The Retentional and the Repressed: Does Freud's Concept of the Unconscious Threaten Husserlian Phenomenology?

This paper investigates the claims made by both Freudian psychoanalysic thought and Husserlian phenomenology about the unconscious. First, it is shown how Husserl incorporates a complex notion of the unconscious in his analysis of passive synthesis. With his notion of an unintentional reservoir of past retentions, Husserl articulates an unconscious zone that must be activated from consciousness in order to “come to life.” Second, it is explained how Husserl still does not account for the Freudian unconscious. Freud's unconscious could be called, in phenomenological terms, a repressed retentional zone that differs from both near and far retention. Finally, an analysis is offered for the significance of this psychoanalytic argument for phenomenology. Does phenomenology provide a complete account of the psychical life of the subject without the Freudian unconscious? Does phenomenology suggest, as is often done, that Freud's “discovery” of the unconscious is a fantastical invention? Or, does the Freudian unconscious represent a true stumbling block for phenomenology?     

The outside of phenomenology: Jean-Luc Nancy on world and sense1

In this essay, I examine Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of the sense of the world in relation to the phenomenological investigation of the life-world in Husserl and the worldhood of the world in Heidegger. My aim is to address the reasons why Nancy stresses the need for a different thinking that goes beyond the phenomenological gesture in order to approach the sense of the world. What is at stake in this other gesture is the overcoming of the way in which phenomenology privileges seeing as the mode of access to the phenomenon, which is but one sense among many and which, as one sense among many, fails to bring thought into relation with the plural- isation of sense. The second part of the essay interprets the pluralisation of both sense and world in terms of Nancy's turn to art, which by touching upon the limit of philosophy, turns the latter into the praxis of the exposition of sense. Pluralisation betokens Nancy's attempt to think the finitude of the world as that which spaces itself out into multiple, singular and shared.     

How do location and control over the music influence listeners’ responses?

This study uses Mehrabian and Russell's ( 1974 ) Pleasure‐Arousal‐Dominance (PAD) model to consider how responses to both the music heard and overall in‐situ listening experience are influenced by the listener's degree of control over music selected for a particular listening episode and the location in which the listening takes place. Following recruitment via campus advertisements and a university research participation program, 216 individuals completed a background questionnaire and music listening task in a 3 (location) × 2 (experimenter‐ or participant‐selected music) design. After the listening task, participants completed a short questionnaire concerning the music they heard and the overall in‐situ listening experience. Results demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between control and liking for the music and episode, whether the former was considered in terms of: (1) whether the music was self‐selected or experimenter‐selected or (2) overt ratings of perceived control. Furthermore, the location and liking for the music were related to people's judgments of their enjoyment of the overall experience. This research indicates that the PAD model is a useful framework for understanding everyday music listening and supports the contention that, in a musical context, dominance may be operationalized as control over the music.     

On the V(I)Erge: Jean‐Luc Nancy,Christianity, and Incompletion

This article explores how Jean‐Luc Nancy attempts to gain critical traction on Christianity by proscribing thinking of completion. First, it describes Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity as stemming from his aesthetic redirection of Heidegger's thinking of finitude. Second, it further details Nancy's noetic declension of Heidegger via Kant and Lyotard, where the imagination and aesthetic communication are deemed impossible. Third, it examines Nancy's treatment of paintings of the Virgin Mary who, for Nancy, exemplifies his brand of incompletion. Nancy's work on Mary reveals both the oversights and the insights of his deconstruction of Christianity, which Catholic theology should seriously engage.     

Time,money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses?

In this paper, we investigate how the impatience that results from placing a price on time impairs individuals' ability to derive happiness from pleasurable experiences. Experiment 1 demonstrated that thinking about one's income as an hourly wage reduced the happiness that participants derived from leisure time on the internet. Experiment 2 revealed that a similar manipulation decreased participants' state of happiness after listening to a pleasant song and that this effect was fully mediated by the degree of impatience experienced during the music. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the deleterious effect on happiness caused by impatience was attenuated by offering participants monetary compensation in exchange for time spent listening to music, suggesting that a sensation of unprofitably wasted time underlay the induced impatience. Together these experiments establish that thinking about time in terms of money can influence how people experience pleasurable events by instigating greater impatience during unpaid time.     

Husserl,Givenness, and the Priority of the Self

This article argues that, despite its apparent radicality, Husserl's later, genetic phenomenology ends up confirming and consolidating a very orthodox transcendental egology. First, the article reconstructs an Husserlian phenomenology of givenness; but then, by considering the ambiguous role of intuition, it also establishes (a) the continued prestige of a 'classical' transcendental subject, and (b) the way in which a denial of ontology allows Husserl's transcendental subject to sublate the provocative challenge of primal Gegebenheit . Overall, the article argues that Husserl is subject to a deep egological faultline, brought about by the self-consciously anti-ontological nature of his project: 'givenness without Being', it suggests, necessitates a prioritized and privileged self.     

