Nicolas de Warren: Original Forgiveness

Original Forgiveness Book Cover Original Forgiveness
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Nicolas de Warren
Northwestern University Press
2020
Paperback $28.00
320

Reviewed by: Fiona Utley (University of New England, Australia)

Introduction

As Nicolas de Warren’s title—Original Forgiveness—indicates, this text, working across philosophy and literature, maps out a depth of forgiveness understood through its relation to trust as a fundamental condition for human existence. The terrain explored, in what is a rich and complex book, aims to “motivate” and “explore” a way of thinking about forgiveness that goes beyond forgiveness as encounter and its basis in our sense of singular being and the freedom, autonomy, and personal interests that such framing evokes.

“We begin and end in trust” is a foundational theme throughout a meditation that ultimately finds its way to Levinas’s provocative ethics and its displacement of an ‘original freedom’ by an ‘original responsibility’ for the Other. De Warren argues that:

In this original binding of responsibility, trust is not given to the Other from my freedom, nor do I receive trust from the Other in my freedom, but rather am already entrusted with a responsibility for the Other and thus am already bound to be oneself available for the Other… (202)

The precise nature of this “original binding of responsibility” and the significance of Levinas’s ethics for thinking about forgiveness is the focus of de Warren’s final two chapters, and thus the fullness of de Warren’s argument for an original forgiveness is grounded in the context of what is often seen as a puzzling and challenging philosophy.

Recognising the challenge of the Levinasian argument, de Warren’s text begins with a focus on how we understand our experience of trust, trust’s failures, and the question of forgiveness, developing this over the first six chapters to reveal how our understandings presume an experience of binding through an originary entrustment. We are not born as individual subjects, rather, it is through our being entrusted to the care of others that we become the subjectivity that we are. The Other is, de Warren argues, a lining of our self, as we are the lining of others.

Here, we find that trust as foundational is to be understood through our being entrusted “with a responsibility for the Other” that we did not choose; rather, we find ourselves responsible. Moreover, it is through such binding that we come to be who we are as, in Levinasian terms, creaturely beings rather than the being of ontology. The issue of forgiveness is therefore unable to be conceived outside of this originary opening on to the world.

I have already committed myself down the path of forgiveness. Even if we never arrive (and we never fully arrive or arrive fully) at forgiveness, I am always walking along this path with you. In belonging to the Other in trust, we are from the beginning already, and, in this sense, ‘originally’, on the path toward—available for—forgiveness. (179)

Availability towards forgiveness is thus a structural feature of a foundational trust as entrustment. In the understanding that de Warren is building, such availability is the necessary precondition for our encounters with forgiveness. Importantly, whilst being a precondition for encounters of forgiveness, de Warren is not suggesting that our original availability forgives ‘in advance’. Rather, and in accordance with the trust that is its ground, availability “resurrects the unforgiveable one, raising them, as it were, to the standing of a person who could be forgiven or not forgiven, allowing them, as well as myself, to enter into the encounter of forgiveness” (179, my italics).

Yet, in understanding our availability to Others, we have still not arrived at the full significance of original forgiveness that de Warren is working towards. De Warren is not mounting an argument for a concept of original forgiveness that could be claimed as a “’new’ principle of forgiveness … (as duty, demand, imperative, charity, etc.)”, nor is original forgiveness “inscribable within any dialectic or dialogue of question and answer” (214). Through Levinas’s philosophy of original responsibility, de Warren is unfolding its significance as:

a forgiveness that I am, as marking the stigmata of here I am, without which, pursuant of Levinas’s thinking the significance of what it is to be a creature, beholden to an original responsibility for the Other, could not be thought to its necessary extreme: the transcendence of the Good. (214)

Our individual need to be redeemed and restored to the “ethical standing of the person” through availability to forgiveness is, thus, de Warren argues, to be returned “home to the life-world” (79). Our journey through de Warren’s discussion brings to clarity how it is an understanding of a self who is displaced “from its own self-conceited and self-regarding freedom” (204) that can make this so. Significantly, through de Warren’s exploration of Jean Amery’s account of his “catastrophic loss of trust in the world” through an “existential abandonment” (209)—the betrayal of an original entrustment as the responsibility of others—de Warren demonstrates that even in this binding of trust desecration can occur.

Thus, the understanding of original forgiveness generated here is significant for the socio-political realm, and for the question of the nature of “evil” more generally. The fundamental question of our being together in a mutual vulnerability and availability to forgiveness does not, and must not indulge others in their trespasses, but can, however, allow both individual life and human society to continue anew; an essential aspect of politics if we are to respect each other’s freedom. De Warren identifies how the trustworthiness of the world, emerging through our early infant experience, and giving our skin as border and containment a special significance (referring here to the work of Didier Anzieu), must be generated, maintained, and regenerated anew through the development of multi-perspectival narratives of the truth of our experience (referring here to Arendt).

Drawing on an impressive range of resources, de Warren’s work is a significant contribution to philosophical reflection on the nature and experience of trust and forgiveness, and an insightful and welcome reading of Levinas’s radical ethic, teasing out the implications of original responsibility through its inevitable failures and the unavoidable question of forgiveness. The overall arc of de Warren’s thought is structured to facilitate an ever-deepening reflection on what I read as its dual aims. Firstly, this is to develop an account of original forgiveness that exceeds and is the condition of possibility for forgiveness as encounter, and, secondly, in this undertaking, to take up some of the unfinished suggestive aspects of Levinas’s radical ethic, specifically his claim that “to be myself is not to be definitive being, but being myself is to be pardoned” (245).

Our investments in thinking forgiveness as anchored in a specific encounter are strong, reflecting, and supported by, conceptions of the self as a singular, self-made individual, who has autonomy and rights. In many ways this is rightly so—understanding the significance of trust relations and the trustworthiness of others is crucial to adult life and a fundamental lesson that we teach our children, in order, not only that they may go safely into the world, but also to open them to the possibilities from having rich trusting relationships in life.  Our bonds of trust that begin in primordial existence sink to phenomenological invisibility and are not only forgotten, but difficult to bring into view, working as they do to constitute our sense of being in the world. Thus, the confrontational mode of Levinas’s ethic—the essential de-centering of the self—if we are to glimpse our original responsibility for the Other.

De Warren has developed a structure that is pertinent to the difficulty of thinking about trust and its primordial operation as an original binding through which subjectivity emerges, aiming to motivate the reader towards interrupting and disrupting our egoistic subjectivity, such that we can explore a deeper dimension of human relationality that he identifies as foundational, and thus the condition of possibility for forgiveness as encounter. While de Warren’s conception of original forgiveness is ultimately grounded in Levinas’s thinking, rather than positing the challenging idea of an original binding of responsibility, and going on to demonstrate how this opens us to insights around an original forgiveness, at the outset, the organisation of de Warren’s meditations, across eight chapters and an afterword, begin with reflections on the nature of trusting experience, individually, socially and politically.

Referring to Levinas’s own cautionary reflection, de Warren is clear about the difficulty of taking our thoughts into Levinas’s radical ethic: “[such] ethical thinking runs against the grain of commonplace intuitions and entrenched concepts” (210). Here he admits that our current conceptual frames around the singular individual, the will, individual agency and accountability, make an argument for an original responsibility (and thus for an original forgiveness) “less intuitive,” “less ‘natural’” (202), and that the significance of a responsibility that precedes one’s own standing in the world, is “not easily fathomed” (202).

Thus, the intended effect of de Warren’s chapter structure is for the text to build on itself, with each discussion and close reading of a range of resources opening reflection on what is implied, assumed or simply overlooked. We are directed to look at the more liminal aspects of experience, aspects that we are perhaps not immediately aware of if we rush to identify forgiveness as an encounter, warranted or not, in response to wrongdoing.

Interestingly, along with directly addressing the challenge of Levinas’s thinking, De Warren also identifies how the work of Hannah Arendt and Gabriel Marcel, philosophers whose work is central to the development of his reflections, utilised exploratory structures in order to open thinking to hitherto unthought aspects of moral and ethical existence. Arendt, for example, in “The Human Condition, does not provide a ‘theory’ of forgiveness but sketches instead ‘trains of thought’ from which a more elaborated account might find inspiration and orientation” (47-48), and Marcel identifies that his reflections on availability (disponibilité) have “’circuitous and perhaps perplexing’ character, styled as a défrichage, “meaning both ‘clearing’, as in clearing the ground in agriculture, and ‘groundwork’, as in laying the groundwork for construction” (146).[1]

In de Warren’s text we are skilfully guided through an extensive and multi-layered study of both philosophy and literature. De Warren shadows in the first pages of the text that we, as readers, are, in general, tacitly asked to trust the journey as we are taken on by an author. De Warren’s meditations, traversing a broad range of philosophical thinking and literary texts, all powerful in themselves, and here part of a larger philosophical terrain, require a profound attention from the reader, with the final two chapters stretching this thinking beyond what might feel ‘natural’ (202) or comfortable. De Warren re-visits familiar and classic philosophical texts dealing, in some way, with issues of trust and forgiveness. Through close and exacting readings of Annette Baier, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Jean Améry, Mikhail Bahktin, Gabriel Marcel, and Emmanuel Levinas, de Warren gradually teases out, in sensitive and complex investigations that interpolate with literary readings, the more primordial aspects of trust and forgiveness—it is the depth of experience that he seeks to address. The richness and density of insight that develops through de Warren’s discussion is achieved through this dual textual examination. De Warren’s investigations of literary texts portraying the paradoxes and complexities of human justice, hospitality, and forgiveness, cover William Shakespeare, Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, Simon Wiesenthal, Maurice Sendak, and, of particular note, in his presentation of a close reading of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, his bringing to our attention Levinas’s own debt to literature.

Alongside, and in response to the text, the reader is nudged and provoked to examine their own experiences of betrayal and availability for forgiveness and to go beyond the concerns and interests of themselves as ‘sovereign subject.’ The motivation de Warren aims for is, and must be, powerful, if we are to open ourselves to the full sense of what is meant by our original relationship of responsibility for others. As exemplified by Dostoyevsky’s character, Ivan, too often we find the

transformation of forgiveness into a transactional power of sovereignty that obscures and perverts the humility and majesty of an original availability to forgiveness, not as the waiting for forgiveness in the aftermath of injury but of that waiting before any encounter with the possibility or impossibility of forgiveness. (193)

It is the intensity of our investment in forgiveness as encounter that makes de Warren’s pathway necessary if we are to come close to understanding the depth and emotional complexity of being situated in an original forgiveness. Through de Warren’s philosophical and literary explorations, we are, rather, “led into the intricate weave” of thinking about trust and forgiveness (an approach that echoes Levinas’s own style), working between different but resonating registers of discourse that lead our thinking to a “different scene” (186).

Reading the chapters in order rewards the reader; the explorations build and bend, each “taking the time to find its own course” (7), all the while inducing us to look, again and again, at the manifold experiences of trust, betrayal and forgiveness, what links these, and, in doing so, gradually shifting our attention from a more well-known understanding of forgiveness to one that asks perhaps more of us than we at first might want to concede.

Thinking trust and forgiveness as originary: the first six chapters

Tracing the trajectory of de Warren’s reflections on trust, its undoings, and forgiveness, we find that de Warren is not focused on developing a comprehensive coverage of the philosophical work on trust, nor on distinguishing distinctive categories of understanding, such as separating trust from dependence, or trust from faith. Rather, drawing on the insights of Husserl, Heidegger, Baier, Løgstrup and Bakhtin, the overview of trust presented aims to draw out the ways that trust is a primordial, foundational binding, functioning as a condition of possibility for self and life-world. Trust is presented as an “elemental form of participation or involvement”, leading to de Warren concluding that “we do not simply live with others: we live with others in us much as we live in others” (30) such that we experience “trusting [as] an assured capacity of coupling”, through which we “[apprehend] the Other as known to me, as known in me, within the arc of my own self-knowledge (34). It is precisely because the other exists as a sort of edging or lining of myself, and that relations of trust require our nurturing that trusting involves me in a responsibility to this relationship and to the Other that is a responsibility of some intimacy, to self and other.

The existence and function of trust as constitutive ground, however, disappears from view. Our bonds of care and responsibilities are submerged, and we retreat into a sense of ourselves as sovereign agents. Insights familiar to scholars of trust are presented here: for example, trust as intimately intertwined with our sense of self-assuredness, with betrayals of trust leading to a feeling of not knowing who we were to have trusted, nor who it was whom I once trusted. Such betrayals not only remind us of the constitutional significance of trust, but this nature of trust as foundational necessarily has us open to ruptures and failures of trust.

It is particularly pleasing to see de Warren develop a view of trust that brings together and substantially explores the relations between trust in the world, trust in others, and self-trust. The examination of these three existential forms of trust throughout the text is a significant contribution of de Warren’s work. De Warren uses this structuring to develop our thinking about the ways that these domains of trust participate in each other, thus reminding us that while separated out for exploration, they always operate as differing registers of our constitutive experience.

Importantly, also, we are introduced to the point that when we trust we are entering a commitment and responsibility where we do not know what this will entail. Thus, he says, “trusting gains its meaning from this responsibility for our trusts without yet understanding the rules, meanings, and expectations of our trust” (7). This point—that we trust because we do not know, and we do not know at multiple levels—is often overlooked in accounts that consider warranted trust or the obligations of trust. De Warren unfolds the significance of our openness to a future that remains unknown, and how our availability for the Other is an availability through a self that will be demanded without rehearsal; that is, we do not yet know who or what we might need to be in order to remain in such availability to the Other.

The development of thinking about trust, its undoings, and hence the question of forgiveness, is presented as intertwined. An examination of Hannah Arendt’s “exemplary account” of forgiveness as encounter, which de Warren endorses (presented in Chapter 2), draws out how this tacitly presupposes an abiding availability to forgiveness. Interrogated through the lens of the redemptive significance of a dialogical approach to forgiveness as narrative, and its requirement for social renewal, de Warren identifies an assumption of availability to forgiveness in order to keep our responsibility towards nurturing trust relations—in the world, self and others—as grounding our sociality.

The way forward for de Warren is to scrutinise the pivotal aspects of Arendt’s account that signify a redemptive significance of forgiveness, and we see that our responsibility towards nurturing and nourishing trusting relations includes availability as a listening in openness to the perspective of the other, understanding that forgiveness is not to erase the event of betrayal, but to allow both parties to move on, to not be tied to this one event as representative of future trustworthiness: “Forgiveness recovers—and, in this sense, redeems—who the person can (still) become from (just) being what the person has done (64).

De Warren’s expanding and deepening examination of literary narratives throughout the text works at multiple levels, including here, as an amplification of one of Arendt’s central arguments. Arendt’s work argues for the being-at-home with oneself as thinking that welcomes alterity “within oneself” (59). This welcoming of alterity in our thinking reflects our ‘perceptual faith’ or certainty that our perceptions have a basis in ‘reality’, that is, others see what we see, with this seeing acknowledged and shared (see fn 32, cited at p.57).

The weight of our actions is by way of their having ‘narrative incarnation’, that is, through the multi-perspectival rendering of human action, its meaning, consequence and significance is articulated, contested and thus shaped as action meaningful in a public human sphere. As de Warren says, for Arendt, “[w]hat is profoundly human about the appearance of unpredictability and irreversibility in our world is that both predicaments incite us to speech and, more generally, storytelling” (60-61) and that “[a]cting finds fulfilment in narratives, not in the sense of finality but as openness to accountability, responsibility, and truthfulness” (60). While the events of the past are irreversible, forgiveness releases its hold on the present and the future. Both the betrayer and the betrayed are released, but this can only come about if there is “the joint authoring of a truthful narrative of what has been done, to whom, and by whom, which, as with any author function, essentially invokes the attestation of plurality” (65). It is in this way that “forgiveness lays the past (wrongdoing) to rest in giving it a proper, truthful place in narrative (and public) remembrance” with this being a “restoration of the world to truth” (65). Here, “the past is neither literally or figuratively erased; rather it is given place and meaning, laid to rest” (67).

