Why should we be interested in early women phenomenologists alongside the most famous male philosophers? Why should we care about Latin philosophy that has not been translated into English? Antonio Calcagno (b. 1969) visited the University of Helsinki in November 2024, invited by the Centre of Excellence EuroStorie. Calcagno is a professor of philosophy at King’s University College. He investigates lesser-known historical authors in phenomenology and particularly political Latin philosophy, which he also translates into English. These two seemingly distant lines of investigation come together in his work on political philosophy.
Sociality, commonality, and the political: What lies between the major figures?
Your work involves several philosophical traditions, such as phenomenology and continental political philosophy. How do these different traditions relate to each other in your work?
In phenomenology, what I’m really interested in is how sociality and social bonds are formed. I believe that any kind of political life—any kind of political action—really depends on an agent. I do not mean just an agent as externally viewed but as having some kind of inner life. Phenomenology allows me to investigate the inner perspective and then other traditions of political philosophy allow me to understand the external conditions that make politics possible.
Where do you position your work? Do you consider yourself a phenomenologist or rather a political-social philosopher?
I would like to think that I do both. But the two should not be seen as excluding one another, although methodologically they often conflict. There is tension between the more immanent analysis of consciousness that you get in the phenomenological tradition and the other political traditions like the Marxist tradition or the liberal tradition where the emphasis is on the materialist historical understanding of things and actions. So, I see phenomenology and political philosophy as distinct realms of investigation, but I also think that they ultimately affect and feed one another. I do not think that you can understand action without an understanding of the consciousness that drives it. With the help of phenomenology, you can understand an individual subjectivity from within affectivity, sense, rationality, motivation, and values.
You have published on a variety of philosophers, such as early phenomenologists and on more contemporary continental philosophers, such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. Your latest book On Political Impasse: Power, Resistance, and New Forms of Selfhood (Bloomsbury Press, 2022) cites a wide range of authors. Are there any philosophers that are the most important ones for you?
Even though I write on different figures, different parts of their respective projects, and on different issues, I have been deeply moved by three philosophers, who I encountered while finishing high school and entering university: Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Hannah Arendt. Reading their work just blew my mind. These three figures have shaped my sensibility about politics in a way that no other philosophers have. From Simone Weil, I got the whole idea of suffering and what we can do about it, in this very strange way of thinking of the self. Edith Stein, in turn, always gives hope, and she exposed me to the idea of what a person could be, to what life and self-constitution are. I like Hannah Arendt because of her theory of action and the world, of the amor mundi sort of return to the outside. So, Edith Stein tells me what an inside is and what a person is. Simone Weil tells me that what it is to be human also involves great suffering and that we can do something about it. Hannah Arendt tells me that we can build something new in between people through action and speech. This trio of philosophers captures for me something important about what it is to be a human being living with others and trying to make a better world.
What has been the process of your work, how has it developed?
I had a classical education in philosophy, which consisted largely of studying male philosophers that were considered the geniuses of philosophy. In the curriculum, nothing else existed other than those six, seven or eight philosophers that were all Western and all men. There was always something uneasy about just studying those authors, because when you actually look at the history of philosophy, you realize that these figures were in deep conversations with all kinds of people around them and that their views shifted in dialogue with others. These figures themselves often took seriously the community of philosophers that was around them. I do not think that these large figures are unimportant. But I think we can learn more about philosophical ideas by also studying the authors in between these figures, that is, the people around them. Thereby we can understand the debates and issues better and what is at stake in the works of the large figures.
I have devoted my work to mining what is in between these large figures that philosophy has identified as canonical, to show a different kind of history and the complexity of philosophical problems. Part of this is to uncover women’s philosophical contributions, like the early phenomenology of Stein, Walther and Conrad-Martius as foundational for the phenomenological movement. They were not simply secretaries writing copies or derivatives of the great authors’ works, but they were actually formative for the movement and had an idea of what phenomenology should be. I have tried to pull out this larger sense of the phenomenological movement to show how rich it was by focusing on these three foundational figures.
