This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some (...) of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of how to engage one phenomenologically orientated version of relational research based on ideas from existential phenomenological philosophy as well as Gestalt theory, relational psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity theory and feminist methodology. Relational dynamics (both conscious and unconscious) between researcher and co-researcher are explored reflexively using illustrations from various phenomenological projects in which the author has been involved. The relational approach to phenomenology described involves attending to four interlinked dimensions: open presence, embodied intersubjectivity, dialogic co-creation and entangled (...) selves. The paper aims to show the importance of retaining an open, empathic, embodied presence to another's personhood while acknowledging the power of dialogue to bring to life new realities. Data is seen to emerge out of the researcher/co-researcher relationship and is mutually co-created in this encounter as each touches and impacts on the other. What we can learn and know about another arises within the intersubjective space between. In this zone of ambiguity and uncertainty, the unforeseen hovers and layered meanings invite discovery. (shrink)

Based mainly on research conducted as part of a doctoral thesis (Guimond-Plourde, 2004), this paper introduces an epistemological and methodological framework based on the foundations and characteristics of a qualitative/interpretative approach rooted in hermeneutic phenomenology as conducive to disclosing the meaning that healthy adolescents, aged 15 to 17, attribute to the stress they experience in school and to their coping behaviour. Moving from the empirical to the phenomenal makes it possible to evoke a return to dimensions of meaning which have (...) been set aside or forgotten in the lived experience of stress-coping. By thus bringing stress-coping into focus in a new way, it enables us to glimpse the phenomenon anew, with the prospect of revealing what we haven't yet appreciated. A dual philosophical approach is outlined: a phenomenological perspective apprehends stress-coping as an existential phenomenon, while the hermeneutic focus is on interpreting the links between lived experience and meaning. The kind of knowledge generated by means of this approach offers a new way of understanding that focuses on the unique and personal nature of healthy adolescents' daily life at school and, as such, provides educators with a sensitive account of adolescents' experiences of stress in the school context. (shrink)

Existentialist thinkers often publicly acknowledged Husserl’s phenomenology as one of their main points of departure for treatment of such themes as intentionality, comportment, transcendence, and the lifeworld. Several central elements of Husserl’s approach were adopted by the Existentialists, but equal to their gratitude were vigorous declamations of Husserl’s mistakes, dead-ends and failures. Many of the Existentialists’ criticisms of Husserl’s project are well-known and have been rehearsed in various surveys of 20th century thought, but less well-remarked are the discrepancies between their (...) complaints about Husserl’s aborted achievements and what Husserl actually delivered. This paper attempts to uncover the accuracy of some of their assessments of Husserl’s alleged failures and mistakes, whether or not Husserl actually held the position they claim he did, and especially whether or not Husserl was himself aware of some deficiency in his thematic analysis, and thus would have been able to offer a cogent response to critique. In doing so, a good case can be made that Heidegger, for example, quietly adopted some of Husserl’s main insights without credit, slanted his picture of Husserl’s work so that his own reversals had better purchase, or overlooked evidence that Husserl had already moved beyond that position. At least on some key topics, Husserl emerges as an exceptionally self-critical philosopher who had already gained the perspective more usually associated with an Existentialist orientation. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 1, Edition 1 April 2001. (shrink)

Western culture has a few traditions of representing the human body – among them mortuary art (gisants), the freak show, the culture of the relics, renaissance art and pre-modern and modern anatomy. A historical analysis in the spirit of Norbert Elias is offered with regard to body – person relationship in anatomy. Modern anatomy is characterized by separating the story of the person from the story of the body, a strategy that is incompatible with the bio-psycho-social paradigm of clinical medicine. (...) The paper discusses different aspects of the above traditions and how they might bear on this conflict and on contemporary bioethics and bedside practice. (shrink)

This article elaborates a relational phenomenology of violence. Firstly, it explores the constitution of all sense in its intrinsic relation with our embodiment and intercorporality. Secondly, it shows how this relational conception of sense and constitution paves the path for an integrative understanding of the bodily and symbolic constituents of violence. Thirdly, the author addresses the overall consequences of these reflections, thereby identifying the main characteristics of a relational phenomenology of violence. In the final part, the paper provides an exemplification (...) of the outlined conception with regard to a concrete phenomenon of violence, i.e., slapping, and a concluding reflection upon its overall significance for research on violence. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively underused within sports studies. A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer-standing literature in feminist phenomenology. These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure. After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some (...) of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist, phenomenology might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant (...) to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the use of imaginative play in child psychotherapy, yet the theoretical conceptualization of the meaning of play is lacking behind its application in practice. In search of a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of imaginative play, the author turns to Merleau-Ponty's ontology and to his phenomenology of structure, of the lived body, of perception, and of expression. In light of his work, play is an embodied mode of being in the (...) world and a body-world phenomenon. Imaginative play in particular exemplifies the human order in that it enables the child to create and re-create his own meanings within his play world. In a therapeutic context, the evocation of play imagery and the expressive shaping and reshaping of play meanings lead to surprising insights and new discoveries relevant to the child's life-world. A central therapeutic value of imaginative play lies in its promise for facilitating change and healing. A clinical case illustration of a young boy is provided, and the meaning of his imaginative play is exemplified in light of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Some implications are drawn for the theory of play in child psychotherapy. (shrink)

