From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world.
In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg's attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.
What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often been overlooked by phenomenology. In confronting this oversight, Dylan Trigg's The Thing redefines phenomenology as a species of realism, which he terms unhuman phenomenology. Far from being the vehicle of a human voice, this unhuman phenomenology gives expression to the alien materiality at the limit of experience. By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.
Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy – and phenomenology in particular – until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna. Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike. Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.
In der philosophischen Phänomenologie ist der menschliche Körper und das Körperhafte eine immer wieder gestellte, nie abgeschlossene Frage. Dylan Triggs Buch stellt sich der Aufgabe, die Phänomenologie unter Einbeziehung der Bilderwelten des (Horror-)Films neu zu orientieren. Der Körper, der unser In-der-Welt-sein ermöglicht und durch ein Gefühl der Selbstidentität bestimmt bleibt, soll nun erweitert und zum Schauplatz eines anderen, fremden, der individuellen Existenz vorgängigen Lebens werden. Im Dialog mit Lévinas und dem späten Merleau-Ponty, den Filmen von Carpenter und Cronenberg und den Schriften von H. P. Lovecraft versucht Trigg, jenem Unheimlichen und Unmenschlichen auf die Spur zu kommen, von dem der Mensch heimgesucht wird und das nicht völlig in die Menschlichkeit integriert werden kann. Die Erfahrung des Grauens, das immer ein »Körpergrauen« ist, kennzeichnet dabei sowohl den Verrat an als auch die Erneuerung einer anthropozentrischen Phänomenologie, oder besser: die Begründung einer »unmenschlichen Phänomenologie«.