Ida Djursaa | Newcastle University (original) (raw)

Book reviews by Ida Djursaa

New Formations, 2018

Book review of: Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (eds.), Plastic Materialities: Politi... more Book review of: Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (eds.), Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2015.

Conference Presentations by Ida Djursaa

Paper presented at the Society for European Philosophy Conference, Cardiff University, 2nd - 4th ... more Paper presented at the Society for European Philosophy Conference, Cardiff University, 2nd - 4th July 2024.

Paper presented at the conference Metamorphoses of Mimesis: Plasticity, Subjectivity, and Transfo... more Paper presented at the conference Metamorphoses of Mimesis: Plasticity, Subjectivity, and Transformation with Catherine Malabou, organised by the Gendered Mimesis team at KU Leuven, 23rd-24th February 2023.

Abstract:
From a feminist perspective, this paper investigates what I argue is a plastically mimetic relation between sensibility, eroticism, and the world.
Recent years have seen an increased interest across fields such as phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and continental and analytic philosophy in the affective and pre-reflective dimension of bodily life. From a critical phenomenological perspective and in dialogue with authors such as Merleau-Ponty (1945), Al-Saji (2008), and Sparrow (2015), I conceptualise this dimension specifically as sensibility. I argue, first, that the notion of sensibility decribes a plastic mimesis through which the body is always already and continuously transformed in the rhythm of responding to and being solicited by itself, the world, and others.
Second, I show that insofar as sensibility designates a bodily openness to the world and others, sensibility is characterised by a certain eroticism. I follow Audre Lorde’s (1984) description of the erotic as a life force – a capacity for joy, creativity, intimacy, and pleasure – which for many women is, to borrow Malabou’s (2022) phrase, ‘erased’ in the context of patriarchy.
Finally, contra the dominant presumption in popular and scientific discourse that female sexual desire is naturally low, I argue, through a mimetic notion of the erotic, that the contexts of patriarchy and heteronormativity negatively affect the erotic life force of women, not only in the sexual domain but also in other areas of their lives. How does this contextual structuring of the erotic happen at a bodily, that is, a sensible level? And, given the plastic capacity not only to receive but also to give form, how can bodies step into this process of structuring and, perhaps, structure it otherwise?

Paper presented on 31st January 2023 as part of the visiting speakers series organised by the phi... more Paper presented on 31st January 2023 as part of the visiting speakers series organised by the philosophy department at the University of the West of England.

Abstract:

In Ideas II, Husserl writes that what constitutes the body as a living body-or Leib-rather than a mere material thing-or Körper-is its capacity for double sensation. When my hands touch one another, each at once feels itself touching and being touched. The touchingtouched thus describes a reflexivity of the body with itself, designating its double ontological status as at once a subject that can touch and an object that can be touched. Whilst phenomenological analyses of the body generally privilege the touching-touched, in this paper, I challenge such privileging by showing that this model itself presupposes the existence of an irreducible gap in between the touching and the touched. Through Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, I conceptualise this gap concretely in terms of a pre-reflective and pre-perceptual sensibility which is, I argue, tied to movement rather than touch. Finally, in a move towards a critical phenomenology of sensibility, and in dialogue with some of the feminist literature, I address the cultural and historical structuring of the ways in which bodies come to move, as well as outlining some challenges that this notion of sensibility poses to 'classical' phenomenology.

Towards a Critical Phenomenology of the Erotic, 2022

Paper presented at the British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference on 31st August 2022 at... more Paper presented at the British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference on 31st August 2022 at Exeter University, UK.

