Why phenomenology? (part 1)

I have been trying to think of my fond relationship with phenomenology. What, over the years, has brought me so close to it? Or, what uses--to put it a more practical way--have I been able to make out of it? And where do I stand with relationship to its particular problems? And which practitioner of phenomenology do I find most productive for me?
I first came to phenomenology through work on philosophy of mind--the mind body-problem specifically. What intrigued me most here, though, was more the misfires of the mind when it has input from the body than the more traditional (and difficult) problem of establishing the fact of this input. Perception occurred for me pretty unproblematically. Thus the qualia problem never really interested me (though you might expect that it would). I felt it was just a problem about how we talk about what is represented to us: it was still too connected with problems of establishing that perception occured. I still think that what interests people about qualia is not the qualia themselves, but what it does to a theory of mind. However, what intrigued me at the time was precisely this--what was perceived, the actual forms perceptions themselves took. So the way into this was looking at the stuff we could perceive that was not so cleanly perceived. Definite perceptions, definite input from the body to the mind, but not so definite in terms of its content--not because it remains irreducible to a theory of perception (in positive terms, completely full of qualitative content) but because the content itself is one of discrepancy between the perception and how perception usually works.
So you can see an interest in the anticipatory powers of the bodily schema coming into play--the eventual form that this interest would take. This I picked up in full force with the help of one of my professors, Arthur Melnick, who pursues his Kantian problems with the aid of phenomenology--especially Merleau-Ponty, whose conception of phenomenology remains closest to me, even now, and whose work (I should just note this) colors pretty much everything I will say on the subject here, even when (as I will) I go and look at Husserl. But what is important is that here, in the transit between this initial interest and the eventual fully-fledged phenomenological form of my study, was the first use of phenomenology that I really discerned: it is a sort of thing that can fill out what a language focused roughly on the general form of perception (whether this articulates itself in terms of mind-body input, or, as was the case for Melnick, in terms of Kantian intuition) with more specific concerns about what happens when this general schema can't account for something. To put it a better way, phenomenology picks up this moment in the failure of a general account of mental life not as a "problem," as the phil-mind people take it up, but as the starting point of its analysis. More simply put, failures in perception are precisely indicators as to the fullness of experience itself for phenomenology, because phenomenology is focused on the content of experiences not as just a general stuffing for form, but as distinct instances that have the power to make the usual working of perception take a singular detour. The most extreme way of putting this (and I do so by using all these terms less technically) would be to say that, to a degree, phenomenology allows for experiential content to make the form of its own perception. Or, in even more plain and less burdened language: phenomenology allows for something in experience to cohere such that it generates thereby the terms of its own coherence. (This is largely because what I am describing here is simply the reduction: to take up, theoretically, a "failure" is the beginning of a suspension of the natural attitude.)
However I explain this, what's clear is that this quality makes phenomenology fall into places where more formal theories of perception just don't have anything to say--or, quite frankly, don't want to say anything. Though its aims are much more lofty (and problematic, as its goal is nothing less than the complete reappropriation of this sphere to philosophy), this often makes it work a bit a posteriori, almost a bit empirically, without being beholden to the oppositions these two terms usually enter into. There is a story that someone came up to Sartre who was eating something like an ice cream, and told him with phenomenology he could describe the ice cream--this is what got him exited about it. For me it was very similar, though without the more militant desire to oppose this sort of everyday reality to the high philosophies. If one goes too far with this way of looking at it, one easily makes the mistake (and it is often made by those who don't know phenomenology but want to criticize it) of thinking that phenomenology is a going back to the self-evident, the common sense, the ordinary, when (see Husserl, Ideas I §32) what is at stake is the making-scientific or theoretical of the assumption of self-evidence, an estrangement that brings something like the eating of the ice cream into the theoretical. So, without this militant edge, for me, what is important is the more basic fact that phenomenology can begin to rigorously investigate as completely normal what other theories consider aberrant.
As I said, I took up interest in the body, and this was mostly because that is where a lot of these "aberrations" in perceived or experienced content took place: the double-touch, tricks of perspective due to one's bodily stance, afterimages and the structure of the eye etc. etc. But as you can see, the interest began to take the form of wondering what was special about the phenomenon that it could fall into this particular place all the time--as I said, what was special to me was the forming power of the phenomenological content, or its sort of self-generating coherence, even if it is an aberrant perception. I'll pick this up next time as it took the form of a meditation on finitude, helped by Heidegger (then on to non-phenomena, like writing). This will lead us to another use of phenomenology, one that will emerge from what I am talking about here, which is essentially what Husserl calls "immanence," and moving towards the being of the phenomenon itself--the fact that (and this is really what "immanence" is about for Husserl) its own limit is its condition for emergence.

Heidegger, Affect, Performativity

It has always surprised me how little Heidegger's conception of mood or attunement (Stimmung) is used by theorists of affect. It's a very rich concept, and in fact it is one of Heidegger's most significant contributions to philosophy that he rigorously thought it out: he rescued it (with Husserl, and, in a different quarter, Bergson) from the oblivion to which epistemology-centered work had consigned it, arguing it had more significance than as an external accident of psychology.
Perhaps this is the case because the body doesn't make too many significant appearances in Heidegger (unlike Husserl and Bergson): the circuit between body and mood might have to be a bit more elaborated for them to pick it up. But Heidegger does indeed make inroads into this connection (especially in his seminars), so the problem seems deeper than this.
A clue is given from these theorists' reliance on psychology. It is as if we get that odd connection Husserl and Bergson were making between the psychology and a larger structure of existence, without Heidegger's development of it into an existential structure that depends on a real rich conception of being. That is, it is as if philosophy just before Heidegger has returned in this area with a vengeance, to the precise exclusion of Heidegger.
This proves one thing: people want to subtract being from theories of affect. This makes total sense: the proliferation of performativity as a conception of identity precisely junked being in the area of selfhood, where anticipation and historicity were, so what remains is to explain affect while junking its dependence on mood or attunement too.
I don't think this is a mistake, personally, but I do think since affect has been much more maligned as a phenomenon than selfhood, these theorists might be losing something significant. They are losing, first and foremost, an idea of the coherence or structuredness of affect--or, since coherence and structuredness get thought otherwise in performative theories of identity, I should probably say an idea of function. Affect functions. It leads you into other states. The biggest problem with studies of affect that I see is that, fundamentally, because everything is performative, there is no ability to distinguish between affects: shame might be different than anxiety, but there's no way to explain that, because in the end it all really just collapses into performativity. Again, this collapse is great--I like performativity--it's just that we're not able to explain affects (in the plural) as accurately as we seem to want by way of it.
Fundamentally, I think there is a problem of phenomenality involved. Performativity is a theory of identity that disturbs (delays and defers) phenomenality. This brings it beyond Heidegger. But this same disturbance cannot exactly take place with affect, though it should: the real interesting thing about performative theories of affect is that there should be no subordination of affect to identity, precisely as there is in Heidegger. But this occurs: not because studies of affect perpetuate the old subordination, but because if they don't do it, affect becomes performativity, as we were saying. The two have the same function--to subvert the subject. The subordination remains, then, but for a different reason.
What this does though is--oddly--to make affect function more phenomenally than identity. This leads to--and this is a real regression--the desire to want to explain certain aspects of how one really does feel like when they are sad, or anxious, or whatever. But this is to precisely undo the contribution that performativity makes to the study of identity: it doesn't matter how you "really are," because you are determined (subverted) otherwise than that--in other words, the basis of your identity is not in being, so the question of authenticity (which is the phenomenological question par excellence) isn't relevant.
I think we need, then, to turn the focus on affect around: this would bring us to consider the link between a particular affect and all performative aspects of a self, and why one in the end can't be distinguished from the other. It would bring us to the problem of how to distinguish otherwise--and it would do this precisely in opposition to the tendency to try and explain affect based on how we really feel in a situation.
And oddly, I think, this would bring us back to Heidegger. For what Heidegger has some very rigorous functions ascribed to affects--and different affects, by the way--which we can study. If we can somehow extricate ourselves from their focus on being, we might then see that what is performatively subverted in the realm of affect is precisely a certain understanding of the functions of various affects. This would seem to be closer to the real thrust of performance, as we find in Butler, for example: the issue is not exactly to constitute a self that is free of all constraints, but to have a self that does this only by deconstructing the particular understandings (that is, phenomenologies) of roles that exist.
This has been sketchy at best (especially the last part, of which I'm really not sure), but I hope to revise this over the next few days and somewhat make it all clearer. The important thing for now was outlining the path of the thought.

