Introduction

Abstract

Phenomenology has always dwelled on the borders. Its methods border on those of psychology, logic, and anthropology; its contents, on those of virtually every other discipline. From the beginning phenomenology has been concerned with beginnings and endings—temporal borders—and with finite and infinite forms (spatial borders). Philosophically, phenomenology borders on existentialism, hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, feminism, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and other fields of inquiry. Such borders are obviously not well defined, which is not to say that they do not exist. Phenomenology dwells on its borders by letting itself be challenged about how it represents them. To dwell on borders is not only to live on them but to think about what they do, how they abide and change, and how they undergird or destabilize our thinking. Directly or indirectly, the articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy all dwell on phenomenology's borders. They were presented at the fifty-sixth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. The meeting was hosted by the University of Memphis, October 19–21, 2017.In her co-director's address, “Hesitation as Philosophical Method—Travel Bans, Colonial Durations, and the Affective Weight of the Past,” Alia Al-Saji begins by presenting “a critical phenomenology of borders and travel bans.” As an Iraqi-Canadian national who frequently travels to the United States to attend academic conferences, Al-Saji is well situated to describe what it is like to be subjected to the various travel bans that the Trump administration has put into effect. Moving from first-person description to phenomenological analysis, she uses her experience to theorize a conception of hesitation as philosophical method. This leads to a novel understanding of the relationship between the present and the past. Much as Faulkner said that “the past is never dead. It's not even past,” Al-Saji argues that the past is never complete. This is true of the colonial past, which persists in the present not like a deadweight on the bodies of the living but as a fractured phenomenon whose sense can be reconfigured through a form of critical hesitation.Walter Mignolo's plenary address, “Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and Epistemic/Ontological Colonial Differences,” deals with phenomenology's borders in a colonial and decolonial context. Mignolo first encountered the works of Edmund Husserl as a student in Córdoba, Argentina. Fascinated by Husserl's account of the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and the lifeworld, he was also disconcerted by Husserl's representation of Europeanness as a universal ideal. As Mignolo explains, he went on to study semiotics instead of philosophy but continued to think about how Husserl's conception of the lifeworld might be repurposed in a decolonial context. His address at the meeting gave him the opportunity to explore this topic via Aníbal Quijano's account of the “coloniality of knowledge.”Ashley J. Bohrer received the Junior Scholar Award for her article “Color-Blind Racism in Early Modernity: Race, Colonization, and Capitalism in the Work of Francisco de Vitoria.” While Bohrer agrees with scholars such as Leslie Carr and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva that we are living in an age of so-called color-blind racism, she argues that forms of color-blind racist philosophy emerged much earlier than is usually thought. She supports her thesis by showing how the sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher Francisco de Vitoria introduced a conception of universal human rights of travel and commerce to justify colonization in the Americas, allowing European settlers free movement and open access while criminalizing indigenous resistance.Güçsal Pusar received the Graduate Student Award for his article “Heidegger on Kant, Finitude, and the Correlativity of Thinking and Being.” Between 1929 and 1961 Heidegger presented three different interpretations of Kant's “supreme principle of synthetic judgments,” namely, that the conditions of the possibility of experience are the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience. Each time Heidegger revisits this principle he tries to reveal an excessive element that eludes Kant's account of the correlativity of thinking and being. Yet, as Pusar shows, Heidegger also demonstrates the resources Kant has for accommodating the excesses identified in his previous readings.The question of racialized bodies in the history of philosophy is taken up, in different ways, by the next three articles of the special issue. In “Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel's Africa,” Andrea Long Chu addresses Hegel's notorious claim that black Africans deserve their enslavement. Chu says that the aim of her article is not to establish the fact of Hegel's racism but, rather, to diagnose its manner. Hegel is morally opposed to slavery, but he takes it to play an important role in human development. It is a temporary and in some sense necessary stage on the route to self-emancipation. However, as Chu demonstrates, Hegel represents the predicament of enslaved black Africans as one whose sublation can only be indefinitely deferred—a constitutive racist exception to Hegel's dialectical humanism.In “Levinas on the Knife Edge: Body, Race, and Fascism in 1934,” Christopher Cohoon offers a novel reading of Levinas's early essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Usually this essay is interpreted as a defense of liberalism, but Cohoon reads it instead as an antiliberal defense of the “fatalism of corporeal facticity.” Levinas criticizes the philosophy of Hitlerism not for its conception of existential facticity but for its biologization and racialization of this condition. In support of this reading, Cohoon demonstrates that the concept of corporeal facticity reappears in Levinas's later account of ethical embodiment.In “The Human as Double Bind: Sylvia Wynter and the Genre of ‘Man,’” Emily Anne Parker examines Wynter's account of the “epochal shift” that took place in Europe when human beings began to represent themselves as natural organisms. Unlike Husserl, who privileges the mathematical physics of Galileo, Wynter focuses on Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian Man—a “referent subject” for the new humanistic ideal. While purporting to be universal, humanism was founded on a network of exclusions that Parker summarizes under the heading of the “splitting of the political from the ecological”—a split that cannot be overcome without working through the legacy of colonialism.The next section of the special issue brings together two articles on Husserl: one on his realism and the other on