4
French Phenomenology
Phenomenology is alive. It is one way in which philosophy incessantly reinvents itself today, one way that it brazenly takes upon itself the task not to completely fold upon itself within its own history, not to timidly abandon the territories of truth, especially that of perception, to the sciences – whether they deal with humanity or nature. Phenomenology is particularly alive in France, in the French language, and in French writing.1
If one takes a closer look at “French Phenomenology,” one could perhaps distinguish two “families.” There is one family of those who, following Merleau-Ponty, maintain tangible perception as the initial opening for all things to appear. To trace how things appear, they turn their attention in the direction of that which, in perception, is prior to the complete and static thing in its face-to-face relation with a subject that is, itself, complete and static. The works of Henri Maldiney, Jacques Garelli, Marc Richir, and Renaud Barbaras,2 for example – without trying in the least to “compress” them all together – may be classified, up to a certain point, in this family. It is thus a question of getting back to a pre-originary stage of experience, paralyzed by instability and ambiguity because it comes before the clean division of determined identities – and that because the latter is the place where we find ourselves, the place of logical and ontological determination. In other words, we must put to work a reduction that is already inchoate or incomplete. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty: a reduction that tends toward that which, by definition, escapes stabilization at a glance; a reduction that, in every instance, requires by the same token its never-ending renewal. Thus this gesture leads toward the anonymity of the World: anonymity if it goes toward that which precedes the subject that is fixed in its identity; the World, if the “World” is fixed as the name of the prior horizon on which all that appears can be shown.
We can distinguish another family of thought that branches off from the same phenomenological requirement that we return to the event of appearance. This family, concerned as it is with a reduction that seeks to be even more radical, attempts to turn its view to that which would be more originary than the World itself. One immediately sees the paradox to which this phenomenology exposes itself – whether it asserts the paradox, or, on the contrary, claims to disqualify it. The very necessity of radicality, in its concern for exposing the manner of appearing, leads phenomenology to (or beyond) what generally presents itself as the norm of appearance: the visible, in its essential structure. This phenomenology tends toward that which comes to rupture the visible, that which comes to disrupt it and does not allow itself to be captured by it. From whence comes, without doubt, the violence of its style, which cannot be reduced to the violence in the act of writing, as exemplified not only by Levinas in Otherwise Than Being, Or, Beyond Essence (Levinas 1974), but also by Michel Henry when it pertains to describing the structure of Immanence – Immanence that conceals itself from the light of the World and whose movement flirts with tautology without ever collapsing into it. A traumatic – and traumatizing – way of testifying to the ordeal that consists in exposing oneself to that which, older than the visible, overcomes and escapes it, but at the same time forgives it – or at least gives it meaning. This phenomenological family shares with the first family mentioned, the “Merleau-Pontian” family, the concern for dismissing the subject as the pole of initiative and sovereignty. However, because it seeks to be even more radical, this critique of the subject will not lead to an originary anonymity, but rather toward “the passivity older than all passivity” of a named Self, evoked, precisely, as an example of endurance of the test at hand; a Self that, in one sense, consists entirely of the one proven by this very ordeal.
One cannot fail to wonder, in light of this briefly sketched “table of families,” “Where is French phenomenology going?” One may very well look like a “bad pupil” if one does not ask the question: How did Husserlian rationalism and the responsibility of rigor that it constantly affirmed, give birth to a philosophy that concerns itself with that which precedes the determination of stable identities, with that inchoateness which, by so doing, unceasingly escapes into the ambiguously winding “neither . . . nor” in which the visible is interwoven and to which painters bear witness so well (as in the first-evoked “Merleau-Pontian family”)? Must not poetic suggestion come to replace the rigorous discourse that seeks to fittingly describe the order of essences? Irrationality raises its head; but, one could well say, it could have been “worse.” The worst would be the second family evoked – which this chapter prefers to examine.
Before delving deeper into this study, let us quickly attempt to introduce the most significant representatives – while understanding that such a perilous exercise runs the risk of caricaturing each of the movements somewhat and blurring that which individuates them and makes them resist easy classification into a “family” (such classification into “families” only sheds light by temporarily obscuring the thing that is classified).
Emmanuel Levinas
Levinas deserves credit for having introduced phenomenology to France (see Levinas 1988, 1989). Above all else, he would not desist in asserting himself to be a phenomenologist – in the meantime, however, evoking “the ethical language, which phenomenology resorts in order to mark its own interruption” (Levinas 1974: 120n.35). It is necessary to insist that Levinas, often suspected of veering from phenomenological description in the name of a speculative construction of the Other (with a capital “O”) or of its praise, has, for his own part, always claimed to practice phenomenological description – especially at the beginning of his career, without ever contradicting this claim, even if it did complicate the meaning of his work. “Description,” in a sense, is truly renewed: it is not relevant to identify and establish essences, but, on the contrary, to “de-formalize,” to surrender, through the act of writing, the phenomenon to a dynamic indetermination of the horizons of sense. The question will always remain, by the same token, of how to understand the phenomenological imperative as the impossibility of separating the “concepts” from the empirical examples by which they are solidified. However, we would now like to underline another aspect of the relationship that Levinas has with phenomenology. Describing the way in which the face of another appears simultaneously in frankness and in ambiguity, he insists on the following: the face obscures all power of constitution; it disrupts any predetermined horizon. The face of another is always “out of context.” Thus, it opens a dimension of significance (in that it is pure address and pure injunction; it summons, issues a call): more and more clearly over Levinas’s career, it is this ethical dimension that would come to endow phenomenality with signification, with “significance,” as he put it. This said, the “transcendence to the point of absence” that Levinas names the “Infinite” or even “Illéité” (that is, the absolute “it”) appears however in its own paradoxical manner: in – or like – the very disruption of phenomenality, as “a trace of that which will have never been present.” Nevertheless, the trace always holds to the horizon that it divides (Illéité is, precisely, only offered like the face), and the disruption of phenomenology is only allowed to inhabit the same horizon that it disrupts and opens to signification: a radical disruption of phenomenology which is, nevertheless, only given as a trace or an echo of the very thread that is always already bound to phenomenology.
