The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology 1003197434, 9781003197430

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology has primarily been concerned with conceptual questions about knowledge and ontology. However, in recent years, the rise of interest and research in applied phenomenology has seen the study of political phenomenology move to a central place in the study of phenomenology generally. The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology is the first major collection on this important topic. Comprising 35 chapters by an international team of expert contributors, the handbook is organized into six clear parts, each with its own introduction by the editors: • • • • • •

Founders of Phenomenology Existentialist Phenomenology Phenomenology of the Social and Political World Phenomenology of Alterity Phenomenology in Debate Contemporary Developments

Full attention is given to central figures in the phenomenological movement, including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, as well as those whose contribution to political phenomenology is more distinctive, such as Arendt, De Beauvoir, and Fanon. Also included are chapters on gender, race and intersectionality, disability, and technology. Ideal for those studying phenomenology, continental philosophy, and political theory, The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology bridges an important gap between a major philosophical movement and contemporary political issues and concepts. Steffen Herrmann is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. Gerhard Thonhauser is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at TU Darmstadt, Germany. Sophie Loidolt is Professor and Chair of Practical Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at TU Darmstadt, Germany. Tobias Matzner is Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University, Germany. Nils Baratella is Professor of Social Philosophy and Social Ethics at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Germany.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN PHILOSOPHY

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research. All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications. Also available: THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF MINDFULNESS Edited by Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CONTEMPORARY EXISTENTIALISM Edited by Kevin Aho, Megan Altman, and Hans Pedersen THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ESSENCE IN PHILOSOPHY Edited by Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY Edited by Steffen Herrmann, Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner, and Nils Baratella THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EMBODIED COGNITION, SECOND EDITION Edited by Lawrence Shapiro and Shannon Spaulding For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY

Edited by Steffen Herrmann, Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner, and Nils Baratella

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter Steffen Herrmann, Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner, and Nils Baratella; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Steffen Herrmann, Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner, and Nils Baratella to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baratella, Nils, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of political phenomenology / edited by Nils Baratella, Steffen Herrmann, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner, and Gerhard Thonhauser. Other titles: Handbook of political phenomenology Description: First edition. | New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge handbooks in philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023056743 (print) | LCCN 2023056744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032054094 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032054100 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003197430 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. | Political science—Philosophy. Classification : LCC B829.5 .R733 2024 (print) | LCC B829.5 (ebook) | DDC 320.01—dc23/eng/20240205 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023056743 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023056744 Ref:MSG1365228_EZQfRy3fHAr3m3AczUIr ISBN: 978-1-032-05409-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05410-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19743-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsx List of Contributors xi

Introducing Political Phenomenology Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, and Steffen Herrmann

1

PART I

Founders of Phenomenology

9

Introduction to Part I: Plural Beginnings, Ambivalent Heritage Sophie Loidolt

11

  1 Edmund Husserl: Idealistic Politics and Communal Spirit Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi

18

  2 Max Scheler: The Politics of Ressentiment Zachary Davis

30

  3 Martin Heidegger: Destiny, Founding, and Being Richard Polt

41

  4 Context: Community, State, and Law in Times of Crisis Michael Gubser

52

v

Contents PART II

Existentialist Phenomenology

65

Introduction to Part II: Politicizing Phenomenology in the Struggle With Colonialism, National Socialism, and Stalinism Gerhard Thonhauser

67

  5 Jean-Paul Sartre: On the Many Senses of the Political in His Writings Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

73

  6 Simone de Beauvoir: Encroachment, Agency, Embodiment Sara Heinämaa

86

  7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Contingency, Conflict, and Coexistence Martin Oppelt

97

 8 Trần Đức Thảo: Practicing Phenomenology Through Anticolonialism, Dialectical Materialism, and Socialism Jérôme Melançon

108

  9 Frantz Fanon: Anticolonial Phenomenology, Refusal, and the Question of Method Alia Al-Saji

120

10 Context: From Existential Marxism to Post-Marxism Gerhard Thonhauser

134

PART III

Phenomenology of the Social and Political World

Introduction to Part III: Phenomenology of the Social and Political World Nils Baratella

11 Alfred Schütz: Imposed Political Relevances and the Subjective Meaning of the Actor Michael D. Barber 12 Günther Anders: Technology, Antiquatedness, and Apocalypse Babette Babich

vi

147 149

156 167

Contents

13 Hannah Arendt: Plurality, Worldliness, and Action: Inverting the Image of Totalitarianism Sophie Loidolt

180

14 Jan Patočka: Heresies, History, and the Care for the Soul in Its Political Aspects James Dodd

191

15 Context: Between Individualism and Totalitarianism Nils Baratella

203

PART IV

Phenomenology of Alterity

213

Introduction to Part IV: From the Primacy of the Other to the Politics of Alterity Steffen Herrmann

215

16 Emmanuel Levinas: The Politics of Alterity Steffen Herrmann

223

17 Paul Ricœur: The Political Through the Lens of Oneself as Another Dries Deweer

235

18 Luce Irigaray: The Politics of Sexual Difference as Anontological Difference247 Anne van Leeuwen 19 Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction: Through Phenomenology to the Political257 Joseph Cohen 20 Bernhard Waldenfels: Responsive Phenomenology of the Political Thomas Bedorf 21 Context: Philosophies of Dialogue and Psychoanalytic Thought: The Impossibility of Thinking ‘I’ Without the Other Tina Chanter

vii

269

279

Contents PART V

Phenomenology in Debate

291

Introduction to Part V: Phenomenology in Debate: Criticism, Cooperation, Inspiration Gerhard Thonhauser and Sophie Loidolt

22 Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School Danielle Petherbridge 23 Phenomenology and the Early Marx: Italian Phenomarxism and the Yugoslav Praxis Group Nils Baratella

293 300

312

24 Phenomenology and Queer Theory Lanei M. Rodemeyer

324

25 Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism Matthias Flatscher

336

PART VI

Contemporary Developments

349



351

Introduction to Part VI: Situating Contemporary Phenomenology Tobias Matzner

26 Feminism and Gender Marieke Borren

360

27 Race Yoko Arisaka

372

28 Intersectionality Emily S. Lee

384

29 White Ignorance Lisa Guenther

398

30 (De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology Nelson Maldonado-Torres

410

31 Migration Ayten Gündoğdu

423

viii

Contents

32 Disability Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

434

33 Affects and Emotions Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen

448

34 Technology and the Digital World Nolen Gertz

460

35 Ecology and the Environment Bryan E. Bannon

469

Index

483

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A volume of this kind always has a longer history and many helping forces to make it succeed. The idea of editing a handbook on the topic of political phenomenology arose at several conferences in Oldenburg, Paderborn, and Darmstadt. Our initial common interest in Hannah Arendt’s work, phenomenology, and political theory quickly developed into a network of discussion and friendship with the aim of creating something together. We would like to thank all those who have been involved in compiling this handbook and making it what it is. First and foremost, our authors, who have provided the substance of this book and who have enriched it with many different perspectives and their expertise. However, before texts become a manuscript ready for publication, important steps need to be taken, for which we would like to express our gratitude to our academic assistants Merle Götz, Sebastian Mantsch, and Marius Wecker. A very special thanks goes to Dominik Schmidt, who assisted us in the final editing phase, not only with his time and patience but also with his editorial expertise. Last but not least, our editors Tony Bruce and Adam Johnson have always helpfully accompanied the creation of this handbook with advice and support, for which we are very grateful.

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Alia Al-Saji is James McGill Professor in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. Yoko Arisaka is a Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, USA. Bryan E. Bannon is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Merrimack College, USA. Nils Baratella is Professor of Social Philosophy and Social Ethics at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Germany. Michael D. Barber is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, USA. Thomas Bedorf is Professor of Philosophy at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. Marieke Borren is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at Open University, Netherlands. Tina Chanter is Associate Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Newcastle University, UK. Joseph Cohen is Associate Professor of Contemporary Continental Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Zachary Davis is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at St. John’s University, USA. Nicolas de Warren is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA. Dries Deweer is Associate Professor at the Tilburg School for Humanities and Digital Sciences, Netherlands. James Dodd is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, USA. xi

List of Contributors

Luna Dolezal is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at University of Exeter, UK. Cathrin Fischer is PhD student in philosophy at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at University of Exeter, UK. Matthias Flatscher is Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Nolen Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Michael Gubser is Professor of History at James Madison University, USA. Lisa Guenther is Professor of Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. Ayten Gündoğdu is Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, USA. Sara Heinämaa is Professor of Philosophy at University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Docent of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Steffen Herrmann is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. Emily S. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at California State University at Fullerton, USA. Sophie Loidolt is Professor and Chair of Practical Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at TU Darmstadt, Germany. Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut, USA, and Professor Extraordinarius, Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa. Tobias Matzner is Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University, Germany. Jérôme Melançon is Associate Professor of French, Francophone Intercultural Studies, and Philosophy at the University of Regina, Canada. Jonathan Paul Mitchell is Teaching and Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland. Martin Oppelt is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Lucy Osler is Lecturer in Philosophy at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. Danielle Petherbridge is Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Richard Polt is Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, USA. William Remley is Lecturer in Philosophy at Saint Peter’s University, USA. Lanei M. Rodemeyer is Associate Professor at the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts at Duquesne University, USA. xii

List of Contributors

Gerhard Thonhauser is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at TU Darmstadt, Germany. Ruth Rebecca Tietjen is Assistant Professor at the Tilburg School for Humanities and Digital Sciences, Netherlands. Anne van Leeuwen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at James Madison University, USA. Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

xiii

INTRODUCING POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, and Steffen Herrmann

1. Introduction The idea to edit a handbook on political phenomenology was motivated by three main reasons. In this introduction, we want to present them as opening theses to our field of exploration: (1) Political phenomenology exists in different variants today, even if not always under this name. We believe, however, that these approaches can justifiably be covered and systematized under the label ‘political phenomenology.’ Our goal is therefore to bring its different strands into dialogue with each other, to connect them to resources in the history of phenomenology, and to make them available to researchers from various disciplines and traditions who are interested in using phenomenological concepts and methods. (2) Political phenomenology makes an important systematic contribution to political theory. Our thesis is that it functions as a valuable corrective to dominant trends in current political philosophy and therefore serves a crucial function within contemporary political thought. By addressing what is understood as ‘political’ in political phenomenology, we aim to elaborate on the specific strengths and focuses of its various approaches. (3) Political phenomenology catalyzes crucial debates within the phenomenological tradition. As this handbook is meant to show, the history of political phenomenology goes back as far as the history of phenomenology itself. Reflecting on the history of the different phases and variants of its politicization not only serves as a significant medium for the self-understanding of the phenomenological movement but also allows it to be seen as a situated and engaged endeavor rather than a detached theoretical undertaking.

2.  Contemporary Strands of Political Phenomenology Let us begin the introduction of currently existing strands of political phenomenology by identifying three approaches in the contemporary intellectual landscape. A  great deal of important work is being done under the label ‘critical phenomenology.’ The origins of critical phenomenology can be traced back to the meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (see the very useful introduction by Magrí and McQueen 2023). Critical phenomenology is now a well-established approach with a lexicon style volume

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-1

1

Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, and Steffen Herrmann

elaborating on its key concepts (Weiss, Murphy, Salamon 2020) and its own journal (Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology). There is a lively debate about what exactly is ‘critical’ about critical phenomenology and if and how critical phenomenology is different from classical phenomenology (Salamon 2018; Guenther 2021; Aldea, Heimämaa, and Carr 2022; Thonhauser 2023; Herrmann 2023a). Moving from the North American context from which critical phenomenology originated to the German-speaking area, we find a second variation of contemporary political phenomenology that could be called the ‘Waldenfels school.’ Besides developing his own responsive phenomenology of the political (see Chapter 20), Bernhard Waldenfels was key in introducing French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida to German-speaking philosophy. Many of his students made use of different resources from those French philosophers for critical and political purposes: for instance, by combining a Foucauldian analysis of power with phenomenological questions (Gehring 2004) or by developing a Levinasian politics of alterity (Bedorf 2003; Gelhard 2005). Continuing this tradition, the bi-annual conference of the German Society for Phenomenological Research in 2017 had the title ‘Phenomenology and the Political’. A selection of talks from this conference, including a systematic approach to the field of political phenomenology, was published under the title Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme (Bedorf and Herrmann 2020). Finally, moving to the British and Scandinavian context, the movement of ‘applied’ and, more specifically, ‘engaged phenomenology’ offers a third approach to using phenomenological tools for socio-political analysis. As the term is currently used, ‘applied phenomenology’ denotes any attempt to adopt concepts and methods from phenomenology for empirical work in disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, health sciences, nursing studies, and sports sciences (for an overview, see Burch 2021). Engaged phenomenology emphasizes the political commitment in these applications. The conference of the British Society of Phenomenology even saw it necessary to address the topic of engaged phenomenology in two parts, in 2020 and 2022. As in the case of critical phenomenology, it is an ongoing topic of lively debate whether applied/engaged phenomenology is defined by a unique method, how it relates to classical or ‘pure’ (as it is usually called in those debates) phenomenology, and in what sense it is rightfully deemed a phenomenological approach (see Zahavi 2023). On the basis of the aforementioned approaches, one can speak of a political turn in contemporary phenomenology, the manifold manifestations of which we want to do justice to in this handbook. However, it should also be emphasized that even if this explicit politicization of phenomenology has only recently begun, politicization has always been present in phenomenology. This is often neglected in current discourse, and we suspect that a major reason is that the politicization the founding generation of phenomenology had in mind was not critical emancipative, but rather critical conservative. Indeed, it more often took the form of an orientation towards the tradition and pursued conservative, sometimes even reactionary aims. As, for example, the debate on Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft (community vs. society) illustrates, many proponents of the first generation of phenomenology were politicized in that way (see Introduction to Part I and Chapter 4). Some also pursued revolutionary or enlightenment goals, but not in terms of an emancipatory fight against oppression, discrimination, and exploitation. While a leftist-emancipatory politicization of phenomenology most likely does not date back to the founders of phenomenology, it is not as if it does not have a long and rich history. Most importantly, French existentialism and 2

Introducing Political Phenomenology

its serious attempt to bring phenomenology and Marxism together should be mentioned here. We cover this endeavor extensively in Part II. Similar developments took place in other countries of postwar Europe, such as in Italian phenomarxism, the Yugoslav Praxis School, and among dissidents in Central and Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries (see Chapter 23). This handbook in this sense reinvestigates what the phenomenological tradition can offer to contemporary approaches to political phenomenology. And it therefore not only explores concepts for a political phenomenology but also draws these concepts from phenomenology. The systematic question that comes to mind here is: What actually makes a phenomenological approach ‘political’? Or, to put it differently: What constitutes ‘the political’ in political phenomenology?

3.  The Systematic Contribution of Political Phenomenology to Political Thought A systematic understanding of what makes a phenomenological approach specifically political (in contrast, for example, to an ethical or socio-ontological approach) has only recently begun to emerge. While we are aware that broad characterizations of this kind are usually doomed to failure due to their generality, we will try to offer a preliminary understanding here of what constitutes the political in political phenomenology according to our considerations. This heuristic orientation should also make transparent what has guided us in the selection of authors and topics. As we see it, the political in political phenomenology can be roughly summarized in three respects. (1) First, in a narrow sense. In this case, the attribute ‘political’ stands for a certain subject area. Political systems such as democracy and totalitarianism, as well as their structural elements such as constitutions and laws, or institutions and their division of power come into view here. In this perspective, political phenomenology fits into the broad field of political theory, whose task it is to investigate the foundations, structures, and functions of political communities. (2) The second orientation aims at the politicization of our experience and therefore can be conceived as a critical political phenomenology. Here classifications, norms, and practices that appear as given in the ‘natural attitude’ are analyzed using phenomenological tools. This makes it possible to show that they are the result of social and historical processes of constitution and institution. As a consequence, they can become the object of social negotiation. In this case, the political aspect of political phenomenology consists of the politicization of phenomena that appear to us in everyday life as immediately given. (3) If we take this further, we can see a broad concept of political phenomenology emerge. We distinguish it from the other two in the sense that it takes up the fact that social classifications, norms, and practices are ‘thick concepts’ that cannot simply be described without being evaluated by our descriptions. For example, the analyses of gendered identities, the status of norms such as femininity and masculinity, and the examination of the multiple ways of doing gender are political because describing these phenomena requires taking sides. This is what the attribute ‘political’ stands for in the third case. The varieties of what is ‘political’ in political phenomenology can thus be interpreted as a focus on a subject area, as a mode of critical questioning, or as a partisan statement. If one wants to deepen the first understanding of political phenomenology in the sense of addressing a subject area, it is helpful to build on the well-known distinction between ‘policy,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘polity.’ Policy primarily refers to certain political contents and topics, such 3

Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, and Steffen Herrmann

as ecology, social issues, and education; politics, on the other hand, refers to the negotiation of such topics in the public and the institutional spaces of the political community; polity, finally, refers to the principles and regulatory structures of the political community, such as those laid down in a constitution. With this tripartite division, we can distinguish between themes, processes, and institutions of the political order. Phenomenology can contribute to the investigation of such fields in different ways by presenting its own analysis of certain topics, such as migration, technology, and ecology (see Chapters 31, 34 and 35). This can enable a new kind of access to and perspective on these topics. At the same time, however, phenomenological reflection can also be used to focus on political processes, such as consensus formation, compromise, and dispute, and thus elucidate what they entail (e.g., from an intentional perspective) and how they should be shaped (Herrmann 2023b). Finally, it can also reflect on the normative foundation of political orders by developing its own conception of intersubjectivity, community, and communality (Loidolt 2018). Political phenomenology thus enters the broad field of classical political philosophy, in which liberalism, deliberativism, and republicanism are the most powerful currents. Political phenomenology is not committed to any of these options, insofar as it is not a fixed theoretical framework but is, in itself, heterogeneous. Depending on whether one operates with Heidegger, Fanon, or Arendt, one will accordingly arrive at quite different political orientations. Nonetheless, it seems crucial to us that all the different phenomenologies derive their respective norms from concrete experience. Political phenomenologies do not work in the vacuum of ideas; they start with concrete bodily, affective, and social experiences in order develop a political standpoint. Another important distinction of political thought is helpful here and allows us to deepen our understanding of the second and third strands of phenomenology: Since the 1980s, the distinction between ‘la politique’ (politics) and ‘le politique’ (the political) has become widely established in francophone political philosophy (Marchart 2007). Although this distinction appears in different terminological variations in the works of various authors, it always systematically expresses a demarcation line that is drawn vis-à-vis traditional political theory. The latter is criticized for only asking about the organization of political processes while remaining blind to the constitution of the political framework itself. Where theories of politics, for example, focus on concrete questions of distribution, theories of the political ask how the political subjects who can lay claim to just distribution are constituted in the first place. Hence, theories of the political can be understood primarily as theories of the critical interrogation of all those basic concepts and assumptions that classical political theory has established or simply adopted from political discourse. Accordingly, theories of the political are interested in all those social and political movements that question what we take for granted. (This can have a merely theoretical or a more activist side.) It is therefore exemplary for the kind of understanding of political phenomenology we portrayed earlier as critical questioning. The continuities with phenomenology become obvious if we look at the lineage of ideas and constellations of authors: Claude Lefort, a student of MerleauPonty, played a fundamental role in shaping the distinction between ‘le politique’ and ‘la politique’ and, consequently, also in the development of radical democratic theories of the political that rely on this distinction. (See Chapters 7 and 25.) In summary, we can say that what is political about political phenomenology can be understood in terms of a subject area, a process of critical questioning, or taking a political stance. As a final characterization of these three aspects of political phenomenology, we can point out three respective counter-positions that our authors target or criticize: (1) Political 4

Introducing Political Phenomenology

phenomenology as a theory of political contents, structures, and procedures is usually directed against a political normativism. Phenomenologists criticize such theories for wanting to analyze political norms such as freedom, equality, or solidarity on the basis of theory without resorting to the lived experience of subjects. Political phenomenology, on the other hand, tries to offer saturated normative concepts gained from experiences of community, (in)justice, freedom, solidarity, etc. (2) Political phenomenology as critical questioning is directed against all forms of political fundamentalism. Such fundamentalism is typically found in political orders that claim to realize the natural or historic-teleological order of things. In the form of totalitarianism, it aims to close and destroy all possible alternatives to its own ideological narrative. A tuned-down version of this attitude is found today in authoritarianism and populism, in which the voice of the people and the irrefutable power of tradition are claimed as sources of unequivocal answers to all political problems. In all cases, political fundamentalism is characterized by a denial of plurality. Many versions of political phenomenology instead show precisely how plurality, alterity, and contingency are existential or even ontological factors that amount to keeping the ‘place of power’ empty and open. (This, again, is Lefort’s formulation of the paradigm of the democratic age.) (3) Finally, political phenomenology as a form of partisanship for a specific conception of the political order contradicts notions of political functionalism. Political functionalism understands politics solely from the perspective of coordination and control. As a result, democratic processes of power formation are primarily regarded as instrumental processes of outcome acquisition. Several strands of political phenomenology argue that this not only might result in a cynical kind of realpolitik but also disregards the fact that political action belongs to the basic and intrinsically meaningful dispositions of human life. While in no way exhaustive, these remarks aim to offer our systematical take on what can be regarded as political phenomenology and what its possible contribution to the debate can be.

4.  The Political History of Political Phenomenology The last section of this introduction presents the main guidelines by which we have ordered and grouped the different authors and movements presented in this handbook. The narrative we want to present about phenomenology becoming political is that in each case, it is deeply influenced by the respective historical events that shaped the 20th and 21st century in Europe and beyond. The first deep rupture, which coincides with the generation of the founding phenomenologists, is the First World War—i.e., ‘The Great War’—followed by a time of crisis for the newly emerging, fragile democracies in Europe (see de Warren and Vongehr 2017; Hacke 2018). What was known as the ‘old world’ no longer existed after this war. The political and societal changes were so massive that many philosophical responses called for a new radicalism—which Husserl, for example, always regarded positively in the sense of going back to the ‘roots’ (see Husserl 1994, 408–11). In Part I of this handbook, we aim to show that the important founding figures of phenomenology (Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, as well as Stein, Reinach, von Hildebrand, and Kolnai) were shattered and/or inspired by their political situation and were therefore not at all as ‘unpolitical’ as is usually claimed. Even though one might not endorse their political stances, and even if there are highly problematic cases such as Heidegger, it is impossible to claim that early or classic phenomenologists did not care about politics. In fact, it was nearly impossible not to position oneself or to analyze the ‘crisis’ that ‘European mankind’ was in. 5

Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, and Steffen Herrmann

The second catastrophic event that followed shortly after and as a consequence of the failure of the interwar period was the Second World War. Parts II and III and, to a certain extent, also Part IV revolve around the deeply shattering realities of the Holocaust, totalitarianism, and occupation, as well as the aftermath of colonial liberation and the Cold War. Part II covers the phenomenological proponents of French existentialism (Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Thảo, Fanon), who were known to be engaged public intellectuals and political writers addressing economic, sexist, and racist oppression. The spotlight in this handbook is on how they politicized themselves and phenomenology in the struggle with colonialism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. Part III covers a more heterogeneous group (Schütz, Arendt, Anders, Patočka) who expressed care for the social and political world after totalitarianism and who also looked critically at the challenges of technology, bureaucracy, and consumerist society. What becomes visible here are the different directions in which a Husserlian and a Heideggerian approach are taken and how phenomenology was politicized beyond the influence of Marxism. Part IV continues to be characterized by the project to overcome a thinking of totality; however, the focus here is directed towards alterity rather than an analysis of the social and political world. Several authors discussed in this section (Levinas, Ricœur, Derrida, Irigaray, Waldenfels) in this sense started out with ethical projects that subsequently, inevitably politicized themselves. On the timeline, we move from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the end of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the challenges posed by an increasingly pluralistic and globalized ‘postmodern’ world, where nonidentity (or identity politics), difference, and the relation between the self and the other gained traction as political questions. Part V introduces a kind of incision before we proceed to the contemporary questions and developments. It covers the cross-cutting issue of fruitful debates and controversies between political phenomenology and other politico-philosophical approaches, especially those that continue to inspire discussions today: the long cultivated enmity with Critical Theory, for example, which contemporary ‘critical phenomenology’ seems to have productively overcome, or the manifold approaches to combining phenomenology with Marxism, which, beyond the French Existentialists, we find in different forms in Italy and the former Yugoslavia. Other important debates have taken place with queer theory, which moved from salient criticisms to a new rapprochement, and with post-foundationalism, which sparked new ontologies of the political based on contingency and difference. Finally, the last and largest Part VI provides an outlook on contemporary debates fueled by post-democratic indifference, so-called ‘culture wars,’ the rise of populist and neo-fascist movements, and an ecological and climate crisis that can no longer be denied. Without trying to historicize specific groups or strands of today’s debates—for which we believe it is too early—we have focused on specific topics here. Political, critical, applied, and engaged phenomenologists are all active participants (maybe with different emphases) in analyzing and discussing these contemporary challenges of crisis and transformation. We have tried to map out topical clusters of race/decolonization, migration/refuge, (trans)gender, (dis) ability, technology, and ecology that intersect and interact with one another. Chapters on white ignorance and affect and emotion additionally demonstrate the phenomenological resources for analyzing today’s polarized societies. Given that the overall structure of the handbook stretches over a broad frame of time and political orientation, we hope to offer a rich and nuanced understanding of what political phenomenology has been and what it can be today. As is always the case, we had to be selective and discussed a great deal about who and what should be included in our 6

Introducing Political Phenomenology

handbook. Being aware that every selection can be questioned with good arguments, we have tried to supply the author-focused parts (Parts I through IV) with a ‘context’ chapter at the end. This at least allows a broader view of the figures and contexts that played a role in each phase of the development of political phenomenology. By engaging with its history, this handbook explores the opportunities but also the pitfalls of a phenomenological engagement with politics. We see Part I as addressing the founders and foundations of phenomenology. Parts II through IV represent three different paths or ‘pillars’ for how a politicization of phenomenology took place. Part V is there to demonstrate that the politicization of phenomenology is not just an internal debate but was inspired by mutual influences and controversies with other traditions, which are fruitfully taken up. Finally, Part VI aims to show how phenomenology can contribute to tackling pressing political issues of our present time.

References Aldea, Andreea Smaranda, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa, eds. 2022. Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters. New York/London: Routledge. Bedorf, Thomas. 2003. Dimensionen des Dritten. Sozialphilosophische Modelle zwischen Ethischem und Politischem. München: Fink. Bedorf, Thomas, and Steffen Herrmann, eds. 2020. Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme. New York/London: Routledge. Burch, Matthew. 2021. “Make Applied Phenomenology What it Needs to Be: An Interdisciplinary Research Program.” Continental Philosophy Review 54: 275–93. de Warren, Nicolas, and Thomas Vongehr, eds. 2017. Philosophers at the Front: Phenomenology and the First World War. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Gehring, Petra. 2004. Die Philosophie im Archiv. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Gelhard, Andreas. 2005. Levinas. Leipzig: Reclam Leipzig. Guenther, Lisa. 2021. “Six Senses of Critique for Critical Phenomenology.” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 4 (2): 5–23. Hacke, Jens. 2018. Existenzkrise der Demokratie: Zur politischen Theorie des Liberalismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Herrmann, Steffen. 2023a. “Horizons of Critique. From Transcendental to Critical and Political Phenomenology.” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 6 (3): 61–80. ———. 2023b. Demokratischer Streit. Eine Phänomenologie des Politischen. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Husserl, Edmund. 1994. Briefwechsel IV: Die Freiburger Schüler. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III—4. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Loidolt, Sophie. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York/London: Routledge. Magrí, Elisa, and Paddy McQueen. 2023. Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Salamon, Gayle. 2018. “What’s Critical about Critical Phenomenology?” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1 (1): 8–17. Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2023. “Phenomenological Reduction and Radical Situatedness: Merleau-Ponty and the Method of Critical Phenomenology.” Genealogy+Critique 9: 1–18. Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, eds. 2020. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2023. “Applied Phenomenology.” In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Nicolas de Warren and Ted Toadvine, 1–6. Cham: Springer.

7

PART I

Founders of Phenomenology

INTRODUCTION TO PART I Plural Beginnings, Ambivalent Heritage Sophie Loidolt

1. Introduction1 Thinkers, as Hannah Arendt (1977a, 75–78) says, can distance themselves from worldly events in order to make sense of them. But they cannot escape the times they live in. Part I  of this handbook looks at the founders of phenomenology and examines their politicization through the events of the Great War and the interwar period. Given the genesis of phenomenology, the authors we cover in this part exclusively originate in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there is therefore also a specific focus on the impact WWI had on these countries. A complete breakdown of the political and social order, followed by economic instability, made the political situation explosive. Modernity had finally arrived in the form of mass society, the contingency of formerly fixed orders, and a split society, torn between a widespread feeling of humiliation and the will to radical renewal—reaching out in very different directions. Democracy, installed in both countries after the war, lacked traditions and was regarded as the weakest option by many people, not least a large number of intellectuals. Self-perceptions between a ‘capitalist West’ and a ‘communist East,’ and pretty soon a fascist Italy in the south, shaped and sharpened political orientations. While there were only rare exceptions that succeeded in channeling the energy of the nationalist movements of the 19th century into a republican and democratic project (Czechoslovakia would be one example), the common case was rather that its radicalized forms saw themselves in opposition to their existing states and forms of government.

2.  The Politicizations of Early Phenomenologists In this environment, a philosophical approach that claims to go back to the ‘things themselves’ cannot remain untouched. This is not only because phenomenology always regarded itself as a radical renewal in philosophy; it was a shared conviction of early and classical phenomenologists2 that this must also have existential and political consequences and that being a phenomenologist was intrinsically tied to an idea of some sort of ‘community.’ To be sure, the directions that this idea was supposed to take were imagined quite differently. The landscape of positions is wide and would demand its own detailed investigation. In this handbook, we had to limit ourselves to throwing a spotlight on the main figures Edmund DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-3

11

Sophie Loidolt

Husserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger. In an additional chapter, we try to give at least a synthesized impression of some of the most interesting and influential figures of early phenomenology in this regard: Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Aurel Kolnai. Many more could be named. To address two sides of the spectrum, Arnold Metzger had in 1919 sent a manuscript with the title Phänomenologie der Revolution (Phenomenology of Revolution) to Husserl, in which he advocated a renewal of Marxism through a strictly ethical idea of the “loving community”3 (Metzger 1979, 15)—beyond mere economic change and beyond a liberal form of democracy. Husserl responded enthusiastically, emphasizing how Metzger’s “selfless devotion to ‘ideas’ ” (Husserl 1994b, 407) and his “splendid ethical radicalism or maximalism” (411) had refreshed his heart. He even confirmed his anti-capitalist sentiments (407) and saw a “striking relationship between the new revolutionary movement and phenomenology” (414) but also made clear that he had serious doubts, up to a “decisive No!” (411), concerning Metzger’s ideas. Instead, he portrayed his own whole philosophical path as a way to God (Husserl 1994b, 408; see also Kohák 1963). Metzger came to Freiburg in 1920 and worked for four years as Husserl’s assistant. Another assistant who joined in this period, along with Martin Heidegger, was Oskar Becker. Becker was initially working in mathematics and logic. As his former friend Karl Löwith tells us in his bitter evaluation of Becker’s “ ‘awakening’ in reverse” (1994, 47), his “initially apolitical” interest in “race” (49) developed into an open and convinced affirmation of Hitler’s politics. In the 1930s, Becker published papers with titles like “Nordic Metaphysics” in a journal called Rasse. A brief look at the women involved in the phenomenological movement similarly demonstrates the diversity of possible political backgrounds, orientations, and developments. Edith Stein’s path from her Jewish origins to Catholicism is famous as well as exemplary4 and converges with her community- and person-based conception of the state, which she entertained even before her conversion. Gerda Walther, known for her seminal work on the Ontology of Social Communities (1923), came from a social-democratic background and was raised without religion; later, she turned to mystics, parapsychology, and in 1944 to Catholicism (Walther 1960). The sense in which this might also have had political implications still needs to be researched. Else Voigtländer (1920) started out with what she called a ‘phenomenological psychology,’ continued her career in welfare education in the 1920s by collaborating with the racial hygienist Adalbert Gregor, and ended up being a director of a penal institution for women in the Third Reich. Her German nationalistic and antisemitic background already clearly shines through in a text on “The Psychology of Political Positionings” from 1920, which is also a telling document about political self-evaluations of this time. Whatever form their politicizations (or, for that matter, their de-politicizations) took, it is important to note that all these women were denied their desire to pursue a habilitation and further academic career—partly by the master Husserl himself, who regarded women as not yet fit for that task.5 Valuable research on this topic has started in recent years and needs to be continued.6 Even if the specific stories of politicization are complex and diverse, as these brief remarks intend to show, I would claim that it is nevertheless possible to identify certain political trends in early and classic phenomenology: 1. As has been mentioned before, the topic of community is essential. This is also the field in which the phenomenologists’ confrontation with modernity gains its shape. Ever since Ferdinand Tönnies, one of the founding fathers of sociology, introduced the difference between 12

Introduction to Part I

Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) in 1887, there has been a lively debate about these two social formations and their association with political orientations such as socialism and liberalism. Max Weber and Georg Simmel added to the conceptualization of modern society with their descriptions of social differentiation, instrumental rationality, and the systemic impact of modern capitalism. As Gerhard Thonhauser (2022) notes, Max Scheler complemented these notions of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft with the idea of the ‘mass’ or crowd (Masse) from Gustave Le Bon’s crowd psychology and thereby set the stage for the way in which phenomenology approached sociality. As will become evident in the subsequent chapters, all phenomenologists defend a notion of community against society, which reflects their worries regarding an emerging mass society. They often combine this with an ethics of values and personalities of higher order or an idea of historicity and the common fate of a people. Regardless of how these thoughts could be made fruitful in other ways, this effectively resulted in two political positions: one of ethical community,7 which can range from Catholic conservatism to a utopian anarchism and universalism, and one of a more historically conceived revolutionary community, trying to ‘overcome’ modernity, which saw potential in National Socialism. 2. As a second common feature, phenomenologists are united in being anti-materialists and anti-naturalists; on a political level, this results in a problematic relation with Marxism, even if its ethical and utopian ideas of a classless society are appreciated. 3. Given their skeptical take on the development of modern capitalist society, many phenomenological positions can be characterized as anti-capitalist for ethical reasons and, consequently, as anti-liberal, communitarian, and eventually influential for the development of ordo-liberalism (Miettinen 2016). If we compare their existing or non-existing political statements with those of the outspoken defenders of liberal democracy in the interwar period, such as Hans Kelsen and Helmuth Plessner, it also has to be said that phenomenologists did not out themselves as burning democrats. It might be telling that Plessner (1999), who at least had a background in phenomenology, was the only one who fiercely criticized the notion of community, also pointing to its possible problematic political implications. 4. Finally, a certain cosmopolitan universalism (Husserl) and pluralistic multiculturalism (Scheler) are typical of the international political visions of early or classical ­phenomenologists. This can come in the form of a nationalist mission—the German or ­European spirit containing an idea of salvation—and, moreover, must be criticized from today’s perspective for its obvious Eurocentrism (see Chapter 30). As declared beliefs in a European community, these ideas need, on the one hand, to be contextualized as anti-­nationalist statements in their time and can be read today in terms of a necessarily pluralistic and self-critical historical and intercultural reflection (Miettinnen 2020); on the other hand, they obviously also contain an ignorance of colonial oppression and an uncritical affirmation of a special position for Europe.

3.  Complicated Heritage, Fruitful Sources, and the Myth of Unpolitical Classical Phenomenology To a large extent, dealing with the political heritage of early and classical phenomenology is no easy or comfortable task. This is true of the aforementioned positionings and, more concretely, of explicit bellicose statements made during the First World War 13

Sophie Loidolt

(notably Scheler’s) and involvements with National Socialism and antisemitism.8 The debate on Heidegger, refueled after the appearance of the Black Notebooks, is certainly the most prominent example for the predicament and intellectual challenge this leaves us with.9 Heidegger is not the only problematic case, though; a recent publication has examined the work and life of Else Voigtländer (Vendrell Ferran 2023). Digging a little deeper, also seemingly unproblematic figures like Ludwig Landgrebe10 and Hans-Georg Gadamer11 made dubious statements about race and the National Socialist Party, and even in the case of the outspoken opposition to National Socialism and antisemitism that we find in von Hildebrandt, it is difficult not to feel unease in the face of his Austrofascist liaison.12 There are several strategies to deal with this. One option would be to completely ignore or avoid any of the early or classic phenomenologists if one wants to engage with political phenomenology. As editors of this handbook, we naturally don’t think this makes much sense. On the contrary: We would insist that being aware of the history and context is the only way to come to a well-founded assessment of how philosophical concepts and political orientation hang together. This is, of course, the key question if one aims at the second option of a fruitful reappropriation of politically relevant ideas, approaches, and conceptions we find in early and classic phenomenology. That such a reappropriation is possible is demonstrated through the history of ideas itself, given the French Existentialists’ (see Part II) as well as other (mostly French) reappropriations of Heidegger’s thought (see Chapter  25). The question of ‘contamination’ will remain valid and is not something that can be answered once and for all. Instead, it can only be treated by thorough ongoing critical studies that discern a fruitful hermeneutics of suspicion from a simple conviction without examination. Our handbook wants to contribute to a differentiated assessment of this ambivalent heritage. Another option for fruitful reappropriation is to simply extract certain concepts and place them into a different framework. A  recent example for this would be Rachel Bath’s attempt to understand Edith Stein’s ideas of value modification and reiterative empathy as a “contribution to critical phenomenology” (Bath 2021, 24). In this case as well, our handbook—and specifically this part of it—aims to make clear that certain concepts, analyses, and methods that phenomenologists developed in a non-political or different political context can be employed in a contemporary critical manner; on the other hand, we should remain aware that most of these thinkers indeed had quite different political ideas and visions of their own. Most importantly, the following chapters should demonstrate that early and classic phenomenologists were not just caught up in abstract debates on eidetic, transcendental, or existential foundations of phenomenology but always connected this to social, ethical, and political questions. It might come as a surprise, but even Husserl confesses in his letter to Metzger that his decision to live as a purely scientific philosopher does not mean that truth and science would have the highest value for him. Instead, he would also see himself as a servant to shaping practical life and leading humanity, a task, however, his daimonion had warned him not to take up (Husserl 1994b, 409). The widespread preconception that phenomenology is only a theoretical endeavor that does not have to say much about political questions or is politically neutral is wrong. This does not rule out a certain naïveté concerning political implementation and institutionalization. But it could also be identified as an idealistic or utopian take on politics we so seldom find today.

14

Introduction to Part I

4.  Overview of Chapters In Chapter 1 of this part, my co-author Dan Zahavi and I try to sort out the two distinctive traits of Edmund Husserl’s approach to politics. While appreciating that Husserlian concepts such as the horizon, the lived body, and the lifeworld have been employed in a critical and politicizing way, we aim to show that, for Husserl himself, a phenomenology of communities related to ethical ideas and ideals is at the heart of his take on political questions. In Chapter 2, Zachary Davis follows the remarkable transformation of Max Scheler’s political thought. While at the beginning of World War I, Scheler (1990, 94) defended the “genius of war” and German aggression, he appreciated the ideal of pacifism under the impression of the 1920s. His attention was specifically directed at the growing political crisis and the rise of fascism. At the center of this examination are Scheler’s analyses of a politics of resentment, which Davis sees as the crucial political hinge between his works on sociology, philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, and history. Chapter 3 is yet another necessary engagement with Martin Heidegger’s political ideas and entanglements in the context of this handbook. Richard Polt gives a focused and comprehensive overview that reaches from Being and Time up to Heidegger’s postwar writings, including the Black Notebooks. He makes clear how the early political visions of Being and Time are directed against liberal-democratic conceptions and shows how Heidegger’s continued affirmation of Nazism is connected to the idea of bringing about the collapse of modernity and clearing the path for a new inception of being. Polt’s assessment is that in all these phases, Heidegger’s thought remains too divorced from concrete experience to offer political guidance—an assessment that not only echoes Hannah Arendt’s (1977b, 157) judgment but also reads as an interesting claim in the context of this handbook, where we try to show that political phenomenology’s competence lies precisely in tying political concepts to experience. Chapter 4, in conclusion, provides us with more context on the historical situation in the interwar period and the concrete engagement of the generation of early phenomenologists who expanded the range of realist phenomenology into areas of political and social concern: civil law, the state, empathy, community, and ethics. Michael Gubser follows Adolf Reinach’s and Edith Stein’s theoretical developments and then delves deeper into the political engagement of Dietrich von Hildebrand, who joined a group of conservative Catholic critics of Nazism based around the journal Der christliche Ständestaat in Vienna. Also, Aurel Kolnai enlisted phenomenology in the battle against Nazism, although he broke with von Hildebrand regarding the latter’s support for authoritarian rule. Gubser shows how early phenomenologists provided philosophical arguments for critics of totalitarian regimes in these troubled times.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Matthias Schloßberger for providing me with plenty of texts and background information for this chapter. 2 Part I covers the ‘classic phenomenologists’ such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler, as well as people from the Göttingen and Munich schools, such as Reinach, Stein, and von Hildebrandt. For the latter, the notion ‘early phenomenologists’ seems more appropriate; sometimes this group is also labeled ‘realist phenomenologists,’ given their realist stance concerning essences and their rejection of Husserl’s transcendental turn. 3 All English translations of the original German in this chapter are my own.

15

Sophie Loidolt 4 Husserl speaks of the “neo-Catholic movement with its army of converts, whose great star is Max Scheler” (Husserl 1994a, 24). Husserl had converted himself but was a convinced Protestant. Indeed, Reinach had also converted to Protestantism in 1916. 5 See Husserl’s “expert opinion” (Gutachten) on the habilitation of women from 1915 (Husserl 1994d, 216–17). In the case of Edith Stein, Husserl seemed to have been of a more positive opinion; however, as his letter exchange with Georg Misch (Husserl 1994c, 271) reveals, her Jewish origins presented another, intersectional impediment—which he regretted. 6 See the research that has been done in the context of the Center for History of Women’s Philosophers in Paderborn, as well as work by Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, George Heffernan, Rodney Parker, and Thomas Vongehr. 7 However radically this ethical community is conceived, property relations are never explicitly questioned. Critical theorists—more specifically, Ernst Bloch (1987, 144)—already criticized this heavily with regard to Reinach’s notion of property: “The blindness of phenomenology to the economic-historical production and genesis of ‘essential contents’ has the effect of letting capitalist patterns of thought flow unimpeded and uncontrolled into the ‘intrinsically obvious nature of the matter.’ ” 8 It also has to be noted that phenomenology was defamed by Nazi proponents as “Jewish Philosophy.” See Meyers-Lexikon (1938). 9 For a recent critical survey, see Thomä 2023. 10 In his correspondence with Husserl, Landgrebe indicated as early as 1932, in response to Husserl’s question as to whether he was now also a National Socialist, that he had “always stood on the right,” that he endeavored to appreciate the National Socialist movement “objectively for its achievement and function in the political play of forces,” and that he was willing to believe “that despite all its aberrations there must be a good core in it” (Husserl 1994b, 299). Husserl warns him urgently and also makes it unmistakably clear that he considers a habilitation and career in Germany “out of the question, since your wife falls under the Non-Aryan Law” (Husserl 1994b, 313). Nevertheless, Landgrebe wrote in a draft letter of July 1933 (we do not know if it was sent in this form) that he was now certain that the “German fate has been decided for an unforeseeable long time” and that he considered it his duty to “no longer stand aside.” He adds, oddly, that it is not made “entirely easy” for his honored teacher to empathize with “the commitment to National Socialist Germany that is contained in these words” (Husserl 1994b, 382). 11 In an interview from 1990, Gadamer defends Oskar Becker as a “good race theoretician, just like Ferdinand Clauß” and calls his “race-theoretical interests . . . absolutely legitimate” (Gadamer 1990, 546). Clauß was also a former student and assistant of Husserl and an influential race theorist in the 1920s and during the National Socialist era. Husserl refused to accept his work on the “The Nordic Soul” as a habilitation thesis. 12 For a brief informative overview of many figures in the phenomenological movement under National Socialism, see Alloa and Caminada 2023. This clearly shows that more in-depth research is a desideratum.

References Alloa, Emmanuel, and Emanuele Caminada. 2023. “Phänomenologie im Nationalsozialismus.” In Handbuch Phänomenologie, edited by Emmanuel Alloa, Thiemo Breyer, and Emanuele Caminada, 38–48. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Arendt, Hannah. 1977a. The Life of the Mind. Vol. One: Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1977b. The Life of the Mind. Vol. Two: Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bath, Rachel. 2021. “Edith Stein’s Contribution to Critical Phenomenology: On Self-Formation and Value-Modification.” Puncta. Journal of Critical Phenomenology 4 (2): 24–42. Bloch, Ernst. 1987. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Translated by Dennis J. Schmidt. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, in conversation with Dörte von Westernhagen. 1990. “ ‘. . . die wirklichen Nazis hatten doch überhaupt kein Interesse an uns.’ Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräch mit Dörte von Westernhagen.” Das Argument 182 (July–August): 543–55.

16

Introduction to Part I Husserl, Edmund. 1994a. Briefwechsel III: Die Göttinger Schule. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–3. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994b. Briefwechsel IV: Die Freiburger Schule. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–4. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994c. Briefwechsel VI: Philosophenbriefe. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–6. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994d. Briefwechsel VIII: Institutionelle Schreiben. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–8. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kohák, Erazim V. 1963. “Edmund Husserl: A letter to Arnold Metzger.” Philosophical Forum 21: 48–68. Löwith, Karl. 1994. My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report. Translated by Elizabeth King. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Metzger, Arnold. 1979. “Die Phänomenologie der Revolution. Eine politische Schrift über den Marxismus und die liebende Gemeinschaft.” In Phänomenologie der Revolution. Frühe Schriften, 15–104. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat. Miettinen, Timo. 2016. “Governing with Ideas. On the Phenomenological Roots of the Ordoliberal Tradition.” Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 4 (1): 111–29. Miettinnen, Timo. 2020. Husserl and the Idea of Europe. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Plessner, Helmuth. 1999. The Limits of Community. A Critique of Social Radicalism. Translated by Andrew Wallace. Amherst, NY: Humanities Press. Scheler, Max. 1990. Schriften aus dem Nachlass, IV. Philosophie und Geschichte: Gesammelte Werke XIII. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. Bonn: Bouvier. Thomä, Dieter. 2023. “Heideggers Schwarze Hefte. Eine Bestandsaufnahme.” In Handbuch Phänomenologie, edited by Emmanuel Alloa, Thiemo Breyer, and Emanuele Caminada, 49–52. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2022. “A Critique of the Crowd Psychological Heritage in Early Sociology, Classic Phenomenology and Recent Social Psychology.” Continental Philosophy Review 55: 371–89. Vendrell-Ferran, Íngrid. 2023. Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality. Berlin: Springer. Voigtländer, Else. 1920. “Zur Psychologie der politischen Stellungnahme. Eine massenpsychologische Studie.” Deutsche Psychologie 3 (3): 184–206. Walther, Gerda. 1923. “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften.” In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung VI, edited by Edmund Husserl, 1–93. Halle: Max Niemeyer. ———. 1960. Zum anderen Ufer: Vom Marxismus und Atheismus zum Christentum. Remagen: Otto Reichl.

17

1 EDMUND HUSSERL Idealistic Politics and Communal Spirit Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi

1. Introduction The founder of phenomenology is neither known as a political philosopher nor as an intellectual who publicly expressed his political position. However, this should not lead us to think that Husserl himself or his thoughts were completely “unpolitical”1 (Schuhmann 1988, 18–19).2 Different suggestions have been made concerning the potential political implications of his phenomenology, though it remains difficult to pin him down on these matters. In this chapter, we will differentiate between his contribution to a political theory/ philosophy and his likely political opinions and stances—although we also acknowledge that these elements often correlate and that one might be a key to the other. Our main claim is that two things are distinctive in Husserl’s approach to politics: First, it is of utmost importance for him that politics should be guided by ‘ideas,’ which means that it should not just administer the status quo or engage in realpolitik but be regulated by an idealistic, maybe even utopian picture of how the state and the community should be organized (cf. e.g. Husserl 1956, 16; 1959, 199–201; 1973a, 107; 1987, 289). Second, Husserl clearly grounds ‘the political’ (i.e., the existential basis for organized politics) in a phenomenology of communities. Hence, one could speak of an idealistic politics, situated in a community-based approach to the political. At the same time, however, Husserl also sees politics as a practical endeavor, one that can and must be supplemented with theoretical knowledge but that realizes itself only as “praxis” and remains the domain of the professional “politician” (Husserl 1954, 328; 1973c, 410). This also entails a close link between the political, the ethical, and the social dimension. Politics, for Husserl, concerns the organization of the state and the community as well as the external relations between states, up to a unified humanity. It is not fully clear whether, in Husserl’s view, the ultimate goal of a unified universal humanity would still be in need of the state and the law or whether the latter would wither away to make room for a universal ethical community—which he calls “the community of love” (Husserl 1973b, 172–75; 2014, 301–2, 512–15). (Schuhmann 1988 and Hart 1992 argue in this direction.) Yet the status of this ideal seems to serve more as an ethical orientation point than a concrete strategic political goal. The role of ethics in connection with politics is thus to be “constructive” (Husserl 1996, 305) in the sense of rationally examining the values and norms (in Husserlian terms: the axiological and 18

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-4

Edmund Husserl

practical dimensions) of communal life. This process must remain open to renewal since its ideal goal can only lie in infinity (Husserl 1989, 34, 36). Finally, the social dimension, in which these ideas must be situated, in which they emerge and in which they can only be realized through the participation of all members, also has its own dynamics of historicity, generativity, and communication. Therefore, communities, identities, but also home and alienworlds are not fixed entities but can constantly be reconfigured. What Husserl understands by science (Wissenschaft) and rationality and their task in this intertwinement of politics, ethics, and sociality can be drawn from his thoughts presented in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Indeed, as a philosopher, Husserl warned his audience of the political consequences of a technologized naturalism bereft of meaning and forgetful of (inter)subjective accomplishment and responsibility. In this sense, the mathematization of politics is just as pernicious as the mathematization of the lifeworld, since it necessarily gives rise to irrationalist tendencies as a compensation for the lack of existential meaning. The “true rationality” (Husserl 1989, 6) that Husserl speaks about is hence one that originates in the lifeworld and remains tied to persons, in science as well as in ethics and politics. The reception of Husserl’s political ideas and its possible role for a political phenomenology have, no doubt, been controversial. Often, Husserl’s whole approach was refused point blank, based on a prior rejection of his alleged transcendentalism, solipsism, internalism, subjectivism, essentialism, Platonism, etc. More recent debates have focused more on Husserl’s social ontology while critical phenomenologists have used conceptual and methodical tools, such as the reduction, the Leib/Körper distinction, habitualization, sedimentation, the lifeworld, etc. in order to conduct political inquiries. Although often associated with Merleau-Ponty’s approach, Husserl remains the original source of most of these tools. Without trying to save or defend the whole range of Husserl’s political ideas, we therefore believe that a careful discussion is needed in order to assess which challenges or opportunities Husserl’s framework—conceptualized as a remedy for ‘crisis’—really poses or offers for a phenomenology of the political.

2.  Husserl’s Political Phenomenology 2.1  Idealistic Politics Politics, writes Husserl to Dietrich Mahnke in May 1933, basically threw him twice into a “dangerous personal crisis”: once, it was “the War” (WWI) that shattered his “philanthropic optimism” and showed him how ideals could be “misused in the most abominable way as means for war” (Husserl 1994b, 493).3 Now, in 1933, his exclusion from the German people “attacks the deepest roots of my existence” (Husserl 1994b, 493). Husserl’s own identity struggles tell a complicated political story: brought up with German culture as an assimilated Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Moravia, Husserl came to admire and love the tradition of German philosophy and Geistesgeschichte. Not only did he occasionally ‘forget’ his Jewish origin; he also actively converted to Protestantism under the “tremendous and life-changing impression of the New Testament” as a young man in Vienna (Husserl 1994b, 432). Later, he became a German citizen and civil servant as a university professor in Göttingen/Freiburg and even came to identify with the German enthusiasm for war, although his “Daimonion” (Husserl 1994c, 409) had warned him against speaking out publicly. This only anticipated his later disappointment. That he, who considered his philosophy 19

Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi

to fulfill the promise of German thought, had to end his life in utter and painful “loneliness,” expelled from the university by the Nazis and persecuted as a “Jewish intellectualist,” was an absurdity he experienced with desperation (Husserl 1994b, 494–95). Without reducing him to his biography, these circumstances should not be ignored when trying to assess his writings about community, especially during the last years of his life. As for his own political inclinations, Husserl is indeed not easy to pin down as even in his Briefwechsel, explicit positionings are rare. In a letter to the monarchist Graf von Keyserling from 1919, Husserl once mentions that “politically, I always stood on monarchical ground” (Husserl 1994d, 223). But this can be contrasted with a letter to Roman Ingarden from 1918, in which he states that the old regime “had failed in every respect” and that he did not think “that it would ever resurge” (Husserl 1994b, 201). What Husserl cares about more than ever in the days after the Great War is a renewal he thinks can only be born out of a love for ‘ideas’; as long as this “truly selfless devotion to ideas,” is present, Husserl can be quite tolerant, even welcoming toward political positions he normally rejects, such as Marxism and social democracy (Husserl 1994c, 407).4 For Husserl, the real opponents are materialist, reductionist, and skeptical positions, which reflects how his theoretical positions influence his political stances. Materialism, for Husserl, is not only the problematic, hopefully outdated component of social democracy (Husserl 1994b, 94); he also holds it responsible for capitalism and claims that it is at the basis of racism and antisemitism (Husserl 1994b, 23, 494). What might be more surprising is that Husserl also proves to be a critic of liberalism, when understood as a Hobbesian form of psychological naturalism combined with a view of society as consisting of a multitude of atomistic, self-interested individuals. Those who falsely take Husserl to be a solipsist should take this outspoken “anti-individualist view of the social realm” (Miettinen 2023) seriously. Finally, a politics of hate deeply troubled Husserl, who claimed that its poisonous effects drove nations and groups apart. He already mentioned this in 1902 in a letter to Masaryk vis-à-vis developments in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (Husserl 1994a, 107) and even more in 1919, when he bitterly noticed that German desperation produces a “raging antisemitism, that gets angrier by the day” (Husserl 1994b, 24, 433). This is why “love” was important for Husserl, not only as a Christian motto but also as a striving for a communal life in harmony, underpinned by respect for ideas, wisdom, and beauty (Husserl 1994b, 24)—a life of respectful cosmopolitanism, in which differences were recognized and appreciated but nobody was reduced to a pseudo-materialist basis (in race or class, one might add). Even if some letters as well as his published writings on renewal strike this rather enthusiastic tone and display more “suggestive than critically clarified concepts” (Schuhmann 1988, 186), Husserl does not want to be a naïve dreamer. He mocks the excessive sentiment for ‘Geist’ found in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and clearly disapproves of the “neoCatholic movement with its army of converts, whose great star is Max Scheler” (Husserl 1994b, 24; cf. also Husserl 1994a, 114).5 Husserl wants to remain a sober idealist and calls for “an ethos, as plain as possible” (Husserl 1994d, 226). But what is this ‘love of ideas’ about? Husserl often alludes to Plato in this context and has therefore repeatedly been characterized as a political Platonist (Schuhmann 1988; Held 2012). But it is important to be clear about what exactly this does and does not amount to. It does not, for example, amount to a tripartite division of society (rulers, auxiliaries, and producing classes), it entails no radical ideas on education, nor does it advocate for philosophers to be the rulers. Husserl’s own characterization of the central idea of Platonism, as it has been taken up since the Renaissance, is rather broad: it entails “reshap[ing] not 20

Edmund Husserl

only oneself ethically, but the whole human environment, the political, the social existence of mankind on the basis of free reason, and through the insights of a universal philosophy” (Husserl 1954, 6). In First Philosophy, Husserl is more specific in that he credits Plato for the insight that the single human being must be seen as a functional member in the unity of a communal life. Therefore, “the idea of reason is not an individual but a community idea” under which social formations need to be normatively evaluated (Husserl 1956, 15f.). This not only founds a “social ethics” (Husserl 1989, 21) but also anticipates the conception of a personality of higher order—and Husserl does not hesitate to invoke the Platonist picture of “man on a big scale” (Husserl 1956, 16) in this context. Husserl thus seems to take a rather strong communitarian inspiration from Plato, combined with the approach of a constant normative evaluation that must also occur as a common communicative, intra- and interpersonal, rational (i.e., justifiable) practice. As Miettinen puts it: “Politics is more than the sum of individual interests: it is the creation of a shared will and a shared telos for the ‘personality of a higher-order’ ” (2023, 455). It is obvious that this political model emphasizes harmony more than conflict, unity more than plurality, and a form of living more characterized by rational insight than political debate. But it would not shy away from radical reforms since Husserl’s constant call for renewal (Erneuerung) aims at an open, utopian future, characterized by personal responsibility and communal ideals. Husserl is aware that the idea of an “absolutely valuable community” cannot be “a priori statically realized” (Husserl 1959, 199). Hence, its form necessarily implies an infinite process of becoming (cf. Husserl 1959, 199–201; 1989, 58, 117f.). Husserl values tradition, but what he values more is the promise of a common life guided by reason while being able to respect the diverse ways of its realizations (Husserl 1994b, 201, 432; 1993, 9–10). The function of philosophers in this enterprise would be to generate, as one would say today, the ‘expert knowledge’ on how to ‘construct’ a just legal system. Husserl envisages this as a phenomenological “working community” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) (Husserl 1954, 133, 439), with phenomenologists considering themselves “functionaries of mankind” (Husserl 1954, 15), who are entrusted with a critical and continuously ongoing, perhaps infinite task. But as Husserl notes, this expert knowledge also needs to convince the whole people; otherwise, it has neither political nor legal value: The construction of a philosophical law by individual philosophers does not yet create law. They would first have to convince the public of it, the community at large would have to take it up in its will. [Note on the margin:] Perhaps there would have to be a philosophers’ estate, recognized in the profession of constructing “right law” [richtiges Recht] as an idea, and the will to follow this estate. (Husserl Ms. A II 1, 6b; cited in Loidolt 2010, 59) What we can see here is that Husserl’s model of politics (in this case, qua legislation) somehow includes the people but remains rather rudimentary in its dichotomy of ‘expert knowledge’ and ‘will to follow.’ Most of the political operations typical of democracies are absent rather than present in this constellation: deliberative and participatory processes, public debates on expert knowledge that would add different aspects and angels, institutional mediation, compromise, etc. Only when these processes indeed take place can one truly speak of the formation of a common will and joint decisions through political practices. This is something very different than simply taking something up in one’s will. Husserl thus seems to underestimate the political sphere itself or shy away from it, probably because of 21

Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi

the traditional philosophical concern that it might replace episteme (knowledge) with endless debates of a plurality of doxai (opinions). This could eventually end up in irrationalism and skepticism. Even though Husserl defended the doxa of the lifeworld against naturalistic mathematization, this does not automatically make him an advocate for democracy. At least, nothing of the sort can be found in his writings, neither arguments and statements pro or contra the democratic system—which is remarkable, given that he lived in the Weimar Republic, where this issue was constantly and existentially at stake (cf. Hacke 2018). One can only speculate: Had he seen democracy as a political expression of relativism, he might have been critical; had he regarded it as fostering personal autonomy, he might have taken a more positive stance. But, to our knowledge, there is no concrete passage in his writings that would settle these questions. In any case, we think it is important not to de-historize him and take his political ideas as simply converging with today’s image of a liberal democracy. What is also possible is that Husserl regarded the specific political form of government (constitutional monarchy, democratic republic, communitarian formations without a state, etc.) to be of secondary importance as long as it helped realize the idea of a “philosophical humanity,” striving toward the “true world” as its correlate—which rules out tyranny or other forms of suppression. This merger of politics, ethics, and philosophy might indeed be seen as the core of Husserl’s Platonism. Plato was not the only thinker to influence Husserl in this manner, however. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was another important source of inspiration, especially during World War One.6 Fichte’s ideas of mankind striving through an “instinct of reason” toward the “ethical world-order” (which is God itself as its teleological principle) and culminating in a “blissful humanity” (Husserl 1987, 277) complemented Husserl’s otherwise Kantian and cosmopolitan ideas with material values and emotions beyond mere duty. But the bliss soon ended for Husserl as he was not even accepted as a member of the Fichte Society, founded in 1914, because of his Jewish origins (Husserl 1994b, 24, 430). These circumstances alerted him to the fact that the “constant ethical progress” (Husserl 1989, 4) he envisioned was meant to strive not toward an exclusive nationalism but toward a universalist humanity, a society that was inclusive of all people and nations and that was, indeed, guided by ‘ideas’ people could freely relate to. As we have pointed out, Husserl doesn’t offer many descriptions of political institutions or processes. In his discussion of communities, however, he does provide detailed analyses of communication, conflict, association, common will, and action. Whether we might find the realm of “the political” in Husserl’s phenomenology of communities is to be seen.

2.2  A Community-Based Approach to the Political Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of communities is wide-ranging and characterized by a distinct bottom-up approach. Not only does his investigation move from dyadic relations to increasingly complex social formations, but he also emphasizes the extent to which social formations that are established through specific forms of intentional activity are founded on pre-theoretical, passive, and instinctual forms of connectedness (Husserl 1962, 486, 514). Husserl speaks of the mother-child connection as the most original of all and then explains how the scope of one’s social environment as a result of one’s socialization increasingly widens to include siblings, friends, the local community, and eventually “my nation with its customs, its language, etc.” (Husserl 1973c, 511). By being socialized, we also inherit 22

Edmund Husserl

and appropriate a tradition that is passed down over generations: a tradition that comes to normatively regulate, orient, and organize our experiences and actions by serving as a guide for how we ought to think and act. But the reason for Husserl’s focus on the dyad is that culturalization and socialization in the first instance happen through bodily interaction and communication (Husserl 1973c, 472–73; Meindl and Zahavi 2023). By being addressed, my personal development is being influenced by the thoughts and feelings of others (Husserl 1952, 268). This already happens pre-verbally (Husserl 1973b, 167), but soon it takes linguistic form, and it is precisely by “speaking, listening, and replying” that subjects “form a we that is unified, communalized in a specific way” (Husserl 1973c, 476). Husserl often refers to the ‘we’ that is generated out of this intentional co-determination or interlocking as an “I-you community” (Husserl 1973c, 476) or a “communicative community” (Mitteilungsgemeinschaft) (Husserl 1973c, 475). A first stage of unification occurs when mutual understanding is achieved. Such mutual understanding is to be found even in situations of disagreement, rejection, or conflict. In fact, Husserl is quite insistent that a communicative community doesn’t require agreement. Even antagonistic encounters in which we are “against-each-other” count as cases in which I and another are “within-one-another” in the sense of being communicatively intertwined (Husserl 1973c, 477). Even when we fight with others over territory, scarce resources, etc., there is something that is shared (Husserl 2008, 197). But a new, qualitatively different kind of unification occurs when one’s communicative intention isn’t simply understood but also fulfilled or realized by the other. Husserl discusses different cases of such volitional intertwinements, which he sometimes calls practical communities of will (praktische Willensgemeinschaften). There are short-lived ephemeral types, as when somebody makes a request that I comply with or when a group of persons jointly establish a shared goal and act accordingly (Husserl 1973b, 170). The latter group might disperse when the goal is realized, but there are also more enduring and habitualized groups that are unified by normative systems of duties and rights (Husserl 1973a, 105), which Husserl sometimes calls “personalities of higher order” (Husserl 1973b, 197, 200). Subjects can “unite inwardly-personally and finally become a personality of a higher order, an association, a nation, etc., in which lives a will, a purpose, an embodiment of practical convictions, political or scientific” (Husserl 1973b, 90). To form a personality of higher order, more is needed than a shared tradition and membership in a language community (Sprachgemeinschaft). It also requires a unity of will. But what does this amount to? Just as an individual person can be the substrate of both fleeting and enduring acts and can be said to possess convictions, evaluations, volitions, etc., a wellstructured group formation—say, a government, a faculty, an executive board etc.—can be said to have convictions, make resolutions, perform actions, etc. (Husserl 1989, 22). By coordinating their activities to realize a common goal—a goal that is communally striven for—the individual volitions of the members are transformed into “member-volitions” (Mitgliedswille) (Husserl 1973a, 108). It is important not to misunderstand Husserl. He often talks of the higher-order personality or communal spirit (Gemeingeist) as a “many-headed subjectivity” (Husserl 1973b, 218). A community is composed of a multiplicity of persons, each with their own stream of consciousness. There is never a fusional unification. Moreover, the supra-personal common spirit that is alive in the community members and flows through them—or rather, as Husserl writes, “out of them” (Husserl 1973b, 200)—is dependent on their continuing contributions. The higher-order personality is “a communicative unity” founded on 23

Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi

multiplicities; its substrate is none other than the “communicative multiplicity of persons” (Husserl 1973b, 200–201) that are intentionally integrated. For Husserl, social formations of a certain size need structures in place for their maintenance; they require divisions of labor, in which the willing and acting of individuals are coordinated with one another and subordinated to the communal willing. They will feature members who do not simply live their own private lives but also act in an official capacity as functionaries or representatives of the group and who, by performing their duties and acting in the name of the group will, let the wills of others work in them (Husserl 1973b, 183). In an early text from 1910, Husserl argues that the existence and persistence of a political organization like a state depends not on the existence of specific individuals but on the existence of individuals with appropriate attitudes and beliefs. As he writes, it can only exist if it is supported by functionaries who possess the requisite state consciousness (Staatsbewusstsein) (Husserl 1973a, 110). But again, this is not about participating in a collective stream of consciousness but about identifying with a communal normative codex. In a much later text from August 1934, Husserl explicitly equates the generative context that every human being is embedded within with the nation (Husserl 1993, 9). He then states that every nation, as a supra-personal totality, coexists with other nations and that this coexistence isn’t to be understood as a physical being next to each other but as a communicative, spiritual exchange that can be either peaceful or conflictual (Husserl 1993, 10). Husserl’s emphasis on the importance of communication again makes it clear that he doesn’t think of national unity as being based on ties of blood but on a shared life in a shared place with a shared history (Husserl 1973b, 183). One passage in his letters to Masaryk makes explicit that this does not even require speaking one and the same language. Indeed, one can see the “idea” of a unified Czechoslovakia as exemplary for how Husserl envisions political unity in a nation, as well as its relation to other nations. This is also a point at which his personal convictions very probably converge with his theoretical ones: May your [Masaryk’s] old ideal of a national ethical existence be fulfilled in the empire at whose head Providence has placed you and to whose good genius you have been chosen: A single nation, united by the love of the common homeland and by the unity of patriotic history—a nation, not separated by the different languages, but mutually enriching and elevating itself by the mutual participation in the linguistically developing cultural achievements. You have already educated me to this ideal in Leipzig! May the Republic, through such political-ethical ennoblement, become the ethical foundation for the renewal of the European culture, which is highly endangered by nationalistic degeneration. (Husserl 1994a, 120) Where, then, do we find ‘the political’ in Husserl? The unifying process of nation-­building, the constitution of a higher-order person (the ‘nation state’), can certainly be seen as a political process based on and rooted in communities with their phenomenologically described features. It is political in the sense that it willfully unites the communities by norms, which distinctively goes beyond simply being a “cultural community”: “Political community—cultural community, this does not coincide” (Husserl 2008, 528). However, Husserl has not much to say about intra-communal conflicts regarding fundamental questions of justice, distribution of wealth, or the economic system of a state: i.e., classic political conflicts between ‘right’ and ‘left.’ Instead, he discusses the constitutive importance of 24

Edmund Husserl

inter-communal encounters, of encounters between conflicting spheres of normality. It even seems that he uses the term ‘political’ mainly in this context. In one text from 1934–35, for example, Husserl remarks that the “life of a nation in a unified internationality results in a development of a new kind of historicity, the political historicity” (Husserl 1993, 10). Judging by this use of the term, “becoming political” (Husserl 1993, 11) is primarily tied to inter- rather than intra-communal encounters. Such encounters can be hostile, but Husserl does not have an essentially antagonist picture of the political like Carl Schmitt, who defines it by the friend/enemy distinction. Rather, his approach has to be understood in line with his discussion of the home-world alien-world encounter, in which the confrontation with a different set of norms doesn’t simply allow for a new perspective on one’s own way of life but also motivates one to aim for truth common to all (Steinbock 1995; Zahavi 1996). In this sense, Husserl speaks of “the political” as the “most general” (Husserl 1973c, 411) in the relation of communities/nations/states and argues that communal life can expand and become political insofar as it strives for a “universal practice” (Husserl 1973c, 226). The political, for Husserl, thus seems to involve a cosmopolitan idea of aiming at communicatively interrelated communities (Husserl 1993, 10–11).7

3. Outlook Let us distinguish three strands in the reception of Husserl’s political philosophy: One group of Husserl scholars have explored and creatively expanded on Husserl’s ideas on the state, community, and home- and alien-world(s) (Otaka 1932; Schuhmann 1988; Hart 1992; Steinbock 1995; Drummond 2000; Gniazdowski 2006; Miettinen 2023). Another group of scholars has expressed reservations about whether Husserlian phenomenology for methodological reasons allows for genuine political thought at all (Adorno 1940; Habermas 1971; Guenther 2020). And finally, there is a group of scholars who have used analyses or methods that Husserl developed in a non-political context—such as his analyses of experience, the body, or habitualization—and employed them in a politicizing and critical manner (Heinämaa 2003, 2022; Oksala 2016; Rodemeyer 2017, 2022; Wehrle 2021). One particularly influential reading found in the first group is that of Karl Schuhmann, who, in his book Husserl’s Staatsphilosophie (Husserl’s Philosophy of the State) from 1988, presented a detailed overview and interpretation of Husserl’s published and unpublished notes on the topic. Schuhmann’s basic thesis is that the state would prima facie have no place in Husserl’s intersubjective teleology. To put it differently, in the development from instinctive communities to communities of will, culminating in the community of love, the state would not occupy a specific eidetically necessary stage or form of communalization (Vergemeinschaftung). At the same time, however, it is undeniable—also for Husserl—that ‘the state’ or states are facts. Schuhmann therefore concludes that the state only has one purpose: to order conflicts and thereby prevent the worst “collisions of purpose” (Schuhmann 1988, 45). This makes it a sort of “external superior force which provides, vis-à-vis the divergent strivings of individual monads, the guarantee of their ‘conformability’ Übereinstimmbarkeit” (Schuhmann 1988, 45). On this reading, the state would become obsolete and “wither away” (Schuhmann 1988, 159–60) on the way to the community of love. This thesis is further elaborated by Hart (1992), who sees a kind of communitarian anarchism in Husserl’s political philosophy of community. It is true that Husserl occasionally speculates about how strong the state should be and whether humanity essentially needs a state in its development toward an ethical community. 25

Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi

But he also describes the teleological end goal of a “truly humane world-people [Weltvolk]” in terms of a supranational “world state” (Husserl 1989, 57–59). Furthermore, Husserl employs a peculiar terminology evoking strong political connotations. He speaks of a “communist” community of wills (Husserl 1989, 53) when describing cases in which the community members are united freely in the pursuit of a common goal. His key example is the community of philosophers or mathematicians. In contrast to this, he speaks of an “imperialist” organization of wills (Husserl 1989, 53), in which the community is pervaded and governed by one organized will that demands subordination. His example here is the monastic community or the community of priests in the civitas dei (Husserl 1989, 90). Although one can detect a slight preference for the “communist” model of free association and organization in Husserl, the “imperialist” model remains just as much an option in how to organize communities in Husserl’s very general reflections on the topic. An interpretation heading toward a communitarian/communist anarchism should not ignore this. In any case, one should avoid hasty political conclusions based on this terminology. More careful studies of Husserl’s philosophy of the state and international relations are still needed (Miettinen 2023; Szanto 2023). The second strand of reception builds on the often repeated—and, meanwhile, often refuted—criticism that Husserl’s ‘philosophy of consciousness’ and his transcendental approach would make it impossible to tackle the problems of intersubjectivity, sociality, and history in a satisfactory manner and would therefore also be “unable to treat the political life, ethics, gender, ecology, and so forth” (cf. Steinbock 1995, 23, who names Habermas and Luhmann as two famous proponents of this criticism). In what has become known as ‘critical phenomenology’ today, the criticism of Husserl has become more nuanced and differentiated and largely avoids the “caricature of phenomenology as a philosophy that is too subjective and too trapped inside first-person perspective to be able to offer any purchase on ethical or political struggles” (Salamon 2018, 11). Nevertheless, a certain tendency to distance oneself from the ‘classical’ Husserl in favor of Merleau-Ponty or some other existential phenomenologist still seems de rigueur when seeking to establish one’s critical and political credentials (cf. Rodemeyer 2022, who points to Guenther as an example of this tendency). Finally, a third strand draws ideas for political and critical inquiries in parts of Husserl’s oeuvre that is decoupled from his own political ideas. One example is the feminist investigations undertaken by Heinämaa (2003), Rodemeyer (2017), Oksala (2016), and Wehrle (2021). Other examples can be found in the volume on 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, in which several prominent Husserlian concepts are discussed, including ‘Horizons,’ ‘The Körper/Leib Distinction,’ ‘The Natural Attitude,’ and ‘Operative Intentionality’ and in which one can also find a productive use of methodological concepts such as the epoché and the phenomenological and eidetic reductions (Davis 2020). As Rodemeyer has claimed, “Husserl’s phenomenology, and especially his discussions of horizons, foreground/background, and the lifeworld, is already critical” (2022, 98). Something similar might be said about Husserl’s writings on sociality and community: While, at first glance, Husserl’s analyses of community and its possible forms rarely transcend or question the societal and political order of his time and while they clearly prioritize agreement over disagreement and valorize harmony and consensus over conflict and dissensus, his meticulous analysis of its communicative and generative constitution reveals its fragility, as well as its openness to change and constant reconfiguration. If one wants to re-politicize Husserl’s work on social ontology, it might consequently be better to bet on the transcendental Husserl than on Husserl the Platonist.8 26

Edmund Husserl

Notes 1 All English translations of the original German in this chapter are our own. 2 This often-cited quote (following Schuhmann’s original citation) stems from a three-line letter from 1935, in which Husserl characterizes either his pending talks or his manuscripts as “completely unpolitical,” and it probably alludes to negotiations with the Cercle philosophique to save his manuscripts. Given the political circumstances, Husserl’s hope for political asylum in Prague and, consequently, the precautions he had to take, we find it problematic to use this quote as a comprehensive self-characterization of his work (cf. Husserl 1994e, 244–45; Husserl 1994c, 329). 3 Husserl never mentions the death of his son Wolfgang on the battlefield 1917, but it is obvious that this caused a re-evaluation of his enthusiasm for the German cause, as did the rising antisemitism shortly after WWI. 4 Husserl, in a response to Arnold Metzger, who sent him his book Die Phänomenologie der Revolution. Eine politische Schrift über den Marxismus und die liebende Gemeinschaft. Cf. also Husserl’s letter to the social democrat Adolf Grimme from 1932, in which he praises his “strong belief in idealism” (Husserl 1994b, 94). 5 Husserl calls Scheler a “genius of pose” who “unfortunately wants to reform the catholic ecclesiastical philosophy by basing it on phenomenology instead of Aristotle” (Husserl 1994b, 24). 6 This is especially evident in Husserl’s Three Lectures on Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity (Husserl 1987, 267–93), which he delivered to soldiers in 1917. Cf. also Hart (1995). 7 To be sure, and this is a topic we can only allude to here, Husserl’s Eurocentric perspective influences his universalism as well as his internationalism. For example, the “Patagonians” (exemplary for someone very far away from Europe and already a perplexing issue for Kant) seem to be on the fringes of what Husserl calls the interactional unity (Verkehrseinheit) of humanity (Husserl 1973b, 219). 8 Thanks to Sara Heinämaa and Timo Miettinen for helpful comments. Dan Zahavi acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 832940) and from the Carlsberg Foundation (Grant ID: CF18-1107).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1940. “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism.” The Journal of Philosophy 37 (1): 5–18. Davis, Duane H. 2020. “The Phenomenological Method.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 4–9. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Drummond, J. 2000. “Political Community.” In Phenomenology of the Political, edited by Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree, 29–53. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Gniazdowski, Andrzej. 2006. “Die Phänomenologie als transzendentale Theorie des Politischen.” In Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie, edited by Dieter Lohmar and Dirk Fonfara, 108–25. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Springer. Guenther, Lisa. 2020. “Critical Phenomenology.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 11–16. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective.” In Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by J. J. Shapiro, 301–17. Boston: Beacon Press. Hacke, Jens. 2018. Existenzkrise der Demokratie. Zur politischen Theorie des Liberalismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hart, James G. 1992. The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 1995. “Husserl and Fichte: With Special Regard to Husserl’s Lectures on ‘Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity’.” Husserl Studies 12: 135–63. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

27

Sophie Loidolt and Dan Zahavi ———. 2022. “On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology: A Case Study of Embodiment.” In Phenomenology as Critique. Why Method Matters, edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa, 113–37. New York/London: Routledge. Held, Klaus. 2012. “Towards a Phenomenology of the Political World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 442–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1952. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Edited by Marly Biemel. Husserliana 4. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. Husserliana 6. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1956. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil. Kritische Ideengeschichte. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. Husserliana 7. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1959. Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil. Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. Husserliana 8. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1962. Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Edited by Walter Biemel. Husserliana 9. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1973a. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil. 1905–1920. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana 13. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1973b. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–1928. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana 14. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1973c. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–1935. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana 15. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921). Edited by Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp. Husserliana 25. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1989. Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937). Edited by Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp. Husserliana 27. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1993. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937. Edited by Reinhold Smid. Husserliana 29. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994a. Briefwechsel I: Die Brentanoschule. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–1. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994b. Briefwechsel III: Die Göttinger Schule. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–3. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994c. Briefwechsel IV: Die Freiburger Schule. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–4. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994d. Briefwechsel VI: Philosophenbriefe. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–6. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1994e. Briefwechsel IX: Familienbriefe. Edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Husserliana Dokumente III–9. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1996. Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Edited by Ursula Panzer. Husserliana 30. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2008. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Edited by Rochus Sowa. Husserliana 39. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2014. Die Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). Edited by Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr. Husserliana 42. Dordrecht: Springer. Loidolt, Sophie. 2010. Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie. Eine historisch-systematische Darstellung. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Meindl, Patricia, and Dan Zahavi. 2023. “From Communication to Communalization: A Husserlian Account.” Continental Philosophy Review 56 (3): 361–77. Miettinen, Timo. 2023. “ ‘A Sociality of Pure Egoists’: Husserl’s Critique of Liberalism.” Continental Philosophy Review 56 (3): 443–60. Oksala, Johanna. 2016. Feminist Experiences. Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Otaka, Tomoo. 1932. Grundlegung der Lehre vom sozialen Verband. Vienna/Berlin: Springer.

28

Edmund Husserl Rodemeyer, Lanei. 2017. “Husserl and Queer Theory.” Continental Philosophy Review 50 (3): 311–34. ———. 2022. “A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology as Critique. Why Method Matters, edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa, 95–112. New York/London: Routledge. Salamon, Gayle. 2018. “What’s Critical about Critical Phenomenology?” Puncta. Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1: 8–17. Schuhmann, Karl. 1988. Husserls Staatsphilosophie. Freiburg: Alber. Steinbock, Anthony. 1995. Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Szanto, Thomas. 2023. “Husserl on the State: A  Critical Reappraisal.” Continental Philosophy Review 56 (3): 419–42. Wehrle, Maren. 2021. “ ‘Bodies (that) Matter’: The Role of Habit Formation for Identity.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20: 365–86. Zahavi, Dan. 1996. Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

29

2 MAX SCHELER The Politics of Ressentiment Zachary Davis

1. Introduction As demonstrated by some of his earliest published writings such as Arbeit und Ethik (Work and Ethics) ([1899] 1971), Max Scheler was, from the outset, deeply concerned with the political and cultural climate of Germany and remained so until the end of his life. In fact, Scheler’s interest in politics was not merely academic, and for a time during the war, he held a governmental position in the office of war propaganda (Mader 1995). While his commitment to German and European politics never wavered, Scheler’s political thought followed a tumultuous path that began with a nationalistic defense of German aggression during the first years of the Great War and ended with a reversal of this position wherein he defended the eternal idea of peace and warned of the rise of fascism throughout Europe. Yet, despite the dramatic changes in his political thought and aims, one notion in particular remained central to his approach throughout his life: the notion of ressentiment. My task in this chapter is to trace Scheler’s use of ressentiment through the distinct stages of his political thought. Following Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in his On the Genealogy of Morals, Scheler understands ressentiment as a type of value reversal that elevates a lower value type over higher value types by virtue of a negation of the higher values. I demonstrate here that Scheler makes use of the sense of value reversal entailed in the notion of ressentiment in at least two different senses. In his earlier political writings, especially those written during the first years of World War I, Scheler used the value reversal accomplished by cultural forms of the feeling of ressentiment as a means by which to justify political violence. The Great War was, for Scheler, a just war because it would serve as the action necessary to reverse the value reversal being imposed on the German people and consequently bring about a cultural renewal for both Germany and Europe in general. In his later political writings, Scheler would become quite critical of this approach and the apparent justification for the use of violence. His attention would turn rather to the way in which the toxic feeling of ressentiment seeks to negate the value of the political altogether. Political activity was, for Scheler, the process whereby power is spiritualized: that is, the way by which power comes to be directed and channeled by cultural values. The negation of the value of this 30

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-5

Max Scheler

activity through a politics of ressentiment serves to elevate the base and violent expressions of power and cultivate as a consequence the call for the despot, for a leader unchecked by political norms and values. It is in this later analysis that we find the means to critique and clarify cultural trends that give rise to the call for the authoritarian personality and end of democratic rule.

2.  The Meaning and Structure of Ressentiment Scheler (1955, 37) had considered Nietzsche’s “discovery” of the feeling of ressentiment as the source of value judgment to be one of the most important and penetrating insights of the modern era.1 Scheler’s own analysis of ressentiment quite closely followed the analysis Nietzsche had given in his Genealogy of Morals. Both thinkers had argued that modern morality suffered from poisonous infliction of ressentiment. Yet they diverged quite dramatically in respect to the root cause of this infliction. Nietzsche maintained that the Judeo-Christian notion of love was responsible for sense of ressentiment in modern morality. In his treatment of ressentiment, Scheler (1955, 106) attempted to show that Nietzsche was deeply mistaken about the notion of Christian love and that the modern notion of love—namely, humanitarian love—was responsible for the introduction of ressentiment into modern morality and values. My interest here is not in examining who was right in this debate concerning Christian love and morality, but rather the description both thinkers provided of the meaning and structure of ressentiment. The formal structure, as Scheler (1955, 59) calls it, of ressentiment is a value reversal wherein a lower value is elevated by virtue of the negation or devaluation of a higher value. For Nietzsche, this value reversal can be found at the origin of the value of evil. The value judgments of good and bad originated in the spontaneous response to particular types of actions associated with certain types of persons. Those actions associated with so-called aristocratic person types were considered good by virtue of their ability to create a qualitative difference from merely common or ordinary acts, a difference Nietzsche referred to as a “pathos of difference” (1989, 26). At the origin of modern morality, there is the ancient hierarchy of values that places the good—namely, the powerful aristocratic type of activity— over the bad and common, the activity of the weaker slave or priestly types. According to Nietzsche, the slave type is only able to overcome this inferior value position through the act of ressentiment and the introduction of a slave morality. What was once considered good is negated and taken as evil. By virtue of this value negation, what was originally taken as ‘bad’ becomes the good. The use of moral values as a means to elevate one group of persons over another was the moment in history, for Nietzsche, when humans truly became “interesting animals” (1989, 33). Scheler’s account of the modern reversal of values is not genealogical but rather phenomenological. In his magnum opus in ethics, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values), Scheler ([1913] 1980) attempted to show that there is an objective order of values and that this order is demonstrated through the preferring of certain values over others by virtue of their value depth. From the lower to higher values, the objective order is as follows: pleasure, utility, life, culture, and the holy. All experience is, for Scheler, value laden, and the experience of value necessarily precedes any knowledge of the world. The human being is thus being pulled and repelled in accordance with how objects are given as having either positive or negative 31

Zachary Davis

value. The relation humans have to value is intentional, and objects are always given as having a particular value. Scheler calls love the intention wherein values are originally disclosed and further describes love as a movement from higher to lower values, a movement that is drawn to ever-greater value depth. Critical to his treatment for ressentiment is Scheler’s distinction between feelings and feeling-states. Feelings are, for Scheler, intentional acts and concern the disclosure of value. Feeling-states are, in contrast, reactions to the disclosure of value. For instance, anger is a feeling-state one has in reaction to a perceived devaluation of oneself or another person.2 Anger is not the disclosure of the value of a person but the reaction to the mistreatment of one. According to Scheler, there are two basic feelings: love and hate. Whereas love is the original disclosure of value, hate is the intentional act wherein a positive value is negated. Ressentiment, by virtue of its basic structure, is an intentional act—an act in which a lower value is promoted over a higher value. Hence, ressentiment is not a feeling-state but rather a feeling or, more precisely, the feeling of hate. Scheler’s (1955, 128–31) early treatment of ressentiment focused on the value reversal wherein the value of utility is elevated over the value of life. The elevation of the value of utility is the defining feature of the modern worldview and what has allowed the rise of late capitalism, the mechanization of nature, and the predominance of the classic liberal notion of individualism. Although Scheler would continue to change his focus on where to locate the value reversal of ressentiment, he understood a central task of his work to overcome the modern value reversal: an attempt to overcome the destructive social-political consequences of the growing cultural dominance of the value of utility. For both Nietzsche and Scheler, the reason a cultural reversal in values is able to succeed lies in its ability to disguise the act of negation and masks itself under a cloak of positive valuation. In Nietzsche’s account, slave morality appears to be an embrace of the meek, an apparent positive step in ending aristocratic oppression. For Scheler, the rise of utility through the devaluation of life is masked by the modern love of humanity, an apparent embrace of all persons regardless of race, gender, or culture.3 In other words, the deceptive nature of ressentiment makes it appear as if it were an act of love while, in fact, it is an act of hate. The illusionary value-givenness is the most distinctive accomplishment of the act of ressentiment (Scheler 1955, 66). It is precisely because of the deceptive nature of ressentiment appearing as a positive act of valuation that makes a direct critique impossible. In order to reveal the value deception, it is necessary to address its psychological roots. “The point of departure” (Scheler 1955, 38) for ressentiment begins with the need for revenge. As Joseph Butler (1827, 125) noted in his sermon on resentment, it is “natural” for a human to feel some “emotion of mind” in response to some injury to feeling of injustice. The origin of ressentiment lies then in a felt or perceived sense of injustice, and the need for revenge springs from the desire to rectify the problem. In this respect, ressentiment is not inconsistent with good will (Butler 1827). If a person is able to act immediately and directly to address and right the wrong, the need for revenge dissipates, and the feeling of ressentiment never takes hold. The feeling of ressentiment only arises when a person is unable to take revenge, unable because the person feels a lack of power to do so. Powerlessness is, hence, one of the key psychological roots of ressentiment. Since the injured person is unable to take action to rectify the perceived injustice, they have no choice but to resort to the moral sphere to take revenge. It is not merely the action of the other person that is negated or criticized, but the very value of the person themselves. Through the act of ressentiment, morality becomes weaponized, and moral judgment becomes the means to restore justice. 32

Max Scheler

The second essential aspect of ressentiment is the feeling of envy. Again, ressentiment is an act by which values are reversed in order to elevate a lower value over a higher value. Prior to the act of ressentiment, there is a felt value hierarchy between two persons, between the person strong enough to carry out the harm and the person powerless to act in response. The powerless person thus envies the power the other has. This feeling of envy is, for Scheler (1955, 45), no ordinary sense of envy. It is a feeling of existential envy. The ‘weaker’ or impotent person envies not merely the act the person committed but the being of the person. For this reason, the act of revenge must target the value of the person themselves. It is also possible that the target of this revenge is not simply an individual person; it can also target an entire group of persons. Through the act of ressentiment, a person or group of persons are able to overcome both the sense of impotency and envy. The use of moral value empowers the person to take revenge and feel morally superior for it. The psychological roots of ressentiment help explain the sense of moral if not righteous indignation that often accompanies the feeling of ressentiment. They also help clarify the possible means by which to address the feeling of ressentiment. It would be important to analyze not only why a person or group of persons feels harmed but also why they feel powerless. The destructive nature of ressentiment can only be addressed by addressing the psychological origins fueling it.

3.  War and Ressentiment Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Scheler had primarily been concerned with the articulation of the particular value structure of a culture and the social perversions of the objective rank order of values, addressing the political sphere only indirectly. The Great War provided Scheler with the opportunity to step into the political arena in a direct and influential manner. Scheler was certainly not alone amongst either the leading intellectuals or his fellow phenomenologists in his enthusiastic support of German aggression.4 At this time, Scheler had lost his university teaching privileges and was forced to earn a living through private lectures and publications. The early years of the war were some of Scheler’s most prolific, and he wrote extensively in support of the war. His main publication, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (The Genius of War and the German War) ([1915] 1982), was, according to the historian Jeffrey Verhey (2000), the most popular and reviewed work in Germany upon its publication. The purpose of these wartime writings was twofold: to demonstrate that (1) war makes an invaluable contribution to the growth and development of a people and their culture and (2) German aggression was morally justified and consequently would serve as the means by which to reawaken the unique value of both the German people and the idea of Europe. The notion of ressentiment played a central role in achieving the latter. The Genius of War and the German War was published just a year after Scheler published his works on sympathy and his theory of value, both of which establish the love of persons as the most profound act and moral obligation. There is, however, no contradiction between works dedicated to the value of love and those dedicated to the value of war. In fact, Scheler goes so far as to write that “war is the greatest aid of the light, holy, and beautiful genius of love” ([1916] 1982, 280). The so-called genius of war lies in its unique ability to awaken a people from its “leaden sleep” ([1915] 1982, 12) in order that they are able to recognize the significance of their history and value. As a means to remain consistent with his value theory, Scheler examines the genius of value in accord with the order of values, examining the relation that war has to life, culture, and the holy. 33

Zachary Davis

The “true root” ([1915] 1982, 31) of any war, according to Scheler, lies in the nature of life itself. Life in any of its forms, which includes the life of a people, is a dynamic process of becoming, growth, and unfolding. War is simply the outcome of the vital expansion of people coming into conflict with the vital growth of other peoples. As Scheler argued in his work on ressentiment, life grows through an overcoming that necessarily entails a sacrifice (1955, 76). Scheler expressed great regret that he could not join in the war efforts directly due to his health and age, dedicating his work on the war to “his friends in the fields” ([1915] 1982, 8). The heroic sacrifices soldiers make contribute directly to the continued growth and expansion of their people, lifegiving to the life of a people. War serves as a reminder of the willingness to sacrifice, a reminder of the value of the life of a people. War also makes a similar contribution to the continued growth of the culture of a people. It is only in war that the history of a people is brought to lived experience, a process by which a people collectively are placed into contact with the creative resources responsible for this history. Scheler ([1915] 1982, 48) goes so far to say that the greatest written works of history are all the direct consequences of war. The growth of a culture lies in the insights of great intellects, and war serves as both a reminder of these ingenious insights and an inspiration for novel ones. Once Scheler provided an analysis of the contributions war can make to the growth of the life and culture of a people, his attention turned directly to the Great War and whether it ought to be considered a just war. Only a just war brings about a positive contribution. According to Scheler, there are two conditions that must be met in order for a war to be just. First, the threat posed must be both imminent and serious, and secondly, it must correspond to the genuine collective will of the people (Scheler [1915] 1982, 101). Scheler thought there was overwhelming evidence to satisfy the second condition, appealing to the popularity the war appeared to have across Germany at the time. The more difficult task was to satisfy the first condition. The imminent and serious threat was not a military invasion but a spiritual one. In his work on ressentiment, Scheler had argued that the modern worldview harbored a value reversal that placed utility over life. This value reversal posed a threat to both Germany and Europe because it threatened to destroy their unique value structures. The elevation of utility over life necessarily places the value of society over the communal bonds of a people.5 All relations become mere contractual agreements.6 A culture is not carried on through contractual relations but through the shared experiences of a people. In The Genius of War and the German War, Scheler focused primarily on how the promotion of utility over life had bolstered the rise of late capitalism, which thrives in any cultural environment that treats its people as self-interested individuals and not members of a community sharing historical bonds. As a type of ressentiment, the late capitalism of the modern worldview conceals its destructive and hegemonic nature under the apparent positive guise of greater international relations and the erasure of national borders that create only division amongst the world’s people. Yet, for Scheler, the promise of greater international trade and commerce across borders was the deceptive means by which to replace one cultural ethos with another. An introduction of a new ethos for any culture would be the death of that culture; 1914 was the culmination of the growing cultural tensions that would threaten both Germany and Europe. “That is the great enormity of the world historical situation: that this unprecedented war is the beginning of Europe’s new birth or the beginning of its demise! There is no third option” (Scheler [1915] 1982, 182). Scheler’s analysis of the dangerous cultural ethos of modernity in his earlier treatment of ressentiment was described as a value reversal permeating different aspects of the European 34

Max Scheler

culture such as religion, economics, and science. In his wartime writings, this ethos becomes personified in the country of England, the “motherland of late capitalism” ([1915] 1982, 54). Scheler goes so far as to conclude The Genius of War and the German War with a list of 52 different forms of the reduction of cultural values to the value of utility in “English thinking” (249–50). It was England that had waged a silent spiritual war against Germany and Europe, and it was this war that justified a political war. Germany was merely defending itself against the colonial and hegemonic aspirations of England.7 These wartime writings were the only time Scheler defended the use of violence as a means to reverse the value reversal brought about through the act of ressentiment. It was a relatively short-lived political thought but one that contributed to a war that was responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people. Before the war officially ended, Scheler had withdrawn his enthusiastic support and turned his attention to a different resource in search of the possibility of a cultural renewal.8 This new resource was the Catholic Church and its notion of solidarity, which he sought to capture with his notion of Christian democracy ([1917] 1954, 382). His turn to the Church was also short lived as he grew very disillusioned with the real political potential of the Church due to its “passivity” (Scheler 1990, 103). Nonetheless, it was the religious phase of Scheler’s work that allowed him to rethink his use of ressentiment in the justification of violence and, in particular, his own hatred of the English people. He had argued that a new beginning for Germany and Europe would have to begin with a sense of collective guilt (Scheler [1918] 1954, 416). Although Scheler does not speak explicitly of his own guilt for how his work may have contributed to the great loss of life during the war, he is quite critical of his approach in The Genius of War and the German War as an example of ressentiment thinking. For instance, he refers to his work as a model of “protesting thought” ([1919] 1963, 205), a manner of thinking that arrives at its goal and task through a protest against others. A telling sign of the act of ressentiment is the moral degradation of others in order to promote one’s own moral value. England was Scheler’s victim. The lesson that Scheler would learn from his moral failings at this time would direct his attention away from the justification of violence and make use of ressentiment as a means to avoid war and open up a path toward peace.

4.  Politics and Ressentiment The first phase of Scheler’s political thought is characterized by the search to discover a resource that could reverse the value reversal of the modern ethos. His turns to both the war and the Church were motivated by the hope that the deeper values of the European culture and the holy would inspire a cultural renewal and overcome the feeling of ressentiment that had infected the German people and Europe. The second phase of Scheler’s thought takes place in the context of the Weimar Republic and the parliamentary democracy. This phase was haunted by the specter of a second world war and the threat of greater “destruction, explosion, blood, and tears” (Scheler [1928] 1976, 153). It is also marked by a significant shift in Scheler’s understanding of spirit and the power that values can wield. The utter failure of the war and his disappointment with the Church had shown Scheler that the deeper spiritual values are powerless on their own to direct the course of a culture and history. Ideals and values only have power when they become realized in and through the basic lifedrives of a people. Politics is the activity whereby the drive for power comes to be directed by deeper spiritual values, a process he calls the spiritualization of power. Although Scheler remains very much concerned with the value reversal of modernity and the promotion of 35

Zachary Davis

the lower value of utility, his focus in respect to ressentiment is the manner in which this feeling devalues the activity of politics and attempts to negate the process of spiritualization. The result of this form of value negation is that power comes to be directed by the lower values, bringing an end to democratic rule and sowing the seeds of despotism. Had Scheler lived long enough, he would have witnessed all his greatest fears coming true: the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. Scheler was developing his later political thought in conjunction with a myriad of new projects such as the sociology of knowledge, philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, and history. All these different projects were understood to be complementary and different ways to describe the interplay of the two basic movements of life and spirit.9 The human being as finite person is the intersection of these two movements and the being who thus has the task of unifying them. In the human being, the movement of life is expressed in three distinct life-drives—nutrition, sex, and power—and consequently related to three basic social institutions: namely, the economy, the family, and politics. The institutional forms of these drives are determined by the dominant ideals and values of a culture. In the movement from lower to higher values, the spiritualization of power follows the tendency from the power to might to the power of right, from physical power to spiritual power (Scheler 1990, 93–94). However, if there is a perversion in the order of values and the lower values takes precedence, power moves in the opposite direction and takes on impersonal expressions such as violence and oppression. The movement of life and thus the drive for power are fundamental aspects of the individual and of a people. It is not a question of whether power is being spiritualized but a question of how—of whether power is being directed by the higher or lower values. In his earlier work on ressentiment, Scheler had warned of “situations” ([1912] 1955, 52) in which the psychic roots of ressentiment were cultivated and bolstered. Given the economic and cultural depression experienced after the war, it was, for Scheler, not surprising that the feeling of ressentiment would enter the political climate of postwar Germany. Not only had Germany suffered an embarrassing defeat, but it was also forced to make devastating concessions in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. This situation would foster both the need for revenge and a sense of impotence, the two basic ingredients in the feeling of ressentiment. As an act of value negation, the feeling of ressentiment permeating the political arena in Germany sought to negate and devalue the value of political activity altogether. There are three distinct ways in which the value of politics was demeaned during this time, according to Scheler. The first and most dangerous was the rise of political indifference. The deceptive nature of ressentiment lies in its ability to mask a value negation behind an apparent positive valuation. The indifference rising amongst the students and working groups was rooted in a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that there was nothing they could do politically that would change the depressed state of Germany. Yet, rather than admit this sense of powerlessness, politics is transformed into an activity that is damaging to the person’s “soul.” In his essay Von zwei deutschen Krankheiten (The Two German Illnesses), Scheler refers to this protection of one’s inner sacred life as “false interiority” ([1919] 1963, 208). Disguised as a spiritual move inward, the retreat to the purity of one’s soul only signals a feeling of deep powerless to do anything in the ‘outside’ world. “Those who disdain politics because it presupposes a striving for power and say that ‘a political song is a nasty song,’ that politics ‘spoils character,’ indicate only that they have a weak character, that they prefer to avoid their duty” (Scheler 1990, 72). The direct connection Scheler makes between this form of political indifference and the rise of the despot springs 36

Max Scheler

from the vacuum of political leadership created when there is no longer any public interest in politics. In order to ‘protect’ themselves from the grime of politics, the indifferent welcome someone else doing the dirty work and granting them complete power to do so.10 The second form of ressentiment haunting European politics at this time was what Scheler calls “re-sublimation” ([1928] 1976, 155). Sublimation is another name Scheler uses to describe the act of spiritualization, the act in which life-drives such as power are directed and channeled by the deeper spiritual values. Resublimation is the process that devalues all activity related to spiritual or intellectual endeavors. In this respect, it is a movement of irrationalism and anti-intellectualism. As a result of negating the intellect, the vital values are promoted over the deeper spiritual ones. For Scheler, it is this process that defines the rise of fascism during his time. Brute force and violence become political goods, and genuine political activity such as the making of laws and public debate becomes a show of weakness. Such a movement is fueled by a sense of intellectual inferiority and powerlessness. Rather than admit this shortcoming, those who feel powerless in this way take physical force as the higher value. In such a situation, the path to absolute power is paved for that opportunistic leader who is able to demonstrate the ability to rule with an iron fist, a leader of law and order. Scheler found the third and final form of ressentiment in the parliamentary politics of the Weimar Republic. Even the politicians were not immune to the feeling of ressentiment and the devaluation of the political at this time. The political situation gave rise to “parties of principle” (Scheler 1990, 73). Genuine political debate and compromise were no longer seen to have any value. Political parties chose rather to remain true to their “principles” and not be tainted by the nastiness of politics. Rather than seek to cross a political divide, the opposing side was demonized and deemed unworthy of any political attention, what Scheler called “ressentiment politics” (Scheler 1990, 67). Again, this retreat to the principles of the party was motivated not by a powerful political will but by a sense of political powerlessness, a sense that, as politicians, they were incapable of acting with others in a way that would make a real difference in the world. The consequence of remaining true to one’s principles not only means a deaf ear to the real suffering of the people but also the end of any meaningful debate. Once again, the feeling of ressentiment has created a political vacuum all too easily filled by the despot. As Scheler writes: In both cases, the consequence of this new type of thinking is “fragmentation” up to the danger of “no longer being able to understand one another” and the rising opportunism in the direction of the prevailing interests. When the danger is realized, the call for metaphysics immediately resounds—or unfortunately, more likely the call for the authoritarian binding to an old-substance, a truth substance that is offered always as a good from all sides and mostly sold very cheaply to submissive-hungry, desperate conscience; in the political sphere resounds simultaneously the call for the “disassembly of the outdated parliamentarism,” for the “dictator” from the left or the right and those similar to it. Thus the liberal scientism and the parliamentary democratism have played themselves out and meanwhile have only made literally—not just ­politically— meaningful cries of confusion for a “decision,” a dictator, a place of authority. (Scheler [1926] 1980, 182; emphasis in original) Even though ressentiment took different forms in the early 1920s, the result was the same: namely, the need and call for a dictator. The strength of Scheler’s later political thought lies 37

Zachary Davis

in the concreteness of his analysis, examining the way in which the value reversal of ressentiment took hold of different aspects of political life. It also meant that concrete steps would need to be taken in order to remedy the growing political crisis.

5. Outlook Despite the growing political crises across Europe, Scheler ([1928] 1976, 153) argued that there was a unique opportunity for a type of “balancing” (Ausgleich) of opposing social and political forces, which would ease the explosive tensions.11 This balancing would require tremendous political will and a certain “cosmopolitan spirit” ([1926] 1980, 91) that would promote a great dialogue amongst leaders of different states and cultures.12 In direct contrast to his earlier work on the “genius of war” (1990, 94), Scheler defended the eternal idea of peace and attempted to show that the arc of history tends ultimately to peace and pacifism. He had hoped that a new metaphysical spirit would raise a spirit that embraced the “Sache” (1990, 54) of philosophy, science, the arts, and religion—a spirit that could empower a people to make possible a new future. This was Scheler’s way of remedying the psychic ills feeding the feeling of ressentiment in Weimar Germany. Scheler’s premature death prevented him from finishing his later politics and taking up his own call for greater political action. In 1928, the year of his death, Scheler accepted a position at the Frankfurt School and was looking forward to working with Max Horkheimer and the promising young Theodor Adorno. We are, unfortunately, left only to speculate what would have come from such conversations between the phenomenologists and critical theorists.13 Relatively little has been written directly on Scheler’s political thought.14 The nationalism expressed in his extensive wartime writings has most likely been a deterrent.15 Partly due to how deeply Scheler’s political thought is rooted in its cultural climate, Avé-Lallemant (1994, 160) argues that Scheler had not provided a grounding for a political theory but rather “an essential foundation for a political culture.” For this reason, much of Scheler’s political work has been used as a form of cultural critique, making use of his notion of ressentiment and other types of value reversals.16 However, with the rise of more authoritarian forms of governments threatening constitutional forms of democracy, Scheler’s political work addressing the call for a dictator in both Germany and Europe as a whole during the 1920s is all the more relevant and critical.

Notes 1 For the sake of consistency, all English translations of the original German are my own. 2 For a clear and precise introduction to Scheler’s value ethics, see Frings (1997). 3 For an analysis of Scheler’s critique of the modern idea of the love of humanity, see Davis (2022). 4 For an account of the role different phenomenological thinkers had in the war, see de Warren and Vongehr (2017). For an account other German professors supporting the war, see Hermann (1992). 5 Scheler makes reference to Ferdinand Tönnies and the analysis he made of the reduction of the community to society; see Tönnies 1887. 6 For a clear and concise treatment of Scheler’s descriptions of the various types of social units, see Ranly (1966). 7 In The Genius of War and the German War, Scheler also writes of the hegemony of Russia as a means to justify German aggression to the east ([1915] 1982, 108). 8 For a fuller treatment of Scheler’s changing political views over the course of his life, see Davis (2012).

38

Max Scheler 9 The interplay between life and spirit is one of the most contested topics in the secondary literature on Scheler. I offer a review of this debate and literature in my essay “Scheler and the Task of Human Loving” (Davis 2010). 10 For a more detailed analysis of Scheler’s notion of political indifference, see Davis (2009). 11 For a treatment of Scheler’s notion of Ausgleich, see Gaber (1994), Pöggeler (1994) and Kelly (2022). 12 For a treatment of Scheler’s notion of the ‘elite’ that he developed in his later political philosophy, see Schneider (1997). 13 In his work on Scheler’s sociology of knowledge, Barber (1993) does place Scheler into critical dialogue with later critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas. 14 The one main exception is Schneck’s (1987) work Person and Polis: Max Scheler’s Personalism as Political Theory. Yet Schneck does not follow Scheler’s political thought directly and attempts to develop a political approach rooted in Scheler’s notion of the person. 15 There are certainly exceptions, and some have chosen to address Scheler’s wartime writings directly. For instance, see Fetscher (1975), Gottlöber (2020), and De Monticelli (2022). 16 For instance, see Frings’s (1987) use of Scheler’s notion of capitalism in his Philosophy of Prediction and Capitalism and Pöggeler (1997).

References Avé-Lallemant, Eberhard. 1994. “Die Aktualität von Schelers Politischer Philosophie.” In Studien zur Philosophie von Max Scheler: Internationales Max-Scheler-Colloquium ‘Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs,’ Universität zu Köln 1993, edited by Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Gerhard Pfafferott, 116–63. Freiburg: Karl Alber. Barber, Michael. 1993. Guardian of Dialogue. Max Scheler’s Phenomenology, Sociology, and Love. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Butler, Joseph. 1827. “Sermon IX: Upon Resentment and Forgiveness of Injuries.” In Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel. Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown. http://anglicanhistory.org/butler/ rolls/. Davis, Zachary. 2009. “A Phenomenology of Political Apathy: Scheler on the Origins of Mass Violence.” Continental Philosophy Review 42: 149–69. ———. 2010. “Scheler and the Task of Human Loving.” In Phenomenology 2010, edited by Michael D. Barber, Lester Embree, and Thomas J. Nenon, 123–54. Bucharest: Zeta Books. ———. 2012. “The Values of War and Peace: Max Scheler’s Political Transformations.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue Canadienne de philosophie continentale 16 (2): 128–49. ———. 2022. “From Nationalism to Cosmopolitanism: Scheler’s Political Trajectory.” In Max Scheler in Dialogue, edited by Susan Gottlöber, 193–206. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. de Warren, Nicolas, and Thomas Vongehr, eds. 2017. Philosophers at the Front: Phenomenology and the First World War. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Fetscher, Iring. 1975. “Max Schelers Auffassung von Krieg und Frieden.” In Max Scheler im Gegenwartsgeschehen der Philosophie, edited by Paul Good, 241–57. Bern: Francke Verlag. Frings, Manfred S. 1987. Philosophy of Prediction and Capitalism. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1997. The Mind of Max Scheler. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Gaber, Michael. 1994. “Ausgleich als Verzicht: Schelers später Gedanke des Ausgleichs im Licht seines phänomenologischen Ansatzes.” In Studien zur Philosophie von Max Scheler: Internationales Max-Scheler-Colloquium ‘Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs,’ Universität zu Köln 1993, edited by Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Gerhard Pfafferott, 204–39. Freiburg: Karl Alber. Gottlöber, Susan. 2020. “Max Schelers Kriegsüberlegungen als Zivilisationskritik.” In Wurzeln der Technikphilosophie. Max Schelers Technik- und Zivilisationskritik in unterschiedlichen gesellschaftlichen Kontexten, edited by Stephan Fritz, Michael Gabel, and Zachary Davis, 165–83. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz. Hermann, Hans Peter. 1992. “German Professors and the Two World Wars.” In 1914/1939 German Reflections of the Two World Wars, edited by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, 154–74. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

39

Zachary Davis Kelly, Eugene. 2022. “Ausgleich and Allmensch in Confrontation with Contemporary Thought.” In Max Scheler in Dialogue, 207–20. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Mader, Wilhelm. 1995. Max Scheler in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Monticelli, Roberta. 2022. “Peace and War: Value Pluralism in the Light of Phenomenology.” In Max Scheler in Dialogue, edited by Susan Gottlöber, 239–59. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Pöggeler, Otto. 1994. “Ausgleich und anderer Anfang. Scheler und Heidegger.” In Studien zur Philosophie von Max Scheler: Internationales Max-Scheler-Colloquium ‘Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs’ Universität zu Köln 1993, edited by Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Gerhard Pfafferott, 166–203. Freiburg: Karl Alber. ———. 1997. “Ressentiment und Tugend bei Max Scheler.” In Vom Umsturz der Werte in der modernen Gesellschaft: II. Kolloquium der Max-Scheler-Gesellschaft, edited by Gerhard Pfafferott, 7–19. Bonn: Bouvier. Ranly, Ernest. 1966. Scheler’s Phenomenology of Community. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Scheler, Max. (1899) 1971. “Arbeit und Ethik.” In Frühe Schriften: Gesammelte Werke I, edited by Maria Scheler and Manfred S. Frings, 161–96. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1912) 1955. “Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen.” In Vom Umsturz der Werte: Gesammelte Werke III, edited by Maria Scheler, 33–148. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1913) 1980. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus: Gesammelte Werke II. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1915) 1982. “Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg.” In Politisch-Pädagogische Schriften: Gesammelte Werke IV, edited by Maria Scheler and Manfred S. Frings, 7–250. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1916) 1982. “Der Krieg als Gesamterlebnis.” In Politisch-Pädagogische Schriften: Gesammelte Werke IV, edited by Maria Scheler and Manfred S. Frings, 267–83. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1917) 1954. “Die christliche Liebesidee und die gegenwärtige Welt.” In Vom Ewigen im Menschen: Gesammelte Werke V, edited by Maria Scheler, 355–401. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1918) 1954. “Vom kulturellen Wiederaufbau Europas.” In Vom Ewigen im Menschen: Gesammelte Werke V, edited by Maria Scheler, 403–47. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1919) 1963. “Von zwei deutschen Krankheiten.” In Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre: Gesammelte Werke VI, edited by Maria Scheler, 204–20. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1926) 1980. Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft: Gesammelte Werke VIII, edited by Manfred S. Frings. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. (1928) 1976. “Philosophische Weltanschauung.” In Späte Schriften: Gesammelte Werke IX, edited by Maria Scheler and Manfred S. Frings, 73–182. Bern: Francke Verlag. ———. 1990. Schriften aus dem Nachlass, IV. Philosophie und Geschichte: Gesammelte Werke XIII. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. Bonn: Bouvier. Schneck, Stephen F. 1987. Person and Polis: Max Scheler’s Personalism as Political Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. Schneider, Gabriele. 1997. “ ‘Vorbilder’ in Max Schelers wertfundiertem Elitekonzept.” In Vom Umsturz der Werte in der modernen Gesellschaft: II. Kolloquium der Max-Scheler-Gesellschaft, edited by Gerhard Pfafferott, 180–202. Bonn: Bouvier. Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als Empirischer Culturformen. Leipzig: Fues. Verhey, Jeffrey. 2000. The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and the Mobilization of Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press.

40

3 MARTIN HEIDEGGER Destiny, Founding, and Being Richard Polt

1. Introduction Martin Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism will forever raise questions about the explicit and implicit political content of his thought. Much evidence has been published since his death in 1976, including lecture courses, seminar notes, private manuscripts, correspondence, and the journals known as the Black Notebooks. This material makes it more feasible to develop a balanced assessment of Heidegger’s life as a whole. (The best current biography is Payen 2023.) The evidence also illuminates his attraction to Nazism as well as his eventual critique of it. However, the philosophical questions cannot simply be settled by facts and evidence. Readers of Heidegger are permanently challenged to reflect on the meaning of his political ideas and to ask whether his core insights can be disentangled from his sympathy with a dictatorial and murderous regime. Reflection on his politics is essential to interpreting his thought. The phenomenological ontology of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) ([1927] 1953) is prima facie apolitical. Nevertheless, some readers detect an implicit hostility to liberal, democratic, and leftist approaches to politics in the pages of Heidegger’s main work. In this chapter, I make the case that the text’s concepts of being-with, destiny, and historicity describe the ontological basis for politics but remain too abstract to indicate a particular political direction. In the 1930s, Heidegger initially supports Nazism as a movement based on the particular historicity of Germany, in hopes that it can found a new form of existence. Serving as Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933–34, he presents the revolution as an opportunity for the German people to choose their own being. In his teaching during that year, he supports authoritarianism and the destruction of those designated as the internal enemies of the people. After his rectorate, Heidegger comes to see national destiny as a more difficult question. The founding of a people becomes a task for thinkers, poets, or even the impersonal “event” that grants a meaning of being. By the late 1930s, his journals portray Nazism as the ultimate form of modern machination and brutality, and racism as a manipulative reduction of collective destiny to objective facts. Yet he continues to “affirm” Nazism because it may bring about the collapse of modernity and clear the way for a new inception DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-6

41

Richard Polt

of being. His journals from this period and World War II include some hostile and stereotyped characterizations of “world Judaism.” After the war, Heidegger advocates awaiting a new inception rather than acting to bring it about. The very ideas of will and action are tainted by the subjectivist humanism of modernity, as is every contemporary political movement. Only the gift of a new meaning of being could offer an alternative. In all these phases, Heidegger’s thoughts arguably remain too divorced from concrete experience to offer political guidance. A more nuanced and phenomenologically sensitive description of action and community is required to appreciate the practice of politics and to distinguish better and worse approaches to the problems of the shared human world.

2.  Being and Time Being and Time was written during the turmoil of the Weimar Republic, when events challenged every citizen to take a political stance. There is no shortage of interpreters who take the book as a piece of crypto-rightist ideology that anticipates Heidegger’s explicit support for Nazism in the 30s (e.g., Altman 2012; Faye 2009; Fritsche 1999). Heidegger himself agreed with his former student Karl Löwith in 1936 that key concepts from Being and Time, existence and historicity, harmonized with his political engagement (Löwith 1994, 60; Heidegger and Löwith 2021, 165). We must ask, then, whether the book’s seemingly abstract analyses of human existence covertly imply a nationalist and authoritarian political view. It is, at least, clear that several themes in Being and Time are relevant to humans as political beings. First, being-there (Dasein) is always being-with (Mitsein) (Heidegger [1927] 1953, 118–25). My world constantly implies others, even if they are not currently on the scene. My habits are cultural, my language is dialogical, and the traditions to which I am indebted were developed by others. To grapple with my own existence is, at the same time, to address what it means to be a member of my community. According to Being and Time, meaning occurs only within a particular historical “world”—a weave of practices and purposes (Heidegger [1927] 1953, 83–88). Situated interpretation, which dwells in a world, underlies all “apophantic” (223) assertions and objective propositions. This view has affinities to culturally conservative critics of Enlightenment universalism, such as Herder and Burke. However, for Heidegger, our ordinary immersion in the world is “inauthentic”—it fails to grapple with the question of who we are (175–76). A radical crisis is required to provoke us to come to grips with the deeper meaning of our historically situated lives. This line of thought brings Heidegger into the ambit of so-called revolutionary conservatism. Being and Time’s account of historicity considers the shared happening of Dasein as a “people” (Volk) charged with discovering its destiny through “communication and struggle [Kampf]” (Heidegger [1927] 1953, 384). Some communal authenticity is possible: beingwith is not simply the anesthetized irresponsibility of das Man (the anonymous “they” or “anyone,” our everyday default identity) or the cultural background against which an individual develops. A genuine shared response to the question of who we are may emerge. We can speculate that such a response would not be fostered by liberal democracy; elections and guarantees of personal liberties do nothing but reproduce the chatter of the day and reinforce the illusion that a people is nothing but a sum of individuals. Primal truth

42

Martin Heidegger

does not emerge from democratic processes but from a moment of disclosive resoluteness, an intersection of past and possibility that reveals the present as a singular “situation” (Heidegger [1927] 1953, 299). It seems, then, that an individual must act decisively in order to rally the community to a new vision. If we combine Being and Time’s concepts of historicity and resoluteness with the ideas of choosing a hero (385) and “leaping ahead” (122), we can read the text as glorifying the idea of a charismatic popular leader. However, in my view, the analyses in Being and Time remain at a highly abstract and formal level. Their content can be filled in from various perspectives, even communism (Marcuse 2005). One can argue that any political movement, regardless of its ideology, must work with a community’s shared past to articulate some vision of its destiny. Being and Time claims that we must find possibilities to retrieve from our heritage, but it remains at the general level of ‘existential’ ontology, avoiding the particular ‘existentiell’ question of which possibilities to retrieve. At the same time, any response to this question remains vulnerable to anxiety, which senses the contingency of all orientations and movements (Heidegger [1927] 1953, 184–91). Thus, as Heidegger’s students quipped, “I am resolved, only towards what I don’t know” (Löwith 1994, 30). Rather than specifically promoting right-wing politics, Being and Time is devoid of political content. It proposes an ontological basis for political (and other) action, without specifying what that action ought to be.

3.  Heidegger in the Third Reich In the 1930s, Heidegger abandons the detached viewpoint of Being and Time and tries to act as a member of his own community at a particular historical juncture. His texts from the National Socialist period reflect both his initial support for Nazism and his later critiques of it as he leaps into a revolution and then passes through the political into the mysterious ‘event’ of being itself. By Heidegger’s own account, from 1930 to 1934, he believed National Socialism could be the harbinger of a new inception (2017a, 318)—an alternative to the entire traditional understanding of being and truth founded by the Greeks. The first draft of his lecture On the Essence of Truth (1930) is nationalistic: he links truthfulness to rootedness (Bodenständigkeit), including “natural connection to the soil, provenance from an ethnicity, and being woven into the landscape” (Heidegger 2016b, 338) as well as “saving the people and protecting the homeland” (339). In December 1931, he writes to his brother that Hitler “has an uncommon and sure political instinct” (Homolka and Heidegger 2016, 22). Clearly, Heidegger was one of the millions who welcomed Hitler in 1933 as the hero destined to rescue Germany from threats to its ethnic and territorial integrity by founding an authoritarian state. But he is set apart by the ontological concept of founding that runs through his thought in the 1930s. Not just a particular regime, but Dasein, truth, and being itself need a new inception. The seemingly transhistorical concept of Dasein’s existence in Being and Time now takes on a historical specificity: “Not all humans who are actual, were actual, or will be actual do ‘exist,’ have existed, or will exist—in the sense [in which] we understand existence” (Heidegger [1932] 2015, 64). Dasein is no longer the human condition in general but a possible transformation of the human (Heidegger 2018, 22, 56–57, 74, 100; Polt 2020). These notions give Heidegger’s political reflections a distinctive ontological pathos: in the question of founding, the destiny of our being and the meaning of being itself are at stake.

43

Richard Polt

In May 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party and became rector of the University of Freiburg. One of his notable acts was to implement a government order that faculty complete a questionnaire about their family background (Denker and Zaborowski 2009, 13, 17). “Non-Aryans” would be fired (Heidegger 2000, 84–85) with few exceptions (91–92); Heidegger himself argued against the dismissal of two Jewish colleagues (140–41, 144–46). He faced opposition from faculty who resisted alignment with the new regime, student groups who wanted a still more radical Nazism, and Berlin officials who found his ideas too idiosyncratic. In April 1934, he resigned and returned to the faculty. Heidegger’s inaugural address as rector is the most famous of his political texts. By taking its place in the new order, the university is performing an act of “self-assertion” (Heidegger 2009, 109). The academy as a place for “knowledge service” will harmonize with “labor service” and “military service” to empower the German spirit (114). Otherwise, “the spiritual strength of the West” will fail and our “illusory culture [will] suffocate in madness” (116). He declares that a new inception “has invaded our future” (111), but he is vague about its content. According to his own report, his speech was criticized by a government minister for its non-racist, “private National Socialism” (Heidegger 2000, 381). For the duration of the Third Reich, he was viewed with suspicion by elements of the regime that did not trust his peculiar version of Nazism (Zaborowski 2010, 552–601). Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks, ranging from the 1930s to the 1970s, comment on contemporary developments from the point of view of his history of being. The entries from his rectorate are ambiguous and abstract. He worries that he is “acting for the first time against my innermost voice” but tells himself that “the Führer [gives] our thinking the correct course and impetus”; we must be “relentless in the hard goal” (Heidegger 2016a, 81). He is unwilling, however, to articulate this goal in terms of prevalent slogans: “National Socialism [is] not a ready-made eternal truth come down from heaven—taken in that way, it is an aberration and foolishness” (84). The ascendant ideology is “a confused worldview” based on “the most problematic means of the nineteenth century” (94), such as “a dismal biologism” (105). This is just “cheap dogmatics” and “semblant philosophy” (95), “merely a Marxism set on its head” (116). Instead, he seeks a “metapolitics” (85) that places politics in the perspective of being. Metapolitics would expand “the metaphysics of Dasein” (91) into a confrontation with the historical meaning of the German people, in accordance with “a transformation of being” that grips “the will of the leader” (92). (For more on metapolitics, see 2022, 172–78.) At the end of his rectorate, he bitterly vows to “remain in the invisible front of the secret spiritual Germany” (Heidegger 2016a, 114). Heidegger’s political theory in 1933–34 is articulated most directly in his seminar “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State,” which survives as student protocols (2013). He argues that a people can attain its full being only through its state, which is to be ruled absolutely by the leader’s will. The state is not just grounded in the people’s being (Heidegger 2013, 46) but is the people’s being (46, 53, 57). Just as individuals care about their own being, the people loves its state and its constitution, which is a sign of “what we take to be our historical task as a people” (48). A born leader needs no political education but ought to be supported by a “band of guardians.” He not only understands but actually “brings about” what the people and the state are (45). There is no room for debate and disagreement in Heidegger’s complex of people, state, and leader. “Only where the leader and the led bind themselves together to one fate and fight to actualize one idea does true order arise” (49). He envisions “a deep dedication of all forces to the people, the state. . . . [T]he existence and superiority of the leader sinks into the Being, the soul of the 44

Martin Heidegger

people” (49). In this whole, which recalls “the medieval order of life,” citizens are ready for sacrifice to defeat “death and the devil—that is, ruination and decline from their own essence” (49). Education at all levels “is nothing but the implementation of the will of the leader and the will of the state, that is, of the people” (63). A bond to the Volk “creates the highest freedom, whereas lack of commitment is negative freedom. One has sometimes understood political freedom in this latter sense, and thus misunderstood it” (63). The same seminar develops two aspects of the space of a people: homeland and territory. The first calls for standing steadfast and rooted in the soil. But there is another impulse that pushes into “the wider expanse” (Heidegger 2013, 55). Only when rootedness is supplemented by “interaction” does a people come into its own (55). Germans who live outside the boundary of the Reich cannot participate in the extended territory of interaction. If the state is the very being of the people, these groups are “deprived of their authentic way of Being” (56). Heidegger contrasts a rooted people to a nomadic people that not only comes from deserts but also devastates every place it goes; “Semitic nomads” may never understand the character of “our German space” (56). In his 1933–34 lectures On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger claims we must “draw on the fundamental possibilities of the proto-Germanic ethnic essence and . . . bring these to mastery” ([1933–1934] 2010, 71). Germany must creatively appropriate the Greek inception; here Heraclitus’ fragment 53, which describes “war” (polemos) as the “father and king of all,” is decisive (compare Fried 2000). In a chilling passage, Heidegger describes polemos in terms of enmity: The external enemy is not even always the more dangerous one. And it can seem as if there were no enemy. Then it is a fundamental requirement to find the enemy . . . or even first to make the enemy, so that this standing against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may not lose its edge. The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against it. [The task is] to prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of total annihilation. (Heidegger [1933–1934] 2010, 73) Heidegger rejects abstract, eternal, Platonist values: “In the Enlightenment and in liberalism, [Platonism] achieves a definite form. Here all of the powers against which we must struggle today have their root. Opposed to this conception are the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings” ([1933–1934] 2010, 129). He also attacks racist writer Erwin Kolbenheyer. Biologism is no different from “the psychoanalysis of Freud and his ilk” or Marxism: the spiritual is reduced to a function of the subspiritual (162). Biology can never explain “the decision for a particular will to be and fate” (160). The human being “is not indifferent to its own mode and possibility of Being” (163), so the question is not what we are, but who we are. This is the “condition of possibility of the political essence of man” (220). The lecture course Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language again criticizes biologism (Heidegger [1934] 2009, 53–54, 57) and insists that a people need a state that establishes an order of rank (137), rather than a liberal society grounded on a social contract (119). Every citizen is challenged to affirm the will of a state that wills that the people become its own master (50). No one can know with certainty whether others have made this choice, but our individual wills can secretly coincide (51–52). What 45

Richard Polt

is absent from Heidegger’s concept of popular will is a public space where citizens might debate and modify their decisions. Heidegger’s first course on Hölderlin (1934–35) turns to poetry in search of the elusive German essence and the enigma of the fatherland. “Who are we?” must remain a question “throughout our entire short lifetime” (Heidegger [1934–35] 2014, 55). The poet is to found a people’s relation to being by withstanding the divine lightning and bringing it into words. This esoteric mission has nothing to do with “patriotism full of noise” (108) and “the needs of the day” (4). Still, one can read these lectures as a purified Nazism: reclaiming our “endowment” (265), we will confront the “Asiatic” (118, 158), inciting the Volk to will “to be itself” (126) in a time of “threat to our spiritual and historical Dasein” (103) when “the West [is] hovering at the edge of the abyss” (202). The 1934–35 seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right claims the people comes to itself in the will of a true leader (Heidegger 2014, 182) and reaffirm historicity, as opposed to an eternity that is “equal to itself—calm—present—sated with the past—futureless essence!” (143). Heidegger also rejects Carl Schmitt’s theory that the essence of politics is the friendenemy relation: the “self-assertion” of a people’s being is more fundamental (609, 655). The 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics displays Heidegger’s increasingly desperate hopes for a German awakening as well as his growing disillusionment with actual Nazi policies. Philosophy cannot contribute directly to politics (Heidegger [1935] 2014, 11): the thinker and the statesman are distinct (68, 170). But philosophy can initiate a creative reconception of the basis of politics and the sense of human existence. We have forgotten the roots of our understanding of being in the Greek conception of emergent presencing (physis). Physis is polemical: a world opens only through confrontation (67–68), and we are called to participate in the struggle between being and nonbeing, truth and semblance. This is also a struggle over who we are (156). Humanity is “the site . . . that being necessitates for its opening up” (228). We are the ‘there’ for the happening of being, but this ‘there’ needs founding. The founders do not inhabit the accustomed realm of sense but create the polis as “the site, the there” for historical Dasein (170). Germany is caught between Russia and America, which are unaware of the historicity of the ‘there’ and enslaved to the “demonism” of technological calculation (51). Although the term ‘National Socialism’ appears only once, Heidegger often implicitly attacks Nazism as it stands, in the name of its “inner truth and greatness” (222). Various elements of Nazi ideology are shallow: the celebration of body over spirit (52), the “time of the We” (77), and “value philosophy” (222). Nazi initiatives are also superficial: purges of the academy (53), language reforms (56), and changes in school curricula (58). The manuscript Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38) delves into das Ereignis—the appropriating event of the “grounding of the ‘there’ ” (Heidegger 2012, 59, 144, 195). This unique founding would not be a human creation but would initiate us into genuine selfhood and “the domain of what is proper” (253). This emphasis on belonging gives Ereignis a slant to the right—but this belonging is not grounded in a fixed identity. Absence, departure, denial, and longing point more genuinely to our selfhood than any ascertainable, present-at-hand characteristics. Sense and self hover over an “abyssal ground” (299). Heidegger diagnoses complacent self-certainty as the fatal trait of his time. The self-assured subject willfully plans and manipulates the world, turning itself into the center of all sense. The predominant racial ideology is nothing but “biological liberalism” (43), and Marxism is an equally thoughtless outgrowth of Judeo-Christian egalitarianism (44). All these ideologies posit humanity “as already known in essence” (22). The Volk is never an end in 46

Martin Heidegger

itself (109); its highest goal is not to maintain itself as one entity among others but to watch over the truth of being (321). The Black Notebooks offer many telling comments on ideas and events during the Nazi regime. Most notoriously, several passages express hostility to “world Judaism.” For some critics, these texts leave Heidegger’s philosophical standing in “ruins” (Wolin 2023). However, they also develop a critique of Nazi ideology. Heidegger comes to see Nazism and its ‘machination’ and ‘brutality’ as an Unwesen or ‘distorted essence’ that he affirms despite its negativity, for “one who encounters the distorted essence only negatively will also not ever be equal to the essence” (2017a, 3). According to a crucial entry from the late 30s, from 1930 to 1934, Heidegger believed Nazism could bring about a new inception. He now admits that he misunderstood the movement, but it cannot be rejected because it represents the consummation of modern selfcertain rationalism (Heidegger 2017a, 318–19). As the ultimate form of modernity, Nazism can bring about a salutary collapse and make a new inception possible. Such a downfall is “the highest testimony to, and history of, the uniqueness of beyng [Seyn]” (315). Nazism is the clearest expression of machination, brutality, and criminality. These are not ethical or political concepts but descriptions of how entities are revealed in late modernity. They are inspired, in part, by Ernst Jünger’s The Worker (1932), a quasi-Nietzschean vision of a world of ‘total mobilization’ empowering a new form of subjectivity. Heidegger (2009, 189–206) takes Jünger to have painted a strikingly accurate picture of the metaphysics of the contemporary world without grasping its deeper sources. ‘Machination’ is a manipulative understanding of beings as such so they appear as objects to be calculated, controlled, and transformed. Humanity becomes an agent for the machinational understanding of what is; “all become [its] slaves” (Heidegger 2017b, 110). Nazism, as “the machinational organization of the people,” is essentially technological, so it can never freely command technology itself (Heidegger 2016a, 342). “Those who want to breed the people ‘biologically’ ” (266) are carrying out an “animalization and mechanization of the people” (163). This program is “a consequence of the machinational power which must subjugate beings, in all their domains, to planning and calculation” (Heidegger 2017b, 44). “All glorification of ‘blood’ [is] a facade and a pretext” (Heidegger 2017a, 298) to distract the masses from the sovereignty of destructive machination. ‘Brutality’ means that while modern humanity develops logical calculation to its extreme, it indulges its bestial impulses. “To the consummation of machination in being, there corresponds and must correspond the unconditional brutalitas of humanity” (Heidegger 2017a, 313). “The mark of the reality of everything real at the end of metaphysics is the capacity for brutalitas” (Heidegger 2017b, 201). “The predatory animal endowed with the means of highest technology—completes the actualization of the brutalitas of being” (Heidegger 2017a, 310). ‘Criminality’ is the devastation of everything into what is broken. The broken is broken off from the inception and dispersed into the domain of the breakable. Here, there remains only one possibility of being—in the mode of order. Ordering is only the counterpart of criminality. (Heidegger 2017b, 211, trans. modified) The human will tries to structure the devastated, fragmented world. 47

Richard Polt

Because these phenomena are inextricable from modernity, critiques of dictatorship from modern points of view are misguided. Democracy is “a barricade that can delay but is incapable of stopping the essential consummation of modernity”; it lacks “the courage for the unfolded essence and for the extreme essential consequences” (Heidegger 2017a, 317). Totalitarian systems are “effective forms of machination,” and dictators are “the executors of the consummation of modernity” who bring modernity “to its highest essence” (317). Dictatorships are “the dictatum of that essence of being from which modern humans cannot withdraw, because in order to become themselves they must affirm that essence, even in all its essential consequences” (336). Heidegger’s “affirmation” of Nazism is thus a sort of fatalism: “The new politics is an inner essential consequence of ‘technology’. . . . [T]his birth of the new politics from the essence of technology . . . is necessary, and thus is not the possible object of a shortsighted ‘opposition’ ” (2016a, 342–43). The Black Notebooks’ comments on Jews and Judaism arise within this bleak vision of the present age. They are mostly directed against a supposed powerful, global Jewish elite and the Judeo-Christian worldview. The paradox of a “world Judaism” that is worldless (Heidegger 2017a, 75–76) is not hard to explain: a cosmopolitan, global entity is precisely what lacks a Heideggerian ‘world,’ a historically grounded unity of senses and purposes. These passages echo the familiar right-wing canard that Jews are devoid of roots. Heidegger refers to Judaism’s power and calculation (Heidegger 2017b, 46), its exploitation of both pacifism and bellicosity (133), and its “uprooting of all beings from being” (191). He speaks of a Judaism that “cannot be held fast” and avoids having to fight while the Germans must sacrifice (208)—although one should note that this is an item in a list of “ ‘facts’ [which] are always only half true and therefore are erroneous” (207). He compares Nazis to Jews, often appearing to be hostile to both, in references to sociology (2017a, 161); anti-Cartesianism (168); psychoanalysis (2017a, 258, 2017b, 218); cultural politics (2017a, 326); racism (56); and Barmat and Kutisker, Jewish swindlers denounced by Nazis in the 1920s (2017b, 234). Although Heidegger wrote little in the Black Notebooks during the Second World War, there is an important reference to Nazi antisemitism. When what is “Jewish” in the metaphysical sense combats what is Jewish, the high point of self-annihilation in history has been attained—supposing that the “Jewish” has everywhere completely seized mastery, so that even the fight against “the Jewish,” and it above all, becomes subject to it. (Heidegger 2015, 20) The passage seems to blame the Jews for their own destruction but also says that Nazis are unwittingly lashing out against their own ideological source: they fight against all that is “Jewish” without understanding their own “Jewish” (machinational) mentality.

4.  Heidegger’s Post-Political Thinking Beginning in the late 30s, Heidegger turns away from decision, action, founding, and the political sphere in general. He comes to see power as the contemporary sense of being (Heidegger [1938–39] 2006, 160–61). The so-called possessors of power cannot get power within their grasp—instead, power possesses us. We must find “that which is in no need of power” (Heidegger [1938–1940] 2015, 60). 48

Martin Heidegger

Dialogues composed in the final phase of the war suggest that will itself may be evil (Heidegger [1944–45] 2010, 134). Heidegger turns to “pure waiting” (140) or “releasement”—not a human act or attitude, but the fact that humanity primordially belongs to, or is let into, the region of truth (79). The Black Notebooks from the late 1940s refer to “the reign of terror of the bygone system” (Heidegger 2015, 84), “the massive brutality of ahistorical ‘National Socialism’ ” (87), and “the criminal madness of Hitler” (444). “ ‘National Socialism’ very quickly and inexorably became one of the aberrations into criminality” (200–201), as evidenced by “the atrocious business of the ‘gas chambers’ ” (99). “In ‘National Socialism,’ i.e. in the wretched aberration of its essence, ‘the spirit’ was simply despised” (209). Heidegger also rejects “ ‘antisemitism,’ which is as foolish and despicable as Christianity’s bloody and, above all, non-bloody attacks on ‘heathens’ ” (159). However, his attitude in this period is never contrite, but rather indignant and bitter. He pushes back against the talk of German guilt, rejecting calls for morality and justice as nothing but the spirit of revenge (64, 99, 117, 129, 134–35, 146–47). All his comments on the Nazis are embedded in denunciations of postwar developments, which he often portrays as worse than Nazism. A rare public expression of these views compares “the production of corpses” in death camps to nuclear bombs and mechanized agriculture (Heidegger [1949, 1957] 2012, 27). Heidegger continues to see Nazism as an instance of technological modernity, which continues to threaten the Earth. Heidegger awaits a new dispensation that can come only from being itself. He advocates a pastoral “dwelling” that claims to be the true “ethics” but is essentially contemplative (1998, 271–72). As he puts it in an interview in 1966, “Only a god can still save us” (2009, 326).

5. Outlook Heidegger’s radical perspectives on politics have a dramatic power that has attracted admirers on both left and right. After his enthusiasm for Nazism as a new rootedness, he includes it in his sweeping diagnosis of all modern forms of social organization and ideologies: they express a manipulative subjectivism that is locked into an exploitative understanding of being. Ultimately, the only hope for salvation is meditative, poetic patience. Whatever their merits may be, the very breadth and generality of Heidegger’s views prevent him from engaging with concrete political problems and making significant distinctions. He demonstrates the typical philosopher’s thirst for essence at the expense of facts. The metaphysics of power as the basis of Nazi ideology gets many pages of discussion, but most specific Nazi actions go without comment. Heidegger dismisses particular facts as superficial scum (2017a, 75) or a frayed semblance of genuine history (2017b, 198). His hostility toward the empirical also excludes any feeling for victims of war and tyranny. He laments “the annihilation of the human essence” ([1944–45] 2010, 133) but fails to face the “total annihilation” ([1933–1934] 2010, 73) of particular human beings that he himself had legitimated in 1933. His interpretation of the Shoah as a form of machination lacks empathy and abandons moral judgment. For these reasons, Heidegger does not offer (or claim to offer) any guidance for specific political choices or, in his late thoughts, any grounds to prefer one regime over another. One could say that he is too ontological to be genuinely political or to carry out a sufficiently sensitive phenomenology of politics. 49

Richard Polt

From an Arendtian point of view, one can argue that Heidegger focuses too much on the work of founding a political space and does not do justice to the political action that would happen in that space. Such action is essentially plural and open ended (Polt 2019, 190–95). In a climate of growing neo-fascism, one may well want to dismiss a philosopher who never adequately confronted his own Nazism. All the same, Being and Time’s insights into human sociality and the need to ask about individual and collective selfhood remain valid and should contribute to our reflections on political existence. Even Heidegger’s work of the 1930s offers suggestive proposals on collective transformation and revolution. Retrieving politics after Heidegger means resisting his mythmaking tendencies and his unempathetic detachment and drawing selectively on his best insights to develop better concepts of community, decision, and initiative.

References Altman, William. 2012. Martin Heidegger and the First World War: “Being and Time” as Funeral Oration. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Denker, Alfred, and Holger Zaborowski, eds. 2009. Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus I: Dokumente. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4. Freiburg: Karl Alber. Faye, Emmanuel. 2009. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fried, Gregory. 2000. Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fritsche, Johannes. 1999. Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1953. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. (1932) 2015. The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1933–34) 2010. Being and Truth. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1934) 2009. Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language. Translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. (1934–35) 2014. Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine”. Translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1935) 2014. Introduction to Metaphysics. 2nd ed. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. (1936–38) 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1938–39) 2006. Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum. ———. (1938–40) 2015. The History of Beyng. Translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1944–45) 2010. Country Path Conversations. Translated by Bret Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1949, 1957) 2012. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into that Which is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Translated by Andrew Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (1910–1976). Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 16. Edited by Hermann Heidegger. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2009. The Heidegger Reader. Edited by Günter Figal. Translated by Jerome Veith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. Nature, History, State: 1933–1934. Translated and edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. London: Bloomsbury.

50

Martin Heidegger ———. 2014. On Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”: The 1934–35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays. Edited by Peter Trawny, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, and Michael Marder. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2015. Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948). Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 97. Edited by Peter Trawny. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2016a. Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2016b. Vorträge 1915 bis 1932. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 80.1. Edited by Günther Neumann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2017a. Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017b. Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2018. Zu eigenen Veröffentlichungen. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 82. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2022. Ergänzungen und Denksplitter. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 92. Edited by Mark Michalski. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———, and Karl Löwith. 2021. Correspondence: 1919–1973. Translated by J. Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Homolka, Walter, and Arnulf Heidegger, eds. 2016. Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen im Widerstreit. Freiburg: Herder. Löwith, Karl. 1994. My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report. Translated by Elizabeth King. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 2005. Heideggerian Marxism. Edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Payen, Guillaume. 2023. Martin Heidegger’s Changing Destinies: Catholicism, Revolution, Nazism. Translated by Jane Marie Todd and Steven Rendall. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Polt, Richard. 2019. Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties. London: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2020. “A Running Leap into the There: Heidegger’s Running Notes on ‘Being and Time’.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 41 (1): 55–71. Wolin, Richard. 2023. Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zaborowski, Holger. 2010. “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?”: Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

51

4 CONTEXT Community, State, and Law in Times of Crisis Michael Gubser

1. Introduction Phenomenology emerged in a Europe in crisis. Introduced in 1901 by Edmund Husserl, the new philosophy spread in the years straddling World War I, attracting students determined to escape the prevalent neo-Kantian idealism and grapple with the “real reality” (ConradMartius 1965, 397) of the modern world. By the 1930s, as depression and fascism swept the continent, phenomenologists faced the collapse of the social and academic milieu that had nurtured their successes. While some, including Husserl, withdrew into deeper philosophical labors, others tapped phenomenological insights for anti-fascist purposes. Still others, most famously Heidegger, embraced Nazism, even if only temporarily. Thus, if phenomenology did not yield uniform political premises, Europe’s interwar traumas nonetheless revealed that it had become an active and widespread social philosophy. Despite these engagements, phenomenology’s status as a political philosophy, the focus of this volume, is less clear. This is partly because many phenomenologists blurred the distinction between political and social thought, examining themes—such as empathy, morality, or community—that fall outside the traditional boundaries of political philosophy but nonetheless have political implications. While theorists such as Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt explicitly distinguished the political from the social and ethical realms, others— including those I consider in this chapter—tended to blend these fields, seeing in the latter the source of ideas that should or did influence the former. Ethics and politics, as I have argued elsewhere, are both worldly in that they regulate affairs among people: politics concerns the organization of power and ethics the evaluation of right and wrong, of values (Gubser 2014). It is precisely the severance of the two that phenomenological social thinkers rejected since doing so denied a mutual interdependence widely felt in daily human affairs. This severance, of course, is typical of liberal thought, which privatizes ethics and publicizes power. For interwar phenomenological social theorists, who saw in liberalism the root of later totalitarian excesses, this separation led to a dangerous void of public accountability. The quintessential move of the phenomenologists examined here was thus to embed politics in the wider spheres of social and moral life, broadening what counted as political by considering the ethical freight of public actions. In this effort, they tended to embrace Max Scheler’s concept of objective moral values, which he believed were available 52

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-7

Context

to phenomenological insight (Scheler 1973). For Scheler (1972, 2008), awareness of these values led naturally to social critique: Modern liberal society exhibited a perverse preference for base material values over higher ethical ones, leading to inequality, mistrust, and social instability. If this recourse to objective values held the potential to trump democratic debate, it could also, especially in totalitarian systems, provide a powerful lever for dissent and resistance against regimes that attempted to monopolize not just the political but also the social and ethical realms. Here interwar phenomenologist engagés anticipated later dissidents in communist Eastern Europe, who would also tap phenomenology to mount campaigns against their regimes. Václav Havel (1983, 119), for example, who described himself as imbibing the “atmosphere” of existentialism and phenomenology, rooted his dissent in a pre-political realm of ethical and existential commitments to truth and authenticity. The interwar thinkers considered in this chapter, while not denying the importance of the ­quintessentially political realms of governance and public engagement, also insisted that political action had to be grounded in ethical conviction. If this could be seen as anti-political—a term Havel made famous—it could also have deeply political ramifications in a century that confronted several totalitarian threats. Further, while the strong distinction between the political, the social, and the ethical is analytically useful, it can be historically misleading: An ethics-based politics, common among religious thinkers, including the Catholic phenomenologists considered in this chapter, profoundly shaped not just 20th-century anti-totalitarianism but also postwar Europeanism, human rights, and liberation theology. In this regard, understanding the political landscape of the past century requires a capacious recognition of the ways that political, ethical, and existential concerns interpenetrated. The thinkers we examine here illustrate one episode in this history.

2.  Adolf Reinach The year 1913, which saw the publications of Max Scheler’s books on ethics and sympathy, marked the coming out of phenomenology as a social philosophy. Less well-known but also important was Adolf Reinach’s essay “The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law,” published in Husserl’s house journal, the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. One of Husserl’s earliest protégés, Reinach can, with Scheler, be credited with pioneering the phenomenology of the social realm. Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and many others called him their true mentor, a lucid speaker and warm personality compared to the aloof Husserl. Reinach’s 1913 essay posited a new kind of act—the “social act” (1983, 21)— which some commentators see as a precursor to Austin’s and Searle’s speech acts (see, for example, Schuhmann 2002). “[P]erformed in the very act of speaking” (Reinach 1983, 36), social acts have to be heeded by another person in order to be complete. They are therefore distinct from intellectual or emotional acts that might occur in solitude, and their intended goals differ from the intentional objects of Husserl’s early logic, such as mathematical truths, which are fixed and eternal. Instead, the correlates of commands—an exemplary social act—are not timeless objects but temporary obligations established in the act of commanding and fulfilled in the act of obeying. The act of promising also generated obligations that, once discharged, ceased to exist. These obligations, however, were no less real for their evanescence. Claim and obligation, then, were “structures . . . in time” that “derive[d] from . . . social acts” (109)—real states of affairs existing in the world that came and went as a result of human acts and demanded a moral response. 53

Michael Gubser

These transient essences formed the basis of Reinach’s theory of a priori right [Recht], which laid out essential relations—such as that between claim and obligation—that formed the pre-legal basis for civil laws. A priori right, Reinach (1983, 139) explained, was “independent of human knowledge, independent of the organization of human nature, and above all independent of the factual development of the world”—including actual law codes, which did not always reflect the right. One might explain this as follows: For promises or commands to preempt the ebb and flow of social interactions, they must generate obligations that have some kind of necessary (even if only temporary) force. Reinach distinguished the realm of right from that of morality. While both impose demands, they are separate fields that require phenomenological distinction. (His two-part essay “Die Überlegung” [1912, 1913] made a related distinction between intellectual and ethical deliberation.) Thus, one can promise to commit an immoral act, establishing one sort of obligation while betraying another. When the two conflict, Reinach (1983, 44–45) argued, one should fulfill the higher demand, even if it means violating a prior obligation. The point is significant: In an impure moral world, the fulfillment of one duty may violate another. While we must defer to higher goods, they do not cancel the lower. It is easy to imagine cases in which the fulfillment of a moral imperative—the saving of a life, for example—might necessitate violating a lesser obligation, such as a prior promise of secrecy, even though that lesser violation still constitutes an unfortunate infraction. A similar reconciliation might be made for Reinach’s political views. At the risk of smoothing contradictions and ambiguities in his unfinished philosophy, we might summarize his position as follows: While state law codes often do not reflect a priori right, they ought to nod insofar as possible toward an ideal polity that strives to promote fruitful social relations. Reinach was killed in World War I  before he could develop the political implications of this theory. While one might imagine that his a priori rights could be used as benchmarks for evaluating the sufficiency of actual legal systems, it is not entirely clear how this would be done. How can law codes appropriately recognize and promote essential obligations while acknowledging the difficulty of translating a priori right into legal practice? It is not clear that Reinach himself would have taken up this task of elucidation. In his last w ­ ritings—letters from the front to his wife—he sketched out an aspirational project for a phenomenology of religion. Yet if Reinach—a Jewish-born Lutheran convert—died ­dreaming of a new spirituality, other phenomenologists moved in the opposite direction, toward the urgent consideration of society and politics that he helped inspire.

3.  Edith Stein Edith Stein, in fact, did both together—a religious and a political turn. Reinach’s letters, along with related project fragments, eventually came to his students, and Stein was particularly moved by their piety. By her account, Reinach’s “experience of God,” coupled with her own 1921 reading of Teresa of Avila, spurred her on the path toward religious conversion (quoted in Conrad-Martius, 1921, XXXVII). One of Nazism’s most renowned victims, Stein was born Jewish, lost her faith as a teenager, studied in Göttingen under Husserl and Reinach, converted to Catholicism in 1922, took the habit a decade later, and was ultimately slain as a Jew in Auschwitz in 1942. Pope John Paul II canonized her as St. Teresa Benedicta in 1988. Stein shared with her Göttingen cohort a belief that phenomenology was a worldly enterprise, and her early work built outward from a theory of interpersonal understanding 54

Context

to a theory of community and the state. Her 1916 dissertation on empathy marked the initial stage of her social thought. She encountered the theme of empathy—the recognition of another as a conscious subject—on numerous occasions in the phenomenological literature: in the Munich philosopher Theodor Lipps’s writings as well as in Husserl’s early flirtation with Lipps’s model; in Adolf Reinach’s 1913 seminar, Einleitung in die Philosophie; and in Scheler’s prewar book on sympathy. Yet the experience of empathy, she felt, was still ill explained. Stein (1989a) tried to clarify it with a two-sided account: Empathy was “primordial as present experience” yet “non-primordial in content” (10). In other words, in affirming other people as independent subjects, empathy was immediate and assured, but their thoughts and feelings could not be directly known. Stein insisted that “empathy was not a feeling of oneness” (17); instead, the pure I remained an indissoluble “zero point of orientation” (43) that one could not simply trade for another perspective. Accordingly, the spiritual person, who joined together a soul or “conscious unity of an ‘I’ ” with a physical “living body” (56), became the centerpiece of her ensuing thought. Yet Stein’s subject was not solipsistic; its worldliness was secured by empathetic experience, which allowed one to recognize others as separate and distinct beings. Moreover, in offering reflective selfawareness through the eyes of others, empathy grounded a unified sense of self based on particular qualities and values. A fully functioning person was oriented toward both other people and objective external values. If the theory of empathy did not yet address overtly political themes, it did provide a grounding for later claims about the interpersonal nature of community. Three years later, in an ill-starred Habilitationsschrift, Stein moved closer to a political philosophy by building a complex model of the relation between individual and community. Adopting Ferdinand Tönnies’s famous sociological dyad, she examined the person-toperson interactions presumed in communities (Gemeinschaften) and associations (Gesellschaften). Community, she proposed, entailed solidarity among its members, the recognition of mutual spiritual persons engaged in a common purpose and oriented toward shared ­values. Stein maintained that true community rested on a joint experience and affective links that bound together neighbors and friends who nonetheless still maintained their individuality. Yet this communal sense was not merely an aggregate of individual experiences but a meaningful whole in which each member participated, sharing common motivations and a manifold but unified life. Community members encouraged each other to spiritual growth and ethical achievement, leading to a common purpose and “collective experiencing” (Stein 1989b, 187). In Gesellschaften, by contrast, individuals treated each other as objects or instruments used in the pursuit of individual goals. In reality, of course, the types mixed; associational interaction could not exist without a modicum of communal trust, and communities needed some instrumental routine. Yet the distinction was crucial. Communities nurtured active, thinking leaders who could spearhead ethical and spiritual growth; associations yielded managers (at best) or demagogues (at worst). In proper Gemeinschaften, leaders emerged from interaction with others by channeling the energy of communities. They not only generated ideas but also helped direct the communal “lifepower” that stirred residents to act, “coalesc[ing] from the power of single [members]” (Stein 1989b, 203) and emboldening everyone toward higher aspiration. While this could sound like a Platonic model of the polis, Stein emphasized the empathetic openness to neighbors, rather than an ascetic contemplation of ideals. As she later put it: “[C]ommunal life subsists” when “individuals are ‘open’ to one another” and “attitudes of one don’t bounce off the other” (214). In addition to reciprocity, persons, 55

Michael Gubser

and hence interpersonal communities, were “value-tropic”—they tended or grew toward shared values. “[W]e see what the person is,” Stein explained, “when we see which world of value she lives in, which values she is responsive to, and what achievements she may be creating” (226–27). She called the person’s durable core a soul, which “took up the world into itself” (230) and expressed one’s axiological uniqueness. “Having a soul means carrying your being’s center of gravity inside of yourself” (275), she wrote, even as the individual spirit moved outward to other subjects, joining together in a value-laden community. Communal integration, in other words, did not abolish the individuality of its members. Yet in order to maintain both positions, Stein had to assume a harmony between the cultivation of individual personalities and their membership in communities of value—perhaps along the lines, given her burgeoning spirituality, of religious communities. In her most overtly political essay, a 1925 contribution to Husserl’s Jahrbuch, Stein (2006, 10) examined the institution of the state, whose essential property she identified as sovereignty: All state “actions and laws,” she wrote, “originate from itself and not from any community standing under, beside, or above it”—a curious claim for someone who celebrated integral community. Yet state sovereignty, she noted, was rooted in its essential purpose: legislating and governing in ways that perpetuated the values of the whole. In an ideal sense, this implied a dissipation of politics into the mere administration of values determined by the community. But given the constant misalignment between actual and ideal politics (also implied in Reinach’s distinction between a priori right and actual law codes), worldly politics took the form of an ongoing struggle to bring state policies closer to societal values. While Stein acknowledged that states were generally dominated by elites— the need for political, military, legal, and cultural executors was particularly evident in her discussion of social hierarchy, where she allowed for the possibility of a class of Platonic state guardians—she also maintained that governments were to serve as “carriers” of the life of the community, not autocrats imposed upon it (32). Lawmaking and governance, while emanating from the political realm, were Reinachian social acts that required “the recognition of those to whom the claim is directed in order to become ‘legally binding’ ” (50). Accordingly, laws obligated both citizen and state—a characteristic later exploited by East European dissident organizations such as Charter 77, which called on communist authorities to adhere to the laws they had articulated. Stein also distinguished the state from the individual executives who acted in its name. Just as Reinach’s pure law formed a legal a priori to which worldly law ought to refer to some degree, Stein’s state made claims on its subjects that bound individual leaders as well. In principle, this construction hedged worldly authority in two ways. First, while law codes may vary in time and place, legislators were supposed to honor a pure law, “the same in all times and with all peoples.” (Stein 2006, 39). This might be interpreted either in a Schelerian sense of honoring objective values of right and good or in a formal Reinachian sense of accepting that ethical claims entail obligations. In either case—and both were crucial for Stein—the legitimacy of civic statutes (or positive law) owed something to concurrence with the essential rules of right and wrong that formed a basis for human trust and interaction. In this regard, ethics underpinned politics in Stein’s ideal polity. More important, despite the state’s title as sovereign commander, its leaders and policies required the sanction of the governed. States evolved for the sake of societies that acknowledged and embraced shared values; they were not organic entities or natural executives in their own right. Instead, sovereign control and legislation needed citizen acceptance. A state that violated the conscience of its subjects “lost the basis of its existence” (Stein 2006, 191). In a construction 56

Context

that anticipated Catholic phenomenologists such as Karol Wojtyła after World War II, Stein argued that politics should serve as an expression of communal values and an extension of the social and moral realm. Without this continuity, government becomes a technocracy divorced from people or an autocracy opposed to them.