Abstract:

This paper seeks to advance a phenomenological notion of sexuality as a modality of bodily sensibility through the lens of Merleau-Ponty.
Feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler (1989) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994) have critiqued Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception for presenting sexuality in a universalist (hence masculinist) way, abstracted from the reality of gender difference and non-heterosexual identities. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji’s (2008) and Tom Sparrow’s (2015) work on sensibility, however, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sexuality should be understood as a modality of sensibility that operates prior to, and as generative of, categorisations into sexual identities. I show how Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of sexuality, rather than making a claim about the universalist character of desire such as it must be for everyone, in fact makes a more basic claim about the strictly bodily, that is, the sensible dimension of our most intimate intercorporeal relations.
Insofar as sensibility designates the pre-reflective and pre-perceptual binding of bodies, then, understanding sexuality as a modality of sensibility, this paper argues, allows us to investigate the ways in which bodies live desire prior to perception and reflection. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s description of sexuality as the ‘blind linking of bodies’ (Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, p159) is thus not reducible to sexual identity but is rather descriptive of the erotic as the life force that motivates attractions and repulsions – affective ‘pulls’ – between bodies.
Finally, the paper asks how this erotic life force itself, and hence our bodies’ (in)capacity for intimacy, is structured by our socio-politico-historical contexts, including the reality of gender norms? Can a critical phenomenology of sexuality help us to not only understand but also empower the erotic lives of bodies?

Papers by Ida Djursaa

new formations, Jul 1, 2018

In On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy, Derrida, Jean-Paul Martinon articulates the notion that any criti... more In On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy, Derrida, Jean-Paul Martinon articulates the notion that any critique of Malabou’s concept of plasticity inherently calls for the questioning of the plasticity of that critique itself. This is one of the paradoxes of the concept of plasticity, and as a result, Martinon suggests, one can only ‘weigh’ Malabou’s work, stay faithful to it and follow it as it forms another path, in itself plastic.1 This is the path that Plastic Materialities to a large extent takes up. Relating Malabou’s work to the New Materialisms movement, the book is concerned with the possibility of the future of a world in which global capitalism reigns and neurological advancements tell us that the brain, our ‘self ’, is essentially changeable – is essentially other than itself. Thus, the guiding question of the book is ‘What future?’ Where are the gaps in the present which allow for change? And what kind of change would this be? Essentially, what is the promise of a plastic change, a plastic future? By plasticity, we mean the double movement of giving and receiving form, such that it at the same time is a saying farewell to something past and a saying hello to something new, a complete coincidence of new and old – a kind of creative explosion, so to speak. This concept of plasticity was first developed from Malabou’s reading of Hegel in The Future of Hegel, and was later materialized in her work on brain plasticity. This later work emphasizes the fact that we constantly shape and reshape our brains, without knowing that we do so. Malabou urges us to become aware of this notion that our self is essentially and constantly changing, but that we always have the opportunity to wriggle and slip out of – to resist – the determination of the brain and likewise the determination of the world of global capitalism. Malabou’s work thus urges us to believe in, and act upon, the possibility for change. Plastic Materialities does exactly this. Consisting of three chapters written by Malabou and twelve chapters written by different scholars, the book explores different ways of incorporating plasticity into pressing issues in the contemporary world. Whilst some of the chapters seem to slightly miss the point of Malabou’s work and thus harbour their critique of plasticity less convincingly, most of the chapters are highly interesting and compelling. For example, Silvana Carotenuto’s chapter explores the plastic potentiality of art to express the uncertainty of the future of the Middle East, and her focus on uncertainty thus directly benefits from the metamorphic character of plasticity. In the true spirit of plasticity, Jairus Grove considers the notion booknoTe

Études Phénoménologiques - Phenomenological Studies, 2023

Critically tracing the genealogy of the notion of transcendence in Levinas's oeuvre, this paper c... more Critically tracing the genealogy of the notion of transcendence in Levinas's oeuvre, this paper challenges the standard conception according to which this central Levinasian notion designates what is inherently immaterial. I emphasise the importance of the early formulation, from the 1930s and 40s, of transcendence as the need to escape materiality and the body to better understand Levinas's later insistence, in Totality and Infinity, upon an absolute transcendence. Through a critical engagement with this work, I develop the notion of a "non-assimilative sensibility" as the modality of the "experience" of the face. Whilst emphasising fecundity as the concretisation of transcendence in Totality and Infinity, I argue, however, that it is not until "substitution" that Levinas finds his resolution to the need for escape, as the synchronic alterity of the face and the diachronic alterity of fecundity merge in the sensible materiality of the body itself. We shall thus trace the way in which the notion of an infinite or absolute transcendence, as if despite Levinas's own intentions, transcends itself, and in the end returns to the basic materiality of the sensible body.

