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Meehan Crist reviews Catharine Malabou’s The New Wounded, translated from the French by Steven Miller, for Book Forum. Malabou tackles Descartes’s distinction between the brain and the mind using developments in neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
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“The revolution eats its own”: Jonathan Chait on the decline of moderates in the GOP for The New Republic.
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At Aeon Magazine, Michael Ruse wonders how Humanism has come to operate much like the religions and ideologies it set out to undermine.
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Ralph Harrington examines the Victorian roots of digital publishing for The Literary Platform.
As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Brendan O’Connor looks at Joseph Ferrandino’s “Joyce and Phenomenology,” from Telos 2 (Fall 1968). |
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In “Joyce and Phenomenology,” Joseph Ferrandino proposes a “phenomenological reading” of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and while he admits that much of the epic eludes such sweeping, categorical interpretations, he maintains that “in terms of aims and methods, Ulysses can only be seen as a concrete application of what Husserl means by phenomenology” (84). Ferrandino provides an excellent gloss on Husserl and his notoriously difficult philosophy before he delves into the equally difficult Joyce. Ferrandino explains that the aim of Husserl’s phenomenology is “to get back to the ‘things themselves.’ This is done by suspending judgment . . . reducing the immediate experience to the operations of the life-world (the phenomenological reduction), and then constituting again the whole in its proper subjective sense” (87). Joyce, in objectifying individual experience so deftly, enables us, as readers, to consider our own experience from a sort of literary remove. Ferrandino understands this to be analogous, even equivalent, to the work of the phenomenologist: “It is from this viewpoint that the reader can come to grasp the proper meaning of the experience, just as the phenomenologist who has performed the reduction can view the bracketed experience and its correct sense” (91). The reader’s experience of Ulysses, Ferrandino argues, is a reflexive one, and by bringing us into an awareness of ourselves as readers the text also aligns us with Joyce as the author: “We, as readers, have access to the same viewpoint that Joyce has. We are not Stephen walking on the strand contemplating philosophical problems. The philosophical is not the object of our act of awareness. It is Stephen’s object. Our object is Stephen’s act of awareness and its object” (90). 
