Andreea Smaranda Aldea

This chapter investigates the phenomenalization of power through a phenomenological framework, analyzing its dynamic interplay between visibility and invisibility. Building on critiques of the Western “metaphysics of presence,” I argue that power operates not only through material representation but also through the legitimizing concealment of its foundations. The visible—marked by immediacy, verifiability, and perceptibility—is co-constituted by absence, which actively shapes power’s efficacy. I introduce the concept of “coordinates of phenomenalization” to trace the relational dynamics through which power becomes effective, articulated across three interrelated dialectics: (i) representation, in which authority relies on figures that mediate abstract power; (ii) legitimacy/authenticity, where power’s validity rests on perceived origins and social recognition; and (iii) visibility/concealment, where dominance depends on a calibrated interplay of exposure and obscurity. The analysis culminates in a critique of hierarchies that privilege presence, offering tools to dismantle structures of domination by centering absence as constitutive. This approach not only reframes the ontology of power but also opens pathways for transformative resistance.

If Beauvoir has done a phenomenology of political life, it is partly by providing, in The Second Sex, theoretical elements for a phenomenology of domination. Beauvoir indeed redefines subjectivity and subjective life as implying—in themselves—relations with others that are relations of domination, working as an objectification. This reevaluation of subjective life occurs through a twofold movement specific to Beauvoir’s methodology. A first movement goes from subjectivity to objectivity, explaining how the dominated subject can find himself fixed in the objective position, lost in objectivity. A second movement returns from objectivity to subjectivity, describing how the dominated subject still lives this objective situation. In this sense, Beauvoir’s phenomenology of domination has both a theoretical interest—opening phenomenological method and concepts to social and political themes—and a political one—struggling against the way lived experiences of dominated subjects are structurally silenced by their objectification and contributing to their (re)-subjectivation.

Recent phenomenological work on race and racism makes frequent appeal to the concept of ‘racialization,’ which is meant to refer to the processes whereby one’s embodied existence qua ‘raced’ is formed and incorporated into one’s habits of comportment and body schema. However, the term is also consistently linked to processes of ‘othering’ and understood to apply only to nonwhite persons, such that one can refer to ‘racialized subjects’ and be understood as excluding white people. While there are important and compelling reasons for employing the term in this way, I will argue in this chapter that ignoring the ways in which subjects are racialized as white limits and even undermines anti-racist theorization and practice. Taking seriously the ways in which thinkers like Alia Al-Saji and Helen Ngo are quite right to point out specificities in the ways in which nonwhite racialization occurs, I will argue for the need to offer rigorous phenomenological investigation of whiteness as a particular form of racialization. Finally, I will draw on “white noise” as a metaphor for the larger social milieu that normalizes and empowers white racialization.

This chapter reads Husserl’s Crisis texts (especially his Origin of Geometry) alongside Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in order to critically assess the relationship between Husserl and Fanon. Our core claim is that the argument of the Origins allows Husserl to thematize some important aspects of the crisis of Western culture in twentieth-Century Europe, such as the “hollowing” of meaning that occurs in written language; the passivity and domination of the subject in relation to engagement with theory; and the tendency for scientific and other cultural practices to become rote. Yet Husserl’s strategy in that text makes clear how its Eurocentric orientation obscures certain other crises that should be deeply significant to a project that attempts the humanization of Western culture. We bring this out through close engagement with two closely related concepts: the geological phenomenon of “sedimentation,” which is Husserl’s metaphor for the preservation of meaning in tradition, and Fanon’s cognate concept of “petrification,” which describes the compartmentalizing and reifying strategies of colonial institutions. Through this, we demonstrate that Fanon creatively and critically takes up phenomenological resources with Husserlian roots in order to make sense of both colonial and decolonial history, reality, and futurity.

