Hybrid Seminar – Wednesday 18 September, 1-2.30pm UK time. Online: via Zoom. In person: Wellcome Centre, University of Exeter, UK.
“A Critical Phenomenology of Political Conflict: The Plural Normativity of the Political World”
Dr Niclas Rautenberg (University of Hamburg)
Hybrid Seminar
Wednesday 18 September, 1-2.30pm UK time
All welcome!
Online: via Zoom
In person: Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter
Register here for Zoom link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-critical-phenomenology-of-political-conflict-tickets-979943095177?aff=oddtdtcreator
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.
Dr Niclas Rautenberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hamburg and principal investigator of the research project ‘Virtual Battlefields: Political Conflict in Digital Spaces’. The investigation’s objective is to elaborate a systematic account of the structure and experiential character of digital conflict as a challenge to collective sense- and decision-making. Previously, he was a PhD student at the University of Essex, supervised by Prof Fabian Freyenhagen and Dr Jörg Schaub. Niclas’s work lies at the intersections of phenomenology, social and political philosophy, and qualitative social research, and has been published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Human Rights Review.