- Universität Wien
Institut für Philosophie (Room: 1020)
Sensengasse 8
1090 Wien
Dylan Trigg
University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Phenomenology of the body, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Environmental Philosophy, and 12 moreGaston Bachelard, Aesthetics, Architecture and Phenomenology, Phenomenology of Home, Phenomenology of Illness, Philosophy of Nature, Émmanuel Lévinas, Edward Casey, Embodiment, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalysisedit
- Dylan Trigg is an FWF Senior Researcher at the University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. He has previously held... moreDylan Trigg is an FWF Senior Researcher at the University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. He has previously held several positions, including: Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy & University College Dublin (2014-2017); Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin (2012-2014); CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Les Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure (2012-2013); and CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (2011-2012).
Trigg is currently the PI on an FWF research project, "The Phenomenology of Nostalgia" (P33428). More information on the project's activities and themes can be found here - https://sites.google.com/view/phenomenologyofnostalgia/home
He earned his PhD at the University of Sussex (2009), MA at the University of Sussex (2005), and BA at the University of London, Birkbeck College (2004). He has also been a visiting scholar at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art and Design and University of Duquesne, Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center.
He is the author of several books including "Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety" (2016); "The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror" (2014); and "The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny" (2012). His research interests include phenomenology, embodiment, and aesthetics. He is currently writing a book no the phenomenology of nostalgia.edit
German translation of "The Thing" translated by Maximilian Gregor Hepach published by Turia + Kant (Vienna/Berlin) In der philosophischen Phänomenologie ist der menschliche Körper und das Körperhafte eine immer wieder gestellte, nie... more
German translation of "The Thing" translated by Maximilian Gregor Hepach published by Turia + Kant (Vienna/Berlin)
In der philosophischen Phänomenologie ist der menschliche Körper und das Körperhafte eine immer wieder gestellte, nie abgeschlossene Frage. Dylan Triggs Buch stellt sich der Aufgabe, die Phänomenologie unter Einbeziehung der Bilderwelten des (Horror-)Films neu zu orientieren. Der Körper, der unser In-der-Welt-sein ermöglicht und durch ein Gefühl der Selbstidentität bestimmt bleibt, soll nun erweitert und zum Schauplatz eines anderen, fremden, der individuellen Existenz vorgängigen Lebens werden.
Im Dialog mit Lévinas und dem späten Merleau-Ponty, den Filmen von Carpenter und Cronenberg und den Schriften von H.P. Lovecraft versucht Trigg, jenem Unheimlichen und Unmenschlichen auf die Spur zu kommen, von dem der Mensch heimgesucht wird und das nicht völlig in die Menschlichkeit integriert werden kann. Die Erfahrung des Grauens, das immer ein »Körpergrauen« ist, kennzeichnet dabei sowohl den Verrat als auch die Erneuerung einer anthropozentrischen Phänomenologie, oder besser: die Begründung einer »unmenschlichen Phänomenologie«.
In der philosophischen Phänomenologie ist der menschliche Körper und das Körperhafte eine immer wieder gestellte, nie abgeschlossene Frage. Dylan Triggs Buch stellt sich der Aufgabe, die Phänomenologie unter Einbeziehung der Bilderwelten des (Horror-)Films neu zu orientieren. Der Körper, der unser In-der-Welt-sein ermöglicht und durch ein Gefühl der Selbstidentität bestimmt bleibt, soll nun erweitert und zum Schauplatz eines anderen, fremden, der individuellen Existenz vorgängigen Lebens werden.
Im Dialog mit Lévinas und dem späten Merleau-Ponty, den Filmen von Carpenter und Cronenberg und den Schriften von H.P. Lovecraft versucht Trigg, jenem Unheimlichen und Unmenschlichen auf die Spur zu kommen, von dem der Mensch heimgesucht wird und das nicht völlig in die Menschlichkeit integriert werden kann. Die Erfahrung des Grauens, das immer ein »Körpergrauen« ist, kennzeichnet dabei sowohl den Verrat als auch die Erneuerung einer anthropozentrischen Phänomenologie, oder besser: die Begründung einer »unmenschlichen Phänomenologie«.
Research Interests:
Russian translation of "The Thing" out through Hyle Press (Perm, Russia)
Translated by: Dmitri Chulakov, Dmitri Vyatkin and Yana Tsyrlina.
Translated by: Dmitri Chulakov, Dmitri Vyatkin and Yana Tsyrlina.
Research Interests:
Qu’est-ce que le corps humain ? A la fois la plus familière et la plus méconnue des choses, le corps est au centre de l’expérience mais représente également le lieu d’une préhistoire antérieure à toute expérience. Étrange et inconnu, cet... more
Qu’est-ce que le corps humain ? A la fois la plus familière et la plus méconnue des choses, le corps est au centre de l’expérience mais représente également le lieu d’une préhistoire antérieure à toute expérience. Étrange et inconnu, cet autre aspect du corps a bien trop souvent été négligé par la phénoménologie. En se confrontant à cette négligence, The Thing redéfinit la phénoménologie en tant qu’espèce du réalisme, nommée phénoménologie inhumaine. Loin d’être le simple véhicule d’une voix humaine, cette phénoménologie inhumaine permet l’expression d’une matérialité étrangère aux limites de l’expérience. En associant la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, Husserl et Levinas à l’horreur de John Carpenter, David Cronenberg et H. P. Lovecraft, Trigg explore la manière dont cette phénoménologie inhumaine place le corps hors du temps. Remettant en question les notions traditionnelles de la philosophie, The Thing fait également écho aux philosophies contemporaines du réalisme. Le résultat n’est ni plus ni moins qu’une renaissance de la phénoménologie redéfinie à travers la focale de l’horreur.
Research Interests:
About Topophobia Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy –... more
About Topophobia
Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy – and phenomenology in particular – until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna.
Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike.
Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.
Table of contents
Preface
1. The Home at Night
2. Under the Skin
3. Two Ocular Globes
4. Lost in place
5. Through the Mirror
Conclusion
Index
Reviews
“Readers will be captivated by Dylan Trigg's penetrating insights into and eloquent accounts of his experience of anxiety. They lead him into strikingly new and important ideas for psychology and philosophy.” – Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA
“Dylan Trigg's Topophobia puts you inside the phenomenology of place-related phobias, so that you can explore the modulations of such experiences as they unfold and twist themselves into an anxiety that is without boundaries. This is a true phenomenological study of how places appear cut up and displaced, how they are darkened and blindingly lit, how they overwhelm, grab you and close in, how one's body turns against itself, freezes, and starts to drift, and how others invade and obstruct one's intentions. Trigg also draws from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to map out a detailed landscape of anxiety, delivering a deep analysis of the interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious elements that constitute the phobias related to place. He shows us that anxiety and the self are always more than, and at the same time, less than personal.” – Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA
“Topophilia, our love of place and our embeddedness in it and indebtedness to it, is not the only story to tell about place. In Topophobia, Dylan Trigg brilliantly shows that topophobia is woven through our experience of place, from its most intimate to its most public. He is equal parts Virgil and J. G. Ballard: he is our guide into the anxious, uncanny, nausea-inducing, claustrophobic, and agoraphobic places we are seduced by and condemned to live in, and he is the one who puts into words that which haunts us.
But this is not an account of the macabre, nor is it a tour of the bleak spaces of post-industrial collapse. Trigg gives us a rigorous phenomenology of the gaps and fissures of everyday place, the anxieties and ambiguities of being a body that must at some level be committed to its places, and yet which does not always experience a similar commitment in return. This book should have a rightful place for anyone interested in phenomenology, place, and body.
” – Bruce Janz, Professor & Co-Director, Department of Philosophy and Centre for Humanities & Digital Research, University of Central Florida, USA
Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy – and phenomenology in particular – until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna.
Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike.
Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.
Table of contents
Preface
1. The Home at Night
2. Under the Skin
3. Two Ocular Globes
4. Lost in place
5. Through the Mirror
Conclusion
Index
Reviews
“Readers will be captivated by Dylan Trigg's penetrating insights into and eloquent accounts of his experience of anxiety. They lead him into strikingly new and important ideas for psychology and philosophy.” – Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA
“Dylan Trigg's Topophobia puts you inside the phenomenology of place-related phobias, so that you can explore the modulations of such experiences as they unfold and twist themselves into an anxiety that is without boundaries. This is a true phenomenological study of how places appear cut up and displaced, how they are darkened and blindingly lit, how they overwhelm, grab you and close in, how one's body turns against itself, freezes, and starts to drift, and how others invade and obstruct one's intentions. Trigg also draws from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to map out a detailed landscape of anxiety, delivering a deep analysis of the interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious elements that constitute the phobias related to place. He shows us that anxiety and the self are always more than, and at the same time, less than personal.” – Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA
“Topophilia, our love of place and our embeddedness in it and indebtedness to it, is not the only story to tell about place. In Topophobia, Dylan Trigg brilliantly shows that topophobia is woven through our experience of place, from its most intimate to its most public. He is equal parts Virgil and J. G. Ballard: he is our guide into the anxious, uncanny, nausea-inducing, claustrophobic, and agoraphobic places we are seduced by and condemned to live in, and he is the one who puts into words that which haunts us.
But this is not an account of the macabre, nor is it a tour of the bleak spaces of post-industrial collapse. Trigg gives us a rigorous phenomenology of the gaps and fissures of everyday place, the anxieties and ambiguities of being a body that must at some level be committed to its places, and yet which does not always experience a similar commitment in return. This book should have a rightful place for anyone interested in phenomenology, place, and body.
” – Bruce Janz, Professor & Co-Director, Department of Philosophy and Centre for Humanities & Digital Research, University of Central Florida, USA
Research Interests:
What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often... more
What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often been overlooked by phenomenology. In confronting this oversight, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing redefines phenomenology as a species of realism, which he terms unhuman phenomenology. Far from being the vehicle of a human voice, this unhuman phenomenology gives expression to the alien materiality at the limit of experience.
By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.
***
Dylan Trigg's The Thing is a sophisticated melding of philosophy, literary criticism, and film criticism that underscores his major thesis that 'the horror of the cosmos is essentially the horror of the body.' Its discussions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the films of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and other texts and films allow us to look at these works from a fascinating new perspective while shedding light on humanity's fragility in a boundless cosmos. ~ S. T. Joshi
Dylan Trigg's The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror takes up the central challenge of contemporary philosophy - grappling with the world as indifferent to human constructs and concepts. Trigg's analysis suggests to us that phenomenology - too often regarded as a philosophy of the human par excellence - is uncannily suited to thinking the world-without-us. Husserl writing horror fiction is the spirit of this study. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet
By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.
***
Dylan Trigg's The Thing is a sophisticated melding of philosophy, literary criticism, and film criticism that underscores his major thesis that 'the horror of the cosmos is essentially the horror of the body.' Its discussions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the films of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and other texts and films allow us to look at these works from a fascinating new perspective while shedding light on humanity's fragility in a boundless cosmos. ~ S. T. Joshi
Dylan Trigg's The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror takes up the central challenge of contemporary philosophy - grappling with the world as indifferent to human constructs and concepts. Trigg's analysis suggests to us that phenomenology - too often regarded as a philosophy of the human par excellence - is uncannily suited to thinking the world-without-us. Husserl writing horror fiction is the spirit of this study. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet
Research Interests:
""From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The... more
""From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world. Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies.
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”""
REVIEWS
“Genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature … It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.”
— Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook
“This work marks a highly original contribution to the growing interdisciplinary, phenomenological informed, literature examining the nature of place. However, while drawing on phenomenology, this is by no means standard phenomenologically-informed fare. The terrain covered and position arrived at is far weirder and unsettled.”
— Emotion, Space and Society
“Trigg displays an impressive knowledge of the recent literature on place, memory and the uncanny, and the book is worth the effort for those with an interest in where the concept is currently headed…. Trigg’s emphasis on Merleau-Ponty rather than Heidegger for his phenomenology is a master-stroke: Trigg skillfully deploys Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to transcend the rigid dichotomy between subject and object and thus manages to reveal uncanniness as both a subjective experience.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“(The Memory of Place) will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, cultural studies, architectural theory, geography, and environmental studies. Summing Up: Recommended.”
— Choice
“Trigg takes readers on a subtle and nuanced tour that will intrigue philosophers and psychologists as well as students and researchers involved with any of the disciplines that intersect as ‘place studies’ — including architecture, geography, urban planning, and environmental studies.”
