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

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.

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. 

In this paper, I develop a phenomenological analysis of gender identity on the basis of Alfred Schutz’s concept of relevance. To do this, I first analyse Schutz’s “Reflections on the Problem of Relevance” and offer an explication of the concept and its different variants. Based on my critical remarks, I then revise the concept and apply it to the problem of gender identity and gender-based oppression. By using the methods of phenomenological description to account for the lived experiences of different gender identities, I argue that a Schutzian conceptualisation of gender in terms of relevances (and types) can offer a critical phenomenological standpoint complementing contemporary discussions on the topic in two fundamental ways. First, a Schutzian perspective is useful for shedding light on the dual nature of experiences of gender identity. Namely, being-gendered and gendering. Making this distinction allows us to analyse both (a) the internalisation of socio-culturally imposed gender norms by individual subjects and (b) the observer’s unconscious inclination to categorise perceived individuals into socially accepted binary norms. In other words, Schutz's approach helps us understand how our perception of gender identity is structured by predetermined systems of typification and relevance. The discrepancy between an individual's internal experience of gender and the gender assigned to them by society has several consequences. On the side of the targeted individual’s subjective experience, it can lead to feelings of objectification and alienation. On the side of the external perceiver, it can trigger implicit or explicit forms of biased behaviour. These considerations lead to the second aim of the paper. The aforementioned analysis offers valuable insights into understanding processes of discrimination and marginalisation, particularly concerning the experience of gender identities that diverge from taken-for-granted binary gender norms, which are considered normal (e.g., transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming individuals). 

This paper articulates the sense of silence as a historically constituted, embodied capacity to skillfully grasp and deploy silence, using mania as a breakdown case.

Silence is ubiquitous. We are surrounded by the silences of objects, spaces, other people, and our own bodies. Generally, these silences go unnoticed, forming a background against which we skillfully engage with people and the world through speech and sound. For example, we can pre-reflectively grasp the silence punctuating an interlocutor’s utterance as a solicitation to break our own silence by speaking. Similarly, we can pre-reflectively grasp their waning attention as a solicitation for us to become silent again, enabling them to speak and us to listen. I will propose that we can usefully understand this as involving the sense of silence.

Drawing on resources from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I will define and explore this sense of silence through a case in which that sense has apparently broken down, namely, mania. Symptoms of mania include an unmanageable flood of thoughts and an urge to speak. First-person accounts of those symptoms indicate that they may bring a profound disruption in the individual’s relationship to silence. In some, silence is described as a newfound source of agony, in others, as an elusive goal. Individuals appear reflectively aware of social norms and personal habits that ordinarily govern silence but their affective hold has loosened. Some people invent painful, physical methods to try to replace that hold. This suggests that the sense of silence is an embodied capacity, historically constituted through the sedimentation of norms and habits.

Thus, the paper offers two benefits: first, a better understanding of how our historically constituted relationship to silence enables us in our everyday lives, and second, insight into how its disruption may disable us in mania.

Is there a possibility to think the ecological crisis through the logic of History, or is the Modern concept of ‘History’ rather driven to its end? I examine Chakrabarty’s and Merleau-Ponty’s strategies to end ‘History’ in their reflections on Nature, and I argue that if Chakrabarty’s diagnosis of the necessity to end ‘History’ to give space to ecological thinking is right, Merleau-Ponty’s strategy proves more effective, as it enables us to think the philosophical end of ‘History’ while retaining the necessity of a political ecology attentive to differentiation and domination. I first develop Chakrabarty’s insights on the exhaustion of ‘History’ as a concept, both in its Eurocentric and anti-Eurocentric variations, and the need to replace it with a negative universal History which substitutes a positive teleology (being-toward-freedom) for a negative teleology (being-toward-catastrophe), and de-centers human subjectivity and freedom in a phenomenologically empty ‘species universalism’. I then argue that evacuating the body, the possibility of phenomenological apprehension and hence of thinking particularity, while retaining a universalising teleological dynamic, leads Chakrabarty to a Eurocentric status quo, that is, an abstract universalism that flattens out the thought of difference. I finally turn to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Nature, and argue that it offers us a productive articulation of the philosophical experience of Nature, including in its contemporary destruction, and the political differentiation and domination at stake in this ecological crisis. I provide a phenomenological apprehension of the climate crisis, albeit a non-Eurocentric one, which would not be predicated on European or Anthropocene-like universalism, by insisting on two features of his philosophy of Nature: first, the chiasmic intertwining of Nature and History (which recasts universality as foundational); second, the necessity of institution and expression in this intertwining, which gives space to think the political condition of the climate crisis, in its sedimentation, domination, and creativity.

Cultural competence is considered important in medicine and healthcare. It is generally defined as respect for patients’ values, beliefs, and behaviours in the medical encounter, as well as understanding how these affect health and healthcare.

In this paper I will problematize this notion of cultural competence and propose an alternative analysis rooted in Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment.

In the phenomenology of medicine and illness, modern medicine is criticized for primarily adopting what Husserl termed the naturalistic attitude (Husserl 1993), prioritizing disease physiology and dismissing illness experience (e.g.: Toombs 1992; Carel 2016). This tendency to take the naturalistic attitude as the sole objective way of describing the human body is clearly reflected in the medical understanding of cultural difference as obscuring the otherwise neutral process of the discovery of diseases universally present in humans. In contrast, I argue that an understanding of cultural difference should be rooted in an analysis of illness experience. Since it is precisely in this experience where the cultural differences lie.

Existing phenomenological analyses of illness stress their own cultural specificity, thereby anticipating cultural differences (Carel 2016). However, these differences have not yet been thematized as such. Here, I will analyse the effect of culture on illness using Husserl’s distinction between concordance-normality and optimal-normality. For Husserl, normality concerns lived-experiential normativity. This understanding differs from the medical understanding of normality as an average characteristic or biological functionality. Simultaneously, Husserl describes normativity as embodied, placing social norms and values in the body where they are lived and experienced from a first-person perspective (see: Steinbock 1995; Heinamaa 2018; Wehrle 2020).

Lastly, I will show that this enriched analysis of illness is better suited to grapple with complex illness phenomena such as culture-bound syndromes, gendered differences, and historic trends in illness occurrence (see: Carel and Cooper 2010).

In this paper we consider Välkky, a full body teleoperated robot deployed in a hospital environment, which enables nursing care to be delivered to patients through a robot avatar. We explore the phenomenological challenges and opportunities of nurse clinicians that were trained to provide robotic care at a distance. Our reflections draw on qualitative research and critical reflections generated during a trial of Välkky in a hospital ward. We explore various ways that nurses were ‘striving for presence’, attempting to close the gap between a technologically-mediated remote environment and their immediate field of perception and action. We examine four modalities of embodied presence through a phenomenological analysis of these experiences: (i) presence enabled by technological transparency, where a remote environment is experienced as immediately present without the mediating technology ‘getting in the way’; (ii) presence enabled through skill acquisition, where clinician-operators strive to master technology in order to enable seamless motor-action in a remote environment; (iii) presence felt through affective, intercorporeal and social resonance, where interpersonal presence and relations of care are transmitted through the robot avatar; and (iv) presence enabled through recognition, where nurses strive to have their social and human existence affirmed while operating the robot. Through exploring how experiences of presence were enabled or diminished through Välkky, we examine the limits of the phenomenological experience of technological ‘re-embodiment’. 

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. 

In this paper, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment to expose and interrogate the mechanisms through which certain neurocognitive differences, and the neurocognitive profiles they constitute, become constructed as inferior and divergent. Focussing on one neurocognitive profile in particular, namely autism, I seek to challenge predominant characterizations of autistic embodiment as a set of inherent deficiencies. Instead, I make central the dynamic relationships between the individual, those around them, and their social environments in order to make explicit the framework of neuronormativity that underpins prevailing conceptualisations of autism and autistic bodies.  

 Taking as my point of departure the notion of the body schema (le schéma corporel), the ensemble of possibilities emergent from our situated embodiment, I set out two co-constitutive yet distinct dimensions of neuronormativity and autistic embodiment, what I refer to as, the normative body schema and interpretative registries of neurominoritization.  

The normative body schema presents an intervention upon the first-person relationship between the body and the world, wherein the field of possibilities available to one through that relationship is constrained by the (purported) deviancy of one’s embodiment. Operative from the third-person perspective, interpretative registries are the perceptual and hermeneutic matrix through which we make sense of, or “read”, bodies. In the case of autism, this too becomes invested with the normative, correlating attributes of the autistic body (its appearance, behaviour, sensitivities etc.) with deficiencies of capacity, sociability, epistemic authority, utility, morality, aesthetic status, and so forth, constructing autistic embodiment as an inferior neurominority.  

