THE EXPERIENCE OF OPPRESSION: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF POLITICAL RESISTANCE

Michaëlle Provost

(PUF, 336 pages, 2023)

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How to explain the force of resonance specific to the term oppression, the images and experiences it conjures? How and why does its invocation open the possibility of hearing, thinking, and looking at violence and social injustice differently?

Mickaëlle Provost, a young philosopher whose work has already been noticed and rewarded, seeks to understand how oppression structures our bodies, minds, and the way we perceive and give meaning to our experiences. While “oppression” has been used in historical contexts to designate distinct struggles, practices, and policies, Provost draws the contours of a common space of understanding among experiences that are distinct yet similar in several respects. Beginning with the observation that oppression designates at once an objective situation and an embodied subjective reality, she thinks of oppression in terms of lived experience and explores what we mean when we speak of “the experience of oppression.”

Provost’s work is characterized by her skillful and original approach which highlights the exchange of ideas between writers and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic such as Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright as well as Audrey Lorde and contemporary feminist philosophers. The Experience of Oppression offers a novel way to conceptualize the experience of oppression: not simply by focusing on the dispossessions and blockages it causes but also tracing the phenomenology of political resistances.

Mickaëlle Provost is a philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research explores contemporary feminist philosophy, the phenomenology of sexism and racism, and Afro-American feminism. Winner of the Young Researcher prize from the Fondation des Treilles, she notably co-edited, with Marie Garrau, Expériences vécues du genre et de la race. Pour une phénoménologie critique (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022). In 2021, she was awarded the first Patterson Prize in the Francophone competition for her development of a “transatlantic existentialism,” which highlights the exchange of ideas between thinkers on both sides of the ocean.