Ryan Gustafsson

This article articulates a critical phenomenological account of the being of the Korean transracial adoptee, through an analysis of three fundamental interrelated experiences. First, I argue that adoptee being is marked by epistemological ambiguity, or the impossibility of knowing and the ambiguous value of any knowledge gained. Second, the arbitrary sense of one’s place and identity contribute to a sense of substitutability among adoptees. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema, I then argue that for the Korean adoptee, racial difference is inscribed in the body schema as absence. The article ends with a discussion of the complexities of racial embodiment that underpin adoptees’ identifications and experiences of belonging and place, and which result in what I term ‘hyper(in)visibility’.

Philosophies of Difference engages with the concept of difference in relation to a number of fundamental philosophical and political problems. Insisting on the inseparability of ontology, ethics and politics, the essays and interview in this volume offer original and timely approaches to thinking nature, sexuate difference, racism, and decoloniality. The collection draws on a range of sources, including Latin American Indigenous ontologies and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Mills, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The contributors think embodiment and life by bringing continental philosophy into generative dialogue with fields including plant studies, animal studies, decoloniality, feminist theory, philosophy of race, and law. Affirming the importance of interdisciplinarity, Philosophies of Difference contributes to a creative and critical intervention into established norms, limits, and categories. Invoking a conception of difference as both constitutive and generative, this collection offers new and important insights into how a rethinking of difference may ground new and more ethical modes of being and being-with. Philosophies of Difference unearths the constructive possibilities of difference for an ethics of relationality, and for elaborating non-anthropocentric sociality. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in Australian Feminist Law Journal.

This dissertation develops an account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature, and demonstrates the importance of nature and the concept of negativity for his phenomenological ontology. For Merleau-Ponty, nature is the unreflected, “that which carries us” (N 4); it cannot be unequivocally conceived as an object or pure extension. The first part of the dissertation frames Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature in relation to his critical engagement with Kant, Schelling, and Husserl, all of whom are working within, or at the margins of, the modern philosophical tradition instituted by Descartes. Merleau-Ponty identifies two irreducible ideas of nature in each of these philosophies, a ‘doubleness’ that destabilizes and renders ambiguous the concept of nature as object. This dissertation contends that this ambiguity intensifies in Husserl’s philosophy; Husserlian phenomenology allows Merleau-Ponty to develop a ‘chiasmic’ or binocular ontology. Furthermore, this section also traces the concept of negativity as it emerges in the work of these three thinkers. Secondly, the dissertation demonstrates the importance and continuing relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the sciences and the objectivist ontology on which it relies. According to Merleau-Ponty, modern science has begun to critique its own classical foundations, and hence serves as an important corrective to Cartesian ontology. This section focuses on the 1942 text The Structure of Behavior and the 1956-1960 Nature courses, and demonstrates how the earlier emphasis on perceptual consciousness gives way to the notion of Being as interrogation. Importantly, it is in the Nature course that Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of ‘natural negativity,’ which will be central to his ontology. This section puts forth the argument that the concept of negativity informs Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the actualism of both mechanism/causalism and finalism/idealism, thereby allowing him to develop a philosophy of life as emergence. Consequently, the critique of actualism allows him to formulate or envisage a ‘new’ notion of the possible. Finally, the third section focuses on the human body as understood within the philosophy of nature. This section draws on Merleau-Ponty’s later works and returns to his critical reading of Husserl in order to emphasize the importance of the principle of negativity and the philosophy of nature for his ontology or concept of flesh. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of nature cannot be articulated without an account of the perceiving body. This section concludes with a discussion of constitutive negativity – as opposed to ‘nothingness’ or void – with regard to perception as well as organic development. This final section thus informs and deepens the preceding two, and argues that the concept of negativity allows Merleau-Ponty to overcome the vertigo of Cartesian ontology and ‘rehabilitate’ a notion of the possible. This rehabilitation of possibility and the ‘savageness’ of nature results in a phenomenological ontology that moves beyond metaphysical dualism, and which is capable of conceiving the radical openness and inexhaustibility of the world in which we live.

This article is a review of Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers, a timely and crucial contribution to critical animal studies scholarship. CIFERAE is a remarkable and careful analysis of epistemological anthropocentrism – in particular, what Tyler calls a “first-and-foremost anthropocentrism” - and the ways in which animals ‘figure’ in the history of Western thought. Moreover, the text prompts a critique of ‘the human’ and the formation of the ‘we.’ As such, Tyler’s philosophical investigation or bestiary pertains not only to theories of knowledge, but holds significant ethical and political implications.

This paper argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology may serve as an important and exigent critique of the dominant understandings of nature and living being that circulate today. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature involves a return to perceptual experience – a return that amounts to a restoration of the inexhaustible depth of the world, and offers a non-subjectivist account of embodied participation or relationality. This emphasis on participation can lead to an increased attentiveness to difference. The paper begins with a discussion of Merleau-Ponty's critique of Cartesian ontology and the idea of depth, as outlined in his last published text 'Eye and Mind.' The idea of depth is then related to Merleau-Ponty's engagement with the work of Jakob von Uëxkull, as outlined in the Nature lectures in 1956-60. Finally, the paper links these discussions to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body and his phenomenological ontology.

The concept of natural, common life is distinguished from life as political existence in the opening lines of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer – a schism within ‘life’ that has profound consequences for Agamben’s political theory and ontology. Agamben claims that bare life now “dwells in the biological body of every living being” . As such, it is necessary to ascertain what the ‘life’ of biopolitics is – the life capable of politicization. The notion of natural living being is central to Agamben’s account, and yet it remains an ambiguous and indeterminate concept. This conceptual ambiguity is informed by Agamben’s account of anthropogenesis and the relation between the ‘human’ and the realm of animality, to which the concept of negativity is pivotal. Negativity is also central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. However, for Merleau-Ponty the ontology of Nature and man constitute “the leaves of one sole Being” . Animality and human being are emergent; Merleau-Ponty adamantly maintains, “there is no rupture” . This paper analyzes the notion of negativity in Agamben and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of Being and life, and contends that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy gives rise to an ontology that offers a more open and productive account of animality and nature. In Agamben’s account, negativity is constitutive of man, which gives rise to an irreducible disjuncture between Being and life. For Merleau-Ponty, negativity is ‘in’ Being. There is no tension between Being and ‘life’: Nature is “a leaf or layer of total Being,” and we must conceive of “the ontology of Nature as the way toward ontology”