Husserl’s concepts of “homeworld” and “alienworld” appear to have much promise for a political phenomenology. However, their simple dichotomy leads one to wonder whether they are flexible enough to handle the complexities of current issues. In this chapter, I propose that the notions of “homeworld” and “alienworld” are much more versatile than they first appear, as evidenced in textual analyses and interpretations given in secondary literature, and in Husserl’s later work. I begin by discussing the basic definitions of these concepts as well as some contemporary interpretations. I then turn to selections from Husserl’s work on the Lebenswelt that address homeworld and alienworld in order to demonstrate further nuances in Husserl’s own texts. Finally, I consider the possibility of alien experiences within the “home,” asking whether Husserl’s concepts can be manipulated to address such cases.

The concept of constitution is at the heart and the task of Husserlian phenomenology. The same notion of constitution that has also appeared in the field of law from its origins. The same? We are interested in asking ourselves here about the conceptual archaeology of constitution, and more precisely about the possibility of establishing a problematic link common to the double tradition that seems to make up this concept: on the one hand, the tradition of legal thought; on the other, that of the phenomenological philosophy. Our hypothesis in this regard is staged in four parts: first of all, we will make explicit the meaning of constitution within Husserlian phenomenology so as to analyze, on that basis, the semantic shift that Merleau-Ponty proposes from the gnoseological to the legal register of constitution. Then, we will seek to establish the legitimacy of this procedure. Finally, we will seek to determine the relevance, not only of a post-Husserlian, but also of a post-Merleau-Pontian phenomenological perspective on institution and its possibilities.

Often, the term ‘normal’ is used to express what is socially acceptable within a given cultural or social context. While an established social normality presents itself as a timeless and self-evident truth, it grows out of a contingent and fragile state, where norms have not yet been established. This dynamic state is a precondition of established social norms, so this paper argues, and can be phenomenologically described as intersubjective normality. Lived intersubjective normality is understood as an interactive and ongoing process of making and (un-)making of normality, which is characterized by an experienced friction between different ‘normalities.’In a first step, the paper describes the genetic dimension of lived normality, that is, how something becomes normal on an individual level. In a second step, the paper analyses how normality is made and unmade intersubjectively. It thereby distinguishes between a social and an intersubjective normality. Whereas social normality situates and shapes every individual experience, intersubjective normality refers to the actual encounter between subjects. Such a space between is a source of normative friction, but also the place where one can stop clinging to old fictions, and begin to perceive the world and others anew, do things differently, and tell better stories.

Historian Patrick Wolfe argues that colonial invasion “is a structure, not an event.” The violence of colonialism is not confined to an isolated moment with a definite beginning and end; it is an ongoing process that organizes the political, economic, social, and interpersonal life of both settlers and Indigenous peoples. This chapter reflects critically on the way colonial structures are lived and experienced—or ignored and disavowed—at the level of the settler body schema. Are there specific forms of perception, cognition, and action that colonialism engenders and reproduces in those who benefit from colonial power? And if so, how do we disrupt and transform these structures, such that they no longer appear as simple pathways to objective knowledge but as contingent schemas that have sedimented over time and remain open to revision, perhaps even to abolition? I engage with these questions through a reading of Susanna Moodie’s 1852 colonial narrative, Roughing it in the Bush, and Margaret Atwood’s 1970 poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 course notes, The Sensible World and the World of Expression.

In Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism, Husserl’s concept of primal institution [Urstiftung] is used to distinguish between three concepts of history: contingent history (which is not a subject for phenomenological investigation), transcendental history (which refers to an institution, such as Galilean science, that structures experience during its persistence), and the event whereby transcendental history incurs into contingent history. In the event, a transcendental, philosophical form affects empirical history such that subsequent events refer back to the original event and forward to its completion [Endstiftung]. This threefold structure applies to the primal institution of philosophically justified political principles in historical life. I will argue that the incursion of philosophy into political life requires a rhetorical structure of a double negative that expresses the paradox of primal institution. Through an analysis of the famous Socratic statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and Kant’s definition that “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” the paradoxical double negative in both statements is shown to be a necessary feature of their primal institution. In conclusion, the necessary reference of philosophy to politics, alongside the distinction between them, is clarified.

