This essay speaks to a certain kind of difficulty that stands in the way of doing phenomenology. I argue that this difficulty has its source in the sort of institutional structures many of us think and write under, which gives rise to a kind of attitude that tends to obscure or diminish the worth and promise of attending to the things themselves, phenomenologically. I refer to this attitude as the “exegetical attitude.” In attempting to make this attitude more manifest, I (...) hope to further phenomenological investigations of the lived world. (shrink)

Between March and June 2008, a group of fifteen Performance Studies and Communications students at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia undertook a course on comedy based on a series of six lectures by Agnes Heller in which she outlined ideas from her book, Immortal Comedy. Subsequently, the students attended a number of comedy shows and other events to perform practical group phenomenological research with an aim to activate the ground opened by Heller’s theories through description of actual comic phenomena. The (...) outcomes—theoretical, experiential and, most surprisingly, pedagogical—were remarkable in their demonstration of the efficacy of group phenomenology as a method of intertwined practice, research and learning. (shrink)