RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY最新文献

In this paper, I argue that lived time is anagrammatical. Anagrammatical time is a time that lands differently along race/gender/class lines. Its sens – its grammar – is rearranged by the context of its unfolding, at times effecting temporal harm while, at others, offering paths for temporal freedom. After introducing the notion of anagrammatical in part 1, in part 2, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s notions of Stiftung and virtuality to account for the “nestedness” of anagrammatical time. The past and present of anagrammatical time, I show, co-exist in the present diachronically. In part 3, I focus on temporal harm. I show how, in the context of the afterlife of slavery, the immemorial functions as a traumatic, compulsive-repetitive temporality, as a thief of time temporalizing with the felt necessity and determinacy of the future anterior. In part 4, I briefly turn to the temporal grammar of the “could have been” to think through temporal freedom.

This essay argues that the interpretations we develop through the activity of reflection have a share of the truth. I argue this, first, by outlining the relationship of concepts to intuitions in Kant’s theory of cognition, which presents the measure for truth in his philosophy. I turn, second, to explicate in detail the relation of the faculties in Kant’s descriptions of the free play between the imagination and the understanding in judgments of taste. Here, we find that concepts relate to what appears in a partial but also multiple way, leading to a conclusion that our reflective judgments share in the truth. This is important, I note, for the need we have to inhabit a shared world where we can communicate with each other about the way that things are, even about things that are not objects of ‘knowledge’ proper.

This essay is split into two thought experiments. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Édouard Glissant. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I then look at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers in the Poetics of Relation. I argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all signals the overcoming of ressentiment. The second experiment diffracts ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion, then putting our diffracted ressentiment in conversation with the Brazilian anthropologist’s post-structural interpretation of Amerindian perspectivism.

Inspired by a (process) phenomenological reading of Deborah Bird Rose’s 1988 article “Exploring an Aboriginal Land Ethic,” and drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that knowledge is “in the hands,” this paper explores the intersection of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, process phenomenology and Indigenous Australian place-based ontologies. Rather than the moral demands or consequences of adopting an “Aboriginal land ethic,” the present paper is concerned with the ontological and epistemological – or, broadly speaking, the phenomenological – underpinnings of such a land ethic. Contra Rose’s claim that, in the Western tradition, we “have very little idea of what a non-human-centred cosmos looks like and how it can be thought to work,” it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental thought provides us with a viable pathway towards a non-human-centred phenomenological ontology that, somewhat paradoxically, is nevertheless grounded in the lived body. It is suggested that such an approach is compatible with, and complimentary to, the traditional Indigenous Australian ways of being and knowing outlined by Rose.

While Eros has a central philosophical function in the dialogues of Plato, it all but disappears as a philosophical term in the thought of Aristotle, and is replaced by the more rational and reciprocal relation of friendship, φιλία. This essay asks what becomes of Eros in Aristotle’s thinking, whether as deity, natural or cosmic force, or mode of human relation. Drawing on the ancient epithet of Eros, Ἔρως λυσιµελής, unbinder of limbs, Aristotle’s usages of both ἔρως and λύσις (loosening, unbinding), respectively are traced in their ambivalence for his fundamentally organismic philosophy, insofar as they disturb the organism’s ontological integrity. With the assistance of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, it is argued that while Aristotle’s overt stance is a polemic against eros, his principal metaphysical innovations – the recasting of ἀρχή as divine τέλος, and the separation of material and moving causes – are solutions (λύσεις) to aporias that may involve a traversal of the sublime that is also irreducibly corporeal and erotic.