In the three published volumes of his History of Sexuality Foucault reflects on themes of anxiety situated in the Christian doctrine of the flesh that led to a pastoral ministry establishing the rules of a general social economy—rules that enabled, over time, a discourse on the flesh that took thrift, prudence, modesty, and suspicion as essential ethical premises in the emerging “art of the self.” Rather than sensing flesh as a charged, motile potentiality of attachment and intimacy, it came to (...) be seen as skin—as the limit of a sovereign body, embedding guilt and shame into the texture of its expression. This essay pursues the psychological and communication problematic of intimacy as a critical and developmental experience of the flesh. Foucault's concept of self-care and parrhesia, Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh and embodiment, and Bataille's concept of glory and eroticism contribute to a phenomenology of human development that seeks to articulate an idea of a self diffierentiated from the unspoken binds of familial anxiety and emotionality. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty, in his well-known essay, "Eye and Mind," startlingly comments: "A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an 'outside,' which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh." This essay opens up a discourse on this very problem: the question of what one sees when looks at oneself in the mirror. As well, (...) the now-common assumption that we have arrived at a postmodern condition of experience, knowledge, and interpretation comes into question when we consider the possibility that the human sciences have not sufficiently embraced a post-Cartesian perspective on mind, body, self, and vision. The essay closes with a reflection on the contact of the self and the other in vision. The self and the other are not "signs" that are "read" in the context of a perceptual field. Rather, the interpersonal world embodied through the vital flesh of self in communion with other is reflected to the eye only if the observer cares to take note, to imaginatively flesh-out the world embodied in the moment of a thoughtful glance. (shrink)

This study, based upon empirical phenomenological research, explores an essential phenomenon of human existence: the interpermeating communion of self and world. In interpermeation, the supposed separation of self and world is transcended. The being, energy, life, and meaning of the world "flow into" one's self and become integrated as part of who one is; simultaneously, one's being, consciousness, awareness, and self "flow into" the world and become part of the world. Conscious of interpermeation, we tend to understand ourselves and reality (...) differently, and to be more aware and compassionate with others and the natural world: awareness of interpermeation generates love as love generates awareness of interpermeation. A hermeneutic dialogue is offered between existential phenomenology, transpersonal psychology, and the world's spiritual traditions. (shrink)

This paper is a review of the work that has been carried out on machine consciousness. A clear overview of this diverse field is achieved by breaking machine consciousness down into four different areas, which are used to understand its aims, discuss its relationship with other subjects and outline the work that has been carried out so far. The criticisms that have been made against machine consciousness are also covered, along with its potential benefits, and the work that has been (...) done on analysing systems for signs of consciousness. Some of the social and ethical issues raised by machine consciousness are examined at the end of the paper. (shrink)

It has become almost commonplace to recognise that teaching is an embodied practice. Most analyses of teaching as embodied practice focus on the embodied nature of the teacher as subject. Here, we use Butler's concept of performativity to analyse the reiterated acts that are intelligible as—performatively constitute—teaching, rather of the teacher as subject. We suggest that this simultaneously helps explain the persistence of teaching as a narrow repertoire of actions recognisable as ‘teaching’, and the policing of conformity to teaching thus (...) embodied. However, like performatively accomplished subjectivity, this repertoire is unstable and ambiguous, and thus open to change and disruption. Moreover, teacher subjectivities may lead them to mobilise these possibilities of disruption. (shrink)

In an effort to reassess the status of Phenomenology of Perception and its relation to The Visible and the Invisible, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's text and his discussion of the “field of presence” in La temporalité are intended to think through the field in which time makes its appearance as one of passage. Time does not show itself as presence or in the present but manifests itself as Ablauf, as lapse or flow, an écoulement that is (...) simultaneously an explosion, an éclatement. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in these pages is thus legible as recovering the primordial experience of time as a self-differentiating déhiscence in its dual power of articulation and erosion. Time is thus simultaneously the vehicle of the world's appearance and of its “disarticulation”, the passage of a rhythm of affirmation and disintegration. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception is oblique, somewhat fragmentary and circuitous.11 References to Merleau-Ponty's works cite the French followed by the English translation. I will use the abbreviation PhP for Phenomenology of Perception and VI for The Visible and the Invisible. Other texts by Merleau-Ponty will be referenced by the title. References to Husserl and Heidegger use the German followed by the translation. I will use the abbreviations ZB for the Zeitbewußtsein lectures; FT for Formale und transzendentale Logik; EU for Erfahrung und Urteil; and SZ for Sein und Zeit. View all notes While of course this phenomenon comes under close scrutiny in La temporalité, a brief inspection of this text as a whole finds it to be virtually everywhere.22 The theme of temporality is introduced as early as the Preface to Part I, “Experience and Objective Thought” and appears again in almost every subsequent chapter: the first chapter of Part I ; in his discussion on number blindness and Goldstein's patient known as Schneider in La spatialité du corps et la motricité ; in the sexuality chapter ; in the discussion of memory in La corps comme expression et la parole ; in Le sentir ; in the discussion of depth in L'espace ; in La chose et le monde naturel ; in Autrui et le monde humain and in Le cogito. Rather than providing the perhaps much called for synopsis of these scattered accounts of time or trying to locate a unified account in Phenomenology of Perception through such a synopsis, this essay will focus only on La temporalité, particularly the discussion of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein and the “champ de présence”. View all notes It is this apparent ubiquity that will motivate scholars such as Renaud Barbaras to claim that “… the entire structure of Phenomenology of Perception rests on a chapter devoted to temporality”.33 Barbaras The Being of the Phenomenon, 218. View all notes In spite of this ubiquity and apparent centrality, however, the treatment of temporality seems to neglect a systematic and thoroughgoing approach, and whether this work manages to address this theme with a sufficient degree of rigor remains open to debate. Furthermore, beyond the scattered and fragmented appearance of temporality in the text, the chapter devoted to its exploration contains numerous, well-recognized problems.44 Merleau-Ponty's misinterpretation of Bergson in this chapter has received much warranted attention. Alia Al-Saji, for example, has criticized Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in this chapter of Phenomenology of Perception for this misreading as well as its perhaps too uncritical infatuation with Husserl and his emphasis on presence. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, Al-Saji “The Temporality of Life” and “A Past Which Has Never Been Present” and Barbaras “The Turn of Experience”. View all notes Among these difficulties, Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's lectures on time-consciousness, the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins,55 The 1928 publication of the Zeitbewußtsein, edited by Heidegger, is what appears in the bibliography of Phenomenology of Perception. This version, from the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologishe Forschung, as Brough notes, appears as “Part A” of Husserliana X. The notes that constitute this version of the text, furthermore, as Heidegger mentions in his preface to the Jahrbuch version and which Brough repeats were heavily edited by Husserl's assistant at the time, Edith Stein. Merleau-Ponty's references to the Zeitbewußtsein cut across various moments of the text and do not focus on one section in particular, and in fact, he actually references section 11, “Urimpression und retentionale Modifikation”/“Primal impression and retentional modification” in his discussion of the field of presence. As Al-Saji has noted, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty's account of time in La temporalité centres the account of time on “the living present” can be shown to be at play behind the misreading of Bergson. While I do not wish to dispute the specifics of her compelling reading, it is nonetheless worth noting that Al-Saji's reading of the Zeitbewußtsein only focuses on Appendix V, “Gleichzeitigkeit von Wahrnehmung und Wahrgenommenem”/“Simultaneity of Perception and the Perceived”. View all notes looms large, as it seems that his discussion of what he designates as le champ de présence or “field of presence” commits him to the ontological primacy of the present in his account of time. As a result, this earlier work appears to confine itself to a metaphysics organized around the privilege and authority of the present in establishing the structure of time.66 Leonard Lawlor has convincingly argued against this interpretation. Following the famous remark at the end of Le Sentir about “a past which has never been present”, Lawlor argues that precisely because Merleau-Ponty's critique of Bergson is a straw man – that is, because his critique of Bergson is based on a misreading – a closer inspection of Le Sentir and La temporalité shows Merleau-Ponty to be committed to the ontological primacy of an “originary” past. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, 89. Marratto, following Lawlor, takes up the charge of a metaphysics of presence in Phenomenology of Perception in dialogue with Derrida. Marratto argues that Derrida's reading selectively overlooks “the very imporant dimensions of difference, discontinuity, and delay and non-self-presence in Merleau-Ponty's descriptions”, located particularly in the latter's theory of subjectivity. I agree with Marratto's assessment, and my aim here is to deepen it by turning in more detail to La temporalité. View all notes This apparent commitment to the ontological primacy of the present, for some readers, has also functioned as an index for tracking the revision of Phenomenology of Perception that is said to figure in The Visible and the Invisible, where a metaphysics of the present is replaced with a commitment to the primacy of an original past, signalling a significant break in the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought.77 This has bearing on the debate mentioned above as the question of temporality and Merleau-Ponty's evolving relationship with Bergson are also cited as part of the index for tracking the differences between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. What we see, according to this reading, is Merleau-Ponty move away from a more strictly phenomenological orientation of Phenomenology of Perception, an orientation that is said to adversely mediate his early, critical stance with respect to Bergson, toward a progressively less Husserlian and more Bergsonian stance in The Visible and the Invisible. While he does not specifically address Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Bergson, Marratto's reading also places a special emphasis on the