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This podcast is for the British Society for Phenomenology and showcases papers at our conferences and events, interviews and discussions on the topic of phenomenology.
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2 hours ago
2 hours ago
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Daire Boyle
Abstract:
In his 1913 work Ideas I, Edmund Husserl stated that “[c]ertainly an incorporeal and, paradoxical as it may sound, even an inanimate and non-personal consciousness is conceivable” (§54). This quote, understood in context, serves to underline the irreducibility of consciousness even after the world is “nullified” or “annihilated”. That this annihilation could happen is due to the phenomenological reduction; Husserl does not wish to deny the existence of the natural world, but simply wishes to consider the consequences of putting our naturalistic understanding of it out of play. In the context of artificial intelligence this assessment of consciousness is impossible to overlook; Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, as outlined in Ideas I, describes what consciousness truly is like no other philosophical movement. Many thinkers use Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of consciousness as a roadblock for machine consciousness – how could machines, created by man, ever have access to the specifically non-naturalistic mechanism of consciousness? We argue that there is another way to interpret Husserl’s work, and support this by analysing strands of his argumentation that can be characterised as open to the possibility of artificial consciousness. We further argue that Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, as method, must be broadened in assessing technologies arising out of a rapidly-changing world in order to prepare ourselves for the future of AI research and its potentialities. The philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler is suitable for this task, especially given Scheler’s appreciation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research from computer science will continue at an exponential rate, therefore we must use the insights of Husserl and Scheler to presage this coming new epoch and deepen our understanding of what it means to be conscious.
Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Susan Gottlöber and Dave O'Brien:
”The World as Technological Advancement” – Perspectives from Philosophical Anthropology and Phenomenology on Transhumanism, Consciousness, AI, and our future concerns’ This panel will assess three contemporary and future issues that are of serious imminent concern to philosophy; namely, transhumanism, machine/artificial consciousness, and consciousness in light of rapid technological advancements. Each panel member's paper shall address these concerns with reference to philosophical anthropology as foundational paradigm, while phenomenological methods shall be employed to better analyse and evaluate said concerns. The link between philosophical anthropology and phenomenology shall be emphasised and concepts from Max Scheler, in particular, will be examined in phenomenological terms.
Biography:
Daire Boyle is a 3rd-year PhD candidate at Maynooth University and is currently studying in KU Leuven. He is also a graduate teaching assistant at Maynooth University, and has experience of guest lecturing. Daire completed a BSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy in 2017, and an MA in Philosophy in 2018, both at Maynooth University. His current work, and PhD thesis, 7 seeks to utilise Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as an answer to modern debates on consciousness and machine consciousness. This is an interdisciplinary project and the thesis considers contemporary results from computer science in assessing the possibility for artificial consciousness.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
3 days ago
3 days ago
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Javier Moscoso Cala
Abstract:
‘A New Humanism? The Precarious Condition of the Human in Judith Butler’ To be qualified as human is a troubling matter after anti-humanistic critiques to humanness. Despite this, some thinkers such as Judith Butler have returned to using the term "the human" to refer to 30 something more than a universal whose production is exclusionary. In this paper I propose to deem the human in terms of a precarious condition intertwined in the midst of animal life and nature. This human life is persistently exposed to violence as derealisation of life and humanness. This refurbishment of the human allows us to think of it as a process open to the future. The movement of the human is characterised by a dynamic of catachresis, subversive reiteration and performative contradiction. The possibility of reiteration and performative contradiction is made possible when derealisation lives unexpectedly speak to the human on its own terms. This point refers to the instability of every form that the universal of the human takes, its attributes and its movement. Yet it is still possible to wonder about the condition of precariousness in which the universal of the human always takes place. The unstable relation of the human to the natural, the animal, life and technology leads to unstable limits of what is recognisable as human. The possibility of violence intrinsic to the human reveals its inevitable condition of vulnerability, whereby not only is any life exposed to injury but also to no longer being considered a human life. Judith Butler is an author who manages to restore the human by thinking on its condition and not on its attributes. The condition of crisis and precariousness of the human, made and unmade by language, its multiple relations and normativity, opens every figure of the human to a future that is yet to come.
