Performatywność sztuk walki: jak agresja zaczyna mieć znaczenie
The Performativity of Martial Arts

Summary/Abstract: In this article, martial arts and aggression constitute a case study showing the transdisciplinary po-tentiality of the contemporary humanities, its ability to cross and blur the boundaries between disci-plines in order to produce new, hybrid kinds of knowledge. The author considers the broadly under-stood phenomenon of martial arts as bodily practices aimed at familiarizing oneself with aggression and violence, going beyond their moral aspects and the question of self-defense. Following Allen Barry, the word “art” is interpreted in martial arts as the ancient Greek technē or the Latin ars mean-ing knowledge or a method of achieving intended results through specific actions. Performativity, on the other hand, is considered by the author to be the causality of human and non-human bodies interacting with each other as specific systems of relationships, including (but not limited to) the people participating in the classes, the equipment, and the space where the training is organized. In this context, the author refers to the material-discursive practices and posthumanist performativity of Karen Barad, among others.

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