Guest Lecture Christine Leroy: Falling and Being Uplifted — a Theoretical Experiment on Kinaesthetic Empathy
What: Guest lecture
Where: University of Humanistic Studies, Kromme Nieuwegracht 29, Utrecht, room 1.22
Registration: See below.
Christine Leroy is a philosopher and dancer. Drawing on her book Kinaesthetic Empathy, Ethics and Care: A Phenomenology of Dance (trans. Anna Pakes; Routledge, 2025), she develops a philosophy of dance that foregrounds the psychological, aesthetic, and ethical significance of dancer-viewer interaction in the moment of performance. She brings together phenomenology, psychoanalysis, dance studies, and care ethics to analyse kinaesthetic empathy as a form of intersubjective performance.
According to Leroy, through the interweaving between the corporealities of dancer and viewer, each party supports or upholds the other in a process of mutual care: dance movement’s play with gravity alleviates the weight of repressed desire, redefines the contours of the body-image, and enables psychological self-repair. Through projection into the body of another, we develop independence and autonomy as subjects even in the midst of relational being. This establishes a corporeal basis for ethics that reveals how a return to the moving body through dance helps lay the foundations for a more humane society.
The talk will focus specifically on phenomenological accounts of empathy as an embodied disposition to move towards and be moved by the other. After tracing the conceptual history of Einfühlung, Leroy shows how dance and somatic practices exemplify empathy’s motor dimension, and how they open a new path for care ethics: the lived body as a medium for apprehending the other and attuning to their feelings.
Biography
Christine Leroy is a philosopher and dancer. An associate researcher at Lille University and Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne School of the Arts, she holds a PhD in Aesthetics and teaches in the Classe Préparatoire aux Grandes Écoles in Lille, France. Her work sits at the crossroads of the epistemology of embodied care and the phenomenology of dance and movement practices. She mainly publishes in French, but recently published Kinaesthetic Empathy, Ethics and Care: A Phenomenology of Dance (Routledge, 2025, trans. Anna Pakes), as well as two articles in English: ‘Performance and Bodily Anchoring of Care: Dance’s Power to Care’ in the International Journal of Education in Arts, vol. 25, special issue 1.23 (ed. Merel Visse and Elena Cologni); and ‘Is Care Compatible with the Tyranny of Immediacy? On Substituting Rhythm for Cadence’, Journal of Philosophical Investigations, 2025, special issue Care and Time (ed. Maurice Hamington and Sarah Munawar), 19(51), pp. 91–102, University of Tabriz.
This talk is made possible in 2026 thanks to the support of the Maison des Sciences Humaines et Sociales Paris Nord and the University of Humanistic Studies.
Questions?
Andries Hiskes, a.hiskes@uvh.nl