Abstract
What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology.
Highlights
I do think there is a significant difference between a practice of phenomenology that explicitly engages in social critique—let’s call this critical phenomenology—and a practice of phenomenology that does not
It is by no means clear that we can “bracket” white supremacy or “put it out of play” in order to reflect on the way it shapes our lived experience and our lifeworld
The stakes of bracketing the assumption that the world exists apart from consciousness and bracketing the complex matrix of assumptions built into white supremacy, including its intersections with colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism, are different in scale and complexity
Summary
There is a point where methods devour themselves. I would like to start there. – Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks to interpret the meaning of lived experience, and to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed.. I don’t think anyone would say of themselves, “I do classical phenomenology,” nor would it be helpful to draw up a list of classical and critical phenomenologists, as if these were two different schools of thought. I do think there is a significant difference between a practice of phenomenology that explicitly engages in social critique—let’s call this critical phenomenology—and a practice of phenomenology that does not. I have opted to call the latter classical phenomenology, not to suggest that such an approach is uncritical—as I will argue, there are multiple senses of critique at work in both classical and critical phenomenology—but rather to reflect in an open-ended way on the senses of critique that I see operative both in the emerging sub-field of critical phenomenology and in work throughout the phenomenological tradition that engages in some form of social critique
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