The meaning of Capitalocene / necropolitics / necroeconomy — explained

Capitalocene: naming the crisis by its engine

The term Anthropocene suggests that “humanity” as a whole is responsible for planetary destruction. Capitalocene, however, shifts the blame from humanity in general to the specific system of capitalism — the global organization of production, consumption, and exploitation that has driven ecological collapse. The political ecologist Jason W. Moore and theorist Donna Haraway use the term to describe how capitalism operates as a “world-ecology”: a system that thrives on extracting “cheap nature” — cheap labor, cheap energy, cheap raw materials — while externalizing the social and environmental costs.

In this view, the crisis is not geological but systemic. Capitalism doesn’t just use nature; it organizes the entire relationship between human and nonhuman life through profit, competition, and endless growth. Some thinkers even date the Capitalocene back to the early modern period — to colonization, plantation agriculture, and the slave trade — where the global metabolism of capital first took shape.

Necropolitics: the power to decide who must die

The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe coined necropolitics to describe a darker extension of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. While biopower governs life — promoting health, reproduction, and productivity — necropolitics governs death. It’s the political capacity to decide who may live and who must die.

Necropolitics highlights how modern power often manifests not through explicit killing but through exposure — leaving certain populations to die slowly, by poverty, environmental destruction, or neglect. These “death-worlds” are spaces where life is reduced to bare survival: refugee camps, occupied territories, prisons, or toxic neighborhoods. In modern democracies, too, Mbembe argues that racial capitalism and militarized borders continue to determine which lives are protected and which are disposable.

Necroeconomy / Necroeconomics: when death becomes profitable

The term necroeconomy has two distinct uses.

1. In economics, Levan Papava used necroeconomics to describe “dead sectors” — unproductive industries sustained by subsidies and inertia in post-Soviet economies. These are parts of the economy that should have died but continue to exist artificially.

2. In critical theory, however, the term takes on a much grimmer meaning. Drawing on Mbembe’s necropolitics, scholars use necroeconomy or necrocapitalism to describe profit systems built upon disposability — industries that depend on suffering, precarity, or slow death. Examples include extractive mining zones that poison local communities, privatized detention centers, or economies of war and surveillance.

The Mexican theorist Sayak Valencia calls this “gore capitalism” — an economy in which extreme violence itself becomes a market logic. In such contexts, death is not an accident of capitalism but one of its operating costs, even a source of value.

How the three ideas connect

• Scale: Capitalocene diagnoses the macro-system — capitalism as the planetary driver of ecological and social breakdown. Necropolitics describes how that system distributes death and vulnerability. Necroeconomy analyzes how these logics become profitable and institutionalized.

• Agency: Together they reveal how power and profit operate not simply through production, but through abandonment — through deciding which lives can be wasted for the system’s continuation.

• Ethics: The trio of ideas forces us to ask moral and political questions beyond individual responsibility: how do we design economies that refuse to treat death as collateral, and how do we create governance structures that make life, not profit, the central measure of value?

See also:

Dead Labor, Dead Bodies, Dead Earth: The Triple Crisis of the Capitalocene

The meaning of Technosphere, Technogenesis and Technicity - explained

What Is Cultural Discourse Analysis?

In an age of constant communication—tweets, texts, captions, voice notes—it's easy to mistake language for mere exchange. But what if the way we talk isn’t just shaped by culture, but actively shaping it? This is the premise of Cultural Discourse Analysis, a method that explores how communication practices perform cultural meanings.

While discourse analysis broadly examines how language constructs social reality, Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) goes further: it treats language as a window into the underlying assumptions, values, and norms of a culture. Developed by Donal Carbaugh, CuDA offers a structured approach to uncovering how people make sense of their world through patterns of communication.

Theory Snapshot: Beyond Words

Cultural Discourse Analysis is built on a deceptively simple idea: ways of speaking are ways of being. Every culture has preferred modes of expression, and these aren’t just stylistic—they carry implicit notions of what it means to be a good person, to speak well, to belong.

