Public Programs And Events

Presentations will tackle the issue of vulnerability and reassess the ontological framework of philosophical and psychological theories in dialogue with the phenomenological tradition and contemporary moral theory. This event is aimed at (1) facilitating institutional cooperation between American and European philosophers working on phenomenology; (2) creating a transatlantic research network for young researchers interested in phenomenology; (3) showcasing the importance of phenomenology for understanding vulnerability in dialogue with other philosophical areas or other fields (anthropology, feminist theory, cognitive science, mind theory etc.); and (4) raising awareness among the general public and promoting contemporary philosophical research on vulnerability and its potential impact on society.

The Husserl Archive at the New School for Social Research was established in 1966 in honor of Alfred Schütz in an effort to promote the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, as well as the phenomenological tradition more generally. To this end, the center hosts small research groups, seminars, workshops, and conferences that bring together international students and scholars working in or near the phenomenological tradition. In concert with this aim, the conference seeks to further establish the Archive as a center for phenomenological research on the east coast for junior scholars working in phenomenology and to strengthen scholarly ties to the Husserl Archives in Leuven and Paris. This conference is the inaugural event of this organization in an effort to facilitate cross-continental collaboration between American and European scholars in addition to strengthening research activities in the area of phenomenology in the U.S. The groundwork for this organization and conference is already in place to the extent that many of the scholars The New School intends to invite already have a record of collaboration. Nonetheless, there has not yet been an umbrella research group linking the Husserl Archives in Louvain, New York, and Paris and affiliated researchers. The two-day conference will include a total of twelve (12) invited presentations with representatives from these respective research centers and others.

Thursday, May 5th, 2016

The New School, Room UL105 - 63, 5th Avenue, NY

 

Introduction

9:30 – 9:45: Opening remarks (Alice Crary, Elodie Boublil, Keith Whitmoyer)

Session 1: Intersubjectivity, Violence and Desire

9:45-10:30: “Violence and non-Violence”, James Dodd (The New School)

10:30-10:45: coffee break 

10:45-11:30: ““A Bird as Rare upon the Earth as a Black Swan”: The Dream of an Unusable Friendship in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship”, Leonard Lawlor (Penn State)

11:30-12:15: “Whose Desire Is This That I Experience? Flesh, Vulnerability, and the Extended

Subject”, Jennifer McWeeny (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Lunch Break: 12:15-2:00 (free)

Session 2: Existential Vulnerability, Lebenswelt and Identity

Chair: Keith Whitmoyer

2:00-2:45: “Existential Vulnerability”, Thomas Fuchs (University of Heidelberg)

2:45-3:00: Coffee Break

3:00-3:45: “Alterations in self-experience after torture: the fear of being real”, Gry Ardal Printzlau (University of Copenhagen)

3:45-4:30: “Relational Vulnerability: the ethical demands of community bonding”, Elodie Boublil (CNRS-ENS, PSL University, Archives Husserl de Paris, Marie Curie Actions).  

4:30-5:00: Coffee Break

Keynote Address 

5:00-7:00: “Gated Communities: Vulnerability, Precarity and the Carceral State”, Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt University)

 

 

 Friday May 6th, 2016

 

The New School, Room UL105 - 63, 5th Avenue, NY

Session 3: The vulnerability of Meaning 

Chair: James Dodd

9:45-10:30: “On the Vulnerability of a Community: Edith Stein and Gerda Walther”, Antonio Calcagno (King’s University College at Western University)

10:30-10:45: “The Phenomenological Significance of Reversibility: On Depth and Pain in

Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger”, Vedran Grahovac (Guelph University)

10:45-11:00: coffee break 

11:00-12:00: Flanders House Session by Julia Jansen 

Flanders House Reception: 12:00-2:00  

Session 4: Vulnerability, Corporeity & the Flesh of the world 

Chair: Elodie Boublil 

2:00-2:45: “Ontological Openness in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy: ‘The Silent World is Our Only Homeland’ (Ponge)”, Galen Johnson (University of Rhode Island). 

