Molly Kelly

Adopting a critically phenomenological approach, this article explores how John Cage’s famed 4’33” (1952) lends itself to a politics of hesitation. Reading Cage together with philosopher Alia Al-Saji, the essay explores how Cagean silence operates by interrupting sedimented habits of listening to (1) denaturalize the automaticity of listening, (2) change the directionality of perception toward the unintended, and (3) critically implicate the listener in the act of listening. Just as Al-Saji describes hesitation as a felt, temporal interval that opens possibilities to see and feel otherwise, so, too, does Cage offer silence as a duration capable of transforming listening into “something else.” By approaching Cage’s silence as a form of phenomenological hesitation, the essay ultimately emphasizes the critical and ethical import of his work.

Building from the works of Jacques Derrida, this article explores health anxiety’s aporetic relationship with medicine through a deconstructive approach. I argue that attention to Derrida’s writings (and in particular, his readings of pharmakon and autoimmunity) may prove useful in explaining the cyclical character of health anxiety and its ambivalent response to medical reassurance. What’s more, I demonstrate how structuralist interpretations of health anxiety as a signifier without referent prove insufficient within a Derridean account. Such a reading emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary medical humanities as well as critical reflections on the possible limitations of Western medical semiotics.

During his period of exile in Scandinavia, Bertolt Brecht wrote “I don’t think the traditional form of theatre means anything any longer. Its significance is purely historic; it can illuminate the way in which earlier ages regarded human relationships […] [but] a modern spectator can’t learn anything from them”. To create a modern theatre fit for a modern audience, Brecht holds that not only would the content of plays have to change, but the experience of theatrical spectatorship itself. To fully capture how Brecht’s work differs from that of previous playwrights, a close analysis of spectatorial experience and perception is required. In this paper, I compare the aesthetic techniques used in Brecht’s epic theatre to the genetic phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Reading Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt through a Husserlian lens, I argue that Brecht mobilizes phenomenological methodology in order to suspend the audience’s preconceived notions of theatre and to cultivate self-conscious, critically aware, and socially motivated spectatorship. Just as Husserl describes phenomenology as a presuppositionless science, so too does Brecht offer epic theatre as a way to free “[…] socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity”.