We are happy to feature four invited submissions by Lisa Guenther, Kym Maclaren, Bonnie Mann, and Gayle Salamon, all of whom respond to the questions motivating our inaugural issue. Both Salamon and Maclaren offer a response to the question “What is critical phenomenology?” by exploring the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology. Salamon does this by tracing the history of the term critical phenomenology. Maclaren further explores the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology en route to her analysis (...) of intimacy. Focusing on the phenomena of shame and long-term solitary confinement, Mann and Guenther take up that question by performing the work of critical phenomenology. Mann also offers suggestions regarding critical or, as she calls it, feminist phenomenology’s relation to the tradition—both of classical phenomenology and feminist philosophy. Guenther shows how the work of critical phenomenology is already at play in the practices of resistance among prisoners in the Security Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State Prison in California. (shrink)

In the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty uses punctum caecum (physiological blind spot) as a metaphor for the unconscious and the invisible of the visible. I read the punctum caecum alongside Merleau-Ponty’s call in another working note to “[e]laborate a phenomenology of the other world.” I take up a phenomenology of the other world as directed toward the punctum caecum of this world. I begin with a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s unconscious and continue its unfinished thought by (...) drawing in other iterations of the punctum caecum – the involuntary memories in Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time, the punctum Roland Barthes finds in Camera Lucida and in words that refer to other worlds. Among Merleau-Ponty, Proust, and Barthes I sense something shared – a latent intentionality, and a question about mourning expressed across their disparate texts: the other who existed once, do they exist still? The other who looked at me once, do they look at me still? (shrink)

I offer a re-evaluation of Freudian melancholy by reading it in-conjunction with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of phantom limbs and Marcel Proust’s involuntary memories. As an affective response to loss, melancholy bears a strange, belated temporality (Nachträglichkeit). Through Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the phantom limb, I emphasize that the melancholic subject remains affectively bound to a past world. While this can be read as problematic insofar as the subject is attuned to both the possibilities that belong to the present and the impossibilities that (...) belong to the past world, I turn to Proust whose writings on involuntary memory indicate a way of taking up these futural (im)possibilities. I focus the discussion on the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother after her death to highlight the creative transformation of his melancholy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between the historical materialism of Walter Benjamin and the poetics of Paul Celan, and claims that within Celan’s poetics, we find a form for thinking Benjamin’s Marxism beyond Benjamin. The driving force of Benjamin’s critique of historicism is the desire to free Marx’s ideas from the empty time of progress. By attending to the “breathturns” at the heart of Celan’s, The Meridian, this article uncovers a poetic historiography grounded in Benjamin’s now-time. It is with this (...) conception of history that Marx’s ideas can be reimagined as a historico-poetic materialism and reinvigorated with revolutionary force. (shrink)