“The giving birth of a world”: Fanon,Husserl, and the imagination

This article examines the role of the imagination in Fanon's and Husserl's work in order to rethink Fanon's relationship with Husserlian phenomenology. I begin with an investigation of the oft-overlooked ways in which the imagination appears in Wretched of the Earth. Here, I argue that Fanon puts a great deal of stock in the imagination, ultimately calling upon this faculty in order to presage the novel ways of being, thinking, and acting, which are a recurrent signature of his vision of decolonization. In the latter half of the article, I then offer an account of the decisive methodological significance of the imagination within Husserl's work. Revisiting the methodological infrastructure of phenomenology with Fanonian concerns in mind casts Husserl's project in a surprising new light, bringing to the fore the revolutionary potential of both the epoché and the method of eidetic variation. For at the core of Husserlian methodology lies a resolve to exceed the limits of our present empirical reality—a leitmotiv of Fanon's own thinking. I ultimately show that Fanon's work can thus be imagined as a reactivation, indeed a revolution, inaugurated at the heart of phenomenology and its most basic methodological commitments.     

The concept of unlivability: A reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952)

From a close reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952), this article draws out Fanon's understanding of “death in life” to suggest that a concept of unlivability in the present must account for the temporal duration of racialized and colonized experiences of pain and trauma. It is thus critical of Judith Butler's and Frédéric Worms's discussion of unlivability in The Livable and The Unlivable (2023) for not centering a phenomenological study of the testimonies of the oppressed. I argue for a greater engagement with Fanon on the longue durée of racial and colonial violence enacted on the bodies, psyches, and histories of racialized and colonized peoples. This article concludes by pointing to possibilities for a shared unlivability in a shared temporality, with potential to move beyond refusal and toward resistance to the colonial control over time.     

A POSITIVE PHENOMENOLOGY: THE STRUCTURE OF MAURICE BLONDEL'S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

Given recent developments in Franco‐German phenomenology with its so‐called ‘theological turn’, there has been a concomitant renewal of interest in Maurice Blondel's thought. In this paper I consider the phenomenological structure of Blondel's early philosophy. Blondel defended and published his controversial thesis in 1893 and with this work presented a highly original phenomenology that was deeply indebted to the positive tradition and yet went beyond this same tradition to include even religious practice as part of its inquiry. Keen to engage the rationalist philosophers of the French academy, Blondel proposed a phenomenological project that was geared to engage the critical spirit of an age that was already deemed to be post‐metaphysical. It is in clarifying the manner in which Blondel conceives such a positive phenomenology that I indicate how his thought may contribute to contemporary debates in the phenomenology of religion.     

A Phenomenology of Excorporation,Bodily Alienation,and Resistance: Rethinking Sexed and Racialized Embodiment

The article examines how some culturally shared and corporeally enacted beliefs and norms about sexed and racialized embodiment can form embodied agency, and this with the aid of the concepts of incorporation and excorporation. It discusses how the phenomenological concept of excorporation can help us examine painful experiences of how one's lived body breaks in the encounter with others. The article also examines how a continuous excorporation can result in bodily alienation, and what embodied resistance can mean when one has undergone or undergoes excorporation. Elaborating on the work of, among others, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Drew Leder, and Sarah Ahmed, I discuss incorporation and excorporation of beliefs and norms regarding sexual difference, such as beliefs and norms regarding female and male embodiment, through a reading of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex. I also suggest that it is useful to understand the postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon's narrative of how he could not but attend to his own skin color while living in France in the 1940s and 1950s, in terms of excorporation. Whereas these are different narratives in many ways, I regard them as helpful for clarifying what excorporation implies and what analytic work this concept can enable.     

Phenomenological reduction in Merleau‐Ponty's The Structure of Behavior: An alternative approach to the naturalization of phenomenology

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete.     

Is there a phenomenological argument for higher-order representationalism?

In his 2009 article “Self-Representationalism and Phenomenology,” Uriah Kriegel argues for self-representationalism about phenomenal consciousness primarily on phenomenological grounds. Kriegel’s argument can naturally be cast more broadly as an argument for higher-order representationalism. I examine this broadened version of Kriegel’s argument in detail and show that it is unsuccessful for two reasons. First, Kriegel’s argument (in its strongest form) relies on an inference to the best explanation from the claim that all experiences of normal adult human beings are accompanied by peripheral awareness of those very experiences to the claim that all experiences are accompanied by peripheral awareness of those very experiences. This inference is inadequately defended, for the explanandum may also be given a straightforward evolutionary explanation. Second, contra Kriegel, I argue that phenomenological investigation does not support the thesis that we are always peripherally aware of our experiences. Instead, it delivers no verdict on this thesis. Kriegel’s phenomenological mistake may be explained via a highly diluted version of the famous transparency thesis about experience.     

