Transcendental Practice Research Articles

Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Pragmatist

Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Pragmatist

Laruelle, Immanence, and Performance: What Does Non-Philosophy Do?

François Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophical’ practice is connected to its performative language, such that to the question 'what is it to think?, non-philosophy responds that thinking is not “thought”, but performing. Non-philosophy is equally described by Laruelle as ‘transcendental practice’, an ‘immanent pragmatics’, or a ‘universal pragmatics’ that is ‘valid for ordinary language as well as for philosophy:’ He insists that we look at ‘that-which-I-do-in-saying and not just what I say’ – for the latter is simply what happens when thought is ‘taken hold of again by philosophy.’ Resisting this hold, non-philosophy performs re-descriptions of philosophy that, in doing so, produce effects on how philosophical texts are seen. All the same, it is notable that Laruelle objects to the focus on activity within the concept of a speech act, and instead emphasizes the ‘descriptive passivity’ that an immanent pragmatics obliges; statements that manifest ‘by their very existence what they must describe in the last instance – statements identically descriptive and performative.’ What Laruelle calls a ‘Performed-Without-Performation’ would be an action of the Real, or the ‘in-One’ – philosophical language seen as a performed without we using this or any language to perform. In this essay, this complex thought is compared with certain concepts and practices of performance that do not come from philosophy so explicitly (Allan Kaprow’s, Richard Schechner’s and Michael Kirby’s especially), but may well offer a key to understanding this passive action of the Real.

The primacy question in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology

This paper takes up the question as to what has primacy within Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a way to provide insight into the relation between empirical science and transcendental philosophy within his account of embodiment. Contending that this primacy necessarily pertains to methodology, I show how Kurt Goldstein’s conception of biology provided Merleau-Ponty with a scientific model for approaching human existence holistically in which primacy pertains to the transcendental practice of productive imagination that generates the eidetic organismic Gestalt in terms of which sense is made of empirical facts. Considering the analogous role played by imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perceptual synthesis in the form of what he called projection, I argue that his account of embodiment is, parallel to Goldstein, grounded methodologically on the projection of an organismic Gestalt, and that as a form of operative-intentional praxis projection is the site of primacy in his phenomenology overall. In terms of the relation between natural science and transcendental philosophy in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, while the theoretical dimension of the latter—the eidetic apriority of the organismic Gestalt—is coupled dialectically with empirical facts on an epistemically coeval basis, these are jointly subordinated to the normative commitments implied by the imaginative projection of that Gestalt. The primacy of the latter is transcendental but in a distinctly practical sense, such that any substantive discrepancy between natural science and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology reflects metaphilosophical, not theoretical, disagreement.

Laruelle’s ‘Criminally Performative’ Thought: On Doing and Saying in Non-Philosophy

François Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophical’ practice is connected to its performative language, such that to the question 'what is it to think?, non-philosophy responds that thinking is not “thought”, but performing, and that to perform is to clone the world “in-Real”’ (François Laruelle, ‘What is Non-Philosophy?’ in From Decision to Heresy [2012], 233).Non-philosophy is equally described by Laruelle as ‘transcendental practice’, an ‘immanent pragmatics’, or a ‘universal pragmatics’ that is ‘valid for ordinary language as well as for philosophy:’ He insists that we look at ‘that-which-I-do-in-saying and not just what I say’ – for the latter is simply what happens when thought is ‘taken hold of again by philosophy.’ Resisting this hold, non-philosophy performs re-descriptions of philosophy that, in doing so, produce effects on how philosophical texts are seen. Of course, whether these effects are always desired or are merely nominally considered ‘effects’ such as any description might create (misunderstanding, disbelief, dismay, boredom) is entirely debatable (and a matter for this paper). In accordance with this, however, it is notable that Laruelle objects to the focus on activity within the concept of a speech act, and instead emphasizes the ‘descriptive passivity’ that an immanent pragmatics obliges. Laruelle calls this a ‘Performed-Without-Performation’ which would be an action of the Real: philosophical language seen as a performed, but without a ‘we’ – or any others – performing (or ‘cloning’) it. It is this notion of the performative without either active human or philosophical adumbration, which is the topic of this paper.

신체론으로서의 감각론 － - 스피노자의 물음 ‘신체는 무엇을 할 수 있는가’에 대한 들뢰즈의 답변 = Theory of Sensation as Theory of Body: - Deleuze’s Answer to Spinoza’s Question: What Can Our Bodies Do?

The purpose of this paper is to reconstitute the answer of Deleuze and Guattari to Spinoza’s question (“What can our bodies do?”) and to properly situate their theory of sensation as an answer to this question. Their theory of sensation is basically an extension of their ethical project, ethology. In their view, ethology means the study of the body’s ability of composition and modification. But normally, it is difficult for us to concretely feel and understand compositions and modifications. To do this, we require a type of transcendental practice of our sensations. In my opinion, their theory of sensation shows this transcendental practice. The core of their theory of sensation is to distinguish two pairs of concepts, perception/percept and affection/affect, and to accept only percept and affect as the two constituents of sensation. Percept and affect are the genetic elements of our ordinary perception and affection. Deleuze and Guattari consider a work of art as a block of percepts and affects. According to them, a work of art is a special body that modifies our bodies, and it makes us reach percepts and affects. In this sense, for Deleuze and Guattari, a work of art is considered an effective means for transcendental practice of our sensation.

Generating Sense: Schizophrenia and Phenomenological Praxis

The aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. This implies that the standpoint of the phenomenological reduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. This paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on efforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the reduction is approached as a kind of transcendental practice in the context of generativity. Foregrounding the psychotherapeutic encounter with persons suffering schizophrenic delusion as paradigmatic of the emergence of shared meaning, it is argued that this is where we may best come to terms with the methodological exigencies of phenomenology’s transcendental aim. it follows that phenomenologists across all disciplines may have something important to learn from how phenomenology has been put into practice in the psychotherapeutic domain.