Biography:
Javier Moscoso Cala is a Postgraduate Researcher at University of Malaga. His interests are vulnerability and the human in contemporary philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. He recently published "Apuntes para una política precaria del duelo en tiempos de covid-19", in Nacho Escutia, María Begoña Fleitas and Teresa Oñate (ed.) Pandemia, Globalización, Ecología, Madrid, Fénix-UNED, 2020, 85-94. He presented several papers in local and international conferences in Spain and is in charge of Derivas. Seminario Permanente de Estética at Complutense University of Madrid with three other colleagues.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Friday May 15, 2026
Friday May 15, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Panos Theodorou
Abstract:
Generally speaking, these naturalised renderings of Phenomenology aspire to show that intelligent behaviour in living beings is grounded in that they are embodied and embedded in a world that they enactively constitute. Intentionality of the mind and its meaning-giving essence are understood in such a context. Meaningfulness of cognition and behaviour, however, presuppose the organisation and the synthesis of sensory and other elements in a horizon of temporality. But how is the opening up of this horizon made possible in the living being? Quite a few ideas have been offered to this effect (Varela 1999, van Gelder 1999, Lloyd 2002, Grush 2006, 2017). They attempt to ‘transplant’ Husserl’s account of temporality into the neuronal substructure of the living organisms. These attempts, however, have notable defects. In our paper we develop a detailed but concise critique of the aforementioned views and proposals. We show that they wrongly assimilated Husserl’s analysis of inner time consciousness as one concerning timing rather than temporality (Varela, van Gelder, Lloyd) or as concerning prediction of hyletic data rather than temporal flow (Grush). We argue that either their ideas regarding the specific neuronal networks and functions that give rise to the opening up of the temporal horizon show toward irrelevant directions (Varela, van Gelder, Lloyd) or they lack any successful positive suggestion (Grush). We present and develop the novel idea that the lived-through temporal horizonality resides in the orectic (appetitive-desirative) character of basic functions of the living organism. We offer a classification of the orectic phenomena in the different levels of the living beings. We appeal to Panksepp’s behavioral neuro-ethological findings regarding the presence of a SEEKING system in interconnected dopaminergic circuits in the subcortical frontal brain. Finally, we interpret these results in a way that suggests how this system makes possible the opening up of the primordial temporal horizon. Paper co-authored by Anna-Irene Baka, Costas Pagondiotis, and Constantinos Picolas.
Biography:
Panos Theodorou is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Crete (Greece). He is author of the books Perception and Theory as Practices (Kritiki, 2006; in Greek), Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial (Springer, 2015), Introduction to the Philosophy of Values (Kallipos, 2016; in Greek). He has translated in Greek and commented the corpus of the texts written by Husserl and Heidegger for the ‘Britannica Artikel’ project (Kritiki, 2005) and Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Parts I and II) (Nissos, 2012). Articles of his, on Phenomenology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of emotions and values, appear in international journals and volumes.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Wednesday May 13, 2026
Wednesday May 13, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Cătălina Condruz
Abstract:
The event of birth has been a topic of concern for the phenomenological tradition and remains up to date since birth represents our starting point in life, just like dead is generally considered the last point reached. However, it’s still an event which involve us, even if it does not happen to us (Marion). The birth event makes us vulnerable, totally overwhelmed by the extraordinary fact of being thrown in the world. In Marion’s terms, we are passive subjects (adonnés) receiving ourselves from the saturated phenomenon of the birth event. Unlike Marion, Claude Romano’s evenimential hermeneutics proposes a different account according to which birth is the original event that opens the advenant’s world and draws upon a temporality more original than the Heideggerian one. The present paper goes beyond the paths followed by both Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Romano, by dissecting the question of testimony and outlining as accurately as possible its fundamental role in framing the temporal dimension of the birth event. Firstly, my main objective will be to analyse in detail the two philosophical positions briefly mentioned above, namely the phenomenology of givenness of Marion and the evenimential hermeneutics of Romano. Secondly, in order to clarify my position, I will refer to the relation between analyst and analysed and I will show that it can be interpreted as an event featuring the birth of the one (the analysand) witnessed by the other (the analyst). This comparison will help me show that both events incapsulate the future, releasing it in degrees of givenness. Moreover, it will help me bring to the fore that the passive subject that I am in the moment of my birth is witnessing not only my factuality, but is witnessing also the future because is setting up a gaping fissure that will be always opened.
Biography:
Cătălina Condruz is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, under the supervision of Dr. Lect. Cristian Ciocan. In her thesis, she is reconstructing the philosophical framework of intersubjectivity within Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, taking as point of departure the notion of counter-intentionality. During her second year of PhD, Cătălina was involved in Erasmus programme and spent a semester at University of Rouen (France), working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Natalie Depraz.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Monday May 11, 2026
Monday May 11, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Melissa Burchard
Abstract:
If it is true, as Tribunella argues in Melancholia and Maturation, that US culture includes a belief that children must undergo certain forms of trauma in order to become “proper” adults, then at least one sense in which the future is a present concern is in the form of cultural machinations directed at the formation of future adults. The characteristics presented as desirable for “proper” adulthood align with the values of the dominant culture and consumer capitalism; for example, seriousness and productivity, as well as heteronormativity. Clearly, this conservative approach maintains the status quo, rather than inventing different future possibilities. The question can then be posed, is this picture of proper adulthood, and the future that it presumes, one that is actually desirable on moral and/or political/social grounds? Given, for example, how much the US has seen in the last year of renewed or revitalised racial and ethnic violence from whites, it seems arguable that our “program” for developing “proper” adults is either failing, or succeeding, but producing adults that should not be considered proper under current conditions of increasing diversity and our (at least rhetorical) commitment to equality. I will argue in this presentation that the belief that trauma is necessary for producing “proper” adulthood is deeply misguided in that it is re-producing an ongoing kind of “hazing” as initiation into adulthood, based on a “for your own good” mentality. I will introduce the possibility that if we were to change our picture of the necessity for trauma for developing proper adults, we might get a kind of adult that is more inclined toward open-mindedness, empathy and inclusivity, which would allow us to move toward a future of greater peace and equity.