New Formations, 2018

Book review of: Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (eds.), Plastic Materialities: Politi... more Book review of: Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (eds.), Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2015.

Paper presented at the Society for European Philosophy Conference, Cardiff University, 2nd - 4th ... more Paper presented at the Society for European Philosophy Conference, Cardiff University, 2nd - 4th July 2024.

Paper presented at the conference Metamorphoses of Mimesis: Plasticity, Subjectivity, and Transfo... more Paper presented at the conference Metamorphoses of Mimesis: Plasticity, Subjectivity, and Transformation with Catherine Malabou, organised by the Gendered Mimesis team at KU Leuven, 23rd-24th February 2023.

Abstract:
From a feminist perspective, this paper investigates what I argue is a plastically mimetic relation between sensibility, eroticism, and the world.
Recent years have seen an increased interest across fields such as phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and continental and analytic philosophy in the affective and pre-reflective dimension of bodily life. From a critical phenomenological perspective and in dialogue with authors such as Merleau-Ponty (1945), Al-Saji (2008), and Sparrow (2015), I conceptualise this dimension specifically as sensibility. I argue, first, that the notion of sensibility decribes a plastic mimesis through which the body is always already and continuously transformed in the rhythm of responding to and being solicited by itself, the world, and others.
Second, I show that insofar as sensibility designates a bodily openness to the world and others, sensibility is characterised by a certain eroticism. I follow Audre Lorde’s (1984) description of the erotic as a life force – a capacity for joy, creativity, intimacy, and pleasure – which for many women is, to borrow Malabou’s (2022) phrase, ‘erased’ in the context of patriarchy.
Finally, contra the dominant presumption in popular and scientific discourse that female sexual desire is naturally low, I argue, through a mimetic notion of the erotic, that the contexts of patriarchy and heteronormativity negatively affect the erotic life force of women, not only in the sexual domain but also in other areas of their lives. How does this contextual structuring of the erotic happen at a bodily, that is, a sensible level? And, given the plastic capacity not only to receive but also to give form, how can bodies step into this process of structuring and, perhaps, structure it otherwise?

Paper presented on 31st January 2023 as part of the visiting speakers series organised by the phi... more Paper presented on 31st January 2023 as part of the visiting speakers series organised by the philosophy department at the University of the West of England.

Abstract:

In Ideas II, Husserl writes that what constitutes the body as a living body-or Leib-rather than a mere material thing-or Körper-is its capacity for double sensation. When my hands touch one another, each at once feels itself touching and being touched. The touchingtouched thus describes a reflexivity of the body with itself, designating its double ontological status as at once a subject that can touch and an object that can be touched. Whilst phenomenological analyses of the body generally privilege the touching-touched, in this paper, I challenge such privileging by showing that this model itself presupposes the existence of an irreducible gap in between the touching and the touched. Through Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, I conceptualise this gap concretely in terms of a pre-reflective and pre-perceptual sensibility which is, I argue, tied to movement rather than touch. Finally, in a move towards a critical phenomenology of sensibility, and in dialogue with some of the feminist literature, I address the cultural and historical structuring of the ways in which bodies come to move, as well as outlining some challenges that this notion of sensibility poses to 'classical' phenomenology.

Towards a Critical Phenomenology of the Erotic, 2022

Paper presented at the British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference on 31st August 2022 at... more Paper presented at the British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference on 31st August 2022 at Exeter University, UK.

Abstract:

