A critical assessment of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology highlights singular differences between Husserl’s phenomenological methodology and existential analysis, between epistemology and ontology, and between essential and individualistic perspectives. When we duly follow the rigorous phenomenological methodology described by Husserl, we are confronted with the challenge of making the familiar strange and with the challenge of languaging experience. In making the familiar strange, we do not immediately have words to describe what is present, but must let the experience of the strange (...) resonate for some time, and even then, must return to it many times over to pinpoint its aspects, character, or quality in descriptively exacting ways. Moreover as Husserl points out, language can seduce us into thinking we know when we do not know. The methodology thus highlights the import of being true to the truths of experience, and in doing so, authenticates the basic value of a phenomenological methodology to the human sciences. (shrink)

While interactions with other animate beings seem mostly to serve our own human interests, there are, at times, fugitive glimpses, passing contacts, momentary motions, and fleeting feelings of vital connection with other life forms. Life phenomenology attempts to realize these relational, interactive and intercorporeal possibilities. It challenges the language game of presuming the muteness and bruteness of non-human creatures and, at best, of speaking for them. It critiques the capture of non-human species within the inhibiting ring of human functions and (...) forms to reveal feelings and flows of interspecies commonality. It brings to expression the experiences of being moved to act and speak with others who do not share the human tongue. In part a critique of the logocentric, anthropocentric phenomenologies of intentionality, life phenomenology is more positively a means of coming to terms with the life-affirming kinetic, kinesthetic and affective dynamics of interspecies relationality. I take up the interrogation of this phenomenality, this humanimality, with the assistance of phenomenological scholarship that lends fuller credence to the experiences we have of moving in concert with other animate beings. In doing so, I aim to show the important insights that life phenomenology offers us in fostering not only greater appreciation of, responsivenss to and connection with other animals, but also in indicating the qualitative dynamics of relating with greater animate consciousness to one anotherof our own animal kind. (shrink)

This paper is based on the eco-pedagogical aspiration to live with domesticated animals in accordance with Alphonso Lingis's Community of those who have nothing in common. I draw upon this remarkable text as well as Lingis's animal writings in describing moments and movements of pathic community. Such a community in affective affiliation with one another, where symbiotic relations are possible and bodily kinships are exercised, exemplifies what is possible in more rational human communities where domesticating impulses seek to harness the (...) vital powers of coconstitutive life. Of telling significance are predatory threats, the manner in which they appear, and the protectionist responses they occasion. By recasting these threats and responses in terms of motional affordances, it may well be possible to move with non-human creatures, both literally and figuratively, beyond the anthropocentric confines of domestication. Animals with whom we appear to have nothing specifically, or in species terms, in common can show us how to cultivate more pathic communities of our own kind. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article considers the relationship of Heidegger's metaphysics of Being-toward-death to what Heidegger describes as “the enigma of motion,” that is, to Dasein's “historicality.” In doing so, the article confronts a series of questions concerning fundamental realities of animate life, realities centering on angst in the face of death, but including curiosity and fear, for example, all such realities being what Heidegger terms “states-of-mind” or “moods.” Thus, the article basically questions Heidegger's elision of a Leibkörper, not only in terms of (...) feelings but in terms of an exaltation of language, an insular notion of Dasein's historicality, and a narrow and deficient depiction of animals in his “philosophical biology.” Through a critical examination of the phenomenological disclosure that Heidegger seeks in his metaphysics of Being-toward-death, the article shows that death and the very concept of death hinges on being a body, a temporally finite animate body. Thus, however metaphysical its exposition, Being-toward-death is existentially anchored in being a body. (shrink)

This article offers critical and constructive perspectives essential to understanding living bodies, and, in effect, to showing that kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life. Critical perspectives focus on practices that distance us from the lived realities of animate nature, on insights into those realities, and on ways in which language is intimately related to those realities. Constructive perspectives focus on ontogenetic studies that empirically testify to our being animate organisms from the start. The studies (...) validate Husserl’s insight into the developmental progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. On the basis of these perspectives, concluding observations focus on the mutual validation of empirical and phenomenological research, on the distinction between movement and objects in motion, on the distinction between perceiving and feeling one’s body, and on the distinction between having a body and being a body. (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)

Se aborda de forma crítica la exposición del desorden del espectro autista llevada a cabo en la quinta y última edición del Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), herramienta principal de muchos psiquiatras para comprender y diagnosticar cualquier psicopatología. Con este abordaje se busca evidenciar cómo, en el DSM-5 –al igual que en la interpretación inaugurada por Baron-Cohen, Leslie y Frith–, se deja de lado la experiencia y el cuerpo animado del paciente, por lo que es aconsejable un (...) nuevo acercamiento a dicho desorden que tenga fundamentos fenomenológicos. Finalmente, se presenta el bosquejo de una fenomenología del desorden del espectro autista que reconoce la primacía del cuerpo animado en la experiencia del mundo, de sí mismo y de los otros. (shrink)

Se aborda de forma crítica la exposición del desorden del espectro autista llevada a cabo en la quinta y última edición del Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, herramienta principal de muchos psiquiatras para comprender y diagnosticar cualquier psicopatología. Con este abordaje se busca evidenciar cómo, en el DSM-5, al igual que en la interpretación inaugurada por Baron-Cohen, Leslie y Frith, se deja de lado la experiencia y el cuerpo animado del paciente, por lo que es aconsejable un nuevo (...) acercamiento a dicho desorden que tenga fundamentos fenomenológicos. Se finaliza presentando un bosquejo de una fenomenología del desorden del espectro autista que reconoce la primacía del cuerpo animado en la experiencia del mundo, de sí mismo y de los otros. (shrink)

A key phrase in working with horses, “bringing up life” is taken in its literal sense of moving expressively and energetically in order to animate the movements of the horses. The phrase also points to both what the radical phenomenologist Michel Henry referred to as the auto-affectivity of life and the vital powers of an essential hetero-affectivity. “Bringing up life” is the kinetic, kinaesthetic, affective expression of this fundamental impression that life is shared with other animate beings and that it (...) is all the more powerfully felt for being so. Working with horses – in spite of all the human conceits that groundwork, liberty training, and the riding disciplines hold – can thus reveal what it means to “bring up life” as more than a topic of very practical interest and specific phenomenological description. Through the impressional investigation of this expression we may well begin to feel our way toward more life-affirming, life-enhancing interactions with others of our own and many other animal kinds. (shrink)