I have worked this way also in different languages. I have tried to bring into the Anglosphere the idea that philosophy happens in many traditions, in many languages, and they all have something to say. I have tried to do this with Hispanic and Italian philosophy, because those are the languages I you know fairly well. I uncover and translate a lot of the philosophical work that has been done in these languages. So that is how I work with what I was introduced to, what I fell in love with, but at the same time was profoundly dissatisfied with—that very limited reading of things. I try to push other schools of thought also because I am myself deeply interested in what they have to say.
How I met the saint
Within phenomenology, the early women philosophers have not been a very popular topic of research, and you mentioned that your philosophical education concentrated on the classics. How did you find these authors?
This is a little story of how I met Edith Stein. On one Sunday, the New York Times would come in with an enormous issue, and on the cover of The Sunday Times, there was a picture of this Jewish nun, Edith Stein, who was being canonized as Catholic saint. The article talked about her conversion and her religious life, but then it also mentioned that she was a student in philosophy, first and foremost a student of Edmund Husserl. I thought “Wow, this is the kind of philosophy I am really interested in.” But I had never heard of her, even though I had heard a lot about Husserl and Heidegger.
Then I went to read about her work and her autobiography. A lot of the autobiography focuses on Göttingen philosophical circle. I was gripped by that whole phenomenological movement. As I began to study it more, I realized that there is not only Husserl, there is not only Heidegger, but there are a lot of philosophers that were part of this movement. I wondered, why have we not been reading what they have to say. Husserl himself had published many of their works in his yearbooks. I was able to read all that material, and what I really loved about that material was that they covered almost everything. These early phenomenologists were not afraid to talk about aesthetics, religion, politics, science, or metaphysics. There was openness to different topics, and rich ideas that were coming from there.
I had a lot of trouble convincing my supervisors to work with me on these things. They did not understand who these people were and why I would bother to read them. They thought that all you really need is Husserl. I tried to tell them that, no, we really should read these authors. A lot of my work just consisted of trying to convince them that these were legitimate authors that had published serious work of philosophy.
I think I was pretty successful with this. There has been a lot of resistance, but I am stubborn. Now that I look back on my work, I can see that people in philosophy know who these authors were. Younger philosophers have taken these figures very seriously and produced dissertations and other research about them. It only adds to the value of philosophy, it does not take away from it.
Despite ignoring her in philosophy, Stein is a much-investigated figure within theology, and she is recognized as a patron saint of Europe. What has been the role of Stein’s theological and religious work in your research of Stein?
I would say very little. Not because I am not interested in these things, but mostly because that seems to have had a lot of attention already. It is received by a large audience in Christian theology in the way that her phenomenology is not. However, her phenomenological work is really important. It really increases our understanding of what Husserl was doing at a certain point in his life and what the phenomenological method could or should be. It has really been a struggle to get people to read Stein’s phenomenological works, because her later theology, theologically inflected ontology, and metaphysics have been privileged.
Merleau-Ponty was probably the only philosopher who recognized how important Stein was when he went to Louvain to look at Husserl’s manuscripts that helped to form his understanding of the phenomenology of perception. He read Stein’s Beiträge and cites Beiträge1Stein 1922/2010. in Phenomenology of Perception.2Merleau-Ponty 1945, 39, 379. The citations are in the footnotes, probably because of the prejudices towards Stein, as people did not understand what she was doing and that she was doing the same kind of research as Husserl had done. But Merleau-Ponty understood her ideas of phenomenological psychology, and he takes from there the layers of analysis in Phenomenology of Perception, including embodiment and everything else that really comes from Stein working on Husserl’s manuscripts of Ideas.3Stein worked on the second part of Husserl’s Ideas titled Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, published posthumously in 1952 as the fourth volume of Husserliana. It still took another generation or even two or three until people saw her significant contribution to phenomenology.
Edith Stein as a political philosopher
Stein is not generally considered a political philosopher. Do you think that she, or at least some of her works, should be considered political philosophy?
