AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT: “THE BODY BEFORE THE BODY”

Recently, I participated in a Gaga class: a movement language developed by' the choreographer Ohad Naharin. For the majority of participants attending the session, it was their first experience of Gaga, and since it was late in the evening, most of us were tired after a long day' at work, something that the instructor noticed immediately. The instructions that we were given initially' sounded simple. At first we were asked to imagine ourselves floating freely and effortlessly over a sea of bubbles, becoming aware of the movement in our bodies as we delved into an almost meditative state. “If you look at an animal”, Naharin explained in an interview, “how they move, shifting their weight, there is a letting go ... to be explosive and quick, you must let go, you must collapse” (quoted in Subin, 2015). But what is it that we have to let go of? The thing I found most challenging in the session (and looking around me I could see that I was not the only one) was leaving behind, as it were, the body I “wore” all day, the postures I “used” at work, the movements I adopted when I met students in the university, taught a class, and so on. This body of habitus, of the Heideggerain Das Man, consisting in movements that were professionally' appropriate, movements borrowed from the academic and social “repertoire” in the same way' that I learned how to dress, the appropriate tone of voice and language to speak in class, and the appropriate way to address students. Recalling Heidegger’s thesis that “Da-sein’s fundamental tendency is to turn away' from himself to a self-forgetful absorption in his occupation in company with other people” (King, 2001, p. 41), most of that day I was absorbed in the world, and my movements accordingly manifested that absorption. I was Dasein in its everydayness: a “they-Body”. And then there was Gaga, which demanded that I respond to the verbal cues of the instructor in movements of my own, inventing or locating movements in my body instead of borrowing those from a given repertoire, that is, from what I already knew.

The experience was intensive, and whether I succeeded or not is beside the point. What the session so vividly demonstrated to me was the coexistence of two bodies: the body of everyday Dasein, and its repertoire of movements, varied and many as they were. Then there was something else: the search for a different movement: something of my own. This search was neither active nor intentional: it happened as soon I began struggling to leave behind my everyday movements and to experiment with something that was unknown to me. This ‘letting go’, as Naharin notes, is not about a loss of control. It is instead, I would argue, about connecting with our intuitive knowledge that there is more to movement than what we are familiar with. For me, it was about acting on the intuition that there is something that is mine and yet is utterly unknown to me. Far from being a case of authenticity, this “experiment” presented me with a question, a question that is at issue for each Dasein.

In analyzing Nietzsche’s attitude to dance, philosopher Alain Badiou repeats the former’s claim that the body in dance is the “body before the body” (Badiou, 2005, p. 57). This before echoes the Heideggerian priority of the ontological, and, in this case, the priority of the Being of the body that precedes any meaning or sense that is subsequently attributed or given to the body. What, then, about movement? Paraphrasing this argument, we could say that authentic movement is the “movement before the movement”, that is, a movement that is not a quality that is added to an already given existence but rather the fact that being itself is in movement. In other words, movement is the way in which Dasein is rather than something that man as entity does. However, this movement is not given: it is always something Dasein has to disclose actively, as an invention that is, paradoxically, a discovery of one’s ownmost being, or mineness.

In Dance as a Metaphorfor Thought, Badiou distinguishes between two types of movement according to their source: First, there is a movement that is caused by external forces acting upon the body—whether necessary, like the force of gravity, or contingent, like the force of the wind. Second, there is a movement that is instigated by an internal motive, whose source is the mover herself. Badiou sees dance as a prime mover: “every gesture and every line of dance must present itself not as a consequence, but as the very source of mobility” (Badiou, 2005, p. 58). “Dance is like a circle in space”, he continues, “but a circle that is its own principle, a circle that is not drawn from the outside, but rather draws itself”. This movement is not the execution of a plan or design, nor a realization of finality, such as when I reach my hand to take a glass because I want to drink. It is instead a movement that is a pure and unintentional happening: a creation. This ontological analysis corresponds to Mary Whitehouse’s insights gleaned from her experience:

An early discovery’ in class or private work is that will power and effort impede movement. Gritting the teeth and trying inhibits the feel of the movement quality. . . . Whether it is a given exercise or free improvisation, one has to learn to let it happen, as contrasted to doing it. Since we are in general convinced that the body is our personal possession, an object, it feels strange to allow it, as subject, the independence of discovery.

(Whitehouse, 1963/1999, p. 53)

Authentic movement is not a response to forces acting upon the body and therefore is not a passive movement. Nevertheless, this movement is far from being the outcome of intentionality, that is, as a product of the conscious will to move in a certain way. Rather, it is a movement induced by an unconscious will, by what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “it speaks” (fa parle), rather than “I speak”, thereby differentiating between the conscious and unconscious ego, or Ca (in French, “it”, a translation of Freud’s “id”). As such, authentic movement transcends the dualism between mind and body and is essentially a psychic movement, an expression of unconscious desire. Authentic movement is movement that is irreducible to the materiality of the body and the forces that act upon it. Neither is it reducible to the ideality and abstraction of the mind. It is rather situated elsewhere and otherwise than in the traditional opposition between mind and the body, that is, in the “extension of the psyche” to refrain Freud’s aphorism that transgresses the Cartesian separation between body and mind.⁸ Furthermore, authentic movement transcends the opposition between passivity and activity. This is because the subject is active, in the sense of being the agent of the movement, but she is nevertheless not the conscious “I” who authors the movement. Psychoanalytically speaking, this movement is akin to a slip of the tongue (what Freud called “parapraxia”), or to the surprise and strangeness of the disclosure of an unconscious desire in speech, or, in this case, in movement.⁹ A patient of Mary Whitehouse describes her experience thus:

Once, for the first time I experienced “being moved” rather than moving. . .. Mary had said that we should rise in the simplest, most direct way we could without overtones. ... I rose in one complete spiral movement. . . physically if I had been asked to do it, I could not have. “It” moved me, I did nothing.

(Whitehouse, p. 53)

Badiou analyzes movement in dance in terms of a primary movement. As he puts it: “[I]t is like the first body ... it is a new beginning, because the dancing gesture must always be some thing like invention of its own beginning” (Badiou, 2005, p. 64). Along the same lines, in a conversation dedicated to conceptualizing the relationship between dance and philosophy, French choreographer Mathilde Monnier tells her interlocutor, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: “I believe that this text [Nancy’s] approaches dance like a the first movement of being, as if seeing and describing movement, is already seeing it as dance” (Monnier & Nancy, 2005, p. 14). For each of Badiou, Nancy, and Monnier, dance is like the primary movement of being, owing to which it is also a movement of coming into being: a movement that in itself is a creation. This thought is in line with Heidegger’s way of conceptualizing the ontology of art in The Origin (ursprung) of the Work of Art. In this essay, Heidegger explores art in connection with its Ursprung, that is, in connection with its origin. For Heidegger, art is not about representation or mimesis. Rather, it is about a primordial (tZr) leap (sprung) into existence.¹⁰ Art, just like Dasein, is capable of disclosing Being, and is therefore capable of being authentic or inauthentic. The connection between authentic movement and art is reflected in Whitehouse’s experience:

I think that we have separated the artist and therapy with no man’s land in between. Eventually you will let go of the therapy and move through the whole thing that gets you ready for art and you will be an artist.

(Fricdcr, 2007, p. 37)

Authentic movement captures the two senses of Heideggerian authenticity as a movement of creation that does not distinguish between therapy and art. Authentic movement is a way of disclosing one’s own being by way of invention, given that this movement, as that which is closest to us and most intimate for us, is at the same time the farthest from us. Heidegger writes:

Ontically, of course, Dasein is not only close to us—even that which is closest: we are it, each one us, wc ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest.

