BSP Podcast

Tom Hey - 'A Phenomenological Approach to Bulimia'

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Tom Hey, Lancaster University. 

Tom Hey 'A Phenomenological Approach to Bulimia' 

Abstract: Bulimia has been medically and socially constructed as an illness afflicting affluent, young, white women, which is to be cured through weight gain and the resumption of a ‘normal' relationship with food. This myopic depiction of bulimia represents a predilection to ‘make sense' of illness experiences in medically- and/or culturally-intelligible terms, and constitutes epistemic violence towards sufferers through its erasure of diverse forms of suffering and its disavowal of the subjective complexities of recovery. The pervasiveness of the eating disorder memoir, which dominates written representations of bulimia and positions linear recovery (expressed in narrative terms) as an experiential norm, further marginalises ongoing experiences of suffering; as Angela Woods argues, ‘[n]arrative does not have a monopoly on expressivity' (Woods, 2013: 124).   In this paper I will use a phenomenological approach informed by affect theories, specifically Sara Ahmed's work on orientations and attachments, to engage with embodied experiences of bulimia. I will read Bulimics on Bulimia (2009), a collection of fragmented, first-person, present-tense accounts of bulimia edited by Maria Stavrou, to propose that living with bulimia can engender individualised, affectively-charged attachments between selves, objects, and spaces through which each is destabilised and redrawn. Aiming to ‘provide a sample of insight into what life is like living with bulimia' (Stavrou, 2009: 7), Bulimics on Bulimia seeks to address the privileged articulacy of narrativized accounts of bulimia through its representation of moments of intensity situated within social worlds from a polyphony of voices. Using an engaged phenomenological methodology which provides new ways of listening to written accounts of living with bulimia, I will seek to rearticulate bulimia as an object around which surges illogical, ambivalent feelings and emotions. 

Bio: Tom Hey is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Lancaster University, researching representations of eating disorders in contemporary literature through the intersecting frameworks of the medical humanities, postcolonial theories, and affect theories. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

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. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Ida Djursaa - 'Towards a Critical Phenomenology of the Erotic'

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Ida Djursaa, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London.

Ida Djursaa 'Towards a Critical Phenomenology of the Erotic'

Abstract: This paper seeks to advance a phenomenological notion of sexuality as a modality of bodily sensibility through the lens of Merleau-Ponty.    Feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler (1989) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994) have critiqued Merleau-Ponty's analysis of sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception for presenting sexuality in a universalist (hence masculinist) way, abstracted from the reality of gender difference and non-heterosexual identities. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji's (2008) and Tom Sparrow's (2015) work on sensibility, however, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty's notion of sexuality should be understood as a modality of sensibility that operates prior to, and as generative of, categorisations into sexual identities. I show how Merleau-Ponty's analysis of sexuality, rather than making a claim about the universalist character of desire such as it must be for everyone, in fact makes a more basic claim about the strictly bodily, that is, the sensible dimension of our most intimate intercorporeal relations.    Insofar as sensibility designates the pre-reflective and pre-perceptual binding of bodies, then, understanding sexuality as a modality of sensibility, this paper argues, allows us to investigate the ways in which bodies live desire prior to perception and reflection. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty's description of sexuality as the ‘blind linking of bodies' (Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, p159) is thus not reducible to sexual identity but is rather descriptive of the erotic as the life force that motivates attractions and repulsions – affective ‘pulls' – between bodies.   Finally, the paper asks how this erotic life force itself, and hence our bodies' (in)capacity for intimacy, is structured by our socio-politico-historical contexts, including the reality of gender norms? Can a critical phenomenology of sexuality help us to not only understand but also empower the erotic lives of bodies?

Bio: I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London. My research project critically traces the phenomenological notion of transcendence such as it operates in Husserl, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that transcendence works, most basically, at the level of bodily sensibility rather than consciousness or perception. Ultimately, I employ this notion of sensibility to investigate how the particular ways in which our bodies move are structured by our individual history as well as the socio-cultural-historical contexts which invisibly prescribe normative ways of moving and acting based on gender, race, class.

Kira Meyer - 'Ecophenomenology as a Contribution to Transformation'

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Kira Meyer, Kiel University.

