BSP Podcast

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Maya Mukamel

 

Abstract:

In this research, we employed a phenomenological inquiry into our embodied histories to develop an account of our collective experiences of institutional racism in the fields of psychology, counselling, and psychotherapy in th UK. We approached this as Black tutors and allies, who are educators, trainers, practitioners, and former students and trainees. The study is based on six interviews conducted by and with three participants. In the interviews, we utilized Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing technique to access our embodied experiences of racism and institutional racism. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the data.

 

The research findings show that institutionalized racism within the psychotherapeutic field is a prevalent lived experience among the Black academics who participated in this study. They have been profoundly affected by institutional racism, through race-based traumatic stress and racial trauma. Institutional racism emerged as a lived reality in their narratives concerning participation in psychotherapy training environments, both as trainees and academics. They described institutional racism as fostering hostile and unsafe environments, where racial microaggressions were pervasive, prompting coping mechanisms associated with survival and self-preservation. Similar experiences have been documented in prior research on trainee experiences.

 

Several protective factors were identified: participants leveraged their awareness of racial dynamics to recognize and navigate these dynamics, in a way that contributed to their personal and professional development. Supportive relationships among Black staff and students during training, as well as relationships with academic and professional staff who demonstrated a deep understanding of these issues, were deemed highly beneficial, even essential. Participants also drew on resources outside of professional settings for support, and engagement in research and critical bodies of knowledge aided in contextualizing their experiences and generating knowledge on these issues.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 concludes with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Mariah Partida

 

Abstract:

My presentation will take a critical-phenomenological approach to examining the intertwining of the physical and psychological pain caused by prolonged solitary confinement. Amending classical phenomenology’s focus on the transcendental conditions of possibility for experience as such, critical phenomenology broadens its considerations to include social, political, and historical factors that can allow for a more apt characterization of the peculiar form of suffering induced by such extreme methods of carceral isolation (Guenther, 2019). One question that frequently arises in discussions of solitary confinement is whether it amounts to torture, and there is a growing consensus among researchers that the answer is “yes.” For example, EEG-like tests from detention camps in the former Yugoslavia reveal that without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has suffered a traumatic brain injury (Gawande, 2009). Similarly, Catherine Malabou (2007) argues that the behavior of victims of sociopolitical traumas display striking similarities to that of individuals who have suffered brain lesions. Malabou refers to both types of victims as the “new wounded.” She insists that these individuals, having undergone severe shock to their affective brain, display posttraumatic personality changes characterized by disaffection and indifference. Albert Woodfox’s autobiographical narrative of his decades-long incarceration in a six-by-nine-foot cell at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison parallels Malabou’s description of the new wounded. He states, “I had to shut my emotional system down. I buried my emotions, so that things that would normally touch me or move me didn’t touch me or move me” (Woodfox, 2019). Since the lasting psychical anguish brought about by solitary confinement all too closely resembles the enduring bodily scars left by physical torture, the question for critical phenomenology, as a transformative political practice, is: how can its philosophical resources assist in abolishing such an oppressive and debilitating practice?

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from James Costello

 

Abstract:

The psychotherapist’s “in the moment” relationship with the otherness of their client is the most central aspect of the therapeutic encounter. The real problems are the present problems, and so the therapist must seek contact with the client in the present. Addressing relational experiences of the past or future can only be understood in the encounter now. The purpose of remembering the past becomes attuned to its re-imagination in the present.

 

The radically relational therapist understands depression for example, as an uncoupling from the present moment, and not the reverse, where a person’s past is the cause of difficulties in the present. What is at stake when we think about menopause, depression, dementia, or trauma in this way, is the peculiar human capacity for stepping out of our bodies and adopting a detached and disembodied perspective of ourselves. It is our capacity to rise above the here-and-now of current experience - a “view from nowhere” - which admits, filters, valorises and denies aspects of the world about me.

 

It is the co-created therapeutic “now” that becomes the place for learning and change. As relational patterns appear “now,” the therapist engages with the client in examining, challenging, and articulating new pictures, more apt metaphors for making sense of the world. It is in the present that awareness of what sectors of a client’s world need be recovered for healthy living come to the fore.

 

This feature of radical relationality is reminiscent of the psychodynamic concept of transference – where the client projects their internal representations of relational figures from the past onto the therapist. The radical relationist, instead, sees these patterns as appearing in the real relationship of therapy; one just as authentic, if not more so than those where the client participates as part of their embodied relational field of experience.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Mauro Senatore

 

Abstract:

In his Freiburg lectures on passive syntheses (Hua XI), Husserl evokes a catastrophic scenario concerning consciousness and the world as a limit-case of standard perceptual experience. He supposes that, although problematic uncertainty (doubt) and disappointment (unfulfilled expectations) are admitted, a certain unity of sense (namely, a minimal certainty in the fulfilment of expectations) must be maintained, in order for the constancy of a single consciousness and the endurance of this one world to be safeguarded (§§6 and 23). According to the suggestive reading offered by the philosopher of psychiatry Matthew Ratcliffe, this scenario accounts for a structural alteration of the global style of anticipation that is inherent in perception and a shift to pervasive anxiety, which is characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorders (2017). Interweaving these references together, in my talk, I will interpret the dark horizon (der dunkle Horizont) of anxious possibilities that Husserl describes in his Freiburg reflections on ethics (Hua XLII, text n.24), as an adventurous exploration of the scenario evoked in his contemporary lectures on passive synthesis. My reading hypothesis is that the general uncertainty of life that motivates that horizon should not be measured against the thesis of the world (de Warren 2022), but against the thesis of the minimal certainty of fulfilment and the related understanding of the lived body as a kind of performance machine, which Husserl subscribes to in his late phenomenology of perception. To test this hypothesis, I will focus on Husserl’s analyses of how the dark horizon, specifically, the anticipation of a corporeal and mental sickness, disrupts the habitual confident style of anticipation.  

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Kylie Erfani

 

Abstract:

This essay explores the philosophical significance of nausea through a novel analysis of the similarities between Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenologies. Sartre and Levinas agree that nausea can teach us deep existential and ontological truths, or in their terminology, that nausea discloses being. Nausea is distinctively disclosive, or revealing, for these two authors, especially in their early works. So, we begin with an analysis of Levinas’s first philosophical essay, On Escape. Levinas dedicates only three pages to the topic, but in a short analysis sets out two major, interrelated claims. First, that nausea is an experience of being “riveted” to yourself. And second, that nausea discloses pure being. A preliminary exegesis of Levinas’s theory provides a framework to place the narrative account found in Sartre’s novel, Nausea. This juxtaposition shows many deep agreements as Sartre’s vivid descriptions bring Levinas’s account to life. What these accounts fail to explain is the premise on which nausea’s capacity for ontological disclosure is founded. To that end, the existentialist account of the lived experience of nausea will serve as a point of departure and comparison for both a first-person phenomenological attestation and the available natural scientific account of nausea. Through this analysis, we find that the origins of nausea remain unclear and thus Levinas’s claim—that nausea is self-positing—cannot be settled. However, incorporating these new perspectives, as well as recent developments in critical phenomenology, advances a richer and more complete philosophical understanding of nausea. Ultimately, we argue for a concept of nausea that is not reducible to a somatic metaphor for anxiety (as is the fault of the existentialist view), and one that extends the disclosive potency of nausea beyond the merely ontological and into the complex gendered lifeworld of chronic illness in a capitalist political economy.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Srijan Uzir

 

Abstract:

In the late text Le Toucher - Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida engages with the French reception of Husserl’s Ideas II, focusing particularly on the constitution of the “corps propre” (Leib) and, in this context, dedicating an important chapter to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body. Le Toucher-Jean-Luc Nancy is important not simply because it allows to see how the problematics of deconstruction relate to the questions of bodily perception, but also because it allows us to situate deconstruction outside the restricted domain of language games. In this paper, we will pay attention to Derrida’s reading of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in this late text, in the light of the published course notes of Merleau-Ponty’s lessons on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, entitled Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. This approach will allow us to compare the differences in their perspectives with respect to the origin of sense in history and question of embodiment. Although both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida are deeply influenced by Heidegger in their reading of the late Husserl, for the former the genesis of sense takes places in corporality, a virtue that is shared with the Other, and language is conceived of as the site of the original presence where a chiasmus (Ineinander) between self and other is realized. On the other hand, instead of conceiving language as a form of embodied relation, Derrida wants to reconfigure the concept of the body as writing. It is the nuance of this distinction that must be brought to bear on their respective philosophies. Our paper will explore this with regard to the husserlian problematics of facts and essences. This paper suggests that whereas Merleau-Ponty is interested in situating essence in factuality without succumbing to empiricism, Derrida focuses on the topic of exemplarity as a necessary means of passing to ideality; for him, ignoring the difference between facts and examples can only lead to empiricism and psychologism.  

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Oda Davanger

 

Abstract:

The paper, “Tracing Inscriptions: Can Signs be Embodied?” analyzes the linguistic implications of what it means to theorize bodies as inscripted, particularly in relation to intentionality. In critical phenomenology, the notion of embodied inscription has been important to investigate the effects of agency on gendered and racialized bodies, as theorized by Young and Fanon in pointing out the shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The author identifies structuralist tendencies in Merleau-Ponty that has survived critical phenomenology’s double critique and appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s texts. The author does so by invoking Jacques Derrida’s critique of Saussurian structuralism, by positing inscription as a form of Althusserian interpellation, and analyzing the body as trace instead of sign. The author asks, if there are strucutralist premises in critical phenomenology, what might the critique of such structuralism provoke in terms of its analysis of otherness? For it is not inscription alone that leads to inhibited intentionality, for as black existentialism and feminist phenomenology has pointed out, whiteness and maleness are likewise inscriptions. Analyzing the body as trace rather than sign interestingly reinvigorates Derrida’s critique of Saussure’s privileging of speech over writing, and presence over absence, in new gendered terms. Furthermore, this analysis of inscription opens the door to historicity, to a combined notion of language, temporality and otherness that expands the Saussurian structuralism within Merleau-Ponty’s already temporal notion of habit. This paper provides an opportunity to find approaches to the ambiguity of embodied otherness and its effects as inhibited bodily and political movement. The alterity easily distinguishable in gender and race potentially reveals something about the human condition as inscribed altogether.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Adam Takacs