By rendering explicit the normative body schema and interpretative registries of neurominoritization I show how normatively loaded meanings become ascribed to autistic individuals and inform autistic lived experiences. In taking such an approach, and locating the emergence and reproduction of neuronormativity, the paper thereby makes possible the transformation of neuronormative frameworks operative in society. 

We, humans, are living in a world, shared with non-human beings. Throughout our entire history, we, humans, prevailingly lived according to an anthropocentric paradigm, and we related to non-humans essentially as potential resources, obstacles, or even threats. In other words, humans instinctively, or sometimes on a reflectively elaborated ideological basis, treated non-humans in objectified or instrumentalized terms. During Modernity, due to rapidly developing technologies, this anthropological stance even had increasingly catastrophic consequences, that became apparent in the 1960s, thanks to the increasing global ecological crisis, which now has features that appear to threaten even the mere physical existence and survival of the human race.

In my presentation, I would like to have a closer look at this ecological crisis from the viewpoint of Husserlian phenomenology, and I will look for possible ways of solution, again, from a Husserlian perspective. Not only from a biological viewpoint, but also for a phenomenological approach, humanity appears as a subsystem of the Earth as a global ecosystem, entwined with other ecological subsystems, and partly interdependent from them.

As many authors and interpreters made it clear (e.g. Erazim Kohák, Annabelle Dufourcq, Ullrich Melle), in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl – especially in his late period, in the 1930s – we can find many ecologically relevant topics. In this regard, I would like to highlight especially his conceptions concerning life and the inherent value of life in his ethical lectures (as could be read in Husserliana Volumes 28, 37, and 42). In my presentation, I aim to show how a Husserlian notion of the inherent value of life would lead to an inescapable ethical imperative to respect life in every form and try to harmonize our relationship with the other, non-human parts of the Earthly ecosystem, with which we are essentially entwined.

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.

In Die neue Wissenschaft vom Recht II, Husserl’s former student Wilhelm Schapp states that, “the history of humanity is the history of its works” and for this reason the relations between self, work, value, and production can be considered as “the a priori of historical science” (p. 67). Starting from this, he proposes an analysis of the historical dimension of values and their relationship to the production and development of objects of use. This analysis proposes a phenomenology of creation that aims at dismissing the static conception of essences of classical phenomenology. In In Geschichten verstrickt, this analysis is further deepened and linked to the theory of human entanglement in histories. Central to the notion of entanglement is Schapp’s conception of the primal body. By primal body he means the body of humans when they act in the everyday life-world. It is this conception of the primal body that makes it possible to conceive of humans as being intertwined with histories and carrying histories. The life-world displays traces of the histories of the past that thicken around historical events with agent subjects, individual or collective, at the center. We can get in connection with them through what Schapp calls co-entanglement. The co-entanglement can be defined as a kind of taking part in histories, projecting ourselves into the historical horizon of something that is told to us, through narratives and books, but also through things and monuments understood as works of humanity. The past in this way emerges on the horizon as a tangle of intertwining stories of our past in which we personally or our family and nation are entangled. In my paper I will analyze the relationship between body, history and life-world taking into account Schapp conception of entanglement in histories. 

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? 

Violence is often conceptualised as an act (Bufacchi, 2005), entailing a focus on violent behaviours and violent practices (Cavanaugh, 2012; Walby, 2013; Wieviorka, 2014). When violence is conceptualised as an act, it brings attention to the agent carrying out the act, entailing a perpetrator-centred view on violence (Bufacchi, 2022, p. 211). However, such an approach only captures one side of violence. This paper employs a phenomenological approach, shifting the focus from violence as an act to violence as an experience to capture the other side of violence – from the point of view of the person subjected to violence. In his phenomenological discussion of violence, Staudigl (2007, p.235) argues: “violence can be analyzed as a destruction of our physical and bodily existence, as well as of its symbolic representations in language and other institutions. Violence, however, can also be analyzed at a more fundamental level. Phenomenologically viewed, it is not only destructive of pregiven sense, but also affects our being-in-the-world, i.e., our basic capacities for making sense”. A phenomenological approach enables us to expand the concept of violence to move beyond violence as something that is fixed in time to something that extends in time and encase everyday life as it is lived (Das, 2007; anonymised reference). I approach violence as a lived experience, which enables an exploration of violence that moves beyond the immediate experience, and sheds light on how an experience can make a lasting impression that gives it significance over time (Frechette et al., 2020). Thus, based on narrative interviews with 12 women who have experienced intimate partner violence, the paper explores how violence can continue to influence the lives of women after the act – as bodily reactions to violence that has happened or restrictions imposed on the body to manage expectations of future violence. 