This paper seeks to advance a phenomenological notion of sexuality as a modality of bodily sensibility through the lens of Merleau-Ponty.
Feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler (1989) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994) have critiqued Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception for presenting sexuality in a universalist (hence masculinist) way, abstracted from the reality of gender difference and non-heterosexual identities. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji’s (2008) and Tom Sparrow’s (2015) work on sensibility, however, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sexuality should be understood as a modality of sensibility that operates prior to, and as generative of, categorisations into sexual identities. I show how Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of sexuality, rather than making a claim about the universalist character of desire such as it must be for everyone, in fact makes a more basic claim about the strictly bodily, that is, the sensible dimension of our most intimate intercorporeal relations.
Insofar as sensibility designates the pre-reflective and pre-perceptual binding of bodies, then, understanding sexuality as a modality of sensibility, this paper argues, allows us to investigate the ways in which bodies live desire prior to perception and reflection. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s description of sexuality as the ‘blind linking of bodies’ (Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, p159) is thus not reducible to sexual identity but is rather descriptive of the erotic as the life force that motivates attractions and repulsions – affective ‘pulls’ – between bodies.
Finally, the paper asks how this erotic life force itself, and hence our bodies’ (in)capacity for intimacy, is structured by our socio-politico-historical contexts, including the reality of gender norms? Can a critical phenomenology of sexuality help us to not only understand but also empower the erotic lives of bodies?

new formations, Jul 1, 2018

In On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy, Derrida, Jean-Paul Martinon articulates the notion that any criti... more In On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy, Derrida, Jean-Paul Martinon articulates the notion that any critique of Malabou’s concept of plasticity inherently calls for the questioning of the plasticity of that critique itself. This is one of the paradoxes of the concept of plasticity, and as a result, Martinon suggests, one can only ‘weigh’ Malabou’s work, stay faithful to it and follow it as it forms another path, in itself plastic.1 This is the path that Plastic Materialities to a large extent takes up. Relating Malabou’s work to the New Materialisms movement, the book is concerned with the possibility of the future of a world in which global capitalism reigns and neurological advancements tell us that the brain, our ‘self ’, is essentially changeable – is essentially other than itself. Thus, the guiding question of the book is ‘What future?’ Where are the gaps in the present which allow for change? And what kind of change would this be? Essentially, what is the promise of a plastic change, a plastic future? By plasticity, we mean the double movement of giving and receiving form, such that it at the same time is a saying farewell to something past and a saying hello to something new, a complete coincidence of new and old – a kind of creative explosion, so to speak. This concept of plasticity was first developed from Malabou’s reading of Hegel in The Future of Hegel, and was later materialized in her work on brain plasticity. This later work emphasizes the fact that we constantly shape and reshape our brains, without knowing that we do so. Malabou urges us to become aware of this notion that our self is essentially and constantly changing, but that we always have the opportunity to wriggle and slip out of – to resist – the determination of the brain and likewise the determination of the world of global capitalism. Malabou’s work thus urges us to believe in, and act upon, the possibility for change. Plastic Materialities does exactly this. Consisting of three chapters written by Malabou and twelve chapters written by different scholars, the book explores different ways of incorporating plasticity into pressing issues in the contemporary world. Whilst some of the chapters seem to slightly miss the point of Malabou’s work and thus harbour their critique of plasticity less convincingly, most of the chapters are highly interesting and compelling. For example, Silvana Carotenuto’s chapter explores the plastic potentiality of art to express the uncertainty of the future of the Middle East, and her focus on uncertainty thus directly benefits from the metamorphic character of plasticity. In the true spirit of plasticity, Jairus Grove considers the notion booknoTe

Études Phénoménologiques - Phenomenological Studies, 2023

Critically tracing the genealogy of the notion of transcendence in Levinas's oeuvre, this paper c... more Critically tracing the genealogy of the notion of transcendence in Levinas's oeuvre, this paper challenges the standard conception according to which this central Levinasian notion designates what is inherently immaterial. I emphasise the importance of the early formulation, from the 1930s and 40s, of transcendence as the need to escape materiality and the body to better understand Levinas's later insistence, in Totality and Infinity, upon an absolute transcendence. Through a critical engagement with this work, I develop the notion of a "non-assimilative sensibility" as the modality of the "experience" of the face. Whilst emphasising fecundity as the concretisation of transcendence in Totality and Infinity, I argue, however, that it is not until "substitution" that Levinas finds his resolution to the need for escape, as the synchronic alterity of the face and the diachronic alterity of fecundity merge in the sensible materiality of the body itself. We shall thus trace the way in which the notion of an infinite or absolute transcendence, as if despite Levinas's own intentions, transcends itself, and in the end returns to the basic materiality of the sensible body.