Actions, Imagined Communities and the Question of Power

Abstract

If human action cannot be understood separately from subjectivity, as the phenomenological tradition has shown, with this article I seek to explore the relationship between subjectivity and community, in what can be taken as an intersubjective consciousness constituted by the phenomenological totality of a particular way of being human -an anthropical image-. Thus, if such consciousness is intersubjective, it is precisely because it implies the same way of being and acting in others. This way of being and acting is the expression of a certain power, not only that of persisting in the actualisation of this anthropical image, but also that of incarnating it in progressive degrees of perfection. This power, therefore, although it is to a greater degree in those subjects who incarnate it more perfectly, whom we can call elites, it is also to an essential degree in the other co-subjects. Acting in a certain way implies a meaning and an interest, both of which are particularly vested in the community’s elites.