50. Blanchot, “Penser l’apocalypse,” 45. This passage is quoted in Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas, 68.
51. Lyotard, Phenomenology.
52. Some of these are collected in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. [A partial English translation is available as Discovering Existence with Husserl; other essays included in the French edition are not in that volume but are available elsewhere in English translation. See n. 64.]
53. Paul Ricoeur makes the same claim in “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans le Krisis de Husserl,” 167.
54. Levinas, Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. [Originally published in 1930.]
55. Hering, “Recension de E. Levinas,” 479.
56. Ibid., 478.
57. Levinas’s distancing from Heidegger is often dated back to World War II, but in fact Levinas is not entirely Heideggerian even in his first works.
58. Consider a reproach to Husserl that will be ceaselessly repeated in his later work: “For a theory of intuition, the primacy of theoretical consciousness is of the first importance, as we shall see later. The act of intuition, which brings us into contact with being, will be first and foremost a theoretical act, an objectifying act, and it remains so despite the modifications that Ideen [Ideas] will try to introduce in the notion of an objectifying act” (Theory of Intuition, 63).
59. Ibid., 119 (emphasis in original).
60. Ibid., 155.
61. This theme, already present in The Theory of Intuition, will clearly become central in his later work, as he says in “The Ruin of Representation” [1959].
62. The theme of “nonintentional” consciousness can be found in Levinas’s first texts and is a characteristic marker. On the explicit development of this theme, see his much later [1991] work Entre Nous.
63. The multiplicity of Levinas’s sources and influences has often been noted. In this particular case, his early education, i.e., his Hasidism, seems decisive. This religious movement is distinguished by a concern to promote, against the flagrant intellectualism of Talmudic scholars, a concrete, carnal, immediate piety.
64. Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” 70. [This 1965 article is included in the 1967 French edition of En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger but is not available in the English translation. See n. 52.]
65. The link between an escape from representation and anti-intellectualism does not go without saying; I have shown in Critique de la représentation how a line of thought could use reason against representation. But the connection is present in Levinas.
66. Bataille, “From Existentialism to the Primacy of Economy.”
67. I am of course evoking the title of Michel Henry’s book on Kandinsky, Seeing the Invisible.
68. Benoist, “Dépassements de la métaphysique,” 167.
69. Janicaud, “Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” 19.
70. Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” This is a special issue of the journal, whose title, “Tourner la phénoménologie,” I have taken as the heading for this section. [Literally, “to turn phenomenology,” or, more loosely, “turning phenomenology.” See n. 46.] This special issue asks, from its introduction, if phenomenology “is more in alignment with a scientific or rather artistic type of project” [Choplin, “Tourner la phénoménologie,” 147], and seems to represent, if not all, at least a significant part of the various trends in current phenomenology. Thus, if Jocelyn Benoist [“Dépassements de la métaphysique”] defines it as a philosophy marked from the beginning, in the same way as the analytic movement, by scientificity, Hugues Choplin considers it as a “radically literary style of writing”; Natalie Depraz [“Le tournant pratique de la phénoménologie”] puts phenomenology “in touch” with the “cognitive sciences” as well as “gnosis,” while Gilles Grelet [“Anti-phénoménologie”] understands it as a pure gnostic theory whose problem is “that the angel would arrive.”
71. Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” 200, Choplin’s emphasis on “metaphysics.” The idea that all philosophy is metaphysics and that, therefore, to escape metaphysics means “the end of philosophy” is just as forcefully underlined by Gilles Grelet, who writes in the same issue, “A word of warning: phenomenology is understood here as an opportunity to deploy an anti-philosophical theory and method” (“Antiphénoménologie,” 211). We see that “antiphilosophy” or “post-philosophy” are not to be found only in Rorty. It is a theme that crosses paradigms.
72. Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” 199, in a section heading.
73. Ibid., 199.
74. Ibid., 201, quoting Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 176.
75. I take these two examples, of course, for if Derrida embodies Continental philosophy, the idea of Robert Musil as a philosopher is not self-evident. And hence we can see that, above and beyond the paradigmatic disputes, certain temptations are shared.
76. Given that the aim of this book is to understand philosophy as an autonomous and distinct discipline, a full response to this question about the overlaps between art, science, and philosophy cannot really be given until the inquiry has been completed.
77. Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” 199.
78. In this section devoted to contemporary phenomenology as “metaphysics” or literature, I am using the term “metaphysics” in the sense employed by its detractors.
79. An accusation that transcends the differences between approaches, for it is made by Derrida and deconstruction, the existential phenomenologists, and even analytics.
80. It goes without saying that I’m not making any comparison between these two absolutely incommensurable uses of the term “phenomenology.” I use the example, or counterexample, of Hegel simply because he is taken to have raised to its summit the demand for metaphysics’ self-transparence and thereby for the domination of the real, while in my view it is the existential phenomenologists who have pushed this demand to its climax, where Hegel “let go” of contingency.