— Book News
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”""
REVIEWS
“Genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature … It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.”
— Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook
“This work marks a highly original contribution to the growing interdisciplinary, phenomenological informed, literature examining the nature of place. However, while drawing on phenomenology, this is by no means standard phenomenologically-informed fare. The terrain covered and position arrived at is far weirder and unsettled.”
— Emotion, Space and Society
“Trigg displays an impressive knowledge of the recent literature on place, memory and the uncanny, and the book is worth the effort for those with an interest in where the concept is currently headed…. Trigg’s emphasis on Merleau-Ponty rather than Heidegger for his phenomenology is a master-stroke: Trigg skillfully deploys Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to transcend the rigid dichotomy between subject and object and thus manages to reveal uncanniness as both a subjective experience.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“(The Memory of Place) will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, cultural studies, architectural theory, geography, and environmental studies. Summing Up: Recommended.”
— Choice
“Trigg takes readers on a subtle and nuanced tour that will intrigue philosophers and psychologists as well as students and researchers involved with any of the disciplines that intersect as ‘place studies’ — including architecture, geography, urban planning, and environmental studies.”
— Book News
Research Interests: Space and Place, History and Memory, Homelessness, Phenomenology, Horror Film, and 14 moreGhosts, Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hauntology, Memory Studies, Phenomenology of the body, Philosophy of Time, Megalithic Monuments, Architecture and Phenomenology, Flesh, The uncanny, H.P. Lovecraft, Haunting and Spectrality, and Ruins
In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a... more
In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg’s attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.
Research Interests:
This book explores the role atmospheres play in shared emotion. With insights from leading scholars in the field, Atmospheres and Shared Emotions investigates key issues such as the relation between atmospheres and moods, how atmospheres... more
This book explores the role atmospheres play in shared emotion. With insights from leading scholars in the field, Atmospheres and Shared Emotions investigates key issues such as the relation between atmospheres and moods, how atmospheres define psychopathological conditions such as anxiety and schizophrenia, what role atmospheres play in producing shared aesthetic experiences, and the significance of atmospheres in political events.
Calling upon disciplinary methodologies as broad as phenomenology, film studies, and law, each of the chapters is thematically connected by a rigorous attention on the multifaceted ways atmosphere play an important role in the development of shared emotion. While the concept of atmosphere has become a critical notion across several disciplines, the relationship between atmospheres and shared emotion remains neglected. The idea of sharing emotion over a particular event is rife within contemporary society. From Brexit to Trump to Covid-19, emotions are not only experienced individually, they are also grasped together. Proceeding from the view that atmospheres can play an explanatory role in accounting for shared emotion, the book promises to make an enduring contribution to both the understanding of atmospheres and to issues in the philosophy of emotion more broadly.
Offering both a nuanced analysis of key terms in contemporary debates as well as a series of original studies, the book will be a vital resource for scholars in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, human geography, and political science.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Atmospheres of Shared Emotion
Dylan Trigg
Part I: Moods and Atmospheres
Chapter 1. Are Atmospheres Shared Feelings?
Tonino Griffero
Chapter 2. Tuning the World: A Conceptual History of the Term Stimmung Part Two
Gerhard Thonhauser
Chapter 3. Moods and Atmospheres: Affective States, Affective Properties, and the Similarity Explanation
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Part II: Psychopathological Atmospheres
Chapter 4. Atmospheres of Anxiety: The Case of Covid-19
Dylan Trigg
Chapter 5. Feeling Bodies: Atmospheric Intercorporeality and its Disruptions in the Case of Schizophrenia
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei
Chapter 6. Agency and Atmospheres of Inclusion and Exclusion
Joel Krueger
Part III: Aesthetic and Political Atmospheres
Chapter 7. Shared or Spread? On Boredom and Other Unintended Collective Emotions in the Cinema
Julian Hanich
Chapter 8. Nazi Architecture as Design for Producing "Volksgemeinschaft"
Gernot Böhme
Chapter 9. Political Emotions and Political Atmospheres
Lucy Osler and Thomas Szanto
Conclusion: Something We All Share
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Index
Calling upon disciplinary methodologies as broad as phenomenology, film studies, and law, each of the chapters is thematically connected by a rigorous attention on the multifaceted ways atmosphere play an important role in the development of shared emotion. While the concept of atmosphere has become a critical notion across several disciplines, the relationship between atmospheres and shared emotion remains neglected. The idea of sharing emotion over a particular event is rife within contemporary society. From Brexit to Trump to Covid-19, emotions are not only experienced individually, they are also grasped together. Proceeding from the view that atmospheres can play an explanatory role in accounting for shared emotion, the book promises to make an enduring contribution to both the understanding of atmospheres and to issues in the philosophy of emotion more broadly.
Offering both a nuanced analysis of key terms in contemporary debates as well as a series of original studies, the book will be a vital resource for scholars in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, human geography, and political science.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Atmospheres of Shared Emotion
Dylan Trigg
Part I: Moods and Atmospheres
Chapter 1. Are Atmospheres Shared Feelings?
Tonino Griffero
Chapter 2. Tuning the World: A Conceptual History of the Term Stimmung Part Two
Gerhard Thonhauser
Chapter 3. Moods and Atmospheres: Affective States, Affective Properties, and the Similarity Explanation
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Part II: Psychopathological Atmospheres
Chapter 4. Atmospheres of Anxiety: The Case of Covid-19
Dylan Trigg
Chapter 5. Feeling Bodies: Atmospheric Intercorporeality and its Disruptions in the Case of Schizophrenia
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei
Chapter 6. Agency and Atmospheres of Inclusion and Exclusion
Joel Krueger
Part III: Aesthetic and Political Atmospheres
Chapter 7. Shared or Spread? On Boredom and Other Unintended Collective Emotions in the Cinema
Julian Hanich
Chapter 8. Nazi Architecture as Design for Producing "Volksgemeinschaft"
Gernot Böhme
Chapter 9. Political Emotions and Political Atmospheres
Lucy Osler and Thomas Szanto
Conclusion: Something We All Share
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Index
Research Interests:
1st Edition The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia Edited By Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg Copyright 2025 Hardback £164.00 ISBN 9781032429205 600 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations August 7, 2024 by Routledge Austria Flag Free Shipping (7-14 Business... more
1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia
Edited By Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg
Copyright 2025
Hardback
£164.00
ISBN 9781032429205
600 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
August 7, 2024 by Routledge
Austria Flag Free Shipping (7-14 Business Days)
shipping options
Hardback
Available for pre-order on July 17, 2024. Item will ship after August 7, 2024
Original Price£205.00
Sale PriceGBP £164.00
QTY
1
Description
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly.
Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements and gaps in existing literature. Comprising forty-five chapters, the volume covers the following topics:
Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology.
Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory.
Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia.
Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects.
Media related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels.
Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia
Edited By Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg
Copyright 2025
Hardback
£164.00
ISBN 9781032429205
600 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
August 7, 2024 by Routledge
Austria Flag Free Shipping (7-14 Business Days)
shipping options
Hardback
Available for pre-order on July 17, 2024. Item will ship after August 7, 2024
Original Price£205.00
Sale PriceGBP £164.00
QTY
1
Description
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly.
Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements and gaps in existing literature. Comprising forty-five chapters, the volume covers the following topics:
Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology.
Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory.
Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia.
Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects.
Media related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels.
Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.
Research Interests:
"This book contains a series of essays that explore the concept of unconsciousness as it is situated between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. A leading goal of the collection is to carve out phenomenological dimensions within... more
"This book contains a series of essays that explore the concept of unconsciousness as it is situated between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. A leading goal of the collection is to carve out phenomenological dimensions within psychoanalysis and, equally, to carve out psychoanalytical dimensions within phenomenology.
The book examines the nature of unconsciousness and the role it plays in structuring our sense of self. It also looks at the extent to which the unconscious marks the body as it functions outside of experience as well as manifests itself in experience. In addition, the book explores the relationship between unconsciousness and language, particularly if unconsciousness exists prior to language or if the concept can only be understood through speech.
The collection includes contributions from leading scholars, each of whom grounds their investigations in a nuanced mastery of the traditional voices of their fields. These contributors provide diverse viewpoints that challenge both the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions in their relation to unconsciousness."
With Dermot Moran, Alexander Schnell, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Timothy Mooney, James Phillips, Dorothée Legrand, Francois Raffoul, Joseph Cohen, Drew Dalton, Dylan Trigg, Thamy Ayouch, Dieter Lohmar, Line Ryberg Ingerslev, Nataille Depraz, and Alphonso Lingis.
The book examines the nature of unconsciousness and the role it plays in structuring our sense of self. It also looks at the extent to which the unconscious marks the body as it functions outside of experience as well as manifests itself in experience. In addition, the book explores the relationship between unconsciousness and language, particularly if unconsciousness exists prior to language or if the concept can only be understood through speech.
The collection includes contributions from leading scholars, each of whom grounds their investigations in a nuanced mastery of the traditional voices of their fields. These contributors provide diverse viewpoints that challenge both the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions in their relation to unconsciousness."
With Dermot Moran, Alexander Schnell, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Timothy Mooney, James Phillips, Dorothée Legrand, Francois Raffoul, Joseph Cohen, Drew Dalton, Dylan Trigg, Thamy Ayouch, Dieter Lohmar, Line Ryberg Ingerslev, Nataille Depraz, and Alphonso Lingis.
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Since March 2020, many if not all of us have had to contend with new ways of comporting ourselves in the world. From the way we shop to the way we socialise-in a comparatively short amount of time, COVID-19 has exposed many of us to the... more
Since March 2020, many if not all of us have had to contend with new ways of comporting ourselves in the world. From the way we shop to the way we socialise-in a comparatively short amount of time, COVID-19 has exposed many of us to the fragility of everyday life. These changes to everyday experience are not isolated to specific localised actions, such as using more hand-sanitizer or even staying at home; rather, these changes have transformed experiences of the world-including ourselves and other people-more generally. The world that we have known, with its coat of familiarity and constancy, its atmosphere of security and protection, has come to an end. In its place, we have had to contend with a world stricken by disease and uncertainty, in which fundaments of everyday life can no longer be taken for granted. This fragile world has been given expression through the experience of our own bodies, as well as other people's bodies. In "typical" (or at least, pre-pandemic) circumstances, the body appears for us as a source of familiarity and intimacy. We are situated in the world, not as abstract and atomic entities in a grid of spatial references, but as living and embodied beings that are affectively attuned to the world and to the other bodies in that world. We move through the world with a tacit confidence shaped and framed by the liaison between the body and the environment. We reach out to things, maneuver out of the way, adjust ourselves, and communicate with others-all without having to think about it in the abstract. Our senses are not merely computational systems processing data, but affective regions, each tied together, which enable us to be situated in the world in a meaningful sense. Of course, this is not always the case and in certain affective, neurological, and medical situations, the idea of a "typical" body that is a source of familiarity and intimacy is far from a given. Anxiety disorders would be one such example where the body is experienced from the outset as being radically contingent and in some cases alien to a sense of self (Guilmette 2020; Trigg 2016, 2018). The same is also true of pregnant embodiment (Trigg 2021). Other cases would include people living with chronic medical conditions, especially people COVID-19 and the Anxious Body • 107 Dylan Trigg
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How does a unit of space become a home? From a phenomenological perspective, the response to this question has been to accent the lived relations we have with spatiality, both subjectively and intersubjectively. Thus, for Gaston... more
How does a unit of space become a home? From a phenomenological perspective, the response to this question has been to accent the lived relations we have with spatiality, both subjectively and intersubjectively. Thus, for Gaston Bachelard, homliness is predicated on the rapport between memory and imagination working in tandem (Bachelard 1994). But what has been overlooked in this tradition is what I’m calling the prehistory of the home. The life of an apartment does not begin and end with our own occupancy. Rather, it extends itself in time to accommodate those who come after us, and it attests to a history prior to us. In this paper, I explore these relations and tensions through situating Roman Polanski’s 1976 film The Tenant in dialogue with Bachelard. Polanski’s film is notable for eliciting the uncanny and anxiety-provoking rapport between the prehistory of an apartment and the identity of the dweller, such that there is an increasing loss of distinction between the two.
