This seminar will focus on the exploration of the representational practices participating in the construction of what can be seen, how it can be seen, and where it can be seen.  In this case, that "thing" to be seen is the body. 

In the post-IVth Lateran Council (1215) of the Ecclesia Universalis, the desire to give visibility to the body of Christ, which had disappeared, propelled a complex theological thought that delimited a place where all the gazes were supposed to see the same body—"Hoc est corpus meum." The early modern period and neo-classical order attempted to severe the link with Christian theology of similitude by promoting resemblance/neo-classical order, as evidenced by the culture of dissection. It marked a shift from theological/logocentric towards corporeal investigations about the body as long as that body was coded as a system, a design, or a structure, whose rules of operation, comprehended with the help of reason or a microscope, confirmed the agreement between theology and the sciences. The production of the mechanized body in the eighteenth century, so poignantly described by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his Machine Man (1747), turned it into the object and target of power—Michel Foucault’s docile body—which can be analyzed, manipulated, and corrected; into a sexed body—Walter Laqueur’s socialized sexed body—that could be discussed in new spaces opened by the intellectual, economic, and political changes in the eighteenth century; or into a new personality type that placed the body under the surveillance of a new economic mechanism. 

From the Enlightenment to the postmodern condition, the body has been cut into to facilitate its encounter between pedagogy, medicine, economics, or politics. Here are some of these cuts: the fragmented positivist inscriptions of social (August Comte), economic (Karl Marx), and psychoanalytic (Sigmund Freud) meanings onto the body; the aporias of Auschwitz, Srebrenica, and Rwanda, which ripped open the Enlightenment thought and that which can be communicated about the body; current deliberations on the body, gender, ethnicity, race, globalization, the virtual, etc., which make us consider the body, as overdetermined by social structures, economics, identity politics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, or partisan attention to the subaltern. Every single one of these cuts leaves its indelible marks on the body in the arts—for example, medieval cycle plays; comedies of Ben Jonson; Denis Diderot’s Paradox of Acting or François Boucher’s paintings; realism/naturalism, symbolism, the first wave avant-gardes; Committed Art; Informel Art; body and performance art in Euro-American cultural landscape. 

The seminar will focus not only on resingularizing these marks on the body, which are described and claimed by different disciplines and academic fields, all of which look for the body, but also on a critique of the approaches towards making the body visible be in a medieval cultural landscape, the Enlightenment, or in a postmodern condition.  How do these strategies frame the body, as well as other objects, in terms of the visible, thinkable, identifiable, or readable by past and present imaginations?

To make these bodies visible or readable on the level of a diagram or a sentence is to gloss over that moment when something happens which cannot be fully folded into the known—an epistemological hiccup/syncope.  The seminar is a call for research projects, which explore this idea of the body housed and unhoused in being and its consequences for political/social markings or modes of perception as well as for bio-politics, theatre historiography, gender/ethnic (or any other) identity formation.