Select Page

Le dansêtre – on psychoanalysis and dance

by | Vol 36 (3) 2018

This article tries to provide a few concepts that can be of interest when thinking about dance, a theme that’s been rarely explored within psychoanalytic literature. Based on interviews conducted with professional dancers, we develop the idea of the dansêtre, in analogy to what Lacan specifies as the parlêtre. With this term we refer to the dancer who carries out a singular dance consisting of repetitive movements which are linked with a bodily jouissance. This entails that, through these movements, the real of the body can partly be experienced while at the same moment the dance movement offers a way of coping with this bodily jouissance. At this point something sinthomatic appears, a way of dealing with the real which has no sense. The factor that drives the singular dance doesn’t seem to belong to the symbolico-imaginary and is therefore unknown to the dancer. Yet the own singular dance is expressed anyway and it is by expressing it that the dansêtre takes shape. By elaborating this concept, we aim to invite future research regarding dance. The way in which the bodily jouissance takes place in dance, seems a question that can lead to interesting findings, taken that we are all confronted with the capricious real of the body.

Related articles

  • Psychoanalysis and Modernity

    This article gives a rough sketch of psychoanalysis as part of modern culture (modernity) and as participating in the problematic of modern culture (modernity). It starts from the present day lack of interest in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is minimally defined by its concern for human experience, dividedness and conflict and for the maintenance of a lack. Present day culture can be described by a prevalence of instrumentalism, narcissism and the practice of a culture of immediacy. It can be interpreted in…

  • The joke of psychoanalysis

    Lacan's notion of "objet a" designates the paradox of an object which gives body to a surplus over all determinate objects, an object which gives body to a lack constitutive of desire. What happens with this object at the end of the psychoanalytic treatment? The text proposes a parallel between the final moment of the treatment and the final reversal in telling a joke: in both cases, the sudden shift of perspective enacts what Lacan called the fall of the…

  • Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problem

    In this article the author explores why psychoanalysts are often seen as troublesome people and why they give so much critique. Foucault stated that in modernity the epistèmè changed: ‘man’ came in the thinking frame and human sciences were born. In his opinion psychoanalysis has in this epistèmè the position of a counter-science. In this article the author shows how psychoanalysis is different from human sciences in two aspects. First, psychoanalysis has another subject theory. The subject is not seen…