Srijan Uzir - Comparing Derrida and Merleau-Ponty's philosophies of Embodiment and Language

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Srijan Uzir   Abstract: In the late text Le Toucher - Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida engages with the French reception of Husserl’s Ideas II, focusing particularly on the constitution of the “corps propre” (Leib) and, in this context, dedicating an important chapter to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body. Le Toucher-Jean-Luc Nancy is important not simply because it allows to see how the problematics of deconstruction relate to the questions of bodily perception, but also because it allows us to situate deconstruction outside the restricted domain of language games. In this paper, we will pay attention to Derrida’s reading of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in this late text, in the light of the published course notes of Merleau-Ponty’s lessons on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, entitled Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. This approach will allow us to compare the differences in their perspectives with respect to the origin of sense in history and question of embodiment. Although both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida are deeply influenced by Heidegger in their reading of the late Husserl, for the former the genesis of sense takes places in corporality, a virtue that is shared with the Other, and language is conceived of as the site of the original presence where a chiasmus (Ineinander) between self and other is realized. On the other hand, instead of conceiving language as a form of embodied relation, Derrida wants to reconfigure the concept of the body as writing. It is the nuance of this distinction that must be brought to bear on their respective philosophies. Our paper will explore this with regard to the husserlian problematics of facts and essences. This paper suggests that whereas Merleau-Ponty is interested in situating essence in factuality without succumbing to empiricism, Derrida focuses on the topic of exemplarity as a necessary means of passing to ideality; for him, ignoring the difference between facts and examples can only lead to empiricism and psychologism.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Oda Davanger   Abstract: The paper, “Tracing Inscriptions: Can Signs be Embodied?” analyzes the linguistic implications of what it means to theorize bodies as inscripted, particularly in relation to intentionality. In critical phenomenology, the notion of embodied inscription has been important to investigate the effects of agency on gendered and racialized bodies, as theorized by Young and Fanon in pointing out the shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The author identifies structuralist tendencies in Merleau-Ponty that has survived critical phenomenology’s double critique and appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s texts. The author does so by invoking Jacques Derrida’s critique of Saussurian structuralism, by positing inscription as a form of Althusserian interpellation, and analyzing the body as trace instead of sign. The author asks, if there are strucutralist premises in critical phenomenology, what might the critique of such structuralism provoke in terms of its analysis of otherness? For it is not inscription alone that leads to inhibited intentionality, for as black existentialism and feminist phenomenology has pointed out, whiteness and maleness are likewise inscriptions. Analyzing the body as trace rather than sign interestingly reinvigorates Derrida’s critique of Saussure’s privileging of speech over writing, and presence over absence, in new gendered terms. Furthermore, this analysis of inscription opens the door to historicity, to a combined notion of language, temporality and otherness that expands the Saussurian structuralism within Merleau-Ponty’s already temporal notion of habit. This paper provides an opportunity to find approaches to the ambiguity of embodied otherness and its effects as inhibited bodily and political movement. The alterity easily distinguishable in gender and race potentially reveals something about the human condition as inscribed altogether.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Adam Takacs   Abstract: The traditional phenomenological approach to the body is premised on a constitutive analysis of touch and movement. On this basis, it is possible to trace the configuration that entangles the affective experience of the “lived body” with the objectified conditions of the world as given in space, orientation and perspective. It is also on this basis that one can conclude that the body, as Merleau-Ponty claims, possesses an “operative intentionality” that endows it, through its own habitualities, with a specific temporality and memory. This talk aims to go one step further in this direction. I will argue that in interpreting the body’s own time, it is also worth considering the context implied by its relationship with the physical environment. To highlight this, I will introduce the notion of “contact” as distinct from touch, as a phenomenological feature that testifies to the body’s intense and intricate coexistence with things. I try to show that, at the level of physical contact, the body is subject to temporal processes which inevitably affects its living structure, exposing it to the interplay of erosion and resilience. By showcasing a time that leave material marks or ontologically “stigmatizes”, I will argue that this condition, through the facticity and phenomenality of bodily ageing, inscribes the primordial mode of embodiment in the fabric of collective history.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Paul Tuppeny   Abstract: Our world is, by its nature, a place of change; trees grow, fruit ripens and skin wrinkles; every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting. Intrinsic to the perceptual apparatus through which we know this place, it seems, are pre-reflective judgements concerning these transformative processes. We experience these intuitions as age.   Through this phenomenon of age, we ‘feel’ Time in the physical things around us, every episode of perception conveying the past, projecting a future and delivering to us a temporally extended spatial arena. Although derived from only momentary observations, the discernment of objective age allows us to chronicle the world’s flux and stabilise the evanescent environment in which we find ourselves.   This primordial perceptual comportment, evolved to understand changes in the Natural environment, is applied equally to the artefacts of our technicity, gathering together their sedimented temporal layers to build our heritage.   The paper begins with an investigation into the “material-temporality” of natural entities and speculates on the cognitive mechanisms that might imbue physical objects with temporal characteristics. In these, Husserl’s notion of the ad-memorised co-presentations that fuse with our sensory data appear central. Similarly important, though, are Aristotle’s observations concerning our biographic assimilation of objects and the coalescence of those change-narratives around an entity’s actuality, or telos, as defined through the purposes of the subject.   The discussion then moves to the age that we experience in man-made objects. These artefacts do not just embody their own past but that of their originating community, experienced through our empathic interpretation of them as “spiritualised objects,” animated by the intent of their makers.   The paper concludes with the proposition that it is the phenomenon of age which stitches us into the fabric of the world and marries our needs with its, and our own, inherent generative processes.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Andrejs Balodis   Abstract: The paper will explore the concept of body memory and its application in the context of phenomenologically oriented medical humanities. Recent phenomenological research indicates that body memory plays a significant role in shaping embodied experience, both at the subjective and intersubjective levels. (Casey 1987, Fuchs 2012, 2017, Froese & Izquierdo 2018, etc.) However, due to its non-representational nature, body-memory is a challenging topic for research. I argue that structures of embodiment such as body memory and collective body memory (introduced by Fuchs) contribute in shaping health behaviors of individuals and communities, such as reluctance to get vaccinated against Covid-19 during the pandemic.   We* conducted a phenomenologically grounded qualitative research to explain motivations behind vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Existing studies on the subject lack a comprehensive, in-depth explanation of the role of the embodied experience in vaccine hesitancy. By applying a phenomenological conceptual framework – using concepts like embodiment, intentionality, lifeworld, body image, body schema, habitual body, normality etc.), we have gained insights into the embodied experience of vaccine reluctance and the underlying structures that shapes this experience.   The qualitative study (N=16) carried out in Latvia allows us to draw conclusions not only about individual but also collective models of health experience, emphasizing the socio-cultural and historical dimensions in the embodied experience. I will argue that the phenomenological concepts of the body memory and collective body memory can shed light on long-standing practices, habits and attitudes, thereby explaining culturally specific health behaviours, including hesitancy to vaccinate.   *This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project Hesitant bodies: phenomenological analysis of the embodied experience of vaccine hesitancy, project No. lzp-2021/1-0360   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Dan Degerman   Abstract: This paper articulates the sense of silence as a historically constituted, embodied capacity to skillfully grasp and deploy silence, using mania as a breakdown case.   Silence is ubiquitous. We are surrounded by the silences of objects, spaces, other people, and our own bodies. Generally, these silences go unnoticed, forming a background against which we skillfully engage with people and the world through speech and sound. For example, we can pre-reflectively grasp the silence punctuating an interlocutor’s utterance as a solicitation to break our own silence by speaking. Similarly, we can pre-reflectively grasp their waning attention as a solicitation for us to become silent again, enabling them to speak and us to listen. I will propose that we can usefully understand this as involving the sense of silence.   Drawing on resources from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I will define and explore this sense of silence through a case in which that sense has apparently broken down, namely, mania. Symptoms of mania include an unmanageable flood of thoughts and an urge to speak. First-person accounts of those symptoms indicate that they may bring a profound disruption in the individual’s relationship to silence. In some, silence is described as a newfound source of agony, in others, as an elusive goal. Individuals appear reflectively aware of social norms and personal habits that ordinarily govern silence but their affective hold has loosened. Some people invent painful, physical methods to try to replace that hold. This suggests that the sense of silence is an embodied capacity, historically constituted through the sedimentation of norms and habits.   Thus, the paper offers two benefits: first, a better understanding of how our historically constituted relationship to silence enables us in our everyday lives, and second, insight into how its disruption may disable us in mania.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from David Ventura   Abstract: Despite seldom referring to the European phenomenological tradition in his varied studies of Caribbean subjectivity, Édouard Glissant’s work has often been read as phenomenological. Even Glissant’s most perceptive readers seemingly take for granted that his work fits this description, “privileging as it does phenomenology over ontology” (Wiedorn). This paper aims to complicate Glissant’s relation to the phenomenological tradition by placing his work into dialogue with the “six senses of critique for critical phenomenology” identified by Lisa Guenther. I argue that while Glissant’s work is broadly aligned with Guenther’s stipulation that “Critical phenomenology (…) [seeks] to trace the contingent, historical emergence of structures like white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, to ask whether and how these structures could be otherwise (…) and to reclaim, create, and support more liberatory ways of being, relating, and sense-making,” Glissant also significantly alters, or creolizes, the stakes of this critical phenomenological enterprise by virtue of his sustained attention to the brutal historical experiences of transatlantic slavery, the Middle Passage, and their ongoing implications for present and future forms of thinking and relating. Attending both to his theoretical texts (e.g. Poetics of Relation) and his literary output (e.g. Mahagony), I argue that Glissant’s work critically brings into relief some of the still-too-Western presuppositions of Guenther’s politically engaged definition of critical phenomenology. As such, I conclude, Glissant’s corpus offers new directions for what future senses of critique may be adequate for a phenomenological practice seeking to overcome the violence of contingent structures such as coloniality, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Haotian Wu   Abstract: Can film do phenomenology? The short answer is ‘Yes’. As Heidegger (2001: 59) writes, ‘any exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself, may be called “phenomenology” with formal justification.’ In essence, ‘phenomenology is to “let us see”.’ Accordingly, film, an artform excelling at showing, exhibiting, and letting us see, is phenomenology per excellence. It is, therefore, not surprising that many people, including Merleau-Ponty (2020), claim that film is the most phenomenological medium. However, this fertile land of film as phenomenology remains largely uncultivated.   This paper contributes to this gap by showing that Farwell My Concubine (Kaige Chen, 1993), a masterpiece of Chinese cinema, is a phenomenology of modern Chinese history. I argue that it shows a structure of historical experience as a repetition of an ambivalent gesture, a farewell to the past as performative identities, which is simultaneously a beckoning to the future as an authentic self-transcendence. These two aspects of the same gesture are respectively represented by Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung), two Peking opera actors. From their first-person perspective, we witness the historical upheavals of 20th-century China, which, in the film, is foregrounded by the opera ‘Farwell My Concubine’. The opera is a historical drama about an ancient warlord, Xiang Yu, played by Xiaolou, bidding farewell to his beloved concubine, Consort Yu, played by Dieyi, after losing a decisive battle. As the opera mirrors each regime transformation, the phenomenological nature of the film is laid bare: It is not about modern Chinese history per se but about how history, enacted out and suffered by the two actors’ lived bodies, manifests a common structure of experience, worthy of phenomenological articulation.   Articulating this structure, this film-phenomenology paper contributes to exploring the linear and cyclical nature of the phenomenology of history.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Daniele Nuccilli   Abstract: In Die neue Wissenschaft vom Recht II, Husserl’s former student Wilhelm Schapp states that, “the history of humanity is the history of its works” and for this reason the relations between self, work, value, and production can be considered as “the a priori of historical science” (p. 67). Starting from this, he proposes an analysis of the historical dimension of values and their relationship to the production and development of objects of use. This analysis proposes a phenomenology of creation that aims at dismissing the static conception of essences of classical phenomenology. In In Geschichten verstrickt, this analysis is further deepened and linked to the theory of human entanglement in histories. Central to the notion of entanglement is Schapp’s conception of the primal body. By primal body he means the body of humans when they act in the everyday life-world. It is this conception of the primal body that makes it possible to conceive of humans as being intertwined with histories and carrying histories. The life-world displays traces of the histories of the past that thicken around historical events with agent subjects, individual or collective, at the center. We can get in connection with them through what Schapp calls co-entanglement. The co-entanglement can be defined as a kind of taking part in histories, projecting ourselves into the historical horizon of something that is told to us, through narratives and books, but also through things and monuments understood as works of humanity. The past in this way emerges on the horizon as a tangle of intertwining stories of our past in which we personally or our family and nation are entangled. In my paper I will analyze the relationship between body, history and life-world taking into account Schapp conception of entanglement in histories.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Philip Tovey   Abstract: Breverton Pond, situated on the southern edge of Exmoor in Somerset England, is commonly cited as the source of the River Tone - its origins. Rivers often have disputed origins. A second stream, rising in Elworthy, 2.6 miles West, contends to be the source of the River Tone. Problems of origin were central to Husserl's project in Experience and Judgment (EJ), where enduring objects are constituted in the flux of an ever becoming. Judgements, like rivers, have disputed origins, creating issues with the temporal fixity modernity is reliant on. Using the temporal overlaps Jay Lampert extracts from EJ, together with David Woods eco-phenomenological outline of the plexity of time  as my analytical handrails, this paper reports an autoethnography of the embodied ecologies of the River Tone, walked barefoot, from source to mouth, over three consecutive days and nights. How does the River Tone ‘originate’ in experience when I put my foot in it? As the headwaters ‘overlap’ (Überschiebung) my foot now ‘depositioning’ into the streambed of historical depositions of Devonian Sandstone, how do these ecological entanglements mediate the visibility of my origins? The implications of ecophenomenology as an analytical framework coupled with autoethnography are briefly discussed in relation to how temporality features in riverine policy formulations within the UK.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/