Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters 1438466218, 9781438466217

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction: Reconsidering the Phenomenology of Social Encounters......Page 10
Notes......Page 25
References......Page 26
Part I: Embodied Politics: Encountering Race and Violence......Page 28
Introduction......Page 30
Selfhood and Sociality Based on the Corporeal Sharing of Meaning......Page 34
Politics Providing the Conditions for the Possibility of Sharing Meaning......Page 37
Political Violence and Its (Direct and Indirect) Impact on Bodies......Page 39
Conclusion: Bodies in Revolt Between Isolation and Homogenization......Page 46
Notes......Page 48
References......Page 52
2 A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes......Page 56
Extreme Isolation and Gang Validation at Pelican Bay State Prison......Page 59
Critical Phenomenology as a Practice of Liberation......Page 63
Resistance and Solidarity in the Pelican Bay Shu......Page 68
Notes......Page 74
References......Page 79
3 Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities......Page 84
Questioning White Ignorance......Page 85
Beauvoir and Merleau-ponty on Privilege, Passivity, and Responsibility......Page 94
Notes......Page 104
References......Page 109
4 Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility......Page 112
The Dialectics of Invisibility and the Lived Experience of Race......Page 115
Re-visioning Ethical Forms of Seeing: Perception Contra Sartre......Page 119
Rupturing Racialized Patterns of Perception......Page 122
The Phenomenology of Invisibility: Honneth’s Account of Recognition and Perception......Page 125
Notes......Page 130
References......Page 136
Part II: Relationality, Ethics, and the Other......Page 140
Interaction......Page 142
Recognition......Page 146
Relational Autonomy......Page 154
Notes......Page 160
References......Page 166
6 The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading......Page 170
“Others” in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception: From Epistemology to Ontology......Page 173
Others and Language in Phenomenology of Perception......Page 179
Traces of Others in Phenomenology of Perception......Page 182
Notes......Page 187
References......Page 191
7 Linguistic Encounters: The Performativity of Active Listening......Page 194
Language and Social Power......Page 195
The Hearer’s Uptake as a Felicity Condition for Speech-acts......Page 202
Performativity of Active Listening......Page 209
Notes......Page 213
References......Page 216
8 Wonder as the Primary Passion: A Phenomenological Perspective on Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference......Page 218
The Mind–body Union......Page 219
Wonder as a Passion of the Soul......Page 222
Wonder as Task......Page 224
Conclusion: An Ethics of Reading and Writing?......Page 229
Notes......Page 230
References......Page 240
9 Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Other Others......Page 246
The Problem of Others: First Epistemological Problem......Page 248
The Problem of Others: Second Epistemological Problem......Page 251
The Problem of Others: The Conceptual Problem......Page 252
The Problem(s) of Other Others......Page 254
Conclusion......Page 263
Notes......Page 264
References......Page 274
Part III: Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Intercorporeality......Page 276
The Breakthrough Discovery of Embodiment in Phenomenology......Page 278
Embodied Being-in-the-world as an Overcoming of Cartesian Dualism......Page 279
The Key Phenomenological Distinction: Leib Versus Körper......Page 285
Bodily Mineness: The Uniquely Personal “Possession” of My Body......Page 288
The Intertwining of the Senses: Merleau-ponty’s “Chiasm”......Page 290
The Lived Body as Experienced in Fantasy, Dream, and Altered States......Page 293
Intersubjectivity, Intercorporeality, Being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein)......Page 295
Notes......Page 298
References......Page 309
11 Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy......Page 320
The Metaphors and Practices of Surrogacy......Page 324
The Phenomenology of Intercorporeality and the Maternal–fetal Relation......Page 329
Conclusion......Page 335
Notes......Page 337
References......Page 342
Introduction......Page 346
Sartre and the Body......Page 350
The Body-For-Others......Page 353
The Case of “Vincent”......Page 354
The Look of the Other......Page 356
Agoraphobia and the Look......Page 358
Notes......Page 362
References......Page 365
Introduction......Page 368
Intercorporeal Capabilities......Page 369
Constitutive Intercorporeality......Page 372
Intercorporeality as a Relation of Expression......Page 377
Situated Expression......Page 380
Conclusion......Page 384
Notes......Page 386
References......Page 391
Notes on Contributors......Page 396
Index......Page 402

Citation preview

Body/Self/Other

Body/Self/Other THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS

Edited by

Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2017 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Jenn Bennett Marketing, Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dolezal, Luna, editor | Petherbridge, Danielle, editor Title: Body/self/other : the phenomenology of social encounters / Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge, editors. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016041360 (print) | LCCN 2017033666 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466217 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438466224 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Philosophy. | Other (Philosophy) | Phenomenology. Classification: LCC HM1106 (ebook) | LCC HM1106 .B635 2017 (print) | DDC 142/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041360 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Reconsidering the Phenomenology of Social Encounters

vii 1

Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge

PART I EMBODIED POLITICS: ENCOUNTERING RACE AND VIOLENCE 1 The Body and Political Violence: Between Isolation and Homogenization

21

Rosalyn Diprose

2 A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes

47

Lisa Guenther

3 Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities

75

Gail Weiss

4 Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility

103

Danielle Petherbridge

PART II RELATIONALITY, ETHICS, AND THE OTHER 5 Social Interaction, Autonomy, and Recognition Shaun Gallagher

133

vi

CONTENTS

6 The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading

161

Donald A. Landes

7 Linguistic Encounters: The Performativity of Active Listening

185

Beata Stawarska

8 Wonder as the Primary Passion: A Phenomenological Perspective on Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference

209

Sara Heinämaa

9 Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Other Others

237

Katherine J. Morris

PART III EMBODIMENT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND INTERCORPOREALITY 10 Lived Body, Intersubjectivity, and Intercorporeality: The Body in Phenomenology

269

Dermot Moran

11 Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy

311

Luna Dolezal

12 Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Look

337

Dylan Trigg

13 Intercorporeal Expression and the Subjectivity of Dementia

359

Lisa Folkmarson Käll

Notes on Contributors Index

387 393

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council and the European Commission (Marie Curie Actions) for funding the research projects from which this book has arisen. We would also like to thank Andrew Kenyon, our editor at SUNY, for his support, David Markwell for copyediting, and our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on each chapter and an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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Introduction RECONSIDERING THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge

The essays collected in Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters examine the lived experience of our relations with others as well as the complexity of embodied interaction and forms of sociality. Deploying phenomenology along with a variety of other philosophical approaches, including critical theory, social philosophy, feminist theory, and post-structuralism, the contributions in this book describe and critically interrogate existential, material, and normative features of self-other relations in a range of contexts with contemporary significance. The book questions, for example, what it is to perceive or be perceived in terms of race, gender, sexuality, animality, criminality, or medicalized forms of subjectivity. If these are habitual patterns or attitudes built up in everyday experience within our lifeworlds, how do we transform, or even rupture, these perceptions and experiences? Moreover, if we, as social beings, are constituted through intersubjective relations, what are the costs of the absence of this relationality in conditions of isolation or imprisonment, or, why might such relations manifest fear and anxiety in public space or in old age? Moreover, what is the nature of our intercorporeality and what ethical obligations, if any, does the fact of our embodied relationality imply for us? Following the work of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology has articulated various aspects of self-other relations making salient the intercorporeal and constitutive nature of our encounters with others. This book significantly extends 1

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these phenomenological insights and takes the notion of the “phenomenology of social encounters” in its broadest sense. With rich descriptions of lived phenomena occurring in experiences such as racism, solitary confinement, surrogacy, dementia, agoraphobia, and violence, among others, the essays in this book yield important and original insights about embodied social relations, or the enduring interrelation between body/self/other. Interrogating modes of embodied interaction such as vision, speech, pregnancy, recognition, and objectification, the essays collected here not only provide a description of the lived experience of social encounters but also develop alternative ways of relating subjective experience to a broader analysis of social structures and institutions across a range of contexts. Challenging the criticism that phenomenology, as concerned primarily with subjective experience has little to offer social critique, the contributions in this book demonstrate the importance of phenomenology when considering questions of social justice and critique that hinge on the textures of lived experience. Many of the authors represented here develop a critical phenomenological perspective that is not only alert to embodied lived experience and interpersonal interaction, but also to the broader structures, institutions, and discursive practices that shape our perceptual and social frameworks.1 Social injustices and inequalities are not abstractions played out in the realm of law or politics; rather, they are matters that impinge on our embodied lives and our lived relations with others. A phenomenological approach to social encounters enables us to take account not only of the way in which embodied habits and forms of perception become sedimented in particular social contexts but also the ways in which particular practices and habits are taken up and reiterated in our lived bodies in an active manner. Exploring the intertwining of body/self/other through the fabric of lived experiences framed by variable normative structures, this book offers a unique contribution to scholarship within contemporary phenomenology. While the contributions in this collection articulate various types of encounters between “self ” and “other,” it should be emphasized that these are by no means discrete entities. In fact, the essays all take body/self/other as their starting point, demonstrating that intersubjective and intercorporeal relations are simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by subjects and forms of sociality. However, it is important to note that from the perspective of the different philosophical traditions represented in the book, the notion of intersubjectivity carries various connotations. It may refer to interpersonal

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or face-to-face and embodied encounters, for example, as explored extensively in the phenomenological tradition, but is also understood to form a background of norms and meanings that constitute the social or “lifeworld,” prominent not only in phenomenology but also in social-philosophical accounts.2 Importantly, embodied intersubjectivity is also constitutive of subjects and social life, designating an existential, ontological, or anthropological category and may also refer to normative or ethical forms of relation that are built into the fact of our sociality or are present as a potentiality. For some theorists, then, the notion of social “encounters” between self and other is in many ways a nomenclature, as it tends to indicate that we begin from the assumption of isolated individual consciousness, or suggests a view of monadic or atomistic subjects who only secondarily “encounter” one another. In contrast, for some theorists it might be more appropriate to speak of an original fabric of social relations into which we are interwoven, or of primary ethical relations in which we always already move.3 The notion of “social encounters” represented in the book is then intended to capture various aspects of interrelation and interaction—both positive and negative—whilst taking into account the broader social and political frameworks of meaning in which these interactions take place. Moreover, despite the fact of our sociality and dependency upon others, many of the essays examine the ways in which intercorporeal and intersubjective relations become overdetermined by forms of racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and so on, which become sedimented into habitual patterns of meaning and perception that structure our social lifeworlds. The book is divided into three thematic sections: “Embodied Politics: Encountering Race and Violence”; “Relationality, Ethics and the Other”; and “Embodiment, Subjectivity and Intercorporeality,” which draw on or emphasize different aspects of the phenomenological tradition or undertake alternative levels of analysis. The essays in Part I, “Embodied Politics: Encountering Race and Violence” explore the lived experience of race, violence, homogenization and isolation. Engaging phenomenology with critical race theory, social philosophy, and feminist theory, the first four essays engage with the complexity of embodied politics, exploring the manner through which social injustices color and shape the texture of our lived experiences. These four essays, in their various ways, explore how injustices such as racism, criminalization, and symbolic violence are inscribed and reinforced on and through the body, or the way

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in which racializing or criminalizing perceptions become “epidermalized,” to use Frantz Fanon’s term.4 Rosalyn Diprose’s essay, “The Body and Political Violence: Between Isolation and Homogenization,” opens the book with a provocative analysis of embodied politics and violence, which she argues operate through processes of isolation and homogenization. In previous work on corporeal generosity, Diprose highlights the ways in which bodies are socially constituted through an intertwining with others who are also already social beings.5 In this sense, habitual patterns and attitudes of intolerance toward otherness are built up over time and, in turn, these forms of intolerance limit modes of bodily comportment in attitudes of sexism, racism, or heterosexism, for example. Diprose extends these insights here and offers an analysis of the kinds of violence that structure sociality within liberal democratic polities that incite divisiveness and conflict rather than promoting uniqueness and forms of interrelatedness and belonging. She not only draws attention to the centrality of the body in understanding political violence but also to the ways in which embodied politics create complexes of meaning that generalize and categorize, consequently erasing alterity and difference or denying the uniqueness of particular persons. Deploying insights from Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Diprose seeks to develop a political ontology that is based on a notion of corporeal intertwining and modes of dwelling together that can also account for alterity and difference. She argues that political violence not only damages the subjects upon whom it is inflicted but also the broader social fabric by closing down the potential for dynamic modes of intercorporeal dwelling. In response, Diprose highlights a notion of affirmative interrelation or affectivity—a notion that is explored in different registers in several essays in the book—that she suggests is intrinsic to forms of relationality and is required for the mutual disclosure of individual uniqueness. Diprose’s analysis of isolation and homogenization resonates with Lisa Guenther’s work, particularly her analysis of the “collapse of personhood” for prisoners contained for long periods in solitary confinement.6 In her work on isolation practices in prisons, Guenther highlights the pathologies that develop from the systematic deprivation of social relations with others, such as paranoia, panic attacks, or hallucinations, that lead to the eventual breakdown of self and the world, and which highlights the way we become “unhinged from ourselves by being separated from others.”7 In her essay “A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013

INTRODUCTION

5

California Prison Hunger Strikes,” Guenther moves beyond her previous phenomenological analysis of the effects of solitary confinement on individuals to develop an account of solidarity and resistance between prisoners subjected to conditions of extreme isolation. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on collective praxis, Guenther articulates a critical phenomenological account of the action taken by prisoners in Northern California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, who put aside their differences in order to collectively protest against conditions they faced within the prison system. As Guenther notes, many of the ways in which prisoners are identified or treated, such as body searches, body cuffing, surveillance, detention, isolation, gang identification, and internal daily punishment, are not based on specific actions they have undertaken within prison but on racializing and criminalizing perceptions, stereotyping and profiling about perceived personas or identities that cohere to entrenched and naturalized attitudes and norms. This, of course, is the case not just behind prison walls but is acutely apparent in U.S. policing practices more generally, such as “stop and frisk” policies or being pulled over on suspicion of minor traffic violations that disproportionately target black Americans (also known as the “offense” of “driving while black”), which have resulted in high numbers of deaths in police custody and shootings. Engaging the work of Fanon, Guenther points to the way in which racial and colonial structures not only effect political and social institutions but also psychic life and lived experience. Moreover, she highlights the manner in which one’s mode of being becomes undermined or distorted through the systematic deprivation of or exclusion from generalized patterns of social relations. However, she is also concerned to articulate the modes through which the logic of racializing and colonizing structures and frameworks of meaning can be both critically assessed and transformed, creating new modes of being with others and new forms of thought and action. Guenther suggests that by bringing a critical phenomenological perspective to such forms of experience and collectivization it is possible not only to reveal historical, social, and material structures that condition and constrain all forms of action but also to develop transformative practices for reforming the world.8 In her essay “Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities,” Gail Weiss provides a reflection on how white privilege operates and the ways in which perceptual habits are maintained by failing to acknowledge and neglecting to take existential responsibility for them. She provides an insightful analysis of social encounters characterized by perceptual and embodied

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habits with respect to racial stereotypes, taking place against a background of unwritten rules or typical patterns of social interaction. Weiss points to the ways in which perceptual habits are relational phenomena that connect us not only to others but also to broader cultural, social, and historical frameworks. She highlights how perceptual habits become sedimented in forms that privilege some individuals and are oppressive for others. Weiss’s aim is to disclose the psychic and bodily advantages that attach to racial privilege and the ways in which ignorance and lack of acknowledgment of such privilege contributes to the sedimentation of racializing perception. She suggests that the figure/ground model explicated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative account of the way in which habits function in the background of our experience, blending in such that they remain unnoticed until an unexpected experience brings them to our awareness. In this manner, an unsettling event or transformative experience may reveal perceptual habits such as racism by bringing them to the fore, and can be the catalyst for changing entrenched habits such as white privilege. It is precisely this kind of new experience that is described by Simone de Beauvoir in her memoir, America Day by Day; a work that recounts her travels in southern parts of the United States in 1947, through which she is confronted by her own white privilege. Drawing on the writings of Alia Al-Saji, Weiss demonstrates that Beauvoir’s experiences of race can be read as unsettling such that they rupture preconceived ideas and habits of perception. As Al-Saji suggests, if we take into account the temporality or duration that structures habit, we can see that such habits or patterns of perception rely on repetition or reiteration for their existence and maintenance over time, but it is this very requirement of ongoing repetition that also opens a space for such patterns to be interrupted. In the very repetition of habits of perception, ways of seeing may falter or be dislodged and a new way of seeing may emerge. It is also this sense of challenging racialized forms of perception that Danielle Petherbridge explores in her essay, “Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility.” In contrast to Weiss, who draws on Al-Saji’s work to help deconstruct white privilege, Petherbridge brings Al-Saji’s work on hesitation and perception together with Axel Honneth’s work to examine the phenomenology of invisibility and racializing forms of perception more generally. Through a reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Petherbridge explores the phenomenon of invisibility and race and questions what factors contribute to the

INTRODUCTION

7

deformation of perception in the sense that a subject fails to see the other in a manner that grants her social validity. In order to examine this set of issues, Petherbridge brings together resources from Axel Honneth’s recognition theory, Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenology, and Fanon’s account of racializing perception to explicate how racism fosters dialectical modes of being between visibility and invisibility. Racialized subjects no longer experience themselves as body-subjects but as objects, which in different contexts manifests as either a form of heightened visibility or as a form of objectification, denial, or dehumanization that renders subjects invisible. Petherbridge argues that the phenomenological account of embodied lived experience and perception can productively be brought together with Honneth’s insights in regard to the relation between cognition, perception, and recognition. To this end, she argues that Al-Saji’s rich account of hesitation, which points to the temporality and space required to interrupt habitual patterns of perception, can be augmented by an account of recognition that potentially provides the normative force required for transforming racializing forms of seeing and for ethically reorientating forms of perception. Following on from the substantive accounts in Part I, the essays in the second part of the book, “Relationality, Ethics and the Other,” explore the theoretical and experiential foundation of social encounters. Each chapter in Part II considers questions of alterity and difference and various modalities of interacting or engaging ethically and corporeally with others. Many of the essays in the second part explore ethical accounts of relationality or the potential for ethical encounters and the reconstruction of intersubjectivity, for example, in relation to sexual difference, to speaking and listening, or in the development of a relational notion of autonomy based on primary responsiveness. Through examining the question of encountering the other, or other others, the essays in this section explore themes such as autonomy, wonder, ethics, performativity, and recognition as they arise in our embodied lived experience and offer substantial new theoretical insights. In his essay “Social Interaction, Autonomy and Recognition,” Shaun Gallagher also explores interconnections between phenomenology and Axel Honneth’s critical-theoretical approach to intersubjectivity, more specifically with regard to connections that can be made between recognition and enactive approaches to cognition or interaction theory. Gallagher highlights how a “social encounter,” or face-to-face interaction, is not only central for the development of autonomy but also for establishing broader forms of social

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organization, which transcend interpersonal interaction and are reflected in broader social and political institutions. With reference to recognition theory and developmental literature, Gallagher articulates a feedback loop between autonomy and interaction such that individual autonomy depends on recognitive forms of interaction. In turn, he argues that more generalized patterns of autonomous interaction can be achieved only on the basis of the ongoing autonomy of participants in interaction. In this regard, autonomy is not conceived as an individualistic category, as one based on self-determining and self-legislating subjects, as in the Kantian tradition, or as isolated subjects depicted as masters of their own sovereignty or self-mastery. Rather, for Gallagher, autonomy is a relational category shaped through social interaction and dynamic intersubjective processes. In addition, he argues that forms of interaction not only have resonance at the interpersonal level but also develop into complex patterns of interaction that transcend individual social encounters to form what he terms a dynamic system of “autonomy of interaction.” He compares this notion to Levinas’s account of the transcendence of the face-to-face encounter, pointing to a post-metaphysical notion of ethical responsiveness and mutual engagement generated by ongoing forms of autonomous interaction around which certain practices are built. In this sense, like Petherbridge, Gallagher seeks to develop a notion of “elementary responsiveness” or primary affectivity that he suggests can be found in Honneth’s work. However, he argues this notion of primary responsiveness is somewhat obscured in Honneth’s own work by its conflation with secondary or more developed linguistic and normative forms of recognition. Gallagher argues that Honneth downplays or overlooks the embodied dynamics of social interaction that begin at a primary level of intersubjectivity, and that crucially form the basis for more mature and ongoing normative forms of interaction. It is through these elementary forms of responsiveness, which refer to emotional and embodied responses rather than cognitive ones, that the subject is called to respond to the other and for interaction of any kind to be ongoing. In his essay “The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading,” Donald A. Landes offers a reconsideration of the way in which the “problem of the other” and of alterity and difference has been interpreted in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Instead of moving to the later ontology of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible, Landes offers a detailed reading of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier existential phenomenology as represented

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in Phenomenology of Perception, which he argues is the more productive place to begin in order to trace the status of the other in Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre. Landes suggests that, for Merleau-Ponty, encounters between self and other can be understood as a type of “reading” in which subjects read the expressive gestures of one another and gear onto the open trajectories of sense, which are always ongoing and never complete. He therefore highlights not only the existential-phenomenological but also the temporal aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s account. In this sense, embodied relationality always carries the weight of language, culture, and the past but also points toward open trajectories beyond the present and lived moment, those that transcend us but which we also take up and live in new and unexpected ways. Landes suggests that the other can be understood as “the speaking traces of an existence” and, consequently, that it is more appropriate to understand that embodied encounters are never complete nor reduced to a particular way of “knowing” or to enclosed interpretations. Rather, the notion of “reading” suggests there are multiple ways of engaging with and responding to the other, and that as with reading a text, the practice of reading is always a “reperformance” that elicits new modes of meaning that are never ultimately encoded but open to an on-going hermeneutical process. Landes suggests that social encounters as “reading” offer the potential for ethical encounters between self and other. However, there is no designation from the outset regarding what such a reading will elicit or whether it will be characterized by positive or negative modalities. In fact, Landes suggests that the best we can claim is for the possibility of an ethical response to the other rather than one that can be guaranteed or grounded either anthropologically or ontologically. Whereas Landes’s essay traces the possibility of an ethics of reading the other in Merleau-Ponty’s work, in her essay “Linguistic Encounters: The Performativity of Active Listening,” Beata Stawarska points to an ethics and politics of hearing with reference, not only to Austin’s speech act theory but also to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Luce Irigaray. In this sense, Stawarska outlines a phenomenology of speaking and listening, which breaks down the components of speech acts to uncover the ways in which everyday linguistic encounters can express or reinforce relations of power. However, she also emphasizes the way in which such micro-acts are never isolated forms merely enacted in interpersonal or face-to-face encounters, but always already situated in broader social structures of power that either lend or deny legitimacy to the status of speaking subjects.

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Stawarska explores the way in which, particularly for women, a perfectly appropriate and audible speech act may be expressed but fails at the illocutionary level. As she explains, however, the failure does not lie in the initial locutionary act but rather in the neglect or refusal of uptake on the part of the listener. She argues that in social encounters it is the interlocution of speech acts that is central, in the sense that communication depends not merely on making an appropriate and audible utterance but also on the receptivity of the other to the utterance. In this respect, “failures” of listening and hearing can become a disempowering strategy that works to reproduce habitual and inequitable patterns of interaction and reinforce power relations by deauthorizing a marginalized speaker. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work, Stawarska suggests these are not isolated incidents specific to particular social encounters but that language and linguistic interaction take place within and reflect social structures or conditions of power, which delegitimize the speech of those who have not been granted a particular social status or authority. This sensibility is also reflected in Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of speech and interpellation, in which she examines the way in which subjects are constituted linguistically and whereby subordination is understood to take place through language. Stawarska draws on Butler’s analysis of the performativity of speech acts but augments it by turning to Irigaray’s arguments about active listening. Irigaray’s account does not assume that the listener has a preconceived knowledge or comprehension of the speaking subject but rather listens to each utterance with an openness that provides a space of freedom in which new forms of becoming might emerge. In this way, Stawarska redirects an analysis of the potential empowerment of linguistic encounters away from Butler’s focus on speech and the reclaiming of words through their reiteration, to a focus on the ethical and political practice of listening and hearing. This has the effect of reauthorizing the status of a previously disempowered speaker in a new way, enabling the subversion of gender roles and assisting in challenging positions of power and authority. Irigaray’s work also provides a point of orientation for Sara Heinämaa’s essay, “Wonder as the Primary Passion: A Phenomenological Perspective on Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference.” While Stawarska focuses on the reorientation of speech acts and the responsivity of the other in terms of the hearer’s uptake to reorientate intersubjective relations, Heinämaa takes up Irigaray’s notion of ethics based on what she terms a sense of “wonder.” Heinämaa draws on Descartes’s work on the passions and Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the phenomenological reduction in order to further explicate what Irigaray means

INTRODUCTION

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by referring to wonder as the basis for ethical renewal of the relation between the sexes. Her contention is that wonder is central not only for developing an ethical account of sexual difference but of intersubjectivity and difference more generally. For Heinämaa what is most striking about Descartes’s account in The Passions of the Soul, is the manner by which he not only posits wonder as the primary “emotion-passion” but also articulates it as a primary form of affectivity that precedes all forms of evaluation. In this sense, wonder, which is grouped with emotion-passions such as love, hatred, and desire, is also distinct as a passion that has no opposite. More important, it is the first and most significant of the passions because it designates a form of engagement with others and the world that is non-instrumental, non-objectifying, and prior to classification. Instead it lays the ground, so to speak, for an “active grasping,” that is, of a responsiveness to the other that opens up new forms of experience or perception in social encounters. However, Heinämaa argues that in order to fully understand Irigaray’s claims about wonder, we need to view wonder not merely as a primary passion that evokes new forms of responsiveness, as implied in Descartes’s work, but also as a goal or a task. In order to explicate this project, she claims we need to reconsider the phenomenological account of the reduction found in Merleau-Ponty’s work and described, following Eugene Fink, as a form of wonder or surprise. Heinämaa argues that Irigaray’s notion of wonder can be understood in a manner similar to the phenomenological attitude; it requires a suspension of judgment and perception, of common-sense conceptions and experiences of the other sex in order to make possible new forms of ethical relation. This is, of course, an ongoing task, one that not only makes possible an altered form of receptivity toward the other but also self-transformation. Applied to philosophical practice, wonder opens new interpretations, new readings, and new spaces and creates the possibility for redefining and reshaping entrenched institutions, including philosophical ones. In her essay “Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Other Others,” Katherine J. Morris engages Merleau-Ponty’s work in order to address the perennial question that continues to preoccupy analytic philosophy regarding the problem of understanding others: How do we know that other minds exist? Morris argues that Merleau-Ponty not only transforms these traditional philosophical problems but also offers a radically different approach that effectively dissolves the question as it is conventionally posed. Through a detailed reading of Merleau-Ponty’s work, Morris points to several epistemological

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and conceptual strategies through which Merleau-Ponty tackles the “problem of others.” This includes not only a reconceptualization of the body that challenges the mind-body distinction but also the idea that the body is merely another object in the world. In this respect, for example, the notion of the body schema is remarkable for describing the way in which bodies are “in the world,” and also provides the basis for knowing there are other “equivalent” body schemas for those persons with whom I interact or with whom I exist in the world. However, Morris’s point is not just to address the standard question of the problem of others posed by analytic philosophy. Instead, she turns to consider how this approach might apply to an understanding of “other others.” By this she means to refer to those categorized as other others in Merleau-Ponty’s work, including “animals, children, primitive peoples and madmen.” Morris suggests that there are two ways in which the problem of understanding other others is approached in Merleau-Ponty’s work that stem from the basic manner in which he reconceives the problem of the other more generally. One is by replacing the notion of cognitive understanding with the phenomenological notions of “conduct” and “milieu,” and the second, which is more speculative, is to extend the notion of bodily reciprocity to the mode of understanding other others. The first claim is based on the notion that although other others dwell in the world in “their own fashion,” we can understand that they have their own milieu and their own forms of conduct or movement to which we can relate, without assuming others are the same as us. In other words, we can understand their conduct as conduct with vital significance for them, despite it being structurally different to our own. The second claim Morris makes extends Merleau-Ponty’s insights beyond his own, to suggest how it is possible that we might have a bodily understanding of other others. Key here, Morris suggests, is a consideration of the acquisition of habits together with Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus.” Morris argues that understanding other others is akin to acquiring what might be termed a “second habitus” (similar to learning a second language or culture). She argues that by way of a system of equivalences we can, for example, come to understand the purr of the cat as she sits in my lap as a bodily gesture equivalent to my smile, or the flick of her tail as equivalent to a frown. In this way, Morris highlights not only the way in which Merleau-Ponty’s work deconstructs traditional philosophical problems by challenging the very presuppositions that underlie them, but also offers a unique way in which phenomenological solutions

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to perennial problems create a means to radically reorientate our understanding of other others. The essays in Part III, “Embodiment, Subjectivity and Intercorporeality,” explore in further detail the primacy and complexity of intercorporeality, particularly in regard to the development of subjectivity and the body schema, and the ways in which embodied relations are pivotal for understanding gestation, anxiety, and aging. While the insights of the canonical phenomenologists were primarily concerned with articulating the structures of what might be called “ordinary” or “non-pathological” embodied experience, the essays in this section push these initial insights to explore variations of experience through dementia, pregnancy, and agoraphobia, demonstrating how these experiences are intertwined not only with others but with the normative structures of the broader world. In his essay “Lived Body, Intersubjectivity, and Intercorporeality: The Body in Phenomenology,” Moran traces the concepts of embodiment and intercorporeality through the phenomenological tradition, demonstrating the contributions of both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to questions of embodiment and the phenomenological modalities through which we experience our own lived bodies and through which we encounter the “other.” Moran elucidates the concept of embodiment with reference to Husserl’s work on the distinction between Leib and Körper and in relation to important concepts such as the double sensation, “mineness,” and bodily sensings. Furthermore, through a careful lexical consideration of the key concepts in Husserl’s account, Moran demonstrates the influence of Husserl on Merleau-Ponty and other twentieth-century thinkers and traditions. With particular reference to concepts such as the “body schema,” “intertwining,” and the “flesh,” he argues that the phenomenological account of embodiment has provided an important corrective to some strands of contemporary philosophy of mind, which now recognize that consciousness is not only embodied but also relational. With reference to Gail Weiss’s insights on intercorporeality, Moran notes that the first “encounter” with the other occurs in the womb, demonstrating that we are always already enmeshed in an intercorporeal nexus from which our individual experiences emerge. In her essay “Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy,” Luna Dolezal takes up a similar set of issues and provides a detailed examination of primary intercorporeality within the womb as the basis for both the development of the body schema and future forms of embodied relationality. Dolezal’s point, however, is not just to highlight the

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way in which intercorporeality in gestation is constitutive of primary intersubjectivity but to draw attention to the way in which this complex state is largely overlooked in contemporary literature on surrogacy. In particular, she argues that the role of the surrogate is not just one of “gestational carrier” or “womb donor” but in fact should be considered as providing the “fleshy foundation” for the embodied subjectivity of the growing fetus. Dolezal argues that we need to rethink and critically examine the way in which commercial surrogacy has been conceived. She suggests that surrogacy cannot be viewed merely as a form of “labor” akin to other forms of production, or in terms of a “gifted womb,” but rather that the surrogate should be understood as intertwined in primary embodied and affective experiences with the child that are not only life-giving but also have kinship-generating capacities. In other words, Dolezal’s claim is that in commercial surrogacy the role of the surrogate mother—as a woman with a primary embodied relation to the gestating child—should be brought more centrally into philosophical, bioethical, and medical analysis. She therefore demonstrates not only the importance of gestation and pregnancy for phenomenology and for any understanding of primary relationality but also provides the basis for critiquing and transforming conceptions and practices of commercial surrogacy, effectively putting the role of the surrogate and the sociality of the surrogate-child relation at the center of the analysis. Where Dolezal emphasizes the affective and life-giving aspects of sociality and our being with others, in his essay “Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Look,” Dylan Trigg turns to an examination of the way in which forms of intersubjectivity can equally evoke fear or anxiety. With reference to Sartre’s account of the look and an early twentieth-century case study of an agoraphobic subject, Trigg explores the relation between embodiment, intersubjectivity, and spatiality, providing insights not only into agoraphobia but also forms of social relationality more generally. In this sense, Trigg contests conventional understandings of agoraphobia as a pathology, instead arguing that agoraphobia amplifies certain themes of everyday existence in regard to the more general relation between self, others, and the world as well as our spatial orientation. He suggests that Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity in Being and Nothingness is helpful for revealing the way in which relations between self and other are structurally based on exclusion or negativity, and for explicating the manner in which I not only become an object of the other’s gaze but in like manner become an object for myself. It is this sense of both being othered and surrounded by the condition of alterity that the agoraphobic subject responds to with dread and anxiety. As Trigg suggests, however, the

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sense of being looked at does not disappear when there is no one literally present but is extended beyond perception such that it becomes a general condition of otherness. For the agoraphobic subject, open, unmediated spaces are particularly threatening as otherness permeates all things, appearing everywhere as engulfing and omnipresent such that the subject feels literally “lost in space.” It is through this sense of spatiality, Trigg suggests, that the agoraphobic subject constructs forms of relationality with the other and tries to avoid incorporating the other into his or her existence, refusing alterity despite being immersed in a world in which otherness is everywhere infused. In her essay “Intercorporeal Expression and the Subjectivity of Dementia,” Lisa Folkmarson Käll takes up some of these themes from an alternative vantage point by examining the care of subjects with dementia. Through an examination of clinical practice in dementia care, Käll highlights the way in which the capabilities of dementia patients are fostered and encouraged intercorporeally. However, she argues that what is remarkable about such practices of relational capacity building are that they make acutely apparent how subjective capacities are intercorporeally constituted more generally. In this respect, Käll’s essay highlights many of the themes explored throughout the book, including the foundational nature of embodied interconnectedness and the processes of individuation in which subjects develop their singularity through constitutive forms of embodied relationality. In this regard, social encounters can be understood to be based on a constitutive openness and accessibility to the other, which as Käll points out, is prefigured in the experience of the “double sensation” in which the subject has a double experience, for example, when touching one hand with the other. The double sensation as described by Merleau-Ponty discloses a reversible structure, one that is constitutive of identity and also extends to interrelation with others and the world. Käll demonstrates the way in which primordial intercorporeality provides the basis for all future forms of face-to-face intercorporeality, in the sense that it is foundational for relationality as well as the body schema. She also draws attention to the situatedness of the lived body and its endlessly changing and future-directed paths of becoming. Primary intercorporeality then opens new possibilities for action and the ongoing, dynamic configuration of bodily space, which she argues is important for understanding dementia. Following Merleau-Ponty, Käll argues that subjectivity can be understood as an expressivity that is experienced through our intercorporeal relations with others such that interiority is expressed and disclosed. The significance of this analysis for understanding conditions such as dementia is that subjects

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can be understood to continue to express their interiority and continue to “become who they are” through expressive interaction with others rather than assuming that subjectivity becomes dormant, as in conventional analyses. In a manner that insightfully brings together many of the issues explored in the book, Käll’s essay demonstrates that we are always already intercorporeal and intersubjective beings who not only grow, change, and express our uniqueness in relation to others but who also suffer and are diminished when deprived of interaction and encounters with others, despite the complexity through which those encounters might unfold. As all of the essays in the book highlight, primary forms of intercorporeality and intersubjectivity form the basis for ongoing forms of relationality and modes of interaction. Moreover, an underlying agreement runs throughout the chapters that more general forms of sociality are built up through our embodied interaction and everyday social encounters, and that patterns of interaction and intersubjectivity shape, alter, and amend the background norms and meanings that structure our social lifeworlds. In this regard, many of the essays explore the form, texture, and differential experience of social encounters and examine the ways in which habitual attitudes or patterns of perception become sedimented and expressed in forms of inequality and oppression, in the denial of uniqueness and alterity or social validity. To challenge the disavowal of difference through exclusion and privilege, many authors in the collection investigate ways in which such attitudes, habits, and experiences might be ruptured, resisted, and transformed. In different ways, the essays demonstrate the normativity built into the fact of our sociality or embodied relationality and the ways in which social encounters might be ethically reorientated. The authors rethink the materiality and normativity of social encounters, taking into account not only intersubjective and embodied relations but also investigating the ways in which lived experience might inform the critical analysis of broader social structures, institutions, and contexts. Most notably, the book reveals the richness and diversity of our intercorporeal existence and the necessary intertwinement of body, self, and other in ways that demonstrate both our uniqueness and diversity as well as our fundamental social interdependence and the potential for new and ever-changing forms of relationality.

NOTES 1. See Helen Ngo, “Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, DOI:

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10.1177/0191453715623320, 16 February 2016, 14–15; Alia Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Emily Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014, 133–172. 2. See for example, Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, D. Carr (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970); contrast Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations (ed.) H.R. Wagner (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Jürgen Habermas who takes up and transforms Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld in The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, T. McCarthy (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 3. See for example A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, J. Anderson (trans.) (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995). See also M. Merleau-Ponty, for example, The Visible and the Invisible, A. Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), for an account that is suggestive of an originary ontological fabric into which we are all interwoven (although this is not necessarily an explicitly ethical claim it can be argued it gestures towards such an account). 4. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 2008); also see Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation.” 5. See R. Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), esp. 69, 55. 6. L. Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013), 29. 7. Guenther, Solitary Confinement, xi, xii. 8. Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 60. Also see Fanon, Black Skin White Masks.

REFERENCES Al-Saji, A. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Emily Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 133–172. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002.

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Fanon, F. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Guenther, L. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013. Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Honneth, A. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Ngo, H. “Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 16 February 2016: 14–15. doi: 10.1177/0191453715623320 Schutz, A. On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.

PART I

EMBODIED POLITICS ENCOUNTERING RACE AND VIOLENCE

CHAPTER 1

The Body and Political Violence BETWEEN ISOLATION AND HOMOGENIZATION Rosalyn Diprose

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores how ontologies of intercorporeality from the existential phenomenological tradition and its sympathetic critics might enhance our understanding of the operation of legal political violence in liberal democracies.1 The target of the analysis is not so much obvious kinds of state-sanctioned killing (for example, through capital punishment or war) but the less explicit kind of violence that does not tend to count as such: the violence involved in the political framing of sociality in a way that disables social interaction and the agency of the actors. I argue that not only is this disabling itself a form of political violence, but also that it can incite explicit acts of violence within the populace by fostering fear, divisiveness, social conflict, and/or indifference to difference and to the plight of the less fortunate. My aim is to better understand how a politics of fear and exclusion can have a physical and violent impact, not just on those targeted by the policies, but also on the modes of belonging of those in the community that the policies supposedly protect. To explain the impact of government policy in a democracy in terms of political violence requires that we understand the place of the body in the political and that we understand the political as entailing, not just the institution of government per se, but the broader space of interrelation between other-oriented agents. The proposition that democratic government policy and its publicity can entail violence addresses the connection between everyday notions 21

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of violence as consisting in physical harm (from the breaking of skin and drawing of blood to causing the death of another) and the idea of discursive or symbolic violence, which does not necessarily involve explicitly touching the body of the target. Linking the two notions of violence is facilitated by existential phenomenological accounts of embodiment as well as various philosophies of the body that understand the body as a target of political power. The notion of symbolic violence is a legacy of the phenomenological tradition and its sympathetic critics. In particular, Emmanuel Levinas has argued that politics, law, and conceptualization per se entail violence insofar as such thematization generalizes and categorizes and thereby excludes from consideration or simply erases alterity, the unknowable difference and unique value of particular persons.2 However, this idea of symbolic violence tends to render all law and conceptualization equally violent toward its targets and says little about the impact of a politics of fear and exclusion on those who are supposedly protected rather than targeted by it.3 Also, it does not explicitly address the physicality of violence, which itself presents difficulties for a clear definition of violence. On the one hand, while violence must entail some kind of physical turbulence or harm, it should not be assumed that causing physical damage and pain to another’s body is essentially violent: tattoo artists and willing adult participants in sado-masochistic sexual practices, for example, would object to that assumption. On the other hand, to suggest that government policy and its publicity, as well as discourse and categorization in general, can be violent requires some account of how discourse impacts on the body to cause damage of some kind. Michel Foucault’s thesis on the relations among (political) power, discourse, and the body goes some way toward explaining how government policy can impact on bodies in the sense of normalizing them and rendering them compliant. But can we say that mechanisms of normalization, while transformative of bodies, amount to violence? Since the early 1980s feminist, race, and political theorists have worked up various accounts of the relation between politics and the body to account, if not for the violence of political discourse, at least for the unethical aspect of its normalizing tendencies. This pertains to the uneven distribution of normalizing discourses and how they operate at the level of the body to discriminate against and silence “minority” ways of being. Two main approaches to the relation between the body and normalizing sociopolitical discourse have emerged from this work. One approach explains discrimination and some kinds of violence as arising

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from the way that the body politic assumes a white, male, heterosexual body such that other modes of embodiment are excluded from, disadvantaged by, or rendered incoherent within the public space of the political.4 The second dominant approach, especially in much race theory in the United States and in some postcolonial theory in Britain, draws on existential phenomenology (especially Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) and psychoanalytic theory to explain how individuals are impacted by discriminatory public discourse, that is, by a sexist, racist, and heteronormative symbolic order. This covers two kinds of impact: how a discriminatory symbolic order gets embodied to infect our perceptions such that we reproduce those biases in our everyday seeing and being with others; and second, how victims of that discriminatory discourse come to embody their inferior social status in various kinds of traumatized subjectivities.5 While my analysis of political violence is sympathetic with some of this work, especially insofar as it draws on the existential phenomenological tradition, it moves the focus away from the impact of symbolic violence on individuals to the level of sociopolitical relations and their enframing by the symbolic order or, specifically, by government policy and its publicity. Second, I depart from any post-Hegelian model of sociality and interrelatedness that views the self-other relation in terms of negation, dialectics, recognition, vulnerability, or hybridity. These other ontologies of interrelatedness imply different understandings of political violence that in turn imply different ways of addressing the problem. Third, the analysis attempts to differentiate between normalization that is part and parcel of conditioning that is not essentially harmful or violent and that we cannot escape completely and the conditioning of sociopolitical relations that damages the fabric of interrelation to a point that could be considered violent and that incites violence. To do this I begin by outlining Merleau-Ponty’s account of the corporeal basis of both selfhood and sociality, which also provides an account of how we are conditioned by sociopolitical meanings that we inherit (including racist and sexist discourse) and how this conditioning occurs at the level of the body. This account of the relation between the symbolic order and the body suggests that, whatever our conditioning, we are also fundamentally opened to a world of other bodies and hence opened to an undetermined future (that is, symbolic violence is not integral to sociality). The analysis links Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of body-subjectivity and sociality with Hannah Arendt’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s political ontologies that are centered

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on models of interrelatedness compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s. I will explain this approach to interrelatedness more fully below, but I want to preview two key points. First, all three accounts chart a course between individualism and communitarianism in that neither individual sovereignty nor shared identity is the starting point or the goal of human interrelations. Rather, there is a fundamental separation, uniqueness, or singularity that is signified within and arises from communion with others. Arendt refers to this paradoxical condition of sociality as the “disclosure of natality” within the togetherness of human affairs; Nancy calls it the “sharing of singularity.”6 Second, for all three the fabric of interrelation is characterized as “potentiality” through “being together,” which, for Nancy, defines democracy or, in Merleau-Ponty’s case, this fabric of interrelation (which he eventually calls the “flesh”) is characterized as corporeal intertwining opening an undetermined future.7 This political ontology not only explains how political discourse impacts on bodies in ways that I will elaborate, but also it locates violence in a particular aspect of this impact. Within this paradigm political violence can be understood, not in terms of the effects of the generalization, categorization, and identification that are inherent to government, law, and the typical self-other encounter, but in terms of government no longer providing the conditions that support this potentiality of being together, this dynamic interrelatedness that is characteristic of the fabric of sociality. The analysis goes on to show that, on this model, political violence “resolves” the paradox of the sharing of singularity into one of two poles and it manifests in one of two ways: it either isolates bodies from open encounters with other persons or it attempts to homogenize bodies into a uniform social or national identity. There is also something to say about the impact of isolation and homogenization of some bodies on the wider social fabric. The analysis concludes with brief consideration of the political conditions necessary to avoid both kinds of violence and to enable the recovery of bodies that have been isolated or homogenized by political forces. The key point here is not so much to emphasize the inherent vulnerability to the acts of others arising from our intercorporeal condition, the acknowledgment of which, some argue, should lead to a political community and sense of responsibility that desists from violence.8 Rather this phenomenological analysis of body politics points to the need to actively “do” community in ways that vigorously foster the sharing of singularity and, hence, diversity and an open future.

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SELFHOOD AND SOCIALITY BASED ON THE CORPOREAL SHARING OF MEANING I begin by deriving, from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, an idea of democratic political community based on the sharing of meaning through dwelling with others. The aim is to account for how we are ordinarily conditioned by sociopolitical ideas of gender, race, ability, and so on without this entailing harm or violence in any essential way. Nor do we necessarily notice this sharing of meaning: as sociality is based on intercorporeality, the sharing of meaning involved in particular social encounters is not necessarily accessible to conscious reflection (we cannot easily pinpoint exactly why someone appeals to us while others may repel us). Hence, it is not the kind of sharing of meaning implied in a politics based on recognition of individual or group identity. Beyond such differences, the main idea that differentiates this account of interrelatedness from that of recognition and vulnerability theory is that the principle underlying the sharing of meaning (and that is essential to it) is the paradox mentioned above: what Nancy calls the “sharing of singularity” and what Arendt refers to as the “disclosure of natality” (the new and the agent as the beginning of the new) within the togetherness of human affairs.9 It is this sharing of singularity (rather than sharing any particular ideas or a common identity) that is disabled through political violence. Let me elaborate. Bodies usually mean something but not as individuals that present a meaning in and for itself. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, no body is a sign of itself; no individual has a self-contained identity. Insofar as a body means something it derives that meaning from its historical and sociopolitical context, but only in relation to other bodies. That is, the meaning of any body is formed and transformed through the sharing of social meaning in community with other bodies. For Merleau-Ponty, there are two entwined sides to this sharing of meaning that together consist in an irreducible ambiguity of the body: a receptiveness to circulating meanings embodied in others (the “centripetal” aspect of perception) and an outward-orientation (activity or the “centrifugal” aspect of perception) where one’s history is not so much imposed upon the world but influences how one responds to and impacts on others.10 In his later work Merleau-Ponty describes how, within the hiatus of meaning, human bodies, and things, human existence continues “a vortex of experience which is formed, with our birth, at the point of contact between the ‘outside’ and he who is called to live it.”11 For Merleau-Ponty, this “point of contact” with the “outside” is a body that is “inspired” and “called to live”

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by elements that are not itself. The body, in responding to other significant and material elements in its world, provides some stability for assemblages with those elements, but, rather than maintaining a unified identity or fixed set of inherited meanings, the body (intertwined with others as the “flesh”) always manifests a degree of “divergence” from meanings that it inherits.12 No body then is simply active or passive, free or determined, in control or vulnerable in relation to the “outside” that calls it to live. This is because of an ambiguity of the body that Merleau-Ponty describes as a “double belongingness” of dwelling in a world: “the body sensed and the body sentient” are “two phases” of “the flesh,” and between the world and my body, “there is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.”13 Hence, as perception or experience is “a feeling that is felt,” a seeing that is seen, then “my activity is equally passivity” and vice versa.14 There are three points about this account of the sharing of meaning that I wish to emphasize before outlining the model of the political that it implies. First, it is from the sharing of meaning with and through other bodies that a dynamic sense of belonging to a social and material world arises, a sense of belonging without which we could not live. It is by virtue of this intertwining of “the flesh” that I live my dynamic spatial orientation; it is also how I live time (time expands and contracts depending on what am doing and with whom) and it is the vehicle of my temporality, stretched between past and future. This sense of belonging is located not in a table of shared values and social meanings that I reflect upon or that I use to identify with or recognize in others. Rather, this familiarity is located in my body as an atmosphere that informs how I perceive the world as I live through it. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh is at once an account of how we are conditioned by circulating ideas (including ideas of race, gender, ability, age, and so on) and also an account of how those meanings we come to embody influence our perception of the world and of others. Qualities (color, age, texture, etc.) that I perceive do not, for Merleau-Ponty, adhere to the object of perception; nor are qualities mental ideas that I project onto the world. Red, for example is a “punctuation in the field of red things” actualized in the intertwining of body and world through the impact of “cultured being” on incarnated ideas drawn up from sociopolitical “imaginary worlds” (ideas of red associated with, for example, political “revolutions,” “scarlet women,” the “robes of bishops,” and so on).15 Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, my style of existence is inseparable from a corporeal-spatio-temporal expression of meaning informed by sociopolitical values and ideas that we come to signify and live through.

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Second, we do not incorporate these ideas in exactly the same way as each other or in a fixed, predetermined, or ahistorical way. While meaning comes to me through habituated dwelling with other bodies within a sociopolitical context, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we break with or transform the meanings we have inherited as a matter of course and this break with tradition is tantamount to human agency (this is the “divergence” of flesh). Divergence happens not by virtue of free will but via the ambiguity of the body, which gives dwelling its dynamism and uniqueness. Dwelling is open to an open future, or, as Arendt puts it, the fabric of interrelatedness is power as “potentiality.”16 One way that Merleau-Ponty formulates this idea of the divergence of the flesh is in terms that describe complexes of human–non-human elements of dwelling being simultaneously “instituted and instituting.”17 The vortex of experience lived by a human body always involves “institution” in the first sense of “those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or a history.”18 On the other hand, in the play of ambiguity, “institution” also involves actively “instituting,” beginning something new, initiating, or innovation. In other words, institution itself—being receptive of “outside” elements, significances, and past events—initiates the present and simultaneously “opens a future,” “a” singular or unique divergence from the past.19 As I will argue shortly, this future-oriented open divergence of intercorporeal dwelling is what is disabled or damaged by political violence. The third point to note about this idea of intercorporeal sharing of meaning is that even though government policy and its publicity have some influence over whether and how corporeal markers of identity (social, ethnic, sexed, etc.) become significant, that they are significant is not essentially harmful. Perceiving and living a world in terms of sexual, racial, or religious identity, for example, may not involve political violence or precipitate conflictual relations with others so long as these meanings, and the way we live them, remain dynamic and open to contestation. A carnal sense of belonging to race, gender, religion, and place is all part of how we get along without thinking within familiar territory. But it may also be a source of advantage or disadvantage and the medium of prolonging discrimination. It is in nurturing this discrimination and, in the extreme, promoting division and conflict that a politics of fear and exclusion does harm. The challenge for political theory is to explain the difference between the sharing of meaning that fosters dynamic senses of belonging to gender,

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race, place and so on, and political violence that exploits corporeal markers of identity and difference in a way that disables some bodies and their comportment towards a world and that damages the fabric of sociality in general.

POLITICS PROVIDING THE CONDITIONS FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF SHARING MEANING Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political based on the “disclosure of natality” to and with others and Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of community in terms of the “sharing of singularity” help in the task of elaborating this difference. Both accounts describe the principle underlying democracy—or the “reality principle,” as Nancy puts it: the principle of reality or of the world that we hold in common is the “affirmation,” prior to any evaluation of characteristics or judgment of actions, of the “unique, incomparable, unsubstitutable ‘value’ or ‘sense’” in each person and “of each relation.”20 This is not a regulative idea to guide good governance, but the principle from which democratic government begins, and it is the space of affirmative interrelation that democracy makes possible. As I go on to argue, it is this principle and the fabric of sociopolitical relations that it maintains that is either not upheld or is harmed or destroyed by political violence and violence of all kinds. Understanding how that operation can be harmed requires, first, understanding what makes the sharing of meaning possible, which will also explain what prompts the “divergence” of the flesh and what inclines humans toward others such that the sharing of meaning is open as potentiality or to “a future.” It is to that question that I now turn. Arguably the first phenomenologist to explicitly account for what makes possible this “principle” of uniqueness that orientates us toward others was Emmanuel Levinas who, in a critique of phenomenology, describes the “signifyingness of a trace” in the face of the other that he says underlies all sociality.21 By this he means that underlying sociality is a “signifyingness” of the irreducible otherness of others, their unknowability and unique value that arises through, but also prompts, my “desire” or my responsiveness toward (and responsibility for) them. I am borrowing the term “signifyingness” from Levinas, but I ascribe this signifyingness to bodies in general (rather than just the face) and I leave aside the details of Levinas’s account of responsibility for the other. Nancy and Arendt, in different ways, put this idea of the “signifyingness’ of uniqueness, into their accounts of politics. For Arendt, the space of the

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political consists in the “disclosure of natality” through action and speech within the “web of human relationships.”22 By “natality” she means the beginning of something new, much like the “instituting” side of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution. Natality is not so much an actual “capacity,” like reason or will, that people have and that allows them to create a new idea or thing. Rather, natality refers to the idea that a person appears in the world to others as the beginning of something new, as “unique distinctness,” as the beginning of a new chapter in their life, and as the source of an impact on the world (they “set something in motion”), and therefore as a break with the past.23 By describing the space of the political as the welcome and “disclosure of natality” of each to the others, Arendt is saying that the political is nothing more or less than the process of expressing and attributing to others the signifyingness of natality whereby each person is disclosed as an agent, as the source of the new and as uniqueness per se. Another way that Arendt puts this is in terms of the mutual welcoming of the (unknowable) “who,” as opposed to the (knowable) “what,” of other persons.24 This public space of the disclosure of natality between human beings is “power as potentiality”25 and the dynamic space of “freedom.”26 Hence, this space of active interrelation keeps human dwelling open to an undetermined future. This “in-between” of human interrelatedness is the “intangible” fabric of human dwelling that is “frail” in two senses: in a positive sense, it is the space of constant revision of the world and its inhabitants that wards off determinism and totalitarianism; but second, this “power as potentiality” does not survive the active interrelations of agents and is frail in the sense that it can be undone by neglect or by violence.27 As Arendt tends to avoid the notion of bodies as the vehicles of the signifyingness of uniqueness and agency, I turn to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas about the role of the body in the political, which can be found within his account of community in terms of the “sharing of singularity.”28 “Singularity” is not individuality. Instead, as singular beings we are the unique event of the taking place of meaning, but only by “exposition,” by a “sharing” that exposes this uniqueness to others and so allows its expression.29 What Nancy adds to Arendt’s similar account of the “disclosure of natality” to and by others are two refinements of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of intercorporeality. These refinements help explain, in ways I will get to, why political violence can hurt even if there are no physical scars to prove it. One refinement is that for Nancy the body and its comportment toward a world is a primary site of the signifyingness of uniqueness and for the “taking place of sense” or meaning.30 Second, Nancy provides an explanation of the affectivity underlying this sharing

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of singularity that drives interrelations whilst maintaining the separation between bodies. He does this by adapting Heidegger’s idea of “mood” underlying human dwelling with others.31 For Nancy, what characterizes this relation between bodies (and what cannot be assimilated or known in any terms) is a directional, affective leaning-toward or “unidentifiable” inclination (“clinamen”) toward others.32 What sustains this relation is that it is inclined toward the other’s finitude, singularity, or what Nancy also describes as the other’s unidentifiable inclination toward other others. This idea of the “sharing of singularity” explains why “the flesh” or intercorporeality is divergent and open to “a future,” to the new, or potentiality. Or to put this in less abstract terms, it is fundamental to human existence that a sense of belonging with others and to places, while subject to habit and coded by a history of relations with others and the government of these, must also be temporally and spatially open to constant renewal through and by others, and thereby open to an undetermined future, to new circumstances and strange bodies. As with Arendt and Merleau-Ponty, Nancy suggests that circulating ideas of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and so on “bring into relief” rather than necessarily harm or erase this expression of uniqueness in community.33 What he seems to change about this idea of community in his more recent work is that this sharing of singularity is described as the principle of democracy (rather than politics or community per se). Nevertheless the point is the same: what opens us to ourselves, to each other, and to potentiality, is the “sharing (out)” of the “incalculable” unique “sense” of each and all together or the “affirmation” of the “uniqueness” of all of us in all our relations.34 This sharing is not itself politics because (contrary to Arendt’s idea of the public space of the disclosure of natality) it can happen everywhere in all sorts of private and public encounters. The role of politics is to make this sharing possible.35 Violence, on the other hand, can be understood as an event (political or personal) that halts the expression and circulation of meaning necessary for agency (in Arendt’s sense) and for sociality. Violence deprives bodies of their signifyingness of unique sense. It is to that proposition that I now turn.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND ITS (DIRECT AND INDIRECT) IMPACT ON BODIES The incarceration of any body is an act of political violence on this definition, as is state-sanctioned torture. But to these examples I would add other

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kinds of political violence that do not usually fall under dictionary definitions of violence: detention and/or the exclusion of any body from one’s community, not on the grounds of criminality, but on the grounds of their group identity implied by government to be harmful to the national interest. Just to help illustrate the analysis, the two political issues in Australia that, since 2000, have manifest as this kind of political violence are harsh refugee policies and draconian antiterrorism legislation, both of which (implicitly) target “people of middle-eastern appearance” (and which reached a whole new dimension in 2013–2014 in relation to conflicts in Sri Lanka, Syria, and Iraq). Government policy and its publicity pertaining to these issues amount to a politics of fear and exclusion. Not only do I contend that this kind of politics is harmful to its direct targets, but also that it can be indirectly harmful to the community it is said to protect by implicitly endorsing the same kind of divisiveness and conflict within social relations. How then do Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Nancy’s ontologies of interrelatedness enable such a claim about political violence? Arendt describes “force and violence” as pertaining to acts, including by governments, that seek to eliminate the dynamism and pluralism characteristic of this “potentiality in being together.”36 We can refine her account of how violence operates by taking note of the role of the body in politics with the help of two points arising from the above account of the sharing of singularity. First, the body is not ordinarily a sign of itself. Instead, it is the unique event of signification, of the “taking place of meaning,” but only through the “limit” of its community with other bodies.37 This limit between bodies is ambiguous. So, second, and paradoxically, the signifyingness of uniqueness by the other’s body happens only if we remain separate in this sharing. Moreover, that which does not maintain this spacing, this separation in sharing, is “deprived of meaning,” as Nancy puts it.38 Given that, for instance, the demonization of some bodies through a politics of exclusion actually imposes a meaning on those bodies rather than deprives them of meaning, perhaps a better way to put this point is to say that such bodies are deprived not of meaning but of their signifyingness of uniqueness, their ability to signify themselves to others as agents, as unique beginners of the new, and absolute value per se. Following from this point, on Arendt and Nancy’s account, there are two ways that bodies can be deprived of the ability to express their uniqueness to others. First, they can be so deprived through isolation or rejection by a community on the basis of a preemptive determination of their difference

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as posing some kind of threat.39 The second and less obvious way that bodies can be deprived of their signifyingness is through homogenization, by absorption into a common identity through the political assumption of shared or “common interests,” for instance, an appropriation that would also dissolve the limit or separateness between bodies.40 In both cases, symbolic violence meets physical violence in a drama that is played out through bodies, through cessation of the expression and sharing of meaning, and through dissolution of a dynamic sense of belonging with other bodies through a world. Explaining these two manifestations of political violence is best done by way of some examples. First, how isolation impacts on the isolated person can be demonstrated most dramatically through the case of prisoners held in solitary confinement. Helpful here is Lisa Guenther’s phenomenological analysis of this form of isolation with reference to Husserl’s ontology.41 She summarizes Stuart Grassian’s studies of the effects of isolation on the subjectivity of prisoners in supermax-units of prisons in the United States by listing the six components of a syndrome that Grassian identifies in many of these internees: “(1) Hyperresponsivity to External Stimuli; (2) Perceptual Distortions, Illusions, and Hallucinations; (3) Panic Attacks, (4) Difficulties with Thinking, Concentration, and Memory; (5) Intrusive Obsessional Thoughts; and (6) Overt Paranoia.”42 Guenther explains these effects in terms of the “structural undermin[ing]” of “the whole complex of interrelations” entailed in Husserl’s model of personhood: interrelations “within and between a multileveled self, a concrete world, and the other concrete egos who co-constitute this world.”43 Moving beyond Husserl, these effects can be also be explained in terms of damage done to aspects of intercorporeality that Merleau-Ponty says are essential to the sharing of meaning and to a dynamic sense of belonging. And they are vividly portrayed by the behavior of Daniel Holden, the central character of the 2013 television drama Rectify.44 Daniel has been released from prison (but without being pardoned) after nineteen years on death row. In obvious ways he is not well equipped to dwell in a world that has moved on in his absence, but especially apparent are dysfunctions in aspects of what Merleau-Ponty would say are “normal” characteristics of spatio-temporal-intercorporeal belonging or comportment toward a world. His movements and sense of lived time do not keep pace with the surrounding world and, related to this, aspects of sharing of meaning seem to be faulty. He hallucinates whole scenarios. (Although, in a manner that imitates Descartes’s dreaming argument, it is not clear to the viewer or to Daniel whether or not he is hallucinating.

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Merleau-Ponty would say that is because Daniel has lost the perceptual certainty that is provided by the flesh, by the body opened to a world.)45 But also, he does not “read” the coded behavior of those around him very well. He seems to trust the wrong people or is apparently unaware of danger until it is a little too late. Arendt would say that a life lived in isolation from interactions with other humans “has ceased to be a human life.”46 Indeed, to be without this web of the “in-between” of the disclosure of natality, “to be isolated, is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”47 This is partly due to the spatial segregation of a body, which, especially on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, would sever that body from the flesh of the world. But also inherent in this deprivation of the touch, sight, smell, taste, and sound of other bodies is the absence of the means of sharing meaning. I leave aside the violent effects of holding prisoners in isolation to argue that violence, which I am defining as that which effects a loss of signifyingness of uniqueness, is also the effect of a more general politics of exclusion even when those targeted by such policies are not actually isolated from each other in a spatial sense. A politics that, as a matter of policy, makes the other absolutely Other denies the separation and sharing in the circulation of meaning, and hence the uniqueness of the other that I cannot know or control. Instead, Nancy suggests, a politics of exclusion seeks to fix the meaning of the other, to “fix the other . . . in one place,” in order to either become the origin of meaning itself or expel any other origin outside the world.48 It could also be said that such a politics seeks to be the origin of meaning by fixing the limit itself by making the limit (of oneself or one’s nation) one of separation without sharing and deeming that what does not belong this side is absolutely strange and does not belong anywhere or at all. That, in sum, is what is implied in the latest Australian government antiterrorist policies and policies toward asylum seekers who arrive by boat. The introduction, ongoing refinement, and enactment of both kinds of policies are highly publicized, which ensures the highest possible impact. For example, in the name of upholding the “national interest” the Abbot government, in September 2013, re-introduced a policy that had operated up until Labor won government temporarily from 2007–2013 that allows boats carrying asylum seekers to be intercepted by the Australian Navy and either escorted back into Indonesian waters or to off-shore detention centers.49 In so far as these people are excluded from interrelations within Australian society, en mass and in a brutal fashion, they are deprived of sense. For Nancy, these bodies “are not even signs any longer, nor are they the origin of any sign.”50 Giorgio Agamben refers to bodies that

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have been deprived of their status as political agents as “bare life”—bodies that have been stripped of political significance to a point at which they can be subjected to violence with impunity.51 As Ewa Ziarek explains, “bare life” expresses the emergence of a “dangerous link between citizenship, nation, and biological kinship.”52 But she adds the important qualification that human existence can never by completely stripped of political significance (or what I am calling signifyingness) and therefore of agency: bodies will protest their exclusion from the space of the political. I will return to this point. The second, and less well documented, kind of political violence whereby bodies can lose their signifyingness and hence their sense (or means of sharing meaning), besides through isolation or expulsion from a world, is through homogenization whereby bodies lose the separation necessary to the sharing of singularity. Examples of direct acts of violence of this kind are rape and torture where the signifyingness of the targeted body is more or less absorbed or dominated by the perpetrator and any remnant is discarded. But homogenization is also the implicit aim of indirect political violence insofar as politics of fear and exclusion imply an ideal shared identity that is supposedly protected or fabricated through attendant government policy and its publicity. This homogenization affects not just the targets of government policies of exclusion but the rest of the citizenry as well. Members of the wider community not targeted by those policies of fear and exclusion are at risk of getting absorbed into the ideal identity that the policies assume insofar as they accept the ideas of danger of the foreign that are implied in those policies. The point here is that political violence can backfire and impact on the bodies of people who are supposedly served by and embody the national interest. Helpful for understanding this process is Arendt’s account of how totalizing governments attempt to “coordinate” a population into one organic whole.53 Coordination turns not so much on force or on obvious physical violence directed against the dominant population group. Rather, it relies on juxtaposing policies of exclusion of particular groups from the mainstream with rhetoric about the dangers of the foreign and with reference to an ideal national identity that is supposedly being protected. An extreme example of this process can be found in Olympia (1938)—Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film—which explicitly illustrates Arendt’s thesis. The film begins by glorifying the (individual) sporting body by juxtaposing classic Greek statues of sporting figures (for example, a copy of Myron’s Discobolus, the discus thrower) with similarly muscular (German, fair-skinned, blond) sports men and women who increasingly act in concert with each other in synchronized formations.

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The cinematic action aligns this perfect body-formation with Nazi ideology and its ideal (Aryan) group-identity by gradually moving on to footage (taken at the 1936 Berlin Olympics) of the German Olympic team marching and saluting Hitler in total synchronicity, juxtaposed with scenes showing sections of the German crowd saluting them back.54 This film was shown throughout Germany in the late 1930s at the same time as Nazi state-sanctioned activities directed against Jews and other so-called “undesirables” was increasing. The propaganda that accompanies a politics of fear and exclusion and the attendant fabrication of a homogenized communal identity is, of course, much more subtle in contemporary liberal democracies. Government policy that operates through provoking fear of differences also, paradoxically, fosters relatively quiet, but also damaging, “indifference to difference,” as Levinas puts it.55 But the effect can also be to foster blatant hostility within social relations. By refusing to welcome the uniqueness of others or by denying the “potentiality of belonging together” that values the uniqueness and dynamism of belonging to race, gender, place, and so on, a politics of fear and exclusion nurtures an atmosphere of sociality that, in effect, encourages the building of barriers between bodies. “Wedge” politics proceeds through a process of ordering meaning that operates with reference to an ideal national identity that is imposed, not by force, but through the rhetoric of aspiration toward a mythical shared national identity. (For example, Tony Abbott, the conservative Australian Prime Minister [2014–15], employed this tactic when referring, in various contexts, to the need for citizens to prove that they are “playing for team Australia.” He initially used the phrase when explaining, in August 2014, the point of new antiterrorism legislation that requires some people who are traveling to some countries in the Middle-East to prove that they are not going to fight in one of the conflicts there. He subsequently used the same phrase when urging business leaders to help boost the Australian economy and when promoting policies of assimilation to new immigrants). Some people in the wider community may take up this aspiration toward a mythical national identity and mimic the policies and rhetoric of exclusion practiced by its government. This seems to be a partial explanation for the Cronulla riot of 2005, an event that, if not unprecedented, is certainly rare in Australia. In the week after the 2005 antiterrorism legislation passed through the Australian parliament in a flurry of publicity, a minor argument on Cronulla Beach (in December 2005) between several lifesavers and Lebanese youths, reportedly over the treatment of women, turned into a full-scale drunken riot the following weekend when five thousand local

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residents, many draped in the Australian flag, gathered to protest the presence of Lebanese people on “their beach.” Worse they set upon anyone who looked vaguely Middle Eastern and then defended their actions to television cameras in terms of protecting their beach in the same way as their grandfathers fought to protect the beach at Gallipoli in Turkey in World War I (which at best is a gross misrepresentation of an already overdetermined moment of mythical national-identity-building).56 This fabrication of and homogenization by a unified national or communal identity is bound to fail. Anyone acceding to, or homogenized and coordinated by, an ideal of common identity implied in a politics of exclusion would become a stagnant mode of existence that is closed to the uniqueness of others and to the transformations, potentiality, and opening to an undetermined future that dwelling with others and the sharing of singularity effects. Arendt argues that to the extent that a population becomes coordinated by the fiction of “common interest” it has lost the space of “freedom” (as she understands it): the space for the contestation of interests, the disclosure of natality, the expression of agency through speech and action that is part and parcel of the central principle of democracy.57 Homogenization of a population via a notion of the “oneness of man-kind” is a kind of political violence that mimics determinism: the future of the community or nation is apparently predetermined (which would “threaten humanity with extinction”), as is the future of the individual who would consequently be little more than an automaton deprived of the capacity to act (in Arendt’s sense of beginning something new and being recognized as an agent by others through that action).58 Political and personal violence contributes to this suppression of the sharing of singularity. But also, on Arendt’s account, violent behavior on the part of those homogenized by the fictional shared identity may arise in response to “severe frustration of the [suppression of the] faculty of action in the modern world.”59 Homogenization fails to achieve the aim of shared or common identity insofar as it dissolves the limit or separation between bodies by which the sharing of singularity takes place. In dissolving this limit not only do I strip the bodies of others of their ability to make unique sense in a community of bodies, I also lose my exposition, and dissolve my open sense of belonging. If government policy implicitly condones treatment of other bodies in a way that deprives them of the ability to signify their uniqueness, then with this loss we not only make refugees of other ways of being, we also in the process reduce our sense of belonging to non-sense.

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CONCLUSION: BODIES IN REVOLT BETWEEN ISOLATION AND HOMOGENIZATION But nonsensical bodies, or “bare life” to use Agamben’s terminology, are never completely without agency; no body is devoid of signifyingness, whatever Agamben implies. Even the most senseless bodies can stage a revolt. Indeed, Arendt defines “revolution” as the staging of the coincidence of the “idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning” in situations where people have been deprived of the space where that experience of expressing uniqueness is welcomed.60 Initially this revolt may consist in an individual act where the body is the primary weapon. The way Nancy describes an individual revolt against a politics of either isolation or homogenization is to say that bodies deprived of the ability to make sense in togetherness with others, the ability to be the unique expression of the taking place of meaning, will, if they are alive, attempt to be a sign of themselves.61 Examples of this abound in Australia’s detention camps that house asylum seekers: many detainees have sewn their lips together in protest at being silenced, and others participate in hunger strikes. The famous hunger strike of the IRA activist Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners, graphically (and brilliantly) depicted in the film Hunger, is a case in point.62 The film starts with the “blanket” and “no wash” protests of 1976–78 commenced by Sands’s fellow prisoners who were protesting their loss of status as political prisoners by refusing to wear the prison uniforms, which, they claimed homogenized them into an anonymous group. As if echoing Arendt’s definition of the political, they reasoned that, as they were political prisoners they should be allowed to wear their own clothes, presumably as a sign of their status as unique agents who are beginners of the new, who act in, contest the meanings of, and have an impact on, a world. Such protests can only have limited success if conducted in isolation, which Sands and company were obliged to do. In attempting to be a sign of itself, such a body has not yet recovered a sense of belonging to a world and sharing meaning with others, nor will others necessarily incline themselves toward the lone body in revolt. But a protesting body could be the unique place for the expression and circulation of meaning if there is someone there to listen, to witness, and to participate in the event. The hunger strike of 1981 involving IRA prisoners led by Sands in Long Kesh prison was much more a collaborative effort of “acting in concert,” to use Arendt’s phrase. While it did not succeed in the prisoners gaining recognition as political actors within prison, the publicity surrounding the hunger strike resulted in Sands getting elected to the

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British Parliament, although he did die as a result of the strike, along with nine other IRA protesters. Bodies outside of detention that have been deprived of community through policies of fear and exclusion can stage a protest in a way that actually builds political community with those who have spurned them. For instance, in January 2007, in an event that was as unprecedented as the Cronulla riots of 2005, Mecca Laalaa became one of twenty-four young Australian Muslims of Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian heritage who graduated as lifesavers at Cronulla. She wears what is called a “burqini,” a neck to knee swimsuit that also keeps in place the Muslim requirement that women cover their heads in public. The Muslim lifesavers were recruited from a sporting club in the Lebanese-dominated suburb of Lakemba, in inland southwestern Sydney. The program was an initiative of Jamal Rifi, president of the Lakemba Sports Club, as a way of breaking down racial barriers at Cronulla and of healing the rifts left by the riots. Presumably, Mecca and her friends would have found the surfer culture of the lifesavers at Cronulla just as alien as Cronulla residents would find the suburb of Lakemba, although the (largely Anglo-Celtic) surfers would be highly unlikely to visit Muslim dominated regions. Still, despite the history of hostility, she reached out to build the space of the political within Cronulla through collaborative action aimed at promoting pluralism, and potentiality of being-together, that is, intercultural “sharing” (rather than intercultural tolerance or cross-cultural understanding, both of which involve some homogenization). It is also the case that the citizens of a national or local community that is homogenized and supposedly protected by a politics of fear and exclusion do not have to go along with the political agenda and its rhetoric. Even though the flow-on effect of public displays of a politics of division and exclusion impacts at the level of bodies to build a shared identity, there is always “divergence” in the flesh, in the sharing of meaning between bodies. This means that no body’s behavior is determined by ideas that it inherits, including ideas that perpetuate fear of the foreign. Nor can anyone sustain that stance toward strangers and maintain a meaningful existence. This difference or signifyingness of uniqueness between bodies is what animates the social expression of bodies and is “their means of communication,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it.63 Further, to effectively challenge political violence it is not enough to desist from treating others badly or to remain indifferent to their plight. Participating in the sharing of meaning that would open oneself to “a future” requires actively welcoming the uniqueness of others while disclosing one’s own. At the same time,

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this has to be done without overwhelming others with that gift of hospitality. Sharing singularity and, with that, sharing meaning requires a light touch that does not impose one’s own ways of belonging and being-together upon others. As the disclosure of natality and the inclination toward others that this involves are reversible, so is the responsibility for maintaining the limit and hence the difference between bodies. Finally, to the question of the role that government plays in maintaining the conditions of nonviolence: Arendt defines government as “organized and institutionalized power,” where, as discussed above, power is the “potentiality of being together” or the “human ability not just to act but to act in concert,” to begin something new in the presence of other natal beings who recognize this agency as such and uniquely so.64 The raison d’être of government in a liberal democracy, then, is to provide the institutional support for the collective exposure of uniqueness, which, on Nancy’s account, is necessary for the sharing of meaning. Moreover, “violence can destroy power.”65 Hence, a government that fosters political violence in the ways discussed not only fails its electorate, but also puts itself in jeopardy. Indeed, Nancy, in his recent work, suggests that it is democracy’s failure to recognize its own principle and starting point as making possible the sharing and “affirmation” of “nonequivalent” uniqueness and “incomparable ‘value’” of everybody to each other; the failure to maintain the conditions that enable this sharing opens the way for democracy to mutate into totalitarianism.66

NOTES 1. This analysis of political violence is a refinement of points I have touched on in papers published in the past decade, especially: R. Diprose, “Corporeal Interdependence: From Vulnerability to Dwelling in Ethical Community,” SubStance, 42(3) 2013, 2–20; and “‘Where your people from girl?’ Belonging to Gender, Race, and Place Beneath Clouds,” differences 19(3) 2008, 28–58; and “Community of Bodies: From Modification to Violence,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 19(3) 2005, 381–392. 2. Levinas’s philosophy has been particularly influential in establishing a link between philosophical and political paradigms on the one hand and violence on the other hand. For example, the Preface to Totality and Infinity is devoted to equating philosophy with war insofar as both philosophy and war annihilate otherness. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority,

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A. Lingis (trans.), (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001). For developments in Levinas’s thought regarding symbolic violence see, for example, J. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, A. Bass (trans.) (Chicago, IL.: The University of Chicago Press, 1978); D. Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); and S. Haddad, “A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to Autoimmune,” diacritics, 38(1–2; Spring–Summer) 2008, 121–142. 3. More detailed critiques of accounts of symbolic violence along these lines can be found in A. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012) and E. Ziarek, The Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford CA.: Stanford University Press, 2001). 4. Two different ways of formulating this idea of an isomorphism between the male body and the body politic are Moira Gatens’s notion of “imaginary bodies” and Luce Irigaray’s notion of “morphology”: see M. Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), chapter 2; and L. Irigaray, “Speculum” in Speculum of the Other Woman, C.G. Gill (trans.), 133–242 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 5. Two early exemplars of this second approach to the relation between the symbolic order and bodily comportment that draw on existential phenomenology are Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask (1952), R. Philcox (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 2008) and Iris Marion Young’s seminal essay “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980) reprinted most recently in I.M. Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays, 27–45 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6. H. Arendt, The Human Condition, M. Canovan (intro.) (Chicago IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 178, 180; .J-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, P. Connor (ed. and trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 26–28. 7. For Nancy’s somewhat cryptic summary of this idea see J-L. Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, P-A. Brault and M. Naas (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 14. 8. This seems to be Judith Butler’s argument in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 20, 30. For critiques of this approach to violence that claim or imply that an ontology of interdependence automatically grounds an ethics of nonviolence, see Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, and Diprose, “Corporeal Interdependence.”

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9. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 26–28; Arendt, Human Condition, 178–180. 10. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (trans.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 121, 136; and M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, A. Lingis (trans.) (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 32. Merleau-Ponty has many accounts of this ambiguity but the two that I draw on here are from The Visible and the Invisible and his 1954–55 lecture courses on “Institution in Personal and Public History” and “The Problem of Passivity” published in M. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), C. Lefort (Foreword), L. Lawlor and H, Massey (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University press, 2010). 11. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 206. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 135. 13. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 137–138. 14. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 139 (emphasis added). 15. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 132. 16. Arendt, Human Condition, 199–200. 17. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 6–8. 18. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 77. 19. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 8–9. 20. Nancy, Truth of Democracy, 24–25. 21. E. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans.), 75–108 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 103. 22. Arendt, Human Condition, 9, 176–178. 23. Arendt, Human Condition, 176–177 24. Arendt, Human Condition, 181–182 25. Arendt, Human Condition, 201. 26. Arendt, Human Condition, 233–234 27. Arendt, Human Condition, 190–191 28. Here I am combining salient points from Nancy’s idea of community outlined in chapter 1 of The Inoperative Community with his discussion of the body and violence in a chapter entitled “Corpus” that is reprinted in J-L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, B. Holmes et al. (trans.) (Stanford CA.: Stanford University Press, 1993). 29. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 25–28, Birth to Presence, 205. 30. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 204.

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31. Arguably, Nancy is also borrowing from Levinas in his idea of “inclination,” which is reminiscent of Levinas’s idea of “desire” for the absolutely other (discussed in “Meaning and Sense” among other places). But Nancy does not to my knowledge acknowledge any debt to Levinas (or Merleau-Ponty for that matter), and it is fair to say that he would reject Levinas’s idea that desire for the other is one-way. 32. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 6–7. 33. J-L. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Byrne (trans.) (Stanford CA.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 8. 34. Nancy, Truth of Democracy, 24. 35. Nancy, Truth of Democracy, 26. 36. Arendt, The Human Condition, 199–206. See also H. Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1970), 44–46 especially. 37. Nancy makes this point specifically in relation to the body, that is, that the body signifies itself as a body of value through the touching the limit of another body. See Birth to Presence, 205. 38. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 5. 39. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 206. Arendt makes this point about isolation often, for example in The Human Condition, 176. 40. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 206; Arendt, Human Condition, 40. 41. Lisa Guenther, “Subjects Without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement,” Human Studies 34(3) 2011: 257–276. 42. Guenther, “Subjects Without a World?” 259. 43. Guenther, “Subjects Without a World?” 262. 44. R. McKinnon (creator and writer) and K. Gordon (director), Rectify, season 1 (SundanceTV; AMC Networks), 2013. 45. For Merleau-Ponty’s account of how the body provides perceptual certainty, which he develops from Descartes’s dreaming argument, see Visible and Invisible, 3–14. 46. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 47. Arendt, The Human Condition, 188. 48. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 20. 49. The policy and legislation is called “Operation Sovereign Borders.” A detailed explanation has been provided by Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) journalists Tim Leslie and Mark Corcoran in “Operation Sovereign Borders: The First Six Months,” ABC News (Online), March 26, 2014. Accessed November 28, 2014, at http://www.abc.net.au/news/interactives/ operation-sovereign-borders-the-first-6-months/

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50. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 195. 51. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, D. Heller-Roazen (trans.) (Stanford CA.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8–9. 52. E.P. Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike: Notes of the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,” The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue), A. Ross (ed.), 89–105 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 89–92. 53. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1968), chapters 11 and 12. 54. Olympia (1938) was directed by Leni Riefenstahl. The film was released in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil—Fest der Völker and Olympia 2. Teil—Fest der Schönheit. It can be viewed on YouTube. 55. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 88–89. 56. As I do not have the space to follow up in detail this example of a “flow-on” effect of government policy, I refer the reader to other analyses of the riot itself that also tie it to trends in national government policy: S. Poyning, “What Caused the Cronulla Riot?,” Race & Class, 48(1) 2006: 85–92, and A. Johns, “White Tribe: Echoes of the Anzac Myth in Cronulla,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22(1) 2008: 3–15. 57. Arendt, Human Condition, 40–42, On Violence, 81–82. 58. Arendt, Human Condition, 46, On Violence, 82. 59. On Violence, 83. 60. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963); new edition, J. Schell (intro.) (London: Penguin, 2006), 19. 61. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, 195 62. S. McQueen (writer and director) and E. Walsh, Hunger, Film4 Productions, 2008. 63. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 135. 64. Arendt, On Violence, 44, 51, 82. 65. Arendt, On Violence, 56. 66. Nancy, Truth of Democracy, 24, 30.

REFERENCES Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Arendt, H. On Revolution. New ed. Introduction by J. Schell. London: Penguin, 2006..

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Arendt, H. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1970. Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1968. Arendt, H. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Introduction by M. Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Butler, J. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Diprose, R. “‘Where Your People from Girl?’ Belonging to Gender, Race, and Place Beneath Clouds.” differences 19(3) 2008: 28–58. Diprose, R. “Community of Bodies: From Modification to Violence.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 19(3) 2005: 381–392. Diprose, R. “Corporeal Interdependence: From Vulnerability to Dwelling in Ethical Community.” SubStance, 42(3) 2013: 2–20. Fanon, F. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Gatens, M. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Guenther, L. “Subjects Without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement.” Human Studies 34(3) 2011: 257–276. Irigaray, L. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by C.G. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Johns, A. “White Tribe: Echoes of the Anzac Myth in Cronulla.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22(1) 2008: 3–15. Leslie, T., and M. Corcoran. “Operation Sovereign Borders: The First Six Months.” ABC News (Online), March 26, 2014. Accessed November 28, 2014, at http://www.abc.net.au/news/interactives/operationsovereign-borders-the-first-6-months/ Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987: 75–108. Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. McKinnon, R. (creator and writer) and K. Gordon (director). Rectify. Season 1. SundanceTV; AMC Networks, 2013. Merleau-Ponty, M. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Foreword by C. Lefort; translated by L. Lawlor and H. Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Murphy, A. Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012. Nancy, J-L. The Birth to Presence. Translated by B. Holmes et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Nancy, J-L. Being Singular Plural. Translated by R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Byrne. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nancy, J-L. The Inoperative Community. Translated by P. Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Nancy, J-L. The Truth of Democracy. Translated by P-A. Brault and M. Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Poyning, S. “What Caused the Cronulla Riot?” Race & Class 48(1) 2006: 85–92. Riefenstahl, L. Olympia. [Film.] Parts I and II. 1938. Young, I.M. “Throwing Like a Girl.” In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays, 27–45. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ziarek, E.P. “Bare Life on Strike: Notes of the Biopolitics of Race and Gender.” The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue). Edited by Alison Ross. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2008): 89–105 Ziarek, E.P. The Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 2

A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes Lisa Guenther

On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history.1 The strike action resumed a campaign beginning in the summer of 2011 in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California. The organizing committee, known as the Pelican Bay SHU-Short Corridor Collective, has maintained five core demands throughout the multi-year strike action: (1) to end group punishment for individual rule violations, (2) to reform gang validation procedures, (3) to comply with the recommendations of a national commission on long-term solitary confinement, (4) to provide adequate and healthy food, and (5) to expand rehabilitation, education, and recreation programs.2 On September 5, after a core group of forty prisoners had refused meals continuously for sixty days, and hundreds more had participated for days or weeks on end, the hunger strike was suspended in response to a commitment by two California lawmakers to hold hearings on solitary confinement and other prison issues before a joint Public Safety Committee. In response to these hearings, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has conducted an internal policy review and a case-by-case audit of SHU prisoners.3 Meanwhile, a class action lawsuit initiated by hunger strike organizers to challenge long-term solitary confinement in California is advancing in the courts, with hundreds of plaintiffs from the Pelican Bay SHU.4

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Members of the Pelican Bay SHU-Short Corridor Collective have described the 2013 hunger strikes as a “multi-racial, multi-regional Human Rights Movement to challenge torture in the Pelican Bay SHU.”5 But the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) tells a different story. According to them, the four main organizers of the hunger strikes—Antonio Guillen, Arturo Castellanos, Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa (Dewberry), and Todd Ashker—are the leaders of four major prison gangs or “Security Threat Groups” in the California system: Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, Black Guerilla Family, and Aryan Brotherhood. Secretary of the CDCR, Jeffrey Beard, condemned the strike action as a “gang power play”: Don’t be fooled. Many of those participating in the hunger strike are under extreme pressure to do so from violent prison gangs, which called the strike in an attempt to restore their ability to terrorize fellow prisoners, prison staff and communities throughout California . . . We’re talking about convicted murderers who are putting lives at risk to advance their own agenda of violence.6 Much depends on the battle to define the kind of social group that organized the 2013 hunger strikes. Was it an activist group engaged in a nonviolent human rights struggle, or was it an alliance of gang leaders manipulating the prison system, the public, and vulnerable prisoners in order to enhance their power? Could it be both? Without taking a position on whether members of the Short Corridor Collective are, or ever were, gang members or leaders, I want to analyze the emergence of collective agency and organizational power in the Pelican Bay SHU. How did such agency and power emerge from the extreme isolation of the Pelican Bay SHU, among people who might otherwise be divided by social, material, and institutional barriers? And what might we learn from their example about the phenomenology of social encounters, the structure of collective action, and the political possibilities for effective resistance in an age of mass incarceration and extreme punishment? I will begin with an account of the material conditions of solitary confinement in the Pelican Bay SHU, including the gang validation procedures that allow the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to isolate gang members and associates indefinitely. Then, building on prisoner-poet Raúl R. Salinas’ insight that the U.S. prison system functions as “a backyard form of colonialism,” I will situate the practice of indefinite isolation very

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briefly in the context of Fanon’s critique of racism and colonial domination.7 I will then turn to Sartre’s social ontology of collectives and groups in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing the emergence and development of collective agency and identity in the Pelican Bay SHU. Finally, I will read the first-person testimony of hunger strike organizers, both to account for the emergence of collective resistance in their own terms and to explore the possibilities for a critical phenomenology of prisoner resistance based on Sartre’s social ontology. By critical phenomenology, I mean both a philosophical practice of reflecting on the transcendental and material structures that make experience possible and meaningful, and also a political practice of “restructuring the world” in order to generate new and liberatory possibilities for meaningful experience and existence. As a philosophical practice, critical phenomenology rejects the absolute priority of a singular transcendental ego, both to the world and to a more complex sense of transcendental intersubjectivity. It also questions the priority of the transcendental to the material, without foregoing a transcendental analysis of experience altogether. As a political practice, critical phenomenology is a struggle for liberation from the structures that privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others. These structures exist on many levels: social, political, economic, psychological, epistemological, and even ontological. They are both “out there” in the world (for example, in the disproportionate incarceration of people of color) and they are also intrinsic to subjectivity and intersubjectivity, shaping the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world. In other words, they are both the patterns that we see when we study something like incarceration rates, and also the patterns according to which we see. As a material practice of “restructuring the world,” critical phenomenology goes beyond a critical analysis of oppression; it also calls for concrete strategies for dismantling oppressive structures and creating or amplifying different, less oppressive, and more liberatory ways of Being-in-the-world. This reference to “a restructuring of the world” is from Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks, where he calls for both concrete social and political change and also for a revolution at the level of meaning: a new sense of humanity, beyond the black–white binary and the negation of black existence.8 Fanon’s practice of critical phenomenology is exemplary both as a practice of philosophy and as an approach to activism; his call for “a fundamental redistribution of relations between men” is both a task for thought and also a call to arms.9

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I will let this stand as a sketch of my approach to critical phenomenology.10 How might this framework help us to understand both the transcendental structures of material-historical practices such as solitary confinement and prisoner resistance, and also the concrete implications of philosophical practices such as transcendental inquiry? More specifically, how might it help us to understand and support the emergence of collective resistance and identity among people in extreme isolation? Ultimately, my aim is to explore and to amplify the possibilities for social encounter, collective agency, and mutual liberation in a carceral society, behind and across the prison walls. In this sense, the chapter is intended less as a scholarly meditation on the theories of Sartre or Fanon, and more as an exploration of the possibilities for understanding and supporting prisoner-led movements for social justice from the position of a non-incarcerated scholar-activist.