"I don't believe that there is any perception"

The following--from a discussion at Johns Hopkins during the great structuralism conference in 1966 (!) that took place right after Derrida delivered his "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture--might help out some of my phenomenologist friends trying to wrap their heads around Derrida. Doubrovsky's great question at least allows you to approach the more structuralist and semiological mode of that essay's articulation:

SERGE DOUBROVSKY: You always speak of a non-center. How can you, within your own perspective, explain or at least understand what a perception is? For a perception is precisely the manner in which the world appears centered to me. And language you represent as flat or level. Now language is something else again. It is, as Merleau-Ponty said, a corporeal intentionality. And starting from this utilization of language, in as much as there is an intention of language, I inevitably find a center again. For it is not "one" who speaks, but "I." And even if you reduce the I, you are obliged to come across once again the concept of intentionality, which I believe is at the base of a whole thought, which, moreover, you do not deny. Therefore I ask how you reconcile it with your present attempts?

DERRIDA: First of all, I didn't say that there was no center, that we could get along without the center. I believe that the center is a function, not a being--a reality, but a function. And this function is absolutely indispensable. The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don't destroy the subject; I situate it. That is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions. Therefore I keep the concept of center, which I explained was indispensable, as well as that of subject, and the whole system of concepts to which you have referred.
Since you mentioned intentionality, I simply try to see those who are founding the movement of intentionality--which cannot be conceived in the term intentionality. As to perception, I should say that once I recognized it as a necessary conservation. I was extremely conservative. Now I don't know what perception and I don't believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don't believe that there is any perception.
-From The Structuralist Controversy, Discussion of "Structure, Sign, and Play," 271-2

Translating Husserl into the language of structuralism and specifically semiology was primarily the work of Merleau-Ponty (good friend of Lévi-Strauss), and if one reads certain remarks of his from the late 50's you can get a good sense of what that work of translation entails--you can piece together the puzzle that semiology poses to the phenomenologist of the non-French tradition, and begin to read, because all of a sudden you are launched into the types of conversations that were held after his classes there. Suddenly, this more formalized remark of Derrida's--no less extreme in its conclusions--from 1959 might also help, because one understands that it basically says the same thing in a less semiological language:

The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer. It is the question of the possibility of the question, opening itself, the gap, on whose basis the transcendental I, which Husserl was tempted to call "eternal" (which in his thought, in any event, means neither infinite nor ahistorical, quite the contrary) is called upon to ask itself about everything, and particularly about the possibility of the unformed and naked factuality of the nonmeaning, in the case at hand, for example, of its own death.
-"'Genesis and Structure' in Husserl's Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference, 167-8

All this is evidence of the benefits of a historically minded approach to philosophy, which doesn't so much focus on the appropriations and misappropriations of particular philosophers (Husserl or Heidegger), but tries to reconstruct the discourse in which those appropriations are happening. It is also helpful in discussions of Kant, say (who is dealing with the British empiricists and materialists, like Priestley), and Descartes.

Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, concluded

I ended my last post by saying that Merleau-Ponty, in his working notes, outlines two notions of the invisible in order to clarify its relationship to the visible. The invisible, which we tried phenomenologically to specify as that sort of reversibility of the seeing-seen relationship, or touching-touched relationship (when I touch my hand touching something, as Husserl said, suddenly I feel the hand that is touching something reverse itself into a hand that is being touched), this invisible reversibility needs to subtend the visible as what makes it possible. It needs to do this in such a way that the invisible itself can only remain purely this reversal. But if this is so, how can it have some relationship to the visible at all? With these questions in mind, I propose recalling the two notions of the invisible he outlines, before ending this paper (which does not totally come to a real conclusion):

But instead of quoting them directly, let us use Derrida’s summary of them, which takes place as he specifies what we now understand to be that crucial aspect of drawing he calls the aperspective of the graphic act—the fact that the point where the line is put down cannot be seen. This aperspective is crucial to us now because we understand that, due to the failure of vision in front of the drawn line via the withdrawal of the trait and its rhetoric or re-inscription—a failure we know Merleau-Ponty resists by bringing the line under the sway of painterly depth—we ourselves become the draftsman in front of the drawing. In other words, we always have to fall back upon the aperspective of the graphic act, because we always have to redraw the line in our trying to see the line. In failing to see the line and re-inscribing it, however, we also inhabit the blindness that this aperspective constitutes (thus, again, every drawing is a self-portrait of the blind), and in two ways that reflect these two ways the aperspective is inhabited (that is, in ways that mirror those of the withdrawal of the trait and its rhetoric). These two blindnesses within the aperspective of the graphic act are precisely visible invisibility and the absolutely invisible.
Indeed, the point under the pencil in which the inscription of the inscribable takes place “escapes the field of vision” for two reasons: “not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity” (MB, 45). In other words, it is either merely hidden from view (potentially visible, “visible invisible”), as a point that will be drawn once the pencil moves past where it has contacted the paper; or it is radically different than the visible, completely of another order than the visible, never to become visible precisely because it is the point that gets carried along with the point of the pencil when it puts down the line (its invisibility would therefore be absolute). Or, as Derrida puts it, the invisibility can be interpreted

either as the eve or the memory of the day, that is as a reserve of visibility (the draftsman does not presently see but he has seen and will see again: the aperspective as the anticipating perspective or the anamnesic retrospective), or else as radically and definitively foreign to the phenomenality of the day. This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility (MB, 45).