Through de Warren’s close reading we begin to identify how such an account of forgiveness as encounter necessarily rests in a depth of originary experience, experience whereby we are already, and irredeemably connected with others. He emphasises how “this form of thinking about forgiveness tacitly presupposes an unbroken trust in the world, in others, and in oneself, and hence an abiding availability to forgiveness” (8).

We are now well on the way to having a clearer insight into how original forgiveness is in our availability towards the other in forgiveness and is an original forgiveness that is always already in place and being the place where the particularities of encounters of responsive forgiveness will come to reside. This meditation on Arendt is not however sufficient to ground the fullness of what such thinking of forgiveness entails. De Warren’s next steps in unfolding this meditation take us back to our fundamental embodiment, grounding us in our bodies through which we transform our world as a meaningful world, our openness onto loving relations that transform our sense of meaningfulness, and which remain our vulnerability to suffering.

It is in Chapter 3, “The unforgiveable and forgiving without forgiveness”, that de Warren outlines the significance of our being open to the encounter of forgiveness, doing so via the short account of “Simon Wiesenthal’s narrative of his encounter with the request for forgiveness from a dying SS soldier during WWII in The Sunflower” (76-92). In undertaking this request, the listening soldier models a not unforgiving availability to forgiveness, which he subsequently withholds. Significant here for the development of de Warren’s argument is the listening soldier’s availability for forgiveness—his listening—and what this means for the dying soldier/wrongdoer, who seeks to have themselves restored to the world of trust, that is, to know themselves as not in the final instance condemned and excluded for their ‘insufficiency’. Increasingly, De Warren’s text challenges us to think about our capacity to reflect without a condemnation which excludes the wrongdoer from human acceptance, and to re-examine what devastates and what is devastated by violence.

In sharp and painful contrast to this, is Jean Améry’s response to Wiesenthal. De Warren straight away challenges us with the possibility that, not only might forgiveness not be offered, but that there are circumstances where such availability cannot be offered. It is Amery’s response to Wiesenthal and his identification that the issue of forgiving or not forgiving has both psychological and political aspects: he dismisses the psychological aspect on the grounds of its non-relevance (he sees that here forgiveness is a matter of temperament and hence self-serving (85)), and his verbal rejection of the question of forgiveness—“Politically, I don’t want to hear anything of forgiveness” (85), “testifies … to an abjection of human condition, or better: an inhuman condition” (85-86).

Having presented the idea that there are experiences of catastrophic loss of trust in the world where the very question of forgiveness becomes “destitute” (86), and thus there is a boundary to the human capacity to be available to forgiveness, de Warren goes on to undertake a closer critical examination of Améry’s argument (Chapter 4).  Here we encounter torture as the manifestation of the unforgivable, where “the truth of torture becomes existentially inscribed within the being tortured of human abjection” (98).  Améry’s memoir on ressentiment and the position where availability for forgiveness is no longer meaningful after the experience of violence that devastates, shows us that what has been devastated is the world as trustworthy.

The significance of this account includes what de Warren here teases out as the suffering of the body and the violation of the skin “as the border that sets the world at a distance but also sets the terms for the encounter with the world” (10). De Warren, citing the work of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, says that “the formation of the ‘true self’ occurs … through the mother’s care (or parental care), which structures the child’s sense of identity as contained and bordered” (111). De Warren is building a thought-frame around the emergence of ourselves as available to the world as well as to myself (111) and the significant grounding that this has for our sense of self-trust: “I am available to the world as well as for myself, and available precisely in terms of self-trust, trust in others, and trust in the world” (111).

Understanding the significance of our fundamental embodiment to trust, betrayal and forgiveness means confronting those times when human cruelty destroys this trust in the world. Not only is this significant for individual accounts such as that of Jean Améry, but this individual case reflects a social breakdown such that, in, for example, state-sanctioned sadism, “inhuman sovereignty constitutes itself through absolute negation so as to realise the fiction of ‘god’” (119). This is in stark contrast to Arendt’s notion of the self-regenerating collective human narrative that can witness and encompass the full range of citizen perspectives, thus allowing the past to rest and a future of renewal to move forward. De Warren says,

In Arendtian terms, the necessity of this absolutization of violence becomes more pronounced and deemed more urgent the less any political system is based on trust, deliberation and consensus…. The event of torture is thus, not limited to an individual suffering body but implicates (as with Améry’s subtle shift to the inclusive pronoun man) the social body as such: das Man. (120-121)

Amery’s “ressentiment gives voice to the imperative of giving witness to the trust of evil—its corrupting presentness in the world—and absoluteness in the absence of any meaningful ethical response of forgiveness and restitution of trust in the world” (124). Importantly, de Warren is developing a meditation that includes how we think about forgiveness as reflecting on our relation to others understood in both their precariousness and insufficiency, and thus in terms of our responsibility towards them.

We go on to confront the issue of trust’s silent operation, as invisible, foundational, and generative, and the significance of trust as dialogical relationship. The nature of trust, for it to be trust, means our getting on with things, and in doing so, living this trust that is integral to our getting on with things. De Warren, in Chapter 5, rightly argues that to demand proof or explication of one’s trust itself breaches trust’s condition—it is an action of distrust, “[betraying] any sustaining trust in the other’s love” (134).

De Warren’s focus unfolds an understanding of the significance of the somewhat paradoxical thought that trust relationships must be both ‘taken for granted’ and nurtured and honored. This continues to develop his account of trust relationships as not simply constitutive of the self, but ontologically prior to any distinction between subject and object and the intentionality of such a distinction. Importantly for the developing argument, throughout this chapter, de Warren reflects on how this is a bond that we are entrusted with, and, in this, “the Other participates in my existence, much as I stand in, and so participate in, the life of the Other” (137).

Immersing the reader in Shakespeare’s King Lear, de Warren explores Cordelia’s silence in response to her father’s unforgivable demand of proof of trust, as faithful and truthful to her love, testament to how “the presentness of trust can sustain itself only when taken for granted and hence, in this regard, ‘understood’ as self-evident”, and that her silence explicitly expresses “that love is absolutely nothing other than itself” (134). Lear’s request for proof of trust, however, effectively reduces the “bottomless mystery” of love and trust to a banal story of pandering and selfishness. De Warren identifies Cordelia’s silence as preserving the binding of love, as she remains grounded in this place of ‘in-betweenness’, attesting to its “unknowingness/unknowness” silence— a bond that is “ontologically primitive, or ‘original’ in its dialogical and temporal disclosure of myself, others and the world” (140). These bonds are generative and constitutive, underlying our perception of the world, the real, and our potential within it.  These bonds are both expressive and creative.

Importantly for de Warren’s developing argument, this reading of King Lear introduces the insight that, as subjectivity emerging through the bond of trust, this entails that that “I am as much your keeper as we are together the guardians of our trust” (141), and that while each serves as the Other’s keeper, we must at the same time “[serve] as keepers of the our trusting relationship (143).” As much as trust relationships are to be understood as self-evident and the ground for an assuredness, they require nurturing that involves a self-valuing as well as valuing of the Other, and a monitoring of the relationship that honors “the future of our respective and reciprocal development in interdependent freedom” (144). Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogical relationship as triadic, de Warren explores how this structure honors not only the presence of “I” and “Thou”, but allows the “self-understanding of the relationship itself, its meaningfulness, between us” (144) to be present as an unclaimed and unoccupied position that is available as an autonomy of the relationship of trust.

This autonomy of the relation of trust does not imply that none of the entrusted persons cannot speak for and from the position of the third but that each speaks in turn on behalf of the third without claiming to speak exclusively for the third—that is, the self-understanding of our trust. (145)

Such a relationship is thus founded on a “creative self-prescribing element and initiative concerning its own meaningfulness and possibilization of itself” (144). The trust relationship which is not pre-ordained ahead of time, nor functions to set of prescribed rules, “empowers potentialities of our being” that “depend on sustaining an openness to who we are to become together in trust” (144).

Central to de Warren’s unfolding explorations on trust and its undoing “as unmaking of the world, the self, and relations to others” (146), is his presentation to us of our vulnerability to, and availability for the other as experienced together, inextricably intertwined. Through both King Lear and Gabriel Marcel’s notions of disposibilité and fidélité créatrice, in Chapter 6 de Warren takes up the philosophical challenge of exploring the question of how we participate in the lives of other people through trust, and the complexity of what participation and belonging in trust means.

To this point, de Warren has demonstrated how our experience and thinking about trust are structured by its primordial operation, with this entailing a form of commitment to interdependency and thus to a responsibility towards the Other, such that when trust turns against me, I am in the position of being betrayed through a relationship to which I have a responsibility; to its “continuous and sustaining dialogue about how we are to trust each other, measure and adjust and expand trust’s limits, and when betrayed, how to respond  in trust to its breakages, ruptures, and aftermaths” (144).

It is through the work of Gabriel Marcel that we are now propelled towards the final framing of original forgiveness. De Warren says that Marcel’s thinking around defrichage “can be harnessed to motivate and delineate more emphatically a distinction between ‘availability to forgiveness’ and encounter in forgiveness” and in this regard, consolidate a view of ‘original availability’ (159).

De Warren’s three forms of existential trust—trust in Others, self-trust, and trust in the world—are here “matched” with three forms of availability, as per Marcel and Buber, identifying that “what is entailed in trusting and being trusted is our availability for each other in the dialogue of trust” but perhaps more importantly, that “I must trust in myself to become—‘create’—the kind of person I need to be in order to do what would seem to be impossible beforehand: to remain available to forgiveness when the Other has committed the unforgivable in betraying my trust” (11).

It is through Marcel’s notion of disposibilité that de Warren is able to unpack how to belong to another in trust, attests to my being available to you, to stand by you, thus bringing to our attention the dimension of trust generally overlooked in understanding forgiveness as encounter: that of “giving myself to you in making myself available for you in the charge of my trust” (147).

There is a significant movement in thinking here: in giving you discretionary power and entrusting myself to you, I at the same time “become responsible for you in being available, if and when you turn away from me” (148). This is perhaps the most challenging turn of thought in these explorations. This is to say that, should you fail me, I am to turn to you and ask: ‘what has happened with you that you have failed our bond of trust? Tell me of yourself in these actions, that I might keep faith in our trust’. This reflects the mutual role of keepers of our trust, the role of nourishing and nurturing our trust that nurtures and nourishes our individual but intertwined lives—this mutual role does not stop because one person has momentarily failed.

It is important to note the significance of de Warren’s meditative style here, where the commonplace analytical conventions of distinguishing between reliance, trust and faith are not in play. As is evident in Marcel’s thinking, de Warren points out, when we are called upon to remain available to the Other, this asks that the “sustainability and meaningfulness” of our trust be underwritten by a constitutive dimension of faith—an “empowering faith” in the Other, that

requires a nourishing draw of creativity regarding the ways in which I am able to remain available in times when the Other fails, betrays, or abandons me, when my faith in the Other—in their trustworthiness, in their judgement, and so forth—is put to the test. (148-149)

De Warren identifies that what is needed here is a ‘metatrust’ in the other’s trust and trustworthiness, and a faith in the “unimaginable otherness of the Other” (152) and the relationship of trust—the betweenness—that we have both nourished. We are asked, and are asking for, the trust relationship to prevail as a commitment, rather than be abandoned in seeking punishment for our betrayal, or simply reverting to tolerating the otherness of the Other.  It is our faith in the Other that allows us to be open to navigating and negotiating the futural complexity of the trust relationship: “I am open (embrace and invite) to the complexity of the Other and thus good-naturedly participate in her (entangled and invested) complexity, standing within its presence rather than outside or against it” (149-150, my italics). This shift in thinking about trust is pivotal to the whole thesis of original forgiveness.

Understandings of forgiveness as encounter often turn on our negotiating the potential for forgiveness from the position of being thrown outside the relationship of trust, that is, that the relationship of trust has at this point of betrayal broken down, no longer recognisable as the relationship we had, potentially already abandoned. The understanding that de Warren is building here, through his exploration of Marcel, is how a betrayal, while incurring pain and damage, is not yet a breaking of the trust relationship. The keeping of the trust relationship is still asked for at this point, with its dialogue continuing as an openness to the future, as now, perhaps more than ever, the reality of our trusted other being both friend and stranger—there being a gap in our knowledge of them and their unfolding lives—is apparent. What is required, is what Marcel refers to as “the ‘essentially mysterious act’ of keeping faith with the Other” (153). Such creative faithfulness, de Warren argues, is not a virtuous disposition, nor is it something that is prescribed by norms or duties (154) but requires a faith in myself to rise to what is required, even if I don’t know what this is, and I do this for your sake, for my sake, and for the sake of our trust relationship. This faith in myself, de Warren says, is “underwrites the modus vivendi of sustaining trust in the Other and retaining faith in myself” (155).

What is at stake in this demand of trust at this point, is that in withdrawing from the sustaining dialogue of trust, we refuse the strangeness, complexity and freedom of the other, reducing them to an object for me, tied to their actions in the past. Such withdrawal reflects both the gap in our knowledge of ourselves—that is, of what will be required of my “ethical openness” to the Other—and the need for self-trust. When the Other deceives, betrays, or abandons me, I cannot have ahead of time anticipated the “otherness of myself in having to become other than the person I thought or imagined I could ever be” (153).

The issue that de Warren must confront at this point in his reflections is how, for Marcel, such faith and availability is underwritten by God who remains available beyond all human reckoning. De Warren, while seeing that such availability “allows for a recasting of forgiveness beyond its established framing as encounter”, is wanting to go beyond a need to bring faith as faith in God into the very human picture of trust and betrayal.

Significantly, de Warren’s reading of King Lear reveals the play as offering something beyond a Christian reading; indeed, de Warren’s reading allows us to grasp the originality of Cordelia’s forgiveness (166). Shakespeare performs an inversion, de Warren argues, whereby Cordelia (daughter) forgives Lear (father) with there being no biblical basis for this directionality. De Warren says:

It is not the figure of Christ, who interrupts the mimetic rivalry of human beings, but Cordelia’s dechristening of forgiveness, as the daughter who forgives in her name, rather than the father-become-son who forgives in the name of the father to become the forgiveness of all sons…the daughter becomes herself a mother to the father who in turn has become a child … in this sense, if Cordelia’s forgiveness of Lear offers a striking example of natality, in another sense her forgiveness significantly restores Lear to the world while ambiguously reconciling the world with itself… (167)

Cordelia effectively demonstrates what de Warren identifies as the modus vivendi of faith in the Other: that is, as operating “through patience and postponement: patience with the Other’s mis-steps, miscues, and miscommunications within the dialogue of our trust along with the postponement of any final reckoning or accounting of my faith in the other” (157).

This necessarily raises many questions for a philosophy of trust, as it has historically been undertaken. The questions are pertinent, and de Warren’s work opens the field to a deeper examination about what unites trust, faith and reliance in human experience, rather than having the analysis of what are the distinctive characteristics of trust overtake what appears to be evident in human experience—that we move fluidly between these states, that we make errors of judgement and have faith when we need a more tempered trust, and that our reliance on others can inadvertently strip them of their subjectivity and otherness.

Original forgiveness as forgiving and beseeching forgiveness: the final two chapters

Original forgiveness is not an ‘action’ or ‘act’ of the subject but the subjectivity of the subject in its inspiration toward the Other—its openness—and investiture of the Good in the being in the world. (231)

It is in Chapters 7 and 8 that de Warren takes up Levinas’s “fleeting evocation” of forgiveness, that is, his broaching ‘pardon’ “as the most radical rupture of the categories of the I, for it is for me to be somewhere else than myself … it is to be pardoned, not to be definitive existence” (Levinas, cited at 245).