Michel Henry
Since The Essence of Manifestation (Henry 1990a), his first master work, Michel Henry has incessantly practiced the following gesture which can only be qualified as transcendental: if that which is shown is taken in a movement of transcendence, of “exit outside itself,” then such a reality would not be able to provide a foundation. Only radical immanence is substantial reality. Radicalizing this description in his most recent works (see especially Henry 1996, 2000, 2002), Henry describes what he calls the duplicity of appearance: the ek-static appearance of the World that is then opposed to the auto-appearance of self-immanence, of that which he calls “Life.” The appearance of the World brings to light – and this light is purely an exteriority endowed with a power to exteriorize – to draw out any being that shows itself within itself: the appearance of the World is de-realizing. If phenomenology, subordinated to its Greek origin, is based on the principle according to which “whatever appears, is,” and if it comprehends only the appearance of the World, then it describes nothing of that which, at the same time, is and actually appears; and, it even fundamentally participates in this enterprise of the de-realization of all existence. It is thus necessary not to abandon phenomenology but to reverse it into an authentic phenomenology (this reversal is explicitly evoked in Henry 2000: 238). That is, the denunciation of the World, of the visible, would not be the denunciation of all appearance: in truth, if the World is that which “expels from itself” all beings by its ek-static movement, if it is that which defeats interiority, then only that which comes from the self, is brought to the self, and likewise, brings each being into itself, endows it with an interiority and an ipseity, and will in actuality be an effectivity. What it all amounts to is this motion of bringing into itself that which truly exists, a purely immanent motion that “ipséizes” or “subjectifies”: a grasping of Life itself in which each Living Thing is grasped. We must insist, according to Henry, that this immanent movement of Life into itself makes its appearance the most authentic auto-revelation by which it appears to itself without any detour through the World where beings are shown. Henry qualifies this radical phenomenology as “material phenomenology” (see Henry 1990b) to express the fact that it owes nothing to form or to essence. This phenomenology is more than “possible”: even obscured by the phenomenology of the World, it cannot, in any sense, be always already at work beneath the surface, in the same way that Life, in its absoluteness, supports the World.
It will be noted that the material phenomenology of Henry does not choose to privilege phenomena (as does that of Jean-Luc Marion – as we will soon see – or of Levinas, in a certain sense, when he grants privilege to this “contra-phenomenon” – in both meanings of the word “contra” (“opposed to” or “butted against”) – that is, the face).3 A constant of the Henrian gesture consists, not in dismissing phenomena that seem irreducibly marked by their ek-static structures, but, on the contrary, in attempting to renew them: a tour de force, aimed at the specific auto-revelation with which each is endowed, from the point of view of the immanence of Life (Flesh, for example, will provide the opportunity of a description that singularizes it as such, in such a way that it would owe its appearance to absolutely nothing else in the World).
Jacques Derrida
The Derridean gesture is, undoubtedly, of all those presented, the most reticent to allow itself to be included in a family in general, and in this one in particular. Nevertheless, we will attempt to show in what ways it is not without legitimacy that we invite him to this “family reunion.” Derrida’s relationship with phenomenology, from his earliest texts – meticulous commentaries on Husserl (see Derrida 1962, 1967) – was constant, even if he never accepted phenomenology as such. Without a doubt, he radically deconstructed the metaphysics of presence that would have animated the movements of phenomenological reduction (eidetic and transcendental reduction) – insofar as these would ultimately lead back to the present-living of the consciousness. However, deconstruction is never a negation or a simple critique. Thus, from a certain point of view, Derrida could have asserted the reduction “as a resource of deconstruction,” because “reduction” always signifies, in the work of Husserl, the reception, without reservation or prejudice, of phenomena – what Derrida would radicalize through “exposure,” in “saying yes” (dire oui) to the limitlessness of what would come: deconstruction itself (see especially Derrida 1987). Of all the threads through which Derrida would never cease weaving the problems of phenomenology, here we will only mention two: the motif of the trace and the problem of the gift (don) (see especially Derrida 1991, 1993). Referring explicitly to Levinas (but also drawing from other sources, such as Nietzsche), the notion of the trace in Derrida finds itself at the crossroads of a reflection on the sign and a description of phenomenality: the trace declares at the same time, the originary contamination of the transcendental with the empirical (in virtue of which there is no pure origin), and, in as much as it always presupposes the motif of the archi-trace, that there is never full presence of phenomena, that there are no such phenomena and, in closing, no “phenomenology as such.” This last point lends itself to the paradox of the same movement: that the phenomenon will have always already been taken into the paradigm of the spectral. This is because the spectral affirms itself, explicitly in Derridean texts beginning in the 1990s, as the paradigm of all phenomenology: the specter is neither the least presence nor a mixture of presence and absence that could be grasped as two autonomous terms, pure from the origin. In the same motion, the specter is neither purely life nor purely death, nor a mixture of the two (which would assume the prior purity of the two terms), but originary “survival,” all life being survival “from the origin” (when set in the crisis of all plenitude and purity of origin). Even if one should not imprudently force the problem of the gift onto that of donation in phenomenology, one will notice that Derrida’s description of the gift – as a gift, by definition, is never given without lacking in generosity – goes in this same direction, creating a crisis of phenomenology as a reception free of prejudice, of a phenomenality that is offered without remnants (traces): according to Derrida, phenomena are only given from an “originary” absence, which would never allow itself to be apprehended as pure absence. Always already spectralized and deceptive, it creates a crisis in the clean division between presence and absence, in a contamination that does not allow it to be derived from a supposed purity, since this purity is what would have been the distinction and the prior opposition of the two terms (presence and absence). Phenomenology is, consequently, impossible as such. However, this impossibility of espousing the phenomenological necessity and method renders it equally impossible to be absolutely and definitively detached. One cannot adopt both the principles of phenomenology according to Derrida and naïveté at the same time – however, neither can one abandon them.
Jean-Luc Marion
The phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion shares an affinity, often explicit or asserted, between the movements we have just rapidly covered. It could be said only with some reservations – because thought, of course, can never be reduced to the sum of affiliations and associations – that Marionian phenomenology, with that of Henry, affirms the liberation of phenomena from the limitations of intentionality – of Seeing – and explores the radicality of an auto-affection preceding any variation (Flesh); it could further be said that, along with Levinas, his phenomenology designates an inverse intentionality and “destroys” the subject only to discover an “instance,” integrally organized by what is shown by itself (an instant that he names, for his part, the “devoted”4). Again, with affinity to Levinas, this phenomenology designates that which exceeds all horizons of visibility. Neither is it without relation to the Derridean gesture, from which it recognizes having experienced, for example, in the name of différance, a rupture with the horizon of the object or of the being. It would first acknowledge Derrida for having prepared the terrain through his deconstruction of the primacy of presence, to a donation that would no longer be reduced to the different models of presence we have at our disposal (this consequence being, as such, definitely not Derridean).