Kira Meyer 'Ecophenomenology as a Contribution to Transformation'

Abstract:   Engaged phenomenology does not only have the potential to transform socio-political realities and power relations between human beings, but also those between man and nature. Currently, anthropocentrism, namely the view that nature has only an instrumental value which is relative to the ends of human beings, governs these realities and relations. Phenomenology can contribute to transform them by including the lived body in the self-understanding of human beings. Understanding the lived body as the “nature that we are ourselves” (Böhme, 2019) would involve a different conception of nature as well: Man and nature wouldn't be dichotomic anymore, rather human beings would be part of nature. Embracing such an ecophenomenological (cf. Brown and Toadvine, 2003) conception would have important normative implications. I will present them in three steps. Firstly, I argue that the instrumental value of nature for the fulfillment of human basic needs and health can be particularly well justified based on an ecophenomenological approach for it is precisely man's corporeality by virtue of which he has these needs and through which health (or illness) manifest themselves. Secondly, sentience is inseparable from corporeality. Therefore, insofar as it is a concern of the ecophenomenological approach to take corporeality and its implications seriously, sentient beings deserve direct moral consideration. Thirdly, natural entities build an integral part of the good life of human beings, hence they deserve indirect moral consideration because of their eudaimonic value (Chan et al., 2016). As corporeal beings, humans can enjoy nature aisthetically, that is via their senses: The beautiful, the sublime, but also nature as home, as offering leisure and recreation, spirituality and transformation (Krebs et al., 2021). Taking corporeality into account, that is embracing an ecophenomenological account, thus leads to a deep anthropocentric position (Ott, 2016) and facilitates the transformation of current power relations and thereby shaped human-nature-relations. (301 words exclusive of literature) Literature:BÖHME, G. 2019. Leib: Die Natur, die wir selbst sind, Berlin, Suhrkamp.BROWN, C. S. & TOADVINE, T. 2003. Eco-Phenomenology. An Introduction. In: BROWN, C. S. & TOADVINE, T. (eds.) Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. New York: State University of New York Press.CHAN, K. M. A., BALVANERA, P., BENESSAIAH, K., CHAPMAN, M., DÍAZ, S., GÓMEZ-BAGGETHUN, E., GOULD, R., HANNAHS, N., JAX, K., KLAIN, S., LUCK, G. W., MARTÍN-LÓPEZ, B., MURACA, B., NORTON, B., OTT, K., PASCUAL, U., SATTERFIELD, T., TADAKI, M., TAGGART, J. & TURNER, N. 2016. Why protect nature? Rethinking values and the environment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 1462–1465.KREBS, A., SCHUSTER, S., FISCHER, A. & MÜLLER, J. 2021. Das Weltbild der Igel. Naturethik einmal anders, Basel, Schwabe Verlag.OTT, K. 2016. On the Meaning of Eudemonic Arguments for a Deep Anthropocentric Environmental Ethics. New German Critique, 43, 105-126.

Bio:   Kira Meyer is a doctoral candidate in the field of environmental ethics at Kiel University. In her dissertation project she investigates the connection between the lived body and a relational understanding of freedom and argues on this basis for the compatibility of (strong) sustainability and freedom. Her research focuses on (eco-)phenomenology, new phenomenology, environmental ethics, and the concept of political freedom.

Dr Ullrich Haase - ‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’

Season 6 continues with another keynote presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.

 

‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’

This year saw the 50th anniversary of The Limits of Growth, the publication by the Club of Rome, which for many was the trigger of the birth of climate activism. The message was that action on global warming now was necessary immediately – but nothing much happened until the Fridays for Future movement, which appeared as if it just occurred to us that there might be a problem. About a decade after the publication of The Limits of Growth, parts of the ecological movement wondered why nothing happened and turned towards the critique of technological rationalism, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, to provide an explanation for that inaction and to open the way for a more radical ecological thinking. While the insight that nothing would change as long as ecology would either be swallowed up by the same technological rationalism that caused the crisis, nor by some middle-class Europeans ‘moving off grid’, did give rise to more than a decade of engagement, what in turn has happened to this movement, which claimed that ecology can only be meaningful when joining postmodernism’s turn to language, while also claiming that postmodernism is essentially an ecological thinking? Again, nothing. Instead, all we wonder about today is whether Heidegger was an antisemite or not. In this talk I will reflect on the reasons for which Heidegger’s other thinking has become so unpalatable in our age and why these reasons are the same that should still engage us with the problems of global heating and globalization and the critique of the feverish search for technical solutions to the problem of technology.