De Warren presents a reading of Levinas’s “radical rupturing” of the “I”, a rupturing such that “to be me” is understood as something other than my assumed definitive, and singular existence; rather, to be me is to be pardoned—forgiven. De Warren issues a tentative apology with regard to his reading and interpretation of Levinas, while also identifying the difficulty that might confront readers in the final two chapters. However, the reader is now, de Warren hopes, fully motivated to engage with clearly going beyond what is argued in the previous six chapters.

We are now asked to do much more than understand forgiveness as emerging through an availability that nourishes and allows the ‘in-between’ of trust, and those whose ‘in-between’ this is, to start anew. Rather, de Warren’s investigations, directly taking up a Levinasian context, now take us through how an original forgiveness is an infinite postponement of my rage against my responsibility for the Other, “in patience, and hence trust, for the Other in my entrusted responsibility for them” (245).

Through his reading of Levinas and his account of ethical substitution, de Warren develops an understanding whereby he argues that “It is through the condition of being hostage [i.e., expiation or original forgiveness] that there can be in the world pity, compassion, forgiveness [pardon] and proximity…” (234).

De Warren, over the course of the text, has teased out how the understanding that we are not self-created beings, but begin our subjectivity through pre-cognitive dimensions that are inherently intersubjectively conditioned, functions as underpinning the philosophical works that he has presented so far. Now he takes this thinking through Levinas’s direct engagement with describing the encounter of the Other at the primordial or pre-cognitive level—that is, in terms of the Other’s entrustment to me. Such entrustment is understood as proximity, whereby our embodied experience, prior to all reflexive and practical activity is fundamentally haunted by others—this is the lining of oneself by the Other, and myself forming a lining of the Other, that de Warren has shown to be assumed in intersubjective philosophy. In proximity, this entrustment that binds me to you and you to me, is a binding that is forgotten in the natural attitude. It is only through a powerful de-centring of the subject that this “creaturely” existence that I am, through which I am beholden to others in my responsibility for them, can be glimpsed.

This pre-intentional experience of spontaneous responsibility, not chosen by me but elicited by the approach of the Other, ‘agitates’, and produces ‘affective unease’, as we are provoked out of egoistic being into an awakening of oneself as for the Other (223). This awakening is resisted, understandably, as egoistic being struggles with being faced with guilt not for anything that I have done or not done, but for “that-I-am”.

Such an original entrustment of the Other, and thus that I am the Other’s keeper, is not given to me, and hence cannot be received, but forms a binding that, at the same time, unbinds me from being too tightly wrapped, or involved in myself, with my own being” (207). We are beholden to the disruptive realignment that comes with finding ourselves “begotten and begetting in an ethically primordial sense” (201).

In an existential awakening at the approach of the Other, my outrage, indignation and exasperation at being commanded to a responsibility that is impossible and unbearable, we are involved in what de Warren identifies as a “prophetic trust”—that is, neither trust in the Other or trust in the self. We must make room for the Other as existence outside, alongside and inside my own existence, and I must exert my freedom towards this impossible responsibility without knowing in advance what this will entail. My outrage and exasperation must be overcome, and the drama of my suffering in shame for “that I am” must be transformed into a welcoming of the Other. It is this transformation, or ‘transfer’ as Levinas says, that is “subjectivity itself”—this transfer accomplishes the “salient meaning” of substitution (230). In this subjectivity as substitution, we expiate for the Other’s persecution.  In what de Warren outlines as the “trial of subjectivity” we must, he argues, forgive the Other for their assignment of impossible responsibility: we must expiate or atone for the Other’s persecution. This is not something “I” “do”, rather, we are forgiving in substitution:

I am beseeching forgiveness for my accusation, my unjustified existence … in this breath of expiation I am atoning for the unforgiving and persecuting commandment to which I am subject, hostage. (231)

For Levinas then, de Warren argues, “original forgiveness for the Other, on the condition of which the Other’s persecution becomes welcomed and in this specific sense, ‘commanded’ in the form of hospitality” (231-232). Importantly, in this configuration of original forgiveness, the command of the Other is to relinquish sovereignty to an openness under the “aegis of Goodness and the height of the Other” (232). We are guided through understanding how for Levinas, in such hospitality, reciprocity and hierarchy become neutralized (232), there being in the command, “a command to be commanded in turn” (232).

Final remarks and reflections on the Afterword

De Warren closes the text with a close reading of what he understands to be an exemplary text of the existential situation of bearing responsibility for all others: Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There. It is the story, he says, “of the passage of the subjectivity of the subject as substitution in outrage and expiation, or, in other words, original forgiveness” (247). The child in this story, Ida, in the absence of her parents, is “[e]lected and entrusted”, bearing sole responsibility for her sister. As the story unfolds, we find Ida undergoing resistance to her responsibility and rage at her entrustment, a rage that turns love to murderous hate. While Ida ultimately “expiates her shame for her rage against the entrustment of her sister to her responsibility” (250), I think it important to pause, longer than de Warren does, on the way that Ida’s rage is one at having this responsibility “in the absence of the father and mother” and that her transformation from rage to expiation is enabled through her hearing “her sailor Papa’s song” (249). The significance of our early life and the ‘teaching’ of our entrustments and our belonging to a life-world, that is our mutual availability to and responsibility for Others, from our parents or caregivers is significant.

All the while I have been reflecting on de Warren’s text, and in particular while reading this Afterword, I have thought of Lisa Guenther’s drawing attention to Levinas’s words that to be responsible as such, we must become like a maternal body, that is, to bear responsibility for another as if she were my child.[2] This is not a remark that de Warren takes up throughout his investigation, yet, given the reflections on our coming into the world as entrusted to the Other, the significance of the development of the skin-self, and the learning of trust and trustworthiness in childhood—that is, the significance of the parent/caregiver, whose presence comes in and out of focus in de Warren’s reflections—warrants more attention. Linked to such reflections on my part, is that De Warren includes footnote reference to a psychoanalytic take on our failures of responsibility, citing the work of Simone Drichel.[3] Drichel, identifying that while Levinas “was no friend of psychoanalysis”,[4] argues that his ‘ethic of ethics’ needs a psychology, outlined as it is without reference to the experiential life of the infant. Understandably, de Warren’s text is already rich and complex, and cannot, of course, pursue all that is relevant and interesting, however, the implications here need careful attention; for women in particular, given the ongoing inclination towards oppression and political control of women’s bodies, but also anyone in the role of carer, a role undervalued in our heavily transactional socio-political context.


[1] While not noted by de Warren, but a point that only adds weight to the acuity of de Warren’s approach, is that Annette Baier, who he presents as a significant philosophical voice on trust, also used an open exploratory structure—what she referred to as a “mosaic” method: one where a coherent account (for her, of trust) could be built through assembling a lot of small-scale reflections that together develop a resonance around what is central and compelling (see Annette Baier, 1985, “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” Nous, 19:1, pp.54-55).

[2] Guenther, L., 2006. “Like a maternal body”: Emmanuel Levinas and the motherhood of Moses. Hypatia21(1), p.120.

[3] Drichel, S. 2018. “’A forgiveness that remakes the world’: Trauma, Vulnerability, and Forgiveness in the work of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. M. La Caze (London: Rowman and Littlefield), pp.43-63. See also, Drichel, S., 2019. “Emmanuel Levinas and the “specter of masochism”: A Cross-Disciplinary Confusion of Tongues.” Psychoanalysis, Self and Context14(1), pp.3-22; Drichel, S., 2019. Refusals of Responsibility: A Response to Donna Orange and Robert Bernasconi. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context14(1), pp.36-52.

[4] Drichel, S., 2019. Refusals of Responsibility: A Response to Donna Orange and Robert Bernasconi. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 14(1), p.37.

Iso Kern: Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und metaphysische Monadologie, Schwabe Verlag, 2021

Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und metaphysische Monadologie: Zu einer Synthese von Husserl und Leibniz Book Cover Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und metaphysische Monadologie: Zu einer Synthese von Husserl und Leibniz
Iso Kern
Schwabe Verlag
2021
Paperback $29.95
240

Karel Novotný: Welt und Leib. Zu einigen Grundmotiven der Phänomenologie

Welt und Leib. Zu einigen Grundmotiven der Phänomenologie Book Cover Welt und Leib. Zu einigen Grundmotiven der Phänomenologie
Orbis Phaenomenologicus Studien, Vol. 50
Karel Novotný
Königshausen & Neumann
2021
Hardback 28.00 €
172

Reviewed by: Nikos Soueltzis (University of Crete)

World and the Lived-body: From the title of the book the author cares to prepare us for an encounter with two of phenomenology’s most prominent themes. Trivial as it may be this ascertainment is already an understatement of the complexities and shifts that have marked the history of their treatment within phenomenological tradition. Only the plural form in the subtitle (On Some Basic Motifs of Phenomenology) gives a hint of the challenges that await the reader. Thought-provoking and informative, Karel Novotný’s book discusses the work of philosophers who have voiced their objections against Husserl’s classic conception of the consciousness–world correlation.

It should be clarified from the start that Novotný’s book is not meant as an introduction to the phenomenological themes of the world and the lived-body. To appreciate the fineness of his analysis some degree of familiarity with the phenomenological tradition is clearly presupposed. Thus, the reader should be prepared for a close engagement with the text and indirectly with the broad corpus of texts Novotný discusses. We will briefly present the content of each chapter and then address a few points that caught our attention.

The book comprises three main parts each of which consisting of two chapters. In the first part, Novotný examines Eugen Fink’s and Renaud Barbaras’ attempts to initiate and carry out a cosmological turn from within phenomenology. In the second part, he discusses Jan Patočka’s and László Tengelyi’s transcendentally oriented phenomenological conceptions of the world. In the third part, the book focuses explicitly on what he calls the “margins” of the world/lived-body correlation. Patočka’s conceptions of movement and life, both in his late and early work, are given here special attention. Finally, after demarcating the “marginal” function of lived-corporeality in Husserl’s work, the book culminates in a concise exposition of Emmanuel Levinas’ and Hans Rainer Sepp’s original elaborations of it.

In the opening chapter of the book, Novotný introduces the problem of the world’s pregivenness by referring to some of Husserl’s classic texts and to the revisions it undergoes but also elicits in the hands of his major successors. For Husserl, the world is the open framework of all fields in which something that appears exerts an affection on the ego. The world’s transcendence is always given to a horizon-consciousness and phenomenologically explicating its constitution amounts to explicating the world’s horizon-structure. The Noesis-Noema correlation involves horizon-nexuses on both sides. But the world is not a horizon that correlates to a single act; it is the horizon of all horizons. Husserl’s description of the performance of epoché and phenomenological reduction in Ideas I reveals the fundamental function of the Generalthesis: the positing of the world as existing. The world is a sense-formation of a universally functioning subjectivity. Thus, subjectivity and world are tightly connected in this correlation that forms an absolute basis for Husserl’s phenomenology. But, according to Novotný, his theory of world-apperception carries with it a debatable implication much criticized by his successors. Namely, the tendency to understand world-apperception as prescribing that every real thing is determined in advance in its universal typicality. Met with suspicion, this implication led to two different currents of critisism. On the one hand, fearing that this typicality poses a threat to the openness of appearing, the line of Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Marc Richir, dismisses the view that the world is the origin of appearing or that this appearing is tied to a total apperception (21). On the other hand, before this turning-away from the world, cosmological attempts were made to recover the world in its primordial pregivenness and establish it as the framework that makes possible every phenomenal correlation. Novotný briefly discusses the second line of thought characterizing it as a “cosmological turn” and names Fink as its main proponent. The latter grasps human relating to the world not on the ground of an intentional consciousness and its horizons but within a framework that already embraces them both. To do so, he moves away from Husserl’s model of horizon-gradations by reversing the direction of its openness. Instead of beginning from a subjective bearer that stands outwards (Hinausstehen) toward the openness of the horizon, we now follow the opposite direction and focus on the world’s emerging within (Hereinstehen) the horizon-system (23). Fink’s contribution rests in pointing out the fleeting dimension of the world beyond the bipolar appearing/withdrawing characterizing the ontological difference—i.e., Being’s withdrawal for the beings to appear, while remaining inseparable from them.

In the second chapter, Novotný discusses extensively Renaud Barbaras’ work. In broad strokes, he summarizes the latter’s project as an attempt to radically de-subjectivize appearing as such by being led back to the world’s own process of becoming. He distinguishes between two modes of appearing: “primary” and “secondary.” Primary manifestation is the world’s anonymous process of becoming. Secondary appearing, on the other hand, is the appearing that involves a subjective pole. The world itself exhibits an essential distance within its movement of primary manifestation, a dynamic depth. Thanks to the latter, living beings are characterized by the movement of an insatiable desire: they reach out to the world, always moving within its depth and being that movement. For Barbaras, herein lies the deepest structure of correlation. Secondary appearing emerges through this movement of desire once a peculiar event of rupture occurs. In his earlier texts, this event transpires within the world but does not stem from the world’s movement. Having placed at the core of this movement the productive force of physis, he characterizes this event of rupture as metaphysical to denote what Husserl calls the primary fact of subjectivity (34f.). But the “transformation” effectuated through the event of rupture is a mere prolongation of the world-movement and not a radical change or any kind of discontinuity. The significance of this event as well as the difficulties that follow from it become apparent if one considers the spatial dimension of appearing and the accompanying individuation of the living subjects in it through their lived-bodies.[i] Given his cosmological perspective, it is no surprise that Barbaras speaks of a proto-spatialization. Beings are spatially individuated prior to their embeddedness into any framework of orientation.

As Novotný points out, it is imperative to explain what the role of the event of rupture is in this proto-spatialization. The prolongation of primary manifestation into secondary appearing implies the emergence of the lived-bodily centrality and this must be somehow related to the event of rupture. Trying to delve deeper into the cosmological realm, Barbaras recently revised his initial conception. Focusing on proto-spatialization, he describes the world’s movement through a threefold articulation: (a) as ground (Boden, le sol), (b) as site (Sitz, le site), and (c) as place (Ort, le lieu) (39). Novotný tries to explain the complex ways in which these modes of spacing relate to each other, finally making possible the openness of subjectivity. Barbaras employs this threefold distinction to show that subjectivity’s intentional tendency rests on a more primal movement. Far from being an autonomous self-movement, the movement of phenomenalization is the world’s ultimate force returning to itself. To further explain the emergence of subjectivity within the world’s movement he claims that the world already exhibits a subjectivity of its own, one that differs from the self-relation peculiar to the experiencing of appearing yet attested to by the latter. All beings exhibit subjectivity in different degrees. Human subjectivity is inscribed deeper within world’s subjectivity, while subjectivity of lifeless things is inscribed in it in the most fleeting and volatile manner. Acknowledging world’s own subjectivity implies that lived-bodily subjectivity occurs as a movement within world’s own movement. In the same movement that bodies become individuated, the human living being takes hold of the world in its phenomenalization (43).

It is in the third chapter that Novotný moves away from the previous cosmological attempts. He discusses the similarities and differences between Patočka’s and Fink’s understanding of the world. Like Fink, Patočka does not subscribe to a world-conception based on thing-apperception: the world is not a mere extension of the objectifying intentionality into surrounding zones. However, the peculiarity of his approach rests on acknowledging that there is a deeper horizonal structure involved in thing-apperception that is intimately connected to the world and co-shapes its pre-givenness in a primordial manner. Thus, Patočka’s phenomenology places emphasis on the mutuality between the pre-givenness of the whole and the fact of its limitation: both permeate and sustain each other. He admits that the world-totality does not need the various subject-centers of appearing, but he acknowledges their interrelation as a fact that cannot be ignored. Thus, instead of relinquishing phenomenology altogether towards a speculative cosmology, he insists on the possibility of a phenomenology of the world-totality. Such a phenomenology cannot perform the metaphysical leap to a “real world” behind appearances. Instead, it tries to make accessible those appearances on the ground of the world-totality that is present in them. Novotný characterizes Patočka’s perspective at that time as “static,” provisionally setting aside the “genetic” access to the world-totality, a task taken up in his theory of the “movements of existence.”