4.  Dietrich von Hildebrand Reinach’s and Stein’s contributions to political thought remained largely academic, even as they wrote about issues of political significance. But the crises of the 1930s—a catastrophic depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism—demanded a more direct response. In phenomenology, the most famous was Husserl’s (1970) Crisis of European Sciences, which attributed modern crises to the increasing divorce between technical science and the lifeworld of human experience. Yet even his argument, published in 1936, avoided the era’s immediate traumas in favor of a historico-philosophical accounting. Not so Dietrich von Hildebrand, who tapped phenomenological insight for political activism. The son of a famous sculptor, von Hildebrand is best known as an interwar personalist who took up cudgels against National Socialism. Less familiar was his membership in the early phenomenological movement—and the influence of phenomenology on his personalism and anti-Nazism. As a young philosopher, von Hildebrand celebrated Husserl’s philosophy and its insight into essences, but Scheler and Reinach, with their worldly concerns, proved more direct phenomenological forebears. Von Hildebrand’s first outline of an act-oriented moral theory came in a 1912 dissertation on ethical action, later published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch (von Hildebrand 1916, 126–251). “Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung” offered a three-part anatomy of ethical acts: The first step was conscious engagement with or attention to an object or state of affairs, what he called taking notice (Kenntnisnahme). From this initial investment, a person spontaneously took an ethical position or attitude (Stellungnahme) based on an emotional reaction to the value embedded in the object or situation. As von Hildebrand (1950, 3) explained in 1933, “The soul of every morally good attitude is abandonment to that which is objectively important, is interest in a thing because it has value.” Each value had its proper emotional response, which, in turn, stirred action—the third step—aimed at realizing the value in a new and better state of affairs. This value response (Wertantwort) was von Hildebrand’s signature addition to phenomenological ethics (Seifert 1992, 34–58). Von Hildebrand shared the wider phenomenological commitment to the spiritual person, not simply the mind, body, or ego. After converting from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1914, he fixed virtue in a person’s “basic moral attitude [sittliche Grundhaltung]” (1922, 548), which sprouts, he argued, from a “single root . . . a spirit that is in all of us” (587). Morality did not simply concern ‘this thing as good or bad’ but rather the full moral investment of a person in a particular situation, a personalist conviction that carried forward into 1930’s Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft, in which von Hildebrand declared every affirmation of another person’s worth “morally positive” and every rejection “negative” ([1930] 1955, 304). In a critique that echoed Scheler and foreshadowed his own denunciation of Nazism, von Hildebrand decried relativism and vitalism as value distortions, skewing societies away from true objective values. The modern world, alas, presented the unhappy choice of two extremes: individualist isolation or an impersonal merger with the mass. While the latter “relieves one from . . . the egocentric position of the modern age,” it also encourages “a merely vitalist ‘social consciousness’ whereby the individual relinquishes any spiritual attitude” (9). Devotion to values and love of others, by contrast, helped one overcome egotism 57

Michael Gubser

and establish communal ties; indeed, values themselves had a socially unifying effect. Authentic communities came about, per von Hildebrand, through “devotion to God and one’s neighbor”—through the incorporation of values by persons, of persons into wider communities and of communities into the value realm (9). The “res publica” (185), the true ethical community, emerged in shared openness to the value hierarchy and recognition of the “primacy of the individual person” (397). These themes, of course, echo the common phenomenological move of embedding politics in the ethical field. As a bridge to his anti-totalitarian activism, von Hildebrand ended his 1930 tract with an attack on the “dangerous mistake” (von Hildebrand [1930] 1955, 397) of state or social exemptions from morality, the idea that a state or large group is somehow above moral claims and responsibilities, an overt attack on the legal theorist Carl Schmitt but also a critique of the left and right moral relativism of the Bolsheviks and National Socialists. In 1933, he espoused instead a Christian corporatism that embedded persons in hierarchical “natural communities” (von Hildebrand 1950)—family, church, nation, and only latterly, the state. Within a year, he found a contemporary model of his vision in neighboring Austria. With the Nazi ascension in Germany, von Hildebrand, a vocal adversary since the early 1920s, made the difficult decision to leave Munich for Vienna, where he championed Engelbert Dollfuß’s conservative Christian chancellorship. Dollfuß has not fared well with historians: In the effort to overcome internal fragmentation and rising Nazi threats, he adjourned the Austrian Parliament in March 1933 and imposed authoritarian rule—dubbed AustroFascist by its critics—based on Christian corporatist principles. In line with contemporary papal doctrine, Dollfuß sought to reorganize Austrian society into supra-partisan estates (Stände) that would quell social disorder and promote loyalty to church and state. This effort prompted a strike in early 1934, which the Austrian chancellor crushed in a bloody civil war that led to the abolition of the Social Democratic Party. The artillery bombardment of the Karl-Marx-Hof, a low-income tenement block on the outskirts of Vienna and a symbol of the city’s progressive tradition, emblematized Dollfuß’s heavy-handed rule. Claiming to defend Austria against Nazism, he marched it halfway there. Nonetheless, Dollfuß had supporters. The essayist Karl Kraus came to respect his defiance of Hitler and defense of Austrian independence. And the newly exiled von Hildebrand not only viewed the chancellor’s measures as necessary to combat internal and external threats, but he also saw them as midwives of a more devotional society that would reject the anomie of liberal modernity. In this regard, Dollfuß’s authoritarianism bolstered von Hildebrand’s vision of communal reciprocity (Chappel 2012, 200–46). Whereas both liberalism and totalitarianism stripped men of spiritual qualities, corporatism, per von Hildebrand, dignified persons by embedding them in communities of love and meaning, overseen and secured by the state. That it did so by removing citizens from meaningful participation in public decisions was a point von Hildebrand seemed ready to accept. Shorn of this political involvement, citizens could return to the cultivation of communities of value. Upon arrival in Vienna, von Hildebrand was recruited to edit the regime’s mouthpiece journal, Der christliche Ständestaat, funded by Dollfuß himself (Ebneth 1976). In that capacity, he attracted what one historian called “perhaps the central group of Catholicconservative resistance against Nazism outside of Germany” (Seefried 2006, 251). Austria’s Catholic mission, von Hildebrand announced in 1933, was to show the correct way for the German people in a time of boundless confusion, in which the bankruptcy of individualistic Liberalism has led to two new and far more 58

Context

terrible mistakes that threaten to destroy the whole of Western culture at its roots: Bolshevism and National Socialism. (von Hildebrand 1994, 166) Corporatism afforded the chance to rebuild organic communities around “solidary togetherness” (von Hildebrand 1994, 168), to recognize that a person’s responsibility to his ethos, family, church, and humanity preceded his duties as citizen and needed state protection (191). For von Hildebrand, it offered a compelling alternative to both totalitarian absolutism and the forlorn liberal individual. While their focus was cultural and political, von Hildebrand’s essays in Der christliche Ständestaat rested on his earlier phenomenological analyses. Most obviously, he defended the existence of a Christian “hierarchy of goods” (168) that National Socialists rejected in favor of “blood materialism” (237), a view he drew from Scheler. The Nazi “heresy” (168), to use von Hildebrand’s word, elevated the vital over the spiritual, degrading the person to a “mere function of blood and race” (237) and denying the value richness that phenomenology revealed. Nazism and Bolshevism, he charged in 1941, reflected a “slave uprising against the spirit” (198), a tragic preemption of higher intellectual and spiritual values by the agents of blood and might (von Hildebrand 1941). Free persons should instead orient themselves toward independent values, a view that many phenomenologists affirmed. Like Husserl, von Hildebrand blamed an overweening scientism for crippling human understanding and prompting a crisis of meaning and spirit. Only by acknowledging the infinite worth of persons and the objective hierarchy of values could man hope to “rehabilitat[e] the spirit” (von Hildebrand 1994, 205). This conviction fueled his condemnation of Nazi racism in the 1937 talk “Jews and the Christian West,” in which he rejected antisemitism on personalist grounds and celebrated Jews as a root of the Christian faith, a privileged people in God’s eyes (Connelly 2012, 130–33; von Hildebrand 1994, 340–58). Forced to flee Vienna a year later ahead of the Nazi Anschluß, von Hildebrand spent the second half of his career—a Christian philosopher at Fordham University—dedicated to the social and spiritual renewal he had outlined in his European years. Von Hildebrand’s activism highlights strengths and weaknesses of political phenomenology. While his positive political program was vague, conservative, and potentially repressive, the insistence on social rights, objective ethical values, and essential human relations provided a powerful platform for political dissent in a time of crisis, one that would be tapped again in communist Eastern Europe, where anti-political dissidents drew on phenomenology to criticize Soviet Bloc regimes (Gubser 2014).

5.  Aurel Kolnai Von Hildebrand’s friend and colleague Aurel Kolnai also enlisted phenomenology in the battle against Nazism, although he broke with von Hildebrand regarding the latter’s support for authoritarian rule. Born to a liberal Jewish family, Kolnai fled Budapest for Vienna near the end of Bela Kun’s regime to avoid antisemitic right-wing reprisals. He first took interest in phenomenology when he enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1922. Not only was the philosophy, he later effused, the “glorious movement of a new realism, the most important departure in philosophy since Socrates and Aristotle” (Kolnai 2002, 26), but in its Schelerian form, phenomenology also spurred Kolnai’s budding interest in Catholicism, a religion to which he converted in 1926. The phenomenological method, wrote Kolnai 59

Michael Gubser

(2005, 2) in 1930, offered “the most penetrating analysis” of spiritual and mental essence available to philosophers, revealing “what is really meant, or intended, in a spiritual act” and dispensing with scientific “ ‘inferences’ and ‘inductions’ ” in order to “attain a ‘direct view’ of the objects or their spiritual structure.” His conversions to phenomenology and Catholicism were clearly of a piece. Despite admiration for von Hildebrand the philosopher, Kolnai dissented vehemently from his elder colleague’s views on Dollfuß. “So great a philosopher, and no character, no backbone at all,” he snorted in 1934 (as cited Dunlop 2002, 137). What a shame he is a toady of Austrofascism. . . . There is no philosophical thinker whose thought I am so close to . . . and yet I shudder to shake hands with him when I think of his vomit-making Regime-salon Thursday evenings and his apotheosis of Dollfuß! (cited in Dunlop 2002, 147) Despite this revulsion, Kolnai contributed articles to von Hildebrand’s journal, Der christliche Ständestaat, under the moniker ‘Van Helsing,’ Bram Stoker’s warrior against evil. Yet his dismay at von Hildebrand’s political alliance illustrates a fixation of his wider work: the failure of philosophers to translate ethical principles into effective political practice. In later life, Kolnai was fond of saying that his 1926 dissertation on ethical value contained the seeds of all his subsequent thought, including his political views (Kolnai 2002, xi–xiv). Its express purpose was to “complete the phenomenology of moral values” pioneered by earlier thinkers such as Husserl, Scheler, and von Hildebrand. Phenomenological ethicists, Kolnai said, had left their task incomplete, confirming the existence of objective values but failing to enlist them for moral practice. Kolnai, for his part, would “design the bridges which lead to a morally valuable reality” (2002, 12). This engineering feat required him to span the chasm between absolute values and everyday circumstance, to “bring about an ethically desirable state of things . . . on the basis of existent moral needs and powers” (3, 27). The key to achieving this goal was recognizing that the range of values was infinite and kaleidoscopic and that no single value should monopolize decision making. To that end, Kolnai introduced the concepts of value limitation and gradation. Every value, he wrote, had limits of applicability, and at the margins, it verged on the domain of others. In addition, values were graded, each implying others that had a “peripheral presence” (62) in its precinct. In other words, values interpenetrated: one or two emphatic in any given situation, others muted but present. As circumstances changed, new emphases arose. Kolnai further specified four types of ethical engagement. The most common was the struggle against vice—what Kolnai called value exclusion—combating ills and distortions caused by false programs such as materialism and totalitarianism. But he also identified three further forms of engagement, these inclusive rather than exclusive: The first was coordination, by which features of reality were related to compatible values; the second was incorporation, through which one embraced and absorbed the values of a loved one; and the third was directness, which indentured one to God and the good. The latter two, Kolnai believed, broached the heights of moral “rapture” (2002, 136), through which a person achieved self-transcendence by affirming the being of another, even while preserving the “distance” (136) essential to personal dignity and autonomy. Based on this analysis, Kolnai resisted the tendency to impose an austere moral or political yardstick on complicated human realities. Practical ethics abjured purity; responsible 60

Context

decisions required a survey of “the entire range of ethical value[s]” (Kolnai 2002, 59) appropriate to a situation. By contrast, duty ethics, vitalism, utilitarianism, and totalitarianism all disregarded the value conflicts intrinsic to moral life, yielding at times to “blatant immoralism” (43) in the name of ethical absolutes. Here, Kolnai made a move typical of realist Catholic phenomenologists by blending the political and the ethical, but he did so in a distinctive way, deploring as related ills both the moral absolutism that some Schelerian acolytes embraced and the political absolutism that von Hildebrand seemed to espouse. Yet he did share their conservative and anti-totalitarian leaning: Communism in particular, Kolnai averred, promoted a “moratorium on values” (43) in its utopian pursuit, a monomania that betrayed a deep “contempt for Mankind” (105). And, like Scheler and von Hildebrand, he traced these ills to totalitarianism’s liberal precursor—the “atomistic ­individualism” (157) that eroded human community. But, unlike the latter, Kolnai embraced democracy as a “movement for social liberation and construction in the most serious and responsible sense” (158) and reform over revolution as a means for social change since it respected the “precious value” (156) of each person (157–58, 191). True social and political reform, he maintained, required “the actual presence of ethical need, [and] the availability of moral energy in the circles concerned” (56). At times, it entailed drastic action: the revival of materialist society, he felt, demanded “extensive transformation” (158) that involved “working, inventive, free and promising engagement for the cause of good in the business of the world” (190). Yet it always respected real circumstances and genuine needs rather than sacrificing men to beautiful utopias. Phenomenology, it seemed to Kolnai, provided the best philosophical prop for this vision. Its appreciation of moral plenitude and its orientation toward objective values—what he called its value-intentionality—became the hallmarks of political probity and good will (169–81). By contrast, men should resist “the dreary imperious demand to confine the motives of conduct within materially simple, indeed uniform bounds”—an attitude, he wrote, driven by “ice-cold pride” (34). Kolnai’s own resistance to ice-cold politics grew in the late 1920s, when he penned a series of analyses of political and ideological movements on the radical fringes, presenting right and left politics “according to [their] essence” (Kolnai 1938, 19), rather than as a factual catalogue of surface traits. Austria’s high press, with its sophisticated mixture of cultural analysis and political commentary, was an ideal venue for his philosophically minded social criticism, and he was able, like von Hildebrand, to adapt the technical and granular analyses of phenomenology to the more colloquial flair of Viennese feuilletons. Yet even as he joined the Social Democratic Party in 1930—the last gasp of his youthful leftism— Kolnai’s editorials displayed a deepening conservatism. Liberal ideology came in for particular attack: In two articles from 1927, Kolnai condemned Liberalism’s utilitarian notion of progress. While Liberals were right to emphasize the gradual amelioration of want, their program reduced persons to material contingencies, denying the spirit and turning subjects into anonymous men whose loneliness opened them to extremist exploitation (Kolnai 1927a, 933–36, 1927b, 965–69). Alas, the overcoming of liberalism took pathological form. In 1926, Kolnai declared Bolshevism a graver threat than Fascism because it was more seductive, standing “at once nearer to God and the devil” (1926, 213). By 1931, however, he came to see the Nazi threat as more urgent—a quintessential counter-revolution distinguished from conservative anti-Communism by its embrace of revolutionary violence and terror (Kolnai 1931, 1932, 1938, 672). In 1933, Kolnai assailed Carl Schmitt’s vision of politics as an external relation of friend or foe in which war was an intimate partner. Instead, Kolnai stressed the primacy of domestic political disputes and “the coexistence of 61

Michael Gubser

opponents” (Balázs and Dunlop 2004, 34) in a common society. Political discussion, not mortal combat, was the “essential mark” (34) of politics, its proper content the debate over “fashioning” (31) a shared destiny. In the face of Austria’s own increasing brutality, Kolnai continued to endorse the vision of a Europe of spiritual persons outlined in his earlier phenomenological tracts. Indeed, we find in the 1930s his first clear endorsement of the pragmatic conservatism for which he became known in later life: Conservatism .  .  . can only effectively take up its struggle against the anarcho-­ naturalistic extreme right if it is aware of being conservative with a very specific character and aims, which has distinct bridges to the left and takes over from it certain responsibilities, but otherwise occupies a middle point, from which it strikes the actual enemy, the right-totalitarian and mythical variety, beating it on its own territory and hitting it partly with its own weapons. (Kolnai 1934, 944) Here he echoed von Hildebrand’s call for a personalist order, but with a democratic rather than an authoritarian dispensation: Whereas “[f]ree democracy means the personalistic life of man in society, fascist dictatorship means the person-denying rule of the masses” (­ Kolnai 1933–34a 319, 1933–34b, 442). No doubt it was for this reason that Kolnai deplored von Hildebrand’s truck with Dollfuß, for he saw in the Austrian strongman not a bastion against Hitler but an agent in the suppression of personal freedom and political liberty. In posthumously published memoirs, Kolnai reflected on the relation between his phenomenological and his political interests. While acknowledging the danger of phenomenological abstraction from reality, he ventured that Husserl’s brainchild had a ­democratic-conservative slant. Phenomenology, he wrote, “bases philosophy on the broad pediment of ‘current experience’ and develops it in keeping with the categories and valuations of ordinary man” (Kolnai 1999, 140–41). But this bias did not pander to base popular will or delirious visions of national unity: The phenomenological attitude reveals . . . a “democratic” slant in the sense of thinking “in correspondence with” the thinking of the “people,” not in the sense of any sanctification of “the people’s will.” It has a natural affinity to “government with the people” rather than “by the people.” It is aligned to the conservative-democratic idea of popular participation in government as opposed to the national-democratic and totalitarian formula of an “identity between the rulers and the ruled.” (Kolnai 1999, 140–41) This democratic conservatism, already emergent in the 1930s, became the trademark of Kolnai’s second career in English exile.

6. Outlook By embedding political questions on the nature of the state, law, and revolution in the broader framework of a social ethics based on objective values, thinkers such as Stein, von Hildebrand, and Kolnai articulated a key strain of political phenomenology, providing philosophical purchase for critics of totalitarian regimes that violated the norms and 62

Context

rights of interpersonal interaction and ethical governance—even if, as von Hildebrand shows, it could also license support for other types of autocracy. In so doing, they presented totalitarianism as the predatory spawn of liberal individualism and capitalist materialism, which had already weakened communal integrity. This kind of communitarianism is out of fashion today, partly because it suggests an inherent conservatism that, in the name of solidarity and tradition, can weaken the drive for social change or equity. Nonetheless, it paid important dividends in Central Europe. And a value-oriented communitarianism, if appropriately updated, may also provide resources for confronting twenty-first-century neo-authoritarianism. In this regard, phenomenology’s insistence that politics cannot be divorced from ethics bears consideration in an age that seems to be losing its grip on both.

References Balázs, Zoltán, and Francis Dunlop. 2004. Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai. Budapest: Central European University Press. Chappel, James. 2012. “Slaying the Leviathan: Catholicism and the Rebirth of European Conservatism, 1920–1950.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Connelly, John. 2012. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conrad-Martius, Hedwig. 1921. “Einleitung.” In Adolf Reinach. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. V– XXXVII. Halle: Niemeyer. ———. 1965. “Die transzendentale und die ontologische Phänomenologie.” In Schriften zur Philosophie III, edited by Eberhard Avé-Lallemant, 175–84. Munich: Kösel-Verlag. Dunlop, Francis. 2002. The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ebneth, Rudolf. 1976. Die österreichische Wochenschrift ‘Der christliche Ständestaat’: Deutsche Emigration in Österreich 1933–1938. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag. Gubser, Michael. 2014. The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Havel, Václav. 1983. Letters to Olga. New York: Holt and Company. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. Kolnai, Aurel. 1926. “Faschismus und Bolschewismus.” Der deutsche Volkswirt 1 (7): 206–13. ———. 1927a. “Die Ideologie des sozialen Fortschritts.” Der deutsche Volkswirt 1 (30): 933–36. ———. 1927b. “Kritik des sozialen Fortschritts.” Der deutsche Volkswirt 1 (31): 965–69. ———. 1931. “Gegenrevolution, Pt. 1.” Kölner Viertelsjahrshefte für Soziologie 10 (2): 171–99. ———. 1932. “Gegenrevolution, Pt. 2.” Kölner Viertelsjahrshefte für Soziologie 10 (3): 295–319. ———. 1933–34a. “Katholizismus und Demokratie.” Der österreichische Volkswirt 26 (13–14): 318–21. ———. 1933–34b. “Persönlichkeit und Massenherrschaft.” Der österreichische Volkswirt 26 (20): 442–43. ———. 1934. “Die Aufgabe des Konservatismus.” Der österreichische Volkswirt 26 (44): 943–46. ———. 1938. The War against the West. New York: Viking. ———. 1999. Political Memoirs. Edited by Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2002. Early Ethical Writings of Aurel Kolnai. Edited by Francis Dunlop. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2005. Sexual Ethics: The Meaning and Foundations of Sexual Morality. Edited by Francis Dunlop. Aldershot: Ashgate. Reinach, Adolf. 1912. “Die Überlegung; ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung, Part I.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 148: 181–96. ———. 1913. “Die Überlegung; ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung, Part II.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 149: 30–58. ———. 1983. “The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law.” Aletheia 3: 1–142. Scheler, Max. 1972. Ressentiment. New York: Schocken. ———. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Evanston: Northwestern.

63

Michael Gubser ———. 2008. The Nature of Sympathy. New York: Routledge. Schuhmann, Karl. 2002. “The Development of Speech Act Theory in Munich Phenomenology.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2: 73–92. Seefried, Elke. 2006. Reich und Stände: Ideen und Wirken des deutschen politischen Exils in Österreich 1933–1938. Düsseldorf: Droste. Seifert, Josef. 1992. “Dietrich von Hildebrands Philosophische Entdeckung der ‘Wertantwort’ und die Grundlegung der Ethik.” Aletheia 5: 34–58. Stein, Edith. 1989a. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. ———. 1989b. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. ———. 2006. An Investigation Concerning the State. Translated by Marianne Sawicki. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. von Hildebrand, Dietrich. 1916. “Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung III: 126–252. ———. 1922. “Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung V: 462–602. ———. (1930) 1955. Die Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft. Regensburg: Josef Habbel. ———. 1933. “Die korporative Idee und die natürlichen Gemeinschaften.” Der katholische Gedanke 6: 48–58. ———. 1941. “The World Crisis and Human Personality.” Thought 16 (3): 457–72. ———. 1950. Fundamental Moral Attitudes. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries. ———. 1994. Memoiren und Aufsätze gegen den Nationalsozialismus, 1933–1938. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald.

64

PART II

Existentialist Phenomenology

INTRODUCTION TO PART II Politicizing Phenomenology in the Struggle With Colonialism, National Socialism, and Stalinism Gerhard Thonhauser

1. Introduction The second part of the handbook discusses the adaptation of phenomenology in French existentialism, which was the crucial first stage in the explicit politicization of phenomenology. The existentialist appropriation of phenomenology and its steering toward political issues were facilitated by several factors. On the level of theory, the French intellectual landscape saw the simultaneous reception of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. While from today’s perspective, Hegel’s dialectic of the spirit, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of consciousness, and Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics might be seen as competing methodological frameworks, the generation of French thinkers to be discussed in this part brought them into productive dialogue to open new directions of thought. In terms of politics, I identify four factors that were key for the politicization of this generation of French intellectuals: (1) the résistance to the Nazi occupation; (2) the struggle with French colonialism; (3) the fight against different forms of domination and oppression, especially connected to class, gender, and race; (4) and the need to clarify one’s relationship to communism in light of the Stalinist terror and the beginning cold war, which implied the philosophical task of connecting phenomenology and Marxism. The first three chapters of Part II focus on the core group of Les Temps Modernes: Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. They were not the only editors of Les Temps Modernes; it was edited from the beginning by a large team with changing personnel. However, they formed the core around which the group initially formed. From its first issue in 1945, the journal generated a considerable public response, and the Les Temps Modernes group succeeded in achieving what can be described as an intellectual hegemony in the first years after the war (Boschetti 1988; Drake 2002). This public status was mainly driven by Sartre’s high-profile life as a politically engaged intellectual. Nicolas de Warren and William Remley show in Chapter 5 that for Sartre, the political does not denote a specific area of expertise but a mode of committing oneself to and acting toward a better world. Accordingly, the group’s engagement with the political is not limited to a set of essays that explicitly dealt with political issues but is expressed in all their writings, irrespective of genre and occasion. The heyday of Les Temps Modernes ended in 1953 with DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-9

67

Gerhard Thonhauser

Merleau-Ponty’s departure from the editorial team. The main reason Merleau-Ponty left was irreconcilable differences with Sartre on the question of how to relate to communism. From the beginning, Les Temps Modernes was a central organ of criticism of colonialism, racism, and imperialism. Trần Đức Thảo (1946, 1947a, 1947b) was a key factor in the decidedly anticolonial stance of the journal, most importantly through a series of articles on the Indochina War. But Thảo was also a key contributor to the debate on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism, most importantly with his influential book Phenomenology and Dialectical Marxism (1951). During his work on his dissertation on Husserl, Thảo became the second French intellectual after Merleau-Ponty to study Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. He was particularly interested in the study of the lifeworld but concluded that lifeworld meaning as discovered by phenomenology needed to be grounded in material reality, and therefore, phenomenology needed to be integrated into dialectical materialism. Frantz Fanon was not part of the initial Les Temps Modernes group, and he first appeared in the French public around the time when the cultural hegemony of Les Temps Modernes began to vanish. (Black Skin, White Masks appeared in 1952.) For this reason and others, it might be a usurpation to place him under the label of existential phenomenology, as the structure of our handbook suggests. As Alia Al-Saji argues in Chapter 9, Fanon should be read as engaging with the material and political conditions of the possibility of doing phenomenology. Fanon’s goal is to bring to light the colonial horizon within which the phenomenological method is embedded but that it traditionally does not see, which is its epistemology of ignorance. Following Fanon, Al-Saji’s core claim in Chapter 9 is that “if it is to be more than a regional study of lived experience structured by coloniality and whiteness, phenomenology needs to become anticolonial.”

2.  The Introduction of Phenomenology in France The interest in phenomenology in France can be dated back to around 1930, the year in which Emmanuel Levinas’s dissertation, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, appeared (Levinas 1930). The following year saw the publication of Levinas’s translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, based on a lecture Husserl gave at the Sorbonne in 1929. The first translations of Heidegger also appeared during those years, most prominently in the newly launched journal Recherches philosophiques, which was edited by Alexandre Koyré, Henri-Charles Puech, and Albert Spaier. They published six volumes between 1932 and 1937. What was particularly interesting about the reception of phenomenology in the context of the Recherches philosophiques was that it took place amid a concern for an existential reading of Hegel. This was exemplified by Jean Wahl’s (1929) Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel and a couple of articles by Koyré (1931, 1934). It was in this intellectual milieu that Alexandre Kojève (1947) delivered his influential lectures on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit from 1933 to 1939.1 Kojève, who was born in Russia and educated in Germany, was a Marxist political philosopher. In his reading, he gave The Phenomenology of Spirit an existential and political spin and linked Hegel to Marx and Heidegger and, in doing so, prepared the ground for the development of existential Marxism.

3.  Four Interrelated Factors of Politicization In the 1930s, when Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre began to study phenomenology, they were not yet political thinkers. They were preoccupied with philosophy and saw in the 68

Introduction to Part II

study of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger a way out of the narrow constraints of the French academic philosophy of the time. As Merleau-Ponty writes in his programmatic text “The War Has Taken Place,” it was the Nazi occupation of France that brought political issues to the forefront: “We were no longer permitted to be neutral in this combat. For the first time we were led not only to awareness but to acceptance of the life of society” (MerleauPonty 1964, 144). Although the Nazi occupation was the central trigger of politicization, it was not its only factor. Moreover, it can be noted that the intellectual confrontation with National Socialism did not play a major role in the philosophical works of the authors discussed in Part II of the handbook. This stands in contrast to authors discussed in Part III and Part IV, such as Arendt and Levinas, for whom the challenge of totalitarianism, especially but not exclusively in its National Socialist variant, was not only a decisive factor in their politicization but also a central topic of their thought. One at least equally important factor for the politicization of phenomenology in the context of postwar France was the struggle with French colonialism. The traces of this struggle go far back. For instance, the successful uprising of Haitian slaves against French colonial rule is a core (albeit often neglected) part of the origin story of modern democracy. Together with the French and the American Revolutions, the Haitian revolution forms the triad of democratic revolutions during the Enlightenment. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the colonial wars in Indochina (1946–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962) shaped the political battle over French colonialism. It was in the context of these wars that Trần Đức Thảo and Frantz Fanon published their works. Thảo was an early advocate of Vietnamese independence and used phenomenological tools to understand the colonial situation. In “On Indochina” (1945), he argues that colonizers and the colonized live in incommensurable worlds, which makes any kind of agreement difficult, if not impossible. His commitment to Vietnam’s liberation struggle led Thảo to leave France for the newly independent Vietnam in 1951. In his contribution, Jérôme Melançon not only discusses Thảo’s work during his time in France but also traces the development of his thought after his return to Vietnam. The anticolonial struggle was not exclusive to Thảo and Fanon, however. From its first issue, Les Temps Modernes was a central organ of critique of not only colonialism but also racism and imperialism (Altman 2020, 247–49). This brings us to a third key factor that shaped how the core group of Les Temps Modernes engaged with political issues. They dealt intensively with various forms of racism. As early as 1944, Sartre ([1946] 1948) wrote Anti-Semite and Jew, one of the first intellectual engagements with antisemitism after the war. Sartre visited the United States in 1945 and 1946, and he wrote numerous articles describing his experience during those trips (Aronson 2000; Murphy 2002). Moreover, his experiences served as inspiration for the drama The Respectful Prostitute (1946), which deals with anti-black racism. Sartre’s trips were followed in 1947 by Beauvoir’s four-month trip through the US, about which she published a detailed travelogue that dealt in depth with—among many other aspects—anti-black ­racism (Beauvoir [1948] 1952). The engagement with anti-black racism is also evident in Les Temps Modernes. Mediated through the friendship with Beauvoir, Les Temps Modernes published several French translations of the African American writer Richard Wright. The first was in the inaugural issue of the journal, prominently placed between the programmatic articles of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. These opening articles were meant to present the intellectual outlook of the new journal. Placing a text by Wright there shows how key the issue of racism was in the eyes of the editorial team.2 Moreover, Issues 11 and 12 in 1946 were special issues on the United States. Given the prominence of The Second Sex in 69

Gerhard Thonhauser

the reception of Beauvoir, it might come as a surprise to some readers that her engagement with racism proceeded her work on the situation of women. As has already been mentioned, the initial appropriation of phenomenology in France took place under the sign of Marxism. This orientation was complicated in the postwar period by the coming to light of the Stalinist terror. Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon was crucial to this. Originally written in German, the text first appeared in English translation in 1940. A French translation followed in 1945. Among other things, the book provided the occasion for Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror. For left intellectuals like Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, the Stalinist terror made it necessary to take a stand on Soviet communism. Moreover, the Communist Party in France also posed a challenge as the latter made a claim to sole representation of the left and thus challenged left intellectuals to clarify their relationship to the party. Finally, the beginning of the Cold War also played a key role, as it urged European intellectuals to search for the future place of Europe in a world dominated by two superpowers. The confrontation with Marxism, which is especially intense in Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Thảo and which manifests itself in numerous publications, took place not only in light of a rebuttal to Soviet communism but also in light of a critique of American imperialism. The mediation of phenomenology and Marxism in French existentialism is part of the history of Western Marxism. The term “Western Marxism,” first used by Merleau-Ponty in Adventures of the Dialectic ([1955] 1973, 30–58), now denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced a non-dogmatic version of Marxism in contrast to the state doctrine of the Soviet Union (Anderson 1976). Although they shared the goal of bringing together phenomenology and Marxism, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Thảo came to very different conclusions about how this could be achieved. As Chapter 10 explores, this led to an irreparable rift between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Chapter 8 elaborates on Thảo’s conclusion that phenomenology needs to be integrated into a Marxist approach, as exemplified by his major work of this period, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951). Simultaneously, Thảo professed his support for communism and drew the consequence of going back to Vietnam to support the newly established communist regime. In his role as editor of Les Temps Modernes, Merleau-Ponty was key to the journal’s taking an equidistant stance between the two great powers. His aim was to develop a third way between American imperialism and Soviet communism—a kind of democratic socialism that pursued the Marxist ideal of universal liberation while remaining mindful of the violent realities of politics.

4.  Striving for a Method of Political Phenomenology One thing that unites Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Thảo, and Fanon is that they all became interested in phenomenology because it promised them a way to engage with the political challenges they faced. But it also became apparent to them that phenomenology, as it was conceived by the founding generation of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler, had to be modified to be up to the task. Perhaps a general lesson that can be drawn from this handbook is that phenomenology has reinvented itself and continues to reinvent itself, depending on the task it faces. For the protagonists of Part II of the handbook, the challenge was to develop a phenomenology attuned to addressing the political challenges of economic, colonial, racist, and sexist oppression. Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Thảo, and Fanon all agreed that it would be insufficient to use an established phenomenological 70

Introduction to Part II

method and apply it to the domain of politics. In other words, a regional phenomenology of the political sphere was not enough. Rather, they all pointed to the task of developing a political phenomenology that could address how our lifeworld is structured by intersecting axes of domination and oppression: most importantly, class struggle, coloniality, racism, and patriarchy. Far from being an epigone of Sartre, Beauvoir’s approach to political phenomenology had a profound influence on how Sartre and Merleau-Ponty approached intersubjectivity and embodiment. In Chapter  6, Sara Heinämaa focuses on the concepts of encroachment, ambiguity, oppression, and violence to unfold Beauvoir’s version of political phenomenology. Encroachment (empiétment) refers to how human wills interpenetrate and mutually limit each other, implying that the realization of my freedom always depends on others. Ambiguity refers to the fact that our bodily existence in the world is twofold. On the one hand, our bodies are the medium through which we express ourselves and act in the world. On the other hand, our bodies are also things that can be acted upon by others. Based on the concepts of encroachment and ambiguity, Beauvoir also developed original conceptualizations of oppression and violence that continue to be influential today. In the reception of Merleau-Ponty, it is common to draw a sharp line between his phenomenological writings like The Structure of Behavior (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and his political writings like Humanism and Terror (1947) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Accordingly, most recent work on Merleau-Ponty in the context of a critical and political phenomenology focus on the critical potentials of his (supposedly more) phenomenological writings—most importantly, his phenomenology of the body— and pays little attention to his political theory. However, others like Martin Oppelt in Chapter 7 argue that there is a tight connection between Merleau-Ponty’s supposedly phenomenological and supposedly political works, with the first laying the political groundwork for the latter and the latter further advancing Merleau-Ponty’s unique version of political phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty claimed that phenomenology and Marxism recommend the same form of social analysis and critique, even if they arrive there via different routes (Melançon 2010). He envisions an analysis and critique based on concrete interbodily relations as they manifest themselves in lived experience. Such an analysis must start at the level of bodily habits because these precede our intended actions, both temporally and constitutionally. Moreover, if one wants to understand politics and history, not just the economic relations but the totality of interpersonal relations, institutional settings, and cultural products need to be taken into account. The author-focused chapters in Part II trace the unique approach to the development of political phenomenology that each author pursued. In doing so, they offer a rich repertoire of concepts of, methods for, and theoretical reflections on doing political phenomenology.

Notes 1 The first French translation of The Phenomenology of Spirit was done by Jean Hyppolite and published in two volumes in 1939 and 1941. A selection of Kojève’s lectures were published in 1947, the same year as Hyppolite’s commentary on The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hyppolite [1947] 1974). 2 The tables of contents of all issues of Les Temps Modernes can be viewed on the publisher’s website. Here is the direct link to the table of contents of the first issue: www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/ GALLIMARD/Revue-Les-Temps-Modernes/Les-Temps-Modernes314.

71

Gerhard Thonhauser

References Altman, Meryl. 2020. Beauvoir in Time. Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi. Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London/New York: Verso. Aronson, Ronald. 2000. “Sartre on the American Working Class Seven Articles in ‘Combat’ from 6 to 30 June, 1945.” Sartre Studies International 6 (1): 1–22. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1952. America Day by Day. Translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boschetti, Anna. 1988. The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Drake, David. 2002. Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hyppolite, Jean. (1947) 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à La Lecture de Hegel. Edited by Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. Koyré, Alexandre. 1931. “Note Sur La Langue et La Terminologie Hégéliennes.” Revue Philosophique de La France et de l’Étranger 112: 409–39. ———. 1934. “Hegel à Iéna. (A Propos de Publications Récentes).” Revue Philosophique de La France et de l’Étranger 118: 274–83. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1930. Théorie de l’intuition Dans La Phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan. Translation: 1973. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by André Orianne. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Melançon, Jérôme. 2010. “Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Politics: A Humanism in Extension.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (5): 623–34. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1955) 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Murphy, Julien. 2002. “Sartre on American Racism.” In Philosophers on Race. Critical Essays, edited by Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott, 222–40. Oxford: Blackwell. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1946) 1948. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker. Paris: Schocken Books. Thảo, Trần Đức. 1945. “Sur l’Indochine.” Les Temps Modernes 5: 878–900. Translation: 2021. “On Indochina.” Translated by Hayden Kee. Études Phénoménologiques—Phenomenological Studies 5: 1–24. ———. 1947a. “Les relations Franco-Vietnamiennes.” Les Temps Modernes 18: 1053–67. ———. 1947b. “Sur l’interprétation trotzkyste des événements d’Indochine.” Les Temps Modernes 21: 1697–705. ———. 1951. Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique. Paris: Minh Tan. Translation: 1986. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Edited by Robert S. Cohen. Translated by Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Wahl, Jean. 1929. Le Malheur de La Conscience Dans La Philosophie de Hegel. Brionne: Gerard Monfort.

72

5 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE On the Many Senses of the Political Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

The point is, all writing is political.

—Sartre

1.  Introduction: A Committed Life Jean-Paul Sartre’s life spanned nearly a century of political turmoil that repeatedly marked and catalyzed the development of his thinking. Although Sartre never authored a work of political philosophy per se or a systematic articulation of his political outlook, there is arguably no aspect of Sartre’s voluminous writings that does not bespeak the political realities of his times. What distinguishes Sartre’s thinking is that ‘the political’ does not denote a delimited expertise, particular form of experience, special method of analysis, or narrow academic discipline. To be sure, Sartre produced writings, mainly in the form of essays, that were explicitly political in content. Nevertheless, all of Sartre’s writings can arguably be considered ‘political,’ although not in the same sense and degree, thus rendering the issue of surveying Sartre’s ‘political thought’ a complex challenge. On the one hand, Sartre understood writing to be a performative act meant to affect others by staging a confrontation between writer and reader in view of the world to which each belonged without necessarily having to remain beholden. In this broad sense, writing is political insofar as it exemplifies human freedom in its creative potential, in acting on others in a contested space of action and meaning. On the other hand, Sartre mastered different genres of writing—plays, philosophical treatises, essays, novels, journalistic reportage, public lectures—each geared to its own type of performativity. This polymorphous discourse, in which ‘the political’ can be said to be everywhere and nowhere, cannot be separated from the situatedness of individual writings themselves. It is therefore more fruitful to address Sartre’s political life rather than merely ascertain his political thought, for despite having never authored a work in political philosophy, he restlessly authored a resilient political life as a thinker. Yet Sartre did not possess a fixed identity with his ambulatory existence of protest and provocation. He was variously and often simultaneously writer, activist, playwright, teacher, journalist, agitator, celebrity, public spokesperson, and moral authority. He was not a cloistered academic, nor did he DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-10

73

Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

hold political office; he did not adhere to an institution and famously refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature; he co-founded the journal Les Temps Modernes and a shortlived political party (Rassemblement democratique revolutionnaire); he participated in Bertrand Russell’s 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. Sartre was equally fascinated by power and powerlessness and never failed to seize an opportunity to meet eminent political figures (Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Che Guevara, and Tito) but also lent his support to movements of national liberation, the working class, student organizers, and marginalized anticolonial writers. And lastly, proof, as it were, of Sartre’s political significance: He was himself on various occasions the target of political violence—his (brief) arrest for his role as nominal publisher of the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple, an attempt on his life due to his encouragement of French soldiers in Algeria refusing service, an FBI investigation and surveillance (Martin 2013). These different personas and experiences manifest the plural senses of the political in Sartre’s life in situ. As Sartre observed: I don’t like to argue. Discussions or arguments don’t represent real relations between people: real relationships are when you act in concert, when you decide to do something together—it may be an intellectual act, of course, such as signing some paper or writing an article—but that’s the level where one can act. (Sartre 1978, 93) More than anything, Sartre was a philosophical enfant terrible who spoke truth to power with an impassioned hatred of ‘cannot,’ much to the consternation and anger of the adults in the room. Sartre’s perpetual antagonism with the hypocrisy and moralism of ‘the serious man’ is inseparable from what Bernard Henry-Lévy called Sartre’s real discovery of genius—commitment. Commitment is less an obligation, a mission, or an imperative than a consciousness of the power of words in action: namely, that bringing the world to speech “is to make it lose its ‘innocence,’ to ‘alter’ it, to give it another type of ‘existence,’ a ‘new dimension,’ ‘to transform it’ and by that very fact to ‘commit’ it” (Levy 2003, 60). Commitment, not merely critique, is the operative way of life, rather than any method, animating Sartre’s political thinking.

2.  A Strange Peace Sartre came of age intellectually during the late 1920s and 1930s. It is generally acknowledged that he was not political during this formative period in which he discovered Husserl’s phenomenology as well as himself as a writer. Although he refrained from contemporary political debates, Simone de Beauvoir recalls that they nonetheless followed political events of the day (Sartre 1978). This distance from the political arena is notable, given the tumultuous interwar years, which witnessed, on the one hand, an attempted far-right wing coup in 1934 and, on the other hand, the rise of a left-wing popular front government. Yet Sartre’s reticence as an ‘apolitical litterateur’ did not reflect ignorance or indifference. In The Theory of the State in Modern French Thought (1927), Sartre shows his familiarity with a debate among French political theorists (Georges Davy, a student of Durkheim, and Léon Duguit, a legal theorist) regarding the relation between individual rights and the state sovereignty. A number of themes touched on here would become prominent in his later writings: solidarity, the social function of sovereignty, individual freedom (Sartre [1927] 1974). 74

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre’s removal from political involvement largely stemmed from his skepticism towards political parties and thus implicitly posed a question that became fundamental to his thinking: How can an individual achieve historical agency in concert with others without thereby losing their own individuality: that is, freedom? As Sartre recalled, it was impossible at the time to become engaged politically without adhering to a party and “accept[ing] the group’s theories without reservation” (1978, 32). This tension between individual freedom and collective political agency was at the center of Sartre’s fallout with Paul Nizan, with whom he enjoyed a close personal relationship. The politically fraught events of 1934, marking for Nizan a dividing point in literature as well as politics, precipitated his joining the PCF. Sartre refused to follow his friend’s example. Nizan’s exemplary commitment (he was killed in action near Dunkirk in 1940) left an enduring mark on Sartre, especially Nizan’s critique of capitalism and the clergy of bourgeois academics, whose pretension to knowledge of an eternal order of fixed ideas found powerful expression in Les Chiens de Garde (1932). In this seminal text, Nizan called on intellectuals to abandon the conceit of speaking for “humanity” or “humankind in general” and address instead real human beings in their material-historical condition; philosophy must not merely interpret the world but change it. Nizan’s search for the realization of individual freedom along with radical social change echoed across the pages of Sartre’s life. The revolutionary potential of youth, which Sartre embraced during his Maoist period after May 1968, equally found inspiration in Nizan’s writings. As Sartre writes in his review of The Conspiracy (1938): “Nizan shows that from this age [youth], which Comte termed ‘metaphysical,’ one exits only by revolution” ([1938] 2010, 37). Sartre readily acknowledged that, during the 1930s, his study of phenomenology preoccupied him more than anything else, along with the composition of his first novel, Nausea. Yet it is noteworthy that the final pages of Transcendence of the Ego ([1936] 1991) evoke the social and political potential of phenomenology as a response to what Sartre calls the extreme left’s (i.e., the PCF’s) labelling of phenomenology as an idealism. Already in this early philosophical essay, Sartre argues that, far from an idealism, phenomenology is the only method capable of plunging humankind back into the world, giving full measure to “human agonies, sufferings, and rebellion” (Sartre [1936] 1991, 106). This movement “towards the concrete,” to echo the title of Jean Wahl’s influential 1934 book, manifested itself in Sartre’s literary writings as well. The Wall (1939) was written while fretting over his decision not to follow his student Jacques Bost’s departure for the Spanish Civil War. Sartre stayed in France because, in his words, “I didn’t feel that I was needed” and, therefore, “felt terrible” (1978, 32). The collection of short stories by the same name includes as well “Childhood of a Leader,” which can be read as laying the basis for Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1948) in mirroring the rise of antisemitism in France while highlighting the ominous threat posed to Europe by Nazism. Although these narratives offer some insight into Sartre’s political leanings, Sartre himself noted that he was of the conviction that a writer should only write and “only after 50 turn to the political” (1978, 34).

3.  The Republic of Silence Sartre always stressed that the Second World War was decisive in awaking him from his dogmatic political slumber. As he noted: “To that particular generation, the breaking point was 1940. We saw that we have been living through an absolutely faked age: since we imagined it as a rather indefinite progress towards peace, we took it as such” (1978, 9). 75

Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

Sartre’s experience of the war can be characterized as enacting a political-phenomenological suspension of the natural attitude in three stages: the suspended animation of the ‘phony war’ of 1939–1940; Sartre’s interment as a POW (1940–1941), with his experience of the interruption of social class identities and reduction of the social-political to the facticity of solidarity under German Occupation from 1941 until 1945; and finally, with the end of the war, hope for radical social and political change. As Sartre observed: “I considered that war not as something absurd but as a kind of revelation, in the sense that we had lived since the end of World War I with the illusion that it was the last” (1978, 48). Sartre’s wartime transformation set forth a threefold schema for this thinking: revelation (to speak the truth to power), resistance (to act on speaking the truth to power), and revolution (to change the world in the name of truth spoken to power). The initial experience of the war as an epoché and reduction finds expression in Sartre’s wartime diaries. In a revealing passage, published as an extract in 1942 as “La Mort dans l’âme” (“With a Heavy Heart”), Sartre recounts how he and a handful of soldiers found themselves wandering in a deserted town: “[T]he bourgeois streets, a public garden in flower, paths of the railroad station,” cafes, and residences are all empty of people. Suddenly, they spy a German dive bomber—a Stuka— “shining in the sun,” circling overhead (Sartre [1942] 1974, 149). Hiding under the awning of a butcher’s shop, Sartre muses: [T]his little twinkle of metal is the only living thing in the sky, with a dense metallic life which belongs with the heat of this pitiless blue and with the sun’s heavy flames. And on earth we living beings are the only living beings, whom great hollow stones surround with their shadows and their mineral silence. I do not know why this brilliant burst of steel tracing its furrow up above has made me feel so keenly that I have been abandoned in the midst of war. (Sartre [1942] 1974, 149) The Stuka departs; “[T]he alert is over; we return to our solitude” (Sartre [1942] 1974, 149). Upon his return to France, Sartre published Being and Nothingness ([1943] 2018) and wrote the plays The Flies (1943) and No Exit (1944), both of which were performed to much acclaim. While not a work of political philosophy in any sense of term, Being and Nothingness articulates an ontology of human freedom, centered on individual existence in relation to others, as well as various positions that Sartre will elaborate in later writings, including, most significantly, a constitutive account of violence. Rather than Sartre’s magnum opus being consider apolitical, it should rather be read as a ‘pre-political’ philosophy insofar as it provides an ontological foundation of human existence in freedom along with the primacy of action in relation to other actors on the world stage. Central to this complex theoretical work is Sartre’s argument that an individual is always enmeshed in conflictual relations with others, that who we are stands in a perpetual tension between our projects “at being oneself” and how we are constituted by the projects of others (the celebrated “gaze of the other”). Being and Nothingness argues that all human relations (including love and sexuality) are constitutively agonistic, thus lending conflict an existential-ontological status that implicitly underpins and animates the political. Even as Being and Nothingness is far from a political work, the existentialism with which it immediately became identified was, during the Occupation, perceived as politically fraught by Marxist intellectuals. The fact that Sartre’s ontology of human existence, centered on individual existence, drew significantly from Heidegger, whose involvement with Nazism was an open secret at the time, 76

Jean-Paul Sartre

added to the sharpness of attacks leveled against Sartre for his work. Sartre responded to this charge in A More Precise Characterization of Existentialism by drawing attention to his affinity with Marx: the human is defined by action and “this motto of ours for man: make, and in making make yourself, and be nothing but what you made of yourself” (Sartre [1944] 1974, 157). It would be myopic to abstract Being and Nothingness from Sartre’s other writings during the Occupation. Indeed, Sartre’s theatrical works cannot be separated from his theoretical works; the former stage basic tenets found in Sartre’s existentialism, and thus, even though Being and Nothingness, when taken on its own, does not contain a political philosophy per se (or, indeed, an ethics), given the inter-relationality among different facets of Sartre’s literary oeuvre, it is only when ‘theatre’ and ‘theory’ are seen as symbiotically entwined that the appearance of a ‘non-political’ Sartrean philosophy in contrast to Sartre’s political dramas is dispelled. The relationship between individual agency and decisional freedom in relation to its effects on others (community) and its consequences in a world caught in the convulsion of historical forces is a central problem explored in The Flies (1943), No Exit (1944), and The Victors (1947), whereas the dilemma of a heroic choice between ethics and instrumental efficacy is addressed in The Trojan Women (1965), Dirty Hands (1948), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), and The Condemned of Altona (1959). As would have been apparent to audiences at its first performances in 1943, The Flies transplants the collaborationist situation of Vichy France to the Ancient Greek setting of Argos in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In Men Without Shadows (1946), Sartre examined the existential moral ambiguity of captured Resistance fighters facing death and torture. Revealingly, the spokesperson for the aims and aspirations of the Resistance movement in this play is the Greek communist character Canoris, thus suggesting the international dimension of resistance against Nazism along with revolution of the proletariat. During the Occupation, Sartre became involved with a resistance group of intellectuals, Socialisme et Liberté, and assisted in publishing a clandestine journal. The extent to which Sartre played an active—as opposed to a literary—role in the French Resistance is much debated and is part of the broader debate about the French Resistance and its mythological postwar status. However one assesses Sartre’s role in the Resistance, it is clear that his various personas during the war—soldier, prisoner, playwright, thinker—attest to his transformative politization: “I was not made for politics, and yet I was remade by politics so that I eventually had to enter them” (Sartre 1978, 32). As Sartre noted in his diaries: “What ten years of politics could not do, the war would do in a month” (Sartre 1978, 37).

4.  The Political Intellectual as Ferryman The end of the Second World War galvanized and emboldened Sartre’s political thinking and engagement. The liberation of France from Nazi occupation propelled Marxism to the forefront of his political thinking and social activism, yet this window for the transformation of social and political life in France—indeed, for many French intellectuals—was immediately threatened by, on the one hand, the sclerotic Marxism-Stalinism of the PCF and, on the other hand, the embrace of ‘American’ neo-liberalism and late-modern capitalism. War, in its different pulsations and intensities, from the strange peace of the interwar years to the ‘phony war’ of 1939–1940 to the catastrophic destruction of Europe from 1941 to 1945 to the planetary antagonism between the USA and the Soviet Union, set the stage for the development and direction of Sartre’s political thinking during the 1950s and 1960s. 77

Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

With the end of the German Occupation, Sartre declared in his radio essay The Republic of Silence (1944) that, paradoxically, (mirroring his own experiences in a German POW camp) “never were we been freer than under the German Occupation” (Sartre [1944] 2008, 3). The situation of the war exposed the existential dimension of responsibility in its “total solitude.” James Baldwin trenchantly stated this Sartrean insight: “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” (Baldwin [1963] 1992, 34). Especially for those involved in the Resistance, everyone was equal before the same danger in shouldering their own individual responsibility for a common cause. In this manner, political resistance becomes integral to the ontological experience of individual freedom. This political resonance of a core tenet in Being and Nothingness is stated again in Sartre’s most famous lecture (and essay), “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946), delivered in October 1945 in Paris. In this popularizing presentation, Sartre illustrates his insight into human freedom and responsibility with the example of the mother’s son who must choose between going off to war and staying at home. Sartre further relates the power of resistance to the power of words: “Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-power police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle” (Sartre [1946] 2007, 48). Words, in this regard, matter because the world is made, or unmade, by what and how we say (or fail to say) of it. Words thus institute reality, but by the same token, words can “de-institute” reality in breaking the world from entrenched molds of meaning. The power of words consists in the commitment of speaking truth to power, much as, against the Nazi regime, every ‘accurate thought’—i.e., truthfulness in thought—was a triumph against the falsification of the world without which oppressions of all types—social, political, and cultural—could not sustain itself. Arguably, the aspiration to transform the world for the better in the aftermath of two world wars becomes the defining impetus for Sartre’s intellectual development. In What Is Literature? (1947), Sartre argues that both wars need to be seen together: Whereas the First World War shattered the “illusions” of Europe and the bourgeoise as well as precipitating “a crisis of language,” the Second World War made it an imperative to discover “a new power in language,” rather than just another new language ([1947] 1966, 123). This imperative for a new power in language is embodied in Sartre’s signature notion of commitment. The writer must not just bring the world to speech; in thus making the world speak, the writer discloses the world anew and, by the same token, affects the world, thus precipitating its transformation. As Sartre writes, “What aspect of the world do you want to disclose? What change do you want to bring into the world by this disclosure?” ([1947] 1966, 123). This emphasis on the disclosive power of language with its phenomenological accent on “seeing” is tethered to the creativity of language to recover the world from deception, illusion, and ideology, each of which functions as an epistemology of ignorance. This littérature engage is exemplified, for Sartre, by the movement of négritude. In his preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, entitled “Black Orpheus” (1948), Sartre (1965, 32) evokes the “apocalypse of language” effectuated by négritude poets writing in French. In their hands, language enacts a transformative revelation; the French language begins to speak against itself, thus exposing and undermining the sedimentations of racist profiles and colonial prejudices. Sartre’s commitment to anticolonial movements of national, cultural, and intellectual liberation remained peerless during the 1950s and often put him at odds with the French establishment and political authorities. In the two conflicts that shook French 78

Jean-Paul Sartre

national esteem—Indo-China and Algeria—Sartre steadfastly called for French withdrawal from both colonies. Sartre’s support of anticolonial struggle was not just manifested with his public speeches, editorials, and travels. His trenchant critique of colonialism and racism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason is still foundational today—if often neglected or forgotten—and, at the time, was a rare analysis. Along with this critique of racism, S­ artre ([1946] 1948) was the first European thinker to formulate a philosophical critique of antisemitism, elements of which drew substantially from his conception of bad faith and the gaze of the other in Being and Nothingness. The revelation of the magnitude and ferocity of the Nazi extermination of Jews exposed for Sartre the impotence of the intellectual and yet, by the same token, brought into sharper focus the imperative of the intellectual’s responsibility to expose the mechanisms—social and psychological—of different forms of oppression and hatred. Sartre’s political activism during the 1950s was shaped by his antagonistic relationship with the PFC and the Gaullist conservative establishment. Although the PCF regarded Sartre with suspicion, he leaned toward them during the Korean War and expressed his support for the Soviet Union in Les Communistes et la paix (1952). Sartre, however, broke with his sympathy for Stalinism with the 1956 invasion of Hungary and distanced himself from the PCF in Stalin’s Fantom (1957). The French withdrawal from Indochina after the military debacle at Dien Bien Phu (1954) and ongoing quagmire in the war in Algeria adduced for Sartre the imperative that anti-colonial struggles for national liberation cannot be separated from the social-political transformation of Western capitalism and, hence, the emancipation of the working class in France. Unlike the contemporary political left, which has arguably forgotten or repressed class consciousness and the working class, Sartre’s did not abstract the struggle for cultural justice, centered around cultural-social identity (race, gender, etc.) from socio-economic material conditions and relationships to the means and modes of production. As Régis Debray argues, Sartre represents a “transitional political intellectual who enabled his own generation to negotiate its way more effectively towards participation in practical politics.” Through his writings and activism, Sartre became “the bridge to be crossed in order to reach the other bank” of what Sartre himself called “the impassable philosophy of our times.” Sartre, the committed intellectual, functions as the “ferryman between moralizing attitudes of bourgeois rebellion and a more systematic participation in political projects at the centre of which was Sartre himself” (as cited in Scriven 1999, 11).

5.  The Intelligibility of History Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Sartre operated as a geo-political thinker—and not merely a political thinker—for whom ‘the political,’ as engaged philosophy, must take into view the intersection and interference between politics at home—France and Europe—and global historical dynamics. In this expansive sense, struggles for anticolonial national liberation and transformational critique of capitalism are brought together for Sartre with the overarching question concerning the intelligibility of history. Human actions make history, and yet human actions are themselves shaped by historical forces. Situated in this context of questioning, Sartre pursues, as a kind of ferryman for history itself, a third way for modern human existence as an alternative to both Western capitalist-liberalism (with its colonial imperialism) and Soviet Marxist-Stalinism. This quest for an alternative to the status quo, East and West, responds to the imperative of peace yet throws into sharper relief a defining 79

Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

ambiguity of Sartre’s political outlook: While sectarian conflict is endemic to human beings, given its ontological roots, the desire for peace among human beings, guided by the ideal of direct political participation, economic justice, and social equality, delineates the hopeful horizon for human coexistence to come. As Sartre writes in We Must Have Peace in Order to Remake the World (1948), to refuse both America and the Soviet Union does not mean that one must “yield to the one, yield to the other, or let ourselves be tossed about between them both.” It is, instead, “to make a positive choice—the choice of Europe, socialism, and ourselves,” and this ultimately means “to want to make peace by building the only kind of regime that is by its very structure peaceful—socialist democracy” (Sartre [1948] 1974, 195). Developing an alternative to “American” liberalism, with its Neo-Liberalism slide, as well as Stalinism, with its dogmatic Marxism, would require the revolutionary overcoming of socio-economic class divisions. These considerations point to two related themes—the idea of totality and the dialectical intelligibility of history—that were at the center of Sartre’s twofold project, albeit never completed, that consumed his theoretical efforts in the 1950s and 1960s: Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot. On the one hand, following György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a critique of capitalist society (which Sartre, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, extends to Soviet Stalinism as well) must take into view the totality of mediated forms of social relations rather than attending piecemeal to one particular form. With this emphasis on the methodological standpoint of totality, any given social relations (race or gender, for example) are mediated by other social forms: racial inequality and injustice cannot be separated from economic inequality and injustice, for example. Moreover, Sartre’s notion of totality—namely, that social relations intersect and, hence, are mediated by all others—invokes a reformulated method of dialectical thinking, in terms of which to establish the intelligibility of history, which, for Sartre, is an intrinsically political question that upends the “naturalization” of socio-economic structures as well as demythologizing exculpatory narratives of supremacy and self-justification.

6.  Political and Social Violence Although not a work of political philosophy per se and despite its unfinished condition, the Critique of Dialectical Reason ([1960] 2004) can nonetheless be read as political statement insofar as, among his many objectives, Sartre seeks to bring Marxism “up to date” by offering an alternative critique to modern capitalism (as well as Stalinism) that further develops defining Marxian insights. Crucially, however, Sartre rejects the dialectical materialism of Stalinism espoused by PCF and, through his dialectical method, develops a complex social ontology of group formation, based on the relationality of collective agency, or praxis, and its reification into the ‘practico-inert.’ The Critique is a massive and sprawling philosophical work: aside from its social ontology and emphasis on the praxis of collective agency, it proposes a theory of institutions, the hierarchical organization of advanced societies, and the revolutionary potential of the working class. In its attempt to steer a theoretical alternative to Western liberalism and Stalinism, the Critique can be regarded as a work of “cold war” philosophy in searching for a “third way.” One of the main aspects of the Critique is its emphasis on violence and conflict as a constitutive dynamic for social relations, social groups, and collective action. Violence is an essential element for Sartre, and, as it is fundamental to human relations, it never disappears from his thoughts, his writings, or his philosophy, whether political or otherwise. In fact, it only develops more fully as Sartre’s writing matures. From his initial position in 80

Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness, in which all human relations are cast in antagonistic terms, Sartre elaborates on this early notion of violence in his Notebooks for an Ethics. Although Sartre grants that “violence is an ambiguous notion,” he proposes defining it as the “use of facticity of the other person” for the purpose of achieving an objective “at any price.” Violence against others does not, however, merely treat them as a means toward some goal or objective, for paradoxically, for Sartre (1992, 436), this exercise of violence must “preserve the value” and, hence, “freedom” of the other as a freedom that has been captivated and contained within the freedom of one’s own violence. Violence, in this sense, entails the destruction of another’s freedom as an original relation between humans through the mediation of matter. From this understanding of violence, aspects of which harken back to Being and Nothingness, Sartre develops a more elaborate and encompassing conception in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. In addition to an instrumental notion of violence, in which the other is rendered into a means for one’s own projects, Sartre addresses constitutive violence, in which collective acts of violence become constitutive of group formation and identity, as well as structural violence, in which violence becomes effected and embodied in social structures, as with the example of the institution of the police, and mental structures, as with racism. Importantly, in the Critique as well as in his earlier works, Sartre takes pains to qualify the belief—widely held, at least among Marxists—that social violence emanates solely from oppression, which, in turn, springs from class struggle. For the proletariat, the modes of capitalist production succeeded in diminishing the workers’ strength and “duped” them into accepting their condition (Sartre 1968, 51). The worker, it seems, always finds himself “already committed to and enlisted in a society which has its code and its jurisprudence, its government, its notion of what is just and what is unjust, and (a more serious fact still) whose ideology he spontaneously shares” (51). Not only does society impose on the proletariat a destiny, but it also enacts limits inflicted as fragmented and semiautomatic tasks. In short, Sartre sees the worker as enclosed in a dull web of repetition designed to rob them of their humanity and, little by little, weave them into a thing. The contradiction the worker faces, as both human and “petrified thing,” leads to what Sartre calls “original violence,” which, in his view, is not oppression. Oppression, for Sartre, merges with justice and order. On the other hand, violence is interiorized oppression: the oppression lived as an internal conflict, as constraint exercised by one-half of one’s self on the other half. In other words, the worker commits the first violence against himself to the extent he makes himself a worker (Sartre 1968, 51). Violence is not suffered unless and until the worker makes himself their accomplice. This logic of violence recurs in colonialism, in which the colonizer renders the colonized population the “other of the human,” into a ‘thing’ or ‘object’ of cultural expropriation and economic exploitation; the white gaze constitutes the ‘black’ person as black but likewise allows the white colonizer to constitute themselves as ‘white’: i.e., as superior to the oppressed and petrified black colonized populations (de Warren 2006). In the (unfinished) second volume of the Critique, Sartre further expands on the political implications of his social ontology, dialectic of violence, and antagonistic relations among social groups. In an illuminating discussion, boxing represents the “bourgeois domestication of proletarian class violence,” in which the violence becomes commodified into a sport and thus must be “studied on the basis of the real structures of the exploitative system” (Sartre [1960] 2006, 27). This commodification of class violence—i.e., the structural violence of capitalism against the proletariat—effectively neutralizes and, hence, de-politicizes the proletarian. The spectacle of violence subverts the potential of proletarian violence against the bourgeoise: the working-class boxer becomes 81

Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

transformed from a “wild and liberating passion” into a “painful and dangerous labour” (Sartre [1960] 2006, 37). The possibility of revolutionary action and the self-objectifying and, hence, emancipatory class consciousness of the proletariat is effectively defanged, as it were, in its transfiguration into the entertaining violence among individuals: i.e., the boxers in the ring. From this complex account of how violence constitutes and structures, for example, the colonial situation between colonizers and colonized or the bourgeoise and the proletariat, Sartre seeks to account for how the revolutionary potential of the working class or colonized populations manifests itself as redemptive and socially and politically transformative violence. As Sartre recognizes, quite often, oppression is not a visible offense because the ideology of the dominant class, primarily through its system of laws, defines exactly what counts as just and, conversely, what is unjust. Consequently, nothing is gained without eradicating the existing order, and the protestor’s affirmation of his own human reality only reveals itself in their eyes as a manifestation of violence. Rather than accept a Romantic or vitalist notion of revolutionary violence as a spontaneous, sudden outburst (as with Georges Sorel’s notion of “general strike”), Sartre understands the passage to revolutionary action as involving different stages in both the crystallization of a revolutionary social agency, as a collective of individuals in solidarity with each other, and as conflictual antagonism with other social groups (de Warren 2016). As Sartre states, “[T]here never has been any violence on earth that did not correspond to the affirmation of some right” (Sartre 1992, 177). Violence is a demand on others, and this violence clashes head on with society’s mobilized violence. The police and other instrumentalities of the law change the worker’s milieu, they get his violence ready for him, and they make sure he pushes it to the extreme. Thus, the protestors “discontent must turn into a strike, his strike into a riot, and the riot into murder” (Sartre 1968, 54). As he stated in an interview in 1973: But the revolution involves violence and the existence of a more radical party which imposes itself at the expense of other more conciliatory groups. . . . But a revolutionary regime must rid itself of those individuals who threaten it and I  see no means other than death. (Sartre 1973, 76) When the protestor realizes that his simple demand for human rights leads him to strike, which, in turn, leads him to kill, the repression begins anew. The eventual return to calm, the status quo, is not actually calm and hardly the status quo but a return to original violence. The primitive contradiction reappears, only this time reinforced. The protestor experiences the counter-violence of society, it still acts within him, and he reacts to it with two contradictory feelings: fear and hatred. At the same time, he discovers himself, and he now knows that “violence is the law of action” (Sartre 1968, 54). Yet, later in his life Sartre, will reject abstract terrorist violence. In discussing the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, he says, I support violence as a political weapon where it is necessary, that is to say where mass confrontations exist or can be unleashed . . . but this does not mean that I consider violence like that of Baader, that is to say political assassination attempts carried out here and there in Germany, as valid political act. (cited in Scriven 1999, 73–74) 82

Jean-Paul Sartre

At some level, Sartre sees violence imbued in any action undertaken, but he also emphasizes the type of violence occurring because of membership in a group or society. Sartre sees the reactionary, repressive tactics of government becoming more oppressive after the violence of the protests and demonstrations recedes into the background. Sartre’s third way rejects Soviet-style Marxism as inherently authoritarian, but he also rejects liberal democracy as capable of turning to authoritarian government. As he began to develop in his incomplete analysis in the Critique, the slide towards authoritarianism among democratic societies, as startlingly manifested by Trumpism in the US and comparable political demagogues in Europe and Brazil, reflects the political ramification of the increasing standardization and bureaucratization—collective un-self-reflective thoughtlessness—of society in its totality. The temptation to embrace authoritarianism remains as long as society is subjugated to the institution of the state, which, for its part, increasingly abrogates individual freedom even as, in capitalist societies, the ideology of robust individualism is maintained. This criticism of the existing authoritarian structure of society with its apparatuses merely designed to coerce its members is a fundamental aspect of Sartre’s social/political philosophy not just in the Critique but throughout his entire life. For Sartre, once the group is institutionalized, it is ever prone to return to the practico-inert, where the structure of violence loses its instrumental qualities and becomes constitutive of human relations. Recent events in Memphis, Tennessee, where five black police officers brutally beat a young black man to death over a dubious traffic stop only indicates a systemic issue with police violence as an apparatus of the state. Racism and antisemitism cannot be reduced to individual patterns of belief or psychological worldviews or merely the aggregate result of subjective mindsets; they stem from and remain sustained by the total and dynamic structuration of society. In this regard, although Sartre refashions Marxist concepts, the thrust of his political critique of authoritarianism and the sovereignty of the state reflects an anarchist undercurrent.

7. Outlook Sartre’s widespread significance is paradoxically difficult to succinctly characterize despite, or perhaps because of, his international reputation and, indeed, ‘celebrity’ status. From the unwilling recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, awarded for his “farreaching influence on our age” and yet promptly declined, to a figure of parody in a Monty Python sketch (“Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion Visit Jean-Paul Sartre”), Sartre was arguably the first globally recognized intellectual of the 20th century whose writings diversely impacted philosophers, political activists, writers, artists, and—more broadly— culture at large in Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and Asia. At Sartre’s funeral procession on April 19, 1980 (he died of pulmonary edema on April 15), 50,000 people followed his cortege to the Montparnasse Cemetery on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. This public reverence for a name and face that symbolically the wider expressed the politically committed life of a thinker has not, since his death, abated in cultural imagination, including, on occasion, a gossipy fascination for Sartre’s dangerous liaisons. Although Sartre’s philosophical thinking has remained ostracized from French academic philosophy (notwithstanding Gilles Deleuze’s homage on the occasion of Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize in “Il a été mon maître”) and suffers from the banalization of ‘existentialism,’ fostered in part by Sartre’s own mediatic popularization of his thinking, a series of Sartrean political commitments—radical democracy, individual freedom, creative self-fashioning, political resistance, social critique, anticolonialism, a new humanism, and literary-artistic 83

Nicolas de Warren and William Remley

audacity—along with a train of Sartrean concepts—praxis, form of life, collective agency, engagement, the gaze, bad faith, the constitutive role of violence, the apparatus, practicoinert, the imaginary—have proved seminal in its catalyzing effect, oftentimes reconfigured against or beyond Sartre in the writings of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Claude Lefort, Iris Murdoch, Arthur Danto, Angela Davis, Lewis Gordon, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Roland Barthes, Stokely Carmichael, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Mafika Pascal Gwala, Noel Chabani Manganyi, Ralph Ellison, Steve Biko, and David Foster Wallace.

References Baldwin, James. (1963) 1991. The Fire Next Time. London: Vintage. de Warren, Nicolas. 2006. “The Apocalypse of Hope: Political Violence in the Writings of Sartre and Fanon.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27 (1): 25–60. ———. 2016. “Brothers in Arms: Fraternity-Terror in Sartre’s Social Ontology.” In The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, 313–27. London: Routledge. Levy, Bernard-Henri. 2003. Sartre. The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity. Martin, Andy. 2013. “The FBI Files on Being and Nothingness.” Prospect, November 19, 2013. www. prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/51776/the-fbi-files-on-being-and-nothingness#.Uo7ii6UkTwK. Nizan, Paul. 1932. Les chiens de la garde. Paris: Les Editions Rieder. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1927) 1974. “The Theory of the State in Modern French Thought.” In The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Vol. 2: Selected Prose, edited by Michael Contat and Michel Rybalka, 22–36. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1936) 1991. The Transcendence of the Ego. Translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. (1938) 2010. “The Conspiracy.” In Critical Essays, translated by Chris Turner, 32–39. London: Seagull Books. ———. (1942) 1974. “Sick at Heart.” In The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Vol. 2: Selected Prose, edited by Michael Contat and Michel Rybalka, 141–52. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1943) 2018. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Sarah Richmond. New York: Routledge. ———. (1944) 1974. “A More Precise Characterization of Existentialism.” In The Writings of JeanPaul Sartre. Vol. 2: Selected Prose, edited by Michael Contat and Michel Rybalka, 155–61. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1944) 2008. “The Republic of Silence.” In The Aftermath of War, translated by Chris Turner. London: Seagull Books. ———. (1946) 1948. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker. Paris: Schocken Books. ———. (1946) 2007. Existentialism as a Humanism. Translated by Carol Maccomber. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. (1947) 1966. What is Literature? Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. (1948) 1974. “We Must Have Peace in Order to Remake the World.” In The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Vol. 2: Selected Prose, edited by Michael Contat and Michel Rybalka, 192–95. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1960) 2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. I. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith and Jonathan Rée. London: Verso. ———. (1960) 2006. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. II. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith and Jonathan Rée. London: Verso. ———. 1965. “Black Orpheus.” Translated by John MacCombie. The Massachusetts Review 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1964–Winter 1965): 13–52. ———. 1968. The Communists and Peace. Translated by Martha Fletcher. New York: George Braziller.

84

Jean-Paul Sartre ———. 1973. “Sartre parle des maos.” Interview by Michel-Antoine Burnier. Actuel, February 28, 1973. ———. 1978. Sartre by Himself. Translated by Richard Seaver. New York: Urizen Books. ———. 1992. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scriven, Michael. 1999. Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

85

6 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Encroachment, Agency, Embodiment Sara Heinämaa

1. Introduction Simone de Beauvoir develops her political philosophy in several different forms of writing: ethical essays, metaphysical novels, scholarly treatises and political articles. She explores many central ideas in her early novels but gives exact formulations to her analytical concepts, distinctions, and arguments in the ethical essays “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (“Pyrrhus et Cinéas”) (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de la ambiguïté) (1947). At the same time, the essays clarify the historical philosophical origins of her existential position and defend it against various simplifications and misinterpretations. Beauvoir makes clear that her understanding of human intersubjectivity differs from the dominant neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian theories of respect and recognition, and for this, she highlights her indebtedness to 20th-century phenomenology and the classical existentialism of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. She argues forcefully that ethical insights cannot be captured in the form of a normative theory or rule system that could simply be applied in various cases, independently of situational considerations (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, 134, cf. [1945] 2004a, 177). This thesis holds for principled reasons, she argues, due to the intentional structures of human action and will. Practical deliberation and critical evaluation of the goals, means, and actions of human agents differ structurally from theoretical reasoning. The rationality of deliberation is internally tied to the motivational lives of the agents under consideration and therefore impenetrable to any external observers who refrain from participating in the situations of the agents under evaluation via empathy or imagination (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [105–7] 74–76). Beauvoir’s novels concretize the arguments of the ethical essays. They experiment with alternative lines of ethical deliberation and political discourse and demonstrate how existential insights gear into concrete personal and communal situations. Each novel offers a Kierkegaardian and Bakhtinian polyphony of divergent voices, in complex relations of collaboration, conflict, dispersion, and union, and leaves it to the reader to decide what she would do in the formally similar but materially unique situations of her own existence. The most important works in this respect are the early novel The Blood of Others (Le sang des autres) (1945) and the celebrated The Mandarins (Les mandarins) (1954), which deal 86

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-11

Simone de Beauvoir

with the ethico-political problems of collaboration, resistance, and violence in both speech and action. The two giant treatises The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe I–II) (1949) and The Coming of Age (La vieillesse I–II) (1970) identify numerous empirical processes that generate and maintain various forms of suppression: psychic, socio-economic, cultural, and historical. More fundamentally, these works demonstrate how the existential conditions of domination and violence, analyzed in the ethical essays, are at work in concrete socio-historical circumstances. The focus of these two treatises is on the hierarchical relations that obtain between men and women on the one hand and different age groups on the other, but both works also elucidate how the transcultural form of suppression, characteristic of androcentrism, differs from historically established forms of oppression, manifested in racism, colonialism, and the oppression of the proletariat (cf. Heinämaa 2003, 2023). The three central concepts that Beauvoir develops for ethical and political philosophy are the action-theoretical concept of encroachment, the fundamental ontological concept of ambiguity, and the existential-phenomenological concept of oppression. In what follows, I will provide an original interpretation of these central concepts and show how they operate in Beauvoir’s arguments against neglective, suppressive, and violent treatments of individuals and groups. Section 1 deals with encroachment and the related concept of existential violence. Section 2 focuses on the ambiguities of intersubjectivity and our embodied existence, and Section 3 clarifies on this basis Beauvoir’s conceptualization of oppression.

2.  Encroachment and Existential “Violence” Beauvoir’s political and ethical arguments build on her philosophical theory of action and agency, which is grounded in her existential-phenomenological conception of human beings. From classical phenomenology, she inherits the insight that human willing and conative consciousness in general differ from other forms of consciousness both in their temporality and in their world engagement. More precisely, the specificity of conative consciousness concerns its futurity and its embeddedness in the material world. This is a general characteristic of willing, and it holds for decisions, resolutions, and intentions of all kinds and, ultimately, for concrete actions as bodily modes of conative consciousness (Heinämaa 2023). The temporality and worldliness of conative consciousness are mutually implicatory structures, but for the purpose of illuminating Beauvoir’s political philosophy, it is instrumental to study them separately. First, acts of conative consciousness differ from other forms of consciousness in their temporality. They are open to the future in a manner that diverts from the horizontality that characterizes all modes of consciousness in general, be they conative, cognitive, or emotive. Rather than being simply directed at pregiven objects with determinate but open horizons, the will creates its own objects in the form of goals and means. Moreover, the will is thereby able to direct and shape its own future. By positing goals and means, it sends its command forward in time and thus informs its own future formation. So, by acts of willing, subjects are able to shape both the world and their own future conscious lives. Second, acts of conative consciousness are also specific in their world engagement or worldliness. The goals posited by the subject commit her to realizing actions in the material world and to whole series of such actions. This holds independently of the nature of the goals posited, be they near or far, immediate or gradual, personal or collective. In all cases, the willing subject is bound to realizing actions of some kind. Her consciousness thus differs 87

Sara Heinämaa

drastically from the consciousness of hoping and daydreaming subjects, who are directed at the future but not committed to action (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [39–40] 27). The implications of these two structural facts about conative consciousness are crucial to Beauvoir’s understanding of intersubjectivity. She argues that since human life is finite and human resources and capacities limited, only a small portion of human willing, if any, can be immediately realized in the world, and whatever can be realized cannot be realized equally (Beauvoir [1944] 2004, [60–69] 113–17, [1947] 1948, [39–40] 27–28, [166] 118). This means that we are constantly committed to realizing projects of various extensions, some of which are strictly personal but many of which require collaboration with others or, at least, their acceptance. Thus, we are bound to other subjects by the very structure of our volitions. In order to describe and analyze more exactly the manners in which multiplicities of human agents can operate in a common world, Beauvoir’s coins the concept of encroachment. By this, she means a special type of intertwinement of conative consciousnesses: more precisely, the coincidence and overlap of human wills and desires in the material world in the form of realizing actions and motivating expressions (e.g., Beauvoir [1945] 1948, [93] 98–99, [110] 115–16, [124] 130, cf. [1947] 1948, [101] 71, [1960] 1965, [694] 733; cf. de Saint Aubert [2014] 2019). The neologism is derived from the common language verb “to encroach” (empiéter), which means to intrude, intervene, impinge, influence, or penetrate into. So “encroachment,” in Beauvoir’s concepts, refers to the interpenetration and mutual limitation of human wills in the material world—the world in which each individual agent needs to engage in order to realize her goals and promote her values now and in the future.1 Such overlap is unavoidable, since each material constellation of worldly affairs is fixed, but the power of the human will is transfinite and directed at practical possibilities in the future. In The Blood of the Others, Beauvoir uses the concept of encroachment for several purposes. She describes the specific manners in which human wills influence one another on the level of private life (in desire and love) and on the level of public life (in resistance activities, labor union and party politics, peace movements, and pacifism). Moreover, she studies different variants of encroachment: immediate and mediated, discursive and non-discursive, amiable and conflictual, mutual and one sided, dual and plural, positive and negative. In all cases, human actions interpenetrate one another and delimit one another by producing material effects in the world. Suspension of participation, consensual passivity, and yielding to external forces are just limit cases of action and thus partake in the universal encroachment of human willing. The most important philosophical distinction that Beauvoir makes in her early action-­ theoretical explorations is the distinction between encroachment as a constitutive condition  of human coexistence and the different manners in which we can relate to this condition. As an existential condition, encroachment means that our realizing actions necessarily operate as limitations on the realizing actions of others since, in addition to our intended ends, our actions always bring about manifold other effects and side effects in the world. Our plans, decisions, and projects constantly solidify into material things and empirical facts that others have to take into consideration in their attempts to realize their own goals (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [39] 27). Some of the effects of our actions can be cancelled, but others are irreversible; some can be predicted or noticed, but others are unforeseeable; some can be adjusted to globally altruistic ends, but others entail tragic sacrifices. In each case, however, our action unavoidably delimits and structures the field in which others can operate. More concretely, our actions necessarily constitute both obstacles and advances 88

Simone de Beauvoir

for the actions and projects of others; they both enable and hinder, advance and block. In Beauvoir’s own words, “I am the very face of [the other’s] misery. . . . I am the facticity of their situation” (Beauvoir [1944] 2004, [58] 126, translation modified; cf. [1945] 1948, [148] 115; cf. de Saint Aubert [2004] 2019, 37–38). Beauvoir distinguishes this basic existential form of encroachment from the different manners in which we can consciously relate to it in our ethical and political lives. On the one hand, we can eschew acknowledging that we necessarily operate as the masters of the fates of numerous others, known and unknown, and on the other hand, we can try to take full responsibility for the destinies of all. The characters in Beauvoir’s novels represent different variations of these extreme alternatives. In The Blood of Others, for example, the main character, Jean Blomart—a dedicated labor union and resistance activist and an immature lover—suffers constantly from the Dostoyevskian conviction that he is responsible for the suffering of all others. This conviction paralyzes Blomart and robs him of the motivation to do anything. However, by choosing non-invention, Blomart ends up affecting the lives of his collaborators and lovers and ultimately clears the way to their deaths.

3.  The Ambiguities of Embodiment and Intersubjectivity The introduction of the concept of encroachment marks a crucial advancement from the schematic and still very Sartrean account of freedom given in Pyrrhus and Cineas (e.g., [1944] 2004, [83–89] 123–26, [117] 138) to the more mature account provided by The Ethics of Ambiguity (cf. de Saint Aubert [2004] 2019, 56–57, 60).2 The ontological and ethical argumentation of The Ethics of Ambiguity directly builds on the insights won in the experimental investigations of the early novels, She Came to Stay (L’invitée) (1943), The Blood of Others (1945), and All Men Are Mortal (Tous les hommes sont mortels) (1946). It develops the non-systematic explorations of the novels into an existential-phenomenological account of the structures of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality and their ethical dimensions. Beauvoir is now able to put forward and defend her mature thesis, according to which all human subjects are necessarily dependent on one another, not simply in their bio-genetic or evolutionary makeup or merely in the emotive registers of respect, esteem, and recognition but, more fundamentally, in terms of their agency. To put it simply, she argues that we are necessarily bound to others since the constitution of the sense and value of our projects exceeds our finite lives and depends on others. More concretely, we depend on others for the openness and non-stagnation of our own existence as willing and valuing subjects: “Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening into the absurdity of facticity” (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [102] 71, cf. [85] 60, [95] 67). Beauvoir’s main idea here is that in order to have a meaningfully open future for my projects, I need to posit the freedom of all others. It is not sufficient that I focus on those whose actions happen to fit my goals, but I need to will the freedom of all, universally (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [46] 32, [127] 89–90, [201–2] 144, cf. [85] 60, [100] 71, [110] 78, [218] 156). This is because the world, as the common platform and dynamic nexus of all agents, cannot be controlled. Each alien action has the character of an unexpected interference that potentially can change the common operative field of all agents. Through their intended results and their non-intended effects and side effects, our actions unavoidably gear into the lives of (some) others, and, conversely, each possible action of any other subject either advances our projects by opening meaningful space for them or blocks our endeavors by 89

Sara Heinämaa

closing sensible avenues of progress. This is the main existential insight on which Beauvoir builds her ethical and political arguments for equality in The Second Sex and The Coming of Age and in her ethico-political essays.3 Ultimately, the necessity involved in Beauvoir’s formulation of human interdependence is existential and constitutive. It is thus not a matter of any practical-normative or natural law. The point is not that we need to will the freedom of others in order to achieve our goals or promote our values, nor is the point that such willing is determined by human genetics or natural selection. Rather, the core idea is that we need to posit the free will of others in order to meaningfully intend any goals and values at all: that is, in order to operate as volitional agents in the first place (e.g., Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [157] 112–13; cf. Keltner 2006, 208). Beauvoir’s conceptualization of encroachment strongly influenced both Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of intersubjectivity. By this concept, Beauvoir was able to demonstrate concretely how human will solidifies into material realities—things, instruments, and institutions—through realizing actions and their intended and non-intended consequences. Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were impressed by this analysis and developed their own concepts as responses to it. Traces of Beauvoir’s idea of encroachment can be found, most importantly, in Sartre’s theory of seriality and the practico-inert in Dialectics of Practical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique) (1960) and in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of political conflicts in Humanism and Terror (Humanisme et terreur) (1947). A few words about these connections are at place, since they are crucial to the development of the field of (political) phenomenology but are often neglected by its contemporary critics. In Sartre’s concepts, seriality means the form of sociality that is not established on the basis of any shared emotion or intention but is simply guided by our interested perceptions of material realities, as such (Sartre [1960] 2004, 256–63; cf. Kruks 2001, 106–29; Nya 2015; Young 1994). Sartre’s well-known example pictures the seemingly random sociality of people waiting at a bus stop in an urban city. No shared decision, intention, or even motivation is needed for such social formation; the mere arrangement of material things—a signpost or an indentation in the passageway—is sufficient to steer people, independently of one another, to stand at the same spot and organize their positions and behaviors in harmonized manners. Sartre uses the term “practico-inert” for the material realities that “externally” guide and unite human behavior in this manner (Sartre [1960] 2004, 258–59; cf. Detmer 2008, 191; Sartre [1943] 1956, [555–59] 655–59). He argues, along with Beauvoir, that since our actions constantly establish and shape such realities, we are bound to structure the field in which others have to operate. Our influence is both enabling and preventive and thus can be said to condition and restrict the possibilities of others to complete their projects. Merleau-Ponty draws explicitly from Beauvoir’s early novels when he moves from his empathy-dominated account of intersubjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception) (1945) to the more nuanced accounts developed in The Prose of the World (La prose du monde) (1969) and The Visible and the Invisible (Le visible et l’invisible) (1964). As Emmanuel de Saint Aubert has demonstrated, Merleau-Ponty’s “Mexico lectures” from the end of 1940s are full of quotes from Beauvoir’s The Blood of the Others (De Saint Aubert [2004] 2019). It is on the basis of these paragraphs that Merleau-Ponty proceeds to contrive his novel account of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. This new account gives priority to the dynamism of action over the stability of empathetic apperception. 90

Simone de Beauvoir

For purposes of contemporary political phenomenology, however, the most important reworking of Beauvoir’s concept of encroachment is in Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror. The book begins with the questions “Does not every action involve us in a game which we cannot entirely control? Is there not a sort of evil in collective life? At least in times of crisis, does not each freedom encroach upon the freedom of others?” (MerleauPonty [1947] 1969, xxxviii). Merleau-Ponty answers these questions by conceptualizing intersubjectivity as the encroachment of volitional agents. He argues that we do not usually encounter one another “face to face” (109) in our private or public lives but more often by the mediation of the roles that others can have in our projects. Intersubjectivity is agentive and thus embodied and worldly: individual subjects are bound together not by emotion or cognition, but by “the threads of their actions” (110).

4.  Oppression and Situational Violence Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity gives an original reformulation to Kierkegaard’s notion of the paradoxical character of human existence, articulated between finitude and infinity and relative and absolute relations (Beauvoir (1947) 1948, [15ff.] 9ff., cf. [1960] 1965, [537–38] 468–70). However, when developing her account of the specific forms of ambiguity that characterize human embodiment and intersubjectivity, Beauvoir also draws from the works of classical and her contemporary French phenomenologists. The basic idea here is that all humans necessarily live their lives constantly negotiating between the two opposite poles of existing: pure transcendence and pure immanence. These two extremes must not be taken as ideal states, experiential alternatives, or goals of any kind but must be understood as limits between which concrete human life is articulated into endless variants. Both poles have several aspects: transcendence means the free movement of consciousness with endless horizons and unrestricted possibilities; immanence manifests in the stagnation of our strivings in contingent material circumstances but also the susceptibility of human bodies to the effects of external forces (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [9–10] 7–8; cf. Arp 2001, 2004; Deutscher 2008; Gothlin 2006; Keltner 2006; Kruks 2021; Schott 2003). For the understanding of Beauvoir’s critique of various forms of oppression, the most significant dimension of ambiguity is the twofoldness of our bodily existence in the world. The ambiguity of our existence results from the constitutive fact that our own bodies are given to us in two different manners, and necessarily so. On the one hand, our bodies appear to us as our very basic manner of operating in the world and as our fundamental means of expression, but on the other hand, they also appear to us as things among other similar things, exposed to external forces and manipulable by ourselves and others (cf. Heinämaa 2021). The ambiguity of embodiment therefore means the tension between the human body taken as a unique expression of will, desire, and emotion, and the very same body taken as a mere thing among other things. Beauvoir herself captures this insight in The Second Sex by stating that “insofar as our body is not a thing, it is our grasp upon the world and an outline of our projects” (Beauvoir [1949] 1987a, 66, translation modified; cf. [1945] 2004b, [1947] 1948, [60] 41–42).4 A complete harmony between our own experience of our bodies—of their appearance and behavior—and the external interpretations given by others is possible in principle. Often, however, the two experiences, own and alien, enter in tension, and they can also conflict comprehensively. Others can emphasize the dimensions of our bodies that we would want to forget, or they may neglect the dimensions that we have decided to bring to the 91

Sara Heinämaa

fore. Ultimately, others can operate systematically to reduce our bodies to mere things and thus neglect their expressive and agentive powers altogether. Examples of the systematic treatment of human bodies as mere things or tools are not restricted to the historical past or to extreme circumstances, such as war, natural catastrophes, and labor camps. They are common also in the bureaucratic organizations of contemporary liberal societies and in the standardizing serial processes of welfare states. What makes Beauvoir’s analysis of the ambiguity invaluable to contemporary political philosophy is her clear insight that it is the very structure of our embodiment that constantly exposes us to various forms of violence, accidental and intended, random and organized, spontaneous and institutionalized. The exposure is unavoidable because the ambiguous structure of embodiment conditions all our world relations: we need to be thus exposed in order to operate in the material world and operate together with similarly embodied subjects. The oppressor, however, systematically distorts this condition by using it for egoistic, tyrannical, or dictatorial purposes. She imaginatively splits the necessary ambiguity of all human bodies into two components—pure consciousness and mere materiality—and p ­ ostulates them as two separate levels of being. The oppressor then embraces pure ­consciousness as a defining characteristic of herself and her kind and attributes mere materiality to her victims (e.g., Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [138–43] 99–102). The spitting is an abstractive, imaginary, and idealizing figure of thought, but it feeds on affective experiences and uses them to block critique. It is motivated by a set of repressed emotions: anguish about one’s own finitude and mortality; jealousy of the other’s vitality and potency; resentment at prior injustices, hardships, and sufferings; and frustration with and rage at one’s own impotence (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [135–36] 96–97; cf. Heinämaa and Jardine 2021). For Beauvoir, all forms of oppression entail a systematic denial of the ambiguity of human embodiment (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [116–17] 82–83). The oppressor denies the ambiguity of her own existence by pretending to be a pure consciousness that acts independently of any material ties, and, at the same time, she denies the ambiguity of her victim by reducing her to a mere material thing, devoid of consciousness. Due to this double denial, Beauvoir argues, oppression is an absolute evil in all its manifestations and must be countered by all means possible, personal and collective (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [135] 96, [1949] 1987b, [31] 29). This ethico-existential analysis holds for the oppression of women (Beauvoir [1949] 1987a, [1949] 1987b), but it also applies to the persecution of Jews in Europe, the suppression of African American people in the USA, and the colonialization of Algerians by France (Beauvoir [1945] 1948, [1949] 1987a, [1960] 1962; Beauvoir and Halimi 1962).5 Furthermore, it illuminates the condition of the propertyless and the stateless in modernity and the neglect and maltreatment of  old people across human cultures (Beauvoir [1949] 1987a, [1970] 1996; cf. Heinämaa 2014). On the basis of the same ethico-existential analysis, Beauvoir also contends that, in certain specific circumstances, oppression can be legitimately countered and undone by acts of direct violence. Thus, revolts, revolutions, and terrorist attacks can find situational grounds of justification in Beauvoir’s discussions of oppression and violence (e.g., Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [135–39] 96–99, [209–16] 150–54, [1946] 2004, [1960] 1962; cf. Murphy 2006). However, Beauvoir also develops strong arguments for ethical generosity and political solidarity (e.g., Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [95] 64–67, [201–2ff.] 144ff.; Bergoffen 1999; Bergoffen and Burke 2020; Murphy 2006; cf. Gothlin 1995, 1999). 92

Simone de Beauvoir

These two lines of argumentation—for violence and for generosity—may seem contradictory, but they have a common basis in Beauvoir’s anti-universalistic or particularistic conception of practical deliberation and judgment. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she forcefully attacks all universal principles and theories of the human good and demolishes a priori theorization of violence as well as non-violence or pacifism (Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [135–40] 97–100, [206–7] 148, cf. [1945] 1948, [167–71] 131–33). Her ethics and ­politics are deeply situational, and their common topic is the concrete subject—individual and collective—in specific circumstances. The aim of ethics—and ethically and ontologically grounded political reflection—is therefore not to offer any rule book of action and interaction but to establish methods for deliberation and for the evaluation of action (e.g., Beauvoir [1947] 1948, [194] 134, [212] 152). Beauvoir develops this view throughout her works. She brings her conceptualization to the ethico-political reflections of her very first novels; she sharpens her critical tools in her ethical essays, targets them at the problem of racism and colonialism in her political articles, and applies them in her discussion of sexism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and ageism. In all these cases, oppression entails a systematic denial of human ambiguity, a fundamental existential and ethical error that, on some occasions, can only be rectified by acts of violence. In An Eye for an Eye, Beauvoir explains: [W]hen a man deliberately tries to degrade man by reducing him to a thing, nothing can compensate for the abomination he causes to erupt on earth. There resides the sole sin against man. When it is accomplished, no indulgences are permitted and it belongs to man to punish it. (Beauvoir [1946] 2004, 257) The analyses of The Second Sex begin with the same insight: “This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, its spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil” (Beauvoir [1949] 1987a, [31] 29).

6. Reception The reception of Beauvoir’s philosophical work was long restricted by two false assumptions, one topical and the other methodological. On the one hand, Beauvoir’s work was taken to contribute merely to the philosophical critique of patriarchy and the theory of women’s emancipation. On the other hand, it was assumed that she simply proceeded on Sartrean grounds without having any original philosophical methodology or arguments of her own. Moreover, most commentators merely knew one book, The Second Sex, from her extensive œuvre. Thus, for decades, it seemed that what Beauvoir offered was merely a set of voluntaristic Sartrean (and Cartesian) arguments for women’s liberation. On the basis of such preconceptions and assumptions, several critics have attacked Beauvoir’s work as inadequate or outdated. Some have claimed that her account of women’s situation is intellectualistic and ahistorical, ignoring the material realities of women and the manifold differences between women of different ethnic and religious groups, cultures, and historical eras. Other have contended that Beauvoir’s work betrays an individualistic and/ or subjectivistic preoccupation with selfhood and ignores questions of governance, power, and violence (e.g., Hekman 1990, 74–78; Butler 1990, 8, 129–30, 143–49). 93

Sara Heinämaa

Starting from the beginning of the 1990s, a series of new interpretations have challenged these older forms of critique as eclectic and prejudiced. These newer contributions are based on careful and comprehensive scholarly investigations that cover all aspects of Beauvoir’s philosophy, from ethics to ontology and metaphysics and further to theory of action and political philosophy (Arp 2001; Altman 2020a; Bergoffen 1999; Deutscher 2008; Heinämaa 2003, 2010; Kruks 1990, 2021; Simons 1999). Beauvoir is today read, not just as a critic of patriarchy and a feminist theorist, but as a self-standing philosopher who analyzes and criticizes the foundations of oppression in all its forms. In addition, the new scholarship contextualizes Beauvoir’s arguments not just by her personal relation with Sartre or by the dominant figure of Hegel but, more broadly, on the basis of her own accounts of her philosophical interests and aims. Thus, we now can avoid reductive Sartrean and Hegelian accounts and find connections to classical and existential phenomenology, to history of philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson), and to the traditions of literature and the visual arts.

Notes 1 Beauvoir also agrees with her phenomenological predecessors in arguing that philosophical ethics must not take values as givens but must proceed to study how values are constituted and coconstituted by (human) subjects in experiences of feeling and valuing (Beauvoir [1945] 2004a, 188, [1947] 1948, [22] 14–15, [34] 23–24, [51] 35, [61] 42, [68–69] 47–48, [1949] 1987b, [76] 68–69, [93] 83; cf. Bergoffen and Burke 2020, 9; Heinämaa 2012, 129–30). 2 For Beauvoir, freedom is ultimately not a value but the constitutive ground of all values and all valuing (e.g., [1947] 1948, [34] 24, [157] 113). 3 Future others have a special role in Beauvoir’s account of intersubjectivity since only they are able to take on our projects. However, for their sense and value, our projects also depend on the projects of past others. 4 Beauvoir’s account of the duality of embodiment draws from 20th-century French phenomenology and also from Husserl’s original account of the mundanization of consciousness, as developed in Cartesian Meditations and the second volume of Ideas (Heinämaa 2003, 2012, 2021; cf. Arp 2004). 5 For a long time, Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological critique of racism was bypassed, but today it is well known and widely applied in new case studies. For pioneering contributions, see Altman 2020b; Surkis 2010; Deutscher 2008; Murphy 1995; Simons 1999, 2002, 2008.

References Altman, Meryl. 2020a. Beauvoir in Time. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2020b. “Nothing to Say about Race and Class?” In Beauvoir in Time, 116–236. Leiden: Brill. Arp, Kristana. 2001. The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Ethics. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2004. “An Eye for an Eye’—Introduction by Kristiana Arp.” In Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader, 237–61. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. (1944) 2004. “Pyrrhus and Cineas.” In Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader, translated by Marybeth Timmermann, 77–150. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Originally published as Pyrrhus et Cinéas (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). ———. (1945) 1948. The Blood of Others. Translated by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse. New York: Knopf. Originally published as Le sang des autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). ———. (1945) 2004a. “Moral Idealism and Political Realism.” In Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader, translated by Anne Deing Cordero, 175–94. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

94

Simone de Beauvoir ———. (1945) 2004b. “A Review of Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” In Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader, translated by Stacy Keltner, 159–64. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Originally published as “La phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” (Temps modernes 1 (2): 363–67, 1945). ———. (1946) 2004. “An Eye for an Eye.” In Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader, translated by Kristiana Arp, 245–60. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Originally published as “Œil pour œil.” (Les temps modernes 5: 813–30, 1946). ———. (1947) 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. Originally published as Pour une morale de la ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). ———. (1949) 1987a. The Second Sex. Translated and Edited by Howard Madison Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Originally published as Le deuxième sexe I: les faits et les mythes (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). ———. (1949) 1987b. The Second Sex. Translated and Edited by Howard Madison Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Originally published as Le deuxième sexe II: l’expérience vécue (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). ———. (1954) 1956. The Mandarins. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman. Cleveland: World Publishing Company. Originally published as Les mandarins I—II (Paris: Gallimard, 1954). ———. (1960) 1962. “In Defence of Djamila Boupacha.” In Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl which Shocked the Liberal French Opinion, edited by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, translated by Peter Green, 194–98. New York: Macmillan. Originally published as “Pour Djamila Boupacha.” (Le monde, 1960). ———. (1960) 1965. Prime of Life (1929–1944). Translated by Peter Green. London: Penguin Books. Originally published as La force d’âge (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1960). ———. 1970. The Coming of Age. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Originally published as La vieillesse I—II (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). ———, and Gisèle Halimi. 1962. Djamila Boupacha. Paris: Gallimard. Bergoffen, Debra B. 1999. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities. Albany: SUNY Press. ———, and Megan Burke. 2020. “Simone de Beauvoir.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/beauvoir/. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. De Saint Aubert, Emmanuel. (2004) 2019. “The Blood of Others: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir.” Translated by Jennifer McWeeny. Simone de Beauvoir Studies 30: 33–65. Originally published as “Le Sang des Autres—Merleau-Ponty et Simone de Beauvoir.” (In Du Liens des êtres aux éléments de l’être. Paris: Vrin, 2004). Detmer, David. 2008. Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity. Chicago: Open Court. Deutscher, Penelope. 2008. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gothlin, Eva. 1995. “Gender and Ethics in the Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.” NORA—Nordic Journal of Women Studies 3 (1): 3–13. ———. 1999. “Simone de Beauvoir’s Notions of Appeal, Desire and Ambiguity and Their Relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Notions of Appeal and Desire.” Hypatia 14 (4): 83–95. ———. 2006. “Beauvoir and Sartre on Appeal, Desire, and Ambiguity.” In The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, edited by Margaret A. Simons, 132–45. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2010. “Phenomenologies of Mortality and Generativity.” In Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment, edited by Robin May Schott, 73–156. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. “Beauvoir and Husserl: An Unorthodox Approach to The Second Sex.” In Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, edited by Shannon Mussett and William Wilkerson, 125–51. New York: SUNY Press.

95

Sara Heinämaa ———. 2014. “Transformations of Old Age: Selfhood, Normativity, and Time.” In Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Old Age: Gender, Ethics, and Time, edited by Silvia Stoller, 167–87. Würzburg: De Gruyter. ———. 2021. “On the Transcendental Undercurrents of Phenomenology: The Case of the Living Body.” In Methods, edited by Steven Crowell and Anthony Fernandez. Special issue, Continental Philosophy Review 54 (2): 237–57. ———. 2023. “Vocational Life: Personal, Communal and Temporal Structures.” Continental Philosophy Review 56: 461–81. ———, and James Jardine. 2021. “Objectification, Inferiorization, Projection: Phenomenological Insights into Dehumanization.” In Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, edited by Maria Kronfeldner, 309–25. London: Routledge. Hekman, Susan J. 1990. Gender and Knowledge: Elements of Postmodern Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Keltner, Stacy. 2006. “Beauvoir’s Idea of Ambiguity.” In The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, edited by Margaret A. Simons, 201–13. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kruks, Sonja. 1990. Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society. New York: Routledge. ———. 2001. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2021. Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1995. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). ———. (1947) 1969. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Translated by John O’Neil. Boston: Beacon Press. Originally published as Humanisme et terreur: essay sur de problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). ———. (1964) 1983. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). ———. (1969) 1973. The Prose of the World. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as La prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Murphy, Ann V. 2006. “Between Generosity and Violence: Toward a Revolutionary Politics in the Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.” In The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, edited by Margaret A. Simons, 262–75. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Murphy, Julien. 1995. “Beauvoir and the Algerian War: Toward a Postcolonial Ethics.” In Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret A. Simons, 263–97. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Nya, Natalie. 2015. “Sartre and Fanon: On Men and Women, and Gender and Race Intersection as they Relate to French Colonial Resistance.” GSTF Journal of General Philosophy 2 (1): 61–71. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1943) 1956. Being and Nothingness: A  Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Originally published as L’être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). ———. (1960) 2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso. Originally published as Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). Schott, Robin May. 2003. “Beauvoir and the Ambiguity of Evil.” In Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claudia Card, 228–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simons, Margaret A. 1999. Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2002. “Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism.” In Philosophers of Race: Critical Essays, edited by Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott, 260–84. Oxford: Blackwell. Surkis, Judith. 2010. “Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War.” French Politics, Culture & Society 28 (2): 38–55. Young, Iris Marion. 1994. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (3): 713–38.

96

7 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY Contingency, Conflict, and Coexistence Martin Oppelt

1. Introduction Maurice Merleau-Ponty is considered a fixture in the canon of Western philosophy. However, whether his existentialist and phenomenological thought is political is, at the very least, a contentious issue. Undeniably, Merleau-Ponty was a political man who, throughout his life, intervened in the social debates and struggles of his generation by writing. He coedited Les Temps Modernes, for example, until the early 1950s, when he broke away from his co-editor and friend Jean-Paul Sartre because the latter did not distance himself from the political developments in the Soviet Union and remained firmly loyal to the Communist Party as the only legitimate representative of the working class and of supposedly orthodox Marxism. For Merleau-Ponty, however, Sartre’s “Ultrabolshevism” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 95–201), the Marxist historical determinism, and the required faith in the Communist Party were no longer tenable. As a result, he began to extend his phenomenological investigations of political events to the analysis of liberal institutions of representative democracies and their potential to promote freedom and emancipation. This should not be mistaken for a liberal turn. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty, in the sense of his own brand of political phenomenology, was concerned with breaking down the rigid patterns of thought and binary political positionings that were imposed during the Cold War, the systemic opposition of capitalism and liberal democracy in the West and the planned-economy party communism in the East. So, in that sense, Merleau-Ponty can be understood as a political author. He also radically challenged all the purported truths, self-evident facts, and self-conceptions of Western philosophy in its liberal character and thus questioned the understanding of the individual, society, the state, and politics that are based on them. His efforts to develop a philosophy of perception as an alternative to the hegemonial Cartesian dualism in Western thought and his critique of Western ontology and its fixation on being can be seen as an intellectual as well as a political commitment. However, Merleau-Ponty never formulated a systematic political philosophy or political theory in his lifetime. Nevertheless, already MerleauPonty’s early phenomenology of the body can be read politically (2). Phenomenology, according to him, refers to the ongoing interpretation of and simultaneous participation in the dialectic of human coexistence, and it aims at analysing the emergence of meaning from DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-12

97

Martin Oppelt

this coexistence without resorting to pre-formulated theories. Especially in his decidedly political writings (3), Humanism and Terror (3.1) and Adventures of the Dialectic (3.2), Merleau-Ponty does not limit himself to an application of methods and concepts from the phenomenological tradition for the consideration of politics but rather develops a specific method that can be called, with some justification, a political phenomenology (4). This became significant in the course of Claude Lefort’s reflections on modern democracy and totalitarianism, understood as a “revival of political philosophy” (Lefort 1988, 9) and thus for the currently influential strand of post-foundationalist radical democratic theory (5).

2.  Phenomenology of the Body For Merleau-Ponty, the body is the vehicle by which one accesses the world (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 91). Through the body, people have always already been in connection with their fellow human beings and, as a “sensorium commune” (246), constitute the social even prior to any notion of the individual and cognition. In the experience of dialogue, a common ground is formed between the self and the other; the thinking of the self and the other form a weave, and “I am freed from myself” (370) in the present dialogue. Here, Merleau-Ponty reveals anti-identitarian features in his understanding of politics. He rejects the liberal idea of an autonomous individual who is aware of its quasi nature and its natural law and defines coexistence and mutuality as the basic conditions of the social. Before even deliberating on it, people experience their social, political, and economic existence in society through their bodies. The fact that the body always already participates in social existence is politically relevant insofar as this implies a notion of freedom that also brings to light its obstacles (460). Although one does not choose one’s own social situatedness, it is possible to relate to it individually and to engage in political activity accordingly (468). Class affiliation and its respective ramifications on individual freedom would therefore always be experienced bodily first, even before they could be conceived through thought (472) and politically engaged with in coexistence with others. A  phenomenology of the body thus becomes a political phenomenology in which, for example, the corporeal experiences of the living conditions of people under capitalism (i.e., exploitation, alienation, and violence) and their significance for the formation of revolutionary energies are analysed. In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty states accordingly that “one does not become a revolutionary through science, but out of indignation. Science comes afterward to fill in and delimit that open protest” (1969, 11). For Merleau-Ponty, the subject of history and politics is neither the individual of the liberal discourse nor the Marxist collective agent of the social class or the proletariat. Instead, in his phenomenology of the body, he sees generalized and individual existence in a reciprocal exchange (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 475), whereby the individual human being enjoys a certain freedom of action within a socially and politically pre-structured world of intersubjectivity.

3.  Political Writings 3.1.  Humanism and Terror Merleau-Ponty’s text collections Humanism and Terror and Adventures of the Dialectic, which are clearly written as political interventions, offer an opportunity to identify his fundamental understanding of politics based on the premise of inter-subjective coexistence: 98

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“[T]here exists not a plurality of subjects, but an inter-subjectivity” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 110). On the surface, Merleau-Ponty dealt with the relationship of the emancipatory left to communism or, more specifically, to the French and the Soviet communist parties after the Second World War. However, on a deeper level, it is possible to identify which understanding of politics, and thus which kind of political phenomenology, drove Merleau-Ponty’s work. In Humanism and Terror, published in 1947, Merleau-Ponty focuses on the so-called Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s and the question of justifying revolutionary violence. This was prompted by the publication and widespread public success of Arthur Köstler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which was a literary reworking of these trials and served as ‘proof’ for a large number of Western intellectuals that communism had taken on totalitarian features and was to be fought accordingly. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, which started at that time, this argument was then used politically against the communist parties in Europe. Merleau-Ponty opposed a rash assessment of these events on the basis of unjustified premises: in this case, Western-liberal premises that were unfamiliar to the actors involved. In order to adequately understand events such as the Moscow Trials and thus the issue of how to legitimise revolutionary violence, it is necessary to step back and make a serious attempt to understand the agents involved from the perspective of their own worldview. In other words, Merleau-Ponty was by no means concerned with uncritically defending Stalinist politics, but rather with understanding them in order to then be able to appropriately criticise them on the basis of an adequate understanding and to highlight whether revolutionary violence serves to establish genuinely human relations between people and to contribute to the emancipation from domination and violence. The widespread anticommunism of postwar Western societies and the self-assurance of liberal ideology that sustained it, however, completely disregarded the motives and the meaning, as well as the Marxist background that the leaders of the Communist Party ascribed to themselves, through which they identified their existence and legitimised their actions. Merleau-Ponty wanted to make this meaning available to objective observation, which is a fundamental methodological feature of his political phenomenology. This meant understanding historical events based on the self-conceptions of those involved and, at the same time, against the background of the general, objective political situation. As the standard for evaluation, Merleau-Ponty held fast to the humanist claims of Marxism here. He then spent much of his writing justifying his approach to his critics in the French intelligentsia—leftists, liberals, and conservatives—who accused him of blind obedience and allegiance to the Stalinist regime of terror. His justifications reveal the method of his political thinking. In his critique of liberalism, for example, he strictly applied the methodological principles that he also insisted on when evaluating Marxist theory and practice—in this case, the politics of the Soviet Union—namely, to measure every theory not by its self-declared abstract values alone but by the “prevailing relations between men in a . . . state” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xiv). It is therefore necessary to use actual human relations as a touchstone for theories and principles or societies guided by these. This requires in-depth study of the respective society, wherein the question must be what the respective (liberal or Marxist) state does exactly, the value of human relationships between people, and how the respective principles work in practice: i.e., how they are experienced and lived out in everyday live. “Man’s relation to man” in a society is the object of every social analysis, the “human bond upon which [society] is built” (xiv) dependent on the respective legal conditions but also on the way of working, loving, living, dying (xiv). 99

Martin Oppelt

This is even more true in historically decisive political moments, those “epoch[s]” or “one of those moments where the traditional ground of a nation or society crumbles and where, for better or worse, man himself must reconstruct human relations” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xvii). Here, Merleau-Ponty touches on the ontological dimension of the foundation of societies, at the basis of which he, in line with Machiavelli and in opposition to Kant (104), sees politics and violence as constitutive. He thus rejects the liberal idea of a foundational consensus of society, as well as any deterministic historical conceptions of continuously improving societies. Revolutionary epochs in particular are “confused period[s]” in which the “major lines of history are uncertain” (xxii). It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty is not simply siding with Marxism and the policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin, especially since he also rejects the Marxist teleological understanding of history. Rather, the “formal liberties of democracy” should even be maintained as instruments of political and social culture as long as they have not yet become “actual liberties” insofar as a “fresh historical impulse” allows “engag[ing them] in a popular movement without ambiguity” (xxiii). At the same time, formal liberties must be criticised in the name of actual liberty wherever they legitimise violence: for example, in the context of colonialism and imperialism (xxiv). Political systems are therefore never to be judged in the abstract, and their historical and geographical enabling conditions are to be considered in each case (xxiv). Methodologically, “concrete liberty” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xxv) means to measure the other as well as political phenomena in general only by the implementation of their own principles and thus to fulfill the freedom of thinking in the freedom of understanding (xxv, FN 4). Even if one should reach the same result in a specific example, just like a locationbased critique that is based on one’s own principles and premises, the former method should be retained because “the sense of the conclusion is not the same if reached by one path or by another” (xliv). There are, for example, two conceptions of freedom: freedom as a propaganda slogan and active freedom, which seeks to understand fellow human beings before making value judgements and which can never be used for propaganda purposes. This approach entails “thinking like living men” (xlv) and not in absolute categories such as friendship or enmity. In the tradition of Machiavelli, Marx, and Weber, the understanding of the political and politics appropriate to this approach is therefore one of struggle, risky decision making, and tragedy. Accordingly, “political action is of its nature impure, because it is the action of one person upon another and because it is collective action” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xxxii). To govern is to anticipate the unpredictable without having the possibility of excusing oneself (xxxiii). History is always antagonistic; it has no room for neutral and indifferent actions, and, consequently, there is no innocence in politics. Contrary to what liberal theory claims, the motives of political action are of no interest; politics could never be legitimised by good intentions. Every legal system “begins by being a power de facto” (xxxiv), “all law is violence” (xxxvi), and not all successful politics are intrinsically good, but all politics that want to be good must succeed. This is “the curse of politics . . ., that it must translate values into the order of facts” (xxxv). Merleau-Ponty’s concept of politics is thus based on an understanding of contingency and conflict, which does not offer a choice between Weber’s “ethics of responsibility” and “ethics of faith” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xl), between prioritizing consequences over values, and which also does not purport, with Kant, to treat one’s neighbour not as a means but as an end since this would be an inapplicable imperative for all politics. At the same time, however, this always involves the possibility of communication and reason. Drawing 100

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

on Aron and Weber, politics for Merleau-Ponty is essentially immoral; it is a struggle for power that leads to violence; it is polytheism and the struggle of the gods: “The world is governed by paradox, division, anxiety, and decision” (187). Therefore, there can be no Kantian universal reason and no harmony, as liberal political thinking either assumes or strives for. This is to be recognised in the political and in politics: People are “thrown into an adventure whose happy end is not guaranteed” (xlii). Nevertheless, or precisely because of it, what matters in politics is the inter-subjective perspective of coexistence and, thus, collective action. Accordingly, the role of the intellectual is to highlight the true terms of each problem beyond the paradoxes and contingencies of contemporary history (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 179). From this premise, Merleau-Ponty derives a general rule according to which “human life and history in particular are compatible with truth provided only that all its aspects are clarified” (185). By contrast, those who demand ‘solutions’ to political challenges equate human coexistence with a mathematical task in which there are indeed things that are unknown but nothing that is undetermined. However, the most important task is the recognition of men by men (186). Therefore, truth cannot be found in a priori reflection and solitary thinking alone but must be sought in the experience of a specific situation and in dialogue with others. This method represents the “exact contrary of irrationalism, since it accepts our incoherence and conflict with others as constants but assumes we are able to minimize them” (187). The great challenge here is to deal with the contradiction of reason and experience and to understand it as a constitutive element of human coexistence. The desire for unity, transparency, and overcoming and resolving contradictions must be put aside in order to “[open] us to the other person” (188). We need the ability to put ourselves in the position of the other in order to evaluate ourselves: that is, to have “the experience of the other person as an alter ego in the very course of discussion” (188); “The human world is an open or unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it” (188).

3.2.  Adventures of the Dialectic Even though Merleau-Ponty looked at Soviet communism and Marxism more sceptically in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), he did not abandon the Marxist premises of his thinking. Despite not surrendering the Marxist dialectic, he granted the proletarian masses no possibility of reviving the revolution that Stalinism had killed off. It would simply not make sense to commit to the revolution as the only way to end exploitation, alienation, and violence since the revolution had not actually achieved any of this, which is the only yardstick against which it must be measured. Hence, the revolution did not, as a matter of course, always represent the interests of the exploited and oppressed; instead, in the mid-1950s, it actually demanded submission instead of involvement. Merleau-Ponty also stuck to his methodological premise of not elaborating principles of politics and instead learning in the process of studying events and discerning what is acceptable or unacceptable and then turning this interpreted experience into hypothesis and philosophy. By doing so, the false pretence of numerous systematic texts, pretending to spring from nothingness and “to display a superhuman understanding” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 3), can be avoided. This still implies rejecting any teleological understanding of politics and history but does not completely exclude the idea of a purposeful development, albeit in the 101

Martin Oppelt

form of a removal of obstacles to freedom and of the mechanisms and tools of oppression (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xxxv). However, Merleau-Ponty still considered the idea that history automatically points in one direction to be an essentialist illusion. Marxism, which insists on its truth regardless of the actions taken in its name, thereby bypassing the need for tangible successes in reality, is “Kant in disguise” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 232). In regard to the specific case of the Soviet Union, this meant that the state—which, according to Marxist theory, should have withered away with the revolution—had c­ onsolidated its power by identifying the revolution and the state with each other through the bureaucratic rule of the Communist Party. The seizure of power by one class would thus have closed the opened depths again, and the new ruling class would have reinstated its power, “which is already being challenged” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 209). Lefort would later link his theory of democracy to this image of the eventful opening of spaces of possibility in the usually closed symbolic dispositive of a society in the same way he understands totalitarianism as the violent closure of the political. According to Merleau-Ponty, “[P]articular acts would open or close hidden fissures in the block of general consent, and trigger a molecular process which may modify the whole course of events” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 216). For Lefort, this maintaining of openness is a basic trait of democratic societies that fundamentally distinguishes them from their totalitarian counterparts (see Section 4). Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, focused on politics’ possibility in the sense of an encounter “in action, in the relative and the probable” (1973, 205) and stated in this regard that political action requires putting oneself back into the common sounding board of human relations, narratives, and undertakings in order to be able to perceive the other as a companion (205). Such politics is “not pure morality, nor is it a chapter in a universal history which has already been written. Rather it is an action in the process of self-invention” (4). An end of history, regardless of how it is imagined or to be achieved, is a return to the immobility of nature and thus an apolitical notion (5). Universal history, however, “is not to be contemplated but to be made” (5), and the knowledge of the secrets of history does not provide the knowledge of its paths (6). All politics thus remain necessarily “undemonstrable” (6), and every political act becomes enmeshed in history at large. Politics is thus “tracing a line in the obscurity of historical symbolism” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 201) and must be understood as a new way of linking modes of reference. This emphasises the interruptive and processual character of politics in its foundational dimension, which is also significant for Lefort’s political philosophy and the theories of radical democracy following Lefort (Norval 2001, 589). Consequently, Merleau-Ponty argues that revolutions “are true as movements and false as regimes” (1973, 207), which means that at the moment of their institutionalisation they once again become a target for criticism and attack. Every historical movement “betrays and disfigures itself in accomplishing itself” (207).

4.  Method for a Political Phenomenology It can be argued that Merleau-Ponty’s political phenomenology aims at understanding as the comprehensive grasp of the entire meaning of a phenomenon. This understanding encompasses what he terms, the “ontological cipher” (Coole 2001, 27) representing a certain way of structuring the world. This “unique core of existential meaning” (27) facilitates a shared mode of existence for individual components of the social sphere, such as culture, the economy, or the state (27). Our understanding is always pre-structured by 102

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

intersubjective perception. Facts and attributions of meaning, value judgements, and interpretations cannot be separated from one another, which is why there is a need for cooperation between the empirical social sciences and interpretive philosophy. A phenomenology that reconstructs these lived meanings from the ambiguities of collective life therefore does not strive for a truthful representation but rather processes the world interpretively and reconstructs meaning. In politics, this means identifying existing fissures and thus possibilities for change in firmly established structures. Societies are therefore not analysed on the basis of their chosen principles and descriptions, but on the basis of the lived relationships within their framework. Thus, in order to understand and make an assessment of a society, its basic structure must be penetrated down to the human bonds as the smallest unit on which it is built. This makes it possible to compare different societies, each of which offers different ‘solutions’ to the issues of coexistence. In terms of methodology, Merleau-Ponty thus pursued a phenomenological approach to research that attempted to analyse societies from within: i.e., against the background of the socio-economic experiences and intersubjective relationships of its members. This also required a certain reflective capacity on the part of the researcher in order to constantly question both the values and ideas of the research object and the researcher’s own conceptual tools. In this sense, political phenomenology does not provide a truthful depiction of an environment but calls for a critical analysis of the underlying values. In practical terms, the others must therefore be accepted in their diversity without falling prey to relativism. This requires immanent critique: i.e., confronting the official narratives with actual experiences. Here, all social orders must be understood as forms of expression that are always only provisional and whose gaps and fissures are what make change possible to begin with. A political phenomenology thus analyses societies from the vantage point of their own claims and, at the same time, views them as an experiment (Coole 2003, 330) with uncertain outcome. Since intersubjectivity is the constitutive condition of political and social communities, the methodological consequence is that neither the individual nor the collective can be used as a starting point for their analysis and understanding (Coole 2007, 242). Moreover, where intercorporality is the ontological condition of all social, ethical, and political relations, conflict and differences will always exist and have to be dealt with politically.

5.  Reception History and Contributions to Current Debates 5.1.  Reading Merleau-Ponty as (A)political Author The influential poststructuralist theories of the second half of the 20th century criticised phenomenology in general, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body in particular, for its preoccupation with the self; its supposed idealism, subjectivism, and humanism; and, thus, its apolitical nature. Although this criticism does not actually apply to Merleau-Ponty, as Coole (2007, 1–17) points out, his two explicitly political text collections Humanism and Terror (1969) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) nevertheless tend to be received as exceptions, missteps, or books of lesser value than his other works (Coole 2003, 332). Adventures of the Dialectic is still interpreted as supposed proof of Merleau-Ponty’s turning towards liberalism (Plot 2012): an opportunity “to see how Merleau-Ponty worked his way out of Marxism” (Flynn 2007, 126), to which he allegedly remained uncritically loyal in Humanism and Terror. In this line, an early political phase, to be taken less seriously with regard to his philosophical work, is distinguished from a later, mature creative 103

Martin Oppelt

phase. Since the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty 2012) has also been more commonly interpreted as apolitical and the ontology of the flesh developed in his late work (Merleau-Ponty 1968) has remained incomplete due to his early death, Merleau-Ponty was only marginally received as a political theorist (Coole 2001, 2003, 2007; Dormal 2019) or political phenomenologist (Flynn 2013). The Cambridge Companion (Carman and Hansen 2005) only lists two contributions to the question of politics in Merleau-Ponty’s work, and his contribution to the radical democratic tradition has been addressed only minimally (Mazzocchi 2015). Mazzocchi points out, however, that in letters to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty himself rejected the idea of a break, a change, or a retreat with regard to questions of politics in his work (Mazzocchi 2015, 60, FN 4 with reference to Stewart 1998). Coole (2007, 14) furthermore argues that the early works laid the political foundations of Merleau-Ponty´s later political works and that they must therefore be read in the context of these. This is especially significant in view of the reception of his political phenomenology by his student, the political philosopher and democratic theorist Claude Lefort. Bedorf and Herrmann, for example, read Merleau-Ponty as a representative of a “political phenomenology” and a decidedly political philosopher, and they also link him to Lefort´s radical theory of democracy (Bedorf and Herrmann 2020, 2), which he influenced significantly. Bedorf (2020) furthermore examines Merleau-Ponty’s use of the German term Stiftung in the context of the establishment of institutions and the institutionalising of the social (Merleau-Ponty 2010b). He classifies it according to the Phenomenology of Political Episteme, which deals with the constitution of the realm of the political (Bedorf and Herrmann 2020) while understanding all human relations as principally political and assuming contingent foundations of the social (Bedorf 2020, 241). This perspective uses genetic analysis to uncover the historical and social situatedness of the self, the Other, and the world. Thus, the sphere of experience becomes understandable as the result of political struggles and human worldliness as the object and arena of political disputes (Bedorf and Herrmann 2020, 12).

5.2.  Claude Lefort’s Revival of Political Philosophy Following Merleau-Ponty Lefort’s theory of democracy sees modern democracy as a permanent institution of the social and political order and decisively influenced current radical democratic theory (Norval 2001, 589). Lefort took Merleau-Ponty’s approach to a political phenomenology as the starting point for his project of a “revival of political philosophy” (Lefort 1988, 9). After Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961, he edited Merleau-Ponty’s writings (Merleau-Ponty 2010a) and dedicated a collection of essays to him (Lefort 1978). During his youth, Lefort became a follower of Trotskyism, which he said he joined in 1943, mainly because of the strong personal influence of his teacher Merleau-Ponty at the Lycée Carnot. Lefort reported how Merleau-Ponty’s remark on Trotskyism fell on fertile ground in his mind since, at that time, he was searching Marx’s writings for arguments for an anti-authoritarian Marxism (Lefort 2007a). Like Merleau-Ponty, Lefort understood and practised philosophy as something that does not find definite answers, and he valued Merleau-Ponty above all as a thinker “who refused the distinction between subject and object, who thought that the true questions .  .  . are the sign of our interaction with the world, with others, with Being itself” (Lefort 1986, 294). 104

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Thematically, like Merleau-Ponty, he was concerned throughout his life with the significance of communism for modern democracy, also striving to avoid liberal biases (Lefort 2007b). Methodologically, for Merleau-Ponty and for Lefort, thinking is always a new beginning, based on the experience of unacceptable events, through which hypotheses and thus, ultimately, philosophy would be able to emerge in the first place. All theoretical work can only emerge from practical experience (Lefort 1988, 47), and for Lefort, as for MerleauPonty, history is always based on both logic and contingency (Lefort 2005, 359). Following Merleau-Ponty, Lefort (2000, 244–45) thus believed that theoretical work could only make sense if it was linked to the interpretation of contemporary political events. “Breaking with the prevalent illusions,” which he subsequently declared to be his program with the “revival of political philosophy” and a “liberation of thought” (Lefort 1988, 9), Lefort started to rethink the ideas of freedom and social creativity in relation to the phenomenon of modern democracy. He perceived the Marxist philosophy of history as a mystification of the open character of modern democratic society and its absence of ultimate foundations, and he henceforth placed overcoming this mystification at the centre of his theoretical work, which counts as a highly significant contribution to post-foundational theory (Marchart 2007). This was no small step for Lefort, who, despite all his criticism, had long considered the proletariat to be the privileged agent of history (Lefort 1986, 293). However, his analysis of the Soviet Union ultimately led him to the conviction that totalitarianism must be understood as symbolic mutation of modern democracy (Lefort 2000, 245) and that the communist dream of a conflict-free society could not be dissociated from the nightmare of totalitarianism. On the contrary, modern democracy must be accepted as characterized and structured by the “dissolution of the markers of certainty” (Lefort 1988, 19) and represented by an empty place of power (225). Lefort´s theory of democracy and totalitarianism owes much to Merleau-Ponty’s political phenomenology and, like the latter, takes as its point of departure the founding moment of social and political communities. Like Merleau-Ponty, Lefort dismissed the existence of a place outside the flesh of the social, as such a place would be impossible to adopt. Power is thus the condition for the possibility of a society’s quasi-representation of itself; it is the symbolic pole to which those in power refer in order to generate legitimacy for holding this very position and symbolically unifying society from there. Power as a central category of the political thus first symbolically establishes the unity and identity of any society. In this respect, Lefort (1988, 219–20) described the moment of origin of a society as the simultaneous act of its mise-en-scène, mise-en-forme, and mise-en-sens. The mise-en-forme of the social refers to the way in which a society gives itself a form: i.e., the institutionalisation of its principles, its unity, and its existence. The mise-en-sens, on the other hand, closely relates to the process of attributing meaning to one's own existence as a political community. This is because a society can only perceive and understand itself intersubjectively in its societal form when social practices acquire meaning within a shared and accepted framework of significance. And, finally, the mise-en-scène relates to the symbolic staging of a society’s social relations and selfperception on the symbolic stage of politics. Consequently, the quasi-representation of a society, made possible by the symbolic occupation of a place of power distinguishable from this society, is the first condition for its existence (Lefort 1988, 218–19). Societies therefore do not establish themselves in reality and therefore do not really exist in the strict sense of the word. Hence, there is no society—only the symbolic assertion of its existence and the attempts to represent it (which are necessarily doomed to failure). A fundamental split between reality and representation, between the instituent and the instituted, and between 105

Martin Oppelt

the people and the government is the fundamental prerequisite for the possibility of society and, at the same time, for its constant change and challenging. Thus, when Lefort (1988, 9) declared to “contribute to a revival of political philosophy,” this should not be misunderstood as a search for a society harmoniously united under the idea of the common good. Rather, Lefort applied Merleau-Ponty’s ontological concept of the flesh to the socio-philosophical designation of relationships that are yet to be formalized. This is crucial in shaping the social fabric. Like Merleau-Ponty, Lefort was ultimately concerned with the tangible differences between social dispositives. This does not exclude advocacy for democracy, especially in light of its ever-present alternative, totalitarianism. According to Lefort, the democratic institutions are in charge of warding off the latter. They do this by regularly reminding people of the fundamental impossibility of staging society in a definitive way, of giving it a form and ascribing a final meaning to it. However, for Lefort, the democratic age is not simply to be accepted as one of permanent uncertainty but instead must be accepted as an adventure in the form of continuous democratic self-inquiry and self-criticism, and the reorganisation of social and political arrangements must always remain a possibility. This understanding of democracy as an essential mode of the self-constitution of societies and of political practice beyond certainty is something all radical democratic theories owe to the analyses of Lefort, who, in turn, was influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s political phenomenology. Where radical democracy sees the absence of ultimate foundations of the social as a prerequisite and the permanent questioning of all institutions as a condition of democracy, Merleau-Ponty’s political phenomenology offers the possibility of analysing the opportunities and difficulties of democracy in the actual experience of interpersonal interaction.

References Bedorf, Thomas. 2020. “Instituting Institutions. An Exploration of the Political Phenomenology of Stiftung.” In Political Phenomenology. Experience, Ontology, Episteme, edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, 239–55. New York/London: Routledge. ———, and Steffen Herrmann. 2020. “Three Types of Political Phenomenology.” In Political Phenomenology. Experience, Ontology, Episteme, edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, 1–14. New York/London: Routledge. Carman, Taylor and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coole, Diana. 2001. “Thinking Politically with Merleau-Ponty.” Radical Philosophy 108 (July— August): 17–28. ———. 2003. “Philosophy as Political Engagement: Revisiting Merleau-Ponty and Reopening the Communist Question.” Contemporary Political Theory 2, no. 3 (November): 327–50. ———. 2007. Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dormal, Michel. 2019. “Zur Welt kommen. Politische Theorie mit Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie (ZPTh) 10 (2): 151–68. Flynn, Bernard. 2007. “The Development of the Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty: Humanism and the Rejection of Terror.” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2): 125–38. ———. 2013. “Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political.” In Claude Lefort. Thinker of the Political, edited by Martin Plot, 23–33. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefort, Claude. 1978. Sur une colonne absente. Écrits autour de Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1986. “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism.” In The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Claude Lefort, edited by John B. Thompson, 292– 306. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by D. Macy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

106

Maurice Merleau-Ponty ———. 2000. “Philosopher?” In Writing. The Political Test, edited by Claude Lefort, 236–51. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. ———. 2005. “Thinking Politics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, edited by Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, 352–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007a. “Entretien avec L´Anti-Mythes.” In Le Temps Présent. Ècrits 1945–2005, edited by Claude Lefort, 223–60. Paris: Belin. ———. 2007b. Complications. Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mazzocchi, Paul. 2015. “Politics à l´écart: Merleau-Ponty and the Flesh of the Social.” In Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-War France, edited by Martin Breaugh, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, and David Penner, 60–88. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1969. Humanism and Terror. An Essay on the Communist Problem. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2010a. Œuvres. Edited by Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2010b. Institution and passivity: Course notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge. Norval, Aletta. 2001. “Radical Democracy.” In Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought, edited by B. Clarke and J. Foweraker, 587–94. London/New York: Routledge. Plot, Martin. 2012. “Our Element: Flesh and Democracy in Merleau-Ponty.” Continental Philosophy Review 45, no. 2 (March): 235–59. Stewart, John, ed. 1998. The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

107

8 TRẦN ĐỨC THẢO Practicing Phenomenology Through Anticolonialism, Dialectical Materialism, and Socialism Jérôme Melançon 1. Introduction Trần Đức Thảo can be said to belong to the tradition of political phenomenology in that he pursued the questions raised by phenomenology after abandoning Husserl’s project in favour of a Marxist approach. Thảo contributed to political phenomenology from the perspective of the anticolonial class struggle in Vietnam, which formed his intellectual horizon and practical motivation. Since his allegiance lay with the anticolonial and communist movement in Vietnam, his dialectical materialism built on Marx, Engels, and Lenin and often moved beyond their analyses. In 1936, Thảo was among the first Vietnamese humanities and social science students to attend an institution of higher education in France and the first in philosophy. At the École normale supérieure, he was mentored by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and wrote his Mémoire d’études supérieures on Husserl for the Diplôme d’études supérieures under Jean Cavaillès. He then began a doctoral dissertation which gave him access to many of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. After the war ended, he supported Vietnamese workers in France, grew closer to the French Communist Party, and openly supported the Vietminh. While in France, he provided an analysis of colonialism and of anticolonial and revolutionary movements, which led him to revisit the central concepts of existential phenomenology. His major work, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Thảo [1951] 2013), draws on his years of philosophical work since his arrival in France, including his unfinished dissertation. It also acts as a break with phenomenology in favour of Marxism. After his clandestine return to Vietnam in 1952, he joined the effort to spread the revolution and undertook research on Vietnamese history and literature, some of which eventually criticized the government and led to his expulsion from the university. As the Vietminh and its successors controlled his access to a livelihood and to the organs of intellectual debate, he focused on developing a materialist, humanist, and dialectical philosophy which transformed several of the concepts of phenomenology. His work first focused on the themes of language and production, and, beginning in the 1970s, he deepened his engagement with the problem of the origins of humanity and with dialectics as a method. He would attempt to circulate the results of this work upon his return to France late in life, mostly through 108

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-13

Trần Đức Thảo

self-published booklets distributed to friends and colleagues. As a result of his approach, Thảo’s philosophy is political in its goals and supported by epistemology rather than centered on it, in opposition to much of Husserl’s work; phenomenological and existential in its inspiration but marked by an incomplete break with this tradition; and Marxist in its method and contents, although without clear adhesion to any party line.

2.  Phenomenology and Marxism Phenomenology, as Thảo suggests in “Marxisme  & Phénoménologie” (1946), does not provide a guide for action but only expresses a sentiment of action: not a coherent practice, but only a feeling that something is being done; not an understanding of the economic structures that shape the experience of the world, but the understanding of what daily life hides of the world lived by consciousness. On each point, phenomenology provides a support for Marxism but does not allow for any forward momentum. However, it does lead away from the temptation to explain all of history directly through class struggle and economic life and to see all ideologies, thought, and institutions as mere reflections of these infrastructures, by finding and respecting the value of all meaning emerging within human life. Yet dialectical materialism does show that the lifeworld is economic: all superstructures find their origin in the lived experience of a world shaped by economic relations and practices. As technology changes and economic relations change, culture and superstructures change as well since they are expressions of the experiences and intuitions made possible by such new lived experiences and material life. As the lifeworld changes, revolutions are needed to carry away the practices and superstructures that remain from the previous state of the lifeworld and make way for a new social organization. Thảo (1948) points out in “La Phénoménologie de l’Esprit et Son Contenu Réel” that both existentialism and official Marxism were limited in their capacity to account for this concrete universal movement of human history—hence, the need to further develop dialectical materialism. In “Existentialisme et matérialisme dialectique,” Thảo (1949a) presents the two forms of thought as tied to existing society and its rejection, opposing bourgeois intellectuals and bourgeois thought to their adversaries—that is, the proletariat. This political opposition and enmity emerge from conflicting experiences of the same social reality and of constituted values: bourgeois philosophers only see the positive side of the society at the source of their conditions of existence, whereas proletarians only experiences this society through the sacrifices and hardships it imposes on them. Likewise, dialectical materialism provides a critique of ideologies in place which is only negative and destructive for bourgeois thinkers but brings a positive vision of authenticity and a positive norm for truth for those who develop it. This divide in experiences prevents bourgeois philosophers from understanding the full reality not only of dialectical materialism—which is not meant for them—but also of their own society. In spite of his social position, Thảo does not despair of creating the bases for the understanding of—and adhesion to—dialectical materialism since it remains united to Marxism, which offers philosophy a mediation toward the experiences of the oppressed. Indeed, “dialectical materialism, such as it presents itself in the current moment, expresses the result of the contemporary philosophical movement” (Thảo 1949a, 318; author’s translation). Thảo consequently takes up what he presents as the central themes of phenomenology: existence defined as the full plurality of meanings reality takes on; the lifeworld, in which an effective subject lives a concrete life; the transcendental self, or being-in-the-world, 109

Jérôme Melançon

understood as the human self. However, he also makes it plain that the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, even as they bring us to the real existence of the self, oppose it to the world and limit the world to a moment of human existence. As a consequence, facticity, engagement, freedom, situation, and being there are all empty, abstract aspects of the subject. In other words, material reality is abstracted from the existence of the self, condemning the latter to be nothingness. Dialectical materialism takes up this negation of the subject and places it within nature. My being, Thảo explains, imposes itself on me; my life is conditioned by the milieu, by social structures, by material organization, which give it meaning; I belong to a nation or to a class before I can ever choose them; and, as systems, they provide a horizon of meaning to my life. Extending the “sphere of ownness” defined by Husserl ([1931] 1960, 92–105), Thảo argues that social structures are mine, that they make things what they are to me. In a Merleau-Pontian vein, he adds that the meaning of any project emerges from a sedimentation of past experiences and from a feeling that values have not been realized—action being not a matter of freedom but rather of following a direction that is privileged among others because of the weight of structures and past experiences and belongings which form the horizon of meaning. In line with ideas Merleau-Ponty ([1947] 1969a) shared in Humanism and Terror, for Thảo, values “reveal themselves, in their being, through human practice, in lived and enacted relations of man with nature and his fellow men” (Thảo 1949a, 323; author’s translation). Concrete life provides evidence with which events come to clash, calling for actions, reactions, or legislative changes as new situations are formed. Meanings present themselves, already constituted, in everyday life, within a lifeworld that is a material world and that envelops all signification. Deepening the dialectics of infrastructure (or base) and superstructure, Thảo presents materiality as the infrastructure of human life, as a foundation for all human meaning. Of course, this materiality is not to be understood solely in terms of matter or nature: as forces of production develop, relations of production—a spontaneous reorganization of human activity—are the grounds for renewed values that give a human meaning to the world. Actions undertaken to realize these values, to defend them, then consolidate certain relations of production and undermine others, leading to new developments in the forces of production: modes of production which can be seen as new modes of existence, as “the triumph of an existence over another existence” (Thảo 1949a, 326; author’s translation). Existences consequently constitute themselves in everyday life within the class struggle that structure it and that, more than a conflict of material interests, is a conflict between horizons of meaning defined by class interests, the defence of which is felt as a moral obligation since they set out material conditions of existence. Class struggle is thus existential struggle, and, as a class loses its anchoring in everyday life and as the material foundations of a mode of existence weaken, it becomes possible to desert the bourgeois class to join another class, where a fuller existence becomes possible. Trần Đức Thảo’s major work, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Thảo [1951] 2013), closes this cycle, as dialectical materialism demands that thought be aimed not at bourgeois intellectuals in their journals in the imperial centre, but rather at those fighting for their own liberation at the colonial margins. As its author presents it, this book consists in an internal study of Husserl’s phenomenology and in a second section, where dialectical materialism aims to take up the movements in this phenomenology to place them within material, animal, and human life. The relationship between the two forms of thought is now clear: phenomenology is valid in its historical-intentional form provided by genetic phenomenology but not in its results, and “Marxism imposed itself as the only conceivable 110

Trần Đức Thảo

solution to the problems raised by phenomenology itself” (Thảo [1951] 2013, 267; author’s translation). From there on out, Thảo’s philosophy would focus on the problem of production: The notion of production fully accounts for the enigma of consciousness, in as much as the worked-upon object takes on a meaning for man, as human product. The understanding of meaning is precisely but the symbolic transposition of material operations of production into a system of intentional operations where the subject appropriates the object ideally by reproducing it in its consciousness. (Thảo [1951] 2013, 271; author’s translation) Various experiences of work and of production will consequently create various forms of consciousness. Transcendence is then nothing other than the idealization of oppression and exploitation, of relations of command, and of appropriation of the work of others, reaching the material world only through the negation of the work of others and the imposition of new meanings on it. This transcendence presents itself as a denial of the material reality of consciousness—it is the repetition of the expropriation that takes place in material life and which is a part of the class struggle. Indeed, the passage from the fact of property to a right to property is a movement of expropriation. This movement ends with transcendence: like other bourgeois philosophers, Husserl depicts consciousness as no longer having any ties to materiality and hides its origins in productive activities. In bourgeois thought, the right to property is a “mystical union” (Thảo [1951] 2013, 462; author’s translation) between owner and property. Whereas the work of production is the only material basis for possession, this right anchors property in the fictional consent of others. Against this privative appropriation, which has alienation as its correlate, Thảo suggests that the joy that emerges from cooperation is a better outcome of production. Common tasks allow at once a distribution according to needs and a continuous development of productive activities as well as of exchanges with others, both allowing for a flourishing of the singular existence which consciously lives its relations to others and its participation in a social totality, where properly human relations can take place for all—and which only a revolution can bring about.

3.  Anticolonialism and Vietnamese Independence Truthful to his method, Trần Đức Thảo developed this reading of the relationship between phenomenology and dialectical materialism by studying the material realities of class struggle and of colonial struggle—and in reflecting on his experience of these realities. In 1944, he joined Vietnamese activist networks for the rights of Vietnamese workers in France and against the return of French colonialism to Vietnam (Hémery 2013, 55–57). In three texts published in 1946 and 1947 (and a fourth [Thảo 1949b], which confirms his earlier analyses), he mobilized and expanded the reach of the concepts of horizon and project in order to account for both French colonialism in Indochina and the Vietnamese resistance and liberation struggle. In his first article, “On Indochina” (Thảo 2021), published in 1956 in Les Temps Modernes after his incarceration for his anticolonial activities and preceded by a warning through which Merleau-Ponty distanced the journal from his views, Thảo focuses on questions of political epistemology: that is, on the capacity for a mutual understanding between Vietnamese and French. Such an understanding would be a precondition for any 111

Jérôme Melançon

kind of agreement but is made impossible by bad faith and the repetition of the same arguments and the same facts to which the other group remains indifferent. In contrasting the two positions and repeating the arguments presented on each side, Thảo already offers a critique of French colonialism: the material infrastructure (roads, schools, clinics) mostly benefits the colonizers; this supposed progress would have come to Vietnam without France’s occupation, with the expansion of capitalism; it could have come peacefully, respecting Vietnam’s independence and the historical path on which it was already set; industrialization, beyond resource extraction, is made impossible by France. The French perspective remains the same across all aspects of colonialism: it is one of wonder, self-congratulation, and pride for having brought to Vietnam what would not have arrived otherwise. While France sees only its own actions, the Vietnamese perspective sees only what France has not done, what the Vietnamese could have done if they had been left to govern themselves. Indochina, Thảo writes, “would have become such a modern country without colonization. The Annamites are convinced of this. They experience [éprouver] it in their will to live, in the obstacles they face on all fronts, in the examples provided by neighboring countries” (Thảo 2021, 10). The opposition between these two perspectives is a matter of the definition of what is effectively possible: that is, what would be possible were it not for the obstacles that have been encountered. This definition rests on an effectively lived collective project, an identification with this collective, as well as on a life lived in a world that was shaped at once by a long historical development, bearing its own meaning, and by colonization, barring the meaning the Vietnamese world ought to have had. It rests on achievements of the past and of the present; it is tied to aspirations and capacities demonstrated when the Vietminh took power. This world of possibilities—what the Vietnamese call Vietnam—is full of things and institutions that take their meaning against its background; it is lived as a horizon against which all events take their meaning, with colonization interrupting this world, erupting into it, and placing it within the limits of ‘Indochina.’ The colonizers are simply not able to understand the meaning Vietnam and colonization take on for the Vietnamese since their own horizon is limited by Vietnam being already imbricated within their world, as Indochina and as one of its regions. Having been taught that Indochina is French, they can only grasp Vietnam as an arbitrary region within Indochina and Indochina as appearing within a French community which no one would ever want to leave—since they themselves wouldn’t think of leaving France. Any social or economic problems are simply tasks yet to be completed, requiring the collaboration of the local population as part of the potential of colonization and all the good it is able to bring. For the French, these problems in no way condemn colonialism. The development of Vietnam is part of the development of France, and the needs of the broader community take precedence over local needs. The horizon of the French imperial community does not even allow for the notion of self-government or renovation of Vietnam—and war is a necessary part of maintaining Indochina within the French community, the first step to ensuring that France can play its civilizing role there. In a few pages, Thảo thus presents a theory of both colonial oppression and political or historical worlds: the colonized experience themselves through what they collectively could have been, but do not live within the world of colonizers. They live at once within the positivity of the world that continues to be their horizon and the negativity which colonization brings into this world. Implicitly refusing ontological difference, Thảo describes the ontological dimension of historical events and relationships. As a result, he 112

Trần Đức Thảo

finds at the heart of colonialism an opposition that is at once epistemological, political, and ontological: The opposition is radical, rooted in the mode of existence, in two ways of life and of understanding the world. It is not about a discussion regarding this or that particular fact. The discussion itself would be of no use, since each fact is interpreted, is perceived, in a different manner. (Thảo 2021, 15) The opposition precedes any discourse and is found within existence, within what gives meaning to words, arguments, and facts. The same situation can be found in diplomatic relations, where paternalism prevails (Thảo 1947a), and in French Marxist critiques such as Claude Lefort’s, which are unable to imagine that a Vietnamese revolutionary organization may have better knowledge of the situation (Thảo 1947b). The political meaning of history and of a situation can only arise out of lived experience, as the lived meaning that emerges out of the practical possibilities they present for action. An important aspect of this analysis is the precision with which Thảo defines community belonging as a part of individual selfhood: It is not possible to persuade individuals to enter a community because all the reasons that could be given presuppose that they are already part of that community. The project that is outlined before individuals, as having meaning for them, can only apply to the community in which these individuals feel themselves as existing. Such a feeling defines the very being of their existence, that which is for them, that without which they would no longer exist. (Thảo 2021, 20) To be colonized, or to be oppressed, exploited, dominated, is to feel a belonging to a community which is not that of the colonizer. Against this impossible absorption into the community and horizon of the colonizer, Trần Đức Thảo appeals to humanity as the originary community, found in the roots of human existence—humanity as a living and concrete totality. It is an elevation above particular horizons and worlds. This human community, to be lived as such, requires full human development, which capitalism and colonialism make impossible among the oppressed because of the living conditions they impose but also as a result of the obstacles they create to an elevation to a higher kind of material and spiritual life. We can see in this phenomenology of the colonial political project the root of the opposition between classes outlined earlier (Thảo 1949a). We can also see a deepening of Thảo’s opposition to French colonialism as he moves from a form of dissent aiming at convincing France to recognize the right to self-determination of its colonies to participating in Vietnam’s liberation struggle. The Vietnamese revolution appeared as the real movement of dialectics—and Thảo felt compelled to join it.

4.  Socialism in Vietnam While, for most of his life in Vietnam, Trần Đức Thảo would be ostracized, kept outside the range of influence of political power and of universities, and live in poverty, he 113

Jérôme Melançon

nonetheless continued his research. Having limited access to philosophical texts, especially from abroad, and given the impossibility of publishing on political matters, his work turned to a central question of phenomenology: consciousness. Thảo relied heavily on anthropology and ethology, searching for the origins of animality, of consciousness, and of humanity. As Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism provided lived existence and experience as the source of meaning, Thảo’s work on consciousness allowed him to take up his project of grasping “the genesis and the development of consciousness beginning with the dialectics of material production” (Thảo 1992a, 2). In other words, he would reset some of the problems of phenomenology, among them consciousness and meaning, within productivity and relationality. His second major book, Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness (Thảo [1973] 1984), was followed by a series of essays in the French communist journals La Pensée and La Nouvelle Critique (1974–1986). In the Investigations, he sought to overcome the subjectivism of phenomenology without falling into a mechanistic objectivist philosophy. To do so, he proposes a model of forms of consciousness in which each finds its historical origin in productive life and in the social relations it makes possible, and each continues to coexist within subjectivity as it develops: historical development is additive, rather than progressive. Consciousness and language thus arise together in prehistoric animality and humanity as a reaction to the possibilities opened by production. New possibilities to publish opened for Trần Đức Thảo as communist policies shifted in the early 1980s. The policy of Doi Moi (renewal or renovation) consisted of an opening to foreign direct investment, differentiated wages, and a focus on a long-term revolutionary strategy rather than a rapid passage to socialism and then to communism. (Kleinen 2001; Marangé 2012) The same year he published a critique of Althusserianism and Maoism (in part in reaction to the Cambodian genocide) in Vietnam, Trần Đức Thảo published in France his most overtly political work, La philosophie de Staline (1988). This short book was written in French, published by a friend and, it seems, for the Vietnamese intellectuals who had found a home there (Melançon 2016). There, he shows the errors of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders as the effects of voluntarism and bureaucratism. He then moves on to establish the economic materiality of dialectics, relying on Marx, Engels, and Lenin to do so. His last theoretical move is to show the socialist character of the Doi Moi policy— without, however, naming it as such. Thảo’s concern in these pages appears to be to suggest criteria for what would make a socialist regime through a critique of authoritarianism and a re-valuing of human production. Dialectics is the main conceptual instrument to achieve these ends. Maintaining a focus on the question of meaning, Thảo places it beyond the place and time of the manifestation of phenomena and within the furthest relations in the universality of history. He explains that phenomena are constantly in movement as they appear, develop, and disappear, according to the transformations within the sphere of labour as it is lived by workers and their responses to the necessities that make up economic life. Hence, the centrality of the present, where there is an interplay of past and future, of capitalism and communism, where the remnants of the past can be slowly removed and transformed to make way for the elements of the future system that are already developing. Thảo contrasts this view with that of the bureaucrat, whose sphere of action is strictly limited and provides an illusion of control over phenomena which maintain static relations, leading to a cult of personality of the one bureaucrat at the top of the hierarchy, who alone is able to force the passage from capitalism to communism. A  bureaucracy, a command economy, and a narrative of necessary progress in an ever-intensifying class struggle are the outcomes of this undialectical view. 114

Trần Đức Thảo

This location of phenomena and actions within history is repeated within nature, which also forms a coherent whole in which a universal relation can exist as the site of a mutual dependency of all things and a reciprocal action between them. As actions build on actions and become more complex, the phenomena that act on consciousness become something else. Everything, from supplies to communities, is thus in constant movement through reciprocal actions, a movement which is the source of their meaning and value. Workers act on society through their labour while society reacts on them by providing them with objects for consumption, which are crystallized labour (Thảo 1988, 20), thus inciting them to continue working. Politics then becomes a matter of acting on action, of organizing actions, especially production and consumption—of creating mediations so that actions reach objects that cannot immediately be grasped. While in a capitalist economy, labour is sold and becomes a merchandise that is separate from the worker—a matter of alienation and exploitation, thus of control—in a socialist economy, workers provide their labour to the society in which they participate, allowing them to benefit from what is given to others in exchange of means of consumption. With this change in the organization of labour and consumption, surplus value disappears in favour of a transfer of labour effort toward society, and the appropriation of the labour of the work gives way to the production of use value for others with whom concrete relationships exist. Thảo presents a new juncture for phenomenology and Marxism: “[T]he things themselves” are the real, and the real, or reality, is productive work which is in contact with materiality, with nature. And so Husserl’s “things themselves” are none other than real subjects, who produce both meaning and value through their labour.

5.  The Renewal of Dialectics and the Outline of a New Political Phenomenology Like Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty [1964] 1969b), Trần Đức Thảo sought to develop dialectics away from its closure into a synthesis and away from the notion of reconciliation, toward a longer historical process which harbours the possibility of further processes. To this end, he presents in the still-unpublished manuscripts Recherches dialectiques (dated 1992, likely written that year) an outline of a dialectics that functions through a cumulative process of four negations, with revolution being a matter of contradictions within struggle as well as within production. Socialism is the first negation of capitalism, but it negates itself as it maintains inequality of retribution for work. As this inequality is regulated, bureaucracy is strengthened and threatens the equality in the ownership of the means of production that socialism has established. Bureaucracy thus creates a contradiction within the socialist system. A third negation is then needed: the negation of the first negation of capitalism, bringing back elements of capitalism, chiefly democratic liberties that will stand against the arbitrary power of the bureaucracy but also the rationalization of production that emerged within capitalism but is not bound to it. Again, new contradictions emerge as social elements push for a return to capitalism or to authoritarian management, setting the two systems as simple alternatives, undialectically. A fourth negation, that of the abstract character of the negation of capitalism, becomes necessary to overcome these contradictions and to develop concretely the new productive forces and new relations of production that have been created through these negations toward a new system. Here, Thảo uses explicitly political examples, and first among them is Lenin’s New 115

Jérôme Melançon

Economic Policy, which, in his explanation, comes to resemble Vietnam’s Doi Moi (Thảo 1992a, 4–15). These negations, Thảo warns us, are not successive but are essentially united through mediations: that is, through “links” (liaisons) between individuals and systems. Here, the Husserlian concept of essence reappears in a discussion of the dialectics of systems. For Thảo, “The concept of system is thus to be understood as a set of particular and singular components linked to one another, in such a way that these links lead to the concrete general or general system” (Thảo 1992b, 3; author’s translation). Each component is a subsystem of its own as the general system is a subsystem of larger systems and is also linked to other systems through its interactions with their particular components. The structure of links between components is the essence of the system. Each system is established through the same fourfold process of negation. Through these internal contradictions and struggles among components—be they socio-historical or biological—systems are transformed to the point at which, eventually, the links will have changed so much that, after the fact, we can see a different essence having emerged on the basis of earlier states of the system (Thảo 1992b, 4–7). Thus understood, essences are no longer eternal but rather entirely historical. Through this development of the dialectical method, Trần Đức Thảo sought to understand humanity—a concept central to his thought since his anticolonial work on Vietnam and the conclusion to Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique ([1951] 2013). In La philosophie de Staline (1988) and La formation de l’homme (1991), he describes the movement of production as producing at once material objects and humanity itself. The break between animality and humanity would then occur within the process of production, along with the consciousness of the object as worked upon by others following one’s own action. Deepening and reorienting his account of humanity, in the unpublished manuscript of the Recherches dialectiques (Thảo 1992a, 1992b, 1992c), Thảo speaks of the human essence and describes it as the whole of social relations accumulated through all human history, with past layers being sedimented and constantly opening the possibilities for new relations. While brief, his account of essence shows the depth of his use of phenomenology as a guide in developing dialectical materialism, notably in the manner in which he connects essence and sedimentation, and has recourse to corporeity and intentionality. While ongoing social relations of production define a first-rank, dominant essence to human subjectivity, there are only ever historical, concrete subjectivities to speak of. And during childhood, these subjectivities acquire the sedimented acquisitions of past systems of production, going through the equivalent of past social relations of production as they learn over a very short period what developed over centuries—this is their second-rank essence. A third-rank essence is constituted by the social relations of early humanity, acquired during infancy and early childhood (Thảo 1992b, 13–14). Thảo finds the first-rank essence of his own period in bourgeois social relations, the secondrank essence in the acquisitions of servitude in antiquity and medieval times, and the thirdrank essence in early communal times. Politically speaking, the full sentiment of being human, as opposed to animal, arises under slavery when resistance and sabotage become the means to feel human and make others feel one’s humanity. Human dignity consists of living oneself as equal to oneself, of being no less than human, a subjective equality that is internal but continually broken externally by the slaves’ living and working conditions, which confer on them all productive duties but no rights. The reaction to these revolts and this search for objective equality—equality of duties and rights among all—is answered by the creation of the despotic state by the military-merchant aristocracy (Thảo 1992b, 116

Trần Đức Thảo

16–18). Social relations then define the same first-rank essence of individual subjectivities differently based on their class sentiment, which leads to different subjectivations, given the place of individuals within the social relations of production. Even as members of different classes continue to act on each other and develop the same psychic system through their childhoods, they enter into antagonistic relations with one another. These antagonisms come to define their respective class consciousness and the entry into class struggle, as a result of either a desire for objective equality or a fear of losing one’s privileges (Thảo 1992b, 20–22).

