Bsp Podcast

Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season four now continues with recordings from our 2019 Annual Conference. To kick off, here is a recording of one of our keynotes, Dylan Trigg, FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna   ABSTRACT: In this talk, I attempt a phenomenological analysis of childbirth as a strange event using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of anonymity. The concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty refers to how our bodily existence is constituted by a Nature outside of ourselves. Such a formulation allows him to explain how perception is both general and singular in the same measure, how temporality can be contemporaneous and immemorial, and how the body is both one’s own while at the same time marking a prehistory that is never entirely my own. My point of departure for thinking through the issue of birth and anonymity begins from the conviction that Merleau-Ponty’s account of anonymity tends to privilege themes of integrity and syn