Works-in-Progress

This paper is one in a series of attempts on my part to think through one of the central challenges left to us by Merleau-Ponty’s sudden death in 1961: if we understand the turn, in his later writings, toward an ontology of the flesh as “a radical rethinking of the experience of belonging from within, [as] a phenomenology of being-of-the-world” (Landes 2020, 141), how is the inquirer to bear witness to such an experience? What modalities are called forth to do justice to this silent belonging? It is my contention that, when phenomenology becomes critical, the question of modality becomes central; how we bear witness to experiences of marginalization and the operations of power that produce them matters in that it risks reifying the same normative structures that predicate the oppression of many. In this article, I turn to Aymara activist and sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s poethics to show how the mobilization of deep silences through the aesthetics can be a powerful tool for a critical phenomenology that bears witness without capitulating to the imperative of transparency norming the colonial/modern world system, toward sensibilities capable of tracing the whispers and haunting of existence and disclose time in its multi-temporal homogeneity.

This article is current under review for Chiasmi International’s Special Issue: “La phénoménologie critique après Merleau-Ponty,” 2021.