The Body Politic: Husserl and the Embodied Community

Abstract

This article elucidates Edmund Husserl’s theory of community by examining its critical relation to the tradition of body politic, that is, the philosophical current employing the analogy between community and human body. It is argued that Husserl employs the corporeal analogy for three purposes: to describe the peculiar materiality, autonomy as well as the normative ideal of the social collective. Despite his relentless critique of naturalistic concepts in the description of the social sphere, Husserl nevertheless resorted to organic and bodily metaphors in his attempts to delineate the ideal form of communal co-existence, the “community of love”. With the help of the notion of love, Husserl was able to articulate his most elaborate account on the authentic relation between the individual and the collective.