Critique of phenomenology amounts to a tiny piece of the puzzle that is Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s thought-provoking Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx.[1] According to the spot allocated to it, phenomenology fits in with the other manifestations of classical metaphysics, bent on preserving the transcendental privilege of immutable truth. In what follows, I will argue that such placement may not do justice to phenomenology, which, in its most critical manifestations, is an ally of hermeneutic communism. This particular piece of the puzzle belongs on the other side of the intellectual and historical barricades, and, more importantly, 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.
To appreciate the unique position of phenomenology, let us take one of the original terms, with which Hermeneutic Communism operates, namely, “framed democracy.”[2] An ingenious turn of phrase, “framed democracy” has a double sense. First, it means “democracy enframed,” restricted within a set of limiting parameters of parliamentary liberalism and militant capitalism wherein its procedures largely devoid of substance are allowed to unfold. Presented as the only legitimate political regime in existence today, it is a paradigm that claims for itself the universality of law and order, while viewing everything that falls outside its confines as chaotic, anarchic, and fraught with violence. Second, “framed democracy” implies the framing of those who subscribe to its logic, a situation where the oppressed are duped into believing that its system works in circuitous ways also to their advantage. It reveals a thoroughly ideological construction of the paradigm that highjacks the place of political universality. The beauty of the expression is that the two meanings are actually inseparable one from the other: the parameters of contemporary liberal democracies are set up in such as way as to frame their subjects.
Throughout their book, Vattimo and Zabala insist on the rigidity of the frame that separates not only different accounts of truth but also opposing sets of interests, histories, and classes. Clearly, they redraw these active front lines, so as to demonstrate the limitations of framed democracy that, in its most delusional moments, has pictured itself as wholly unframed, trans-historical, objective, and universally applicable. “It should not be a surprise,” they write, “that democracy and science have become indissoluble. And it is this indissolubility that situates framed democracy outside history, where its ideal of objectivity can finally be fulfilled” (HC 39). Still, even in their account, the frame acts more as a membrane; it is porous, and, thanks to this porousness, it is able to draw on what lies outside it, just as it can expel what was previously captured within its confines. If, for instance, “the weak are the discharge of capitalism” (HC 7), then there must be a way for them to be ejected outside the system of framed democracy and, whenever necessary, to be reincorporated and exploited from within this system once again. Echoing the “industrial reserve army” in Karl Marx’s Capital,[3] these discharges provide the much-needed flexibility to the political economic system during the alternating periods of growth and contraction that depend on the periodic crises of capital.
On the epistemological plane, too, the paradigmatic frame is more of a porous membrane, creating the lines of communication between the two sides it separates. As Jacques Derrida convincingly showed in The Truth in Painting, frames, in their materiality, are not one-dimensional, inasmuch as they have a width and thickness of their own, outer and inner edges, elaborate or austere parergonal elements, and so forth.[4] Following Vattimo and Zabala’s account, framed democracies thrive on the imposed descriptions of what they consider to be true and relegate flexible interpretations to the hither side of the frame. But what if, instead of scrutinizing the inside and the outside—the staple categories of metaphysics proper—we focused on the frame itself? What does it consist of? What is interjected between presumably objective descriptions and free interpretations?
I submit that this place in-between is occupied by the appearing (not the appearance) prior to its transformation into materials for either description or interpretation. Phenomenology is concerned, precisely, with the appearing in the how of its appearance, that is to say, with the modes of givenness of phenomena. It thus deals with the infrastructure common to descriptions and interpretations, which is why it could influence both John Searl and Martin Heidegger or Hans-Georg Gadamer. Phenomenology oversteps its metaphysical confines, inasmuch as it is interested in the problem of givenness, in all its finitude; its crucial question is how the world appears to an embodied, emplaced, mortal, and fallible subject. Already in the thought of Edmund Husserl, phenomenological investigations of givenness are intensely perspectival. His term for perspectivism is “givenness through adumbrations,” or being faced with a seemingly inexhaustible array of physical dimensions of the appearing object. Least of all does phenomenology impose a prefabricated mold of objectivity onto ontology. Far from it, phenomenological practice liberates our not yet formalized life-world from the projections of the scientific and natural attitude (“common sense”) that suffocate the very thing they are meant to express.
