Conférence Anna KérchyPosthuman Somaesthetics in Humanimal Body Art Performances

Le 5 novembre 2019

Nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter à la conférence de Anna Kérchy, University of Szeged, Hungary

Posthuman Somaesthetics in Humanimal Body Art Performances

le mardi 5 novembre 2019 à 18h15

Salle Frida Kahlo, Maison de la Recherche Germaine Tillion (5 bis Boulevard Lavoisier - Angers)

Anna Kérchy is an Associate Professor of Literature at the English Department of Szeged University, Hungary, where she teaches courses on children’s literature, Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, and gender studies. She is the author of Alice in Transmedia Wonderland and Angela Carter’s Body-Texts. Her (co-)editorial work includes Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy-Tales and a journal issue on Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature. She has also authored a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures.

Summary : 

Anna Kérchy will speak of controversial anthropozoological body art action pieces which challenge biased speciesist standpoints along with sexist, racist, classist, ableist ideologies. Aesthetic agenda and (post)humanist politics are conjoint with the legal, ethical, phenomenological problematizations of human and animal relations, rights and experiences. 

These artistic explorations of the philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters aim to facilitate the comprehension of shared vulnerabilities, interspecies affective relations, as well as collective anxieties. 

They also reveal how the common “animal condition” of the precarious existence of all mortal beings is tied up with biopower technologies and knowledge-formations which inform who we humans are or claim ourselves to be in opposition to or/and in connection with the conventionally rejected, over-corporealized, bestial not-me. Performers of humanimal body art, much in line with Donna Haraway’s feminist philosophy, think in terms of post-anthropocene ecologies, where humans, non-human organisms, and technologically enhanced beings unite as “littermates,” bonded in “significant otherness.”  Like Cary Wolfe, they regard our shared “animal condition” as the foundation of posthuman ethics: transspecism underpinned by compassion.

Cette conférence est organisée par l’axe 1 et l’axe 2 du CIRPaLL.

Contacts :