There is a tension within radical political philosophy between the immanence of its social critique and the transformative nature of its goals. This chapter aims to resolve this tension by working out a non-Promethean vision of self-emancipatory historical agency. Set within an enactivist framework of habitual embodied agency and intercorporeal habitus, the key problem is identified as the hegemony of a mythic reification of nature that occludes any latent transformative possibilities within lived embodiment. This calls for a dereification of nature through a counterhegemonic act of mythopoesis. It is argued that such mythopoesis is a basic methodological feature of critical phenomenology understood as a generative project, and this in a way that aligns with Hans Blumenberg’s account of “work on myth.” By way of conclusion, the chapter outlines the content of this mythopoetic dereification in terms of the Adornian idea of “nature-history” and describes the potential significance of this non-Promethean vision for the project of doing a critical phenomenology of political life.

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Critical Phenomenology, Embodied Historical Agency, and the Mythopoetic Dereification of Nature

  • Bryan Smyth

摘要

There is a tension within radical political philosophy between the immanence of its social critique and the transformative nature of its goals. This chapter aims to resolve this tension by working out a non-Promethean vision of self-emancipatory historical agency. Set within an enactivist framework of habitual embodied agency and intercorporeal habitus, the key problem is identified as the hegemony of a mythic reification of nature that occludes any latent transformative possibilities within lived embodiment. This calls for a dereification of nature through a counterhegemonic act of mythopoesis. It is argued that such mythopoesis is a basic methodological feature of critical phenomenology understood as a generative project, and this in a way that aligns with Hans Blumenberg’s account of “work on myth.” By way of conclusion, the chapter outlines the content of this mythopoetic dereification in terms of the Adornian idea of “nature-history” and describes the potential significance of this non-Promethean vision for the project of doing a critical phenomenology of political life.