EXTREME ISOLATION AND GANG VALIDATION AT PELICAN BAY STATE PRISON Pelican Bay State Prison was built in 1989 to house “the worst of the worst” in the California prison system. The “worst” does not necessarily refer to prisoners who have been convicted of the most violent crimes, or who are serving the longest sentences. Rather, the target population of Pelican Bay is, in the words of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), “difficult management cases, prison gang members, and violent maximum security inmates.”11 “Difficult management cases” may include habitual rule violators, politically active prisoners, jailhouse lawyers, and the mentally ill. Pelican Bay is one of the world’s first “supermax” prisons, designed specifically to keep prisoners in long-term isolation.12 By 1997, there were at least fifty-seven supermax facilities across the United States, in addition to countless isolation units of similar design in lower-security prisons, county jails, and juvenile detention centers.13 Prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU are isolated for twenty-two and a half to twenty-four hours a day in an eight-foot by ten-foot cell with concrete walls and no windows. Fluorescent lights illuminate the cell twenty-four hours a day. The door is made of perforated steel, looking out onto another concrete wall. There’s a slot in the door, often called a cuffport, through which the prisoner’s hands are cuffed or uncuffed for transportation outside of the cell, and through which meals are delivered twice a day,

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typically around 4:30 am and 4:30 pm. These slots can be bolted from the outside, in part to prevent prisoners from “bombing” the guards with cocktails of their own feces or urine. When this happens (as it does fairly often in isolation units), or when prisoners engage in other forms of resistance such as refusing to “cuff up” or to return their meal tray in a timely fashion, they can be forcibly extracted from their cells by an emergency response team in riot gear. They may be pepper-sprayed or tasered and put in four- or five-point restraints (with wrists and ankles fastened to the ground, with or without a helmet fastened to the ground) or in a restraint chair. Officers are entitled to perform strip searches of inmates—including cavity searches—if they suspect the inmate of possessing contraband items. Often, these searches are conducted as a matter of routine when prisoners return from the showers, the exercise yard, or even from noncontact visits. The exercise yards are often not much bigger than the cells. They are typically made of concrete or tightly woven security mesh walls that offer little or no view of the outside and only a small glimpse of sky. These yards are often called “dog runs” because of their resemblance to an outdoor kennel. Depending on the prisoner’s level of good behavior, they may be given access to books, radio, and television, but often the only “television” available in a supermax prison is a closed-circuit broadcast of training videos and religious programming. The average length of incarceration time in the Pelican Bay SHU is seven and a half years, but two hundred prisoners have been isolated there for over fifteen years, and seventy-eight prisoners have been isolated there for more than twenty years.14 Between 4,500 and 12,000 prisoners are currently held in some form of restrictive housing in California prisons, and due to severe overcrowding, many are double-celled in isolation units built for one.15 Approximately 3,000 prisoners in California are isolated indefinitely as a result of CDCR policies for the management of “security threat groups” or prison gangs.16 These policies are highly controversial, and they form the basis of the hunger strikers’ second core demand to radically revise its gang management policies. In response to the strike action and the legislative and legal reviews that it provoked, the CDCR is in the process of revising its gang validation procedures. But the policy that was in place in May 2013, when the hunger strikes began, allowed only four ways out of the SHU for validated gang members and associates: (1) to make parole or serve out your sentence (at which point you will be released directly onto the streets after years of isolation), (2) to prove that you have been falsely classified (to the same officials who approved your validation), (3) to remain inactive as a

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gang member for six years (again, as assessed by an internal review board), or (4) to “debrief ” by providing prison authorities with accurate information about gang membership or activities. Among prisoners, these alternatives are known as “parole, snitch, or die.”17 Snitching and dying are by no means mutually exclusive possibilities, as former gang members face retaliation upon reintegration into the general prison population. And even if they are willing to face this risk, gang members who have been isolated for years or decades often lack reliable information with which to debrief, so their only option for reintegration is to operate as an informant on an ongoing basis, thus putting themselves in danger and/or isolating themselves socially, even in general population. There is often no way out of the nightmare of gang validation. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation defines a criminal gang as: Any ongoing formal or informal organization, association or group of three or more persons which has a common name or identifying sign or symbol whose members and/or associates, individually or collectively, engage or have engaged, on behalf of that organization, association or group, in two or more acts which include, planning, organizing, threatening, financing, soliciting or committing unlawful acts of misconduct classified as serious pursuant to the California Code of Regulations. (CCR, Title 15, Division 3, Section 3315)18 This definition is flexible enough to include almost anyone. Theoretically, given the CDCR’s criteria, a person who informally associates with two other people, to whom an identifying sign (say, a drawing or a color) has been collectively attributed, could be identified as planning (without executing) two or more acts of unlawful misconduct with these people, and be isolated for the rest of his or her life on the basis of this identification. California Assembly Member and Chair of the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, Tom Ammiano, made this observation at the second joint California Assembly-Senate hearing on the use of solitary confinement: “According to CDCR’s policy . . . many of us sitting on this committee would be gang associates. I don’t know how it’s possible to avoid association under this system.”19 But the possibility of gang validation is not just theoretical for people who are incarcerated. Steve Champion, an award-winning author and prisoner on California’s death row, was validated as a member of the Black Guerilla Family in 2010 and isolated in the San Quentin death row Adjustment Center

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on the basis of his possession of a Kiswahili dictionary and the book Soledad Brother by George Jackson. Champion calls this practice “criminalizing critical literacy”: a brilliant diagnosis of the logic whereby the possession of certain books, or even the reference to certain authors, can result in one’s indefinite exile from collective social life.20 Note that it is not illegal, as such, to possess a Kiswahili dictionary and a copy of Soledad Brother; a non-incarcerated person in California can possess these objects without fearing punishment, let alone indefinite isolation. Rather, the act—or fact—or perceived fact— of possessing certain objects is what Lisa Cacho calls a “de facto status crime”: it only applies to those whose very existence is perceived as essentially criminal. Cacho argues that terms like “gang member,” “illegal alien,” and “suspected terrorist” function as markers of de facto status crimes; they allow for the surveillance, detention, isolation, and incapacitation of certain groups, not on the basis of what they have done, but on the basis of who they are perceived to be and, more remotely, on a prediction of what they might do, given their perceived social essence.21 This social essence is not just criminalized, it is also racialized, both within the prison system and beyond. Black and brown people are disproportionately exposed to police surveillance and arrest, longer prison terms, harsher penalties for rule infractions in prison, higher rates of gang validation, and— as a result of gang validation—indefinite solitary confinement. For example, in 2011, 85 percent of the prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU were Latino, more than double their representation in the general prison population.22 The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has its own racial taxonomy consisting of four basic categories: White, Black, Latino, and “Other.” In spite of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling against racial segregation in California prisons, the systematic separation of racialized groups continues to this day, in the name of gang management and institutional security.23 But it is not clear that the CDCR’s policies of gang management and de facto segregation do anything to reduce gang activity, and they may even compound the need for protective alliances among prisoners.24 Investigative journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells explains in his report on the 2013 California prison hunger strikes: Prisons sometimes institute separate exercise schedules for each racial group, and it is very rare to find two cell mates in California from different ones. These practices have helped to reduce gang conflict but also, obviously, strengthen the gang system. Corrections officials

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at Pelican Bay will often switch, sometimes in midsentence, between referring to a “gang” and a “race” and a “group”. . . Even social relationships between members of the same ethnic group can be outlawed: Some prisoners have been validated for speaking with a known gang member from their own racial group. The prison officials, [Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective member Sitawa] Jamaa told me, “blur the line between what is a gang and what is a racial group. They have to, because they don’t understand where a gang ends and a racial group begins.”25 This is clearly an issue for critical phenomenology, both as a philosophical practice of interrogating the transcendental and material conditions of meaningful experience, including the perception of “gangs” and “racial groups,” and also as a political practice of disrupting oppressive norms of perception and social organization, such as racism and criminalization. In the next section of this chapter I will draw on Fanon’s decolonial practice of phenomenology and Sartre’s existential Marxist account of the social ontology of groups to develop the critical dimensions of phenomenology as a practice of liberation, not only from the nonrelational thinking of the natural attitude, but also from the coercive relationality of oppression.

CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY AS A PRACTICE OF LIBERATION Fanon’s key insight is that colonization shapes not only the social and political structures of a society, but also the psychic life and lived experience of both the colonized and the colonizer, albeit in different ways. Colonial occupation is inherently unstable; it’s difficult to sustain without structures and processes by which the domination of one people by another and the theft of their land, labor, and resources is naturalized, as if no other arrangement were possible. This is the work of racism: to produce a colonial “natural attitude” that unreflectively shapes the meaning of the world and the shape of consciousness, both for the colonizer and for the colonized. In order to support their precarious identity and to justify their claim to power and property, white settler colonials represent the colonized as a subhuman Other, as everything that white civilization is not. This leaves the colonized nowhere to be, except in the place of an excluded Other, a nonbeing without a proper world. In Fanon’s words, “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”26 His

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being does not matter; he might as well be dead, if his material and symbolic labor were not so profitable. For Fanon, this position does not give rise to a “feeling of inferiority” but rather to “a feeling of nonexistence.”27 Without a white mask, and without functioning as a foil for white identity, the black man does not exist—which is to say that he does not, and cannot, exist as a black man (but only as a failed white or honorary white) as long as colonial structures remain in place. The internalization of these structures creates a profound sense of psychic and existential dissonance for the colonized. As a subject forced into the position of object, the joints of his relational existence are forced to the breaking point; his Being-in-the-world is dislocated; and the intercorporeal web that ought to support his coherent experience of the world is torn to shreds. Fanon asks: What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together.28 In a chapter entitled, “L’expérience vécu du noir” (“The Lived Experience of the Black”—usually translated as “The Fact of Blackness”), Fanon performs a phenomenological reduction of the colonial natural attitude, beginning with an epoché or bracketing of naturalized racism, provoked by the words of a white child on a French train: “Look, a Negro!” Singled out as Other by a child who does not yet know that you shouldn’t say such things out loud, Fanon develops a phenomenological account of the lived experience of black nonexistence, which I read as a phenomenological account of social death. Fanon articulates this (unraveling of ) experience in terms of confinement and isolation, as well as dislocation and amputation: “I was walled in,” “[s]ealed into that crushing objecthood,” “imprisoned on [my] island.”29 But he also points the way beyond this captivity, and beyond the colonial logic that isolates both the colonizer and the colonized in their racialized identities.30 A critical phenomenology of colonial experience demands, for its accomplishment, not just a reflection on the transcendental structures that make first-person experience possible and meaningful, and not even just a reflection on the social structures of colonization that undermine the coherence of first-person experience for racialized subjects, but also a concrete

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social practice of liberation from the colonial structures that both enable and dis-able the lived experience of colonization. The task of the critical phenomenologist is both to analyze the logic of colonial domination and also to create new possibilities for thought, action, and existence—in short: new ways of Being-in-the-world in solidarity with others. Sartre’s account of praxis and the social ontology of groups in Critique of Dialectical Reason helps to clarify these possibilities for solidarity.31 For Sartre, praxis refers to individual or collective practical activity in a material, historical situation or context. As individual, the meaning of praxis is not unlike the meaning of the project in Sartre’s earlier work: it is the creative activity of consciousness or Being-for-itself, which negates the inert materiality of Being-in-itself in order to bring meaning into the world. Collective praxis is not merely the sum of individual existential projects, but rather the inter-activity of historical subjects with different, often contradictory, relations to a common situation. Praxis is not just located within a material-historical context; it also alters that context by producing “finalities,” or structures with enough stability to constitute a new sense of social and historical reality. Sartre calls this reality “the practico-inert;” it is the material-historical field out of which praxis arises and which it struggles to transform. Each configuration of the practico-inert has its own sedimented objects, patterns, and norms that shape and constrain the possibilities for action without fully determining them. In the case of the U.S. prison system, the practico-inert includes material objects such as razor wire fences and solid steel doors; material assemblages such as pods and units; institutions such as the police and the court system; sentencing structures such as Three Strikes or Truth in Sentencing; social practices such as stop-and-frisk policing or racial profiling; epistemic technologies such as criminal records and sex offender registries; economic policies allowing private prisons and private contracts with public prisons; political practices such as felon disenfranchisement and prison gerrymandering; prison management policies such as gang validation and solitary confinement; subject positions such as inmates, correctional officers, activists, victims, and volunteers; and so on. By approaching the prison system in this way, not as an object nor even a system of objects, but as a practico-inert field—as the sedimented materiality of collective praxis, which is both stable enough to constitute our current historical reality and also open to reconfiguration through further collective praxis—we may begin to map the possibilities for new material-historical realities, beyond the prison industrial complex.

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For Sartre, the relation between praxis and the practico-inert is dialectical; praxis is the activity that both generates and disrupts the passivity of the practico-inert, and the practico-inert is both the enabling ground and the limiting constraint of praxis. As an historical-material dialectic, praxis generates both finalities—new configurations of the practico-inert—and also counter-finalities—ossified structures that constrain or block the possibilities for practical action, to the point of becoming obstacles for individuals and/or groups. The production of counter-finalities cannot be avoided; they are a necessary moment in the dialectical logic of practical activity, a complex interweaving of constitutive and constituted power. The problem for human praxis is not that it generates counter-finalities, but that it sometimes mistakes a finality or counter-finality for a completed, non-dialectical reality. This is bad faith, not just as a pathology of individual consciousness, but as a social, material-historical problem of false consciousness and collective inertia. There is another problem with counter-finalities. Given the uneven distribution of power among social groups—through contingent, but sedimented, stabilized, and often naturalized historical processes—the burden of negotiating with counter-finalities falls more heavily on the marginalized and oppressed, as more powerful groups manipulate counter-finalities to serve their own interests. In the case of the U.S. prison system, conservative politicians, private investors, and privileged classes more generally have benefited from the war on drugs, harsh sentencing policies, and the privatization of prisons and prison contracts, at the expense of poor people, people of color, people with mental health and public health issues, and many other (overlapping) groups.32 This has prompted some critics to claim that the U.S. prison system is not “broken,” in spite of its massive and well-documented inefficiency, unsustainability, and evident injustice; rather, the prison system is working just as it was intended: as an instrument of social control for the marginalized, and a source of material and political gain for the powerful. In other words, the U.S. prison system is a counter-finality that supports and enhances the privilege of some groups, while radically constraining and undermining the agency of others. More precisely, given the disproportionate criminalization, incarceration, and isolation of poor people of color, the U.S. prison system could be understood as a neocolonial counter-finality, a perpetuation of slavery and racial segregation in the name of criminal justice.33 What would it take to transform this counter-finality? What sort of collective praxis could alter the historical reality of the neocolonial prison industrial complex, and what forms of collective existence would this require?

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Sartre distinguishes between four main kinds of social groups: seriality, the group-in-fusion, the standing organization, and the institution. Seriality is a loose collection of individuals brought together by a common situation or activity; Sartre’s example is of people waiting at a bus stop.34 The group-in-fusion emerges when the serial collective faces an external obstacle or threat; for example, if the bus fails to arrive, a group-in-fusion might coalesce to solve the problem. Once the external conflict is resolved, the group-in-fusion may dissolve back into seriality, or it may become a standing organization with a more stable structure that supports the collective agency of each member; for example, the bus riders may form an activist group to improve public transport in their city. A standing organization is often inaugurated through a pledge in which members vow to remain in solidarity with one another, even beyond the resolution of the problem that initially brought them together. But in the absence of an external threat, the standing organization may produce and exacerbate internal divisions among its members. It may begin policing its own boundaries, purging its own members, and adopting increasingly rigid and hierarchical structures to maintain its formal existence. In other words, the standing organization that supported the individual and collective agency of its members may become an institution that constrains and eventually undermines this agency. This is the challenge of political organizing: to navigate between the Scylla of seriality and the Charybdis of the dehumanizing institution. This is not just a contingent challenge that could be overcome through the creation or discovery of a perfect organizational structure, or through the unconditional commitment of every member; rather, it is an essential problem posed by the tension between constituent and constituted power, or between the creative violence of forming a group and the coercive violence of maintaining its existence and efficacy. The same pledge through which an organized group constitutes itself as a relation of fraternité also raises the possibility of betrayal and, with it, the terror of coercive force to maintain the pact of solidarity. Whether or not Jeffrey Beard, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, is correct in his characterization of the prison hunger strikes as a “gang power play,” Sartre’s social ontology of groups suggests that every organization—be it a gang, an activist group for social justice, or a correctional department—relies on some degree of coercion to maintain its constituted power. The question is not whether violence arises, but how it arises, in what form, and to what extent it supports or undermines the freedom of a group’s members.

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There is much more to be said about Sartre’s social ontology, which is complex, nuanced, and relatively neglected both in the secondary literature on his work and in political philosophy more generally.35 But since my aim in this chapter is to understand the emergence of solidarity and resistance among prisoners at Pelican Bay, I will now shift my focus to the reflections of prisoners involved in the Short Corridor Collective. I will argue that the Short Corridor Collective began as a group-in-fusion in response to the crisis of extreme isolation in the SHU, and eventually became a standing organization capable of supporting the agency of individual members and amplifying their collective agency. It remains to be seen if the Short Corridor Collective will become an institution, sustain itself as a standing organization, dissolve back into seriality, and/or re-emerge as a group-in-fusion in the face of new or ongoing challenges in the California prison system.

RESISTANCE AND SOLIDARITY IN THE PELICAN BAY SHU In 2003, seven gang-validated prisoners with different racial and regional affiliations were moved into a particularly isolated part of the Pelican Bay SHU called the Short Corridor. Among these prisoners were Todd Ashker, Arturo Castellanos, Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa (Dewberry), and Antonio Guillen: the men who eventually emerged as the core leadership team of the PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective and the main organizers of state-wide prison hunger strikes. Todd Ashker describes the hunger strikes as “a collective effort initiated by a multiracial group of long-term, similarly situated (SHU) prisoners who decided enough is enough.”36 How did this collective effort arise within the extreme isolation of the SHU? How did a multi-racial group emerge within a system of rigid racial classification, among men who had been “validated” by that system as leaders or key players in rival gangs? And what did it take to move from the shared situation of isolation in the SHU, to the collective perception of this shared situation, to the decision that “enough was enough,” and ultimately to the formation of the Short Corridor Collective and the collective organization of the largest hunger strike in state history? In other words, how did a group-in-fusion and/or a standing organization emerge from the seriality of prison life? There is perhaps no better example of seriality than a collectivity of prisoners in which each individual has been given a number, issued a uniform, and slotted into a system that treats them both as interchangeable units and as a

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mass.37 Prisoners may speak the same language, come from the same neighbourhood, and share the same ethnic or racial identifications; they may live in the same housing unit, eat the same meals, and cycle through the same programs. But this does not, in itself, lead to the formation of a coherent social group that is capable of transformative collective praxis. The instability of prison life, the threat of violence from prison staff or other prisoners, and the failure of the prison system to protect them from this violence may lead to temporary insurrections such as riots or fights, and it may provoke the formation of prison gangs as groups-in-fusion. These groups may eventually stabilize into standing organizations and even institutions with rigid hierarchies, written and unwritten rules of conduct, and systems of surveillance, enforcement, discipline, and punishment.38 (In this sense, the structure of prison gangs may share more in common with the structure of correctional departments than either would like to admit.) How does a multi-racial human rights movement emerge, in resistance to both the seriality of prison life and the institutionality of gangs and correctional departments? Through an engagement with published first-person testimony of Short Corridor Collective members, I will argue that the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective emerged as a group-in-fusion in response to the crisis of extreme isolation, and that it later became a standing organization with the capacity to organize collective praxis on a state-wide level. The Collective has not, to my knowledge, become an institution. This is a crucial difference between an activist organization, understood as an alliance for mutual support and collective empowerment, and a gang, understood as an institution that empowers some of its members, polices and disciplines most of its members, and exploits nonmembers for the advantage of the few. Both groups engage in collective praxis, and both may transform the given configuration of the practico-inert, but only the activist organization supports the collective liberation of its members and nonmembers. Ultimately, the distinction between a prison gang and an organization like the Short Corridor Collective is not an absolute difference in their means (coercive or liberatory) or ends (criminal advantage or “human rights”). Rather, it is a relative difference in structure: a difference in the degree to which the individual and collective agency of members and nonmembers is supported by the relationships and activities of the group. Criminal gangs may become activist “street organizations,” and vice versa; their common ground, and the ground that they share with mainstream political formations like political parties, NGOs, or the state itself, is that they organize the interests and stabilize the satisfaction of basic

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needs for a certain group of people. By understanding the Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective as an organization emerging from a group-in-fusion, in connection with but also in distinction from prison gangs as institutions that were themselves once groups-in-fusion, we will be able to better understand what it means to resist state violence from a position of extreme isolation. We will also be in a better position to understand what is at stake in civil and social life in an age of mass incarceration, when no one is completely unaffected by carceral structures and logics. To what extent does this theory address and respond to the first-person testimony of key organizers in the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective? Let’s begin with the practico-inert field of the Pelican Bay SHU as both an obstacle to collective praxis and a motivation to form a group-in-fusion. Antonio Guillen describes the SHU as “an environment that discourages a man’s ability and/or desire to socialize with other human beings.”39 Guillen’s account is consistent with the official rationale of supermax confinement, which seeks to manage security threats by isolating perceived leaders, blocking communication, and limiting their opportunities for social interaction—all in the name of increased safety and harm reduction. But Guillen’s account adds a critical analysis of the CDCR’s unofficial policy of amplifying and exploiting racial hatred as a means of further isolating prisoners by dividing them against each other, in spite of the many interests they share in common. According to Guillen, prison officials “[i]ntentionally assigned rival prisoners from different races and/or regional groups to a pod. The idea being, if a pod were populated with those who didn’t socialize with each other to begin with, then this would further serve the intended purpose of discouraging their ability and/or desire to socialize.”40 This analysis is consistent with reports from prisoners across the United States of racial baiting in prison, including “gladiator fights” staged or tolerated by correctional officers, sometimes as opportunities to place bets on winners and losers. It is also consistent with Fanon’s account of the logic of colonial domination, which racializes, isolates, and pits colonized groups against each other as a way of reinforcing the domination of the colonizer. Guillen explains the emergence of a sense of solidarity among the prisoners in the Short Corridor, in spite of the practico-inert barriers of extreme isolation and institutional racism: At first it seemed to start off with common tier courtesies, then to casual conversations which lead to more in depth discussions about

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a variety of topics. This allowed each of us to gain a better understanding of the next man—who he was, the things he cared about or believed in and his way of thinking. At least for me, I soon realized that many of these men were no different from who I am. We shared the same interests and things of importance, and some of us even thought along the same lines. As time went by, we soon started to share reading materials—books, magazines, newspapers etc.—and providing legal assistance—filing prisoner grievances and court litigation. And for those men who didn’t have the means to purchase items from the prison commissary—writing materials, personal hygiene, food, beverages—the rest of the pod would get together and help out when we could . . . 41 Guillen acknowledges that, when he came to prison, he brought with him “attitudes and mindsets that were shaped and hardened by the years of gangbanging in the streets of San Jose and the several years spent in the California Youth Authority.” Rather than interrupting this pattern and introducing the possibility of different, less violent forms of sociality, Guillen’s experience of prison was continuous with his experience of the streets; he describes the prison yard as “no different from any other hostile environment I had experienced.” It took a prisoner-led movement, beginning with everyday small talk and leading to the eventual identification of common interests, to create a meaningful alternative to the world-destroying violence of the streets and the prison yard. How did this process unfold? In an interview with Democracy Now, Todd Ashker explains how, beginning with this nascent sense of a shared situation, prisoners in the Short Corridor began to recognize their common interests and to identify as members of a “prisoner class” with both a specific agenda of its own and a broader human rights agenda: In response to your question on how it’s come to pass that prisoners of different races and groups have become united in our struggle for prisoners and our outside loved ones to be treated humanely, with dignity and respect, in spite of our prisoner status, well, we’re glad you asked about this because we believe it’s inclusive of a powerful symbol of the wisdom and strength similarly situated people can achieve in the face of seemingly impossible odds when they collectively unite to fight for the common good of all . . . Many of us housed in the short corridor have been subject to PBSP SHU solitary confinement torture since it opened in 1989, 1990,

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wherein we’ve been housed together in an eight-cell pod. Many of us have taught ourselves and each other about the law in order to utilize the legal system to challenge those conditions. We’ve come to know, and in large part respect, one another as individuals with the common interest of bringing change to our conditions in ways beneficial for all concerned. This common experience together, with the group of us being housed together in adjacent cells, wherein we engaged in dialogue about our common experience, legal challenges, politics and the worsening conditions, enabled us to put aside any disputes we may have harbored against each other and unite as a collective group—a prisoner class—with the common goal of using nonviolent, peaceful means to force meaningful, long-overdue prison reform to happen now.42 Ashker emphasizes the importance of perceiving, articulating, and building upon a “similar situation,” “common experience,” and “common interest” to establish an explicitly identified prisoner class, in resistance to both the (alleged) “classless society” of late capitalism and the (disavowed) class war of carceral neoliberalism.43 But he goes even further by calling for both a particular collective identification as members of a “prisoner class” and a universal commitment to human rights and to “the common good of all.” This connection between a particular struggle for certain concrete, clearly articulated goals (the five core demands) rooted in a prisoner class that affirms its existence on the basis of a shared situation and common interests, and a universal struggle for social justice, makes a counter-hegemonic claim against the power of the prison system to frame certain groups of people as always-already criminal and therefore destined for punishment, isolation, and incapacitation. It further distinguishes the Short Corridor Collective from a gang that would protect its own collective interests, narrowly defined, at the expense of others. A turning point in the emergence of a “prisoner class” across the California prison system was the “Agreement to End Hostilities,” issued on August 12, 2012, by the Short Corridor Collective. Sitawa Jamaa calls this agreement “an historical document . . . We are a prisoner class now.”44 The agreement calls upon all prisoners to set aside racial hostilities for the sake of uniting as a multi-racial prisoner class: If we really want to bring about substantive meaningful changes to the CDCR system in a manner beneficial to all solid individuals, who have never been broken by CDCR’s torture tactics intended to coerce

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one to become a state informant via debriefing, that now is the time for us to collectively seize this moment in time, and put an end to more that 20-30 years of hostilities between our racial groups. Therefore, beginning on October 10, 2012, all hostilities between our racial groups . . . in SHU, Ad-Seg, General Population, and County Jails, will officially cease. This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end . . . and if personal issues arise between individuals, people need to do all they can to exhaust all diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues!! . . . [W]e must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention, and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [i.e., prisoners], and our best interests. We can no longer allow CDCR to use us against each other for their benefit!! Because the reality is that collectively, we are an empowered, mighty force, that can positively change this entire corrupt system into a system that actually benefits prisoners, and thereby, the public as a whole.45 The Agreement to End Hostilities calls upon prisoners to resist one form of collective identification—institutional(ized) racism, where the logic of race is construed as oppositional rather than differential, and where racial opposition overcodes personal disagreements as occasions for racial hostility—for the sake of another form of collective identification as “an empowered, mighty force” with the collective capacity for social transformation. I interpret this document as a pledge, not just to fight collectively for the interests of a small group of people at a particular point in time, but to stand together in solidarity, and in resistance to the oppressive structures that divide them. This pledge is a form of collective praxis that enjoins prisoners to resist the counter-finalty of institutionalized racism and to transform the material-historical reality of the California prison system for the benefit of prisoners as a class, and ultimately for “the public as a whole.” For this reason, I believe that the Short Corridor Collective is best understood as a standing organization that emerged out of a group-in-fusion, in resistance to the seriality of prisonization. As “a multi-racial group of long-term, similarly situated (SHU) prisoners who decided enough is enough,” and as a “prisoner class—with the common goal of using nonviolent, peaceful means to force meaningful, long-overdue prison reform to happen now,” the Short Corridor constitutes

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a group-in-fusion. They respond collectively to an obstacle that concerns them here and now. But as a “prisoner class” made up of “similarly situated people” who “collectively unite to fight for the common good of all,” and who are committed to transforming the California prison system from within, beyond the confines of the Short Corridor, they constitute a standing organization with both particular and universal aspirations. As a group-in-fusion, the Short Corridor Collective may have been able to transform the practico-inert field of its own local environment through the collective praxis of its members. But as a standing organization, the Collective was able to organize state-wide hunger strikes and to campaign effectively for structural change across the California prison system and beyond. And yet, it remains to be seen whether the partial success of the Short Corridor Collective in demanding legislative hearings on solitary confinement, a revision of the gang validation policy, and a class-action lawsuit will strengthen the standing organization, dissolve the group back into seriality, or render it inert through institutionalization. In conclusion, a critical phenomenological perspective helps to articulate both the social ontology of groups in the 2013 California prison hunger strikes and also the possibilities for political activism when similarly situated people join together in solidarity. In order to unite as a prisoner class and to launch a human rights movement from this particular counter-hegemonic position, emergent members of the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective had to collectively resist both the institutional constraints of the prison and also the institutional constraints of prison gangs (whether or not they were directly affiliated with these gangs). They had to contest and transform the material-historical reality of prison life in order to begin creating a new reality or, in Fanon’s words, to “restructure the world.” By engaging with the collective praxis of an emergent prisoner class from a critical phenomenological perspective, we stand to learn what it means to resist state violence from a position of extreme isolation and systematic criminalization, and to understand how best to support and amplify this resistance as non-incarcerated people in an age of mass incarceration, when no one is unaffected by carceral structures and logics.46

NOTES 1. Carroll, Rory. “California Prisoners Launch Biggest Hunger Strike in State’s History,” The Guardian, July 19, 2013, accessed July 20, 2013 at http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/09/california-prisoners-hunger-strike

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2. “Prisoners’ Demands,” last modified April 3, 2011, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, accessed Aug. 5, 2013, at http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/the-prisoners-demands-2/ 3. The case-by-case audit of SHU prisoners has led to the release of over 400 SHU prisoners back into the general prison population: roughly 80% of the 632 cases reviewed. The CDCR has also revised its policies on gang validation and debriefing, but prisoners’ legal representatives argue that the reforms do not go far enough, and in some ways intensify the problem. Sarah Shourd, “At Hearing on Solitary Confinement in California Prisons, Advocates Challenge ‘Reforms.’” 4. Center for Constitutional Rights, “Hundreds of California Prisoners in Isolation to Join Class Action Lawsuit,” June 2, 2014, accessed on July 14, 2014, at http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ hundreds-of-california-prisoners-isolation-join-class-action-lawsuit 5. Antonio Guillen, “Why I joined the Multi-racial, Multi–regional Human Rights Movement to Challenge Torture in the Pelican Bay SHU,” The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, Aug. 29, 2013, accessed on Nov. 10, 2013, at http://sfbayview.com/2013/why-i-joined-the-multi-racia l-multi-regional-human-rights-movement-to-challenge-tor t ure-in-the-pelican-bay-shu/ 6. Jeffrey Beard, “Hunger Strike in California Prisons is a Gang Power Play.” L.A. Times, Aug. 6, 2013, accessed Sept. 1, 2013, at http://www. latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beard-prison-hunger-strike20130806,0,636927.story 7. Quoted in Alan Eladio Gómez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Penitentiary, 1972,” Radical History Review 96 (Fall 2006): 58. For a more detailed account of the U.S. prison system as a structure of racist colonial domination, and the relevance of Fanon’s work for a critique of this system, see Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30(2) 2003: 18–27; and Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013), 39–61. 8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 82. 9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Philcox (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 178.

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10. “Critical phenomenology” is my way of naming both a practice of critically engaged and historically situated phenomenology in the work of Fanon, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and others, and also a methodology that I seek to explicate and develop in my own work. For a more in-depth discussion of critical phenomenology, see Guenther, Solitary Confinement (in particular, the explicitly methodological remarks on xiii–xv). 11. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, “Prison Facilities, Pelican Bay State Prison,” accessed July 12, 2013, at http://www. cdcr.ca.gov/Facilities_Locator/PBSP.html 12. For a more detailed history of supermax prisons in the United States, with a focus on Pelican Bay, see Sharon Shalev, Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement (Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2009). 13. Lorna A. Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press, 2004), 238. 14. Center for Constitutional Rights, “Hundreds of California Prisoners in Isolation to Join Class Action Lawsuit.” 15. Pelican Bay has a design capacity of 2,280 inmates, but in 2011, when the prison hunger strikes began, the prison population at Pelican Bay exceeded this capacity by more than a thousand prisoners (CDCR no date, California Health Online 2013). 16. Solitary Watch, “FAQ,” accessed Jan. 25, 2013, at http://solitarywatch.com/faq/ 17. Keramet Ann Reiter, “The Most Restrictive Alternative: A Litigation History of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons, 1960–2006,” in Studies in Law, Politics and Society 57, ed. Austin Sarat (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2012), 71–124. 18. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, “Security Threat Group Prevention, Identification and Management Strategy,” 2012, accessed July 21, 2014, at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/ Reports/docs/Security-Threat-Group-Prevention-Identificationand-Management-Model-03-01-2012.pdf. Emphasis added. 19. Quoted in Sarah Shourd, “At Hearing on Solitary Confinement in California Prisons, Advocates Challenge ‘Reforms,’” Huffington Post, Feb. 15, 2014, accessed June 21, 2014, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ sarah-shourd/solitary-confinement-hearing_b_4795113.html

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20. Steve Champion, “Gang Validation: The New Inquisition,” San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, Feb. 18, 2011, accessed July 28, 2014, at http://sfbayview.com/2011/gang-validation-the-new-inquisition/ 21. For a more comprehensive analysis of the criminalization of collective resistance and existence in the California prison system, see Lisa Guenther, “Social Death and the Criminalization of Resistance in the California Prison Hunger Strikes,” TruthOut, Aug. 2, 2013, accessed Aug. 2, 2013, at http:// truth-out.org/opinion/item/17948-social-death-and-the-criminalization-ofresistance-in-the-california-prison-hunger-strikes 22. Center for Constitutional Rights, “Hundreds of California Prisoners in Isolation to Join Class Action Lawsuit.” 23. Christie Thompson, “Are California Prisons Punishing Inmates Based on Race?” ProPublica, April 12, 2013, accessed April 15, 2013, at http:// www.propublica.org/article/are-california-prisons-punishing-inmates-base d-on-race; Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 2007), 275, n. 1. 24. David Skarbek, “Prison Gangs, Norms, and Organizations,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 82(1) 2012: 702–716. 25. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Plot from Solitary,” New York Magazine, Feb. 26, 2014; accessed July 23, 2014, at http://nymag.com/news/features/ solitary-secure-housing-units-2014-2/ 26. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 110. 27. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 139. 28. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 112–113. 29. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 117, 109, 21. 30. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 9. 31. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London and New York: Verso, 2004). While I do not have the space to address the intellectual and political relation between Sartre and Fanon at any length in this chapter, it is important to note Fanon’s critique of Sartre in Black Skin White Masks (27–29, 118–119, 132–139), and Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth (xliii– lxii). For insightful scholarship on the relation between Sartre and Fanon, see Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995); Jonathan Judaken, ed., Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008); Robert Bernasconi, “Fanon’s The Wretched of the

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Earth as the Fulfillment of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason” (Sartre Studies International 16:2 [2010]: 36–47); and Bernasconi, “On Needing Not to Know and Forgetting What One Never Knew: The Epistemology of Ignorance in Fanon’s Critique of Sartre,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, eds. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). 32. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York and London: The New Press, 2010); Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: when Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3 (January 2001), 95–133. 33. See Rodriguez, Forced Passages; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); James, Joy, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005). 34. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 256–269. 35. Notable exceptions include Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Gavin Rae, “Sartre, Group Formations, and Practical Freedom: The Other in the Critique of Dialectical Reason” (Comparative and Continental Philosophy 3:2 [2011]: 183–206); Christopher Turner, “The Return of Stolen Praxis: Counter-Finality in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason” (Sartre Studies International 20:1 [2014]: 36–44). 36. Quoted in Paige St. John, “Prison hunger strike leaders are in solitary but not alone.” L.A. Times, July 28, 2013, accessed Aug. 17, 2013, at http://www. latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ff-ashker-20130729,0,1059923.story?page=2 37. For a insightful discussion of “criminals” and “felons” as serial collectives, see Andrew Dilts, Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 207–216. Dilts is drawing on Iris Marion Young’s important essay “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective” (Signs 19:3 [Spring, 1994]: 713–738). 38. Skarbek, “Prison Gangs, Norms, and Organizations.” 39. Guillen, “Why I joined.” 40. Guillen, “Why I joined.” 41. Guillen, “Why I joined.” Readers may wonder how “common tier courtesies” and “casual conversations” were even possible under conditions of extreme isolation among people who could not speak directly to one another face-to-face. Wallace-Wells discusses some of the creative ways in which prisoners in the Short Corridor managed to reach across the material barriers of

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the SHU in “The Plot From Solitary,” but many of these techniques remain secret to protect their continued use. 42. Todd Ashker, “EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: CA Prisoner Todd Ashker on His Evolution from Violence to Peaceful Hunger Strike,” Democracy Now, Aug. 23, 2013, accessed Aug 25, 2013, at http://www.democracynow.org/ blog/2013/8/23/exclusive_audio_california_prisoner_on_hunger_strike_ and_how_he. Emphasis added. 43. See Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” for a discussion of the neoliberal economics of the carceral-assistantial complex as a mechanism for social control and biopolitical management. 44. Quoted in Wallace-Wells, “The Plot From Solitary.” 45. Pelican Bay State Prison SHU Short Corridor Collective, “Agreement to End Hostilities,” Aug. 12, 2012, accessed Aug. 5, 2013, http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/agreement-to-end-hostilities. pdf. Emphasis added. 46. For an excellent model of outside support for the collective resistance of prisoners, see the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/

REFERENCES Alexander, M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York and London: The New Press, 2010. Ashker, T. “EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: CA Prisoner Todd Ashker on His Evolution from Violence to Peaceful Hunger Strike.” Democracy Now, Aug. 23, 2013, accessed Aug. 25, 2013, at http://www.democracynow.org/ blog/2013/8/23/exclusive_audio_california_prisoner_on_hunger_ strike_and_how_he Beard, J. “Hunger strike in California prisons is a gang power play.” L.A. Times, Aug. 6, 2013, accessed Sept. 1, 2013, at http://www.latimes. com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beard-prison-hunger-strike-2 0130806,0,636927.story Bernasconi, R. “Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as the Fulfillment of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.” Sartre Studies International 16(2) 2010: 36–47.

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Bernasconi, R. “On Needing Not to Know and Forgetting What One Never Knew: The Epistemology of Ignorance in Fanon’s Critique of Sartre.” In Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Prison Facilities, Pelican Bay State Prison,” accessed July 21, 2014, at http://www.cdcr. ca.gov/Facilities_Locator/PBSP.html California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Security Threat Group Prevention, Identification and Management Strategy,” accessed July 21, 2014, at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports/docs/Secur ity-Threat-Group-Prevention-Identification-and-Manage ment-Model-03-01-2012.pdf California Health Online. “California Lawmakers OK Compromise Plan to Reduce Inmate Population,” Sept. 12, 2013, accessed Sept. 13, 2013, at http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2013/9/12/ calif-lawmakers-ok-compromise-plan-to-reduce-inmate-population Carroll, R. “California prisoners launch biggest hunger strike in state’s history.” The Guardian, July 19, 2013, accessed July 20, 2013, at http://www. theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/09/california-prisoners-hun ger-strike Center for Constitutional Rights. “Hundreds of California Prisoners in Isolation to Join Class Action Lawsuit,” June 2, 2014, accessed July 14, 2014, http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ hundreds-of-california-prisoners-isolation-join-class-action-lawsuit Champion, S. “Gang Validation: The New Inquisition.” San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, Feb. 18, 2011, accessed July 28, 2014, at http://sfbayview.com/2011/gang-validation-the-new-inquisition Davis, A.Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Dilts, A. Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Fanon, F. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by C. Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Flynn, T.R. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Gilmore, R. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 2007.

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Gómez, A.E. “Resisting Living Death at Marion Penitentiary, 1972.” Radical History Review 96 (Fall 2006): 58–86. Gordon, L. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995. Guenther, L. “Social Death and the Criminalization of Resistance in the California Prison Hunger Strikes.” TruthOut, Aug. 2, 2013, accessed Aug. 2, 2013, at http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17948-so cial-death-and-the-criminalization-of-resistance-in-the-california-pri son-hunger-strikes Guenther, L. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013. Guillen, A. “Why I joined the multi-racial, multi–regional Human Rights Movement to challenge torture in the Pelican Bay SHU.” The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, Aug. 29, 2013, accessed Nov. 10, 2013 at http://sfbayview.com/2013/why-i-join ed-the-multi-racial-multi-regional-human-rights-movement-to-chal lenge-torture-in-the-pelican-bay-shu James, J. (ed.) The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005. Judaken, J. (ed.) Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008. Pelican Bay State Prison SHU Short Corridor Collective. “Agreement to End Hostilities,” Aug. 12, 2012, accessed Aug. 5, 2013, at http://prisoner hungerstrikesolidarity.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/agree ment-to-end-hostilities.pdf Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. “Prisoners’ Demands.” April 3, 2011, accessed Aug. 5, 2013, at http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity. wordpress.com/the-prisoners-demands-2/ Rae, G. “Sartre, Group Formations, and Practical Freedom: The Other in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 3(2) 2011: 183–206. Reiter, K.A. “The Most Restrictive Alternative: A Litigation History of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons, 1960–2006.” In Austin Sarat (ed.), Studies in Law, Politics and Society, vol. 57, pp. 71–124. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited (2012). Rhodes, L.A. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press, 2004.

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Rodríguez, D. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Sartre, J-P. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. Translated by A. Sheridan-Smith. London and New York: Verso, 2004. Shalev, S. Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2009. Shourd, S. “At Hearing on Solitary Confinement in California Prisons, Advocates Challenge ‘Reforms.’” Huffington Post, Feb 15, 2014, accessed June 21, 2014, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ sarah-shourd/solitary-confinement-hearing_b_4795113.html Skarbek, D. “Prison Gangs, Norms, and Organizations.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 82(1) 2012: 702–716. Solitary Watch. “FAQ.” Accessed Jan. 25, 2013, at http://solitarywatch.com/faq/ St. John, P. “Prison hunger strike leaders are in solitary but not alone.” L.A. Times, July 28, 2013, accessed Aug. 17, 2013 at http://www.latimes. com/news/local/la-me-ff-ashker-20130729,0,1059923.story?page=2 Thompson, C. “Are California Prisons Punishing Inmates Based on Race?” ProPublica. April 12, 2013, accessed Aug. 17, 2013 at http://www. propublica.org/article/are-california-prisons-punishing-in mates-based-on-race Turner, C. “The Return of Stolen Praxis: Counter-Finality in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.” Sartre Studies International 20(1) 2014: 36–44. Wacquant, L. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment & Society 3 (January 2001): 95–133. Wallace-Wells, B. “The Plot from Solitary.” New York Magazine (Feb. 26, 2014), accessed July 23, 2014, at http://nymag.com/news/features/ solitary-secure-housing-units-2014-2/ Wilderson, F.B. “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.” Social Justice 30(2) 2003: 18–27. Young, I.M.. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” Signs 19:3 (Spring 1994): 713–738.

CHAPTER 3

Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities Gail Weiss

In 1932, Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World was originally published in Vienna, a year before he left Austria along with other Jewish intellectuals to forge a new life, first in Paris and then in the United States, where he took a position on the faculty of The New School for Social Research. Schutz’s analysis of how mundane social interactions often proceed in a typical fashion, following a largely tacit social script that we inherit from our earliest childhood, has become a classic text in its own right and continues to have a major impact in philosophy, sociology, and the other social sciences. An important point discussed at some length in Schutz’s text concerns the social utility of anonymity in our daily lives. Since it is impossible to have what Schutz refers to as “face-to-face” or “we-relationships” with everyone we encounter, we often rely on social scripts or “recipes” for many of our personal and professional communications in which, he notes, we relate to one another as “ideal types” (e.g., teacher, student, cashier, bus driver, doctor, patient, etc.), following the established, yet largely unwritten rules that govern these typical interactions in a particular social community. For Schutz, being able to relate to other people anonymously is not an inauthentic mode of comportment, as Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous example of the waiter in Being and Nothingness suggests, but rather an indispensable feature of social existence, especially in a world where one might come into contact with hundreds or even thousands of people on any given day. In this chapter, I would like to address a unique challenge raised by Schutz’s discussion of the social 75

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utility of anonymity that has been taken up by critical race scholars, namely, whether the ability to transact one’s daily business fairly anonymously without drawing undue attention to oneself is itself an unacknowledged racial (as well as gender, class, and able-bodied) privilege that has historically been enjoyed by white people more than others. By focusing in particular on how racialized habits of perception subtly (and frequently not so subtly) reinforce (stereo)typical ways of interacting with others, we can, I believe, arrive at a more in-depth understanding of both the promise and the peril of anonymity for socially marginalized individuals and groups.

QUESTIONING WHITE IGNORANCE Critical race theorists in the early twenty-first century have revealed the insidious ways in which white privilege affects not only the institutional and historical structures in which people participate as social and political citizens but also the everyday relations, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge claims that people hold with respect to one another. Given that many white people neither realize nor acknowledge that their white identities grant them advantages that are not enjoyed by their non-white counterparts, the aim of critical whiteness studies, in particular, has been to bring these “unearned” benefits to light, to draw attention to their active presence so that, it is hoped, they will become impossible to (continue to) deny. And since, as Sara Ahmed poignantly observes, in “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” “Whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inhabitance that they learn not to see it, even when they are not it,” the emphasis in much critical race theory has rightly been on making what Jane Lazarre calls “the whiteness of whiteness” visible, that is, on overcoming white ignorance by “marking” the ongoing influence of white privilege even (and especially) when it is presumed to be nonexistent or absent.1 A crucial question raised by this important antiracist project that needs to be addressed further concerns the existential status of white ignorance (of one’s racial privilege) as a lived experience.2 For, as Shannon Sullivan persuasively suggests, white privilege is not a mental state, but rather a complex, embodied phenomenon that influences not only what we think but also what we feel and how we act, often without our explicit awareness. In her words:

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White privilege is not just “in the head.” It also is “in” the nose that smells, the back, neck, and other muscles that imperceptibly tighten with anxiety, and the eyes that see some but not all physical differences as significant. A person’s psychological disposition toward the world can be found throughout her body, in her physical comportment, sensations, reactions, pleasures, and pains, just as her bodily (dis) functionings help constitute her mental tendencies and proclivities.3 By drawing our attention to the intersensory, kinesthetic experience of white privilege in this passage, Sullivan is filling out an important piece of the picture provided by Frantz Fanon, Patricia Williams, George Yancy, and other critical race scholars who have depicted the deleterious somatic effects of what Fanon calls the “malédiction corporelle,” the “corporeal malediction” or “bodily curse” that infects the bodies of individuals who lack white privilege.4 These powerful accounts collectively illustrate Vivian May’s point that “privilege and oppression are experienced and structured simultaneously.”5 Once we recognize the intimate, interdependent relationship between privilege and oppression, moreover, we can be more attuned to the subtle (and not so subtle) ways in which they intensify one another in the daily “conversation of gestures,” or interpersonal encounters that, as May also emphasizes, are “reinforced by social practices, philosophical norms, and structural inequalities.” 6 Discussing these co-constitutive features of black and white lived experience, Yancy declares: “It is important to note that an analysis of Black lived experience is dialectically linked to an account of whiteness and how whites construct Black bodies, how the latter are experienced as problematic bodies, as problem people.”7 Despite their mutually constitutive, dialectical relationship, as Yancy implies in the passage above, having and lacking white privilege each produce distinctive bodily responses. Indeed, a significant existential difference between them is that while many people who enjoy the unearned benefits of white privilege are often not explicitly aware that they are doing so and so also enjoy the peace of mind and body conferred by white ignorance, most people of color who are discriminated against because of their failure to live up to a white bodily norm are fully aware that they are being treated unfairly. W.E.B. DuBois’s famous early twentieth-century description of “double consciousness” eloquently portrays this heightened awareness of and receptivity to the nuanced racial currents that structure one’s environment that are so frequently experienced by racial minorities. Perceiving one’s alleged

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inferiority through the perspective of the privileged other, as both DuBois’s and Fanon’s autobiographical examples make clear, is a form of embodied knowledge that encompasses not only an awareness of one’s racist treatment but also an awareness of the ignorance of the privileged white other who is benefitting from not being subject to that treatment. In “The Forethought” that sets out his project in The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois offers to reveal the “two worlds within and without the Veil,” where the Veil refers to a world of lived black oppression that coexists with yet lies beyond the “world of the white man.” DuBois tells us that he has “stepped within the Veil, raising it so that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,— the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls,” and he concludes with a biblical citation from the Book of Genesis that affirms his bodily solidarity with those who dwell within its confines, yet who also, through their daily labor, sustain the white world that lies outside of it: “I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil.”8 DuBois’s double consciousness positions him, then, both within and outside of this Veil of oppression because sharing the fate of those who “live within the Veil” involves sharing their intimate knowledge of the “other world” that violently circumscribes it. It is precisely because white privilege and white ignorance of that privilege often go hand in hand, whereas the experience of racist discrimination almost always involves awareness of one’s unethical treatment by others (including both people and institutions), that we must attend more closely to the phenomenon of white ignorance to better understand why it is able to persist, seemingly unabated, even when palpable signs of racist oppression and its corollary, white privilege, are so readily available. A related question that also demands to be considered is why some white people are able and willing to recognize their white privilege while others are content to live within this decidedly non-Rawlsian “Veil of Ignorance” that functions like an armed fortress or Platonic cave, shielding them from the reality of that other “Veil” that DuBois invokes, a “densely populated” zone of “unlivability,” in Judith Butler’s words, whose legitimacy, value, and significance they refuse to acknowledge.9 In order to interrogate the existential status of the phenomenon of white ignorance and to unmask the self-and-other deceptions that keep it firmly in place, we must directly confront the ethical implications of the claim that many white people are unaware of their own racial privilege. There are multiple ways one might approach the intersecting epistemological, ontological,

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perceptual, cognitive, affective, temporal, spatial, and other somatic dimensions that sediment white ignorance and that mark it as an existential, or lived, phenomenon rather than an aleatory or ephemeral experience, and several different and extremely persuasive accounts have been provided by critical race theorists to help explain why white people’s ignorance of their racial privilege has remained so persistent even in the face of widespread public evidence that makes this lack of awareness politically, socially, and historically suspect. Aside from the obvious material benefits that come from profiting at someone else’s expense without much effort (save for the effort required to remain unaware that one is doing so), there are also the less visible psychic and bodily advantages that come from guiltlessly and comfortably enjoying an elevated, unearned social status that is ethically unjustifiable. With respect to this experience of comfortably “fitting in,” albeit not in a generic space available to all but in the unmarked “white” space that one’s racial privilege enables one to occupy, Ahmed observes that: White bodies are comfortable as they inhabit spaces that extend their shape. The bodies and spaces “point” towards each other, as a “point” that is not seen as it is also “the point” from which we see. In other words, whiteness may function as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. Those spaces are lived as comfortable as they allow bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies.10 Taking both Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to task, as have Fanon and Iris Marion Young before her, for the formers’ failure to recognize that the sense of “ontological expansiveness”11 that underpins this comfortable, “I can” body is actually a racialized, gendered, and classed phenomenon rather than a universal, positive experience of embodied agency that all human beings share, Ahmed points out that: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe the body as “successful,” as being “able” to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world. Fanon helps us to expose this “success” not as a measure of competence, but as the bodily form of privilege: the ability to move through the world without losing one’s way. To be black in “the white world” is to turn back towards itself, to become an object, which means not only not being extended by the contours of the world, but

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being diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of others. For bodies that are not extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? Each question, when asked, is a kind of stopping device: you are stopped by being asked the question, just as asking the question requires that you be stopped. A phenomenology of “being stopped” might take us in a different direction than one that begins with motility, with a body that “can do” by flowing into space.12 Ahmed’s critique of the comfortable white body, at ease in its social, spatial, and cultural environment, is not, it should be noted, an indictment of a “can do” bodily experience of “flowing into space” but rather of the fact that the frequency (or conversely, relative rarity) of this experience is itself not a function of the body’s “natural motor powers” but rather of unearned racial privilege. Moreover, her account makes an even more pressing case for explicitly confronting what I am calling “the question of awareness,” that vexing matter of the existential status of white ignorance that Sullivan directly addresses through a psychoanalytic (albeit Kleinian rather than Freudian) appeal to what she refers to as “the unconscious habits of racial privilege.”13 Is it possible that those people who fail to recognize their white privilege but who benefit from it on a daily basis are truly unconscious of their white privilege, as Sullivan and, at least on occasion, other critical race theorists have suggested?14 And, is it possible to provide a satisfactory and compelling account of the historically sedimented layers of white privilege and its frequent counterpart, white ignorance, that does not fall prey to the challenges of accessibility and, therefore, responsibility that arise as soon as one claims that a given phenomenon is unconscious in its operation and/or effects? The stakes here are extremely high, for while the claim that racial privilege often operates unconsciously enables us to make sense of why so many white people deny that it is an active and significant feature of their daily lives, at the same time, accepting that racial privilege usually (or even often) functions unconsciously makes it that much more difficult to see how those for whom it is unconscious can in any way be responsible for it. For, how and why should an individual be held accountable for a belief, desire, attitude, perspective, and/ or behavior of which she is unconscious? Indeed, one might argue, it would be like holding the lifelong inhabitants of Plato’s mythical cave responsible

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for not realizing that there is another, “truer” reality that is the source of the images projected on the wall of their cave.15 By offering a psychoanalytic account of the “unconscious habits of white privilege,” Sullivan is well aware that she might be seen as letting white people “off the hook” for their racist behavior, and to correct for this possible misinterpretation she repeatedly stresses that it is indeed possible to “become aware” of these unconscious habits and, ultimately, to engage in the hard work of changing them even when the institutionalized white privilege that enabled them to form in the first place remains fairly intact. Moreover, she provides several concrete examples of “indirect assaults” on one’s unconscious habits of privilege, such as when one unexpectedly finds oneself in an unfamiliar and unwelcoming environment, that illustrate how and when this can occur. While I agree with Sullivan’s general description of habits as “mental and physical patterns of engagement with the world that operate without conscious attention or reflection” as well as her subsequent claim that “they fly under one’s conscious radar, so to speak, and are all the more effective precisely because they tend to function unnoticed,” what I am resisting is what I take to be her overly hasty rejection of the possibility of understanding habits of white privilege as operating pre-reflectively rather than unconsciously.16 Before addressing why I think this move is problematic, let me present one of her initial arguments in favor of understanding habits of white privilege as unconscious: It is no accident that it is difficult to hear the soft patter of white privilege. White privilege goes to great lengths not to be heard. Habits of white privilege are not merely nonconscious or preconscious. It is not the case that they just happen not to be the object of conscious reflection but could relatively easily become so if only they were drawn to one’s attention. This overly optimistic picture implicitly denies the possible existence of formidable obstacles to the conscious acknowledgement of certain habits. It omits the strong resistance to the conscious recognition of racism that characterizes habits of white privilege. As unconscious, habits of white privilege do not merely go unnoticed. They actively thwart the process of conscious reflection on them, which allows them to seem nonexistent even as they continue to function.17

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To understand habits of white privilege as functioning preconsciously or pre-reflectively, I would argue, need not entail an “overly optimistic picture [that] implicitly denies the possible existence of formidable obstacles to the conscious acknowledgement of certain habits”; moreover, I believe that recognizing that habits of white privilege often function pre-reflectively can also do justice to, rather than disavow, “the strong resistance to the conscious recognition of racism that characterizes habits of white privilege.” The reason Sullivan so quickly raises and then rejects the possibility that racist habits can be pre-reflective, or, in her words, “nonconscious,” seems to be due to an overly simplistic conception of pre-reflective experiences as phenomena I am easily capable of becoming explicitly aware of and modifying without much effort, as soon as they are drawn, whether willingly or unwillingly, to my attention. Her failure to take seriously the possibility that our habits (and not merely racist habits of white privilege) operate pre-reflectively also runs the risk of supporting the untenable conclusion that when people are acting habitually, they are acting unconsciously, a position that seems at odds with most people’s lived experience. Sullivan does directly raise the question of the accessibility of unconscious experiences, informing us that, “unlike some psychoanalytic uses of the term, my use of ‘unconscious’ does not mean that what is unconscious is necessarily and completely inaccessible to consciousness.”18 And, she adds: I prefer to remain something of an agnostic practitioner about the level of accessibility of the unconscious. Whether and to what degree unconscious habits can be examined and possibly reworked can be found out only in practice. To declare that unconscious habits are in principle inaccessible creates a dangerously self-fulfilling situation in which no attempts at transformation are made because they are thought pointless, which then ensure that unconscious habits remain beyond the reach of conscious influence.19 For Sullivan, there seem to be only two alternatives: habits are either nonconscious (or what I am calling pre-reflective) or unconscious. If, she suggests, they are pre-reflective, then they would be readily accessible to consciousness, whereas many racist habits are stubbornly resistant to our awareness. Hence, they must be unconscious, but, she also asserts, this does not necessarily make them inaccessible. But why should we be forced to accept that habits can only be understood either as pre-reflective (the position Sullivan roundly rejects)

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or as unconscious (the position she embraces)? Isn’t this a false dilemma? Indeed, isn’t it more plausible that our habits incorporate a dynamic and shifting range of reflective, pre-reflective, and unconscious experiences rather than that they operate in the latter domain alone? And, if this is so, their very complexity and irreducibility to a single domain provides ample reason why racist and other habits might be resistant to our explicit awareness and/or modification, without claiming that they must be unconscious. The Gestalt figure/ground framework that Husserl and Merleau-Ponty both utilize to describe the nature of intentional experience provides an excellent model for understanding how our embodied, social, and perceptual habits can function in the background of our experience without being explicitly paid attention to or focused on until an unexpected event or set of events occur that brings them directly to our awareness, making them the figure rather than the ground.20 In fact, it is just such an unsettling and transformative experience that Simone de Beauvoir so eloquently describes in her 1947 memoir America Day by Day. Before turning to Beauvoir’s depiction of her own forced awareness of her white skin privilege while traveling in the southern United States during the post–World War II Jim Crow era, however, I would like to call attention to Alia Al-Saji’s emphasis on the crucial role repetition plays both in stabilizing and in de-stabilizing racialized habits of perception. According to Al-Saji, “since temporal becoming is interval and hesitation, since each repetition is never quite the same, the possibility of interruption is inscribed within the same temporality that habit relies on to establish closure.” Thus, she adds, “Duration at once structures and fractures habits of seeing.”21 For Al-Saji, Merleau-Ponty, and, most famously, Marcel Proust, the affective, bodily memories that ground our habits “are not atomistic entities but networks of relations, wherein the critical reconfiguration and destabilization of one sector of the past recasts the whole.”22 Or, as Proust lyrically asserts: “What attaches us to people are the countless roots, the innumerable threads which are our memories of last night, our hopes for to-morrow morning, the continuous weft of habit from which we can never free ourselves.”23 Understanding habits as embodied, sedimented, relational phenomena that bind us to others and to a larger social, cultural, and historical world in ways that we are often not aware of, but which can be brought to our attention, even against our will, makes it clear that there is no way to escape or “transcend” our habits altogether. Indeed, as Proust observes: “habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has least need of nutritious

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soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock . . .”24 As organic phenomena, or “plants of human growth,” they can be nourished by a hospitable environment or even killed off by an unhospitable one. Indeed, no matter how durable our habits may be, they always remain susceptible to being altered, and thereby transformed, especially in the face of a new situation that does not readily accommodate our habitual responses to it. While racist habits of perception, in particular, seem to be especially rigid and persistent, Al-Saji, following Merleau-Ponty, argues that: There are events for which we cannot account from within our instituted system of meaning—events that reveal, if we are open to them, the fractures in the coherence of the visual field. There are two ways of responding to such events: by maintaining the normative organization of the field and refusing to see them, or by receptively allowing an event to insinuate itself into our vision as the dimension according to which the visual field is restructured—thus changing how we see.25 In the course he taught in the mid-1950s at the Collège de France on “Passivity,” Merleau-Ponty argues that the first strategy Al-Saji mentions above, namely, refusing to acknowledge unassimilable events and choosing instead to adhere to familiar, habitual visual schemas “would . . . be pathological.”26 Recognizing, nonetheless, that this is often a choice people are willing to make in order to preserve the status quo, he adds that when the established system of meaning “does not allow itself to be constructed without division of the self from the self, our truth falls outside of us.”27 Though he does not develop the implications of this point further, Merleau-Ponty’s provocative claim that an unwillingness to alter old perceptual schemas and develop new ones can lead to a pathological splitting of the self from itself in which “our truth falls outside of us” is especially germane to the problem of racist habits of perception that so often seem to survive intact even when directly challenged by innumerable “unassimilable events” that contradict them. Beauvoir’s account of her own growing awareness of the extent of her white skin privilege, and of the resentment and hostility it produces in the African American men and women she encounters on her travels in the southern United States, provides a first-person, cautionary case study of the fact that being receptive to and deliberately cultivating antiracist habits of perception is never sufficient to counter the relational and structural dynamics of racism.

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Instead, Beauvoir’s memoir, as well as her existentialist ethics, suggest that one must take responsibility for one’s unearned white privilege and the dysfunctional “old system” on which it is based by working collectively with others to transform the broader social, cultural, and institutional environment in which the toxic and infectious “plant” of racial prejudice has historically grown and flourished. For, as Linda Martín Alcoff observes when discussing Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, “Individual antiracist intentions count for naught in a social realm overdetermined by histories of slavery, lynching, and sanctioned racism.”28

BEAUVOIR AND MERLEAU-PONTY ON PRIVILEGE, PASSIVITY, AND RESPONSIBILITY Although critical race theory has strong and deep existential roots, the resources Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty can offer to our understanding of the lived experience of racism have, with all too few exceptions, not received much attention. While Beauvoir’s name has been indelibly linked with Existentialism since the latter emerged as a movement in France in the 1940s, and while her long friendship with Richard Wright is fairly well known, the work in which she discusses racial oppression in detail from a first-person perspective, America Day by Day, is not read or commented on nearly as much as her other philosophical and literary works. Perhaps this is because this idiosyncratic travelogue “falls through the cracks” as far as traditional genres and Beauvoir’s own oeuvre are concerned. It is a nonfictional memoir like many of Beauvoir’s other autobiographical texts, but the focus is less on Beauvoir herself than on the “American Others” she is exposed to throughout her four-month inaugural sojourn in the United States from late January through May, 1947. Indeed, many of the dated entries contained within America Day by Day read as proto-ethnographic studies of the widely varying “American types” who Beauvoir becomes acquainted with throughout her travels across the United States. It would be a fascinating project, in its own right, to delve into the ways in which Beauvoir’s preconceptions about the United States and its citizens are revealed, confirmed, and disconfirmed in the pages of America Day by Day, however, my focus here will be on the first-person account Beauvoir provides of her experience of white skin privilege as she encounters America’s own “Others,” namely, its large, mostly disenfranchised African

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American population, especially in the U.S. South. What I find especially striking about Beauvoir’s narrative, from an existential, phenomenological, ethical, and political perspective, is the accountability she assumes for her whiteness and for the hostility it generates from black Americans in the segregationalist, “Jim Crow” South, even though the distinctively American form of racism she encounters there is a totally new experience for her. Rather than emphasizing her own “Outsider” status as a Frenchwoman, as one might expect a foreign traveler to do in such an uncomfortable situation, Beauvoir acknowledges and takes responsibility for her own privileged and protected position, which is due first and foremost to her white skin, and, to a lesser extent, to her sex and social class.29 Merleau-Ponty does not address the topic of racism explicitly in his work, yet his existential phenomenology does call attention to the significance of cultural differences in how specific gestures are understood and responded to in our daily social interactions. More specifically, his comments on the sedimentation of habits coupled with his recognition of the crucial role that one’s social class plays in shaping one’s point of view on the world one shares with others together provide crucial tools for understanding how and why racist habits of perception (and conception!) are often so hard to break, even when the basis for these perceptions (and conceptions) is clearly revealed to be false or illusory. Taking the phenomenon of sedimentation seriously, I argue, is crucial for any serious antiracist project that seeks to enact lasting social change. This is because sedimentation is not only part of the problem that helps to explain how racist attitudes are reinforced and passed down from one generation to another, but it must also be part of the solution since antiracist habits of perception need themselves to be sedimented on both individual and community levels in order to move us forward decisively toward a nonoppressive future. In America Day by Day, Beauvoir shares her personal reflections as a French intellectual on American culture, people, cities, institutions, and landscapes. A quasi-stranger in a strange land, who is competent but not fluent in the native language, she finds that her stereotypical preconceptions about Americans and American life are sometimes belied but just as often reinforced in her daily encounters both with Americans and expatriates from France and other European countries. As she traverses the city streets, visits old friends and new acquaintances in their homes, lectures at colleges and universities, meets with American editors and publishers in their corporate offices, listens to music at jazz clubs, watches American movies, stays in various American

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hotels, visits classic tourist sites around the country, and takes her meals at local restaurants, Beauvoir eagerly experiences American culture in both its “high” and “low” forms, often preferring the latter to the former. Never content just to live in the moment, Beauvoir records her varied impressions in a diary and in her frequent letters home, and, upon her return to France, she edits and publishes these reflections as America Day by Day. In an important sense, we can read this text as an ethnographic study of both Americans and America from the perspective of a non-native observer-participant who seeks to understand the specific culture, values, and social norms that define the different places she visits as she crisscrosses the United States from east to west and north to south. At the same time, this memoir is clearly an existential analysis that, as Beauvoir notes in her Preface, “is truthful only because it includes the unique personal circumstances in which each discovery was made.”30 As an existential project, America Day by Day attempts not only to describe the “American way of life” to her fellow countrymen, but also to convey the ways in which this experience in America profoundly affects Beauvoir herself. And though the major personal transformation that her biographers and commentators have long focused on concerns the commencement of her passionate love affair with the man she called her “American husband,” Nelson Algren, I would argue that her firsthand encounters as a white woman with American anti-black racism as a social, political, ideological, and structural reality gives Beauvoir a visceral experience of the responsibilities associated with white skin privilege that completely shatters any distinction she might have wanted to maintain between being a foreigner and being a native. Implicated completely in a drama not of her own making, Beauvoir discovers that a white woman in the American South in 1947 (or even in Harlem) is a white woman first and foremost: her ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, education, values, and social class are irrelevant. Moreover, to her increasing dismay, Beauvoir recognizes that the social, political, historical, and legal barriers that definitively separate her from the black men and women she encounters in the South cannot be surmounted by any of the efforts she makes to overcome them. That is, American racism is itself a sedimented reality that cannot be dismantled by one person’s conscious unwillingness to be associated in any way with it. Given her strong desire to “fit in,” not to be the Frenchwoman, the Other, but to be accepted as an equal by the various Americans she encounters, it is ironic that one of the times that Beauvoir loses her outsider status is when she may least want to, namely, when she is regarded as a generic White Woman

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indistinguishable from all others while she is traveling in the pre–civil rights era, Jim Crow South. This is a form of identification she finds abhorrent given her own antiracist politics, but instead of attempting to retreat to the detached standpoint of the outside observer who bears no responsibility for the history of race relations in America, she accepts responsibility for the hostility and resentment that she and her companion (who is a fellow Frenchwoman) inspire in the black men and women they encounter as they walk through an impoverished black neighborhood of New Orleans. This experience, Beauvoir quickly realizes, is vastly different from her leisurely, solitary strolls through the black neighborhoods of upper-Manhattan when she first arrived in the United States in late January. “This is not Lenox Avenue or Harlem,” she poignantly observes, “there is hatred and rage in the air.” And, she adds: [W]ith every step, our discomfort grows. As we go by, voices drop, gestures stop, smiles die: all life is suspended in the depths of those angry eyes. The silence is so stifling, the menace so oppressive that it’s almost a relief when something finally explodes. An old woman glares at us in disgust and spits twice, majestically, once for N., once for me. At the same moment, a tiny girl runs off crying, “Enemies: Enemies!” It seems a long way back to the squares with flowering baskets.31 Though Beauvoir and N. are clearly regarded as “outsiders” in this black community on the periphery of the city of New Orleans, this is not because they are French but because their whiteness confirms them as “insiders” who don’t belong there, and whose very presence, as the young girl’s cries attest, represents a threat despite their benign intentions. For, as white women who have chosen to venture, without warning, outside their designated space of privilege, their appearance runs the risk of calling forth their self-appointed “protector,” the White Man, who, as Fanon and Edward Said both emphasize, exerts his psychic, social, economic, political, and physical dominance over those whom he has colonized, whether or not “he” is actually present in the flesh. It is not insignificant, moreover, that the symbolic and material power of the “White Man” that Beauvoir unwillingly exemplifies during this trip to the American South in the mid–twentieth century continues to be so prominent two years after the conclusion of World War II, when the symbolic and material significance of being an “Aryan” (a more specific type of “White Man”) was reinforced not only in Germany but in all of the German-allied and German-occupied countries in Europe, including France.

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Said’s Orientalism provides an incisive critical analysis of this powerful figure of the “White Man” who, Said notes, has long been glorified for his colonizing conquests in British literature. Said observes that for Rudyard Kipling and his countrymen, “Being a White Man”: was . . . an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant—in the colonies— speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulation, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible.32 Clearly, the work performed by this iconic, larger-than-life figure throughout history renders him incapable, as Said rightly points out, of being interpreted simply as an ironic fiction. Indeed, we find him alive and well not only in Kipling’s own literary texts, where his colonizing exploits are glorified, but as he is experienced from a colonized people’s perspective, in Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. In contrast to Kipling’s laudatory portrayal of him, this “Other, the white man,” who Fanon repeatedly invokes (in the lower case), is a sinister, omnipotent, voracious force who infects the psyches of colonized people everywhere with a visceral sense of their essential inferiority. “The white man,” Fanon maintains, “is all around me; up above the sky is tearing at its navel; the earth crunches under my feet and sings white, white. All this whiteness burns me to a cinder.”33 There is no way to inoculate oneself from this all-devouring White gaze, according to Fanon. In his words, “I tried to escape without being seen, but the Whites fell on me and hamstrung me on the left leg. I gauged the limits of my essence; as you can guess, it was fairly meager.”34 The corporeal imagery Fanon is invoking here, being burned to a “cinder,” being “hamstrung” by the Whites who “fell on me,” far from being a rhetorical flourish, offers a graphic depiction of the

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actual bodily violence black people have faced for centuries at the hands of their white colonizers, who view them, paradoxically, both as essentially and irredeemably inferior and as an essential, irredeemable threat to white superiority. And, as Fanon points out, we should not be surprised that clinging to one’s essence as a human being offers far too little sustenance in the face of such dehumanizing violence. Perhaps it is not surprising, given Fanon’s account and Beauvoir’s own prior awareness of and sensitivity to the pervasiveness of American anti-black racism as well as her own (relatively) privileged status as a white woman, that she experiences the hostility she and her friend encounter on the segregated buses and streets across the U.S. South with genuine sorrow but not resentment. In order for black Americans “to refuse to accept” what Fanon calls an “amputation” of their very being-in-the-world, in order to maintain their humanity in the face of constant dehumanization, Beauvoir recognizes that it is almost inevitable that many of them will redirect the hatred the oppressor feels for them back onto the people who collectively represent the White man, whether or not they are white men, or even racist, themselves.35 Corporeally suffering the “collateral damage” of guilt by association, Beauvoir realizes that it is impossible, at least in the Jim Crow South, to openly express solidarity with the black people around her, or even to mitigate their despicable treatment at the hands of whites and white society more generally, as she and her friend quickly discover when their offer of a seat in the white section of their bus to a pregnant black woman is quickly, definitively, suspiciously, and fearfully refused. Traveling from New Orleans by bus to Jacksonville, Florida, through the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, Beauvoir observes that: [T]he great tragedy of the South pursues us like an obsession. Even the traveler confined to a bus and waiting rooms cannot escape it. From the time we entered Texas, everywhere we go there’s the smell of hatred in the air—the arrogant hatred of whites, the silent hatred of blacks. At the stations the respectable, badly dressed lower-middle-class matrons stare with envious anger at the pretty black girls in bright dresses and joyful jewelry, and the men resent the nonchalant beauty of the young black men in light suits. American niceness has no place here. In the crowded line outside the bus, the blacks are jostled. “You aren’t going to let that Negress go in front of you,” a woman says to a man in a voice trembling with fury.36

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As Beauvoir explicitly calls attention in this passage to the reciprocal, yet asymmetrical, hatred of white women and men for black women and men, she also reveals the impossibility of disentangling race relations from class relations. For the angry white woman trying to make sure that no black woman gets on the bus before she does, her race is the guarantor of the superior status that her underprivileged social and economic class fails to provide; given the precariousness of lower-middle-class existence in the post–World War II era, it is ironic, but perhaps not too surprising, that these white people envy their more attractive black counterparts even as they insist upon the deference that is supposed to flow unquestioningly from their whiteness alone. Beauvoir’s ready recognition of her own white skin privilege in America Day by Day facilitates her assumption of an existential responsibility that extends beyond her own actions to encompass the attitudes and actions of the society in which she is immersed, even when, as in Beauvoir’s case, this society is not her own. While Beauvoir makes her antipathy to anti-black racism clear throughout this text, this memoir, as well as her later work in The Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and other texts, also raises the question of how racist, classist, and sexist attitudes and behaviors become so ingrained in a particular society in the first place. How and why are some people able to find paths that lead out of the destructive trap of hatred and fear, envy and resentment, which fuels the flames of racism, classism, sexism and ableism, while others are not? Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of sedimentation in the Phenomenology of Perception, a text that Beauvoir herself both read and reviewed two years before her 1947 trip to America, I suggest, offers us a productive way of addressing this question. Strikingly, it is in the final chapter, entitled “Freedom,” in the Phenomenology of Perception that Merleau-Ponty invokes a major obstacle to changing racist attitudes toward others, attitudes we are often unaware we possess even as we respond to and judge others through them. Though he is not discussing racism, his claim that “we must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: when an attitude towards the world has been confirmed often enough, it becomes privileged for us” offers, I believe, a crucial insight into how racist attitudes are developed, reinforced, codified, and institutionalized over time, in the process becoming self-fulfilling prophecies for those who espouse them.37 Like Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty is indebted to Marx for the latter’s emphasis on the crucial role that one’s economic class plays in establishing the material, sociopolitical conditions out of which one makes sense of his or her life, including one’s concrete relations with others. “At the outset,” Merleau-Ponty

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tells us in this same chapter, in remarks that seem clearly aimed at the overemphasis on consciousness as the means to achieve existential freedom in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: I am not an individual above class; I am situated socially, and my freedom, even if it has the power to commit me elsewhere, does not have the power to turn me immediately into what I decide to be. Thus, being a bourgeois or a worker is not merely being conscious of so being, it is to give myself the value of a worker or a bourgeois through an implicit or existential project that merges with our way of articulating the world and of coexisting with others.38 The proletariat’s “attitude towards the world,” Merleau-Ponty suggests, is not a creation of his individual (self)consciousness but instead gradually and organically emerges over time and across space in response to the world he shares with his co-workers. Similarly, a bourgeois individual’s “attitude towards the world,” or habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s language, can’t be dissociated from his own class status even when, as Marx himself did, he rebels against it. “To make class consciousness into the result of a decision or a choice,” Merleau-Ponty maintains, “is to say that the questions are resolved the day they are posed, that every question already contains the response it awaits: it is, in short to return to immanence and to give up the hope of understanding history.”39 To understand history, for Merleau-Ponty, instead requires that we acknowledge the embeddedness of each individual in a particular social class that is itself situated within the larger intersubjective world; we cannot understand our respective attitudes toward one another or toward the world of our concern, he is suggesting, without recognizing the intercorporeal, temporal, political, economic, geographic, and historical conditions through which they have been formed, often without our explicit awareness. Thus, he asserts, “I am the one who gives a sense and a future to my life, but this does not mean that I conceive of this sense and this future; rather, they spring forth from my present and from my past, and particularly from my present and past mode of coexistence.”40 The sense and future of my life, as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in this passage, does not spring from the type of consciousness I have or how I choose to exercise it, but rather emerges organically out of the intercorporeal relations that situate me as a member of a particular social class with a specific racial, sexual, and cultural identity. These various, intersecting layers that comprise the sedimentation of my life may be more or less accessible to me or to others

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(e.g., through therapy that is supposed to help expose them), but, whether or not I become aware of them, the crucial point is that these identities and the existential attitudes associated with them are always already shaping the meanings of my encounters with others as well as my own self-perceptions. Moreover, it is precisely insofar as these identities and attitudes tend to operate in a pre-reflective manner that they so often escape our conscious attention and, as a result, that we are able to avoid taking responsibility for them. In the “Passivity” lectures Merleau-Ponty delivered two decades after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, he reinforces this point, observing that “we live in intersubjectivity . . . we do not make contact with ourselves any more than we make contact with others. Thus, no absolute privilege of the I.”41 As this passage suggests, Merleau-Ponty does not think that a subject’s perspective on herself or others can ever be rendered fully transparent, even in reflection. And yet, this does not mean that our habitual perspectives are incapable of being altered because, as he also emphasizes, they are never forged privately, but rather emerge out of our concrete relations with others, relations that are never static but always subject to change. A further complicating factor in acknowledging the ongoing influence of the racial, cultural, sexual, and religious attitudes that we have internalized since early childhood is that drawing explicit attention to racial, cultural, sexual, and/or religious differences, much less the stereotypical attitudes (both positive and negative) associated with them, is usually viewed as rude or, at the very least, socially inappropriate. Indeed, citing Toni Morrison’s observation in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that, “The habit of ignoring race is understood [by white people] to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture,” Shannon Sullivan points out in Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege, that “behind that ‘generosity’ often lurks a very self-serving desire. Far from being merely innocent, ignorance can operate as a shield that protects a person from realizing her complicity in an oppressive situation.”42 Identifying sedimented racist behaviors and/ or attitudes in ourselves and in others is undoubtedly a complicated project attendant with many risks. It requires that we acknowledge the “implicit biases” that influence the meaning we ascribe to our intersubjective encounters, which in turn involves making these implicit biases explicit so that they can be critiqued and, one hopes, minimized or eradicated altogether.43 Of course it is always possible that as we identify and eliminate some implicit biases, new sedimented habits of perception may replace them that are also problematic (racist, sexist, ableist, etc.). Thus, we must begin by refusing the

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“epistemology of ignorance” that disavows our existential responsibility for the perceptual habits that we form, even when these latter largely operate on a pre-reflective level. Even though, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly asserts, the world and everyone who coexists with us in it appear meaningful to us from the outset, independently of our conscious action, this does not mean that we are condemned to merely accept the established meanings and values that present themselves all too often as unquestioned norms. Invoking Marx, Merleau-Ponty definitively asserts at the conclusion of the Phenomenology of Perception that class revolutions are always possible. But these revolutions, as Marx emphasizes, arise out of the material conditions of lived experience—that is, they are motivated by the very history that may seem to preclude them. Thus freedom, Merleau-Ponty declares, “only modifies history by taking up what history offered at the moment in question, and it does so by a sort of shift or slippage.”44 Modifying history, both Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir insist, is a collaborative project that relies heavily on the contingent opportunities that may suddenly be provided by a given situation; it can never be performed by a single individual or even a group of individuals acting alone.45 As Beauvoir famously observes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, one cannot will one’s own freedom without simultaneously willing the freedom of others. And, Merleau-Ponty reminds us, this can never be construed as a purely abstract or theoretical project, for “[f ]ar from my freedom being forever alone, it is in fact never without accomplices, and its power of perpetually tearing itself away leans upon my universal engagement in the world.”46 Recognizing that her white skin can’t help but make her an accomplice in the racist drama that unfolds all around her, Beauvoir is forced to confront the limits of consciousness as well as the limits of her own embodiment. Rather than attempting an impossible detachment from her lived experience as a white woman in the American South, she chooses to own it and examine it, in conversations and in writing, not shying away from the ugly truths it reveals. Engaging concretely in this intersubjective world, for both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, is the only means of transforming it; rather than positing antiracist, antisexist, liberatory utopias as transcendent ideals we should individually or even collectively strive for, their work suggests that we can only confront the oppressive forces of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism day by day, relationship by relationship, gesture by gesture, working together to modify history so that its sedimentations do justice to all of the bodies and all of the societies out of which it is created.

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NOTES 1. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8.2 (August) (2007), 149–68, 157. See also Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), xv. 2. Although the term “white ignorance” certainly extends beyond a lack of awareness of the white privilege that is enjoyed by oneself or others, I am invoking the term to refer specifically to this latter phenomenon. 3. Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 188. 4. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks, Richard Philcox (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 91. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 111. I am citing both Philcox’s 2008 translation of Fanon’s original term, malédiction corporelle as “bodily curse” as well as Lam Markmann’s 1967 use of the more literal expression, “corporeal malediction” here because both powerfully convey the somatic trauma that is one of the least recognized and discussed, yet at the same time, most debilitating legacies of racism. 5. Vivian M. May, Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (New York: Routledge, 2015), 23. Not only does one person’s (or nation’s) privilege intensify another person’s (or nation’s) oppression, but, as May, Audre Lorde, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and many other feminist, critical race, Marxist, and disability theorists have pointed out, an individual may be privileged in some ways (e.g., race, class, and/or gender) and discriminated against in others (e.g., sexuality, religion, and/or disability). By focusing fairly narrowly on white privilege and white ignorance, I am knowingly running the risk of providing what Crenshaw calls a “single-axis” account that does not sufficiently acknowledge that over- and underprivilege are often experienced simultaneously and so are intertwined phenomena that can both be true for a single individual. Ultimately, it is clear that a more comprehensive account of both privilege and oppression as they are experienced both by individuals and by larger groups requires an intersectional or “matrix” analysis. The more modest task I am taking up here, namely, raising questions about the existential and ethical status of the claim that a person can be unaware of her or his unearned racial privilege, is intended to contribute to this larger project.

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6. May, Pursuing Intersectionality, 23. George Herbert Mead’s term “conversation of gestures” seems particularly apt to describe this dynamic, affective relationship between overprivileged and underprivileged bodies even though Mead does not use this expression to address the relationship between entitlement and oppression. See George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, Society, Charles W. Morris (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 63. Although I am unable to develop this point further here, I find Mead’s insistence that the meaning of the conversation is never pre-established or privately determined, but rather an emergent, socially constructed phenomenon that unfolds across time and space (even without the explicit awareness of the participants who contribute to it) to be directly pertinent to this discussion. 7. George Yancy, “White Gazes: What it Feels Like to be an Essence.” In Emily S. Lee (ed.) Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 43–64, 51 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 8. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 3–4. 9. Butler offers a moving portrayal of the marginalized world(s) occupied by people who violate bodily norms of race, gender, and/or sexuality in the Introduction to Bodies that Matter. She describes this abject domain as “those zones of ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.” Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. Butler’s Hegelian emphasis on the constitutive role that this abject domain plays in shoring up the unquestioned superiority and legitimacy of the white, heteronormative world, reminds us of how co-dependent these “zones” are even when the relation between them is unacknowledged or actively disavowed. 10. Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 158. 11. This term is introduced originally by Sullivan in the Introduction to Revealing Whiteness, and she also provides a wonderful, in-depth discussion of this phenomenon in the chapter called “Race Space, and Place.” Ahmed in turn takes up this term to describe how the experience of the “I can” body itself can function as a form of racial privilege. 12. Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161. 13. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness. My emphasis. This expression serves as the subtitle of her book.

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14. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, offers a detailed, psychoanalytic account of the “unconscious habits of racial privilege” while other contemporary critical race theorists such as Charles Mills, Alia Al-Saji, George Yancy, and Sara Ahmed only periodically suggest that an individual can be unconscious of her racial privilege. More often, the latter theorists ascribe this unawareness to unthematized, taken-for-granted, and/or pre-reflective habits and behaviors. I hope to demonstrate that this latter thesis is a much more promising and phenomenologically accurate way of describing white ignorance than can be obtained from a psychoanalytic appeal to unconscious habits of white privilege, notwithstanding the subtle and frequently compelling features of Sullivan’s feminist, pragmatist, and profoundly antiracist account. While I would not deny, as Jean-Paul Sartre has famously done, the existence of the unconscious itself, or that there are unconscious forces at work that help to secure the “bad faith” of white ignorance as a relatively stable phenomenon, I am arguing that white ignorance persists primarily because white privilege is a pre-reflective, taken-for-granted, and habitual experience that can remain unthematized and hence unnoticed as long as it is not directly challenged. Indeed, a major privilege of white privilege is that it can offer the possibility of remaining blissfully ignorant of it for many, many years or, in some cases, for a lifetime. 15. Plato, it should be noted, does not seem to hold the cave people responsible for not wanting to leave the cave to see whether there is indeed another reality outside of its confines until the possibility of exiting the cave is available to them; that is, they are responsible for clinging to false beliefs only and as soon as the means of refuting them exists. Nor does he seem to hold them responsible for being entrapped in the cave and therefore subject to its limitations in the first place. While one might argue that the cave reality is the prisoners’ true reality and so take issue with Plato’s depiction of their “world” as an illusory or deceptive appearance, the pertinent point is that the prisoners are unaware of the fact that the “reality” of others may be quite different from their own. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir cites slaves and women in harems as examples of people whose lifelong, severe oppression may render them unaware of the possibilities, however limited, of realizing their freedom and she suggests that their passive acceptance of their tragic lot is due to their having been “mystified” by their oppressors; while Beauvoir does not appeal to the unconscious to explain the reason for their lack of awareness that they deserve a better life, she does claim that it is the responsibility of others who are not mystified to offer the “seeds of liberation”

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to these oppressed people so that the latter can acquire the material, social, and emotional resources necessary to pursue their freedom on their own terms. As Beauvoir observes: “the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed themselves; mystification is one of the forms of oppression; ignorance is a situation in which man may be enclosed as narrowly as in a prison . . .” See Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Bernard Frechtman (trans.) (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1976), 98. While I am focusing on privileged people’s (alleged) ignorance of their privilege in this essay in contrast to Beauvoir’s concern with people who are ignorant of the illegitimacy of their oppressed status and so who passively accept it as their “lot” in life, both examples differentially raise what I am calling “the question of awareness,” a question that may also require quite different answers due to the crucial existential factors that radically separate these respective situations. 16. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 4. 17. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 5–6. 18. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 7. 19. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 7. 20. See chapter 1, “Context and Perspective” of my Refiguring the Ordinary for an in-depth discussion of the figure/ground structure of perception and chapter 5, “Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks: Habitual Horizons in James, Bourdieu, and Merleau-Ponty” for an extended discussion of habit and perception. Gail Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Alia Al-Saji’s, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” in Emily E. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 133–172 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), directly addresses the thorny issue of how to change racist habits of perception. Helen Fielding’s essay: “The Poetry of Habit: Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Aging Embodiment,” in Silvia Stoller (ed.) Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age: Gender, Ethics, and Time, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), highlights the creative possibilities afforded by habit in our daily lives. 21. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 149. 22. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 149. 23. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume III: The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained, Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 92.

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24. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Thing Past, Volume II: The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain, Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilartin (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 123. 25. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 155. 26. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massy (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 192. 27. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 192. 28. Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Future of Whiteness,” in Emily E. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Embodiment, and Race, pp. 255–281 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 159. 29. Indeed, I would argue that what Beauvoir is offering here is an intersectionalist account of her white skin privilege, which involves the acknowledgment that this privilege is never attributable simply to one’s race since it is also affected by one’s other “visible identities” (to use Linda Martín Alcoff’s expression), such as one’s sex, gender, and social class. See Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 30. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day By Day, Carol Cosman (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xvii. 31. Beauvoir, America Day By Day, 236. 32. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 227. My emphasis. 33. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 94. 34. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 109. 35. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 119. 36. Beauvoir, America Day By Day, 233. 37. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Donald A. Landes (trans.) (New York: Routledge Press, 2012), 466. 38. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 473. 39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 472. 40. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 472. 41. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 134. 42. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 127–128. See also Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 9–10. 43. The rapidly growing literature on and tests for “implicit bias” in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the social sciences are providing

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powerful ammunition in the struggle to make racist habits of perception visible, a necessary (though clearly not sufficient) first step to undermining them. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), in particular, provides an easy, yet dramatic way to assess the power of one’s own “implicit biases” in one’s everyday life. See implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. 44. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 476. 45. The sudden upsurge of the “Black Lives Matter” movement in response to specific, widely publicized racist incidents in the United States that culminated in the deaths of unarmed black citizens is an excellent case in point. 46. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 479.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (August 2007): 149–168. Alcoff, Linda Martín. “The Future of Whiteness.” In Emily E. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 255–281. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Al-Saji, Alia. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Emily E. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 133–172. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. MalovanyChevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. Translated by C. Cosman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by B. Frechtman. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1976. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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Crenshaw, Kimberle W. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–168. DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Fielding, Helen. “The Poetry of Habit: Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Aging Embodiment.” In Silva Stoller (ed.), Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age: Gender, Ethics, and Time, pp. 69–81. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Lazarre, Jane. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” In Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, pp. 281–287. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1: The Process of Capitalist Production. Edited by Frederick Engels; translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1979. May, Vivian M. Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. New York: Routledge, 2015. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Translated by L. Lawlor and H. Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D.A. Landes. New York: Routledge Press, 2012. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Plato. Republic “Book VII.” In Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Paul Shorey. 747–772. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, Volume II: The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain. Translated by S. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, Volume III: The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. Translated by S. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by H.E. Barnes. New York: Pocket Books, 1956. Schutz, Alfred. Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Sullivan, Shannon. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Weiss, Gail. Refiguring the Ordinary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Yancy, George. “White Gazes: What it Feels Like to be an Essence.” In Emily S. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 43–64. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In I.M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, pp. 141–159. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990

CHAPTER 4

Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility Danielle Petherbridge

In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison depicts the Breedlove family as poor and black, and accepting of their dire circumstances because they believe they are ugly. The novel revolves around Pecola, the youngest daughter of the Breedlove family, who Morrison describes as someone who is rendered invisible in her social context and who experiences the death of self-esteem due to a lack of recognition.1 As Pecola goes to buy candy at the local store, her invisibilization is rendered in piercing terms: She pulls off her shoe and takes out the three pennies. The gray head of Mr. Yacobowski [the storekeeper] looms up over the counter. He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Blear-dropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant store-keeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth . . . see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary . . . She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition . . . 2 103

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The social philosopher Axel Honneth describes failures of recognition such as the one Pecola experiences as a form of social “invisibility”—a form of perception that designates the subject has been actively or intentionally ignored or “looked through.” In this sense, recognition is considered not merely a form of cognition but an intentionally expressive act that overwhelmingly confers “the positive meaning of an affirmation.” Consequently, the absence of such forms of “social” perception indicates that a subject (or group) is not visible in a figurative sense for the other—in other words, they are not granted social validity.3 In this chapter I examine the phenomenology of invisibility and modes of racializing perception through which “others” are intentionally denied social existence or validity. First, I explore the dynamics of seeing others, or what I am terming the dialectics of hypervisibility and invisibility, in racializing perception, drawing initially on texts by Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and Frantz Fanon. Following a consideration of the lived experience of race depicted by these existential-phenomenological authors, I wish to consider what it might take to rupture the racializing habits of seeing so vividly portrayed in their work.4 To explore this possibility, I turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insights about embodied perception and Alia Al-Saji’s account of “hesitation” as a means of breaking embedded habits of racializing perception. Finally, I turn to Axel Honneth’s work to consider the argument that re-visioning the dynamic of seeing others requires a reconceptualization of the interrelation between perception, cognition, and recognition. That is, what is required for Mr. Yacobowski, the storekeeper in Morrison’s novel, not only to make the effort to “see” Pecola, but also, in undertaking this act, to grant her social validity? What is it that fills the “vacuum” between “retina and object,” “vision and view,” that in this case is not addressed by the storekeeper’s hesitation but instead requires a fundamental act of social recognition? My intention here is to bring together resources from both phenomenology and social philosophy to provide an effective account of the phenomenology of invisibility and the dynamics of racializing perception, and to consider what is required for an ethical account of seeing others. In pursuing these questions, I am also concerned with the ways in which forms of affectivity and racialization circulate around the bodies of racialized minorities, and the forms of lived experience and subjectivity that develop when certain bodies are overdetermined and marked as “different” from the “universal white norm” in particular spaces.5 In this sense, as I shall discuss below, hypervisibility and invisibility, although seemingly contradictory, work

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together; one creates overdetermined perceptions in the gaze of the other; the other is de-subjectifying. As George Yancy suggests in forms of hypervisibility the racialized body becomes excessive, whereas in experiences of invisibilization the body is constantly under erasure, and the individual struggles to be recognized as a subject. Thus, in both cases, “the ocular frame of reference” is central because, paradoxically, the racialized body is a “seen absence” or “seen invisibility.”6 But the question is: within whose field of vision are forms of visibility and invisibility framed? As Yancy points out, in the United States the “black body’s racial experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the raced white body.”7 As George Yancy and Shannon Sullivan both argue, we can only understand racializing perception and the phenomenology of invisibility if we identify the way in which whiteness is the taken-for-granted norm and as such is itself fundamentally invisibilized. Sullivan argues that we not only need to speak about colored or black lived experience but also the ontological expansiveness of white bodies. By this she means “the habit . . . of assuming and acting as if any and all spaces—geographical, psychological, cultural, linguistic [and so on]—are rightfully available to and open for white people to enter whenever they like.”8 Thus, it is important to note that the forms of hypervisibility and invisibility conveyed by Morrison and Ellison, for example, are structurally supported by another more fundamental invisibility: the invisibility of whiteness as the somatic norm. In this sense, the bodies of racialized minorities are seen to be trespassers when they enter such spaces,9 and they are rendered either highly visible or suffer denial and invisibilized. As Puwar suggests, “in accordance with how bodies and spaces are imagined they are circumscribed as being ‘out of place’; they are ‘space invaders’” in particular kinds of public and political spaces.10 With this crucial point about the invisibility of whiteness kept in mind, I now want to turn to a more detailed consideration of the dialectics of invisibility and the lived experience of race. In doing so, however, I want to stress that racializing perception is understood not simply in terms of its ocular elements, but as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, perception must also be considered in terms of embodied gestures and habits that become sedimented in particular cultural, social, and historical contexts and that are picked up, lived, and reiterated by subjects in their embodied encounters with others.11

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THE DIALECTICS OF INVISIBILITY AND THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF RACE Linda Martín Alcoff argues for the importance of an approach to racialization that begins from lived embodied experience, suggesting that “subjective descriptions” demonstrate the ways in which constructions of race are “a constitutive element of fundamental everyday” life and social interaction. As she highlights, “the body itself is a dynamic material domain” not only due to its visibility but also to “the materiality of the body,” which is the site of changing racializing projections and inscriptions that vary across different social-historical contexts. Importantly, as she notes, an account of lived experience can elucidate the ways in which these projections are often picked up and lived by and through the bodies upon which they are inscribed. As Martín Alcoff suggests, such projections then tend to produce “gestural and perceptual practices [that are] correlated to racial identity and a tacit but substantive racialized subjectivity.”12 In this way, as Janice McLane suggests, racialized bodies tend to “develop . . . styles or modalities of endurance” in order to survive. Such modalities become incorporated into the subject’s corporeal style or mode of being-in-the-world, and the body becomes a site of conformity to oppressive conditions.13 Ralph Ellison’s text Invisible Man describes such corporeal modalities and the lived experience of race in visceral terms. Painfully subjected to the structural conditions of racism, Ellison’s “invisible man” finds himself living underground, illegally tapping the New York electricity grid as a form of protest and striking out at those who ignore or “look through” him as he walks the streets attempting to elicit some kind of recognition. In the context of everyday interactions, he begins to comport himself in a manner that actively seeks to rupture his invisibility through bodily movements and gestures. Ellison’s main character (who remains nameless throughout) begins by explaining his invisibility: “I am an invisible man,” he says. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”14 As with Toni Morrison’s work, Ellison’s novel explores the way in which the main character is constituted by his being-for-others, and depicts the way in which he is constantly objectified and distorted by the white gaze.15 He powerfully depicts the dialectical experience of the hypervisibility of the black

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body and the invisibility through which such bodies are constantly erased. In the opening scenes, this “visible invisibility” is explained as being the result of “the construction of the inner eyes” of white people, those “inner eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”16 As George Yancy suggests, Ellison’s provocative description suggests that invisibility is a form of ontological and epistemological violence, which points to the sedimented habits or general normative constructs of white perception of “others.”17 As Ellison’s invisible man explains, sometimes it is “advantageous to be unseen” to avoid scrutiny and excessive determination by others. But, he says, the problem is that when you remain constantly unseen or invisible you begin to “doubt if you really exist . . . You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in a real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish” and you begin to comport yourself in a manner that might “make them recognize you” instead of bumping into you in the darkness of the night.18 These themes are brilliantly and explicitly conveyed throughout the text, where on several occasions both as a youth in the South of the United States, and later when he moves to New York, Ellison’s invisible man finds himself caught in a one-way gaze; he is looked at by the white other but is unable to see them or return their gaze. For example, early in the text, the invisible man is misled into thinking he is being invited to give a speech to a whites-only gentleman’s club on the “progress of his race and the opportunities he has been afforded.” However, upon arriving at the venue, instead he is forced into a boxing ring with other young black men where they are made to fight one another blindfolded. In this scene, the white lawyers, doctors, and councilors watch on jeering, whilst the black boys who are fighting are unable to return their gaze or even to see one another. Later in the novel, when the protagonist moves to New York and is hired by the Communist Party to bolster their black credentials, one of the members asks: “But don’t you think he should be a little blacker?”19 As he stands on a stage in Harlem, encouraged by the committee to incite enthusiasm for the cause, he describes feeling somewhat like a rabbit caught in a spotlight. He walks to the microphone and upon doing so enters “the spot of light” that surrounds him like a “seamless cage of steel . . . The light was so strong that [he could] no longer see the audience, the bowl of human faces. It was as though a semi-transparent curtain had dropped between [them] . . . through which they could see [him but] without themselves being seen.”20 As a result, Ellison’s invisible man feels he is being watched at all times; he says he always feels the “pressure of eyes.” Goldberg has described this hypervisibility

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of contemporary African Americans as being a form of “Super/vision,” whereby black bodies and black neighborhoods are continuously under a spotlight. Not only are their identities exaggerated and overdetermined in terms of racist stereotypes, such as being constructed as a “threat” or a “hazard,” but they are constantly surveilled and their visibility monitored and supervised.21 Thus, while black bodies are “marked” as highly visible, they are invisible in the sense that they are de-subjectified and denied social validity; forms of objectification that overdetermine and mark racialized bodies as highly conspicuous are simultaneously a form of invisibilization in the sense that they de-legitimate and deny subjectivity or social recognition. Ellison provides a powerful literary example of both the lived experience and generalized structures of racism when the main protagonist first moves to New York and finds a job working for “Liberty Paints.” As he ponders the company slogan—“Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints”—he is instructed to make tins of white paint that he is told are being shipped for use by the government on national monuments. His task is to add ten drops of an unspecified black liquid into the paint and to stir the black liquid in until it disappears and produces a purer, whiter paint. He later learns that the name of the paint is “Optic White” and is proudly championed by the company with the slogan, “If it’s Optic White, It’s the Right White.”22 As Yancy suggests, Ellison’s evocation of “optic white” here can literally be translated as “eye white” or “seeing white,” a theme that also resonates in Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, in which the young Pecola is obsessed with whiteness and blue eyes. In Morrison’s text, Pecola only ever sees “the eyes of other people”—eyes that she constantly shrinks from in belief of confirmation of her ugliness; blue eyes, the eyes for which she yearns; those pretty blue eyes on Mary Jane candy wrappers and movie hall posters; the same eyes that look at her with “distaste.” She has seen this look “lurking in the eyes of all white people . . .”—a dislike for “her blackness.” It is this blackness that is understood to create the “vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes.” She feels condemned by the gaze of others from whom she internalizes “immutable inferiority.” She wishes she could eat those eyes; to eat blue-eyed Mary Jane on the candy wrapper; to “[b]e Mary Jane”; or to be “validated” by “ingesting whiteness.”23 Frantz Fanon famously captures this kind of dialectics of invisibility in Black Skin, White Masks when his body becomes the object of a racializing look or gaze when traveling in metropolitan France. “Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!” exclaims a little white boy. With that, Fanon explains, “he couldn’t take it any longer.” He felt his “body schema, attacked in several

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places” and, as a result, “it collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema.”24 A sudden acute awareness of his body, this experience of “epidermalization,” makes him feel uncertain; he is no longer a body-subject, but his body becomes “solely negating” and he experiences it in the “third person” as a body-object. Suddenly, he says, his body was not only his body but also stood in for his race and his ancestors. He discovers that beneath the body schema lies an “historical-racial schema.”25 He objectifies himself, gazing at himself as if in the third person, and “discovers his blackness,” internalizing the racial projections that are directed at him by the white population. His encounters with others leave him “unable to discover the feverish coordination of the world,” and his body is “returned” to him “spread-eagled, disjointed, redone . . .”26 Like Ellison’s narrator, Fanon describes the way in which as a result of these racializing encounters he amends his bodily mode of being-in-the-world. He takes to “slipping into corners,” “to keeping silent.” “All I want,” he says, “is to be anonymous, to be forgotten.” Despite wanting to resist the associations made by others of his perceived body with “white teeth,” “big feet,” “cannibalism,” “backwardness,” “slave traders,” and “racial stigmas,” he exclaims: “Look, I’ll agree to everything, on the condition I go unnoticed!”27 And, yet, like Ellison’s “invisible man,” he is at the same time bewildered by the fact that he is continually ignored and “looked through.” His disbelief is palpable: “Whereas I had every reason to vent my hatred and loathing [toward them], they were rejecting me? [ . . . ] I was denied the slightest recognition.”28 And since, like Ellison’s “invisible man,” he remains unrecognized, he feels compelled to strike out to make himself known, to shout out his blackness.29 As these texts reveal, racialization is sedimented both in forms of bodily comportment as well as in habits of perception or seeing. As Alia Al-Saji suggests, the process of racialization relies on a “projective mechanism” or intentionality by which certain undesirable features or aspects of identity are projected onto the other. What is most pernicious about this projective mechanism is not only that it remains hidden from view, but that it works to ossify difference into hierarchical structures that are situationally embedded, thereby impeding the openness and fluidity of relationality in particular contexts. In this way, structures and processes of racialization come to be viewed as a “feature of the world,” and perceptions of race become tied to “visible features of the body”—they become “epidermalized,” to use Fanon’s term.30 Certain constructions of race thereby become “naturalized,” and these categorizations become inscribed upon the perceived body.

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Thus, as Al-Saji demonstrates, forms of racialization predominate lived experience predominately by means of perception, even though these structures and processes largely remain invisible.31 They work to naturalize certain bodily features such as body shape, features, and skin color, as well as attach “naturalizing” stereotypes to forms of bodily practice and clothing. In this context, Al-Saji questions whether vision is inherently and universally objectifying, as Sartre’s work would seem to suggest, or if “there is a distinctive phenomenological structure to [racializing] ways of seeing . . .” that are reinforced through social, cultural, and historical “constructs.”32 Employing a Merleau-Pontian framework, Al-Saji argues that the “rigidity” of racializing vision can be deconstructed, or “interrupted,” and its historical and social situatedness made manifest, which consequently enables a basis for both the critique and transformation of such practices of vision.33 But what is it about perception that facilitates racializing forms of seeing, and how can such practices be ruptured? Moreover, can our modes of seeing be re-visioned such that they become the basis for ethical forms of perception?

RE-VISIONING ETHICAL FORMS OF SEEING: PERCEPTION CONTRA SARTRE In his study Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay suggests that perception, or more properly vision, has a tarnished reputation, particularly following the work of Sartre and in the wake of French post-phenomenological philosophers, who have tended to argue that vision is inherently objectifying, alienating, or dominating.34 In contrast to this trend, and following Merleau-Ponty, writers such as Kelly Oliver and Alia Al-Saji have in different ways attempted to show that such violent or objectifying tendencies are not intrinsic to the nature of vision as such but made “possible by the intentional structure of vision and its reliance on habit.” This does not mean, however, that such tendencies are necessary properties of vision. As Al-Saji argues, objectification and domination are not universal traits of vision but contingent upon certain social, cultural, and historical circumstances that facilitate racializing perception and structure habits of seeing.35 As James Hatley has suggested, the problem with conventional understandings of vision has been a tendency toward totalization, that is, “to consider all phenomena are both seeable and fully seen.”36 In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s work offers the means to elucidate an alternative model

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of perception, one that abandons any attempt at totalization or control and avoids objectification. In his work on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty explores the way in which the painter abandons the notion of the “distanced spectator” with a “god’s-eye” view, who is able to “see objects in perspectivalized space from afar.”37 Instead, he suggests that Cézanne developed a sense of “lived-experience,” which he attempted to convey in painting, thus challenging either geometric or photographic perception. Thus, Cézanne is said to have been aware of a multisensory notion of perception that he attempted to disclose in his work, breaking down the “distance between viewer and viewed” and inspiring a sense of wonder in that which was perceived. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, Cézanne wanted “to make visible how the world touches us”; to “see the depth, the smoothness, the hardness of objects . . . even see their odor.”38 Moreover, Cézanne’s work also offers a means by which perceptual habits might be ruptured or suspended. His “painting suspends all . . . habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself.” Instead he challenges our taken-for-granted view of things and discloses new ways of seeing: his “people are strange,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “as if viewed by a creature from another species.”39 Hence, as Jorella Andrews suggests, Cézanne’s painting evokes a sense of perceptual instability and an alternative way of seeing, which demonstrates how perception both exceeds and undermines itself.40 In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty proclaims: “Perception . . . asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a whole perceptual future. Similarly, when I say that I know and like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed of him.”41 In this context, Merleau-Ponty writes, perception is a “violent act.” As Jorella Andrews suggests, this image of violence of which Merleau-Ponty speaks has a two-fold meaning. On the one hand, it suggests perception has both a temporal and spatial dimension. In other words, there is a “beyond” to perception such that it “extends into the future” and does not inherently remain static or fixed in time; rather, it “remains open to the unfolding of experience.” On the other hand, this temporality points to the centrality of lived experience, which, Andrews argues, means that vision is not inherently objectifying and rigid but has the potential to be “ethically productive”—that is, new experiences have “the power to shatter truth claims” that become attached to particular forms of perception.42 The “violence”

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of perception, then, is both projective and assertive, but this means it also has the capacity to rupture established patterns of seeing and to open up new forms of perception. The fact that, as Shannon Sullivan suggests, our “bodily existence is projective” means acts of perception are “centrifugal” and have the capacity to open outward toward the world and to others. This fact also points to the “impersonal” and “anonymous” nature of perception, which reveals that living bodies have the same structure and the same projective capacities; that is, they are mutually recognizable in the sense that all embodied persons have a similar and “familiar way of dealing with the world.”43 Importantly, as Andrews’s discussion makes clear, Merleau-Ponty also seems to assume a “primordial” mode of perception prior to objectification or reification that is based on prereflexive or nonconceptual thought. In Phenomenology of Perception, seemingly as a direct critique of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty writes: “In fact the other’s gaze transforms me into an object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature.”44 As Andrews suggests, then, it appears that alienating and objectifying vision are associated with abstract thought and judgment in a way that has “relinquished their primordial embeddedness in perception.”45 More precisely, in a manner that has some affinities with Honneth’s notion of primary intersubjectivity or recognition as prior to reification, Merleau-Ponty also articulates this in social and intersubjective terms, when he states: Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgment. It is false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification.46 For Merleau-Ponty, then, our projective intentionality does not inherently posit the other as an object within a field but in fact the projective, outward movement of our bodily existence points to a form of relationality and intersubjectivity.47 In this sense, and in contrast to Sartre, mutually objectifying perception should not be considered an inherent aspect of perception but is in fact a “modification” of a primary mode of relatedness. Taylor Carman captures this point well when he suggests that “[t]he dramatic antagonistic experience Sartre regards as metaphysically basic is in fact a kind of interpersonal

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disturbance or distortion, a felt deviation from a social equilibrium that is ordinarily inconspicuous precisely because it is so pervasive in our experience and our understanding. The pressing phenomenological task, which Sartre neglects, is to describe that background social equilibrium that makes such interpersonal disturbances intelligible as deviations from a preferred state.”48 As I will discuss further below, this notion of a primordial or “background social equilibrium” is precisely what Honneth also seeks to address with the notion of primary affectivity or recognition. The crux of Honneth’s notion of recognition is that “all human coexistence presupposes a kind of basic mutual affirmation between subjects, since otherwise no form of being-together whatsoever could ever come into existence.”49 As we shall see in the final section, in Honneth’s view recognition relations always already provide a minimal background of affirmative relationality that underlies forms of conflict, objectification, or alienation because for such negative forms of relationality to occur “subjects must, in some way, have already recognized each other” in advance.50 In this sense, both Honneth and Merleau-Ponty seem to share the view that a basic form of social relationality precedes all forms of objectification and contemplative thought, and that such phenomena are indicative of a forgetfulness or denial of primary social bonds and open perceptual horizons.51

RUPTURING RACIALIZED PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION However, in particular social and historical contexts, habits of perception also develop to reinforce racializing patterns of seeing. In this sense it is important to understand the schism that occurs between underlying forms of affirmative intersubjectivity and objectifying or alienating habits of perception, particularly because, as Honneth suggests, recognition and the human capacity for perception are closely interconnected. What is required, then, to rupture racializing habits of perception in order that recognition is re-established? In her early work, Al-Saji describes the possibility of an ethics of seeing as a form of “expressive vision” that is both creative and attentive, one that does not reside within vision alone but is interwoven with the other senses, especially listening, hearing, and touching, as well as bodily gestures and language.52 As she explains it, her proposal is aimed at “[interrupting] the usual tendencies of vision, its desire for ubiquity, as well as habits of objectification and generalization.” Interrupting the objectifying habits of vision enables us instead to develop what Waldenfels refers to as a “responsiveness” to the

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other, or as Al-Saji suggests, enables us to “await the other in active attentiveness.”53 Concurring with Linda Martín Alcoff’s contention that we need to develop new modes of seeing, Al-Saji suggests that “unlearning” or “seeing” racism requires a “fluid” and “non-oppositional” form of vision that does not create a veil of ignorance or “color-blindness” but “unlearns and criticizes these habitual and categorical ways of seeing.”54 In later work, Al-Saji builds on these ideas in her study on racializing vision, suggesting that nonobjectifying perception requires not merely attentiveness but also “hesitation” in order to open up both time and space in which such perceptual reorientations can occur. In this sense, she factors in both a temporal element (pause or hesitation) as well as attentiveness based on what might be termed a form of affectivity in relational space. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, perception is “ambiguous” and “shifting,” and “is shaped by its context.”55 Moreover, we perceive objects always as part of a field or as a “figure against a background” such that objects are never perceived in isolation but always in relation to something else, or in other words, perception might be said to be structured differentially. In this sense, vision works in such a way that it allows “certain aspects of that world to be foregrounded” whilst other aspects become invisibilized, and hence it “makes visible . . . according to sedimented habits of seeing.”56 As Merleau-Ponty describes in Phenomenology of Perception, vision is “always limited” in the sense that “around what I am looking at a given moment is spread a horizon of things which are not seen, or which are even invisible.”57 However, as Al-Saji also argues, racializing vision cannot be attributed solely to habitual forms of seeing. In fact, she makes the important argument that “racializing vision is more and less than vision in general.”58 Given Merleau-Ponty’s description of the openness and ambiguity of vision, Al-Saji means to suggest that racializing vision must indicate that this openness toward a “perceptual future” has somehow been closed down, inhibiting the potential of vision to “shatter perceptual schemas” in which racialized bodies might be “seen otherwise.” Moreover, such processes then “overdetermine” what is seen in the production of particular “representations and affects” that are inscribed on the perceived body. As Al-Saji suggests, “racializing vision thus wears “blinders” . . . It is a representational and objectifying way of seeing.”59 We might also argue, with Honneth, that this inability to see otherwise is not only a habitualized mode of seeing based on the sedimentation of certain racializing perceptions but the neglect to grant the other “visibility” in the ethical sense of granting them social validity. Moreover, as I will discuss further

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below, it can be suggested that these reifying or objectifying forms of vision indicate a denial of underlying relations of recognition or elementary forms of affectivity. What Al-Saji terms the “I cannot” of seeing in racialized forms of vision can then be understood as belonging to social-historical horizons (or the closing down of those horizons), not to the structure of vision per se. As Al-Saji puts it, what is “closed down in racializing perception is the receptivity of vision: its ability to be affected, to be touched, by that which lies beneath its habitual objectifying schemas.”60 In other words, primary forms of relationality or affectivity are “forgotten,” to employ Honneth’s terms. In a similar manner, Al-Saji suggests that what is characteristic about racializing vision is the way in which it limits a primary “affective openness” to others and ignores the “relationality,” “plasticity,” and “livedness” of bodies, instead ossifying or reifying them into different “natural and cultural types.”61 As Helen Ngo suggests, “[r]acism does not unfold primarily in the register of conscious thought or action, but more intimately and insidiously in the register of bodily habit.”62 In this sense, two interconnected aspects need to be taken into account—embodied perception and responsive gesture— which are both “mutually reinforcing aspects” of racialization.63 Moreover, Ngo argues that racist practices or habits are best explained if both embodied gestures and affects, as well as racializing forms of perception, are analyzed as active iterations that are taken up and held in the body. Thus, although more generalized structures or patterns of racism become sedimented or calcified, racist habits and forms of perception reinforce one another and are “held and activated” by individual embodied subjects. In this sense, they are not passive or unconscious thoughts or practices, but individual bodies become “receptive” and “compatible” with more generalized patterns of racism within a particular social or cultural milieu.64 As Merleau-Ponty suggests, “it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another . . .”; it is my body that builds up an implicit knowledge and familiarity with the world through its movement and interactions with objects and other bodily subjects, and it is the body’s intentionality that gears us toward the world.65 Moreover, it is through our projective action or intentionality that objects are bestowed with significance or particular evaluations in our acts of perception. However, racialized forms of bodily orientation often remain invisible or “undetected” when analyzing racist encounters and forms of perception. Not only are racist habits “seamlessly integrated into our body schemata,” but as Ngo argues, racialized bodies are “responded to pre-reflexively . . . owing to the long and

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fraught histories of racism accumulated in the cultural imaginary and collected in our lived bodies.”66 This is also why the task of rupturing racist habits and forms of perception must be leveled not only at racist structures, thoughts, and forms of knowledge but also at the level of embodied affectivity and perception. As Al-Saji argues, it is therefore at the level of affectivity and perception that racializing structures have to be interrupted and that a critical practice might be found. Following Bergson, Al-Saji reconstructs a notion of “affective hesitation,” which aims at an interruption of habitual action and which in turn is “felt” at the level of bodily affect.67 The importance of “affective hesitation” in perception is not only that it opens up a space for alternative perceptions but also for remembering or disclosing what Al-Saji refers to as the “structures of affectivity, which [have] been elided and distorted in racializing affect, and allows affect to resume its flow.”68 This formulation, and the importance of embodied affect as an underlying ground, has remarkable affinities with Honneth’s notion of primary affectivity. As I will discuss in the following section, Honneth also interprets objectifying forms of perception as indicating a distortion of originary affective relations. Moreover, both understand such affectivity as pivotal to encounters between self and other, which are both “prereflexive” and “preintentional.”69 Al-Saji’s claim is not only that “affective hesitation” might enable a “remembrance of things past,” but that it also creates a pause in action, allowing time for the historical and social frameworks that structure perception to be illuminated. Although she concedes that hesitation on its own is not enough to rupture racializing perception and that other measures such as discursive intervention are also required, the import of her suggestion is that, with hesitation, affect might be redirected in a “positive” rather than objectifying manner, opening a gap for “critical memory” and social and ethical transformation to take place.70

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF INVISIBILITY: HONNETH’S ACCOUNT OF RECOGNITION AND PERCEPTION Al-Saji’s work on affectivity, hesitation, and vision offers a rich and important corrective to the lived experience and perception of racialization. Her study of racialized habits of seeing offers a means to disclose the pernicious structures of perception that affect everyday lived experience and contribute to social, cultural, and historical frameworks of oppression. However, my contention

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is that such re-visioning or the creation of new ways of seeing also requires a second element, which can be understood as recognition of the other in a manner that grants her social validity. That is: what is required in the encounter between Pecola and Mr. Yacobowski when he hesitates, which would transform his act of perception into an act of recognition rather than one that intentionally looks through her? This possibility seems to be open in Al-Saji’s work when she mentions that “affective hesitation” is only a first step in rupturing racializing perception. In this respect, I suggest that Al-Saji’s phenomenologically inspired work on perception might be productively brought together with Honneth’s notion of recognition, especially in the sense that we might understand perception and affectivity to be closely interconnected. In turn, Honneth’s assumptions about an affective and embodied form of recognition also seem to require the kind of moves that Al-Saji makes in terms of thinking about the interrelation between perception and affective recognition, and the temporal and embodied aspects first required for recognition to take place. In other words, my argument is that we need to consider ways of interrupting racializing modes of embodied affect and perception in order that a space can be opened in which social validity through recognition might unfold. In his work on “invisibility,” Honneth sets out to examine the relation between perception and recognition, and to consider what further elements are necessary to transform an act of perception into one of recognition. In this context, recognition is equated with the acknowledgment that the other is perceived in a manner that designates not merely a literal act of perception but that she is also perceived in a way that affirms her social existence. Honneth therefore elucidates several factors about visibility in relation to recognition: first, in regard to the need for publicly expressing acts of recognitive perception in order that they are experienced as affirmative by the other; and second, how we might understand the relation between perception, cognition, and recognition. In regard to the first aspect, Honneth suggests a direct connection exists between perception of the other and forms of gestural expression indicating that the other has been perceived and hence confirming her social validity. In this regard, recognition is equivalent to “an expression” of the perception of another or of taking notice of them in a positive manner. As Honneth explains, the absence of such forms of expression, whether embodied gesture or vocal, indicates that the other is not visible for her “counterpart in a social sense.” The phenomenology of invisibility so strikingly described in both

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Ellison’s and Morrison’s novels can therefore be disclosed by examining the “complex relationships that exist among human beings between perception and expression.”71 In many ways, we could say that failures of recognition therefore indicate a deformation of perception in the sense that an intersubjective perceptual act has failed by not completing the act in an expressive and affirmative manner. Key to Honneth’s view is an underlying notion of primary empathetic and affective intersubjective relations, which he refers to as an “elementary form of recognition.” As Honneth puts it: The making visible of a person extends beyond the cognitive act of individual identification by giving public expression with the aid of suitable actions, gestures or facial expressions, to the fact that the person is noticed affirmatively . . . it is only because we possess a common knowledge of these emphatic forms of expression in the context of our second nature that we can see in their absence a sign of invisibility, of humiliation.72 What Honneth has in mind here are the kinds of bodily and facial expressions and gestures, such as a smile, the affirming lift of an eyebrow, the wave of a hand, or the nod of the head, by which we communicate to the other that she has been recognized. These affirmative gestures are both culturally specific and change over time, and they can also be specific to certain contexts in which the form of relationality is situated, whether this be at a party, in a school room, or in a train on our daily commute.73 In this context, it is important to note that recognition, in Honneth’s sense of the term, does not refer to an act of “re-cognizing” the other. In other words, it is not an act of cognition nor one made according to preconceived categories or habitual patterns but instead refers to an affective and empathetic response that affirms the other in his or her personhood. In this sense, recognition is a moral or ethical act based on “elementary forms of co-existence,” which Honneth argues are always already present and are made against a background of “social bonds within which subjects always already move.”74 This brings us to the second important feature of Honneth’s account of invisibility. At first sight, Honneth suggests, it would appear that in order for someone to be rendered invisible (or for that matter to be social visible) a literal act of perception must already have taken place. Although this might conventionally be assumed to be the case, Honneth

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seeks to re-examine this assumption and to reverse the relation between literal and recognitive perception. To begin, Honneth examines the idea that “visibility” must in fact require more than an act of perception in the sense of perceivability understood as a form of elementary identification.75 For it seems that for a person such as Pecola to be rendered “invisible” in her interaction with the storekeeper, she must first have already been “encountered” or taken “cognizance” of within his visual field. In other words, for Pecola to be ignored or looked through appears to be an active secondary element in the perceptual process that occurs after primary identification. In contrast, recognition is not considered a cognitive act of identification but instead “the expression of an evaluative perception” in which, as Honneth explains, “the worth of persons is “directly” given.”76 In this sense, recognition at first sight appears to be a secondary moment of perception that builds upon or responds to primary identificatory perception. However, as a consequence of re-examining the relation between perception, cognition, and recognition in regard to the phenomenology of invisibility, Honneth is led to argue that we need to reconsider the relation between them. Instead of considering that a cognitive identification of the individual has genetic priority in the act of perception, Honneth argues we need to amend the status of cognitive acts vis-à-vis recognition. The crux of Honneth’s argument is that in fact “recognition precedes cognition” and is genetically prior, thereby forming the basis of our perception of others. As James Jardine well expresses it, recognition is therefore “grounded in a form of evaluative intentionality already present in our perceptual awareness of others.”77 In a manner similar to Merleau-Ponty’s claims regarding a primordial form of perception prior to reflexivity and conceptualization, Honneth also grants priority to a primary form of perception that is interconnected with recognition. For Honneth, the forms of invisibility that Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Frantz Fanon describe can then be understood as “deformations of the human capacity for perception,” or as abstractions from a primary background form of recognition.78 As Honneth explains, the form of primary recognition to which he refers indicates an emotional and affective rather than epistemic stance to others and the world.79 In this sense, objectifying or reifying tendencies can be understood to be a deviation from what Honneth refers to as a “genuine” mode of relating to the world. According to this formulation, for Honneth, objectification or alienation can be understood as the temporary loss, concealment, or

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“forgetfulness” of an elementary form of recognition. In this sense, objectifying stances must already presuppose “a more primordial and genuine form of praxis, in which humans take up an empathetic and engaged relationship towards themselves and their surroundings.” Recognition then indicates that in our interactions with others and the world, we do not primarily take a contemplative or cognitive stance but rather assume a positive or affirmative practical engagement, an existentially conceived notion of “caring comportment.”80 Thus, recognition can be understood as an “affectedness” or “antecedent identification” toward others and the world, and for Honneth it is upon this primary form of affective relationality that more explicitly normative recognition stances are then built.81 It is in this context that the kind of perceptual or affective hesitation of which Al-Saji speaks might become an important critical practice. For, a moment of “hesitation” can be understood as potentially opening up a space in which the normative force of an act of recognition can occur. Affective hesitation enables both a pause in perceptual action, which might prevent the “seer” from rushing to merely reiterate racializing habits of perception, and a “critical memory” of primary forms of affective relationality in which we always already move; in other words, it opens a space in which originary recognitive relations might be re-membered. Hesitation then becomes critical for halting or interrupting the process of racializing perception and perceptual habits built up over time through social and cultural constructs and the reiteration of embodied practices, so that affirmation of the other as being a person like myself can be enacted. Of course, there is no guarantee that recognition will occur even when this space is opened by the practice of hesitation. As Honneth suggests, Ellison’s “invisible man” does not wait for recognition to occur but actively seeks recognition through his own forms of protest, such as striking out into the air in front of passersby in order to elicit a response. In this sense, recognition is not a passive category but an active one on the part of both the seer and the person seen, and often requires some kind of action on the part of the recognizee in which affirmation is explicitly requested or demanded. Honneth also points out that recognition should not be understood as a “constitutive” act, which bestows certain identificatory features upon the other, but should instead be understood as a “receptive” act, which affectively responds to the other, or as he puts it in later work, simply reproduces the positive status or qualities of the other in a meaningful way.82 As Fanon expresses it, recognition is “an affirmation”; it is, he writes, a means of saying “Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity.”83 Thus, when

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brought together with a critical practice of affective hesitation, recognition offers a means of rupturing the kinds of indifference and denial, of hypervisibility and invisibility, that those who suffer from racialized forms of perception live and experience daily. As this analysis has sought to demonstrate, challenging racist forms of perception requires more than merely a cognitive transformation but, as Yancy argues, equally involves “a continuous effort at performing [the] body’s racialized interactions with the world differently.” In this sense, even though one may come to understand racist perceptions as “epistemologically false,” it is still possible that racism maintains “a hold on [the] lived body.”84 This is why racializing perception must be ruptured at an embodied and affective level and why an account of affective hesitation and recognition are central to such an analysis. Rupturing embodied habits of perception also means acknowledging the unseen forms of white privilege that structure the spaces in which we live, move, and work, and the ways in which such privilege is normalized and invisibilized with increasingly detrimental consequences.

NOTES 1. I wish to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council and the European Commission (Marie Curie Actions) for funding the research project from which this paper arises. I also wish to thank Barnard College, Columbia University, for their support during this project. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers, and especially to Luna Dolezal for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage Books), 1970 (2007), pp. x, 48, (emphasis in the original). Also see the discussions of Morrison’s text by George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham & New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008); Laura Doyle, “Bodies Inside/Out: Violation and Resistance from the Prison Cell to The Bluest Eye,” in Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006) 183–208; and Kathleen Woodward, “Traumatic Shame: Toni Morrison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural Politics of the Emotions.” Cultural Critique, 46, Fall 2000, 210–240. 3. Axel Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’” in Recognition, Axel Honneth and Avishai Margalit, Supplement of the Aristotelian

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Society, no. 75, 2001, 127–139. A small section of the material on Axel Honneth has previously been discussed in my book The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth (Lanham & New York: Lexington Books, 2013). See that book for a full account of Axel Honneth’s work. 4. In this respect, I take seriously George Yancy’s argument that authors such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison effectively enable the reader to enter into an “imaginative lived space, a powerful narrative space that is able to articulate modalities of lived existence . . .” to which they might otherwise not have access (Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 217). 5. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Oxford & New York: Berg Publishers, 2004); also see Anwen Tormey “‘Everyone with Eyes can see the Problem’: Moral Citizens and the Space of Irish Nationhood.” International Migration, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2007, 69–98. 6. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 75–76. 7. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 65. 8. Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 20. 9. Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Oxford & New York: Berg Publishers, 2004); cited in Tormey, “‘Everyone with Eyes can see the Problem,’” 82. 10. Puwar, Space Invaders, Ch. 3; see Tormey “‘Everyone with Eyes can see the Problem,’” 82. See also David Goldberg, “In/Visibility and Super/ Vision,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. L. Gordon, T. Sharpley-Whiting, and R. White, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For example, black bodies are disproportionally stopped by police for alleged traffic offenses, or marked as suspicious “walking the street while black.” (See George Yancy, “Walking while Black in the White Gaze,” The New York Times, 1 September, 2013). The recent shootings of unarmed African Americans such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Jonathan Ferrell, and Renisha McBride indicate the way in which black bodies are criminalized or marked as deviant, or as “space invaders” when they enter particular spaces, such as white neighborhoods. As Ngo suggests, although many of these were police shootings, McBride, for example, was shot by a white middle-aged man on the porch of his home when she sought assistance after a traffic accident. In this sense, the “problem of habitual and embodied racism lies not only with the police and authorities . . . but also with everyday citizens in the course of their daily

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lives.” See Ngo, “Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 16 February 2016, 14–15. doi: 10.1177/0191453715623320 11. See Helen Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 2016. 12. Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), 184, 186. 13. Janice McLane, “The Boundaries of a Victim-Life,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (Pittsburgh: PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 135–147, 143. As McLane suggests, the body can also become the potential site for transforming those conditions. Also see Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 141–159). 14. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1952]), 3. 15. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 76. 16. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 17. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 76 18. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3–4. 19. Ellison, Invisible Man, 303. 20. Ellison, Invisible Man, 341. 21. Goldberg, “In/Visibility and Super/Vision,” cited in Puwar, Space Invaders, 61. 22. Ellison, Invisible Man, 217; Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 79. 23. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 47, 49, xi, 50, 193; also see Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 185. 24. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 92. 25. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 91. 26. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93. 27. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92, 96. 28. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 94–95. 29. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95, 101. 30. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 136–137. 31. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 137. 32. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 137. 33. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 137–138.

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34. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 275– 276, 289. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 35. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 137. 36. James Hatley, “Interrogating Ethics,” Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (Pittsburgh: PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 26. 37. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 158. 38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964); Jay, Downcast Eyes, 158–159. 39. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 19. 40. Jorella Andrews, “Vision, Violence and the Other: A Merleau-Pontian Ethics,” in Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006) 167–182, 173. 41. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London & New York: Routledge, 1962), 421; see also Jorella Andrews’s discussion in “Vision, Violence and the Other,” 167–168. This is not to suggest that painting is the only or even the best way in which forms of perception might be ruptured, but it is to note that painting, literature, and other forms of art are important mediums for challenging sedimented modes of seeing or seeing things otherwise. Political and protest movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, are also important in this regard for revealing and contesting sedimented forms of perception. 42. Andrews, “Vision, Violence and the Other,” 169, 168. 43. See for example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 250– 251; Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins, 70. 44. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 420. 45. Andrews, “Vision, Violence and the Other,” 169. 46. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 421. 47. See Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins, 65, and the entire chapter 3, “Communicating with Another,” for an interesting discussion. 48. Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty, (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 140. 49. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 43. 50. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 42.

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51. I explore the difference and affinities between Merleau-Ponty, Honneth, and Sartre more extensively in “Encountering the Other: Recognition and Perception in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Honneth,” Critical Horizons, forthcoming. 52. Alia Al-Saji, “Vision, Mirror and Expression: The Genesis of the Ethical Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (Pittsburgh: PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 56. 53. Al-Saji, “Vision, Mirror and Expression,” 57; Bernhard Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body: Traces of the Other in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Body and Flesh,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (Pittsburgh: PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 91–106. 54. Al-Saji, “Vision, Mirror and Expression,” 57; also see Linda Martín Alcoff “Habits of Hostility: On Seeing Race,” Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement, 2000: 30–40, 38, 35. 55. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 13 56. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 138. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 251. 58. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 138. 59. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 138–139. 60. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 140. 61. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 140, 139. 62. Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 1. 63. Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 14. 64. Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 17. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 12. 66. Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 13, 16. 67. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 142, 143. 68. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 147. 69. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 148. 70. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 149. 71. Honneth, “Invisibility,” 114–115. 72. Honneth, “Invisibility,” 115. 73. Honneth, “Invisibility,” 119. 74. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995), 14. Shannon Sullivan and Kelly Oliver have expressed reservations about the appropriateness

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of a theory of recognition for addressing forms of inequality, domination, and oppression, especially in regard to race. Sullivan, for example, suggests that the Hegelian master–slave model only maintains or reinforces power relations rather than offering an alternative model. As I hope to have made clear, though, Honneth’s theory of recognition from which I draw is not based on the master–slave dialectic outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Rather, Honneth originally bases his model on the early Jena texts, especially The System of Ethical Life, in which recognition is structured on love relations. In later work, as discussed here, Honneth also articulates a primary form of affectivity that precedes normative recognition. See Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 75. Honneth, “Invisibility,” 113. 76. Honneth, “Invisibility,” 114, 125 (my emphasis). 77. James Jardine, “Stein and Honneth on Empathy and Emotional Recognition,” Human Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, December 2015, 567–589. 78. See Honneth, “Invisibility,” 126. 79. Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90, ff. 70. 80. Honneth, Reification, 27, 32, 38. 81. Honneth, Reification, 151–152. 82. See Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology,” in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, eds. David Owen and Bert van den Brink (New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 323–347, 81. In previous work I have dealt extensively with the question of whether the two forms of recognition can be so easily disentangled in the way Honneth assumes—that is, whether recognition is only ever responsive or whether there is always a constitutive element. However, for the purposes of this essay, I will leave those issues to one side for now. See my discussion in The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. 83. Fanon, Black Skins White Masks, 197. 84. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 5.

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REFERENCES Ahmed, S. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Alcoff, L. Martín. “Habits of Hostility: On Seeing Race.” Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement, 2000, 30–40. Alcoff, L. Martín Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Al-Saji, A. “Vision, Mirror and Expression: The Genesis of the Ethical Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works.” In J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (eds.), Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in MerleauPonty. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Al-Saji, A.” A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Emily Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, pp. 133–172. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. Andrews, J. “Vision, Violence and the Other: A Merleau-Pontian Ethics.” In Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, pp. 167–182. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006. Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. Doyle, L. “Bodies Inside/Out: Violation and Resistance from the Prison Cell to The Bluest Eye.” In Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006. Carman, T. Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Ellison, R. Invisible Man. London: Penguin Books, 2001 (first published in 1952). Fanon, F. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Hatley, J. “Interrogating Ethics” In J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (eds.), Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Honneth, A., and H. Joas. Social Action and Human Nature. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Honneth, A. “Embodied Reason: On the Rediscovery of Merleau-Ponty.” In Charles W. Wright (ed.), The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.

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Honneth, A. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Honneth, A. “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition.’” In Recognition, Supplement of the Aristotelian Society, no. 75 (2001): 127–139. Honneth, A. “Recognition as Ideology.” In David Owen and Bert van den Brink (eds.), Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Honneth, A. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Edited by Martin Jay. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Irigaray, L. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and G.C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Jardine, J. “Stein and Honneth on Empathy and Emotional Recognition.” Human Studies 38(4) December 2015: 567–589. Jay, M. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. McLane, J. “The Boundaries of a Victim-Life.” In J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Dieham (eds.), Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in MerleauPonty. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006,135–147. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London & New York: Routledge, 1962 (first published in 1945). Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D.A. Landes. London & New York: Routledge, 2014 (first published in 1945). Merleau-Ponty, M. “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Nonsense. Translated by H. Dreyfus and P.A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mills, C. W. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Morrison, T. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Books, 2007 (first published in1970). Ngo, H. “Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 16 February 2016. doi: 10.1177/0191453715623320 Oliver, K. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

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Petherbridge, D. “Encountering the Other: Recognition and Perception in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Honneth,” Critical Horizons, Special Issue on French Philosophy and Recognition Theory 18(1) 2017. Petherbridge, D. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. Lanham, MD & New York: Lexington Books, 2013. Puwar, N. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2004. Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by H.E. Barnes. New York & London: Washington Square Press, 1984 (first published in1956). Sullivan, S. Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Sullivan, S. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Sullivan, S. Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White AntiRacism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Tormey, A. “‘Everyone with Eyes can see the Problem’: Moral Citizens and the Space of Irish Nationhood.” International Migration 45(3) 2007: 69–98. Waldenfels, B. “Responsivity of the Body: Traces of the Other in MerleauPonty’s Theory of Body and Flesh.” In J. Hatley, J. McLane and C. Dieham (eds). Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in MerleauPonty. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006, 91–106. Yancy, G. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD & New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Yancy, G. “Walking while Black in the White Gaze.” The New York Times, 1 September 2013. Young, I.M. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In I.M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, pp. 141–159. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Woodward, K. “Traumatic Shame: Toni Morrison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural Politics of the Emotions.” Cultural Critique 46 (Fall 2000): 210–240.

PART II

RELATIONALITY, ETHICS, AND THE OTHER

CHAPTER 5

Social Interaction, Autonomy, and Recognition Shaun Gallagher

Debates about the nature of social cognition, like the debates about embodied, enactive approaches to cognition, have stayed within the walls of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. However, if social interactions, involving not only primary and secondary intersubjectivity, but also communicative and narrative practices, play an essential role in understanding others and in the co-constitution of the lifeworld, and if some aspects of cognition and social cognition are constituted by processes that are located in the physical and social environment, including social and cultural institutions and practices, as is argued by the phenomenologically inspired enactive approach to cognition, then these debates hold some important implications for larger themes in the social and political realm. In this chapter1 I explore how we might move from considerations that focus on social-cognitive issues to understanding their implications for concepts that are basic to the development of a critical theory that addresses social and political issues, specifically issues that concern agency, autonomy, and recognition.

INTERACTION Critical theorists have recently returned to the idea that recognition is an important principle in regard to how we live our everyday lives, as well as in regard to philosophical questions of justice. Axel Honneth especially 133

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makes this a central theme of his work. Almost all contemporary discussions of this concept take their bearings from Hegel’s discussion of recognition (Anerkennung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit with references to his early Jena manuscripts and his late Philosophy of Right. What Hegel shows in the Phenomenology is that when intersubjective interaction, which in the strict sense involves a two-way reciprocal relation, is eliminated, as in slavery, recognition is too, and that this is destructive not only for the victim, but is also self-destructive for the victimizer. In his well-known master–slave dialectic, not only is the autonomy of the slave explicitly denied, the autonomy of the master is compromised because the master refuses to recognize the other, the slave, as an autonomous subject. The slave, who is denied status as a subject, and treated as a reified object, is, as nonsubject from the perspective of the master, in no position to recognize the master’s status as master; that status depends, as such, on just that possibility of recognition. If we accept the following definition of interaction, then the undermining of recognition is due to a failure of interaction. Interaction: a mutually engaged co-regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where (a) the co-regulation and the coupling mutually affect each other, and constitute a self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics, and (b) the autonomy of the agents involved is not destroyed, although its scope may be augmented or reduced.2 In the case of slavery, the social institution not only distorts interaction, but undermines it almost completely since it does not allow for co-regulation, and autonomy is compromised on both sides of the relation. This conception of interaction is central to what is termed “interaction theory” (IT) in debates concerning social cognition.3 The claim made by IT is that social cognition depends upon, and is sometimes constituted in the dynamics of, embodied social interaction, rather than in innate brain modules or mechanisms (theory-of-mind mechanisms or mirror neurons), that underpin mindreading inferences or simulations, as argued, respectively, by “theory theory” (TT), which defines mindreading as the use of folk-psychological inference, and “simulation theory” (ST), which appeals to our ability to imagine others empathetically by taking their perspective. In contrast, IT maintains that interacting agents are phenomenologically “in-the-world,” and not just in their heads trying to infer or simulate their way into the heads of others;

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social cognition most often involves a full-bodied, affective interaction involving posture, movement, facial expression, gestures, vocal intonations, joint attention, contextualized actions, and so on. “Primary intersubjectivity” is the term used to signify the kind of faceto-face embodied interaction that depends on movement, gesture, facial expression, and the like.4 It’s distinguished from “secondary intersubjectivity,” which involves joint attention and joint action directed toward objects in their worldly contexts, beginning around nine months of age, if not earlier.5 These forms of intersubjective interaction are not stages that we go through and then leave behind; they continue to characterize intersubjective interaction throughout the lifespan. IT finds support for these processes not only in phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeity), but also in developmental psychology and neuroscience.6 It’s not possible to review the full scope of evidence here, but let me note, as an example, one experiment found in the developmental literature in support of the phenomenon of “primary intersubjectivity.” A study by Murray and Trevarthen shows the importance of live interaction between caregivers (in this case, mothers) and two-month old infants in a “double TV monitor experiment” in which mother and infant interact by means of a two-way live video link.7 Despite the intervention of the communicative technology, the infant and mother engage in lively interaction in this situation similar to when the mother and child are in nonmediated contact. When presented with a recorded replay of their mother’s actions, however, the infant quickly disengages and becomes distracted and upset. This change in behavior occurs despite the fact that the visual stimulation has remained precisely the same as what the child had seen during the live action. What’s missing is the dynamical contingency of interaction. The experiment indicates that agents, even young infants, are not primarily passive observers or mind readers, but that they enactively engage with others. The infant responds not just to the mother’s expressive behavior (which appears in both the live circumstance and the recorded replay), but also to the fact that the mother’s movements are contingent on the infant’s own movements—that is, the infant responds to the dynamics of the interaction. These results have been replicated, eliminating alternative explanations such as infants’ fatigue or memory problems.8 During live interaction, the infant comes to be enactively coupled to the mother. The idea of enactive coupling means, in this context, that (1) it is a dynamical process (i.e., one in which a co-dependence is established between the coupled systems such that what happens in or to one system is partly dependent on the situation of the other); (2) the recurrent engagement with

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the other person leads to a structural congruence between self and other;9 and (3) that the engaging organisms (or agents) maintain their autonomy (their own internal self-organization).10 Accordingly, although one can still talk of individuals who engage in the interaction, a full account of such interaction is not reducible to mechanisms at work in the individuals qua individuals. The lack of interaction dynamics between infant and the videotaped mother registers, in the infant, as a lack of recognition of the infant by the mother, and causes emotional consternation. Just as in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, the failure of the “external” relation translates immediately into “internal” decline. “External” and “internal” are here abstractions from what turns out to be a failure of dynamical coupling at the level of the intersubjective system that would typically be constituted by the interaction. In this case, there is a lack of interaction. As reflected in the definition of interaction, in interactional dynamics recognition depends on autonomy and is undermined by reification. At the same time, individual autonomy diminishes without social interaction; and interaction doesn’t exist if the autonomy of any of the participants is denied. Interaction dissipates in cases of slavery, torture, or terrorism.11 It is also important to note that interaction has its own autonomy. On enactive versions of social interaction, the autonomy of interaction means that, for example, in a dyadic relation of two dynamical systems (two individuals), a new dynamical system is formed. New processes emerge from the interaction and constitute meaning, which transcends anything that the participating agents as individuals can bring to the process. De Jaegher and Di Paolo call this “participatory sense making.”12 Complex coordination patterns that result from the mutual interaction of a social encounter, as such, are not simply inputs to individual mechanisms.13 Such coordination processes can acquire a momentum of their own and can pull participants into further or continuing interaction. Interaction in intersubjective contexts goes beyond each participant; it results in something (the creation of meaning or an autonomous level of organization) that, at the level of the relational dynamics, goes beyond what each individual qua individual—that is, on their own—can bring to the process.14 I’ll argue below that the autonomy of the individual depends on the autonomy of interaction—that is, to the extent that the individual can participate in the autonomy of interaction, there is the possibility of an increase or decrease of his or her autonomy. Individual autonomy varies, positively or negatively, in relation to the individual’s positive or negative interactions.

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RECOGNITION Slavery and terrorism, reification and the denial of autonomy, are real enough at the political level of nations and subnational groups, but they can be just as real in our everyday lives, in our relations with others, as well as in reifying bureaucratic, administrative, and institutional arrangements that are externally imposed, deliberately or not. Such arrangements are reflected in just those cases where, as Honneth puts it, social relationships give way to a “climate of cold, calculating purposefulness”; where artisans’ care for their creations gives way “to an attitude of mere instrumental command; and even the subject’s innermost experiences seemed to be infused with the icy breath of calculating compliance.”15 In the view of critical theorists, cases of reification are social pathologies because they freeze, or at least distort interaction and rob individuals of autonomy. Reified and pre-packaged ways of interacting lack dynamic spontaneity, impose a mechanistic order, and can undermine the autonomous processes implicit in genuine forms of interaction; accordingly, they also distort intersubjective understanding. Mild forms of this can be found in everyday practice. Sometimes reification is reflected in simple things, such as established seating arrangements or meeting protocols, and other times when electronic communication on social media, such as Facebook, is substituted for face-to-face interaction. This critical interpretation, of course, can be overplayed. One might feel liberated by the possibilities of electronic communication. Such communication can be spontaneous and thoughtful. Moreover, it is sometimes possible to break through dehumanizing bureaucratic arrangements, to meet and to recognize each other as humans and not just as cogs in a mechanistic system. Yet, to be sure, abusive relationships still exist, slavery still exists, as do various scales of torture and political terrorism. Many of these cases require a form of intervention or action other than communicative action to re-establish interaction or to withdraw entirely from that possibility. The latter alternative suggests a situation in which recognition, and even mutual recognition, may be possible without interaction. A recognizes B, but leaves well enough alone and keeps a safe distance. Is there a difference between this divorced or detached recognition and a recognition that is intrinsic to interaction itself? Honneth describes a change of perspective from empathic engagement to detached observation.16 The latter tends toward a reification of others and can be found in attitudes that commodify relationships and in what Lyotard

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called the attitude of performativity.17 Honneth, however, suggests that the detached, observational relation may in fact be a necessary strategic stance required in developed societies to deal with some aspects of the business of everyday life. This kind of detached stance may have a “perfectly legitimate place” in some situations.18 The question, then, is whether there is a form of recognition appropriate to this kind of stance, something that saves it from falling into a reifying attitude. If there is, it could be only a formal and empty kind of interaction-impoverished recognition—détente—something that maintains the peace, perhaps, but does not promote or support interaction. This realization, or something like it, motivates Honneth to turn to a pragmatism that emphasizes engaged action. In effect, all of our relations cannot be of the strategic observational kind since our primary stance toward the world is to deal with it in a pragmatic, hands-on way, “from the perspective of the participant,” rather than the distant observer.19 Honneth, however, immediately puts this in terms that come close to simulation theory, referring to it in Lukács’s terms of “empathetic engagement”: In other words, human subjects normally participate in social life by placing themselves in the position of their counterparts, whose desires, dispositions, and thoughts they have learned to understand as the motives for the latter’s actions. If, conversely, a subject fails to take over the perspective of another person and thereby takes up a merely detached, contemplative stance toward the other, then the bond of human interaction will be broken, for it will no longer be maintained by their reciprocal understanding of each other’s reasons for acting. The elements characterizing the so-called participant’s perspective thus consist of the act of taking over the perspective of another person and the resulting understanding of the other’s reasons for acting.20 In this text, at least, Honneth seemingly favors ST (putting oneself in the other’s place) over TT (taking an observational stance) as a model of mindreading mental states (desires, motives, reasons for acting). Tellingly, Honneth, even as he retains the phrase “empathetic engagement,” also recognizes something problematic with the emphasis on attempting to understand the other in terms of motives and reasons. Here Honneth engages with Dewey’s pragmatic view: the idea that our “understanding of the world is always already bound up with a holistic form of experience, in which all elements of a given situation are qualitatively disclosed from a perspective of engaged involvement.”21 I note,

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however, that Dewey uses the term “interaction” to signify something broader than social or intersubjective engagement.22 For Dewey, following a broadly understood sense of the term, we interact with things as well as with people. Honneth moves us away from this word by substituting the word “recognition” directly for Dewey’s term “interaction.”23 Yet to the extent that he retains Dewey’s concept, “recognition” seemingly signifies more than something tied to the dynamics of social interaction; it involves engagement with the world, empathetic engagement with both things and people.24 I’m focusing on these turns in Honneth’s texts primarily to indicate some obstacles to avoid in working out the right concept of recognition. There are three of them here, two of which I’ve already mentioned. First, on one reading, recognition seemingly applies equally to things and to other persons; there is no distinction between an engaged involvement with things and one’s engaged, two-way interaction with others. It’s not clear that Honneth makes that distinction strong enough. To be sure, recognition as it applies to things in our natural surroundings is, for him, derivative from our recognition of others. It involves the transfer of value that others place on things, to the things themselves.25 Although such relations with things may be important in many ways,26 and may be involved in processes of secondary intersubjectivity—joint attention, joint action, and participatory sense-making—it is important to note that our relations with others are essentially different from our relations with objects. Accordingly, on a terminological level it would be beneficial to reserve the terms “recognition” and “interaction” for the intersubjective. I believe this is more consistent with the philosophical tradition from Hegel to Levinas (see below). This first point may be more than just terminological, however. There is a current debate within critical theory concerning whether and how intentionality with respect to self, other person, and thing (world) is the same or different or in some regard related.27 Let’s note three aspects of this debate: 1. The intentionality at stake involves, at the extremes, recognition and reification, where these are taken in some sense as opposites. 2. Most of the debate focuses on the question of whether self-consciousness and intersubjectivity are intricately related (whether one has a priority over the other, or can be thought

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to be equally primordial), and whether the relations are necessary (essential) or simply empirical. 3. One common strategy is to distinguish a primordial (pre-linguistic) intentionality from a more developed (linguistic) form. Although, as we noted, Honneth, following Dewey, does not make a strong distinction between recognition of the other person and a pragmatic engagement with worldly things, he criticizes Lukács’s failure to distinguish between different forms of reification, and claims that there is no necessary connection between reification of self, other persons, and things.28 Whether there might be an empirical connection is left an open question. Still, Honneth qualifies this claim by asserting a necessary connection running from the reification of the world to the reification of others, since, “reification of the objective world . . . must be understood as a mere derivative of the forgetfulness of our recognition of other humans.”29 This latter idea seems consistent with the idea that recognition of the world is derivative from our recognition of others. Varga, commenting on Honneth’s criticism of Lukács, wants to move back to Lukács’s idea of an essential or necessary connection between different modes of reification. He sets aside the difference between a relation being necessary versus merely empirical, and he focuses on an example involving self and other people. “Does for example the reificatory objectifying treatment of others not necessarily involve some objectifying stance toward oneself?”30 Even as he cites the example of racism as one that “necessarily” involves denigration or reification of the racist as much as of the other person, he justifies this, in part, on the basis of empirical studies. Second, to emphasize the role of interaction, especially with respect to primary intersubjectivity, it will be best not to confound it with a simulationist view of “taking over the perspective of the other” if that is meant as a form of mindreading. Here Honneth is right to reject the idea that recognition is simply a matter of taking a communicative stance that searches for motives and reasons (mental states) in the minds of others.31 There is, of course, a role for perspective taking, namely in the service of understanding the surrounding world. Here Honneth appeals to developmental psychology and the “triangulation” of joint attention that begins around nine months of age, and he rightly emphasizes the emotional aspects involved: “emotional identification with others is absolutely necessary in order to enable the taking over of another person’s perspective, which in turn leads to the development

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of the capacity for symbolic thought.”32 This is, at best, secondary intersubjectivity, and to the extent that it might also serve to understand the other person’s actions (in terms of their relations to things), it is also secondary to primary intersubjectivity. This, however, is a third problem that we find with Honneth’s conception of recognition, at least in some of his texts. It starts too late: “The starting point of these investigations consists in the same transition from primary to secondary intersubjectivity that the cognitivist approaches also have in mind”—that is, it starts with joint attention and secondary intersubjectivity.33 In doing so it overlooks, or at least discounts, the embodied dynamics of social interaction that begins in primary intersubjectivity. At best, and with respect to the emotional attachment found there, Honneth points to primary intersubjectivity as a necessary antecedent to recognition, again, something that simply serves what he takes to be primary in recognition— the disclosure of a world: “it is through this emotional attachment to a ‘concrete other’ that a world of meaningful qualities is disclosed to a child as a world in which it must involve itself practically.”34 Again, to raise the right question here, we need to keep in mind that the processes of primary intersubjectivity are not only descriptive of early infancy, or antecedent to a more cognitive stance, but continue to characterize social cognition and are sustained throughout the lifespan. Against this reading of Honneth I propose to focus on the intersubjective relation that is characterized by the dynamical social interactions of primary intersubjectivity, by engagements that are enactive rather than simulative, and that, developmentally, predate joint attention, but are nonetheless sustained in later development. Perhaps, however, it may be consistent with this reading of Honneth to say that primary intersubjective relations are more basic than anything that qualifies as recognition—a term that seems to be already appropriated, perhaps appropriately, in many kinds of more developed, complex, normative situations of secondary intersubjective actions and interactions. Let me note, however, that a second possible reading of Honneth would put him closer to this alternative by making the term “recognition” synonymous with primary intersubjective processes, at the expense of claiming that he is neither clear nor unambiguous in his definition of the concept. As we saw, Honneth begins by clearly equating recognition with Dewey’s notion of interaction, which equally applies to things and persons. He next identifies the starting point of his analysis as concerned with joint attention, and the infant’s engagement with the world of objects. His qualification of this,

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however, was that even prior to joint attention one has to consider the emotional aspects of intersubjective attachment, which we could associate with primary intersubjectivity. On the second reading, Honneth could be said to slide from making this a mere qualification to equating emotional intersubjective attachment with recognition: What I hope to have been able to show by this point in my account is that in ontogenesis . . . recognition must precede cognition . . . [T]he individual’s learning process functions in such a way that a small child first of all identifies with its figures of attachment and must have emotionally recognized them before it can arrive at knowledge of objective reality by means of these other perspectives.35 Here the hint is that recognition is really the emotional attachment to the other that precedes secondary intersubjective processes. We can find some support for this interpretation in his later use of the concept of elementary recognition.36 It’s clear that there is a great deal of complexity in Honneth’s concept of recognition. He distinguishes three different forms of intersubjective recognition, but focuses his analysis more on the status of the self (or self-relation) within these contexts than on social interaction. Specifically, he distinguishes in recognition aspects that involve self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem.37 In later texts he discusses “elementary recognition,” which is clearly tied to primary intersubjectivity.38 Accordingly, Honneth presents a two-level account of recognition, in which elementary recognition is placed at a more fundamental level than the types of recognition involved in categories like confidence, respect, and esteem. Elementary recognition precedes, both ontogenetically and conceptually, second-order and more normative patterns of recognition where the other person’s particular characteristics are affirmed. The normative forms of recognition are expressions and further articulations of the elementary recognition involved in immediate self–other relations. The use of the term “recognition” to encompass both the elementary aspects and the more developed normative aspects of social interaction has confused some commentators, who have univocally criticized Honneth’s account, maintaining that the elementary level of recognition is depicted as a positively loaded condition, which involves an overly optimistic anthropology.39 To be clear, however, Honneth emphasizes that elementary recognition should not be understood in strictly positive terms; the term “elementary” is meant to convey that positive and negative attitudes, and even

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indifference toward others, depend on this prior recognition. When responding to his critics, Honneth emphasizes the “non-epistemic,” non-cognitive, and pre-normative character of elementary recognition, which involves a kind of existential affectivity.40 It is on this notion of elementary recognition that I want to focus, and to get some distance from the terminological issues, I propose to call this “elementary responsiveness” rather than recognition. The term “responsiveness” is meant to reflect the fact that it is more akin to emotive or agentive processes than to strictly cognitive ones; elementary responsiveness is implicated in the beginning of interaction, and I mean to associate it with the kind of embodied interactive relation that we find in primary intersubjectivity, while again keeping in mind that we find primary intersubjectivity throughout the lifespan. We can certainly learn a good number of things from Honneth about the concept of recognition, one of which is that it may be helpful to reserve the term “recognition” for the more normative aspects of human relations. Honneth himself, influenced by Hegel, continues to explicate “an ordered plurality of models of recognition”;41 he continues to use the term to apply in legal contexts and contexts that involve institutional arrangements.42 Let me also note that, having made a seemingly neat conceptual (and terminological) distinction between elementary responsiveness and other forms of recognition, anything like pure elementary responsiveness in post-natal humans may be rare, especially once interaction gets under way. Even in regard to primary intersubjectivity in infancy, from the perspective of the adult caregiver or parent who is interacting with the infant, and is therefore part of the interaction, the interaction is already part of an instituted, normative practice—and that defines important aspects of the interaction. Honneth associates love with the notion of the recognition involved in self-confidence, and therefore as already a normative relation. In this regard, then, perhaps we need to talk about recognition as involving degrees (as well as various kinds) of normativity, from the basic forms involved in love, respect and esteem, to more complicated forms that are involved with formalized social institutions, such as the legal system. Even for the developing infant (and certainly for those beyond infancy) it may not be possible to speak of a pure elementary responsiveness; each response may already involve a basic emotion, like love,43 and, therefore, may already be subject to what Ian Hacking calls a “looping effect” involving some degree of normative recognition.44 That’s because the other (e.g., the caregiver) is already engaged in cultural practices in his or her response to the infant.

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One can, nonetheless, clearly contrast the notion of elementary responsiveness, associated with the perspective of the participant in primary intersubjectivity, to the notion of recognition that might be involved in the détente or the divorced observational perspective that, as Honneth suggests, may sometimes be required in developed society. To the extent that recognition is involved in the latter, it remains formal and relatively empty of affective valence. It may be what is required by a purely procedural rationality, but it is not sufficient for everyday interaction or communicative action. In contrast, the more basic, existential sense of elementary responsiveness, on the enactive-interactive approach, is tied to first-order face-to-face interaction. As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with the other is called to respond, that is, to take responsive action in some way, if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding, positively or negatively, with action to her action. I think that research on primary intersubjectivity provides a detailed model of elementary responsiveness. It may be useful, however, to consider Levinas’s analysis of the face-to-face relation in order to explicate what this research tells us.45 The virtue of Levinas’s analysis, which also carries over to the interactive analysis, is that the other person, in her otherness, resists being simply an entity—resists reification—whether as physical object or epistemological subject. Likewise, the other is not, analogically, another me, or a set of mental states that are like mine. Rather, Levinas suggests, the other, in her alterity, makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond—the face-to-face is primarily an ethical relation. To frame this in terms of enactivist versions of interaction, I note that the perception of another’s face activates not just the brain’s face recognition area and ventral visual pathway, but also the dorsal visual pathway that directly informs motoric processes46—suggesting that we perceive affordances for possible responsive actions in the face of the other.47 Faced with the face of a real person, at a minimum, subjects make eye contact with very subtle eye movements. Accordingly, face perception presents not just objective patterns that we might cognitively [re]cognize as emotions. It involves complex interactive behavioral and response patterns arising out of an active engagement with the other’s face—not a simple [re]cognition of facial features—but an interactive perception that constitutes a response to the other’s emotional expressions.48 Levinas emphasizes the asymmetrical demand of the other on me.49 Yet, we could think that the elicitation to respond involved in elementary

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responsiveness is generated in the mutual (even if not necessarily symmetrical) turning toward each other. What is important is that the other looks back at me, as I meet her gaze with my own—this mutual engagement is an aspect of primary intersubjectivity. I’ve argued elsewhere that it is possible to understand the transcendence Levinas finds in the face of the other, in terms of the transcendence associated with the autonomy of interaction.50 Rather than conceiving of this experience of transcendence as something unreachable in or beyond the other, or in the other’s face, it is possible to conceive of it as generated in the interaction that transcends individuality. The most basic and elementary response to the other is in this face-to-face, which sets subsequent interaction, and the possibility of transcendence, into play. Elementary responsiveness, as it gets shaped in intersubjective interaction, leads to a transcendence that carries agents beyond the meaning of their individual actions. The meaning that emerges or that is established by the interaction, in turn, calls for further response, in the form of interpretation, ongoing interaction, or communication. The ethical, to the extent that it is about our way of living with others, is built around this kind of interaction—and around it we start to build certain practices.

RELATIONAL AUTONOMY The possibility of experiencing the kind of transcendence that comes from interaction is important for working out a concept of autonomy. Traditional conceptions of autonomy focus on self-sufficiency, self-legislation, or self-determination. Kant is the locus classicus for this view. For him, autonomy means giving oneself the law, and the law is an a priori universal law that one can find within oneself. Autonomy, in this regard, is an individualistic concept, self-enclosed in an abstract consciousness. As John Christman notes, “traditional conceptions of the free, autonomous individual put undue emphasis on the ideal/assumption of rational self-awareness and cognitive mental operations and have ignored the importance of embodiment, affect and instinctive (and socially embedded) action.”51 Hegel offers a critique of Kant that has the potential to address this problem, by emphasizing the concept of socially embedded action. For Hegel a subject is autonomous if, as Honneth puts it, the subject “directs its efforts towards finding itself in a world whose structure is an expression of the subject’s own will.”52 In this regard, autonomy involves action and

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externalities—finding the right fit between self and world. As Hegel writes in the Philosophy of Right, “A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere in order to exist as Idea.”53 For Hegel, the external sphere is also social. If Hegel goes some distance toward a conception of autonomy that is more social and relational, it takes something of a hermeneutical push to get him closer to a concept that would relate autonomy and recognition, as Honneth makes clear. Honneth pushes his interpretation of Hegel further by making the intersubjective aspect more apparent and by appealing to some insights from Donald Winnicott.54 If institutions of objective spirit were simply externalizations or extensions of my individual mind, the only problems we might run into would be cases that involve self-deceit or self-contradiction. But what we find are differentiated responses to our actions from others. Winnicott shows this to be the case even at the most basic level of elemental responsiveness in early development. He shows that the mother or other caregiver will respond to the infant’s actions, sometimes by showing understanding, other times by showing disapproval or indifference. The infant learns that the other’s response will depend not entirely on what the infant will do, but on the other’s own intentionality, situation, or emotional state. This, Honneth suggests, motivates a transition from desire to recognition, which incorporates a reciprocity, which in Hegel’s terms involves negativity or a restriction. “In the encounter between two subjects, a new sphere of action is opened in the sense that both sides are compelled to restrict their self-seeking drives as soon as they encounter each other . . . [I]n the process of interaction both subjects undergo a transformation.”55 As Honneth notes, Hegel calls this “recognition” “the reciprocal limitation of one’s own egocentric desires for the benefit of the other.”56 It’s precisely this kind of reciprocal recognition that leads Honneth to the concept of relational autonomy. [W]e achieve autonomy along intersubjective paths by learning to understand ourselves, via others’ recognition, as beings whose needs, beliefs and abilities are worth being realized. However, this will only be possible if, at the same time, we recognize those who recognize us . . . Therefore, if individual autonomy is to emerge and flourish, reciprocal intersubjective recognition is required. We do not acquire autonomy on our own, but only in relation to other people . . . Autonomy is a relational, intersubjective entity, not a monological achievement.57

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Again, I would argue, what Honneth and Hegel are calling “recognition” here is better conceived in terms of a process of elementary responsiveness. We find the concept of relational autonomy most clearly developed in recent feminist critiques of traditional conceptions of autonomy (see Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000, for a good summary; I take my bearings on this topic from their Introduction).58 Here, Annette Baier’s idea that “persons are second-persons” is a good starting point. “Persons are essentially successors, heirs to other persons who formed and cared for them, and their personality is revealed both in their relations to others and in their response to their own recognized genesis.”59 Baier in effect argues against an ontological individualism and against traditional descriptions of autonomy that downgrade social ties, usually, in this context, pictured as positive phenomena such as trust, friendship, loyalty, or caring. Agents are not abstract entities; they are embedded in intersubjective relations with others from the beginning.60 Thus, Virginia Held can point to early development as a critical time when: a need for recognition and a need to understand the other . . . are created in the context of mother-child interaction and are satisfied in a mutually empathetic relationship . . . Both give and take in a way that not only contributes to the satisfaction of their needs as individuals but also affirms the “larger relational unit” they compose. Maintaining this larger relational unit then becomes a goal, and maturity is seen not in terms of individual autonomy but in terms of competence in creating and sustaining relations of empathy and mutual intersubjectivity.61 The “larger relational unit” emerges in interaction and, I would argue, involves the autonomy of interaction and is experienced as the transcendence described in the previous section. At the same time, the transcendence and the establishment of a larger relational unit depends on the preservation of the autonomy of the agents involved. As Evelyn Fox Keller makes clear, what we are calling the dynamic autonomy of interaction involves both relatedness to, and differentiation from, others. It promotes a sense of agency in a world of “interacting and interpersonal agents” and a sense of others “as subjects with whom one shares enough to allow for a recognition of their independent interests and feelings—in short, for a recognition of them as other subjects.”62 The autonomy pictured here is not a static state where the other is seen in opposition to self; it is a relational autonomy where self and other

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are in reciprocal recognition. The autonomous self, on this view, is more like an intersection or integration of relations with others. This conception of relational autonomy has to wrestle with problems that seem implicit in the notion of socialization. Here one finds the difference between procedural and substantive accounts of autonomy. For procedural (seemingly content-neutral) accounts, which do not prescribe in any positive way what one’s life should be, some model of critical reflection is essential. Mackenzie and Stoljar distinguish between structural, historical, and competency approaches to procedural accounts.63 Each account runs into hermeneutical limitations. A structural approach, such as Harry Frankfurt’s conception of autonomy as a capacity for a reflective use of second-order desires (or intentions) to evaluate first-order desires might be challenged by asking what makes second-order desire autonomous. If our second-order desires themselves are shaped by our social relations, that would seem to place limits on autonomy. On the historical account, critical reflection needs to be independent of historical accidental formation,64 or at least not influenced by negative historical formation.65 The problem here, however, is that someone who is thoroughly embedded in their historical perspective is not necessarily in a position to recognize what would count as negative for autonomy. Finally, the competency-based concept of autonomy requires reflection and skills of self-direction/self-realization. Here, too, any such reflective skills are learned as practices within social and historical settings.66 The response to these issues should be that although they appear to be problems for nonrelational accounts of autonomy, they are not necessarily problems for relational accounts since relational accounts recognize that autonomy is always a matter of degree and is always relative to the particular social situation in which a particular agent finds herself. That is, an account of relational autonomy should fully accept the historical and hermeneutical limitations as definitive for a limited autonomy, in contrast to anything like an abstract, absolute individual autonomy. Moreover, critical reflection is not something that happens on an internalist conception of a purely “in-the-head” process. It, like many other types of cognitive events, can be an intersubjective, interactional accomplishment that takes place in communicative practices. Accordingly, any degree of autonomy traced to this kind of critical reflection will already be delimited by social and normative practices. Among substantive accounts, some are stronger than others. On a strong account, one requires a context-free knowledge of right and wrong based on rationality. One has to be in a position to be able to distinguish correct

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from incorrect behavior, and to be autonomous one needs to choose the right or correct way to live.67 On this account, there’s no such thing as an autonomous criminal or terrorist. On a weaker account, autonomous subjects must be free to choose the right way to live (even if they don’t), and having made a choice, their social situations should not be oppressive to the point of taking away self-respect, self-trust, or competence to judge from a rational perspective. Even a criminal can be autonomous if she has the wherewithal to make rational judgments about her life. From the perspective of relational autonomy, such demands for rational judgment are too narrow, since agents in the lifeworld are in fact not just rational minds. Mackenzie and Stoljar summarize the kinds of issues that are at stake in these different approaches. [P]ersons are socially embedded and . . . agents’ identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity . . . [A]n analysis of the characteristics and capacities of the self cannot be adequately undertaken without attention to the rich and complex social and historical contexts in which agents are embedded; . . . [we] need to think of autonomy as a characteristic of agents who are emotional, embodied, desiring, creative, and feeling, as well as rational, creatures.68 There are two ways to conceive of this complex relational conception of autonomy. On a constitutional reading, agents are intrinsically relational because their identities or self-conceptions are constituted by elements of the social context in which they are embedded—social relations make autonomy. On a causal reading, agents are produced by historical and social conditions—relations limit or enhance autonomy. If we think of relational autonomy as involving the “larger relational unit” that results from intersubjective interaction, so that there is no individual autonomy without the kind of interaction that involves an extra-individual autonomy, then the constitutional reading seems most appropriate. At the same time, the idea of a constitutive relational autonomy should not ignore the variability, contingency, and temporally fluid nature of human existence—and this helps us to steer away from any deterministic view. A relational self (as a second person) does have some independence of specific social circumstances since change of self is possible, and self-concept varies over social

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situations. One can build this into a prescriptive model of social-relational autonomy. John Christman finds this, for example, in Marina Oshana’s concept of relational autonomy, which he describes as follows. [A]utonomy obtains only when social conditions surrounding an individual live up to certain standards. In addition to allowing the person to develop critical reflective abilities and procedural independence (of the sort internalists demand), the surrounding social conditions in which the autonomous person resides must allow her significant options, they must ensure that she can defend herself against psychological and physical assault when necessary or against attempts to deprive her of her rights, she must not be forced to take responsibility for others’ needs unless agreed to or reasonably expected, and they must allow her to pursue goals different from those who have influence or authority over her.69 Christman, who tends to be critical of this kind of account of relational autonomy, worries about the strong substantive aspects of this account.70 On such a view, if a person freely chooses to give up what seems to be his freedom to make alternative life choices—for example, if someone choses a life of obedience and gives up all other alternatives for religious or other reasons— then isn’t this still an informed exercise of autonomy? Christman argues that a person’s authentic choice, based on a free deliberation, to adopt an oppressed or subservient social status reflects autonomy and deserves respect. On this view, the exercise of freedom has to be authentic. Autonomy depends on a reflective deliberation that allows the person to realistically choose otherwise “were she in a position to value sincerely that alternative position.”71 On Christman’s conception of authentic reflection, relational views, like Oshana’s, sometimes stray when they include conditions that rule out the free choice of a life that involves strict obedience. In considering such issues, I think it helps to appeal to the concept that autonomy is not only relational but is also always a matter of degree, and that a strong statement to the effect that someone is only autonomous if she can completely escape a life structured by authoritarian rule is misleading. Christman holds for a weaker condition, namely, having the ability to adequately reflect on one’s life and embrace it. Autonomy, however, as indicated above, is not simply hinged to one’s reflective judgment, where one seemingly gives oneself the law, since the law or the order that one

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chooses, and in some sense, one’s reflective capacity itself, are things that depend on others. Reflective ability is limited or enhanced by social relations and arrangements. Reflection may be literally a social accomplishment if it involves communicative practices and deliberations with others. On the one hand, communicative practices may involve the exercise of public discourse—which in a political framework may sketch out a range of acceptable lifestyles. On the other hand, such communicative practices are not necessarily public since our lives are mainly circumscribed in a mix of private and social practices within contexts of personal relations and local institutions. It’s difficult (and perhaps impossible) to attain a third-person, purely rational reflective attitude, since we are immersed in and shaped by our everyday dynamic interactions with others. Any procedural framework that supports or advances autonomy is already relational and socially embedded. How does this look from the perspective of interaction theory? Relational autonomy is in some sense a compound autonomy, because one agent’s autonomy is always defined (constrained or enhanced) not only by others, but by another (extra-agentive, extra-individual) autonomy—that of the larger relational unit.72 Accordingly, the autonomy of the individual depends on the autonomy of interaction. That is, to the extent that the individual can participate in the autonomy of interaction, the possibility exists of an increase or decrease of his or her autonomy. The individual’s autonomy, which is a relational autonomy, varies, positively or negatively, in relation to the individual’s positive or negative interactions, the valence of which will depend, in part, on the individual, in part on the others with whom she interacts, and in part on the structural features of the specific practices or institutions within which she interacts. The idea that autonomy is relational, moreover, again emphasizes the importance of elementary responsiveness and various forms of recognition. The relational aspect of autonomy, which begins in elementary responsiveness, can be defined further in terms of recognition. Failures in elementary responsiveness or recognition will always involve failures or declines in autonomy.

NOTES 1. For support in writing this chapter, the author gratefully acknowledges the Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Award.

