Lewis Gordon

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Lewis Gordon : biography

1962 –

Phenomenology and colonialism

Gordon is also known as the founder of postcolonial phenomenology and the leading proponent of Africana phenomenology which has enabled him to make a mark in Fanon Studies. Gordon was able to develop postcolonial phenomenology, which he sometimes refers to as Africana phenomenology or de-colonial phenomenology, through making a series of important innovations to Husserlian and Sartrian phenomenologies. The first, and perhaps most important, is his transformation of parenthesizing and bracketing of the natural attitude into what he calls “ontological suspension.” Although Husserl called for a suspension of the natural attitude, his goal was primarily epistemological. Gordon’s interest is, however, primarily concerned with errors that occur from inappropriate ontological assertions. Gordon is also concerned with metaphysics, which he, unlike many contemporary thinkers, does not reject. Instead, Gordon sees the continuation of Aristotelian metaphysics, which advances a notion of substance that is governed by essence that leads to definition in the form of essential being, as a problem. Gordon wants to talk about the social world and the meanings constructed by it without reducing it to a physicalist ontology. The notion of ontological suspension, which he claims is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology, advances this effort. Gordon also advances phenomenology as a form of radically self-reflective thought, which means that it must question even its methodological assumptions. Because of this, it must resist epistemological colonization, and it is in this sense that phenomenology is itself postcolonial or decolonizing. Because of this, Gordon refused for some time in his career to refer to his work as “philosophy,” for that would mean colonizing it with a disciplinary set of assumptions. He preferred to call his work “radical thought,” which for him meant being willing to go to the roots of reality in a critical way. From these moves, Gordon was able to generate a set of theoretical concepts that have become useful to those who have adopted his theoretical lexicon: his unique formulation of crisis; his theory of epistemic closure; his theory of disciplinary decadence and teleological suspension of disciplinarity; and his analysis of maturation and tragedy.

Most of these ideas first emerged in the work that also gave Gordon a reputation in Fanon studies—namely, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995). Gordon introduced a new stage in Fanon studies by announcing that he was not interested in writing on Fanon but instead working with Fanon on the advancement of his (Gordon’s) own intellectual project. Fanon was thus an occasion or point of departure but not the main object of the study. The work is, then, a statement more of Gordon’s philosophy than that of Fanon, who, in this text, is more a major influence. The book offers several innovations to the question of colonialism and the human sciences. First, Gordon argues that crises are really human communities refusing to make the choices necessary for the transformation of realities created by human agency. In short, they are forms of choices against choice or choosing not to choose, which amounts to bad faith. History, he argued, must transcend the imposition of world history (and thus become structured as a crisis) and move toward an existential-historical understanding of human communities on the basis of critical good faith. Phenomena such as racism and colonialism, because they attempt to erase the humanity of the colonized and object of racism, place challenges on whether it is possible to study human communities without collapsing into acts of discursive, imperial practices.

Dr. Gordon has also made an important contribution to the understanding around the work of Steve Biko by way of a new introduction to Biko’s classic text I Write What I Like. New Introduction to Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like by Lewis Gordon

Essentialism and race