The phenomenology of Marion explicitly contemplates the phenomenological method and means to radically implement it. From this point of view, it is closer to the Henrian gesture than to those of Levinas or Derrida. In fact, it is explicitly opposed to the Derridean movement, in that the latter, as we have stated, contemplates “the impossibility of phenomenology as such.” Nor does it align with Levinas, taking into account his type of phenomena, that tear away from or exceed the horizon of the visible, implying a phenomenology that tested by its own limitations, if not interrupted. On the contrary, phenomenology according to Marion must be measured with a certain fidelity to Heidegger, in as much as this is possible. Marion proposes to liberate the reduction of any presupposed limitation and thus to give access to the donation (which will itself, in a certain circularity that should be questioned, allow this reduction and free it of its prejudices). To evoke the giving (Gegebenheit) is to call upon a Husserlian concept that would make it possible to be freed from the limitation to the object (constituted by intentionality) and even to being (a radical liberation that Husserl and Heidegger would have questioned, each in his own manner, and just as soon stepped back from). To state it all too rapidly, in the “donation,” according to Marion, the phenomenon is presented as unconditioned, as never limited by any way of measuring that would precede it. Consequently, the phenomenon shows itself only as it gives itself. Marion proposes to describe phenomenality, not by describing regions, but rather degrees of phenomenality: there are phenomena that are poor in intuition – in particular, those that are understood in the form of the object seen in light of intentionality – and this because their weakness in intuition guarantees them a certain assurance, that is, permits the subject to keep them under the control of its view, which has always traditionally been the model for all phenomenality. Opposing these, Marion designates that which exceeds the limits of the object, of what can be constituted by intentionality: “the saturated phenomenon.” A phenomenon saturated by the donation is never limited to what a subject can submit to the control of its view. But, we must insist that the saturated phenomenon, according to Marion, far from being exceptional or eccentric, will serve the function of the norm or the paradigm of phenomenality, since in it, the donation is, in a way, liberated (and we must necessarily describe how, in even the poorest phenomenon, something of the saturated phenomenon remains – because it is well given). Let us note that Marion produces a typology of saturated phenomena. He constructs this typology beginning with the categories of understanding according to Kant, each type of phenomenon implying an additional donation compared to each of these categories: they include the event (saturated according to quantity), the idol or the table (saturated according to quality), the flesh (saturated according to relation), and the icon or the face of the other (saturated according to modality). Finally, there is the phenomenon, saturated par excellence, which groups the four types of saturation and thus elevates saturation as such. Qualified as “phenomenon saturated with power” or as “paradox of paradoxes,” Marion speaks of the phenomenon of revelation (which we will later consider).
As we see at the end of this brief presentation, the four authors presented here can all be considered as assuming a phenomenology of excess (understood according to both the objective and subjective genitive); but only Derrida and Levinas can be explicitly regarded as assuming or asserting something like a test of the limits of phenomenology, or proving its impossibility – an impossibility that remains fruitful. Henry and Marion, each in his own way, claims, on the contrary, to have released the phenomenon from its limitation to the Seen and/or to the form and/or to the object, and to be able to practice a reduction whose radical possibility, precisely, makes it possible to skip over these various obstacles. Significantly, Marion writes: “Therefore, in the driving figure of the saturated phenomenon, phenomenology finds its last possibility: not only the possibility that surpasses effectivity, but also the possibility that surpasses the same conditions of the possible, the possibility of the unconditioned possibility – otherwise stated, the possibility of the impossible, the saturated phenomenon” (Marion 1997: 304).
It is, therefore, only at the price of an interpretive gesture, which could not be completely implemented here, that one could show in what, and how, authors such as Henry and Marion, in their practices of excess, productively (or not) test the limits of phenomenology. We will, however, at the end of this chapter, venture to outline this gesture.
* * *
Regardless of these distinctions and oppositions that we present as being “parts of a family,” and in order to widen our perspective, let us emphasize the fact that our approach broaches the problem proposed by Dominique Janicaud in configuring this field: the opposition between the “theological turn” that characterizes these works on one side, and, on the other, a “minimalist”5 phenomenology that is disabused of a fascination with the originary and of the pretension to pose as first philosophy. And, it is, of course, in this second phenomenology, which holds to different types of phenomena given in their singularity, that we find Janicaud’s convictions.
But in a difference – decisive in our eyes – from Janicaud, we are not inclined to diagnose a simple escape from phenomenology in authors such as Henry or Levinas. We attempt once again to comprehend the reproach addressed in this “theological” French phenomenology from an appropriately phenomenological motif, that is, while trying to grasp that which, from the most intimate phenomenological obligation, was able to present the latter as being, so to speak, its complete auto-transgression. It would be a question of refusing to allow oneself to be confined by the way in which Janicaud poses the problem – by refusing in the same motion to erase the real problem that he indicates – and by attempting to understand this problem as an integral part of phenomenology itself in what it contains that is, at once, irreducibly paradoxical and fertile – fertile in and by the aporia.
It is useful to pause on the problems of phenomenological reduction (which we set aside at the beginning of the chapter and which we must now address), because it appears as though it is the phenomenological operator par excellence, in the sense that, at the very least, all phenomenologists stop at the gesture that consists in tearing oneself from that which appears to the appearance itself. In saying this, we here propose a (doubtless poor) definition of phenomenological reduction, one that is simply negative, not indicating which “domain” is attained by the reduction – whether it should even be described as consciousness, for instance. And this so as to find the lowest common denominator that makes phenomenologists of phenomenologists.6 One could designate as a “phenomenologist” the one who holds himself or herself to the necessity of reduction. Did Merleau-Ponty not write that “the greatest teaching of reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction”? (Merleau-Ponty 1981: Introduction, p. VIII). Still, all concern themselves with phenomenological reduction, and – in this sense – all practice it, even if testing the impossibility of its accomplishments without abandoning the test remains a method of its practice.
Undoubtedly, the motif of phenomenological reduction is not single-faceted within Husserl’s own writing. We will not enter into a discussion of the different modes of reduction – which consists, at heart, in asking ourselves the different ways to carry out a reduction – but, as a prerequisite, we will speak of the ambiguities that affect the very necessity indicated by the word “reduction,” as taken from Husserl. The ambiguities, we hasten to stress, according to our own judgment – and this working hypothesis will necessarily have to be supported hereafter – do not signify anything incoherent or inconsistent from the reduction, only its proper place and fruitfulness.7
The distinction between the two families of contemporary French phenomenology (the Merleau-Pontian family and the other to which we more particularly attach ourselves here) allows us to develop our own outlook on the problem of reduction.
Thus, the Merleau-Pontian family understands and applies reduction more like a placing between parentheses that brings us back to the horizon of the World than as a renewed drive to an ultimate ground.8 (Things are never quite the caricatures that we present here, and it must be said that, in a sense, this family also shares the need to return upstream toward the originary, in themes of presupposition or perceptive faith, for instance, but it is never a question, in any case, of returning to an ultimate, absolute founder.)
Across from the “Merleau-Pontian” family, the spectrum of contemporary French phenomenologists that interests us here opens up: starting with the specific desire not to yield to the requirement of renewal toward the originary – from beyond which one is unable to return – we hold to the end of auto-appearance (at the very least, an end to the ability to make appear, or provide meaning, which can no longer be understood as auto-appearance – the Infinite operates thus in Levinas’s work), to which we can relate all appearance; beginning from such a desire, subjectivity assumes a central place.
