Dylan Trigg
Dylan Trigg is an FWF Senior Researcher at Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Vienna and faculty member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy.
He has previously held several positions, including: FWF Senior Research at University of Vienna (2017-2024); Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy & University College Dublin (2014-2017); Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin (2012-2014); CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Les Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure (2012-2013); and CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (2011-2012).
Trigg is currently the PI on an FWF research project, "Parenthood: a Study of Lived Experience," funded by FWF PAT 4547224.
He earned his PhD at the University of Sussex (2009), MA at the University of Sussex (2005), and BA at the University of London, Birkbeck College (2004). He has also been a visiting scholar at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art and Design and University of Duquesne, Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center.
He is the author of several books including "Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety" (2016); "The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror" (2014); and "The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny" (2012). His research interests include phenomenology, embodiment, and aesthetics. He is currently writing a book on the phenomenology of nostalgia.
Address: Universität Wien
Institut für Philosophie (Room: 1020)
Sensengasse 8
1090 Wien
He has previously held several positions, including: FWF Senior Research at University of Vienna (2017-2024); Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy & University College Dublin (2014-2017); Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin (2012-2014); CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Les Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure (2012-2013); and CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (2011-2012).
Trigg is currently the PI on an FWF research project, "Parenthood: a Study of Lived Experience," funded by FWF PAT 4547224.
He earned his PhD at the University of Sussex (2009), MA at the University of Sussex (2005), and BA at the University of London, Birkbeck College (2004). He has also been a visiting scholar at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art and Design and University of Duquesne, Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center.
He is the author of several books including "Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety" (2016); "The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror" (2014); and "The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny" (2012). His research interests include phenomenology, embodiment, and aesthetics. He is currently writing a book on the phenomenology of nostalgia.
Address: Universität Wien
Institut für Philosophie (Room: 1020)
Sensengasse 8
1090 Wien
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Books by Dylan Trigg
In der philosophischen Phänomenologie ist der menschliche Körper und das Körperhafte eine immer wieder gestellte, nie abgeschlossene Frage. Dylan Triggs Buch stellt sich der Aufgabe, die Phänomenologie unter Einbeziehung der Bilderwelten des (Horror-)Films neu zu orientieren. Der Körper, der unser In-der-Welt-sein ermöglicht und durch ein Gefühl der Selbstidentität bestimmt bleibt, soll nun erweitert und zum Schauplatz eines anderen, fremden, der individuellen Existenz vorgängigen Lebens werden.
Im Dialog mit Lévinas und dem späten Merleau-Ponty, den Filmen von Carpenter und Cronenberg und den Schriften von H.P. Lovecraft versucht Trigg, jenem Unheimlichen und Unmenschlichen auf die Spur zu kommen, von dem der Mensch heimgesucht wird und das nicht völlig in die Menschlichkeit integriert werden kann. Die Erfahrung des Grauens, das immer ein »Körpergrauen« ist, kennzeichnet dabei sowohl den Verrat als auch die Erneuerung einer anthropozentrischen Phänomenologie, oder besser: die Begründung einer »unmenschlichen Phänomenologie«.
Translated by: Dmitri Chulakov, Dmitri Vyatkin and Yana Tsyrlina.
Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy – and phenomenology in particular – until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna.
Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike.
Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.
Table of contents
Preface
1. The Home at Night
2. Under the Skin
3. Two Ocular Globes
4. Lost in place
5. Through the Mirror
Conclusion
Index
Reviews
“Readers will be captivated by Dylan Trigg's penetrating insights into and eloquent accounts of his experience of anxiety. They lead him into strikingly new and important ideas for psychology and philosophy.” – Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA
“Dylan Trigg's Topophobia puts you inside the phenomenology of place-related phobias, so that you can explore the modulations of such experiences as they unfold and twist themselves into an anxiety that is without boundaries. This is a true phenomenological study of how places appear cut up and displaced, how they are darkened and blindingly lit, how they overwhelm, grab you and close in, how one's body turns against itself, freezes, and starts to drift, and how others invade and obstruct one's intentions. Trigg also draws from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to map out a detailed landscape of anxiety, delivering a deep analysis of the interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious elements that constitute the phobias related to place. He shows us that anxiety and the self are always more than, and at the same time, less than personal.” – Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA
“Topophilia, our love of place and our embeddedness in it and indebtedness to it, is not the only story to tell about place. In Topophobia, Dylan Trigg brilliantly shows that topophobia is woven through our experience of place, from its most intimate to its most public. He is equal parts Virgil and J. G. Ballard: he is our guide into the anxious, uncanny, nausea-inducing, claustrophobic, and agoraphobic places we are seduced by and condemned to live in, and he is the one who puts into words that which haunts us.
