The Political Logic of Experience

Abstract

The book argues that expressivity is the key to understanding experience and phenomenology. Experience is the constant tying together of knowing, being, and doing in a way that is simultaneously transcendental and empirical, and expressivity names the process by which this tying happens, and so it functions as the logic—the ‘how’—of experience itself. This logic is inherently political, insofar as it necessarily ties together a socially constituting force and socially constituted individuals. Articulating the generative role that expressivity plays in experience therefore allows the book to argue three main claims: first, that political questions can never be entirely separated from our understanding of “human experience”; second, that phenomenology remains an essential methodological tool for understanding those ‘political’ questions; and third, that every transcendental claim concerning “human experience” is never fully separable from particular empirical circumstances. This, in turn, allows the book to offer advances in four key areas: first, it offers expressivity as an ultra-transcendental account of how phenomenality functions, building on other ultra-transcendental accounts of phenomenality such as différance (Derrida), flesh (Merleau-Ponty), and auto-affection (Henry); second, it explains the relation between transcendental phenomenology and other uses of phenomenology, such as critical phenomenology and applied phenomenology; third, it provides an understanding of the essentially political nature of experience that can undergird the work of feminism, critical race theory and queer theory; and fourth, it argues that the fight against oppression is phenomenological and not simply cultural or ‘structural.’