However, a distancing occurs in connection with the Husserlian movement that results precisely and paradoxically from a will to radicalize it even more, if that is possible – or, more exactly, not to yield to the radical requirement of the Husserlian movement to return toward something originary. This “radicalization of (Husserlian) radicalism” straightforwardly reverses the point of arrival. Also, suspecting – as Pato
ka does – the “Husserlian transcendental subjectivity” of being merely a speculative construction, a naïveté created and left outside of the reach of épokhè, these phenomenologists seek something more originary. Still, that which they arrive upon is not an épokhè of transcendental subjectivity that would convey the horizon of the World. On the contrary, true will to rejoin an absolutely original originary (by giving themselves ground, so to speak, to rest on the theme of transcendental subjectivity) does not consist, especially not for them, in suspending the movement of renewal. Not trying to mislead with the requirement of renewal will clearly signify radically assessing subjectivity as the finality of a point of view that in fact examines an irreducible delay of what it provides itself. That which gives subjectivity to itself only does so in a paradoxical mode of proving it by means of an irreducible overflow, and, consequently, driving it back against itself into the most radical passivity. The concern for respecting the character of the originary, its position prior to anything, requires that these authors do not identify this originary, or more exactly, that they identify it as the unidentifiable, as that which irreducibly surpasses the act by which I give it to myself. (Thus, it comes from the Infinite, according to Levinas, and even, in a sense, from Life, according to M. Henry, because if Life is given to itself and embraces itself, in each Self, then no Self, in any situation, can give itself Life.) Such is the paradox that, at heart, forces these authors to inscribe the épokhè as the requirement to neutralize all positions of being (l’être) to the very core of reduction, as a renewal toward the originary that produces a sort of “drive” for the originary – a higher bid for the originary.
Consequently, one could reproach them for the whole lot: for exceeding the given limit – in the sense of the limit of appearance – in an effort to seize the root of appearance as such,9 in an endless, vertiginous movement, since all identification of the originary, suspected of being a hypostasis, will necessarily have been ineluctably deconstructed to enable the very movement of appearance that, by definition, can only be solidified in a being. Or, one could reproach them for the contrary – but this second risk is engendered by the first – for deferring to hypostasis at the worst moment, that is, when the constraints of appearance have been transgressed in an attempt to offer, despite the break, a place for hyperbolic reduction and incomplete definition,10 and without an end result of their own, finally and inconsequently finding, in a manner of speaking, a term.11(One will recall on this matter the capitalizations of the Other and Life that were denounced by Janicaud.) At base, the desire for reduction that characterizes this family of French phenomenology is contradictory. This renders the following question impossible: Is it true to itself when it incessantly restarts itself, expecting all beings to recover an event that is always older and, as such, unidentifiable; or, on the contrary, when it pretends precisely to succeed in rejoining the absolutely originary?
This phenomenology would thus fall victim to excess and the “excess of excess.” This excess leads beyond the field of appearance and then fails to provide the grounds of originary auto-appearance (but is therefore also true to the radicality of the return upstream, which makes no disillusion in giving itself an identifiable, non-phenomenological origin). The “excess of excess” is that which consists of wanting to make it so that the effort of reduction is labeled a success and points to itself as indisputable evidence of the source of all giving – without the ability to avoid the suspicion that this phenomenological evidence is nothing but phenomenological pseudo-evidence, a speculative construction, a naïve thesis, the naïve position on existence of an absolute being that is beyond appearance.12 With so much suspicion that the motivating dilemma is impossible to circumvent, one is obliged to leave it alone. (What is given as the result of épokhè is necessarily already external and escapes methodological control.)
Therefore, in all these cases, is this phenomenology untrue, in part, to the phenomenological requirement in order to be true to another part of this requirement – as though the phenomenological requirement was contradictory at its origins? These contradictions being the following: first, to respect épokhè and to deprive oneself of the renewal (toward the originary) and second, to completely carry out the renewal and, to accomplish this, yield to épokhè.13 The family of contemporary French phenomenology that interests us here assumes this very position of exemplary confrontation with this double-constraint that seems to be inscribed as the heart of the requirement, as the phenomenological imperative. Unceasingly passing from excess to “excess of excess,” and inversely, since none of these moments is completely satisfactory from the point of view of phenomenological injunction (which is actually a contradictory injunction), this phenomenology cannot be stabilized in a final, definitive and inapprehensive figure of itself, but becomes, properly stated, a “sporadic phenomenology” (phénoménologie clignotante) (Sebbah 2001a).
There is a significant conclusion to be drawn: this phenomenology that we just recognized calls for a complete reflection as to what use we can make of it. The real question it poses to its reader is: How will you make good use of me? Indeed, its unceasingly excessive character – regardless of what side we take – prohibits (or protects) us – from being able to completely adhere to and state it definitively: we cannot, it seems, find comfort and peace of mind; neither in a reading of Levinas nor in one of Henry can we adhere to these authors to the very end. Yet, is it not this that makes good masters of them, masters who caution their readers – if they know how to read them – from all epigonal conduct? Conversely, these are the main truths of phenomenology, if their transgressive practice of phenomenological method testifies, in fact, to a fidelity, to a contradictory injunction of phenomenology itself. We can neither completely adhere to these phenomenologies, nor completely detach ourselves, without yielding to the phenomenological requirement.
* * *
This matter has undoubtedly suffered from its great generality (since it proposed to find the means of reconfiguring the entire field of contemporary French phenomenology by evaluating its paradoxical fruitlessness). Allow us to attempt to outline, obviously too schematically, using examples from each author that we have discussed, the manner it endures (or, at times, circumvents?) the test of excess that forges their common bond.
Jacques Derrida
It is, of course, significant that Jacques Derrida is not included as part of the group of authors identified by Janicaud as attempting to negotiate a theological bend within phenomenology. This is due to the fact that – if “theology” here means (what is, after all, a rather derived meaning!) passage beyond the borders of that which is given as evidence of the essence and reception of something given beyond this evidence – it should indeed be affirmed that Derrida never carries out such a transgression without return. To meditate upon and test this crisis of evidence – its impossibility as such being found in its purity – certainly never returns, as we have suggested, offering a presence in excess to the sovereignty of evidence. The test of the limit of the phenomenological, according to Derrida, does not open one to that beyond the phenomenon, as Husserl defines it: this is why he is not a target of Janicaud’s criticism. If he is sometimes the object of bitter criticism, it is owing to the positions by which his movement – such as we have described it – would be found to be irrational (i.e., weakness of the argument, effects of seduction, identification of the paradoxes halting the eidetic description forced by obviousness, etc.). The test of the phenomenological, the setting into crisis, and even the continuation of the crisis, are not reducible by us according to what is envisioned by these types of objections (which are sometimes reduced to a great deal of brutality and poverty; but this is another debate). The Derridean test of the phenomenological always maintains an intimate rapport with that which is being put to the test (and the accusation that it is non-phenomenological could not be held except from a position that would identify phenomenology with Husserlianism and Husserlianism with a transcendental type of rationalism supporting no setting into crisis). This rapport will never be noticed often enough in the description and reduction proposed by Derrida, as they resist such exposure. Moreover, to really reflect upon it, the Derridean movement – in that which implies as much the impossibility of forsaking the “as such” of phenomenology as the impossibility of this “as such” – is one of the rare movements that reflects the same movement that it practices.
