Mickaëlle Provost’s research while affiliated with Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and other places

Introduction to Special Issue

Résumé En proposant une lecture intertextuelle de la philosophie de Simone de Beauvoir, cet article étudie la possibilité d’un « existentialisme transatlantique ». Y sont analysés le récit proposé par Beauvoir dans L’Amérique au jour le jour et la manière dont la conceptualisation phénoménologique beauvoirienne du racisme fait écho à la pensée de Richard Wright, mais aussi à celles de W.E.B. Du Bois et de Frantz Fanon. La mise au jour de ces parentés théoriques permet d’éclairer les différences et les conflits entre des vécus distincts d’oppression.

This article raises the issue of the relationship between lived experience and language, by bringing into dialogue two seemingly incompatible positions within feminist philosophy: one poststructuralist, the other phenomenological. First, I analyze the poststructuralist position according to which experience is constituted by a set of discursive norms. In a second step, I study the phenomenological criticism addressed to this position, by underlining the singularity and the complexity of the concept of experience: experience can include some unspeakable or inexpressible dimensions, without being entirely irreducible to social and discursive conditions. For this reason, it seems useful to explore the conceptual distinction between "discourses" and "language". Finally, I consider Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex as an illuminating perspective on the relationship between experience and discursive norms, managing to articulate a phenomenological approach and an analysis of the discursive formation of lived experience.

The aim of this paper is to understand vulnerability as a lived experience through the lens of phenomenology. First, this approach helps to think about the ambivalence of vulnerability by questioning the passivity which can be attached to it. Vulnerability can, on the contrary, be seen as a capacity to be affected or as an exposure to what is not predictable. This ambivalence of vulnerability can however be atrophied in specific political and social situations (sexism, colonialism and racism), rendering vulnerability mostly negative. The challenge is then to understand how these different dimensions of vulnerability are intertwined in terms of lived experience and how to work on vulnerability, how it can be modified and oriented in the perspective of ethical and political resistance.

The aim of this paper is to understand whiteness as a political category which organizes ordinary experience. I will use a phenomenological framework in order to denaturalize the white experience and make it a possible object of transformation and education. A description of whiteness as a category of experience has implications not only for our understanding of political education but also for a feminist reflection on racism within the academic field. Indeed, the fight against racism has to be led not only at the level of intent or belief, but more fundamentally in terms of pre‐reflective experience, body, perception, affects. This means that a political education against racism must involve a critical attention to one's experience and perceptual habits: putting one's own experience to work. Phenomenology seems to offer a method articulating the ethical transformation of the self and the transformation of society, and then to problematize both an education of self and a reflection on educational institutions.