Miriam Ambrosino - ‘Using Feeling: Engaging Aesthetic Experience in Phenomenological Practice’

<p>This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Miriam Ambrosino, New York University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.</p> <p> </p> <p>ABSTRACT: In her essay, “The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology: The Case of Shame,” Bonnie Mann (2018) contends that feminist scholarship in all areas of philosophy is up against “an affective problem, not a cognitive one.” Mann calls attention to the “problem of reverence” that prevents philosophy—especially feminist phenomenology—from considering new methods of theorizing and interpreting. Following Mann's claims and Alia Al-Saji’s (2014) work on affective hesitation, I investigate how contemporary thinkers can attend to and thus reconfigure their affective commitments of reverence towards the white male canon in phenomenology. I argue that part of this project involves using one’s affects as a mode of critique. For phenomenology to open up to cross-disciplinary dialogue, it must recognize that critique is sufficient at the level of self reflection and transformation of habitual modes of feeling and perceiving. I read Aimé Césaire epic poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, as a case study that demonstrates my methodology of using affect in critical phenomenological practice. I explicate how the rhetoric of disgust in this poem can catalyze a critical and ethically responsive phenomenological reduction for myself, a white reader. I claim that this experience of disgust in reading resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) account of wonder, vis-à-vis Eugen Fink, as “perhaps the best formulation of the reduction,” a reflection that “reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.” Guiding this methodology is Louise Rosenblatt’s (1969) transactional theory of literary criticism, inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatism. Through my case study I clarify how this theory provides a framework for engaging phenomenology with lived aesthetic experience to facilitate transformative affective work on one’s affective comm