Biography:
Melissa Burchard is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She works in theoretical and applied ethics, and social and political philosophy. Her current research interests are primarily in the philosophy of trauma, especially in representations of trauma in children’s literature and popular culture. Recent publications include Philosophical Reflections on Mothering in Trauma and a special edition of Public Philosophy Journal, “Philosophical Engagements with Trauma”, co-edited with Courtney Miller and Hannah Bacon.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Wednesday May 06, 2026
Wednesday May 06, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Siobhán Lenihan
Abstract:
Recommendation engines, curated feeds, and personalisation systems of all kinds have long since become a domineering force in technologically-mediated spaces; the impetus to freely roam and to choose one's own path becoming increasingly rare as control is sold for convenience (Bozdag & van den Hoven, 2015; de Vries, 2010). The next logical leap for this optimising force is into an enmeshed digital and physical experience, as heralded by the advent of augmented reality technologies. In this omnipresent context, one's sense of self and place is altered and re-altered algorithmically, in a manner which may blur the line between implant and intent beyond recognition. While it has been suggested that a sister medium, virtual reality, may offer the conditions for a life-world that transcends spatial restraints (Metzinger, 2018), it is arguable that augmented reality poses a threat in the inverse – that the fracturing of perception across personalisation lines may impair the shared sense of living together within a collective consciousness. With such attention to the socially-oriented phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the question of how to address this alienation may be found in the adaptation of the notion of 'drifting' found in the theory of psychogeography. In extending rebellion against the practical intentions of the built environment to that of pervasive technologies, there emerges the potential to thwart one's artificial predictors and regain agency over both individuated and shared experience.
Biography:
Siobhán Lenihan is a PhD candidate investigating practical ethics applications for extended reality technologies, supervised by Prof Heike Schmidt-Felzmann and funded by Science Foundation Ireland within the Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (D-REAL) programme. She holds a B.A. (Joint Honours) in Philosophy, Sociology & Political Science from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a HDipSci in Web Technologies from the National College of Ireland. Previously, a bright-eyed graduate Content Strategist for the Central Statistics Office. They try to separate the critical segment of their life led online from the remaining recreational time, with middling success.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Monday May 04, 2026
Monday May 04, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Roberto Wu
Abstract:
The future is usually taken from the perspective of an absence, as a horizon that is continually projected from the present, but which is not already there. As present centered, this temporal relationship attempts to bridge the future fulfilling it with our expectations and accordingly subordinating it to us. However, a phenomenology of temporal responsibility challenges this dynamic. On the one hand, it does not consider the “absence” of the future as a sheer void to be fulfilled, for it is already meaningful to us. On the other hand, it does not take the future as something present-at-hand merely delivered by human actions, but rather, as an instance of time that resists to be determined by the present, a resistance that is related to the alterity of the future ones. Future events, as enacted by forms of alterity, are unpredictable and elude dominion and calculation. The inadequacy of conceiving future practices as mere extension of ours consists in the failure in recognising that our responsibility to contemporary others differs from that to futural others. Considering that the future presents distinct instances of world that will inevitably collide with structures, arrangements, values and meanings as employed today, and also that different communities and individuals will perform distinct courses of action, one may ask how phenomenological investigation may elaborate a temporal responsibility without making violence to the alterity of the futural ones. In order to develop these issues, this proposal focuses primarily on two subjects: first, the elaboration of phenomenological categories that render future people as meaningful in their alterity, and second, the suggestion of minimal conditions of achieving a temporal community based on the openness to distinct forms of alterity in time.
