Dylan Trigg - Who is the Subject of Birth?

<p>Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season four now continues with recordings from our 2019 Annual Conference. To kick off, here is a recording of one of our keynotes, Dylan Trigg, FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna</p> <p> </p> <p>ABSTRACT: In this talk, I attempt a phenomenological analysis of childbirth as a strange event using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of anonymity. The concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty refers to how our bodily existence is constituted by a Nature outside of ourselves. Such a formulation allows him to explain how perception is both general and singular in the same measure, how temporality can be contemporaneous and immemorial, and how the body is both one’s own while at the same time marking a prehistory that is never entirely my own. My point of departure for thinking through the issue of birth and anonymity begins from the conviction that Merleau-Ponty’s account of anonymity tends to privilege themes of integrity and synthesis while neglecting how anonymity can serve as a threat or rupture to the unity of selfhood, especially in the context of limit-experiences, not least childbirth. I contend that the concept of anonymity helps us to understand how childbirth is an irreducibly strange event. This is evident in at least two claims that tend to populate accounts of childbirth. First, the strangeness accompanying the sense of leaving one’s body behind, or, otherwise letting the body do its own thing. Second, the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them here phenomenologically as being instructive not only of uniqueness of childbirth but also telling us something important about bodily life more generally, especially in terms of who the subject of perceptual life, and thus childbirth, is.</p> <p> </p> <p>BIO: Dr Dylan Trigg is an FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow at University of Vienna, D