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Instructor: Lisa Guenther

Phenomenology is a philosophical practice of reflecting on the transcendental structures that make lived experience possible and meaningful. It begins by bracketing the natural attitude, or the everyday, common-sense assumption that the world exists apart from consciousness, and tracing our experience of this world back to the relational structures that constitute its meaning and coherence. In this sense, phenomenological method already points us in a critical direction; it interrupts our default experience of the world and challenges us to deepen our understanding of how this experience unfolds. But where classical phenomenology remains insufficiently critical is in failing to give an equally rigorous account of how contingent historical and social structures also shape our experience, not just empirically or in a piecemeal fashion, but in a way that is so fundamental, we could call it quasi-transcendental. Structures such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity permeate, organize, and reproduce the natural attitude in ways that go beyond any particular object of thought. They are not things to be seen, but rather ways of seeing, and even ways of making the world that go unnoticed without a sustained practice of critical reflection to make them visible. In this seminar, we will learn the basic concepts of classical phenomenology with a focus on Merleau-Ponty, and we will explore the possibilities for critical phenomenology in the work of Iris Marion Young, Frantz Fanon, Maria Lugones, Sara Ahmed, and others.