This special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy offers a wonderful sample of the innovative scholarship that was presented at the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), which was hosted by Pennsylvania State University, October 18–20, 2018. We have chosen the title “Critical Phenomenologies: Past, Present, and Future” for this volume because the essays included within it pay close critical attention to temporally thick features of our everyday lived experience. While some of the essays would more readily be identified as “phenomenological” than others, all of them offer valuable contributions to the project of a critical phenomenology as Lisa Guenther describes it in Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Critical phenomenology, she tells us, “continues the phenomenological tradition of taking first-person experience as the starting point for philosophical reflection and also resists the tendency to privilege transcendental subjectivity over transcendental intersubjectivity.”1 In addition, and equally important, critical phenomenology utilizes phenomenology's descriptive methodology not just to reveal what is positively present in a situation but also to highlight and address constitutive omissions, particularly those with social, political, and ethical implications. It is the critical phenomenologist's clear-sighted, incisive, yet loving attention to these lacunae, and her concomitant rejection of the abstract ideal of an ideologically neutral description of reality, that distinguishes this approach.Before providing more detail about each of the essays included in this volume, we would like to offer a quick tour of the table of contents to sketch out the trajectory of the volume as a whole. We begin with an essay by Robert Pippin, one of this year's plenary speakers, that presents his influential reinterpretation of Hegel. Next, we turn to the fundamental phenomenological domains of language, speech, and intentionality (Rachel Aumiller and John Montani's prizewinning essays). In the section entitled “Critical Intersections and Queer Interventions” our authors offer intersectional understandings of (de)coloniality (Emma D. Velez), freedom and invention (William Michael Paris), queer self-harm (Chris Jingchao Ma), and ability and disability (Joel Michael Reynolds). The next section, “Challenging Forms of Life and Thought,” includes essays on a Beauvoirian “art of living” (Céline Leboeuf), the nonrational domains of the unconscious and madness (Keith Whitmoyer and Hannah Venable), and the impossibility of distinguishing thought and information in our contemporary, virtually interconnected life (Brent Adkins). The final section, “Affecting Others and Othering Affects,” begins with an exploration of the role played by graphic texts in the experience and reception of Greek tragic dramas (Ian Maley) and then turns to Jan Patočka's account of how self-awareness “passes through the other” (Jakub Čapek). The third essay suggests that concentration camp prisoners' shame offers an affective resistance to dehumanization (Debra Bergoffen), and the concluding article reflects on the relationship between disgust and (the failure of) political judgment in Arendt's “Reflections on Little Rock” (Vilde Aavitsland).Pippin's “Idealism and Anti-idealism in Modern European Thought” clarifies the nature of Hegel's idealism and assesses the main lines of criticism that have been directed against it by anti-Hegelians such as Schelling, Marx, Adorno, Derrida, Lyotard, Levinas, and Heidegger. On Pippin's account, Hegel's idealism isn't a traditional metaphysical doctrine about ultimate reality (e.g., that nature is grounded in spirit) but rather a logical doctrine about the knowability of everything that can be known. He acknowledges that Hegel himself paved the way for misinterpretations of his philosophy by seemingly turning away from “purely ideal theory” to embrace “historical actuality,” only to identify a “rational core” of historical actuality that is “ultimately available only to pure philosophy or pure thinking.” According to Pippin, the key question for Hegel is whether or not reason is self-sufficient. If it is, as Hegel argues, then “pure thinking” is nothing but the process by which reason determines the form of the knowable. If it is not, as many of Hegel's critics have contended, then the onus is on the critics to explain how and why reason fails to recognize its own limitations. Pippin addresses three anti-Hegelian positions: those of Kant, Schelling, and Heidegger. He takes Heidegger to offer the “first genuine confrontation with Hegel in all of the post-Hegelian tradition” by distinguishing the intelligibility of beings (the topic of Hegel's Science of Logic) from “being as intelligibility itself.” Whether Hegelians should be troubled by Heidegger's challenge is a question Pippin leaves for his readers to determine.Aumiller's “Fantasies of Forgetting Our Mother Tongue” is the winner of the junior scholar award and is the first of the two prizewinning essays in this volume. Her essay brings together Derrida, Augustine, and Marx in an extended meditation on “the bond of the mother tongue.” She argues that this bond is inextricably linked to two fantasies: one that appeals to a mythical time “before” language (a position she associates with Augustine as well as psychoanalytic accounts of early childhood development) and another that invokes an imaginary time “after” language (a position she associates with Marx). Drawing on Derrida's reflections on Augustine and Marx—and on the relation in his work between spectrality and circumcision—Aumiller warns us of the dangers associated with the fantasy of escaping our mother tongue.In “Sense Experience and Poly-intentionality in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception,” graduate student award winner Montani develops a novel account of poly-intentionality through a close examination of Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the intimate forms of pre-reflective communication that our sensations establish between our bodies and the world. “Intentionality,” Montani asserts, “can be understood as a matrix of poly-intentional threads, woven by the body's different sense organs.” Understanding our sense organs as poly-intentional threads, he in turn suggests, means that each sense has the capacity to reveal the world in its own distinctive way.The essays included in “Critical Intersections and Queer Interventions” bring the fields of continental philosophy, decolonial studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies together in rich and groundbreaking ways. What unites all four essays is the way they foreground the experience of historically at-risk, marginalized groups, including black women, Latinas, slaves, queer youth, and people with disabilities. Both separately and together, these authors reveal the promise of intersectional approaches that seek to do justice to the distinctive forms of oppression as well as resistance that have historically been associated with each of these groups.Velez's “Decolonial Feminism at the Intersection: A Critical Reflection on the Relationship Between Decolonial Feminism and Intersectionality,” offers a critical analysis of María Lugones's “linguistic critique” of intersectionality, a methodology associated with the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and other Black feminist theorists. Velez argues that Lugones's “coloniality critique,” which identifies and rejects categorial logics that are the result of colonial impositions, is not opposed to but actually “furthers the insights of intersectionality,” and she concludes that both an intersectional approach and a coloniality critique are equally necessary for establishing “decolonizing coalitions among women of color.”A central question in Paris's essay, “‘One Does Not Write for Slaves’: Wynter, Sartre, and the Poetic Phenomenology of Invention,” is whether literature can only be addressed to free subjects, as Sartre suggests, or whether it can and should be addressed to subjects who are not free, as Wynter argues. This leads to the broader question of whether literary invention itself presupposes freedom, as Sartre also maintains, or whether American slaves and other “blackened” subjects have inherited a liberal discourse of freedom that, as Wynter observes, “invents them as being wrong—desêtre.”Ma's “Silent Rage: Queer Youth Self-harm as a Protest,” resists dominant interpretations of queer youth's self-harming practices as an abnormal response to a difficult yet allegedly livable situation. Rather, Ma reads the high prevalence of self-harm among this population as a resistant response to the transphobic and homophobic harms that young queers face on a daily basis. More specifically, she argues that we should stop viewing “self-harm merely as the individuals' psychological capacity of managing emotions or a self-willing pursuit of pain.” For if we continue to do this, we run the danger of failing to hear “this silent protest.”In the final essay in this section, “The Meaning of Ability and Disability,” Reynolds offers a new interpretation of the interdependent relationship between ability and disability, a topic that is central to contemporary disability studies. His essay presents a tripartite framework to excavate the “meaning of ability” as it is both implicitly and explicitly articulated in our everyday lives. Its three dominant features include what he calls “the verdict of bodies,” “the bind of bodies and worth,” and “the dogma of individual ability.” To avoid being “stuck in well-trod, eugenic dead ends,” he concludes, all three must be rejected; instead, we should demand the resources we individually and collectively need to support “our shared precarity.”Our next section, “Challenging Forms of Life and Thought,” commences with Leboeuf's essay, “Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Art of Living.” This essay seeks to remedy what Leboeuf argues is too intensive a focus on Beauvoir's conceptual contributions at the expense of what Leboeuf calls Beauvoir's “sensualism.” Turning to Beauvoir's descriptions of her hiking trips in her autobiographical memoirs, most notably The Prime of Life, Leboeuf reveals an implicit Beauvoirian “art of living” that warrants further examination in its own right. This art of living, Leboeuf suggests, arises directly out of “a sensual appreciation of the body” that can be achieved not only through hiking or rigorous exercise but also through meditation and other, less physical forms of bodily activity.In “The Wounds of Time: Phenomenology and the Problem of the Unconscious in Merleau-Ponty's Passivity Lecture,” Whitmoyer begins by reminding us that the unconscious has traditionally posed a problem for phenomenology since, by definition, it does not “appear” to consciousness and hence seems unable to be grasped as a phenomenon. In his Passivity lecture, Merleau-Ponty takes on this challenge directly and, inspired by Proust, suggests that the unconscious is, in Whitmoyer's words, “this profound forgetfulness that tears us apart, separating us from each other as well as from ourselves.” According to Whitmoyer, Merleau-Ponty's distinctive contribution to a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious as a nonpresence is the latter's depiction of the unconscious as an unhealed or open temporal wound, “the very wound that articulates our experiences and our lives.”Venable's essay, “At the Opening of Madness: An Exploration of the Nonrational with Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard,” focuses on another challenging phenomenon that defies reason, namely madness. More specifically, Venable argues that the dominant view of madness as “inaccessible and unintelligible” can be countered with a “tri-perspectival approach” that exposes the prerational, irrational, and suprarational dimensions not only of madness but of human experience more generally. Through a critical examination of madness as it is differentially depicted by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard, she maintains, we can gain valuable insights into the central role nonrational experiences play in our everyday lives.The final essay in this section, Adkins's “Information as the Image of Thought: A Deleuzian Analysis,” starts