phenomenology topical
Mission
from phenomenology to politics
With the philosophers Rudolf Boehm, Willy Coolsaet and Jacques De Visscher, among others, Ghent has a rich tradition of phenomenological research, which has always been socially and politically engaged.
The Node Phenomenology aims to continue this tradition. In the first place, it wants to be a digital archive, in which the oeuvre from the past is easily accessible in one place. But phenomenology is more than preserving the past. We need to update phenomenology in view of the political-economic and environmental challenges of our time. Social problems need to be tackled critically and fundamentally.
The Node Phenomenology seeks alternatives through publications, lectures, seminars and a dialogical collaboration with universities, colleges and civil society.
Initiatives
Rudolf Boehm archives
The first initiative of the Node Phenomenology is the expansion of the digital Archive Rudolf Boehm. As far as this is possible by copyright, Boehm's oeuvre is digitized and made freely accessible on this website. The archive contains books, articles, audio recordings, interviews, et cetera. Those who are not yet familiar with Boehm's work can take a look at 'First Acquaintance', a selection of introductory works from various fields of his research.
However, the Node Phenomenology wants to do more than just archive the work of Rudolf Boehm. It wants to keep its thinking alive, continue to work on it and develop a public outreach. In concrete terms, we plan to regularly organize a colloquium in Ghent with a link to his philosophy.
Rudolf Boehm's Natural Philosophy
On Saturday 24 April, the Node Phenomenology organized an online lecture about Boehm's natural philosophy as part of The Day of Philosophy. This was done in collaboration with the philosophical magazine De Uil van Minerva and Avansa (the new name of Vormingplus).
In a video message, Jan Leyers told how Boehm influenced him:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tick4fyl11352en/BOEHM%20Jan%20Leyers%20highest.mp4?dl=0
News
As familiar as a friend, loved one, pet, or home may be, they may one day seem strange to us. "Intimate strangers," as Lillian Rubin called it. As if there is something strange hidden beneath the intimate proximity that comes to the surface. Even to yourself you can be a stranger, as the philosopher Julia Kristeva said. Does that strangeness get in the way of intimacy? Or is this precisely the condition for intimacy?
In 2022, Philosophy Day will be dominated by intimacy and alienation. What impact do social changes such as the digitization of the living environment, the arrival of migrants and refugees, and climate change have on intimacy and strangeness? What effect do lockdowns have on how we relate physically and mentally to others near and far?
Intimate and strange – own and other: how a small logical shift makes all the difference
Gertrudis Van de Pond
I will start from the formulas of Jacques Lacan's sexualization, on the one hand to ask the question of the logic that can work in recognizing the like at the expense of the strange - in Lacan: the phallic function that is made recognizable through properties – “be … and you belong to the phallic group” – , and on the other hand to create perspective for a different logic, which is not based on such a group-forming and group-bearing recognition, and which structurally gives a place to the impossible to decide on based on properties. Through this step I will argue that logic is a (much-needed) attempt at meta-language, an attempt that can help to make clear, beyond the what of saying, the dimension that is being said, by something or by someone. It is precisely the forgetting of that dimension that is partly at the root of too rapid identifications, all too rapid group formations, which go along too uncritically with what is unique and what is foreign.
Pathos en topos, about intimacy and alienation
Volkmar Mülheis
Jean-Christophe Ammann, then director of the Städelmuseum in Frankfurt, pointed out that in a work of art or performance the artist does not share the private with us, but does share the intimate with us in an exemplary way. A good example is the poem Strange Days by Frank Koenegracht. I want to relate the distinction between the intimate and the private to a study of the responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels. I also wonder what caveats arise from the topical perspective that Rudolf Boehm has introduced in phenomenology. And what does this mean for the demand for intimacy and alienation?
The body, own and foreign to thinking
Levi Haeck
When we ask questions about intimacy within the framework of philosophy, one must first and foremost position oneself with regard to philosophy itself. If it is understood as a "thinking about thinking", then the question of intimacy must also be situated somewhere on this level. The theme of intimacy, however, also evokes the dimension of the body, a dimension that is somewhat uncomfortable for philosophy. Since at least Descartes, the body has been the nail in every philosopher's coffin. Thought must, on the one hand, be resolutely separated from the body in order to be able to capture it as thinking. On the other hand, it appears, equally succinctly, that thought always appears in conjunction with the body. This paradoxical situation, perhaps peculiar to modernity, can be elegantly analyzed through the work of Immanuel Kant. Throughout his oeuvre, Kant manages to interpret in an original way why the body is both native and alien to thought, which allows us to specify something about our modern condition and the place of intimacy within it.
https://dagvande Philosophy.be/sessions/phenomenologie-vulnerability-en-intimiteit/
Sonja Lavaert about Rudolf Boehm
Four contemporary philosophers discuss the work and life of their predecessors and teachers at the University of Ghent. Together with Leo Apostel, Jaap Kruithof and Etienne Vermeersch, Rudolf Boehm belonged to what is called the Big Four. Sonja Lavaert will speak about Rudolf Boehm on 9 March.
https://www.masereelfonds.be/activities/sonja-lavaert-over-rudolf-boehm-1927-2019/
Jean-Luc Nancy
Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP), the University of Amsterdam's Critical Cultural Theory Seminar (CCT) and Knooppunt Fenomenologie Gent welcome all interested persons to a symposium on Jean-Luc Nancy's work on 11-12 January 2022.