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Phenomenologically grounded research on pregnancy is a thriving area of activity in feminist studies and related disciplines. But what has been largely omitted in this area of research is the experience of childbirth itself. This paper... more
Phenomenologically grounded research on pregnancy is a thriving area of activity in feminist studies and related disciplines. But what has been largely omitted in this area of research is the experience of childbirth itself. This paper proposes a phenomenological analysis of childbirth inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty. The paper proceeds from the conviction that the concept of anonymity can play a critical role in explicating the affective structure of childbirth. This is evident in at least two respects. First, the concept of anonymity gives structural specificity to the different levels of bodily existence at work in childbirth. Second, the concept of anonymity can play a powerful explanatory role in accounting for the sense of strangeness accompanying childbirth. To flesh these ideas out, I focus on two attributes of birth, sourced from first-person narratives of childbirth. The first aspect concerns the sense of leaving one's body behind during childbirth while the second aspect concerns the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them as being instructive not only of the uniqueness of childbirth but also revealing something important about bodily life more generally. Accordingly, the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I will critically explore the concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty; second, I will apply this concept to childbirth; finally, I will provide an outline of how childbirth sheds light on the broader nature of bodily life.
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This paper considers the relation between nostalgia and sublimation through the figure of Gaston Bachelard and the American artist, Joel Sternfeld. In the thought of Bachelard, time is subjected to a process of sublimation, such that past... more
This paper considers the relation between nostalgia and sublimation through the figure of Gaston Bachelard and the American artist, Joel Sternfeld. In the thought of Bachelard, time is subjected to a process of sublimation, such that past ceases to be inactive and instead becomes the ground of perceptual experience more broadly. Nostalgia is one such affective state which is central to Bachelard and which presents us with a vivid sense of how pastness is manifest in and through the present rather than being consigned to an archive. Yet Bachelard’s account of time as an “epiphanic instant” does not entirely capture the way temporal sublimation often entails an incomplete transformation, in the process producing a series of fragments that resist incorporation into the present. To explore these tensions, I consider the work of the American photographer, Joel Sternfeld, focusing especially on his American Prospects series from 1979. In doing so, I argue that an atmospheric approach to nostalgia and sublimation allows us to grasp the manifold ways in which past and present join and disjoin in the same measure.
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The topic of shared emotion is an active area of investigation in contemporary phenomenological research. Despite this upsurge of interest in the phenomenology of shared emotion, a critical analysis of the role atmosphere plays in cases... more
The topic of shared emotion is an active area of investigation in contemporary phenomenological research. Despite this upsurge of interest in the phenomenology of shared emotion, a critical analysis of the role atmosphere plays in cases of shared emotion remains underexplored. My objective in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of atmosphere as a key tool in the understanding of shared emotion. To clarify this role, I develop a twofold strategy. First, by way of stage setting, I begin by identifying the requirements for the co-constitution of shared emotion. Second, in response to existing models of shared emotion, I argue that the concept of atmosphere can play a critical role within genuine cases of shared emotion in two key respects. First, through diffusing emotion in public space, an atmosphere serves as a common ground between people, in turn generating the conditions for mutual self-other awareness. Second, though being instituted as the bearer of value within cultural practices, modes of bodily comportment, and societal norms, an atmosphere serves as a space of attunement, in turn generating a sense of togetherness.
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This paper examines phenomenology's idea of the body as «one's own» by establishing a dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and the Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector. Central to this study is the question of to what extent the anonymous... more
This paper examines phenomenology's idea of the body as «one's own» by establishing a dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and the Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector. Central to this study is the question of to what extent the anonymous undercurrent of existence is threat to bodily integrity. In response to this question, the paper unfolds in two stages. First, I pursue an analysis of the body in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, giving special focuses to the role anonymity plays in the constitution of the body as one's own. Arguing that Merleau-Ponty tends to underplay the disruptive implications of his thought, I then turn to Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. The motivation for pairing Lispector and Merleau-Ponty is twofold: first, Lispector provides a subtle and incisive analysis of the affective experience of anonymity; two, Lispector issues a challenge to phenomenology to rethink the division between selfhood and elemental materiality.
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This essay considers the role of depersonalization in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. While there has been a modest amount of interest in depersonalization from a phenomenological perspective, a critical exploration of the theme of... more
This essay considers the role of depersonalization in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. While there has been a modest amount of interest in depersonalization from a phenomenological perspective, a critical exploration of the theme of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking itself remains overlooked (cf. Varga (Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 19:2, 103-113, 2012); Colombetti and Ratcliffe (Emotion Review, 4:2, 145-250, 2012). This is an oddity, given that the theme of depersonalization proves instructive in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the constitution of the subject, and appears within Phenomenology of Perception at key points in his thinking (Merleau-Ponty 2012). This paper serves as a critical exposition of the role of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I proceed in three ways. In the first instance, I provide an overview of depersonalization, addressing its salient characteristics, which includes: a feeling of disturbed bodily subjectivity; a diminishment of affective feeling; and a corresponding and overarching sense of unreality, carrying with it a sense of estrangement. In the main part of the paper, I consider the articulation of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty, especially as it figures in Phenomenology of Perception. My claim is that depersonalization can be best captured as an expression of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ambiguity. I conclude by considering to what extent Merleau-Ponty’s account of depersonalization corresponds with the medical understanding of the condition.
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The aim of this paper is to examine Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “psychoanalysis of Nature” (Merleau-Ponty 1968). My thesis is that in order to understand the creation of a Merleau-Pontean psychoanalysis (together with the role the... more
The aim of this paper is to examine Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “psychoanalysis of Nature” (Merleau-Ponty 1968). My thesis is that in order to understand the creation of a Merleau-Pontean psychoanalysis (together with the role the unconscious plays in this psychoanalysis), we need to ultimately understand the place of Schelling in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought. Through his dialogue with Schelling, Merleau-Ponty will be able to formulate not only a psychoanalysis of Nature, but also fulfil the ultimate task of phenomenology itself; namely, of identifying “what resists phenomenology—natural being, the ‘barbarous’ source Schelling spoke of” and situating it precisely at the heart of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 178). The plan for studying this natural psychoanalysis is threefold. First, I provide an overview of the role psychoanalysis plays in the 1951 lecture, “Man and Adversity,” focusing especially on this lecture as a turning point in his thinking. Second, I chart how Merleau-Ponty’s psychoanalysis is informed by the various ways in which the unconscious is formulated in his thought, leading eventually to a dialogue with Schelling. Accordingly, in the final part of the paper, I trace the role of Schelling’s thought in the creation of a Merleau-Pontean psychoanalysis. As I argue, what distinguishes this psychoanalysis is the centrality of Schelling’s idea of the “barbaric principle,” which manifests itself as the notion of an unconscious indexing an “excess of Being” resistant to classical phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 38).
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This paper argues that the concept of the Earth plays a pivotal role in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in two ways. First, the concept assumes a special importance in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Husserl via the fragment known as “The... more
This paper argues that the concept of the Earth plays a pivotal role in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in two ways. First, the concept assumes a special importance in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Husserl via the fragment known as “The Earth Does Not Move.” Two, from this fragment, the Earth marks a key theme around which Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy revolves. In particular, it is with the concept of the Earth that Merleau-Ponty will develop his archaeologically oriented phenomenology. To defend this claim, the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I provide a preliminary reading of Husserl’s fragment, focusing in particular on the co-constitution of body and Earth. Two, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of this fragment, especially in the lectures on nature and then in the later lectures on Husserl. From these varying interpretations, the germs of Merleau-Ponty’s archaeological phenomenology are conceived. Accordingly, in the final part of the paper, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the Earth is Husserlian insofar as it reinforces the primordial “ground (sol) of experience” but at the same time marks a departure from Husserl insofar as the Earth registers a brute or wild layer that resists phenomenology.
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How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the... more
How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the intersubjective formation of the world, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. I will be making two key claims. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, a point I shall explore with recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the prepersonal body. The implication of this claim is that evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects. Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others. Each of these claims is demonstrated via a phenomenological analysis of the agoraphobe’s interaction with others. From this analysis, I conclude that our experience of the world is affected by our experience of others precisely because we are in a bodily relation with others. Such a relation is not causally linked, as though first there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other, and world are each intertwined in a single unity and cannot be considered apart.
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Emmanuel Levinas is often thought of as a philosopher of ethics, above all else. Indeed, his notions of the face, the Other, and alterity have all earned him a distinguished place in the history of phenomenology as a fundamental thinker... more
Emmanuel Levinas is often thought of as a philosopher of ethics, above all else. Indeed, his notions of the face, the Other, and alterity have all earned him a distinguished place in the history of phenomenology as a fundamental thinker of ethics as a first philosophy. But what has been overlooked in this attention on ethics is the early work of Levinas, which reveals him less a philosopher of the Other and more as a philosopher of elemental and anonymous being, a speculative metaphysician whose ethical voice was still in the process of forming. In this paper, I explore the early Levinas, specifically with an aim of assessing what he can tell us about phenomenology in its relation to the non-human world. I make two claims. One, Levinas’s idea of the “il y a” (the there is) offers us a novel way of rethinking the relation between the body and the world. This idea can be approached by phrasing Levinas as a materialist. Two, the experience of horror, which Levinas will place great onus on, provides us with a phenomenology at the threshold of experience. As I argue, it is precisely through what Levinas terms “the horror of the night,” that phenomenology begins to exceed its methodological constraints in accounting for a plane of elemental existence beyond experience.
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The history of the sublime within aesthetics has tended to focus on the natural world. Within this history, the sublime has been a category reserved for awe-inspiring and overwhelming experiences, in which the finite subject is dwarfed by... more
The history of the sublime within aesthetics has tended to focus on the natural world. Within this history, the sublime has been a category reserved for awe-inspiring and overwhelming experiences, in which the finite subject is dwarfed by a more expansive force. Despite subjectivity being foremost in this topic,
what has been overlooked, is the role the body plays in being the centre of aesthetic experience. In this paper, I will turn the tide on this omission and thematize the role of the body within the experience of the sublime. My plan for reconsidering this movement is to uniteWerner Herzog’s Aguirre,Wrath of God
(1972) with the late thought of Merleau-Ponty, especially his enigmatic notion of "flesh" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). In both Herzog and Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of nature exists which challenges the dichotomy between the autonomous self encountering the objective realm of wilderness. In each case, an ambiguity
undercuts the idea of wilderness existing "there" while human subjectivity remains placed "here." I will "read" the film as an instant of the chiasmatic relation between nature and humanity. Doing so, I will suggest that the reversibility between the body and the environment can be seen as an amplification of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "wild being" (l’etre sauvage).
what has been overlooked, is the role the body plays in being the centre of aesthetic experience. In this paper, I will turn the tide on this omission and thematize the role of the body within the experience of the sublime. My plan for reconsidering this movement is to uniteWerner Herzog’s Aguirre,Wrath of God
(1972) with the late thought of Merleau-Ponty, especially his enigmatic notion of "flesh" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). In both Herzog and Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of nature exists which challenges the dichotomy between the autonomous self encountering the objective realm of wilderness. In each case, an ambiguity
undercuts the idea of wilderness existing "there" while human subjectivity remains placed "here." I will "read" the film as an instant of the chiasmatic relation between nature and humanity. Doing so, I will suggest that the reversibility between the body and the environment can be seen as an amplification of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "wild being" (l’etre sauvage).
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From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and... more
From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way.
First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.
Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.
First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.
Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.
