1.4 - Towards a Critical Phenomenology

Summary

If the previous chapter tracked the trajectories of the ‘forgetting’ of labour, and the diverse ways in which the emancipatory promise was lost to the mundane violence of the practices of work, the widespread commodification of social life, and the categorical schemata that vacate political opportunity, a critical phenomenology is tasked with recovering what was forgotten. We begin with such deployments of phenomenology as counter-method, as they inform Weil’s concept of attention and Rancière’s of dissensus. The emphasis here is on the largely underplayed phenomenological moment in the work of both, the disclosure that attention achieves in Weil, that the aesthetic act brings to presence in Rancière. The meaning of these insistent efforts at making perceptible is at the heart of a critical phenomenology, critical in the sense that it proceeds against the usual path-dependencies. The difficulty is captured in the ‘as-if’ of courage in Weil, the counter-factual staging of dissensus in Rancière. Both Weil’s ‘attention’ and Rancière’s ethnographies are, I will argue, profoundly phenomenological endeavours that pit themselves against the self-evidence of what appears as given. It is their unremitting refusal to give in to the ‘distributions of sense’ currently in circulation that mark them out as political, critical phenomenological undertakings.