Body/Self/Other

Description

Body/Self/Other brings together a variety of phenomenological perspectives to examine the complexity of social encounters across a range of social, political, and ethical issues. It investigates the materiality of social encounters and the habitual attitudes that structure lived experience. In particular, the contributors examine how constructions of race, gender, sexuality, criminality, and medicalized forms of subjectivity affect perception and social interaction. Grounded in practical, everyday experiences, this book provides a theoretical framework that considers the extent to which fundamental ethical obligations arise from the fact of individuals' intercorporeality and sociality.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reconsidering the Phenomenology of Social Encounters
Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge

Part I. Embodied Politics: Encountering Race and Violence

1. The Body and Political Violence: Between Isolation and Homogenization
Rosalyn Diprose

2. A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes
Lisa Guenther

3. Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities
Gail Weiss

4. Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility
Danielle Petherbridge

Part II. Relationality, Ethics, and The Other

5. Social Interaction, Autonomy, and Recognition
Shaun Gallagher

6. The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading
Donald A. Landes

7. Linguistic Encounters: The Performativity of Active Listening
Beata Stawarska

8. Wonder as the Primary Passion: A Phenomenological Perspective on Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference
Sara Heinamaa

9. Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Other Others
Katherine J. Morris

Part III. Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Intercorporeality

10. Lived Body, Intersubjectivity, and Intercorporeality: The Body in Phenomenology
Dermot Moran

11. Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy
Luna Dolezal

12. Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Look
Dylan Trigg

13. Intercorporeal Expression and the Subjectivity of Dementia
Lisa Folkmarson Kall

Notes on Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Philosophy
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438466224
• Langue: English