But this is not an account of the macabre, nor is it a tour of the bleak spaces of post-industrial collapse. Trigg gives us a rigorous phenomenology of the gaps and fissures of everyday place, the anxieties and ambiguities of being a body that must at some level be committed to its places, and yet which does not always experience a similar commitment in return. This book should have a rightful place for anyone interested in phenomenology, place, and body.
” – Bruce Janz, Professor & Co-Director, Department of Philosophy and Centre for Humanities & Digital Research, University of Central Florida, USA
By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.
***
Dylan Trigg's The Thing is a sophisticated melding of philosophy, literary criticism, and film criticism that underscores his major thesis that 'the horror of the cosmos is essentially the horror of the body.' Its discussions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the films of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and other texts and films allow us to look at these works from a fascinating new perspective while shedding light on humanity's fragility in a boundless cosmos. ~ S. T. Joshi
Dylan Trigg's The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror takes up the central challenge of contemporary philosophy - grappling with the world as indifferent to human constructs and concepts. Trigg's analysis suggests to us that phenomenology - too often regarded as a philosophy of the human par excellence - is uncannily suited to thinking the world-without-us. Husserl writing horror fiction is the spirit of this study. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”""
REVIEWS
“Genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature … It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.”
— Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook
“This work marks a highly original contribution to the growing interdisciplinary, phenomenological informed, literature examining the nature of place. However, while drawing on phenomenology, this is by no means standard phenomenologically-informed fare. The terrain covered and position arrived at is far weirder and unsettled.”
— Emotion, Space and Society
“Trigg displays an impressive knowledge of the recent literature on place, memory and the uncanny, and the book is worth the effort for those with an interest in where the concept is currently headed…. Trigg’s emphasis on Merleau-Ponty rather than Heidegger for his phenomenology is a master-stroke: Trigg skillfully deploys Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to transcend the rigid dichotomy between subject and object and thus manages to reveal uncanniness as both a subjective experience.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“(The Memory of Place) will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, cultural studies, architectural theory, geography, and environmental studies. Summing Up: Recommended.”
— Choice
“Trigg takes readers on a subtle and nuanced tour that will intrigue philosophers and psychologists as well as students and researchers involved with any of the disciplines that intersect as ‘place studies’ — including architecture, geography, urban planning, and environmental studies.”
— Book News
Edited books by Dylan Trigg
Calling upon disciplinary methodologies as broad as phenomenology, film studies, and law, each of the chapters is thematically connected by a rigorous attention on the multifaceted ways atmosphere play an important role in the development of shared emotion. While the concept of atmosphere has become a critical notion across several disciplines, the relationship between atmospheres and shared emotion remains neglected. The idea of sharing emotion over a particular event is rife within contemporary society. From Brexit to Trump to Covid-19, emotions are not only experienced individually, they are also grasped together. Proceeding from the view that atmospheres can play an explanatory role in accounting for shared emotion, the book promises to make an enduring contribution to both the understanding of atmospheres and to issues in the philosophy of emotion more broadly.
Offering both a nuanced analysis of key terms in contemporary debates as well as a series of original studies, the book will be a vital resource for scholars in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, human geography, and political science.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Atmospheres of Shared Emotion
Dylan Trigg
Part I: Moods and Atmospheres
Chapter 1. Are Atmospheres Shared Feelings?
Tonino Griffero
Chapter 2. Tuning the World: A Conceptual History of the Term Stimmung Part Two
Gerhard Thonhauser
Chapter 3. Moods and Atmospheres: Affective States, Affective Properties, and the Similarity Explanation
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Part II: Psychopathological Atmospheres
Chapter 4. Atmospheres of Anxiety: The Case of Covid-19
Dylan Trigg
Chapter 5. Feeling Bodies: Atmospheric Intercorporeality and its Disruptions in the Case of Schizophrenia
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei
Chapter 6. Agency and Atmospheres of Inclusion and Exclusion
Joel Krueger
Part III: Aesthetic and Political Atmospheres
Chapter 7. Shared or Spread? On Boredom and Other Unintended Collective Emotions in the Cinema
Julian Hanich
Chapter 8. Nazi Architecture as Design for Producing "Volksgemeinschaft"
Gernot Böhme
Chapter 9. Political Emotions and Political Atmospheres
Lucy Osler and Thomas Szanto
Conclusion: Something We All Share
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Index
Co-edited books by Dylan Trigg
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia
Edited By Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg
Copyright 2025
Hardback
£164.00
ISBN 9781032429205
600 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
August 7, 2024 by Routledge
Austria Flag Free Shipping (7-14 Business Days)
shipping options
Hardback
Available for pre-order on July 17, 2024. Item will ship after August 7, 2024
Original Price£205.00
Sale PriceGBP £164.00
QTY
1
Description
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly.
Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements and gaps in existing literature. Comprising forty-five chapters, the volume covers the following topics:
Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology.
Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory.
Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia.
Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects.
Media related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels.
Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.
The book examines the nature of unconsciousness and the role it plays in structuring our sense of self. It also looks at the extent to which the unconscious marks the body as it functions outside of experience as well as manifests itself in experience. In addition, the book explores the relationship between unconsciousness and language, particularly if unconsciousness exists prior to language or if the concept can only be understood through speech.
The collection includes contributions from leading scholars, each of whom grounds their investigations in a nuanced mastery of the traditional voices of their fields. These contributors provide diverse viewpoints that challenge both the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions in their relation to unconsciousness."
With Dermot Moran, Alexander Schnell, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Timothy Mooney, James Phillips, Dorothée Legrand, Francois Raffoul, Joseph Cohen, Drew Dalton, Dylan Trigg, Thamy Ayouch, Dieter Lohmar, Line Ryberg Ingerslev, Nataille Depraz, and Alphonso Lingis.
Peer-reviewed articles by Dylan Trigg
In der philosophischen Phänomenologie ist der menschliche Körper und das Körperhafte eine immer wieder gestellte, nie abgeschlossene Frage. Dylan Triggs Buch stellt sich der Aufgabe, die Phänomenologie unter Einbeziehung der Bilderwelten des (Horror-)Films neu zu orientieren. Der Körper, der unser In-der-Welt-sein ermöglicht und durch ein Gefühl der Selbstidentität bestimmt bleibt, soll nun erweitert und zum Schauplatz eines anderen, fremden, der individuellen Existenz vorgängigen Lebens werden.
Im Dialog mit Lévinas und dem späten Merleau-Ponty, den Filmen von Carpenter und Cronenberg und den Schriften von H.P. Lovecraft versucht Trigg, jenem Unheimlichen und Unmenschlichen auf die Spur zu kommen, von dem der Mensch heimgesucht wird und das nicht völlig in die Menschlichkeit integriert werden kann. Die Erfahrung des Grauens, das immer ein »Körpergrauen« ist, kennzeichnet dabei sowohl den Verrat als auch die Erneuerung einer anthropozentrischen Phänomenologie, oder besser: die Begründung einer »unmenschlichen Phänomenologie«.
Translated by: Dmitri Chulakov, Dmitri Vyatkin and Yana Tsyrlina.
Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy – and phenomenology in particular – until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna.
Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike.
Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.
Table of contents
Preface
1. The Home at Night
2. Under the Skin
3. Two Ocular Globes
4. Lost in place
5. Through the Mirror
Conclusion
Index
Reviews
“Readers will be captivated by Dylan Trigg's penetrating insights into and eloquent accounts of his experience of anxiety. They lead him into strikingly new and important ideas for psychology and philosophy.” – Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA
“Dylan Trigg's Topophobia puts you inside the phenomenology of place-related phobias, so that you can explore the modulations of such experiences as they unfold and twist themselves into an anxiety that is without boundaries. This is a true phenomenological study of how places appear cut up and displaced, how they are darkened and blindingly lit, how they overwhelm, grab you and close in, how one's body turns against itself, freezes, and starts to drift, and how others invade and obstruct one's intentions. Trigg also draws from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to map out a detailed landscape of anxiety, delivering a deep analysis of the interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious elements that constitute the phobias related to place. He shows us that anxiety and the self are always more than, and at the same time, less than personal.” – Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA
“Topophilia, our love of place and our embeddedness in it and indebtedness to it, is not the only story to tell about place. In Topophobia, Dylan Trigg brilliantly shows that topophobia is woven through our experience of place, from its most intimate to its most public. He is equal parts Virgil and J. G. Ballard: he is our guide into the anxious, uncanny, nausea-inducing, claustrophobic, and agoraphobic places we are seduced by and condemned to live in, and he is the one who puts into words that which haunts us.
But this is not an account of the macabre, nor is it a tour of the bleak spaces of post-industrial collapse. Trigg gives us a rigorous phenomenology of the gaps and fissures of everyday place, the anxieties and ambiguities of being a body that must at some level be committed to its places, and yet which does not always experience a similar commitment in return. This book should have a rightful place for anyone interested in phenomenology, place, and body.
” – Bruce Janz, Professor & Co-Director, Department of Philosophy and Centre for Humanities & Digital Research, University of Central Florida, USA
By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.
