What does it mean to be an alien? Bernhard waldenfels and politics of responsive interculturalism

Abstract

The author analyzes the politics of responsive interculturalism in Bernhard Waldenfels’ thought, starting from the assumption that after Husserl’s phenomenology only two fundamental concepts – body and the Other – should be considered. In contemporary German “post-phenomenology” the first concept was systematically articulated by Hermann Schmitz, while the latter theme has been advanced in Waldenfels’ works as the phenomenology of the alien, up until the end of Western metaphysics. In the two parts of the discussion, the author draws on his fundamental hypothesis about aporias and paradoxes of interculturalism, since responsiveness and xenology cannot reach the positive definition of the concept of culture in the era of global entropy. The analysis, therefore, deals with the questions: (1) what is the responsiveness of man in relation to the Other, including the different ways of his presence in the world; and (2) whether the Other as alien and uncanny (Unheimlich) calls into question the basic assumption of phenomenology as such – the intentionality of consciousness?.