First of all, in her life, she was deeply political. She campaigned long and hard to establish the German Democratic Party in her hometown Breslau.4The German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei) was a central-left liberal party during the years 1918–1930. She also actively campaigned for women’s rights to access educational institutions and government. I think that she remained a political person even in the convent, where she wrote her autobiography which I see as a political act. In the convent, she also tried to secure the safety of her Jewish family and especially her sister during the Nazi regime.
I think that the general reception of her treatise on the state [Eine Untersuchung über den Staat, ”An Investigation Concerning the State”, 1925]5Eine Untersuchung über den Staat, 1925/2006. See Kekki 2024. as something tangential, as an add-on or not really phenomenology and the general dismissal of that work is misguided in many ways. This is because that work is essential in understanding who she was as a phenomenologist and as a political philosopher. If you read the treatise on the state and her Münster lectures,6Stein 2004. it repositions the whole idea of consciousness in the personal existence in the state and in the community. So, I would say that she is a deeply political philosopher. I think that one of the next things that should happen in Stein scholarship is to begin to read her through her politics, not the other way, not thinking of politics as something she just did in addition to her work. Rather, this was always her way of doing philosophy, given that deep commitment to action and life.
In the end of your book on political impasse, that is, on the moment when there is no clear ruler-ruled dynamic, you discuss Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being (2006/1935–37). This book is often not read as a political work. How does that work relate to political phenomena?
The reason why I discuss her work in the book is because in Finite and Eternal Being, there is an analysis of the possibility of hope and expectation and the idea of not only being thrown into being but being held on being. An existential sense, some kind of certainty, some kind of possibility is actually unfolding in our being. This is important for the fallout of politics and political philosophy. The French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon has just published a work of the invisible institutions of democracy, Les Institutions invisibles (Seuil, 2024). His point is that if you want democratic politics to work, you need the institutions to be correct in terms of legitimacy, authority, some kind of sense of belonging, and so on. These aspects are really about human compartment and human behavior that you have to cultivate in addition to the structure. I think that Stein can also be read as analyzing the feeling of justice, comportment, and hope. Hence why I turned into the Finite and Eternal Being.
I think politics really is not simply about contracts, laws, situations, and history. You need psyche, you need human relationships. You need a sense of yourself. You need some kind of affectivity. Those things are harder to quantify, but they are there. Plato and Aristotle have also talked about this, but they place these aspects in the ethical instead of the political realm. But I think these aspects can help fortify institutions and activities, inventions and the law.
Creating counter-narratives of the history of European philosophy
Does the investigation of the early women phenomenologists create counter-narratives about the history of European philosophy?
I think it does. In this case, counter-narratives take place on many levels. The first level is the material and historical one, which has a direct and immediate impact on the way we teach the history of philosophy. When students come to philosophy and study the history of thought as a kind of preparation for future studies in philosophy, it makes a difference, when you begin to realize that phenomenology is not just two figures with a French half-phenomenological, half-existential branch. Instead, you have a lot richer field from which to draw.
Second, philosophically, the debate becomes richer. What is exactly the phenomenological method? What is the nature of consciousness? Various problems of phenomenology are reworked in different ways by different philosophers. For example, the nature of I-consciousness, the “I,” in Gerda Walther is very different from the “I” of Edith Stein and Husserl and their position of the ego-consciousness. You just get a richer series of arguments and positions that we need to take seriously if we are going to do philosophy.
What about the other topics and authors you work on, do you see counter-narratives there?
Yes, I do. Much of current Western philosophy is revolving around Anglo-American, French, and Germany traditions. I think this is something that was set up in the 20th century. But when you look at Western philosophy, there are all kinds of philosophical traditions that work in different language groups. My idea is to help to transmit what is being said in those traditions. Those traditions, too, if they are considered, change the way, let us say, of how Husserl is understood. Husserl in French philosophy is something different than what you have been studying in German philosophy. When you learn how Husserl was so received in the Hispanic tradition in places such as Mexico or from parts of South America, you get another sensibility of it. In many ways the Hispanic scholars are very classical, but they also do their own thing that becomes fused with postcolonial theory and theology of liberation. So, phenomenology comes to play a different role in there.