***
Dylan Trigg's The Thing is a sophisticated melding of philosophy, literary criticism, and film criticism that underscores his major thesis that 'the horror of the cosmos is essentially the horror of the body.' Its discussions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the films of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and other texts and films allow us to look at these works from a fascinating new perspective while shedding light on humanity's fragility in a boundless cosmos. ~ S. T. Joshi
Dylan Trigg's The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror takes up the central challenge of contemporary philosophy - grappling with the world as indifferent to human constructs and concepts. Trigg's analysis suggests to us that phenomenology - too often regarded as a philosophy of the human par excellence - is uncannily suited to thinking the world-without-us. Husserl writing horror fiction is the spirit of this study. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”""
REVIEWS
“Genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature … It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.”
— Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook
“This work marks a highly original contribution to the growing interdisciplinary, phenomenological informed, literature examining the nature of place. However, while drawing on phenomenology, this is by no means standard phenomenologically-informed fare. The terrain covered and position arrived at is far weirder and unsettled.”
— Emotion, Space and Society
“Trigg displays an impressive knowledge of the recent literature on place, memory and the uncanny, and the book is worth the effort for those with an interest in where the concept is currently headed…. Trigg’s emphasis on Merleau-Ponty rather than Heidegger for his phenomenology is a master-stroke: Trigg skillfully deploys Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to transcend the rigid dichotomy between subject and object and thus manages to reveal uncanniness as both a subjective experience.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“(The Memory of Place) will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, cultural studies, architectural theory, geography, and environmental studies. Summing Up: Recommended.”
— Choice
“Trigg takes readers on a subtle and nuanced tour that will intrigue philosophers and psychologists as well as students and researchers involved with any of the disciplines that intersect as ‘place studies’ — including architecture, geography, urban planning, and environmental studies.”
— Book News
Calling upon disciplinary methodologies as broad as phenomenology, film studies, and law, each of the chapters is thematically connected by a rigorous attention on the multifaceted ways atmosphere play an important role in the development of shared emotion. While the concept of atmosphere has become a critical notion across several disciplines, the relationship between atmospheres and shared emotion remains neglected. The idea of sharing emotion over a particular event is rife within contemporary society. From Brexit to Trump to Covid-19, emotions are not only experienced individually, they are also grasped together. Proceeding from the view that atmospheres can play an explanatory role in accounting for shared emotion, the book promises to make an enduring contribution to both the understanding of atmospheres and to issues in the philosophy of emotion more broadly.
Offering both a nuanced analysis of key terms in contemporary debates as well as a series of original studies, the book will be a vital resource for scholars in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, human geography, and political science.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Atmospheres of Shared Emotion
Dylan Trigg
Part I: Moods and Atmospheres
Chapter 1. Are Atmospheres Shared Feelings?
Tonino Griffero
Chapter 2. Tuning the World: A Conceptual History of the Term Stimmung Part Two
Gerhard Thonhauser
Chapter 3. Moods and Atmospheres: Affective States, Affective Properties, and the Similarity Explanation
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Part II: Psychopathological Atmospheres
Chapter 4. Atmospheres of Anxiety: The Case of Covid-19
Dylan Trigg
Chapter 5. Feeling Bodies: Atmospheric Intercorporeality and its Disruptions in the Case of Schizophrenia
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei
Chapter 6. Agency and Atmospheres of Inclusion and Exclusion
Joel Krueger
Part III: Aesthetic and Political Atmospheres
Chapter 7. Shared or Spread? On Boredom and Other Unintended Collective Emotions in the Cinema
Julian Hanich
Chapter 8. Nazi Architecture as Design for Producing "Volksgemeinschaft"
Gernot Böhme
Chapter 9. Political Emotions and Political Atmospheres
Lucy Osler and Thomas Szanto
Conclusion: Something We All Share
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Index
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia
Edited By Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg
Copyright 2025
Hardback
£164.00
ISBN 9781032429205
600 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
August 7, 2024 by Routledge
Austria Flag Free Shipping (7-14 Business Days)
shipping options
Hardback
Available for pre-order on July 17, 2024. Item will ship after August 7, 2024
Original Price£205.00
Sale PriceGBP £164.00
QTY
1
Description
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly.
Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements and gaps in existing literature. Comprising forty-five chapters, the volume covers the following topics:
Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology.
Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory.
Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia.
Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects.
Media related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels.
Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.
The book examines the nature of unconsciousness and the role it plays in structuring our sense of self. It also looks at the extent to which the unconscious marks the body as it functions outside of experience as well as manifests itself in experience. In addition, the book explores the relationship between unconsciousness and language, particularly if unconsciousness exists prior to language or if the concept can only be understood through speech.
