The Case for a Phenomenological Politics
摘要
The paper argues for a “phenomenological politics.” In doing so, it offers two main conclusions: first, that experience is inherently political; and second, that politics would benefit from phenomenological insights. To support these claims, the paper begins by explaining expression and its central role in phenomenology. It then defines “politics” expressively, to make clear how politics is being employed in the context of phenomenological politics. It then draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, Husserl’s notion of spirit, and the notion of Stiftung drawn from both to show that experience is inherently “political” in this sense. The paper concludes by showing how this constitutes an important development of phenomenology and how political action must account for subjective constitution if it wants to be genuinely radical. Throughout its argument, the paper will show some continuities between critical and “classical” phenomenology, though this will not be a main focus of this chapter. The purpose of this paper is to argue for the development of a “phenomenological politics” that can do for contemporary phenomenology what “phenomenological psychology” did in phenomenology’s early days: show both how phenomenology can reveal some important presuppositions in a cognate discipline and how seeing a discipline as a cognate of phenomenology can alter our understanding of the role and scope of phenomenology itself. Such a phenomenological politics arises as a necessity for phenomenological inquiry because experience itself—the subject matter of phenomenology—is inherently political. In articulating this, phenomenological politics helps us understand phenomenology more politically and politics more phenomenologically.