Starting from the hypothesis that all human forms of life have a political dimension—be it clearly expressed or hidden, conscious or unconscious—this volume examines the ways in which political life can be analyzed with the help of phenomenological methodologies. How can we approach political life phenomenologically? What can phenomenology offer to a political investigation that has its already established fields of expertise, its history of ideas, and its own methods? Taking up the challenge, we have gathered a variety of phenomenological perspectives on political dimensions of experience that are otherwise difficult to examine with clarity—or even notice—as they appear in the field of our social practices. Phenomenology, among other approaches, has indeed the task to make visible aspects of human experience that tend to remain hidden, and to clarify experiential stakes that appear first in a distorted fashion. In a social world where ideology has taken over rational discourse and communication, dividing it in segments and isolating everyone from everyone else (Debord 2021), this task can be put to work to reveal the political dimensions of our shared experience that are hidden and distorted by the ideological apparatuses of social reproduction (see Althusser 2014).

Every “We” is controversial. It calls for a collective to do something together, which at the same time claims to be the subject of speech. Psychoanalysis has taught us that it’s hardly possible to say “I” without a interruption, because something (the “id”, the “superego”, “desire”) always speaks with or in the I, over which we have no control. It’s hard to imagine it being simpler with a “We”.In philosophical terms, the fragility of the we presents itself, on closer inspection, as a conflictual relationship. The contribution tries to develop this fragility in terms of three differences, which will be called the recognitive difference, the linguistic difference and the situational difference. These interruptions must show that there can be no “We”, at least not “as such”. A “We” is impossible to affirm as such. Yet, as we see in our political present, political situations demand what Judith Butler has called “performative assemblies”, forms of political communities that articulate “us” as a political force not only in imaginary ways, but also in ways that shape reality. A phenomenology of plural singular positioning could be the strategic option for the political that is possible and necessary in an age of the fragility of “We”.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Husserl developed a method of intentional-historical reflection (Besinnung) meant to guide his transcendental eidetic project. This method of critique, which falls within the purview of Husserl’s framework of transcendental clarification (Klärung), is a response to what he saw as the crisis of science, philosophy, and, ultimately, humanity. This chapter offers a deep dive into three core aspects of Husserl’s method of Besinnung: restoration (Restitution), reactivation (Reaktivierung), and reorientation (Umwendung). Whereas restoration focuses on the pre-givenness of experiential evidence, reactivation targets the sedimented layers of this evidence. My main contentions in this chapter are threefold. (I) Restoration and reactivation condition, in a performative manner, the possibility of a radical reorientation toward the historicity of this evidence. (II) This sustained reorientation qualifies both the attitudinal shift of the phenomenological reductions and our grasp of transcendental necessity. (III) This transcendental-historical reorientation, in turn, has self-referential implications: critique is eo ipso radical self-critique—a self-critique (Selbstbesinnung) that necessarily entails the (re)evaluation of methodological commitments and theoretical accomplishments (Leistungen) alike. In short, the performativity we see at work at the level of domain-specific analyses also unfolds at the higher-order, meta-phenomenological level. The chapter closes with reflections on the implications of this self-referentiality for understanding transcendental phenomenology as a qualitatively distinctive kind of radical critique.

In this paper, I examine the way in which temporal reconfigurations of experience open new arenas of subjectivation and question our established positions from the standpoint of a process of sense-formation, whose dynamic undergirds the whole field of experience. By investigating these transformations, I am interested in thinking about the way in which contingent turns, discoveries, and events participate in the phenomenological foundation of subjective life, shaping its system of reality and determining its freedom. Investigating the problem of the ego in Husserl’s phenomenology, I examine its self-objectification and its self-variation, insisting on the formation of its material historicity in relationship to a reification inscribed in the modes of production and reproduction of our society.