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2. See H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo, and S. Gallagher, “Does Social Interaction Constitute Social Cognition?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(10) 2010: 441–447. 3. S. Gallagher, “The Practice of Mind: Theory, Simulation, or Interaction?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7) 2001: 83–107; Gallagher S., How the Body Shapes the Mind. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gallagher, S. “Inference or Interaction: Social Cognition without Precursors,” Philosophical Explorations 11(3) 2008: 163–173; Ratcliffe, M. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Reddy, V. How Infants Know Minds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 4. C. Trevarthen, “Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary Intersubjectivity.” In Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication, M. Bullowa (ed.), 321–348 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 5. C. Trevarthen and P. Hubley, “Secondary Intersubjectivity: Confidence, Confiding and Acts of Meaning in the First Year,” in Action, Gesture, and Symbol: The Emergence of Language, A. Lock (ed.), 183–227 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Reddy, How Infants. 6. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. A. Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 141,143; see, e.g., T. Froese, and S. Gallagher, “Getting IT Together: Integrating Developmental, Phenomenological, Enactive and Dynamical Approaches to Social Interaction.” Interaction Studies 13(3) 2012: 434–466; S. Gallagher, “Neural Simulation and Social Cognition.” In Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition, J.A. Pineda (ed.), 355–371 (Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2008). 7. L. Murray and C. Trevarthen. “Emotional Regulation of Interactions between Two-Month-Olds and their Mothers,” in Social Perception in Infants, T.M. Field and M.A. Fox (eds.), 177–197 (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985). 8. For example, J. Nadel, I. Carchon, C. Kervella, D. Marcelli, and D. Réserbat-Plantey. “Expectancies for Social Contingency in 2-Month-Olds,” Developmental Science 2(2) 1999: 164–173; R. Soussignan, J. Nadel, P. Canet, and P. Gerardin. “Sensitivity to Social Contingency and Positive Emotion in 2-Month-Olds.” Infancy (10, 2) 2006: 123–144. Similar results can be found, without technological mediation, in Tronick’s still face experiment: E. Tronick, H. Als, L. Adamson, S. Wise, and T.B. Brazelton. “The Infant’s Response to

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Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction,” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17(1), 1979: 1–13. 9. E. Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 45 10. For a more formal account of dynamical coupling, see E. Di Paolo and De Jaegher, H., “The Interactive Brain Hypothesis,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (6) 2012: 163. 11. Terrorism, if we define it as including the closing down of any possible response from the victim(s). See, for example, J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 12. H. De Jaegher and Di Paolo, E. “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4) 2007: 485–507. 13. De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher. “Does Social Interaction Constitute Social Cognition?” 14. As E.A. Di Paolo, M. Rohde, and H. Iizuka, “Sensitivity to Social Contingency or Stability of Interaction?” New Ideas in Psychology (26) 2008: 278–294, put it, “interaction can dynamically create phenomena that do not directly result from the individual capacities or behaviors of any of the partners if investigated on their own” (279). 15. A. Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),17. 16. Honneth, Reification, 24. 17. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 18. Honneth, Reification, 28. 19. Honneth, Reification, 34, making reference to J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. T. McCarthy (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). 20. Honneth, Reification, 34. 21. Honneth, Reification, 36. 22. J. Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958). 23. Honneth, Reification, 36. 24. Honneth, Reification, 38, ties the concept of recognition closely to Dewey’s concept of “practical involvement” but also Heidegger’s notion of “care,” which Honneth interprets in terms of Zuhanden involvement, and Lukács’s “engaged praxis.” On a related point, there are terminological difficulties with the word “recognition.” In English (and in the French reconnaissance)

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it clearly has cognitive associations (e.g., with memory), both in etymology and in its use in experimental psychology. The German word Anerkennung involves identification as a form of knowledge, and being able to label something. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), looks closely at the lexicon to discover all relevant meanings of reconnaissance, and he cites the Robert dictionary first of all: “To grasp (an object) with the mind, through thought, in joining together images, perceptions having to do with it; to distinguish or identify the judgment or action, know it by memory” (23). Both Honneth and Ricoeur want to break free of this overly intellectualist connotation of “recognition”—but it’s not clear they are successful in this regard. 25. Honneth, Reification, 63. 26. See L. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 27. For summary, see S. Varga, “Critical Theory and the Two-Level Account of Recognition: Towards a New Foundation?” Critical Horizons 11(1) 2010: 19–33. 28. Honneth, Reification. 29. Honneth, Reification, 77. 30. Varga, “Critical Theory,” 23. 31. Honneth, Reification, 41. 32. Honneth, Reification, 42. 33. Honneth, Reification, 43. 34. Honneth, Reification, 45. 35. Honneth, Reification, 46. 36. A. Honneth, “Rejoinder.” In Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, 147–159 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 37. A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 131; A. Honneth, Philosophy in Germany: Interview with S. Critchley. Radical Philosophy (89) 1998: 27–39; A. Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007; Honneth, Reification; see S. Varga and S. Gallagher, “Critical Social Philosophy, Honneth and the Role of Primary Intersubjectivity,” European Journal of Social Theory 15(2), 2012: 243–260. 38. For example, Honneth, “Rejoinder.” 39. J. Butler, “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications.” In: Honneth, Reification, 97–119; R. Geuss, “Philosophical Anthropology and Social Criticism,” in Honneth, Reification, 120–130; and Lear, J. “The Slippery

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Middle,” in Honneth. Reification, 131–146. Honneth’s (Reification) citation of Tomasello in this regard might reinforce this view (see S.N. Larsen, “Critical Notice: Michael Tomasello on the ‘Prosocial’ Human Animal,” Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology 5(2) 2014: 257–269). 40. Honneth, “Rejoinder,” 151–152. 41. Ricoeur, Course of Recognition, 175. 42. A. Honneth, The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2012). 43. Not everyone lists love as a basic emotion, but some do, for example, P. Shaver, J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O’Connor, “Emotional Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach.” In Emotions in Social Psychology: Essential Readings, G. Parrott (ed.), 26–56 (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2001). 44. I. Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach, D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A.J. Premack (eds.). Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach (351–383) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 45. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity. A. Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 46. M.A. Goodale and A.D. Milner, “Separate Visual Pathways for Perception and Action.” Trends in Neurosciences (15, 1) 1992: 20–25. 47. J.B. Debruille, M.B. Brodeur, et al. “N300 and Social Affordances: A Study with a Real Person and a Dummy as Stimuli.” PLoS One 7(10) 2012: e47922. 48. The use of the term “recognition” in this literature on face recognition is, of course, not equivalent to Honneth’s use of the term. 49. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 46. 50. S. Gallagher, “In Your Face: Transcendence in Embodied Interaction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (8) 2014: 495. 51. J. Christman, The Politics of Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13 52. Honneth, The I in We, 23. 53. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. T.M. Knox (trans.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 40 54. Honneth, The I in We, 13ff. 55. Honneth, The I in We, 15. 56. Honneth, The I in We, 17. 57. Honneth, The I in We, 41.

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58. Mackenzie, C. and N. Stoljar. “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured” In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Automony, Agency, and the Social Self. C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar (eds.), 3–31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 59. A. Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 85. 60. See L. Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 61. V. Held, Feminist Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 60 62. E.F. Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1985), 99. 63. Mackenzie and Stoljar, “Introduction.” 64. G. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 65. J. Christman, “Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of Selves.” Philosophical Studies 117(1) 2004: 143–164. 66. For example, C. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 157. 67. P. Benson, P. “Free Agency and Self-Worth.” Journal of Philosophy (91) 1994: 650–668; S. Wolf, Freedom within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 68. Mackenzie and Stoljar, Introduction, 4. 69. Christman, “Relational Autonomy,” 150; see M. Oshana, “Personal Autonomy and Society.” Journal of Social Philosophy 29(1) 1998: 81–102. 70. Christman, Politics of Persons, 14. 71. Christman, “Relational Autonomy,” 154. 72. On the enactivist view, this idea has its roots in a certain conception of biological autonomy defined in terms of autopoiesis, or the self-organization of the biological system (F.J. Varela, H.R. Maturana, and R. Uribe. “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, its Characterization and a Model,” Biosystems [5(4) 1974: 187–196]). Autopoietic systems are organizationally closed (equivalent of biological autonomy), but energetically open (coupled in life-sustaining ways to an environment), which means the autonomy is relational. However, for some qualifications on this model as it applies to social phenomena see N. Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems.” Journal of Sociocybernetics (6) 2008: 84–95.

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REFERENCES Baier, A. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Benson, P. “Free Agency and Self-Worth.” Journal of Philosophy (91) 1994: 650–668. Butler, J. “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications.” In A. Honneth, Reification. A New Look at an Old Idea, pp. 97–119. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Christman, J. “Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of Selves.” Philosophical Studies 117(1), 2004: 143–164. Christman, J. The Politics of Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Code, L. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Debruille J.B., M.B Brodeur, et al. “N300 and Social Affordances: A Study with a Real Person and a Dummy as Stimuli.” PLoS One (7, 10) 2012: e47922. De Jaegher, H., and E. Di Paolo. “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (6, 4) 2007: 485–507. De Jaegher, H., E. Di Paolo, and S. Gallagher. “Does Social Interaction Constitute Social Cognition?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10) 2010: 441–447. Dewey, J. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover, 1958. Di Paolo E.A., M. Rohde, and H. Iizuka. “Sensitivity to Social Contingency or Stability of Interaction?” New Ideas in Psychology (26) 2008: 278–294.

Di Paolo, E., and H. De Jaegher “The Interactive Brain Hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (6) 2012: 163. Dworkin, G. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Froese, T., and S. Gallagher. “Getting IT Together: Integrating Developmental, Phenomenological, Enactive and Dynamical Approaches to Social Interaction.” Interaction Studies 13(3) 2012: 434–466. Gallagher, S. “The Practice of Mind: Theory, Simulation, or Interaction?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7) 2001: 83–107. Gallagher, S. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Gallagher, S. “Inference or Interaction: Social Cognition without Precursors.” Philosophical Explorations 11(3) 2008: 163–173. Gallagher, S. “Neural Simulation and Social Cognition.” In J.A. Pineda (ed.), Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition, pp. 355–371. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2008. Gallagher, S. “In Your Face: Transcendence in Embodied Interaction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (8) 2014: 495. Geuss, R. “Philosophical Anthropology and Social Criticism.” In A. Honneth, Reification. A New Look at an Old Idea, pp. 120–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Goodale, M.A., and A.D. Milner. “Separate Visual Pathways for Perception and Action.” Trends in Neurosciences 15(1) 1992: 20–25. Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Hacking, I. “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds.” In D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A.J. Premack (eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 351–383. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated by T.M. Knox. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Held, V. Feminist Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Honneth, A. The Struggle for Recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Honneth, A. Philosophy in Germany: Interview with S. Critchley. Radical Philosophy (89) 1998: 27–39. Honneth, A. Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Honneth, A. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Honneth, A. “Rejoinder.” In Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, pp. 147–159. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Honneth, A. The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2012. Keller, E.F. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1985. Larsen, S.N. “Critical Notice: Michael Tomasello on the ‘Prosocial’ Human Animal.” Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology 5(2) 2014: 257–269 Lear, J. “The Slippery Middle.” In A. Honneth, Reification. A New Look at an Old Idea, pp. 131–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Luhmann, N. “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems.” Journal of Sociocybernetics (6) 2008: 84–95. Lyotard, J.F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Malafouris, L. How Things Shape the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mackenzie, C., and N. Stoljar. “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured.” In C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar, Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Automony, Agency, and the Social Self, pp. 3–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Murray, L., and C. Trevarthen. “Emotional Regulation of Interactions between Two-Month-Olds and their Mothers.” In T.M. Field and M.A. Fox (eds.), Social Perception in Infants, pp. 177–197. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985. Nadel, J., I. Carchon, C. Kervella, D. Marcelli, and D. Réserbat
Plantey. “Expectancies for Social Contingency in 2
Month
Olds,” Developmental Science 2(2) 1999: 164–173. Oshana, M. “Personal Autonomy and Society.” Journal of Social Philosophy 29(1) 1998: 81–102 Ratcliffe, M. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reddy, V. How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Ricoeur, P. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Shaver, P., J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O’Connor. “Emotional Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach.” In G. Parrott (ed.), Emotions in Social Psychology: Essential Readings, pp. 26–56. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2001. Soussignan, R., J. Nadel, P. Canet, and P. Gerardin. “Sensitivity to Social Contingency and Positive Emotion in 2-Month-Olds.” Infancy 10(2) 2006: 123–144. Taylor, C. Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

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Thompson, E. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Trevarthen, C. “Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary Intersubjectivity.” In M. Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication, pp. 321–348. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Trevarthen, C., and P. Hubley. “Secondary Intersubjectivity: Confidence, Confiding and Acts of Meaning in the First Year.” In A. Lock (ed.), Action, Gesture, and Symbol: The Emergence of Language, pp. 183–227. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Tronick, E., H. Als, L. Adamson, S. Wise, and T.B. Brazelton. “The Infant’s Response to Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Faceto-Face Interaction.” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17(1) 1979: 1–13. Varga, S. “Critical Theory and the Two-Level Account of Recognition: Towards a New Foundation?” Critical Horizons 11(1) 2010: 19–33. Varga, S., and S. Gallagher. “Critical Social Philosophy, Honneth and the Role of Primary Intersubjectivity.” European Journal of Social Theory 15(2), 2012: 243–260. Varela, F.J., H.R. Maturana, and R. Uribe. “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, its Characterization and a Model.” Biosystems 5(4) 1974: 187–196. Wolf, S. Freedom within Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER 6

The Weight of Others SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS AND AN ETHICS OF READING Donald A. Landes

Whether it has to do with vestiges or with another person’s body, we must ask how an object in space can become the speaking trace [la trace parlante] of an existence.1 —M. Merleau-Ponty

With Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961, the same year in which Lévinas published Totalité et infini, it is tantalizing to reflect upon just what might have become of the “Other” in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Is there already a genuine thinking of the “Other” to be found in the traces that remain of his unfinished late ontology? Would this thinking have evolved in response to Lévinas or to other developments in contemporary French thought? Or—as Irigaray suggests in her influential reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late concept of the flesh—would Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to visibility and reversibility have ultimately left him unable to think radical alterity and a politics of difference?2 Perhaps as a result of how Lévinas and Irigaray have shaped reception of Merleau-Ponty on this question, much scholarship that addresses Merleau-Ponty and the question of the “Other” has unfolded in the context of coming to terms with his late ontology of reversibility and the flesh of the world.3 Such an ontology appears, at first glance, to be haunted by at least two dangers: (1) an emphasis on visibility that seems to totalize and possess the other, and (2) an emphasis on reversibility that seems to reduce the other to the same.4 And yet, as Renaud Barbaras asserts: “It is impossible to exaggerate the . . . question of the other throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work” (although, as we will see, Barbaras too ultimately turns to Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology to address this question).5 161

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In this chapter I explore how the question of the “other” structures Merleau-Ponty’s early existential-phenomenological work in order to suggest that the question of how to understand the social encounter in Merleau-Ponty remains unanswered if only the late ontological reflections are emphasized. If we return to his existential-phenomenological account of the social encounter in Phenomenology of Perception, we find reason to believe he is guilty neither of totalizing the other nor of rendering the relation to the Other a simple substitutability. For Merleau-Ponty, I will argue, the social encounter is understood as a type of “reading” that takes part in the fundamental “paradoxical logic of expression” that animates all of his work.6 This suggests not only a continuity of Merleau-Ponty’s early thinking of the Other with the late work, but also introduces layers of existential-phenomenological nuance into the description of the encounter with the Other that seem to be forgotten in readings that dismiss that late work as insufficient in respecting the otherness of others. Moreover, I will suggest, it reveals a nascent ethics of reading the expressive gestures and the vestiges of expression of others that emerges from Merleau-Ponty’s account of gearing into open trajectories of sense, an endless task imposed upon us since, for Merleau-Ponty, the other is never radical alterity and yet never reducible to the same. In general, we fail to embrace the spirit and potential of Merleau-Ponty’s work if we forget that his late ontology too must unfold from within a phenomenological description—the flesh is not something that I can stand outside of and simply describe, putting on a metaphysician’s hat and spectacles in order to assume the privilege of a pensée de survol. The goal of this chapter, then, is to carry forward the existential-phenomenological nuance of Merleau-Ponty’s early work so as to take up as responsibly as possible the trajectory of his unfinished thought. On my reading, the existential-phenomenological and the ontological intertwine. In fact, this reflects the very practice of reading that Merleau-Ponty himself began to thematize near the end of his life, since the reader can never merely repeat the meaning encoded in a text, given that no philosophy or work is reducible to a “system of neatly defined concepts, of arguments responding to perennial problems, and of conclusion which permanently solve the problems.”7 Each text invites further expression, and reading is reperformance. Each reading breathes life into a text that remains as the trace of, and invitation to join, a trajectory of sense, and by lending my body and my life to a text, I necessarily introduce something new in a “coherent deformation” through my creative repetition.8 Merleau-Ponty’s description of flesh is an attempt to express the ontological implications of our phenomenological-existential

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situation of being within and yet transcending, of being enveloped and enveloping. It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty describes the “flesh” in a late working note as like “Bergson’s nascent duration, ever new and always the same.”9 Moreover, “expression” is Merleau-Ponty’s name for our being within that which we sustain and take up and yet that transcends every expression. Flesh and expression are internally related by this logic; flesh is like a language, a system in motion, a trajectory, ever new yet always the same, and stylized by so many explicit and implicit factors. A phenomenological ontology is the attempt to describe this moving equilibrium from within, and this leaves open the possibility of describing innumerable ways of being within according to power structures and other cultural forces and personal histories, since expressive existence is forever between pure repetition and pure creation, never reaching either extreme.10 Given this understanding of the relation between existential-phenomenological and ontological description, I would like to point to an important though unexplored aspect of our encounter with the other as it emerges in Phenomenology of Perception. For Merleau-Ponty, the other’s body and their expressive gestures are the speaking traces of an existence, and thus the social encounter needs to be understood as a “reading” of others, taking this term in its literal and figurative senses. The implication is that despite his explicit late self-criticism, Merleau-Ponty’s genuine thinking of the other, at its most responsible, is at once phenomenological and ontological and, indeed, at once in the early and in the late work.11 Sociality is an existential dimension of bodies subject to the weight of the past, the weight of language, and the weight of others, and the ontological description of these bodies encountering others is always an attempt to express what can only be lived, an attempt that calls us to nothing less than the impossible task of responsible openness to trajectories that we take up and sustain, and yet that transcend us. Contra Levinas, ethics appears in Merleau-Ponty not from beyond history, but precisely because there is no beyond history and yet always history remains open and mutable, like a language.12 This, I suggest, puts Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of the other into the lineage not just of phenomenology, but of Bergson’s rich insights into becoming and Simondon’s subtle descriptions of the open and intertwining trajectories of individuation, and this lineage results in neither a simple relativism nor a fixed universalism or objectivism. The paradoxical logic of expression indicates a place between pure repetition and pure creation, and this is a subtle point that should shape any discussion of an ethics in Merleau-Ponty. For the purposes of this chapter, I’ll focus on how the

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social encounter in Phenomenology of Perception offers this account of gearing into and taking up the vestiges and expressive gestures of others, of “reading” others, and how this suggests that totalization and substitutability are foreign to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of the social encounter.

“OTHERS” IN THE PREFACE TO PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION: FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO ONTOLOGY Husserl famously addresses the question of the other in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations,13 and the influence of Husserl’s Meditations can be felt throughout Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, beginning with the preface. Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of the problem follows Husserl in dismissing the classical attempt to dissolve the epistemological problem of knowing others through analogy, and in insisting that the other is a problem for phenomenology. Although Barbaras criticizes Merleau-Ponty for failing to resolve the problem of the other in the early work,14 it is worth raising the question as to whether or not the problem of the other indeed needs to be resolved, and whether or not the flesh is introduced in order to resolve it. My intuition is that for Merleau-Ponty the other remains necessarily a problem, and to interpret the flesh as resolving that problem would be to attribute to Merleau-Ponty an ontology of survol that he would have resisted. The unresolvability of the epistemological problem of the other provides a first key nuance in understanding the potential of a Merleau-Pontian account of the social encounter, and this opens the way toward the ontological implications, rather than blocking that direction. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty criticizes intellectualism precisely because this theory attempts to resolve the problem of the other. They reason that if each person is a consciousness, then there is no difference between self and other: “the Alter and the Ego are one and the same in the true world, which is the unifier of minds.”15 Yet for an embodied existential phenomenology, the problem of others cannot be resolved because “the other myself,” the Alter-Ego, presents an inescapable paradox within the phenomenal world. Over there looms up an undeniable “I” that is not myself. This paradox of “another myself ” reveals the classical definition of the self to be insufficient. My existence is not reducible to the consciousness that I have of my existing—my existence, as Merleau-Ponty stresses, “must in fact encompass my embodiment in a nature and at least the possibility of an historical

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situation.”16 My existence is always intersubjectively available as a component of and a condition for the phenomenal world, never isolated to the private refuge of constituting consciousness. But also note this mention of an historical situation: my existence is always a phase in a trajectory, the taking up of the past toward a future, which is to say, a participation in duration. As Simondon might say, I become a self, I individuate, not through separation from the world and others, but by taking up the past and others into this unique expression that is my existence.17 Others can and do exist for me because I am not purely accessible to myself and not fully contained in the present. The existential-phenomenological description reveals an ontological structure, but this is less to dissolve the problem of the other than to throw it into relief. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas suggests that Merleau-Ponty is to be praised for his emphasis on the fact that thought does not exist prior to its expression (a point to which I will return below). For Lévinas, however, Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to the phenomenological account of “intentionality” prevents him from escaping the solitude that results from constitution. Beginning from intentionality renders impossible, it seems, “the welcoming of the being that appears in the face, the ethical event of sociality.”18 In short, for Lévinas, even bodily intentionality suggests a subsumption of the Other into the Same.19 And yet, even the preface to Phenomenology of Perception invites a more nuanced reading of Merleau-Ponty’s position. Merleau-Ponty certainly argues for a priority of Husserlian “operative intentionality” over Kantian “act intentionality,” but is Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of this new concept of intentionality equally inimical to radical alterity? Operative intentionality surely “establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life,”20 suggesting that intentionality imposes meaning from within immanence, what Lévinas would call a failure to respect the transcendence of the Other. But, for Merleau-Ponty, operative intentionality does not simply project meaning across my landscape from within immanence; rather, it takes up the landscape that solicits me because it transcends me and cannot be fully comprehended, only lived. Operative intentionality provides us a foothold upon an open text that our explicit forms of knowledge will always fail to fully encompass, a knowing without knowing explicitly or fully.21 Such a “gearing into” is hardly constitution in the classical sense, but rather a gearing into that which we live more than we know, and yet that would be nothing without our taking it up. The intentionality that Merleau-Ponty wants to carry forward from Husserl, then, is not one that ties the lived world to a transcendental

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ego; the introduction of embodiment marks a significant change in the very concept of intentionality cited by Lévinas to dismiss Merleau-Ponty. In fact, for Merleau-Ponty, operative intentionality seems to be another name for our existence itself, as the taking up the past toward a future from within the world, where the world, the past, and the future all transcend me and yet require that I sustain them. Without operative intentionality, that which transcends me would be nothing for me, and there would be no encounter with the Other at all. It seems to me that this is an essential point, but one that has to be carefully parsed. Operative intentionality is our situation in the world such that the world solicits us and such that we take it up as meaningful. But since there are many ways of responding to the solicitations made upon me by the past and the present, there are many ways in which I can fail to recognize others or the violences I commit, permit, or benefit from. Operative intentionality, then, is what makes possible our experience of the other and yet which also makes possible our violence toward them, whether that violence be one of a failure of recognition or of an active objectification. Thus, operative intentionality is not a guarantee of a recognition of the solicitation made upon me by putting me into a world of harmoniously intersubjective fellows; it is what makes possible the very ethical failures that Lévinas and others warn us about. Indeed, without operative intentionality, there is no relation to the other, and so equally no possible effort at communication across difference. Merleau-Ponty seems to understand our existence itself as communication, as the intertwining between the past and the present, the ideal and the real, and this is what he means by operative intentionality. It is less of an emphasizing of the “I can” of a privileged subject than the recognition of existential dimensionality itself. Of course, for Lévinas, communication or sociality is language and expression, and the very heart of the face-to-face encounter, suggesting here that Lévinas and Merleau-Ponty are closer than Lévinas’s critique might suggest. Thanks to operative intentionality, everything in the phenomenal world is both meaningful and yet only ever provisionally so. Others might thus be considered nothing less than the most fascinating of questions posed to my body from the outside, from transcendence, and yet only insofar as I am prepared to gear into them by taking up their sens, and so precisely not from a position of radical alterity. For Merleau-Ponty, the key point is the inescapable intertwining of immanence and transcendence. This understanding of operative intentionality has broad implications for Merleau-Ponty in terms of rethinking the epistemic parameters that

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underscore the classical formulation of the problem of others. It is thus significant that Merleau-Ponty introduces a notion of “phenomenological understanding.” Phenomenological understanding does not consist in a consciousness knowing facts, properties, or ideas; rather, it involves gearing into the “total intention” of the thing understood, and this is a practice that admits of degrees of success. For example, a civilization is not understood through a set of juxtaposed facts in the mind of the historian or observer; it is understood when she or he gears into its unique style and take it up according to the dimensions of operative intentionality by which those who live that civilization live their relation to “others, Nature, time, and death.”22 Certainly this kind of understanding can never be total, but some communication must be possible. This description already invokes a kind of reading, since for Merleau-Ponty the practice of reading will never succeed in recreating precisely the intentions and meanings the text had for the writer, and yet some level of success is possible and necessary for it to be a reading. The text cannot mean for the reader what it meant for the writer, since the reader is living the text through a different time and from a different perspective, taking the text up into their own life. And in fact, even if the reader is the writer, just a moment later, this too brings about a new event, and so not even the writer can be self-identical in a reading of their own text. This is the very logic of trajectory already invoked above to characterize flesh: ever new, yet always the same. Any reading can be more or less successful, but never complete. Even when it comes to my own expressions, what I actually express is a unique formula of so many merely implicit levels and allusions to my past, my future, my relation to this other, my relation to others, my economic or social status, and all the intertwining layers of culture that weave through any meaningful gesture. This may appear at first glance to be reading back into the preface of Phenomenology of Perception some more nuanced material from later in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. Yet such considerations are already at work in his early existential-phenomenological position. Consider the examples that Merleau-Ponty uses in this context of habitual and distracted gestures. The first is a politician who simply utters a platitude, and the second is a person who “keeps quiet” because of fatigue. Although the politician may understand themselves to be “getting through” just another speech or event, their utterance in fact expresses much more. The platitude (“stopping the gravy train”) may mean one thing (“ending corrupt spending practices”), be used for another purpose (“galvanizing a certain electoral base”), and yet

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also express an entire existential decision regarding the meaning of the situation and the stance being taken up in response to that situation. That is, beyond meaning and use, phenomenology points us toward another component of meaningfulness, captured more aptly by Merleau-Ponty’s constant use of the French term sens, which means both “sense” and “direction.” The politician’s utterance gears into a certain sense of the situation and also reveals a certain direction or attitude adopted toward that situation and his or her audience. Innumerable layers shape the “sense” of any gesture, and thus each gesture has an existential dimensionality. The past, the present, the looming “next event,” the speeches the politician has heard, the open possibilities of language and the seemingly fixed availability of certain phrases—all of these dimensions weigh upon this utterance and make it meaningful. The listener gears into them, but never fully occupies the existential intertwining that is the embodied speaker. The gesturing speaker is this unique formula. The same existential analysis holds for the second example too, when I “keep quiet” out of what I experience as fatigue. My manner of remaining quiet through fatigue expresses a particular stance of weariness or “not-wanting-to-endure-it-anymore” that reveals much more than fatigue. Fatigue is not an objective, fixed category, but tracks my existence itself. It expresses my stance toward the situation and to those others who are involved, my personal resilience, and even my personality more generally. As Merleau-Ponty writes later in Phenomenology of Perception: [I]f I experience pain or fatigue at a given moment, then they do not come from the outside; they always have a sense, they express my attitude toward the world . . . Fatigue does not stop my companion because he likes the feel of his body damp with sweat, the scorching heat of the road and the sun and, in short, because he likes to feel himself at the center of things, to draw together their rays, or to turn himself into the gaze for this light and the sense of touch for these surfaces. My fatigue stops me because I do not enjoy this, because I have differently chosen my way of being in the world.23 My fatigue is not isolated from my existence, it is my manner of taking up the past and the situation. My silence may mean I am tired, may be used to gain a bit of repose for myself, but it also expresses the very sense of my unique way of being in the world. Another person, or even myself at a later moment, can never completely occupy this existence, yet they can gear into it and

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understand it, which is a creative and open process. Real layers of historical, cultural, and linguistic weight are expressed in my very posture toward the world. Merleau-Ponty may write such as to emphasize the “I can,” but the experience of being an existential intertwining as oppressed is also possible through his description. To understand anything, truly, is not to know it, but rather to gear into a network of dimensions and trajectories that render the object of operative intentionality meaningful: Must history be understood through ideology, through politics, through religion, or through the economy? Must we understand a doctrine through its manifest content or through the psychology of the author and the events of his life? We must in fact understand in all of these ways at once; everything has a sense, and we uncover the same ontological structure beneath all of these relations.24 The epistemological “problem” of others has led us to an ontological insight: “existence” is the name for the experience from within the accomplishing of an ontological intertwining. Merleau-Ponty writes: The phenomenological world is not pure being, but rather the sense that shines forth at the intersection of my experiences and at the intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing into each other. The phenomenological world is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity.25 Others are not objects to be known out there in an objective world, nor are they consciousnesses to be dissolved by analogy into the one self-same power for constituting the world. Others are co-expressers, sharing in the creation of meaning, and no single constituting consciousness dissolves all difference and exhausts all expression. Lévinas praises Merleau-Ponty on this account as having overcome “Platonism” through a rejection of any single culture (the realm of ideas) coming to encompass all difference, something we might see as a decolonization.26 History is a duration, ever new and always the same, and as such no culture can legitimately claim to possess or complete history. And we never share equally in the creation of meaning or in the power and privilege to interpret and shape history. But trajectories are not the collapse to pure relativism, and the result of these observations is that there is no outside of history from which ethics might appear. Ethics will have to be the

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name for a trajectory of a certain kind, toward openness and less violence, a certain kind of reading that can never be complete.27

OTHERS AND LANGUAGE IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION This reading of Merleau-Ponty is confirmed throughout Phenomenology of Perception, and one particularly fruitful place to look is to the observations that structure the chapter on expression and speech. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty here argues that the phenomenon of speech offers a chance to leave behind the subject-object dichotomy, the very root of the solipsism of classical thought. He weaves together his descriptions of the experience of speaking and of the experience of hearing another speak, and the presence of the other structures the entire chapter. Speech, he argues, accomplishes thought, or in other words, thought does not pre-exist its expression. This point is one that receives praise from Lévinas in Totality and Infinity and elsewhere, and it is worth clarifying just how this insight in Merleau-Ponty might help us to address the question of the other. For Merleau-Ponty, classical accounts of language fail to adequately capture the phenomenon of speech because they miss the meaningful nature of the event of expression. An empiricist approach will reduce language to a moment in a causal chain of mutually exclusive events, whereas an intellectualist approach will see in language nothing but an indifferent envelope for thought, a mere “external accompaniment.” 28 Yet a careful phenomenological investigation into the actual experience of speaking will unravel this presumed debate. Such reflection reveals that the expressions themselves are not merely triggers in a causal chain, but bear their sense, and also that thought does not exist prior to its expression, but is accomplished by expression. Sense is immanent in the speech, and a speaking gesture accomplishes meaning by taking up the past of the words it uses and creatively playing them into this new context. The speech I actually accomplish is consistently identified with listening to another speak, and even the most banal speech act takes on the significance of a social encounter. For instance, Merleau-Ponty understands language to be sedimented behavior; it exists not in dictionaries, but as the possible gestures of a properly situated and solicited lived body. Even listening has this structure: “there is a taking up of the other person’s thought . . . a power of thinking according to others, which

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enriches our own thoughts.”29 Communication is not a question of grasping the ideas they have in the privacy of their mental space, decoding the clues left for me in words. Rather, it involves gearing into the gestural signification of the words. As Merleau-Ponty writes: The operation of expression, when successful, does not simply leave to the reader or the writer himself a reminder; it makes the signification exist as a thing at the very heart of the text, it brings it to life in an organism of words, it installs this signification in the writer or the reader like a new sense organ, and it opens a new field or a new dimension to our experience.30 Communication is the following of the grooves carved out into the materiality of the body, the sounds, or the vestiges of expression. Yet it is not just following the grooves, since I can never merely repeat the words I have learned. Each repetition is a taking up of what I have learnt into the present situation, and this at once repeats the past and reshapes it. Learning a word is not to internalize a definition or to store the word in the mind to be used later for decoding the ideas of another person. Rather, to learn a word is for that word to become part of the horizons of my possible gestures. To learn a word is for it to become felt in its absence, for it to solicit my voice or my eyes in a meaningful way, and this is why operative intentionality is what characterizes my very existence. The word becomes something for me. As such, the body is the very nexus of all of the existential dimensions that create it as this unique trajectory, ever new yet always the same. Embodiment is not just about space, about bringing the mind into material, it is also about time, since the body is nothing other than “the means of our communication with both time and space.”31 Existential dimensionality reveals that we are condemned to sense, which is both larger than us and yet requires that we sustain it and play it forward in the possibilities of our bodies, since it exists nowhere else. Sense shines forth in the performance, which is always a re-performance and yet is always creative. The expressive gesture embodies sense, accomplishes it, and as such at once offers itself to communication with other expressive bodies who can also take it up in a new modality and into their own unique trajectory. There is no sense in Merleau-Ponty of asking about how to bridge to the other, since there is no place that is purely isolated as the “self.” We accomplish an open trajectory that is the placing into communication of the dimensions of meaning that

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make up our existence. We can only know ourselves by taking up our own vestiges again, or by expressing ourselves with the acquired language we have around us, and so our “self-access” is a difference in degree, not in kind, from our access to others. This is why sometimes others can know us better than we know ourselves, why another’s piercing gaze can be so threatening, and why we often sense that there is more to us than any self-understanding we have yet achieved, no matter how complete it may be. And this is also why there is always some reserve that will remain hidden from the other who tries to encompass us, so long as we understand that reserve to not be an actual private refuge, but rather the overflow of sense and the forever open nature of a trajectory that cannot cease becoming. Here the logic of reading again governs the presentation, always more or less successful, but never complete. This approach seems to offer a useful way of grasping why Merleau-Ponty goes to such lengths to sketch a “gestural” theory of meaning in Phenomenology of Perception, since this is what we would now expect if the social encounter really was a form of reading. Gestures are not meaningful in the manner of being a sign for an idea, nor in the manner of having a certain “use”; they are meaningful because they have a sense, they participate in taking up a past into the present, of enacting the logic of trajectory and therefore of appearing at the nexus of the existential dimensions that each one of us is as an embodied subject becoming in the world. If this is correct, then the brief section titled “The Understanding of Gestures” at the heart of this chapter on expression becomes the key to grasping Merleau-Ponty’s position both on language and on the social encounter as reading. In this section, he clarifies how the existential-phenomenological investigation undoes (though does not dissolve) the epistemic problem of others. Existential dimensionality reveals that we are communication, and we do communicate with others, and that in communication there is no reasoning by analogy. He emphasizes how the speaker or listener does not look inside themselves for the sense of the gestures they witness. Rather, “communication or the understanding of gestures is achieved through the reciprocity between my intentions and the other person’s gestures.”32 The gestures or the vestiges of gestures (tools, artworks, etc.) solicit an entire style of behavior, and understanding involves opening ourselves up to the solicitation, not imposing a meaning from the outside. Yet the further removed from my lived experience, the less the scene will solicit my body, the more difficult becomes the reading. Difference creates the need for communication and defines its inherent failures. No two bodies are identical when the bodies in question

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are the seat of an existential dimensionality and trajectory, and difference then is an existential reality of all communication, even of oneself with one’s own past. Complete communication is always deferred. Given these existential-phenomenological nuances that identify our manner of being the nexus of so many layers and relations, it would be strange to attribute to Merleau-Ponty a complete failure to think difference, since difference is the very engine of communication at the heart of each being, both necessitating a reading and yet blocking any completion of this demand. Each trajectory is different, the very production of difference, and introducing this complexity is required to truly grasp the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, where reversibility, just like communication in Phenomenology of Perception, can never be complete.

TRACES OF OTHERS IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION Merleau-Ponty turns his full attention to the question of others in the chapter titled “Others and the Human World.” Here we find a definitive intertwining between the epistemological question and the ontological descriptions, and indeed Merleau-Ponty again insists that our phenomenological understanding of others must be clarified through our deferred understanding of ourselves, a position that connects him as much to Bergson as it does to Husserl. Our existence is a moving equilibrium, a duration or a trajectory of individuation; we are not completed, self-identical individuals. Every present offers the opportunity to understand my past, but each attempt will fail since the logic of trajectory forever defers self-coincidence. Merleau-Ponty writes: My hold on the past and . . . future are precarious and my possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive since it would again be a moment, bordered by the horizon of a future, and would in turn require further developments in order to be understood.33 Any understanding of myself must emerge from within my becoming, an open work in progress that is “ever new and always the same.” In phenomenological understanding, any attempt at apodictic certainty is artificial at best, violent at worst, and always essentially premature: “the lived is never fully comprehensible in this way.”34

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This deferred self-relation shapes Merleau-Ponty’s account of our relation with others. There is a certain pre-personal or anonymous being in the world through perception, which through a primordial level of operative intentionality gives access to the natural world of things. But this is nature in itself for us, showing through our perception, precisely because it is not possible to have an unsituated perception. In perception, we are not given the thing in itself, but rather the thing that looms up as “a transcendence in the wake of a subjectivity.”35 The thing is never the thing in itself, for such a thing would be nothing for us: “We must live things in order to perceive them.”36 Even in the most rudimentary forms of lived perception, there is an expressive taking up of the sense of the thing, and so there is no “thing” outside of culture. Even a natural thing solicits us to gear into its “unique manner of existing,” its existential unity, and Merleau-Ponty identifies our understanding things to be of the same manner as our understanding of a behavior, since a thing is animated by a certain sense that inhabits it. He goes so far as to explicitly conclude that as the other side of perception, and “[p]rior to other persons, the thing accomplishes this miracle of expression: . . . a signification that descends into the world and begins to exist there and can only be fully understood by attempting to see it there.”37 As such, the thing is a correlate “of my existence of which my body is merely the stabilized structure” and is thus constituted by the possibilities I have of gearing into it. And since the body is always both general and particular, natural and cultural, there is no “the” truth of the thing. The thing is a certain kind of solicitation of my body, which speaks to my body depending upon what my body is as a nexus of an existential structure that takes up the past and other influences into this encounter. When the perceiving subject encounters the thing, they do not get to the truth of the thing, nor do they project an idea across some indefinite givens: “The perceiving subject must . . . tend toward things whose key he does not hold in advance, and whose design he nevertheless carries within himself, he must open up to an absolute Other that he prepares from deeper within himself.”38 To be a perceptual body is to have a nascent grasp upon color and light and textures, such as to respond to the solicitation of the coloured and illuminated surfaces that draw our gaze and reveal the unique accent of this particular thing. To have a perceiving body then is not to be an object, but to be a power for opening to the world, a power for reading the world as taking it up in response to its solicitation though never being able to exhaust its depths.39

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Turning to the world of others and culture, Merleau-Ponty suggests that first others appear as the anonymous others who use the cultural objects around me (“villages, streets, churches, a bell, utensils, a spoon, a pipe”). Objects that are “incorporated” into human behavior literally “bear the imprint” of human behavior and solicit gestures from a body like mine. Rather than being available as a unique solicitation for “one” to see, cultural objects appear as for “one” to use. The meaning shines forth as I gear into (at least intentionally) the behaviors for which these cultural objects are the support, even if I cannot actually accomplish them from my current position or given my current condition. The sense of the cultural object too is intimately connected with the existential dimensionality of the one who encounters them. When the instruments are from my own culture, my body fluently gears into them and likely comes very close (even if only through intention) to the sense of their place in the cultural world, a reading of them that proceeds fluidly and without detour. For the objects of an “unknown” civilization, the art of understanding involves being open to the ways of being and living that are soliciting the body, and since there are several ways these vestiges might be lived, one must remain open to revision and alive to the what is brought to the experience from myself.40 Thus, the experience of things, cultural objects, and others are for Merleau-Ponty different only by degree—and they are all manners of reading. As he writes, the very first cultural object, “and the one by which they all exist, is the other’s body as the bearer of a behavior.”41 The other’s body, gesturing and behaving, or the vestiges of others, such as instruments or texts, solicit my body to gear into the sense that will shine forth in my encounter with them. To understand the other is to read their body and their traces as, to return to the epigraph of this chapter, “the speaking trace of an existence,” and in such a reading we take up as meaningful a text of which total comprehension is necessarily deferred. This is neither an attributing of beliefs or internal states to the other person, nor an interpretation of their behavior. Rather, it is a genuine form of phenomenological understanding, gearing into. Indeed, here Merleau-Ponty writes: [T]hrough phenomenological reflection I discover . . . why that expressive instrument that we call a face can bear an existence just as my existence is borne by . . . my body . . . I reenact the foreign existence… but here there is nothing like a reasoning from analogy.42

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It is worth making even more explicit how an encounter with the other is a “reading.” Consider Merleau-Ponty’s example of an infant imitating an adult’s biting motion. Although the infant has never seen her own jaw, when confronting my intentional behavior, she senses, from within, a power for biting and gears into the intentionality of my gesture in a playful mimicry. Although meaning shines forth from the infant’s gesture, this is surely not the precise meaning it had for me, and yet this is communication and reperformance. “I experience my body as the power for certain behaviors and for a certain world,”43 and the same is true for reading or listening. I can lend my body to the expressions that I come across, and this allows for the other to be present without ever being reduced to an object, despite the pretentions we make in this direction. But although the other comes into my world, this is never to the degree that I experience myself. The other lives their experience, but at best I gear into that experience. Even coexistence is “in each case lived by each person,” something Merleau-Ponty admits is a sort of “lived solipsism that cannot be transcended.” We are thus caught in an endless intertwining between solitude and communication, which are “two moments of a single phenomenon.”44 But recall that this is also true of my communication with myself. The existential truth is that every experience, of myself, a thing, an object, or another person, will always be but a moment in a more elaborate and forever deferred trajectory, an intertwining of intentional threads and divergent trajectories across space and time that are not merely created from within immanence.45 This, Merleau-Ponty concludes, is the very structure of the “problem of transcendence”: Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them.46 Barbaras cites this passage as evidence that Merleau-Ponty fails to resolve the problem; on my reading, this passage reveals Merleau-Ponty’s recognition that any attempt to resolve it would in fact be an important form of violence, the very violence Levinas warns us of under the name of “totalization.” Merleau-Ponty concludes: “every other person exists for me as an irrecusable style or milieu of coexistence, and my life has a social atmosphere.”47 The ontology of the flesh is the elaboration, not the resolution, of this rich existential

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dimensionality, and it sets for us the endless task of understanding the other with whom we communicate yet who ceaselessly escapes our grasp. Whether it be the fleeting gestures of a body that cannot help but behave or the materials traces of the expressive acts of bodies gone by and now fallen deep into history, an expression bears a sense and invites readings and reperformances by other expressive bodies able to lend their bodies to the sense that is the other side of this sedimented activity.48 The body, the voice, the text, the work of art, these are all solicitations, eloquent traces that invite a reading public. But they were not fully transparent even in their first expression, and they never reveal all of their secrets—the first speaker or writer is as much a first reader of her or his own body and traces. To be an expressive body, a lived body, then, is to be a reading body that takes up and gives life to the traces of expression, thereby at once reperforming them and reshaping their trajectories, and thus taking responsibility for a tradition or trajectory of sense. An ethics of this gesture would, it seems to me, insist that a reading be at once honest to the traces performed (rather than to some pure original ideas behind them) and open to a less and less violent future of communication, where violence is understood as the denial of a communication already underway or the attempt to finalize the meaning of the text and thereby to totalize any Other. The social encounter, then, is necessarily ethical in the sense that our relation with the other forever admits of degrees of success, though is never complete, and thus violence threatens this relation from both sides of the spectrum: either turning away from the other and denying communication with them, or projecting across the other a totalizing interpretation that denies the excess of their very existence. This is precisely the structure of reading that I have been exploring in this chapter: we must take up a text in an encounter, and yet we must also resist the attempt to freeze, once and for all, the trajectory of meaning through reperformance that we are merely called to continue, not to complete. If the social encounter is reading, then at best it guarantees the possibility for the ethical, setting up the need for a virtuous practice of reading, and simultaneously guarantees the possibility for violence, leaving to each of us the difficult task of cultivating a virtuous relation with others. The ethical does not exist at the outset, at the opening, but rather solicits us as the very sens (meaning and direction) of existence itself. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty began to thematize a practice of reading. One cannot simply repeat the writer’s words, but must “take up and resume” the “very movement of [another’s] thought.”49

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In reading, he argued, our responsibility is to remain mindful of the excess of the thought itself that we are taking up and aware of the inevitable deflections and deformations it will undergo in this new performance within my life. Such a practice of reading, I would suggest, is what Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy offers us in the face, or in the traces, of the Other. Coming face to face with others demands a phenomenological understanding, a genuine communication with all of the rich dimensions of that trajectory, and this is a task that can never be wholly without violence, since the taking up is always a taking into another trajectory that at once guarantees error and violences, and yet this cannot ever be removed without falling back again to an incoherent solipsism, the opposite violence that is a denying of a communication already at work. In the unpublished Mexico lectures titled “Autrui” (The Other/Others), Merleau-Ponty speaks of the violence of intersubjectivity: “From the moment I exist, I act, I seduce, I encroach upon the freedom of others.”50 Violence is the existential force of the space between the other and my understanding of them (which is my existence), and this is a gap that can never be wholly removed. If our relation to the other calls for an ethical or virtuous practice of reading, then it requires us to take up their expressions as that which we are called to reperform because they solicit us from within the open trajectory of history, with the hopes of establishing a community of lesser and lesser violence and more and more expression. This is an orientation without a telos, an ethics that remains a task despite our constant and necessary failures, the weight of an impossible responsibility. This would be to definitively link expression, ontology, and responsibility, where alterity is radical because any understanding we have is always provisional and yet because any attempt to refuse communication is to undermine the very existential dimensionality of our being that is already at once what unites us intersubjectively and what reveals our differences as the inexhaustible place for reading.

NOTES I would like to thank the editors of this collection and the two anonymous reviewers of this chapter for their very helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et culture (FRQSC).

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1. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, D.A. Landes (trans.) (London: Routledge, 2012), 364. 2. See L. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, C. Burke and G. C. Gill (trans.), 151–184 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). I am sympathetic to the account of Irigaray’s practice of reading as presented in J. Butler, “Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty,” in Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), 107–126 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006). 3. For readings of Merleau-Ponty that tend to privilege the final work as responding to the problem of the Other, see R. Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (trans.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); L. Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); C. Lefort, “Flesh and Otherness,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, G.A. Johnson (ed.), M.B. Smith (trans.), 3–13 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990); A.V. Murphy, “Language in the Flesh: The Politics of Discourse in Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas, and Irigaray,” in Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, D. Olkowski and Gail Weiss (eds.), 257–271 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006). Michael Sanders also provides a valuable discussion of intersubjectivity in M. Sanders, “Intersubjectivity and Alterity,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, R. Diprose and J. Reynolds (eds.), 142–151 (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008). Also, see B. Waldenfels, “The Responsivity of the Body: Traces of the Other in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Body and Flesh,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, J. Hatley, J. McLane and C. Diehm (eds.), 91–106 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006). My approach shares some affinities with Waldenfels’, as well as with Sonia Kruks. See S. Kruks, “Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), 24–47 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006). 4. Although the focus here is on the second of these two worries, important implications may be drawn for the first as well, since the ethics of reading is in fact a modality of seeing the other or their traces in a non-totalizing way. As such, I believe the current chapter harmonizes with A. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Critical-Ethical Vision: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Seeing Differently,” Chiasmi International 11 (2009), 375–399.

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5. Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 19 (emphasis added). 6. For my reading of how the “paradoxical logic of expression” structures Merleau-Ponty’s work, see D.A. Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 7. M. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, L. Lawlor with B. Bergo (eds.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 5. This passage comes from the summary of one of his last courses at the Collège de France (1959–1960). He also thematizes a practice of reading in the late essay “The Philosopher and His Shadow” [1958], in Signs, R.C. McCleary (trans.), 159–181 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 8. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, R.C. McCleary (trans.), 39–83 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 54–55. 9. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, A. Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 267. My attention was drawn to this working note thanks to the excellent essay by Ann V. Murphy, cited above. 10. The claim that “we” are all ontologically situated in this way does not suggest, then, that we are all situated in precisely the same way, nor does it necessarily entail the privileging of a particular way of being so situated, even if Merleau-Ponty’s presentation at times fails to live up to this inclusive potential. 11. For an alternative reading, see Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 33–40. 12. See E. Lévinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans.), 75–107 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998). See also R. Bernasconi, “One-Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonization and its Ethics,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, G.A. Johnson and M.B. Smith (eds.), 67–80 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990). This question of relativism is also addressed by Murphy, “Language in the Flesh,” 264. 13. E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Dorion Cairns (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999). 14. Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 36ff. 15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. 16. Ibid., lxxvi. 17. For more on the possibility of bringing together Merleau-Ponty and Simondon, see Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, 22–27.

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18. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, A. Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 207. 19. Ibid., 206. See also, Murphy, “Language in the Flesh,” 263. 20. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxxii. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 466. 24. Ibid., lxxxiii. 25. Ibid., lxxxiv. 26. Bernasconi does an excellent job of parsing the subtle points being made by Lévinas in “Meaning and Sense” against Merleau-Ponty. Bernasconi, “One-Way Traffic,” 74–80. Bernasconi suggests that there is an open humanism in Merleau-Ponty that reveals a close proximity to Lévinas. I am sympathetic to this approach, and have also argued for a subtle humanism within Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical logic of expression in Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, 103–126. 27. This foreshadows Simondon regarding ethics. See my discussion at D. Landes, “Individuals and Technology: Gilbert Simondon, from Ontology to Ethics to Feminist Bioethics,” Continental Philosophy Review 47(2) 2014: 153–76, particularly 156. 28. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 182. 29. Ibid., 184. 30. Ibid., 188. 31. Ibid., 187. 32. Ibid., 190–191. 33. Ibid., 362. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 340. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 333–334. 38. Ibid., 340. 39. Kruks’s essay “Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism” is particularly useful in demonstrating that the anonymous body of perception invoked by Merleau-Ponty in such discussions does not ultimately mean that embodiment alone guarantees a common ground between all subjects, thereby utterly failing to recognize difference and oppression in favor of what amounts to an unacknowledged masculine, white, and

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young male body. This is the critique that is offered of Merleau-Ponty by S. Sullivan in “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” Hypatia 12(1) 1997: 1–19. Kruks quite rightly concludes that for Merleau-Ponty “the body is not . . . a ‘short cut’ to a common ground,” but rather a “source of its possibility” (42, 37), and this is precisely the position being supported in the present paper. Embodiment as existential dimensionality creates the possibility of communication and the various levels of violence of intersubjectivity as well. 40. This suggests a harmony with Al-Saji’s notion of a “critical-ethical vision” in the cited essay. 41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 364. 42. Ibid., 367. 43. Ibid., 370. 44. Ibid., 374. 45. Ibid., 377. 46. Ibid., 381. 47. Ibid., 382. 48. See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 25. 49. M. Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, R.C. McCleary (trans.), 84–97 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 84. 50. This passage from the unpublished lecture is reported in E. de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être: Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951 (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004), 64.

REFERENCES Al-Saji, A. “A Phenomenology of Critical-Ethical Vision: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Seeing Differently.” Chiasmi International 11 (2009): 375–399. Barbaras, R. The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Translated by T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

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Bernasconi, R. “One-Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonization and its Ethics.” In G.A. Johnson and M.B. Smith (eds.), Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, pp. 67–80. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Butler, J. “Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty.” In D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, pp. 107–26. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. Hass, L. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by D. Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999. Irigaray, L. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and G.C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Kruks, S. “Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism.” In D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of MerleauPonty, pp. 24–47. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. Landes, D.A. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Landes, D.A. “Individuals and Technology: Gilbert Simondon, from Ontology to Ethics to Feminist Bioethics.” Continental Philosophy Review 47(2) 2014: 153–176. Lefort, C. “Flesh and Otherness.” In Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, edited by G.A. Johnson and M.B. Smith (eds.), pp. 3–13. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Lévinas, E. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Merleau-Ponty, M. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Edited by L. Lawlor, with B. Bergo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D.A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, M. Signs. Translated by R.C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

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Murphy, A.V. “Language in the Flesh: The Politics of Discourse in MerleauPonty, Lévinas, and Irigaray.” In D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, pp. 257–271. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. Saint Aubert, E. de. Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être: Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951. Paris: J. Vrin, 2004. Sanders, M. “Intersubjectivity and Alterity.” In R. Diprose and J. Reynolds (eds.), Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, pp. 142–151. Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008. Sullivan, S. “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.” Hypatia 12(1) 1997: 1–19. Waldenfels, B. “The Responsivity of the Body: Traces of the Other in MerleauPonty’s Theory of Body and Flesh.” In J. Hatley, J. McLane, and C. Diehm (eds.) Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in MerleauPonty, pp. 91–106. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 7

Linguistic Encounters THE PERFORMATIVITY OF ACTIVE LISTENING Beata Stawarska

When social encounters play out in language, they typically involve the acts of saying something to someone. Such acts are communicative in their reliance on a speaker’s performance and a hearer’s response, but to explain why some sayings typically succeed with relative ease while others do not—even when the person has said appropriate words in the right way—or why some sayings have a potential to produce massive harm that seems out of bounds with the individual speakers’ signifying intent, we need to expand the horizon to include the inherited social conditions of power and the received histories of the said words and the situated identities of the persons saying and hearing them. In this chapter,1 in examining social encounters in language, I will therefore seek to combine an inquiry into individual saying acts (otherwise called speech-acts, such as issuing an order, refusing an offer, or insulting someone) with a reflection on how the enabling and constraining social conditions influence the success of such acts in the present. In other words, I will work at the intersection of a microsociology of social encounters with a larger structural focus on historically contingent social positions. Yet my overall task is not only diagnostic but also emancipatory, and I will seek resources for resisting the received and sedimented social relations of power, including at the level of the individual sayings themselves. I will therefore recover Bourdieu’s central claim that language mirrors social conditions of power operative in our not-solely-linguistic lives but will emphasize, in agreement with Butler’s conception of linguistic performativity, 185

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that an ongoing linguistic practice does not solely reflect but can also resist and revise dominant distributions of power by enacting novel social relations through the saying acts. I will argue that both Bourdieu’s and Butler’s understanding of the language power structure will benefit from integrating additional insights from speech-act theory, specifically regarding the importance of the hearer’s uptake for a successful or felicitous performance of a speech-act. Speech is typically thematized in terms of the vocal production made by an individual speaker or a group, but I will argue, drawing on Austin and in agreement with Hornsby and Langton, that the hearer’s uptake, which includes at least minimal receptiveness to what the speaker is saying, constitutes an integral and active element of the total speech situation. Defined in this way, uptake belongs to the language and power structure since granting the speaker minimal receptivity can enable a speech-act to function as such (for example, an attempted order to become an accomplished one) while withdrawing minimal receptivity can make the speech-act flounder. The hearer’s uptake thus plays an active role in shaping social power relations, which opens up a possibility of a bottom-up remedy to unjust speech. Language users can re-shape the social world by being active listeners to those who have been historically disempowered. I will turn to Irigaray’s philosophy of dialogue across sexual difference to make a case for active listening as an emancipatory strategy that can re-authorize speakers who have been socially disempowered on account of their gender. Throughout, I will seek to both recognize the weight of inherited social conventions in language and to recover the capacity for socio-linguistic renewal within the partially unscripted and potentially innovative interactions between language users in the present.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL POWER According to Bourdieu, structural linguistics tends to separate the linguistic instrument from its social conditions of production, reproduction, and usage; this purported divide between the “internal” and the “external” elements of linguistics bestows the appearance of scientificity on the products of history, the symbolic objects, and thus exercises an ideological effect.2 As Bourdieu puts it, “bracketing out the social, which allows language or any other symbolic object to be treated like an end in itself, contributed considerably to the success of structural linguistics, for it endowed the ‘pure’

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exercises that characterize a purely internal and formal analysis with the charm of a game devoid of consequences.”3 This presumed autonomy of language emerged from the standpoint of a purportedly disengaged intellectualist philosophy that regards language as an object of contemplation at the disregard of its bond to action and power. Bourdieu’s own central project will consist in reconstituting this bond, and expanding the scope of analysis to include not only the symbolic interactions of cognition and recognition but also the “relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers or their respective groups are actualized.”4 These relations of symbolic power can best be witnessed in the production and reproduction of the official language, the assumed object of study in structural linguistics. Challenging the “illusion of linguistic communism,” which would have us believe that language is a common treasure equally available to all, Bourdieu contends that official language is closely bound up with the state apparatus and serves the political function of unification of the citizens, notably within the educational system. The standard language is thus not a finished product or a factual given but an active instrument of normalizing select linguistic practices and deeming others derivative or deviant forms. This normalizing process is pursued by those with greater power: “All linguistic practices are measured against legitimate practices, i. e., the practices of those who are dominant.”5 The linguistic hierarchy between the official language and the dialect therefore reflects the social hierarchy between the members of dominant and subordinate groups. Thus, while the structural linguist foregrounds the virtually universal human capacity to speak (the condition sine qua non of linguistic communism), the sociologist recognizes the “socially conditioned way of realizing this capacity,” 6 that is, the direct link between the socioeconomic conditions of subjugation and subordination in a class society on the one hand and the linguistic stratification into a refined style empowered with the functions of distinction and correctness and the popular, common-place, vulgar usages on the other. The social process that legitimates the dominant discourse as being recherché and dignified is thus contingent on the de-legitimation or abjection of forms marked as crude, coarse, uncouth, if not altogether unspeakable (forms such as slang, pidgin, gibberish). While the former function as “linguistic capital” in that they not only reflect but also increase the profit of distinction enjoyed by the speaker of legitimate language, the latter are likely to further subordinate the ones whose speech lacks social acceptability even if it may be grammatically correct. As Bourdieu puts it, “[t]

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he competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to . . . Speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence.”7 A narrowly linguistic focus on grammaticality at the exclusion of social acceptability makes this phenomenon of silencing effectively undecipherable. Importantly, the process of social legitimation does not only affect the stratification of competence between the more or less socially acceptable language, but also empowers some speakers with authority, while disempowering others. To draw on classic examples from J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory, a performative utterance that realizes a given act by virtue of pronouncing the appropriate words can only go off or be felicitous if the person christening a ship is a person previously entitled to do so, or if the person issuing orders has the authority to issue them. The felicity of speech-acts, just like the legitimation of official language, cannot be accounted for in purely linguistic terms; it reflects “the whole social order behind them,” that is, the pre-existing social conditions of greater and lesser power. “From a strictly linguistic point of view, anyone can say anything and the private can order his captain to ‘clean the latrines,’ but from a sociological point of view . . . it is clear that not anyone can assert anything, or else does not at his peril, as with an insult.”8 If the person has not been previously delegated with authority, the order or the insult will fail to work its magic because it is deprived of the necessary social backing by the existing order of institutional conditions and distributions of power; regarded in the abstractum, such speech-acts may still have linguistic sense, but they lack the requisite social sense and cannot effectively perform their function in the social world. Bourdieu apparently assumes that the efficacy of speech-acts depends directly on the pre-existing order of social rights and privileges, such that only those previously authorized to perform requisite social functions can exercise these functions by speaking with authority. As Butler puts it: [Bourdieu] tends to assume that the subject who utters the performative is positioned on a map of social power in a fairly fixed way . . . Although Bourdieu is clearly right that not all performatives “work” and that not all speakers can participate in the apparently divine authorization by which the performative works its social magic and compels collective recognition of its authority, he fails to take account of the

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way in which social positions are themselves constructed through a more tacit operation of performativity. Indeed, not only is the act of “delegation” a performative, that is, a naming which is at once the action of entitlement, but authorization more generally is to a strong degree a matter of being addressed or interpellated by prevailing forms of social power. Moreover, this tacit and performative operation of authorization and entitlement is not always initiated by a subject or by a representative of a state apparatus. For example, the racialization of the subject or its gendering or, indeed, its social abjection more generally is performatively induced from various and diffuse quarters that do not always operate as “official” discourse.9 While the language of social positions may suggest a fixed spatial stratification based on class, Butler reminds us that social positions emerge via interpellation: yet another performative act that produces what it names when it names an individual a “woman,” a “black,” or a “queer.” Importantly, these linguistic instruments of social abjection have a corporeal history in that “[o] ne need only to consider how racial or gendered slurs live and thrive in and as the flesh of the addressee, and how these slurs accumulate over time, dissimulating their history, taking on the semblance of the natural, configuring and restricting the doxa that counts as ‘reality.’”10 The subjects produced through these acts of naming are therefore positioned firmly, corporeally, and not “just” linguistically, outside of the field occupied by those already authorized to speak. Their name is a performative marker of exclusion from the social position of greater power, but contrary to Bourdieu’s analysis, “it is clearly possible to speak with authority without being authorized to speak.” Specifically, it is possible to re-appropriate, mis-appropriate and expropriate the very terms of abuse and degradation, to deploy them through a citation that alters the very historically charged term it reiterates in the present, “rallying under the sign of ‘queer’ or revaluing affirmatively the categories of ‘blacks’ or ‘women.’”11 These subversive citations expose prior forms of authorization and exclusion, but they also complicate the relations between authorized and de-authorized speech, since those who have been previously denied the social backing needed to perform the magic of felicitous speech may actively appropriate a social position of power via linguistic reclamation of sexist, racist, and homophobic speak. I/we have been called by that name; I/we shall re-appropriate that name by its “incorrect” citation and thus claim

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discursive powers to reformulate the very subjectivity that is hailed into existence by naming. Now that is social magic. Butler’s appeal to transgressive reclamation of socially harmful speech describes an empowering emancipatory practice; it also offers, in my view, a useful alternative to the strategy of regulation, including government censorship of derogatory expressions, developed by Lawrence, Matsuda, Delgado, and Williams Crenshaw.12 The regulation approach calls on the state to intervene between the citizens; the state is charged with the power to prohibit certain linguistic expression and to punish their users. Butler’s own approach, inspired by Bourdieu, J.L. Austin, and others13 is a “bottom-up” approach, since social groups themselves are empowered to negotiate what words signify and what effects they may produce; in a felicitous case of reclamation of the words “queer,” “black,” or “woman,” an expression that previously carried the force of exclusion and contempt shifts to a celebratory term of self-affirmation within the relevant group. The performative approach empowers the citizens themselves to assume authority over meaning and identity; it may also avoid one of the difficulties entailed by the regulatory approach, that is, maintaining marginalized groups in a position of victimhood and dependency, played out no longer in relation to the dominant social groups but to the apparatus of the state. Butler makes a compelling case that the regulatory approach inadvertently preserves the notion of sovereign subjectivity in its assumed view of language, since the offending speaker is charged with all the power to cause social harm by wielding words like weapons.14 Once we acknowledge that linguistic meanings are arbitrary, that is, grounded in the historically inherited, sedimented, as well as revisable conventions of usage, we can tap into their socially contingent plasticity and make the words speak somewhat differently than they did in the past. Importantly, linguistic arbitrariness is not a purely negative category implying an absence of any “extra-linguistic” motivation; linguistic arbitrariness is fueled by the forces of performativity, that is, by the enduring, evolving, and conflicting sets of social rituals and conventions that dictate what words mean.15 While Butler’s analysis of subversive resignification offers a much-needed corrective to Bourdieu’s socially static account of language and power, I will argue that linguistic performativity is not exhausted by novel practices of naming, and that speaking with authority is not limited to an active assumption of the speaker role. Specifically, I will argue that acts of active heeding to speech-acts issuing from the members of historically de-authorized groups can also work the social magic of re-authorization. This argument

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will require attending to the microlevel of saying something to someone, the actual linguistic encounter between at least two parties, who can communicate as well as reproduce, resist, and actively renegotiate power relations tied to their social standing during the encounter. This microlevel of power can be traced in the interrelation between a felicitous speech-act and a receptive uptake from the hearer; the latter is necessary for the former to carry force. An act such as issuing an order depends on the hearer’s uptake, which may be granted or withheld depending on the perceived appropriateness of the person issuing the order, and this appropriateness is not regulated solely by the official function but also by the more tacit forms of social authorization and social abjection through the gendering and racialization of speaking subjects. In fact, Bourdieu’s own analysis of social power acknowledges a correlation between legitimation and recognition. The symbolic capital wielded by previously authorized speakers is a “recognized” power, a power contingent on “the recognition, institutionalized or not, that the [agents] receive from a group.”16 Speech-acts draw their efficacy by reproducing previously established processes of legitimation, but their ongoing legitimacy depends on the recognition in the present with a renewed claim “to be heard, believed, and obeyed.”17 The production, reproduction, and recognition of legitimacy are therefore interdependent; just as language deemed illegitimate is less likely to be listened to and vulnerable to being silenced through misrecognition, so is language with an ongoing claim to legitimacy in dire need of being respectfully received for its performance in the present to be felicitous. According to Bourdieu, this reliance of speaker authority on audience recognition is especially apparent in the language of rituals and religious discourse.18 The symbolic efficacy of religious language that magically transforms wine into blood and bread into flesh would become threatened if the congregation did not recognize the ceremony as authorized magic, performed by a legitimate speaking subject (traditionally gendered male). Yet the claim to “be heard, believed, and obeyed” is not limited to religious rituals. A command that is not obeyed, as when a mutinous crew challenges the authority of the captain to issue binding orders despite his unchanged official standing, fails as a speech-act. The institutional standing of the captain alone does not guarantee that reproduction of legitimate discourse will ensue; the captain must be heeded by the crew for his word to be their bond. The heeding act is not regulated fully by delegated authority and prior entitlement; hence it is perennially vulnerable to social disruption. Much as the subversive reclamations of historically injurious names by the members of previously

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de-authorized groups can work the social magic of re-authorization, so the acts of disobedience can de-authorize institutionally backed-up discourse by withdrawing recognition. Bourdieu does not probe the possibility of such social upheavals affecting the felicity of speech-acts in detail, and he does not seem to acknowledge that social effects related to authority and legitimacy could be produced at the level of linguistic interaction between individuals and/or groups. This reticence reflects perhaps his skepticism about a “micro-sociology” modeled on Husserl’s attempt to ground knowledge in lived experience, which is bound to miss the reality that “lies in structures transcending the interaction which they inform,”19 and to reduce relations of power to communication. But this skepticism risks congealing social structures and power relations into finished products, and imparts upon them the same ideology that Bourdieu had previously uncovered in the quarters of literary criticism and structuralist linguistics. His own emphasis on the socially conditioned nature of linguistic structures should leave a door open to social resistance and critique, including within socio-linguistic practices. In agreement with his stated view that claims to legitimacy and appeals to respectful listening belong together,20 it is possible to imagine that recognition granted and/or withheld may impact the ongoing social process of legitimation. Such a microsociology proposed within this essay can complement Butler’s analysis of speaker re-authorization by extending the scope of linguistic performativity to include the active process of heeding to speech issuing from the members of historically de-authorized groups. Active heeding can work the social magic of re-authorization in addition to the subversive reclamation and rallying under the sign “queer,” “woman,” or “black” by the historically marginalized groups themselves. I believe that both acts are necessary to institute a redistribution of power in the social world, and that the transgressive reproduction of linguistic usage that undoes traditional construals of authority and legitimacy is most effective when coupled with a rewired recognition of the de-authorized speakers and with a re-attuned ear to their making of sound and sense. The process of re-authorization vitally depends on cultivating a stance of productive listening that empowers the utterance to become felicitous by virtue of the recognition it bestows upon the speaker. This kind of listening is performative in that it has the power to bring new sense into being, without needing to say a word. I will emphasize the felicity condition of the hearer’s uptake to bear this point out.

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THE HEARER’S UPTAKE AS A FELICITY CONDITION FOR SPEECH-ACTS J.L. Austin famously distinguished between the three interconnected layers within the speech-act: locution, that is, the saying of certain words with a certain meaning or content; illocution, that is, performing an act in saying these words; and perlocution, namely producing certain effects by saying these words. Let me illustrate this distinction by means of an example borrowed from Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton. A woman says to a man who is making advances toward her: “I am not interested.” The locutionary act consists in the meaningful content of the woman’s utterance, that is, in the fact that she does not produce mere noise but conveys meaning. The illocutionary act in this case is the woman’s refusal to engage in sexual intercourse. The perlocutionary act includes the effects and consequences of the woman’s utterance, and if she is successful, the withdrawal of the man. Needless to say, the speaker’s utterance of the appropriate locution for an act of refusal does not necessarily yield the intended illocutionary force. A “NO” uttered by a female speaker may be received by a male hearer as a titillating invitation to press on, especially in light of the practice pervasive in pornographic speech to have the “NO” mean anything but. Following Hornsby and Langton, “pornographic speech-acts help create a communicative climate in which the felicity conditions for some of women’s speech are not met.”21 This means that the felicity conditions for a speech-act of refusal, and possibly other speech-acts tied to the exercise of authority and autonomy, are not met within the communicative climate in which women’s speech is systematically deprived of the illocutionary force that the appropriate locutions are likely to produce when uttered by socially dominant speakers. Hornsby and Langton term the process that makes certain speech-acts effectively unspeakable for women “illocutionary disablement” or “silencing.” The silencing occurs at the illocutionary level, meaning that even though the speaker effectively produces an articulate and intelligible utterance indicating refusal, her speech fails as illocution, that is, it fails to enact the force needed to turn her utterance into an effective speech-act (of refusal in this case). This infelicity befalling the otherwise appropriate and audible speech cannot therefore be accounted for in terms of the subjective utterance alone; the failure arises due to a withdrawal of uptake on the hearer’s part, and is therefore a socially modulated fact.22

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Let me flesh out this point in a series of steps, by using and modifying some of Austin’s classical distinctions. Austin distinguishes between different kinds of infelicity affecting conventional speech-acts. The infelicity can affect, first, the conventional procedure (say, a marriage ceremony), and second, the persons and circumstances involved (say, the minister and the couple), who must in a given case be deemed appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure. For example, the words uttered by the couple during the ceremony must include the conventional “I do.” Furthermore, until recently the couple would have been deemed inappropriate for invocation of the marriage procedure within parts of the United States if they were of the same sex. The third and fourth infelicities affecting speech-acts have to do with the procedure needing to be executed by all participants correctly and completely. For example, the utterance “I divorce you” spoken by a Christian does not enact an existing procedure, and therefore fails. It would however be effective, Austin notes, if uttered by a Mohammedan.23 Austin refers here to the divorce procedure under Islamic law, which consists in the Talak invocation (or some equivalent thereof, with the implied meaning of “divorced”). What Austin fails to notice is that Talak procedure is traditionally enacted by men, and becomes ineffective when uttered by women (a woman can reserve in her marriage contract the right to divorce, but in practice few women do).24 The existence of a conventional procedure does not therefore guarantee its general accessibility. A woman may utter the right words, and yet her utterance be deprived of illocutionary force. In cases of both the infelicitous refusal and divorce, the judgment regarding appropriateness ties to the pervasive social norms relative to gender in male-dominated societies, rather than to determinate rules and conventions. It is the gender-based power inequity that accounts for the infelicity of some of women’s speech-acts, and not, say, a legal standing that can in principle be reversed—as in the case of heterosexual marriage, where a previously married person can become appropriate for the invocation of marriage vows to a new partner by going through a divorce, and so a previously infelicitous act can meet felicity conditions. In the case of women’s disempowered speech, there is no readily available legal or other procedure that would make the relevant speech-act felicitous. The perceived inappropriateness of the person for the invocation of the speech-act is here largely based on unwritten social mores. Yet these social mores effectively determine who has the social power and authority to refuse unwanted sex or terminate an unwanted marriage, amongst the many things we do with words. Furthermore, a minimum of power and authority is required for

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felicitous enactment of most speech-acts (other than acts of deprecating or deriding oneself ), and if femininity is systematically entwined with powerlessness, then women’s speech is routinely at risk of failure. As Miriam Meyerhoff notes, expanding on Lakoff’s and Langton’s views: You have to be a serious person with your own views to satisfy the felicity conditions for most speech-acts, and if women are socially and discursively constructed in roles that preclude having serious views, then as far as some speech-acts go, their attempts to act are silenced.25 It follows that the existing status quo makes women’s speech socially vulnerable. Unwritten habitual practices relative to gender and social power—and not just the official and legal status acknowledged by Austin—can negatively impact its felicity and lead to a withdrawal of the hearer’s uptake from the otherwise appropriate and articulate speech.26 Austin continually returns to the infelicity of uptake in the lectures, albeit he does not include it in the formal list.27 It is “a sort of infelicity of misunderstanding,”28 that complicates the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary dimensions of speech, and thus further illuminates the cases of silencing referred to here. For example, my speech-act of ordering someone to do something is vulnerable to the infelicity of misunderstanding if it has not been heard or taken up by the addressee as an order. Austin notes that an order to, for example, go and pick up wood on a desert island will be disregarded if the speaker does not have sufficient authority to pass orders, unlike a captain on a ship who genuinely has authority.29 Needless to say, speakers may have conventionally recognizable authority and yet be perceived as inadequate leaders, as discussed above. Austin seems to assume that the officially and legally specified status (for example captain versus the purser, unmarried versus married person) suffices to regulate success in speech. Still, his emphasis on hearer-dependency can be extended to cover cases in which infelicity is tied to gender-based power inequity, regardless of official titles and status. Austin notes: [I]t is always possible, for example, to try to thank or inform somebody yet in different ways fail, because he doesn’t listen, or takes it as ironical, or wasn’t responsible for whatever it was, and so on. This distinction will arise, as over any act, over locutionary acts too; but

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failures here will not be unhappiness as there, but rather failures to get the words out, to express ourselves clearly, etc.30 Austin distinguishes here between locutionary and illocutionary failure, a failure at the level of the physical act itself—for example, speaking in sotto voce, and an illocutionary failure located at the level of the speech-act properly so called. The former infelicity seems bound to the utterance narrowly construed as the sound sequence issuing from the speaker’s mouth, while the latter is a socially modulated act, constituted by the speaker’s vocal productions and the hearer’s uptake of these productions in a certain sense. As Austin notes: Unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed. This is not to say that the illocutionary act is the achieving of a certain effect. I cannot be said to have warned an audience unless it hears what I say and takes what I say in a certain sense. An effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out . . . [T]he performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake.31 This passage is intriguing on multiple counts. First, Austin complicates here the distinction he is keen to preserve elsewhere between the speech-act and its effect, or the illocution and the perlocution.32 The speaker is not in control of the effects of her speech on others, and the former cannot be simply derived from the latter. Still, the felicity of the speech event is contingent on an intrinsic interrelation between the two, insofar as the effect of securing uptake helps to convert an attempted speech-act into an effectively achieved one. We find here an interesting case of retroactive constitution of the force of the utterance by the audience who must receive it in a certain sense for the utterance to take effect. This is not a (solely) subjective constitution of meaning, but a socially modulated one. The hearer’s uptake is both the effect of what is being said and the condition of the saying acquiring the force of a speech-act. The accomplishment of the speech-act is thus contingent not only on the speaker’s actions but also on the hearer’s participatory involvement in the speech event, and on actively attending to what the speaker is up to. Receiving speech in an appropriate way is as much a speech-related act as producing it is.33

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The infelicity resulting from insufficient uptake influences most illocutionary acts. As Hornsby and Langton put it, reciprocity provides a background condition of speech as a whole. In their words: Language use . . . relies on a mutual capacity for uptake, which involves a minimal receptiveness on the part of language users in the role of hearers. This minimal receptiveness does not mean that a hearer will agree, or is even capable of agreeing, with what a speaker is saying; but it does mean that a hearer has a capacity to grasp what communicative act a speaker might be intending to perform. When reciprocity is present, the speaker’s utterance works as she means it to. Its working so appears to depend on nothing more than speaker and hearer being parties of a normal linguistic exchange, in which a speaker’s attempt to communicate is successful. A speaker tries to do an illocutionary thing; a hearer recognizing that the speaker is trying to do that thing is then sufficient for the speaker to actually do it.34 To extend Hornsby and Langton’s insightful analysis further, a speech-act includes not only the three dimensions previously discussed (locution, illocution, perlocution), but also an interlocutionary one, co-involving the speaker and the hearer in similar measure. Austin may not have recognized the importance of interlocution because his conception of illocution is narrowly tied to the issuing of utterance, at partial neglect of the receiving end. This focus on the active doing explains why the infelicities included on the master list have all to do with the production, and not the reception, of the utterance. It explains also why the infelicity of misunderstanding or misrecognition does not get included in the master list despite being taken up—excuse the pun—over and over during the lectures. Austin states overtly that his primary interest lies in illocution or action, separated off from perlocution.35 However, as we have seen, a speech-act is intrinsically interconnected with its effect on the hearer, and the infelicity relative to this effect shapes the force of the speech-act itself. If so, then illocution and perlocution are more intimately interwoven than the initial classification suggests.36 Austin’s formal distinction between the speaker and the hearer domains, between the force and the effect of speech, turns out therefore to be more permeable as well. The two are linked via interlocution that may but need not always be formally manifest within the utterance, since I do not always (need to) employ a direct

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form of address to nonetheless speak to you, the hearer of my speech, the reader of these lines. If the hearer’s uptake can impact the felicity of speech-acts in the way described above, then it forms an integral element of a complex communicative phenomenon co-involving the speaker and the hearer. The hearer’s uptake is not a mere effect of an already constituted signifying process but a constituting force within the process itself that contributes to some degree to its happiness by re-affirming and/or denying the authority of the speaker. As such, the hearer’s uptake can function as a disempowering strategy that reproduces the socially entrenched power inequities by seeking to de-authorize a marginalized speaker. I have argued elsewhere that the hearer’s uptake can function in this manner to disempower women’s speech, and that it does so not solely by active misrecognition of specific speech-acts, such as the speech-act of refusal discussed above, but that it also assumes a more diffuse form of illocutionary disablement; the latter indicates a pervasive stance of unreceptiveness toward a female speaker who deploys an authority position in a public space—as distinguished from the more focused illocutionary disablement of specific speech-acts, as in the No or Talak illocutions noted above.37 I argued that in the context of public education at a large university, diffuse illocutionary disablement can be expressed by an audience in a hostile and confrontational gaze, enacted bewilderment that punctuality and classroom participation are expected, disregard of classroom etiquette by ongoing chatting, smirking, etcetera. In this setting, the speaker’s utterances can fail as speech regardless of her institutionally recognized position. I previously argued that illocutionary disablement, whether focused or diffuse, can be described as unhappy speech if one agrees that the reception and recognition of a speech-act contribute to its illocutionary success. Yet the reception and recognition of any speech-act in the present is not limited to the specific hearer’s and/or audience’s good will. In agreement with Bourdieu’s analysis, linguistic interactions reflect pre-existing social conditions of power, and they tend to authorize the speech of those who have been authorized already, and de-authorize the speech of those who have not. If the traditional construals of femininity and epistemic authority tend to be at odds with each other, then not only may women’s speech contain elements indicative of lesser power, but also, importantly, it may systematically fail to find the minimal receptiveness necessary for speech to carry force. Whether it is because women are raised to speak in sotto voce, or because their/our

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speech goes unheeded despite being audible, the felicity of women’s speech is systematically endangered in a nonreceptive communicative climate. Similarly, the felicity of verbal insults, such as racial slurs or sexually degrading and homophobic speech, typically reflects socially conditioned greater power and privilege of the offending speaker in relation to the target audience. The manifest success of words such as “bitch,” “cunt,” or “whore” to act in a magical manner as direct instruments of denigration of women by men depends upon a long history of accumulated prejudice against women in male-dominated societies. A gender-based power disparity is symbolically reflected in the scarce linguistic resources for speaking back: the English language includes longer litanies of insulting terms for the historically marginalized than for the mainstream groups. A verbal insult is therefore a complex communicative phenomenon that works its social magic in the present by calling up historically sedimented power inequities between those who are likely to be successful in provoking insult and those who are likely to be harmed by it. These enabling social conditions account for the greater likelihood of harmful speech being felicitous when it is deployed by members of socially privileged groups in relation to the historically subjugated ones. If words can hurt us now, it is because words have a history. Sexist words can hurt because relations of sexual difference have tended to play out as relations of subjugation without mutual recognition between men and women. Yet while the felicity conditions of speech cannot be deciphered through a narrow focus on the speaker performance and the hearer response in the present, I believe that communicative acts retain some explanatory and emancipatory potential, and should not be reduced to simple epiphenomena of a more complex set of structural relations of power. Linguistic interactions retain the power of the performative that Butler associates with the process of reclaiming historically injurious terms by marginalized social groups and of re-authorizing their/our speech in the process. Small-scale linguistic interactions partake in the process of interpellation that produces what it names. Yet their performative potential is not limited to naming, and linguistic performativity is not reducible to the speaker’s vocal productions. Listening too is performative in its potential to engender (or co-engender) new sense and to re-authorize a marginalized speaker by lending her a receptive ear. This happens when an already authorized hearer actively renounces his total claim to the signifying space so that a historically de-authorized speaker may occupy her half in the now. I’ll draw on Irigaray’s argument for a culture of sexual difference to bear this point out in the remainder of the essay.

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PERFORMATIVITY OF ACTIVE LISTENING According to Irigaray, the traditional discourse of science and philosophy makes a claim to a total, systematic view of nature, but considering that this discourse emerged within the historically male-dominated institutions it effectively lacks the universality it uncritically assumes. Specifically, she argues that traditional discourse is couched in metaphors that re-affirm male privilege (notably, solid objects over fluids, and vision over touch) and foregrounds the exclusion of subjects and ways of knowing that are gendered female. Importantly, however, Irigaray does not simply diagnose the multitude of ways in which gender and sexuality are reflected in legitimate discourse. On my reading, her central project is twofold: it demonstrates that language reflects social reality and the pre-existing relations of power (it claims to be neutral/asexual but effectively assumes the primacy of the male norm), but it also contains a possibility of an alternative social order within it, which would recognize the feminine as a speaking subject in her own right. Irigaray’s critique of the eradication of sexual difference in language is therefore coupled with a positive emancipatory vision of a “new felicity in history”: that is, a new culture of sexual difference bound up with a reform of language itself.38 For sexual difference to be reclaimed within the legitimate language, it is necessary to include intersubjective communication and dialogue within its bounds. Irigaray argues that the dominant discourse of science and philosophy tacitly assumes the denotative language of object-relations as standard norm, at the expense of intersubjective exchange.39 Irigaray ties this discourse to the linguistic style preferred by male speakers, and argues that women, especially in the early years, actively seek relations of collaboration, communal play, and dialogue—but that these communicative gestures are not recognized and legitimized by their social milieu, including by the mothers the girls may reach out to.40 Irigaray’s proposed emancipatory reform consists therefore in actively cultivating a language proper to intersubjectivity and dialogue so that women can act on the desire to communicate. She writes: If we are to regulate and cultivate energy between human beings, we need language. But not just denotative language, language that names, declares the reality or truth of things and transmits information; we also and especially need language that facilitates and maintains

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communication. And it is not just the lexicon we are talking about, but a syntax appropriate to intersubjectivity.41 Irigaray argues in favor of a language of direct address, in which the two genders can grow in relation to the other—a relation that preserves the unique and irreducible place of each. This would be a language of recognition and intransitivity in which the other ceases to function grammatically and existentially as a direct complement of my action, and is encountered across an unbridgeable difference marked by the proposition “to.” As Irigaray explains in an interview, she chose the strange, agrammatical construction: “I love to you” (rather than “I love you”) in the title of the book dealing with language and sexual difference to indicate that love is a relation between two subjects, comparable to a reciprocal relation of speaking (as in “I talk to you” versus “I handle you” or “I see you” without reciprocity).42 The proposition “to” is also a marker of separation and distance: “I Love to You suggests the necessity for a relation that’s indirect, intransitive meant to maintain the two in the relationship between genders . . . I love to what you are, to what you want, to what your intention is. I renounce possessing and having you, in order to be and build something with you.”43 The relation enabled by this “syntax appropriate to intersubjectivity” co-involves intimacy and separation, but it is not limited to the sphere of private affects and domestic relations. Irigaray imagines the new culture of sexual relations simultaneously in the domain of political action, including in the context of her own collaboration with the communist politician Renzo Imbeni, and considers the development of specific sexuate rights for women (such as the rights to physical and moral inviolability, voluntary motherhood, and preferential rights for mother and child[ren]) an integral element of this culture. As such, the intersubjective relation across sexual different plays out within the daily dealings of flesh-and-blood individuals, but it ties to the evolving social conditions of power and privilege, as reflected in the political quest for an increased legal standing of women in society. The personal and the political effectively intersect within the culture of sexual difference.44 Importantly for the purposes of my analysis, Irigaray argues that the cultivation of intersubjective relations across sexual difference depends upon developing an active and receptive orientation to the other: To you constitutes an overture, to the other who is not and never will me mine. It is a silence made possible by the fact that neither I nor

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you are everything, that each of us is limited, marked by the negative, non-hierarchically different. A silence that is the primary gesture of I love to you. Without it, the “to,” such as I understand it, is impossible.45 The orientation to the other as a non-hierarchically different subject is therefore not to be cast primarily as talking to the other; if its primary gesture is silence, then the orientation to the other depends on cultivating a stance of attentive listening which leaves a space-time open for the other to occupy, in her own way. Irigaray writes: I am listening to you, as to another who transcends me, requires a transition to a new dimension. I am listening to you: I perceive what you are saying, I am attentive to it, I am attempting to understand and hear your intention. Which does not mean: I comprehend you, I know you, so I do not need to listen to you and I can even plan a future for you. No, I am listening to you as someone and something I do not know yet, on the basis of a freedom and an openness put aside for this moment. I am listening to you: I encourage something unexpected to emerge, some becoming, some growth, some new dawn, perhaps. I am listening to you prepares the way for the not-yet-coded . . . for a space for existence, initiative, free intentionality, and support for your becoming.46 This open listening to someone and something I do not yet and perhaps never will comprehend is clearly an act that requires concentrated effort; it calls for an active dispossession of prior knowledges, a deliberate suspension of judgment in the face of the one who may speak in strange and surprising ways, since she is coming to being in the process of becoming, as if for the first time, someone who merits being listened to. The emphasis here is not solely on the content of what she is saying, but on its event, its renewed claim to time and space, its resonance with a discourse that previously assumed unrivaled claim to legitimacy and is now limiting this prior claim through an encounter with a non-hierarchically different speaking subject. As Irigaray notes, this active listening can be liberating for the one who makes himself available, too—but above all it gives space to the other.47 Such encounters are notoriously difficult to cast in propositional terms, or else they lend themselves to a mystical discourse. But it’s social magic we’re talking about, and it does happen, including in the context of public

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education in large public universities I previously described as a likely sphere of illocutionary disablement. In my own more recent pedagogy, I seek to actively create a situation that may promote the space-time of active listening across sexual difference. I do it especially when the male students in a class tend to routinely take up more discursive space than the female ones, even when we’re discussing topics related to gender, power, and sexuality. I ask that first only women speak and men listen; we then reverse the roles. If this experiment works (for nothing guarantees its felicity!), then the following may happen: first the women stumble and look for the right words and seek the confirmation of the teacher and the other classmates of almost everything they say; and then, when I actively return the authority to them, and listen with the openness Irigaray may have described, as do the others, then the magic of self-authorization happens, and the women begin to speak with a new force, now tapping freely into their own ways of knowing and sense-making. And the men are not indifferent to this process; they participate, silently, in the transformation, and may have been liberated by it as well. I believe that such an event reflects a process of speaker re-authorization, engendered in this particular case not by reclaiming the received lexicon of offensive names, but by occupying a subject position in language and by refashioning the syntax of intersubjectivity across sexual difference. Language is both lexicon and syntax, and the latter a marker of the manifold relations between subjects. If relations of sexual difference are to play out otherwise than as fixed hierarchies, then a socio-linguistic change at the level of the relations themselves can contribute to creating a new culture of sexual difference and a re-mapping of discursive positions of power and authority. This change may actively subvert the inherited gendered roles of pronouncing and receiving knowledge, of speaking and listening, and even though it may be more likely to happen in the microsphere of social encounters than in the macroworld of large social movements and institutionalized processes (or perhaps it extends to both?), I believe that it belongs to a continuum of emancipatory efforts to reclaim and share power in a mixed social world. I believe that the more intimate encounters and the large-scale political movements are both necessary to institute a redistribution of power, and that the transgressive reproduction of linguistic usage that undoes traditional construals of authority and legitimacy needs to be coupled with a rewired recognition of resignified content and a re-attuned ear to previously excluded speakers. In fact, considering the vulnerability of the re-authorization process by the same subjects who continue to be pushed outside the bounds

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of normalcy and legitimacy, linguistically and otherwise, this process vitally depends on cultivating a stance of productive listening within socially dominant groups that can empower the “other” discourse to become legitimate by virtue of the recognition it bestows upon it. The stance of productive listening would actively suspend the typical turns of pornographic speech and make space-time for a woman’s act of refusal of unsolicited sexual overtures to resonate as such in the present; it would recognize the authority of a historically marginalized speaker in the classroom by both acknowledging and actively putting on hold biased beliefs and attitudes of social abjection. This stance would be coupled with a self-oriented quieting that actively restrains an impulse to translate established privilege and mainstream standing into felicitous speech. As an actively undertaken exercise of receptivity and self-restraint, this stance would perform social magic in the mixed sexed world and be liberating for its silent agents as well. It would bring forth a greater felicity of socially vulnerable speech-acts, and a possible felicity in history for all.

