Individual residencies / Andorra
IRINA POLESHCHUK
From Wednesday, 9 October 2019 to Tuesday, 29 October 2019
Bio
Her educational background lies in fields of arts and aesthetics. Since 2000 Irina has been teaching history and theory of arts, philosophy of art. At the same time her research interest was mostly in phenomenology of ethics and temporality, she has been studying philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In 2010 Irina have defended PhD with the monograph ‘Temporality of the Face-to-Face in Levinas’ Ethics’ (University of Helsinki). Since then, her post-doctoral research at the University of Helsinki has focused on the ethics of temporality, temporality of justice pain, shame, gilt, suffering and the phenomenology of embodiment, the feminine and maternity, phenomenology of pain and paternal relation, temporality of pain and responsibility.
Project
“Phenomenology of pain: narrative, normativity and ethical dimension”
My objective is to bring into discussion intersubjective dimension of pain and its ethical impacts. Addressing different existential modalities of being-in-pain I would like to problematize various aspects of normativity of pain imposed by medical discourse and often easily accepted by our society. I want to talk about traumatic experiences of body-in-pain (body multiplying in pain), narratives of pain (patient’s narrative versus doctor’s narrative) and about possibilities of de-institutionalization of pain. My main focus will be on how to differentiate illness and disease, the way they are represented and metaphorically described in people’s diaries and how to see their impacts on formation of social norms and our intersubjective world. One of the problems I want to tackle is a relation of pain to depression, which often comes as an existential marker formatting a traumatized ‘multiple’ body ignored in medical discourse. I will demonstrate my main arguments and ideas using examples of contemporary art works and art practices.
Research project: “Phenomenology of pain: narrative, normativity and ethical dimension”
During three weeks, I have been working with my research project on phenomenology of pain experience. This residence gave a great opportunity to concentrate on intense writing and to initiate several projects with colleagues from Andorra La Vella. I have focused on contemporary studies that develop interdisciplinary field of how the phenomenon of pain can be approached. Thus, I concentrated on the works by Annemari Mol, Rita Charon, Cheryl Mattingly, and Thomas Fuchs to develop phenomenological approach to different narratives of subjects experiencing pain. My main goal was to deepen a concept of affectivity and to bring on the surface a contemporary discussion of affective space, affective depersonalization, interaffectivity, meaning structures of emotions and formation of ethical subjectivity. The important contribution of the residence is time: it provided exceptionally good conditions for reflection, contemplative but also analytical thinking, which became a rare gift in our live. An important part of the residence is an encounter with colleagues from the university of Andorra La Vella and to discuss possible implications of my projects to other interdisciplinary fields (education, nursing in medical system, psychology).