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.  

The paper will be devoted to the concept of the “space of the body” in the thought of the contemporary Portuguese philosopher José Gil. It will first recapitulate the characteristics of space of the body, such as the prosthetic extension of the body into space and the convergence of the body with space through the extension of the skin of the body. Further, it will focus on Gil’s reflections on the space of the body opened up by dancing movements. The paper will draw attention to the affective and energetic nature of this space and emphasize the constant fluidity of this space in terms of time and space. Gil’s consideration of the dynamic nature of space of the body is in many ways inspired by the concepts of Gilles Delleuze and Félix Guattari. This relates to the distinction between “pulsed” and “unpulsed” time, “smooth” and “striated” space, and “becoming”. In relation to the narcissism of the dancing body, the paper will also highlight the continuity of Gil’s reflections with the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The paper will also point out that the exacerbated narcissism of the dancer needs to be linked to Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the multifaceted sensory experience of the artwork. However, this multiplicity of experience involving seeing, hearing and proprioception is also constantly evolving from the actual position of the dancing body into virtuality. This unfolding into virtuality gives rise to the multiplicity of aspects in which the multiplicity of experience or synaesthesia takes place. Finally, the paper will suggest the possibility of using these characteristics of the space of body to refine the concept of aesthetic “atmospheres” that contemporary phenomenological aesthetics is concerned with. It will highlight that the space of the body needs to be conceived as a dynamic and synaesthetic aesthetic atmosphere. 

This paper explores the historical dimension of speech and its alteration in mood disorders. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of “existential signification”, I propose that speech is a historically mediated social act that discloses one’s existential orientation to another subject. Specifically, I elucidate two distinct aspects of existential signification: a) interpersonal and b) anticipatory. With this, I establish the following claim: everyday speech expression discloses one’s historically embedded existence to another speaking subject and, in the moment it does so, it also immediately draws or pulls another individual into the interpersonal world. 

Having established this claim, I turn to the recent psychopathological research initiative aimed at clarifying the experiential nature of silence involved in mood disorders. More specifically, I focus on a set of psychopathological cases where people living with depression experience a loss of words during a depressive episode, i.e., empty silence.

Employing Merleau-Ponty’s framework, I argue that the loss of words present in these cases indicates a severe disruption in the socio-historical dimension of one’s existence and describe how even a simple everyday invitation to speak comes to feel overbearing. More precisely, I argue that, in such instances, another individual’s invitation to speak a) reveals the depressed individual’s relative disembeddedness from the interpersonal world and b) makes explicit the individual’s inability to take up the speaker’s anticipatory intention, actualising both the sense of isolation from the social world and the hopelessness that they may never be able to re-enter such a world.

By examining the historically embedded aspect of speech and its alteration in depression, I hope to provide a more in-depth experiential profile of empty silence and detail the loss of social agency involved in such cases. I conclude by sketching out a kind of silence that may help restore such a loss of agency: empathetic silence.

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. 

Breverton Pond, situated on the southern edge of Exmoor in Somerset England, is commonly cited as the source of the River Tone - its origins. Rivers often have disputed origins. A second stream, rising in Elworthy, 2.6 miles West, contends to be the source of the River Tone. Problems of origin were central to Husserl's project in Experience and Judgment (EJ), where enduring objects are constituted in the flux of an ever becoming. Judgements, like rivers, have disputed origins, creating issues with the temporal fixity modernity is reliant on. Using the temporal overlaps Jay Lampert extracts from EJ, together with David Woods eco-phenomenological outline of the plexity of time  as my analytical handrails, this paper reports an autoethnography of the embodied ecologies of the River Tone, walked barefoot, from source to mouth, over three consecutive days and nights. How does the River Tone ‘originate’ in experience when I put my foot in it? As the headwaters ‘overlap’ (Überschiebung) my foot now ‘depositioning’ into the streambed of historical depositions of Devonian Sandstone, how do these ecological entanglements mediate the visibility of my origins? The implications of ecophenomenology as an analytical framework coupled with autoethnography are briefly discussed in relation to how temporality features in riverine policy formulations within the UK. 

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.

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.  