The collection includes contributions from leading scholars, each of whom grounds their investigations in a nuanced mastery of the traditional voices of their fields. These contributors provide diverse viewpoints that challenge both the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions in their relation to unconsciousness."
With Dermot Moran, Alexander Schnell, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Timothy Mooney, James Phillips, Dorothée Legrand, Francois Raffoul, Joseph Cohen, Drew Dalton, Dylan Trigg, Thamy Ayouch, Dieter Lohmar, Line Ryberg Ingerslev, Nataille Depraz, and Alphonso Lingis.
what has been overlooked, is the role the body plays in being the centre of aesthetic experience. In this paper, I will turn the tide on this omission and thematize the role of the body within the experience of the sublime. My plan for reconsidering this movement is to uniteWerner Herzog’s Aguirre,Wrath of God
(1972) with the late thought of Merleau-Ponty, especially his enigmatic notion of "flesh" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). In both Herzog and Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of nature exists which challenges the dichotomy between the autonomous self encountering the objective realm of wilderness. In each case, an ambiguity
undercuts the idea of wilderness existing "there" while human subjectivity remains placed "here." I will "read" the film as an instant of the chiasmatic relation between nature and humanity. Doing so, I will suggest that the reversibility between the body and the environment can be seen as an amplification of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "wild being" (l’etre sauvage).
First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.
Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.
embodiment Holocaust materiality nightmares phenom
As an aesthetic category, the sublime emerged in the first century A.D. through the Greek writer Longinus. In his On the Sublime, we are told how rhetoric fills us "with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaulting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we heard." Although he established ideas that would remain central to discussions on the sublime—grand conceptions, inspired emotion, a zeal that borders on the violent, and above all a gravity of thought, Longinus's text is largely concerned with the rhetorical sublime and to a large extent excludes Nature, which both Burke and Kant would later hold as central to their particular philosophies.
Edmund Burke's seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757 was celebrated for its contrast between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime, Burke tells us is "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." While the beautiful is "a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them . . . they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affections towards their persons." The differences are rendered explicit when Burke, in a well-known passage, depicts the sublime as vast, rugged, negligent, gloomy, and great, and the beautiful as small, smooth, polished, light, and delicate.
Implicit in Burke's inquiry is the notion that the sublime experience stretches the epistemological apprehension both sensibly and intelligibly. In Kant's account of the sublime, this idea is pivotal. For Kant the feeling of the sublime emerges when the senses fail to sufficiently apprehend an object. The subject's sense of individuation is therefore lost in the expansiveness or force of the object. Consider the Grand Canyon. In its spatial depth, we are both astounded and struck with a nervous exaltation; in its temporal presence, as an object where the lines of time have manifested themselves physically, we sense the sublimity of history unfold before us, but also realize the contingency of the present. The alchemical adage states as above, so below; and so too in the sublime: the finite and the infinite, terror and awe compound violently. The experience is such that the thought of throwing oneself into this yawning abyss is surely never far away. However, this subordination of subject to object is not a consequence of a substance inherent in the object acting as a causal thing-in-itself...
This chapter looks at a late fragment in Husserl’s philosophy concerning the relationship between the Earth and the body. In it, Husserl argues that the Earth is the primal ground of the possibility of movement and rest. In addition, he also poses some important questions concerning the origin of the body as an earthly entity. By examining this fragment, I investigate whether or not the body as an earthly entity can ever be transcended, thus allowing for the conceptualization of both another Earth and an alien entity that is not reducible to human experience. To assist with these questions, I draw upon Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. The reason for doing so is that Tarkovsky draws our attention to the limits phenomenology faces in contending with alien entities, which defy not only science but also descriptive methods. In both Husserl and Tarkovsky, an encounter with the alien is only possible in terms of a breach in our understanding of familiarity and unfamiliarity. To this extent, the alien finds its home in the uncanny, a point I develop at the conclusion.
In short, an archaeology of the past provides us with the conceptual language to understand how artefacts such as The Overlook Hotel can retain a latent history that is marked by a sense of depth rather than being a distance “behind” us. Indeed, one of the insights of The Shining is to show us that the past is the ground beneath oneself, contemporaneous with the present, rather than consigned to a void. To understand this relation between the trauma of the past and the materiality of the present, I draw on both the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the late psychoanalysis of Freud. As I argue, only by staging phenomenology and psychoanalysis together can the sedimented burial ground of the past be brought to life in such a way that we can begin to understand the nature of The Shining as a film as much about what Kubrick terms the “murderous bidding” of Jack Torrance as it is the eternal recurrence of a time that can never be assimilated into the present.
