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.
The paper focuses on the possibilities to constitute meaning in the
?borderline- situations? (Jaspers) of the social sphere, such as the loss of
validity of orientation within and experience of reality in the socially
shared structures of the lifeworld. On the one hand, I will refer to A.
Schutz? and his constitution-analysis of foreign understanding and of shared
meaning; on the other hand, I bear onto I. Kert?sz literary project to
narrate the biography of an Auschwitz-survivor as close to his experiential
perspective as possible. I will focus both on the concept of constitution and
of interpretation with respect to their enabling of the transcending of a
typologized everyday?s world which suppresses subjective meaning and its
individual articulation. The main guideline is the problem how identity ?
i.e. a life-story ? is configured out of subjective meaning without recourse
to everyday reality. A. Schutz?s and Th. Luckmann?s note on a range of social
transcendences and on biographical categories referring to the constitution
of a socially shared meaning offer a theoretical perspective for dealing with
constitutive differences within the reach of understanding social meaning;
Kert?sz? narrative mode expandes this theoretical stance as it problematizes
exemplary subjective experience.
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