The Saturated Phenomenon According to Jean-Luc Marion
We had, when considering an earlier work (Marion 1997: 304), designated Marionian phenomenology as precisely that which justified Janicaud’s objections; like that which, precisely, validates the economy of the test of the phenomenological limit, of its domain in law (evidence) and, in the same gesture, of its methodical constraints. Exempt, always already and even in advance, from the limitations of the domain of the given (which, in Husserlian terms, is usually only allowed for that which concerns objectifying acts), will it not have difficulty playing out the giving of that which exceeds intuition without one being able to rationally discuss it on the standard norm of that which is given (or not)? Among these French phenomenologists, it would be no less than the appearance of a paradox that Marion would be the one who asserts most of all phenomenology as a method, its practical application and the success of reduction. If the sequence of reductions functions so well with Marion (after the Husserlian reduction to the object, then the Heideggerian reduction to being, the third and final – since it succeeds in leading to the most radical – reduction is the Marionian reduction to the saturated phenomenon), is this not because this exercise, and its implicit risk-taking – the opening of the un-anticipatable – is in some way feigned? Precisely, since one pretends to provide himself the means of succeeding in reducing the un-anticipatable, does he not provide himself the means to anticipate, and thus miss as such – to miss as such for having excessively pretended to have provided himself with such?
Such was, in substance, the argument that we presented to oppose Marion’s Réduction et donation (Reduction and Givenness; Marion 1989). Without attempting here to distinguish between what is to be ascribed to the insufficiency of our earlier reading, and what is to be ascribed to the increasingly profound investigations and displacements of Marionian thought itself since this seminal work, we should be precise in stating that it is impossible to take back this criticism and announce its lack of accuracy and justice toward the phenomenology of the saturated phenomenon. That leads us, not to discount our objection, ourselves, but to attempt to nuance it, to moderate, renew, and deepen it. Henceforth, concerning the saturated phenomenon of Marion, the objection for which Janicaud would have furnished the seminal form seems to have, so to speak, been “exceeded.”
If the question really is: “From whence comes the right to consider as an attested phenomenological example an element of revealed theology, for example, Christ?” then one cannot merely hold to pointing out, while being scandalized, that Marion gives himself allowances for that which exceeds the norm of evidence (and camouflages the violence of this simple fait accompli with a façade of methodological rigor). This is because Marion’s work deepened: if we grant that it is, at the very least, possible to deliver the giving from its limitation to the object (which is, undoubtedly, debatable, but, in any state, constitutes a philosophically admissible statement and is thus philosophically debatable), then Christ can offer himself. The most important step produced by Marion is the following: “can offer” is changed to “offers.”
The Marionian movement consists, in fact, of saying that if one takes the Heideggerian definition seriously, then the phenomenon that “shows itself” would not, by definition, be preceded and determined by its condition of formal possibility: the phenomenon does not surprise me except when it is preceded by nothing, which conditions the possibility in advance – and especially not by categories such as those on the side of a subject that one could qualify as a constituent. This description applies to any phenomenon inasmuch as it is phenomenalized; even the poorest of phenomena, if one remains, must maintain its bond with this additional category. From this (Marionian) point of view, it could be said that the advantage of phenomenology consists in canceling out the Kantian question, that of the right or legitimacy of appearance. The questions of “What right?” or “What is the condition of possibility?” make no sense phenomenologically and can only, in their very formulation, miss the phenomenon. This excess on the condition of possibility will be, in the same movement, an excess on the phenomenon to any empirical or objective effectivity: no longer measuring itself alongside the right, the phenomenon is thus no longer measured with the fact, at least with the fact of the object. This is what the Marionian theme means when speaking of the “possibility that surpasses not only affectivity, but also the very conditions of possibility.”14 From this point, it becomes insufficient to declare that saturated phenomena – especially the saturated phenomenon par excellence, revelation – absolutely transgress any norm or right of appearance. It becomes insufficient in comparison with the gesture that we have just indicated. Of course, no one is held to do it, but, it should at least be noted that this gesture was produced, that it rests all the same on a description of the phenomena (would this description force the opening of what we held until now as indescribable?) and on a series of arguments: for this reason, it is justifiable as a subject of phenomenological discussion. We must add something: Marion, in order to be prudent, insists that, in this way, he simply establishes phenomenologically the possibility of revelation. In the same movement, he insists that the effectiveness of this revelation, the ontic status of this revelation, concerns a revealed theology that he carefully avoids producing himself in his works on phenomenology (this is especially the case in Levinas 1961).
The radical phenomenologist, Marion exempts himself from all rational theology (where the question is of beings and of the relation of causality between beings and the “super-being” we call “God”). Acceptance of the phenomenology that he proposes implies the possibility of the “giving” of the “saturated phenomenon par excellence,” revelation, this possibility, consequently, culminating in putting into play the very idea of phenomenology: the release of the framework of the object being like the release of a giving beyond the very question of intuition (fulfilling the concept), of its excess or of its deficiency.
It is out of the question to simply dismiss this objection according to which Marion never attempts to test the limits of phenomenality – because he does well to assert a transgression, so that he, himself, is liberated from the very idea of a limit (a limitation to the form of the object and just the same for whatever limit); however, it is necessary to produce this objection due to the rigorous reception of argumentation and description produced by Marion in his most recent texts.
Such a task exceeds the limits of this presentation. Nonetheless, we will suggest a direction of research: Marion allows for the possibility of a phenomenon that is without any further rapport with the “phenomena of common right.” For example, concerning the traits proper to the face, is it not that case that these are not given except at the very core of the upheaval of the visible, to which they are ineluctably attached? To justify this excess of the visible (in the sense of what is given in the paradigm of form, evidence, or object), perhaps it is this point that characterizes all these French phenomenologists; but, can this reception cut off all the accumulation of common visibility? Whereas, according to Marion, the historical event or the face of another are saturated phenomena, their excess to the visibility of common right never entirely extracts them from the ordinary world. They contaminate it as much as they are contaminated by it – the saturated phenomenon par excellence, revelation, is absolved of any rapport with ordinary phenomenology, for it is not shown “there” except in the event of an absolutely other giving, showing no bond of common visibility.
