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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Dariusz Gafijczuk
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2023. 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.
Author(s): Gafijczuk D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Theory, Culture and Society
Year: 2023
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 07/08/2023
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 13/09/2023
ISSN (print): 0263-2764
ISSN (electronic): 1460-3616
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764231187589
DOI: 10.1177/02632764231187589
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