<P>The choreographic stages a conversation in which artwork is not only looked at butlooks back; it is about contact that touches even across distance. The choreographic moves betweenthe corporeal and cerebral to tell the stories of these encounters as dance trespasses into thediscourse and disciplines of visual art and philosophy through a series of stutters, steps,trembles, and spasms. In <I>The Choreographic</I>, Jenn Joy examines dance andchoreography not only as artistic strategies and disciplines but also as intrinsically theoreticaland critical practices. She investigates artists in dialogue with philosophy, describing a movementof conceptual choreography that flourishes in New York and on the festival circuit. Joy offers closereadings of a series of experimental works, arguing for the choreographic as an alternative model ofaesthetics. She explores constellations of works, artists, writers, philosophers, and dancers, inconversation with theories of gesture, language, desire, and history. She choreographs a revelatorynarrative in which Walter Benjamin, Pina Bausch, Francis Alÿs, and Cormac McCarthy dance together;she traces the feminist and queer force toward desire through the choreography of DD Dorvillier,Heather Kravas, Meg Stuart, La Ribot, Miguel Gutierrez, luciana achugar, and others; she maps newforms of communicability and pedagogy; and she casts science fiction writers Samuel R. Delany andKim Stanley Robinson as perceptual avatars and dance partners for Ralph Lemon, Marianne Vitali,James Foster, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Constructing an expanded notion of thechoreographic, Joy explores how choreography as critical concept and practice attunes us to a moreproductively uncertain, precarious, and ecstatic understanding of aesthetics and artmaking.</P>