Emanuele Caminada

Joining the Background: Habitual Sentiments Behind We-Intentionality

How can the inner structure of we-intentionality be described? The early phenomenological account of Gerda Walther (Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaft. In: Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung, vol 6. Niemeyer, Halle, pp 1–158, 1923) offers interesting insights into the nature of human sociality: according to her we-intentionality is embedded in a network of intentional habits a network that shapes individual minds. She claims that the core of community is grounded in a concrete, intentional background that arises through a particular structure of affective intentionality: habitual joining.

Retorica corporea: le “constructed situations” di Tino Sehgal

Tino Sehgal is internationally renowned for his »constructed situations«, artworks based on the interrelation between their interpreters, the spaces in which they take place, and the audiences of different art institutions. Exploring the boundaries of speech act performativity as well as choreography, dance and song, the artist’s immaterial pieces inhabits the interplay between bodily gesture and rhythmic attunement. Sehgal’s works leave no material trace, yet are commodities nonetheless to be bought and sold. His aim for an immaterial production is very close to the concept of cognitive capitalism analyzed in the past years by scholars such as the philosopher Paolo Virno. Focusing on some of his most interesting artworks, our contribution proposes an art historical and phenomenological reading of the embodied rhetoric through which Sehgal constructs the social space of his pieces. By inviting the visitors to take part and actively discuss with its interpreters, Sehgal’s works enact different spaces of sociality, experimenting with different forms of agreement upon which various understanding of consensus and dissent can be envisaged. Lingering on the multimedia nature of Sehgal’s work, our interdisciplinary analysis will shed light on the embodied rhetoric appearing as part of the contemporary immaterial forms of production. Finally, we aim to sketch some of the political potentials of the concept of embodied rhetoric itself.

The Phenomenological Background of Collective Positionality

Searle is convinced that phenomenology is inadequate to face social-ontological problems. Despite his opinion, collective intentionality in its positional effort can be explained through phenomenological reductions. Clarifying how Husserl comes to the evidence of the background within the exercise of the transcendental reduction, it has to be shown how the frame of primordinal reduction could make an inner description of the plural firstperson perspective possible. Finally, some of the reasons that left Husserl to be completely overlooked in the contemporary debate on collective intentionality are exposed. The suspicion that is aroused by Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology could be dispelled if one only considers the social-ontological value of the structure of collective positionality that Husserl claims to be the condition of possibility for the experience of objectivity.