Which key concepts are crucial for conceptualizing the political in a phenomenological way? With focuses on methodological groundwork the proposed issue will by examining six key concepts that are taken from the phenomenological tradition and will be further developed in terms of political inquiries: field, situativity, plurality, corporeal difference, quasi-transcendentality, and style. The field of inquiry starts by questioning seemingly unchangeable conditions causing oppression, discrimination, or other forms of injustice. In phenomenological reflection, they prove to be institutions (Stiftungen) which produce fields of meaning that need to be examined in their historical genesis and future transformability. In the sense that they are both contingent (historical) and constitutive, they can be called quasi-transcendental. What can also be analyzed is how they inscribe themselves into lived bodies and are manifested in specific styles of behavior and perception. Political phenomenology therefore takes its point of departure from the concrete situatedness of subjects, who stand in the ambivalence of transcendence and immanence, of irreducible embeddedness and possible transgression. This set of tools, provided mainly by French Existentialist phenomenology, can be complemented by the Arendtian notion of plurality which she conceives as the political condition as such. Plural perspectives, opinions, as well as conflicts allow the world to come in view as a disputed place, but also as a space for common action.
