JBSP Online: Jessica Wiskus on Proust and the Experience of Empathy with Music

journal update

Jessica Wiskus’s essay for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, published online in advance of the paper edition.

Jessica Wiskus – ‘On the Petite Phrase of Proust and the Experience of Empathy: Exploring the Rhythmical Structure of Music’ (Originally published online: 28 March 2019)

Abstract: How does music (as Proust tells us) have the power to speak to us as if it were a living being, endowed with subjectivity? Do we empathize with music? Ordinarily we consider our perception of subjects as subjects, through empathy, to pertain to flesh-and-blood persons; this article asks how it is possible for us to empathize with the ordered movement of aural sensations in time. Drawing upon Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy together with Edmund Husserl’s work on Querintentionalität and Längsintentionalität in Husserliana X, I show, first of all, how the temporal structure of inner time-consciousness pertains to the ordered structure of musical expression; secondly, I investigate how the other as other is given with respect to retention and protention. My claim is that musical expression, insofar as it partakes of the potentiality of protention in particular, is creative and opens the possibility for that which is other-than-myself.

Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2019.1594040

Jessica Wiskus, School of Music, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Reminder: JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks (2019)
In celebration of Volume 50 of the JBSP, the British Society for Phenomenology is running a three-day conference, examining the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being. See the conference homepage for early bird registration, as well as the speakers and abstracts.