NOTES 1. This essay includes a slightly revised discussion of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, which is published separately in a book chapter in an anthology titled Future Directions of Feminist Phenomenology, co-edited by Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski, (Indiana University Press, 2017). 2. P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 33. 3. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 34. 4. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 37. 5. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 53. 6. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 54, italics in original. 7. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 55, italics in original. 8. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 74. 9. J. Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, Richard Schusterman (ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 6. 10. Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic,” 7. 11. Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic,” 6.

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12. C.R. Lawrence, M.J. Matsuda, R. Delgado, and K.W. Crenshaw. Words That Wound. Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 13. Butler’s approach is developed in more detail in J. Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative, (Psychology Press, 1997). 14. Butler, Excitable Speech. 15. See my Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) for a more extended argument that linguistic arbitrariness is tied to evolving social conventions. 16. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 72, italics in original. 17. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 73. 18. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 73. 19. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 68. 20. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 11. 21. Hornsby and Langton, “Free Speech and Illocution,” 27. 22. For other recent discussions of silencing and recognition of speaker authority, see, for example, M.K. McGowan “On Silencing and Sexual Refusal,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17(4): 487–494. 23. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 27. 24. See M. Meyerhoff, “Doing and Saying. Some Words on Women’s Silence.” In Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries, Robin Lakoff; ed. Mary Bucholtz, 209–215 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 214. 25. Meyerhoff, “Doing and Saying,” 213. 26. For recent discussions of constructions of speaker authority and the interrelation between speech and social power see, for example, Maitra and McGowan (eds.) Speech and Harm (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012). 27. I do not discuss the two last infelicities of persons having certain thoughts and feelings, and so conducting themselves (e.g., being sincere in making a promise), as they have no direct bearing on this discussion. 28. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 22. 29. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 28. 30. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 106. 31. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 116/7; see also 139. 32. See, for example, Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 118. 33. This analysis leads me to use “uptake” in a broad sense that includes the reception and recognition of the speech act as carrying a given illocutionary force and of the speaker’s authority to issue such acts.

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This broad conception ties the illocutionary force of an utterance to its effect upon the hearer; while perlocution tends to be confined to the post-illocution effects of a speech act upon the hearer, I argue that receiving and recognizing a speech act contributes to its illocutionary force while also being one of its effects. 34. Hornsby and Langton, “Free Speech and Illocution,” Legal Theory, 4(1) 1998: 21–37, 25. 35. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 103. 36. While I cannot fully develop this point within the limits of this paper, the general focus in Austin’s lectures on performativity is on the procedural aspect of speech acts, which could in principle be formalized. The commitment to formal criteria animates Austin’s search for explicit performatives, whose grammatical form (such as first person singular present indicative) would help to disambiguate them from constatatives or descriptive statements (to be cast in the third-person singular or plural indicative). As every student of speech act theory knows, this quest for formal criteria ultimately fails, and language-qua-speech turns out to be performative through and through, with even the most mundane declarative statements—“The cat is on the mat”—still doing things with words. This explicit failure of Austin’s project is thus a measure of its success, since the scope of performativity turns out to be greater than initially assumed, expanding to language as a whole. I would like to suggest that a similar productive failure affects Austin’s formal distinction between illocution and perlocution. 37. B. Stawarska, “Unhappy Speech and Hearing Well,” Future Directions of Feminist Phenomenology (2017). 38. L. Irigaray, I love to you (Psychology Press, 1996), 56. 39. Irigaray, I love to you, 44–45. 40. Irigaray, I love to you, 74. 41. Irigaray, I love to you, 100. 42. Irigaray, Conversations (Continuum, 2008), 46. 43. Irigaray, Why different? (Semiotext[e], 1999), 90. 44. In response to Fiorella Ianucci’s question about why she combines politics and love, Irigaray explains: “The primary goal of politics should be ensuring peace, harmony and happiness among the citizens. This can’t happen unless a society’s main priorities are the rights of each person in his/her uniqueness, as well as in his/her desire for a respectful relationship with the other. Hence my suggestion to rebuild democracy on an infinite number of relationships between women and men which respect their differences. This allows

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for a truly democratic, living civil community to be built. Respecting sexual difference encourages the respect of other differences” (Why Different?, 83). 45. Irigaray, I love to you, 117. 46. Irigaray, I love to you, 116. 47. Irigaray, I love to you, 118.

REFERENCES Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bourdieu, P. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Butler, J. Excitable speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Psychology Press, 1997. Butler, J. “Performativity’s Social Magic.” In R. Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: a Critical Reader, pp. 113–128. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. Hornsby, J., and R. Langton. “Free Speech and Illocution.” Legal Theory 4(1) 1998: 21–37. Irigaray, L. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, L. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History. Psychology Press, 1996. Irigaray, L., S. Lotringer, and C. Collins. Why Different? A Culture of Two Subjects. Translated by Camille Collins. New York: Semiotext(e), 2000. Irigaray, L., S. Pluháček, et al. Conversations. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. Lawrence, C.R., M.J. Matsuda, R. Delgado, and K.W. Crenshaw. Words That Wound. Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993 McGowan, M.K. “On Silencing and Sexual Refusal,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17(4): 487–494. Meyerhoff, M. “Doing and Saying. Some Words on Women’s Silence.” In R. Lakoff and M. Bucholtz (ed.), Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries, pp. 209–215. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Stawarska, B. Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology. Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Stawarska, B. “Unhappy Speech and Hearing Well.” In Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski (eds.), Future Directions of Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

CHAPTER 8

Wonder as the Primary Passion A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRIGARAY'S ETHICS OF DIFFERENCE Sara Heinämaa

In her work An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Éthique de la Difference Sexuelle 1984), Luce Irigaray1 argues that the question of sexual difference is the philosophical question of our time. Her book is an attempt to think this difference through in a new way, and not just to think it but also to realize it in practice. Irigaray sets about to develop a new relation and to open up a new space between the sexes. One of the concepts that she uses when describing this new way of relating to the other sex is the notion of wonder2 (admiration) that Descartes presents in The Passions of the Soul (Les Passions de l’âme, 1649).3 She states: To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first of passions: wonder. This passion has no opposite or contradiction and it exists always as if for the first time. Thus man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted one for the other. I will never be in a man’s place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other.4 This chapter is an attempt to understand what Irigaray means when she states that we must return to wonder. What I find crucial to the development of contemporary ethics and social philosophy is that Irigaray describes wonder 209

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in normative terms: wonder is something that we must accomplish for an ethical relation to be possible between human beings, men and women. This means that, in Irigaray’s account, wonder is a necessary condition for the ethical renewal of the relation between the sexes. It is a starting point for becoming “at least two” as human beings, and our task is to realize it.5 I will argue that Irigaray’s discussion on wonder brings together two ideas. On the one hand, she develops her concept of wonder as a reading of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, and here we find a certain idea of receptivity.6 On the other hand, Irigaray’s discourse on wonder is informed by the phenomenological tradition, and here we find an idea of a task.7 The chapter consists of two main parts. First, I go into Descartes’s discussion on the mind-body union and the passions as its modes of relating to the world (sections I and II). The aim here is to explicate Descartes’s concept of wonder and clarify its peculiar function among the so-called emotion-passions. In the second part of the chapter (sections III and IV), I will first present Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the suspension crucial to the phenomenological reduction and then argue that this interpretation allows us to understand what Irigaray means by the necessity of returning to wonder. Finally, I bring the Cartesian and the phenomenological elements together in a discussion of Irigaray’s ethics and her practice of reading and writing.8 This chapter is motivated by two convictions. I believe, first, that Irigaray’s discourse on Cartesian wonder is indispensable for an adequate philosophy of sexual difference. Second, I am also convinced that Irigaray’s discourse is able to enrich contemporary phenomenology of social emotions that is preoccupied with shame, guilt, pride and humility, all paradigmatic emotions of self-assessment and social approval. A new philosophical focus on the basic emotions of wonder and its inflections, love and joy, is needed if we want to understand human relations not just as relations of identity and group-membership but also, and more fundamentally, as dual relations that involve two bodily-spiritual persons alien to one another. Thus, through readings of Descartes, Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, I propose that wonder has a crucial function in the renewal and recreation of intersubjectivity.

THE MIND–BODY UNION Descartes’s description of the passions is part of his discussion of the mind– body relation. Descartes is usually known for his dualism of mind and body,

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or more precisely for the dichotomous distinction between the thinking substance and the extended substance. Substance-dualism is certainly a central factor of his metaphysics, but it is not the whole of the Cartesian heritage. Descartes’s philosophy also includes a description of a union or compound of mind9 and body. The idea is presented already in the sixth part of Meditations of First Philosophy published in 1641 (Meditationes de Prima Philosophiea), but a detailed study is given eight years later in the The Passions of the Soul.10 The Passions of the Soul is usually not considered philosophically as important or central as Descartes’s metaphysical and methodological writings. Such a notion of philosophical significance stems from Descartes’s own methodological writings. He argues that the knowledge that we have of the mind–body union is usually hopelessly obscure and confused. In contrast, we have clear and distinct ideas of the separate substances and their internal natures.11 Philosophy consists of clear and distinct ideas and the rational relations between them.12 Thus, there seems to be no place in philosophy proper for the mind–body union.13 The theoretization of this union is left, at best, to the applied sciences, such as medicine and economics, or else doomed as part of pseudoscience. Merleau-Ponty calls this “Cartesian understanding” of philosophy into question at the beginning of his Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la Perception, 1945) by reference to Descartes’s own concepts.14 Following Husserl’s reappropriation of Descartes, Merleau-Ponty argues that all thinking about worldly entities rests on the bedrock of sense perceptions that ultimately refer back to sensations. If philosophy can state only that these elementary layers of mentality are confused and cannot say more about them, then its self-understanding is seriously defective. Merleau-Ponty points out that Descartes’s own demand for radical reflection does not allow for such an unthought-of element. So we must question the mathematical model and the axiomatic-deductive way of proceeding that Descartes used in developing his metaphysics and that rules out the possibility of a philosophy of passions.15 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is well known for its critique of quasi-physicalistic theories and mechanist descriptions of bodily states and processes. Merleau-Ponty argues against all attempts to subordinate the description of perceptions, sensations, and emotions to the idea of exactitude that governs mathematical and natural sciences.16 Sometimes these arguments are characterized by saying that here Merleau-Ponty attacks Descartes’s notion of the body.17 This, however, is misleading since through the book, and through his whole work, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that in addition to the

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theory of two distinct substances Descartes gives us a fruitful notion of the union of mind and body.18 In the description that Descartes develops in his correspondence with his critics and in The Passions of the Soul, mind and body are not two separate things nor in a part–whole relation. They are “intertwined” and mutually implicatory.19 The soul is not in the body like a pilot is in his ship, but wholly “intermingled” with the body. Merleau-Ponty explains further: “The body, in turn, is wholly animated, and all its functions contribute to the perception of objects.”20 Understood in this way, the soul is not an entity that we can find behind the surface of the body or within its organs. Rather than being separate and merely causally linked to the body, the soul is present in all its movements, gestures, and affects.21 Merleau-Ponty points out that this implies that all instrumentalistic and mechanistic models of the human body are misleading. The soul is more intimately and more comprehensively intertwined with the body than any possible tool or instrument. In order to understand how the soul-body unity relates to its environing world, to other bodies and to itself, we must not compare the body with the tools and machines that we use for various purposes, but must conceive the soul-body unity as an expressive totality, analogous to artworks and linguistic units. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explains: A novel, poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning, accessible only through direct contact, being radiated with no change of their temporal and spatial situation. It is in this sense that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms.22

Merleau-Ponty sees Descartes’s idea of the mind–body union as an important forerunner of the phenomenological description of the lived body (Leib) that Husserl develops in the second volume of his Ideas (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1952) and in The Crisis of European Sciences (Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften, 1954).23 He ends the chapter, “The body as Expression and Speech” in his Phenomenology of Perception by stating that the distinction between the lived body (Leib) and the body as an object of theoretical thinking is not Husserl’s invention but

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can be found already in Descartes’s works. What is original and path-breaking in Husserl’s phenomenology is that the lived body and its expressive structures have a fundamental, founding position. The moving sensing body is discovered as the foundation of all perception and all cognitive functions that rest on perception; as such, it secretly supports the objectification of both nature and spirit.24 In the Cartesian framework, on the contrary, bodily experiences remain subordinated to theoretical thinking that posits the body as an object of observation and measurement, an extended material thing among other things. This difference in the understanding of primacy is decisive to the whole philosophical enterprise since it concerns the development of the philosophical method. Merleau-Ponty argues, however, that even though Descartes’s exposition is limited by his adherence to the methodological model of the mathematical sciences, his Passions can teach us about the crucial functions of the basic emotions and thus provide insights that are missing in post-Cartesian philosophies of human relations. In the following I try to show that the teaching of the book is indispensable in the case of the passion of wonder.

WONDER AS A PASSION OF THE SOUL Wonder (admiration) is, according to Descartes, the first of all emotion-passions. It is the basis for other emotions, love and hatred, for example. It is involved in all of them, but it can also appear alone as pure wonder and is thus independent of the other emotions. Emotions in general are one species of the so-called passions of the soul, a larger category that also includes other types of passions. The other two classes of passions are sensations and sense perceptions.25 Wonder, love, pride, and shame, for example, are emotion-passions; pain and pleasure are sensations; and seeing and hearing are perceptions. In all these states, the body affects the soul or mind and sets it in motion by the mediating movements of the so-called animal spirits. Thus, passions in general are both actions of the body and passions of the mind, these two characterizations being conceptually distinct but concerning one and the same relation. Descartes distinguishes between six basic emotion-passions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. According to him, all other emotions are “either composed from some of these six or they are species of them.”26 In

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order to understand Irigaray’s proposal for the beginning of ethics of sexual difference, it is necessary to study in detail Descartes’s descriptions of the relations among the six basic emotions and the reasons he gives for the special role of wonder among them. Descartes explains the primacy of wonder by pointing out that we wonder at an object “before we know whether it is beneficial to us or not.”27 Further, he remarks that wonder has no opposite, unlike the other emotion-passions. Irigaray emphasizes both these aspects in her Ethics, but the key to her interpretation of wonder is in Descartes’s description of the functions of the passions. The common function of the passions, Descartes tells us, is to “dispose the soul to want the things which nature deems useful for us, and to persist in this volition.”28 The soul needs the passions in order to be able to direct and fix its thoughts to beneficial tasks, such as developing practical skills and acquiring scientific knowledge.29 The passions “move the soul to consent and contribute to actions which may serve to preserve the body or render it in some way more perfect.”30 So their function is to contribute to the maintenance and well-being of the mind–body union.31 But taken strictly, this applies only to the five basic passions: desire, love, hatred, joy, and sadness.32 The function of wonder is different. It precedes all evaluations of the object, of its suitability (convenance), usefulness, or harmfulness to the maintenance and well-being of the mind–body union. This is why it has no opposite, and why Descartes considers it the first of all passions.33 Wonder is indispensable because it allows us to notice, perceive, and learn things of which we were previously ignorant or that are different from the ones that we already know. It is the state in which we pay attention to a thing before we apply our standards of good and bad, pleasurable and painful, useful and harmful to it. So wonder is the passion that allows us to encounter, to perceive, what is un-usual and extra-ordinary, new to our previous experience.34 Descartes writes: “The other passions may serve to make us take note of things which appear good or evil, but we feel only wonder at things which merely appear unusual.”35 Jean-Marie Beyssade characterizes Cartesian wonder by saying that it resides in “the alertness of the first glance”: when we look at something and see something for the first time, we attend to it in a specific way. Wonder is like a precursory movement of observance that does not yet proceed toward the object but prepares ground for an active grasping. Beyssade further emphasizes that wonder is a state between two extremes, between stupidity that is stagnated by the first impression and dogmatic knowledge that sticks to its

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habits. The one who wonders is able to illuminate the object without adjusting it to his or her natural needs or habituated volitions;36 she does not adapt the object to her expectations, but instead lets the object change the habitual motions of her mind–body.37 So, in summary, we can say that Cartesian wonder is a preparative state that allows us to relate cognitively and emotionally to objects that are new to us. It precedes all knowledge of the value of the object for the survival and well-being of the mind–body union. It is the state in which we have not yet reacted to the object as good or bad for us. We have not yet “measured” the object by our standards of survival and wellbeing. Thus understood, wonder is a specific way of attending to the object before evaluating its suitability, appropriateness, and fit to ourselves. The emotion is specific in being interested but not judgmental: we are looking at and listening to the object as it appears before all evaluations based on our own life.

WONDER AS TASK This short explication of Descartes’s theory of bodily emotions gives us a first idea of what Irigaray means when she argues that wonder is indispensible for ethics of sexual difference. Irigaray’s main idea is that an ethical relation between man and woman cannot begin in respect, attraction, or generosity, or joy and enjoyment, since all these emotions involve natural and habitual ways of evaluating the other. According to her, the relation between man and woman can be established only in the state of wonder, since only this emotion allows us to unlearn our sexual habits and disregard our preconceptions about sex and gender. She writes: The feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference. The passions have either been repressed, stifled, or reduced, or reserved for God. Sometimes a space for wonder is left to works of art. But it is never found to reside in this locus: between man and woman. Into this space came attraction, greed, possession, consummation, disgust, and so on. But not that wonder which beholds what it sees always as if for the first time, never taking hold of the other as its object. It does not try to seize, possess, or reduce this object, but leaves it subjective, still free.38

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So Irigaray argues that in order to institute the ethics of sexual difference, we must be able to look at the other, man or woman, without evaluating him or her according to our own cognitive, practical, or axiological standards. We must be able to attend to the other before judging if she or he improves our lives as mental-bodily beings, contributes to our well-being, or functions as an obstacle to our needs and desires.39 In Descartes’s description, wonder is a natural, immediate reaction or response that cannot be controlled by will. Emmanuel Lévinas develops further this idea of receptivity in his ethics by arguing that the ethical attitude is not something that I decide to take. Instead the other invites or impels me to it; it is he or she who changes my way of relating: For the ethical relationship that subtends discourse is not a species of consciousness whose ray emanates from the I; it puts the I in question. This putting in question emanates from the other.40 In Irigaray’s Ethics, however, wonder is not described as a purely receptive or responsive state but also as a goal to be reached or as a task to be undertaken. She writes, for example, that the feeling of wonder or surprise “ought to be returned to its locus, that of sexual difference,” and again: “to arrive at the constitution of sexual difference, we must return to wonder” (italics added). Her formulations are clearly normative. The Cartesian concept of wonder cannot be used in this way, for it is an immediate response to an external percept, outside of our control. In a purely Cartesian framework all talk about returning to wonder or re-establishing wonder would be hyperbolic or nonsensical. Thus in order to understand the seriousness of Irigaray’s proposal, we must turn to further developments in the Cartesian tradition. In addition to Descartes’s Passions and Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity, Irigaray’s Ethics refers to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. I argue in the rest of the chapter that here we have the key to Irigaray’s characterization of wonder as a task. The claim is that Merleau-Ponty’s description of the phenomenological reduction offers a model for understanding the transformation that Irigaray calls the “return to wonder.” In the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty gives an unusual characterization of the founding ideas or, as he says, “the celebrated themes” of Husserl’s phenomenology: intentionality, ideality (eidos), rationality, and reduction. He argues that the meaning of these concepts will not

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become clear to us if we ask how Husserl defined or explicated them. Rather than sticking to any one definition, we should, according to Merleau-Ponty, follow Husserl’s line of thought, his practice of thinking, and see how the ideas of intentionality and ideality, rationality and reduction, are worked out and developed in his works. In this context, Merleau-Ponty illustrates Husserl’s phenomenological method of reduction in a specific way. He says that “the best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant, when he spoke of wonder or surprise in the face of the world.”41 Here Merleau-Ponty uses the French word étonnement (surprise), which in Descartes’s description of the passions refers to excessive wonder. This is not accidental, for in Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, reduction is a move to an unnatural, exceptional way of attending.42 Merleau-Ponty explains his assimilation of wonder and reduction by saying that we are “through and through compounded of relationships with the world.”43 The only way to become aware of these relations is to suspend for a moment all our involvement, to interrupt our actions and reactions. In order to notice, and understand, our attachments to the world, we must step back and arrest our natural and habitual movements: Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.44 Merleau-Ponty’s formulation brings up an important similarity between Cartesian wonder and the phenomenological change of attitude: both are modes of arrested activity, and in both it is exactly the arrest of motion that allows us to notice something that we have not seen or heard before and attend to it. This similarity is crucial to our attempt to understand what Irigaray means by ethics of sexual difference: receptivity to the unprecedented is needed. But equally important is to realize the difference between Descartes’s wonder and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reduction. We saw above that in Descartes’s description wonder precedes the activation of evaluative functions: the perceiver has not yet “made up his mind” about the suitability or usefulness of the object. The phenomenological

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attitude, on the other hand, means canceling evaluations and judgments already in operation. Reduction is a return to the state of pure alertness, free of all positing of validity and existence. According to Merleau-Ponty, such a change of attitude cannot be effected by a mere act of decision.45 For him, the phenomenological reduction is not a technique to be applied at will; rather, the reduction is a method in the sense of a way or path of thinking. It involves essentially a receptive moment similar to Cartesian wonder: something unexpected strikes us from outside and thoroughly changes our ways of perceiving the world, seeing, hearing, and touching things and persons. What is at issue is not just a particular percept or a particular perception deviating from other perceptions but an experience that comprehensively upsets our natural way of perceiving. The phenomenological reduction combines this receptive moment with an active arresting. The surprising event naturally loses its force and, without our own active resistance, we fall back into perceptions and movements determined by our natural and habitual interest. The task of the phenomenologist is to prevent this inevitable from happening. She must postpone, delay, or defer the natural settlement of things and the stabilization of the world.46 The deferral allows her to capture—and describe— the correlations and dependencies between her natural activities and the given structures of phenomena. Her difficult task is to stay in the unnatural, extraordinary state that she fell into, and actively sustain her newly found inaction. Irigaray’s idea of wonder, I argue, is basically the idea of the arrest of judgment and the suspension of perception. Irigaray is suggesting that we put aside all our habitual notions of the other sex—not just our scholarly doctrines and scientific theories but also our common-sense conceptions. And even more. Irigaray’s refraining attitude, her self-critical stance concerns more than just cognitive acts. She is also arguing that we must suspend all our natural emotions and feelings as well as our practical dealings when relating to the other sex.47 Her idea is that we must refrain from measuring the other by our own cognitive and emotional standards of correctness and by our vital standards of well-being in order to relate to the other in his or her own right. The state of wonder is for her a state of openness in which we attend and listen to the other when she describes herself, or he himself. In Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray explains that wonder is indispensable exactly because it precedes appropriation: It is set apart from rejection, which expresses itself notably through contradictory positions. That which precedes suitability has no opposite.

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In order for it to affect us, it is necessary and sufficient for it to surprise, to be new, not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known.48 This concerns both men and women. The attentive and nonjudgmental open space is impossible between them since both are imprisoned by their preconceptions, habits, and expectations. Irigaray writes: “He believes that she is drawing him down into the depths; she believes that he is cutting himself off from her to constitute his transcendence. Their paths cross but achieve neither an alliance nor a mutual fecundity.”49 As such, Irigaray’s notion of wonder owes much to Descartes; it is, as Descartes characterizes it, our attitude toward an unexpected, unpredictable occurrence or event. In her I Love to You (J’Aime à Toi, 1992), Irigaray says that the new relation requires that I must “listen to your words as something unique, irreducible, especially to my own, as something new, as yet unknown.”50 But what is different from Descartes is that, for Irigaray, wonder is not just something that happens to us. It is also something that we have to struggle for—a particular receptivity that demands an activity in order to be sustained.51 In I Love to You, she expresses this idea by saying that “listening to you [ . . . ] that I be once more and always capable of silence,”52 and in Elemental Passions, she declares: A song, for you. But that “for you” is not a dative. Nor that song, a gift. Not received from you, not produced by me, nor for you, that song: my love with you. Intermingled. Escapes from me.53 I suggest that this aspect of Irigaray’s thinking stems from the phenomenological tradition. Like the phenomenological attitude, as described by Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray’s wonder is a specific combination of receptivity and arresting activity. It is not a temporary state into which we fall and from which we recover naturally. Neither is it planned, chosen, or decided about by an isolated self or by a disinterested spectator. Rather, wonder falls upon us as persons thoroughly involved in interpersonal worldly relations. The other—man or woman— unsettles these relations by radically transcending our horizons of perception and our standards of evaluation.54 But although wonder thus depends on the other, it is our task to maintain this opening and to delay the normalization and habitualization of our cognitions, perceptions, and emotions. Wonder, in Irigaray’s description, is a particular way of attending to the other that makes possible a comprehensive self-transformation:

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The other, male or female, should surprise us again and again, appear to us as new, very different from what we knew or what we thought he or she should be. Which means that we would look at the other, we would stop to look at him or her, ask ourselves, come close to ourselves through questioning. Who art thou? I am and I become thanks to this questioning.55

CONCLUSION: AN ETHICS OF READING AND WRITING? We started our reading by claiming that Irigaray’s Ethics is an attempt to think sexual difference through in a new way. I argued that Irigaray’s discourse on wonder is crucial to her ethical enterprise since it brings together the ideas of attentiveness and self-questioning in a specific way. Further, I demonstrated that Irigaray’s discourse on wonder is influenced both by Descartes’s theory of passions and by the phenomenological methodology of Merleau-Ponty, and that her original reading of these historical sources allows her to argue for the normative necessity of wonder in relations between men and women. But in addition to this, it seems to me, something more is also going on in Irigaray’s Ethics. In addition to thinking about and arguing for sexual difference, Irigaray also works to realize this difference in her own practice of reading and writing. I want to suggest, in conclusion, that her Ethics is both a description of the possible beginning for an ethical relation between the sexes and an institution of such an opening.56 It is noteworthy that in this work Irigaray’s attitude to the philosophical tradition is very different from the critical and deconstructive approach of the early study Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum, de l’Autre Femme, 1974).57 In Ethics, she questions and comments on the texts of ancient and early modern philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Spinoza, but here her questions do not aim at deconstructing the texts or at locating their blind spots. Instead, she lets every singular text enrich and transform her own inquiry. In each case, she defers the closure of the reading, and ends in novel questioning. So what we have is not just an argument for wonder, but also an attempt at establishing a wondering attitude toward philosophical texts and at opening a new space between a female reader and an androcentric tradition. The aim is not just to write about wonder but also to read in wonder.

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NOTES 1. I am grateful to Luce Irigaray for her critical comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to Roy Martinez, Lilli Alanen, Martin C. Dillon, Virpi Lehtinen, Martina Reuter, Silvia Stoller, and Debra Bergoffen for their critical insights and helpful suggestions in the different stages of developing the argument. 2. The French word admiration primarily means wonder, surprise, or amazement: “etonnement devant qqch. d’extraordinaire ou d’imprévu.” It has also the second meaning of adoration and positive judgment: “sentiment de joie et d’épanouissement devant ce qu’on juge supérieurement beau or grand.” Descartes uses the term primarily in the sense of wonder and surprise. For a complete account of the meaning of these terms, see A. Lalande, Vocabulaire Technique et Critique de la Philosophie, 12th edition (Paris: PUF, 1976), 27–28. The Cottingham-Stoothoff-Murdoch translation of Descartes’s works renders admiration as “wonder,” and I will follow this procedure (René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991). 3. I will refer to the annotated edition of Descartes’s works, Œuvres de Descartes I–XII, by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (revised edition, Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S., [1964–1976] 1996). The standard procedure is to give the reference by marking first the initials of the names of the editors “AT,” then the number of the volume and finally the page numbers(s). For example, since The Passions of the Soul has appeared as the XI volume of this edition, its reference is ATXI. I will use the standard abbreviation “CSM,” followed by the volume number, for the English translation of Descartes’s work: R. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I–III, J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991). 4. L. Irigaray Éthique de la Différence Sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 19–20; An Ethics of Sexual Difference, C. Burke and G.C. Gill (trans.) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 12–13, emphasis added. In my reading, Irigaray is a philosopher of sexual difference in the strong sense of the word. For her this difference is not merely the real empirical difference between multiple genders or sexual identities—including maleness and femaleness— but is a fundamental transcendental-ontological difference between masculine being and feminine being. More precisely, Irigaray rejects all realistic and

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objectivistic conceptualizations of sexual difference and works to develop a dynamic conceptualization of the transcendental structure that precedes all empirical accounts of sexuality and sexual identities—biological, psychological, sociological, and historical. 5. C.f. L. Irigaray, Passions Élémentaires (Paris: Minuit), 32–34; L. Irigaray, Elementary Passions. J. Collie and J. Still (trans.). New York, London: Routledge, 1992, 27–29. 6. Erica Harth suggests in her work Cartesian Women that Luce Irigaray is possibly the last of Descartes’s “feminist” followers (E. Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime, 235–239 [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992]). Thus Harth places Irigaray in the same tradition with the Cartesian women of the seventeenth century, for example, Elisabeth of Bohemia and Catherine Descartes. Cf., M. Reuter Questions of the Body, Sexual Difference and Equality in Cartesian Philosophy (Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, 2000). 7. M. La Caze argues in her Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (2014) that Descartes’s philosophy of passions, and especially his analysis of the emotions of generosity and wonder, is crucial to our understanding of Irigaray’s ethics and politics of difference (M. La Caze, Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics [Albany, NY: SUNY, 2014]). I agree with La Caze’s general line of argumentation, but I see it as necessary to account for the modifications that have to be made in the Cartesian concept of wonder for it to have any role in a normative discourse. Without such an account, it is impossible to understand what Irigaray means when she states that the other should surprise us, that we have to return to wonder and that wonder ought to be returned to the locus of sexual difference. My argument is that the key to the normative aspects of Irigaray’s discourse on wonder is in her indebtedness to the methods of classical phenomenology. 8. Irigaray’s work is not usually rendered as phenomenological. Most interpreters have focused on and emphasized her connection to Lacan’s structuralistic psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstruction. However, Ellen Mortensen, Tina Chanter, and Anne van Leeuwen have argued that the key to Irigaray’s thinking is in Heidegger’s phenomenology (E. Mortensen, The Feminine and Nihilism: Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and Heidegger [Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm: Scandinavian University Press 1994]; T. Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers [New York, London: Routledge, 1995]; A. van Leeuwen, “Sexuate Difference, Ontological difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger,” Continental Philosophical Review, 43:1 [2010]:

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111–126; A. van Leeuwen, “An Examination of Iriagaray’s Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in the Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love,” Hypatia, 28:3 [2013]: 452–468). Mortensen’s, Chanter’s, and van Leeuwen’s works contribute to the understanding of the fundamental-ontological and transcendental character of Irigaray’s inquiries. The reading that I develop differs from these contributions in that I approach Irigaray’s work, not through Heidegger’s description of Dasein (or through Lévinas’s account of the face-to-face encounter), but through the methodological insights of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. I argue that such a focus is necessary if we want to understand the radical task Irigaray sets to us. In an interview from 1996, she comments on her relation to phenomenology by emphasizing especially its methodic strength: “A certain recourse, or return, to the phenomenological method seems necessary in order to make enter into the universe of the rational some natural, corporeal, sensible realities which until now had been removed from it. It is true for me” (L. Irigaray, “Thinking Life as Relation: An Interview with Luce Irigaray,” Man and World, 29(4) 1996: 351). For more detailed accounts of Irigaray’s indebtedness to the phenomenological tradition, see C. Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); S. Heinämaa, “On Luce Irigaray’s Inquiries into Intersubjectivity: Between the Feminine Body and its Other,” in Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, M. Cimitile and E. Miller (eds.), 243–265 (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2006); V. Lehtinen, Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2014). 9. I use here interchangeably the terms “mind” and “soul” for Descartes term “âme.” 10. See also the more elaborated account in the first book of his Principles of Philosophy (Principia Philosophiae, 1644), volume VII of AT. 11. Already several contemporaries criticized Descartes for his dualism. Criticism was issued both publicly in the Objections to Meditations and privately in correspondence. One of Descartes’s correspondents was Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia who challenged his account of the mind-body parallelism and urged him to develop a theory of the passions of the soul. For this philosophical relation, see L. Saphiro “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7(3) 1999: 503–520; L. Saphiro, “Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013, E.N. Zalta (ed.) (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/elisabeth-bohemia/;

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L. Saphiro (ed.), The Correspondence between Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia and Descartes (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 12. Descartes, Œuvres, ATVII, 12–16, 34–35, 144–149, 156–157, 226– 230; CMS 9–11, 24, 103–106, 159–161; cf. ATVIIIA 39, 21–22; CMSI 221, 207–208; ATIXB, 14–16; CMSI 186–187. 13. For a nonstandard interpretation of the role of the union in Descartes’s philosophy, see S. Heinämaa “Merleau-Ponty’s Dialogue with Descartes: The Living Body and its Position in Metaphysics,” in Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, D. Zahavi, S. Heinämaa, and H. Ruin (eds.), 23–48 (The Hague: Kluwer, 2003). 14. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, [1945] 1993), 58–61, cf. 213–232; M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 165, 181. 15. For a more comprehensive account of this argument, see Heinämaa “Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue”; S. Heinämaa “The Body,” in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, S. Luft and S. Overgaard (eds.), 222–232 (London, New York: Routledge, 2011). For Husserl’s discussion of the limits of the mathematical methods, see E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Husserliana, Band III, W. Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), §72–75, 149–158; E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, W.R.B. Gibson (trans.). New York, London: Collier, 1962, 185–193; Cartesianische Meditationen und pariser Vorträge, Husserliana, Band I, S. Strasser (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), §10–11, 63–65; E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, D. Cairns (trans.). Dordrecht, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960, 23–26. 16. This is not an attack on the sciences as such; this is an attack on a philosophical-epistemological paradigm that aims at subordinating all possible forms of knowledge universally to the mathematical methods of modern natural sciences. 17. For example, D.M. Levin, The Opening of Vision (New York & London: Routledge, 1988); D. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). 18. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 52ff.; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 42ff.; M. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 221–222, 242, 285–288; M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, A, Linguis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1975, 1964), 168, 188, 232–234; M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard,

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1964), 51–60; M. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and mind,” C. Dallery (trans.), in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, J. M. Edie (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 175–178. On the role of the passions in Descartes’s ethics, see L. Saphiro, “Cartesian generosity,” in Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes, Acta Philosophica Fennica, Volume 64, T. Aho and M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.), 249–275 (Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland, 1999); Saphiro, “Princess Elisabeth,” Saphiro (ed.), The Correspondence. On passions in Seventeenth-century philosophy more generally, see S. James, Passions and Actions: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1997); D.J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); L. Saphiro and M. Pickavé (eds.), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2012). 19. Descartes, Œuvres, ATVII 74; CMS 51. 20. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Un Inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Métaphysique et Morale, 4 (1962), 401–409, 403; “An Unpublished text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” A.B. Dallery (trans.), in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, J. Edie (ed.), 3–11 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5; cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du Corps, J. Deprun (collected and ed.) (Paris: Vrin, [1947–1948] 1997), 11–16; M. Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Brian, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, P.B. Milan (trans.), A.G. Bjelland Jr. and P. Burke (eds.) (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 33–35; Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible, 288; Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 243; Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil, 60; Merleau-Ponty, Eye, 178. 21. For a detailed argument, see, S. Heinämaa, “Embodiment and Expressivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology: From Logical investigations to Cartesian Meditations,” SATS–Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 11(1) 2010: 1–15; Heinämaa, “The Body.” Many philosophers today still assume that Descartes understood the soul as a separate spiritual entity within the corporeal body. This misconception is largely due to Gilbert Ryle’s influential criticism in The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949). Ryle argued against the thesis that he attributed to Descartes and labeled “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” For explicit critiques of the Rylean interpretation of Descartes, see, for example, A. Baier, “Cartesian Persons,” in Postures of Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of

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Minnesota Press, 1981); Amelie Rorty, “Descartes on Thinking with the Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, J. Cottingham (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); L. Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 22. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 177; Phenomenology, 151. Merleau-Ponty does not provide a unified account of expressivity in Phenomenology of Perception but discusses the phenomenon in several contexts and in connection to several topics, from perception and motility to sexuality and conceptual thinking. In the chapter “World as Perceived” he explains further: “My body is the seat or rather the very actuality of the phenomenon of expression (Ausdruck), and there the visual and auditory experiences, for example, are pregnant one with the other, and their expressive value is the ground of the antepredicative unity of the perceived world, and, through it, of verbal expression (Darstellung) and intellectual meaning (Bedeutung). My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’” (Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 271–272; Phenomenology, 235, translation modified.) 23. Husserl’s descriptions and analyses of the lived body (Leib) in the second volume of Ideas owe to his earlier investigations in the lectures on Thing and Space (Ding und Raum 1907) but also enter a completely new level of analysis (E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana, Band IV, M. Bimel [ed.] [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952]; E. Husserl, Urfassung von Ideen II [Original version of Ideas II], D. Lohmar and D. Fonfara [eds.], in preparation; E. Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, U. Claesges [ed.], R. Rojcewicz [trans.] [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, (1973) 1997]). Husserl never finished the manuscript for Ideas II. His assistant Edith Stein worked long periods with it, between 1916 and 1918, transcribing, editing and developing Husserl’s text. Later, in 1923 Ludwig Landgrebe, another assistant, prepared the text for publication. Husserl continued revising the manuscript till year 1928 when he finally abandoned the project for another manuscript (Cartesian Meditations). The work remained unpublished until 1952. It seems that several sections of it are based on Stein’s work on empathy, On Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 1917). On this see, for example, K. Haney, “Edith Stein,” in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, L. Embree et al. (eds.) (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). On the description of the living body (Leib)

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developed in Ideas II, and on its influence on later phenomenological and existentialist philosophy, see S. Heinämaa Towards a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Heinämaa, “The Body.” 24. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 371–372; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 321–322. 25. Descartes defines passions as ideas that have their proximate (prochain) cause in the body, and he distinguishes them thus from emotions caused by the soul itself, that is, the so-called internal or intellectual emotions, such as loving God (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI §19, 343; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 335). 26. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 380; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 353. Wonder is thus the primary passion in three senses for Descartes. First, wonder precedes the perception of the goodness and badness of the object which gives rise to the five other basic passions. Love, for example, originates “when we think of something as good with regard to us, that is, as beneficial to us” (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 374; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 350). Second, this implies that wonder is independent of the functions of the other passions (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 373; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 350). But in addition to this, wonder is also primary in the sense that it is involved in the other passions, it is a component of them. Descartes says that it “normally occurs in and augments almost all of them” (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 382; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 353–354). So wonder is temporarily, functionally and constitutionally primary in respect to the other emotion-passions. 27. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 373; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 350. 28. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 372; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 349. 29. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 385; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 355. 30. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 430; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 376. 31. Cf. A. O. Rorty, “Cartesian Passions and the Union of Mind and Body,” in Essays on Descartes’s Meditations, A.O. Rorty (ed.) (London: University of California Press, 1986), 518, 520–524; Rorty, “Descartes,” 380–385. 32. Descartes, Œuvres, AT XI, 430.

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33. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 373; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 350. 34. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 384; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 354–355. 35. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 384; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 354–355. 36. J-M. Beyassade “Réflexe ou admiration: sur les mécanismes sensori-moteurs selon Descartes,” in La passion de la raison: Homage à Ferdinand Alquié, J. L. Marion and J. Deprun [(eds.]) [(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ([1968,] 1983), 113. 37. Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 382; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI 353–354. In addition to the functional and phenomenal characterizations of wonder, Descartes also gives us a physiological explanation of its causal origin. Physiologically, wonder is specific because it lacks the cardiovascular modification that is the central component of the physiology of the other passions. In Descartes’s words, wonder is not accompanied by the “changes in heart and blood” that characterize all other passions (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 381, 350; Descartes CMSI 353, 339; cf. J-M. Beyassade “Réflexe ou admiration, 124–125]). Still, wonder is an emotion-passion, according to Descartes’s definition: it is a state caused by the movements of the animal spirits and attributed to the soul (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 349; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI, 338–339). Its energy or power economy is, however, different from that of the other emotions. In wonder, the initial impression of the external object on the sense organs is so strong and unexpected that it does not need the maintenance or strengthening of the heart in order to affect the brain. Descartes expresses the idea by saying that wonder has “no relation with the heart and blood, on which depends the whole wellbeing of our body” (Descartes, Œuvres, ATXI, 381; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, CMSI, 353). Thus, Descartes’s physiological explanation of wonder is in accordance with his description of its function: physiologically wonder has no essential relation to those organs that secure the sustenance and wellbeing of the mind-body union. This does not mean that the heart and blood are totally irrelevant to the physiology of wonder; they are needed, but only as mediators through which the animal spirits enter the brain. So wonder gets all its force from the external object, its first cause. 38. Irigaray Éthique, 20; Irigaray, The Ethics, 13. cf. Irigaray, Elementary, 1–5. 39. Cf. Irigaray, Passions, 33; Irigaray, Elementary, 27–28.

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40. E. Lévinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’Extériorité (Paris: Kluwer Academic Press), 213; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, A. Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969, 195. 41. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, xiii; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, xiii. 42. More precisely, Merleau-Ponty is here describing the first phase of the phenomenological reduction, the so-called epoche. On the more detailed description of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reduction, see S. Heinämaa, “From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s reduction,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.), 127–146 (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 2001). 43. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, viii; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, xiii. 44. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, viii; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, xiii. 45. Here Merleau-Ponty’s account of the reductive step differs from Husserl’s original explication according to which the step results from a decision or an act of will. Notice, however, that in his later works, e.g., The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl himself discusses the existential and vocational aspect of the phenomenological stance (e.g., Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana, Band VI, W. Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 138–140; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, David Carr (trans.), (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 135–137. 46. Cf. W.J. Lenkowski, “What is Husserl’s Epoche? The Problem of the Beginning of Philosophy in a Husserlian Context,” Man and World, XI:3/4 (1978), 299–323. 47. A widespread misconception is that classical phenomenology is merely an epistemological endeavor that is dominated by an exclusive interest in the promotion of the sciences and in the accumulation of knowledge. This conception still governs many contemporary debates despite of Husserl’s explicit statements to the contrary in The Crisis and related works and despite of the fact that new inquiries into Husserl’s manuscripts have disclosed the ethico-practical grounds of his philosophy. For this see, for example, U. Melle, “The Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” Etudes Phénoménologiques, 12–14 (1991), 115–135; J. Donohoe, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,

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2004); H. Peucker, “From logic to the person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Ethics,” Review of Metaphysics, LXII (2008), 307–325; S. Loidolt, “Husserl and the Fact of Practical Reason—Phenomenological Claims Toward a Philosophical Ethics,” in Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication/Santalka: Filosofija, Komunikacija, 17:3 (2009), 50–61; J. Siles i Borràs, The Ethics of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Responsibility and Ethical Life, London, New York: Continuum, 2010; S. Rinofner-Kreidl, “Moral Philosophy,” in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, S. Luft and S. Overgaard (eds.), 417–428 (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 48. Irigaray, Éthique, 74–75; Irigaray, The Ethics, 77. 49. Irigaray, Éthique, 186–187; Irigaray, The Ethics, 202. 50. Irigaray, J’aime à toi: esquisse d’une félicité dans l’histoire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1992), 180; L. Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, A. Martin (trans.) (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 116. 51. Irigaray, Éthique, 76; The Ethics, 73. 52. Irigaray, J’Aim, 183–184; Irigaray, I Love, 118. 53. Irigaray, Passions, 7; Irigaray, Elemental, 7. 54. The phenomenological tradition involves several comparisons between the epoche and the ethical stance. E. Lévinas, for example, argues in his essay “Philosophy and Transcendence” (1989) that “the wonder of the I vindicated in the face of the other, is also like the suspension (like the epoche) of the eternal and irreversible return of the identical to itself ” (E. Lévinas, Altérité et transcendance [Montpellier: Fata Morgan (1967–1989) 1995]; E. Lévinas, Alterity and Transcendence, M.B. Smith [trans.] [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], 27–28). Husserl himself emphasized the comprehensive and transformative character of the phenomenological change of attitude by comparing it to religious conversion (E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana, Band VI, W. Biemel [ed.] [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954], 140; Husserl, The Crisis, 137). From the point of view of feminist philosophy, an important parallel is to be found in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, 1947). In this essay, Beauvoir illuminates her own existential stance by a comparison to the philosophical attitude of the phenomenologist. She explains that the ethical stance, as conceived by herself and Sartre, must be kept separate from the Hegelian act of surpassing and from the Stoic conversion. Instead, she states, it “should be compared to Husserlian reduction: let man put his will to be ‘in parenthesis’ and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition. And just as phenomenological

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reduction prevents the errors of dogmatism by suspending all affirmation concerning the mode of reality of the external world, whose flesh and bone presence the reduction does not, however, contest, so existential conversion does not suppress my instincts, desires, plans and passions. It merely prevents any possibility of failure by refusing to set up as absolutes the ends toward which my transcendence thrusts itself, and by considering them in their connection with the freedom which projects them” (S. de Beauvoir, Pour une Morale de l’Ambiguïté [Paris: Gallimard, 1947], 20–21; S. de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, B. Frechtman [trans.] [New York: Carol Publishing Group Editions, 1994]). 55. Irigaray, Éthique, 77; Irigaray, The Ethics, 74. 56. I have explicated the idea of wonder as a performative in my earlier work Ihmetys ja rakkaus: esseitä ruumiin ja sukupuolen fenomenologiasta [Wonder and Love: Essays in the Phenomenology of Body and Sex] (Helsinki: Nemo, 2000). The idea is studied closer and elaborated further by Virpi Lehtinen in her recent work Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being (2014). 57. L. Irigaray, Speculum, de l’Autre Femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974); L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, G.C. Gill, (trans.) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

REFERENCES Alanen, L. Descartes’s Concept of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Baier, A. “Cartesian Persons.” In Postures of Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. de Beauvoir, S. Pour une Morale de l’Ambiguïté. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. [In English, The Ethics of Ambiguity, B. Frechtman (trans.). New York: Carol Publishing Group Editions, 1994.] Beyassade, J-M. “Réflexe ou Admiration: sur les Mécanismes Sensori-Moteurs selon Descartes.” In Jean Luc Marion and Jean Deprun (eds.), La Passion de la Raison: Homage à Ferdinand Alquié, pp. 113–130. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1968] 1983. Beyassade, J-M. “The Idea of God and the Proofs of his Existence.” In J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, pp. 174–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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Brown, D.J. Descartes and the Passionate Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Chanter, T. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York, London: Routledge, 1995. Descartes, R. Œuvres de Descartes I–XII. Revised edition. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin/CNRS, [1964–1976] 1996. Descartes, R. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I–III. Translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoof, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991. Donohoe, J. Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004. Gueroult, M. Descartes selon l’Ordre des Raisons. Paris: Montaigne, 1952. Haney, K. “Edit Stein.” In L. Embree et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, pp. 679–683. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Harth, E. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Heinämaa, S. “The Body.” In S. Luft and S. Overgaard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, pp. 222–232. London, New York: Routledge, 2011. Heinämaa, S. “From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction.” In T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.), MerleauPonty’s Reading of Husserl, pp. 127–146. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 2001. Heinämaa, S. “Embodiment and Expressivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology: From Logical Investigations to Cartesian Meditations.” SATS–Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 11(1) 2010: 1–15. Heinämaa, S. Ihmetys ja Rakkaus: Esseitä Ruumiin ja Sukupuolen Fenomenologiasta [Wonder and Love: Essays in the Phenomenology of Body and Sex]. Helsinki: Nemo, 2000. Heinämaa, S. “Merleau-Ponty’s Dialogue with Descartes: The Living Body and its Position in Metaphysics.” In D. Zahavi, S. Heinämaa, and H. Ruin (eds.), Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, pp. 23–48. The Hague: Kluwer, 2003.

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Heinämaa, S. “On Luce Irigaray’s Inquiries into Intersubjectivity: Between the Feminine Body and its Other.” In M. Cimitile and E. Miller (eds.), Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, pp. 243–265. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006. Heinämaa, S.. Towards a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, MerleauPonty, Beauvoir. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Hennig P. “From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Ethics.” Review of Metaphysics, LXII (2008): 307–325. Husserl, E. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Husserliana, Band III. Edited by W. Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913. [In English, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, W.R.B. Gibson (trans.). New York, London: Collier, 1962.] Husserl, E. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana, Band I. Edited by S. Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950. [In English, Cartesian Meditations, D. Cairns (trans.). Dordrecht, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960.] Husserl, E. Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana, Band IV. Edited by Marly Bimel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. [In English, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenological Constitution, R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (trans.). Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.] Husserl, E. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana, Band VI. Edited by W. Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954. [In English, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, D. Carr (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.] Husserl, E. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Edited by U. Claesges; translated by R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, [1973] 1997. Husserl, E. Urfassung von Ideen II [Original version of Ideas II]. Edited by D. Fonfara. Forthcoming.

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Irigaray, L. Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Minuit, 1977. [In English, This Sex Which is Not One, C. Porter with C. Burke (trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.] Irigaray, L. Éthique de la différence sexuelle. Paris: Minuit, 1984. [In English, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, C. Burke and G.C. Gill (trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.] Irigaray, L. Speculum, de l’Autre Femme, Paris: Minuit, 1974. [In English, Speculum of the Other Woman, G.C. Gill (trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.] Irigaray, L. Passions Élémentaires, Paris: Minuit, 1982. [In English, Elementary Passions. J. Collie and J. Still (trans.). New York, London: Routledge, 1992.] Irigaray, L. J’aime à Toi: Esquisse d’une Félicité dans l’Histoire. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1992. [In English, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, A. Martin (trans.). New York and London: Routledge, 1996.] Irigaray, L. “Thinking Life as Relation: An Interview with Luce Irigaray.” Man and World, 29(4) 1996: 343–360. James, S. Passions and Actions: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1997. La Caze, M. Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. Lalande, A.Vocabulaire Technique et Critique de la Philosophie, 12th ed. Paris: PUF, 1976. Leder, D. The Absent Body. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Leeuwen, A. van. “An Examination of Iriagaray’s Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in the Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love.” Hypatia, 28(3) 2013: 452–468. Leeuwen, A. van. “Sexuate Difference, Ontological Difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger.” Continental Philosophical Review, 43(1) 2010: 111–126. Lehtinen, V. Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. Lenkowski, W.J. “What is Husserl’s Epoche? The Problem of the Beginning of Philosophy in a Husserlian context.” Man and World, XI(3/4) 1978: 299–323. Levin, D.M. The Opening of Vision. New York & London: Routledge, 1988.

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Lévinas, E. Altérité et transcendance. Montpellier: Fata Morgan, [1967–1989] 1995. [In English, Alterity and Transcendence, M.B. Smith (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.] Lévinas, E. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Kluwer Academic, 1971. [In English Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, A. Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969.] Loidolt, S. “Husserl and the Fact of Practical Reason—Phenomenological Claims toward a Philosophical Ethics.” Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication / Santalka: Filosofija, Komunikacija, 17(3) 2009: 50–61. Melle, U. “The Development of Husserl’s Ethics.” Etudes Phénoménologiques, 12–14 (1991): 115–135. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phénoménologie de la Perception, Paris: Gallimard, [1945] 1993. [In English, Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (trans.). New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995.] Merleau-Ponty, M. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. [In English, Signs, R.C. McCleary (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, (1964) 1987.] Merleau-Ponty, M. L’Œil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. [In English, “Eye and Mind,” C. Dallery (trans.). In J.M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, pp. 159–190. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.] Merleau-Ponty, M. L’Union de l’âme et du Corps, J. Deprun (collected and ed.). Paris: Vrin, [1947–1948] 1997. [In English, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Brian, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul. Edited by A.G. Bjelland Jr. and P. Burke; translated by P.B. Milan. New York: Humanity Books, 2001.] Merleau-Ponty, M. Le Visible et l’Invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. [In English, The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Linguis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1975.] Merleau-Ponty, M. “Un Inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Métaphysique et Morale, 4 (1962): 404–409. [In English, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Translated by A.B. Dallery. In J. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, pp. 3–11. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.]

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Mortensen, E. The Feminine and Nihilism: Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. Reuter, M. Questions of the Body, Sexual Difference and Equality in Cartesian Philosophy. Unpublished dissertation. Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, 2000. Rinofner-Kreidl, S. “Moral Philosophy.” In S. Luft and S. Overgaard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Rorty, A.O. “Cartesian Passions and the Union of Mind and Body.” In A.O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’s Meditations. London: University of California Press, 1986. Rorty, A.O. “Descartes on Thinking with the Body.” In J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, pp. 371–392. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind. London: Penguin Books, 1949. Saphiro, L. “Cartesian Generosity.” In T. Aho and M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.), Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 64, pp. 249–275. Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland, 1999. Saphiro, L. “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of Philosophy.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7(3) 1999: 503–520. Saphiro, L. “Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia.” In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013. Accessed Oct 11, 2016, at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/elisabeth-bohemia Saphiro, L. (ed.). The Correspondence between Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia and Descartes. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Saphiro, L., and M. Pickavé (eds.). Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Siles i Borràs, J. The Ethics of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Responsibility and Ethical Life, London, New York: Continuum, 2010. Vasseleu, C. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and MerleauPonty. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

CHAPTER 9

Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Other Others Katherine J. Morris

There are many questions that may be addressed under the general banner “the problem of others.” (That the tradition tends to speak of “the problem of other minds” is not insignificant.)1 The most familiar is an epistemological problem that is typically expressed as, “How do we know that minds other than our own exist?” There is another epistemological problem that may be expressed: “How do we understand others’ minds? How do we know what they are feeling or thinking?” There is also what is sometimes called “the conceptual problem of other minds”: “Can we have a concept of mind that—perforce—applies generally and unambiguously to oneself and to others?”2 Merleau-Ponty has something to say about all of these questions. His remarks amount not to solutions but to dissolutions—or perhaps transformations3—of the problems.4 Implicit in the usual treatment of these questions, however, is the presupposition that the others in question are human others. Even if it is recognized that parallel questions arise regarding nonhuman animals—is there anything to understand about them? How can we understand them? Are our mental concepts univocal in application to humans and to animals?—such questions are not normally seen as within the scope of “the problem(s) of others.” Perhaps less obviously, the usual treatment of these questions presupposes that the others in question are not just humans but humans more or less like us: adult, “civilized,” and mentally healthy.5 Again, however, questions parallel to the traditional problem(s) of others may be raised not just about 237

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animals but about (in Merleau-Ponty’s words) “children, primitive peoples and madmen.”6 It is (at least) these (animals, children, “primitive peoples,” and “madmen”) that the phrase “other others” of the title is meant to designate.7 The main focus of this chapter is to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the problem(s) of other others; because his responses to the traditional problems introduce concepts that will be important for addressing these, they are briefly outlined in the first three sections of the chapter. His approach to both sets of questions exemplifies Merleau-Ponty’s most renowned and incontrovertible contribution to phenomenology: his reconceptualization of the body. His approach to the problems of other others exemplifies another unique (and controversial) feature of his phenomenology: its detailed engagement with the “human sciences.” Before we begin, however, we ought to consider two grounds for hesitation about the value or indeed the possibility of such a project. First, can a distinction really be drawn between “others more or less like us” and “other others”? Even within the category of adult “civilized” healthy human beings, important differences distinguish us (class, race, age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.); if taken to its logical conclusion, this observation might appear to suggest that all others are “other others.”8 Less drastically, it may be argued that the distinction between “others more or less like us” and “other others” is simply a matter of degree.9 Second, given the methodological centrality that phenomenological method accords to experience, does phenomenology not inevitably either lead to solipsism or, less drastically, limit us investigating others who are more or less “like us”?10 A broad-brush response to both grounds for hesitation would point out two things. First, the basic premise of existential phenomenology is that human beings are, in Heidegger’s famous phrase, “being-in-the-world,” so that human beings and the world are internally related. Thus experience for the phenomenologists is not experience as understood by the empiricists, for whom “experience” is a pluralizable term that designates the putative causal upshot in the mind of the perception of putative atomistic qualities of the world: inner, private, atomistic objects also known as “sensations” or “impressions.” Rather, it refers to our engagement with the life-world though action, practice, and exploration.11 The threat of solipsism brought out in the previous paragraph depends on understanding “experience” roughly as the empiricists did. Second, phenomenology aims not simply at “describing experience” but at eliciting the essential structures of experience; and given phenomenology’s conception of “experience,” we may equally talk about the

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essential structures of “human reality,” or of the life-world, behavior, and so on. The claim, therefore, is not simply that other others’ experience is different from ours but that their experience differs structurally.12 I leave the notion of “essential structure” undefined for the time being. I introduce it here simply to indicate the grounds for arguing that the distinction between “others more or less like us” and “other others” is not simply a matter of degree. The essential structures of experience, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly emphasizes, are the structures of our experience, that is, of ourselves and others more or less like us.13 The experience of other others, as we will see, typically differs structurally from this by being simpler or having fewer articulations; it will, from this perspective, appear as a privation or lack. Yet Merleau-Ponty is also at pains to insist that from its own perspective, such experience is “a complete form of existence,” that is, not lacking.14 (To take a simple analogy, if four-legged tables are the norm, a three-legged table will appear to be deficient; but both are stable: each—to use a favored Merleau-Pontian phrase—“has its own equilibrium.”)15

THE PROBLEM OF OTHERS: FIRST EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM The question “How do we know that minds other than our own exist?” contains certain presuppositions that more or less inevitably lead to the answer that we don’t know (or that our knowledge is at best probable).16 This answer is troubling because, we might say, it is unlivable.17 Thus there is a powerful motive for identifying and challenging these presuppositions. We might identify at least two: (1) that the body is a “mere object” and (2) that there is an asymmetry between my knowledge of my own (my mind’s?) existence and my knowledge of others’ (others’ minds’?) existence. Treatment of the first “problem of others” usually begins, however inexplicitly, from the idea that the body is a mere object: something like a Cartesian anatomical/physiological machine. To ask “How do we know that minds other than our own exist?” suggests that the issue of the knowledge of other bodies has been solved or shelved along with the general issue of “knowledge of the existence of the external world”: the other’s body is just one more object in the world, and we can be as sure of its existence as of that of any other physical object; the issue is how we know that that body “contains”

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or “is associated with” or “is animated by” a mind, that its movements are “caused” or “occasioned” by a mind. A large proportion of Phenomenology of Perception is devoted to a reconceptualization of the body according to which it is precisely not such an object. A central concept for this reconceptualization is the “body schema.” At its most basic, the body schema is “a way of stating that my body is in-the-world.”18 (We know already that human beings are “in-the-world”; Merleau-Ponty’s claim here is that our bodies are “in-the-world,” as opposed to “in-the-midst-of-the-world,” as mere objects are.) In his thinking, this implies, most centrally, that (a) the body schema is a “system of equivalents”19 and that (b) “equivalent” means “equivalent for a particular bodily purpose,”20 so that we may speak of a bodily teleology.21 The crucial point is simply that no mere object could possess such a body schema. These implications can perhaps most easily be brought out in connection with motor “habits” or skills (e.g., driving). The acquisition of a motor skill is “a rearrangement and renewal of the body schema.”22 Prior to becoming fully habituated to driving a car, I must explicitly calculate the width of a gap and judge whether the car will fit; once the habit is sedimented in my body, “I enter a narrow opening and see that I can ‘get through’ without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my own body.”23 But to acquire a motor habit, that is, to learn, “never consists in being made capable of repeating the same gesture, but of providing an adapted response to the situation by different means . . . It is . . . a new aptitude for resolving a series of problems of the same form.”24 “Problems of the same form” is the precise correlate of the body schema as a “system of equivalents”: to learn how to drive is to learn how to deal with problems of the form “the car is about to stall on this hill,” and its solution (e.g., changing gears) has the same form whether I am driving a right-hand-drive or a left-hand-drive car, requiring different “gestures” because requiring different hands: the gesture with my left hand and the gesture with my right hand are (not identical but) systematically equivalent within the body schema. It should be clear that this notion of “equivalence” is a teleological notion; the gestures are equivalent for a particular (problem-solving) purpose.25 This is also why the switch from a right-hand-drive car to a left-hand-drive car does not require my relearning to drive from scratch. The “transferability” of habits or skills is premised on the body schema as a system of equivalents.26

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The question “How do I know that minds other than my own exist?” also presupposes that one’s own (mind’s) existence is absolutely certain (perhaps via something like the Cartesian cogito), while the existence of others (others’ minds) is not. Merleau-Ponty resists this presupposition via what he calls “the system ‘Self-others-things.’”27 He argues, first, that my knowledge of my own existence and my knowledge of the existence of the world are exactly as certain as each other, because my existence and that of the world are intertwined. He, secondly, makes a parallel argument about the existence of others and that of the world. Thus there is no such epistemological asymmetry. In more detail: Merleau-Ponty argues (pace Descartes) that the cogito does not narrow my existence to the sphere of my thought, but rather widens the sphere of my thought to my existence, that is, to my being-in-the-world, which it has been the task of Phenomenology of Perception to bring to light.28 He rejects the sharp separation on which Descartes relies between the truth of “I see” and that of “I think I see.” “Perception and the perceived necessarily have the same existential modality, since perception is inseparable from the consciousness it has, or rather is, of reaching the thing itself.”29 That to which perception “throws me open” is the world; there is “absolute certainty of the world in general,”30 and there is, correlatively, “absolute certainty” of my own existence: “consciousness of the world is not established upon self-consciousness; they are strictly contemporary.”31 This world, moreover, is an “interworld,” one shared with others. At the most basic level, the interworld is simply the obverse of the perspectivity of perceived objects. “[W]e have learned in individual perception not to conceive our perspective views as independent of each other; we know that they slip into each other and are gathered together in the thing.” In like fashion, my perspective “slips spontaneously into the other’s . . . because both are gathered together in a single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.”32 Thus “[i]n so far as I have sensory functions . . . I am already in communication with others.”33 There is also a social and cultural layer of the interworld. To learn what a chair, a cup, or a rocking horse is is to learn how it is used, that is, how it is used by others (one’s parents, teachers, or peers), so that “when the 'cultural objects' that fall under my regard suddenly adapt themselves to my powers, awaken my intentions, and make themselves 'understood' by me—I am then drawn into a coexistence of which I am not the unique constituent.”34 In virtue of these layers of shared existence, I am always already “situated in an intersubjective world”;35 the “social world” is “a permanent field or dimension of existence,”36 and the other’s “existence on the horizon of my life is beyond doubt.”37

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THE PROBLEM OF OTHERS: SECOND EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM Merleau-Ponty also identifies problematic presuppositions in the second epistemological problem of others. One presupposition is again of an asymmetry: the idea that I am “transparent” to myself while others are “opaque” to me. A second (which helps to justify the idea that others are opaque to me) follows from the conception of the body as a mere object, namely, the idea that all I have to go on in understanding another is the movements of his body understood as such an object. We have seen already that my knowledge of my own existence is exactly as certain as that of the world, and that there is “absolute certainty of the world in general”; but, Merleau-Ponty adds, “. . . not of any one thing in particular”:38 the world “outruns” my perception, so that perception “cannot present me with a ‘reality’ otherwise than by running the risk of error.”39 But if we and the world are bound up with one another, and if our contact with this world is always open to error, then we “cannot be transparent to ourselves.”40 Although there is “absolute certainty” of my own existence, my existence is never “in full possession of itself ”—though nor of course is it “entirely estranged from itself.”41 So I am not completely transparent to myself. Nor are others completely opaque to me. This would be so if the other’s body were a “mere object” whose movements were “mere behavior,” that is, behavior as understood by the behaviorists, “reduced to the sum of reflexes and conditioned reflexes between which no intrinsic connection is permitted.”42 But it isn’t such an object, and behavior (even “reflex” behavior: Structure of Behavior Part I) is not to be understood in this way. (I will, as Merleau-Ponty does, often use the term “conduct” to express the notion of behavior properly understood.)43 “[T]he notion of behavior remains something anchored in a body, but the body is no longer [understood as] a machine,”44 it is the “living body,” which could not be grasped without this “internal unity of signification, which distinguishes a gesture [conduct] from a sum of movements [mere behavior].”45 Merleau-Ponty identifies three linked key elements to the structure of behavior, all of which serve to differentiate it from the “mere behavior” of the behaviorists.46 (1) First, behavior is “a debate between the individual and the world.”47 The behaviorist notions of “stimulus” and “response” conceive the relation between world and behavior (mere behavior) as external. But, argues Merleau-Ponty, “It is necessary to interpose, between the stimulus and

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the reaction, the behavioral context” (or “behavioral setting” or “milieu”).48 “Behavioral setting” is contrasted with “geographical setting” as the lived world is contrasted with the objective world;49 in each case the former is a microcosm of the latter. The behavioral setting or milieu is structured by the individual’s “valuations,”50 in virtue of which its objects possess “demand characters” (solicitations, invitations to act) and “functional characters” (“affordances”), so that there is an internal relation between the individual and his milieu. A “stimulus” only ever functions as a stimulus in a behavioral setting, and this means that we can no longer talk of “stimuli”—isolated “pushes,” as it were.51 Nor can we talk of “responses” if a response is supposed, à la the “mere behavior” conception, to be a reaction to such an isolated push, but must instead talk of “behavior proper” (conduct). And now the relation between world (milieu) and behavior (conduct) can be seen as internal.52 (2) This dialectical relationship between individual and setting is oriented toward a norm, in particular what Canguilhem called a “vital norm”: “the reaction depends on the vital significance rather than on the material properties of the stimuli.”53 Hence the internal relation between behavior and milieu may also be described as “a relation of meaning,”54 that is, “vital meaning.” (3) Behavioral responses involve a kind of “abstraction” from the material properties of the “geographical” stimulus,55 so that “the original response movement is established only as a particular instance of a general aptitude which can vary around the same fundamental theme.”56 It is this that underlies the “habit transfer” referred to in the previous section. So behavior is not mere behavior. Behavior properly understood, within its milieu, is meaningful, and the relation between the individual and his milieu is intelligible; this removes the primary reason for supposing that others are opaque to us. Merleau-Ponty nicely brings these two strands of argument together by positing that if I were completely transparent to myself, others really would be completely opaque to me: “The other can be evident for me because I am not transparent for myself.”57

THE PROBLEM OF OTHERS: THE CONCEPTUAL PROBLEM The worry about the unity of mental concepts stems in part from an asymmetry that has not yet been addressed: not an asymmetry of the certainty of existence, nor an asymmetry of transparency, but one that is sometimes called an

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“asymmetry of access”: even if my knowledge of another’s mental life is not a matter of tenuous inference from his mere behavior but grounded in his conduct, my knowledge of my own mental life is not grounded in my own conduct. How then can our mental concepts be the same in application to oneself and to others? Before we address this head-on, we need to identify certain presuppositions of the third problem of others that Merleau-Ponty would want to reject: (a) the assumption that the concepts by which we understand others are, primarily, mental concepts; and (b) the assumption that to understand another is, primarily, to apply (correctly) a concept to another, to make a (correct) judgment. The analytic literature on the “problem of other minds” tends to use the expression “mental concept” with little examination. We called attention earlier to the danger that the term “mind” is contrasted with “body” in such a way that the body is understood as a “mere object”; there is a parallel danger of using the expression “mental concept” to contrast with “bodily concept,” such that bodily concepts are only instantiated by mere objects.58 The fundamental concepts that Merleau-Ponty would have us focus on, namely, “conduct” and “milieu,” have enormous advantages in just this respect.59 For Merleau-Ponty, understanding others, at least primarily and for the most part (and at least when it comes to others more or less like us), is not a matter of “applying concepts” or “making judgments” at all: “The sense of the gestures is not given, but understood . . . The whole difficulty is to conceive this act [of understanding] clearly without confusing it with a cognitive operation.”60 His conception of this act involves two closely linked claims: first, that the understanding in question is bodily, not intellectual or cognitive: “It is through my body that I understand other people,”61 and, second, that this bodily understanding involves a type of reciprocity grounded in the body schema as a system of equivalents. But here, crucially, the equivalence is not between (for example) a gesture made with my right hand and one made with my left, but between my gesture and that of the other.62 Merleau-Ponty develops this notion most famously by reference to infants, especially in his oft-quoted example of the fifteen-month-old baby who “opens its mouth if I playfully take one of its fingers between my teeth and pretend to bite it.”63 The baby’s response shows that it, in a perfectly clear sense, understands my “biting intention”; but this understanding cannot be a cognitive operation: the infant hardly possesses the sophisticated concepts (e.g., “intends to bite”) required here. “‘Biting’ has immediately, for it, an intersubjective significance.”64 Within the infant’s body schema, the other’s mouth and its

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own are equivalent: the baby’s “own mouth and teeth, as it feels them from the inside, are immediately, for it, an apparatus to bite with, and my jaw, as the baby sees it from the outside, is immediately, for it, capable of the same intentions.” In effect, the infant “perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its own body.”65 Merleau-Ponty cautions us that we cannot simply transfer these observations from the infant to the adult.66 Indeed, he tells us, the young child, up to around age three, “has no awareness of himself or of others as private subjectivities.”67 From this perspective, when the infant perceives “my” biting intention in “its” body, it does not distinguish this from its own biting intention—so it opens its mouth and makes as if to bite.68 We gradually become individuals; however, the process of “segregation,” of individuation, “is never completely finished”;69 “the unsophisticated thinking of our earliest years remains as an indispensable acquisition underlying that of maturity.”70 Thus even as an adult, I—primarily and for the most part—understand others through “the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my intentions and gestures discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his.”71 This “bodily reciprocity” involves an internal relation between my body and that of the other. What becomes of the “asymmetry of access” that helped to motivate the third problem of others, that is, the thought that my understanding of the other is grounded in his conduct whereas my understanding of myself is not? This too is transformed. First, “grounding” is no longer the right word: “grounds” are normally understood as reasons for beliefs or judgments, and this is no longer what is at issue. Second, the distinction in question is that between conduct seen from the outside (e.g., the “visual smile” of the other) and conduct felt from the inside (e.g., one’s own “motor smile”).72 This is an asymmetry all right, but it should be no more troubling for the unity of the concept of conduct than the fact that we both see and taste a lemon should be worrying for the unity of the concept of a lemon; the visual smile and the motor smile are internally related, just as are the look and the taste of the lemon.73

THE PROBLEM(S) OF OTHER OTHERS So far, we have cleared away a number of important presuppositions that have dogged discussions of the first three problems of others, and have introduced

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some important Merleau-Pontian concepts that allow us to characterize our experience of others more accurately. The next question is whether this is of help in addressing the problem(s) of “other others.” The passage from which we took our paradigmatic “other others” reads more fully: “this world is not just open to [us] . . . but also to animals, children, primitive peoples and madmen who dwell in it after their own fashion; they too coexist in this world” (i.e., what he calls “the world of perception,” by contrast with “the world of science”).74 To “dwell” in the world of perception is, I take it, to have a milieu (or set of milieus).75 Has Merleau-Ponty not begged a question here—namely, the first epistemological problem regarding other others? (To see other others as having a milieu is to see them as meaningful, as “to-be-understood”; has he not simply assumed this?) 76 However, this question, like the traditional question “How do we know that minds other than our own exist?,” rests on presuppositions that have already been challenged.77 The conceptual problem also looks much less pressing once we replace “mental concepts” with the phenomenological concepts of conduct and milieu, so I will say no more about it here. Thus the focus of this final section will be on the second epistemological problem: how, if at all, can we understand other others? Our discussion thus far has indicated two possible routes to understanding. One is the possibility of a cognitive understanding grounded not in “mental concepts” but in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notions of “conduct” and “milieu.” The second is the possibility of an immediate noncognitive understanding grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bodily reciprocity. It is primarily the first that Merleau-Ponty himself pursues in his discussions of other others; the second possibility is perforce more speculative. Cognitive Understanding of Other Others The claim that other others dwell in this world “after their own fashion” suggests that their milieus differ from ours.78 Nonetheless, to see other others as having a milieu and to see their movements as conduct are the twin starting points of any attempt to understand other others.79 The claim is that we can understand their conduct even if it is not conduct that we ourselves display, by understanding its “vital significance,” even if what is of vital significance to them is not to us, and thereby understand their milieu even if it is not ours—crucially, even if their conduct and milieu differs structurally from ours (again, primarily, in virtue of having fewer articulations). Merleau-Ponty relies

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for descriptions of the conduct of other others on the findings of psychologists and anthropologists, descriptions that he nonetheless, characteristically, feels free to criticize; for example, he broadly accepts the descriptions of the Gestalt psychologists (“the very psychologists who described the world as I did”)80 and the culturalists such as Margaret Mead (“[c]ulturalism is close to a phenomenological sociology”),81 while rejecting others. Merleau-Ponty urges an important methodological principle, here expressed with respect to children but equally applicable elsewhere: “We must conceive of the child neither as an absolute ‘other’ nor as ‘the same.’”82 This principle circumvents twin dangers: the one is what is sometimes called “othering,” of presupposing that these other others are, as it were, wholly other, a presupposition that would not only put other others beyond the reach of understanding,83 but is typically accompanied by a disvaluing of those other others. The second danger is what might broadly be called “anthropomorphizing,” used narrowly to refer to the projection of human qualities onto animals, but here used more broadly to the treatment of children as “miniature adults,”84 and so on. Nonetheless, this methodological principle needs careful handling to distinguish it from the claim that the difference between “others more or less like us” and “other others” is simply a matter of degree. Rather, as we saw in our opening remarks, there are structural differences. I cannot hope to treat any other others in detail; the aim is simply to indicate how this methodological principle plays itself out in each case. Animals. Merleau-Ponty’s first book The Structure of Behavior (1942) largely concerned animals; he returned to this subject much later in his second lecture course on nature (1957–58), the notes for which have recently been published in English translation under the title Nature (2003).85 Much of SB, as we have seen, argues against a behaviorist understanding of behavior and offers an alternative conception. SB Part III distinguishes between the physical, the vital, and the human “orders.” Animals belong to the vital order, not the physical order; this means that they exhibit conduct, not just mere behavior, and (hence) that they inhabit a milieu: even an insect “projects the norms of its milieu and itself lays down the terms of its vital problem.”86 He adds, however, that “[t]he gestures of behavior, the intentions which it traces in the space around the animal, are . . . directed to . . . being-for-the-animal, that is, to a certain milieu characteristic of the species”;87 with the insect, “it is a question of an a priori of the species and not a personal choice”;88 this latter is the prerogative of the human order.

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Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between three “forms” of behavior, which he labels “syncretic,” “amovable” and “symbolic.” The first two are found in the vital order, the last only in the human order: although these categories “do not correspond to three groups of animals: there is no species whose behavior never goes beyond the syncretic level nor any whose behavior never descends below the symbolic forms,” only human beings (he claims) exhibit the symbolic forms.89 Syncretic behavior is “imprisoned in the framework of its natural conditions,” which “release” “instinctive” behavior.90 Amovable forms of behavior allow the appearance of “signals which are not determined by the instinctual equipment of the species”;91 to the animal capable of amovable behavior, “the object appears clothed with a ‘vector,’ invested with a ‘functional value’ which depends on the effective composition of the field.”92 But if it is only capable of amovable behavior, the animal cannot choose to adopt a different point of view, to invest the object with a different “functional value.” In symbolic forms of behavior, by contrast, we have symbols rather than signals. In symbolic forms of behavior, signals are “liberated” from “the here-and-now relations . . . and from the functional values which the needs of the species … assign to them”;93 the corresponding milieu is “unlimited.”94 Hence animals are like us in being part of the vital order and thus in having a milieu and exhibiting conduct; their milieus and conducts are structurally unlike ours insofar as their milieus are limited (by the species-given functional values) and insofar as animals (correlatively) are incapable of symbolic forms of behavior. Children. Merleau-Ponty gave a series of lecture courses at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952; although some of these had appeared earlier in English translation in one form or another, the complete set has only recently been published, under the title Child Psychology and Pedagogy (2010). Of particular relevance are his engagements with Piaget’s experiments on and interpretations of children’s perception. Merleau-Ponty is sharply critical of Piaget because of his thoroughgoing intellectualism, which manifests itself simultaneously in making the child “too similar to the adult (Piaget looks for a mode of reasoning in the child)” and making it “too different from the adult (when Piaget does not find the same system of thought in the adult as in the child, he accounts for this by claiming there is a difference in mentality).”95 For instance, Piaget famously says that “the child does not believe that objects persist once they have disappeared from his or her visual field.”96 Merleau-Ponty’s response is that “[i]n order to describe the child’s original experience, one would have to find a means of expression which

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suggests neither a permanent world in the adult’s sense, nor a world of vanishing objects.”97 Pace Piaget, the child’s perceived world is structured,98 but “we are not thereby obliged to hold that the structure of a child’s perception is akin to that of an adult . . . its structures are compacted, global and inexact,” but “[t]he child’s perceptual organization is able to function according to its own logic.”99 The most central difference between the child and the adult, Merleau-Ponty tells us, is “the difference between a perceived world which embraces only vaguely certain ‘ultra-things’ . . . and the child’s world which involves a great number of them, because the child’s organized behavioral forms do not extend beyond an immediate sphere.”100 “Ultra-thing” is a term Merleau-Ponty takes from Wallon; it refers to “horizons of reality that the child does not doubt, but toward which he cannot take an objective or objectifying attitude,” because they are out of reach. Thus, for example, whereas “[w]e conceive of an indefinite series of sizes,” for the child “[t]here is a sort of threshold. Once the threshold is surpassed, one is in the absolutely ‘large.’ ”101 This is not the only structural difference between the child’s experience and that of the adult; for example, we have seen already that the young child, up to around age three, “has no awareness of himself or of others as private subjectivities,” and surely this too is a structural difference. Again, in his discussion of children’s drawing and its relation to the child’s perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests that “the affective character of the object [drawn] is primordial for the child and constitutes the object’s very structure. Only the adult has the idea of pure quality.”102 “Primitive peoples.” Merleau-Ponty has no systematic discussion of the structure of experience of “primitive peoples.” He offers, however, an indication that primitive peoples, like children, “have no awareness of themselves or of others as private subjectivities”; it is this, he suggests, that underlies Lévi-Strauss’s observations that primitive peoples “respect the rule for the sake of the rule,” attempt to establish “reciprocal relationships allowing for the resolution of conflicts,” and treat a gift as adding something “to the given thing by the very fact that it is given.”103 Into this same category might also fall “the existence in a great number of societies of an obligatory expression of sentiment. Everything happens as if it was impossible to establish a divide between what is lived by the individual and what is expressed by him.”104 “Madmen.” I take it that Merleau-Ponty’s term “madmen” does duty for the general category of “pathological” or “morbid” thought and conduct, which would include not just what psychiatrists would call “mental disorders” but

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also what they would call “neurological disorders,” such as Schneider’s “visual agnosia.” It seems wildly implausible that any general claim can be made about the structure of pathological experience. However, Schneider can serve as a paradigm for the kind of cognitive understanding we can arrive at. Merleau-Ponty reiterates his basic methodological principle: we can neither see normal and pathological as identical nor as “an absolute alterity.”105 He considers Schneider’s ability to perform “concrete movements” but inability to perform “abstract movements” and suggests that while his “motor intentionality” (“an anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective,” which is “ensured by the body itself ”)106 is relatively intact, he has lost “the power to reckon with the possible,” which is what enables normal individuals to “play-act,” to extricate their bodies “from the living situation to make them breathe, speak and, if need be, weep in the realm of the imagination”;107 play-acting is precisely what abstract movement demands, but Schneider is “incapable of play-acting.”108 Thus the essential structure of Schneider’s conduct differs from ours, even if there are instances of Schneider-like behavior in “normal” adults, for example, in fatigue.109 Somewhat as the milieus of animals are limited by the species-given functional values, Schneider’s milieu, while clearly a milieu in which he exhibits conduct, is limited by the functional values (thread to-be-cut, leather to-be-stitched, etc.) involved in concrete, familiar tasks (such as sewing wallets) in which he is immediately engaged. Bodily Understanding of Other Others So the concepts of milieu and conduct offer a framework in terms of which we can approach understanding other others. But what about the immediate preconceptual bodily understanding described in the previous section? Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that such understanding is confined to those others who are more or less like us: “I do not ‘understand’ the sexual pantomime of the dog, still less of the cockchafer or the praying mantis. I do not even understand the expression of the emotions in primitive peoples . . .”110 However, “do not” does not mean “cannot.” The strategy in this more speculative section is to begin with some reminders that some of us do after all bodily understand some of the conduct of some other others. I will then ask how we can make sense of this on at least broadly Merleau-Pontyan principles. First reminder: this concerns children, and seems the obvious place to begin, given that we were all once children, and given that our own capacity for bodily understanding is, according to Merleau-Ponty, a vital legacy

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of our own childhoods. Almost all of us bodily understand at least some of the emotional and intentional conduct of human infants and children: the curious reaching for a shiny dangling object, the moue of distaste at certain foods. Nor need we confine ourselves to the visual (even if Merleau-Ponty, at least in Phenomenology of Perception, tends to do so). We also bodily understand the infant’s (heard) cry of distress or its gurgle of delight: we grasp its distress or delight, instantaneously, powerfully, and beyond all possibility of doubt, with our own bodies. Even more forcibly, we have a tactile bodily understanding of infants and children: when we pick up the crying infant, our bodies feel its body’s tension, and its body feels our body’s reassuring strength and calm.111 Second reminder: this concerns animals, and seems the obvious next step, given that we are, after all, animals, even if our conduct exhibits greater structural complexity than that of other animals. Many of us—especially those of us who share our lives with animals—bodily understand the emotional and intentional conduct of (some) animals: the cat’s meaning look when sat in front of the food bowl, its fascination with the end of the bit of string. Again, we can go beyond the visual to the auditory (the cat’s contented purr, the kitten’s frightened mew) and the tactile (our bodies feel its body’s sudden tension when the fireworks start, and its body feels the reassurance of our stroking; likewise when we are ill or unhappy, its purring and kneading of our laps comforts our bodies). To be sure, we may not bodily understand “the sexual pantomime” of the cockchafer or the praying mantis, yet those who share their lives with dogs surely bodily understand some of their emotional and intentional conduct. But what about “primitive peoples”?112 Most “civilized” people, apart from anthropologists, have no real contact with “primitive” peoples (by contrast with children and animals). Yet those anthropologists, in the course of their fieldwork, may surely come to achieve an immediate bodily understanding of their informants’ emotional and intentional conduct.113 What then about “madmen”? Somewhat parallel points apply: most mentally healthy people in “civilized” societies, apart from mental health professionals, have no contact with such individuals unless they are relatives. But surely some neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists may come to understand their patients bodily, and likewise, surely, for some relatives of the mentally ill.114 So how, on Merleau-Pontyan principles, could we make sense of these further possibilities of bodily understanding?

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We noted earlier that the child comes to inhabit the social and cultural interworld through the acquisition of habits;115 more precisely, the acquisition of that set of embodied cultural practices that Bourdieu called “habitus.”116 To learn how to walk, eat, speak, and express emotions is to learn how “one” walks, eats, speaks, and expresses emotions, that is, how others—rather, a particular set of others: members of one’s own class and culture—do these things. Merleau-Ponty appears to suggest that the infant bodily understands certain basic gestures and facial expressions from a very early age (the biting gesture, the smile expressing pleasure).117 Importantly, a newborn infant’s body schema (“the schema of all possible activities”)118 is capable of being molded to any habitus: “the child is socially polymorphic.”119 Because it is “not yet integrated into our culture,”120 “[v]ery diverse possibilities coexist within the child.”121 But to be “integrated into our culture” (to acquire the habitus of “our culture”) is to achieve further layers of bodily reciprocity with members of that culture.122 For example, according to Merleau-Ponty, “The angry Japanese smiles, the westerner goes red and stamps his foot or else goes pale and hisses his words.”123 For the “Western” child to be integrated into its culture is (inter alia) for it to learn bodily to understand the reddening of the face and the stamping of the foot; the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the Japanese child and the angry smile. This amounts to a sketch of the acquisition of what we might call a “first habitus,” a “mother habitus” as it were, like a “mother tongue.” But we surely can acquire second habituses, just as we can learn second languages (e.g., an Englishman who emigrates to Japan can come to acquire the habitus of a Japanese person, possibly switching back and forth as he travels from one country to the other). And I want to suggest that coming to understand other others is in some ways like acquiring a second habitus (hence the importance to bodily understanding of sharing one’s life with or spending extended time with other others). To be sure, the acquisition of a second habitus cannot be exactly like the acquisition of a first habitus, any more than the acquisition of a second language can be exactly like the acquisition of one’s mother tongue.124 The child may be “socially polymorphic,” but we adults are not. Yet those “very diverse possibilities” that “coexist within the child” are not lost when the child is “integrated into our culture,” else all “second habituses” would be out of reach. Rather, although some possibilities are developed through the acquisition of a first habitus and others are not, these undeveloped possibilities, although “inhibited,” remain as part of the body schema.125 Acquiring a second habitus would be a matter of “disinhibiting”—hence not

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merely developing—these undeveloped possibilities. (Thus the adult retains a kind of social polymorphism, though in a very different sense than the child.) There is a further difference between first and second habitus: whereas first habituses, by and large, entail mutual bodily understanding, second habituses do not. The Japanese person bodily understands members of her own class/culture and vice versa; the English émigré to Japan may come to understand the Japanese bodily (although there are no guarantees), but in his own conduct he is likely to retain slight traces of his British accent—both literally and figuratively—even after many years, and this may cause interference when it comes to Japanese people fully bodily understanding him. Objection: the acquisition of a habitus requires that the others’ conduct presents itself to the child as a “theme of possible activity” for the child’s own body.126 Now, it may be argued that other others’ bodies precisely do not do this; the strongest case might be with nonhuman animals. How can a cat’s purring speak to a body that cannot purr? How can a cat’s switching its tail present itself as a theme of possible activity for a human, tailless body? This objection, however, seems to rest on treating the body as an anatomical/ physiological object. The equivalence entailed by the body schema as a system of equivalence is a teleological one, as we have seen; can my body not come (in effect) to understand the cat’s purr as its smile (and thus equivalent to mine), its tail-switching as the equivalent of my frown?127Strikingly, there are a handful of well-documented cases of “feral children” raised by animals. Consider this description of a Ukrainian girl who lived exclusively with dogs from the age of three to the age of eight: “She bounds along on all fours through long grass, panting towards water with her tongue hanging out. When she reaches the tap she paws at the ground with her forefeet, drinks noisily with her jaws wide and lets the water cascade over her head . . . she shakes her head and neck free of droplets, exactly like a dog when it emerges from a swim . . . Then, she barks.”128 Evidently the dogs’ bodies presented “themes of possible activity” to this young girl. I have suggested that coming to understand other others is in some ways analogous to acquiring a second habitus. Let me end with a qualification: such habituses will be less “second” than “secondary.” A second habitus (e.g., that of the English émigré to Japan) is one that is livable for extended periods. There are by contrast obstacles to our living the habituses of animals, children, “primitive people,” and “madmen” for more than a little while and in circumscribed situations: we can’t simply leave behind the essential structures of our experience, as the Englishman can leave behind his English

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habitus in Japan. (Note that the Japanese and the English are not “other others” to each other; their experience is not structurally different: different as the cultures are, both are in Merleau-Ponty’s terms “civilized.”)

