"something happened between us"

Let's say there were only the two of us there, or at least that only the two of us were witnesses to what happened. Anyone else would have seen whatever was objectively observable, but could not have been witnesses to what happened, because what happened was "between us."

Now, what happened? If what happened "between us" is different for each of us, then what did happen? Even more: if what I say happened you say did not happen, then what did happen? Did our intentions pass by each other without engaging each other "like gears" (Merleau-Ponty)? Or are our present intentions, to deny or remember, now passing by each other? Or are we each intending something different?

If you deny that anything happened, or deny what I say happened, and if I take your word for your intention, then I am stuck without the reality of anything happening at all. It could be, or it is, only my imagination, my own denial, bad faith, or fantasy. It can't be real as long as you deny it, because I can't determine what really happened between us. And this includes meaning, affect, history, futurity, facticity, morality.

Still more. You are the only other person in the world who was witness to what happened. You are the only one I could possibly talk to about it. If you deny that it happened, that is, deny what I say happened, then we will not be able to talk about it as though it were the same. If you won't talk about it, I can't know even whether you deny it, let alone whether there ever was a moment when our intentions engaged each other.

But why should I know? What difference would it make, for instance, if I were "right" or "wrong"? The urge to know what happened seems possessive, not only of what happened but of our intentions, that is, of us, that is, of you. And so, I haven't talked to you about it. I haven't been able to choose between permanent irreality perpetually wanting a witness to become real and to take on a meaning, and violating you and what happened between us by demanding to know.

what I really need - a new philosophical task!

Right now, I've got the following balls in the air:

• stuff about the phenomenological concepts of normal and abnormal, and the critique of these concepts by Foucault and Canguilhem
• something about the construction of faculty subjectivity, via Foucault, in order to get at some kind of non-professional or para-professional or renewed professional ethics of faculty, given the ongoing degradation of our work and employment status
• more phenomenology, of orientation
• still more phenomenology, working out further the ontology of subjection

It's fun, or it would be, if I weren't teaching five classes, staring at the first of five sets of papers I'll receive between yesterday and Tuesday, and doing faculty rights work. I have also been taking all of my blog posts and turning them into Word documents, in preparation for putting them all together as a book, sort of as a gift to my mom. 

To avoid reading student papers, I was just re-reading a post about language, from a series of entries about Merleau-Ponty. In this post I said that we describe our experience using the concepts of truth and reality. It took me aback.

So now I have another thing to think about, and to try to track down, doing what could be a weird kind of Foucauldian phenomenology of the way we describe our experience using such terms, and I suppose some others. It wouldn't be a genealogy of truth like Foucault's, but it would borrow from his scholarly methods and certainly owe a lot to his philosophical spirit. It would be phenomenological: how does something like truth or reality become constituted on the basis of lived experience -- and why? And are there alternatives?

But now I have to go to class.

intentionality and receptivityMichel Henry is in my pants!

Regular readers of this feature, and some people who just know me, and a few people whom I've grabbed at random and told about it, know that for several years I've been trying to work out a phenomenology of subjection. What I mean by subjection are all the ways that the conscious active subject or ego is susceptible to suffering and affectivity of all kinds. In relation to the phenomenology of consciousness or intentionality, what I've been poking around with is what Husserl called the "givenness" of sensation, or, elsewhere, passivity, and even, most weirdly, "pregivenness."

A standard, unhelpful, criticism of Husserl is that his idealist resolution of epistemology means that his phenomenology cannot account for the materiality of givenness. That the senses are materially conditioned by biological bodies seems to disappear from his explanation of consciousness. This is part of Michel Henry's criticism, and the impetus for Henry's ontological inquiry. I say this is wrong because Husserl speaks directly to givenness of sensory "hyle" in both Ideas II and in the analyses of passive synthesis (presented as lecture courses in the 1920s - and the spot where he coins the bizarre term "pregivenness"). Henry ignores this outright. However, part of Henry's and others' criticism of Husserl still seems right to me, in that Husserl's concern in the passive synthesis lectures is not to account for passive synthesis in any extensive or thorough way, but to use it to show how consciousness can have intentional objects and proceed to make judgments and to know them. In other words, Husserl's analysis is directed always toward the teleological endpoint of knowing, presuming, as he does throughout his work, that consciousness is a little knowing-machine.

That seems obviously false to me, or else trivially true. Either Husserl means that knowing in a serious, scientific way (and that seems to be the case), and he's wrong that consciousness primarily aims at knowing; or else Husserl means knowing in a very thin way, as in, e.g., judging merely that the keyboard is there, and judging merely that the letters I'm typing are showing up on my screen (and he doesn't seem to mean this), and then indeed every act of consciousness aims at a kind of knowing, but it's a trivial sort of knowing. In my view, consciousness does all sorts of things that aren't knowing, and even most often engages in non-knowing acts. Most of my wakeful consciousness is spent thinking about food, sex, and music (in approximately that order), not in a judicative way, but more in a state of generalized lust.

(If you think that's too much information, then you clearly have not been reading this blog, or don't know me, or aren't one of the random passersby I've grabbed and talked phenomenology at.)

Henry's answer to this problem is provocative, but ultimately can't be cashed out phenomenologically. He says the basic foundation of consciousness, that would explain what Husserl leaves unexplained about "pregivenness," and would counter Husserl's teleology, is Life. Life is characterized by its pathos (a notion I have deep affinity for): to be a living conscious subject is fundamentally to be a living subject, which is a hungering, suffering, loving, etc., subject, rather than a judging, knowing one.

Yet there's all kinds of problems with Henry's critique, and he smuggles in a whole lot of metaphysical baggage. Plus, I don't think the foundationalist move Henry makes is either necessary or a good solution to the gaps Husserl leaves. Henry is too eager to fill those gaps, and Husserl is too eager to leave them behind. I want to explore them, and the dilemma I have at the moment is a startling one: I don't know whether what I'm doing fits into phenomenology (Husserlian or otherwise), but I don't know what method other than phenomenology would provide any kind of rigor for exploring subjection. I do not want to be caught up in ontological speculation, and wouldn't be caught dead adopting a theological explanation (like Henry does). I'm not sure where that leaves me. It's unsettling.

*gong!* Start again!

The conclusion of Marion’s book leaves me totally suspicious of the entire text, and most troublingly of the integrity of the phenomenological descriptions throughout – including those I found compelling and harmonizing with my own. I’m very concerned about the appearance of any affinity between this completely corrupt and intellectually dishonest account and my own.

I was suspicious of Marion’s start. He developed his account of “the erotic phenomenon” and “the erotic reduction” (my emphasis – and I’ll get to that in a bit) on the basis of the question “Does anyone out there love me?” and the threat of futility. That seemed rather dichotomous (i.e., either someone loves me, or life is futile), but did seem to me to evoke the risk of erotic love, and the contingency and ambiguity of erotic experience.

He then turned this question and this dichotomy toward the desire for eternal assurance of love, which struck me immediately as a strange and phenomenologically ungrounded move, but I took it in stride to let him have his word. The “lover’s advance,” the expression of desire, Marion determined, is properly an advance that is eternal.

He then turns toward failures of love: lying, deception, flirtation, infidelity – as my previous post noted, by imparting ethical ideas into the phenomenon of the erotic, without identifying the context of these ethical judgments, admitting them to be judgments, or admitting to the arbitrary normativity of this account. At that point, he’s clearly gone far beyond the circumspect bracketing necessary to a phenomenological description.

In the final chapter, Marion resolves the paradox of the desire for eternal love (the same desire he imposed on the erotic phenomenon in the first place) by saying that love between two lovers is vain, futile, a lie, unless they have a child – flesh of their flesh, yet not their flesh; an ongoing extension of their love beyond their love and their deaths. So add to the normative, imposed, anti-phenomenological account of the erotic phenomenon the necessity that the only properly erotic encounter is a procreative one.

Not content with that, Marion then goes on to mark how hopelessly contingent the issue of a child is. The couple may be barren (thus, their love futile and a lie); the couple may choose not to procreate (thus, their love futile and a lie); the child may die, or may not love them back, or they may not love the child (thus, their love futile and a lie). So the only way that love can be true, and avoid being a lie, he says, is in the… Wait for it…

… final judgment, which can only be by…

… God, whose love is so great that obviously, God’s the best lover.

This is not a phenomenology. Note that, from the start, the entire project takes as its focus “the erotic phenomenon.” There is only one, because Marion construed love, from the start, strictly and only from the cultural tradition of Catholicism. That makes this a theology of heterosexual child-bearing love in service to God, and not a phenomenology.

So, unless he just got lucky with some of his nicer descriptions (the description of faithfulness is really very good, for instance, even though its totally insincere), how can I take up any of these descriptions? All of them are infected by this ideology, and the fact that he never admits of it makes the infection all the more pernicious. The book is rotten to its core.

Or, in the immortal words of David Mamet, “fuck you you fucking fuck!”

Incidentally (no doubt), the book was translated by a professor from Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Back in Pittsburgh, I was briefly involved in the local chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Catholic Pittsburgh was a battle ground in the nasty early-90s anti-abortion-rights crusade, and every week Franciscan would round up folks from Steubenville and bus them 50 miles or so to Pittsburgh to harass and yell at the women entering Planned Parenthood and other clinics. The more of this book I read, the more I thought about those people from the place I used to call Stupidville.