Oscillation Between Literature and Metaphysics
The current infatuation with what is called—depending upon the day and the person—the intimate experience of “there is,” the protomovement of existence, the arche-original feeling, the fleshly body—variations on what Levinas called “concrete life”—gives rise to a question about the status of this phenomenological practice. Indeed, like most contemporary analytics, “existential” phenomenologists vigorously reject classical philosophy’s claim to preside over different areas of knowledge, to bring reason to a reality become transparent, and to have an overarching position with respect to other disciplines. But a certain affinity seems to have covertly taken shape between this much-disparaged hegemonic claim of old philosophy and the phenomenological movement of the end of the twentieth century. For, indeed, Dominique Janicaud asks, “How [is] the method of eidetic description going to enable us to encounter and to restore the concrete—in particular, in the affective domain—without falling into essentialism”? 69 With this injunction to think the concrete, phenomenology seems constrained to implement even more systematically what it objected to in classic philosophy; indeed, the desire to annex the least rustles of intimacy, the concern to hunt down an arche-original “je ne sais quoi” (feeling, desire, drive) in the most minute nooks of contingency, make certain phenomenologists’ projects even more all-encompassing than Hegel’s, who at least abandoned genuine contingency without trying to deduce the movements of his pen or of his momentary feelings. Thus it can seem as if a good number of the professors of “the lived” and other “feelings” or “distortions” in every genre confront the following option: either they generate an even more hegemonic discourse than the one that they vehemently reject as metaphysics, or else, if they do not wish to take on this totalizing vision (to speak the essence of the least, most fleeting feeling), they give up philosophical propositions as candidates for truth. And consequently, their descriptions can claim only to be literature. In saying this, I do not mean to mock, like those who say, “All that is only literature.” Indeed, the resort to literature as a possible escape from philosophy is a move proclaimed and assumed by many phenomenologists. On this point, Hugues Choplin’s recent article “L’homme ou la littérature? Levinas et la phénoménologie de la transcendance radicale”70 articulates in just a few sentences the series of substitutions that I have pointed out (metaphysics = phenomenology = all philosophy) while simultaneously bringing out its rigorous consequence: the literary future of phenomenology. He writes:
Whether it is a question of Heidegger, Derrida, Marion, or even Levinas, they all (each in his own way) recognize the originality of the Husserlian project while rejecting Husserl’s challenge to metaphysics—that is, to presence—as ultimately insufficient … As a result, they each have elaborated a phenomenology that rests on a radical transcendence insofar as it goes beyond the Husserlian phenomenological system and that of metaphysics, taking the form of Being (Heidegger), différance (Derrida), the gift as such (Marion) or even the other as inadequacy par excellence.71
We can clearly see here the movement relegating Husserlian phenomenology to metaphysics, and, therein, the assertion that every philosophy up to now was also metaphysics. Thinking will therefore break with the philosophy of the past. Confronting this diagnosis of a philosophical past to be rejected, it is necessary, Choplin tells us, “to cultivate metaphysical language in order to demonstrate radical transendence.”72 But the problem—the tension or equivocation—immediately crops up: “Is it possible, and how, to speak a transcendence by rights unspeakable because in its very radicality it surpasses the regime of the sayable.”73
To overcome this tension, it will be necessary to overcome the language of philosophy. This work on “saying” (carried out, in Choplin’s eyes, as much by Heidegger and Levinas as by Marion and Derrida) is the work of a “‘writer [who] twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions.’”74
There is another commonality in these projects, Choplin tells us, namely, “a radically literary writing,” an apparently natural conclusion to the series of substitutions effected on this path. To escape from metaphysics thus means to escape from philosophy in order to move toward literature.