Novotný then examines Patočka’s project of asubjective phenomenology. His discussion is initially limited to Patočka’s relevant published texts. He provides us with a brief presentation of his critical reconsiderations of Husserl’s phenomenology, based on the need to preserve the world’s irreducibility to the constituting life of consciousness. But the risk of ending up with a metaphysical enclosure of a cosmos that affords its own hypostatized mode of appearing is too high. He chooses to “focus on the openness of appearing itself, for which the world serves only as a respectively a priori form but not as a ground in the sense of source” (63). The world is an a priori form. But where is this a priori hinged on and how can we trace it? Patočka’s reply is that phenomenology’s proper theme of inquiry is the autonomous “field of appearance,” i.e., the sphere of the different modes of appearing that is independent both from the appearing objects as well as from the spontaneity of the acts of consciousness. Thus, it should not be subjectivized and reduced to the noetic-noematic distinction. The allegedly immanent components of appearing (e.g., sensation and apprehension) are in fact modes of appearance pertaining to the object (65). But how does this field appear and how does it relate to the appearing of the beings that appear in it? Patočka follows a specific methodological path that allows him to free the phenomenal sphere from all possible constraints and misinterpretations. While he employs Husserl’s phenomenological epoché, he dismisses the complementary move toward the immanence of consciousness, i.e., his phenomenological reduction. He characterizes this break as a radicalized epoché (66). In Patočka’s Nachlass Novotný traces significant contributions to an understanding of this asubjective world-a priori. He distinguishes its three structural moments: (a) the totality of “what” appears, (b) the “who” to which it appears, and (c) the “how” of the appearing (72). All these moments are themselves given within appearing as such. Even though Novotný leaves out of consideration Patočka’s relation to Heidegger, he adds that in his project of asubjective phenomenology Patočka is clearly inspired by the motif of the ontological difference (74). In any case, Patočka’s insistence on the primacy of the problem of appearing attests to a certain distancing from Heidegger’s path, albeit on occasions in an ambivalent manner.

Chapter four discusses the issue of world’s pregivenness in Tengelyi’s project of phenomenological metaphysics from his last book Welt und Unendlichkeit. The guiding theme is his investigation on the kind of “necessity” implied in the commonly held view of the world’s non-modalizability. Tengelyi grasps this necessity not as a priori but as a factical one (78). He draws attention to what he considers to be “primal facts” that can be phenomenally shown but are irreducible or non-inferable. In the three sections of this chapter Novotný focuses on three points from Tengelyi’s phenomenological metaphysics of the world: (a) the conception of world’s openness as its essence, (b) the world’s openness in relation to the event of appearing, and (c) the reality of the world. To address the theme of the world, Tengelyi employs what he calls the “diacritic” method and gradually differentiates between world-totality and infinity (83). Both poles are treated in their contrast but as necessarily belonging together (Tengelyi 2014, 301). His aim is to revise our familiar phenomenological conception of the total world-horizon as a mere correlate of consciousness. The world’s existence in experience presupposes an inner concordance that is not a priori guaranteed but only factually shown (cf. Tengelyi 2014, 323). Thus, our world-cognition entails a certain contingence. Starting from this, Novotný broaches the issue of the relation between the world’s openness and the appearing as event. This contingence of my world-cognition attests to an alterity that leaves its traces in the infinite system of possible experiences, it always threatens to disrupt it (85). To denote that, Tengelyi refers to the possibility of “unavailable” experiences, to wit, experiences that do not accord with the smooth sense-giving intentional streaming of consciousness. Appearing announces itself in experience as an event bearing the character of contingent facticity, namely, an event that can never be reduced to sense-giving. This alterity with its potentially disruptive effects is tightly connected to world’s reality. The latter exhibits an openness that is announced in our experience of the world through the potentially disruptive contingence. The fact that this contingence is experienced entails that the openness of the world can be phenomenologically exhibited (88). But Tengelyi also tries to phenomenologically clarify the belief in the existence of the world based on the primal fact of lived-bodiliness. The fact of the sensory appearing of the world that nurtures our world-belief, as Novotný very vividly says, points to the fact of our embodiment. Even though the latter is never implicated in the event of appearing, it shows itself as its factical condition (90).

In chapter five, Novotný examines the basic motif announced in the title: Of the world’s being anchored to a relation to lived-corporeality (Leib-Körper). The experience of the world is always centered around a lived-bodily zero-point of orientation and always bears the polarity “home-alien.” But the lived-body borders on what is alien to it in another peculiar manner. It is the corporeal aspect that attests to this bordering and inscribes certain gaps to the continuous pregivenness. Novotný discusses Patočka’s relevant positions beginning from his dismissal of the primal correlation as one between an objectifying experience and its object. Instead, he privileges the correlation between life and the pregiven world that confronts it with its alienness. To situate this correlation, Patočka will appeal to a third concept of lifeworld mediating between the world as universe of beings and the world in its ontological function. It is the world that correlates to the fundamental movements of human life and not to a traditionally conceived subject. But, as Novotný points out, substituting life-movements for the subject does not amount to an overall dissipation of subjectivity: it is neither a way of naturalizing consciousness nor a cosmological reduction. The movements of existence are forms of expression of a living inwardness. Focusing on the dimension of movement introduces us to a dynamic-genetic perspective that encompasses the static-phenomenological one. Novotný highlights the role of lived-corporeal life for Patočka’s phenomenology by discussing his broader theory of movement and zeroing in on what he defines as the first movement of existence, i.e., the movement of “anchoring.” This movement originally opens the world in a purely instinctive manner; it is the sensuous life that is externally stimulated to movement (105f.). But for Patočka lived-corporeality points to a plurality of life-centers that form the world as the medium of expression starting from their respective internality and in mutual contact. The first world-relating movement is individuated through an intersubjective connection between living interiorities. Thus, the movement of “anchoring” involves more than our organic world-embeddedness. It is also articulated by our being accepted in a community. This acceptance or non-acceptance colors the world respectively either with a welcoming warmth or with the threatening coldness of its vastness.

Novotný turns further to Patočka’s unpublished manuscripts to defend him against any allegations of a cosmological turn. The most challenging part is the one dedicated to Patočka’s early project of life-phenomenology. Novotný guides us through the bulk of untranslated texts from the 1940’s introducing the reader to its main elements (122ff.). From life’s “inwardness” to the appearing as expression of this “inwardness” and his peculiar account of aesthesis based on a polarity of indifferences, Patočka’s early project involves many radical revisions of familiar aspects of phenomenology. As an example, Novotný refers to Husserl’s “hyletic sphere” and how Patočka integrates it to his project. The hyletic sphere is a first externality but not a lifeless one. It must already contain that which enables the intention to turn the hyletic stratum into a bearer of expression (127). Thus, it is not only to the other person or living animal being that an “inwardness” is ascribed but to other beings in general. Hyle is already an externalization that expresses an “inner” life. Lived-corporeality plays here an essential role as the particular expression of human life that offers us the key to understand expression as a phenomenon of life in general (129).

In the last chapter, Novotný focuses explicitly on lived-corporeality and its phenomenological examination. His guiding assumption is that the lived-body (Leib) can only be the core of the self inseparably from corporeality (Körper) while the latter is experienced at the same time as a limit of subjectivity. What we are looking for is a primal lived-corporeal experiencing in which the inner and the outer are intimately connected. His itinerary starts with Husserl and his conception of the lived-body. The aim is to point out the ineradicable significance of the corporeal aspect (Körper) and the impossibility of a total abstraction from it. He does that by critically showing that in Husserl’s (especially later) work the lived-body is absorbed in the immanence of living-experiencing leaving no room for a differentiating singularization. It cannot account for the singularity of the self, i.e., for the singularity of the perceiving subjectivity in its factual distinction from any other. Thus, we should entertain the hypothesis that this is carried out by the twofold character of lived-corporeality. As Novotný says, living-experiencing is each time mine thanks to the “psycho-physical” lived-corporeality (136). Living-experiencing and the lived-body, according to him, are anonymous in their immanence and thus unable to singularize the self. This singularization is only possible through the anchoring of lived-corporeality (140). It is at this point that he will interpose Levinas’ theory about the position (or positing) of the body as corporeality (Körper) from his early text Existence and Existents.

According to Levinas, egoic living-experiencing cannot posit corporeality on its own, so it is posited through an event that escapes the custody of the subject. Levinas refers to a materiality that lies hidden within the objects of the surrounding world as an alterity. It is neither perceived nor thought of as it cannot be fixated within a system of sense-relations, but it is affectively given. This materiality attests to the fact of the anonymous existence, the there is that is revealed in the experience of horror with its depersonalizing effect (142). The emergence of consciousness is made possible by a positing that depends on corporeality and not on a pure ego or the flesh of the lived-body. It is a corporeality that does not point back to a constituting immanence. It is no object but the event of the positing of “here” and a precondition for any immanence. Translating it in the terms of his own model, Novotný claims that the position (or positing) of corporeality lies in the margins of the universal correlation.

Novotný’s last stop is Hans Rainer Sepp’s concept of the border-Leib (Grenzleib) drawn from his project of phenomenological ecology. Along with direction-Leib (Richtungsleib) and sense-Leib (Sinnleib), they form the three fundamental dimensions of lived-body.[ii] Border-Leib refers to the limit-experience of our lived-body in which the nakedness of the real is experienced prior to its articulation in a sense; direction-Leib refers to the movement of an embodied experiencing that is a reaching out to an exteriority by desiring it; the sense-Leib refers to a fixed framework of sense that structures a new lived-bodily dimension. Sepp starts with the acceptance that human subjectivity is an embodied subjectivity. Thus, we must understand how its relation to its environment and to itself is bodily formed in such a way that human beings participate to place-relations determined by their lived-body. To that extent, Sepp speaks of a primordial place as a limit or a border that delineates the singularity of life. It is a factical limitation in an absolute “here.” For Sepp this limit or border is a “living being-inside” (146). With respect to the subjective pole of the correlation, Novotný sees in Sepp’s idea of border-Leib an affinity with Levinas’ positing (or position) of corporeality. But he finds Sepp’s conception of the “real” as more fitting to describe the primal situation with respect to the non-subjective pole. He integrates Sepp’s as well as Levinas’ positions to his own model of the margins of the universal correlation. The former’s “real” and the latter’s anonymous “there is” lurk in the margins deprived of any sense-articulation.

As already mentioned at the beginning, Novotný’s book is a demanding read not due to its writing style but because it engages in a discussion of a wide range of authors and texts. To that extent, the reader’s effort is dictated by the material itself. That being said, the only traceable drawback is that at times Novotný inserts his own remarks and reconstructions without having previously provided a sufficient context. Unfortunately, sometimes this interrupts the reading flow and thus raising the suspicion that particular  sentences are packed with dense implications which are not properly fit in the context. To be fair, this is a recurring pattern only in the chapter on Barbaras’ cosmology.

A striking example can be found on page 34 where he refers to “appearing as such” as the core of his reconstruction without a clear indication as to its differentiation from “primary” and “secondary appearing.”[iii] Things would probably be much easier if a chapter on Patočka already preceded his discussion of Barbaras’ work. However, in the given occasion the lack of an explicit distinction incites confusion especially when Novotný transposes the “event” of rupture into the context of “appearing as such”: it is the latter that exhibits an essentially evental character. Trying to follow this transposition, one can ask: if the distinction between primary and secondary manifestation is something derivative from the point of view of “appearing as such,” why should there be any essential connection between its evental character and the event of rupture? It could even be misleading to employ it as a leading clue. The world’s obtaining its specific mode of appearing (its “how”) does not signify anything like a radical rupture since it is already a moment of the a priori of appearance. In fact, one could contend that there is no dimension of “appearing as such” that could accommodate the speculative demands of “primary manifestation.”

But let us make a more general interpretive suggestion based solely on Novotný’s analysis. Can we claim that in the present context switching from a cosmological to a phenomenological perspective and vice versa is a matter of subordinating interchangeably to each other two significant aspects of the event—its dynamic and its facticity? Can it be the case that Barbaras privileges spatialization by adopting the spatial-modal tripartition of the primary event (le sol, le site, le lieu) to compensate for tacitly ascribing a secondary function to the event’s facticity as opposed to its dynamic? To be sure, Barbaras’ turn to a metaphysical cosmology is not a matter of carefully blurring the limits of phenomenology. However, a close investigation of how he moves away from the latter is surely a productive endeavor. Novotný’s model of the “margins” of correlation admittedly provides us with a solid basis to carry it out.

From a broad perspective, the model of the “margins of correlation” that Novotný promotes in his book allows us to pinpoint and thematize an area of investigation that is quite elusive. He employs it with caution and with a specific aim. To that extent it is a rather useful instrument of analysis. Nevertheless, there is a risk of stretching the model considerably by trying to fit in everything that speculative thought defines as escaping phenomenology’s reach. Some precaution is perhaps necessary to avoid measuring up those margins against the criticized instances of arbitrary hypostatization and to maintain their reference to the correlation itself. This is already what Novotný has in mind when he describes them based on the “escaping appearing/conditioning appearing” dipole and this is probably why confronting Barbaras’ peculiar cosmology is so important for his project.

Apart from this general remark, many interesting points of discussion are raised from Novotný’s analysis. Indicatively, we will mention only two. Because of the varied contexts of the chapters, we will address them in the specific frameworks in which they emerge. The first is drawn from his reference to what Patocka calls the “first movement of existence.” Towards the end of section 5.1 he distinguishes two of its components: (a) our primary acceptance by the others and (b) the affective readiness of life (113). We believe that this is a very interesting issue that should draw our attention to the complex interrelations between these two components, i.e., how the one affects the other. But a more pressing question comes to mind: how does Patočka gain access to the phenomenality of their connection within the anchoring-movement? How is their structural balance on such a dynamic ground procured at a phenomenological level? Is it a matter of their intertwinement in a past that is irretrievable in its own terms or is the first movement of existence as such characterized by an ultimate actuality that sets the limits of any inquiry into the origins of its components? If the latter is the case, should we not acknowledge this actuality first as the phenomenological edge of human life in its polyphonous movement before we proceed to its characterization (as event, proto-facticity, etc.)?

The second remark refers to Sepp’s notion of border-Leib discussed in section 6.3. We mentioned earlier that Sepp considers the limit that delineates life’s singularity as a “living being-inside.” But Novotny traces a certain tension at this point: this absolute “here” where life is factically singularized is not a place where this life is opened up for itself in its singularity. How can Sepp claim that they coincide as a “living being-inside”? To accommodate both claims, Novotny suggests viewing them through the perspective of lived-corporeality. As corporeal, this singularity is posited as absolute “here” in a proto-factical manner. As lived-body, this factical limitation is identified with an “absolute being-inside.” The problem is how to understand the transition or contact between the two. According to Novotný, Sepp settles it by resorting to the perspective of the direction-Leib. It seems that it was probably Sepp’s reference to an “absolute ‘here’” that led Novotny to such a claim (146). Yet, Sepp elsewhere refers to the dimension of “Ausleben” to connect the two poles (cf. Sepp 2010, p. 134). Roughly translated, it is the living-out of the lived-body (here: at an organic level). Orientation and directedness are built on this tendency of “Ausleben” when this tendency itself encounters its limit as an obstacle. In short, the “Da” to which Sepp refers is meant to circumscribe the primary resistance of the naked real against the organic tendency of lived-bodily “Ausleben.” Novotný probably wants to connect this primal contact between lived-body and corporeality with an experiential dimension that does not run the risk of lapsing into a cosmological or naturalistic interpretation. It seems that appealing to direction-Leib as the broader perspective in which the two poles of border-Leib come in contact is what enables him to claim that border-Leib is a component of the margins of correlation.