In the unpublished seminars given in the United States and France between 1989–1991, Manger l’autre: Politiques de l’Amitié and Rhétoriques du Cannibalisme, Derrida analyzes the rhetorical function that the act of eating has in the Western tradition’s philosophical texts. In this paper I analyze the reading Derrida makes in those seminars of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, in order to show that they are entangled with a critique of political sovereignty. For Derrida, Augustine has a cogito of his own, which is a cogito du manger l’autre. Augustine’s formulation is “I think, eat and drink” (ego cogito, manduco et bibo), and Derrida understands it as a way of constituting both the self of the ego and the self of the community. The first form of Christian community configured through the intake of food is the fraternity of milk: infants that suck the same milk from the breast of their nurse or mother. The second configuration of the community is, of course, the sacrament of Eucharist, in which the body of the father is divided (partagé) among the brothers. I show how the analysis Derrida makes of Augustine in these seminars is a way of deconstructing the very concept of community and its relation to sovereignty. This is attempted by Derrida through the problem of jealousy: the brothers of milk will always be jealous of each other, being themselves the condition for the breaking of the community and their sovereignty. But the second form of community is also threatened by food: since the holy wafer is an edible thing and the act of incorporation of food is really an act of theophagy.

To the limited extent that Arendt’s stance on Heidegger has been studied in relation to her thinking on guilt, the focus has been on her outright repudiation of Heidegger’s controversial ontologization of guilt. However, that Arendt does not simply repudiate Heidegger’s account of guilt becomes clear if we recognize that she deals with guilt, albeit less explicitly, in her theory of political action, particularly in her notion of “trespassing” as a specifically political form of harm. In this context, Arendt appropriates key features of Heidegger’s account. I argue that, in doing so, she transfers Heideggerian features into a political framework, insisting that they proceed not from individual existential indebtedness but from political intersubjectivity, or what she polemically – with a redefined Heideggerian term – calls the “with-world” (Mitwelt). This politicization testifies to Arendt’s overall approach to Heidegger’s existential analytic: a critical-transformative appropriation through her signature concepts of action and plurality.

This article explores the idea of ‘play’ as a metaphor to understand the world as an always presupposed frame of all experiences and appearances. A large part of it is devoted to the work of Eugen Fink, who developed a notion of the world as play, as a speculative idea beyond phenomenology. This article argues firstly in favor of such an effort to understand the world as play, as an alternative to onto-theological metaphysics. However, it argues secondly, that a stronger and more convincing concept of play can be found by elaborating on the views of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jan Patočka. Gadamer discussed ‘play’ as a metaphor for art, while Patočka worked on the notion of ‘world’ as a phenomenological idea that serves as a frame for all experiences. A combination of these two ideas may result in a better alternative to both Fink’s approach and to traditional onto-theological metaphysics.

This paper attempts to develop a phenomenological account of community which would not be pervaded by Eurocentric assumptions. Such Eurocentrism is what Husserl’s phenomenological framework has been accused of. I first reconstruct Husserl’s phenomenology of community in his late transcendental phenomenology by examining the Vienna Lecture. I show that Husserl’s Eurocentrism is encapsulated in his account of corporeity, which simultaneously recognizes the importance of corporeity and its necessary overcoming in theoria, which originates in the European philosopher. I then argue that Merleau-Ponty, through his rigorously embodied phenomenology, can offer a non-Eurocentric phenomenology of community. Elaborating on the Husserlian insight of corporeity, notably the perceptual experience and the écart at stake in the encounter with other bodies, allows Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh to recast community from and with the body as an open, situated, and non-archeo-teleological structure, allowing phenomenology to reimagine inter-cultural encounters away from tropes of European exemplarity.

Merleau-Ponty suggests in his Nature lectures that myth provides the best way into thinking the relation of strange kinship between humanity and animality. He goes on to refigure Husserl’s paradigm of the two hands touching to extend beyond merely human-to-human relations, invoking in the process the myth of Narcissus. By carefully examining Merleau-Ponty’s late refiguration of that paradigm, alongside the revised conception of narcissism that it helps him to develop, we find that while human-animal empathy is made possible by a ground of intercorporeal kinship, human-animal estrangement makes possible the emergence of an ethical relation to other animals, contingent upon the sublimation of animal desire. Holding human-animal kinship and estrangement in tension reveals a nascent ideal present implicitly in the early stages of childhood development: a vision of the possibility of interspecies harmony, rooted in the bodily reciprocity that drives the process of self-maturation.