Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Conference | Keynote

Environmentality / Umweltlichkeit: World, Generation and Postcolonial Space

Tao DuFour

Wednesday 4 September 2024

17:30 - 19:00

TU-Main Venue

This lecture presents a phenomenological theory of spatial experience that it terms ‘environmentality’. The term is a rendering in English of the German expression, Umweltlichkeit, used by Edmund Husserl in his late works on themes concerning the role of generative relations in the formation of human community and world. Questions regarding the generative transfer of spatio-environmental sense implicate difficult interpretative problems, when colonial legacies of migration that involved mass and forcible displacements of populations are taken into consideration; such conditions determine the historical situation of the environmental horizons of the Caribbean. With reference to this Caribbean situation, we will consider the significance of the environing world for negotiating complex and often conflicting senses of the space of generative relationships, affections, and belonging characteristic of postcolonial contexts.