| Kommentar |
This course studies key concepts and methodologies in the existentialist tradition and assesses their relevance for contemporary politics. Concepts such as ‘freedom,’ ‘the Other,’ ‘intercorporeality’ and ‘recognition’ are central to philosophical questions of subjectivity, knowledge production, and ontology, but also pertain to politics, and in particular to struggles against forms of oppression linked to patriarchy, colonization, racism, and exploitation. Methodologically, analyses of interlocking forms of oppression start from the explication of lived experience, and the existentialists’ social critique deploys a variety of genres, including novels, plays, and (auto)biography.
Existentialism has typically been associated with French existentialism—Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir: their engagement as public intellectuals with Cold War politics, and their theoretical attempt to reconcile phenomenology with historical materialism. This restricted account has been challenged in recent years by two, closely related developments. Firstly, we have witnessed a growing awareness of ‘the diverse lineages of existentialism’, and its history has hence been rewritten to include other traditions of existentialist thought, including Black existentialism, Arab existentialism, and Chicana and Latinx feminisms (Gordon 1997; Di-Capua 2012; Ortega 2016). This widening extends the geographical scope from existentialism beyond Europe, and shifts the main problematization away from class and revolutionary praxis, to feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist struggles. Furthermore, scholars in ‘critical phenomenology’ have successfully developed a vocabulary to describe various aspects of lived experience omitted from classic phenomenology, such as disability, trans embodiment, and queerness (Ahmed 2006; Bettcher 2014; Hall 2021). They often deploy the anti-racist, feminist analyses of authors such as Fanon and Beauvoir, and critically reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment, cross-reading these authors with recently developed genealogies to criticize the effects of, inter alia, ableism, transphobia, and heteronormativity.
This course will proceed thematically, focusing on one concept each work, and discussing both classic and contemporary texts. In addition to theoretical texts, students will also be asked to engage with literary works of fiction and non-fiction. |
| Literatur |
Preliminary bibliography:
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. 4th ed. Aunt Lute Books.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier. New York: Vintage Books.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2014. “When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation.” Journal of Homosexuality 61 (5): 605–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.865472.
Di-Capua, Yoav. 2012. “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization.” The American Historical Review 117 (4): 1061–91.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Gordon, Lewis R., ed. 1997. Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy. New York/London: Routledge.
Hall, Kim Q. 2021. “Limping Along: Toward a Crip Phenomenology.” The Journal of Philosophy of Disability 1 (November): 11–33. https://doi.org/10.5840/jpd20218275.
hooks, bell. 2014. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge.
Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. SUNY Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1944. “Paris Alive: The Republic of Silence.” The Atlantic, December 1, 1944. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/12/paris-alive-the-republic-of-silence/656012/. |
