ABSTRACT
During the 1960s and 1970s, phenomenology was increasingly received by Marxists who hoped that this combination would help them point out the existential meaning of praxis. This resulted, above all, from the critique of Stalinist and dogmatic readings of Marx, which threatened to lose sight of the concrete phenomena of the lifeworld. In Italy, different thinkers worked on bringing Husserl and Marx into conversation with each other, and in the Yugoslavian journal Praxis, which was able to appear despite Soviet attempts at suppression, Sartre, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger were increasingly discussed. In particular, the concepts of facticity and ideality in their historical and lifeworldly significance promised to shed light on the Marxist claim to the materiality of concrete human practice. Moreover, the Marxist critique of bourgeois science and the Husserlian crisis of modern science are similar in their diagnosis of modernity’s experiences of alienation and the resulting claim to align theory with lifeworld practices. In a related vein, Italian phenomarxism (fenomarxismo) receives German and French phenomenology to understand the practice and incorporation of ideology. The chapter aims to illuminate the practice-theoretical significance of Marxist conceptions of phenomenology on the basis of these two exemplary debates.