81. Recall that the Phenomenology of Spirit is the first part of what would be, according to Hegel’s title, the “system of science,” or Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science, that would encompass three moments or deployments of truth—logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of mind—moments for which the phenomenology of spirit was a propaedeutic conceived as a deconstruction of the illusions of consciousness.
82. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 60, para. 95.
83. Ibid., 66, para. 110 (emphasis in original).
84. This is the first sentence of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past.—trans.
85. Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 183.
86. Ibid.
87. Fontaine, “Le statut de l’individualité chez Merleau-Ponty.”
88. Beckett, Unnamable.—trans.
89. On the centrality of this “image,” see Saint-Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux elements de l’être, which takes as its epigraph a phrase of the later Merleau-Ponty, “Encroachment, which is, for me, philosophy.”
90. Having said this, it is not at all my intent to criticize Merleau-Ponty but to pose the question of the status of these concepts. In so doing, I cannot but repeat what his most talented interpreters, like Saint-Aubert, have said: “The wealth of semantic overtures nevertheless introduces a possible byproduct, confusion … To successfully keep oneself from any form of univocity, … the philosopher sometimes moves within the margins of equivocity … And when this image [i.e., encroachment] is excessively generalized, it narrowly avoids a new abyss, the risk of self-destruction. [The ‘flesh of the world’ becomes that] about which nothing more can be said, since it is everything. The ‘flesh of the world’ of the last writings poses this problem most acutely” (ibid., 20). Later, Saint-Aubert recalls what has been noted long before, that the “metaphorical” writing of Merleau-Ponty’s last works is “more literary than properly philosophical.”
91. “Le corps propre”
(my own body) in the French translation of Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book; Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (henceforth Ideas II) is, in the English translation, “the Body,” with a capital “B.”—trans.
92. Husserl, Ideas II, 61.
93. With Dominique Janicaud, I must say that phenomenological description is an important and essential part of philosophy, but that it is not all of philosophy, which can be defined other than by description. I will come back to this point.
94. What Paul Ricoeur, in his French translation of Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book; General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (henceforth Ideas I), terms “le vécu” (lived experience) is, in the English translation, “the mental process.” The earlier English translation (by W. R. Boyce Gibson) rendered it as “experience.”—trans.
95. Husserl, Ideas I, 175 [translation modified].
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., 175–76.
98. Ibid., 176 [translation modified].
99. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 164.
100. Ibid., 166 [translation modified].
101. In “Notes de lecture et notes de travail sur et autour de Descartes” [unpublished manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque Nationale], quoted by Saint-Aubert as the epigraph to the introduction of Du lien des êtres aux elements de l’être (17).
102. On reflection and its various possible definitions, including the specular reflection of an image in a mirror and the optic reflection of light on an obstruction, see my Critique de la représentation. Merleau-Ponty outlines a form of reflection other than those whose typology I described in that text—namely my own body’s unconscious reflection.
103. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 249.
104. If we follow the semantic chain deployed in Merleau-Ponty’s texts, “transcendental” is a synonym for an “overlooking position,” for “transparency,” and for “self-coincidence.” It may be admitted that these terms describe the Cartesian ego, which is beyond the world to the extent that the world is suspended from it, and which is coincident with itself by the fact that thinking and the thought are equal at the moment of the cogito’s utterance. “Transparency” might even be accepted, if the attributes exhaust substance—which, for all that, Descartes does not say. But I confess that for Kant, normally considered the father of the transcendental, I do not know how to explain these adjectives.
105. Benoist, “Faut-il défendre la phénoménologie?” 64 (emphasis added).
106. I allow myself to use this negative expression because Benoist, more competent and better versed than I am in the history of phenomenology, describes this phenomenology as “kindergarten phenomenology with which certain contemporary French phenomenology often appears to identify itself” and defines it as “the pathos of impairment and affection” (ibid.).
107. Three concepts put forward in Levinas, Otherwise Than Being [henceforth OTB].
108. Levinas, OTB, 5.
109. Ibid., 6.
110. Ibid., 7.
111. Ibid., 6.
112. In English in the original.—trans.
113. Levinas, OTB, 62.
114. Ibid., 47.
115. Ibid., 49.
116. Ibid., 144.
117. Ibid., 145.
118. Ibid., 49.
119. Ibid., 74.
120. Ibid., 111, et al. On this noncoincidence with oneself or the contradiction of thinking as trauma in Levinas, see Bernet, “Le sujet traumatisé”; Waldenfels, Grenzen der Normalisierung; Gondek, “Trauma”; Haar, “L’obsession de l’autre”; and finally and especially Duportail, Intentionnalité et trauma, especially chap. 2. Duportail analyzes this notion of noncoincidence with oneself in Otherwise Than Being to show how its explication, its legitimation, and its continuation are found, in fine, in Lacan’s notion of “trauma.”
121. Levinas, OTB, 46.
122. Ibid., 150–51.
123. On this point, see Levinas, Totality and Infinity.
124. Levinas, OTB, 7.
125. Ibid., 155.
126. Ibid., 7 (emphasis in original).
127. Ibid., 156.
128. Ibid.
129. Longinus, On the Sublime.
130. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 135.
131. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings. [This translation combines two French texts, Quatre lectures talmudiques (published in 1968) and Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelle lectures talmudiques (1977). Since Otherwise Than Being was published in 1974, Thomas-Fogiel is referring in particular to the latter French text.]
132. Gondek, “Trauma,” 456.
133. Derrida writes, “We live in and of difference, that is … ‘the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets’” (Writing and Difference, 153 [Derrida is quoting Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 24]). That said, if I intend not at all to criticize Levinas’s recourse to religion, I can express certain doubts about the practices of the numerous disciples who take up or imitate his style without leaning upon the prophets, even though this reference seems to me to give Levinas’s text its meaning. To speak of literature is to mask the religious aspect (Choplin); to replace the specific religion that Levinas consults with gnosis (Depraz, Grelet) is not to see that oxymoron—the inexpressible in the expressed, the invisible in the visible, the unsayable in the sayable—is inherent in prophetic discourse, whose status and structure have been struggled with by religious commentaries throughout the centuries, and which Levinas’s text takes up very specifically. Briefly, it seems to me that Levinas’s recourse to the prophets is not one “module” among others, which could be replaced by another (gnosis, literature, flesh, desire, or another). Thus, the problematic of incarnation introduced by Christianity because it says “the infinite in the finite” could only take up as such the theme of the oxymoron, inherent in the discourse before the incarnation. In a word, one subject cannot be substituted for another as if Levinas’s theme did not have coherence in its very demand for incoherence. In my understanding, the prophetic, and thus oxymoronic, style is the very content of Levinas’s religious thought, which, he himself says, is no longer philosophy.
134. In an interview with Christian Bouchindhomme, Hilary Putnam says that Frege’s “semantic triangle [sign, meaning, denotation] is a catastrophe.” “A certain number of risks” are incurred, he says here, “depending upon which point is emphasized”: if we emphasize the sign, we run the risk of relativism, while conversely reference (denotation) induces scientism. As for meaning, it is liable to two pitfalls: mentalism through intentionality or Platonic objectivism, which absolutizes truths (Putnam, “Les voies de la raison,” 55).
135. That is what I maintained in the introduction to Critique de la représentation.
136. Searle does not propose a supersession. I have discussed him only to show a possible reading of Austin, but Austin is much more “scientistic” than Searle in his declarations of the necessary dissolution of philosophy.
137. In a chapter on Marin (“Le signe et l’image: Louis Marin et la critique de la representation”) in Le concept et le lieu, I have shown how he tried, with an original theory of signification, to overcome the opposition between the iconic and linguistic orders. For Marin, the sign and the face have as a common point a dual structure of transitivity and reflexivity: “to say something about” and “to understand oneself to be saying something about.” This common structure allows Marin to analyze the Port-Royal theory of signs with the same instruments as for a painting by Poussin. This connection explains one of the most basic aspects of Marin’s venture, to tirelessly flush out the procedures by which the representation of painting realizes itself as a representation, a self-realization that is itself unrepresentable.
3. The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example
1. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests.
2. Habermas, Philosophical Discou
rse of Modernity.
3. Habermas, Truth and Justification.
4. In English in the original.—trans.
5. Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, 13.
6. Luhmann, “Systemtheoretische Argumentationen,” 326ff., cited in Ferry, Habermas, 391–92.
7. Perhaps because Jean-Marc Ferry does not give sufficient attention to Habermas’s evolution, he reduces the contradiction or tension in Habermas’s work to a single moment. Thus, simultaneously agreeing with both Luhmann and Frank, he writes: “In this respect, there is a question left unanswered, that is … to know what, in the final analysis, is more fundamental: is it language … or is it, on the contrary, reflexive activity itself … or is it language that possesses us, and not we who possess language … or should we rather regard communication to be somehow prior to language, or at least that it is this capacity for practical self-reflection that allows us to go beyond the constituted authority of language—that historical facticity—to reflect upon it, to cause it to evolve, and to renew it. Thus, the question is to know whether, at bottom, we are subjects or not” (Ferry, “La philosophie moderne face à la société moderne,” 32–33). As we shall see in what follows, it is not at all obvious, in my view, that this contradiction structures Habermas’s philosophy.
8. Habermas, Theory and Practice.
9. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
10. Rivelaygue, “Habermas et le maintien de la philosophie,” 296.
11. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 276.
12. There are multiple ways to interpret Wittgenstein: the reading asserted by the first-wave analytical positivists, as well as the second wave’s interpretation (Cavell), which criticizes the first, the radical skeptics’ (Rorty), or the deconstructionists’, or even the naturalists’ (there are a few). My point is not to catalog the different guises that Wittgenstein has been given in the twentieth century, which would require an entirely different book. Here I mention only one of Wittgenstein’s possible guises.
The Death of Philosophy Page 41