2:45-3:30: “Vulnerability from a Phenomenological-Materialist View,” Jenny Slatman (Maastricht University)

3:30-3:45: coffee break

3:45-4:30: “The Wounds of Time: Merleau-Ponty on Corporeal Memory and Openness” Keith Whitmoyer (Pace University)

4:30-4:45 Concluding remarks 

 

             

                                                            ABSTRACTS

 

Elodie Boublil

(CNRS-ENS, PSL University, Archives Husserl de Paris, Marie Curie Actions)

 

Relational Vulnerability: the ethical demands of community bonding 

 

 

In this paper, I argue, with Merleau-Ponty, that the plasticity of interpersonal understanding pertains to the multilayered expression of subjectivity’s vulnerability: vulnerability related to subjectivity’s diachronic experience of the world, vulnerability related to the magnitude of her life and the lived distance she undergoes, vulnerability due, ultimately, to her exposure to the world’s adversity and to the other’s imaginary. But, if vulnerability structures the subject’s experience of the world, it remains a “susceptibility” to be wounded rather than an actual failure or frailty.

Antonio Calcagno

King’s University College at Western University

 

On the Vulnerability of a Community: Edith Stein and Gerda Walther

 

Edith Stein and Gerda Walther have developed phenomenological accounts of community. Stein argues that the bond of community is experienced as a coalescence of sense or meaning that constitutes itself as a solidarity in which members live and grasp each other’s life and experience, what Stein calls an “ineinandergreifen.”  In Stein’s account, community members never fuse or identify with one another: there is no Einsfühlung.  Walther maintains that the most intense form of community is experienced as a union, a becoming one

(Einigung or Vereinigung), which manifests itself both in the passive structures of habit and the conscious experiences of sense-making and feeling.

 

James Dodd

The New School

 

Violence and Non-Violence 

 

Thomas Fuchs

Heidelberg University 

 

Existential Vulnerability 

 

Karl Jaspers’ concept of limit situations seem particularly appropriate not only to elucidate outstanding existential situations in general, but also basic preconditions for the occurrence of mental disorders. To this purpose, the concept is first explained in Jaspers’ sense, then related to an “existential vulnerability” of mentally ill persons which makes them experience even inconspicuous events as distressing limit situations. 

 

Vedran Grahovac

Guelph University

 

The Phenomenological Significance of Reversibility: On Depth and Pain in MerleauPonty and Heidegger

 

In this paper I explore the phenomenological weight of reversibility and focus on the concept of depth in Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind “ and The Visible and the Invisible, and the notion of pain in Heidegger’s writings on Trakl, Rilke and Hölderlin. 

 Merleau-Ponty rearticulates the ‘Cartesian fixity’ of the seer-visible, mind-body, and the body-world polarities, by emphasizing the ‘dynamism’ of their intertwinement. He suggests, however, that the seeming dynamism of these polarities culminates in the selfenclosure of their ‘components’. Merleau-Ponty explores Cézanne’s understanding of depth, and suggests that depth cannot be threated as a third dimension, a mere mediator or a combination between the two dimensions. The depth is the “experience of the reversibility of dimensions”, where the terms in relation occupy their position because they “eclipse one another”. 

 

Lisa Guenther

Vanderbilt University

 

Gated Communities: Vulnerability, Precarity and the Carceral State

 

This paper explores a particular site of paranoid precarity: the gated community.  Building on Jonathan Simon’s account of “homeowner citizenship” as a form of political subjectivity that perceives itself as a potential victim of violent crime (whether or not there is a credible risk of such crime) and endorses ultimate sanctions such as capital punishment as a form of “homeowner’s insurance,” I argue that the gated community is the structural counterpart to the prison in a carceral state.  The project of dismantling the carceral state calls for new forms of world disclosure, as well as more equitable ways of negotiating vulnerability and addressing precarity.    

 

Julia Jansen

KU Leuven

 

On the Vulnerability of Phenomenology

 

Speakers are vulnerable as speakers insofar as they depend on the willingness and capability of their audiences to be heard as speakers and knowers. Speakers are vulnerable to silencing. Philosophers tend to be most concerned with silencing by dismissal or attack. We typically desire to be perceived ‘invulnerable’ to correction or critique, or – perhaps the worst – to disrespect. At the very least, we want to be taken seriously. This desire itself makes us vulnerable in yet another sense. It influences how we conceive of philosophy, in particular ‘good’ philosophy. 

