My M.A. thesis "Subject Becoming Matter: on the anaesthetic in medicine, erotics, and choreography"

was written in the program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University, under the supervision of Dr. Carola Hilfrich and Prof. Vivian Liska.

 

This research is a critical phenomenological inquiry, in which I illustrate a theoretical framework regarding the cultural conditions and consequences of anaesthesia as a reversable shift from being-subject to being-matter. As a first step toward exceeding the scientific-medical context, I phrase the anaesthetic as a mode of being in which a subject becomes matter, as a form of spectacle in which a body is exposed as body-matter, and as a movement against sensation that allows for the transference of sovereignty over one’s body to another.

 

Through three chapters-organs, I place anaesthesia in the hands of medicine, at the core of erotics, and in the veins of choreography, in order to understand how in each of these contexts, anaesthesia, in varying levels of literality and metaphorization, is needed for a body to become matter: biological and mechanistic matter in the operating room, sensual and indulging matter, or matter that creates performative organic imagery.is a performative workshop that took place at the "Live Lessons" exhibition at the Azrieli Gallery, Jerusalem. Moving between a talmudic text and a choreographic practice of moving-other and being-moved by others, the workshop emerced in the exhibition space, and opened its negative space for choreographic action of the live/anaesthetized body.

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December 2022