Aandacht, normativiteit en onwetendheid: Repliek op focus artikel van Hans Lindahl "De normativiteit van het recht in statu nascendi"

In “Legal normativity in statu nascendi,” Hans Lindahl draws on my phenomenological account of receptive attention in the development of his phenomenological genealogy of legal normativity. While sympathetic to this project, here, I articulate a number of barriers to being receptive that might impede the redrawing of our attentional field and threaten to totalize existing norms. In particular, I describe how, in the context of everyday life, practices of (more or less active) ignorance are operative on the pre-reflective level that go against our being receptive as individuals or collectives. Then, I point to how institutions are normatively constitutive of our pre-reflective experience of the everyday world in ways we remain ignorant of, which may only become visible from certain embodied perspectives. This raises the following question for a phenomenological genealogy of legal normativity: Is ignorance, understood in this twofold way, also at play in the legal Sonderwelt, or are legal collectives (more or less) ignorant in any of these ways? If this question is answered in the affirmative, two related questions follow: Does receptive attention suffice to overcome these forms of ignorance? And does a phenomenological genealogy suffice to capture how ignorance is at work in the genesis of legal normativity?