Adriano Lotito - ‘Tran Duc Thao between Phenomenology and Marxism’

<p>This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Adriano Lotito, Milano-Bicocca University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.</p> <p> </p> <p>ABSTRACT: This contribution focuses on the Tran Duc Thao’s work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, that is fundamental to post-war French thought, having influenced thinkers as Lyotard and Derrida amongst others and representing the first systematic attempt to synthesize Marxism and phenomenology. Firstly I examine the Tran’s reconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. Originally there is an objective idealism theorizing the independence of the object; then there is its reversal in a subjective idealism highlighting the constituting consciousness; finally there is the switch from static to genetic phenomenology with the thematization of the life-world as historical-empirical ground (I). Secondly I explore the contradiction indicated by Tran between the Husserl’s idealistic frame, implicating the reproduction of an abstract dualism, and the results of the concrete analysis, bound to the original claim of going back to the things themselves. This tension is particularly detectable in The Origin of Geometry (II). Thirdly I discuss the Tran’s solution to this riddle, namely the radicalisation of the materialistic stance discovered in the Husserl’s late writings towards a Marxist horizon. The genesis of the a priori forms of the antepredicative experience is derived from the evolution of species and from the development of human work. The dialectic of behaviour as practical interaction between organism and nature determines the emergence of meanings structuring the experience. The notion of intentionality is interpreted as result of an immanent negation, the aufhebung of any immediate determinations through the work of an emerging  bodily-social intersubjectivity that in this way reaches the self-consciousness. The real movement, insofar as is sketched out and repressed at once, is sublated as intention