Overall, Novotný’s book is an invaluable addition to the arsenal of phenomenological scholarship. Insightful and rigorous, Welt und Leib meets all the requirements: rich in content, organized, detailed, historically and systematically informing, and conversing with major contemporary phenomenological theories. In short, the reader can only benefit from it in so many ways.[iv]

References

Sepp, Hans Rainer. 2010. „Gabe und Gewalt. Gedanken zum Entwurf einer leibtheoretisch verankerten Anthropologie.“ Cornelius Zehetner, Hermann Rauchenschwandtner u. Birgit Zehetmayer (Hg.): Transformationen der kritischen Anthropologie. Für Michael Benedikt zum 80. Geburtstag. Wien: Löcker: 133-146.

Tengelyi, László. 2014. Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik. Freiburg: Karl Alber.


[i] Novotný refers on purpose to the Leib-Körper compound and not just to Leib. He does so throughout the book, and it is important for his theory regarding the body’s primary role in the correlation to the world and its way of being situated in the “margins” of the correlation. Below, we will translate it as “lived-corporeality” to preserve a reference to both components.

[ii] Sepp develops this threefold distinction in Sepp (2010).

[iii] Another example is his abrupt reference to the “Earth” as the ground of all corporeality on page 47, while we first learn more about its role in Patočka’s philosophy on page 109.

[iv] This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning” in the context of the project “Reinforcement of Postdoctoral Researchers – 2nd Cycle” (MIS-5033021), implemented by the State Scholarships Foundation (ΙΚΥ).

Maria Agustina Sforza: Sein und Leben: Zur Andersheit des Tieres bei Heidegger, Klostermann, 2021

Sein und Leben: Zur Andersheit des Tieres bei Heidegger Book Cover Sein und Leben: Zur Andersheit des Tieres bei Heidegger
Heidegger Forum 18
Maria Agustina Sforza
Klostermann
2021
Hardback 49,00 €
302

Eric S. Nelson: Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other Book Cover Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other
SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
Eric S. Nelson
SUNY Press
2020
Paperback $34.95
480

Reviewed by: Kristóf Oltvai (The University of Chicago)

In Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other, Eric S. Nelson advances, via these two key interlocutors, a “materialist ethics of nonidentity” (14) that would critique nothing less than “contemporary capitalist societies in their complexly interconnected cosmopolitan neoliberal and neomercantile nativist and nationalistic ideological variations” (260). Such great expectations, and mouthfuls, populate the whole continent of this nigh-five-hundred-page tome, which, alongside its protagonists, surveys, enlists, or corrects thinkers as diverse and challenging as Enrique Dussel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Jacques Derrida, and Iris Murdoch. While such breadth – to say nothing of Nelson’s frequent and fascinating asides to Asian philosophies – reveals a deep erudition, the study’s verbosity often belies its chief argument: that Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological defense of ethics as ‘first philosophy,’ if informed by and reinterpreted through Theodor Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics, offers up a useful framework for rethinking our ethical obligations to dehumanized human and nonhuman Others in the Anthropocene. Admittedly, Nelson tips his hand quite late when he writes that “[t]he alternative interpretative strategies outlined throughout this work…point,” not to some reconstitution of “a republic of rational spirits or community of communicative and dialogical agents” à la Habermas and Honneth (Nelson’s whipping boys), but to an “an-archic and unrestrained solidarity…between material existents” (332). His concerns seem, in the final analysis, ecological, while his conclusions share a family resemblance with object-oriented ontology.

The text’s primary theoretical contribution is its concept of “asymmetry”: if ethics is founded on ontological equality, then one’s moral obligations to certain humans, and even more so to nonhuman or flat-out nonliving beings, is impossible. We must thus develop, Nelson claims, ways to think moral obligation in ontologically asymmetrical conditions. Even putting stylistic issues aside, the argument is vexed by a central difficulty, namely, an inability to articulate what sets its solutions apart from the behemoth it means to criticize. While he does offer some recommendations, Nelson frequently jumps from first-person phenomenological description to third-person, extremely concrete public policy positions, or puts forward an idea that “the ‘saintliness,’ ‘genuine humanity,’ and ‘greatest perfection’ that transpires in the insufficiency and incompletion of everyday life in ordinary acts in which one places the other before oneself” (337). The former confuses distinct levels of philosophical analysis, while – to echo Slavoj Žižek’s criticism of Levinas, one that Nelson himself considers (299) – the latter risks a sentimentalism unable to deconstruct global capitalism. Both fangs of this problem arise from Nelson’s underdeveloped account of the precise epistemological connection between phenomenology and critical theory, as well as from a conflation of liberalism and capitalism his own sources reject. The Ethics of the Material Other thus ultimately finds itself unable to decide whether liberalism’s wholesale rejection, or just its reformulation, is in order.

After an introduction meant mainly to acknowledge Adorno’s and Levinas’s diverging philosophical idioms, Nelson divides his study into three parts: “After Nature,” “Unsettling Religion,” and “Demanding Justice.” In “After Nature,” Nelson turns to Marx’s and Adorno’s idea that ‘nature,’ as an ideological category, is dialectically-materially constructed, first using this idea to critique Habermas and Honneth, and then suggesting it helps us get around Levinas’s anthropocentrism. The basic point here is easy to grasp. ‘Nature’ and ‘culture’ are not static ontological spheres; rather, ‘nature’ is itself historically conditioned, and, in late capitalism, serves as both “the environment,” a mere “background for human activity” (38), and as a fetishized reservoir for consumers’ ‘sublime’ experiences. The “natural and human worlds” should thus be rethought, Nelson argues, “as historically intertwined and mutually co-constituting” (46), with ‘nature’ now defined, with Adorno, as the material τόδε τι that confronts and resists reason’s dialectic. In contrast to Habermas and Honneth, then, for whom the Marxian “expression ‘domination of nature’…is [only] a metaphor extended to nature from the domination between humans in misshapen relations” (44), Nelson recovers Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s sense that, in fact, the real exploitation of nature grounds, and is interwoven with, specific forms of dehumanization. In other words,

[i]nsofar as humans are worldly bodily beings, with practical material lives, it is debatable whether the nondisposability of humans can be preserved in a world where everything else is disposable… In not listening and responding to animals, environments, and the materiality of the world… numerous human forms of life and suffering are silenced (48).

The extent to which Nelson himself actually embraces the “nonreductive, aporetic, and ethical praxis-oriented…materialism” (49) he finds in the older Frankfurt School is another question, as his examples of ‘natural’ phenomena still seem oriented by romanticism; we hear of “melting glacier[s]” and “polluted wetlands” (128), for example, but few of the more discomfiting candidates from radical ecology. Nelson wonders, for example, if “[i]t might be the case that there can be an ethics that is responsive to and responsible for animals, ecosystems, and environments without presupposing or requiring any concept or experience of nature” (114), without interrogating what concept of ‘nature’ underlies the three ethical subjects with which he begins that very sentence. The extent to which “bodily suffering” (81) motivates Nelson’s ethics – and restricts them – is likewise open to debate, and downplays, in his account, the extent to which ‘nature’ remains, for Adorno as it was for Hegel, an epistemological category. Nonetheless, Nelson’s use of Adorno to overcome Levinas’s alleged “antinaturalistic and antibiological” (91) is convincing. Levinas’s critique of ‘naturalism’ is indeed oriented by his desire to steer clear of anti-humanist romanticism, especially in its reactionary modes; if we jettison a romantic construction of ‘nature,’ then, granting an “alterity and transcendence to life and living beings insofar as they are ethically rather than biologically understood” (116) does become possible. This reinterpretation also dovetails with the one advanced by Megan Craig and others, namely, that Levinas’s descriptions of the ethical encounter are just extended epistemological metaphors, meant to ground a radical empiricism. This would fit nicely with Adorno’s own defense of empiricism, in his Metaphysics lectures and elsewhere, against idealism’s alleged hatred of the empirical.

In his study’s second part, “Unsettling Religion,” Nelson focuses on the notion of ‘prophecy,’ primarily in Levinas’s philosophical interpretation of Judaism. Before jumping into this, though, he begins by overviewing Ricœur’s three ‘masters of suspicion’ – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – and their critiques of religion. In what amounts to a methodological exercise, Nelson admits that while “[r]eligions operate as ideological disguises and hegemonic regimes of this-worldly power that demand ascetic and sacrificial practices and exact heavy costs in lives and suffering,” they are simultaneously “expressive of prophetically inspired hope for forgiveness, happiness, and justice” (150). He expends particular energy evaluating Nietzsche’s views on religion in On the Genealogy of Morality, affirming the Genealogy’s ‘prophetic’ elements while rejecting its crypto-virtue ethics and justification of suffering through amor fati. Nelson then turns to the meat of the argument in this part, which is Levinas’s confrontation with Kierkegaard over the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. For Nelson, this contrast illustrates two fundamental ‘religious’ modes: Kierkegaard’s, that of fundamentalism and theocratic tyranny, of “the religious constituting the suspension of the ethical,” as against Levinas’s ‘prophetic’ “interruption of [God’s] command by the ethical demand not to kill” (181). For Levinas, Kierkegaard’s positive valuation of Abraham’s decision in Genesis – to carry out God’s command to sacrifice Isaac despite its patent immorality and absurdity – shows that Christianity is “an egotistical and self-interested search for consolation, redemption, and salvation.” Judaism, on the other hand – which Levinas identifies with the angel intervening to stay Abraham’s hand – is “not even primarily about God” (184), but about “the humanism of the other.” This is “the ethical truth of monotheism,” which Levinas actually finds in the later Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, not “faith and its subjectivity” (183). Through this analysis, Nelson provides evidence for the theory that – as Samuel Moyn has argued – Levinas’s concept of ethics norms his construction of ‘Judaism,’ not vice versa. This is why, for example, he can praise “atheism” in one moment “as the break with mythic absorption and monistic participation” while lambasting it as “the denial and absence of the transcendent” (213) in the next.

Nelson then turns to Bloch, for whom the “the radical potential of prophecy in Judaism and Christianity, the prophetic denunciation of exploiters, despots, and masters… prepared the way for the communist communities of love from which” – on Bloch’s reading, at least – “primordial Christianity emerged” (230). Finally, “Unsettling Religion” concludes, in a somewhat disjointed way, with a chapter on Murdoch and the Danish Lutheran thinker Knud Ejler Løgstrup. Apart from Løgstrup’s apparently “underappreciated” (243) status in contemporary philosophy and his use of Kierkegaard, I found this excursus confusing, especially given that Nelson would have had to unpack Murdoch’s metaphysical commitments in a more sustained way to make the comparison of her and Levinas other than external. Also meriting scrutiny is the “category of the religious” Nelson claims his analysis has uncovered – namely, one that, “through its prophetic and redemptive moments and in its dreams, hopes, and visions formed and expressed in abject, damaged, and wounded life… heighten[s] the radical republican and social democratic alignment in the direction of equality (fairness), liberty (autonomy), and solidarity (love)” (259). After all, his frequent gestures to Asian religious and philosophical concepts notwithstanding, Nelson’s proponents of ‘prophecy’ here all work within one textual reception history – that of the Hebrew Bible. Can we cleave this ethically- and politically-oriented prophetism from its scriptural origins, ethos, and legitimation? If not, we may need to resist identifying it with ‘religion’ sans phrase; “messianism” (232), per Nelson’s own suggestion, may be more accurate.

“Demanding Justice,” the study’s final part, attempts to think through how a Levinasian ethics, having passed through the clarificatory crucible of the first two parts, might reorient contemporary political theory. I stress ‘Levinasian’ because, at this juncture, Nelson’s use of Adorno recedes into the background, even as earlier adversaries like Habermas and Honneth return as the “high priests” (to repeat Žižek’s quip) of global capital. Nelson’s guiding question here is whether “there [is] in the Levinasian motif of the ‘language of the other’…the possibility of an alternative to both the false universality of liberal and neoliberal cosmopolitanism and the false concreteness of communitarianism and racialized particularism” (320). These two frameworks are, for Nelson, secretly complementary: neoliberalism preaches universal equality and ‘human rights’ while materially erasing those distinct ways of life – human and nonhuman – unable to be integrated into the free market’s logic, and finds itself quite comfortable with new forms of nationalism and chauvinism that stratify intrasocietal wealth as long as global capital flows remain unimpeded. He takes especial issue with the classical Enlightenment concept of freedom, which he sees as having been perverted into an ideology whereby “appeals to one’s own freedom function to justify power over others and deny the freedom of others to live without coercion and violence” (285). Where this disfiguration is not carried out by the state, it is done so by the ‘culture industry’ and other homogenizing social and economic mechanisms, as diagnosed by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Alexis de Tocqueville. This ideology finds its quintessential expression in the fact that the modern subject is told her freedom is absolute while she finds the most primal experience of freedom – the freedom for meaningful political action – denied her. “Freedom from society robs the individual of the strength for freedom. Asocial freedom limited to an absolutized private self, and divorced from the sociality of the other, is…a denial of the freedom that participates in and helps shape society” (303).

Now, Nelson is aware that Levinasian ethics does not have an obvious answer to this problem; he repeatedly cites, for instance, Žižek’s objection that Levinas, by hyperbolically exaggerating the self’s infinite responsibility for the Other in the ethical encounter, just shifts the burden of society’s sins onto the atomized subject. Nelson claims in response that Levinasian ethics serves as a corrective to existing egalitarianisms rather than a full-blown political counterprogram. Because “Levinas’s political thinking is in multiple ways…an ethically informed and other-oriented transformation of French republican thought” (321), it aims at “disrupting and potentially reorienting self and society, immanently within and yet aporetically irreducible to being, its unity or multiplicity, or other ontological determinations” (332). “Instead of offering an ethical program of cultivating virtues or duties, or setting up procedural normative guidelines,” then, “Levinas speaks of the other as a who. This ‘who’ cannot be defined by ethics in the sense of a normative theory or moral code” (324). Nelson, however, and in a way that I will momentarily question, then turns to define and elucidate precisely such a theory: a “cosmopolitanism of the other,” one “not only concerned with universal and abstract justice” but with “the singularity and particularity of those forgotten and suppressed by the universal as incarnated in the current social-political order” (340). This new cosmopolitanism would “require…a radically an-archic res publica, a republicanism of unrestricted civic associations, public spheres, and solidarities that contests the overreaching powers of the state, the market, and manufactured public opinion” (338). Moreover, it would extend from the human into the nonhuman world, “[n]ourishing and cultivating the life of material others…in fairer forms of exchange and distribution of goods and of intersubjective and interthingly recognition” (332). Ethics of the Material Other closes by suggesting that, although it has successfully gestured toward the ethical and theoretical foundations of this ‘cosmopolitanism of the other,’ only a “political economy oriented toward alterity and nonidentity” would complete its task. Such a political economy would “address” itself to the same themes – “the modern domination of nature that has resulted in disappearing species, deteriorating ecosystems, and the wounds of damaged life” (356) – with which Nelson framed the first part, underscoring the text’s ecological orientation.

