Spins

This essay explores some of the points of contact between philosophical reflection and dance. Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Plato, and Jacques Derrida, the essay teases out a connection between the philosophical gesture of exemplification, the non sequitur whereby the abstract is propped up by or otherwise made to lean upon the concrete, and the move to an "outside" of the text understood either simply as reference, or more ambitiously as revolution. When, as is the case with the texts attended to here, dance is the example exemplified, a swirling field of reflexive associations arise around it, associations that invite us to recognize in dance a stance to be taken, perhaps even a set of steps to be followed, as activists and scholars alike contemplate what will be required to get from one world to another.