Biography:
Roberto Wu is Professor of Philosophy, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), author of numerous paper and book chapters on Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, and phenomenology.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Friday May 01, 2026
Friday May 01, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Spyridon Kaltsas
Abstract:
The main aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual relations between hope and the concept of the future in the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty. My presentation is divided into two main sections. In order to establish my position, I will first undertake a reconstruction of Rorty’s thought with a focus on the concept of hope. Rorty’s neo-pragmatism centers on the need to rethink freedom after the collapse of foundationalism and seeks to understand the possibility of building a common future without accepting the absolutist and authoritatian pretensions of essentialist metaphysics. Rorty aims to substitute hope for knowledge and replace objective certainty with a new relation to the future of a better common world. In this respect, hope is not understood as an objective ideal, but is rather to be seen as a practical achievement. However, Rorty’s view on the relation between hope and the future is far from being without problems. In the second section of my paper, I will try to further elucidate my argument by turning to the contradiction between two different conceptions of the future in Rorty’s thought. The first one understands the future as the fulfillment of the potential of the present, while the second one regards the future as wholly different from the present, as an alternative to present constraints in knowledge and social practice. I conclude by arguing that these conceptions of the future are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in Rorty’s argument.
Biography:
Spyridon Kaltsas holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). His main research interests are in the fields of moral philosophy, social theory, and the theory of communicative action. He is currently teaching social theory and epistemology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Wednesday Apr 29, 2026
Wednesday Apr 29, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Tris Hedges
Abstract:
Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) was arguably his most socio-politically influential work. Although this is mostly indebted to his conceptualisation of the Lebenswelt (life-world), Husserl also provided an important account of the epoché as a praxis rather than the more abstract conception outlined in Ideas I. In the Crisis, Husserl’s project is to show how ‘the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché […] are destined in essence to effect […] the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind.’ This paper aims to demonstrate how the epoché, as a habitual attitude, can be practically carried out in order to effect an existential transformation. I will argue that personal pronouns offer an avenue through which Husserl’s phenomenological reorientation can be demonstrated as a practical, methodological, blueprint for the future. Husserl’s ‘humanistic’ phenomenological project most likely had social categories such as nationality and religion in mind. However, this paper will employ the methodology provided in the Crisis to critically reflect on the taken-for-grantedness (Selbstverständlichkeit) of sex and gender.The paper will proceed by first outlining the task of Husserl’s Crisis and its concern for the objective sciences, before characterising the epoché as a habitual attitude in need of constant renewal. Following this, I will examine how cultural and scientific traditions, and the fixed typology of language fetter the subject to life in the naïve ‘natural attitude’. By showing that sex and gender are linguistically, culturally, and performatively determined ‘types’, their bracketing will be exposed as vital for a genuine phenomenological reorientation. Finally, to avoid the danger of what Husserl calls the ‘seduction of language’, I will show the reactivation and transformation of the personal pronoun ‘they/them’ to be exemplary of the radical praxis at the heart of the Crisis.
Biography:
Tris Hedges is a philosopher based in Berlin working at the intersections of phenomenology, social ontology, affect studies, and queer feminist philosophy. Their work explores themes of sexuality, normalisation, affect, gender, and group identity, and has been published in numerous academic journals as well as literary and scientific magazines. They are currently working as a postdoctoral fellow between Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Copenhagen with a project on the politics and affects of doubt.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
Monday Apr 27, 2026
Monday Apr 27, 2026
Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.
This episode features a presentation from Lorenzo Buti.
Abstract:
This paper reconceptualises the phenomenon of depoliticisation as the materially closing off of alternative future possibilities on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Marxist-existentialist theory of human praxis. Traditionally, political theorists have defined depoliticisation as a symbolic mutation at the level of ‘the political’. In this account, a state of depoliticisation occurs when a contingent situation appears as immutable or the expression of a more foundational (theological, cultural, technocratic) logic. The future in any society is radically open, but this ontological fact is symbolically covered up. The task of political theory therefore is to show that a particular situation is politically instituted and that a society should acknowledge its own constitutive openness towards an undefined future. This paper criticises this exclusive emphasis on the symbolic conditions of futurity in the theorisation of depoliticisation. By turning to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, it argues that next to a symbolic closure, the future can also be practically or materially closed. Practico-inert ensembles can impose a specific directionality on the future by formulating exigencies or imperatives that human praxes must fulfil. By reconstructing Sartre’s conceptual framework, this paper reformulates the phenomenon of depoliticisation as a future which cannot be transcended. In a word, a depoliticised society is one where the future becomes a fate which one cannot escape. This reformulation carries significant consequences for the critical analysis of contemporary 9 societies. It implies that depoliticisation can occur even in situations where there is a high level of political contestation (protests, riots, social polarisation) but where groups lack the practical capacity to redirect the imperatives that are imposed on society. Finally, it shows that confronting depoliticisation not only entails revealing the contingency of a specific situation, but also dismantling the exigencies that dominate our praxis.
Biography:
Lorenzo Buti is a doctoral candidate at RIPPLE (Research Institute in Political Philosophy Leuven), KU Leuven. His research interests lie in continental political philosophy (Lefort, Balibar, Rancière) and the tradition of critical theory (Marx, the Frankfurt School and, somehow, Sartre). Lorenzo works on a research project that aims to rethink the character of democratic action along insurgent lines, in the face of material conditions that structure the stakes of the political stage.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/