Taking up a more difficult and controversial author close to Stein, what is your relation to Heidegger? Sometimes, in your work, you mention Heidegger’s problematic attitudes towards Stein and his unfriendly actions towards her, while sometimes you discuss Heidegger in a more neutral tone.
I think I just transmit the tension that Edith Stein and the women in general had with Heidegger, as well as many students that worked with Husserl and then with Heidegger as colleagues. They had a strange relationship with Heidegger. On the one hand, they did not trust him. They knew that he was bad-mouthing Husserl, while they were devoted to Husserl. They were uneasy with Heidegger even before his Nazi period. At the same time, they admired and respected him, especially his Being and Time.7Heidegger 1927/2006. That work had huge significance for the phenomenological movement.
You find in Stein’s letters comments about Heidegger’s behavior and how uneasy she was with him and how he treated her. At the same time, she reads Heidegger’s work. At the end of Finite and Eternal Being, there is abundance of interpretation of three or four of Heidegger’s works. The same is true for Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Gerda Walther, in contrast, had a very tense relationship with Heidegger. Of the women phenomenologists, she was the least interested in his work. She was a Marxist and leaned more towards psychology and sociology.
So, on one hand, as a human being, you have problems with Heidegger’s careerism, which his anti-Semitism, with his sexism. On the other hand, you have these early works of Heidegger on Kant and his Being and Time that were very respected.
I have myself the same tension when I teach Heidegger. I do not teach him that much anymore, but when I had to teach his work, I was always negotiating. On the one hand, there are these amazing ideas. But then there is also this person, and you must wonder whether some of those ideas reflect his political commitment. There are some Nazi ideas involved, but at the same time, there are philosophical ideas that are not related to those things.
In my own undergraduate studies in phenomenology, my courses were largely on Heidegger, it was almost cultist. A little of Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology8Calcagno refers to Husserl’s famous lecture series “Die Idee der Phänomenologie” from 1907. It was published posthumously as the second volume of Husserliana. was included, but there was no serious reading of it. I had to do that much later. What I found bothering during my studies was the idea that Heidegger could explain everything. My teachers were very intolerant towards anything else. So, I ran away.
On political impasse and political phenomenology
How would you describe the topic of your latest book, the phenomenon of political impasse and why is it an important topic to investigate?
I think there are two claims that I really make in that work on political impasse. The first claim is that the neoliberal economics and politics are in the center and dominant in the current world. To use Antonio Negri’s words, the empire that neoliberalism has established has produced a new class of people with a new structure which helps fortify further the dominance and hegemony of the neoliberal model.9Negri & Hardt 2001; Negri & Hardt 2005. I call this the impasse. Power is classically understood as the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. What neoliberalism has done is that it has generated a class of people that neither suffer oppression— economic, racial, sexual, etc.—nor have power. They are impotent. They cannot really change their situation. Even voting is, or at least seems, pointless.
It is not meant to deny that there is a rule. Part of the neoliberalist strategy is to keep the distinction between the ruler and the rest, but by also immobilizing vast amounts of people by making them feel that there is nothing that can be done. No change, no action. The neoliberal strategy has generated this odd class of people who are somewhere in between the rule and oppression and who are impotent both towards the oppression and the ruling. In this situation, you as a citizen are comfortable enough to collude with the oppression. You cannot do anything about it either. It is too massive on both ends. Many find themselves in this political state of political impasse. It crosses the globe.
And that is the first claim. The second claim is, what that pressure when you live in the impasse does is that, either you will go mad because you cannot do anything and you feel helpless or it pushes you inward, forces a new way to think and a new way to be. So, you turn inward to think of how you can be different. How can I make myself different when the outer world really gives me no possibility? This means to engage with kinds of neo-stoic and Arendtian principles of self-constitution and constancy, with those kinds of inner movements that could generate another model or another actor to change in this. This could generate actors that can bring about something new.