CuDA identifies key themes in communicative practices, such as:

• Personhood: Who counts as a legitimate speaker?

• Emotion: How is feeling expressed or concealed?

• Time and Space: How are past, present, and future invoked?

• Power: Who gets to define what is appropriate or true?

Unlike broader discourse analysis that often zeroes in on macro-discourses (e.g., neoliberalism, colonialism), CuDA is attuned to the everyday: how people greet each other, tell stories, argue, or stay silent. These small acts reveal big patterns.

Case in Point: Silence and Voice

Take silence. In Western cultures, silence is often awkward or suspect—a sign of discomfort or lack of confidence. But in many Indigenous and East Asian traditions, silence can signify wisdom, respect, or reflection. CuDA helps us see that such differences are not trivial; they reveal contrasting models of personhood and social harmony.

Or consider “authenticity.” In American cultural discourse, being “real” is highly valued—often expressed through emotional transparency or personal storytelling. But in other cultures, authenticity may lie in restraint, formality, or performing one’s social role. Again, communication styles point to deeper cultural ideals.

Why It Matters

Cultural Discourse Analysis gives us tools to listen more carefully—not just to what is said, but to the cultural logics behind how it's said. In a globalized world, misunderstandings often arise not from language barriers, but from clashes between communication norms.

For scholars, CuDA offers a grounded methodology for analyzing culture-in-action. For everyone else, it cultivates intercultural awareness, empathy, and the ability to recognize that no way of speaking is universal. It invites us to reflect on our own discursive habits—what they assume, exclude, or privilege.

See also: Discourse in Cultural Studies: Definition, Meaning & Significance

Glossary of Walter Benjamin’s Key Concepts and Terms

Allegory –

A central concept in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Unlike the symbol, which suggests unity between image and meaning, allegory expresses fragmentation, decay, and the ruins of meaning. For Benjamin, allegory reveals the historical truth of loss — the world as a ruin open to interpretation, not redemption.

Angel of History (Engel der Geschichte) –

The image in “On the Concept of History” inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. The angel looks upon the wreckage of history blown forward by the storm of progress. Benjamin’s most enduring symbol of the tension between catastrophe and redemption.

Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk) –

Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus — a montage of quotations, notes, and reflections on nineteenth-century Parisian arcades. It is both an archaeological and a philosophical project: the material “dreamworld” of capitalism seen as a constellation of social, aesthetic, and political forms.

Aura –

The unique presence or authenticity of an artwork, bound to its ritual and tradition. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility (1936), Benjamin argues that modern technologies (especially film and photography) destroy the aura — democratizing art but also risking its politicization.

Baroque –

For Benjamin, the seventeenth-century Baroque world epitomizes Trauerspiel (mourning play): an allegorical, fragmented worldview obsessed with death, ruins, and authority. The Baroque expresses the tragic historical consciousness preceding modernity.

Commodity Fetishism / Phantasmagoria –

Adopted from Marx, these terms describe how capitalist society turns social relations into fetishized things. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin analyzes commodities (fashion, architecture, advertising) as dream-images that both conceal and reveal history.

Constellation –

A key methodological metaphor. Truth does not emerge from linear argument but from the constellation — the configuration of fragments, images, or ideas that illuminate one another across time. History itself appears as constellations between past and present.

Critique (Kritik) –

For Benjamin, critique is not judgment but revelation. Drawing from German Romanticism, he conceives it as the uncovering of the truth content within a work, distinct from its material content (Form- and Sachgehalt). True critique participates in the work’s own striving for truth.

Dialectical Image –

A flash-like moment where a fragment of the past becomes legible in the present. Central to The Arcades Project and Theses on History, it embodies Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit (now-time): a revolutionary recognition of historical truth in an instant of awakening.

Experience (Erfahrung) and Lived Experience (Erlebnis) –

Benjamin distinguishes Erfahrung (deep, cumulative experience, shared through narrative) from Erlebnis (isolated, modern, subjective impressions). Modernity, he argues, replaces Erfahrung with fragmented Erlebnisse, producing the alienation explored in “The Storyteller.”

Flâneur –

The detached observer of urban life in nineteenth-century Paris, immortalized in his studies of Baudelaire. The flâneur strolls through the crowd, reading the city as a text — an emblem of modern consciousness and the first theorist of everyday life.

Historicism / Historical Materialism –

In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin opposes historicism (which views history as progress) to historical materialism (which redeems the silenced, defeated past). The task of the materialist historian is to “brush history against the grain.”

Image (Bild) –

Not a picture but a configuration of meaning — the meeting point between past and present, idea and matter. The dialectical image is Benjamin’s answer to how thought can capture history without reducing it to narrative.

Language as Such / Pure Language –

From the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” All beings “speak” by communicating their essence; language is the medium of creation. Pure language is the divine totality toward which translation and expression strive.

Loss and Redemption –

Benjamin’s entire thought oscillates between loss (the fragmentation of meaning in modernity) and redemption (the sudden possibility of recovering meaning through art, memory, or revolutionary insight). Redemption is secular, historical, and momentary — not theological salvation.

Messianic Time (Jetztzeit, “now-time”) –

A concept uniting theology and revolution. History’s “empty, homogeneous time” is interrupted by Jetztzeit — moments charged with messianic potential when the past erupts into the present. These are revolutionary instants of recognition.

Mimesis –

The human capacity to perceive and reproduce patterns in the world. For Benjamin, mimetic faculty is both pre-linguistic (children’s play, gesture) and historical (art, representation). In modernity, it becomes abstracted but still underlies all communication.

Montage / Fragment –

A structural principle of Benjamin’s writing. Instead of continuous argument, he juxtaposes fragments — citations, aphorisms, reflections — to let meaning emerge through tension. Montage enacts his idea of truth as constellation.

Myth / Divine Violence –

In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin contrasts mythic violence (founding law through force) with divine violence (pure, law-destroying justice). The latter is a messianic interruption that breaks cycles of domination.

Origin (Ursprung) –

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, origin is not a chronological beginning but a process of becoming — the moment where ideas crystallize out of historical life. It is dialectical: both emergence and ruin.

Reproducibility –

Modern technology’s power to copy and distribute art, dissolving aura but democratizing perception. This new reproducibility transforms the relation between art, politics, and mass consciousness.

Shock (Schock) –

Aesthetic and psychological experience of modernity, especially in the metropolis. In his Baudelaire studies, Benjamin links shock to the overstimulation of the senses and the fragmentation of attention in industrial life.

Storytelling (Erzählen) –

From “The Storyteller.” An ancient form of shared wisdom based on lived experience (Erfahrung), now lost in modernity. The storyteller’s disappearance marks the decline of communal meaning and the rise of isolated subjectivity.

Surrealism –

Benjamin saw Surrealism as the last attempt of European intellectuals to awaken from bourgeois slumber through the dream-world. It revealed revolutionary potential in the unconscious and in everyday objects.

Technology / Technique (Technik) –

For Benjamin, technology is not merely a tool but a transformative medium of perception. The camera and film, by penetrating reality differently from the eye, reconfigure the human sensorium and open art to politics.

Translation –

A philosophical act, not a linguistic one. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin argues that translation aims not at communication but at the revelation of pure language — the eternal kinship among tongues.

Truth-Content (Wahrheitsgehalt) vs. Material-Content (Sachgehalt) –

Distinction in Benjamin’s aesthetics: material content is a work’s historical, social, and linguistic dimension; truth-content is its metaphysical or redemptive essence. The critic’s task is to extract the latter from the former.

Utopia / Awakening –

The Arcades Project presents history as a dream from which humanity must awaken. Awakening is the revolutionary consciousness that recognizes itself as historical — the secular counterpart of messianic redemption.

Back to: Introduction to Walter Benjamin

Glossary of Terms and Concepts in Fredric Jameson’s Thought

1. Materialism

Jameson’s work begins from Marx’s materialist premise — that social and cultural phenomena must be understood in relation to material, historical conditions rather than abstract ideas. Culture is never autonomous; it is a product and reflection of the social relations of production.

2. Ideology

A key Marxist inheritance for Jameson. Ideology is not simply false consciousness but the total structure through which people live their relation to reality. All cultural texts are ideological because they symbolically negotiate contradictions within a given historical moment.

3. The Dialectic

Jameson’s method is dialectical — interpreting contradictions not as failures but as revealing historical processes. Influenced by Hegel, Lukács, and Adorno, Jameson treats dialectical thought as a means to grasp totality without simplification, always holding contradictions in play.

4. Totality

For Jameson, totality means the attempt to understand any cultural text within the full structure of social and historical relations — the “whole system.” While Althusser warned that such totalization leads to totalitarianism, Jameson insists that without the category of totality, critique becomes fragmented and politically impotent.

5. Reification

Adopted from Lukács, reification refers to the process by which social relations appear as things, obscuring their historical and human origins. For Jameson, reification characterizes modernity itself: the aesthetic and ideological freezing of living processes into static forms.

6. Commodification

The twin concept to reification. Commodification describes how every aspect of life, including art and identity, becomes subsumed under capitalist exchange. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson argues that this process reaches its zenith in postmodern culture, where style, affect, and value are flattened into the commodity form.

7. The Political Unconscious

Perhaps Jameson’s most famous concept. Every cultural artifact, like a dream, encodes repressed historical conflicts. Interpretation thus resembles psychoanalysis: the critic’s task is to reconstruct the buried history — the “political unconscious” — that a text both reveals and conceals.

8. History as the Real

Jameson often describes History (with a capital H) as analogous to the Lacanian Real — the ultimate horizon of meaning that resists full representation. Literature and theory can only approach history indirectly, through its symbolic and ideological traces.

9. Narrative

For Jameson, narrative is the central form through which societies symbolically organize experience. In The Political Unconscious, he calls narrative “the socially symbolic act” — a structure that mediates between individual experience and historical process.

10. Mediation

Mediation is the dialectical link between the cultural and the economic. Art and ideology are not mere reflections of material conditions; they are complex mediations that translate systemic contradictions into symbolic form.

11. Late Capitalism

A term Jameson borrows from Ernest Mandel. It refers to the global, post-industrial phase of capitalism characterized by multinational corporations, mass culture, and digital production. Jameson identifies postmodernism as its cultural logic — the aesthetic expression of late capitalist society.

12. Postmodernism

Jameson defines postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” — a historical condition marked by the collapse of historical depth, the replacement of affect by pastiche, and the dominance of image over substance. It is not an artistic movement but a global mode of production in culture.

13. Pastiche vs. Parody

A key distinction in Jameson’s analysis of postmodern art. Parody mocks the original through irony, implying a moral stance; pastiche, by contrast, imitates without critique — a “blank parody” emblematic of a culture that has lost historical consciousness.

14. Utopia

Utopia, for Jameson, is not a blueprint for a perfect society but a structural function in thought — a “desire called Utopia” that points toward what cannot yet be imagined within existing social limits. It is a necessary horizon for political and aesthetic practice.

15. Cognitive Mapping

A later concept introduced in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cognitive mapping refers to the need for cultural forms that help individuals orient themselves within the totality of global capitalism — a project of restoring a sense of collective spatial and social location amid fragmentation and alienation

Back to: Introduction to Fredric Jameson's Philosophy

Glossary of Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics

1. Hermeneutics

The philosophy of interpretation. For Paul Ricoeur, hermeneutics is the practice of interpreting texts, symbols, and narratives to uncover meaning and deepen self-understanding.

