18. Doing Performance Philosophy

Performance philosophy is an interdisciplinary field of thought, creative practice, and scholarship concerned with the relationship between performance and philosophy. Emerging since around 2012, performance philosophy can be broadly defined as a performative paradigm of knowledge-making attentive to how thinking performs and performance thinks. This chapter introduces performance philosophy as an experimental practice of ‘thinking alongside performance’, starting from the premise that performance is itself a mode of thinking with the capacity to expand and transform normative paradigms of what counts as thought. The author highlights how performance philosophy often takes up a non-anthropocentric, relational approach—moving away from the notion of the individual subject of thought towards the sense of thought as constituted by unique assemblages of human and nonhuman materialities in specific evental contexts. The method is also contextualised as emerging from a nondualist, nonreductive understanding of mind and body, in which the physical world is understood as movement or change and matter is construed as a process of emergence. Three ways of doing performance philosophy are offered: attention-training, letter-writing, and an experimental approach to format. The method is demonstrated with An [Interrupted] Bestiary,a performance philosophy project by the author produced through a process of thinking alongside the Chicago-based company Every house has a door.