significance of the past, specifically Merleau-Ponty's reference to a “past which has never been present”. It is also not my intention to enter into the question of Merleau-Ponty's relationship with Bergson. Rather, I will restrict my remarks specifically to Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl and the Zeitbewußtsein in La temporalité in order to show that there are grounds for at least questioning one of the premises of the interpretation mentioned above, namely that Phenomenology of Perception is unequivocally legible as committed to the ontological primacy of the present. As will become clear later in the essay, I also dispute interpretations that would place the emphasis on the ontological primacy of an original past. For my own views on the significance of a “past which has never been present”, see Whitmoyer “The Primary Silence of the Past”. View all notes In considering the manner in which the Zeitbewußtsein figures in La temporalité and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the field of presence, it will do to think about the parameters in which his engagement with Husserl is staged more generally. It seems that Merleau-Ponty never considered his task in terms of the perhaps false alternative of fidelity and heresy, because “any commemoration is also a betrayal”, and because the task of the interpreter is, as he famously notes, thinking through that “unthought-of element … which is wholly his [Husserl's] and yet opens out on something else”.88 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 203/160. This methodological dictum is developed in more detail in the notes to the course offered on Husserl's Origin of Geometry in 1959–1960. “We are saying not that Husserl was that, but that Husserl was not only what they say, was also another, bearer of an unthought”. View all notes Following Merleau-Ponty's own indications, we could suggest that Husserl's text, rather than a source of orthodoxy, functions as a point of orientation through which Merleau-Ponty marks out his own theory of temporality.99 I will not, therefore, address the question of the “accuracy” of his interpretation of Husserl because, according to Merleau-Ponty himself, this question presupposes that the author, in this case Husserl, has a privileged access to his thought, as if there is some kernel or essence of what a philosopher thought that interpreters can either get right or wrong. As the remarks in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” make clear, interpretation can never really avail itself of this presupposition and in this manner the question of accuracy is precisely the wrong question. View all notes This essay argues that his discussion of the Zeitbewußtsein in Phenomenology of Perception does not offer an account of time that “centers around the living present”, as some have argued,1010 Al-Saji “A Past Which Has Never Been Present”, 42–44. View all notes but that the discussion of the field of presence and what follows are rather intended to account for the field of temporal phenomenalization – not as a presence – but as écoulement, passage and flux. Time, therefore, does not appear in the present or as presence, but manifests itself as a flow and movement that is simultaneously an éclatement, an eruption, and a self-differentiating “dehiscence”.1111 A favorite word of Merleau-Ponty, borrowed from botany, where it designates the splitting open of a seed-pod or flower as well as medicine, where it refers to the splitting open of a healed or partially healed wound. The idea here is that, in its flow and passage, time splits open in a process of differentiation – which is simultaneously a process of degeneration, decay, and what Merleau-Ponty will term in The Visible and the Invisible, “disarticulation”. View all notes Time's passage is not determined, organized and oriented in advance in accordance with a transcendental synthesis that would give it shape and form, privileging one temporal dimension over another, so much as it is understood in terms of a splitting open, or to use another favoured locution of Merleau-Ponty, a “deflagration”.1212 In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “deflagration of being”. Metaphors of explosiveness and dissonance populate his attempt to think being otherwise than as structure, form, and stability. Here I will focus particularly on écoulement, flux and éclatement, eruption, because these are the terms he uses in his discussion of time in La temporalité. See Merleau-Ponty L’Œil et l'esprit, 64/369. View all notes To this extent, Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception cannot be said to orient itself in terms of the ontological primacy of any one temporal dimension – past, present, or future – but is more accurately understood as an attempt to recover the primordial experience of time as the simultaneity of écoulement and éclatement – an account that thinks time in its dual power of phenomenalization and erosion, the “pulse [pulsation] of my existence, its systole and diastole”.1313 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 337/332. View all notes Time is the vehicle of the world's appearance, and at the same time of its “disarticulation” [désarticulation],1414 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible in a well-known working note entitled “ Transcendence – forgetting – time”. See Merleau-Ponty VI, 247/197. View all notes the vehicle through which “becoming” – rather than being – shows itself. This process of phenomenalization, precisely because it is temporal, never achieves the density of fully realized being – the sense of this becoming is never fully articulate – but is perpetually subject to a temporal erasure that necessitates its repetition and reiteration. Time, in other words, is the principle of the world's eloquence – it is that thanks to which things have and make sense and simultaneously the principle of the world's murmuring stutter, the principle through which the sense of things remains incomplete and even erodes, decays, and degenerates. To begin, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein, which opens his attempt to “arrive at authentic time”.1515 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 477/483. View all notes Rather than simply rehearsing Husserl's discussion of primal impression, retention and protention, Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram provides an opportunity for raising two problems: the problem of time's representability and the problem of its synthesis. Rather than through an “act intentionality” carried out by a transcendental subjectivity, time appears in accordance with an “operative intentionality” always already under way. Turning to the section of La temporalité aptly entitled “Passive Synthesis”, we see that Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram leads him to the paradox of passive synthesis and what he calls, following Husserl, “transition synthesis”. Time does not show itself punctually – time appears neither as presence nor in the present – but only in the dual movement of its flux, its écoulement, and its éclatement, its explosive, self-differentiating unfurling. These reflections, finally, bring Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with Heidegger on what the latter called the Zusammenhang des Lebens. The “unity of a life”, accordingly, is not a question of any “resolution”, but is a function of our immersion in this temporal dehiscence. The important lesson to be learned from Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's Zeitbewußtsein is not something about the ontological primacy of one temporal dimension over another but what Merleau-Ponty famously calls in The Visible and the Invisible the “passivity of our activity”1616 Merleau-Ponty VI, 270/221. View all notes and our immersion in time's power of disarticulation. (shrink)

