Conference | Paper

Revolution as Instituting New World. Phenomenological Analysis of World of Revolutionary Experience

Michal Lipták

Wednesday 4th September 2024

15:40 - 16:20

TU-Main Venue

Phenomenological investigations are especially well-suited to capture the transformative effect a mass revolutionary experience has on revolutionary subjects. Merleau-Ponty has pioneered phenomenological reading of Marxist theory of revolution which precisely focused less on structural conditions of revolutions and more on lived-experience of the revolutionary subjects. This reading has not contended itself with analysing one aspect of revolutions, but sought to provide generative phenomenological account of revolution as such. In my presentation, I want to focus on the other pole of intentionality and address what happens with the world in revolutionary experience. Taking cue from Husserl’s notion of “cutting-off of horizons” in case of aesthetic experience, I argue that revolutionary experience structurally similarly causes rupture in the world cuts off the horizon of world in which we lived until that time. From phenomenological point of view, what sociological analyses of revolutions do is that they analyse the initiating cutting off of horizons with a revolution’s outbreak and subsequent reconnection of horizons with a revolution’s pacification. What phenomenology is more interested in is the new world that revolution institutes. I will argue and explain how the notions of freedom and dignity are actualised in the world of revolutionary experience, and how this world is in a sense complete and holistically self-enclosed.