Abstract

BATTAN HORENSTEIN, Ariela. Body as Theater: Phenomenology and Emotions. Eidos [online]. 2021, n.35, pp.207-235.  Epub Feb 08, 2022. ISSN 1692-8857.  https://doi.org/10.14482/eidos.35.142.7.

The central aim of this paper will be to consider the role assigned to the body in contemporary discussions about emotions. I will particularly examine the metaphor of the emotions in the theater of the body, presented by A. Damásio, with the purpose of raising doubts about two dominant models of embodiment of emotions -an externalist or behaviorist and an internal or neurobiological -which remain trapped in several difficulties. So I will reject the general concept of body these models are committed with, and I will suggest an alternative understanding of emotions along the line of a bodily and motor phenomenon. To do that, I will deepen the analysis of the relationship between movement and emotion by considering it under the theoretical framework provided by the Phenomenology of Body developed by M. Merleau-Ponty and his followers. Thus, my alternative proposal will be to take emotions as a bodily performance which can provide us a way to avoid both the dualist and the reductionist standpoint commonly held on emotions.

Keywords : phenomenology; body; emotions; movement; expression.

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