ABSTRACT
The political phenomenology of Trần Đức Thảo (1917–1993) is developed within an anticolonial, dialectical materialism. Taking up the questions and concepts Edmund Husserl had developed, Thảo integrated phenomenology into a Marxist approach. The result is a description of the lifeworld as economic, of consciousness as developed through production, of social structures as belonging to the sphere of ownness and forming the essence of phenomena, of essences as economic and social relations that are historical and changing, and of human development as additive rather than progressive. Different worlds or lifeworlds can be found in oppressor and oppressed groups, notably through class and colonial struggles, in which the distance between horizons and perspectives leads to the impossibility for oppressors to understand the oppressed and for the oppressed to do anything other than develop new forms of life and consciousness as they resist their oppression.