Children’s lived experiences of movement indicate possibilities for teaching them to be at home in increasingly challenging domains of activity. Especially significant are movements that reflect landscape connection, that carry an intention not confined to individual purpose, and that are enhanced by observational glance. The first rush of movement is described phenomenologically as an essential feature of these movements and of the vital consciousness they engender. The phenomenon of the first rush of movement attests to a mimetic impulse towards otherness (...) that overrides personal motive and moderates an otherwise containing gaze. Its intentionality is evident in an extended, inclusive and progressive range of human movements that affirm a natural, intimate relation with others and the world at large. The embrace, caress and kiss are described as primary, elemental gestures from which movement disciplines sustaining the first rush of moment and its mimetic impulse can be cultivated. Accordingly, this study prefaces a practice of education in which children’s movements, originating in responsiveness to landscape and motivated by a mimetic impulse, can be guided towards enhanced and sustaining world relations. Vital qualities of movement can be sustained from childhood to adulthood and from the most rudimentary contacts with the world to the most refined, skill-based encounters. (shrink)

Through a comparative analysis of the key ontological notions in Merleau-Ponty and Nagarjuna, I develop a relational social ontology that is grounded in their respective implicit and explicit ethics. Both thinkers take heed of our being-in-the-world; this is evident in their views on intersubjective sociality and language. Recognizing the limitations in these views points us toward a greater understanding of the meaningfulness of our situated existences. In this vein, I propose a number of ideas to guide the work of comparative (...) philosophy. (shrink)

Proust interrogates Gilles Deleuze's notion of resistance in relation to death as that which is “turned against death.” She questions a concept of resistance which is “no more than impassivity and indifference.” How, she asks, can we know if the force of resistance is on the side of death or life? Characterizing life as movement, she speaks for a concept of resistance as on the side of life.

My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

In this article, I first problematize the concept of rationality as educational ideal through the use of feminist philosophy. I then offer an alternative concept of rationality as educational ideal based on my reading of Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, epigenesis, and rationality. In a last part, I explore the ontological and normative dimensions of this new concept of rationality through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “hyper-dialectics.”.

This article brings together mindfulness and habitus theory in relation to developing wise leaders. In particular, we present new insights about the intersection of time, subjective and intersubjective experience, and mindfulness that are relevant to developing embodied wisdom in leaders. We show that temporal competence is essential for shaping habitus and developing embodied wisdom. Further, and to extend theoretical understandings of mindfulness in leadership, we argue that temporal capabilities developed through mindfulness can foster embodied wisdom by creating a specific ‘wisdom (...) habitus’ that includes values and ethics. The system of dispositions that comprise one’s habitus is, however, largely unconscious and implicit and we discuss how mindfulness renders habitus, including ethical conation accessible to development for the bodily ability to act wisely. This article then establishes a framework that leadership development programs in business schools can adopt for understanding habitus and mindfulness to enable embodied wisdom to develop in leaders. Finally, we show that a mindfulness perspective offers valuable contributions to research on leadership. (shrink)

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational (...) knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. (shrink)

Salsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence (...) filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life. (shrink)

