Almost every human activity involves voluntary bodily movements. As agents, we act upon the world with our body, and we experience ourselves, and the world through the same body. This fact implies that the sense of self is crucially dependent on motor and sensory signals. These signals are related to the phenomenological experience of agency and body-ownership. Agency is the sense of oneself as being the source of the action, the sense that actions are one's own. Body-ownership is the feeling that the body I inhabit is mine and always with me. The sense of ownership is present not only during voluntary actions, but also during passive movement and at rest. In contrast, only voluntary actions should produce a sense of agency. Thus, agency seems to be closely linked to the generation of efferent motor signals, and ownership to the perception of afferent sensory signals. This distinction suggests that agency and ownership should have different effects on awareness of the body. The aim of the present thesis was to investigate how efferent and afferent signals interact to generate the sense of agency and the sense of ownership. In particular, the experiments focused on four main varieties of bodily experience: time-perception, sensory-motor perception, self-recognition, and self-attribution. Overall, the results showed a consistent contribution of voluntary action to a number of different measures related to the bodily self. In particular, efference underlies the sense of agency and at the same time functions as a unifying element that structures a coherent representation of the body. At the same time, the sense of body-ownership results as an interaction between bottom-up and top-down influences: sensory inputs related to the body are integrated against a set of body-scheme representations that guarantee the functional and phenomenological coherence of bodily experience. It is suggested that the unity of bodily self-consciousness comes from action, and not from sensation.

This thesis examines an approach to movement education that I call Move into Life. This praxis is interrogated here through a set of ecological principles and tools. I discuss how this approach opens up our normative attachment to a fixed sense of self. My research question enquires whether an ecological approach to movement training can release a fixed and deterministic notion of self by engaging with the changing body/soma as part of a changing environment? A kinaesthetic awareness of context and environment are fundamental to this approach. It challenges the acculturated experience of ‘myself’ as both in control of, and fundamentally separate from, the cyclical life of the surrounding environment. The cultivation of environmental awareness through movement is shown to serve as a way of being simultaneously involved and self-reflexive within the presently changing moment. At the outset of this thesis, I identify movement as primary to human expression. Movement precedes and underpins cognition, language and creative art. The thesis then identifies four key movement dynamics: active and passive, proportion, transition/position and point, line and angle. These dynamics inform all movement and all analysis of movement. I proceed to investigate these dynamics through three practical research projects: facilitating a workshop, co-directing a performance and creating and performing my own piece. Subsequently, each project is analysed through the ecological lenses of niche, pattern and emergence. These lenses serve to reveal how an embodied sense of self as an impermanent dynamic system is an intrinsic part of a complex and shifting dance of multiple social, cultural and environmental systems. . The research projects are discussed in relation to seven traditions which have informed my critical reflections: Amerta Movement, (Suprapto Suryodarmo), Satipatthāna, (the Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness), Gregory Bateson’s understanding of pattern, James Gibson’s work on ecological perception, Tim Ingold’s research in the field of social anthropology, Paul Connerton’s notion of ‘inscription’ and ‘incorporation’, and theories of developmental movement. The relevance of ecological movement to intercultural communication and performance is explored through research as practice and in the context of relevant theories from cultural anthropology. By introducing a practical discourse of embodiment, movement and awareness into the ecological debate, this thesis intends to stimulate creative responses to the on-going environmental degradation that is here seen to result in part from a sense of body as object and of ourselves as separate from our surrounding environment. The practice of ecological movement is shown to offer a foundation in environmental embodiment for performers, teachers and arts therapists. It is also shown to contribute to our understanding and appreciation of cultural difference through the body and the way we move, as well as helping us to assess the cultural aspects of other-than- verbal communication and the body’s cultural memory and lineage.

