Where Life Itself Lives

Sylvia Wynter’s work seeks to expose Man as an arbitrary conception inherently linked to racism and too often mistaken for the human as such. She also offers a more capacious model for being human—one that is culturally specific, relational and dynamic. This constructive dimension of her work is especially evident in her novel, The Hills of Hebron, for the literary genre is consonant with her argument that communities invent genres of being human from their local histories, the specificities of landscape, religious visions, and creative practices. This essay examines the contribution of the novel to Wynter’s broader project of deconstructing the doctrine of Man.

Dinge im Kollektiv

Husserls Analyse der Wahrnehmung und Heideggers Zeittheorie sind beide in ihrem Theorieaufbau auf die Gegenständlichkeit der Gegenstände – oder auf den Gegenstandsbezug der Erfahrung und seine wesensmäßige Konstitution – fixiert. Hierin spiegelt sich, bei Heidegger explizit, Kantisches Erbe. Diese phänomenologische, transzendentalphilosophische Relevanz des Gegenstands verweist im Kern auf Intentionalität – und damit auf eine objektbezogene Selbstüberschreitungsfigur der Subjektivität. Ganz anders bestimmt Latour den Stellenwert der Dinge im Kollektiv, wenn er ihnen eine Handlungsmacht zuschreibt, die den traditionellen Gegensatz zwischen Handlungssubjekten und Objektbehandlung einklammert. Der folgende Beitrag kreist den kritischen Punkt ein, der in der Theoriebildung zur Verzweigung phänomenologischer und ANTistischer Ansätze führt. Während sich die Phänomenologie im Zuge einer begrifflichen Rekonstruktion der Erfahrung von Gegenständen konsolidiert, ist die ANT auf die Beschreibung von Handlungsstrukturen ausgerichtet, die sich aus Aktanten aller Art zusammensetzen. Abschließend stellt sich die Frage, ob nicht die kollektivistische Soziologie Latours von dem methodischen Solipsismus der Phänomenologie lernen kann, dass es eine konstruktive Dimension und Machtfülle der deskriptiven Arbeit gibt, die nicht einfach den Akteuren überhaupt, sondern vor allem der Analytikerin überlassen ist? </br></br>Husserl's analysis of perception and Heidegger's theory of time are both fixated on the objectivity of objects - or the objectrelation of experience and its essential constitution. This reflects - and in the case of Heidegger quite explicitly - Kantian heritage. This phenomenological, transcendental relevance of the object essentially refers to intentionality - and thus an object-related figure of self-transcending subjectivity. Quite differently, Latour determines the status of things in the collective, ascribing to them an agency that brackets the traditional opposition between acting subjects and passive objects. The contribution encircles precisely that critical point which leads to the separation of phenomenological and ANTistical approaches. While phenomenology grounds itself by reconstructing the experience of objects, ANT focuses on the description of the structures of action, which are composed of actants of all kinds. Finally, the question arises whether Latour's collectivist sociology can learn from phenomenology's methodological solipsism that there is a constructive dimension and plenitude of power in the work of description that is not just left to actors in general, but above all to the analyst herself?

Reaching for Meaning

In this paper I am exploring meaning and meaning constructions as forms of human agency. Drawing on notions of meaning, agency, and subjectivity by Jerome Bruner and Klaus Holzkamp, my discussion emphasizes the human potentials to act, choose, and imagine as integral to the human condition. Against the backdrop of this discussion, I am particularly interested in the meaning-making resources of language, especially, of two forms of language use. One is agentive discourse—the discourse of agency—because it brings to the fore the constructive dimension of language. The other is narrative, because it is the most complex and comprehensive construction site of human imagination. I suggest that narrative imagination plays a central role in probing and extending real and fictive scenarios of agency.