Reconstructing Experience After the Interpretive Turn: Reading The Critical Shusterman

Abstract

Anthologies rearrange the texts they preserve. They establish continuities between them, and occasionally bring into view trajectories that remained invisible while the essays stood apart. This paper examines what The Critical Shusterman accomplishes that Pragmatist Aesthetics and Thinking Through the Body did not, by focusing on the first four chapters of the collection. Read in their editorial sequence, these essays reveal the gradual emergence of a philosophical project that the original publications did not make visible: a pragmatist reconstruction of experience as a qualitative, transactional field, neither foundationalist nor textualist. “Foundation or Reconstruction?”, set in a central position, retroacts on “Beneath Interpretation” and projects forward onto “Organic Unity” and “Affective Cognition,” serving as an operator of retrospective coherence. The anthology thus renders visible the conceptual archaeology of somaesthetics: the moves by which experience was reconstructed as a qualitative field, unity given a pragmatic sense, and cognition grounded in affect. In doing so it transmits these foundations to those already building on them.