Nelson’s fundamental contribution here is his use of Adorno to refine Levinas’s concept of alterity and thereby extend the latter’s phenomenology of the ethical encounter to explicitly include nonhuman Others. This detour through Adorno is not, strictly speaking, necessary. Otherwise than Being can, in particular, be read as an empiricist epistemological treatise, in which Levinas uses a prolonged interhuman metaphor to express the radical exteriority, objectivity, and claim on the conscience, not just of the human Other, but of the truth as such. Nelson’s decision to implicate Adorno is nonetheless insightful insofar as the latter’s later work not only concerns itself with the fact that the history of “metaphysical” (Levinas would write “ontological”) thought identifies the particular as negative and meaningless, but with the particular’s epistemological function, as the concretum of experience, without which reason loses contact with reality. The connection between human materiality and particularity on the one hand, and the functional meaning of these two terms on the other, is thus clearer in Adorno’s oeuvre than in Levinas’s, where Otherwise than Being has to flesh out the genetic phenomenology of reason that remains underdeveloped in Totality and Infinity. Nelson’s ‘asymmetry’ productively borrows this ontological-into-epistemological fluidity from Adorno. Asymmetry characterizes my relationship to the culturally, biologically, and, ultimately, even the epistemically Other, such that I might have, for example, an asymmetrical responsibility to a work of art, to my cultural traditions (‘the past’), or to coming generations or states of being (‘the future’). Access to the Other’s internal states or experiences, nay, even to their external characteristics, need not be a prerequisite for ethical relationship. That Nelson himself seems to sometimes ground these relationships in some shared quality – “sentience,” for example, as in “Buddhist ethics,” “or the equal consideration of interests in Peter Singer’s utilitarian animal ethics” (74) – suggests that certain political aims, such as environmentalism, motivate his project, but it does not obviate the fact that his conclusions align with some of our most important moral intuitions: the care for landscapes, landmarks, sacred sites or objects, and institutions. Whether or how these intuitions can be translated into political aims, however, is a more difficult question.

It is here that Nelson’s argument runs into its central difficulty, namely, in its attempt to map what is, for Levinas, a first-personal phenomenological description of the ethical encounter onto a third-personal normative prescription for political action. Otherwise than Being provides Levinas’s own account of how this transition takes place: although my obligation to the other is experienced as infinite, as soon as another other, “the third,” also places its unlimited demand on me, there takes place an ethical compromise whereby these two others’ needs are compared before I act upon them. This tragic but necessary choice, whereby I must not respond to the other’s infinitude for the sake of a ‘third’ just as transcendent, is the abiogenesis, not just of ethical speech, but of reason and language as such. It is in this paradoxical “comparison of the incomparable [that] there would be the latent birth of representation, logos, consciousness, work, the neutral notion being.”[1] For Levinas, then, what marks any given politics’ ethicality is not whether it does in fact respond to each and every claim of alterity – an impossible task – but the degree to which it allows itself to be challenged by such claims at all. “It is then not without importance to know if the egalitarian and just State in which man is fulfilled…proceeds from a war of all against all or of the irreducible responsibility of the one for all… It is also not without importance to know, as far as philosophy is concerned, if the rational necessity that coherent discourse transforms into sciences, and whose principle philosophy wishes to grasp, has thus the status of an origin…or if this necessity presupposes a hither side…borne witness to, enigmatically, to be sure, in responsibility for the others.”[2] What Levinas offers us in Otherwise than Being is a genetic phenomenology of human politics, linked to one of rationality. These are accounts of how all such discursive and social formations have in fact come about, as is evident from how Levinas explicitly juxtaposes them against two other universal accounts, namely, Hobbes’s theory of the state of nature and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Levinas is not prescribing, then, a certain form of government, let alone specific policy recommendations – although, if his account is true, and rationality is born of the ethical encounter, then a politics that flouts its hetero-foundation may risk unreason and collapse, as natural law theory believes tyrannies do.

Nelson acknowledges this several times (277, 281, 282) only to then jump to specific cases; “the denial of healthcare” (296) and “the use of capital punishment” (323), for example, are said to be incompatible with Levinasian commitments, as is liberal capitalism. “[E]quality cannot be limited to symmetrical rational agents exchanging reasons or rights. Such an abstract ideal misses the reality of exchange as structured by desires and interests, relations of power, status, and wealth, and the social-economic reproduction of society” (283). This diagnosis of liberalism – shot through with unseen power dynamics and guided by bellicose competition – sits uneasily with Levinas’s genetic account for both structural and epistemological reasons. The structural reason is that Nelson’s argument effectively, in an odd Hobbesianism, hypostasizes the State; it places the State in what is, for Levinas, the subject’s phenomenological position, expecting the State to experience and respond to alterity in the way the subject does. The epistemological reason is that Levinas’s phenomenology, like phenomenology in general, assumes a transparency incompatible with a transcendental hermeneutic of suspicion applied to the same object of analysis. If we accept Levinas’s account of political formation, in other words, we cannot accept a (broadly) Marxian one at the same level.

We are left with three possibilities. Either (a) Levinas’s account is accurate, and liberalism is simply a social formation that necessarily forgets its ethical genesis; (b) liberalism is compatible with societies’ ethical genesis, but has only contingently forgotten it; or (c) the Marxian account of liberalism is accurate, and Levinas’s is an ideological concoction. Because Nelson’s study does not develop a rigorous epistemological link between their phenomenological and critical-theoretical analytic registers (in the vein of, say, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), it cannot firmly decide between these three options. Instead, Nelson wavers between them. Many passages seem to opt for (a): because liberal capitalism has so deeply failed morally, its normative presuppositions are shams. “Abstract liberal arguments against oppression that leave capitalist forms of power essentially unquestioned are complicit with systems of subjugation that exploit, marginalize, and systematically reinforce powerlessness and vulnerability. They are compelled to sustain the machinery of global capitalism” (341). Or, again: “The liberal priority of justice over care, charity, and republican and communistic solidarity functions as a veil of indifference for excusing injustice, given the structures of domination imbedded in the institutions and practices of social-political life” (323). Nelson, rhetorically at least, seems to prefer (a); not unproblematically, however, his conclusion’s writ actually leans toward (b) or (c).

Nelson himself provides an important formulation of (c) in the form of Žižek’s and Stephen Bronner’s objections to Levinas (299, 305): does Levinas’s ethics, by placing a burden of infinite moral responsibility on the individual, not surreptitiously excuse the State or society of their structural injustices? Secondly, does this shift not privatize ethical discourse, obviating the need for social critique and collective action? Thirdly, does a phenomenology of infinite indebtedness to the Other not preclude moral criticism of that Other, “turn[ing]” society, in effect, “into a set of competing cultural ghettos” (314)? Nelson does not provide robust answers to these concerns. His alternative to particularistic communitarianism, the ‘cosmopolitanism of the other,’ remains underdeveloped, its only seeming quality a promise to avoid the mistakes of past cosmopolitanisms. Even more strikingly, there are moments where Nelson’s interpretation of Levinas as a theorist of ‘small acts of kindness’ meshes with Žižek’s view of him as a bourgeois sentimentalist. In his chapter on Levinas, Murdoch, and Løgstrup, for example, Nelson embraces their idea that “the good can occur through both uncultivated and cultivated human attitudes and practices of goodness, such as the small everyday acts that all three philosophers elucidate to different degrees” (249). We are told that Levinas is, in fact, “the opposite of the moralizing and ethically privileged perfectionist imagined by his detractors. Ethics does not consist in moralistic perfection, not even as a regulative ideal, but in the ‘saintliness,’ ‘genuine humanity,’ and the ‘greatest perfection’ that transpires in the insufficiency and incompletion of everyday life in ordinary acts in which one places the other before oneself” (337). Nelson’s emphasis on the quotidian may assuage Žižek’s worry that Levinas presses for a “hyperbolic yet ultimately empty responsibility” (272), but not its corollary, that “asymmetrical freedom is inherently conservative and elitist in negatively privileging myself over others, as if injustice were solely my responsibility” (299). Indeed, Nelson’s answer to this specific charge – that Levinas can be placed in the French republican tradition and was sympathetic to socialist causes, and hence would surely not endorse a “neoconservative” policy of American exceptionalism (319) – substitutes biography for philosophy. The question is not where Levinas’s personal political proclivities lay, but whether his ethics structurally endorses a quietism or separatism (as in Totality and Infinity’s phenomenology of family life) that frames individual political involvement as morally irrelevant or, at best, unfulfilling. Given especially Levinas’s known antipathy to Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology of social life,[3] Nelson could have probed this angle further.

In yet other moments of his argument, however, Nelson seems to opt for (b). Levinas, he says, does not proposes any formation to replace liberal capitalism and its grounds in Enlightenment universalism, but rather offers up the encounter with the Other as its continual corrective. “[A]symmetrical ethics signifies a way of correcting,” rather than replacing, “standard liberal and socialist categorizations of social-political equality.” Again: it “indicates a noteworthy way of revising the contemporary discourses of ethical and critical social theory.” Or, yet again: “Levinas’s articulation…is not so much a rejection as it is a critical transformation of the categories of modern universalism” (281). While these sorts of statements get closest to Levinas’s actual position, they are not compatible with Nelson’s siding throughout his text with (a). We cannot claim that encountering the Other urges us to revise our political priorities within an existing liberal framework while also claiming that liberalism is fundamentally an ideological obfuscation. This contradiction stems, in Nelson’s account as in many others’ in contemporary continental thought (including, say, Agamben’s), from a conflation of liberalism with capitalism. Defining ‘liberalism’ as just free markets, and the unitary state power that enforces these (333), makes this conflation possible. Liberal theorists like Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt (to name two of Nelson’s own interlocutors) argue, however, that liberalism requires, above all, ‘civil society,’ the ‘thick,’ face-to-face communities that make deliberative rationality possible. Nelson’s most programmatic gesture, toward “a republicanism of unrestricted civil associations, public spheres, and solidarities that contests the overreaching powers of the state, the market, and manufactured public opinion” (338), fully fits into this richer concept of liberalism, his protests notwithstanding. Classing Levinas with Arendt among capitalism’s liberal critics should lead us, however, to a more nuanced parsing of the relationship between alterity and communality than what Nelson offers here. After all, the point Arendt makes about refugees and human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which Nelson cites in this context, is not really one of “an inclusive republic that would welcome the stranger, the exile, and the stateless who have lost the very right to have rights” (321). (To be fair, Nelson’s misreading here is now so widespread in Arendt reception as to have become an interpolation.) Arendt certainly lauds such welcome, but her basic argument is Burkean. Universal human rights are an aspirational norm, but they are meaningless outside of a concrete political community; the nation-state’s particularism is thus the vehicle that realizes the universal. Arendt would agree with Levinas that “justice remains justice only, in a society where there is no distinction between those close and far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest,”[4] but would stress that said ‘society’ must be bounded if we wish to retain a lived and practical meaning for ‘passing by’ the neighbor. Ultimately, then, Nelson’s embrace of “unrestricted solidarities” (2) may contradict some of his sources’ terms. I can have an unrestricted sense of responsibility for every possible Other, or a solidarity with the actual others I encounter in my embeddedness in my particular context, but unless ‘the face of the Other’ is but a cipher for a universal ontological determination (which Levinas would surely reject), I cannot have both. It is past due for the ‘negative political theologies’ inspired by Levinas, Adorno, Derrida, Hent de Vries, and others to acknowledge this fact and so to begin shifting their analyses from the insistence on ‘alterity’ to asking what political procedures and norms make – or could make – regular encounters with the Other a feature of public life.


[1] Emmanuel Levinas. 1998. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974).  Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, p. 158.

[2] Id., p. 159.

[3] Dominique Janicaud. 2000. “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology” (1991). Trans. Bernard Prusak. In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, p. 44.

[4] Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 159.

Kimura Bin: L’Entre, Jérôme Millon, 2021

L'Entre. Une approche phénoménologique de la schizophrénie Book Cover L'Entre. Une approche phénoménologique de la schizophrénie
Krisis
Kimura Bin. Traduit du japonais par Claire Vincent
Jérôme Millon
2021
Paperback $28.00
160

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Sensible World and the World of Expression. Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 Book Cover The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth
Northwestern University Press
2020
Paperback $34.95
320

Reviewed by: Antonia Schirgi (University of Graz)

Background

Merleau-Ponty suddenly died in 1961, at the young age of 53, at a time when he was still in the process of developing his thoughts and was working on a major book in which he wanted to further his thoughts and present a new ontology beyond a strict distinction of subject and object. For many years thereafter, notes that Merleau-Ponty drew up in preparation of this book that were posthumously published under the title The Visible and the Invisible and his  second thesis (habilitation), the Phenomenology of Perception, were considered to be his most important works. Apart from some published articles and books, Merleau-Ponty left a number of unpublished manuscripts and working notes (more than 4000 pages). Some of these unfinished works and notes were published in the years after Merleau-Ponty’s death. In 1992 the majority of Merleau-Ponty’s notes were donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France by his family and, since then, some previously unpublished materials have been published. These notes allow their readers to follow Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts from his early works to the later ones, to see continuities, moments of self-criticism as well as to understand his engagement with certain philosophical and other literature (cf. Saint Aubert 2011, 7).

After the completion of his second thesis, Merleau-Ponty was affiliated to the University of Lyon (1945-1949), later he held a professorship for child psychology at the Sorbonne (1949-1952). In 1952 he was elected to the Collège de France, he assumed his position there the same year, held his inaugural lecture on the 15th of January 1953 and began his regular teaching activities the following week (cf. xxxvii, endnote 1). The Sensible World and the World of Expression (Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression) was the title of one of the two courses that Merleau-Ponty gave that year. The Collège de France is a unique institution; even if it is a public university, it does not offer regular introductory courses. The courses taught at the Collège are lectures and colloquia that permit the professors to present their ongoing thoughts and recent research to advanced students and/or the general interested public. Holding a chair in philosophy at this institution permitted Merleau-Ponty to further his philosophical thoughts, to return to some the phenomena that he treated in his first and second thesis as well as to some issues of his approach that he became aware of during the years after the completion of these books, and to present these thoughts to his audience. This return does, however, not present a break with his work and thoughts from the years at Sorbonne; rather, the insights that he gained during these years enriched his perspective on the phenomena (perception, the union of body and soul etc.) that he re-started to deal with.

In this review, I will discuss the translation of the posthumous edition of Merleau-Ponty’s notes on The Sensible World and the World of Expression. Furthermore, I want to give a brief overview of the course and of some of the key innovations that can be found in these notes. However, I will not discuss the content of the book in detail here.

The Manuscript

Detailed preparatory notes for the course on the sensible world as well as some further workings notes were part of the materials donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF “don 92-21 de Suzanne Merleau-Ponty”, NAF 26993 X). Merleau-Ponty himself published a brief summary of this course (cf. Résumés de cours. Collège de France 1952-1960. Paris: Gallimard, 1968, 11-21), as he did of every course that he held at the Collège de France, but he did not publish any further materials. The preparatory and working notes were transcribed and published by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen in 2011 (MetisPresses).