Jean-Luc Nancy met death definitively in August 2021. One imagines that he had come close to death before, notably at the time when he had to endure a heart transplantation. This personal experience had major philosophical consequences: it did not lead to gloomy meditations of the shortness of life, but on the contrary to another kind of finite thinking, where finitude is thought as function of the necessary plurality of bodies which are the sense of the world: finitude is the very sharing of finitude. The sense of the world is nothing else than the singular plurality of bodies.
The work of Jean-Luc Nancy radiates a rare joy of life, but it is also very sensitive to what he called the 'immonde', the un-worlding that manifests itself as the eco-technical misery that presses the world of bodies. He diagnosed the fundamental philosophical reasons of this un-worlding, but above all he sought philosophical tools to re-world existence. Many of these tools are rooted in the polysemy of "sense," that leads Nancy's work to sensitive and even sensual questions of art, to questions of the sense of the world and of religion, and of course to questions of the way in which philosophy makes sense, word by word, enunciation by enunciation.
Wishing to share the emotion of Jean-Luc Nancy's passing away, we want above all to share the experience of thinking finitude with the help of his unique, singular work. This is why we invite you to a symposium in which all aspects of Nancy's abundant work will be discussed and new opening will be explored.
Speakers: Martin Crowley, Peter de Graeve, Ignaas Devisch, Alexander García Düttman, Juan-Manuel Garrido Wainer, Irving Goh, Ian James, Esa Kirkkopelto, Susanna Lindberg, Artemy Magun, Boyan Manchev, Frédéric Neyrat, Anne O'Byrne, Aukje van Rooden, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Georgios Tsagdis, Paul Willemarck
The symposium will take place online.
The program will be updated on the symposium website (coming soon). People interested in the symposium should register with the conference secretary Donovan Stewart: dastewart@phil.leidenuniv.nl
Volkmar Muhles
The Begräbnis des Philosophen
One Novelle
Verlag Karl Alber (2021)
Aus dem Verlags-Prospekt:
Die letzten Stunden eines Philosophen
"Das Begräbnis des Philosophen" ist eine erzählerische Meditation über das letzte Jahr im Leben eines Philosophen, seine Zeit am Husserl-Archiv in Leuven, den Austausch mit Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponundy, oder Martin Hesseindegen. Who die Philosophie nicht von ihren Protagonisten zu trennen ist, so steht here beispielhaft der Philosoph für ein Leben, das ganz in der Eigenen Profession auf- und geght. Zugleich ist diese Person des Philosophen ‚nach dem Leben' gezeichnet, as eine Hommage an den 2019 gestorbenen Philosophen Rudolf Boehm.
Es gibt im www eine Leseprobe aus dem Buch: https://media.herder.de/leseprobe/978-3-495-49202-4/html5.html
May 2021 / Book publication Sonja Lavaert et Pierre-François Moreau (dir.), Spinoza et la politique de la multitude, Éditions Kimé, 296 p.
https://www.editionskime.fr/publications/spinoza-et-la-politique-de-la-multitude/
Violence, domination, inégalité, tyrannie et insurrections : la reflexion de Spinoza sur le droit et la politique ne se limite pas au pacte social, ni à la liberté de philosopher. Il ne s'agit pas seulement de dresser la liste des droits respectifs du souverain et des sujets, dans le sillage des théories du droit naturel. Déjà Althusser avait rapproché Spinoza de Marx et Alexandre Matheron avait montré le rôle essential des passions dans la Cité et ses transformations. Toute une génération de chercheurs s'est interrogée ensuite sur les notions par lesquelles se pense ce devenir : foule, peuple, nation, mais aussi multitude. C'est ce dernier terms surtout qui concentrate le mieux une pensée de l'initiative historique des citoyens et de leur puissance collective. Il restait à en tirer les conséquences sur les rapports entre individu et multitude, sur les relations de la pensée spinoziste avec Machiavel, Grotius et Hobbes, sur l'attitude de Spinoza envers révolution et conservation, résistance, assimilation et intégration, désetoyennetés revolt. Autant de thèmes qui sont développés ici, à travers la lecture renouvelée de L'Éthique, du Traité théologico-politique, et du Traité politique.
Le volume s'achève par un entretien avec Toni Negri, qui fut le premier, dans son livre L'Anomalie sauvage, à mettre en lumière l'importance et le rôle de ce concept. Il y fait le bilan de son propre itinéraire et des discussions qu'il a suscitées.
Avec des contributions de : Dimitris Athanasakis, Laurent Bove, Blanche Gramusset Piquois, Céline Hervet, Chantal Jaquet, Jacques-Louis Lantoine, Sonja Lavaert, Alexandre Mbomé, Pierre-François Moreau, Vittorio Morfino, Toni Negri, Tilman Reitz.
The Father and the Philosopher
Toon Horsten's book on the rescue of Husserl's manuscripts is now also available in German. There is also an electronic version in Dutch.
On the occasion of the presentation of the German translation, the author had a conversation with the current director of the archive, Prof. Dr Julia Jansen. The conversation will be distributed via Youtube and can be found via the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkkkqQtraLc&t=64s