CONCLUSION I suggested at the outset that Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the traditional problems of others amounts not to solutions but to dissolutions, or even “transformations.” It dissolves the problems insofar as it identifies and challenges the presuppositions that underlie and motivate them, so that the questions as originally posed no longer arise. It transforms them insofar as it provides new concepts (in particular, “conduct” and “milieu”), grounded in his reconceptualization of the body, in terms of which to offer new and more fruitful questions. I have tried to argue that these concepts afford us the framework for a conceptual phenomenological understanding of other others, although it takes the observations of “human scientists” (psychologists and anthropologists) to provide the material for filling in this framework. As noted at the beginning, Merleau-Ponty’s detailed engagement with the human sciences is both unique and controversial among phenomenologists; is he not eroding the boundaries between philosophy and empirical research? He is aware of the potential for controversy, but argues that the philosopher has no “right” to ignore what science says about the world and experience, which are after all what the philosopher too is investigating;129 “[p]sychology and philosophy are nourished by the same phenomena.”130 Anthropologists and psychologists are able to extend our perforce limited experience of other others through their observations. This does not, however, erode the boundaries between science and philosophy: the human scientist “philosophises every time he is required to not only record but comprehend the facts,”131 and here a philosopher clearly has a right to intervene: he “is not disqualified to reinterpret facts he has not observed himself, if these facts say something more and different than what the scientist has seen in them.”132 For Merleau-Ponty, the facts about other others gathered by the human sciences do just this: they reveal—to the phenomenologist’s eye, focusing on their conduct and milieu—the essential structure of other others’ experience. I have also drawn attention to another, preconceptual, mode of understanding identified by Merleau-Ponty, again grounded in his celebrated reconceptualization of the human body. I explored, in ways that

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Merleau-Ponty did not, the possibilities for understanding other others via the sort of bodily reciprocity with which we, primarily and for the most part, understand others more or less like us. Such understanding, however limited and circumscribed, is surely something to which Merleau-Ponty, of all phenomenologists, would be open.

NOTES 1. By “the tradition” I mean both so-called “analytic” philosophy and the historical tradition common to analytic and “Continental” philosophy. My primary engagement in the present essay is with analytic philosophy, but the endnotes identify one or two points of reference toward the ways in which these issues have been discussed in the Continental literature. 2. See especially A. Avramides, Other Minds (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Her own approach to these problems of others, although firmly located in the analytic tradition, is not all that distant from Merleau-Ponty’s; there is nothing in her book, however, that compares to Merleau-Ponty’s reconceptualization of the body, and her reconceptualization of behavior is only gestured at. 3. “What is interesting is not an expedient to solve the ‘problem of the other’—it is a transformation of the problem.” M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Claude Lefort (ed.), A. Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 269. 4. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop on “Encountering the Other: Philosophical Perspectives on Recognition,” University College Dublin (March 2012). A more recent version was presented at the University of East Anglia (January 2015). I am grateful to the participants in both discussions for their comments on those occasions, and to Meirav Almog and the anonymous reviewers of this volume for their very helpful comments. 5. Hence traditional treatments of the epistemological problems of others are haunted by the “argument from analogy,” however they respond to this argument. The conceptual problem begins from worries about the univocality of “mental concepts” between one (adult, civilized, sane) human being and another, where these worries are grounded in the first/third-person asymmetry of such concepts; worries about the univocality of mental concepts between such humans and “other others” have different grounds.

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6. M. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, O. Davis (trans.). (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 54. 7. C.f. T. Morton’s phrase “strange strangers” (The Ecological Thought [Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2012]); thanks to Rupert Read for drawing this to my attention. Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty (evidently speaking “as a man”) suggests that this list of other others should also include women: see Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–52, T. Welsh (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 373. For the purposes of the present essay I ignore this: there is more than enough complexity already, and Merleau-Ponty says little about women. I will however say this much: to justify a male phenomenologist treating women as “other others” would require showing not just that men and women have different experience but (to anticipate) that their experience differs structurally. (Note that structural differences in experience may be brought about through cultural/social/political means, as it evidently is in the “primitive”/“civilized” distinction.) Some feminists’ arguments may be seen in just such a light; e.g., I.M. Young (“Throwing Like a Girl,” in I.M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,1980], 141–159) may be seen as identifying structural differences between masculine and feminine motility, and L. Irigaray (e.g., in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, C. Burke and G.C. Gill [trans.] [London: Athlone Press, 1993]) as identifying structural differences between male and female sexuality. 8. This line of argument is widely discussed in feminism. See S. Kruks, “Merleau-Ponty and the problem of difference in feminism,” in D. Olkowski and G. Weiss, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 25–48, for both a discussion of and a broadly Merleau-Pontyan response to this issue, though not exactly the response I see him as making. 9. These issues arise sharply in the more specific case of the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal.” See, for example, K.J. Morris, Starting with Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), Ch. 3, section vi. 10. It might be thought that this objection applies only to phenomenology, but a parallel question can be raised about analytic philosophy, in part because of the methodological centrality of a particular notion of rationality. This point cannot be pursued here, but see Winch’s exploration of one version of one of “the problems of other others,” namely, the problem of

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understanding “primitive” societies. P. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964), 307–324. 11. See L. Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 5–10 for a useful presentation of the phenomenological method as a method of reasoning that he, following Heidegger, calls “saying to show,” as well as a rebuttal of the supposition that phenomenology is essentially subjectivistic. 12. An apparent complication is the fact that the category of children (at least) seems to have vague boundaries. A partial reply would point out that the psychologists of childhood with whom Merleau-Ponty engages—e.g., Freud, Piaget, Lacan—identity relatively clearly demarcated stages in childhood, which may differ structurally from one another. 13. Rather as, within some strands of analytic philosophy, concepts such as the concept of pain are understood as having their primary application to human beings. One of Merleau-Ponty’s characteristic strategies is to use other others, particularly pathological ones, to help to highlight structures of ‘normal’ experience. 14. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 123/110. There are two widely used translations in English: C. Smith (Routledge: London and New York, 2002), and D. Landes (London: Routledge, 2011). All page references to Phenomenology of Perception cite both, in chronological order. 15. C.f. “Illness is auto-regulation, an establishment of an equilibrium to a level other than the normal one. But it is not a totally incomprehensible phenomenon.” Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 41; C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 376. 16. Or is at least treated as if it contains these presuppositions. These kinds of presuppositions are encapsulated in what Merleau-Ponty labels “the prejudice of objective thought.” Thus “[t]he existence of other people is a difficulty and an outrage for objective thought,” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 406/364. 17. Avramides, following T. Nagel (“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83(4) 1974: 435–450), speaks of our “lived position,” and thinks that the central issue is “how the lived position is possible” (Other Minds, 210). We need not accept this quasi-Kantian way of putting the issue to see affinities with phenomenology: her answers to this question may be seen as explorations of “the ante-predicative [pre-conceptual] life of consciousness” which is “the core of primary signification around which [conceptual]

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acts of naming and of expression take shape,” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xvii/xxix. 18. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 115/103. 19. For example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 163/142. 20. C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 113/101 (Landes here uses “plan” rather than “purpose”). 21. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 376/337. I here take the phrase “bodily teleology” out of context, but the point remains. 22. C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 164/143. 23. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 165/144. 24. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, A.L. Fisher (trans.). (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 96. 25. A more general characterization of bodily purpose is, again, given by the notion of “equilibrium”: the body is “a totality of lived-through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 177/155). 26. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 163/142, C.f. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 97. 27. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 66/57. D. Davidson posits a kind of “triangulation” of mutually irreducible kinds of knowledge, viz. of our own mind, of other minds, and of the world: “Three varieties of knowledge,” in A.P. Griffiths, ed., A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). There are both parallels with and differences from Merleau-Ponty’s “system ‘Self-others-things’”; in particular, Davidson does not allow internal relations between anything other than propositions (see D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, esp. the first essay), whereas Merleau-Ponty’s term “system” precisely indicates internal relations between the three relata. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s “system” is in the first instance ontological, not epistemological. 28. C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 446/403. 29. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 435-6/393. 30. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 347/311. 31. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 347/311. 32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 411/369. 33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 411/369. 34. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 222. 35. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 414/371. 36. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 421/379.

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37. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 419/376. 38. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 347/311. 39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 439/396; C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,345–346/311. 40. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 444/401. 41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 444/401. 42. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 4. 43. Avramides, following Armstrong, marks a parallel distinction by distinguishing between “physical behavior” and “behavior proper.” The latter, however, is mainly characterized simply as bearing a “relationship to mind” (Armstrong quoted in Avramides, Other Minds, 269), which is rather vague and, moreover, inherits the difficulties around the word “mind.” Merleau-Ponty refers to “the reciprocal character of the notions of body and behavior” (Merleau-Ponty, Nature, ed. D. Séglard, trans. R. Vallier [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003], 147), and even claims that “the body is a system of motor powers that crisscross in order to produce a behavior” (Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 148); this suggests that one cannot fully conceptualize “behavior proper” without reconceptualizing the body. 44. Merleau-Ponty, Nature 140. 45. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 162. 46. I here draw on an analysis by T. Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 25. 47. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 342. 48. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 344. Other terms for the same concept: “situation” or Umwelt, often translated as “environment” or “environing world.” In Child Psychology and Pedagogy, Merleau-Ponty tends to use the Gestalt psychologists’ term “behavioral setting”; “milieu” is his preferred term in Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, and I will tend to use it. 49. C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 343. 50. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 344. 51. C.f. for example, Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 44. 52. Or “intrinsic,” Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 161; “intelligible,” Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 345. 53. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 161. See G. Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, C.R. Fawcett (trans.). (Boston and London: Reidel: Dordrecht, 1978). 54. For example, Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 103 and 161.

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55. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 97. 56. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 99. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 410/368; C.f. “if I have no outside, then others have no inside” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 434/391). 58. P.F. Strawson, in Individuals (London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1959), to be sure, went some distance toward correcting this by making his famous distinction between P-predicates (which apply only to persons) and M-predicates (which apply to material objects). But, first, even the literature which shows an awareness of Strawson continues to use the expression “mental concept” and, second, “person,” at least if this is understood to imply “human,” begs some questions. 59. C.f. for example, Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 343. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215/190. 61. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 216/191-2. 62. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 163/142. Such bodily reciprocity is sometimes termed "intercorporeality” or “intercorporeity.” 63. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 410/368. Merleau-Ponty held the Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne for three years. 64. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 410/368. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 410/368. 66. C.f. e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 123/110. This is, as we will see, crucial for his remarks on understanding other others. 67. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 413/371. 68. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 410/368. 69. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 119; c.f. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 260. 70. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 414/371. 71. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215/192; C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 410/368, Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 247–248 (where Merleau-Ponty offers this as an interpretation of Husserl’s notion of ‘coupling’). 72. C.f. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 116. 73. Merleau-Ponty rejects the empiricist supposition that “this lemon is a bulging oval shape with two ends plus this yellow colour plus this fresh feel plus this acidic taste” (Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 45). Some may feel that this makes the difference between I and the other “too slight” (C.f. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe

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[Oxford: Basil Blackwell], 1968, §339); we might see Levinas’s critique of Merleau-Ponty on intersubjectivity in this light, although that critique merits fuller treatment than can be given here. See, e.g., E. Levinas, “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty,” in M.B. Smith (trans.), Outside the Subject (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 96–103. It seems to me that the notion that I and the other are radically separate is precisely part of the prejudice which Merleau-Ponty is seeking to combat. 74. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 54. 75. The term “milieu” seems to be used both narrowly (to refer to a particular situation in which an organism is embedded on a particular occasion) and much more widely (to refer to an organism’s whole manner of being-in-the-world). 76. C.f. “my attitude toward him is an attitude toward a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (Wittgenstein, Investigations, 178). R. Read (“On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Psychology 14:4 [2001]: 449–475) has argued that certain “other others,” namely (some) schizophrenics, cannot be viewed as exhibiting conduct/possessing a milieu, thus that nothing would count as understanding the world (milieu) of such a schizophrenic. I do not wish to rule this out as a possibility; it reinforces the point that ‘madmen’ form too diverse a group to allow generalizations. Many “madmen” (including some schizophrenics), however, can in this sense be understood. 77. See §I. To be sure, we can’t talk about the social and cultural layers of the interworld when it comes to other others, and the perceptual layer of the interworld may need some tweaking to accommodate differences in perceptual apparatuses. But the groundwork for a response has already been laid. 78. For example, he rejects “the belief that animals have the same behavioral setting that we do,” Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 346. 79. Avramides suggests that “behavior proper is the behavior of a subject that is comprehensible to other subjects” (Other Minds, 270), with which Merleau-Ponty will agree, as long as “comprehensible” is not taken to imply “already comprehended” but as “such that there is something to comprehend.” 80. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, J.M. Edie (ed.), various translators (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 23. 81. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 239. 82. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 377; C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 389. 83. For example, Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 389.

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84. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 131. 85. There are important changes in his view of animals between The Structure of Behavior and Nature; for present purposes there is no need to delineate these. 86. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 90/80. 87. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 125. 88. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 90/80. 89. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 104. 90. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 104. 91. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 105. 92. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 116–117. 93. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 122 94. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 104 95. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 407. 96. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 142. 97. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 142–143. 98. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 153. 99. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 149. 100. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 193, C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 413. 101. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 412–413. 102. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 172; c.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 372–373/333. 103. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 136. 104. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 448. 105. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 41; 132. 106. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 127/113. 107. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 120/107. 108. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 156/136. This interpretation is controversial; see Morris, Starting with Merleau-Ponty, 59–63, for a more detailed discussion of these concepts and for references to further reading. 109. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 117. 110. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 214/225. As this passage occurs just before he introduces the notion of bodily reciprocity, we can take it that ‘understanding’ here means ‘bodily understanding.’ He adds: “. . . or in milieus too unlike the ones in which I move,” which threatens the reversion of the distinction between others more or less like us and other others to a mere matter of degree.

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111. Merleau-Ponty says relatively little about touch until his later (unfinished) work The Visible and the Invisible, hence his Phenomenology of Perception treatment of bodily reciprocity remains entirely visual. This is perhaps all the more surprising in view of J.-P. Sartre’s use of the term “reciprocity” in his famous discussion of the caress (Being and Nothingness, H.E. Barnes (trans.). [London: Routledge], 1986, 389ff.). Irigaray offers a reading of part of The Visible and the Invisible that explores the interplay between the visible and the tangible (Sexual Difference, 151–184), and that argues for the primacy of the tangible; of particular interest for our purposes, she draws attention to the tactile bodily reciprocity between pregnant woman and fetus. 112. It is noteworthy that many “primitive” peoples retain the sort of bodily understanding of animals that among “civilized” people is largely confined to those who happen to share their lives with animals (e.g., pet owners). They also retain a sort of bodily understanding of “madmen,” who tend, in “civilized” societies, to be largely deliberately obscured from public view. 113. In this connection, we might take note of Csordas’s (explicitly Merleau-Ponty-influenced) reinterpretation of the phenomenon of couvade (wherein “an expectant father experiences bodily sensations attuned to those of his pregnant mate”) as “a phenomenon of embodied intersubjectivity that is performatively elaborated in certain societies, while it is either neglected or feared as abnormal in others.” He thus exhibits couvade as a mode of bodily reciprocity. He claims, however, to have come to this understanding through “observations made while my wife and I were expecting the birth of our twins” (T. Csordas, Body/ Meaning/Healing [Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], 252). A fully Merleau-Pontyan account might have him come to this understanding via bodily reciprocity with expectant fathers in couvade societies. 114. In this connection, we should take note of Merleau-Ponty’s approving reference to Minkowski, who says (according to him) “I will “coexist” with my mentally ill patient and observe the repercussions of his conduct on me. I will locate the moment when I have the feeling of slipping into the subject’s morbid universe. I will listen to the patient, write what he says and how I feel . . .” (Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 376–377). 115. “It is,” as Mead puts it, “the body that learns the way of the body,” quoted in Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 237. Hence “[t]he very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behavior” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 406/364; C.f. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 451/408).

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116. See especially P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). It may seem strange to describe animals as possessing a habitus in anything like Bourdieu’s sense; yet they too clearly learn a set of skills from those others around them. 117. Bourdieu describes habitus as “history turned into nature” (Outline, 78), further characterized as “second nature.” Perhaps the young infant’s repertoire of bodily understanding comes under “first nature.” This must, however, be understood so as to be consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “[i]t is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior that one chooses to call 'natural,' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world” (PP 220/195). 118. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 44. 119. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 136. Merleau-Ponty credits this phrase to Lévi-Strauss. The alleged “polymorphic perversity” in childhood discovered by Freud is simply one instance of this general rule (Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 377). 120. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 377. 121. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 378. 122. Yet further layers of bodily reciprocity may need to await biological development. “If a child happens to witness sexual intercourse . . . the sexual scene will merely be an untoward and disturbing spectacle, without meaning unless the child has reached the stage of sexual maturity at which the behavior becomes possible for it,” PP 214–215/190. 123. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 219/195. 124. C.f. Wittgenstein, Investigations, §30. 125. See Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 136. 126. “I can meet in things the actions of another and find in them a meaning, because they are themes of possible activity for my own body” (Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 117). 127. This is widely culturally recognized: we describe human beings as “positively purring with pleasure,” “wagging their tails with delight,” and “pricking up their ears with interest.” 128. Elizabeth Grice, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2006, in reference to a Channel 4 documentary “Feral Children” broadcast that same night: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3653890/Cry-of-an-enfant-sauvage.html 129. Merleau-Ponty, Signs 102; cf. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 91. 130. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 24.

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131. Merleau-Ponty, Signs 101. 132. Merleau-Ponty, Signs 101.

REFERENCES Avramides, A. Other Minds. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Canguilhem, G. On the Normal and the Pathological. Translated by C.R. Fawcett. Boston and London: Reidel/Dordrecht, 1978. (Original French publication 1966.) Csordas, T. Body/Meaning/Healing. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Davidson, D. “Three Varieties of Knowledge.” In A.P. Griffiths (ed.), A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Davidson, D. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Hass, L. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Irigaray, L. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and G.C. Gill. London: Athlone Press, 1993. Kruks, S. “Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism.” In D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of MerleauPonty, pp. 25–48. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Levinas, E. “On intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty.” In Outside the Subject. Translated by M.B. Smith, pp. 96–103. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behavior. Translated by A.L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. (Original French publication 1942.) Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. (Original French publication 1945.) There are two widely used translations in English: C. Smith, London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Classics), 2002, and D.A. Landes, London: Routledge, 2011. Merleau-Ponty, M. Signs. Translated by R.C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. (Original French publication 1960.)

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Merleau-Ponty, M. The Primacy of Perception. Edited by J.M. Edie; various translators. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort; translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. (Unfinished work. Original French publication 1964.) Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. Translated by O. Davis. London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Classics), 2008. (Original French publication 1948.) Merleau-Ponty, M. Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–52. Translated by T. Welsh. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. (Original French publication 2001.) Merleau-Ponty, M. Nature. Edited by D. Séglard; translated by R. Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. (Original French publication 1994.) Morton, T. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Morris, K.J. Starting with Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Nagel, T. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83(4) 1974: 435–450. Read, R. “On Approaching Schizophrenia through Wittgenstein.” Philosophical Psychology 14(4) 2001: 449–475. Sartre, J.-P. Being and Nothingness. Translated by H.E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 1986. (Original French publication 1943.) Strawson, P.F. Individuals. London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1959. Toadvine, T. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Winch, P. “Understanding a Primitive Society.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 307–324. Wittgenstein, L. Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough. In C.G.. Luckhardt (ed.), Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968. Young, I.M. “Throwing Like a Girl.” In I.M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980: 141–159.

PART III

EMBODIMENT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND INTERCORPOREALITY

CHAPTER 10

Lived Body, Intersubjectivity, and Intercorporeality THE BODY IN PHENOMENOLOGY Dermot Moran

How would it be possible to think the reality of the mind, of the I-subject, without a lived body?1 —E. Husserl

My body is the common fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension.”2 —M. Merleau-Ponty

No phenomenology of life, of body and the flesh, can be constituted without basing itself on a phenomenology of touch.3 —J-L. Chrétien

THE BREAKTHROUGH DISCOVERY OF EMBODIMENT IN PHENOMENOLOGY Twentieth-century and, indeed, contemporary analytical philosophy of mind, has for the most part (with some notable exceptions) ignored the body, even in discussions of perception and agency that are clearly body-dependent. The phenomenological movement, on the other hand—especially through the groundbreaking research of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—was the first philosophical tendency of the twentieth century to really insist on the centrality of embodiment and to make 269

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it thematic in their analyses of consciousness and subjectivity.4 Moreover, their original discoveries continue to be mined for insights that drive current research into embodiment. To begin, phenomenology approaches the phenomenon of embodiment in a holistic way. From the outset the language is distinctive. Husserl speaks variously of “embodiment” (Leiblichkeit and Verleiblichung),5 but also of “incorporation” (Verkörperung)6 and “humanization” (Vermenschlichung),7 whereas Merleau-Ponty speaks primarily of “incarnation” (incarnation).8 Incarnation expresses the historically situated, localized, temporal, finite, and intentionally constituted nature of human existence. Embodiment locates us in a specific place and time but has its own inner trajectory in regard to its development, its aging, its gaining or losing characteristics, and so on. To express both the fragility and the “thickness” (l’épaisseur) of incarnation, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty invoke the notion of “flesh” (la chair), understood as the living membrane of our bodies that is our constant point of contact and exchange with the surrounding sensible and intersubjective world. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the flesh palpating in the world. Phenomenology offers, moreover, still relevant important descriptions not just of the lived body in its relation to its immediate here-and-now environment, but also of the embodied subject’s complex relations to other embodied subjects, and indeed the phenomenon of “intertwining” (Husserl: Verflechtung; Merleau-Ponty: l’interlacs,),9 of embodied subjects in mutual understanding, in intercorporeal relations (including sexual relations) that Merleau-Ponty names “intercorporeality” (l’intercorporéité), and in the constitution of the entire social, historical, and cultural world. This phenomenological emphasis on embodiment, intercorporeality, and intersubjectivity provides an important corrective to approaches taken by analytic philosophy of mind and, indeed, through the work of Hubert L. Dreyfus,10 Shaun Gallagher,11 Dan Zahavi, and others, has influenced analytic philosophers of mind such as Alva Noë.12 But the full riches of the phenomenological heritage regarding embodiment remains to be explored, and in this chapter I shall seek to articulate some aspects of corporeality and intercorporeality deserving of further analysis.

EMBODIED BEING-IN-THE-WORLD AS AN OVERCOMING OF CARTESIAN DUALISM For the phenomenological tradition generally, embodiment is the basis of our entire “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein, être au monde), of our perceptual,

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conceptual, voluntary, and motor capacities, but also of our understanding of other living beings13 in what the phenomenological tradition termed “empathy” (Einfühlung, Hineinversetzen),14 as well as of our “co-existence” (Mit-Dasein) with other beings (Mitsein) sharing a common world (Mitwelt), to use Heidegger’s terminology.15 Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and the phenomenological tradition more generally, reject the classical, dualistic descriptions of human beings in terms of soul and body and narrowly naturalistic scientific efforts to inscribe the body entirely within the discourse of natural science, in favor of recognizing the primacy of intersubjectivity and sociality. Humans always exist in an already constituted social world, the world of what Heidegger calls “das Man,” the anyone, the “they,” the anonymous public, for which the anonymous collective publicity of language is a good example. There are, strictly speaking, as Husserl says, no “first” humans—humans are always encountered as members of a sociality, a community. For phenomenology, the unity and plasticity of the body-subject are paramount. As, Merleau-Ponty writes in his groundbreaking Phenomenology of Perception (1945): “The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence.”16 Merleau-Ponty goes on to speak of the body as a “subject-object” (sujet-objet),17 who is projected into a world and, as it were, palpates and interacts with it. It is not always appreciated that Merleau-Ponty’s own hugely influential discussion was largely inspired by, and is essentially a creative reprise of, his reading of Husserl’s Ideas II, the Freiburg philosopher’s phenomenological meditations on the body. Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on Husserl’s analysis of the reflexive “touching-touched” relation.18 Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty wish to overcome naturalistic prejudices inherent in the tradition of empirical psychology, especially the then current behaviorism19 and the “sensualistic atomism” inherited from British Empiricism (and still present to a degree in Brentano’s analyses). Naturalism is now almost a dogma in the sciences and in philosophy of science. It is therefore important to understand how the experience of the lived body in the humanized lifeworld cannot be captured in naturalistic third-person description.20 In fact, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology initially took up this interrogation of the “lived body” (Leib) partly in response to discussions prevalent in the nascent empirical psychology of the late nineteenth century, and in part remains bound to that language, although its account of the lived body departs radically from the psychophysical accounts. Husserl’s sources in this respect include the “psychophysics” of Gustav Fechner (which itself developed from the psychological

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laws of Weber concerning the degree of perceptibility of different sensory stimuli),21 the “physiological psychology” of Wilhelm Wundt,22 and, in particular, the “descriptive psychology” (as opposed to “genetic” or physiological psychology) of his mentor Franz Brentano. Brentano’s psychology was itself deeply informed by his interest in Aristotle’s De anima.23 Brentano and his school24 discussed in very fine detail (and indeed engaged in psychological experimentation) the nature and proper objects of the senses, especially the experiences of seeing, but also the particular nature of remembering and imagining, and other “psychic” activities (including the constitution of the sense of space and time) that all involved embodied subjects and contribute to the process of understanding and knowing. Brentano’s student Carl Stumpf, for instance, who taught the Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, investigated the apprehension of sounds and tones.25 Gradually descriptive psychology evolved into phenomenology, and first-person experience came to be explicated in its own right and in its own nonreductive language. Besides giving him the feel for close, nonreductive psychological description, Brentano’s main contribution to Husserl’s phenomenology was his rediscovery of the concept of intentionality as the mark of the mental in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874).26 Intentionality allowed Husserl to consider all human conscious behavior (perceptual, emotional, and cognitive) as meaning-establishing or “sense-giving” (sinngebend). All mental “acts,” including not just perceiving and judging but also hoping, fearing, or loving, are directed toward an object (which does not have to exist—I can long for the perfect lover without there being such a one), and this object-directedness informs the intending act and also determines the manner in which the object presents itself to the subject (the “mode of givenness,” Gegebenheitsweise). Even supposedly pure physical or “biological” drives, such as hunger and thirst, are configured meaningfully and in quite a defined manner, in human beings—we are craving a cup of coffee or an Indian curry. We are intentionally oriented toward objects that we have meaningfully configured (though not necessarily consciously). One may love someone, in part, because her generosity reminds one of one’s mother, and so on. Meaning is layered on meaning, and we live in the sense-constituted world that our embodiment has configured for us and predetermined in distinct ways. For phenomenology, then, the human existential insertion into the world is in the form of intentional comportment or enactment.27 Both Husserl and Heidegger use the term “Verhalten,” comportment, precisely because they are suspicious of the term “behavior.” Indeed, in the Crisis

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of European Sciences,28 Husserl denounces what he terms the “exaggerations of the behaviorists” (Behavoristen, the English word “behavior” is crossed out),29 meaning thereby the mechanistic stimulus-response understanding of behavior as opposed to true intentional comportment toward senseful objectivities and states of affairs. Furthermore, on Husserl’s account (and here, of course, he is followed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), this comportment always takes place against the backdrop of an ever-present, meaning-loaded “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt), a lifeworld whose “horizonality” outruns all possible intentions and which is also always experienced in a unified manner. Human beings are essentially meaning-weavers comporting themselves corporeally and intentionally in the context of a living, temporal world, always already invested with significance. The body is itself already a complex network of relationships and openings outward to the world. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, in his Phenomenology of Perception, speaks of the body as a “nexus of living meanings” (un noeud de significations vivantes)30 comparable to a work of art. As Heidegger says, in Being and Time, we see that the boat is used by someone or other for leisure, the field is plowed by some farmer, and so on. We are always already in a world where others have established meanings in advance. The park bench is not just encountered as a physical thing in space but as a place to rest during a walk. Husserl’s student David Katz (1884–1953)31 greatly advanced this notion of a perceptual world encountered as already meaningful through active embodied exploration in his studies of touch and color. Influenced by Katz, the psychologist James J. Gibson proposed the idea of the world as offering “affordances,” a concept that has gained wide currency in recent years.32 Katz was one of the pioneers of the psychology of touch and the role of hand movements in perception.33 For Gibson, environments have properties for action that are relative to the needs and actions of organisms. For instance, a seabird may see the surface of the ocean as something on which to rest; another bird may choose a letterbox as a nesting place. These properties are, for Gibson, neither objective nor subjective. They are relative to the concerns of the organism in question.34 The world unfolds its properties in collaboration with the living beings that dwell in it. Husserl’s research manuscripts in particular offer extremely detailed and intricate analyses of embodiment in relation to being-in-the-world. Taking up and correcting Kant’s discussions, Husserl in his Göttingen lectures of 1907, for instance, Ding und Raum (Thing and Space)35 was particularly interested in mapping the manner in which the lived body contributes to the

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constitution of the experiences of lived space and time (from which scientific conceptions of space and time are extracted by a process of formalization and emptying of meaning). He also discussed perception in detail, and especially touch in relation to sight, but his phenomenological studies included analyses of memory, fantasy, and time consciousness, and inspired a whole tradition of phenomenological exploration of the senses, the emotions, and the embodied constitution of space, time and the historical world of culture and tradition.36 Husserl’s most influential discussion was his analysis in Ideas II (a text that he and Edith Stein struggled to bring to published form) of the way a living body can experience itself in touch.37 Touch has a reflexive movement; if I touch one hand with the other hand, there is the sense of both touching and being touched. Each hand has its own touch sensations. As Husserl writes: If I speak of the physical thing, “left hand,” then I am abstracting from these sensations . . . If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, instead it becomes Body, it senses [es wird Leib, es empfindet]. “Touch”-sensations belong to every appearing objective spatial position on the touched hand, when it is touched precisely at those place. The hand that is touching . . . likewise has its touch sensations at the place on its corporeal surface where it touches (or is touched by the other).38 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty will take up this precise Husserlian remark, es wird Leib, es empfindet (“it becomes Body, it senses”) as a kind of slogan or shorthand for the nature of lived sensitive, self-reflexive embodiment.39 The body, as it were, comes to life, through its ability to sense, and indeed the self-reflexivity of touch is seen by Merleau-Ponty, invoking another of Husserl’s phrases, eine Art von Reflexion (“a kind of reflection”),40 as a better way of thinking about self-conscious thought than the formulations used by Descartes and the modern philosophical tradition. Merleau-Ponty writes in his celebratory essay on Husserl “The Philosopher and His Shadow”: There is a relation of my body to itself which makes it the vinculum of the self and things. When my right hand touches my left, I am aware of it as a “physical thing.” But at the same moment, if I wish, an extraordinary event takes place: here is my left hand as well starting to perceive my right, es wird Leib, es empfindet. The physical thing

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becomes animate. Or, more precisely, it remains what it was (the event does not enrich it), but an exploratory power comes to rest upon or dwell in it. Thus I touch myself touching: my body accomplishes “a sort of reflection.” In it, through it, there is not just the unidirectional relationship of the one who perceives to what he perceives. The relationship is reversed, the touched hand becomes the touching hand, and I am obliged to say that the sense of touch here is diffused into the body—that the body is a “perceiving thing,” a “subject-object.”41 Indeed, in this passage, Merleau-Ponty is invoking the concept of “subject-object” directly from Husserl’s Ideas III42 where he speaks of “das subjektive Objekt”: “Interwoven with the psychic subject as it is, it is the subjective Object to which all other objects are “vis-à-vis,” or surrounding Objects.”43 Interwoven with the psychic subject is the “subjective object” through which external objectivities are experienced. Husserl’s point is that bodily movement and action is essential to perception and to the constitution of various forms of “objectivities.” Correlatively, all perceivable things have a relationship to the lived body and its organs. Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on this supplementary text of Husserl’s, which was specifically written around 1912 to transition between the projected volumes, Ideas II and Ideas III, of the originally envisaged tripartite Ideas project. Husserl’s phenomenological explorations (especially combined with Merleau-Ponty’s creative underscorings and sympathetic elaborations) of embodiment continue to have an enduring influence, for example, on the research of the neurologist Oliver Sacks,44 the neuroscientist Francisco Varela, and the philosopher Evan Thompson.45 In general, however, the phenomenological analysis on embodiment (including the way the body is an obstacle, a limitation, a disruption, hiatus, or finitude) does not support the claim that all bodily activity (including gender) is socially constructed as a kind of “performance,” since this would be to reduce the complexity of embodiment to one of its features.46 Although the lived body is constituted, many of its experiences belong to the sphere of passivity. Furthermore, for Husserl, the lived body is a “remarkably incompletely constituted thing”47 and, for Merleau-Ponty, too, the constitution of the body is always ongoing and, in a sense, “unfinished”48 and ongoing. Interestingly—and this is confirmed in Beauvoir’s memoirs about Sartre— the body, in Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions, is more often than not experienced as an impediment to action and the fulfillment of desire.

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As Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness (1943), “[t]he body is necessary again as the obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world; that is, the obstacle which I am to myself.”49 Sartre speaks of the notion of surpassing. I need to overcome myself—shake off the feeling of lassitude, make the effort to walk faster, and so on. At these times, the body intrudes itself between me and my surrounding world. In normal functioning, I experience mastery or governance over my body, but in cases of illness the body stubbornly intrudes on my agency.

THE KEY PHENOMENOLOGICAL DISTINCTION: LEIB VERSUS KÖRPER Phenomenology begins from the distinction between the physical body (Körper)—the body as an object subject to the laws of nature (gravity, force), the body understood, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, as partes extra partes50—and the body as lived (Leib), as experienced from within, the experience of the embodied consciousness. Leib signifies the animate, living body, the living organism—the body that is experienced in a specifically subjective, first-person way but which is more than just what Husserl frequently calls “the psychic subject” (das seelische Subjekt). Husserl writes about Leib in his Cartesian Meditations (1931) as something uncovered in the reduction: Among the bodies belonging to this “Nature” and included in my peculiar ownness, I then find my animate organism [Leib] as uniquely singled out namely as the only one of them that is not just a body but precisely an animate organism: the sole Object within my abstract world-stratum to which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe fields of sensation (belonging to it, however, in different manners a field of tactual sensations, a field of warmth and coldness, and so forth), the only Object “in” which I “rule and govern” immediately, governing particularly in each of its “organs.” Touching kinesthetically, I perceive “with” my hands; seeing kinesthetically, I perceive also “with” my eyes; and so forth; moreover I can perceive thus at any time. Meanwhile the kinesthesias pertaining to the organs flow in the mode “I am doing,” and are subject to my “I can”; furthermore, by calling these kinesthesias into play, I can push, thrust, and so forth, and can thereby “act” somatically immediately, and then mediately.51

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I experience my body as sensory fields, as capacities of movement I can exercise, as a range of abilities I control. Note that Husserl puts many of the key words describing the living body in quotation marks. I am not literally “in” my Leib, when I perceive using my hands, I am not literally perceiving “with” my hands, and so on. Husserl is clearly signaling the need for a new vocabulary for our somatic experience (something the late Merleau-Ponty will try to provide with his conception of “chiasm”). The objective body (Körper), on the other hand, is the body as disclosed in the objectifying medical gaze, the body as corpus (from which comes the word “corpse”), the body without vitality, the body as object of physiological and biological understanding. It is, as Sartre puts it, the “body-for-others” (le corps pour autrui).52 It is not that we have, as it were, two bodies, a physical and a psychical one, but rather our experience fluctuates between one pole and another of the one composite and multilayered plastic entity. In good health, my body is almost invisible, transparent; it simply enables my movement and activities, but in illness or tiredness, it is a weight that I drag around. As Husserl writes in Ideas III: In the apprehension of the lived body accordingly there is determined the distinction between passive movements, of the purely mechanical movements of the lived body as a physical thing and the free movements of the lived body, which are characterized in the mode of “I perform a movement of my hand,” “I lift my foot,” and so on.53 This key distinction between Leib and Körper is found not only in Husserl, but also in Max Scheler, 54 Hellmuth Plessner,55 and Edith Stein,56 among others. It is further taken up and modified in French phenomenology by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as the distinction between “body” (le corps) and “own body” (le corps propre) or “flesh” (la chair). Indeed the phenomenologists prefer to say: “I am my body” (je suis mon corps), rather than that “I have a body.” Sartre, for instance, has another similar formulation: “the body-as-existed” (le corps-existé), and he offers a new locution: “I exist my body” (j’existe mon corps).57 For Sartre, this lived body is best described as “flesh” (la chair), a term taken up by Merleau-Ponty and the French tradition generally, including Michel Henry.58 This fleshly body is responsible, in Sartre, for “the pure contingency of presence.”59 Phenomenological analysis begins from my experiences as located in and mediated through my own body, what Merleau-Ponty calls “le corps propre,” that is, the body that is proper to oneself, that is properly

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oneself. As Merleau-Ponty writes in his Phenomenology of Perception: “One’s own body (Le corps propre) is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.”60 The lived body constitutes, intrudes into, and regulates our experience. For Husserl, there is a sensuous (“hyletic” in his terminology) substructure (hyletische Unterlage) that constitutes the lived body; it has a continuous passive flow of sensings and drives; it is localized and temporalized through its body. In his Thing and Space lectures, particularly, he recorded how bodily changes can modify our sensuous experiences, how our eye movements reveal the movements or stasis of the visible. Or, as he discusses in Ideas II, one can take a drug (santonin, a common powder to treat worms) that makes all visible objects seem to be tinted yellow.61 There is a complexity here: the world seems yellow, but one does not infer that the world is yellow—rather, the coloring is referred back to being caused by the drug. This is not an invocation of scientific causality (the objective causality underlying the process in “nature”) but experienced causality, a part of motivated experiencing or what Husserl calls “experiential motives.”62 There is a conscious experience of the total change of color as being a change not in the objective world but in the subject (presumably on the basis of an assumption of an underlying “normality”). One can touch something with a sore finger, and the very manner of one’s touch will be impeded and the object itself modified. Then again, there is, as in the phenomenon of the ingestion of santonin, a strange complexity in touch (as David Katz showed). Touch sometimes reveals even when its normal function is displaced. For instance, I can touch something with a gloved hand and still have the sensation of the smoothness of the surface such as I would have had without the glove. But if it is not the smoothness, but the sensation of touch that is sought, then the glove will be experienced as impeding it. In the case of touch, furthermore, there are different degrees of depth that can be experienced; I can press my hand on my flesh and trace the line of the bone in my hand.63 In this case, I am touching not the surface but what lies beneath the surface. Vision, on the other hand, cannot penetrate beneath surfaces. It is literally a superficial sense faculty. In Ideas II § 36, Husserl explores the lived-body as constituted as a “bearer of localized sensations.” “Localization” means, for Husserl, as for the psychological tradition of that time, both that the sensations are somehow marked out with regard to a certain place in the body (I feel my toes) and are recognized as belonging phenomenally to it.64 Ernst Mach, for instance, characterizes emotions as not

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well-localized sensations; and William James in his Principles of Psychology speaks of self-consciousness as largely localized in the head. Husserl terms these localized sensations “sensings” (Husserl’s neologism: Empfindnisse),65 since they are not directly sensed in our sensory awareness but can be brought to attention by a shift of apprehension. Furthermore, for Husserl, the body is a constituted unity66 but it is “a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing.”67 It is experienced as having “gaps” (Lücke), blind spots, areas not immediately accessible to vision or touch. The body has a certain plasticity that allows it to be further developed. I can write a telephone number on the back of my hand, using it as a convenient notepad. I can acquire tattoos or other forms of body modification. The body is a malleable entity, self-forming, self-protecting, always changing, not always for the better. I can develop muscles through running, swimming, or skiing, but they can waste away in disease or due to infirmities of old age. I am enclosed within a body that, however, is not a hard shell but has openings. The lived body has pre-delineated pathways along which it can develop or decline (I can gradually go deaf or blind and my experiences are modified accordingly). The body has its internal and external horizons. But, Husserl recognizes that even if I experience gradual blindness and no longer experience colors, for instance, I am not motivated to conclude that things in the objective world have lost their color. Rather I am more likely to think that things still have their colors and I can no longer see them, analogous to the situation of seeing colored things in the dark.68 This is because our embodiment constitutes a certain “normality” that prevails in our experience.69

BODILY MINENESS: THE UNIQUELY PERSONAL “POSSESSION” OF MY BODY Husserl and Merleau-Ponty emphasize the peculiar first-person manner in which we “own” or inhabit the body (le corps propre), something that gets passed over in third-person naturalistic scientific descriptions. My experience has a peculiar “mineness.” Mineness (Jemeinigkeit) is a crucial existentiale of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time,70 but, interestingly, he does not there associate “mineness” directly with the body. This seems a strange omission. One of his most original followers, however, the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, has sought to interpret this mineness as something that can be disrupted in conditions of “self-disturbance” (Ich-Störung), such

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as schizophrenia.71 This mineness should not be considered as modeled primarily on one’s sense of self-possession that one has of one’s own thoughts (as in current analytic formulations) but is a kind of egoic-dwelling that permeates one’s emotions, actions, and even the occupation of space (“personal space”). There are undoubtedly zones of my body that I appreciate more as “mine” than others. The phenomenological concept of one’s personal experience of owning one’s own body should not be confused mistakenly with a purely objectivist sense of ownership (as is often done in cases discussing one’s “right” to ownership of a body). One can, for instance, while still alive, donate a kidney, or bone marrow, or sell one’s body for the use of another in sex. But the concept of legal ownership of or right to control one’s body is not actually what is at issue in the phenomenological discussion. Rather, the phenomenologist is interested in how I consciously—and even pre-consciously—experience my body as mine, how I mark off the zones (mine/other) of my own incorporation, how my body establishes and mediates my “being-in-the-world” through my body schema, how I relate “in the personalistic attitude” (die personalistische Einstellung, as Husserl calls it in Ideas II § 49) to other living embodied subjectivities, and how together we constitute the embodied intercorporeal cultural world. In his phenomenological investigations, Husserl places great emphasis of the “I/not I” (ichlich/nicht-ichlich) character of my experience of my own body.72 Connected with the sense of “mineness” of my embodied experience is the complex issue of “body schema” or “body image” (le schéma corporel), originally discussed by the Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst—and pupil of Freud— Paul Schilder73 and taken up and adapted in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.74 The phenomenologist and cognitive scientist Shaun Gallagher has proposed to draw a distinction between “body image” and “body schema” (the terms were more or less interchangeable in the literature—especially in Colin Smith’s English translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; furthermore, Schilder, who wrote in both German and English, used the terms interchangeably). According to Gallagher’s distinction, “[a] body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body. In contrast, a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring.”75 On this account—which is stipulative—body image is, broadly speaking, conscious or pre-conscious, and saturated with intentionality, whereas body schema is primarily unconscious, and primarily constituted as a

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set of motor functions (among which Gallagher, however, includes habits and posture, which seem to involve intentionality).76 While there are definitely conscious and unconscious elements in one’s sense of one’s bodily map, hard distinctions are difficult to set down. Some muscle systems seem inaccessible to conscious control yet can be accessed consciously (e.g., some can waggle their ears; others cannot—it can be learned by some; for others, the muscles cannot be accessed or activated). It is possible that the digestive system can be affected by emotions, and so on. Acrobats can access and train their sense of balance in ways that perhaps others cannot. The whole area of one’s sense of “ownness” in relation to one’s body image or body schema needs much more detailed phenomenological investigation.77

THE TECHNOLOGICALLY ENHANCED BODY Just as the peculiar sense of the mineness of one’s body is a matter for serious philosophical and phenomenological analysis, so also is the question of the relationship between the body and other objects, especially tools that are external to the body and extend it in various ways, or technological insertions into the body.78 Phenomenologists have tended to focus on tool use, but more recently posthumanists have become fascinated with various technological enhancements of the body. The sense of “ownership” here is even more complex.79 Don Ihde has written, for instance, of the new plasticity of the body in relation to technological modifications and enhancements: “We are our bodies—but in that very basic notion one also discovers that our bodies have an amazing plasticity and polymorphism that is often brought out precisely in our relations with technologies. We are bodies in technologies.”80 The manner in which this incorporation takes place is still a matter of great interest not just to phenomenologists but also to those working at the forefront of medicine.81

THE INTERTWINING OF THE SENSES: MERLEAU-PONTY’S “CHIASM” Phenomenologists write not just about the experience of embodiment or “incarnation”; they are also interested in the peculiar fused unity of experience in the singular flow of a conscious life, and in particular in the intertwining

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of the senses whereby sight, touch, and bodily movement all combine to give the experience of a single undivided person in a single, shared world. In a manner typical of phenomenologists generally, Husserl understands intersubjectivity (Intersubjektivität) as constitutive for the phenomenological experience of objectivity, of the oneness of the world. The world is what it is because it is experienced as a world in which other subjects are encountered against a common backdrop. Moreover, each person co-experiences other persons as experiencing the same world. He writes in one of his meditations on intersubjectivity: “In any case, embodiment is the condition of possibility of a passivity in the subject, through which an intersubjective world is passively constituted and can be actively controlled.”82 Phenomenologists insist that this phenomenon of the experience of one, common world, a world that transcends forever each of our perspectives and yet it given through our embodied perspectival apprehension, has never been properly appreciated, never mind properly analyzed, by the very objective sciences that assume the existence of the world. Merleau-Ponty expresses this paradox of being embedded in a world constituted by our senses and at the same time transcending them: We understand then why we see the things themselves, in their places, where they are, according to their being which is indeed more than their being-perceived—and why at the same time we are separated from them by all the thickness [l’épaisseur] of the look and of the body; it is that this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it. It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication.83 The world can only be disclosed in its transcendent thickness because our flesh itself has the same kind of “thickness” (épaisseur).84 The lived body unifies its experience into a single complex, even though there are separate streams (visual, tactile, kinetic, and so on). Merleau-Ponty discussed the intertwining of the senses in his famous chapter “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible.85 As Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, vision discloses an organized world: “I do not look at a chaos, but at things.”86 He writes:

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We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out [taillé] in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement [impiétement, enjambement], not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility [un néant de visibilité], is not without visual existence. Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world.87 This “intertwining” of sight and touch was already discussed by Husserl as early as his Thing and Space lectures and later in what became known as Ideas II. Husserl’s term is Verflechtung, and he further emphasizes that although the senses intertwine, there is a priority to touch as that sense that gives embodied spatiality its constituted character. For example, Husserl writes in Ideas II (in a way that will greatly inspire Merleau-Ponty): Everything that we see is touchable and, as such, points to an immediate relation to the body, though it does not do so in virtue of its visibility. A subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing body . . . The body as such can be constituted originally only in tactuality.88 This intertwining of vision of touch, and indeed of all the senses, is a major phenomenon but much overlooked except in the rather narrow psychological literature on synaesthesia.89 For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, synaesthesia is not just the rare phenomenon of people who can taste colors or see sounds, but is an essential feature of embodied being in the world since all the senses intercommunicate to disclose the nature of things. This radical reflexivity characterizes all the senses; indeed, it prefigures and founds the reflexivity of thought. In his late essay “Eye and Mind,”90 Merleau-Ponty— citing the testimony of painters—evocatively expresses this intertwining as it is found in sight, such that just as the seer sees the visible so too the visible in a sense sees the seer.91 In Visible and Invisible, he writes: This . . . as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things (je me sens regardé par les choses), my activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside (dans le dehors), as the others see it, the

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contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another (se réciproquent) and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.92 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty elevates the double sensation to be the central characteristic of what he calls “flesh.” The flesh is characterized by what he calls the “chiasm” (le chiasme, le chiasma),93 or “interlacing” (l’interlacs)94, “overlapping” (l’impiétement, EM 162; 13), “blending” (recroisement)95, “coiling over” (l’enroulement), “inversion” (renversement), and even the “metamorphosis” (metamorphosis) that he says “defines” flesh.96 For Merleau-Ponty, this “duplicity” (duplicité) and “reflexivity of the sensible” (réflexivité du sensible)97 has ontological significance and expresses the ambiguous character of human embodied being-in-the-world (l’être-au-monde). He even speaks of the “flesh of the world” (la chair du monde)98 and the “flesh of things” (chair des choses)99 to indicate the reciprocity and communality between our lived bodies and the vibrant sensuous world in which we inhere. The very flesh of the external world, embodied in sensuousness, mirrors the embodied subject’s own flesh: “it is already the flesh of things that speaks to us of our own flesh.”100 There is not just a remarkable correlation between the world’s availability to perception and human perceptual systems, but the human subject it itself part of this world and is also the perceived. The body is the site of the confluence of the channels of the senses, but the senses in turn are tuned and transformed by the body’s corporeal movements, gestures, and the overall integrity of the body. The senses overrun their proper boundaries and overlap. We live in a multisensorial world that has precisely the properties to which our senses are finely tuned.

THE LIVED BODY AS EXPERIENCED IN FANTASY, DREAM, AND ALTERED STATES Traditionally, the phenomenology of embodiment, especially in the writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, has concentrated primarily on sensuous perception, motility, and bodily agency. The body has an undeniable fleshly presence, a location, gravity, an embeddedness in the perceptual domain. It is our “zero-point of orientation.” It literally grounds us to the earth. But

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the lived body also enters in very peculiar ways into imagination, fantasy, erotic reverie, dreams, memories, and all kinds of what Husserl generally calls “calling to mind” (Vergegenwärtigung), the general name that he gives for all appresentations that are not direct perceptions of something bodily given “in the flesh” (leibhaftig da). It is a basic presupposition of Husserlian phenomenology (accepted also by Merleau-Ponty) that the body is inextricably (but not necessarily noticeably) present in all perceiving, but it is also present in dreams, reveries, fantasies, daydreaming, flights of imagination, and various kinds of temporal displacement. The body does not just unify the sensory modalities but also lives in a continuous stream of consciousness, interwoven with fantasy, memory, desire, sleep, dreaming, and other forms of “absence.”101 The manner in which the body occupies this imaginary space is the reason why Sartre, for instance, speaks of the body as a “psychic” object. He writes: “The body is the psychic object par excellence—the only psychic object.”102 In vivid dreaming, even of the most passive kind, the scene unrolls in front of an observer, and the dreamer can sense being moved or moving, running or falling, looking up and down, approaching and receding, and so on. There is the added complication of the relations between the sleeping body (prone, passive) and the active dream-body. Sometimes, for example, dreamers report experiencing both moving their bodies and looking down on their sleeping body from above. All this involves perspective taking that implies a corporeal position and motility, without even adverting to the fact that dreams involve a visual and auditory experiential dimension. The body, then, extends from the sensuous and perceptual realm into the imaginary realm in very complex ways that are only beginning to be explored in the cognitive sciences.103 There is a kind of “doubling” of the body in fantasy and dream situations. The sleeping body can continue to be experienced passively, whereas the dream-body can be active. Similarly, it is reported that persons with limb paralysis can still dream of running and moving such that they have some way of activating these sensuous “hyletic” feelings relating to bodily movement. Imagining (visualizing, mentally imaging, simulating, rehearsing) bodily movements in advance of carrying them out is a standard part of athletic training since it is considered to affect positively the unconscious processes controlling the movements, reduce anxiety, and improve the time taken to effect the action.104 There has to be an active subjective exploration of the body through mindful focusing, concentrating, and imagining of bodily actions. Here imagining and agency are intertwined.

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INTERSUBJECTIVITY, INTERCORPOREALITY, BEING-WITH-ONE-ANOTHER (MITEINANDERSEIN) So far, this account has concentrated on the phenomenological description of the first-personally experienced lived body, what Husserl sometimes refers to as the body “in solipsistic experience” (Ideas II § 42). This first-person phenomenology needs to be supplemented with the much less well-described phenomena of intercorporeality, the manner in which lived bodies interact with each other, in the overall context of intersubjectivity and “being-with-one-another” (Miteinandersein). Gail Weiss has written (following Merleau-Ponty): “To describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies.”105 From the point of view of genesis, all humans experience the original intercorporeality of living and experiencing within the womb of the mother. The mother’s pre-natal infant relation is well documented in recent psychological literature on fetal psychology and neonatology, and recent investigations by Vasudevi Reddy,106 Colwyn Trevarthen,107 and others confirm what earlier phenomenologists postulated regarding the richness of early mother–child experiences. It is well known that the mother can experience the child, move, kick, sleep, or be awake and lively within her. There is already here one body apprehending another lived body—at literally a deep personal, even visceral level. Furthermore, there is also conscious communication between mother and fetus in the womb—the mother may speak or sing to a baby of massaging the baby in the womb.108 Similarly, it is well documented that the fetus can respond and recognize the mother’s voice. These are merely examples of the intercorporeal nexus out of which individuality comes to be. Early Freudian theory claimed that even after birth, mother and child lived in a kind of undifferentiated communion, but this does not seem to accord with the phenomenological evidence.109 For many years, psychology disputed the claim that neonates apprehend their mother’s as subjects, denied that neonates experienced pain, and so on. This put supposedly scientific psychology in conflict with human experience. Mothers have a distinct sense of the individual personality of the newborn and her individual patterns of behavior, sleep, feeding, fascination with objects, and so on. It is therefore interesting to see empirical psychology becoming informed by phenomenological insights.110

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Human embodied life is, then, essentially intercorporeal from the womb onward. In a way, the question as to which comes first—monadic egoic consciousness or intersubjectivity—is a false question. The child’s ego and sense of self can grow only in communication with other selves, which themselves had an interconnected communality of selves to draw on. It is not the case that egos or consciousnesses are in communion in their own right— as Husserl’s misleading talk of the “community of monads” might suggest. Rather, intersubjectivity is founded on intercorporeality. Intercorporeality is a phenomenon even less studied than intersubjectivity. There is, already in everyday experience, a vast repertoire of intercorporeal experiences. Sartre, in particular, has focused on the experience of the caress, the loving touch. He writes in Being and Nothingness that the touch is that which brings alive the other’s lived body for me and for the other person: “The caress reveals the Other’s flesh as flesh to myself and to the Other . . . it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s flesh to be born.”111 There is a vast field of intercorporeal activities, from shaking hands (discussed by Merleau-Ponty), kissing, massaging, to having sex, dancing, wrestling, and so on. In each, the other’s body comes to appear and is experienced in a particular way by my body. One learns to anticipate the other, to respond to the other’s timing, distance, speed, and so on. In everyday life, although this is heavily inflected by local cultural traditions, a handshake can disclose something about another person, even if it is only their warmth or level of energy (a firm or limp handshake), as well as being an act of decisiveness, symbolizing a personal greeting, the expression of agreement, the closing of a deal, and so on. To give just one example, the refusal of some men in some cultures, for religious/cultural reasons, to shake hands with women in business situations discloses a field of contestation that was hitherto invisible. It illustrates how meaning-loaded shaking of hands can be and how different kinds of hand-to-hand contact can constitute the intersubjective relationship in crucially different ways (the unwelcome touch is another example). The first encounter with the other is through intercorporeal contact in the womb. Subsequent discussions of the “experience of the other” (Fremderfahrung) have concentrated on perception and the engagement with others through what Sartre calls the “look” (le regard). As described by Husserl, the understanding of others involves a living body to living body relation, a Leib-Leib relation. For Husserl, “[t]he body, the living body of the other, is the first intersubjective thing.”112 In other words, it is through

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experiencing the other’s experiences that one comes to recognize that there is an intersubjective world, a world on which we have different experiences. Within the overall problematic of intersubjectivity, the phenomenon of intercorporeality is even more complex, since the manner in which embodied human subjects cooperate and intertwine with one another is enormously varied, and there is also the hugely underexplored area of human relations with animals (riding horses, petting cats and dogs, not to mention more controversial relations such as zoophilia).113 Intercorporeality takes many forms, from the double body of pregnancy, through the caress (which Sartre discusses), the kiss, the embrace, the handshake, sexual intercourse, to corporal punishment, sado-masochistic relations, team sports, martial arts, wrestling, dancing with a partner, even singing together (harmony of voices), joint chanting, and other forms of intercorporeal blending. Medicine has many forms of intercorporeal practice, including various forms of massage. There are intercorporeal emotions—shyness, shame, sexual attraction, for instance—that relate one person’s body to another. One very complex kind of intercorporeality is the case of conjoined twins—some rare few of whom live entire lives as conjoined, such as the Minnesota twins Abby and Brittany Hensel, now in their twenties, who have separate upper bodies and stomachs but share their digestive tract and reproductive organs.114 This case of conjoined twins challenges the classic assumptions of bodily integrity and unity and even puts in question the usual medical procedure of separating conjoined twins.115 In discussing intercorporeality, Merleau-Ponty himself introduces another new term, “interanimality,”116 which has a wider scope and includes, presumably, interspecies animal–animal relations (both within and between species). The late Merleau-Ponty considered the human insertion into the living, organic world to be a kind of intertwining and intercorporeality. It is not possible within a short chapter to offer detailed explications of the extraordinarily rich heritage of phenomenological discussions of embodiment. I have tried simply to show how the first-personal experience of one’s lived body in fact opens out, as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty recognized, into much wider reflections that include the relations between embodied subjects, other animals, and in the very constituted of the spatiotemporal, natural, cultural, and historical world, which is why both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty link the interconnected Ineinander of human embodied subjectivities with the very experience of “worldhood”117 itself. I hope to have at least woken

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an interest in what the phenomenologists have to say on these matters and what vast regions remain to be explored.

NOTES 1. “Wie wäre geistige Realität, Ichsubjekt denkbar ohne Leib?” Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana XIII. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil. 1905–1920, Iso Kern (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 229. Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. From the Lectures, Winter Semester 1910–1911, Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (trans.) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 157. 2. “Mon corps est la texture commune de tous les objects et il est, au moins à l’égard du monde perçu, l’instrument général de ma ‘compréhension,’” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 272. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith(trans.) (London: Routledge, 1962), 235. Hereafter followed by the text of the English translation and then the French original. 3. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’Appel et la réponse (Paris: Éditions Minuit, 1992). Jean-Louis Chrétien The Call and the Response, Anne Davenport (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 86. 4. Joona Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014) and Taylor Carman, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophical Topics 27(2) 1999: 205–226. 5. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana XV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–1935, Iso Kern (ed.) (The Hague: Martins Nijhoff, 1973), 289. 6. Husserl, Husserliana XIII, 139. 7. E. Husserl, Husserliana XV, 705. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, Claude Lefort (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 31. Hereafter cited with English pagination preceding French pagination. 9. See Dermot Moran, “The Phenomenology of Embodiment: Intertwining (Verflechtung) and Reflexivity,” in The Phenomenology of Embodied

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Subjectivity, Dermot Moran and Rasmus Thybo Jensen (eds.) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 285–303. 10. See, inter alia, Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment,” The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, Issue 4 (Spring) (1996) and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, “The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science,” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1999), 103–120. 11. See Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Shaun Gallagher “Body Schema and Intentionality,” in The Body and the Self, José Bermúdez, et al. (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 226-29. 12. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 13. See Thomas M. Seebohm, “The Givenness of the Other Living Body and Animal Understanding,” in Hermeneutics: Method and Methodology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 98–105. 14. See Dermot Moran, “The Problem of Empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and Stein,” in Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond in Honor of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy, Thomas A. Kelly and Phillip W. Rosemann (eds.) (Leuven/Paris/ Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2004), 269–312. See also Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7) 2001: 151–167. 15. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 17th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). In Being and Time, in particular §§25–27 and § 74, and also dispersed through his phenomenological writings (1919 to 1929) more generally, Heidegger uses a number of terms to express the a priori structures of human social interrelatedness and the manner in which they share a common world with others. The most common term used by Heidegger is Mitsein (“being-with”) but he also speaks of “co-existence” (Mitdasein) and, more generally, of “being-with-one-another” (Miteinandersein) in an overall “shared world” (Mitwelt). For Heidegger, Dasein is essentially being-in-the world, but there are other structures “equiprimordial” (SZ 114) with “being in the world,” namely: “being with” (Mitsein), “existence-with” or “co-existence” (Mitdasein) and “being-with-one-another” (Miteinandersein). Being-with is a fundamental existentiale of Dasein, so

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Dasein is always in the condition of being-with even if there are actually no others in Dasein’s environment. 16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 88–89; 105. 17. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 95; 111. 18. See Dermot Moran, “Phenomenologies of Vision and Touch: Between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” in Carnal Hermeneutics R. Kearney and B. Treanor, (eds.), (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 214–234. See also Filip Mattens, “Perception, Body, and the Sense of Touch: Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind,” Husserl Studies 25 (2009), 97–120. 19. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 20. See Dermot Moran, “Defending the Transcendental Attitude: Husserl’s Concept of the Person and the Challenges of Naturalism,” Phenomenology and Mind (2014), 37–55. 21. Gustav T. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1860). 22. Wilhelm Wundt, Principles of Physiological Psychology, Edward B. Titchener (trans.) (London: Allen, 1904). 23. See, for instance, Franz Brentano, Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom Nous Poietikos (Mainz: Verlag von Franz Kirchheim, 1867). Franz Brentano, The Psychology of Aristotle: In Particular His Doctrine of Active Intellect, Rolf George (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 24. See Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi and Roberto Poli (eds.), The School of Franz Brentano (Kluwer: Dordrecht 1996); and The School of Brentano and Husserlian Phenomenology, special issue, Studia Phaenomenologica vol. III, nos. 1–2 (2003). 25. Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1883). 26. Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1973). Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Antos C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell, and L.L. McAlister (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1995). 27. See Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Critique of the Husserl/Searle Account of Intentionality,” Social Research 60(1) (Spring 1993): 17–38; and Dermot Moran, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality,” Inquiry 43.1 (March) (2000), 39–65.

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28. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana VI. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Walter Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff, 1954). Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, David Carr (trans.) (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 29. See Husserl, Crisis, 247 n. 4; Husserliana VI 541. 30. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 151, 177 31. David Katz studied at Göttingen with the experimental psychologist and psychophysicist and researcher on color perception Georg Elias Müller (1850–1934), who himself had been a student of Wilhelm Wundt. Katz also attended Husserl’s lectures and seminars and Husserl was one of his doctoral thesis examiners in 1907. His Die Erscheinungweisen der Farben appeared in 1911 and later was expanded into Die Farbenwelt (1930), trans. as The World of Colour, trans. Robert Brodie MacLeod and Charles Warren Fox (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935). He published his study of touch Der Aufbau der Tastwelt in 1925, in Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, Ergänzungsband, vol. 11, 1–270 (reprinted: Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969); trans. Lester Krueger as The World of Touch (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 1989). Katz continued to work in experimental and developmental psychology at Göttingen until 1919 when he moved to the university of Rostok. He grew close to the Gestalt psychologists but was not a member of their group. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933, first for England, and then, in 1937, he took a position at the University of Stockholm, where he remained until his death in 1953. He had a major influence on the ecological theories of perception of James J. Gibson; see the obituary of R. Arnheim, “David Katz, 1884–1953,” American Journal of Psychology, 66(4) (October 1953): 638–642; and Lester Krueger, “Tactual Perception in Historical Perspective: David Katz’s World of Touch,” in Tactual Perception: A Sourcebook, William Schiff, Emerson Foulke (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1–54. 32. See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press Classic Edition, 2015), see especially 119–135. See also his The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). Influenced by William James and by Gestalt psychology, Gibson criticized then current psychology for focusing on the perceiving subject who was fixed in position and looking at things like a camera rather than discussing more normal perception that includes “ambulatory” vision. In his Preface to The

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Ecological Approach, on page 6, Gibson acknowledges the contribution of Katz and the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka. 33. The pioneering contributions by David Katz and James J. Gibson to the science of voluntary manual exploration are acknowledged in Lynette A. Jones and Susan J. Lederman, Human Hand Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); see, especially, p. 6. 34. For a discussion of affordances and solicitations, see Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, “Agency and Embodied Cognition,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111(1) 2011: 79–95 and Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, “Habit and Attention,” in The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, Dermot Moran and Rasmus Thybo Jensen (eds.), 3–19 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). 35. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana XVI. Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, Ulrich Claesges (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) Edmund Husserl, Husserl Collected Works VII. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, Richard Rojcewicz (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). 36. See H. Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 37. A new edition of Ideas II that clearly distinguishes Husserl’s texts and Edith Stein’s editorial interventions will appear as Urschriften der Ideen II und Ideen III, Dirk Fonfara (ed.) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017). 38. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana IV. Ideen Zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweitas Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchngen sur Kontiution, Marly Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 145. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 152–153. 39. Merleau-Ponty cites Husserl’s phrase ‘es wird Leib, es empfindet’ in his essay “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 201–228 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 210, and 222–223. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), 159–181 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. 40. Husserl, Ideas II, 7, Huserliana IV, 5. 41. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 166, 210. 42. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana V. Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, Marly Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952). Edmund Husserl, Husserl Collected

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Works I. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences, Ted E. Klein and W.E. Pohl (trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980). Hereafter “Ideas III” followed by page number of English translation and Husserliana volume and page number. The English translation of Signs page 166 n.16 incorrectly attributes this citation to Ideas II rather than Ideas III. 43. Husserl, Ideas III, 111; Husserliana V, 124. 44. See Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1985). 45. See, inter alia, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (eds.), The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) and Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 46. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Volume I: The History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969) has been influential in this regard concerning the social construction of bodily functions over European history. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 47. “. . . ein merkwürdig unvollkommen konstituiertes Ding,” Husserl, Ideas II, 167; Husserliana IV, 159. The English translation inaccurately reads “a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing” rather than the more faithful “a remarkably incompletely constituted thing.” See Elizabeth A. Behnke, “The ‘Remarkably Incompletely Constituted’ Body in Light of a Methodological Understanding of Constitution: An Experiment in Phenomenological Practice (I),” in Phenomenology 2010: Selected Essays from North America Part I, Michael Barber and Thomas Nenon (eds.), 19–70 (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010). 48. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 209–210; 259. 49. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 391. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1995), 326. Hereafter English pagination preceding French pagination. 50. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 73; 87. 51. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana I. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, 2nd ed., S. Strasser (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1963), 128. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Dorion Cairns (trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 97.

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52. See Dermot Moran, “Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the ‘Double Sensation,’” Philosophy Today 54(35) (Supplement) 2010: 135–141, and Dermot Moran, “Revisiting Sartre’s Ontology of Embodiment in Being and Nothingness,” in Ontological Landscapes: Recent Thought on Conceptual Interfaces between Science and Philosophy, Vesselin Petrov (ed.), 263–293 (Frankfurt: De Gruyter, 2011). 53. Husserl, Ideas III; Husserliana V, 121. 54. Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus, Maria Scheler (ed.) (Bern and München: Francke Verlag, 1954). Max Scheler Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt Toward a Foundation of An Ethical Personalism, Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Fink (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), esp. p. 399. 55. See Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), and Robert Gugutzer, Leib, Körper und Identität. Eine phänomenologisch-soziologische Untersuchung zur personalen Identität (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002). For a discussion of Plessner’s influence on Jürgen Habermas, see Thomas Hoppe (ed.), Körperlichkeit—Identität: Begegnung in Leiblichkeit (Freiburg/Vien: Herder, 2008). 56. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, Walter Stein (trans.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964). 57. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351; 428. 58. See Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000) Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, Karl Hefty (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). See also the recent critical discussion by Claude Romano, “Après la chair,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy/Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, 21(2) 2013: 1–29. 59. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 343; 410. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 203; 235. 61. Husserl, Ideas II, 68–69; Husserliana IV, 63–64. 62. Husserl, Ideas II, 68; Husserliana IV, 63. 63. David Katz, who studied with Husserl in Göttingen, published early psychological explorations of touch that were heavily influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology; see David Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, Ergänzungsband, 11 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969). David Katz, The World of Touch,

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Lester Kruger (trans.) (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 1989). Merleau-Ponty cites David Katz in his Phenomenology of Perception. 64. Husserl, Ideas II, 153; Husserliana IV, 145. 65. See Husserl, Ideas II, 153; Husserliana, IV 146; Husserliana V, 8–10. 66. Husserl, Ideas II, § 40. 67. Husserl, Ideas II, § 41(b). 68. Husserl, Ideas II, § 18. 69. See Joona Taipale, “Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primordial Constitution,” Husserl Studies, 28(1) 2012: 49–60. 70. See Heidegger Being and Time. For a discussion of Heidegger on the body, see Kevin Aho, Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). See also C. Ciocan, “The Question of the Living Body in Heidegger’s Analytic of Dasein,” Research in Phenomenology, 38(1) 2008: 72–89; and Akoijam Thoibisana, “Heidegger on the Notion of Dasein as Habited Body,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 8(2) 2008: 1–5. Dasein is embodied and this embodiment in part constitutes its finitude, its being-toward-death, and its “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) orientation to entities encountered in its world. 71. Ludwig Binswanger, Schizophrenie (Pfullingen, Germany: Neske, 1957). See also Aaron L. Mishara, Paul H. Lysaker, and Michael A. Schwartz, “Self-disturbances in Schizophrenia: History, Phenomenology, and Relevant Findings from Research on Metacognition,” Schizophrenia Bulletin, 40(3) 2014: 479–482. 72. See Husserl Husserliana XII & XV along with Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana XIV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass Zweiter Teil 1921–1928, Iso Kern (ed.) (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). 73. Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950). 74. See Shaun Gallagher and Johnathan Cole, “Body Image and Body Schema in a Deafferented Subject,” Journal of Mind and Behavior, 16(4) 1995: 369–389 and Shaun Gallagher, “Body Image and Body Schema: A Conceptual Clarification,” The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 7(4) 1986: 541–554. See Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind. See also Frédérique de Vignemont, “Body Schema and Body Image—Pros and Cons,” Neuropsychologia, 48 (2010): 669–680. 75. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 24.

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76. On the phenomenology of habit, see Dermot Moran, “‘The Ego as Substrate of Habitualities’: Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Habitual Self,” Phenomenology and Mind, 6 (July 2014): 27–47; and Dermot Moran, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42(1) (January 2011): 53–77. 77. See Frédérique de Vignemont, “Embodiment, Ownership and Disownership,” Consciousness and Cognition (2010): 1–12. 78. See Helena de Preester and Manos Tsakiris, “Body-Extension Versus Body-Incorporation: Is There a Need for a Body-Model?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(3) 2000: 307–319. 79. See Helena de Preester, “Technology and the Body: the (Im)Possibilities of Re-embodiment,” Foundations of Science, 16(2) 2011: 119–137. See also Don Ihde, “Postphenomenological Re-Embodiment,” Foundations of Science, 17(4) 2012: 373–377. 80. Don Ihde, Bodies in Technologies (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 137. 81. See Margrit Shildrick, “Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body,” Body and Society, 2(1) 1996: 1–15. 82. Husserl: “Jedenfalls, Leiblichkeit ist Bedingung der Möglichkeit einer Passivität im Subjekte, durch die sich eine intersubjektive Welt passiv konstituieren und sich aktiv beherrschen lassen kann” (St. Margen 1921 Leib-Ding-Einfühlung) in Husserl, Husserliana XIV, 73. 83. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 135; 176. 84. For a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “thickness” of the flesh, see Dermot Moran, ‘“There is no Brute World, only an Elaborated World’: Merleau-Ponty on the Intersubjective Constitution of the World,” South African Journal of Philosophy, 32(4) (December 2013): 355–371. 85. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130–155; 170–201. 86. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 133; 173. 87. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 134; 175. 88. Husserl, Ideas II, § 37, 158; Husserliana IV, 150. 89. V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbard, “The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(8) 2003: 49–57; and Ophelia Deroy, “Synesthesia: An Experience of the Third Kind,” in Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience and the Nature of Experience Richard Brown, (ed.), 395–407 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014); and Berit Brogaard, “Varieties of Synesthetic Experience,” in Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience and the Nature of Experience, Richard

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Brown (ed.), 409–412 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). Synaesthesia is usually associated with sight and sound, but Merleau-Ponty believes all the senses display synaesthesia. 90. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics Carleton Dallery (trans.), James M. Edie (ed.), 159–190 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Hereafter followed by pagination of English translation and then French edition. 91. In “Eye and Mind” Merleau-Ponty illustrates this claim with a quotation from the French painter André Marchand (who in turn is citing Paul Klee)—“sometimes rather than feeling that I look at the forest, I feel I am being looked at by the forest”; see “Eye and Mind,” 167; 23. Merleau-Ponty is here drawing on Marchand’s interview with Georges Charbonnier in Charbonnier’s Le Monologue du peintre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959) that had only recently appeared. 92. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139; 181. 93. Merleau-Ponty uses two terms: “le chiasme” (Visible and the Invisible, 130; 171) and “le chiasma” (Visible and the Invisible 214; 264). Both derive from the Greek χιασμός (“criss-crossing”). “Chiasm” has a double meaning. It can refer to the rhetorical figure of speech (in English termed “chiasmus”) in which elements are repeated in a reversed pattern, e.g., Cicero’s “one should eat to live and not live to eat,” and also to an anatomical feature whereby the nerves in the eye cross over to the opposite side of the brain. Merleau-Ponty never invokes the rhetorical figure as such, and it is often assumed he is employing the term in its anatomical sense; see the editors’ Introduction to “The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/ Postmodernism Debate,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (eds.), 1–20 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), esp. 17–18 n.2. 94. See also David Brubaker, “Merleau-Ponty’s Three Intertwinings,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 34 (2000): 89–101, and Leonard Lawlor, “Verflechtung: The Triple Significance of Merleau-Ponty’s Course Notes on Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry,’” in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Len Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (eds.), ix–xxxvii (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 95. See Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 163; 16. 96. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 169; 25.

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97. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 168; 24. See also Beata Stawarska, “Mutual Gaze and Social Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5 (2006): 17–30. 98. “. . . toute chair, même celle du monde, rayonne hors d’elle-même,” Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 186; 55. 99. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 133; 173. 100. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 193; 243. 101. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, Daniel Russell (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). 102. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 347; 414. 103. See Antti Revonsuo, “The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23 (2000): 793–1121 and F. Snyder, “The Phenomenology of Dreaming,” in The Psychodynamic Implications of the Physiological Studies on Dreams, Leo Madow and Laurence H. Snow (eds.), 124–151 (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1970). 104. Aidan P. Moran, Sport and Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2012). 105. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999), 5. 106. Vasudevi Reddy, How Infants Know Minds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 107. See, for instance, the special issue on “The Intersubjective Newborn,” in the journal Infant and Child Development, 20(1) (Jan./Feb. 2011), especially the article by Colwyn Trevarthen, “What Is It Like To Be a Person Who Knows Nothing? Defining the Active Intersubjective Mind of a Newborn Human Being,” 119–135; and Emese Nagy, “The Newborn Infant: A Missing Stage in Developmental Psychology,” 3–19. See also Colwyn Trevarthen and Kenneth J. Aitken, “Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(1) (Jan. 2001): 3–48. 108. See Colwyn Trevarthen and Vasudevi Reddy, “Consciousness in Infants,” in A Companion to Consciousness M. Velman and S. Schneider, (eds.), 41–57 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); and Colwyn Trevarthen, “First Things First: Infants Make Good Use of the Sympathetic Rhythm of Imitation, without Reason or Language,” Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 31(1) 2006: 91–113. 109. See Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1992) and E. Zakin, “Psychoanalytic Feminism,”

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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), accessed at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ feminism-psychoanalysis 110. See Ronald S. Valle and Steen Halling (eds.), Existential Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology: Exploring the Breadth of Human Experience (New York: Plenum, 1989) and Amedeo Giorgi (ed.), Phenomenology and Psychological Research (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985). See also Linda Finlay, “The Body’s Disclosure in Phenomenological Research,” Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3 (2006): 19–30. 111. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 390; 459–460. 112. Husserl, Husserliana XIV, 110. 113. See Rebecca Cassidy, “Zoosex and Other Relationships with Animals,” in Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters, Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan (eds.), 91–112 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009). 114. See Margrit Shildrick, “This Body Which is Not One: Reflections on Conjoined Twins,” in Body Modification, Mike Featherstone (ed.), 77–93 (London: Sage, 2000) and the BBC TV series “Abby and Brittany: Joined for Life.” 115. See Gail Weiss, “Intertwined Identities,” in The Body Within: Art, Medicine and Visualization, Renée van de Vall and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds.), 173–185 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Weiss discusses the problematic distinction between conjoined and parasitic twins. For a more general critique (in part inspired by Merleau-Ponty, as well as Nietzsche) of the assumptions behind corrective normalizing surgery, see Ellen K. Feder, Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Bio-Medicine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 116. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 172, 224. 117. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 172, 224.

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Husserl, Edmund. Gesammelt Werke. Husserliana VI. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitun in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954. Husserl, Edmund. Gesammelt Werke. Husserliana XIII. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass, Erster Teil 1905–1920. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Gesammelt Werke. Husserliana XIV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Text aus dem Nachless Zweiter Teil 1921–1928. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Gesammelt Werke. Husserliana XV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass Dritter Teil 1929–1935. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Gesammelt Werke. Husserliana XVI. Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907. Edited by Ulrich Claesges. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Husserl Collected Works I. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences. Translated by T.E. Klein and W.E. Pohl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980. Husserl, Edmund. Husserl Collected Works VII. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Translated by R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. Husserl, Edmund. Urschriften der Ideen II und Ideen III. Edited by Dirk Fonfara. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. Ihde, Don. Bodies in Technologies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Ihde, Don. “Postphenomenological Re-Embodiment.” Foundations of Science 17(4) 2012: 373–377. Jones, Lynette A., and Susan J. Lederman. Human Hand Function. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Katz, David. Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane Ergänzungsband 11. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellshaft, 1969.

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Katz, David. The World of Colour. Translated by R.B. MacLeod and C.W. Fox. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Katz, David. The World of Touch. Translated by L. Krueger. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 1989. Krueger, Lester. “Tactual Perception in Historical Perspective: David Katz’s World of Touch.” In William Schiff and Emerson Foulke (eds.), Tactual Perception: A Sourcebook, pp. 1–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Lawlor, Leonard. “Verflechtung: The Triple Significance of Merleau-Ponty’s Course Notes on Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry.’” In Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (eds.), Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, pp. ix–xxxvii. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Mattens, Filip. “Perception, Body, and the Sense of Touch: Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind.” Husserl Studies 25 (2009): 97–120 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” Translated by C. Dallery. In James M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, pp. 159–90. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. L’Œil et l’espirt. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Translated by R.C. McCeleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. La Structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Translated by A. L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l’invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lings. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mishara, Aaron L., Paul H Lysaker, and Michael A. Schwartz. “Self-disturbances in Schizophrenia: History, Phenomenology, and Relevant Findings from Research on Metacognition.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 40(3) 2014: 479–82.

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Moran, Aidan P. Sport and Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2012. Moran, Dermot. “Defending the Transcendental Attitude: Husserl’s Concept of Person and the Challenges of Naturalism.” Phenomenology and Mind (2014): 37–55. Moran, Dermot. “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42(1) (January 2011): 53–77. Moran, Dermot. “‘The Ego as Substrate of Habitualities’: Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Habitual Self.” Phenomenology and Mind 6 (July 2014): 27–47. Moran, Dermot. “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality.” Inquiry 43(1) (March 2000): 39–65. Moran, Dermot “Phenomenologies of Vision and Touch: Between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (eds.), 214–34. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Moran, Dermot. “The Phenomenology of Embodiment: Intertwining (Verflechtung) and Reflexivity.” In Thybo Jensen (eds.), The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, Dermot Moran and Rasmus, pp. 285–303. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Moran, Dermot. “The Problem of Empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and Stein.” In Thomas A. Kelly and Phillip W. Rosemann (eds.), Amor Amiciitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond in Honor of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy, pp. 269–312. Leuven, Paris, and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2004. Moran, Dermot. “Revisiting Sartre’s Ontology of Embodiment in Being and Nothingness.” In Vesselin Petroy (ed.), Ontological Landscapes: Recent Thought on Conceptual Interfaces Between Science and Philosophy, pp. 263–293. Frankfurt: De Gruyter, 2011. Moran, Dermot. “Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the ‘Double Sensation.’ ” Philosophy Today 54(35) (Supplement) 2010: 135–141. Moran, Dermot. “’There is no Brute World, only an Elaborated World’: Merleau-Ponty on the Intersubjective Constitution of the World.” South African Journal of Philosophy 32(4) (December 2013): 355–371. Nagy, Emese. “The Newborn Infant: A Missing Stage in Developmental Psychology.” Infant and Child Development, 20.1 (Jan./Feb. 2011): 3–19. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

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Plessner, Helmuth. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975. Preester, Helena de. “Technology and the Body: The (Im)Possibilities of Re-embodiment.” Foundations of Science 16(2) 2011: 119–137. Preester, Helena de, and Manos Tsakiris. “Body-Extension Versus BodyIncorporation: Is There a Need for a Body-Model?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8(3) 2000: 307–319. Ramachandran, V.S., and E.M. Hubbard. “The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(8) 2003: 49–57. Reddy, Vasudevi. How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Revonsuo, Antti. “The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000): 793–1121. Romano, Claude. “Après la chair.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy/ Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française 21(2) 2013: 1–29. Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine. “Agency and Embodied Cognition.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111(1) 2011: 79–95. Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine. “Habit and Attention” In Dermot Moran and Rasmus Thybo Jensen (eds.), The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, pp. 3–19. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Summit Books, 1985. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by H.E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 1995. Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward a Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Translated by M.S. Frings and R.L. Fink. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Scheler, Max. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die material Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eins Ethischen Personalismus. Edited by Maria Scheler. Bern and Müchen: Francke Verlag, 1954. Schilder, Paul. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. New York: International Universities Press, 1950.

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Seebohm, Thomas M. “The Givenness of the Other Living Body and Animal Understanding.” In Hermeneutics: Method and Methodology, pp. 98–105. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. Shildrick, Margrit. “This Body Which is Not One: Reflections on Conjoined Twins.” In Mike Featherstone (ed.), Body Modification, pp. 77–93. London: Sage, 2000. Shildrick, Margrit. “Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body.” Body and Society 2(1) 1996: 1–15. Snyder, F. “The Phenomenology of Dreaming.” In Leo Madow and Laurence H. Snow (eds.), The Psychodynamic Implications of Physiological Studies on Dreams, pp. 124–151. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1970. Spiegelberg, Herbert. Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Stawarska, Beata. “Mutual Gaze and Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5 (2006): 17–30. Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by W. Stein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. Stumpf, Carl. Tonpsychologie, 2 vols. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1883. Taipale, Joona. Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Taipale, Joona. “Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primordial Constitution.” Husserl Studies 28(1) 2012: 49–60. Thoibisana, Akoijam. “Heidegger on the Notion of Dasein as Habited Body.” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 8(2) 2008: 1–5. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Trevarthen, Colwyn. “First Things First: Infants Make Good Use of the Sympathetic Rhythm of Imitation, without Reason or Language.” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 31(1) 2006: 91–113. Trevarthen, Colwyn. “What Is It Like To Be a Person Who Knows Nothing? Defining the Active Intersubjective Mind of a Newborn Human Being.” Infant and Child Development 20(1) (Jan./Feb. 2011): 119–135. Trevarthen, Colwyn, and Kenneth J. Aitken. “Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(1) (Jan. 2001): 3–48. Trevarthen, Colwyn, and Vasudevi Reddy. “Consciousness in Infants.” In Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (eds.), A Companion to Consciousness, pp. 41–57. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

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Valle, Ronald S., and Steen Halling (eds.). Existential Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology: Exploring the Breadth of Human Experience. New York: Plenum, 1989. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (eds.). The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Vignemont, Frédérique de. “Body Schema and Body Image—Pros and Cons.” Neropsychologia 48 (2010): 669–680. Vignemont, Fédérique de. “Embodiment, Ownership and Disownership.” Consciousness and Cognition (2010): 1–12. Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, 1999. Weiss, Gail. “Intertwined Identities.” In Renée van de Vall and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds.), The Body Within: Art, Medicine and Visualization, pp. 173–185. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Wundt, Wilhelm. Principles of Psychology. Translated by E.B. Titchener. London: Allen, 1904. Zahavi, Dan. “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7) 2001: 151–167. Zakin, E. “Psychoanalytic Feminism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed Oct. 29, 2016, at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/feminism-psycho analysis/

CHAPTER 11

Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy Luna Dolezal

The images of baby Gammy and his surrogate mother that saturated the media for several weeks of mid-2014 made salient the multitude of philosophical, moral, and ethical ambiguities inherent to commercial gestational surrogacy that are compounded when the practice crosses national, racial, and economic boundaries. In this highly controversial case of transnational surrogacy gone awry, an Australian couple left behind their Down’s Syndrome baby with his surrogate mother in Thailand, taking his twin sister back to Australia. In the wake of the baby Gammy scandal, the Thai government banned commercial surrogacy, and there has been an international outcry by human rights groups that argue that transnational surrogacy preys on poor and vulnerable women in developing countries. In the Republic of Ireland, later in the same year, the Irish Supreme Court ruled that in cases of gestational surrogacy the genetic mother cannot be named as the mother on the expected child’s birth certificate. In a landmark and controversial ruling, the court declared that regardless of genetic ties, “the woman who gives birth is the mother of the child.”1 This case involved altruistic surrogacy in which a surrogate carried twins to term for her sister who was unable to be pregnant due to a disability. In Japan, Mitsutoki Shigeta, the son of a Japanese billionaire, fathered sixteen babies in just over twelve months, from June 2013, using surrogates in Thailand. In his mid-twenties, Shigeta has been investigated for human trafficking and child exploitation. Cleared of all charges, this young man claims that he used serial surrogacy simply because he wants a big family.2 What these 311

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diverse cases make salient is the quagmire of philosophical, moral, legal, and ethical questions that permeate the practices of surrogacy, whether commercial or altruistic, gestational or traditional, questions concerning exploitation, alienation, “baby selling,” eugenics, “proper” parenting, and the legal, social, and existential status of motherhood and paternity. Commercial surrogacy, also referred to as contract motherhood, is the practice whereby a woman agrees to undergo fertilization and subsequently gestate a fetus, ultimately relinquishing the resulting child to the intended parent or parents. In its traditional form, the surrogate mother is the genetic parent, and sperm comes from a donor or the intended father. In gestational surrogacy, embryos created through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) are implanted into the womb of the surrogate mother, and she has no genetic ties to the fetus she is gestating. Gametes may come from what are referred to as the “commissioning parents,” creating a genetic link between the child and its intended parents, or may simply be purchased by the commissioning parents, meaning that it is possible for there to be no genetic link between the child and its intended parents. Gestational surrogacy has become an alternative to adoption since the advent of IVF. It is often a last resort for individuals or couples who wish to have a child but may be physically unable to carry a fetus to term themselves. While some intended parents seek out domestic surrogacy (where it is legal), increasingly international cross-border arrangements, frequently with surrogates in low-resource or developing countries, are pursued in order to circumvent legal restrictions and for reasons of reduced cost. For instance, while commissioning a gestational surrogate in California might cost upward of $250,000, a similar arrangement with a surrogate in India could incur costs of around $20,000. As a result, in very recent times, a global industry of commercial surrogacy has exploded, where Western parents from high-resource countries are contracting surrogates from low-resource countries to carry pregnancies to term.3 These arrangements are mediated through commercial surrogacy agencies and fertility clinics, and the women who act as surrogates are frequently impoverished and uneducated, with little other opportunity for lucrative employment. In India, which has quickly become a global leader in commercial surrogacy since it was legalized in 2002, some fertility clinics run surrogacy hostels where surrogates are kept cloistered in residential facilities under constant surveillance during their pregnancies, with their food, medicine, and daily activities regulated and monitored by medical staff.4 At present, reproductive medical tourism is a multibillion

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dollar global industry, with commercial surrogacy playing an important role in the global medical market. Many bioethicists, practitioners, policymakers, and feminist theorists have profound ambivalences and anxieties regarding the practices of commercial surrogacy. Despite being seen as inherently exploitative along gender, class, racial, and economic lines by many, the practices of transnational commercial surrogacy have proliferated within the neoliberal market rationality that governs the global economic order. My interest in this chapter is to contribute to the debates regarding the ethical and gendered parameters of commercial surrogacy. However, my approach is not to look at the (many) intersections of dubious political legacies that have fed into the practices of sex-specific reproductive “labor,” such as racial slavery, gender segregation, and global inequalities, among others.5 Instead, my approach focuses on the status of surrogate motherhood in the first instance, employing phenomenological insights regarding the experience and ontological status of pregnancy, gestation, and the maternal-fetal relation in order to provide more context for feminist and bioethical debates regarding the ethical parameters of gestational commercial surrogacy. In short, my focus in this chapter is twofold. First, I aim to articulate the significance of the primary intercorporeality that is constituted in pregnancy through the maternal-fetal relation that is developed through gestation. This relation is appropriated, but simultaneously rendered absent from the discourse of surrogacy, through the employment of metaphors such as “labor,” “the gift,” and “hospitality.” Second, through articulating the significance of gestational intercorporeality, my additional aim is to interrogate the status of pregnancy in the context of the gestating surrogate mother. In part, this is because the logic of the permissibility of commercial gestational surrogacy rests primarily on a particular conception of surrogate mothers as “womb donors” who are merely “carriers” or containers for the “real” parents.6 This logic predominates because there is a surprising lack of reflection on pregnancy, as a uniquely gendered life-generating and kinship–generating experience, in the literature about commercial surrogacy. Furthermore, surrogacy is often discussed in the same breath as other Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) bodily “services,” such as gamete donation, from which, I would argue, it should be considered essentially, and even ontologically, distinct.7 Recent scholarship regarding pregnancy in the field of feminist phenomenology has important insights that can move the debates around surrogacy forward, and my aim in this chapter is to bring the insights of feminist

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phenomenological ontology to bear on questions regarding the status of the surrogate mother, who may have no genetic tie to the fetus she is gestating. There is a lot at stake in how pregnancy, the maternal–fetal relation, and the gestating woman are conceived and theorized within commercial surrogacy arrangements, especially as a result of the tendency to commodify bodily parts and bodily functions within ART practices. In effect, the manner through which pregnancy and gestational motherhood are conceived and theorized shape the ethical landscape, delineating what is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of common practices, where potential injustices fall largely on (already underprivileged) women’s shoulders. In this chapter, I will attempt to put the maternal–fetal relation through pregnancy into the center of the ethical questions that arise in gestational surrogacy. I will proceed by drawing attention to the predominant logic regarding bodies, babies, pregnancy, and motherhood that underpins most bioethical discussion regarding commercial surrogacy, making salient the dominant metaphoric and patriarchal landscapes that shape how we commonly understand pregnancy, surrogacy, and parenthood in the present day. Following Emily Martin, I argue that key metaphors about the body and bodily events can shape one’s experience and the logic of the practices that surround those experiences.8 Through describing aspects of the metaphoric landscape within which the practices of commercial surrogacy are primarily thematized, I will demonstrate that a phenomenology of pregnancy, or a theorizing of pregnancy as a complex existential intercorporeal and lived experience, is most often omitted or effaced in bioethical discussions about commercial surrogacy. As such, I will suggest that what is missing in the discourse and bioethical literature on surrogacy is an adequate theorizing of pregnancy. In order to suggest how we might introduce a theory of pregnancy, I will turn to recent phenomenological ontological accounts of pregnancy and intercorporeality, using the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a conceptual ground. In doing so, I will describe the phenomenology of the affective maternal–fetal relationship, engaging with Iris Marion Young’s classical discussion of pregnant embodiment alongside recent accounts of the phenomenology of pregnancy from Jane Lymer and Sara Heinämaa. Ultimately, I will argue that the role of the surrogate is phenomenologically and existentially significant in fetal development and in the creation of a new human subject through communicative intercorporeal relations. As a result, any conceptualization of the ethical parameters of gestational surrogacy must recognize the constitutive role that surrogate mothers play through gestation and pregnancy in the

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creation of lived subjectivities. I will argue that a phenomenological analysis of intercorporeality through pregnancy demonstrates that the constitution of the structures of subjectivity is not merely something that occurs through social and embodied relations after birth, but has its origins in the process of gestation itself. Overall, my aim is to put the maternal–fetal relation and pregnancy, as a complex life-generating and kinship-generating experience with substantial social, developmental, and existential significance, at the center of conversations about commercial gestational surrogacy and to disrupt the predominant logic that surrogate mothers are merely “human incubators,”9 or a special type of container or vessel for the fetuses that they gestate.

