Introduction

This special issue brings together some of the highlights from the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). Emory University hosted the conference on October 8–10, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. The articles included in this volume draw out, in plural ways, the trajectories, methodologies, and orientations that run through what we call today Continental philosophy. By mining the affective, imaginary, conceptual, and political dimensions of experience, they critically deepen and elaborate, indeed perform, not only what Continental philosophies are about but how they orient perception, feeling, and thinking. Hence our issue, “Critical, Affective, and Plural Trajectories in Continental Philosophy,” both reflects the trajectories sketched by current work in the field and gestures to a performative openness and pluralism, a thinking in movement, that these philosophical trajectories embody.The issue opens with the plenary address that Barbara Cassin delivered at the close of the 2015 SPEP conference. Cassin's article, “Translation as Paradigm for Human Sciences,” shows what it means for philosophy to be performative. Cassin takes her point of departure in her own experience of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, which has recently appeared in English (Princeton University Press, 2014). Itself a creative reworking of the French edition, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaires des intraduisibles, which was published in 2004 (Éditions de Seuil) and became a best seller in France, this book is more than simply a dictionary or even an encyclopedia. Widely acclaimed as a novel and pioneering work, it shows the loving attention and critical dedication of its editors to languages—to the differences within and between languages, their equivocations and homologies, and to the difficult and endless experience of translating between them. Untranslatables, Cassin tells us, are “not what one doesn't translate but what one doesn't stop (not) translating.” Cassin notes how moments of untranslatability and resistance are “symptoms” of the differences between languages, but she argues against these becoming the bases for reifying any language into an “ontological nationalism.” Untranslatability is, then, not a barrier but an ongoing task that cannot come to an end. Moreover, this task is a philosophical one, Cassin argues, since to translate is already to do philosophy; philosophical concepts are not disembodied ideas but, rather, need to exist in words, in languages that perform differential worlds.Doing things with words, (re)making reality, is precisely what Cassin's Sophists are doing. Cassin argues for philosophy in terms of what she calls sophistics and shows this to be a discursive practice that is performative—in other words, rather than saying what is, this discourse produces its world. Cassin offers a forceful and creative rereading of the history of philosophy that critically engages with and challenges Heideggerian ontology—and which offers a different way of being pre-Socratic, namely, “logology.” Of interest here are the gestures of exclusion whereby Sophists become cast as irrecuperable, as nonphilosophy, even as nonhuman or plantlike—gestures that are replicated in philosophy today. The point for Cassin is not to rehabilitate the Sophists, to bring them back into the philosophical fold, but to take them as countermodels. This offers ways of resisting philosophical regimes of univocity and of performing a different relation of language and being. Here Cassin argues for what she calls a “consistent relativism.” Instead of the binary opposition of true and false, Cassin proposes a “dedicated comparative” that complicates the universal, makes it strategic, and takes into account context and locality; its purpose is not Truth as such but to help choose what is “better for.” In this way, Cassin shows how untranslatables are the basis not only of philosophical method but also of political method: “They deepen differences as a way of understanding, not through assimilation but by bridge-building.” This political gesture refuses the impoverishment of language in Globish (Global English), just as it refuses the sacralization of any national language. Translation is a political method that dwells in plurality; to translate, says Cassin, is to move between languages, without end, so “de-essentializ[ing]” any given language by “showing the gap, the entre, instead of fixed essences or unique ideas.” To translate is to remain with the multiplicity of, within, and between languages. In Cassin's words, it is to “philosophize in tongues.”The next section of the special issue brings together the three prizewinning articles by emerging scholars from the 2015 SPEP conference. The recipient of the Junior Scholar Prize was Erica Harris, whose article “Side-Stepping the Problem of the Unconscious: Why We Ought to Reframe the Lacan/Merleau-Ponty Debate in Bodily Terms” defends an unconventional, organic reading of the Lacanian “Real” that differs from interpretations of it as a lack produced by language. By relocating attention to Lacan's account of anxiety as an affect intimately related to the body, Harris renews the possibility of a dialogue between psychoanalysis and phenomenology and draws on Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy for clues in overcoming ambiguities in Lacan's own work on the nature of the Real. In 2015, the recipient of the Iris Marion Young Prize for the Best Paper in Feminist Philosophy was Shiloh Whitney. In “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor,” Whitney attends to a different dimension of affect—the political economy of racialized and gendered exploitation in affective labor. Drawing on Gutierrez-Rodriguez, Lorde, and Fanon, Whitney argues that affective labor functions according to a logic of transmission and amplification, rather than use and exchange; it secretes an “indigestible” affective by-product that it becomes the burden of racialized bodies to carry. The Graduate Student prize in 2015 was awarded to Jasmine Wallace for her article “The Fragments of the Disaster: Blanchot and Galeano on Decolonial Writing.” In her article, Wallace attends to the plural and differential positionalities of historically marginalized communities in the work of remembering/silence. While Wallace draws on Blanchot's account of fragmentary writing, aimed at a silence anterior to language that could found future communities, she notes that, without a historical lens, such silence is in danger of being romanticized—compounding the oppression of communities whose histories have been forcibly fragmented. With Galeano, Wallace proposes a different process: to reconstruct memories of lost histories before refragmenting these narratives.The following five sections consist of articles chosen from among the papers that were either selected or invited for presentation at the SPEP conference. These articles cover a wide range of themes, figures, and topics—reflecting the deep diversity, but also the productive echoes, among presentations heard at the conference. Our special issue spans philosophies from their ancient to contemporary expressions. In addition to figures already mentioned, the issue includes articles on Augustine and Duns Scotus, Schelling and Nietzsche, Husserl, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Henry, Barbaras, Malabou, and Le Dœuff. It broaches methodologies from the phenomenological and psychoanalytic, through the deconstructive and sophistic, to feminist, critical race, and decolonial approaches. But there are also themes that weave through different contributions, darting in and out, so as to create unexpected linkages; of these, it is worth noting the ways in which plurality (as we saw with Cassin) and affectivity (as touched on by some of the prizewinning articles) take different philosophical expressions in the rest of the issue.The first of these five sections, entitled “Rethinking Politics: Democracy and Community,” consists of two articles that draw on contemporary French philosophy to offer novel conceptions of the plurality of the political sphere. In “Derrida and the Autoimmunity of Democracy,” Fred Evans reconsiders Derrida's argument for the autoimmunity of democracy, questioning the guiding role that he assigns to an unconditional “democracy to come.” While Evans sees this as undoing the autoimmunity of conditional democracies, he also argues that the promise of democracy can be derived from a different aspect of Derrida's thinking: his philosophical use of “voice”—and what this implies for the political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and the creation of new voices. In “The Clinamen of Community: Duns Scotus's Political Ontology,” Andrew LaZella responds to Nancy's question as to whether immanence can be undone through community. To answer this question, LaZella turns to an unlikely source: he finds in Duns Scotus's political ontology a powerful critique of immanentism. Though Scotistic univocity may appear totalizing, the inherent inclination—or “clinamen” (that is, “swerve”)—of univocal being ruptures the circuit of identity; being is always already being-as. Scotus thus allows us to think community as resisting both its hypostatization and its appropriation by individual subjects.The next section, “Aesthetics: Time-Consciousness, Memory, Imagin-ation,” brings together two articles that ask after phenomenological experiences of music and art. In “Rhythm and Transformation Through Memory: On Augustine's Confessions After De Musica,” Jessica Wiskus reads Augustine's Confessions as performing the very phenomenology of time-consciousness it describes. Key is the nonlinear work of memory disclosed in Augustine's notion of rhythm (through his interpretation of the hymn “Deus, creator omnium” in De Musica). This centrality of rhythm in the earlier text of De Musica sheds light on how the structural whole of the Confessions is organized rhythmically, performing a “beginning” that serves as origin only retroactively, through relation or proportion to the end. In “Toward a Husserlian Foundation of Aesthetics: On Imagination, Phantasy, and Image Consciousness in the 1904/1905 Lectures,” Azul Katz asks how a Husserlian aesthetic consciousness can be conceived. While Husserl did not write systematically on experiences of works of art, Katz considers two avenues for a Husserlian aesthetics. The first avenue, through image consciousness, would lead, she argues, to an overly narrow reduction of aesthetics to figurative and almost exclusively visual experience. The second, more promising avenue makes use of the heuristic model of phantasy; this widens the field of aesthetics not only to nonvisual experiences but also to oneiric and ecstatic phenomena. While this allows for a more creative aesthetics, the fluctuation, freedom, and spontaneity of phantasy pose a threat, according to Katz, to some of the methodological requirements of Husserlian phenomenology itself.The next section is entitled “Deleuzian Abstraction and Nietzschean Will to Power” and asks after the alternative ways in which these two philosophers conceive of thinking. In “Who Thinks Abstractly? Deleuze on Abstraction,” Brent Adkins argues that “abstract” is another way of talking about the intensive for Deleuze. In contrast to Hegel, who thinks of the abstract in opposition to the concrete, Deleuze thinks of the abstract in opposition to the discrete. Thus Deleuze can say that “lived experience” is “absolutely abstract” because it is rhythmic and intensive. In this sense, philosophy's failure is that it does not think life abstractly enough. In “Will to Power as Alternative to Causality,” Joshua Rayman shows the force of Nietzsche's critique of causality to be broader than Nietzschean naturalists conceive, for it deprives us not only of causal-scientific forms of explanation but of metaphysical explanation in general. But Rayman argues that the will to power, in its combination with eternal recurrence, provides a nonnaturalist, nonmetaphysical replacement for causal-metaphysical ways of thinking. It offers an alternative description of the origin of movement at work immanently in all events, such that there can be no temporal separation between prior and posterior events. Nietzsche thus integrates his thinking of will to power, flux, strife, time, and play with his destruction of metaphysics.In the next section, “Religion and Myth,” we see this concern with thinking extended to the role of revelation and myth in philosophical thought. In “Theology, Ontotheology, and Eschatology in Schelling's Late Thought,” Martijn Buijs asks how Schelling holds together revelation and philosophy in his late thought. While Schelling insists on the limited nature of a philosophy in which the highest principle is an eternal Absolute, he pursues philosophy in a different mode, in which God as God successively but never fully and finally reveals himself in history. Neither idealism nor theology, Buijs argues, this should be read as philosophical eschatology. Bryan Smyth's article “Merleau-Ponty and the Myth of Human Incarnation” offers a novel reading of Merleau-Ponty's early reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. Smyth argues that Merleau-Ponty resolved the methodological problem of the external horizonality of experience, intuitionally, based on a mythic understanding of human embodiment. This implies that phenomenology, and human thought in general, involves some mythic outer horizon (whether this is recognized or not).In the final section of this issue, “Affectivity: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophical Pedagogy,” we return to affectivity in its plurality. In “Renaud Barbaras and Michel Henry: A Contemporary Debate on the Status of Affectivity and a Farewell to the ‘Flesh of the World,’” Frédéric Seyler argues that Henry's and Barbaras's critiques of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the “flesh of the world” point to the compatibility of their phenomenologies of life. While both understand life as affectivity—desire for Barbaras and immanent affectivity for Henry—their analyses open different, but complementary, spheres of phenomenological investigation. The phenomenological sphere of existence developed by Barbaras continues to depend on the deeper, transcendental level given by Henry's radical phenomenology of life. Their combination, Seyler argues, would open the path to a more integrated phenomenology of life and existence.In “Trauma and Historical Witnessing: Hope for Malabou's New Wounded,” Jennifer Gammage criticizes the ahistoricity and affective emptiness that Malabou attributes to trauma victims and the supposed powerlessness of psychoanalysis to address these wounds. In contrast, Gammage, along with contemporary theorists and analysts, argues that the very temporal structure of trauma requires us not only to rethink the importance of Freudian theory but also to rethink the mission of psychoanalysis as a political project of bearing witness to those narratives prohibited from entering normative discourse. Here, we encounter again the traumatic silence of politically motivated violence and the affectivity of repressed histories, to which Wallace's article pointed.The closing piece in this issue turns to the pressing question of philosophical pedagogy and to its performative, affective, and plural dimensions. Samir Haddad's “Pedagogy and Plurality in the Work of Michèle Le Dœuff” takes up Le Dœuff's diagnosis of philosophy's exclusionary practices toward women, practices grounded in the philosophical imaginary and the way it structures desire. To transform the imaginary, for Le Dœuff, involves the introduction of an original understanding of plurality in philosophy. But, as Haddad shows, Le Dœuff does not address the question of how philosophy thus transformed should be taught. Haddad's tentative response proceeds through affect—specifically, the affective charge of Le Dœuff's own work; he proposes that the infectious joy of her texts be used to reorient philosophical and pedagogical practice.This affectively rich and pluralized philosophy recalls Cassin's pluralism, with which this issue begins, the critical and inclusionary politics to which the issue aims to contribute, and the textured affective field to which many of the articles gesture. The contributions collected here show the plural, imbricated, and deep trajectories of current work in Continental philosophy, its thinking in movement.

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