Belonging / Zugehörigkeit

»Belonging« is usually discussed in the context of social participation. However, the English »belonging« also associates – similar to the German word ›zugehörig‹– the aspect of possession and property: it is also about »belongings«. In the following, various examples from religion, politics, literature, and film will be used to discuss the narratives that intertwine social belonging and material possession and reveal as well as conceal their (neo)mythical connection.

Western Culture knows only a single judicial concept of ownership: private property. Private property meaning, all things belong to people in the same normalized way. A closer look reveals that our relationship with things is more complex than that and confirms a gradual belonging of things to persons that stretches from an organic or intimate property to things being only vaguely attached to persons. This essay tries to outline this plural concept of ways of owning.

In my paper I discuss belonging to a community as a lived experience aiming at interrogating with Hannah Arendt the dynamics of constituting or reshaping communities through action. The ungraspable »we« of communities allows for both constraining narratives and initiating new forms of belonging as a response to the need to belong. Acting together creates communities which can overturn the often painful experience of belonging to unbearable social units.

Our time as the age of fragmented cultural ontologies, acceleration, and ongoing socio-cultural transformations is the age of the quest of belonging par excellence. My paper deals with this quest out of a singular culturally situated perspective – the work of the Indologist and comparative philosopher Daryush Shayegan (1935–2018) – which despite its singularity hints at a general hypothesis: the recognition of a tamed cultural schizophrenia can be an inspiring model of belonging for our time.

The books by Annie Ernaux and Didier Eribon can be interpreted as testimonies of the struggle for belonging. With their rich descriptions of growing up in poverty, of shame and degradation, they make an important contribution to the analysis of orders of belonging. Educational institutions play a significant role in this. In this way, Ernaux and Eribon shed light on the mechanisms through which belonging is created or denied.

»[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ›ancestors‹.« These words lead to the heart of a dispute between Ralph Ellison and the Dissent editor Irving Howe in the early sixties which had an impact far beyond literary criticism and scholarship. From this well documented controversy we can learn something about both the power of attributions of belonging and the art of evading them.

My contribution interrogates how to conceive belonging and how to clarify conceptual connotations of this and other concepts as ›home‹ or a ›dwelling in a place‹ according to their meaning for orienting our social life and identities. Methodically, I start with the phenomenological consideration of ›operative concepts‹ and how these might be reflexively brought into work with experiencing loss of belonging, negation of a home to stay in, and infraction of identity as they are expressed in personal life-stories.

Based on her own experience of long years of statelessness, Arendt demands that the right of the individual to belong to a political community be recognized as the only human right. However, while the »right to have rights« can serve as a regulative idea, belonging that respects an individual’s personhood can neither be decreed nor granted but must have constitutive meaning for the individual. In the article, belonging therefore is described as different ways of a human’s being-in-the-world or simply as different ways of experience.

Sophia Gräfe: Noch einmal nachdenken. Tierforschung für Philosophen (Martin Böhnert, Methodologische Signaturen. Ein philosophischer Versuch zur Systematisierung der empirischen Erforschung des Geistes von Tieren). Arne Klawitter: Die Erfahrung des Fleisches und die Hermeneutik des Begehrens. Michel Foucaults vierter Band von »Sexualität und Wahrheit« (Michel Foucault, Die Geständnisse des Fleisches). Nikola Mirkovic: Anerkennung als Autorität (Alexandre Kojève, Der Begriff der Autorität). Johannes Röß: Krisenhaftes Denken. Erkundungen zu Georg Simmels Philosophie und ihrer Wirkung (Gerald Hartung/Heike Koenig/Tim-Florian Steinbach (Hrsg.), Der Philosoph Georg Simmel). Volker Schürmann: Bekennender Anti-Reduktionismus (Thomas Fuchs, Verteidigung des Menschen. Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie).