Lecture
LCCP/CPP Colloquium "Social Critique at a Crossroads: Marxism and Critical Phenomenology"
- Date
- Monday 25 November 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
The Centre of Political Philosophy and the Leiden Centre of Continental Philosophy are pleased to announce a lecture by Prof. Johanna Oksala the Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy of the Loyola University Chicago.
Abstract
The paper stages an encounter between Marxist theory and critical phenomenology for the purpose of contributing to the development of a distinctive method for critical phenomenology. The argument proceeds in three stages. In the first section, I discuss the Marxist critique of immediate experience. I contend that it has two important consequences for the method of critical phenomenology. First, critical phenomenology needs to adopt a hybrid method that can combine phenomenological analyses with systemic investigations. Second, the method must also grapple with the fundamental Marxist insight that experiences are always ideologically distorted, reified, or mystifying. In the second section, I will investigate the possibility of experiential breaks that would allow for the disruption of such ideological mystification and the creation of new and potentially emancipatory experiences. The suggestion is that critical phenomenology should attempt to investigate precisely such experiential breaks. In the final section, I illustrate what this might mean with a brief discussion of Franz Fanon’s famous analysis of racialized experience in Black Skin, White Masks.
About
Dr. Johanna Oksala is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Her areas of expertise are political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, Marxist theory, and phenomenology. Her books include Foucault on Freedom (2005), How to Read Foucault (2007), Foucault Politics, and Violence (2012), Political Philosophy: All That Matters (2013), and Feminist Experiences (2016). Her most recent book, Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology came out in 2023.
All are welcome!