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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

phenomenology as a historical relic? « Previous | |Next »
December 29, 2006

Phenomenology as a tradition is associated with continental thinkers like Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. These figures are long dead. Can we talk about the Phenomenological tradition in the past tense? Or is it still living in the continental wing of Anglo-American philosophy departments?

I mention this because the poststructuralist turn has pushed phenomenology into the background, and the philosophical focus, which was now on the text, signs, intertextuality---was counterposed to the body as biological stuff of human matter. This trajectory often lead to the enclosure of textuality to the point that 'there is no outside language.'

'Where then is phenomenology? Is it reduced to being about the productivity of consciousness in generating meaning and value from the meaninglesss of the natural order? To what was prior to structuralism? Haven't we inherited the phenomenologist vs post-structuralist schematic and this is now a traditional way of reading in continental philosophy?

Does this way of reading continental philosophy make sense in terms of the blurring of the boundaries between ideality and matter?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:21 PM | | Comments (4)
Comments

Comments

Of course you can talk about phenomenology in the past tense, but you don't have to.

I am currently reading Jean-Luc Marion who is very much alive and in the tradition of phenomenology. He teaches out of the divinity school at Chicago.

The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy has a list of graduate programs friendly to contintental philosophy. I don't think this exhausts the tradition because a lot of thinkers are tucked away in weird places outside of philosophy departments.

Fido,
yes you are right. We can accept the poststructuralist insight that "there is nothing outside of the text," and continue to read Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, without embracing semiological reductionism. How we do that, whilst retaining the insights of structuralism on language, is the problem.

Or, in the case of Deleuze perhaps, how do we still read both post-structuralists and phenomenologists without the insights of a transcendental empiricism still being held to...a rhetorical question, obviously but I think the idea of a linear progress within philosophy is impossible and the idea that post-structuralism provides a definitive answer to philosophy is precisely the sort of thing Badiou takes up explicitly with his 'end to the end of philosophy' arguments and Deleuze takes up implicitly with his shift away from meaning as the dominant paradigm of thinking conceptually.

Curiously I was reading through some of Silvermans' 'Inscriptions' today (preparing to teach a course on phenomeonology that begins next wekk ;- ) and his description of american continental philosophy includes all of these currents of phenomenology, post-structuralism and an 'existential' approach. His definition of cont. phil. as a style and set of references is probably still, in effect, the most practical, as well as his comment about its lack of 'disputation' and its interest in "extending the understanding" (p6).

Gary, I missed your second set of questions the first time around, but I'd like to answer. It shouldn't really matter to phenomenology whether the body is raw or cooked, natural or inscribed. The question is whether its inscription can be shown or whether it must be presumed. I don't see any logical barrier to a phenomenological description of the inscribed body, so long as such a thing is in fact experientially evident. (I think its evidence would fall under the rubrics of "habit" or "coexistence" and by those names the phenomenological tradition perhaps does have something to say.)

Now I will show my bias and perhaps my age. I read the "post-" in "post-structuralism" as informed by phenomenology. On the topic of the inscribed body, I think the distance between Bourdieu or Kristeva and Merleau-Ponty is not as great as the distance between Levi-Strauss and Merleua-Ponty. Neither Bourdieu nor Kristeva are reductionist in my view. Neither are they phenomenologists, though they are both well read in phenomenology. I don't see any reason that would preclude one from pursuing things further along those lines.