50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology 50 CONCEPTS FOR A CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY EDITED BY GAIL WEISS ANN V. MURPHY GAYLE SALAMON Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2020. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Weiss, Gail, 1959– editor. | Murphy, Ann V., editor. | Salamon, Gayle, editor. Title: 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology / edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V Murphy, Gayle Salamon. Other titles: Fifty concepts for a critical phenomenology Description: Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2019. | Includes index. | Summary: “This volume is an introduction to both newer and more established ideas in the growing field of critical phenomenology from a number of disciplinary perspectives”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019022558 | ISBN 9780810141148 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810141155 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810141162 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. Classification: LCC B829.5 .A314 2019 | DDC 142.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022558 This volume is dedicated to critical phenomenologists: past, present, and future. Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Transformative Descriptions xiii Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon 1 The Phenomenological Method 3 Duane H. Davis 2 Critical Phenomenology 11 Lisa Guenther 3 Bad Faith 17 Lewis R. Gordon 4 Being and beings: The Ontological/Ontic Distinction 25 John D. Caputo 5 Being-in-Itself, Being- for-Itself, and Being-for-Others 31 Kris Sealey 6 Being-toward-Death 39 Mark Ralkowski 7 Borderlands and Border Crossing 47 Natalie Cisneros 8 Collective Continuance 53 Kyle Whyte 9 Compulsory Able-Bodiedness 61 Robert McRuer 10 Confiscated Bodies 69 George Yancy 11 Controlling Images 77 Patricia Hill Collins 12 Corporeal Generosity 83 Rosalyn Diprose 13 Decolonial Imaginary 91 Eduardo Mendieta 14 Durée 99 Alia Al-Saji 15 Epistemological Ignorance 107 Charles W. Mills 16 Eros 115 Tamsin Kimoto and Cynthia Willett 17 The Eternal Feminine 121 Debra Bergoffen 18 Ethical Freedom 127 Shannon M. Mussett 19 The Face 135 Diane Perpich 20 The Flesh of the World 141 Donald A. Landes 21 Geomateriality 149 Ted Toadvine 22 The Habit Body 155 Helen A. Fielding 23 Heteronormativity 161 Megan Burke 24 Hometactics 169 Mariana Ortega 25 Horizons 175 David Morris 26 Imaginaries 181 Moira Gatens 27 Immanence and Transcendence 189 Shiloh Whitney 28 Intercorporeality 197 Scott Marratto 29 The Körper/Leib Distinction 203 Jenny Slatman 30 The Look 211 William McBride 31 Mestiza Consciousness 217 Elena Ruíz 32 Misfitting 225 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 33 Model Minority 231 Emily S. Lee 34 The Natural Attitude 237 Lanei M. Rodemeyer 35 The Normate 243 Joel Michael Reynolds 36 Ontological Expansiveness 249 Shannon Sullivan 37 Operative Intentionality 255 Jennifer McWeeny 38 Perceptual Faith 263 Jack Reynolds 39 Public Self/Lived Subjectivity 269 Linda Martín Alcoff 40 Queer Orientations 275 Lauren Guilmette 41 Queer Performativity 283 Sarah Hansen 42 The Racial Epidermal Schema 289 Axelle Karera 43 Racist Love 295 David Haekwon Kim 44 Sens /Sense 303 Keith Whitmoyer 45 Social Death 309 Perry Zurn 46 The They 315 Nancy J. Holland 47 Time/Temporality 321 Dorothea Olkowski 48 Trans Phenomena 329 Talia Mae Bettcher 49 Witnessing 337 Kelly Oliver 50 World-Traveling 343 Andrea J. Pitts Contributors 351 Index 359 xi Acknowledgments We wish to thank the societies that have nurtured us as critical phenomenologists, par- ticularly the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, and philoSOPHIA: A Society for Continental Feminism. Not only academic venues, but also scholarly communities, they have fostered the friend- ships we share with each other and with the volume’s contributors. Thanks to Northwestern University Press for enthusiastically supporting this proj- ect from its inception. We are grateful to Jane Bunker, to whom we originally pitched this idea, to Trevor Perri, who shepherded it all the way through, and to Anne Gendler for her skillful handling of the final production process. We thank RL Goldberg for his invaluable assistance formatting a long manuscript and Cathy Hannabach for the book’s index. Finally we thank our contributors, whose collective support and enthusiasm was our greatest inspiration. We are grateful to each of them for their dedication to the project and for their wonderful work. xiii Introduction: Transformative Descriptions How could an anthology possibly have a central perspective? — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins with a question: “What is phenomenology?” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, this question remains unan- swered. Our volume does not propose to answer it but rather to honor its generative insight, an insight that Merleau-Ponty inherits from Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology , namely that the philosopher is a “perpetual beginner.” As a philosophical tradition, phenomenology has privileged wonder, ambiguity, and curiosity over the Cartesian drive toward certainty, determinacy, and indubitability. One of phenomenology’s most axiomatic methodological commitments is the refusal to accept the taken-for-grantedness of experience. This commitment entails the perpetual interrogation of the most familiar features of our everyday experiences, not to deny them but in order to know them better. Like literature, history, and anthropology, phenome- nology has yielded rich descriptions of lived experience. Phenomenology is marked by a faith that such descriptions can disclose the most basic structures of human existence, including temporality, perception, language, and intersubjectivity. As these structures are brought into relief, our understanding of our own experiences is transformed, and our deepest assumptions about our very being in the world may be challenged. The fifty concepts that appear in this volume exemplify the continuing fecundity of attunement to lived experience and its structuring conditions that have been a hallmark of the phenomenological method. Together they also expand our understanding of phe- nomenology’s potential far beyond its classical horizons. Our intellectual landscape has now been significantly shaped by disciplines that did not exist when phenomenology’s foundational texts were being written. It is our conviction as phenomenologists that the diverse disciplinary perspectives offered by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, queer theorists, decolonial and indigenous scholars, disability studies scholars, and oth- ers are crucial for phenomenology’s future. They are also producing exciting readings of the phenomenological canon from marginalized perspectives that breathe new life into its foundational texts. By illuminating constitutive aspects of human existence that chal- lenge the universalizing tendencies of philosophy, they bring new accountability and new promise to the practice of phenomenology. A central Husserlian tenet is that an experience can never be understood or described in isolation. This means not only that our experiences are interconnected but also that xiv Acknowledgments they are always generated from particular places, times, and cultural milieus. More spe- cifically, Husserl claims that there is a dynamic and reversible figure/ground structure to all experience whereby in focusing on an individual phenomenon, all else necessar- ily recedes into a more or less indeterminate background. This holds true not only for perceiving and conceiving but also for imagining, judging, willing, valuing, and feel- ing, that is, for the many different ways we are intentionally oriented toward the world around us. The figure/ground structure, he asserts, is itself situated within multiple horizons of significance, including temporal, spatial, social, historical, cultural, politi- cal, and institutional horizons. These horizons actively inform our experience and for the most part do so prereflectively, without our explicit awareness. Nonetheless, they exert substantial influence in determining what becomes the figure and what remains the ground. Merleau-Ponty, focusing on the primacy of perception, describes the ways in which perceptual patterns become sedimented over time as embodied habits. Hab- its can render the world comfortable, familiar, and predictable even though, as several entries in this volume remind us, they necessarily limit our horizons, foreclosing some perspectives and possibilities by privileging others. Contemporary phenomenologists increasingly recognize that these foreclosures are a function of structural, political, and institutional inequities that are internalized as personal biases and habits. This insight has inspired a critical phenomenology, one that mobilizes phenomenological description in the service of a reflexive inquiry into how power relations structure experience as well as our ability to analyze that experience. Critique is not critical if it refuses to situate itself, to recognize the limitations and liabil- ities of its own perspective. A critical phenomenology draws attention to the multiple ways in which power moves through our bodies and our lives. It is also an ameliorative phenomenology that seeks not only to describe but also to repair the world, encourag- ing generosity, respect, and compassion for the diversity of our lived experiences. Such a project can never be an individual endeavor, moreover, but requires coalitional labor and solidarity across difference. The authors collected in this volume range from distinguished scholars revisiting some of the terms they have coined or made famous to newer voices who are actively working to expand the boundaries of what counts as philosophical inquiry. These think- ers bear varying degrees of fidelity to phenomenology as a method and a tradition; however, as their entries reveal, each offers rich phenomenological insights that open up new horizons for critical phenomenology. This volume is intended as a resource and also as an invitation to you, our readers, to join us in the interrogation of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, whether in experience, thought, or perception. In so doing, we make the familiar newly strange and bring the unfamiliar in closer, even while pre- serving its alterity. Such a critical phenomenology—whatever it may become—disrupts sedimented patterns of thinking and perceiving, creating the conditions of possibility for new and unpredictable futures. Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 2017, and North Pomfret, Vermont, March 2018 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology 3 1 The Phenomenological Method Duane H. Davis If, just over one hundred years after its initial development, we ask what the meaning and significance of the phenomenological method could be for us today, it is imperative that the articulation of this position be fundamentally situated within the intersectionality that is human existence. From its beginnings in Husserl’s thought, phenomenology has consistently been defined as a response to crisis—a critical inquiry into the very nature of our being. There is no doubt that Husserl’s phenomenological method famously or infamously invokes a transcendental turn that is grounded in the reflective power of the transcendental ego, but surely all of this matters to us only if it pertains to matters- at- hand. Husserl noted that all subjectivity is intersubjectivity ; now we must consider such differentials not only among our diverse selves but within the selves we are becom- ing. Transcendental subjectivity must be redescribed in terms of intersectionality to develop a critical phenomenology. As we shall see, the phenomenological method pro- vides the basis for us to do so. Another, more direct way of emphasizing the praxial promise of this project is to describe intersectionality as the occasion for the redeploy- ment of phenomenology. Thus, race, gender, and class and their intersection are not ancillary to phenomenology if it is to be relevant today for addressing the ongoing crises we face daily. I will begin with a general account of the phenomenological method—more conjur- ing its spirit than explicating any specific philosopher’s incarnation of it. There are great differences in the senses ascribed to the phenomenological method among the various philosophers who are associated with the phenomenological movement. 1 Given the brevity of this essay, we do not have the luxury of exploring the nuances of any phe- nomenologist’s position; however, in the latter portion of this essay, I would like to call attention briefly to one small aspect of Husserl’s thought that might help us see the promise of a critical phenomenology in a direction similar to the vision of Patricia Hill Collins. 4 Duane H. Davis The General Sense of the Phenomenological Method The phenomenological method is an attempt to offer prescriptive descriptions of the world in which we live. 2 It involves the transformation of the way we understand our world such that we can be astonished before it—the attempt to see our world as if for the first time, through unjaded eyes. This transformation is to be affected by suspending our habitual and theoretical presuppositions and thus allowing the world to appear as it becomes what it is and as it matters to us. When we read that phenomenology is the account of appearances , we see that there is something at stake here that does not come down to subjective perspective or worldview—the way something appears to some one , to one ’s culture, or even to any one culture. Appearances in the phenomenological sense are not psychic construc- tions. Likewise, the account of appearances-as- they-are does not connote an objective account. Appearances in the phenomenological sense are not abstractions bereft of a world. The phenomenological method is not an attempt to purge subjective bias to reveal objective truth—instead it regards the pretense of traditional objectivity as a bias every bit as much as the caprice of subjectivity. As we shall see, it is helpful to remember that phenomenology seeks to give accounts of appearances as processes —of the coming- to- appear. The principal aspects of the phenomenological method we shall consider here include intentionality , the epochē , the phenomenological and eidetic reductions , and transcendental subjectivity . Each of these aspects of the phenomenological method is intertwined with the others, yet we should attempt to distinguish these aspects in order to reveal the promise of critical phenomenology. Undoubtedly the foundational insight of the phenomenological method is intention- ality : our understanding is always engaged within the world. We stand in the world we are understanding. This means that neither subjectivity nor objectivity is an epi- phenomenal illusion determined at the exclusion of the other, but both are instead ineluctably bound together. The principle of intentionality thus offers a new standpoint to seek