In an unpublished book on the thought of Rousseau, Marc Richir begins a reflection on the question of pity. To do so, he draws on the readings of Jacques Derrida, which he intends to radicalize. In this paper, I would like to return to the phenomenological status of reflection within pity, to highlight a kind of reflexivity that precedes reflection. I will argue in favor that this reflexivity makes it possible to think of a “double-movement of phenomenalization” which, in an an-archic and a-teleological way, affects the question of the social and the political. Finally, I will argue that this double-movement imposes a double displacement in regard to the question of intersubjectivity, but also and above all with regarding the social division.

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.

The paper attempts a phenomenological reconstruction of Villoro’s theory of values that underlines his approach to the problem of justice. In contrast to formalist approaches based on the theory of rational choice or the reconstruction of normative rationality departing from the principles of discourse Ethics, Villoro suggests an alternative that takes as its point of departure the historical experiences of injustices as the axis that allows us to glimpse an elucidation of the notion of justice via negativa. Villoro’s approach is not far from other philosophical perspectives that start from experiences and contexts of injustice such as those of Axel Honneth or Nancy Fraser, however Villoro’s inspiration is Husserl’s theory of value, which opens the way to a reconsideration of Husserl’s ethics as a complement to Villoro’s disruptive Ethics.

This paper is about the relationship between intergenerational and subjective dimensions of settler colonial power. I mobilize both generative phenomenology and settler studies to analyze how settler affects toward land have maintained logics of dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people in Canada and the U.S. in past decades. I do so through Eva Mackey’s ethnographic study of settler feelings of surprise and anxiety in the context of 1990s land disputes in Southern Ontario and Upstate New York. Through a critical uptake of the phenomenological distinction between homeworld and alienworld, I propose the notion of settler homeworlds, where senses of home are generated not in co-relation to the “alien,” but through the intent to replace entire peoples on foreign land and erase that ongoing history of elimination. My approach challenges the absence of the land in the general structure of lifeworlds and offers an account of the term “settler subjectivity.”

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.

This paper considers two claims Merleau-Ponty makes about about institution very early on in his course: that it is a “symbolic matrix”; and that it is “not the opposite of revolution.” The first claim is psychoanalytically oriented. It suggests that subjectivity is internally structured by what resists it (Merleau-Ponty makes this claim in the context of cathexis and animal instincts) and that this resistance is nonetheless operant. The second claim is historical and political. The past internally structures the present and is operant within it, but this past is not something to which we can return—it is not an original moment—so much as it continually opens the present to its otherwise latent meanings. I want to show the inherent connection between these personal and public institutions in Merleau-Ponty by stressing the logic of power at play in both, or what Merleau-Ponty calls the “problem of power.” That is the resistant element to both the levels the particular and the general, which Merleau-Ponty, I think, highlights in his unique notion of institution. The last section of this paper contrasts a resulting notion of violence in institution to the one that Fanon outlines.

Starting from the hypothesis that all human forms of life have a political dimension – be it clearly expressed or hidden, conscious or unconscious – this volume examines the ways in which political life can be fruitfully analyzed with the help of phenomenological methodologies. Examining issues of power dynamics as they relate to pervasive epistemic and axiological commitments as well as deeply seated socio-cultural and institutional practices, this text opens and develops, through a radical critical lens and a commitment to the emancipatory potential of theoretical work, innovative paths for phenomenological investigations of the complex political aspects of our shared lived experiences. These investigations, both focused on the content matter at hand and on their own methodology, draw on phenomenological resources as well as resources from other philosophical traditions and fields, such as critical theory, feminist philosophy, and queer theory. While various theories in political philosophy nurture an open suspicion about subject-oriented philosophical approaches (c.f., Adorno, Althusser, for example), this volume questions the status of the subject of political experience in order to explore multiple forms of political subjectivation. These guiding questions allow an investigation into a new field of research where phenomenological methodologies can help negotiate the political challenges of our time. This book appeals to students and researchers working in phenomenology and related disciplines.

