ABSTRACT
The issue this essay will address is that of the enjoyment of the dancing body, a particular kind of enjoyment which, as I will try to show, paradoxically survives the ‘death’, the ‘slaying’ of the body. It is from this perspective that dance will be examined as one of the technologies of otherness. First, it will be argued that the dancing body is split between enjoyment and the signifier in so far as dance is nothing other than an oscillation between the body-enjoyment, the enjoyment attached to the flesh, this being the ‘body before the body’, and another body, the body of the signifier which is the ‘dead’ body, the body purged of enjoyment. Second, this vacillation between the ‘not yet’ and the ‘no longer’ of the body, this Splitting of the body will be explored as a staging, proper to dance, of the impossibility of the body as a body. Third, in the process of the ‘disembodiment’ of the body, that is, the banning of what I have termed body-enjoyment, dance produces a ‘surplus of enjoyment’, an obscene and unrecognized enjoyment which results from the very foreclosure of enjoyment of the body.