6. Influence Thảo’s influence on phenomenology was concentrated in the ten years following the Second World War. Given his position as caïman, a mix of tutor and teacher, at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), he was in contact with slightly younger students. There, alongside Jean-Toussaint Desanti, he notably taught Louis Althusser. In the autobiography Althusser wrote to redeem himself after he murdered his wife, Hélène Rytmann, he stated that he had found Thảo’s 1942 thesis to be “brilliant” (Althusser 1993, 176) and recognized him as his sole philosophical mentor (Althusser 1993, 180). To him, Thảo stood out because he had integrated phenomenology into Marxism, rather than the other way around as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had done. Beyond French Marxism, as de Warren (2009) suggests, Thảo’s influence likely also extended to anticolonial thought and notably to Fanon and Memmi. A few years later, Thảo’s book Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism would leave a deep impression on young philosophers. Part of this effect may have been due to the discussion that quickly emerged around it, as it was discussed by Ricœur, Barthes, Foucault (Feron 2022, 174), and Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 2020, 27). Two books from this period stand out, both written within a few years of the publication of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. In 1953–1954, Jacques Derrida wrote his Mémoire d’études supérieures on Husserl. For the younger Derrida, Thảo had come close to overcoming the shortcomings of Husserl’s philosophy but ultimately failed to surpass them because of his loyalty to a worldly, materialist dialectic (Derrida 2003, xli–xlii) while his efforts continued to presuppose the problems defined by Husserl (Derrida 2003, 138). In 1954, Jean-François Lyotard would give Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism an important place in his account of phenomenology, marking it as a “remarkable little book” (Lyotard 1991, 51) which “he cannot recommend enough”; a “remarkable text” (Lyotard 1991, 125). He explains that Thảo’s work establishes the links between épochè, existence, and freedom. For Lyotard, it is Thảo and not Sartre or Merleau-Ponty who holds the key to the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism. Lyotard endorses Thảo’s criticism that phenomenology sacrifices matter and nature to meaning, forgetting that meaning finds its origin in matter. The timing of Lyotard’s book publication is not to be neglected: 1954 was the year Lyotard joined Socialisme ou barbarie (Vega 2011). Like Thảo, Lyotard would thus tie together philosophy and political engagement and attempt to resolve some of the antinomies of phenomenology in collective political action, and Lyotard would soon break with phenomenology because of its inability “to respond to the ways in which the economic relations of production produce given conscious states, that is, how subjectivity is founded in objectivity” (Gratton 2018). For both Lyotard and Thảo, “Marx’s theory is not a dogma, but a guide for action” (Lyotard 1991, 129). 117

Jérôme Melançon

These reactions to Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism show that the significance of Trần Đức Thảo’s work up to 1951 to phenomenology and Marxism lay in his precise and novel reading of Husserl and especially of the phenomenological reduction, as well as the critical outlook he adopted on the founder of phenomenology. Consequently, his immediate legacy had to do with attitude and method. Beyond this initial reception, Thảo offers contemporary readers questions and insights that continue to be relevant outside the Husserlian or Leninist frameworks within which he elaborated them. His description of the lived experience of colonialism, his unearthing of the origins of many aspects of consciousness and social relations in production, and his historicizing of the concepts of essence and humanity are lasting contributions to a materialist and politically salient and useful phenomenology.

References Althusser, Louis. 1993. The Future Lasts Forever. A  Memoir. Translated by Richard Veasey. New York: The New Press. de Warren, Nicholas. 2009. “Hopes of a Generation: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Tran Duc Thao.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 263–83. Derrida, Jacques. 2003. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Translated by Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feron, Alexandre. 2022. Le Moment marxiste de la phénoménologie française. Sartre, MerleauPonty, Trần Đức Thảo. Cham: Springer. Gratton, Peter. 2018. “Jean François Lyotard.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/ lyotard/. Hémery, Daniel. 2013. “Itinéraire I. Premier exil.” In L’itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels, edited by Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne, 47–61. Paris: Armand Colin. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kleinen, John. 2001. “La comédie de l’État-parti. Le Viêt Nam depuis la réunification.” Raisons politiques 3 (3): 37–54. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. Phenomenology. Translated by Brian Beakley. Albany: State University of New York Press. Marangé, Céline. 2012. Le communisme vietnamien, 1919–1991: Construction d’un État-nation entre Moscou et Pékin. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Melançon, Jérôme. 2016. “Preface. Trần Đức Thảo, las transformaciones de una vida.” In La filosofía de Stalin, edited by Tran Duc Thao, 9–28. Santiago de Chile: Doble Ciencia. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969a. Humanism and Terror. An Essay on the Communist Problem. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1969b. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2020. The Sensible World and the World of Expression. Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953. Translated by Bryan Smyth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Thảo, Trần Đức. 1946. “Marxisme & Phénoménologie.” Revue internationale 2: 168–74. Reprinted: 2014. Contretemps. Revue de critique communiste. Accessed May 31, 2022. www.contretemps. eu/marxisme-et-phenomenologie/. Translation: 2009. “Marxism and Phenomenology.” Translated by Nicolas de Warren. Graduate Faculty Philosophy 30 (2): 327–35. ———. 1947a. “Les relations franco-vietnamiennes.” Les Temps Modernes 18: 1053–67. ———. 1947b. “Sur l’interprétation Trotzkyste des événements d’Indochine.” Les Temps Modernes 21: 1697–705. ———. 1948. “La Phénoménologie de l’esprit et son contenu réel.” Les Temps Modernes 36: 492–519. ———. 1949a. “Existentialisme et matérialisme dialectique.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 54 (3–4): 317–29. Translation: 2009. “Existentialism and Dialectical Materialism.” Translated by Nicolas de Warren. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 285–95. ———. 1949b. “Le conflit franco-vietnamien.” La Pensée 22: 17–19.

118

Trần Đức Thảo ———. (1951) 2013. “Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique.” In L’itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels, edited by Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne, 263– 502. Paris: Armand Colin. ———. (1973) 1984. Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 1988. La philosophie de Staline. I. Interprétation des principes et lois de la dialectique. Paris: Éditions Mây. ———. 1991. La formation de l’homme. Introduction à l’origine de la société, du langage et de la conscience. Paris: Published by the Author. ———. 1992a. Recherches dialectiques I (p. 30). Unpublished manuscript. ———. 1992b. Recherches dialectiques II (p. 24). Unpublished manuscript. ———. 1992c. Recherches dialectiques III (p. 21). Unpublished manuscript. ———. 2021. “On Indochina.” Translated by Hayden Kee. Études phénoménologiques—­ Phenomenological Studies 5: 1–24. Vega, Amparo. 2011. “Socialisme ou Barbarie et le militantisme de Lyotard.” Cités 45: 31–43. www. cairn.info/revue-cites-2011-1-page-31.htm#pa5.

119

9 FRANTZ FANON Anticolonial Phenomenology, Refusal, and the Question of Method Alia Al-Saji

1. Introduction Frantz Fanon has often been read through the lens of other thinkers whose philosophies are understood to be original in their own right. (Think of how Fanon is read through Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, or Hegel.) Through these lenses, Fanon is taken to be derivative or approximating in his methodology—having an imperfect phenomenological method if not lacking one altogether.1 Here, the impurity of Fanon’s method would derive from the intertwining of militancy with philosophy, of politics and phenomenology. My argument in this chapter takes a different turn: Rather than shying away from this impurity, I take it to be central, indeed desirable and necessary, to Fanon’s phenomenology. I argue that Fanon reconfigures phenomenological method as needing to be anticolonial—situating an anticolonial politics of refusal as a condition of possibility for phenomenological method. My reading of Fanon takes the failure to neutralize or fully bracket the political to be a virtue of his method, rather than its negation. We learn from Fanon that, if it is to be more than a regional study of lived experience structured by coloniality and whiteness, phenomenology needs to become anticolonial. My reading is new in three ways. First, I claim for Fanon a phenomenological method, not in an attempt to rehabilitate Fanon into the phenomenological tradition, but by taking him to address a lack within phenomenology—uncovering the conditions of possibility (material, ontological, epistemological) that are required for doing phenomenology beyond the white, Western male philosophers who have generally populated this canon.2 Second, I read Fanon’s phenomenology in Black Skin, White Masks not through the lens of a politics of recognition but as a nascent politics of refusal. While this politics of refusal can be found elaborated in more depth in his later work, I  trace its beginnings as hesitantly woven through the fabric of Black Skin, White Masks. Although I agree with Glen Sean Coulthard’s reading of Fanon’s text as a failed politics of recognition (Coulthard 2014), I take Fanon to be experimenting and staging this failure as a methodological turn. Third, I  emphasize the necessity of anticolonial or decolonial politics to how Fanon does phenomenology. This is to say that Fanonian phenomenology is not simply a description of racialized or colonized experience, nor are colonialism and racism mere additive layers to 120

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-14

Frantz Fanon

lived experience that could be stripped away to reveal a universalizable core (a pure flow of inner time consciousness, for instance). Rather, colonialism and racism are structuring of experience and seep into—destructure and restructure—the very transcendental (including temporal) conditions that form lived experience. This is the reflexive lived experience we, phenomenologists, have access to in the longue durée of our historical-colonial epoch.

2.  Method: Fanonian Political Phenomenology My point is not only that Fanon’s phenomenology is a critical and political phenomenology but also that he shows how phenomenology needs to be politically engaged in a specifically anticolonial vein. This is not merely a choice that a phenomenologist can take but a need that makes phenomenological work possible in the first place. Phenomenology is called on to be critical, and this critique needs to aim to destabilize and deconstruct the colonial structuring of our lifeworlds. A phenomenology that leaves coloniality (Quijano 2000)—or what I  call colonial duration (Al-Saji 2018)—unquestioned and undeconstructed fails as phenomenological reduction; this is because it both fails to bracket the colonial natural attitude and, more deeply, fails to uncover the structuring conditions of existence in our historical epoch. In Three Types of Political Phenomenology (2019), Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann offer a framework for understanding phenomenology as political, showing how the meanings of both phenomenology and the political shift in different instantiations of ‘political phenomenology’—and how ‘phenomenological method’ itself changes. Although Bedorf and Herrmann do not cite Fanon, we may ask how his phenomenology in Black Skin, White Masks could be read within the framework of the three types they categorize. (1) Albeit an insufficient reading, Fanon’s phenomenology can be read as eidetic analysis of colonized and racialized lived experience, as a “phenomenology of political experience” (Bedorf and Herrmann 2019, 3), supplementary to previous traditional phenomenological descriptions of experience. But such a reading would underestimate the critical depth of how Fanon destabilizes settled phenomenological concepts: how he shows that colonialism cannot be read as an addition or variation of a previously given, invariant core of experience—how its ‘absolute wound’ is founding and world destructuring. (2) Fanon’s phenomenology can be read as a social-political ontology that “transform[s] phenomenology from a science of essence into a science of existence,” taking as its subject matter “actual existence” (Bedorf and Herrmann 2019, 7). To wit, Fanon has argued that ontology, which “leave[s] existence by the wayside, does not permit us to understand the being of the Black man” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [108] 110/90).3 Indeed, Fanon refuses to dehistoricize the ontological structures of the social and the lifeworld, locating them centrally in our colonial epoch (specifically European colonialism). Thus, if Fanon were to be taken as a basis for understanding existential phenomenology, I would dispute Bedorf and Herrmann’s (2019, 7) claim that “existential phenomenology lacks . . . the ability to reflect on the political foundation of its own concepts,” so that “historicity itself is in danger of being erased.” For Fanon reveals how existential phenomenology can, and must, become reflexively critical. (3) The third, broader type of political phenomenology proposed by Bedorf and Herrmann—a “phenomenology of political episteme” (7)—is more promising for reading Fanon and taking him as the starting point for a critical reconfiguration of phenomenology. This is because Fanon reveals the colonial structuring of phenomenological concepts themselves (e.g., body schema, ego, ontology, even method). To use Bedorf and 121

Alia Al-Saji

Herrmann’s terms, “[W]hat is at stake is the political institution of our worldliness as such. In this sense . . . all our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world are political” (7–8). Indeed, rather than merely exposing “the subjective genesis of meaning” as is phenomenology’s purview, Fanon shows “this genesis itself as an effect of political foundation” (8)—or what he calls sociogeny (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [11] 11/xv). Yet I would argue that Fanonian phenomenology goes much further than Bedorf and Herrmann’s tripartite typology and upends it. For I think Fanon reveals a fourth type, or more accurately a structuring level, of political phenomenology—one that addresses the very material and ontological conditions of possibility of doing phenomenology in the first place. His phenomenology makes tangible the conditions that capacitate phenomenology, that allow the leeway or opening for both imaginative variation and reduction to take place (in eidetic and transcendental phenomenological methods). In revealing these conditions, Fanon at once performs a trenchant critique of the colonial structuring, or coloniality, that phenomenological method presupposes yet ignores (its ‘epistemology of ignorance,’ so to speak), and traces a route to what would be needed for phenomenology not to repeat and reinstitute this colonial duration. In so doing, he both opens up phenomenology as a method for colonized and racialized phenomenologists to take up and reconfigure on their own terms and demonstrates its decolonizing potential. In my reading, the ‘political’ for Fanon cannot be understood apart from colonialism or the critical apart from anticolonial affect. In understanding the political as inextricably colonial, I claim that the politics Fanon puts forth in Black Skin, White Masks is one of refusal; this politics refuses to seek recognition within—indeed, performs the hesitation and failure of the racialized phenomenologist to belong to—what Fanon calls the colonial “white world” ([1952], 1967a, 2008, [118] 121/100). My use of method in speaking of Fanon’s anticolonial phenomenology might raise an objection, for Fanon refuses to define himself through “a methodological point of view” in psychology at the outset of Black Skin, White Masks ([1952], 1967a, 2008, [12] 12/ xvi). He frames this as a willful failure: “We leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians. There is a point where methods are resorbed [Il y a un point ou les méthodes se résorbent]” ([12] 12/xvi). Yet this organic image makes us ask, what are methods absorbed into; what becomes of their subjects and material remains? We might understand this resorption to be the way in which medical and psychiatric methods (e.g., l’école d’Alger) are absorbed back into the toxic circulation system of colonialism, leaving behind lives and deaths experimented on and forgotten, doubly pathologized and (de)structured, tetanized bodies in spasm. Fanon critiques the ‘objectivity’ and primacy of scientific methods, their classification and measurement that schematize experience in advance; he refuses to be ‘put in his place’ within such taxonomies. He would likely have been allergic to typologies that pin down his method, like those of Bedorf and Herrmann. Rather, I read Fanon as offering an alternative way of conceiving method (and not just an alternative method): Black Skin, White Masks as an anticolonial prosthesis that accompanies colonized experience, reveals and interrupts its colonial duration—a prosthesis according to which, or with which, we can perceive and think differently.4 In the rest of this chapter, I focus on Black Skin, White Masks because of both its early role in grounding Fanon’s thinking and its phenomenological character. While I would contend that Fanon’s later work extends his phenomenological method, this requires going beyond what I  have space for in this chapter. But I  also offer this rereading of Black Skin, White Masks to counter tendencies to culturalize or de-politicize the text as only a regional matter of racial identity (read through the subjectivation of Fanon’s lived experience)—divorcing it 122

Frantz Fanon

from the anti-Black and colonial world that Fanon shows to be debilitating and that he works to refuse. When Black Skin, White Masks is read as merely a phenomenological description of colonized and racialized experience (the first type of political phenomenology à la Bedorf and Herrmann) rather than a phenomenological critique and deconstruction of the colonization of experience—including the colonization of temporality, possibility, and conceptual thinking— then the radical transformation of phenomenology that Fanon performs is elided. What is missed in surface readings of Black Skin, White Masks is the political and critical nature of Fanon’s phenomenological approach—for which the colonial structuring of experience and the need for anticolonial therapeutics (refusal, love, invention) are central.

3.  The Absolute Wound of Colonialism The centrality of a jointly structural and affective critique of colonialism to Fanonian phenomenology is clear from Chapter 4 of Black Skin, White Masks, yet this is a chapter whose methodological import is often underestimated. What Fanon says there of his therapeutic practice as a psychoanalyst is telling (a vigilance that continues in his later psychiatric writings ([2015] 2018). Responding to the case of a Black patient who comes to him with a dream of “hallucinatory whitening,” Fanon notes “the necessity for combined action on the individual and the group” ([1952], 1967a, 2008, [97] 100/80). Fanon emphasizes the need not only to deconstruct “the dilemma to whiten [assimilate] or disappear” but also to enable his patient “to become conscious of a [third] possibility of existing [possibilité d’exister]” ([97] 100/80). His therapeutic objective is not to keep his patient within limits but, rather, “to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict—that is, toward the social structures” ([97–98] 100/80). It is in this sense that Fanon’s method is a “sociodiagnostic,” a prognosis that is a “struggle on two levels”; while mutually dependent, “any unilateral liberation is flawed,” says Fanon ([11] 11/xv), so that disalienation and decolonization need to proceed on subjective and objective levels at once. What we learn from Fanon is that colonization cannot be compartmentalized to the ‘colonies,’ nor circumscribed as a layer added to societies being colonized. There is no dimension of ‘modern’ life, no region of being, that is left untouched by it. In arguing that French colonization of Madagascar provoked “an absolute wound [une blessure absolue]”—that Madagascar “underwent destructuralization [connut une destructuration]” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [94] 97/77)—Fanon’s argument has ontological dimensions: The reactions, the behaviours to which the arrival of the Europeans in Madagascar gave rise were not tacked onto a preexisting set. There was no augmentation of the previous psychic mass. If, for instance, Martians [Martiens] undertook to colonize earthlings [Terriens], not to initiate them into Martian culture, but literally to colonize them, we would doubt that such a personality could survive. (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [92] 95/75) Fanon’s aim is not to calculate the destructive effects of colonization against arguments for its partial ‘civilizing’ benefits. Rather, Fanon insists that there is colonization of being— destructuration and rot on multiple levels—which is why Wretched of the Earth aims to decolonize being (Fanon [2002] 2004, [40] 2). Indeed, this is not just an “existential deviation” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [14] 14/xviii) on the experiential level; it is also a structural transformation of the social, economic, and political sphere. More precisely, we can 123

Alia Al-Saji

understand the corrosiveness of colonization to be at work within the individual and the social in literal, imaginary, and metaphorical senses inseparably. Of the civilizing colonial mission, Fanon notes: “It is utopian to expect the Black man or the Arab to accomplish the effort of embedding abstract values in their Weltanschauung when they have barely enough food to survive [alors qu’ils mangent à peine à leur faim].” Because, he adds, they “lack the possibility” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [93] 95/75). Here, material embodied conditions and foreclosed possibilities, eating and thinking, are held together in the affect of hunger. The overall point is that hunger is an obstacle to conceptual creation. But Fanon is also making the more subtle point that colonization wants to block imagination and invention and uses all material and affective means to do so, including turning the bodies of the colonized into instruments against them and into material resources to be exploited—“walking manure,” he says, citing Césaire (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [95] 98/78; Césaire 2017, 114). The affect of colonized hunger calls for more than nutrition; it calls for inventing sociality and ways of living and dying, on one’s own terms, from the reconfigured ruin of foreclosed possibilities. Drawing on Fanon, I understand colonialism to be a duration. To speak of colonialism as ‘duration’ is to refuse to leave it to the past, in a linear construction of time.5 Colonial temporality snowballs and intensifies through the weight of its own duration; it retains a trace of this duration in its affective texture, even as it tries to disavow the persistence of the past in the present. Colonial ontology relies on a split architecture of time that Fanon describes in terms of “two systems of reference”: while the dominant frame is that of white ‘civilizational’ history, the second frame positions colonized peoples as foils to this history, as swept up in it without contributing to it, always coming “too late” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [108] 110/90). In my reading, both frames are constructs of colonialism (AlSaji 2021), which has attempted to erase and rewrite the precolonial past and to suppress contemporaneity. Racial imaginaries cover over this differential architecture and, in so doing, ontologize colonialism. They repress the histories and operations of power that constitute colonialism and project that guilt onto the ‘backwardness’ of colonized others (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [188] 194/170); Fanon calls this “the racial redistribution of guilt” ([101] 103/83). What is disavowed is the corrosive (de)structuring and world-destroying power that colonization enacts. Racialized bodies are, at once, the material and affective labor, the disposable lives that colonization exploits, and they are the scapegoats upon which the paternalistic need for colonization and its constitutive (and institutional) violence are retroactively projected. Racialization has more to do with drawing lines of domination—­ policing the borders of ‘whiteness’ and Eurocentric modernity—than with the concrete lives that are its ostensible objects and that it actively misrepresents. This epistemology of ­ignorance (Mills 2007) is conditioned by an affectivity of colonial disregard (Al-Saji 2018)—what Fanon calls “affective ankylosis” ([1952] 1967a/2008, [119] 122/101). Fanon shows colonialism to be at once recalcitrant and mobile. Its recalcitrance relies on an ability to adapt to its time and place, taking on the guise of prevailing norms (Fanon [2006] 1967b, [40] 32).6 Rather than losing their hold over time, colonial imaginaries dig grooves as they repeat and rephrase; they have a snowballing duration that imbues colonialism with the weight of inevitability and forecloses—even actively forgets—other possibilities. It is as if these (now foreclosed) possibilities had not been part of the map of the virtual, as if they had never existed, were not lived and felt by the peoples undergoing colonization. Through this retrograde temporality, colonialism ontologizes itself. This is the 124

Frantz Fanon

pretense according to which colonialism is a totality with no outside—so that we (colonized or ‘damnés’) are no more than what colonialism has made of us, robbed of our opacity. Colonialism glues us to its schemas and keeps us in our place.7 Loosening or undoing this glue—creating leeway and interval—is what I think is at stake in Fanon’s politics of refusal. There is no affect that escapes the violence of colonization for Fanon. Both colonial and colonized bodies undergo “aberrations of affect” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [8] 6/xii), condemned to non-relationality. It is through such aberrant affect, I argue, that colonialism and racism expose the limits of the phenomenological reduction (in its Husserlian and even Merleau-Pontian formulations). Colonization can neither be bracketed to reveal a core of sense, as if racism were an afterthought, nor put out of play to conceive a universalizable subject free of historical violence. Phenomenology cannot stay at the level of constitution of sense, for colonization already structures the phenomenological field of sense and draws the borders that differentiate sense from nonsense ([9] 9/xiii). By calibrating the affective relief of the perceptual field, racism already operates at the level of passivity and habituality. Colonial duration buoys some and submerges others, a differential weighting that translates temporal and spatial leeway. Rather than leave methods to “resorb” back into this colonial circulatory system ([12] 12/xvi), I read Fanonian method as taking place on another level: going beneath phenomenological practice to that which makes it possible— the need to create the leeway to hesitate, imagine, and think differently. It may be objected that the neutralization of natural and theoretical attitudes—in the work that individual phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty undertook—was already meant to open up this space for the imagination to play. Yet Fanon shows that this leeway requires work directed to the lifeworld, to social structures; it needs environmental change and not only self-transformation.

4.  A Politics of Refusal Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has often been read through the lens of a dialectic of recognition. As Coulthard has argued, what the text in fact shows is the failure of recognition for colonized subjects, whenever this is sought within a colonial framework (2014, 131–33, 141–44). Instead of a phenomenology of identity and recognition, I broach a new reading of Black Skin, White Masks through the lens of a politics of refusal. I think Fanon’s refusals enact his hesitation with respect to the dialectic of recognition and reconciliation that he experiments and shows to fail elsewhere in the text (a performative and staged failure). Here, I argue against the tendency to find refusal only in Fanon’s later work. Albeit nascent and ambivalent (and while admittedly not as explicit as later work), there is a strand of insurgent affect, revolt, and refusal that I believe can open us to Fanon’s distinctively political and critical phenomenological method in Black Skin, White Masks. My argument is that attempts to put colonialism in brackets, to neutralize it in order to study it, fail to suspend it because colonialism occupies the very atmosphere we breathe; it not only structures lived spatiality but also ontologizes itself temporally. The distancing provided by the epoché of previous phenomenologies—even attempts to “loosen the intentional threads” of colonialism to reveal its ontology as contingent historicity becomenecessity (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 14)—remain insufficient. It is through refusal that leeway can be created to imagine what could have been; such refusal, which is neither denial nor escapism, lives in the world colonialism has (de)structured while working to uncover and make possible other worlds. For hitherto foreclosed and forgotten possibilities to emerge, 125

Alia Al-Saji

the weight of colonialism (its ontologized necessity) needs to be actively destabilized by performing what colonialism constructs to be unimaginable: that the colonized have resources that give the power/ability to refuse.8 This is what is needed for a colonized phenomenologist to have breathing room, scope of life, and leeway to think (Minkowski 1995). Colonization means that possibilities for living and thinking otherwise are continuously buried, exhausted, foreclosed (actively forgotten though not erased); indeed, this foreclosure is part of how the necessity and inevitability of colonialism are retrogradely constructed. Imaginative (eidetic) variation no longer has access to these possibilities. Appeals to archives to supplement phenomenological imagination fail, as do uncritical ethnographic accounts like those that Husserl thought Lucien Lévy-Bruhl could provide (Husserl 2007) because how experience is documented and what is preserved in archives are often of a part with imperial logics (Azoulay 2019; Hartman 1997).9 A different method is needed for foreclosed possibility to be reconfigured and felt, for its virtuality to weigh again in the phenomenological field, for its haunting not to be discounted as nonsense (Morrison 2004; Hartman 2008). The point here is not to dictate what refusal looks like or means—there are multiple ways in which it may be enacted—but to show how Fanon models this practice in his phenomenology. It is here that political phenomenology can tie into the power of refusal in Indigenous philosophy and practice, in Black feminist thought, and in racialized aesthetics (Campt 2019). Refusal is neither denial nor ignorance but, as Kahnawake Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2017) shows, a conscious practice and method, a structure that accompanies and interrupts the colonial structuring of colonized lives, a way of surviving it. Taking seriously Fanon as phenomenologist means understanding how phenomenology needs to refuse colonialism. More so, this is the condition for phenomenology to be more than a regional description of lived experience that leaves undeconstructed its coloniality/ whiteness. To make conscious the coloniality of the field of experience is to ask how it capacitates and orients what (and who) matter within this field (Ahmed 2006) and what phenomenologists ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ do (Al-Saji 2018); it is to ask how phenomenological concepts may themselves be circumscribed and shaped by colonial duration. I sketch Fanonian method through three sites of refusal in Black Skin, White Masks, dimensions that continue to be deepened in his later work.10

4.1  Affective Refusal: Tetanization In his narrative of the debilitating experience of racialization (in Chapter  5), Fanon describes affects of “peeling, tearing apart, haemorhaging” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [110] 113/92), of disorientation, of being walled in by a colonial world. He adds: “But I  refused any affective tetanization” ([110] 113/92). ‘Tétanisation affective’ is used by Fanon in medical and metaphorical senses inseparably. If colonization is tetanus, then it is an infection that penetrates colonized bodies through colonial wounds, injecting “toxic bodies” ([33] 36/19). It leads to spasming of the muscles in a useless repetition, which may look externally like paralysis but which hides in its depth intense activity and sensitivity to the violence of the colonial world. Commonly misinterpreted as numbness, tetanization is hypersensitivity in reaction to a hostile and toxic atmosphere that imprisons, occupying our bodies and our breath. Fanon extends this medical metaphor in Wretched of the Earth, speaking of “tétanie musculaire” (Fanon [2002] 2004, [46] 8); he diagnoses cases of muscular contraction as distinctive responses to the ‘atmospheric’ violence of the Algerian war ([279–82] 216–19). 126

Frantz Fanon

That the body spasms in reaction means that injury or infection has already occurred; spasms would be part of a protective mechanism, an attempt by the body to distance itself in a situation in which it is unable to move. Its prognosis is not determined. It is clear from the rest of Fanon’s narrative that he does not propose to nullify or ignore sensation but to deepen and dwell with it—that the so-called hypersensitivity of the colonized is appropriate to their time and place. Indeed, it is because of its sensitive and attentive calibration to its lifeworld that colonized sensibility is put at constant risk of spasming (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [117] 120/99). In contrast, colonial sensibility, which Fanon describes as “affective ankylosis” ([119] 122/101), is built on absence of reciprocity, on quickly moving on and ignoring the violence and suffering upon which its comfort relies. Fanon’s refusal of ‘affective tetanization’ could be read on multiple levels. In its protective contraction, we feel the refusal of the colonial world that takes place within colonized embodiment and sensory life. Readers like Dariek Scott (2010) and Fred Moten (2018) take Fanon further, showing how spasming muscles can have alternative power, revolutionary and liberatory potential, since spasm is itself a form of refusal. But I want to complicate this with two other levels of refusal: refusal of colonial infection and toxicity (the death, debilitation, and environmental racism that colonialism brings about) but also refusal of the quasi-automaticity of tetanized reaction, which would collapse the sensory-motor interval of action, leaving no time for hesitation, memory, or thinking to make a difference (and that leaves Fanon ambivalent toward muscle spasms). It bears remembering that tetanization is not only about spasms (locating the problem in the reactions of colonized bodies) but also a matter of toxicity (which makes it a question of structure and institution): the toxicity of the colonial atmosphere that occupies breathing, of colonial violence that makes other ways of living unrealizable (Fanon [2001] 1965, [49] 65). Fanon’s response is worked out across his psychiatric and political writings; the form it takes in Wretched of the Earth is “disintoxication” (Fanon [2002] 2004, [90] 51; wrongly translated as “cleansing”). This refusal is not just a therapeutic and protective response to the debilitation that colonialism brings about; it is also about refusing complicity in the circulation of racism, refusing to pass on the infection to others. This care for fostering relationality among the colonized can be found repeatedly in Fanon’s clinical practice.

4.2  Intersubjective Refusal: Refusal to Address Others in Petit-Nègre In the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks on language, Fanon describes the tendency of French-trained clinicians to speak to Black and Arab patients in “pidgin [petit-nègre].” This ‘comfortable’ slippage—addressing racialized patients not only as children but also as cognitively inferior—reveals the entanglement of ableism and racism in clinical practice and shows how medicine can reinforce and institutionalize colonialism. Recognizing this oppressive logic, Fanon makes a point of refusing—not allowing himself—to speak “petitnègre” to his Arab (“bicots”) patients (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [30] 33/16). He repeats this refusal in “The ‘North African Syndrome’ ” (Fanon [2006] 1967b, [17] 9), and he remains vigilant in his later psychiatric writings from Blida-Joinville (Algeria) and Tunisia regarding such colonial paternalism (Fanon 2015, 2018). What is at stake is not simply a misrepresentation but a repetitive process by which colonized patients are further debilitated. Fanon notes how speaking petit-nègre to the other is to infect them “with extremely toxic foreign bodies” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [33] 36/19); in this vein, clinical practice intensifies the circulation and toxicity of colonial 127

Alia Al-Saji

infection. This toxicity is immobilizing, for to speak petit-nègre to the other is to say, “You, stay where you are [Toi, reste où tu es]” ([31] 34/17). Moreover, this glues us to an image, “imprison[ed] as the eternal victim of an essence, an appearance for which [we] are not responsible” ([32] 35/18). Fanon shows how language, being addressed in petit-nègre, is bodily debilitating: not only because it traps patients in a retrograde image of naturalized debility and infiltrates medical diagnoses that cement this ‘essence’ (as in ‘the North African syndrome’) but also because it repeats and intensifies—through the very medical context that is supposed to alleviate their pain—the everyday racist injury and colonial terror from which their debility arises (Fanon [2006] 1967b, [23] 14). We miss the import of Fanon’s refusal if we read petit-nègre as just any pidgin or take it to be a stand-in for Créole, different only in degree (cf. Moten 2018). It should be noted that petit-nègre was a colonial invention. It was not just pidgin but the unconjugated, simplified French that European officers and administrators spoke to Africans, intended in particular for colonial infantry troops. Codified in a military manual (Anonymous 1916), it pretended to represent the “langage tirailleur” that West African soldiers adopted (despite their diverse African languages)—the primary modality in which they were capable of communicating in French. Not only does petit-nègre flatten time in the infinitive and being to ‘y’a,’ it reduces pronouns to ‘moi’ and ‘toi,’ addressing the other (normally ‘vous’) in the familiar and infantilizing ‘toi.’ This went beyond colonial infantry to the address of many colonized peoples as witnessed in comic books (when Tintin visits a ‘third-world’ country and we hear the ‘natives’ speak)11 and in the enduring ‘Y’a bon banania’ advertisements for a breakfast cocoa drink.12 I read Fanon’s refusal of petit-nègre in Black Skin, White Masks as disavowal of neither the actual languages of colonized peoples nor of Créole or even pidgins in general.13 Rather, it is his attempt to loosen, to undo, the racist and ableist glue that ensnares colonized peoples and keeps them ‘in their place.’ They are cast into perpetual infancy, ‘cognitive deficiency,’ and ‘backwardness,’ because they are taken to lack the capacity or resources to express themselves ‘properly’—to have “no culture, no civilization, no ‘long historical past’ ” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [31] 34/17). Through the disabling perspective of petit-nègre, the voices and accents of colonized peoples are taken as signs of cognitive inferiority, nonsense, and lack. The structuring assumption of this ableism is that the colonizing language, French, is the primary dimension for access to modernity—the language of education, science, and culture. In its refusal to reduce us to toxic stereotypes, Fanon’s anticolonial phenomenology opens the way for an ethics that allows colonized peoples our “right to opacity” (Glissant 1990, 203–9)—to express ourselves on our own terms and in our own time, without demanding colonial legibility.

4.3  Ontological Refusal: To Refuse Actuality as Definitive At the end of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon says: The problem considered here is located in temporality. Disalienation will be for those whites and Blacks who have refused to let themselves be sealed away in the substantialized Tower of the Past [la Tour substantialisée du Passé]. For many other Blacks, moreover, disalienation will be born from the refusal to hold actuality as definitive [du refus de tenir l’actualité pour définitive]. (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [220] 226/201) 128

Frantz Fanon

What does it mean to refuse actuality? The term is mistranslated in both English translations of Fanon. Actuality is more than “the present” (Markmann in Fanon 1967a), for it includes actualized parts of the past (in recollection, body memory, sedimented landscape, the past as narrated and factually given) and the mapped-out future (destiny). And actuality is less than “reality” (Philcox in Fanon 2008) because not all that is real is actual; the real can also be virtual, unconscious, or forgotten. Thus “refusal to hold actuality as definitive” not only inserts indetermination into the present but also introduces hesitation within the past; it reconfigures the colonial past so the memories of other, hitherto foreclosed pasts come into reach. While the attempt to suspend colonialism “loosens the intentional threads” to reveal its structuring ontology, refusal destabilizes its inevitability. It leaves an interval for foreclosed and eliminated possibility to be remembered—to reconfigure what was through what could have been. These are simultaneous possibilities that were set aside, continually excluded, and buried by the violent material conditions of the past. As those contingent colonial conditions became past, they were ontologized in a retrograde movement as the (only possible) ground of the present—and other ways of becoming were cast as impossible, ‘unrealizable,’ within that linear timeline.14 Imagining such alternative conditions of possibility for the present, through the virtual folds of nonlinear duration (in the past subjunctive), is to destabilize the ‘inevitability’ and ontological weight of the colonial past (Azoulay 2019, 43)—even when we cannot go back to an unwounded past where such possibilities might have been whole. Such foreclosed possibility is more than what is available through imaginative variation; if phenomenological method (eidetic and transcendental) is not sensitive to the longue durée of colonial violence in which it is located, then imagination remains trapped in the recursive temporality of this same duration. A more radical “critical fabulation” is called for (Hartman 2008, 10–12; see also Morrison 2004; Azoulay 2019). This is the sense in which I read colonized “refusal to hold actuality as definitive”: the need to restore indetermination to the present also implies “refusing to let [ourselves] be sealed away in the substantialized Tower of the Past,” to accept the colonial construction of the past (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [220] 226/201, citing Césaire 2017, 124). I would add that this means refusing to reduce the past to actuality—to facts accessible through colonial schemas and in institutions of archive and museum—but rather having “to take up the whole past of the world” in its opaque virtuality (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [220] 226/201). Such anticolonial refusal is not only epistemological and affective but also ontological; it takes place simultaneously on the levels of present and past, and it shows us what is needed to do phenomenology from within colonial duration. This refusal—in its multiple dimensions—may give the colonized phenomenologist the “ontological resistance” ([108] 110/90) and leeway needed to make (ontologized) colonial time hesitate. This anticipates Fanon’s temporal refusal at the end of Wretched of the Earth. While Black Skin, White Masks shows colonized being to be stuck, always coming “too late” in the colonial “white world” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [118] 121/100), Wretched of the Earth, by refusing to play catch-up, turns this lag into a positive difference. Showing what a temporally attuned anticolonial solidarity would be, Fanon notes the need to “walk with” and “in the company of” oppressed others—attentive “not to stretch out the caravan, because then each row barely perceives that which precedes” (Fanon [2002] 2004, [304] 238, transl. revised). What is at stake is “not to pull [people] in directions that mutilate, not to impose on the brain rhythms that rapidly obliterate and break it down” ([304] 238, transl. revised). Refusing developmental teleology and formalist schemas (which cast 129

Alia Al-Saji

us as imitatively different in degree), anticolonial phenomenology slows down and waits; hesitantly, we embrace temporality on our own terms.

5. Outlook Readings of Fanon as phenomenologist often aim to show how he fits within and adds (albeit critically) to the existential phenomenological and psychiatric traditions with which he was in dialogue. His critical phenomenological attitude is read synchronically within the fields in which he practiced and diachronically as following other thinkers. Yet this reception often forgets that Fanon also sought to break with the colonial framework that structured these philosophies and made colonized ontology and life “unrealizable.” I have argued that this break is a refusal that creates the leeway to breathe and the interval to think; it is to refuse that which denies our relationality and colonized sociality, our very possibility of existing. Fanon neither abandoned psychiatry and phenomenology for anticolonial struggle, nor practiced them apart from anticolonial politics; as we can see from “The ‘North African Syndrome’ ” but also Chapter  4 of Black Skin, White Masks, they were always conjoined. Rather than provide yet another map of so-called Fanonisms, I think a more generative way of tracing lines of reception and flight is to understand them not as supplanting one another in stages but as charting the virtual multiplicity of Fanon’s thinking—to keep its thickness without flattening the coexistence of different tendencies and possibilities. As each tendency is actualized and narrows, other ways of thinking may appear incompatible yet remain as virtuality and foreclosed possibility. In my view, Fanon’s texts are not doctrines to follow but anticolonial prosthetics with which or according to which we can feel and think; this is the sense in which I  think Fanon offers a phenomenological ‘method.’ When we try to categorize Fanon’s influence into sharply distinct spheres—e.g., postcolonial theory, decolonial theory, afropessimism15—we forget that the differences between theorists within a field might be as significant as those between fields. And we risk forgetting what is uncategorizable in Fanonian reception, the inventive philosophies that he makes possible. Each interlocutor traces a thread that weaves through the texture of Fanon’s work, but his work has a generativity and opacity that resists totalization. Each offers a way of thinking the colonial and anti-Black (de)structuration of the world. Rather than a set of beliefs, we trace different affective means for refusal and conceptual tools for resistance—different ways of living, of surviving colonialism, by means of Fanon’s phenomenology.

Notes 1 See David Macey’s (1999) controversial claim that Fanon’s knowledge of phenomenology and Husserl was lacking. For accounts that dispute this, see Lewis Gordon (2015) and Jean Khalfa (2006). 2 See Sara Ahmed (2006) on Edmund Husserl. 3 I cite Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks with French pagination in square brackets, followed by both English translations, by Markmann (Fanon 1967a) and Philcox (Fanon 2008). I use and correct both translations, since each has its virtues and errors. 4 Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2017) contrasts “attitude” to “method,” taking Fanon to have embraced the former term and rejected “scientific method.” While I  find his reading to offer a way out of the impasse of debates on method, I think that Fanon’s commitment to psychiatric and clinical practice concurrent with his anticolonial activism—in particular his experimentation with

130

Frantz Fanon psychiatric methods in Algeria and Tunisia—shows his complex relation to method (Fanon [2015] 2018; Khalfa 2015). I add that what is meant by “method” shifts with disciplinary and historical horizons. That attitude and method are conjoined in phenomenology, rather than opposed, permits my more capacious use of “method.” 5 My concept of colonial duration critically retools Henri Bergson’s durée (Al-Saji 2018). 6 Contemporary examples of such norms, repurposed for empire, include: laïcité, democracy, human rights, and gender equality. 7 I derive this sense of “glue” from Fanon’s use of the French verb “engluer,” lost in both translations (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [32] 35/18, [224] 230/205). 8 It is not just historical revolts that offer lived, intergenerational resources for the present; religion, ritual, everyday bodily practices, reconfigured kinship and sociality, and mourning can serve as substance for anticolonial practice. 9 Husserl’s letter ([1935] 2008) to anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl ([1935] 2007) portrays LévyBruhl’s descriptions of “primitive mentality” as potential resources for expanding phenomenological imagination through other cultural lifeworlds. This shows that seeking an archive beyond the first person of the phenomenologist is not sufficient to make phenomenological method critical. 10 I already address Fanon’s famous “I refuse this amputation” in Al-Saji 2023. 11 For example, Tintin au Congo and Le Temple du Soleil. 12 “Y’a bon banania” is typical petit-nègre (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [31] 34/17, [110] 112/92). It was used in the advertising of a brand of cocoa drink (Banania) that displays on its tin the caricature of a grinning Black man—supposed to represent a Senegalese colonial infantry soldier. 13 I would argue that the representation of Créole as “midway between petit-nègre and French” is part of the toxic stereotype that the Martiniquan “knows” waits for him in France and not a final statement of Fanon’s view (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [18] 20/4). What Fanon does seem to hold is a diglossia that takes Créole to be inferior to French (but also to other colonized languages because it’s unwritten). Fanon’s views of Créole become more positive in later texts (2006, 104). 14 This sheds light on Fanon’s claim that “every ontology is rendered unrealizable [irréalisable] in a colonized and civilized society” (Fanon [1952] 1967a/2008, [107] 109/98). See Al-Saji 2021, 185–86. 15 For afropessimist readings of Fanon, I point the reader to Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson. Fred Moten (2018) gives a sympathetic disagreement with afropessimism, putting forward his “optimistic” reading of Black social life. For decolonial readings, see Maldonado-Torres (2017). There is a long history of postcolonial readings of Fanon, notably Homi Bhabha (1994) and Edward Said. This map does not exhaust his influence for the Black radical tradition, for the Global South—and the uncategorizable diversity and generativity of Fanon reception in Black studies, philosophy, film studies, Indigenous studies, feminist theory, and critical theory. I point the reader to Kara Keeling (2003), David Marriott (2020), Jean Khalfa (2006), Dariek Scott (2010), Helen Ngo (2017), Glen Coulthard (2014), Robert Bernasconi, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, George Yancy, Françoise Vergès, and Sylvia Wynter and regret not having the space to cite more. My own reading shies away from seeing Fanon scholarship in terms of ‘schools’ and finds richness in the differentiation made possible by divergent readings.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Al-Saji, Alia. 2018. “Hesitation as Philosophical Method—Travel Bans, Colonial Durations, and the Affective Weight of the Past.” SPEP Co-Director’s Address, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32 (3): 331–59. ———. 2021. “Too Late: Fanon, the Dismembered Past, and a Phenomenology of Racialized Time.” In Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology, edited by Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, and Miraj Desai, 177–93. New York: Routledge. ———. 2023. “A Debilitating Colonial Duration: Reconfiguring Fanon.” Research in Phenomenology 53 (3): 279–307. Anonymous (L. Fournier). 1916. Le français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais. Paris: Imprimerie militaire universelle.

131

Alia Al-Saji Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso. Bedorf, Thomas, and Steffen Herrmann. 2019. “Three Types of Political Phenomenology.” In Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme, edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, 1–15. London/New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Campt, Tina Marie. 2019. “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29 (1): 79–87. Césaire, Aimé. 2017. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, a bilingual edition. Translated by N. Gregson Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 1965. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1967a. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1967b. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2001. L’an V de la révolution algérienne. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2002. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2006. Pour la révolution Africaine. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2015. Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté. Edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert Young. Paris: Éditions la découverte. ———. 2018. Alienation and Freedom. Edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert Young. Translated by Steve Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury. Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Gordon, Lewis R. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14. Husserl, Edmund. (1935) 2008. “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.” In The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, edited by Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. Translated by Lukas Steinacher and Dermot Moran, 349–55. London/New York: Routledge. Keeling, Kara. 2003. “In the Interval: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation.” Qui Parle 13 (2): 91–117. Khalfa, Jean. 2006. “Fanon, Corps Perdu.” Les Temps Modernes 1 (635–36): 97–117. ———. 2015. “Fanon and Psychiatry.” Nottingham French Studies 54 (1): 52–71. Macey, David. 1999. “Fanon, Phenomenology, Race.” Radical Philosophy 95 (May–June): 8–14. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2017. “Frantz Fanon and the Decolonial Turn in Psychology: From Modern/Colonial Methods to the Decolonial Attitude.” South African Journal of Psychology 47 (4): 432–41. Marriott, David. 2020. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Mills, Charles W. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 11–39. Albany: State University of New York Press. Minkowski, Eugène. (1933) 1995. Le temps vécu: Études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Morrison, Toni. 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books. Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ngo, Helen. 2017. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Philosophy of Race. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

132

Frantz Fanon Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South 1 (3): 533–80. Scott, Dariek. 2010. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2017. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (1): 18–33.

133

10 CONTEXT From Existential Marxism to Post-Marxism Gerhard Thonhauser

1. Introduction A distinctive feature of the initial French reception of phenomenology was its shaping by Marxism. This contrasts with classical and early phenomenology as it had developed in Germany, which, apart from Herbert Marcuse and Arnold Metzger, was characterized by a rejection of Marxism. (See Part I of this handbook.) The Marxist framework of the initial French appropriation of phenomenology was already emerging in the interwar period. The 1930s saw the simultaneous rise in interest in Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Marx, and those thinkers were read as having a common interest in the description of concrete existence. In the period immediately after World War II, when French existentialism was making headlines around the world, the question of the systematic relationship between phenomenology and Marxism was a major concern for thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Trần Đức Thảo. At the same time, their different answers to this question were precisely what divided them. The differences proved so great that they led to a rift between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the early 1950s, which led to Merleau-Ponty’s departure from the editorial team of the journal Les Temps Modernes, which he had co-founded with Beauvoir and Sartre in 1945. Clarifying the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism was not a purely intellectual matter but involved high political stakes. At the latest, when the Stalinist terror became widely known, the Soviet Union could no longer serve as an undisputed model for a proletarian revolution, and left-leaning intellectuals had to clarify their relation to communism, especially in its Stalinist version. At the same time, leftist intellectuals such as Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Thảo invoked Marx to point out the continuing legitimacy of a Marxist critique of capitalism. European (especially French) colonialism also became a target of critique, as did the radical anti-communism of the United States during the McCarthy era. It was in this geo-political and intellectual constellation that Merleau-Ponty summed up the difficult position of a left-wing intellectual in 1947: “It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xxii). This chapter explores the debate about the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism in French existentialism. To set the stage, Section 2 introduces the field of Western 134

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-15

Context

Marxism and contextualizes the French Existentialists within that field. Section 3 provides an overview over the intellectual landscape in postwar France based on a brief description of three important groups: Combat, Les Temps Modernes, and Socialisme ou Barbarie. Section 4 then offers a reconstruction of the systematic debate between Beauvoir, MerleauPonty, Sartre, and Thảo about the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism. The first key contributions to this debate came from Merleau-Ponty and Thảo. In the period immediately after the war, Merleau-Ponty propagated a synthesis of phenomenology and Marxism (Section 4.1). By contrast, Thảo suggested that phenomenology is a useful introduction to Marxism but that, in the end, the inadequacy of phenomenology becomes apparent and thus needs to be overcome by a dialectical materialism (4.2). While Merleau-Ponty was highly interested in Marxism immediately after the war and slowly but surely distanced himself from it in subsequent years, Sartre had far less to say about Marxism in the 1940s but offered a fierce defense of the Communist Party at the beginning of the 1950s and began an intense intellectual engagement with Marxism afterward (4.3). This led to a heated debate between the two, with Beauvoir intervening on the side of Sartre and Lefort emerging as one of the main allies of Merleau-Ponty, who added one last chapter to his relationship with Marxism (and Sartre) with Adventures of the Dialectic (4.4). Sartre tacitly embraced much of Merleau-Ponty’s critique and incorporated it into his last major work, Critique of Dialectical Reason (4.5). This chapter ends with an outlook sketching the paths from existential Marxism to post-Marxism, post-foundationalism, and the theory of radical democracy.

2.  Western Marxism Mark Poster (1975) coined the term ‘existential Marxism’ to describe the intellectual current in postwar France that strove to bring phenomenology and Marxism together. Existential Marxism can be seen as a variant of ‘Western Marxism.’ This term was first used by Merleau-Ponty in Adventures of the Dialectic as a heading for the second chapter (MerleauPonty [1955] 1973, 30–58), in which he mainly discusses György Lukács’s ([1923] 1999) History and Class Consciousness. This work played an important role in Western Marxist theorizing, particularly through its rejection of positivism and economism and the development of the concepts of ‘alienation’ and ‘reification.’ It made Lukács a founding figure of Western Marxism, although as a representative of this current, he occupies an ambivalent position, insofar as he later openly supported Stalinism and revoked many of his core claims in History and Class Consciousness, especially those claims that became guiding principles of existential Marxism.1 The term ‘Western Marxism’ was popularized by Perry Anderson’s (1976) book Considerations on Western Marxism. Anderson’s enumeration of paradigmatic representatives includes Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Della Volpe, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Adorno, Sartre, Goldmann, Althusser, and Colletti (Anderson 1976, 34–35). Describing the systematic context that unites this collection of thinkers, Anderson writes that the absence of a proletarian revolution in the capitalist-dominated countries of Europe and the bureaucratization of the USSR led to an increasing separation between Marxist theory and proletarian practice. This resulted in a retreat of Marxist theorists into the universities and a reorientation of theory away from economics toward philosophy. The writings were characterized by an increasing linguistic complexity that made the theories inaccessible to 135

Gerhard Thonhauser

outsiders. Furthermore, there was a nationalization of discourse. The question of Marxist practice was hardly asked anymore; instead, the focus was on the historical exploration of the Marxist legacy and the question of the appropriate intellectual method. This was accompanied by cultural superstructures becoming the main subject matter. At the same time, a profound pessimism dominated questions outside the cultural field (Anderson 1976, 92–93). In my assessment, however, Anderson’s definition of Western Marxism does not really apply to Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Thảo. While it is true that their discourse was largely internal to France and that there was a shift of emphasis from economics to culture and politics, the diagnoses of a separation between theory and practice and a profound pessimism do not fit. In the immediate postwar period, they were instead driven by the assumption of the real possibility of a proletarian revolution. Moreover, Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s self-understanding as engaged intellectuals and their broad public efficacy, as well as Thảo’s decision to return to Vietnam to support the newly established communist regime, undermine a clearcut separation between theory and practice. One can also hardly claim that French existentialism displayed a retreat into the universities since only Merleau-Ponty pursued the classical path of an academic career while all other leading representatives chose much more practically engaged career paths. In the preface to his key book on the topic, Mark Poster offers the following loose definition of existential Marxism that nicely captures the intellectual outlook of Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Thảo: [A] non-Leninist Marxism that conceptualizes advanced industrial society in a way that points toward the possible elimination of its alienating structures; that looks to all the relations of daily life, not simply to relations of production, to make society intelligible; that picks up from existentialism the effort to capture human beings in the moment of their active creation of their world, in their ­subjectivity; and, finally, that rejects the attempt to have a closed theory complete within itself. (Poster 1975, ix) Within this basic consensus, however, there were significant differences, which will be examined in the following two sections. The concluding outlook returns to this basic consensus and investigates how it distinguishes existential Marxism from subsequent post-Marxist currents.

3.  An Intellectual Landscape of Groups and Journals Regarding the intellectual landscape in postwar France, Boschetti aptly writes: “Witness the fact that in post-War French culture the stars are generally backed by some group, and these groups are usually identified by some common publication” (1988, 138). In many cases, the group and the publication also bore the same name. This was the case, for example, with Combat. Combat was the name of a resistance group formed in 1941 by the merger of several smaller groups. Beginning in December 1941, it published an underground newspaper of the same name. After the liberation of France, Combat continued as a daily newspaper. From 1943 to 1947, Albert Camus served as the editor in chief. During this period, the newspaper’s political orientation was to support the establishment of a non-communist 136

Context

left in France. Immediately after the end of the war, Sartre undertook a trip to America at Camus’s invitation, from which he reported not only for Combat but also for the conservative daily Figaro (Aronson 2000; Murphy 2002). Overall, there were close ties during this period between the Combat and Les Temps Modernes groups, in terms of both political outlook and personal relations. Les Temps Modernes was founded in 1945, with the first issue appearing in October. The original editorial board included Raymond Aron, Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, MerleauPonty, Albert Ollivier, Jean Paulhan, and Sartre, but Aron, Ollivier, and Paulhan all left the journal within a year, leaving Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre as the core group and intellectual leaders. The inner circle of contributors included, among many others, Claude Lefort and André Gorz. Based primarily on Sartre’s high profile as a public intellectual, Les Temps Modernes became a dominant intellectual group in the postwar period. The original phase of Les Temps Modernes ended with Merleau-Ponty’s departure from the editorial team in 1953, but Sartre, Beauvoir, and the journal continued to maintain a high profile through their support of Algerian independence and the protests of 1968, among other things. Another influential journal was Socialisme ou Barbarie, which was published from 1949 to 1965. The journal’s goal was to develop an anti-dogmatic Marxism in opposition to communism in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. They saw the Soviet Union as a society of exploitation with a new ruling class—the bureaucracy. The main figures behind Socialisme ou Barbarie were Cornelius Castoriadis and the already-mentioned Lefort. Lefort was a student of Merleau-Ponty and part of the wider Les Temps Modernes group. After an initial closeness to Trotskyism, Lefort moved away from it and developed an increasingly pronounced critique of the Soviet Union. Castoriadis was a refugee of the civil war in Greece, from where he came to France in 1946. That same year, he met Lefort, and they founded the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort’s and Castoriadis’s departures from Socialisme ou Barbarie were accompanied by them moving away from Marxism, after which they wrote their respective major works in which they became important proponents of a theory of radical democracy, securing them lasting influence in political theory (Castoriadis [1975] 1987; Lefort 1988).

4.  The Debate About Phenomenology and Marxism In the newly shaping intellectual landscape in France immediately after World War II, existentialism, which was mainly associated with Sartre, was attacked by communists as a bourgeois and anti-humanist philosophy (Poster 1975, 109–60). Sartre’s famous public lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1945) can be seen as a defense against those charges. He followed that up by a counterattack in an article published in Les Temps Modernes with the title “Materialism and Revolution” (1946), in which he argued that communism failed to meet its humanist goals. This shows that in this period, Sartre understood his existentialism as a better alternative to the Marxism of the time. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty and Thảo had a keen interest in both phenomenology and Marxism and explored possibilities for their connection. Thảo, who came to Paris in 1936, studied at the École Normale Supérieure beginning in 1938. At the time, Merleau-Ponty was the caiman: that is, the professor responsible for preparing the students for the agrégation. Thảo thus became a student of the nine-years-older Merleau-Ponty and shared with him an interest in phenomenology and Marxism. 137

Gerhard Thonhauser

4.1.  Merleau-Ponty’s Synthesis of Phenomenology and Marxism Albeit often overlooked in the reception, one of the main goals pursued in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, was to transform phenomenology in a way that made it suitable for a progressive social and political philosophy. Against Sartre’s focus on ontological freedom in Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty develops in the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception a concept of actual and conditioned freedom (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 458–84). His core idea is that human freedom is always conditioned by a field, but at the same time, it continuously acts on that field and thereby constantly modifies it. Freedom can only be effective as conditioned, and the results of its effectiveness are always uncertain. However, it is this conditioned human freedom that drives history. Hence, Merleau-Ponty identifies human agency as the driving force in history while emphasizing the power of history on human freedom. Connected to this understanding of history is a social analysis that begins with and focuses on lifeworld structures of meaning. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes how power relations and social structures shape bodily habits and habitualized patterns of interaction. In other words, politics is inscribed in the most everyday patterns of our behavior, shaping “a certain style of life” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 469). Merleau-Ponty provides an example of this with regards to social classes: “I exist as a worker” or “I exist as a bourgeois” first, and this mode of communication with the world and society motivates both my revolutionary or conservative projects and my explicit judgments (“I am a worker,” or “I am a bourgeois”), without it being the case that I can deduce the former from the latter, nor the latter from the former. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 469) This shows a key feature of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to social and political philosophy. He follows Lukács in understanding classes as the driving forces in history and the possible emergence of class consciousness as the key issue. Merleau-Ponty opposes objectivist theories that seek to derive class consciousness from economic conditions as well as subjectivist theories that seek to ground it in deliberate choices. Instead, he suggests that we need to understand how class consciousness grows out of specific styles of life and modes of coexistence. This stands in contrast to Being and Nothingness, in which Sartre denies the “subject-we” a genuine ontological status, implying that collective agency does not really exist but needs to be reduced to individual choices and their consequences (Sartre 1966, 413–30). Merleau-Ponty replaces Sartre’s individualistic understanding of agency and his ontologically radical but historically empty conception of freedom in Being and Nothingness with the actual freedom manifest in the coming to agency of the proletariat. “[T]he revolution only ceases to be the abstract decision of a thinker and becomes an historical reality if worked out in inter-human relations and in the relations of man with his work” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 471). Merleau-Ponty’s project is thus about understanding how a revolution “ripens in coexistence” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 471). In numerous essays immediately following the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty engaged intensively with Marxism. These essays are largely collected in Humanism and Terror and Sense and Non-Sense, both first appearing in 1947 (MerleauPonty 1969, 1964). Merleau-Ponty aims to defend the same theory as in Phenomenology 138

Context

of Perception, only this time addressed not to an existentialist audience to inspire them to move toward a Marxist social and political philosophy, but to Marxists with the aim of convincing them of the value of a phenomenological conception of history. His argumentative strategy is to show that such a conception of history corresponds to Marx’s own thought.2 Against the economism of the communists, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the central role of lifeworld structures, which must be studied in their totality, as this is where human meaning is primarily generated. Against their historical determinism, he highlighted the central role of human agency as the driver of history. Merleau-Ponty’s focus is on Marxism as a theory of the proletariat, claiming that “the proletariat and class consciousness are fundamental to the character of Marxist politics” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xix). Contrary to the communists’ deterministic view on history, Merleau-Ponty maintains that human freedom makes it equally possible that the proletariat will not pursue a revolution. Since the course of history is determined by human agency, the role of the proletariat needs to be understood against the background of contingent but not arbitrary political developments and a principal openness of the future. We are “thrown into an adventure whose happy end is not guaranteed” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xlii). Hence, if there will be a proletarian revolution, it will not be the result of determining economic forces but of human achievement.

4.2. Thảo’s Overcoming of Phenomenology by Marxism During a brief period from 1945 to 1951, Thảo published several essays and a monograph on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism, becoming one of the main voices in the debate.3 His decision to return to the newly independent Vietnam in 1951, the same year as the publication of his main work Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (Thảo [1951] 1986), caused him to disappear abruptly from the French intellectual landscape, so he was unable to contribute to the further development of the debate when it heated up in the 1950s. It also meant that he increasingly fell into oblivion and was not rediscovered until this millennium.4 In his first essay on the subject, “Marxism and Phenomenology” ([1946] 2009), Thảo distinguishes vulgar from historical materialism. Whereas vulgar materialism only considers the physical facts of an abstract matter, historical materialism is concerned with the totality of experience that the world provides in its richness of meaning. For Thảo—as for Merleau-Ponty—meaning is primarily anchored in our bodily engagements and thus must be made intelligible from the totality of the experience of Being-in-the-world. He sees the strength of phenomenology in its analysis of the richness of lifeworld meaning as it is given to us by lived experience. However, Thảo claims that if phenomenology had continued to trace the source of lifeworld meanings, it would have realized that economic relations are this source. So his core claim is that phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld is a crucial step for social analysis and critique, but it ultimately needs to be transcended toward a materialist framework. Interestingly, Thảo formulated the transcending step with reference to Heidegger: He takes up the idea from the reflections on historicality in Being and Time that authenticity can only be achieved if one projects oneself according to the fate into which one is thrown (Heidegger 1996, 350–54). In Thảo’s interpretation, only a projection according to one’s fate is an act of actual freedom. However, he clearly diverts from Heidegger in claiming that one’s fate can be objectively determined by a materialist analysis. Heidegger would firmly reject both the value of a materialist analysis and the possibility of objectively determining one’s fate. 139

Gerhard Thonhauser

Whereas in the first essay, Thảo sees the phenomenological lifeworld analysis as making a central contribution to the transformation of vulgar into historical materialism, the role of phenomenology is reduced to that of an introduction to Marxism in “Existentialism and Dialectical Materialism” (Thảo [1949] 2009). The strength of phenomenology, he argues again, lies in its precise description of lifeworld meanings. But in the end, phenomenology remains an idealistic transcendental philosophy. This also applies to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialist adaptation of phenomenology. By contrast, Thảo strives for a more objective definition of the situation than phenomenology as transcendental philosophy can provide. According to him, the objective reality of existence can only be grasped if actual existence is understood as material existence. He believes dialectical materialism as needed for the task of grasping actual existence in its materiality. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (Thảo 1986) offers a more detailed unfolding of the project outlined in “Existentialism and Dialectical Materialism.” The book consists of two largely independent parts. The first part develops an immanent critique of phenomenology; the second part promises the outline of a dialectical materialism. The main theses are summarized in a preface. Thảo begins by stating that his “examination of the unpublished manuscripts demonstrated, in fact, that the concrete analyses took a direction that was incompatible with the theoretical principles from which these concrete analyses were elaborated” (Thảo 1986, xxi). Husserl’s concrete analyses demonstrate his striving toward real content. But such content, Thảo claims, cannot be adequately grasped within the methodological framework Husserl had outlined. Thảo sees no “hope of reconciling the concept of phenomenology with its actual achievement” (xxii). Instead, he again argues for the necessity of moving from phenomenology to dialectical materialism to account for the content phenomenology is striving for: “Marxism appears to us as the only conceivable solution to problems raised by phenomenology itself” (xxi). However, the second part of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, in which Thảo promises to present the outline of such a dialectical materialism, remains underdeveloped and wanting. Hence, Thảo never came through on the promised dialectical materialism that is able to overcome phenomenology.

4.3.  Sartre’s Defense of Communism The year 1950 was the turning point in the intellectual relationship between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. While Merleau-Ponty had hitherto been far more interested in Marxism, he began to turn away from it in the early 1950s. In the last years of his life before his early, unexpected death in 1961, he returned to being far more interested in Husserl and Heidegger than in Marx. By contrast, Sartre showed no real intellectual engagement with Marxism in the 1940s; such engagement only began in the 1950s. It was only in his later work, culminating in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that he pursued the project of an existential Marxism as it was outlined by Merleau-Ponty’s works of the 1940s. The year 1952 marked the point in Sartre’s life when he arguably displayed his worst political judgment. This episode is documented in a series of essays entitled The Communists and the Peace (Sartre 1968). The occasion for these texts was a series of events in 1952: They began with the arrest of leaders of the Communist Party (CP) in an arbitrary fashion, obviously meant for repressive purposes. In response, the CP called for a general strike, which found little support among the workers. In this situation, Sartre broke out in a fierce defense of the CP. Merleau-Ponty’s position in the 1940s seems understandable 140

Context

and sensible, given the historical situation. Immediately after the liberation of France, in a time of tripartite government, with participation of the CP and before the escalation of the Cold War, it was reasonable to see a window of opportunity for France (and Europe at large) to pursue a path beyond the alternatives of American imperialism and Soviet communism. With his reflection on the connection between phenomenology and Marxism, Merleau-Ponty wanted to contribute to seizing this opportunity. By contrast, it is difficult to understand how Sartre in the early 1950s could come to the judgments he advocated in The Communists and the Peace. With increased knowledge about the Stalinist terror, the separation of Europe by the Iron Curtain, and in the middle of the Korean War, it became clear to Merleau-Ponty that the window of opportunity was gone and one needed to adjust to the new political situation. Sartre, by contrast, suddenly felt the need to align himself with the CP and to defend the actions of the Soviet Union on the world stage. Leaving his lack of political judgment aside and focusing on Sartre’s intellectual development displayed in The Communists and the Peace, it can be noted that not much seems to have changed in Sartre’s theory in comparison to Being and Nothingness. However, an important shift occurred insofar as he now began to take an interest in the historical role of the proletariat. This marks the beginning of the departure from the individualism of his earlier thought. Whereas in Being and Nothingness, he denied any ontological status to the subject-we, he now poses the question of how the proletariat can organize itself and act. How is it possible for workers to overcome their separation and engage in collective practice? The proletariat’s possible agency, which was new subject matter for Sartre, had already been a central concern of Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. When writing The Communists and the Peace, Sartre (2004) still lacked the theoretical means to answer this question in a meaningful way. He only succeeds in doing so in Critique of Dialectical Reason. The stable element between Being and Nothingness, The Communists and Peace, and Critique of Dialectical Reason is Sartre’s rejection of the communist assumption that economic conditions unite the workers. So far, of course, he is in line with Merleau-Ponty. And it shows that, in terms of theory, he is miles away from the position of the CP. So his defense of the CP is based on his own premises and not those of the communists. This is something that Sartre explicitly noted, writing that “the purpose of this article is to declare my agreement with the Communists on precise and limited subjects, reasoning from my principles and not from theirs” (Sartre 1968, 68). But what he does in The Communists and Peace is to replace the communists’ determinism with an understanding of class consciousness that simply transfers the ontological conception of freedom in Being and Nothingness from the individual to the collective level. In the approach displayed in The Communists and Peace, “the proletariat forms itself by its day-to-day action. It exists only by action. It is action. If it ceases to act, it decomposes” (Sartre 1968, 97). But how should the proletariat’s action be organized? To solve this puzzle, Sartre suggests that the CP is needed because only the CP can unite the workers and constitute the proletariat; without organization by the party, there is only a collection of individual workers unable to act collectively. Where Sartre goes completely astray, however, is with his conclusion that whatever the CP does, it cannot go wrong. He considers this the case because without the party, the proletariat is literally nothing; it does not exist unless united by the CP. Therefore, he considers it impossible for the proletariat to collectively articulate an opposition to the CP: “To carry ‘the masses’ to a collective repudiation of the C.P. would have required nothing less than the Communist Party itself” (Sartre 1968, 100). 141

Gerhard Thonhauser

4.4.  Lefort’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Attack and Beauvoir’s Defense of Sartre Many former companions found Sartre’s newfound alignment with the communists, especially the claim summarized in the previous paragraph, so outrageous that they felt the need to publicly break with him. One prominent example, albeit preceding the publication of The Communists and Peace, is Albert Camus. Les Temps Modernes published a highly critical review of Camus’s 1951 book The Rebel, to which Camus responded with a letter to the editor of Les Temps Modernes: that is, Sartre (Camus 1952). On a personal level, the letter and Sartre’s response mark the break between the two. On an intellectual level, the exchange is about the critical stance The Rebel takes toward Marxism. Camus complains about Les Temps Modernes’ attitude of classifying any criticism of Marxism as right wing and thus identifying the left solely with Marxism. What is at stake for Camus, then, is the possibility of a non-Marxist left. The first to firmly critique Sartre’s The Communists and Peace was Lefort in an essay published in Les Temps Modernes in 1953, along with Sartre’s reply (Lefort 1953; Sartre 1968). One of Lefort’s core claims is that Sartre was subject to a completely misguided assumption when he saw the unorganized and passive masses of workers on the one side and the necessary organization by the CP on the other as the only two alternatives. By contrast, Lefort points out that Stalinism, through its bureaucratization and hierarchization, demands strict discipline from the workers and thereby presses them into passivity. Thus, there could be no question of the CP being necessary for organizing the proletariat; quite the contrary, the CP made an organization of the proletariat, in fact, impossible. Sartre’s apologetics of the CP just demonstrated that he lacked any understanding of how revolutionary dialectics work. Lefort thus concludes that The Communists and Peace was incapable of contributing anything to an understanding of how the proletariat comes to political action. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre in Adventures of the Dialectic (Merleau-Ponty [1955] 1973) aligns with the general thrust of Lefort’s critique: His core claim is that Sartre has been unable to synthesize his social ontology of Being and Nothingness with a Marxist understanding of history and society. What are left are the untenable alternatives of Sartre’s subjectivism and Stalinist objectivism. Looking at Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual development, the book displays the transformation of his political-intellectual orientation: He no longer believes in the possibility of a proletarian revolution putting an end to oppression and alienation. Whereas in the 1940s, Merleau-Ponty believed in the special mission of the proletariat, he now claims that “the failure of the revolution is the revolution itself. Revolution and its failure are one and the same thing” (Merleau-Ponty [1955] 1973, 219). All revolutions will eventually lead to a new ruling class, and the Soviet Union exemplifies that, in the case of the proletarian revolution, the new ruling class is the bureaucracy. I suggest reading Adventures of the Dialectic as Merleau-Ponty’s transition toward a post-Marxist theoretical framework: With the revolution no longer on the horizon and the proletariat no longer in the driver’s seat of history, a new form of social analysis and a new understanding of political agency are required. MerleauPonty’s later texts, most notably the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968), show his return to phenomenology. As he is no longer concerned with contributing to revolutionary theory and practice, which have become suspect to him, he reengages with the phenomenological project of describing the ambivalence of human existence. 142

Context

Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre comprises the last and, by far, the longest chapter of Adventures of the Dialectic, with the title “Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism” (Merleau-Ponty [1955] 1973, 95–202). Beauvoir wrote a defense of Sartre in response to Merleau-Ponty with the title “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartrianism,” published in Les Temps Modernes (Beauvoir [1955] 1998). Overall, Beauvoir seems justified in rejecting Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre as unfair and overdrawn. In his critique, Merleau-Ponty repeated longstanding objections to the social ontology developed in Being and Nothingness without, however, appreciating the potential displayed in the reorientation of Sartre’s approach through his newfound engagement with Marxism. However that may be, I consider it far more interesting that Beauvoir’s defense—if one looks past the polemics and ad hominem attacks—turns out to be far more convincing than Sartre’s own presentation of his thought.5 As Gray (2006) has shown, Beauvoir’s defense reformulates Sartre’s theory in a way that moves away from The Communists and Peace and anticipate key developments that Sartre would only achieve in Critique of Dialectical Reason. Most importantly, we can trace in Beauvoir’s essay the core conviction that praxis needs to be at the center of an existential Marxist social philosophy. This follows the guiding principle for existential Marxism that Merleau-Ponty set out in the 1940s through his initial appreciation of Marx’s work. The core of this approach is an understanding of human agency as radically conditioned and nevertheless the driving force of history. Following this guiding principle, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is the last great push to formulate existential Marxism as an encompassing social theory.

4.5  The Final Word of Existential Marxism in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason With the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre comes through on the project of existential Marxism that Merleau-Ponty outlined in his works immediately after the war. Sartre did so by infusing the existentialist’s concern for subjectivity into a Marxist understanding of society. The result was a social and political philosophy that placed human praxis at the center. The second central idea that guided Sartre in the Critique can be traced back to Beauvoir’s early essays “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (Beauvoir [1944] 2004) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir [1947] 2018): the idea of placing oppression at the center of social analysis and critique. The Critique is too complex to be discussed in detail here. I will take Sartre’s conception of the ‘series’ as an example to show the potential of his approach. As part of a series, individuals are placed under an external ordering principle. Being part of a series structures the possibilities of action of the single individual, and this often happens without individuals noticing the serial order. Sartre’s famous example is a collection of individuals waiting at a bus stop. But the newfound conception of the series allowed Sartre not only to elaborate on everyday examples but also to develop a conception of classes that goes well beyond the misguided conception displayed in The Communists and Peace. Conceptualizing classes as series allows him to consider that class membership prescribes the agency of individuals even (and perhaps especially effectively) when it is not a central part of their self-understanding. Individuals do not have to identify as workers for their possibilities to be structured by their being workers. Iris Marion Young (1994) has shown that not only classes but also other categories such as gender, race, and nationality can be conceptualized with the help of Sartre’s concept of series. This makes it possible to address structural forms 143

Gerhard Thonhauser

of oppression that result from belonging to different collectives without having to ascribe a common identity to these collectives. In Sartre’s new theory, collectivization into a group can overcome oppression through collective practice. What Sartre calls a “group-in-fusion” emerges from a serialized collective as an attempt to overcome the external structuring. When fusing into a group, individuals become aware of their common interest and start acting on its basis. As in Being and Nothingness, the figure of the ‘third’ plays a major role for the constitution of groups. However, the theory of the third no longer leads to the denial of the reality of we-groups. Moreover, the third is no longer thought of as external to the group but finds itself integrated into the fusing group. As thirds, group members identify the common cause that guides their actions, which allows them to join forces in a collective effort. These brief reflections are meant to indicate how Sartre’s new approach in the Critique culminates in a theory of revolutionary activity based on spontaneous but organized group action.

5. Outlook Existential Marxism is a form of Marxism that focuses on concrete historical praxis. It emphasizes the contingency of history and the crucial role of human freedom. But it also believes in the historical mission of the proletariat and the possibility of universal liberation through a proletarian revolution. At the latest, when writing Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty no longer shared the hope of a proletarian revolution. This modified outlook of his last years made him a forerunner of later developments in leftist political thought. A first line of his influence was on the development of the theory of radical democracy. This matter is discussed in detail in Chapter 7 of this handbook on Merleau-Ponty. ­Similarly, Merleau-Ponty made crucial contributions to the development of post-foundational thought, a matter that is discussed in detail in Chapter 25 of this handbook on post-foundationalism. In both cases, the influence was mediated through Lefort and, to a lesser extent, his companion in Socialisme ou Barbarie Castoriadis. The version of existential Marxism defended by the late Sartre continued to find followers throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Poster 1975; Flynn 1984; Catalano 1986). But in the grand scheme of things, two shifts in the intellectual landscape meant that the influence of existential Marxism vanished beginning in the 1960s. First, the advent of structuralism driven by figures such as Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Foucault meant that the existentialist (as well as phenomenological) focus on subjectivity was increasingly seen with great suspicion. Second, the shift from a Marxist to a post-Marxist framework in left-leaning political thought meant that the Marxist orientation of existential Marxism came under similar scrutiny. The term ‘post-Marxism’ was coined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe 1985), but it was already prepared by earlier developments: e.g., the collaborative volume Reading Capital (Althusser et al. [1965] 2015), which brought together, among others, Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, who all became major figures in a new generation of French intellectuals for whom existential Marxism no longer served as a frame of reference.

Notes 1 Lukács’s later critique of his approach in History and Class Consciousness can be seen in the 1967 preface to the new edition (Lukács [1923] 1999, ix–xxxix).

144

Context 2 Merleau-Ponty mostly relied on readings of the convolute of text, including The German I­ deology and the Paris Manuscripts, which only became available in 1932 as part of the Marx-EngelsGesamtausgabe published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. These texts were crucial in challenging the scientism of orthodox Marxism as they embedded Marx in a philosophical framework that allowed for his reinterpretation as a humanist thinker focusing on situated human praxis. 3 When writing about phenomenology in France in the early 1950s, there was no getting around citing Thảo. As prominent examples, consider the engagements with phenomenology of Ricœur (1953) and Lyotard (1954). 4 English sources contributing to the rediscovery of Thảo include McHale (2002); Herrick (2005); de Warren (2009); Ford (2020); and Melançon (2020). 5 The same has also been noted for Beauvoir’s earlier defense of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in her essays “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (Beauvoir [1944] 2004) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir [1947] 2018): “Regardless of what she believed herself to be doing, in order to answer Sartre’s critics Beauvoir paradoxically had to move increasingly far away from exactly those of his views that she was undertaking to defend” (Bauer 2001, 142).

References Althusser, Louis, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. (1965) 2015. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. London: Verso. Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London/New York: Verso. Aronson, Ronald. 2000. “Sartre on the American Working Class Seven Articles in ‘Combat’ from 6 to 30 June, 1945.” Sartre Studies International 6 (1): 1–22. Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simeone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. (1944) 2004. “Pyrrhus and Cineas.” In Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader, 77–149. Urbana/Chicago/ Springfield: University of Illinois Press. ———. (1947) 2018. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Open Road Integrated Media. ———. 1955. “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme.” Les Temps Modernes 114–15: 2072–122. Translated as “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism.” In The Debate between Sartre and ­Merleau-Ponty, edited by John Stewart, 448–91. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Boschetti, Anna. 1988. The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Camus, Albert. 1952. “Lettre au directeur des ‘Temps Modernes’.” Les Temps Modernes 82: 317–33. Castoriadis, Cornelius. (1975) 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press. Catalano, Joseph S. 1986. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. de Warren, Nicolas. 2009. “Hopes of a Generation. The Life, Work, and Legacy of Trân Duc Thảo.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 263–83. Flynn, Thomas R. 1984. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Ford, Russell. 2020. “Tran Duc Thảo: Politics and Truth.” Philosophy Compass 15: 1–11. Gray, Kevin. 2006. “Beauvoir contra Merleau-Ponty: How Simone de Beauvoir’s Defense of Sartre Prefigured The Critique of Dialectical Reason.” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 23: 75–80. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press. Herrick, Tim. 2005. “ ‘A Book Which is No Longer Discussed Today’: Tran Duc Thảo, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (1): 113–31. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London/New York: Verso. Lefort, Claude. 1953. “Le Marxisme et Sartre.” Les Temps Modernes 89: 1541–70. ———. 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lukács, Georg. (1923) 1999. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

145

Gerhard Thonhauser Lyotard, Jean-François. 1954. La Phénoménologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. McHale, Shawn. 2002. “Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory: Tran Duc Thảo, 1946–1993.” The Journal of Asian Studies 61 (1): 7–31. Melançon, Jérôme. 2020. “Trân Duc Thảo.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, edited by Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, and Claudio Majolino, 636–45. London/New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1955) 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1969. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London/New York: Routledge. Murphy, Julien. 2002. “Sartre on American Racism.” In Philosophers on Race. Critical Essays, edited by Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott, 222–40. Oxford: Blackwell. Poster, Mark. 1975. Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1953. “Sur La Phenomenologie.” Esprit 209 (12): 821–39. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1966. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Estella Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. 1968. The Communists and Peace; With A  Reply to Claude Lefort. New York: George Braziller. ———. 2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. London/New York: Verso. Thảo, Trần Đức. (1946) 2009. “Marxisme et Phénoménologie.” Revue Internationale 2: 168–74. Translated as “Marxism and Phenomenology.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 327–35. ———. 1949. “Existentialisme et Matérialisme Dialectique.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 54 (3–4): 317–29. Translated as “Existentialism and Dialectical Materialism.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 285–95, 2009. ———. 1951. Phénoménologie et Matérialisme Dialectique. Paris: Minh Tan. Translated as Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986. Young, Iris Marion. 1994. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” Signs: Journal for Women in Culture and Society 19 (3): 713–38.

146

PART III

Phenomenology of the Social and Political World

INTRODUCTION TO PART III Phenomenology of the Social and Political World Nils Baratella

1. Introduction The second generation of phenomenologists, those who were still students of Husserl and Heidegger, opened phenomenology to a new understanding of the social and the political in response to the crises of their time. In this context, Husserl’s concepts of ‘intersubjectivity’ and the ‘lifeworld,’ as well as Heidegger’s analyses of ‘being-with’ and the ‘worldliness of the world,’ served as prototypes for the introduction of phenomenological methods into social and political thought. The thinkers discussed in this chapter also enjoyed a broad reception within related disciplines, such as sociology and political theory. And outside academia, they were seen as commentators on the existential political crises of their time.

2.  The Crisis and the Analysis of the Lifeworld The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl quickly spread beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy into the adjacent political and social sciences. Husserl’s “critique of the geometrizing-mathematizing grid of the real” (Alloa, Breyer, and Caminada 2023, 15), coupled with his radical commitment to taking seriously the foundations of everyday experience in the lifeworld, provided a methodology that allowed for the conceptualization of a widespread “uneasiness in civilization” (Freud 1930), an unease with a rapidly evolving modern world marked by multiple crises, catastrophes, and ongoing existential threats. The period after the First World War, in which the phenomenologists presented here first came into contact with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and grew into their own both philosophically and politically, was characterized by rapid modernization, which brought with it experiences of the technicized violence of war and the introduction of Fordist principles to the economy, as well as the emergence of a new mass culture and mass media. In this climate, politics and philosophy became radicalized but also sought to establish themselves on the basis of new foundations. Husserl’s rejection of a positivist understanding of science, including Darwinist and especially Social Darwinist theories, as well as his dismissal of neo-Kantian notions of autonomous subjectivity, proved fruitful in this respect and led to the idea that the social and political sciences also needed to position themselves in a new way (as can be seen especially in Schutz’s work). DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-17

149

Nils Baratella

Husserl’s critique of Hegelian-inspired teleologies of history as they were formulated, especially in historical materialism, also attracted attention. The authors discussed here were attracted to the possibility of opening up alternatives beyond these well-worn analyses (Gubser 2014), not least because it was foreseeable that the great teleological ideologies and associated mass movements of the time threatened to turn into totalitarianism. Husserl’s diagnosis that the sciences, which had slipped into positivism since the modern era, had become so distant from the questions of people’s lives that they not only no longer had any answers to these questions, but also no longer even accepted these questions as questions, could also be applied to the social and political sciences—especially since these sciences explicitly understand the world not as simply given by nature but as manmade. What unites the philosophers presented here is the fact that they aim to understand the social world, in its foundational sense, as always preceding the political human being, the zoon politikon (Aristotle 1984, Politics 1.1253a), without, however, interpreting this condition as being solely an expression of material living conditions. This kind of political phenomenology instead always asks how subjects locate themselves in the political and social worlds they collectively create. The point, as these thinkers see it, is not to explain consciousness on the basis of being but to understand being and consciousness in their mutual relations. We share a common world that is not simply given to us but is something that can be shaped by us. And understanding this common world is the job of philosophers, the “functionaries of mankind” (Husserl 1970, 17) whose “ground” is the sedimented conceptuality with which they work and, in doing so, make the self-evident comprehensible. This brings with it its own inherent humanism as is repeatedly noted by the thinkers here. And it is not least because of this inherent humanism that political phenomenologists worked to understand the lifeworld in a new way but also saw it as their duty to oppose totalitarian regimes and critically intervene in political discourses. Probably the most widespread understanding of phenomenology as an investigation of structures of consciousness as experienced in the first-person perspective leads to the common accusation of epistemological solipsism (Adorno 1983) from the social sciences early on but also to the recognition of the attractiveness of such a theory that would allow us to think about the intra- and intersubjective conditions of the relationship between the individual and sociality. This latter aspect plays out not least in the discussion of the fundamental conditions of human life that must be assumed to be a priori after the process of epoché is complete—that is, what the “structures of the lifeworld” are. Husserl indeed noted early on that the problem of intersubjectivity is a fundamental problem of phenomenology (Husserl 2006). So it is for good reason that this focus on intersubjectivity is repeatedly pointed out against critics of Husserl, who reproach him for his alleged first-person perspective (e.g., Habermas and Apel) (Zahavi 1996). In this context, however, Husserl’s understanding of intersubjectivity should not be understood as a mere I-thou relationship, as a superficial reading of his Cartesian Meditations would suggest. Rather, intersubjectivity is always also the experience of otherness and foreignness, which is, at the same time, constitutive for self-experience and for the constitution of ‘normality’ in the lifeworld. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity, according to a credo of phenomenology, cannot be thought of separately from each other; they are always in relations whose objectification Husserl calls “world”: In the consciousness of each individual, and in the overarching community consciousness which has grown up through [social] contact, one and the same world 150

Introduction to Part III

achieves and continuously manifests constant validity as the world which is in part already experienced and in part the open horizon of possible experiences for all; it is the world as the universal horizon, common to all men, of actually existing things. (Husserl 1970, 163–64)

3.  The Shared World (Mitwelt) Husserl initially stops at the observation that the world of the individual is, in its foundations, always an intersubjectively shared and therefore common world. The step from this observation to the emphasis on the fact that the world is always socially and therefore communally constituted is not a big one. But a number of political phenomenologists tend to attribute this insight more to Heidegger than to Husserl. Heidegger’s understanding of world is different from Husserl’s in that Heidegger understands world as something from which we cannot distance ourselves (Heidegger 1996, 59f.). It is instead something that must be understood by living in it. World cannot be objectified and made accessible like simple objects; it has to be made accessible by our (individual and therefore also historical) manner of living in it. Laying this open is the task of the phenomenological/ontological investigation. In Heidegger’s words: But even the positive interpretation of Dasein that has been give up to now already forbids a point of departure from the formal givenness of the I if the intention is to find a phenomenally adequate answer to the question of value. The clarification of being-in-the-world showed that a mere subject without a world “is” not initially and is also never given. And, thus, an isolated I without the others is in the end just as far from being given initially. But if the “others” are always already there with us in being-in-the-world, ascertaining this phenomenally, too, must not mislead us into thinking that the ontological structure of what is thus “given” is self-evident and not in need of an investigation. The task is to make this Mitdasein of the nearest everydayness phenomenally visible and to interpret it in an ontologically adequate way. (Heidegger 1996, 109f.) In this passage, Heidegger formulates a kind of outline for a programmatic approach to understanding social structures as more than a “summative result of the occurrence of several ‘subjects’ ” (Heidegger 1996, 118). As is well known, Heidegger himself demonstrates how being-with can be understood phenomenologically. His well-known analyses of the ‘they’ (das Man) and especially of its leveling and de-individualizing character can be read as a critique of modern living conditions, from which one can only free oneself qua ‘being toward death’ (Heidegger 1996, 240f.) (an analysis which certainly can and has been read politically—see Chapter 3 on Heidegger in this volume). Heidegger’s concept of the ‘they’ serves to characterize the respective political, cultural, and social contexts into which the respective individual I is always already inserted, where these contexts take place over and through the individual without the individual thereby realizing their individuality. This idea presents a strong contrast between the actual self and leveling social structures, which share connections to the concept of alienation as well as to ‘völkisch’ fantasies of origin. Even though Heidegger makes it clear that the ‘facticity’ 151

Nils Baratella

of social life is inevitable, it is nevertheless leveling in a special way under the conditions of modernity. In his words: We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the “great mass” the way they withdraw, we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness. . . . Overnight, everything primordial is flattened down as something long since known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes something to be manipulated. Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Da-sein, which we call the levelling down of all possibilities of being. (Heidegger 1996, 119) At the same time, ‘historicity’ shows itself as an ‘existential’: As the analysis of the social and political world demonstrates, it is always prior to us as individuals. In this sense, ‘Dasein,’ as Heidegger says, and thus human beings, inevitably find themselves ‘thrown’ into the world. This social space that the individual always finds themselves in is something that has been created, both individually and collectively. It lays the ground from which one can understand oneself (as well as distance oneself). As individuals, we project possibilities before ourselves in order to project an I-within-we. While this can be read as a move in the direction of a ‘Volk’ and ‘community of destiny’ in Heidegger’s thinking as well as his actions in the 1930s, it also suggests a reading that can illuminate the basic socio-ontological concepts of a collective practice that is historically shaped. Heidegger’s analyses of historicity as a history of Being also came to be of enormous importance for an alternative (anti-Hegelian) understanding of history (which can be found, for example, in Jan Patočka). Heidegger’s fundamental analyses of the socially and historically conditioned nature of human life and his emphasis on the phenomenological explicability of social structures exercised an immense influence on 20th-century political thought in general because it becomes clear from his analysis that finding oneself as a subject and living within social and political structures is “not a conduct toward . . . [intentionality], but a how of Dasein itself” (Heidegger 1988, 15). This goes hand in hand with Heidegger’s opposition of an original, existential world of interpersonal care with the modern world and its forgetfulness of being, which has arisen through increasing technicization. This represents another facet of his critique of modernity. Even though Heidegger emphasizes that the “homelessness” of modern man should not be equated with “alienation” within capitalist structures, characterizing it instead as a loss of “metaphysics” (Heidegger 1993, 243), this closely related description of the problem nevertheless opens up an approach that can begin to understand socio-economic situations philosophically without limiting this understanding to the economic realm. Controversially, Heidegger also implicitly formulates a critique here of the living conditions of modernity that can be connected with the “völkisch” and antisemitic attitudes of the time (see Fritsche 1999). Although this connotation was seen early on (and Heidegger’s political commitment to National Socialism was never a secret), his twist on phenomenology had an impact that reached far across political divides. One important example of this is the “first Heidegger-Marxist” (Habermas 1984, 326), Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, who 152

Introduction to Part III

had studied with Heidegger and attempted to synthesize Being and Time with the theory of alienation from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, repeatedly emphasized that Heidegger’s twist on phenomenology allowed for the uncovering of the basic Marxist situation .  .  . in which a new revolutionary basic attitude gains a new view of the whole of social being from the realization of its historicity, which culminates in the discovery of historicity as the basic determinacy of human existence and, with a new understanding of reality, acquires the possibility of a radically transforming deed. (Marcuse 1973, 42) Heidegger’s proposal to think of social life less as a given than as a practice becomes an important driver in this sense for a whole series of thinkers aiming to overcoming existing conditions. (See the chapters on critical theory as well as on phenomarxism in this volume.)

4.  From Heidegger’s Ontology to Political Philosophy In Marxist philosophy, Heidegger was seen critically as a provocation and often as an advanced form of bourgeois thought. Nevertheless, his existential analytical thinking also had an immense influence on a new understanding of politics and the lifeworld. The equiprimordial constitution of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, world, the historicity and generativity of existence, the emphasis on interpersonal difference—or just plurality—contradict the levelling ideologies that only recognize or want to produce a mass subject. While in totalitarian thought, “the image of the body is combined with that of the machine” (Lefort 1986, 300), the phenomenologically underpinned notion of the political, in contrast to the notion of politics, emphasizes the contingent nature of the human formation of communities. Empathy with others, the ‘lifeworld,’ ‘worldliness,’ and ‘being-with’ are all concepts formulated with phenomenological precision, which can be conducive to thinking the social without having to rely on deterministic presuppositions. But all these concepts also indicate that Husserl’s concept of world and its further development into the lifeworld already contain an idea of our communality. Indeed, Husserl’s assistant Ludwig Landgrebe defined “life-worlds, as worlds surrounding typical human communities” (1940, 47) in this sense. The social-scientific reclamation of phenomenology or the attempts to describe crisis-ridden social and political realities must, of course, oppose the focus on the more broadly transcendental phenomenological project here. Social structures are thus considered here in terms of the lifeworld and personal experience rather than in terms of justification and a fundamentum inconcussum. The authors in this section are, for these reasons and others, concerned with revising Heidegger. ‘Existence,’ ‘historicity,’ ‘togetherness,’ and understanding of ‘being’ remain important themes for these authors, but they also seek to uncover a kind of openness that goes beyond Heidegger’s finite universe and opens up new political horizons—even in the sense of a new humanism. This is because totalitarianism, which authors like Schütz, Arendt, Anders, Patocka, and others saw as the most drastic crisis of their time, is characterized precisely as a plurality- and world-destroying phenomenon that aims to erase all differences internally and externally only understands absolute enmity in the sense of Carl Schmitt (see Schmitt 1996). The challenge for phenomenological thinkers of the political 153

Nils Baratella

in light of this totalitarianism is therefore to find a new theory of what connects us that is neither deterministic nor fateful.

5.  Overview of Chapters Alfred Schütz, with whom this chapter begins, emphasizes in his first major work, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, which is clearly influenced by Husserl, that human beings should be understood primarily as social beings. His general thesis of the alter ego shows that the shared world and the environment must first be accepted without question but must also be understood in their constitutive structure. On the basis of this thesis, Schütz develops not only a phenomenological method for investigating the social foundations of human life but also, as Michael D. Barber’s chapter shows, a positive vision of social life. Alfred Schütz is, in this sense, undoubtedly a key figure in the adoption of Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld for the social sciences but also, and especially, for the introduction of phenomenology to the United States. Although Schütz employs the concept of lifeworld for the social sciences and the empirical study of the everyday world, he leaves the political as a necessary dimension of everyday life in its own right relatively unexamined. While Schütz continues to think closely along the lines laid down by Husserl, Hannah Arendt, in contrast, at first glance almost strikingly turns away from any attachment to a philosophy of the subject and treats the political and, consequently, action as the primary and always prior practice that allows people to become people in the first place. In Arendt’s case, this is even more closely related than in Schütz’s to her experience and her analysis of totalitarian politics. Arendt clearly formulates as the core of her work a new understanding of the political, which puts plurality and natality in the center and which can be interpreted as the development of a political methodology that draws on phenomenology but also transforms it. Arendt’s phenomenology of the political still enjoys a wide reception today because she addresses questions that remain highly relevant. The question of truth and lies in politics, the reasons for accepting totalitarian policies, and the relationship between privacy and the public sphere in times of extensive digitization continue to be relevant. The questions that Günther Anders addressed do not have such broad appeal but are, at the same time, just as topical. For him, the modern world of technology, with its destruction of nature and the possible destruction of mankind, becomes a subject of phenomenological considerations, including its specific ethical and political implications. That is why Anders develops a phenomenologically motivated “negative anthropology” in which the human being is conceived as world building but, at the same time, as existentially menaced by the technological products resulting from this capacity. The existential crises and dangers faced not only by European societies but also by almost every individual in the 20th century virtually demand their phenomenological exploration. Jan Patočka (1999), in this sense, shows how the First World War can be seen as a philosophical event that forces us to think about the limits of existence. In close proximity to Hannah Arendt and against the background of these crisis, Patočka is not least concerned with recovering philosophical traditions as a kind of railing for thought. For despite the crises with which existential questions are confronted, existence remains historically anchored. Patočka’s thought is thus a crucial example of how phenomenology became political through the experiences of the crisis of European thinking and the massive violence of the Second World War and the Shoah. 154

Introduction to Part III

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1983. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Alloa, Emmanuel, Thiemo Breyer, and Emanuele Caminada. 2023. “Einleitung.” In Handbuch Phänomenologie, edited by Emmanuel Alloa, Thiemo Breyer, and Emanuele Caminada, 1–17. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Aristotle. 1984. “Politics.” In Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin. Fritsche, Johannes. 1999. Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gubser, Michael. 2014: The Far Reaches. Phenomenology, Ethics and Social Renewal in Central Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. “Herbert Marcuse. d) Psychischer Thermidor und die Wiedergeburt der Rebellischen Subjektivität (1980).” In Philosophisch-politische Profile, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 319–26. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin. 1988. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1993. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, edited by Davis Farell Krell, 213–67. San Francisco: Harper. ———. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State of New York Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2006. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910– 1911. Translated by Ingo Farin and James G. Hart. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1940. “The World as a Phenomenological Problem.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (1): 38–58. Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Marcuse, Herbert. 1973. “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des Historischen Materialismus.” In Existentialistische Marx-Interpretation, edited by Herbert Marcuse and Alfred Schmidt, 41–84. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsgesellschaft. Patočka, Jan. 1999. Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire. Translated by Erika Abrams. Lagrasse: Verdier. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zahavi, Dan. 1996. Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität. Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

155

11 ALFRED SCHÜTZ Imposed Political Relevances and the Subjective Meaning of the Actor Michael D. Barber

1. Introduction Envisioning what Alfred Schütz’s view of the political sphere might be, this chapter first explains his general stance toward social relationships as conveyed in his phenomenology of the social world. It then considers critically objections of Pierre Bourdieu’s regarding Schützian phenomenology that could render it inadequate for understanding political life. Bourdieu claims that Schütz’s phenomenology represents “one of the purest expressions of the subjectivist vision” (1990b, 125) that ignores the political sphere’s “structural constraints” (130), which objectivism highlights. Because of such subjectivism, Bourdieu and others argue that phenomenology is uncritical of the political realm and neglectful of its power structures (Bourdieu 1990a, 25–26). In the third section, we will inquire how Schütz construes social collectivities such as ‘the state,’ ‘congress,’ or ‘the city.’ Finally, we will speculate about Schütz’s ‘vision’ of political life, of what might be hoped for in political relationships, after the pattern of Hannah Arendt’s work.

2.  Schütz’s Phenomenology of the Social World Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) in 1932 produced his major work Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie, translated as The Phenomenology of the Social World, in which he develops a phenomenology of the natural attitude or, as he also calls it a “phenomenological psychology” (Schütz 1967, 44) to underpin philosophically both interpretative sociology, which Max Weber elaborated, and ultimately the other social sciences. Schütz deploys the phenomenological reduction to build a theory of action based on internal time consciousness and then, dispensing with the reduction, rounds out his eidetic account of the “invariant, unique, a priori structure of the mind, in particular of a society composed of living minds” (1967, 44). He elucidates key components of that society, ‘the social world’: intersubjective understanding; socially shaped and transmitted structures of relevances (or interests) and typifications (e.g., classifications), on which common sense interpreters rely to interpret each other; and the structure of the social world extending from face-to-face

156

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-18

Alfred Schütz

consociates to spatially distant contemporaries to spatially and temporally remote predecessors and successors. Schütz (1962b, 59) distinguishes eidetically the natural world of molecules and ­electrons—to which the world does not mean anything and on which natural scientists carry out investigations—from the social world, which common-sense, everyday actors do give meaning to and interpret. Social scientists turn to this social reality and interpret everyday actors’ meanings by fashioning ideal-typical constructs of their everyday constructs, constructs of the second degree. After first eidetically clarifying the difference between the objects studied by the natural and social sciences, Schütz then explains the different methodologies called for, empirical observation versus the type-construction of actors’ meanings. He thereby follows Husserl’s theory of regional ontologies that demands that one first clarify the object of investigation before settling on a methodology to examine it, as opposed to positivism, whose basic, unexamined presupposition is that the method of the natural sciences—namely empirical observation—is the only method appropriate for science, no matter the area investigated. Hence, according to Schütz, social scientists trying to understand the meaning of everyday actors—that is, the purposes informing their actions—can rely on Schütz’s theory of action and motivation, particularly the ‘in-orderto’ motive, that guides and provides the meaning of sub-actions. Max Weber (1958) first modeled this process of understanding actors’ meanings when he constructed the type of the ‘Protestants,’ whose ultimate ‘in-order-to motive’ was to win eternal salvation, the goal that guided all their sub-acts and the disciplined labor, which helped generate the capitalist system. The positivists’ placement of human actors in the same classification with nonmeaning-giving molecules and their lack, as a result, of any method of type-construction, risk overlooking what Schütz (1964a, 227) calls the “subjective” meaning of the actor, which social scientists, from their outsider or “objective” perspective, ought to grasp. Schütz’s phenomenology, by articulating the diversity of the sciences and expounding on how everyday actors meaningfully interpret their actions, lays the ground for social scientists to construct (via ideal types) the constructs of the meaning of everyday actors. While Schütz’s work leans in a basically epistemological direction, the meaningful interactions between everyday actors that his theory of the social world depicts will be taken up into those actors’ political life together, and hence political institutions can be shown to grow out of, reflect, and modify the everyday social actions and interactions that Schütz describes. He recognizes how basic relations undergo modifications in his treatment of the structure of the social world. For instance, face-to-face consociates, sharing space and time and given to each other directly and immediately, continually revising their typifications of each other with every change in each’s facial expressions, find their relationship fundamentally transformed when one partner moves away and they become ‘contemporaries,’ living at the same time but spatially distant and relating indirectly and inferentially, constructing types of each other on the basis of scattered letters, emails, or reports from visitors. As one would expect, social collectives build on and introduce variations in the way social relationships are carried on in everyday life. Schütz (1967, 198–200), not himself a political philosopher, suggests how a bridge can be built from his account of the everyday social world to social collectives, such as ‘the state,’ ‘the press,’ or ‘the economy.’ He presents these collectives in terms of contemporary (and consociate) relationships, ideal type constructions, and different degrees of concreteness and anonymity, as Section 3 will show.

157

Michael D. Barber

3.  Phenomenology’s Subjectivism: Uncritical Neglect of the Political Domain? Pierre Bourdieu (1990a, 25–26, 1990b, 130–31) bemoans the artificial and ruinous opposition between subjectivism (focused on agents’ inner experience) and objectivism (structures, laws, and systems of relationships independent of human consciousness)—an opposition he seeks to overcome through his notion of ‘habitus’: that is, regularized patterns of acting internalized in response to objective institutional pressures. Phenomenology, though, he believes, confines itself to the subjective side of the dichotomy because it cannot do more than describe the (subjective) lived experience of the social world (Bourdieu 1990a, 25). For Bourdieu, phenomenological sociology reduces the objective dimension of the social world to merely the cultural representations that agents make of it (Dreher and López 2015, 200). In such a Schützian idealist construction of the social world, there would be no engagement with objective power, whose relationship with everyday life Jürgen Habermas (1987) provides for when he explains how systemic market or bureaucratic imperatives colonize and steer lifeworld interactions, at least until everyday communicative practices reclaim their terrain and limit systemic incursions (Dreher and López 2015, 209; Bohman and Rehg 2014). Phenomenology, however, reduces the fabric of objective existence to society’s individual members, who become the only source of data, the only topic of investigation, and court of final appeal (Dreher and López 2015, 209). This subjectivistic approach further deprives sociology of any reflective, critical potential with regard to objective social structures. In phenomenological sociology, subjectivity so thoroughly subsumes its object—the society that it thinks it knows—that it cannot know that object, and it un(self)consciously reads its own principles into the object of its study (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 236). For Bourdieu (1990b, 125), Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 73), and Dreher and López (2015, 200), this lack of self-reflection is accentuated since Schützian phenomenology describes the world of daily life “as taken for granted,” and, instead of social science breaking critically with everyday life to examine the way political institutions determine it, Schützian social science is continuous with everyday life. By wedding oneself in this way to the uncontested acceptance of the daily lifeworld in which those who are dominant ensconce themselves, phenomenological sociology acts as an “absolute form of conservatism” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 74) and conformism. Instead of criticizing common sense, as Zygmunt Bauman thinks social science should, phenomenological sociology fails “to set itself outside commonsense at a great enough distance” (Bauman 1976, 43) to render visible the tacit premises of common sense and to question the reliability of common sense’s ontological evidence. As further indications of the uncritical character of phenomenological sociology, Bauman (1976, 59, 61, 64) charges Schütz with elevating specific features of social relationships to “anthropologically universal structural features of the life-experience” (59), such as typifications and the reciprocity of perspectives. Consequently, phenomenological sociologists universalize the features of a specific social reality, rendering them “eternal” (65) and forbidding one from imagining alternative societal arrangements, thereby blocking the possibility for people “to ‘see through’ the totality of their social entanglements” (64). However, several authors have criticized the charges that phenomenological sociology is uncritical. Martin Endreß, for example, resists criticisms that Schützian phenomenological sociology is not reflective by pointing out how Schütz and his followers Berger and Luckmann revolutionized the sociology of knowledge by focusing it on everyday knowledge

158

Alfred Schütz

(Endreß 2005, 59). In addition, phenomenologists have recognized the ever-present hermeneutic circle that highlights the intricacy and limits of the everyday and sociological understanding of others (Endreß 2005, 61). Besides, while Schütz acknowledges a close linkage between everyday constructs and the social-scientific constructs of those constructs, he also repeatedly reflects on the distinctive methods required if second-order-type constructions are to be accurate regarding first-order meanings (Schütz 1962a, 34–44; Schütz 1962b, 63; Schütz 1967, 186–94; Endreß 2005, 64). Schütz spells out the scientific postulates social scientists ought to observe and demands that they detach themselves from their everyday life biographical situation and transpose themselves into the scientific situation, adopting its relevances. Furthermore, Schütz himself (1967, 205) remarks that “[o]bservation of the social behavior of another involves the very real danger that the observer will naively substitute his own ideal types for those in the minds of his subjects.” Bourdieu and Bauman seem oblivious to these discontinuities. In addition, Bauman misunderstands Schütz’s use of eidetic method insofar as he sees it as illegitimately universalizing specific societal experiences and structures. When adopting eidetic methodology, one seeks to establish by freely varying instantiations of a type of object whether or not a particular feature (e.g., the color of a cube) is merely particular to such an object or whether a feature (e.g., having six square faces) is constitutive of it, such that you could not have an object of that kind without such a feature. The examples one considers can be empirically given or imagined, and to regularly take account of objections from those outside one’s familiar milieu would converge with the self-critical method already at work in free variation. Moreover, the universals Bauman mentions, such as the use of typifications in general or the principle of the reciprocity of perspectives (which we employ in every conversation insofar as we regularly assume that other’s understanding will converge with our own) do seem universal; both Thomas Eberle (2012) and Ilja Srubar (Dreher and López 2015, 205–6) insist that the structures of the lifeworld serve as a tertium compartionis for intercultural comparison, which would be impossible if the account of those structures was aligned with any one culture. As to whether phenomenology is insufficiently attuned to considerations of power, Dreher and López remind readers of key features of phenomenology. First, when one envisions phenomenology as a self-enclosed, idealistic system, one misunderstands it. Phenomenology begins in everyday life, where we encounter real objects, and then, by reflection, it brings to light intentionality: namely, those acts appearing in the field of consciousness and directed toward the objects that are given to them as independent of those acts (Dreher and López 2015, 201–2). After distinguishing also between social scientific construction of the phenomenon, which involves investigating the objectively existing social hierarchies of power, and the subjective constitution of the phenomenon—that is, the subjective conscious experience and perception of power—Dreher and López dedicate the rest of their essay to the latter, which they parse in terms of Schütz’s theory of relevance (2015, 212, 213–16). They explain Schütz’s two systems of relevance. Intrinsic relevances, our more-or-less well-defined ranking of interests and values, shape our everyday efforts to master our world regularly, spontaneously, purposefully, or, often, subconsciously. Imposed relevances are those events, persons, or objects that confront us from without that we may not have chosen but that we must, nevertheless, come to terms with. Our relevances, intrinsic or imposed, appear in different versions as thematic relevances, in accord with which we focus our attention on some theme; motivational relevances, by which we make choices and select the purposes we will pursue; and interpretative relevances, which guide what typified 159

Michael D. Barber

interpretations we will make use of upon encountering objects and situations. Dreher and López (2015, 218–20) proceed to discuss how power structures shape our systems of relevances and typifications and our social stock of knowledge, thereby framing our subjective perceptions and experiences of the persons, laws, or events through which power is exerted. In addition, those power structures ensure the legitimacy of their authority through signs, symbols, and myths and through the promotion of selective bestowals of meaning (that omit other possible meanings and interpretations), as when the British believed their king ruled by Divine Right or when the United States claimed Manifest Destiny to protect its hegemony over Latin America. Our intrinsic relevances, however, can support us in either conforming to the legitimacy of authority or challenging it and creating alternative supportive symbols, as when Black Americans devised counter-symbols, such as raising fists in the Black Power salute or singing the African-American national anthem, in opposition to symbols conveying white supremacy (e.g., Ku Klux Klan garb and rituals). Dreher and Lopez’s account of relevances and power reveals the usefulness of phenomenology’s intentional approach to experience, insofar as the subjective intendings of thinking and acting run up against the constraints through which power is exercised as givens from without, as equivalent to the imperatives and limitations that Émile Durkheim, whom Belvedere (2015, 378–79) considers a phenomenologist, depicted as stubborn, resistant “social facts.” López (2021, 195–210), for instance, extends Schütz’s understanding of imposed relevances to those acts and structures that maintain social inequalities before which those who are treated unequally decide how to respond as their systems of intrinsic relevances prompt. The advantage of bringing to bear phenomenology’s theory of intentionality on the issue of politically imposed relevances opens a space in which social actors and groups, on the basis of their intrinsic relevances, can ‘give meaning to’ the relevances imposed on them by deciding to accept or struggle against them. In fact, Dreher (2019, 243) accuses Bourdieu, who envisions the habitus internalized from institutions as determining how individuals act, of betraying a bias toward the objectivist model of social structure, which predetermines individuals’ actions, often reducing them to victims of social structures, “without the possibility of willingly reflecting on these structural dependencies.” In fact, the question of imposed relevances, rarely even mentioned by Schütz critics like Bourdieu, Bauman, and Habermas, is central to Schütz’s thought, as he mentions in an essay on the sociology of knowledge and political life, The Well-Informed Citizen: We are, however, not only centers of spontaneity, gearing into the world and creating changes within it, but also the passive recipients of events beyond our control which occur without our interference. Imposed upon as relevant are situations and events which are not connected with interests chosen by us, which do not originate in our acts of discretion, and which we have to take just as they are, without any power to modify them by our spontaneous activities except by transforming the relevances thus imposed into intrinsic relevances. (Schütz 1964c, 127) Schütz (1964c, 129) provides a strikingly timely example of such a relevance when commenting on how we could become, within minutes, the target of destructive weapons released from a faraway place by anonymous others, who could bring our system of relevances under their control; Schütz sees this as indicative of other politically, economically, and socially imposed relevances beyond our control that we must take into account. He 160

Alfred Schütz

provides numerous other instances of such imposed relevances, such as when Daughters of the American Revolution denied the opera singer Marian Anderson the right to sing at Constitution Hall simply because she was Black (Schütz 1964a, 259). Likewise, Jews who had severed ties to Judaism were classified in Nazi Germany as Jews because their grandfathers were Jewish (257). Moreover, innocent Japanese citizens in the United States were imprisoned after Pearl Harbor (257). In addition, soldier-homecomers from World War II were likely to be assigned to their old, stifling place behind the cigar counter if they did not avail themselves of the GI Bill of Rights or if the legislation creating that bill had not been passed at all (Schütz 1964b, 117). Finally, the ideal of equal opportunity, ‘the career open to the talents,’ could only have achieved legal protection because of the French Declaration of Human Rights, but even now, such legalized equal opportunity provisions might present themselves as objective, imposed relevances for citizens hoping to take advantage of them but lacking, from their subjective perspective, the knowledge, skill, and standing to navigate the objectively established legal requirements (Schütz 1964a, 269–73). Not only does Schütz recognize the imposed relevances that derive from political power structures but he also, repeatedly considers non-political imposed relevances and highlights how we regularly come to terms with them in varied ways, learning to live with them or surmounting them. For instance, when one finds oneself restricted by the limits of one’s manipulatory area, one can access, often via locomotion, the worlds within reach, restorable reach, or attainable reach (Schütz 1962c, 222–26). Or if one finds oneself narrowing one’s focus to the present moment, one can recover the past through memory or reach into the future via acts of protention or projection (Schütz 1962c, 214–18). Further, Schütz develops a system of signs and symbols that we employ when we run up against the boundaries of present experience and seek to transcend them. For instance, marks (such as bookmarks or knotted handkerchiefs on trees) enable us to retrieve what might have been lost when we had to break off what we were doing (Schütz 1962d, 308–9). Or by indications, such as the smoke rising from the distant tree line, we can know of events, such as the fire burning in the forest, distant from us in space or time (Schütz 1962d, 310–11). Confronted with persons whose originary experience we can never directly access, we resort to linguistic signs to cross that barrier and understand them as far as possible, and, when pushed to the very edge of the everyday lifeworld, symbols allow us to leap into entirely other spheres of reality, what Schütz and Luckmann (1989, 117–30) call the “great transcendences” (Schütz and Luckmann 1989, 106), in literature, art, or religion (Schütz 1962d, 312–39). Knowing at the outset that the same object means different things to different persons, we overleap this gap by employing the idealization of the reciprocity of perspectives (Schütz 1962a, 11–12), an idealization by which we believe that if we were in the other’s place, we would see things the way the other does or that the differences in our biographical situation would be irrelevant when it comes to resolving a common problem. Although our unique biographical histories imply that we will never understand others exactly as the others understand themselves, we are not stymied, but instead take recourse in signs and communicative gestures to understand each other sufficiently for practical purposes (Schütz 1967, 99). We can even understand our vast system of typifications as ways of coming to terms by giving meaning to the imposed relevances of the objective world. Though our automatic typifications function so successfully that we do not even seem to be confronting a world as imposed, when we find ourselves searching for the appropriate typification to handle the world, as occurred when people struggled whether to typify whales as ‘fish’ or ‘mammals,’ the persistence of an independent world becomes clear. Whether in action or cognition, 161

Michael D. Barber

the intentional structure of phenomenology is operative, as are the interactions between imposed relevances and the intrinsic relevances that motivate us to deal with imposed relevances. This is the case whether we are interpreting imposed relevances, deciding (with degrees of deliberateness) simply to accept them, or resisting them by looking for ways to supersede them, work around them, or, in the case of political life, even to change the very power hierarchies from which they derive. A particularly instructive example that suggests what Schütz’s (1964a) approach to a phenomenology of political life might look like appears in “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World”. Early in that essay, he attributes a kind of agency to groups, discussing how in-groups and out-groups interpret the world differently. Then, using Charles Cooley’s idea of a ‘looking glass,’ in which the intricacies of intergroup intentional interlocking become patent, Schütz shows how in-groups and out-groups not only interpret the world but also interpret the other group’s interpretation of themselves, with the result that each group has its subjective perspective against the other group’s objective perspective (Schütz 1964a, 243–48). At that point, Schütz (259–62) brings the “looking glass” (247, 260) to bear on a particularly cruel politically ‘imposed relevance,’ the US Supreme Court’s decision in 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized the “separate but equal” (260) doctrine that excluded Blacks from white facilities (e.g., bathrooms, hotels, buses, water fountains). Justice Brown, representing the Court and a larger encompassing in-group of white supremacists, interpreted how Blacks would interpret the decision that they could not share bathrooms or drinking fountains with whites as implying their inferiority, but Brown disputes that any inferiority is being implied and claims instead that Blacks will be choosing to “put that construction upon it” (260). He further adds that whether African-Americans were inferior to whites or not was not a question that the United States legal system could decide, but, contrary to Brown’s protestations, legally requiring separate but equal facilities implies that those so excluded are racially inferior. Schütz proceeds to explain how the looking glass unfolds since Brown interprets how African-Americans will interpret the Court’s decision as soon as the ink on it was dry, before African-Americans had even read it or been allowed to proffer their interpretation. Not only is the imposed relevance of separate but equal facilities inflicted on Black people, but Brown interprets away any interpretation on their part in which they might have protested this decision. Schütz recognizes that African-Americans, according to their intrinsic relevances, will undoubtedly take this decision as an insult and, as a result of it, will have vast new problems to grapple with (e.g., how to travel by train when they are denied the use of sleeping cars) (261). Schütz further claims that society is free to respond to these imposed relevances by adopting the rather modest educational goal of slowly and patiently modifying the relevances of those in power (262). The removal of such imposed relevances, though, had to wait for the Civil Rights movement in the United States, but the underlying racial power hierarchy, which Schütz recognized, still needs dismantling.

4.  The Structure of the Political Realm in Schütz’s Thought Granted Schütz’s recognition of the importance of imposed relevances and individual resilience and creativity in giving actional or cognitive meaning to them, we can inquire how he moves from the social relationships described in his phenomenology to political structures. In the section of his Phenomenology dealing with contemporaries, Schütz (1967, 198) portrays “social collectivities” as constructs referring to such contemporaries, and he attributes 162

Alfred Schütz

higher degrees of anonymity to collectivities like “the state” or “the nation.” The action of such organizations is reducible to the action of functionaries (able to be apprehended through personal ideal types) with the result that “the state” serves as an abbreviation for a “highly complex network of interdependent personal ideal types” (Schütz 1967, 199). Since we often do not come face to face with these functionaries, such as congresspeople or court justices, and since they carry out their interactions (often face to face with each other) at a distance from us (as is typical of contemporaries), one might come to think of “the state” as a mere subjective concoction, devoid of the direct engagement and resistance experienced with face-to-face consociates. However, Schütz and several commentators (Belvedere 2015, 379) envision the eidos “social organization” as an ideal unity of meaning, like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, standing independently of us, resisting our tampering with it and persisting as “ ‘the same’ in its supra-individual historical-temporal durations no matter how its factual ‘component parts’ continually undergo change” (Schütz 1996, 205). Fred Kersten observes that “Eidetic political philosophy, then, is a regional or material ontology with at least two branches, Law and Polity, standing together in a structural nexus (‘constitution’) with respect to the Eidos, Social Organization” (1999, 194; emphasis in original). Besides, the interactions of these highly complex networks of interdependent personal ideal types according to a constitution result in actions that are concretely mediated by consociates in ways that are not merely subjective fantasies, as when African-Americans will be prosecuted if they ride in Pullman cars, when “gentlemen with uniforms and badges” (Schütz 1967, 185) appear at my front door, or when I hand my letter to a postal employee with confidence that it will be delivered (184–85). These examples suggest that consociates, directly acting on us, must also be included under the ideal unity of meaning “the state” (200), with the last example suggesting that the state also affords necessary services and promotes cooperation, revealing Schutz’s positive interest in social order (López 2014, 72–84). A further reason why the institutions like the state are not simply a product of subjective fantasy is that they have a generative history grounded in ancestral and cultural communities, encompassing diverse individuals and cultures, and often solidified in encounters with other political communities, as John Drummond (2000, 45, 49) maintains. A related reason one might argue that Schütz does not give the political sphere the objectivity that is its due has to do with the methodological individualism attributed to him. Alexis Gros (2022, 28–29, 43–45), however, explains Schütz’s methodological individualism in a way that converges with his account of collectivities (which impose relevances) by claiming that, as opposed to strong normative or ontological individualism, Schütz endorses a weak, partial, methodological individualism. Such a methodological version explains social facts and developments not only in terms of individual actions but also on the basis of structural constellations (Gros 2022, 32–33). Gros (2022, 35–38) traces Schütz’s preference for methodological individualism to Max Weber, whose individualism, Schütz (1966, 39) believed, was closer to the spirit of phenomenology than Husserl’s personalities of higher order. Weber, rejecting positivistic explanation, embraced a hermeneutical methodological individualism since he took meaning-giving human actors as the most basic unit for sociological study, though he also allowed for a supra-individual plexus of activity, as can found in worldviews and universal religions. According to Gros (2022, 45), Schütz also favored a kind of “methodological groupism,” as his essay on equality instances. When Gros (2022, 46) entertains the idea that Schütz propounded a “weak ontological holism,” his definition of this view accords more with methodological groupism since such a view does “not hypostatize groups but conceives of them as intersubjective constellations producing and 163

Michael D. Barber

reproducing themselves in and through the group members’ acts of ‘mutual understanding and interaction’ ” (Gros 2022, 46, emphasis in original). That we can describe individuals as abstracted from groups implies, despite what some weak ontological holists may think, neither that these abstracted individuals are the equivalent of abstracted non-independent contents like the color of a thing (Husserl 2001, 309) nor that the groups thus abstracted from are ontological substrates like physical things, instead of ideal unities of meaning (Embree 2015, 43; Belvedere 2017, 81).

5.  Outlook: A Schützian Vision of Political Life Although we have defended Schütz against criticisms that his view of political life is subjectivistic, idealistic, and excessively individualistic, we can also think of Schütz as presenting a positive vision of political life. Recent rehabilitations of Hannah Arendt’s work reveal a visionary version of what political life might be, and they contrast her position with much of contemporary political theory that reduces political life to a “real politics” (Loidolt 2018, 265), emphasizing power, conflict, and antagonism and playing a reckless game that crushes individuals and permits blind, unfeeling forces to prevail (see Loidolt 2018, 9, 265; Hummel 2016, 101, 116–18). Instead, Arendt, drawing on Kant’s Third Critique, proposes a “beautiful” politics (Hummel 2016, 116) of an “actualized plurality” (Loidolt 2018, 65) that follows the pattern of aesthetic judgments. Such judgments “determine nothing; they open up possibilities. Rather than being under our control or compelling us to agree with inexorable logic, such judgments announce themselves through a subtle feeling” (Hummel 2016, 101). As a consequence, Arendtian political life is characterized by “the joy of inhabiting together with others a world whose reality is guaranteed for each by the presence of all” (Arendt 1998, 244; Loidolt 2018, 241). What vision of political life might Schütz’s phenomenology imply? One might look for such a vision in Schütz’s theoretic analyses regarding proposed or implemented political policies, particularly his emphasis on disclosing the subjective meaning of the other. For instance, when questions arose regarding policies to facilitate the return of soldiers from World War II, Schütz prioritized understanding via an ideal type of the subjective viewpoint of the “homecomer.” In his essay on equality, Schütz demonstrates how Justice Brown in Plessy utilized the looking glass between in-groups and out-groups to dismiss the interpretive perspective of African-Americans even before they had a chance to develop it, and Schutz explores what that suppressed subjective point of view would be, considering how African-Americans would grapple with new restrictions and asserting that the key to understanding discrimination is paying heed to “the subjective viewpoint of the afflicted individual” (Schütz 1964a, 261). In recommending as a solution the diminishment of racial tensions by education, Schütz pays attention to the subjective viewpoint of even the Negrophobe who will not be convinced if biologists attempt to prove that there really is no Negro race (Schütz 1964a, 262). Before considering or enacting policies in political life, it is essential to take account of the subjective point of view of those who will be affected (Barber 2004, 194–95). This is nothing novel for Schütz, who supported Weber’s ‘comprehending sociology’ (verstehende Soziologie) by expounding a phenomenology of meaningful action that ideal types could capture; who resisted the positivism that would virtually do away with the subjective interpretations of actors; who opposed democratic mechanisms that might prevent the opinions of individuals from being “heard and appreciated” (Embree 1999, 164

Alfred Schütz

271; Barber 2005, 196–97); and who, as a phenomenologist, refused to conceive of our actions as being merely caused like physical things and who instead saw us constantly giving meaning, even through passive syntheses, to whatever we encounter. In the Schützian view, the very effort to dispassionately and carefully elucidate the subjective viewpoint of those whose point of view has been suppressed is itself a work of critical social science and of social justice, Bourdieu, Baumann, and Habermas notwithstanding. Finally, though, Schütz would have conceived political life as a space in which participants could drop their guard and attend carefully to the subjective meanings of co-citizens before rushing to establish and enact policies.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barber, Michael. 2004. The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schütz. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2005. “If Only to Be Heard: Value-Freedom and Ethics in Alfred Schütz’s Economic and Political Writings.” In Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schütz, edited by Martin Endreß, George Psathas, and Hisashi Nasu, 173–202. Dordrecht: Springer. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1976. Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Common Sense and Emancipation. London/Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Belvedere, Carlos. 2015. “Durkheim as the Founding Father of Phenomenology.” Human Studies 38: 369–90. ———. 2017. “Lester Embree on ‘Collective Subjects’.” Schützian Research 9: 79–84. Bohman, James, and William Rehg. 2014. “Jürgen Habermas.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/ entries/habermas/. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990a. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1990b. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Translated by Matthew Adamson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. 1992. “The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (‘The Paris Workshop’).” In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, 60–260. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Dreher, Jochen. 2019. “Oblivion of Power? The Social Construction of Reality and the (Counter-) Critique of Pierre Bourdieu.” In Social Constructivism as Paradigm? The Legacy of The Social Construction of Reality, edited by Michaela Pfadenhauer and Hubert Knoblauch, 235–50. Oxford: Routledge. ———, and Daniela Griselda López. 2015. “Subjectivity and Power.” Human Studies 38: 197–222. Drummond, John. 2000. “Political Community.” In Phenomenology of the Political, edited by Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree, 29–53. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Eberle, Thomas. S. 2012. “Phenomenological Life-world Analysis and Ethnomethodology’s Program.” Human Studies 35: 279–304. Embree, Lester. 1999. “The Ethical-Political Side of Schütz: His Contributions at the 1956 Institute on Ethics Concerned with Barriers to Equality of Opportunity.” In Schützian Social Science, edited by Lester Embree, 213–85. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. ———. 2015. The Schützian Theory of the Cultural Sciences. Cham: Springer. Endreß, Martin. 2005. “Reflexivity, Reality, and Relationality: The Inadequacy of Bourdieu’s Critique of the Phenomenological Tradition in Sociology.” In Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schütz, edited by Martin Endreß, George Psathas, and Hisashi Nasu, 51–74. Dordrecht: Springer. Gros, Alexis. 2022. “Methodological Individualism in Alfred Schütz’s Work: Scope and Limits.” Schützian Research 14: 27–50. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.

165

Michael D. Barber Hummel, Ralph P. 2016. “Arendt, Kant and the Beauty of Politics: A Phenomenological View.” In Political Phenomenology: Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, edited by Hwa Yol Jung and Lester Embree, 93–120. Cham: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Logical Investigations. Vol. 1. Translated by J. N. Findlay. Edited by Dermot Moran. London and New York: Routledge. Kersten, Fred. 1999. “The Purely Possible Political Philosophy of Alfred Schütz.” In Schützian Social Science, edited by Lester Embree, 187–211. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Loidolt, Sophie. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. London and New York: Routledge. López, Daniela Griselda. 2014. “El ‘Schütz objetivista’: Aportes de las Reflexiones Schützianas al Problema del Orden Social.” In Fenomenología del Poder, edited by Jochen Dreher and Daniela Griselda López, 65–86. Bogotá: Universidad Santo Tomás. ———. 2021. “The Subjective Experience of Inequality in Everyday Life: Contributions of Alfred Schütz’s Phenomenological Sociology.” In Mathesis Universalis: Die aktuelle Relevanz der “Strukturen der Lebenswelt”, edited by Jochen Dreher, 195–210. Wiesbaden: Springer. Schütz, Alfred. 1962a. “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action.” In Collective Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson, 3–47. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1962b. “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences.” In Collective Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson, 48–66. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1962c. “On Multiple Realities.” In Collective Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson, 207–59. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1962d. “Symbol, Reality, and Society.” In Collective Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson, 287–349. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964a. “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World.” In Collective Papers 2: Studies in Social Theory, edited by Arvid Brodersen, 226–73. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964b. “The Homecomer.” In Collective Papers 2: Studies in Social Theory, edited by Arvid Brodersen, 105–19. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964c. “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge.” In Collective Papers 2: Studies in Social Theory, edited by Arvid Brodersen, 120–34. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1966. “Edmund Husserl’s Ideas.” In Collected Papers 3: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Vol. II, edited by I. Schutz, 15–39. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1996. “The Foundations of the Theory of Social Organization.” In Collected Papers 4, edited by Helmut Wagner and George Psathas in Collaboration with Fred Kersten, 203–20. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. ———, and Thomas Luckmann. 1989. The Structures of the Life-World. Vol. 2. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

166

12 GÜNTHER ANDERS Technology, Antiquatedness, and Apocalypse Babette Babich

1. Introduction Günther (Stern) Anders (1902–1992) was a student of both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as well as Max Scheler. Formed in the phenomenological tradition with respect to both epistemology and ontology but also philosophical anthropology, Anders’s work may not be understood apart from the Frankfurt School he began with: Babich (2022); Gros, Dreher, and Rosa et al. (2022); Müller (2016); Dawsey (2015); Osorio (2019); Perreau (2007); and, more broadly, Rasmussen (1978) and Rovatti (1973). Nevertheless, within critical theory as in hermeneutic phenomenology, quite along with philosophical anthropology and philosophy of literature and media as well as technology and music, Anders tends to be marginalized. Arguably, some of the reasons for this marginalization were ‘political’ (Lütkehaus 2002; Armon 2017; Babich 2022). Thus, van Munster and Sylvest point to the lack of fit between Anders and ‘insider’ academic circles, including mainstream phenomenology (typically quite incestuous) but not less the Frankfurt School, and they begin by underlining that Anders’s concerns were quite close to the agenda of the Critical Theorists. He was highly attuned to the antinomies and contradictions in the constitution of modern society, but what makes his work so interesting for contemporary efforts to grasp the nuclear condition is the central place he accords to technology, and in particular to weapons technology, as a prism through which to understand wider societal shifts. Moreover, and unlike many of the Critical Theorists who took up central positions at universities, Anders’ intellectual work developed in tandem with his political activism. (Van Munster and Sylvest 2019, 4) Nosthoff and Maschewski (2019) emphasize a related constellation. Perhaps what makes reading Anders politically challenging is that he integrates Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology with Husserlian and Schelerian elements together with critical theoretical assumptions, which means that Anders articulates a more critical critical theory just to the extent that he offers a more ‘concretely’ (here to use language both Anders and Adorno use) phenomenological political phenomenology. DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-19

167

Babette Babich

An author for our times, Anders thematizes our ‘antiquatedness’ as he says in the German title of his major work Antiquiertheit: a term that might also be translated as passing an original expiration date, as if we human beings were manufactured products in a culture of planned obsolescence as Anders argues that what he names our ‘Promethean shame’ betrays a certain envy, our machine ressentiment, our visceral desire machine ressentiment, our visceral desire to ‘be’ as he wrote, as products are. Manufactured to plan, products are assumed to be designed for improvement at scheduled intervals, to be replaced with newer models, rendering the original human being ‘outdated.’ The transhuman dream re-imagines humanity; this would be a messianism for our bio-tech era, on the way to an enhanced version of itself: a techno-scientifically modifiable—thus, the appeal of gene editing and mRNA technology—version of the human (Beinsteiner 2019), alien in and to the world, quite as Anders anticipates, consequent to our own interventions, ultimately in a world without humans.

2.  Anders’s Political Phenomenology as a Negative Anthropology Thinking technology in its political dimensions (Schraube 2005) from the atomic age and global politics (Europe, but especially Japan and Vietnam [Jolly 2013; Van Munster and Sylvest 2019]) but also via the culture and propaganda industry, Anders should be read not only as coordinate with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s and Marcuse’s critical theory but also together with the then-contemporary social technological critique of Jacques Ellul, along with the later contributions of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. A political thinker focused on the problem of time—Anders argues that “philosophies that spring from the Kantian theory of freedom, from Hegel’s to Heidegger’s, are philosophies of time” (Anders 2009, 290; cf. Mayer 1981)—Anders argues that time is labile, meaning that both the future and the past are subject to change and, ultimately, annihilation. To Anders’s compound formation between social and political philosophy, to which must be added the challenges of his literary style (Staeuble 1987), Anders must be read heremeneutico-phenomenologically, in terms of Frankfurt School-style critical theory and ‘negative anthropology’ (see Dries and Gätjens’s 2018 compilation of Anders 2018; Bajohr 2021; Zill 2015; more broadly, Zenkert 2009). What makes the point problematic for scholars is that Anders does not ‘do’ the kind of thing claimed as conventional; thus, he is not included or recognized by others writing in the same tradition (this is part of the politics of non-reception), and Anders, following his own approach to both hermeneutic phenomenology and social thought, does not use a language/ framework today’s readers can suppose themselves to know. In some part, this is because, despite his training as a scholar, Anders lived a life apart from the academy—lacking an appointment and, ultimately, in the course of his life, a pension, which lack played a role in his later thinking and reception and certainly the material circumstances of his later life. If Anders’s political philosophy articulates Frankfurt School Critical Theory, what it does not offer is a messianic ideal of any kind, including the liberating promise of redemption through hypertrophy of rational exchange, arguably characteristic of Lukács, Habermas, and other thinkers. Thus, Anders’s hermeneutico-phenomenological philosophical anthropology is conspicuously negative (Bajohr 2019, 2021; cf. Zill 2015). To make matters more complicated— and this must be thought together with his uncompromising anti-nuclear weapons and anti-nuclear power perspective (thus crossing nuclear applications in war and peace)—Anders’s political philosophy was also ‘impolitic.’ To this extent, Anders refused 168

Günther Anders

to articulate an us/them or friend/enemy distinction and conspicuously refused to take the side of or even to identify a set of supposed ‘good guys’—these would be the Americans as Americans at the time congratulated themselves (and still do) on wearing the white hats in history. By contrast, Anders’s reflection on the politics of ‘the situation’ would be defined for him apart from and across such divisions where Americans (but not only Americans) find themselves, simply given ‘the having done’ of what one has done. This is the force of the ‘having’ of what ‘we’ have (Anders 1928): in this case, nuclear technology, as every superpower, bomb-wise, subsequently developed or acquired and, as part of their nuclear armaments programs, ‘tested’ and thus, as Anders went on to argue, used weapons of this kind (see for discussion, Babich 2021a, 142–143). Thus, Anders reflected not only on the progress of nuclear capacity qua politics of nuclear proliferation but also emphasized the ineliminable paradox of developing what would be newer models of such weapons, improved as less (rather than more) effective weapons, calculatedly less lethal not only in order to be able to keep these on hand but also in order to advance the possibility of their future deployment. (See further references in Jolly 2013; Dawsey 2016; Van Munster and Sylvest 2019; Babich 2021a; Borowski 2022.) Calculating the apocalypse from (and as) the use of the bomb (see Babich 2023) and, consequently, in a ‘postapocalyptic’ era, humanity is dedicated to a political course that cannot be relinquished, embroiled not only in what Adorno emphasized as a ‘damaged life’ but also one that might turn time around, inverted “like a glove” (to use the language of Daniel Charles, like Anders a philosopher of music and, for a different topological transformation, cf. Müller and Mellor 2019), such that having destroyed ourselves and our memory, it will be ‘as if’ we had never been (Nichols 2006; Babich 2023). Far from emphasizing a Heidegger-styled propriety, Anders spoke of the future as determined by a ‘having-been’ and thus susceptible to a transformation into the negative as Sophocles had emphasized in antiquity, influencing the political philosophy of revolution and risk articulated in Hölderlin’s Hyperion or Hermit in Greece: μὴ φῦναι—never to have been. This is a future to be unmade in reverse: retrodynamically, psychologically, and, in effect, undone (see in addition and again to Nichols 2006; Van Munster and Sylvest 2019; Babich 2021a, 2021b, 2023). This is the “nakedness” revising the act of creation, to use the language of Oppenheimer and others who, for their own part, draw on the classical literature of apocalypse to do so, transfigured in Anders’s thinking of the bomb as it had been used and as it would continue to be developed, toward factive apocalypse. Thus Anders’s thinking is to be thought as Heidegger thinks time, hermeneutico-phenomenologically speaking: where there is no to-day, no to-morrow can become a to-day. The door in front of us bears the inscription “Nothing will have been” and from within: “Time was an episode.” Not however as our ancestors had hoped, between two eternities; but one between two nothingnesses; between the nothingness of that which, remembered by no one, will have been as though it had never been, and the nothingness of that which will never be. (Anders 1961, 11; cf. Anders 1957, 2019) This uncanny element is highlighted in Anders’s reading of Beckett on Godot, intercalated with a political theology (cf. Anders 1980, 243). This same reflection on nothingness and nothing is also the theme of the political theorist, Tracy B. Strong’s reflections on 169

Babette Babich

“Heidegger and the Space of the Political” in his negatively themed Politics Without Vision (Strong 2012). Both Anders (1965) and Strong hear the resonances of the French where Strong hears echoes of Shakespeare: King Lear: . . . Speak Cordelia: Nothing, my lord. King Lear: Nothing! Cordelia: Nothing: King Lear:

Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

(Shakespeare, cited in Strong 2012, 262; cf. too Dahms 2019) In a singularly compact sentence, Strong writes to remind us that “Carl Schmitt had sought to ground political life and authority on the decisions of a sovereign that rested, as he said, on nothing—they provided the terms of their own justification” (Strong 2012, 262; cf., 281ff.). For Anders, the concept of “Sein ohne Zeit” forms the center of his The Antiquatedness of Humanity (Dis Antiquiertheit des Menschen): “Being Without Time,” written in 1956 as a response to Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time, thought phenomenologically, quite in retrospect: “denn Zeit ist Geschichte,” as Anders frames his argument. We cannot read Anders’s political phenomenology without noting that he foregrounds the psycho-­ adaptation of a techno-conformism that continues to this day as a politics of compliance. For us today, such compliance has been rendered second nature, habitual, automatic, whether it be consenting to ‘cookies’ or airport scanners or lockdowns or masks or vaccine mandates: no opting out. Anders reflected on the already-given, self-imposed and thus self-made, self-invented, self-curated ‘work’ of techno-conformity. Thus, writing on the ‘home-worker’ for Anders accords with what Bajohr characterizes, using Anders’s terms, as “a priori a posteriori’ (2019, 144; cf. Anders 1934–1935, 1937), to apostrophize Anders’ negative anthropology: “ ‘A posteriority is an a priori character of the human, that is, that experience comes specifically after the fact is not itself a post hoc circumstance’ ” (Anders 2019, 144; emphasis added). Note that this cannot be parsed apart from critical theory, whether in terms of Anders’s philosophy of technology or Adorno’s ‘standardized ubiquity,’ as the psychological is the spiritual/anthropological precondition for this very ‘working’ efficacy. In Adorno’s sense, Anders’s techno-conformity is standardizing. For this reason, Anders’s second volume of collected essays runs through various iterations of ‘antiquatedness,’ including the ‘antiquatedness of the individual,’ one section of which is entitled “The Conformist System—Too Good to Be Recognized” (Anders 1980, 139, author’s translation; cf., too, Han 2019), but this is also to be understood in terms of the ‘user illusion’ or filter that is the soft but total fascism of social media or a life online (see Berry 2014 as well as, for reference to Anders, see Babich 2022 and for a parallel analysis, similarly unreceived—or as Fuchs 2017 would say: “undiscovered”—Smythe 1977). The running headers in Anders’s second volume vary in a typographical archaeology of the text, including the bite size: Niemand nicht gleichgeschaltet (1980, 141; author’s translation). The text was composed in the 1960s, a time of nonconformity, and Anders’ term ‘beatniks’ would come to be replaced with ‘hippies’ to indicate those who disputed the ‘establishment,’ a project Anders, here like Adorno, calls into question. This point would be repeated in his reflection Gewalt, ja oder nein? [Violence, yes or no?] at the end of his life, challenging the efficacy/coherence of passive resistance/protest (Anders 1987). For 170

Günther Anders

Anders, the impact of a hunger strike against a totalitarian regime would be (inevitably) bootless whilst effectively bringing the ‘impact’ of the protest action as such to the protester’s consciousness. This is a political socio-psychology but nowhere else, thus articulating the same mechanism of interiorization/co-option. In this way, Anders raised the question of the ‘politics’ of the political by foregrounding an interiorized impotence as machine envy/ressentiment (Babich 2022, 209f.). Anders’s questioning objection remains salient to this day as scholars imagine/argue that the having of cell phones or a corporate takeover of Twitter might be all that is needed to change regimes. (Thereby the solutionist conundrum of Morozov 2013 becomes farce: cf. Zuboff 2018; Thompson 2018; Liggieri 2022.) Note the parallel between Anders’s afterthought concerning the ubiquity/invisibility of the conformist system: the standardized automaticism of desire. As we know, repetition works a charm in the service of propaganda. The totalitarian threat implicit in the claim is already patent in the psychoanalytic maxim that it is not you but and much rather another someone or something that knows you ‘better than you know yourself’ (Carmichael 2014; Thompson 2018; and on Eric Schmidt, who ‘coined’ this phrase, Tsotsis 2010). The caution has oracular origins (Delphi), repeated in St. Augustine’s reflections on what is closer to him than his own heart. Today, this is the stuff of industry: influence, manufactured on demand, curated and fine tuned for specific results; this is the insight of Anders’ Frankfurt School thinking. Echoing a point on writing as such (see Baudrillard 1981 for a parallel; cf. Babich 2018), as Plato already argues in his Phaedrus, Anders reflects on the communicative politics of the culture industry, a key focus for critical theory. In addition to Smythe 1977, to aid us in reading Anders, we need Paul Virilio’s observation that today’s language has lost not only its social relief (primordial eloquence), but also its spatial relief (its emphases, its prosody). This was a popular poetics which was not long in withering away, then dying, literally for want of breath, before lapsing into academicism and the unambiguous language of all propaganda, of all advertising. (Virilio 2000, 37) As Plato tells us, the Pharaoh-deity Thamus maintained in a conversation between equals with the Ibis-headed god Theuth: we are in love with our own creations (this is part of Promethean shame and ressentiment), and given over to this captivation, we resist critique. At issue is authority, no matter who tells us how to read, to use the language of the perfectly ‘politic’ Strong, Heidegger, and the political, much less how to read those authors, political thinkers tend not to read like Anders or Virilio or Baudrillard or Ellul or Illich. We tend to want to read only certain authors on the political as other authors, especially those critical of technology and its works, tend to unsettle or ‘upset,’ to vary Nietzsche on the ancient Greeks, ‘all our expectations.’ Thus the young Anders wrote ditties in homage to what some critically (others admiringly) call AI (or ‘robot’ or computer or cybernetic—for Anders this would be ‘machinic’) ‘envy.’ Authors who discuss these issues do not tend to read Anders (but see Coeckelberg 2020; Gunkel 2018; Bateman 2018, in addition to Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016; Gertz 2018; Dowd 2021) where ‘Promethean shame’ offers an affect analysis that requires phenomenological unpacking (Anders 1956, 21f; cf. Müller 2015, 2016, Babich 2022. 99ff). Anders’s 1962 text on memory and life articulated as a constellation of ‘lives’—that is, “not a vita,” as Ernst Schraube writes, “but a life in plural, vitae” (Schraube 2005, 171

Babette Babich

78)—was published when the author turned 60 (in English: “The Émigré,” Anders 2014), in tension with and echoing Hannah Arendt’s 1958 Vita Activa. At issue was what Ellul called the ‘technological system,’ which functions as it does for Anders because conformity is part and parcel of being a child of one life, one era, born as one is into one’s world and to the use of the tools and ‘gadgets’ of the same—this is Anders’ phenomenological anthropology of the world, quite as “no one is free to select ‘one’s world’ among possible worlds,” so too one cannot “live apart from the epoch in which one happened to have been born” (Anders 1980, 141; author’s translation). Living with and on the terms of ordinary technology is all that is needed for this “Gleichschaltung.” For Anders—and this is true of smartphones and for the users of social media, just as it was true of Anders’s reference to a ‘radio receiver’—in the measure to which one becomes accustomed to regard oneself as “lord and owner of one’s apparatus,” one becomes the “servant and possession of the same.” Listening to the radio, one becomes aware of what programs are available, and this transforms the time of one’s life and consciousness as one (this is the point of programming) dedicates one’s free time, “oneself” (Anders 1980, 142; author’s translation), to it. Desire is key, but as Adorno and Anders and Marcuse (and, differently, Baudrillard) have argued, desire is manufactured: an artifact of propaganda and ‘priming.’ But scholars are more concerned with the fact that Anders was related to Walter Benjamin and was Hannah Arendt’s first husband than with exploring the nuances of his analysis of the programming of affect in terms of shame and desire (cf. Liesmann 2011; Hauskeller 2014; but, per contra, Babich 2022). In the same way, fascination with the personalities of the various members of the Frankfurt School can draw our attention (Staeuble 1987; Jeffries 2017; Duford 2017; Babich 2022). The points are part of Anders’s arguments contra surveillance (the antiquatedness of privacy), by now so very consummate that Anders’s remarks may seem outdated even as we continue to miss his point (cf., albeit without reference to Anders, Smythe 1977; Berry 2014; Zuboff 2018). For Anders, paralleling Marcuse’s reflections on eros where the issue concerns the political marketing of candidates but which today might be extended to social media in general, whereby “being  =  selling being” works to the extent that the idea of ‘world’—and the current focus on climate change—succeeds a largely greenwashed focus on the ‘environment’ to the extent that, as Anders writes, one identifies ‘world’ with its ‘advertised’ ideal (Anders 1980, 162). This is political inasmuch as it is the only thing we see, phenomenologically: “what offers itself to us” and ‘compels’ us, to the extent that everything else is excluded. Note the parallel with the sirens in Homer to recall Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, including their own reference to Goethe, if Anders sets the compulsion/competition of advertising in the pell-mell of Hobbes’s “bellum omnium contra omnes”: whatever is not marketed, what does not solicit us, what does not show itself, what has no share in the glaring light of advertisement has no power of reclamation: that we do not perceive, we do not hear, we do not go along with, do not recognize, do not apply, do not consume; in brief: it is “ontologically subliminal” in the pragmatic sense, it is not ‘there’ [nicht “da”]. When Heidegger, be it rightly or wrongly, reenlivened the then bloodless word “phenomenon” via his explication [Deutung] as “that which shows itself” he was hardly thinking the phenomenality of advertised commodities yet his explication precises just this. (Anders 1980, 160; author’s translation) 172

Günther Anders

For his part, Jean Baudrillard takes up the same insight into the ‘consumer society,’ and by reminding us that ‘advertising’ (la sollictation, Werbung), on the level of the word, is erotic in origin (Anders’s resonance is elided in English translation), a point that is, of course, also Marcuse’s point, Anders can argue that ever “since the world as a whole has been eroticized,” the erotic has been “completely foreclosed in consciousness” (Anders 1980, 160, author’s translation; see, on love and eros, the contributions to Hauskeller 2014 and on Anders’s conception of the ‘radio leash’ as this extends to today’s social media, Babich 2022, 168ff.). For Anders, consequently, the “collapse of prudishness” is simply “an exclusively commercial fact” (Anders 1980, 161; author’s translation). Anders’s political conception of ‘world’ is indebted to Heidegger and no less significantly to Max Scheler and Karl Jaspers. But Anders’s singular voice on world cannot be mistaken as he connects world alienation, strangeness, indeterminacy, and contingency in a reflection on freedom: To be free, this means: to be strange [étranger], to be bound to nothing specific, to be cut out for nothing specific, to be within the horizon of the indeterminate and in an attitude such that the indeterminate can also be encountered amongst other indeterminates. In the indeterminate, which I am able to find thanks to my freedom, it is also my own self that I encounter; by the same token, for as much as it is of the world it is strange to itself. Encountered as contingent, the self is, so to speak, the victim of its own liberty. (Anders 2009, 280) The reflexive paradox ‘that I am precisely myself,’ that ‘I am not myself’ (Anders 2009, 281) may be traced through Hegel as Anders emphasizes, but no less to Schopenhauer, just as it is also to be found in Heidegger’s gnomic response to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein. Anders thinks this through as Heidegger does not in the Gerade-ichsein that is the “ ‘being-precisely-me’ ” (Anders 2009, 282). Anders’s reflection on shame continues his 1956 reflections relevant in the decade of rebuilding after Hiroshima but is no less reminiscent of his Parisian exile in 1934 (see Wolfe 2009 and, in passing, Paucker 1982). Here, it is politically relevant that Anders combines reflection on the commonality of “in the world” and “with the world” that one may connect with Arendt’s political thinking with reference to the private sphere along with Weberian maturity and what is “one’s own”: i.e., authenticity. Rather than attempting to think the possibility of a tendentious “moral happy ending” (Anders 2009, 289), for Anders: The thousand forms of hypocrisy, of disguise, and of comedy positively exemplify the negative proof of shame and disgust: the instability of man in relation to himself, his vagueness. (Anders 2009, 289) Anders’s grammatical precision coordinates thinking any possible political future as phenomenologically projected, protentionally speaking, in time: always, already, and in advance. For Anders, a reflexive self is key to this protentional comprehension: “The ‘I will be’ is henceforth changed into a ‘what will be, I will not be’. The positive expression of this formula is the future perfect: ‘I will have been’ ” (Anders 2009, 290). 173

Babette Babich

One can add to this a reflection on memory along with the same perfected future: “[A]lready the future becomes the past” (Anders 2009, 290). Mindful of current crises, we may refer to ‘frontier zones’ (cf. Oberprantacher 2016)—crises to be updated given the ongoing and constantly shifting crisis of emigration (see Owen’s 2020 discussion of the refugee crisis more broadly)—but also the ongoing intensification of war. Thus, Anders cites Scheler and still the focus on what could have been, the subjunctive that is for Scheler the Christian contrast with the Nietzschean insight into the force of political ressentiment, where Anders’s reflections on shame and envy should be developed as impotence as noted earlier, that is: as the incapacity of expression Scheler analyses this, following Nietzsche’s original analysis of the power dynamics of ressentiment, as key as depending on class and societal status, including gender, impotence always, and not only in a given situation, accompanies life from youth and thus its embedded dependence on the social circumstance that vary for women and go along with adulthood and aging (see Scheler [1915] 2015, Babich, 2000, and cf. van Tuinen 2024 as well as, for the notion of the ‘soul’ as Anders uses this in the technological era after Scheler and in the context of Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s political theology and philosophy of technology: Nichols 2006 and see, for Anders’ political theology, Armon 2017; Babich 2018, 2023). Thus Anders writes: One can envisage space, as does Max Scheler, as a milieu, seeing it as the product of the freedom characteristic of motility, as the independence of the here and the there, and as their permutability. This freedom can now go astray, veering off into areas of complete irrelevance to me. If it sets its course according to its own impulse, a moment comes where it exceeds the limits of its own domain. Countless ‘also-theres’ [auch-dort] arise without any differentiation: they are there simultaneously and claim to be there singularly, without this simultaneity being fulfilled in such a way that man could be there-and-there at the same time. (Anders 2009, 291) Anders remains an untapped theorist for our current focus on migration, compounded as it is/has been with the factive suspension of any possibility of movement (this is lockdown as past and future/prospective global prospect): “[A]ll emigration ends nevertheless in a new here and pushes the wanderer from one contingency to another, and from one subjunctive to another” (Anders 2009, 292; cf. Anders 2014). Anders reminds us that the human is alien or stranger in the world: He can abandon “his” place, and he hopes that by losing it he can forget the principle of individuation and his own belongings. And in losing what belongs to him—the “his”—he hopes to lose himself. (Anders 2009, 293) This reflection on what is one’s own is likewise articulated at the level of grammar and its transforms as Bajohr explains that “Anders calls this a ‘datival’ world-relation, while the distanced model of theory is ‘accusatival’ ” (Bajohr 2019, 142). If “[s]pace is thus the Principium individuationis” (Anders 2009, 293), it is also a matter of alienation, thinking what Jacques Lacan calls the shifter, the I, that is what is, as Heidegger says, in each case mine, together with political time. Here, Anders reads through the conflicts of the “absolute disappointment that the I feels when it realises that once in existence it is confined to 174

Günther Anders

share it with other beings and that the totality of existence is not its alone” (2009, 294). Here, Anders raises a key question in 20th-century philosophy: the self, the I, the memory problem he names ‘identification.’ Thus, the role of the shifter incorporates the challenge of memory together with the critical theoretical ‘fragment’: as Anders explains, “yesterday’s I is not exactly an ‘I’ but a fragment of life—at least in the eyes of today’s memory” (2009, 298; cf. Pollmann 2019). Anders’s focus here requires the reference to Heidegger already emphasized, but the reference is radically transformed into a reflection on what Adorno calls ‘damaged life’: The possessive pronoun does not ordinarily designate only the fact of possession but also the fact of “being possessed”; neutrally, it designates the general fact of belonging. “My” life thus equally signifies the fact that I belong to my life, as I, and that my life belongs to me, as mine. (Anders 2009, 299) Anders thus articulates a reflexive politics of mediatic technological dominion that is dependent on sympathetic identification, projection, and representation, as this is the means of the psychology of political transformation and not political rallies—and Anders explicitly invokes theorists of the mass human being and the crowd per contra and qua supplanted with unerring efficacy by the same media on an individual level: He gets his revenge on the world by spreading his contingent self over the world, by incorporating it within himself and by representing it. For the one who is powerful is no longer only himself, such as he was in his miserable condition, but this one and that one, himself and the other, an ensemble. He is simultaneously here and there and there again. For he is, in domination, in representation, and in glory, to employ an expression from theology, omnipresent. (Anders 2009, 294) The expressly situational, world hermeneutic, here as phenomenologically articulated, is crucial to Anders’s political psychological point of reflective memory: Unlike perception which has its object in front of it, a fragment of the world, memory is memory of a situation in which the perceiving and the perceived, the I  and the world, are already confused to such an extent that neither the I without the world nor the world without the I can be abstracted as such from this single given. (Anders 2009, 299) With all this, including an excursus into melancholy and self-claiming reconstitution, recognition, the draft, and the vortex of being, Anders suggests that it is in order “to be at home” in the world that the human being “is forced to superimpose on the natural world an artificial world, arrested and constructed by him—that is, the social and economic world with its customs and its laws” (2009, 303). This allows him to argue very much as theologians typically do, emphasizing a self-assertion that differs in its pathos from Blumenberg’s, that the human being “is not cut out for the natural world” (2009, 303; Babich 2023). In 1956, Anders reflected on a certain very American can-do ability, which he continued to analyze throughout his work in terms of an imperative necessity—that is, the imperative 175

Babette Babich

of actualizing what can be done—transformed in his thinking via the negative. For this same reason, Anders reflects on Goethe’s fairytale (originally borrowed from the second-century Lucian), “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (see a footnote, which Anders would have appreciated, in Dahms 2019, 24–26 as well as Liggieri 2022; Babich 2022, 172f). For Anders, the caution may be understood as the challenge not only of ressentiment and its conjunct impotence but also of consequences that then cannot be controlled, resulting from that same frustration (1980, 395; see Müller 2016; Beinsteiner 2019; Babich 2022, 209f, 223). This reflects the individual’s contingency, which Anders distinguished as nihilistic (“ ‘I am myself’ ”), historical (“ ‘I am that which was’ ”), and, in contrast to a strikingly Nietzschean formula (“What I willed, I will’) (2009, 306) to emphasize that “acting is not being” (2009, 306). Thus, well in advance of Adorno’s challenges, Anders has already reminded us that The question of knowing what man is authentically [Eigentlich] is consequentially wrongly posed. For the theoretical definition is only a shadow that decision rejects in the theoretical realm [sic]. “[W]hat I am in an authentic sense,” “what I discover in me,” is always already decided, whether by myself or by another. What is opposed to the definition of man is thus not the irrational but the fact of human action; the action whereby man is constantly defined in fact, and whereby he determines what he is on each occasion. (2009, 307)

3.  Outlook: ‘Never Having Been’ The prospect of going forward with Anders requires that we read him as we read Adorno and phenomenology as critical theory. For Anders’s radically phenomenological political thinking both reflects the urgency of our situation and engages the obstacles that face ‘thinking.’ Where Heidegger insisted that we ‘are still not thinking,’ Anders argued that our technology and our involvement with technology dictate a complicity and anaesthetization of the capacity for thought, largely by social means. This turns out to be exceedingly effective, even for academics: one does not, Anders argues, want to be taken for a reactionary. (See, for current discussion, Agamben 2021.) To the extent that the threat of being taken to be a ‘reactionary’ has since been replaced with the fear of being thought a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ the prospects remain arguably more daunting than the obstacles Anders projected, but as Anders reminds us in his reflections on Franz Kafka, Pro and Con, we remain morally bound, however little this may seem, ­however contra the principle of hope—“not for us, Max, not for us”—to commit ourselves to undertaking the attempt (Anders 1953, 73f). For Anders, with or without hope, this is a challenge that is imperative. Usefully, concisely, in the same constellation, Howard Caygill frames this hope as an “occasion,” here via Walter Benjamin, “which is, after all, even if not for him and not for us, only another way of saying ‘future’ ” (Caygill 1998, 152).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2021. Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics. Translated by Valeria Dani. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Anders, Günther Stern. 1928. Über das Haben. Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis. Bonn: Verlag Cohen.

176

Günther Anders ———. 1934–1935. “Une interprétation de l’a posteriori.” Translated by Emmanuel Levinas. Recherches Philosophiques IV: 65–80. ———. 1937. “Pathologie de la Liberté. Essai sur la non-identification.” Translated by P.-A. Stéphanopoli. Recherches Philosophiques VI: 22–54. ———. 1953. Kafka Pro und Con. Die Prozeß Unterlagen. Munich: Verlag C. W. Beck. ———. 1956. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen I. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution. Munich: Verlag C. W. Beck. ———. 1957. “Gebote des Atomzeitalters.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 13, 1957. ———. 1961. “Commandments in the Atomic Age.” In Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly, told in his Letters to Günther Anders, 11–20. New York/London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. 1965. “Being Without Time: On Beckett’s Play Waiting for Godot.” In Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Martin Esslin, 140–51. New York: Prentice Hall. ———. 1980. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen II. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Munich: Verlag C. W. Beck. ———. 1987. Gewalt: Ja oder Nein, Eine notwendige Discussion. Munich: Knaur. ———. 2009. “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification.” Deleuze Studies 3 (2): 278–310. ———. 2014. “The “Émigré.” In The Life and Work of Günther Anders. Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters, edited by Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey, and Berhard Fetz, translated by Otmar Binder, 171–86. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag. ———. 2018. Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen: Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie. Edited by Christian Dries and Henrik Gätjens. Munich: Beck. ———. 2019. “Apocalypse without Kingdom.” E-Flux Journal, no. 97 (February). www.e-flux.com/ journal/97/251199/apocalypse-without-kingdom/. Armon, Adi. 2017. “The Parochialism of Intellectual History: The Case of Günther Anders.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 62: 225–41. Babich, Babette. 2000. “Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Problem of the Artist as Actor–Jew–Woman.” Continental Philosophy Review, 33: 159–188. ———. 2018. “On Günther Anders, Political Media Theory, and Nuclear Violence.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 44 (10): 1110–26. ———. 2021a. “Günther Anders’s Epitaph for Aikichi Kuboyama.” Journal of Continental Philosophy 2 (1): 141–58. ———. 2021b. “Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News: ‘Inventing’ Epidemics and the Police State.” In The Psychology of Global Crises and Crisis Politics Intervention, Resistance, Decolonization, edited by Irene Strasser and Martin Dege, 241–72. London: Springer. ———. 2022. Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2023. “Gnosticism, Critical Theory, and Apocalypse: Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders, Tracy Strong and Carl Schmitt.” Philosophy & Social Criticism: 1–42. Bajohr, Hannes. 2019. “World-Estrangement as Negative Anthropology: Günther Anders’s Early Essays.” Thesis Eleven 153 (1): 141–53. ———. 2021. “Negative Anthropologie jenseits der Negativen Anthropologie. Eine historische Semasiologie.” In“Denn das Wahre ist das Ganze nicht .  .  .” Beiträge zur Negativen Anthropologie Ulrich Sonnemanns, edited by Tobias Heinze and Martin Mettin, 101–36. Berlin: Neofelis. Bateman, Chris. 2018. The Virtuous Cyborg. London: Eyewear Publishing. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. “Requiem for the Media.” In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 164–84. New York: Telos Press. Beinsteiner, Andreas. 2019. “Cyborg Agency: The Technological Self-Production of the (Post-) Human and the Anti-Hermeneutic Trajectory.” Thesis Eleven 153 (1): 113–33. Berry, David. 2014. Critical Theory and the Digital. London: Bloomsbury. Borowski, Audrey. 2022. “Günther Anders: A Forgotten Prophet for the 21st Century.” https://aeon. co/essays/gunther-anders-a-forgotten-prophet-for-the-21st-century. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2016. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: Norton.

