Abstract
What might enable us to imagine a radically renewed, more vibrant field of “the Humanities”? How can we reconceive of the Humanities as transformative for body, mind, and soul in this historical moment of severe health, political, and moral crisis for humanity? How can we identify emergent possibilities for qualitative transformation in experience, in taking positions, and in thinking? Can the Humanities transcend their knowledge-oriented practices and open up more to include practices of (now largely unpracticed) primordial sensuous and perceptual experience and thus also to potentially life-changing ways of being? The crises that entangle us demand profound transformations of the “human.” My paper correlates three potentially redemptive “comportments” or “postures” emergent in 20th century philosophy and psychoanalysis that are still available to us and that turn us away from the hyper-objectifications of life that define us: 1) Foucault’s under-developed references to “limit-experience,” in which a “self” dissociates from “itself” for the sake of radical transformation of “self”; 2) the Heideggerian life- and thought-changing “event,” experienced on the level of individual “factical life,” that can unleash transformations in language, thinking, and bodily experiences themselves; and 3) a phenomenology of identified autistic traits that, fascinatingly, overlap with certain pre-subjective “body-ego” phenomena crucial to the Heideggerian phenomenology of “authentic” being, and with some of Heidegger’s cryptic references to the transformative “event.” How might such phenomena call for a new (real, fantasmatic, perhaps fictional) connection to meaningful being? And can they lead us onto a path of renewal within the Humanities?
Presenters
Elizabeth StewartAssociate Professor, English, Yeshiva University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Humanities, Crisis, Transformation, Subjectivity, Autism, Experience, Thinking, Phenomenology, Event, Limit-Experience