2. Symbol Gives Rise to Thought

Ricoeur’s starting point: symbols and myths are not primitive remnants but sources of reflection that stimulate philosophical inquiry.

3. Distanciation

The autonomy a text gains when separated from its author and original context. Distanciation makes interpretation possible beyond subjective intention.

4. Appropriation

The act of making the “world of the text” one’s own. Readers integrate new horizons of meaning into their lives through interpretation.

5. Surplus of Meaning

Texts carry more meaning than intended by their authors. This surplus ensures multiple valid interpretations while resisting reductionism.

6. Explanation and Understanding

The two moments of interpretation: explanation (structural analysis of the text) and understanding (existential grasp of meaning).

7. Living Metaphor

Metaphor as semantic innovation. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, metaphors disclose new truths by redescribing reality.

8. Narrative / Emplotment

Narratives configure events into plots (emplotment), giving coherence to human time and experience.

9. Threefold Mimesis

The three stages of narrative:

• Mimesis1: prefiguration of action.

• Mimesis2: configuration into a plot.

• Mimesis3: refiguration in the reader’s world.

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10. Narrative Identity

The self is shaped by the stories it tells and receives. Ricoeur distinguishes between idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood).

11. The Capable Human Being

Human beings are defined by their capacities: to speak, act, narrate, and take responsibility.

12. Attestation

Practical assurance of selfhood. Attestation grounds responsibility without requiring metaphysical certainty.

13. Little Ethics

Ricoeur’s ethical formula: “aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions.”

14. Solicitude

The ethical relation of care and reciprocity between self and other.

15. Justice and the Third

Justice arises when a third party mediates conflicts, ensuring fairness beyond personal ties.

16. Forgiveness

A difficult gift that interrupts cycles of violence. Forgiveness differs from amnesty, which risks erasing responsibility.

17. Memory, History, Forgetting

Ricoeur’s triad of historical hermeneutics:

• Memory as duty.

• History as critical reconstruction.

• Forgetting as both danger and possible healing.

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18. Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Critical interpretation inspired by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Ricoeur balances suspicion with a restorative hermeneutics of trust.

19. Recognition

The final arc of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics: mutual recognition as the condition for peace and dignity.

20. Fallibility and Evil

Human beings are fragile and fallible. Hermeneutics explores how fault, guilt, and evil are narrated and confronted.

21. Second Naïveté

Gadamer's Terms and Concepts Explained

Philosophical Hermeneutics

– Interpretation is not a method for the humanities but the basic condition of human existence. All understanding is hermeneutical.

Understanding (Verstehen)

– Not the reconstruction of an author’s intent, but a dynamic, historically conditioned participation in meaning.

Effective-History (Wirkungsgeschichte)

– The idea that our historical context shapes interpretation. Tradition is not an obstacle but a medium of understanding.

Fusion of Horizons (Horizontverschmelzung)

– Understanding arises when the interpreter’s horizon and the horizon of the text/tradition merge in dialogue, creating new meaning.

Prejudice (Vorurteil)

– Not necessarily a bias to be eliminated, but the inevitable pre-judgments through which understanding begins. Some are enabling rather than distorting.

Tradition (Überlieferung)

– A living transmission that continually shapes and is reshaped by interpretation. Understanding involves openness to tradition rather than escape from it.

Language as Medium of Truth

– Language is not a tool but the very medium in which truth appears. Conversation (Gespräch) exemplifies how meaning unfolds dialogically.

Play (Spiel)

– Borrowed from aesthetics: the experience of art (and by extension, understanding) is like play—an event where the subject participates and is transformed, not an act of control.

Application (Anwendung)

– Interpretation is inseparable from application. To understand a text is always to apply it to one’s own situation.

Dialogue / Conversation (Gespräch)

– The model of understanding is conversation, where meaning arises between interlocutors and is not mastered by either side.

Truth Beyond Method

– From Truth and Method: truth is not reducible to scientific or methodological procedure; it emerges in art, history, and human experience.

Hermeneutic Circle

– Understanding moves back and forth between part and whole, interpreter and text, in a dynamic process. Gadamer stresses this as an ontological structure, not just a methodological rule.

Belongingness (Zugehörigkeit)

– The interpreter belongs to tradition and history; understanding is possible only within this belonging.

Hermeneutic Experience (Erfahrung)

– Genuine understanding involves being open to being changed by what one encounters. It is marked by finitude, risk, and surprise.

Solidarity / Participation (Teilhaben)

– To understand is to participate historically and communally in a shared world, affirming bonds of solidarity through conversation.

Consciousness as “More Being than Conscious”

– Gadamer reinterprets consciousness (contrary to Heidegger’s critique) as openness to Being, emphasizing relationality rather than self-enclosure.

Hermeneutics and Finitude

– Human understanding is never total; it is shaped by limits of history, mortality, and language. Truth always exceeds us.

Hermeneutics of Trust vs. Suspicion

– While acknowledging Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s hermeneutics of suspicion, Gadamer stresses trust, openness, and receptivity to meaning as conditions of understanding.

Hermeneutic Relevance of Theology

– Faith and interpretation share a structure: both involve openness to what transcends control and a search for understanding beyond certainty.

Between Phenomenology and Dialectic

– Gadamer situates his hermeneutics between Heideggerian phenomenology (emphasis on finitude and Being) and Platonic/Hegelian dialectic (emphasis on dialogue and the search for truth).

More on Gadamer:

Introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy

Gadamer in Context: Philosophy After Heidegger

Gadamer and Truth Beyond Method

Understanding Gadamer’s Understanding

Gadamer's Horizons of Understanding

Gadamer's Fusion of Horizons Explained

Gadamer Between Relativism and Realism

Gadamer on Dialogue, Language, and Understanding

Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Politics

Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Faith: Interpretation as Discovery and Revelation

Gadamer Today: Hermeneutics in the 21st Century

Gadamer's Fusion of Horizons Explained

Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, devoted his life to exploring how human beings understand one another, their traditions, and the world. Among his many contributions, none is more central than the idea of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung), a concept that reshaped the very meaning of interpretation.

Horizons of Understanding

To grasp this idea, start with the image of a “horizon.” For Gadamer, a horizon is not just the line where the earth seems to meet the sky; it is a metaphor for the range of vision that defines our understanding. Each of us lives within a horizon shaped by our history, culture, language, and prejudices (in Gadamer’s sense of “pre-judgments” or inherited assumptions). When we read a historical text, listen to another person, or encounter a foreign tradition, we do so from within our own horizon, which is never neutral or universal.

But the other—the text, person, or tradition—also has a horizon. The horizon of ancient Greece, for example, is not the same as that of 21st-century readers; the worldview of a medieval theologian differs dramatically from that of a modern scientist. If horizons are different, how can understanding occur at all?

Fusion, Not Collapse

Gadamer’s answer is that understanding is achieved through a fusion of horizons. This does not mean that one horizon collapses into another, or that differences are erased. Rather, it is a dialogical process in which my horizon and the horizon of the other come into contact, overlap, and expand. When I interpret a text or converse with another person, I bring my questions and assumptions to the encounter. The text or person responds, challenges, and reshapes them. In this exchange, my horizon shifts, and so does the horizon of the meaning I encounter.

For example, when a modern reader studies Plato, they inevitably bring contemporary concerns—questions of democracy, justice, education. Plato’s texts, written in a distant historical horizon, answer back in ways that can unsettle or enrich the reader’s assumptions. The result is not simply the past horizon, nor purely the present one, but something new: a fusion that enlarges both.

