Critique of phenomenology amounts to a tiny piece of the puzzle that is Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s thought-provoking Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx. According to the spot allocated to it, phenomenology fits in with the other manifestations of classical metaphysics, bent on preserving the transcendental privilege of immutable truth. In what follows, I will argue that such placement may not do justice to phenomenology, which, in its most critical manifestations, is an ally of hermeneutic communism. This particular piece of the puzzle belongs on the other side of the intellectual and historical barricades, and, more importantly, holds the potential for mediating between the various opposed camps—description and interpretation, realism and anti-realism, the strong and the weak, metaphysics and postmetaphysics—that Vattimo and Zabala keep apart.

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