UC Santa Cruz

This thesis argues that the twentieth-century encounter between phenomenology and dialectical materialism provides vital resources for reconsidering the possibility of revolutionary consciousness as immanent to the daily life of struggle. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács famously insists on establishing a distinction between empirical and revolutionary class consciousness; the latter, he says, is an objective possibility that must be rationally imputed to the proletariat in virtue of its position within the capitalist production process. My claim is that the fragmented history of phenomenological Marxism contains the lineaments of a revised approach, one that, while maintaining a critical distance towards the empirically given, attempts to rediscover the possibility of revolutionary consciousness, not merely in the objective situation of the proletariat, but in how that situation is actually lived in the historical force of its contradictions.The dissertation develops this approach across two parts. In Part I, I examine a pair of efforts, relatively neglected in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, to bring phenomenology and dialectical materialism into dialogue around the question of revolutionary subjectivity. Chapter 1 reconstructs Enzo Paci’s Husserlian reading of Marx, seeking to clarify the philosophical and political imperative at its heart: the imperative to return to the human subject whose historical operations constitute, but are occluded and negated by, the abstract categories of bourgeois political economy. Chapter 2 considers the underappreciated discussion of working class consciousness in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which I explicate in connection to his existential-phenomenological account of space as a site of social polarization and potential compulsion. In Part II, my aim is to open a line of inquiry between phenomenology and Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist critique of everyday life. Chapter 3 pursues this task by surveying Lefebvre’s forceful criticism of the phenomenological tradition, whose premium on contemplation, he argues, ultimately devalues everyday life in capitalist society as a one-sidedly trivial or inauthentic mode of existence. Focusing on Lefebvre’s dialectical conception of lived experience, I show how his project transforms the basic concerns of phenomenology within and towards a critical knowledge of everyday life inseparable from the action of its revolutionary rehabilitation. The final chapter investigates the concepts of residue and sedimentation in Lefebvre’s project, arguing that they are integral to his sustained effort to redefine class struggle on the worldwide level of uneven development. As a whole, the dissertation lays the groundwork for a phenomenological critique of everyday life, a critique that aims to salvage the possibility of revolutionary consciousness in the impoverished human core of capitalism, the mundane repetition of estrangement.