ABSTRACT
What is transfiguration, and under which conditions does it take place? To provide subsidies to answer this question, this chapter presents and discusses elements for an inventory of definitions and uses of transfiguration as a transdisciplinary concept found in the social sciences and humanities literature while relating some of its variations to different genealogies. A central notion of transfiguration refers to its biblical descriptions. It relates to theological discussions which coproduce a particular version of an archetypal found in other confessions, such as Ancient Egyptian religion, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, transfiguration points to encounters between artists’ bodies and God and saints, which result in genius art. Although keeping its religious character, a further genealogy is a less-confessional development of transfiguration as conducted through its adoption and reappropriation by thinkers such as Nietzsche and, later, Foucault as constitutive of modernity. Yet while one finds diffuse efforts to detach transfiguration from its religious aspects, such as to derive transfiguration from Elias’s concept of “figuration,” transhumanism apparently emerges as a contemporary form of it. Overall, this chapter systematizes developments that precede these genealogies and addresses transfiguration as a religious phenomenon directly implied in body changes and worldmaking.