Jean-Paul Sartre is not traditionally thought of as a philosopher of the body and, until very recently, little critical attention has been paid to this aspect of his work. Nevertheless, since 2005 a number of articles have begun to appear which suggest that Sartre‘s account of the body in L’Être et le Néant may be worthy of more consideration than it has thus far received – perhaps most notably Joseph Catalano‘s 2005 article suggesting that the chapter on the body is central to a proper understanding of Sartre‘s philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir is often criticised for her writing on the body in Le Deuxième Sexe, with much of the criticism suggesting that Beauvoir‘s use of existential philosophy is to blame for her failings. Yet Toril Moi argues that Beauvoir‘s claim that the body is a situation, a claim that arises from existential philosophy, is a valuable contribution to feminism. In light of these developments, it seems pertinent to look again at Sartre‘s chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and at Beauvoir‘s work to try to understand exactly what is meant by the body as a situation and how this concept relates to Sartre and Beauvoir‘s well-known ideas on freedom and responsibility. The aim of this thesis is to examine the importance of the chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and to demonstrate its relevance to Sartre‘s philosophy as a whole, to look at how Beauvoir has used Sartre‘s philosophy in her own writing and to consider the relevance of that philosophy to more contemporary writing on the body. The thesis will focus on L’Être et le Néant, Le Deuxième Sexe, and La Vieillesse with references also made to both authors‘ fictional works, to Beauvoir‘s autobiographical writings, and to more contemporary work on the body.

La matérialité biologique du corps humain est devenue l'objet d'interventions inédites au moyen de nouvelles technologies biomédicales, comme la procréation médicalement assistée, les tests génétiques, la contraception hormonale. Cette thèse part des difficultés inhérentes à une approche antinaturaliste pour aborder la dimension biologique des corps sexués. “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” : mais qu'en est-il des corps ? Les technologies biomédicales investissent la chair selon des modalités qui échappent aux grilles d'analyses matérialiste et butlérienne. Faut-il y voir une réfutation du constructivisme, la revanche d'un socle biologique – hormonal, génétique, moléculaire – primant sur les effets anatomiques de la socialisation, comme le suggèrent les partisan·e·s d'un material turn féministe ? À partir d'une analyse de l'évolution de la notion de nature, définie comme "vie elle-même" depuis la révolution moléculaire de la biologie, cette thèse propose une autre interprétation, en définissant les technologies biomédicales comme des technologies de pouvoir relevant d’une biopolitique moléculaire de genre. Sans infirmer la perspective constructiviste, ces médiations sociales originales (adossées au nouveau paradigme épistémique) permettent de comprendre comment les frontières et limites du genre sont déplacées, tout en produisant des identités, des expériences et des subjectivités genrées inédites. En dégageant les coordonnées d'un véritable dispositif biomédical, notre étude comparative entre techniques disciplinaires et biopolitique moléculaire de genre plaide pour une critique antinaturaliste renouvelée, s’articulant à une critique de la technique qui permette d'inventer collectivement des moyens pour se réapproprier démocratiquement les technologies biomédicales. / The biological materiality of the human body has become an object of unprecedented interventions through “new biomedical technologies” as medically assisted procreation, genetic tests, or hormonal contraception. This thesis interrogates the difficulties inherent to anti-naturalist approaches in order to address the biological dimension of sexed bodies. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”, but is this also true for the body? The analytical frames of materialist or deconstructivist feminism cannot cease the modalities through which biomedical technologies invest the flesh. Do biomedical technologies make constructivist approaches obsolete through the revenge of a biological – hormonal, genetic, molecular – ground that tops the anatomical effects of socialization? Partisans of a feminist “material turn” seem to think so. After analyzing how the molecular biology revolution changes the very concept of nature in defining it as “life itself”, I offer an alternative interpretation by defining biomedical technologies as technologies of power that stem from a molecular biopolitics of gender. Instead of overturning constructivist perspectives, these new social mediations (residing on a new epistemic paradigm) help understanding a shift in what has been seen as the limits of gender. This shift creates unprecedented identities, experiences and subjectivities of gender. In exposing the coordinates of the biomedical apparatus, this comparative study between disciplinary techniques and molecular biopolitics of gender pleads for a renewed anti-naturalist critique that takes the form of a critique of technology in order to allow for a collective appropriation of biomedical technologies.