ABSTRACT

Guided by the search for a bridge between phenomenology and politics, this chapter is divided into four thematic moments. The first examines Husserl’s evolving conception of Einfühlung (understood as “immediate relation,” [Depraz]), notably in his mature, 1927, re-reading of Hegel’s Herr-Knecht encounter. The second moment contrasts Einfühlung – as spontaneous and as a kind of metaphoric ‘force’ analogous to those described in his notes on passive synthesis – with Hegel’s early Jena writings on love and with his 1807 Phenomenology. The third moment turns to the ‘realist’ jurist and inheritor of Hegel (inter alii), Carl Schmitt who attempted a kind of eidetics of politics in the same year, 1927. It argues that the circularity of sovereignty, presupposed by the decision about the state of exception yet enacted in that decision, is tied to the under-determination of Schmitt’s conception, therein, of authority. The final moment turns to the phenomenology of authority developed by Alexandre Kojève (Outline for a Phenomenology of Right). It argues that the spontaneity and intersubjectivity of the phenomenon of authority solves the conundrum of motivation in a phenomenology of political action, and can itself be elucidated in turn by Einfühlung, as the dynamic process explored by Husserl, following Edith Stein.