Helen A. Fielding

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is directed towards the future.

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of feminist phenomenology and chart its political and ethical future in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Arendt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Deleuze are evident as they reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this lively volume represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research.

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is directed towards the future.

What are the ethical, political and cultural consequences of forgetting how to trust our senses? How can artworks help us see, sense, think, and interact in ways that are outside of the systems of convention and order that frame so much of our lives? In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Helen Fielding challenges us to think alongside and according to artworks, cultivating a perception of what is really there and being expressed by them. Drawing from and expanding on the work of philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fielding urges us to trust our senses and engage relationally with works of art in the here and now rather than distancing and systematizing them as aesthetic objects. Cultivating Perception through Artworks examines examples as diverse as a Rembrandt painting, M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry, and Louise Bourgeois' public sculpture, to demonstrate how artworks enact ethics, politics, or culture. By engaging with different art forms and discovering the unique way that each opens us to the world in a new and unexpected ways, Fielding reveals the importance of our moral, political, and cultural lives.

This dissertation employs a phenomenological perspective to explore recent attempts in poststructuralist feminist theory to return to the body. Importantly, these current approaches try to theorize the body in a way that avoids biological and essentialist accounts; what this means, however, is that they think the body in terms of representation and signification, and not embodiment. This is not surprising given that in this modern epoch, which is characterized by a propersity to rationalize all areas of our existence, we tend to live our bodies primarily according to the cognitive region of existence; accordingly, the insidiousness of this cognitive focus, or what I have called surface, means that attempts to explore embodiment also tend to end up at the "surface". ;By exploring embodiment phenomenologically, new approaches for feminist concerns over issues of essentialism, identity and difference, and the building of community can be explored. In developing further Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth, this dissertation shows up how our bodies have intrinsic structures and capacities, in particular an amazing capacity to move into the world and to take it up corporeally. This means that we move into and take up the systematicity of this age. Showing up the tendency to actually live our bodies representationally, or at the surface, is to begin to explore what it is to live our bodies-as-depth with the attendant ethical implications. ;What is significant about depth is that it is not an interior space of the body; indeed depth only emerges in our relations with others and the world. For this reason, depth can only be experienced by the phenomenal body; when cognitively thought it is easily reduced to breadth or width. But allowing an exploration of depth to show up our embodied capacities does not mean that the body is privileged over the cognitive. Indeed, the cognitive is but one region of the body. Exploring embodiment through depth means that we can more often think according to the body; the inherent sinuosity of the body shows up the potential for contingency and openness that is to often shut down in this age. ;In order to explore feminist postructuralist attempts to theorize the body, their philosophical foundations are first examined. A phenomenological understanding of depth allows for new ways of approaching the works of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Lacan, in order to show up the insidiousness of surface even in these important theoretical accounts of embodiment