Critical & Political Phenomenology in Debate

In phenomenology, two lines of thought have recently emerged, both dealing with the experience and structures of political conflicts and with social relations of domination: critical phenomenology on the one hand and political phenomenology on the other. Both claim to respond to the crises of the present and to inner-phenomenological desiderata.

Classical phenomenology, despite its turn to lived experience and embodied subjectivity, has failed to adequately address these dimensions of experience. Both political and critical phenomenology aim to compensate for this deficiency. They aim to show that phenomenology not only analyzes consciousness, subjectivity, lifeworld, and intersubjectivity, but can also illuminate the multiple experiences of marginalized subjects, historicize perceptual schemas, and thematize political experiences.

The online lecture series is intended to open a debate on critical and political phenomenology in which, on the one hand, methodological and content-related differences are to be worked out and, on the other hand, common goals are to be brought into view. In particular, the advantages and benefits of a critical-political phenomenology over constructivist and normative theories of the social and political will be discussed.

The invited speakers will each develop their concept of a critical and/or political phenomenology in a lecture. Each lecture will be accompanied by a response and then opened to public discussion: In this way, critical and political phenomenology will be “in debate.”