To this end, I will pursue the final option in the topography of ghost’s altering manifestations: the insect trapped in amber. As I read it in this paper, such an image captures the paradoxical quality of the ghost in both a temporal and material way. In the first case, the image distorts boundaries between time, conflating past and present. If the trapped insect belongs to the past, then it is nevertheless preserved in the present as something which is still alive, resisting erosion owing to its resin shell, and for this reason, has outlived its own death. In material terms, the significance of amber is manifold. If amber marks the presence of spectrality, then it is no coincide that the film itself is set in this colour, suggesting from the outset a ghost’s presence is dispersed through the landscape rather than contained to the body itself. Moreover, the quality of the insect/ghost as being trapped in amber allows del Toro to stage a series of paradoxical encounters between the living and the dead—not least the physical interaction between material and immaterial bodies—such that by the end of the film the exact boundary between the those who are alive and those who are dead is sufficiently blurred so as to render the division reversible.
To approach these paradoxical thoughts, I turn to phenomenology. In particular, I turn to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, each of whom gives us a different reading of ghostly matters. For Husserl, the ghost retains a body in spite of its being “dead matter, a sheer material thing” (Husserl 1990, 100). In his understanding, this “spatial phantom” gains its identity as a ghost through an appeal to intersubjectivity—i.e., that the ghost can be experienced by more than one person thanks to the fact the body, beyond being a material entity, is also an “organ of the spirit” (102).
If Husserl thus indicates to us how a material body can become—at least in principle—haunted, then it falls to Merleau-Ponty to reveal how the interaction between the material and immaterial realms collide. This, I argue, he is able to do with his concept of “flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1968). By this term, Merleau-Ponty gestures toward an ontology that precedes the division between subject and object, and thus allows for the intertwinement of different things thanks to the fact that things are made of the same fabric. Flesh is neither matter nor spirit, nor is it a substance. Rather, flesh marks an element insofar as it is root of things without being reducible to those things. In a word, the flesh is ghostly insofar as it affects things without itself being present.
This thought allows us to grasp the central question for a phenomenology of ghosts: does the ghost have a reality outside of it being experienced by a living being or is it simply a narcissistic mirror of the living? By situating Merleau-Ponty within the context of del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, I will show that such a reality is possible given that both ghost and non-ghost share the same world, a world that if prior to the split between self/other and subject/object, is also imbued with a spectral dimension that renders the relation between the visible and the invisible possible in the first place.
JUNE 23, 2017
Centre Culturel Irlandais
5 Rue des Irlandais
Salle Michel Guillaume
75005 Paris
France
Brexit. Trump. Terrorism. The rise of the far-right.
Anxiety is both everywhere and nowhere at once. At once a condition to be understood in psychiatric and psychoanalytical terms, anxiety is also a political, aesthetic, cultural, and metaphysical affair.
To what extent is anxiety a philosophical problem, though? And what role do art and literature play in articulating the anxieties that are embedded in society? Philosophy and anxiety have a long established history. From Kierkegaard to Heidegger, anxiety has been regarded as the philosophical mood par excellence.
In bringing together a collection of distinguished thinkers and broad perspectives, from phenomenology to psychoanalysis to literature, this colloquium will explore a plurality of anxieties, each of which is central to contemporary culture and thought.
With:
Joseph Cohen (University College Dublin)
Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis)
Hadrien Laroche (Writer)
Dorothée Legrand (École Normale Supérieure)
Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)
Matthew Ratcliffe (University of Vienna)
Special Guests:
Jean Greisch (l'Institut catholique de Paris)
Hugo Hamilton (Writer)
Registration - https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/philosophies-of-anxiety-tickets-31873517549
Website - http://dylantrigg.com/anxiety.htm
Sponsored by Marie Curie Actions, Centre Culturel Irlandais, and University College Dublin.
In this paper, I will formulate a way to commune with the dead which seeks to avoid reducing ghostly phenomena to an offspring of psychic activity. I will do this via the lived body. Two thoughts will be pursued. On the one hand, with recourse to Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that our embodied experiences are never unequivocally "mine," but forever doubled by an anonymous presence, a trace of a pre-personal body folding into my personal body. Drawing out this theme of doubling, I will develop a phenomenological theory of the Doppelgänger, which attends to the ambiguity of the body as being an object possessed and subject possessing. Phrasing the space between subject and object a site of abjection, I will conclude by aligning the immateriality of the ghost with the materiality of the lived body.