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Implicit in theoretical treatments of the memory of trauma is the fragmented reception of the past. While a great deal of research has approached this issue from the perspective of oral testimony, what has remained underdeveloped is the... more
Implicit in theoretical treatments of the memory of trauma is the fragmented reception of the past. While a great deal of research has approached this issue from the perspective of oral testimony, what has remained underdeveloped is the role sites of memory play in contributing to our understanding of trauma. Accordingly, in this article, I intend make a foray into this convergence between place and trauma through undertaking a phenomenological investigation of the testimonial attributes of ruins. In doing so, I will pursue two central questions. First, insofar as the built environment is able to contain memory, how does the place of trauma testify to history? Second, if ruins are by their nature contingent and dynamic, how can the past be spatially preserved without creating a false unity between time and the event? In response to these questions, I will put forward the notion that sites of trauma articulate memory precisely through refusing a continuous temporal narrative. My conclusion is that the appearance of the ruin, understood phenomenologically, allows us to approach the spatio-temporality of trauma in terms of a logic of hauntings and voids.
embodiment Holocaust materiality nightmares phenom
embodiment Holocaust materiality nightmares phenom
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It has become customary to distinguish between place and placelessness in terms of a distinction between the specificity of a particular environment and the standardised uniformity of the environment respectively. In this article, I... more
It has become customary to distinguish between place and placelessness in terms of a distinction between the specificity of a particular environment and the standardised uniformity of the environment respectively. In this article, I negotiate this dichotomy, and in the process address the role played by place in reinforcing the law of the city. My principal thesis is that the qualitative judgement concerning place and placelessness relies on a questionable conflation between culture and subjective experience, insofar as cultural assessments determine the experience of a place independently of that place itself. Phenomenologically, the implication of this claim is that place is formed in advance of it being experienced - a position untenable for a phenomenological method. By turning to Agamben s (1998) writings on law, Virilio s (2005) writings on the city and Merleau-Ponty s (1968) notion of flesh , I attempt to breach this division between place and placelessness with two claims. First, because the spatiality of law occupies a normative and stabilising presence, I argue that the concept of place lends itself toward a purely formal notion entirely complicit in defining place as an experience. Second, through applying this claim to a phenomenological analysis of borderlines, my claim is that the characterisation of placelessness as being pernicious to the centrality of place rests on a false premise: namely, that place is singular and incommensurable, while placelessness is barren of specificity. Implicit in this claim is a commitment to phenomenology s role in disturbing sedimented judgements of experience. The outcome of this paradoxical emergence is a lawless zone played out on the border between the visible and the invisible, which I will consider with recourse to Merleau-Ponty s notion of flesh .
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Accusations of empty formalism are something of a cliché when it comes to Kant’s ethics and aesthetics. Nevertheless, in the case of the latter, the accusation might well be justified. Kant’s failure to put disinterestedness in place... more
Accusations of empty formalism are something of a cliché when it comes to Kant’s ethics and aesthetics. Nevertheless, in the case of the latter, the accusation might well be justified. Kant’s failure to put disinterestedness in place means that numerous questions remain unanswered concerning the spatiality of aesthetic experience. The purpose of this article is to ask whether a specific spatial context can influence the emergence of Kant’s disinterested delight. The author hence asks two questions: First, is there a definite distinction between interested and disinterested delight? Second, if there is such a distinction, do there exist any factors that would facilitate disinterestedness to occur? Making recourse to an essay by Siegfried Kracauer, as well as compositions by Erik Satie and Brian Eno, the author argues that context does have an influence on the distinction between disinterestedness and interestedness and that the hotel lobby is an excellent illustration of a spatial context that facilities disinterested delight for the reason that it is largely impersonal, indifferent, and so universal.
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Despite a notable resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, prompted chiefly by the French postmodernist Jean-Françoise Lyotard, the aesthetic of the sublime is largely absent from contemporary debate. Countered by the modern desire for base... more
Despite a notable resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, prompted chiefly by the French postmodernist Jean-Françoise Lyotard, the aesthetic of the sublime is largely absent from contemporary debate. Countered by the modern desire for base expressionism in art, sublimity is perhaps untimely again, and furthermore incongruous with an age in which, either epistemological skepticism or crude (exclusive) empiricism predominates. At best, it is viewed, not as a permanent structure of consciousness, but contextually as a disposition that peaked during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the philosophies of Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer, the paintings of Friedrich, Turner, and Carus, and the music of Beethoven, Wagner, and later, Bruckner. Characterized by, to put it prosaically, the inability of the mind or the senses to grasp an object in its entirety, whether it be in size (mathematically) or in force (dynamically), the sublime lends itself well to the affirmation of an experience that contains in itself a sense of both awe and terror. This dynamic is thus embodied par excellence in the opposition between a finite individual existing, and the world of apparent and immediate infinity, both spatially and temporally, in which he exists.
As an aesthetic category, the sublime emerged in the first century A.D. through the Greek writer Longinus. In his On the Sublime, we are told how rhetoric fills us "with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaulting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we heard." Although he established ideas that would remain central to discussions on the sublime—grand conceptions, inspired emotion, a zeal that borders on the violent, and above all a gravity of thought, Longinus's text is largely concerned with the rhetorical sublime and to a large extent excludes Nature, which both Burke and Kant would later hold as central to their particular philosophies.
Edmund Burke's seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757 was celebrated for its contrast between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime, Burke tells us is "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." While the beautiful is "a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them . . . they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affections towards their persons." The differences are rendered explicit when Burke, in a well-known passage, depicts the sublime as vast, rugged, negligent, gloomy, and great, and the beautiful as small, smooth, polished, light, and delicate.
Implicit in Burke's inquiry is the notion that the sublime experience stretches the epistemological apprehension both sensibly and intelligibly. In Kant's account of the sublime, this idea is pivotal. For Kant the feeling of the sublime emerges when the senses fail to sufficiently apprehend an object. The subject's sense of individuation is therefore lost in the expansiveness or force of the object. Consider the Grand Canyon. In its spatial depth, we are both astounded and struck with a nervous exaltation; in its temporal presence, as an object where the lines of time have manifested themselves physically, we sense the sublimity of history unfold before us, but also realize the contingency of the present. The alchemical adage states as above, so below; and so too in the sublime: the finite and the infinite, terror and awe compound violently. The experience is such that the thought of throwing oneself into this yawning abyss is surely never far away. However, this subordination of subject to object is not a consequence of a substance inherent in the object acting as a causal thing-in-itself...
As an aesthetic category, the sublime emerged in the first century A.D. through the Greek writer Longinus. In his On the Sublime, we are told how rhetoric fills us "with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaulting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we heard." Although he established ideas that would remain central to discussions on the sublime—grand conceptions, inspired emotion, a zeal that borders on the violent, and above all a gravity of thought, Longinus's text is largely concerned with the rhetorical sublime and to a large extent excludes Nature, which both Burke and Kant would later hold as central to their particular philosophies.
Edmund Burke's seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757 was celebrated for its contrast between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime, Burke tells us is "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." While the beautiful is "a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them . . . they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affections towards their persons." The differences are rendered explicit when Burke, in a well-known passage, depicts the sublime as vast, rugged, negligent, gloomy, and great, and the beautiful as small, smooth, polished, light, and delicate.
Implicit in Burke's inquiry is the notion that the sublime experience stretches the epistemological apprehension both sensibly and intelligibly. In Kant's account of the sublime, this idea is pivotal. For Kant the feeling of the sublime emerges when the senses fail to sufficiently apprehend an object. The subject's sense of individuation is therefore lost in the expansiveness or force of the object. Consider the Grand Canyon. In its spatial depth, we are both astounded and struck with a nervous exaltation; in its temporal presence, as an object where the lines of time have manifested themselves physically, we sense the sublimity of history unfold before us, but also realize the contingency of the present. The alchemical adage states as above, so below; and so too in the sublime: the finite and the infinite, terror and awe compound violently. The experience is such that the thought of throwing oneself into this yawning abyss is surely never far away. However, this subordination of subject to object is not a consequence of a substance inherent in the object acting as a causal thing-in-itself...
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This chapter investigates the phenomenological significance of so-called hypnagogic states of consciousness. The hypnagogic state refers to the transitional zone between wakefulness and sleep, which tends to be characterised by vivid... more
This chapter investigates the phenomenological significance of so-called hypnagogic states of consciousness. The hypnagogic state refers to the transitional zone between wakefulness and sleep, which tends to be characterised by vivid visual phenomena. Phenomenologically rich, the hypnagogic state appears to dissolve the boundary between different levels of subjective existence. While there has been a modest amount of phenomenological research into hypnagogic visions and images, what has been overlooked is the affective relation we have to this experience. Investigating this oversight, this chapter aims to do two things. First, I provide a phenomenological account of hypnagogia. Second, I argue that that there is a close relation between hypnagogia and states of anxiety, evident in conditions such as depersonalization. My argument is that both hypnagogia and anxiety involve a loosening of the ego together with an exposure to temporal ambiguity. I demonstrate this claim through case s...
The emergence of the infectious disease known as Covid-19 has caused widespread death and illness, economic unrest, and global uncertainty, the impact and extent of which remains presently unknown. Throughout this, there has also been an... more
The emergence of the infectious disease known as Covid-19 has caused widespread death and illness, economic unrest, and global uncertainty, the impact and extent of which remains presently unknown. Throughout this, there has also been an expediential growth in anxiety across different populations. Yet the anxiety produced by Covid-19 is not only an affective state experienced by individuals, it is also something that is extended in the everyday world as part of a general atmosphere. This chapter's point of departure is that the concept of an atmosphere can play a powerful role in accounting for (i) how anxiety is distributed through the world and (ii) how anxiety can institute and express itself in specific things without being reducible to those things. The chapter unfolds in three ways. First, the chapter considers the intentional structure of an atmosphere, giving special attention to the way an atmosphere generates a specific affective style. Second, attention is given to one of the salient themes of Covid-19 anxiety; namely, staying at home and leaving home. Finally, the chapter focuses on how the lived body is augmented in and through the lens of coronavirus. The chapter concludes by consolidating the role atmospheres play in synthesising these elements together.
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In "Transcendence and Film: Cinematic Encounters with the Real." Edited by David P. Nicholas. London: Lexington Books (2019)
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In his book The Animal That I am, Derrida issues a critique of the usage of the term “animal.” Pointing toward the Heideggerian treatment of the animal as worldless, Derrida posits that the concept has been used in a reductive and... more
In his book The Animal That I am, Derrida issues a critique of the usage of the term “animal.” Pointing toward the Heideggerian treatment of the animal as worldless, Derrida posits that the concept has been used in a reductive and anthropocentric manner. Taking this line of thought as a cue, in this essay I question whether phenomenology can (i) negotiate with the concept of animality without reducing it to an inhuman humanity, or, (ii) glorifying it as a form of fluid kinship, in which the animal somehow serves as a guide for being human. Both of these modes instrumentalise the animal for the sake of developing an epistemic or ethical value critical to human identity. In response to this question, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the concept of animality. In particular, I plot the evolution of the concept from its inception in The Structure of Behaviour to its radical revision through the concept of “flesh.” As I argue, what Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy presents us with is neither a glorification of the animal as a figure of moral redemption nor an alien existence that is sealed off from human existence; instead, we are presented with a kinship that is strange on both a conceptual and affective level, and which ultimately registers a limit for phenomenological thought.
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What can phenomenology and psychoanalysis say about nostalgia? In contradistinction to anxiety, which has become the philosophical and psychoanalytical mood par excellence, nostalgia has by contrast fallen by the wayside. Even in the... more
What can phenomenology and psychoanalysis say about nostalgia? In contradistinction to anxiety, which has become the philosophical and psychoanalytical mood par excellence, nostalgia has by contrast fallen by the wayside. Even in the corpus of Freud, with the accent on the archaeology of sedimented meanings, the term “nostalgia” itself only appears a handful of time. For its own part, phenomenology has registered the mood of nostalgia only fleetingly, with a handful of papers appearing over the last two decades or so. In this paper, I’d like to consider one subdivision of nostalgia’s structure through bringing together phenomenology and psychoanalysis into the same lens. In particular, I would like to consider nostalgia’s relation to time and embodiment as it figures in both phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The plan for this study is threefold. First, I will frame nostalgia’s relation to time in terms of an intolerance of ambiguity; second, I will phrase the object of nostalgia as involving the lure of temporal identification; finally, I will end by considering how this temporal identification is played out through the body, and, more narrowly, through the body image.
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Anxiety is sometimes thought of as either a state of mind, lacking a thick spatial depth, or otherwise conceived as something that individuals undergo alone. Such presuppositions are evident both conceptually and clinically. In this... more
Anxiety is sometimes thought of as either a state of mind, lacking a thick spatial depth, or otherwise conceived as something that individuals undergo alone. Such presuppositions are evident both conceptually and clinically. In this paper, I present a contrasting account of anxiety as being a situated affect. I develop this claim by pursuing a phenomenological analysis of agoraphobia. Far from a disembodied, displaced, and solitary state of mind, agoraphobic is revealed as being thickly mediated by bodily, spatial, and intersubjective dimensions.
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Forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, eds. Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer. Routledge.
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From "Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness." Edited by Kevin Aho. London: Rowman and Littlefield International (2018). pp.43-57.
