ABSTRACT
The political is not only the field of encountering others in their plurality but also a field of alienness by which politics is challenged. With his phenomenology of alienness, Bernhard Waldenfels sets his philosophy of the political in motion by demonstrating that normative orders are always forced anew to react—or, more precisely, to respond—to internal ruptures or external irritations. The responsive structure of the phenomenology of alienness makes the dynamics of political transformation visible and refuses any identitary closure and normative encapsulation.
