A Right to Walk (Away), or how to analyze the ‘kinetographies’ of plasticity in Vaslav Nijinsky’s so-called "Diary"

peer-reviewed article

Wojciech Klimczyk

wojciech.klimczyk@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3331-1721

Abstract

Walking, as Frederic Gros demonstrates, is a highly ambiguous activity both on individual and sociopolitical plane. One can walk for one’s sake but also together with others: to demonstrate or achieve a common goal. Among the manners of walking the article analyzes the one that after Catherine Malabou can be called the walk of plasticity: walking that transforms the walking subject radically, altering its existential and therefore political status. In this context and in reference to the descriptions of walks taken from Nietzsche’s Ecce homo and Nijinsky’s so-called Diary, transformative texts by two famous “mad artists”, a universal right to walk (away) is discussed in the article. Walking (away), when seen from the perspective of Malabou’s ontology of the accident, can be perceived as a condition that can befall any thinking subject and which every subject has a right to go through with dignity. In Nietzsche and Nijinsky we find a particularly moving descriptions of such understood walking (away). The article attempts at showing their political potential.


Keywords:

walking, walk , Vaslav Nijinsky, Friedrich Nietzsche , plasticity

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Published
2024-03-18

Cited by

Klimczyk, W. (2024) “A Right to Walk (Away), or how to analyze the ‘kinetographies’ of plasticity in Vaslav Nijinsky’s so-called ‘Diary’”, Pamiętnik Teatralny, 73(1), pp. 97–119. doi: 10.36744/pt.1496.

Authors

Wojciech Klimczyk 
wojciech.klimczyk@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3331-1721

Wojciech Klimczyk - dance theoretician and historian working as a professor in the Department of Comparative Civilisation Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Author of the books Erotyzm ponowoczesny (2008), Wizjonerzy ciała: Panorama współczesnego teatru tańca (2010), The Virus of Mobilization: Dance and the Shaping of Modernity 1455–1795 (2015, eng. 2020). Co-editor with Agata Swierzowska of the volume Music and Genocide (2015) and with Julia Hoczyk of Prze-pisać taneczny modernizm:sieci / Re-writing Dance Modernism: Networks (2022). He co-founded the dance collective Harakiri Farmers for almost a decade and currently works as an independent artist. His next book will be a monograph on Vaslav Nijinsky.



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