177

Babette Babich Carmichael, James. 2014. “Google Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself.” The Atlantic, August 19, 2014. Caygill, Howard. 1998. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge. Coeckelberg, Mark. 2020. AI Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Dahms, Harry F. 2019. “Ignoring Goethe’s Faust: A  Critical Theoretical Perspective on American Ideology.” Fast Capitalism 16 (2): 9–30. Dawsey, Jason. 2015. The Life and Work of Gunther Anders: Emigre, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters. Vienna: Studien Verlag. ———. 2016. “After Hiroshima: Günther Anders and the History of Anti-Nuclear Critique.” In Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945–90, Cultural History of Modern War, edited by Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann, 247–95. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dowd, Maureen. 2021. “A.I. is Not A-OK.” New York Times, October  30, 2021. www.nytimes. com/2021/10/30/opinion/eric-schmidt-ai.html. Dries, Christian. 2018. “Von der Weltfremdheit zur Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Günther Anders’ Negative Anthropologie.” In Günther Anders: Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen. Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie, edited by Dries and Henrike Gätjens, 437–535. München: Beck. Duford, Rochelle. 2017. “Daughters of the Enlightenment: Reconstructing Adorno on Gender and Feminist Praxis.” Hypatia 32 (3): 784–800. Fuchs, Christian. 2017. “Günther Anders’ Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology in the Age of Big Data Capitalism.” mbien 15 (2): 582–611. Gertz, Nolen. 2018. Nihilism and Technology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gros, Alexis, Jochen Dreher, and Hartmut Rosa, eds. 2022. Phänomenologie und Kritische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Gunkel, David. 2018. Robot Rights. Cambridge: MIT University Press. Han, Byung Chul. 2019. Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hauskeller, Michael. 2014. “Promethean Shame and the Engineering of Love.” In Sex and the Posthuman Condition, 41–52. Frankfurt: Springer. Jeffries, Stuart. 2017. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. London: Verso. Jolly, Edouard. 2013. “Entre légitime défense et état d’urgence: La pensée andersienne de l’agir politique contre la puissance nucléaire.” Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics XV (2): 210–30. Liessmann, Konrad Paul. 2011. “Thought after Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt.” Enrahonar 46: 123–35. Liggieri, Kevin. 2022. “Between Technology and ‘Humans’: The Idee of an Anthropological Signature in Human-Machine Interactions.” Technology and Language Технологии в инфосфере 4 (2): 129–44. Lütkehaus, Ludger. 2002. “In der Mitte sitzt das Dasein. Die Philosophen Günther Anders und Peter Sloterdijk lesen zweierlei Heidegger.” Die Zeit, January 24, 2002. Mayer, Hans. 1981. “Die Zerstörung der Zukunft. Günther Anders: Skizze zu einem Porträt.” Die Zeit, July 17, 1981. Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here. New York: Public Affairs. Müller, Christopher John. 2015. “Desert Ethics: Technology and the Question of Evil in Günther Anders and Jacques Derrida.” Parallax 21: 42–57. ———. 2016. Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Müller, Christopher John, and David Mellor, eds. 2019. “Utopia Inverted: Günther Anders, Technology and the Social.” Thesis Eleven 153 (1). Nichols, Aidan. 2006. Scattering the Seed: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Early Writings on Philosophy and the Arts. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press. Nosthoff, Anna-Verena, and Felix Maschewski. 2019. “The Obsolescence of Politics: Rereading Günther Anders’s Critique of Cybernetic Governance and Integral Power in the Digital Age.” Thesis Eleven 153 (1): 75–93. Oberprantacher, Andreas. 2016. “Of Other Spaces (of Memory).” Social Research 83 (2): 329–57.

178

Günther Anders Osorio, Gabriela Macedo. 2019. “Hacia una reflexión sobre la crisis ambiental. Max Horkheimer y Günther Anders: Afán de dominio y desfase prometeico.” Bajo Palabra. Revista de filosofía 2 (21): 81–94. Owen, David. 2020. What Do We Owe to Refugees? London: Polity. Paucker, Henri R. 1982. “Exile and Existentialism.” In Exile: The Writer’s Experience, edited by John M. Spalek and Robert F. Bell, 82–94. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Perreau, Laurent. 2007. “Günther Anders à l‘école de la phénoménologie.” Tumultes 28–29 (1–2): 21–34. Pollmann, Anna. 2019. Fragmente aus der Endzeit. Negatives Geschichtsdenken bei Günther Anders. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Rasmussen, David. 1978. “Issues in Phenomenology and Critical Theory.” In Crosscurrents in Phenomenology. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Vol. 7, edited by Ron Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire, 13–29. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Rovatti, Pier Aldo. 1973. “Critical Theory and Phenomenology.” Telos 15 (Spring): 25–41. Scheler, Max. (1915) 2015. Ressentiment. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Schraube, Ernst. 2005. “ ‘Torturing Things Until They Confess’: Günther Anders’ Critique of Technology.” Science as Culture 14 (1): 77–85. Smythe, Dallas W. 1977. “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1 (3): 1–27. Staeuble, Irmingard. 1987. “Von der Schwierigkeit, über Günther Anders zu schreiben.” Leviathan 15 (2): 305–17. Strong, Tracy B. 2012. Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Bannister in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, Nicholas. 2018. “When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself.” Wired, October 4, 2018. Tsotsis, Alexia. 2010. “Eric Schmidt: ‘We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like.” September 7, 2010. https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/eric-schmidt-ifa/. Van Munster, Rens, and Casper Sylvest. 2019. “Appetite for Destruction: Günther Anders and the Metabolism of Nuclear Techno-Politics.” Journal of International Political Theory 1–19. van Tuinen, Sjoerd. 2024. The Dialectic of Ressentiment. Pedagogy of a Concept. New York: Routledge. Virilio, Paul. 2000. The Information Bomb. London: Verso. Wolfe, Katharine. 2009. “Introduction to Günther Anders’ ‘The Pathology of Freedom’.” Deleuze Studies 3 (2): 274–77. Zenkert, Georg. 2009. “Mensch ohne Bild. Grenzen der Bestimmung des Unbestimmten.” In Negativität und Unbestimmtheit. Beiträge zu einer Philosophie des Nichtwissens, edited by Andreas Hetzel, 155–67. Bielefeld: Transcript. Zill, Rüdiger. 2015. “Vom Verschwinden des Menschen. Günther Anders’ Negative Anthropologie.” In Fines Hominis? Zur Geschichte der philosophischen Anthropologiekritik, edited by Marc Rölli, 159–75. Bielefeld: Transcript. Zuboff, Shoshanna. 2018. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.

179

13 HANNAH ARENDT: PLURALITY, WORLDLINESS, AND ACTION Inverting the Image of Totalitarianism Sophie Loidolt

1. Introduction Hannah Arendt can rightfully be characterized as one of the main proponents and founding figures of a political phenomenology. She underwent a thorough phenomenological formation before she became one of the few theorists who made the political their explicit topic and main concern. Furthermore, she also made some crucial methodological moves that fundamentally politicized classical phenomenology. Thinking “the political”—which, in Arendt’s case, amounts to thinking plurality—thus proved to have a transformative effect on the phenomenological approach. How far does this reach? Arendt herself (1994a, 1) famously claimed that what she was doing was, in fact, political theory and not philosophy. This claim is a complex one, involving Arendt’s philosophical argument that philosophy traditionally does not deal with plurality since it concentrates on essences, metaphysics, and contemplation. Still, Arendt did not simply leave philosophy behind and turn to politics. Instead she aimed at “thinking” instead of fabricating theories and at understanding the world in a post-metaphysical and (post-)totalitarian age. And that meant thinking the political anew: by questioning and rereading the tradition and the constellations of meaning it had generated and by assessing them through the lens of the concerns of the present. From this, a genuine political phenomenology emerged that puts plurality and action at its center. The main claim of this political phenomenology is that it is the ontological primal fact of plurality—in its phenomenologically conceived, contingent actualization—that fundamentally politicizes our Being and not, for example, the friend-enemy constellation as in Carl Schmitt. This claim has normative implications for the term of “the political,” as well as for a whole political theory derived from it. As Arendt would argue, this is not a construed normativity derived from an imposed idea or concept, but one that lies in the phenomenon of actualized plurality itself, in the experiences it allows for as well as in its conditions of success. Arendt hence develops a phenomenologically grounded political theory that, in contrast to her French existentialist colleagues, can do without a Marxist background. In contrast to Heidegger and Schmitt, on the other hand, it allows her to argue for an intrinsically democratic and isonomic constellation, one that needs to be protected from an antagonism that aims to destroy plurality itself. 180

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-20

Hannah Arendt

“Saving the phenomena” (Arendt 1977b, 3), one of Arendt’s oft-used quotes, thus amounts to saving the precise articulation of what makes us political beings (and what doesn’t)—which points to experiences, not to ideas, and to interaction, not to theory. What follows from this is that “experiences” for Arendt are never simply occurring empirical events or merely subjective impressions but are always regarded with respect to their essential structure and existential meaning. And this is only one aspect that shows how Arendt phenomenologically grasps, describes, and analyzes the political. In the following, I  will show how Arendt develops her political philosophy with phenomenological means and how she does so by inverting the negative foil of her analyses of totalitarianism. In contrast to authors who read her as an eclecticist, my claim is that there is an implicit structure and methodology at work in her approach that are phenomenological in origin and that, indeed, for Arendt, are the medium of seeing the political the way she does. The major point is, however, that Arendt not only uses phenomenological concepts in order to develop her main political ideas but thereby also transforms and politicizes them. The result is a strong, methodically reflected, and genuinely phenomenological approach to political intersubjectivity, political practices, and the political.1 Complementary to her theoretical work, Arendt also engaged in concrete political judgment and saw herself as a “thinker” whose publications should make the public reflect and debate. Indeed, the infamous cases of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 2006) and “Little Rock” (Arendt 2003) provoked widespread controversies that also led to rightful criticisms of some of her conceptual distinctions (such as “the social” and “the political”), as well as their application. Yet the possibility that judgment can fail is something that Arendt clearly preferred over not judging at all (Arendt 2000, 394). This inherent need for ongoing communication and interaction is what makes us human and keeps us open. Arendt’s grounding of the political in basic existential conditions which are action based and world related and which have practical as well as material aspects, is her contribution to a political phenomenology that dynamically goes beyond a classic anthropology of the “zoon politikon.”

2.  Arendt’s Political Phenomenology: The Experience of Totalitarianism and Its Retrieval in a Phenomenology of Actualized Plurality It is undisputed that totalitarianism is one of the main negative motors of Arendt’s political thinking. In many respects, Arendt’s analyses in Origins of Totalitarianism ([1951] 1973) and “Ideology and Terror” ([1953] 2018), on which I will focus here, are classical political analyses that show how totalitarian rule transforms and demolishes the basic pillars of a political system: It destroys civil associations and all social, legal, and political traditions of the country; it transforms classes into masses and supplants the party system in favor of a mass movement; it dynamizes law into “laws of movement,” be it of history or of nature; it executes these laws through the combination of ideology and terror; it shifts the center of power from the army to the police; and, finally, it directs its foreign policy openly toward world domination (cf., Arendt 2018, 68, 73). What is interesting in particular about these political analyses for us here is how Arendt embeds them in a broader existential-phenomenological framework. This is the basic point of departure from which she starts to develop a political phenomenology ex negativo. The existential aspects that are fundamental for Arendt are (1) the attack on plurality and natality through the destruction of the spaces of freedom, action, and movement “in-between” people and (2) the “basic experience” of loneliness, 181

Sophie Loidolt

fostering the consequential reasoning of ideology, which is not in need of experience, truth, or trust anymore, but just of a premise. Seyla Benhabib has called this, rather derogatorily, an “existential psychology” and asserts that “what remains viable of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism today is not the existential psychology or phenomenology of loneliness but the political sociology of the public sphere and of intermediate associations” (Benhabib 2003, 69). I  would like to argue instead that these two aspects cannot be separated in Arendt’s analyses and that one essentially elucidates the other. Furthermore, we are not dealing with an “existential psychology” in the sense of an opposition of inner minds of people to their outer actions or associations. Instead, what Arendt unfolds is a description of an inter-relational space of meaning in which self, world, and others concomitantly co-constitute each other. Let me therefore try to throw a light on both existential aspects mentioned here: Ad (1): Arendt repeatedly characterizes totalitarianism by its “iron band of terror which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of many the One who unfailingly will act as though he himself were part of the course of History or Nature” (2018, 76). In a nutshell: For Arendt, the destruction of the “in-between” is one of the central strategies of totalitarianism. But what does this in-between involve? It is a space where relations between unique beings can be actualized, where these unique beings can appear, articulate themselves, and form all kinds of bonds or opponencies. Plural beings thus need a world, a space of appearance in which they can realize their interaction, and totalitarianism precisely attacks this basic condition for plurality to unfold. “By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them. . . . It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space” (2018, 75). Arendt’s use of the term “space” certainly comprises several metaphorical meanings here. But it is also concrete in the sense of restricting individual movement2 and invading and annihilating public as well as private space. While tyranny “only” destroys the public sphere and the possibility to move and act together, totalitarianism invades the private sphere, too, and undermines trust relationships in the hearts of people’s homes. It uproots people fundamentally and isolates them in mistrust that destroys the space of possibilities before “pressing” them against each other. Another form of destroying the in-between in a more institutionalized sense is the way totalitarianism disconnects law and politics from all action and the will of people, which typically manifests itself not in a unified but in a plural form. In other forms of political organization, the law would, instead of being one anonymous law of ‘nature’ (biology) or ‘history,’ hedge the space between people and thereby determine an arena of freedom and action. Totalitarianism, however, abolishes that principle. It only allows for one perspective and one common course of action, which is determined by ideology and its impersonation, the Führer. Thereby, it literally deflates the space of appearance, where multiple perspectives and outcomes are possible, to a one-dimensional common movement of one body. Finally, this “oneness” violates the basic existential situation of human beings who are not only many but who also enter the world by birth and leave it again, dying. In contrast to this individuating and relational line of generativity, of persons who are parents and children, the gigantic movement of history or nature “uses mankind as its material and knows neither birth nor death” (Arendt 2018, 83). Their meaning is made superfluous. Arendt therefore characterizes the concentration camps and their “experiments with humanity” as the core of totalitarian domination that explicitly aims to “destroy the person” (1973, 453) and hence all signs of natality and plurality. 182

Hannah Arendt

Ad (2): The second train of thought connecting ideology, loneliness, and the loss of the capacities to think, act, and trust in experience has epistemic as well as existential components: “self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality” (Arendt 2018, 83): it makes people “lose contact with their fellow men” (2018, 83), which weakens the capacity for both experience and thought. Therefore, The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. (2018, 83) We can see not only an early characterization of the Eichmann case here but also how Arendt masterfully intertwines phenomenological core notions such as experience, worldrelated thinking, and intersubjectively constituted reality with political conditions. With the multi-perspectival experiential world destroyed in totalitarianism, Arendt (2018, 83) repeatedly points out that there emerges a new “basic experience” that correlates to this novel form of government and domination. It gravely underestimates the importance of her argument to label this basic experience—which she identifies as “loneliness”—simply as a psychological state belonging to a dubious “existential psychology.” Instead, Arendt intends to describe the specific way in which intersubjective relationships, self, and world are given and apprehended in totalitarianism. As Arendt is keen to show in her later works, such as The Human Condition ([1958] 1998), this is well prepared by the developments of modernity, although not a necessary trajectory: “To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all”—“the curse of the modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution” (Arendt 2018, 85). The experience of loneliness, consequently, reflects an existential and socio-economically very real situation in which nothing is secure anymore, economically, politically, or socially. It is “a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship” (Arendt 2018, 84) and, consequently, an “experience of not belonging to the world at all” (87). What Arendt tells us is that being disentangled from stabilizing contexts and relations has a serious effect on our basic trust in the world and others, and this again affects our capacities to judge, to act, and to project a coherent self-identity: What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience, are lost at the same time. (Arendt 2018, 86–87) A functioning constellation of “self—world—others” is thus necessary in order for experience and thought to be able to work properly. Arendt seems to say that we cannot think, act, or even experience in the proper sense of a multidimensional, open world-experience if we are put in a state of loneliness and isolation. This implies that a world-relation as well as a self-relation is intrinsically in need of others. The only capacity that remains in the state 183

Sophie Loidolt

of loneliness, when experiential hold and dialogical thinking are waning, is the ability of “logical reasoning.” Arendt discerns this intellectual procedure from the inter-relational, worldly, and intersubjective epistemic capacities to say what is objectively real, to form an opinion about it, to judge with an appeal to “common sense” (and thus different perspectives), and to retreat to the dialogical capacity of reflection. For logical reasoning we do not need others, a self, or the world; we just need to consistently follow certain logical rules. Applied to the intersubjective world of experience, this can have disastrous outcomes. If totalitarianism can hand over entire masses to “the logic of an idea” (Arendt 2018, 79), then the reason is not that everyone has suddenly fallen into dullness and slow-wittedness. It rather has to do with not being able to think and experience differently anymore—which means to encounter resistance, irritation, ruptures—for which we need meaningful interactions with others and an articulation of different perspectives. Arendt’s political phenomenology gains its contours against the negative background of attacked and destroyed conditions of plurality under totalitarian rule. It is a political phenomenology that elaborates on these conditions and their formational force, as well as their fragility, transformability, and vulnerability. This is what Arendt calls “the human condition,” which is to be grasped as the condition of human existence in the plural and not as human essence in the singular. Turning to thinking of the existence of “men”/people in the plural and not the essence of “man”/the human being in the singular is Arendt’s programmatic step into what she calls “political theory.” At the heart of this political theory there lies an answer to the phenomenological and existential questions of self, world, and reality raised earlier. Besides common action, what Arendt aims at in her major works is the experience of reality as a common ground and the articulation of individuality through human plurality. Arendt draws the phenomenal structure of “actualizing plurality” from basic experiences instead of starting at the higher, more abstract level of discourse, rational argumentation, or the normativity of the concepts of “politics,” “freedom,” and “justice.” The meaning harbored in these concepts, she would claim, can only stem from common experiences that have been transformed into thoughts and ideas. Going back to these experiences and phenomena is essential. Why? Because when plurality is actualized in speaking, acting, or judging, a meaning dimension is revealed in the course of the interaction itself. This points not only to the pre-reflective roots of certain concepts but also to the existentially meaningful component in political (inter)action, as it is something we live through, and which thereby makes us who we are. Arendt hermeneutically unfolds this existential dimension either by analyzing contemporary political events or by unearthing experiences of the past, be it the Athenian polis or the American Revolution. In this sense, we can discern between a certain methodical framework or architectonics of Arendt’s political phenomenology, her concrete political analyses, and her historical rereadings. For a positive articulation of the framework of Arendt’s political phenomenology, let me focus on a few key notions that have already been addressed in their privative mode: world, appearance, realization of plurality, personhood, reality, meaning, and the capacity for action, thought, and judgment (cf., Loidolt 2020). We have seen that plurality needs a world in which to unfold. This implies that plurality is not simply a fact but something that needs to be actualized under certain conditions. We hence need to discern different conditions, possibilities, and levels of actualization from the ontological ground or “primal fact” of plurality. This primal fact is different from a contingent empirical fact in the sense that it is itself a condition for a meaningful world to emerge. What makes humans unique is not that they are just many and different in qualities 184

Hannah Arendt

(a “what”) but that they are an irreducible first-person access or openness to the world (a “who”) and that they are able to articulate this being-a-perspective. Being-an-access or being-a-perspective is not something distanced or theoretical but a practical, meaningful, and oriented immersedness in the world through activities. This is intrinsically connected to appearing before others. Plurality is thus a plurality of fundamental perspectives actively sharing a common world in which they appear. Arendt develops three different but closely interrelated notions or layers of this common “world”: first, the “appearing world,” the fundamental space of appearance, in which being equals appearing; second, the world of objects and objectivity (Dingwelt) that we encounter in the activity of working; and third, the “second in-between,” which emerges through our intersubjective relations (Mitwelt). Importantly, Arendt emphasizes that the world is a frail and endangered space that constantly has to be intended in order to sustain it. What is at stake here is the third notion of world, the web of relationships or Mitwelt, which, as she argues, holds everything together and which—to come back to totalitarian deprivation— also guarantees our sense of reality, the reality of our bearings in the world and of ourselves. World and worldliness are thus not simply theoretical issues for Arendt, but urgent political problems: Her diagnosis of “worldlessness,” “loss of world,” and “world alienation” in totalitarianism, the Modern Age, and capitalist-consumerist societies is one of her core motivations for promoting “care for the world.” This is a political attitude and virtue, directed at the conditional space for plurality to unfold. It stands in contrast to the classical ethical and metaphysical attitude of a “care for the soul,” which tends to remain only self-directed. Arendt’s whole phenomenology of the world is thus pervaded by a normative tendency to foster plurality. The medium of plurality’s actualization in the world is appearance. It has been widely recognized that Arendt’s concept of appearance refers to the worldview of the ancient Greeks and Nietzsche’s reappropriation of it, as well as to Kant’s Third Critique. These references, however, are held together by an operative notion of appearance that is of phenomenological origin and therefore equates “appearing” with “being.” (Arendt defends this position most clearly in The Life of the Mind: Arendt 1977a, 19, 24, 38, 54.) Through this, Arendt ties the notion of appearance back to the constitution of reality and truth and thereby puts limits on a Nietzschean aestheticization of appearance (cf., Villa 1996, 103f.). At the same time, she holds up pluralization through appearance, as Jacques Taminiaux (1997, 127) observes: [P]recisely because they [Being and appearing] coincide, nothing of what is, i.e., of what appears, is strictly singular: instead, it remains offered to the gaze of several spectators. And those spectators in the plural are also offered as a spectacle, they are at the same time perceiving and perceived. This implies three further theses: to be real means to appear; to be a self means to appear; to “be-of-the-world” means to fundamentally belong to the realm of appearance. It also implies that appearance, which equals the intentional presence of the world, is not thought as a functional or causal relation between two pregiven substances, subject and object. Instead, appearance is the basic event, a state of actuality, from which subjectivity, world, and intersubjectivity emerge as interrelated elements. Without recognizing this verbal sense of equi-primordial emerging as an operative element in Arendt’s thought, we cannot properly understand how she conceives of the world-relation as well as the intersubjective relation. Instead of the classical “dative of appearance” that remains in itself, Arendt’s brand 185

Sophie Loidolt

of subjectivity is turned “inside out” and enacts itself in the world. Arendt is therefore the phenomenological thinker who seriously takes into account the worldly self-appearance of consciousness/Dasein as the “who one is” and who gives it a distinctly political dimension: “Who one is” appears and develops only together with others, in speech and action. What appears is not controllable, and it might reveal itself better to others than it does to the acting person herself. This could be called an anarchic quality of appearance, which implies its ongoing politicization and pluralization, as it can always be taken up in different ways. Furthermore, it creates stories, a shared reality, and allows one to experience oneself as an end in itself within an open web of relationships: that is, as a person. As we have seen, it is crucial for Arendt’s approach that she regards the activities of speaking, acting, and judging as well as a space of visibility (“the public”) as necessary for actualizing plural uniqueness—which otherwise remains unarticulated. In the latter case, differences between people really only amount to a mere difference in properties (different genetic codes, fingerprints, and other features of “uniqueness”—i.e., identifiability—that are, for example, important at borders) and not in perspectives. Plurality is hence essentially something we do, something we have to articulate and actualize together. This enactive character also makes it fundamentally precarious and in need of encouragement and support. On the other hand, we can, in a certain sense, rely on the rupturing power of plurality. Arendt, through her life, develops a whole “architecture” of the actualized space of plurality: While acting and speaking form the closely intertwined ontological core domain of plurality on the “stage of the world,” judging expands its horizon to the dimension of spectators who judge actors and thereby form a community. It is in this full sense that Arendt contends that plurality is essential for a sense of self, a sense of reality, and a sense of acting, speaking, and judging that realizes the specific freedom of creatures who express their individuality by relating to the world and others. Furthermore, the space of actualized plurality is guided by a “logic” of its own. Arendt’s respective demand that the “principles” of political action must be drawn from “experiences which are entirely based on the presence of others” (1998, 237) and not from any moral principles foreign to the political domain is a demand that is typical for a phenomenological approach in which the method is prescribed by the phenomenon in question.

3.  Outlook: Arendt’s Approach in Relation to Other Types of Political Phenomenology As an outlook, let me focus on Arendt’s possible relations with some other types of political phenomenology. This will allow me to address some topics from the widespread and sometimes controversial reception of Arendt’s work, which only confirms her position as one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. One group highlighted in this handbook, which was explicitly discussed by Arendt herself (although this was, to my knowledge, not reciprocated) is the French Existentialists (cf. Part II). With her background of having lived in France for nearly ten years, she was able to introduce those famous public intellectuals to a curious American audience. In the respective articles and talks (Arendt [1946] 1994, 1994b), she mainly addresses Camus, Malraux, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, with the odd omission of Beauvoir. Arendt certainly shows admiration for their political activism and courage. But, theoretically, she articulates some central criticisms: For Arendt—and this is certainly a view focused on Sartre and Camus—the French Existentialists remain Cartesianists and therefore fail to recognize the 186

Hannah Arendt

phenomenon of the political world, of a political form of being-with-others and, consequently, the real ground and motivation for political action. Their “leap into action” arises for philosophical reasons, “the springboard being the certitude of individual existence in the midst of an uncertain, incoherent, and incomprehensible universe” (Arendt 1994b, 438). Arendt regards this as a misguided starting point for thinking the political not only because it arises from a fundamentum inconcussum but also because it deems the world to be a chaotic place, either in its absurdity or in its problematic refusal of thrownness/facticity. Clearly, we can see a disagreement of how to read Husserl (1970) as well as Heidegger (1962) here. For Arendt, facticity and thrownness are not just viewed as challenges to be mastered and changed. She calls this a fantasy of sovereignty, of being able to act alone, which ultimately aims at a revolution against the human condition as such (Arendt 1994b, 439). Instead of this, Arendt imagines a political world where factual givenness is accepted, even with a feeling of gratitude— where people can positively relate to their thrownness and facticity while, at the same time, they are not reduced to it. For this to be possible, “givenness” must be able to enter various ways of political expression. This results in a different notion of freedom, a more associative and responsive one than what Sartre conceptualizes as the radical freedom of a world-creating, inventive pour-soi. A second point of criticism is Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “arbitrary superimposition” of Marxism on their theories, “although their original impulses owed hardly anything to Marxism” (Arendt 1994b, 439). According to Arendt, it is precisely because the project of political existentialism steps up as a conscious change of a meaningless world, it is unable to “indicate any orientation” (Arendt 1994b, 438) as a frame of reference for action. Therefore, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty just contingently turn to “a modified Hegelian Marxism as a . . . logique of the revolution” and thereby dilute the common original existential impulse for the sake of “Hegelian metaphysics” (Arendt 1994b, 438). Although Arendt points to a certain problematic gap between a phenomenological and a Marxist approach that always haunted Sartre, this criticism is certainly also characteristic of her own view. This is a view that regards the social question and its economic basis as reductivist points of departure to capture the phenomenon of the political. While I  can only hint at the large and controversial debate on that issue here, let me mention that Arendt’s reason for separating “the political” and “the social” in such a strict sense is not just based on a personal quirk to “make differences” but follows from a differentiated phenomenological argumentation concerning different spaces of meaning and their logic of unfolding and forming the political space (cf., Loidolt 2018, 109–46). Arendt considers the actualization of plurality qua “the political” to be a most fragile phenomenon that is easily overwhelmed by the logic of the needs of life and a corresponding politics (be it a revolutionary one, realizing a “necessary development of history,” or a governmental one in the form of biopolitics). Rather, it tends to end up eclipsing plurality and individual freedom—a conclusion that is fueled by Arendt’s experience of totalitarianism as well as her analyses of modernity. Whether this tension must result in an absurd ban of social questions from the political realm, or it must not rather be taken up as a specific political responsibility, is a question that Arendt’s advocates and critics have struggled with ever since. In any case, in an Arendtian spirit, the simple superimposition of a Marxian framework, as we find it in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, would betray the possibilities of a political phenomenology. A third point of disagreement is that Arendt does not see a fundamental and unresolvable conflict at the heart of the intersubjective relation as Sartre does. For Arendt, the look (cf., Sartre 2003) and its implied dialectics of master and slave, doomed to a constant 187

Sophie Loidolt

struggle for recognition, count as another case of overleaping the world and its fundamental sharedness in being-with (Miteinandersein). This does bring her closer to MerleauPonty (2005); even more so, however, it could have brought her into a fruitful dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir. The emphasis on being dependent on others for one’s own projects and on having to positively welcome this uncontrollable ambiguity (cf., de Beauvoir 2000) is something the two thinkers share. Unfortunately, this is a dialogue that never occurred, since the two grandes dames of political phenomenology ignored one another. The fact that there is plurality and neither a doomed dialectical conflict nor an antagonistic ontological principle at the heart of Arendt’s political phenomenology also allows her to be situated with respect to other political phenomenologists who further developed Heidegger’s thought. Again, I  have to limit myself to a specific perspective and selected authors here, but the obvious collegial connections to Jonas, Anders, and Löwith, as well as the more mediated ones to Patočka and Levinas, would all be of specific interest. Let me, however, focus on the group of the so-called left Heideggerians or post-foundationalists here (cf. Chapter 25), with a special side glance at the political theory of Claude Lefort. Arendt’s general relation to the diverse assembly of theorists such as Lefort, Nancy, Laclau, Mouffe, Badiou, and Agamben, who positively related to and transformed (late) Heideggerian tropes such as a history of Being, the event, or the ontological difference, has to be characterized precisely with regard to the question of ontology (which goes beyond the typical line of reception addressing the paradigm of the camps or the “homo sacer” in Arendt and Agamben). As far as the question of ontology is concerned, I take Arendt to be more in agreement with Levinas (1978), who prefers “beings” over “Being” and who pays attention to the singularity and uniqueness of the other as always transcending any ontological principle. Therefore, a general ontological antagonism is not Arendt’s eventual ontological (non-)ground that only “ontically” expresses itself in plurality. Rather, the uniqueness of individualities is itself unfathomable, and action and speech are their way of actualizing it. Arendt, in her very late work, speaks quite critically of the reversal (Kehre) and Heidegger’s late philosophy of an idea of a “withdrawal” of “Seyn.” Interestingly, Arendt (1977b, 187) reproaches Heidegger for having left the path of phenomenology and criticizes the fact that “the counter-current of Being underlying the ‘foam’ of beings” becomes more important than the appearances themselves—making the concept-orientated thinkers more important for politics and history than the actors: “ ‘Being’s History’ secretly inspires and guides what happens on the surface, while the thinkers, hidden by and protected from the ‘Them,’ respond and actualize Being” (1977b, 186). So, while Being “work[s] behind the backs of acting men” (1977b, 179), the thinker actually “acts while he does nothing” (1977b, 187). Now, this sharp criticism does not yet preclude a positive relation to theories such as Lefort’s. Without doubt, Lefort himself appreciated Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism as well as her conception of the “right to have rights” (Lefort 1988b, 37), although he discovered Arendt’s work only after his own investigation of totalitarian, especially Soviet, bureaucracy. Furthermore, he echoes her theories of spontaneous concerted action as a “radical beginning” (Lefort 1988c, 54) in such texts as La Brèche (Castoriadis, Lefort, and Morin 2008). As Marchart (2007, 48) reads it, Lefort follows the Arendtian trajectory by reclaiming an autonomy of the political. He can do this precisely on the post-metaphysical assumption that the social cannot ground the political anymore but always appears as already divided. In Lefort’s case, the political is the moment by which the symbolic form of society is instituted. Since society is never identical with itself, it can only relate to itself via a symbolic dimension. The political and its representation of power are the mise en 188

Hannah Arendt

forme and the mise en scène of this symbolically mediated self-relation. In Arendt, such a symbolic dimension and ontological conception are missing—especially in the Lefortian form of a certain history of Being, combined with a Lacanian system of self-representation and a Merleau-Pontyan (1968) ambiguity of the “flesh” of society. One might find it in her descriptions of certain institutionalizing actions. But, as mentioned before, Arendt prefers to look at acting beings instead of any forces or principles “behind” or ontologically implied in them. Nevertheless, Lefort’s (1988a, 17) famous formulation of the “empty place of power”—the democratic symbolic institution—fits well with Arendt’s paradigm of plurality. It implies, apart from associative possibilities, that any power structure, any narrative, any institution can always be interrupted or contradicted. And for Arendt as well as for Lefort, this figures as “the political” (le politique) in distinction to a positivistic notion of “politics” (la politique). As Marchart (2007) has argued, this translates Heidegger’s “ontological difference” into a “political difference.” Finally, for both Lefort and Arendt, totalitarianism is a counter-image to democracy that answers to democracy’s endless pluralization and decentration with the fantasy of returning to oneness. As Lefort (1988c, 52–53) notes, Arendt arrives at these conclusions from a slightly different angle than the symbolic register (as was depicted at the beginning of this chapter). But he agrees with the central thesis presented here that “Arendt’s reading of totalitarianism, in both its Nazi and Stalinist variants, governs the subsequent elaboration of her theory of politics”: “She conceptualizes politics by inverting the image of totalitarianism” (1988c, 50)— and this means to institute plurality and isonomia. For both Arendt and Lefort, “Equality is an invention; it is an effect or simply a sign of the moment which raises men above life and opens them up to a common world” (1988c, 51). In Lefort’s case, this “invention” is mapped and instituted in the symbolic dimension; for Arendt, it remains a constant responsibility. Arendt’s desire to make clear distinctions and to point out the fragility of plurality sometimes makes us, and even herself, forget her own point of departure: the fact that the human conditions of life—worldliness and plurality, as well as natality and mortality—fully pervade all of us. Since we cannot separate our living bodies from our political existence, this has to be existentially and politically reconciled. But, for Arendt, it is plural beings who have to stage and actualize this tension and not an ontological insight or “understanding of Being.” The political theorist and phenomenologist wants to understand—but her fascination does not lie in the inscrutability or ambiguity or contingency or antagonism of Being but rather in that of plural beings who can make new beginnings.

Notes 1 I develop this thesis in depth in Loidolt 2018. In this chapter, I take a few formulations from a similar handbook entry on Arendt as a phenomenologist (Loidolt 2020). 2 Cf., Chapter 31 on migration by Ayten Gündoğdu in this volume.

References Arendt, Hannah. (1946) 1994. “French Existentialism.” In Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn, 188–93. New York: Schocken. ———. (1951) 1973. Origins of Totalitarianism. New Edition with Added Prefaces. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. (1953) 2018. “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.” In The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragmente eines Buchs, edited by Barbara Hahn and Philip J. McFarland, 68–88. Göttingen: Wallstein.

189

Sophie Loidolt ———. (1958) 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1977a. The Life of the Mind. Vol. One: Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1977b. The Life of the Mind. Vol. Two: Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1994a. “ ‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Gaus.” In Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn, 1–23. New York: Schocken. ———. 1994b. “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought.” In Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn, 428–47. New York: Schocken. ———. 2000. “A Response to Gershom Scholem.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr, 391–96. New York/London: Penguin Books. ———. 2003. “Reflections on Little Rock.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 193–213. New York: Schocken. ———. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2000. Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 2003. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt: New Edition. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Castoriadis, Cornelius, Claude Lefort, and Edgar Morin. 2008. Mai 68: La brèche, suivi de Vingt ans après. Paris: Éditions Fayard. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1977. The Question of Technology and other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York/ London: Garland. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lefort, Claude. 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1988a. “The Question of Democracy.” In Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, 9–20. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1988b. “Human Rights and the Welfare State.” In Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, 21–44. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1988c. “Hannah Arendt and the Question of the Political.” In Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, 45–56. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne, PA: Duquesne University Press. Loidolt, Sophie. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2020. “The Phenomenological Arendt.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, edited by Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, and Claudio Majolino, 445–53. London/New York: Routledge. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Rev. ed. Translated by H. E. Barnes. London/New York: Routledge. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1997. The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. Albany: SUNY Press. Villa, Dana R. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger. The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

190

14 JAN PATOČKA Heresies, History, and the Care for the Soul in Its Political Aspects James Dodd

1. Introduction When the organizers of the Charta 77 human rights initiative in Communist Czechoslovakia faced the task of selecting who would assume the crucial role of public spokesperson, an important factor was the desire to represent the diversity of the group that was coalescing behind the effort. The decision in the end was to choose three spokespersons, two of whom were obvious: Jiří Hájek, who had been foreign minister during the Prague Spring, would represent the reform Communists, an important faction among the signatories, and the playwright Václav Havel, who would represent the youth and the artistic community. The third, it was decided, should be someone of the older generation who could contribute the intellectual gravitas of an eminent scholar. Here, two figures were immediately identified: Václav Černý, an important literary theorist and translator, and the phenomenological philosopher Jan Patočka (see Bolton 2012, Chapters 4 and 5). Patočka was ultimately chosen, ironically because of his relatively apolitical profile. Unlike the more outspoken and publicly combative Černý, before Charta 77, Patočka had never involved himself directly in politics, instead devoting his energies exclusively to academic philosophy, even if, at the same time, he was exposed repeatedly to political persecution. Prevented from university teaching during the Second World War due to the closing of Czech universities by the occupying Germans, Patočka was again excluded from the university for political reasons after the Communist coup in 1948 and finally, after a brief return, pressured into retirement during the period of normalization after the Soviet invasion in the wake of the 1968 Prague Spring. Throughout all this, Patočka never engaged in overt political activity, something that put him in an excellent position to embody the peculiar “anti-political” posture that formed the core strategy of Charta 77. Yet it would be a mistake to infer that Patočka had ever been indifferent to the political storms and social upheavals that repeatedly rocked the world, and the world of Central Europe in particular, throughout the 20th century. On the contrary, grappling with the meaning of contemporary political events is the often implicit, sometimes explicit goal of Patočka’s philosophical itinerary, even in its most academic expressions. If Patočka inherited from Edmund Husserl the problematic of the lifeworld, the phenomenological project DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-21

191

James Dodd

of providing detailed analyses of the fundamental contours of concrete human being in the world, he equally appropriated that other organizing theme of Husserl’s late philosophy: the spiritual crisis of Europe (Husserl 1970). This is clear from the opening pages of Patočka’s 1936 Habilitationsschrift, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, in which the entire project is presented as an attempt to address the fundamental split within modern consciousness inaugurated by the rise of modern natural science, in which an objectivistic understanding of things had become increasingly distant from its own living ground in concrete life (Patočka 2016, 3–5). That the resulting widespread disillusionment with rationality was more than a theoretical affair of interest only to the philosophical specialist, instead having profound spiritual consequences not least of which were strikingly political in character, was all too poignant in 1936 and increasingly so in subsequent years. This chapter seeks to accomplish two interlocking goals: (1) a summary exposition of the discussion of political themes found in the writings of Patočka, such as the problem of Europe, the role of the intellectual, and the Charta 77 civil rights movement, and (2) an exploration of the complex interweaving of these political reflections with Patočka’s phenomenological philosophy. Issues germane to the latter include Patočka’s philosophy of the movements of human existence, his historical reflections on the twin births of philosophy and politics in the Greek polis, his claims regarding the enduring mythical framework of Western thought, and the critique of technology and techno-civilization as paradigmatic of contemporary nihilism.

2.  Patočka’s Reflections on the Political 2.1  Platonic Influences and Criticisms A key element of Patočka’s reflections, present from the beginning of his career as an interpreter of the classical phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to its finale as a spokesperson for Charta 77, is the question of the place of the philosopher in the world. In broad terms, this has to do with the status of philosophical thinking as a way of life, but it also includes the philosopher’s self-understanding and sense of relevance in political life as well. This is a consistent leitmotif that stretches from the 1930s and 1940s in texts such as “Platonism and Politics” (Patočka 2007, 13–17), “Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude” (Patočka 2007, 32–41), “Ideology and Life in the Idea” (Patočka 2007, 43–50) to the 1968 “Intellectuals and Opposition” (Tava and Meacham 2016, 7–26) and the 1975 private seminar “The Spiritual Person and the Intellectual” (Patočka 2007, 51–69).1 As some of these titles patently suggest, Plato plays an important role in Patočka’s reflections on the place of philosophy in the world. The theme that draws Patočka’s attention time and again to the Platonic moment in ancient thought is its expression of a chronic dissonance between philosophy and the polis: always in some sense both outside and inside, a subject beholden to the community but who is, at the same time, committed to something that transcends it, the philosopher is a figure who gives expression to what Karl Jaspers (an important influence on Patočka) would describe as a kind of “limit-situation.” Life in the “idea,” life in “amplitude,” in the sense of a full embrace of the horizonal breadth of existence with all its conflicts at the expense of a self-limiting harmony—all this signifies at bottom an exercise in discontinuity, a revolt against the harmony with things as they are, in which one would abandon the existential risk of radical questioning and remain content à cultiver son jardin. 192

Jan Patočka

In Patočka’s eyes, Socrates can be fundamentally understood only in terms of such a life in amplitude. His reading of Socrates lodges the question of freedom, for discontinuity but also for resistance, at the very heart of Platonic philosophy and in a way that effectively opposes Socrates the proto-philosopher against Plato the metaphysician. For Patočka, Socrates represents the constant reminder of the problematicity of human existence that, in other respects, Platonic metaphysics is designed precisely to foreclose. In Patočka’s reading, this results in a tension inscribed in the very concepts of Platonic philosophy, along the lines of an inward driving Socratic motivation that is metaphysically reinterpreted and simultaneously suppressed. In the important essay “Negative Platonism” (Kohák 1989, 175–206; see Evink 2011) from the 1950s, Patočka accordingly argues that the key concept of chōrismos does not originally indicate, as it does in Platonic metaphysics, the separateness between two orders of being: that distance across which the idea governs the real, effectively closing the openness of meaning to fixed, determinate forms of manifestation. Chōrismos is originally, Patočka argues, an emblem of the experience of freedom, of amplitude, which should be understood as a movement away from the limitedness of particularity, the opening of a horizon of experience and not simply the advance from one level of objectivity to another. However reinterpreted and incorporated in subsequent metaphysics, this original experience of freeing oneself from the limitations of individuation remains as a subterranean source of inspiration and, with that, the abiding Socratic legacy of Platonism (Kohák 1989, 198–202). The hermeneutic exercise pursued in “Negative Platonism” of recovering and appropriating a radical Socratic element within Platonic thinking (cf. Kohák 1989, 181) serves the larger purpose of engaging the broader question of the history of metaphysics, including the critique of its totalizing form in the age of modern science and technology. In this way, Patočka’s reading of Plato plays a foundational role in his diagnosis of the spiritual condition of modern humanity. As Erika Abrams outlines in the bibliographical notes to the volume Liberté et Sacrifice, an important collection of translations into French of Patočka’s politically oriented writings, the “Negative Platonism” essay was part of a much larger, unfinished project on modern philosophy and techno-civilization (Patočka 1990a, 379–81). This larger project was to include a series of historical reflections, some of which exist only in outlines and sketches, but others are more fully drafted, among which is perhaps the earliest comprehensive attempt of the younger Patočka to reflect on the state of the human condition post-1945: namely, the essay “Super-Civilization and Its Internal Conflict” (Patočka 1990a, 99–180).2

2.2 Super/Techno-Civilization The point of departure in the “Super-Civilization” essay is Arnold Toynbee’s theory of civilization as a social formation that arises from a break with patterns of human life that had been predicated on the mimesis of tradition, thus limiting the horizon of the human world to what had essentially been given in the form of an immemorial past (see Toynbee 1974, 67–111). Civilizations emerge, according to Toynbee, as the result of creative breakthroughs that disrupt the “cake of custom” (Toynbee 1974, 68) in response to fundamental challenges (often from the environment, but also competition with other social groups). Such breakthroughs, creative but also destabilizing, shift the center away from traditional forms of existence toward a more energetic engagement with the possible, a 193

James Dodd

pattern facilitated by an element of universality that had often been contributed by the formation of early empires. For Patočka, the role of universality is arguably central, perhaps even more important than it had been for Toynbee. Patočka observes that past civilizations had never been fully successful in becoming genuinely universal, concretely absorbing all humanity within their horizons, for their creativity had always been mobilized by an effectively “irrational” core—such as religious or political fanaticism, individual or collective lust for conquest, or robust self-confidence, whether cultural or political. Such phenomena are always limited, driven by the passions of the few or the dangers of the moment, and never manage to sustain much momentum beyond a finite temporal horizon. The influence and expansion of such civilizations have thus taken the form of “explosions,” or a series of explosions, which ultimately fade back into the more reliable rhythms of traditionality that had never really been fully shaken off. Thus, for Patočka, the limits of Toynbee’s perspective, for whom contemporary civilizations were, in essence, no different from those of the past: modern civilization has, through its embrace of rationalization as the fundamental pattern for the shaping of societies, reached a level of de facto universality that has superseded anything that had ever been accomplished in the past. The resulting global reach of modern civilization in its various permutations of scientific rationality, the organization of political and social life on a massive scale, the seemingly limitless reach of contemporary capitalism—all of this constitutes a new species of society that had remained unrecognized by Toynbee: super-civilization (Patočka 1990a, 104–9). Some of the characteristics of super-civilization, or what Patočka will later describe under the rubric of modern techno-civilization (cf. Patočka 1996a, 95–118), are familiar from Husserl’s critique of modern science in the Crisis. At the center is a form of scientific rationality that projects objective relations as the fundamental fabric of reality: relations that are both quantifiable and manipulable and articulated at such a level of generality that their methods of determination can be modified to yield concrete results in applications that include virtually all domains of human experience. Rationalization, unlike the episodic explosions of the irrational, gives rise to a permanent revolution creatively refashioning the organization, mobilization, and manipulation of the world, all in the spirit and service of an objectivity that now determines once and for all what can meaningfully count as “universal.” The sense of crisis germane to the modern dominance of techno-rationality—what Patočka in his essay describes as its “inner conflict”—is also mutatis mutandis familiar from Husserl’s late writings, but the crisis is here articulated on an even more explicitly political register. The inner conflict involves, on one level, the split of super-civilization into two prevailing forms, each of which roughly maps onto the two sides of the Cold War that had come to dominate the geopolitical context of the 1950s. On one side, there is a “moderate” form, in which instrumental rationality is limited to the regulation of the means and processes of social existence, leaving its content, purpose, and ends effectively to the prerogatives of the surviving remnants of older forms of civilization. On the other side is a “radical” form, which seeks to reconstruct human reality from the ground up, thus forcing the universality of reason into concrete existence, idea into reality, without effective remainder. Each is destructive in its own way, one more indirect than direct; each is also committed to both human freedom and the rationalization of life and thus belong to the same creative endeavor, though in contrasting ways that lead directly to conflict (Patočka 1990a, 109–20). 194

Jan Patočka

“Super-Civilization” is an early essay, but it already introduces several themes that will be important for Patočka for the remainder of his career and is thus read profitably alongside later texts such as Heretical Essays (Patočka 1989) and Europa und Nacheuropa. (Patočka 1988b, 207–87). Perhaps the most important such theme is another type of conflict that Patočka describes in “Super-Civilization”: namely, an inner tension that arises due to the incapacity of the totalizing tendencies of modern society, whether in its moderate or radical forms, to exhaust the problem of meaning (Patočka 1990a, 159–77). In contrast to otherwise similar approaches that would interpret modernity along the lines of a Weberian “disenchantment of the world,” Patočka does not understand the situation in terms of the rupture of a meaningfulness that had once characterized traditional, pre-modern life, as if the issue were merely replacing the old gods with the new god of technology. The issue for Patočka is instead the ultimate impossibility of removing from human life the problematicity of meaning, the sense that any attempt to address meaning in human terms invariably faces its limitations, its partiality. Life, in other words, is for Patočka something never closed but always limited by an outside that nevertheless reaches to its very core. Technocivilization is a creative attempt, vast in scale and seeming to reach to the very ground of the order of things, to essentially close life in on itself, totalize its horizon and thus world. Or, in the language from an essay of Patočka’s on the 17th-century philosopher Comenius, rational modernity is the attempt to refashion self-consciousness into a “closed” as opposed to an “open soul” (Patočka 1987, 175–90), thereby establishing a perspective within which everything finds its rigorous thematization, fixed meaning, and secured ground. One of Patočka’s guiding philosophical insights is the futility of such an attempt at systematic closure and, with that, the inevitability of crisis in the wake of any attempt to achieve it. The openness characteristic of human existence is not extinguished in modern projects of totalization, just as it hadn’t been in those ancient tendencies towards evasiveness and the suppression of the problematicity of life characteristic of traditionality or what Patočka describes in the Heretical Essays under the heading of “pre-history” (Patočka 1996, 1–26).

2.3  The Philosophical Anthropology of the Heretical Essays This theme of the irreducibility of human problematicity, central to Patočka’s diagnosis of the crisis of the modern age, is intrinsically related to the philosophical project of grasping the dynamics of human openness, which forms the core of Patočka’s mature phenomenological philosophy. This project arguably culminates in the ontological elaboration of human existence as movement: drawing on a reading of Aristotle’s kinēsis as the concrete becoming of possibility, Patočka seeks to further develop Heidegger’s conception in Being and Time of the ontological structure of Dasein as care (Sorge) into a full-fledged philosophical anthropology, one that will serve as the basis for his philosophy of history in his later writings, above all in the Heretical Essays (Patočka 1996, 7–10; 1998, 143–62; cf. Heidegger 2001, 39–44). The elaboration of the existential structure of care under the philosophical leitmotif of movement has several goals, some of which overlap with Heidegger’s project, such as the emphasis on the temporality constitutive of Dasein, the problem of selfhood, and the conception of human existence as a relation to truth. Yet in Patočka’s hands, these themes are at the same time leveraged for the purpose of an ontological explication of the phenomenon of community, which has as its core the attempt to explicate those dynamics that form the 195

James Dodd

basis for the emergence of what Patočka takes to be the original and equi-primordial constellation of politics, philosophy, and history (Patočka 1996, 43–44). The overall movement of human existence for Patočka always involves a double inflection of the individual in the community and the community in the individual, and it articulates itself in three specific movements (Patočka 1996, 29–51; 2016, 160–80). The first movement crystallizes around the arbitrary event of being born, what Arendt had understood under the concept of natality (cf. Arendt 1958, 8–9): that emergence of the new that provides the first impetus of individual life before any designation of function or role, forming, as it were, the raw material for individuality. The new, however, must also be welcomed, sheltered from a world that, in its indifference, welcomes no one: only others are open to welcoming new life, providing that space of shelter in which it becomes possible for life to become rooted, nourished by an embrace that simultaneously forgives the impetuosity of being born and the unconditional demand of need that it initiates. Here, already, the finitude of the human is a fundamental theme: whatever human freedom is, it is from the start stretched from a beginning of radical need toward an inevitable death, an exposed existence that can be at all only if initially addressed by others and absorbed into their lives. A second movement, inseparable but in tension with the first, also responds to a need: namely, the collective need to secure the means for material life. This demands an inner articulation of the community, the organization of a collective engagement with the environment, and the maintenance of the realm of labor and work. What had taken root and been nourished is now called upon to play a role; the individual here emerges as an available body that is subsequently placed into a set of relations with others, mediated by the radical unfreedom of labor. Here, for Patočka, is the domain of alienation, of giving oneself over to roles and being exposed not to the indifference of nature, but to domination and exploitation within and thanks to the specific organization of each life in relation to others. Each of these two initial movements—anchoring and self-extension—represents a relation to the whole, to the world. In that sense, each is a primordial figure of the openness of human existence, and as movements, they are determinations of its fundamental transcendence. Each of the first two movements is, in turn, an instance of something like an “understanding,” a sense life has of itself and the whole to which it relates. But for all that, such an understanding is neither explicit nor even an issue. Each movement represents a dimension of human experience that calls neither for a fundamental reflection nor for their own problematization—at least, not from out of their own defining exigencies. Instead, the tendency in both is for understanding to remain immersed in the care of life; if a relation to the whole is expressed at all, it is, at most, in the poetic imagery of the mythical, lacking in theoretical distance but nevertheless expressing a fundamental human truth. The relation to the world established and fortified in these first two movements of existence serves as both the point of departure for and impediment to the unfolding of a third movement Patočka takes to be fundamental: namely, the movement of truth itself, or of “existence” in the proper sense. Here, the very openness to what is basic to the ontological structure of human existence comes into view and in a distinctively problematic sense: what it means to be, what it means to live, emerges here as an issue no longer encrusted in pre-given meaning or what had been taken for granted. Understanding thus comes into its own as a uniquely open movement, a transcendence that casts all life into question and seeks to establish the understanding of the whole on firmer, more exacting ground. Given the resistance of the first two movements to explicit problematicity of this kind, the third movement is established as a function of what Patočka describes as the shaking of all pre-given meaning: the 196

Jan Patočka

disruption of the sheltered security of life yields to a more robust sense of risk, of a confidence in the human capacity to stand together facing the unknown. It is important to emphasize that, for Patočka, the three movements are equally present in both the prehistorical, mythical world and the world that emerges from its being shaken. The impediment that characterizes the mythical world for the demand for a more exacting meaning, for the possession of more disciplined truth that Patočka takes to be embodied above all in Socrates, is not, for all that, an absence of an awareness of the truth of human existence altogether. On the contrary: the realization that the truth of things is something that is not completely in our grasp, that it transcends us even in the wake of our success in bringing it into the clarity of knowledge, that our paths through life are not stable and transparent but saturated with a dark contingency—all this belongs just as much to ­mythical humanity as it does to the post-mythical world of Socrates and Sophocles (see Patočka 1987, 99–126; Patočka 2002, 38–70; Patočka 2017).3 This implies that, in an important sense, the mythical world has never really been left behind. Patočka, in this vein, argues that a mythical understanding of the human condition remains as part of the fundamental framework of Greek philosophy, presupposed as much as it is at the same time modified or even partially abandoned (Patočka 2002, 49–50). Yet at the same time, the difference is enormous. The shaking of the pre-given, as a mode of human understanding, elevates life for Patočka onto a very different register, expressed in terms of the emergence of history as such, in its most fundamental of senses: history as a way of inhabiting time that frees possibility from the blind repetition of the past, opening humans to an embrace of the future in all its contingency. Historical consciousness for Patočka represents accordingly the double birth of politics and philosophy: for political existence—and here the ancient experience of the Greek polis is taken by Patočka to be paradigmatic—is the emergence of a radically autonomous freedom, a space carved out of the necessity of nature, where contingency is no longer the darkness in which one wanders but that which focuses collective endeavor in the form of opportunity (Patočka 1996, 41–42). Politics thus represents a distinctive mode of setting out into the world, entering what Arendt had described as the “space of appearance,” which is, above all, a space of action, and with that of conflict. Freedom now asserts itself in terms of an understanding that takes conflict to be illuminative of what is, revealing ally and opponent in kind, disclosing the world as a terrain of struggle that is fundamentally constitutive of a newly established human condition (cf. Arendt 1958, 198–207). The human world in this way shifts from a self-perpetuating rhythm of sheltering and submission to one of exposure, risk, and cooperation: in short, everything that belonged to the archaic experience of the polis echoes another, related experience—that of war. Hoplite warfare thus comes to symbolize in ancient Greece the self-understanding of a properly political existence, positing a virtual identity of citizen and warrior that, even in the waning of the polis, will still be idealized in the guardians of Plato’s Republic, that curious amalgam of citizen, warrior, and philosopher. Accordingly, Patočka never tires of citing the dark saying of Heraclitus: “[W]ar (polemos) is the king of all” (1996, 41–44).

2.4  The Care for the Soul in Its Political Aspects History, politics, and philosophy are thus by definition contested ground or, better, they are original expressions of the becoming-contested of the meaning of human life. All such expressions are accordingly unstable, transitory, punctuated by discontinuities of 197

James Dodd

collapse and failure. They all require new modes of self-cultivation, self-awareness, and self-­possession over and above the rooting and securing of life, thus setting into play new possibilities of selfhood that are both intrinsically problematic and also eminently creative. This new spiritual formation with its many permutations (philosophical, political, historical) Patočka understands under the rubric of the “care for the soul” (epimeleia tēs psūches): the formation of a self capable of not only navigating an uncertain world but also embracing that very uncertainty as an opportunity to stand in relation to what is ultimate in things, thereby taking responsibility for the manifestation of an explicit understanding of the being of the whole (Patočka 1996, 82–83; 2002, 71–130). The care for the soul takes many forms. Democritos and Plato are, for Patočka, the paradigmatic philosophical exemplars in the classical context, introducing spiritual motifs that are modified fundamentally in the period between the collapse of the polis and the rise of the Roman civitas. Christianity represents perhaps its single most radical transformation, with an abyssal deepening of the soul and the transposition of a relation to an anonymous Good (as in Platonism) to the person of divine love (Patočka 1996, 107–8). What remains constant in this inconstancy of the care for the soul is arguably the motif of responsibility: life is here experienced not as a burden to be shouldered but a task to be embraced or avoided in periods of decadence and irresponsibility. Life itself becomes a task, with all that brings, entailing consequences that are not within the control of humans, for nothing in human existence can be completely determinate or under control: one must stand responsible for the darkness in things as well: that contingency that always necessitates vigilance. The unforeseen, the limitations of understanding, the contingency of events, death itself thus become an intrinsic concern of a being striving to take responsibility for itself, responding in kind to both its ignorance and its insight. This is as true of the community as it is of the individual: the care for the soul is as much a collective task of the community as it is the singular task of the individual. This is the deeper meaning of the analogy of the polis and the soul in the Republic and the reason Patočka sees Plato as so essential to the spiritual history of Europe, even in the wake of what he takes to be its contemporary collapse in techno-civilization (Patočka 2002, 1–14, 109–30). Seen from the ontological perspective of Patočka’s phenomenology of movement, selfresponsibility is understood to be a concrete achievement as much as a universal requirement or moral demand. The care for the soul is not something given or even transparent, an insight or a calling set into place once and for all—no meaning is ultimately set into place once and for all, least of all a meaning that would demand to be spoken for by a responsible being. Nor is the care for the soul a function of reflection and judgment alone, a conscience that would prove itself to be independent from the rest of life, confronting it from a position of transcendental independence. Responsibility for Patočka is an orientation within the very living of life, the self-organization of its multiple movements into expressions that are always evolving, always in some sense incomplete. The care for the soul is, in short, including in its political form, historical in its essence. If responsibility is an achievement, it is a fragile one, buffeted continuously by the equally human possibility of irresponsibility, in the form not only of inauthenticity but also of what Patočka in the Heretical Essays describes as the demonic or the orgiastic: those equally primordial expressions of human freedom (Patočka 1996, 110–17). The genesis of political existence in the shaking of meaning that gave rise to the care for the soul is also the genesis of the possibility of decadence and its modern cousin, nihilism, in both its passive and active modes. The pre-history to the rise of the nihilism characteristic, for Patočka, of modern techno-civilization 198

Jan Patočka

includes that decisive shift in the meaning of knowledge from what Patočka describes as a “care to be,” the will to shape oneself and one’s life in accordance with knowledge of the good, to the “care to have,” to shape knowledge itself into an instrument that will allow humans to possess and dominate the earth without restraint (Patočka 1996, 83–84). Knowledge was, from the beginning, a key leitmotif of all the stages in the history of the care for the soul, conditioned but never fully eclipsed by faith, and this had, in turn, always included both the practical task of coming to a better understanding of things in their being on the one hand and the demand to know oneself on the other, together aimed at the formation of a community of persons and things conducive to the flourishing of responsible life. The relative abandonment of self-knowledge in favor of the radical expansion of the technical manipulation of things, and thus their domination and possession, Patočka dates to the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, thereby providing perhaps the essential thread to the rise of a rapacious Europe and a global civilization predicated on an absolute yet nihilistic totality (Patočka 1996, 83–84).

3. Outlook This brings us back full circle to Patočka’s diagnosis of the contemporary spirit of the age with which we began, namely the “Super-Civilization” essay from the 1950s and its development in later texts such as Plato and Europe, Europa und Nacheuropa, and above all the Heretical Essays. It also brings us back to Patočka’s involvement in Charta 77, for here in particular the existential question of responsibility plays a central role, having an enormous influence on how Charta 77 came to be understood, and the thinking of Václav Havel in particular (see Havel 1985). Patočka himself expressed his ideas on the task of personal responsibility in two texts circulated after the release of the Charta: “The Obligation to Resist Injustice” and “What We Can and Cannot Expect from Charter 77” (Kohák 1989, 340–48).4 It has often been remarked that these two texts show Patočka defending a distinctively moral position, in line with the strategy of presenting the charter as an apolitical initiative, and, of course, this is true. But the invocation of something higher than the immediate needs of the state, the call to an obligation that remains distinctly individual in a world that has attempted to collectively direct all such commitments from an organizational center—all of this has its roots in something philosophically far deeper than mere indignation at the moral irresponsibility of politicians. Perhaps, in the end, one should be careful not to exaggerate the political significance of Patočka’s thought, however, or even the role of Charta 77 in recent history—at least not if one takes as a measure the political situation in Central Europe and the world generally some 30 years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.5 In the final analysis, the Chartists were always the parallel polis of the few, and they were, by and large, ignored by a public that in 1977 was deeply immersed in the state of self-withdrawal and bad faith that had settled in after the collapse of the Prague Spring and the relative success of normalization. Even after 1989, Havel and other Chartists entered politics and actual power with unsure steps and much disillusionment, their efforts to establish a new tone of politics quickly superseded by a crush of events and a public mood that tended to favor the siren calls of populism and nativism over the ideals of self-responsibility and liberal humanism. In short, the legacy of Patočka and Charta 77 threatens to be eclipsed by the rise of a political culture that is tending in a far more illiberal direction than had been hoped by those who did so much to keep the spirit of the Charta alive in the isolation of the late 1970s and early 1980s.6 199

James Dodd

Patočka himself had hopes but few illusions about the political prospects of the Charta, not to mention the fate of Europe. He rather amusingly refers to his predicament in a 1974 letter to his friend Walter Biemel as something comparable to being a “Robinson theorizing on an island” (Hagedorn and Sepp 1999, 26). Despite Patočka’s subsequent fame, perhaps this comparison remains apt, even in the wake of the wave of velvet that eventually reached the shores of Bohemia in 1989.

Notes 1 A note on translations and the general availability of Patočka’s writings is in order. The good news is that the situation has improved dramatically since 1989. The publication of a critical edition of Patočka’s work in Czech, which started in the 1990s under the auspices of the newly founded Jan Patočka Archive in Prague, has, at the writing of this chapter produced 19 of 25 planned volumes (Patočka 1996b). The availability of Patočka’s works in translation has also increased dramatically over the past 30 years, though unevenly. The most comprehensive selection by far can be found in French, thanks to the indefatigable Erika Abrams (see, for example, Patočka 1985, 1986). The five-volume Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Klaus Nellen and company at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in the 1980s, remains among the best sources in German (Patočka 1987, 1988a, 1991, 1992, 1996b), with some additions of note, such as the excellent recent translation of the Heretical Essays by Sandra Lehmann (Patočka 2010). In this chapter, English translations, when available, will be cited—otherwise, French or German. 2 Helpful analyses of and those inspired by this important text include Meacham 2016, Sepp 2008, and Hagedorn 2008. 3 Also see de Warren 2016. 4 Kohák 1989, 340–48. See Palouš 2011 and Crépon 2011 for reflections on these texts and Patočka as dissident. 5 Important contributions to the discussion of the broader political and philosophical significance of Patočka’s political ideas and dissidence include Brinton 2021, Falk 2003, Gubser 2014, Tardivel 2011, and Tucker 2000. 6 For an interesting assessment of the new reality post-1989 formulated by two key actors in events post-Charta, Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, see Matynia 2014.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bolton, Jonathan. 2012. Worlds of Dissent: Charta 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brinton, Aspen. 2021. Confronting Totalitarian Minds: Jan Patočka on Politics and Dissidence. Prague: Karolinum Press. Crépon, Marc. 2011. Fear, Courage, Anger: The Socratic Lesson. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams, 175–86. Dordrecht: Springer. de Warren, Nicolas. 2016. “He Who Saw the Deep: The Epic of Gilgamesh in Patočka’s Philosophy of History.” In Thinking after Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, edited by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham, 135–59. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Evink, Eddo. 2011. “The Relevance of Patočka’s ‘Negative Platonism.’ ” In Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology. Centenary Papers. Contributions to Phenomenology, edited by Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams, 57–70. Dordrecht: Springer. Falk, Barbara. 2003. The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. Gubser, Michael. 2014. The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hagedorn, Ludger. 2008. “Überzivilisation und Differenz. Jan Patočkas (Nach-)Europa.” In Über Zivilisation und Differenz. Beiträge zu einer politischen Phänomenologie Europas, edited by Ludger Hagedorn and Michael Staudigl, 59–76. München: Königshausen & Neumann.

200

Jan Patočka ———, and Hans Rainer Sepp, eds. 1999. Jan Patočka: Texte—Dokumente—Bibliographie. Freiburg/ München: Alber. Havel, Vaclav. 1985. “The Power of the Powerless.” In The Power of the Powerless. Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, translated by Paul Wilson, 23–96. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kohák, Erazim, ed. and trans. 1989. Jan Patočka. Philosophy and Selected Writings. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Matynia, Elzbieta, ed. and trans. 2014. An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Václav Havel & Adam Michnik. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Meacham, Darian. 2016. “Supercivilization and Biologism.” In Thinking after Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, edited by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham, 95–116. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Palouš, Martin. 2011. “Jan Patočka’s Socratic Message for the Twenty-First Century: Rereading Patočka’s ‘Charter 77 Texts’ Thirty Years Later.” In Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology: Centenary Papers. Contributions to Phenomenology: Vol. 61, edited by Ivan Chvatík and Erika Abrams, 163–74. Dordrecht: Springer. Patočka, Jan. 1985. La crise du sens. Tome 1: Comte, Masaryk, Husserl. Translated by Erika Abrams. Brussels: Éditions OUSIA. ———. 1986. La crise du sens. Tome 2: Masaryk et l’action. Translated by Erika Abrams. Brussels: Éditions OUSIA. ———. 1987. Kunst und Zeit. Kulturphilosophische Schriften. Edited by Klaus Nellen and Ilja Srubar. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1988a. Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften. Jan Patočka Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Klaus Nellen and Jiří Němec. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1988b. “Europa und Nach-Europa. Die nacheuropäische Epoche und ihre geistigen Probleme.” In Ketzerische Essais zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften. Jan Patočka Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Klaus Nellen and Jiří Němec, 207–87. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1990a. Liberté et sacrifice. Écrits politiques. Translated by Erika Abrams. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 1991. Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz. Phänomenologische Schriften II. Jan Patočka Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Klaus Nellen, Jiří Němec, and Ilja Srubar. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1992. Schriften zur tschechischen Kultur und Geschichte. Jan Patočka Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Klaus Nellen, Petr Pithart, and Miloš Pojar. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1996a. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1996b. Sebrané spisy Jana Patočky. 18 Vols. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba. Prague: OIKOYMENH. ———. 1998. Body, Community, Language, World. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2002. Plato and Europe. Translated by Peter Lom. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. Living in Problematicity. Edited by Eric Manton. Prague: Edice Oikúmené. ———. 2010. Ketzerische Essays zur Philosophie der Geschichte. Translated by Sandra Lehmann. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2016. The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem. Translated by Erika Abrams. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2017. Socrate. Translated by Erika Abrams. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg Suisse/Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Sepp, Hans Rainer. 2008. “Über Zivilisation.” In Über Zivilisation und Differenz. Beiträge zu einer politischen Phänomenologie Europas, edited by Ludger Hagedorn and Michael Staudigl, 15–24. München: Königshausen & Neumann. Tardivel, Émilie. 2011. La liberté au principe. Essai sur la philosophie de Patočka. Paris: Vrin.

201

James Dodd Tava, Francesco, and Darian Meacham. 2016. Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics. ­London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Toynbee, Arnold. 1974. A Study of History. Abridgement of Volumes I—VI by D. C. Somervell. New York: Dell Publishing. Tucker, Aviezer. 2000. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel. ­Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

202

15 CONTEXT Between Individualism and Totalitarianism Nils Baratella

1. Introduction The philosophers discussed in this part were all affected by the political events of their time. Despite their differences, they have one important thing in common: Having witnessed the destructive power of totalitarian politics, they realized that new social and political theories and conceptions were needed: theories that did not simply understand these interactions on the basis of prefabricated models. The phenomenological first-person perspective is one such theoretical approach that promises neither to subordinate the individual to overarching processes (such as history or biological survival of the fittest) and therefore erase the individual nor, conversely, to conceive of the social and political space from a natural state of individuals who are hostile or at least alien to one another (as, for example, the Hobbesian tradition of political philosophy does). The fundamental picture of humanity at work here also plays a role. But the philosophers assembled here do not pose this question in traditional anthropological terms based on an image of the human being, but rather with phenomenological explorations of human beings’ political activities and their social practices. Phenomenology in this regard had a clear and repeated impact on political philosophy early on. (See Dodd 2012 for an overview.) A theory of the political that sees as a historical question how individuals can understand themselves as part of political communities between complete absorption into mass movements and radical isolation must find a way between these two poles. The goal is to develop social theory without relinquishing the focus on the individual subject. There are two strong positions in this confrontation about the role of the individual: On the one hand, there are totalitarian, often “völkisch,” collectivisms and “radical” (Plessner 1999) communal ideologies, which attempt to subject people and the entire space of the political to one logic. (Stalinism and National Socialism are particularly visible examples of this.) On the other hand, there is (especially Fordist) capitalist liberalism with an inherent radical individualism. The philosophers discussed here do not aim for a return to a celebration of individualism as a response to the assimilation and negation of the individual. Picking up on phenomenological thinking about intersubjectivity, they focus instead on the social practices and processes in which human beings relate to each other—because it is in DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-22

203

Nils Baratella

the course of these collective mutual relations that human beings create a sphere in which they can appear as independent individuals. This approach is accordingly not a matter of applying a prefabricated political theory as a template to every social event (e.g., looking for class struggle in every conflict) and thus fitting these events into a supposedly objective logic. Instead, such a phenomenological approach to the social makes it possible to understand action and thought as the social practices of concrete individuals from the perspective of their experiences and participation. In the context of these practices, individuals shape and are shaped by mutual “human relationships” (Arendt 1998, 183). Or, as Arendt points out with a caveat, this is at least the case in those specifically revolutionary moments in which real political action is possible (Arendt 1990). These philosophers and their contemporaries experienced the drastic political events of totalitarianism, the Shoah, and the Second World War as the unrestricted integration of the individual into the “assimilated” mass (especially the mass in concentration camps). In light of these experiences, it remains crucial for these philosophers to reevaluate concepts and theories of politics that seriously incorporate individual perspectives as legitimate political viewpoints while avoiding the pitfalls of arbitrariness and subjectivism. In other words, the subject matters: That is one way of summing up the phenomenological impact of the horrors of the first half of the 20th century on the social and political sciences.

2.  Understanding the Lifeworld as a Lived World Starting from the concrete world as it is perceived and collectively produced by human beings is diametrically opposed to starting from overarching claims to objectivity. This is especially true since the lifeworld is constantly being produced and therefore changed, so it can never be reconstructed conclusively and comprehensively in descriptive terms. Nevertheless, despite this inherent alterability, the lifeworld still often appears to subjects as a solidified monolith that has grown historically and is characterized by its own logic. The focus is thus on a peculiar ambiguity of social reality: namely, that it is something that subjects experience and suffer through but also something they create together. The lifeworld is, in this sense, precisely “the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate” (Schütz 1962a, 58). A phenomenological approach must therefore make it possible to relate micro- and macro-phenomena to each other and, in doing so, grasp the connections between political experiences and their understanding. Indeed, Husserl’s criticism of the modern sciences was largely aimed at the fact that, although they progressively generate knowledge, they no longer have anything to say to people about metaphysical questions of existence, questions about meaning (Husserl 1970, 6). In a world seemingly unraveled by war and mass destruction, addressing these questions becomes fundamental to establishing a new order in which individuals don’t coexist in opposition but live together. A phenomenological approach to thinking the political in this sense does not focus only on the nature of political life with all its distortions and crises. Rather, it also explores how the political can be conceived starting from the social: i.e., from the fundamental human practices of communality. Alfred Schütz, who impactfully introduced Husserlian phenomenology into the social sciences, is important in this respect. Schütz proposed adopting “the subjective viewpoint of the afflicted individual” (1964, 261; author’s translation) in order to evaluate political events. Schütz thus urges us to focus first on the subjective experience of the social world. 204

Context

Things make sense to subjects when they reflect on the world and their experiences. “It is the meaning of our experiences and not the ontological structure of the objects, which constitutes reality” (Schütz 1962b, 341; author’s translation). The theory of social action developed by Schütz aims to make the “invariant, unique, a priori structure of the mind, in particular of a society composed of living minds” (1967, 44; author’s translation) comprehensible. Human beings are not part of society by virtue of their mere existence but by virtue of the fact that they act as agents in the world. Schütz’s insight here marks a decisive fork in the road in the history of phenomenology. Phenomenologists who turn to the social and political in this way are also simultaneously turning against Heidegger’s ontology, against his focus on mere being. By emphasizing Husserl’s concept of the “lifeworld,” they want to shed light on the dynamic event of human interactions and the joint production of the world (even if Schütz criticizes Husserl for not sufficiently emphasizing the importance of intersubjectivity). The lifeworld in this view is produced, dynamic, and alterable, and it is important to trace the processes and practices of its production and dynamics. Starting from Schütz, phenomenology finds its way into sociology. The sociology of knowledge as well as ethnomethodology take up the egological perspective of the individual and their natural attitude, as primarily treated by Schütz, but, at the same time, also examine their integration into social contexts in order to incorporate the corporeality, historicity, and sociality of the human being, which can be understood as anthropological constants, into models of the social (see also Eberle 2008). Thomas Luckmann proposes understanding phenomenology and sociology in this sense as “parallel enterprises” (Luckmann 2008). Summarizing his view, he states that it must be clarified to what extent “the analysis of the time dimensions of habitual everyday behavior can on the one hand identify the invariant forms of the articulation of inner time, but on the other hand must describe the institutionally determined categories for time sequences and the calendar” (Luckmann 2007, 64; author’s translation), in that the perspective of the subject and that of the collective are addressed in parallel and presented in their contexts without one integrating the other (see Berger and Luckmann 1966). This also true for Goffman’s theory of social interaction, which seeks to grasp the “the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence” (Goffman 1959, 14) and, last but not least, in Aron Gurwitsch’s (1966) linking of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. But also in other developments parallel to phenomenology, the relationship between subject and its lifeworld becomes a new question to be discussed. It can be seen in others: for example, in Max Scheler, who was the first to develop the idea of a sociology of knowledge and who, at the same time, “turns against materialist ideology and against idealism” (Fischer 2022, 29; author’s translation). Scheler (2007) wanted to interweave “ideal factors” and “real factors” and thus turned toward pragmatism but, at the same time, also opened a discussion between phenomenology and philosophical anthropology. Phenomenology provides the latter with clear conceptual and methodological resources for discussing the traditional issue of the human being, especially with regard to the relationships that humans have with one another. This often and almost inevitably leads to questions about the fundamentally political dimensions of human communities. In Scheler’s ([1927] 1976) work, this can be seen in his use phenomenological means to develop a new image of the human being capable of balancing political opposites. In Helmuth Plessner’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, his depiction of the human biological life form in the Levels of Organic Life almost inevitably leads to the identification of the shared world as a specific “sphere” of the human being because only it allows “eccentric positionality” (Plessner 205

Nils Baratella

1999). In his more recent phenomenological anthropology, Hans Blumenberg understands the phenomenological question of how “the inevitably emerging human being has to make themselves transparent and transitory, as it were” (Blumenberg 2006, 9; author’s translation), not least as a question of the image human beings have of themselves collectively.

3.  From Real Politics to the Political Facing up to the challenges of this world requires moving from the mere description of events and objects to a critical stance on them. This criticism must not be based on prefabricated norms but must be oriented toward the political, which is fundamental to interpersonal interaction. This insight is perhaps clearest in Hannah Arendt. Given her experiences with totalitarian politics, Hannah Arendt would like to work out the fundamental conditions of politics. What is it, Arendt asks, that has been destroyed by the totalitarian reduction of politics to administration and the militarization of social relations? She considers the political in its world-shaping form and asks how the political is lived under the prevailing conditions. Arendt reflects on the experiences of totalitarian politics as experiences of the destruction of the political through the reduction of all human interaction to “real politics” (Loidolt 2018, 265) but also as experiences of the potential self-destruction of human life itself through technology, the atomic bomb. In view of this violence, Arendt devotes herself to a phenomenology of the areas of life that cannot yet be fully mechanized and economized: speech and action. Human beings appear to each other and with each other in ways that relate them but also individualize them. As Arendt writes: “Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men” (1998, 176). According to Arendt, it is in this joint action, in the effort to deal with common matters and in the mutual distinction between one another, that human beings are able to be free and, at the same time, integrated into a community. By turning a phenomenological eye to the fundamental conditions of the political, she simultaneously formulates an idea of the political that opposes the uniformity and totalization of real politics. Inherent in this idea of the political is an ethics based on the fundamental freedom of interpersonal exchange. From the point of view of this phenomenology of the political, Arendt formulates the requirement for politics to defend the freedom of public, interpersonal interaction against any kind of standardization and economization and to enable people to participate publicly in the political space. In her words: “The meaning of politics is freedom” (Arendt 2005, 108). Arendt, in this sense, proposes thinking of the political in light of its experience, which is precisely the experience of a shared world. This also includes Arendt’s reflection on the effects of totalitarian politics. She makes it clear in these reflections that the aim of totalitarian politics is to isolate people from each other. And this isolation is supposed to lead to a “bundle of reactions” (Arendt 1979, 441). The “peace in death” that totalitarian politics attempts to establish is, in this sense, the inversion of differentiation, the eradication of all contradictions, or the reduction of the other from an actual subject to an enemy to be destroyed. For Arendt, the world can only be a shared one because we differentiate ourselves from each other in it: the political is the experience of plurality. Arendt herself limited the moments of experience of the truly political to a very few historical moments (e.g., the moments of the revolution or the council movement). Even these moments of freedom 206

Context

threaten to quickly evaporate. One thing is clear from her description of these moments— or rather, encounters: They are moments of interaction between individuals who mutually grant each other independence and who therefore can also be in an agonal relationship with one another, but at the same time, they are also concerned with creating a political space that does not erase the differences between them but rather enables and allows them (see also Herrmann 2023). Hannah Arendt expresses this clearly time and again when she states that the starting point is not the individual human being but human beings. For Arendt, the constitution of the individual human being says only something very limited about the form human lives can take. It is not the individual but far more interpersonal action that shapes human beings’ lives. As she writes: “The conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the Earth—can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely” ([1958] 2013, 11). In doing so, Arendt makes it clear that the discussion about anthropological definitions is important, but, at the same time, it is also highly political. Even though Arendt herself made a clear distinction between the social and the political, it is clear that action is about understanding intersubjective structures within which subjects are shaped but also assert themselves. This intersubjective structure makes it possible to understand politics not as a separate process, but as a social practice. Even if Arendt only recognized a limited area of social life as political practice, it can still be argued that it is, above all, the social practices of conscious, interpersonal interaction in which the political is produced. In this understanding, political action is seen as a practice that subjects don’t just engage in permanently in exchange with others. It is also the context in which they constitute themselves as politically independent subjects capable of judgment. Political action is, in this sense, about social practices within which people mutually enable each other to enter into an exchange about their affairs on the basis of their independently made judgments and in which they simultaneously grant each other the ability to make free judgments. At the same time, however, these spaces of interaction are also predestined to exclude those who are not recognized as subjects capable of judgment—such as slaves in the ancient polis, for example— by not recognizing them as worthy interlocutors (a point that is currently being discussed around the concept of epistemic injustice; see Fricker 2007; Guenther 2017; and also in the chapters on white ignorance [29] and Decolonial Phenomenology [30] in this handbook).

4.  The Technicization of the Lifeworld A wide variety of processes play roles in the works of the philosophers discussed here, be it the increasing technicization of the lifeworld, be it war and the Shoah, be it the subordination of all social processes to a historically understood functional logic. What all these processes have in common is that politics is understood as something in which the perspective of the individual is nothing while the historical-technical, and (in the case of Nazi racial thinking) the (supposed) physical circumstances are everything. The fact that this time was a phase of massive mechanization of the living environment will be discussed in particular by Günther Anders. The political processes also take place in a world that is increasingly beyond the comprehension of the individual due to technicization. These philosophers belong to a generation that Walter Benjamin described with these words: A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, 207

Nils Baratella

at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. (Benjamin 1999, 732) The human body thrown back to its physicality and bare existence is confronted not merely with political currents but with technical explosions. But can the direction of action also be reversed? Can politics also be thought in terms of the body and its perspective? Günther Anders takes as his starting point the technical phenomena that shape and/or threaten the lives of human beings, such as the atomic bomb. And he asks how this influence is exerted on the lives and the world of the human beings who use this technology. This requires overcoming the idea of the constant anthropological nature of human beings and the constant development of their technically and culturally shaped environment. Indeed, when dealing with things, human beings don’t just change them; they also change themselves. This raises the question of the status of human beings in a largely technologized world, especially in view of the mechanical perfection of machines. In this respect, Anders points out the shame that grips people in the face of the perfection of the mediatized and technological world they have created for themselves but can never grasp. The question that needs to be asked in this context is to what extent people are capable of surviving amid a permanent flood of information. Anders’s diagnosis of the outdatedness of human beings is especially evident here: Humans process the vast amounts of information available to them in a different way than machines, for which this information is merely data. In this sense, for Anders, it is not information that the subjects obtain through media, but rather, it is more about the halting of interpersonal interaction. But unlike machines, human beings are subjects and act politically. And the political thinking that leads to action in the sphere of politics to which human beings are not just exposed, but in the context of which they are also involved in the shaping of coexistence, consists of not merely utilizing information as data but also evaluating its impact. Machines cannot be expected to act morally, only efficiently. Moral action is the domain of human beings, especially when individual subjects have the means to destroy all others with the press of a button. This is why Anders appeals to us not to accept and carry out any work without first having checked whether it is direct or indirect work of destruction; to abandon the work in which we are currently engaged if it should prove to be such direct or indirect work of destruction. (Anders 1981, 137; author’s translation) In this era of advancing “technization of the lifeworld,” evident in the increasing tendency to view technical access to the world as unquestioned, we must consider the profound implications this shift has on our perception of reality and human experience. Technology is becoming a “world of inconspicuousness” (Blumenberg 2010, 70; author’s translation) that moves “below the level of attention and expressiveness” (Blumenberg 2006, 50; author’s translation), the question still needs to be raised as to how the change in technology also brings about changes in the consciousness that engages with this world by means of such technology. Blumenberg advocates understanding technology less fundamentally and anthropologically and more historically. In doing so, he is opposing an overly “dogmatic” (Blumenberg 2015, 259; author’s translation) criticism of technical progress. Rather, Blumenberg emphasizes its ambivalence and always 208

Context

sees opportunities for “self-correction” (Blumenberg 2015, 272; author’s translation) in modernization.

5.  The Individual as a Whole Some of the philosophers here who were influenced by phenomenology did not stop at a theoretical reflection on experience and lifeworld. They instead saw their thinking itself as a tool for influencing political conditions. In one of his last programmatic essays entitled “What Is Phenomenology?” Jan Patočka concluded with the following words: “The endeavor to offer a searching way in opposition to the fundamental concept of modernity that has here been exposed—that is phenomenology” (Patočka 2019, 107–8). Following Patočka, it is important to emphasize the word “searching” here. This searching is a process of criticism and variation that makes it possible not only to allow contradictions and plurality but also to appreciate them. According to Patočka, however, the dynamics of the living environment must also be emphasized here. The supposedly uniform course of events and ordinariness must be questioned, and emphasis must be placed on the potential for change. Understanding the world allows (and, at the same time, demands) consciously choosing one’s own position, throwing overboard the deceptive certainty of one’s own attitude. Understanding the world as dynamic and plural inevitably leads not only to seeing the conflictual nature of the world but also to understanding this conflict as constitutive. Patočka comes close to a Marxist concept of history here, but without falling back into dialectical models or historical teleologies. In his words: “History is nothing other than the shaken certitude of pre-given meaning” (Patočka 1996, 118). Meaningfulness must therefore be constantly questioned. This includes the individual as part of the political space in which they act. Patočka’s work can be read as an attempt to maintain the standpoint of the individual or to acknowledge that the individual is not absorbed into the greater whole but remains an independent entity within it. The reference to the individual and the adoption of the first-person perspective of political phenomenology do not mean ignoring the individual’s affiliation with the jointly produced world, as real socialist Marxists in the period interpreted the world. In their understanding, from which Patočka consciously seeks to distance himself, the world is a practically produced one, which can be completely penetrated and understood with the help of historical materialism as a closed system of knowledge. Patočka opposes the idea of closed systems of knowledge that can be applied to the world like a template— which, incidentally, is a t­ypically modern phenomenon for Patočka (see Srubar 2006)— by e­ mphasizing the practical, active character of philosophy, history, and politics. These essential aspects of the human understanding of the world are not merely preexisting entities to be learned and applied; instead, they are actively shaped and redefined through our interactions with one another. And they are therefore what human beings must grant to each other and consequently form the basis of an ethics of the other or the concession of fundamental rights, such as human rights.

6.  Conclusion: Between Collectivism and Individualism—The Political as Social Practice The phenomenological approach to the world that is negotiated by the philosophers discussed here encompasses events, objects, ideas, spaces, and, last but not least, living beings. 209

Nils Baratella

However, these things do not represent merely objectively existing conditions but rather a conglomerate of relationships and political practices. In this context, phenomenology may be interpreted as an endeavor to depict the world, our experiences in it, and the living subjects as intricately interwoven. Phenomenology can, in this sense, be understood as the attempt to describe the world, the experiences we have in it, and living or experiencing subjects as connected to each other in it. The task of phenomenology is accordingly to understand the network of these relations. The metaphor of the web here points to a decisive feature of this way of thinking—there is no single objective perspective, only different perspectives that must be related to each other. People enter into an exchange with the world. And they are equal in this sense. But they each do this in their own way, and that is where they differ. This peculiar simultaneity of commonality, equality, and differentiation must be understood not only theoretically but also as a basic condition of the human being as zoon politikon (Aristotle 1984, Politics, 1.1253a). In this sense, human beings are social and therefore collective beings and individuals at the same time. This simultaneity, which is repeatedly emphasized in philosophical anthropology as a characteristic of the human being, requires understanding the political as something that human beings do together. Nevertheless, this basic political condition of differentiation is not always given in the same way. The experiences of totalitarian politics, as well as modern science’s claims to objectivity, which only recognizes differences if they can be quantified, have taught us that the ability to differentiate is not always a given. The ability to differentiate must be continuously established, maintained, and defended. Thinking in terms of differences can thus be read as a counter-model to the Marxist thinking of the period, as well as an assertion of the right to autonomy (Lefort 1991, 283f.). But how and under what conditions can political spaces be created that enable individuals to actively distinguish themselves from one another? Phenomenological methodology in the field of political thought proposes thinking the necessary conditions of experience—the experiencing subject, its object, and the process of experiencing—as equal and equivalent aspects of a process of consciousness. What the philosophers mentioned here have in common is that they have witnessed political processes that have significantly influenced their lives but over which they, in turn, had no influence whatsoever. The individual counted for nothing, and more than that, the individual was subjugated to the point of extinction. The permanent alteration in the spaces of social interaction also changes the forms through which human beings give meaning to their world, as well as the process of forming their self-image within the framework of this meaning making. The conferral of meaning takes place jointly, not always in a harmonious way and often in conflict—“as a result of political disputes” (Bedorf and Herrmann 2019, 12). But the powers and structures that permeate these disputes must also be questioned. In view of the historical destruction of everything political under totalitarianism, the philosophers discussed here provide a descriptive insight into the political as a practice and, at the same time, develop it further into an ideal. They also reject the idea of using a preconceived theory to define the political, just as they do not wish to overemphasize the role of the individual (in the sense of a “sovereign subject” or complete independence). The political is instead understood as a practice in which we are all involved that allows us to integrate ourselves into tradition as well as to start something new. The focus is on the question of how the collective practices of the political can be mediated and conceived between dispute and cooperation, between togetherness and opposition. The phenomenology of the political that is laid out here makes it possible to think of the political as an ideal. For 210

Context

what a phenomenological methodology insists on is that the first, fundamental, irreducible experience of the individual is that of a social world, whatever the influence of this social world on the individual may be in concrete terms.

References Anders, Günther. 1981. Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegungen zum atomaren Zeitalter. München: C. H. Beck. Arendt, Hannah. 1979. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1990. On Revolution. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Introduction into politics.” In The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn, 93–201. New York: Schocken Books. ———. (1958) 2013. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1984. “Politics.” In Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bedorf, Thomas, and Steffen Herrmann. 2019. “Three Types of Political Phenomenology.” In Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme, 1–15. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Experience and Poverty.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 2.2, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 731–36. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City/New York: Doubleday. Blumenberg, Hans. 2006. Beschreibung des Menschen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2010. Theorie der Lebenswelt, edited by Manfred Sommer. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2015. “Dogmatische und rationale Analyse von Motivationen des technischen Fortschritts.” In Schriften zur Technik, edited by Alexander Schmitz und Bernd Stiegler, 259–77. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Dodd, James. 2012. “Political Philosophy.” In The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, edited by Sebastian Luft and Soren Overgaard, 429–38. New York: Routledge. Eberle, Thomas S. 2008. “Phänomenologie und Ethnomethodologie.” In Phänomenologie und Soziologie. Theoretische Positionen, aktuelle Problemfelder und empirische Umsetzungen, edited by Jürgen Raab, Michaela Pfadenhauer, Peter Stegmaier, Jochen Dreher, and Bernt Schnettler, 151–63. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Fischer, Joachim. 2022. Philosophische Anthropologie. Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts. Baden-Baden: Karl Alber. Fricker, Miranda. 2007.  Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.  Oxford:  Oxford Academic. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Guenther, Lisa. 2017. “Epistemic Injustice and Phenomenology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 195–205. New York: Routledge. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1966. Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Herrmann, Steffen. 2023. Demokratischer Streit. Eine Phänomenologie des Politischen. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lefort, Claude. 1991. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity Press. Loidolt, Sophie. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge. Luckmann, Thomas. 2007. “Über die Grenzen der Sozialwelt.” In Lebenswelt, Identität und Gesellschaft, 62–90. Konstanz: UVK.

211

Nils Baratella ———. 2008. “Konstitution, Konstruktion: Phänomenologie, Sozialwissenschaft.” In Phänomenologie und Soziologie. Theoretische Positionen, aktuelle Problemfelder und empirische Umsetzungen, edited by Jürgen Raab, Michaela Pfadenhauer, Peter Stegmaier, Jochen Dreher, and Bernt Schnettler, 33–41. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Patočka, Jan. 1996. Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Edited by James Dodd. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2019. “What Is Phenomenology?” In German Perspectives, edited by John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe, 84–109. New York, USA: Fordham University Press. Plessner, Helmuth. 1999. The Limits of Community. A. Critique of Social Radicalism: Humanity Books. Translated by Andrew Wallace. New York: Prometheus Books. Scheler, Max. (1927) 1976. “Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs.” In Späte Schriften: Gesammelte Werke IX, 145–70. Bonn: Bouvier. ———. 2007. Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. Bonn: Bouvier. Schütz, Alfred. 1962a. Collected Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality. Edited by Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1962b. “Symbol, Reality and Society.” In Collected Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson, 287–356. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964. “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World.” In Collective Papers 2: Studies in Social Theory, edited by Arvid Brodersen, 226–73. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Srubar, Ilja. 2006. “Patočkas praktische Philosophie als Kritik der Moderne.” Bohemia 47 (2): 289–99.

212

PART IV

Phenomenology of Alterity

INTRODUCTION TO PART IV From the Primacy of the Other to the Politics of Alterity Steffen Herrmann

1. Introduction The fourth section of this handbook delves into a branch of phenomenological thinking that uses alterity and the accompanying experience of difference as a starting point. The concept of the Other has always been integral to phenomenology; its significance can be traced back to the seminal works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Jaspers, in which the relation between the Other and the self is central. What sets the phenomenology of alterity apart from these classical approaches is its orientation: It does not start with the self and then proceed to the Other. Instead, it places the experience of the Other at the forefront in order to think about the self. Consequently, the defining trait of the phenomenology of alterity is its shift from the “primacy of the self” to the “primacy of the Other.” The concept of alterity evolved through a dynamic interplay between German and French thought. Thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of France in the 1930s. Emmanuel Levinas significantly influenced this reception. His translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations in 1931, co-authored with Gabrielle Pfeiffer, as well as his thesis The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, published in 1930, had a major impact on its reception in France (Levinas 1995). This work stood out as one of the pioneering interpretations of the novel method of phenomenology, guiding its reception for an entire generation. This influence is underscored by Sartre’s notable comment: “I came to phenomenology through Levinas” (Taminiaux 2007, 6). Emerging authors like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, and Jacques Derrida, who would later play pivotal roles in shaping French phenomenology into a vibrant intellectual tradition, were first introduced to this new school of thought through Levinas’s interpretation of Husserl. Just as Alexandre Kojève’s seminal lectures paved the way for Hegel’s reception in France in the 1930s, Levinas’s early work established the foundation for the reception of Husserl’s phenomenology. This has resulted not only in productive intersections between the two lines of thought, as is evident in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but also in the emergence of complementary concepts. For instance, the figure of the ‘hostage’ subsequently introduced by Levinas can be understood as a counterpoint to Hegel’s figure of the ‘bondsman’ insofar as it contrasts the asymmetrical dependence on recognition by the Other with the asymmetrical exposure to responsibility for the Other (Herrmann 2017). DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-24

215

Steffen Herrmann

Already in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s writings, we can find approaches to the concept of alterity. When Husserl characterizes the alien in terms of the “accessibility of what is not originally accessible” (Husserl 1960, 14), he suggests that the Other cannot merely be regarded as a double of the self. And Heidegger points out that the Other is always already part of the self when he states: “It could be the case that the who of everyday Dasein is precisely not I myself,” but rather “anyone” (Heidegger 1996, 108, 118). This idea is radicalized in the philosophy of dialogue: In the reflections of Buber and Rosenzweig, the Other is understood as someone whose otherness concerns and challenges the I. This shift in perspective is made possible by the fact that the relationship with the Other is no longer conceptualized from the standpoint of the existent or the existence but from the ‘in-between’ of the interpersonal encounter. The Other is not simply given to us in its otherness but concerns and affects us. It is this idea of radical alterity that was taken up and expanded in French philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of “substitution” (1978, 99), Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the “host” (2000, 41), Paul Ricœur’s idea of “oneself as another” (1992, 1), and Luce Irigaray’s concept of the “sex which is not one” (1985, 23) bear witness to the primacy of the Other. This, in turn, has been productively taken up again in contemporary German phenomenology, with thinkers like Bernhard Waldenfels developing it further into a phenomenology of “responsivity” (2011, 36). The Franco-German psychoanalytic thought of Freud and Lacan also plays an important role in the philosophies of alterity. Waldenfels (2019) as well as Ricœur (2012) and Derrida (1998) frequently return to psychoanalytical themes in their work. The same is true for Irigaray (1987), who is even a trained psychoanalyst. Additionally, Levinas’s reflections can, at least retrospectively, be interpreted through the lens of psychoanalytic thought (Harasym 1998). At the core of these discussions lies Freud’s idea that “the ego is not master in its own house.” Freud highlights that the self only comes into being through interactions with others and that these interactions come along with attachments and desires that elude our control. Lacan built on this idea, utilizing the registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real to show how the self is haunted by the other. The resulting decentering of the subject is a crucial element across all philosophies of alterity. The philosophers discussed in this section are unique in that they extend the concept of alterity beyond the issue of intersubjectivity to derive its implications for political philosophy. Their primary focus thereby is not on the ideal structure of institutions; instead, they explore the origins of the political order, its underlying dynamics, and its limits. In the following, I would like to briefly outline the main features of their political thinking. Despite the differences between the individual approaches, there are some commonalities that can be highlighted. To do so, I will first delve into the methodological shift accompanying the transition from Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology to the phenomenology of alterity. Subsequently, I  will introduce several key concepts of alterity, thereby shedding light on its political trajectory. In a final step, I will then provide an outlook on which political interventions arise from the phenomenology of alterity by comparing it to the politics of difference.

2.  A Twist in Phenomenological Method What distinguishes the developments in Franco-German philosophy in the second half of the 20th century is that they give the phenomenological method a specific twist (Tengelyi and Gondek 2011; Simmons and Benson 2013). The peculiarity of this twist can be made 216

Introduction to Part IV

clear with reference to Husserl. The latter holds in the Ideas §55 that “all real unities are ‘unities of sense’ ” (Husserl 1983, 128). In doing so, he clarifies that phenomenology does not perceive the world as a mere collection of coexisting individual beings but focuses on the sense relationships that bring each of these beings to light. What is crucial is that Husserl subsequently ties this definition of phenomenology back to a constituting consciousness when he states: “Unities of sense presuppose . . . a sense-bestowing consciousness” (128f). Following from this, Husserl makes transcendental consciousness the proper field for phenomenological investigations. And in this sense, he inherits Descartes, who uncovered this field with his ego cogito. However, Descartes left this field immediately again in his desperate need to secure the existence of the outside world. Therefore, Husserl holds: “Consequently he stands on the threshold of the greatest of all discoveries, yet he does not grasp its proper sense, the sense namely of transcendental subjectivity” (1960, 24). Husserl today is often regarded as representing a paradigm of phenomenology that is centered around the ego. This paradigm is, among others, challenged by those thinkers that can be grouped under the label ‘phenomenology of alterity.’ Their goal is to focus on sense structures that do not arise from a ‘sense-bestowing consciousness’ but rather originate from the Other or, more precisely, from the alterity of the Other. To get a closer look at the methodological twist that comes along with the phenomenology of alterity, it is helpful to turn to the reflections of Jean-Luc Marion. In his study Reduction and Givenness (1998), Marion distinguishes three forms of phenomenological reduction: First, there is the transcendental reduction as we find it in Husserl. Its task is to bracket the implicit existence positings that automatically occur in the natural attitude via the epoché in order to uncover the intentional acts of consciousness in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. Secondly, there is ontological reduction as we find it in Heidegger. He claims to expand beyond the scope of Husserl’s philosophy by focusing not on the “apprehension of a being,” but on “the being of this being” from the standpoint of the being-there [Dasein] (Heidegger 1982, 21). Heidegger’s analysis thereby not only claims to delve into a phenomenal depth that remained foreclosed to Husserl’s phenomenology, but also to leave behind the primacy of objectifying acts. Marion now places a third variant of reduction alongside the two variants of phenomenological reduction, which follows the task of “letting appearances appear in such a way that they accomplish their own apparition, so as to be received exactly as they give themselves” (Marion 2002, 7). This means moving away from understanding intentionality through Husserl’s lens of transcendental consciousness or through Heidegger’s concept of being-there. Instead, we should approach it from the demands to which the living being is exposed. Marion calls this the “self-givenness” (20) of the phenomenon, stemming from beyond being. It testifies to the existence of a “counter-intentionality” (175) in which the phenomenon reveals itself to me, rather than being something I actively perceive. Such counter-intentionality is present, for example, in the encounter with the other person. Marion refers here to Levinas’s analyses of the Other, whose appearance is conceived as a “Me voici,” a “Here I am,” that speaks directly to me (286). If we take Marion’s considerations as a guideline to the phenomenology of alterity, then it becomes apparent that the phenomenological reduction here no longer starts from individual beings or from Being as such but from a call that is constituted beyond both. It is no longer “intentionality” (Husserl) or “care” (Heidegger), but “counter-intentionality” (Marion) that acts as the guiding principle of phenomenological investigation. This does not simply represent a third, even deeper layer of analysis, but rather that which constantly 217

Steffen Herrmann

interrupts, disturbs, and confuses the disclosedness of beings and their Being. The genuine idea of the phenomenology of alterity, as it can be found in Levinas, Ricœur or Waldenfels, one could argue, consists in making this disturbing counter-intentionality the starting point for their philosophizing. In a specific sense, this characterization also applies to both Derrida and Irigaray, who are situated at the margins of phenomenology. Even if neither one can be called a phenomenologist in an outright sense, both have consistently and critically engaged with phenomenology throughout their careers. Derrida’s critical interpretations of Husserl and Heidegger, combined with his sustained engagement with Levinas, have profoundly influenced his method of deconstruction (Dastur 2016). Similarly, Irigaray’s readings of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas have significantly shaped her thought on sexual difference (Lehtinen 2014). What both take away from these engagements is their recourse to a variety of figures of alterity, to which I will now turn.

3.  Figures of Alterity In the following, I want to highlight five figures of thought that can be found throughout the phenomenology of alterity. I associate the five main authors presented in this part of the handbook with one figure each, even if these figures can, of course, be found across different authors. The basic idea here is that these figures lead us step by step from the initial experience of alterity to what could be termed the politics of alterity. 1. Between-us: The phenomenology of alterity understands the relationship between self and Other not from a fixed concept of neither the same nor the Other, but rather from their encounter. In this manner, an ‘in-between’ takes center stage, persisting as an event that cannot be pinned exclusively to either side. Where two bodies touch or two gazes find each other, something happens that defies attribution to one side. In this space, intertwinings, intersections, and transitions emerge, with both sides constantly responding to each other. Bernhard Waldenfels also speaks here of ‘in-between modes,’ ‘in-between events,’ and ‘in-between things’ that manifest themselves in ‘in-between spheres’ and ‘in-between times.’ Crucial for Waldenfels here is the interweaving of pathos and response. It testifies to a difference between “by what” we are affected and “to what” we respond, or what Waldenfels calls “responsive difference” (2006, 134). It leads to the fact that what happens ‘between-us’ can never be brought to a standstill because there is always more to do, to answer, and to say. 2. The Other in the self: When Luce Irigaray states, that the woman “enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either” (Irigaray 1985, 31), she takes up the figure of the in-between just discussed. Irigaray gives this idea a specific twist by applying it to subjectivity. The woman, she argues, is “indefinitely other in herself” (28) because “the other is already within her” (31). Irigaray anchors that thought in a female imaginary that centers on the vulva, symbolizing the inherent self-difference of women. While the phallus represents the principle of oneness, the vulva embodies a twoness that is in touch with each other. This thought underscores the idea not only that a subject can never fully align with itself but also that it must stay in connection with its inherent otherness. Whereas male subjectivity lives from rejection of its inherent otherness, linking its striving for ideals such as autonomy and rationality to the denial of its own dependence and desire, female subjectivity comes along with the promise of staying in touch with these moments. 218

Introduction to Part IV

3. Conflictuality: Levinas takes up the figure of the Other in the self when he states that “subjectivity is structured as the other in the same” (1978, 25). This thought is based on his insight that from the relation to the Other there arises an ethical demand that captures our subjectivity. This captivity is ethical in nature, anchoring in us a profound responsibility for the body and life of the Other. This responsibility, Levinas teaches us, is inescapable. Even in instances where we meet others with indifference or violence, the interaction occurs within an ethical context. “Morality,” according to Levinas, must therefore be understood as “first philosophy,” as the beginning of everything (Levinas 1969, 304). Ethical action becomes particularly challenging when our ethical responsibility extends not just to the Other but to multiple others. This complexity arises when the demands of various individuals collide and compete with each other. Living in a world with others means we are perpetually confronted with conflicting demands and must react accordingly. Such conflicts necessitate taking a stance. Since there are not always pre-established guidelines for these stances and we often need to develop them out of the current situation, it is essential for us to take political responsibility for our stances. 4. Ontological violence: Derrida takes over from Levinas the idea of a political responsibility that has to answer to conflicting demands. Following Levinas, he elaborates an unavoidable “ontological violence” or “violence of the concept” that is already connected with such a responsibility (Derrida 1978, 134, 147). This becomes clear in his work on hospitality (Derrida 2000). Derrida here initially interprets the responsibility toward the Other through the lens of unconditional hospitality, which welcomes the other irrespective of their status and reputation. Yet, to accommodate the diversity of the Other, it is inevitable to move from the unconditional concept of hospitality to a right to hospitality. This right introduces limits on the duration of stay, designates specific places for it, and stipulates the provision of certain goods. However, this right inevitably categorizes individuals into welcome and unwelcome guests. Derrida’s main claim is that unconditional hospitality can only realize itself as a right to hospitality, but in doing so, it invariably exerts an exclusionary and suppressive force that contradicts the ideal of unconditional hospitality. In emphasizing this failure, Derrida points to the ontological violence that is intertwined with justice. He subsequently emphasizes that true justice only ever remains “to-come” (1992, 27). 5. Aporetic politics: At the core of Paul Ricœur’s political phenomenology is what he terms the “political paradox” (1965, 247). The paradox arises out of a tension that springs from two dimensions of the political process. While the horizontal dimension of the political is based on equality, the vertical dimension is based on domination. Because the latter is always in danger of detaching itself from the former, a fundamental fragility is inscribed in the political process that must be contained through civic responsibility. For Ricœur, such responsibility can only arise from an ethical relationship to others in which the self is constituted via exposure. It supplies the resources necessary to repeatedly interrogate the political order. In this context, Ricœur suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Derrida, that justice is invariably linked to violence. This inherent violence must be consistently challenged and critically reevaluated within the political process. As a result, politics is intrinsically paradoxical or aporetic. It must constantly turn against itself in order to question its own foundations. The five figures outlined here are not just recurring motifs across various thinkers in the phenomenology of alterity; they can also be conceptualized as stages of a trajectory. We 219

Steffen Herrmann

have seen that the phenomenology of alterity is anchored in the idea of the between-us. In the encounter with others, something happens to us. This introduces an otherness within the subject. As a result, the subject never fully aligns with itself. It is always disrupted by this internal alterity. This internal disruption can be interpreted as an ethical responsibility, particularly when confronted with the diverging ethical demands of others. These compel us to take political action. Yet these actions, even if made with the best intentions, run the risk of exercising ontological violence. Instead of serving justice, they might inadvertently harm those they intend to protect. This presents a paradox, leading to an aporetic understanding of politics in which one must perpetually scrutinize one’s political actions. It becomes evident that this political thinking leans less toward established political institutions, systems, and traditions, and more toward the inherent tensions, paradoxes, and aporias that define the political realm. I will illustrate what this means in practice in the next section.

4.  Politics of Difference and Politics of Alterity If we turn our attention to what the politics of alterity could entail in a practical sense, it becomes beneficial to examine its correlation with the politics of difference. Charles Taylor’s essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” serves as a prime example of the latter (Taylor 1992). In this essay, Taylor delves into the unique situation faced by the Canadian province of Quebec during the 1980s. The primary challenge then was that the distinctive features of this French-speaking province risked fading away through integration into a culturally cohesive Canada, unless the French-speaking culture received special recognition and rights. In order to safeguard this distinct cultural heritage, Taylor champions a multicultural policy tailored to honor Quebec’s unique context. At first glance, such a policy appears to align closely with the core principles of a politics of alterity, given its emphasis on valuing and conserving otherness. This appearance, however, is deceptive. The politics of alterity, as I  have delineated it here, is not devoted to a social Other but to a radical Other. The radical Other stands for an alterity with which even such a politics of difference cannot come to terms. From the perspective of a politics of alterity, three criticisms can be made of the politics of multiculturalism: First, it presupposes an overarching horizon of values against which it is possible to judge which culture is worth preserving. In contrast, it is necessary to look at what constitutes the value of these values, how they structure from the outset which others can come into view, and how they structure the field of political visibility. Second, Taylor is guided by an ideal of authenticity based on unconditional fidelity to one’s tradition of origin. If, however, nothing is allowed to change in a cultural encounter with the respective cultures, then the cultural encounter becomes a fiction. Thirdly, such a perspective does not get hold of the differences within a culture. Under the master signifier of “the French culture,” differences within that culture become invisible, so problematic notions of sexuality or race that may come along with that culture do not come into view. In sum, then, problematic idealizations of universality, authenticity, and homogeneity are at work in the politics of multiculturalism, despite its orientation toward difference. The task of a politics of alterity is thus to interrogate the logic of identity that even haunts the politics of difference. In line with an aporetic politics, the aim is not simply to reject the politics of multiculturalism but rather to accompany and drive it with critical questioning. The politics of alterity thereby remains closely related to a politics of difference, even if it does

220

Introduction to Part IV

not culminate in such politics. It highlights that even where culture, gender, race, ability, or age is recognized as a marker of difference, there is always more difference to acknowledge that goes beyond these differences. However, this does not result in the politics of alterity being limited to an idle demand for ever-increasing recognition of more differences. Instead, its politicization lies in the fact that such differences must be considered in specific situations. Political action, therefore, requires judgment concerning which differences are appropriate in which situations. Political conflicts should therefore not be fought in the name of fixed cultural identities but always only in the name of temporary political identifications. In this sense, the politics of alterity can perhaps best be characterized as a ‘fugitive politics.’

References Dastur, Françoise. 2016. Déconstruction et phénoménologie. Derrida en débat avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Hermann. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference, 79–153. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1992. “Force of Law. The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, translated by Mary Quaintance, 3–67. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Of Hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harasym, Sarah. 1998. Levinas and Lacan. The Missed Encounter. Albany: SUNY Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press. Herrmann, Steffen. 2017. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity. From Recognition to Responsibility and Back.” Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 5 (1): 73–87. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Dodrecht: Springer. ———. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Vol. 1. The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff Publishers. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1987. Speculum or the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lehtinen, Virpi. 2014. Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being. Albany: SUNY Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1978. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1995. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by André Orianne. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Reduction and Givenness. Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology. Translated by Thomas Carlsen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Being Given. Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1965. History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. On Psychoanalysis. Writings and Lectures 1. Cambridge: Polity Press. Simmons, Aaron J., and Bruce Ellis Benson. 2013. The New Phenomenology. A Philosophical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Taminiaux, Jacques. 2007. “Levinas and the History of Philosophy.” Levinas Studies 2: 1–28.

221

Steffen Herrmann Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tengelyi, László, and Hans-Dieter Gondek. 2011. Neue Phänomenologie in Frankreich. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2006. Schattenrisse der Moral. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2019. Erfahrung, die zur Sprache drängt. Studien zur Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie aus phänomenologischer Sicht. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

222

16 EMMANUEL LEVINAS The Politics of Alterity Steffen Herrmann

1. Introduction For a long time, Levinas was regarded as a thinker of the ethical who had little to say about political matters. He himself seemed to encourage this view. In an interview, his terse answer to the question “How do you tie your moral philosophy to the consideration of political questions?” was: “Listen, I am a democrat. What more would you like me to say?” (2001, 195). This answer reinforces the impression that Levinas did not seem to care much about the political consequences of his thought. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that this aspect of his philosophy went unnoticed in academic scholarship for a long time. Illustrative of this is Dominique Janicaud’s prominent diagnosis of a “theological turn” in 20th-century French phenomenology (2000). Janicaud not only identifies a growing shift away from worldly concerns toward transcendence and religion but also accuses phenomenological thought of becoming progressively de-politicized. In the wake of such diagnoses, it is no great surprise that Levinas is often regarded as an apolitical thinker. However, this perception is misleading. Since the beginning of the millennium, there has been a ‘political turn’ in Levinas research, with the goal of rehabilitating him as an “ethicopolitical” thinker. These new approaches examine Levinas’s thinking from various novel perspectives. Firstly, scholars emphasize that, starting with the figure of the third, his work does, indeed, offer a conception of the political that is central to understanding the course of his thinking. (Drabinski 2000; Simmons 2003; Bergo 2003; Bedorf 2006; Critchley 2007; Fagan 2009). Secondly, there is a growing interest in the political statements Levinas made about contemporary events in interviews and shorter writings and how these relate to his broader thought (Caygill 2002; Morgan 2016; Eisenstadt and Katz 2016). Thirdly, Levinas’s Talmudic readings have increasingly become subjects of research as they contain insightful applications of his political thought (Herzog 2020). With this in mind, Levinas’s political thought can be considered well explored today. One of the few desiderata concerns the question of how Levinas’s reflections can be brought into juxtaposition with approaches in political theory that extend beyond phenomenology (Simmons 2019). In the following I will mainly focus on the theoretical conceptualization of Levinas’s politics of alterity and how it can be connected to contemporary political theory. To achieve this, I will first demonstrate that, like many of his contemporaries, Levinas grappled with DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-25

223

Steffen Herrmann

the question of how barbarism could arise in the heart of Europe, leading to the loss of millions of Jewish lives. Levinas’s response posits that Western history is marked by a denial of transcendence, and, as a consequence, it has lost touch with the fundamental significance of the ethical (2). In the following section, I  will delve into Levinas’s exploration of the face-to-face relationship, demonstrating that both ethical responsibility and political justice originate from it (3). Subsequently, I will take up Levinas’s notion of a “just state,” positioning it within the tradition of republicanism (4). I will conclude by arguing that Levinas’s philosophy holds particular relevance today, especially when viewed through the lens of the politics of difference and radical democratic theory (5).

2.  From Politics to Ethics: The Critique of Totality Levinas’s thought can first of all be characterized as a political phenomenology because it is deeply informed by the Shoah (Spargo 2006; Shaw 2010). In his autobiographical essay “Signature” from Difficult Freedom, Levinas mentions that his life has been “dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror” (1990a, 291). Furthermore, he dedicates his second major work, Otherwise than Being, to the victims “of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism” (Levinas 1991). Levinas thus places his thinking in the context of the confrontation with political horror (Caygill 2002, 5). Like many of his contemporaries, Levinas grappled with the challenge of understanding the unimaginable, pondering what direction philosophy should take following the atrocities of Auschwitz. Much like Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Topolski 2015; Bell 2018) or Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Eisenstadt 2006; Nelson 2012), Levinas perceives the rise of Nazi antisemitism not as a throwback to pre-Enlightenment values but as deeply intertwined with the evolution of occidental culture itself. In his first major work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas (1969, 102) posits that the entirety of Western philosophy, from Parmenides through Spinoza to Hegel, operates under the banner of totality. Furthermore, he insinuates that this pervasive mode of thinking in totalizing categories has paved the way for totalitarianism. To grasp the link between totalitarianism and totality more precisely, it may be beneficial to revisit one of Levinas’s early essays. In 1934, at the age of 28, he publishes “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” a text in which he delves into the origins of fascist thought (1990b). In this essay, Levinas diagnoses the rise of Hitlerism as stemming from nostalgic longings. He states that Hitlerism “is an awakening of elementary feelings” (64). Fascism then translates these sentiments into a unique philosophical form, aiming to overcome the Western distinction between mind and body through a novel conception of man. From this perspective, it is not the mind that governs the body; rather, it is the other way around: the body dominates the mind. Levinas further expounds that this inversion comes with a shift in how truth is perceived. While a spiritual idea can detach from its originator, thereby becoming part of the “common heritage” (70), the body’s truth remains tethered to membership in a specific community. Here, the spread of the truth does not foster a community of equals; instead, it gives rise to a “world of masters and slaves” (71). Following on from this, the philosophy underpinning Hitlerism is intrinsically linked to “war and conquest” (71) as the body’s truth can only be universalized through such means. One might argue that totalitarianism is clearly the antithesis of an enlightened culture and, therefore, cannot be understood as its consequence. Levinas addresses this argument by

224

Emmanuel Levinas

interpreting totalitarianism as an inversion of both Christianity and liberalism (Caygill 2002, 38). Both worldviews share the notion of the subject’s radical freedom. This is evident in their conception of history, which they see as a force of destiny that can be disrupted at any moment as well as in their view of the body, perceived as a barrier hindering the “free flight of the spirit” (1990b, 67). Although Levinas undoubtedly appreciates that human freedom “constitutes the whole of thought’s dignity” (69), its unchecked glorification leads to a selfindulgent game in which man “does not definitively compromise himself with any truth” (69), and culture is subsequently “invaded” by fashionable interests (70). As a consequence, Christianity and liberalism lead to “degenerate forms” of freedom (70). However, it is crucial to emphasize that this is not Levinas’ final stance on Christianity and liberalism. In his later works, he frequently underscores the profound connection between Christianity and Judaism, as well as the merits of the liberal state. However, in this early essay, Levinas uses both traditions of thought to demonstrate how the false totalization of the ideal of freedom can lead freedom to turn against itself. For if thought rejects the connection between freedom and the body and history, it runs the risk of turning into an abstract privileging of the body and thus undergoing the kind of reversal that occurred in National Socialism. While fascism may be seen as a regression from Christianity and liberalism, it shares an ontological similarity with them. They all hinge on the idea of an essence defining the nature of the individual. Therefore, to know the truth about an individual, one must understand its “fixed essence” (Rae 2016, 149). This leads not only to a neglect of the uniqueness and particularity of the individual but also to a misrecognition of the role of the Other for the constitution of the self. Whereas Levinas focuses primarily on Christianity and liberalism as representatives of a concept of totality in his early essay, in his first major work, Totality and Infinity, published 27 years later in 1961, it is Western philosophy as a whole that he suspects of totality. To understand the thrust of this work, it is important to highlight that the title is not ‘From Totality to Infinity,’ since, for Levinas, it is not possible to leave the thinking of totality entirely behind. On the contrary, in a certain way, this thinking is our destiny: understanding and speaking are processes that necessarily generalize and abstract from singularity and transfer it to an order of being. In this order, the other person always comes into view only in terms of the same. This reduction of the uniqueness of the Other is often referred to as “ontological violence,” following Derrida’s famous reading of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” (1978, 164). It entails diminishing the alterity of the Other: that is, his absolute otherness in comparison to me. Crucially, Levinas argues that the order of being and the ontological violence connected with it are disturbed again and again by what he calls the ‘infinite.’ What is meant by this is the encounter with the inexhaustible uniqueness of the Other. Accordingly, he characterizes the idea of the infinite in negative terms, describing it as “transcendence with regard to totality” (Levinas 1969, 23) or as something that “cannot be stated in terms of experience” (25). Levinas critiques Western metaphysics for its inclination to neglect the relation to this infinity and for subordinating “the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of existents” (45). To navigate around this shortcoming, it is essential to delve into an encounter with the Other through a tangible face-to-face relationship. This perspective serves as a beacon for those wishing to depart from the constraints of totality. It has now become clear how Levinas’s thinking starts out from an attempt to understand totalitarianism. From there, he traces the concept of totality back through liberalism and Christianity to ancient metaphysics. Totalitarianism is thus understood as a consequence

225

Steffen Herrmann

of the concept of totality that has accompanied Western thought since ancient times. This is clearly expressed in a subsequently written prefatory note from 1990 to “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” in which Levinas emphasizes that the “bloody barbarism of National Socialism” is not an “anomaly within human reasoning” but that it is a possibility “inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being” (1990b, 63). Although the concentration camps of Nazism are not necessarily a consequence of Western ontology, they represent a possibility inscribed within it. This possibility arises from the fact that Western thought lacks an understanding of the ethical as it appears in the dimension of infinity. The political task that confronts Levinas, therefore, is to make this ethical moment visible and to integrate it into Western thought: For only where there is a simultaneous presence of totality and infinity can the possibility of totalitarianism be held in check.

3.  From Ethics to Politics: The Other and the Third Under the banner of ‘Ethics as First Philosophy,’ Levinas’ phenomenological project sets out to demonstrate that ethics precedes ontology (Peperzak 1995). It is important to understand that this is not meant as an appeal but as a fact. Levinas is not simply an advocate of morality. His claim is more fundamental and comprehensive: He wants to show that ethics always precedes ontology, whether we profess to morality or not. As human beings, we cannot help but dwell in the world of the ethical. Closely connected to this project is a demarcation from Heidegger’s phenomenology. Although Levinas is convinced that there can be no return to a pre-Heideggerian philosophy, his own reflections are carried by the “profound need” to leave the “climate of that philosophy” (1978, 19; Drabinski and Nelson 2014). Given Heidegger’s personal and theoretical involvement in the Nazi regime, this is certainly not surprising. But Levinas’s critique is remarkable insofar as it also accuses Heidegger—the great destroyer of classical metaphysics—of remaining within the f­ ramework of classical ontology. Consequently, Levinas conceives the self no longer in Heidegger’s terms of ‘finitude’ and ‘authenticity’ but rather through ‘infinity’ and ‘responsibility.’ ‘The face’ is rightly considered the central term of Levinas’s philosophy (Bernasconi, 2005, 101; Bergo 2011, 117). It has a specific, extraordinary meaning: it does not refer to the perceptible face of the Other but rather to the event wherein the Other approaches us. Levinas calls this the “epiphany of the face” (1969, 75). In this broader understanding, the ‘face’ of the Other might equally be “a hand or a curve of the shoulder” (262). The fact that other people concern us is thus not bound to the fact that they are bodily turned toward us. Levinas subsequently captures the epiphany of the face in the register of speech when he states: “The face speaks” (66). This too, however, is not to be taken in a literal sense. The face speaks not merely in the sense that it makes sounds but by addressing me and by directing itself to me. A crucial factor here is that once this demand has taken place, we cannot evade it but must respond to it. Even when we disregard the demand of the Other or delegate someone else to deal with it in our place, we are still responding because ignoring and delegating are still responses. What distinguishes the encounter with the face, then, is that we cannot evade a response. By compelling this response, the face of the Other “demands,” “commands,” or “summons,” as Levinas writes (1969, 75, 162, 215). This alone, however, does not result in an ethical character. This only comes into play through the fact that the face also “surrenders,” “supplicates,” and “appeals” (40, 75, 200). This stems from the fact that the Other in a face-to-face relationship is associated with a specific vulnerability. Levinas 226

Emmanuel Levinas

also calls this the “nudity of the face” (74). It arises from the fact that the Other exposes itself in the course of its claim to our response and that this response can be condescending, degrading, or disrespectful. What is crucial now is that even when we respond to the Other in a degrading way, we always do so with reference to his or her vulnerability. We declare that the insult was justified or that the other person is despicable. And this applies not only to the insult but also to physical violence, murder, and terror. They are all characterized by the fact that we cannot treat people like things (Margalit 1996). Levinas therefore states: “But the first thing, the miracle of the miracle, is that one person can have meaning for another person” (2005, 30). This is evident when we attempt to justify or account for even our most reprehensible actions to others. In doing so, we are affirming the realm of the ethical. Such actions bear witness to the Other’s ethical demand. In this sense, ethics is primary for Levinas. There is a gravitation toward the good that even persists in violence in a negative way and cannot be banished from our human relations. So what does taking responsibility for the demand of the Other entail in a full and positive sense? In answering this question, Levinas’s positive concept of ethics comes into play. Here, to care for the Other means to assume an asymmetrical responsibility for their vulnerability. Levinas also speaks here of an “asymmetry of the interpersonal relation” (1969, 226). One way to get a grip on this is to realize that we frequently shoulder an overwhelming responsibility for our friends and family, often prioritizing their well-being (even to our own detriment). This embodies Levinas’s insight: “[M]an is capable of putting the other’s existence before his own” (2001, 231) Levinas now takes this idea to the extreme when he speaks of an “infinite responsibility” (244). He thereby alludes to the fact that there can be no definitive answer to the demand of the Other—in the sense that our answer, even where it strives for an understanding of the Other, will not avoid exercising ontological violence. As speech inherently operates with generalizations, the asymmetrical responsibility inevitably falls short of fully acknowledging the uniqueness of the Other. Hägglund therefore rightly states that Levinas’s ethics only ever follow a trajectory of “lesser violence” (Hägglund 2008, 82). The ethical relationship with the Other is now further complicated at the moment when a third party appears. At that moment, the relationship of responsibility enters into crisis. Where one is responsible for two others, these responsibilities can collide and come into conflict. This results in what Levinas calls the “birth of the question” (1991, 157), and he describes it as follows: The third party is other than the neighbor but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other. . . . What am I to do? What have they already done to one another? Who comes before the other in my responsibility? What, then, are the other and the third party with respect to one another? Birth of the question. The first question of the interhuman is the question of justice. Henceforth it is necessary to know, to become conscious. (Levinas 1996, 168) Justice signifies an expansion of responsibility to encompass multiple others while also constricting that responsibility as this expansion is only achievable through some form of limitation. This inherent constraint compels us to perceive others in a novel manner. We have to categorize them and compare them to other others. Accordingly, the ontological 227

Steffen Herrmann

violence that was already at work in the relation of responsibility inevitably increases in the order of justice. Crucially, now, for Levinas, the relation to the third party does not succeed the relation to the other but is given simultaneously with it. “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other” (Levinas 1969, 213). Through this triangulation, not only the demands of various others but also my own demands come into view. Accordingly, in the order of justice, my demands also play a legitimate role. Thus, we are no longer dealing with an asymmetrical but with a symmetrical interpersonal structure of “reciprocal recognition” (64). With the introduction of the third party, we transition into the domain Levinas labels as politics. Whereas the term ‘ethical’ signifies the existence of moral justifications concerning others in general and ‘responsibility’ defines the positive ethical relationship to others, ‘justice’ stands for the overarching guidelines of coexistence as manifested in state constitutions and laws. Politics is the realm in which competing ethical demands are to be mediated. For “if one speaks of justice, it is necessary to allow judges, it is necessary to allow institutions and the state; to live in a world of citizens, and not only in the order of the Face to Face” (1998, 105). If Levinas ultimately allows responsibility to culminate in justice, then the question naturally arises as to why he takes the long detour via the face-to-face encounter and asymmetrical responsibility in order to explain it. The following passage provides an answer to this question: “But, on the other hand, it is in terms of the relation to the Face or of me before the other that we can speak of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state” (105). Levinas is suggesting to us here that the political order can only be adequately grasped if it is understood against the backdrop of its infinite responsibility for the Other. Accordingly, however, if there can be neither pure ethics nor pure politics, then Levinas’s approach can rightly be described as an ethico-political one (Flatscher and Seitz 2018). I will show what this means in the next step.

4.  Levinas’s Political Thought: The Just State We saw in the last step that politics is deeply embedded in Levinas’s thinking. Starting from the responsibility for the Other, it emerges as a question of justice. This centrality of justice for the understanding of the political is also expressed in the fact that Levinas often speaks of the “just state” (2001, 112). This state is not to be understood and evaluated in terms of concern for oneself but in terms of concern for others. Its origin is not egocentric but ethical. In this way, Levinas’s reflections differ from classical contract theory, as exemplified by Thomas Hobbes. Directed against him, he holds: It is then not without importance to know if the egalitarian and just State in which man is fulfilled .  .  . proceeds from a war of all against all, or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for all, and if it can do without friendship and faces. (1991, 159) Instead of the just state, Levinas also speaks generally in some places of “democracy” or the “liberal state” (2001, 203, 51). The latter may be surprising. First of all, Hobbes, against whom Levinas distinguishes himself, is generally regarded nowadays as the founding father of liberalism, and secondly, we saw at the beginning that Levinas develops his reflections precisely in distinction to the ontology of liberalism. Let us first see what Levinas has to say about the state before we go back to these questions. 228

Emmanuel Levinas

The concept of justice in Levinas emerges from a sense of overwhelming responsibility: It is not merely my immediate neighbor who challenges me with demands; it is also my neighbor’s neighbor and the neighbor of this neighbor, and so on—each confronting me with demands that necessitate a response. This moment of generality marks an emancipative moment of justice. It points us to the fact that our responsibility must not stop with our immediate neighbors but must also affect those whom we do not initially have in mind. We must, out of respect for the categorical imperative or the other’s right as expressed by his face, un-face human beings, sternly reducing each one’s uniqueness to his individuality in the unity of the genre, and let universality rule. Thus we need laws, and— yes—courts of law, institutions and the state to render justice. (Levinas 1994, 174) Although Levinas here mentions the indispensability of laws, courts, and institutions, his oeuvre conspicuously lacks an in-depth exploration of a political system that grapples with the intricacies of public opinion formulation, the dynamics of institutional power, or the mechanics of political governance. Levinas has little interest in such questions. Instead, his preoccupation is with how we should relate to justice within a state from an ethical standpoint. Two lines of thought can be distinguished here: Firstly, Levinas emphasizes at various points that liberal democracy is characterized by the fact that decisions can always be questioned and renegotiated. “That is perhaps the very excellence of democracy, whose fundamental liberalism corresponds to the ceaseless deep remorse of justice: legislation always unfinished, always resumed, a legislation open to the better” (Levinas 2001, 206). Liberal democracy is primarily characterized by its lack of a definitive conception of justice. Instead, what is deemed just arises from the process of selflegislation. In this process, citizens debate how to collectively shoulder their responsibility for one another, ensuring that everyone has a part in it. In the words of Claude Lefort, the place of power in democracy has become an “empty place” (Lefort 1991, 17), which must be constantly reoccupied in the course of conflictual disputes. And it is precisely in this respect that the liberal state stands in contrast to the totalitarian state. For in the latter, according to Levinas, a fixed conception of justice prevails: “When the State lays claim to an unvarying justice that is logically deduced, one must suspect Stalinism and fascism” (2001, 231). Liberal and totalitarian states thus differ, first of all, in that the latter is based on a closed and the former on an open conception of justice. Nevertheless, open does not mean arbitrary. The yardstick for measuring justice is, and always will be, responsibility toward others. However, given that this responsibility can be realized in numerous ways, no definitive rules for establishing political systems can be derived solely from ethical relationships. Instead, politics should be viewed as a continuous process of upholding our ethical responsibilities. Levinas also refers to this as a “permanent revolution” (1998, 88). Secondly, even if the liberal state is superior to the totalitarian state because of its open conception of justice, this does not mean that it is free of all violence. Even if it does not act unjustly or tyrannically toward its citizens, it must nevertheless establish an order of justice that must necessarily abstract from singularity. In this sense, Levinas states: For me, the negative element, the element of violence in the State, in the hierarchy, appears even when the hierarchy functions perfectly, when everyone submits to universal ideas. There are cruelties that are terrible because they proceed from the 229

Steffen Herrmann

necessity of the reasonable order. There are, if you like, the tears that a civil servant cannot see: the tears of the Other. (1996, 23) Here, Levinas underscores the fact that any established order brings with it a form of ontological violence. This inherent violence—associated with the state—must continually be challenged by emphasizing what resists quantification by objective reason. Political action in this context means reminding the civil servants and the political public again and again of those sufferings that have no place in regular political life and yet persist as suffering and are relevant. We can term this a ‘politics of interruption.’ While politics in the mode of ‘permanent revolution’ seeks continual improvement of justice, politics in the mode of ‘interruption’ focuses on constantly reminding us of what the political order neglects or rejects. To explain this dynamic, Levinas often draws on two seemingly contradictory statements in the Torah: Deuteronomy 1:17 and Numbers 6:26. He rephrases both passages in the following way: “Do not look at an individual’s face when judging,” and “Make his face to shine upon thee” (2001, 231). These passages might seem mutually exclusive: The first emphasizes the primacy of justice and the second the primacy of responsibility. The Talmud, Levinas continues, resolves this apparent contradiction by temporalizing it: “The first before the verdict, the second afterward” (231). He thus interprets this passage to mean that in the order of justice, there must always be a place for responsibility in the form of charity: “When the verdict of justice is pronounced, there remains for the unique I that I am the possibility of finding something more to soften the verdict. There is a place for charity after justice” (1988, 175). Responsibility not only precedes and drives justice but must also follow it. It must continually correct justice and prevent it from becoming absolute. Levinas’s reflections on the just state show us that there is no ethics without politics, just as, conversely, there is no politics without ethics. Each continually corrects and informs the other. Aaron Simmons speaks here of a “never-ending oscillation” (1999, 84). Since the ethical and the political do not coincide, democracy and justice, as Derrida puts it, always remain “to come” (1992, 27). Bearing this in mind, if we ask again what Levinas thinks of liberalism, it becomes clear that he used liberalism exclusively as a counter-concept to totalitarianism. This broad concept of liberalism is to be distinguished from a narrower concept of liberalism in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, which sees the task of the state as the defense of individual liberty. Levinas’s politics of alterity cannot align with such a conception, focused solely on the self. Instead, it can be aligned with philosophical republicanism, which, following Rousseau’s tradition, views fraternity as the cornerstone of state coexistence (Caygill 2002, 30; Nelson 2012, 73). Levinas follows this tradition when he adopts fraternity as a pivotal term in his philosophy. However, he imparts a unique character to the term. Typically, fraternity is perceived as a bond of solidarity between the self and the Other, rooted in a shared commonality. In contrast, Levinas contends: “That all men are brothers is not explained by their resemblance, nor by a common cause of which they would be the effect” (1969, 214). According to Levinas, fraternity does not stem from commonality but from difference. It is the infinite alterity of the Other that gives rise to asymmetrical responsibility. As previously mentioned, the nature of such a relationship can be best understood through the intensity of familial bonds. Thus, it is fitting to describe the asymmetrical responsibility toward a neighbor using the term ‘fraternity,’ even if Derrida (1997) reminds us of the androcentric implications of this term. From this fraternity, Levinas argues further, 230

Emmanuel Levinas

emerges not only justice but also freedom. Instead of an individualistic interpretation of freedom—in which freedom signifies the capacity to initiate something from nothing— Levinas views freedom as always being “freedom invested” (1969, 302). It is realized in our response to the demand of the Other and the third. Thus, it does not emanate from within us but originates from our openness to the other person. Although we cannot avoid responding to the Other’s demand, we do have a choice as to how we answer that call. When reflecting on these considerations against the backdrop of the French Revolution’s slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” it becomes evident that Levinas reads this slogan, as it were, from the opposite side. At the forefront is no longer the question of liberty but rather the fact that we are always already possessed by the Other. It is our fraternity with other people that pushes us toward equality and from which our vested freedom emerges. Consequently, Levinas develops a distinct form of republicanism, which can be termed here a ‘republicanism of alterity.’

5. Outlook Levinas’s political thought has been prominently taken up and critically commented on by Gillian Rose (2016), Alain Badiou (2001), Howard Caygill (2002), Judith Butler (2004, 2012), and Simon Critchley (2015), among others. Michael Morgan has insightfully collected and discussed these objections in a chapter titled “Levinas and His Critics” (2016, Chapter 11). This gives me the opportunity to conclude by highlighting two approaches from the field of political theory that otherwise receive little attention in Levinas scholarship: First, I would like to draw attention to the conceptual links to a politics of difference as we see them in the work of William Connolly (1991, 2005) and Iris Marion Young (1989, 1990). Like Levinas, Young contends that the political concept of universal justice entails a form of violence that fails to account for the unique starting conditions of political subjects. In her writings, she elaborates—at times directly referencing Levinas—on the concept of differentiated justice, which aims to address the unique situations of political subjects. Thus, Young’s politics is oriented toward a ‘lesser violence’ approach, seeking to reduce ontological violence by making the political system more just, specifically by adapting it to individual particularities. The second line of connection relates to radical democratic thought as it developed in the French tradition. When Levinas refers to ‘revolutionary politics’ in his Talmud readings, aiming to disrupt the order of the ‘police’ (1990c), we see an interpretation of politics that resonates with Jacques Rancière’s (1999) terms (Drabinski 2007). While Rancière distances himself from Levinas’s thinking (1999, 135), Miguel Abensour (2011), in his Democracy Against the State, explicitly follows Levinas’s motifs. Much like him, he views the role of politics as disrupting political routines, highlighting the deficits, boundaries, and aporias of justice, thereby keeping open the possibility of a political revolution. The dialogue between Levinas and the radical theory of democracy seems to me to be particularly fruitful because Levinas’s concept of alterity offers a standard against which the political order has to be measured and proven again and again without giving it a final foundation. Accordingly, Levinas can be considered a post-foundationalist thinker avant la lettre (Marchart 2007; Rae 2016). Undoubtedly, any contemporary political philosophy that draws affirmatively from Levinas must also address its inherent issues. Simon Critchley (2004) insightfully pinpointed a range of problems, categorizing them under terms like ‘fraternity,’ ‘androcentrism,’ and 231

Steffen Herrmann

‘descent.’ These suggest that, despite their radical nature, Levinas’ reflections frequently remain within the horizon of phallogocentrism. Thus, Levinas’s thought is itself permeated by an ontological violence, which, in turn, must once again be subjected to critical questioning (Irigaray 1986). The same is true of Levinas’s engagement with other cultures. Here, his recourse to Jewish and Greek thought threatens to turn into evolutionary supremacy. This bias is glaringly evident when, in an interview, he dismisses other cultures as beneath consideration, suggesting that all they are is just “dance” (Mortley 1991, 18). An unsettling Eurocentrism is also evident in his remarks about the “rise of countless masses of Asiatic and underdeveloped people” (Levinas 1990a, 165), who he also refers to as the “yellow peril” (Levinas 2004, 108). Undoubtedly, such passages testify to the white male situatedness of the author, which can give rise to doubts about his thinking. Nevertheless, feminist and postcolonial thinkers have repeatedly emphasized that Levinas’s philosophy provides important impulses, insofar as it is committed to a radical opening toward the Other. It seems reasonable, then, to hope that Levinas’s philosophy will be receptive to opening up to other notions of solidarity, gender, culture, and kinship (Chanter 2001; Drabinski 2001; Guenther 2012; Sealey 2015; Coe 2019), thus unleashing the full potential of a politics of alterity.

References Abensour, Miguel. 2011. Democracy Against the State. Marx and the Machiavellian Moment. Cambridge: Polity Press. Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London/New York: Verso. Bedorf, Thomas. 2006. “The Irreducible Conflict. Subjectivity, Alterity and the Third.” Archivio di Filosofia 74 (1–3): 259–70. Bell, Nathan. 2018. “ ‘In the Face, a Right Is There’: Arendt, Levinas and the Phenomenology of the Rights of Man.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 49 (4): 291–307. Bergo, Bettina. 2003. Levinas between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty That Adorns the Earth. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2011. “The Face in Levinas.” Angelaki: A  Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16 (1): 17–39. Bernasconi, Robert. 2005. “No Exit: Levinas’ Aporetic Account of Transcendence.” Research in Phenomenology 35 (1): 101–17. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London/New York: Verso. ———. 2012. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Caygill, Howard. 2002. Levinas and the Political. London: Routledge. Chanter, Tina. 2001. Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Coe, Cynthia. 2019. “Levinas, Feminism, and Temporality.” In Oxford Handbook of Levinas, edited by Michael K. Morgan, 731–48. New York: Oxford University Press. Connolly, William E. 1991. Identity/Difference. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Critchley, Simon. 2004. “Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them.” Political Theory 32 (2): 172–85. ———. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. ———. 2015. The Problem with Levinas, edited by Alexis Dianda. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

232

Emmanuel Levinas ———. 1992. “Force of Law. The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, translated by Mary Quaintance, 3–67. London: Routledge. ———. 1997. Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso. Drabinski, John E. 2000. “The Possibility of an Ethical Politics. From Peace to Liturgy.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (4): 49–73. ———. 2001. Levinas and the Postcolonial. Race, Nation, Other. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2007. “Who Are His Poor? Reading Levinas with Rancière.” International Studies in Philosophy 39 (4): 1–14. ———, and Eric S. Nelson, eds. 2014. Between Levinas and Heidegger. Albany: SUNY Press. Eisenstadt, Oona. 2006. “Levinas and Adorno: Universalizing the Jew after Auschwitz.” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14 (1–2): 131–51. ———, and Claire Katz. 2016. “The Faceless Palestinian. A History of an Error.” Telos 174 (Spring): 9–32. Fagan, Madeleine. 2009. “The Inseparability of Ethics and Politics: Rethinking the Third in Emmanuel Levinas.” Contemporary Political Theory 8 (1): 5–22. Flatscher, Matthias, and Sergej Seitz. 2018. “The Ethico-Political Turn of Phenomenology: Reflections on Otherness in Husserl and Levinas.” In Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, edited by Luca Vanzago, Michela Summa, and Thomas Fuchs, 321–41. London/New York: Routledge. Guenther, Lisa. 2012. “Fecundity and Natal Alienation: Rethinking Kinship with Emmanuel Levinas and Orlando Patterson.” Levinas Studies 7 (1): 1–19. Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Herzog, Annabel. 2020. Levinas’s Politics. Justice, Mercy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1986. “The Fecundity of the Caress: A  Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros’.” In Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard Cohen, translated by Carolyn Burke, 231–56. Albany: SUNY Press. Janicaud, Dominique. 2000. Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”. The French Debate. Translated by Bernhard G. Prusak. New York: Fordham University Press. Lefort, Claude. 1991. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1978. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1988. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas.” In The Provocation of Levinas. Rethinking the Other, edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, translated by Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, 168–81. London: Routledge. ———. 1990a. Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1990b. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1): 62–71. ———. 1990c. “Judaism and Revolution.” In Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz, 94–119. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1991. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1994. “On Jewish Philosophy.” In In the Time of the Nations, translated by Michael B. Smith, 167–83. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996. “Peace and Proximity.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, translated by Peter Atterton and Simon Critchley, 161–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. Entre nous. Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001. Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Jill Robbins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

233

Steffen Herrmann ———. 2004. Unforeseen History. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2005. “Antlitz oder erste Gewalt. Ein Gespräch mit Hans-Joachim Lenger über Phänomenologie und Ethik.” In Levinas Ethik im Kontext, edited by Christian Kupke, 11–24. Berlin: Parados. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Margalit, Avishai. 1996. The Decent Society. Translated by Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morgan, Michael. 2016. Levinas’s Ethical Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mortley, Raoul. 1991. “Emmanuel Levinas.” In French Philosopher’s in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida, 11–24. London/New York: Routledge. Nelson, Eric S. 2012. “Against Liberty. Adonro, Levinas and the Pathologies of Freedom.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 59 (131): 64–83. Peperzak, Adriaan T., ed. 1995. Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. New York: Routledge. Rae, Gavin. 2016. The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. London: Palgrave. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Dis-Agreement. Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, Gillia. 2016. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sealey, Kris. 2015. “Power as (or in) Vulnerability: Levinas and Fanon on an Ethical Politics.” Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture 50 (1): 38−45. Shaw, Joshua. 2010. “Is Levinas’s Philosophy a Response to the Holocaust?” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 18 (2): 121–46. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2019. “Levinas, Politics, and the Third Party.” In Oxford Handbook of Levinas, edited by Michael Morgan, 279–302. New York: Oxford University Press. Simmons, William Paul. 1999. “The Third Levinas’ Theoretical Move from An-Archical Ethics to the Realm of Justice and Politics.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (6): 83–104. ———. 2003. An- Archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’s Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Spargo, R. Clifton. 2006.  Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: JHU Press. Topolski, Anya.  2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. Lanham, MD: Rowman  & Littlefield. Young, Iris Marion. 1989. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship:” Ethics 99 (2): 250–74. ———. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

234

17 PAUL RICŒUR The Political Through the Lens of Oneself as Another Dries Deweer

1. Introduction Paul Ricœur’s main contribution to political phenomenology consists of the elaboration of the political paradox. Initially, the concept of the political paradox was the product of phenomenological reflection on political power on the occasion of the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Ricœur identified the events as an expression of a structural problem for revolutions: Ending socio-economic oppression without recognizing the independence of political oppression is doomed to end the first type of oppression only by multiplication of the other kind. The political always implies risks of its own, despite its potential for steering us towards a better future (Ricœur 1965, 247–70). After this initial occasion, the concept of the political paradox returned to the forefront of Ricœur’s philosophy during the final decades of his career. In this chapter, I  will clarify how he eventually distinguished paradoxical combinations of political form and political force, of horizontal and vertical political relationships, and of the bounded and bounding character of the political sphere. To get into view Ricœur’s political solution to the political paradox, we have to turn to his hermeneutic phenomenology of selfhood and alterity as it is presented in his seminal work, Oneself as Another. Here, Ricœur argues that civic responsibility only comes to life within institutional relationships since they allow bridging the gap between ethics and politics. The pursuit of “the good life with and for others in just institutions” (Ricœur 1992, 180), therefore, is at the heart of Ricœur’s hermeneutic phenomenology. The third element of this formula implies that the political task of human persons is a continuation of their ethical task. In other words, the political task consists of developing and conserving an institutional framework that structurally enables everyone to make full use of their human capabilities, considering both the role and the risk implied by the political paradoxes. Ricœur’s response to the political paradox, I will finally show, has important implications for political phenomenology. First of all, it allows the situating of Ricœur in the republican tradition of political philosophy, albeit in a version of his own. Furthermore, it has the potential for a genuine conceptual and normative study of democratic praxis.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-26

235

Dries Deweer

2.  The Political Paradox(es) Ricœur’s reflection on the Hungarian uprising was methodologically in line with his philosophy of the will, his magnum opus developed around that time (Ricœur 1966, 1986a). This phenomenological approach consisted of “extracting essential meanings from lived experiences, . . . carried out in reflection not in introspection” (Moran 2017, 187). The result of this analysis applied to the human will was the attestation of a dialectical relationship between finitude and infinitude at the heart of “the capable human being.” Following Emmanuel Mounier, Ricœur elaborated a “tragic optimism” of human beings characterized throughout by mediation between recognition of our own boundedness and a more original affirmation of life (Ricœur 1965, 168–72). The affirmation of human capability implied a specific perspective on liberty. Society, being the product of our actions, externalizes our freedom while also conditioning what we do in the future and, therefore, our freedom. The institutional mediation of freedom implies that political institutions both enable and endanger our freedom, but tragic optimism reveals itself in the affirmation that the non-pathological side surpasses the pathological side (Ricœur 1986a). That was the phenomenological starting point for Ricœur’s idea of the political paradox. Ricœur’s original formulation of the political paradox stated that the greatest “promise” goes hand in hand with the gravest “risk,” to use the words of Bernard Dauenhauer (1998, 66–68). The core idea is rather simple: political power is what allows us as human beings to build our societies, but this positive potential is intrinsically linked to the threat of oppression. It is precisely because the State is a certain expression of the rationality of history, a triumph over the passions of the individual man, over “civil” interests, and even over class interests, that it is the most exposed and most threatened aspect of man’s grandeur, the most prone to evil. . . . Henceforth, man cannot evade politics under penalty of evading his humanity. Throughout history, and by means of politics, man is faced with his grandeur and his culpability. (Ricœur 1965, 261) The idea of a paradox at the heart of the political phenomenon was initially not much more elaborate than this awareness that politics can lead to both good and evil and that political evil is evil because of the good political action is supposed to beget, while the political good is only good if we remain aware of the evil that lurks around the corner (Ricœur 1959, 1965, 247–70). However, since the 1980s, Ricœur developed this initial idea of the political paradox into three distinct but related versions, in conversation with different authors and in different contexts.1 In a first reformulation of his idea of the political paradox—in conversation with ­Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, and Éric Weil—Ricœur (1991a, 325–38) emphasized three different kinds of political evil. The first is related to the founding of a state, which is never free from war, violent revolution, and oppression. Second, this original violence always remains present in the form of residual violence, for politics will always be marked by a struggle for power, with all kinds of violence and oppression attached. Finally, the state is essentially not universal, which implies exclusion and rivalry. However, in light of the political paradox, even the distinction between different faces of political violence did not 236

Paul Ricœur

overshadow political rationality in Ricœur’s reflection. Both rationality (form) and violence (force) constitute the state. The concept of ‘form’ refers to the rational side of the establishment of political power, principally embodied in a constitution that enshrines equality before the law and mutual checks and balances between the branches of government. Force, on the other hand, refers to the distinct faces of political violence, of the original and residual kind. Political power always brings form and force together, according to Ricœur, especially when violence attached to the founding of a state is institutionalized under pressure of legal rationality. But even the rule of law does not escape this paradox. It is never only about the law but is also about force, which is visible in the police forces’ monopoly on violence. Ricœur’s paradox uncovers a fragile equilibrium at the heart of the rule of law, in the sense that force is to remain subject to legal form, which is to ensure its humanization and institutionalization (Ricœur 1991a, 325–38, 1993, 14, 2003, 133–34). Later, Ricœur (1991b, 15–66, 1992, 256–62, 1993, 15) distinguished a different political paradox, which he considered even more fundamental than the paradox of form and force, inspired by Hannah Arendt (1970) and her distinction between the power to act in common and violence. His interpretation of Arendt enabled Ricœur to clarify intuitions that were at the basis of his political thought all along about jointly taking responsibility for a collective future being the source of power. This led to a second version of his political paradox. He identified the horizontal relationship between people who share the will to live together as a necessary condition for the existence of a political community, but it is not a sufficient condition because there is always a vertical political relationship between rulers and ruled as well. Both relationships constitute the political, which implies a fragility of its own, as the horizontal relationship is always in danger of being forgotten behind the prominence of the vertical relationship of domination and subordination (2003, 134). Finally, a third version of the political paradox resulted from theories about the plurality of societal spheres (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991; Walzer 1983). Ricœur argued that there is something wrong with these theories when they treat the political sphere like any other sphere, for there is something particular about the political in comparison to other societal spheres, such as the economic, scientific, or cultural sphere. He pointed at a tension within the political between its specific role as a sphere among other spheres and its special role as overarching instance entrusted with the task of setting and checking the boundaries between societal spheres in such a way that every sphere fulfils its role without encroaching on territory on which it is not supposed to tread. The latter risk applies to the market sphere in particular, as Ricœur argued in reference to contemporary neoliberalism. Considering this understanding, the third paradox concerns the fragile combination of the bounded and the bounding role of the political. The political sphere has an important role to play while dancing on a tightrope. It is to avoid other spheres overstepping their boundaries without overstepping its own (Ricœur 1995a, 2000, 76–93). Ricœur’s phenomenology of the political paradox was always meant to imply a call to responsibility. The different paradoxes all lead Ricœur (2017, 65–74) to argue that vigilant and active citizenship is required to avoid political imbalances. Only a dynamic participatory and associative democracy can safeguard legitimate exercise of political power. The fragile equilibria of the distinct political paradoxes require personal commitment of citizens in a plural and effective civil society (Ricœur 1998, 41–94, 2003, 135). It is only the continuous democratic commitment of the citizens that can contain violence within the rational boundaries of the rule of law, avoid the domination of the rulers overpowering the collective 237

Dries Deweer

power-in-common of the will to live together, and provide space for other societal spheres while keeping the market sphere from pushing everything else away.

