Crisis – of Phenomenology

This article locates an irreducible point of crisis in phenomenology’s attempt to think historically and critically. Using the notion of crisis as my guiding thread, I show how Husserlian phenomenology cannot think history, or historically, without renouncing its fundamental principles. I focus on Merleau-Ponty’s diagnosis of a double crisis of western rationality – the collapse of its “civilizing” mission at a time of decolonial struggles and the collapse of our relation to Nature through science and technology – in his later writings, and show how they point to a moment of crisis within phenomenology, one that Fanon, Patočka, and Derrida, each in their own way, emphasize and invite us to draw to their logical conclusion: every attempt to overcome such crises by returning to the firm, common foundation of the lifeworld, or “Nature-for-us,” reveals another layer of historical sedimentation. Not phenomenology, or “transcendental geology,” but archaeology and genealogy enable us to reach the standpoint of historical critique

Continental philosophy · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Philosophy of mind · Philosophy of science · Rationality · Relation (database) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Literature and Cultural Memory · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy