But this quest for the prereflective original is not at all Husserl’s aim, as he attests in section 77 of Ideas I (as well as elsewhere)—there Husserl begins a meditation on immediate lived experience:
When the lived experience94 which, at any particular time, is actually being lived comes into reflective regard it becomes given as actually being lived, as existing “now.” But not only that: it becomes given as having just now been and, in so far as it was unregarded, precisely as having been unregarded, as not having been reflected on. In the natural attitude, without our thinking about it, we take it for granted that lived experiences do not exist only when we advert to them and seize upon them in an experience of something immanent; and we also take it for granted that they actually existed and, indeed, were actually lived by us if they are still, in reflection on something immanent, within retention (“primary” memory) as having been “just now,” “still intended to.”95
But, Husserl tells us, “We make all that clear to ourselves in the natural attitude, perhaps as psychologists, and we trace the broader contexts in which the phenomena are involved.”96 The phenomenological reduction should be operated on this basis. Once it has been effected, “our findings … change into exemplificatory cases of eidetic universalities which we can appropriate and systematically study within the limits of pure intuition.”97
The study of what has, by the reduction, already become universality, not concretude, and without remainder, must simultaneously consider that the lived experience in question is
a lived experience regarded and perceived as something immanent, fluctuating and fading away thus and so as it is regarded reflectively. At the same time, the freedom of the course of thought suffers; we are now conscious of it in a modified manner; … that too we can observe by adverting our
Reflection of the unreflected must grasp the reflection reflecting on the unreflected; it is not a matter of achieving the arche-original but of scientifically understanding the relation between the unreflected and reflection. The questions are, “How do they influence each other? How do these two elements mutually inflect each other?” It is not at all a matter of aiming—forever impossible—at a “before” the aim.
As these considerations show, for me it is not a question of declaring that only the reflectible can be reflected, or of holding any analysis of lived experience, in the precise sense that Husserl used this term, to be nonphilosophical. I said at the beginning of this discussion that my only question is, Why did phenomenology, at its beginning understood by Husserl to “save” philosophy, become a synonym, at the end of the century, for “the end of philosophy”? Why do current phenomenological studies only sing the tunes of “antiphilosophy,” “post-philosophy,” and “literature”—terms that would have astounded its inventor? I think this may be explained as “enthusiasm” for the questions of existence, of the unreflected, and the concrete. It seems to me that we can locate a sort of progressive deterioration in the existential derivatives of phenomenology, from Levinas’s and Merleau-Ponty’s controlled and conscious shift to the more radical projects illustrated in the recent issue of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, “Tourner la phénoménologie.”
To eliminate any confusion as to the nature of my investigation and thus to bring my analysis to completion, let’s take up my question from a different angle.
The Utterance in Question
We know how Merleau-Ponty wanted to explore natural consciousness, the domain of the preobjective. He wrote, “The truth is that the relationships between the natural and the transcendental attitudes are not simple, are not side by side or sequential,”99 even if he concluded, later in the text, that, “there is undeniably something between transcendent Nature, naturalism’s being in itself, and the immanence of mind, its acts, and its noema. It is into this in-between that we must try to advance.”100 The concept of “encroachment,” which Merleau-Ponty gives as a synonym for “philosophy,”101 is meant to explore this in-between. The concept of encroachment is in line with the object he’s aiming for, namely the “in-between” that is neither the object of pure nature (“naturalism’s being in itself”) nor the transparent subject of Husserl’s transcendental position (“mind’s acts and noema”). The “in-between” that is neither totally subject nor completely object is the body, the incarnated body, my own body. My body is at the same time an inner worldly thing, a figure in a time and a space, an object of nature subject to its causality, and a body of flesh by which there are objects. It is therefore a subject but no longer the disembodied subject of Descartes that holds for every subject, but rather this subject that is me (born and soon dead) and no other. This Leibkörper requires tools other than vision and, in particular, objectifying Cartesian representation, which inexorably transforms this body into res extensa, an inert object of nature. We can thus understand why the concept of “encroachment” is necessary to the unveiling of the “in-between.” My own body is neither subject nor object and displays, Merleau-Ponty tells us, its own reflexivity that has nothing to do with the specular vision too often paradigmatic of philosophical reflection.102 This reflexivity consists in “the fact that [the body] touches itself touching, sees itself seeing,” but this possibility “does not consist in surprising a connecting activity behind the connected, in reinstalling oneself in this constitutive activity; the self-perception … : in fact I do not entirely succeed in touching myself touching, in seeing myself seeing, the experience I have of myself perceiving does not go beyond a sort of imminence, it terminates in the invisible, simply this invisible is its invisible, i.e. the reverse of its specular perception, of the concrete vision I have of my body in the mirror.”103 We have here the possibility of a reflection of the unreflected (in the sense that the body possesses a form of reflexivity); this reflexivity of the body proceeds from noncoincidence and not, as in the Cartesian ego, from coincidence with itself. Given Merleau-Ponty’s analyses, my problem is not to claim that the body is not an “in-between,” nor that it “does not reflect,” even less that it is not accessible to philosophy—that would be a direct opposition to the content of the author’s theses. My problem is much more simply expressed in this question: what can account for the experience that I have of my body? Who makes this analysis of the “in-between”? Who uses the concept of encroachment to attempt to adequately express the aimed for object? My body? No, of course not, but rather the philosopher himself—this reflection is not by the body but by Husserl himself in section 77. Consequently, the assertion of an end of philosophy here would clearly be impossible, because it is the philosopher who speaks the encroachment, the in-between, the body. It is the philosopher, in all these analyses, who cannot be eliminated.
