Critical phenomenology and the banality of white supremacy

Abstract

Critical phenomenology is a rapidly flourishing field of research within philosophical phenomenology. This article undertakes a genealogy of the critical philosophical enterprise, drawing out its key commitments, motivations, tensions, and productive potential. In the second half of this article, I explore the promise of critical phenomenology, by examining how a critical phenomenological approach to questions of racism and racialised embodiment can help extend our understanding of white supremacy, opening up new possibilities for thinking its banality and ubiquity in contemporary social and political life.

Robustly embodied imagination and the limits of perspective-taking

“…For a detailed characterization of critical phenomenology, see(Guenther, 2020;Ngo, 2022) Representatives of critical phenomenological approaches include, for example, feminist phenomenologists, like Simone De Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young, and critical race theorists, like Franz Fanon and Linda Alcoff.7 Phenomenologists have emphasized the temporal nature of experience, more specifically, its anticipatory or future-oriented character (e.g.,Husserl, 1991;Merleau-Ponty, 2002)), which gives our interactions an openness toward the world. More important for our purposes, this character has been linked to imagination as the mental process that "engenders" it(Casey, 1977;.…”