susan Kozel’s chapter in this volume, as well as her conversation with choreographer and dancer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir. Tissue is both active and passive: it fills the gaps and forms parts, and at the same time accommodates systems. Tissue is intelligent before being conscious: it is another way to reconcile life and reflection in a phenomenological perspective. Merleau-Ponty’s thought implies embodiment as the temporal texture of being, whereby the subject is crossed and ‘lived’ by the unconscious, the passivity, and the vulnerability of having a body and being alive.

In their contributions, Lucilla Guidi, Alberica Bazzoni, and Ursula Fanning focus on language performativity as Beginning of page[p. 7] providing the most effective objection to mind–body dualism. They investigate philosophical and literary language by foregrounding performativity — what language does, and how it does it — over its semantic function — that is, what it refers to. In these essays, performativity describes the embodied, relational, and situated feature of language, as opposed to a structuralist (and, later, deconstructionist) paradigm which focuses primarily, if not exclusively, on the absence of the signified and the web of relationships among signifiers. Much more than being just a sign that points to an external, independent referent, here language is understood as an embodied gesture that enacts — that is, performs — a certain configuration of reality. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Cavell, Guidi’s chapter examines our mutual attunement in a shared and embodied practice of language; it further explores mutual attunement through Judith Butler’s notion of opacity as a relational and affective ontology. Literary texts explored by Bazzoni and Fanning draw attention to writing as a physical act, carried out by an embodied and situated subject, which summons the reader into a shared temporality, further anchoring language to the body. Significantly, such an attention to the link between writing and embodiment is often central in texts written by women, who were historically excluded from self-representation. Within a patriarchal order, as Butler argues, ‘the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom.’1515Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), p. 17. In the course of the twentieth century, women writers appropriate and deeply transform the function of literature, as they seek to ‘dismantle the Cartesian Beginning of page[p. 8] and phallocentric separation of mind and body and push the woman’s body, as part of her being, into the speaking subject’.1616Jennifer Burns, Fragments of Impegno: Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative 1980–2000, Italian Perspectives, 9 (Legenda, 2002), p. 85.

The volume then moves away from language into a second area of inquiry: dance. In framing the ways in which embodiment is performed, the concept of choreography emerges as a particularly generative one. In her essay, Susan Kozel focuses on affective choreographies through a phenomenological framework, whereby attention to affective states can be articulated. As patterns of movement, choreographies suitably foreground processes and transformations that take place in time while retaining intelligible shapes. Furthermore, as patterns of movement that are defined by affective inter-actions within and among bodies, choreographies are powerful ways to capture the embodied dynamics of passivity and activity, design and improvisation, inner and outer states, and reciprocity of action and re-action. Such dynamics are central to Margrét Guðjónsdóttir’s work on somatic practices, which she has also developed in her long-term collaboration with Kozel. As the conversation included here between Kozel and Guðjónsdóttir illustrates, their collaboration exemplifies a phenomenological methodology, which constantly circles theory back to praxis. This rooting of philosophical reflection into embodied and performative praxis was reflected in the structuring of the international symposium ‘Performing Embodiment: Practices of Reduction’, which took place at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in February 2022 and from which this volume originates. On that occasion, standard academic presentations and Beginning of page[p. 9] panel discussions were accompanied by the premiere of Guðjónsdóttir’s installation CATALYSTS — Somatic Resonance, which explores intensive somatic states in dance through the lens of augmented reality, and by a somatic practice workshop run by Guðjónsdóttir herself with the symposium’s participants.

The notion of choreography as effectively capturing the dynamic between design and improvisation and the mutual affective influence among bodies is also relevant in Dorothea Olkowski’s essay on Argentine tango. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre, Olkowski shows how embodied existence always implies appearing in front of an Other and into a world that is the site of that appearance. In tango, the dancing partners’ embodied experience appears, as their self-display, relationality, mutual affect, and recognition are performatively heightened. A similar form of performative appearance also takes place in the literary writings analysed by Fanning, as the authors come into existence as authors precisely through the act of writing and their concomitant exposition to the (desired) reader.

Alongside language and dance, a third area where the coupling of performativity and embodiment offers original insights is socio-political analysis. Again, the notion of choreography is relevant here, as it fittingly describes the processes through which social norms categorize, orient, and discipline bodies, and the ways in which such norms are implemented — or may be challenged — in practice. Gender is possibly the most disputed ground in this respect, with Butler’s Gender Trouble providing a fundamental contribution to the very notion of performativity. Biology, representation, norms, violence: gender is constantly produced and reproduced through the inscription of gestures, the selection of physical descriptors, and the Beginning of page[p. 10] attribution of social roles, which form complex disciplinary choreographies that function as dispositives, in a Foucauldian sense. Elisa Virgili’s essay begins from these premises, analysing gender performance and women’s bodies in combat sports. Virgili opens up the investigation of a field of experience where performativity and embodiment may come into conflict, ultimately pointing back to dominant social norms and calling them into question.1717The subject of women and trans people in combat sports recently came to worldwide attention due to the transphobic, racist, and sexist remarks made by several public figures, including Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, US president Donald Trump, British novelist JK Rowling, and multibillionaire Elon Musk (among other right-wing public figures), concerning Algerian female boxer Imane Khelif’s participation at the 2024 Olympics. Accusing Khelif of being a ‘man’ who was unfairly competing against women, these figures prompted surreal and violent speculation regarding Khelif’s gender identity, and general confusion as to whether this ought to be determined by her birth certificate (which registers her as female) or by her hormone levels, leading to waves of degrading comments. Khelif went on to win the gold medal and sued her detractors. See ‘Algeria’s Imane Khelif Files Harassment Case After Gender Row’, Al Jazeera, 11 August 2024 <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/11/algerias-imane-khelif-files-harassment-case-after-gender> [10 November 2025]. As repeated and incorporated patterns of behaviour, disciplinary choreographies organize social space, dictating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that work on and through bodies. While these dynamics and the lines they trace may be more evident in contexts where bodies are explicitly concerned — such as dance or, indeed, combat sports — they are no less stringent when a certain context is (allegedly) primarily concerned with ‘the mind’. In her essay, Chiara Montalti draws on feminist and disability studies to investigate the role of embodiment and performativity in the academic field, exposing its obliviousness to the weight and needs of actual bodies engaged in academic work. Based on old-fashioned assumptions of neutrality and universality,Beginning of page[p. 11] accustomed to abstracting the intellect from the flesh, the academic field is in fact organized around very specific bodies, while through its choreographed performances it works as an exclusionary field. The Cartesian mind–body split is incorporated into a social field that tightly selects which bodies belong in it, and which do not. The lines of inclusion and exclusion, however, are not spelled out, as this would imply acknowledging that bodies matter; rather, they are performed. To foreground embodiment and performativity, thus, is also to challenge the mind–body split in the academic field: in theory and in practice.