This last point is the most crucial for Derrida, and reveals why he only quotes Merleau-Ponty while trying to specify absolute invisibility. For we can now ask: precisely what invisibility constitutes the reversibility that supports the flesh, the intertwining of vision and the visible? While he specified both types, Merleau-Ponty never could concretely state on which model the invisible is itself constituted. Thus, he was not able to think, like Derrida, that it might be precisely the difference or heterogeneity between them as that ideal that would sustain or subtend the flesh. Derrida thus only takes Merleau-Ponty’s speculations on absolute invisibility, working out visible invisibility with the help of Baudelaire, and thinking the difference between them on his own.
No doubt Merleau-Ponty could not think this heterogeneity because it has the effect of completely reversing all his thought. For if Merleau-Ponty were to call not one or the other but the difference between the two the invisibility or reversibility of the senses, he would be saying, like Derrida, that the type of invisibility that subtends the vision and the visible would have to be vision and the visible: it would have to be so indeterminable in not being either one of these two that it would be indistinguishable from vision itself; being identical with the possibility, within visibility, of invisibility. Suddenly what Merleau-Ponty is trying to specify as the invisible has become precisely vision and the visible itself, while, for Derrida, what he called vision and the visible is now merely that withdrawing and retracing of the line—mere representation, flat upon the paper. Where has the body, the visible and vision—the whole presence of the flesh to itself—where has this all this gone?
We can only suggest the ways that this question already returns us to the relation of sight and secrecy. For Derrida, depth is completely gone—or rather, it is only surface: if it is achieved, it is through the invisibility that is vision, the heterogeneity between both modes of invisibility that itself constitutes seeing. What this means is that depth is always only a possibility achieved in a surface: as such, there is no flesh, no continuity between vision and the visible that could be determined without being blind to this very continuity. If the body is still there in the sense that Merleau-Ponty specifies it, it could not be seen or seen out of in the sense that he specifies it, since it would precisely only appear when the vision and the visible was indistinguishable from invisibility. This is all to say that where Merleau-Ponty holds out the possibility that vision can see itself seeing, Derrida says that this possibility is only possible on the condition that, when it was achieved, we would be blind.
The body and secrecy, therefore: both seem incompossible in Derrida, but we see that there is a possibility that this incompossibility or non-coincidence, in preserving itself, would keep the blindness (to which it is blind) to itself. This—we can only sketch this here—might be secrecy, and it thus could only be achieved by a body, a body with the reverse structure of Merleau-Ponty—that is, a body that did not see itself seeing but was precisely blind to the fact that it was a body.

This body—this is what I was hastening towards as the paper became too long already!—would of course have to be a technical body, a body of surfaces and not of depths. We could look, for an example of precisely this type of depth in a surface, not to either paintings or drawings, but to the photograph—which in Memoirs of the Blind seems to accommodate itself to the model of drawing Derrida there outlines. The photo would then perhaps preserve, by a technical supplement, the body qua Derridian body—and our bodies would already in a sense be photos, in a sense. This means that the act of responsibility could be achieved not through something like Merleau-Ponty’s painting, but in an act that accommodated photography, seen as the technical supplement of natural experience (Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind” has much to say against photography because it eliminates flesh). The photo, like the drawing, would be that in which we see in secret—and our photographic body would therefore in a sense always be responsible (but—as The Gift of Death says, also never responsible enough). This is the sense in which the sacrifices “are not even invisible:” our vision is this invisibility that we need to dedicate to secrecy more and more… The End

Reading Heidegger's language

A few days ago I got an email from someone reading the blog here. It asked some general questions about reading Heidegger's "The Thing," saying the following:

I am a little handicapped with Heidegger (I think) because I do not speak German. "The Thing" is probably the easiest Heidegger essay to parody, especially since one spends so much time reading about the thingliness of the thing and the thing's thingness. So - here's what I am wondering. What are the connotations and the denotations to the words Heidegger uses in this essay in German? I am assuming that Heidegger is using "Sache" for "thing" as this is the most direct translation. But I wonder if Heidegger is using other words for "thing" in this essay that I don't know of because of my language barrier. FYI - I am reading the Albert Hofstadter translation in Poetry, Language, Thought.

Now, this I think is a series of great questions. Moreover the way they are asked outlines a particular orientation towards Heidegger that many people, I think, have (I certainly did): it is the orientation that prescribes really wondering what is going on with the words Heidegger is using and why they are so funny, in a way--one could generally say the "style" (but of course this is not how Heidegger would exactly put it), or perhaps the "approach" of Heidegger. Why is it so hard to make sense of? And--and here is the crucial question--does going back to the particular valences of the words he is using help? My answer was no: one really has to try and see the phenomenon Heidegger is getting at before one tries to look at the twists and turns of the language, and especially before one looks at connotations. This risks making a totally denotative Heidegger (I'd say Dreyfus is a bit too far in this direction, at least in his thinking and teaching Heidegger--not so much in his writing), but I would say that this is more profitable than a connotative Heidegger at the stage when you are getting to be familiar with him (reading texts for the first or second time), because the phenomenon is brought to light (especially in its structure) that way. Now, this does not mean the phenomenon is separable--by any means--from the words and their connotations: what usually happens is that there is a path of thought being pushed through by each sentence and word, and one has to respond by altering the phenomenon accordingly to bring it further and further to light.
The example of the jug in "The Thing" is a good one. Think of the jug first. Then bring it out bit by bit following the path of the words and their interrelation. Now, this does not mean "picture" a jug, and alter the picture. It means intending towards it, feeling yourself as you would feel about the jug if you were attending to it, that is, attuning oneself to the attending to the jug, and then look at the words and how they reflect this attending and bring out or separate the intention from it. "Reflect," here, of course, is the key word here: it is what makes this an approach focused more on denotation. One has to, in a sense, reduce Heidegger's language to reflection or mere representation of the phenomenon. That is, one has to reduce Heidegger's language to a discourse about the phenomenon. He warns against this himself in What is Called Thinking? where thinking itself is the phenomenon:

The question "What is called thinking?" can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition. In what follows, we shall not think about what thinking is. We remain outside that mere reflection which makes thinking its object. Great thinkers, first Kant and and then Hegel, have understood the fruitlessness of such reflection. That is why they had to attempt to reflect their way out of such reflection.
-What is Called Thinking?, 21

I am recommending this against Heidegger, then. But I am also convinced that one can then correct this reduction of the language precisely by resubmerging it back into the path of thinking that the phenomenology (the alteration of the phenomenon in its exposition, from what is formally indicated to what is essential) demands. This, at least, is a good way to begin to approach Heidegger, I think, even though it risks setting up a dialectic of sorts. But I think it stays true to what Heidegger has to say about the path of thought:

When thinking attempts to go after a matter that has claimed it, it may happen that on the way it undergoes a wandering. It is advisable, therefore, in what follows to mind the path of thought rather than its content. To dwell properly upon the content would simply block the going-forward of the talk.
-"The Principle of Identity," in Identity and Difference, 23, translation heavily modified

In short, this means thinking on the "matter" (Sache) that gives thought. One can see that looking for connotations here doesn't and wouldn't add anything unless this is done beforehand. This was what I was trying to get at in my (impromptu) response, below: what "Sache" means and why it is what, in the thing, requires or asks for thinking. Here is what Heidegger has to say about this Sache in "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics:"

This seminar [which this essay concluded] made an attempt to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. [...] The matter of thinking presses upon thinking in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the heart of the matter and from there to thinking itself.
-"The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics," (in the same volume as above), 42

The German is more interesting and more elucidating. Stambaugh, however, precisely because she thinks connotations mean too much here, does not translate the whole of it in the above passage (she thinks these connotations are untranslatable):

Dieses Seminar versuchte, ein Gespräch mit Hegel zu beginnen. Das Gespräch mit einem Denker kann nur von der Sache des Denkens handeln. "Sache" meint nach der gegebenen Bestimmung den Streitfall, das Strittige, das einzig für das Denken der Fall ist, der das Denken angeht. Der Streit aber dieses Strittigen wird keineswegs erst durch das Denken gleichsam vom Zaun gebrochen. Die sache des Denkens ist das in such Strittige eines Streites. Unser Word Streit (ahd. strit) meint vornehmlich nicht die Zwietracht sondern die Bedrängnis. Die Sache des Denkens bedrängt des Denken in der Weise, daß sie das Denken erst zu seiner Sache und von dieser her zu ihm selbst bringt.
-"Die Onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik," 107

I'll see what I can do here to resist Stambaugh and bring it out, as it bears upon precisely what we mean by "matter:"

This seminar sought to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. "Matter" means according to the given determination of the point of contention--that contention that alone is, for thinking, the point that thinking tackles. The contending or contention however is not by any means only broken into by thinking, as it were, like picking a fight. The matter of thinking is the contention in a point of contention. Our word contending [Streit] (Old High German strit) means primarily not a confrontation [between two things] but a conflict. The matter of thinking makes thinking conflict in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the matter and from there to thinking itself.

Better translations are very possible. Bedrängnis is tough for me here and so I decided to play with the word "conflict" as both a noun and a verb (thus the "makes" in the last sentence--though that is way too causal for Heidegger): I hoped it thereby retains some of its affinity with "affliction." Regardless, the point (which I hope to be proving by example) is that if you got the phenomenon here, then the "play" on the words, their connotations, is more of the matter for the translator than the person who is thinking through and with Heidegger. And that the "Sache" itself is what is important: as this passage makes clear, it is what is at the essence of a point, what besets thinking and calls out for it (the Latin root of contention is contestare: to call out for a witness to testimony). It is that which does not make thinking stand over and against what is to be thought (another thinker's thought, for example), as if to confront it and struggle with it that way. It is that which is singular or one in any such engagement with what is to be thought: that which brings thinking to other thinking, that in which both have their being such that any confrontation between them is only possible in this one essential conflict. Insofar as language enters into this, it will be only to open up that essential conflict. That means that one doesn't really dispute with another thinker, for example, by quibbling over connotations--or at least this only happens after the essential has been touched.
In the end, it was interesting to even think again about the difference between Sache and Ding: I think if you were too immersed with Heidegger you wouldn't even think again about the fact that the two have serious affinity connotatively in German. I certainly was too immersed here--a bit too dogmatic as I say at the end. But you see that language here is precisely coming in for me when I already think I have a clear sense of the phenomenon. I guess this means that, in short, language in Heidegger should, ideally, act more as a corrective to the phenomenology than as something that communicates it. This would be true, then, for both newcomers and those to whom Heidegger is familiar. Anyway, here is the response:

To my knowledge, the word Heidegger is usually using is "das Ding" for thing, not "Sache." You're not wrong though: in German one can use either word for "thing." But for Heidegger, the reason it's not the latter is because "Sache" ususally means "the matter" or "the issue," not something more like an object, a stuff, an item, which is closer to what Ding means. Heidegger generally seperates the two because the first, in its more broad scope, is closer to what phenomenology tries to get at: "die Sachen selbst" is what Husserl says one has to go towards when looking at the phenomenon. In this sense, "Sachen" here means not what it is usually translated as ("the things themselves"), but something closer to "the matter at hand" or "for thought"--in short, and in Husserlian terms, the essence of whatever is concerning the phenomenologist, what it is as it is, that is, what it means for whatever to be what it is as such. This is different from it being a Ding--so different, in fact, that what Heidegger is doing in "The Thing" is precisely looking at das Ding so as to discern what about it makes it a Sachen for thinking, a matter for thinking or thought, that is, his type of phenomenology (different, of course, from Husserl's). In this sense, what is the Sachen here about the Ding is precisely its "thingliness," that is, what makes it, as a thing, be a thing--what makes it a thing as such. The odd words here--"thinghood" "thingliness"--are trying to refer to the thing in its being, that is, the thing in what makes it what it is, its as such, its essence (although one has to understand essence differently than with Husserl--but that's another issue somewhat).
The only other word Heidegger will be using repeatedly here for "thing" is Objekt: but this will only be translated as "object," never as "thing," precisely because, as you know, the essay is trying to get at the bottom of the difference between Ding and Objekt, and see the thing underneath, as it were, the object--the object being an ob-ject, what stands-apart-or-against us, as Heidegger says (taking ob- as the latin prefix for "standing-apart"). The point is to see the table, for example, or the jug, as something I can pick up and use, not as a set of points in Cartesian space--as I'm sure you know.
All this said, I don't think hunting around in the German is really worth your time: Hoftstader is usually pretty good at translating and Heidegger himself isn't usually trying to deceive you or play on words in a way that would repay this. What he does when he plays on words is groups together cognates, so as to show you an affinity between them: thus he'll gather together a whole bunch of words that start with über- or Ab-, or have -schick- in them (a word in itself meaning something, for Heidegger, like destination, which, if you grant Heidegger the affinities he is trying to piece together, makes up Geschehen, history, and Schicksal, fate, etc.)--but all of this is trying to work out the phenomenon, to show you certain things are part of its structure and are so because they are related to how we attend to them and other phenomena (which we might not expect the same attention to reside within). And if you haven't got a sense of this (for example, in "The Thing," the sense of a negative space inside the jug, that at once is and isn't space because it is meant only to contain, to lack, to hold in, and never to push out, like a wall would), you're going to be lost no matter how much German you look at. Frankly, my German isn't that good. You just pick up on the crucial distinctions (like that between Sache and Ding for Heidegger) by reading enough Heidegger--glancing at the German only occasionally when Heidegger draws attention to it or uses a phrase continually ("proximally and for the most part," for example, in Being and Time: the only reason I know the German is cause I got curious and was like, I wonder what the hell that phrase is after all! and looked it up.).
And, one more thing: Heidegger will always be easy to parody. Only when you got a sense of what he's getting at under his funny language does the drive to imitate him get serious--and often then, you're probably too serious about whatever Heidegger is talking about. If you want to look at the origin of that language and the necessity for its use, you really have to just ground Heidegger back in phenomenology. Otherwise he just looks ridiculous and obsessed with certain "intrinsic" aspects of German. And while this latter thing might be true, insisting on it doesn't get you anywhere when you are trying to understand him: it is said that Merleau-Ponty remarked that he didn't like the later Heidegger precisely because of this linguistic factor or obsession, and focused on his early work only for this reason. While Merleau-Ponty is on some level right (the workings of the language are a layer to phenomenality that is not exactly obvious or by any means traditional--though Husserl himself, it can be argued, insisted on similar things), it shouldn't just make you put down a bunch of the work: you have to keep yourself from doing that. I would say, though, that it is a healthy impulse, and it shouldn't be gotten rid of in principle: it's surprising how far Heidegger can take you away from what you are familiar with, even if you aren't suspecting him of anything, and you actually do feel repulsed at particular points by whatever he is saying. Keep that up: without it, you end up a little too dogmatic and you end up not understanding, I think, the operations of uncovering that Heidegger is really getting at.

Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, almost almost concluded

I forgot how long this essay was... I ended last time with the idea that, for Derrida, what we see in a drawing always prompts us to redraw what we see. This means that what we don't see (what is not visible) does not disappear from our vision and become merely the negation of visibility, but--and this thesis is surprisingly like that of Freud's in his "Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad,"--rather is simply replaced by something that we see again. In short, the withdrawal that made a line a presence, a depth, a phenomenon in the most technical sense of the term, for Derrida is not itself indifferent to its own activity but leaves a trace, a trace that itself takes over and supplants the phenomenality of this presence (this has the effect of rendering the phenomenon that would have appeared a trace as well). I asked, then, whether this means "that Derrida seems to have a radically different idea of the visible than Merleau-Ponty? " Here we begin to find out, but first we need recall Merleau-Ponty and him a little further:

But does this mean, then, that Derrida seems to have a radically different idea of the visible than Merleau-Ponty? As soon as I see, Merleau-Ponty said,

it is necessary that the vision (as is so well indicated by the double meaning of the word) be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot (VI, 134).

This, we said, indicated that vision itself was visible, that vision would intertwine itself into the visible just as much as the visible intertwined itself into vision (in depth, for example)—indeed, we can suppose that this is the meaning of that word “intertwine.” But we do not yet know how this intertwining of the former would be possible by virtue of the powers of vision itself. Vision would have to view itself, it would have to see itself seeing. This is the “enigma,” as Merleau-Ponty said earlier, and he solves it not by saying that the vision gains an added force that would allow it to blast itself outside of itself merely by becoming more intense, but by saying that vision itself supposes an invisibility dispersed throughout the flesh that allows this intertwining to be possible, that allows heightening vision to supersede or comprehend itself above and outside itself by dissolving into what is not itself.
This invisible would hold together vision and the visible underneath the flesh that we thought united vision and visible sufficiently (and does, except for this one crucial instance), remaining just that extra element which allowed the former to flip into the latter. In short, it would be the opposite of what Merleau-Ponty saw in birth, and we already see in characterizing it that way that it would therefore have to be one of the oddest and least natural (and therefore most technical) moments in bodily experience (supposing that birth is the most natural for Merleau-Ponty—most certainly a questionable presupposition). Merleau-Ponty therefore turns to the phenomena of the “double touch,” that Husserl (to take only one person who describes this phenomenon, but whose account of it is of course always within Merleau-Ponty’s mind) observed at length in the second book of his Ideas:

Touching my left hand, I have touch-appearances, that is to say, I do not just sense, but I perceive and have appearances of a soft, smooth hand, with such a form. The indicational sensations of movement and the representational senses of touch, which are Objectified [Merleau-Ponty would say, made visible] as features of the thing, “left hand,” belong in fact to my right hand. But when I touch the left hand I also find in it, too, series of touch sensations, which are “localized,” in it, though these are not constitutive of properties (such as roughness or smoothness of the hand, of this physical thing). If I speak of the physical [i.e. visible] thing, “left hand,” then I am abstracting from these sensations (a ball of lead is nothing like them and likewise for every “merely” physical thing, every thing that is not my Body). If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer [i.e. more visible, by becoming more intense, as we said above], but instead it becomes Body, it senses [i.e. becomes the vision in the body]… The hand that is touching [i.e. the right], which for its part again appears as a thing, likewise has its touch sensations at the place on its corporeal surface… (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Tr. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Collected Works, III. London: Kluwer, 1989. p. 152-3, §36. In On Touching Derrida meticulously reconstitutes the logic of this movement between the visible and the tactile constantly at work in Merleau-Ponty that we—for the sake of convenience, but inexcusably—are reduplicating here. Suffice it to say that the movement is not so easy: one either posits, in accomplishing it, a) a synesthetic experience between not just these two senses but also all of them or b) an anesthetic experience that would allow the two senses to communicate (but again, also all of them) though their suspension. See his “Tangents” II and III, OT, 159-215.)

Upon reading this description, we understand, now, that this inclusion or exclusion of the localized touch sensations is where intertwining would occur: it is where the body becomes, in its vision, visible, and at the time where the body becomes, in its being visible, vision. The leap is accomplished from one to the other and back again, based on the perspective that we assume towards it. Furthermore, this perspective—this stance towards my own touching or vision—is only accomplished via the body’s motility, its movement through the visible as vision and vice versa. Thus we can finally understand that sentence which begins Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on painting: “that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.” Furthermore, we can understand fully how the painter lends himself to the visible: he looks at the world as if the world itself, the things in it, were looking back at him as if they were not just potentially seeing, but actively seeing, bodies—which, as we know, they already are. Merleau-Ponty says this all explicitly in a concise formulation: “inevitably the roles between him and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them.” This is what is meant by that point of view within the visible that would be “myself seen from without, such as another would see me:” one hand in a sense sees another as if it were foreign to it, precisely when it is able to also intertwine itself with the experience of sensing itself (as a system of two hands). It is in the reversing of the sensing and the sensed here between the hands that the intertwining is lodged.
But if this is the case, we now also know that it is in this reversing that something more than visible comes in. For in this flip between the vision and the visible, what sustains the identity of the body? We can understand, because of something like birth, how the visible might come to attain vision (though even this is just as problematic when we begin to think about that point at which one turns into the other). But it is absolutely unclear how the dispersal of a view outside of itself can retain the same power of vision, without some structure that would keep these two visions together: if we really think about it, how could any point among things really lend itself to a view “such as another would see me” while still remaining oneself? Merleau-Ponty helpfully points us to the case of the two eyes (which Husserl broached also in Ideas II): their overlapping of view, however, seems less natural. Merleau-Ponty, however, tries to inscribe it back into the bodily precisely as a structure that would merely be its non-technical extension, though of a radically different element than it: how is he able to do this?
He is able to accomplish this by conceiving of the reversing as precisely reversibility—as an ideal potential or structure that subtends the intertwining or always remains immanent with respect to it:

We spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing [or vision] and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand [Merleau-Ponty switches the hands with respect to Husserl’s description] is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching… but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering… I am always on the same side of my body; it presents itself to me in one invariable perspective. But this incessant escaping, this impotency to superpose exactly upon one another… this is not a failure (VI, 147-8, emphasis added).

Because I can never actually witness the moment when vision is changed into the visible, this change or intertwining takes place. Though the logic may sound dubious at first, phenomenologically the description is exact. The question then becomes whether we can map on this phenomenon of the lack of coincidence of vision in the visible, its eclipse, with that of the reversibility beyond it that makes it possible. Obviously, we cannot: the reversibility itself is, properly speaking, a non-phenomenon, an ideal, only immanent and never realized in fact. This is why Merleau-Ponty calls it the invisible.
But how can one then be sure that this invisible reversibility of the flesh actually makes vision view itself? Merleau-Ponty attempts to think it as rigorously as possible so that it can get installed not just anywhere apart from the visible—in the realm of the transcendental, in a space that could be known without the visible—but right upon the back of the visible, such that it becomes “its lining” (VI, 149). In other words, Merleau-Ponty tries to think of how the invisible sustain the flesh such that, if the flesh were removed in order to grasp this invisible more clearly (even in our thought about it), “it is then that [it] would be inaccessible to us” (VI, 150). In doing so, he outlines two types of invisibility: precisely those that Derrida quotes in Memoirs of the Blind and then transfers to The Gift of Death. They appear most schematically in Merleau-Ponty’s working notes, though we could specify many places in his oeuvre where either one or the other sense is being used (indeed each time we have tried to talk about intertwining and even before about some aspects of the motile body, there in Merleau-Ponty one or another sense is present—thus our lengthy reconstitution of its logic). Of course they will be what we have already seen specified in The Gift of Death: the “visible in-visible” and the “absolutely invisible.”