The Face According to Levinas
There is a way of determining the precise location of the objection we are outlining, which is at the place of the saturated phenomenon par excellence, that boils down to determining the difference between the Levinasian description of the face and the one put forward by Marion. From the beginning of this presentation, let us recall that the face according to Levinas – as well as according to others whose arguments we will not develop here – presents two decisive characteristics: “frankness” and “expression”; it “speaks,” and thus, it is true, it is “given” fully and as – in addition to the visible – an ethical language (Schonfeld 2005). However, the face – more so in Otherwise than Being than in Totality and Infinity – is characterized as much by its ambiguity as by its frankness: ambiguity in that it is not given, so to speak, save as a void, that like the upheaval of the appearance of the World, that is: still and ineluctably the same – visible; it is a trace of that which will never be present, and the trace gives only insofar as it implies the absently irreducible. Without going into all the details here, it could be said that already in his interpretation of Levinas, and especially in his description of the face that he proposes under his own name, Marion favors the first of these two characteristics and tends to rescind the second, or at least, envelop it within the first: if there is a certain “deficiency” of the face, something like the absence that haunts it, this deficiency will be interpreted by Marion as a deficiency of intuition signaling, in fact, an addition, an additional giving. Such is, according to us, the difference between a movement that legitimizes the giving of revelation within phenomenology, liberates giving beyond any limit to the point that the absently irreducible trace cannot find at its heart any status of radicality (Marion), and the movement (that of Levinas) that never ceases to test the limit of phenomenality, the absently irreducible marked by the trace of the face to the World itself, is thus apprehensive with regard to revelation. For Levinas, revelation, although beyond theoretical or objectifying knowledge, is still not the otherwise than knowing appropriate for the otherwise of being, but still a form of knowing, if we take this last term to mean a sort of giving (which, circumstantially, would give as any other form of giving constrained by the rule of the object or by evidence would give).
The Levinasian movement would never cease to test the limits of phenomenology, whereas the Marionian movement, dismissing all limits, could propose itself as allowing the possibility of revelation and thus being the most radical form of phenomenology. However, one could, “from the exterior,” so to speak, designate this second gesture as providing an excess through a simple transgression that, consequently, is cut off from any rapport with the extremities of phenomenology, and maybe even from phenomenology altogether. Would such a transgression, an absolute transgression, be one from which one could never again transgress (if all transgressions are tested in relation to limits)?
We should emphasize here that the Derridean rapport with phenomenology recognizes a deep affinity with the relationship of the Levinasian movement with phenomenology. Like the latter, Derrida favors the problematic of the trace and never ceases to test the limits of the phenomenal while simply demanding that it not be transgressed. One could even say that Derrida accentuates this tendency. One would, in turn, find a sort of confirmation a contrario of this hypothetical reading in that if Marion minimizes the ambiguity of the face in order to favor his additional giving, Derrida, for his part, tends, on the contrary, to accentuate the dimension of the absence of the trace as forming a crisis surrounding any presence and leaving aside the frankness of the face that is given (his rapport with ethics plays itself out differently). It is significant from this point of view that Eli Schonfeld, in a text sensitive to Jewish lineage in the work of Levinas (Schonfeld 2005: 446), accentuates the difference between Levinas and Derrida at the exact point where we have the tendency, for our own part, to accentuate the proximity. It is true that the Levinasian description of the face carries within itself a tension between these two directions (contradictory up to what point?): the positivity of the ethical frankness of the face on one side, and, on the other, the ambiguity of the trace working the phenomenal horizon in absence. Schonfeld emphasizes, for his part, that if the trace fails to return to any positivity for Derrida (we are incessantly returned from trace to trace, and the archi-trace is “first”), for Levinas, it returns to the positivity of ethical language and even, he says, beyond the ethical, “the trace returns us to a Jewish God, with the God of the book of Exodus” (ibid.). In all consistency, this Levinas would be more suitable for Marion.
Thus, we clearly see two manners of practicing excess in phenomenology distinctly taking form. There is the one that tests the limits: the Derridean movement; but there is also the Levinasian movement. (We should, of course, concede that there is, in the work of the latter, a certain ethical “positivity,” but it seems to us – though arguing would take us too far from the scope of this chapter – that one can, in no case, concede that the frankness of the face leads one directly and ineluctably back to the God revealed at Sinai. Levinasian phenomenology remains fixed to this pole of phenomenality, the face overwhelming the visibility of the visible itself as a trace of that which will have never been present.)
In light of this gesture, there is one that liberates the giving from the limit of the visible (constrained by the norm of evidence), that being Marion; and, as we demonstrated above, the movement of Henry, which is, from this point of view, closest to that of Marion.
The Auto-Revelation of the Figure of Christ in Michel Henry
Henry, nevertheless, if he dismisses the authentic phenomenality of his attachment to any ek-static structure still does not allow for any giving that would not be limited by some unit of measure, but once again takes up the discussion of the immanence of the proof of Life, that, at base, holds the place of a criterion of authentic phenomenology: this is, no doubt, debatable – in true sense of debate, discussion – but it institutes a norm that returns to the certification that the living self creates from the source of this auto-affection (for example, but not exclusively, through suffering). The auto-revelation in question, in order to radically free itself from the World, is all the more strongly attached to that which always also constituted a norm in phenomenology, the lived experience, the “auto-effective” certification, if you will. Henry’s “revelation” looks to nothing other than to this: that in the description he proposes, the pressure of Life alone, which is always pressure exerted from the self of a Living Thing, constitutes immediately the very expression and the source of all signification.
It seems that the relationship of excesses (concerning the visible) is offered in a manner strikingly and perceptibly different between the work of Henry and that of Marion. We would, therefore, like to conclude with a simple outline of a precise example, a precise textual sequence of the method of reading that we have just proposed, to locate within his work a moment of phenomenological transgression that attests at the same time to the proof that this limit has been endured.
Let us focus on the question that is absolutely central to the status of Christianity, and more precisely, to the status of the figure of Christ, in the economy of the latest work published to date by Henry, I am the Truth (Henry 1996). To what point should we follow Henry in his use of Christianity in phenomenology? Is there a point where we can no longer follow him on this path? Can we identify this point? In what ways does this final point still testify to the center of the matter of transgression of the phenomenological – a transgression that, we must emphasize, is not completely proven and reflected upon as such by Henry – of infidelity to the phenomenological requirement?