understanding of the world, since we are no longer equating consciousness with some interiority standing over against some exteriority which must be related through metaphysical sleight of hand. Instead, phenomenological intentional consciousness is the relation itself such that consciousness is always “consciousness of ” something. As existential phenomenologists (i.e., Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Sartre) expanded upon Husserl’s position, they explored intentionality as an intimate relation and explored its significance in ways not restricted to its epistemological formulation. That is, consciousness is not merely a knower-known relation but is also “being-in- the- world” or “the flesh of the world.” However it is construed, this phenomenological intentional consciousness is not easy to come by; it is an achievement—a radical alteration of everyday and theoreti- cal consciousness. Our most common ways of understanding are motivated by biases and habits that can originate individually or culturally. Phenomenology is, as the name implies, an account of appearances, and it begins as a reflection upon experiences as we live them. Lived experience ( Erlebnis ) is transient, fleeting, and not intrinsically reliable as a form of understanding. Yet this is the kind of understanding that prevails in our everyday ways of acting and interacting in the world. Husserl’s name for this The Phenomenological Method 5 uncritical affirmation of the world is the natural standpoint , to which he contrasts the phenomenological standpoint . Phenomenology involves a radical alteration of conscious- ness—a complete shift in attitude toward what appears that involves a suspension of the natural attitude. 3 Yet this “mere change of standpoint” holds “the key to all genuine philosophy.” 4 According to Husserl, at least, phenomenology was to be a presuppositionless phi- losophy. In order for phenomena to appear in an unencumbered way as the intentional relations of phenomenological consciousness, we must suspend our everyday assump- tions about phenomena as well as our theoretical predispositions. This process of “bracketing” or “putting out of play” is what Husserl adopted a term from the ancient Greek skeptics to describe: the epochē . Only through this arduous critical exercise can we reveal phenomena as they are. The phenomenological and eidetic reductions are the other side of the same coin, so to speak, of the epochē . Implementing the epochē is the first step in the phenomenological reduction. (It is first logically rather than temporally.) We can think of the word reduc- tion in its culinary sense such that a sauce is reduced to its essence: its defining character becomes unmistakably manifest. By setting aside habitual biases, the phenomenological reduction provides free access to real and potential experience of phenomena con- ceived within the intentional relationship, while the eidetic reduction provides access to “invariant essential structures” of phenomena. 5 These ideals or essential structures are possible only through transcendental reflection. That is, the conditions of the possibility of the appearances are disclosed through this intense reflection. And so, by implementing the skeptical attitude of the epochē and at once engaging in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions, a field of transcendental subjectivity is revealed as the condition of the possibility of the appearance of phenomena within intentional relations. 6 It is important to note here that Husserl did not equate transcen- dental subjectivity with the sovereign subjectivity of early modern Western philosophy’s models of the individual. Transcendental reflection reveals that the subjectivity of the Cartesian “I think,” for example, is but one psychological aspect of the intentional rela- tion of consciousness in all its possibilities. So phenomenology is a rigorous quest asking after the essential structures of appear- ances. They can be disclosed only within the context of intentionality. By bracketing out the natural attitude—the aforementioned habitual biases and theoretical biases—the phenomenon is reduced to its essence. The disclosed structures of phenomena bespeak a certain propriety. For Husserl, especially, the phenomenological method leads us to the things themselves. 7 Husserl’s phenomenology developed constantly throughout his career, yet its status as a purification project remained constant. The purification process of knowledge is achieved only through transcendental phenomenology. It is to be “won,” as Husserl fre- quently states. This rhetoric of winning out against the limitations, biases, errors, and vicissitudes of everyday experience and theoretical presuppositions alludes to a crisis in our understanding of the world. Husserl believed that these crises, both theoretical and practical, could be addressed only through employing the phenomenological method. Now we must consider anew the value of critical phenomenology in addressing con- temporary crises that we understand in terms of intersectionality.