(To be concluded...)

The body of Jean-Luc Nancy performs

Nancy's magnificent essay "Corpus," in The Birth To Presence, would do much for anyone trying to link a more phenomenological tradition of thought about the body and embodiment, culminating in the reflections of Merleau-Ponty that seem today to be gaining in popularity (and will be gaining even more, with the upcoming publication of Sean Kelly's new translation of The Phenomenology of Perception), to those reflections on embodiment that have perhaps more recently arisen (though, through Foucault, one could say that their origins are the same) in work on performativity. Nancy essentially could be said to--like Derrida--take the theses of the latter tradition and elaborate them in the language of the former--though perhaps with more intent than Derrida to elaborate, rather than focus on the resistances or misreadings this elaboration would also constitute. In short, Nancy makes the performative body thinkable in terms not of performativity but of the body "itself:" that task which Judith Butler attempts so nobly and rigorously within terms of performativity (and power) in Bodies that Matter.

Merleau-Ponty held that the body was a basic disposition or structure of intentionality constituting a particular point of view. This has the effect of reversing the oldest conception of the body in the way Nancy describes:

...one had to dispense with the body, with the very idea of the body. The body was born in Plato's cave, or rather it was conceived and shaped in the form of the cave: as a prison or tomb of the soul, and the body first was thought from the inside, as buried darkness into which light only penetrates in the form of reflections, and reality only in the form of shadows. This body is seen from the inside, as in the common but anguishing fantasy of seeing the mother's body from the inside, as in the fantasy of inhabiting one's own belly, without father or mother, before any father and bother, before all sex and all reproduction, and of getting hold of oneself there, as a nocturnal eye open to a world of chains and simulacra. This body is first and interiority dedicated to images, and to the knowledge of images; it is the "inside" of representation, and at the same time the representation of that "inside."

-"Corpus," The Birth to Presence, 191-2

Merleau-Ponty shows that the body itself must, prior to being this inside, create this insideness. In other words, it must be outside its inside, ek-statically, as an interface with the world that juts out into it. The body is outside, for Merleau-Ponty (for some merits of this view and the amazingness of Merleau-Ponty more generally, see one of my earlier posts on him).

But can this body itself be viewed by itself? It is here that the question of performativity would come up: one would be viewing one's own body from the outside. The difficulty of this for Merleau-Ponty is that viewing as such requires that the body precisely be unable to view itself. It turns back on itself, but can never quite slip out of its own grip on itself to fully, coherently, see itself. This would require it remove itself from its bodily, embodied perspective (to the third-person perspective that he says science studies), which Merleau-Ponty holds to be impossible. And it would have to do this precisely without overshooting itself or viewing itself past or beyond or outside itself. This is really the crux of the problem, and why the impossibility is there in the first place. Merleau-Ponty thinks intentionality can only be unidirectional, fundamentally, because (this is ultimately a Heideggerian claim which Merleau-Ponty does not make well in The Phenomenology of Perception; precisely because he is not trying to run into the problems Heidegger encountered in expanding and refuting Husserl's "Internal Time-Consciousness" essay; in other words, he sticks close to Husserl against Heidegger to be more Heideggerian than Heidegger) the body is temporal and finite. It temporalizes itself, or bursts forward towards the world temporally from... the inside. Or rather, an outside that can only gain coherence by equally being the most inside of insides. By being outside, by structuring the Platonic inside, Merleau-Ponty is really positing just an inside that is prior to the inside. At least in The Phenomenology of Perception. He moves beyond this in his later work, most notably The Visible and the Invisible. Of course this view might be the only one that makes sense to some people, most notably those just discovering Merleau-Ponty and using him to counter representationalist theories of perception and action either phenomenologically or in computational models (cf. Dreyfus, Taylor, Kelly, even Davidson etc.).

But it cannot account for performativity. This is probably why, despite the affinity that one might think resides between Butler and Merleau-Ponty in their concern for the bodily (and that some unthinking critics looking for new theoretical combinations have mistakenly asserted exists in their statements about the body), Butler does not engage him.

Merleau-Ponty holds an interesting and somewhat controversial (though, upon some reflection, completely intuitive) view regarding the objects that our body intends towards: they can be viewed (or, in general, related or intended to) from all angles. This means that when I am outside and my body sees a house across the street, I am seeing the back of the house as well as the side "facing" me. Why? Because my intention must already be relating beyond what is represented to the general presence of the house which my body recognizes. The house is part of a field of action or intention that could include me going behind the house: thus my body (perhaps more dimly) can be said to perceive the "back" of the house when I perceive its "front."

The question Nancy is asking, then, would be about how the body itself could be viewed like this. And viewed like this while also remaining that body that is viewing. In other words, how can the body view (we are using vision, because it is the easiest example) itself? This is the question of performance: the body must somehow remain itself at the same time as it performs or makes viewable (to this very body and to others--and we should note that we are only loosely using "viewable" here as a synonym for performance: we mean viewable only in the sense that the body is "viewing" or "seeing," not that performance has to do with mere exhibition as such) this self. To use a different sense: it would be like trying to hear oneself speak in the first and third person at the same time about oneself. And another (and this is a famous example): it would be like trying to touch oneself touching (take one arm and with a finger touch the other, trying to be touched in the second arm and feel the touching in the finger of the first arm at the same time).

Nancy claims throughout "Corpus" that this is precisely what the body does--and, we must add, thoroughly fails to do. At the point at which the body would see itself (and see all of itself, every angle of itself, like the house), it would precisely be failing to see itself: not because it is really still "inside" itself in being beyond itself and thus misses itself, but exactly for the reason that it does not miss itself and sees itself. It actually does hear itself speak in the first and third person, and this is why it becomes, as it were, deaf to itself. Or, with the example of touch, it touches itself touching and yet touches as itself: it touches itself and is touched by itself. Because this means it is no longer an "itself:" the body is external to itself, then, but not because it is beyond itself by virtue of some intention. It is because this "itself" is ("itself") an externality. In other words, it is "shared out of itself," partes extra partes:

...here, at the body, there is the sense of touch, the touch of the thing, which touches "itself" without an "itself" where it can get at itself, and which is touched and moved in this unbound sense of touch, and so separated from itself, shared out of itself.

-"Corpus," 203

The body would have to be some residue of both itself moving outward from inside (towards what the inner considered outer, that is, the outside that is related to in terms of the inside, thus when what is taken to exist or matter is only "insides") and coming back inside from the outside (towards what the outer considered inner, that is, the inside when what is taken to exist or have sense is only "outsides") at the same time. It would not be a membrane or an interface, however, that had consistency as a point by itself. Rather, it would be the trace of both inside and outside, first and third person, as they made their respective movements (holding that only insides and outsides, respectively, had sense) into their opposites. It would not exist at that point at which it would perform itself: this would have only the consistency of a performance. Thinking this point is the hardest because it lacks any density whatsoever, but, as I said, Nancy will help both those who think of performance to think phenomenologically and those who think of phenomenology performatively.

Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology

Here is what I think is an absolutely crucial, unbelievably (unbelievably!) brilliant text of Sartre's, in full, explaining and popularizing phenomenology. I'll make some remarks afterwards. In the meantime, hopefully this will get the text out there more, and help to save both it and Sartre from their current under-appreciated stature. At the very least, it still remains one of the most (if not the most) clear introductions to intentionality in Husserl, in my mind. This is a text everyone interested in philosophy should read. Who else could have explained its merits as a restoration of the horror and charm to things? Or the deficiency of other accounts which it corrects as the solipsism of a child kissing his own shoulder? Who else could have made you feel the operation of this idea within our everyday practices, precisely because of its theoretical sophistication, so viscerally that when we indeed think it, we react even bodily--becoming entranced, disgusted, or even dizzy with near-rapture? Who else, except Sartre?!

"Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology"
From The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermont Moran and Timothy Mooney (London, Routledge, 2002). Found online in Thomas Sheehan's notes for his Sartre course at Stanford.
A translation (by Joseph P. Fell) of “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l'intentionnalité,” in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

“He devoured her with his eyes.” This expression and many other signs point to the illusion common to both realism and idealism: to know is to eat. After a hundred years of academicism, French philosophy remains at that point. We have all read Brunschvicg, Lalande, and Meyerson, we have all believed that the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and slowly swallowed them, reducing them to its own substance. What is a table, a rock, a house? Answer: a certain assemblage of “contents of consciousness,” a class of such contents. Oh digestive philosophy! Yet nothing seemed more obvious: is not the table the actual content of my perception? Is not my perception the present state of my consciousness? Nutrition, assimilation! Assimilation, Lalande said, of things to ideas, of ideas by ideas, of minds by minds. The corpulent skeletons of the world were picked clean by these diligent diastases: assimilation, unification, identification. The simplest and plainest among us vainly looked for something solid, something not just mental, but would encounter everywhere only a soft and very genteel mist: themselves.
Against the digestive philosophy of empirico-criticism, of neo-Kantianism, against all “psychologism,” Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things in consciousness. You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness, for it is not of the same nature as consciousness. One is perhaps reminded of Bergson and the first chapter of Matter and Memory. But Husserl is not a realist: this tree on its bit of parched earth is not an absolute that would subsequently enter into communication with me. Consciousness and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness. Husserl sees consciousness as an irreducible fact that no physical image can account for. Except perhaps the quick, obscure image of a burst. To know is to “burst toward,” to tear oneself out of the moist gastric intimacy, veering out there beyond oneself, out there near the tree and yet beyond it, for the tree escapes me and repulses me, and I can no more lose myself in the tree than it can dissolve itself in me. I am beyond it; it is beyond me.
Do you recognize in this description your own circumstances and your own impression? You certainly knew that the tree was not you, that you could not make it enter your dark stomach and that knowledge could not, without dishonesty, be compared to possession. All at once consciousness is purified, it is clear as a strong wind. There is nothing in it but a movement of fleeing itself, a sliding beyond itself. If, impossible though it may be, you could enter “into” a consciousness, you would be seized by a whirlwind and thrown back outside, in the thick of the dust, near the tree, for consciousness has no “inside.” Precisely this being-beyond-itself, this absolute flight, this refusal to be a substance is what makes it be a consciousness. Imagine for a moment a connected series of bursts that tear us out of ourselves, that do not even allow to an “ourselves” the leisure of composing ourselves behind them, but that instead throw us beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the plain earth, amidst things. Imagine us thus rejected and abandoned by our own nature in an indifferent, hostile, and restive world -- you will then grasp the profound meaning of the discovery that Husserl expresses in his famous phrase, “All consciousness is consciousness of something.” No more is necessary to dispose of the effete philosophy of immanence, where everything happens by compromise, by protoplasmic transformations, by a tepid cellular chemistry. The philosophy of transcendence thrown us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light.
Our own being, says Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. One must understand this “being-in” as movement. To be is to fly out into the world, to spring from the nothingness of the world and of consciousness in order suddenly to burst out as consciousness-in-the-world. When consciousness tries to recoup itself, to coincide with itself once and for all, closeted off all warm and cozy, it destroys itself. This necessity for consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself is what Husserl calls “intentionality.”
I have spoken primarily of knowledge in order to make myself better understood: the French philosophy that has molded us understands little besides epistemology. But for Husserl and the phenomenologists our consciousness of things is by no means limited to our knowledge of them. Knowledge, or pure “representation,” is only one of the possible forms of my consciousness “of” this tree; I can also love it, fear it, hate it; and this surpassing of consciousness by itself -- i.e., intentionality -- finds itself again in fear, hatred, and love. Hating another is just a way of bursting forth toward him; it is finding oneself suddenly confronted by a stranger in whom one lives, in whom, from the very first, one lives through the objective quality of “hatred.”
So all at once hatred, love, fear, sympathy -- all those famous “subjective” reactions that were floating in the malodorous brine of the mind -- are pulled out. They are simply ways of discovering the world. Things are what abruptly unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, lovable. Being dreadful is a property of this Japanese mask: an inexhaustible and irreducible property that constitutes its very nature -- and not the sum of our subjective reactions to a piece of sculptured wood.
Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, and with its havens of mercy and love. He has cleared the way for a new treatise on the passions that would be inspired by this simple truth, so utterly ignored by the refined among us: if we love a woman, it is because she is lovable. We are delivered from Proust. We are likewise delivered from the “internal life”: in vain would we seek the caresses and fondlings of our intimate selves, like Amiel, or like a child who kisses his own shoulder -- for everything is finally outside: everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.

Kant and the world

I wasn't exactly clear or even exactly right in my post below on Kant, when I said that the unity of the perspective from which the manifold is represented as connected is the real place where apperceptive synthesis is at work:

...we have to understand that, for Kant, this is really where the power of representation, the whole process of eventual synthesis and connection of representation, originates and is at work--but not yet as itself. In other words, connection as an act is really located here, in the unity: connection itself just issues forth from this act of unifying that is not yet action, not yet reducible to the power of representation as such.

This is generally in the right ballpark, and that is indeed where I was trying to get us in that post, but this problem, the unity of the manifold prior to representation in apperception, gets complicated and indeed is buttressed by the entire third Critique. 

Do we have reason to believe that this connection is unified simply by the existence of one perspective (speaking loosely, of course) upon the manifold? Or is this unity essentially issuing forth from the nature of the assumption we must make in order to do anything about the nature of the objective world itself? That is, the unity of the manifold must be assumed in an act of judgement regarding it: the unity of our perspective on it is thus dependent on this judgement itself being consistent. It is there that the Transcendental Deduction must find its completion and apperception really find itself issuing forth from a coherent point of view on the world. To support this reading, let's just refer to the famous introduction to the third critique where it specifically mentions the unity of the manifold in apperception with respect to reflecting judgement:

...There is such a manifold of forms in nature, as it were so man modifications of the universal transcendental concepts of nature that are left undetermined by those laws that the pure understanding gives a priori, since these pertain only to the possibility of nature (as object of the senses) in general, that there must nevertheless also be laws for it which, as empirical, may indeed be contingent in accordance with the insight of OUR understanding, but which, if they are to be called laws (as is also required by the concept of nature), must be regarded as necessary on a principle of the unity of the manifold, even if that principle is unknown to us.

-Critique of the Power of Judgement, Guyer and Matthews translation, 67 (5: 179-80), my italics.

The validity of the principle here is what is primarily in question. Indeed, Husserl notes this quite thoroughly in his The Crisis of the European Sciences. We should remark that it is actually quite useful to go there after the third critique, because it is really this problem that leads Husserl to posit the existence of a "life-world." He does not think that the third critique is able to answer this question sufficiently and still posits something about the world apart from any judgement. He must therefore look at the third critique to justify this, and out of it cull a pre-assumed "life world" that Kant fails to address. However, he does not do this to the extent we would wish it to be done. The question gets recasted, in a sense, but never explicitly read back into the place in which it originated, the third critique. Merleau-Ponty is a bit better about this, actually, and addresses specifically Kantian concerns often--turning to him next would be useful. But, frankly, all of phenomenology's concern with worldhood or the life world stems from this basic problem in the third critique. Indeed, Heidegger's assumption of the individuality of Dasein that gets given to me in being-to-death--its mine-ness, that brings Dasein away from a world at the same time as it involves Dasein in it authentically--could be said to stem from this problem, at least in the way it is carried out (and Heidegger indeed refers to the transcendental deduction in Being and Time, and his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is, after all is said and done, primarily concerned with the role of the third critique in this problem relating to the deduction). Anyway, all I'm trying to do here is redirect some musings earlier: I hope they were not that misleading (and I don't think they were).

The movements of Donner la mort

The Gift of Death (Donner la mort) perhaps can be interpreted as having four movements, each named roughly by the title of each section (chapter in the English edition).

1. Les secrets de la responsabilité européenne ("Secrets of European Responsibility"). Here Derrida insinuates that (a logic of) a secret is present in Jan Patočka's narration of the history of (European, Christian) responsibility, against his wishes to eradicate this secret through a passage of this history into Christianity.

2. Au-delà: donner à prendre, apprendre à donner -- la mort. This section's title gets rendered in English as: "Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death." This understands the play going on here but perhaps brings to the fore the language of the classroom and instruction too much. For the subject of this movement is how this secret intrudes as or appears as the gift of death. The emphasis thus falls on the word that is being played upon, apprehénder: how is one going to anticipate (Heidegger) or intuit (Husserl) the phenomenon of this secret if it comes forth as (and in) the experience of death--i.e. if the secret of responsibility is in every case a way of grasping (almost in the German sense of begreifen) this dreadful experience? Furthermore, grasping it as it is given, in the Husserlian sense of what is there before us phenomenally, as a given?

3. A qui donner (savoir ne pas savoir). "Whom to Give To (Knowing Not to Know)" excellently captures the sense of this movement, except that "savoir ne pas savoir" can also be rendered to better accommodate the play on "ne pas," that we find throughout Derrida's work, so as to elucidate the thing known as opposed to the knowing involved (David Wills again emphasizes the "learning" perhaps too much, even though his translation is in most respects just unbelievably good, given Derrida's extremely fuzzy phrasing of things in this particular text). The remark in the parenthesis would then be closer to "knowing not-knowing." This is important because the name of this section gets at the experience of that apprehension featured the last section. Furthermore, upon traversing this section's content we see that this "not-knowing" is the precise experience of the responsible subject that Derrida finds in Kierkegaard. The movement here, then, seeks to show via the secret in the gift of death that Patočka's responsible Dasein can be interpreted (if he is reshaped a little) as a responsible knight of faith. However, we then find that this Knight, in order to accommodate the secret of responsibility Derrida has already wrested from Patočka, gets reshaped precisely to encompass the "formula" named in the title of the last movement:

4. Tout autre est tout autre ("Every other (one) is every (bit) other"). Responsibility can only be constituted if it comports itself towards the other (and this implies towards the gift of death) as an infinitely recursive or already-othered other, an other that is other than its alterity. This other then is finally interpreted and reintegrated within the history determined by secrecy that was elaborated in the first movement or chapter, to ask the question as to whether this history is still as determined by secrecy as Christian secrecy or not. The answer is that it remains between both determinations, being an evangelist as well as a heretical history. The history does not show us merely this, however, but brings out how we must think the giving in the gift of death in more than one way. The gift of death is an offering, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it (somewhere, I think in "The Sublime Offering"): it withdraws itself as it proffers itself in order to continue giving itself, that is, in order to never be reducible to what is given or to the act of giving itself. But two ways of this withdrawal are here constituted, which means that two ways of giving also simultaneously are implicated if the gift is an offering. First, the withdrawal of what is given, and, second, the withdrawal of the giving in favor of the what. One can formulate this in the following statement that reduces to one gift: giving is always to give all (one has) and to give (one's) all--the first instance withdrawing the giving, offering the what, the second withdrawing the what and offering the giving.

The space of the body

Here is yet more powerful empirical evidence that Maurice Merleau-Ponty is extremely right in his theory of the body as an intentional structure, and anti-representationalist accounts of consciousness or existence in general on the right track in exhaustively explaining even the most extreme phenomena. The evidence is an article, to be published in Science, about several experiments that detail how one can experimentally produce "out-of-body" experiences.
The main experiment detailed was conducted at Princeton and essentially proves (primarily spatial) intentionality as someone like Sartre explains it: in standing towards a tree, for example, looking and directing oneself to it, one is not observing the tree from the physical point in Cartesian space that one occupies, but is rather at the tree. Sartre shows that this "at" is not vague in any way, but is in fact highly determinate: one is with the tree, there, where the tree is--not in the sense of its being in space but of its being in a field of intentions, in a field of possible things I may walk towards, act towards, or, in general, be-towards. Instead of using Sartre's "at," we may put it in a Heideggerian way and say that one is"nearest" the tree, that is, nearest in the sense of intention: what being "at" the tree means when we understand it this Heideggerian way is that I am at the tree such that something that interposes itself between me and the tree in Cartesian or empirical space will be "further" away from me than the tree.
Now, the experiment at Princeton set up some virtual goggles such that one's viewpoint when the goggles were on appeared several feet ahead of one's actual viewpoint in physical space. Prodding them with a stick (in what looks like the direction of the virtual viewpoint, though I don't see in the end why it being otherwise would contradict the point I'm about to make) would give them the "out-of-body" experience. Now, isn't it clear that the "out-of-body" experience detailed here would be almost identical with the experience of being "at" or "near" the tree in the distance? One is pushed a little with a stick, and one feels (the experimenters document) the feeling of being "out-there" at the point in physical space where the virtual viewpoint is supposed to be. In other words, what is this but a feeling of what is, insofar as intentionality is supposed by Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and others to be the way things actually are--what is this but a feeling of what is actually the case? In a sense the experiment just makes you perceive where you are already at.

Note: This example of Sartre's is in his extrordinarily brilliant two-page article entitled "Intentionality: a fundamental idea in Husserl's phenomenonlogy," which everyone who has five minutes of free time should read: witty, concise, and extremely illustrative, it is I think one of Sartre's best pieces of writing--and given his ouvre, that is saying something. Unfortunately it is located in the hard-to-find Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (in its 1970 issue), so I can't give you a link to it (which I would love to be able to do). Recently, however, it has been included in The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, and published by Routledge, which is in most bookstores, so next time you're in Barnes and Noble (or at the library) take five minutes and read it, then put the book back. If you're worried you just stole knowledge, remember that Alain Badiou develops into a pretty coherent philosophical position the notion that knowledge is and should be free, and you'll feel better about it.