[Feature on France Culture by Géraldine Mosna-Savoye featuring "The Thing: Une phénoménologie de l'horreur" <Editions MF>]
https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-journal-de-la-philosophie/la-philosophie-face-ses-monstres
1. Place—lived emplacement, place attachment, and environmental design as place making;
2. Nature—the lived constitution of the natural environment and natural world;
3. Real-world applications of phenomenological principles (transit design; virtual reality; environmental education);
4. Broader conceptual issues (the subjectivity-objectivity duality; phenomenology vs. analytic science; phenomenology as practiced by non-phenomenologists; phenomenological understanding vs. practical applications; parallels between real-world and phenomenological pathways).
Contributors and essay titles are as follows:
David Seamon, “Human-Immersion-in-World: Twenty-Five Years of EAP”;
Robert Mugerauer, “It’s about People”;
Jeff Malpas, “Human Being as Placed Being”;
Eva-Maria Simms, “Going Deep into Place”;
Sue Michaels, “Viewing Two Sides”;
Dennis Skocz, “Giving Space to Thoughts on Place”;
Bruce Janz, “Place, Philosophy, and Non-Philosophy”;
Janet Donohoe, “Can there be a Phenomenology of Nature”;
Tim Ingold, A Phenomenology with the Natural World”;
Mark Riegner, “A Phenomenology of Betweenness”;
Bryan E. Bannon, “Evolving Conceptions of Environmental Phenomenology”;
John Cameron, “Place Making, Phenomenology, and Lived Sustainability”;
Lena Hopsch, Social Space and Daily Commuting: Phenomenological Implications”;
Matthew S. Bower, “Topologies of Illumination”;
Paul Krafel, “Navigating by the Light”;
Yi-Fu Tuan, “Points of View and Objectivity: The Phenomenologist’s Challenge”;
Julio Bermudez, “Considering the Relationship between Phenomenology and Science”;
Edward Relph, “Varieties of Phenomenological Description”;
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, “Phenomenology, Philosophy, and Praxis”;
Elizabeth A. Behnke, “In Celebration of a Conversation of Pathways.”
This workshop is part of the FWF-project P33428 "A Phenomenology of Nostalgia", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (2020-2024)
The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis via the theme of nostalgia. While there has been a modest but steady pool of research on nostalgia from a phenomenological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis—especially within the context of Freud—and nostalgia remains more ambiguous. In the work of Freud himself, the term “nostalgia” appears only once and even then only in passing in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passing mention to nostalgia is all the more striking given Freud’s concern with the archaeology of meaning, the function of fixation, and the different modalities of memory conceived in his work. This workshop proceeds from the point of view that the theme of nostalgia provides an opportunity for dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In particular, the workshop posits that nostalgia can provide a space of possible encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis across several key themes and questions.
1. Temporality: what is the temporality of nostalgia? Contemporary understanding tends to treat nostalgia as a mode of reminiscence, in which we “travel” back to the past, as though the past were a discrete zone of time behind us. But nostalgia’s temporality is more complex than this; if the past is involved in nostalgia, then it is not clear what type of pastness is implicated. Moreover, nostalgia not only involves the past as a dimension of time, but also the present and the future as determining structures of nostalgia. How can phenomenology and psychoanalysis help us understand these complex relations (especially in terms of concepts such as retention and protention as well as psychoanalytical concepts such as repetition, fixation as well as Nachträglichkeit)?
2. Affectivity: the history of nostalgia is a history of transformation. During its inception, nostalgia was understood as a deadly disease; today, by contrast, it is understood as a benign pastime. What is the affective status of nostalgia and how can we think of the emotion outside of the binary between disease and well-being? What role do other emotions such as anxiety, melancholia, and shame play in the formation of nostalgia as a mood? What exactly is the affective tonality of nostalgia and what role can Freud’s notion of the uncanny play here?
3. Subjectivity: much of the contemporary research on nostalgia maintains that the emotion bolsters and fortifies a sense of self, acting as a form of self-help therapy in moments of distress. Yet convictions such as these tend to overlook the structure of subjectivity at work in nostalgia. Here questions such as what role nostalgia plays in generating an impression of unity (or otherwise disclosing the fragmented foundations upon which subjectivity is grounded) are critical. Furthermore, one could ask if this impression of unity points to the embodied experience of nostalgia, e.g. as identification with a totality outside of one's body?
4. Unconsciousness: what role do unconscious mechanisms play in nostalgic desire? How do the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness differ from one another and what conception of the unconscious is suited best to conceptualise nostalgia? Can phenomenological notions such as operative and latent intentionality play a beneficial role in enriching the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness?
