Greetings to all I hope you are very well in these difficult moments

In this short presentation, I would like to show the relationships in Ko Muroboshi’s work with the question of otherness and impossibility as an important element, in order to understand the relationship that Murobushi proposes with the body.

When Ko states that “Our own body is the first ‘Other’ and the first ‘alien’ that we face,” we must take this statement in its deepest sense, as testimony of an existential-vitalist experience of the carnal body. The phantasmatic image of the self, as a result of the relationship with stratified forms of subjectivation, hides the fundamental alterity of carnal experience as an intensive surface. The very idea of ​​ the “body” seems to open the possibility of saying the possessive form, as in the phrase “my body, as if there were an object that it is possible to own.” In this sense, one can see in Murobushi’s dance a question about the existence from the flesh, where the dance is the result of the original conflict of the forces at the limit of the logics of identity which enter into crisis in such a way. Thus, it is possible to say that Ko’s thinking is a carnal material thinking.

As you know, Ko Murobushi in some interviews spoke very emphatically about cutting off the culture, cutting off the mother tongue and arriving at orphanhood. How can we understand this? If with Nietzsche we can conceive dance as a form of ecstasy, this implies that there is a forgetfulness of the self in the dancing body. The multiple forces that break into the experience of the dancing flesh-body exceed the boundaries of the illusory image of the self as a univocal identity. And for Ko, unhiding this plurality of forces is precisely what it means to dance, in his words “To be far from the myth of identity, […] this is to dance.” This implies then that there is no way to dance within identity; dance from identity is not dance, since far from allowing the irruption of forces, with and from the flesh, what identity shows us is a petrified metaphor. In other words, a domesticated interpretation that is the result of the forms of domination and discipline that go through the stratified body.

At this point, it is very important to emphasize the permanent interlocution that Murobushi kept with Maurice Blanchot, since it allows us to understand that the deterritorialization of the logic of identity is also a displacement of any trace of anthropocentrism that crosses the bodies to allow the irruption of becoming-animal. Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation points out the complex relationship between possibility and impossibility as ways of relating to the world. Regarding the problem of possibility he tells us—

Open quotation:

In this perspective, our relationships in the world and with the world are always ultimately power relationships, in which power is germ within possibility. Let’s stick to the most apparent features of our language. When I speak, I am always exercising a power relationship; I belong, whether I know it or not, to a network of powers that I make use of, fighting against the power that asserts itself against me. All speech is violence, violence all the more fearsome because it is secret and the secret center of violence, violence that is already exerted on what the word names and that it can only name by withdrawing its presence – a sign we have seen that when I speak, death speaks (death that is power).

I close the quote.

Regarding the impossibility, he points out—

I open a quote:

The impossible is not here to make thought capitulate, but to allow it to announce itself according to a measure other than that of power. What would that other measure be? Perhaps precisely the measure of the other, of the other as other, and no longer ordered according to the clarity of what adapts it to the same. We think we have the thought of the strange and the alien, but in reality, we always only have the familiar—not the distant, but the close that measures it. Even so, when we speak of the impossibility, only the possibility is the one that, giving it references, sarcastically already submits it. Will we therefore ever get to ask a question of this type: what is the impossibility, that non-power that would not be the simple negation of power?

I close the quote.

Continuing with this reflection, the question of possibility defines relationships with the world insofar as they go through the logic of appropriation; relating to the world in capitalist modernity is relating from possibility, which here is understood as the possibility of appropriation, of instrumentalization that subjects the object to the order of useful productivity, and the means to certain ends. However, at the base of this apparent immediacy of possibility, there is the impossibility, not as its negation but as an original way of being understood as openness to the other as other. Alterity, that not only is it human, but that it is an opening towards the Other, as intensive forces of the living non-human.

Impossibility is not the opposite of possibility, but is at the base of it as an experience of estrangement, which in the stratified life of the useful is closed and sutured by an apparent immediacy of the productive. Murobushi’s dialogue with Blanchot lies in seeing in dance a staging of that original experience of the impossible as an experience of the flesh. Staging that is not representative and not an imitation or performance of the impossibility, but requires going beyond the apparent immediacy and familiarity of the body, to arrive at an impossible carnality, a recognition of the body as otherness. This experience of the flesh is what Vaslav Nijinsky reports when in his diaries. He says—I open a quote:

I mojo, but I am not a bull. I moo, but the bull that is killed does not moo. I am God and Bull. I am Apis. I am Egyptian. I am Hindu. I am Indian. I am black, I am Chinese, I am Japanese. I am a foreigner and a foreigner. I am a sea bird. I am a land bird. I am the tree of Tolstoy. I am the roots of Tolstoy. Tolstoy is mine. I am yours.

I close the quote.

In this fragment, Nijinsky shows how this experience of the flesh is an experience of multiple becoming where there is no central and dominant identity, but a play of forces which triggers a permanent becoming another. This ecstatic experience of self-forgetfulness puts us in front of that human animality that is characterized by permanent uprooting, since, unlike the non-human animal, the human animal is at an original disadvantage with the world; this is the origin of the technique, but under this apparent dominance of technique in modernity, what we find is human animality encrypted by helplessness. In this case, distinguishing the human animal does not mean putting it in a superior relationship with the non-human animal. It only means that, in contrast to the attempts of the episteme of techno-scientific and capitalist modernity, which shows an apparently dominating humanity, the dance of Murobushi is the unmasking of this despotic formation—it is the staging of the power of the impossible.

In the impossibility, the body makes present its constituent alterity and the irreducible alterity of the world. There is no certainty in walking, speaking, or standing; there is no certainty in the relationship with the world, since the body is not the dominating agent of objects. The impossibility is the becoming-animal of the dancing body insofar as it breaks the human relationship with itself and with the world—but not by imitation in this impossibility. For Murobushi, the impossibility as the creative principle of dance is a disclosure of the original impossibility of the body. Murobushi’s dance occurs in the rupture of the identity synthesis that is the body in its productive daily life; that is, the dancing body for Ko does not imitate an apparent impossibility, but rather, makes visible the original precariousness of the body in its vital existence that he recognizes himself and the living as inappropriate and irreducible otherness.

The politicity that emerges in this impossible carnal body lies in the suspension of the apparent naturalness of the body’s relationships with the world—the apparent naturalness of the body’s productive relationship with things as well as with itself, which is unmasked with the irruption of ecstatic experience that displaces the body into the territory of the impossible. The relationship between the body and the world, traversed by the forms of utilitarian organization, covers the world with this veil of habits, which builds an illusion of familiarity that makes the world and corporeality seem like objects for a subject. The ecstatic experience in Murobushi’s dance denounces the apparent naturalness of the organism—that is, the apparent naturalness of the organization of the body in the layers that seek to extract utility.

Murobushi’s dance and textuality is not a form of resistance not because it is inscribed in a specific political ideology, but because it is an affirmative exercise of a corporeality in conflict with itself that calls into question power as the only possibility of relating to the Other. The radical nature of this way of understanding the flesh-body and dance is that this deterritorialization not only calls into question personal identity, but this process of becoming-animal, becoming-intense, also leads to a becoming-imperceptible that casts out of the known frontiers of the anthropocentric narrative.

I really appreciate your attention, and I hope that in the midst of these difficult moments for all of us, we can find ourselves in this unfinished conversation.