Session 4 – AFFECTIONS AND TRANSGRESSIONS OF THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART(14-16 April, 2026 – International Colloquium Politics and Narratives of the Body)

This year again, I am honored to organize a session entitled: Session 4 – AFFECTIONS AND TRANSGRESSIONS OF THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART at the International Colloquium Politics and Narratives of the Body (14-16 April, 2026).

Contemporary art is known for testing the limits of the body, both physical, conceptual and emotional. According to the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the physical and sensitive limits of the body allow “être au monde”, to interact with our environment, while establishing a tangible border with what surrounds us. What happens when artists shake up corporeality to strive for fusion with “the other”? In this axis, the “other” can represent both the human and the non-human. In “Mille Plateaux”, the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari invited us to rethink corporeality by considering it as a moving and fluid state. What he calls “Le Corps sans organe” would envisage a disturbance of the human organism, a becoming-machine as much as a becoming-animal. By way of example, it is possible to mention the work “Let the horse live in me!” of Art Orienté Objet which consisted, among other things, of transfusing horse blood into the veins of the artist Marion Laval-Jeantet; this discursive performativity around biological and ethical limits also drew attention to the commonalities that unite humans and animals. The processes of hybridization of the body with new technologies as Stelarc, ORLAN or Moon Ribas do, present themselves as political manifestos which use technology for the improvement of the human condition. Beyond performance, Patricia Piccinini’s monstrous hyper-realistic sculptures and Unica Zürn’s drawn creatures deconstruct and reconstruct the body, provoking a sense of uncanny Freudian strangeness. Leading to aroused reactions ranging from admiration to repulsion, why is the affect of the spectators so jostled? How do the transgressions of the body make it possible to give flesh to social, political and cultural issues? In what ways do explorations around the body make it possible to address issues relating to the human psyche? What dialogues does art make possible between affections and transgressions of the body?