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The distinction between place and non-place has occupied a critical role in both the philosophy of place and human geography for the last 20 years. In a distinction that stems from Marc Augé but is traceable to Edward Relph, " place " is... more
The distinction between place and non-place has occupied a critical role in both the philosophy of place and human geography for the last 20 years. In a distinction that stems from Marc Augé but is traceable to Edward Relph, " place " is thought as being relationally constructed, laden with meaning, and shaped by a broader history; home being emblematic of place. " Non-place, " on the other hand, is taken to mean places divested of meaning, homogenous, and largely interchangeable ; airports, supermarkets, and prefabricated office complexes being examples. Whilst this distinction has tended to be pervasive and influential in phenomenologi-cal accounts of place, critical analysis on the relation between place and non-place has been sparse. This paper aims to (1) develop an analysis of the distinction, ambiguities , and tensions between place and non-place. (2). To question and interrogate what kind of difference is involved in this distinction. (3). To address the role inter-subjectivity and affectivity plays in the " sense of place. "
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Abstract: When reflecting on the idea of personal identity, we tend to privilege memories that are in some sense our own. In distinction to this tendency, this chapter investigates to what extent our sense of self is united (and by the... more
Abstract: When reflecting on the idea of personal identity, we tend to privilege memories that are in some sense our own. In distinction to this tendency, this chapter investigates to what extent our sense of self is united (and by the same measure, disunited) by a memory outside of experience. My claim is that such a memory exists as an object of anxiety for a subject, emerging as a threat to the image of the self as integrated and self-mastered. I pursue this thought in three ways. First, I consider Freud’s speculative idea of phylogenetic memory in its relation to the uncanny. What Freud’s idea brings to light is the notion of a past that influences the subject without the subject being explicitly conscious of this influence. Second, I pursue a cinematic articulation of this structure in the form of Ken Russell’s Altered States. Russell’s film is beneficial to this discussion in multiple ways. Above all, in the figure of the film’s protagonist, we gain insight into the affective structure binding different orders together in the same body. Finally, I pursue the anxiety at the heart of this structure through Lacan. Lacan’s reflections on the mirror stage give conceptual shape to the inability of the subject to perceive an object anterior to itself, except in the shape of anxiety. Situating Lacan in the context of Russell’s film allows me to explicate this structure.
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From: "Image in Space: Contributions to a Topology of Images, libri nigri Band 49" (Edited Martin Nitsche). This chapter looks at a late fragment in Husserl’s philosophy concerning the relationship between the Earth and the body. In it,... more
From: "Image in Space: Contributions to a Topology of Images, libri nigri Band 49" (Edited Martin Nitsche).
This chapter looks at a late fragment in Husserl’s philosophy concerning the relationship between the Earth and the body. In it, Husserl argues that the Earth is the primal ground of the possibility of movement and rest. In addition, he also poses some important questions concerning the origin of the body as an earthly entity. By examining this fragment, I investigate whether or not the body as an earthly entity can ever be transcended, thus allowing for the conceptualization of both another Earth and an alien entity that is not reducible to human experience. To assist with these questions, I draw upon Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. The reason for doing so is that Tarkovsky draws our attention to the limits phenomenology faces in contending with alien entities, which defy not only science but also descriptive methods. In both Husserl and Tarkovsky, an encounter with the alien is only possible in terms of a breach in our understanding of familiarity and unfamiliarity. To this extent, the alien finds its home in the uncanny, a point I develop at the conclusion.
This chapter looks at a late fragment in Husserl’s philosophy concerning the relationship between the Earth and the body. In it, Husserl argues that the Earth is the primal ground of the possibility of movement and rest. In addition, he also poses some important questions concerning the origin of the body as an earthly entity. By examining this fragment, I investigate whether or not the body as an earthly entity can ever be transcended, thus allowing for the conceptualization of both another Earth and an alien entity that is not reducible to human experience. To assist with these questions, I draw upon Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. The reason for doing so is that Tarkovsky draws our attention to the limits phenomenology faces in contending with alien entities, which defy not only science but also descriptive methods. In both Husserl and Tarkovsky, an encounter with the alien is only possible in terms of a breach in our understanding of familiarity and unfamiliarity. To this extent, the alien finds its home in the uncanny, a point I develop at the conclusion.
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To what extent is our experience of spatiality affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the mood of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is often thought of as a phobia involving... more
To what extent is our experience of spatiality affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the mood of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is often thought of as a phobia involving spatiality, especially in relation the space of the home. In this paper, I will argue that the issue of spatiality cannot be understood without reference to intersubjectivity. I will pursue this claim with a first-person analysis of agoraphobia. To achieve this, I will turn to Sartre’s account of the look. Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity is helpful in allowing us to recognise both the intersubjective structure of spatiality and the embodiment. For Sartre, the look of the other carries with it a destabilising affect. In it, a conflict takes place between two of more selves, each of whom struggle to regain control over their environmental and bodily bearings, as he puts it: “The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centrality which I am simultaneously effecting” (255). To understand this relation between decentralization and centralization, I turn to the phenomenology of agoraphobia, and especially to the experience of walking. My claim is that the agoraphobic experience getting from A to B is never simply a question of spatial relations, but is always informed by the expression of our total subjectivity and our relation with the other’s look. By way of conclusion, I will propose the following formulation: our experience of others is mediated by space and our experience of space is mediated by the look of the other, such that we cannot speak about intersubjectivity without also speaking about interspatiality.
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This paper argues that a phenomenological understanding of death and materiality need not only be understood in terms of the extinction of the living body but instead in terms of the survival of a prehistory which continues to make life... more
This paper argues that a phenomenological understanding of death and materiality need not only be understood in terms of the extinction of the living body but instead in terms of the survival of a prehistory which continues to make life possible. With recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy of the body, I make two claims. First, the body is symbiotically constituted by two orders of time: a lived experience of time and a non-experiential prehistory. Second, bringing these two orders together, the body is as much a site of lived experience as it is an archaeological relic to be understood in fossilised terms. This formulation allows me to develop an account of death that challenges the idea of it being an event in empirical world, marked by an impending futurity. As an alternative, I present death as an invariant structure of the body’s prehistory, which is experienced precisely in its resistance to experience.
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Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is ostensibly a film about hauntings within a hotel. More specifically, it is a film about hauntings as a particular articulation of the traumatic past erupting into the present. In this case, the trauma... more
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is ostensibly a film about hauntings within a hotel. More specifically, it is a film about hauntings as a particular articulation of the traumatic past erupting into the present. In this case, the trauma centres on the hotel’s foundations as being built upon an ancient Indian burial ground. In this paper, I aim to interrogate what The Shining can tell us about the nature of the past, especially as it articulates itself as an irrecoverable depth, which can only be understood in archaeological rather than experiential terms. The usage of “archaeological” here refers to a past that is less one of experience and more a layer of sedimented meaning that effects the present without ever being reducible to the present. To this end, the very experience of horror—such as horror is able to maintain an experiential dimension—is the limit the film’s characters contends with in the face of a past violates the present but at the same time refuses to integrate with the present.
In short, an archaeology of the past provides us with the conceptual language to understand how artefacts such as The Overlook Hotel can retain a latent history that is marked by a sense of depth rather than being a distance “behind” us. Indeed, one of the insights of The Shining is to show us that the past is the ground beneath oneself, contemporaneous with the present, rather than consigned to a void. To understand this relation between the trauma of the past and the materiality of the present, I draw on both the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the late psychoanalysis of Freud. As I argue, only by staging phenomenology and psychoanalysis together can the sedimented burial ground of the past be brought to life in such a way that we can begin to understand the nature of The Shining as a film as much about what Kubrick terms the “murderous bidding” of Jack Torrance as it is the eternal recurrence of a time that can never be assimilated into the present.
In short, an archaeology of the past provides us with the conceptual language to understand how artefacts such as The Overlook Hotel can retain a latent history that is marked by a sense of depth rather than being a distance “behind” us. Indeed, one of the insights of The Shining is to show us that the past is the ground beneath oneself, contemporaneous with the present, rather than consigned to a void. To understand this relation between the trauma of the past and the materiality of the present, I draw on both the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the late psychoanalysis of Freud. As I argue, only by staging phenomenology and psychoanalysis together can the sedimented burial ground of the past be brought to life in such a way that we can begin to understand the nature of The Shining as a film as much about what Kubrick terms the “murderous bidding” of Jack Torrance as it is the eternal recurrence of a time that can never be assimilated into the present.
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Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone begins with a mediation on what a ghost is. Of the various possibilities, at least six articulations of the ghost emerge: as a tragedy, an instant of pain, a half-dead thing, a suspended emotion,... more
Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone begins with a mediation on what a ghost is. Of the various possibilities, at least six articulations of the ghost emerge: as a tragedy, an instant of pain, a half-dead thing, a suspended emotion, a blurred photograph, and “an insect trapped in amber.” If much attention has been rightly given to the political ghosts and allegories that haunt del Toro’s work, then what remains unsaid is his treatment of the ghost as a ghost. Put another way, what can del Toro tell us about the experience of a ghost as (im)material body that is both of the living and the dead simultaneously? Such a question is the topic of my paper.
To this end, I will pursue the final option in the topography of ghost’s altering manifestations: the insect trapped in amber. As I read it in this paper, such an image captures the paradoxical quality of the ghost in both a temporal and material way. In the first case, the image distorts boundaries between time, conflating past and present. If the trapped insect belongs to the past, then it is nevertheless preserved in the present as something which is still alive, resisting erosion owing to its resin shell, and for this reason, has outlived its own death. In material terms, the significance of amber is manifold. If amber marks the presence of spectrality, then it is no coincide that the film itself is set in this colour, suggesting from the outset a ghost’s presence is dispersed through the landscape rather than contained to the body itself. Moreover, the quality of the insect/ghost as being trapped in amber allows del Toro to stage a series of paradoxical encounters between the living and the dead—not least the physical interaction between material and immaterial bodies—such that by the end of the film the exact boundary between the those who are alive and those who are dead is sufficiently blurred so as to render the division reversible.
To approach these paradoxical thoughts, I turn to phenomenology. In particular, I turn to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, each of whom gives us a different reading of ghostly matters. For Husserl, the ghost retains a body in spite of its being “dead matter, a sheer material thing” (Husserl 1990, 100). In his understanding, this “spatial phantom” gains its identity as a ghost through an appeal to intersubjectivity—i.e., that the ghost can be experienced by more than one person thanks to the fact the body, beyond being a material entity, is also an “organ of the spirit” (102).
If Husserl thus indicates to us how a material body can become—at least in principle—haunted, then it falls to Merleau-Ponty to reveal how the interaction between the material and immaterial realms collide. This, I argue, he is able to do with his concept of “flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1968). By this term, Merleau-Ponty gestures toward an ontology that precedes the division between subject and object, and thus allows for the intertwinement of different things thanks to the fact that things are made of the same fabric. Flesh is neither matter nor spirit, nor is it a substance. Rather, flesh marks an element insofar as it is root of things without being reducible to those things. In a word, the flesh is ghostly insofar as it affects things without itself being present.
This thought allows us to grasp the central question for a phenomenology of ghosts: does the ghost have a reality outside of it being experienced by a living being or is it simply a narcissistic mirror of the living? By situating Merleau-Ponty within the context of del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, I will show that such a reality is possible given that both ghost and non-ghost share the same world, a world that if prior to the split between self/other and subject/object, is also imbued with a spectral dimension that renders the relation between the visible and the invisible possible in the first place.
To this end, I will pursue the final option in the topography of ghost’s altering manifestations: the insect trapped in amber. As I read it in this paper, such an image captures the paradoxical quality of the ghost in both a temporal and material way. In the first case, the image distorts boundaries between time, conflating past and present. If the trapped insect belongs to the past, then it is nevertheless preserved in the present as something which is still alive, resisting erosion owing to its resin shell, and for this reason, has outlived its own death. In material terms, the significance of amber is manifold. If amber marks the presence of spectrality, then it is no coincide that the film itself is set in this colour, suggesting from the outset a ghost’s presence is dispersed through the landscape rather than contained to the body itself. Moreover, the quality of the insect/ghost as being trapped in amber allows del Toro to stage a series of paradoxical encounters between the living and the dead—not least the physical interaction between material and immaterial bodies—such that by the end of the film the exact boundary between the those who are alive and those who are dead is sufficiently blurred so as to render the division reversible.
To approach these paradoxical thoughts, I turn to phenomenology. In particular, I turn to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, each of whom gives us a different reading of ghostly matters. For Husserl, the ghost retains a body in spite of its being “dead matter, a sheer material thing” (Husserl 1990, 100). In his understanding, this “spatial phantom” gains its identity as a ghost through an appeal to intersubjectivity—i.e., that the ghost can be experienced by more than one person thanks to the fact the body, beyond being a material entity, is also an “organ of the spirit” (102).