Despite seldom referring to the European phenomenological tradition in his varied studies of Caribbean subjectivity, Édouard Glissant’s work has often been read as phenomenological. Even Glissant’s most perceptive readers seemingly take for granted that his work fits this description, “privileging as it does phenomenology over ontology” (Wiedorn). This paper aims to complicate Glissant’s relation to the phenomenological tradition by placing his work into dialogue with the “six senses of critique for critical phenomenology” identified by Lisa Guenther. I argue that while Glissant’s work is broadly aligned with Guenther’s stipulation that “Critical phenomenology (…) [seeks] to trace the contingent, historical emergence of structures like white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, to ask whether and how these structures could be otherwise (…) and to reclaim, create, and support more liberatory ways of being, relating, and sense-making,” Glissant also significantly alters, or creolizes, the stakes of this critical phenomenological enterprise by virtue of his sustained attention to the brutal historical experiences of transatlantic slavery, the Middle Passage, and their ongoing implications for present and future forms of thinking and relating. Attending both to his theoretical texts (e.g. Poetics of Relation) and his literary output (e.g. Mahagony), I argue that Glissant’s work critically brings into relief some of the still-too-Western presuppositions of Guenther’s politically engaged definition of critical phenomenology. As such, I conclude, Glissant’s corpus offers new directions for what future senses of critique may be adequate for a phenomenological practice seeking to overcome the violence of contingent structures such as coloniality, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy. 

Hartmut Rosa’s (2016) theory of resonance has become a central issue of current debates on social theory (Susen, 2020). Much of the debate has been focused on the normative viability of “resonance”, and its risk of becoming a totalitarian concept. These observations on so-called “bad resonance” have been answered by Rosa in many opportunities (Rosa, 2020). Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to the phenomenological foundations of the theory of resonance. We argue that some critical observations are yet to be made, particularly on the issue of hostile emotions. Can anger, fear, discomfort, and repulsion all be counted as alienated? Is there no resonance involved in these experiences? We address these questions by reviewing the fundamental concepts of alienation and resonance in its phenomenological basis. To do so, we propose to bracket any normative assumptions that may interfere with an “immanent description”.

First, we review Rosa’s concept of alienation as a “relation of no relation”, and its phenomenological stamp of the “lack of responsivity”. We argue that Rosa’s central examples of experiencing alienation i.e., “the world as cold, depressive, indifferent” are not of the same kind as hostile relations, such as hostile emotions. When examining hostile emotions from a phenomenological point of view, we observe that responsivity is present in various ways (Kolnai, 1998). Then, we question whether experiences of hostility can be resonant. To answer this question we analyze some aspects of resonance based on Thomas Fuchs’s concept of bodily resonance (Fuchs, 2000, 2014; 2017). We offer a distinction between “consonant resonance” and “antagonistic resonance” (Fuchs, 2000, 2017), a distinction that is overlooked by Rosa’s work. The “antagonistic resonance” suggests that many hostile experiences are a proper form of resonance. Finally, we suggest some normative consequences that derive from this analysis and how they can be addressed.

Can film do phenomenology? The short answer is ‘Yes’. As Heidegger (2001: 59) writes, ‘any exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself, may be called “phenomenology” with formal justification.’ In essence, ‘phenomenology is to “let us see”.’ Accordingly, film, an artform excelling at showing, exhibiting, and letting us see, is phenomenology per excellence. It is, therefore, not surprising that many people, including Merleau-Ponty (2020), claim that film is the most phenomenological medium. However, this fertile land of film as phenomenology remains largely uncultivated.

This paper contributes to this gap by showing that Farwell My Concubine (Kaige Chen, 1993), a masterpiece of Chinese cinema, is a phenomenology of modern Chinese history. I argue that it shows a structure of historical experience as a repetition of an ambivalent gesture, a farewell to the past as performative identities, which is simultaneously a beckoning to the future as an authentic self-transcendence. These two aspects of the same gesture are respectively represented by Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung), two Peking opera actors. From their first-person perspective, we witness the historical upheavals of 20th-century China, which, in the film, is foregrounded by the opera ‘Farwell My Concubine’. The opera is a historical drama about an ancient warlord, Xiang Yu, played by Xiaolou, bidding farewell to his beloved concubine, Consort Yu, played by Dieyi, after losing a decisive battle. As the opera mirrors each regime transformation, the phenomenological nature of the film is laid bare: It is not about modern Chinese history per se but about how history, enacted out and suffered by the two actors’ lived bodies, manifests a common structure of experience, worthy of phenomenological articulation.

Articulating this structure, this film-phenomenology paper contributes to exploring the linear and cyclical nature of the phenomenology of history.