Merleau-Ponty wrote up these notes in order to present the thoughts they contain to his audience; however, they are not immediately written for a public (like it would be the case with an article or a book). The manuscript contains some paragraphs that are written in full sentences. Nevertheless, large parts of the manuscript consist of incomplete sentences, bullet points, or listings of keywords. The editors of the French edition “strove to present Merleau-Ponty’s notes in a virtually verbatim form, and meticulous effort was made to keep the page layout as close as possible to that found in the actual notes themselves” (xliii). This effort of the editors is of high value for those working with Merleau-Ponty’s notes, as it permits readers to follow Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts in the way he developed them and not to be simply guided, and potentially misguided, by the interpretation of the editors. However, interpretations of a text like the present one, are challenging. As Merleau-Ponty’s notes are, to my knowledge, the only materials available (no student notes or similar document have been published or included in the collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France), it remains unknown how Merleau-Ponty elaborated and discussed his thoughts during his lectures. Smyth argues for a limited interpretation of this manuscript. Even if these notes were of importance as they date back to a crucial moment in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts, the thoughts they contain were thoughts and work in progress. According to Smyth one should not over-hasty draw conclusions from these notes, from the perspective of a present-day reader who knows the further development of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Furthermore, the course notes should not be interpreted “in isolation from his other courses at the College de France” (xxxvi). Merleau-Ponty himself stated in his official course summary that it would still be necessary to further explore linguistic expression in order to define the philosophical meaning of the analyses perused during this course (cf. xxxvi; Merleau-Ponty 1968, 21). Therefore, Smyth argues that “we should be cautious about drawing any firm conclusions from them [these notes, A.S.] at all” (xxxvi). His call for a cautious interpretation of a manuscript like the present one seems adequate and valuable, but it might be a bit too far reaching. In this manuscript Merleau-Ponty discusses issues from a different angle than he did in other texts, and he elaborates thoughts more in details than he did in his published writings. Even if these notes were still work in progress, they can help readers to understand where Merleau-Ponty was coming from – which sources he considered important, in which direction his thoughts developed etc. To name an example, the importance of the writings of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder for Merleau-Ponty’s development of the concept of the body schema can only be understood from the present manuscript, not from Merleau-Ponty’s earlier writings (in the Phenomenology of Perception Schilder is only mentioned once). His discussion of the body schema in the present preparatory notes does not only deepen the thoughts Merleau-Ponty already developed in the Phenomenology of Perception, but it also shows new directions that he has been about to take with regards to this concept. Smyth is right that these preparatory notes should not be interpreted in isolation from Merleau-Ponty’s notes for his other courses and other materials, but does this not hold true for all of Merleau-Ponty’s writings? Even if certain writings, like the Phenomenology of Perception, were published by Merleau-Ponty himself, now that we know from courses like the present one as well as from articles and manuscripts that Merleau-Ponty himself was critical of some of his early positions and descriptions, it seems wrong to interpret the position he presented there as the position of Merleau-Ponty. Besides that, the problematic status is not unique to the manuscript of the course on the sensible world. None of the posthumously published manuscripts was intended to be immediately published. Even if Merleau-Ponty’s most renowned mature work – The Visible and the Invisible – is the publication of a manuscript that Merleau-Ponty prepared for publication, the manuscript that Merleau-Ponty left when he died in 1961 seems to have been far from a final version. We can only speculate how he would have further developed this manuscript would he had been given the time to do so.

The Translation

Editing notes, like Merleau-Ponty’s notes on the sensible world, is not an easy task; the same holds true for their translation. The present edition is a translation of the French edition (not of the original notes) (cf. xliii). The peculiar style of the manuscript that is, as I already mentioned, excellently reflected in the French transcript, has largely been preserved in the English translation. This means, for example, that words that Merleau-Ponty underlined, are underlined in the book, words that he crossed out, are included in the text, but crossed out as they were in the manuscript and so on (cf. xliv). Nevertheless, a translation is not simply a reproduction of a text in a different language, but it is the outcome of a process of interpretation. Smyth makes very clear that he is aware of his own interference in the text, when he states: “It is not possible […] to translate the notes as they stand without engaging in some disabbreviation, for there are simply too many uncertainties and ambiguities at the level of the words themselves.” (xlv) Hence, while the French edition in general does not add any terms to the text itself, but sticks to the original manuscript and its abbreviated style, the English translations “adds a very large number of terms within the text itself” (xiv). Thereby Smyth wants to enhance the readability of the text, “to facilitate as clear and unambiguous a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notes as possible” (xiv), and to outline the “intended meaning of the transcribed words” (xiv), or rather the transcribed words as they were read and interpreted by the translator. Further to the additions that Smyth made to the text itself, his translations “includes a new and expanded set of annotive notes” (xliii), that go beyond the notes included in the French edition. In addition, Smyth outlines his choices concerning the translation of some crucial terms that are not easily to translate – the “hard cases” as he would say (cf. xlvi-li).

The Structure of the Course and of the Book

In general, Merleau-Ponty held two courses per year, each one comprised fourteen to fifteen lectures (cf. xxxvii, endnote 1). Often the topics of the two courses corresponded – this was also the case in 1953, when Merleau-Ponty dealt with issues of language in his second course – and on two occasions the two weekly courses were merged in order to develop one single issue more in depth (1956-1957 and 1957-1958, when Merleau-Ponty gave two intense courses on nature).

The Sensible World and the World of Expression comprises fourteen lectures. The course can be divided into four parts: (1) the first three lectures serve as a general introduction and overview of the course, (2) in lessons four to ten Merleau-Ponty discusses space and movement from a phenomenological point of view (including depth perception, a phenomenon that has become highly important for Merleau-Ponty), (3) the lessens ten to thirteen are dedicated to the body schema and (4) the last lesson dealt with expression (primarily with non-linguistic expression, but Merleau-Ponty gave some indications concerning linguistic expression too). As Smyth points out, Merleau-Ponty did not intend to discuss linguistic expression in detail in this course; however, he did intend to discuss “the passage from expression at the level of the sensible to cultural expression that is not yet language” (xvii), as it is the case in visual art. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty took more time than planned to elaborate the basis of his thoughts and therefore he could only discuss this move in his last lesson. Hence, the four parts were not given equal attention in the course (cf. xvii).

The book (the French and the English edition) contains the notes preparing the course, as well as working notes that Merleau-Ponty developed while preparing the course. These notes were not dated or classified by Merleau-Ponty. The editors of the French book categorized them thematically for their edition (cf. 129; Saint Aubert 2011, 171).

Merleau-Ponty’s Thoughts on the Sensible World

In The Sensible World and the World of Expression Merleau-Ponty primarily deals with the relation between the bodily human being and the sensible world. As I already mentioned, the relation between the world of expression is briefly touched in this course, but dealt with more in detail in his courses and writings on language. So, how does Merleau-Ponty understand this sensible world and what did his course aim at?

Sensible world = things

World of expression = cultural things, ‘use objects,’ symbols. (I didn’t say: universe of language)

Double goal:      — deepen the analysis of the perceived world by showing that it already presupposes the expressive function.

                             — prepare the analysis of this [expressive] function through which the perceived world is sublimated, produce a concrete theory of mind. (9)

This brief definition and equally brief statement concerning the double goal of the course present the first lines of the preparatory course manuscript of Merleau-Ponty. Even if these first words seem to indicate a strong division of the sensible world and the world of expression, in what follows Merleau-Ponty makes clear that they are not separated, but “enveloped” (27) in each other. He is less interested in their analytic distinction, than in the dynamic passage from the one to the other in and through movement. As explained above, Merleau-Ponty did not follow his original plan for the course, in particular did he not manage to extensively discuss expression. Therefore, the course dealt more with the first part of his twofold goal than with the second part; indeed, after spending more time than expected on topics related to the first part of his general aim, only the last lesson remained for the second part (cf. xvii).

The main concepts that Merleau-Ponty deals with in this course are perception and expression (in its relation to the sensible world). Already on the first page of his manuscript Merleau-Ponty criticises his own approach towards perception, as he presented it in the Phenomenology of Perception and in a lecture that he gave at a meeting of the Société française de philosophie in late 1946 on the issue of the Primacy of Perception (lecture and discussion published with Northwestern University Press, 1964). He argues that his earlier works did not present strong and clear enough a break with classical positions, concepts and terms. With reference to the critique by Jean Hyppolite and Jean Beaufret, following his lecture in 1946, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that readers and listeners could have gotten his thoughts wrong, as (1) one could have thought that the “primacy of perception” as he presented it was primacy in the classical sense, a “primacy of the sensory, of the natural given”, even if for him “perception was essentially a mode of access to being” (10); (2) one might have missed Merleau-Ponty’s ontological thoughts and taken his work as “only a phenomenology” (10); (3) therefore readers might have thought “that being was reduced to the ‘positivism’ of perception”, even if the perceived is “not possessed” by the philosopher, but “unquestionably before us” (10; underlining in the original). With reference to this discussion, Smyth argues that the main innovative aspect of this course “is that Merleau-Ponty is also revisiting the phenomenological analysis of the perceived world itself.” (xvi, emphasis in the original) However, Smyth presents an even stronger claim concerning the shift in Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts as he outlined them in the present course. According to him, Merleau-Ponty realized that his manner of presenting the problem of “how the sensible is taken up expressively […] made it unsolvable” (xvi). Perception was an “encounter with the sensible” and as such it was “already expressive” (xvi). Hence, Merleau-Ponty “came to realize […] that he didn’t get the phenomenology of phenomenology right, because he didn’t get the phenomenology itself right in the first place. So, he was still building his phenomenological method, not building on it” (xvi-xvii; emphasis in the original). Even if this reading indicates a strong shift in and important innovations of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on phenomenology and the phenomenological method, it does not negate the continuity of this development.

Besides perception, the other central concept that is discussed in this manuscript, is expression. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of expression is broad: Expression is “the property that a phenomenon has through its internal arrangement [son agencement interne] to disclose another [phenomenon] that is not or even never was given” (11; annotations and emphasis in the original). This definition already highlights the relational aspect of expression. Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of perception and expression presuppose and involve a certain conception of the human being. As he already did in his early works, also in this course Merleau-Ponty opposes dualist conceptions. It is the body (in its entirety) that perceives and expresses. A body that is able to perceive and to express, is a body “as [a] given organization, [as] ‘sensory’ activity” and a “body that moves itself”, it is a body “[as a] response to ‘natural’ aspects of the world” and a body “[that] returns to the world in order to signify it [or] to designate it” (28; annotations in the original).

Particularly during the first two introductory lectures Merleau-Ponty discusses consciousness. In the second part of his course, he deals with space and movement, especially with depth perception and the perception of movement. The following lectures are dedicated to the body schema (a part that Merleau-Ponty seems to have added in the course of the semester) (xxii). The notes to this course are the first writings in which Merleau-Ponty aligned depth perception and (the perception of) movement with the body schema (cf. Saint Aubert 2011, 10-11).

Thereby Merleau-Ponty further elaborates concepts and thoughts that he already discussed in his earlier works and at the same time he introduces new concepts and thoughts and present some major shifts with regards to some concepts. Some of the core innovations that he outlines in these preparatory notes are:

  • Merleau-Ponty rejects classical conceptions of consciousness (particularly in the first and second lecture). In his course on the sensible world, Merleau-Ponty introduces for the first time the concept of “écart” (generally translated as “divergence”) (xix). Merleau-Ponty elaborates this, not only but particularly well, by referring to the example of the perception of a circle. When a circle is perceived it offers its sense as a tacit sense (as opposed to the classical position, according to which sense is essence and given). The sense of a circle is a “certain mode of curvature” (13), namely the “change of direction at each instant always with the same divergence” [même écart] (20) and therefor the circle itself is a “mode of divergence” [mode d’écart] (20; underlining in the original). Merleau-Ponty develops this notion further in his preparatory and working notes for this course (e.g. working note on the Diacritical Conception of the Perceptual Sign or working note on Diacritical Perception, included in the present edition on the pages 158 and 159).
  • When Merleau-Ponty discussed the concept of the body schema in the Phenomenology of Perception he presented it mainly as a sensory-motor unity. The Sensible World and the World of Expression is the first document in which the body schema is “understood in a much more active (or enactive) – because expressive – way” (xxii). At the same time, this is the first document in which Merleau-Ponty elaborates its relational dimension – the relation of the body schema and the (sensible) world (cf. 123) as well as the relation between different body schema (cf. Saint Aubert 2011, 13). The extension of the concept of the body schema has important implications for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of movement and expression as well as their perception (movement is perceived by the entire body schema) and the relation to the world and others.
  • In the context of his discussion of the body schema, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of praxis, a notion that he prefers to the notion of action (cf. 100). “The unity of the body schema is that of a praxis so construed, and the body schema is the background implied in [this praxis].” (100; annotation in the original) The praxis builds on the body schema (that is formed by the praxis, but that is more than a memory of previous praxis and/or experience) and continuously forms and transforms the schema. The praxis is a form of interaction with the world – it is not an “adaptation” to the world, at the same time it is not a world-less action performed by an isolated individual, it is “not only functional, but projection of the whole man” (100).
  • Merleau-Ponty intensively discusses movement – what movement is, how movement can be perceived and how movement can be expressed in visual art (How can something that is stationary express movement? (cf. xxxv)). For Merleau-Ponty movement is not displacement, a variation of relations, and a place is not a “relation to other places” (33; underlining in the original), rather it is “first of all situation” (35; underlining in the original). Movement requires that the moving is in movement, that movement is something different to a series of different spatial positions, but rather something “absolute”, something that is “in the thing in motion and not elsewhere” (52). Movement entails an encroachment of here and there, before and after; something that is only possible if movement is neither only in the moving thing nor only in the perceiving or observing subject, but if it occurs “through a sort of mixing of me and the ‘things’” (52). The perception of movement is not simply an intellectual undertaking, rather it is the body schema in its entirety that perceives movement (cf. 64-65).

Consequently, in visual art movement is not something that is depicted by signs that indicate a change of place, but by the “envelopment of a becoming in a stance [attitude]” (124, annotation in the original). It is, for example, the body of a horse that is painted in a manner that shows its intentionality of movement. Movement is indirectly presented or a reference of something oblique. The language of “écart” plays into Merleau-Ponty’s description of the problem of movement in visual art. Movement is “[reference] of signifying to signified that is elsewhere and only appears through [the signifying], presentation through divergences with respect to a norm that is itself never given. Presentation of the world through variations in modulations of our being toward the world.” (125-126; annotation in the original)

Because of these and some further innovations the book is a valuable source for researchers working on and with the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Together with his published writings from the early 1950s and the manuscripts of his other courses it can help to better comprehend the development of his thoughts and to enrich one’s interpretations of his concepts.

Bibliography

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. Résumés de cours. Collège de France 1952-1960. Paris: Gallimard.

Saint Aubert, Emmanuel de. 2011. “Avant-propos.” In: Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Cours au Collège de France. Notes, 1953, edited by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen, 7-38. Geneva: MetisPresses.

Steven DeLay: In the Spirit: A Phenomenology of Faith, John Hunt Publishing, 2022

In the Spirit: A Phenomenology of Faith Book Cover In the Spirit: A Phenomenology of Faith
Steven DeLay
John Hunt Publishing
2022
Paperback £8.99 || $13.95

Stuart Elden: The Early Foucault

The Early Foucault Book Cover The Early Foucault
Stuart Elden
Polity
2021
Paperback $26.95
288

Reviewed by: Michael Maidan (Independent Scholar)

Stuart Elden’s The Early Foucault is the third of a four-volume study of the origins and development of Michel Foucault’s thought. This book is the first one regarding the period it covers, basically the 1950s, but it is the third to be published. It will be soon followed by a fourth and final book, that will cover the ‘archaeological’ period and Foucault’s forays into art history and literary criticism. External factors explain the disconnect between the order of production and the chronology. Elden’s first two books dealt with the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France.  The publication of the Lectures began in 1997, with the publication of the sixth lecture, Il faut défendre la société (1975-1876). Additional volumes followed it, released not in the order of their delivery by Foucault, but on the availability of audio recordings of the lectures. Foucault’s preparatory notes and other ancillary materials later supplemented and eventually displaced the recordings. Elden’s earlier books responded to the availability of the Lectures and the will to integrate the new material into a coherent picture. The First Foucault and the forthcoming book on Archaeology deal with the archive material made available to the public in recent years. This material includes reading and preparatory notes, lectures of the period before his appointment to The College de France, manuscripts in different degrees of development, philosophical diaries, bibliographies, etc.

Elden is one of the first to attempt a synthetic picture of this wealth of materials. He relies on archival material from Foucault and his contemporaries, detailed comparisons between different editions of published works, and a thorough familiarity with the secondary literature.

While we have three superb biographies of Foucault (Eribon, Miller, and Macey) and numerous specialized studies, these are primarily based on Foucault’s published work and interviews with Foucault and his contemporaries. But the opening of Foucault’s literary estate — deposited today in the Bibliothèque nationale de France — necessitates revisions, or at least qualifications, of our prior understanding of Foucault’s thought and development. Elden’s book is a thorough study of the archive. It also explores Foucault’s stay in Upsala (Sweden) and his use of its University Library’s significant collection of medical books and printed materials. Also, using documents unearthed in recent years by Polish historians, he sheds some light on the sordid story of how the communist Polish secret police attempted to entrap and possibly blackmail Foucault.