Ullrich Haase is Principal Lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on 19th and 20th Century German and French Philosophy, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Blanchot. He served as the editor of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology from 2005 to 2020.

Prof. Giovanna Colombetti - ‘Varieties of incorporation: beyond the blind man’s cane’

Season 6 continues with another keynote presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.

‘Varieties of incorporation: beyond the blind man’s cane’

In post-phenomenology and other disciplines, “incorporation” refers to the assimilation or integration of tools into the body. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had already discussed examples of tool-incorporation—including, famously, the example of the blind man and his cane. Merleau-Ponty's analysis refers to what he called the “body schema”: our prereflective awareness of ourselves in terms of what we can do and perceive in the world. Subsequent discussions of incorporation have similarly focused on the integration of tools into the tacit (or even unconscious and sub-personal) sensorimotor body. In my talk I want to draw attention to the fact that we can incorporate tools in other ways, too, because we experience ourselves not just as tacit sensorimotor bodies. First, we can also incorporate tools into the so-called “body image”—the experience of our body as an intentional object of awareness, which can itself be distinguished into various (sub)experiences. Second, we can incorporate tools into our “lived seen body”—our sense of how we appear to others. I will illustrate these distinctions with examples and empirical evidence, and conclude with some reflections about the relationship between experiences of incorporation and the much discussed notion of the “extended mind”.

 

Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology of the University of Exeter (UK). She was educated in Italy and the UK, and after receiving her PhD from the University of Sussex in 2004, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of York (Canada), Trento (Italy), and Harvard. Since 2007 she has worked and lived in Exeter, temporarily visiting various research centres in Europe, Asia, and Australia. At Exeter she is also member of EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences), where she leads the Mind, Body, and Culture research cluster. She is further affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark, where since 2021 she has been Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Health Sciences, and collaborates with its research cluster on Movement, Culture, and Society. She is also Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science (especially embodied and situated cognition), philosophy of emotion, phenomenology, and material culture studies. She has worked the notions of emotion and affectivity, and on their relation to theories of cognition, embodiment, enaction, and extended mind. She is the author of several articles and book chapters in which she argues that, from an embodied-enactive perspective, cognition and emotion are not separate mental faculties, and rather emotion is a primordial and all-pervasive dimension of the mind. In 2010-2014 she was Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council, titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind”, during which she wrote her monograph The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (MIT Press, 2014). Since then, she has worked mainly on the notion of “situated affectivity” and is currently writing a second monograph on how we use objects to influence our affective life.

Prof. Alia Al-Saji - 'Fanon and an Engaged Phenomenology of Affect: Touching the wounds of colonial duration'

The BSP Podcast Season 6 begins with the first keynote speaker from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II.

 

'Fanon and an Engaged Phenomenology of Affect: Touching the wounds of colonial duration'

Surrounding Frantz Fanon's work is a persistent, and at times reductive, debate on method: phenomenological, psychoanalytic, psychiatric, Merleau-Pontian, Sartrean, afropessimist, or decolonial. What is often forgotten is that the originality of Fanon's philosophy comes from the multiplicity of approaches he was able to weave together. More so, in attempts to read Fanon through other philosophers (e.g. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, or Lacan), his contemporaneity with these thinkers is elided. I propose it might be time to read phenomenology through Fanon, rather than centering analysis on Fanon's assumed debt to Merleau-Ponty's body schema. In this paper, I focus on the question of phenomenological method (without assuming this to be the defining method of Fanon's work). My argument is not one from continuity. Rather, I want to show how Fanonian phenomenology is one of rupture with, and ungrounding of, the phenomenological tradition—how Fanon creates his own method through an engaged phenomenology of racialized affect and touch that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the centre of most phenomenologies before him. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description, that he invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell.

 

Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. Her work brings together phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, and feminist theory, with an abiding interest in questions of time, affect, and racialization. Notable among her works, she is the author of “The Racialization of Muslim Veils” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2010), “Decolonizing Bergson” (Beyond Bergson, SUNY 2019), and “Glued to the Image: A critical phenomenology of racialization through works of Art” (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2019). Al-Saji argues for the philosophical, political, and lived importance of affective hesitation, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Hesitation: Critical Phenomenology, Colonial Duration, and the Affective Weight of the Past.