Locke claims that a person’s identity over time consists in the unity of consciousness, not in the sameness of the body. Similarly, the phenomenological approach refuses to see the criteria of identity as residing in some externally observable bodily features. Nevertheless, it does not accept the idea that personal identity has to consist either in consciousness or in the body. We are self-aware as bodily beings. After providing a brief reassessment of Locke and the post-Lockean discussion, the article draws on (...) phenomenological arguments that show the body as lived, that is, lived as one’s own body, but also possibly as “other” or “strange.” Against what has been claimed in recent writing, especially in literature on Merleau-Ponty, the author argues that the “mineness” of the body and its “alterity” are not two mutually exclusive features. In the final part of the article, the author suggests that the becoming strange of one’s own body may legitimately be considered as a prominent experience of what it means to be a person. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore Merleau-Ponty’s ambivalent relationship with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. I begin by looking at several points of convergence between Kant and Merleau-Ponty, focusing on the affinities between Kant’s account of transcendental realism and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of objective thought. I then show how Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Kant’s paradox of asymmetrical objects points to a parallel in Kant’s thought to Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. In the second part of the paper, I show why (...) Merleau-Ponty believes that, despite the promise of Kant’s thought, he fails to adequately escape from objective thought. After presenting the central claims of the transcendental deduction, I piece together Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of it by answering three questions: For Merleau-Ponty, how do we encounter the world prior to reflection? How is experience constituted? And what leads Kant to mischaracterise experience in his own transcendental philosophy? (shrink)

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...) I show how thinking from this more intimate process may transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. (shrink)

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...) I show how Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin help us think from this more intimate process to transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. (shrink)

The main claim in this article is that the traditionally Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. The racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the older Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. In the Great Chain of Being of Western metaphysics it is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes (...) and separates humans from that same domain. Situated in the border between human and Animal, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. With the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. African Woman, in particular, is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project thus institutes a certain flight from Nat... (shrink)

One of the more perplexing terms to appear across Claude Lefort’s later oeuvre, ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ democracy has proved a difficult and divisive facet of Lefort’s political phi...

The digital technology and the world of a virtual space by projecting them cardinal changed the face of the world. This wide-spread in varying degrees digital-virtual technology in modern society for nearly thirty years now, radically changed the society on a planetary scale, in various economic, political, social, legal, ethical, cultural, etc. perspectives. Indeed, to this day the world turns into a possible “togetherness” – the catalyst for this is digital, technical and technological boom. The whole boom in turn raises (...) many questions mostly related to the source, which builds digital-technology “body” and its “life” – the human. What happened to his purely human body senses and what possible virtual or imaginary worlds hovers it? Here are a few thoughts as sketched lines in the first person singular, an essayistic-philosophical perspective on human senses and virtual. The “imperfect concurrency”... for which we do not speak or do not think, but actually it is constituted direct and intentional phenomena of “stuff” into, within and out of the world. Moreover, we, humans, experience the world in narrow barriers of time in which there remains no reflects not seen, or rather not take very much of what happens in it. For virtual, fantasy and sensuality in touch for life. Unfortunately the humans in their existence increasingly trying to “numb themselves” rely on their eyes and ears, and to distance itself from their non-visual senses. For the loss of this ability or the need for feeling, for example, a touch of liveliness helps – contributes comparison of human, with residence and his communication in virtual space. The virtual creates the false illusion of a public world, that is “with” and “together” us. (shrink)

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with (...) the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses. (shrink)

In Survivance des lucioles, Georges Didi-Huberman cites sections from a letter in which Pier Paolo Pasolini describes an encounter with a swarm of fireflies. The sight of the fireflies triggers reflections on various topics on the part of Pasolini. However, at the end of his life, Pasolini lamented the fact that fireflies had disappeared in modern society, serving as a metaphor for the fact that he had lost all hope in the consumerist society in which he was living. Pasolini’s reflections (...) on fireflies illustrate Georges Didi-Huberman’s theories on the current state and politics of images in contemporary society. In this article, several key features of the politics of images, according to Didi-Huberman, are clarified, in particular, the role of pathos and imagination. It is on the role of pathos and imagination that Didi-Huberman’s views will diverge from the theories of other prominent theorists of images, such as Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, W.J.T. Mitchell and Bruno Latour. By clarifying these diverging views, the theories of Didi-Huberman can be formulated more precisely. (shrink)

In this text, Georges Didi-Huberman responds, in letter-form, to the critical reflections about his work formulated by Jacques Rancière in “Images Re-read: Georges Didi-Huberman’s Method.” Didi-Huberman disagrees with Rancière’s analysis that images are “passive” and that the words which accompany them are “active.” Instead, he agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s view, which postulates that any analysis of images that seeks to disentangle its elements will render the image unintelligible. In opposition to Rancière’s presentation of his work, Didi-Huberman argues that his method is (...) one of tracing the mutually entangled implications of images. Furthermore, Didi-Huberman challenges Rancière to articulate what exactly “the sensible” means when he uses the phrase “distribution of the sensible.” While Rancière distrusts the reliance on pathos and emotions when it comes to analysing images, Didi-Huberman argues that “the sensible” will always involve the body with all its pathos, emotions and gestures. (shrink)

In light of the central role scientific research plays in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the question has arisen whether his phenomenology involves some sort of commitment to naturalism or whether it is better understood along transcendental lines. In order to make headway on this issue, I focus specifically on Merleau-Ponty’s method and its relationship to Kant’s transcendental method. On the one hand, I argue that Merleau-Ponty rejects Kant’s method, the ‘method-without-which’, which seeks the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. On (...) the other hand, I show that this does not amount to a methodological rejection of the transcendental altogether. To the contrary, I claim that Merleau-Ponty offers a new account of the transcendental and a priori that he takes to be the proper subject matter of his phenomenological method, the method of ‘radical reflection’. And I submit that this method has important affinities with aesthetic themes in Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a comparison between the philosophies of Husserl and James in relation to their concepts of experience. Whereas various authors have acknowledged the affinity between James’ early psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, the late development of James’ philosophy is often considered in opposition to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is because James’ radical empiricism achieves a non-dual dimension of experience that precedes the functional division into subject and object, thus contrasting with the phenomenological analysis of the dual structure (...) of intentionality. However, I argue that the later “genetic” development of phenomenology converges with some central aspects of James’ radical empiricism. This is because genetic phenomenology leads us to conceive of the flow of primal impressions as a fundamental dimension of experience that precedes the subject-object duality and is at the base of the process of co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. At the same time, Husserl conceives of the impressional core of experience as structured by formal conditions that depend on the concrete constitution of an embodied subject. For this reason, I argue that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can complement James’ radical empiricism, thus leading to the development of the doctrine of pure experience as a form of empirical and not metaphysical realism. (shrink)

I argue that the physiological, phenomenal and conceptual constitute a trichotomous hierarchy of emergent categories. I claim that each category employs a distinctive type of interactive mechanism that facilitates a meaningful kind of environmental discourse. I advocate, therefore, that each have a causal relation with the environment but that their specific class of mechanism qualifies distinctively the meaningfulness of that interaction and subsequent responses. Consequently, I argue that the causal chain of physical interaction feeds distinctive value-laden constructions that are ontologically (...) distinct for each category. Within the limitations of the interactive mechanisms of each category, increasingly sophisticated forms tend to evolve. The increase in sophistication in each category inevitably leads to the emergence of the novel mechanism particular to the next in the hierarchy. In essence, there is an emergent hierarchy of evolving categories delineated by the nature of their mechanism of environmental engagement. I argue that biochemical mechanisms have a tendency to evolve meaningfully, specifically in a way that is both qualitatively relevant and responsive to environmental particulars. I explain that these mechanisms set in play an organisational imperative that leads to the emergence of the capacity to evaluate and prioritise qualitative biochemical assimilations which, inevitably, generates a subjectively individuated experience phenomenon. I then relate this to the novel characteristics of the human perspective. (shrink)

‘Taking time seriously’ is an enduring human concern and questions about the nature of time bear heavily on the meaning of childhood. In the context of the continuing debates on readiness for school, ‘taking time seriously’ has contributed to policies on ‘early interventions’ which claim to support children in reaching their full potential but limit this potential when enacted in practice. Much of current policymaking takes the meaning of time for granted within a ‘quantitative’ view of time as a neutral, (...) standardised parameter. In everyday educational practice, this view of time may lead to an excessive preoccupation with assessing standardised characteristics of ‘school ready’ children, who are expected to follow a uniform path of development predetermined by their biological clock. However, the quantitative view of time has been challenged both in philosophical and scientific thought by an understanding of time as complex, irreversible and emergent in the present. George Herbert Mead’s ‘philosophy of the present’ and Ilya Prigogine’s ‘arrow of time’ point to important implications of a ‘complex’ view of time for readiness for school as an event rather than a fixed set of characteristics that children should possess upon entry to primary school. Engaging in educational practice as it unfolds in the present also calls for ethics that are not focused on adhering to fixed moral universals but on our actions ‘here and now’ and attending to the ethical meaning that arises in children’s responses to our actions. (shrink)

