A reading of Husserl’s “life-world” against the loss of history in the context of postcolonial Aboriginal Australia.

Recently, Husserl’s phenomenology of the “life-world” has been givenspecial emphasis in those areas of the social sciences that are concerned with the crisisof values and meaning in our contemporary world. Husserl conceived the concept of“life-world” as a final introduction to his system of transcendental phenomenology, theproject of a lifetime. As Husserl puts it in The Crisis of the European Sciences andTranscendental Phenomenology (7), phenomenology is not only the act of “senseinvestigation”(Besinnung), but also the universal “coming to self-awareness”(Selbstbesinnung) of humanity in a reflective manner, and herein precisely lieshumanity’s responsibility towards itself. Husserl expected phenomenology to be theultimate universal science, destined to ground all human achievements in the soil of the“life-world” (33-34). But can Husserl’s phenomenology accomplish this task effectivelyoutside the horizon of Europe, and outside the context of a critique of modern scienceand technology? So as to try to answer this question, our aim will be to introduce somekey concepts and notions that characterize Husserl’s phenomenology of the “life-world”or philosophy of genesis in the context of Aboriginal identity in Australia. For thispurpose, we will offer a reading of Sally Morgan’s My Place, an autobiographical novelwhich narrates the personal quest of a woman of Aboriginal descend to find her rootsand identity in a Westernized world. In the course of our analysis, we will describe inwhat ways some of Husserl’s notions related to the life-world are hindered inpostcolonial contexts, and whether a phenomenological analysis can provide a means ofreconcilement. Finally, we will also ask ourselves about the possibility of aphenomenological idea of history that respects the idiosyncracies of historicity.