We must first point out that Henry does not seem to endorse Christianity in exactly the same way that he did, for instance, Cartesian or Marxist thought (see, for Descartes, Henry 1985; and for Marx, Henry 1976). Addressing the manner that he is comparable to Descartes and Marx, let it be said that he was sometimes reproached for carrying out a sort of “forcing” (forçage) by which he succeeds in finding in them an annunciation of his own basic intuition. Of course, in Henry’s eyes, it is Life that is omnipresent in his auto-revelation – up to the very symptoms of its negation: barbarism – which is revealed most particularly in these works (although less completely so, of course, than in his own!). In any event, at the very most, we can expect a Henrian description to take excessive liberties with the texts that it employs. Whereas, in I am the Truth – although no one can judge it as a being anything but a very specific “account” of Christianity – it is the opposite question that arises. That is, to know the following: was the Henrian phenomenology of Life not surreptitiously subordinated to a motif and an intuition that were, at first, foreign to him, and, that threaten to control it from this exteriority? From Henry’s point of view such is, of course, not the case: he would claim to have simply known to recognize in Christianity an exemplary revelation from the very movement of Life. There would be no place for him to be scandalized by subordination to philosophy in general, and by phenomenology in particular, to a particularized faith in the whole of specific dogmas in their positivity. There would also be, except in the case of misapprehension, a poor way of articulating the question: indeed, for Henry, it is Life that reveals itself in different ways in the philosophies – as in other types of work. In the same way, Life reveals itself in different ways in the different religions. Consequently, there is nothing anti-phenomenological to be found in the particular way that Christianity reveals Life: there would be nothing reprehensible; on the contrary, in continuing the revelation of Life that takes place in Christianity in and by philosophical discourse that would take into consideration Christian faith without distorting it with its own constraints (those, in particular, of a requirement of rigorous, rational explanation of the sequence of its expressions).
If, in examining Christianity, we suspect that something else is coming into play and asserting itself in Henrian philosophy outside the – absolutely legitimate – Henrian conception of philosophical practice, it is for the following reason: the question that arises here is of knowing if it is, indeed, the Henrian phenomenological description that ends in the figure of Christ, or if, on the contrary, it is not rooted as a prerequisite. Is this not the irruption of a non-phenomenological theme, not produced by phenomenological constraint, in Henry’s phenomenology that brings to him, from without, the possibility of resolving a problem that arose in this phenomenology and has not managed to resolve itself by its own means?
We will content ourselves here with outlining the problem at hand: in I am the Truth, the issue is to know how each Living Thing (Vivant) ipseizes itself in the movement of Life. How does a Living Thing acquire its ipseity from the sovereignty of Life? This question arises if we must hold that Life absolutely gives life to every being and that, even so, from the point of view of a Living Thing, to be oneself always supposes a meaning – even if it is only one meaning – to be tested absolutely separately, absolutely autonomously, in its singularity, to be held absolutely to oneself. How do we make this event of the singularity of the Self thinkable and describable in the sovereignty of Life without always already compromising the latter, this first event toward which the whole is, however, entirely predisposed?
Very precisely, the answer is in Christ, as he will be designated as the “First Living Thing,” as the “Archi-Son” who will allow the paradoxical double-constraint that we have just explained to be rendered intelligible.15 As the Archi-Son, Christ is, rightfully, the unheard-of first occurrence of ipseic singularity in Life that, in a sense, owes nothing to Life, but, on the contrary, offers it something in the possibility to ipseize Living Things by inaugurating this possibility. Consequently, Christ offers to each Being to be itself. As such, the event of the coming of Christ is a transcendental event. It also escapes the linear and cumulative temporality of objective time, and it is not absurd to say that the event of the “Archi-Son” has always already taken place in Life, making possible in itself the ipseization of Living Things; and that, still, in the same motion, must be characterized by the unrepeatable singularity of the event, that which is supposed to identify it (being about Christ and not another, and this because Christ has no trace of general abstraction), even if this identification has nothing to do with the World or the object (it is certainly not initially about spatio-temporal individualization) and is strictly transcendental?
From this point, it is legitimate to wonder, as we do, if Christ is not a motif imported from outside the phenomenology of Life, allowing Him to face a double constraint that we were unable to manage to produce or govern using our own resources. Therefore, everything is held up: by pointing toward Christ, does Henry not provide a precise identification of the transcendental? Does he not identify the most originary source of all giving (would this identification indicate a transcendental event)?
It is now time to tie up the loose ends of this rapid analysis of the status of Christ as the Archi-Son in the Henrian phenomenology of Life,16 as well as those of the hypothesis that we presented above, in order to help configure the field of contemporary French phenomenology and orient ourselves within it.
One will have understood that the figure of Christ would occupy, according to us and within Henrian phenomenology, the function and the place of the motif, undiminished by épokhè, through which reduction as hyperbolic renewal would be able to stabilize itself on an ultimate ground, thus inverting the excessive movement by which it is prone to an “excess of excess” that identifies the unidentifiable, despite everything and in contradiction with the inclinations of its own requirements, to give a term to the anxiety it accommodates.
It is useless to specify that the movement we are attempting to characterize here is, in fact, neither linear nor sequential, and that the production of the figure of Christ in phenomenology does not simply negate the phenomenological character of the Henrian system. This philosophy is sufficiently complex so as not to be subject, in any event, to a case of easy exit without returning to phenomenology, while at the same time, retaining the necessity of knowing how to indicate the present transgression of the imminent constraints of phenomenology.
To conclude, let us reiterate that if, for our part, we cannot accompany Henry when he allows himself to use Christ, which we have diagnosed as an “excess of excess,” we hold that the “excess of excess” itself, which disallows complete agreement with the phenomenological course of an author, is still, and perhaps more so than ever, the testimony of the radicality of the phenomenological movement in question, of the risk that it knows to take.
Notes
This chapter takes up, builds upon, and significantly modifies portions of Sebbah 2001b and 2000.
1 So that we are not mistaken here, the affirmative position of this statement in no way implies an “apology” for any school: likewise, there is no way of judging except for the gestures of thought that will be evoked in the following lines that testify to an exit from, or a treason against, phenomenology; others, or even the same, speak of a “post-phenomenology.” It would be useless to mention that the stakes that we claim here are not those that concern the guardians of vaults – or of temples.
2 See, for example, Maldiney 1973; Garelli 1991, 2000; Richir 1987, 1992; and Barbaras 1993, 1999.
3 Except when considering that Life is this privileged “phenomenon,” because nothing is revealed except in Life or as Life.
4 From Marion 1997, the book that we favor most particularly here, written in the wake of Marion 1989; we also make reference, in this presentation, to Marion 2001, which takes up the contributions of Marion 1997 in a concern for systemization, depth, and clarification.
5 See Janicaud 1998. Let it be noted that Janicaud had criticized the authors that we are treating here – we must stress with the exception of Derrida – for the motif of the others of trying to negotiate a “theological turn” of phenomenology. See Janicaud 1991.
6 At least pertaining to that which no one would qualify as a “continental” use of phenomenology: the analytical use and the use of phenomenology in the cognitive sciences being precisely characterized by that. These uses seem to us, for the most part, to ignore and even explicitly divert the requirement of reduction. It is, at least, necessary to point out, however, a notable exception concerning the rapport between cognitive sciences and phenomenology: the recent work of Natalie Depraz and Francisco Varela (see Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003).
7 One could speak of “fruitfulness” if such an ambiguity of reduction, prohibiting all pretension of a definitive description as to the way of appearance, does not, however, result in abandoning the requirement, but on the contrary, indefatigably starting it over again.
8 To make the distinction operative, in our own way, let us particularly draw on the method worked out by Patoka that differentiates between “épokhè,” in the sense of a simple movement of suspicion or placing between parentheses of the thesis of the world, and “reduction,” in the sense of a “renewal toward the source of any appearance” (Patoka 1988).
9 This would then produce, at the very heart of phenomenology, a sort of dialectic of appearance, in the Kantian sense of the term.
10 And all the while entirely aiming at this accomplishment.
11 These hypostases would still be even more detached from the field of appearance than was Husserlian transcendental subjectivity: these authors would do “worse” than Husserl to want to rightly radicalize the Husserlian gesture of reduction.
12 “Beyond appearance”: that is to say, beyond perceptive actions and all the actions that modify or are founded upon them.
13 One could, furthermore, wonder – we will simply suggest it here – that if this way of presenting oneself entirely is proof of this double-constraint with the impossibility of constituting oneself in the definitive figure of the self, then, it does not constitute an overall greater fidelity to phenomenology than the practices of phenomenology that, to be entirely and definitively faithful to the branch of double-constraint, completely dodge the imperative charge of the other. This is evident, but one still needs to more deeply support this hypothesis. In formulating this suggestion, we keep in sight the alternative between the phenomenology that is considered “theological” and that considered “minimalist” as proposed by Janicaud – and we would readily propose to short-circuit this alternative in the name of anything else. In addition, we will have understood that happy medium in an affected, quantitative, and inconsistent sense. The strictly Aristotelian idea of the “happy medium” would be more appropriate for what we have in mind, if, for Aristotle, “happy medium” maintains within itself the opposing excesses.
14 The prudent call to this distinction between simple possibility and effectivity can, in addition, be surprising, from the point of view of an author who seems to have, so to speak, short-circuited it in liberating the giving as the “possibility of the impossible.”
15 See Henry 1996, in particular ch. 5, “Phénoménologie du Christ” [Phenomenology of Christ], and especially chs. 6 and 7, “L’homme en tant que ‘Fils de Dieu’ “[Man as “Son of God”], and “L’homme en tant que ‘Fils dans le Fils’ “[Man as “Son in the Son”].
16 We looked longest at part II, ch. III of Sebbah 2001a.
References and Further Reading
Barbaras, R. (1993) De l’être du phénomène; sur l’ontologie de Merleau-Ponty. Grenoble: Éditions
Jérome Millon (The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, trans. T. Toadvine.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
—— (1999) Le désir et la distance. Introduction á une phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Vrin. Depraz, N., Varela, F. J., and Vermersch, P. (2003) On Becoming Aware. An Experiential Pragmatics.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Derrida, J. (1967) La voix et le phénomène[Voice and phenomenon; only available in English as part of anthologies; the French subtitle is “introduction to the problem of the sign in the Phenomenology of Husserl”]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
—— (1962) Edmund Husserl : L’origine de la géométrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. and intro. J. Derrida, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
—— (1987) Psyché. inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée (expanded 1988) (Psyche: Invention of the Other, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
—— (1991) Donner le temps. Paris: Galilée (Given Time, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
—— (1993) Spectres de Marx . Paris: Galilée (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York: Routledge, 1994).
Garelli, J. (1991) Rythmes et mondes – au revers de l’identité et de l’altérité. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon.
—— (2000) Introduction au Logos du monde esthétique – de la Chôra platocienne au schématisme transcendental et à l’expérience phénoménologique du monde. Paris: Beauchesne.
Henry, M. (1976) Marx: une philosophie de la réalité, une philosophie de l’économie. Paris: Gallimard
(Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
—— (1985) Généalogie de la psychanalyse: le commencement perdu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).
—— (1990a) L’essence de la manifestation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (original work published 1963) (The Essence of Manifestation, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
—— (1990b) Phénoménologie matérielle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
—— (1996) C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Seuil (I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
—— (2000) Incarnation. Une philosophie de la Chair[Incarnation: a philosophy of flesh]. Paris: Seuil.
—— (2002) Paroles du Christ [Words of Christ]. Paris: Seuil.
Janicaud, D. (1991) Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Combas: Editions de l’Éclat (Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
—— (1998) La phénoménologie éclatée. Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat (Phenomenology “Wide Open”:
After The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
Levinas, E. (1961) Totalité et infini. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
—— (1974) Autrement qu’être, ou, Au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Otherwise Than Being, Or, Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998).
—— (1988) En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [Discovering existence with Husserl and Heidegger]. Paris: Vrin (original work published 1949).
—— (1989) Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Vrin (original work published 1930) (The Theory of Intuition in Husserlian Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
Maldiney, H. (1973) Regard, Parole, Espace. Lausanne: Éditions L’Âge d’Homme.
Marion, J-L. (1989) Réduction et donation. Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).
—— (1997) Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
—— (2001) De surcroît: études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France
(In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1981) La Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard (original work published 1945) (Phenomenology of Perception, London, Routledge, 2002).
Patoka, J. (1988) Epokhè et réduction. In Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie? (pp. 249–61). Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon.
Richir, M. (1987) Phénomènes temps et êtres – ontologie et phénoménologie. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon.
—— (1992) Méditations phénoménologiques – phénoménologie du langage. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon.
Schonfeld, E. (2005) Hommage à Jacques Derrida. “Jewgreek is greekjew”: les extrêmes se rejoignent-ils vraiment? [“Jewgreek is greekjew”: do the extremes every really meet?]. Cahiers d’Études Levinassiennes, 4, 441–51.
Sebbah, F-D. (2000) Une réduction excessive: où en est la phénoménologie française contemporaine? [An excessive reduction: where is contemporary French phenomenology?]. In in
E. Escoubas and B. Waldenfels (eds.), Phénoménologie française et phénoménologie allemande (pp. 129–55). Paris: L’Harmattan.
—— (2001a) L’épreuve de la limite. Derrida, Henry, Levinas et la phénoménologie[The test of the limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and Phenomenology]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
—— (2001b) L’exception française [The French exception], Le Magazine littéraire, 403, November.