The Significance of the Concept

The fusion of horizons has radical implications. First, it undermines the dream of a “view from nowhere”—the belief that interpretation could ever be purely objective. Understanding is always situated, conditioned by time and place. Second, it gives tradition a positive role: we are not trapped by our prejudices, but enabled by them to enter into dialogue with what is other. Third, it makes understanding an open-ended process. Each generation reads Shakespeare differently, not because we misread him, but because new horizons of meaning emerge with time.

Finally, Gadamer’s concept highlights the ethical dimension of interpretation. To engage in a fusion of horizons requires openness, humility, and a willingness to be transformed. It is not about mastering the other, but letting one’s own horizon be challenged and expanded.

A Philosophy of Dialogue

In a world marked by cultural plurality and conflict, Gadamer’s vision of the fusion of horizons offers a hopeful model. Understanding across differences—whether between cultures, political communities, or individuals—is never about imposing one’s own horizon but about creating space for a shared horizon to emerge. This is the essence of hermeneutics: truth as something that happens in dialogue.

More on Gadamer:

Introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy

Gadamer in Context: Philosophy After Heidegger

Gadamer and Truth Beyond Method

Understanding Gadamer’s Understanding

Gadamer's Horizons of Understanding

Gadamer Between Relativism and Realism

Gadamer on Dialogue, Language, and Understanding

Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Politics

Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Faith: Interpretation as Discovery and Revelation

Gadamer Today: Hermeneutics in the 21st Century

Gadamer's Terms and Concepts Explained

What is Intersectionality and How it Screws You Over

What happens to someone who belongs to a discriminated gender, an oppressed minority, a low socioeconomic class, and a persecuted race? The answer is that all these factors combine to make their life particularly difficult. This concept is known as "intersectionality". The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s to challenge simplistic views of identity and oppression. Intersectionality highlights how different aspects of a person's identity intersect and interact, creating unique experiences that are often overlooked.

So, what is intersectionality? It challenges the traditional model of seeing identity and oppression as separate and distinct. People embody multiple identities that intersect and interact, shaping their experiences in profound ways. For example, a black woman's experiences may differ significantly from those of a white woman due to the additional layer of racial discrimination she faces.

The wage gap between the sexes is a good example of intersectionality. While the gap is often presented as a gap between men and women, a cross-view reveals a more complex reality. Taking into account social background and ethnicity, we find that the pay gap for minority women is multiplied by the gap between them and men, as well as the gap between them and other cultural groups.

Intersectionality becomes especially important when examining the lived experiences of marginalized people. For instance, a disabled, transgender immigrant who belongs to a lower socioeconomic class has experiences shaped not only by their disability but also by their gender identity, immigrant status, and economic circumstances. The approach's crucial insight is that social change must recognize and address the intersections and intersections of oppression. By understanding the complex ways in which different forms of harm, oppression, and exclusion intersect, better strategies can be devised to deal with them.

see also: Three Theoretical Takes on Intersectionality

Husserl's Intentionality explained simply

In Edmund Husserl's phenomenology Intentionality (Intentionalität) means that consciousness is characterized by the fact that it is always related to something. That is, consciousness is always an intentional act. The simplest definition of intentionality is simply  an "awareness of something" (here you can read what a "thing" is).

Intentionality serves a key function in Husserl's phenomenology as the relationship between an act of consciousness and the outside world. Husserl borrowed the term from Franz Bretano who defines it as a key characteristic of mental phenomena. Every psychic act has content, an object "intended" by consciousness. This applies not just to sensual phenomena, but also to things imagined. Every belief, desire, etc. has an object to which it refers: the believed, the desired and the imagined (think about how imagination always has to imagine something). 

