This presentation at the Center for Subjectivity Research’s Winter School devoted to Alfred Schutz’s legacy (where I was happy to be one of six speakers), was motivated by a curious observation: while Schutz’s texts, especially later ones, are full of references to ‘normal,’ (his ‘everyday life’ is ‘normal life of a normal adult,’ all in all) he almost never problematizes it. Just a handful of essays do this – one addresses ‘normativity’ in law and two other small essays discuss ‘normality’ and ‘normalcy’ in response to Husserl’s models of normality. He might also have intended to discuss it later, as hinted by his draft outline for SLW Vol. II. Maybe this is why his perspective remains almost untouched in rapidly growing discussions on phenomenology of normality and normativity.
Still, although Schutz doesn’t address it explicitly, all his phenomenology is indeed a ‘phenomenology of the normal.’ In my talk, I offered a lexicographical analysis of all published Schutz’s texts, tracing how terms like normal, normality, normalcy, and anomaly appear and function. I hope to have a chance to investigate his manuscripts in the Konstanz archive shortly and then move to a conceptual reconstruction of what a Schutzian approach to normality might look like.
My ultimate ambition is to do what Steinbock has done with Husserl’s writings on normality and normativity (and his genetic phenomenology in general): to bring Schutzian perspective into phenomenology of normality and normativity.
The presentation transcript is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19068705
- Log in to post comments