This research explores the carnal, experienced self as processual and becoming, situating life as zoe (as per Braidotti) in the context of the Western culture, characterized by alienation (Fromm, Foucault). The study first addresses the ontological disposition of the carnal self and then turns to the concepts of life and death (Freud, Fromm), to explicate the tie between materiality and discourse conditions. Erich Fromm’s classical distinction of having and being is restated as a distinction of having and becoming, which are (...) then explored as complimentary ontological, cultural, and characterological directionalities. A genealogy of their mutual dynamics then allows situating the relations of carnal bodies and inorganic prosthesis (e.g. technologies) in the light of life considered as the necessary synthesis of forces of preservation and perpetual change, beyond subject-object duality. (shrink)

The article explores embodied critical thinking (ECT) for engaging with the enfleshed and trans-corporeal self on an affectual and experiential level. By discussing three exemplifying affectual instances that expose the experiential level of processuality, emergence, and intercarnality, the article shows the methodological use of ECT as a fruitful approach to developing embodied ontologies and a toolkit for the experiential reflection of one's en-fleshment, as tuning into the body-environment.

Whereas classical Critical Theory has tended to view phenomenology as inherently uncritical, the recent upsurge of what has become known as critical phenomenology has attempted to show that phenomenological concepts and methods can be used in critical analyses of social and political issues. A recent landmark publication, 50 Concepts for Critical Phenomenology, contains no reference to psychiatry and psychopathology, however. This is an unfortunate omission, since the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry—as we will demonstrate in the present article by surveying and (...) discussing the contribution of Jaspers, Minkowski, Laing, Basaglia, and Fanon—from the outset has practiced critical thinking, be it at the theoretical, interpersonal, institutional, or political level. Fanon is today a recognized figure in critical phenomenology, even if his role in psychiatry might not yet have been appreciated as thoroughly as his anticolonial and antiracist contributions. But as we show, he is part of a long history of critical approaches in psychopathology and psychiatry, which has firm roots in the phenomenological tradition, and which keeps up its critical work today. (shrink)

The paper investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a “toolbox” of methodological reflections, tools and topics, by relating to the classics of the tradition and to the emerging movement of “critical phenomenology,” as well as by touching upon current issues such as experiences of rightlessness, experiences in the digital lifeworld, and experiences of the public sphere. It is argued that phenomenology provides us with a dynamic methodological framework that emphasizes correlational, co-constitutional, (...) and interrelational structures, and thus pays attention to modes of givenness, the making and unmaking of “world,” and, thereby, the inter/subjective, affective, and bodily constitution of meaning. In the case of political and legal orders, questions of power, exclusion, and normativity are central issues. By looking at “best practice” models such as Hannah Arendt’s analyses, the paper points out an analytical tool and flexible framework of “spaces of meaning” that phenomenologists can use and modify as they go along. In the current debates on political and legal issues, the author sees the main task of phenomenology to reclaim experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and to demonstrate how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticize, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable. (shrink)

This article interrogates twelve step practice within Alcoholics Anonymous from the perspective of Foucault’s later work on governance, truth-telling and subjectivity. Recent critical studies of addiction tend to view self-help cultures like that of AA and related twelve step programs as integral parts of contemporary power/knowledge complexes, and thus as agents of the modern “will to knowledge” that Foucault often engages with. In line with the widespread Foucauldian critique of governmentality, addiction self-help culture is thus conceived as one that primarily (...) reproduces abstract, neoliberal norms on health and subjectivity. The argument put forward in this article aims to upset this framework attending to a number of features of twelve step practice that, arguably, bear striking resemblances to Foucault’s later discussions of ethics, care of self and truth-telling. In this, it is suggested that a close study of AA practices, might interrupt assumptions about contemporary addiction discourse and its relationship to issues of truth and power often reproduced in Foucauldian critiques. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question, “What is the subject matter of phenomenological research?” I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology’s identity, I show how the question of phenomenology’s subject (...) matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology’s methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology’s subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework. (shrink)

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

This paper will interpret Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and materialization as a theory of identity, and so put it into dialogue with a phenomenological account of habit formation. The goal is to argue that identity is developed already at a bodily level and that this takes place via the processes of habit formation. The constitution of subjectivity, in other words, requires at the most basic level some kind of bodily performativity. What follows intends to draw out the concept of (...) ‘the body’ in Butler’s work, the role of which is surprisingly meagre given her clear favour of language signification in the elaboration of her theory of performativity. Alternatively, this paper will provide a phenomenology of habit formation that re-introduces the body not as thematic materiality, but as lived materiality. The body will therefore be conceived as something which is already skilful and creative, sensitive and vulnerable, and ultimately, as Butler anticipates, responsive to the intertwinement of individual and social aspects of identity formation. In this regard, I will argue for a performative theory of (bodily) habitual identity. (shrink)

The paper introduces the concept of “spaces of meaning,” distilled from the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt, and used as an interpretative tool to understand some central theoretical moves in the The Human Condition. By focusing on activities which actualise conditional structures and which thereby generate experiences and meaning, I present a phenomenological re-interpretation of Arendt’s three basic activities of labour, work, and action, which actualise the conditions of life, worldliness, and plurality. The term “spaces of meaning” indicates how (...) the unfolding of certain activities simultaneously creates and structures spaces and meaningful orientation which involves a certain temporality, spatiality, corporeality, and intersubjectivity. I differentiate between activity-based and visibility-based spaces of meaning and present a dynamic interpretation of their interplay. In doing so, I challenge Seyla Benhabib’s view that part of Arendt’s methodology contains what Benhabib calls “phenomenological essentialism.” Furthermore, this analysis aims at developing an analytical tool and flexible framework also beyond Arendt scholarship. Phenomenologists can use this model of “spaces of meaning” for the task of reclaiming experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and of demonstrating how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticise, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that a phenomenological concept of normality can be helpful to understand the experiential side of post-truth phenomena. How is one’s longing for, or sense of, normality related to what we deem as real, true, or objective? And to what extent is the sense for “what (really) is” related to our beliefs of what should be? To investigate this, I combine a phenomenological approach to lived normality with a genealogical account of represented normality that sheds light (...) on the social and historical contingency of definitions of normality and their intertwinement with structures of power. It is my contention that such an approach to normality is well-suited to investigate how is and ought are interrelated within subjective experience and practice. This might in turn help overcoming one-sided debates on post-truth, which rely on the strict opposition of objectivity versus subjectivity, universal truth versus subjective experience, facticity versus meaning, or reason versus stupidity. It also sheds light on the ambivalent or contested status of experience within debates of post-truth and feminist theory. I will conclude that post-truth is related to what Hannah Arendt has termed the lack of a common world (i.e., normality), arguing that a plurality of experiences is needed to let the “real world” stand its ground again. (shrink)

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- and (...) lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination. (shrink)

This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded (...) in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political. (shrink)