Silvia Stoller

What does love have to do with sleep? In her philosophical essay The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir reflects upon the sleep from the perspective of existentialist feminism, focusing on the French writer Violette Leduc and her novel Je hais les dormeurs from 1948 in which she describes how a woman unloads her hate for a man while he sleeps. These few passages remained widely unexplored within the phenomenological and feminist research. In this article, I explore Beauvoir’s existentialist reading of Leduc and suggest some alternative conclusions.

What does love have to do with sleep? In her philosophical essay The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir reflects upon the sleep from the perspective of existentialist feminism, focusing on the French writer Violette Leduc and her novel Je hais les dormeurs from 1948 in which she describes how a woman unloads her hate for a man while he sleeps. These few passages remained widely unexplored within the phenomenological and feminist research. In this article, I explore Beauvoir’s existentialist reading of Leduc and suggest some alternative conclusions.

Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post‐structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique. In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text “‘Experience’”. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post‐structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems – as I will maintain – that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept.

What kind of ethics can we consider in the framework of feminist phenomenology that takes poststructuralist feminism into account? This seems to be a difficult task for at least two reasons. First, it is not yet clear what ethics in poststructuralist feminism is. Second, phenomenology and poststructuralism are still regarded as opposites. As a phenomenologist with strong affinities to poststructuralism, I want to take on this challenge. In this paper, I will argue that phenomenology and poststructuralism share the idea of the “indeterminable.” If this idea is applied to the topic of gender, we can speak of an “indeterminable gender.” Moreover, phenomenology and poststructuralism support an ethical attitude toward genders inasmuch as they both avoid making problematic determinations. My goal is to explore what the so-called “indeterminable gender” is and to illuminate the ethical implications of this concept.

A remarkable number of philosophies of laughter center their research on explosive laughter. When it comes to 20th century philosophers of laughter, this is true for Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Hélène Cixous and Helmuth Plessner among others. What those approaches share is the assumption that in explosive laughter people are rendered powerless. Others, as for example Georges Bataille speak of the entire loss of intentionality. But how far does the loss of intentionality and power really go? From this starting-point a reconsideration of the so-called loss of power seems to be at stake. I will discuss selected theories of laughter from the phenomenological tradition in order to show that the loss of power cannot be claimed to be total. With the help of Plessner’s phenomenology of the body in Laughing and Crying and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “operative intentionality” from his Phenomenology of Perception, I will argue that a certain form of intentionality is a precondition for the act of laughter. In general, the paper aims at clarifying the phenomenon of explosive laughter and expounding on the debate over intentionality vs. non-intentionality from the perspective of phenomenology.

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as feminist difference theory, I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry.

This essay argues that despite of the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty his phenomenology can be positively appropriated to the theory of sexual difference. It focuses on three issues: the first one is closely linked to the Phenomenology of Perception and introduces a concept of "difference as differentiation". The second one is concerned with the intersubjective dimension of sexuality and will be called a "sexual syncretism". Finally, I’m referring to Merleau-Ponty's notion of "chiasm" in his late work The Visible and the Invisible in order to apply it to the theory of sexual difference. At this point, the difference between sexual beings will be conceptualized as "chiasmatic intertwining". In doing so, I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful resource for philosophical research that is mainly concerned with the questions of sexuality and sexual difference

Der französische Phänomenologe Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) hat sich sein ganzes Oeuvre hindurch mit der Wahrnehmung auseinandergesetzt. Diesseits von empiristischen und rationalistischen Vorurteilen versucht er, der Eigenlogik der Wahrnehmung gerecht zu werden. Seine Interpretation mündet in die These vom Primat der Wahrnehmung, wonach die Wahrnehmung Grundphänomen ist. Die Autorin widmet sich in ihrer Studie der Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (1945), worin Merleau-Pontys Wahrnehmungstheorie grundgelegt ist, indem sie die fundamentale Bedeutung der Wahrnehmung in diesem Werk herausarbeitet.