3.  Fragility and Responsibility The connection between political fragility and political responsibility required a phenomenological account of the concept of responsibility. In Oneself as Another (1992), Ricœur had linked responsibility to the temporal dimension of personhood, referring to the present in which one must recognize having a past and a future as well. In his elaboration of what makes us responsible in present, past, and future, Ricœur relied on Hans Jonas (1984), whose phenomenology of responsibility emphasizes that responsibility always concerns something fragile entrusted to us. It is the fragility itself that urges us to take a conscious course of action. As Ricœur (2003, 128; author’s translation) puts it: “We feel required, enjoined by the fragile . . . enjoined to do something . . . to help, certainly, but better yet, to make grow, to allow for accomplishment and flourishing.ˮ2 Responsibility is, therefore, not only the ability to recognize oneself as the author of one’s actions but also an attitude toward the fragile. Both dimensions, one past oriented and the other future oriented, rely on each other in Ricœur’s account of responsibility (Ricœur 1992, 294–96, 2003, 129–30, 2007, 72–90). Given the premise that responsibility is required by the fragile, the connection between the political paradox and political responsibility is clear. It is precisely the fragility of politics that is expressed in the paradox, together with an implicit appeal to civic responsibility: “If the fragile is in all circumstance the object itself of responsibility, like Hans Jonas teaches us in The Imperative of Responsibility, then politics, because of its own fragility, is left in the vigilance and care of the citizens” (Ricœur 1993, 17; author’s translation). Human affairs are always tainted by fragility, as Ricœur (1986a) had already emphasized early on in his career, in his phenomenology of the will. Nevertheless, political responsibility is something he considered special. The specificity of responsibility in the political domain is related to the meaning of citizenship that resulted from Ricœur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of selfhood and alterity. His anthropology was aimed at the attestation of personhood, despite the postmodern breakdown of the Cartesian subject at the hands of those he himself termed “masters of suspicion” (Ricœur 1970). Throughout his reflections on the speaking, acting, narrating, and responsible self, he argued for the need to recognize the other in order to attain attestation of the self (Ricœur 1992). The starting point of this philosophical recovery of personhood was the suggestion that the self is to be understood as a text, which led to the distinction between idem-identity (sameness across time) and ipse-identity (identifiability across changes over time). He singled out the particularity of ipse-identity by means of the notion of a promise, wherein a self-affirmation takes place that defies changes over time (Ricœur 1992, 113–39). This connection with the concept of the promise would suggest that the self initiates their own responsibility for the other, which runs counter the phenomenology of the Other maintained by Emmanuel Levinas (1961), who emphasizes that the Other has always already raised my responsibility. Ricœur (1992, 180–94) rejected this radical asymmetry by claiming that the self-constitutive effect of the appeal by the Other is still dependent on a receptivity on the part of the self. However, this does not mean that the self governs responsibility or meaning. Asymmetry remains in place in Ricœur’s phenomenology of selfhood and alterity. There is only a self because the other makes the self responsible for actions imputed to the self. The other is both the source of 238

Paul Ricœur

my call to action and the sufferer of my actions. The latter passivity does not get the upper hand, and the asymmetry prevails because of the “benevolent spontaneity” (Ricœur 1992, 190) that characterizes the self. The fragility of this benevolent spontaneity requires institutional mediation between selfhood and alterity (Remodo n.d.; Venema 2000). Therefore, the recovery of selfhood eventually comes down to the attestation that human beings are “capable” after all, while simultaneously pointing at the necessity of not only interpersonal but also institutional mediation for the development of those human capabilities—the capabilities of the speaking, acting, narrating, and ethically and juridically responsible person: “Man defines himself fundamentally by means of powers that don’t achieve their full achievement unless under the regime of political existence, in other words, in the context of a political community” (Ricœur 1993, 6; author’s translation). The role of institutional relationships in his anthropology, distinct from interpersonal relationships, constitutes a crucial connector between ethics and politics (Ricœur 1995b, 51–52). This is prominent in Ricœur’s (1992, 180) famous ethical formula of the pursuit of “the good life with and for others in just institutions,” which is the culmination of his anthropology. The third element of the formula implies that the political task of human beings is an extension of their ethical responsibility. In other words, our political vocation is to create and maintain an institutional framework that allows everyone the full development of their human capacities in a sustainable manner. Not any institutional framework will do the job. The formula explicitly mentions “just institutions,” which Ricœur himself saw as an expression of the political domain’s belonging within the scope of ethical interaction (Ricœur 1993, 10–11). Political ethics is therefore not to be separated from the fundamental ethical aim, but it concerns a distinct dimension of it: namely, the recognition of the unique dignity of every individual person in the will to live together: Justice, by means of its distributive character, brings the element of distinction, articulation, coordination, that lacks in the notion of the will to live together, which, without this important corrective, would yield to the fusional decline of the relation to the other, like nationalisms and other reductions of the political bond to an ethnic bond verify. (Ricœur 1993, 11–12; author’s translation) The political is therefore a field of application of the ethical pursuit. It concerns the creation of “spaces of liberties” and equality before the law as the absolute minimum (Ricœur 1991a, 334–35, 1993, 12).3 Ricœur clearly emphasized the bond between ethics and politics, but he did not ignore the particularity of the political. He explicitly used the distinction between interpersonal and institutional relationships to distance himself from theoretical tendencies to think of the political community after the model of friendship. The particularity of long, indirect relationships that connect us to anonymous others within institutions shows itself in the focus on justice, rather than friendly solicitude in close, direct relationships between persons (Ricœur 1999). The autonomy of the political came to the fore in a similar way in Ricœur’s reflections on happiness. He argued that the just cannot be detached from the good (the ethical aim), but he emphasized simultaneously that politics should not be aimed at making people happy. Happiness is always out of reach (hors lieu), especially in the political domain. A state aimed at the happiness of its citizens results in horrible oppression. 239

Dries Deweer

Nevertheless, the state should aim for the public conditions for happiness: namely, a just distribution of social primary goods, which is only possible if the political remains connected to the ethical and if formal principles of justice remain rooted in a more fundamental sense of justice (Ricœur 1991b, 178–88, 1994, 332–36). This argument about the state fulfilling its role in the creation of a proper framework for human happiness without overstepping brings us back to the political paradoxes (Abel 1992, 37–38). The phenomenological connection between anthropology, ethics, and politics resurfaces here. The hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject presented personhood with a combination of huge potential and fundamental fragility. This general vulnerability of personhood perseveres in the fragility of the political. The state has an important role to play in the institutional mediation of human capabilities but a problematic one: “[T]hese capacities would remain virtual, even aborted and repressed, in the absence of interpersonal and institutional mediations, the State figuring a problematic place among these latter” (Ricœur 2000, 9). It is this problem that characterizes Ricœur’s approach to citizenship. The way of defining citizenship influences the responsibilities it entails. Ricœur argued that the mainstream liberal conception of citizenship is based on the subject as bearer of rights prior to the community. This is also the conception of citizenship at the heart of social contract theory. However, this perspective entails a kind of atomism of which Ricœur (1991b, 163; author’s translation) disputed the anthropological presuppositions: “It is a hypothetical construction that represents the retroactive projection of an achievement of social evolution, namely the promotion of the autonomous individual, to the top of the hierarchy of values of human society” (1991b, 163; author’s translation). Based on his phenomenological account of selfhood and alterity, he defended the idea of citizenship born from the recognition that the political community is constitutive of human action or, in other words, that the human being only becomes a free person, bearer of rights and capabilities, within a given institutional framework. The difference in terms of the implied responsibilities is considerable: [If] the individual considers himself as originally bearer of rights, he will take society and all of the ensuing efforts to be a mere instrument of security under the protection of which he will pursue selfish goals and he will consider his participation as conditional and revocable. If, however, he takes himself to be in debt by birth with regard to institutions that exclusively enable him to become a free agent, then he will consider himself obliged to these institutions, particularly obliged to make these institutions accessible to others. (Ricœur 1991b, 164; author’s translation) Our responsibility as citizens with regard to political institutions is, therefore, not just an implication of the fragility expressed in the political paradoxes. It is also a duty resulting from the intersection of selfhood and alterity, in the sense that we can only recognize ourselves by recognizing alterity, not only in the self-constitutive character of our relationships with other persons but also in our self-constitutive relationships with the institutions that enable us to develop as human persons: In other words, it is not legitimate for the individual to reap the benefits of belonging to a community without paying his dues. Belonging develops an obligation, to 240

Paul Ricœur

the extent that the capacities of which the flourishing depends on this belonging are themselves worthy of respect. (Ricœur 1991b, 164; author’s translation) As a result, Ricœur placed our political responsibilities as citizens in line with our ethical responsibilities as human beings. Given that political institutions enable the pursuit of the good life with and for others in just institutions and given the special fragility that characterizes these institutions, care for these political institutions is an integral part of the ethical pursuit.4

4. Outlook The perspectives in contemporary political philosophy opened up by Ricœur’s political phenomenology are countless.5 I will tentatively address two of these: namely, his relationship to republicanism and an outlook on democratic praxis. Many commentators have situated his contribution in the discussion between liberalism and communitarianism (Dallmayr 2002; Dauenhauer 2010; Kaplan 2003; Michel 2006). The particularity of his thought is, however, better served by an interpretation in light of contemporary republicanism. The particularity of republicanism mainly consists of its conception of freedom as the absence of domination, which requires a constitution that sufficiently restricts those in power, and a vigilant citizenry on the lookout for infringements of the authorities on their rights and liberties and willing to act against any such transgression (Pettit 2012, 5–8). These core ideas of republicanism are reflected in Ricœur’s political phenomenology. First, it is important to see that the political paradox and, hence, Ricœur’s political thought in general is about freedom: “[T]he central problem of politics is freedom: whether the State founds freedom by means of its rationality, or whether freedom limits the passions of power through its resistance” (Ricœur 1965, 270). The concept of freedom envisaged here is definitely republican in nature. Ricœur argued that real political freedom consists of the elimination of the alienation at the dark side of political power; freedom is the absence of illegitimate, arbitrary power-over (Ricœur 1959, 52). Second, in response to the political paradox, the question is how to realize freedom of non-domination. Ricœur emphasized that the conclusion of the paradoxical nature of politics should not be défaitisme. Rather it is supposed to give rise to a vigilant and active citizenry. Given the fact that political power confronts man with opportunity as well as risk, the conclusion is that every citizen has a duty to enact political vigilance and the willingness to move from critical reflection to action (Ricœur 1965, 260–61). This brings us to the third core idea of ­republicanism—the idea of a mixed constitution—which was also present in Ricœur’s inferences from the political paradox. The institutional framework of democracy must be such that a vigilant citizenry can have an adequate influence, and it should also guarantee the necessary automatic checks and balances within the system itself, not leaving the power in single hands. The political rationality expressed in the political paradox implies that the constitution needs to establish institutional techniques that make the exercise of power possible but the abuse of power impossible: The notion of “control” derives directly from the central paradox of man’s political existence; it is the practical resolution of this paradox. To be sure, it is, of course, necessary that the State be but that it not be too much. It must direct, organize, and 241

Dries Deweer

make decisions so that the political animal himself might be; but it must not lead to the tyrant. (Ricœur 1965, 262) The reformulation of the political paradox in terms of the special function of the political sphere—as sphere next to other spheres and, at the same time, as border patrol between the spheres—reframed the issue of the mixed constitution. The balance between the roles of the state as bounding and bounded is, on the one hand, a matter of a strong state, able to resist the border-crossing dynamics of the economic (or any other) sphere and, on the other hand, a matter of a state that knows how to deal with a separation of power between different instances and levels (Ricœur 1995a, 134–42). Although Ricœur’s political philosophy answers the essential requirements of talking about a kind of republicanism, he nevertheless preserves a distinct identity in comparison with the mainstream branches of contemporary republicanism: namely, civic republicanism (Skinner 1984; Pettit 1997) and civic humanism (Arendt 1958; Sandel 1996). Ricœur shared the perspective on civic duties from the idea of freedom as non-­ domination, in which active citizenship is a necessary countermeasure against the inclination toward domination that political power entails. However, whereas civic republicanists explicitly reject any positive conception of freedom, Ricœur embraced such a conception. He left no doubt that his conception of liberty was, in fact, a positive one. That is the bearing of the attestation of the ethical orientation in all human action toward living the good life with and for others in just institutions. What Ricœur essentially rejected was the liberalindividualist starting point of civic republicanism, given the fact that civic republicanists, in fact, remain within the boundaries of liberal individualism (Kymlicka 2001, 331–46; Rawls 1993, 205–6; Patten 1996). This leaves them all the more vulnerable to the communitarian criticism of liberalism, which argues that liberal principles provide no or insufficient basis to support necessary civic virtue (Sandel 1984, 1996; Taylor 1989). The fact that civic republicanism relies even more strongly on civic virtue makes it all the more disputable. Ricœur’s positive conception of liberty—and the implied hermeneutical phenomenological attestation of the idea that selfhood is connected to responsibility to and solicitude for others—makes it possible to circumvent this difficulty. Given his positive conception of freedom, we might be tempted to think that Ricœur was closer to civic humanism. However, this neglects the fact that Ricœur’s positive conception of freedom is significantly different from the conception of civic humanists. The core of civic humanism is the controversial idea that active participation in the selfgovernment of the political community is intrinsically valuable (Sandel 1996, 25). Ricœur’s positive conception of freedom, by contrast, was not based on the intrinsic value of selfgovernment. He did not think of self-government as an intrinsic good but as a necessary condition for the pursuit of the good life with and for others in just institutions because of politics’ susceptibility to oppression. This difference particularly emerges in Ricœur’s criticism of both Aristotle and Arendt. He argued that they both insufficiently reckon with the dark side of politics (Ricœur 1965, 249–54, 1991b, 75–76, 1998, 151–52). Along the same lines, he denounced any vision that exalts politics to the supreme rank in human existence (Ricœur 1949, 156–57, 1991b, 60–63). His plea for vigilant and active citizenship was not based on the direct contribution of political action to a fulfilled human life but on the paradoxical nature of politics. Being an active citizen is necessary to limit the violence that politics necessarily entails: violence that stands in the way of the actualization of the 242

Paul Ricœur

ethical pursuit. That is, according to Ricœur, the reason freedom and self-government are connected, which keeps Ricœur far away from the exaltation of politics that characterizes civic humanism.6 Another important outlook opened by Ricœur’s political phenomenology concerns democratic praxis. Much of the contemporary conceptual and normative debate on the democratic process is deadlocked in two seemingly irreconcilable camps—a radical, agonistic approach, exemplified by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) on the one hand and a procedural, deliberative approach, exemplified by Jürgen Habermas (1996) on the other. The first pole focuses on passionate conflict and struggle towards hegemony, the other pole on rational deliberation toward universal consensus. Several authors have highlighted a connection between Ricœur and Mouffe (Arthos 2019; Erfani and Whitmire 2008; Marcelo 2022; Tholen 2022). With the idea of the political paradox, Ricœur recognized the extent to which struggle and conflict are at the center of the political. Still, contrary to Mouffe, he did keep faith in the idea of a common good. It is this combination at the heart of the political paradox that provides a promising way out of the deadlock. Erfani and Whitmire (2008) explore this outlook regarding the question of political agency in a globalized world. Ricœur’s combination of civic optimism and recognition of the ineradicable tenacity of political alienation leads them to a model that realistically and practically allows for meaningful global political agency. Similarly, Tholen (2022) illustrates Ricœur’s force in thinking about the values and virtues of political compromise.7 He deduces from the political paradox a democratic praxis in which we act “from the presupposition of a common good, without actually having a shared conception of the common good from which we can deduce what the proper rules and actions in particular cases are” (Tholen 2022, 504). He thus describes a starting point that avoids the political pitfalls of naïveté and cynicism. To conclude, Ricœur’s political phenomenology provides us with a multifaceted account of political fragility, which he related to responsibility on the basis of his phenomenology of selfhood and alterity. It is exactly this combination that shows us a viable path in contemporary political philosophical reflection: for example, with regard to republicanism and democratic praxis.

Notes 1 Fred Dallmayr (1993) also criticized the vagueness of Ricœur’s initial formulation of the political paradox. Deweer (2017a, 2017b), Monteil (2013), and Padis (2006) provide a more elaborate discussion of the origin and development of Ricœur’s notion of the political paradox. 2 See also Ricœur and Aeschlimann (1994, 24–25). 3 See also Suazo (2014). 4 Ricœur’s political phenomenology also contained directions regarding the content of political responsibility. He argued that the necessary equilibria between the poles of the political paradoxes depend on formulating the common good. First, it is the prudential formulation of the common good that indicates and confirms the form that needs to limit the force (Ricœur 1986b, 440–41). Second, it is through the common good that the horizontal dimension of the will to live together becomes concrete in its unification of the plurality of outlooks present in society (Ricœur 1992, 249–62). Third, politics can only fulfill its function as bounding sphere if the different spheres are assigned a distinct place in an overarching conception of the good, for it is only an overarching project that provides a clear delineation between spheres (Ricœur 1994, 327–37). However, within the context of contemporary superdiverse societies, the common good is far from obvious. It can no longer be the point of departure, but it forms the horizon—that toward which we proceed step by step, without ever fully reaching our goal. This implies that Ricœur’s political ethics is essentially an ethics of compromise (Deweer 2022).

243

Dries Deweer 5 Several edited volumes and special editions illustrate this broadness (Chinello et al. 2013; Dierckxsens 2020; Johnson and Stiver 2013; Mei and Lewin 2012; Porée and Vincent 2010). 6 This is an abbreviated version of an interpretation I have elaborated at length elsewhere (Deweer 2017b, 2018). George H. Taylor also points at the link between Ricœur and what he describes as “deliberative republicanism” (2020, 64). 7 Other studies have also focused on Ricœur’s theory of political compromise (Assayag-Gillot 2018; Deweer 2022; Pierosara 2013).

References Abel, Olivier. 1992. “Bonheur et cité chez Ricœur.ˮ Autres Temps 35: 33–38. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Arthos, John. 2019. Hermeneutics After Ricœur. London: Bloomsbury. Assayag-Gillot, Laure. 2018. “Le compromis selon Paul Ricœur.” Négociations 29 (1): 103–20. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 1991. De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur. Paris: Gallimard. Chinello, Chiara, Claudia Pedone, Alberto Romele, and Pierluigi Valenza, eds. 2013. “Attraverso la crisi et il conflitto. Pensare altrimenti con Paul Ricœur.” Archivio di Filosofio 81 (1–2). Dallmayr, Fred. 1993. “Politics and Power. Ricœur’s Political Paradox Revisited.” In Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricœur, edited by David. E. Klemm and William Schweiker, 176–94. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 2002. “Ethics and Public Life. A Critical Tribute to Paul Ricœur.” In Paul Ricœur and Contemporary Moral Thought, edited by John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, 213–32. London: Routledge. Dauenhauer, Bernard. 1998. Paul Ricœur. The Promise and Risk of Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2010. “Ricœur and Political Theory: Liberalism and Communitarianism.” In Ricœur Across the Disciplines, edited by Scott Davidson, 102–21. New York: Continuum. Deweer, Dries. 2017a. “De dosering van de staat. Ricœurs politieke paradox herbekeken.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 79 (1): 89–110. ———. 2017b. Ricœur’s Personalist Republicanism. On Personhood and Citizenship. Lanham, MD: Lexington. ———. 2018. “Ricœur and Anglo-American Political Philosophy: Liberalism, Communitarianism and Republicanism.” Philosophy Today 62 (3): 803–21. ———. 2022. “Creation and Renunciation in Ricœur’s Political Ethics of Compromise.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 48 (6): 813–32. Dierckxsens, Geoffrey, ed. 2020. The Ambiguity of Justice: New Perspectives on Paul Ricœur’s Approach to Justice. Leiden: Brill. Erfani, Farhang, and John F. Whitmire Jr. 2008. “Ricœur and the Pre-Political.” Continental Philosophy Review 41: 501–21. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, Greg. S., and Dan R. Stiver, eds. 2013. Paul Ricœur and the Task of Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kaplan, David M. 2003. Ricœur’s Critical Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony  & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Marcelo, Gonçalo. 2022. “The Hermeneutics of Polarized Ideologies. Conflict, (Ir)rationality and Dialogue.” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 13 (1): 68–89.

244

Paul Ricœur Mei, Todd S., and David Lewin, eds. 2012. From Ricœur to Action: The Socio-Political Significance of Ricœur’s Thinking. London: Continuum. Michel, Johann. 2006. Paul Ricœur. Une philosophie de l’agir humain. Paris: Cerf. Monteil, Pierre-Olivier. 2013. Ricœur politique. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Moran, Dermot. 2017. “Husserl and Ricœur. The Influence of Phenomenology on the Formation of Ricœur’s Hermeneutics of the Capable Human.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 25 (1): 182–99. Padis, Marc-Olivier. 2006. “À la poursuite du paradoxe politique.ˮ Esprit 72 (3–4): 216–30. Patten, Alan. 1996. “The Republican Critique of Liberalism.” British Journal of Political Science 26 (1): 25–44. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierosara, Silvia. 2013. “Estraneità assimetrica. Ricœur e l’etica del compromesso.” Archivio di Filosofia 81 (1–2): 187–98. Porée, Jérôme, and Gilbert Vincent, eds. 2010. Paul Ricœur, la pensée en dialogue. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Remodo, Adrian. n.d. “Ricœur on Ipseity and Alterity. The Models of Promising and Narrating.” www.academia.edu/34747272/Ricœur_on_Ipseity_and_Alterity_The_Models_of_Promising_ and_Narrating. Ricœur, Paul. 1949. “La culpabilité allemande.ˮ Le christianisme social 57 (3–4): 150–57. ———. 1959 “Le paradoxe de la liberté politique.ˮ In La Liberté: Rapport de le sixième conférence annuelle Canadien des Affaires Publiques, 51–55. Montréal: Institut Canadien des Affaires Publiques. ———. 1965. History and Truth. Translated by Charles Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1970. Freud and Philosophy. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1986a. Fallible Man. Translated by Charles Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 1986b. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991a. From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1991b. Lectures 1. Autour du politique. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. “Morale, éthique et politique.ˮ Pouvoirs, revue française d’études constitutionnelles et politiques 65: 5–17. ———. 1994. “Le bonheur hors lieu.ˮ In Où est le bonheur? edited by Roger-Pol Droit, 327–37. Paris: Le Monde. ———. 1995a. “La place du politique dans une conception pluraliste des principes de justice.ˮ In Pluralisme et équité. La justice sociale dans les démocraties, edited by Joëlle Affichard and JeanBaptiste de Foucauld, 71–84. Paris: Esprit. ———. 1995b. “Intellectual Autobiography.” In The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur (The Library of Living Philosophers Volume XXII), edited by Lewis E. Hahn, translated by Kathleen Blamey, 1–53. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1998. Critique and Conviction. Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1999. “Approaching the Human Person.ˮ Translated by Dale Kidd. Ethical Perspectives 6 (1): 45–54. ———. 2000. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. “Responsabilité et fragilité.ˮ Autres Temps 76–77: 127–41.

245

Dries Deweer ———. 2007. Reflections on the Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. Philosophie, éthique et politique. Entretiens et dialogues. Paris: Seuil. ———, and Jean-Christophe Aeschlimann. 1994. “Entretien.ˮ In Éthique et responsabilité, edited by Jean-Christophe Aeschlimann, 11–34. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière. Sandel, Michael J. 1984. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Political Theory 12 (1): 81–96. ———. 1996. Democracy’s Discontent. America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Skinner, Quentin. 1984. “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives.” In Philosophy in History, edited by Richard Rorty, John B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 193–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suazo, Ruby S. 2014. “Ricœur’s Ethics of Politics and Democracy.” Philosophy Today 58 (4): 697–712. Taylor, Charles. 1989. “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy Rosenblum, 159–82. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, George H. 2020. “Reenvisioning Justice.” In The Ambiguity of Justice: New Perspectives on Paul Ricœur’s Approach to Justice, edited by Geoffrey Dierckxsens, 55–71. Leiden: Brill. Tholen, Berry. 2022. “Holding It All Together: On the Value of Compromise and the Virtues of Compromising.” Human Studies 45: 493–508. Venema, Henry Isaac. 2000. Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative and Hermeneutics. New York: SUNY Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice. A  Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.

246

18 LUCE IRIGARAY The Politics of Sexual Difference as Anontological Difference Anne van Leeuwen

1. Introduction Luce Irigaray is rightly thought of, alongside a coterie of other 20th-century French philosophers, as a philosopher of alterity. At the core of her philosophy of alterity is the figure of difference. Difference here refers to a paradoxical two: a two that is uncountable, a two that is not simply an extension and elaboration of the one, a two that is irreducible to one (Dolar 2012).1 Drawing from phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Irigaray identifies this difference as sexual difference. Yet there is a fundamental scandal—to borrow Alenka Zupančič’s formulation—surrounding sexual difference in Irigaray’s thought (Zupančič 2016, 88).2 Without question, sexual difference is the concept operating at the very center of her oeuvre, and yet Irigaray scholarship reveals that there is no consensus concerning what it is.3 One view is that sexual difference refers to an ontological difference. According to this view, when Irigaray describes sexual difference as original and irreducible, she is describing a difference that is inscribed in being itself: being as two, not one. Read in this way, the task of her project is to provide the imaginary infrastructure for and symbolic articulation of this difference—a difference that has always already been elided, reduced to sameness through appeals to a univocal understanding of being. This chapter considers the way Irigaray’s work supports this ontological interpretation of sexual difference. It is also possible, however, to identify a second, more marginal reading of Irigarayan sexual difference. This more liminal figure of sexual difference is the key to articulating a different and, I will argue, more promising view of the political in Irigaray’s thought. According to this second interpretation, sexual difference is not an ontological difference but what we might call an anontological difference: It is not a difference of being but a difference within being itself. On this reading, sexual difference lacks an eidos or essence; instead, it marks a point of antagonism, an ontological inconsistency of being. This second reading, I will argue, can be elaborated via Irigaray’s engagement with phenomenology and psychoanalysis.4 I will develop this interpretation of Irigaray by examining her readings of Heidegger and Lacan in L’oubli de l’air chez Martin Heidegger (1983) and Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977), respectively. While Irigaray’s engagement with Heidegger anchors her account of sexual difference to a phenomenological tradition vis-à-vis a fundamentally revised understanding of phenomenology—one that identifies ontological DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-27

247

Anne van Leeuwen

inconsistency as the very meaning and structure of the phenomenological epoché, her reading of Lacan provides the point of departure for her understanding of the politics of sexual difference. On this basis, I will argue that Irigaray’s work delimits a politics of sexual difference, not in the sense of politicizing aspects of our personal or corporeal existence but rather in that she identifies sexual difference as a constitutive antagonism that is the domain of emancipatory feminist politics (Zupančič 2016, 89). To put it differently, Irigaray turns to phenomenology and psychoanalysis to delimit the political precisely because, on her reading, they are situated within the conflict that they theorize: i.e., part of the reality they recognize as antagonistic.5

2.  Alterity and Phenomenology We find Irigaray’s most sustained engagement with a phenomenological tradition in the context of her reading of Heidegger.6 Here, I  will focus on Irigaray’s critical analysis of Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964) in L’oubli de l’air (1983). However, given that Heidegger’s 1964 lecture develops a critique of Husserl’s 1911 essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1965), it will be helpful to briefly begin with Husserl. As the title suggests, Husserl’s twofold task in this essay is to criticize what he identifies as naturalistic philosophies’ pretensions to scientific rigor and thereby demonstrate the necessity for delimiting what he sees as a genuinely scientific philosophy: namely, phenomenology. In contrast to naturalistic philosophies and their appeal to the transcendent of givenness of things-in-themselves, Husserlian phenomenology suspends any appeal to a pregiven domain of transcendent objects. Invoking the phenomenological epoché, Husserl restricts phenomenological inquiry to the constitution of objectivity within the immanence of consciousness. What the phenomenological epoché discloses is a flux of phenomena. Yet, on the basis of this eidetic reduction, it is only the essence of these phenomena that is disclosed. What the eidetic reduction reveals are the constitutive accomplishments of purified consciousness as new objectivities. The eidetic structures of these accomplishments are thereby revealed as founding for those phenomena disclosed through the transcendental reduction. According to Husserl, these eidetic structures delimit the phenomenological notion of the a priori. What is a priori, according to him, is not that which can be known independently of experience but what is revealed as constitutive of it. For Husserl, the eidetic reduction thus reveals a priori structures that can be brought into intuitive givenness within the phenomenal flux of transcendentally reduced consciousness. In his 1964 essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger takes up Husserl’s 1911 essay in an attempt to renegotiate the meaning and sense of transcendental phenomenology. Here, Heidegger criticizes Husserl’s articulation of the constitutive a priori of phenomenology and introduces an important revision. Heidegger’s objection is that the a priority of these constitutive structures should not be conflated with the disclosure of a foundation or ground. He develops this critique of Husserl in his discussion of aletheia. Here, Heidegger invokes aletheia in what he argues is its etymological sense: namely, unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Unconcealment, he emphasizes, should not be conflated with what is plainly visible. Instead, the double negative must be preserved: aletheia designates concealment, latency, or forgetting (lethe) and its privation or withdrawal (a understood as privative). With this account of aletheia, Heidegger is underscoring the bivalence of the constitutive withdrawal that was given expression two years earlier in his discussion of das Ereignis. In his 1962 lecture “Time and Being,” Heidegger had argued 248

Luce Irigaray

that das Ereignis is characterized by a bivalence wherein, as the very ground of es gibt Sein, it withdraws (1972). Heidegger’s discussion of aletheia in his 1964 essay rearticulates exactly this revision in his account of the constitutive a priori of phenomenology. Aletheia is that constitutive condition that withdraws or withholds itself from sight. The bivalence of this constitutive condition that withdraws is, for Heidegger, the true meaning of the phenomenological epoché. Yet, if the epoché does not disclose the eidos of constitutive structures but rather designates the self-withdrawal of the very ground of constitution, then, as François Dastur argues, it does not bring us before a foundation but rather an abyssal withdrawal (i.e., an Abgrund) (Dastur 1998, 64–65). Irigaray begins L’oubli de l’air by citing the final passage of Heidegger’s 1964 essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” Immediately following the citation of this passage and summarizing the central argument of this essay, Irigaray tells us: That the there is [il y a] of the clearing has never been questioned by thought, although it would be the ultimate condition of possibility for thought [la condition ultime de possibilité] . . . such would be the forgetting [I’oubli] that sub-tends the history of metaphysics, thus entailing the destiny of Being [I’être] as being(s) [l’etant(s)]. (Irigaray 1999, 1–2) By reiterating this argument, Irigaray draws our attention to Heidegger’s claim that philosophy is subtended by the forgetting of the transcendental conditions thanks to which there is Being (il y a l’être). Irigaray’s (1999, 31) leading claim in L’oubli de l’air is that Heidegger’s discussion of aletheia forgets she who first gives air (“elle donne—d’abord—l’air”). This formulation is clearly intended as a modification of Heidegger’s es gibt Sein. Moreover, Irigaray’s invocation of the forgetting of “she who first gives air” also clearly appropriates Heidegger’s account of aletheia as the constitutive a priori. On the surface, Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger’s forgetting of air appears to designate a forgetfulness of transcendent conditions in his attention to the transcendental conditions of the es gibt Sein: Irigaray seems to accuse Heidegger of forgetting the constitutive role of air and thereby forgetting that she who first gives air (that is, mother/nature) is the maternal and material condition for Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes). Hence, when Irigaray insists that she (mother/nature) first gives air, the primacy of her gift purportedly marks an original, transcendent condition. Heidegger’s forgetting of she who first gives air thus appears to designate his neglect of the constitutive role of both mother and nature as a transcendent material ground. Air, in its polysemy, can thus be understood as what is thereby forgotten by Heidegger in his identification of aletheia as the transcendental condition thanks to which there is Being. Irigaray’s task in this text is thereby legible as the attempt to recover and give philosophical expression to this elided material and maternal ground, to make visible the constitutive role of the transcendent material and maternal condition that Heidegger fails to acknowledge. In this reading, Irigaray attempts to rectify this elision and to bring what is forgotten into view through an act of philosophical recuperation. However, while this account offers a plausible interpretation of the centrality of the notion of air in this text, its explanatory force is parasitic on the systematic neglect of forgetting, an interpretation that implicitly gains traction by decoupling Irigaray’s formulation of elle donne l’air from the idea of l’oubli. By decoupling the two, forgetting is thereby tacitly reduced to a kind of casual neglect, one that always harbors the possibility of remembrance. Yet, as we have already seen, Heidegger’s discussion of aletheia is meant 249

Anne van Leeuwen

to show that transcendental phenomenology is subtended by an ineliminable forgetfulness (lethe): namely, the self-withdrawal (epoché) of its own constitutive conditions. By identifying Heidegger’s forgetting of she who gives air, the point, for Irigaray, is not to appeal to and recuperate what has been forgotten. After all, as Heidegger’s text so clearly demonstrates, not only is this constitutive condition not a what (i.e., not an eidos or essence) but the forgetting of this condition also belongs to its structure as a constitutive (i.e., insofar as aletheia is constitutive a priori). Her point, instead, is that the ubiquitous forgetting of air as the forgetting of the maternal and material throughout the history of philosophy is not a casual instance of neglect or rectifiable oversight but rather, following Heidegger, an expression of thinking’s inability to bring its own constitutive conditions into view. Irigaray’s argument in this text can thus be understood in metatheoretical terms. Forgetfulness is transmuted into philosophical matricide and megalomaniacal domination of nature when this constitutive forgetting is itself forgotten. That is, this forgetting receives its most pernicious articulation in those specular philosophies that claim a kind of transparency and self-sufficiency insofar as they purport to bring their own constitutive conditions into view and, thus, claim to be self-grounding in this sense. The point for Irigaray, then, is not to participate in this specular forgetting through a nostalgic call to remember she (who) gives air; the point, in other words, is not to attempt to retrieve a maternal origin and material nature vis-à-vis a tacit re-inscription of this specular logic. Rather, the point is not to forget this ineliminable and constitutive forgetting. By examining Irigaray’s reading of Lacan in the following section, I will attempt identify a convergence between her engagement with phenomenology and psychoanalysis in terms of exactly this idea.

3.  Alterity and Psychoanalysis Turning to psychoanalysis, Irigaray’s engagement with Freud and Lacan has often been dismissed as based on either an uncharitable misreading or fundamental misunderstanding that revolves around her interrogation of the status of the feminine as either the same or simply an inverse of masculine sexuality, crystalized in Freud’s formulation of the Oedipal complex and its interpretation by Lacan.7 In the fifth chapter of Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, “Cosi Fan Tutti,” in which Irigaray directly engages Lacan, she focuses her critical attention on Lacan’s Séminar XX and the set of claims that ultimately revolve around what Lacan identifies as the sexual nonrelation—including his identification of Other as the other sex and the claim that woman does not exist. Here we find this formulation: Psychoanalytic discourse on female sexuality is the discourse of truth. A  discourse that tells the truth about the logic of truth: namely, that the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A  single practice and representation of the sexual. With its history, its requirements, reverses, lacks, negative(s) . . . of which the female sex is the mainstay. (Irigaray 1985, 86) From this passage, we might be tempted to see Irigaray as attempting to recuperate woman and the sexual relation from its reduction to sameness or consignment to oblivion by psychoanalysis. For example, as Laura Roberts argues, “Irigaray imagines changes in the imaginary and symbolic which literally ‘rewrite’ the cultural meanings and significances of 250

Luce Irigaray

female bodies—meanings that would encode ‘Woman’ as something other than lack” (Roberts 2019, 32).8 On this basis, one might conclude that sexual difference is ontological.9 As Irigaray puts it in J’aime à toi, The natural is at least two: male and female. . . . This two inscribes finitude in the natural itself. No one nature can claim to correspond to the whole of the natural. There is no “Nature” as a singular entity. (1996, 35)10 Elizabeth Grosz (2012, 71) describes Irigarayan sexual difference as “the engine of all living difference.” She argues that Irigaray’s most contentious claim is that sexual difference is the engine or force involved in the production of all other differences, and thus has an ontological status that . . . is both the universal accompaniment of all other lived differences and is one of the means for their transmission and propagation. (2012, 73) The idea is that ontological twoness her, refers to the “twoness of sex” as a mechanism of generativity. In Grosz’s interpretation, sexual difference as ontological difference thus refers to an irreducible difference that is the source of all living differences. Consequently, it is a difference that exists insofar as it is instantiated and incarnated in all living beings. On the basis of this understanding of sexual difference as ontological, scholars argue that Irigaray engages with psychoanalysis in order to challenge its model of sexual difference, which means to “re-figure” woman, to provide a socio-symbolic articulation of female subjectivity and sexuality that is contrary to how woman and female sexuality are figured within psychoanalysis as the inverse or blind spot of masculine sexuality. At times, Irigaray formulates her project in exactly these terms: In fact, criticizing patriarchy or phallocracy does not suffice in order to join a culture of two subjects. Of course, the criticism of a monosubjective culture must remain a constant gesture. But it has to be accompanied by the construction of another culture, and even two other cultures: a culture appropriate to feminine subjectivity and a culture concerning the relation between two different subjects. (Irigaray 2004, viii) Creating a culture of the two, Irigaray (2004, viii) claims, involves a transformation of philosophy, language, religion or spirituality, and politics (viii). Rachel Jones takes up this idea, arguing that “Irigaray’s general project” amounts to “the search for ways to re-figure woman in her sexuate specificity” (Jones 2011, 151). It is possible, however, to distinguish Irigaray’s claim that sexual difference is irreducible from the further claim that the goal of her project is to refigure sexual difference. It is inarguable, in my opinion, that Irigaray engages with psychoanalysis in order to identify sexual difference as an irreducible difference: i.e., to articulate a two that is irreducible to one or an other that is irreducible to the same. Now, it is important to recall that we find at least two Others in Lacan (Dolar 2012): On the one hand, the Other refers to the Other of the socio-symbolic field—the Other as discourse, as language, or as structure. Yet, for 251

Anne van Leeuwen

Lacan, the Other as socio-symbolic structure is constitutively inscribed by alterity—the unconscious—that remains recalcitrant to this order. On the other hand, for Lacan, the Other is the Other of sexual difference. As he puts it: “The Other, in my parlance, cannot be anything else but the Other sex” (Lacan 1975, 40). Following Freud, for Lacan, the Other of sex thus refers to the constitutive derailment of biological or organic satisfaction, a surplus enjoyment that creates a rupture within the body, an impasse in our empirical existence. As Dolar puts it, sexuality thus refers to “this cut in the body, causing the bodily needs to deviate from their natural goal and tend toward other aims” (Dolar 2012, 7). Zupančič describes sexuality as “an impasse in being,” not simply a void but an absence or negativity that is constitutive (2016, 87). What we have, then, are two variants of the Other: the Other as the constitutive impasse of the symbolic and the Other of sex as the constitutive deviation and rupture of our material existence. When Lacan claims that there is no sexual relation, he is referring to precisely this impasse or “ontological lapse in the sexual” (Zupančič 2016, 88). The antagonism here refers not to what exists—an eidos or essence—but rather a contradiction or stumbling block of reality—what Lacan calls the Real (Zupančič 2017, 3). At the same time, this impasse is not simply a void but an absence that is constitutive: As impasse, it is the a priori condition of all concrete empirical relations.11 In “Così Fan Tutti,” Irigaray takes up Lacan’s claim that there is no sexual relation in the field of the Other. She also emphasizes that the Other is not whole, that there is no metalanguage, and, in this sense, that the Other has no Other. As she puts it: The relation to the Other of/by/in/through . . . the Other is impossible: “The Other has no Other.” Which may be understood as meaning: there is no meta-language, except inasmuch as the Other already stands for it, suspending in its own ek-sistence the possibility of an other. For if there were some other—without that leap, necessarily ek-static, of the capital letter—the entire autoerotic, auto-positional, auto-reflexive economy . . . of the subject, or the “subject,” would find itself disturbed, driven to distraction. (Irigaray 1985, 101) Here, Irigaray seems to claim, contra Lacan, that there is another other—namely, woman— contrasting the Other of the symbolic—the unconscious—with the other of sexual difference. Yet, if we are careful, we see that Irigaray posits no such thing. Taking up Lacan’s claim that there is no sexual relation, Irigaray repeats his fundamental point: “That the sexual relation has no as such, that it cannot even be posited as such: one cannot but subscribe to such affirmations” (Irigaray 1985, 99). Irigaray’s point is that sexual difference is either fetishized in or excluded from the socio-symbolic order. Yet, as Penelope Deutscher argues, “One can establish this point [i.e., concerning its fetishization or exclusion] without asserting that there is a specific female sexuality or femininity” (Deutscher 2018, 30). As Irigaray puts it, [T]he discourse of truth, the discourse of “de-monstration,” cannot incorporate the sexual relation within the economy of its logic. But still, does that not amount to saying that there is no possible sexual relation, claiming that there is no exit from this logos, which is wholly assimilated to the discourse of knowledge? (Irigaray 1985, 99) 252

Luce Irigaray

As we see, Irigaray does not answer her own question affirmatively. Rather, it is posed rhetorically. Here, it seems that the other of sexual difference does not refer to something— another eidos or essence—other than the determination that she is given by the patriarchal socio-symbolic order, including the determination of woman as complement, inverse, or the same.12 If the sexual relation is recalcitrant to these symbolic articulations, including its articulation as lack, this not because sexual difference is something other—something else—but because it is the impasse that adheres within all of these articulations.

4.  The Politics of Sexual Difference We can formulate Irigaray’s view of politics in part by articulating a “disjunctive alliance” between the ethics and politics of sexual difference vis-à-vis the danger of fetishization.13 We find Irigaray’s critique of fetishism in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un where she invokes Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in Capital as a homology for the position of women in “so-called patriarchal societies” (Irigaray 1985, 172). Following Marx, Irigaray argues that the qualities that constitute woman as use-values are not natural but “supernatural”: i.e., fantasmatic and imaginary.14 As a use-value, woman shares with the commodity this imaginary form (Tomšič 2015, 27). Like the commodity, however, woman is also an exchange-value. Marx argued that, within the relation of exchange, heterogeneous forms of labor assume the abstract form of a quantitative expenditure (i.e., labor-power) and that “the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values” (Marx 1990, 166). Qualitatively incommensurable things thereby appear as quantitatively commensurable representations of the expenditure of labor-power. Irigaray argues that, as exchange-value, woman has precisely the same form.15 That is, if commodity fetishism refers to an objective and constitutive distortion—i.e., that value can only appear in vis-à-vis the commodity is its “objective shell” (“sachliche Hülle”) (Khatib 2017)—the lesson, for Irigaray, is the same: Fetishism inscribes these imaginary qualities as essential traits or roles to which woman’s “market value” is attached ex post facto. Woman’s exchange-value thus appears as though it were sutured to the imaginary qualities that constitute her use-value. The danger of fetishism haunts the domain of ethics and politics. On one hand, at the heart of the ethics of sexual difference is an insistence on the inviolable alterity of the other, an attempt to wrest the singular ethical relation between the two from fetishization: i.e., to articulate a singular relation between two that does not domesticate difference and annihilate the alterity of the other.16 For the politics of sexual difference, in contrast, the danger of fetishization rather lies with tendency to substantialize woman as the subject position of feminist politics. It is in this sense that sexual difference as ontological scandal is the key to Irigaray’s view of the political. The nonexistence of woman is primarily a “scandal” against the background of a liberal view of feminist politics according to which, in order for women to constitute a political class as the subject of feminist politics, “feminist” must constitute an objective position (Hamza 2021).17 Against this view, Irigaray’s politics of sexual difference suggests that being a “feminist” is not an objective position—there is no transcendent subject of feminist politics; rather, “feminist” is a position that is constituted through concrete struggle.18 Irigaray’s account of sexual difference points to the ontological impasse that is inscribed—or, as Lacan would say, that doesn’t stop not being written— in all concrete political struggles.19 It is in this sense that Irigarayan politics is—to borrow a formulation from Zupančič—“politics of the impossible (relation),” which is to say that “true politics as such is the impossible at work, or the working of the impossible” 253

Anne van Leeuwen

(Zupančič 2016, 87). What this means is that emancipatory feminist politics is situated in the antagonism that is inscribed in our social relations.

5. Outlook Irigaray’s theoretical production has continued into the 21st century, yet her later work is not as widely read as her early writings, and of those who do continue to read her later writings, many argue that her most interesting work remains the early deconstructive work: i.e., those writings that identify sexual difference as a point of antagonism rather than those that try to construct a culture (symbolic and imaginary) of sexual difference. Partly, this is because Irigaray’s later thought is beset with theoretical problems and pitfalls that stem from the cultural politics of these later writings—from the problem of orientalism and cultural appropriation in her comparative East-West writings20 to issues of heteronormativity and transphobia in her explication of ethics and the ontology of sexual difference21 to the occlusion of race and racism from her analyses22 to her jettisoning of a critique of capitalism in favor of a liberal discourse of rights and representation. Since we can find evidence of all these tendencies in Irigaray’s work, if her thought is to remain relevant to contemporary feminism—and it is not a settled question that it is or should be—then scholars must show there is another current in her thought that resists these tendencies. We find one promising example in Petrus Liu’s work on “queer Marxism.” In The Specter of Materialism (2023), Liu directly draws from Irigaray (along with Butler’s reading of Irigaray) in order to formulate a rapprochement of queer theory and Marxism as “subjectless critiques.”23 Liu’s reading resonates with the anontological interpretation of sexual difference in Irigaray that I have proposed in this chapter. The crucial point, then, is that appropriations of Irigaray’s thought, like Liu’s, illustrate that the outlook for her thought hinges on whether we can continue to identify philosophical resources in her writings for articulating a feminist politics outside a liberal politics of recognition.

Notes 1 I am indebted for these formulations to Mladen Dolar’s reading of Lacan. See Dolar 2012. 2 See Zupančič 2016, 88. See also Butler 2001, 417. 3 See, for example, Hill 2016. 4 See also Deutscher 2018; Malabou and Plonowska Ziarek 2012. 5 Here I  am drawing on Althusser’s famous formulation in his essay on “Marx and Freud.” See Althusser and Montag 1991. 6 Elsewhere, I have developed a much longer analysis of Irigaray’s reading of Heidegger. See van Leeuwen 2013. 7 See, for example, Deutscher 2018, 27. 8 See also Roberts 2017; Russell 2013, 298. 9 For example, in her reading of Irigaray’s oeuvre, Rachel Jones argues that Irigaray identifies sexual difference as “originary and ontological” (Jones 2011, 182). 10 In the preface to Key Writings, Irigaray describes “sexuate difference” as “the most basic and universal of all human differences” (Irigaray 2004, viii, xiv). 11 As Zupančič argues, “[T]he non-relation is a priori in the precise sense that it appears with every empirical relation as its inherent condition of possibility” (Zupančič 2016, 91). 12 On this point, see Deutscher 2018, 29. 13 This is Hamza’s formulation of the relationship between love and politics. See Hamza 2021. 14 As Irigaray puts it, for women and commodities, “[T]he ‘properties’ of their bodies do not determine their price” (Irigaray 1985, 173–74, translation modified).

254

Luce Irigaray 15 “When women are exchanged, woman’s body must be treated as an abstraction. The exchange operation cannot take place in terms of some intrinsic, immanent value of the commodity. . . . It is thus not as ‘women’ that they are exchanged, but as women reduced to some common feature” (Irigaray 1985, 175). 16 Hamza describes this as “the singular organization of the couple . . . from being the depository of political ideology” (Hamza 2021). 17 Petrus Liu argues that “[s]ocial theory produced in the United States is ineluctably mired in the multiculturalist conception of race, gender, class, and sexuality as commensurable identities” (Liu 2020, 27). 18 bell hooks makes a similar claim about feminist politics. See hooks 2000. 19 As Zupančič puts it, “[A]ll social relations are concretizations of the non-relation as universal determination of the discursive, which does not exist anywhere outside these concrete (non)relations” (Zupančič 2016, 100). 20 For example, see Deutscher 2018, 171. 21 For example, see Cheah et al. 1998. 22 For example, see Hom 2013. 23 “Within a phallogocentric language, women are the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence. Both women and men are always already marked as masculine, and the symmetry between Same and Other is only an optical illusion of the masculine economy of univocal signification. These are powerful claims. But what happens when we turn this analysis of the marked and the unmarked on queer theory’s own relation to the non-West? Can we say that liberal queer theory’s efforts to include, represent, and explain non-Western sexualities as alterities to ‘homosexuality as we understand it’ produce an optical illusion of diversity within an economy of univocal signification? Is it possible that, within a Foucauldian taxonomy of sexualities, both Western homosexuality and non-Western gender variance are projections of the same concept, while the actual history of the non-West remains an aporia that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence? What happens when we consider how queer theory itself is constituted through the exclusions of non-Western histories and cultures that return to haunt a global history of sexuality as demanded by developments in contemporary capitalism?” (Liu 2023, 29–30). See also Liu 2020, 36.

References Althusser, Louis, and Warren Montag. 1991. “On Marx and Freud.”  Rethinking Marxism  4 (1): 17–30. Butler, Judith. 2001. “The End of Sexual Difference?” In Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, 414–34. New York: Columbia University Press. Cheah, Pheng, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell. 1998. “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell.” Diacritics 28 (1): 19–42. Dastur, Françoise. 1998. Heidegger and the question of time. Translated by Graeme Nicholson. Amherst/New York: Prometheus Book. Deutscher, Penelope. 2018.  A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. New York: Cornell University Press. Dolar, Mladen. 2012. “One Divides into Two.” e-Flux 33. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2012. “The Nature of Sexual Difference: Irigaray and Darwin.” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 17 (2): 69–93. Hamza, Agon. 2021. “On Love.” The Philosophical Salon (July 26). Heidegger, Martin. 1972. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hill, Rebecca. 2016. “The Multiple Readings of Irigaray’s Concept of Sexual Difference.” Philosophy Compass 11 (7): 390–401. Hom, Sabrina. 2013. “Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray.” Hypatia 28 (3): 419–35. hooks, bell. 2000. Feminism is for Everybody. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1965. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, edited by Quentin Lauer, 71–148. New York: Harper & Row.

255

Anne van Leeuwen Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1996. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Translated by Alison Martin. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Translated by Mary Beth Mader. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2004. Key Writings. New York/London: Continuum. Jones, Rachel. 2011. Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Khatib, Sami. 2017. “Where the Past Was, There History Shall Be: Benjamin, Marx, and the ‘Tradition of the Oppressed.’ ” Anthropology & Materialism. A Journal of Social Research. Special Issue on Walter Benjamin. https://doi.org/10.4000/am.789 Lacan, Jacques. 1975. Encore. Paris: Seuil. Liu, Petrus. 2020. “Queer Theory and the Specter of Materialism.” Social Text 38 (4): 25–47. ———. 2023. The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital. New York: Penguin. Malabou, Catherine, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. 2012. “Negativity, Unhappiness or Felicity: On Irigaray’s Dialectical Culture of Sexual Difference.” L’Esprit Créateur 52 (3): 11–25. Roberts, Laura. 2017. “A  Revolution of Love: Thinking through a Dialectic that is Not ‘One’.” Hypatia 32: 69–85. ———. 2019. Irigaray and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Russell, Yvette. 2013. “Luce Irigaray: An Ode to A-(Luce).” In The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, edited by Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie, and Robert Porter, 291–308. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tomšič, Samo. 2015. The Capitalist Unconscious. London: Verso. van Leeuwen, Anne. 2013. “An Examination of Irigaray’s Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love.” Hypatia 28 (3): 452–68. Zupančič, Alenka. 2016. “Sexual is Political?” In Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, edited by Samo Tomšič, and Andreja Zevnik, 86–100. New York/Oxon: Routledge. ———. 2017. What is Sex? Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

256

19 JACQUES DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCTION Through Phenomenology to the Political Joseph Cohen

1. Introduction Nothing could seem more appropriate than to situate Derrida’s philosophical writing within the phenomenological heritage. Indeed, nothing could seem more appropriate both historically and theoretically as Derrida’s philosophical writing emanates from a critical engagement with Husserl’s phenomenological method and scope; this engagement also and consequently reveals within the principle of phenomenology an irreducible question persistently suspending and exceeding the possibility of phenomenology itself. This irreducible question, deployed within phenomenology, generates nothing less than an epoché of phenomenology. But what is this question? What does it question and how? Whence does it formulate and express itself? Toward which heading will the deconstructive question lead phenomenology or, and simultaneously, expect a certain abandonment of its “Principle of All Principles”? Our aim in posing these preliminary interrogations in view of approaching what we will be calling the deconstructive question is first to elaborate how Derrida critically inherits the phenomenological method from Husserl as well as its transformation as “fundamental ontology” and “Thought of Being” in Heidegger. Secondly, we will seek to show how and why, for Derrida, these critical inheritances are oriented toward a political position engaging our contemporaneity in the urgency of inventing a wholly other performative for philosophical thinking and practical action. Indeed, we will attempt to demonstrate, following Derrida’s writing, how and why the deconstructive question always occurs as a political position, commanding an incessant responsibility for doing justice for the irreplaceable singularity of the Other. In this sense, we will see in which manner, for Derrida, political responsibility lies primarily in addressing the irreducibility of the Other and thereby supplementing the very possibility of political decision and action by an irreducible idea of justice for the singular.

2.  From Phenomenology to “Différance” Before approaching the intent of Derrida’s questioning of phenomenology and thereby deploying how deconstruction leads thinking and action to a political responsibility for the DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-28

257

Joseph Cohen

singular, it is capital to remark why the deconstructive question is never dissociated from the inherent intent of that which it questions. Indeed, the deconstructive question is always inscribed within the questioned and, from this inscription, already deploys a further opening toward other modalities of philosophical thinking which exceed both the questioned and the question. In Of Grammatology, Derrida (1974) carefully sought to determine how the deconstructive question operates both inside and, “in a certain way,” also outside the conceptual structures and systems it “inhabits”: The movements of deconstruction do not shake up structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective; they do not focus their strikes, except by inhabiting these structures. Inhabiting them “in a certain way,” because one always inhabits and all the more so when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing from the old structure the strategic and economic resources of subversion, borrowing from the structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction is always in a certain way swept away by its own work. (Derrida 1997, 24) This operation is not without supposing a certain risk—which, in deconstruction, is never dissociable from a certain chance toward another thinking. The risk and the chance always haunting and engaging deconstruction are of incessantly exceeding its work and, thus, of persistently generating more than could be captured or appropriated in a representation, an interpretation, a reconciliatory horizon, a name, or a language. Otherwise said, the deconstructive question relentlessly awakens both that which it questions and its “own” questioning by incessantly overwhelming these, thereby creating singular aporetic supplements which, each time, refuse their appropriation or reappropriation in a circumscribed or determined conceptual representation, hermeneutical interpretation, phenomenological horizon, or ontological truth. It is in the “Différance” essay that Derrida accentuated this point with acuteness and precision. Indeed, in offering not a definition but a certain situatedness of the movement of différance, which is “neither a word nor a concept” (Derrida 1982, 21), Derrida insists—by closely following as well as bending Heidegger’s exposition of the “ontological difference”— on how “différance [is] older than the ontological difference or the truth of Being” (22). Différance as a “play of the trace” (22) which “exceeds the alternative of presence and absence” (20), as an unresolved movement which “is not a present being, however excellent, unique, principal or transcendent” (21–22), as an unsettled operation which “governs nothing, reigns over nothing and nowhere exercises any authority” (22) and relentlessly interrogates “the determination of Being as presence or as beingness” (21) engages toward a thinking beyond the epochality of the history of the truth of Being. It commands not the simple overcoming or surmounting of the metaphysical tradition and its conceptual determinations, but the occurrence of an indeterminate a-topos incessantly haunting the essence of Being, its language, its place and its own-most unification within the “appropriating event” (Ereignis) of its truth through its destiny unfolding in world history as Western metaphysics. Différance—whose aporetic movement “permits” (23) the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of “what exceeds the truth of Being” (23), thereby allowing for “the trace [of that] which can never be presented, the trace which itself can never be presented: that is, appear and manifest itself, as such, in its phenomenon” (23)—instils, 258

Jacques Derrida

both and simultaneously within and beyond the texts of the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Hegel and Heidegger, a wholly other modality of thinking, reading, writing. The deconstructive question pursues, in this sense, both an irreducible beyond and an ineffaceable within philosophical significance which both dismantle whilst purporting the traditional signifiers of “critique,” “dialectic,” “transcendental reduction,” “historical genesis,” and “existential analytic,” and thereby undermine the pretention inherent in these to settle for the primacy of presence and, by this primacy, determine the arché and the telos of possibility in the philosophical alliance of meaning, essence, truth, and Being. Indeed, the deconstructive question refuses to contend solely with the primacy of presence—which Derrida equates with the “closure of ontology” (23)—and seeks to prepare, through a double movement of “differing and deferring” (26), the occurrences of uncontainable and uncontrollable singularities subverting the authority of presence and liberating traces “erasing themselves in presenting themselves, muffling themselves in resonating” (23), thereby opening toward a wholly other thinking which always and also ventures “beyond that which profoundly links fundamental ontology and phenomenology” (23). Deconstructing the primacy and the authority of presence in and through the history of the truth of Being means nothing less and much more, from Plato to Heidegger, than to pierce, suspend, and interrupt the “text of metaphysics” (Derrida 1982, 24) by comprehending it as always “traversed by its limit, marked in its interior by the furrow of its margin” (24). Nothing less, indeed, as deconstruction retrieves the dynamism of Heidegger’s destruction of ontotheology which also, and in its own manner, marks how its history carries within its own development and deployment the trace of the meaning of Being incessantly concealed through its historical presentation. Derrida certainly recalls the radicality of Heidegger’s philosophical breakthrough by recovering, within the operation of différance, the modality by which the forgetfulness of the meaning of Being shows itself as the fact of metaphysics and, therefore, how the truth of Being incessantly traces itself as concealed throughout the history of ontotheology. Indeed, the deconstructive question marks the “ontological difference” and thereby intends to demonstrate, following here Heidegger’s philosophical lead, how the truth of Being constitutes the history of its own presentation in the deployment of metaphysics whilst always remaining irreducible to this very deployment. In this sense, Derrida remains singularly attentive to Heidegger’s own “critique of presence” and understands—indeed, incorporates this understanding in the heritage of différance—how and why the incessant play of concealment, withdrawal, retraction, dissimulation, dispensation, disclosure, and revelation forms the determinate structure of the history of the truth of Being. But, and at the same time, deconstruction operates much more than this retrieval of Heidegger’s destruction of the history of metaphysics and its “critique of presence.” Deconstruction also urges showing how the Heideggerian determination of the history of the truth of Being, deployed through the figure of the Ereignis as “appropriating event” of Being and Time, remains nonetheless constrained within the binarism of concealment and unconcealment and, thus, constricted to a determinate logic of the givenness, of the gift, of the donation of presence and therefore of presencing. This is why Derrida also marks in the “Différance” essay: There is no essence of différance; it (is) that which not only could never be appropriated in the as such of its name or its appearing, but also that which threatens the authority of the as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its essence. 259

Joseph Cohen

That there is not a proper-essence of différance at this point, implies that there is neither a Being nor a truth of the play of writing as it engages différance. (Derrida 1982, 25–26) The deconstructive question points towards a singular exigency which forces philosophical thinking to repudiate all “unique word” (Derrida 1982, 27) and all “master-name” (27) and, in this sense, incessantly seeks to awaken and effectuate singularities without reinscribing these in a reconciliatory and unificatory horizon of presence, objectifying representation or foundational comprehension. Otherwise said, the deconstructive question “puts into question the name of the name” (27) and, through its operativity, engages a radical dismantling of the possibility of determining a single and unitary name on the “alliance of speech and Being” (27). Irreducible to any determination of Being, truth, history, presence, or essence, the operation of “différance” pertains to liberating in the “text of metaphysics” that from which and in which it yet remains to be “deciphered otherwise” (27). That is, “deciphered” from a singular, heterogeneous, and rebellious Law which ensures nothing salvatory, messianic, or kerygmatic but only and uniquely vows the “text of metaphysics” to its incessant aporetisation “all at once,” marking the “monument and the mirage of the trace, the trace simultaneously traced and erased, simultaneously living and dead, and, as always, living in the simulation of life’s preserved inscription” (24). Derrida indeed deploys this singular exigency spurred by the operation of différance in the concluding paragraphs of the “Différance” essay: “Older” than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But, we already know that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally so not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions. (Derrida 1982, 26) The dynamism of the deconstructive question shows here the breadth of its incisiveness as well, and at the same time, as its promise. For deconstruction does not simply set up the tradition it questions, from Plato to Heidegger, as a barrier to be surmounted or a frontier to be overcome by the need to sojourn in the authentic unificatory essence of its inherent logos. It commands this tradition to unceasingly write other performatives than those it has named, write other performatives of those it names and those it could or would name. As if its past, its present, and its future will have incessantly to come. Deconstruction engages its very operativity from an indeterminate temporality in which past, present, and future are always and already distended into what we are to call, following Derrida, the modality of a “to come” (à venir) which remains irreducible and heterogeneous to any temporal determination as such. The modality of this “to come” persistently forces temporality to remain traversed and haunted by a diachrony in which time is “out of joint,” dis-jointed, “differing and deferring” (Derrida 1982, 26), unceasingly unsettling the predominance of presence at work in the multiple and diverse logics of givenness and donation in the history of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Husserl and Heidegger. But this temporal diachrony not only suspends the essence of presence by irremediably displacing and irreconcilably disjoining past, present, and future in an indeterminate 260

Jacques Derrida

“to come” of singularities irreducible to intentional appropriation but also upsets, in the same gesture, the lineaments of the idea of genesis which orders, by deploying the temporality of its originary lived experience, the phenomenological constitution of subjectivity. Indeed, Derrida always remarked how and why genesis and, consequently, genetic phenomenology whilst pretending to constitute and conjure lived experience—where, as Husserl contends, it is through retention and protention, through recollection and anticipation, and thus through the temporalisation of subjectivity that meaning appears originally as presence—also produces “unperceived entailment or dissimulated contaminations” ­(Derrida 2003, xl).1 Which means, for Derrida, that phenomenology—if it is to remain faithful to its “Principle of All Principles” according to which “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimising source of cognition, that everything originally [so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality] offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there” (Husserl 1983, 44)—remains committed to the self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit), or self-presence, of lived experience as temporalisation of subjectivity and yet, at the same time, this very commitment also generates what Derrida calls “differential contaminations” (2003, xl), which depict the need for a genetic phenomenology capable of figuring the originary becoming of subjectivity in its temporalisation whilst also interrupting and suspending its own intentional resolution. The possibility of a genetic phenomenology is, in this sense, problematised by its own-most intent. Indeed, Derrida draws out the aporia of genetic phenomenology by marking how the originary becoming of transcendental subjectivity, its temporalisation, cannot deploy itself within the realm of what is already constituted and hence cannot appeal, without contradicting its own commitment and thereby collapsing the capital distinction between the empirical and the transcendental in phenomenology, to constituted subjects. Where, as Husserl contends, temporality and intentionality are to be generated by the phenomenological reduction and therefore through the act of the transcendental subject, Derrida (Derrida 2003, xxxix) risks the question “How can absolute and monadic transcendental subjectivity be at the same time a becoming constituting itself?” Which is not without opening within phenomenology itself an irresolvable yet essential tension—what Derrida also calls its “fundamental or ontological dialectic” (134)2—in which “every constituting moment brings with it a constituted moment in the intimacy of its foundation” (134). All occurs as if the time-constituting consciousness is always already composed of constituted instants and therefore shows nothing less than an intrusion of constituted time into the constitution of time, which cannot, for Derrida, sustain Husserl’s rigorous distinction between transcendental constitution and the facticity of existence. This irresolvable and yet essential tension produces a heterogeneity incessantly haunting and menacing the operativity of the phenomenological method, which, as Derrida claims, “will show, by deepening the phenomenology of temporality, that at the level of the originary temporal existence, fact and essence, the empirical and the transcendental, are inseparable” and therefore that the “originarily synthetic identification of consciousness and time” prevalent in phenomenology “is equivalent to confusing the pure subject with an originarily historical existence that is the very ‘existence’ of the subject” (134). In this sense, what Derrida calls for through his active rereading of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology is a “reorientation” of phenomenology that would “put us in contact with the existent as such” (2003, 106), and thus confront the paradoxicality at the heart of subjectivity. A paradoxicality which incessantly “produces sameness as self-relation within selfdifference” and, thus, “sameness as the nonidentical” and which engages a displacement 261

Joseph Cohen

of the phenomenological method. This displacement indicates the alteration of the subject through a “movement of difference” which incessantly projects it into a “différance” of itself with itself. This alteration, marked within its lived present, shows subjectivity as “trace” (Derrida [1967] 1973, 85) and, thus, as “openness upon exteriority in general, upon the sphere of what is not ‘one’s own’ ” (86). Derrida also points out that this alteration is not only temporal but also “from the outset, a ‘spacing’ . . . space is ‘in’ time; it is time’s pure leaving itself” (82), which “at once and the same time, both fissures and retards presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay” (88). This incessant altering movement of “différance” signals what Derrida will also call a quasitranscendental, which opens subjectivity not to its presence but toward a primordial supplement marking each time singularly the non-plenitude of presence: a futurity thus at once differing the constitution of its life world and deferring “ad infinitum” its lived present (99). Otherwise said, a futurity which seeks always to reach beyond and outside the Husserlian figure of the “non-fulfilment of intuition” and which thereby already differs intuition and always defers fulfilment. The incessant altering movement of this “différance,” differing and deferring the present and thereby marking each time singularly the temporal non-plenitude of presence situates the deconstructive question precisely where its expression unceasingly reiterates a futurity always overflowing the intentionality of presence and already instigating it to not only depose its predominance but also thereby write itself otherwise than by and through the repetition of its own-most and determined signification. Which means, for Derrida, that the deconstructive question engages this dismantling movement of presence by restating each time singularly a question of justice: according to which Law and in function of which right is presence named as such and determined as the essence of temporality? Or, to phrase this question otherwise: From which principle does presence sustain and maintain its predominance, its sovereignty, its primacy in the determination and constitution of meaning and truth in history? And, furthermore, what is left of justice when it is always and already subjected to conform and predetermined to resolve itself to the meaning and the truth of presence?

3.  On the “Différance” of the Political The deconstructive question here expressed, whose formulation follows the development of its operativity at the heart of Heidegger’s history of the truth of Being and Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, is not only but also, and perhaps primarily so, a political question. Indeed, the deconstructive question spurring on the altering movement of “différance” whilst engaging the supplementarity of singularities which at once dismantle the predominance of presence and produce wholly other performatives than those appropriable in and within the intentional horizon of presence by persistently exposing it to a futurity irreducible to any temporal determination as such also proposes to deploy a responsibility for the political.3 Derrida deploys the ethical and political exigency to come through another form of temporality which unceasingly remains heteronomous to the order of presence and which does not tend towards a unification in a determined intentional horizon. As alluded to earlier, Derrida’s deconstructive question engages the task of thinking a diachrony of temporality in which the differing and the deferring of presence open to an irreducible “futurity-tocome” (“l’à-venir”), where the political is seen as emerging as that which radically disjoins 262

Jacques Derrida

and thereby marks an irretrievable non-contemporaneity within each “lived present.” The ethical and the political exigency here overwhelm and surpass the very possibility of subscribing them to a horizon of intentionality. Indeed, the thrust of Derrida’s ethics and politics is to incessantly sustain a “différance” of any and all actualisations of the ethical and the political by resolutely turning these toward an infinite and undetermined responsibility for the Other—a responsibility always to come to the ethical and the political and which never determines itself through an ethical norm or a political decision. As infinite response to the Other, who incessantly ruptures and fractures the instances of any time consciousness, Derrida operates a radical shift from futurity (“l’avenir”) to a “futurity-to-come” (“l’à-venir”), in which the accent placed on the infinitive form of futurity opens to a radically singular address of the Other toward the Other as an unsubstitutable and indetermined event calling and commanding an always non-fulfilled and each time novel ethical and political responsibility. Certainly, the Levinasian influence4 in Derrida’s gesture is here undeniable (cf. Cohen 2009, 177–202). However, we ought to underline the radicality of the Derridian approach which, far from situating the “political after the ethical” or rethinking “ethics as first philosophy,” ventures into simultaneously thinking of the ethical and the political as indissociable insofar as these are thought of as the urgency of what Derrida calls the “other heading” (cf. Derrida 1992b) and where ethical and political responsibility are seen not as signifying or “awakening” subjectivity to the ethical or the political, but as engaging the respondent in a deconstructive questioning of both the ethical and the political. Indeed, for Derrida, thinking the ethical and the political implies revealing within each an “aporetic experience of the impossible” (1993, 15) in which “when something comes to pass as possible, when an event occurs as possible, the fact that it will have been impossible, that the possible invention will have been impossible, this impossibility continues to haunt the possibility” (15). As matters of example, he often refers to the aporias of hospitality, forgiveness, animality-humanity, friendship, language, mourning and commemoration, judgment, and political decision.5 However, far from trapped in these aporetic double binds in which the unconditional and the conditional both signify and deconstruct their own-most intentions, Derrida marks the place of political responsibility as the incessant confrontation of these tensions, which persistently haunt the very possibility of the political. Indeed, political responsibility means, for Derrida, to face the multiplications of aporetic double binds affecting and working through each and every political signifier. This political responsibility means nothing less than the exercise of persisting in these aporetic double binds in view of dismantling the binary and oppositional forms and contents of political discourses and thereby invent wholly novel performatives which would incessantly exceed the determinations these inscribe and engrave. In this sense, political responsibility signifies the experience of exceeding the pretention of the Law and, thereby, of voiding the prevalence of the “force of Law” in its posture as the truthful embodiment of justice and universality, in the hope of addressing the singularity of each political and ethical situation, case, or event. Political responsibility thus means a certain gesture of aporetising the traditional oppositions at work in political discourses by persistently and without reserve recanting the conditions of possibility or what are thought to be the conditions of actuality of political judgment and decision in an attempt to reveal how and where these aporetisations foster other performatives which resist their confinement in their determined actualisations. Indeed, for Derrida, political responsibility engages each political discourse and its signifier to exceed the confines of what has been, surpass the structure of what is thought to be, transcend the 263

Joseph Cohen

limitations of what is foreseen to occur, and thereby open thinking to that which arrives otherwise than determined or predetermined by and through the categories of political judgment and experience.

4.  For a “Democracy to Come” Political responsibility implies and supposes, for Derrida, a dismantling and disjoining of the temporal determination of presence. Better said: Political responsibility implies and supposes the suspension and the interruption of past, present, and future by and through the incessant encounter toward an indeterminable “futurity-to-come.” Indeed, this political responsibility, which Derrida never dissociates from the perpetual reiteration and reformulation of aporias in each political discourse and context, operates as an insurmountable and unfulfilled engagement towards a “futurity-to-come” in which deconstruction itself is projected in an irreconcilable and indeterminable “historicity.” Otherwise said, political responsibility arises where past, present, and future are radically disjoined and where responsibility is engaged toward historical events which are always growing out of the past as occurring from an unpredictable and irreducible future. Which means political responsibility is always measuring itself against an incessant supplementation of futurity as originary non-plenitude of presence where we remain persistently confronted to the singularity of historical events as erupting from a past which never passes into the past, which resist and rebel against their appropriation in a historical comprehension and thus always occur as unforeseen and unpredictable futurities. In this sense, the political entails, for Derrida, the invention of always-novel performatives of responsibility toward that which incessantly returns as each time singularly arriving. Derrida deploys the meaning of political responsibility in and through its involvement and engagement with history, in which historical events incessantly return as never belonging to a past but as always occurring as futural. Political responsibility engages our we to confront yet another aporia: that of the history of the future, “the past as absolute future” (Derrida 1994, 17), in which “what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back” (10). And, in this sense, engages our we to remain always haunted by “revenants,” (11) which remain irreducible to a lived past but incessantly arrive as irresolvable, unrecognisable, and unfeasible in a “lived state”: that is, as radically and unpredictably futural. This singular attention to the revenants of history, or what Derrida also calls spectres, opens to a responsibility for the singularity of historical events and, in this sense, to a memory, a testimony, and an inheritance of the singularities in and of history, a “hauntology” (10) which, far from being confined to the normative order of commemorations or resolved in strategies of remembrance or forgiveness, urges an address to both past and future as incessantly overflowing the presence of the present and thus commanding an unresolvable, unconditional, unsettled ethics for the Other. Which is why, for Derrida, political responsibility is always and already engaged in the “companionship of spectres” (10), and thus in recurrences which are of the past insofar as they are incomprehensible in a past and thereby always occur as futurities, refusing their inscription in a historical teleology or eschatology. As if the singularity of historical events, returning as always futural and in their futural occurrence persistently resisting their appropriation in a determined historical narrative, would spur on the political to invent another logos than its logos: a logos which would express a justice for a “time out of joint,” a justice “within that which disjoins the living present” (xix), a justice in a time when past and future are both 264

Jacques Derrida

indissociable and indistinguishable and yet arrive and occur as impossible not to address, a justice for the each-time-singular spectres of history. According to which Law can this justice operate and express itself, its responsibility, and its address for and to the Other? To this question, Derrida will have famously advanced the hyperbolical idea of a “messianicity without messianism” (1994, 167–68):6 that is, of a certain democracy. One, however, which always remains actively engaged in the incessant reformulation of its own Law, of its own possibilities, furthering its limits to persistently prompt a surplus of democracy, whilst at the same time already opened and exposed to its radical and uncompromising transformation beyond the confines or the limitations of the reiteration of its inherent possibilities. This “messianicity” or this “democracy-to-come” prompts an excess of or a supplement to what is consigned in the word, the concept, the theory, or the practice of democracy and simultaneously engages democracy to further itself beyond itself toward a hyperbolic justice of the surplus, of the supplement, of the excess to the point where it perhaps would arrive at expressing itself wholly otherwise than according to its democratic expression in view of addressing that which is “to come” to democracy and which democracy has not and, indeed, cannot or could not, foresee. It is perhaps here, in this “messianicity without messianism,” at the heart of this aporetic question within and yet beyond democracy, incessantly urging it to reinvent itself and, at the same time, invent an idea of justice wholly beyond itself. It is perhaps here, in this impossible and yet positive responsibility for a democracy to come, that lies the political Jacques Derrida.

5. Outlook The reception of Derrida’s critical inheritance of phenomenology is highly complex and would require a very lengthy and meticulous development. Suffice it to say nonetheless that the reception of deconstruction and its critical appraisal of phenomenology is profoundly divided and torn between, on the one hand, accusations of ethical and political indeterminacy (cf. Searle 1977, 198–208) or nihilism (cf. Habermas 19877) and, on the other, defences of its radical transformations of philosophical thinking and ethico-political action (cf. Nancy 2007; cf. Butler 1993, 1997). Indeed, deconstruction is seen either as the expression of ethical relativism and metaphysical indefiniteness or as the exigency to invent beyond what it—deconstruction—sees as the determined binarisms of the philosophical tradition from Plato to Heidegger. It is also important to note that in the French intellectual context, Derrida’s work has prompted both praise and rejection. Indeed, deconstruction has profoundly inspired philosophical works as different and various as those of E. Levinas, J.-L. Nancy, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Marion, and J. Rancière. But deconstruction has also been criticised, notably by M. Foucault and P. Bourdieu, not for its supposed radicalism, but rather for what would be its conservatism.8

Notes 1 This early text, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (originally written for the French Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures in 1953 and 1954) was only published at the Presses Universitaires de France in 1990. This text certainly represents Derrida’s first succinct and critical study of Husserl’s philosophy, which would be pursued in numerous later writings, cf.: the French language translation and critical introduction of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry (Derrida [1962] 1978) and Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Derrida [1967] 1973), as well as the following significant articles: “ ‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology”

265

Joseph Cohen (Derrida [1964/1967] 1978, 154–68) and “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language” (Derrida [1967] 1973, 107–28). Critical, but also marking the breakthroughs and originality of Derrida’s philosophical engagement with Husserl—see R. Bernet, La voix de son maître (Husserl et Derrida) (Bernet 1994) and N. de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time. Subjectivity in Transcendental Philosophy (2009, 259). 2 Although Derrida uses, in The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (2003), the historically and philosophically loaded term of “dialectic” in describing an aporia both constituting and yet always dismantling the movement of the phenomenological method, he will, of course, abandon this word whilst developing the very idea of deconstruction and thereby what we are calling here, in the wake of this idea, the deconstructive question. On the relation between dialectic and deconstruction, cf., J. Cohen, The Event of Reading: Hegel ‘with’ Derrida (2013) and D. Dahlstrom, Hegel’s Questionable Legacy (2002). 3 According to our interpretation, it appears nonsensical to speak of a politico-ethical turn in Derrida’s philosophy which would seemingly appear in the 1990s, notably with the publication of such texts as Politics of Friendship (Derrida 1997), Force of Law (Derrida 1992a), and Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994). Quite to the contrary, we claim that the political and the ethical are at the centre of Derrida’s deconstructive question and, indeed, entirely inhabit the deconstructive readings of Husserl and Heidegger. 4 The philosophical relation between Levinas and Derrida has, of course, prompted a great number of scholarly commentaries and interpretations. Our references here are consequently nonexhaustive: N. Anderson, Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure (2012); S. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992); M. Dooley and L. Kavanagh, The Philosophy of Derrida (2014); B. Plant, Doing Justice to the Derrida Levinas Connection: A Response to Mark Dooley (2003). 5 Cf. on the aporias of hospitality (in Of Hospitality [Derrida 2001b]), of forgiveness (in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness [Derrida 2001c]), of animality-humanity (in The Beast and the Sovereign [Derrida [2009] 2011]) and The Animal That Therefore I Am [Derrida 2008]), of friendship (in Politics of Friendship [Derrida 1997]), of language (in Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin [Derrida 1998]), of mourning and commemoration (in The Gift of Death [Derrida 1995]); Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994), The Work of Mourning (Derrida 2001a), of ethical judgment and political decision (in Rogues. Two Essays on Reason [Derrida 2004]). 6 See also Derrida (2002), Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone. 7 It ought to be noted that Habermas subsequently rescinded his initial critique of Derrida. Habermas’s initial critique of Derrida was, however, polemically retrieved by A. Renaut and L. Ferry in French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (Ferry and Renaut 1990). For a criticism of A. Renaut and L. Ferry, cf. J. Cohen and R. Zagury-Orly, The Wears and Tears of the European Humanities (Cohen and Zagury-Orly 2020). 8 For an extensive survey of the influences of Derrida’s deconstruction in 20th-century philosophy, we refer here to C. Norris, Deconstruction and the ‘Unfinished Project of Modernity’ (Norris 2000); Derrida and the Political (Beardsworth 1996); and the edited volume Derrida and the Time of the Political (Guerlac and Cheah 2009).

References Anderson, Nicole. 2012. Derrida: Ethics under Erasure. London: Continuum. Beardsworth, Richard. 1996. Derrida and the Political. London: Routledge. Bernet, Rudolf. 1994. “La voix de son maître (Husserl et Derrida).” In La vie du sujet. Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie, 267–96. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. ———. 1997. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Cohen, Joseph. 2009. Alternances de la métaphysique. Essais sur E. Levinas. Paris: Galilée.

266

Jacques Derrida ———. 2013. “The Event of Reading: Hegel ‘with’ Derrida.” In Hegel’s Thought in Europe. Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents, edited by Lisa Herzog, 250–61. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Joseph, and Raphael Zagury-Orly. 2020. “The Wears and Tears of the European Humanities.” Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 8 (1): 135–61. Critchley, Simon. 1992. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Derrida and Levinas. London: Blackwell. Dahlstrom, Daniel. 2002. “Hegel’s Questionable Legacy.” Research in Phenomenology 32: 3–25. de Warren, Nicolas. 2009. Husserl and the Promise of Time. Subjectivity in Transcendental Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1962) 1978. Edmund Husserl´s Origin of Geometry. Translated by John P. Leavey. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. ———. (1964/1967) 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. (1967) 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison and Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1974. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ———. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992a. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, 3–67. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 1992b. The Other Heading. Reflections on Today’s Europe. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Spectres of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London/New York: Verso. ———. 1998. Monoligualism of the Other or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001a. The Work of Mourning. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2001b. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001c. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. “Faith and Knowledge. The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 40–102. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Translated by Marian Hobson. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2004. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Willis. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. (2009) 2011. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vols. I and II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dooley, Mark, and Liam Kavanagh. 2014. The Philosophy of Derrida. London: Routledge. Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renaut. 1990. French Philosophy of the Sixties. An Essay on Antihumanism. Translated by Mary Schnackenberg Cattani. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Guerlac, Suzanne, and Pheng Cheah, eds. 2009. Derrida and the Time of the Political. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: M. Nijhoff.

267

Joseph Cohen Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: SUNY Press. Norris, Christopher. 2000. Deconstruction and the “Unfinished Project of Modernity”. London: Bloomsbury. Plant, Bob. 2003. “Doing Justice to the Derrida Levinas Connection: A Response to Mark Dooley.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4): 427–50. Searle, John R. 1977. “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida.” Glyph 1: 198–208.

268

20 BERNHARD WALDENFELS Responsive Phenomenology of the Political Thomas Bedorf*

1. Introduction The work of Bernhard Waldenfels represents an essential stage in German phenomenology in the second half of the 20th century: It may not be an exaggeration to call his “responsive phenomenology” the most important German innovation in phenomenology since Heidegger. This innovation would have been unthinkable were it not for Waldenfels’s deep engagement with French phenomenology, to whose reception in the German-speaking world he contributed like no other. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, Waldenfels (1983) transforms the basic phenomenological concept of intentionality into that of responsivity. His work is informed by the conviction that perceiving, acting, and speaking can no longer, at least not primarily, be grasped by referring to a constituting consciousness but by describing the ways in which we deal with and respond to a prior otherness or foreignness (a difference that is itself prominently elaborated). Subjectivity only emerges a posteriori (nachträglich); it is not an autonomous entity that begins spontaneously with itself. This has two consequences for the field of the political. First, it is not a sui generis domain that can be clearly delineated from others if responsivity is understood as a basic feature of rationality, affectivity, and corporeality. Rather, it becomes clear that the political has its genealogical origin in the undecidabilities that exist between different responses, none of which can be the normatively “correct” one. Second, the difference-philosophical orientation of responsive phenomenology is instructive for the political insofar as it situates itself between normative positions (liberalism, critical theory, philosophy of value) and structural theories (Marxism, structuralism, theories of the political). Regarding the differences of the political, it is not necessary to decide hastily since they are to be described—also ­phenomenologically—above all in their tension and conflictuality.

2.  Responsive Phenomenology The philosophical work of Bernhard Waldenfels includes other sources besides phenomenology. On the one hand, since his studies in classical philology and his dissertation on the *Translation by Felix Schneider

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-29

269

Thomas Bedorf

Platonic form of dialogue (Waldenfels 1961), Waldenfels has continuously been interested in and inspired by Greek philosophy, especially the thought of Plato, to whom he dedicated one of his recent works (Waldenfels 2017). It is the openness of Platonic thought, not to be reduced to the classical clichés of “Platonism” (static doctrine of ideas or totalitarian politeia), that sparks Waldenfels’s interest. On the other hand, Waldenfels’s thinking is nourished by those French currents of thought that have challenged and criticized phenomenology, contributing to revisions and refinements—psychoanalysis (Lacan, Laplanche), ethnology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss)—and those philosophers who have developed their ways of thinking by working through the rigid systems of Marxism and structuralism (Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault). Among them, Foucault poses a particular challenge to phenomenology since his critique of the primacy of consciousness and meaning leads not to a bare structuralism but to a notion of historically contingent orders that define what can be said and done at a certain time and place. This explains why Waldenfels, in his work Order in the Twilight (1996), proceeds from Foucault’s expression “Il y a de l’ordre.” “There is order” implies the existence of a variety of types of order that can be distinguished both historically and systematically: Historically formative are, first, the classical total orders such as cosmos, spirit, and nature, organizing the philosophical orientation in a signifying framework. After their delegitimization in modernity, the basic orders of transcendental or linguistic philosophy, which map the necessary conditions of reason, follow. If this claim is abandoned as well, only normal orders remain, positivistically adapting orders to the normal distribution of the average or to the negotiated norm of what is justly valid (Waldenfels 1996, Chapter C.). Waldenfels’s concept of order is characterized by the fact that he does not simply take sides between these options but rather sketches out a philosophy of the extra-ordinary that allows the traditional historical forms of order to be understood either as hyperbolizations or as dwindling stages of a fundamentally dynamic landscape of order. The hyphen is crucial for the concept of the extra-ordinary (as, in general, the hyphens in Waldenfels’s terms deserve special attention) since it symbolizes that every surplus is not to be thought as a transcendent “beyond” but only in relation to a certain order. Dynamism and changeability can exist only thanks to that which is not fully absorbed into the order. Orders turn out to be contingent precisely because they can never get rid of such a surplus, be it in the form of irritations, disturbances, ruptures, or other phenomena of withdrawal. The extra-ordinary exists or appears in experience only contextually: that is, relative to the particular form of order it transcends. Just as for Husserl something can only ever appear as something, the extra-ordinary can only appear as extra-ordinary in a given order. Thus, there can be no unrelated beyond, no radical transgression, no kind of “extraordinary per se,” but only relational surpluses that challenge a given context. Moreover, the apersonal formula “Il y a de l’ordre” points out that there need not be a founder or originator of order. In line with theories of subjectivation, Waldenfels rather shows that the subject, with its horizons of possibility, is co-formed by the order. A given order can co-constitute founding figures without having to presuppose a strong subject at the origin of the order. The 1987 book Order in the Twilight, which Waldenfels himself describes in retrospect as a “breakthrough” (2013, 10), contains many motifs that characterize his later work and are elaborated more thoroughly and systematically there. The key concept of “responsive rationality,” which characterizes Waldenfels’s phenomenology as a whole (Waldenfels 1996, Chapter A. 10.), also already appears there. A decade later, it becomes the leitmotif of his first magnum opus, Antwortregister (Waldenfels 1994, 2024), whose pioneering achievement was to rework the phenomenological conception of intentionality by means of the 270

Bernhard Waldenfels

notion of the Other, resulting in a phenomenology of responsivity. What Waldenfels (1994, 242) calls the “significative difference” of Husserl’s sense reference of “something as something” is embedded in a more fundamental “responsive difference” in which we respond with something to something: the difference between what is responded and what is responded to. The origins of this fundamental structure of responsive difference can be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of alterity. There, otherness was conceived as a phenomenon of withdrawal that can never be fully comprehended—either by perception or by reflection. Any theory that takes subjects and their actions as its starting point will, Levinas argues, inevitably fail to do justice to this phenomenon of alterity. Levinas’s formula of the subject as “sub-jectum . . . responsible for everything” (Levinas 1981, 116) is interpreted by Waldenfels in a radically secular, formalistic way (Waldenfels 1995a). The Other’s demand must be identifiable as transcendence in experience: that is, as a surplus in the intersubjective order, rather than as an ethical beyond of sociality as such. This reading is informed by the difference between “saying” and “said,” which is not—as Levinas sometimes seems to imply—taken to be a religious formula but is reinterpreted phenomenologically in terms of language. Not only is the event of saying, the act of saying (énonciation) not identical to what is said—the content of the speech act (énoncé)—but there is no way to derive content from act or act from content. While there is no event of saying that does not transform itself into “said,” the said does not represent the event in the propositional content. According to Waldenfels, this categorial difference is characterized by the fact that the event of saying appears as “ex-cess, an extra-ordinary, rumbling in the diverse orders of the said” (1994, 199). The figure of thought from Order in the Twilight returns here, reformulated in terms of a phenomenology of language. Although Antwortregister is primarily a confrontation with competing theories in the field of philosophy of language (speech act theory, theory of communicative action, hermeneutics, discourse theory), the book’s claim goes far beyond this: Waldenfels’s theory of “responsive rationality” (333) also encompasses perceiving, speaking, and acting. This especially concerns the “corporeal responsory” (463ff.), as Waldenfels calls it: While it is clear that speech acts are always already embodied, Waldenfels also argues that language as such cannot be thought of apart from its corporeality (312ff.). Responsive phenomenology is always a corporeal phenomenology (cf. Waldenfels 2000). The responsive character of the corporeal responsory derives from the fact that the event of saying, qua event, does not itself prescribe how to deal with it: One can respond to the event of saying in one way or another. The appeal of the Other, whatever it signifies, commands me to respond—before and without knowing its content. Replacing intentionality with responsivity then means conceptualizing sense genesis not by orienting to (intentionality) but by responding to (responsivity). The difference is marked by the temporal structure of posteriority (Nachträglichkeit). “I intend” would have to be reformulated as “I will have responded.” But since the content of the response is contingent (i.e., dependent on but not fixed by social orders), every response contains a “response of responsibility” (Waldenfels 1995a), as Waldenfels puts it in a Levinasian interpretation. If we “cannot not respond” (Waldenfels 1994, 357), then the responsibility for the response specifically chosen in each case cannot be delegated. To paraphrase a famous sentence of Sartre: We are condemned to responsibility. By identifying responding as the locus of responsibility, an ethical moment in perceiving, speaking, and acting can be identified. “Responsive ethics” is then a specification of responding events rather than a method or subdiscipline of ethics. This line of thought contributes to a decentering of the subject, which is always present in Waldenfels’s work. When I act or speak, I do not begin with myself but always depart from 271

Thomas Bedorf

the Other. Putting the notion of intentionality into question also implies rethinking the phenomenological conception of corporeality: While Husserl and Merleau-Ponty still assume a bodily capacity of the “I can,” Waldenfels consequently emphasizes the pathic dimension in all experience. For experience, where it is not merely a comprehension of what is already known, begins with something that stands out or invades, something that imposes itself, entices, or deters. All these events of experience, however, cannot be described as “intended” since they happen to the subject involuntarily—or, as Waldenfels formulates it, they widerfahren. Experiences are first and foremost “Widerfahrnisse” (Waldenfels 2002, 98), a pathos that af-fects us (again, a hyphen is used to clarify that someone is addressed in the af-fect) (Waldenfels 2011, 26; cf. 2016). Pathic affectation addresses the subject and puts it—grammatically speaking—in the dative. From this perspective, not only is the subject decentered, beginning with the elsewhere of the Widerfahrnis, but the object also loses its pure abstract representationality and gains a relationality of its own. Accordingly, pathos is an “event of a special kind that happens to somebody” (Waldenfels 2011, 27). As in Lacan, Levinas, and Foucault, the subject must be understood as a sub-jectum: a subject to whom something happens. Before it can stabilize itself as a subject, the subject experiences itself—in Waldenfels’s terminology—as a “patient” and “respondent” (Waldenfels 2002, 99; see 2011, 44ff.). In contrast to Antwortregister, Waldenfels’s second major work, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung (2002), emphasizes the pathic moment more strongly while retaining the basic responsive structure. Instead of the responsive difference, diastasis now comes to the fore. This term denotes the dynamic nonidentity between that which happens to the subject (the Widerfahrnis) and that to which it responds.1 For not only is there no identity between what all experience proceeds from and what the response is directed to (be it by perceiving, speaking, or acting), but the “antecedence of the Widerfahrnis and the posteriority [Nachträglichkeit] of the response” (Waldenfels 2002, 103) interrupts the chronological sequence of events on a timeline. Similar to Levinas’s “diachrony,” diastatic experience cannot be brought together in a common present. The decentered subject, likewise, is never fully with itself; it is transformed in the transition from pathic to responsive self. This hiatus in diastasis is, at the same time, the locus of responsibility in response, which itself is an open form and cannot be further normatively determined. The concept of diastasis now allows, in a more nuanced way than in the earlier work, tracing the genesis of ethical subjectivity. In the practice of responding, the subject undergoes a transformation from “patient” to “respondent” that does not proceed by logical mechanisms. For the affection becomes an appeal to responsibility only when the indeterminate being affected by is transformed into being affected by whom or by what, and the indeterminate responding to is transformed into a responding to whom or to what. This means that every Widerfahrnis carries an elementary ethical dimension; however, it is only by the minimal interpretation accompanying every response that it becomes an ethical appeal with a specific content. The interpretation of a cry as a call for help makes me someone to whom this call for help is addressed and, thus, someone who could provide help. The open moment of response means that I do not necessarily provide help as I can also refuse to do so. Therefore, Waldenfels, following Levinas, insists on speaking not of an “ethics” but of the “ethical,” which has not yet solidified into a specific form of normativity. However, Waldenfels criticizes Levinas for blurring the difference between “affectation and appeal” so that, in the end, everything appears equally “ethical” (Waldenfels 1995a). To measure the consequences of these basic conceptual considerations for the field of the social and the political, one has to take into account the differentiation between Other 272

Bernhard Waldenfels

and Alien.2 Systematically, the dualism Own/Alien is distinguished from the dualism Same/ Other. It is in line with Levinas’s critique of the occidental inability to conceptualize the Other as Other when Waldenfels points out that the distinction between Other and Same remains in the medium of a general term. Apples are different from pears, but they are both fruit. While the Same is distinguished from the Other (in light of a specific difference), the Own distinguishes itself from the Alien. The elements a and b in the relation Same/ Other are interchangeable: a = non-b is equivalent to b = non-a. Alienness, on the other hand, is not relationally neutral but context-specifically related without a shared generic term. “The” Germans are different from “the” French and vice versa, without an umbrella term under which both fall. In gender difference, the genders are equally not interchangeable because the relations in the relationship between the genders can be neither reversed nor exchanged since they are asymmetrically designed (Waldenfels 2000, 329ff.). “Otherness” is a term for a generalizing collection; alienness is a relational term. The other is merely different as seen from the standpoint of a third party, whereas alienness occurs only in the experience of someone. For this experience, Husserl’s formula—repeatedly quoted by Waldenfels—is authoritative: strangeness is the “verifiable accessibility of what is not originally accessible” (Husserl 1982, 114; see Waldenfels 1990).3 Alienness is inaccessible as such (“original”), although it nevertheless appears in experience (“verifiable”). Yet the inaccessible cannot become accessible in experience itself (then it would not be “inaccessible”) but only in forms of withdrawal in experience: irritations, interruptions, disturbances, surprises. These fundamental, systematic explorations of a responsive phenomenology of experience have their ethical dimension in the elementary responsibility inherent in every response. However, the elementary responsive ethics also generates shifts in the realm of the political. A responsive phenomenology of the political emphasizes the differential, conflictual character of the political. Levinas (1981, 157) identified the figure of the Third as the transition from the ethical to justice, insofar as it forces a comparison that is impossible in the face of the Other. With the Third, other demands arise that have their own right and cannot be reduced to the demands of the Other. But since one—as demands are unconditional and irreducible—can never satisfy two demands at the same time, the demands of the Other and the Third come into conflict with each other. They have to be mediated; they demand a decision—although every demand of the Other (also of the other Other: the Third) is “infinite” (Bedorf 2006, 265). In this conflict, normative constellations are formed out of ethical impulses that must take into account not only the competing demand of other Others (i.e., third parties) but also the “competing demand of the law” (Waldenfels 1994, 308; extensively 2006, 119–38). This reconstruction sheds new light on the classical constellations of normative conflicts. Where, for example, in Antigone or in Kantian normative collisions, a conflict between the singular demand of an Other and the legal claim of the institution or between morality and law becomes noticeable, this conflict cannot, in turn, be resolved by moral means. The conflict becomes political: the conflict between singular demand and legal or institutional claims is itself the place of the political.

3.  Fields of Responsive Politics The perspective of responsive phenomenology yields not so much a different politics or a political theory but rather shows that a politics that takes the experience of the Alien seriously cannot offer any hasty solutions because the political contradiction occurs in the 273

Thomas Bedorf

experiences themselves and can therefore be answered only there. “Responsive politics” is what Waldenfels calls a a politics that devises ways and means to respond to challenges, demands, and appeals. It needs ethical impulses but does not exhaust itself in these. An inventive politics constantly moves between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, between the normal, regulated, and the abnormal, unregulated, between the conditional and that which is not at free disposition. (Waldenfels 2022, 98) Quite classically, the value of a phenomenological approach consists in a better and more precise description that patiently and persistently insists on nuances where normative decisions are often hastily demanded. This phenomenological approach is especially fruitful in the following thematic fields: foreignness, Eurocentrism, identities, collectives, institutions, and universalism. “Foreignness” does not just mean an encounter with the external Other, the other person, the other culture, the other ways of acting, but the experience of foreignness “reaches its high point as our experience itself becomes alien” (Waldenfels 2011, 77). As we exist as corporeal creatures, the foreign occurs intrapersonally: my birth or my name do not originate in myself. Likewise, the foreign occurs intraculturally: this is the case when the neighbor who supposedly belongs to one’s own culture is habitually so different that the commonality is hardly recognizable. The foreignness of another culture in an intercultural encounter is not a mere otherness but consists of events in an in-between space. For Waldenfels repeatedly points out that what is absolutely or totally foreign can no longer be perceived as foreign at all. Even the foreign language must offer a minimal intelligibility so that it remains decipherable as a language at all. In relation to the culturally foreign, different “styles of alienness” occur (Waldenfels 2011, 76), which vary from case to case and must first be described. Eurocentrism is a case of processing the foreign through incorporation, a mixture of “ethnocentrism and logocentrism” (Waldenfels 1997a, 135). Husserl assumed a “telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy” (Husserl 1978, 15) following a “historical movement through which universal reason, ‘inborn’ in humanity as such, is revealed” (16). In opposition to a “merely . . . empirical anthropological type like ‘China’ or ‘India’ ” (16), Europe has a universal mission. This Eurocentrism lives from the fact that one’s own expands into the whole and general by going through the foreign. “The ‘miracle of Eurocentric reason,’ ” as Waldenfels ironically puts it, “consists in the fact that the European proves to be a true cosmopolitan who is at once at home with himself in the world and at home with himself in the world” (Waldenfels 1997a, 136; see Yu 2019, 163ff.). Adopting a non-Eurocentric position as a European would imply speaking of the non-European in Europe: that is, illuminating those zones in between that are the particular mode of appearance of the foreign. If today it is time for a postcolonial phenomenology, Bernhard Waldenfels is one of those who offer approaches for a self-critical reflection of white Europe. Personal or cultural identities can never be fixed if the own can only constitute itself in the exchange with and response to the foreign. What Europe is or what is regarded as Europe cannot be determined on the basis of fixed criteria but is only revealed performatively in the response to historical shocks and challenges. The idea of purity underlying a 274

Bernhard Waldenfels

culture is a phantasm that leads directly to violence against the one who had to be excluded from their own in order to produce the supposed purity. What becomes visible in the interand intracultural interstices is the underlying contingency of all identities, which must first emerge responsively and situationally but cannot be defined on the basis of fixed criteria. Any essentialism is thus excluded. The supposed essence of an identity can only be forcibly generated or asserted when the different dimensions of demands between Other and Third are unified. Identity remains split because the hiatus between Other and Third cannot be closed or bridged. The Third is not a universal figure but that of a universalization of the Other— a universalization that is always disputed and revisable. From the standpoint of social phenomenology, singularity exists only in the plural (Waldenfels 1995b). This has consequences for all political speech acts that (want to) speak “in the name of”: in the name of human rights, a people, a cultural minority, a sexual orientation, etc. “The ‘we’ of the propositional content does not coincide with the ‘we’ of the propositional act that speaks about the we, or with the ‘I’ that speaks for the we” (Waldenfels 1997b, 149). There is always someone or a contingent group that says “we” because the we itself that is claimed in the speech act does not speak. Moreover, the speaker in the we saying occurs twice: both as speaker and as part of the we that is claimed in the speech act. The reflexivity of the we saying means that there is a “performative difference” (Waldenfels 2015, 46) in the speech event itself, a difference that can only appear there. The critique of populism already results from this as a critique of a collectivizing fallacy. In populist speech acts, the plurality of voices that are supposed to be taken into account by saying “we” is homogenized. For the performative production of a “we” is always a staging with a fictitious character, in which the one(s) uttering the speech act—“we, the people”—and the claimed we diverge differentially. An identity between the uttered “we” and the I who says “we” is impossible, so a we without exclusion cannot be had. For a theory of institutions, responsive phenomenology draws on the concept of Stiftung, which has long been known in phenomenology (Bedorf 2020). The contingency of social institutionalization means that the instituting (Stiftung) of an institution can only ever succeed by endowing one particular institution. A political we that gathers to institutionalize cannot guarantee the we that is named in the institution. The speaking we is not congruent with the named one. There remains a “gap between the ‘We’ that speaks and the ‘We’ that is mentioned in the declaration” (Waldenfels 2007, 6). This gap of the event of Stiftung requires—if one wants to account for it—“a phenomenology, genealogy, or deconstruction of the political through which the process of normalization is knowingly carried out as a process and is therefore scrupulously monitored” (Waldenfels 2007, 7; emphasis added). The groundless institution is marked by its irredeemable instability and changeability. This would have consequences for theories of the political as put forward by Rancière, Badiou, and Laclau and Mouffe. They would have to be differentiated by Waldenfels’s concept of difference of the extra-ordinary. The categorical distinction between politics and the political runs the risk of considering politics merely empirically and losing any foundations for politics (instead of merely shaking them). Instead of focusing on radical, revolutionary events, responsive phenomenology emphasizes events that take place “in between,” in which politics and the political are equally intertwined: “embodiments, emblems, supplements, dispositifs, practices, or key events” (Waldenfels 2015, 204). The fact that the meaning of “we” is always contested is an “expression of an inchoative political” (ibid., 275

Thomas Bedorf

181), which Waldenfels sees laid out in Rancière with a simultaneous underdetermination of the precarious binding power of the we. As political speech can be uttered only from a certain perspective, universality (as well as singularity) has to be taken in the plural. For to consider something from the point of view of the whole is one perspective among others. But to speak for the whole because one thinks that one is mandated to do so hypostatizes one’s own perspective as a totalizing one. The “point of view of the universal” is not to be confused with a “universal point of view” (Waldenfels 1997c, 125). Politically, contingent dynamics instead of fixed criteria would have to be put in the foreground—a “universalization in the plural” (Waldenfels 2004, 290), reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s “lateral universal” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 120).

4. Outlook Responsive phenomenology, as Bernhard Waldenfels developed it with great insistence and meticulousness over decades, can be considered one of the great innovations of the phenomenological tradition in the second half of the 20th century. It does not limit itself to an assertion of dealing with political objects (such as institutional practices, programs, or arrangements) but rather sets out to thematize the “open play of forces” that “holds all spheres of order in tension and which, by virtue of its partial indecisiveness, becomes the site of the political” (Waldenfels 2015, 196). The political in Waldenfels’s sense is thus rather implicitly present as the possibility to politicize that which is undecidable. The constellation of I, Other/Alien, and Third that functionally illustrates this undecidability points to a formal reading of Levinas’s theory of justice, whereas the insistence on undecidability recalls the Derrida of the 1990s. A good dose of realism of power à la Foucault prevents moving too far away from practices of politics. This decision to throw oneself into the realities of the orders of politics is expressed, then, in an ironic judgment that Waldenfels makes about arguably radical philosophies of the political: “As in philosophy, so in politics it is often the lack of consistency that prevents the worst” (Waldenfels 1997d, 170). Responsive phenomenology has found multiple connections: in fundamental reconstructions of the politics of responsivity (Vanni 2009; Menga 2011) as well as in the philosophy of law (Lindahl 2013), the philosophy of recognition (Bedorf 2010), and the philosophy of gender difference (Orlikowski 2018). The guiding principle is to always think in terms of difference: significant difference, responsive difference, performative difference, social difference—the patient attention to their respective openness saves Waldenfels from reading political difference as a guiding difference in an overly static way and teaches us to pay attention to the surpluses, ruptures, and possibilities in all political orders where resignation wants to see mere routines of the system. Waldenfels’s “interventions” allow “crack[ing] open that which is truly possible, but which seems impossible” (Gehring 2011, 135).

Notes 1 Experiences are “Widerfahrnisse,” according to Waldenfels’s German neologism. I don’t “have” experiences (Erfahrungen), nor do I make them “happen,” but they “happen to me” (“against” me = wider). On this term, see also Friesen (2014, 72). 2 The translation of the German Fremdes/Fremder is notoriously difficult. Waldenfels prefers the terminological opposition between Eigenes (own) and Fremdes (alien/foreign) to the one of Selbes (same) and Anderes (other) as—for example—Levinas does to make a semantic difference. It

276

Bernhard Waldenfels allows signifying a break with the Hegelian dialectics of the Self while the Other is just a way of turning back to oneself. Waldenfels’s use of fremd to mark an open and unreconcilable relation is a choice of terminology. For non-German readers, this is indeed irritating as the French postwar phenomenology, to which Waldenfels relates in this regard, did not use the term l’étrange. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Derrida all use l’autre or autrui. Because of the multiple possible options of translating Fremdheit (alienness, foreignness, strangeness), we use “alien”/“foreign” for fremd, making the reader aware of the German origin of the terminology. For the terminological problem in the German-French philosophical transfer, see also Bedorf 2007. 3 Here, the English edition translates Fremdes (the strange, the foreign) as “other.” See Husserl 1991, 144.

References Bedorf, Thomas. 2006. “The Irreducible Conflict. Subjectivity, Alterity and the Third.” Archivio di Filosofia 74 (1–3): 259–70. ———. 2007. “Die Konjunktur des Fremden und der Begriff des Anderen.” In Die Fremde, edited by Kurt Röttgers and Monika Schmitz-Emans, 23–38. Essen: Blaue Eule. ———. 2010. Verkennende Anerkennung. Über Identität und Politik. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2020. “Instituting Institutions. An Exploration of the Political Phenomenology of Stiftung.” In Political Phenomenology. Experience, Ontology, Episteme, edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, 239–55. London/New York: Routledge. Friesen, Norm. 2014. “Waldenfels’ Responsive Phenomenology of the Alien: An Introduction.” Phenomenology & Practice 7 (2): 68–77. Gehring, Petra. 2011. “Wie Phänomenologie interveniert. (The Paths of the Alien: On the Philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels).” Etica & Politica 13 (1): 134–35. Husserl, Edmund. 1978. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. 4th ed. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1982. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. 7th ed. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague/Boston/London: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1991. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Vol. 1: Husserliana. 2nd ed. Edited by Stephan Strasser. The Hague: Kluwer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Lindahl, Hans. 2013. Fault Lines of Globalization. Legal Order and the Politics of A-Legality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menga, Ferdinando. 2011. “Guest Editor’s Preface. (The Paths of the Alien: On the Philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels).” Etica & Politica 13 (1): 7–15. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss.” In Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary, 114–21. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Orlikowski, Anna. 2018. “Weiblichkeit als Zweideutigkeit. Phänomenologische Zugänge im Spannungsfeld zwischen Beschreibung und Konstituierung.” In Weiblichkeit—Ansätze zur Theoretisierung, edited by Antje Langer, Claudia Mahs, and Barbara Rendtorff, 53–68. Opladen/Berlin/ Toronto: Verlag Barbara Budrich. Vanni, Michel. 2009. L’adresse du politique. Essai d’approche responsive. Paris: Cerf. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1961. Das sokratische Fragen. Meisenheim am Glan Hain. ———. 1983. Phänomenologie in Frankreich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1990. “Experience of the Alien in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Research in Phenomenology 20: 19–33. ———. 1994. Antwortregister. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1995a. “Response and Responsibility in Levinas.” In Ethics as First Philosophy, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, 39–52. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 1995b. “Singularität im Plural.” In Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge, 302–21. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1996. Order in the Twilight. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1997a. “Europa angesichts des Fremden.” In Topographie des Fremden. Vol. 1: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, 131–44. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

277

Thomas Bedorf ———. 1997b. “Nationalismus als Surrogat.” In Topographie des Fremden. Vol. 1: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, 145–65. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997c. “Der Anspruch des Fremden und die Rolle des Dritten. Interkulturelle Diskurse.” In Topographie des Fremden. Vol. 1: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, 110–30. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997d. “Das Ganze, das Normale und das Fremde. Wissenschafts- und Gesellschaftskritik nach Husserl und Marx.” In Topographie des Fremden. Vol. 1: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, 166–83. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2000. Das leibliche Selbst. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes. Edited by Regula Giuliani. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2002. Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Phänomenologie—Psychoanalyse—Phänomenotechnik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2004. “Homeworld and Alienworld.” In Expanding Horizons of Phenomenology. Vol. 4: Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, edited by Dermot Moran and Lester Embree, 280–91. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. Schattenrisse der Moral. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2007. “Politics on the Borders of Normality.” Translated by A. Calcagno. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 11 (1): 5–13. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2013. Ordnung im Zwielicht. 2nd ed. München: Fink. ———. 2015. Sozialität und Alterität. Modi sozialer Erfahrung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2016. “The Birth of Ἦθος out of Πάθος.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37 (1): 133–49. ———. 2017. Platon. Zwischen Logos und Pathos. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2022. “Migranten auf dem Weg und Flüchtlinge als Gäste in Not.” In Globalität, Lokalität, Digitalität. Herausforderungen der Phänomenologie, 83–107. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2024. Response Register. Transl. Donald Goodwin. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern UP. Yu, Chung-Chi. 2019. Life-World and Cultural Difference. Husserl, Schutz, and Waldenfels. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

278

21 CONTEXT Philosophies of Dialogue and Psychoanalytic Thought: The Impossibility of Thinking ‘I’ Without the Other Tina Chanter 1. Introduction The task of this chapter is to situate Levinas, Ricœur, Derrida, Irigaray, and Waldenfels within the philosophical context of philosophers of dialogue on the one hand (Buber, Marcel, and Rosenzweig), and psychoanalytic thinkers on the other (Lacan and Kristeva). All the philosophers considered construe others as constitutive of the self in some way; they are committed to the idea that the other is constitutively bound up with the subject. It is not just that others are there alongside the subject but rather that the very idea of what it means to be a subject, to be an I, is constituted in and through the relation to the other. The very possibility of being an I, of subjectivity, is bound up with others. To be a human subject, to say I, is to have encountered alterity or to be implicated in one’s relation to the other as other—not just the other as another ‘me,’ but the other as irreducible to me, as in some sense prior to me. In discussing philosophers of dialogue and psychoanalytic thinkers, it is helpful to reference the philosophical inheritance handed down by Descartes as an initial way of contextualising them, adapting Ricœur’s discussion of Descartes. Ricœur (1992) draws out two alternative, influential interpretive strands of Cartesian thought in the history of philosophy, the first of which emphasises the foundational role of the cogito as the originating point of philosophy while the second emphasises the idea of God’s infinity as foundational. The centrality of the I-Thou relation for Buber and the other philosophers of dialogue, which echoes the face-to-face in Levinas, emphasises the second moment in Descartes’s meditations—namely, the appeal to the idea of God as infinite, affirming the radical alterity of the ethical relation. For psychoanalytic thinking, too, the Other is irreducible to the subject, so the discovery of an alterity that transcends the bounds of the subject also parallels the second Cartesian moment. For both dialogical philosophies and psychoanalytic approaches, then, there is a decentring of the subject, an interrogation of its traditional role as the centre of philosophical narratives, and an insistent emphasis on the constitutive importance of the relation to the other as inherently necessary for any conception of what it means to identify oneself, to say I. In this sense, all the thinkers considered in this chapter distance themselves from Descartes’s cogito (I think) as foundational. If Descartes’s appeal to the cogito as DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-30

279

Tina Chanter

foundational traditionally places the subject at the centre of philosophical discourse, the thinkers to be considered in this chapter align themselves less with this first Cartesian moment and more with the second: the appeal to God (explicitly so in the case of philosophies of dialogue and insofar as there is a structural appeal to the Other as prior to the I in psychoanalysis). Just as there is a retrospective acknowledgement in the Cartesian trajectory of thought that the idea of God as infinite must have come from elsewhere, from outside me, so for the dialogical and psychoanalytic thinkers considered here, the subject discovers itself as founded on an encounter with alterity. The first part of this discussion focuses on Buber, Marcel, and Rosenzweig. Broadly speaking, these philosophers of dialogue prioritise the ethico-religious relation with others. All of them, in some way or other, embrace versions of what Buber calls the I-Thou, arguing that the interhuman relation is more fundamental than objective relations or subject-object relations at the heart of traditional ontology. The second part focuses on psychoanalytic thinkers Lacan and Kristeva, paying particular attention to the Lacanian notions of the symbolic, imaginary, and real and Kristeva’s understanding of the symbolic and semiotic aspects of language.

2.  Martin Buber Buber distinguished between two relations: that in which an active subject is in relation to a passive subject and that of a dialogical relationship to the other. The latter is a relation between two people (or between a subject and a thing) in which what is emphasised is the relation between them. One speaks to the other; a mutual recognition passes between them. This is a meeting in which the otherness of the other is recognised. The essential otherness of the other is maintained in a mutual, reciprocal relation. It is a talking with, rather than a talking about. Buber characterises the two relations he distinguishes as ‘I-It’ and ‘I-Thou’ relations. Whenever we say ‘I,’ we refer to one of these relations, claims Buber. “When a man says I he refers to one or other of these” (1950, 4). The “I of man is . . . twofold” (3). For Buber, “There is no I taken in itself” (4). To say I, then, for Buber, is to refer either to the I-It relation, to an objectifying relation with things/objects, or to our relation with others: to myself as understood in relation to the other (or in relation to an object not simply dominated by me). The key for Buber is the idea that, as Levinas puts it: “The I-Thou is true knowledge because it maintains in its integrity the alterity of the Thou” (1994, 25). Like Levinas’s face-to-face relation, Buber’s conception of the I-Thou privileges a kind of ethical relation, yet, unlike the face-to-face, the I-Thou is not confined to human relationships. Indeed, one of the first relations Buber (1950, 6) explores in I and Thou (Ich und Du), originally published in 1923, is the relation between man and nature, drawing on a relation one can have with a tree, construing it as one that goes beyond a merely instrumental relation. Rather, the relation is one exemplifying the ‘between,’ a kind of encounter between an individual and a tree. Here, what is foregrounded is not so much a relationship of objectification as it is, for instance, seeing the tree as a potential resource for timber. Rather it is a matter of communing with the tree, feeling at one with the tree, in a mutual exchange—a kind of metaphorical dialogue. Unlike the I-It relation, the I-Thou relation is not reducible to a relation with a thing. “If I face a human being as my Thou . . . he is not a thing among things” (Buber 1950, 280

Context

8). The relations we have to things/objects are enmeshed in a series of relations to other objects. Buber says, “[W]here there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; it exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds” (4). Thus, Buber distances himself from the idea that meaning is limited to the series of relationships that pertain between objects. If this is how we can characterise the ‘I-It’ relation, it is insufficient for understanding the ‘I-Thou.’ The world of experience and knowledge is the world of things, but the world is not restricted to that of things. Buber says, “The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is ‘in him’ and not between him and the world that the experience arises” (5). Buber specifies three kinds of relationships that are capable of being understood as I-Thou relations. The first is a relation between two human beings, and the second is that between a human and nature, such as I have just referenced with a tree. The third is that between a human and an intelligible form—by which Buber appears to mean the form of an artwork. In each of these cases, it is the relation between the two that is uppermost (between two humans, between a human and a natural phenomenon such as a tree, or between a human and an artwork). In each of these relations, Buber says, “we look out toward the fringe of the eternal Thou; in each we are aware of a breath from the eternal Thou” (1950, 6). In prioritising a relation that is characterised as a between, an encounter, or a kind of communing, Buber is not denying that more instrumental relationships exist between one human and another, between humans and nature, or between humans and art. He is, however, contesting the idea that there is an undisputed, solitary, mastering subject at the centre of the universe, to which all others, whether human or inanimate, are subordinate. While for Buber, the transcendental agency of the I/ego is put into question as the starting point, he is not denying that, as human agents, we do objectify things and others. I can “classify” a tree as a “species,” for instance, and “study” it, but this is to “subdue its actual presence”; the tree “remains my object” (7). As Buber sees it, the I-Thou relation and the more conventional relation of objectification coexist alongside one another. They are not mutually exclusive. Yet, for Buber, the I-Thou relation is primary. Other relations are derivative of it and, in this sense, inferior to it, covering over what he construes as the more authentic relation. The fact that Buber envisages the I-Thou relation not merely as a relation between humans but also as a relation between humans and the domains of nature and art suggests that, although it is appropriate to characterise Buber’s I-Thou as dialogical, this should not be understood as restricted to the linguistic register but also extends to the figurative level. The relation does not have to be a literal speaking. It can be non-linguistic, such as when a look or glance passes between two people (see Meindl, León, and Zahavi 2019, 82). Uppermost for Buber is a spiritual dimension that can apply equally between humans and between humans and nature and art. The relation the I has with intelligible forms (as in art), understood as I-Thou, is not a relation with speech but “begets speech” (1950, 6), says Buber. We are, he says “addressed and we answer” (6). An artist is faced with a form “which desires to be made” through the artist (9). For Buber the “I-Thou” is “spoken only with the whole being” (11). The I-Thou does not take place “through my agency” (11). Rather, it is an unbounded encounter in which I am met by the Thou while also stepping into “direct relation” with it. Buber characterises the Thou as a relation that occurs in the present, whereas, if we merely use objects, for instance, we live in the past (see 12–13). The world of perception, of measurement and calculation, the world of “reliability” and 281

Tina Chanter

“comparison” (32) does not “give” itself to us. It is only in the I-Thou relation that we “meet others.”

3.  Gabriel Marcel There are significant affinities between Buber and Gabriel Marcel, despite their divergent religious affiliations. Buber shares a Jewish heritage with Franz Rosenzweig while Marcel’s philosophy is informed by a Christian background (although Marcel does not see his philosophy as reducible to any religion). For Levinas (1994, 20), both Buber and Marcel, to some extent, privilege interhuman relations as the “source and model” of meaning. As philosophers of dialogue, they can be understood to displace more traditional ontology (Levinas 1994, 23). While other philosophers can be seen as privileging thematisation, whereby individuals grasp meaning, Buber and Marcel can be understood as privileging instead the relations between two people, characterised as a responsive relation, in which that relation remains refractory or elusive to the grasp, and the relation itself is prioritised over the terms. This is not a relation that can be adequately characterised from the outside or reduced to its terms; rather, it is one that can only be properly understood within the relation itself. Marcel makes a distinction between what he calls the problematic and a higher level of being that he characterises as the ontological mystery (see 1984, 28–30). To remain at the level of the problematical is to adhere to a Cartesian, dualistic view of the world, which divides the world into subjects and objects (see Marcel 1964, 169, 1984, 40). In making oneself available to others, one transcends such distinctions—that of subject versus object or inner versus outer. When one gives oneself over to another, one does not belong to oneself. One is called out of oneself. This can occur, for example, in being present to others by listening to them attentively, without calculating the cost to oneself. It can also occur when an artist devotes herself or himself to a work entirely—for a work of art is not just for oneself, but also for others (see Marcel 1964, 47). To refuse to give oneself to others is to be unavailable; it is to remain at the level of the functional. There is a sense of sacrifice in being involved or being committed, which Marcel understands as a “creative fidelity.” Fidelity cannot be objectively measured by a “third party” (1964, 155) standing outside the relation. It goes beyond constancy (155) and is not to be construed in formal terms as duty—Marcel distances himself from Kantian morality on this score. To respond to the other as “thou . . . whether personal or supratemporal” (169) is to respond spontaneously, beyond will or judgment. It is not something that can adequately be represented. It is to be “present” for someone (154), to be fully committed and involved, not out of duty but out of compassion, out of love for one’s friend. To be faithful to a friend is not a matter of holding to a principle, even that of being true to oneself. It is a matter of being disposed to the other, open to the other, giving oneself to another (47). Marcel talks of creative fidelity as a “sacrifice” and as a “continuous creation” (53), acknowledging, paradoxically, that we vacillate (see 173) and even conceding that, in the normal run of things, we are “cut off” from our true selves, from our souls: that is, from “belief in a thou” (169). There is no absolute boundary between “problem and mystery” since when we “reflec[t] on a mystery we tend inevitably to degrade it to the level of a problem” (19). Throughout his work, Marcel counterposes faith to despair; while the latter is bound up with functionality, objectivity, technique, and calculation, the former consists of a 282

Context

disposability that cannot be measured or understood objectively or represented adequately from outside the relation or encounter itself, in which one is open to the Thou.

4.  Franz Rosenzweig In the Star of Redemption (originally published in 1921), Franz Rosenzweig offers an explicitly Judaic theology, grounded in concrete, lived reality. He does not shy away from the singularity of death, which he accuses philosophy of doing (see 1971, 4). He thereby opposes what he casts as the abstractions and deceptions of philosophy. Rosenzweig distances himself from the privilege philosophy accords cognition and its assumption that it can grasp a unified meaning (see 391, 10). Rosenzweig thus contests the priority that philosophy “from Parmenides to Hegel,” as he often stipulates in a refrain that Levinas takes up, attributes to “totality” and to “unity” (12), maintaining, rather, the incontestable priority of “multiplicity” (11) and separation. In privileging dialogue, Rosenzweig attests to the priority of multiplicity (174, 178). God is revealed to individual man as an I that commands love. In this commandment, a Thou is called to love his neighbour, thereby enacting the truth of God’s love. The relation between the three terms God, man, and world is played out in the interconnection between creation, revelation, and redemption (see Rosenzweig 1971, 411). Man discovers himself or herself as Thou—Rosenzweig often refers to the beloved as she/her—as created by God through God’s revelation. In thus revealing himself as an I, God commands love. “Only in the discovery of a Thou is it possible to hear an actual I” (175), says Rosenzweig. In the commandment to love God, man is called to love the world—to love his/her neighbour, thereby enacting the truth of God’s love. The response God calls for is addressed to a Thou. To respond to God’s “Thou shalt love” is to acknowledge “I have sinned” (179). Rosenzweig expresses this in terms of an address that invokes the proper name: “ ‘I have called thee by name: thou art mine’ ” (183; quoting Isaiah 43:1). Hearing God’s call, addressed to a singular I, I cannot escape. Rosenzweig cites Abraham’s response to God, “ ‘Here I am’ ” (396). This is not an address that can be understood from outside by a third party, which would reduce the terms to a he, a she, or an it (see 186). Rosenzweig constantly contests and reworks Hegelian idealism, calling on Hegel’s conception of “world-spirit” (1971, 44), for instance, or on the notion of categories, only to reject them as inadequate to express the relationship between creation, revelation, and redemption (see 186–87, 189). If Hegel might be said to have judged world religions as wanting in comparison to his implicitly Christian, Trinitarian, dialectical thought of determinate negation, Rosenzweig critiques Hegel’s implicitly Christianised, speculative dialectics by disputing the authority philosophy assumes in its effort to reconcile heaven and earth, thinking and being. In an explicitly Jewish theology, Rosenzweig affirms the irreducibility of the word of God, received in “face-to-face” (39) dialogue, in which, like Adam (419), one is reborn (392), as if created for the first time. In such a rebirth, there is a return to the past, to one’s origin, as created by God and, therefore, an “inversion” of chronological time (420). Rosenzweig understands creation, revelation, and redemption as interacting with one another (see 391) neither as a sequence nor as a chronological series. Rather, to respond to God’s command to love is to enact one’s responsibility in the world, to love one’s neighbour. To know God is to love God, and to love God is to love one’s fellow man, one’s neighbour in the world. Rosenzweig’s Jewish theology is one of spontaneity; each word is a new beginning, every present attests to God’s eternity, and only in redemption does creation come into its own (see 420). 283

Tina Chanter

5.  Jacques Lacan For psychoanalytic thought, the initial dependency of infants on others—their vulnerability— marks an indebtedness to others from the beginning. Without the care of others, an infant would not survive. Lacan remarks on the “dependence” of human infants, on the “specific prematurity of birth” (1977, 4) in the context of elaborating on the dynamic of identification that yields an illusory yet facilitating image for the child, who takes the reflection it sees in the mirror for itself. This initial imaginary identification, wherein the formation of a bodily ego is sketched out, is a facilitating fiction. Confronted with an idealising, totalising image that stabilises (and thereby misrepresents) what is, in fact, an infantile “fragmented body,” an unstable lack of motor coordination, the infant finds the image salutary (Lacan 1977, 4). Through its medium, the infant is able to grasp in anticipatory fashion a future mastery and independence it does not yet have. The mirror image confers an imaginary unity on the child, a body image that it does not yet embody but into which it will grow, a kind of ideal. In the mirror stage, Lacan discerns the birth of the ego, in which the relationship that a child has with its image develops, through identification, into a narcissistic investment with itself. At the same time as narcissism, aggressivity is also at play (see 1977, 6); rivalry or competition enters into the picture in relation to the other (which can be another child or a figure who fulfills a mother function). For Lacan, if the ego is first of all bodily or corporeal, it is also, from the beginning, connected with the external, the other, with that which is outside. Lacan’s mirror stage is decisive for the child in that through self-recognition, albeit a misrecognition that is “alienating” (1977, 2) and illusory, the child’s development is also facilitated. The mirror stage has profound consequences for understanding Lacan’s psychoanalysis, remaining a constant reference point for him. The mirror stage is emblematic of the imaginary for Lacan—a term, which, along with the symbolic and the real, makes up the three intertwined registers around which Lacan’s theories circulate. While, in the early stages of Lacanian theory, the emphasis was on the imaginary register, on the primacy of the visual, with the accent on the corporeal, in later years, Lacan began to emphasise first the symbolic order, then the real. Whereas lack and insufficiency in the earlier accounts of the mirror stage were bound up with biological insufficiency, in Lacan’s later extrapolations, lack is understood as symbolic lack. Language—linguistic signification—is always already in play. The child, even as preverbal, is born into a world that is structured by the symbolic, finding itself inserted into the symbolic order, having to negotiate expectations and sanctions. The emergence of the subject, the infant who recognises itself as I, is implicated in the symbolic register, subjected to certain structures, to a symbolic order that operates as law. The subject is “located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer” (Rose 1983, 31). When the child begins to speak, to symbolise, it is in the absence of the object. Words stand in for the lost object; the symbolic is thus bound up with lack. The child symbolises the mother’s absence by throwing “a cotton reel out of its cot” says Rose (1983, 31). This is accompanied by vocalisation that Freud understood as approximating to “Fort/Da.” “Symbolisation starts, therefore, when the child gets its first sense that something could be missing” (Rose 1983, 31). For Lacan, what the child lets fall is not the mother (and Kristeva’s understanding of abjection will capitalise on this ambiguity between self and other) but a “small part” of the child himself or “of the subject that detaches itself from him while 284

Context

remaining his” (Lacan 1997, 62). Traumatised by the mother’s absence, the child tries to master the absence through language. If the imaginary is bound up with fantasy and idealisation and the symbolic is bound up with the linguistic/social rule–governed universe, with language and prohibition, with transgression and taboo, in addition to the imaginary and the symbolic, for Lacan, there is a third register: namely, the real. The real marks the limit of language, that which is beyond the symbolic: the inarticulable, the impossible. The real is that which cannot be articulated, which lies out of reach of language—that which the subject cannot say. It is associated with trauma—with wounds that cannot be communicated adequately. As resistant to symbolisation, the real marks the failure of language, of representation: it is an impossibility of making sense of the world. Even if the real is situated outside or beyond the meaningful, as a site of trauma that is incommunicable in direct terms, there are still symptoms from which it might be discerned (withdrawal, the refusal to speak, acting out, and so on). At the same time, given that codes in which the symbolic is expressed are themselves socially instituted, one might say that the contours of the traumatic real are capable of change, just as language itself is, and therefore, the boundaries that constitute the real as outside meaning are also malleable. They can change over time and can be reconstituted.

6.  Julia Kristeva Kristeva (1982) provides an account of child development that differs from Lacan’s, focusing on the pre-Oedipal relation the child has with the (m)other and on the need to abject, or radically reject, the mother, prior to the mirror stage. As Rose says, “Lacan . . . takes the mirror image as the model of the ego function itself, the category which enables the subject to operate as ‘I’ ” (1983, 30–31). If, prior to the infant’s recognition of itself in the mirror, infancy has been characterised by a dual relationship of immediacy with the mother or carer, it is also the case that the infant has experienced this phase not as an I but as undifferentiated (see Lemaire 1979, 78–79). Kristeva’s understanding of abjection occurring prior to the mirror stage can be understood as a response to this lack of differentiation. When the infant is in nursling dependence, it is still bound to the mother but destined to become independent. This produces a tension which is played out prior to the child’s accession to symbolic language, at the pre-verbal, semiotic level. The infant moves away from, rejects, or abjects the mother. We might say that in order to do so, the infant constitutes the mother as a site of disgust. At the same time, the boundary between self and other is porous, precisely because the child is negotiating what it means to be an I, and in this sense, that which is abjected remains ambiguous. Rejection takes place, but precisely what is rejected by whom remains in question as the very distinctions between inside and outside, between I and other, are under negotiation. A degree of instability will remain, more pronounced for some subjects than for others, even after the Oedipal complex has been navigated. One of the hallmarks of Kristeva’s thinking is her understanding of the semiotic, which supplements Lacan’s emphasis on the symbolic. If abjection is understood as a kind of rejection, a movement away from otherness, where that which is being moved away from is not yet fully symbolised as other, it can be seen as an inscription of the semiotic. Its movement is ambivalent, implicating both the emergent I and the other. Part of what is at stake for Kristeva in her elaboration of the semiotic is rendering more nuanced Lacan’s understanding of language as symbolic by producing a more variegated conception of meaning, 285

Tina Chanter

one that operates at a more instinctual, corporeal register, where meaning is understood to be inscribed in a way that does not appeal solely to language as signification, as a set of linguistic signs. Kristeva contests, to some extent, the Lacanian tendency to envisage what Lacan calls the real as a site of impossibility: that is, as resistant to representation (see Kristeva 2000, 87). The semiotic participates in meaning, despite the fact that it does so in a way that predates the inception of language, understood as a fully developed system of signs in which meaning is achieved through linguistic symbolisation (see Kristeva 1996, 23). By semiotic, Kristeva refers to a bodily, motile aspect of linguistic inscription which, while bound to the symbolic register of language that dominates Lacan’s psychoanalysis, accesses not so much the formal, syntactic aspect of language as the rhythmic, poetic aspect of vocalisation. One way of understanding the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic, as Kristeva sees it, is with reference to poetry. While a poem can be understood at the symbolic level of meaning—in terms of what it signifies or conceptualises— it also operates at a metaphorical and metonymic level. One image is substituted for another, calling up an associative chain. At the same time, poetry appeals to the rhythmic, musical aspect of language, drawing on assonance and alliteration, for example. Such poetic resonances play on the materiality of language, not merely on formal, syntactic, abstract meaning. The semiotic and the symbolic are intertwined such that the overall meaning of a poem—and, to some extent, of any linguistic communication—is achieved in part by what it symbolises in more or less abstract terms through a series of significations which draw on a common stock of shared references and, in part, by the associative, melodic, material resonance of words and images. These two aspects, while analytically distinguishable, in practice work in tandem, depending on and appealing to one another. A poem by Patience Agbabi can serve as an illustration; at the same time, it serves to counterbalance the politically conservative overtones of classic psychoanalytical theory: for instance, its tendency to be inflected in the direction of white, Eurocentric, heteronormative assumptions. Josephine Baker Finds Herself (2008) takes the form of a palindrome, or mirror poem, in which the first half of the poem is repeated in the second half but in reverse; the first line becomes the last line, and the last line becomes the first. The poem is a playful homage to Josephine Baker. One might say that it stages both a desiring and an identificatory scenario between the poem’s narrator and Josephine Baker. The narrator both identifies with the singer (“I’m her light-skinned, negative, twenty-something”) and idealises her (“I worship the way she looks”), wishing to be like her, modelling herself on her, while also desiring her. The poem imagines a meeting of the narrator and Josephine Baker in a nightclub in Brixton, London. A series of images build up, setting the scene, through a network of signifiers which operate both at the level of the musicality and rhythm of the poem (the semiotic) and through what might be understood as their conceptual signification (the symbolic). Meaning here emerges not only from the syntactic order of the phrases but also from their rhythmic sequence. We might say that the symbolic aspects of the palindrome that serve to achieve its meaning are inseparable from its more visceral, associative connotations, which operate to engage us through the images called up. Far from operating in abstraction from, or independently of, the formal, syntactic level of meaning, this more associative level of poetic meaning is entirely implicated in the poem’s symbolic meaning. The two aspects of language work together to convey meaning. 286

Context

For Kristeva, the semiotic aspect of language precedes, in developmental terms, the symbolic aspect and continues to provide meaning with its varied textures and resonances once language is mastered. While infants are in the pre-verbal stage, not yet having developed the ability to substitute words for objects, there is nonetheless a communicative dimension to their interaction with primary carers. Prior to the inception of language, infants emit sounds that convey affects of pleasure or displeasure, for instance, before vocalisation becomes harnessed to the conceptualisation of objects. Infants might move away from or toward objects or people in ways that are indicative of pleasure or pain. Although infants themselves are pre-verbal—unable to speak—they are nonetheless involved in a communicative network of signs from the beginning. They are always immersed in and responding to the linguistic codes which surround them. In this sense, while the semiotic register predates the inception of language at the individual level, infants are imbricated in a socio-symbolic world from the beginning, striated with norms and conventions. So, too, affects are played out in a socio-symbolic context, such that once we have mastered language—or perhaps, more accurately, once language has mastered us (since we are inculcated into a communicative mode, driven by convention)—it is nonetheless the case that meaning continues to be produced through the synergy of semiotic and symbolic energies. Kristeva’s emphasis of not only the symbolic but also the semiotic register of language is, at the same time, an emphasis on the pre-objectal, dyadic relation between infants and primary carers. Given that, in most cultures, primary carers have been traditionally maternal, Kristeva’s work can also be understood to place a recuperative emphasis on the motherinfant relation, thereby providing a corrective to what some might argue is the undue emphasis of Lacanian psychoanalysis on both the symbolic aspect of linguistic meaning and the decisive role of the father, with whom both Freud and Lacan associate the inception of language. Although feminist theory has found license in Kristeva’s explorations of preobjectal relations, in the infant-mother dyad, to argue for the newfound significance of the maternal, Kristeva herself is much more circumspect about any radical feminist potential her work on the semiotic might harbour. She sometimes aligns herself precisely with what some feminists construe as the problematic patriarchal overtones of the Oedipal edifice, which positions the father as the seat of meaning.

7.  Concluding Remarks Throughout this discussion of philosophies of dialogue and psychoanalytic thinking, I have emphasised the extent to which philosophies of the subject or ego are displaced by a relation to others that shapes the I in profound ways. For neither dialogical philosophy nor psychoanalytic theory is it possible to envisage the I without understanding its constitutive relationship to others. If we can say that, for philosophies of dialogue, this relationship is fundamentally pacific, while for psychoanalytic thinkers it is fundamentally conflictual, it is crucial to add that things are more complex than this summary statement suggests. While at the heart of psychoanalytic theory is the subject’s struggle to formulate its own desire as distinct from symbolic expectations or enigmatic demands imposed by others, there is also a commitment to some kind of ethical understanding, even if this is directed more toward a responsibility not to “giv[e] ground” to “one’s [own] desire” than toward any responsibility to others (Lacan 1992, 319). How far one is capable of acting ethically toward others without also finding ways to realise one’s own desire or of being responsible toward oneself 287

Tina Chanter

is, perhaps, in the end, both a political and a personal question that each one of us finds ways of configuring—or not. In different ways, both philosophers of dialogue and psychoanalytic thinkers prioritise others. Dialogical philosophy puts the other first ethically and thereby disrupts the egological priority of the Cartesian subject. I  am not, first of all, an isolated subject, seeking to establish a relation to the world of others. I am, from the beginning, bound to others. In this sense, dialogical thinking is very similar to Levinas’s face-to-face. Clearly, too, there is a close affinity in other respects between Rosenzweig and Levinas, for instance—especially their shared critique of totality, which extends to a critique of totalitarian thinking in the political register. For psychoanalytic thinking, too, it is impossible to conceive of what it means to be a subject without taking account of others on whom I depend from birth. The very language in which subjects understand themselves is inherited from others; both imaginary and symbolic relations are socially implicated. To varying degrees, Waldenfels, Derrida, and Ricœur are sympathetic to psychoanalytic thought, as is Irigaray. In this way, they align with Lacan and Kristeva, although, in Irigaray’s case, she distances herself from what she sees as its masculinist overtones. Politically, Derrida, Waldenfels, and Ricœur are less interested in any strict adherence to psychoanalytic models of thinking than in taking up aspects of psychoanalytic thought in order to explore relations between subjects in ways that are open to, rather than closed off from, alterity.

References Agbabi, Patience. 2008. “Josephine Baker Finds Herself.” https://poetryarchive.org. Buber, Martin. 1950. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. “A  Conversation with Julia Kristeva.” In Julia Kristeva: Interviews, edited by Ross Mitchell Guberman, interview by Ina Lipkowitz and Andrea Loselle, 18–34. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I  Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Écrits: A  Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1–7. London: Tavistock. ———. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. London: Tavistock/Routledge. ———. 1997. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth/Middlesex: Penguin. Lemaire, Anika. 1979. Jacques Lacan. Translated by David Macey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1994. “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Philosophy.” In Outside the Subject, translated by Michael B. Smith, 20–39. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marcel, Gabriel. 1964. Creative Fidelity. Translated by Robert Rosthal. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1984. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Translated by Manya Harari. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press. Meindl, Patricia, Felipe León, and Dan Zahavi. 2019. “Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation.” In Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life, 80–100. New York: Routledge.

288

Context Ricœur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 1983. “Introduction II.” In Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école Freudienne, edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, 27–58. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1971. The Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

289

PART V

Phenomenology in Debate

INTRODUCTION TO PART V Phenomenology in Debate: Criticism, Cooperation, Inspiration Gerhard Thonhauser and Sophie Loidolt

1. Introduction The overall narrative of this handbook aims to show that the phenomenological engagement with political affairs developed in interplay with the central political events of the 20th and 21st centuries. However, phenomenology was not the only and, perhaps, not the most important tradition to engage with these events in attempting to theorize them. Part V of the handbook explores the partly difficult, partly fruitful relationships between phenomenology and other traditions that played an important role in 20th-century political thought: the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (Chapter 22), queer theory founded by Judith Butler (Chapter 24), and the various strands of post-foundationalism (Chapter 25). In addition, Chapter 23 complements Part II of the handbook on the politicization of phenomenology through Marxism by presenting two currents that are often overlooked when focusing on the French Existentialists: Italian phenomarxism and the Yugoslav Praxis Group. Part V is different from the other parts of the handbook. The contributions here are centered on neither authors nor topics. Rather, they provide overviews of debates and theoretical developments, comparable to the context chapters found in Parts I through IV. The contributions deal with important currents in 20th-century ‘continental’ political thought that cannot be subsumed under the heading of political phenomenology but that nevertheless make a crucial contribution to phenomenology becoming political. Historical as well as systematic insights can be distilled from these debates. Part V thus forms a bridge between the author-centered contributions in Part I through IV and the topic-centered contributions in Part VI. Each chapter sheds light on one tradition in the field of political theory with which phenomenology has been in dialogue—sometimes friendly, often hostile. The chapters explore the key issues at stake in each encounter. While doing so, the chapters refer to the authors discussed in the first four parts, who were crucial for shaping the respective encounters, and anticipate the systematic issues discussed in Part VI while showing how the encounters covered here continue to be important for contemporary debates. In the relationships of the Frankfurt School and queer theory to phenomenology, a similar pattern can be recognized: in both cases, we find phenomenological influences on the DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-32

293

Gerhard Thonhauser and Sophie Loidolt

founding figures, whose importance should by no means be overemphasized. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe how these influences were swept under the rug. We argue that this was most likely the case because in both instances, a sharp distinction from and scathing critique of phenomenology were crucial for establishing the new theory and securing its place in the landscape of political thought. Only recently has there been a reorientation within both traditions that makes a productive engagement with phenomenology seem at least conceivable. A quite different story is to be told for Italian phenomarxism and the Yugoslav Praxis Group. These traditions developed in productive engagement with phenomenology, although not in terms of a simple adaptation but in the form of an original critique of phenomenological thought. Authors within these traditions freely used and modified elements of phenomenological thought in ways that allowed them to address the political challenges that arose in their respective contexts. Thus, rather than critical engagements from the outside, phenomarxism and the Yugoslav Praxis Group can be seen as contributions to phenomenology becoming political. In terms of its relationship with phenomenology, postfoundationalism is somewhere in the middle, between the open rejection displayed by the Frankfurt School and queer theory and the productive appropriation seen in phenomarxism and the Yugoslav Praxis Group. However, the exact relationship to phenomenology varies greatly from representative to representative of post-foundational thought.

2.  Phenomenology and Critical Theory Critical Theory and phenomenology have, at least according to their historical selfunderstanding, no common agenda. Their relationship is not only entwined with fondly told stories of personal animosities; political rifts also seem to separate the theoretical projects. There is a certain standard narrative, especially on the side of Critical Theory, that brands phenomenology as ‘uncritical.’ At best, it comes off as a “late bourgeois philosophy” (Adorno 2013, 3) that cultivated a “fetishism of knowledge” (27), albeit with an “anti-systematic attitude” (214), as Adorno wrote about Husserl; at worst, it is blamed for promoting a “jargon of authenticity” that fit in well with National Socialist ideology, as Adorno (1973) charged Heidegger and Jaspers. One finds a related skepticism among critical theorists when it comes to the method of phenomenology. Ernst Bloch, for example, accused Adolf Reinach’s legal phenomenology of exhibiting a “blindness to the economic-historical production and genesis of the ‘essential contents’ ” (Bloch [1985] 1996, [144] 166). Phenomenological approaches would therefore always remain “sublimely critically alien, that is, in agreement” with the capitalist status quo (Bloch [1985] 1996, [144] 166). After Adorno’s strong attacks on Heideggerian thought, little exchange happened— although Marcuse was already heavily influenced by both strands of thought. Even when a political fate and some theoretical alliances were shared, as is the case in the constellation of Adorno-Benjamin-Anders-Arendt, the personal enmities were too strong to make a theoretical effort to bridge them; rather, the proponents either rejected or completely ignored each other. After the war in the 50s and 60s, Arendt did not pass the ‘Marxism test’ (and even later, after her death, the ‘Habermas test’) that would have allowed her to be welcomed into the ranks of ‘critical theorists’ and was labeled either as a liberal or a conservative who did not fit. Finally, Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel still invoked the topos of a ‘philosophy of consciousness’ in the 70s, which would make Edmund Husserl’s project unsuitable for their ‘intersubjective transformation of philosophy.’ This provoked responses and defenses (Zahavi 1996), but initially, it further inhibited dialogue and created a new critical 294

Introduction to Part V

opposition in the form of the Waldenfels School, which would be characteristic of Germany until the 90s. As Danielle Petherbridge shows in her chapter, it makes a lot of sense in this regard to read this troubled history as one of ‘missed opportunities.’ She therefore reconstructs not only the controversies but also the common concerns that shaped both projects from the beginning. These are concerns regarding the political and social (life)world, alterity, and recognition, and they came along with criticisms of positivism, rigid scientific transcendentalism, scientistic reductionism, and capitalism. Petherbridge also throws a spotlight on how figures like Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas borrowed key ideas from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger that, in many respects, became central to their philosophical and political projects, albeit in alternative form. Eventually, proponents of Critical Theory itself, like Axel Honneth, indeed acknowledged the common lines of concern and thereby came to a more sympathetic reading of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice MerleauPonty, and Emmanuel Levinas. Today, it seems that the personal and ideological differences have, to a great extent, outgrown themselves and allow later generations to engage in more productive dialogue and fruitful collaboration—without erasing differences. To be sure, the critiques by Critical Theory have also motivated phenomenologists to counter the attack or rethink their position, which has helped clarify and sharpen the debate. In recent years, the development of new approaches in critical phenomenology and Critical Theory (including feminist Critical Theory and critical race theory) has opened new lines of dialogue. Phenomenology is not viewed as plainly ‘uncritical’ anymore, and Critical Theory can explore new methods for critical analyses of social and political issues, say, through a focus on marginalized experiences, the racialized body, or the predetermining and excluding formation of spaces.1 This helps, as Petherbridge emphasizes, in traversing theoretical divides and enriching mutual endeavors and holds some promise for future developments.

3.  Phenomenology and Marxism As the relationship between phenomenology and the Frankfurt School shows, neither side saw a connection between phenomenology and critical approaches in the Marxist tradition as a viable option. As traced out in Part I of this handbook, most leading phenomenologists of the first generation rejected Marxism, partly for anti-materialist reasons and partly because of their straightforward embrace of conservative or even reactionary values. For the period after World War II, one can speculate that the division of Germany into the West, strongly oriented toward the United States, and the East, dogmatically steered by Moscow, further complicated the dialogue between phenomenology and Marxism. But even apart from Marxism in the narrower sense, the connection between phenomenology and leftist thought has had a difficult history in the German-speaking context, as the last section showed. In other countries, however, quite different developments took place. Part II of this handbook traced the internationally most prominent and influential development, which is the connection between phenomenology and Marxism in French existentialism. However, similar attempts to link phenomenology and Marxism can also be found in other countries. Internationally less well known but equally significant in terms of intellectual engagement were the developments in Italy. One could argue that the intellectual basis for a connection between phenomenology and Marxism was even more favorable in Italy than in France. 295

Gerhard Thonhauser and Sophie Loidolt

Italy arguably had the most influential communist parties in Western Europe and, in Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading representatives of Western Marxism. This means an undogmatic Western form of Marxism could not only boast a long, independent tradition there but was also recognized within wider society. Phenomenology was introduced in Italy by Antonio Banfi, who was a convinced Marxist and was elected several times to the Italian Senate for the Communist Party. His student Enzo Paci, who, like Banfi, was a professor at the University of Milan, is considered the founder of phenomarxism, which—similar to French existentialism—aimed at an existentialist fusion of phenomenology and Marxism. Chapter 23, by Nils Baratella, traces Paci’s version of what might be called a Marxist phenomenology or a phenomenological Marxism in more detail. Among Paci’s students was Pier Aldo Rovatti, who, together with Gianni Vattimo, became the founder of the theory of ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole) (Vattimo and Rovatti [1983] 2012). Rovatti and Vattimo were strongly influenced by Heidegger’s thought and presented reinterpretations of Heidegger that centered on the absence of uncontestable foundations—which brings them in close proximity to the thinkers discussed under the label of post-foundationalism. Nietzsche also plays an important role for both, and, along with Heidegger, is seen as the key precursor of ‘weak thought.’ Moreover, Nietzsche and Heidegger were important for Rovatti and Vattimo’s claimed end of modernity, which was made prominent internationally by Vattimo and made him one of the main protagonists of postmodernism (Vattimo [1985] 1991). The attempt to reinterpret Heidegger against his own political orientation to make him useable for leftist thought is also a concern of representatives of the Yugoslav Praxis Group. As Baratella shows, using the example of Karel Kosík, the focus is on connecting Heidegger’s understanding of being-in-the-world with a Marxist understanding of praxis.

4.  Phenomenology and Queer Theory As Lanei M. Rodemeyer argues in Chapter 24, the relationship between phenomenology and queer theory again includes a history of tension. This has theoretical causes, especially a feminist skepticism regarding the concept of experience.2 But it also has to do with concrete choices made by two prominent figures. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler were both influenced by phenomenology but turned away from it, and it was precisely in their turning away from phenomenology that they became the founding figures of queer theory. This double movement of influence and renunciation can be traced particularly clearly in Butler’s case. A couple of essays from the 1980s show how she developed her gender theory through intensive engagement with phenomenological sources, especially Simone de Beauvoir. In “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex” (Butler 1986), Butler develops an original interpretation of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. According to Butler, Beauvoir’s famous phrase “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, 357) formulates a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that, taken to its logical conclusion, implies a radical separation between the two. As part of her interpretation, Butler develops conceptions of ‘construction’ and ‘performativity’ that become guidelines for her own gender theory. In the essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” published two years later, she refers more generally to the phenomenological understanding of “constituting acts” to develop her understanding of construction in terms of performativity (Butler 1988, 519). Building on Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, she understands the “doing of gender . . . as a corporeal style” 296

Introduction to Part V

(Butler 1988, 521). This leads Butler not only to assert the contingency of the connection between sex and gender but also to raise the question of whether sex, as a supposedly natural aspect of the body, does not, in the end, have the status of gender: that is, of a social construction. Even the strategic use of parody is already considered in these essays. All this shows that Butler developed core ideas of Gender Trouble in the interpretation of phenomenological thought, particularly Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a fact that did not go unnoticed (Heinämaa 1997; Käll 2015). As Käll (2015, 27) aptly noted, this contrasts sharply with the absence of corresponding references to Beauvoir and other phenomenologists in Gender Trouble, published in 1990. In addition to briefly touching on this origin story of queer theory, Chapter 24 focuses on later attempts to bring phenomenology and queer theory back together, discussing the approaches of Henry Rubin, David Ross Fryer, Sara Ahmed, Sayle Salamon, Lisa Käll, and Lanei M. Rodemeyer. In addition, Chapter 24 addresses current developments in critical phenomenology and assesses the relationship between classical and critical phenomenology.

5.  Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism The term ‘post-foundationalism,’ as it is used in today’s political thought, was introduced by Oliver Marchart (2007). As Matthias Flatscher explains in Chapter 25, reconstructing the history of post-foundational thought cannot be done in terms of authors using the label post-foundationalism but in terms of a family resemblance in their thought. What all variants of post-foundationalism have in common is an ontologization of the political that is linked to an understanding of radical democracy (Comtesse et al. 2019). Moreover, what makes them versions of post-foundationalism is, as Flatscher notes, that they all subscribe to two key claims: first, the co-originality of contingency and conflict and second, the rejection of ultimate foundations but the insistence on the inevitability of temporary foundations. An innovative aspect of Flatscher’s reading of the history of post-foundationalism is that he distinguishes two strands that both relate back to a key concept introduced by a major phenomenologist: Heidegger’s notion of the ‘ontological difference’ and MerleauPonty’s notion of ‘chiasm.’ Better known is the first variant, which was canonized by Oliver Marchart. To mark the theoretical connection to and, at the same time, the political departure from Heidegger, Marchart used the term “left Heideggerianism” (Marchart 2007, 2) to denote this line of thought. The core idea is that Heidegger’s thinking of the ontological difference between ‘being’ and ‘beings’ (‘Sein’ and ‘Seiendes’) is transformed into the political difference between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’—in French, ‘le politique’ and ‘la politique,’ in German ‘das Politische’ and ‘die Politik.’ In short, the talk of political difference distinguishes between ‘politics’ as a designation for what political scientists investigate in terms of polity, politics, and policy (the social subsystem whose task lies in the governing of society) and ‘the political’ as the dimension in which the contingency, contestability, and reshapeability of every political order can become an issue. This conceptual innovation can be traced back to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. In 1981, they founded the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political [Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique] and tentatively used the distinction between ‘le’ and ‘la politique’ in their opening address (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 107–21). The second strand of post-foundationalism builds on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘chiasm,’ which was introduced into political thought via his student and the editor of his 297

Gerhard Thonhauser and Sophie Loidolt

posthumous writings, Claude Lefort. In Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term, chiasm means an intertwining of two opposing realms that can neither be separated nor merged—MerleauPonty (2012) thinks about ‘mind’ and ‘body’ and the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’ as standing in such a chiasmatic relationship. In other words, chiasm is about an intersection of elements that cannot be reduced to each other but are nevertheless intimately connected to and continuously cross each other. It simultaneously expresses irreducible difference and the intimate interconnectedness of two elements—in the case of post-foundational political thought, ‘the political’ and ‘politics.’ Chapter 25 traces the trope of chiasm in the works of Castoriadis, Lefort, Derrida, and Butler.

Notes 1 See, for example, works by Ahmed (2006), Gündoğdu (2015), Guenther (2013), Oksala (2016), and Ortega (2016). 2 Foucault’s argument, which regards experience as a ‘discursive effect,’ has been especially scrutinized by feminists (Butler 1990; Scott 1991) who endeavored to counter essentialist accounts or claims that there was something untouched and untouchable ‘outside’ discourse. These influential criticisms from the 70s to the 90s have been responded to and have given rise to a renaissance of refined phenomenological approaches to experience (Young 1980; Zahavi 1996; Heinämaa 2003; Oksala 2016).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by K. Tarnowski and F. Will. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2013. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Translated by W. Domingo. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Bloch, Ernst. 1985. Naturrecht und menschliche Würde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into English as Natural Law and Human Dignity, by D. J. Schmidt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Butler, Judith. 1986. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72: 35–49. ———. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. ———. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Comtesse, Dagmar, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Franziska Martinsen, and Martin Nonhoff. 2019. Radikale Demokratietheorie. Ein Handbuch. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Guenther, Lisa. 2013. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gündoğdu, Ayten. 2015. Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heinämaa, Sara. 1997. “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference.” Hypatia 12 (1): 20–39. ———. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, Boulder. New York/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Käll, Lisa Folkmarson. 2015. “A Path Between Voluntarism and Determinism: Tracing Elements of Phenomenology in Judith Butler’s Account of Performativity.” lambda nordica 2–3: 23–48. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1997. Retreating the Political. Edited by Simon Sparks. London/New York: Routledge.

298

Introduction to Part V Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London/New York: Routledge. Oksala, Johanna. 2016. Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: SUNY Press. Scott, Joan. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (4): 773–97. Vattimo, Gianni. 1985. La fine della modernità. Milano: Garzanti. Translated into English as The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, by John R. Snyder. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vattimo, Gianni, and Pier Aldo Rovatti. 1983. Il pensiero debole. Milano: Feltrinelli. Translated into English as Weak Thought, by Peter Carravetta. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3: 137–56. Zahavi, Dan. 1996. Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

299

22 PHENOMENOLOGY AND CRITICAL THEORY/ FRANKFURT SCHOOL Danielle Petherbridge

1. Introduction The relationship between phenomenology and Critical Theory is a complex one that, in many ways, could be described as a series of missed opportunities. Yet it is possible to argue that underlying both approaches are a set of common concerns as well as the basis for a critical orientation toward the social and political world. Although criticisms of phenomenology by early generations of the Frankfurt School, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, scuttled the opportunity for a genuine debate between the two approaches, later generations have engaged in more productive dialogue. In fact, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse borrow key ideas from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger which, in many respects, become central to their philosophical and political projects, albeit in alternative form. Moreover, there are further avenues of engagement by contemporary critical theorists such as Axel Honneth, who offers a more sympathetic reading of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; and Emmanuel Levinas. In recent years, the development of new approaches in critical phenomenology and Critical Theory (including feminist Critical Theory and critical race theory) has opened new lines of dialogue and illuminated synergies, especially regarding notions of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, relations between self and other, recognition and alterity, the lived experience of suffering, injustice and oppression, political emotions and affect, and political action and participation. This chapter will outline the history of the debate between key phenomenologists and critical theorists, as well as identifying possibilities for traversing theoretical divides and enriching mutual endeavours.

2.  Critical Theory, Phenomenology, and the Critique of Epistemology: Horkheimer and Adorno Horkheimer famously outlines the project of Critical Theory in his programmatic essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” published in 1937, in which he lays out the methodological principle that would define the work of those theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research (Horkheimer 2002). In this context, ‘traditional theory’ was associated

300

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-33

Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School

with ‘pure theory’ or with a descriptive mode of analysis divorced from social, historical, and political issues. In contrast, Critical Theory was defined as having a self-reflexivity about its own social context and political application but also an awareness of the historical process out of which the norms guiding its critique were derived, such that they could be identified as being anchored in social reality. The guiding premise of Critical Theory, then, is a critique of philosophical categories that is immanently connected to social diagnoses that identify an often concealed or ignored emancipatory interest or horizon in historical and social reality. In this respect, Critical Theory is committed to an explicitly normative and emancipatory project, central to which is an examination of not only the forms but also the social conditions of knowledge and thought, as well as the relation between human self-interpretation and experience of the world (Petherbridge 2013). Horkheimer’s project was dedicated to extending the left Hegelian legacy through the particular way theory and practice were brought together to develop the basis for critique. Notably, Horkheimer develops a critical appraisal of positivism and empiricism and, in this regard, shares certain theoretical impulses with Husserl’s phenomenology. However, whereas Husserl argues for the superiority of philosophy over science and a return to philosophical forms of reasoning, Horkheimer instead wants to champion what he terms a form of “critical reason” (2002, 4) that is anchored in social reality. In this sense, Horkheimer argues that the crisis of science must be understood in relation to a theory that is alert to current social conditions and the way “science as a social function reflects . . . the contradictions with society” (9). Horkheimer critiques phenomenology for being ‘ideological’ because, in his view, its own premises prevent it from “discovering the real causes of the crisis” (7). He concludes that Husserl’s attempt to found absolute truth on logical foundations was imbued with as many problems as those forms of idealism that he was attempting to overcome. For Horkheimer, forms of knowledge cannot be confined to the pure realm of thought and purified of the “historical goals and tendencies of which such activity is a part” (245). He argues that human beings produce their own history, including the forms of knowledge used to understand, critique, and change those historical circumstances and forms of life (244). Ultimately, one of Horkheimer’s (248) main criticisms of phenomenology is that it tends to assume that political and social conditions can be severed from forms of knowledge and thought. Significantly, Horkheimer bases his interpretation of Husserl only on early texts, particularly Logical Investigations (2011), and does not engage with the more generative or genetic strains in his work, a pattern that is repeated by many of the critical theorists, which leads to a reductionistic and misguided assessment of Husserl’s work. In contrast to Horkheimer, Adorno’s engagement with phenomenology spans across his work. He offers strident critiques of Heidegger in works such as The Jargon of Authenticity, The Actuality of Philosophy, and Negative Dialectics, and he devotes several significant publications to an assessment of Husserl’s phenomenology.1 In his 1931 inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno (1977, 120–21) offers an analysis of phenomenology as part of his attempt to examine “the crisis of idealism” and what he suggests are philosophy’s problematic “pretentions to totality” and the attempt to derive “all reality, from out of itself.” Notably, Adorno credits Husserl for the “discovery of . . . the concept of the non-deducible given . . . as . . . the fundamental problem of the relationship between reason and reality” (1977, 122). However, he also argues that Husserl only achieved a limited analysis because he never managed to free himself entirely from the presuppositions of idealism (Adorno 1940, 6). In a later essay, he argues that one of the core problems of

301

Danielle Petherbridge

idealism that Husserl failed to overcome was the attempt to base reality and truth on an inner analysis of consciousness (1940, 5). Adorno was also particularly critical of what he viewed as Husserl’s attempt to separate knowledge and thinking from social context and material conditions. Like other members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno is influenced by Georg Lukács’s analyses, in which philosophy is also implicated in the reproduction of the reified relations of late capitalism. This results not only in human relations being objectified as ‘things’ but also in forms of ‘identity thinking,’ “either by assuming that the object can be mastered in its totality by the subject (idealism), or by attempting to remove the subject from the process of knowledge altogether (positivism)” (Miller 2009, 104). Against these impulses, Adorno seeks to offer a dialectical account which can address the social and historical context of knowledge and thought and conceptualizes experience in reciprocal terms as the fraught mediation between subject and object. In Against Epistemology, Adorno positions himself against Husserl and what he terms ‘identity thinking,’ or the view that the object can be grasped in its totality by the subject. In this context, Adorno (2013, 32) critiques Husserl for focusing on “completeness and continuity” rather than any form of contradiction and the non-identical. In a similar vein to his assessment of Husserl, Adorno critiques Heidegger for undialectical thinking in his turn to fundamental ontology. He argues that Heidegger resorts to the “undialectical and historically pre-dialectical ‘ready at hand’ ” (1977, 123), which is his own attempt to move beyond Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy, but in doing so, in Adorno’s view, he moves to a vitalist philosophy orientated by a “metaphysics of death.” In Adorno’s assessment, Heidegger regresses from any of Husserl’s philosophical achievements with false claims of having moved to a concrete philosophy and the “least radical” proposal to move to the question of being, which ultimately ends up in the triumph of “subjective ontology” (1977, 123). In the final analysis, Adorno is ultimately sceptical of phenomenology in the wake of Heidegger’s politics and his refusal to denounce National Socialism, and philosophically, this resonates in Adorno’s mature work, which is defined by the antinomies of experience that dissolve any affinities between subject and object, a position he views as sitting at odds with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

3.  Phenomenology as Historical Materialism: Marcuse, Heidegger, and Husserl In contrast to Horkheimer, Adorno, and others associated with the Institute for Social Research, Marcuse is perhaps the thinker who most fully attempts to synthesize phenomenology and Critical Theory, engaging with the work of both Husserl and Heidegger. It is, however, Heidegger’s work that initially becomes central to Marcuse’s attempt to bring phenomenology together with historical materialism. Marcuse studied at the University of Freiburg and wrote his Habilitationsschrift under Heidegger’s direction between 1928 and 1933, during which time he attempted to develop a version of Hegelian Marxism drawing explicitly on Heidegger’s project in Being and Time (2010). In recounting his positive appraisal of phenomenology, Marcuse (2005b, 165–66) explains that, at that time in Freiburg, he “saw in Heidegger what [he] had first seen in Husserl, a new beginning, the first radical attempt to put philosophy on really concrete foundations—philosophy concerned with the human existence, the human condition, and not merely abstract ideas and principles.” It is noteworthy, then, that Marcuse admired Husserl’s work for his attempt to create a more concrete philosophy based on experience. This depiction of phenomenology 302

Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School

contrasts with the more common perception of Critical Theory’s disdain for and often narrow critique of phenomenology as ahistorical, quasi-positivistic, and abstract often associated with Adorno and Habermas, for example. Moreover, Marcuse’s views toward Heidegger also differed to others within his circle who also studied at Freiburg and who would later be associated with Critical Theory, such as Walter Benjamin, who was highly critical of Heidegger. In his first published essay, “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” ([1928] 2005a), Marcuse attempted to bring together elements of Marxism and existential phenomenology with the dual purpose of moving beyond what he viewed as the shortcomings of each. He was convinced the two philosophical perspectives could supplement one another, which notably brings his work closer in spirit to some of the later works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.2 Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse is critical of orthodox Marxism and the development of Marxism as a scientific theory with its positivistic tendencies, characterized by its designation of “a system of truths” (Marcuse 2005a, 1) and prescriptive “scientific laws” that could prove “the inevitability of socialism” (Abromeit 2019, 50). Instead, Marcuse champions a notion of Marxism understood as a theory of social action or an “historical act” (2005a, 1). In this vein, Marcuse turns to the work of Heidegger to develop what he terms a phenomenology of historical materialism, arguing that “The truths of Marxism are not truths of knowing [Erkennens], but rather truths of happening [Geschehen]” (2005a, 1). This stance is important for the development of a political phenomenology, and, in this respect, Heidegger’s Being and Time provides a “phenomenological interpretation of historicity” (2005a, 2) that could determine whether such truths arise “from a full grasp of the phenomena of historicity” (2005a, 1). At the same time, Marcuse argues that a synthesis between historical materialism and phenomenology can only occur if “phenomenology reorient[s] itself according to the bearings of the dialectal method” (2005a, 2), which, for him, is called for by the historicity of Dasein. In keeping with the approach of Critical Theory more generally, Marcuse’s (2005a, 5) phenomenologically inspired version of critique is immanently derived, in the sense that being is “given along with the doer’s very existence.” Marcuse argues that, in contrast to Husserl, Heidegger is more able to address the “problems of transcendence, reality and demonstrability of the world” (2005a, 11) with his account of Dasein as “being-in-the-world.” Heidegger offers a way to ‘revitalize’ Marxist theory and to reveal “the ontological foundations of subjectivity, which has been concealed by the rationalist tradition of Western philosophy” (Abromeit 2019, 50). In this sense, Marcuse was drawn to Heidegger’s critique of positivism, which was linked to a ‘subjectless’ form of rationality that was characteristic of Western philosophy, as well as his “ontological concept of historicity” (Abromeit 2019, 49). Yet Marcuse also warns against phenomenology gesturing to the ‘historicity of its object’ only to subsequently “return it to the sphere of abstraction” (Marcuse 2005a, 20). The synthesis of phenomenology and historical materialism occurs for Marcuse by ensuring that Dasein be at every moment conceived “in a concrete, historical situation” (20). However, equally historical materialism must become more phenomenological by learning “to incorporate concretion in the full comprehension of the object” (20). The early 1930s ushered in a dramatic shift in Marcuse’s reassessment of phenomenology when Heidegger embraced National Socialism, and Marcuse was forced to flee Germany. While in exile in Geneva and then in New York, he wrote his first serious critique, outlining how elements of vitalism and phenomenology had opened the way for the Nazi 303

Danielle Petherbridge

seizure of power. He identifies what he terms “political existentialism” in Heidegger’s work and points to the way in which its manifestation was indicative of weaknesses in his philosophy. Despite lauding Heidegger’s account of historicity in previous years, Marcuse now describes it as a “depravation of history,” which becomes merely a form of “affirmative myth” (see Abromeit 2019, 53–55). One might have thought this negative assessment in the 1930s and 1940s would have ended Marcuse’s engagement with phenomenology. However, in a 1965 article, Marcuse once again returns to a consideration of Husserl’s later work. Notably, in this context, Marcuse offers a rather sympathetic, even favourable reassessment of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970). This essay is notable because it is one of the few times after his rejection and move away from Heidegger that Marcuse engages once again with phenomenology. Marcuse (2011, 146) credits Husserl for being the most radical of a group of thinkers who, in the last decades of the 19th century, offered a “reexamination of the Western concept of Reason,” particularly through his critique of modern science. He notes the way in which Husserl reconstructs a notion of reason by way of intellectual history that is both theoretical and practical, a notion of reason that Marcuse describes as a “project.” By this, he means to argue that an “idea of rationality and its application is a specific way of experiencing, interpreting, organizing and changing the world” (148). Marcuse commends Husserl for revealing the ignorance of a scientific reason that remains wedded to empirical reality and neglects to consider that it is also a “specific, historical practice” (149) which is shaped by the very empirical reality in terms of the constitution of its own concepts. It is clear, then, that Marcuse identifies the critical and political potential in Husserl’s work. In the end, though, despite these important insights, Marcuse suggests that Husserl does not achieve what he set out to do. Although Husserl champions philosophy as able to reflect on the foundations of knowledge where science failed, Marcuse questions whether philosophy, as Husserl ultimately defines it, can adequately examine its own real foundations and fulfill the ultimate task of a reconstruction of reason “to promote the realization of humanitas” (Marcuse 2011, 154) in practical and not merely theoretical terms.