I recently read an essay by Maria Zambrano, in Spanish on Seneca.10Zambrano 1944. She highlights that Seneca has great significance politically and philosophically. Unlike is sometimes thought, Seneca did not flee the world as a stoic philosopher. Stoicism was rather a way for him to bear the ugliness of this world and the excess of that Roman world. He tried to argue that bearing it is a mode of resistance, which allows us to turn inward and recreate a sense of the self and ethics.
So, what did Seneca leave us? Zambrano says that Seneca gave to political philosophy a sweeter kind of reasoning. Not logic, deduction, or induction, but the reason that gives you consolation. When things are miserable on the outside, you can still continue, you can resist, and you can move forward in the hope that things will get better. Seneca, with this kind of sweeter, formal, and gentler kind of reasoning lets you experience existential thinking and allows you to keep going, to keep fighting.
In general, there is no such established field as the phenomenology of power. Classical phenomenology does not really discuss power, at least not in the sense that it would be widely considered phenomenological and if we don’t consider Arendt as a classical phenomenologist. But in your book on political impasse, you take up the question of power in the ruler-ruled relation and in the lack of experience of power. How do you think of the possibility of phenomenology of power, do you consider it a meaningful possibility?
I think it really is important. In the American context, there is the Critical Phenomenology group, but they largely view power within the feminist decolonial narrative. So, the question of power returns to the material-historical world to understand power by its effects on certain groups. You can do phenomenology that way. But I think there is also room for phenomenology where you look at the essence of something like political power, which I really think is mysterious, which I really do not think we understand. I do not think power can only be seen in its effects. I think that there are other dimensions of power to be discovered. Fanon points a bit in this direction, but critical phenomenology looks at its application much like critical theory.
About your future work. On your university web page, you say that you are “developing an account on micro and passive sources or selfhood, especially in relation to types.” You also mention that you are planning to write a book about this topic titled The Life that is not my own. What do you mean by micro and passing sources of selfhood and how is it a life that is not my own?
In phenomenology, one of the greatest contributions to psychology and philosophy outside phenomenology is the whole description of ownness. It has many senses and many constitutive layers that go with it. But ownness is not only a phenomenological term. It appears in political philosophy, especially in liberal philosophy in the idea of property, in what it is to own things.
Thus, there are two senses of ownness. One from political narratives that materializes ownness as one owning something as property. The ownness in phenomenology is about the possession of the self, the relationship one has with oneself, especially values. I think that these two kinds of ownness have been put into conflict by capitalism and by the contemporary political structure. The political narrative dominates the idea of ownness. You have the idea of the possessive individual that really is what they own. And yet, phenomenologically, you have something like ownness rather as a possibility.
So, the political narrative conflicts with what we actually experience as ownness. Therefore, we do not really understand our ownness. We are not sure we have it, having it all constantly being compromised by relationships with others, by being in power structures and so on. Thus, you have a broken sense of ownness that meets this possessive individualism that tells you can own anything, be anything, all you need to do is to possess and control something.
I think what happens there is that when these two things meet, it causes deep suffering in individuals. Phenomenologically we learn that you own very little in the end, you do not really have control of your autonomic systems, your unconscious, or the external circumstances. You are not even sure sometimes whether the self or this occasional self that you have really is identical with you. The only phenomenologist who really understands this kind of brake is Gerda Walther. She has the idea of the not-I (nicht-Ich), psychotic breaks, the splits in the personhood between the body and spirit that cause all kinds of problems, while Husserl and Stein have a pretty firm concept of “I.” So much of our life is just lived, like Adorno says, das Leben lebt, the life just lives itself.
This conflicts with the narrative of possession, control, property, and materiality, and this really causes us to be sick. You have the possessive individual who also confronts psychologically the fact that you probably own very little. Even the sense of your life, your value of it, and how you see yourself is always changing. I think this just creates a schizoid society. The life that is not my own tries to analyze how this life that we are supposed to own we really do not. We own fragments of it. Maybe we know our limits. But this narrative creates a pressure on you. What I would like to do is to bring some kind of relief.