Aggressive Outcomes and Videogame Play: The Role of Length of Play and the Mechanisms at Work

We conducted three experiments to rectify methodological limitations of prior studies on selective exposure to music and, thereby, clarify the nature of the impact of sad mood on music preference. In all studies, we experimentally manipulated mood (sad vs. neutral in Experiments 1 and 2; sad vs. neutral vs. happy in Experiment 3) and then assessed participants' preferences for expressively happy versus sad musical selections. To further help illuminate the reasons for their music preferences, we also asked participants to indicate how they believed listening to each song would affect their current emotional state as well as how appropriate they felt it would be to select a given song. Results suggested that individuals in sad moods were not reliably inclined to listen to sad songs, but rather, were strongly averse to listening to happy songs, apparently out of concern that choosing such songs would feel inappropriate. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of selective media exposure and emotion regulation.     

Is a kantian Musical Formalism Possible?

In this article, I consider whether a suitably stripped‐down version of Kant's aesthetic theory could nevertheless provide philosophical foundations for musical formalism. I begin by distinguishing between formalism as a view about the nature of music and formalism as an approach to music criticism, arguing that Kant's aesthetics only rules out the former. Then, using an example from the work of musicologist and composer Edward T. Cone, I isolate the characteristics of formalist music criticism. With this characterization in mind, I conclude by showing that even if Kant's aesthetic theory is reduced to its most fundamental claims, the logic of formalist music criticism precludes its practice within even a kantian perspective.     

Participation in God's Love: Revisiting John Milbank's ‘Out-Narration’ in the Light of Jean-Louis Chrétien and the Song of Songs

In this essay, I interrogate the nature and grounds of Milbank's understanding of taste as it applies to differing mythic sensibilities, arguing that it is insufficiently responsive to the priority of God's action and so inadequate to a Christian theological account of the interplay of mythoi. By reading Milbank in light of The Song of Songs and Jean-Louis Chrétien's phenomenology of prayer, I suggest that rather than the subject embracing a mythos, it is instead the mythos which first embraces the subject. Thus one no longer requires recourse to the implicitly violent language of ‘out-narration’, but can speak instead of willing seduction by God. By approaching taste in this way, especially in relation to ‘mythic sensibilities’, a more truly Christian approach to difference becomes possible.     

Kant's Expressive Theory of Music

Several prominent philosophers of art have worried about whether Kant has a coherent theory of music on account of two perceived tensions in his view. First, there appears to be a conflict between his formalist and expressive commitments. Second (and even worse), Kant defends seemingly contradictory claims about music being beautiful and merely agreeable, that is, not beautiful. Against these critics, I show that Kant has a consistent view of music that reconciles these tensions. I argue that, for Kant, music can be experienced as either agreeable or beautiful depending on the attitude we take toward it. Although it is tempting to think he argues that we experience music as agreeable when we attend to its expressive qualities and as beautiful when we attend to its formal properties, I demonstrate that he actually claims that we are able to judge music as beautiful only if we are sensitive to the expression of emotion through musical form. With this revised understanding of Kant's theory of music in place, I conclude by sketching a Kantian solution to a central problem in the philosophy of music: given that music is not sentient, how can it express emotion?     

Hearing histories of Hammer Hill: Pop music as auditory geography

Focusing on artful, embodied listening as a method of analysing the emotional intensities of place, this article calls for academic geographers to listen to practitioners of nonacademic geography. It explores an ethical and methodological agenda for understanding how pop musicians have heard the world, and for taking them seriously as creative geographers who contribute sophisticated interpretations of and interventions in space. It listens emotionally to Jens Lekman's auditory reminiscences – informed by listening and expressed through song – pertaining to the marginalised and stigmatised Gothenburg suburb of Hammarkullen (or ‘Hammer Hill’). By understanding how Lekman's ideas about his home suburb relate to pop musical history, the article analyses the musician's interpretive geographical methods and the effect sound can have on space. It juxtaposes these methods with recent scholarly research on sonic and listening geographies, and embraces the emotional listening practised by pop music fans to appreciate how scholars can learn from this form of nonacademic geography.     

The Effect of Music on Atmosphere and Purchase Intentions in a Cafeteria1

This exploratory study investigates the effect of music on the perceived characteristics of a commercial listening environment and on customers' purchase intentions therein. Three musical styles and also no music were played in a student cafeteria over the course of 4 days. Subjects' responses to a questionnaire indicated that different musical styles had different effects on the perceived characteristics of the cafeteria, and that classical music was associated with subjects being prepared to pay the most for food items on sale therein. There was also some indication that classical and pop music might have increased actual sales in the cafeteria, as compared with easy listening and silence. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for both commercial practice and our theoretical understanding of music and consumer behavior.     

Rethinking the Body and Space in Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology of Music

What is initially striking about Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological account of the musical experience, which encompasses both the performance and reception of music, is his apparent dismissal of the corporeal and spatial aspects of that experience. The paper argues that this is largely a product of his wider understanding of temporality wherein the mind and time are privileged over the body and space, respectively. While acknowledging that Schutz’s explicit or stated view is that the body and space are relatively insignificant to his account, the paper reveals how they actually feature significantly in the latter, but in ways that remain largely implicit. First, the analysis demonstrates that the mental and temporal aspects of Schutz’s phenomenology of the musical experience cannot be considered independently of their interrelations with the equally important, albeit under-examined, corporeal, and spatial aspects. Concepts from Nietzsche’s early aesthetics are recruited to fulfil this task. Second, the analysis challenges Schutz’s dismissal of space in his theory of music perception. Lastly, it reveals the crucial, yet implicit, role of the body and space in his key examination of the intersubjective phenomenon he terms “making music together”. By presenting the above arguments, the paper aims to draw out the implicit dimensions of Schutz’s phenomenology of music and thereby enrich his influential account.     

The Effects of Music on Atmosphere in a Bank and a Bar1

This paper reports 2 studies of the effects of music on customers' perceptions of the atmosphere in a city center bank and a city center bar, respectively. In the first study, classical music, easy‐listening music, and no music were played over the course of 3 weeks, and customers were asked to rate the banking hall in which it was played and the music in terms of twenty 10‐point adjectival scales. Customers' responses indicated a positive correlation between ratings of the banking hall and the music on each of the scales. There were also statistically significant differences between the conditions on factor scores derived from a factor analysis of responses to the banking hall. The second study employed a similar methodology over 9 days in a bar, comparing classical, pop, and no music. Customers rated the atmosphere of the bar and the music played there in terms of II adjectival scales. Once again there was a positive correlation between ratings of the listening environment and ratings of the music. Type of music and volume level gave rise to main effects on ratings of the bar in terms of these adjectives. Factor analysis of the ratings gave rise to 3 factors, which were similar to those obtained in the first study, and also to those in an earlier study situated in a university cafeteria. Finally, there were significant Type of Music × Time of Day, and Volume × Time of Day interactions on customers' estimates of the maximum sum they would be prepared to pay for products on sale in the bar. These results demonstrate that music can have reliable effects on atmosphere and purchase intentions in commercial environments.     

Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity

This essay shows that Jean‐Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis‐integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a “being‐exscribed” begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. Quel étrange moi! —Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus     

Emotion and the new epistemic challenge from cognitive penetrability

Experiences—visual, emotional, or otherwise—play a role in providing us with justification to believe claims about the world. Some accounts of how experiences provide justification emphasize the role of the experiences’ distinctive phenomenology, i.e. ‘what it is like’ to have the experience. Other accounts emphasize the justificatory role to the experiences’ etiology. A number of authors have used cases of cognitively penetrated visual experience to raise an epistemic challenge for theories of perceptual justification that emphasize the justificatory role of phenomenology rather than etiology. Proponents of the challenge argue that cognitively penetrated visual experiences can fail to provide the usual justification because they have improper etiologies. However, extant arguments for the challenge’s key claims are subject to formidable objections. In this paper, I present the challenge’s key claims, raise objections to previous attempts to establish them, and then offer a novel argument in support of the challenge. My argument relies on an analogy between cognitively penetrated visual and emotional experiences. I argue that some emotional experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their improper etiologies and conclude that analogous cognitively penetrated visual experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their etiologies, as well.     

Depicting and seeing-in. The <Emphasis Type="Italic">‘Sujet’</Emphasis> in Husserl’s phenomenology of images

In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject (Sujet or Bildsujet), which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait. Husserl claims that when a consciousness regards a figurative image, it is absorbed in the awareness of the depicted subject and yet this subject some how withholds its presence in the midst of its appearance in the image-object (Bildobjekt). Image-consciousness is an intuitive (anschaulich) consciousness that intends a being that is both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the image: the depicted subject haunts the image. Borrowing Richard Wollheim’s language, the aim of this study is to determine what it means for a consciousness to see a depicted-subject in an image-depiction, which happens on the basis of seeing an image-object in a material image-thing, like paint, canvas, ink, paper etc. Restricting myself to figurative images, I will argue against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive. I argue that the consciousness of the Sujet is quasi-perceptual, which allows for a better account of the depicted subject’s sense of absence. I develop this view on the basis of Husserl’s claims that the depicted subject is the bearer of norms inherent to intuitive appearances, which concern how the profiles and movements of an object ought to unfold, though they fail to do so for image-consciousness. This failure is not a mere privation for the image as a perceptual appearance but is inherent to its status as a mediated and artificial presence.     

The Role of Evil in Kant's Liberalism

Carl Schmitt distinguishes between political theories in terms of whether they rest on the anthropological assumption that man is evil by nature or on the anthropological assumption that man is good by nature, and he claims that liberal political theory is based on the latter assumption. Contrary to this claim, I show how Kant's liberalism is shaped by his theory of the radical evil in human nature, and that his liberalism corresponds to the characterization of liberalism that Schmitt himself offers. My discussion of this issue will be shown to have certain implications with respect to the view that for Kant evil is the product of society. I show that this view is mistaken insofar as it fails to recognize that Kant's political philosophy implies that human beings require the type of society that best suits their radically evil natures, namely, a commercial one in which the “vices of culture” largely have free play, while the state's role is limited to that of preventing the antagonisms found in society leading to the mutual destruction of its members.