 

Abstract:

The traditional phenomenological approach to the body is premised on a constitutive analysis of touch and movement. On this basis, it is possible to trace the configuration that entangles the affective experience of the “lived body” with the objectified conditions of the world as given in space, orientation and perspective. It is also on this basis that one can conclude that the body, as Merleau-Ponty claims, possesses an “operative intentionality” that endows it, through its own habitualities, with a specific temporality and memory. This talk aims to go one step further in this direction. I will argue that in interpreting the body’s own time, it is also worth considering the context implied by its relationship with the physical environment. To highlight this, I will introduce the notion of “contact” as distinct from touch, as a phenomenological feature that testifies to the body’s intense and intricate coexistence with things. I try to show that, at the level of physical contact, the body is subject to temporal processes which inevitably affects its living structure, exposing it to the interplay of erosion and resilience. By showcasing a time that leave material marks or ontologically “stigmatizes”, I will argue that this condition, through the facticity and phenomenality of bodily ageing, inscribes the primordial mode of embodiment in the fabric of collective history.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Paul Tuppeny

 

Abstract:

Our world is, by its nature, a place of change; trees grow, fruit ripens and skin wrinkles; every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting. Intrinsic to the perceptual apparatus through which we know this place, it seems, are pre-reflective judgements concerning these transformative processes. We experience these intuitions as age.

 

Through this phenomenon of age, we ‘feel’ Time in the physical things around us, every episode of perception conveying the past, projecting a future and delivering to us a temporally extended spatial arena. Although derived from only momentary observations, the discernment of objective age allows us to chronicle the world’s flux and stabilise the evanescent environment in which we find ourselves.

 

This primordial perceptual comportment, evolved to understand changes in the Natural environment, is applied equally to the artefacts of our technicity, gathering together their sedimented temporal layers to build our heritage.

 

The paper begins with an investigation into the “material-temporality” of natural entities and speculates on the cognitive mechanisms that might imbue physical objects with temporal characteristics. In these, Husserl’s notion of the ad-memorised co-presentations that fuse with our sensory data appear central. Similarly important, though, are Aristotle’s observations concerning our biographic assimilation of objects and the coalescence of those change-narratives around an entity’s actuality, or telos, as defined through the purposes of the subject.

 

The discussion then moves to the age that we experience in man-made objects. These artefacts do not just embody their own past but that of their originating community, experienced through our empathic interpretation of them as “spiritualised objects,” animated by the intent of their makers.

 

The paper concludes with the proposition that it is the phenomenon of age which stitches us into the fabric of the world and marries our needs with its, and our own, inherent generative processes.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.

 

This episode features a presentation from Andrejs Balodis

 

Abstract:

The paper will explore the concept of body memory and its application in the context of phenomenologically oriented medical humanities. Recent phenomenological research indicates that body memory plays a significant role in shaping embodied experience, both at the subjective and intersubjective levels. (Casey 1987, Fuchs 2012, 2017, Froese & Izquierdo 2018, etc.) However, due to its non-representational nature, body-memory is a challenging topic for research. I argue that structures of embodiment such as body memory and collective body memory (introduced by Fuchs) contribute in shaping health behaviors of individuals and communities, such as reluctance to get vaccinated against Covid-19 during the pandemic.

 

We* conducted a phenomenologically grounded qualitative research to explain motivations behind vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Existing studies on the subject lack a comprehensive, in-depth explanation of the role of the embodied experience in vaccine hesitancy. By applying a phenomenological conceptual framework – using concepts like embodiment, intentionality, lifeworld, body image, body schema, habitual body, normality etc.), we have gained insights into the embodied experience of vaccine reluctance and the underlying structures that shapes this experience.

 

The qualitative study (N=16) carried out in Latvia allows us to draw conclusions not only about individual but also collective models of health experience, emphasizing the socio-cultural and historical dimensions in the embodied experience. I will argue that the phenomenological concepts of the body memory and collective body memory can shed light on long-standing practices, habits and attitudes, thereby explaining culturally specific health behaviours, including hesitancy to vaccinate.

 

*This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project Hesitant bodies: phenomenological analysis of the embodied experience of vaccine hesitancy, project No. lzp-2021/1-0360

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/