Let us take up the distinguishing features of phenomenology, which finds itself under siege in Hermeneutic Communism, one by one, paying close attention to the way that they, in fact, shore up Vattimo and Zabala’s project. Having slotted this piece of the puzzle into its proper place, we will observe how a certain critical spirit of phenomenology resonates with the spectrality of communism, on the one hand, and with the weakness of hermeneutics, on the other. It is my hope that the effects of their multiple resonances would enrich hermeneutic communism, create new alliances with its supposed adversaries, and, especially, defend it against the charges of a dualist or dichotomous world-view reminiscent of classical metaphysics.
Quite rightly, the authors accuse the self-proclaimed objectivity of metaphysical and scientific descriptions of serving as support mechanisms for the worst excesses of the political status quo: “A politics of descriptions does not impose power in order to dominate as a philosophy; rather, it is functional for the continued existence of a society of dominion, which pursues truth in the form of imposition (violence), conservation (realism), and triumph (history)” (HC 12). Although the word description is embraced by phenomenological philosophy, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the violent, realist, and triumphalist pretense of objectivity, associated with its scientific-metaphysical form. Phenomenological descriptions are the positive results of a meticulous work of reduction, which is tasked with stripping away layer after layer of unexamined presuppositions projected onto what is. In other words, they are not imposed but derived from the ever-shifting relation between the subject and the object of knowledge. Nor are they realist (Husserl has always insisted that his thought was suspended between realism and idealism), in that they are the description of givenness in its infinite manifestations, not of reality itself. And they are not triumphalist, since the work of reduction must recommence every time anew, preventing rigorous descriptions from ossifying into new metaphysical dogmas and commonsensical propositions.
We might say that the political case-in-point of phenomenological description is E. P. Thompson’s 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class. A courageous “history from below,” it is an attempt to rescue from the oblivion of the winners’ history “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott.”[5] In describing these characters’ life-worlds, Thompson sets aside the general methodological assumptions of traditional historiography and hence, like Husserl, produces descriptions that are avowedly interpretative and that educe their legitimacy from the fabric of existence, not from an alien ideality.
The role of reduction in phenomenology should not go unremarked, especially because it is allergic to the impositions of truth and to the effects of framing Vattimo and Zabala likewise resist. The goal of reduction is to unhinge the frames that surround the given in its givenness, to reject all sorts of “bonuses” (idealizations, immediate associations, preconceived images) surreptitiously superadded to the given, and to receive what is given within the limits of its givenness. In doing so, phenomenological reduction estranges what seemed to be intimately familiar and sheds light on the being-frame of the frame, its structuring determination of our cognition and perception as well as of the strata that accrete over and suffocate our cognitive-perceptual capacities.
The ideology critique, inherent in Vattimo and Zabala’s interpretation of liberalism, is analogous to the workings of reduction. Hermeneutic communism is to the frames of the liberal state what reduction is to the frames of metaphysical and natural attitudes. Both streams of theoretical practice expose the dead and deadening character of what they reduce. The natural attitude presents the world to us in such a way that the presentation blocks from view what appears in the minutiae of its appearing. Liberal democracy occludes the viability of local alternatives to its impositions, so that “the presence of this democratic frame means not only the imposition of our systems but also the exclusion of the invaded state’s cultural and political systems” (HC 57). While all framing inevitably reveals the enframed at the price of concealing something else, liberal and metaphysical violence inflicted on the given denies the most vital (existential) possibilities, relegated to the realm outside its frame.
