Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Sebbah, François-David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804772754 ISBN 13: 9780804772754

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, Testing the Limit claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

François-David Sebbah is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Compiègne in France and was Program Director at the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is the author of Levinas: Ambiguïtés de l'altérité (2000).

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TESTING THE LIMIT

Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological TraditionBy François-David Sebbah

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Presses Universitaires de France
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7275-4

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................ixIntroduction..........................................................................................................................1PART I: TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RATIONALITY.............................................................................151 Research............................................................................................................................172 Intentionality and Non-Givenness....................................................................................................343 The Question of the Limit...........................................................................................................58PART II: THE FRONTIER OF TIME.........................................................................................................67of the Consciousness of Internal Time.................................................................................................752 Anticipating Phenomenology: Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the Impossible and Possibility.....................................881: The Time of Ordinary Phenomena and Phantoms (Jean-Toussaint Desanti; Jacques Derrida).............................................882: The Impossibility of the Gift: Within the Extreme Possibility of Givenness (Jacques Derrida; Jean-Luc Marion).....................104PART III: THE TEST OF SUBJECTIVITY....................................................................................................1231 Subjectivity in Contemporary French Phenomenology...................................................................................1272 The Birth of Subjectivity in Levinas................................................................................................1424 Spectral Subjectivity According to Jacques Derrida..................................................................................174PART IV: PHENOMENOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND SUBJECTIFICATION..............................................................................1911 The Rhythm of Otherwise Than Being According to Levinas.............................................................................2021: Reading Levinas and Thinking Entirely Otherwise....................................................................................2022: Rhythm as the Question of Intentionality in Levinas................................................................................2122 The Rhythm of Life According to Michel Henry........................................................................................219Conclusion............................................................................................................................243Abbreviations.........................................................................................................................257Notes.................................................................................................................................261Bibliography..........................................................................................................................313

Chapter One

Research

The field and focus of research

Husserlian phenomenological methodology has many descendants. And the current phenomenological landscape is not merely diverse but at the very least full of tensions. It is astonishing to see, for example, the many different—if not contradictory—claims, such as those of Hubert L. Dreyfus, who claims Husserl—though unrecognizable in his immediate offspring—as a father figure for classical cognitivism, and that of Levinas, who claims to radicalize Husserl's insistence on originarity by designating Alterity as the unconstitutable underlying all appearance, all appealing to the same ancestor, by the same name, in the same space. Looking closer, we are encouraged to see that each of these descendants appears to be an absolutely legitimate—and an absolutely monstrous—heir, following the adopted perspective—and is that not the law of all filiation? The legitimate Levinas refuses all naturalization of thought and of consciousness in general, continuing work begun by Husserl and Heidegger but separating himself from all models of an ontic understanding of being. Highly suspect in the eyes of "phenomenology as a rigorous science," he meditates on a transcendence exceeding all thought, sometimes manifested in a style that could be called poetic or even "laudatory." Dreyfus's reading of Husserl is also, doubtless, "legitimate," relying on the Husserlian description of the noeme as a hierarchized group of formal rules, which thus perpetuates the rigorous necessity for a mathesis of lived experience. This is no less "monstrous," in that it naturalizes consciousness and perhaps thus confuses rigor and exactitude.

As exemplars of the current state of phenomenology, these progeny seem to have no possibility of communication between them: their fundamental differences result from a chiasmic connection to their common source.

It seems hardly necessary to ask here who respects and who betrays phenomenology: this would imply asking oneself to be the executor of what phenomenology actually is; one would then necessarily have to ask if such a position could in any simple way be philosophical. Fairly prejudicially, it would be a matter of asking if this formative power over phenomenology is a sign of its vigor and fecundity or contrarily a sign of its weakness, a weakness that would render it colonizable and manipulable by other, radically diverse, projects: "theological spiritualism" or "formalist naturalism"—the name "phenomenology" could only be shared in and as an empty set.

If it is striking from a viewpoint one might call diachronic, this diversity is also marked out from a synchronic viewpoint: one can only marvel at the extraordinary capacity of phenomenology, as first and foremost a method, to invest in different fields. Ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, ethnology, psychiatry, psychology: all these fields find a way of approaching phenomenology, but in none of them—and this can fairly be stated from a strictly factual point of view—does phenomenology impose itself as a dominant methodology. From this viewpoint, too, the question arises of knowing whether such diversity is a sign of fecundity or of weakness. Having this question regarding the fruitfulness of the phenomenological method in mind at and as the very heart of phenomenological diversity, we are inducted into a family.

Thanks to geographical and chronological criteria, this family can be characterized: we concern ourselves here with the most contemporary French phenomenology, after Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, which is still in the making. The principal works we have in view are those of Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, and Jacques Derrida, but in our attempt to lay out a "family resemblance," we will also be led to consider other works, such as those of Henri Maldiney, Jacques Garelli, and Marc Richir, who, so to speak, "swim in the same water," Merleau-Pontian "water"—or rather, that of Jean-Toussaint Desanti,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804772754
• ISBN 13: 9780804772754
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland