David Ventura - Édouard Glissant's Critical Relation to Critical Phenomenology

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from David Ventura Abstract: Despite seldom referring to the European phenomenological tradition in his varied studies of Caribbean subjectivity, Édouard Glissant’s work has often been read as phenomenological. Even Glissant’s most perceptive readers seemingly take for granted that his work fits this description, “privileging as it does phenomenology over ontology” (Wiedorn). This paper aims to complicate Glissant’s relation to the phenomenological tradition by placing his work into dialogue with the “six senses of critique for critical phenomenology” identified by Lisa Guenther. I argue that while Glissant’s work is broadly aligned with Guenther’s stipulation that “Critical phenomenology (…) [seeks] to trace the contingent, historical emergence of structures like white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, to ask whether and how these structures could be otherwise (…) and to reclaim, create, and support more liberatory ways of being, relating, and sense-making,” Glissant also significantly alters, or creolizes, the stakes of this critical phenomenological enterprise by virtue of his sustained attention to the brutal historical experiences of transatlantic slavery, the Middle Passage, and their ongoing implications for present and future forms of thinking and relating. Attending both to his theoretical texts (e.g. Poetics of Relation) and his literary output (e.g. Mahagony), I argue that Glissant’s work critically brings into relief some of the still-too-Western presuppositions of Guenther’s politically engaged definition of critical phenomenology. As such, I conclude, Glissant’s corpus offers new directions for what future senses of critique may be adequate for a phenomenological practice seeking to overcome the violence of contingent structures such as coloniality, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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/