 

Galen A. Johnson

University of Rhode Island

 

Ontological Openness in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy:

“The Silent World is Our Only Homeland” (Ponge)

                         

Merleau-Ponty and Nancy defend openness against its risks, dangers, exposures; the Cartesian reduces perception to the thought of perceiving under the pretext that thought alone is certain, invulnerable.  This “muscled thought” (Nancy) “takes out an insurance [policy] against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify us.” (MP)  Following from an etymological meaning of vulnerability as a kind of openness (Latin, vulnerabilis, literally, “wounding,” also “open to attack”) or exposure, expeausition (Nancy), the paper takes up the multiple philosophical meanings and manifestations of openness.  Three fundamental dimensions occupy us: the body – soul openness, the openness of art and language, and intersubjective openness.  Central texts include a long, dense late Working Note of Merleau-Ponty (January, 1960) and Nancy’s Corpus, especially its sections on “A Wound” and

“The Intruder.”  

 We explore Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic account of soul as the “hollow” (le creux, air, empty space) formed beneath the “solid vault” (la voûte, arch, dome, canopy) above it – “pneumatology” – and in Nancy, the open of touch, which “is not to tear, dismember, destroy,” not a “flaw in the diamond” of the world (Valéry), but the essential meaning of transcendence.  The open ek-stasis of art and the openness of language is the life of literature, poetry, and philosophy reflected in the poetry of Ponge, “taking the side of things” (le parti pris des choses); “the silent world is our only homeland (patri).”  The delicate intertwining of passivity and activity, of an “unspeaking speech” whose strength is in its weakness (Blanchot), of a receptivity that does not grasp but “lets things be,” accepts into the subject a principle of weakness. (MP)  Intersubjective openness concerns relations among “two caverns (deux antres), two opennesses, two stages where something will take place” (MP).  “Love is the touch of the open” (Nancy) and touch and listening, on the one side, and intrusion (empiétement), on the other, stage both bond and rift.

 

Leonard Lawlor 

Penn State University

 

“A Bird as Rare upon the Earth as a Black Swan”: The Dream of an Unusable Friendship in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship

 

This presentation is part of an ongoing book project on violence and reactions to violence. The project, on which I have been engaged for the last eight years, has led me to the question of friendship and love as way to conceive a “least violent” reaction to violence. Previous studies have taken me from Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze, to Foucault, and now Derrida. The current text was written during the summer of 2014 and based on a graduate seminar I taught on Derrida’s  Politics of Friendship in fall 2013. So the text concerns only this one very long and complicated book by Derrida (published in 1994). The presentation is primarily expository, but I hope you’ll be able to see how the ideas here might lead us to a new conception of a least violent reaction to violence. Thus it should also lead to a new understanding of vulnerability, that is, how not to react to vulnerability by closing its openness down. The thesis of the presentation is both antiKantian and hyper-Kantian. On the one hand, (through Derrida), I hope to show that true friendship or love breaks with the teleology that Kant calls the “humanization of man,” in which friendship has a moral goal. Love must break with the moral goal, because loved aimed at the moral goal uses the beloved as a means to an end. In fact, it breaks Kant’s moral imperative. It is hyper-Kantian because the only way to break with means-ends relations lies in making the beloved as distant from me as possible. This is a strange and troubling conclusion, but it saves the beloved from violence. If this “unusable friendship” is possible, it will appear as “a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan.”

 

 

Jennifer McWeeny

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

 

Whose Desire Is This That I Experience?

Flesh, Vulnerability, and the Extended Subject

 

Of Max Scheler’s notion of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty writes “Life in fact radically surpasses individualities, and it is impossible to judge it in relationship to death, which is an individual failure.” [1] Earlier, in The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty offers several examples that suggest that the boundaries of the lived body and its pre-reflective consciousness do not always line up with the boundaries of the objective body, with the boundaries of our skins. Renaud Barbaras has, in particular, emphasized the permeability of a subjectivity made of flesh: “Undergoing the ordeal of the world, sensibility incarnates itself, and it must rather be understood as the advent of Sensibility that is without an assignable subject.”2 Because consciousness and consciousness encroach upon one another, because the body is always cleaved to the world, the possibility arises that certain desires experienced by a subject are not necessarily her own. Anxiety surrounding this possibility is amplified in oppressive contexts where others and the world explicitly aim to craft the desires of the oppressed; if desires can cross bodies, then the oppressed are particularly vulnerable to losing themselves in immanence. This paper considers three concrete cases of desire, namely, sexual desire, consumerist desire, and spiritual desire, in light of the questions of individuation and encroachment at the level of pre-reflective consciousness that arise when exploring certain implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh. Contrary to thinkers like Dan Zahavi, I suggest that insofar as consciousness is bodily in a constitutive way, the first-personal givenness of experience is never fully guaranteed.