The interplay of revealing and concealing in the movement of dis-closure will be readily recognized as the hallmark of Heidegger’s truth as aletheia. Vattimo and Zabala acknowledge their debt to the German philosopher when it comes to this notion of truth (HC 22), as well as to his idea of being-framed, Ge-Stell (HC 145). At the same time, they deem Husserl’s definition to truth one of the “most successful . . . within contemporary analytic and continental philosophy” (HC 19). Success, of course, is the effect of the winner’s history and way of thinking, to which Husserlian phenomenology is said to adhere. The authors of Hermeneutic Communism contend that Husserl advances a metaphysical definition of truth, which
depends on the difference between the mere ‘intention’ of the phenomenological Being and the matter ‘itself’—in other words, between the manner in which something appears and the manner in which it is ‘itself’ . . . [T]hat is, a proposition would be true only if it ‘refers’ to things in a way that permits them to be seen as they are in themselves (HC 20).
Unlike Kantian transcendental philosophy, Husserl’s phenomenology, however, does not postulate the existence of things-in-themselves, somehow distinct from phenomenal appearances. The methodological slogan “Back to the things themselves!” merely signals the aim of phenomenological reduction and description to re-experience the life-world without the impositions of the metaphysical and natural attitudes. Husserl was preoccupied, above all, not with truth claims, condensed in formal propositions, but with the truth of experience, the necessarily imperfect fit between the emptily intended (or the signified) object and the fulfillment of intentionality in intuition. This meant examining every discrete experience on its own terms, with its own specificities, modes of givenness, and ways of appearing. It required, moreover, going back both to the experiencing subject and to the experienced as it was experienced. After the reduction of what was transcendent vis-à-vis pure consciousness in Ideas I, no “matter ‘itself'” remained;[6] rather, it was bracketed and set aside, along with everything that fell outside this newly discovered field for phenomenological operations. The idea of a disembodied, objective, God-like point of view is, actually, the first to be submitted to the knife of reduction, which recognizes in it a groundless imposition on experience.
Looking up to Descartes, Husserl resorts to the Ur-gesture of radical philosophizing, which consists in brushing away all unexamined presuppositions and truth claims and winning a new ground for thinking. Now, this ground is not won once and for all; reduction is an infinite task that must recommence as soon as experience gets buried under the sediments of concepts, theories, assumptions, and representations that grow over it. That is why Husserl is so skeptical with regard to the scientific method and rationality, which, as Vattimo and Zabala concede, he “declared to be in crisis” (HC 13). Given his critique of the European sciences, Husserl refuses either to strengthen their stranglehold on existence or to contribute to their justification of political domination. His project of liberating the life-world from the yoke of scientific rationality is of one piece with the hermeneutic communist demand to let multiple and dispersed existences interpret themselves, revitalizing the active sense of existence as interpretation (HC 87ff.). A return to the life-world opens the same “horizon of emancipation” as hermeneutic communism (HC 93), delving beneath the death masks of facts to the facticity of existence in its infinite variations that do not fit on the Procrustean bed of the sciences.
To sum up, phenomenology 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. But exactly what is political phenomenology? And what can it contribute to the endeavors of hermeneutic communism?
A history of the political “applications” of phenomenology runs parallel to that of the political “applications” of hermeneutics: despite their critical, emancipatory, and anarchic potential, both have been used to promote conservative programs and worldviews. What I refer to under the title political phenomenology has to do with (1) the givenness of political phenomena, (2) the modes of appearance of political actors on the institutional and the informal stages, and (3) the re-activation of political energy, suffocated by the empty proceduralism of the established systems of domination. All three characteristics mentioned above are also crucial to hermeneutic communism, which advances a critique of how political possibilities are precluded, withheld, and decidedly not-given by the status quo (framed democracy); envisions, through the example of the South American Left, the appearance of previously excluded, marginalized, or “discharged” weak actors on the national, regional, and international scenes; and calls for the exercise of active interpretation, coextensive with existential dispersion, as a way to re-energize an equally dispersed, anarchic politics. Having said that, in the title of the present analysis, I qualify hermeneutic communism as a weak political phenomenology. A few words are, therefore, in order on the sense of this weakness or of this weakening.