To put it differently, we are observing here a gap between what is said (the said) and the saying. Admittedly, we must leave aside the possibility of an “in-between” of discourse that would be neither the pure causality of nature (“naturalism”) nor the Cartesian ego’s position of total coincidence (which we can provisionally agree to call, with Merleau-Ponty, the “transcendental position”104). But we must also leave aside the possibility that this “said by the body,” like the “in-between” that is understood through encroachment, would be the work of a saying; if, according to Merleau-Ponty’s suggestive phrase, we must “unveil little by little and more and more the savage vertical world,” this unveiling is not the work of the savage world itself. Even if such were the case, wouldn’t we also have to show its possibility, just as Heidegger shows that Being is the speaking authority? But we have nothing of the sort, neither in Merleau-Ponty (which is understandable, since death did not leave him enough time), nor in his disciples—who, taking every possible opportunity to draw from his uncompleted texts and dismembering writings that were meant to be part of a work and not flashes of heat lightning, neglect to ask the question of phenomenology’s status and thus too often oscillate between a totally private language that c
ould not be literature and a metaphysical though disgraced essentialism. Jocelyn Benoist notes this absence of methodological reflection in contemporary phenomenology: “What is to be done now that we will have ‘seen everything,’ as Dante said, and before phenomenology’s eyelids probably close for an eternal sleep in the paradise of philosophical doctrines? Perhaps there is still time to bring the phenomenological look’s attention precisely on the fact that it is a look, that in its legitimate claims to produce knowledge it has something to say to itself, and that there is something in the fact that a look has something to say to itself and in the way that it can do so—something not at all obvious, but extremely problematic. Perhaps by asking this question, interest in the idea of phenomenology (failing phenomenology itself, if it exists) will be revived.”105 The choice of lived experience, of individual concretude, or of the flesh as the most appropriate thing for a phenomenological discourse thus does not have to be taken to the detriment of the question of the philosophical status of phenomenological description. As Benoist notes further, the phenomenological shipwreck106 in the folds of pathos, feeling, and life feeds on the concealment of this question of the philosophical status of phenomenological description. If, indeed, existential phenomenology would agree to reflect upon the conditions of its own practice and on the status of its own discourse, then it would take care of the tension that traverses it today—a tension between the vehement rejection of a discourse that would unveil the real (so-called classical metaphysics, Husserlian phenomenology supposedly remaining metaphysics) and this hunt for the singular to which a certain kind of phenomenology has surrendered itself; a contradiction between the proclamation of the end of philosophy and its extension to the “savage vertical world”; a contradiction between the rejection of philosophy in its entirety, suspected of wanting to “enclose the real,” and the always-broader extension of its domain of investigation; a contradiction, in a word, between the “said” and the “saying,” between a discourse’s subject and its status; a contradiction that only Levinas was courageous enough to confront. I would like to conclude my analysis by looking at this courageous move.
“Saying,” “Said,” and “Unsaid” in Otherwise Than Being107
In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas develops his theory of signification (“the very signifyingness of signification”)108 starting with the categories of the “said” and the “saying.” As he had done since The Theory of Intuition, he means to break with Husserl’s “objectivism” and thus to link himself to a rejection of the semantic intentionality that the father of phenomenology had developed. Indeed, for Husserl, the “said”—conceived as a topic, as what is said, thus as an object—tends to become sovereign. His project—which in itself would be just as positivist as the Vienna Circle’s—would be to eclipse the “saying” for the sole benefit of the “said.” For Husserl, the correlation between the “saying” and the “said,” Levinas writes, is only “the subordination of the saying to the said,”109 “the said which dominates the saying which states it.”110 But because “apophansis does not exhaust what there is in saying,”111 it is necessary to reexamine the entire Western theory of meaning, which hangs on the theory of objectivity, strict corollary of “representationalism” and of the imperialism of “objectivity,” which Levinas’s 1930 text had already rejected.
