2026 invited Speaker: Leswin Laubscher, PhD

Presenting: Affect and Affectivity in Existential Phenomenology: Frantz Fanon’s Challenge and Elaboration

Existential phenomenology has certainly theorized affect and affectivity – From Heideggerian Stimmungen, to Sartrean transformation and bad faith, Buber’s existential guilt, or the Merleau-Pontian body subject in and among the flesh of the world, for example. Fanon’s elaboration of the lived experience of the Black, and the “fact of Blackness”, will challenge each of these existential ontologies. The nature of this challenge will be elaborated in the presentation, not to the end of a destruction of existential ontology as much as a lesson or plea to learning, to a “deconstructive” consideration of existential elaboration given by the ethical imperative of the other’s j’accuse.

Leswin Laubscher, PhD, counts teaching, research, and clinical experience as a psychologist in both the United States and South Africa. He holds degrees from Northwestern University in Evanston, and the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Recent research interests and publications have examined the intersection of culture and psychology, apartheid and psychology, and the importance of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Frantz Fanon for psychology. His most recent books are “Levinas for Psychologists” (Routledge) and “Darkest before Dawn: Writings, testimonies and correspondence from the life of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe” (Wits University & NYU Press). Dr. Laubscher teaches at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, but has also held external appointments at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, and currently as Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.