SITUATIVE DIFFERENCE. A CONCEPT FOR POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY.

To exist corporally, i.e., in corporeal difference, to the world means that the space of possibilities does not exist as a virtual multiplicity of abstract possibilities, but always only as a horizon of possibilities that orients actions in a situation. For a political phenomenology, the notion of situatedness is attractive because it articulates a rupture in the political. The perspective of an embodied situated subject can neither be transferred into an 'objective' situational picture (a position), nor can its place be assigned in it and thus mapped in it. But if situated subjects want to become visible in the agonistic field of power, they have to choose a position. Only as a position it becomes recognizable what one stands for, even if there is no safe way from situatedness to positioning. A phenomenology of situatedness thus leads to a politics of positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]