Practical bodies

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Bedorf
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281525915

The practice turn in the social and cultural sciences since the middle of the 20th century constitutes a transformation of the theoretical access to descriptions of the social, which is rooted in a departure from dualistic theories. The observation of a 'practice' as the 'smallest unit of the social' represents the attempt to bypass limitations of mentalistic and structuralist advances and thus to approach the social in its own enactment. Next to a focus on an implicit logic of practice and an orientation along the repetition and shifting of social practices, the corporeity and materiality is at the centre of theoretical attention. In particular the corporeity of practices becomes visible as a problem, since no consensual discussion has taken place in this recent shift, which has sufficiently determined the body as a category of analysis. This project therefore considers a foundational discussion of the categories of analysis as a precondition for a practice-oriented research programme that can prove to be productive not only for the social and cultural sciences, but also for the humanities. The differentiation between 'Leib' and 'Körper' as proposed in phenomenological approaches offers an advance, which differentially enriches the objectified status of the Körper with an experiential dimension. This dimension cannot be motivated in a dichotomous fashion as Leib and Körper characterise two perspectives on the same, where the conditions for the possibility of the experience of sociality rest with the role of the Leib. This project therefore pursues, in two separate parts, an examination of the conceptual strategies and operations with regard to concepts of the body: In the first part of the project, those theories of the 20th century will be investigated which have been guiding for contemporary practice theories and to whose concepts of the body today's theories attach themselves (Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault). The second part of the project addresses those contemporary theories of practice that are empirically interested in the body. The genuine philosophical task consists in reflecting on concepts, which cannot be realized by empirical sociology itself. Last but not least such a phenomenologically aligned project expects that practice-oriented research agendas will also be discussed in phenomenological circles and offer, by virtue of a recourse on the results of this research, new conceptual enrichments, which enable us to understand phenomenology as practice theory.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants