Edward S. Casey

From his initial writings on imagination and memory, to his recent studies of the glance and the edge, the work of American philosopher Edward S. Casey continues to shape 20th-century philosophy. In this first study dedicated to his rich body of work, distinguished scholars from philosophy, urban studies and architecture as well as artists engage with Casey's research and ideas to explore the key themes and variations of his contribution to the humanities.

Structured into three major parts, the volume reflects the central concerns of Casey's writings: an evolving phenomenology of imagination, memory, and place; representation and landscape painting and art; and edges, glances, and voice. Each part begins with an extended interview that defines and explains the topics, concepts, and stakes of each of area of research. Readers are thus offered an introduction to Casey’s fascinating body of work, and will gain a new insight into particular aspects and applications of Casey's research.

With a complete bibliography and an introduction that at once stresses each of Casey’s areas of research while putting into perspective their overarching themes, this authoritative volume identifies the overall coherence and interconnections of Edward S. Casey's work and his impact in contemporary thought.

While political discourses on the current 'migratory crisis' often take the language of ecological emergency, depicting Western states as self-sufficient ecosystems put in danger by the 'vermin' of external intruders, postcolonial writing proves crucial in reimagining frontier limbos and precarious existences as the originating centres of unprecedented transformations. Drawing on biological and cultural definitions of the "ecotone" (Haraway 2007, Morrissey 2015) and on Edward Casey's notion of spaces "in-between edges" (2008), I intend to explore two different declinations of literary ecotones centred around migrant children's experiences, namely Igiaba Scego's "La mia casa è dove sono" [Home is where I am] (2010) and J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013). The first chronicles the Scegos's diaspora from Mogadishu to Europe as well as the writer's own struggles in growing up a black Italian-born girl in 1990s Rome. The second is a dystopian fiction in which the protagonists are strangers recently arrived by boat in a posthumous dimension where all inhabitants have forgotten their past and are content with their anodyne present. Scego's memoir and Coetzee's novel provide instances of different but equally powerful literary ecotones. Whereas Coetzee's fictional text focuses on the existential and philosophical limbo of a lost child literally experiencing a new (after)life, Scego's work deals with specific objects (the home-drawn Rome-plus-Mogadishu map, Bernini's Roman sculpture of an African elephant) as objective correlatives of complex and transformative collective geographies.

Love is the desire to know without the temptation to stop learning. In this way, love is patiently engaged with time. Its intersubjectivity hinges on incompleteness.
In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity through flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. (I intend both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change.)
I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas on the problem of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of body to theologized spirit by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind." I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges the concrete place over the abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more plural sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, an interplay between “retention” and “protention,” resists a reduction of the present to an isolated moment. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I conclude with Marcel’s call for patient perception, even hope, acknowledged in the “the pluralisation of the self in time.”

In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity within flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. Perception as ongoing allusion can expose these perceptual illusions—both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change. I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel on the occurrence of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of intersubjectivity to perceptual rigidity by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind.” I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges concrete places over abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more layered sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, as play between “retention” and “protention,” thwarts a reduction of the present to a now-point. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I arrive at Levinas’ call for vigilance, and Marcel’s call for patient perception. Levinas’ “ethics of the infinite” approaches Marcel’s “metaphysics of hope,” especially resonant on Marcel’s conception of “the pluralisation of the self in time.” As Marcel writes,
Patience seems, then, to suggest a certain temporal pluralism, a certain pluralisation of the self in time. It is radically opposed to the act by which I despair of the other person, declaring that he is good for nothing, or that he will never understand anything, or that he is incurable… 

The reductions exposed by these thinkers each enact a collapse of time’s dimensionality, a kind of despairing fatalism (“nothing…never…incurable”) or undifferentiating absolutism (everything…always…everywhere).  I will conclude, then, not far from Marcel’s own position, by signaling the contributions of art and religion in preserving dimensionality and irreducibility. In their respective ways, both the arts and religious beliefs can startle the misperceptions that would otherwise deny the gifts of manifold time: forgiveness, change, hope. Both provide ways of resisting the violence of the fatum—which may be after all a fatal reduction of time, place, and spirited body. By modeling how the finite can engage an infinite, art and religion have the potential to reverse this violence: awakening us to a perception that is beyond the moment, beyond the single interpretation, even perhaps, beyond perception itself.

This chapter first provides a brief map of Edward S. Casey’s work, as a guide to its relevance to the hermeneutics of place. It then articulates two of Casey’s distinctive contributions to this topic: his study of moving, bodily implacement as key to the determinate appearance of things in places, places and place itself; his highly innovative work on what he calls periphenomena. Periphenomena, such as glances and edges, are peripheral to phenomena, yet guide our moving, bodily implacement, and are ingredient in our encountering places, and things in places, as determinate phenomena. Periphenomena, though, are beneath direct notice and inherently escape clear determination or delimitation—they are what I call subliminal. These two contributions together imply a third, underlying point that I draw out of Casey, namely that a hermeneutics of place and indeed all hermeneutics turns on a hermeneutics of place, that is, an account of hermeneutical activity as itself arising from and granted by place—yet the place that grants meaning is not some already fully given and determinate foundation, but is subliminal. This has ethical implications.