Abstract

This article pays tribute to Mabogo Percy More by exploring his salience to recent calls for “critical phenomenology”. The notion of critical phenomenology is explored through Lisa Guenther’s influential advocacy and Elisa Magrì and Paddy McQueen’s effort to offer an overview and definition of the field. I contend that the most laudable aspects of critical phenomenology are achieved in More’s phenomenological work on antiblack racism and black consciousness, but that More’s work nonetheless points to limitations in what its advocates have articulated critical phenomenology to be. I argue against Guenther’s case that critical phenomenology must abandon the transcendental for the “quasi-transcendental”, showing that More’s focus on contingency and its significance in the phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre means that his work is ultimately transcendental existential phenomenology. I then extend the issue of contingency in relation to Magrì and Paddy McQueen’s suggestion of critical phenomenology as centring corporeality. Taking seriously More’s emphasis on the contingency of embodiment points to the matter of what I term “paracorporeal embodiment”, which suggests phenomenological questions that go beyond many of the articulations of critical phenomenology in the contemporary literature.