 

Gry Ardal Printzlau, 

Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen and visiting researcher at the Neubauer Collegium and the University of Chicago. 

 

Alterations in self-experience after torture: the fear of being real.

 

The aim of the paper is to bring a phenomenological perspective on intersubjectivity to bear on a particular problem: how to understand a certain type of experiential disturbance in persons who have suffered severe interpersonal trauma. I have been working on the topic of torture for some years, both philosophically and in some few interviews with survivors, and I am continually puzzled but what I have come to call a loss of a clear sense of reality in relation to themselves and their experiences of others and the world. Diagnostically, that kind of altered self-experience is categorized as derealization and / or dissociation, but I leave that aside here for the phenomenology of it. Torture survivors may say that they feel unreal, insubstantial, empty, ghost- or dream-like or even like they have died.  The sense of being unreal is not a mistaken belief; it is not a mistaken proposition about facts in the world. They know that they are real and fully acknowledge the same shared reality as others. In spite thereof, the realness somehow fails to convince them. In this paper I am seeking to understand what takes place so that we ordinarily are convinced by our experiences: why do we normally immediately experience things as manifestly real? What is the explanation for the damaging of this capacity in torture? 

I will suggest that we should look to a notion of constitutive relationality of the self for an answer to both questions. I propose that attention to the role of responsivity and responsibility for experience (Hegel, Lévinas) can help us understand the existential situation of torture survivors and, in doing so, show how far down relationality goes. 

 

Jenny Slatman

Maastricht University

 

Vulnerability from a phenomenological-materialist view

 

We, humans, are vulnerable, we have the possibility to be wounded (vulnerare = to wound), because we are embodied beings. However, phenomenological reflections on embodiment, such as provided by Husserl in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception, very much stress the capacities and agency that is inscribed in embodied existence. Embodiment is seen as that what involves our zero point of perception and action, our “I can” (ich kann, je peux), which precedes our “I think”. With this emphasis on possibilities and motor intentionality, very little attention is paid to the body’s woundable dimension. I will explain that because of phenomenology’s indebtedness to transcendental reasoning, it prioritizes a form of embodied subjectivity that is virtually dis-embodied. Endowing meaning to one’s world through getting engaged in actions and projects is most successful indeed when one’s body is “absent,” (Drew Leder) “transparent,” (Don Ihde) or, at least, if it is not in the center of one’s attention. In my paper, I will argue that phenomenology of the body that will allow for vulnerability needs to take into account the body’s materiality. 

 

Keith Whitmoyer

(Pace University)

 

The Wounds of Time: Merleau-Ponty on Corporeal Memory and Openness

 

The word, “vulnerable,” comes from the Latin, vulnus, which means a wound. To be vulnerable thus means to be open to and capable of being wounded. According to MerleauPonty, such a capability is constitutive of the beings that we are because we are corporeal, of course, but more importantly, because our corporeality makes itself visible in time. It is the past, here, that is important, which inscribes itself on our bodies like a scar, both literally and metaphorically, that lingers and haunts our presents and our futures. Thus he says, that “time never completely closes over [the past] and it remains like a wound through which our strength ebbs away.” My aim in this paper is to explore the implications of this remark in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and beyond. It is no surprise that the context for this remark is a discussion of repression and memory, the framework of his famous discussion of the phantom limb in Phenomenology of Perception.  

 

Very Special Thanks:

 

The Steering Committee would like to express its gratitude to the Philosophy Department at the New School for hosting the conference, and in particular to Alice Crary, Department chair, and Despina Dontas, Department secretary, for their support and assistance. 

 

The Steering Committee would like to thank the following for their generous financial support of the conference: the DAAD New York Office, The Flanders House of New York, The New School for Social Research, and the European Commission - Marie Curie Actions (European project BETAPEV n°657712). 

[1] Merleau-Ponty (2001/2010, p. 32). 2 Barbaras (2004, pp. 245-6).

This event is sponsored by the Husserl Archive, the Department of Philosophy, at The New School for Social Research.