4.  Language, World, and Intersubjectivity: Habermas, Husserl, and Heidegger Heidegger was not only a defining figure for Marcuse, but was also central in Habermas’s early development. Notwithstanding his vehement critiques of Heidegger in later texts such as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987a), Habermas (1992, 189–90) also admits that he was a “thoroughgoing Heideggerian” early in his scholarly career. One of Habermas’s earliest published works was a 1953 review essay of Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics, which was based on lectures Heidegger gave in 1935 (see Habermas 1998). Although Habermas notes that Heidegger’s early work Being and Time was “the most significant philosophical event since Hegel’s Phänomenologie” (1998, 191), he offers a trenchant critique of the publication of the 1935 lectures, arguing that one of the most disturbing aspects of Heidegger’s later work is that it reveals his unchanging political support for National Socialism. For Habermas, this is also evident in Heidegger’s philosophy after 1933, when the ‘question of being’ is explicitly tied to the “greatness and inner truth of National Socialism” (1998, 197). Such statements in the 1935 lectures are made worse, in Habermas’ view, by the fact that Heidegger offered no formal retraction of, explanation of, or apology for his association with Nazism. 304

Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School

These critiques only harden in Habermas’s work in the 1980s, when he holds the line first articulated in his 1953 critique of Heidegger but augments it by a close reconstruction of the problematic political impulses he detects in Heidegger’s philosophy from 1933 onward. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, his critique is further cemented when he writes that although the “earlier ontology was rooted ontically in the existence of the individual in the lifeworld,” in the later work, “Heidegger singles out the historical existence of a nation yoked together by the Führer into a collective will as the locale in which Dasein’s authentic capacity to be whole is to be decided” (Habermas 1987a, 157). In this context, he also argues that Heidegger is unable to escape the spectre of solipsism and the philosophy of consciousness, which he remains attached to in a negative way and merely transfers onto Dasein (150, 138). He is also especially critical of what he refers to as Heidegger’s inheritance of the elitist, anti-democratic tendencies of the “German mandarins” (140), evident in his notions of ‘das Man’ and critique of the ‘they’ and mass civilization. However, he does somewhat begrudgingly acknowledge Heidegger’s notion of world and the mode in which it is conceptualized as a “network of involvements” and “non-objectifying, practical dealings” in a manner reminiscent of pragmatism (148). However, as Cristina Lafont (2008, 161) has convincingly argued, despite his staunch critiques, early on, Habermas is undeniably also influenced by key aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenological and hermeneutical insights in Being and Time. One crucial point of convergence is the critical relation that Habermas and, indeed, Marcuse have toward their predecessors and their respective attempts to move beyond what they view as the aporias associated with the philosophy of consciousness and the subject-object model of perception. As Lafont (2008, 163) suggests, it is in this context that Heidegger’s hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology is important and represents a shift as significant as Habermas’s own communicative turn in Critical Theory: the key aspect for both accounts is the constitutive world-disclosing nature of language. Habermas explicitly acknowledges that, in the 1960s, his engagement with “hermeneutics and linguistic analysis convinced [him] that critical social theory had to break free from the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy of consciousness flowing from Kant and Hegel” (Habermas 1988, xiii quoted in Lafont 2008, 167). Habermas also views this as a weakness of Husserl’s approach, which he argues is paradoxically repeated in the first-generation Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno, particularly their inability to move away from the subject-object model (Lafont 2008, 166–67). In this sense, Heidegger paved the way for a hermeneutical model based not on reason or perception but on an account of the human being as a self-interpreting animal (Taylor) (Lafont 2008, 164). As discussed later in this chapter, a central component of this reorientation is the manner in which both Husserl and Heidegger reconceive the notion of ‘world’ in specific ways. Heidegger points to the public nature of world and reconceptualizes it in intersubjective terms as a ‘we-world’ or ‘withworld’: one that is intersubjectively shared. This intersubjective character of a shared public world is one more akin to the perspective of the “generalized other” (to put it in Mead’s terms) that is also important in Habermas’s work (Lafont 2008, 165). One of the most significant features of the hermeneutic notion of world emanating from Heidegger, then, is its intersubjective basis, which is anchored language (Lafont 2008, 165). It is precisely this feature of linguistic articulation that becomes fundamental to Habermas’s project, particularly to his reconceptualization of the notion of the lifeworld. As discussed later, a linguistically conceived notion of the lifeworld is central not only to his critique of first-generation Critical Theory but also to his assessment of the phenomenological account 305

Danielle Petherbridge

of the lifeworld in the work of both Schutz and Husserl. Habermas’s (1987b) own theory of communicative action is developed through his engagement with Husserl’s critique of positivism, as well as his accounts of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, which become central to Habermas’s own philosophy and theory of the public political sphere. Thus, despite his criticisms of phenomenology as a form of traditional theory, Habermas engages with Husserl in the development of key components of his own philosophical project. In the later Christian Gauss lecture (2001), Habermas offers what is perhaps one of his most extensive and sympathetic engagements with Husserl’s work in the context of consolidating his own ‘linguistic turn’ in Critical Theory. The advantage of Husserl’s approach is that it understands the social lifeworld from the outset as a world constituted by synthetic accomplishments. In the most general structure of these activities, it recognizes the typical meaning structures that intersubjectively communalized subjects must continually produce insofar as they at all orientate themselves to objects of possible experience in their everyday practice. (Habermas 2001, 26) Moreover, despite his reservations about Husserl’s transcendental approach, he credits Husserl for establishing the intersubjective constitution of the lifeworld and an intentional relation to truth, both of which contest an individualistic and cognitivisitc idea of the subject. Habermas (2001, 26–27) also acknowledges the world-intended or object-related and thereby externalizing nature of Husserl’s account by pointing to the way in which consciousness is always directed outward toward the world. However, despite this more engaged reading, one of Habermas’s concerns is that Husserl and Heidegger cannot provide an approach that adequately accounts for a contexttranscendent and critical stance and not one merely based on context-dependent experience that, in his view, leans on a closed idea of linguistic tradition and community (Habermas 2001, 28; Lafont 2008, 173). Instead, Habermas’s theory is based on the formal presuppositions of language, and it is this particular linguistic form of intersubjectivity grounded in language philosophy that becomes central to his account of politics and the public political sphere. Ultimately, Habermas’s more narrow reading of Husserl is based on what he argues is the recourse to a philosophy of consciousness and a notion of intersubjectivity that does not fully account for linguistic intersubjectivity. However, in response to these criticisms, one might argue that the Habermasian account of self-consciousness and symbolic interaction must already rely on pre-linguistic layers of intersubjective experience and presuppose the kind of phenomenological approach found in Husserl’s work. As Dan Zahavi (2001, 189) argues, although Habermas is correct to identify the importance of language, it does not follow that it can serve “as the foundation for a theory of intersubjectivity, since it comes too late.” In fact, without considering these pre-linguistic foundations, Habermas can be accused of introducing intersubjectivity at a higher level and therefore by way of “external measures” without fully considering the relation between the subject and intersubjectivity (Zahavi 2001, 204–6). Moreover, as Zahavi (2003, 114) suggests, the phenomenological description of the subject-subject relation involves an asymmetry which is indicative of the difference between the experiencing and experienced subject, without which we would not be referring to intersubjectivity but merely undifferentiated collectivity. This raises an important set of issues for political 306

Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School

philosophy in relation to adequately conceptualizing pre-linguistic aspects and embodied politics, recognition and misrecognition, alterity and difference, and a more multidimensional account of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld.

5.  (Mis)Recognition and Pre-Linguistic Intersubjectivity: Phenomenological Impulses in Honneth’s Work Honneth’s work has created the opportunity for new lines of engagement with a range of philosophical traditions, including phenomenology. This is especially the case in terms of emphasizing the more phenomenological and existential aspects, for example, in Sartre’s work; the pre- and extra-linguistic dimensions of sociality and intersubjectivity; and the importance of asymmetricality in ethical relations highlighted by Derrida and Levinas. In this vein, whilst supporting Habermas’s emancipatory aims and his communicative reconstruction of Critical Theory, Honneth attempts to develop an alternative theory of intersubjectivity that extends beyond its linguistic dimensions and is alert to lived experiences of social suffering, fragmentation, and alienation, as well as issues of identity and difference. To do so, in The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth (1995) turns to Hegel’s early Jena philosophy to develop a tripartite theory of recognition which he argues is necessary for successful subject formation and which provides the normative grounds for critique. In this manner, he emphasizes the normative intersubjective conditions required for successful self-realization as well as the conflictual nature of social interaction and subject formation (cf. Sartre’s account of recognition). It is the deep-seated norms intrinsic to recognition relations that motivate individuals and groups to struggle for expanded forms of recognition and social life. Notably, Honneth seeks to address the affective and bodily relations of recognition as well as forms of human vulnerability and suffering and their consequences for identity formation. Following these insights, in his 2008 work, Reification, Honneth develops an affective form of recognition understood as a primary, existential mode of relatedness or “beingin-the-world” that underpins the normative account of mutual recognition. He compares this primordial form of ‘recognition’ with Sartre’s existential stance to others, Heidegger’s notion of ‘care’ or ‘attunement,’ and Lukács’s notion of ‘engaged praxis.’ This existential form of recognition as ‘involvement’ or ‘attunement’ designates an affective and engaged mode of interaction with others and the world. Recognition here indicates that in our interactions with the world, we do not primarily take a contemplative, detached, or cognitive stance but rather assume a positive or affirmative practical engagement, an existentially conceived notion of “caring comportment” (Honneth 2008, 38). This extends work undertaken in Honneth’s earlier work on ‘invisibility’ (2001), in which he seeks to highlight the way in which acts of recognition are affirmed through expressive and embodied gestures that indicate the perception of the other. In this work, Honneth points to an account of perception and ‘affective intentionality’ as intrinsic to a pre-linguistic account of intersubjectivity and this brings aspects of his work closer to a productive dialogue with critical phenomenology around political and critical concerns, particularly in relation to the lived experience of race and gender (cf. Fanon’s account of recognition). For example, in his reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (2001), Honneth examines the relation between perception, cognition, and recognition with the aim of elucidating the elements required to transform an act of perception into one of 307

Danielle Petherbridge

recognition. The key suggestion he makes is that there is a connection between perception and embodied behaviour or gestural expression that indicates that the other is visible for her counterpart in a social sense (Petherbridge 2017). Thus, Honneth’s account of affective recognition points to notions of affectivity and attention in perception and to a form of ‘evaluative intentionality’ that already indicates the worth or otherwise of persons in our basic perceptual awareness of them (Jardine 2015). In this sense, Honneth makes connections between affect, attention, and perception that create openings for a dialogue with certain approaches in phenomenology, and this brings Honneth closer to bridging the differences between the Habermasian and phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity (see Petherbridge 2021, 2022).

6.  Contemporary Engagements: Phenomenology as Political and Critical Theory Although phenomenologists and critical theorists draw from different theoretical resources and work within different language games, there are also many points for mutual engagement. The differences between them have often made an attempt at a direct synthesis difficult, but it is worth emphasizing that both approaches develop out of Enlightenment thought and German Idealism as well as, at times, engagements with Marx’s own work. Moreover, both approaches can be brought together to contribute to a range of important issues, including intersubjectivity and recognition, alterity and plurality, the lived experience of suffering, injustice and oppression, historicity and the lifeworld, and social and political action. In this sense, the points of intersection and mutual enrichment between phenomenology and Critical Theory might more productively become the focus of a critique of existing social and political conditions, rather than an engagement that merely orients around differences. This synthesis is evident in more recent developments in critical phenomenology, in which certain aspects of Critical Theory and critical impulses drawn from classical phenomenology are brought together to develop forms of socio-political analysis and critique more explicitly. Critical phenomenologists are not only oriented by the insights of classical phenomenology but also seek to develop phenomenology as a transformative social and political practice. Such an approach not only describes lived experiences of inequality and oppression but is also motivated by the spirit of Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. In this sense, critical phenomenologists seek to move beyond a narrow focus on classical phenomenology’s methods of reflection and means of interpreting the world to practices that create social and political change. Like critical theorists, contemporary critical phenomenologists aim to provide a critique of philosophical categories and to establish a normative basis for social and political critique (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2019). The contours of this strategy vary across generations of critical theorists, with earlier theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer focusing more on the category of labour or a critique of epistemology and later theorists such as Habermas and Honneth looking to identify intersubjective resources within language or subject formation, with a focus on the meta-ethical considerations that underpin social and political analysis and critique. So, too, there are clearly critical strains, orientations, and resources in the work of earlier generations of phenomenology, such as those of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s account of intentionality, for example, demonstrates how the subject is always directed outward toward others and the world, and his development of the phenomenological method 308

Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School

enables the bracketing of the natural attitude and the means to reflect on the structures that constitute the world and give it meaning and coherence. In this manner, phenomenology not only enables us to reflect on the transcendental structures we rely on to make sense of the world but also discloses the way in which we largely take those structures for granted in everyday experience and often fail to reflect on them (Guenther 2019, 11–12). Moreover, there are important generative strains and insights in Husserl’s work in relation to intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, passive and active layers of perception, the dynamics of affect, and motivation and interest, as well as the relation between individual habituality and social habitus. When enriched with certain developments in Merleau-Ponty’s work in relation to the body schema, intercorporeality, habit and sedimentation, and reformulations in regard to historicity and hermeneutics developed in Heidegger’s work, classical approaches provide rich resources for contemporary critical phenomenology (Guenther 2019, 13). However, Guenther (2019, 12) suggests that although classical phenomenology provides us with crucial methods for reflective practice, it does not extend far enough in terms of developing its critical potential because it fails to give adequate consideration to the way in which social, historical, political, and material structures also shape our experience and the meaning-making structures that help us make sense of that experience. In this sense, emphasizing affinities between contemporary Critical Theory and phenomenology helps sharpen and enrich mutually shared concerns and forms of analysis, particularly around the politics of subject formation, social identity, embodied experience, and power relations (see Magrì and McQueen 2023). Notably, contemporary critical phenomenologists are more alert to the way in which material, social, cultural, and historical changes delimit not only what we perceive or experience but also how we perceive and experience the world (Guenther 2019, 13). Of particular importance to the development of phenomenology’s critical orientation are insights found in the work of Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir in relation to the lived experience of race and gender, facticity, and situatedness. In terms of an analysis of embodied and habitual forms of discrimination, disciplinary power, and identity formation, instead of turning to Frankfurt Critical Theory, critical phenomenologists have often drawn on French versions of Critical Theory and poststructuralism, such as the work of Foucault and Butler. Such impulses have enabled a reorientation of phenomenology toward a more explicit political practice that challenges and dismantles those structures that normalize and privilege certain dominant experiences of the world while “marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others” (Guenther 2019, 15). In addition, following thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, critical phenomenologists incorporate basic insights from Western Marxism in relation to notions such as alienation and reification and the material conditions of injustice and social suffering. In this respect, Critical Theory and phenomenology increasingly share certain impulses and common concerns, not only in relation to describing lived experience but also in their attempt to develop forms of normative practice aimed at the analysis, critique, and transformation of existing social conditions and forms of political organization.

Notes 1 These include his doctoral dissertation completed in 1924, his inaugural lecture to the philosophy faculty at Frankfurt in 1931, and in one of his major works, Against Epistemology (2013), in which he begins to more fully articulate his own version of Critical Theory. There are also scattered remarks and reassessments of Heidegger and Husserl, as well as Scheler and Kierkegaard, throughout Adornos’s works, including Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia.

309

Danielle Petherbridge 2 It is also worth mentioning other such projects, particularly associated with the journal Telos, and the work of Paul Piccone, as well as Mark Poster in the United States.

References Abromeit, John. 2019. “The Vicissitudes of the Politics of ‘Life’: Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse’s Reception of Phenomenology and Vitalism in Weimar Germany.” Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason 62: 39–58. Adorno, Theodor W. 1940. “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism.” The Journal of Philosophy 37 (1): 5–18. ———. 1977. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos, no. 31: 120–33. ———. 2013. Against Epistemology: A  Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity Press. Guenther, Lisa. 2019. “Critical Phenomenology.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 11–17. Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987a. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1987b. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1988. On the Logic of the Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry A. Stark. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1992. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. Rev. ed. Edited by Peter Dews. London/New York: Verso. ———. 1998. “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin, 186–98. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. ———. 2001. “Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology: The Christian Gauss Lecture.” In On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Barbara Fultner, 1–104. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2001. “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’.” Supplement of the Aristotelian Society 75 (1): 111–26. ———. 2008. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Edited by Martin Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max. 2002. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and Others. New York: Continuum. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2011. Logical Investigations. Books One and Two. Translated by John N. Findlay. London: Routledge. Jardine, James. 2015. “Stein and Honneth on Empathy and Emotional Recognition.” Human Studies 38 (4): 567–89. Lafont, Cristina. 2008. “World-Disclosure and Critique: Did Habermas Succeed in Thinking with Heidegger and against Heidegger?” Telos 145 (Winter): 161–76. Magrì, Elisa, and Paddy McQueen. 2023. Critical Phenomenology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marcuse, Herbert. (1928) 2005a. “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism.” In Heideggerian Marxism, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, 1–34. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2005b. “Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview.” In Heideggerian Marxism, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, 165–76. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press.

310

Phenomenology and Critical Theory/Frankfurt School ———. 2011. “On Science and Phenomenology.” In Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Vol. Five, edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, 145–55. London/New York: Routledge. Miller, Jared A. 2009. “Phenomenology’s Negative Dialectic: Adorno’s Critique of Husserl’s Epistemological Foundationalism.” The Philosophical Forum 40 (1): 99–125. Petherbridge, Danielle. 2013. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. Lanham, MD/New York: Lexington Books. ———. 2017. “Racializing Perception and the Phenomenology of Invisibility.” In Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, edited by Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge, 103–23. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2021. “Recognition, Vulnerability and Trust.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (1): 1–23. ———. 2022. “Habit, Attention and Affection: Husserlian Inflections.” In Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Social World: The Continued Relevance of  Phenomenology. Essays in Honour of Dermot Moran, edited by Anna Bortolan and Elisa Magrì, 413–35. Berlin: De Gruyter. Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, eds. 2019. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2001. Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

311

23 PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE EARLY MARX Italian Phenomarxism and the Yugoslav Praxis Group Nils Baratella 1.  The Shared Foundations of Marxist Philosophy of Praxis and Phenomenology There are two reasons the confrontation of praxis-oriented Marxism with phenomenology is an obvious one. First, Marxism claims to grasp the material reality within which subjects are constituted by their practices but which is, at the same time, produced and influenced by these subjects. And phenomenology is able to deliver on this claim insofar as it offers an anti-positivist methodology for analyzing the practical conditions of the constitution of subjectivity, which is capable of looking at more than just economic circumstances. Second, phenomenology is interesting for emancipatory and intellectual currents within Marxism, which distance themselves from dogmatic—scholastic—Stalinism. That is because the founding drive behind Husserl’s phenomenology stems from a critique of an entrenched, positivistic understanding of science, reflected not least in the scientific positivism of the reception of Marx in real socialism and Stalinism, which no longer does justice to the concrete lifeworld of human beings. A Marxist approach to theory that sees itself as humanistic in particular can benefit from such a confrontation because phenomenology enables an understanding of how the subject navigates their lifeworld. But phenomenology also has something to gain here—namely, an understanding of the concrete historical and political world permeated by struggles. It has often been pointed out that the Marxist focus on social praxis begins with the young Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach (see Sánchez Vázquez 1977). In these theses, which were influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach, Marx wanted to address the constitution of human life, the knowledge one could hope to gain from it by striving to overcome the artificiality and alienation of human life under capitalist conditions, and the accompanying classic separation of materialism and idealism through “real, sensuous activity” (Marx 1978a, 143). This theorizing was aimed solely at the “objective truth” (144) and at not merely interpreting the world but changing it at the practical level (145). The young Marx believed that material and economic circumstances have an influence on all aspects of social life, even if this fact is obscured under the circumstances of capitalism. The aim to turn the Hegelian philosophy upside down, as Marx says at the end of Capital (Marx 1976, 103), in this sense is part of the self-understanding of Marxist theorizing 312

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-34

Phenomenology and the Early Marx

precisely because Marxism promises to offer a more realistic, practical concept of human life. Marxists aim to illuminate and understand how human beings collectively navigate life as a historically shaped praxis in order to shed light on the factual circumstances but also to show alternatives to reality that is organized through capitalism. In formulating his theory, Marx pursues the goal of overcoming the opposition of “materialism and idealism” in order, ultimately, to unite both perspectives in the “comprehension” (Marx 1978b, 115) of the historical and practical development of human life. This concept of comprehension (Begreifen) is by no means used unreflectively by Marx, but it is actually the epistemological category by means of which it is shown that cognitive performances are oriented to human beings’ praxis of living. The concept of “praxis” thereby gains a significant role in Marxist thought. But this was by no means the case from the outset. “Praxis” first gained importance in the 20th century, when the representatives of Marxist theory (1) turned away from the Stalinist canonization of Marxism as a clearly definable science, (2) demanded that Marxist theorizing be anchored in the reality of human beings’ lives, (3) aimed to shape the reality of life in a more ethical or humanistic way, and (4) wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the subject and its integration into collective structures, without, however, wanting to assume something more fundamental behind this reality. The phenomenologically directed focus on praxis is, in this sense, always politically motivated and, at the same time, aims to open up the field of the political beyond the sole focus on the economic. The turn to a Marxist philosophy of praxis in light of this also means turning away from the focus on the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. This allows for a more subtle understanding of the lifeworld. The influence recent phenomenology has had on a number of critical Marxists in the 20th century can be explained not least by the fact that the canonization of Marxism as a science led to the alienation of science from the lifeworld of human beings, which Husserl describes in general in the post-Galilean sciences in his well-known Crisis of the European Sciences. Phenomenology and Marxist philosophies of praxis, in this sense, share a certain anti-positivism that seeks to overcome the traditional separation of subject and object. Husserl’s question, which he posed in the intervening phase between the two world wars, regarding what “science [has] to say about reason and unreason” and “about us men as subjects of this freedom” (Husserl 1970, 6), by no means lost its topicality after the end of the Second World War and in view of capitalist rule on the one hand and totalitarian socialism on the other. While in the West, in view of the processes of alienation in modern life, thinkers critical of capitalism refer to the Marxist concept of criticizing economic, social, and political praxis and, accordingly, developing a phenomenology of the lifeworld, in the socialist Eastern Bloc, it was the objectification of a dialectical-materialist understanding of science by state socialism and its academic philosophy that moved critical thinkers to develop a Marxist understanding of praxis as the foundation for a more humanistic from of Marxism. The concept of “praxis” or “praxis totality” here corresponds to the Husserlian “lifeworld,” which can be understood as a micro-theory of intersubjective relations, which is not exhausted by the economic sphere but actually amounts to a phenomenology of the political. Every theory of this type is characterized by the fact that its epistemological goal—i.e., the political practice of human collectivity—is at the same time its most important illustrative material. After all, how else could an understanding of political praxis be developed if not from the execution of political praxis? Phenomenology offers the possibility of not being dragged into a vicious circle in this regard precisely because it is familiar with this danger itself, as Husserl already pointed out (see Husserl 2012, 108f). 313

Nils Baratella

Despite these commonalities, there are nevertheless deep rifts between the Marxist philosophy of praxis and classical phenomenology that should not be overlooked. Even the starting points Marx and Husserl choose could not be more opposed: While Marx wants to start his theory entirely with an analysis of collective practice, Husserl proposes (at least before the appearance of Crisis) to focus entirely on transcendental structures that would form an a priori of the lifeworld. There is, in this sense, a clear discrepancy between Marxism’s focus on the processing of things through labor as a “metabolism between himself [man, N.B.] and nature” (Marx 1976, 283) and phenomenology’s concentration on the “intentionality” of the “ego” (Husserl 1960, 65f.). The presuppositionless epistemic position that phenomenology as a strict science tries to claim for itself is simply not compatible with the Marxist starting point that all thought presupposes the material conditions of the thinker. The focus on the access to and accessibility of the lifeworld through praxis is what first allows this opposition to be overcome. Despite these obvious contradictions, however, after the end of the Second World War, a number of Marxist thinkers, united by the critique of the orthodoxy and dogmatism of interpretations of Marx under real socialism, try to bridge these gaps, at least selectively— not least in order to leave behind the anti-bourgeois reservations of large parts of the workers’ movement towards philosophy and, at the same time, to prevent Marxist theory from slipping into mere dogmatism. Their goal of recognizing “praxis as the decisive, realitycreating attitude of human existence” while at the same time allowing “praxis as revolutionary praxis to become the fulfillment of historical necessity” therefore remains a political one (Marcuse 2005, 33). This raises the question of the extent to which phenomenology can contribute to a “critique of political economy” that also sees itself as a critique of positivist approaches. What Marxist theories of praxis and phenomenology have in common is that they do not start from assertions of objectivity but, rather, from these very opposite perspectives that analyze the constitution of realities as relations of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Both disciplines share the idea that they want not just to stop at basic anthropological and ontological insights about the practical constitution of human beings but to transform these insights into a concept of the everyday world or even lifeworld. The confrontation of Marxism with phenomenology allows the concept of “praxis” to occupy an even more central position. That is because, whereas in Marx, the concept of “praxis” refers to a specific activity of human beings, in Husserl (even if “praxis” is only mentioned sporadically and rather casually), it acquires a meaning that approaches the praxis totality of Marxist philosophers of praxis: The life-world, for us who wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis whether theoretical or extra-theoretical. The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. (Husserl 1970, 142) But this world is not one that is given in this way naturally. The “world” is indeed the “universal horizon, common to all men, of actually existing things” (Husserl 1970, 163),1 but these things are, at the same time, always already disclosed to, understood, and shaped by human beings. The human world is always already historical—both Husserl and Marx 314

Phenomenology and the Early Marx

share this insight, but the two positions differ in the fact that, in Marxism, the historical nature of this world is the result of class struggle and is therefore political.

2.  Beginning of Marxist Philosophies of Praxis After the initial euphoria following the success of the October Revolution of 1917, disillusionment set in among Marxist intellectuals, especially in Europe, particularly after Lenin’s death and Stalin’s ascension to power. The revolution had not spread beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Following World War I, Europe instead developed in the direction of Fordist capitalism, fascism ruled in Italy, and Stalin himself developed the concept of “socialism in one country” (Stalin 1945, 157), imposing an increasingly orthodox and scholastic reading of Marxist theory that basically amounted to Stalinism and rendered critical thinking all but impossible as it rejected all philosophy as bourgeois. Stalinism became its own dominant ideology (Thompson 1957). This teleological philosophy also increasingly came into conflict with the crises facing socialist movements outside the Soviet Union. In light of these problems, a number of Marxist thinkers began searching early on for an alternative understanding of the reality of life, turning to philosophy in order to reinvigorate the philosophical foundations of Marxism—in particular, to the prominent philosophical current of the time, phenomenology. Thinkers in this context such as George Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Karl Korsch, and others focused on the question of how the specifically human mode of existence could be understood comprehensively as praxis. Italian philosophers of the time in particular developed this into a philosophy of praxis, which increasingly allowed for a link between phenomenology and Marxism. (For an overview, see Mustè 2021.)

3.  Italian Phenomarxism The Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola (1843–1904) is the first person to explicitly talk about a “philosophy of praxis” (Labriola 1976, 702), which he uses in order to situate himself within “historical materialism” while at the same time seeking to introduce into it the concrete practices of life as well as a “social psychology” without “separating the accident from the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the intrinsic kernel.” His goal is “to understand the interlacings and the complexus in its inner connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface” (quoted in Musté 2021, 27). The basic idea of this philosophy, which aims to grasp the human activity of life, reverses the epistemological perspective of philosophy from the relation between thinking (i.e. the “subject”) and objects banished to the “external world” to the asymmetrical interrelation of human and world in the praxis of thinking social individuals changing the facts of the world (including human beings themselves). This raises the old question of method anew. (Haug 2021, 24; author’s translation) Thinking, in this sense, is understood as a tool that helps better explain the course of human life and the connection between “being and consciousness.” The reality to be understood is not simply given in a way that can be grasped purely positivistically. Instead, it has to be understood as emerging from practical life processes, as being permanently reproduced 315

Nils Baratella

in them, and as being in a state of change. Reality comes into existence through practical execution and can only be recognized in it. The concept of “praxis” is associated in this light with a comprehensive claim. It is about the “overall configuration” of the always already social life process of human beings in the manifold and circumstantial social relations peculiar to them. This turns the focus beyond the economic conditions of life and production to relations of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which have to be understood as contingent practices. As Andrew Feenberg shows, the philosophy of praxis helps explain how “the social subject must take over all the same powers that individual subjects enjoyed in the old philosophy. Somehow reality is to be understood in an essential relation to a subject situated within it and dependent on it” (Feenberg 2014, 196). The focus on “praxis” as a term for the comprehensive way in which human beings navigate continued in Marxist theory in Italy and eventually led to an openness to phenomenological perspectives. First, however, Antonio Gramsci took up this talk of the “philosophy of praxis,” not primarily as a philosopher but as a committed party intellectual. Gramsci’s primary concern was not merely engaging in philosophical work with concepts. He wanted to create a philosophical-scientific foundation for a political and economic transformation whose aim was to bring a diagnosis of the political and economic state of the contemporary world into public debate and to ask what is revealed in this public sphere. The experience that capitalist conditions do not necessarily lead to revolution—contrary to what the Stalinist teleology of history claims—but can actually descend into fascism makes it necessary to think about the social practices in the course of which subjectivity is constituted. Even if Gramsci himself does not seem to see the productive insights of phenomenology here, a generation later, others attempted to support the concept of “praxis” with Marxist methodology influenced by phenomenology. The Italian Marxist Enzo Paci (1911–1976) is the first to establish this link. Paci, who is often regarded as a representative of Italian existentialism, had enjoyed an education in phenomenology under Antonio Banfi (1886–1957), who himself had met Husserl and brought phenomenology to Italy. Paci argues in his influential work The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man that the Marxist concepts of “alienation,” “fetish,” and the “overcoming of immediate embeddedness in nature” are not merely economic but also phenomenological. For this reason, they can reveal a possible discrepancy between the appearance and the actual essence of things. “Marx wants to decipher the hieroglyphic, beginning with the ‘mystery’ of the fetishism of commodities. The critique of economics aims at discovering what is hidden behind the enigmatic character of the fetishism of commodities” (Paci 1972, 424). Paci’s central concern is to describe Marx himself as a phenomenologist who sets out to reveal the reifications of economic and social processes and to make them subject to critique. The analysis of processes of alienation in particular becomes the starting point of the analysis of the essence of capitalist relations. The specifically Marxist intention, however, is not only to bring the processes of alienation to light but also to uncover, in the sense of the Theses on Feuerbach, what specific forms of subjective consciousness produce and condition these practices. Paci supports his phenomenological reading of Marx’s analysis of capitalism in Capital this way and thereby defends it against the repeated accusation of being a purely sociological or even positivist work. “Paci understands Marx’s Capital as a phenomenological critique of the superficial appearances of the capitalist economy, and of the ‘natural-attitude’ assumed by the estranged experience of that society” (Araujo 2016, 106). The Marxist approach to overcoming classical economics, which obscures rather than 316

Phenomenology and the Early Marx

analyzing the interrelationships, is phenomenological and, consequently, political for Paci in this sense because it overcomes the abstract categories operating in their phenomenal forms, thereby transforming the “phenomenal(s) into the phenomenological” (Paci 1972, 445). Marx’s “analysis is phenomenological” because it “brought to light what political economy as a science has hidden.” It serves to problematize what we take for granted but, paradoxically, also have lost all sense of in Paci’s eyes. But for this to happen, “philosophy as ideology must be negated” and become the “constitutive practice of a new human society” (Paci 1972, 446) so that a “return to the subject is a return to the precategorial and to the foundation of the sciences and, therefore, to the discovery of their functions” (Paci 1972, 444). Paci thus expands Husserl’s analysis of the lifeworld to include a materialist analysis of historically evolved capitalist relations and seeks to use this to recover a concept of the world that has, in turn, been lost. Ultimately, he is interested in clarifying how, from a historical-materialist point of view, the processes of self-objectification in modern subjectivity could come about. He does not follow Husserl here in understanding this as the result of the processes of mathematization and objectification in modern history of science but follows Marx in understanding it as the result of economic processes. This interpretation of Husserl’s thought allows him to detach this process from a purely ontological reading and tie it back to material occurrences. Paci’s emphasis on the dichotomy of human embodiment, which is also reflected in Husserl’s Ideas, offers a starting point for this: On the one hand, the body as a body is one thing among others; on the other, it is also the seat of the primordial self-experience of the subject and, consequently, the interface between the inner and outer world (Paci 1972, 257f.). As embodied creatures, we are dependent natural beings and therefore firmly bound to temporal processes and, consequently, to complex intersubjective relations. These relations provide the foundation for constituting ourselves as subjects. Paci’s linking of phenomenology with Marxist historical materialism here consists decisively of interpreting the lifeworld as a social and therefore political-economic practice in light of capitalist conditions. He is able to do this because his basic question is how we satisfy needs in social interactions. In this broad concept of human praxis as a comprehensive navigation of life, science is merely a culturally and historically contingent way of systematizing this praxis. The focus on praxis as a comprehensive way of navigating human life, however, also redefines the limits of Husserlian phenomenology. That is because a Marxist and philosophical praxis-based application of phenomenology must explain its approach and cannot stop at the level of the epoché, as Paci understands it, and exclude all realities external to the subject (if that would even be possible). Instead, it has to focus on the everyday economic practices of subsistence, on the joint production of the lifeworld, as well as on its endowment with meaning so reality can be seen as the practical activity of subjects, and subjectivity can be understood as being integrated into intersubjective relationships and world relations and constituted in engagement with these. Paci continues in Husserl’s footsteps in this sense but also goes further. Husserl’s egological investigations led him to the idea of “transcendental intersubjectivity” (Paci 1972, 135), but he never had the chance to spell out these relational patterns.2 How subjects shape their coexistence, how they relate to and with each other are practices that could have been explored and deciphered phenomenologically (as, for example, Schütz did; see Chapter 14). These practices are political in the rudimentary sense of the word insofar as they are about concerns common to human beings and about the fact that human beings (must) differ from one another. Paci’s materialist 317

Nils Baratella

reinterpretation of Husserl’s Crisis enriches Marxist thought on the one hand with elements of a first-person perspective and an understanding of subjective everyday experience, but on the other hand, it has to give up the idea of a clearly identifiable revolutionary subject. This leads thinkers influenced by Paci (such as Paul Piccone), who gather around the journal he founded, Telos, to open up to the idea of a more humanistic Marxism that seeks to overcome the scientific, positivist reduction of subjects to mere objects of historical processes. It is not just the Husserlian critique of the (post-)Galilean understanding of science that is taken up in Marxist theory in Italy and, at the same time, contributes to a politicization of phenomenology. The impulses emanating from Heidegger’s thematization of practical “being-in-the-world” and which gained wide reception almost simultaneously with the appearance of Marx’s early writings in 1932, also made an impact. Heidegger enjoyed a reception among Marxist authors quite early on. Ludwig Marcuse could be considered one of the first, but Karl Löwith and Lucien Goldmann also draw on Heidegger. There is also a broad reception of Heideggerian phenomenology in Italy, which, however, also led away from genuinely Marxist ideas, via the reception of existentialism, to an independent theory of postmodernism. Gianni Vattimo could be considered one of its best-known and leading exponents, who, in this spirit, addresses the dissolution of the grand narratives of modernity and develops a philosophy inspired by Heidegger and Gadamer that rejects the assertion of scientific objectivity and develops hermeneutics into a critical theory of the interpretation of the world.

4.  The Yugoslav Praxis School The interest in humanizing Marxist thought continues to be relevant in the second half of the 20th century. The deep discrepancy between the totalitarian reality of state socialism and the philanthropy that socialism purports to represent becomes especially apparent as a result of the Prague Spring and its suppression. However, while the state in most countries of the Eastern Bloc made such thinking impossible, the special political situation in Yugoslavia at the time (Yugoslavia had already been excluded from the Cominform in 1948) allowed a philosophy to develop, which undertook fundamental destruction of Stalinism and its interpretation of Marxist thought. In the first issue of Praxis, Predrag Vranicki formulates a program that aims to develop a comprehensive concept of the human being under the concept of “praxis”: What then we wish here to examine is not any particular practical activity but practice as the basis of humanity, the philosophical characteristic of man. In this sense, following Marx, we see man as par excellence a being of practice, a being who freely and consciously transforms his own life. Practice is an eo ipso, polyvalent category for it embraces all sides of man’s being. We do not need here to repeat what has been said so many times since Marx, and what it is the precondition of all speculation: that man exists and develops only by transforming his natural and social reality and that in this way he transforms himself also. (Vranicki 1965, 42) Even if this inquiry into praxis is initially directed towards basic, quasi-anthropologically anchored activities of human beings, the traditional assumption of human freedom immediately imposes itself here, as well as through the political background of this philosophical 318

Phenomenology and the Early Marx

orientation because human beings are not simply bound by their nature; they are free and create their world in their revolutionary practice, as Gaio Petrović states in the same volume (Petrović 1965). If human beings were not free, praxis would not be possible. This concerns not just praxis in the sense of physical activity or labor; thinking is also praxis insofar as it is the processing of reality itself. This is why the question of praxis is immediately followed by the ethical question of political conditions that enable or deny people the freedom to disclose the world collectively. In this sense, the praxis of thinking is not only political but also always a thinking of the political. The authors of the first programmatic issue of Praxis turn primarily to Marx’s early writings, in which Marx appears as a radical social critic and defender of humanist values or as Mihailo Marković, another member of the Yugoslavian Praxis Group pointed out, a father of a “radical humanism” (Marković 1971). This, of course, brings various fundamental aspects of Marxist thought into focus, which need to be deepened through phenomenological methodology—whether it is the question of alienation and the loss of the immediacy of supposedly natural life or the emphasis on the dynamism or creativity of human activity, which consists not least in humanizing nature. The so-called Korčula School (named after an island where, until the 1970s, the group around the journal Praxis and other Marxist intellectuals such as Karel Kosík, Enzo Paci, Agnes Heller, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Zygmunt Bauman held regular meetings) aimed to develop the program for a creative and undogmatic Marxism that would pave the way for a more humanistic socialism. They were all united by the hope “that philosophy could make a great contribution to liberation,” as Karel Kosík puts it in a letter (quoted in Feinberg, Landa, and Mervart 2022, 309). The philosophy of those days was also significantly influenced by Heidegger. Despite all the incompatibilities of Heidegger’s thought and Marxism—whether with regard to Heidegger’s open approval of National Socialism or his view that Western metaphysics and not capitalist society was the cause of modern experiences of alienation—Heidegger’s attempt to ground philosophy in the “facticity” of life had an extraordinarily vitalizing effect on Marxist philosophies that oppose the positivisms of real socialist thought. Factical life for Heidegger consists of navigating life and the care involved in ensuring everyday existence (see Heidegger 1996, 178). This care is clearly of a practical nature—in this sense, Heidegger provided a key term in the philosophy of praxis that continues to be relevant today (see, e.g., Schatzki 2002). The idea of bringing together the Marxist concept of “praxis” with the Heideggerian concept of “facticity,” thereby making phenomenological thinking arable for Marxism, is attractive for political philosophy because it puts it in a position to be able to explain everyday life. The existential analytic of immediate life contexts, in this sense, accomplishes the aim of turning philosophy “upside down,” even if the Marxist use of phenomenological methodology has to go beyond the mere description of things to include thinking about the possibilities of revolutionary change. Karel Kosík’s study Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World could be considered exemplary for the merging of phenomenology and Marxist philosophy. After his participation in the Prague Spring, Karel Kosík was expelled from the party, was no longer allowed to exercise his professorship, and was only allowed to publish abroad. He participated regularly in the Korčula Summer School. The constitution of worldly reality, which in classical phenomenology is attributed to intentional acts of consciousness, is, from the point of view of a philosophy of praxis schooled by early Marx, the result of human beings’ material appropriation of the world. Reality in this sense becomes the 319

Nils Baratella

product of human praxis, which, however, can only be accessed phenomenologically. Kosík explicitly takes up Gramsci’s notion of praxis to make clear that all cognition accesses reality in specific and formative ways (see Kosík [1967] 2013). Reality does not confront man .  .  . primarily in the form of an object of appearance, examination and theorizing, whose opposite, complementary pole would be the abstract subject of cognition . . . but as a realm of sensuous practical activity, from whose foundation the immediate, practical contemplation of reality grows. (Kosík [1963] 1976, 1) Phenomenology is, in this way, put into the service of the political project of overcoming the “pseudo-concrete” social reality of capitalism with all its phenomena of reification and alienation. At the same time, however, it also serves the turn away from the kind of postGalilean positivism that is expressed not least in the faith state and dogmatic Marxism have in science. Phenomenology is not only an instrument here, but it also sets the program. In the spirit of this program, Kosík is interested in a metaphysics of everyday life and takes up the Heideggerian concepts of “care” and “concern” to focus in particular on the everydayness of the economy. In Kosík’s view, scientific Marxism must first turn its attention to this everyday economy before it can grasp the economic superstructure: “Before an individual ever reads a textbook of political economy and learns about scientifically formulated laws of economic phenomena, he already lives in an economic reality and understands it in his own way” (Kosík [1963] 1976, 36). This does not mean, however, that Kosík wants to go back to the archaic of human practice in Heidegger’s vein (see 37 f.). He is instead concerned with capturing everyday practices and understanding their economics. If reality is a dialectical, structured whole, then concrete cognition of reality does not amount to systematically arraying facts with facts and findings with findings; rather, it is a process of concretization which proceeds from the whole to its parts and from the parts to the whole, from phenomena to the essence and from the essence to phenomena, from totality to contradictions and from contradictions to totality. It arrives at concreteness precisely in this spiral process of totalization in which all concepts move with respect to one another, and mutually illuminate one another. (Kosík [1963] 1976, 23; italics in original) Kosík’s argument is that our basic and fundamental relationship to the world consists significantly of a practical engagement with it. Under capitalist conditions, however, this human practice is “false” since it consists of the acquisition and utilization of what is already available. Capitalism is a reproductive practice that is incapable of producing anything new, at least on economic and social levels. In the capitalist economy, people do not create a new, better world for themselves but are torn apart by the all-consuming crisis economy. Although human beings themselves are the producers of this world, it confronts them as an other—as the false and deeply reified world of pseudo-concreteness, as Kosík calls it. Human beings are completely caught in it qua their everyday practice—while, at the same time, they produce it themselves. The dialectic between production and cognition that accompanies this praxis and is many times more pronounced in highly technical, differentiated societies based on the division of labor, must be disclosed through a philosophy of praxis. Kosík, in this sense, uses the Heideggerian analysis of existential being for a critique 320

Phenomenology and the Early Marx

of relations of reification and alienation. He opposes these relations with a phenomenologically oriented approach that aims to overcome the pseudo-concrete by tracing the dialectic of subject and object to its origin in social praxis, in which both are fully intertwined. Labor thus becomes an event that constitutes us as human beings because through it, we enter into a three-dimensional relationship with our temporality: We use the products of the past in the present to meet our needs in the future. This is where the subjective human being and objective nature come together—we work the world and thereby make it our own world shaped by meaning. Social reality thus grows solely out of social and therefore political praxis. This also applies to the pseudo-concrete social reality of capitalism, which consists of degrading human beings to homo economicus.

5.  Outlook: Philosophy of Praxis as Political Phenomenology If Marxism is thought of as a philosophy of praxis and a political phenomenology, these two ways of thinking inevitably converge. On the one hand, the question arises as to how we can move from materialistic approaches that focus on the practice of carrying out life to a deeper reflection on the subject and the communicative relationships between different subjects. From a phenomenological perspective, however, the question also arises as to how, from the perspective of the meaning-grasping, intentional subject, the lifeworld can be understood as permeated by struggles and conflicts, as a historical world, and how this, in turn, constitutes specific subjects. The issue of the specific relations of subjects cannot be addressed by referring to mere economic conditions alone. “Praxis,” in this regard, becomes a central concept that allows for an understanding of the integration of the subject into the collective not merely at the level of philosophical speculation but in concrete terms. Herbert Marcuse, who provides a significant link between phenomenology and Critical Theory (see Chapter 22 in this volume), is only the first to make this connection. Marxists are increasingly becoming aware that their theory requires its own theory of consciousness that does not treat it solely as an epiphenomenon. Capitalism is not just an economic form of organization; it is also an ideology that inscribes itself in the bodies and consciousness of subjects through practices. The relations of recognition resulting (and failing to result) from capitalist processes of reification, as well as experiences of alienation, thus became central themes—which the young Marx, still strongly influenced by Hegel, had already taken up. It may be a coincidence that the publication of Marx’s early writings in the 1920s coincides with the increasing attention that is paid to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies. Nonetheless, it is no coincidence that the orientation toward praxis in Marx’s early writings fell on fertile ground at a time when Husserl’s critique of the Galilean conception of science and its alienation from the lifeworld of modern mass man, characterized by the “atomized individual” (Kosík [1963] 1976, 57), was particularly popular. The rationalization of all life processes has led to a widespread sense of alienation and individual isolation that needs to be understood. Husserl diagnoses this feeling as a common reaction on the Crisis of European Sciences—while Marx also offers means of diagnosing it through the theme of alienation. The Marxist philosophy of praxis offers a new, different understanding of “praxis” as the existential (or ontological) way for human beings to enter into a relationship with their environment, through which experiences of alienation can be understood and criticized when they are disclosed phenomenologically. The “practical turn” made by Husserl in Crisis and Heidegger in Being and Time not only had a profound impact on what the Marxists called “bourgeois philosophy” 321

Nils Baratella

but also radiated onto Marxist thought itself and helped Marxism fulfill its own claim to uncover human reality and its mutability. As a reaction to the experiences of crises in the 20th century, the engagement with Marxism and phenomenology opens the domain of pre-theoretical but, at the same time, intersubjective understandings of the lifeworld, which are experienced or perceived as immediate but can be understood and changed politically. This, of course, overcomes the phenomenological idea of primarily wanting to describe the “things themselves.” While the focus is still on the practical nature of the world, it is understood as a world that is constructed and not merely one that has become. The world is thus historical without history being understood as teleological. This philosophy of praxis informed by phenomenology also allows us to think through the failure of emancipatory projects—a perspective that we are forced to take given the political experiences of the 20th century.

Notes The quote has been slightly changed. 1 2 Volumes 13, 14, and 15 of Husserliana on the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity were only published in 1973 and could therefore not be acknowledged by Paci.

References Araujo, Christopher Duarte. 2016. “Marx and Paci on the Question of Appearances (Or, Reading Capital as a Phenomenology).” Human Studies 40 (2017): 101–19. Feenberg, Andrew. 2014. The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School. London: Verso. Feinberg, Joseph Grim, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart. 2022. Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete. Leiden: Brill. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. 2021. VorSchule zur Philosophie der Praxis. Hamburg: Argument. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London/New York: Routledge. Kosík, Karel. (1963) 1976. Dialectics of the Concrete: A  Study on Problems of Man and World. Translated by Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Kosík, Karel. (1967) 2013. “Gramsci e la filosofia della prassi [Gramsci and the Philosophy of Praxis].” In Un filosofo in tempi di farsa e di tragedia. Saggi di pensiero critic 1964–2000, edited by Gabriella Fusi and Francesco Tava, 93–98. Milano: Mimesis. Labriola, Antonio. 1976. “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia.” In Scritti filosofici e politici. Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, 658–793. Torino: Einaudi. Marcuse, Herbert. 2005. “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism.” In Heideggerian Marxism: Herbert Marcuse, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, translated by Eric Oberle, 1–33. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Marković, Mihailo. 1971. “The Possibilities for Radical Humanism.” In In the Name of Life: Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm, edited by Bernard Landis and Edward S. Tauber, 275–87. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. ———. (1976) 1978a. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 143–45. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. (1976) 1978b. “Economical and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 66–126. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

322

Phenomenology and the Early Marx Mustè, Marcello. 2021. Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis. An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci. Cham: Springer. Paci, Enzo. 1972. The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man. Translated by Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Petrović, Gaio. 1965. “The Philosophical Concept of Revolution.” Practice. Revue Philosophique Edition Internationale: 151–67. Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo. 1977. The Philosophy of Praxis. Translated by Mike Gonzales. London: Merlin Press. Schatzki, Theodore. 2002.  The Site of the Social: A  Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: Penn State University Press. Stalin, Joseph. 1945. Problems of Leninism. Authorized English Translation from Eleventh Russian Edition. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1957. “Socialist Humanism.” The New Reasoner, no. 1 (Summer): 105–43. Vranicki, Predrag. 1965. “On the Problem of Practice.” Practice. Revue Philosophique Edition Internationale: 41–49.

323

24 PHENOMENOLOGY AND QUEER THEORY Lanei M. Rodemeyer

1. Introduction The relationship between phenomenology and queer theory includes a history of tensions. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, on the surface, phenomenology and queer theory each seek different goals, and, in doing so, they employ distinct methodologies. Phenomenology, on the one hand, works to identify the essential structures that make specific types of experiences possible, so it begins with individual experiences in order to find the universal conditions that underlie them. This has led, for some early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, to an abstraction from gender and often from desire as well.1 On the other hand, queer theory usually begins with themes such as sexual desire and intimate relations, and its methodology, by definition, avoids any type of essentializing—whether in the conclusions it draws or in attempts to nail down its methodological approach. Given these differences, it would seem natural that these two approaches would not intersect. A second reason for the distance between phenomenology and queer theory lies in specific decisions made by two influential figures. The works of both Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are known for their contributions to early queer theory, yet both authors made clear turns away from phenomenology.2 Foucault conclusively denied phenomenology as a methodological option—even while allowing that many other methods were welcome—in his foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things (1970), saying, “If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject” (Foucault 1970, xiv). Comments such as this—especially coming from a rising theoretical star such as Foucault—set the stage for eclipsing phenomenology from queer theory almost entirely, even if Foucault’s comments may have been more locally geared toward rivals such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. His position is nevertheless understandable: Foucault’s work centered around the institutional and discursive formations of subjectivity, and his methodology was often based in genealogical research and analysis. Given this, and given the general presumption (evoked in the citation just given) that phenomenology gives ‘absolute priority’ to an ‘observing subject,’ it seems to follow that phenomenology might not have much 324

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-35

Phenomenology and Queer Theory

to contribute to queer theoretical work. However, in an interview much later in his life, Foucault admitted that his access to Husserl’s phenomenology had been rather limited in his early years, implying that this was unfortunate: France only knew Husserl via an angle which I am not sure was, or represented, the main line of phenomenology. Because in particular, the whole fundamental problem of phenomenology was ultimately a problem of logic: how to found logic. We were not so familiar with all that in France, we knew instead a Husserl who inscribed himself here, it seems to me, if not ingratiatingly, at least with a degree of dexterity, in the Cartesian tradition. (Foucault, Gordon, and Patton 2012, 101) This later insight, however, came well after queer theory and phenomenology had gone their separate ways, and Foucault’s later work was not intended in any way as a ‘return’ to phenomenology.3 Unlike Foucault, who began with an overt eschewing of phenomenology but may have later softened this view, Butler traversed the opposite direction—beginning with clear connections to phenomenology but then erasing these links later on. As pointed out by Lisa Käll (2015), Butler’s early article, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988), was heavily invested in phenomenology and the contributions that phenomenology could make to analyses of gender. As Käll explains, “In [Butler’s] early discussion of gender identity as a performative accomplishment, she instead turns to phenomenology, and more specifically, the phenomenological theory of acts” (Käll 2015, 26). However, when Butler published Gender Trouble (1990) only two years later, the references to phenomenology had disappeared while the main arguments from their early article remained intact. Käll describes this well: It must be noted here that Butler’s explicit reference to and discussion of phenomenology in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” are curiously missing in Gender Trouble, published only two years later, in spite of the remarkable overlap between the two works in the account of gender as a performative accomplishment. Indeed, there are full paragraphs in the earlier article that reappear almost unaltered in Gender Trouble and the general line of argumentation is the same in both texts, but the references to phenomenology, upon which much of the discussion in the earlier article builds, have been removed in Gender Trouble. (Käll 2015, 26–27) Käll also points out that Butler’s use of the notion of ‘style’ in their discussion of ­ erformativity—which led to a common and unfortunate misreading of Butler’s work as p ‘voluntarist’—was quite different from the ordinary use of the word. Instead, Butler’s use of ‘style’ relied on a phenomenological understanding, specifically that of Merleau-Ponty. “Butler employs the notion of style quite differently from these colloquial uses and her characterization of style reveals, once again, her reliance on phenomenology, to which this notion is central” (Käll 2015, 33). We might ask ourselves how the relationship between phenomenology and queer theory might stand today if Butler had not removed these connections from their groundbreaking Gender Trouble. In fact, Käll comments after pointing 325

Lanei M. Rodemeyer

out the disappearance of references to phenomenology in Butler’s Gender Trouble, “[T] he passing over of this influence [of phenomenology] in Gender Trouble two years later raises some interesting questions about positioning, silencing, establishing of traditions, and claiming of intellectual property rights” (Käll 2015, 27). Phenomenology, in other words, appears to be an embarrassing past that Butler sought to cast off, rather than an integral contributor to major insights for queer theory.4 A final reason for the chasm between phenomenology and queer theory is—to put it bluntly (yet lightly)—that the early phenomenologists just did not have enough flair in comparison to queer theory. To be sure, Heidegger shifted the philosophical ground entirely with Being and Time, Sartre and de Beauvoir were certainly intriguing public figures as well as rigorous and stimulating philosophers, and Merleau-Ponty’s work is still central to discussions that integrate phenomenology with approaches to mental and physical health. But the groundswell of queer theory, often led by the works and comments of Foucault and Butler (among others), made these phenomenologists appear behind the times, stodgy, and recalcitrant in their references to Being, transcendental structures, and the like—to say nothing of the density of their writings (especially Husserl’s!). In more philosophical terms, the early phenomenologists appeared inextricably linked with the status quo, heterosexism, institutional power, and hegemonic discourse—all of which were the stated enemies of queer theorists. The two methods, then, were cut off from one another for a variety of reasons. And of the two, queer theory was certainly the more popular.

2.  Tentative Alliances In spite of these challenges to any commonality between phenomenology and queer theory, there has been a small array of individual projects that have sought to (re-)introduce these two approaches to one another. While some have remained rather obscure and others have gained a certain amount of recognition, the question to pursue is to what extent each of these attempts has been successful in bringing phenomenology and queer theory together, and, more importantly, what new outcomes might be possible through such a relationship. We will review several of these proposals here.

2.1  Proposals From Queer Perspectives Henry Rubin’s “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies” (1998) is one of the e­ arliest— if not the earliest—fully developed arguments that phenomenology could be productively integrated with queer approaches in order to address questions of gender. Rubin positions himself as a trans theorist who is justifiably troubled with the dismissive handling of trans perspectives by feminist and queer theorists at that time. To generalize an argument that was common during the 1990s (Rubin focuses on Hausman 1995): If gender is performative, and if it is solely the result of institutional and hegemonic discourses, then ‘transsexualism’ (and especially the desire for surgery) is buying into a fictional notion of essentialized gender, whether naively or cleverly. For this reason, the argument goes, ‘transsexualism’ should not exist in an ideal world where gender is recognized for the constructed identity that it is argued to be, and those who identify as trans should be disabused of their belief in, or misuse of, gender. The issue, Rubin states, is that Foucauldian-inspired ‘discourse theory’ tends to center its entire analyses around discourse and neglects to affirm the subjective, embodied positions that live through those discourses: “The idea of gender identity, 326

Phenomenology and Queer Theory

[Hausman] claims, is only an illegitimate foundationalist category. .  .  . Because of her discursive approach, Hausman has little concern with the experience of having a gender identity that is at odds with one’s body” (Rubin 1998, 265, emphasis in original). Phenomenology, Rubin suggests, is able to provide the analyses of gender experience as well as the perspectives of individual agents that are missing in queer theory. If, as phenomenology suggests, we recognize that the (discursive) world is renewed and potentially contested each time an individual upsurges into consciousness, then such an approach might point to the possibility of refiguring the discursive formulations that capture and reduce experience. (267) Rubin is not naively suggesting that phenomenology is the answer to gender analysis, however, or that it can single-handedly offset the power relations identified through queer theory; he recognizes the limitations of phenomenology, including its naïve presumptions and its history of relying on privileged, white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender perspectives (267). Nevertheless, he argues that trans studies should employ phenomenology as a corrective to the discursive approaches that have silenced trans perspectives and embodiment. In other words, while both discourse theory and phenomenology have their failings— the former in dismissing embodiment and individual experience, the latter in ignoring the formative aspects of institutions and cultural histories—they provide the means to fill in what each is missing, offering an approach that gives voice to all types of experiences, including trans lives. Rubin then turns to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, who present analyses of embodiment that demonstrate alienation from one’s own body as well as more nuanced descriptions of lived corporeality. With these descriptions, Rubin notes that the individual subject of experience is not lost in the discourses surrounding it and, for this reason, finds that phenomenology is a useful tool, alongside discourse theory, for trans studies. “With its emphasis on the body as a point of view on the world, phenomenology accommodates a transsexual awareness that bodies significantly shape experience of the world” (270). Somewhat more recently, David Ross Fryer (2012) has echoed Rubin’s call for an integration of phenomenology with queer theoretical approaches. Instead of focusing on individual experiences of gender, though, Fryer inquires into the possibility of political change within queer theory. He argues that positions derived from the theories of Foucault and Butler are compelled to reject all types of ‘experience’ in favor of analyses of discourse. While this approach can be useful in disentangling gender from a causal relation with material bodies, he says, it throws away the productive aspects that experience can offer to political movements. Phenomenology, however, introduces an understanding of ‘experience’ that can provide the grounds necessary for such change: [W]hen properly understood, Husserlian phenomenology offers us a way to think experience without falling into the traps Foucault and Butler warn us about, a way of thinking experience that is consonant with Butler’s general observations without throwing away experience entirely as Butler, in her positivism, seems to do. (Fryer 2012, 53–54) Thus, Fryer offers us a similar argument to Rubin’s, pointing to the importance of individual, embodied experience and to phenomenology as a method that can analyze these 327

Lanei M. Rodemeyer

experiences without succumbing to difficulties that arise from queer theory on its own. Interestingly, while Rubin turned to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in order to demonstrate how phenomenology might be useful for trans studies, Fryer points to Husserl’s work as informative for political change. Oddly, though, Fryer then employs Levinas in the following chapter in order to introduce a phenomenological counterbalance to psychoanalysis, and one wonders why Husserl’s work is left behind at this point. While Fryer does not offer a demonstration of how queer theory and phenomenology can be integrated in quite as substantial a way as Rubin does, these two proposals hailing from queer theorists5 nevertheless offer careful arguments that show the contribution that phenomenology can make to discursive theories that seek to ground themselves in experience or embodiment, and they do so by pointing to three very different phenomenological figures: Husserl, MerleauPonty, and Sartre.

2.2  Queer Phenomenology One would think that the term ‘queer phenomenology’ would be exactly the marriage of queer theory and phenomenology that was suggested by theorists such as Rubin and Fryer. But that is not necessarily the case. Rubin and Fryer (and others, as will be discussed in the next section) sought a methodological approach that intersects phenomenology with queer theory, suggesting a balance between the advantages brought from each side while correcting or filling in points where they might be lacking. Such an intersection may sometimes be easier said than done. In Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), Ahmed starts her introduction to the book with a promising claim, saying “In this book I take up the concept of orientation as a way of putting queer studies in closer dialogue with phenomenology” (Ahmed 2006, 1). Ahmed’s goal is not only to discuss ‘orientation’ in the sense of viewing an object (as we see in Husserl’s phenomenology) but also to critique the ‘orientation’ of phenomenology as a method and practice itself and, finally, to discuss ‘orientation’ in light of individual sexual orientation. “A queer phenomenology might turn to phenomenology by asking not only about the concept of orientation in phenomenology, but also about the orientation of phenomenology” (Ahmed 2006, 3). As one follows her descriptions and musings, though, it becomes clear that Ahmed employs the phenomenological approach hardly at all in her book, turning instead rather quickly to question the orientation of the phenomenological method and then to describe the experience of sexual orientation through these insights. As Ahmed herself admits: Once I  caught sight of the table in Husserl’s writing, which is revealed just for a moment, I could not help but follow tables around. . . . So I followed Husserl in his turn to the table, but when he turns away, I got led astray. . . . So I kept returning to tables, even when it seemed that phenomenology had turned another way. .  .  . Perhaps my preference for such queer turnings is because I don’t have a disciplinary line to follow. (Ahmed 2006, 22) The overall impact of Ahmed’s analyses, then, is a queer critiquing of phenomenology— albeit with some phenomenological insights—rather than an approach that integrates queer theory relatively evenly with phenomenology. This is not to say that such a project is not important: As we saw already with Rubin’s argument, phenomenology could certainly 328

Phenomenology and Queer Theory

benefit from external critique. But methodologically, phenomenology is already meant to integrate critique as part of its very project, and so a dialogue between it and queer theory could yield new and insightful conclusions. In Ahmed’s handling of queer phenomenology, unfortunately, phenomenology does not get much chance to respond, whereas the queer perspective is given the reins. Again, Ahmed’s project is itself an important contribution that examines the presumptions of a phenomenological standpoint, but it does not offer a mutual dialogue between phenomenology and queer theory. Gayle Salamon’s response to Terry Eagleton’s question “What, for example, do phenomenology and queer theory have in common?” (Eagleton 1996, 207, cited in Salamon 2009, 226) appears more promising. She is affronted at the presumption of Eagleton’s question, which is meant to represent a pairing that is as disparate as “chalk-and-cheese” (Salamon 2009, 226). Salamon responds: “The question of the relation between queerness and phenomenology isn’t quite as improbable as Eagleton seems to suggest, as those of us who work on queer phenomenology would attest” (Salamon 2009, 227). Salamon refers to Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology as “a good place for Eagleton to start”—an appropriate reference since, in spite of any disappointment in how phenomenology might be represented in Ahmed’s book, it nevertheless represents a rare discussion in which both phenomenology and queer theory are parties. Salamon goes on, however, to describe phenomenology in such a way that it no longer contains the phenomenological method but is rather a type of heightened awareness or perception: “Queer folks are natural (and I use that word advisedly) phenomenologists, since careful reading of our surroundings, of the physical and social circumstances through which we move, is often a matter of survival” (Salamon 2009, 227). Additionally discouraging for our considerations is the fact that, for the remainder of her article—and in spite of her affirmation of queer phenomenology as a justifiable combination—Salamon implicitly calls into question whether a true interconnection between philosophy (which encompasses phenomenology) and queer theory is indeed possible. Working in queer theory, she finds herself ejected from philosophical circles or forced to justify her work on philosophical grounds (a more subtle type of rejection): “I find myself in the looking-glass position of leaving a discipline to which I never really belonged” (Salamon 2009, 230).6 It is also interesting to note that, in Assuming a Body (2010), which follows closely on the heels of her article “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy,” (2009), Salamon clearly positions herself as a social constructionist and in opposition to phenomenology. “The phenomenological body presents itself as simply there, as unproblematically available to me. Yet this simple givenness is a fiction, albeit a necessary one” (Salamon 2010, 78). The queer phenomenological approach with which Salamon identifies herself,7 then, is clearly not very sympathetic to phenomenology. Rather, it employs phenomenology as a launching pad from which to establish queer positions that are against phenomenology or that wish to subsume it—reestablishing the antimony already produced by Foucault and Butler. Nevertheless, both Ahmed and Salamon work to put phenomenology and queer theory on the same page in ways that Foucault and Butler did not, even if queer theory is given the upper hand.

2.3  Proposals From Phenomenologists In Lisa Käll’s discussion of Butler, to which we referred earlier, Käll calls for a phenomenological approach to performativity, arguing that the phenomenological perspective would assist Butler in avoiding misreadings of their work as ‘voluntarist’ or ‘determinist.’ But Käll 329

Lanei M. Rodemeyer

does not simply suggest that phenomenology act as a corrective for misreadings; rather, she finds that phenomenology provides an essential perspective that is often absent from Butler’s work on performativity: [B]y locating intentionality and constitution also on a level of lived embodiment, a phenomenological perspective takes the embodiment and situatedness of the subject into serious consideration, dismissing any interpretation of the subject as being an abstract product of linguistic structural play or only a position in language without much connection with lived reality. (Käll 2015, 31) Käll is not arguing that phenomenology should supplant Butler’s queer theoretical approach but instead that phenomenology provides a necessary perspective that avoids the pitfalls of any theory that focuses exclusively on discursive and performative relations.8 For this reason, it is regrettable that all phenomenological influences were erased in the more popular and established rendering of Butler’s position on gender performativity. But this makes Käll’s position all the more compelling since she demonstrates the effectiveness of bringing these two approaches together: Even though the issue of how to understand lived subjectivity is perhaps not of main concern for Butler, her theory of performativity as a way of accounting for the constitution of subjects nevertheless also has implications for how to understand subjectivity and by recognizing and reading her together with her indebtedness to a phenomenological tradition, which in part conditions her own position and writings, we might gain better understanding both of subjectivity and the constitution of the subject. (Käll 2015, 41) An analysis of gendered subjectivity, in other words, could address not only its discursive conditions but also its embodied and individual situation if it were to employ a combined approach that included phenomenology as well as queer theory. Käll’s suggestion not only undermines the various misreadings with which Butler had to contend after the publication of Gender Trouble (1990) but also proposes an approach that investigates and appreciates both the discursive and the lived, embodied aspects of gender. In fact, I made a similar proposal in “Husserl and Queer Theory” (Rodemeyer 2017). Here, however, the argument takes a different direction: Instead of pointing out that a queer position is already phenomenological (or has phenomenological roots) as Käll does, I demonstrate that Husserl’s phenomenological analyses are already open to queer projects if they are not already ‘queering’ in themselves: “Simply put, the queering of subjectivity, identity, and objectivity is already taking place in Husserl’s work, and it is the result of his phenomenological approach.” (Rodemeyer 2017, 324–25) So here, I offer the ‘flip side’ of what we have seen so far, identifying queer components within phenomenological projects. Beyond arguing that phenomenology is capable of taking up queer subject matter, though, I  take a further step, considering the challenges that might face an integrated approach between phenomenology and queer theory. First of all, queer theory—although it may have been represented as such throughout our discussion so far—is not a uniform methodology, and, in fact, neither is phenomenology. Yet they each have their own central issues: In the case of queer theory, while queer 330

Phenomenology and Queer Theory

sexual orientation is not always the direct subject of inquiry, the broader outcomes—like challenging subjective identity and recognizing institutional powers and biases—provide a more general touching point for queer theory as a whole. In the case of phenomenology, not all phenomenologists examine the structures of consciousness as Husserl does, but the approach of grounding one’s analyses in direct experiences in order to identify the structures that make them possible unifies much of phenomenological research. Given this, the next question would be how these two quite disparate approaches can work together. Here, I offer two solutions: On the one hand, . . . the phenomenological approach would lead to a queer theoretical approach, and carrying out analyses from a queer perspective, would then lead back to phenomenological analyses. Such a methodology would clearly be detailed and thorough, but it may also not always be manageable. A  second option, then, would be to focus on those questions that seem to reside between the two methods, at the intersection, for example, between individual sensory experience and discourse. Such an approach would narrow the focus of the analyses to the question at hand, but the employment of the disparate methods at once would require some negotiation. (Rodemeyer 2017, 331) A pairing of approaches between phenomenology and queer theory would thus not be an easy feat, but it is possible, and the results have the potential to provide much deeper insights than either method can offer on its own. The key is to recognize the limitations of each position so that one can shift from one perspective to the other as each approaches its limits. Similar to projects that employ both quantitative and qualitative research, which present one set of analyses and then fill in with the other, a combined queer and phenomenological method would require flexibility to move from one line of inquiry to the other, bringing the different outcomes along throughout the project. The results could offer multilayered insights that honor subjective, individual experiences alongside explications of discursive and performative subjectivities.

2.4  Critical Phenomenology? While the term ‘queer phenomenology’ became popular a couple of decades ago (Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology was published in 2006), it has received less attention lately. Instead, a more recent take on integrated approaches seems to be suggested in the notion of ‘critical phenomenology.’9 Might ‘critical phenomenology’ refer to a shared methodology that could combine phenomenology with queer theory? This is quite possible, although many other combined methods would fall under the same umbrella. ‘Critical phenomenology’ appears to be an approach that takes some of the ‘critical’ insights gained from feminism, critical theories of race, disability studies, trans studies, and other such movements (including queer theory)—all of which challenge the constitution of particular types of bodies and subjects by institutions and discourses of power—and brings them together with phenomenological insights and methods, so a method combining phenomenology and queer theory would certainly fit here. However, there are some concerns with the mobilization of this notion. First of all, popularizing an ‘umbrella term’ such as ‘critical phenomenology’ could have the effect of blending—or even erasing—the specificity that is essential to the various approaches that are meant to be included within it. If feminist phenomenology and critical 331

Lanei M. Rodemeyer

race phenomenologists are both doing ‘critical phenomenology,’ in other words, how do we recognize their distinct projects, the importance of the nuances of their inquiries, and the very different types of oppressions they address? More importantly, how might the impact of intersectionality—where individuals experience compounded, intensified, or just different types of oppressions because of the multiple identities with which they are associated or with which they associate themselves—be negotiated?10 Perhaps—and one could easily argue—we can consider ‘critical phenomenology’ a general heading under which these different movements would maintain their separate identities and projects. But often, ‘critical phenomenology’ appears to substitute for the more direct terms, and in such cases, the specificity of these projects tends to be covered over. This tendency to generalize or fuse distinct approaches, in other words, could have the serious side effect of blending or dismissing the specificity of oppression. My second concern is a linguistic issue—but one that has the effect of possible erasure nonetheless—and, for this reason, I would argue that it extends well beyond a simple choice of terminology: When we introduce the concept of ‘critical phenomenology,’ then the practice of phenomenology on its own appears ‘uncritical’ in comparison. In fact, ‘critical phenomenology’ is often opposed to ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’ phenomenology in descriptions of what critical phenomenology can accomplish.11 This opposition reifies the presumption that phenomenology itself is uncritical or incapable of carrying out critical or queer work, whereas—as I have argued elsewhere (Rodemeyer 2022)—much of the work of ‘classical’ phenomenologists is already highly critical: Husserl’s main import, in several of his texts, is a critique of scientific foundations; Heidegger sought to challenge the very grounds of philosophy, subjectivity, and truth; Sartre analyzed the metaphysical basis of subjectivity; Merleau-Ponty called both Gestalt and empirical psychology into question; and de Beauvoir challenged philosophy and phenomenology with regard to their understanding of a ‘neutral’ subject and (its connection to) the institutional biases affecting women. Identifying ‘critical phenomenology’ as informed by feminist insights and other critical approaches ignores the fact that de Beauvoir’s work was both critical and feminist as much as it was phenomenological. In fact, de Beauvoir’s internal critique of phenomenology’s presumptions about subjectivity was not meant to undermine or dismantle phenomenology; rather, since phenomenology was introduced as a method that must always engage in self-correction, her challenges were meant to introduce new insights and perspectives into an already powerful method. So the introduction of a ‘critical phenomenology’ that distances itself from ‘classical’ phenomenology returns us to the problematic division enabled by Foucault’s and Butler’s erasure of phenomenology from their projects. We end up with the (false) belief that, in order to do critical work, we must leave ‘classical’ phenomenology behind—when ‘classical’ phenomenology is not only critical in its own right but also informed many of the critical projects that ostensibly set it aside (as we saw earlier in this chapter). In other words, imagine introducing a new area called ‘critical disability studies.’ This new movement would need to distinguish itself from ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ disability studies, and in doing so, the implication would be that ‘traditional’ disability studies is not a critical enterprise—which could not be further from the truth. Similarly, the term ‘critical phenomenology’ has the effect of obfuscating the critical methodology already in place in the phenomenological method. We might consider an additional issue pertinent to the topic of this chapter: Given the history of the relations between queer theory and phenomenology, where queer theorists 332

Phenomenology and Queer Theory

have often relegated phenomenology to a relatively minor position in the wave of gender studies in general, we need to attend not only to the oppression of specific groups of people but also to that of philosophical approaches. It seems ironic that critical methods such as queer theory and ‘critical phenomenology’—whose efforts are geared toward illuminating oppression and arguing for transparency—would themselves suppress a crucial method that could provide important insights. But this takes place in all directions, as we saw in Salamon’s description of her exclusion from philosophy because of her work in queer theory. For this reason, we need to be especially (and critically!) aware of the elisions that occur not only in the publications of popular works but also in the naming and employment of our methodological approaches. Critical phenomenology, while mobilizing the importance and effectiveness of combining ‘critical’ and ‘phenomenological’ approaches—and thus being very much in line with the arguments given earlier in favor of integrating phenomenological and queer theoretical approaches—should itself be employed carefully. Otherwise, it carries the risk of effectively silencing the critical insights already inherent in phenomenology itself as well as in other specific approaches.

3.  A Call for Careful Negotiation Should phenomenology and queer theory be put into conversation with one another in theoretical projects? Without a doubt. As we’ve seen earlier, scholars such as Rubin, Fryer, Käll, and myself not only provide rigorous arguments on behalf of such a relation but also demonstrate that this relationship has been in place in the past and that it is conceivable for future projects. Even works like those of Ahmed and Salamon provide examples of putting these two approaches in dialogue with one another, even if the overall impact favors queer theory in those cases. Should such a mutual engagement proceed carefully—even critically? Again, without a doubt. Hegemonic discourses, described so well by Butler, do not just exist on the register of sexual orientation. As Käll indicates—and as Foucault himself argues extensively—methodological approaches can themselves become their own investments of power, and as such, they can silence other positions and approaches. Phenomenology—while clearly not without its own problems, as already discussed—has struggled to maintain theoretical visibility after its rejection by Foucault and its erasure by Butler. The positionings of queer phenomenology and ‘critical phenomenology’ echo this past, even while they also recognize the important, even essential, contribution that a phenomenological perspective can provide to queer and ‘critical’ perspectives. The key is balance: Phenomenology tends toward the individual and can forget the historical, social, and discursive meanings that infiltrate the very subjectivity of the person. Queer theory, for its part, can neglect embodiment and individual experience in favor of its analyses of discursive power relations. But approaches that combine these names can, in a different type of elision, contribute to the minimizing of one side or the other. We saw this in ‘queer phenomenology’, which hardly embraced a phenomenological approach and was more often critical of phenomenology than with it. And we see this potential again in ‘critical phenomenology,’ in which distinctions between ‘classical’ and ‘critical’ phenomenology end up sidelining the critical work already alive in the history and current work of so-called classical phenomenology. With the right balance, however, phenomenology and queer theory are able to produce together what neither of them usually can do on their own. And those results could offer depth and insight into the many levels of gendered, embodied, and discursive experiences. 333

Lanei M. Rodemeyer

Notes 1 Of course, Simone de Beauvoir challenged this tendency quite effectively in The Second Sex (2011). And, in general, these early phenomenologists were not ignorant of gender and sexual desire, as can be seen in Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on “The Body as a Sexed Being” in Phenomenology of Perception (2012); Sartre’s chapters discussing masochism and sadism in Being and Nothingness (1956); and Husserl’s later musings on family relationships, motherhood, and ethics in his manuscripts. 2 Foucault and Butler were clearly not the only early and influential queer theorists. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, in their introduction to The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013), point to Gayle Rubin and Leo Bersani, in addition to beginning the anthology with selections from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whom, it can be argued, were major influences on the burgeoning movement of queer studies. 3 One might suggest that Foucault’s genealogical work was phenomenologically influenced, in spite of his protestations. As H. A. Nethery demonstrates (2013), Husserl and Foucault could be considered complementary to one another, each doing projects that end where the other begins. 4 It is interesting to note that Butler appears to circle back to phenomenology decades later: Their recent book, What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022) not only explicitly mentions phenomenology in the subtitle but also includes discussions of Scheler and Merleau-Ponty. In fact, Butler states in their introduction, “As someone trained in philosophy, I am drawn back to phenomenology, or perhaps compelled to draw it forward in order to understand the phenomenon of the pandemic as exhibiting a sense of the world, or a world that is given to us in part through the senses” (2022, 17). This could be considered a welcome spotlight on phenomenology, especially given its historical elision; however, as discussed toward the end of this article, we must continue to attend to how this method (or its name) is being employed, and what types of exclusions might be implicit even as we ‘draw it forward.’ 5 Rubin was actually a trans theorist, but his article appears during the time when trans theory was just appearing as an established movement. The methodology he had been using (in addition to phenomenology) was Foucauldian ‘discourse theory,’ and his descriptions of this approach align with queer theoretical approaches. Queer theory was a common—and very useful—approach in early trans studies. 6 In this case, Salamon clearly experiences philosophy as subordinating queer theory, and I do not believe her experience is exceptional. However, in the relations between phenomenology and queer theory, queer theory has definitely held the stronger position over the past several decades. 7 Salamon identifies herself as a queer phenomenologist in these texts from 2009 and 2010. More recently, she has aligned herself with “critical phenomenology.” See section 3 in this chapter for further discussion of critical phenomenology. 8 Käll’s argument is thus quite similar to that made by Rubin, which we discussed earlier. 9 See, for example, 50 Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology (2020a), edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, which offers a broad spectrum of phenomenological and nonphenomenological terms in an effort to intersect phenomenology with various critical philosophical enterprises. See also Phenomenology as Critique (2022), edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa, which offers a selection of phenomenological approaches that demonstrate how phenomenology can be (and already has been) employed as a critical philosophy. 10 See Chapters 26, 27, and 28, on gender, race, and intersectionality in this volume. 11 See, for example, Lisa Guenther, “Critical Phenomenology,” in 50 Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, in which she draws this distinction explicitly (2020, 12ff.). In fact, the editors of the same volume that contains Guenther’s chapter make a similar reference, saying: “Together [the concepts in this volume] also expand our understanding of phenomenology’s potential far beyond its classical horizons” (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020b, xiii).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aldea, Andreea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa. 2022. Phenomenology as Critique. New York/ London: Routledge.

334

Phenomenology and Queer Theory Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. ———. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2022. What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. New York: Columbia University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel, Colin Gordon, and Paul Patton. 2012. “Considerations on Marxism, Phenomenology and Power. Interview with Michel Foucault; Recorded on April 3rd, 1978.” Foucault Studies 14: 98–114. Fryer, David Ross. 2012. Thinking Queerly: Race, Sex, Gender, and the Ethics of Identity. Boulder, CO/London: Paradigm Publishers. Guenther, Lisa. 2020. “Critical Phenomenology.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 11–16. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hall, Donald E., and Annamarie Jagose, eds. 2013. “Introduction.” In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, xiv–xx. London/New York: Routledge. Hausman, Bernice L. 1995. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Käll, Lisa Folkmarson. 2015. “A Path Between Voluntarism and Determinism: Tracing Elements of Phenomenology in Judith Butler’s Account of Performativity.” lambda nordica 2–3: 23–48. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London/New York: Routledge. Nethery, H. A. 2013. “Husserl and Foucault on the Subject: The Companions.” PhD diss., Duquesne University. Rodemeyer, Lanei M. 2017. “Husserl and Queer Theory.” Continental Philosophy Review 50: 311–34. ———. 2022. “A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology as Critique, edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa, 95–112. New York/ London: Routledge. Rubin, Henry S. 1998. “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies.” GLQ 4 (2): 263–81. Salamon, Gayle. 2009. “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy.” Hypatia 24 (1): 225–30. ———. 2010. Assuming A Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel. E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, eds. 2020a. 50 Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2020b. “Introduction.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology, xiii–xiv. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

335

25 PHENOMENOLOGY AND POST-FOUNDATIONALISM Matthias Flatscher

1. Introduction From the early 1990s, the term ‘post-foundationalism’ begins to appear in a variety of different contexts: in social theory (Crook 1991), in theology (Van Huyssteen 1997), in postcolonial and subaltern studies (Prakash 2000), in queer and feminist studies (Pini 2001), in education (Ninnes and Mehta 2004), in geography (Sparke 2005), and prominently in (phenomenological) philosophy (Mensch 2001). In all these discourses, ‘post-foundationalism’ is used to counter fundamentalism and various forms of ultimate justification while being treated by and large as synonymous with ‘postmodernism’ or ‘anti-foundationalism.’ The first systematic and nuanced elaboration of the term is given in Oliver Marchart’s Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007) (see also Marchart 2010, 2013, 2018). His take on post-foundationalism has since become an integral part of the conceptual repertoire of political theory (see Wingenbach 2011; Caraus and Paris 2016; Marttila 2016; Landau 2019). According to Marchart, post-foundationalism is characterized by two things: On the one hand, it takes leave of all kinds of foundationalism, be it in the form of ultimate certainties, last principles, or transcendental values; here, Marchart’s critique is directed at those theories that conceive of the laws of the market, one’s genetic code, or rationality as firm foundations. On the other hand, post-foundationalism’s rejection of ultimate foundations does not amount to anti-foundationalism as we cannot do without partial foundations (see Marchart 2007, 8). Against the threat of rampant relativism and drawing on the thought of Ernesto Laclau, Marchart emphasizes the necessity of temporary stabilizations; without these, socio-political relations would, as he puts it, prove to be “psychotic” (Marchart 2007, 136). In short, Marchart understands by post-foundationalism neither foundationalism nor anti-­ foundationalism, insisting instead on the necessity of temporary foundations. Marchart focuses primarily on the socio-political dimension of post-foundationalism. Existing social and political conditions are not given by God or nature; they are artificially produced and could therefore always be different. This understanding of contingency points to the changeability of social and political institutions. Marchart understands political processes as open ended and affirms the dispute over socio-political organization without wanting to 336

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-36

Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism

transfer it into a consensus (see Marchart 2013, 33). In consequence, he comes up with a (radical-)democratic project that is entirely different from liberal and deliberative conceptions of democracy. The following selection of post-foundationalist positions is based not on the explicit use of the term ‘post-foundationalism’ but on the principle of family resemblance. What the positions presented here share, and what makes them post-foundationalist, is that they emphasize both the co-originality of contingency and conflict and the inevitability of partial foundations in socio-political contexts. With one exception, the focus is not on the authors Marchart draws on but on thinkers with a stronger affinity for phenomenology. The aim is to show how phenomenology has influenced recent debates in political theory and radical democratic theory and how these, in turn, challenge and transform some of the basic concepts of phenomenology. The authors dealt with here are Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort—who is also comprehensively treated by Marchart (see Marchart 2007, 85–108)— Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. In contrast to Marchart, the following does not primarily concentrate on the (present) absence of a (final) ground, a figure of thought taken from Martin Heidegger (see Marchart 2007, 18) but centers on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) reflections on chiasm. The concluding outlook discusses the connection between post-foundationalism and Marchart’s radical theory of democracy.

2.  Post-Foundationalist Departures From Phenomenology 2.1  Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Impact on Post-Foundationalism The influence the phenomenological tradition has had on post-foundationalist discourse is considerable, with two authors taking center stage: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Let us start with the former. In order to locate within the history of ideas the notion of the absence of an ultimate ground that remains present precisely in this absence, Marchart draws extensively on Heidegger’s late work. Although Heidegger declares that, in contrast to metaphysics, he does not look for a ‘first principle’ or ‘final cause’ that supposedly grounds all beings, he does not do away with the question of the ground. As he sees it, the ground itself does not possess a ground but passes through an abyss (Ab-Grund), with the latter being nothing more than the ground itself. In this sense, Heidegger writes in the Contributions to Philosophy: “The grounding grounds as abyss” (2012, 25). Marchart uses these elements of a post-metaphysical ontology in his conceptualization of an ontology of the political. Following Heidegger’s claim of a difference between the ontic and the ontological, he introduces the notion of a “political difference” between politics and the political (see Marchart 2007, 35–60). In his view, politics—as a concrete form of institutionalization—can be understood only against the background of a political antagonism that defies ultimate justification. The socio-political echo, as it were, of this ontological insight is twofold. One the one hand, the foundation of the social is inevitable; pace relativistic doomsayers, the function of foundation does not disappear. On the other hand, however, no foundation is final. The ground itself does not possess a ground; it remains bound to its own abyssalness and can therefore always be called into question. Or, in the words of Heidegger (2012, 300), “The lack of the ground is the lack of the ground [Der Ab-grund ist Ab-grund].” Besides Heidegger, the most important phenomenological source of inspiration for postfoundationalism is Merleau-Ponty’s late work. In his posthumously published The Visible 337

Matthias Flatscher

and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty makes extensive use of the idea of chiasm, which has its origins in rhetoric. There, it denotes a mirror-like arrangement of words or phrases (e.g., Lord Byron’s pun in Don Juan that “Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure”) and has the form a + b: b + a; Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, comes up with an ontological interpretation of chiasm. It signifies an intertwining of two opposite realms—such as the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’ or the ‘sensible’ and the ‘sensed’—that does not, however, synthesize said realms. What is at stake, rather, is a form of intersection or overlapping that does not reduce the elements in question to one another; though related, they remain separated by an unbridgeable hiatus. What comes into focus, then, is a simultaneity of identity and difference that is at odds with Cartesian dualism (cf. Toadvine 2012). While MerleauPonty concentrates on the chiasmatic intertwining of ego and world or ego and alter ego, always putting the stress on identity rather than on difference, the authors who follow not only provide a political interpretation of chiasm but also emphasize the incommensurability of the chiasmatically related realms.

2.2  Cornelius Castoriadis In his The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), originally published in 1975, Castoriadis highlights the creative dimension of social and political practices. In his view, causal explanations ignore the emergence of the new in the interplay of socio-historical contexts. For this reason, Castoriadis distances himself both from orthodox Marxism, which he accuses of historical determinism, and from structuralism, which, in his opinion, amounts to sterile formalism and ahistorical closure. Classical phenomenology from Husserl to Heidegger to Sartre does not, according to Castoriadis, do any better. It, too, fails to do justice to “the emergence of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty” (Castoriadis 1987, 184). Therefore, and drawing on Aristotle, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and MerleauPonty’s post-classical phenomenology, Castoriadis advances his very own understanding of an autonomous creative faculty, which he develops on both an individual and a social level. In his discussion of social being, Castoriadis starts with the chiasmatic entanglement of the individual psyche with society. It is only thanks to its embeddedness in a socialization process that the individual can survive and is provided with meaning; likewise, the continuity of sociality proves to be dependent on the individual as its reproduction requires the subjects it calls into social being. Castoriadis does not, however, conceive of this chiasmatic relationship between the psyche and society as perfectly congruent. Though it is true that society ensures the persistence of the psychic monad by providing it with a world shared with and handed down by others that offers stabilizing patterns of order and intelligibility, the individual psyche has the capacity for “radical imagination” (Castoriadis 1987, 252), determining its being in terms of a phantasmatic power to come up with images. This ability does not get absorbed by the process of socialization; on the contrary, because of its power of imagination, the individual turns out to be recalcitrant and able to transform or even break with existing structures. Therefore, social being is a matter of permanent self-transformation, which explains the contingent and divergent configuration of different societies. Now, in order to fend off constant self-transformation and stabilize meaning, society is dependent on partial stabilization. What holds society together is institutionalization. Here, Castoriadis has in mind not only individual institutions but the division of the social order as a whole, together with its basic categories, norms, and values. This institutionalization 338

Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism

can be described metaphorically as the hardening of society’s own fluidity; society must position itself “as outside of time,” subscribing to “the norm of its immutable identity” (Castoriadis 1987, 214). As Castoriadis sees it, this attempt to cover up its own historical genesis and render itself stable is indispensable to society. Even though it is necessary that society give itself stabilizing norms, the form these norms take and how society relates to them are not matters of necessity. According to Castoriadis, stabilizations become problematic once they solidify into unquestioned generalizations or morph into unshakable foundations. This systematic cover-up of society’s own groundlessness through the positing of rigid structures is a form of ‘alienation.’ That is to say, the alienation of society consists of its forgetting that it institutes itself (see Castoriadis 1987, 214). Castoriadis, by contrast, insists on society’s inherent creative power and its creative possibilities: [T]here is no articulation of social life that is given once and for all, neither on the surface nor at a greater depth, neither really nor abstractly. This articulation, whether with respect to the parts it posits or to the relations established between these parts and between the parts and the whole, is in every instance the creation of the society in question. (Castoriadis 1987, 189) According to Castoriadis, then, the social imaginary is not only responsible for the establishment of order by providing meaning and framing social contexts but also capable of questioning and transgressing it. With his affirmation of creativity and his plea for the potential changeability of social being, Castoriadis plumbs the post-foundationalist ontological conditions of democracy. In contrast to the deterministic closure of social structures and the referral to ultimate reasons, democracy accepts its own contingency and that its own principles may be called into question while, at the same time, being aware of the necessity of institutionalization. For Castoriadis, democracy is not a matter of course but something one must fight for. Here, Castoriadis has in mind direct democratic procedures based on the Attic model. In contrast to liberal and representative conceptions, Castoriadis (1991, 81–123, 2020) argues in favor of democratic forms of organization in all parts of social life (focusing particularly on education and work), repudiating institutions of representation. With his emphasis on the immediacy of political decision making, however, he ends up subscribing to a form of presentism that is at odds with post-foundationalist ideas. Claude Lefort, the thinker dealt with in the next section, draws attention to this deficit, coming up with a post-foundationalist understanding of representation.

2.3  Claude Lefort Lefort, who is a student and the editor of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work after his sudden death as well as Castoriadis’s long-time companion in the revolutionary group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, makes use of phenomenological concepts and links them with postfoundationalist considerations. In his programmatic 1983 “The Question of Democracy” (Lefort 1991, 9–20), Lefort rejects any form of transcendental or teleological historiography that conceives of history as a process defined by objective laws and oriented toward an ultimate goal. In addition to this rejection of liberal-contractualist and Marxist positions, 339

Matthias Flatscher

he distances himself from the blind positivism that prevails in the social sciences. The latter understands society as a totality of functional subsystems (politics, economy, law, science, etc.), failing to analyze the overall social context and their genealogy. Against this, Lefort calls attention to the impossibility of objectifying the specific historical situatedness and to the radical contingency of socio-political processes. Things could always be different, and this also holds for today’s society: Even the present hegemonic regime of (liberal) democracy does not constitute an end point to history; it, too, can fail—just like any other social experiment. In order to distinguish this “philosophical” approach from the perspective of empirical political science, Lefort speaks of “the political” (le politique) (see Lefort 1991, 228). Whereas ‘politics’ is a specific subsystem of society that can be explored with quantitative methods, ‘the political’ refers to the precarious institutedness and contingent division of social being. In other words, bringing to the fore the dimension of the political, Lefort makes clear that society, far from being a homogeneous or closed unity, is always already divided. The social, he argues, can be instituted in very different ways and has no ‘essential’ or ‘final’ form. This lack of a definite form turns out to be the condition of possibility of its politicization and thus of the transformation of every particular instantiation. It is this impossibility to be fully instituted or grounded that allows for reflection on society’s contingent form and for the dispute about its (always precarious) identity. That is to say, the institution of society and the possibility of its destitution are in a chiasmatic relation. Against this background, Lefort also redefines modern democracy. What distinguishes modern democracy from other forms of rule is that it does not conceal the abysmal nature of society and the precarious act of its self-institution but puts them on display. Consider, for example, the right to vote, as Lefort suggests. In every fair election, existing social alliances are broken up, and all government posts become vacant as the demos, suspending any essentialist understanding of the people, regroups in accordance with the votes given (see Lefort 1991, 18–19). In other words, the democratic electoral process makes clear that democracy has no underlying substance but must be thought of as body- and formless. This rejection of firm foundations does not, however, make modern democracy an anarchic enterprise. It is true that, in a democratic regime, the place of power cannot be appropriated and therefore remains empty (see Lefort 1991, 17); it belongs to no one and refuses any (permanent) occupation. At the same time, however, and in agreement with the postfoundationalist insight into the inevitability of partial foundations, democracy knows how to deal with this groundlessness by way of its institutionalization; it stages its own abyssalness via representation (see Hetzel and Weymans 2012). This is a form of representation, of course, that no longer refers to a preceding presence but rather puts the performativity of political categories on display. Questions regarding who belongs to the demos and in what way do not antedate this process of representation; they emerge from it. As the history of modern democracy shows, it is precisely the problem of belonging that has been repeatedly debated. This is so thanks to the symbolic emptiness of power and stands in strong contrast to the unquestioned exclusion of women, children, metics, and slaves in ancient democracy. In modern democracy, the hiatus between the symbolic exercise of power and the real of power is not negated but institutionalized in its constitution so that it can be reworked by the public, thereby preventing the escalation of social division. Crucially, modern democracy does not seek to overcome dissent and transform it into consensus but rather attempts to ensure its expression. That is to say, the antagonism inscribed in every society is neither discarded nor suspended by Lefort but brought into 340

Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism

relief in terms of permanently provisional foundations. Again, there is a chiasmatic relation between the institution and the destitution of democracy.

2.4  Jacques Derrida In Lefort, normative aspects are largely neglected. Derrida addresses this desideratum, especially in his later work. In “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” (1992), he counters the accusation all too frequently leveled at deconstruction that it proves useless for ethical, political, and juridical challenges and ultimately amounts to a nihilistic anything goes (see Habermas 1990, 161–84; Taylor et al. 1994, 70). As Derrida’s work makes clear, deconstruction not only rejects anti-foundationalist relativism but also contains farreaching normative implications that can be interpreted in terms of post-foundationalism. At the center of Derrida’s analysis is the relationship between law and justice. On the one hand, he focuses on the forcible positing character of laws; on the other, he concentrates on the aporetic structure of decisions, which cannot be overcome rationally and consensually. Contrary to the view that law functions as a means to institutionalize justice (Habermas) or promote emancipation (Honneth), Derrida starts by problematizing the inherent violence of law. Because at the moment of its foundation, law can neither invoke a preceding legal system nor refer to a transcendent source of justification (God, nature, or reason), it owes its existence to a contingent instituting act of self-legislation. According to Derrida (1992, 14), this act is endowed with a violence that cannot be eliminated: “Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.” Importantly, law is not only interwoven with violence in the founding moment but also remains permanently dependent on it for its effectiveness. The positing character of law raises the question of whether law and force coincide, thus becoming indistinguishable. In spite of its inherent violence, law cannot be a matter of arbitrariness if it is to fulfill its claim and be lawful. The challenge, then, is to identify what legitimates law despite its violent character. Derrida’s response to this challenge is that positive law carries within itself the claim to justice. This is not to say, however, that law is derived from, or justified by, justice. In contrast to foundational arguments, Derrida emphasizes the chiasmatic entanglement of law and justice: Law (droit) is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule. (Derrida 1992, 16) Law and justice follow heterogeneous ‘logics,’ according to Derrida. Law is associated with forms of calculation and regularity that cannot be transposed to the level of justice. Justice rejects any form of calculation. Although law is not simply grounded in justice and thus cannot be derived from it, the calculable and the incalculable stand in a complex relationship: Everything would still be simple if this distinction between justice and droit were a true distinction, an opposition whose functioning was logically regulated and 341

Matthias Flatscher

permitted mastery. But it turns out that droit claims to exercise itself in the name of justice and that justice is required to establish itself in the name of a law that must be “enforced.” (Derrida 1992, 22) The chiasm at work here can no longer be explained in terms of the figure of foundation; the intertwinement of law and justice calls for a different vocabulary. According to Derrida, just as law must seek to put justice into practice, justice is dependent on the institution of law in order to appear at all. That is to say, the transcendence of justice manifests itself only in the immanence of law. In this sense, law and justice stand in a chiasmatic conditional relationship—no law without justice, no justice without law. Derrida does not stop at this point, however. Every institution of law must, he argues, remain open to critique as to whether it has fulfilled its own claim to bring justice into being. Although it is true that justice enables law and law enables justice, every instantiation has to justify itself when called into question and facing criticism. This tension between justice and law thwarts any kind of closure. Without critical reflection within law—and thus the permanent expression of this tension—there is no justice. For Derrida, the instituting of law and its questioning in the name of justice cannot be separated; law and justice remain related to one another without ever merging. The normative claim of law is met only when the positivity of laws remains responsive to a claim that transcends the latter. Conversely, this suggests that as soon as one purports to have wholly fulfilled justice, one can be sure to have missed it. Derrida also draws on this type of reflexive questioning in his understanding of democracy. For him, democracy is not reducible to certain premises and values or some essence: For what is lacking in democracy is proper meaning, the very [même] meaning of the selfsame [même] (ipse, metipse, metipsissimus, meisme), the it-self [soi-même], the selfsame, the properly selfsame of the it-self. Democracy is defined, as is the very ideal of democracy, by this lack of the proper and the selfsame. (Derrida 2005, 37) On closer inspection, democracy’s lack of an essence turns out to be its strength: The insight into the necessity to permanently renegotiate calculations in light of irreducible singularities against the background of a universalizability leads one not only to affirm contingency but to keep this relation open. In other words, the insight into contingency alerts one to the productivity of the ever-renewable conflict. Democracy, in Derrida’s sense, proves to be that manifestation of the political that accepts its own inconclusiveness and provisionality and deals with them in a constructive way, giving forms of self-criticism space to work on the complex relationship between singularity and universality. It would be a mistake to confuse the relationship between singularity and universality put forward by Derrida with an actualized form of Aristotelian equity (epieikeia). The law is not set aside because of special circumstances in order to accommodate the particular outside the law. Rather, so Derrida argues, every universal rule emerges from an engagement with the singular, and universality remains chiasmatically related to the singular (and thus non-universalizable). In this way, deconstruction does not boil down to interpretationism. Quite the contrary, democratic decisions should not be made in accordance with one’s personal will but with regard to the other. It is in this linking of questions of normativity 342

Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism

with the dimension of alterity that Derrida’s innovative potential lies. As he puts it in Politics of Friendship: There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without . . . the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. (Derrida 1997, 22) In Derrida, the question of power is not dealt with directly. Butler addresses this issue by combining Derrida’s thinking (especially on iterability, see Derrida 1988) with Foucault’s discursive approach to power. In this context, the question of how social foundations may be re-politicized plays a central role without, however, giving way to nihilism. It is with good reason, then, that Butler’s reflections can be deemed post-foundationalist.

2.5  Judith Butler In “Contingent Foundations” (1995), Butler vehemently defends herself against the accusation of relativism leveled both at herself and at so-called postmodernism with its idea of a “death of the subject.” In doing so, she counters feminist critiques (see Benhabib 1995; Fraser 1995) of her work Gender Trouble (1990). Butler not only points out that ‘postmodernism’ functions as a diffuse label for heterogeneous theories but also makes clear that the normativist recourse to a supposedly firm foundation renders impossible a selfcritical examination of power relations. Butler thus distances herself from the notion that emancipative projects cannot do without an ‘autonomous’ or ‘sovereign’ subject. Rather than invoking firm foundations, Butler insists on the problematization of socio-political positions. These are neither mere givens nor located beyond the discourse of power. At the same time, however, Butler does not adopt a naïve, anti-foundationalist perspective but is committed to a critical project that reveals the genealogy of the respective positions and thematizes inclusions and exclusions: And the point is not to do away with foundations, or even to champion a position that goes under the name of antifoundationalism. Both of those positions belong together as different versions of foundationalism and the skeptical problematic it engenders. Rather, the task is to interrogate what the theoretical move that establishes foundations authorizes, and what precisely it excludes or forecloses. (Butler 1995, 39) For Butler, foundationalism and anti-foundationalism are but two sides of the same coin. What both positions have in common is that they leave the violence of hegemonic discourses unaddressed and are, in this sense, apolitical. Butler, on the other hand, emphasizes that ways must be found “to bring into question the foundations it [= a social theory; M. F.] is compelled to lay down” (Butler 1995, 41). Thus, it is a matter not of rejecting foundations per se but of keeping them open so that they may be politicized despite their inevitability—an idea perfectly in line with post-foundationalism. In this context, Butler not only reflects on her own position as a speaker but also insists on critically probing into the constitution of subjectivity as a process of subjectivation and subjection (see Butler 1995, 343

Matthias Flatscher

41). Subjectivation and subjection are chiasmatically related: One cannot exist without the other, and yet neither can one be reduced to the other. Here, Butler builds on Foucault’s view that there is no position beyond power that would allow one to formulate a metapolitical foundation; rather, power pervades both the conceptual apparatus and the subject position of those who attempt to analyze and confront power’s modes of operation. The fact that the subject is always already acted on by power-laden discourses does not amount to some kind of determinism. Rather, the insight into the constitution of the subject is the condition of its ability to act: Every attempt at reconfiguring political relations must consequently search for possibilities to rework the power matrix constituting the subject by inscribing itself willy-nilly into discourses and repeating them. It is this inevitability of iterability that, according to Butler, enables one to repeat differently and induce a “resignifying process” (1995, 47). Consequently, to deconstruct the subject is not to negate it but to open it up “to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized” (49). Therefore, deconstructing concepts such as ‘subject,’ ‘foundation,’ and ‘identity’ in no way means banning their use or declaring them obsolete. Rather, a post-foundationalist approach aims to make them the site of political contestation by denaturalizing them and revealing them as contingent, interrogating them as to their implicit presuppositions and exclusions. Reflecting on both situatedness and the possibility of emancipatory democratic change, Butler distances herself from phenomenological approaches: “It is not enough to say that the subject is invariably engaged in a political field; that phenomenological phrasing misses the point that the subject is an accomplishment regulated and produced in advance” (Butler 1995, 47). Even though Butler repeatedly draws on phenomenology while, at the same time, dissimulating her indebtedness to the phenomenological tradition, her critique should be taken seriously when it comes to pondering the accusation of apoliticality so often directed at phenomenology.

3.  Outlook: On the Relationship Between Post-Foundationalism and Radical Democratic Theory While repeatedly hinting at the connection between democracy and post-foundationalism, Butler does not explore it any further. Marchart addresses this desideratum, asking to what extent the ontological dimension of social de-foundationalization can lead to a democratic politics. In contrast to the simple identification of an antagonistic conception of the political with democracy (see Rancière 1999), Marchart focuses on the specific relationship democracy entertains with its own groundlessness. Democratic regimes accept the lack of an ultimate justification by symbolizing the absence of firm foundations. (See the section on Lefort.) Instead of attempting to install fixed principles—the laws of the market or rationality, for example—in order to conceal its own contingency, democracy stages its disembodiment and problematizes its founding attempts as partial. Introducing the theory of hegemony into the discussion, Marchart highlights the following paradox: Because of its claim to hegemony, democracy has to assert and defend itself against other regimes; however, thanks to its affirmation of contingency, it must also display its own provisionality. Far from stabilizing identity, then, such a concept of democracy accepts a process of permanent self-alienation. Marchart sums up this paradox as follows: The same institutions that are supposed to found democracy must therefore at the same time signal the impossibility of this task. There is thus a danger that democracy 344

Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism

will undermine those institutional foundations that form its own preconditions. The fundamental antinomy of democracy, then, is that democracy—or a politics of democratization—is, on the one hand, a political project with claims to enforcement, while, on the other hand, this project—because of the democratic acceptance of contingency—is in danger of unhinging itself, as it were. (Marchart 2010, 332; author’s translation) In democracy, the hegemonic claim goes hand in hand with a process of calling oneself into question. Democracy combines the necessity to assert itself with self-criticism, a fact Marchart seeks to capture by referring to Roberto Esposito’s concept of the “impolitical” (Esposito 2015). Marchart conceives of this impolitical element—which functions as the unconditional in the political space of the conditional—in terms of a “democratic ethics” (Marchart 2010, 333; author’s translation) that is to be distinguished from both ethicism and politicism. On the one hand, Marchart argues that the reduction of the political to ethical premises, as evidenced in Levinas, Derrida, or Badiou, is not plausible: From the fact of the absence of a ground, no ethical obligation follows toward the ground in its absence (e.g., toward the Other in its otherness, the openness of the social, or the event). One could also say, in a variation of Hume’s formula: No ought from an isn’t. (Marchart 2010, 249; author’s translation) On the other hand, Marchart underlines that a complete politicization of democracy cannot do justice to its own groundlessness. Democracy must bear its own provisionality or incompleteness in mind and affirm this ‘constitutive’ lack at the center of its own (non-)identity. In this sense, democracy unavoidably oscillates between institution and destitution. The preceding has shown the impact of phenomenology on post-foundationalist discourse. The Heidegger-inspired question of the absence of a final ground that nevertheless remains present in its absence is of particular importance here, especially to Marchart. It is not surprising, then, that Marchart (2007, 2) also uses the label “left Heideggerianism” to characterize the post-foundationalist approaches he compiles. With Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, I have introduced yet another phenomenological concept. It emphasizes both inseparability and relatedness and difference and nonidentity. The concept of chiasm is evident not only in the thinkers directly influenced by Merleau-Ponty, such as Castoriadis and Lefort, but also in Derrida and Butler. The post-foundationalist approaches I have discussed also criticize (classical) phenomenology, however. They censure its failure to consider political questions. As the remarks on the entanglement between the institution and the destitution of democracy suggest, the crucial point here is that difference can be brought into relief in its constitutive function for political questions: Democracy exists only in dealing with its own groundlessness, in acting out the chiasm between its institution and its destitution.

References Benhabib, Sayla. 1995. “Feminism and Postmodernism.” In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucila Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 17–34. London/New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London/New York: Routledge.

345

Matthias Flatscher ———. 1995. “Contingent Foundations.” In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucila Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 35–57. London/New York: Routledge. Caraus, Tamara, and Elena Paris, eds. 2016. Re-Grounding Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Post-­ Foundational Cosmopolitanism. London/New York: Routledge. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press. ———. 1991. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Edited by David Ames Curtis. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. Democracy and Relativism: A  Debate. Translated by John V. Garner. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Crook, Stephen. 1991. Modernist Radicalism and Its Aftermath: Foundationalism and Anti-­ Foundationalism in Radical Social Theory. London/New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical’ Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by David Gray Carlson, Drucilla Cornell, and Michel Rosenfeld, 3–67. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso. ———. 2005. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2015. Categories of the Impolitical. Translated by Connai Parsley. New York: Fordham University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “False Antitheses.” In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucila Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 59–74. London/New York: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hetzel, Andreas, and Wim Weymans. 2012. “From Substantive to Negative Universalism: Lefort and Habermas on Legitimacy in Democratic Societies.” Thesis Eleven 108 (1): 26–43. Landau, Friederike. 2019. Agonistic Articulations in the “Creative” City: On New Actors and Activism in Berlin’s Cultural Politics. London/New York: Routledge. Lefort, Claude. 1991. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity Press. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2010. Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2013. Das unmögliche Objekt. Eine postfundamentalistische Theorie der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2018. Thinking Antagonism. Political Ontology After Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marttila, Tomas. 2016. Post-Foundational Discourse Analysis: From Political Difference to Empirical Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Mensch, James Richard. 2001. Postfoundational Phenomenology: Husserlian Reflections on Presence and Embodiment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ninnes, Peter, and Sonia Mehta. 2004. Re-Imagining Comparative Education: Postfoundational Ideas and Applications for Critical Times. London/New York: Routledge. Pini, Maria. 2001. Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Prakash, Gyan. 2000. “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.” In Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi, 193–90. London: Verso.

346

Phenomenology and Post-Foundationalism Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Sparke, Matthew. 2005. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Taylor, Charles, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Stephen C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited and Introduced by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Toadvine, Ted. 2012. “The Chiasm.” In The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, edited by Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, 336–47. London/New York: Routledge. Van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel. 1997. Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Wingenbach, E. 2011. Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy. Post-Foundationalism and Political Liberalism. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate.

347

PART VI

Contemporary Developments

INTRODUCTION TO PART VI Situating Contemporary Phenomenology Tobias Matzner

1. Introduction Phenomenological ideas are involved in philosophical analyses of many present political issues: racialized, gendered, and queer lives and their intersections; questions of (dis)ability and embodied forms of inequality; migration and refuge on a global level; the impact of (digital) technology; the environmental crisis; decolonial thought and decentering Western perspectives; and more. Thus, this last part of the handbook moves its focus again, from thinkers in Sections 1 to 4 over fields of theory in Section 5 to issues, problems, and concerns for political thought today. This impact of phenomenology is not limited to philosophy but also flows into related fields such as social and political theory; media and science and technology studies; gender, queer, and trans studies; critical geography; and more. These problems, concerns, and crises also necessitate phenomenology confronting its own politics. This does not only concern the question of what it means to employ the thought of politically fraught thinkers. It also means to confront universalism, Eurocentrism, and other political “blind spots” that pertain to phenomenology as well as many other strands of Western thought. Thus, phenomenology needs to be politically situated. This entails phenomenological thought coming into contact and critical exchange with other theories. This introduction will shortly discuss important contributions of phenomenology to contemporary developments of political thought. In a second part, it will discuss ways in which phenomenology itself needs to be politicized. This double move is present in all texts in this part of the handbook, even if to varying extents. This includes relations to other strands of thought.

2.  Phenomenology as Situating Political Thought Almost all texts in this section highlight that phenomenology starts from particular experiences as a potential for political thought. In fact, despite its own universalist tendencies, this is a central way in which phenomenology can contribute to social, geographic, embodied, and technical situatedness getting the political salience they need.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-38

351

Tobias Matzner

Regarding certain forms of subjectivity, this issue has been prominent in phenomenology from early on. As Marieke Borren shows in her text on feminism and gender, from Simone de Beauvoir to Iris Marion Young to contemporary feminist thought, the experience of women has been analyzed in detail. Similarly, both Yoko Arisaka in her text on race and Nelson Maldonado-Torres in his text on (de)colonization highlight the impact of Fanon’s forceful rendering of his experience as a Black person in a white society and the many detailed descriptions of racial experience that would follow. These texts are about not only particular subjects but also their difference from male and/or white (but apparently universal) forms of experience. Thus, the political impact of a philosophical method that starts from experience is not just additive; it is not about just adding more perspectives. Rather, particular experiences necessitate questioning the structures and relations that constitute them. For example, Emily S. Lee explains in her text on intersectionality the particular situation of women of color and how it matters politically. Lisa Guenther points to that problem quite forcefully, too, in her contribution. The white ignorance she analyzes does not just pertain to a set of factors or issues that white people forget. Rather, it is constitutive of white subjectivity, at least in epistemic if not ontological regards. Thus, phenomenological analysis shows the difficulty of undoing white ignorance. It cannot be based just on better information of non-white lives or countered by a more inclusive environment. It needs a long process of change of white subjectivity itself. In this regard, the importance of experience can also be politically directed against phenomenological thought itself. Of course, also other strands of theory (which will be discussed later) have challenged and questioned established thinkers and theories. That way, for example, the phenomenology of women’s experience has gradually developed into a line of thought that tries to “take into account that and how social and political structures and cultural norms impact differentially on variously situated women, men, intersex, and nonbinary people” (Borren, this volume, Chapter 26). Yet starting from experience rather than from circumspect social or political structures or dynamics entails the ethical challenge that one can never be sure of having included everyone, of having achieved the right position. There might always be others whose situation and experience are missing (see Herrmann, this volume, Chapter 16). The phenomenological analysis of experience also attests to the political relevance of embodiment. It allows showing how bodily actions become habitualized and thus transparent. Thus, the body is often either forgotten in critical discussions or essentialized. Such essentialisms have also been a problem for feminist thought, as Luna Dolezal, Cat Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell show in their text on (dis)ability. They also highlight what it means if that transparency of the body fails or breaks down and for whom it does so. Consequently, differences in having to care for one’s body already constitute a political issue. They are political because these differences are no mere given but need be understood as the outcome of different forms of becoming embodied. This leads on to the second important motive in contemporary developments of political phenomenology: relationality. The individual situated experiences I have just discussed are described as contingent on a primary relation between the self and the world and the self and others. For example, Dolezal, Fischer, and Mitchell explain: [T]he habits involved in [bodily] transparency are acquired within normative socio-political landscapes that condition or inflect their acquisition and 352

Introduction to Part VI

deployment. . . . Many habits can form only because surroundings are prepared for uptake by bodies with a particular shape, size, posture, range of movement, sensory apparatus, cognitive repertoire, and so on. (Dolezal et al. this volume, Chapter 32) Thus, the body is neither a biological nor a somatic given, nor is it fully determined socially. This structure not only helps politicize normalizations of transparent bodies but also introduces a new perspective in the study of (dis)ability. By elucidating how embodied capacities underpin all our engagements with the world, from perception, to motricity, to social relations and dealings with our lifeworlds, phenomenology provides many resources to explicate and interrogate assumptions found in both the medical and social models of disability. (Dolezal et al. this volume, Chapter 32) This relation of individual experience and the social world also structures the other issues discussed here. For example, Arisaka discusses the experience of non-white persons in a hegemonically white world. In this regard, Maldonado-Torres argues that decolonization does not just mean confronting an imperialist mode of politics; it also needs to change subjects’ “world of sense” (Maldonado-Torres, this volume, Chapter 30). In this phenomenological sense of relationality, politics does not just change subjects’ situation but rather the relation of subject and world. In a similar manner, Ayten Gündoğdu argues in her text on migration that contemporary problems exceed an unfair distribution of rights or the exclusion of migrants from commonly accepted rights. Rather, she emphasizes the works of Judith Butler and Hannah Arendt that constitute the world as plural. Consequently, subjects appear in relation to this plurality. The predicament of migrants thus needs to be understood as a relation of “suffocating reification” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 89) by the hegemonic populace that is at the core of racism. It also necessitates rethinking emancipatory concepts in a relational manner, such as understanding “freedom as an intersubjective experience that always situates the individual in relation to a world shared with others” (Gündoğdu, this volume). While most of the concepts and issues discussed so far are inherently political, the relationality at the core of phenomenological thought has also permitted the politicization of other aspects that have not always been discussed as political. For instance, affect and emotions have been analyzed in phenomenology as important elements of the relation of subject and world in epistemic and ontological regards. In other debates, the political relevance of affect and emotions has been emphasized. Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen show how both strands relate by their careful analysis of what makes emotions political. More precisely, they define two subgroups of political emotions: emotions of allegiance and emotions of antagonism. As these terms show, this entails considering emotions not just as personal feeling but in their relation to others, including the group dynamics they create. “According to this view, political emotions have a double affective intentionality: they are based on a shared concern for a matter of political import and involve a background concern for the political community itself” (Osler and Tietjen, this volume, Chapter 33). Technology has been a central issue in phenomenology since Heidegger’s famous texts on the topic. As Nolen Gertz shows, thinkers have taken up these thoughts under the rubric of “post-phenomenology.” In this particular case, they have not just been more focused on 353

Tobias Matzner

epistemic and ontological questions than political ones but deliberately tried to de-politicize reflections on technology to distance themselves from Heidegger’s conservatism and farright views. Yet the careful work on the way in which technology mediates the relation of subject and world or subject and others has, in recent years, permitted these results to be combined with political thought on human relations, both from phenomenology (e.g., Arendt or Levinas) and from other fields of theory (e.g., Foucault, feminist standpoint theory, or critical theory). Finally, analyzing environments has been at the core of phenomenology since Husserl. Quite early on, in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, this also included reflections on the environment of animals. In his text on “Ecology and the Environment,” Bryan E. Bannon asks how this tradition of phenomenological thought can be linked to the recent political issue of the environmental crisis. At first glance, the scientific and statistical evidence for an impending catastrophe might be at odds with phenomenological thought. Yet Bannon argues that this issue cannot be solved without the political question what the environment means to us. “Eco-phenomenologists are well equipped to deal with these questions of meaning in ways that scientists, for methodological reasons, are not” (Bannon, this volume, Chapter 35). In particular, phenomenologists show that no one has direct access to nature or to its essence. Rather, any relation to nature is always “interpreted.” Yet this interpretation forms in situations in which subjects are related to each other within a “relational totality” that is nature. Thus, the subjective interpretation is necessarily formed and influenced by these relations. Consequently, finding relationships “with co-inhabitants who do not use human language” is an issue that cannot be solved scientifically but turns into an ethical and political challenge (Bannon, Chapter 35).

3.  Situating Phenomenology Itself Politically As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, the potential for political thought of phenomenology can be counteracted by the politics of phenomenology itself. If the last paragraph could be summarized as doing justice to situatedness in a relational manner, this one is about situating phenomenology itself. All texts in the last section of this volume contain critical reflections on or reworkings of phenomenological figures of thought and methods—also by using them alongside other theoretical resources. Phenomenology set out as a universalist program. As Lanei M. Rodemeyer writes in this volume, “Phenomenology . . . works to identify the essential structures that make specific types of experiences possible, so it begins with individual experiences in order to find the universal conditions that underlie them.” Starting from experience meant experience of subjects per se, rather than the gendered, racialized, (dis)abled subjects in quite different worlds of technology, (forced) mobility, and environmental catastrophes. Consequently, situating phenomenology entails leaving both the essentialism and the universalism that Rodemeyer mentions behind while keeping the insights of the phenomenological method. Of course, the exact form and extent of both essentialism and universalism that each phenomenologist thinker adheres to are contested. Accordingly, political phenomenologists vary in their view of what I call here situating phenomenology. Few tell a straightforward story, from “early” or transcendental phenomenology toward “later,” more political thoughts, maybe culminating in what today is called critical phenomenology. Almost all authors in this section agree that thought from “the various strands within this tradition, from the transcendental, existential, hermeneutic, and genetic up to the post-phenomenological and 354

Introduction to Part VI

critical” can be useful for contemporary political thought, as Borren (this volume, Chapter 26) explains regarding gender and Arisaka (this volume, Chapter 27) regarding race. Thus, rather than separating universalist from political phenomenology, the challenge is to put elements from this tradition to new or critically reworked uses. For some, this is achieved by introducing a split within the work of a particular thinker. For example, Gertz illustrates the attempts of post-phenomenology to “deromanticize Heidegger” (this volume, Chapter  34) by disentangling Heidegger’s take on technology in Being and Time from his later writings on the topic. For many other authors, however, even the aspects of phenomenological thought are relevant that are politically criticized today. For example, Dolezal, Fischer, and Mitchell (this volume, Chapter 32) explain how Merleau-Ponty’s writing on embodiment is both a lesson in normalization that excludes (dis)abilities and a way to understand how transparency in acting becomes a privilege because it breaks down differently for differently situated subjects. Furthermore, as Lisa Guenther cautions regarding white ignorance, one should not assume that the implicit politics of the thought of others and oneself can be easily left behind or bracketed. “White ignorance is far more complex than the assumption with which the natural attitude is typically identified” (Guenther, this volume, Chapter 29). Reworking white ignorance is not only an epistemic but also an ontological problem that shakes the ground of white subjects’ own world while always encountering limits of knowing. Thus, Guenther summarizes the work of various theorists, who “in different ways, suggest an epistemic practice that neither yields to white ignorance nor assumes that it can be transformed or overcome at the level of knowledge alone. Ultimately, we would need to restructure the world in material ways to abolish white ignorance and the forms of distorted knowledge it actively (re)produces” (Guenther, Chapter 29). Similarly, Dolezal, Fischer, and Mitchell insist that “crip phenomenology is also a cripping phenomenology: a method that explicitly aims not just to expose presuppositions about disability but to reconstruct and re-politicise the philosophical terrain ‘grounded in non-normate experience’ ” (Dolezal et al. this volume, Chapter 32). To summarize, essentialism, universalism, and Eurocentrism in phenomenological thought are, for most political phenomenologists, not just wrong theories to be superseded. Rather, reflection on them becomes part of their own theories in a situated manner that explains or at least illustrates how a particular perspective can be easily taken as valid for others—or even universal. This gives insights into how the blind spots and constitutive exclusions emerge that contemporary political phenomenology addresses without the certainty to evade them. In the background, of course, this is also a debate about what phenomenology is or should be. If, for example, Rodemeyer (this volume, Chapter 24) claims that neither Sarah Ahmed nor Gayle Salamon—both working under the title queer phenomenology—employ the phenomenological method at all, said authors (and many of their readers) would probably object. This, of course, derives from different understandings of what phenomenology is. Yet in the texts discussed in this part of the handbook, for the most part, such questions of theoretical purity are dealt with rather pragmatically—the issue is political problems, not theoretical schools. The question of what phenomenology is or should be mostly surfaces not on a primarily theoretical level but rather considering its place in philosophy, in academia, and in society. Arisaka forcefully argues that starting thought from particular experience that has a racialized, gendered, and classed index also entails asking who is writing, who is admitted to the debate, and who is the audience. These are issues of the job market, publishing processes, university admissions, and more. They even quite practically concern 355

Tobias Matzner

this handbook. Despite all efforts, we could not secure a text on trans perspectives for this last section. Given that this issue is finally considered an important, even “hot” topic and an active research community has emerged, we would have loved to cover its phenomenological aspects. But academic text production and debates can be challenging if there are only few knowledgeable authors established, and many others are in one way or the other hindered to contribute. Maldonado-Torres writes about even stronger commitments beyond philosophical discourse. The “most consistent forms of decolonizing phenomenology or any other field require resignation from the standards and expectations of any given disciplinary formation and actual engagement in combative struggle” (this volume, Chapter 30). This is, however, not the opinion that philosophy is to be left behind for politics. Rather, via Fanon’s work, he explains, for philosophy to emerge, it has to involve a shift from a modern/colonial and antiblack attitude to a decolonial attitude that aims to restore love and understanding. In that sense, decolonization can also be understood as first philosophy: as the philosophical actions that can make philosophy truly possible. Thus, even in this quite far-reaching appeal, situating phenomenology is no endeavor that is taken on from a transcendental or external situation of phenomenology. Phenomenology helps explain situatedness itself in a situated manner. That means that the perceiving or acting subject and its “situation” need to be understood as mutually constitutive. Yet authors vary in how far beyond academic practices this needs to go.

4.  Phenomenology in Relation to Other Fields of Political Thought Even if phenomenology can situate itself, a lot of other strands of thought play a role in the contemporary development of political phenomenology. In this part of the book, phenomenology is rarely “pure.” The theories here are often driven by concrete political problems that then impact thought on essences, universalisms, ontologies, etc. and not the other way around. As has been remarked, in many circumstances, politics means not only political thought but also an interplay between academic disciplines and activism, struggles, and the challenges of politics as a daily practice—or necessity. This concrete political element often orients theoretical development. Rather than adherence to an author, a theory, or a school of thought, a better understanding of the matters at hand is the aim. This aim then guides exchanges and integration of phenomenology with other strands and methods of thought. Maybe the most prominent candidate is poststructuralism, widely conceived. Judith Butler and Michel Foucault are the most referred-to authors in this part of the book who do not have their own text in the preceding ones. In her text on queer theory—that itself is deeply influenced by poststructuralism—and phenomenology, Rodemeyer mentions that, particularly from the former discourse, the essentialism of the latter has been attacked. Yet she also mentions Henry Rubin’s “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies” (1998) as a phenomenological corrective of poststructuralism: “To generalize an argument that was common during the 1990s [. . .]: If gender is performative, and if it is solely the result of institutional and hegemonic discourses, then ‘transsexualism’ (and especially the desire for surgery) is buying into a fictional notion of essentialized gender.” Against this, phenomenology can “affirm the subjective, embodied positions that live through those discourses” (Rodemeyer, this volume, Chapter 24). Generalizing from this analysis, poststructuralism 356

Introduction to Part VI

can be considered as relating everything—including the essences of phenomenology—to contingent, historically and locally indexed practices or discourses. In contrast, phenomenology values subjective experiences methodologically but has also developed a perspective from which every subject is—at least potentially—an excess of the determinations of prevalent practices and discourses. This insight is maybe most prominently given a political turn by Arendt (1998) and an ethical form by Levinas (1991). However, Foucault’s notion that “the archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable” (Foucault 1972, 130), Derrida’s insistence that everything can only be traced in an ever deferred fashion (Derrida 2001), and Butler’s reflection that every account of ourselves is always contingent on an unforeseeable reaction by others (Butler 2005) bring back the necessity of reflecting the individual situation in relation to discourse and practices and thus can lead to quite similar politics. It is certainly no accident that Butler has come to deal with Arendt more and more lately—and that the “Ethics of Deconstruction” (Critchley 1999) relates Derrida to Levinas. There are even stronger connections. As Rodemeyer claims via Käll, the potential of experience as a starting point to introduce plurality into theory and to challenge normalizations and naturalizations was noticed early by Butler but then no longer acknowledged in queer theory (this volume, Chapter 24). Foucault famously proclaimed in his last interview that “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher” (1989, 470). Of course, this does not make the differences go away. Yet it permits a more open and cooperative dialogue between poststructuralism and phenomenology by considering how much both have been in exchange from the start (see Borren, Chapter 26; Dolezal at al., Chapter 32). Linda Martín Alcoff has done some pathbreaking work for thinkers who join the two traditions more methodologically and theoretically in showing that race can be seen as both socially constructed in a Foucauldian manner and still very much embodied and real as described in phenomenology (Alcoff 2006). There are, of course, many other theoretical exchanges. Thought on migration interacts with legal philosophy and political theory of nation states and their colonial heritage (Gündoğdu, Chapter 31). Phenomenology of (dis)ability deals with theories of health and illness, both from biology and medicine and from philosophy and the social sciences (Dolezal et al. this volume, Chapter 32). Natural sciences are also both an input and an object of critique in eco-phenomenology, as well as environmental thought in general (Bannon, this volume). This is a good example of how phenomenology can sometimes export its political self-critique in addition to theoretical contents. For example, Jacob von Uexküll is not just an important figure in ecological phenomenology (Bannon, this volume, Chapter 35) but also often seen as “a pioneer of the ecological movement, with his way of looking at the world often seen as a credible response to the problems of the Anthropocene” (Schnödl and Sprenger 2022, 12). Via the work of J.J. Gibson on “affordances,” he also influenced both the design of technology and its critical analysis (Fultot and Turvey 2019). Yet, at the same time, Uexküll’s thought is deeply intertwined with National Socialism—an insight that has been facilitated quite a bit by the thorough investigation of the Nazism of Heidegger, himself a curious reader of Uexküll (Schnödl and Sprenger 2022, 65). Finally, there are parallels and connections as well as tensions that were hitherto not discussed in great detail. As an example, I will use a field of thought that has been quite influential in queer and gender studies, work on embodiment, and also the environment and the Anthropocene: the so-called new materialism. This term denotes a heterogeneous group of texts and thinkers. Very abstractly, one could delineate a vitalist/neo-Spinozist strand—e.g., 357

Tobias Matzner

in the work of Rosi Braidotti (Braidotti 2013, 2006) or Jane Bennett (Bennett 2009)—and a second strand informed by a philosophy of science that centers on the work of Karen Barad (2007) and, to an extent, Donna Haraway (1988). Despite the quite different theoretical genealogies, they are often grouped together for their emphasis on the importance of matter besides (or over) discourse, culture, and practices. This does not just include embodiment and the environment of bodies but decidedly “non-human” or “posthuman” matter and often “non-human” agency, which both the climate crisis and the rise of digital technologies have brought to attention. This post-humanist emphasis is certainly decisively different from phenomenology. Yet, in the beginning of new materialist thought, an edited volume that would contribute to defining the field combined texts along the lines just mentioned with contributions on matter in phenomenology by Sarah Ahmed and texts on De Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty (Coole and Frost 2010). Some even tried to explicitly fuse thought from both traditions (Connolly 2010). After that, however, phenomenology and new materialism developed in parallel without too much contact or exchange.1 This disinterest is quite curious because both fields of thought—phenomenology and new materialism—play a role in the same fields of political thought: on technology, the environment, health, gender, and more. It is also curious because Karen Barad’s work in particular is, in some regards, structurally similar to phenomenology. She is inspired by the insight from quantum mechanics that no measurement is possible without changing what is measured. Out of this fact, she develops a theory in which every observer and everything that is observed are contingent on a primary dynamic relation. Observer and observed are constantly becoming observer and observed through the unfolding of this primary relation that neither can fully determine or grasp. As soon as one speaks of them as subject or object, one “cuts” this relation and thus ignores important constitutive parts (Barad 2007, Chapter 3). Of course, Barad, committed to posthumanism, never would speak of experience. In her view, a photographic plate can also “observe” something: in this case, light particles. Yet a lot of her other concerns—how practices relate to phenomena, how the subject-object split is secondary to a practice, etc.— resonate with phenomenological thought. A more hidden difference is that Barad’s commitment to situated knowledge would not permit a transcendental analysis of observations. Still, she ontologizes the primary relations without enough care for the standpoint of the theorist who can (or cannot) relate to them—despite different intentions (Matzner 2024, Chapter 3). As becomes apparent in this part of the handbook, this concern for the relation of theorist and theory has been at the center of political phenomenology recently. In this regard, new materialism could learn from phenomenology. The other way around, the intrepid way in which new materialist studies engage with technology, complex scientific practices, and detailed physical processes while keeping a commitment to feminist, queer, and anti-racist values can offer a huge resource of information and inspiration to phenomenologist thought.

Note 1 A noteworthy exception is a debate that ensued when Sarah Ahmed criticized the idea of a “new” materialism that would leave a theory hitherto ignorant of matter behind for disregarding a lot of feminist interest in matter—a text, however, that defended poststructuralism maybe more than phenomenology (Ahmed 2008).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (1): 23–39.

358

Introduction to Part VI Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Connolly, William E. 2010. “Materialities of Experience.” In New Materialisms, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 178–200. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Critchley, Simon. 1999. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. 2nd ed. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1989. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). Fultot, Martin, and Michael T. Turvey. 2019. “Von Uexküll’s Theory of Meaning and Gibson’s Organism—Environment Reciprocity.” Ecological Psychology 31 (4): 289–315. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Matzner, Tobias. 2024. Algorithms: Technology, Culture, Politics. Abingdon/Oxon: Routledge. Rubin, Henry. 1998. “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies.” GLQ 4 (2): 263–81. Schnödl, Gottfried, and Florian Sprenger. 2022. Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and RightWing Thought. Lüneburg: meson press.

359

26 FEMINISM AND GENDER Marieke Borren

1. Introduction What distinctive perspectives, topics, or approaches does phenomenology bring to gender theory? Phenomenologists have sought to understand the ontology and politics of gender and sexual difference by drawing either methods or conceptualizations, or both, from the phenomenological tradition, at least ever since the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work La Deuxième Sexe in 1949.1 Iris Marion Young’s 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl” stands out as a second milestone of feminist phenomenology, even if the latter phrase only became prevalent around the turn of the present century, when a new wave of feminist interest in phenomenology (and of phenomenological interest in feminism, for that matter) took off. Ironically, the debate sparked by poststructuralist feminist criticisms of alleged essentialist conceptualizations of (gendered) experience in phenomenology has been a major catalyst to the further institutionalization of feminist phenomenology as a field of inquiry (Stoller 2017, 335–36).2 Today, phenomenology is one of the major philosophical perspectives in gender theory, next to poststructuralism, with frequent rapprochements between the two, preceded by the unearthing and undoing of mutual caricatures.3 These rapprochements notwithstanding, feminist phenomenology features a specific historical trajectory and methodological debates. Like any phenomenologist, feminist phenomenologists aim to provide rich descriptions of lived experience or first-person perspectives of subjectivity, selfhood, or Dasein: in this case, focusing on their gendered dimension. Unsurprisingly, most phenomenological accounts of gender attend to embodied experience in particular. However, compared to classical transcendental phenomenology, feminist phenomenologists tend to take a more explicitly evaluative stance. They take into account that and how social and political structures and cultural norms impact differentially on variously situated women, men, intersex, and non-binary people. Put differently, feminist phenomenology is attentive to the “constitutive importance of culture, language and historicity” for subject formation (Oksala 2006, 237). Section 1 of this chapter is devoted to methodological debates. I will argue that to do justice to the phenomenon under consideration—gender—we need to adopt a broad and 360

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-39

Feminism and Gender

interdisciplinary understanding of the phenomenological method while remaining faithful to its spirit. Preliminary qualifications need to be made regarding choice of terminology: first of ‘feminism’ and second of ‘gender.’ Feminist theorists, including those working in phenomenology, increasingly acknowledge that gender cannot be isolated from other embodied differences between people as a result of challenges to conventional white, European, middle-class feminism, by, particularly, Black feminists, religious minorities (especially Muslim feminists), queer and trans activists and theorists, and other representatives of marginalized groups. Also, the implicit or explicit limitation of ‘gender’ to female subjectivity or women’s experiences has largely been overcome, with growing attention to experiences of men (‘masculinities’) and of trans, intersex, and non-binary people. Consequently, for many phenomenologists working on gender, ‘feminism’ no longer covers the thrust of their arguments—hence, perhaps, the recent move to ‘critical phenomenology.’ Thanks to these challenges, feminist phenomenology is presently thriving, with analyses ranging from racism as habitual (Alcoff 2006, 187–88; Ngo 2016; Al-Saji 2014), disability as a form of “misfitting” (Garland-Thomson 2011), and queer orientation (Ahmed 2006). Henceforth, I  will stick to ‘feminist phenomenology’ by way of shorthand for critical, power-sensitive phenomenological reflection on the intersections between gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, ability, etc. For reasons of space, I  will focus on gender and ‘racialized difference’ (‘race’ for short). A second preliminary qualification pertains to the very concept of ‘gender’ and takes us to the heart of the matter itself. ‘Gender’ is being contested in much of the existing (Englishlanguage) scholarship in both poststructuralism and phenomenology on the subject. It is widely felt that it cannot be understood apart from the sex/gender distinction that is typical of Anglo American feminism since the 1960s and of the underlying Cartesian dualisms of nature/culture and body/mind that are as tenacious as they are philosophically contested. Whenever I use ‘gender’ in this entry, it is because of its ubiquity in academic and popular speech while being mindful of the problems inherent in it. To be sure, the sex/gender controversy itself provides a fruitful lens through which to study the typically phenomenological contribution to feminist theory: namely, its deconstruction of two intractable controversies that plague conceptions of gendered subjectivity to this day—the already-mentioned nature/culture (and body/mind) controversy on one hand and the subject/structure controversy on the other. To showcase the achievements of phenomenological reflections on gender (whether or not labeled as such), this entry will not focus on phenomenology just as a method but also as a rich repertoire of conceptual resources for understanding gendered existence spanning the various strands of this tradition, from the transcendental, existential, hermeneutic, and genetic to the post-phenomenological and critical. Section 2 discusses one of the concepts that has turned out to be extremely productive for feminist phenomenologists as an alternative to ‘gender’—namely, the ‘lived body’— and suggests that this productivity is the result of its provision of an interactive or relational perspective on the dichotomies underpinning these controversies. The steps taken in Sections  1 and 2 together aim toward presenting phenomenology as an open, inclusive, and living tradition without losing its distinctness. The final section briefly returns to the phenomenological method and draws some conclusions from the double legacy—phenomenology and feminism—in feminist phenomenology and sketches some pathways for future feminist phenomenological projects. 361

Marieke Borren

2.  Gender and the Method of Phenomenology Classical phenomenology and gender theory make a somewhat difficult couple, with both partners pointing out incompatibilities. On the one hand, some consider gender unfit for transcendental inquiry since bodily characteristics do not belong to the constitutive structures of the transcendental ego (even if these structures are conceived as intersubjective) and are bracketed in the epoché. The historically shifting social, political, and cultural norms and structures that shape and inform gender and other embodied differences, so the argument goes, are merely empirical restraints.4 In other words: gender is considered a subject matter for social science research, not for transcendental ontological inquiry. By extension, insofar as gender theory defines itself as an interdisciplinary project that draws on extraphenomenological and even extra-philosophical sources and qualitative methods, it would not meet the requirements of phenomenological investigation. On the other hand, gender theorists tend to be ambivalent about phenomenology because of its traditional neglect of sexual and other embodied differences. The presupposition of a neutral, unsexed subject in classical phenomenology is seen as symptomatic of false neutrality that, in fact, comes down to a masculinist bias. It is argued that this bias is not just accidental but inherent in the very methodological foundations of phenomenology. In a related but slightly different vein, some argue that the phenomenologist’s understanding of human experience ‘in general’—which, after all, is what phenomenology pursues—is severely limited if the lived embodied experiences of women are not considered (Oksala 2004, 16; Stawarska 2018, 14–15; Cohen Shabot and Landry 2018, 2–3). Examples include experiences such as menstruation, menopause, “being breasted” (Young 2005, 96), and, for many though not all women, pregnancy, giving birth (Oksala 2004), and breastfeeding (Cohen Shabot and Landry 2018). Perhaps even more fundamentally, as being born, the self is unthinkable without sexual difference (Oksala 2004, 19). Also, how embodied differences play out in amateur and professional sports, physical exercise, and medicine has received much attention (Young 2005; Chisholm 2008; Zeiler and Käll 2014). In the course of the development of feminist phenomenology, both tensions have been put into perspective. Most feminist phenomenologists today regard the objection that gender is a subject matter for empirical rather than phenomenological investigation as the result of a very specific and unduly narrow construal of the phenomenological method. If one takes into account post-Husserlian phenomenology in its hermeneutic, existential, enactive, genetic, and/or post-phenomenological branches, the transcendental/empirical divide loses much of its force, and, hence, the alleged incompatibility of phenomenology and gender theory is relaxed. With some notable exceptions (Heinämaa 2003; Heinämaa and Rodemeyer 2010), few feminist phenomenologists are unconditionally committed to the transcendental phenomenological method and the full enactment of—rather than critical reflection on—the epoché (Stoller 2017, 338). Most adopt a non- or quasi- (i.e., historico-transcendental) approach. However, several concepts taken from the Husserliana are found useful, such as the Leib-Körper distinction, Husserl’s conceptualizations of sensing and touch (Al-Saji 2010), and “orientation” (Ahmed 2006, 2007). Additionally, many feminist phenomenologists draw fundamental principles and concepts from the work of Heidegger (Beauvoir 20115; Lugones 1987; Ortega 2016; Vasterling 2005) and other hermeneutic phenomenologists such as Gadamer and Ricoeur (Warnke 2017; Alcoff 2006, 84–129; Halsema 2013), from Sartre’s phenomenology (Beauvoir 20116; Young 1994), contemporary genetic phenomenology and Arendt’s work (Schües [2016] 2017; Oksala 362

Feminism and Gender

2004), and, especially, the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir (Heinämaa 2003; Young 2005; Weiss 1999; and many others). With the obvious exception of Beauvoir, it is not implied these phenomenologists themselves investigate gender or race—in fact, they do not—only that their work is often (rightly or not) felt to lend itself better to productive appropriations in the service of gender theory by partially or entirely abandoning the epoché and the phenomenological reduction more broadly and entirely focusing on humans’ practical and embodied ‘being in the world,’ which throws into relief the subject’s irrevocable social situatedness, as expressed in terms of ‘situation,’ ‘historicity,’ ‘facticity,’ or ‘thrownness.’ This opens up the possibility of accounting for social, political and cultural norms and structures as more than merely empirical restraints (Oksala 2006). The skepticism about the masculinist bias of phenomenology has not so much disappeared as given way to a variety of productive feminist engagements with phenomenology (Stawarska 2018, 16–18; Al-Saji 2010). At one end of the scale, we find ‘conservative’ or additive approaches that seek to correct for masculinist bias by providing the complement of women’s experiences (Fisher 2000, 32–38; Heinämaa 2003). On the other end are transformative interventions that aim for radical methodological revisions while still staying within the orbit of phenomenology. An example of the latter is found in the Arendtian principle of natality, which Oksala (2004) and Schües (2016/2017) present as the condition of possibility of intentionality: birth is not just an empirical event in the world, but it is only because they are born into the world that human beings can act and constitute sense. There is a tendency in recent literature to stress the flexibility and openness of the phenomenological method. Feminist phenomenology would fit within a living tradition, which it takes further rather than attacking frontally (Fielding 2012, 525–26; Fielding 2017; Simms and Stawarska 2013, 11). Stressing methodological openness has allowed feminist phenomenology to engage more extensively in dialogue with other areas of contemporary continental philosophy, especially poststructuralism. Also, it has rendered feminist phenomenology a more inclusive and interdisciplinary project that does not categorically reject but even welcomes collaborations with empirical research (Simms and Stawarska 2013, 8–10). For feminist phenomenologists who are committed to historico-transcendental inquiry, interdisciplinarity serves the enactment of the—be it partial—epoché. Oksala, for example, argues that phenomenological description should let itself inform by a plurality of empirical first-person accounts of the lived experience of the phenomenon under investigation. This is indispensable in order for the phenomenologist to achieve a critical distance from her own culturally shaped pre-understandings, which is all the more pressing if the phenomenologist takes up a relatively privileged social position (Oksala 2006, 238–40). For others, a more open method liberates phenomenology from a Eurocentric “border policing” that reinforces unequal academic power relations (Stawarska 2018, 17–18). A commitment to methodological openness does not preclude distinctness. Three features of phenomenology stand out. First, feminist phenomenologists share the general phenomenological predisposition of distancing oneself from pre-understandings, even if they assume the impossibility of a complete epoché. As Cohen Shabot and Landry put it, “[F]eminist tools offer phenomenology what other methodologies cannot; feminist insights not only make visible ‘normal’ experiences of embodied beings but also do so without parsing out that which makes ‘normal’ experiences possible” (2018, 2). Second, feminist phenomenologists typically assume that this predisposition presupposes that one takes a first-person perspective, ‘perspective from within,’ or ‘point of view’ as a starting point for inquiry, in contrast to most social scientific, constructivist, and materialist accounts 363

Marieke Borren

of gender and race, which mostly take a ‘perspective from without’ and do not inquire into the very background beliefs that enable such accounts (Fielding 2017; Oksala 2006, 239–41). Third, feminist phenomenologists align themselves with the relational or interactive ontology that follows from the phenomenological principle of intentionality and its hermeneutic and existential modifications: the fundamental intertwinement of self (or Dasein) and world. In addition to methods, the phenomenological tradition also offers a toolkit of conceptual resources that have been creatively appropriated and reworked for understanding gender questions (Stoller 2017, 339).7 The next section presents what has proven to be one of the most significant and fertile phenomenological interventions in gender theory: the lived body—the body regarded not as a “thing” but as a “situation,” in Beauvoir’s words (2011, 46) or as seen ‘from within.’

3.  The Lived and Habitual Body The aim of this section is to demonstrate the merit of taking serious embodiment in its experiential, material, and habitual reality for rethinking two intractable controversies in feminist philosophy: the sex/gender and subjectivity/structure debates. The former controversy refers to a conceptual dichotomy that constituted an extremely successful Anglo American feminist intervention in academic scholarship from the 1960s. The sex/gender dichotomy has gained a wide circulation well outside academia and even beyond feminism ever since. As it is conventionally understood, ‘sex’ refers to the biological body with its reproductive features and ‘gender’ to socio-cultural norms and meanings attached to them, to social relations and roles expected of women and men. Additionally, in its everyday use, ‘gender’ increasingly refers to individuals’ self-identification. The social constructivist category of gender initially allowed for a non-naturalistic view on feminine (and masculine) identity and on the relations between men and women. It fit well in the feminist agenda of liberating women from the shackles of a fate to which their bodies allegedly destined them. Its purpose was to demonstrate that women’s centuries-long oppression and exclusion is not an immutable natural fact grounded in anatomy but entirely conventional and, hence, open to social, legal, and political change. In other words, the stakes involved in the social constructivist separation of ‘gender’ from ‘sex’ were to abandon the biological determinism, reductionism, or naturalism typical of unequal patriarchal power relations: a naturalism that, incidentally, is all but dead today, given the hold of paradigms on the life sciences such as the neurosciences and evolutionary psychology over explaining sexual difference and gender. However, from the 1980s, feminist poststructuralist philosophers started to challenge the sex/gender divide, mostly because it inadvertently again turned ‘sex’ into an immutable natural given. It was acknowledged that this distinction reproduces a Cartesian ontological dualism since the sex/gender divide maps onto dichotomous realms such as body/mind and nature/culture in which the first is considered given and immutable (a fact, grounded in anatomy) and the second contingent, historical, and therefore open to change. Moreover, this dualism is not neutral but hierarchically structured; with this dualism invariably comes a valuation of one at the expense of the other pole: culture over nature, mind over body, etc. Judith Butler famously argued in Gender Trouble (1990) that sex, no less than gender, is a discursive effect that is subsequently naturalized (i.e., presented as pre-discursive). One could say that sex has been gender all along and all the way down. 364

Feminism and Gender

The poststructuralist deconstruction of the sex/gender dichotomy led to the criticism among feminist phenomenologists that it turned gender into a merely discursive or linguistic effect and accomplished an erasure of the body. The biological reductionism that the concept of gender (grounded in ontological dualism) so effectively denounced was replaced by cultural or linguistic reductionism and determinism in poststructuralist hands, it was argued.8 In short, the sex/gender controversy seems to leave us with a choice between three takes on the relation between body and mind and nature and culture that are, each in its own way, unattractive for ontological or political reasons or both: naturalism, culturalism, or Cartesian dualism. The former two are reductive. For naturalists, the body is a thing or machine, and one only needs to look at the body to get at the truth about sexual difference. In other words, there is nothing but sex, with the body directly issuing norms for women’s and men’s behavioral patterns, identities, and roles. For culturalists, on the other hand, there is nothing but gender, with the body regarded as merely text, becoming almost a phantom, strangely devoid of physical reality. As a result, the body is emptied of ontological dignity. The feminist sex/gender dichotomy does not solve the problem of naturalism; it only displaces it. It is problematic not only ontologically—the body is presented as a passive object awaiting signification, rendering the interaction between body and mind u ­ nintelligible—but also politically: it reproduces the hierarchical structure inherent in C ­ artesian dualism, only on a different level. Due to their relational ontology, feminist phenomenologists are in a good position to deconstruct the body/mind and nature/culture dichotomies without reducing one to the other. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was the first major phenomenological effort to demonstrate that ‘nature’ (the biological body with its visible differences) and ‘culture’ (cultural meanings and evaluations attributed to those differences and the norms informing them) should not be conceived as two substances but as inextricably intertwined in women’s and men’s sexed existence.9 Despite the sometimes-outdated examples and a noted lack of intersectional awareness—it was first published in 1949, and its descriptions of women’s lived experiences reflect Beauvoir’s own white and bourgeois environment—this work, until today, remains an exemplary exploration of sexual difference through an account of its ‘lived experience’ (the title of the second volume) and has proven to have a remarkable capacity for sparking renewed interest in every new generations of feminist phenomenologists. What’s more, previously overshadowed by the existential phenomenology of her partner Sartre, in recent decades, Beauvoir had increasingly been recognized as an original phenomenologist, even if she was inspired by key phenomenological insights from the work of Merleau-Ponty (the lived body, corporeal schema), Heidegger (facticity, projection, thrownness), Sartre (situation, alterity), and Husserl (Leib) for her own project of developing a phenomenology of gender. For some feminist theorists working outside phenomenology, this fitness of Beauvoir’s work for overcoming the sex/gender divide may be somewhat surprising, as The Second Sex has often been interpreted as attaching philosophical credence to this very divide on account of the famous—but often poorly understood—statement “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (2011, 293). Many, especially Anglo American feminists, read this phrase as a straightforward assertion of the social construction of gender. This reading is erroneous, a result of what is now widely considered the first English mistranslation of La Deuxième Sexe by zoologist Howard M. Parshley in 1953, which completely missed the phenomenological background of this work.10 365

Marieke Borren

To understand how Beauvoir phenomenologically deconstructs the nature/culture divide that underpins sex/gender, explicating the meaning of this famous statement is, in fact, a good place to start. Beauvoir takes the lived body as her starting point, which means that she does not conceive of it as a “thing” but as lived as a “situation” (Beauvoir 2011, 46). Being situated means that every human being is born into and exists within particular historical and cultural conditions and relations. One’s particular situation allows for the way human freedom is disclosed (as possibilities) as well as constrained or, in other words, for what one ‘can do’ and cannot do. It is through the body, with its sexually differentiated features amongst others, that one lives one’s situation. “Because the body is the instrument of our hold on the world, the world appears different to us depending on how it is grasped” (45). Beauvoir rejects the idea of human nature, an essence shared by all human beings, in general, and of a female essence (the “myth of the eternal feminine” [3]) in particular, defined and determined by either biological or cultural features. Being a woman (or man, intersex, or non-binary person, for that matter) means being in a never-ending process of becoming one. For Beauvoir, sexual difference belongs to the facticities of human existence: they are given, not chosen but—and here lies the difference with naturalist accounts of sex—contingent. Sexual differences, the ‘facts’ of female and male embodiment, only disclose themselves through interpretation—that is, through the meanings that humans in a particular place and time attach to them—so they are, as a principle, open to interpretation. Biological discourse about women’s and men’s bodies is itself shaped by historical, cultural, and social conditions. [Biological data] are one of the keys that enable us to understand woman. But we refuse the idea that they form a fixed destiny for her. They do not suffice to constitute the basis for a sexual hierarchy; they do not explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her forever to this subjugated role. (Beauvoir 2011, 45) Kruks calls this “the dialectic of the natural and the historical” to point out the reciprocal constitution of bodies and the world (1998, 73). Our bodies disclose the social world according to our situation, which is itself shaped by the world. From being situated also follows, Beauvoir argues, that the opposite of naturalism— namely, cultural or discursive reductionism, or what she calls ‘nominalism’—is equally false. It is not the case that women are “merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman’ ” (Beauvoir 2011, 4). To say there are only human beings irrespective of sexual difference is “an inauthentic flight” for “anyone can clearly see that humanity is split into two categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, movements, interests, and occupations” (Beauvoir 2011, 4). These differences (and here one could add other “visible identities” such as race, to use Alcoff’s [2006] phrase) are profoundly constitutive of life, yet simultaneously, they are contingent, not essential, and may change and even disappear altogether, Beauvoir adds. Building on Beauvoir’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the lived body and situation, Iris Marion Young, in her 1980 essay “Throwing like a Girl,” argues that (stereo) typically feminine bodily movement often displays what she calls “inhibited intentionality” (Young 2005, 37). A careful phenomenological analysis of the way girls and boys, respectively, perform physically challenging (but doable) tasks—the example being throwing a ball—reveals that they “live and move their bodies in space” (40) differently, she argues. 366

Feminism and Gender

For Merleau-Ponty, the body, to the extent that it is competent (‘I can’), creates an immediate link between the spatiality of one’s own body (‘here’) and one’s surrounding or outlying space (‘yonder’) (Merleau-Ponty 2000, 162). The body projects an open space—that is, a space in which outer and inner are continuous—that enables movements and projects (i.e., what they ‘can do’). Young, on the contrary, points out that this may not be a universal human experience but a generalization of a particular—male—way of moving one’s body in space. For women (and, I add, other marginalized subjects, such as racialized people), the continuity between ‘here’ and ‘yonder’ is more likely to be severed, whence allegedly normal everyday open space gives way to an enclosed or confining one that inhibits their movements and projects (‘I cannot’) (Young 2005, 40). Incidentally, Frantz Fanon had already (in his 1952 Peau Noire, Masques Blancs) observed something quite similar with respect to Black bodily agency. No less critical of certain falsely universalizing tendencies in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived body than Young after him, he observes that, for the Black person, the ‘natural’ (but actually naturalized) dialectic between body and world breaks down under (post-)colonial conditions. Both Young and Fanon point to the social and historical world as the source of the ‘dual subjectivity’ of women and Black people, respectively: it reflects that they are seen as objects in sexist and racist society while they simultaneously “live their bodies as subjects” (Young 2005, 44). In other words, one’s sense of bodily agency, of what one ‘can do,’ is contingent on one’s situation, entailing gender and race, among others. Girls’ hesitancy in throwing balls, Young demonstrates, is not dictated by female anatomy. She makes it painstakingly clear that one needs to learn to move ‘like a girl’ in the social world—in line with Beauvoir’s ‘becoming woman.’ Young’s essay is not without its critics. Some generally sympathetic readers nonetheless find her account of split female subjectivity overly dualistic (Weiss 1999). Others accuse her of a methodologically problematic essentialism; Oksala, for instance, argues that Young generalizes a particular first-person description of female embodiment (Oksala 2006, 232). Finally, it has often been declared outdated by a younger generation of feminist phenomenologists (Chisholm 2008). Still, as a modern classic that remains widely read, it continues to make sense to many readers. A more recent development in feminist phenomenology is the adoption of MerleauPonty’s approach of the lived body as “habit body” (Merleau-Ponty 2000, 144). Seeing sexism, racialization, and racism as embodied perceptual habits has turned out to be helpful for understanding their mechanisms and persistence (Alcoff 2006; Al-Saji 2014; Ngo 2016). As suggested in the title of her 2006 monograph Visible Identities, Linda Alcoff observes that and how race and gender manifest precisely through visible bodily differences. Ambiguous or undecidable gendered or racial appearance causes deep confusion, fear, and even hatred. Focusing on racialized identities, Alcoff’s account of perceptual habits provides another argument that collective identities are not merely linguistic or discursive constructs (2006, 102). Yet to acknowledge the visible physical presence of the racialized body is not to reduce it to a biological reality either. Accounting for habituality may help explain the tenacity of processes of racialization (Alcoff 2006, 187–89). Helen Ngo (2016) takes this analysis one step further, from the habituality of racialization to (anti-black and anti-Asian) racism, which she illustrates with an analysis of George Yancy’s much-cited case study of the “Elevator Effect”. Yancy describes how he, a Black man, walks into an elevator with a white woman as its sole other occupant. Seeing him, her body 367

Marieke Borren

becomes tense: she clutches her bag, starts to tremble nervously; her hand palms become sweaty, etc. For Ngo, the elevator effect demonstrates how racism may work “in the register of bodily gesture and response,” which moreover, becomes “habituated” (Ngo 2016, 851). Even if it is a bodily response, it is informed by a long history of racist practices. As ways of seeing that are both learned and embodied, perceptual habits are not so much partly cultural, partly natural—a middle ground between the two—as beyond the nature/ culture dichotomy. So far, the argument has been about the deconstruction of the sex/gender controversy and the underlying nature/culture dichotomy. The phenomenological notion of the lived and habitual body is also helpful in shedding light on the related but distinct debate on structure versus agency. While in current popular discourse on gender, ‘experience’ and ‘identity’ signify highly individualized personal self-identifications and gender something up for the individual to choose and take up and off at will, gender theorists generally assume it is shaped in relation to tough social and institutional structures, power relations, or systems with a long history. However, they disagree as to which one has primacy in shaping human action. Is agency an epiphenomenon, derivative of deeper conditioning and determining oppressive structures and the ideologies organizing them, such as patriarchy or racism, or are these structures and eventual changes to them, reversely, enacted by agents? What is at stake are the conditions of freedom and the possibility of change. Feminist poststructuralists who adopt the type of ontological culturalism described here tend to view agency and related concepts such as experience and subjectivity as mere discursive effects: i.e., the passive outcome of determining social and linguistic power structures (Scott 1992). Feminist phenomenological conceptualizations of ‘becoming woman,’ orientation, and habit, on the other hand, deconstruct the structure/agency dichotomy. Beauvoir’s ‘becoming woman,’ for instance, entails a dialectical understanding of agency and social structure (Stawarska 2018, 22).11 In other words, it is an ambiguous notion, involving “a sense both of being created by externalities and of creating oneself” (Kruks 1998, 73). It means that, as a woman, one is both construct and project, constituted physically and culturally and constituting oneself ‘like a woman’—or a girl. Likewise, that one learns to ‘throw like a girl’ within the bounds of the social world implies that girls (and women) can unlearn self-inhibiting ways of bodily comportment if the social world changes. Indeed, much has changed in gender relations and in the way many girls and women move through the world in various parts of the world since Young’s essay was published in 1980, let alone Beauvoir’s book from 1949. For instance, the accessibility and professionalization of sports for women have increased tremendously. On a different note, the normalization of sexual harassment has been challenged, not in the least by the concerted collective actions of feminist movements. Feminist phenomenologists of habit moreover demonstrate that structures do not so much determine as orient bodily responses and gestures in particular ways (Ahmed 2006, 2007). Ngo (2016) challenges conventional understandings of habit in terms of sedimentation or calcification, for bodily habits—for example, white racist habits—are held, she argues.

