Hermeneutic communism as (weak) political phenomenology

Michael Marder

pp. 85-91

in: Silvia Mazzini, Owen Glyn-Williams (eds), Making communism hermeneutical, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

According to Vattimo and Zabala, phenomenology fits in with the other manifestations of classical metaphysics, bent on preserving the transcendental privilege of immutable truth. In my contribution I will argue that such placement may not do justice to phenomenology, which, in its most critical manifestations, is an ally of hermeneutic communism. As a matter of fact, phenomenology holds the potential for mediating between the various opposed camps—description and interpretation, realism and anti-realism, the strong and the weak, metaphysics and postmetaphysics—that Vattimo and Zabala keep apart. Phenomenology oversteps its metaphysical confines, inasmuch as it is interested in the problem of givenness, in all its finitude; it's crucial question is how the world appears to an embodied, emplaced, mortal and fallible subject. The philosophy of Husserl offers a non-positivist version of description, compatible with interpretation; reduces or brackets extraneous impositions on experience; operates with a pre-prepositional notion of truth; and interferes with the scientific justification of political metaphysical domination. In conclusion, phenomenology stands in a somewhat unexpected proximity to hermeneutic communism.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund