Healing House I: A Material Phenomenology of Illness

This paper is a deep investigation into one art installation, Healing House I, which materializes the lived experience of being diagnosed with a chronic illness. This artwork is part of a collaborative project between artist Darian Goldin Stahl and her sister, Devan Stahl, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Together, they use a phenomenological methodology to express the disconnections between the lived body and the body object that can occur after a diagnosis, as well as the conditions necessary to mend this separation. Joining fleshy material, sound, vibration, and scent in this artwork, Goldin Stahl analyses how a multi-sensory and artistic interpretation of her sister’s illness narratives can tacitly communicate one experience of living with MS. In sharing this artwork with others in a disability arts exhibition, the sisters aim towards fostering a collective, intercorporeal understanding and empathy for the ill body.

Addressing the issue of naturalism in autopoietic enactivism through genetic and material phenomenology

A central idea in autopoietic enactivism is that the living organism is an autonomous system that “enacts” or “brings forth” its environment. In this paper, I connect this thesis to the general philosophical framework developed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch in The Embodied Mind, which is centred on the concept of the co-determination of subject and object of cognition, and I liken this notion to the kind of correlationism that is found in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. However, I argue that there is a tension in autopoietic enactivism between its search for the biological basis of cognition, which seems to be oriented towards a metaphysics of Nature, and the concept of groundlessness, which seems to imply the renunciation of metaphysics. As a consequence, the concepts of Nature and naturalism in autopoietic enactivism turn out to be problematic. A similar problem arises in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in relation to its metaphysical implications and, in particular, to the possibility of a “legitimate naturalization of consciousness”. I find a way out of this issue by combining the genetic development of phenomenology with Henry’s material phenomenology. In the light of the investigation of the temporality of experience in these views, I suggest conceiving of Nature as the qualitative process that grounds the subject-object correlation, and I conceive of the resulting view as a form of neutral monism.

We-Synthesis

The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) To show the basic contours of transcendental subjectivity in the later work of Edmund Husserl, especially the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis, and in the strictly phenomenological work of Michel Henry, especially Material Phenomenology; (2) to highlight Henry’s radical critique of Husserlian intersubjectivity and show that such critique, while valuable in its intention, is ultimately misguided because it neglects the important contribution Husserl’s complicated vocabulary of lifeworld makes to the study of intersubjectivity; and (3) to point toward a phenomenological conception of intersubjective practice we may call the realm of we-synthesis that prioritizes the first-person perspective rooted in empathy, which enables meaningful engagement with the second-person perspective. Working in conjunction with Husserl and Henry on the phenomenological conception of shared life enables the recuperation of the fragile line between subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

The Illam and Its Dispersion

Chapter four examines Nambudiri houses and the place they hold in the material phenomenology of kinship memories. Houses are understood here not only as ‘private domestic’ places but as domains where families’ engagement with political history is expressed, visualiszd (or hidden) in internal spatial dispositions, in the presentation of objects, in the daily routine, and in consumption practices. Indeed, houses are conceived as sites where kinship is ‘made’ by either reproducing the past, or by searching a distance from it. The social and symbolic significance of past Illams architecture (Nambudiri ancestral houses) is contrasted with the meanings ascribed to present middle-class dwellings and to the way people choose to inhabit the latter. The relation between gender, class mobility, and kinship will be developed by comparing middle-class Nambudiri men and women narratives.

Interiority, Exteriority and the Realm of Intentionality

The realm of intentionality is definitive of phenomenology as a reflective methodology. Yet it is precisely the focus on the intentional given that has been condemned recently. Speculative realism (e.g. Meillassoux, 2008/2006) argues that phenomenology is unsatisfactory since the reduction to the intentional realm excludes the ‘external’, i.e. reality independent of consciousness. This criticism allows me to clarify the nature of intentionality. Material phenomenology finds, in contrast, that the intentional realm excludes the ‘inner’ (‘auto-affective life’—Henry, 1973/1963). This criticism allows me to discuss the way in which ipseity enters as an element of experience. Intentionality, viewed psychologically, is rightly the distinct arena of phenomenological psychology. However, there is no doubting the difficulty of maintaining a research focus precisely on the realm of intentionality; there are aporias of the reduction. I discuss some of the difficulties.