The Embodied Genetic Phenomenology of Dynamic Identities

There are number of reasons why it might be problematic to compare surrealism and radiology and this article will address some of them. However, this does not mean that the embodied cognitive patterns that are involved in making and interpreting surreal images cannot be productively correlated with the specifics of radiology imaging. Thus, this article does not focus on diagnostic or aesthetic processes and goals but rather thematizes the experiences of embodied cognition, affect, self-apprehension, and embodied (perceptual) imagination which make the former possible. We show how a phenomenological-enactive perspective helps in understanding the constitution of and participation in shared meanings via affordances structured by the specific ecologies of radiology and surrealist media. Hence, philosophical anthropology based on visual embodied cognition discloses structures that are not static but rather genetic in the process of the apprehension of such images. In the article we use the arguments (especially those regarding embodied cognition) of both classical phenomenologists (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka) and more critically minded ones who in one way or another extend or transform phenomenological ideas (Deleuze, Lacan, Gallagher). While the article aims to enrich philosophical discussions about the experience of images and the cognition involved, it also addresses the specific media of both radiology and surrealism and some assemblage-like relations between the two. For this reason, philosophical arguments are illustrated through the analysis of actual radiograms and surrealist paintings.