Beyond the Flesh : Rethinking the Body through Phenomenology in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Waltz’s Körper and noBody

The paper argues that Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis and Sasha Waltz's dance pieces Körper and noBody destabilize the body's ontological boundaries by reconfiguring psychosis as an alternative mode of being-in-the-world and dissolving corporeal boundaries through movement. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the lived body and Drew Leder's absent body, it shows that both works challenge binaries between self/world and subject/object, revealing perception as inherently participatory and entangled with the world's Becoming. Despite different media, theatre and dance converge to redefine corporeal experience, blurring physicality and abstraction.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological framework of embodied perception, this paper examines Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000) and Sasha Waltz’s Körper and noBody (early 2000s), focusing on how they destabilise the body’s ontological boundaries. By employing Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the lived body, the study explores how both works challenge conventional binaries between self/world and subject/object. Kane’s text reconfigures psychosis as an alternative mode of being-in-the-world, where hallucinatory visions intensify the body–world dialectic rather than rupturing it. In contrast, Waltz’s choreography dissolves corporeal boundaries, revealing the reversibility of perception and the intersubjective nature of embodiment. Despite their divergent media – textbased theatre and movement-based dance – both Kane and Waltz converge on a foundational proposition: perception is inherently participatory, perpetually entangled with the world’s Becoming. The paper also integrates Drew Leder’s concept of the absent body to analyse how both artists explore the ecstatic dissolution of the body, where disappearance becomes a mode of transcendence and reconfiguration. Through phenomenological analysis, this study demonstrates how theatre and dance enact phenomenological principles, blurring the boundaries between physicality and abstraction to redefine corporeal experience.