If Husserl thus indicates to us how a material body can become—at least in principle—haunted, then it falls to Merleau-Ponty to reveal how the interaction between the material and immaterial realms collide. This, I argue, he is able to do with his concept of “flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1968). By this term, Merleau-Ponty gestures toward an ontology that precedes the division between subject and object, and thus allows for the intertwinement of different things thanks to the fact that things are made of the same fabric. Flesh is neither matter nor spirit, nor is it a substance. Rather, flesh marks an element insofar as it is root of things without being reducible to those things. In a word, the flesh is ghostly insofar as it affects things without itself being present.
This thought allows us to grasp the central question for a phenomenology of ghosts: does the ghost have a reality outside of it being experienced by a living being or is it simply a narcissistic mirror of the living? By situating Merleau-Ponty within the context of del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, I will show that such a reality is possible given that both ghost and non-ghost share the same world, a world that if prior to the split between self/other and subject/object, is also imbued with a spectral dimension that renders the relation between the visible and the invisible possible in the first place.
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How does our bodily mood affect our experience and interpretation of an environment? Taking “mood” in the Heideggerian sense of how we attune ourselves to the world, the question points toward the circularity structuring our environmental... more
How does our bodily mood affect our experience and interpretation of an environment? Taking “mood” in the Heideggerian sense of how we attune ourselves to the world, the question points toward the circularity structuring our environmental experience. Thus, if we can speak of an anxious or ecstatic place, then it is only because we can also speak of an anxious or ecstatic body. While Heidegger is helpful in demonstrating the ontological significance of mood, what he leaves unresolved is the role our bodies play shaping the mood of the world. As such, just how this interpretive interaction between mood and environment is possible remains a mystery. In this paper, I will examine the question of to what extent our bodily mood affects our experience and interpretation of an environment by looking at the phenomenology of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is the phobic response to a space in which the possibility of escape is comprised by any number of environmental factors such as large crowds, expanses of space, or an abiding sense of unfamiliarity. Because it produces a restrictive worldview, agoraphobic subjects tend to experience their environment as been constructed from a series of invisible boundaries and voids, all of which demarcate the sense of being at home from non-home. In this paper, I will argue that agoraphobia offers us a clear illustration of how the materiality of an environment gains its genius loci through the affective role of bodily interpretation. In order to defend this claim, I will pursue two trajectories of thought. First, on an interpretative level, not only is the body the “bearer of sensations” (Husserl), but through the sensuality of its moods, it is also the manifestation of an environment’s material reality. Far from the means to orient ourselves in the world and that alone, the body’s moods serve to define the very materiality of that world. This is especially clear in the phobic body. That the agoraphobic subject can experience being outside of his or her home territory as threatening and nauseating illustrates that our interpretation of the world is also an interpretation of our own lived bodies. Second: on an experiential level, the agoraphobic’s bodily experience of the environment is characterised by a sense of impending doom, vertiginous anxiety, and an abiding feeling of ontological security. Because of the disturbing affectivity of agoraphobia, what it reveals is that a place’s genius loci is not only informed by a topophilia but also by a topophobia. By way of conclusion, I will make the argument that the “spirit of place” leads us, not only to an ineffable character within the environment to which we feel an attachment, but to an uncanny agency that is both possessed by the subject and possessive of the subject: mood.
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The concept of awe is often twinned with that of wonder, evident not least in the experience of spaceflight (Gallagher, Janz, Trempler, Bockelman, Reinerman-Jones 2015). But can the experience of awe be located in less wondrous... more
The concept of awe is often twinned with that of wonder, evident not least in the experience of spaceflight (Gallagher, Janz, Trempler, Bockelman, Reinerman-Jones 2015). But can the experience of awe be located in less wondrous situations? In this talk, I argue there is a close relation between awe and anxiety. As I argue, awe's historic rootedness in the sublime— with its onus on vastness, turbulence, and ambiguity—sheds light on how psychopathological conditions such as vertigo and agoraphobia are closely related to the experience of awe.
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PHILOSOPHIES OF ANXIETY JUNE 23, 2017 Centre Culturel Irlandais 5 Rue des Irlandais Salle Michel Guillaume 75005 Paris France Brexit. Trump. Terrorism. The rise of the far-right. Anxiety is both everywhere and nowhere at once. At once... more
PHILOSOPHIES OF ANXIETY
JUNE 23, 2017
Centre Culturel Irlandais
5 Rue des Irlandais
Salle Michel Guillaume
75005 Paris
France
Brexit. Trump. Terrorism. The rise of the far-right.
Anxiety is both everywhere and nowhere at once. At once a condition to be understood in psychiatric and psychoanalytical terms, anxiety is also a political, aesthetic, cultural, and metaphysical affair.
To what extent is anxiety a philosophical problem, though? And what role do art and literature play in articulating the anxieties that are embedded in society? Philosophy and anxiety have a long established history. From Kierkegaard to Heidegger, anxiety has been regarded as the philosophical mood par excellence.
In bringing together a collection of distinguished thinkers and broad perspectives, from phenomenology to psychoanalysis to literature, this colloquium will explore a plurality of anxieties, each of which is central to contemporary culture and thought.
With:
Joseph Cohen (University College Dublin)
Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis)
Hadrien Laroche (Writer)
Dorothée Legrand (École Normale Supérieure)
Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)
Matthew Ratcliffe (University of Vienna)
Special Guests:
Jean Greisch (l'Institut catholique de Paris)
Hugo Hamilton (Writer)
Registration - https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/philosophies-of-anxiety-tickets-31873517549
Website - http://dylantrigg.com/anxiety.htm
Sponsored by Marie Curie Actions, Centre Culturel Irlandais, and University College Dublin.
JUNE 23, 2017
Centre Culturel Irlandais
5 Rue des Irlandais
Salle Michel Guillaume
75005 Paris
France
Brexit. Trump. Terrorism. The rise of the far-right.
Anxiety is both everywhere and nowhere at once. At once a condition to be understood in psychiatric and psychoanalytical terms, anxiety is also a political, aesthetic, cultural, and metaphysical affair.
To what extent is anxiety a philosophical problem, though? And what role do art and literature play in articulating the anxieties that are embedded in society? Philosophy and anxiety have a long established history. From Kierkegaard to Heidegger, anxiety has been regarded as the philosophical mood par excellence.
In bringing together a collection of distinguished thinkers and broad perspectives, from phenomenology to psychoanalysis to literature, this colloquium will explore a plurality of anxieties, each of which is central to contemporary culture and thought.
With:
Joseph Cohen (University College Dublin)
Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis)
Hadrien Laroche (Writer)
Dorothée Legrand (École Normale Supérieure)
Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)
Matthew Ratcliffe (University of Vienna)
Special Guests:
Jean Greisch (l'Institut catholique de Paris)
Hugo Hamilton (Writer)
Registration - https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/philosophies-of-anxiety-tickets-31873517549
Website - http://dylantrigg.com/anxiety.htm
Sponsored by Marie Curie Actions, Centre Culturel Irlandais, and University College Dublin.
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Wittgenstein poses a question: “Is it always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” In this paper, I would like to dwell on Wittgenstein’s question through the... more
Wittgenstein poses a question: “Is it always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” In this paper, I would like to dwell on Wittgenstein’s question through the theme of anxiety. What is it in anxiety that forces us to turn away so violently, to flee the scene lest we become paralyzed? Is there not, so I would suggest, a sense in which anxiety reveals something to us that is too clear, too distinct, too visible? I explore this question through the intersection of philosophy and literature.
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In this paper, I outline some themes I’m working in the course of developing a phenomenological account of the bodily experience of anxiety. The context is an analysis of spatial phobias, such as agoraphobia, taken, not as conceptual or... more
In this paper, I outline some themes I’m working in the course of developing a phenomenological account of the bodily experience of anxiety. The context is an analysis of spatial phobias, such as agoraphobia, taken, not as conceptual or cultural entities, but in experiential terms. The motivation is to do justice to a specific kind of anxiety at stake in spatial phobias, which is, as I see it, an anxiety different from the free-floating anxiety concerning a loss of referential meaning (as one would see it in Heidegger). I will single out two aspects of bodily anxiety. In the first case, my attention concerns what I’m terming the formlessness of the body. By this, I refer to the blurring of the boundary line between the body as the locus of personal meaning and the body as the site of an impersonal organism. So, to speak here of the formless of the body is not to invoke an amorphous body, but instead to point toward the body’s boundaries as constantly shifting, such that the question of to what extent I am identifiable with my body is put into question. The second dimension is that of trust. Here, my question here is: to what end is a body that is both personal and impersonal, mine and not-mine, knowable and unknown, a body that can be trusted upon to preserve and fortify a sense of bodily integrity?
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To what extent is our experience of spatiality affected by our experience of others? Conversely, to what end is our experience of others affected by our experience of space? Such are the questions I will be exploring in this paper. I will... more
To what extent is our experience of spatiality affected by our experience of others? Conversely, to what end is our experience of others affected by our experience of space? Such are the questions I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the mood of agoraphobia. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with a glimpse into the intersubjective formation of space, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. Consulting anecdotal illustrations, I will pursue two trajectories of thought. First, for many agoraphobic people, the condition is controlled to some extent by being accompanied in the world by the presence of a trusted companion. What this will show us is how other people become enmeshed in the material world, indeed, they become the material world. Two, agoraphobia gives us a visceral illustration of how space is the platform for our bodily intersubjectivity. Looking at the phenomenology of the agoraphobe’s experience of walking, I will suggest that getting from A to B is never simply a question of spatial relations, but is always informed by the expression of our total subjectivity and our relation with others. By way of conclusion, I will propose the following formulation: our experience of others is mediated by space and our experience of space is mediated by others, such that we cannot speak about intersubjectivity without also speaking about interspatiality.
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Why do certain memories involuntarily return to us over others? Far from being the sole concern of Proust scholars, the question has significant implications for phenomenologists, too. In this paper, I will pursue the enigma of... more
Why do certain memories involuntarily return to us over others? Far from being the sole concern of Proust scholars, the question has significant implications for phenomenologists, too. In this paper, I will pursue the enigma of involuntarily memory through the lens of nostalgia. In doing so, I will ask two questions. First, how does nostalgic remembering differ from non-nostalgic remembering? Second, what is it that we are nostalgic for? In response to these questions, I will provide an account of embodiment that places spectrality and sublimity central, and at the same time tests the limits of phenomenological inquiry.
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Why do the dead return? It has been customary to respond to this question in one of two ways. First, ghostly apparitions-ranging from benign phantoms to ominous spooks-have tended to be treated as a defect in imagination, the implication... more
Why do the dead return? It has been customary to respond to this question in one of two ways. First, ghostly apparitions-ranging from benign phantoms to ominous spooks-have tended to be treated as a defect in imagination, the implication being that such phenomena are merely a projection of the contents of consciousness on the world. The alternative trajectory has been to reduce ghostly matter to a "blockage" in memory. In such a reading, to "see" ghosts would mean to unconsciously remember that which is dead but has yet to move on, with the experience of being haunted traceable to a debt the dead still owe to the living.
In this paper, I will formulate a way to commune with the dead which seeks to avoid reducing ghostly phenomena to an offspring of psychic activity. I will do this via the lived body. Two thoughts will be pursued. On the one hand, with recourse to Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that our embodied experiences are never unequivocally "mine," but forever doubled by an anonymous presence, a trace of a pre-personal body folding into my personal body. Drawing out this theme of doubling, I will develop a phenomenological theory of the Doppelgänger, which attends to the ambiguity of the body as being an object possessed and subject possessing. Phrasing the space between subject and object a site of abjection, I will conclude by aligning the immateriality of the ghost with the materiality of the lived body.
In this paper, I will formulate a way to commune with the dead which seeks to avoid reducing ghostly phenomena to an offspring of psychic activity. I will do this via the lived body. Two thoughts will be pursued. On the one hand, with recourse to Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that our embodied experiences are never unequivocally "mine," but forever doubled by an anonymous presence, a trace of a pre-personal body folding into my personal body. Drawing out this theme of doubling, I will develop a phenomenological theory of the Doppelgänger, which attends to the ambiguity of the body as being an object possessed and subject possessing. Phrasing the space between subject and object a site of abjection, I will conclude by aligning the immateriality of the ghost with the materiality of the lived body.
