The rhetoric of “unprincipled” philosophy. A critical notice of articulated experiences: Towards a radical phenomenology of contemporary social movements

Abstract

In this critical notice I review the main ideas presented in Peyman Vahabzadeh's thought-provoking investigation into the genesis of new social movements, Articulated Experiences: Towards a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements. I examine two central features of Vahabzadeh's work: (i) its notion of “ultimate referentiality;” and (ii) the centrality of the role accorded to language in Vahabzadeh's overall theory. I argue that in his stipulation that language is the most fundamental mediating factor in articulation and acts of identification, Vahabzadeh implicitly characterizes language as precisely the sort of privileged essential universality that his theory seeks to avoid. The repercussions of this criticism are not only relevant to the thesis of Articulated Experiences, they are also relevant to the thesis Vahabzadeh defends in his contribution to the present volume.

Notes

H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 432, Third Part, Section “3. Language as horizon of a hermeneutic ontology,” Subsection “(c) The universal aspect of hermeneutics.”

• The solution I am here referring to is put forth by Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), cited by Vahabzadeh. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 65–6 make the following observation:

  • His 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, which describes the globalization of technology as the “spiritual decline of the earth,” conjures up pincers of East–West conflicts in which Europe is caught: “From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.” A disconcerting passage when read together with the view expressed in the earlier passages, for this time Heidegger manifestly sees adequacy of response to global technology as a sign of decadence and seems to appeal to the third term, which is neither democracy nor collectivist totalitarianism, to counter this decadence: he of course sees this third term in National Socialism, whose “greatness” and “inner truth” would lie in a relation to technology different from, for example, the one described in his lecture on Nietzsche concerning Germany's defeat of France in 1940.

See Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 20(4) (Winter 1976).

• In M. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 78, the author writes:

  • This difference has to do with the distinction between beings and being. The ontological difference says: A being is always characterized by a specific constitution of being. Such being is not itself a being. But here what it is that belongs to the being of a being remains obscure.

For a fully articulated analysis of the detachment of Being from being in Heidegger, and an analysis of its repercussions, see Jeff Mitscherling, “Prophets and Promises,” Symposium 5 (2001): 155–82.