Critical Impurity and the Race for Critical Phenomenology

Philosophy Compass, 2022

Critical phenomenology is a rapidly flourishing field of research within philosophical phenomenology. This article undertakes a genealogy of the critical philosophical enterprise, drawing out its key commitments, motivations, tensions, and productive potential. In the second half of this article, I explore the promise of critical phenomenology, by examining how a critical phenomenological approach to questions of racism and racialised embodiment can help extend our understanding of white supremacy, opening up new possibilities for thinking its banality and ubiquity in contemporary social and political life.

Chiasmi: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, 2021

Introduction to the special issue "Critical Phenomenology After Merleau-Ponty' in Chiasmi: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, co-edited with Ted Toadvine (Penn State University).

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2023

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2019

This special section brings together scholars working in Critical Philosophy of Race to explore questions of racism, coloniality, and migration, and in doing so, offers a glimpse into some of the scholarship currently being undertaken in this emerging field. The section has its origins in a one-day workshop, On Anti-Racism: A Critical Philosophy of Race Symposium, which took place in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia in October 2017. The symposium participants, Amir Jaima, Helen Ngo, and Bryan Mukandi, are here joined by Lori Gallegos and Chelsea Bond, in an effort to continue and extend some of the conversations initiated at that event.

Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2024

In the fall of 2022, the philosophy department at Loyola University Chicago hosted a conference around the theme "Phenomenology and Critique" in association with Marquette University. On November 4, 2022, there was an atmosphere of bustle as people started to fi ll the room. It was one of the fi rst large in-person events organized by the philosophy department at Loyola since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We welcomed the return to hosting conferences with both anticipation and caution, having made sure that the conference would be held in a hybrid format. We were especially delighted to welcome our two keynote speakers, both renowned phenomenologists spearheading the critical turn in phenomenology, affi liated with two Canadian universities: Professors Alia Al-Saji of McGill University, and Lisa Guenther of Queen's University. The motivation for this conference was not only to collaborate with a neighboring Jesuit university-where phenomenology is also a strong interest of both faculty and students-but more importantly, to bring scholars from around the world together to talk about phenomenology and its critical potential, scholars who are representative of classical phenomenology and those who are now leaders of the critical phenomenological movement. The topic of the conference and this special issue, "phenomenology and critique," was intended to respond to a need for methodological clarifi cation within phenomenology, particularly with respect to critical phenomenology. The "critical turn" that phenomenology is presently undergoing is an attempt for phenomenology to describe and analyze social and political phenomena, especially phenomena that pertain to oppressive structures of the social world such as sexism, white supremacy, and colonialism. This critical turn has been especially driven by debates concerning critical phenomenology. Critical phenomenology is commonly understood to be both a philosophical project that attempts to make visible and analyze certain oppressive structures that are latent in the everyday world of experience and a political practice-a struggle of emancipation from these oppressive structures. Its proponents claim this sort of endeavor necessitates a step beyond the scope and methodology of classical phenomenology, especially Husserlian phenomenology. Although some fi gures of classical phenomenology might off er methods

To resolve the issue of racism in Western society, Critical Race theory (CRT) seeks to apply the negative dialectics of critical theory to the intersection of race, law, and power in the pursuit of racial and ethnic equality in Western society. That is to say, critical race theorists seek to convict Western society for not identifying with their values and ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity, etc.) due to the prevalence of racial and ethnic oppression and subordination in the society. I argue here that this pursuit of racial emancipation and anti-subordination through the negative dialectics of critical theory by critical race theorists offers a false sense of racial difference which is convicting the values (as embedded in the ever-increasing rationalization of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism) of the West for an alternative, more liberating, ontology and epistemology against its devastating effects on the earth, the environment, and human social interactions.

Studia UBB. Philosophia, 2021

As a critique of objectification, phenomenological methodology offers resources for a disruption of sedimented or instituted meanings and practices that are hindering the access to a shared life-world, where self-exposure, hesitation, and vulnerability shape our human connections and the practice of our freedom. Relying on the methodological directions sketched in this special issue, we argue in favor of a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory. For the genetic perspective we indicate, normative imperatives – even if they are limited to a specific social context – tend to cover over living processes of collective emancipation, in the same way in which for Husserl theoretical substructions obscure the realm of the life-world, veiling its intuitive evidence and disorienting the critical work of clarification. If this theoretical tendency toward abstraction is rooted in the actual conditions of the production and reproduction of the social world – a process closely tied to what some have called “real abstraction” – a materially-oriented phenomenology can provide an indispensable set of resources for critical theory, allowing for an in-depth investigation of the lived experience of social forms such as reified individuality and abstract labor.

Springer eBooks, 2023

Research on the experience of gendered embodiment, on the one hand, and racialized embodiment, on the other hand, has emerged as an important tradition in phenomenology thanks to the works of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) and Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) respectively. Beauvoir's work has been prolonged by pioneering feminist phenomenologists, such as Iris Marion Young and Sandra Bartky, who have investigated both the cultural significance of female bodily functions and the alienating effects of feminine standards of beauty for women. And those inspired by Fanon-for example, George Yancy and Alia Al-Saji-have homed in on the experiences of persons of color confronted by the white gaze or entering white spaces. While each of these lineages has contributed to expanding the discipline of phenomenology, specific descriptions of the bodily experiences of women of color have received comparatively little attention in this field. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring the bodily experiences of women of color, thereby making a case for expanding phenomenological work at the intersection of gender and race. I discuss three phenomena that speak to the need for intersectional phenomenologies: body image, the gaze, and embodied resistance. These topics have received considerable attention in critical phenomenological works, either from feminist or critical race perspectives. Yet, treatments of these topics have not considered particularities about the experiences of many women of color. First, feminist studies of body image have probed the allure of thinness and the imperative to one's control one's hunger that are characteristic of eating disorders and diet culture, more generally. This focus, however, is not necessarily relevant to all women. As I will show, they do not speak to the experiences of many African American women. Second, both discussions of the male gaze and the racializing gaze have identified its alienating and objectifying character; furthermore, the literature in the philosophy of race

Phenomenology as Critique – Why Method Matters_TOC, 2022

Drawing on classical Husserlian resources as well as existentialist and hermeneutical approaches, this book argues that critique is largely a question of method. It demonstrates that phenomenological discussions of acute social and political problems draw from a rich tradition of radically critical investigations in epistemology, social ontology, political theory, and ethics. The contributions show that contemporary phenomenological investigations of various forms of oppression and domination develop new critical-analytical tools that complement those of competing theoretical approaches, such as analytics of power, critical theory, and liberal philosophy of justice. More specifically, the chapters pay close attention to the following methodological themes: the conditions for the possibility of phenomenology as critique; critique as radical reflection and free thinking; eidetic analysis and reflection of transcendental facticity and contingency of the self, of others, of the world; phenomenology and immanent critique; the self-reflective dimensions of phenomenology; and phenomenological analysis and selftransformation and world transformation. All in all, the book explicates the multiple critical resources phenomenology has to offer, precisely in virtue of its distinctive methods and methodological commitments, and thus shows its power in tackling timely issues of social injustice.