I argue that the temporality of colonialism is a disabling duration. To elaborate, I focus on a site in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where disability/debility and racism intertwine – Fanon’s refusal of “amputation” in his experience of cinema. While such disability metaphors have been problematized as ableist, I argue that amputation is more than a metaphor of lack. It extends what racializing debilitation means and makes tangible the prosthetics that colonialism imposes and the phantoms and affects of colonized (...) life that it attempts to sever. Engaging with disability studies, especially Black and anticolonial theories, I articulate racism and (dis)ability as more than parallel or analogy and conceptualize a debilitating colonial duration, as instanced in our pandemic time. By reconfiguring the possibilities foreclosed through colonialism, I ask what routes there may be to make colonial duration hesitate and destabilize its inevitability, while dwelling with its wounds and ruptures. (shrink)

This article explores aspects of the theory of the constitution of space in the work of Edmund Husserl that appear in his late, posthumously published writings on the themes of intersubjectivity and generativity, which the article proposes imply a theory of environmental experience. It identifies and examines Husserl’s use of the locution Umweltlichkeit as it appears in these late works, proposing a rendering of this term as environmentality. This concept, the article argues, functions operatively in Husserl’s late work, indicating a (...) relationship between his descriptions of the lived bodily constitution of spatiality and his conception of the spatio-environmental nature of the intersubjective and historical becoming of human community. In this way, the article proposes that through the concept of environmentality, Husserl articulates a phenomenological conception of the generativity of space. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relevance and the conceptual role, within Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, of a fleeting impression of shame that reverts the threat of solipsism looming over any project of transcendental philosophy. In reading Sartre’s masterpiece, I underscore two methodological points that tend to be bypassed in standard interpretations and lengthy discussions of the book. On the one hand, I safeguard the strictly descriptive core of Sartre’s presentation of the impression of shame and what it reveals about the formal (...) structures of the (pre-reflective) cogito, as Sartre understands it. On the other hand, my analysis explores the different phases of the (conceptual) narrative of the For-Itself, which Sartre inherits from the Idealist tradition in modern philosophy and applies to the concreteness of a phenomenological description of the main stages of one’s experience of the outside world. (shrink)

There are several problems in conceiving of value experience in early phenomenology. What exactly does the experience of a value consist in? How are we to determine the morality of an action that is based on a value which is, as a reality in and of itself, imposed on us from without? How is the experience of values related to the person and in what way can an intuitive value response be reconciled with the application of acquired, personal value stances? (...) In a joint reading of the early works of Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I propose a systematic solution to these various problems which revolve around the non-reflective self-awareness that a value experience entails: we cannot experience the real, material value quality without changing as persons. Rather than reflecting on an object, we experience the value as ourselves, dynamically reacting to it in the context of a given situation. (shrink)

This paper aims to lay out the main tenets of Bernhard Waldenfels’s analyses of the experience of the alien and to confront the philosophical thesis underwriting them with a central insight stemming from Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy. In the first section, I reconstruct the outlines of the experience of the alien, as described by Waldenfels, and show that, on his account, this experience can function as a powerful impetus enabling us to call into question some of the most deeply held commitments (...) of Western philosophical tradition: the sovereignty of the ego, the supremacy of order, the priority of the whole. In the second section, I show how a patient analysis of this experience compels us to undertake an inquiry concerning the “inter-world,” understood as the place of the encounter and the threshold of separation between the own and the alien. Finally, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s alternative description of the “inter-world,” I maintain that Waldenfels’s account is insufficiently radical and show that the in-between realm cannot be assimilated to an interstice lodged between two insulated spheres. Rather, the “inter-world” should be conceived of as a shared dimension, subtending the partition between the spheres of ownness and alienness, as the one inclusive world. (shrink)

In his private notes written in 1936 (now published as GA82), Heidegger enumerates three “fundamental deceptions” at play in Being and Time (1927). The thrust of these deceptions is twofold: that Dasein is something given and that the task of phenomenology is to describe Dasein in its givenness. These are deceptions, Heidegger claims in 1936, because Dasein is not something given, but can only be reached in a leap, and because the task of phenomenology is not to describe Dasein in (...) its givenness, but to bring about Dasein and the “there,” the site of Being’s happening, through a creative leap-in. Scholars might be inclined to read these deceptions as further evidence for the view that Heidegger in the 1930s abandons phenomenology understood as a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness. This paper argues, to the contrary, that phenomenology for the young Heidegger was never a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness, but always, however obliquely presented throughout the 1920s, a way of participating in the creative unfolding of the site of Being’s happening. (shrink)

In the essay, I present the basic principles of Merab Mamardashvili’s phenomenology of ontological maturation. Though Mamardashvili’s thinking has been recently introduced to the West, there is still very little awareness of the uniqueness of his phenomenological insights, allowing him to illuminate contemporary philosophy’s central ontological and existential matters in a novel light. The essay addresses Mamardashvili’s interpretation of the “phenomenon,” which he exemplifies on rich experiential material from Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. The “phenomenon” is shown to (...) differ radically from its traditional phenomenological interpretation as something that gives/shows itself in/for experience. Instead, the phenomenon is interpreted as an event that shocks one unexpectedly and offers a momentary opportunity to let oneself be appropriated by that truth, constituting the event of being human. I explicate the relations between Mamardashvili’s notion of the phenomenon, human transformation, and ontology. The central theme of these discussions is a new sense of human agency and autonomy revealed as the goal of transformation and requiring that one walks a path of ontological maturation. (shrink)