The paper contends that abstraction lies at the core of the philosophical and methodological rupture that occurred between Husserl and his mentor Franz Brentano. To accomplish this, it explores the notion of abstraction at work in these two thinkers’ methodological discussions through their respective claims regarding the structure of consciousness, and shows that how Husserl and Brentano analyze the structure of consciousness conditions and strictly delineates the nature and reach of their methods of inquiry. The paper pays close attention to intentionality, founding (Fundierung), and qualitative modification (qualitativeModifikation) understood as principles of consciousness. While intentionality has been the topic of numerous discussions surrounding these two thinkers’ work, founding and qualitative modification have slipped under the radar despite the fact that they hold—as I intend to show—the key to shedding new light on their respective methods of inquiry. More specifically, the paper explicates the ways in which Brentano’s notion of founding (understood as a relationship between whole acts) and his failure to identify radical-qualitative modification as a principle of consciousness preclude him from offering a successful model for philosophical universalizing thought. It is my hope to show that Husserl’s rethinking of founding as a relationship between certain structural moments of acts along with his novel notion of qualitative modification ground his attempt to carve a new method of philosophical inquiry—albeit jejune and ambiguous at the time of the Investigations, yet nevertheless able to successfully negotiate the problems faced by his predecessor.

This paper seeks to elucidate the nature and import of the imagination as Spinoza discusses it in his Ethics. This is an attempt to go beyond the apparently predominant negative tone that seems to permeate Spinoza’s discussion of the imagination as passivity and as epistemic stage that needs to be overcome. As such the focused goal of this present inquiry is to unravel the ways in which the imagination and passivity play a positive role in Spinoza’s epistemology and ethics. This other angle of approaching the topics of imagination and passivity, which have not taken center stage in mainstream Spinoza scholarship, is primarily made possible through Spinoza’s conception of the human condition as potentia agendi et patiendi. Beyond this, however, the paper also aims at emphasizing facets of Spinoza’s rationalism that are all too often overlooked—these include his interest in and positive evaluation of the body, senses, imagination, and the emotions.

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- and lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination.

This dissertation explores and argues for the import of the imagination (Phantasie) in Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method of inquiry. It contends that Husserl's extensive analyses of the imagination influenced how he came to conceive the phenomenological method throughout the main stages of his philosophical career. The work clarifies Husserl's complex method of investigation by considering the role of the imagination in his main methodological apparatuses: the phenomenological, eidetic, and transcendental reductions, and eidetic variation - all of which remained ambiguous despite his extensive programmatic discussions. The work illuminates and clarifies aspects of the Husserlian phenomenological method never before explored. In order to clarify Husserl's eidetic method of inquiry, I propose a new way of thinking about the imagination - as direct intuitive presentation (eigentliche anschauliche Vorstellung) and as horizonal-nexic level of consciousness exhibiting the neutrality, freedom, and possibility as its essential features. Following Husserl's studies of the imagination, I propose a three-level model of consciousness (realizing, imagining, and eidetic) and explore the dynamic flexibility of each level (as horizon within which acts such as judgments or memories can unfold). This model of consciousness allows for a rethinking of the sources and conditions for the possibility of eidetic phenomenological inquiry - topics Husserl was mostly silent about. Through a rethinking of the model of consciousness, I propose a tight and substantial relationship between the natural (everyday) and artificial (methodological, theoretical) attitudes. I argue that the structure and systems of possibilities pertaining to the artificial attitude - i.e., our actual as well as possible methodological tools - are structurally and well as informationally bound to the structure and system of possibilities pertaining to the natural attitude. In order to explore the nature of the relationship between these two attitudes I argue that we must take a closer look at the structure and abilities of imagining consciousness - the sole nexic-horizonal level that can function both naturally and artificially. This insight regarding the nature of consciousness clarifies Husserl's transcendental idealism in its intimate connection to the everyday. Understanding Husserl's philosophical stance is thus purged of all possibility of mistakenly labeling it as entailing immanent detachment, solipsism, or Platonic idealism.