THE METAPHORS AND PRACTICES OF SURROGACY Since the landmark Baby M custody case in 1986, where a traditional surrogate mother “changed her mind” and decided she wanted to keep the baby (to which she was the genetic mother), surrogacy has been governed primarily by service or employment contracts through a property rights model.10 This model implicitly instrumentalizes the bodies of surrogate mothers, rendering their uteri isolated entities that are semi-detached and available for use by others.11 As a result of these contractual arrangements, the dominant metaphoric landscape through which surrogacy is conceived, discussed, and defined is one of economics and production hinging on the central tropes of “labor” and private property. Container metaphors abound, whereby gestational mothers are described as “hosts,” “vessels,” and “carriers” who can “rent” their wombs, invoking the idea of the gestational mother as a temporary dwelling for her “guest” with whom she has no kinship ties. In fact, as Kelly Oliver notes, the terminological shift between “what used to be called surrogate mothers, now called gestational carriers” is telling in itself.12 Through practices of surrogacy, the function of the mother has been split into three potentially distinct components: (1) genetic; (2) gestational; and (3) social.13 Quite simply, in the case of gestational surrogacy, motherhood (contra to the recent Irish ruling) is no longer simply defined as the woman who gestates and gives birth to a child. In surrogacy, the social mother (who raises the child) is not the gestational mother, and, furthermore, not necessarily the genetic mother. Harking back to historical legacy of patriarchy in defining familial relationships and kinship, the location of paternity is once again found in the “seed,” which trumps all other embodied or caring relationships.14 Under

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this patriarchal understanding of kinship, the “ownership” of a baby is not a result of gestation, birth, or an embodied maternal relationship, but results from, as Barbara Rothman remarks, “those who produced (or indeed in these days simply purchased) the genetic material.”15 Although this patriarchal privilege has been extended to the “seeds” of women, the understanding of kin or of who is and is not “really related” renders, in the context of surrogacy, pregnancies somehow marginal and without significant kinship-generating capacity.16 As a result, a “donor-and-surrogacy amnesia”17 is common practice in transnational commercial surrogacy arrangements, where the commissioning parents have no obligation to maintain a connection with the surrogate who will carry their child to term, nor any obligation to inform the child of the identity of their surrogate mother. The pregnant woman, as a subjectivity whose embodied and affective experience warrants consideration and as an individual who has the embodied capacity to generate and sustain life, along with an articulation of the maternal–fetal relation between the surrogate and the fetus she gestates, remain conspicuously absent in the dominant logic that governs surrogacy. This logic arises from the already dominant metaphors of pregnancy, where, as Emily Martin notes, reproduction has been commonly treated as a form of production, where a woman is “a ‘laborer,’ whose ‘machine’ (uterus) produces the ‘product,’ babies.”18 In fact, since the fifteenth century, the same English word “labor” has been used to describe both what women do in order to birth their children and what workers do to produce goods for use and exchange in the home and market.19 Arising from the central trope of pregnancy as “labor” coupled with the contemporary neoliberal tendency to frame all aspects of life in economic terms according to a market agenda,20 terms like “costs,” “factories,” “contracts,” “commissioning,” “compensation,” “services,” and “renting,” among others, are ubiquitous in the discourses that surround gestational surrogacy, and it is almost impossible to talk about surrogacy without leaning heavily on these sorts of metaphors. Furthermore, with the rise of fetal-imaging technologies in recent decades, the womb has been increasingly presented as a generalized and seemingly public space, absent of the pregnant woman’s subjectivity, one “whose particular embodied experience,” as Jane Lymer and Fiona Utley remark, would “[warrant] consideration.”21 In fact, since Lennart Nilsson’s Life Magazine fetus was depicted floating in a disembodied celestial-like black space, with the maternal body—on which it would have been entirely dependent—nowhere in sight,22 images of disembodied wombs containing baby-like fetuses are

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part of the standard visual discourse of pregnancy and gestation. As a result, the unborn has been interpellated as human—a baby, son or daughter—and has been endowed with interests, rights and, in the present day, specialized medical care.23 This logic of fungible wombs containing independent subjectivities with specialized rights is, of course, central and crucial to the practices of surrogate pregnancy. Coupled with the instrumentalist metaphoric language of economics, surrogacy has been effectively reduced to a set of concrete parameters that can be allegedly governed by service contracts. Obviously, the concern among bioethicists, practitioners, and others is that surrogacy and the act of gestating a baby for another or others is something that cannot be reduced to an economic transaction alone, nor can the complexities and potential risks of the arrangement be adequately governed by service contracts. Furthermore, the market logic that governs surrogacy arrangements occludes racial, class, economic, and gender inequalities through discourses that lean heavily on the language of “rights” and “choice,” casting all actors in the surrogacy arrangement as equal agents when, in fact, there are often enormous economic and social inequalities between commissioning parents and the surrogates they contract.24 But leaving those concerns aside and turning again to consider pregnancy, the dominant metaphors of production and “labor” are, Martin argues, inherently limiting: “women lose . . . by having a complex process that interrelates physical, emotional and mental experience treated as if it could be broken down and managed like other forms of production.”25 In fact, many consider conceiving of surrogates as able to be contracted for their reproductive capacities, or wombs, to be inherently dehumanizing, leading to exploitation, objectification, and an intensification of gender inequality, reducing women to a mere “breeder class.”26 Others, on the other hand, argue that pregnancy is merely a specialized type of labor, or work, that women can freely choose to undertake on behalf of another. As a result, contracted pregnancy is no different from other types of physical work that can be governed by employment contracts and, hence, commercial surrogacy should be universally permissible. This is, in part, the argument considered by Deborah Satz in her formulation of the “asymmetry thesis,” which is the idea put forth by some ethicists that there should be an asymmetry between how markets of reproductive labor are regulated and considered and our treatment of markets of other forms of labor.27 In short, the idea, which Satz ultimately rejects, is that there is something essentially “different” or “special” about reproduction that should set it apart from other forms of “work.” The difficulty in articulating precisely

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why reproduction, and especially pregnancy, is essentially different from other forms of bodily labor, such as professional sports or sex work, lies in the fact that the social and cultural variation in experiences of pregnancy overwhelms any physiological sameness.28 As Satz is right to point out, arguing that there is some sort of “maternal instinct” or “sacrosanct bonding” between a mother and her child-to-be is a troubling line of reasoning, as “not all women bond with their fetuses. Some women abort them.”29 As a result, the question about the “the sacredness of the act of child-bearing,”30 as one author writes dismissively, is often sidestepped in debates about commercial surrogacy. When pregnancy is mentioned in the literature it is largely presented as a catalogue of physical and psychological symptoms through a medicalized vernacular, invoked as a means to quantify the physical and psychological “costs” of carrying a child to term for another. For example, in a 2014 paper entitled “Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Does it Have to Be Exploitative?” in the American Journal of Bioethics, Jeffrey Kirby discusses pregnancy in terms of “physical health burdens” and “psychological health burdens,” cataloguing a long list of “symptoms” associated with implantation, IVF, pregnancy, and delivery.31 At no point in the article, or in much of the other literature on commercial transnational gestational surrogacy, is pregnancy acknowledged and investigated as a complex lived, embodied, and affective experience with a unique life-generating and kinship-generating capacity. Nor is there an articulation of, or any speculation regarding, the significance of the maternal–fetal relation. There are many reasons that pregnancy has been occluded in the discourses surrounding surrogacy and in broader social discourses. While arguably, socially and politically, gestation and birth are the most foundational, significant, and powerful human acts, they have been marginalized and radically disempowered within the sociopolitical landscape. This of course is a result of a broader tendency in patriarchal cultures to marginalize and disempower women, and this patriarchal tendency guides the dominant logic regarding the treatment of pregnancy in medicine, bioethics, and philosophy. Furthermore, the prevalence of a technical rationality, especially within medicine and with respect to reproductive technologies, means that instrumentality and the “techne” of producing a healthy human baby are emphasized when considering pregnancy, occluding the existential, social, and embodied aspects of pregnancy, especially with respect to women’s experience. However, what is interesting is that even in feminist literature about surrogacy, an articulation or theorization of pregnancy and the maternal-fetal relation

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are often conspicuously absent.32 This is largely because, as noted above, feminists are cautious about essentializing or sentimentalizing women’s experiences of pregnancy. However, it seems obvious that pregnancy is not irrelevant within surrogacy debates and, furthermore, that without adequately theorizing pregnancy the ethical ground of surrogacy will not be clearly delineated. The difficulty with theorizing pregnancy is much more than just the difficulty of attempting to avoid essentializing or sentimental descriptions of women’s experience or as a result of the prejudices of patriarchy. Pregnancy itself is inherently “difficult,” to invoke Cora Diamond’s discussion of the “difficulty of reality.”33 This is a phrase Diamond borrows from John Updike for the phenomena of lived “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability.”34 The generation of human life through pregnancy is something that is so commonplace and ordinary that on the one hand we have no trouble speaking and thinking about it; however, at the same time, pregnancy, as a unique intercorporeal and affective relation that ushers a new human subjectivity into being, defies ordinary comprehension. Thinking about the origins of human subjectivity within the complex intersections of biology, embodiment, social relations, affect, and humanity, again to borrow Diamond’s words, provokes “the experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters.”35 In order to theorize pregnancy adequately, it must be conceptualized but not reduced to a list of symptoms or social categories, as it will and must overflow any idea we have of it. Concepts such as the gift, generosity, and hospitality are often invoked in feminist discussions of pregnancy—and, in fact, have been introduced into the metaphoric landscape of surrogacy in an attempt to reflect its inherent complexity, while making it more palatable.36 The aporetic nature of concepts like “the gift” and “hospitality,” which contain an insoluble paradox or contradiction at their core,37 are useful in highlighting the inherent ambiguities and complexities in pregnancy and, furthermore, the continuous need for ongoing reflection and re-evaluation when making ethical judgments about surrogacy arrangements. However, more than ambiguity is needed, and the insights of recent scholarship within feminist phenomenology provide an important framework for understanding the significance of pregnancy that could enrich the parameters of ethical debates regarding gestational surrogacy. Beyond giving pregnancy significance for being a site of substantial embodied proximity, where “womb mothers”

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share bodily fluids—breast milk and blood—and the metaphoric “sweat” of labor,38 phenomenological analysis reveals an ontological primacy in the maternal–fetal relation that yields significant insights in terms of the role a gestational mother plays within pregnancy. Turning now to phenomenology and conceptions of intercorporeality within the maternal–fetal relation, I will demonstrate that pregnancy cannot be likened to other forms of “work” or “labor,” and any container or production metaphors are necessarily inadequate in theorizing pregnancy within gestational surrogacy.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF INTERCORPOREALITY AND THE MATERNAL–FETAL RELATION Phenomenological descriptions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity by thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveal that conscious experience is not only corporeal, or embodied, but is necessarily intercorporeal. That is, beneath our explicit individual self-consciousness is a complex layer of responsivity, expression, otherness, and emergence through an embodied relation to others that constitutes our being.39 Merleau-Ponty introduces the idea of intercorporeality in his later writings through the term “intercorporeity.”40 Intercorporeity, for Merleau-Ponty, is the idea that underpinning conscious life is a “kinship”41 between one's body and the bodies of others, subtended by one's bodily engagement with the world. Distinct from the concept of intersubjectivity, which involves communication and relations between conscious self-aware subjects, intercorporeality signifies a primordial bodily relation with others that underpins conscious life. It is a tacit communication involving an embodied entanglement between self and other that constitutes the possibility for individual subjective experience.42 In short, Merleau-Ponty argues that intercorporeality, understood as our relations with others through our bodies, is an ontological structure, or a part of our being that makes our being possible.43 Of course in the context of pregnancy—when we pause to reflect on the fact that every human subjectivity has been gestated in and birthed from a woman’s body—this insight seems so self-evident to not even warrant comment. However, as Lisa Guenther notes, to be born is, “in a sense, to forget one’s birth.”44 This forgetting erases the very condition of one’s existence, namely a woman who gestates and gives life through birth. In fact, this forgetting of birth and maternity has shaped much of the tendencies of Western thought

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to privilege the self-conscious individual (male) subject as the starting point for reflection.45 This is evident in the fact that the idea of intercorporeality— or the fact that we are bound to others’ bodies—as it is discussed initially by Merleau-Ponty and subsequently taken up by many other phenomenologists, does not start with an analysis of pregnancy or maternal constitution. Instead, intercorporeality is, for these thinkers, an account of how, through being bound to other (individuated) bodies through communicative and empathic relations, we constitute our capacity for meaningful action, perception and, ultimately, social relations. For instance, in Merleau-Ponty’s account, intercorporeality is an ontological structure that is fleshed out in our lived experience of encountering other bodies. Intercorporeality is, in part, experienced through the intertwining of vision and movement that constitutes a primordial understanding between individuated bodies. This understanding between bodies occurs through perception, movement, and expression. Through these embodied interactions, lived bodies co-constitute each other. The phenomenologist Rosalyn Diprose’s description of intercorporeality is useful to elucidate this idea: “the self is produced, maintained, and transformed through the socially mediated intercorporeal ‘transfer’ of movements and gestures and body bits and pieces . . . Bodies, as they are lived, are socially constituted, built from an intertwining with others who are already social beings.”46 As demonstrative of this idea, Merleau-Ponty cites the example of an infant mimicking movement: A fifteen month old baby opens his mouth when I playfully take one of his fingers in my mouth and pretend to bite it. And yet he has hardly seen his face in a mirror and his teeth do not resemble mine. His own mouth and teeth such as he senses them from within are immediately for him the instruments for biting, and my jaw such as he sees it from the outside is for him immediately capable of the same intentions. “Biting” immediately has an intersubjective signification for him.47 What Merleau-Ponty is articulating, in citing this example, is that even though the infant has no clear visual representation of his own jaw, when presented with intentional action, he senses from within a power for similar movement and gears into the intentionality of the gesture through mimicry: “He perceives his intentions in his body, perceives my body with his own, and thereby perceives my intentions in his body.”48 The idea is that there is

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“a perceptual-motor coupling,”49 to use Matthew Ratcliffe’s term, that occurs within the encounter with the other. Through these sorts of encounters, Merleau-Ponty argues, the infant does not use the eye or mind in a conscious capacity in the perception and understanding of others, but instead uses the body to perceive.50 In this way, intercorporeal relations with others, understood as an ongoing intertwining between bodies, or “transfer” of movements and gestures and body “bits and pieces,” builds one’s body schema, and ultimately the capacity for meaningful action and engagement. The body schema is a key structure in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and in his account of intercorporeality. The body schema is a system of motor and postural functions that are in constant operation below the level of self-conscious intentionality. In the most basic sense, the body schema is the subject’s noncognitive awareness of its position, orientation, and movement.51 The body schema is renewed and rearranged through the sedimentation of tacit skills and techniques that make regular and repeatable (rather than purely spontaneous) action possible. Furthermore, the body schema not only regulates and controls the body’s posture and motility, but also how the body interacts with the objects and environment that constitute its immediate milieu. To illustrate this point, Merleau-Ponty gives the example of a blind man who uses a cane to aid in his maneuvering around the physical world. After a while, the blind man uses the cane as though it were an extension of his own body. His body schema envelops the cane: “When the cane becomes a familiar instrument, the world of tactile objects expands, it no longer begins at the skin of the hand, but at the tip of the cane.”52 The blind man has incorporated the cane into the body schema of his lived body. It has become “an appendage of the body or an extension of the bodily synthesis.”53 The functionality of the body schema and its ability to incorporate worldly objects and tools is fundamental to motor intentionality. Through acquiring habit and skill, and accommodating objects in the lived environment, the body schema is constantly rearranging itself in order to facilitate the experience of smooth motor intentionally prefigured actions. The body schema is significant in a phenomenology of the lived experience of pregnancy in two key manners. First, it is through the body schema’s flexibility that the pregnant woman is able to adjust to her changing form and incorporate the fetus that is growing inside her. In short, the maternal body schema incorporates the internal entity—the fetus—in a manner similar to how the blind man incorporates the external entity—the cane. As her body changes size and shape, the body schema rearranges itself so the pregnant woman

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can negotiate her lived environment without having to rely continuously on conscious reflection. What is interesting is that despite the fetus being inside the woman’s body, and wholly inseparable from it, there is a palpable sense of the fetus being separate; it does not have the same phenomenology of an internal organ, for example. There is a sense of “doubling,” to use Iris Marion Young’s term. She explains: the “pregnant subject . . . is decentered, split or doubled . . . she experiences her body as herself and not herself. Its inner movements belong to another being, yet they are not other, because her body boundaries shift.”54 The flexibility of the body schema, hence, gives the pregnant woman’s a sense of unity and bodily coherence over time. However, at the same time, there is a sense of inner otherness, a palpable sense of something “other” that ultimately cannot be assimilated into oneself. Through this doubling there is a felt and lived sense that the fetus, especially through its movements in the later stages of pregnancy, constitutes its own “body,” somehow independent (while simultaneously wholly dependent and inseparable) from its gestational mother. Sara Heinämaa articulates this point in contrast to Young’s account. While Young posits that the movements of the fetus “belong to another being, yet they are not other,” Heinämaa argues that these sorts of contradictory formulations are not useful in describing the phenomenology of pregnancy, nor do they capture the nuance of the experience of inner movement. Instead, she argues that “gestation, as experienced by women who live it in the first person, includes a separation between two sensory-motor beings in a nesting relation: the pregnant self and the embryonic other.”55 This is an important point. Namely, the fetus is not simply perceived to be a foreign entity within the mother’s body, but instead through its movements, such as kicking, turning, stretching, it is experienced as a “sensory-motor being,” that is, a being with its own capacity for perception and meaningful movement. Or, in other words, a being with a body schema. Which brings us to intercorporeality and the second significance of the body schema in pregnancy and child development. The formation of a body schema is an important part of child development in Merleau-Ponty’s account. He argues that the child’s transition from experiencing his or her body as indistinct from others to the capacity for individuated self-consciousness arises through self-objectification. This process is mediated through the body schema, which is formed piecemeal through encounters with other bodies. Recalling the example cited above of the fifteen-month-old infant mimicking facial movements, Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is initially a state of pre-communication . . . wherein the other’s intentions somehow play

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across my body while my intentions play across his . . . [there is] a “postural impregnation” of my own body by the conducts that I witness.”56 However, it is not just fifteen-month-old infants and adults that are capable of this sort of intercorporeal constitution. As Meltzoff and Moore demonstrated in a series of experiments in 1977, the capacity for facial mimicry is evident in newborns within the first hour after birth.57 In addition, more recent experiments with neonates have demonstrated that they are available to engage, respond to, and initiate interpersonal embodied exchanges, such as hand gestures and facial expressions, shortly after birth.58 In fact, Gallagher and Meltzoff challenge Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions regarding this early capacity for imitation, arguing that infant imitation would not be possible without a functioning body schema and a primitive body image that entails at least a rudimentary level of self-awareness.59 What this suggests, as Jane Lymer has pointed out in her recent writing regarding the phenomenology of the maternal–fetal relation, is that newborn infants must possess a primitive body schema and, as a result, intercorporeality must begin in utero and not outside the womb with “others.”60 Lymer writes: Put simplistically, the maternal body schema incorporates the foetal body in much the same way that we incorporate artifacts into our body schema. However in this case, doing so elicits, moulds and structures foetal movement into the schemas necessary for basic neurological development . . . it is this affectively structured embodied relation [with a mother] that guides the foetus, and possibly then the child, through the early states of subjectivity development.61 What Lymer is suggesting is that the maternal–fetal relation, through the womb in gestation, is what constitutes the newborn’s, and later the child’s, capacity for meaningful movement, action, and perception. This occurs through the habituated movement patterns of the mother, the maternal heartbeat, breathing, and digestion, all of which together construct what Lymer terms an “intrauterine world” that is “not only moving but also rhythmic, regulated and animate.”62 Hence, this “support-system of maternal tissues”63 is not merely a passive receptacle that simply contains a developing fetus, but rather is a communicative and constitutive medium. Furthermore, as fetal development progresses, after twenty-two weeks, the relationship between the mother and fetus becomes, to some extent, reciprocal. The pregnant women’s body responds, often unconsciously, or below the level

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of perception, to fetal movements.64 Pregnancy becomes, as such, an ongoing exchange and engagement between mother and fetus through an embodied communication. In fact, it is well documented that fetuses are aware of and responsive to the in utero environment. The maternal breathing, heartbeat, and vocal patterns, coupled with the sensory-motor capacities of the maternal body, constitute a lived and dynamic communicative relationship.65 This embodied responsiveness demonstrates a primordial intercorporeal relationship with the gestational mother. This relationship, Lymer argues, “may well set the foundations for affective intersubjective relations post-partum.”66 Or, in other words, this first physical, physiological, and affective “bond” to the gestational mother is what constitutes the ability to form attachment bonds outside of the womb.67 Frances Gray makes a similar claim in arguing that the relationship between the pregnant woman and her “second subject” forms a condition for the possibility of mutual intersubjective understanding later in life.68 Hence, what a phenomenological analysis of intercorporeality through pregnancy demonstrates is that the constitution of the structures of subjectivity is not merely something that occurs through social and embodied relations after birth, but has its origins in the process of gestation itself.69 In this way, intercorporeality is established in utero, as a relation between two “sensory-motor selves” in a nesting relation, to use Heinämaa’s formulation.70 However, this gestational intercorporeal relation is necessarily non-symmetrical and co-dependent, unlike the relations of mutual co-constitution that characterize the encounter between adult subjects. As a result, the gestational mother has a status that potentially destabilizes the three functions of motherhood (genetic, gestational, and social) as commonly employed in conceptions of surrogacy. If it is through the embodied maternal–fetal relation that the structures of one’s being are formed that can give rise to a meaningful life, as an individual and as a social being, then the role of the gestational mother is much more than merely one of a specialized type of incubator, whose “labor” can be compensated through an economic transaction. Furthermore, what should be clear in this analysis is that the phenomenological structures of the maternal–fetal relation, as described here with respect to intercorporeality and the formation of the body schema, are not predicated on any genetic tie between the pregnant woman and the fetus, nor on any particular subjective feelings the woman has about her pregnant state or the fetus she is gestating.71 In short, when considering the primary in utero intercorporeal relation as the basis for all other future intersubjective

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and relational experience and as a primary ground for embodied subjectivity expressed through a successful body schema, the role a gestational surrogate plays in the drama of reproduction is not merely that of an “incubator” or “container.” The role of the surrogate is substantially phenomenologically and existentially significant in fetal (and, later, child) development. As a result, any conceptualization of the ethical parameters of gestational surrogacy must recognize the constitutive role that surrogate mothers play through gestation in the creation of lived subjectivities.

CONCLUSION Using a phenomenological lens to theorize the maternal–fetal relationship sheds light on what is missing in most discussion regarding commercial surrogacy, namely, an adequate theorization of pregnancy as a uniquely subjectivity-constituting embodied process. While the lived experiences of women in pregnancy are traditionally absent in the way pregnancy and birth are managed by the medical establishment, what a phenomenology of pregnancy reveals is that the gestational mother wholly participates in, and is the fleshy foundation for, the constitution of the fetus’s subjectivity. As a result, conceiving of the womb or a pregnant woman as merely a container or vessel for a fetus, who is in turn conceived of as an independent self-constituting subjectivity, is wholly reductive and inaccurate. The metaphors of production—in which the womb is likened to a machine—and of hosting and hospitality—in which the womb is merely a temporary dwelling—do not adequately capture the intercorporeal and communicative nature of gestation, nor the existential status of pregnancy. Gestation is not merely a biological or physiological process, but instead a complex affective state of co-constitution. A new subjectivity, with the capacity for meaningful action, is produced through the relationality and communication that necessarily occurs in utero. In fact, when considering what constitutes kinship, parenting, and relatedness, there is an emphasis on blood ties and a sharing of origins.72 As such, it seems reasonable to assign a type of kinship status to gestational mothers who provide the primary months of care and nurturing through pregnancy. This kinship would be based on social and intercorporeal ties arising from the initial maternal–fetal relation established through gestation, rather than on any genetic link. This should be the case even if the surrogate mother does not share a genetic bond with the child

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she has carried or if she does not continue to play any parental role after the child’s birth. As a result, denying the acknowledgment of kinship through the now commonplace “donor-and-surrogacy amnesia” that occurs in commercial surrogacy constitutes an injustice through the instrumentalization of women as “baby machines,” the effacement of their lived experiences, and a denial of the significance of pregnancy.73 In light of this, the proposal made by Mary Shanley and Sujatha Jesudason, in a recent chapter on surrogacy, that would allow children born through surrogacy to learn the identity of the surrogate and any gamete donor, could redress some of the injustices inherent to current commercial surrogacy arrangements.74 Modeled on practices in adoption, this proposal would allow the formation of new family relationships and, at least, acknowledge the key role that surrogates play in generating new life. This is a role that cannot be and should not be effaced through an economic transaction or governed entirely by a contract. In this chapter, I have attempted to put the pregnant woman and the maternal–fetal relation into the center of ethical questions that arise in gestational surrogacy. I have done so in order to acknowledge the centrality of the primary intercorporeal experience, through gestation, to the development of subjectivity. By exploring the predominant logic regarding bodies, babies, pregnancy, and motherhood that underpins most bioethical discussion regarding commercial surrogacy, I have argued that the theorizing of pregnancy as a complex existential intercorporeal and lived experience is most often omitted or effaced in bioethical discussions about commercial surrogacy. I have suggested that what is missing in the discourse and bioethical literature on surrogacy is an adequate theorizing of pregnancy, and that phenomenology is a means to address this lacuna. Using the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a conceptual ground, I have engaged with the work of feminist phenomenologists who theorize pregnancy, in particular, Iris Marion Young, Jane Lymer, and Sara Heinämaa. Ultimately, I have argued that the role of the surrogate is phenomenologically and existentially significant in fetal development and in the creation of a new human subject through communicative intercorporeal relations, and as a result, any conceptualization of the ethical parameters of gestational surrogacy must recognize the constitutive role that surrogate mothers play through gestation and pregnancy in the creation of lived subjectivities. Overall, my aim has been to put pregnancy and the maternal–fetal relation at the center of conversations about commercial gestational surrogacy and to disrupt the predominant logic that surrogate mothers are merely “human incubators.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to gratefully acknowledge the Irish Research Council for funding my postdoctoral research as an ELEVATE Research Fellow. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who provided feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter—your comments were invaluable. Thank you also to Danielle Petherbridge for her insights on this chapter and her work on this volume.

NOTES 1. M. Carolan, “Supreme Court Rules Genetic Mother of Twins Is Not Their Legal Mother,” The Irish Times, 8 November 2014. 2. “Story of Mitsutoki Shigeta’s First Thai Surrogate Offers Clues into Mystery of 16 Babies,” The Japan Times, 2 September 2014. 3. See F.W. Twine, Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market (London: Routledge, 2011). 4. A. Pande, “This Birth and That: Surrogacy and Stratified Motherhood in India,” PhiloSophia 4(1) 2014. 5. See Twine, Outsourcing the Womb. 6. G. Goslinga-Roy, “Body Boundaries, Fiction and the Female Self: An Ethnography of Power, Feminism and the Reproductive Technologies,” Feminist Studies 26(1) 2000. 7. See for instance: L. Dolezal, “Considering Pregnancy in Commercial Surrogacy: A Response to Bronwyn Parry,” Medical Humanities 41, no. 1 (2015). 8. E. Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Books, 2001), 159. 9. Pande, “This Birth and That: Surrogacy and Stratified Motherhood in India,” 60. 10. For a discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of the contract model in surrogacy see R. Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1994), 2–17. 11. M. Cooper and C. Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 85. 12. K. Oliver, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 52. Italics in original. 13. Twine, Outsourcing the Womb, 10.

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14. B.K. Rothman, “The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling over This?,” American Journal of Bioethics 14 (2014): 36. 15. Rothman, “The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy,” 36. 16. Rothman, “The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy,” 37. 17. A. Phillips, Our Bodies, Whose Property? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 96. 18. Martin, The Woman in the Body, 57. 19. Martin, The Woman in the Body, 66. 20. See W. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 10. 21. J. Lymer and F. Utley, “Hospitality and Maternal Consent,” Law Text Culture 17 (2013): 265. 22. See L. Nilsson and L. Hamberger, A Child Is Born (Delacorte Press, 2003). 23. D. Lupton, The Social Worlds of the Unborn (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 35–38. 24. See Twine, Outsourcing the Womb. 25. Martin, The Woman in the Body, 66. 26. Pande, “This Birth and That: Surrogacy and Stratified Motherhood in India,” 50. 27. D. Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115. For a classical discussion of the issues regarding commodification in traditional surrogacy see also: M.J. Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 140–153. 28. B.K. Rothman, “Laboring Now: Current Cultural Constructions of Pregnancy, Birth and Mothering,” in The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings, ed. Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 63. 29. Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, 122. 30. B. Parry, “Narratives of Neoliberalism: ‘Clinical Labour’ in Context,” Medical Humanities 41(1) 2015. 31. J. Kirby, “Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Does It Have to Be Exploitative,” The American Journal of Bioethics 14(5) 2014: 28. 32. A notable exception in the sociological literature is Amrita Pande’s writing on kinship and “womb mothers” with respect to gestational surrogacy in India. See, for example: A. Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood’: Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India,” Qualitative

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Sociology 32 (2009). Also see Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 33. C. Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Partial Answers 1(2) 2003: 2. 34. Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” 2–3. 35. Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” 2. 36. See, for example, R. Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).; A. Pande, “Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India: Gifts for Global Sisters?,” Reproductive BioMedicine Online 23 (2011); S.J. Toledo and K. Zeiler, “Hosting for the Others’ Child?: Relational Work and Embodied Responsibility in Altruistic Surrogate Motherhood,” Feminist Theory (forthcoming). 37. See, for example, J. Derrida, Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money, trans. Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 29. As articulated by Derrida, the gift, understood in its purest sense, should not demand any reciprocity or exchange; it should be a purely selfless act of giving without expectation of return. Hence, the core paradox of the gift is that as soon as a gift is acknowledged (through thanks, exchange or compensation), gift status is annulled. 38. For example, Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood.’” 39. S.L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 2. 40. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 141. 41. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 184. 42. See also L. Dolezal, “The Phenomenology of Self-Presentation: Describing the Structures of Intercorporeality with Erving Goffman,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (23 November 2015) doi: 10.1007/ s11097-015-9447-6 43. The theme of intercorporeality as constitutive of subjectivity has been taken up by many contemporary phenomenologists. For instance, see G. Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999); Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity; and Diprose, Corporeal Generosity. 44. L. Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), 1. 45. See for example: Diprose, The Bodies of Women, 12.

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46. Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: 54, 55. 47. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 368. 48. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 368. Gallagher and Meltzoff challenge Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions regarding this early capacity for imitation, arguing that infant imitation would not be possible without a functioning body schema and a primitive body image that entails a rudimentary level of self-awareness. See Shaun Gallagher and Andrew N. Meltzoff, “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies,” Philosophical Psychology 9(2) 1996. Merleau-Ponty argues that infant mimicry is not true imitation but rather arises because of an unconscious and primordial participation in intercorporeality, or a “postural impregnation” of my own body with the behavior and expression that I witness in others bodies. See Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 118. For further elaboration see J. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” Parrhesia 13 (2011). 49. M. Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 139. 50. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 341. 51. I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body schema at length elsewhere. See L. Dolezal, The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 22–25. 52. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 153. 53. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 154. 54. I.M. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46. For a discussion of Young’s account of doubling in terms of bodily integrity see also Weiss, Body Images, 51–53. 55. S. Heinamaa, “‘An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life’: A Phenomenological Analysis of Pregnancy,” PhiloSophia 4(1) 2014. 56. M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 119, 18. 57. A. Meltzoff and M. Moore, “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 (1977). 58. E. Nagy, “The Newborn Infant: A Missing Stage in Developmental Psychology,” Infant and Child Development 20 (2011): 7–10. See also: C.

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Trevarthen and K.J. Aitken, “Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory and Clinical Applications,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42(1) 2001. 59. S. Gallagher and A.N. Meltzoff, “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies,” Philosophical Psychology 9(2) 1996. See also Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation.” 60. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” 135. 61. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” 129, 35. 62. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” 138. 63. Trevarthen and Aitken, “Infant Intersubjectivity,” 3. 64. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” 139. 65. See Trevarthen and Aitken, “Infant Intersubjectivity.” 66. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” 139. Complementing these phenomenological claims regarding the maternal–fetal relation is research regarding the physiological mechanisms which regulate communication between the gestating mother and her fetus. See N. Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (London: Vintage, 2002), 91–94. 67. M. Agnafors, “The Harm Argument against Surrogacy Revisited: Two Versions Not to Forget,” Medical Health Care and Philosophy 17 (2014): 360. 68. F. Gray, “Original Habitation: Pregnant Flesh as Absolute Hospitality,” in Coming to Life, ed. Sarah La Chance and Caroline Lundquist (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 71–72. 69. See also F. Wynn, “The Early Relationship of Mother and Pre-Infant: Merleau-Ponty and Pregnancy,” Nursing Philosophy 3 (2002). 70. Heinamaa, “‘An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life,’” 39. 71. In fact, these arguments regarding a primary intercorporeality in pregnancy do not preclude the validity of a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. It should be clear that the relation between the two “sensory-motor selves” is necessarily non-symmetrical. 72. See Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood,’” 380. 73. Phillips, Our Bodies, Whose Property?, 96. 74. M.L. Shanley and S. Jesudason, “Surrogacy: Reinscribed or Pluralizing Understandings of Family,” in Families—Beyond the Nuclear Ideal: For

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Better or Worse?, ed. Daniela Cutas and Sarah Chan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).

REFERENCES Agnafors, M. “The Harm Argument against Surrogacy Revisited: Two Versions Not to Forget.” Medical Health Care and Philosophy 17 (2014): 357–363. Brown, W. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Carolan, M. “Supreme Court Rules Genetic Mother of Twins Is Not Their Legal Mother.” The Irish Times, 8 November 2014. Cooper, M., and C. Waldby. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Derrida, J. Given Time: I, Counterfiet Money. Translated by Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Diamond, C. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” Partial Answers 1, no. 2 (2003): 1–25. Diprose, R. The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge, 1994. Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. Dolezal, L. The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Dolezal, L. “Considering Pregnancy in Commercial Surrogacy: A Response to Bronwyn Parry.” Medical Humanities 41(1) 2015: 38–39. Dolezal, L. “The Phenomenology of Self-Presentation: Describing the Structures of Intercorporeality with Erving Goffman.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 23 November 2015. DOI 10.1007/ s11097-015-9447-6 Gallagher, S., and A.N. Meltzoff. “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies.” Philosophical Psychology 9(2) 1996. Goslinga-Roy, G. “Body Boundaries, Fiction and the Female Self: An Ethnography of Power, Feminism and the Reproductive Technologies.” Feminist Studies 26(1) 2000: 113–140.

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Gray, F. “Original Habitation: Pregnant Flesh as Absolute Hospitality.” In Sarah La Chance and Caroline Lundquist (Eds.), Coming to Life, pp. 71–87. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Guenther, L. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006. Heinamaa, S. “‘An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life’: A Phenomenological Analysis of Pregnancy.” PhiloSophia 4(1) 2014: 31–49. Kirby, J. “Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Does It Have to Be Exploitative.” The American Journal of Bioethics 14(5) 2014: 24–32. Lupton, D. The Social Worlds of the Unborn. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Lymer, J. “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation.” Parrhesia 13 (2011): 126–143. Lymer, J., and F. Utley. “Hospitality and Maternal Consent.” Law Text Culture 17 (2013): 240–272. Marratto, S. L. The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012. Martin, E. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Books, 2001. Meltzoff, A., and M. Moore. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198 (1977): 75–78. Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relations with Others.” Translated by William Cobb. In James M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception, pp. 96–155. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Nagy, E. “The Newborn Infant: A Missing Stage in Developmental Psychology.” Infant and Child Development 20 (2011): 3–19. Nilsson, L., and L. Hamberger. A Child Is Born. Delacorte Press, 2003. Oliver, K. Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pande, A. “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood’: Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India.” Qualitative Sociology 32 (2009): 379–397. Pande, A. “This Birth and That: Surrogacy and Stratified Motherhood in India.” PhiloSophia 4(1) 2014: 50–64.

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Pande, A. “Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India: Gifts for Global Sisters?” Reproductive BioMedicine Online 23 (2011): 618–625. Pande, A. Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commerical Surrogacy in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Parry, B. “Narratives of Neoliberalism: ‘Clinical Labour’ in Context.” Medical Humanities 41(1) 2015: 32–37. Phillips, A. Our Bodies, Whose Property? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Radin, M.J. Contested Commodities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Ratcliffe, M. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Rothman, B.K. “Laboring Now: Current Cultural Constructions of Pregnancy, Birth and Mothering.” In Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosu (eds.), The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings, pp. 48–65. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Rothman, B.K. “The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling over This?” American Journal of Bioethics 14 (2014): 36–37. Satz, D. Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Shanley, M.L., and S. Jesudason. “Surrogacy: Reinscribed or Pluralizing Understandings of Family.” In Daniela Cutas and Sarah Chan (eds.), Families—Beyond the Nuclear Ideal: For Better or Worse? London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. “Story of Mitsutoki Shigeta’s First Thai Surrogate Offers Clues into Mystery of 16 Babies.” The Japan Times, 2 September 2014. Toledo, S.J., and K. Zeiler. “Hosting for the Others’ Child?: Relational Work and Embodied Responsibility in Altruistic Surrogate Motherhood.” Feminist Theory (forthcoming). Trevarthen, C., and K.J. Aitken. “Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory and Clinical Applications.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42(1) 2001: 3–48. Twine, F.W. Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market. London: Routledge, 2011. Weiss, G. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Wolf, N. Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood. London: Vintage, 2002. Wynn, F. “The Early Relationship of Mother and Pre-Infant: Merleau-Ponty and Pregnancy.” Nursing Philosophy 3 (2002): 4–14. Young, I.M. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation.” In On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays, 46–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

CHAPTER 12

Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Look Dylan Trigg

At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook”

INTRODUCTION From a phenomenological perspective, our experience of things takes as its point of departure the fact that we are bodily subjects who exist in the world in a rich and meaningful way. Things matter to us, and they do so because of our inseparable relation with the world. Our human bodies, more than masses of living tissue, are instead constituted by a structure that allows us to both orient ourselves in the world in a pre-reflective way, and also to develop relations with others that would be impossible were our relation to the body a contingent one. As Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger have shown us, it is thanks to the fact that we are bodily subjects that spatiality is not a uniform backdrop against which our lives take place, but instead the very fabric upon which our existence is intertwined.1 This much, of course, we know from everyday experience. Far from neutral, we are at all times involved in a complex relation with the world, which at no point can be reduced to the objective properties of space. Instead, our experience of space is mediated in large by the mood of our bodily existence.2 337

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Illustrations of this interdependency between spatiality and the body are rich in our experience. Let us imagine a scenario in which a person moves to a new country, where they must now orient themselves not only within a new city but also a new culture. There, the person finds their senses awakened to the world in such a way that was hitherto not present in their former habitat. Now, the smooth monotony of a habitualized existence in the world, marked by regularity and conformity, gives way to a body revitalized in its relation to the materiality of new phenomena. In place of an automated routine, the body must work harder to avoid getting lost in place. This raised attention carries with it a renewal of perception, such that the world feels more present than before. Smells, colors, sounds, textures, and tastes all conspire together that germinate in the body, and in doing so, not only make the world feel more alive, but also make the body feel more alive. To explain this transformation of the body from a site of habit to a site of discovery, we would be required to extend our analysis beyond a level of objective analysis and orient that analysis toward a focus on the meeting point between body and world. The question of how a place comes alive is not a question of how objective properties in the world stimulate a subject’s senses, but instead concerns the convergence between body and place, such that the quality of a place being alive marks an ongoing dialogue between the two aspects. But this dialogue, itself a longstanding theme of phenomenological research, concerns not only the relation between spatiality and corporeality, but also implicates the role both other people, but perhaps more importantly otherness, play. Without taking into consideration the issue of otherness, not least as it presents itself in the form of intersubjectivity, any phenomenological analysis of our being-in-the-world remains incomplete. The aim of this chapter is to explore this claim thorough a phenomenology of agoraphobia.3 Employing agoraphobia as a case study to analyze the tripart relation between spatiality, embodiment, and intersubjectivity is helpful in the sense that agoraphobia reveals to us that which was there all along. Far from a deviation of normal existence, agoraphobia discloses the fundamental structure of our relation with others, with spatiality, and with embodiment. The agoraphobic condition does this through bringing to the surface in an especially heightened way basic structures and themes of existence. These themes include our relation to our bodies, to our homes, to others, to unfamiliarity, and to our sense of being a subject. All these themes are not novel to the agoraphobe, but instead received in such a way that they are elucidated through the visceral bodily experience of the agoraphobe.

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Throughout all this, a phenomenological study of agoraphobia attests to the intertwinement between embodiment, spatiality, and the Other. Indeed, it is precisely through a phenomenological reading of agoraphobia that we avoid reducing the anxiety central to the condition as simply a reaction to a particular spatial configuration or otherwise seeking to explain it solely in terms of political or cultural context. While there is no doubt that both the objective aspects of space as well as the cultural and political structure of society play a role in the agoraphobic condition, without situating these aspects in a relational context to embodiment, spatiality, and otherness, then they remain detached from our pregiven experience of the world. To defend the thesis that the relation between embodiment and spatiality can only be understood through a consideration of the Other, I will turn to Sartre. Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity, as it figures in Being and Nothingness, is helpful in allowing us to recognize both the intersubjective structure of spatiality and embodiment. This is especially clear in his notion of “the look” (le regard).4 By “look,” he refers less to the physical vision of another person, and more to the tacit manner in which our phenomenal experience is constituted and altered by the sensing of the Other(ness) in the world. As such, the look does not rely on “the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction,” but takes shape in the very act of being sensibly orientated in the world.5 In the “rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain,” the Other is instigated in the materiality of the world, without even being physically present.6 For Sartre, the look of the Other carries with it a destabilizing effect. In it, a conflict takes place between two of more selves, each of whom struggle to regain control over their environmental and bodily bearings, as he writes in a passage that we will return to in time: “The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centrality which I am simultaneously effecting.”7 In other words, the presence of the Other, far from presenting itself as a continuity of selfhood, instead unfolds as another center, a center that the self must now be incorporated within an already established structure. 8 In this sense, the Other is another possibility in how the world and the self can be constituted, and thus disarms our own self-constitution and self-control, as Sartre has it: “I am no longer master of the situation.”9 ÊÊÊ

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Before we embark, let us clarify what we mean by agoraphobia. Ruling out one singular definition, we can approach the phenomenology of agoraphobia as an experience with a multiplicity of dimensions, each of which center around the privileging of spatiality. What distinguishes agoraphobia from other anxiety-related conditions is the centrality of space as the medium through which a disturbed relation with both the body and otherness is articulated. As the focal point of the condition, spatiality is the pivot around which both the body and the Other revolve. Throughout its rich history, the agoraphobic condition has developed into various spatial phobias, including “la peur des espaces,” “horreur du vide,” “platzschwindel” (square dizziness), and finally, agoraphobia. This Greek heritage of the term “agoraphobia”—“phobia” extending from the mythical figure, Phobos—gains a medical sense only in the late nineteenth century, along with a series of other disorders that have since become part of the medical lexicon, not least anorexia and claustrophobia. The term “agoraphobia” was coined in 1871 by the German psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal.10 Westphal’s original essay on agoraphobia considers three case studies, each distinct, but each revealing a set of common characteristics. Westphal identifies a series of themes still applicable to the experience of agoraphobia: [T]he less an open space is interrupted by objects, the easier it is for the [agoraphobia] to appear; but also the passing of long fronts, now and then through unknown or empty streets, or in the highest level even a short walk through a familiar environment, has the same effect. The condition can be lessened or forced to disappear through an escort, especially while engaging in conversation; at the sight of a vehicle going the same direction, or seeing an open door in one of the houses located on abandoned streets, and so forth.11 As we see, homogenous space—space perceived as having no horizon— becomes especially problematic as it leaves the agoraphobic subject “stranded” in a void, lacking therein any place to hide or retreat. Westphal locates two rejoinders to the subject’s anxiety: the role of what will become the “trusted other” and the function of a “prop,” be it a moving vehicle or, archetypically, an umbrella. Indeed, already in this preliminary account, we see that an “open door” is the bearer of a symbolic meaning that fuses the lived experience of space with the importance placed on other people. As Westphal goes on to say, the transformation of others and objects cannot be reduced

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to “a common feeling of dizziness,” but instead points more specifically to an anxiety, which is to be distinguished from mere vertigo.12 As to the prognosis, Westphal’s patients appear to have benefited from then prevalent forms of treatment, such as spending time in a water spa complemented with a “few glasses of strong wine.”13 How is this relation to space different from non-agoraphobic subjects? One difference is that for the agoraphobic subject, space tends to be divided into fragments, with each fragment assigned a status as being homely/unhomely, familiar/unfamiliar, navigable/ unnavigable, etcetera. Rather than being the implicit context from which our bodily existence takes place, for the agoraphobe, spatiality is the obstacle that prevents this existence from occurring. At all times, space obtrudes and intrudes, disorienting and disturbing the subject rather than cohering and coordinating the subject. For all that, agoraphobia considered as a “pathology” is contentious. As we will see in our case study, far from a radical deviation from everyday existence, agoraphobia presents itself not as a rupture but as an amplification of themes that are already of issue to non-agoraphobic subjects. These themes include our relation to space, others, and to our bodies. Such relations are exposed to vulnerability and alienation alongside fortitude and constancy. The distinction of agoraphobia is that it underscores the contingency of these relations rather than forging relations that are in some sense novel.

SARTRE AND THE BODY Let us begin, then, by considering in more detail the basis of our study in the form of Sartre’s analysis of intersubjectivity and the look. We will begin by examining Sartre’s theory of the body, as it figures in Being and Nothingness. Let us start with a question: What is the body? True to his Husserlian roots, Sartre begins from the perspective by distinguishing the body as it is lived from the body as it is understood as an object. Understood as an object, the body can be broken down in such a way that it never reveals to me anything of my experience. The body in its interiority—the mass of organs that keeps me alive—is quite different from the body that enables me to have a meaningful relation with the world. And yet, from time to time, we see our own bodies projected on medical screens and presented to us in terms of quantifiable data. Still here, my body taken as a thing to be analyzed medically is situated in the midst of other things, as Sartre writes: “I was apprehending a wholly

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constituted object as a this among other thises, and it was only be a reasoning process that I referred it back to being mine; it was much more my property than my being.”14 In this way, the body necessarily evades us. To apprehend it as an object is to efface what is central to it: its experiential structure. Several years before Merleau-Ponty, Sartre introduces into this account of the body the significance of the “double sensation,” which he himself inherits from Husserl.15 The term, which has its roots in psychology, refers to the sensation of one aspect of the body being both touched and touching at the same time when it touches another aspect. Famously, of course, the key illustration is one hand touching the other. For Sartre (and for different reasons Merleau-Ponty), the term, far from revealing something essential about the structure of what we would now call embodied subjectivity, is instead contingent, and could be annulled simply with a “shot of morphine.”16 Without this inseparable relation, we are in fact “dealing with two essentially different orders of reality.”17 To touch and to be touched “exist on two incommunicable levels,” given that there is no reconciliation between the two domains.18 What, in fact, is more important about this revelation of my body as an object to be analyzed, is not an intracorporeal reciprocity, but rather its significance for my relation with others. Thus, Sartre’s account of the body proceeds to distinguish between “ontological levels”: the body as a being-for-itself, the body-for-others; and, most important for our own study, the body as it is seen and known by others. Of the first dimension, the central point concerns the body as that which surpasses itself. It is the body taken as a zero point of intentionality, around which the world revolves, and through which we are able to have a relation with the world in the first place. Such a body is not something I possess in the way I possess an object. Rather, it is the body that I have but never possess. This lived body evades me insofar as it is never visible, as such, without losing its quality as lived. Of course, under certain circumstances the body precisely does appear to me as an object, not least when I am in pain. Here, Sartre offers a series of novel insights into the phenomenology of pain, especially as it redefines our relation not only to the body but also to the surrounding world. The example is presented of having a pain in the eyes whilst reading a work of philosophy.19 At first glance, we have the experience of reading a page in its totality. One word is situated in a sentence, one sentence is situated in a paragraph, and one paragraph is situated in the totality of the page, which itself is situated in the world. In this mode of reading alertly, the eyes

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are, in a manner of speaking, nowhere to be seen. Rather, they conform to a reciprocal exchange between myself and the world of the page. And then the pain of reading intrudes upon this flow and movement. The pain breaks the upsurge of attention, but where does this pain emit from: my eyes or the book? The pain is not localized but instead spreads itself across the page. The same words, which until now presented themselves as integral and unified, now “tremble” and “quiver.”20 The advent of pain signals a different relation between body and world. While it is true that the world and body are never entirely suspended in the act of being absorbed within reading, both aspects nevertheless assume an implicit context or are “lost in the undifferentiated totality which serves as the background of my reading.”21 At the moment I turn to a particular articulation of bodily pain, my relation with the world and my body alters. We notice at first the pain occupies the body in a singular way; it carries with it its own temporality and rhythm, lulling at points while becoming more vocal at other points.22 This “animism,” as Sartre terms it, gives the illness and pain a certain momentum, which is not entirely reducible to my self-conscious apprehension of the phenomena. In turn, the localized pain spreads itself beyond the particular origin—be it the eye, the hand, or the elbow—and spreads to the surroundings of the body itself. What follows is a body that is now thematized as an organ of pain, and no longer interwoven into my life as a silent marker of existence. Now, pain betrays my experience, producing a body that is to some extent alienated from my subjectivity, despite the fact that the pain and illness is my own.23 This awareness of my body as a thing of pain does not equate it with an object of knowledge but instead appears for me through an affective consciousness—that is, as what Sartre terms a “psychic body.”24 In fact, the phenomenology of bodily pain is not a contingent dimension of our existence, but rather reveals something that was there all along—an underlying “insipid taste which I cannot place . . . a dull and inescapable nausea [that] reveals my body to my consciousness.”25 It is precisely this intersection between the nauseating facticity of a body that is never entirely one’s own (while at the same time always already experienced through lens of mineness) that leads us to Sartre’s account of intercorporeality, and then onward to our own investigation into the interspatiality of agoraphobia.

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THE BODY-FOR-OTHERS Under the category “body-for-others,” Sartre refers to the way the Other’s body appears for me as an object, just as I myself appear for the Other as an object. How does the Other appear for me? Sartre suggests there is an extension of sorts of the Other’s body into things of the world more broadly. Thus, in an empty room where Sartre waits “for the master of the house,” the surrounding furniture, desks, ornaments, and even the way the light shines through the window and illuminates objects in the room all conspire together to form a sense of the Other long before the body of the Other is physically present. What this means is that the body of the Other is always involved in a meaningful relationship with the world. The body is not an isolated unit of space, nor is it a chunk of materiality atomized from other chunks. Rather, the body presents itself “in terms of a total situation which indicates it.”26 Not only this, but the body that does appear does so within its own referential totality. Thus, to perceive the body of the Other is not to perceive a discernible set of limbs working independently from one another, but is instead to bear witness to a total subjectivity articulated in and through the body. As if to prove this point, Sartre draws our attention to the phenomena of experiencing “the horror we feel if we happen to see an arm that looks ‘as if it did not belong to any body.’”27 The result is a “disintegration of the body,” given that we take it as pregiven that a body presents itself to us as whole, and it is only within this context that it can be understood. What we are faced with in this preliminary account of embodiment and intersubjectivity is twofold. On the one hand, we have a sense of the I as being equivalent to the body, such as Sartre presents it to us in the first dimension. On the other hand, “my body is utilized and known by the Other,” as we have seen in the second dimension.28 The final dimension of the body’s existence concerns the way in which this knowledge by the Other affects my own experience of myself as a bodily subject, as Sartre has it: “I exist for myself as a body known by the Other.”29 In this mode, my body as lived reaches a limit insofar as something escapes my self-reflection, marking an “outside” in the midst of the intimacy of the “inside.”30 This outside is not simply that of the body as viewed as a thematized physical object, such as when I experience a limb when it is broken or in pain. Rather, the outside of the body is the “original encounter” with the Other.31 Such a moment, for Sartre, is not simply a reciprocal encounter between two or more similarly structured subjects, each of whom stands in a neutral or indifferent relation to one another. Rather,

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what happens in this encounter with the Other is that I become an object for something unknowable, insofar as I am taken now primarily as an object of the Other’s world, the result of which is a “concrete collapse of my world.”32 This alienation of my body is stipulated on the sense of it being perceived in a world “outside of my subjectivity, in the midst of a world which is not mine.”33 Already in this account of my body being taken as an object for the Other, Sartre sees the relevance for phobias and anxiety, writing as follows: This constant uneasiness, which is the apprehension of my body’s alienation as irremediable, can determine psychoses such as ereuthophobia (a pathological fear of blushing); these are nothing but the horrified metaphysical apprehension of the existence of my body for the Others.34 Here, we face a central aspect concerning the relation between phobia and embodiment. First, the structure of phobia is interwoven with the structure of non-phobic existence. This much is clear in Sartre’s sense of ereuthophobia as “nothing but” a different kind of apprehension of my relation with Others. This relation is, of course, unwavering and beyond transcendence, but only now presented in a metaphysical guise as horrifying. Indeed, that Sartre refers to a “constant uneasiness” strengthens this bond between phobic and non-phobic existence, such that there is a continuous arc between each pole. In each case, uneasiness and horror mark two aspects of intersubjectivity, which, if there all along, are nevertheless manifest in varying ways. Here, too, Sartre draws our attention to the intercorporeal structure of phobia. To experience oneself as being phobic toward a particular thing or particular affect is to be phobic in the face of the Other. This is not a contingent aspect of affective existence, but is instead a structural feature of bodily subjectivity, such that we cannot conceive of the body-for-us without also considering the body-for-theOther, indeed Sartre goes as far to say that “the body-for-the-Other is the body-for-us.”35 In order to demonstrate this claim, we can turn toward the phenomenology of agoraphobia, and specifically, its relation to the spatiality of the look.

THE CASE OF “VINCENT” With agoraphobia, we are concerned with a particular type of being-in-the-world, which is resistant to the objective presentation of experience or data. How

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to begin with this set of experiences? If we generalize, we might say something about the body of the agoraphobe as both highly sensitized and highly constricted. In the constricted body, the agoraphobe carries himself through the world in such a way to minimize and restrict contact with others. Generalizing further, we could say that the constricted and sensitized body establishes a boundary, against which the Other is held at a distance. Being yet more specific we would proceed to describe a set of symptoms, mentioning here phenomena such as a pulsating heart, cold fever, ringing in the ear, nausea, tremors in the limbs, and so forth. All of this, however helpful, leads us only so far. After all, the body as heightened in its reception of symptoms and sensations is not peculiar to agoraphobia, and thus does not identify the specificity of the condition. To approach it, we must proceed by way of anecdotal fragments, each of which attests to a larger relationship that cannot be approached in its totality. In this, we will find our resources in the testimony of a “victim” of agoraphobia from 1919.36 The author of this testimony is named simply “Vincent,” and we must assume the anonymity of the text bears witness to the refusal of the subject to be seen by the Other, a point that links both the writing of agoraphobia with the body of agoraphobia. In each case, the alienation of “Vincent” is predicated on an inability to incorporate the Other within the spatiality of his bodily existence, and, indeed, go so far as to conceal the Other. We begin at the onset of Vincent’s illness. He reports that the condition was prefaced with a “coldness that produced a very unusual sort of sensation, or perhaps, a lack of sensation.”37 This confrontation with frail health at an early stage leaves our subject with a melancholic disposition and a heightened sense of danger. Around this time, Vincent encounters a tragedy. At the age of eleven, a friend of Vincent’s disappears, the presupposition being that he had drowned or been kidnapped.38 Sometime later, the body of the friend is found on a riverbank. But instead of being drowned, as was thought, the boy’s throat had been cut, and then dragged to the river afterward. Vincent is traumatized by the experience, and now suffers from an anxiety in certain spatial situations, not least the crest of hills where the symptoms of agoraphobia become acute. Thereafter, he avoids hilltops.39 In turn, this formative experience with anxiety and death spreads itself beyond hills, and now finds expression in “wide fields . . . of crowds of people, and later of wide streets and parks” and even “ugly architecture.” 40 Despite being amplified by certain places

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and situations, the dread remains there implicitly. In a chair, talking with a friend, he soon finds himself “gripping the arm of the chair with each hand. My toes curl in my shoes, and there is a sort of tenseness all over my muscles.” 41 For all this, the anxiety is never constant, but instead fluctuates in its intensity. Moreover, at times, certain things, such as darkness or a snowstorm, alleviate the anxiety “probably because one’s view is obstructed.” 42 For the same reasons, stormy days for him “stand out as bright spots in my life.”43 As for walking, it is manageable but only if he is carrying something such as a suitcase. Without such a prop, Vincent finds himself “suffer[ing] agony” in the very act of walking.44 The extent of this anxiety over walking is so great that when Vincent sees “a man hobbling past my house on crutches, a cripple for life . . . I actually envy him. At times I would gladly exchange places with the humblest day-laborer who walks un-afraid across the public square or saunters tranquilly over the viaduct on his way home after the day’s work.”45

THE LOOK OF THE OTHER As we turn critically to our case study, what is striking is precisely the lack of reference to the Other. For all his phenomenological clarity, the one thing Vincent fails to touch upon is the intersubjective dimension of his anxiety. This blind spot is perhaps not by chance. Indeed, perhaps this omission is even necessary insofar as it is consistent with his refusal to incorporate the Other into his existence, be it textually or corporeally. Yet if we return to his confession with a view of seeking the presence of the Other, either visibly or invisibly, then we find another layer of meaning embedded in the text, a layer that reveals in terms of what is not said. Far from absent, the look of the Other is there from the outset. From his fear of being alone, to the persistence of his anxiety even when in company on top of the hill, to his body recoiling when being seated in the company of the Other, and then onwards to the full blown fear of crowds he develops—in all this, the anxiety of Vincent takes as its point of departure the look of the Other. To appreciate this, it is necessary to insert the presence of Sartre in the midst of Vincent’s confession. Let us, then, think alongside Sartre’s phenomenological exploration of the experience of the Other. ÊÊÊ

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Sartre is in a public park. From where he is sitting, he observes another man passing by some benches.46 As this happens, Sartre reflects on his experience of the man as both man and object. How is this dual perception possible? It is clear that the man is not simply an object, and that alone. If that were the case, then, as Sartre suggests, his presence in the world “would be that of a purely additive type.”47 In other words, if he were to disappear, then there would be no consequences with respect to his relation to other objects. Of course, this is not the case. When we are confronted with the experience of a person entering our visual horizon, our experience of space alters, such that this new thing—the Other—becomes a center, around which my subjectivity now revolves, without at any point augmenting the objective aspects of space, as Sartre has it: “. . . the lawn remains two yards and twenty inches from him, but it is also as a lawn bound to him in a relation which at once both transcends distance and contains it.”48 What happens in this movement, is that the presence of the Other redefines the relational aspect of space: space becomes the province of another presence, and because of this intervention, “there is now an orientation which flees from me.”49 If there is a fundamental difference between my perception of a thing and my perception of another person, then these two poles are nevertheless mutually intertwining: the Other is also a thing, and this intervention into the world shifts my experience of spatiality. The key point that Sartre makes in this initial observation is that this reorientation of space is not affectively neutral, but instead carries with it a certain “element of disintegration.”50 As the Other comes into view, I experience myself as an object for them, thus altering my own experience of myself as a subject and my world. The presence of the Other is the presence of another kind of spatiality, a spatiality that obligates me to re-perceive all the objects within my immediate world, including myself. Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity thus takes as its point of departure the claim that my primordial experience of the world is a world precisely for me. It is my world insofar as derives from, belongs to, and orients itself around my gaze. That the Other alienates me from this world is only possible because of the special status attached to the Other’s look. For Sartre, this collision of self and Other is not a localized interaction, but instead attests to a “decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting.”51 As the Other imposes their look upon my own look, so the world shifts away from me, becoming, in Sartre’s characteristic formulation, a “kind of drain hole in the middle of its being.”52

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For all his emphasis on the view of the Other, Sartre’s account of the look does not reduce itself to a study of “the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction,” nor even to a straightforward account of intersubjectivity.53 If the look has a sensible or material expression to it, then this does not mean it requires an ocular gaze to instantiate it, less even an actual person. In an important move, and one that has a direct impact on our study of agoraphobia, Sartre extends the look beyond the boundaries of the body itself, writing how: The look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.54 How is it that the material world can embody the look of the Other, even if the Other him or herself is physically absent? When we are confronted with a lone house on top of a hill at dusk, the chill we might experience is not simply due to a certain set of contingent dimensions conspiring together to produce a ghoulish atmosphere. Rather, the impression of being looked at stems from a possibility that embeds itself in the materiality of the house, a possibility that cannot be reduced to the empirical situation in and of itself but instead attests to an invariant structure of intersubjectivity, whereby we must make a distinction between the look as something belonging to the eye and the eye that is represented in things other than itself, as Sartre has it: “the eye is not at first apprehended as a sensible organ of vision but as the support for the look.”55 In other words, because the look is ontologically primary to the eye as an organ, it thus becomes possible to detach the look from the eye, establishing in theory a look without eyes. That the look is not reducible to the eyes means, then, they are an organ of expression among other such organs of expression, be it abandoned houses or dense forests. In this respect, the question of the Other for Sartre is not defined simply as a relation between myself and another person. It is also a question of my relation to an alterity that can embed itself in things more broadly, thus assuming a pervasive and all encompassing status, which is not only a presence in the world, but also an “omnipresence.”56

AGORAPHOBIA AND THE LOOK In all this, there are significant implications for our study of agoraphobia, to which we will now return. We see already that Sartre’s account of the look

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is marked by at least two central features. One, the look is not neutral, but instead inscribed with value. To perceive the Other is to experience oneself being looked at by the Other, be it the Other as another person or the Other as an ambiguous if not unknowable presence lurking in the world more broadly. Moreover, to be looked at is to experience oneself in a particular way: no longer a subject of perception, but instead a perceived object, and thereby to recognize that “I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I can not in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense—in short, that I am seen.”57 To be seen is to be seen from a perspective outside of myself, a perspective whose spatiality, perception, and values do not simply disorient me, but actually disintegrate my experience of being a subject. In this sense, to be seen is to necessarily experience myself as a stranger to myself, to which I have no control over, and, in the case of agoraphobia, respond to with anxiety.58 Let us return to Vincent’s blind spot. Vincent is there, reflecting on his anxiety, calm and poised. On first glance, it looks as though he is more or less an autonomous subject, reflecting on his relation to his own anxiety, as if it were a thing of the world. Throughout, there is a tendency to reduce his anxiety to something to be understood solely in physical terms (to be cured at times by a “vigorous rubbing of my body with rough towels,” or, to provide an explanatory context for the condition in terms of something predestined: “I was born with an active, nervous temperament.”59 As we have also seen, aside from this objectification of his anxiety, the complementary tendency is to situate his disorder in a narrative. But such explanations, although valuable, provide only half the picture so long as we overlook the role others play in the structure of Vincent’s anxiety. By situating the Sartrean framework in the context of our study of agoraphobia, we can see how certain idiosyncratic anxieties in Vincent’s report gain a thematic clarity when considered from the perspective of the look and the accompanying desire to conceal the look. Let us take a look at two examples, each of which demonstrates in an especially vivid way the structure of the look: Later, perhaps a year or so, I commenced having a dread of wide fields, especially when the fields consisted of pasture land and were level, with the grass cropped short like the grass on a well-kept lawn.60

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I dread going out on water in a boat, especially if the surface is smooth; I much prefer to have the waves rolling high.61 From land to sea, we follow Vincent in his melancholy journey from a horizon of smooth space to a landscape marked by edges and rolling heights. Given his nervous temperament, why would he prefer being out at sea in stormy waves to smooth sailing? Why, for that matter, would a level and maintained field induce anxiety whereas a field of uncut grass would not? In each of these situations, we have to position ourselves in the place of the agoraphobe. In this gesture of placing ourselves within a visual horizon, we see a certain commonality between the seascape and the field. Namely, both are spaces of exposure that present themselves as fundamentally homogenous in their character. Without the presence of an object to break the homogeneity of the view—be it in the form of a lone tree or in the form of a tumultuous wave— space assumes the impression of being infinite, whilst the subject in the midst of that world becomes the center of a look that cannot yet be placed other than in the form(lessness) of anxiety. Because of this lack of definite features, much less a place to conceal oneself in, there is no place to position oneself in relation to and thus in opposition to. Lacking a place to be concealed, the Other is both everywhere and nowhere. Indeed, the absence of Other in Vincent’s text, and more specifically in these two spatial illustrations, is entirely consistent with the omnipresence of the Other. In both the seascape and the open field, the anxiety at stake concerns the non-localizable look of the Other. In the absence of a place to hide, the Other is permeated through the world, and spatiality itself becomes the medium through which this permeation of otherness takes place. In and through space, the agoraphobe defines his relation to the Other.62 Here, it is not a question of homogenous space as being the site of a multiplicity of looks, as if Vincent were contending with several different eyes gazing at him from nowhere. What is exposed is not the possibility of other human beings empirically lurking within the sea and the field, with each of those beings directing their attention to the solitude of our agoraphobe. Vincent’s anxiety on the calm seas and in the open field concerns an inability to integrate alterity into his bodily subjectivity. In both examples, the phenomena of homogenous space expresses an all consuming threat to the stability of the agoraphobe. The Other is everywhere, embedded not only in regions of the world that render the agoraphobe ill-at-home in the world, embedded even less in the visual gaze of another person, but now

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constitutive of the totality of the world itself. Without darkness and without division—without a place to hide behind and within—the spatiality of the world becomes nothing less than the mask of alterity. More than an incidental gesture, this theme of concealment, darkness, and shadows runs throughout the text, with each illustration attesting to Vincent’s desire to constrict the look of Other. We are told, for example, how he feels better “in the evening partly because the darkness seems to have a quieting effect on me.”63 As we have also seen, for him, snowstorms and storms produce a paradoxically calming effect precisely because “one’s view is obstructed.”64 In fact, despite his professed love of storms and waves, his ideal place is “a wood, where there is much variety in the trees and plenty of underbrush, with here and there low hills and little valleys, and especially along a winding brook.”65 These rich examples serve as a compressed overview of the agoraphobe’s relationship to spatiality. The view obstructed is not simply that of empty space, nor is it an anxiety directed toward the objective properties of space itself, as if those properties could be detached from the Other that inhabits space. Rather, the look of the Other is always already embedded in the world, but nevertheless revealing itself in altering ways depending on the particular way in which spatiality appears for the subject. This is why the expressive role of space is never an incidental aspect of our relation to the Other, be it for the agoraphobe or the non-agoraphobe. In each case, there is a specificity in our relation to space that reveals the place and the absence of the Other. Thus, if there were waves for Vincent to hide in or grass to position himself in relation to, the Other would find their place. Whether or not the Other would still inspire a sense of anxiety is less important than the fact that the Other has a place in the first instance. Once in place, Vincent is able to establish a relationship with the world, such that he is able to “conceal . . . the disease . . . most cunningly.”66 This insistence on concealing his anxiety, as if it were an accident in an otherwise prosperous existence, is not only manifest during anxiety itself, but also possesses him throughout his life, such that by the end of his confession, Vincent is seeking a way to justify himself according to contingent social values: “My credit is good at the banks. But I have deliberately told lies to avoid embarrassing situations and have even changed my plans to have my lies ‘come true’ . . . I have never been refused a policy by any life insurance company.”67 This final attempt at normalizing his existence in accordance with an imagined set of social values marks the natural extension of Vincent’s concealment of the other person as Other

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by filling the gap of the unknowability of the look with the knowability of a defined set of values. This veiling of the Other serves to contain and constrict the anxiety accompanying the “decentralization of the world” central to any account of intersubjectivity and alterity.68

NOTES The research was supported by a Marie Curie grant (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF 624968), which is herein gratefully acknowledged. My thanks to Dorothée Legrand, the editors of this volume, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper. 1. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996); Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes. (New York & London: Routledge, 2012). 2. C.f. Dylan Trigg. “Bodily Moods and Unhomely Environments: The Hermeneutics of Agoraphobia and the Spirit of Place” in Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics. Eds. Forrest Clingerman, Martin Drenthen, Brian Treanor, and David Utsler. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013b). 3. A note on terminology is required. In this chapter, the term “other” has multiple but interrelated meanings. Consistent with Sartre’s usage, “the Other” refers in large to other people. But it is important to note that this usage of “the Other” as referring to other people does not exhaust the meaning of the term. While there is no doubt that Sartre privileges “the Other” as involving an intersubjective structure, at stake in the notion of “the Other” is the very otherness of “the Other.” What this entails is an ambiguity between otherness and “the Other”—an ambiguity that reveals to us the significance of intersubjective relations in the first place. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes. (New York & London: Routledge, 1998). 5. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 258. 6. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 257. 7. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255. 8. Alongside Sartre, the role Merleau-Ponty plays in conceptualizing the relation between self and other is vital. What Merleau-Ponty brings to the debate on intersubjectivity is an emphasis on the primordial and pre-personal unity between self and other, which is at odds with Sartre’s accent on alienation

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and mastery. Merleau-Ponty arguably offers a more convincing account of intersubjectivity, in that he begins not a thematic level, as Sartre does, but at a genetic level with the body. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, intersubjectivity is better understood as intercorporeality. The implication of this is that from the outset, our experience of the world is formed in and through our relation with others, such that to understand our affective and structural relation to the world, we need in the first instance to understand how that relation is mediated through others. For all that, in the present chapter, our focus remains on Sartre rather than Merleau-Ponty. The reason for this is twofold. One, a separate treatment of Merleau-Ponty and agoraphobia can be fruitfully pursued elsewhere—cf. Trigg, Dylan. “The Body of the Other: Intercorporeality and the Phenomenology of Agoraphobia,” Continental Philosophy Review, 46(3) 2013a: 413–429; Dylan Trigg. “Bodily Moods and Unhomely Environments: The Hermeneutics of Agoraphobia and the Spirit of Place” (Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, edited by Forrest Clingerman, Martin Drenthen, Brian Treanor, and David Utsler. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013b). Two, to include a discussion of Merleau-Ponty alongside Sartre would breach the limits and scope of the current chapter, and risk doing an injustice to both philosophers. 9. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 265. 10. Terry Knapp. Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie” with Commentary, trans. Michael Schumacher. (New York: University Press of America, 1988), 1. 11. Knapp, Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie,” 74. 12. Knapp, Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie,” 67. 13. Knapp, Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie,” 40. 14. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 304. 15. Edmund Husserl . Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Andre Schuwer (Heidelberg: Springer, 1990). 16. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 304. 17. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 304. 18. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 304. 19. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 331. 20. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 332. 21. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 334. 22. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 335. 23. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 337. 24. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 337.

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25. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 337. 26. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 345. 27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 346. 28. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351. 29. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351. 30. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 352. 31. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 352. 32. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 352. 33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 353. 34. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 353. 35. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 353. 36. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” The American Journal of Psychology. 30(3) 1919: 295–299. 37. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 296. 38. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 296. 39. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 297. 40. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 297. 41. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 42. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 43. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 44. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 45. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 299. 46. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 254. 47. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 254. 48. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 254. 49. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 254. 50. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255. 51. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255. 52. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 256. 53. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 257. 54. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 57. 55. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 258. 56. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 353. 57. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 259. 58. Here, let us note in passing a certain thematic partiality to Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity framed by alienation. While there is no doubt that a case can be made for Sartre as allowing for experiences of intimacy and love, there is no doubt that his paradigm example is that of the objectifying

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gaze. Patently this is problematic given that he tends to characterize experience in advance of considering it phenomenologically. Nevertheless, Sartre’s views assume an especially incisive and relevant role in relation to agoraphobia, where the other is taken either as a trusted presence, or, otherwise as a presence that serves to destabilize and alienate the subject. For a critical reading of Sartre and the look, see Dolezal (2012). 59. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 296. 60. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 297. 61. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 62. On this point, Vincent’s apparent disdain for “ugly architecture” can be read as much as an expression of aesthetic taste, as it can what the architecture, in its specificity, symbolizes for Vincent’s relation with others. Here, we can take “ugliness” as a judgment upon space that opens itself up to being seen, whereas we take “beauty” as space that enclosed upon itself, allowing Vincent to retreat and withdraw into a space defined by counters and shades. 63. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 64. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 65. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 298. 66. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 299. 67. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim,” 299. 68. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255.

REFERENCES Dolezal, Luna. “Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,” Sartre Studies International. 18(1) 2012: 9–28. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambaugh. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996). Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by A. Schuwer. (Heidelberg: Springer, 1990).

Knapp, Terry. Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie” with Commentary. Translated by M. Schumacher. (New York: University Press of America, 1988). Lovecraft, H.P. Necronomicon. (London: Gollancz, 2008). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D. Landes. (New York & London: Routledge, 2012).

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by H. Barnes. (New York & London: Routledge, 1998). Trigg, Dylan. “The Body of the Other: Intercorporeality and the Phenomenology of Agoraphobia.” Continental Philosophy Review 46(3) 2013a: 413-429. Trigg, Dylan. “Bodily Moods and Unhomely Environments: The Hermeneutics of Agoraphobia and the Spirit of Place.” In Forrest Clingerman, Martin Drenthen, Brian Treanor, and David Utsler (eds.), Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013b. “Vincent. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim.” The American Journal of Psychology (30)3 1919: 295–299.

CHAPTER 13

Intercorporeal Expression and the Subjectivity of Dementia Lisa Folkmarson Käll

[P]eople with dementia have to be understood in terms of relationships, not because this is all that is left to them, but because this is characteristic of all of our lives.1 —J. Hughes, S. Louw, and S. Sabat

INTRODUCTION Different forms of dementia, and in particular Alzheimer’s disease, present us with perhaps some of the most dreaded conditions related to aging. Western culture and popular discourse is dominated by the terrifying notion that conditions of dementia lead to an unrelenting dissolution or loss of self and identity, a mental death before physical death.2 In current dementia research, however, this view of people with dementia in terms of a disappearance of the person and loss of selfhood has been seriously challenged and there is now recognition that the person afflicted with dementia still remains a person and retains vital aspects of selfhood. The self is understood as inherently relational and attention has been drawn to different ways in which identity and selfhood are maintained through interaction with others.3 While this shift of focus in dementia research entails a significant improvement for understandings of how conditions of dementia affect selfhood or subjectivity, it also calls for careful consideration of how to understand subjectivity and what it means to be a self in the world and in relation to others. In the following I will take some steps toward exploring the subjectivity of dementia and at the same time also consider the relational ground of subjectivity in more general 359

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terms. More specifically I will discuss the notion of intercorporeality as it has been articulated in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing on its operative and formative function in the constitution of subjectivity. I will bring out intercorporeal becoming of individual embodiment as a perpetual process of expression in which embodied selves continuously emerge in statu nascendi, in a state of ongoing birth. This process is, I argue, one of alteration, in which the boundaries of embodied selves are drawn and redrawn, reinforced, challenged, established and re-established in reciprocal, but not symmetrical, intercorporeal exchange. I will begin by turning to Kristin Zeiler’s analysis of a case of joint activity in dementia care as giving rise to what she calls intercorporeal capabilities. In line with Zeiler, I will suggest that all capabilities are intercorporeal in so far as individuals are intertwined with and continuously become who they are in relation to one another, rather than atomistic entities independent of and only externally related to each other. By contesting conceptualizations of the self in terms of atomistic autonomy, the notion of intercorporeality offers an important resource for approaching subjectivity in relation to dementia. Furthermore, cases of interaction in dementia, I argue, can provide a beam through which a foundational bond between embodied selves and the world grounding all interaction may be brought to light. Indeed, as Hughes, Louw, and Sabat write in the passage I quote above, the reason people with dementia are best understood in terms of relationships is not that this is all that remains to them but, in fact, is what characterizes all of human existence. Cases of dementia can thus say something of general structures of human existence by displaying such structures in magnified form.

INTERCORPOREAL CAPABILITIES In a discussion of personhood in relation to dementia, Kristin Zeiler draws attention to what the notion of intercorporeality can make possible in terms of capabilities of expression and interaction.4 Zeiler is mainly concerned with what she calls intense face-to-face intercorporeality, which designates a situation in which “self and other are intensively aware, connected and sensitive to each other” and she distinguishes this form of intercorporeality from primordial intercorporeality, which designates a basic bodily openness between self and other and which “serves as a basis for the self as constituted by its social relations with others.”5 Such primordial intercorporeality is thus foundational

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for the face-to-face intercorporeality Zeiler explicitly discusses. Through a phenomenological analysis of a film-clip showing a case of musical interaction in dementia care, Zeiler suggests that such interaction of joint activities and intense face-to-face intercorporeality can give rise to intercorporeal capabilities. The film-clip shows the therapist Naomi Feil initiating conversation with eighty-seven-year-old Gladys Wilson, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and described as virtually nonverbal, who is sitting with eyes closed moving her hand rhythmically to the armrest of her chair and also moving her legs slightly.6 Feil starts singing Christian music, which she knows has been of importance to Mrs. Wilson throughout her life and Mrs. Wilson attunes her hand movements to Feil’s singing. As she gets into the music Mrs. Wilson then takes the lead and starts clapping her hand faster and more forcefully, upon which Feil follows the pace of Mrs. Wilson’s beat, singing louder and faster. As the song comes to an end, Feil starts singing, “He’s got the whole world” and this time Mrs. Wilson takes turns with Feil and responds “in his hands” in a whispering voice. They finish the song together and Mrs. Wilson slows down returning to the rhythmic clapping of the armrest of her chair.7 Based on her analysis of the joint musical activity of Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil shown in the film-clip, Zeiler argues that by expressing themselves through posture, touch, eye contact and movement, bodily subjects “create a shared space of dynamic intercorporeal engagement” in which, what she calls, intercorporeal capabilities can be brought into being, such as capabilities of singing or engaging in a rhythm.8 Such capabilities, she writes, “are realized within the relation between a feature of the world, such as the qualities and structure of [a] piece of music, and self and other who express and make the musical piece together.”9 Further, intercorporeal capabilities would not exist outside of a specific interaction and shared space and are therefore in Zeiler’s contention better understood as “properties of the self-other-world interaction” rather than of the separate individuals involved. Even though the joint musical activity between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil is certainly in part made possible by each of their previously formed intercorporeal memories of how to interact with others in specific situations and activities, Zeiler stresses how the very activity itself also makes it possible for them to express themselves in ways they would not be able to outside this interaction. It can perhaps not be stressed enough that the case of Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil is clearly and unmistakably asymmetrical, and this is also something Zeiler is careful to point out. In sharp contrast to Feil, Mrs. Wilson is no longer able to do things she could in the past; due to her condition

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of Alzheimer’s disease, and also in part due to her advanced age, she requires everyday care and assistance. Feil furthermore enters into the interaction with the explicit therapeutic intention of not only engaging in the musical activity with Mrs. Wilson but also activating her. This intention on Feil’s part is far from insignificant as it is what sets the scene and determines the direction of their interaction. Zeiler makes the point that intercorporeal capabilities, springing forth in self-other joint activities, “enable individuals who cannot express themselves without others’ support to do so in interactions.”10 So, while certain capabilities, as Zeiler argues, seem only to be there when the two women act together, this appears in her analysis to apply primarily, indeed perhaps even exclusively, to Gladys Wilson, whose ability to communicate and overtly express herself through the music is at least in part made possible by the shared space of intense interaction with Feil as well as by Feil’s initial direction. Zeiler does not discuss whether or not also Feil’s capabilities are dependent on the interaction between the two women, and this question is indeed not the concern in the film-clip. Instead, the film is explicitly designed to demonstrate the awakening of dormant capabilities in Mrs. Wilson through a specific therapeutic engagement. The case Zeiler makes for the emergence of intercorporeal capabilities in joint activity is convincing and can arguably be of great importance for clinical practice not only in dementia care but also more generally. Here, however, I want to shift focus and stress the idea that there are in fact no capabilities that are not essentially intercorporeal. Further, while being essentially intercorporeal, capabilities are at the same time also expressed and enacted by singular subjects who are formed in intercorporeal engagement. I share Zeiler’s contention that the film-clip of Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil demonstrates how capabilities emerge in and through a joint activity and shared situation, but what I find most remarkable about the film-clip is not what happens in the specific interaction between these two women but, rather, the extent to which the interaction in this particular situation in fact reflects everyday interaction. What makes the interaction between the two women so exceptional is in my mind the specific conditions under which this interaction takes place, namely those of Mrs. Wilson’s advanced illness and Feil’s therapeutic intention. While expression and communication are indeed remarkable phenomena in their own right, I argue that in their remarkability the expression and communication shown in the film-clip are in some respects quite unremarkable in the sense that they demonstrate, in a magnified way, how everyday interaction and communication come about.