The article proposes a phenomenological journey through three concepts of uncertainty – those of Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jan Patočka. The discussion focuses on the meaning of certainty and uncertainty and on the mutual relations between the two according to each philosopher. Adopting an embodied philosophical-poetic perspective enables the dialectical relations prevailing between these three conceptions to emerge, clarifying that, despite their differences, they share a deep attachment to the transcendent dimension of human existence. This dimension is described as (...) “uncertain certainty,” implying attention to the quiver of absolute meaning dwelling within and beyond the movement of humans and the lifeworld. (shrink)

For Anselm Kiefer, his painting shows that, that something exists “shows that there is also nothingness.” The moment of visibility is also the moment of our exposure in/with/through nothing (in a gerundive sense) elemental in the happening of the visible. Painting bears ways of exposing the becoming of the visible and ultimately of consciousness, both sensible and intellectual, in/through/with emptying and nothing, i.e., in the happening of the seer and the seen, in that coming into being of existing, we are (...) exposed to the insight that “there is also nothingness.” The paper offers a series of transpositions, a series of ways of experiencing visibility and vision found in looking at specific images and paintings. The transpositions expose us to blindness, emptying, gaps, and loss in the happening of the visible, which, in displacing the certainty of rational subjective seeing/consciousness, lead to the quickening of vision and the visible anew. (shrink)

Today, the “we” has not lost its place in contemporary debates. On the contrary, it has become a crucial question in the political and philosophical debates relating to global-scale disasters and traumatic events, which expose all of humanity to the same risks and same threats. In a dramatic and paradigmatic way, these events invite us to “mourn” the fantasy of self-sufficiency of the I and remind us to which extent our lives are immediately linked to those of others. At the (...) same time, however, these events, which yields the potential to reveal a relationality constitutive of “who we are,” also suggest the need to reframe our understanding of the “we,” and to overcome the us/them divide upon which it has been construed until now. In this essay, I take up this challenge by first engaging in a critical discussion of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability, and then turning to the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

The analyses at the core of this essay focus attention on the concepts of “Compearance” and “Exposition” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical reflection. Starting from the analyses carried out by Sartre, Lévinas and Derrida, this paper aims to define and highlight one of the fundamental concepts in Nancy’s philosophical work, which is touching. A “corpus of touch” that is a syncopated corpus, interrupted and mixed with other bodies; here the whole sense of compearance and exposition is at stake.

Jen-Luc Nancy’s thinking of the event stems from his understanding of being as based on no principle, ground or essence. Nothing preexists the event of being, no principle, arche or prior substance. With such a statement, a thinking of the event emerges: not preceded by any principle or ground, being is nothing but the event of itself. In turn, the event is no longer anchored in a principle that itself would not be happening. Thus, preceded by nothing and grounded in (...) no essence, the event of being can only come as a surprise. The event is always the bringing forth of the unprecedented: the event always comes as a surprise. I first show how Nancy thinks the event from the very motif of the surprise, indeed claiming that an event is surprising or it is not an event. In a second part, I explore Nancy’s thinking of the event of the world, understood as creation ex nihilo. Ultimately, I show that Nancy understands the eventfulness of the event in terms of the essencelessness of existence. (shrink)

The author analyzes the deconstruction of the community carried out by Jean-Luc Nancy. For Nancy, the aim of the community has been historically accomplished by its self-destruction in the “work of death” of totalitarianism. This does not lead him to renounce the notion of community, like Derrida, but to highlight its paradoxical (im-)possibility. This is why Nancy proposes the concept of a “community without community” which would retain only the cum of the communitas, the with of being-with or being in-common. (...) The author shows that this approach is subject to aporias. Indeed, Nancy wants to base being-with on an ontology of bodily touch. As he considers touching as distancing, displacement, he fails to understand the cum, that is to say the possibility of constituting a community. (shrink)

This article discusses the relation between philosophy and heart from the viewpoint of a transplanted heart. It is a reflection on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on the heart as intruder in the thought of the world. Departing from the personal experience of a heart transplant, Nancy develops a deconstruction of the idea and experience of the self, showing that the need of another heart in the body of philosophy and in the body of the world has to do with the urgence (...) of experiencing the self as soi-autre, as selfother, which is perhaps nothing but rhythm. Reading passages of his last book Cruor, the article aims to think together the rhythm of a transplanted heart, and of the heart of selfother. (shrink)

The general objective of this essay is to systematize Jean-Luc Nancy’s post- deconstructive reflections on the concept of evidence. A general claim of this paper is that the post-deconstructive concept of evidence is genuinely an epistemic concept of evidence insofar as it refers to structures involved in verification processes. Evidence is the presentation of a state of affairs that relates the presentation not only to what we claim about this state of affairs but also to the singular circumstances of its (...) production. Verification (the production of a claim’s truth) results directly from the singularities involved in the production or presentation of evidence. This means that evidence is never exhausted in the truth it produces or the knowledge it validates but remains a priori exposed or available to produce and validate unknown knowledge about unknown states of affairs. (shrink)