4.  Outlook: Feminist Phenomenology as a Critical Phenomenology In the preceding sections, I hope to have demonstrated that feminist phenomenology fits within the phenomenological method but is also critical of it because it features a double 368

Feminism and Gender

legacy: of phenomenology and of feminism. On the one hand, feminist phenomenologists are faithful, if not to the actual practice of the epoché, then to its spirit: the methodological predisposition to denaturalize the natural attitude (Husserl) and to uncover the everyday practical world that ‘normally’ operates in the background (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). On the other hand, it is not just committed to a description of first-person lived experiences but also galvanized by feminism as a critical political and ethical project and related to feminist struggles. Without exception, feminist phenomenologists are attentive to the normatively significant implications of the historicity, situatedness, and habituality of differential embodiment and committed to change. This double legacy is a persistent yet productive source of tension in feminist phenomenology; it prompts efforts at expansion of the topics deemed proper for phenomenological inquiry and at methodological transformation. There is a tendency in scholarship to put the tensions between phenomenology and critical thinking in general, including feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies, in perspective. It is argued that a critical moment is inherent in any phenomenological undertaking, even in classical phenomenology (Guenther 2021). As a manner or style of thinking, it has been suggested that the epoché is only a “heuristic device” designed “to cast new light on what usually appears natural, or normal”—“like much feminist critique” (Kruks 1998, 67). Indeed, it could reversely be argued that, as a critical political and ethical project, feminist phenomenology works precisely through phenomenological description (Fielding 2012, 518; Ortega 2016, 7; Stawarska 2018, 13–14; Simms and Stawarska 2013, 10–11; Oksala 2006, 239–41). Feminist phenomenologists uncover what has been obscured because it presents itself as normal or natural as it constitutes the horizon or background of lived experience without itself appearing, such as systemic structures of oppression. They more or less systematically reveal commonplace pre-understanding, including gender-based prejudices and racialized or racist bias. As a result, these constitutive structures and pre-understandings are made available as objects for critical scrutiny— hence, the possibility of change. Description itself may thus weaken the normative hold of these structures. For example, uncovering the habitual nature of sexist or racist perception robs the sexed and racialized body of its naturalness and opens up practices of perceiving otherwise. Now that feminist phenomenology has become an established field of academic inquiry, it seems to blend more and more into critical phenomenology more broadly. As Simms and Stawarska write: “Feminist phenomenology is, by definition, a critical phenomenology” (2013, 11). More work needs to be done, though, on the precise historical and conceptual relation between feminist and critical phenomenology. To what extent can feminist phenomenology be said to be the mother discourse from which contemporary critical phenomenology originated? Has feminist phenomenology made itself obsolete as a separate field or even a relic of an unreflectively white, cis-gendered, middle-class feminist past? Whatever the answer, some of the most exiting directions for future phenomenological research on gender pertain, first, to the implications for gender theory of phenomenological reflection in trans studies on non-cis and non-binary bodies and, second, to the intersections between gender and other embodied differences that are not related to the conditions of the reproduction of the human species and therefore may seem less susceptible to biologist reductions. Is the lived body as fruitful a perspective on trans studies and intersectional feminist thought as it has been to gender theory so far? 369

Marieke Borren

Notes 1 However, some trace the advent of phenomenological reflection on gender back to the early work of the German phenomenologist Edith Stein (1891–1942) on the nature of women and on male and female consciousness. 2 For historical overviews of the genesis and recent development of feminist phenomenology, see Simms and Stawarska, 2013; Stoller 2017; Kruks 1998; Stawarska 2018; Fisher 2000; Fielding 2012, 2017. 3 Judith Butler’s work takes a pivotal role in these debates on alleged essentialism on the one hand and cultural or linguistic reductionism on the other. 4 On this argument, see Heinämaa and Rodemeyer 2010, 4–5. 5 On Beauvoir’s relation to key Heideggerian concepts, see Gothlin 2003. 6 On the relationship between Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s phenomenological work, see Gothlin 1996. 7 A clear example of this type of appropriating phenomenology is reflected in Weiss, Murphy and Salamon 2020. 8 Later, I will argue that this is somewhat of a caricature that we perhaps only find in Joan Scott’s work (1992), not in Butler’s. 9 On Beauvoir’s deconstruction of the sex/gender dichotomy, see Fielding 2012, 519–20; Gothlin 1996, 2003; Stawarska 2018; Heinämaa 2012; Kruks 1998; Moi 1999; Young 2005, 16. 10 Also, this mistranslation unjustly led to the accusation that Beauvoir is hostile to women’s bodies. The much-awaited 2011 translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier is now regarded as the authoritative English-language edition. 11 Many feminist phenomenologists today hold that Beauvoir’s ‘becoming woman’ shares this feature with Butler’s gender performativity. By demonstrating the proximity, continuity, or at least compatibility of Butler’s poststructuralist and feminist phenomenology, they adapt a previously held caricature (Stawarska 2018). Weiss 2021 even goes so far as calling Butler a feminist phenomenologist without much ado.

References Ahmed, Sarah. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–68. Alcoff, Linda. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al-Saji, Alia. 2010. “Bodies and Sensings. On the Uses of Husserlian Phenomenology for Feminist Theory.” Continental Philosophy Review 43: 13–37. ———. 2014. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 133–72. Albany: SUNY Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier. London: Vintage Books. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London/New York: Routledge. Chisholm, Dianna. 2008. “Climbing Like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology.” Hypatia 23 (1): 9–40. Cohen Shabot, Sara, and Christinia Landry, eds. 2018. Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology. Theoretical and Applied Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fielding, Helen. 2012. “Feminism.” In The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, edited by Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, 518–27. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. “A Feminist Phenomenology Manifesto.” In Feminist Phenomenology Futures, edited by Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski, vii–xxii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisher, Linda. 2000. “Phenomenology and Feminism: Perspectives on their Relation.” In Feminist Phenomenology, edited by Linda Fisher and Lester Embree, 17–38. Dordrecht: Springer. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2011. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26 (3): 591–609. Gothlin, Eva. 1996. Sex & Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”. Translated by Linda Schenk. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

370

Feminism and Gender ———. 2003. “Reading Simone de Beauvoir with Martin Heidegger.” In The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claudia Card, 45–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guenther, Lisa. 2021. “Six Senses of Critique for Critical Phenomenology.” Puncta 4 (2): 5–23. Halsema, Annemie. 2013. “The Subject of Critique: Ricoeur in Dialogue with Feminist Philosophers.” Etudes Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 4 (1): 21–39. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2012. “Sex, Gender, and Embodiment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 216–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, and Lanei M. Rodemeyer. 2010. “Introduction.” Continental Philosophy Review 43: 1–11. Kruks, Sonia. 1998. “Existentialism and Phenomenology.” In A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Alison Jaggar and Iris M. Young, 66–74. Oxford: Blackwell. Lugones, Maria. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2 (2): 3–19. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2000. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ngo, Helen. 2016. “Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 42 (9): 847–72. Oksala, Johanna. 2004. “What is Feminist Phenomenology? Thinking Birth Philosophically.” Radical Philosophy 126: 16–22. ———. 2006. “A Phenomenology of Gender.” Continental Philosophy Review 39: 229–44. Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between. Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: SUNY Press. Schües, Christina. 2016/2017. “Natality. Philosophical Rudiments Concerning a Generative Phenomenology.” Thaumazein 4–5: 9–35. Scott, Joan. 1992. “Experience.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott, 22–40. London: Routledge. Simms, Eva-Maria, and Beata Stawarska. 2013. “Introduction: Concepts and Methods in Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology.” Janus Head 13 (1): 6–16. Stawarska, Beata. 2018. “Subject and Structure in Feminist Phenomenology: Re-reading Beauvoir with Butler.” In  Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology. Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, edited by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry, 13–33. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Stoller, Silvia. 2017. “What is Feminist Phenomenology? Looking Backward and into the Future.” In Feminist Phenomenology Futures, edited by Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski, 328–54. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vasterling, Veronica. 2005. “Zur Bedeutung von Heideggers ontologischer Hermeneutik für die feministische Philosophie.” In Feministische Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik, edited by Silvia Stoller, Veronica Vasterling, and Linda Fisher, 67–95. Würzburg: Koenigshausen & Neumann. Warnke, Georgia. 2017. “Hermeneutics and Feminism.” In The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, edited by Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander, 644–59. London: Routledge. Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. London: Routledge. ———. 2021. “Feminist Phenomenology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, edited by Kim Q. Hall and Ásta, 63–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, eds. 2020. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Young, Iris M. 1994. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” Signs 19 (3): 713–38. ———. 2005. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zeiler, Kristin, and Lisa Käll, eds. 2014. Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine. Albany: SUNY Press.

371

27 RACE Yoko Arisaka

1. Introduction Discussions about race and racism are never straightforward. They have the immediate effect of affecting the feel of any conversation, communication, and being with others—­ private or public. Racism is not just a theoretical concept; it is, rather, emotive, visceral, and tactile in our immediate experience when we are confronted with it. As David Kim remarks, “racism is . . . a fundamentally emotional phenomenon” (1999, 116).1 While racism may shape the entire mode of participation in society for some, for others it may be entirely invisible—some may not even believe there is such a thing as racism today. As a topic for analysis or discussion, it presents a tiring challenge: the academic norm is to ignore it, as it is often viewed as an academically insignificant problem and treated merely as a problem in society and politics. Philosophy has, for the most part, avoided engagements with the issues of race and racism. Before proceeding, let me briefly clarify some of the definitions of “racism” and “racialization” in current use. Although practices that we would identify as racism today have existed since the beginning of history globally, the modern racial hierarchy is a part of the European colonial project and, in philosophy, propagated by major figures such as Kant and Hegel, who helped legitimatize it.2 However, the term “racism” itself is relatively new. It first appeared in the 1930s among the German social scientists, who condemned the racial policies of National Socialism. Currently, there are several different “strands” of how the term is used. Lawrence Blum locates racism in the person: The term expresses moral revulsion such as bigotry, hostility, hatred, and insensitivity, and it is characterized through the paradigms of inferiorization and antipathy toward a racialized group (2002, 8). According to Albert Memmi, racism is the generalized and absolutized evaluation of actual or fictive biological characteristics in order to benefit the use by the perpetrators and to cause damage to the victims (1987, 151).3 Mark Terkessidis objects to calling racism an “ideology” or “discourse”; rather, he defines it as a political “apparatus” involving processes of racialization, exclusionary practice, and power inequity (2004, 98). Racism is all these things, and the analyses of racism can therefore be moral (personal), socio-political, structural, historical, or combinations thereof. 372

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-40

Race

Today, “race” is predominantly a socio-political term denoting a “racialized group” seen in terms of the “color line,” an invisible-visible line that politically demarcates (and hierarchically orders) different groups of people largely based on their skin color and other physical/visible features, such as facial types and clothing. As Robert Bernasconi eloquently puts it, “[W]hat is most visible, is within the public realm rendered invisible to the extent that the dominant group succeeds in overlooking a minority, denying its members their place in the sun” (2001, 286). To the extent that physical features are still considered markers of racial identities and operative for racial prejudice, the term “race” has biological connotations, although the biological or genetic meaning of human races is mostly obsolete today. Racism thus is a political issue that, however, still manages to come in the guise of the natural or given. Thus, engaging with race philosophically is about “seeing racism,” understanding the apparatus of racialization, identity formation, empowerment, coalition building, the fight against injustice, solidarity, resistance, historical justice, and ethics.4 Race and racism have always, in fact, been discussed in philosophy among black philosophers and thinkers since the beginning of the 20th century, though not as a recognized part of mainstream philosophy. Despite the continuous marginalization of black philosophers as well as the discussions themselves, philosophical treatments of race and racism kept their presence as intellectual anti-racist activism as a small concentration in social and political philosophy, inspiring a number of black philosophers in the Civil Rights era of the late 1960s.5 The earlier activist thinkers continued to carve out a small space within philosophy, and since the mid-1990s, the field of “philosophy of race” has emerged and grown exponentially. Especially since the transnational Black Lives Matter movements began in 2013, it has been recognized as a politically relevant philosophical field that can no longer be ignored. As with feminist philosophies, philosophy of race encompasses a wide range of theoretical approaches, methods, and positions. Within philosophy of race, for example, besides the obvious political and social philosophies of race and racism, the issues are also analyzed in ethics, moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, history of philosophy, philosophy of science (especially biology), and, with particular relevance, in phenomenology and existentialism. While most discussions are explicitly or implicitly political, not all are; there are analyses of race (especially in analytic philosophies) that are primarily semantic, epistemological, or ontological.6 While these philosophical approaches to race tended to remain theoretical and parasitic on the given disciplinary framework (for example, addressing the injustices of racism within theories of justice or the debates about racial essentialism in metaphysics), phenomenological approaches to race and racism, for the first time, enabled those who had been affected by racism to articulate their positions philosophically. The phenomenological approaches generally cover the “experiential phenomena” and/or the thematizations of the embodiments and lived experiences of race and racialization from the first-person point of view. These approaches are particularly effective in continuing the earlier dedications of academic anti-racist activism carried out from the standpoint of those who are affected. The references are phenomenologists who thematize the body as well as the existential dimensions of intersubjectivity, Being-in-the-World, and usually unthematized dimensions of our lived experiences: prominently Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—and, decisively, Frantz Fanon. Phenomenologists of race and racism mostly focus on the negative impact that racialization plays on one’s being, in particular from the perspective of those who are affected. 373

Yoko Arisaka

Though the project follows the descriptive methods and intentional analyses of phenomenology, it often also thematizes power dimensions, referring to Foucault, Marxism, and Critical Theory. Thus, the claims and perhaps the “goals” are fundamentally politiconormative, in that the descriptions are meant to contribute to the larger anti-racist politicophilosophical discussions. One could say that, in this sense, phenomenology of race and racialization belongs to the emerging field of critical philosophy of race.7 In what follows, a brief theoretical orientation that contributed to the emergence of the field of phenomenology of race will be presented first, then recent developments in the field will be discussed.

2.  Theoretical Orientations Perhaps the most salient theoretical framework that the phenomenologists of race have taken from classical Husserlian phenomenology are the epoché and intentional analyses (of the categories of noema and noesis), though they may not directly refer to Husserl. The transcendental move to bracket out the natural attitude so that one can examine the contents of the perceiving consciousness and its components and how they actually “produce” our perceptual objects (and subjects) was crucial in providing a theoretical space to examine how racialization works. In Husserl’s case, the examples were of inanimate objects such as a chair, but in race discussions, the relevant perceptual contents and constructions are, by extension, of persons and their appearances as well as ways of being. In the natural attitude, persons appear as physical and psychological beings who surround us along with other natural objects, with this-and-that characteristics and having such-and-such relations to us (or not). With the epoché, the structure of perception is made available in which these “persons” cease to be simply there as part of the normal word. Instead, they appear to us as such-and-such human object-as, projected by our perception in such-and-such a manner in our lived experiences. From the outset, others in this way become relational to me, and I am implicated in the way in which I experience them (and vice versa). In the natural attitude, racialized persons are taken to be naturally so (“She’s Asian”), with the assumptions and prejudices intact (“She’s probably quiet and plays the piano”), as if it’s just a part of reality. With the phenomenological method of bracketing, the content of such a perception becomes available for analyses. The “Asian woman” is actually an object of perception, in which the perceiver determines, implicitly or explicitly, through interpretation, previous encounter, unexamined hearsay, and perhaps even with prejudice, that person as such-and-such-perceived-by-them, an intentional, noematic being. Correspondingly, one could also analyze the positing of such an object—one’s perceptual field—as a noetic activity. The process of racialization occurs rather immediately in this perceptual whole; one already perceives the other with their racialized or non-racialized appearance, as that is the first visual cue that marks such an encounter in the other person’s difference (or lack thereof). This bracketing move allows us to examine how the patterns might become “sedimented”; through repetition, one comes to generalize and begins to interpret other instances of “Asian woman” in similar ways, perhaps being surprised when a particular encounter turns out to be different from the expectations. This process of sedimentation produces a “background” through which the perceptual world is organized in a manner that things “make sense.” It becomes part of the meaningful “lived experience” that constitutes the whole of one’s perceptual existence. This fundamental phenomenological insight is expanded to include other traditional phenomenological discussions. Following Heidegger, one could say that racialized persons 374

Race

are not simply objects of perception. They are experienced as Being-in-the-World in its worldhood that is in relation to their own existence in the world as Being-in-the-World. They are a Mitsein, a fundamental ontological component in relation to one’s existentiality. Mariana Ortega shows that Heidegger was also helpful in analyzing the selfhood of racialized and migrant persons by his notion of the human (Dasein) as temporal and relationally embodied (Ortega 2016). However, while Heidegger bemoans the ignorance of this ontological dimension in a comfortable life with others (Mitsein), racialized persons never find that stability in social life, living as “multiplicitous [selves]” (Ortega 2016, 50). Heidegger’s view of the difference between ontic and ontological is thus revealed as a particular solipsist and Eurocentric view. It is a novel move to apply Heidegger’s work to race at any rate, given his own political views. Thus, his thought itself needs to be contextualized in a critique of racism. In this regard, Ortega shows the ontic and ontological as much more closely interweaved in the Latina lives she analyzes. Being racialized is not an accidental or even a wrong feature that gets labeled in society and does not have to do with fundamental being. In a similar gesture, Linda Martín Alcoff (2019) has argued that race is ontological for racialized persons, thus moving toward a more intersubjective understanding of the ontological. The entire existence of racialized persons becomes defined through racialization; how one lives and understands oneself in a community and society; how one is interpreted by others in society (morally, aesthetically, culturally, politically), which affects one’s self-understanding; one’s aspirations, hopes, and expectations, which make one’s life orientations; where one lives or is allowed to live; what kind of life chances one has—these are all fundamentally constitutive of one’s being.8 “Being Asian” is not a matter of ontic characterization (though that could also be a component); it rather makes up the existence of one’s being in fundamental ways from birth, through upbringing, socialization, self-understanding, and positioning. There is no neutral “fundamental being” hidden under these determinations that concretely make up one’s Being-in-the-World. The insights from the Sartrean approach add the important dimension of intersubjective exposure. The other is an intentional consciousness just as much as I am, and the “look” turns me into an object for the other. I am suddenly exposed in a way that is beyond my own control as I do not have access to the consciousness of the one who fixates me in her look. I am simply frozen in my tracks, captured in some opacity that determines me nevertheless. My entire being becomes an uneasy amalgamation that includes elements that escape me yet affect me in my lived experience. Racial perceptions are, for the most part, immediately “available” visibly for the other, and thus, before a conceptual register, one is already bound in the shared lived experience that is colored by the race perception.9 It is a well-known racial stereotype that Asian women are sexualized: a “yellow taxi,” an “easy target.” In a subway in a mid-size German city, a man standing near me looks at me for a while, then asks a question: “Do you come from Thailand?” Although I already know about the stereotypical stories, it nevertheless catches me off guard (perhaps because it is such a stereotype—“This can’t be happening”), and I feel a sense of dread because I am suddenly forced to act regardless. Reply, and if so, how? Brush it off or ignore it but worry what comes next? Act normal or walk away or become confrontational or what? I  am pinned down in the other’s “project” beyond my wishes and normal ways of going about my business. Sartre was a very political anti-racist and anti-anti-Semite activist. He himself employed his notion of mauvais foi (bad faith) from Being and Nothingness to antisemitism (Judaken 2020). Applied to the example here, the stranger in the subway employs racist stereotypes 375

Yoko Arisaka

to repel the existential challenge that the other might define him as well. He not only objectivizes the other as a stereotypical Asian woman, limiting her freedom, but he also evades the existential challenge “to face his own finitude and freedom” (Judaken 2020, 111). This is the “bad faith” at the core of antisemitism and racism. Lewis Gordon (2017, 299) has argued that the possibility of this bad faith is a necessary consequence of freedom: one is also free to avoid it. He would go on to develop a detailed theory of anti-Black racism based on the concept of bad faith (Gordon 1995, 2000). In addition, the phenomenology of embodiment by Merleau-Ponty enriches the discussion further. Perceptions as well as intersubjectivities are not merely questions of “consciousness”; consciousness is always already embodied in a concrete, lived context that morphs and defines the particularities of my ontological condition. Lived experiences are not simply “there” but essentially constituted by corporeal participation that organizes and shapes the whole. One “understands” the world through embodied participation with emotive and tactile contents intact. Some elements become the background while others become the foreground, depending on what and how one does things. Temporality, spatiality, embodiment, and sedimentation can all become thematized in order to analyze the content of lived experience in which corporeal being expresses itself. Such a concept of embodiment is essential for understanding racialization because race gets embodied in a way that is often very much visible (Alcoff 2006). To do justice to this fact, without essentializing or biologizing the body, is one of the central features of embodiment following Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, it shows that racism is not just a belief or an ideology. It happens at this level of corporeality/lived experience through which others as well as the self have their beings in their “flesh.” George Yancy uses a famous example of himself, as a “well-dressed” Black man entering “an elevator where a white woman waits to reach her floor.” Immediately, her “body language signifies, ‘Look, the Black!’ ”, which insults Yancy (2016, 4). Importantly, he details his analysis: “After all, she may come to judge her perception of the Black body as epistemologically false, but her racism may still have a hold on her lived body” (Yancy 2016, 5). It is this dimension of racism that can be grasped with recourse to Merleau-Ponty. However, it was Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a psychiatrist, philosopher, and activist born in Martinique and educated in Paris, who provided the most important groundwork for the phenomenology of race and racialization. The well-known passage with which Fanon opens his fifth chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952)—“Look, a Negro!” uttered by a white child—has become the common reference point in phenomenology of race. In this chapter, he elaborates on the power of this utterance, the “white gaze” that freezes his Black body in an anti-Black racist lifeworld. The utterance represents the whole apparatus of Black subjugation, its innocence (by a child) attesting to the power of the political ordering of his existence in that world that enframes him. Fanon is unable to breathe; he is sealed in his Blackness, inferiority, and powerlessness.10 The colonized Black consciousness moreover internalizes the inferiority complex—the Black person comes to believe his or her own inferiority (and the superiority of white colonizing consciousness) forced on him or her. Colonization of consciousness is complete when the colonized actually adopt the discourse of the colonizer that degrades them as real. The entire being of a person is transformed through this embodied transaction of racial degradation. Fanon combines phenomenology and Hegelian and Marxist political analyses of domination. Our lived past experiences are not simply a neutral field of background content 376

Race

that gives our current experiences coherence and meaning. This field is, in fact, sociopolitically and historically loaded from the ground up. What exactly counts as background lived experience and information depends on what kind of access or types of experience one has had, and what kind of encounters, control, exclusionary practices, emotional hardships, and other conditions were shaped by racism. In Fanon’s case, the formerly colonized and the colonizer share lifeworlds radically different from one another, and, moreover, they are hierarchically ordered in terms of domination by the latter. To say or perceive lived experience in a neutral manner is already to abstract its inherently socio-political dimension, or one has the privilege not to notice its socio-political effects (such as being in the dominating class). Political phenomenology thematizes and analyzes such inherently political workings of the lifeworlds that serve as horizons along which lived experiences become articulated. But the decisive contribution of Fanon to political phenomenology was the first-person entry point that specifically articulates the experiences of the victimized. Fanon did not produce a general political analysis. His account was a radically personal analysis of the ways in which the entire apparatus of colonial racism affected his whole existence. It is the I narrative of the silenced but with an existential-phenomenological methodology that turns it into an articulation that others can follow and understand how it might work philosophically, even if the particular experiences may not be shared. Moreover, beyond the personal, it is also a call for a change—the articulated account is inherently normative and activist (see Maldonado-Torres, this volume). One could say that Fanon provided the first framework for critical phenomenology (Weiss, Salamon, and Murphy 2019). There is another political reason why this is extremely important. It is part of the very apparatus of structural hierarchy and domination (such as racism and sexism) that the affected are silenced and excluded from participation. The “natural attitude” of hegemonic lives includes rendering racialized differences invisible. Usually, in philosophy, it has taken the form of subtle norm making that favors that which is “scientific or academic,” which immediately discredits anything “personal.” From the onset, the personal accounts of those who are affected are not considered important (“they just whine”), politically as well as philosophically, but mostly because of the already-existing racialized norms of the society in which those who are non-white must always try extra hard to “fit in,” and this requires that one shuts up and pretend there is really no such thing as the problem of racism (which is itself a practice of color-blind racism). It is easy to contend or even complain that there is racism and that it is bad and that there are victims without including the experiences of those who were actually affected by it in the philosophical conversations about race. Race has been analyzed in terms of justice, ethics, morality, and political philosophy in a normative manner but mostly theoretically by those who had never really been victimized (as most philosophers in Europe and the US are white). What Fanon and those phenomenologists of race who followed the Fanonian approach have enabled is challenging this whole meta-philosophical and political hegemony of the dominant class that had always established the norms of discourse and who participated. Critical phenomenology has opened up a methodological space in which the affected could legitimately participate. This is necessary not only for better philosophical analysis but also as a source for new forms of resistance (Bobel and Kwan 2011). The discrediting move can still be observed (“That’s not serious phenomenology”), but those who continue to challenge the tradition are quite happy to have their own space finally. It was a long path that had to be paved, but now phenomenology of race is here to stay. 377

Yoko Arisaka

3.  Recent Developments During the civil rights era and afterward in the 1970s through the 1990s, many Black philosophers continued to be a part of engaged academic activism and resistance. They became the pioneers of philosophy of race today. Some of these thinkers included Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Cornel West, Leonard Harris, and Bernard Boxill. West’s 1993 book Race Matters, which he wrote for a general public, helped put the issue of racism in the public discussion in the US. It was the first widely read work that described racism as an existential problem that affects Black persons for generations. With it, society as a whole becomes degraded in a state of hopelessness. From the late 80s to the 90s, more philosophers of race began to emerge—the early contributions by Theo Goldberg (1993), Naomi Zack (1993, 1998, 2000), K. Anthony Appiah (1992), Lucius Outlaw (1996), Kwasi Wiredu (1980, 1996) and others paved the way to carving out a recognizable place within philosophy. However, philosophy as a whole still marginalized anything to do with race—while one could respectably specialize in theories of justice or injustice, as soon as one included discussions of racism, it was no longer “serious philosophy” but politics. The same was true for ethics, political philosophy, social philosophy, and any other sub-fields, including phenomenology. Thus, the topic of racism was avoided not only by white philosophers who considered it “unimportant” but also by philosophers and graduate students of color, who were already in marginalized, precarious positions. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that philosophy of race really became an established sub-field within philosophy, and it was, importantly, through the contributions of phenomenologists and other continental philosophers. Philosophers who are known today as the leading figures in race, such as Alcoff (2006, 2021), Bernasconi (2023), Lewis Gordon (1995, 2023) and Yancy (2016), became major figures in phenomenological and existential work, making philosophy of race visible and providing space for an explosion of young philosophers specializing in critical philosophies of race in the last 20 years. Phenomenology allowed the participation of the philosophers and graduate students of color to legitimately pursue race issues in philosophy through their first-person accounts of how they have been affected. The debates also shifted from anti-Black racism to reflect a much wider demographic concern. The newly emerged debates about racism included Asian, Native American, Arab, and Hispanic perspectives, which have different foci: These groups face racism that also includes xenophobia, nationalism, nativism, anti-migration, anti-immigration, charges of invasion, and non-Christianity.11 The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race was established in 2004,12 partly in order to expand the terms of the debates beyond the black-white binary. The works by the younger generation of phenomenologists that reflect this wider demographic change include Sara Ahmed, who was one of the earlier theorists who included race in her Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). As already mentioned, Mariana Ortega refers to Heideggerian existential ontology and elaborates on the notion of the “world traveling” of Maria Lugones and other Latina feminists in In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016). Emily S. Lee has edited two volumes on phenomenology and race, Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2014) and Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race (2019), both of which have become standard reference points for phenomenologists who work on race. In Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism 378

Race

and Racialized Embodiment (2017), Helen Ngo draws resources from Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Fanon, but her examples come from the experiences of being Asian in the USA. An anthology by Weiss, Salamon, and Murphy (2019), 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, also includes chapters on phenomenology of race. The shift to widen the race debates beyond the black-white framework has not been uncontroversial, however. Many Asians, for example, are seen as privileged, white identified, “white adjacent,” and well-educated, so they may not be considered “victims” in the way African Americans are. Hispanics as well as Asians are targets of anti-immigration nationalism in a way African Americans are not, as African Americans are considered “American.” Both Asians and Hispanics are targets of xenophobic racism, but they are not part of the post-slavery narrative.13 Native Americans were internally colonized and face racism but not xenophobia, and they do not share the post-slavery history yet face another intra-US history of racism. Thus, it is challenged whether to “dilute” the race debate by including all the other “ethnicities” with mixed relations to racism. These issues continue to be under discussion.14 Yet, again, it is the strength of the phenomenological method that allows a detailed analysis of these different forms of racism.

4. Outlook So far, most of the literature on the phenomenology of racialization is based on US contexts and this framework, utilizing the traditional American race categories of Black, white, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and so on. However, there is much need to elaborate on the phenomenologies of race in other regions, such as Europe, Africa, the Arabic world, India, Asia, and other parts of the world, as well as their entanglements. The historical as well as cultural and political contexts are quite different from the developments in the US, and the US-based frameworks may not be suited; there is no reason these American categories must be used in other contexts. The European analyses might include migration and post-migration identities, subtle neocolonial operations, Islamophobia, anti-Ziganism, and other forms of cultural racism. Language is a matter here, too. For example, a lot of the work of influential French anti-racist thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire has not or has only recently been translated into English. Africa tends to be framed in terms of Europe in decolonial analyses most of the time, but there are extremely rich historical as well as current strands in Africa that may be fruitful to examine phenomenologically.15 The Arabic-speaking regions are culturally so diverse that one can hardly put them together in one theoretical framework. Islamic regions have similar diversity—Indonesia is Islamic but shares more culturally with other Asian cultures than other Arabic-Islamic cultures. Intra-Asian racisms (for example, Japanese racism against the Chinese and Koreans) have relations to Eurocentrism, yet there are few discussions of this topic generally, let alone phenomenologically.16 All these cultural variations yield different intersectional emphases and relations to religion or other cultural markers. Inclusion of the racialized subjects in other regional analyses in global terms is a step in loosening up the US hegemony in philosophy of race generally and also in phenomenology of race specifically. In the US, it has become quite standard at least to acknowledge that there are philosophers of color practicing phenomenologies of race in philosophy. As mentioned before, this is a necessary methodological move; the moment one includes race and racism as an academic topic, the actual political practice of philosophy can no longer be ignored as that 379

Yoko Arisaka

is part and parcel of the problem itself. In Europe, however, this recognition is still lacking. Philosophy remains largely a theoretical and “academic” field. Philosophy continues to remain Eurocentric, politically white-male-dominated, with most of its colonial framework intact. The way out would indeed be to include more philosophers of color who would challenge the tradition by including their points of view through phenomenology. This is a long transition; however, Europe, too, is going through a radical demographical transformation. Just as the US is becoming increasingly “majority minority,”17 Europe, too, is shifting in this direction. Racism will become an unavoidable issue in the near future, and philosophy can no longer ignore the shift. It is also a matter of academic responsibility that a serious engagement with its history of colonialism and racism must be integrated into the self-understanding of philosophy.18 In order to expand its self-understanding, it is also necessary that the horizons of knowledge about philosophies in non-European regions be expanded, and for this, again, a more diverse body of philosophers must participate. Here, too, phenomenology would be extremely valuable. While Asian philosophies have had a small place within philosophy, there are few phenomenological analyses. Generally, philosophies from the so-called “South” have been almost nonexistent in European philosophical literatures. Thus, there is a need to address the patterns of “knowledge reproduction.” We (re) produce the discipline by the process of inclusion and exclusion. If we keep repeating the non-racist version of the history of philosophy as well as phenomenology and continue to pretend that philosophy is “color blind,” we will never reach the realities of the racialized and marginalizing practice and what the reality and history look like from the perspectives of the marginalized. In this sense, we may have to abandon our narrow conception of what “philosophy” must be. We operate in a circular manner; we deem other philosophies “not real philosophy” only because they don’t fit our purportedly scientific definition, but this is just as “ethnocentric” as when we regard other practices to be ethnocentric to their confines of cultural discourses. The European discourse on universality (rational knowledge is not locally bound) ensures that philosophy, which is considered a part of this universality, is also deemed universal. Phenomenology of race may be precisely what can decenter this particular European understanding of philosophy if the voices of the affected become more integrated into an overall commitment to anti-racism. Another distinct issue might include examining the relation (or lack thereof) with antisemitism. Are Jews racialized? If so, in what way—is the form of racialization similar or different to other forms of racialization? As with the problem of racialization all across the globe, antisemitism has regional differences that may as varied as the racializations. Perhaps antisemitism is not subsumable under anti-racism; currently, these areas are distinct, and antisemitism is an area of research on its own, not subsumed under philosophy of race. It might be interesting to further examine the phenomenological content of the difference. Finally, there is a need to revisit the entire meta-philosophical, overdetermining framework of the “perpetrator-victim” paradigm as well as identity politics. An ironic result of the advancement of the scholarship of the affected in the last 50 years in various areas (feminism, race, sexual identity, and other topics that come under attack as political correctness) is the fact of even stronger backlash. The previously privileged, dominating class (the “white heterosexual male”) now feels silenced in the presumably “PC-dominated” academia, and they are on the offense again. In March 2022, the Florida legislature passed a bill that prohibits educators from teaching critical race theory (which includes teachings about slavery, reparations, anti-immigration, and other content critical of white supremacy). 380

Race

In  Germany, the Network for Academic Freedom (Netzwerk Wissenschaftsfreiheit) was established in 2021; it began as a collective of (liberal) academics who wanted to defend the freedom of expression; however, they actually meant criticizing a postulated PC-related political control of the academic milieu. They feel censored and silenced for their lack of reference for topics such as gender, race, and sexuality. It began among a small number of academics through a website, but it quickly grew, and now it has over 700 signatories. All this is not helpful in advancing scholarship for all parties involved. There should be a new kind of phenomenological articulation of this very problem for further clarification, perhaps to establish an arena for possible negotiation. Such an articulation may not just be by the affected, but it might also have to include the traditional dominating class (though this may be risky for other reasons, such as giving them yet again too much space, which they already have in traditional academic contexts). Phenomenology of racialization is much more than the descriptive account of the process of racialization among those who have been racialized. By including the perspective of the affected, it gains an activist role which can challenge and potentially alter the face of philosophy as a discipline, as it is slowly happening in the US. Beyond the US context, it could potentially be a contributing factor in changing the self-understanding of philosophy itself to become more inclusive worldwide. This may sound like a self-aggrandizing claim, but phenomenology of racialization is particularly suited in its first-person methodology of including the articulations of previously marginalized persons. The current demographic shift worldwide may require just such a shift in philosophy, and phenomenology will, in this sense, continue to make contributions.

Notes 1 For a discussion of a “contempt matrix” as constituting personal racism, see Kim (1999). 2 See Park 2014 for a detailed discussion. 3 “Rassismus ist die verallgemeinerte und verabsolutierte Wertung tatsächlicher oder fiktiver biologischer Eigenschaften zum Nutzen des Anklägers und zum Schaden des Opfers, um damit eine Aggression zu rechtfertigen” (author’s translation). 4 For a detailed discussion, see Arisaka 2010. 5 Historically, the early activist thinkers who influenced the tradition included Sojourner Truth (abolitionist and civil rights activist, 1797–1883), Frederick Douglass (abolitionist and writer, 1817 or 1818–1895), W.E.B. Dubois (sociologist and historian, 1868–1963), and Alain Locke (philosopher and writer, 1885–1954). During the Civil Rights era and beyond, thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X were well-known activist intellectuals. In Africa/Europe, Frantz Fanon (psychiatrist and Marxist philosopher, 1925–1961), Aimé Césaire (writer and politician, 1913–2008), and Albert Memmi (writer and sociologist, 1920–2020) were influential. In the US context, anti-slavery, racism, reparations, and white supremacy were some of the main themes. In the European context, these were colonialism, European and white supremacy, and racism. 6 See, for example, Zack 2017 and Taylor, Alcoff, and Anderson 2018. 7 For further discussion on critical philosophy of race, see Essed and Goldberg 2002, Alcoff 2021, and Bernasconi 2023. 8 See Alcoff 2019 for elaboration on this point. 9 See Judaken 2008 for a collection of essays on the Sartrean analyses on racism. 10 For a recent discussion of Fanon, see Gordon 2015. 11 For an analysis of Asian American identity that addresses these issues, see Kim 2007 and Sundstrom 2008. See also Arisaka 2000 for a discussion of Asian women in philosophy. 12 https://caroundtable.org/. 13 For a discussion of the differences between Latinos and Blacks, see Gracia 2007.

381

Yoko Arisaka 4 See Kim and Sundstrom 2023 for a detailed account of the new forms that race debates must take. 1 15 On African phenomenology, see Olivier, Lamola, and Sands 2023. Though not primarily phenomenological, for an extensive historical and philosophical analysis of philosophies in Africa, see Graneß 2023. See also Gordon 2017. 16 Though not specifically on race, there is an earlier anthology of essays on Japanese phenomenology. See Nitta and Tatematsu 1979. On a Chinese discussion of phenomenology “beyond Orientalism,” see Li 2022. 17 By 2022, seven states had already become “majority-minority states” (whites as the minority), and, if the trend continues, by the mid-2040s, the entire US will be majority minority. Race and ethnicity issues are expected to become major fields of public as well as academic debates. 18 See Park 2014 for an analysis as well as collections of racist material in the history of philosophy. See, for instance, the introduction by Elberfeld 2021a, as well as Elberfeld 2021b (open access) and Elberfeld 2017.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. “Philosophie und Race als Identität.” DZPhil 67 (4): 589–603. ———. 2021. “Critical Philosophy of Race.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-phil-race/. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father’s House: African in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Arisaka, Yoko. 2000. “Asian Women: Invisibility, Locations, and Claims to Philosophy.” In Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical Reader, edited by Naomi Zack, 219–23. Malden, MA/London: Blackwell. ———. 2010. “Paradox of Dignity: Everyday Racism and the Failure of Multiculturalism.” Ethik und Gesellschaft 10 (2). https://doi.org/10.18156/eug-2-2010-art-3. Bernasconi, Robert, ed. 2001. Race. Malden, MA/London: Blackwell. ———. 2023. Critical Philosophy of Race. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Blum, Lawrence. 2002. “I’m Not a Racist, But .  .  .”. The Moral Quandary of Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bobel, Chris, und Samantha Kwan, eds. 2011. Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Elberfeld, Rolf. 2017. Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung in globaler Perspektive. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 2021a. “Geschichte der Geschichten der Philosophie in Horizont verschiedener Sprachen Weltweit. Erste Ergebnisse des Koselleck Projects.” Polylog 46: 7–20. ———. 2021b. Dekoloniales Philosophieren. Versuch über philosophische Verantwortung und Kritik im Horizont der europäischen Expansion. Hildesheim: Olms Verlag. Essed, Philomena, and David Theo Goldberg. 2002. Race Critical Theories. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Goldberg, David Theo. 1993. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. ———. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2017. “Phenomenology and Race.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 294–304. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2023. Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gracia, Jorge, ed. 2007. Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

382

Race Graneß, Anke. 2023. Philosophie in Afrika. Herausforderungen einer globalen Philosophiegeschichte. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Judaken, Jonathan. 2008. Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2020. “Sartre’s Multidirectional Anti-Racism.” In Sartre, Jews, and the Other, edited by Manuela Consonni und Vivian Liska, 107–30. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kim, David H. 1999. “Contempt and Ordinary Inequality.” In Racism and Philosophy, edited by Susan Babbitt and Sue Campbell, 108–23. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. “What is Asian-American Philosophy?” In Philosophy in Multiple Voices, edited by George Yancy, 219–71. Lanham, MD/Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. ———, and Ronald Sundstrom. 2023. “Anti-Asian Racism.” American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4): 411–24. Lee, Emily. 2014. Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2019. Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Li, Jingjing. 2022. Comparing Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism. New York: Bloomsbury. Memmi, Albert. 1987. Rassismus. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag. Ngo, Helen. 2017. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Nitta, Yoshihiro, and Hirotaka Tatematsu, eds. 1979. Japanese Phenomenology: Phenomenology as the Trans-Cultural Philosophical Approach. Analecta Husserliana 8. Heidelberg: Springer Nature. Olivier, Abraham, M. John Lamola, and Justin Sands, eds. 2023. Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges. Albany: SUNY Press. Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: State University of New York Press. Outlaw, Lucius. 1996. On Race and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Park, Peter. 2014. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sundstrom, Ronald. 2008. The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Taylor, Paul, Linda Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. New York/London: Routledge. Terkessidis, Mark. 2004. Die Banalität des Rassismus: Migranten zweiter Generation entwickeln eine neue Perspektive. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Weiss, Gail, Gayle Salamon, and Ann V. Murphy, eds. 2019. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. West, Cornel. 1993. Race Matters. New York: Beacon Press. Wiredu, Kwasi. 1980. Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiredu, Kwasi. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yancy, George. 2016. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Zack, Naomi. 1993. Race and Mixed Race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 1998. Thinking about Race. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. ———. 2000. Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Malden, MA/London: Blackwell. ———, ed. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

383

28 INTERSECTIONALITY1 Emily S. Lee

1. Introduction The identity group women of color remains one of the most elusive and difficult to understand because it is both too specific and too broad. There is an ethical and political urgency to center the experiences of women of color. Although Simone de Beauvoir’s introduction of the experiences of gender and Frantz Fanon’s introduction of the specific experiences of race transform phenomenology into political phenomenology, a focus on the intersectional experiences of women of color requires more contextualized attention to the influence of sex and race on each other. The concept of intersectionality aims to depict the complex experiences of both race and sex. The absence of focus on the intersectional experiences of women of color results in unpredictable and inadvertent manipulations and strategies of highlighting one identifying feature to oppressively enforce the other identifying feature. Intersectionality is one of the initial concepts to illuminate the complex experiences of women of color, but the concept has faced much criticism recently. Most poignantly, Patricia Hill Collins argues that intersectionality does not account for conceptualizing the experiences race and sex, as a group identity. Collins (1998) proposes that subjects with intersectional identities must address intragroup heterogeneity and intergroup homogeneity or heterogenous commonality. Although the idea is very intriguing, it needs elaboration. To better conceptualize intersectionality for women of color, this chapter proposes ­understanding experience. It is the experiences of women of color that need better ­understanding—still. Through a phenomenological focus on experience, the notion of ­heterogenous commonality as a means for coalition building will be elaborated and defended. Only a few phenomenologists have discussed the concept of intersectionality. Linda Martin Alcoff (2006), Mariana Ortega (2016), and Helen Ngo (2017) utilize the phenomenological framework to engage with intersectional subjects. Their work is especially admirable, for they do not center on the experience of discrimination and oppression but elaborate on the confusing experiences of intersectional identifying features for subjects with more than one group identity, more than one world. This chapter contributes to these earlier discussions by focusing specifically on Collins’s (1998) critique of intersectionality and her modified p ­ roposal of heterogenous commonality. 384

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-41

Intersectionality

This chapter also evokes phenomenological forebears such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and their emphasis on the lifeworld and phenomenologists such as Alfred Schütz and Hannah Arendt and their attention to the social world. It explores the ontological structure of experience through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty because of his emphasis on embodiment and its relation to experience.2 Phenomenology has been summarily likened to the study of experience. Without accepting this reductive characterization, phenomenology’s attention to experience aligns with much of the investigations in the philosophy of race. The phenomenological understanding of the ontological and social structures of experience depicts the ambiguous, open structure of experience that admits heterogeneity. Phenomenology denies that certainty or universality characterizes the structure of experience. The phenomenological framework understands experience in its complexity. A phenomenological lens can support realizing heterogenous commonality. This chapter centers on the distances in the structure of experience between the subject and the world, between undergoing and reflecting on the experience, and between the experience and the language, both to understand and to convey the experience. Attention to the distances in the structure of experience can facilitate recognizing the internal, intragroup heterogenous commonality of the identity group, women of color.

2.  Intersectional Subjects The notion of intersectionality has been much discussed by feminist theorists—a good indicator of the complexity and the importance of the idea. Defining and defending the notion of intersectionality, Vivian May writes, “Drawing on knowledge gained from marginalization, its theoretical contours include the notion that social location and the lived body are epistemically significant” (2014, 96). Starting from the basis of women’s lives, much like feminist standpoint theory, “[i]t seeks epistemic and political recognition of different ways of knowing and living and envisions changed social relations via coalitional dynamics rather than notions of sameness underlying liberal notions of equality” (May 2014, 96). All women of color do not undergo uniform experiences, but, in their complexity, women of color’s experiences are somehow distinguishable from a single axis of oppression. The notion of intersectionality relies on references to experience, perhaps more so than those who experience single-axis oppression of only gender, race, or class. Admittedly, it is arguable whether anyone absolutely experiences a single axis of oppression. The term “intersectionality” is most attributed to the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, but others have proposed the notion.3 Notably, Crenshaw’s deployment highlights the very real dangers of domestic violence and rape for women of color. The following examples illustrate the importance of attending to the specific intersectional experiences of women of color as their experiences persist as the most consistently evasive. Neglecting the relationships between race and sex results in serious social, economic, and physical harms. Crenshaw’s work argues that neglecting the experiences of women of color permits and perpetuates physical and sexual violence. Historically, attending to only racism harmed women of color; Crenshaw (1995, 361) explains that the apprehension of communities of color about perpetuating existing stereotypes about black men as violent, prohibited publicizing the existence of domestic violence within their communities, outweighing the urgency of assisting women of color experiencing domestic violence. Helen Zia shows the difficulty of applying hate crime laws to women of color as potential 385

Emily S. Lee

victims of hate crimes. Under the present set of hate crime laws, only men can experience hate crimes (Zia 1997, 207–14). Alternatively, focusing only on feminist concerns harmed women of color; the feminist movement forwarded the universality of domestic violence— that all women may experience violence regardless of income and race—to pass federal legislation on domestic violence. This strategy inherently admits that legislators were well aware of the existence of domestic violence within communities of color, yet these communities’ pain alone did not warrant national attention (Crenshaw 1995, 361). Reflective of the universalizing strategy in the passage of the bill, its enactment was not sensitive to the specific needs of women of color; the placement of shelters and sensitivity to Englishspeaking ability were not considered in the services. Elizabeth Spelman (1988, 63, 75) elaborates on Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that white women adhere to sexism to maintain their class and race privileges.4 These examples illustrate the coincidental repercussions of not foreseeing the intersections between race and sex. More recently, analysis of intersectionality foregrounds the strategy of competitively positioning one group against the other for intragroup and intergroup competition. Aimé Carillo Rowe writes that “the ‘race to innocence,’ a politics based in a hierarchy of oppression, compels us to invest in our particular marginality through the erasure of our complicity in oppressing others” (2010, 93). Those who experience one form of oppression have historically occupied positions in contrast and in competition with one another, overlooking Maria Lugones’s analysis of the intermeshedness of oppression ⇔ oppressed. Traci C. West quotes Homa Hoodfar, who states, “ ‘Muslim feminists have often asked, must ­racism be used to fight sexism?’ ” (2010, 172). Proliferating racism served as an entryway for advances in feminist concerns. Sumi K. Cho (1997, 166) explains that Asian American women have been situated against white women and African American women.5 Cho’s work illustrates the competitive positioning of women of color. Racism ultimately undercuts feminist possibilities by challenging coalition building among women of color and women in general. Or consider the history of justifying colonizing practices in the name of protecting third-world women. Gender normalization hides racial oppression; racism reinforces sexism. Perhaps due to the importance of the idea of intersectionality, it faces many criticisms. The following are three of the more prescient criticisms listed.6 One well-known point of critique does not apply. Mariana Ortega explains that [Michael Hames-Garcia and Maria Lugones] are critical of the notion of intersectionality. . . . [They argue that the notion of] intersectionality assume[s] the separation of the different axes of oppression. Consequently, they opt for the intermeshedness and blending of social identities to emphasize that the axes of oppression are to be understood as mutually constituted. (Ortega 2016, 72)7 Hames-Garcia and Lugones insist that sexism and racism are inseparable. Second, Helen Ngo explains, through Alia Al Saji’s work, a temporal concern; “intersectionality can be problematic insofar as it can operate on the assumption that there already exists relatively stable axes of race and gender (or any other social identities) which converge or ‘intersect’ when a person falls concurrently within both categories” (2017, 34). Al Saji carefully posits not only the intermeshedness of sexism and racism but also the temporality of the assumed periods of welded in contrast to persistent separate expressions. 386

Intersectionality

Acknowledging these first two criticisms, let me submit that Crenshaw never conceived the notion of race and sex as separate entities. Anna Carastathis quotes Crenshaw from her initial introduction: [I]n mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable. (2013, 946)8 In other words, Crenshaw shows awareness of Hames-Garcia’s, Lugones’s, Ngo’s, and Al Saji’s concerns about recognizing the intermeshedness between race and gender. Clearly, Crenshaw acknowledges the continuous relationship between the two. Patricia Hill Collins defends the possibilities with the notion of intersectionality even as she articulates its limitations. Here, two of Collins’ criticisms are addressed. First, the notion of intersectionality promotes thinking about all oppressions as equivalent. Collins explains: [O]ppression talk obscures actual unjust power relations. . . . Although this approach is valid as a heuristic device, treating race, class, and gender as if their intersection produces equivalent results for all oppressed groups obscures differences in how race, class, and gender are hierarchically organized as well as the differential effects of intersecting systems of power on diverse groups of people. (1998, 211) Collins identifies two distinguishable organizing principles—race and class—as distancing strategies and gender as inclusionary strategies. She writes, Although race and gender both mark the body in similar (but not identical) ways, in the United States they are organized in social relations quite differently. Race-class intersections operate primarily through distancing strategies associated with racial and economic segregation. Groups remain separated from one another and do not see themselves as sharing common interests. (Collins 1998, 209–10) Collins continues that “[i]n contrast, gender is organized via inclusionary strategies. . . . Women are encouraged to develop a commonality of interest with men” (1998, 210).9 Collins astutely highlights differences in the functioning of the group identities of race and sex. Focusing on Collins’ second concern, she writes, “[i]ntersectionality works better as a substantive theory (one aimed at developing principles that can be proved true or false) when applied to individual-level behavior than when documenting group experiences” (1998, 206).10 Looking more closely at this latter critique from Collins, we can see two different ways to read it: (1) as a concern for essentialism, in that championing an individual’s experiences does not necessarily speak to the experiences of the identity group as a whole and (2) as a question challenging intersectionality as a theoretical or political strategy. 387

Emily S. Lee

Turning to the first reading of Collins’ second argument, this problem of individualism imbuing group analyses is concerned with essentialism, or regarding any one person as representative of the group. However, the problem of essentialism does not uniquely circumscribe intersectional identity groups. The difficulty of avoiding essentializing the members of any group identity persists even within single-axis identifiers such as African American men or white women. The concern of eschewing essentialism centers on admitting differences among the members of any identity group.11 Hence, Collins’s concern that the idea of intersectionality does not well “document” group experience demonstrates the difficulty of theorizing group experiences in general, whether about single-axis identity groups (however this is framed) or this more specific and more complex identity group, women of color, who experience the intertwined and intermeshed expressions of at least two oppressions. The concern about individualism and essentialism regarding groups centers on identifying patterns of oppression without assuming that all the members undergo similar experiences of oppression and derive similar epistemic conclusions. For this reason, individuals cannot wholly represent the group, even though not representing the group is unavoidable. While acknowledging the dangers of essentialism in any attempt to identify a group identity, portraying the specific experience of intersectionality remains important, and some means of referring to group experience is necessary. Turning to the second possible reading of Collins’s second argument, regarding the difficulties of intersectionality as a theoretical or political strategy, let us focus on Audre Lorde’s words here. She writes about identity groups who have been historically maligned: “[A]dvancement is not simply about individual success. It also involves collective uplift and solidarity” (Havis 2014, 248).12 Lorde illuminates that, for oppressed groups, individual fate is linked with group fate. Hence, although no individual can represent the group in its essence, for minority subjects, our individual fates are integrally tied to our group identity. Marginalized identity groups cannot escape racial stigmas individually; the personal situation is always entangled with the group. We must conceptualize groups. Ortega’s words help here; she recognizes the shared and different experiences among members of one’s identity groups. She writes, My life and the lives of others are always intertwined . . . identity-in-process and by both positionality and relationality. . . . I hold a contextualist view of identity. . . . I  propose that we understand the multiplicitous self as capable of having a coalitional politics that is attuned to multiplicity, difference, and the intersectional or intermeshed aspects between race, class, sexuality, gender, ability, nationality, and other categories. This coalitional politics is about being/belonging or about identifications with others with whom I share identity markers, but it is also about becoming or the possibility of being transformed through my interactions with others. (Ortega 2016, 162)13 Ortega envisions an understanding of groups as fluid by working toward better comprehending our unavoidable linked fate to our group identity through participating in forming our group identity. A fluid understanding of groups—not a rigid understanding—facilitates Collins’s concern about the notion of intersectionality serving as a theoretical or political tool. In emphasizing a contextualist understanding of identity, Ortega features different aspects of any individual identity becoming salient in sundry contexts. Essentialism and recognizing that no one individual can represent the whole group is a concern; nevertheless, 388

Intersectionality

minority subjects must always grapple with their group identity. Recognizing the fluidity of groups and the contextualist circumstances for activating some intertwined and intermeshed feature of at least two, if not more, group identities does not imply that all group identities follow similar organizing principles. The unique value of individual experience, the differences among identity groups, the linked fate of minority subjects with their group identities, and the possibility of identity groups developing and changing all need consideration. Admitting internal heterogeneity and the need for coalition building within the identity group women of color, Collins forwards the notion of “heterogeneous commonality.” Regarding African American women, Collins writes, Shared group location is better characterized by viewing Black women’s social location as one of a heterogeneous commonality embedded in social relations of intersectionality. Despite heterogeneity among African American women that accompanies such intersections, differences in Black women’s experiences . . . theoretically can all be accommodated within the concept of a shared standpoint. (1998, 224) Anna Carastathis applies Collins’s work on conceptualizing groups as a heterogeneous commonality to coalition building among Latin American lesbian women (2013, 942). Carastathis writes, [I]f identity categories are coalitions—constituted by internal differences as much as by commonalities—then this changes how we think about the political task of ­coalitional organizing. The emphasis shifts from forming coalitions across group ­differences to recognizing that groups are already internally heterogeneous. (2013, 945)14 After all, the process of determining what is common and what is different relies on our focus, our project at hand.15 Collins, Carastathis, and Ortega propose recognizing the internal heterogeneity as a bridge to thinking about the relations of women of color. Internal heterogeneity or heterogenous commonality can function as a framework to conceptualize intragroup homogeneity—the definition of the identity group women of color. However, the experience of one marginality does not guarantee understanding the experience of another marginal position.16 How do we attend to the idea of internal heterogeneity or heterogenous commonality and avoid essentialism? The threat of essentialism prevails with any group identity; group identity, by definition, structurally and inherently has commonalities and differences in the fluidity of prioritizing any one individual and group features in our becoming. The question of which features to emphasize and which to deemphasize depends on the project at hand, be it political to change society or community building for personal survival.17

3.  The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: Three Distances Here, toward better understanding heterogenous commonality, we turn to a phenomenological understanding of the ontological structure of experience, which may illuminate both the linked fate conditions of women of color and the individuality of their experiences. Merleau-Ponty defines understanding experience as the philosophical problem par 389

Emily S. Lee

excellence. He writes, “Philosophy’s task is to reinstate [truth] in the private field of experience from which it arises and elucidates its origin” (1962, 40f.)18 Merleau-Ponty follows his forebears Husserl and Heidegger in expressing high regard for understanding experience. Phenomenology theorizes the ambiguous quality of experience as both unique and shared, for any relation with the world is always muted. Perhaps phenomenology may clarify complex identity groups, especially the heterogenous commonality of intersectional subjects. Merleau-Ponty writes, It is just as sure that the relation between a thought and its object, between the cogito and the cogitatum, contains neither the whole nor even the essential of our commerce with the world and that we have to situate that relation back within a more muted relationship with the world, within an initiation into the world upon which it rests. (1968, 35)19 A phenomenology of experience aims to depict experience-in-itself in its ambiguity. Let us begin with three common features of experience: (1) subjects, (2) the world in its materiality and its meaning structures, and (3) time or the temporality of all three features. These three ambiguous elements relate, influence, and function, embedded together in experience. Merleau-Ponty refuses to reduce experience to any of these three features. He writes, [I]f I express this experience by saying that the things are in their place and that we fuse with them, I immediately make the experience itself impossible: for in the measure that the thing is approached, I cease to be; in the measure that I am, there is no thing, but only a double of it in my “camera obscura.” (ibid., 122) These three ambiguous, irreducible features are all necessary for experience. Yet exactly how these features influence each other is not systematic and remains unclear—hence, the ambiguity of experience. Heeding the constraints of space, rather than dwelling on explaining these three features, we can assume some shared understanding about them. Here, the focus is on three distances in the relations among these three features of experience: (1) the distance between the subject and the world, including other subjects; (2) the distance between undergoing the experience and reflecting on the experience; and (3) the distance between the experience and the language with which to understand or to communicate the experience. These distances uphold the nonessentialist structure of experience, forming its ambiguity. Turning to the first distance, within the two poles of the subject and the world, MerleauPonty writes, “[w]e are interrogating our experience precisely in order to know how it opens us to what is not ourselves” (1968, 159).20 Experience opens us to that which lies external to the embodied subject. Yet this exposure does not ensue as an absolute exterior in the traditional sense. The Gestaltian relation of the figure within a background or the theme in a horizon insists that isolated figures or themes defy human experience. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[w]hen we come back to phenomena we find, as a basic layer of experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning, not sensations with gaps between them” (1962, 20f.).21 The subject and the world exist always in relation in the Gestaltian or phenomenal sense; the subject and the world are not separable, although, an infinite chasm structures this relation. This distance is neither placid nor static; continual 390

Intersectionality

change and movement mark the relation between the subject and the world. The becoming of each participant in this relation conditions the distance. Recognizing the simultaneous relatedness and the distance between the subject and the world, including other subjects, characterizes the difference between dialectical and phenomenological frameworks. Dialectic and hermeneutic relations only attend to the influence one pole has on the other, but not how both the poles influence the distance or the depth of the connection between them. Phenomenological frameworks specifically heed the distance between the two poles. Second, Edmund Husserl posits a temporal lag in the interstice between undergoing the experience and the subject reflecting and coming to understand the experience. This temporal lag captures the phenomenological experience of the subject endeavoring to comprehend the meaning of the experience. The subject’s ordering of the meaningfulness of her experience ultimately impacts the discernment of the experience and her own subjecthood. Francoise Dastur explains, Husserl brings to light the principal “delay” of every reflection on the already-there of the world and shows that to reflect is not to coincide with the flux of intentional life. On the contrary, to reflect is to free kernels of meaning, intelligible articulations, and then to reconstruct the flux “après coup.” (2000, 26) As Merleau-Ponty writes: [R]eflection finds itself therefore in the strange situation of simultaneously requiring and excluding an inverse movement of constitution. It requires it in that, without this centrifugal movement, it should have to acknowledge itself to be a retrospective construction; it excludes it in that, coming in principle after an experience of the world or of the true which it seeks to render explicit. (1968, 45)22 In experiencing, one is unaware of the role of reflection, but when coming to understand the experience, reflection constitutes it. An interplay of including and excluding, opening and closing oneself to the prevailing meaning systems requires time. This distance between experiencing and reflecting on the experience occurs within a cyclical and, in a sense, inverse flow of time. During this time, the subject does not passively absorb the experience. Knowledge about the experience does not simply settle into the subject; meaning is not given. In part through her intentions, the subject actively, existentially creates meaning about the experience. But the subject, as historically and contextually situated, cannot possess full self-knowledge; hence, the subject always has a bias. Such bias especially indicates that meaning is, in part, immanent to the subject. Because the subject actively engages in meaning making, the temporal distance between undergoing and reflecting on the experience has existential significance. Lewis Gordon describes this existential paradox: “I face my future self, the self who will come about as the choice I will make. But at the moment of that choice, I will face a self that is a feature of my past” (1999, 14).23 The reflecting subject can never catch up with her being because the reflection occurs after the experience, or the reflecting subject always exceeds her being because the reflection existentially orders the past toward facing the future. Whichever way one looks at it, this distance of reflecting on one’s experiences 391

Emily S. Lee

structures the meaning of the subject’s understanding of her past, her present, and her future. Because of this temporal lag, upon coming to completion of the reflection (however temporarily), the world and the self differ from the beginning of the reflection. Let us turn to the third distance: between the experience and the words to communicate it. Because of the encompassing nature of language, in the difficulty, if not impossibility of thinking without language, language obfuscates its role in experience. Unlike the poststructural (epitomized in Joan Scott’s) conclusion that there is only language, phenomenology still insists on subjects, a world, and experiences of the world. Without getting too carried away with a discussion about language, let us acknowledge that Merleau-Ponty’s work appears to be well aware of the translation “transition and translocation,” which trace the “historical indexing” of linguistic meanings that far exceeds language’s role as simply representation of experience. Krzystof Ziarek writes, These markings of alterity—the continuous reopening within language of a distance or an infold without any point of origin—trace the historical indexing of language: They inaugurate history as the in-thinking, the memoration (Eingedenken, Andenken) not of a past which once took place but rather of the dehiscence which, spacing the past and the present, (re)opens history as an interval. (2001, 66)24 Because of language’s rich and playful relation with meaning, language does not just convey the world and experiences of the world. Language exceeds simply portraying the physical, empirical realities of the world. Yet language always falls short of thoroughly, completely, in any saturated sense, communicating the experience of the world in its entirety. For, after all, language is in itself not a finished, static structure. Dialectically and hermeneutically, language inaugurates history even while history contextualizes language in its meaning development. A depth of distance lies between language and experience.

4. Conclusion From this examination of the ontological structure of experience, three conclusions are drawn. First, the phenomenal structure of experience demonstrates its inherent openness. Because of the distances in the structure of experience, experience is necessarily never total or complete, with clear boundaries demarking the beginning and the end. Because of the subject’s individual history and, hence, biases, each individual experiences situatedness in a particular place on the horizon of the world. The parameters of experience remain open on both spatial and temporal horizons. Such openness denies singularity/individuality; Merleau-Ponty insists that “we have no right to level all experiences down to a single world, all modalities of existence down to a single consciousness” (1962, 290). The openness in the structure of experience contends that subjects never have absolutely isolated experiences and are always in relation with the world and others. Second, and perhaps similarly, the openness at the heart of the structure of experience holds nonidentity. The nonidentity is such an inherent part of the structure of experience that Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is no longer identity between the lived experience and the principle of noncontradiction” (1968, 87). And again, “[b]etween the manifest content and the latent content, there can be not only differences but also contradiction” (1968, 90).

392

Intersectionality

The three distances between the subject and the world, within the subject prior and after reflection, and between experience and language, are inherently nonidentities, in defiance of the possibility of correspondence among these relations. Such nonidentity persists also for shared experiences because of each subject’s individual history and, hence, biases; each individual experiences situatedness in a particular place on the horizon of the world. Theoretically, this implies that no one can wholly participate in the same experience. Without hope for ultimate concordance of these relationships, these three distances always condition experience, ensuring its ambiguity. Although experience structurally holds nonidentity, Merleau-Ponty does not fear the possibility of the subject’s complete separation from the world, and other. He writes, I can count on what I  see, which is in close correspondence with what the other sees (everything attests to this, in fact: we really do see the same thing and the thing itself)—and yet at the same time I never rejoin the other’s lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 10f.)25 This sounds strangely like empiricists’ naïve trust in contact with the world. But complete isolation from the world or from others, or complete and absolute difference, defies subjectivity’s condition of being-in-the-world. Any suggestion of an absolute separation disregards the ontological structure of experience. Experience is neither relative nor solipsistic to isolated individuals. Third, recognizing these distances at the heart of experience, let us return to the concepts of intragroup differences or internal heterogeneity and intergroup similarities or heterogenous commonality. In centering the concept of intersectionality and the experiences of women of color, we arrived at the idea that the group identity “women of color” requires acknowledging differences within a single axis identity group (such as either sex or race) while simultaneously building coalitions across identity groups (such as from Asian American to Latinx or middle-class to working-class women) to appreciate the commonalities with at least another, but greater likely greater than one identity group. The recognition of distances between the subject and the world, between the experience and reflection on the experience, and between language and experience helps explain why, within any identity group, from a single axis to the intersectional identity group “women of color,” there are intragroup differences. Among intersectional identifying features—keeping in mind that these axes are not completely distinguishable or stable—instead of illuminating greater distance, these three distances illuminate the possibility of recognizing the commonalities among the intersectional identifying features. The distances experienced by women of color with intersectional identities are not simply greater or wider. The distances in the experiences of women of color are denser or thicker. Within the distance between the subject and the world, intersectional identities occupy more than one world. Although phenomenologists have not entertained the possibility of more than one world, philosophers of race such as W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Mills, and Lugones posit conceiving the racialized and sexualized subjects as living in distinguishable and separate spaces from dominant populations. Racialized and sexualized subjects live in marginal spaces and distinguishable worlds. Moreover, racialized and sexualized subjects travel between worlds; the worlds at least partially overlap.

393

Emily S. Lee

For intersectional identities, the overlapping of worlds renders the space between the subject and the worlds denser. In the temporal distance between undergoing and reflecting on an experience, because intersectional identities occupy more than one world with varying histories, thinking about an experience demands culling over a greater plurality of meanings, sometimes requiring longer periods of remaining unresolved in reflection. Without prioritizing resolving one’s thoughts, for intersectional identities, the plethora of ideas from inhabiting more than one world contributes to the density in the distance between undergoing and reflecting on an experience. Finally, in the distance between language and experience, many intersectional identities speak more than one language. Even if one of the two languages spoken is relegated as nontraditional, as bastardized, such as Creole or urban dialects, and even if the subjects possess varying degrees of fluency in a particular language, nevertheless, these languages depict and convey different ideas. This is especially evident in the well-known difficulties of translation. In this way, for women of color, the distance between language and experience can only be characterized as more opaque, more complicated—denser. The density of the distances in the ontological structure of experience is emphasized here, for such density invites more possibilities of perceiving commonality in heterogeneity and recognizing intergroup similarities. The density summons more juxtaposing, overlapping, and interweaving of ideas and experiences. Each overlap of worlds and ideas encourages comprehending commonality. The distances in experience facilitate recognizing intragroup differences, so women of color can build coalitions, forging intergroup commonalities. A focus on intersectional identities and the experiences of women of color requires understanding the distances in the structure of experience as not simply empty. Consistent with the relation between the theme and the horizon, there is an infinity, an openness, interior to the distance (in the Husserlian sense) and exterior to the two poles that mark the distance (in the Heideggerian sense). However, the experiences of women of color and the notion of intersectionality highlight the qualitative differences in the distances—differences in thickness and density. These three conclusions from the distance at the heart of experience can illuminate how to conceptualize the heterogenous commonality that both recognizes the linked fate of women of color and articulates the intersectional ties of our complex identities without losing hope for conceptualizing nonessentialist group identities. Admitting that group identities, including intersectional identities, rely on experience and also recognizing that experience’s ontological structure encompasses openness and nonidentity at its center facilitate an understanding of both how no experience is completely individual and how even shared experience varies, even among women of color. This chapter proposes a phenomenological understanding of experience to understand the intra-minority heterogeneity toward recognizing the inter-minority commonality recognized and built within the identity group “women of color.”

Notes 1 This is a much-shortened version of "Chapter Two: The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: the Ambiguity of Intersectionality as a Group Identity," A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference, (New York: Lexington Books, 2024). 2 Herbert Spiegelberg explains that phenomenology arose with the critique of empiricism and its heavy reliance on experience. Nevertheless, phenomenology still focuses on experience—just not

394

Intersectionality a naïve understanding of experience. See his article “Toward a Phenomenology of Experience” (1964, 325). 3 Anika Maaza Mann writes in a footnote that other feminists of color have articulated the idea. Mann cites the following sources: Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York, 1982); Judy Scales-Trent, “Black Women and the Constitution: Finding Our Place, Asserting Our Rights,” Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review 24, no. 1 (1989): 9–43. See Anika Maaza Mann’s article “Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory” (2010, 105–19). 4 Spelman shows that de Beauvoir vacillates between explaining and criticizing such behavior from white women. 5 Additionally, Yen Le Espiritu explains the history in which Asian American women’s advancements followed the denigration of Asian American men. Within the context of the racist demasculinization of Asian American men, Asian American women gained advances. See Yen Le Espiritu 1997, 139. 6 See Mariana Ortega (2016, 156) for the earlier critiques from Butler, Brown, Hekman, and Kruks. 7 Helen Ngo explains Alia Al-Saji’s similar concerns: “Al-Saji’s account . . . advances the idea that gendered schemata are already intrinsic to racialized perception. That is, they are not the intersection of two distinct problems, but rather, ‘continuous’ ” (2017, 34). 8 Ortega defends the notion of intersectionality from this criticism as well: “[N]ot all those appealing to intersectionality assume that the axes of oppression are separable. As Hill Collins states, ‘As a heuristic device, intersectionality references the ability of social phenomena such as race, class, and gender to mutually construct one another’ ” (2016, 73). 9 A point de Beauvoir articulated earlier. 10 See also Collins 1998, 164, or Diane Perpich 2010, 26. 11 Note, essentialism oppresses both when proposed by those internal or external to the group. Mills quotes Kwame Anthony Appiah writing that “identities that ‘come with normative as well as descriptive expectations,’ stipulating ‘proper black modes of behavior’ . . . rais[es] the danger of new forms of ‘tyranny’ that threaten individual freedom and choice” (1998, 14). 12 Collins concurs; see 1998, 205–6. 13 Recall Linda Martin Alcoff’s words here: “Our relational properties can be fundamental to who we are when they have causal determinacy over our epistemic and political orientations to the world—what we notice, what we care about—but also when they profoundly affect how we are seen and interacted with by others” (2006, 90). 14 Carastathis credits Crenshaw with this insight of conceptualizing identity groups as coalitions. See Ortega 2016, 165. 15 Emily S. Lee makes this point in an earlier article, “The Ambiguous Practices of the Inauthentic Asian American Woman” (2014, 146–63). 16 Consider Jose Medina’s words here: “[A] heightened sensitivity with respect to one kind of insensitivity does not at all guarantee any special sensitivity with respect to other forms of insensitivity. In other words, what is learned in one context of injustice or as a result of certain experiences of oppression should not be assumed to be immediately transferable to other contexts of experiences of oppression” (2013, 201). See also Grillow and Wildman 1997, 49. 17 Collins still admits a shared level of oppression. She writes, “[w]hen it comes to oppression, there are essentials” (Collins 225). 18 Merleau-Ponty defines the work of phenomenology as addressing experience: “[t]he legitimate function of the fixing of the eidetic invariants would be no longer to confine us within the consideration of the what but to make evident the divergence between the eidetic invariants and the effective functioning and to invite us to bring the experience itself forth from its obstinate silence” (1968, 47). 19 See also Merleau-Ponty 1962, 57. 20 See also pages 100 and 122 and Merleau-Ponty 1962, 70. 21 See also Merleau-Ponty 1968, 77. 22 See also Merleau-Ponty 1962, 45, 62, 238. Jacques Taminiaux expands on this function of time; he writes, “[A] double overlapping: that of the successive over the simultaneous. . . . The time to

395

Emily S. Lee which the activity of thinking is linked is not constituted by the thinker who would rule over it: the thinker is affected by the push, the onrush of time” (1993, 284–85). 23 Gordon concludes, “[T]he breakdown of the effort to be entails the self-deception of being as such” (1999, 52). 24 See also Ziarek 2001, 54f., where he writes, “[L]anguage works on the principle of transition and translocation, it cannot be properly regarded as either representation or nonrepresentational. I read these approaches to language in terms of how they render the problem of representation secondary.” 25 He continues, “To be sure, the least recovery of attention persuades me that this other who invades me is made only of my own substance” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 11). See also 1962, 353, 1968, 110.

References Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Carastathis, Anna. 2013. “Identity Categories as Potential Coalitions.” Signs 38 (4): 941–65. Cho, Sumi K. 1997. “Asian Pacific American Women and Racialized Sexual Harassment.” In Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, edited by Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California, 164–73. Boston: Beacon Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1995. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 357–83. New York: The New Press. Dastur, Francoise. 2000. “World, Flesh, Vision.” In Chiasm: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 23–49. Albany: State University of New York Press. Espiritu, Yen Le. 1997. “Class and Gender in Asian America.” In Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, edited by Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California, 135–41. Boston: Beacon Press. Gordon, Lewis. 1999. Bad Faith and AntiBlack Racism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Grillow, Trina, and Stephanie Wildman. 1997. “Obscuring the Importance of Race: The Implication of Making Comparisons between Racism and Sexism (or Other Isms).” In Critical Race Feminism, edited by Adrien Katherine Wing, 49–67. New York: New York University Press. Havis, Devonya N. 2014. “ ‘Now, How you Sound’: Considering a Different Philosophical Praxis.” Hypatia 29 (1): 237–52. Lee, Emily S. 2014. “The Ambiguous Practices of the Inauthentic Asian American Woman.” Hypatia 29 (1): 146–65. Mann, Anika Maaza. 2010. “Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, 105–19. Albany: State University of New York Press. May, Vivian M. 2014. “ ‘Speaking into the Void’? Intersectionality Critiques and Epistemic Backlash.” Hypatia 29 (1): 94–112. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mills, Charles W. 1998. Blackness Visible. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ngo, Helen. 2017. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: State University of New York Press. Perpich, Diane. 2010. “Black Feminism, Poststructuralism, and the Contested Character of Experience.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del

396

Intersectionality Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, 13–34. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rowe, Aimee Carrillo. 2010. “L Is for . . .: Longing and Becoming in The L-Word’s Racialized Erotic.” ­ uadalupe In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del G Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, 85–104. Albany: State University of New York Press. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1964. “Toward a Phenomenology of Experience.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (4): 325–32. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1993. “The Thinker and the Painter.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, 278–92. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. West, Traci C. 2010. “Extending Black Feminist Sisterhood in the Face of Violence: Fanon, White Women, and Veiled Muslim Women.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, 157–81. Albany: State University of New York Press. Zia, Helen. 1997. “Violence in Our Communities: ‘Where Are the Asian Women?’ ” In Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, edited by Elaine H. Kim, Lilia v. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California, 207–14. Boston: Beacon Press. Ziarek, Krzystof. 2001. The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

397

29 WHITE IGNORANCE Lisa Guenther

1. Introduction In their introduction to Political Phenomenology (2021), Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann identify three main fields of inquiry for phenomenological research: political experiences, political ontology, and political episteme. This chapter contributes to the third research area by offering a phenomenological critique of what Charles Mills calls white ignorance. White ignorance is a political episteme that serves the collective interests of white people by both disavowing knowledge of racism and perpetuating distorted beliefs that support white supremacy (Mills 2007, 13–34; see also 2015, 217). For example, the belief that America is a nation of immigrants with equal opportunity for all is premised on an ignorance of both the histories of Indigenous genocide, slavery, and racist immigration laws and the ongoing impact of these historical processes on the distribution of social power, economic standing, and political influence today (Martín 2020, 872). The distorted beliefs of white ignorance may or may not be explicitly formulated, and those who hold them may or may not be socially categorized as ‘white’ (Mills 2007, 22). What characterizes white ignorance is not the phenotypical race of the knower but rather “an aprioristic inclination to get certain kinds of things wrong” (Mills 2015, 218): for example, to grant what Miranda Fricker (2007, 17–29) calls a “credibility excess” to white knowers and a “credibility deficit” to people of colour, regardless of contravening evidence. White ignorance is an especially pernicious form of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007); it silences, discredits, or distorts the testimony of those who have experienced racial injustice, and it also blocks the hermeneutical resources needed to name, interpret, and dismantle the structures of white supremacy. As Mills explains, white ignorance is not just “an aggregate of individual mistaken white beliefs” (2015, 217), and so it cannot be corrected by supplying some missing or corrective information. Rather, white ignorance is a cognitive style: “a particular optic, a prism of perception and interpretation, a worldview . . . a ‘white racial frame’ which incorporates multiple elements into a ‘holistic and gestalt . . . racial construction of reality’ ” (Mills 2015, 218). In this sense, white ignorance is a practice of knowing (in some ways) by refusing to know (in other ways); it actively produces and reproduces forms of (highly partial and 398

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-42

White Ignorance

distorted) knowledge that harm non-white knowers and shelter white knowers from challenges to our epistemic authority. Mills asks his readers to [i]magine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge. (2007, 13; emphasis added) This way of (not) knowing and (mis)interpreting the world is not merely cognitive; it has ethical and political dimensions, unevenly distributing power and responsibility by authorizing some forms of ignorance as knowledge and discrediting or occluding some forms of knowledge as ignorance (Mills 2007, 22). Mills argues that white ignorance has become “so foundational to our perceptions that we can no longer see its contingency and arbitrariness” (2015, 223), and yet he does not find it “insuperable” (2007, 23). How, then, can white ignorance be resisted or overcome? And to what extent might phenomenology help us both understand white ignorance and abolish it?

2.  A Critical Phenomenology of White Ignorance For Mills, white ignorance is both the contingent result of historical processes like slavery and colonialism and a non-contingent or “aprioristic” optic, prism, or worldview that shapes the way white people, but also many non-white people, perceive the world. He adds: Perception is also in part conception, the viewing of the world through a particular conceptual grid. Inference from perception involves the overt or tacit appeal to memory, which will be not merely individual but social. As such, it will be founded on testimony and ultimately on the perceptions and conceptions of others. (Mills 2007, 23–24) Phenomenology offers a rich and complex language for articulating these relations between perception, conception, memory, and intersubjectivity. As a way into this language, the phenomenological method gives us some guidance in critically engaging white ignorance from within the lifeworld it (re)produces. To the extent that white ignorance functions as ‘common sense’ in a world structured by white supremacy, it has arguably become part of the natural attitude in this lifeworld. White ignorance is grounded in implicit assumptions that are difficult to express and even to acknowledge without the performance of an epoché: a critical suspension or bracketing of the naturalness and spontaneity of a white ignorant attitude in order to reflect on the basic structures that make lived experience in this attitude possible and meaningful. This is where matters become tricky. White ignorance is far more complex than the assumption with which the natural attitude is typically identified: namely, the assumption that the world exists apart from my own consciousness, and meaning is harvested from the world rather than (co-)constituted by transcendental (inter)subjectivity. Phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, and Fanon have expanded and modified

399

Lisa Guenther

Husserl’s phenomenological method in ways that lend themselves to a more socially grounded, praxis-oriented approach, and yet it is by no means clear that one can simply bracket a white ignorant attitude or put it out of play. To the extent that white ignorance operates at a pre-reflective or even unconscious level as an optic or lens through which one perceives the world, it may be difficult or even impossible to distance oneself from it enough to describe how it works. If my perceptual and conceptual practices are deeply structured by white ignorance—if it’s not just a matter of a single thesis to be suspended but a whole network of epistemic structures that work together to naturalize and reinforce white supremacy, and if not just white people are affected but also racialized people in a white world—then how could I possibly distance myself from these structures enough to reflect on them? How would I even know how to locate an assumption to be suspended and to distinguish this rigorously from more ‘neutral’ beliefs that are not shaped by white supremacy? Do the concepts of neutrality and self-transparency themselves fall under suspicion as soon as one admits that one’s knowledge might be produced through a systemic form of ignorance? Eugen Fink writes of the epoché and the natural attitude that it puts out of play: World-belief is thus a transcendental fact (not a psychological fact): the primal happening of our transcendental existence. With the phenomenological epoché our transcendental existence splits into the phenomenological onlooker removed from world-belief and the transcendental experiencing life that puts world-belief into action. Thus split, transcendental life turns upon itself, becomes objective to itself, and comes back to itself in thematic self-elucidation. (VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 2: Ergänzungsband, 186–87; quoted in Fink 1995, xxxviii) But can we imagine such thematic self-elucidation in relation to white ignorance, which Mills defines not as a single thesis but as “an absence of belief, a false belief, a set of false beliefs, a pervasively deforming outlook—that [is] not contingent but causally linked to .  .  . whiteness” (Mills 2015, 217)? White ignorance is not just a psychological fact that happens to affect some people and not others, nor is it a transcendental fact in the sense of a “primal happening of our transcendental existence.” Rather, I  would argue that white ignorance is a quasi-transcendental structure, historically sedimented through centuries of European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, racial segregation, and ongoing forms of structural injustice at every level of society from the family to the state. These histories could have unfolded otherwise, and they were contested by people of colour and colonized peoples at every point, but together, they have produced a lifeworld in which certain forms of (white) ignorance, such as the failure to notice power imbalances in a department meeting, quietly discredit the testimony, interpretations, and other forms of knowledge that are accessible from racialized or colonized social locations. The problem is not that white people are incapable of noticing such things; we might readily acknowledge the situation as soon as it is pointed out to us. But the correction of an error in this or that instance is no guarantee that we will be able to perceive or interpret power relations in other situations. If white self-knowledge is itself so deeply structured by white ignorance—deliberate or accidental, apologetic or shameless—then how is the phenomenological method ever to get off the ground if it relies on what Fink calls “thematic self-elucidation”? 400

White Ignorance

There may be a way out of this conundrum, but it requires a critical revision of phenomenological method. In “The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology,” Bonnie Mann argues that Simone de Beauvoir reworks the epoché and reduction to reflect on the basic structures of patriarchy in the absence of a neutral position outside of these structures: Beauvoir does not presume that one can “bracket” one’s prejudices at the outset of an inquiry, or that one can in any immediate way neutralize the force of interested, located, particular participation in the ethical background of the inquiry. Instead, one must pass through the prejudices, keeping them close at hand and working on them, in order to begin the never-complete task of neutralizing their hold on us. (Mann 2018, 55) Even though “the very consciousness which must discipline itself to put such things out of play has already been shaped by the prejudices it seeks to neutralize” (Mann 2018, 56), Mann argues that a feminist phenomenology of patriarchy is possible, but only through “a working-through which slowly, painfully reinstates the contingency of the contingentwhich-has-been-rendered-necessary” (56). For Beauvoir, if there is an epoché it is a matter of labor, not of willpower. In her hands, setting aside our preconceptions turns out to be tedious, enraging, and exhaustive hard work; a painstaking reconstitution of our ability to perceive and imagine in ways that exceed the rigid confines of historically sedimented prejudice. (Mann 2018, 56) In other words, the epoché is not just a gateway through which one must pass in order to enter the phenomenological attitude and begin elucidating the structures of “transcendental experiencing life” from the position of a “phenomenological onlooker.” Rather, it is the ongoing labour of preparing the ground for phenomenological inquiry again and again, not unlike the “absolute” or “perpetual beginners” to whom both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty compare the phenomenologist (Husserl 1970, 133; Merleau-Ponty 2002, xv). To be sure, Beauvoir (2010) develops her critical phenomenological method not from the perspective of a man who derives material and symbolic benefits from patriarchy and who, therefore, has an interest in remaining ignorant of its structures, but rather as a woman whose epistemic authority is systemically undermined by patriarchy but who persists in the labour of analyzing its core structures in order to break them down. To the extent that this method may be adopted by white philosophers to undertake a phenomenology of white ignorance, it seems clear that this work could only get off the ground through a practice of listening to people of colour, who have a more reliable perspective on white ignorance than white people do.1 Individual reflection on one’s own lived experience is not sufficient to identify white ignorance, let alone clarify how it manages to convert white ignorance into knowledge and non-white knowledge into ignorance. In the next two sections, I  will engage with some key texts in the phenomenology of racial embodiment, focusing on structures that (re)produce white ignorance, beginning with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the habit body. While Merleau-Ponty himself does not do the work of problematizing white ignorance, his phenomenology of embodied experience has been a touchstone for many who do. 401

Lisa Guenther

3.  The Habit Body White ignorance does not just operate at a narrowly cognitive level of propositional beliefs that could be removed and replaced with different propositional beliefs; it also functions at the deeper, more implicit level of what Merleau-Ponty calls the “habit body” (2002, 95). The habit body allows me to navigate the world without making explicit decisions about every little action. Based on past experience, I can drive home on ‘autopilot’; this is convenient in many ways, but it also allows me to deploy certain forms of knowledge in the mode of ignorance or distraction. In any given situation, I will find myself spontaneously drawn to certain details and not others, depending on how they speak to me practically and affectively. This helps explain the spontaneous sense of ‘rightness’ that white ignorance generates in those whose interests it serves; it’s akin to driving home. I feeling comfort in a particular epistemic milieu to the extent that my perceptual practices are echoed and reinforced by the joint attention—but also joint ignorance—of my epistemic kin (Jacobs, n.d.). The habit body is not strictly individual; rather, it both expresses and reinforces a structural coupling of body and world through which sedimented patterns “afford” or enable certain behaviours, and repeated behaviours leave material and symbolic traces (Gibson 2014). As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the body is “the potentiality of a certain world” (2002, 122), and if this world is structured by white supremacy, then we should not be surprised to find that people can explicitly believe that racism is wrong and yet behave in racist ways at a pre-reflective level of which they are ‘ignorant’ but that deeply shapes their sensemaking practices. This does not excuse white ignorance as if it were merely the world acting through me beyond my agency or control; if anything, it heightens my responsibility to attend to the ways my pre-reflective behaviour both expresses and amplifies oppressive structures in the world. George Yancy’s phenomenological analysis of “the elevator effect,” in which a white woman reacts to the presence of a black man in the elevator as a source of threat despite any evidence beyond racist stereotypes (2008, 17–50; see also Ngo 2012, 15–22), and Mariana Ortega’s critique of white feminists who demonstrate “loving, knowing ignorance” by strategically citing women of colour while ignoring the implications of their work (Ortega 2006, 60) are just two examples of how white ignorance can operate in spite of white knowledge and/or in tandem with it to reproduce the logic of white supremacy, whether through embodied gestures of withdrawal or extractive forms of engagement with people of colour. The embodied and affective complexity of white ignorance suggests that it operates not only as a ‘conceptual grid’ that organizes one’s ‘beliefs’ about the world but also through corporeal schemas and affective dispositions that are both supported by the sedimented structures of a racist lifeworld and reinforce these structures as if they were natural, inevitable, and ‘true.’ In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty shows that perception is more than just the cognitive act of sifting raw sensory data through a conceptual grid of pre-given categories; it is an embodied practice of picking out a figure or Gestalt from a field of possibilities that, even while backgrounded, remain open to (re)activation. This perceptual practice is organized by what Merleau-Ponty calls the body schema: a dynamic pattern of practical knowledge or know-how that emerges through the repetition of certain gestures, comportments, and dispositions in a world shared with other embodied beings (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 112–70; see also Ngo 2012, 2–8). The body schema bears the weight of the past: both the personal history of my own embodied experience in a particular lifeworld and also the historical sedimentation of social and material structures in this 402

White Ignorance

lifeworld, including the forms of knowledge and/or ignorance it has instituted as normal or unsurprising. But it also establishes patterns with the momentum to shape the future, calling forth more of the same behaviour as a spontaneous, intuitively compelling way to make sense of the world (Ngo 2012, 4–5). As Linda Alcoff notes, for Merleau-Ponty, perception is not just “presumed true, but defined as access to truth” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, xviii; cited in Alcoff 2006, 126). He calls this “perceptual faith”: “a deep-seated set of mute ‘opinions’ implicated in our lives” that resist articulation in “theses or statements” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 3). While it may be impossible to perceive the world without relying on some form of perceptual faith, white ignorance is a particularly pernicious form of perceptual bad faith. We will explore the concept of bad faith in the next section. If white ignorance is not just an aggregate of mistaken beliefs but an epistemic style that systematically lends undue credibility to interpretations of the world that support white supremacy while discrediting interpretations that contest this logic, then Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology may help us both sketch the embodied practices through which this epistemic style is normalized or made habitual and imagine ways of altering or revising this style, such that the patterns of white ignorance do not seem insuperable. But for these phenomenological concepts to become effective in resisting white ignorance, we need a more concrete analysis of the phenomenology of racism and other forms of oppression.

4.  Racism and the Habit Body In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that the corporeal schema of a Black man in an anti-Black world is systemically interrupted and fragmented by his lived experience of both explicit racism and more subtle but no less insidious forms of white ignorance that seek to reassure him that he is just “as civilized as we” (1967, 85). Fanon sketches a historico-racial schema and a racial-epidermal schema that (dis)organize the embodied experience of blackness in ways that Merleau-Ponty would have never imagined, helping disrupt scholarly forms of white ignorance that might otherwise take Merleau-Ponty’s account of ‘the’ body as an unraced, universal form of human embodied experience. Fanon’s critical repetition of phrases casually uttered to him by white people—“I want you to understand, sir, I am one of the best friends the Negro has in Lyon,” or “Our doctor is colored. He is very gentle” (Fanon 1967, 88)—flush out the phenomenon of white ignorance and its entanglement with white knowledge claims, even or especially the claim to be non-racist. In her path-breaking essay “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling and Loving Perception,” Maria Lugones draws on Marilyn Frye’s concept of “arrogant perception” to theorize a way of seeing that grasps other people solely in relation to oneself and one’s own needs or interests (Lugones 1987, 3–7). While Frye is describing masculine perception, Lugones connects this way of seeing to White/Angla perception and explores how even her own perception of her mother had been shaped by this optic. Arrogant perception is a modality of white ignorance; it is a way of perceiving others by misperceiving them, generating knowledge through a refusal to know. As Lugones puts it, “White/Angla women do one or more of the following to women of color: they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone, interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst” (7). The counterpoint to arrogant perception is loving perception, which calls for an abdication of the position that is so often taken for granted in phenomenology: the centrality of the ‘I’ to its own experience of the world. For Lugones, a condition for loving 403

Lisa Guenther

perception is the capacity to travel to different ‘worlds,’ not by assuming that one can perceive through the eyes of another but by undergoing an (often painful) experience of displacement and decentering that puts in question not only what one knows but also who one is in relation to different horizons of sense (8–14). Linda Alcoff builds on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Lugones, and other Latina epistemologists to develop an intersectional phenomenology of the racialized and gendered dimensions of embodied experience. She shows how even white critiques of whiteness can compound the harm of white ignorance by projecting fantasies of freedom and joy onto people of colour and yearning to be liberated from the narrow confines of their own white identity (Alcoff 2006, 186–87). In this sense, ‘awareness’ of white ignorance is not an antidote but may even exacerbate the degree to which white knowledge and white ignorance reinforce one another. Likewise, Mariana Ortega (2006, 63) critically examines white (feminist) ignorance as a form of knowledge production that objectifies and extracts value from the scholarship of women of colour while congratulating itself for “giving a voice” to marginalized women. In the context of this scholarship, even confessions of ignorance and performances of epistemic humility by white feminists compound their epistemic authority by deploying the knowledge of women of colour as evidence of their own heightened awareness of oppression. Elaborating this line of critique, Sara Ahmed analyzes whiteness as “a category of experience that disappears as a category through experience,” obscuring the ways it structures the world as an implicit “background” that quietly orients the perspective of those who are interpellated as white and makes our experience of the world “cohere” (2007, 150). But she also troubles the assumption that the power of whiteness can be disrupted simply by making the background visible or by producing knowledge about white ignorance: Does speaking about whiteness allow it to become an “essential something”? If whiteness gains currency by being unnoticed, then what does it mean to notice whiteness? What does making the invisible marks of privilege more visible actually do? Could whiteness studies produce an attachment to whiteness by holding it in place as an object? (Ahmed 2007, 149) Similarly, Alia Al-Saji underscores the sense in which “racializing vision” produces knowledge through ignorance by wearing “blinders” to screen out what it refuses to perceive (2014, 139), but she also proposes a counter-practice of “affective hesitation” that lets the contingency of the historical structures that orient racializing vision be felt as such (143). While there is no guarantee that hesitation will solve the problem of white ignorance or other forms of racializing vision, this is a strength of Al-Saji’s analysis: a refusal to skip too lightly from problems to solutions. Hesitation attends to the ‘noise’ or indeterminate non-sense that would otherwise be filtered out by the spontaneity and naturalness of racist perceptual habits, but, precisely as such, it refuses to transform this noise into new and improved forms of post-racial knowledge (142–150). Each of these phenomenologists, in their own way, gives us a philosophical language to account for the emergence and perpetuation of white ignorance, not just as a contingent set of errors that could be corrected through access to better information but as an embodied epistemic style or know-how that habitually picks out evidence that supports the logic of white supremacy and backgrounds or discounts evidence that contests or contradicts this 404

White Ignorance

logic. But if white ignorance operates at such a deep level, not only in the cognitive apparatus of the mind but also through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, and guts of embodied perceivers, then what would it take to resist white ignorance effectively? How do we move from knowing that white ignorance is a problem to knowing how to dismantle it without presuming that there are epistemic solutions to the racist constitution of “the world as we know it” (da Silva 2014, 81)? To address this question, I turn to the bad faith of white ignorance and the possibility of an ‘unknowing’ beyond the opposition between knowledge and ignorance.

5.  White Ignorance as Bad Faith Charles Mills connects white ignorance to “self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation” (2007, 17), but he does not explicitly engage with Sartre’s account of bad faith or Lewis Gordon’s critique of anti-black racism as a form of bad faith. This is where an existential-phenomenological supplement may help both analyze white ignorance and name what is at stake in its dissolution. For Sartre, bad faith is precisely that: a bad form of faith: a belief that is neither a “cynical lie” nor certain knowledge but an adherence to an object that “is not given or is given indistinctly” but onto which I fasten in order to evade my own existential freedom and responsibility (Sartre 1984, 112). In bad faith, I grasp myself as an in-itself or object whose essence precedes its existence, rather than as a for-itself or subject who is what it is not and is not what it is. So I evade the paradox at the heart of my existence: namely, that I become myself only by ek-sisting outside myself as a no-thing with both the freedom to create meaning and an absolute responsibility for the meanings I create. Bad faith is an existential decision to lie to myself about the fundamental structure of my being in the world, but in order to lie to myself effectively, I must know precisely what I have decided to conceal through ignorance (Sartre 1984, 89). In other words, I must be simultaneously ignorant and aware of my chosen ignorance; on some level I know that I do not know (that I am deceiving myself), and yet I persist in not knowing. (I choose ignorance over freedom and responsibility.) In theory, I could always choose to be honest with myself, to own up to my self-­deception in good faith. But in practice—and for reasons that Sartre does not come close to investigating, but which Lewis Gordon analyzes in detail (1995, 2000)—it is not at all clear that a subjective decision to renounce my chosen ignorance is capable of disrupting the bad faith of white ignorance. For Gordon (2000, 3), the bad faith of anti-black racism is not just a matter of epistemic injustice; it also has ontological dimensions that distort the very meaning of the human. To the extent that not just subjectivity but also the lifeworld itself is structured by white ignorance, it would take much more than a subjective commitment to existential honesty to grapple with the bad faith of white ignorance. A collective restructuring is required of the basic corporeal (and racial-epidermal and historico-racial) schemas through which differently racialized subjects perceive, interpret, and navigate the world, and this would, in turn, result in a restructuring of the world as such, understood as a context for meaning and mattering. Furthermore, it’s not clear that the way out of bad faith is good faith or sincerity. For Sartre, good faith aspires to coincide with itself, “to be what one is” (1984, 105), but in so doing, it merely repeats the structure of bad faith, which evades the existential paradox that “I am not what I am, and I am what I am not” (105–15). To apply this insight 405

Lisa Guenther

to white ignorance: If I choose to admit my complicity in white ignorance, believing that acknowledgement is the first step toward transformation, then I may be tempted to believe that my ignorance can be corrected with enough hard work and determination; eventually, my epistemic authority will be restored, and I  can safely make knowledge claims about myself, others, and the world. In Sartrean terms, I will have overcome bad faith and achieved sincerity, becoming transparent to myself and bridging the gap between white ignorance and more reliable forms of knowledge. But this is precisely the structure of bad faith: to aspire toward a non-paradoxical, unified identity, as if my essence (as a knower) preceded my existence (as white in a world structured by white supremacy). If I try to avoid this trap by admitting that white ignorance is an ongoing problem that might never be overcome or ‘corrected,’ then I slip into another form of bad faith: I resign myself to complicity with white ignorance on the basis of my identity as white. The best I can manage is to confess my white ignorance again and again, hoping that my awareness of this ignorance might earn me some measure of credibility. But this also presumes a non-paradoxical identity, as if I were hopelessly stuck in white ignorance and therefore not fully responsible for the epistemic style assigned to me by a white identity in a white supremacist world. If knowing I am white (and) ignorant does nothing in itself to unravel the structure of white ignorance, then what would effective resistance to white ignorance look like, specifically on the part of white people? Building on Sartre’s analysis, we might translate his existential credo—“I am what I am not, and I am not what I am”—into an epistemic one: “I know that I do not know, and I do not know that I know.” I am aware of my ignorance, and yet I am not aware of the full implications or limits of this ignorance; consequently, I can never be sure of the ways this ignorance is operative and generative of what I take to be ‘my’ beliefs and ‘my’ knowledge. And yet, I cannot take shelter in the pervasiveness of white ignorance, as if knowing that I do not know is enough to preserve some sense of epistemic dignity. Nor is it helpful to wallow in a nihilistic embrace of my own ignorance as a source of perpetual humiliation. Perhaps resistance to white ignorance entails ‘owning up’ to one’s ignorance, not in order to reclaim one’s epistemic authority or to renounce it altogether, but rather as a practice of sustaining the ambiguity of what Gayle Salamon describes as a phenomenological ethos of unknowing. Salamon writes: Phenomenology as method can lead us to a place of greater knowing, but it can also have as one of its effects a loosening or an undoing of what we know. To withhold one’s judgment, to refuse to rush to a conclusion, to resist one’s habits of certainty—these all seem to be strategies keyed to the limits of knowing, which are always at stake in unknowing, yet there is something more, something additional, at work in it. . . . [T]o unknow is to revise or undo knowledge that I already have, perhaps to question the epistemological regime that brought that knowing about in the first place. (Salamon 2018, 149; emphasis added) Salamon’s account of unknowing resonates with Al-Saji’s critical-ethical practice of hesitation: it stays with the trouble of ambiguity, neither failing to ‘do the work’ of Beauvoir’s epoché nor assuming that this work could ever be completed. It also addresses Ahmed’s concern that rushing to ‘solve’ the problem of racism may compound “resistance to hearing 406

White Ignorance

about racism. If we want to know how things can be different too quickly, then we might not hear anything at all” (Ahmed 2007, 165). For Ahmed, It is by showing how we are stuck, by attending to what is habitual and routine in “the what” of the world, that we can keep open the possibility of habit changes, without using that possibility to displace our attention to the present, and without simply wishing for new tricks. (Ahmed 2007, 165) As Lugones argues in her account of ‘complex communication’ between oppressed people struggling to build coalition in the liminal space of the borderlands: Liberal conversation thrives on transparency and because of that it is monologized. Complex communication thrives on recognition of opacity and on reading opacity, not through assimilating the text of others to our own. (Lugones 2006, 84) Each of these theorists, in different ways, suggests an epistemic practice that neither yields to white ignorance nor assumes that it can be transformed or overcome at the level of knowledge alone. Ultimately, we would need to restructure the world in material ways to abolish white ignorance and the forms of distorted knowledge it actively (re)produces (Martín 2020, 875–83). But as we work towards abolition, a phenomenological practice of unknowing may help address the bad faith of white ignorance without presuming that ‘good faith’ is either possible or desirable.

6. Outlook A critical phenomenology of white ignorance raises many questions for further research: What does a deliberate practice of unknowing look like in concrete terms? Is it enough to cultivate a critical sense of humility in the face of problems that do not admit of easy solutions, or is unknowing too precariously close to the ignorance it seeks to resist? How might a phenomenological critique of white ignorance intersect with other accounts of epistemic resistance to hegemonic ignorance, such as José Medina explores in The Epistemology of Resistance (2012)? Does a political phenomenology of white ignorance and anti-racist unknowing call for a reinterpretation of phenomenological methods such as the epoché and reduction? How reliable is the self-elucidation of transcendental experience when structures like white supremacy are not just patterns in the world but cognitive structures that arguably affect what we notice or disregard, not just at the level of everyday lived experience but also in our most sophisticated philosophical reflection? Does the phenomenon of white ignorance put in question the very distinction between the transcendental and the empirical? Finally, could we imagine a phenomenological practice of listening that focuses less on the elucidation of first-person experience, at least for socially privileged subjects, and more on the opacity of ‘complex communication’ among marginalized subjects? Both as a political episteme that organizes the intelligibility of ourselves, others, and the world and as a political experience that risks going unnoticed to the extent that it is operating successfully, white ignorance and its cognate forms of epistemic injustice call for careful and sustained phenomenological attention. 407

Lisa Guenther

Note 1 Thank you to Shiloh Whitney for this point and for feedback and conversations about this chapter as a whole.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–68. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al-Saji, Alia. 2014. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily Lee, 133–72. Albany: State University of New York Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Bedorf, Thomas, and Steffen Herrmann. 2021. Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme. New York: Routledge. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer): 81–97. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Fink, Eugen. 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, James J. 2014. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York/London: Psychology Press/Routledge Classic Editions. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. ———. 2000. “Racism as a Form of Bad Faith.” APA Newsletters: Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 99, no. 2 (Spring): 139–41. Husserl, Edmond. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jacobs, Hanne. No date. “Joint Attention and Joint Ignorance: A  Phenomenological Account.” Unpublished paper. Lugones, María. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (Summer): 3–19. ———. 2006. “On Complex Communication.” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (Summer): 75–85. Mann, Bonnie. 2018. “The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology: The Case of Shame.” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1 (1): 41–73. Martín, Annette. 2020. “What Is White Ignorance?” The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4): 864–85. Medina, José. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mills, Charles W. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2015. “Global White Ignorance.” In Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, edited by Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey, 217–27. Abingdon/Oxon: Routledge. Ngo, Helen. 2012. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ortega, Mariana. 2006. “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color.” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (Summer): 56–74.

408

White Ignorance Salamon, Gayle. 2018. The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia. New York: New York University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1984. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Yancy, George. 2008. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

409

30 (DE)COLONIZATION/ DECOLONIZING PHENOMENOLOGY Nelson Maldonado-Torres

1. Introduction A deadly disease has scotched us. The condemned chained. Traditions wiped out. Native language substituted. Scared and ill the little spirit left, I shout combat.

—Nonkosi Mathonsi, BlackHouse Kollective1

Decolonization has become one of the most prominent political concepts in the human sciences in the last decade. References to decolonization have become ubiquitous in the academy, where there has been a massive shift from a positivistic to a metaphorical approach to decolonization. While the positivistic approach regards decolonization as a fact or historical moment(s) to be studied, the more recent conceptualizations of decolonization as a metaphor make it into an exercise of scholarly critique of disciplines, fields of knowledge, discourses, and institutions whose value is often taken for granted but which nonetheless are bounded by or connected to colonial histories, processes, and logic. Decolonization is thus seen predominantly in the academy now, less as a fact and more as a method or interpretive practice deployed by the interpreter and the critic. Despite the remarkable differences between the positivistic and the metaphorical approaches, they share something in common: a distance from ongoing struggles for the return of stolen land and reparations. As a result, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have eloquently argued, in this context, decolonization tends to collapse into a research theme or an exercise of criticism, and it risks being commodified within the academy.2 Positivistic and metaphorical accounts of decolonization can thus take place within the confines of the liberal arts and sciences and be cultivated by middle-class and upper-middle-class academics with no recognizable relation to decolonial grassroots movements. This chapter explores a different approach to decolonization—a combative one—­ according to which, more than a fact, a method, or an interpretive practice, decolonization 410

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-43

(De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology

is an ongoing struggle. From this point of view, the principal figures who engage decolonization in the most substantive manner are neither scientists nor critics but combatants. Combatants include multifaceted organizers and active participants in multi-layered struggles for decolonization, abolition, reparations, and related activities that counter the catastrophic effects of colonization and coloniality. Combatants are not necessarily members of a militia, a liberation front, or a maroon community engaged in a frontal attack on a colonial plantation structure, although they often are. We can think of combatants and militants as “workers of the process” (obrerxs del proceso), to use the terminology of the late Afro-Ecuadorian elder and organizer Juan García Salazar, senior member of the organization Proceso de Comunidades Negras (García Salazar and Walsh 2017). “Workers of the process” are at once organizers, curators, scientists, and theoreticians who produce knowledge and learn about colonization and decolonization collectively. Perhaps the most influential figure holding this combative approach to decolonization is the Afro-Caribbean and Algerian thinker, doctor, and militant Frantz Fanon. Like many others in his generation, Fanon understood decolonization as a struggle that involves fundamental changes of attitude and the emergence of combative forms of consciousness, which led him to employ phenomenology. Phenomenology’s attention to modalities of consciousness and lived experience, along with its visceral rejection of positivism, historicism, and relativism are in line with the effort of avoiding the pitfalls of positivistic and metaphoric accounts of decolonization today. Yet the formation and history of phenomenology are deeply entangled with Eurocentricism and racism, a problem that Fanon addressed. Fanon employed several key phenomenological concepts while transforming them and redefining the account of the historical context and the major problems within which the contributions of phenomenology and its limits can be appreciated. Fanon mobilized phenomenology, as well as psychoanalysis and Marxism, in a decolonial direction while transcending these discourses and providing the basis for a formulation of decolonization as first philosophy. Neither positivistic nor metaphoric and decidedly non-Eurocentric, for Fanon’s combative decolonial point of view, the most consistent forms of decolonizing phenomenology or any other field require resignation from the standards and expectations of any given disciplinary formation and actual engagement in combative struggle. In the following, the chapter first provides a brief outline and conceptual mapping of some of the discourses and academic projects that have principally engaged decolonization in the academy. Fanon’s work is a common reference across these various approaches, and it becomes the focus of the second part of the chapter. After an exploration of Fanon’s conception of decolonization, the chapter concludes with revisiting one of Fanon’s principal textual sources, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2000). Césaire’s Discourse enacts a decolonial turn that simultaneously reframes the Cartesian problematic about deception in terms of colonization and approaches the fundamental problems of our age, less in relation to the crisis of the European sciences, like Edmund Husserl had it (1970), or the concealment of being, as Martin Heidegger formulated it (1996), and more in terms of the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality.

2.  Mapping Decolonization in the Academy There are four principal spaces in which a non-positivistic account of decolonization has found an important space in the academy: (1) Black, Indigenous, and ethnic (BIE) studies; (2) Black, Indigenous and women of color (BIWC) feminism; (3) postcolonial studies; and 411

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

(4) decolonial thought. BIE studies’ relation with decolonization is very direct as they owe their formal emergence in the academy to student strikes and related forms of organizing whose mission and vision were in line with struggles for liberation in the Third World, including those of Black and Indigenous people as well as people of color in the United States.3 Committed to a revolutionary change in thinking, artistic expression, institutional building, praxis, and education, BIE studies have had to endure resistance to its mission and vision within the fundamentally liberal and white space of the academy. The same is true of BIWC feminism, which, perhaps even more than BIE studies, have kept its center of gravitation and home outside the academy—consider the foundational role of the Combahee River Collective and the more recent work by organizations such as the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción to explore the linkages between Black feminism and decolonial thought—although this is not true of every adherent or scholar who writes about it or identifies with this area. In the academy, BIWC feminism is typically cultivated within or between BIE studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, but it is also found in other spaces. BIWC feminism denounces and opposes misogyny in nationalist liberation discourses and racism in mainstream feminism while expanding the practice and thinking of liberation and decolonization (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Anzaldúa and Keating 2002; Davies et al. 2003). Since BIE studies and academic BIWC feminism are direct extensions of US decolonial combative struggles of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the US academy, they are thus particularly threatening in that context (Davies et al. 2003). Both areas usually contend with the dual combination of racial liberalism and neoliberalism and continually face institutionalized epistemic racism in the academy. It has arguably been different for postcolonial studies, which emerged in the late 1970s and combined an interrogation of discourses of primarily British and French imperialism and colonialism (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995). Postcolonial studies also drew heavily from French theoretical constructions that were welcome or in vogue in US English and comparative literature departments and programs through the 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, by the time the attacks on the World Trade Center took place on September 11, 2001, which made postcolonial and the more critical forms of area studies widely appear as suspect and dangerous in the US, postcolonial studies had been arguably more easily integrated into and celebrated in the humanities than BIE studies and BIWC feminism, where it was largely deployed as a discourse of critique and criticism. It was also largely in this form as theory, critique, and criticism in established disciplines of cultural studies or literature that postcolonial studies would continue their presence in the academy from 9/11 until the present. Explicit references to the “decolonial” started to spread in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Aldama and Quiñones 2002; Mignolo 2000; Pérez 1999; Sandoval 2000; Walsh 2005), but they are rooted in works that can be traced back to the late 1980s and the early 1990s (Anzaldúa 1987; Dussel [1993] 1995; Quijano [1991] 2007). The early 1990s represented an historical conjuncture with generative crossing of various discourses and concerns. Prominent among these were indigenous critiques of the “discovery” of the Americas and its 500th-anniversary celebrations in 1992 and internal critiques of Marxism in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union from the late 1980s through the 1990s.4 The context made a sector of scholars across the Global South, particularly in the Americas, more receptive to theories of Western modernity, including capitalism, that seriously considered the role of colonization and the unfinished project of decolonization. In the US, while decolonial thought has always shared common interests in the exploration of the legacies of 412

(De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology

colonization with postcolonial studies, it has arguably had a closer relationship with BIE studies and BIWC feminism. The combined effect of BIE studies, BIWC feminism, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought has played an important role in a semiotic expansion of the concept of decolonization, taking it beyond the confinement of positivistic approaches. Yet, in the process, a metaphorical view of decolonization emerged and has arguably become dominant in the academy. This has meant that decolonization is often deployed as a practice that is superficially connected or not connected at all with combative movements like the ones that gave birth to BIE studies and BIWC feminism, for instance. In fact, the relevance of BIE studies and BIWC feminism for explorations of decolonization is often lost, as is their longstanding call for a structural and epistemic decolonization of the university. BIE studies, BIWC feminism, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought are all greatly indebted to the mid-20th-century struggles for decolonization, but their combative dimension varies between and within each of them. I cannot pursue an analysis of this point in this chapter, but I  can seek to elucidate the combative decoloniality without which they would not have emerged. For this, I focus on the work of Frantz Fanon, which is a common source for the understanding of decolonization across BIE studies, BIWC feminism, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought.

3. Fanon’s Combative Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Phenomenology5 Without any doubt, the principal contributors to the exploration of the idea of decolonization are found in the mid-20th-century struggles for independence. M. E. Chamberlain centers her exploration of the concept of decolonization in this period while indicating that the term “decolonization” did not “altogether [find] favour with Asians and Africans because it can be taken to imply that the initiatives for decolonization were taken by the metropolitan powers” (1985, 1). As a result, a good number of ideas that are central today in what is understood as decolonization in the Global South have appeared under the banner of “liberation” rather than decolonization. This is evinced in the names of organizations and movements, such as national liberation fronts and various forms of liberation theology and sociology that emerged during the decolonization movements or shortly after. The relationship between decolonization and liberation is complex and important to keep in mind. Fanon wrote about decolonization as a member of the Algerian Liberation Front, meaning that he saw decolonization and liberation as compatible activities, if not as different names for the same activity. In his work, decolonization retains the combative elements that are prominent in the idea of liberation: the notion of an actual struggle with very clear political dimensions and consequences led by those to whom he referred as the “condemned of the earth.” However, with the idea of decolonization, Fanon might have wanted to stress an important consideration that could be lost in discourses framed around liberation: that the struggle against long periods of colonization would continue after independence and the end of military “liberation fronts.” The Fanonian view of decolonization also involves a recognition that the agent of liberation is always already compromised in different ways by the colonial upbringing. That is, liberation necessitates the decolonization of the very subject who liberates or decolonizes, along with their world of sense, which points to the relevance of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, all of which Fanon employed. Fanon’s combative interpretation 413

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

of decolonization involves the recognition of the persistence of colonialism, the absence of a firm ground from which to engage in struggles for liberation, the need to engage in selfdecolonization, the recognition that this self-decolonization takes place in the context of new relations with others who join in the struggle against colonialism, and the idea that decolonization involves the collective undoing and redoing of concepts, practices, and institutions. This is the view of decolonization Fanon advances firmly and openly through all his major works, particularly, The Wretched of the Earth (2004). None other than Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, which was originally published in 1961. Sartre was arguably the most famous living philosopher at the time, and his eloquent and powerful preface surely contributed to the spread of The Wretched globally. Yet it was the first chapter of the book, focused on the role of violence in decolonization struggles, that most captivated the minds of leaders of and participants in anti-racist and anticolonial social movements. This chapter starts with a rich reflection on the meaning of decolonization and violence. The first lines of the first chapter of The Wretched succinctly make the initial point about liberation and decolonization mentioned earlier: that Fanon’s understanding of decolonization is in line with the combative dimension that is more explicitly present in the concept of liberation vis-à-vis critique or criticism, for instance. He writes: “National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event” (2004, 1). Here, Fanon makes clear that decolonization has different names, and all of them seem to involve a form of action—liberation, reawakening, restoration—and a collective form of agency—in this case, the nation, which does not necessarily mean the nation-state. Fanon’s combative view of decolonization invokes the relevance of phenomenology when he asserts that “[d]ecolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor” (2004, 2). That Fanon conceives decolonization as the fundamental alteration of being points simultaneously to the relevance of the category of being—in addition to structure, power, culture, and other such categories—when exploring the meaning of decolonization and to the impact of colonization on being. That is, if being needs to be fundamentally altered, it is because it has already been compromised or affected by colonization. The fundamental alteration of being in the process of decolonization does not take place magically, nor can it be achieved simply by letting beings be, as Heidegger would have it. The decoloniality of being involves collective agency, but this, in turn, presupposes the transformation of the colonized subject. Fanon’s reference to the alteration of being and the mutation of the subject, described initially as a “spectator,” suggests an intimate link between being and subjectivity along the lines of the relationship between consciousness and phenomena in Husserlian phenomenology. Consciousness and being are intrinsically connected: a fundamental change in one presupposes a change in the other. In a context marked by the coloniality of being, however, one does not simply find subjects or beings who are just there (dasein). Fanon refers to the damnés or condemned who are “crushed to a nonessential state” (2004, 2). This description of the initial state of subjects who can become protagonists in the struggle for decolonization is one that Fanon started to explore in relation to Black subjects living in a colonial, anti-black world. The initial main goal for Fanon, as found in his first book Black Skin, White Masks, is to “attempt to discover the various mental attitudes the black man adopts in the face of white 414

(De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology

civilization” (2008, xvi). Fanon’s concept of mental attitudes is a psychological concept but also a phenomenological one. By attitudes, Fanon refers to fundamental orientations of consciousness that constitute the meaning of phenomena. In Black Skin, Fanon seeks to identify the “existential deviation” imposed on Black subjects. The deviation, for Fanon, is so profound that he aims to demonstrate that even “what is called the black soul is a construction by white folk” (2008, xviii). Fanon also expresses this idea in the notion that “the Black is not a man,” which he fleshes out in reference to “a zone of nonbeing,” which he describes as “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region” (xii). Fanon’s reference to the zone of nonbeing has been interpreted in a variety of ways, and there is a general sense that he refers with it to the zones or spaces where Black people are dispossessed. However, this “zone of nonbeing” is not meant to describe the specific social or existential situation of most Black people as Fanon points out that “in the majority of cases, the black cannot descend” to this zone (2008, xii). Rather, the “zone of nonbeing” appears to be one in which humans-qua-humans could be. Fanon refers to the term “authenticity” when he describes the “zone of nonbeing” as a site “from which a genuine new departure [un authentique surgissement] can emerge” (xii). His point is that, since being Black is not to be human, Black subjects can hardly descend to this zone of nonbeing, which makes the question of authentic emergence less central for the Black, if not fundamentally irrelevant. Authenticity is a major term in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1996) and in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1966). For Heidegger, authenticity involves a confrontation with the non-potentiality of death, which involves anxiety. Fanon could have been referring to anxiety in the face of death when he wrote about facing a “sterile and arid region”: that is, a region deprived of meaning and possibilities. Sartre, in turn, linked authenticity to nothingness, understood as the utter lack of preestablished meanings. Authenticity involves the full recognition of human consciousness as a no-thing that is determined by nothing, which means that it is fully free. Authenticity, for Sartre, is therefore connected to the affirmation and deployment of freedom, reflected in projects of existence that assume responsibility for the constitution of meaning and for decisions in the world. Fanon was probably engaging Sartre critically when he wrote that, in most cases, Blacks cannot descend into the veritable hell from which an authentic upsurge could be born. He was making the case that anti-blackness introduces an “impurity,” a “flaw,” or a deviation that tends to arrest Blacks in a perpetual flee from blackness (Fanon 2008, 89–90). The fundamental problem for Blacks is the colonial anti-black world, where they are expected to always see themselves in relation to a master, represented in the white gaze.6 The fundamental problem for Blacks is not inauthenticity writ large but, more particularly, modern colonial anti-blackness, which is countered with decolonization and not with a generalized conception of authenticity. Fanon does not aim to show only specific problems faced by Black people but also problems with philosophical, psychoanalytical, and phenomenological descriptions that do not take the specificity of Black people’s lived experience and situations into consideration. His analyses of colonization and anti-blackness draw from Sartrean existential phenomenology, but they also demand a critical revision of European phenomenology, since those accounts have missed something crucial: that what they usually take as “subjectivity” or similar concepts such as dasein are not universal and that, furthermore, any account of subjectivity or human consciousness in the context of global coloniality and anti-blackness needs a relational sociogenic account of the normative modes of consciousness and attitudes in the 415

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

world. The fundamental problem for Black people is thus, quite simply, the other side of a massive problem for whites: how to overcome anti-blackness and become agents of decolonization. Only in this context, any reference to consciousness, being, authenticity, and bad faith can aspire to contribute to the understanding of the human. Black Skin, White Masks serves as a foundation to Fanon’s approach to the understanding of decolonization in other ways, too, which further explains why decolonization should not be subsumed under the banner of either Heideggerian or Sartrean authenticity. In Fanon’s work, decolonization is not simply a political moment or process; it arguably also plays the role of first philosophy, if there is anything like that. This is evinced in Fanon’s account of modern anti-black colonization, which involves a philosophical anthropological analysis. In Fanon’s account, human consciousness is characterized not only by freedom but also by other equally fundamental dimensions that connect subjects to each other. The two such fundamental dimensions that Fanon identifies are love and understanding (2008, xii). Love and understanding are, for Fanon, fundamental and irreducible dimensions of consciousness that account for the intersubjective dimension of human subjectivity. For Fanon, the human being is characterized not only by negation, transcendence, or freedom but also by affirmation: “Man is a ‘yes’ resonating from cosmic harmonies” (2008, xii). This affirmation can be understood as a “Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity” (2008, 197). Fanon submits a conception of consciousness as loving and communicative transcendence that seeks (is obsessed with) understanding and intimacy. For Fanon, before “love and understanding” can become feelings or decisions that we take, they are fundamental and constitutive features of consciousness. In this sense, Fanon takes a route that is closer to Emmanuel Levinas on this point than to Hegel or Fichte, who are openly criticized in Black Skin, or to Heidegger (Maldonado-Torres 2008). That love and understanding are crucial for Fanon is further evinced in the opening of Black Skin, which starts with one chapter on language (understanding) and follows with two chapters on love. In these chapters, Fanon accounts for modern colonial dehumanization and anti-blackness in terms of existential deviations that lead Black subjects to take language and loving relationships as strategies to escape blackness rather than as modalities of connection with others. The radical mutation of basic means and expressions of loving and understanding, such as speaking, acquiring knowledge, and loving others intimately, represents, more than a crisis, a catastrophe from which there seems to be no escape. The hell where Black people find themselves is thus not the hell of the zone of nonbeing but the scene of self-destruction and of toxic and poisonous intersubjective relations that are meant to affect most Black people regardless of class status. From this perspective, it should be clearer now why, for Fanon, the most relevant project is not the search for authenticity but a struggle for decolonization, understood as the restoration of the role of love and understanding. In this sense, decolonization can become another term for philosophy if philosophy is understood not as the love of knowledge and understanding but in terms of the restoration of the conditions of possibility for love and understanding in the world. On this point, Fanon is also departing from the European phenomenological tradition, which tends to approach philosophy as a way of thinking that originates in ancient Greece and, according to Husserl, is characterized by a shift from a natural to a theoretical attitude. In Fanon’s work, for philosophy to emerge, it has to involve a shift from a modern/colonial and anti-black attitude to a decolonial attitude that aims to restore love and understanding. In that sense, decolonization can also be understood as first philosophy: the philosophical actions that can make philosophy truly possible. 416

(De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology

When the philosophical anthropology that Fanon puts forward in Black Skin informs the reading of the account of decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth, one finds that his work offers a decolonial conception of love and understanding that require (1) the generous and receptive opening of a self to an Other (a certain decolonial logic of the gift) and (2) an expression of freedom as a gift that carries responsibility for everything that prevents subjects to encounter each other freely. In this sense, Fanon’s reference to colonized subjects as “damnés” in The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) does not appear to be accidental since the etymology of the term “damnés” indicates that damnation can be understood as the situation of anyone who is not able to give because everything they have has been taken away from them. This means that colonization is not only about domination or the restriction of freedom but also about the violent interruption of the circle of the gift of generosity and receptivity to that gift. Fanon’s combative decoloniality is therefore rooted in a fundamental decolonial ethics that makes itself evident as he investigates the modalities of human consciousness in a colonial anti-black world. The connection between the Fanonian account of subjectivity and of freedom as a gift that seeks to restore the possibility of giving and receiving accounts for his combative view of decolonization. From a Fanonian perspective, combative decoloniality is a work of love that creates spaces where loving relations and mutual understanding are possible. This kind of decoloniality and combativity are expressed first and foremost in collectives of people who come together to counter the catastrophe of coloniality, who demand land back and reparations for what has been taken, and who reach out to each other lovingly and in search for understanding.

4. Aimé Césaire: From the Crisis of the European Sciences to the Catastrophe of the Modern/Colonial World7 In spite of Fanon’s critique of and distance from Aimé Césaire in Black Skin, there are at least two fundamental contributions from Césaire’s work in Fanon’s text, and they both appear in the form of epigraphs. One of them is the epigraph to the fourth chapter, where Fanon quotes a passage from a play by Césaire. The lines from the play read: “There is not in the world one single poor lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated” (Fanon 2008, 64). This declaration expresses the ethical imperative that Fanon saw at the heart of the human. The phenomenology of subjectivity informs an ethico-political view of decolonization that points to how the philosophical anthropology that appears in Black Skin serves as a ground to the conceptualization of decolonization that appears in The Wretched. The second fundamental contribution from Césaire is found in the very first lines of Black Skin, the introduction, which opens with another epigraph taken from Césaire’s work: “I am talking about millions of men whom they have knowingly instilled with fear and a complex of inferiority, whom they have infused with despair and trained to tremble, to kneel and behave like flunkeys” (Fanon 2008, 11). There is a way in which the two epigraphs that Fanon takes from Césaire’s work speak to each other: They both involve the acknowledgement of violence and the assertion of response-ability in face of this situation. One passage refers to one’s implication in the lynching or torture of any single person and the other to the recognition of and response to a form of domination that involves “despair,” trembling, and the submission of “millions” of people. Both passages are referring to the systematic violence of dehumanization, which works externally, as in lynching 417

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

and torture, and internally, as in submission and despair. The passages seem to indicate that a human being should be compelled to counter modern/colonial violence whether one person or millions of people are directly affected and exposed to its most violent tendencies. Césaire might have led Fanon to consider that colonialism creates a world where lynching, torture, and psychological dehumanization take place. Fanon decided to tackle the issue of psychological dehumanization/subjective alienation in Black Skin, and less than a decade later, he was working with torture victims in Algeria. In an essay that Fanon presented four years after completing Black Skin, he wrote that torture was one of the means that colonizers use to effect psychological dehumanization in a colonized population (1988, 35). One year later, in a chapter entitled “Algeria Face to Face with the French Torturers” Fanon writes, “Torture is inherent in the whole colonialist configuration” (1988, 64). That torture is inherent in an activity (colonization) that is typically perceived by Europeans as a form of civilization reveals the extent to which European modernity had been able to produce an enormous cloud of deception with lethal and tragic consequences. Césaire tackles this problem head on in his classic Discourse on Colonialism, which starts with a reference to European civilization as a decadent and dying civilization that “uses its principles for trickery and deceit” (2000, 31). Césaire’s indictment emerges after the Second World War, when Europeans were ready to condemn the Holocaust and to create organizations that helped prevent a similar catastrophe while justifying colonization on the basis that it brought civilization to the colonized. Césaire’s response is now classic: that colonization does not civilize the colonized; rather, colonization decivilizes the colonizer (2000, 35). Fanon’s and Césaire’s respective critical approaches to modern European civilization/ colonization indicate that the fundamental problems facing humanity in the 20th century emanated not from the crisis of the European sciences, like Husserl imagined, but from the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a downturn. In drama, it is the point at which a story shifts in radical ways, and the major premises of a narrative structure are destroyed. Catastrophe captures what the concept of crisis cannot: the emergence of a new reality that seems permanently structured to naturalize coloniality and its practices of lynching, torture, rape, and psychological domination. Regarding the ‘downturn’ of modern/colonial catastrophe, Fanon and Césaire counterpoise a decolonial turn that accounts for the dehumanizing dimensions of modern catastrophe and for the emergence of the colonized as an agent that challenges the catastrophic world order. Fanon’s and Césaire’s work make clear that a serious response to this catastrophe requires decolonization and the decolonial attitude, not simply phenomenology, authenticity, or fundamental ontology, as the cure. If one follows Fanon and Césaire, it is not difficult to determine that the catastrophic dimensions of modernity are reflected in the demographic and environmental catastrophes that have been part and parcel of modern forms of colonization since around 1492, as well as in the naturalization of practices usually limited to contexts of extreme violence and illegal acts of war, such as rape and torture. The lessons for Husserlian phenomenology are significant since Husserl celebrated the European Renaissance without paying attention to its darker side. The “darker side of the Renaissance” (Mignolo 1995) is hardly invisible since it clearly appears in the maturation and expansion of a conception of civilization that naturalizes ethnic cleansing, the expropriation of lands, and racialized slavery in the guise of “discoveries” since at least 1492. The golden age of the Renaissance cannot be disentangled from the death, dispossession, and dismemberment that characterized much 418

(De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology

of the European presence in its colonies from the late 15th century until the 20th. Césaire’s “discourse on colonialism” seeks to shed light on how the mechanisms and double standards to justify colonization, the racial division of humankind, and the coloniality of gender compromised the integrity of reason and provided a foundation for positions that were far more dangerous than relativism. Césaire’s work also makes clear that the colonized and the enslaved were familiar with the masters’ defiance of reason, which is why Césaire indicates that the colonized knew that “their temporary ‘masters’ are lying” (2000, 32). The colonized themselves were living proof of the existence and effects of a murderous form of irrationality presenting itself as the epitome of reason, on the one hand, and the impulse to objectify consciousness and the human, on the other. Long before white European populations faced their objectification through the propagation of enlightened forms of rationality that derived inspiration from a certain reification of the scientific method and the natural sciences, enslaved and colonized human beings were being objectified and dissected, literally and figuratively, by “rational” Europeans. With the emergence of phenomenology in the late 19th century, Europeans were thus catching up with the awareness about and the rejection of views of the human that pinned down subjects and collectives. If Fanon draws from phenomenology in the mid-20th century, it is because phenomenology was speaking to problems and ideas that were already found among Black and colonized populations. But the frameworks that phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger employed to thematize the problems that they found and to offer their solutions were largely ignorant of coloniality, and therefore, their work fails to identify the philosophical relevance of the struggle for decolonization. This does not mean that these and other European phenomenologists were not able to make important contributions to the critique of objectification and relativism, but only that, from Fanon’s and Césaire’s points of view, they must prove their worth in the context of the struggle for decolonization.

5.  Concluding Thoughts Finally, a third stage, a combat stage where the colonized writer, after having tried to lose himself among the people, with the people, will rouse the people. Instead of letting the people’s lethargy prevail, he turns into a galvanizer of the people. —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 159

Césaire’s description of the entanglement between colonization and Western civilization anticipates the account of the difference between colonialism, modern colonialism, and coloniality that appears in the work of late-20th-century and early-21st-century decolonial thinkers. While colonialism can, in principle, be found in many different societies as far back as late antiquity or before, modern colonialism appears in the context of European “discoveries” and their entanglement with the definition of modern Europe vis-à-vis ancient and medieval Europe. Coloniality, in turn, refers to the very entanglement between modern Western civilization and its premises, view of rationality, and sense of order and colonization and the production of racial slavery. These distinctions are implicit in Césaire’s and Fanon’s discourses on colonization, which means that they understood colonialism as a poly-dimensional structure and logic rather than as an event. Their understanding of colonization was, therefore, different from positivistic approaches. 419

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Fanon builds on Césaire’s approach to colonialism and explores the psycho-existential, structural, and epistemic dimensions of coloniality and its entanglement with anti-blackness. He also fleshes out a view of decolonization as an unfinished project that anticipates the notion of decoloniality. Yet unlike explorations of the postcolonial or the decolonial that collapse into exercises of scholarly criticism or critique, Fanon deployed a combative form of decoloniality grounded in the work of liberation fronts, movements, and collectives that produced “movement-generated” thinking and praxis. Fanon views decoloniality as the collective struggle to counter the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. He conceives of this struggle as a work of love that seeks to restore the basis for love and understanding. Decolonization is a collective dynamic in which “[t]he intellectual sheds all that calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives, that devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper among the people” (2008, 12). Fanon did not believe that liberation fronts, social movements, or collectives represented pure and pristine spaces free from coloniality. His point was rather that it is through the effort of coming together in combat that subjects are best prepared to engage in a process of self and collective decolonization that contributes to the ongoing struggle of the damned of the earth against modern colonialism and coloniality.

Notes 1 Nonkosi Mathonsi is a member of the Blackhouse Kollective based in Soweto, South Africa, who opened an event organized by the Frantz Fanon Foundation to discuss the concept of combative decoloniality (Fondation Frantz Fanon 2021). The event commemorated the 60th year of Fanon’s passing and the 60th year anniversary of the publication of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (2004). Also relevant here is the call from the Frantz Fanon Foundation for different organizations and scholars to reflect on the meaning of combative decoloniality (Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres 2021). 2 There are multiple other similar critiques of the spread of references to decolonization in the academy. See, for example, the contributions of Nitasha Dhillon, Andrew Ross, and Nelson MaldonadoTorres, among others who responded to a questionnaire on decolonization in the journal October (Copeland, Foster, and Joselit 2020). 3 There are a large number of sources that describe the combative origin and scope of BIE studies. For a recent one that considers the history of the first five decades of BIE studies, see the special issue of the Ethnic Studies Review, starting with the editorial introduction by the two guest editors (Bañales and Lee-Oliver 2019). 4 I have characterized this period elsewhere as the third major moment of the decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres 2018). 5 This section draws considerably from Maldonado-Torres 2008, 2016b, 2017, 2021, which provide a more ample development of various points in this section. 6 For an exploration of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as part of a phenomenology of antiblackness, see Gordon 1995a. More than anybody else, Gordon has demonstrated the relevance of Fanon’s work for phenomenology. His work is part of the 1990s wave that brought attention to questions about colonization and decolonization in the human sciences. On this point, see Gordon 1995b, 2000, 2006. 7 This section draws considerably from Maldonado-Torres 2016a.

References Aldama, Arturo J., and Naomi H Quiñones, eds. 2002. Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

420

(De)colonization/Decolonizing Phenomenology Anzaldúa, Gloria E., and AnaLouise Keating, eds. 2002. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. 1995. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Bañales, Xamuel, and Leece Lee-Oliver. 2019. “Guest Editors’ Introduction. Fifty Years of Ethnic Studies: Foundations, Challenges, and Opportunities.” Ethnic Studies Review 42 (2): 7–14. Césaire, Aimé. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chamberlain, M. E. 1985. Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Copeland, Huey, Hal Foster, and David Joselit. 2020. “A Questionnaire on Decolonization.” October 174: 3–125. Davies, Carol Boyce, Meredith Gadsby, Charles Peterson, and Henrietta Williams, eds. 2003. Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Dussel, Enrique. (1993) 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum. Fanon, Frantz. 1988. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Fanon Mendès France, Mireille, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. 2021. “For a Combative Decoloniality Sixty Years after Fanon’s Death: An Invitation from the Frantz Fanon Foundation.” Last Modified November  30, 2021. https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/for-a-combative-decolonialitysixty-years-after-fanons-death-an-invitation-from-the-frantz-fanon-foundation/. Fondation Frantz Fanon. 2021. “For a Combative Decoloniality Sixty Years after Fanon’s Death: Replay!” Last Modified December 21, 2021. https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/for-a-combativedecoloniality-sixty-years-after-fanons-death-replay/. García Salazar, Juan, and Catherine Walsh. 2017. Pensar sembrando/sembrar pensando con el abuelo Zenón. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar and Abya Yala. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995a. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. ———. 1995b. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2016a. “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” In Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, edited by Nada Elia, David M. Hernández, Jodi Kim, Shana Redmond, Dylan Rodríguez, and Sarita Echavez See, 435–62. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2016b. “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality.” Frantz Fanon Foundation. Last Modified October  2016. https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-oncoloniality-and-decoloniality/. ———. 2017. “On Metaphysical Catastrophe, Post-continental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn.” In Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, edited by Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, 247–59. Los Angeles: Museum of Latin American Art. ———. 2018. “The Decolonial Turn.” In New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, edited by Juan Poblete, 111–27. London: Routledge. ———. 2021. “Frantz Fanon and the Decolonial Turn in Psychology: From Modern/Colonial Methods to the Decolonial Attitude.” In Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology: Psychology and the Other, edited by Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, and Miraj U. Desai, 89–99. New York: Routledge.

421

Nelson Maldonado-Torres Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quijano, Aníbal. (1991) 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 168–78. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1966. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, Pocket Books. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (2): 1–40. Walsh, Catherine, ed. 2005. Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: reflexiones latinoamericanas. Quito, EC: Editorial Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar.

422

31 MIGRATION Ayten Gündoğdu

1. Introduction Hannah Arendt’s reflections on freedom of movement, which she describes as “the oldest and also the most elementary” among all the liberties (Arendt 1968, 9), offer an insightful starting point to outline a phenomenological approach to migration. Different from conventional accounts that reduce freedom of movement simply to the individual ability to “go where one pleased” (Arendt 2005, 121), Arendt proceeds phenomenologically and foregrounds its intersubjective dimensions by situating it in relation to a world shared with others. Freedom of movement, she contends, is “the freedom to depart and begin something new and unheard-of” and “the freedom to interact in speech with many others and experience the diversity of the world always in its totality” (129). Understood in this way, freedom of movement is the condition of politics as an activity that brings together a plurality of actors who are capable of initiating new beginnings by sharing words and deeds with each other. Freedom of movement is also necessary to “experience the world as it ‘really’ is,” which requires engaging with different perspectives corresponding to different standpoints in the world since the world “show[s] itself different to each and [is] comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk [about] it” (128). While freedom of movement is the sine qua non of experiencing politics and the reality of the world, it also marks an inegalitarian divide between those who are able to remove themselves from “the entire realm of coercion” and those who are immobilized by coercion (121). If mobility is “the prototypal gesture of being free,” for Arendt, its limitation has always been “the precondition for enslavement” (Arendt 1968, 9). In light of Arendt’s striking reflections on freedom of movement, this chapter outlines three key areas of research for a political phenomenology of migration. First, engaging with Arendt’s work on statelessness, it points to contemporary conditions of rightlessness that arise due to border control policies that aim to immobilize those who have become the new “undesirables.” A  phenomenological account can help us understand these policies beyond the individual rights violations they involve and attend to numerous forms of dispossession and violence they give rise to, including their negative impact on freedom as an intersubjective experience that always situates the individual in relation to a world shared DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-44

423

Ayten Gündoğdu

with others. Second, a phenomenological approach can also be fruitful for understanding how and why freedom of movement is allocated unequally—especially given the extensive phenomenological literatures on topics such as race, gender, and disability. To provide an example, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon and underline the need to understand contemporary problems of rightlessness experienced by migrants in relation to persistent legacies of colonialism and racism. Third, a phenomenological approach can also throw light on the various struggles that migrants have waged against rightlessness. For this purpose, the chapter reconsiders Judith Butler’s work on performative action in the face of vulnerability and “the right to appear” in relation to Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights” and Fanon’s vision of “a new humanism.” Taking issue with the narrow Eurocentric discourses of humanism, these thinkers highlight that neither “humanity” nor the plurality of the world can be taken for granted; they are rather contingent on the political struggles to guarantee equality and freedom for all. These thinkers’ efforts to articulate a critical humanism urge us to understand the various struggles around the right to freedom of movement in terms of a right to appear in an intersubjectively shared world as an equal and distinct living being.

2.  Migration and Rightlessness Writing about the problem of statelessness that emerged in Europe during the first half of the 20th century in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt ([1951] 1968) highlights that the stateless found themselves in a condition of rightlessness, stripped of not only citizenship rights but also human rights. This double loss is at the heart of her critical inquiry into “the perplexities of the Rights of Man,” which foregrounds the problems with positing citizenship status as the basis of entitlement to human rights within a nation-state framework (Arendt [1951] 1968, 290−302). Arendt’s account of statelessness proceeds phenomenologically, as it provides a multifaceted account of rightlessness by attending to the distinctive legal, political, and even ontological predicaments endured by those who can no longer rely on their own states for the protection of their fundamental rights. Legally speaking, the stateless are rightless in the sense that they lack any formal recognition as persons before the law, or as rights-bearing subjects. Relegated to “a form of lawlessness, organized by the police,” they are always subject to arbitrary forms of violence such as forced expulsion and incarceration in camp-like spaces (Arendt [1951] 1968, 288). Living under “arbitrary police rule,” they become “liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime” (286), and the penalties they receive are completely arbitrary, without “any relation whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do” (296). As Arendt’s reflections on personhood in different contexts clarify, personhood arises from legal recognition and is not interchangeable with the mere fact of humanness. It is a mask that is artificially created by law and allows the individual to appear to others as a rights-bearing subject and renders their claims audible to others (Arendt [1963] 1990, 106–107). From Arendt’s phenomenological perspective, the mask works as a form of self-display in its very concealment, allowing one to appear on the legal stage in anticipation of fellow actors and spectators who could attest to one’s equal standing as a rights-bearing subject (Gündoğdu 2015, 98−107). Deprived of the mask of personhood, the stateless were relegated to a condition of invisibility and inaudibility on the juridical stage. Arendt wrote her analysis at the end of World War II, and since then, we have had important developments in the field of human rights, including numerous declarations and 424

Migration

conventions that place on states an obligation to recognize every human being—regardless of citizenship status—as a person before the law. Despite these developments, however, the personhood status of various categories of migrants—especially asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants—remains precarious, affording only a limited number of rights with fragile guarantees (Benhabib 2004; Gündoğdu 2015; Kesby 2012). For example, arbitrary and indefinite detention is prohibited in international law, but there are no clearly articulated, globally accepted guidelines defining “arbitrary” or “indefinite” in the context of immigration detention. In many respects, we are still confronted with a situation similar to the one that Arendt described, as what was exceptional has been normalized as “the routine solution,” and internment camp, in its new guises, has become “the only practical substitute for a nonexistent homeland” (Arendt [1951] 1968, 279, 284). Those who are confined to these sites can rarely access the protections guaranteed to other detainees under the rule of law. Arendt’s account of statelessness brings to view not only the legal dimensions of rightlessness but also its political aspects. The stateless are deprived of a political community that could guarantee their rights and judge them with their words and deeds: “The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (Arendt [1951] 1968, 296). This striking statement needs to be understood in light of Arendt’s phenomenological account of politics, action, and speech in The Human Condition. For Arendt, action denotes the capacity to initiate new beginnings, and it is inextricably linked to speech since it needs words to become meaningful and relevant to others ([1958] 1998, 178–79). Action in concert, which involves sharing words and deeds, is crucial for the constitution of each human being as an individual who is distinct yet equal. One’s unique personal identity, or “who” one is, can only become manifest in one’s words and deeds shared with others, as distinct from “what” one is, which pertains to “qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings” that need no such disclosure (Arendt [1958] 1998, 179). When Arendt argues that the stateless lost “the right to action” ([1951] 1968, 296), she does not mean that they lost their capacity to initiate new beginnings altogether; rather, she underscores that the stateless lost a political space in which they can enact that capacity in the company of fellow actors. Freedom, which is tied to the capacity to act and begin something new, requires “a worldly space to make its appearance,” and it is precisely that kind of space that the stateless are dispossessed of and find it difficult to reestablish (Arendt [1961] 1993, 149). Freedom understood in this sense requires freedom of movement, as highlighted in the introduction. From this perspective, one becomes a zoon politikon by freely moving in the world, sharing words and deeds with others and constituting spaces of appearance that allow equalization and individuation. Border enforcement practices systematically deny these possibilities as can be seen, for example, in the proliferation of camp-like spaces for the management of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants. It is extremely difficult for the inhabitants of such spaces to constitute a polis that, according to Arendt, “arises out of acting and speaking together” ([1958] 1998, 198). The humanitarian administration of refugee camps, for instance, often sets systematic obstacles to refugees’ efforts to organize politically, make demands about their needs, and transform these sites of confinement into homes that are relatively durable spaces fit for human action (Agier 2011; Gündoğdu 2015; Parekh 2017; Singh 2020). Perhaps even more extreme cases of rightlessness can be seen in detention centers that hold asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants for extended periods of 425

Ayten Gündoğdu

time, isolating them from “the world of the living” (Arendt [1951] 1968, 438). It is very challenging for those confined in these spaces to act in concert to contest their rightlessness; such action can, indeed, be grounds for various forms of punishment, including solitary confinement. In the face of such obstacles, detainees have increasingly mobilized their own bodies and resorted to protests such as self-mutilation, hunger strikes, and lip sewing to contest the systematic efforts to render their words and deeds irrelevant and meaningless. Arendt’s phenomenological account of personhood, action, and speech highlights that the loss of legal and political rights goes hand in hand with the loss of one’s recognition as fully human. Deprived of legal personhood and denied the right to action, the stateless were often reduced to “the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human” (Arendt [1951] 1968, 297). In the absence of any legal, political, and social qualifications, they appeared to others as mere human beings, and in that state, they were perceived as “frightening symbol[s]” of a radical difference (“alien,” “barbarian,” “savage”) that had to be eliminated by any means necessary to save “civilization” itself (302). Rightlessness, in its most fundamental sense, denotes an “expulsion from humanity altogether” (297). This condition could be described as a form of “social death,” banishing one from an intersubjectively shared world and interrupting even the most basic forms of human sociability (Patterson 1982). Reduced to the biological necessities of life (zoē) and relegated to an anonymous existence in camps, the stateless could no longer be recognized as individuals leading “a specifically human life” (bios) with distinct life stories and trajectories (Arendt [1958] 1998, 97). Since their lives do not seem to be of any substance or worth living, they could be subject to violence—even lethal violence—with impunity. The superfluousness of lives relegated to a condition of rightlessness has become all the more palpable with the distressing numbers of migrant deaths in the last decade. According to a conservative estimate of the International Organization of Migration, as of February 2024, over 63,000 migrants have died as they tried to cross borders since 2014 (International Organization for Migration n.d.). States that routinely adopt lethal border control policies have so far remained unaccountable for their actions. This regime of impunity goes hand in hand with an institutionalized indifference to the migrants who die or disappear in transit, as can be seen in the lack of any systematic effort to locate their whereabouts, recover remains, identify the dead, inform families, and have proper burials (Gündoğdu 2022). Migrant deaths and disappearances highlight that not every border crosser is equally subject to the violence used to maintain contemporary border regimes; the world of borders allocates rightlessness, injury, and death unequally. In grappling with such fundamental problems of injustice, phenomenological thinkers have drawn our attention to several factors such as race, gender, and (dis)ability, as highlighted in the other contributions to Part VI of this volume. In what follows, I turn to Frantz Fanon’s work on colonialism and racism to think about a key factor that accounts for the unequal allocation of rights and rightlessness in the context of migration.

3.  Borders and Racial Schemas A phenomenological perspective anchors itself in the world of appearances and emphasizes the interchangeability of “being” and “appearance” for living, embodied, sensing beings (Arendt 1978, 19–23). It takes the world as an “intermundane space (l’intermonde),” to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ([1964] 1968) term, “where our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap” ([1964] 1968, 48). Accordingly, intersubjectivity is an ineliminable dimension of 426

Migration

the world, and it is the sine qua non of our being/appearing in this world. In foregrounding the world of appearances as the primary site of inquiry, phenomenology also draws attention to the conditions of perception, including the social norms, historical contexts, and relations of power that continuously shape what we perceive and how we perceive it. Fanon’s work deserves attention for its critical inquiry into the conditions under which some living beings are banished from the intersubjective world of co-appearance and coperception, and his analysis of colonialism and racism illuminates how and why contemporary border policies relegate racialized others to a condition of rightlessness and render them vulnerable to different forms of violence. Fanon’s ([1961] 2004) account of colonialism brings to view the spatial configuration of “a compartmentalized world” that colonial domination engenders. “The dividing line, the border” between the colonist sector and the colonized sector installs an “apartheid” (Fanon [1961] 2004, 3) as it immobilizes the colonized and makes sure that they “remain in [their] place and not overstep [their] limits” (15). Colonialism, for Fanon, transforms the subjects over whom it rules into rightless entities by establishing “a Manichean world” in which the colonized symbolize “absolute evil” and are declared “impervious to ethics” (6). Since the colonized do not belong to the same normative order as the colonizers, they “can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity”; moral principles such as “human dignity” are completely emptied of their meaning in this context (9). Even the most extreme forms of violence such as torture are legalized and normalized under these conditions; torture becomes, in effect, “a fundamental necessity” and “a way of life” under colonialism (Fanon [1964] 1967, 66). In this normative universe, even the massacres of the colonized subjects will not arouse any moral indignation (Fanon [1961] 2004, 47). While Fanon did not directly address questions of migration, his account of colonialism assumes a critical force, especially in the wake of recent scholarship that has challenged the tendency to trace the origins of border control to the rise of the modern nation-state and urged us instead to look to the practices of immobilization and forced displacement that accompanied histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism (e.g., Mayblin and Turner 2021). More specifically, Fanon’s work can help us examine how border enforcement incorporates and refines certain elements of colonialism—e.g., racism as the principle of political rule, immobilization of the colonized, arbitrary rule by the police and the military, and routinized violence—as it substitutes the “migrant” for the “native.” Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves located in North Africa that constitute the only land borders between the European Union and the African continent, illustrate the continuing relevance of Fanon’s work in the context of migration. Just like the colony in Fanon’s analysis, the Spanish Moroccan border is placed under the lawlessness of an arbitrary military-police rule. The Guardia Civil, Spain’s paramilitary police force, cooperates with Moroccan border guards to block migrants, particularly those from West and Central Africa, from entering Europe. Routinized violence that migrants face at the hands of Spanish and Moroccan officers—e.g., beating migrants with truncheons and wooden sticks, shaking the fence to force migrants to fall down, and violently expelling even injured migrants who need medical assistance—has been extensively documented. Read in light of Fanon’s account of colonialism, such forms of violence are not exceptional incidents but rather necessary instruments in a social order organized around racial segregation and domination. How is it possible for human beings to be turned into rightless entities to be maimed and annihilated with impunity? Fanon’s answer to this question can be found in his analysis of racism as an organizing principle of colonialism. Racism is a ruling device that puts the 427

Ayten Gündoğdu

humanity of colonized subjects into question, often animalizing them with zoological references (Fanon [1961] 2004, 7, 182). It also suspends their status as living beings inhabiting a world characterized by intersubjectivity, exposing them to a “suffocating reification” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 89) as Fanon underscores in his phenomenological analysis of racism in Black Skin, White Masks. If human beings are not simply sensed objects but also sentient subjects interacting with and responding to the world around them and other embodied beings, racism reduces those at the receiving end of the “white gaze” to mere objects to be looked at through the racial schemas that affix negative, mythologizing, and deindividuating representations to the color of their skin (Gordon 1995; Yancy 2005). Regardless of what they do or say, they are perceived as “phobogenic” objects that exist solely for the gaze of the (white) other (Fanon [1952] 2008, 132). Every move of these subjects, who are held captive to “a visible appearance for which [they are] not responsible” (18; emphasis in original), is perceived as suspicious on the basis of “solely negating” representations that deny them any possibility of individuating themselves through their words and deeds (90). Similar to the case in the colony, routinized violence in the context of migration control is justified by racial schemas that permeate the perceptual field and hold racialized subjects captive to dehumanizing representations that deprive them of any individuality, treat them as mere specimens of a race, and render their very appearances suspect. Such a racialized partition of the world informs border control policies that make it impossible for people of certain “nationalities” (a term that functions in ways similar to “race” and “ethnicity” in the migration context) to enjoy the right to freedom of movement. Various migration “cooperation” agreements that the European Union and its member states have signed with countries such as Morocco and Libya to close off Europe to most migrants from the African continent illustrate the central role that race plays in determining who is able to move across borders. Just as Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of statelessness urges us to understand “rightlessness” as a multifaceted condition that cannot be reduced to the legal loss of rights, Fanon’s phenomenological analysis of colonialism and racism foregrounds the political, social, and even ontological forms of nonexistence that cannot be captured easily from a legal perspective. Underscoring the interchangeability of “appearance” and “being” from a phenomenological perspective, both Arendt and Fanon bring to view the plight of those who cannot appear to others as distinct yet equal and become an anonymous mass of “savages” to be maimed and killed with impunity. Following their phenomenological insights, we could argue that border control policies subject racialized migrants to a form of “forced disappearance”: Denied the possibilities of individuating themselves through their interactions with the world and other embodied, sentient subjects, they are turned into thing-like entities bereft of any living presence and banished from the intersubjective world of co-appearance and co-perception (Gündoğdu 2022). In a racist social order, racialized embodiment is a form of visibility (even hyper-visibility) that is simultaneously an enforced invisibility to the extent that the meaning of one’s appearance/being is already determined before one does or says anything (Yancy 2005, 226–27). In the context of European migration policies, for example, racialized migrants, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa, are held captive to representations that associate them with criminality, aggressiveness, mendacity, and irrationality, which were central to the construction of “the native” under colonialism, as highlighted in Fanon’s critique of “the North African criminality” thesis (Fanon [1961] 2004, 222–28). This process of reification does not go uncontested, however, and the contemporary struggles for migrants’ rights highlight that borders are sites 428

Migration

not only of rightlessness, disappearance, and death but also of “world-building” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 96), which strives to create the conditions for an intersubjective existence characterized by plurality.