HOW TO ANALYZE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE:

Abstract: This article discusses Jaakko Hintikka's interpretation of the aims and method of Husserl's phenomenology. I argue that Hintikka misrepresents Husserl's phenomenology on certain crucial points. More specifically, Hintikka misconstrues Husserl's notion of “immediate experience” and consequently fails to grasp the functions of the central methodological tools known as the “epoché” and the “phenomenological reduction.” The result is that the conception of phenomenology he attributes to Husserl is very far from realizing the philosophical potential of Husserl's position. Hence if we want a fruitful rapprochement between analytical philosophy and Continental phenomenology of the kind that is Hintikka's ultimate aim, then Hintikka's account of Husserl needs correcting on a number of crucial points.     

The Existential Sources of Phenomenology: Heidegger on Formal Indication

Abstract: This article contributes to the contemporary debate regarding the young Heidegger's method of formal indication. Theodore Kisiel argues that this method constitutes a radical break with Husserl—a rejection of phenomenological reflection that paves the way to the non‐reflective approach of the Beiträge. Against this view, Steven Crowell argues that formal indication is continuous with Husserlian phenomenology—a refinement of phenomenological reflection that reveals its existential sources. I evaluate this debate and adduce further considerations in favor of Crowell's view. To do so, I analyze the young Heidegger's account of phenomenological communication and argue that it further reflects the continuity that Crowell identifies: as he does with reflection, Heidegger refines Husserl's account of phenomenological communication and sheds light on its existential sources.     

Gurwitsch’s Phenomenal Holism

Aron Gurwitsch made two main contributions to phenomenology. He showed how to import Gestalt theoretical ideas into Husserl’s framework of constitutive phenomenology. And he explored the light this move sheds on both the overall structure of experience and on particular kinds of experience, especially perceptual experiences and conscious shifts in attention. The primary focus of this paper is the overall structure of experience. I show how Gurwitsch’s Gestalt theoretically informed phenomenological investigations provide a basis for defending what I will call Phenomenal Holism, the view that all the parts of a total phenomenal state metaphysically depend on it. To illustrate how the ideas developed along the way can be used in advancing work on the phenomenology of particular kinds of experience, I draw on them in defending Husserl’s view that we can be aware of abstract objects against a phenomenological objection.     

Naturalism and Intentionality: A Buddhist Epistemological Approach

In this paper I propose a naturalist account of the Buddhist epistemological discussion of svasa[mdot]vitti (‘self-awareness’, ‘self-cognition’) following similar attempts in the domains of phenomenology and analytic epistemology. First, I examine the extent to which work in naturalized epistemology and phenomenology, particularly in the areas of perception and intentionality, could be profitably used in unpacking the implications of the Buddhist epistemological project. Second, I argue against a foundationalist reading of the causal account of perception offered by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Finally, I argue that it is possible to read Dignāga's (and following him Dharmakīrti's) treatment of svasamvitti as offering something like a phenomenological account of embodied self-awareness.     

THE CALL AND THE GIFTED IN CHRISTOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: A CONSIDERATION OF BRIAN ROBINETTE'S CRITIQUE OF JEAN‐LUC MARION

In his recent article, ‘A Gift to Theology? Jean‐Luc Marion's ‘Saturated Phenomena’ in Christological Perspective’, Brian Robinette has critiqued Marion's phenomenology for confining theology to a one‐sided approach to Christology, one that stresses only the passive, mystical reception of Christ. To correct this imbalance, Robinette brings Marion into dialogue with those more active Christologies or ‘prophetical‐ethical’ liberation theologies of Gustavo Gutierrez, Johann Baptist Metz and others that stress a life‐praxis focused on confronting evil and suffering. In this essay I am arguing that Robinette has not fully developed the ‘logic’ of Marion's phenomenology of the ‘call and the gifted’, in which both a passive and an active element are operative. I explore more fully that very dynamic phenomenological process of the call‐and‐the‐gifted as developed in Marion's work Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Once viewed in Christological perspective, and especially in light of Christ's death and resurrection, Marion's phenomenology entails an ethical trope consistent with the mission of Christ as rendered in Scriptural revelation, and thus the gap between Marion's work and the prophetical‐ethical theologies of Gutierrez and Baptist Metz becomes narrowed.     

Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud

ABSTRACT

While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.     

Phenomenology and the Poststructural Critique of Experience

Abstract

Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post‐structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique.

In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text “‘Experience’”. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post‐structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems – as I will maintain – that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept.     

Searching for the Self: Early Phenomenological Accounts of Self-Consciousness from Lotze to Scheler

Abstract

Phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness are often said to combine two elements by means of a necessary connection: the primitive and irreducible subjective character of experiences and the idealist transcendental constitution of consciousness. In what follows I argue that this connection is not necessary in order for an account of self-consciousness to be phenomenological, as shown by early phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness – particularly in Munich phenomenology. First of all, I show that the account of self-consciousness defended by these phenomenologists was not influenced as much by Husserl as by two important figures in the prehistory of phenomenology: their teacher Theodor Lipps, and – indirectly, through Lipps’ influence – Hermann Lotze. Second, I show that their account of self-consciousness takes the metaphysical realism underlying Lotze’s and Lipps’ views on the distinction between feeling and sensations seriously. I argue that this distinction played a central role in the development of many early phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness.     

Fanon via Lacan,or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means … ?

ABSTRACT

Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon's earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan's ideas of historically-situated forms of madness, (mis)recognition, paranoia and psychic causality. Secondly, it highlights a series of conceptual affinities that exist between the work of the two theorists including idea of sociogeny, the importance of symbolic (or social) structure, the notion of fantasy and of a social (or transindividual) unconscious. Thirdly, it provides an instructive example of how Fanon's theorizations of colonial oppression might be supplemented by means of Lacanian social theory especially in respect of how the colonized are positioned as "non-subjects" relative to the master-signifier of whiteness.     

Merleau‐Ponty on painting and the problem of reflection

The challenge of “catching experience in the act” is commonly recognized as a problem for phenomenological reflection. After tracing this “problem of reflection” to its origin in Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie and discussing Husserl's critical response, I argue that Merleau‐Ponty recognizes that a version of it poses a genuine problem for phenomenology in the form of what he calls “objective thought.” Seen in light of his concern for the distortion of objective thought, his attention to indeterminacy and distortion in the portraits and still lifes of Cézanne takes on philosophical significance. I analyze how Merleau‐Ponty sees phenomenological concepts such as style, horizons, and coherent deformation at work in a number of paintings and suggest how such features remedy objective thought by resisting the tendency for reflection on ordinary perception to mistake objective properties of objects for properties of the experience in which they are given.     

‘Confronting the almighty God’? A study of how psychodynamic counsellors respond to clients' expressions of religious faith

While there is a considerable psychodynamic literature on the topic of religious faith, little is known about how counsellors work with faith in the consulting room. Prompted by the author's own clinical experience, this paper presents findings from a small‐scale research study that explored this phenomenon further, and provides an account of how the research was conducted from a Heideggerian phenomenological standpoint. Two research participants' experiences are examined and a fusion of horizons offered in conclusion.     

Generation,interiority and the phenomenology of Christianity in Michel Henry

In this paper I focus on a central phenomenological concept in Michel Henry’s work that has often been neglected: generation. Generation becomes an especially important conceptual key to understanding not only the relationship between God and human self but also Henry’s adoption of radical interiority and his critical standpoint with respect to much of the phenomenological tradition in which he is working. Thus in pursuing the theme of generation, I shall introduce many phenomenological-theological terms in Henry’s trilogy on Christianity as well as how he understands the relationship between phenomenology and theology. In the final sections of the paper, I turn to positively defining Henry’s notion of divine generation and examine the theological implications of it in light of his confrontation and rejection of the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis found in his book, Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair. Humans are not created but are eternally generated, a bold claim that brings Henry to the brink of a kind of interiorized pantheism or Gnostic dualism. Finally, I offer some critical comments specifically about Henry’s doctrine of generation in light of the tension between auto-affection and hetero-affection and thus how one might think “after Henry” in light of the basic Augustinian theological distinction between self and God and the intentionality of faith opened up by that distinction.     

The Development of the Concept of Concrete Subjectivity from Kant to Neo-Kantianism

One long-running conundrum in Husserlian phenomenology revolves around the question of the identity of what Husserl calls the transcendental ego, a mysterious figure that he identifies as the subject of a genuinely transcendental phenomenology. In dialogue with both Husserl and his assistant and collaborator Eugen Fink (as well as recent commentary), I attempt in this article to give a solid account of the identity of this transcendental ego, and in particular to explain the connection between this figure and the empirical ego of the individual phenomenologist. I make particular reference to Fink's depiction of a "personal union" between these two egos in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation and to certain unclear hints in Husserl's 1923/1924 lectures on First Philosophy. Ultimately, I develop my own account of such a union, which explains the transcendental ego as a certain mode in which the phenomenologist might investigate his own experiences. On this basis, I argue, the status of phenomenology as a transcendental discipline can be understood without subjecting that discipline to certain criticisms that have been levelled against it.