It is not possible to describe in detail the riches of the book in this review. Therefore, I will concentrate on a few issues previously insufficiently documented and on how newly discovered materials sheds light on the formation of Foucault’s thought. Ultimately, the book’s structure is strongly indexed to a foretold result, writing the two texts Foucault submitted for his doctoral degree (Doctorat d’État). This structure necessarily downplays the roads not taken. Elden is aware of this, and on several occasions, he considers projects that Foucault abandoned or reoriented into newer ones.

Chapter 1 discusses Foucault’s university studies in philosophy and psychology, with particular emphasis on a Master’s thesis that Foucault prepared under the supervision of Jean Hyppolite.  This work was presumed lost, but it was recently recovered and would be published soon. Chapter 2 investigates Foucault’s first teaching assignments at the University of Lille and the Ecole normale superieure (ENS) in Paris. Chapter three discusses Foucault’s earlier publications and describes several other projects that Foucault began in this period but left unfinished. Chapter 4 looks at his work as a co-translator of the existentialist psychiatrist Binswanger and the philosopher and essayist von Weizsäcker. Chapter 5 analyzes Foucault’s study of Nietzsche and Heidegger, his reading of the work of Dumezil, and his relationship with the composer Jean Barraqué. Chapter 6 covers Foucault’s postings in Upsala and Warsaw, while chapter 7 does the same for the Hamburg period. In Hamburg Foucault translated and commented Kant’s Anthropology, that he submitted as his secondary thesis for his Doctorat d’état. Finally, chapter eight deals with the defense, publications, and after story of Madness and Civilization, his principal doctoral dissertation.

One of the many strengths of Elden’s account is its attention to Foucault’s study of Hegel, Husserl, Kant, the Dasein analytical movement, and many more. This is particularly welcome because Foucault is not very loquacious about his readings. In particular, there is almost no explicit reference in Foucault’s published writings to his extensive reading of Husserl. Elden shows that Foucault studied Husserl intensively, even reading and annotating some of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. The same is true of other master thinkers, such as Freud, Binswanger, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Chapter 1 presents the teachers Foucault encountered first in Lycée Henri-IV during the preparation for the entrance examination to the École normale supérieure (ENS) and later at the ENS and the Sorbonne. These teachers were not only sources of knowledge and inspiration for Foucault but also incarnated the philosophical establishment, and Foucault will meet them as teachers, examiners, members of his doctoral jury, and later, as colleagues. Of particular interest is the figure of Jean Wahl, who played an essential role as a relay for German philosophy, was interested in the philosophy of Heidegger, but also in Hegel and Kierkegaard. Foucault attended Wahl’s courses on Heidegger in 1950 and possibly also in 1952.

Elden then presents the figure of Jean Hyppolite, and most importantly, the thesis that Foucault wrote under his direction and submitted in 1949. The dissertation asks three questions: (a) what are the limits of the field of phenomenological exploration and what are the criteria for the experience that serves as the point of departure; (b) what the limits of the transcendental domain in which experiences are made up; (c) what the relations of the transcendental world with the actuality of the world of experience (12).

Elden describes Foucault’s arguments (12-17) and adds that Foucault refers to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, other Hegel writings, and a wide range of secondary literature, including the work of Kojève, Lukacs, Hyppolite, Löwith, and Croce. Foucault also references Husserl and expositors of Husserl’s philosophy, such as Levinas, Fink, and Sartre. According to Elden, Foucault argues that The Phenomenology of Spirit is not an introduction to the Hegelian system or its first part, but rather an assessment of how a ‘system as the totality of knowledge… could be conceived’ (13).

Elden concludes that it is ‘an apprentice work’ and is surprised that Foucault does not evoke the famous ‘master slave’ theme. He points out some continuity between the thesis and Foucault’s later interests. For example, Elden lists the idea of the transcendental and the stress on the question of knowledge (16). Elden also notes the absence of references to Heidegger and Nietzsche (17). However, he seems less surprised by Foucault’s strikingly ‘unhegelian’ reading of the Phenomenology.

Foucault studied not only philosophy but also psychology and psychopathology. Elden refers to his teachers, Lagache and the psychiatrist and neurologist Ajuriaguerra.  Foucault also read the work of Georges Politzer, who proposed a Marxist oriented ‘concrete psychology,’ critical of psychoanalysis.  Foucault was also interested in the historical approach to psychology that  Ignace Meyerson developed. Regarding psychoanalysis, Elden refers briefly to Pierre Morichau-Beauchant, one of the earliest French psychoanalysts and a friend of his family. Foucault attended Lacan’s seminars. Based on Maurice Pinget, a close friend at that period, Elden writes that Foucault attended Lacan’s seminars in 1951 and until his departure for Upsala in 1955.  But while Pinget claims that Foucault was very enthusiastic about Lacan, other witnesses seem to remember that Foucault had little sympathy for Lacan’s project and philosophical ambitions (20). And Foucault’s early publications do not reflect Lacan’s teachings.  Elden promises more on the relationship between Foucault and Lacan in his forthcoming book about Foucault’s Archaeology (21).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was another significant influence. Foucault attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures in 1947-48 in the Sorbonne, but probably not his lectures at the College de France. Foucault wrote an unpublished manuscript on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (see chapter 4). Elden describes the influence of Merleau-Ponty as being significant for the young Foucault, in particular, because of Merleau-Ponty’s project to bridge between psychology and philosophy (23).

A section in this chapter deals with the preparation for the aggregation examination. Elden explains the mechanism of the exams (24-25) and portraits some important characters for Foucault in this period, mainly Althusser and Canguilhem. Foucault failed in his first attempt but retook the exam the next year and was graded second in philosophy. One anecdotical aspect of his exams is that Foucault’s subject for the oral exam was sexuality, a topic newly introduced by Canguilhem to the program. It seems that Foucault complained about the subject.

Chapter 2 deals with the Lille and ENS period, from 1949 to his departure for Upsala in 1955. Following his aggregation, Foucault applied for a scholarship to conduct doctoral research at the Foundation Thièrs. His proposal was the study of the problem of human science in post-Cartesian thought and the work of Malebranche and Bayle. Elden remarks that this subject seems to link back to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on Malebranche and Maine de Biran. In this period, Foucault also worked as an assistant lecturer in psychology at the University of Lille. He taught contemporary psychology and its history, psychoanalysis, psychopathology, Gestalt theory, the work of Pavlov and other Soviet psychologists, Rorschach tests, and the existential psychologies of Roland Kuhn and Binswanger. He also taught psychology at the ENS, covering psychology, experimental psychology, Pavlov, and the psychoanalytical theory of personality.

In parallel to his teaching activities, Foucault obtained a certificate in psychopathology from the Institute of Psychology of Paris. The studies there included lectures and practical observations at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital.

We have several archival materials from this period. Three ‘substantial manuscripts’ were preserved: ‘Connaissance de l’homme et réflexion transcendantale’ (Knowledge of man and transcendental reflection), an untitled manuscript on Binswanger, and one on phenomenology and psychology.  We also have indirect materials, such as student notes, which cover Foucault’s teaching at the ENS.  Elden describes and summarizes the content of this archival material.

Regarding ‘Knowledge of Man,’ the manuscript is in a binder labeled ‘Cours 1952-3’, and its content overlaps with a course that Foucault taught in 1954-5 at the ENS with a different title. Elden suspects these notes may be more than just teaching material, maybe material for a projected thesis. In these manuscripts, Foucault takes leave from his Master’s thesis and explores the notion of a ‘philosophical anthropology.’ The manuscript begins with references to the origins of philosophical anthropology in the early modern era. In a typical Foucauldian gesture, he dates the origins of the word ‘anthropology’ to the work of the physician and philosopher Ernst Platner, a Kant’s contemporary. Next, Foucault surveys the development of anthropology in early modern times, referring to Scheler, Husserl, and Binswanger. Finally, Foucault claims that philosophy did not recognize anthropology as an autonomous discipline because of the influence of dualism, theology, and the privilege given to abstract a priori rationality. Foucault refers abundantly to Leibnitz, Spinoza, Lessing, Malebranche, Descartes. Still, Elden suspects that these sections are most likely oriented to the curricular requirements and are not the kernel of Foucault’s project.  The second part of the course studies Kant’s anthropology in relation to the critical project overall.  A few pages inserted after the concluding chapter of the manuscript deal with ‘the end of anthropology,’ an idea that he powerfully develops many years later in The Order of Things. The final pages are devoted to a reading of Nietzsche, to the relationship of biology to psychology, and the criticism of psychologism, religion, and universal history.  Finally, Foucault reviews current views on anthropology, discussing Jaspers, Heidegger, Löwith, Kaufmann, and Vuillemin.

Elden dedicates a few paragraphs to the question of when and how Foucault knew about Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, which was still unpublished at that time. The question is whether Foucault developed his reading of Nietzsche independently of the influence of Heidegger, a query that Foucault himself addressed ambiguously.  Elden discusses this issue in chapter 5.

Another important manuscript of this period is the one on Binswanger.  This manuscript has been, in the meantime, published in a critical edition with the title Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle (2021).  Elden discusses the problems of dating the manuscript, presents Binswanger’s career, and his relationships with Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger.  According to Elden, one of the key themes of Foucault’s manuscript is whether Binswanger was able to move from a descriptive and pre-scientific apprehension of the human being to a rigorously scientific anthropology (34). Elden does not pursue this lead but concentrates instead on showing the extent of Foucault’s mastery of Binswanger’s work.  What attracted Foucault to Binswanger? Elden says that Foucault was attracted by Binswanger’s interest in ‘modes of being of the human.’ Binswanger also provided an alternative to Sartre’s anthropological-phenomenological project (37). Elden adds that while Foucault did not publish this text, it is quite developed. While the manuscript overlaps with his Introduction to Dream and Existence, Foucault did not use this manuscript as a basis for his later essay. Elden speaks of a road not taken, even if eventually the interest in Daseinsanlysis may have inspired Foucault to write History of Madness. But Foucault soon will reject the whole idea of philosophical anthropology and its impossible hermeneutical circle. In his later work, Foucault will castigate as an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ the pretension of a philosophical anthropology.

The third manuscript reviewed in this chapter has for title Phénoménologie et psychologie. Foucault gave a course with the same title in 1953-4 and the following year. A different manuscript on psychology in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty may also be part of the course. And a third manuscript, intitled Psychologie et phénoménologie’, seems to date from the same period, but it has only a thematic but not textual relation to the manuscript (40).

Foucault begins with the claim that ‘The tradition attributed two forms to psychological experience, recognizing each as an independent source: introspection…and objective observation…in the first psychology sought its philosophical foundation, in the other its scientific justification. The situation was clear, but it was an alibi: psychology was never where it was suspected to be’ (Foucault, quoted and translated by Elden, 41).

The manuscript follows with the claim that the death of God contributed to the division between subjective and objective forms of experience. But according to Elden, the reference throughout the manuscript is Husserl. Elden comments that Husserl was a major focus of Foucault’s research at this point in his career, even if he rarely discussed Husserl in his writings (42).

Archival material regarding Foucault’s lectures on psychology, child psychology, testing, etc., is not extant. Still, we know indirectly of Foucault’s lectures through notes from students at the ENS, Lagrange, and Simon in particular (43-46).

Elden also refers to Foucault’s internship in the Sainte-Anne hospital, collaborating with Jacqueline and George Verdeux on various testing and electroencephalography research. Foucault also participated in studies conducted at the Fresnes prison, part of a project to evaluate new inmates suitability for different institutions and programs.  Elden observes that Foucault seems to have had in this period an earlier exposure to many of the issues that he will explore in-depth in his mature work. Elden also mentions that Foucault never referred in detail to his previous work, and his recollections were not very consistent. For example, we know that Jacqueline Verdeux requested Foucault’s help for her translation of Binswanger’s work. But Elden does not say if Foucault knew Binswanger before his collaboration with Verdeux or how he came to be interested in his work.

Chapter 3 deals with Foucault’s first publications in the early ’50s. In this period, Foucault wrote three essays and one book, which reflect on Foucault’s interests in psychology and psychopathology. They are the Introduction to the French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence, a review essay on the history of psychology from 1850 to 1950, and finally, one on scientific research and psychology. Maladie mentale et personnalité, a book, was published in 1954, reissued in 1962 with profound changes, and finally abandoned by Foucault. While these writings were published between 1954 and 1957, Elden estimates that they were written simultaneously.

Elden’s decision to separate the published from the unpublished works may be a disservice to himself and his readers, insofar as the detailed descriptions do not coalesce into a clear hypothesis about what drives Foucault’s explorations. We don’t know if Maladie Mentale et Personnalité and the Introduction to Dream and Existence represent the ideas developed in the early manuscripts or their abandonment.

Maladie Mentale et Personnalité was commanded by Jean Lacroix for the series ‘Initiation Philosophique’ published by the prestigious Presses Universitaires de France. The collection was planned as a series of introductions to philosophical subjects. Lacroix accepted Foucault’s proposal in February 1953, and Foucault delivered a manuscript in October 1953. In Chapter 8, Elden compares the original with the revised edition Foucault published after publishing Madness and Civilization. Elden summarizes the book and emphasizes that the way Foucault presents the problem of psychology and pathology is similar to the approach that he will develop in his mature works, namely, uncovering the structures that make possible forms of scientific knowledge (63). At this stage of Foucault’s evolution, the problem is still presented in philosophical anthropological terms: the approach must be grounded on Man itself, not on the abstraction of illness (Elden 65, quoting Foucault). Evaluating the impact of this book, Elden argues that as Foucault’s profile raised, more attention was paid to this book, especially to the (heavily edited) second edition, despite Foucault’s attempts to forget the book. Nonetheless, some have argued that if we want to examine ‘the archaeology of Foucault’s thought,’ we should consider the first edition (quoted by Elden, 78).

Summarizing his argument, Elden states that “it is striking how much of the work that Foucault undertook in the 1960s has its roots back in the period studied here (190). And he adds, ‘what seems striking in reading all of Foucault’s writings, published and unpublished, are links between periods, rather than clear breaks’ (190). Foucault himself characterized his evolution as a philosopher who moved on to psychology and from psychology to history. Elden shows that these transitions are not breaks but the reconfiguration of some initial questions and their development in new directions.

Elden’s book is undoubtedly a treasure trove for the student of Foucault. Elden says that ‘I have read what he [Foucault] read and analyzed what he wrote.’ The extent of his scholarship, the sources, and the available secondary literature are impressive. Elden benefited from access to Foucault’s papers and the work of a group of young researchers that are busy publishing critical editions of several of the documents that Elden refers to. A good example of this is the recent special issue of the journal Theory, Culture and Society, edited by Elden, Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini with the title ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France.’ And we should commend his selflessly sharing in his blog many facts, big and small, that he helped uncover.

When all is said and done, how is this going to impact our understanding of Foucault? It is too early to say how this will affect our future interpretation of the life and work of Michel Foucault. Most likely, not in a revolutionary way, but we will have a better context and insights on how some of his ideas developed and what they mean. But the philological and the reception dimensions of a work often do not run in parallel. The misunderstandings around Foucault are at least as productive as the historical record. The student of Foucault knows that a concept such as ‘biopolitics’ has a very short half-life in Foucault’s work. But we can argue that it becomes the inspiration for a renewed interest in Foucault’s work several years after his untimely death. The same is true of his criticism of the ‘repressive hypothesis,’ the idea of the ‘death of man,’ the ‘ontology of the present’ and other metaphors easy to weaponize that, tend to disappear from Foucault’s conceptual universe as soon as coined, only to reappear later in a new metaphor.

Maria Gyemant: Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun, Classiques Garnier, 2021

Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun Book Cover Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun
Philosophies contemporaines, n° 14
Maria Gyemant
Classiques Garnier
2021
Paperback 29,00 €
160