The Work of Not Doing: Being-with Texts by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida

: Tracing Encounters through Elliptical Practice in Dancing, Reading and Writing

Abstract

The Work of Not Doing is a Practice-as-Research (PaR) project concerned with encounters between dance and philosophy. Its primary outcome is a new PaR practice that I call elliptical practice, devised as a method for working with bodies and philosophical writing, honed through practical engagement with specific texts by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. Elliptical practice is a method of encounter that uses creative critical and somatic processes of attention, such as listening touch, feeling, staying with and sensing resonance, thereby suggesting an alternative to cerebral approaches to thinking. Elliptical practice facilitates encounter and traces the thinking that takes place through encounter as dancing, writing and reading. This method offers a new model for working with texts through practical rather than theoretical means, which is of relevance to the fields of Creative Criticism and Performance Philosophy as well as Dance Studies and Somatic Enquiry. In The Work of Not Doing, encounter is aligned with Nancy’s ‘being-with’, the core concept under scrutiny in this project and the foundation of elliptical practice. In this enquiry I equate ‘being’ with incipience experienced in ‘the Gap’ and ‘with’ with the resonance that takes place in the space between bodies. Elliptical practice draws on the mathematical and grammatical figure of the ellipse, used by Derrida as a compositional approach in Ellipsis, whereby dancing or writing emerge as an after life that traces the relation of spacing, or encounter, between two poles. Here, dancing or writing are co-composed rather authored. One insight from this enquiry is that such after lives can be understood as bearing witness to an encounter. The title ‘Not Doing’ alludes to emergence, referencing dance processes such as Steve Paxton’s Small Dance, where dance happens, and Susan Melrose’s term ‘expert not-knowing’, (2019) whereby a choreographer composes frames and questions that allow dance to take place. Further insights from this research include an expanded understanding of the materiality of bodies to include all insubstantial and physical matter, a materialist ontology with ramifications for engagement with concepts; a recognition of and devising of processes for accessing the spatio-temporal state of incipience that maintains dancing or writing as always in process; the creative and critical potential of the ontology of being-with for transdisciplinary thinking in the Arts and Humanities; the sense that being-with, as performed through elliptical practice, offers an alternative to experiencing different modes of being as polarising, which has implications beyond the academy and the arts and into the politics of everyday.

Date of Award	21 Aug 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Sponsors	TECHNE
Supervisor	Emily Orley (Supervisor) & Bob Whalley (Co-Supervisor)