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ABSTRACT
Building on a phenomenological analysis of the Tunisian Revolution, this article puts forward the concept of critical experience as a type of experience in which the very experiential structures prove subversive of otherwise established orders (e.g. political, ethical, technological, epistemological etc.). In order to trace the anarchic, but generative impulses of such critical experience, the article develops a variation of the phenomenological reduction called an anarcheological reduction. In the anarcheological reduction, registers of critical experience are accessed in which the aforementioned anarchic impulses elicit a constitutive quasi-transcendental structuring of fields of possible experience. In order to describe the always singular, contingent trajectories along which such quasi-transcendental structuring takes place, the term generative vector is introduced. The article concludes by specifying how the quasi-transcendental registers accessed in the anarcheological reduction are different from other quasi-transcendental registers and accordingly suggesting this type of reduction as a valuable methodological supplement in critical phenomenology.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Maria Robaszkiewicz and Marieke Borren for their great work in putting this collection together and the participants at the People on Streets conference at Paderborn University for their inspiring comments and questions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The spelling of Bouazizi’s given name varies in the sources I cite. In all quotations, I have retained the spelling as it appears in the original source material.
2 “The Tunisian Revolution.” Al Jazeera, 17 December 2015. 15 Dec 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2015/12/17/tunisian-revolution-11.
3 In several recent articles, I have pursued the notions of the anarchic and anarcheology in diverse settings ranging from life with dementia to the anthropocene. See Dyring, “The Futures of ‘Us’,” and Dyring and Grøn, “Ellen and the Little One.”
4 See Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King, 103–13.
5 Guenther, “Six Senses,” 7.
6 Guenther, “Six Senses,” 8.
7 Oksala 5; see also Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 232.
8 Salamon “Gender Essentialism.”
9 Heinämaa 116
10 See Kern; cf. also Luft.
11 For a thorough account, see Zahavi 53ff.
12 Husserl, Crisis, 155.
13 Husserl, Crisis, 172.
14 Husserl, Crisis, 151.
15 See Husserl, Ideas I, 59; Crisis, 156–7.
16 Clancy-Smith 17.
17 Ibid.
18 Aleya-Sghaier 19.
19 Mabrouk 629. For more on this “culture of suicide”, see Clancy-Smith 16.
20 Abouzeid, R. “Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire.” Time Magazine, 21 January 2011. 29 January 2023. https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044723,00.html.
21 Abouzeid, R. “The Martyr’s Mother: An Interview with Mannoubia Bouazizi.” Time Magazine, 14 December 2011. 15 December 2022. https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102138_2102239-1,00.html.
22 Khedhir 42.
23 Ibid.
24 See Aleya-Sghaier 20
25 Abouzeid, R. “Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire”.
26 Maalmi 46. Another student writes the following about the fight for dignity: “[I]t was not easy for me, as a woman, to be openly active in the dissent movements because of restrictive (and, I believe, outdated) customs and traditions. […] How could patriotism be reserved for men alone?” Yazidi, 26.
27 International Crisis Group 3n12.
28 Lim argues that one of the reason the revolution succeeded, was that a “master narrative that culturally and politically resonated with the entire population” was constructed. See Lim 921.
29 Husserl, Crisis, 172.
30 Ibid.
31 See Steinbock.
32 See Guenther’s discussion of the constitutive priority between subjectivity and Intersubjectivity across Husserl’s work. Solitary Confinement, 25ff.
33 Husserl, Crisis, 174.
34 Husserl, Crisis, 173, emphasis added.
35 In a not dissimilar way, Cheryl Mattingly conceives of the perplexing particular of ethnographic experience as “an encounter that not only surprises, in the sense of striking unexpectedly, but also eludes explanation. Such a particular (it could be a person, a scene, an event, an object) emerges with an irreducible singularity. It has a stubborn concreteness that cannot easily be erased by subsuming it under general concepts. And yet it is entangled with concepts.” Mattingly 427.
36 Romano 43, translation modified. What Romano here calls possibilization, is what I refer to with the term potentiation.
37 Romano 43.
38 Jason Throop utilizes this interruptive force of critical experience methodologically, when he writes of the ethnographic epoché as “a form of phenomenological modification that is intersubjectively and passively generated in the subjectivity of an anthropologist who must recurrently and actively face frustrations arising from the limits of his or her abilities to understand.” Throop 85.
39 Lim 922.
40 See Romano 54.
41 Many critical phenomenologists similarly highlight the generativity and critical force of the an-archic and similar phenomena such as interruptions or disruptions: e.g. Guenther, The Gift of the Other; Solitary Confinement; O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude; Salamon, the Life and Death of Latisha King; Zigon, Disappointment.
42 Romano 43.
43 Romano 54.
44 Waldenfels, Antwortregister, 195, Phenomenology of the Alien, 32.
45 Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 31, translation modified.
46 Ibid, 31, translation modified.
47 For a not dissimilar phenomenological usage of the term "vector", see Leder 151, cf. also Lauchlin and Throop.
48 Mabrouk 629.
49 Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 37.
50 Cf. Arendt, 199ff. In an earlier essay on the Tunisian Revolution, I have developed this Arendtian motif of the space of appearances at length, see Dyring, “A Spectacle of Disappearance.”
51 Foucault 138–9.
52 Ibid.
53 The liminal figure of Bouazizi would be an extreme case of such singularization.
54 Fahim, K. “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia.” The New York Times, 21 January 2011. 15 December 2022. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/africa/22sidi.html?pagewanted=all.
55 Mabrouk 630.
56 Elsewhere I have written about this in terms of Befindlichkeit. See Dyring, “A Spectacle of Disappearance.”
57 Ibid, emphasis added.
58 Mabrouk 631.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Yazidi 27.
62 Ibid. 26.
63 Ibid. 27.
64 Saidani 47.
65 Guessoumi 24.
66 Ibid. 24.
67 Hermassi 38.
68 Hermassi 39.
69 Mabrouk, 632.
70 Zigon, “What is a situation?”
71 Guessoumi 21.
72 Fahim, K. “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia”.
73 Waldenfels, The Question of the Other, 7.
74 See Guenther“Six Senses,” 10ff.
75 Ibid. 6n3.