his conception of community. In “‘Yes, the Whole Approach Is Questionable, Yes, False’: Phenomenology and the New Realism,” Matthew Coate argues that Husserlian phenomenology is not caught in what Quentin Meillassoux calls the “correlationist circle”: the idea that it is impossible to conceive of either thought or being independently of their relation to each other. While the phenomenological epoché does involve the bracketing of mind-independent objects, it leads neither to a form of Berkeleyan or Kantian idealism nor to a precritical metaphysical absolute. On the contrary, Coate argues, Husserl should be read as a friend of the “new” form of realism championed by Meillassoux. He supports this interpretation by showing how Husserl's deepening of his phenomenology of internal time-consciousness leads him to reject his own initial positing of an atemporal absolute.In “Husserlian Mereology and Intimate Community Membership,” Sean Petranovich examines how Husserl's account of part/whole relations informs his understanding of “personalities of a higher order.” What unites a communal whole for Husserl is a strictly mereological type of intimacy. Degrees of intimacy are functions not of intensities of feelings and emotions but, rather, of structural relations of dependency. Petranovich explains how communal structure is constituted through “centripetal” and “centrifugal” intentional relations. He concludes by showing what it is like to be part of an intimate community, using the example of “empathic pairing” in early philosophical communities.Philosophies of voice and sound are the topic of the next three articles. In “Adriana Cavarero and the Primacy of Voice,” Fred Evans addresses Cavarero's thesis that voice is the most distinctive feature of human existence. Evans agrees that voice is fundamental, but he questions several aspects of Cavarero's privileging of its vocalic dimension over its semantic dimension. For Cavarero, what is unique about a person's voice has nothing to do with semantics: a voice signifies nothing but itself. Likewise, the most basic relations among a plurality of voices are prelinguistic and pre-political. Evans worries that this account undervalues the signifying dimensions of our uniqueness, relationality, and political life. For him, voices are essentially dialogical and dynamic. He represents society as a “multivoiced body,” an idea that he takes to be in keeping with the spirit, if not the letter, of Cavarero's model.In “good kid, m.A.A.d city: Kendrick Lamar's Autoethnographic Method,” James Haile III analyzes the interplay of voices on Lamar's second hip-hop album. Haile explains how the incorporation of other people's stories into his self-narration enables Lamar to present an autoethnography of “black male youth culture.” For Haile, this method of storytelling calls into question traditional conceptions of truth and ownership even as it strives to faithfully express a plurality of voices—both living and dead—in a nonappropriative way. Lamar conveys both the power and the limits of autoethnography not only by verbalizing other people's stories but by imagining objections they might have raised about this very practice. Haile concludes that good kid, m.A.A.d. city provides an exemplary model of the type of critical introspection that has been especially practiced in recent Africana philosophy.In “Philosophies or Phonographies? On the Political Stakes of Theorizing About and Through ‘Music,’” Robin James contrasts two different approaches in contemporary sound studies. One approach, which James identifies as philosophical, involves “close listening”: instead of theorizing about what one hears, one derives from close listening a way of theorizing that is itself fundamentally sonic or musical in character. The other approach she discusses is that of phonography, which identifies sonic phenomena that have escaped the radar of traditional philosophy. According to James, the point of doing phonography is not to put these phenomena on philosophy's radar but, rather, to remain just below it.The final section of the special issue includes three articles that deal, respectively, with persons, subjects, and pure immanence. In “Personal Identity and Cultural Multiplicity from a Bergsonian Point of View,” Frédéric Seyler asks whether the concept of identity can be appropriately applied to persons, whose constantly changing experiences and perspectives seem to involve a mere Heraclitean flux. In search of an adequate conception of personal identity, Seyler turns briefly to Michel Henry, who locates personhood in the phenomenological experience of pure affective immanence, and then to Bergson, who develops a richer conception of personal individual history and cultural personhood. By distinguishing superficial habits from the deep-seated roots of exceptional personal actions, Bergson provides Seyler with a model of identity that can be applied not only to individuals but to “open” societies as well.In “Freud Beyond Foucault: Thinking Pleasure as a Site of Resistance,” Robert Trumbull argues that despite Foucault's criticisms of Freud, Freud shows how to resolve a problem with Foucault's conception of an ethics of pleasure. For Foucault, pleasure—unlike sex—is supposed to escape the order of power-knowledge insofar as it is prediscursive, and yet it is power that first constitutes us as subjects capable of experiencing pleasure. To resolve this tension, Trumbull turns to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. By ascribing the “binding” of excitations to the “primary process” of the unconscious, Freud represents pleasure as the locus of subjectivity, the place where formative power both gains its hold on us and is resisted.In “To Have Done with the Transcendental: Deleuze, Immanence, Intensity,” Brent Adkins contends that despite Gilles Deleuze's characterization of his philosophy as a type of transcendental empiricism, it is best understood without any reference to the transcendental. Adkins distinguishes Kant's conception of transcendental causality from immanent, transitive, and emanative types of causality. Transcendental causality—indeed, the transcendental as such—involves a relation's being immanent to a subject. Sartre tried to eliminate this dative construction by introducing the concept of a pre-personal transcendental field of consciousness, but for Deleuze this only shifted the locus of the dative subject from the ego to consciousness itself. According to Adkins, Deleuze's conception of intensity enables him to think a genuine form of pure immanence.The articles published in this issue represent a cross section of the work presented at last year's meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Each in its own unique way dwells on one or more of phenomenology's multiple borders.