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Sense, Orientation, and World Creation

Inston, Kevin; (2022) Sense, Orientation, and World Creation. Qui Parle , 31 (2) pp. 345-372. 10.1215/10418385-10052386. Green open access

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Abstract

This article stages a dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy’s postphenomenology and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to examine the conditions, ethos, and politics of world creation as well as the habits, obstacles, and inequalities that resist it. It argues that Nancy’s understanding of sense as the event of the mutual exposure of bodies reveals what exceeds dominant worldviews, how bodies extend the world beyond prevailing spatializations, but that it does not sufficiently examine what prevents us from sensing that event as a call to world creation. Conversely, Ahmed analyzes how the spatial orientation of bodies restricts exposure, causes uneven access to the world, and suppresses Nancean sense. Her account of disorientation illuminates how we could experience the world as ungrounded and susceptible to creation but struggles to explain what would enable the sharing of this event so that it does not reconfirm the dominant orientations of whiteness and heterosexuality. Reframing disorientation in terms of Nancy’s relational ontology and its spatial conception of justice rethinks the nonalignment of bodies and spaces as freeing the circulation of sense so that alternative worlds could appear. In this way, disorientation can be read as potentially opening the passage from injustice to justice, from orientation to creation.

Type: Article
Title: Sense, Orientation, and World Creation
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1215/10418385-10052386
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-10052386
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10163258
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