Approach

Experience is political before it explicitly concerns the state, power or the public sphere. The order of appearance is already political: it determines whether something emerges as significant or marginal, normal or deviant, familiar or threatening.

Phenomenology provides a conceptual vocabulary—of situation, field and world, for example—with which to examine these orders. It asks how bodies are oriented in space, how voices are accorded different weight, and how possibilities for action are opened up or closed off unevenly. This makes it possible to investigate how power relations, social inequalities and discrimination operate within orders of perception, action and experience. Political experience therefore does not denote a separate domain of experience, but the way in which social orders help determine what can appear or become possible, for whom and in what way.

Political phenomenology therefore combines two directions of analysis. It starts from concrete experiences and brings to light the bodily, spatial and institutional conditions that manifest themselves in them. At the same time, it examines how social orders are appropriated, reproduced or contested in experience and action. Experience and institution are not separate: experiences are always already socially structured, while institutions persist only by operating through perceptions, practices and relations. This relation has a temporal structure that phenomenology can grasp through the concept of institution. Institution, in this phenomenological sense, refers to the opening up of a political field that acquires stability through repetition, sedimentation and institutionalisation—and for that very reason can also be transformed.

Contemporary political and critical phenomenology thus draws on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as on Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Arendt, Levinas and Waldenfels. At the same time, it revises classical phenomenology through postcolonial and feminist critique and through a wider critique of society. In methodological terms, this transformation can be described as a transition from epoché to interrogation, from reduction to exposition, and from phenomenological showing to political demonstration.

This perspective is especially important for democratic orders. Conflicts are not merely disruptions of an existing order; they can make overlooked problems and entrenched exclusions visible. Yet not every conflict is already democratic. Democracy presupposes plurality while also having to find forms in which different experiences and claims can appear publicly and remain open to contestation. Under what conditions can public contestation make dissent possible and limit power? How can decisions remain open to objections and change? And how can plural experiences and conflicts yield standards of normativity and critique?