Challenging the “in-order-to-“ structure of Heidegger’s account of Da/Mitsein: Loving coalition, complex communication and contingency in María Lugones’s pluralistic phenomenology

Description

A 20-minute panel talk given at a symposium on "Critical Intersections: Navigating Western and Non-Western Critical Traditions".

Abstract:

María Lugones’ decolonial, feminist phenomenology challenges and helps think the “unthought” in Heidegger’s insufficient, monolithic account of being-human (Dasein), especially regarding what it means to be-with and alongside others (Mitsein). With a richer account of the “self” as multiplicitous, Lugones calls for “loving” coalition and complex communication as tools for realising the contingency of any political position or “truth”. Left Heideggerian post-foundationalism, by contrast, is frequently led to fatalism on questions of the political.

Heidegger’s post-“turn” (Kehre) works and Lugones put forward different versions of “ontological pluralism”: For Lugones’ existential pluralism, a “self” is multiplicitous, living between and across worlds in a manner that is precluded by Modern, unified subjectivity; for Heidegger, ontologies are historicised and epochal, conditioning how entities are unconcealed (alētheia), and the pluralistic modes of truth and language built upon it.

Despite and alongside these differences, Lugones and “Left” Heideggerian thought gesture towards a comparable post-foundationalist conclusion: They emphasise the contingency of any “truth” or political position, challenging hegemonic structures that falsely universalise and totalise from abyssal grounds.
This critical reflection will argue that Lugones’ decolonial phenomenology challenges Left Heideggerian ontological pluralism, while augmenting it by thinking its “unthought”. I will argue that Heidegger offers an incomplete account of Mitsein and “care” (Sorgen), reducing other Dasein to a monolithic “other” (das Man), and to equipment for Dasein’s existential self-fulfilment and competition. This allows Heidegger to call for an authentic stance apart from the existentially tranquilising “public”.

Lugones instead emphasises the radical interdependency of one-self with others, echoing reflections Heidegger made in 1923, but then left behind. Lugones’ call is not to the freedom of an isolated Modern subjectivity; it is to “world travel”, “complex communication” and speaking “face-to-face”, providing tools for seeing the radical contingency of political positions and truths. The outcome is not “authentic” independence and isolation, but a “loving” coalition and care.

Marianna Ortega argues that a Lugonian-Heideggerian account better accounts for lives lived “in-between” and across worlds, in positions of oppression<-->resistance. I will build on Ortega’s amendment of the “existentiales” that Heidegger' argues are fundamental to Dasein, focusing on Mitsein, authenticity and care. I will argue further that the tools Lugones offers for an “epistemological shift” from an isolated subject to a multiplicitous “active subjectivity” help solve one of the perennial problems in Heidegger studies: They offer an alternative to the fatalism that has dogged Heidegger and Left Heideggerian thought since Being and Time.

Period	15 May 2025
Held at	King's College London, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International