This essay explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh as it applies within the Community of Philosophical Inquiry, the pedagogical method developed by philosopher Matthew Lipman to foster young people’s multidimensional thinking—critical, creative and caring—through collaborative dialogue. Using a phenomenological framework, the essay aims to extend Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasmatic relations between self and other by appealing to the account of intersubjective dialogue presented in the work of phenomenologist and CPI scholar David Kennedy. The guiding question focuses on hostility expressed corporeally (...) in dialogue: How might the phenomenological experience of individual inquirers within a CPI be affected by the hostile interventions of body language? The essay introduces the notion of body taunting as the combined “vocabulary” of flesh—gestural, postural, physiognomic, kinetic expression—with which inquirers both deliberately and inadvertently provoke, dismiss, intimidate or alienate one another as they attempt to co-construct meaning. Building on what Kennedy calls “the lived experience of preverbal dialogue”, the essay argues that body taunting poses a threat to the CPI’s emerging intersubjectivity by changing the chiasmatic relations between inquirers, making boundaries between self and other seem more pronounced, notably in moments when disagreement is communicated nonverbally in antagonistic ways that betray or contradict voiced arguments. (shrink)

Based upon a brief outline of existential-phenomenological ontology we present a theoretical and practical understanding of humanbeing, which is suited for a methodologically reflected approach to qualitative research. We present the phenomenological distinction between threedimensions of corporeal intentionality(structural, generative and dialectic intentionality) that form elementary events and structures of meaning. Various aspects of human being are better scrutinized with these concepts of intentionality, such as the association of individual being or collective being (e.g. groups) with the less differentiated anonymity of (...) human being. The aim of our framework is to support the qualitative researcher in grasping the experience of the human life in closer accord with how this being actually unfolds and is lived. Application of the presented framework is illuminated with empirical examples from educational, health and psychological contexts. Finally, we discuss the methodological implications that our approach has for qualitative investigations of human being. (shrink)

While Merleau-Ponty’sPhenomenology of Perceptionrelies on the descriptive register of the body proper, his Sorbonne lectures on child psychology investigate the genesis of the experience of a body as one’s own. I demonstrate the uniqueness of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the narcissistic affect and sociality involved in this developmental process, distinguishing his account vis-à-vis Wallon’s and Lacan’s studies of the mirror stage. I conclude that in Merleau-Ponty’s account, (1) the experience of the body proper is not singular, but encompasses a range of (...) phenomenological variation; and (2) the genesis of the body proper is not confined to the mirror stage. The production of bodily boundaries is an ongoing process identified not only with its advent in childhood, but also with adult emotional life. The boundaries between inner and outer domains of perception are not merely discovered, but must be negotiated and cultivated in the intercorporeal affective dramas of adult life. (shrink)

The aim of this psychobiography was to uncover, reconstruct and illustrate significant trajectories of psychosocial development and historical events over the lifespan of Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926). The British-born Hobhouse later became an anti-war campaigner and social activist who exposed the appalling conditions of the British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), as evidenced by primary and secondary historical data. Purposive sampling was used to select Hobhouse as a significant and exemplary subject. Levinson’s four eras or seasons of lifespan development (...) served as the theoretical psychological approach. The study was undertaken against the background of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological philosophy that elucidates a human science phenomenology where the individual cannot be separated from her social world. Alexander’s model of identifying salient biographical themes was utilized and a conceptual psycho-historical framework, based on both the life cycle theory of Levinson and significant historical periods throughout Hobhouse’s life, was employed to assist with data gathering, categorisation, and analyses. The findings highlight significant psychosocial and historical events in the life of Hobhouse that shaped her development as an anti-war campaigner. These include: The role of her strong-willed and determined mother; the denial of an opportunity to study and pursue a formal education; her management of painful feelings of abandonment and grief; the care of her father during his illness and his eventual death; the abrupt ending of her failed romantic relationship; her networking capacity; and her open-mindedness and capacity for independent humanitarian thought. Against the philosophical background of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology, Levinson’s theory and eras proved valuable in identifying these particular psychosocial life experiences and historical events as having shaped Emily Hobhouse into an antiwar campaigner. (shrink)

The films of Sergei Parajanov remain some of the most stylistically unique in the history of the medium and easily place him within the pantheon of the world's great filmmakers. This article offers a new perspective on Parajanov's art through a detailed examination of the two works at the center of his oeuvre, The Colour of Pomegranates and The Legend of Suram Fortress. In addition to their undeniable aesthetic value, these films may be appreciated as meaningful discourse on our conceptions (...) of time, perception, and identity. Like Parajanov's other films, they dismantle the perceptual and narrative structure of classical cinema in order to stimulate awareness of an expressly raw layer of reality beneath what we customarily take to be static, indivisible essences or identities. With specific attention to the correlation of difference, repetition, and perception, this article also focuses on the effects this presentation of perpetual flux and variation has on consciousness and subje... (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. (1) While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. (2) While ‘being there for you’, partners (...) take care of each other in mutually dependent ways. (3) While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners (re-)relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. (4) While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)