Marieke Borren - ‘The Spatial Phenomenology of White Embodiment’

Season five of our podcast concludes with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Marieke Borren, Faculty of Humanities, Open University Netherlands.

 

ABSTRACT: Within critical race theory, phenomenological scholarship is unique in focusing on the racialized body. Based on the work of Fanon and Merleau-Ponty (even if the latter does not address racial difference), phenomenologists have recently developed rich explorations of racial embodiment, predominantly in a visual register (Alcoff, Al-Saji, Gordon, Weiss, Yancy, among others). However, ‘white’ and ‘black’ embodiment are not just involved in perceptual (notably: visual) habits, but also, so I will argue in this paper, in ways of inhabiting and taking up space and habits of moving. What ‘I can’ do, and where, is to a large extent dependent upon my racial situation. This presentation seeks to expand the phenomenology of racial embodiment, more particularly whiteness, by attending not just to the (in)visibility but also to the spatiality and motility of racialized – in particular: white – embodiment. To this end, I will I confront the conceptual resources for understanding spatiality and motility in relation to embodiment, present in the work of Merleau-Ponty (while challenging its false racial neutrality), Fanon’s phenomenological account of black racialization, and Shannon Sullivan’s (feminist) pragmatist account of the ‘ontological expansiveness’ of whiteness. Being a key feature of what the latter calls ‘the unconscious habits of racial privilege’, white expansiveness entails the taken-for-granted freedom to inhabit space and move around as one sees fit. Finally, I will argue that the normative implications of the phenomenology of white expansiveness are undecided. It might be strategically employed for undercutting itself. However, any effort to fight white privilege may end up reconfirming rather than undermining white expansiveness. I will illustrate this undecidability with the case study of Carola Rackete, the self-proclaimed white and privileged German captain of the Sea-Watch 3, who rescued 42 African migrants on the Mediterranean and brought them into port in Lampedusa in July 2019.

 

BIO: Marieke Borren currently works as an assistant professor in philosophy at Open University Netherlands. From 2015-2017, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the department of philosophy of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Specializing in Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, her research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has widely published on Arendt’s work, in particular about dis-placement and having a place in the world (‘the right to have rights’), focusing on the predicament of refugees and undocumented migrants.

 

This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/

 

You can check out our forthcoming events here:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/

 

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. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

 

Ondra Kvapil - ‘Thought-provoking Death’

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Ondra Kvapil, École Normale Supérieure de Paris / Charles University in Prague. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.

 

ABSTRACT: My paper will focus on Sartre’s meditations on death. Sartre formulates them as a critique of Heidegger – and the majority of commentators adopt his approach. I will however claim it more fruitful to read Sartre’s conclusions in the light of Husserl’s analyses of death. These were indeed unknown to Sartre, nonetheless the two share key presuppositions: Because our death cannot be grasped in reflection on our subjectivity, it cannot belong to the ontological structure of subjectivity itself; death is then classified as a mundane event, as well as a limit-problem of phenomenological description. I will demonstrate how Sartre radicalizes this notion. Death is not a limit-problem only for transcendental reflection, but already in pre-theoretical and pre-phenomenological attitude. Not only can we never live to seeit coming, we cannot even anticipate it, as the instant of death is principally indeterminate. The only meaning we can attribute to our death is that of the end of our –meaningful, or meaningless – existence. Our death is thus categorically different from all that is intended in the world. There is also a tacit consequence to the exclusion of death from subjectivity: mortality is reduced to bodily vulnerability. Death is the final strike, which may come in various disguises – perhaps that of a virus. Coming from the world, where we nevertheless cannot intend it, death remains essentially exterior to us. In sum, I will unravel the missing link between Husserl’s unpublished reflections on death and Levinas’ grasp of death as radically Other. Moreover, it will emerge that death, which as a mundane fact becomes a subject to a variety of disciplines, at the same time exceeds all empirical facts and thus engages philosophy. Far from being limited to academia, death engages thinking of each and every one of us – no matter where we come from.

 

BIO: I am a postgraduate researcher at École Normale Supérieure de Paris and Charles University in Prague, currently working on my dissertation The Philosophical Significance of Death. Previously, I have also studied at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. I have taught several courses in phenomenological philosophy, mainly on Heidegger, at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University. My research concerns phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics, as well as 19th-century continental philosophy, with particular research interests that include death and mortality, relation between being and nothingness, and the problem of time.