with the Deleuzian claim that information should not be understood as a mere metaphor for thought since thought and information processing have become indistinguishable in our contemporary, globally networked society. He finds an unexpected source for this view in F. A. Hayek's 1945 essay on the distribution and processing of information, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Adkins also draws upon Claude Shannon's “Mathematical Theory of Communication”—which, as he observes, is usually credited with “single-handedly inventing information theory”—to advocate for a “noological” account of “the historicity and contingency of information as the contemporary image of thought.”While these four essays call upon us to acknowledge and affirm the physical, cognitive, and nonrational challenges of life, the essays included in “Affecting Others and Othering Affects” take up a different critical thread, directing our attention to specific, intersubjective dimensions of our affective lives. Together, they collectively reveal the limitations of the face-to-face encounter as a paradigmatic model of intersubjectivity since our responses to others and their responses to us affect us across space as well as time, and can be communicated through the written word as powerfully (and often more powerfully) than in person.Maley's “The Literary Relation to the Other in the Greek Tragic Text” reveals a “graphic relation to the Other” at the heart of Greek tragic drama, namely, the dramatist's own text. The affective power of the text, he argues, tends to be undervalued and overlooked in favor of the actual performance that brings the written lines to life on the stage. More specifically, Maley argues that we must “start with the tragic text through which the poet relates to the actor and from which the actor draws her performance” if we are to grasp the alterity that is so central to tragic drama. Drawing support from Blanchot, Derrida, Jennifer Wise, and Charles Segal, Maley rejects the classical Aristotelian move of grounding poetry within human nature or the being of the poet herself, emphasizing instead “the use of scripts and masks” in conjuring the Dionysian aspect of tragic drama.Socrates' appropriation of the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” is often portrayed by modern philosophers as a solitary (quintessentially Cartesian) undertaking that an individual self is supposed to perform without relying upon others. Čapek corrects this misperception in “Intersubjectivity and Self-Awareness in Husserl and Patočka.” He appeals to Jan Patočka's critical writings on Husserl to challenge the primacy of the detached self in self-awareness. Arguing that subjectivity is mediated by, or “passes” through, others, Čapek endorses Patočka's view that self-awareness is fundamentally intersubjective. Since each of us receives our understanding of ourselves through our encounters with others, it follows that “there is no first ego.”“From the Shame of Auschwitz to an Ethics of Vulnerability and a Politics of Revolt” by Bergoffen addresses the ethical and political implications of the profound bodily shame (and lack of bodily shame) that is powerfully (albeit differently) described by Primo Levi and Jean Améry in their respective autobiographical memoirs. For both Levi and Améry, the visceral experience of shame, Bergoffen argues, is precisely what “salvages” their humanity, preventing them from becoming Giorgio Agamben's “Muselmänner,” the “living dead” who are no longer capable of reacting to their “violated humanity.” As a “self-reflexive affect,” the experience of bodily shame, she maintains, “simultaneously acknowledges our vulnerability to the power and judgments of the other and rebels against the violence of degradation.” This form of resistance, Bergoffen claims, recalls Antigone's resistance to Creon's denial of her brother's humanity (by refusing the latter proper burial rites); what these examples reveal, she concludes, is the inseparability of an ethics of vulnerability and a politics of revolt.In “The Failure of Judgment: Disgust in Arendt's Theory of Political Judgment,” Aavitsland turns our attention to the political implications of another negatively charged affect, namely, disgust. Drawing directly upon Arendt's (Kantian) account of the inhibiting influence of disgust “on both the sensuous and reflective level of political judgment,” Aavitsland argues that the “aversion of disgust” is an “affective moment of judgment in its own right.” “[T]he attraction of beauty or the aversion of disgust,” she further suggests, “is the basis on which we include some and draw borders that exclude others.” Noting that affective responses (both positive and negative) that fail to “take the perspective of specific others into account” lead to failures of political judgment when they are not subjected to critical reflection, Aavitsland claims that Arendt exhibits just such a failure of judgment in her controversial 1959 essay, “Reflections on Little Rock.” Agreeing with Kathryn Sophia Belle's critique of the racist aspects of Arendt's political thought, Aavitsland also points out that the racist views exhibited in the essay fail to meet the demands that Arendt's own theory of political judgment requires. Thus, Aavitsland maintains, it is not the theory that should be rejected but the political theorist's failure to subject her own affective moments of judgment to critical reflection.Tracing a circuitous path from idealism to disgust, the essays in this volume all contribute to the project of a critical phenomenology insofar as they reflect on the ever-accumulating weight of the histories we have been told as well as on the more elusive burden of those that are yet untold. As so many of these essays illustrate, it is when we commit ourselves to looking backward and taking responsibility for the injustices that have been committed in the past, when we reject false illusions of complete objectivity or neutrality, and when we subject our own affective responses to critical reflection, that we may be best positioned (philosophers and nonphilosophers alike) to chart a course for a more just future.