Interview with Nathanael Bassett in Communication +1 ( Vol. 7, Issue: 1, Article 9.)
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Corps informes, freaks, mondes sans hommes… une philosophie du monstre est-elle possible ? [Feature on France Culture by Géraldine Mosna-Savoye featuring "The Thing: Une phénoménologie de l'horreur" <Editions MF>]... more
Corps informes, freaks, mondes sans hommes… une philosophie du monstre est-elle possible ?
[Feature on France Culture by Géraldine Mosna-Savoye featuring "The Thing: Une phénoménologie de l'horreur" <Editions MF>]
https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-journal-de-la-philosophie/la-philosophie-face-ses-monstres
[Feature on France Culture by Géraldine Mosna-Savoye featuring "The Thing: Une phénoménologie de l'horreur" <Editions MF>]
https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-journal-de-la-philosophie/la-philosophie-face-ses-monstres
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Interview with The Irish Times (May 9th, 2017)
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For the LSE Forum, Thinking in Public series
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We review the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and then explore these concepts, and their reflective attributions, in schizophrenic symptoms and agoraphobia. We show how the underlying dynamics of these... more
We review the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and then explore these concepts, and their reflective attributions, in schizophrenic symptoms and agoraphobia. We show how the underlying dynamics of these experiences are different across these disorders. We argue that these concepts are complex and cannot be reduced to neural mechanisms, but involve embodied and situated processes that include the physical and social environments. We conclude by arguing that the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of agency and ownership cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but instead form an interdependent pairing.
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Text for special issue of ETC Media on the work of Gregory Chatonsky, (No. 110, 2017).
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Research Interests: Architecture, Space and Place, Environmental Studies, Phenomenology, Environmental Ethics, and 11 moreSpace And Place (Art), Environmental Sustainability, Anthropology Of Nature, Experiences of Place and Space, Philosophy of Nature, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Nature, Space, place and culture; geography of lifeworlds; Soundscape Studies, Human-Wildlife relationships, with particular reference on human perceptions of, and attitudes towards, large carnivores and their depredations on livestock.., Lifeworld, Community Planning, Adaptation to Climate Change, and Architecture and Public Spaces
Research Interests: Environmental Education, Space and Place, Environmental Studies, Environmental Planning and Design, Urban Planning, and 15 morePhenomenology, Urban Studies, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Merleau-Ponty, Tourism Impacts, Destination Marketing, Risk and crisis management, Tourism Planning & Development, Environmental Preservation through Tourism, Alterations in Urban Island Tourism Destinations, Tourism Flows, and Tourism Sustainability
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Research Interests: Aesthetics, Space Syntax, Space and Place, Phenomenology, Anthropology of space, and 13 moreSoundscape Studies, Environmental Aesthetics, Theological Aesthetics, Theory of Space, Philosophy of Space, Urban Open Space Design, History Of Body, Time And Space, Experiences of Place and Space, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Space, Public Space, Sacred Space, and Relational and process ontologies
This special issue of EAP celebrates 25 years of publication and includes 19 invited essays organized in terms of four themes: 1. Place—lived emplacement, place attachment, and environmental design as place making; 2. Nature—the lived... more
This special issue of EAP celebrates 25 years of publication and includes 19 invited essays organized in terms of four themes:
1. Place—lived emplacement, place attachment, and environmental design as place making;
2. Nature—the lived constitution of the natural environment and natural world;
3. Real-world applications of phenomenological principles (transit design; virtual reality; environmental education);
4. Broader conceptual issues (the subjectivity-objectivity duality; phenomenology vs. analytic science; phenomenology as practiced by non-phenomenologists; phenomenological understanding vs. practical applications; parallels between real-world and phenomenological pathways).
Contributors and essay titles are as follows:
David Seamon, “Human-Immersion-in-World: Twenty-Five Years of EAP”;
Robert Mugerauer, “It’s about People”;
Jeff Malpas, “Human Being as Placed Being”;
Eva-Maria Simms, “Going Deep into Place”;
Sue Michaels, “Viewing Two Sides”;
Dennis Skocz, “Giving Space to Thoughts on Place”;
Bruce Janz, “Place, Philosophy, and Non-Philosophy”;
Janet Donohoe, “Can there be a Phenomenology of Nature”;
Tim Ingold, A Phenomenology with the Natural World”;
Mark Riegner, “A Phenomenology of Betweenness”;
Bryan E. Bannon, “Evolving Conceptions of Environmental Phenomenology”;
John Cameron, “Place Making, Phenomenology, and Lived Sustainability”;
Lena Hopsch, Social Space and Daily Commuting: Phenomenological Implications”;
Matthew S. Bower, “Topologies of Illumination”;
Paul Krafel, “Navigating by the Light”;
Yi-Fu Tuan, “Points of View and Objectivity: The Phenomenologist’s Challenge”;
Julio Bermudez, “Considering the Relationship between Phenomenology and Science”;
Edward Relph, “Varieties of Phenomenological Description”;
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, “Phenomenology, Philosophy, and Praxis”;
Elizabeth A. Behnke, “In Celebration of a Conversation of Pathways.”
1. Place—lived emplacement, place attachment, and environmental design as place making;
2. Nature—the lived constitution of the natural environment and natural world;
3. Real-world applications of phenomenological principles (transit design; virtual reality; environmental education);
4. Broader conceptual issues (the subjectivity-objectivity duality; phenomenology vs. analytic science; phenomenology as practiced by non-phenomenologists; phenomenological understanding vs. practical applications; parallels between real-world and phenomenological pathways).
Contributors and essay titles are as follows:
David Seamon, “Human-Immersion-in-World: Twenty-Five Years of EAP”;
Robert Mugerauer, “It’s about People”;
Jeff Malpas, “Human Being as Placed Being”;
Eva-Maria Simms, “Going Deep into Place”;
Sue Michaels, “Viewing Two Sides”;
Dennis Skocz, “Giving Space to Thoughts on Place”;
Bruce Janz, “Place, Philosophy, and Non-Philosophy”;
Janet Donohoe, “Can there be a Phenomenology of Nature”;
Tim Ingold, A Phenomenology with the Natural World”;
Mark Riegner, “A Phenomenology of Betweenness”;
Bryan E. Bannon, “Evolving Conceptions of Environmental Phenomenology”;
John Cameron, “Place Making, Phenomenology, and Lived Sustainability”;
Lena Hopsch, Social Space and Daily Commuting: Phenomenological Implications”;
Matthew S. Bower, “Topologies of Illumination”;
Paul Krafel, “Navigating by the Light”;
Yi-Fu Tuan, “Points of View and Objectivity: The Phenomenologist’s Challenge”;
Julio Bermudez, “Considering the Relationship between Phenomenology and Science”;
Edward Relph, “Varieties of Phenomenological Description”;
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, “Phenomenology, Philosophy, and Praxis”;
Elizabeth A. Behnke, “In Celebration of a Conversation of Pathways.”
Research Interests: Environmental Sociology, Geography, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, and 77 moreUrban Geography, Visual Studies, Environmental Education, Space Syntax, Virtual Reality (Computer Graphics), Virtual Environments, Environmental Psychology, Place and Identity, Environmental Studies, Community Engagement & Participation, Virtual Communities, Homelessness, Phenomenology, Virtualization, Anthropology of space, Tourism Geography, Goethean Phenomenology, Place (Architecture), Place Identity, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Geographical education, Goethe Studies, Sense of Place, Phenomenology of the body, Holistic Education, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Heidegger, Environmental Sustainability, Goethe, Dwelling Practices and Built Environments, Virtual Worlds, Architecture and Phenomenology, Landscape, Husserl, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Merleau-Ponty, Goethe and Phenomenology, Goethean Science, Public Space, Heidegger's later thought, Heidegger and Technology, Urban Social Geography, Heidegger's Being and Time, Holistic Approaches, Tim Ingold, Place-Identity (Environmental Psychology), Place, Virtual Reality, Geographical Method and Theory, Dwelling, Virtual Learning, Healing Environments, Synergy, David Seamon, Jeff Malpas, Place Making, Heidgger, Edward Relph, Systems Science, Its Methodologies and Aplications in Complex Social Organizations, in Ecothenics, in Holistic Health and Alternative Education, VIEWSCAPE CONSERVATION, PLACE ATTACHMENT, SPACE & PLACE, Virtual Revolution, Architecture and Public Spaces, Henri Bortoft, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Yi-Fu Tuan, Synergism, At homeness, Environment behavior Research, Bryan Bannon, Robert Mugerauer, Eva Simms, Bruce Zanz, Janet Donohoe, and Elizabeth A Behnke
May 20th, 2022, Freud Museum: Nostalgia Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Organized by: Leyla Sophie Gleissner (Husserl Archives-ENS Paris/University of Vienna) & Dylan Trigg (University of Vienna) This workshop is part of the... more
May 20th, 2022, Freud Museum: Nostalgia Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Organized by: Leyla Sophie Gleissner (Husserl Archives-ENS Paris/University of Vienna) & Dylan Trigg (University of Vienna)
This workshop is part of the FWF-project P33428 "A Phenomenology of Nostalgia", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (2020-2024)
The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis via the theme of nostalgia. While there has been a modest but steady pool of research on nostalgia from a phenomenological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis—especially within the context of Freud—and nostalgia remains more ambiguous. In the work of Freud himself, the term “nostalgia” appears only once and even then only in passing in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passing mention to nostalgia is all the more striking given Freud’s concern with the archaeology of meaning, the function of fixation, and the different modalities of memory conceived in his work. This workshop proceeds from the point of view that the theme of nostalgia provides an opportunity for dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In particular, the workshop posits that nostalgia can provide a space of possible encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis across several key themes and questions.
1. Temporality: what is the temporality of nostalgia? Contemporary understanding tends to treat nostalgia as a mode of reminiscence, in which we “travel” back to the past, as though the past were a discrete zone of time behind us. But nostalgia’s temporality is more complex than this; if the past is involved in nostalgia, then it is not clear what type of pastness is implicated. Moreover, nostalgia not only involves the past as a dimension of time, but also the present and the future as determining structures of nostalgia. How can phenomenology and psychoanalysis help us understand these complex relations (especially in terms of concepts such as retention and protention as well as psychoanalytical concepts such as repetition, fixation as well as Nachträglichkeit)?
2. Affectivity: the history of nostalgia is a history of transformation. During its inception, nostalgia was understood as a deadly disease; today, by contrast, it is understood as a benign pastime. What is the affective status of nostalgia and how can we think of the emotion outside of the binary between disease and well-being? What role do other emotions such as anxiety, melancholia, and shame play in the formation of nostalgia as a mood? What exactly is the affective tonality of nostalgia and what role can Freud’s notion of the uncanny play here?
3. Subjectivity: much of the contemporary research on nostalgia maintains that the emotion bolsters and fortifies a sense of self, acting as a form of self-help therapy in moments of distress. Yet convictions such as these tend to overlook the structure of subjectivity at work in nostalgia. Here questions such as what role nostalgia plays in generating an impression of unity (or otherwise disclosing the fragmented foundations upon which subjectivity is grounded) are critical. Furthermore, one could ask if this impression of unity points to the embodied experience of nostalgia, e.g. as identification with a totality outside of one's body?
4. Unconsciousness: what role do unconscious mechanisms play in nostalgic desire? How do the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness differ from one another and what conception of the unconscious is suited best to conceptualise nostalgia? Can phenomenological notions such as operative and latent intentionality play a beneficial role in enriching the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness?
5. Intentionality: what is it that we are nostalgic for? Historically, the answer to this question has been home, where home has been understood in geographical terms. Over the last century, the emphasis has shifted from spatiality to temporality. Yet things—objects—remain critical to the advent of nostalgic desire. Nostalgic desire is not an abstract longing nor is it a pure mode of recollection, but instead a desire that is given expression through particular things (including other people), whether they be real or phantasy. Here, questions emerge about what role intentional states such as memory, imagination, and reverie play in the formation of nostalgia and in the transformation of the past into a nostalgic object.
This workshop is part of the FWF-project P33428 "A Phenomenology of Nostalgia", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (2020-2024)
The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis via the theme of nostalgia. While there has been a modest but steady pool of research on nostalgia from a phenomenological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis—especially within the context of Freud—and nostalgia remains more ambiguous. In the work of Freud himself, the term “nostalgia” appears only once and even then only in passing in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passing mention to nostalgia is all the more striking given Freud’s concern with the archaeology of meaning, the function of fixation, and the different modalities of memory conceived in his work. This workshop proceeds from the point of view that the theme of nostalgia provides an opportunity for dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In particular, the workshop posits that nostalgia can provide a space of possible encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis across several key themes and questions.