 Husserl gives an example of intentionality with a mannequin in a shop window in front of which we are standing. it can happen that we realize with surprise that it was not a mannequin but a human being. At that moment - and this is the moment when the illusion turns - the meaning of this character changes. The meaning of the object was not in itself (actually mannequin or human) but in the manner in which consciousness actively engaged them. (For a similar example see Freud's Uncanny)

 

Intentionality, noesis and noema

In his "Ideas I" Husserl speaks of noesis and noema as basic moments of the constitution of objects and thus as the limit of what can be said. "Noesis" means how the act of consciousness relates to its object (believe, want, hate, love) and "Noema" means how the object appears through these noetic acts (what is believed, wanted, hated, loved).

 In the mannequin/human example, Husserl would say that in both cases we had a perception of the object. Through a change in our "Noesis", the way we realted to the object, its "Noema" changed and its meaning for us shifted from mannequin to human. 

 

Husserl's adumbration

Another central concept in Husserl's phenomenology whish relates to intentionality is "adumbration" or "shadowing" (Abschattung). Objects are never presented to us as a complete unit, they only show themselves to us in a partial manner. We never have full perspective of what we percieve, and this means for Husserl the total imperceptibility of the object. The prerequisite for perception is therefore the perspective, which at the same time constitutes the hiddenness of the thing and therefore makes the phenomenon of misconception possible in the first place.

 

For background see: Husserl's Critique of Psychologism

For Husserl's next step see: Phenomenological Reduction and Epoché or Transcendental Subjectivity and the Transcendental I 

Back to the beginning: Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology

 

 

 

Meaning of Spivak's Strategic Essentialism Explained

Strategic essentialism is a key term in postcolonial theory, introduced by Indian thinker and literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1987.  The term deliberately subverts the meaning of traditional essentialism or "ontological essentialism".  

The meaning of Spivak’s Strategic Essentialism refers to a political tactic by which social groups that constitute minorities, nationalities or ethnic groups temporarily build a joint mobilization on the basis of a gender, cultural or political identity in order to self-represent themselves. It implicitly recognizes the inherent constructivism of society, but does not deny its power or the need for political solidarity of a group that is considered as such, even if it is an artificial exercise. While there may be differences between members of these communities that may not be agreed upon in certain debates, it makes it possible for the strategy to be temporarily imbued with a common "essential " feature". Strategic essentialism is thus utilized in order to promote their joint position and simplify the potential to achieve certain goals such as equal rights or anti-globalization positions. All this without  having to abandon the debate, or positions and differences of each.

An example of resolute solidarity using tactics of strategic essentialism could be the case of “Sati” : this was a funeral practice practiced by certain Hindu communities in which the widow of the deceased had to set fire to the funeral pyre. In her famous “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak holds that the history of this act has only been recorded from the hegemonic discourses of British imperialism and Hinduism, while the widow's testimony is nowhere to be found. Spivak explained this recorded lack of voice in the widespread absence of the voice of those she calls subordinates.

In later years Spivak became critical of her own concept of strategic essentialism, especially after it was used for nationalists goals. But still, the concept is also commonly used in the context of Queer Theory and feminism. 

Here you can find an introduction to spivak's thought and summaries of her main works.

Internal colonialism - short definition

Internal colonialism refers to a structural political and economic inequality between regions of a nation state . This term is used to describe the distinct separation between the dominant center and its periphery. It is derived from colonialism which is “the submission by physical and psychological force of one culture by another… through the military conquest of territory” . The term internal colonialism was coined to describe the blurred boundaries between sites that are geographically close but which are clearly different in terms of culture. Other factors separate the center from the periphery such as language, religion, physical appearance, types and levels of technology, and sexual behavior. Internal colonialism makes it possible to describe the effects of uneven economic development on a regional basis, and to describe the exploitation of minority groups within a society at large. This is considered to be similar to colonialism in the relations between the metropolis and the colony. For the Bolivian sociologist Félix Patzi, internal colonialism is a social process whereby resources, life opportunities and real citizenship are affected by criteria of inclusion or exclusion similar to those of a colony and, by therefore, racial and ethnic.