The ecstatic-poetic phenomenology of Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Abstract

Ferencei studied at Columbia University, where she obtained a Master of Fine Arts in poetry; at Villanova University, where she gained a PhD and MA in Philosophy; and at Oxford University, where she was granted a Doctor of Philosophy in German Literature and a Master of Studies in European Literature. Her extensive and varied background is evident in the wide range of sources she cites and discusses from philosophy, phenomenology, the fine arts, and languages. She translated (with Matthias Fritsch) Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life (2004). She published a selection of her own poetry, After the Palace Burns (2003), for which she won the Paris Review Prize in poetry. Gosetti-Ferencei has a special interest in the phenomenology and philosophy of literature and aesthetics. Her several books include Heidegger, Hölderlin and the Subject of Poetic Language (2004); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (2007); and Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (2011).Gosetti-Ferencei is especially relevant for human science in that she explores the crossings between phenomenology and the media of poetry and painting. In particular, she explores the creative significance of poetic language and the vocative for phenomenological understanding. In The Ecstatic Quotidian Gosetti-Ferencei proposes that phenomenology is like art in that it tends to be interested in the ordinary and in everydayness; the quotidian. And, of course, the whole point of phenomenology is to help us grasp the meaning of the world as we live it in everyday experience. The quotidian everydayness of the world and its taken-for-grantedness makes phenomenology not only desirable but also possible. But Gosetti-Ferencei shows how, in both phenomenology and the arts, the attentive and aesthetic gaze at the ordinary inevitably causes the ordinary to shift towards the extraordinary, which she terms 'the ecstatic. ' Now, this shift from the ordinary (the quotidian), to what lies outside the ordinary (the ecstatic quotidian) is suggestive of the moment of phenomenological seeing. What happens when we "see" an ordinary phenomenon phenomenologically? We need to acknowledge that this phenomenological seeing is a reflective seeing through the refractional lens of the phenomenological method of stepping outside of oneself: the epoché (bracketing) and the reduction (returning or leading back to experience as lived). This "stepping outside of oneself" of Ekstasis is experienced as a deranged astonishment or distracted wonder: re-seeing the world ecstatically through the (re)turning and refocusing of the phenomenological glance to the world as lived. In describing this moment of wonder, Heidegger suggests that what we now see is not really the extraordinariness of the ordinary but, rather, it is the very ordinariness of the ordinary that is yielded in this ecstatic experience. Accordingly, Gosetti-Fereince's phrase "The