THE UNFINISHED SELF: A Phenomenology of Hybrid Being - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

What if hybridity is not a mixture to be celebrated, but a way of being to be understood?

For a century, the "mixed" subject of Latin America—and of Brazil above all—has been caught between two distortions. One celebrates racial mixture as harmonious synthesis, a national myth of racial democracy. The other, in exposing that myth, dissolves the lived subject into a category, a statistic, a false consciousness. The Unfinished Self refuses both.

Drawing on the rigorous phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl, Noah Blake argues that hybridity is an undeniable sociological fact—but a fact that only phenomenology can reach in its full reality. Beneath the celebratory ideology and beneath the reductive critique lies a deeper truth: hybridity is a lived structure of incompletion, sedimented from a colonial history, carried in the flesh, and irreducible to the language of either harmony or pure domination.

At the center of the book stands the moreno—reinscribed from a category of racial classification into a phenomenological category: the name for a mode of being whose meaning never closes, and whose dignity is found not in the completion it lacks but in the lucid inhabiting of its own unfinished condition.

In a sustained dialogue with Gilberto Freyre (read through Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo), Néstor García Canclini, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, and the contemporary critical phenomenologists, Blake builds a combative argument: that the phenomenology of the mestizo subject possesses an analytic priority over the critical sociology of race—exposing the latter's two failures, its reduction of the lived to the structural and its erasure of the very subject it means to defend.

Lucid, rigorous, and ethically uncompromising, The Unfinished Self offers a new vocabulary for thinking identity at the fault lines of the modern world: not as harmony, not as a structural position to be measured, but as phenomenological exposure—a wound and a lucidity at once.

Readers of Linda Martín Alcoff, Lewis Gordon, Sara Ahmed, and Lisa Guenther will find here a bold new contribution to critical phenomenology and Latin American thought.

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