Deutsche Gesellschaft
für phänomenologische Forschung

Lecture Series | Paper

Style

Gerhard Thonhauser

Montag 27 Oktober 2025

18:15 - 19:00

Structures of power and domination are sedimented into our lifeworld and shape our bodily habitualizations. Following Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, we can understand them as inscribed into the overall style characterizing all activities of a subject as well as the overall style characterizing the surrounding world. Together, they form the specific style of our communication with the world. These styles, however, are not universal, they are rather what differentiates us along intersecting axes of power and domination. As shown by feminist phenomenology, the phenomenology of race, the phenomenology of (dis)ability and already Merleau-Ponty’s Marxist phenomenology, power and domination are inscribed both in the comportments of the oppressed and in the embodied habits of the privileged, as well as shaping the places and spaces in which everyone moves. Thus, our being-in-the-world, in all its aspects and modalities, is always stylized. This renders the analysis of those styles a central concern for political phenomenology.