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Even though we do not for the most part in normal everyday interaction need to be brought into a specific situation in order to express and enact previously formed capabilities, such as appears to be the case with Mrs. Wilson, these capabilities are nevertheless situated and formed in relation with others and a surrounding world. There are undeniably highly significant differences between the specific interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil, characterized by asymmetrical conditions, and interaction between subjects assumed to have similar conditions and capabilities. However, at the same time, the interaction between the two women in the film-clip in which each, given their very different conditions, responds to the other and to their shared situation, is in my contention in important respects not different from much other interaction between self and other. In order to make the point that all capabilities are intercorporeal and that the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil in certain respects reflects ordinary everyday interaction, I will here turn to what Zeiler terms primordial intercorporeality, that is, the basic corporeal openness between self and other in and through which both self and other come into being. Like Zeiler I want to emphasize the formative force of intercorporeality but in addition to her analysis I want to draw attention to intercorporeality in terms of a corporeal connection conditioning the intense face-to-face intercorporeality she describes.11

CONSTITUTIVE INTERCORPOREALITY Intercorporeality is, as Ann Cahill notes, a theme that runs throughout the work of many thinkers in Continental philosophy, such as Nietzsche, Husserl, Levinas, de Beauvoir, Derrida, and Nancy, even though it is mostly associated with the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.12 In Merleau-Ponty’s work, the notion intercorporeality or intercorporeity (intercorporeité) appears in the later writings to describe a constitutive interconnection between bodies that are embedded in and intertwined with a shared world.13 By focusing on the dynamic social, cultural, material and historical situatedness, and interrelatedness of embodiment, intercorporeality deepens the phenomenological notion of the lived body, intended to capture the body as it is subjectively lived and experienced in contrast to the body as an object for natural science. In Merleau-Ponty’s work, intercorporeality designates the ways in which bodies are not only interconnected with one another but also formed and

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emerging as singular and separate bodies in their interconnection. They are furthermore embedded in and formed in interaction with a shared world. An intercorporeal conception of bodies shifts focus from individual bodies to the constitutive relations between them. The notion challenges ideas of the body as a self-enclosed discrete entity with distinct boundaries and instead draws attention to the continuous becoming of bodies and bodily boundaries, stressing a corporeal interconnectedness as the very ground for the individuation of bodies. Intercorporeality in fact constitutes the condition for the singularity of bodies; singular lived bodies come into being as boundaries between them are established, reinforced, challenged and continuously altered. From a philosophical perspective of intercorporeality, bodies are not, as Ann Cahill writes, conceptualized “as atomistic entities, with clearly marked borders” but, rather, as coming into being simultaneously with one another “as the incarnate manifestations of social, political, and personal relations, and as the conditions of possibility of those relations.”14 However, it is important to emphasize that an intercorporeal understanding of bodies in no way completely collapses the boundaries or differences between them so that they become one body. Rather, such an understanding draws attention to bodies both as going beyond the surface of their own skin and as bounded and singular, continuously receiving their boundaries and singularity in intercorporeal relation with the world, other bodies, histories, institutions, technologies and fields of meaning. As intercorporeal, lived bodies or embodied selves thus come into being through continuous differentiation and alteration. Further, this process of differentiation is not only one in which the embodied subject differentiates herself from others and her surrounding world but also and at the same time a process of self-differentiation as her being is a continuous becoming in which she goes beyond herself.15 The intercorporeally constituted lived body is in Merleau-Ponty’s work described in terms of ambiguity as a unity of subject and object, characterized by the capacity of so called double sensations. It is a unity of sensible and sentient being, “a being of two leaves,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees and touches them.”16 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty illustrates the phenomenon and experience of double sensation with the figure of the two touching hands; “when I touch my right hand with my left,” he writes, “my right hand, as an object, has the strange property of being able to feel too.”17 This self-affecting structure of sensing and sensed implies that when I touch myself, I also touch myself touching. The two aspects of my one body, writes Merleau-Ponty, present “an ambiguous

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set-up” of alternating roles, so that the touched hand becomes the touching hand and vice versa. Although, it is the same lived body that manifests itself both as sensing and as sensed, these two aspects of the body are never simultaneous with one another. Instead there is “a sort of dehiscence,” what Merleau-Ponty terms écart, between the touching and the touched that “opens my body in two.”18 Embodied self-reflection, he writes, “always miscarries at the last moment” and “coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization” so that when the touched hand starts touching, the touching hand correspondingly alters into the role of touched.19 The phenomenon of double sensation is thus a matter of both drawing together and distancing and a matter of being open to myself in such a way that I distance myself from myself. The drawing together of touching and touched, Merleau-Ponty writes, “at the same time takes away and holds at a distance, so that I touch myself only by escaping from myself.”20 Sensing oneself is not “to reach oneself, it is on the contrary to escape oneself, to be ignorant of oneself, the self in question is by divergence (d’écart).”21 The divergence between the body as sensible and the body as sentient is described in terms of an opening that “is spanned by the total being of my body,” splitting my body in two without sacrificing its unity of being “the junction of the for itself and the in itself.”22 It is a divergence of the same that expresses the other dimension of this same, namely its inner openness and space for self-differentiation.23 The clearing of écart splits my body into touching and touched and reveals its reversible structure as a structure of self-affection in which an element of otherness is brought to light. The self-sensing of my lived body is an experience in which I encounter my own exteriority and situatedness in a world that I share with others, and in which it becomes clear that in order for me to be an experiencing subject I must also be experienceable to myself as well as to others. Merleau-Ponty puts this point nicely when saying that “to feel one’s body is also to feel its aspect for the other,” namely, that it can be perceived as visible and tangible in a shared world.24 He insists that my first-person experience of my own embodiment involves the experience of being intersubjectively accessible precisely as embodied. Lived embodiment, he writes, reveals with clarity that the order of the subjectively experienced and that of the intersubjectively accessible call for one another and cannot be kept in complete separation.25 I experience myself in a way that anticipates both the way I can experience another and the way another can experience me. My own embodied self-awareness is at the same time a disclosure of myself

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as intersubjectively accessible to the external other and my encounter with the other is a revelation of my basic openness. There is no hierarchical ordering between the experience of the external other and the experience of myself as other; the two are rather simultaneous and there is no self without the other, nor is there an other without self.26 The description of the lived body in terms of self-affection and self-differentiation, incorporating a moment of otherness within and as a constitutive element of identity convincingly does away with conceptualizations of the body as an isolated object and instead brings to light its structure as essentially intercorporeal. Intercorporeality is furthermore not limited to the bodily interconnection between self and other but extends to include the shared world in which both are situated and of which both are part. Merleau-Ponty speaks of a bodily pre-conscious possession of the world and of the body as flowing over into the world “whose schema it bears in itself.”27 One’s own lived body, he writes, is immediately present to the self not as “an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space” but instead as a system, a corporeal or postural schema, in which the parts are “enveloped in each other” and which is “a total awareness of one’s posture in the intersensory world.”28 While the corporeal schema is a unity of the lived body, it is not, Merleau-Ponty insists, limited to being a unity of the different parts and organs of the body but refers rather to the unity of the lived body with the world and space in which it is situated and embedded, including its relations with other lived bodies. It is through my bodily situation that I grasp external space as my “body is not in space like things” but instead “inhabits or haunts space.”29 The body schema, Merleau-Ponty writes, “is finally a way of stating that my body is in-the-world,” “not only as a system of present positions, but besides, and thereby, as an open system of an infinite number of equivalent positions.”30 The total awareness provided by the body schema thus involves an experience of one’s own lived body as spatially and temporally situated in a social, cultural, historical and material world. This situatedness of the lived body is not limited to the actual here and now but, rather, extends into an open-ended horizon of potentialities for being.31 By stressing the openness of body schemata, Merleau-Ponty puts focus on the volatile character and continuous becoming of embodied subjectivity. He is also careful to point out that the body schema, even though it is “a total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world,” is neither a complete awareness, nor a fixed totality that can be grasped and described in objective terms. He famously argues that the spatiality of the body is not like that

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of external objects but rather a dynamic and active “spatiality of situation,” drawing attention to the intimate and constitutive interrelation between body and world and how this interrelation involves an ongoing reconstitution of bodily space.32 The onset of a throbbing migraine for instance will most likely make external stimuli in the world, such as sound and light, appear in different ways and thereby entail a reconstitution of bodily space, perhaps imposing limitations on one’s comportment and expression in the world. In a similar way, the way the world and others in the world appear to me and ground my perception, movement and action will come to govern the formation of my body schema and my experience of myself and of my possibilities in the world. This close constitutive interrelation between the embodied self, the world and others, in short, the formative situatedness of the self, is what Zeiler captures in her analysis of the emergence of intercorporeal capabilities in the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil. The film-clip of their interaction shows how the presence of Feil involves a reconstitution of Mrs. Wilson’s bodily space, thereby allowing her to engage in the music with Feil. While Mrs. Wilson’s cognitive, as well as bodily, decline and her confinement to a nursing home impose limitations on her ways of being in the world, the presence of another person engaging with her movements and expressions, as well as offering her own, opens possibilities and options for action. Both limitations and new possibilities involve reconfiguration of bodily space and redrawing of the boundaries of body schemata. As intercorporeal, body schemata are thus continuously formed, transformed and expressed in dynamic exchange between bodies of different kind and differently situated. Boundaries of body schemata are configured and reconfigured as different elements, aspects, objects, values and other bodies are incorporated into one’s own lived body and body schema. Body schemata do not end at the surface of the skin but instead contribute to what we might call processes of surfacing through which bodily surfaces and bodily morphologies are produced, as boundaries between bodies are established in intercorporeal exchange. This is something we can recognize well in everyday lived experience of engaging with others and our surrounding world. When sensing the world, I often cannot tell exactly where my body ends and the world begins; rather than sensing the meeting point between my body and the world, which is also the point where my body begins, as a sharply drawn line, it is made present as the point where sensation terminates and begins again. Imagine for instance walking on the beach feeling the softness of warm wet sand against the soles of your feet and then suddenly

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stepping on a sharp object buried in the sand. Such an experience captures the ambiguous boundaries between bodies (in this case, feet, sand, and sharp objects) and the materialization of bodily surfaces in relation to one another.33 As I step on the sharp object, both the surface of my skin and that of the world, specifically the sharp object, are, to speak with Sara Ahmed, “felt as ‘being there’ in the first place.”34 In this experience, the interrelation between the body and the world is unveiled as a relation of mutual becoming in which both the body and the world are given birth through their encounter. On the one hand, the lived body makes the world appear as the world unfolds underneath the sensing body. On the other hand, and simultaneously, the lived body emerges from within the depths of the world.35 The embodied subject, writes Merleau-Ponty, “undergoes a continued birth” with the continuous unfolding of its situation in the world, and the world is in the same manner of coming into being, described as an “unfinished task” that “lacks a conclusion.”36 The world of perception is an indubitable given, but it is a given which unfolds in relation to my sensible and sentient body (and to its unfolding) and which emerges over time.

INTERCORPOREALITY AS A RELATION OF EXPRESSION The intercorporeality of bodies may thus be understood as a weave of impressing and being impressed upon, of offering, receiving, resisting, and coming into being. Intercorporeality is a formative and dynamic structure, and the foundational relation between embodied selves is an ongoing process of becoming who one is through alteration. Self and other, writes Merleau-Ponty, “are like organs of one single intercorporeality;” the “constitution of others does not come after that of the body” but instead “others and my body are born together from the original ecstasy.”37 This original ecstasy, from which singular bodies are born together, is, as Scott Marratto points out, how Merleau-Ponty describes the event of expression and the intercorporeal relation between bodies is in his work conceptualized in terms of a relation of expression.38 Here, I will turn to some of Merleau-Ponty’s writings on expression in order to further explicate the intercorporeal constitution of self and other. I will focus on expression as a founding event in which something emerges as something and meaning is in statu nascendi.39 I will also, in the section following, return to the film clip of the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil and consider

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this in light of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of expression as a dynamic structure of continuous becoming. The phenomenon of expression holds a central place throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work and is key for his reconceptualization of subjectivity.40 Subjecting a literal understanding of expression in terms of a pressing out or making public of inner thoughts, feelings, and experiences to careful and critical analysis, he insists that there is no meaning that precedes an event of expression or that expression simply translates into gestures and words. Instead, each singular expression is in each moment that which it expresses.41 This identity is perhaps most clearly brought out in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the expressive body. In the case of the lived body, writes Merleau-Ponty, the sign does not convey its significance “in the way that stripes indicate rank, or a house-number a house,” but, instead, “it is filled with it; it is, in a way, what it signifies.”42 Human embodied existence does not indicate any hidden affection by its expressive behavior, but, rather, the body is at all times what it expresses. When I for instance see someone smiling or laughing I do not look for her joy as a psychic fact hidden behind her smile, but, instead, her smiling face is the joy itself experienced by both of us in different ways and from different perspectives. Merleau-Ponty even goes further, arguing that bodily gestures and expressive behavior constitute a subject’s way of being in the world. Subjective experience is the body in a certain manner of being and apprehended in a certain situation. “The expression of sadness,” he writes, “is a way of being sad.”43 Thus, it does not suffice to say merely that my subjective experience of sadness (although not its quality) is directly visible in my expression of sadness. My body in its expressive being must also be recognized as the way in which I experience my feelings and emotional states of mind. Without the burning tears in my eyes that make me see the world in a new way, or the lump in my throat and shivering lips that keep me from speaking, my sadness would be experienced differently. The identity between an expression and what is being expressed (such as a gesture and an experience) does not, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, entail a reduction of one to the other. Instead, he offers an understanding of this identity (this unity of the expressive experiential lived body) in terms of self-relationality and as containing an element of otherness or difference within itself. Any separation between what we might call interiority and exteriority is secondary to an original unity but this unity nevertheless encompasses a seed of self-differentiation or non-coincidence, which cannot be fixed in terms of secondary separations.44 The event of expression, which

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is thoroughly intercorporeal, thus gives birth to a difference or gap between an “inner world” of experiencing subjectivity and an “outer world” of the intersubjectively accessible expressive body. Interiority, the subjective sense of who we are, is always experienced through our relations with others and the world. It is not, writes Merleau-Ponty, because an inner thought or experience on the one hand and an outer gesture or language on the other are separate parallel realms that we express ourselves, as if a making public from one to the other. Instead, he describes the event of expression as that founding event constituting them as separate and parallel orders. Merleau-Ponty identifies a weakness of parallelisms and dualisms in that they provide themselves “with correspondences between the two orders” and thereby conceal “the operations which produced these correspondences by encroachment to begin with.”45 The difference between experience and its expression is instead a function of the event of expression itself, in which corresponding processes of interiorization and exteriorization come about. The “inner” emerges in intimate connection with the “outer,” which is equally an outcome of the event of expression. Accounting for how a secondary separation between interiority and exteriority is brought about, Merleau-Ponty draws attention to an original unity that contains its own element of self-differentiation. While Merleau-Ponty insists that there is no meaning preceding the event of expression, it is important to point out that he also stresses the presence of an intention or will to express. We do experience ourselves as having something to say and as more or less successfully expressing our intentions, thoughts, and feelings. The will to express is informed and limited by already reiterated expressions, which to a greater or lesser extent cut through and alter my intentions. I cannot will without willing something precisely as something. There is a necessary presence of meaning, which arises anew in every moment of expression. This meaning stems from me as an expressive self and is solicited by the world in which I am embedded but it at the same time stems from the world and is solicited by me. The meaning of an expression is not merely the meaning I intend, nor is it its particular use on any one particular occasion but must instead be understood in terms of the rules and conventions, which govern its use on all occasions. The intention with which I express something is, to speak with Waldenfels, a “‘broken’ intention, broken like the stick in the water, immersed in an alien medium.”46 My intention depends on “what the words want to say.”47 Merleau-Ponty quite forcefully states that simply by virtue of being in the world “we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.”48 It is,

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in fact, by being condemned to meaning that we are able to do or say anything at all. I express myself by intentionally or unintentionally taking up meanings in which I dwell and which in part define who I am, and I make these meanings my own through expressing them. I reiterate meaning simply by being in the world but this reiteration is in each moment also a creation through which established meanings are altered and re-established. Merleau-Ponty does not subordinate subjectivity to an overarching structure but, rather, offers an account of expression that preserves spontaneity and creativity. Acts of expression inscribe the expressive body within a system of expression while at the same time resisting its complete enclosure within that system. Meaning can thus be reduced neither to the intention with which something is expressed, nor to the established form of expression already carrying a meaning. Rather, meaning is the totality of what is expressed and as it arises in the event of expression, it arises as ever new and at the same time already there. The meaning of expressive gestures is, writes Merleau-Ponty, a meaning in genesis.49 The notion of expression is in his articulation, as Silvia Stoller points out, “by its very definition the realization of meaning in the act of ‘expression.’”50 Meaning is in statu nascendi, that is, it is not a stable value but something that is continually constituted and “comes into existence at the same time as it is produced.”51 The expressive body as intercorporeally constituted continuously emerges anew, expressive of meaning in statu nascendi.

SITUATED EXPRESSION In light of this understanding of expression as a founding event in which meaning is in statu nascendi, let us return to the film-clip of the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil. As we recall, and following Zeiler’s reading, the clip demonstrates how the joint musical activity between the women gives rise to intercorporeal capabilities that seem to enable Gladys Wilson to express herself in ways she shows no signs of being able to do by herself outside the interaction. Given Mrs. Wilson’s condition of cognitive decline as well as the description of her as virtually nonverbal, it is quite easy to read the interaction between the two women as solely one of Mrs. Wilson being helped to expression by Feil. While this aspect is certainly important in their encounter, and part of the intention with which it is initiated, I want to stress the importance of not reducing the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil to being only about the dependence of the former and

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the enabling role of the latter. While not denying the limited conditions of Mrs. Wilson due to her illness, her expression in the encounter with Feil should not in my contention be understood simply in terms of something within her that lies dormant and is awoken and brought out in communication with Feil. Instead, what comes to expression is her being as becoming; she becomes who she is through her intercorporeal relation with Feil and their shared situation. Her identity is in a state of continuous birth, in statu nascendi, endlessly achieved as relational and situated, but never brought to completion as fixed. I am not in any way denying the importance of Mrs. Wilson’s past experiences and formed identity for how she is able to express herself and, indeed, her response would most likely have been very different had Feil engaged in some form of music unfamiliar to Mrs. Wilson. However, there is something else at stake in the interaction between the two women than simply the awakening of previously formed capabilities or the unveiling of remainders surviving cognitive decline. The capabilities that are brought to expression come into being, as Zeiler argues, in the intercorporeal self-other-world relation. This is not only the case with regard to Mrs. Wilson, but also, I would argue, with regard to Feil who becomes who she is in and through her relation and shared situation with Mrs. Wilson. It is of course undeniable and important to underline that Feil’s conditions for interaction are dramatically different from those of Mrs. Wilson in so far as she has a completely different degree of independence than Mrs. Wilson, but here it is important to bear in mind that all independence is rooted in dependencies on situations and conditions through which it is formed. Even though becoming dependent in new ways may often be experienced and conceived, both by self and others, as a loss of independence, it cannot be stressed enough that to be independent is also to be dependent on certain conditions making that independence possible. This is not to say that everyone is equally dependent on others and certainly not equally dependent in the very same ways; instead, dependencies are articulated in different ways, with different conditions and in different situations and surroundings. These differences are clearly of great significance as the case of the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil demonstrate; it is Feil who approaches Mrs. Wilson and not the other way around and this is not simply because of her intention of engaging Mrs. Wilson but also, and importantly so, because Mrs. Wilson lacks the ability to move about independently and approach the world and others in the same way as Feil. Mrs. Wilson also has very little possibility to escape Feil’s interaction, while

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she could certainly refuse to interact and remain quiet and unresponsive, she has no possibility of walking away. Another point to be made about the film-clip is that while Mrs. Wilson only starts singing as a response to and together with Feil, it is in fact not at all clear that she is unable to express herself without the explicit help of others. In fact, the first shot of the film-clip, showing Mrs. Wilson sitting by herself in the arm chair, does not in my contention show her as unexpressive. She is seen moving her hand and leg rhythmically before anyone approaches her and she is engaging with her specific situation given her specific conditions. It shows her as turned inward, away from her surroundings but instead of being unexpressive, she is expressive precisely of inwardness. Her inwardness is responsive to her situation and it is as situated and in relation to her surrounding conditions that she emerges as expressive of her own specific individual identity. While she does not express herself overtly in response to anyone else present with her and while she seems to be cut off from her surroundings, this does not make her unable to express herself without the help of others. Her expressions may be understood as minimal but they are there even before anyone explicitly engages with her in joint activity. From what we have said thus far, it should be clear that this is not to say that there is a fully formed individual identity expressing itself independently of its surroundings and only in a second step interacting with others, but instead to emphasize that our intercorporeal relations are much more thoroughgoing than bodily intersubjective encounters with concrete others and that expression cannot be understood in simple terms of pressing out or making public. Even without interaction with any concrete other, sitting all by herself and seemingly isolated from the world around her, Gladys Wilson becomes who she is in intercorporeal exchange with the world and her situation. However, if she is deprived of encounters and interaction with other concrete others, her intercorporeal becoming and her possibilities of expressions in the world are increasingly diminished. Lived bodies, regardless of how they are situated, are extended out into the world of which they form part and intentionally directed toward their surroundings and each other. They are immediately expressive of meaning and their expressions are responsive to their situation as a whole, including the ever-changing horizons of this situation. It is through my expressive embodiment and relation to the world that my actions can be taken up and understood by others and that I can likewise take up and understand theirs. Through the other’s expressions in the world, which I immediately recognize as overflowing with meaning,

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I identify her as another self from whom I differentiate my own self. It is in the other’s expressions and the way in which the other deals with the world that her subjectivity is made present and that I discover, to speak with Merleau-Ponty, “a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world.”52 Through her conduct the other offers herself to my motor intentions embodied in my conduct. This recognition of a prolongation of intentions and a familiar way of dealing with the world is brought out in the encounter between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil, shown in the film-clip. As Feil engages Mrs. Wilson in interaction, she engages Mrs. Wilson’s already expressive lived body, meeting her way of dealing with the world in the minimal movements of her arm and leg and in light of her Christian faith and involvement with the church. As Feil starts singing, Mrs. Wilson in her turn recognizes in Feil’s conduct a familiar way of dealing with the world to which her own intentions are responsive. In the words of Merleau-Ponty, she comes to “live in the facial expressions of the other” as she experiences the other living in hers.53 This “miraculous prolongation” of one’s own intentions and “familiar way of dealing with the world”54 that the self recognizes in the other only stand out against the background of her alterity and the perplexity, wonder and surprise it evokes. Her alterity, in turn, is made present as escaping grasp within the fabric of the familiar, as a style of weaving it in new, perhaps unexpected, and yet recognizable patterns. To be extended out into the world and intentionally directed toward other people is to be open to disorientation and perplexity and to allow oneself “to be pulled down and rebuilt again by the other” who in turn is pulled down and rebuilt again by me.55 The other draws me toward herself and I am thus drawn out of myself and back again. In equal measure I draw the other out of herself and toward me. To recognize another person precisely as other, as another self who is not myself, and not simply as an extension or enlargement of one’s own being, thus involves being open to becoming other to oneself through interaction. The importance of this openness to becoming other and letting oneself be affected, drawn out of oneself and transformed in the encounter with the other, is difficult to exaggerate in cases involving relations of asymmetrical dependencies or where the other appears so radically other that familiar ways of engaging with the world are difficult to detect. Suffering from the cognitive and physical decline of Alzheimer’s disease and requiring the care of others for basic everyday needs, Gladys Wilson is described as virtually non-verbal and she does not conform to conventional understandings of what it means

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to be a subject in expressive relation to the world. It would be easy to dismiss Mrs. Wilson as being without a sense of subjectivity and as “unbecoming’ a self ”56 due to her condition. However, as we have seen, the film-clip does show her as expressive of subjectivity both before and after the encounter with Naomi Feil. Furthermore, and importantly, it shows Feil as being open to being drawn out of herself in the interaction, letting Mrs. Wilson, through her movements and manner of being in the world, her response to the rhythm and way of taking the lead, pull her down and rebuild her again in a new rhythm. In spite of the asymmetry in their relation, the clip, I argue, not only shows Feil as enabling Mrs. Wilson’s expression but also draws attention to a force in Mrs. Wilson’s engagement in the joint activity through which the boundaries between the two women are redrawn. Being responsive to the situation in which she finds herself, Mrs. Wilson’s expressions not only reflect the intercorporeal connections of her being but also come to affect them in different ways.57

CONCLUSION In the above, I have drawn attention to how specific encounters and interaction between embodied subjects, such as that between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil, rest on a foundational intercorporeal connection constitutive of subjectivity. The interaction between Mrs. Wilson and Feil, which is governed by the specific conditions of Mrs. Wilson’s cognitive decline as well as by Feil’s therapeutic intention with which it is initiated, offers a beam through which this foundational bond can be made visible. While I agree with Zeiler that the interaction between Mrs. Wilson and Feil gives rise to intercorporeal capabilities, I argue, in addition, that this interaction in fact reflects what happens in all interaction and that all capabilities are fundamentally intercorporeal in so far as embodied subjectivity emerges in dynamic intercorporeal exchange with the world and others. The point I want to bring home is that what happens in the interaction between Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil is in important respects not any different from what happens in all interaction and that what makes this interaction exceptional is in great part that it allows us to see a constitutive relationality and intercorporeal bond that in normal everyday interaction is often obscured by ideals of independence and atomistic conceptions of subjectivity. Cases that in different ways do not conform to conventional conceptions of what it means to be a subject in the

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world and that are instead characterized in terms of dependence, incapacity or vulnerability, such as cases of dementia, should in my contention motivate critical interrogation of such conventional conceptions and can provide important insight into that which is considered normal and unremarkable. Highlighting the relationality and intercorporeal bond of the subjectivity of Gladys Wilson is not to point to an extraordinary deviance, but instead to call attention to aspects essential to subjectivity as such. Rather than conceptualizing the relationality, interconnection, and interdependence of bodies as threatening to subjectivity and individual identity, we must, as Gail Weiss puts it, “rethink the very concept of identity in order to see that it only has meaning in and through, and not despite our relations with others.”58 The understanding of intercorporeality as a relation of expression that I have brought out here is important also for conceptualizing the idea that there is a remainder of selfhood in persons afflicted with conditions of dementia. To speak of a remainder of the self that survives and comes to expression in spite of cognitive decline risks presupposing and reproducing an understanding of the self or subjectivity as a stable, already formed identity that is kept preserved, lies dormant as it once were through the development of the condition, and might be helped to expression, conceived in terms of a making public. Instead, I have emphasized how an intercorporeal understanding of embodied subjectivity shifts focus from already formed bodily subjects to the constitutive relations between them and highlights how bodily boundaries are continuously drawn and redrawn, established and altered to form embodied subjectivity in different ways and in different relations to each other. I have further put focus on Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualization of the intercorporeal becoming of selfhood in terms of expression, in which expression is not understood as a pressing out or making public of an already formed interiority but, rather, as a movement of interiorization and exteriorization in which something emerges as something and meaning is in a state of continuous birth, in statu nascendi. Such conceptualization recognizes subjectivity as a continuous achievement that is never brought to completion but is in constant becoming, even through the cognitive decline involved in dementia. Clearly, speaking of what remains of selfhood in conditions of dementia, that are characterized by disorientation and loss of taken-for-granted abilities, familiarities, and recognition, must include a recognizable identity consisting of bodily norms, values, individual preferences, character, thoughts, and ways of being in and dealing with the world that have been sedimented and settled through time. However, what is also important to underline is that this recognizable identity is not

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only settled but also constantly altered as it is articulated in lived experience and reiterated through time. The survival of the self through the cognitive decline of conditions of dementia is, I argue, not as much a settled identity that once was in full bloom and now is dormant, as the capacity for expression of a self whose very being is a continuous becoming in response to her situation as a whole. Conditions of dementia are both a matter of severe loss and suffering, of no longer being who one is, and a matter of remaining who one is, living through that loss and finding ways of reorientation and rehabituation. Understanding the person with dementia as intercorporeal and in statu nascendi can throw light on both that which remains, on sedimented bodily norms and ways of being in the world, and on the disorientation and reorientation of continuously becoming who one is in radically different ways from what one was.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the participants in the P6 seminar at the Department for Thematic Studies: Technology and Social Change, Linköping University and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. The chapter is part of my work within the research program CEDER at Linköping University, financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

NOTES 1. J. Hughes, S. Louw, and S. Sabat, “Seeing Whole,” in Dementia: Mind, Meaning and the Person, J. Hughes, S. Louw, and S. Sabat (eds.), 1–40 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5. 2. Such a view was popularized in D. Cohen and C. Eisdorfer, The Loss of Self: A Family Resource for the Care of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders (New York: New American Library, 1986). For an overview, see A. McLean, The Person in Dementia: A Study of Nursing Home Care in the US (New York: Broadview Press, 2007). 3. Tom Kitwood’s writings on personhood and the subjectivity of dementia was pioneering in establishing this shift of focus and field of research and it remains of great importance. See T. Kitwood, Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First (New York: Open University Press, 1997); T. Kitwood,

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Tom Kitwood on Dementia: A Reader and Critical Commentary, C. Baldwin and A. Capstick (eds.) (New York: Open University Press, 2007). See also for instance R. Hedman, Striving to Be Able and Included: Expressions of Sense of Self in People with Alzheimer’s Disease (Stockholm: Karolinska Institutet, 2014), J. Hughes, S. Louw and S. Sabat, “Seeing Whole,” J. Hughes, Thinking Through Dementia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). L-C Hydén, H. Lindemann, and J. Brockmeier. Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), P. Kontos, “Ethnographic Reflections on Selfhood, Embodiment and Alzheimer’s Disease,” Ageing and Society 24 (2004): 829–849, P. Kontos, “Embodied Selfhood in Alzheimer’s Disease: Rethinking Person-centred Care,” Dementia 4 (2005): 553–570, S. Sabat, “Surviving Manifestations of Selfhood in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Case Study,” Dementia 1 (2001): 25–36, S. Sabat, The Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease. Life Through a Tangled Veil (Oxford & Malden: Blackwell, 2001), S, Sabat and R. Harré, “The Construction and Deconstruction of Self in Alzheimer’s Disease,” Ageing and Society 12 (1992): 443–461, L. Örulv, Fragile Identities, Patched-up Worlds: Dementia and Meaning-Making in Social Interaction (Linköping: Linköping University, 2008). 4. K. Zeiler, “A Philosophical Defense of the Idea that We Can Hold Each Other in Personhood: Intercorporeal Personhood in Dementia Care,” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17 (2014): 131–141. 5. Zeiler, “A Philosophical Defense,” 137. 6. The film-clip “Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil” is produced as a presentation of so-called Validation Therapy, which was developed by Naomi Feil as a method for communicating with very old people diagnosed with dementia. In the clip, segments showing the interaction between the two women are intertwined with segments of Naomi Feil describing the therapy and giving her interpretation of what is going on in her interaction with Gladys Wilson. My interest here is limited to the segments of the interaction, and even though there is much to be said about Feil’s interpretation of the interaction and of Mrs. Wilson’s experience, this is not something I will do in this paper. The clip is from the documentary film There is a Bridge produced by Memory Bridge, a foundation for Alzheimer’s disease and cultural memory. It is available at http://www.memorybridge.org/videos.php and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrZXz10FcVM. Information about Validation Therapy can be found at https://vfvalidation.org. 7. Continued presence of musicality and musical ability despite severe cognitive decline has been reported in even advanced stages of dementia,

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and musical therapy in dementia care has shown to be effective in engaging and activating people with dementia. See for instance P. Kontos, “Musical Embodiment, Selfhood, and Dementia,” in Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood, L-C. Hydén, H. Lindemann, and J. Brockmeier (eds.) 107–119 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Zeiler, “A Philosophical Defense,” 136. 9. Zeiler, “A Philosophical Defense,” 138. 10. Zeiler, “A Philosophical Defense,” 139. 11. The face-to-face intercorporeality Zeiler describes might perhaps also be understood in terms of a bodily intersubjectivity insofar as it is an interrelation between conscious (and self-conscious) subjects. Stressing a distinction between the concepts of intercorporeality and intersubjectivity, Scott Marratto writes, “my body is already bound up with the other’s body before there can be any relation between conscious subjects. But this mutual involvement of bodies does not overcome the difference between conscious subjects. It simply asserts that this difference must be watched over; it is a matter of responsibilities and decisions, decisions that did not begin as conscious decisions, but that must be assumed by a consciousness.” S. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 144. 12. A. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 148. 13. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Although Merleau-Ponty uses only the specific term intercorporeité in his later works, the constitutive interconnection between bodies that this term captures is present throughout his writings. In Phenomenology of Perception he writes, “my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.” M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London & New York, 1962), 354. Also in his lectures on The Child’s Relations with Others from 1950-51, he discusses the constitutive interconnection between bodies in terms of syncretic sociability and transitivism. M. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 14. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification, 148. 15. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self, 146.

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16. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 137. I discuss the lived body and its self-affecting structure of double sensation in my “A Being of Two Leaves—On the Founding Significance of the Lived Body,” in Body Claims, J. Bromseth, L.F. Käll and K. Mattsson (eds.), 110–133. Uppsala University Series in Gender Research: Crossroads of Knowledge, 2009. 17. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 93. 18. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 123. Cf 147f, 254; Phenomenology of Perception, 93. 19. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 9, 147, 260f. 20. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 408. Cf Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 254. 21. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 249 (italics in original). 22. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 148; Phenomenology of Perception, 373. 23. The connection between touching and touched, where one passes over into the other, writes Merleau-Ponty, takes place in the untouchable. This untouchable is the other dimension of the touchable and cannot be understood simply as a touchable that is out of reach and has not yet been touched. It must rather be seen as the untouchable of the touchable that has to remain untouchable in order for the touchable to be touchable at all. It is equally that of the other and that of myself which I will never touch, never see, never know. The untouchable is however not external to the touchable, but is rather found in the midst of the touchable and overflowing with it. The untouchable (the invisible, the unperceivable) is my necessary blind spot that founds the perspective out of which my perception emerges. It is the starting point for my experience of myself as sensing and sensed, as well as the point in which this experience terminates. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 151, 249, 254, 272. 24. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 245. Cf M. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 134f. 25. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 137, 245. 26. With the risk of getting caught too tightly in the language of otherness: My own self is revealed to me as being different from the other but also as being as other to the other as the other is other to the self, and therefore I am also revealed as being other to myself. Thus, as I become other to the other I simultaneously become other to myself in so far as the other is another self like myself, but not myself. My openness to the other renders an openness to myself as other, or to an otherness which is already in me as an

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essential part of my being. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 85f, 134f; The Visible and the Invisible, 139, 224; Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 120. 27. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 78. In the state of pre-conscious possession of the world in which I flow over into the world and become world, my original relation to the world is revealed as being one of intertwinement in which body—mine and the other’s—and world are both emergent from and made of the same flesh. The notion of flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is rich with meaning and a full discussion of it goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p 248. 28. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 98, 99. 29. M. Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work,” in The Primacy of Perception, J. Edie (ed.), 3–11 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5. 30. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 101, 141. 31. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 106. 32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 100. 33. I use this example of walking in wet sand and suddenly encountering a sharp object also in my article “Intercorporeality and the Constitution of Body Schemata: A Case of Pain,” in Perceiving Pain: Global and Cross-Cultural Understandings, R. Fox and N. Monteiro (eds), 51–62 (Witney, Oxfordshire: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014). 34. S. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London and New York: Routledge), 24. 35. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xi; The Visible and the Invisible, 136; The Prose of the World, 78. 36. Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” 6. 37. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 168, 174. 38. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self, 181. 39. B. Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, F. Evans and L. Lawlor (eds.), 89–102 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 93. 40. V. Fóti, Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), R. Kwant, Phenomenology of Expression (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), L. Käll, Expressive Selfhood (Unpublished dissertation) (Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen: Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007), D. Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression.”

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41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 391. 42. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 161. 43. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 449. 44. The notion of expression on Merleau-Ponty’s account thus provides a way out of the traditional impasse between an interior mind and an exterior body, and it does so both without collapsing one into the other and without doing away with a tension between that which is subjectively experienced from a first-person perspective and that which is intersubjectively accessible from a third-person perspective. And, indeed, the reason Merleau-Ponty turns to the area of expression, and particularly speech, in the first place is in order to be able to leave behind “once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy.” See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 174. 45. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 18. 46. Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” 98. 47. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xv. 48. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xiv. 49. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 82. 50. S. Stoller “Expressivity and Performativity: Merleau-Ponty and Butler,” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 97–110, 98. 51. Stoller, “Expressivity and Performativity,” 109; see also Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” 92f. 52. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 354. 53. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 146. 54. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 354. 55. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 20. 56. A. Fontana and R. Smith, “The ‘Unbecoming’ of Self and the Normalization of Competence,” Sociological Perspectives 32 (1989): 35–46. 57. G. Weiss, “Intertwined Identities: Challenges to Bodily Autonomy,” Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 2 (2009): 22–37. 58. Weiss, “Intertwined Identities,” 35.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Cahill, A. Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

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Cohen, D., and C. Eisdorfer, The Loss of Self: A Family Resource for the Care of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders. New York: New American Library, 1986. Fontana, A., and R. Smith. “The ‘Unbecoming’ of Self and the Normalization of Competence.” Sociological Perspectives 32(1) 1989: 35–46. Fóti, V. Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Hedman, R. Striving to Be Able and Included: Expressions of Sense of Self in People with Alzheimer’s Disease. Stockholm: Karolinska Institutet, 2014. Hughes, J., S. Louw, and S. Sabat. “Seeing Whole.” In J. Hughes, S. Louw, and S. Sabat (eds.), Dementia: Mind, Meaning and the Person, pp. 1–40. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hughes, J. Thinking through Dementia. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hydén, L-C, H. Lindemann, and J. Brockmeier. Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kitwood, T. Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First. New York: Open University Press, 1997. Kitwood, T. Tom Kitwood on Dementia: A Reader and Critical Commentary. Edited by C. Baldwin and A. Capstick. New York: Open University Press, 2007. Kontos, P. “Ethnographic Reflections on Selfhood, Embodiment and Alzheimer’s Disease,” Ageing and Society 24 (2004): 829–849. Kontos, P. “Embodied Selfhood in Alzheimer’s Disease: Rethinking Personcentred Care,” Dementia 4(4) 2005: 553–570. Kontos, P. “Musical Embodiment, Selfhood, and Dementia.” In L-C. Hydén, H. Lindemann, and J. Brockmeier (eds.), Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood, pp. 107–119. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kwant, R. Phenomenology of Expression. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Käll, L.F. “A Being of Two Leaves—On the Founding Significance of the Lived Body.” In J. Bromseth, L.F. Käll, and K. Mattsson (eds.), Body Claims, pp. 110–133. Uppsala University Series in Gender Research: Crossroads of Knowledge, 2009.

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Käll, L.F. “Intercorporeality and the Constitution of Body Schemata: A Case of Pain.” In R. Fox and Nicole Monteiro (eds.), Perceiving Pain: Global and Cross-Cultural Understandings, pp. 51–62. Witney, Oxfordshire: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014. Käll, L. Expressive Selfhood (Unpublished dissertation). Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007. Landes, D. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Marratto, S. The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012. McLean, A. The Person in Dementia: A Study of Nursing Home Care in the US. New York: Broadview Press, 2007. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge, 1962. Merleau-Ponty, M. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work.” In M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception. Edited by J.M. Edie, pp. 3–11. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Prose of the World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Merleau-Ponty, M. Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Sabat, S. “Surviving Manifestations of Selfhood in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Case Study.” Dementia 1(1), 2001: 25–36. Sabat, S. The Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease. Life Through a Tangled Veil. Oxford & Malden: Blackwell, 2001. Sabat, S., and R. Harré. “The Construction and Deconstruction of Self in Alzheimer’s Disease,” Ageing and Society 12 (1992): 443–461. Stoller, S. “Expressivity and Performativity: Merleau-Ponty and Butler,” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 97–110. Waldenfels, B. “The Paradox of Expression.” In F. Evans and L. Lawlor, Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, pp. 89–102. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000. Weiss, G. “Intertwined Identities: Challenges to Bodily Autonomy,” Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 2 (2009): 22–37.

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Zeiler, K. “A Philosophical Defense of the Idea that We Can Hold Each Other in Personhood: Intercorporeal Personhood in Dementia Care,” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17 (2014): 131–141. Örulv, L. Fragile Identities, Patched-up Worlds: Dementia and Meaning-Making in Social Interaction. Linköping: Linköping University, 2008.

Notes on Contributors

Rosalyn Diprose is Emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her books on the body and sociopolitical relations include Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (SUNY Press, 2002) and The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Difference and Embodiment (Routledge, 1994/2007); and the co-edited collections Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (with J. Reynolds, Acumen 2008/ Routledge, 2014) and Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (with R. Ferrell, Allen, and Unwin 1991). Her current research includes examining issues at the intersection between phenomenology and biopolitical theory, including completing a book-length project with Ewa P. Ziarek on Natality and Biopolitics. Luna Dolezal is a lecturer in philosophy and medical humanities at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine, and medical humanities. Her writing has been published in various academic journals including Hypatia, Sartre Studies International, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, among others. She has recently completed a monograph entitled The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015). Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in philosophy at the University of Memphis, and professorial fellow at the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong (AU). He is also He is honorary professor health sciences at Tromsø University (Norway). He is currently a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier research 387

388 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

fellow (2012–2017). His publications include Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (OUP, 2018); The Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015); Phenomenology (2012); The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi 2012); and How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005); he is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Lisa Guenther is associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015) with Geoffrey Adelsberg and Scott Zemon. She facilitates a weekly discussion group with men on Tennessee’s death row, called REACH Coalition. Lisa’s current book project, Life against Social Death: From Reproductive Injustice to Natal Resistance, explores the structural and historical connections between reproductive politics and the politics of mass incarceration and capital punishment in the United States. Sara Heinämaa is academy professor (2017–2021) of the Academy of Finland and in this position leads a five-year research project on the phenomenology of normality and the philosophy of exclusion/inclusion. Heinämaa holds a chair of philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä and is the director of the interdisciplinary research community, Subjectivity, Historicity, Communality (SHC). She is also associate professor (docent) of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. In her systematic work, Heinämaa investigates the nature of embodiment, intersubjectivity, temporality, and normality. Her exegetic work is focused on the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Irigaray. She has published widely in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of mind, and history of philosophy. Her most important publications include Phenomenology and the Transcendental (with Hartimo and Miettinen, Routledge, 2014), New Perspectives on Aristotelianism and Its Critics (with Mäkinen and Tuominen, Brill, 2015), Birth, Death, and Femininity (with Schott, et al., Indiana UP, 2010), and Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). At the moment she is working on a book on personhood and generativity. Lisa Folkmarson Käll is associate professor (docent) of theoretical philosophy and associate senior lecturer in gender research at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her work brings together phenomenology with current gender research and feminist theory to inquire into questions concerning embodied

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 389

subjectivity, vulnerability, bodily constitution of sexual difference and sexual identity, intersubjectivity, and the relation between selfhood and otherness. Käll is also an affiliated research associate in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics at the Center for Dementia Research, Linköping University, Sweden, where she is currently completing a book project on conceptualizations of subjectivity in relation to age-related dementia. Käll is editor of Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities: Interrogating Social, Cultural and Political Aspects of Embodiment (Springer, 2015) and Dimensions of Pain (Routledge, 2013) and co-editor of Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (SUNY Press, 2014). Donald A. Landes is professeur adjoint (assistant professor) in the Faculté de philosophie at Université Laval in Québec City. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Stony Brook University in 2010 and held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University (2010–2012). He specializes in twentieth-century continental philosophy, ethics, and the history of philosophy, and his current book project draws together these interests by exploring a phenomenological virtue ethics through the concepts of embodiment and temporality. In addition to several journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also the sole translator of the most recent translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2012). Dermot Moran is professor of philosophy (metaphysics and logic) at University College Dublin, Ireland, and president of the International Federation of Philosophical Studies/Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP). His books include The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1989; reissued 2004), Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge, 2000), Edmund Husserl. Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and The Husserl Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2012), co-authored with Joseph Cohen. He has edited Husserl’s Logical Investigations, two volumes. (Routledge, 2001), The Shorter Logical Investigations, The Phenomenology Reader, co-edited with Tim Mooney (Routledge, 2002), Phenomenology. Critical Concepts in Philosophy, five volumes, co-edited with Lester E. Embree (Routledge, 2004); The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (Routledge, 2008); with Rasmus Thybo Jensen, The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity

390 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

(Springer, 2014) and, with Thomas Szanto, The Phenomenology of Sociality (Routledge, 2016). He is Founding Editor of The International Journal of Philosophical Studies (1993) and editor of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology (Springer). He is a member of the Executive of SPEP. Professor Moran was awarded the Royal Irish Academy gold medal in the humanities in 2012. In 2013, he was awarded the DLitt Degree by the National University of Ireland on the basis of published work. In 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Athens. Katherine J. Morris is a fellow in philosophy at Mansfield College, Oxford University, UK. Her books include Descartes’ Dualism (with Gordon Baker, Routledge, 1996), Sartre (Blackwell Great Minds series, 2008), and Starting with Merleau-Ponty (Continuum Starting With series, 2012), and she has published widely on Descartes, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. She also co-edits the series International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry for Oxford University Press. Danielle Petherbridge is lecturer in continental philosophy at University College Dublin. From 2013–2015 she was an Irish Research Council/Marie Curie international research fellow at Columbia University, New York. Her current research project, entitled Encountering the Other, provides an examination of theories of intersubjectivity and self/other relations in German Idealism, social philosophy, phenomenology, and contemporary French philosophy. Her publications include The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth, (2013); Axel Honneth: Critical Essays, with a Reply by Axel Honneth, (2011); and co-editor of Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory (2007). Beata Stawarska is professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is an author of Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology (Ohio University Press, 2009), as well as a number of essays in contemporary European philosophy (especially phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism), feminism, philosophy of language (broadly construed), and philosophical psychology. Beata Stawarska is currently investigating the complex ways through which language reflects as well as subverts dominant relations of privilege and subordination in society, especially through the reclamation of hate speech

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 391

by marginalized groups. She is a 2017–18 Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Nantes, France. Dylan Trigg is a Marie Curie International outgoing fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy and at University College Dublin, School of Philosophy. He is the author of several books, including Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014); and The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012). With Dorothée Legrand, he is the editor of Unconsciousness between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Contributions to Phenomenology) (forthcoming: New York/Heidelberg: Springer). Gail Weiss is professor of philosophy at The George Washington University and general secretary of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. She is the author of two monographs, Refiguring the Ordinary (Indiana University Press, 2008) and Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge, 1999), and has edited/co-edited four other volumes: Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (SUNY, 2008), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Penn State Press, 2006), Thinking the Limits of the Body (SUNY, 2003), and Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture (Routledge, 1999). Other co-edited projects include the Summer 2011 Special Issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 26.3, on “The Ethics of Embodiment” and the Winter 2012 Hypatia, vol. 27.2, Cluster Issue, “Contesting the Norms of Embodiment.” She is currently completing a monograph on Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir that is under contract with Indiana University Press.

Index

ableism, 3, 91, 94 access asymmetry of, 243–245 self-, 172 Adam, Charles, 221n3 admiration, defined, 221n2. See also wonder affective hesitation, 116, 117, 120–121 affectivity. See primary affectivity African Americans hypervisibility and, 107–108 Jim Crow South and, 83, 86–88, 90 as “Others,” 85–86 police shootings of, 122n10 with social invisibility, 103–104 Agamben, Giorgio, 33–34, 37 agoraphobia defined, 340 embodiment and, 337–341 intersubjectivity and, 14–15, 338 “the look” and, 349–353 as otherness, condition of, 15 spatiality and, 337–341, 346–347 “Vincent,” case of, 345–347, 350– 352, 356n62 “Agreement to End Hostilities” (Short Corridor Collective), 63–64 Ahmed, Sara, 76, 79–80, 97n14, 368 Al-Saji, Alia, 6, 7, 83, 84, 97n14 hesitation and, 104, 117, 120

with perception, racializing, 109– 110, 114–116 seeing as “expressive vision,” 113–114 Algren, Nelson, 87 alienation body, 345 intersubjectivity and, 355n58 recognition and, 119–120 altered states, lived body in, 284–285 Alzheimer’s disease, 359, 361–362, 378n6. See also dementia America Day by Day (Beauvoir), 83, 85, 86–87, 91 “American way of life,” 86–87 Ammiano, Tom, 52 Andrews, Jorella, 111 animals anthropomorphizing of, 247 behavior of, 261n78 habitus of, 264n116 “interanimality,” 288 as other, 12, 237–238, 246, 247– 248, 251 anonymity invisibility and, 109 with perception, 112, 174, 181, 241 social utility of, 75–76 anthropomorphizing, of animals, 247 antiterrorism laws, 31, 33, 35–36, 42n49

393

394 INDEX

Arendt, Hannah, 36, 39 on isolation, 33 with political violence and body, 23–24, 25, 27, 28–29, 31 with revolution, defined, 37 Aristotle, 220, 272 art, 177 body as, 212, 273 racialized perception ruptured with, 111, 124n41 See also musical ability, dementia and ART. See Assisted Reproductive Technology Ashker, Todd, 48, 59, 62–63 Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), 313–314 asymmetry of access, 243–245 with problem of “Others,” 242 thesis with labor, 317 Austin, J.L., 188, 190, 204n1, 206n36 infelicities and, 194–195, 197 speech-act and, 193–196 Australia antiterrorism legislation in, 35–36, 42n49 Cronulla riots of 2005, 38, 43n56 Gammy case, 311 with political violence, 31, 33 autonomy, 94 of interaction, 8, 136, 145 reification and, 137 relational, 145–151, 156n72 autopoiesis, 156n72 “Autrui” (Merleau-Ponty), 178 Avramides, A., 255n2, 257n17, 259n43, 261n79 Baby M custody case (1986), 315 Baier, Annette, 147 Barbaras, Renaud, 161, 164, 176 “bare life,” 33–34, 37 Beard, Jeffrey, 48, 58 Beauvoir, Simone de, 83, 84, 97n15, 99n29, 230n54

on “American way of life,” 86–87 racism and, 85–88, 90–91, 94 Sartre and, 275 behavior, 261n79 of animals, 261n78 body and, 259n43 comportment and, 273–274 structure of, 242–243, 247–248 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 14, 75, 92, 276, 287, 339 Being and Time (Heidegger), 273 being-in-the-world, 270–276 being-with-one-another, 286–289 Bergson, Henri, 116, 163 Bernasconi, Robert, 181n26 Beyssade, Jean-Marie, 214–215 Binswanger, Ludwig, 279–280 Black Guerilla Family, 52–53 “Black Lives Matter” movement, 100n45, 124n41 Black Skin White Mask (Fanon), 40n6, 49, 68n31, 108–109 The Bluest Eye (Morrison), 6, 103, 108 bodies, 42n37, 123n143, 216, 379n13 alienation, 345 as art, 212, 273 behavior and, 259n43 discourse and power with, 22–23 equilibrium and, 258n25 illness and, 276–277, 343 “imaginary,” 40n4 motor skills, 240 objective, 276–279 with other “Others,” understanding of, 250–254 ownership, 279–281 pain and, 342–344 as psychic object, 285 with racism and habit, 115 in revolt with homogenization and isolation, 37–39 Sartre and, 285, 341–345 senses with perceiving, 174–176 soul-body unity, 212, 225n21, 271

INDEX 395

spatiality and, 337–338 technologically enhanced, 281 See also embodiment; lived body; mind-body union; political violence, body and Bodies that Matter (Butler), 96n9 bodily curse. See malédiction corporelle bodily mineness, 279–281 bodily reciprocity children and, 264n122 couvade, 263n113 bodily understanding of other “Others,” 250–254 of primitive peoples, 263n112 body schema intercorporeality and, 367 mineness and, 280–281 pregnancy and, 322–326 as system of equivalents, 240, 244 “body-for-others,” 344–345 Bourdieu, Pierre, 92 habitus and, 252, 264n117 with language and social power, 186–189, 191–192 Brentano, Franz, 272 Brown, Michael, 122n10 Butler, Judith, 40n8, 78, 96n9 with language and social power, 186, 188–190, 192 linguistic performativity and, 10, 185–186 re-authorization with speech-acts and, 199 Cacho, Lisa, 53 Cahill, Ann, 363, 364 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) gang validation and, 50–54, 66n3 on prison gangs, 48, 50, 52 racial taxonomy and, 53 See also Pelican Bay State Prison Canguilhem, G., 243 Carman, Taylor, 112–113 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl), 164

Castellanos, Arturo, 48, 59 CDCR. See California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Cézanne, Paul, 111 Champion, Steve, 52–53 Chanter, Tina, 222n8 “chiasm,” 281–284, 298n93 Child Psychology and Pedagogy (Merleau-Ponty), 248 children bodily reciprocity and, 264n122 mothers communicating with, 286 as other, 12, 238, 246, 248–251 See also infants Christman, John, 145, 150 Cicero, 298n93 class consciousness, 92 human rights for prisoner, 47, 48, 60, 62–63, 65 collective praxis, 60–61, 64 Collins, Patricia Hill, 95n5 colonization impacts of, 54–56 White Man and, 89–90 commercial surrogacy, 312–313, 316, 318, 327 communication defined, 171 between fetus and mothers, 286 gestures and, 172 in solitary confinement, 69n41 women and, 200–201 See also language; listening, active; speech community, with prisoners and protests, 37–38 comportment, behavior and, 273–274 The Concept of Mind (Ryle), 225n21 consciousness class, 92 intercorporeality and, 320 self-, 139–140, 279 unconscious habits of white privilege, 81–83, 93, 97n14

396 INDEX

constitutive intercorporeality, dementia and, 363–368 contract motherhood, 312. See also surrogacy coordination, exclusion with, 34–35 Corcoran, Mark, 42n49 “corporeal malediction,” 77, 95n4 corporeality, with sociality and selfhood, 25–28 The Course of Recognition (Ricoeur), 154n24 couvade, bodily reciprocity, 263n113 Crenshaw, Kimberle W., 95n5, 190 The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl), 212, 229n45, 229n47, 273–274 critical phenomenology connotations, 49–50 in context, 67n10 as liberation practice, 54–59 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 49, 56 Cronulla riots of 2005, 38, 43n56 Csordas, T., 263n113 cultural practices habitus and, 252–254 infants with embodied, 252 sexism with handshakes, 287 Dasein, 290n15, 296n70 Davidson, D., 258n27 De Anima (Aristotle), 272 de facto status crimes, 53 De Jaegher, H., 136 Delgado, R., 190 demands, hunger strikes, 47 dementia constitutive intercorporeality and, 363–368 intercorporeality and, 15–16, 360– 368, 382n44 with intercorporeality as relation of expression, 368–371, 382n44

musical ability and, 361–362, 367, 372, 378n7 selfhood with, 359–360, 376–377 situated expression and, 371–375 Democracy Now, 62–63 Derrida, Jacques, 222n8, 363 Descartes, Rene, 42n45, 241 dualism and, 223n11, 270–276 with emotion-passions, 213–214 mind-body union and, 210–213 with passions, defined, 227n25 with soul-body unity, 225n21 with wonder, physiology and causal origin of, 228n37 wonder and, 11, 209–210, 214, 216, 227n26 detention, as political violence, 31 developmental psychology, 140–141 Dewberry, Ron. See Jamaa, Sitawa Nantambu Dewey, John, 138–139 Di Paolo, E., 136 Diamond, Cora, 319 Ding und Raum. See Thing and Space discourses, body and power with, 22–23 discrimination with fear and exclusion, 27 political violence and body with, 22–23 divergence, of flesh, 26, 27, 38, 365 double sensation, 15, 342, 365 “doubling,” with pregnancy, 323 Downcast Eyes (Jay), 110 dream states, lived body in, 284–285 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 270 dualism, 223n11, 270–276 DuBois, W.E.B., 77–78 The Ecological Approach (Gibson), 293n32 education illocution and public, 198, 202–203 for prisoner class, 47

INDEX 397

system and language, 187 Elemental Passions (Irigaray), 219 elementary recognition, 142–143 Ellison, Ralph, 6 invisibility and, 106–107, 109, 120 lived experience and, 122n5 “seeing white” and, 108 embodiment “chiasm” and, 281–284, 298n93 with dualism and being-in-theworld, 270–276 fantasy, dream, and altered states, 284–285 with infants and cultural practices, 252 with intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, being-with-one-another, 286–289 with leib versus körper, 276–279 in phenomenology, 269–270 with spatiality and intersubjectivity, 338–341 emotion-passions, wonder and, 210, 213–215, 227n26 emotions identification with recognition, 140–142, 146 “looping effect” with, 143 love as basic, 155n43 epistemology of ignorance, 94 “Others” and first problem of, 239–241 “Others” and second problem of, 242–243 equilibrium bodies and, 258n25 with illness, 257n15 moving, 163, 173 social, 113 equivalents, body schema as system of, 240, 244 ethics of surrogacy, 311–312 See also reading, ethics of

An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Irigaray), 209, 218–219 The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir), 91, 94, 97n15, 230n54 exclusion with coordination, 34–35 discrimination with fear and, 27 propaganda and fear with, 34–35 existential phenomenology, 238–239 Existentialism, 85 experience. See intentional experience; lived experience expression intercorporeality as relation of, 368–371, 382n44 situated, 371–375 “expressive vision,” seeing as, 113–114 “Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 283, 298n91 face-to-face intercorporeality, 15, 360– 361, 363, 379n11 facial mimicry, of infants, 324 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 40n6, 77, 79 critical phenomenology and, 49, 54–59 invisibility and, 108–109 isolation and, 49–50 malédiction corporelle and, 95n4 racism and, 89–90 recognition and, 120–121 Sartre and, 68n31 White Man and, 88 fantasy states, lived body in, 284–285 Die Farbenwelt (The World of Colour) (Katz), 292n31 fatigue, pain and, 168 fear discrimination with exclusion and, 27 homophobia, 189–190 propaganda and exclusion with, 34–35 See also agoraphobia; terrorism Fechner, Gustav, 271

398 INDEX

Feil, Naomi situated expression and, 371–375 Wilson and, 361–363, 367, 368–369 feminism, 181n39, 204n1 surrogacy and, 313–314, 318–319 Ferrell, Jonathan, 122n10 fetus in Life Magazine, 316 mothers communicating with, 286 pregnancy and, 316, 318, 322–326 surrogacy with maternal-fetal relation, 318, 320–326 with surrogate, role of, 14 See also surrogacy Fielding, Helen, 204n1 Fink, Eugene, 11, 217 flesh divergence of, 26, 27, 38, 365 Merleau-Ponty and, 27, 162–163, 270, 277, 284, 381n27 Sartre and, 270, 277 Foucault, Michel, 22 Frankfurt, Harry, 148 Freud, Sigmund, 286 Future Directions of Feminist Phenomenology (Fielding and Olkowski), 204n1 Gammy case, in Australia, 311 gangs. See prison gangs, in Pelican Bay State Prison Garner, Eric, 122n10 Gatens, Moira, 40n4 gender, 186 power disparity based on, 199 social power and, 195–196 space and, 203 speech-acts and, 194, 199 Gestalt psychologists, 247, 259n48, 292n32 gestational surrogacy IVF and, 312 laws, 311

in media, 318 with mother, role of, 315–316 gestures recognition with affirmative, 118 senses and, 172, 177 silence as, 201–202 Gibson, James J., 273, 292n31, 293n32 Goldberg, David, 107–108 Grassian, Stuart, 32 Gray, Frances, 325 Guillen, Antonio, 48, 59, 61–62 habits, 96n11, 96n13 affective hesitation and, 116, 117, 120 motor skills and, 240 Proust on, 83–84 racism and bodily, 115 sedimentation of, 86, 91–93 of white privilege, 81–83, 93, 97n14 habitus acquiring additional, 252–253 of animals, 264n116 cultural practices and, 252–254 defined, 264n117 Hacking, Ian, 143 Hatley, James, 110 hearers speaker and, 197 speech-acts and, 191 with speech-acts and active listening, 193–199 women with speech and uptake of, 10 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 126n74, 134, 145–146 Heidegger, Martin, 30, 222n8, 238, 271 comportment and, 273–274 Dasein and, 290n15, 296n70 Held, Virginia, 147 Hensel, Abby, 288

INDEX 399

Hensel, Brittany, 288 hesitation, 7, 104, 116, 117, 120–121 heterosexism, 3, 4 homogenization bodies in revolt with isolation and, 37–39 criticism of, 36 as political violence, 32, 37–39 homophobia with language and social power, 189–190 with speech, 199 Honneth, Axel invisibility and, 104 primary affectivity and, 8, 113, 116 with recognition and perception, 116–121 recognition theory and, 7, 104, 113, 125n74, 126n74, 137– 145, 154n24 Hornsby, Jennifer, 193, 197 “The Horror at Red Hook” (Lovecraft), 337 Hughes, J., 360 human rights for prisoner class, 47, 48, 60, 62–63, 65 surrogacy and, 311 Hunger (film), 37–38 hunger strikes in Ireland, 37–38 at Pelican Bay State Prison, 47–49, 53–54 Husserl, Edmund, 32, 79, 192, 229n45, 229n47 comportment and, 273–274 dualism and, 271 embodiment and, 269–270 influence, 1, 13 intentional experience and, 83 intentionality and, 216–217, 272 intercorporeality and, 287–288 intersubjectivity and, 282 leib and, 276–277, 278, 279

lived body and, 212–213, 226n23, 286 Merleau-Ponty on, 216–217, 274–275 “Other” and, 164 senses intertwining and, 283 on touch, 274 hypervisibility, 104–105, 107–108 I Love to You (Irigaray), 201–202, 219 Ianucci, Fiorella, 206n44 IAT. See Implicit Association Test Ideas (Husserl), 212, 226n23 Ideas II (Husserl), 226n23, 271, 274, 278, 283 Ideas III (Husserl), 277 identification, emotions with recognition and, 140–142, 146 Ihde, Don, 281 illness bodies and, 276–277, 343 equilibrium with, 257n15 schizophrenia, 261n76, 280 See also agoraphobia; dementia illocution public education and, 198, 202–203 silencing with, 193 speech-acts and, 193–197, 206n33 “imaginary bodies,” 40n4 Imbeni, Renzo, 201 Implicit Association Test (IAT), 99n43 In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), 312 India, surrogacy in, 312 Individuals (Strawson), 260n58 infants Baby M custody case (1986), 315 biting intention of, 244–245, 252, 321 with embodied cultural practices, 252 Gammy case, 311 intercorporeality and, 321 mimicry of, 321, 324, 331n48

400 INDEX

infants (continued) mother-infant live interaction, 135–136, 146 ownership of, 316 with pain, 286 infelicities, with speech-acts, 194–195, 197 intentional experience, 83 intentionality, 139 Husserl and, 216–217, 272 with infant and biting, 244–245, 252, 321 operative, 165–167, 171 interaction, 153n14 autonomy of, 8, 136, 145 defined, 134, 136 mother-infant live, 135–136, 146 primary intersubjectivity and, 135, 141 recognition and, 138–139 social encounters and, 7–8, 133 social media and, 137 interaction theory (IT), 7, 134, 151 “interanimality,” 288 intercorporeal, shared meaning politics with conditions for, 28–30 selfhood with sociality based on, 25–28 intercorporeality constitutive, 363–368 defined, 270, 286 dementia and, 15–16, 360–371, 382n44 as expression, relation of, 368–371, 382n44 face-to-face, 15, 360–361, 363, 379n11 intersubjectivity and, 2–3 with intersubjectivity and beingwith-one-another, 286–289 primordial, 360–361, 363 surrogacy and maternal-fetal relation with, 318, 320–326 within womb, 13–14

interlocution, speech-acts and, 197 intersubjectivity agoraphobia and, 14–15, 338 alienation and, 355n58 connotations, 2–3 with embodiment and spatiality, 338–341 Husserl and, 282 intercorporeal relations and, 2–3 with intercorporeality and beingwith-one-another, 286–289 Merleau-Ponty and, 178, 353n8 primary, 135, 140–145 secondary, 133, 135, 139, 141 self-consciousness and, 139–140 violence of, 178 wonder and, 210 invisibility, 263n111, 283–284 anonymity and, 109 race and dialectics of, 106–110 recognition and perception with phenomenology of, 116–121 social, 103–104 Invisible Man (Ellison), 6, 106, 109 Ireland gestational surrogacy laws in, 311 hunger strike in, 37–38 Irigaray, Luce, 40n4, 161, 186 male privilege and, 200 performativity of active listening and, 200–204 on phenomenology, 223n8 on politics and love, 206n44 with reading and writing, ethics of, 220 with sexual difference and wonder, 215–220, 221n4 wonder and, 10–11, 209–210, 216, 218 isolation bodies in revolt with homogenization and, 37–39 Fanon and, 49–50

INDEX 401

Pelican Bay State Prison and extreme, 50–54 as political violence, 31–33, 37–39 solitary confinement, 4–5, 32–33, 50–54, 62–63, 69n41 IT. See interaction theory IVF. See In Vitro Fertilization Jackson, George, 53 Jamaa, Sitawa Nantambu (Ron Dewberry), 48, 54, 59, 63 James, William, 279, 292n32 Jardine, James, 119 Jay, Martin, 110 Jesudason, Sujatha, 327 Jim Crow South, 83, 86–88, 90 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 145, 165, 273 Katz, David, 273, 292n31 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 147 Kipling, Rudyard, 89 Kirby, Jeffrey, 318 Kitwood, Tom, 377n3 knowledge, triangulation of, 258n27 Koffka, Kurt, 272 Köhler, Wolfgang, 272 körper. See objective body Kruks, Sonia, 181n39 La Caze, M., 222n7 labor asymmetry thesis with, 317 pregnancy and, 316, 318 Lacan, Jacques, 222n8 Lakoff, Robin, 195 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 226n23 Langton, Rae, 193, 195, 197 language educational system and, 187 and “Others,” 170–173 of recognition, 201 sedimentation and, 170–171, 190 sexual difference in, 200–201, 203

with social power and active listening, 186–192 speech-acts and, 188, 193–199 with surrogacy, 315 Lawrence, C.R., 190 laws antiterrorism, 31, 33, 35–36, 42n49 divorce and Islamic, 194 gestational surrogacy, 311 Lazarre, Jane, 76 Lebenswelt (“lifeworld”), 273 legitimation, recognition and, 191 leib. See lived body Leslie, Tim, 42n49 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 22, 28, 35, 39n2, 161, 169, 170 on ethical attitude, 216 influence, 42n31 intentionality and, 165–166 recognition and, 144–145 liberation, critical phenomenology as, 54–59 life, 40n8, 126n74, 273 “American way of,” 86–87 “bare,” 33–34, 37 “Black Lives Matter” movement, 100n45, 124n41 “lifeworld.” See Lebenswelt listening, active in context, 9–10, 185–186 with hearer’s uptake as condition for speech-acts, 193–199 language and social power, 186–192 performativity of, 200–204, 206n36 silence and, 219 literacy, persecution of, 52–53 lived body (leib) constitutive intercorporeality and, 365–366 in fantasy, dream, and altered states, 284–285

402 INDEX

lived body (continued) Husserl and, 212–213, 226n23, 286 körper versus, 276–279 lived experience Cézanne and, 111 of race with invisibility, 106–110 role of, 122n5 locution, speech-acts and, 193, 196 “the look,” 287 agoraphobia and, 349–353 defined, 339 of “Others,” 339, 347–349 “looping effect,” with emotions, 143 Lorde, Audre, 95n5 Louw, S., 360 love, 201 as basic emotion, 155n43 politics and, 206n44, 207n44 Lovecraft, H.P., 337 Lukács, György, 140 Lymer, Jane, 314, 316, 324, 325, 327 Lyotard, J.F., 137 Mach, Ernst, 278–279 Mackenzie, C., 148–149 madmen “milieu” of, 261n76 as other, 12, 238, 246, 249–250 male privilege, 200 malédiction corporelle (bodily curse), 77, 95n4 Marchand, André, 298n91 Markmann, Lam, 95n4 Marratto, Scott, 368, 379n11 Martin, Emily, 314, 316, 317 Martin, Trayvon, 122n10 Martín Alcoff, Linda, 85, 99n29, 106, 114 Marx, Karl, 91, 92, 94 master-slave dialectic, 126, 134, 136 Matsuda, M.J., 190 May, Vivian, 77, 95n5, 96n6 McBride, Renisha, 122n10 McLane, Janice, 106, 123n143

Mead, George Herbert, 96n6 Mead, Margaret, 247 media, gestational surrogacy in, 318 medical tourism, 312–313 Meditations of First Philosophy (Descartes), 211 Meltzoff, Andrew N., 324, 331n48 “mental concepts,” 237, 243–244, 246, 255n5, 260n58 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1, 23, 38, 104, 298n91, 314. on animals, 247–248, 251, 261n78 with behavior, structure of, 242–243 body and, 25–26, 79, 115, 216, 379n13 “chiasm” and, 281–284, 298n93 on children, 248–251 dualism and, 271 embodiment and, 269 expression and, 368–371, 382n44 flesh and, 27, 162–163, 270, 277, 284, 381n27 on Husserl, 216–217, 274–275 intentional experience and, 83 “interanimality” and, 288 intercorporeality and, 270, 320– 323, 363–365 intersubjectivity and, 178, 353n8 language and, 170–173 on madmen, 249–250 on mimicry of infants, 331n48 mind-body union and, 211–212, 213, 226n22 with other “Others,” problem of, 245–254 with “Others,” problem of, 11–13, 237–245, 255 perception and, 111–112, 114 on primitive peoples, 249, 251 racism and, 86, 91–92 reduction and, 229n42, 229n45 on Sartre, 112 sedimentation and, 86, 91 on self-perception, 93

INDEX 403

with senses and body, 174–176 social encounters and ethics of reading “Others,” 8–9, 161–164 soul-body unity and, 212 subject-object and, 275 on touch, 263n111 women and, 256n7 wonder and, 210, 217 See also Phenomenology of Perception metaphors, surrogacy practices and, 315–320 Meyerhoff, Miriam, 195 “milieu,” 12 connotations, 261n75 of madmen, 261n76 with “Others,” problem of, 243– 244, 246–247, 250, 259n48 Mills, Charles, 97n14 mimicry, of infants, 321, 324, 331n48 mind, 225n21, 255n2, 283, 298n91 “calling to,” 285 “mental concepts” and, 237, 243– 244, 246, 255n5, 260n58 with other “Others,” cognitive understanding of, 246–250 with “Others,” problem of, 239–241 thought, 170, 241, 257n16 mind-body union criticism of, 223n11 Descartes and, 210–213 Merleau-Ponty and, 211–212, 213, 226n22 wonder and, 214–215 mineness, bodily, 279–281 Minkowski, Eugene, 263n114 Moore, M., 324 “morphology,” 40n4 Morrison, Toni, 6, 93, 103 invisibility and, 119 lived experience and, 122n5 “seeing white” and, 108 Mortensen, Ellen, 222n8 mothers contract motherhood, 312

fetus and communication with, 286 gestational surrogacy and role of, 315–316 maternal-fetal relations with intercorporeality and surrogacy, 318, 320–326 mother-infant live interaction, 135–136, 146 womb, 329n32 See also surrogacy motor skills, 240 Müller, Georg Elias, 292n31 Murray, L., 135 musical ability, dementia and, 361– 362, 367, 372, 378n7 Muslims, 38 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 363 body and, 42n37 Lévinas and, 42n31 with political violence and body, 23–24, 25, 28, 29–30, 31, 33 natality, 29–30, 33, 36, 39 naturalism, 271 Nazis, 34–35, 43n54 Ngo, Helen, 115–116, 122n10 Nilsson, Lennart, 316–317 Noë, Alva, 270 norm “vital,” 243 whiteness as, 105 objectification, recognition and, 119–120 objective body (körper) defined, 277 lived body versus, 276–279 objects bodies as psychic, 285 cultural, 175, 241, 263n115 subject-object, 275 Oliver, Kelly, 110, 125n74, 315 Olkowski, Dorothea, 204n1 Olympia (Nazi propaganda film), 34–35, 43n54

404 INDEX

On Empathy (Stein), 226n23 “Operation Sovereign Borders,” 42n49 operative intentionality, 165–167, 171 oppression, privilege and, 77 Orientalism (Said), 89 Oshana, Marina, 150 Other Minds (Avramides), 255n2 otherness, agoraphobia as, 15 “Others,” 2, 220 African Americans as, 85–86 with agoraphobia and “the look,” 349–353 “body-for,” 344–345 connotations, 353n3 “insiders” as, 88 with language in Phenomenology of Perception, 170–173 “the look” of, 339, 347–349 in preface of Phenomenology of Perception, 164–170 selfhood and, 380n26 social encounters with ethics of reading, 8–9, 161–164 traces of, 173–178 “Others,” problem of bodily understanding of other, 250–254 cognitive understanding of other, 246–250 conceptual issue, 243–245 in context, 237–239, 254–255, 257n16, 259n48 epistemological query, first, 239–241 epistemological query, second, 242–243 other, 11–13, 245–254 “outsiders,” 88 ownership body, 279–281 of infants, 316 pain, 213, 257n13 bodies and, 342–344 fatigue and, 168

infants with, 286 reading with, 342–343 Pande, Amrita, 329n32 “parole, snitch, or die,” prison gangs with, 52 participatory sense-making, 136 passions, 219, 227n25. See also emotion-passions, wonder and passions, of soul mind-body union and, 214 wonder and, 213–215 The Passions of the Soul (Descartes), 11, 209, 210, 211 Pelican Bay State Prison with critical phenomenology as liberation practice, 54–59 gang validation and extreme isolation at, 50–54 hunger strike at, 47–49, 53–54 with literacy, persecution of, 52–53 population, 67n15 prison gangs in, 48, 50–54, 66n3 with racial bating, 61 Short Corridor Collective at, 47–49, 59–65 perception, 93 anonymity with, 112, 174, 181, 241 passions of soul and senses, 213 See also Phenomenology of Perception perception, racialization of art and, 111, 124n41 in context, 7, 103–105 hypervisibility with, 104–105 with invisibility, dialectics of, 106–110 with patterns ruptured, 111, 113– 116, 124n41 recognition and, 116–121 re-visioning ethical forms of seeing and, 110–113 social invisibility and, 103–104 violence and, 111–112 performativity

INDEX 405

of active listening, 200–204, 206n36 linguistic, 10, 185–186 perlocution, speech-acts and, 193, 195, 196, 197 persons, as second-persons, 147 phenomenology, 204n1, 229n45, 229n47 critical, 49–50, 54–59, 67n10 embodiment in, 269–270 existential, 238–239 of intercorporeality and maternal-fetal relation, 318, 320–326 of invisibility, 116–121 Irigaray on, 223n8 with körper versus leib, 276–279 psychology and, 272 role of, 2 of social encounters, 1–17 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 91, 93, 111, 114 body schema and, 240, 280, 322 mind-body union and, 211–212 “Others” and language in, 170–173 “Others” in preface of, 164–170 with “Others,” traces of, 173–178 with social encounters and reading “Others,” 162–164 soul-body unity and, 271 Phenomenology of the Social World (Schutz), 75 “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” (Ahmed), 76 Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel), 134 Philcox, Richard, 95n4 “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (Merleau-Ponty), 274–275 philosophy analytic, 255n1, 256n10, 257n13 “Continental,” 255n1 mind-body union with, 211 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 134, 146 Phobos (Greek mythical figure), 340 Piaget, Jean, 248, 257n12

Plato, 79–80, 97n15, 169, 220 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison), 93 Plessner, Hellmuth, 277 political violence, body and in context, 4, 21, 24 direct and indirect impact, 30–36 discrimination and, 22–23 homogenization and, 32, 37–39 isolation and, 31–33, 37–39 selfhood and sociality, 25–28 with shared meaning, conditions for, 28–30 politics intercorporeal shared meaning and, 28–30 love and, 206n44, 207n44 pornographic speech-acts, 193, 204 possession. See mineness, bodily; ownership power, 40n8 discourse and body with, 22–23 with gender-based disparity, 199 social, 186–192, 195–196 speech-acts and, 9–10, 188 violence and, 39 praxis collective, 60–61, 64 Sartre and, 56–57 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Butler), 40n8 pregnancy body schema and, 322–326 costs, 318 labor and, 316, 318 See also surrogacy pre-reflective habits, of white privilege, 81–83, 97n14 primary affectivity, 8, 113, 116 primary intersubjectivity, 135, 140–145 primitive peoples bodily understanding of, 263n112 as other, 12, 238, 246, 249, 251

406 INDEX

primordial intercorporeality, 360–361, 363 Principles of Psychology (James), 279 prison gangs, in Pelican Bay State Prison with isolation, 50–54 major, 48 with “parole, snitch, or die,” 52 validation, 50–54, 66n3 prisoners with “Agreement to End Hostilities,” 63–64 human rights for class of, 47, 48, 60, 62–63, 65 with hunger strikes, 37–38, 47–49, 53–54 solitary confinement and impact on, 4–5, 32–33 torture of, 48 See also Pelican Bay State Prison privilege male, 200 oppression and, 77 with passivity and responsibility, 85–94 See also white privilege propaganda, fear and exclusion with, 34–35 protests Cronulla riots of 2005, 38, 43n56 prisoners, 37–38 See also hunger strikes; Pelican Bay State Prison Proust, Marcel, 83–84 “psychic body,” 343 psychic object, bodies as, 285 psychologists Gestalt, 247, 259n48, 292n32 role of, 254 psychology, 248 developmental, 140–141 phenomenology and, 272 self-consciousness and, 279

public education, illocution, 198, 202–203 Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (May), 95n5, 96n6 Puwar, Nirmal, 105 “queer,” 189–190, 192 race baiting in Pelican Bay State Prison, 61 CDCR with taxonomy of, 53 invisibility and lived experience of, 106–110 political violence and body with, 23 See also whiteness racialization, process of, 109–110. See also perception, racialization of racism, 96n11, 96n13, 97n14 with African Americans, shootings of, 122n10 bodily habit and, 115 Jim Crow South and, 83, 86–88, 90 with language and social power, 189–190 with privilege, passivity, and responsibility, 85–94 reification and, 140 role of, 3 sedimentation of, 86, 93–94, 109 slurs, 189, 199 White Man and, 88–90 See also white ignorance; white privilege Ratcliffe, Matthew, 322 rationality, Husserl and, 216–217 reading, ethics of “Others” and language in Phenomenology of Perception, 170–173

INDEX 407

“Others” and social encounters, 8–9, 161–164 “Others” in Phenomenology of Perception, preface, 164–170 “Others” in Phenomenology of Perception and, 173–178 writing and, 220 reading, with pain, 342–343 re-authorization, with speech-acts, 190–191, 192, 199, 203 reciprocity bodily, 263n113, 264n122 Sartre and, 263n111 speech and, 197 recognition elementary, 142–143 emotional identification and, 140– 142, 146 etymology, 154n24 with gestures, affirmative, 118 interaction and, 138–139 language of, 201 legitimation and, 191 master-slave dialectic and, 126, 134, 136 mimicry of infants and, 321, 324, 331n48 mother-infant live interaction without, 136 objectification and alienation with, 119–120 with perception, racialization of, 116–121 relational autonomy and, 146–148 theory, 7, 104, 113, 125n74, 126n74, 137–145, 154n24 Reddy, Vasudevi, 286 reduction, 229n42, 229n45 defined, 218 Husserl and, 216–217 wonder and, 217 reification autonomy and, 137 racism and, 140

relational autonomy, 145 autopoiesis, 156n72 with persons as second-persons, 147 recognition and, 146–148 social-, 149–151 responsibility with privilege and passivity, 85–94 racism and, 85–88, 90–91, 94 Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Sullivan), 93, 96n11, 96n13, 97n14 revolution, defined, 37 Ricoeur, Paul, 154n24 Riefenstahl, Leni, 34–35, 43n54 rights. See human rights Rothman, Barbara, 316 Ryle, Gilbert, 225n21 Sabat, S., 360 Sacks, Oliver, 275 Said, Edward, 88–89 Salinas, Raúl R., 48–49 Sands, Bobby, 37–38 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 92, 269 anonymity and, 75 Beauvoir and, 275 bodies and, 285, 341–345 criticism of, 112 embodiment and, 276 Fanon and, 68n31 flesh and, 270, 277 influence, 1, 5 intersubjectivity and, 14, 339 “the look” and, 287, 339, 347–349 on pain, 342–344 perception and, 110–113 praxis and, 56–57 “psychic body” and, 343 reciprocity and, 263n111 social ontology and, 49, 56, 58–59 touch and, 287 Satz, Deborah, 317–318

408 INDEX

Scheler, Max, 277 schizophrenia, 261n76, 280 Schneider, Susan, 250 Schutz, Alfred, 75 secondary intersubjectivity, 133, 135, 139, 141 second-persons, persons as, 147 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 91 sedimentation of habits, 86, 91–93 language and, 170–171, 190 of racism, 86, 93–94, 109 ruptures, 124n41 seeing as “expressive vision,” 113–114 re-visioning ethical forms of, 110–113 “white,” 108 See also perception, racialization of self-access, 172 self-consciousness intersubjectivity and, 139–140 psychology and, 279 selfhood, 2 with dementia, 359–360, 376–377 with “Others,” 380n26 with sociality based on corporeal sharing of meaning, 25–28 self-relation, 142, 173–174, 369 sensations double, 15, 342, 365 passions of soul and, 213 senses “chiasm” and, 281–284, 298n93 gestures and, 172, 177 participatory sense-making, 136 with perceiving bodies, 174–176 perceptions and passions of soul, 213 See also touch; vision sexism with handshakes, 287 heterosexism, 3, 4 with language and social power, 189–190

speech, 199 sexual difference in language, 200–201, 203 with politics and love, 207n44 wonder and, 209–210, 215–220, 221n4 Shanley, Mary, 327 Shigeta, Mitsutoki, 311 shootings, police, 122n10 Short Corridor Collective “Agreement to End Hostilities,” 63–64 collective praxis and, 60–61 demands, 47 hunger strike and, 47–49, 53–54 as prisoner class with human rights agenda, 47, 48, 60, 62–63, 65 with resistance and solidarity, 59–65 See also Pelican Bay State Prison silence active listening and, 219 as gesture, 201–202 with illocution, 193 Simondon, Gilbert, 163, 165 simulation theory (ST), 134, 138 situated expression, dementia and, 371–375 slavery. See master-slave dialectic slurs, racial, 189, 199 social class, consciousness and, 92 social encounters double sensation and, 15, 342 with ethics of reading “Others,” 8–9, 161–164 interaction and, 7–8, 133 phenomenology of, 1–17 social scripts in, 5–6, 83–84 social equilibrium, 113 social invisibility, African Americans with, 103–104 social media, interaction and, 137 social ontology, Sartre and, 49, 56, 58–59

INDEX 409

social power gender and, 195–196 with language and active listening, 186–192 social scripts, in social encounters, 5–6, 83–84 social utility, of anonymity, 75 sociality in context, 23 with selfhood and corporeal sharing of meaning, 25–28 social-relational autonomy, 149–151 Soledad Brother (Jackson), 53 solitary confinement communication in, 69n41 impact of, 4–5, 32–33 with isolation, extreme, 50–54 as torture, 62–63 See also Pelican Bay State Prison soul, 11, 209, 210, 211 soul-body unity, 212, 225n21, 271 wonder and passions of, 213–215 The Souls of Black Folk (DuBois), 78 space, 273–274, 278, 283 gender and, 203 of white bodies, 79–80 spatiality agoraphobia and, 337–341, 346–347 body and, 337–338 with embodiment and intersubjectivity, 338–341 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray), 220 speech harmful, 199 homophobic, 199 Islamic law and divorce procedure with, 194 receiving, 196 reciprocity and, 197 thought and, 170 women and, 10, 194–195, 198–199

speech-acts active listening and hearer with, 193–199 in context, 185 gender and, 194, 199 illocution and, 193–197, 206n33 infelicities with, 194–195, 197 interlocution and, 197 language and, 188, 193–199 with language and social power, 188 legitimation and, 191 locution and, 193, 196 perlocution and, 193, 195, 196, 197 pornographic, 193, 204 power and, 9–10, 188 re-authorization with, 190–191, 192, 199, 203 verbal insults and racial slurs, 189, 199 Spinoza, Baruch, 220 ST. See simulation theory Stein, Edith, 226n23, 269, 277 Stoics, 230n54 Stoljar, N., 148–149 Stoller, Silvia, 371 Strawson, P.F., 260n58 The Structure of Behavior (MerleauPonty), 247–248 Stumpf, Carl, 272 subject-object, 275 Sullivan, Shannon, 96n11, 96n13, 97n14, 181n39 perception and, 112 racism and, 93 recognition and, 125n74 white ignorance and, 76–77, 81–82 on whiteness as norm, 105 supermax prisons, 50. See also Pelican Bay State Prison surrogacy commercial, 312–313, 316, 318, 327

410 INDEX

surrogacy (continued) costs, 312 “donor-and-surrogacy amnesia,” 316, 327 ethics of, 311–312 feminism and, 313–314, 318–319 fetus and role of surrogate, 14 gestational, 311, 312, 315–316, 318 human rights and, 311 intercorporeality and maternal-fetal relation with, 318, 320–326 laws, 311 metaphors and practices of, 315–320 symbolic behavior, 248 symbolic violence, 3, 22–23, 32 syncretic behavior, 248 The System of Ethical Life (Hegel), 126n74 Tannery, Paul, 221n3 task, wonder as, 11, 215–220 technology ART, 313–314 bodies enhanced with, 281 terrorism, 53, 136, 137 antiterrorism laws, 31, 33, 35–36, 42n49 defined, 153n11 Thing and Space (Ding und Raum) (Husserl), 273–274, 278, 283 Thompson, Evan, 275 thought with “Others,” problem of, 241, 257n16 speech and, 170 “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Young), 40n6 torture of prisoners, 48 solitary confinement as, 62–63 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Lévinas), 39n2, 161, 165, 170, 216

touch, 263n111, 274, 278 Sartre and, 287 vision and, 282–283 touchable, untouchable and, 380n23 tourism, medical, 312–313 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 135, 286 twins, conjoined, 288 “ultra-thing,” 249 unconscious habits, of white privilege, 81–83, 93, 97n14 untouchable, touchable and, 380n23 Updike, John, 319 “uptake,” in context, 205n33 Utley, Fiona, 316 Validation Therapy, 378n6 van Leeuwen, Anne, 222n8 Varela, Francisco, 275 Varga, S., 140 verbal insults, 189, 199 “Vincent,” agoraphobia case, 345– 347, 350–352, 356n62 violence, 40n8 connotations, 21–22 “gladiator fights,” 61 of intersubjectivity, 178 perception and, 111–112 police, 122n10 power and, 39 symbolic, 3, 22–23, 32 See also political violence, body and The Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty), 263n111, 283–284 vision seeing, 108, 110–114 “super/vision,” 108 touch and, 282–283 See also perception, racialization of “visual agnosia,” 250 “vital norm,” Canguilhem and, 243 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 113–114, 370

INDEX 411

Wallace-Well, Benjamin, 53–54, 69n41 Westphal, Carl Friedrich Otto, 340–341 white ignorance with bodies and space, 79–80 in context, 95n2 defined, 76–77 with privilege, 76, 78–79 questioning, 76–85 unconscious habits of, 81–83, 93, 97n14 White Man, 88–90 white privilege, 96n11, 96n13 habits of, 81–83, 93, 97n14 ignorance with, 76, 78–79 whiteness, 76, 93, 96n11, 96n13, 96n14 as norm, 105 “seeing white,” 108 Williams, Patricia, 77 Wilson, Gladys Feil and, 361–363, 367, 368–369 situated expression and, 371–375 Winch, P., 256n10 Winnicott, Donald, 146 womb, 317 intercorporeality within, 13–14 IVF and, 312 mothers, 329n32 with mothers communicating with fetus, 286 See also surrogacy women, 190, 192, 220 communication and, 200–201 Merleau-Ponty and, 256n7

pornographic speech-acts and, 193, 204 with speech, failure of, 194–195, 198–199 with speech and listeners, 10 See also mothers; surrogacy wonder admiration and, 221n2 emotion-passions and, 210, 213– 215, 227n26 as goal or task, 11 Irigaray and, 10–11 passions of soul and, 213–215 physiology and causal origin of, 228n37 sexual difference and, 209–210, 215–220, 221n4 as task, 215–220 The World of Colour. See Die Farbenwelt The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 68n31 Wright, Richard, 85 writing, ethics of reading and, 220 Wundt, Wilhelm, 272, 292n31 Yancy, George, 77, 97n14, 105, 107, 121 Young, Iris Marion, 40n6, 79, 314, 323, 327 Zahavi, Dan, 270 Zeiler, Kristin, 360–361, 363, 367, 372 Ziarek, Ewa, 34