Sense and fiction, or the strange effects of three sensorial chiasms

Sens et fiction ou les effets étranges de trois chiasmes sensoriels

Michel Bernard (1)

1 Danse, geste et corporéité

Translated by Anna Pakes from « Sens et fiction ou les effets étranges de trois chiasmes sensoriels », in De la création chorégraphique, Pantin : CND, 2001, p. 95-100. Merleau-Ponty's most important and fruitful insight remains, in my view, his chiasmatic theory of the sensorium. This theory famously led him to implode the classical concept of body in favour of an entity that is enigmatic although empirically lived, and which he suggests is equivalent to the generality of the Sensible in itself. This strange medium or reversible tissue would be immersive like the natural elements of water, air, earth or fire; it would envelop beings, even all Being, both collective and individual, spiritual and material; and it is designated, in Merleau-Ponty's writings, by the ambiguous term flesh. I will attempt myself to outline how this Merleau-Pontian insight might be developed and interpreted in the field of dance, connecting his chiasmatic theory to my own conception of the utterative mechanism of the sensory act and, simultaneously, its hidden fiction-generating power - or, perhaps, its enduring but covert process of originary simulation. This attempt has no pretensions beyond stimulating as much reflection as I can on dance corporeality and, particularly, choreographic creation.

Mots clés: Dance performance analysis; Merleau-Ponty; Sensorium

Domaines: Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Michel Bernard. Sense and fiction, or the strange effects of three sensorial chiasms. 2019. ⟨hal-02292135⟩