Phenomenology as Performative Exercise

This volume, edited by Lucilla Guidi and Thomas Rentsch, establishes the first systematic connection between phenomenology and performativity. On the one hand, it outlines the performativity of phenomenology by exploring its enactment and the transformation of attitude it effects; this exploration is conducted through a number of parallels between phenomenology and the ancient understanding of philosophy as an exercise and a way of life. On the other hand, the volume examines different notions of performativity from a phenomenological perspective, so as to show that a phenomenological understanding of embodied experience complements a linguistic account of performativity and can also offer a ground for bodily practices of resistance, critique, and self-transformation in our own day and age.

Lucilla Guidi (Ph.D.) is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Her main research interests are phenomenology, performativity and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Her publications include the book Il rovescio del performativo (2016), as well as many articles on Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Thomas Rentsch is Professor of Practical Philosophy/Ethics at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. His fields of research are phenomenology, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language. His latest book is Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts (2014).