Animation: Its Foundational Realities and Descriptive Challenges
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
That “consciousness of the world . . . is in constant motion,” as Husserl meticulously documented, and that “the kinestheses” are integral to perception, as Husserl furthermore meticulously documented, are in different but deeply related ways phenomenological testimony to the fact that movement is both at the core of being alive and at the core of subject/world relationships. Moreover though Husserl did not extend his investigations fully into what he termed “affect and action,” he surely realized their import in being alive and in subject-world relationships when he specified them as “the root soil,” for example, and as “paths of affections.” To understand the foundational significance of movement and of the relationship between motion and emotion, it is indeed necessary to return again and again to the things themselves. In doing so, one meets the phenomenological challenge of languaging experience, and in particular, languaging the inherent dynamics of animate life.
The vitality of humanimality
Response by Stephen Smith
I shall refer to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's extended interrogation of 'vitality affects,' David Abram's lively practices of 'becoming animal,' and Ralph Acampora's moving ethic of 'transpecific conviviality' to show where the phenomenological divide between transcendental self-affectivity and ecstatic world intentionality is linguistically through not corporeally drawn. My response to the keynote presentations draws upon Michel Henry's radical phenomenology of life as particularly valuable for a somatic, onto-ethological consideration of interspecies relations and thus of the vitality of the relationships amongst ourselves.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
That “consciousness of the world . . . is in constant motion,” as Husserl meticulously documented, and that “the kinestheses” are integral to perception, as Husserl furthermore meticulously documented, are in different but deeply related ways phenomenological testimony to the fact that movement is both at the core of being alive and at the core of subject/world relationships. Moreover though Husserl did not extend his investigations fully into what he termed “affect and action,” he surely realized their import in being alive and in subject-world relationships when he specified them as “the root soil,” for example, and as “paths of affections.” To understand the foundational significance of movement and of the relationship between motion and emotion, it is indeed necessary to return again and again to the things themselves. In doing so, one meets the phenomenological challenge of languaging experience, and in particular, languaging the inherent dynamics of animate life.
The vitality of humanimality
Response by Stephen Smith
I shall refer to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's extended interrogation of 'vitality affects,' David Abram's lively practices of 'becoming animal,' and Ralph Acampora's moving ethic of 'transpecific conviviality' to show where the phenomenological divide between transcendental self-affectivity and ecstatic world intentionality is linguistically through not corporeally drawn. My response to the keynote presentations draws upon Michel Henry's radical phenomenology of life as particularly valuable for a somatic, onto-ethological consideration of interspecies relations and thus of the vitality of the relationships amongst ourselves.