This stance is not contradictory in itself as long as it is maintained all the way to the end. To maintain it to the end means to accept the claim that phenomenological descriptions—for example, the description of a half-sleeping state or of a present perception that is also a memory—have the same status as the portrayals created by Marcel Proust or other writers. Proust, of course, never claimed to be doing philosophy but did want to make a work of art and thus created an unparalleled style of writing. Proust’s portrayals, if they aim to come into agreement with the reader, to make him feel, if not the same memories (we haven’t all eaten madeleines), at least similar experiences (perception, memory, then the projection of a memory on the present, etc.), nevertheless do not claim to take a position on the history of philosophy or even on philosophy itself. It will be said that I am here assuming distinctions between literature and philosophy that have gone out of fashion. Why wouldn’t Derrida be a writer and Robert Musil a philosopher, if not in the eyes of a depressing and ridiculous conservatism? 75 To respond to this challenge, I can, roughly speaking,76 suggest the following: in presenting a book to his readers, Proust does not intend that, after having read it, someone would say to him that “this is totally false and I will try to show you, so that, convinced by my words, you will write something else.” The appraisal that Proust seeks is not of this sort but rather of the order of aesthetic evaluation. Even if one considers these categories obsolete (“speaking the truth” or “creating an aesthetic feeling”), the fact remains that there is a sort of discursive contract that commits both author and reader to practice a specific language game, with defined, if sometimes tacit, rules. It will be granted, perhaps, that the statement “This is entirely false and I will convince you of that” would not apply to Remembrance of Things Past and would be a negation of “what the author was doing.” This is why, without going so far as to inscribe the categories of the true and the beautiful in the heaven of Forms, I can say that “claims to” are not the same, depending on whether the author is situated in an artistic or philosophical system. But, when one says that “philosophy has reached its conclusion,” if one claims that this statement is true, then one is not at all in the realm of literature. And that is the equivocation, for phenomenologists never seem to totally and entirely stick to a strictly literary definition of their work. Here again, we are confronted with the paradoxes of the statement, which, as in Rorty, make characterizing their positions very delicate—for “radical” phenomenology cannot maintain its stance all the way to the end without admitting that it does not claim that what is says is true. But if it did, we would not have to consider its proclamation of the end of philosophy. Aren’t we being asked, in speaking of this end, for our opinion about the beauty of this statement? But we know that this is not the case, as does the phenomenologist who challenges us to admit that “radical transcendence” “surpasses the Husserlian phenomenological system as well as metaphysics,”77 that is, every statement that has an implicit claim to be true.
But on the other hand, the impossibility of maintaining a literary posture poses a problem about the nature of this quest for the concrete, this hunt for the singular, this trail to the intimate, this search for the contingent on which every phenomenological description today seems to outdo yesterday’s. Doesn’t the impossibility of maintaining a literary stance trap subsequent phenomenology in the same corner as the metaphysics that it rejects? 78
To show the problem, let’s look at the example of Hegel, who is always subject to the same accusation79—of advancing a totalizing vision of philosophy, of wanting to ground contingency, of claiming to deduce reality while ignoring its fullness, its opacity, and its irreducibility. But a careful reading of the
beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit shows that this text begins by bracketing contingency—it is the meaning of this bracketing that we should understand in order to grasp the distance between Hegel and contemporary phenomenologists,80 a distance to be understood contrary to how contemporary despisers of metaphysics see it.
Let’s reread the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit to understand how it begins in what could be considered as the defeat of contingency, the “failure of the singular” (singular in the sense of “sense-certainty,” of “here and now,” and not, of course, in the sense that this concept will have in the “system of science”81). The “this,” Hegel tells us, is certain, but this certitude cannot be philosophically expressed, that is, it cannot rise to the significance of a concept; if this certitude were to be expressed, it would immediately dissolve and become other. For example, if, wanting to express the most concrete, most immediate time, the singularity of my experience of the direct present, I were to say, “Now is night,” I could never inscribe this sentence within the element of a philosophical signifier because “if now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.”82 Likewise:
If they [somebody] wanted to say “this” bit of paper … then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal … Those who started to describe it would not be able to complete the description, but would be compelled to leave it to others, who would themselves finally have to admit to speaking about something which is not. They certainly mean, then, this bit of paper here which is quite different from the bit mentioned above; but they say “actual things,” “external or sensuous objects,” “absolutely singular entities” and so on; i.e., they say of them only what is universal.83
It is constitutively impossible for philosophy to speak the immediate, the contingent, the isolated sensation.
