Beyond the Flesh

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

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.