ABSTRACT
The chapter considers some of the teachings of Confucius and principle tenets of Confucianism from a performance philosophical lens. Highlighting the importance of rites and rituals and the role of the body therein, Confucius and Confucianism are framed as providing transcultural thinking resources for thinking with the body in an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. The body figures prominently in performances and is vital to the question of how performances might think. The open field of performance philosophy offers an anchor for these non-representative forms of knowledge in the body and the ways in which they are organised and interact with other bodies, constituting an immanently creative process. This establishes a possible line of performance philosophy in the Confucian tradition, be it in its channelling of the invisible through the body-medium, in the man–heaven alignment through resonances in activities and thought or in the enacting of the cosmological dimension through a grounding of technical objects or technical bodies.