 

This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/

 

You can check out our forthcoming events here:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/

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. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Sam McAuliffe - ‘The Improvisational Encounter: What is Common to Music and Hermeneutic-Phenomenology’

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Sam McAuliffe, Monash University

 

ABSTRACT: Hermeneutic-phenomenology as a method of inquiry is increasingly finding its way into music studies, and the performing arts more generally. Indeed, with respect to music studies there is no shortage of projects where hermeneutic-phenomenology is employed as a means to better understand music, both from the perspective of creating music and experiencing it as a spectator. There is a clear distinction, then, between the practice of music and the application of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry; one is used to understand the other. Rarely acknowledged however, are those characteristics that are common to both music and hermeneutic-phenomenology. In this paper I would like to explore one of those shared characteristics: improvisation. By exploring the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition from a Gadamerian perspective and the practice of music, broadly conceived, I argue that what is common to each is the ‘improvisational encounter’. Which is to say, the improvisation that is essential to the practice of music is equally essential to hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. By highlighting the hermeneutic-phenomenological nature of improvisation in music and the improvisational nature of hermeneutic-phenomenology we might better notice the relevance of each field to the other. Consequently, not only can applied hermeneutic-phenomenology better speak to the practice of music, but so too can studying music provide insight into hermeneutic-phenomenology as such. Thus, perhaps by acknowledging the commonalities between art and philosophy we can notice ways in which these disciplines might speak to and complement one another.

 

BIO: Sam McAuliffe is a PhD candidate at Monash University, working at the intersection of improvised music and philosophical hermeneutics. In addition to his academic work Sam has worked as a musical director for experimental theatre productions, has curated sound installations for major Australian art festivals, and he plays guitar in a variety of ensembles.

 

This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/

 

You can check out our forthcoming events here:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/

 

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. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Adriano Lotito - ‘Tran Duc Thao between Phenomenology and Marxism’

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Adriano Lotito, Milano-Bicocca University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.

 

ABSTRACT: This contribution focuses on the Tran Duc Thao’s work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, that is fundamental to post-war French thought, having influenced thinkers as Lyotard and Derrida amongst others and representing the first systematic attempt to synthesize Marxism and phenomenology. Firstly I examine the Tran’s reconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. Originally there is an objective idealism theorizing the independence of the object; then there is its reversal in a subjective idealism highlighting the constituting consciousness; finally there is the switch from static to genetic phenomenology with the thematization of the life-world as historical-empirical ground (I). Secondly I explore the contradiction indicated by Tran between the Husserl’s idealistic frame, implicating the reproduction of an abstract dualism, and the results of the concrete analysis, bound to the original claim of going back to the things themselves. This tension is particularly detectable in The Origin of Geometry (II). Thirdly I discuss the Tran’s solution to this riddle, namely the radicalisation of the materialistic stance discovered in the Husserl’s late writings towards a Marxist horizon. The genesis of the a priori forms of the antepredicative experience is derived from the evolution of species and from the development of human work. The dialectic of behaviour as practical interaction between organism and nature determines the emergence of meanings structuring the experience. The notion of intentionality is interpreted as result of an immanent negation, the aufhebung of any immediate determinations through the work of an emerging  bodily-social intersubjectivity that in this way reaches the self-consciousness. The real movement, insofar as is sketched out and repressed at once, is sublated as intentional content. Transcendental subjectivity becomes an immanent subjectivisation of the object through praxis. This could lead to an alternative antireductionist ontologization of phenomenology despite a teleologism that risks to cage the dialectic in a too narrow path (III).

 

BIO: Adriano Lotito graduated in Philosophy (B.A) at the University of Bologna with a thesis entitled Phenomenology and Marxism in Tran Duc Thao (Supervisor Prof. Manlio Iofrida) and in Philosophy of the Contemporary World (M.A) at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University with a thesis entitled Criteria of Normativity in the Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory (Supervisor Prof. Roberto Mordacci). He is currently attending the Advanced Course in Critical Theory of Society at the Milano-Bicocca University. He is focusing, with the view to a future Ph.D., on the rethinking of the immanent critique specifically in connection with the work transformations.

 

This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/

 

You can check out our forthcoming events here:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/

 

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. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/