MUSTS Colloquium with Jenny Slatman on Phenomenological materialism

Wednesday, January 11 2017, 15:30-17:00, in the Attic (Grote Gracht 80-82, Maastricht)

Followed by a poster session by CAST students

Abstract:

It is well-known that in phenomenology the body, as lived body (Leib, corps vécu), is considered as a condition of possibility for perception and action. Because of this ‘transcendental’ approach, so I argue, the so-called embodied subject is virtually immaterial, disembodied.  This tendency towards disembodying the embodied subject becomes manifest if we look at phenomenology’s principle of incorporation and its premise of intentionality in terms of “I can”. In my paper, I will discuss the limits of incorporation, and will put forward a form of phenomenology that can account for the non-disembodied embodied body, in other words, a phenomenology that can account for the body’s materiality. To this purpose, I will draw on a case of a woman who describes how she managed to habituate to her mastectomy scar. Habituation in her case, so I hold, requires a habituation to the non-incorporable; it requires a facing of her body’s matter.

 

Bio:

Jenny Slatman is Professor of Medical Humanities in the department of Culture Studies, Tilburg School of Humanities at Tilburg University. Having a background in physiotherapy, philosophy and cultural studies, her research consists of philosophical and anthropological analyses of the body and embodiment in medical practices. From 2011 to 2016, she conducted a NWO-VIDI project on Bodily Integrity in Blemished Bodies at the Department Health, Ethics and Society of Maastricht University.

 

Poster session:

Directly after the colloquium lecture, from 17:00-18:00 in the Attic, second-year CAST students will present posters about their internships. There will be drinks and snacks to celebrate their safe return to Maastricht.