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This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a comparative study based on the interviews with leading French and Russian intellectuals and scholars (Khapaeva, 2005) . Initially focused on the phenomenon of translation in the social sciences and humanities over last 15 years, it gradually grew into a search for an explanation of the contemporary state of intellectual uncertainty, usually associated with the present-day crisis of social sciences and humanities. In particular, this paper attempts to contribute to an understanding of the dramatic changes undergone by the social sciences and humanities' conceptual apparatus over the last two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]