29/07/2015

Xavier Escribano Guest Lecturer on Pain and Corporality at Universidad de los Andes

During the period from 11 to 19 July 2015, Humanities Faculty lecturer Dr. Xavier Escribano was invited to speak at the Universidad de los Andes (Santiago de Chile), where he read three papers on corporality and illness.

Two of the lectures were read at the Faculty of Medicine and the School of Nursing and included a reflection on illness, bearing in mind the paradigm of the body's own experience, or, in Dr. Escribano's words, “the experience you have with your own body as a means of relating to yourself, others and the world around you”.

Dr. Escribano continued, “This paradigm offers an interesting complement to the concept of the body and illness based on what is known as the biomedical paradigm, which breaks the body down into subject areas in terms of function and not so much from the perspective of corporality, which attempts to give meaning to life and existence”.

Dr. Escribano gave his third lecture at the Faculty of Philosophy. With the title, “Subjectivity and Embodiment: Reflections on Wenders and Husserl”, he embarked on a phenomenological analysis of Wim Wenders' 1987 film, Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire). He said, “The film is a poetic reflection on what it means for an ‘embodied’ subject or individual to feel rooted or involved in the world”.