(§5, p. 36)

In DMT, the human being as Dasein discloses its potentiality-of-Being by way of movement. This could only be possible if movement was in the first place not merely a kinetic ability that we share with other types of beings, but a mode of Being, belonging uniquely to the kind of beings that we are. Since Dasein is such that he understands himself in his Being, the therapist plays an indispensable role in the process of opening up and creating a space of “ontological disclosure”, giving the subject a free space to discover its innermost movement and authen-tic-Self, thereby transcending the understanding of herself as an inauthentic “they-self”. This new self-understanding derives from the subject’s own transformational progress in therapy. During this process, the patient becomes an “artist of movement” (rather than a dancer), like the eighteenth-century, Kantian figure of the Genius, the prototype of every artist, whose originality lies in inventing the rules of art rather than following them. Likewise, the discovery of authentic movement is an invention of a “rule” that is one’s ownmost. This freedom is a moment of individuation, bringing us face to face with our potentiality-of-Being, a freedom “which has been released from the illusions of the ‘they’, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious” (§53, p. 311).

CONCLUSION

Philosophy' and DMT come close in acknowledging that movement is a medium of authenticity. I should emphasize that this claim is not contextualized in the domain of art or the beautiful movement. Nevertheless, even if we did contextualize the claim in this way, this would be consistent with Heidegger’s thought that authentic movement is akin to a work of art insofar as both are events of the “unconcealment of Being”.

NOTES

• 1. This way of commencing is in the spirit of Thierry' de Duve’s opening of Kant after Duchamp (MIT Press, 1966), p. 3.
• 2. We see the distinction between ontic and ontological in the case of death. For example, being-towards-death is a mode of Being that is given to Dasein by virtue of the fact that it is, which is to say by virtue of its existence. It is therefore the object of study of an existential investigation. But death does not only have an ontological meaning; in its ontic meaning, we understand death as the termination of one’s life (rather than being-towards-death as the manner in which our finitude shapes our life). Death in the ontic-biological sense is a property of organisms. Owing to this, death belongs properly to the domain of science and biology: For Heidegger, both the hard and social sciences, such as mathematics, physics, anthropology' and so on, address the ontic because they are concerned with the study of beings, not with their Being. For the purpose of this article, I use ‘ontological’ in the sense of that which pertains to Dasein's Being, and I use ‘ontic’ in the sense of all other characteristics of the human subject that do not pertain to its Being, but rather to its being (Seiende}. The important point here is that, for Heidegger, the ontological is prior to the ontic, because Dasein first of all exists before it exists as X or Y. However, the ontological and the ontic are always connected: “For more on this distinction, see Heidegger, Being and
• 3. For more on the modality of the “I can be” as a creative mode in a therapeutic setting, see also Wen-grower Hilda (2016) The creative—artistic process in Dance/Movement Therapy. In S. Chaiklin & H.

Wengrower (Eds.), The art and science of Dance/Movement Therapy (2nd cd., p. 24). New York and London: Routledge.

• 4. According to Heidegger, as falling, “[E]veryday Being-towards-death is a constant fleeing in the face of death” (§51, p. 298). This fleeing is encouraged by “the They” who “provide a constant tranquilization about death” (p. 298). In Daseins public way of interpreting, “it is said that ‘one dies’, because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that ‘in no case is it I myself’, for this one is the ‘nobody’. (p. 297). For more on this point, see §51.
• 5. The connection between ‘eigentlich' (authentic, real) and eigen (own) is lost in translation. See translators’ footnote 3 on Being and lime (§9, p. 68).
• 6. “We are ourselves the entities to be analysed. The Being of any such entity is in each case mine’ (§9, p. 67).
• 7. Parts outside parts, in Latin literally means “parts outside parts”. This is how Descartes describes the relation between body and mind, as things that exist alongside and exterior to each other, “side by side”, as it were.
• 8. The full quote goes as follows: “Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it”. See Freud, S. (2001 /1938). “Findings, ideas, problems,” in The standard edition of the collected works of Freud, vol. XXIII, Trans. J. Stra-chey. London: Vintage Press, pp. 299-300.
• 9. For a further elaboration of this point, with connection to improvisation and free association, see Wen-grower (2016), p. 16.
• 10. This is a play on words for the German “Ursprung' (origin), which is pronounced in the same way as Ur-Sprung, meaning an original (ur-) leap (sprung).

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