4.  Towards a World of Plurality Border control policies, especially those that subject migrants to death and disappearance, aim to create “holes of oblivion” where migrants relegated to rightlessness can be treated “as if they had never existed” and “disappear in the literal sense of the word” (Arendt [1951] 1968, 434, 442). But as Arendt underscores, “The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left to tell the story” (Arendt [1963] 1977, 232– 33). Similarly, as Fanon describes the colonial policies that aimed to turn the colonized into object-like entities, he underscores that “the colonist achieves only a pseudo-petrification” (Fanon [1961] 2004, 17) because the operations of reification are continuously undercut by the resistant acts of the colonized. In the migration context, as border control policies consign particularly racialized migrants to a form of civil and social death (and, increasingly, physical death), various struggles contest these policies by resolutely advocating for a world of plurality in which every living being can appear to others as equal and free. Judith Butler’s work on “precarity” invites us to understand such struggles waged by those “precluded from being part of the plurality that brings the space of appearance into being” in terms of “the right to appear” (Butler 2015, 55). “Precarity,” denoting our differential exposure to violence, injury, and death with impunity, arises from the exploitation of “precariousness,” understood as a condition of vulnerability ensuing from “living socially” or “the fact that one’s life is in some sense in the hands of the other,” according to Butler (2009, 14; see also Butler 2004, 128–51). While this argument has been criticized for ontologizing vulnerability from an ethical and de-politicized perspective (e.g., Honig 2010), Butler’s longstanding engagement with the phenomenological tradition provides crucial resources for steering clear of ontologization and understanding vulnerability rather as a condition that is always contested and interpreted in “the highly regulated field of appearance” (Butler 2015, 35). This phenomenological orientation can be detected, for example, in Butler’s analysis of the trial that acquitted the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King in 1991—an analysis that is particularly relevant for understanding racialized border violence. Building on Fanon, Butler (1993) draws attention to racial schemas that recast King as a violent threat and police officers as vulnerable victims. To the extent that we always find ourselves in a field of perception regulated by various norms and schemas, it is impossible to speak of a vulnerability that is ontologically given and prior to the social conditions that inform perception. What is particularly important for purposes of migrants’ contemporary struggles is Butler’s understanding of “precarity,” not only in terms of violence and vulnerability but also in terms of politics and agency—a move that resonates with the representation of “pariahs” by Arendt ([1944] 2007) and of “the wretched” by Fanon as subjects capable of becoming political. When subjects relegated to rightlessness reclaim the public space and claim the rights that they are denied, they also enact, according to Butler (2015), “the right to appear.” Such struggles contest the “already imagined borders” of universality by bringing into view its exclusions, and in doing that, they open universality to an unpredictable future (Butler 1997, 91). This is an apt characterization of the struggles waged by migrants 429

Ayten Gündoğdu

and their allies against enforced forms of invisibility imposed by policies such as detention, deportation, and pushbacks. From the hunger strikes of migrants held incommunicado in privatized detention centers to the marches of families of dead and disappeared migrants, such struggles strive to animate those who are supposed to be civilly and socially dead and transfigure them into subjects entitled to rights. Butler’s reflections on “the right to appear” arise out of an engagement with Hannah Arendt’s declaration of “a right to have rights” to address the plight of statelessness. This declaration highlights the need for, among other things, a right “to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions” and “to belong to some kind of organized community”—in short, “the right of every individual to belong to humanity” (Arendt [1951] 1968, 296–98). Rather than grounding this new right in a conventional foundation such as “nature” or “history,” Arendt highlights that it “should be guaranteed by humanity itself” ([1951] 1968, 298). In shifting the question from one of foundations to one of guarantees, she urges her readers to address the challenging question of how human rights can be politically affirmed and recognized through mutual promises that can find relative stability in institutions and laws. From an Arendtian perspective, such guarantees originate in, and can only be maintained by, concerted political action. When undocumented immigrants refuse to lead a life in shadows, appear in public, and demand and enact the rights that they do not formally have, their political performance illustrates what it means for “humanity” to guarantee “the right to have rights” (Beltrán 2009; Gündoğdu 2015; Krause 2008). “Humanity,” reconsidered beyond its metaphysical conceptions in terms of a given essence or a fixed identity, could be best understood as a contingent and contested effect of the struggles to affirm and guarantee equality: “Man, as philosophy and theology know him, exists—or is realized—in politics only in the equal rights that those who are most different guarantee for each other” (Arendt 2005, 94). Political action understood in these terms is crucial for the institution of a world that is truly plural—i.e., inhabited by individuals who are equal to and distinct from each other. From this perspective, the condition of “plurality” that Arendt takes to be characteristic of the world of living beings is not an empirical fact to be taken for granted; it is rather a condition that can only be sustained and actualized with practices that allow human beings to establish themselves as equal in their distinctness (Loidolt 2018). An emphasis on the crucial importance of political action and struggle for reimagining “humanity” beyond its narrow and exclusionary conceptualizations is also at the heart of Fanon’s critique of colonialism and racism. Fanon denounces the hypocrisy of abstract principles that are continuously violated by colonialism, including the French ideals of “Rights, Duties, Citizenship, Equality” ([1964] 1967, 13). Just as Arendt foregrounds the failures of an abstract humanism that revolves around the sacredness of life in her analysis of statelessness, Fanon shows how a humanitarian discourse, invoking “man” and “dignity,” is limited to effectively intervene and stop “multiple daily murder of humanness” in the colonial context (Fanon 2018, 434). This is why he calls for leaving behind Eurocentric discourses of “man” that turned out to be “murderously carnivorous” (Fanon [1961] 2004, 236). However, Fanon’s radical critique does not turn away from humanism altogether and results in its radical rethinking (Mbembe 2019, 160). He appeals for “a new humanism, a new theory of man,” which can only be actualized through the struggles of the colonized (Fanon [1964] 1967, 125). Similar to Arendt’s emphasis on the crucial role of action in actualizing the conditions for a truly plural world, Fanon urges us to understand “humanity” not as a given fact but rather as a fragile achievement resulting from the resolute actions 430

Migration

of those who refuse to be relegated to the status of petrified objects. Understood not simply as the formal end of colonialism but rather as a revolutionary overthrow of the power relations established by colonialism, decolonization promises to liberate both the colonized and the colonizer and establish the conditions for recognizing each human being in their distinct individuality—and not according to their assigned roles in a racial hierarchy: “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 206). Read alongside the works of Butler, Arendt, and Fanon, contemporary struggles of migrants are significant not only for claiming rights such as freedom of movement and legal residence but also for transforming the field of perception. Contesting sedimented perceptions of migrants, which often vacillate between the images of threatening invaders and tragic victims, these struggles enact what Butler (2015) calls “the right to appear” as they stake a claim to the public space for subjects relegated to an illicit life in shadows. Additionally, they underscore that the performance of this right by rightless subjects is crucial for rethinking humanity beyond the divisions and hierarchies established by current border regimes. If “the right to have rights” can only be guaranteed by humanity, as argued by Arendt ([1951] 1968, 298), then humanity can be best understood not as an entity that precedes such political practices but rather an effect that ensues from them. Finally, migrants’ struggles for rights bring to the fore the racial divisions and violence of border control policies, and, in doing that, they alert us to exclusions of a Eurocentric discourse of humanism that “never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world” (Fanon [1961] 2004, 235). Accordingly, they call attention to the need to reimagine humanity beyond the racial hierarchies established by borders, and, in doing so, they stage a “new humanism” that strives to institute “a world of reciprocal recognitions” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 193).

5. Outlook A phenomenological approach can contribute to contemporary studies of migration by examining the various schemas that permeate borders as perceptual fields and their devastating effects on our experience of the world in its plurality. It can also help us understand the political struggles to transform what we perceive and how we perceive it when we look at borders and the people trying to navigate them. Conversely, studying the contemporary problems and struggles of migration can allow us to rethink key phenomenological concepts and ideas in a political register by paying closer attention to the socio-political norms, institutions, and practices that can undermine or augment the conditions for experiencing the world in its plurality. Phenomenology, as illustrated by the works of Arendt, Fanon, and Butler, can make three key contributions to the study of migration. First, it alerts us to fundamental forms of loss, violence, and injury that cannot be easily captured within strictly juridical frameworks centered on individual human rights violations experienced by migrants in transit or in host countries. Among these, we can cite being deprived of the intelligibility and relevance of speech (Arendt); being transformed into object-like entities bereft of any living presence (Fanon); and, finally, being consigned to a condition of unlivability and ungrievability (Butler). With its emphasis on intersubjectivity, phenomenology urges us to understand these problems beyond their strictly individual aspects and in terms of an expulsion from a world in which one can be recognized by others as an equal and distinct living being. Second, a 431

Ayten Gündoğdu

phenomenological approach can help us rethink borders as perceptual fields regulated by various norms and schemas that ultimately inform who can move across them with ease and who face systematic obstacles (Ahmed 2007). Given the connections between contemporary migration politics and histories of colonialism, empire, and slavery, a phenomenology of race and racism, as exemplified by Fanon’s work, can provide critical insights into the new forms of apartheid created by borders. Third, in thinking about the normative questions about the right to freedom of movement, a phenomenological approach parts ways with strong foundationalist accounts that would strive to find a normative ground (e.g., sanctity of life) that could endow this right with a universalist justification. Instead, moving from the question of foundations to that of guarantees, to recall Arendt, it foregrounds the centrality of political action in contesting the condition of rightlessness, reimagining humanity beyond its narrow conceptions and creating the conditions for a world characterized by plurality. Finally, studying migration pushes phenomenology in an unmistakably political direction and invites an inquiry into the institutional norms, historical conditions, power relations, and political struggles that continuously shape what we perceive and how we perceive it. More recently, various scholars have proposed the term “critical phenomenology” to mark a decisive turn away from “the meta-level of ‘pure’ subjective description advocated by Husserl” in order to examine “the constitutive social, political, psychological, economic, historical, and cultural dimensions of the phenomena under investigation” (Weiss 2017; see also Guenther 2013; Salamon 2018). When read in light of contemporary migration problems and struggles, the works of Arendt, Fanon, and Butler suggest that there is no phenomenology worthy of the name that is not critical. By privileging the world of appearances as its main site of inquiry, phenomenology immediately raises questions about how and why things appear to us in the way they do: Why do borders subject some migrants and not others to rightlessness, violence, and death? How does someone cease to appear to us as a living being with whom we share the world as an equal? Through what kinds of processes do we transform them into entities to be detained, deported, maimed, and annihilated with impunity? What kinds of perceptual shifts are necessary to change this taken-for-granted background and open up new ways of perceiving the world beyond the hierarchical divides installed by borders? Phenomenology can address such questions and proceed with the very task it sets for itself—inquiring into the world of appearances—only by being critical through and through.

References Agier, Michel. 2011. Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–68. Arendt, Hannah. (1944) 2007. “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” In The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, 275–97. New York: Schocken Books. ———. (1951) 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. (1958) 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1961) 1993. “What is Freedom?” In Between Past and Future, 143−71. New York: Penguin. ———. (1963) 1977. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. ———. (1963) 1990. On Revolution. New York: Penguin. ———. 1968. “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing.” In Men in Dark Times, translated by Clara Brussel Winston and Richard Winston, 3−31. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. ———. 1978. Thinking. Vol. 1: The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

432

Migration ———. 2005. “Introduction into Politics.” In The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn, 93−200. New York: Schocken Books. Beltrán, Cristina. 2009. “Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance.” Political Theory 37 (5): 595–622. Benhabib, Seyla. 2004. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited with an introduction by Robert Gooding-Williams, 15−22. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London/New York: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London/New York: Verso. ———. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. ———. (1961) 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. ———. (1964) 1967. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2018. Alienation and Freedom. Edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Guenther, Lisa. 2013. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gündoğdu, Ayten. 2015. Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2022. “Border Deaths as Forced Disappearances: Frantz Fanon and the Outlines of a Critical Phenomenology.” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 5 (3): 12–41. Honig, Bonnie. 2010. “Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism.” New Literary History 41 (1): 1–33. International Organization for Migration. n.d. “Missing Migrants Project.” Accessed July 30, 2022. https://missingmigrants.iom.int. Kesby, Alison. 2012. The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity, and International Law. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Krause, Monika. 2008. “Undocumented Migrants: An Arendtian Perspective.” European Journal of Political Theory 7 (3): 331–48. Loidolt, Sophie. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. London: Taylor and Francis. Mayblin, Lucy, and Joe B. Turner. 2021. Migration Studies and Colonialism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964) 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Parekh, Serena. 2017. Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement. New York: Routledge. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salamon, Gayle. 2018. The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia. New York: New York University Press. Singh, Ashika L. 2020. “Arendt in the Refugee Camp: The Political Agency of World-Building.” Political Geography 77. Weiss, Gail. 2017. “Phenomenology and Race (or Racializing Phenomenology).” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, 233–44. New York: Routledge. Yancy, George. 2005. “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19 (4): 215–41.

433

32 DISABILITY Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

1. Introduction Disability is often understood as an impairment of the individual body or mind which limits the possibility for an individual to perform certain activities or to interact with the social and material world. Since the 1960s, activists and disability scholars have progressively differentiated between first, medical and social approaches to disability and second, disability and impairment. In a medical model, disability is rooted in biological deficit, and there is a tight correlation between the body and disadvantage (Goodley 2013; Oliver 2012). Here, disability is understood as something abnormal about an individual body that reliably produces disadvantageous outcomes (or disability simply is those outcomes). In this view, appropriate responses are correction or rehabilitation. The social model, by contrast, claims that while disability does describe limitation and disadvantage, these have nothing to do with individual bodies but are located in “the organisation and structures of society” (Barnes, Oliver, and Barton 2002, 5). The social model distinguishes impairment (difficulties that follow from physical characteristics) and disability (oppressive and limiting social outcomes experienced by impaired people). For social model theorists, then, disability ranges “from individual prejudice to institutional discrimination, from inaccessible public buildings to unusable transport systems, from segregated education to excluding work arrangements” (Oliver 2009, 33). Impairment might mean that someone cannot walk and is a wheelchair user; they are only disabled, however, where buildings and public transport are inaccessible to them. Here, appropriate responses are social: elimination of barriers and challenge to prejudices with the objective of inclusion in ordinary social and working life. As a philosophical approach concerned with describing the structures of lived experience from the first-person perspective, phenomenology is ideally suited to interrogate the experience of disability. The classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Maurice MerleauPonty, and other 20th-century phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre offers a rich conceptual toolkit that can help elucidate experiences of ability and disability, understand first-person subjective embodied experiences, and interrogate broader material and socio-political frameworks within which experiences of disability and ability occur. And by elucidating how embodied capacities underpin all our engagements with the 434

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-45

Disability

world, from perception to motricity to social relations and dealings with our lifeworlds, phenomenology provides many resources to explicate and interrogate assumptions found in both the medical and social models of disability. However, these classical phenomenological thinkers did not fully interrogate disability as a feature of ordinary lived experience. Instead, their phenomenological works tend to ‘instrumentalise’ disability or the ‘abnormal’ as a means to illuminate tacit structures of “normal” experience that might otherwise be taken for granted. Nevertheless, these early phenomenological descriptions of embodiment also imply that body and self are open and relationally constituted and that agency is achieved with technologies beyond the boundaries of the skin; consider Merleau-Ponty’s well-known example of the blind man incorporating his cane into his body schema (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 144). The phenomenological openness and malleability of the lived body, along with its relationality to others and its lived environment, have significant ramifications for ideas of normalcy, ability, and disability. This chapter discusses how these phenomenological ideas can elucidate the lived body as a political entity and sketches a political phenomenology of disability. It first considers how Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s1 phenomenology offers a productive framework for attending to the lived body. It then moves to critiques of classical phenomenology and mainstream phenomenological accounts of illness concerning assumptions about normal embodiment and the breakdowns caused by disability and illness. Finally, it explores critical and crip phenomenological approaches, which are where we see the political potential of phenomenology of disability.

2.  The Account of Classical Phenomenology The body, as the grounding of first-person subjective experience, is a frequent concern in classical phenomenology. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological description of embodiment rejects dominant dualist frameworks that see the human body as distinct and separate from consciousness or the mind. He demonstrates that when we regard the physical body phenomenologically, it cannot be reduced to a material object or understood merely as an appendage to the self that is controlled in a conscious and mechanistic manner. Instead, Husserl highlights how the lived body constitutes spatial relations, perception, sensation and feeling, and, most importantly, agency and free will through action. He characterises subjectivity through the lived body as an “I can,” in contrast to the dominant Cartesianism which focuses on subjectivity in consciousness and cognition through the privileging of a conscious “I think that” (Husserl 1989, 159). By emphasising the body as the site of agency, will, and movement, Husserl creates the conditions for a latent ableism within subsequent phenomenological conceptions of the body and its capacities (Hall 2021). Here, ableism refers to a set of assumptions and practices that reify and prioritise a particular account of the normal or able body/mind and concurrently bolster the structural marginalisation of disabled people (Campbell 2009). Husserl’s early insights provide the ground from which subsequent existential phenomenologists elucidate how the various social characteristics of one’s body—as gendered, racialised, disabled, or ill, for example—are not merely contingent features that can be used to describe one’s body or identity but are instead constitutive of one’s lived experience as a being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1962) and, furthermore, constitute how one relates to others and the lifeworld. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is probably the most notable existential 435

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

phenomenologist to take up Husserl’s ideas. He develops an account of embodied subjectivity after reading Husserl’s unpublished writings in the Leuven archives in 1939 (Toadvine 2002). In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty takes up and extends Husserl’s account of lived embodiment, describing an anonymous, pre-personal body that is “in and toward the world,” intertwined with and making manifest our cultural and social existence (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 80). Central to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived body is his idea of “motor intentionality” (113), which describes how our bodies are necessarily oriented towards a world that solicits engagement through action and motricity. As he writes, “[M]y body appears to me as a posture toward a certain task, actual or possible” (102). This orientation to the world through the body is not merely a contingent feature of subjectivity but the very ground through which subjectivity is constituted. Echoing Husserl, Merleau-Ponty argues, “Consciousness is originarily not an ‘I think that,’ but rather an ‘I can’ ” (139). For Merleau-Ponty, this capacity to be an ‘I can’ is underpinned by the ‘body schema’: a system of motor and postural functions that are in constant operation below the level of self-conscious intentionality. The body schema is created, renewed, and rearranged through the acquisition and sedimentation of tacit skills, habits, and techniques that make regular and repeatable (rather than purely spontaneous) action possible. Through acquiring bodily skills—e.g., walking, driving, touch typing, dancing—we open up possibilities in our lifeworlds. ‘Underneath’ more apparent and reflected-upon movements, gestures, dispositions, and so on, then, exists a complex of embodied skills and dispositions that respond spontaneously to the relevant affordance or cue. These render the world immediately meaningful and primed for action. Crucially, our body schema is not static or fixed but “an open system of an infinity of equivalent positions in different orientations . . . by which different motor tasks are instantly transposable” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 142). Merleau-Ponty illustrates this idea with some examples. He describes at length the case of Schneider, a war veteran, who makes wallets by trade. While a brain injury prevents Schneider from performing spontaneous movements out of context (such as a military salute on command), his body schema remains intact such that he can perform habitual movements when they are solicited, in context, by familiar objects in the world. Merleau-Ponty writes: [T]he subject placed in front of his scissors, his needle, and his familiar tasks has no need to look for his hands or his fingers, for they are not objects to be found in objective space (like bones, muscles, and nerves), but rather powers that are already mobilized by the perception of the scissors or the needle. . . . [I]t is our body as a power of various regions of the world that already rises up toward the objects to grasp and perceive them. (2012, 108) Such examples, Merleau-Ponty argues, illustrate that my body “has its world, or understands its world without having to go through ‘representations,’ or without being subordinated to a ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’ ” (2012, 141). Indeed, it is by elucidating Schneider’s inability to perform “abstract movements,” except through a painstaking conscious reconstruction of movement, that Merleau-Ponty homes in on what he argues constitutes the experience of the “normal subject” (2012, 107). Merleau-Ponty’s account of ‘normal’ embodiment is not explicitly conceptualised in terms of biological or physical factors. Classical phenomenological accounts, and later

436

Disability

accounts inspired by them, reject comprehensively external and objective views of embodiment: When we view the body solely as an object, they suggest, we elide its lived and meaning-constituting dimensions. They do not understand normality in terms of ideal Vitruvian proportions, essential biological features, or definitional properties (Watkin 2017). Initially, then, it looks like a phenomenological approach might provide an alternative framework for disability that eschews deep-seated ideals about what properties are necessary or essential to humans (ideals that disqualify many atypical ways of moving and cognising from the outset). Nevertheless, Phenomenology of Perception abounds with references not merely to normal activity and experience but to ‘the normal person’ and ‘the normal subject.’ While MerleauPonty routinely discusses “pathological phenomena” (2012, 110) like phantom limbs, brain injuries, and perceptual anomalies, his focus is on showing how these purported breakdowns in experience illuminate the putative “normal person” (110) who has “normal experience” (121). In this way, such ordinary bodily experiences as illness, pain, and disability are positioned as undesirable and contrary to a normal state. Yet despite frequent invocations of normality, Merleau-Ponty is imprecise about this concept (Ward 2022) and arguably takes a certain notion of normality as given (Wieseler 2019). His approach implies not just that some individuals have experiences that are normal or abnormal for them; rather, some subjects act and experience normally while others do not. This has potentially exclusionary ramifications: It implies that some criterion distinguishes these various pathologies from the capacities found in ‘normal subjects.’ The criteria for normality and pathology in classical and mainstream approaches usually involve the presence or absence of certain capacities, rather than objective somatic properties. In descriptions of successful or ‘normal’ motor intentionality, Merleau-Ponty (2012) points to the capacity to “reckon with the possible” (to respond to situations imaginatively and creatively, rather than mechanically or instinctually). He also suggests that skillful embodied navigation of the world involves constant adjustment to achieve an equilibrium, such as when I position myself at just the right distance to view a painting: neither so close that the colours and shapes blur nor so far that the painting is merely a mass of colours (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 316). Hubert Dreyfus calls this state “maximal grip” and further suggests that, following skill habituation, embodiment involves the capacity to have uninterrupted and flowing bodily engagement with things and situations that are intuitively familiar and graspable (Dreyfus 2013; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999).2 This common theme in phenomenology is crucial for what follows. In ‘normal’ motor intentionality, the lived body seamlessly facilitates the subject’s relation to external environments through an ability to spontaneously move and act and does so without ‘getting in the way.’ The body recedes from reflective awareness during activity; the subject is not aware of their body but rather of the situational engagement it allows. The body, then, becomes ‘invisible’ (Sartre 1956), ‘disappears’ (Leder 1990), or achieves ‘transparency’ (Carel 2016). Shaun Gallagher terms this the “absently available body” (2004, 278). He writes: When the lived body is “in tune” with the environment, when events are ordered smoothly, when the body is engaged in a task that holds the attention of consciousness, then the body remains in a mute and shadowy existence and is lived through in a non-conscious experience. (Gallagher 2004, 277)

437

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

3.  Disability in Classical and Mainstream Phenomenology The idea of the ‘absently available body’ raises some important questions. Does this approach equate transparency with healthy or normal embodiment? When a body is not transparent—when it experiences disruptions, struggles to achieve a hold on its surroundings, stands out as an object—is the problem something about that body itself? Does this approach understand disability as individual limitation or dysfunction? The notion of disruption points us toward a common strategy in phenomenology: attending to cases of experiential breakdown to reveal otherwise unnoticed, essential aspects of ‘normal’ experience. The general understanding is that core features of subjectivity can be sharply illuminated through a study of their pathological distortions. Pathological cases can function heuristically to make manifest what is normally simply taken for granted. They serve as a means of gaining distance from the familiar, in order better to explicate it. (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 140) This strategy is especially evident in phenomenological approaches to topics that are notionally akin to disability, such as disease and illness. Phenomenologists of health and illness like S. Kay Toombs (1988, 1995), Drew Leder (1990, 2016), and Havi Carel (2022, 2021, 2016) consider various conditions that disrupt the operations of the ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ body and stress the significance of breakdowns: not just as aspects of the illness experience but insofar as these reveal background conditions of the healthy bodily state of affairs. Illness and disability incur a kind of forced suspension of the natural attitude, permitting a phenomenological reduction that grasps how illness perturbs experiential structures. Despite conceptual differences, they broadly agree that pathological cases reveal the normal conditions and capacities of the body; what pathology disrupts, and thus reveals, is the basic tendency of bodies to disappear during activity. Leder, for instance, proposes that the healthy body is ‘absent’: spontaneously available for activity while disappearing into the attentional background. During experiences like pain, however, the body “dys-appears” (1990, 84): it not only comes sharply to the foreground of attention but does so in a problematic and uncanny way. A few things merit discussion. These approaches comprise one strand of phenomenology that regularly discusses disability. However, these theorists sometimes use ‘disability’ fairly generally as a synonym for loss, limitation, or dysfunction. Leder often uses it this way (1990, 74, 2016, passim). So does Carel when she writes of “lost bodily capacities, and the disability and dependence that stem from this loss” (2016, 78). Sometimes ‘disability’ is presented as the cause of disease and dysfunction and sometimes as their symptom. This resembles what Joel Michael Reynolds calls the “ableist conflation”: a tendency to equate disability “with pain, suffering, and disadvantage” (2019, 244; see also Reynolds 2017). And although these theorists rightly criticise medico-scientific reduction of the body to an object, they frame their analyses largely in terms of changes within individual bodies. The upshot is a rather individualistic and apolitical view that leans toward the aforementioned medical model (Oliver and Barnes 2012). This overlooks many ways the association of disability with individual limitation and suffering has been problematised (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019; Tremain 2018; Shildrick 2012; McRuer 2006; Wendell 2001; Stiker 1999). The point is neither that disability never involves pain or disadvantage nor that it is fully explicable 438

Disability

via social factors (McConville 2021). It is rather that such outcomes are not entailments of physical or cognitive anomaly and will be modulated by social circumstances (Lajoie 2019).3 As the social model attests, many difficulties involved in being atypically bodied or minded involve factors outside the body. This approach arguably evinces a variation on what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the ‘normate’: “[T]he figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries . . . the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings” (1997, 7). The normate is a paradigm or “archetypal representation” (Reynolds 2019, 244) of how bodies ought to look, think, and move. This structures the modern self-understanding in profound ways, organising the social fabric and the self-conception of individuals within it. As Garland-Thomson notes, the normate is the space delimited by rendering others as non-normate. Put differently, disability is just as much involved in the self-understanding of those who register as normal as those who do not. The normate grants privilege and opportunity to those who meet its standards and reduces them for those who do not. Turning to breakdown, it is not certain whether, or how, this applies to disability as such. Breakdown only strictly applies to acquired, fluctuating, or temporary conditions and not to congenital cases or conditions that are relatively unchanging, in which there is no prior undisrupted state that has now broken down (McConville 2021). The aforementioned theorists take different positions on the extent of the relationship between breakdown and disability. Toombs reflects on disruptions and limitations occasioned by the onset of her multiple sclerosis and suggests that this phenomenological description reveals “disruption of space and time that are an integral element of physical disability” (1995, 10). She generalises from her experience, with its transition from normal to disrupted state to physical disability in general, which surely includes experiences involving no such transition. Although Leder (1990, 70) professes not to endorse an “invariant essence of corporeal experience,” he also claims that the body is “essentially characterized by absence” (1) and that disappearance is characteristic of “normal and healthy functioning” (69). He does not explicitly theorise disability but counts it among various types of dysfunction that disrupt and prevent disappearance. Toombs and Leder, then, suggest that bodily normality is essentially transparent and place disability on the side of things that interrupt this normality. However, if there are instances of disability that do not involve this diachronic breakdown—in which normal state is supplanted by pathological—it is unclear that breakdown can characterise disability as such. At stake here is the conceptualisation of transparency. The strong linkage of normality and health with transparency creates some tensions concerning disability. Kim Q. Hall proposes that, because Leder proceeds from within the perspective of an ideally able disappearing body, he can only understand disability as loss and reiterates the common notion of disability as “an unwelcome intrusion” that should be corrected or eliminated (2021, 16). Carel has the most fleshed-out conception of transparency, which develops ideas from Toombs and Leder. She suggests that Toombs’s account is too strong and argues that transparency is neither as ubiquitous nor as absolute as some suggest (2016, 2022); she qualifies the concept in several ways and suggests that transparency proper only applies during “healthy adulthood” (2016, 83). However, Carel extends some arguments about breakdown to “all kinds of illness: chronic and acute, somatic and mental, congenital or acquired—all the disorders subsumed under these categories give rise to a change in one’s body and world” (2016, 74). Further, she asserts that “transparency is the hallmark of health and normal function” (2016, 56) for adult bodies that are “not hampered by 439

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

disability or illness” (2016, 80). Despite the qualifications, then, Carel retains a notion of ‘paradigm health’ linked with transparency. There is an abiding tension here, as in Leder and Toombs: Breakdown is supposed to identify cases in which a former status has been lost but seems to implicate a wider array of instances. If transparency breaks down in a consistent manner, that body is not healthy or normal. Carel suggests that congenital disability does not involve breakdown: There is no prior state, and those with congenital conditions can enjoy a feeling of integration and transparency. However, many with congenital conditions do consistently struggle to achieve transparency (McConville 2021) and may not experience “a strong sense of integrity, completeness, agency, and ability, untouched by what others may see as disability” (Carel 2022, 86). This places the congenital-acquired distinction under some duress. It also points toward the fact that transparency can break down not only due to somatic factors but also due to how body and surroundings interact. Crucially, these formulations tend to credit the body alone for successful realisation of the ‘I can’ and transparency. They understand illness and disability alike mostly as individual bodily predicaments and so are not well suited to thinking about disability in relational and political terms. For them, healthy, normal bodies are transparent entirely, or overwhelmingly, due to their own powers. Their descriptions of breakdowns also suggest that these are largely occasioned by somatic disturbances. Toombs (1995) and Carel (2016) discuss various issues—inability to participate in social activities, cook, access, and move freely in urban and public spaces—largely as though bodily changes cause the problems: a new wheelchair user cannot enter a building because of their newly limited motility. In this view, if the world becomes unwelcoming or inaccessible, it is because an individual body has become dysfunctional, not because of the more political matter of the relationships between bodies and social organisation (Mitchell 2021; Moser 2006). The aforementioned building access problem is a constant for those who have always used chairs. The problem for the new chair user is that now, unlike before, they are in a world that is not organised around their body, where others treat them poorly on that basis. This, not just bodily changes, will have abiding effects on their capacity to act. Disability does involve many disruptions—including those mentioned here—but these do not have straightforwardly somatic causes. They are relational and political. This means something different from both the social model claim that disability exists in social and environmental arrangements and the phenomenological claim that bodies can be rendered unpleasantly conspicuous by social encounters. Rather, it means that an aspect of disability involves interrelations between bodies and world, including whether and how these relations afford ability and transparency. Transparency is, as Carel (2016) rightly proposes, often overstated. Further, while transparency does involve bodily capacities, it involves much more: The ability involved in the ‘I can’ itself demands critical attention. If bodies can enjoy the free and effortless activity described by phenomenologists, it is because they are acting in a world that supports them. First, as Iris Marion Young’s (1980) oft-referenced article on gendered embodiment attests, the ability to do something, including the confidence and competence to do it spontaneously, is no mere matter of somatic properties or an abstract bodily capacity. Rather, the habits involved in transparency are acquired within normative socio-political landscapes that condition or inflect their acquisition and deployment. Second, these environments affect what bodies can do and how much the body can be forgotten. Many habits can form only because surroundings are prepared for uptake by bodies with a particular shape, size, posture, range of movement, 440

Disability

sensory apparatus, cognitive repertoire, and so on. We might modify what Sara Ahmed (2007) says of whiteness to suggest that where one has normatively validated embodiment, the arrangement of the world “extends one’s shape” and vastly increases the capacity to act in myriad ways without undue reflection. Philosophers can happily ignore the bodies, pens, laptops, and tables that they often discuss only if these tools comport with their embodiment. Ability and disability alike, then, have much to do with the shape of tools and surroundings and their role in activity (Weiss 2017). They are matters of fit and misfit (Garland-­ Thomson 2019, 2011). ‘Fit’ occurs when a body encounters an environment that accords with its shape and supports its activity, ‘misfit’ where the environment is inapt, and activity is precluded. The congruence of typical bodies and everyday environments is not natural; things have been made this way, not least due to the organising force of the normate. This means the ‘problem’ is not in the body but in the quality of the relation between bodies and aspects of their surroundings. Here, then, ability and disability are recast as relational (effects of the relations between bodies and more or less congruent situations) and dynamic (changing with the spatial and temporal situation) (Garland-Thomson 2019). Consequently, the tools that extend the shape of typical bodies are formally equivalent to the ‘compensatory’ prosthetics used by atypical individuals (Ott 2002). All organised a­ rrangements— the ­gradients and textures of the paths on which we walk or roll; the ­distances between buildings, their interior dimensions, colour, shape, and smell; the devices we hold and tap to access knowledge; the things we sit in to get from here to there—are effectively ­accommodations. And however neutral these appear, they incorporate ­assumptions about the bodies that will enter them or take them up. Those objects and environments designed for typical bodies can more readily disappear into the taken-for-granted background structure, where they appear passive. A supportive world extends one’s shape, which also affects habit memory, transparency, and the projective engagements these ground. Habituated repertoires form through repeated correlations with things and situations. And, as Thomas Fuchs suggests, embodied habits do not reside fully in the body: the habits that permit spontaneous typing, for instance, are “an emergent dispositional property of the whole system of organism and keyboard connected to each other” (2017, 337). For body and tools to disappear, for environments to be intuitively accessible, the extra-somatic participants must extend the body’s shape. Where they do not, there will be frustration of habit formation and, thus, of the spontaneous activity of the ‘I can’ in which body and things can become transparent. Transparency—now in a qualified and relational sense—like fitting is always somewhat provisional and imperfect. Moreover, much of this state is only possible due to the organisation of surroundings. The ‘I can’ is not a simple entailment of the bodies in question. As Reynolds puts it: [T]he “I can” is necessarily constituted by one’s environment and the futures it affords. Ability expectations are culled not just from one’s proprioceptive-kinesthetic experience of one’s body, but from one’s environment and social milieu. (2019, 245) The organisation of these environments and milieus means that the typically embodied have opportunities to achieve transparency without undue effort, while the atypically embodied must bend themselves around environments that do not take them into account. 441

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

4.  Critical and Crip Phenomenology While phenomenology itself is sometimes understood as a critical discipline (Zahavi and Loidolt 2022), insofar as it calls on us to discard naïve, preconceived ideas about phenomena and a world that exists apart from consciousness, Guenther (2019) reminds us that mainstream phenomenology itself is in need of discarding naïve accounts of consciousness that do not attend to the contingent power structures of experience. Following the pioneering work of Frantz Fanon (1970), Simone de Beauvoir (2011), and Young (1980), a contemporary critical turn identifies how mainstream phenomenology tends to problematically posit a de-situated, ahistorical subject and presume the possibility of a pre-social and pre-discursive body. This critical phenomenology attends to the social, political, and cultural situatedness of experience and how this experience is contingently shaped by social, political, and cultural structures. In this way, critical phenomenology is in conversation with political and social theories of gender, race, sexuality, and disability and is itself not just philosophical, but distinctly political. Guenther (2019, 15) succinctly summarises this two-pronged project as not just involving a reflection on what structures our experience but as engaging in a “material practice” of “restructuring the world” by rethinking what constitutes meaningful experience and liberating ourselves from structures that render certain existences normal and others deviant. A critical phenomenology of disability, then, moves even further away from the biomedical understanding of disability by also reflecting critically on the use of phenomenology itself. This includes drawing attention to how mainstream accounts of illness in phenomenology tend to assume an able, cisgender, white male body as a neutral ‘normal’ subject who exists first and foremost as an individual (Lajoie 2019; Wieseler 2019), despite Merleau-Ponty’s firm assertion that the world is primordially shared and the social and subjectivity are “two moments of a single phenomenon” (2012, 276). The assumption of a neutral, ‘normal subject’ is what enables mainstream phenomenological accounts of illness and disability to understand disability in terms of loss and privation and, moreover, to divorce disability from its intersections with other points of marginalisation. A critical phenomenology of disability retains the attention to meaningful, subjective experience but takes an intersectional approach to disability: it considers how both disabled and nondisabled bodies are constrained by social, political, and cultural structures (Hall 2021; Wieseler 2019). A critical phenomenology of disability is promising because it attends to the lived experiencing body—the lack of which is perhaps the social model’s biggest weakness—while retaining explicit attention to the social, political, cultural, and material context of that body. That is, it does not draw a firm line between embodiment and everything else. Furthermore, this approach reconfigures our view of impairment and ability from straightforward biological or somatic categories to relationally constituted states or occurrences. It can disclose constituent aspects of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ conditions alike that usually go unnoticed. It allows us to attend to an underlying relationality (Lajoie 2019): that disability exists in relations between bodies and material-semiotic situations. This permits a focus not only on what constitutes these conditions but also on how resources are unequally distributed. If it still pays attention to disruptions, it does not view these in terms of pathological embodiment but in terms of their constituent relationships and elements and the political conditions these reveal. An inability to function in ordinary environments can disclose the composition of ableist architecture. Inadequate care during periods of illness 442

Disability

can reveal how some resources are also insufficient or how they are distributed to mitigate some conditions but not others. A phenomenology that starts from the perspective of disabled experience demonstrates how ability and disability are not properties of individual agents in neutral environments, and disability is not simply the lack of ability but a “world-creating phenomenon” (Reynolds 2017, 246). Reynolds highlights the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s example of the blind man and his cane has a different status to his other examples of how extracorporeal objects can become incorporated into the body schema. On one hand, Merleau-Ponty overlooks how aspects of the built environment (such as cracks in the pavement that cause the cane to get stuck) and social attitudes toward a white cane user (such as shouting at them loudly) will modulate whether an extracorporeal tool can be successfully incorporated—and, likely, the white cane is often not allowed to truly recede into the background of experience. On the other hand, Reynolds is concerned with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a sighted person could similarly incorporate the white cane, which overlooks that the existential structures of blindness are more than being unable to see. Being disabled creates new structures of experience that are not reducible to a deviation of experience from a presumed ‘normal’ subject.4 Some authors take the particular critical stance of writing through the lens of a crip phenomenology rather than a phenomenology of disability; for Hall (2021), the latter takes disability as the object of study, instead of starting with disability. The terminology of ‘crip’ and ‘cripping’ originates with disabled people who choose to reclaim language used against them and is closely tied to queer theory (McRuer 2006; Sandahl 2003). Crip experiences, like queer experiences, trouble conceptions of ‘the normal’ and ‘taken for granted’ and use this to the phenomenologist’s conceptual advantage. Crip phenomenology is also a cripping phenomenology: a method that explicitly aims not just to expose presuppositions about disability but to reconstruct and re-politicise the philosophical terrain “grounded in non-­normate experience” (Reynolds 2017, 426; see also Hall 2021,18). The prevailing assumption of a ‘normal body’ in phenomenology can then be understood as a result of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’: a naturalised ideal of the body that we are compelled to strive for and which is reproduced through various institutions (McRuer 2019, 62). A critical phenomenology of disability therefore does not deny experiences of disruption in disability and illness but reveals how these are caused by the misfit of atypical bodies and minds with social norms (and not by a ‘natural state’ of the body). Corinne Lajoie, for example, considers disability through a phenomenology of disorientation (2019, 2022). Attending critically to the phenomenology of space and belonging reveals many ways that disabled bodies are made to feel unwelcome—that bodies and world are not synced up—as a result of which some bodies are allowed to belong and are supported while others are not. Such disorientations call into question the familiar, give rise to the body’s appearance as alien and objectified, and loosen one’s grip on the world (Lajoie 2022, 331). By reframing disruption as disorientation, Lajoie can call attention to the cause of these experiences: lasting, harmful, and structurally enforced ableist norms of what a body is and ought to do (2022, 332). This critical project shows that a political phenomenology of disability must be a process of politicising and reconstructing phenomenology itself. Describing disability by starting from its lived experience, rather than from a tacitly assumed norm from which a body deviates, not only provides us with more precise and expansive accounts of disability but also gives us the opportunity to rethink phenomenological concepts. 443

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

5. Outlook To conclude this chapter, we offer an outlook of what critical and crip phenomenologies offer beyond what we have covered here. A key issue in critical disability studies has been how to account for experiences of pain and suffering in illness and disability without conflating these. Part of the issue here is that the social model has consistently asserted that disability does not equal sickness or suffering (e.g., Clare 2015, 105). However, as Susan Wendell points out, some disabled people are sick and are suffering, so we must reconsider pain and illness and examine their meaning and relationship to disability. Reynolds (2022, 110f.) finds that even non-congenital degenerative conditions like multiple sclerosis are not so tightly correlated with consuming pain that their corporeal alterations can be straightforwardly equated with suffering. He suggests that phenomenology is perhaps uniquely suited to exploring what pain is and how it operates. This chapter did not discuss disability technologies, which present a particular challenge to the social model. Most disability technologies are fundamentally rooted in curative attitudes towards disability, reminiscent of the medical model, and reiterate the notion of the normal body. Prostheses, for example, often function to produce the appearance of ablebodiedness and aesthetic conformity (Kurzman 2001; Sobchack 2006). However, a critical and crip phenomenology can draw out how prostheses also challenge us to understand the body as fundamentally malleable and open to the world (Dolezal 2020; Shildrick 2015) and to explore crip uses of technologies like loading a spare wheelchair with takeaway to feed a disabled group (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, 50f). In short, it may offer a more politicised account of disability technologies. Finally, disability studies has been called to recognise how disability is enmeshed with such categories as race, gender, and sexuality and the resulting intersecting oppressions (e.g., Kafer and Kim 2017). In this chapter, we, as many others we reference, draw on works from Ahmed (2006) on queerness and race and Young (1980) on gender to advance arguments about disability. This is no mere coincidence: phenomenological works on gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other marginalisations identify how environmental, social, political, and cultural factors shape embodiment and subjectivity. These accounts are relevant across intersections of marginalisation. Moreover, theorists and phenomenologists draw on thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa (who did not write explicitly on disability nor consider herself disabled) and find great value in her work for theorising disability and crip imaginaries, such as her work on “being other” in the “borderlands” of the normal (McRuer 2006, 39; Pitts 2021). Critical and crip phenomenology calls us to adopt an intersectional method and embrace thinkers beyond the Western philosophical canon into our phenomenological practice.

Acknowledgements The research undertaken by Luna Dolezal and Cathrin Fischer was funded by the Wellcome Trust [214963/B/18/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Notes 1 We focus mainly on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontean phenomenology here as they are the thinkers who are most influential in the phenomenology of disability. However, Martin Heidegger

444

Disability and Jean-Paul Sartre, two other early phenomenological thinkers who were deeply influenced by Husserl, also developed an idea of lived experience as characterised by practical and meaningful engagement with the world. For detailed accounts of their philosophies, see the relevant chapters in this handbook. Heidegger offers an account of “being-in-the-world” (Dasein) that is particularly concerned with how we engage with affordances of the world through skillful action and the incorporation of tools and objects, or “equipment,” through his account of “ready-to-hand” (1962, 99). Sartre (1956, 356) offers an account of illness not just as a disease state discernible by others but as a kind of illness-as-lived: an experience that breaks down the body’s capacity to recede from awareness as it does in its ‘normal’ state as ‘being-for-itself.’ The phenomenologists of illness discussed here use these ideas. Sartre’s account of the body as an object “known by the other” through the other’s look (1956, 254) is crucial to understanding experiences of social judgment, shame, and stigma, which could help our understanding of the social aspects of disability experience. 2 See Reynolds (2006) and Salamon (2012) for critiques of Dreyfus’s approach. 3 Lajoie (2019) extends this line of argumentation beyond disability to include illness. 4 This applies to disability simulations that are sometimes part of ‘disability awareness,’ such as wearing a blindfold for the day. These inadequately convey what it is like to be disabled and reduce disability to a “knowable fact of the body” (Kafer 2013, 4).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 (4): 543–74. ———. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–68. Barnes, Colin, Michael Oliver, and Len Barton. 2002. “Introduction.” In Disability Studies Today, edited by Colin Barnes, Michael Oliver, and Len Barton, 1–16. Cambridge: Polity. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Shiela MalovanyChevallier. London: Vintage. Campbell, Fiona Kumari. 2009. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Carel, Havi. 2016. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. “Pathology as a Phenomenological Tool.” Continental Philosophy Review 54 (2): 201–17. ———. 2022. “Lived Experiences of Illness & Disability.” In The Disability Bioethics Reader, edited by Joel Michael Reynolds and Christine Wieseler, 82–91. London: Routledge. Clare, Eli. 2015. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. 2nd ed. London: Duke University Press. Dolezal, Luna. 2020. “Disability as Malleability: The Prosthetic Metaphor, Merleau-Ponty and the Case of Aimee Mullins.” In Medial Bodies Between Fiction and Faction: Reinventing Corporeality, edited by Denisa Butnaru, 125–45. Bielefeld: Transcript. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2013. “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental.” In Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph K. Schear, 15–40. Abingdon/Oxon: Routledge. ———, and Stuart E. Dreyfus. 1999. “The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science.” In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, edited by Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 103–20. London: Routledge. Fanon, Franz. 1970. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markham. London: Paladin. Fuchs, Thomas. 2017. “Collective Body Memories.” In Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, edited by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes, 333–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 2004. “Lived Body and Environment.” In Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy. Vol. 2, edited by Dermot Moran and Lester E. Embree, 265–93. Oxon: Routledge. ———, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

445

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer, and Jonathan Paul Mitchell ———. 2011. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26 (3): 591–609. ———. 2019. “Misfitting.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 225–30. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Goodley, Dan. 2013. “Dis/Entangling Critical Disability Studies.” Disability  & Society 28 (5): 631–44. Guenther, Lisa. 2019. “Critical Phenomenology.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 11–16. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hall, Kim Q. 2021. “Limping Along: Toward a Crip Phenomenology.” The Journal of Philosophy of Disability 1: 11–33. Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5 (1): 1–33. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—Second Book. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer ­Academic Publishers. Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———, and Eunjung Kim. 2017. “Disability and the Edges of Intersectionality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, 123–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kurzman, Stephen L. 2001. “Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (30): 374–87. Lajoie, Corinne. 2019. “Being at Home: A  Feminist Phenomenology of Disorientation in Illness.” Hypatia 34 (3): 546–69. ———. 2022. “The Problems of Access: A Crip Rejoinder via the Phenomenology of Spatial Belonging.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2): 318–37. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016. The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McConville, Pat. 2021. “Toward a Phenomenology of Congenital Illness: A Case of Single Ventricle Heart Disease.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24 (4): 587–95. McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. London: New York University Press. ———. 2019. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 61–68. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. London: Routledge. Mitchell, Jonathan Paul. 2021. “Unsafe Ground: Technology, Habit and the Enactment of Disability.” Women, Gender & Research 31 (2): 24–39. Moser, Ingunn. 2006. “Disability and the Promises of Technology: Technology, Subjectivity and Embodiment within an Order of the Normal.” Information, Communication  & Society 9 (3): 373–95. Oliver, Michael. 2009. Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. ———, and Colin Barnes. 2012. The New Politics of Disablement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ott, Katherine. 2002. “The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics.” In Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, edited by Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm, 1–44. New York: NYU Press. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Pitts, Andrea J. 2021. Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance. New York: SUNY Press.

446

Disability Reynolds, Jack. 2006. “Dreyfus and Deleuze on l’Habitude, Coping, and Trauma in Skill Acquisition.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (4): 539–59. Reynolds, Joel Michael. 2017. “Merleau-Ponty, World-Creating Blindness, and the Phenomenology of Non-Normate Bodies.” Chiasmi International 19: 419–36. ———. 2019. “The Normate.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 243–48. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2022. The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Salamon, Gayle. 2012. “The Phenomenology of Rheumatology: Disability, Merleau-Ponty, and the Fallacy of Maximal Grip.” Hypatia 27 (2): 243–60. Sandahl, Carrie. 2003. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9 (1–2): 25–56. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Shildrick, Margrit. 2012. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. “ ‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia: 13–29. Sobchack, Vivian. 2006. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor and Materiality.” In The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanna Morra, 17–41. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stiker, Henri-Jacques. 1999. A History of Disability. Translated by William Sayers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Toadvine, Ted. 2002. “Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl: A Chronological Overview.” In MerleauPonty’s Reading of Husserl, edited by Ted Toadvine and Lester E. Embree, 227–86. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Toombs, S. Kay. 1988. “Illness and the Paradigm of Lived Body.” Theoretical Medicine 9: 201–26. ———. 1995. “The Lived Experience of Disability.” Human Studies 18: 9–23. Tremain, Shelley. 2018. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ward, Katherine. 2022. “Misfitting, Breakdowns, and the Normal in Merleau-Ponty.” Human Studies 45: 697–718. Watkin, Christopher. 2017. French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weiss, Gail. 2017. “The ‘Normal Abnormalities’ of Disability and Aging: Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir.” In Feminist Phenomenology Futures, edited by Helen Fielding and Dorothea E. Olkowski, 203–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wendell, Susan. 2001. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities.” Hypatia 16 (4): 17–33. Wieseler, Christine. 2019. “Challenging Conceptions of the ‘Normal’ Subject in Phenomenology.” In Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 69–86. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3 (1): 137–56. Zahavi, Dan, and Sophie Loidolt. 2022. “Critical Phenomenology and Psychiatry.” Continental Philosophy Review 55 (1): 55–75.

447

33 AFFECTS AND EMOTIONS Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen

1. Introduction It is widely recognised that the political sphere is suffused with affectivity. As Szanto and Slaby (2020, 478) put it: “The political is affective because it fundamentally deals with what matters to us, what we value, fear or desire, or what concerns us—us as a polity.” This recognition is accompanied by the acknowledgement that the affective is also suffused with the political. For our affective lives, our feelings and emotions are governed by rules about what, how, and when we should and can feel (Hochschild 1979; Whitney 2018; Archer and Mills 2019). In many ways, we can see this as a philosophical adoption and endorsement of the second-wave feminist rallying cry that the political is personal, and the personal is political. In contemporary political phenomenology, discussions of affectivity and emotions in the political realm typically fall into one of two camps. On the one hand, we find discussions of political affect. Influenced by the affective turn and drawing notably from theorists such as Spinoza and Deleuze, these debates consider how relational affect circulates, transmits, and sticks to subjects and objects (e.g., Ahmed 2013; Slaby and Bens 2019; Bens et  al. 2019; Massumi 2015; Protevi 2009; Wuth 2019). On the other hand, we find discussions of political emotions (e.g., Szanto and Slaby 2020; Osler and Szanto 2021; Stephan and Osler forthcoming). Influenced by and situated in the phenomenology of emotions, growing interest has arisen around what makes an emotion specifically political. Here, we find a focus on how emotions are formed against the backdrop of a political community, the demand such emotions have for public recognition, and the shared dimension of political emotions and atmospheres. Note, though, that while the focus has been on political emotions, this approach can also be used to explore other affective phenomena such as political moods, political sentiments, and political existential feelings. In addition to this division between political affects and political emotions, phenomenological attempts have been made to define political emotions as a sub-category of collective emotions (Szanto and Slaby 2020). According to this view, political emotions have a double affective intentionality: they are based on a shared concern for a matter of political import and involve a background concern for the political community itself. Fear of rising fuel prices based solely on one’s concern for one’s own workplace security will not count 448

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-46

Affects and Emotions

as a political emotion according to this definition, whereas fear based on a concern for the working and middle classes who are disproportionately affected by such a rise in price will. The sharedness is not just a contingent matter of fact; rather it is necessary for political emotions in this narrowly defined sense that the emotions of the individual members of the group interact and that the sharedness puts normative pressure on individual group members to maintain and express specific emotions. Note that sharedness can come in different degrees, spanning a co-occurrent sharing of an emotion in the moment between parties—for example, a shared anger at a political demonstration—to a looser form of sharing, in which one’s emotion refers back to one’s political community’s values, concerns, or emotions: for example, being angry when one hears about a new law victimising asylum seekers but having no one else present with you (Salmela 2012). Finally, political emotions characteristically come with a claim for public recognition. Note that this is a definition of collective political emotions proper. A wider definition might cover phenomena that meet some but not all of these criteria. For the purposes of this chapter, the main focus is on political emotions, and, in what follows, it will be presumed that the emotions discussed meet the criteria for political emotions. It has been suggested, both explicitly and implicitly, that collective political emotions broadly fall into two sub-categories: political emotions of allegiance and political emotions of antagonism (Szanto and Slaby 2020; Slaby and Bens 2019). Solidarity, for instance, is thought to be a political emotion concerned with building allegiance, harmony, and accord within a political group (Laitinen and Pessi 2015; Müller 2020; Salmela 2015; Szanto forthcoming) while hatred seems to be an antagonistic political emotion that sows friction, discord, and hostility between political groups. In the literature on political emotions, focus on seemingly antagonistic political emotions dominates, with rich explorations of emotions such as anger (Cherry 2021; Srinivasan 2018), hatred (Brogaard 2020; Brudholm and Schepelern 2018; Richardson-Self 2018; Szanto 2020; Vendrell Ferran 2021), vengefulness (Cherry 2023; MacLachlan 2023), disgust (Munch-Jurisic 2022), fear (Tietjen 2023), resentment (Stockdale 2013), ressentiment (Salmela and Capelos 2021; Salmela and von Scheve 2018), indignation (Osler 2023), envy (Archer, Thomas, and Engelen 2022; Protasi 2021; Ceva and Protasi 2023), and loneliness (Tietjen and Tirkkonen 2023). It is not clear, however, what counts as or constitutes a specifically antagonistic political emotion or a specifically allegiant one. This is not so much because of a lack of consensus on this point as that little to no work has been done to clarify what these sub-categories amount to. In this chapter, we will see how phenomenology can help unpack how political emotions can be antagonistic and, through our analysis, begin to unsettle the clear binary between the categories of allegiance and antagonism. Three ‘levels’ of phenomenological analysis will be introduced with regard to antagonistic political emotions: (1) the antagonistic character of the emotion, (2) the antagonistic role in group dynamics, and (3) a critical reflection on the very notion of antagonistic. In doing so, this chapter draws, in turn, from work done on the phenomenology of emotions, the phenomenology of sociality, and critical phenomenology. Through this tripartite phenomenological analysis, it is shown that whether an emotion is considered one of allegiance or antagonism depends on the level of analysis employed.

2.  Antagonistic Character Many works on the phenomenology of emotions follow Bennett Helm (2002, 2009) in taking emotions to be “felt evaluations.” In this view, emotions are conceived of as feelings 449

Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen

that disclose the world in a certain way and show what matters to us. The feelings are both intentional (they are about something in the world) and evaluative (they reveal the world as being a particular way based on one’s own concerns). The cliff is revealed as dangerous through one’s fearful apprehension of getting close to the edge based on one’s concern for one’s own safety. This intertwining of feeling and intentionality has led some to describe emotions as having “a distinctively affective form of intentionality” (Helm 2020, 227; Slaby and Stephan 2008). What makes an emotion a particular type is that it shares a common evaluative characteristic or formal object with others (Kenny 1963; Teroni 2007). For instance, the formal object of fear is danger; the formal object of anger is offence. Each emotion also has a particular object to which it is directed, described as the target. In walking forward, the edge of the cliff is the target of fear. Emphasis is also often placed on the way emotions motivate us to act in various ways. Standard examples of antagonistic political emotions include hatred, resentment, anger, disgust, indignation, fear, and contempt (e.g., Brogaard 2020). What does this list of emotions have in common? It is not the case—at least not straightforwardly—that all these emotions share the same formal object or evaluative characteristic, as this would collapse them into one type of emotion. However, they do share the characteristic of being aversive reactions: they involve some form of negative hedonic valence but also a form of negative appraisal (Colombetti 2005). As aversive reactions, antagonistic political emotions differ from ‘affirmative’ political emotions, such as solidarity, compassion, love, hope, and joy, which typically have a positive hedonic valence and involve a positive appraisal. Note that some political emotions do not straightforwardly fit into either of these categories: for instance, cases of moral shock, in which the emoter experiences bewilderment at the occurrence of something, may not, at least initially, have an obviously positive or negative valence (Stockdale 2022). Being aversive, though, is not sufficient to make a political emotion antagonistic. For these aversive emotions to be antagonistic, the target of the emotion must be another person or group (see also Brogaard 2020, 12). Antagonistic political emotions, then, differ from emotions that do not take people or groups as their targets but rather, for instance, political structures and events. In this regard, not all forms of, for example, anger and hatred are antagonistic. A climate activist might feel angry about climate change yet not blame any specific person or group of persons. However, aversive political emotions of this kind can transform into antagonistic political emotions if the target shifts from, say, an event or fact to an individual or group. For example, Greta Thunberg’s anger is antagonistic as the target of her anger is those in power who are failing to act on their promises to prevent or tackle the climate crisis. Finally, in antagonistic emotions, we feel offended by the other(s) (Brogaard 2020, 12). Either the target’s behaviour and actions (e.g., in the case of anger) or their very being and existence (e.g., in the case of hatred) are experienced as offensive. To summarise, antagonistic political emotions differ from other political emotions in, first, being aversive; second, targeting persons or groups of persons; and third, attributing some form of offensiveness to the target. What this reveals is that certain emotions, when directed at others, are inherently oppositional and sometimes even hostile. In this analysis, antagonism is baked into the affective intentionality of such emotions. Other political emotions, by contrast, when directed at others, seem to be inherently friendly and amicable: e.g., political solidarity or political admiration. Their seemingly inherent hostile nature is one of the reasons antagonistic political emotions such as anger and hatred traditionally have a bad reputation. For instance, in the 450

Affects and Emotions

liberal tradition, anger has been criticised for its vengeful or retributive nature and portrayed as a politically destructive emotion (Nussbaum 2016, 2019). By contrast, scholars in the traditions of critical and feminist philosophy have highlighted the potential epistemic, moral, and prudential value of antagonistic emotions. For instance, they have argued that anger at racial oppression allows us to acknowledge injustices and can motivate us to fight for the freedom of all. In these cases, rather than striving for retaliation, anger strives for recognition: the recognition of past and present injustices and of one’s own and all other people’s freedom (Silva 2021; Srinivasan 2018). As these considerations demonstrate, although anger—if directed towards other people or groups of people—is inherently oppositional, it is not necessarily hostile. Other antagonistic political emotions, such as hatred, however, might be inherently hostile (Szanto 2020; see Brogaard 2020; Vendrell Ferran 2021 for a partial defence of hatred). What is interesting about this analysis is that, while it might capture many of the classic cases of what comes to mind when we think of antagonistic political emotions, it notably leaves other examples by the wayside. On the one hand, political emotions that are often listed as examples of antagonistic political emotions do not clearly fall within this category. Envy, for instance, while an uncomfortable emotion that is directed at another person or group of persons for having something that we desire to have ourselves, does not necessarily involve an experience of offence (Protasi 2021; see, by contrast, Brogaard 2020, 14–16). For example, I might envy my colleague for her tenure-track position and yet not feel offended by her but rather see the real problem in the precarious working conditions in academia. On the other hand, nationalistic pride is a political emotion that is often deeply associated with antagonism, yet if we only analyse the affective character and intentionality of the emotion, it seems to fit better into the category of ‘affirmative’ political emotions as it involves feelings of solidarity with, allegiance to, and affirmation for members of one’s own political community. This suggests that antagonism does not lie solely in the character of the emotions but in how they impact or shape dynamics between groups. We turn to this second level of analysis now.

3.  Antagonistic Dynamics Our first level of analysis situates antagonism in the character of certain kinds of emotion. On this second level, we move from the question of ‘what emotions are’ to the question of ‘what emotions do.’ Here, antagonism is framed in terms of the emerging oppositional dynamics between political groups. In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the phenomenology of sociality, with a particular emphasis on the formation and maintenance of groups and collectives (Szanto and Moran 2015; Salice and Schmid 2016; Dolezal and Petherbridge 2017). Such discussions have brought to the fore questions about what it is to feel with, act with, belong to, and identify as a ‘we’ or an ‘us.’ At the heart of these discussions is an emphasis on the role that affective and embodied interactions and relations play in the lives of groups. Attention has been devoted primarily to exploring the role that feelings of belonging, togetherness, and shared emotions play in the emergence of collectives (e.g., Walther 1923; Osler 2020; Thonhauser 2018). However, with eyes turned toward the ‘we’ and intragroup dynamics, less attention has been given to the role of the ‘they’ and intergroup dynamics. Sara Ahmed (2013), though, stands out among phenomenologists with her critical focus on how emotions shape individual and collective bodies through contact with others, stressing 451

Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen

how emotions in and between groups play a central role in politics. (For an epistemological perspective, see Pismenny, Eickers, and Prinz forthcoming.) These reflections prompt the question of what role ‘antagonism’ plays in the affective dynamics of group formation. Scholars in the traditions of anti-liberal political theory (e.g., Carl Schmitt) and post-foundational democratic theory (e.g., Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau) claim that antagonism, broadly understood, is an integral part of all forms of political communalisation. According to this view, all political emotions involve an oppositional distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ meaning that “conflict is an ineliminable dimension of politics” (Mihai 2014, 32). The antagonistic group dynamics involved in political emotions are most obvious in cases like (group-focused) hatred. Hatred is not only directed toward an outgroup, but also constitutes (at least in part) the in-group. Our ‘we’ is constituted through hating ‘them,’ though this is not simply a matter of constituting boundaries between those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out.’ As phenomenologists have stressed, sharing emotions with others involves a sense of connectedness and belonging to those whom we share our feelings with. While hatred appears to be the epitomisation of an antagonistic political emotion, when we hate together as a group, it also acts as an effective tool of allegiance, binding the haters together. This has been described as ‘negative solidarity’—a form of solidarity that is purely negative in that it is constituted through the opposition to others rather than in a positive identification with one another and shared commitment to a political ideal (Arendt 1968). By attending to both the character of hatred and what group hatred can do, we muddy the waters when it comes to the division between antagonism and allegiance. For an ­inherently antagonistic emotion like hatred can—and, according to some, always does— build and sustain allegiance. To blur the picture even further, there is often not a clear chronological order between antagonism and allegiance—we might feel allegiance to a group, from which emerges a hatred of others or a hatred of an ‘other’ that can help prompt the emergence of a group. Sharing anger or hatred can also work to build solidarity between unusual bedfellows as has been the case in the allegiance of SYRIZA and ANEL, left-wing and right-wing populist parties, respectively, in Greece (Aslanidis and Rovira Kaltwasser 2016; Tietjen 2022). Political emotions that, on the surface, do not appear antagonistic in nature, such as pride and hope, can also create antagonistic group dynamics. Think of how nationalistic pride not only bonds the members of a group in solidarity but also does so to the exclusion of others. Being proud to be Danish is, whether explicitly or implicitly, pride in being Danish rather than a member of another nation-state. Indeed, in many cases of national pride, there is another level of exclusion relating to the legitimacy of membership to the group among the citizenry of that nation: for instance, in terms of who counts as ‘Danish.’ Such cases of nationalistic pride seem to devalue those who are excluded based on where they come from, who they are, how they feel, what they think and do, and what values they subscribe to. Again, we can distinguish between hostile and non-hostile antagonistic dynamics of emotions. Within post-foundational democratic theory, this distinction has been framed in terms of a distinction between ‘antagonism’ and ‘agonism’: While antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/they relation where the conflicting 452

Affects and Emotions

parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognise the legitimacy of their opponents. (Mouffe 2005, 20) Sticking to our own broader understanding of antagonism, we can say that, although all forms of political group formation may involve an oppositional understanding of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ not all forms of political communalisation involve hostility. For example, in a society that is structured by patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity, as members of an oppressed group, we may rightfully feel angry about our oppression. Our anger thereby has an antagonistic affective dynamic in that it is directed at those who are responsible for our oppression. However, as Myisha Cherry (2021, 24) has shown in her analysis of Lordean rage, if this form of anger is informed by an inclusive rather than an exclusive perspective according to which “I am not free while any [other] is unfree,” the antagonistic dynamics involved are not hostile. Other emotions with antagonistic group dynamics, by contrast, are tied to an exclusive perspective that disvalues others. This is especially the case in hostile, antagonistic political movements and structures, such as misogyny and fanaticism (Manne 2017; Tietjen 2023). In this analysis, as before, the focus was on what appear to be more or less ‘openly’ antagonistic emotions based on how these emotions impact the relations between groups. Inspired by the lessons of critical phenomenology, we now turn the lens of critique on the very conception of ‘antagonism’ and ‘allegiance’ and show how the antagonistic or allegiant character and dynamics of certain political emotions only come into view when we situate those emotions and emoters in a social-political historical context.

4.  Beyond Antagonism and Allegiance Critical phenomenology calls attention to how contingent social structures like patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity shape our experiences in a quasi-­transcendental way (Guenther 2020, 12) and to how affectivity can be a source of critique and resistance in our emancipatory practices and struggle for liberation (Lugones 2003; Ahmed 2013; Weiss et al. 2019). Often, such critical work thematises what and who are absent in the very purview of classical phenomenological study. Doing so draws attention to how experiences subjected to phenomenological exploration are presumed to be universal but are, in fact, shaped by the social and cultural privilege that the phenomenologist himself occupies. Thus, critical phenomenology stresses the situatedness of phenomenology itself. Taking our cue from this critical stance, the chapter now examines cases in which the antagonistic features of political emotions only come to the fore if we adopt a thoroughly historical and situated position. This discloses numerous ways in which antagonism can masquerade as allegiance. Here, three exemplary but not exhaustive ways in which this might occur are explored: (1) where supposedly affirmative political emotions mask prejudice and oppression—what is called ‘ersatz allegiance’; (2) political emotions of allegiance that are offered in the face of harm without the recognition that one’s own political community contributed to the emergence of the harm in the first place—what is called ‘amnesiac allegiance’; and (3) cases of supposedly ‘universal’ political emotions that have as their background concern humanity as a whole political community—what is called ‘homogenising allegiance.’ 453

Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen

First, consider the case of political admiration that occurs in instances of so-called positive prejudice, taking inspiration from Sara Protasi’s (2021) discussion of the positioning of Asian Americans as ‘the model minority.’ On the surface, the admiration of Asian Americans as hard workers who contribute to the American economy might look like a political emotion of allegiance and affirmation. Yet this political admiration works as a case of smoke and mirrors. What this positive prejudice masks is the very real oppression of and discrimination against Asian Americans, removing this political community from sight in discussions and policies about anti-discrimination and positive efforts regarding diversity. Moreover, such supposed admiration can work to position Asian Americans to become the target of a hostile political emotion: envy. This may be experienced by other marginalised groups, such as, say, African Americans, who envy Asian Americans for seemingly being exposed to less racialism, and also by white Americans, who envy them for their seemingly effortless socio-economic success and recognition. The contingency of this political admiration should also be highlighted. For the status of ‘model minority’ is a precarious one, one that can be revoked overnight. Think, for instance, of the rise of discrimination against Asian Americans after the outbreak of COVID-19 and the heightened political tension between America and China. When a political community is not acknowledged as a target of racism and hostile political emotions, this obscures recognition of that community’s struggles living within and being the victim of a racialised system. Among other things, this failure to recognise this ‘positive prejudice’ as grounded in an oppositional stance makes it harder to legitimise and argue for the appropriateness and aptness of antagonistic political emotions such as anger arising from the affected communities. Consequently, what might posture as allegiance on the surface can give rise to affective injustices that work to silence and undermine the political emotions of communities (Whitney 2018; Srinivasan 2018; Archer and Mills 2019). In light of this, this chapter suggests that this kind of political admiration is an example of ‘ersatz allegiance’—a faux allegiance that masks its own oppositional stance while also working to cauterise the legitimate antagonistic political emotions and actions of those whom it affects. Second, take the case of political sympathy or pity that motivates foreign aid and private donations of colonial nations to improve the situation in former colonies. For instance, the allocation of the majority of British foreign aid to India in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, a sense of ‘we’ is constituted through seemingly moral emotions and virtues such as pity, compassion, and generosity (see also Ahmed 2013, 20–23), emotions that again seem to fit with the label ‘allegiance.’ What falls out of sight, however, is the way in which Britain’s colonial history contributed to the emergence of this situation and ongoing suffering. Moreover, it ignores the fact that the very possibility of this generosity—and, in turn, the possibility of presenting and constituting members of the British public as ‘generous’ ­subjects—rests on wealth generated by the oppression and exploitation of these ‘others’ in the first place. Behind the seemingly positive character and dynamics of these emotions, then, is a history of antagonism. Another example is that of the characterisation of LGBTQIA+ individuals, particularly in the case of trans persons, as ‘brave’ upon coming out, by those who have previously contributed to hostile heteronormative environments and politics. We dub instances of this second kind ‘amnesiac allegiance’ as their characterisation as political emotions of allegiance depends on forgetting the historical context that underpins the current situation, and only through this historical short-sightedness does the longer antagonistic context fall out of view. 454

Affects and Emotions

Finally, we turn our attention to examples of political emotions that supposedly take all humanity as a political community, such as collective hope. The belief in the idea of moral progress that is central to some forms of US-American culture and the unambiguous collective hope for a world free of racial oppression, at first sight, seems to be radically inclusive and equalising. Indeed, by hoping ‘for us all,’ it seems that there is no ‘other’ that such an emotion could antagonise. In this regard, collective hope presents itself as a political emotion that is not only free of antagonism but also explicitly committed to the idea of overcoming antagonism in the form of racial inequality and oppression. However, as Joseph R. Winters (2016) has argued, collective hope still might implicitly reinforce oppressive structures in that it fails to acknowledge past and ongoing injustices— and, more generally, the fact that we are not equal but rather find ourselves embedded in radically different socio-political situations that are deeply entrenched in histories of oppression. A more just affective attitude, therefore, would be what Winters calls ‘melancholic hope,’ a form of hope that is sensitive to the various ways in which we are wounded and broken. Ruling out antagonism for all parties itself becomes a form of injustice when antagonism is warranted and apt. Unambiguous collective hope, then, can work to silence the voices of the oppressed. Due to the way in which this political emotion flattens out and erases various political communities, claims, and histories in the attempt to create a single, unified political group, this will be called a form of ‘homogenising allegiance.’ What these three cases have in common is that they all involve a partial failure of recognition that does not allow an antagonism to develop or come to the foreground. The example of portraying Asian Americans as a model minority shows how practices such as ‘positive’ prejudices can mask antagonism and deprive a group of the possibility of feeling apt antagonistic political emotions. The example of former colonial powers feeling pity and presenting themselves as benevolent illustrates how what might present itself as allegiance may obscure the history of hostile antagonism that gave rise to the situation in the first place. The case of collective hope, finally, exemplifies how ‘de-othering’—i.e., including the ‘other’ in an allegedly homogenous ‘we’—can itself be a form of disregard, disvalue, or lack of recognition when centuries of oppression have created this other as another. In all cases, those who are excluded are not excluded based on an open form of antagonism or animosity, and it is exactly for this reason that this form of exclusion tends to remain invisible.

5. Outlook In this chapter, three layers of affective ‘antagonism’ have been distinguished: 1. The first, most visible form of affective antagonism is an antagonism inherent to the structure of the emotion itself. It is an antagonism between the emoter(s) and the target that can but need not be hostile. ‘Antagonism’ here describes an aversive affective reaction or attitude toward a person or group that is experienced as offensive. This form of affective antagonism can be uncovered through an analysis of the affective phenomenology of the emotion. 2. The second form of affective antagonism is an antagonism connected to the social dynamics of the emotion. Here, ‘antagonism’ describes a way of forming an in-group through opposition to others. This opposition can but need not take the form of an open antagonism between the emoter(s) and the target. It also brings into view emotions such as pride or hope that, on the surface, do not seem to be antagonistic but contribute to 455

Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen

antagonistic group dynamics. This form of affective antagonism can be uncovered with the help of phenomenology of sociality. 3. The third form of antagonism is an antagonism inherent in the socio-political structures themselves, which build the background of the emotion and are presupposed and reinforced by it. Antagonism of this form is even less visible than the second form, especially if it masquerades as allegiance. The disclosure of this form of antagonism requires a thoroughly historically and socially situated analysis through the lens of critical phenomenology. This three-pronged phenomenological analysis showed how we can better understand and critique the conceptualisation of political emotions of antagonism and allegiance and what role they play in the political sphere. However, each of the three layers individually and together deserves further attention. To conclude, four open research questions will be pointed out that roughly concern the first, second, and third levels of analysis as well as the structure as a whole. First, there is an ongoing discussion about the potential epistemic, moral, and prudential value of political emotions. This discussion has resulted in a reconsideration of the ‘appropriateness’ of political emotions such as anger, hatred, and hope. This discussion, however, has been focused on specific types or tokens of political emotions. What we lack, however, is a more general account of what standards of appropriateness political emotions have and how our understanding of the political as such and our socio-political situatedness itself shape our understanding of and answer to this question. Second, the question of how communities are presupposed by, shaped by, or constituted through political emotions of allegiance and antagonism was addressed However, these processes themselves are highly context sensitive and require a more thorough and critical analysis of the metaphysical, ontological, and normative nature of these communities. For example, the community that builds the background concern of the emoter(s) can be defined more or less narrowly or broadly: e.g., a group of activists who jointly fight for a common political goal, a group of (allegedly) suffering and oppressed people whose rights it defends, or the social or legal community that one aims to change. The boundaries of such groups are often inherently vague, and there are various ways in which processes of group formation and identification can go wrong. Third, while attention was called to the way in which the antagonistic and allegiant dimensions of certain political emotions are revealed only by the socio-historical and political context of those emotions and emoters, we have not analysed examples of political emotions, which themselves are directed toward history. Nostalgia, for instance, is often discussed as a political emotion that binds together a community through a collective longing for bygone times as well as acting as an antagonistic catalyst between political communities (Menke and Wulf 2021). This notoriously difficult-to-define affective phenomenon brings to the fore questions not only about how we characterise and categorise various political emotions and affects but also about how conceptions of history feed into and shape political affectivity. Finally, further research needs to be done to consider how these three different dimensions of antagonism interact with, presuppose, exclude, intersect with, influence, and sustain one another. Moreover, the analysis needs to be complemented by an analysis of the concept and phenomenon of allegiance. It could be that this—and the commitment to philosophy as a critical practice—would also contribute to overcoming the gap between affect 456

Affects and Emotions

studies and emotion theories by focusing not so much on the question of what political emotions and affects, respectively, are as on what they do—and what we do by focusing on one rather than the other phenomenon, labelling it in one way or the other.

Acknowledgements and Funding A huge thank you to the Critical Emotions Theory network, Thomas Szanto, and the attendees at the For, Against, Together: Antagonistic Politic Emotions conference, who gave us very helpful and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. Also, thanks to the Austrian Science Fund, who funded the project Antagonistic Political Emotions (grant number P32392-G), out of which this work arose.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Archer, Alfred, and Georgina Mills. 2019. “Anger, Affective Injustice, and Emotion Regulation.” Philosophical Topics 47 (2): 75–94. Archer, Alfred, Alan Thomas, and Bart Engelen. 2022. “The Politics of Envy: Outlaw Emotions in Capitalist Societies.” In The Moral Psychology of Envy, edited by Sara Protasi, 181–97. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in Dark Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Aslanidis, Paris, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2016. “Dealing with Populists in Government: The SYRIZA-ANEL Coalition in Greece.” Democratization 23 (6): 1077–91. Bens, Jonas, Aletta Diefenbach, Thomas John, Antje Kahl, Hauke Lehmann, Matthias Lüthjohann, Friederike Oberkrome, et al. 2019. The Politics of Affective Societies: An Interdisciplinary Essay. Bielefeld: Transcript. Brogaard, Berit. 2020. Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press. Brudholm, Thomas, and Birgitte Johansen Schepelern. 2018. “Pondering Hatred.” In Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations, edited by Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang, 81–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ceva, Emanuela, and Sara Protasi. 2023. “The Role of Envy in Transitional Justice.” Passion 1 (1): 68–84. Cherry, Myisha. 2021. The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2023. “Feeling Revengeful.” Passion 1 (1): 18–30. Colombetti, Giovanna. 2005. “Appraising Valence.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (8–10): 103–26. Dolezal, Luna, and Danielle Petherbridge, eds. 2017. Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters. New York: SUNY Press. Guenther, Lisa. 2020. “Critical Phenomenology.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Gayle Salamon, and Ann V. Murphy, 11–16. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Helm, Bennett W. 2002. “Felt Evaluations: A Theory of Pleasure and Pain.” American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1): 13–30. ———. 2009. “Emotions as Evaluative Feelings.” Emotion Review 1 (3): 248–55. ———. 2020. “Affective Intentionality and the Reactive Attitudes.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer, 227–38. New York: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie R. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (3): 551–75. Kenny, Anthony. 1963. Action, Emotion and Will. London: Routledge. Laitinen, Arto, and Anne Birgitta Pessi, eds. 2015. “Solidarity and Motivations to Help Others: The Case of Finns.” In Solidarity: Theory and Practice, 272–98. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

457

Lucy Osler and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. MacLachlan, Alice. 2023. “Hell Hath No Fury: The Place of Revenge in Moral Repair.” Passion 1 (1): 1–17. Manne, Kate. 2017. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press. Massumi, Brian, ed. 2015. Politics of Affect. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Menke, Manuel, and Tim Wulf. 2021. “The Dark Side of Inspirational Pasts: An Investigation of Nostalgia in Right-Wing Populist Communication.” Media and Communication 9 (2): 237–49. Mihai, Mihaela. 2014. “Theorizing Agonistic Emotions.” Parallax 20 (2): 31–48. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. Müller, Jan. 2020. “Feeling Solidarity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer, 532–42. New York: Routledge. Munch-Jurisic, Ditte Marie. 2022. Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at our Political Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Osler, Lucy. 2020. “Feeling Togetherness Online: A Phenomenological Sketch of Online Communal Experiences.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (3): 569–88. ———. 2023. “WTF?! Covid-19, Indignation, and the Internet.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22: 1215–34. ———, and Thomas Szanto. 2021. “Political Emotions and Political Atmospheres.” In Atmospheres and Shared Emotions, edited by Dylan Trigg, 162–88. New York: Routledge. Pismenny, Arina, Gen Eickers, and Jesse Prinz. (forthcoming). “Emotional Injustice.” Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. Protasi, Sara. 2021. The Philosophy of Envy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Richardson‐Self, Louise. 2018. “Woman‐Hating: On Misogyny, Sexism, and Hate Speech.” Hypatia 33 (2): 256–72. Salice, Alessandro, and Hans Bernhard Schmid, eds. 2016. The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality: History, Concepts, Problems. Cham: Springer. Salmela, Mikko. 2012. “Shared Emotions.” Philosophical Explorations 15 (1): 33–46. ———. 2015. “Collective Emotions as ‘the Glue’ of Group Solidarity.” In Solidarity: Theory and Practice, edited by Arto Laitinen and Anne Birgitta Pessi, 55–78. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———, and Tereza Capelos. 2021. “Ressentiment: A Complex Emotion or an Emotional Mechanism of Psychic Defences?” Politics and Governance 9 (3): 191–203. ———, and Christian von Scheve. 2018. “Emotional Dynamics of Right- and Left-wing Political Populism.” Humanity and Society 42 (4): 434–54. Silva, Laura. 2021. “Is Anger a Hostile Emotion?” Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Slaby, Jan, and Jonas Bens. 2019. “Political Affect.” In Affective Societies, edited by Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve, 340–51. New York: Routledge. Slaby, Jan, and Achim Stephan. 2008. “Affective Intentionality and Self-Consciousness.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2): 506–13. Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. “The Aptness of Anger.” Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–44. Stephan, Achim, and Lucy Osler. (forthcoming). “Affective Phenomena in the Political Arena.” In Crying for Respect and Seduced by Populism? Nationalism as a Challenge to the European Project, edited Sabine Döring and Thomas Sturm. Stockdale, Katie. 2013. “Collective Resentment.” Social Theory and Practice 39 (3): 501–21. Stockdale, Katie. 2022. “Moral Shock.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (3): 1–16. Szanto, Thomas. (forthcoming). “Feeling Belonging and Feeling Solidarity: Two Forms of Social Cohesion?” In The Phenomenology of Belonging, edited by Danielle Petherbridge and Luna Dolezal. New York: SUNY Press. ———, and Dermot Moran, eds. 2015. Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. New York: Routledge.

458

Affects and Emotions ———, and Jan Slaby. 2020. “Political Emotions.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer, 478–94. New York: Routledge. Teroni, Fabrice. 2007. “Emotions and Formal Objects.” Dialectica 61 (3): 395–415. Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2018. “Shared Emotions: A Steinian Proposal.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (5): 997–1015. Tietjen, Ruth Rebecca. 2022. “The Affects of Populism.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (2): 284–302. ———. 2023. “Fear, Fanaticism, and Fragile Identities.” The Journal of Ethics 27 (2): 1–20. ———, and Sanna K. Tirkkonen. 2023. “The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Misogyny in the Online Movement of ‘Involuntary Celibates’(Incels).” Topoi: 1–13. Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid. 2021. “Hate: Toward a Four-Types Model.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology: 1–19. Walther, Gerda. 1923. “Zur Ontologie der Sozialen Gemeinschaften.” In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung, edited by Edmund Husserl, 1–158. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Weiss, Gail, Gayle Salamon, and Ann V. Murphy, eds. 2019. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Whitney, Shiloh. 2018. “Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56 (4): 488–515. Winters, Joseph R. 2016. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wuth, Marie. 2019. “Circular Politics: Potentials, Limits and Boundaries of an Arendtian NaturePolitics.” HannahArendt.net 11 (1): 73–95.

459

34 TECHNOLOGY AND THE DIGITAL WORLD Nolen Gertz

1. Introduction The relationship between humans and technologies is a theme that occurs in the work of numerous phenomenological thinkers. Hannah Arendt described the importance of seeing “things” as not a “mere heap of unrelated articles” but as “conditioners of human existence” (Arendt 1958, 27). Jean-Paul Sartre analyzed the relationship between factory workers and factory machines to develop his understanding of how materiality can shape human freedom, or how the “practico-inert” can shape “praxis” (Sartre 2004).1 Early in his career, Maurice Merleau-Ponty took up Descartes’s (2001) analysis of a blind man using a cane in order to describe how human “embodiment” could “incorporate” objects not as mere tools but as extensions of our “bodily schema” (Merleau-Ponty 2012). Later in his career, Merleau-Ponty compared the perceivability of objects to the perceivability of the body in order to replace his earlier understanding of human life as being in the world with a new understanding of human life as being of the world—of the “flesh” of the world (MerleauPonty 1968). Yet for each of these thinkers, technologies were not themselves the focus of their arguments but were instead used as examples in phenomenological investigations intended to help us better understand what it means to be human.2 Martin Heidegger, however, was the first phenomenologist to investigate the nature of technology itself, which is why his work influenced the work of Arendt, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty and why he has become a pivotal figure in philosophy of technology. Indeed, in many ways, the field of philosophy of technology could be seen to have developed in response to Heidegger as philosophers have since established their positions on technology in part by contending with Heidegger’s. The shadow of Heidegger thus looms over philosophy of technology not only because of the centrality of his arguments and of his concepts but also because of the odiousness of his politics, an odiousness that has led many to try to appropriate Heideggerian ideas while distancing their work from Heidegger himself. For this reason, this chapter first describes the development of Heidegger’s views on technology in Being and Time and in his “The Question Concerning Technology.” I then show how Don Ihde developed post-phenomenology by turning Heidegger’s analyses of technology into a research program while, at the same 460

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-47

Technology and the Digital World

time, Ihde sought to distance this program from Heidegger’s politics. This chapter then concludes by looking at the consequences of trying to de-politicize Heidegger’s phenomenology as this has helped post-phenomenology become successful at describing human-technology relations but at the cost of not being able to provide a normative account of these relations. This has led philosophers of technology to look elsewhere in order to engage in political debates concerning technology.

2.  Being and Time Heidegger’s influence on philosophy of technology is due primarily to two of his works: Being and Time ([1927] 1962) and “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977). In Being and Time, Heidegger tries to investigate the “meaning of Being” ([1927] 1962, [1] 19), which leads him to investigate the “worldhood of the world” ([1927] 1962, [63] 91). To avoid what he sees as the Cartesian dualism that follows from thinking of what exists in the world as mere “things”—as objects that are to be found and studied by a subject— Heidegger instead focuses on describing something more fundamental than such a theoretical attitude toward the world, which is simply how we experience the world practically in our everyday lives. Heidegger famously uses the example of a hammer in order to demonstrate how we primarily encounter objects in the world: not as objects in the world but as means to our ends. Heidegger writes: Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowledge about [um] the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the “in-order-to” which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammerThing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ [“Handlichkeit”] of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call “readiness-to-hand” [Zuhandenheit]. (Heidegger [1927] 1962, [69] 98) According to Heidegger, in our everyday lives, we relate to a hammer not as a thing, not as a res extensa, like a Cartesian subject would, but rather as something we grasp in order to carry out a project, like a carpenter would. A Cartesian subject would see a hammer in terms of its materiality, such as its length, its width, its color, its weight, and the substances out of which it was made. But, as Heidegger points out, this is not how we experience a hammer when we are engaged in hammering. In hammering, we notice none of these specific aspects of the hammer nor even the hammer itself as, instead, “our concern subordinates itself to the ‘in-order-to,’ ” or, in other words, we are too focused on our ends to pay attention to our means.

461

Nolen Gertz

It is this “in-order-to” aspect of the hammer that Heidegger is focused on because it demonstrates how, in our practical relationship to the world, we relate to objects not on an individual basis but as part of a “referential totality” (Heidegger [1927] 1962, [69] 99). This is what Heidegger means by describing the hammer as “equipment” (das Zeug): as an object that we relate to as belonging together with other objects, objects that we can use without having to think about them or even having to look at them. In this way, objects appear to us as “ready-to-hand,” or as usable in such an immediate manner that they seem to disappear or “withdraw” into the work, into the “towards-which” that we are “absorbed” in carrying out (Heidegger [1927] 1962, [69–70] 99). When something occurs that interrupts our absorption in our work, such as when a tool breaks or goes missing, then the tool no longer is one piece of equipment among many that we use unnoticeably, but instead, it stands out and is seen as an object (Heidegger [1927] 1962, [73–74] 102–4). Heidegger thus distinguishes tools as they withdraw into our concerns as “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden) and tools as they appear to us when they become the object of our concern as “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden). Tools that are present-at-hand are still not the mere things of a Cartesian subject, however, as it is the fact that they lack the ability to serve as ready-to-hand that makes apparent that they can serve as ready-to-hand and so makes apparent what we would otherwise be too absorbed in to notice. According to Heidegger, then, it is only in these situations when something goes unexpected with our tools that we, as “Being-in-the-world,” step back from our absorption in the world and can actually see the world (Heidegger [1927] 1962, [76] 107).

3.  “The Question Concerning Technology” As we have now seen, technologies play an important role in Heidegger’s arguments in Being and Time. However, as Heidegger himself states, “[I]n the disclosure and explication of Being, entities are in every case our preliminary and our accompanying theme [das Vor-und Mitthematische]; but our real theme is Being” (Heidegger [1927] 1962, [67] 95). In other words, in Being and Time, technologies are simply a means to his end. It was not until after World War II and his attempts to resuscitate his career through a public speaking tour in Germany with fellow disgraced former Nazi Party member Werner Heisenberg (Carson 2010, 109) that Heidegger became concerned with carrying out a more detailed phenomenological investigation into technologies themselves. It is this investigation that we find in his lecture that was published as “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977). Heidegger opens the lecture by arguing that we need to question the essence of technology because we take for granted that technologies are merely means to our ends. This perspective on technology has blinded us, according to Heidegger, such that we see technologies as neutral instruments: as things that we use as we want, when we want, to do what we want. Heidegger agrees that this view of technologies is not wrong but claims that it is incomplete. This instrumental view does not tell us the whole story about our relationship to technologies, which tricks us into thinking that we are in control of technologies and so prevents us from questioning the degree to which technologies are, in fact, in control of us. By investigating instrumentality itself, Heidegger is led to the answer to his question, which is that the essence of technology is “a way of revealing” (Heidegger 1977, 12). Heidegger argues that even though we can distinguish ancient technologies from modern technologies, both kinds of technologies have revealing as their essence. However, there is a difference, he claims, between the ways of revealing belonging to each kind of technology, as 462

Technology and the Digital World

ancient technologies reveal in the mode of “bringing-forth” (poiēsis) and modern technologies reveal in the mode of “challenging-forth” (Herausfordern) (Heidegger 1977, 13–14). An ancient windmill uses the wind as a power source, but it does so without disturbing the wind. Even in the beauty of its construction, we can see the ancient windmill as a way to appreciate the wind as something godlike, as something more powerful than we are that helps us give thanks for our being able to share in its power. A modern hydroelectric plant, on the other hand, uses water as a power source, but it does so by forcing the water to flow in accordance with the needs of the plant. It is such “monstrousness” (Heidegger 1977, 16) that makes it seem as though the water, as though nature itself, is merely just another thing at our command. According to Heidegger, the ability of modern technologies to turn nature into something we can control—into something we can “challenge” to give us power on demand— changes our relationship to nature such that it is now revealed to us as “standing-reserve [Bestand]” (Heidegger 1977, 17). This concept of “standing-reserve” is meant to indicate both how modern technologies lead us to reduce nature to a battery, to a power source that we can store and exploit as needed, and how modern technologies remove the objective nature of objects (Gegenstand), such that objects are conceived of not as existing as things in themselves but as existing only for us. Therefore, we don’t see an airplane, according to Heidegger, as an object—as a massive metal flying machine, for example—but rather only as something that sits on a runway to be called on by the transportation industry to get us where we want to go. The obvious fact that it was humans who built modern technologies leads Heidegger to argue that it is, indeed, humans who are “challenging” nature to become “standingreserve,” but that does not mean, as we tend to assume, that humans are therefore in control of this process. Rather, according to Heidegger (1977, 18), “only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen.” To explain this idea, Heidegger gives the example of someone who works for the lumber industry and who can thus be made to chop down trees because trees can be made into paper, which can be made into newspapers, out of which the public opinion of its readers can be made. Yet this example of humans challenging nature because humans have themselves been challenged to do so is not used by Heidegger to argue, as we might expect, that thanks to capitalism, humans have become “standing-reserve” as well. Heidegger instead suggests that to make such a Marxist argument would be to fall into the trap of thinking that humans are more in control of how technologies reveal the world to us than we really are. According to Heidegger, humans are challenged to challenge nature, not by other humans but by “that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: ‘Ge-stell’ [enframing]” (Heidegger 1977, 19). This “challenging claim” is something humans participate in by responding to it and thus not something that we control as, for example, when Michelangelo famously claimed to have seen David in the marble and so saw his role as that of merely having to remove the unnecessary parts. The change from technologies revealing as “bringing-forth” to technologies revealing as “challenging-forth” is not a decision made by humans but rather a “destining [Geschick],” according to Heidegger (1977, 24). Although this sounds like humans are constrained by fate and so lack free will, Heidegger argues against such deterministic thinking—not by claiming that humans do have free will but rather by separating freedom from will in order to argue that we have freedom in the sense of the freedom to respond to this “destining,” 463

Nolen Gertz

either by acknowledging it or by ignoring it. It is for this reason that Heidegger claims we are facing the “supreme danger” (26)—the danger of ignoring how we are ourselves challenged by enframing—and so we act like we are “lord of the earth” while we are, in fact, sinking to the level of “standing-reserve” because we have, through this ignorance, become blind not only to the essence of technology but also to the essence of humanity (27). Coming to see the world only in terms of instrumentality has led us to instrumentalize ourselves. And so we not only have lost sight of the possibility for a non-instrumental relationship to the world, such as ancient technologies made possible, but we also go so far as to assume that ancient technologies were merely more primitive versions of our modern instrumentalizing technologies. In other words, Heidegger can here be understood as continuing the argument he made in Being and Time: the argument that we become so absorbed in using technologies to carry out our projects that we relate to technologies only as “ready-to-hand” instruments, only as “in-order-to,” and so it is only when something goes wrong or is unexpected that we stop what we are doing long enough to actually take notice of what we are doing. Yet, whereas before, Heidegger claimed a broken hammer could move us from using technologies to questioning technologies, Heidegger here claims instead that we have become so absorbed in enframing—in what we could call “in-orderto-ness”—that we need art—a technē that reminds us how technē can reveal as poiēsis (Heidegger 1977, 34)—to move us from using technologies to questioning technologies.

4. Post-Phenomenology Heidegger’s impact on philosophy of technology can be seen in the work of numerous scholars, such as Albert Borgmann (1984), Donna Haraway (2000), Hubert Dreyfus (2001), Babette Babich (2013), and Yuk Hui (2016). However, it is in the philosophy of technology known as post-phenomenology that we can see most clearly how Heidegger’s work was turned into a research program for phenomenological investigations of technologies. As the name implies, this philosophy of technology, which was first developed by Don Ihde, was based on phenomenology as it applies the methods of phenomenology to carry out investigations of “human-technology relations” (1990, 21). Though Ihde (1979) does also refer to the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, it was Heidegger who was most influential in the development of post-phenomenology. Ihde’s concept of human-technology relations develops based on Heidegger’s analyses of “Being-in-the-world” as post-phenomenology is a method for studying the role technologies play in mediating the relationship between “Being” and “the world.” Or, to be more precise, post-phenomenology studies the mediating role of technologies between “beings” and “the world.”3 The “post” in post-phenomenology can thus be seen as indicative of Ihde’s attempt to adopt Heidegger’s analyses of tool use from Being and Time while severing them from Heidegger’s ontological analyses of technology as found in “The Question Concerning Technology” and elsewhere, including, of course, in Being and Time—a severing that Ihde describes as “deromanticizing Heidegger” (Ihde 1993, 103).4 This severance enabled Ihde to get post-phenomenology off the ground without the burden of having any association with Heidegger’s politics, but this came at the cost of post-phenomenology seemingly having lost any association with politics whatsoever (Scharff 2006; Kaplan 2009; Feenberg 2015; Gertz 2020; Babich 2021). Post-phenomenology’s move away from Heidegger and from politics is most evident in Ihde’s concept of “multistability” (Ihde 2012, xiv; Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015, 25–26), 464

Technology and the Digital World

which is a modification of Husserl’s concept of eidetic variation. This concept is meant to show how technologies can have various “stable” meanings, depending on the specific ways that specific people in specific situations take them up and use them. The concept of multistability therefore enables post-phenomenology to refute totalizing or essentializing descriptions of “technology”—such as are found in Heidegger’s distinction between “ancient technology” and “modern technology”—but, at the same time, it closes off the possibility of normative descriptions of technologies to the extent that such descriptions would require being able to predict in advance how users would relate to technologies. The de-politicization of post-phenomenology can also be seen in Ihde’s human-technology relations themselves. Ihde (1990, 72) describes four types of human-technology relations, which he formalizes as: • • • •

Embodiment relations: (I-Technology) → World Hermeneutic relations: I → (Technology-World) Background relations: I → World-(-Technology) Alterity relations: I → Technology-(-World)

In embodiment relations, the technology (e.g., a hammer) becomes an extension of the user, such that, as Heidegger described, it is the world (e.g., what we are hammering) that we are focused on; I would say, “I am hammering,” rather than “I am using a hammer to carry out hammering.” In hermeneutic relations, the technology (e.g., a computer) becomes an extension of the world, such that in my interpretation of the world the role of the technology withdraws from my concern; I would say, “I am reading the news,” rather than “I am reading Facebook reading the news.” In background relations, the technology (e.g., a ceiling light) shapes how I experience the world but in a way that is meant to be ignored; I would say, “I see my bedroom,” rather than “I see my bedroom as illuminated by the ceiling light.” In alterity relations, the technology (e.g., a smartphone) shapes how I experience the world but in a way that is meant to consume my attention; I would say, “My phone keeps sending me notifications,” rather than “My phone keeps sending me notifications while I’m walking into traffic.” These human-technology relations show how Ihde adapted Heidegger’s analysis of absorption during tool use in order to develop a research program that can investigate various types of absorption during various types of tool use. But because post-phenomenology uses the first-person perspective, these investigations only offer individualistic descriptions of how a human is relating to a technology rather than providing the social and political analyses that would be required for making normative prescriptions concerning how humans ought (or ought not) relate to a technology. Consequently, critics have argued that post-phenomenology must expand its worldview or risk being unable to contend with the political demands of new and emerging technologies, even if such an expansive view would require a return to a more Heideggerian view of the “world” (Michelfelder 2015).

5. Outlook We have now seen how Heidegger’s phenomenology of technology, through the work of Don Ihde, has come to have a central role in philosophy of technology in the form of postphenomenology. However, we have also seen that Ihde’s success in adopting Heideggerian phenomenology while attempting to avoid Heideggerian politics has led post-phenomenology 465

Nolen Gertz

to become apolitical. Consequently, scholars have sought to push post-phenomenology to follow Ihde’s “empirical turn” with a “normative turn” (Verbeek 2011). This push has been carried out by supplementing Ihde’s descriptive analyses of human-technology relations with normative analyses of human-human relations, as found, for example, in the work of Hegel (Gertz 2018a), Nietzsche (Gertz 2018b), Peirce (Aydin 2019), Foucault (Verbeek 2011; Dorrestijn 2012), Arendt (Bas 2022), Levinas (Wellner 2014; Bergen and Verbeek 2021), feminist standpoint theory (Rosenberger 2017), and techno-moral change theory (de Boer and Kudina 2021). This “normative turn” has enabled post-phenomenology to engage in ethical and political debates about what role various technologies should or should not play in society. Examples of such normative post-phenomenological investigations include analyzing the role that ultrasound technology plays in shaping decisions about abortion (Verbeek 2008), revealing the “cyborg intentionality” introduced by cochlear implants (Besmer 2012), debating how cell phone usage can shape the awareness of drivers for better (Wellner 2014) and for worse (Rosenberger 2014), and analyzing how Facebook influences how users experience the world through embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations (Gertz 2019). Perhaps the most important contribution of post-phenomenology to such debates, however, has been in showing that, rather than investigating whether technologies are good or bad for ourselves, respect or violate privacy, support or undermine democracy, instead, we need to investigate how technologies shape our understanding of what concepts like “self” (Aydin 2021), “privacy” (Nagenborg 2017), and “democracy” (Verbeek 2020) mean.

Notes 1 For an analysis of the changing role that technologies play for Sartre over the course of his work, see Engels 2018. 2 Thus, for example, when Hoel and Carusi (2015) attempt to construct a “Merleau-Pontian philosophy of technology” they admit that, with regards to Merleau-Ponty’s work, “to the extent one can speak of a systematic approach to technology, this approach must be teased out of the scattered references to instruments, tools, and technologies in his later works, and in the notes and course lectures that surround these works and provide a broader context for them” (Hoel and Carusi 2015, 76). 3 On the phenomenological consequences of post-phenomenology rejecting the ontological in favor of the ontic, see Zwier, Blok, and Lemmens (2016). 4 In order to develop his own strand of post-phenomenology, which would come to be known as “mediation theory” (Verbeek 2011), Peter-Paul Verbeek similarly argues that a distinction can be made between the “early and late Heidegger.” For Verbeek the “early” Heidegger provided an “ahistorical” account of how humans interact with technologies, as opposed to the “later” Heidegger, who instead had an account of this relationship that reduced it to the “history of being” (Verbeek 2005, 80–83).

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aydin, Ciano. 2019. “World Oriented Self-Formation as Sublimation: Or why Post-phenomenology needs Peircean Pragmatism.” Cognitio Revista de Filosofia 19 (2): 204–19. ———. 2021. Extimate Technology: Self-Formation in a Technological World. New York/London: Routledge. Babich, Babette. 2013. The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology. London/New York: Routledge.

466

Technology and the Digital World ———. 2021. Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bas, Melis. 2022. Technological Mediation of Politics: An Arendtian Critique of Political Philosophy of Technology. Enschede: University of Twente. Bergen, Jan Peter, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. 2021. “To-Do is to Be: Foucault, Levinas, and Technologically Mediated Subjectivation.” Philosophy & Technology 34: 325–48. Besmer, Kirk. 2012. “Embodying a Translation Technology: The Cochlear Implant and Cyborg Intentionality.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 16 (3): 296–316. Borgmann, Albert. 1984. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A  Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Carson, Cathryn. 2010. Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere. New York/ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Boer, Bas, and Olya Kudina. 2021. “What is Morally at Stake when Using Algorithms to Make Medical Diagnoses? Expanding the Discussion Beyond Risks and Harms.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42: 245–66. Descartes, René. 2001. Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. Translated by Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Dorrestijn, Steven. 2012. “Technical Mediation and Subjectivation: Tracing and Extending Foucault’s Philosophy of Technology.” Philosophy & Technology 25 (2): 221–41. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2001. On the Internet. London/New York: Routledge. Engels, Kimberly S. 2018. “From In-Itself to Practico-Inert.” Sartre Studies International 24 (1): 48–69. Feenberg, Andrew. 2015. “Making the Gestalt Switch.” In Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, edited by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 229–36. London: Lexington Books. Gertz, Nolen. 2018a. “Hegel, the Struggle for Recognition, and Robots.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 22 (2): 138–57. ———. 2018b. Nihilism and Technology. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. ———. 2019. “The Four Facebooks.” The New Atlantis 58: 65–70. ———. 2020. “Democratic Potentialities and Toxic Actualities: Feenberg, Ihde, Arendt, and the Internet.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 24 (1–2): 178–94. Haraway, Donna. 2000. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York/ London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. ———. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row. Hoel, Aud Sissel, and Annamaria Carusi. 2015. “Thinking Technology with Merleau-Ponty.” In Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, edited by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 73–84. London: Lexington Books. Hui, Yuk. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd. Ihde, Don. 1979. Technics and Praxis. Boston/Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, Inc. ———. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kaplan, David. 2009. “What Things Still Don’t Do.” Human Studies 32 (2): 229–40. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London/New York: Routledge. Michelfelder, Diane P. 2015. “Postphenomenology with an Eye to the Future.” In Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, edited by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 237–46. London: Lexington Books. Nagenborg, Michael. 2017. “Hidden in Plain Sight.” In Privacy in Public Space, edited by Tjerk Timan, Bryce C. Newell, and Bert-Jaap Koops, 47–63. Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

467

Nolen Gertz Rosenberger, Robert. 2014. “The Phenomenological Case for Stricter Regulation of Cell Phones and Driving.” Techné: Research in Philosophy & Technology 18 (1–2): 20–47. ———. 2017. Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. 2015. “A Field Guide to Postphenomenology.” In Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, edited by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 9–41. London: Lexington Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London/New York: Verso. Scharff, Robert C. 2006. “Ihde’s Albatross: Sticking to a ‘Phenomenology’ of Technoscientific Expertise.” In Postphenomenology: A  Critical Companion to Ihde, edited by Evan Selinger, 131–44. Albany: State University of New York Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Translated by Robert P. Crease. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2008. “Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis.” Human Studies 31: 11–26. ———. 2011. Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2020. “Politicizing Postphenomenology.” In Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde, edited by Glen Miller and Ashley Shew, 141–55. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Wellner, Galit. 2014. “The Quasi-Face of the Cell Phone: Rethinking Alterity and Screens.” Human Studies 37: 299–316. Zwier, Jochem, Vincent Blok, and Pieter Lemmens. 2016. “Phenomenology and the Empirical Turn: A Phenomenological Analysis of Postphenomenology.” Philosophy & Technology 29: 313–33.

468

35 ECOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT Bryan E. Bannon

1. Introduction Eco- or environmental phenomenology is a philosophical approach oriented toward improving the human relationship to the rest of the natural world. Phenomenology has always concerned itself with the subject’s “environment [Umwelt],” and, as environmental affairs grew in importance, phenomenologists began to apply their insights into the environment in an ecological sense. Brown and Toadvine (2003) argue that eco-phenomenology is a natural consequence of these analyses of environment, which makes a great deal of sense when one considers, for example, Husserl’s (1936) analysis of scientific naturalism, Heidegger’s (1953) resistance to the instrumentalization of nature, and Hans Jonas’s (1979) arguments in favor of having responsibility to future generations for the ecological integrity of the planet. Thus, even though eco-phenomenology has emerged as a specifically normative project, its roots lie in these classical phenomenological concerns. Eco-phenomenology is intrinsically political in at least two ways. First, there is the broadly political question of how human beings fit within the ecological systems that they inhabit: that is, the question of what kind of relationship with the rest of the natural world is appropriate. Second, there are the more traditionally political questions of what social forms and structures might cultivate and support better relationships with nature and people and how best to create those structures. Neither set of concerns is novel in and of itself, but phenomenological analysis offers a distinct approach to them due to its methodological commitment to beginning in experience and understanding said experience in terms of relationships. For this reason, phenomenology presents a perspective on environmental issues not frequently represented in contemporary political discourse. One obstacle to eco-phenomenological analysis, however, is translating its insights out of the idiom of phenomenological discourses into that of contemporary political conversation. This difficulty is exacerbated by how the word “phenomenology” is frequently employed in the psychological sense of “what something is like” rather than as a reference to phenomenology as a method or school of thought. It is compounded again insofar as eco-phenomenologists tend to make their cases through engagement with the primary texts of historical figures such as Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, which can make it DOI: 10.4324/9781003197430-48

469

Bryan E. Bannon

easy to ignore such work if one is not already familiar with or interested in the thought of those figures. Nevertheless, eco-phenomenological analysis has much to contribute to the resolution of contemporary political problems pertaining to the environment due to both its methodological commitment to taking the environment as an explicit object of analysis and its rejection of the ontological commitments that make environmental problems so intractable. But what specifically does eco-phenomenology offer to current political conversations concerning issues of environmental concern? This chapter will outline how eco-­ phenomenologists tend to deal with questions of political ecology. Section 1 describes the origins of eco-phenomenology as a normative offshoot of the original phenomenological project. Section 2 discusses how intersubjectively inhabited narratives structure our relationship to particular places. Section 3 then describes the process by which an eco-phenomenologist can normatively evaluate those narratives. Finally, the concluding section offers several examples of how this method can be applied to contemporary political problems regarding the environment.

2.  From Environments to Nature From its Husserlian origins, phenomenology has thematized environment (Umwelt) as one of the central concepts of the method. Since the experiencing subject is always already surrounded by something, determining (1) the nature of those surroundings, (2) how the subject encounters and makes sense of those surroundings, and (3) how those surroundings shape or otherwise influence the subject will be of the utmost importance. Phenomenologists have therefore paid close attention not only to how human subjects inhabit their environments but also to how various forms of animal life do as well. Arguably, Heidegger (1983) initiated this trend with his study of Jakob von Uexküll and Hans Driesch in favor of his claim that animals have no world, but other prominent historical phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (1994) shared the intuition that understanding how animals inhabit their environments would help illuminate how humans dwell in theirs. Assessments and developments of this historical work continue today (e.g., Buchanan 2008; Westling 2013). Hence, many phenomenologists have focused their attention on developing a philosophical anthropology that unifies our natural and social existence without being reductionistic in the manner of many social scientific accounts (e.g., evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, or behavioral economics). Kohák’s (1987) The Embers and the Stars remains exemplary in this regard. On the other hand, there seems to be a gap between this sense of environment and that which is employed in speaking of an “environmental crisis” or the natural world in general. Eco-phenomenology emerged to bridge this gap by parlaying the results of earlier analyses of environments into a meaningful response to the current environmental situation we all face. To see the extent to which the field has developed, readers can compare early anthologies such as Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (Brown and Toadvine 2003) and Rethinking Nature (Foltz and Frodeman 2004) to more recent anthologies such as The Wonder of Water (Stefanovic 2019) and Nature and Experience (Bannon 2017). The field is moving away from detailed exegetical engagements with historical texts toward a critical analysis of practices and conceptual frameworks. The relationship between this interest in and appreciation of environments and the science of ecology is more complicated than one might expect. On the one hand, ecology 470

Ecology and the Environment

as a field science carries much practical appeal to the phenomenologist: Its findings are based on a direct observation of nature rather than laboratory experimentation, it tends to understand phenomena in terms of relationships rather than intrinsic properties, and its conclusions tend to be specific and situational rather than general and universal. On the other hand, contemporary ecology has adopted many of the practices about which phenomenologists have historically expressed skepticism: for example, a reliance on statistical analysis, which abstracts from experience, and basing its findings on quantitative modeling rather than experience itself. The claim here is not that there is something inherently flawed in utilizing these methods but that there is a longstanding tradition of thought within phenomenology—stemming from a certain Heideggerian approach to science and technology—that is skeptical of such scientific practices. Thus, even as ecology as a science seems to have much in common with phenomenology, there also seem to be good reasons for phenomenologists to retain a critical attitude toward it. For the eco-phenomenologist, the science of ecology lacks the kind of uncritical authority to guide action that underwrites many dominant approaches to environmental problems such as climate change mitigation because ecology is understood more as a perspective based in experience than as a privileged point of objective access to reality. But what does the ecological vision of nature reveal? The internal debate between scientists who prefer holistic and those who prefer more individualistic explanations for ecological phenomena can, at times, obscure the larger agreement that nature, as we experience it, is an historical phenomenon comprising relationships. Regardless of whether a given ecological system arises as an epiphenomenon of the relationships and behaviors of specific individuals or whether there are larger overarching patterns or rules for the evolution of ecological systems, both agree that the fundament of nature is relationship. The meaning that one takes away from this consensus is inflected with politics. Additionally, what that ecological system ought to be like is a political question rather than a straightforwardly scientific one. Consider, for example, the debate surrounding the ecology of non-native/ invasive species: Unarguably, many species radically alter the ecology of the environments into which they are introduced, but what remains unclear is whether or not (and according to what standard) these alterations of local ecology can be characterized as destructive. So, even if we accept the ecological vision of the world wherein natural systems comprise of myriad relationships between organic and inorganic phenomena, the related questions of how to interpret the meanings of nature and how humanity should inhabit the natural world remain.

3.  Political Narratives Eco-phenomenologists are well equipped to deal with these questions of meaning in ways that scientists, for methodological reasons, are not. Since phenomenology takes the intersubjective constitution of the subject’s “world” as one of its central questions, there has been extensive analysis of how perceivers make sense of their worlds, specifically through narrative structures. The branch of phenomenology that deals with the role narratives play in helping us make sense of experience and make experience meaningful and coherent is hermeneutic phenomenology. Recently, environmental hermeneutics has emerged as a specific employment of hermeneutic methods to analyze how human beings encounter meaning within their environments. It focuses on “hermeneutic consciousness,” which is to say how historical systems of meaning inform current experience—including our relationship 471

Bryan E. Bannon

with the environment—with an emphasis on “the ‘conflict of interpretations’ that exists in our intersubjective encounters with the material, emotional, and intellectual world” (Clingerman et al. 2014, 4–5). In other words, hermeneutic phenomenology maintains that the nature we encounter in experience is always already interpreted: human beings exist already situated within networks of meaning that accrue over time as a result of our embeddedness in an environment. From a hermeneutic perspective, it is the case neither that there is one unequivocal way of interpreting nature nor that all interpretations are equally valid; rather, we are engaged in a “structurally open project” of ongoing interpretation of experience “that never comes to a final closure” (3). Eco-phenomenologists are committed to the ideas that (1) there are multiple, malleable narratives concerning what nature is and should be like, and (2) those narratives address and are shaped by an experience of the world itself.1 Hence, the interpretation of nature— that is, how we make sense of the relations in which we are embedded—is never the project of a subject conjuring meanings that it impresses upon a passive nature. Rather, interpretation occurs within what is known as a hermeneutic circle. A hermeneutic circle begins with the observation that one can only ever interpret experience from a perspective, but that perspective will always be formed through the kind of experiences one has had, which includes the environmental context of said experiences. In addition to the aforementioned natural context of experience, the background of an experience can include a variety of social factors (e.g., language and interpersonal norms for social behavior) with respect to which the experiencer is habituated. Interpretations will therefore reflect values derived from the specific ways in which human beings have come to establish identities for themselves in that context. Frequently, our sense of self and regional identity is a product of generations’ interactions with the landscape. As Martin Drenthen explains, “[P]laces served as shared reference points: They both expressed and helped to support regional identities thus providing human inhabitants with a means of identification and orientation” (2014, 227). The relationship to the place—the habits and practices necessary to surviving and thriving in a given landscape—is formative of cultural and individual identity, but those practices and habits, in turn, shape the landscape around us. Again, we see the circularity of the interpretive relationship wherein the landscape shapes behavior, which shapes the landscape in turn. Being attentive to this circulating interpretive dimension of experience interestingly calls on us to reflect on how the places we construct and otherwise inhabit contribute to or detract from the potential for us to craft more productive narratives about nature. Of course, in a specific place, there will be a variety of narratives regarding the natural world, some of which are more or less conducive to a decent relationship to the surrounding environment and its inhabitants. In this sense, the interpretation of nature is an inherently political project wherein the narratives we use to understand the natural world embody and encourage one way of inhabiting the environment over others. These narratives are social, so they must be negotiated with others—and not necessarily only human others if one considers the eco-phenomenological work on animal worlds—to ensure they reflect what we take to be decent relationships. Also, since our individual identities are tied up in these lived relations to place, we are normatively negotiating how we think about ourselves and our situation in the world through the narratives we advance. Our narratives concerning nature (and ourselves) can be incomplete, overlapping, multiple, or even inconsistent with themselves. If all this is the case, however, the conflicts over how best to inhabit environments go far beyond simple questions of environmental management: we are really debating the existential questions of who we, inhabitants of a place, endeavor to become and what makes 472

Ecology and the Environment

life worth living. Given this account of how we utilize narrative to make sense of nature, the issue that remains is to offer an account of what guidance eco-phenomenology could provide with respect to negotiating these heterogeneous interpretations.

4.  The Politics of Inhabiting the Natural World To this point, we have seen that nature is a relational totality to which we relate as denizens of specific places, not a separate domain devoid of human influence. As a relational totality, it is continually evolving into ever-new permutations depending on the collective agency that emerges within it; there is no one way that nature is supposed to be. Some guiding political questions, then, are (1) how to improve the human relationship to specific places given the diversity of narratives within a place, (2) how to analyze specific habits and practices to discern whether they are conducive to living well in a specific locale, and (3) how to engage with co-inhabitants that do not use human language. In taking up this normative project of eco-phenomenology, it is important to note the overlap between the ethical and political spheres. There is an intimate connection between our ethical ideals—that is, the kinds of people we endeavor to be and the lives we hope to live—and political ideals—that is, the kinds of relations between others, institutions, and community governance we believe will facilitate bringing those lives into being. These two sets of concerns both emerge from the narratives that individuals use to make sense of themselves, the social world, their environment, etc. We project into the future specific goals that emerge from our understandings of the world, which are developed through our inherently social emplacement within that world. So our perceptions of how we ought to live and the kind of world we would like to live in will depend on the intersubjectively cultivated narratives we utilize to interpret our environments. As intersubjective understandings, however, these narratives are also political in nature, with disagreement emerging between parties with disparate experiences of their worlds. In considering a relational, narrative approach to ethics and the political consequences thereof, it is also important to keep in mind some of the facets of hermeneutic analysis described here—most notably, the iterative process of narrative construction and the potential for multiple valid narratives in any situation. Since, as Brian Treanor notes, there is likely no single, all-encompassing narrative of a good life that applies to all people and all places, a better approach is to focus on virtue (2014a, 22).2 Focusing on virtue asks us to respond to some of the existential questions raised in this chapter: Who do we endeavor to become as individuals? As a species? What are decent ways of living with one another? With our fellow species? Since our responses to these questions are embedded within contemporary social relations and embody the values that have led to the current state of environmental affairs, we must be willing to engage critically with even our most dear traditions in order to transform ourselves in ways that make possible better relationships with other humans, fellow beings, and perhaps even the planet as a whole.3 Hence, one way we can discriminate between better and worse narratives is by examining whether the kind of relations they make possible bring us closer to defensible conceptions of a good life. To demonstrate this last point, I  shall lay out four methods an eco-phenomenologist uses to engage with narratives: (1) critically analyzing the implications of accepting a given narrative, (2) rejecting narratives and concepts that create dysfunctional relationships, (3) finding more fitting concepts within experience, and (4) developing new narratives to help 473

Bryan E. Bannon

us make sense of the world. As an example of how these methods function, let us consider Elizabeth Anderson’s (2004, 288) recommendation for how to live with “vermin”: that is, species whose ways of inhabiting the world can be at odds with human well-being. In Anderson’s account, these species, who implacably behave in ways that are hostile to human interests, cannot adjust their behavior so as to accommodate human interests. With them, there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests, as animal rights theorists demand of moral agents with respect to rights bearers incapable of reciprocation, would amount to surrender. . . . Vermin, pests, and parasites may be killed, deprived of subsistence, and driven out of their human niches, in ways that, if necessary, cause them great suffering, even if their innate intellectual and affective capacities are considerable. (Anderson 2004, 288–89; emphasis added) There are several things to note in this passage, which I shall identify as the interest-based narrative because it embodies many of the classic values of anthropocentric Western liberalism, the very values that have been challenged by a number of environmentalist discourses. There is a story we are being asked to accept about animals such as mice: that their interests are at odds with our own, we cannot communicate with them in any meaningful way, and they will not alter their behavior in response to human efforts to do so. According to this understanding, the most appropriate way to conceive of such a situation is that we are engaged in a zero-sum conflict with the mice who enter our homes; it’s them or us. Given that understanding of our relationship to the mice, it seems plausible to recommend the harsh measures Anderson endorses: killing, depriving of subsistence, and driving them from territory. She later softens these points by indicating that: even vermin have some degree of moral considerability. I  am claiming the level of moral considerability they “have” (that is, that humans owe them) is profoundly diminished by the joint occurrence of two facts about them: the essential opposition of their interests to ours and their incapacity for reciprocal accommodation with us. (Anderson 2004, 289) Presumably, then, we would still be restricted by conventions such as proportionality of response when considering what to do about the mouse in our kitchen, but we nevertheless are in the position of asserting the priority of human needs (and possibly desires; the line can be thin) over those of the other species without need for justification of that prioritization. The first mode of analysis concerns the kinds of attitudes toward ourselves, otherness, and the world that narratives implicitly endorse and encourage. In other words, what concerns the eco-phenomenologist is what Cheshire Calhoun has called the “nonlogical implications” (1988, 453) of the narrative: the generally accepted beliefs that are not logically entailed by the narrative but are required for the narrative to function and might even be denied by those espousing the narrative were those beliefs articulated explicitly (452–53). The most trenchant nonlogical implication of the interest-based narrative is that we as individuals and as a species are continually enmeshed in a zero-sum competition with certain of our fellow inhabitants of the planet. This implication emerges from the notion of interests 474

Ecology and the Environment

in the narrative. Conceiving of beings as defined by their interests is deeply entrenched in Western political thinking, but it can prove a difficult notion in an environmental context. In thinking about ourselves in terms of interests, we reduce our being in the world to those goods that are required for survival, that enable a decent social existence, and that we desire to make life worthwhile. Since we all have a need for shelter, we could say that human beings each have an interest in securing such for themselves. Or, if we acknowledge that humans are social animals, we could say that each of us has an interest in having access to the company of others. These may be perfectly fine ways of conceptualizing how to deal with certain social problems such as the allocation of finite resources. Yet conceiving our relationships with others in terms of real or potential conflicts of interest construes these relationships as fundamentally adversarial. Consider the mouse in the kitchen: I have an interest in a sanitary cooking space whereas mice have an interest in acquiring food. These interests obviously conflict. Because I cannot talk with the mice in order to ask them to stop eating my flour or to train them to eat from and defecate in a designated area, it is justified that I exterminate them. The narrative precludes considering other ways of dealing with the situation besides securing my interests over and above those of the mouse. Even were we to acknowledge the commonality of an interest, we are then placed in a position of competing to secure the resources that might satisfy that shared interest. Conceiving of ourselves in terms of interests, therefore, encourages both egocentrism and anthropocentrism; relationships become about what they bring to me or to humanity in general. Another nonlogical implication is that a moral framework is the most appropriate one for understanding our relationship to others and that morality is to be understood in terms of concepts such as reciprocity, negotiation, moral considerability, duty, and rights. Observing this implication leads to a second mode of eco-phenomenological analysis: analysis aimed at undermining concepts and methodologies that have buttressed or created the environmental crisis. In this way, the eco-phenomenological project is a critical one. To use the reliance on moral analysis as an example, there is ample reason to believe that the moral approach is the wrong one.4 Most glaringly, moral analysis tends to isolate individual agents to assign responsibility. In most cases, however, environmental problems are problems of collective action and are structural in nature. As Iris Young (2006, 2011) convincingly argues, these kinds of global, structural problems require a different framework for analysis than the traditional system of moral analysis provides: we need to analyze how we participate in and benefit from the systems that continue to perpetuate injustices and seek to change them to the extent that we are able, regardless of whether we are to blame for the problem. The purpose of such political responsibility is to establish conditions under which better social relationships are possible. A third and more constructive employment of eco-phenomenology involves the return to experience in order to reinterpret traditional concepts or develop new ones. Depending on the individual eco-phenomenologist, the conception of experience will be more or less broad, but the methodological move is generally the same. As described earlier, since our daily experience takes place in a world of understandings, our habits are shaped by meanings we have received over time in a variety of contexts. But by examining the actual experiences that initially gave rise to those meanings, it is possible for us to reconceptualize our experience and think of it differently. Returning to the example, the interest-based narrative frames both communication and reciprocity narrowly. Communication is understood in terms of the ability to use human spoken language; hence, there is no possibility of it with the mice. Mice, however, as embodied beings, possess meaningful relations to 475

Bryan E. Bannon

their environments, and so it may, in fact, be possible to “communicate” with them given a more expansive sense of what it means to engage in communication. For example, if one were to adopt a cat, one would clearly send a message to the mice: Stay away! But even more subtle means of communication are possible, such as keeping one’s dry goods in glass containers (no food here) or relocating the mice using humane traps (maybe you’d be happier far from here?). Even though I will never sit down and have a conversation with a mouse, there are many ways in which we might communicate with one another through our shared embodiment. The case is similar with reciprocity. Consider David Abram’s (2004) reimagining of the term: rather than thinking of reciprocity in the way the interest-based narrative assumes—that is, that one will take into consideration my interests as I take into consideration theirs—Abram asks us to reconnect with how we experience reciprocity in nature. We frequently do not experience reciprocity in a transactional way. Thus, he redefines it in terms of how beings mutually define one another through their relationships with one another. Since we find ourselves enmeshed in a network of relationships and are enriched and defined as individuals through our contact with otherness, that contact and mutual definition is a form of reciprocity. So even though he agrees that “[r]eciprocity can emerge only if there is some common ground, some common medium through which a mutual exchange can unfold,” it is equally the case that the common medium is our shared embodiment, both human’s and mouse’s belongingness to and dependence on the rest of the material world of nature (Abram 2004, 83; see also 88). Rethinking reciprocity thusly, we are, of course, enmeshed in such mutual exchange with “vermin” and should perhaps think more cautiously about how to have a healthy relationship with them: for example, by not calling such species “vermin.” Regardless of whether one wants to endorse Abram’s account, the general approach of eco-phenomenologists is to take up a concept that is generally employed and reveal the reasons stemming from experience for thinking about that concept in a different way: namely, one that will engender better relationships within the ecological community. A variant of that strategy is to provide what Plumwood (2005) refers to as “counternarratives” that challenge the dominant relationships of power that have conspired to create the current state of environmental affairs. With these points in mind, we might question if the interest-based narrative’s adversarial approach is the only way to frame the experience of mice entering one’s kitchen. One might question, for example, why altering one’s approach in the kitchen would constitute “surrender” or why surrender is, in all cases, a bad thing. Compare the interest-based narrative to that of Thich Nhat Hanh on dealing with mosquitoes: I learned that a mosquito needs food in order to live. A mosquito is always trying to get some food. It is like us. When we are hungry we also look for something to eat, and that’s very natural. I think there are ways in which we can protect ourselves from being bitten by mosquitos. In Vietnam everyone has a mosquito net to sleep under at night. And if they don’t use a mosquito net, they have to kill mosquitos the whole night. Not only a few—because after you kill one, another will come. You could spend your entire night killing mosquitos. So killing mosquitos is not a solution. One way we can protect ourselves is by using a mosquito net. Sometimes when I see a mosquito landing on me, I produce a kind of storm with my hand so the mosquito will fly away. I do it without any anger. I just prevent the mosquito from biting. (Nhat Hanh 2011, 137–38) 476

Ecology and the Environment

In this passage, the mosquito is considered as a fellow being also seeking its vital needs rather than as a competitor for scarce resources. But, most importantly and for that reason, it begins from a position in which the dominant response is being compassionate to otherness rather than being adversarial. Hanh proposes that begetting violence against the mosquito is a pointless gesture, and instead, we ought to take actions that might preserve our own well-being while preserving the space for the mosquito’s as well. Making space for the mosquito to pursue its needs without compromising one’s own well-being asks for different attitudes toward otherness besides viewing oneself in a permanent state of war with the other. This narrative challenges the overt anthropocentrism of Anderson and asks us to frame our relationships with others in a more compassionate way. In this sense, it provides a counter-narrative to Western political liberalism and invites us to think about how reciprocal accommodation with others who are very different from ourselves may be possible. This kind of narrative also recalls our attention to how our habitual ways of relating to others shape who we are. Being based in experience, what lies at the heart of the normative project of eco-phenomenology are the values that make one way of living more appealing than another. As stated earlier, these values are not universal and are subject to discussion and debate. They are, however, normative insofar as they emerge from the narratives that structure our experience of the world. Common goals, however, can frequently guide normative reflection in situations where values conflict. In the context of environmentalism, certain of these are easy to identify: clean air and water, the availability of healthy food, the leaving of space for other species to thrive, etc. So there is a pragmatic case to be made for one narrative’s efficacy in fulfilling those goals rather than another. Also, in thinking through the kinds of people we endeavor to be—that is, thinking through what kinds of lives might serve as reasonable ethical ideals—we can identify certain habits and dispositions that are necessary to social living in general such as open-mindedness, willingness to forgive, ability to adapt, etc. Hence, a second mode of normative analysis of a narrative is to ask whether the narrative and the habits it cultivates lead us closer or further away from endorsed ethical ideals. Of course, all these elements—our sense of who we strive to be, what we hope for from the world, what a good environment is like—are interrelated, and questioning one narrative can lead to questioning other domains. This overlapping and inconsistency are not flaws of the method but rather point to the aforementioned iterative nature of the hermeneutic process: there is no end to the need to evaluate our narratives critically. So, in sum, there is a recursive, fourfold method that lies at the eco-phenomenologist’s approach to normative evaluation of narratives. First come the two critical modes of identifying and criticizing the nonlogical implications of existing narratives and their constitutive concepts. Having identified certain problems, the constructive modes entail returning to actual experiences in order to see whether the problematic concepts can be transformed or whether it is possible to articulate new environmental narratives that challenge existing social relations in order to bring about healthier ecological relationships.

5. Conclusion To recapitulate briefly, environmental phenomenology is an approach to environmental philosophy that seeks to better understand and thereby improve the human relationship with the rest of the natural world. Because eco-phenomenology begins with the concrete experience of the natural world rather than theoretical abstractions, practitioners 477

Bryan E. Bannon

conceptualize nature in a distinct way from the dualistic metaphysics received in much of Western metaphysics wherein “nature” describes the material domain of the non-human. Rather, we describe this nature as a relational whole, meaning nature is an ever-developing and mutating whole, the current structure of which will be determined by the historical relationships between beings present within it. This nature is permeated by values that inhere in the interplay between specific bodily compositions and their environments. The concept of nature, then, lacks the normative force to tell us what to do in any particular case since there is no intrinsic value to any one configuration of a natural system. Despite stripping the traditional concept of nature of its normative force, the relational concept of nature facilitates improving the human relationship with the rest of the natural world in a number of ways. First, it calls attention to how human beings make sense of their environments: namely, through narratives. These structure the relationship to the environment such that we understand ourselves and the things around us through said narratives, which are inevitably plural and, at times, conflict with one another. So the habits we use to navigate the world and the values we seek to establish in the world through those actions are the products of narratives, even as those same habits and values shape the narratives we live through the experiences we have. Critically analyzing this circulating relationship between behavior, narrative, and environment provides a more expansive sense of both the origin of environmental woes and possible responses to them. Second, the relational conception of nature entails that environmental problems are primarily social problems. Saying so does not imply a separation of the natural and social; on the contrary, if the social world is embedded within nature as a part of it and the relationships, both interpersonal and systemic, and institutions we establish are therefore part of nature’s fabric, then what we face is primarily a crisis of our mode of living in the world wherein we are making it inhospitable to ourselves and many other forms of life. In order to transform those relationships, it is necessary to examine and revise the narratives, habits, and values that gave rise to them. Third, the relational conception of nature helps make sense of the environmental problems we face in a different way: rather than viewing these problems as problems of isolated responsibility, it asks everyone who is a part of the social nexus that creates a problem to contribute to a response to that problem to the extent to which they have the power to do so. Thinking in terms of dynamic systems demands more complex ways of assigning and fulfilling responsibilities than the individualist model provides. Most importantly, eco-phenomenology’s methodology calls for continual critique of social conditions and the narratives that create them in order to establish a responsive environmental culture. It does so by (1) determining what the nonlogical implications of current narratives are in order to (2) assess the ecological rationality of specific concepts and undermine those that fail to contribute to an environmental culture. From there, ecophenomenologists (3) examine experience in order to reform existing concepts so as to reflect the world we experience accurately and to avoid the negative environmental consequences of existing concepts. Failing that, eco-phenomenologists formulate new concepts to replace the old. But, in either case, the goal is to (4) create counter-narratives to those employed in contemporary ecologically destructive societies in order to establish better ideals for living well. These counter-narratives will, of course, be politically negotiated and do not necessarily preclude others from holding competing narratives. Though this chapter has focused primarily on motivating the project of eco-­phenomenology and formulating a basic approach to the practice in general, I will close by providing a few examples of where the reader may find exemplary works of eco-phenomenology working 478

Ecology and the Environment

on practical problems we face in developing a positive relationship with the rest of nature. These examples are not intended to be exhaustive but rather demonstrate clearly some of the methods discussed in this chapter: 1. Ontological intervention: As described in the first section, eco-phenomenologists frequently seek to reexamine experience to uncover more adequate metaphysical conceptions of taken-for-granted concepts. Matthias Fritsch (2018) has developed a novel response to dominant trends in thinking about intergenerational justice by proposing an alternative metaphysics of the self, conceiving of humanity as “generational” beings rather than ones limited to their own present time. On the face of it, this proposal makes a great deal of sense, given that our individual impacts on the environment will long outlive our own lifespans. But Fritsch goes further to describe how the various structures, institutions, languages, etc. that serve to constitute our identities are never strictly a product of the present and always project a future horizon of possibilities. We are, therefore, never solely in the present but possess a temporal extension across generations. This model of generational selves leads to two models of intergenerational justice: an “indirect reciprocity” model, wherein I possess obligations to ensure that the interests of the future have the possibility of being met resulting from past generations doing the same for me, and the “generational turn-taking” model, wherein the earth is seen as something shared across generations, and each is called to preserve that with which they take a turn. 2. Cultural transformation As discussed in the second section, eco-phenomenology seeks to call attention to the narratives that have shaped the environment in order to transform those narratives and develop new possibilities for inhabiting the landscape. Irene Klaver’s work on the environmental imagination falls squarely into this category. Whether examining Dutch landscape painting in order to describe how the collective cultural imagination of the landscape emerged (2012) or discussing the slogan “Don’t mess with Texas” as a way of displaying how boundary objects can, paradoxically, bring people together (2007), Klaver’s work examines how we construct ideals for the landscape and how those ideals determine our relation to places. Her writings on water are especially poignant (e.g., Klaver 2011, 2014, 2018): She is arguing for a transformation of our relationship with water from one in which it is primarily a commodity into one in which it is, in part, a reflection of ourselves and a means for biological preservation and cultural diversification. To do so, she develops new phenomenological concepts such as “meandering” and “riverspheres” as alternatives to the managerial and technocratic models for thinking about riparian management. 3. Altering the standards of evaluation Lastly, I will mention Ingrid Stefanovic’s (2000) important intervention in rethinking sustainability from the 1987 World Committee on Environment and Development report, Safeguarding Our Common Future. The dominant concept of sustainability—that the present needs be met in a way that does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet theirs—takes for granted an instrumentalizing worldview in which the Earth is assumed to be defined by its “resources” and “services.” In doing so, the concept of sustainability fails to be as comprehensive and politically significant as it could be. Given the prevalence of the sustainability discourse in public policy, she proposes a more robust conception based in her account of “originative thinking,” which asks us to relate 479

Bryan E. Bannon

to things as they manifest to us in their complex relationality, rather than through their instrumental value to us. This originative thinking is, in fact, a mode of ethical seeing; it allows us to return to our experiences of the places we inhabit in order (1) to uncover the implicit judgments contained in our worldviews and (2) to offer alternative “indicators” for sustainable development that emerge from analyzing the habits that enable sustained dwelling in the landscape. Thus, rather than the current sustainability discourse’s emphasis on global resource management, Stefanovic offers a place-based vision that considers individual human relationships to the landscape and each other. In each of these cases, the authors are using various of the methods described in this chapterin order to engage with real-world concerns in a way that changes how they are to be approached. The consensus here is clear: Merely approaching environmental problems as problems of distribution without attempting to grapple with the deeper cultural problems that lead to the habits and practices that despoil the earth is not sufficient. It is possible that the reliance on globalizing strategies for addressing environmental degradation ignores the power of autochthonous values and alienates the inhabitants of places who may, in fact, know quite a bit about how to inhabit a place sustainably. The project of eco-phenomenology, then, is to foster the reflective and critical powers to enable the development of place-based ethics so we may learn to dwell in our places in ways better than those yet foreseen.

Notes 1 On its surface, environmental hermeneutics resembles the position that nature is a social construction, but many environmental phenomenologists resist that language. Phenomenology in general has long seen itself as a means of escaping so-called realist and idealist positions. In the environmental context, this takes the form of rejecting stronger versions of social constructionism that hold that “nature” is nothing but a political concept, the use of which ought to be eschewed. But it also rejects realist views that deny the role that the human body, social life, and experiences have in our experience of the natural world. As examples, Brown (2003) and Toadvine (2009) offer different approaches to negotiating these poles. 2 Treanor (2014b) offers a much richer account than I can do justice to here with respect to the connections between the approach to ethics deriving from the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology and addressing our environmental situation. Of particular note is his observation that the narrative virtue approach makes us sensitive to nuances that more moralizing approaches have us ignore, such as emotional attunement, divergences in what constitutes ethical goods, the need both to provide motivation to act and transmit values across generations and individuals, etc. 3 An excellent example of this process is Jonathan Safran Foer’s (2009) Eating Animals. In learning about how animals are treated and the ecological impacts of industrial animal agriculture, Safran Foer determines that eating meat is not aligned with the values with which he seeks to raise his children. In the appropriately titled chapter “Storytelling,” he uses the example of Thanksgiving to show how the values we narratively espouse around Thanksgiving are not reflected in the practice of eating turkey while also recognizing the challenge not only to one’s own identity but also to the identities of those around one in eschewing such a practice. 4 It would be a chapter in and of itself to argue such a point thoroughly, but the history of environmental ethics bears this claim out. Since the majority of the concepts of moral theory were developed in anthropocentric contexts, they are acknowledged to be unsuitable for dealing with environmental problems (e.g., Routley 1973). This acknowledgement led to an avalanche of literature attempting to show that those concepts could be extended beyond the narrow confines in which they were developed. But, given the myriad critiques of the moral approach (e.g., Walker 2007; Williams 1985) and the difficulties engendered by attempting to extend traditional moral concepts to parties normally excluded from the moral framework, environmentalists ought to question whether such tools of reasoning are adequate to fashion a new relationship to the environment.

480

Ecology and the Environment

References Abram, David. 2004. “Reciprocity.” In Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman, 77–92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2004. “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life.” In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, 277–98. New York: Oxford University Press. Bannon, Bryan E., ed. 2017. Nature and Experience: Phenomenology and the Environment. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Brown, Charles S. 2003. “The Real and the Good.” In Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, edited by Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, 3–18. Albany: SUNY Press. ———, and Ted Toadvine, eds. 2003. Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. Albany: SUNY Press. Buchanan, Brett. 2008. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, MerleauPonty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press. Calhoun, Cheshire. 1988. “Justice, Care, Gender Bias.” Journal of Philosophy 85 (9): 451–63. Clingerman, Forrest, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen, and David Utsler. 2014. “Introduction: Environmental Hermeneutics.” In Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, edited by Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen, and David Utsler, 1–14. New York: Fordham University Press. Drenthen, Martin. 2014. “New Nature Narratives: Landscape Hermeneutics and Environmental Ethics.” In Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, edited by Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen, and David Utsler, 225–42. New York: Fordham University Press. Foltz, Bruce, and Robert Frodeman, eds. 2004. Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fritsch, Matthias. 2018. Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1953. “Die Frage nach der Technik.” In Gesamtausgabe, Band 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze, 7–36. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1983. Gesamtausgabe, Band 29/30: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt-EndlichkeitEinsamkeit. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Husserl, Edmund. 1936. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Vol. 641. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Jonas, Hans. 1979. Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation. Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag. Klaver, Irene J. 2007. “Boundaries on the Edge.” In Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice, edited by Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, 113–32. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2011. “Placing Water and Culture.” In Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change, edited by Barbara R. Johnston, Lisa Hiwasaki, Irene J. Klaver, Ameyali Ramos Castillo, and Veronica Strang, 9–29. Dordrecht: Springer Publications. ———. 2012. “Authentic Landscapes at Large: Dutch Globalization and Environmental Imagination.” SubStance 41 (1): 92–108. ———. 2014. “Meander(ing) Multiplicity.” In Water Scarcity, Security, and Democracy: A Mediterranean Mosaic, edited by Francesca DeChâtel, Gail Holst-Warhaft, and Tammo Steenhuis, 38–47. Ithaca/New York: Global Water Partnership Mediterranean, Cornell University, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. ———. 2018. “Reclaiming Rivers from Homogenization: Meandering and Riverspheres.” In From Biocultural Homogenization to Biocultural Conservation, edited by Ricardo Rozzi, Roy H. May Jr., F. Stuart Chapin III, Francisca Massardo, Michael C. Gavin, Irene J. Klaver, Aníbal Pauchard, Martin A. Nuñez, and Daniel Simberloff, 49–69. Dordrecht: Springer. Kohák, Erazim. 1987. The Embers and the Stars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1994. La Nature: notes, cours du Collège de France. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

481

Bryan E. Bannon Nhat Hanh, Thich. 2011. Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press. Plumwood, Val. 2005. “Toward a Progressive Naturalism.” In Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature, edited by Thomas Heyd, 25–53. New York: Columbia University Press. Routley, Richard. 1973. “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?” Proceedings of the XV World Conference of Philosophy: 205–10. Safran Foer, Jonathan. 2009. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Stefanovic, Ingrid Leman. 2000. Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2019. The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Toadvine, Ted. 2009. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Treanor, Brian. 2014a. “Narrative and Nature: Appreciating and Understanding the Natural World.” In Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, edited by Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen, and David Utsler, 181–200. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2014b. Emplotting Virtue: A Narrative Approach to Environmental Virtue Ethics. Albany: SUNY Press. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Approach to Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Westling, Louise. 2013. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2006. “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model.” Social Philosophy and Policy 23 (1): 102–30. ———. 2011. Responsibility for Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.

482

INDEX

Abensour, Miguel 231 ableist conflation 438 Abram, David 476 Abrams, Erika 193 Adorno, Theodor 38, 294, 300; critiques of Heidegger 301 – 2; critiques of Husserl 302 affective ankylosis 124, 127 affective antagonism 455 – 56 affective refusal 126 – 27 Agbabi, Patience 286 Ahmed, Sara 297, 328 – 29, 355, 358, 378, 404, 406 – 7, 441, 451 – 52 Alcoff, Linda Martín 357, 366, 367, 375, 378, 384, 403, 404, 453 – 55 alterity; see also philosophers of dialogue; psychoanalytic thought; individual names: aporetic politics concept 219; between-us concept 218; conflictuality concept 219; ontological violence concept 219; Other in the self-concept 218; philosophers of dialogue and 279 – 83; politics of, with politics of difference 220 – 21; psychoanalytic thought and 284 – 87 Althusser, Louis 117, 144 ambiguity 71, 87, 89 – 91 Anderson, Elizabeth 474 Anderson, Marian 161 Anderson, Perry 135 – 36 Antagonism 449 – 455 anticolonialism and Vietnamese independence, Thảo on 111 – 13 antisemitism 14, 20 Anzaldúa, Gloria 444 Apel, Karl-Otto 294 Appiah, K. Anthony 378

applied phenomenology 2 Aron, Raymond 101, 137 Avé-Lallemant, Eberhard 38 bad faith, white ignorance as 405 – 7 Badiou, Alain 231 Baldwin, James 78 Balibar, Étienne 144 Banfi, Antonio 296, 316 Barad, Karen 358 Bath, Rachel 14 Baudrillard, Jean 168, 173 Bauman, Zygmunt 158 – 59 Becker, Oskar 12 Belvedere, Carlos 160 Benhabib, Seyla 182 Benjamin, Walter 172, 176, 207 – 8, 303 Bennett, Jane 358 Bernasconi, Robert 373, 378 Biemel, Walter 200 biologism, Heidegger and 45 – 6 Black, Indigenous, and ethnic (BIE) studies 411, 412, 413 Black, Indigenous and women of color (BIWC) feminism 411, 412, 413 Black Lives Matter movements 373 Bloch, Ernst 294, 315 Blum, Lawrence 372 Blumenberg, Hans 206, 208 – 9 body schema 402 – 3 Borgmann, Albert 464 Bourdieu, Pierre 156, 158 – 59, 265 Boxill, Bernard 378 Braidotti, Rosi 358 Brown, Charles S. 469

483

Index Buber, Martin 280 – 82 Butler, Joseph 32 Butler, Judith 231, 293, 296 – 97, 324, 325 – 26, 337, 356; see also queer theory; postfoundationalism and 343 – 44; precarity and 429 – 30; “the right to appear” concept 424, 430, 431

cultural transformation 479 culture wars 6, 33 – 4

Calhoun, Cheshire 474 California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race 378 Camus, Albert 136 – 37, 142 Carastathis, Anna 387, 389 Carel, Havi 438, 439 – 40 Castoriadis, Cornelius 137, 337, 338 – 39 Cavaillès, Jean 108 Caygill, Howard 176, 231 Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political 297 Ćerný, Václav 191 Césaire, Aimé 379, 411, 417 – 19 Chamberlain, M. E. 413 Charta 77 human rights initiative 191, 192, 199 – 200 Cherry, Myisha 453 chiasm concept 297 – 98 Cho, Sumi K. 386 chōrismos concept 193 Cohen Shabot, Sara 363 Colectiva Feminista en Construcción 412 collective hope 455 Collins, Patricia Hill 384, 387 – 89; see also intersectionality colonial duration 121 colonialism 69, 79, 124 – 25 coloniality 419 colonial “white world” 122 Combahee River Collective 412 Combat (underground newspaper) 136 – 37 Communism, Sartre defense of 140 – 41 Connolly, William 231 Coole, Diana 103 – 4 Cooley, Charles 162 cosmopolitan universalism 13 Coulthard, Glen Sean 120, 125 counter-narratives 476 credibility excess/deficit 398 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 385, 387 crip/cripping phenomenology 355 Critchley, Simon 231 – 32 critical phenomenology 1 – 2; of disability 442 – 43; feminist phenomenology as 368 – 69; queer theory as 331 – 33 critical race theory 380 cultural identities 274 – 75

Dastur, François 249 Dauenhauer, Bernard 236 Davis, Angela 378 Dawsey, Jason 167 Debray, Régis 79 decolonial thought 412 – 13 Democritos 198 de Saint Aubert, Emmanuel 90 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint 117 Deutscher, Penelope 252 dialogue, philosophers of 279 – 83; Buber, Martin 280 – 82; Marcel, Gabriel 282 – 83; Rosenzweig, Franz 283 diastasis 272 Dolar, Mladen 252 Dollfuß, Engelbert 58 – 9 Dreher, Jochen 158, 159 – 60, 167 Drenthen, Martin 472 Dreyfus, Hubert 437, 464 Driesch, Hans 470 Drummond, John 163 DuBois, W. E. B. 393 Durkheim, Émile 160 Eagleton, Terry 329 Eberle, Thomas 159 Eidetic political philosophy 163 eidetic variation concept 464 – 65 “elevator effect” 367 – 68, 376, 378, 402 Ellison, Ralph 307 – 8 Ellul, Jacques 168, 172 embodiment relations 465 empathy 55 encroachment (empietment) concept 71; Beauvoir and 87 – 9 Endreß, Martin 158 – 59 engaged phenomenology 2 environmental hermeneutics 471 – 72 epiphany of the face 226 – 27 Erfani, Farhang 243 Esposito, Roberto 344 ethics-based politics 53 Eurocentrism 274 existentialist phenomenology; see also individual names: Beauvoir, Simone de 86 – 94; Fanon, Frantz 120 – 30; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 97 – 106; political phenomenology methods and 70 – 1; politicization and 68 – 70; Sartre, Jean-Paul 73 – 84; Thǻo, Trân Ðúc 108 – 18 existential Marxism 68; Critique of Dialectical Reason and 143 – 44; groups and journals formed during 136 – 37; phenomenology

484

Index and 137 – 44; as variant of Western Marxism 135 – 36 existential psychology 182 existential violence, Beauvoir and 87 – 9 false interiority 36 Feenberg, Andrew 316 feminist phenomenology: as critical phenomenology 362 – 63, 368 – 69; features of 363 – 64; intersectionality and 385 feminist standpoint theory 466 fetishism 253 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 22 Figaro (newspaper) 137 Fink, Eugen 400 Fischer, Cat 352, 355 foreignness 274 Foucault, Michel 265, 270, 296, 324 – 25, 356, 357 freedom of movement 423 – 24 French existentialism see existentialist phenomenology; existential Marxism Fricker, Miranda 398 Fritsch, Matthias 479 Fryer, David Ross 297, 327 – 28 Fuchs, Thomas 441 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 14 Gallagher, Shaun 437 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 439 Gauss, Christian 306 Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft (community vs. society) debate 2, 12 – 13; Stein and 55 – 6 Gibson, J. J. 357 Glissant, Édouard 379 Goffman, Erving 205 Goldberg, Theo 378 Goldmann, Lucien 318 Gordon, Lewis 376, 378, 391 – 92, 405 Gorz, André 137 Gramsci, Antonio 296, 316 Gregor, Adalbert 12 Gros, Alexis 163 – 64, 167 Grosz, Elizabeth 251 group-in-fusion 144 Gurwitsch, Aron 205 Habermas, Jürgen 158, 243, 294, 295, 300, 304 – 7; critiques of Heidegger 304 – 5; Heidegger influence on 305; Husserl influence on 306; lifeworld and 305 – 6 habit body concept 402 – 5; racism and 403 – 5 Hägglund, Martin 227 Hájek, Jíři 191 Hall, Kim Q. 439

Haraway, Donna 358, 464 Harris, Leonard 378 Havel, Václav 53, 191, 199 Helm, Bennett 449 – 50 Henry-Lévy, Bernard 74 hermeneutic relations 465 heterogeneous commonality 389 historicity 42 – 3 Hobbes, Thomas 228 homogenising allegiance 453, 455 Honneth, Axel 295, 300, 307 – 8 Hoodfar, Homa 386 hooks, bell 378 Horkheimer, Max 38; criticisms of phenomenology 300 – 301 Hui, Yuk 464 human-technology relations 464 – 65 Ihde, Don 464, 465 impairment vs. disability 434 Institute for Social Research 300, 302 interest-based narrative 476 intersubjectivity concept 149; and embodiment, ambiguities of 89 – 91; Husserl on 150 – 51 interwar phenomenologist 53 ‘I-Thou’ relations 280 – 82 Janicaud, Dominique 223 Jaspers, Karl 173, 192 Jonas, Hans 238; eco-phenomenology and 469 Jones, Rachel 251 Jünger, Ernst 47 just state 228 – 31 Käll, Lisa Folkmarson 297, 329 – 30; on Butler 325 – 26 Kant, Immanuel 100 Kelsen, Hans 13 Kersten, Fred 163 Kim, David 372 Klaver, Irene 479 Koestler, Arthur 70, 99 Kohák, Erazim 470 Kojève, Alexandre 68, 215 Kolbenheyer, Erwin 45 Kolnai, Aurel 12, 59 – 62 Korčula School 319 Korsch, Karl 315 Kosík, Karel 296, 319 – 21 Köstler, Arthur 99 Koyré, Alexandre 68 Kraus, Karl 58 Kristeva, Julia 285 – 87 Kruks, Sonia 366

485

Index La Breche (Castoriadis, Lefort, and Morin) 188 – 89 Labriola, Antonio 315 – 16 Lacan, Jacques 284 – 85 La Cause du Peuple (newspaper) 74 Laclau, Ernesto 144, 243, 336 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 265, 297 Lafont, Cristina 305 Lajoie, Corinne 443 Landgrebe, Ludwig 14 Landry, Christinia 363 La Nouvelle Critique (French communist journal) 114 La Pensee (French communist journal) 114 Le Bon, Gustave 13 Leder, Drew 438, 439 – 40 Lefort, Claude 4, 102, 113, 137, 229, 298, 337; attack on Sartre 142 – 43; on modern democracy and totalitarianism post-MerleauPonty 98, 104 – 6; political theory of 188 – 89; post-foundationalism and 339 – 41 left Heideggerianism 297 Leiris, Michel 137 Les Temps Modernes 67 – 8, 74, 97, 134; Camus and 142; colonialism critique by 69; overview of 137; racism critique by 69 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 126 lifeworld concept 149; Habermas and 305 – 6; as lived world 204 – 6; praxis totality and 313 – 14; technicization of 207 – 9 Lipps, Theodor 55 Liu, Petrus 254 lived body, habitual body and 364 – 68 López, Daniela Griselda 158, 159 – 60 Lorde, Audre 378, 388 Löwith, Karl 12, 42, 318 Luckmann, Thomas 161, 205 Lugones, Maria 378, 386, 393, 403 – 4, 407 Lukács, György 80, 135, 315 Lyotard, Jean-François 117 machination 47 Mahnke, Dietrich 19 Mann, Bonnie 401 Marcel, Gabriel 282 – 83 Marchart, Oliver 189, 297, 336, 344 – 45 Marcuse, Herbert 134, 152 – 53, 295, 300, 302 – 4, 321; critique of Marxism 303 Marion, Jean-Luc 217, 265 Marković, Mihailo 319 Marxism 12, 13, 20, 77 – 8, 293, 312 – 22; Italian phenomarxism 315 – 18; MerleauPonty on phenomenology and 138 – 39; phenomenology and, Thảo on 109 – 11; and phenomenology debate 137 – 44; philosophy of praxis as political

phenomenology 321 – 22; praxis-oriented, with phenomenology 312 – 15; Sartre’s defense of Communism and 140 – 41; Thảo’s overcoming phenomenology by 139 – 40; Yugoslav Praxis Group 318 – 21 Maschewski, Felix 167 May, Vivian 385 Mazzocchi, Paul 104 Medina, José 407 Memmi, Albert 372 Metzger, Arnold 12, 134 Miettinen, Timo 21 Mills, Charles 393, 398 – 400, 405 mirror stage 284 Mitchell, Jonathan Paul 352, 355 Morgan, Michael 231 Moscow Show Trials 99 Moten, Fred 127 Mouffe, Chantal 144, 243 Mounier, Emmanuel 236 Müller, Christopher John 167 Murphy, Ann V. 379 Nancy, Jean-Luc 265, 297 natality 363 National Socialism 13, 14; Heidegger affiliation with 41, 43, 49; von Hildebrand and 57 negative anthropology 154 Network for Academic Freedom 381 Ngo, Helen 367 – 68, 378 – 79; intersectionality and 384, 386 Nhat Hanh, Thich 476 Nietzsche, Friedrich 30, 31 – 2, 296 Nizan, Paul 75 normate 439 Nosthoff, Anna-Verena 167 Oksala, Johanna 26, 363, 367 Ollivier, Albert 137 ontological difference 297 ontological intervention 479 ontological reduction 217 ontological refusal 128 – 30 ontological violence concept 219 oppression concept, Beauvoir and 91 – 3 Ortega, Mariana 375, 378, 402, 404; intersectionality and 384, 386, 388 Osorio, Gabriela Macedo 167 Other 215; face of 226 – 27; in Lacan 251 – 52; and the third party 226 – 28, 273, 275; Waldenfels and 272 – 73 Other in the self concept 218 Outlaw, Lucius 378 Paci, Enzo 296, 316 – 18 Parshley, Howard M. 365

486

Index Paulhan, Jean 137 perceptual faith 403 perpetrator-victim paradigm 380 – 81 Perreau, Laurent 167 Petrović, Gaio 318 – 19 Pfeiffer, Gabrielle 215 phenomenological psychology 12, 156 phenomenological reduction 217 philosophers of dialogue 279 – 83; Buber, Martin 280 – 82; Marcel, Gabriel 282 – 83; Rosenzweig, Franz 283 philosophers of race 393 – 94 Plato/Platonism 20 – 1, 22; Heidegger on 45; Patočka and 192 – 93, 198; Waldenfels and 269 – 70 Plessner, Helmuth 13, 205 Plessy v. Ferguson 162 Plumwood, Val 476 pluralistic multiculturalism 13 plurality, migration and 429 – 31 political community, Husserl and 22 – 5 political emotions as collective 448 – 49 political paradox, Ricœur phenomenology on 236 – 38 politics of interruption 230 postcolonial studies 411, 412 Poster, Mark 135, 136 post-Marxism 144 Praxis (journal) 318 – 19 Protasi, Sara 454 psychoanalytic thought 284 – 87; introduction to 279 – 80; Kristeva, Julia 285 – 87; Lacan, Jacques 284 – 85 Puech, Henri-Charles 68

Rosenzweig, Franz 283; the Other in reflections of 216 Rovatti, Pier Aldo 167, 296 Rowe, Aimé Carillo 386 Rubin, Henry 297, 326 – 27, 356 Rytmann, Hélène 117

radical Other 220 Rancière, Jacques 144, 231, 265 Rasmussen, David 167 reciprocity 475, 476 refusal 125 – 30; affective 126 – 27; intersubjective 127 – 28; ontological 128 – 30 reification (Honneth) 307 Reinach, Adolf 12, 53 – 4, 294 relevance theory 159 – 61 responsive phenomenology 269 – 73 ressentiment; see also Scheler, Max: aspects of 32 – 3; Butler sermon on 32; meaning and structure of 31 – 3; Nietzsche’s account of 30, 31 – 2; politics and 35 – 8; war and 33 – 5 re-sublimation 37 Reynolds, Joel Michael 438, 444 rightlessness, migration and 424 – 26 Roberts, Laura 250 – 51 Rosa, Hartmut 167 Rose, Gillian 231 Rose, Jacqueline 284

Salamon, Gayle 297, 329, 355, 379, 406 Salazar, Juan García 411 Schmitt, Carl 25, 46, 52, 61, 180 Schraube, Ernst 171 – 72 Schües, Christina 363 Schuhmann, Karl 25 Scott, Dariek 127 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 78 sex/gender divide 364; Cartesian dualism and 365; culturalism and 365; naturalism and 365; poststructuralist deconstruction of 365 sexual difference 247; politics of 253 – 54 Simmel, Georg 13 Simmons, Aaron 230 Simms, Eva-Maria 369 Simpson, Audra 126 Slaby, Jan 448 social collectivities 162 – 64 social democracy, phenomenology of: Husserl on 19, 20; Reinach on 53 – 4 Socialisme et Liberté 77 Socialisme ou Barbarie (journal) 137 social/political violence, Sartre and 80 – 3 Spaier, Albert 68 Spelman, Elizabeth 386 Srubar, Ilja 159 Stalinist terror 70 standing-reserve 463 Stawarska, Beata 369 Stefanovic, Ingrid 479 – 80 Stein, Edith 12, 14, 53, 54 – 7; empathy theme of 55; Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft (community vs. society) debate 55 – 6; political philosophy of 55 – 6; religious and political turn 54 Steiner, Rudolf 20 Strong, Tracy B. 169 – 70 subjectivism of phenomenology 158 – 62; Butler and 343 – 44 sublimation 37 Sylvest, Casper 167 Szanto, Thomas 448 Taminiaux, Jacques 185 Taylor, Charles 220 techno-moral change theory 466 techno-rationality 194 – 95 Telos (journal) 318 Terkessidis, Mark 372

487

Index Tholen, Berry 243 Thunberg, Greta 450 Toadvine, Ted 469 Tönnies, Ferdinand 12 – 13, 55 Toombs, S. Kay 438, 439 – 40 totality, Levinas critique of 224 – 26 Toynbee, Arnold 193 – 94 transcendental reduction 217 transparency 439 – 41 Treanor, Brian 473 Tuck, Eve 410 Van Munster, Rens 167 Vattimo, Gianni 296, 318 Verhey, Jeffrey 33 Virilio, Paul 168, 171 Voigtländer, Else 12, 14 von Hildebrand, Dietrich 12, 14, 53, 57 – 9; Dollfuß and 58 – 9; ethical action dissertation 57 von Keyserling, Graf 20 von Uexküll, Jacob 357, 470 Vranicki, Predrag 318 Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 158 Wahl, Jean 68, 75

Walther, Gerda 12 weak thought theory 296 Weber, Max 13, 101, 156, 157, 163, 236 Weil, Éric 236 Weimar Republic 22, 35 – 6, 37, 42 Wendell, Susan 444 West, Cornel 378 West, Traci C. 386 Western Marxism 70, 135 – 36 Whitmire, John F., Jr. 243 Winters, Joseph R. 455 Wiredu, Kwasi 378 Wojtyła, Karol 57 women of color 384; see also intersectionality Wright, Richard 69 Yancy, George 367 – 68, 376, 378, 402 Yang, K. Wayne 410 Young, Iris Marion 143 – 44, 231, 360, 366, 367, 440, 442, 475 Zack, Naomi 378 Zia, Helen 385 – 86 Ziarek, Krzystof 392 Zupančič, Alenka 247, 252, 253

488