Abstract

In this project, I consider the relation between the emergence of the concept of everyday life within a variety of discourses in the late 20th century, and the crisis in disciplinary knowledge that has plagued the humanities and social sciences in recent years. I maintain that everyday life presents not just a new, hitherto neglected, object of study, but is itself the figure of an emerging epistemological/ontological paradigm that significantly challenges many of the conceptual commonplaces of Modernity. ;In particular, I consider attempts in recent philosophy to move "beyond the linguistic turn," in order to make philosophy more worldly. Many such attempts fail, I argue, because of a reluctance to allow for an encounter with everyday life. Philosophy as discourse depends upon the construction of everyday life as its disciplinary limit and it resists any conclusions that would endanger the persistence of this limit. But a truly worldly philosophy requires reflection upon its own conditions of possibility and hence requires a reconsideration of its conception of everyday life. ;I consider everyday life, first, as a challenge to the epistemological presuppositions of Modernity, which persist undigested within the linguistic turn. The thematization of the concept of everyday life allows us to see how Modernity has depended upon the occlusion of everyday life in order to preserve its notion of a detached and specular reason. Secondly, I consider everyday life as a utopian figure that allows us to flesh-out what is at stake in the "recovery of the human sensorium," to which Walter Benjamin refers. In order to intervene within "the spectacle" that is consumer society and the aestheticized politics that are its expression, we need, I argue, to begin to live in sensuous relation to the world