Tag Archives: Phenomenology

William Underwood: “The Time of Love’s Power: Lorde, Marion, and the Politics of the Erotic ‘I'”

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William Underwood

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

The Time of Love’s Power: Lorde, Marion, and the Politics of the Erotic “I”

Wednesday, October 18, 4:30pm, Swift 208

In the twentieth century, the problem of desire in the constitution of the self-became the hinge of theories that challenged the privilege of a self-possessed subject and its attendant politics of universalist liberation. Defining work in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and literature, this critical countermovement of desire contributed to the critique of existing epistemological paradigms and generated new vistas for both philosophy and political struggle. In this paper, I bring into contact two thinkers—Jean-Luc Marion and Audre Lorde—who subject modern accounts of the subject to reformulation through novel treatments of eroticism, but whose work is rarely, if ever, brought into contact. In so doing, I argue that Lorde’s critical and poetic work extends Marion’s erotic expansion of the phenomenological field, and helps articulate a distinct erotic politics informed by the sociogenic dimensions of phenomenality and oriented toward the project of liberation.

Refreshments will be served

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Bettina Bergo (University of Montreal): “And God Created Woman”

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Bettina Bergo

Professor of Philosophy, University of Montreal

And God Created Woman

Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, Swift 201

Emmanuel Levinas wrote his « And God Created Woman » (Tractate Berakhot, 61a) between 1972 and 1973 in the shadow of “mai soixante-huit”. It follows, even stands in the shadow of his “Judaism and Revolution” (a reading of Baba Metsia 83), which appeared in 1969. The two Talmudic readings arguably share a guiding thread, although their discussions are quite different: in 1969 it is social and metaphysical alienation; in 1972, it concerns an enigmatic domain of justice situated between the universal and the particular. Thus Levinas’ clin d’oeil to Godard’s film with Bardot focuses on “a difference that does not compromise equity,” before it so much as touches on sexual difference. Perhaps predictably, we find running through the debate about God’s ‘second’ creature (viz., is the rib from which Eve is created a face, or rather a tail?), the question of alterity itself. But is this not one of those abstractions—flowing out of phenomenological formalism—that belies its lived origin in our experiences of or with actual people? Alterity and its “modalizations” would be the question that opens to that of justice in this reading, as in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being. To understand this approach I compare his Talmudic reading with Daniel Sibony’s discussion of the discovery, après coup, of Eve, Isha, by Adam, Ish.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Sean Hannan on Time: Augustinian/Post-Phenomenological Critiques of New Realism

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Sean Hannan (PhD Candidate, U Chicago Divinity School)

“A New Realist Philosophy of Time and its Augustinian or Post-phenomenological Critique”

Tuesday, February 17, 4:30 pm

Swift 201

Abstract:

In recent years, certain philosophical circles have come to revolve around a shared interest in reviving the project of what they’d like to call realism, materialism, or ontology.  This movement is no monolith.  Conversations have grown up around the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, the Badiou-inflected materialism of Quentin Meillasoux, and the Heidegger-influenced ontology of objects put forth by Graham Harman.  What ties these disparate threads of thought together is the goal of somehow moving past a state of intellectual gridlock, which has supposedly stalled the momentum of movements tracing their roots back to German Idealism and phenomenology.  The way to do this, according to many, is to take away the privilege accorded to the human subject in order to treat all ‘things’ as ontologically equal.

One of the liveliest voices in the field belongs to Tristan Garcia, a young French novelist and philosopher whose substantial work—Form and Object: a Treatise on Things (Edinburgh UP, 2014)—has just been translated into English.  Garcia’s take on things has, even more recently, turned towards time as a suitable topic for post-idealist or post-phenomenological speculation.  In his article “Another Order of Time: Towards a Variable Intensity of the Now” (Parrhesia 14 [2014], 1-13).  Garcia offers up a new theory of temporality that, in his estimation, will allow us to move beyond the inadequate theories once offered up by idealism, phenomenology, and even Anglo-American ‘analytics.’

Throughout the article, Augustine of Hippo appears as a foil.  In the account of temporality given in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions, Garcia finds a precursor to the phenomenology of time as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl.  And yet, while Garcia’s approach to time comes off as fresh and thought-provoking, it’s not entirely clear that he’s adequately dealt with the questions posed both by Augustine and the phenomenological tradition.  Most specifically, he fails to appreciate the degree to which certain thinkers—Augustine not least among them—were willing to dethrone the ‘present’ from its privileged position at the center of temporality.  This paper, then, aims both to sketch out Garcia’s doctrine of time and to push back against it from the perspective of Augustine’s critique of the present.  It might turn out that the question of the now has less to do with intensity or intension than with what Augustine called ‘distension.’