Having reconstructed this analysis of the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the task, of course, is to determine its true meaning. Does Hegel here relegate lived experience, the sensible instant, to a definitive insignificance? If we rigorously follow the text, it is a matter of the absence of philosophical importance, not of insignificance or of radical nonexistence. Hegel simply says that this lived immediacy does not have meaning for philosophy, which aims, by definition, at the true, that is, at what lasts and is universally valid. On this point, if philosophy claims to speak the concrete, the lived, immediacy, individuality in its most specific singularity, it cannot but miss it for philosophy will transform it with conceptual language into a universal, an essence, a concept, by general definition. But, if we draw out this statement’s consequences, that philosophy cannot explain immediacy without negating it, this does not at all mean that in other registers it would not be able to have the meaning of evoking the “now of the night” or of recalling those individual and concrete moments that make up the “now” for each singular person. So Aloysius Bertrand, in his poem “Gaspard de la nuit,” which begins with the phrase “It was night,” as much as Proust, in the description, prelude to the night, that follows the famous line “For a long time I used to go to bed early,”84 could attempt through his art of writing to say what seems to escape language, namely the fleetingness of the instant, the lived experience of “now,” the intimate temporality of existence. The individual, in this particular sense of concrete immediacy, is the domain of literature, its loam and its horizon, but not at all the domain of philosophy, which can only transform this individual concretude, this intimate life, into a universal and thus, inexorably, to negate it. It follows that Hegel’s bracketing of the “this”—far from having to be interpreted as a violence done to the real, to its infinite and indescribable iridescence, on the contrary—presents itself as the only way philosophy can take it into account. Bracketing the contingent speaks to the respect that one holds for it. The fact that Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, progressively delimits philosophy’s domain of relevance does not mean that he rejects what cannot be philosophy as nonsense. Literature can attempt to approach the “now,” it can go to the deepest feelings, but philosophy is concerned with the universal and could only do violence to the infinite wealth of contingent individuation in transforming it into an essence, a concept, a universal. This interpretation—of the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a delimiting of philosophy’s domain of significance and thereby as respect for the contingent through the very fact of its bracketing—contrasts point by point, in my view, with the opposite practice of some phenomenologists who seem, according to their descriptions, to want to return to the trap of a language that essentializes the ineffable, the rustle of a feeling, the irreducible individuality of the lived, the specific dynamic of a given desire or drive. This is an aporetic enterprise, as Renaud Barbaras himself notes, writing of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to grasp the principle of individuality that, “by means of its purity, the formal determination exceeds the concreteness of the individual. How can what is universal in itself possess an individuating power? Thus as soon as one isolates a principle of individuation, one finds oneself led back immediately to the opposite pole.”85 This sentence could just as well be a faithful commentary on the “defeat of the individual” that opens the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is even more the case for what Barbaras says next: “Taken at the level of matter, individuality disappears into indetermination; but assigned to a form, it dissolves into the universality of the quid. The individual, then, is always missed—by excess or by lack—by the principle that is supposed to account for it.”86 So why not stop there, why not resolve that, regarding what must be denied in being said, we must be silent? Why continue this hunt for individuality, for example through the themes of the “flesh,” of which Philippe Fontaine shows in an article on the status of the individual in Merleau-Ponty87 that his goal in his later works is to think as nearly as possible individual concretude? Why want to say “the unnameable,” which the poets, like Samuel Beckett in his novel of the same name88 or Nathalie Sarraute in her stories, surely attempt to think but through a literary language, a style, that is, through the creation of a language honed for that purpose? We can address these perplexities by noting that Merleau-Ponty’s later concepts (notably his strange topological metaphors like “interweaving” or “encroachment,”89 “circles,” “knots,” “linings”) show the extent to which, aware of the problem, he had tried to create a new language. But here, too, a question arises about the status of these concepts or metaphors, that is, about the status of this linguistic intervention: is it philosophy or literature?90 If it is literature—the images used here would be stylistic figures in the sense that Pierre Fontanier defined them—why not proclaim it as such? If it is philosophy—the images would definitely be conceptual figures to compare, at least in their claim to say the truth, to the images of mathematical topology that they clearly echo—how are we to characterize this movement by which the concrete is seized, grabbed, speared by means of concepts that claim to be universal? How are we to understand not only a real universal, sought after long before the invention of phenomenology, but also, and more paradoxically, a lived universal, or even an intimate temporality, which we know Merleau-Ponty defined as “tacit” subjectivity, as my own individuality, limited by my birth and my death and embodied by my body? Isn’t to want to philosophically understand this concretude of the individual tantamount to extending the domain of philosophy to the least recesses of contingency? Isn’t it, thereby, to claim to make transparent what is given as a mystery? Isn’t it, consequently, to extend the metaphysical claim to what philosophers like Descartes or Hegel recognized as specific and irreducible precisely by refusing to accept them as a subject of philosophical investigation?
I probably ought to clarify my position here: by thus interrogating the project of existential phenomenology, I do not at all mean to reject a priori any description nor to declare that philosophy has nothin
g to do with embodied man, natural consciousness, or immediate phenomena like feelings, worldly phenomena like history, or existential phenomena like death. I am investigating the status of a practice and am showing how its systematization can sometimes lead to the logical pathologies or paradoxical discursive postures that I am bringing to light. So what I am criticizing is the possibility of reflection of the unreflected. In Ideas I, sections 76 and following, Husserl attempts to show this possibility and respond to various critiques that could be made of this project. He shows that philosophical reflection upon concrete life is possible, just as in Ideas II he wonders about the constitution of one’s own body,91 an impenetrable, self-obscuring opacity, as he tells us, “The Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception” but is a hindrance in its own self-perception.92 So isn’t it a question, given my previous discussion, of excluding the descriptive method advocated by phenomenology from philosophy?93 I only mean to show on the one hand that the violence done to the concrete by Hegel and the old metaphysics is mythological and, on the other, that the status of a discourse of the unreflected must be disclosed, otherwise one runs the risk of extending the domain of phenomenological analysis all the way to complete contradiction: speaking the immediacy of the instant, the ephemerality of lived experience, presenting the original unreflected, empty of any reflection.
The Death of Philosophy Page 10
