Reflections: Corpus/Mimesis

The 2025 release of Corpus/Mimesis marked the culmination of a decade-long sonic engagement with Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus. The project developed from AMAE and Pier Giorgio De Pinto’s 58+1(63) Indices on the Body project and centred on Nancy’s recordings of his own readings. In the recordings Nancy is heard reading selections from his fifty-eight indices on the body. This writing explores a series of short reflections that engage the bodily themes of rhythm, noise, cycles, discontinuities, overlapping harmonies and, critically: the voice.

Between 2014 and 2022 I worked with these recordings to produce a series of compositions and installations. Initial composition efforts produced work for the 58+1(63) Indices on the Body project while the pieces the following pieces extended the work in new directions. Each index is enfolded in a unique soundworld that both reflects and elaborates upon Nancy’s statements, embodying the rich layers of meaning that inhere in his work through the medium of sound. The essay text generates points of harmony and dissonance against the sonic material, surfacing the research work involved in producing such highly personal sonic horizon. The reader is encouraged to listen, as a mode of reading, while the listener is asked to read as words as music, such that an intermedial space that might spotlight the meaning-making body as at once the sonorous receiver and active retriever of Nancy’s layered transmission may be constructed and realised.

“Rock: under this body cadence of body, it turns out that our world has deployed a rhythmical world-wideness, from jazz to rap and beyond, a crowd, a proliferation, a glut, a popularity of postures, a zoned, massed, electronic skin, which, if we insist, we can certainly call noise, because in fact it is, to begin with, background noise arising where forms no longer hold sway, no longer make sense (social, common, sentimental, metaphysical)-and where, to the contrary, aesthetics will have to be reworked at the level of bodies with naked senses, deprived of reference points, disoriented, disoccidented, and where arts have to be reworked, through and through, as the technē of the creation of bodies. Yes, noise: it’s like the other side of thought, but also like rumblings in the coils of the body.” - Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, 2008 ¹

In 2012 AMAE and Pier Giorgio De Pinto began collaborating on their project 58+1(63) Indices on the Body ². This project focuses on the 58 indices on the body, written in 2006 by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and incorporated, alongside 4 new compositions, into Richard A. Rand’s 2008 translation of Nancy’s 1992 book Corpus. The first performance took place in June 2013 at the Kommunales Kino Gallery in Freiburg for the SPUREN 2.0 Symposium ³ by MBODY Research.

Nancy agreed to take part in the performance commenting at the time:

“When I watched the performance by Amae/De Pinto, it made me understand why I wrote the essay of the 58 indices… On the basis of what I had the opportunity to see in this performance, I find it is a text to which I ought to add something. If in due course you manage to present all the indices, the entire project… that would be splendid.” ⁴

At Freiburg, Nancy became an active collaborator in the project, he recorded himself reading, performing, each of his original 58 indices and produced 4 additional indices 60-63, specifically for the project.

AMAE and Pier Giorgio De Pinto ran an open call in 2015 for composers and sound artists to contribute to the project by developing short pieces around the indices. At this point I was working through Nancy’s 2002 book Listening and was searching for a new copy of it online when I came across the open call.

I tracked down a copy of Corpus and immersed myself in it for a week, listening to Nancy’s recordings as I went. When it came to creating a piece I couldn’t limit myself to just one index and so I created a work that incorporated three indices that particularly resonated with me. Indices 21, 7, & 3:

/21. A body is a difference. Since it is a difference from every other body-while minds are identical-it’s never done with differing. It also differs from itself. How are we to ponder a baby and an old man next to one another?

/7. The soul is extended everywhere along the body, says Descartes; it is entirely everywhere all along it, on its very surface, insinuated within it and slipped into it, infiltrated, impregnating, tentacular, inflating, modeling, omnipresent.

/3. A body isn’t empty. It’s full of other bodies, pieces, organs, parts, tissues, knee-caps, rings, tubes, levers, and bellows. It’s also full of itself: that’s all it is.

The piece, 21,7 & 3, opens slowly with ethereal wisps of voice heralding Nancy’s performance before degraded strings piano and percussion enter into the mix in a rhythmic cycle. The distorted timbres, rough edges, and small discontinuities in time, frequency and amplitude present in Nancy’s recordings are carried over into the soundworld.

Credit: Pier Giorgio De Pinto

Pier Giorgio would later point out that the piece I submitted had broken the rules of the open call which asked that each track use only a single index. Nonetheless, a few weeks later I received an email from AMAE and Pier Giorgio asking if I would be interested in performing the piece for the 2015 edition of Helicotrema at the Punta della Dogana in Venice ⁵. I happily obliged. With the encouragement of AMAE & Pier Giorgio I planned a further series of works incorporating Nancy’s indices producing 12 pieces over an intense three day period in 2016. These pieces conformed to the original parameters of the open call and were complimented with a final piece in 2017, over 10 minutes in length, incorporating indices 15, 22, 27, 32, 45, 46 & 9.

My composition for Index 24 was incorporated back into the 58+1(63) Indices on the Body project alongside works by other composers ⁶.

Throughout 2018 I developed a multimedia installation that incorporated and reacted to the pieces. I was particularly interested in what happens to the body when we begin to rely heavily on translations across disembodied sonic technologies to mediate our communication and art-making and this central theme was explored in subsequent iterations of the installation.

The first iteration was installed on-site for the 2019 Irish Sound Science and Technology Conference at the Cork School of Music ⁷. During the COVID years two further iterations were installed online for NIME: The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression at Birmingham (moved online for COVID) in 2020 ⁸ and for xCoAx the 9th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X in July of 2021 ⁹, ¹⁰. Jean-Luc passed away in August of 2021.

“We need only remark that humanity was never ready for any phase of this question and that its unreadiness for death is nothing but death itself: its stroke and its injustice” - Jean-Luc Nancy, The Intruder, 2000

The following year I produced one final iteration of the installation for the 2022 International Computer Music Conference at the Irish World Academy, at the University of Limerick ¹¹. In its exploration of the body, Corpus concerns itself, at different points, with themes of rhythm, noise, cycles, discontinuities, overlapping harmonies and, critically, the voice.

The pieces here explores these notions within the broader framework of Nancy’s conception of ‘the body’ as it is set up with/against his conception of ‘mimesis’. The tracks represent a celebration of the life and work of Jean-Luc Nancy and the final fulfillment of this project for me.

My encounter with Corpus, and my experience working with the Indices on the Body, has profoundly shaped my thinking and the manner in which I approach my artistic practice. I have loved, and will deeply miss, working on this project. It has been such an ease and a joy. In that sense this is also a thank you to Jean-Luc and to Ivan (from AMAE) and Pier Giorgio for including me in the project way back at Helicotrema 2015, and for so graciously allowing me to work with this material in my own practice since then. In 2025, a decade. after the project began, I gathered all of these pieces from across the different iterations of the project. I released them on limited run of 25 casette tapes through the ever wonderful Fiadh Productions ¹², a label dedicated to surfacing the beauty in dysfunction. This digital sonic essay we’ve been working our way through here is another, final, way of marking and honoring an extraordinary project.

References

Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham Univ Press, 2008) ↩
https://58indicesonthebody.wordpress.com/ ↩
https://www.zag.uni-freiburg.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Forschergruppe_MBody.pdf ↩
https://58indicesonthebody.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/portfolio-amae_de-pinto-58plus1-indices-on-the-body_updated.pdf ↩
https://www.cacticino.net/helicotrema-amaede-pinto-with-jean-luc-nancy-stephen-roddy-palazzo-grassi-punta-della-dogana-venice/ ↩
https://58indicesonthebody.wordpress.com/2016/11/14/63-variations-on-the-body-second-edition-selected-tracks/ ↩
https://csm.mtu.ie/contentfiles/PDFs/ISSTA%20Programme%20Draft%207.pdf ↩
https://nime.org/web_archive/2020/index.html%3Fp=678.html ↩
https://2021.xcoax.org/sro/ ↩
Stephen Roddy, ‘The Body in the Machine: Indices Online’, in Proceedings of xCoAx 2021 9th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, ed. by M. Carvalhais, M. Verdicchio, L. Ribas & A. Rangel (Porto, Portugal: i2ADS, 2021), (p. 420). ↩
https://icmc2022.wordpress.com/ ↩
https://stereogum.com/2228636/fiadh-means-many-things/columns/the-black-market ↩