But, it will be asked, if the “said” is the object, the topic, the content, what is the “saying”? Is it the act of a speaking subject? Evidently not. Levinas’s critique of the objectivism of Husserl’s Logical Investigations does not mean to effect a revival of the transcendental subjectivity of Ideas, nor does the reversal of semantic intentionality lead to a restoration of the act of a sovereign subject. Nor can the “saying” be interpreted, following Austin and Searle, as the illocutionary force implied in any propositional content. His critique of representationalism must not be understood as the illumination of a “speech act,”112 as an assertion of the pragmatic against the hegemonic claims of the semantic. But what, then, is this “saying”? “Saying” is first of all speech addressed to an other, turned toward the other, anterior to any “said”—that is, to any intentionality toward an object. “The saying that states a said is … a pure for-another, a pure giving of signs.”113 We know that in Levinas, the relation to the other is originally primary, foundational, that the other constitutes me deep down in myself, before myself. This foundational intersubjectivity has nothing in common with the communicational exchange, a relation between two equal consciousnesses, that Habermas will develop. If I am, first of all and before anything else, a response to the other, this response is passivity, suffering, or even, Levinas tells us here, “exposure.” Step-by-step, saying becomes “the supreme passivity of exposure to another.”114 This exposure to another leads quite clearly to the dismissal of the cogito but also of any idea of communicative action in a symmetrical intersubjective relation. This “exposure” by which I offer myself to another makes me infinitely vulnerable. This fragility is born in the “sincerity” with which I give myself to another. Unconcealed, sincere, exposed—I am thus liable to be wounded, or even annihilated by this gift of myself to the other: “The one is exposed to the other as a skin is exposed to what wounds it, as a cheek is offered to the smiter.”115 “Led to sincerity, making signs to the other,”116 a simple “‘here I am,’”117 a “gift of myself”—with this sincerity of saying, I take the risk of an offering without insurance, “the limit of the stripping bare,”118 “tearing from oneself,”119 “absolute non-coincidence,” “towards the skin,” “trauma.”120 This saying as “saying to the other,” this sincere and thereby infinitely dangerous “saying to the other,” is anterior to and the condition for any “said about something.” “This saying has to be reached in its existence antecedent to the said, or else the said has to be reduced to it”121—this clearly moves in the opposite direction from Logical Investigations, for which signification depends upon the said, the topic, the object.
This saying that always already constitutes me, by which I come into relation with another in sincerely exposing myself to him, this “here I am” is like the trace of the infinite that traverses me and constitutes me. The “Thou” to whom I am the response, this “Thou” by which I become a “here I am,” is in fact originally the call of God. At the end of this analysis of “saying,” we are led to what Levinas calls the “glory of the Infinite.” Saying is ultimately the way in which the infinite speaks itself in multiple ways in each of us:
That the glory of the Infinite is glorified only by the signification of the-one-for-the-other, as sincerity, that in my sincerity the Infinite passes the finite, that the Infinite comes to pass there, is what makes the plot of ethics primary, and what makes language irreducible to an act among acts. Before putting itself at the service of life as an exchange of information through a linguistic system, saying is witness; it is saying without the said, a sign given to the other … saying that does not say a word, that signifies, that, as responsibility, is signification itself, the-one-for-the-other. It is the subjectivity of the subject that makes itself a sign, which one would be wrong to take as a babbling utterance of a word, for it bears witness to the glory of the Infinite.122
The series of substitutions is clear that leads us from “saying” to “the response to the other,” from this “response” to “sincerity” (which, Levinas notes, is not an attribute of saying but rather is the saying itself), and from “sincerity” to “the Infinite speaking itself.” The other is not others as an earthly empirical subject, it is the Infinite of which others, through their faces, are the trace.123 The signifyingness is from the Infinite, my saying carries its trace, as Abraham’s “here I am” carried in itself the call of God.
We can see that Levinas’s theory of signification is quite the reversal of Logical Investigations, a reversal in that saying precedes the said, the sign, the expression, the respondent’s passivity, the observer’s activity. Semantics is relativized not by a theory of acts (pragm
atics) but by a conception of the sublime, the eruption of the Infinite, which disorganizes the relation between what is said and the fact of saying.
But here too—as with Merleau-Ponty’s “body,” “in-between,” and “savage world”—the question arises as to who says this, the question of the philosopher. Levinas, far from his contemporaries’ concealment or his successors’ frivolous shunning of it, is willing to answer the question. Even if, Levinas tells us, the objection has “overcome skepticism” since “the dawn of philosophy,”124 it is necessary to confront it and ask:
What about our discussion, narrating, as though they were fixed in themes, the anarchy and the non-finality of the subject in which the Infinite would pass? They are thus found to answer in the end not with responsibility, but in the form of theoretical propositions, to the question “What about …?” They do not answer the proximity of the neighbor.125
Levinas does not only thematize this performative contradiction, but, what is more, he assumes it, he demands it by and in what he calls the “philosopher’s unsaid.” The philosopher must accept this gap, not try to fill it in by arguing here for an impossible to realize coherence.
To conceive the otherwise than being requires, perhaps, as much audacity as skepticism shows when it does not hesitate to affirm the impossibility of statement while venturing to realize this impossibility by the very statement of this impossibility.126
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