The minimal and chronologically first meaning of weak thought denotes, according to Vattimo and Zabala, “the abandonment of pretensions to absolutes that had characterized the metaphysical traditions” (HC 96). Proceeding along the path of the reductions, Husserlian phenomenology, too, did not spare the idols of absoluteness, including reality “in itself,” scientific rationality, and God. But it did insist on describing the being of pure consciousness, which remained after the operations of reduction were complete, as absolute. Henceforth, in Husserl’s vernacular, absolute will acquire a very specific signification of absolutely irreducible. While it may be argued that, with this notion, the old chimeras of metaphysics re-enter thinking through the backdoor, there are also traces of such irreducibility in other postmetaphysical philosophies, influenced by the founder of phenomenology. For Heidegger, absolute irreducibility will have stood for the temporality of Dasein. Emmanuel Levinas considers the alterity of the other irreducible. And, in Derrida’s corpus this idea assumes the shape of the un-deconstructable. In any event, the negative version of absoluteness is consistent with the tenets of weak thought that absorbs into itself the remains of the absolute (in Zabala’s terms, “the remains of Being”[7]) and that, subsequently, produces a positive interpretation of the weakening inherent in the metaphysical tradition itself.
In Husserl’s phenomenological universe, absolute consciousness has a constituting function: it is the ground, on which experience as such and the world will be reconstructed in the aftermath of reduction. The political equivalent of this function is sovereignty, or the right to decide upon and constitute the political sphere, to give it a determinate shape. This is where we must insist on the weakening of political phenomenology (as much as of political metaphysics), in keeping with the argumentative thrust of Hermeneutic Communism. Although Vattimo and Zabala do not openly engage with the concept of sovereignty, they gesture toward its breaking-up into sovereignties (in the plural) that invalidate the assumption of a unitary and preponderant will of the sovereign. Consistent with the current theories of popular self-determination, this multiplication is possible thanks to the grounding of hermeneutic communism in existence, which cannot be gathered into a totality without losing its existential character. If the right to interpretation is coeval with the right to existence, then the active exercise of both rights by all those who have been dispossessed due to the global system of domination is tantamount to the egalitarian distribution of sovereignty that shatters its unified core. “Politics without truth” as much as “anarchic interpretation” (HC 98–99) are the corollaries to a politics without sovereignty, though not without sovereignties.
As the book’s subtitle indicates, Hermeneutic Communism is entrusted with an ambitious task of charting backwards an intellectual itinerary that leads from Heidegger to Marx, that is to say, from existence to justice. “If Marx emphasized the significance of keeping our feet anchored to the earth,” Vattimo and Zabala write, “it is Heidegger who indicated through the thought of Being how such earth is constantly moving and changing, constantly in conflict” (HC 5). Husserl’s phenomenology combines these divergent relations to the earth, much in the same way hermeneutic communism wishes to do. Phenomenology appeals to the concreteness of the earth as the ground from which our abstractions are born and to which they are bound to return if they are to retain their meaningfulness. But it also recasts the grounds of experience through reduction, by depriving us of the conceptual ground we thought secure and by rooting thinking itself in the life-world, in existence, and, ultimately, in something self-grounded, ungrounded, and groundless, i.e., Being itself. Hence, the hypothesis of my brief intervention: the road leading from Heidegger back to Marx must traverse the philosophy of Husserl, which stands in a somewhat unexpected proximity to hermeneutic communism.
Notes
1. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2011). Cited hereafter as “HC” within the text.
2. Cf. part one of Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism.
3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. 781ff.
4. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). Cf., especially, the section on the “parergon.”
5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 12.
6. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, trans. F. Kersten (Dodrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), esp. §33, “Preliminary Indication of ‘Pure’ or ‘Transcendental’ Consciousness as the Phenomenological Residuum,” pp. 63–66.
7. Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009).