1. Temporality: what is the temporality of nostalgia? Contemporary understanding tends to treat nostalgia as a mode of reminiscence, in which we “travel” back to the past, as though the past were a discrete zone of time behind us. But nostalgia’s temporality is more complex than this; if the past is involved in nostalgia, then it is not clear what type of pastness is implicated. Moreover, nostalgia not only involves the past as a dimension of time, but also the present and the future as determining structures of nostalgia. How can phenomenology and psychoanalysis help us understand these complex relations (especially in terms of concepts such as retention and protention as well as psychoanalytical concepts such as repetition, fixation as well as Nachträglichkeit)?
2. Affectivity: the history of nostalgia is a history of transformation. During its inception, nostalgia was understood as a deadly disease; today, by contrast, it is understood as a benign pastime. What is the affective status of nostalgia and how can we think of the emotion outside of the binary between disease and well-being? What role do other emotions such as anxiety, melancholia, and shame play in the formation of nostalgia as a mood? What exactly is the affective tonality of nostalgia and what role can Freud’s notion of the uncanny play here?
3. Subjectivity: much of the contemporary research on nostalgia maintains that the emotion bolsters and fortifies a sense of self, acting as a form of self-help therapy in moments of distress. Yet convictions such as these tend to overlook the structure of subjectivity at work in nostalgia. Here questions such as what role nostalgia plays in generating an impression of unity (or otherwise disclosing the fragmented foundations upon which subjectivity is grounded) are critical. Furthermore, one could ask if this impression of unity points to the embodied experience of nostalgia, e.g. as identification with a totality outside of one's body?
4. Unconsciousness: what role do unconscious mechanisms play in nostalgic desire? How do the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness differ from one another and what conception of the unconscious is suited best to conceptualise nostalgia? Can phenomenological notions such as operative and latent intentionality play a beneficial role in enriching the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness?
5. Intentionality: what is it that we are nostalgic for? Historically, the answer to this question has been home, where home has been understood in geographical terms. Over the last century, the emphasis has shifted from spatiality to temporality. Yet things—objects—remain critical to the advent of nostalgic desire. Nostalgic desire is not an abstract longing nor is it a pure mode of recollection, but instead a desire that is given expression through particular things (including other people), whether they be real or phantasy. Here, questions emerge about what role intentional states such as memory, imagination, and reverie play in the formation of nostalgia and in the transformation of the past into a nostalgic object.
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Le colloque est conçu dans le but d'interroger la notion du corps, en particulier dans le contexte des épreuves d'un sujet en souffrance. Nous partirons du constat que, dans la souffrance et l'impossibilité́ de sa médiation complète à... more
Le colloque est conçu dans le but d'interroger la notion du corps, en particulier dans le contexte des épreuves d'un sujet en souffrance. Nous partirons du constat que, dans la souffrance et l'impossibilité́ de sa médiation complète à travers le langage, les liaisons étroites entre corps et langage se dévoilent, rendant nécessaire de les penser ensemble. Afin de réfléchir sur ce champ thématique, nous inviterons de jeunes (post)doctorant.e.s en philosophie, psychanalyse, science politique et sociale ainsi que des artistes, à un atelier de deux jours à l'École normale supérieure (Paris). L'événement aura lieu le 1er et le 2 octobre 2021.
La problématique en jeu est précisément explicitée dans le titre de l'évènement :
Corps à (re)construire implique, dans un premier temps, que le corps qui est en jeu ici reste à bâtir. Il est pris à la fois comme fragmentaire, un corps souffrant morcelé par les épreuves qu'il a dû traverser, et conçu, précisément en raison de son caractère ouvert, comme lieu d’une potentielle transformation.
Corps à (re)construire fait référence au passé, notamment à ce qui s'est inscrit en lui : il évoque une matière temporelle. Néanmoins, cela ne veut pas dire que nous intégrions cette dimension temporelle du corps comme une simple donnée.
Car le corps à (re)construire nous amène à questionner l'idée d'un corps accessible de façon immédiate. A l'inverse, nous nous intéressons à une conceptualisation du corps dans laquelle il est considéré comme une altérité structurée et médiatisée par le langage.
Ces trois perspectives de recherche permettront de déplier la richesse du terme construction, et d’ainsi déconstruire la possibilité-même d’une reconstruction complète qui viendrait réparer les possibles destructions subies par le corps souffrant : face à l’altérité émergeant du langage, le sujet souffrant échouera dans la tentative de décrire son état présent ou passé, corporel ou psychique de manière adéquate. Cette incapacité d’une description complète et immédiate, ou encore d’une narration linéaire des épreuves d’un corps singulier nous permettra d’ouvrir notre champ de recherche éthique et sociale, en prenant cette impossibilité-même comme point de départ : elle ouvre au corps qui reste à construire la voie à sa propre configuration.
Nous nous demanderons notamment : comment le corps peut-il parler de sa souffrance ? Quelles modalités du langage sont aptes à témoigner des épreuves du corps ? Quelles transformations subit la souffrance du fait de sa mise en mots ? Quels récits du corps subsistent et se transmettent à travers le temps ? Lesquels sont oubliés ? Quelles sont les structures sociales et politiques qui se cachent derrière cet oubli ?
ORGANISATION
Leyla Sophie Gleissner (ENS Paris et Université de Vienne) et Flora Löffelmann (Université de Vienne)
CONTACT
reconstruire.workshop@gmail.com
La problématique en jeu est précisément explicitée dans le titre de l'évènement :
Corps à (re)construire implique, dans un premier temps, que le corps qui est en jeu ici reste à bâtir. Il est pris à la fois comme fragmentaire, un corps souffrant morcelé par les épreuves qu'il a dû traverser, et conçu, précisément en raison de son caractère ouvert, comme lieu d’une potentielle transformation.
Corps à (re)construire fait référence au passé, notamment à ce qui s'est inscrit en lui : il évoque une matière temporelle. Néanmoins, cela ne veut pas dire que nous intégrions cette dimension temporelle du corps comme une simple donnée.
Car le corps à (re)construire nous amène à questionner l'idée d'un corps accessible de façon immédiate. A l'inverse, nous nous intéressons à une conceptualisation du corps dans laquelle il est considéré comme une altérité structurée et médiatisée par le langage.
Ces trois perspectives de recherche permettront de déplier la richesse du terme construction, et d’ainsi déconstruire la possibilité-même d’une reconstruction complète qui viendrait réparer les possibles destructions subies par le corps souffrant : face à l’altérité émergeant du langage, le sujet souffrant échouera dans la tentative de décrire son état présent ou passé, corporel ou psychique de manière adéquate. Cette incapacité d’une description complète et immédiate, ou encore d’une narration linéaire des épreuves d’un corps singulier nous permettra d’ouvrir notre champ de recherche éthique et sociale, en prenant cette impossibilité-même comme point de départ : elle ouvre au corps qui reste à construire la voie à sa propre configuration.
Nous nous demanderons notamment : comment le corps peut-il parler de sa souffrance ? Quelles modalités du langage sont aptes à témoigner des épreuves du corps ? Quelles transformations subit la souffrance du fait de sa mise en mots ? Quels récits du corps subsistent et se transmettent à travers le temps ? Lesquels sont oubliés ? Quelles sont les structures sociales et politiques qui se cachent derrière cet oubli ?
ORGANISATION
Leyla Sophie Gleissner (ENS Paris et Université de Vienne) et Flora Löffelmann (Université de Vienne)
CONTACT
reconstruire.workshop@gmail.com
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Atmospheres of Shared Emotion April 25-26th, 2019 University of Vienna Department of Philosophy, Room 3D NIG Universitätsstraße 7 Stg. III/3. Stock, 1010 Wien Over the last twenty years or so, the concept of atmosphere has flourished... more
Atmospheres of Shared Emotion
April 25-26th, 2019
University of Vienna
Department of Philosophy, Room 3D
NIG Universitätsstraße 7
Stg. III/3. Stock, 1010 Wien
Over the last twenty years or so, the concept of atmosphere has flourished within phenomenological research. Inspired by the works of Hermann Schmitz, Gernot Böhme, and Tonino Griffero, the concept of atmosphere has played an influential role in contributing to debates in phenomenological psychopathology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. Despite this surge of interest, the role that atmospheres play in contributing to cases of shared emotions remains neglected. This oversight is all the more surprising given the potentially powerful explanatory role atmosphere can play in helping clarify the complex structure of shared emotion. The aim of this workshop is to explore the intersection between shared emotion and atmospheres by bringing together leading and emerging scholars in the field. Possible topics include:
Defining and conceptualizing atmospheres.
The methodology of studying atmospheres.
The relation between atmosphere, mood, and aura.
The role atmospheres play in the politics of emotion.
The spatial and embodied aspects of atmospheres.
The function of contagious emotions in atmospheres.
The relation between atmospheres and the “staging” of shared emotions.
Confirmed invited speakers:
Tonino Griffero (University of Rome)
Gernot Böhme (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster)
Joel Krueger (University of Exeter)
Thomas Szanto ( University of Jyväskylä)
Jan Slaby (Freie Universität Berlin)
Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Basel)
Guest speakers:
Gerhard Thonhauser (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lucy Olster (University of Exeter)
Maximilian Gregor Hepach (University of Cambridge)
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei (Heidelberg University Hospital)
Mikkel Bille (Roskilde University)
Stamatina Kousidi (Politecnico di Milano)
April 25-26th, 2019
University of Vienna
Department of Philosophy, Room 3D
NIG Universitätsstraße 7
Stg. III/3. Stock, 1010 Wien
Over the last twenty years or so, the concept of atmosphere has flourished within phenomenological research. Inspired by the works of Hermann Schmitz, Gernot Böhme, and Tonino Griffero, the concept of atmosphere has played an influential role in contributing to debates in phenomenological psychopathology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. Despite this surge of interest, the role that atmospheres play in contributing to cases of shared emotions remains neglected. This oversight is all the more surprising given the potentially powerful explanatory role atmosphere can play in helping clarify the complex structure of shared emotion. The aim of this workshop is to explore the intersection between shared emotion and atmospheres by bringing together leading and emerging scholars in the field. Possible topics include:
Defining and conceptualizing atmospheres.
The methodology of studying atmospheres.
The relation between atmosphere, mood, and aura.
The role atmospheres play in the politics of emotion.
The spatial and embodied aspects of atmospheres.
The function of contagious emotions in atmospheres.
The relation between atmospheres and the “staging” of shared emotions.
Confirmed invited speakers:
Tonino Griffero (University of Rome)
Gernot Böhme (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster)
Joel Krueger (University of Exeter)
Thomas Szanto ( University of Jyväskylä)
Jan Slaby (Freie Universität Berlin)
Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Basel)
Guest speakers:
Gerhard Thonhauser (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lucy Olster (University of Exeter)
Maximilian Gregor Hepach (University of Cambridge)
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei (Heidelberg University Hospital)
Mikkel Bille (Roskilde University)
Stamatina Kousidi (Politecnico di Milano)
Research Interests:
Programme 10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome 10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) – Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View 11.30 am - 12.30... more
Programme
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
– Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View
11.30 am - 12.30 pm Tobias Becker (FU Berlin)
– Retro : Aesthetics and Temporalities
01.30 pm - 2.30 pm Michaela Bstieler/Stephanie Graf (University of Innsbruck)
– Angels of Nostalgia. Walter Benjamin's Images of Homecoming
02.30 pm - 3.30 pm Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
– Construction and Ruination
03.45 pm - 4.45 pm Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
– From Nostalgic Ruins to Challenging Monuments
04.45 pm - 5.00 pm Conclusion
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
– Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View
11.30 am - 12.30 pm Tobias Becker (FU Berlin)
– Retro : Aesthetics and Temporalities
01.30 pm - 2.30 pm Michaela Bstieler/Stephanie Graf (University of Innsbruck)
– Angels of Nostalgia. Walter Benjamin's Images of Homecoming
02.30 pm - 3.30 pm Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
– Construction and Ruination
03.45 pm - 4.45 pm Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
– From Nostalgic Ruins to Challenging Monuments
04.45 pm - 5.00 pm Conclusion
Research Interests:
Critical Temporalities Online Event Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time.... more
Critical Temporalities Online Event
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.