Chen Chieh-jen is currently the most renowned contemporary Taiwanese artist, participating in numerous worldwide art biennals and exhibitions. Firstly, this paper will narrate how Chen managed to become an artist, while, at the same time, an anylysis of Taiwan´s sociopolitical and cultural history will be presented. The analysis will be from an unusual viewpoint: that of Taiwanese contemporary art, a field of study marginalized by Western Scholars in Taiwanese Studies. The testimonies of its protagonists, Taiwanese artists, will also be included. Secondly, the lifting of a 40 year period of martial law in 1987 symbolizes the kickoff point for the development of contemporary Taiwanese art. Chen Chieh-jen, as many other Taiwanese artists, participated in this process. making use of his body to state his sociopolitical stance. This paper will demonstrate how the body became one of the main focal points in contemporary art in Taiwan. Having been hidden by censorship, the body was turned into an instrument of political condemnation, an even a key element in the local claim of Taiwanese identity. And finally, we will analyze how Chen Chien-jen developed his own artistic interpretation of the body, beginning with his political performances and moving onto the recovery of his personal identity and story through the medium of his black and white photographic series.
An essay by the contemporary Portuguese philosopher José Gil addresses the prominent American choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham’s conception of dance. Gil emphasizes that Cunningham approaches dance in a way that is fundamentally different from the traditional mimetic and expressive paradigm. With the help of Giles Deleuze’s observations, Gil proves that even in the case of dance shorn of the faculty to represent and express emotional contents, we can talk about units of dance, about their meaning and unity, and thus about the language of dance. Gil spells out this idea by showing a parallel between dance, in Cunningham’s conception of it, and modern painting. and Esej současného portugalského filosofa Josého Gila se zabývá pojetím tance u významného amerického choreografa a tanečníka Merce Cunninghama. Gil zdůrazňuje, že Cunningham pojímá tanec způsobem, který se zásadně odlišuje od tradičního mimetického a expresivního paradigmatu. Za pomoci úvah Gilese Deleuze Gil dokazuje, že i v případě tance zbaveného schopnosti reprezentovat a vyjadřovat emocionální obsahy můžeme hovořit o jednotkách tance, o jejich významu a jednotě, tedy o jazyku tance. Tuto myšlenku Gil upřesňuje pomocí paralely mezi tancem v Cunninghamově pojetí a moderním malířstvím.
On the basis of the theory of Benedict Anderson on the „imagined political community“, the work analyses the processes of construction of bodily ideal and movement patterns in physical exercises of the Czech sport association Sokol („Eagle“). Through gymnastics based on Greek mythology and Plato, through large-scale floor exercises, through paramilitary marches, body became a tool for constructing national identity. Through ritualized exercise and the use of body symbolics, body became „nationally encoded“. However, Anderson’s concept of „imagined community“ does not suffice for an explication of the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century Sokol achieved great increase of members. Especially for young gymnasts of both sexes membership in the association entailed the fulfillment of concrete social and psychological needs. Contact with coevals and pubertal search for one’s own identity were equally important in mass integration into Sokol as individual pursuit of better performance. The author raises a query if the perception of Sokol as „popular“ (instead of „national“) movement represents a meaningful cathegorial enlargement. Dance figures and Greek myths dealing with the purity of the body indicate a „popular“ ideology of the association, separated from the political ideas of modem nation.
The right to end an unwanted pregnancy as an integral part of the full citizenship of women has been influenced, reinfluenced, and questioned by different actors in the Czech Republic since the 1950s. Until 1986 the right to abortion was not viewed as a woman’s personal right, but depended upon the decision of abortion commissions and was influenced by the current demographic and political situation. The decision-making process was a very embarrassing experience for many women, who in fact had no other means of contraception available to them. In this paper, I analyse the legal and political regulation of abortion from the perspective of Foucault´s theory of governmentality and biopower. Abortion regulation is an example of how state power influences and disciplines the bodies of its subjects, how it regulates the population and shapes it according to the government’s needs. Through the regulation of abortion, the state not only attempted to restrict a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, but also defined which of its citizens should or should not become a parent and under what circumstances, and who should or should not have the right to be born. In the text I first present the theory of governmentality, then I analyse the periods of the regulation of abortion in socialist Czechoslovakia, and finally I show how this regulation can be understood as an instrument of a specific form of governmentality typical of totalitarian communist regime., Radka Dudová., Obsahuje bibliografii, and Anglické resumé
In his late philosophy, Levinas finds that the human being, along with his body, is constituted by “sensibility as proximity, as signification, as one-for-the-other, which signifies in giving”; otherwise he or she is not human. For Levinas, therefore, it is also an affectivity, which, in its bind to the Other, opens up as a sensitivity to the Other. The Other is what animates affectivity. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, “the passage to the physico-chemico-physiological meanings of the body”, that is prepared by “sensibility as proximity, as signification, as one-for-the-other”, as the materialization of the body, is now exclusively reabsorbed in ethical signification. Nevertheless, the article shows some other figures of incarnation in the earlier works of Levinas as well: the position and the enjoyment.