47 research outputs found
Decolonizing Bergson: The temporal schema of the open and the closed
I attend to the temporal schema of open/closed by examining its elaboration in Bergson's philosophy and critically parsing the possibilities for its destabilization. Though Bergson wrote in a colonial context, this context barely receives acknowledgement in his work. This obscures the uncomfortable resonances between Bergson's late work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and the temporal narratives that justify French colonialism. Given Bergson's uptake by philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze, and by contemporary feminist and political theorists (especially ânew materialistsâ), a critical re-examination is called for. The Two Sources not only introduces a new dichotomy into Bergsonian philosophyâthat of open/closedâit puts an end to the movement of duration by defining its possibilities as goals already given in advance. By turning the tools of Bergsonian critique onto The Two Sources, I propose an alternative to the open/closedâthat of the âhalf-openââcreating in this way the conditions for decolonizing duration
An absence that counts in the world: Merleau-Pontyâs later philosophy of time in light of Bernetâs 'Einleitung'
This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Pontyâs later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserlâs early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Pontyâs re-reading of Husserlâs time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernetâs âEinleitungâ to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the central Husserlian concepts of present and retention in Merleau-Pontyâs later work, and how do Husserlâs elisions, especially of the problem of forgetting, become generative moments for Merleau-Pontyâs thought on time? The answer passes through the logic of institution as the âretrograde movement of the trueâ (Henri Bergson) and through unconsciousness as disarticulation of the perceptual field, as Merleau-Ponty attempts to detach Husserlian concepts from the philosophy of consciousness and rehabilitate them within an ontology of time
A Phenomenology of Critical-Ethical Vision: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the question of seeing differently
Drawing on Merleau-Pontyâs âEye and Mindâ and Bergsonâs MatiĂšre et mĂ©moire and âLa perception du changement,â I ask what resources are available in vision for interrupting objectifying habits of seeing. While both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty locate the possibility of seeing differently in the figure of the painter, I develop by means of their texts, and in dialogue with Iris Marion Youngâs work, a more general phenomenology of hesitation that grounds what I am calling âcritical-ethical vision.â Hesitation, I argue, stems from affect and leads to critical memory. In hesitation, the seeming coincidence between my habits of seeing and the visible is decentered, revealing these habits and their social reference as the constitutive horizon of my field of vision. Hesitation, then, provides the phenomenological moment within which vision may become at once critically watchful, destabilizing its objectifying habits, and ethically responsive, recollecting its affective grounds. The critical and the ethical are here inseparable. Critically, this vision is an awareness of the structures of invisibility, diacritical and habitual, social and historical, to which my vision owesâdimensions which institute particular ways of seeing and being as norm while eliding others. Ethically, this is the recognition of how seeing is already seeing with othersâothers whose affective influence is operative within vision, even as their existence is reductively represented or denied
The Site of Affect in Husserlâs Phenomenology: Sensations and the Constitution of the Lived Body
To discover affects within Husserlâs texts
designates a difficult investigation; it points to
a theme of which these texts were forced to
speak, even as they were explicitly speaking of
regional ontologies and the foundations of sciences.
For we may at first wonder: where can
affection find a positive role in the rigor of a
pure philosophy that seeks to account for its
phenomena from within the immanence of
consciousness? Does this not mean that the
very passivity and foreignness of affect will be
overlooked; will it not be continually linked to
a Vorstellung that issues as a ray of the pure
ego? That is, will the phenomenological account
of affect be reduced to the cognition of
an object, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests? Yet
there are affects in Husserlâs texts that maintain
their autonomy and resist subsumption to an
objectivating intentionality.We may see this in
the Lectures On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time: in the longitudinal
intentionality of retention, through which
consciousness becomes aware of its elapsed
phases without making them into objectsâa
passive synthesis that gives the flow of
time-constituting consciousness the form of a
continually deferred auto-affection.1We find it
again as early as the fifth Logical Investigation,
2 providing us with the impetus to radicalize
Husserlian phenomenology
Too Late: Fanon, the dismembered past, and a phenomenology of racialized time
This essay asks after the lateness that affectively structures Fanon's phenomenology of racialized temporality in Black Skin,White Masks. I broach this through the concepts of possibility, âaffective ankylosisâ, and by taking seriously the dismembered past that haunts Fanon's text. The colonization of the past involves a bifurcation of time and of memory. To the âburning past,â wherein colonized experience is stuck and to which we remain sensitive, is contrasted the colonial construction of white, western time as progressive and futuralâa construction that relies on the very indifference, ankylosis, and closure of this time to the multiple, lived temporalities of colonized others