5. Intentionality: what is it that we are nostalgic for? Historically, the answer to this question has been home, where home has been understood in geographical terms. Over the last century, the emphasis has shifted from spatiality to temporality. Yet things—objects—remain critical to the advent of nostalgic desire. Nostalgic desire is not an abstract longing nor is it a pure mode of recollection, but instead a desire that is given expression through particular things (including other people), whether they be real or phantasy. Here, questions emerge about what role intentional states such as memory, imagination, and reverie play in the formation of nostalgia and in the transformation of the past into a nostalgic object.
La problématique en jeu est précisément explicitée dans le titre de l'évènement :
Corps à (re)construire implique, dans un premier temps, que le corps qui est en jeu ici reste à bâtir. Il est pris à la fois comme fragmentaire, un corps souffrant morcelé par les épreuves qu'il a dû traverser, et conçu, précisément en raison de son caractère ouvert, comme lieu d’une potentielle transformation.
Corps à (re)construire fait référence au passé, notamment à ce qui s'est inscrit en lui : il évoque une matière temporelle. Néanmoins, cela ne veut pas dire que nous intégrions cette dimension temporelle du corps comme une simple donnée.
Car le corps à (re)construire nous amène à questionner l'idée d'un corps accessible de façon immédiate. A l'inverse, nous nous intéressons à une conceptualisation du corps dans laquelle il est considéré comme une altérité structurée et médiatisée par le langage.
Ces trois perspectives de recherche permettront de déplier la richesse du terme construction, et d’ainsi déconstruire la possibilité-même d’une reconstruction complète qui viendrait réparer les possibles destructions subies par le corps souffrant : face à l’altérité émergeant du langage, le sujet souffrant échouera dans la tentative de décrire son état présent ou passé, corporel ou psychique de manière adéquate. Cette incapacité d’une description complète et immédiate, ou encore d’une narration linéaire des épreuves d’un corps singulier nous permettra d’ouvrir notre champ de recherche éthique et sociale, en prenant cette impossibilité-même comme point de départ : elle ouvre au corps qui reste à construire la voie à sa propre configuration.
Nous nous demanderons notamment : comment le corps peut-il parler de sa souffrance ? Quelles modalités du langage sont aptes à témoigner des épreuves du corps ? Quelles transformations subit la souffrance du fait de sa mise en mots ? Quels récits du corps subsistent et se transmettent à travers le temps ? Lesquels sont oubliés ? Quelles sont les structures sociales et politiques qui se cachent derrière cet oubli ?
ORGANISATION
Leyla Sophie Gleissner (ENS Paris et Université de Vienne) et Flora Löffelmann (Université de Vienne)
CONTACT
[email protected]
April 25-26th, 2019
University of Vienna
Department of Philosophy, Room 3D
NIG Universitätsstraße 7
Stg. III/3. Stock, 1010 Wien
Over the last twenty years or so, the concept of atmosphere has flourished within phenomenological research. Inspired by the works of Hermann Schmitz, Gernot Böhme, and Tonino Griffero, the concept of atmosphere has played an influential role in contributing to debates in phenomenological psychopathology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. Despite this surge of interest, the role that atmospheres play in contributing to cases of shared emotions remains neglected. This oversight is all the more surprising given the potentially powerful explanatory role atmosphere can play in helping clarify the complex structure of shared emotion. The aim of this workshop is to explore the intersection between shared emotion and atmospheres by bringing together leading and emerging scholars in the field. Possible topics include:
Defining and conceptualizing atmospheres.
The methodology of studying atmospheres.
The relation between atmosphere, mood, and aura.
The role atmospheres play in the politics of emotion.
The spatial and embodied aspects of atmospheres.
The function of contagious emotions in atmospheres.
The relation between atmospheres and the “staging” of shared emotions.
Confirmed invited speakers:
Tonino Griffero (University of Rome)
Gernot Böhme (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster)
Joel Krueger (University of Exeter)
Thomas Szanto ( University of Jyväskylä)
Jan Slaby (Freie Universität Berlin)
Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Basel)
Guest speakers:
Gerhard Thonhauser (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lucy Olster (University of Exeter)
Maximilian Gregor Hepach (University of Cambridge)
Valeria Bizzari and Veronica Iubei (Heidelberg University Hospital)
Mikkel Bille (Roskilde University)
Stamatina Kousidi (Politecnico di Milano)
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
– Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View
11.30 am - 12.30 pm Tobias Becker (FU Berlin)
– Retro : Aesthetics and Temporalities
01.30 pm - 2.30 pm Michaela Bstieler/Stephanie Graf (University of Innsbruck)
– Angels of Nostalgia. Walter Benjamin's Images of Homecoming
02.30 pm - 3.30 pm Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
– Construction and Ruination
03.45 pm - 4.45 pm Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
– From Nostalgic Ruins to Challenging Monuments
04.45 pm - 5.00 pm Conclusion
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.