J. Reese Faust - Writing a New Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Ethics of Futurity

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from J. Reese Faust Abstract: Frantz Fanon closes his two major works with appeals to alter the flesh of the social world: Black Skin, White Masks pleas for a “sloughing off” of one’s skin (« un dépouillement »), while The Wretched of the Earth calls for us to “make a new skin” (« faire peau neuve »). Despite the clear influence that his notion of the body schema had on Fanon, it is surprising that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the “flesh of the world” (« le chair du monde ») does not feature more frequently in scholarship—particularly so given Fanon’s sociogenic account of collective meaning-making. In this paper, I will read the diplopic ontology of Merleau-Ponty alongside the similarly deferred ontology that Fanon tacitly uses in Wretched of the Earth. I will argue that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the flesh of the world renders his ethical and political demands all the more pressing, because it renders the future already pre-figured—although not totally determined—in the present. On this account, if the present quite literally consists in the socio-ontological grounding for any possible future, then embodied activity constructs and delimits those futures as part of the same ethico-ontological totality. In this sense, I argue that the future cannot be a “given,” since our embodied, intersubjective activity is what constitutes the horizons against which we act toward/in light of those futures. Since the ethical demands of the determinable future redound back onto those of the present, (in)capability is equivalent to futurity. I conclude by reflecting on how this reading alters Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness, through (re)conceptualising “being human as praxis.” Biography: J. Reese Faust is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at The University of Memphis. His primary areas of research are philosophy of law/critical legal theory and contemporary Continental philosophy, with interests in decolonial thought and social and political philosophy. He is currently writing a dissertation articulating a critical legal hermeneutic, using embodied phenomenology and Ronald Dworkin’s notion of dignity. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/