Affective Perception and the Sense of the Self

In my presentation, I explore how the sense of the self is shaped by olfactory experiences. The methods that I use are the ones of phenomenology and empirically informed philosophy of mind. First of all, I try to define what to mean with the term ‘self’, and the notion of personal identity that is at stake there. The problem that I want to tackle is the one usually labelled as being ‘the characterisation question’, and it is usually answered by narrative theories. Instead, I argue for a less intellectualistic answer – a perceptual and embodied theory of what constitutes the feeling that we are people characterised by a certain identity. To explore my thesis, I analyse in which ways perception (in particular, the perception of smells) is affectively loaded. Then, I explore how this affective tonality of perception can be key in understanding the constitution of an embodied perspective. I argue that subjects have a certain affective style of perceiving the world, and such style shapes the sense of having a certain identity. The perceptual encounter with the world is not anonymous but permeated by our past interactions, aims and values.
Keywords: Philosophy, Perception, Olfaction, Self, Affective

María Laura Paradizo Bergalli √ (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain)
Multisensoriality And Construction Of The Self In The Bathroom

In this article I will focus on the bathroom space as a multisensory experience. Through the narratives of the interlocutors I will address the encounter with oneself within the bathroom, understood, from a Gofmannian (1970) perspective, as a space of “scenic background” together with Mary Douglas' (1973) idea of “anomaly”. Through a qualitative methodology, the ethnography was based on open interviews with both men and women between 15 and 52 years old, inhabitants of the urban environment. Conducted with informed consent, they addressed four major blocks of reflection: descriptive, intimacy/privacy, sensoriality, cleanliness/dirtiness.

The articulation of these main ideas will allow me to explore the bathroom as a multisensory space that enables people to deploy creative processes of sensory construction of the self and how these highlight the capacity of agency of the interlocutors and at the same time make it a place of encounter and disagreement of different rationalities.

Keywords: Bathroom, multisensoriality, senses, self, scenic background

Yaiza Bocos √ (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain)

On The Edge of Taste. Subject And Beyond Through the Senses

In Western culture, the hierarchy of the senses establishes that sight and hearing are of a higher order than touch, taste or smell, mainly because the latter determine bodily contact (Korsmeyer). In short, this organisation of the senses implies not only a distribution of the senses (Rancière), but above all the formation of a body (Johnson) and its relation to a subject (Simondon). However, taste served as the basis for the metaphor (metapherein, 'to transfer') of the aesthetic in the 18th century (Jaques). What are the qualities of the sense of taste that enabled it to lay the foundations for being thought of as the sense capable of perceiving the something-else of beauty? What do they tell us about the aesthetic construction of the modern subject? The particular bodily dimension of the sense of taste makes it an ecological sense (Mall), because of its interaction with the environment and the transformation it brings about in the subject. The sense of taste expresses the indigent freedom of living beings (Jonas) and connects to what is at once beyond and, at the same time, inherent to, the human subject. The tip of the tongue is the edge of the modern subject, an aesthetic edge (Agamben) where other ways of perceiving, thinking and acting open up.