Extrait

Body/Self/Other
Body/Self/Other
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS
Edited by Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dolezal, Luna, editor | Petherbridge, Danielle, editor
Title: Body/self/other : the phenomenology of social encounters / Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge, editors.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041360 (print) | LCCN 2017033666 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466217 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438466224 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Philosophy. | Other (Philosophy) | Phenomenology.
Classification: LCC HM1106 (ebook) | LCC HM1106 .B635 2017 (print) | DDC 142/.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041360
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reconsidering the Phenomenology of Social Encounters
Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge
PART I EMBODIED POLITICS: ENCOUNTERING RACE AND VIOLENCE
1 The Body and Political Violence: Between Isolation and Homogenization
Rosalyn Diprose
2 A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes
Lisa Guenther
3 Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities
Gail Weiss
4 Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility
Danielle Petherbridge
PART II RELATIONALITY, ETHICS, AND THE OTHER
5 Social Interaction, Autonomy, and Recognition
Shaun Gallagher
6 The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading
Donald A. Landes
7 Linguistic Encounters: The Performativity of Active Listening
Beata Stawarska
8 Wonder as the Primary Passion: A Phenomenological Perspective on Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference
Sara Heinämaa
9 Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Other Others
Katherine J. Morris
PART III EMBODIMENT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND INTERCORPOREALITY
10 Lived Body, Intersubjectivity, and Intercorporeality: The Body in Phenomenology
Dermot Moran
11 Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy
Luna Dolezal
12 Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Look
Dylan Trigg
13 Intercorporeal Expression and the Subjectivity of Dementia
Lisa Folkmarson Käll
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council and the European Commission (Marie Curie Actions) for funding the research projects from which this book has arisen. We would also like to thank Andrew Kenyon, our editor at SUNY, for his support, David Markwell for copyediting, and our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on each chapter and an earlier draft of this manuscript.
Introduction
RECONSIDERING THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS
Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge
The essays collected in Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters examine the lived experience of our relations with others as well as the complexity of embodied interaction and forms of sociality. Deploying phenomenology along with a variety of other philosophical approaches, including critical theory, social philosophy, feminist theory, and post-structuralism, the contributions in this book describe and critically interrogate existential, material, and normative features of self-other relations in a range of contexts with contemporary significance. The book questions, for example, what it is to perceive or be perceived in terms of race, gender, sexuality, animality, criminality, or medicalized forms of subjectivity. If these are habitual patterns or attitudes built up in everyday experience within our lifeworlds, how do we transform, or even rupture, these perceptions and experiences? Moreover, if we, as social beings, are constituted through intersubjective relations, what are the costs of the absence of this relationality in conditions of isolation or imprisonment, or, why might such relations manifest fear and anxiety in public space or in old age? Moreover, what is the nature of our intercorporeality and what ethical obligations, if any, does the fact of our embodied relationality imply for us?
Following the work of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology has articulated various aspects of self-other relations making salient the intercorporeal and constitutive nature of our encounters with others. This book significantly extends these phenomenological insights and takes the notion of the “phenomenology of social encounters” in its broadest sense. With rich descriptions of lived phenomena occurring in experiences such as racism, solitary confinement, surrogacy, dementia, agoraphobia, and violence, among others, the essays in this book yield important and original insights about embodied social relations, or the enduring interrelation between body/self/other. Interrogating modes of embodied interaction such as vision, speech, pregnancy, recognition, and objectification, the essays collected here not only provide a description of the lived experience of social encounters but also develop alternative ways of relating subjective experience to a broader analysis of social structures and institutions across a range of contexts. Challenging the criticism that phenomenology, as concerned primarily with subjective experience has little to offer social critique, the contributions in this book demonstrate the importance of phenomenology when considering questions of social justice and critique that hinge on the textures of lived experience. Many of the authors represented here develop a critical phenomenological perspective that is not only alert to embodied lived experience and interpersonal interaction, but also to the broader structures, institutions, and discursive practices that shape our perceptual and social frameworks. 1
Social injustices and inequalities are not abstractions played out in the realm of law or politics; rather, they are matters that impinge on our embodied lives and our lived relations with others. A phenomenological approach to social encounters enables us to take account not only of the way in which embodied habits and forms of perception become sedimented in particular social contexts but also the ways in which particular practices and habits are taken up and reiterated in our lived bodies in an active manner. Exploring the intertwining of body/self/other through the fabric of lived experiences framed by variable normative structures, this book offers a unique contribution to scholarship within contemporary phenomenology.
While the contributions in this collection articulate various types of encounters between “self” and “other,” it should be emphasized that these are by no means discrete entities. In fact, the essays all take body/self/other as their starting point, demonstrating that intersubjective and intercorporeal relations are simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by subjects and forms of sociality. However, it is important to note that from the perspective of the different philosophical traditions represented in the book, the notion of intersubjectivity carries various connotations. It may refer to interpersonal or face-to-face and embodied encounters, for example, as explored extensively in the phenomenological tradition, but is also understood to form a background of norms and meanings that constitute the social or “lifeworld,” prominent not only in phenomenology but also in social-philosophical accounts. 2 Importantly, embodied intersubjectivity is also constitutive of subjects and social life, designating an existential, ontological, or anthropological category and may also refer to normative or ethical forms of relation that are built into the fact of our sociality or are present as a potentiality.
For some theorists, then, the notion of social “encounters” between self and other is in many ways a nomenclature, as it tends to indicate that we begin from the assumption of isolated individual consciousness, or suggests a view of monadic or atomistic subjects who only secondarily “encounter” one another. In contrast, for some theorists it might be more appropriate to speak of an original fabric of social relations into which we are interwoven, or of primary ethical relations in which we always already move. 3 The notion of “social encounters” represented in the book is then intended to capture various aspects of interrelation and interaction—both positive and negative—whilst taking into account the broader social and political frameworks of meaning in which these interactions take place. Moreover, despite the fact of our sociality and dependency upon others, many of the essays examine the ways in which intercorporeal and intersubjective relations become overdetermined by forms of racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and so on, which become sedimented into habitual patterns of meaning and perception that structure our social lifeworlds.
The book is divided into three thematic sections: “Embodied Politics: Encountering Race and Violence”; “Relationality, Ethics and the Other”; and “Embodiment, Subjectivity and Intercorporeality,” which draw on or emphasize different aspects of the phenomenological tradition or undertake al