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The Phenomenology of Pain and Pleasure: Henry and Levinas
Full text linkWhile Henry and Levinas are often juxtaposed, little attention has been given to their shared views on pain and pleasure. Both phenomenologists converge on the argument that an adequate account of pain and pleasure requires a critical confrontation with the theory of intentionality. This raises further questions. What roles do interiority and exteriority play in pain and pleasure? Should they be conceived as different tonalities of one essence or as heterogenous phenomena? Despite their shared critique of intentionality, Henry and Levinas respond differently to these questions. We argue that Henry’s account suffers from an imprisonment in immanence, leading to a homogenous account of pain and pleasure as derivatives of one essence. In our view, Levinas points toward a more fruitful phenomenological account, both in so far as he does not divorce pain and pleasure from exteriority, and also in the way his phenomenology preserves the heterogeneity of pleasure and pain
What World is This? On Judith Butler\u27s Ethico-Politics of Breath and Touch: Review Essay
No full textSartre and the Phenomenology of Pain: A Closer Look
Full text linkConventionally distinguished as a problem for medical professionals, experiences of embodied pain have prompted a significant set of themes and perspectives in the Continental tradition of philosophy. The discipline of phenomenology, in particular, offers thought-provoking approaches for understanding the fullness and diversity of living one’s pain in everyday life. In contrast to scientific practices that tend to take for granted the subjective structures of human consciousness in action, the phenomenological framework of lived experience offers profoundly subtle accounts for explaining how a person’s pain alters their ways of relating to themselves, to others, and to the wider world around them. In recent years, scholars of phenomenology have undertaken extensive research on the complex relationality between health and human consciousness, including the behavioral grids and existential textures that come with that relationship. Greatly influenced by twentieth century phenomenology, this new development in the scholarship has undergone three distinct waves. The first wave focused on the work of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer to develop a hermeneutic of healthcare practice; the second wave incorporated Maurice Merleau-Ponty to understand illness from an increasingly carnal point of view; and the third and most recent wave has relied primarily on Edmund Husserl to construct the intentionality involved with the consciousness of pain
The Divine Game Versus the Demonic Game: The Fourth Copernican Revolution in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition
Full text linkIn Difference and Repetition1 Deleuze sets out to critique the regime of representation and common sense by developing a new conception of difference and repetition in which difference and repetition become liberated from the coherence and continuity of a self or I.2 Difference in itself means that difference has become independent not only from representation, but also from an enduring or coherent self. Difference in itself and repetition in itself are the becoming different and the repetition of a fractured or dissolved self, which Deleuze relates to both a larval subject3 and to a simulacrum.4 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defines both the concepts of larval subject and simulacrum through the multiplicities and differential relations of the realm of the virtual.5 However, they are not the same. A simulacrum defines a condition in which an entity has become transformed into pure appearance in which nothing appears. A simulacrum is no longer an entity, but only the illusion of an entity.6 This is distinct from the larval subject because the larval subject is an embryonic entity, an entity in the process of formation.7 Through an analysis of the conceptual relation and distinction between larval subject and simulacrum in the first part of the essay, I will reinterpret Deleuze as a philosopher of indifference and the impossibility of repetition, which is a critique on the common idea that Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is a philosophy of pure difference and pure repetition. Also, I will argue that Deleuze did not just develop a transcendental empiricism (a metaphysics of process), but a philosophy of the universal in itself (which is the collapse of metaphysics). The universal in itself emerges when experience collapses and when the self-determination of entities has become impossible
Loving with bell, Leaping with Fanon, and Landing Nowhere
Full text linkbell teaches us that love is what makes it possible for life that doesn’t matter—life that doesn’t have access to the timeline of Man (or any timeline)—to matter. She writes, “No matter our place in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal culture, when we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination.” bell calls on us to abandon our (bad) faith in Man’s positivism and progress in favor of another kind of faith: “spiritual awakening.” In what follows, I pair bell’s insight with Fanon’s argument that “occult instability” is what yields revolution, in order to elaborate love in bell’s own words: as “reckless abandon,” as a “spiritual awakening” that asks us to give up on this world in search of an/Other, even (especially) if we do not (yet) know where or how or if we will arrive at that landing
