Hosted by the University of Exeter’s Wellcome Centre for Cultures & Environments of Health
Though political conflict is an inevitable feature of human life—and one that seems ever-more on our minds in today’s democratic societies—it has so far garnered little attention in political philosophy as a phenomenon in its own right. In this talk, Dr Niclas Rautenberg will introduce some themes from HIS book A Critical Phenomenology of Political Conflict, under contract with the Routledge Research in Phenomenology Series. This work combines the tools and insights of existential phenomenology with those from critical theory (broadly construed) and qualitative social research in order to make sense of the ways that we experience political conflict as embodied agents. Underlining the corporeal dimension of political conflict, this monograph sends the reader on a trajectory from the irreducibly plural normativity of the political world to political conflict’s spatial and bodily origins. Based on interview data and a fruitful dialogue between ‘classical’ phenomenologists, feminism, and critical philosophy of race, it shows that political conflict often ends up irresolvable because of the way that power asymmetrically situates us vis-à-vis one another. Instead of subsuming unique perspectives under the imperative of abstract political principles, the goal must be to explore new ways of communal learning, based on a political flesh that we are always already part of.