Atlantic Theory and Theories
Full text linkNotes on Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy XXX, no. 2 (2022
Martinique Between Fanon and Naipaul
Full text linkAn argument for the proximity, if not absolute sameness, of Naipaul and Fanon on the status of the West Indies in the age of colonialism and independence struggle
Epidermalization of Inferiority: A Fanonian Reading of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour
Full text linkAs part of the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the following reflections are akin to his critical work on the psychoaffective impact of colonialism. Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority has inspired my analysis of the socio-political struggles in Haiti and the complex antagonisms shaped by colonialism, contemporary political personalities, and constantly clashing perceptions of race, gender and nation. I turn to Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority in Black Skin, White Masks to explore the effects of French colonization on the female protagonist’s psyche in Marie-Vieux Chauvet’s Amour. Chauvet was born just short of a decade prior to Fanon, and writes, like him, in the moment of anti- colonial struggle in the Caribbean, exploring like Black Skin, White Masks the psychological effects and affects of colonialism. A Fanonian reading of the text illustrates the psychological impact of colonialism on women in post-colonial societies that remain deeply governed by the former colonizer’s values
Book Review: Jill Jarvis, Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)
Full text linkJill Jarvis’s book Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony is a promising contribution to the flourishing research being done in the field of Memory Studies, that is challenging the Western and in this case the French politics of testimony from the postcolonial point of view. This book can be read from the larger ethical-political perspective in the field of International Relations, where there is a growing demand for Reconciliation Commissions to address archives beyond the legal framework. The book, as the title suggests, brings together both Postcolonial Studies and Memory studies in the context of Algerian history. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Jarvis’s deconstructive approach to testimony and memory examines how literature archives the two as forms of resilience, as bearers of witness to experiences that surpass both time and space to fill the gaps in official forms of testimony. As more and more nations are demanding compensation from their perpetrators for past violence and crime against humanity on the political front, this book’s relevance is heightened with its demand for justice and reform, and not merely to forgive and forget. The work of deconstruction that Jarvis undertakes to break down familiar language through reflections on the idea of Muslim, justice, witness, and revolt among others, she critiques the age-old practices of testimonial interrogations and censure that destabilises the multifaceted embodiment of Empire. “France remains constitutively haunted by the empire that it has tried both to exorcise and atone for (12)” succinctly covers the period of Algerian colonisation in 1830 to France’s continued endeavour to redeem and absolve itself from its colonial violence that has been and still remains under the shroud of wilful Western amnesia. Jarvis attempts to expose the denial of the paradox of the French Republican values they are so proud of, to demand justice and reform for the most abject
The Work of Staying-With
Full text linkThere is a breathlessness to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon leaves us in no doubt that he is an author with a great deal to say about matters, among which racism, colonialism and the effect of both on the black body and psyche are his preeminent concern, that are politically urgent. As they are. Such is Fanon’s urgency that he uses every resource at his disposal – works of literature that turn on the colonial condition, psychoanalysis (from Freud to Lacan with the likes of Mannoni in between), as well as the occasional philosophical invocation (Hegel is a presence if by no means a fleshed-out one; although, it must be said, it is Jean-Paul Sartre who is called to do duty most often). Although Fanon suggests that he considered presenting Black Skin, White Masks as a doctoral thesis, one finds it difficult to imagine such a prospect, in no small measure because the project is so stylistically incoherent. Black Skin, White Masks is an admixture of the anecdotal (Fanon has no trouble extracting political or psychoanalytic conclusions from his personal encounters; a tendency which applies as much to his Martinican past as to his experience of living in France; a tendency that extends to making deductions based on his observations in colonized Algeria), the psychoanalytic, the implicitly philosophical and the rhetorical. That is, the rhetorical in the sense that this is how Fanon structures his argument: through the declarative, through declamation. A scientific work Black Skin, White Masks is not.