Fido the Yak

At the risk of veering off into something that's not quite philosophy I must forward the argument that the ultimate dimension which makes the world intelligible is provided by the face of the Beloved, understood as a person. Concomitantly, irreplacability of the singular face rather than the reversibility of relationship to the world characterizes the drama of existence. It must be acknowledged that not everybody knows the Beloved, or any beloved of any kind. Existence on this planet is such that faces may become strange and even horrible and still possess the semblance of being faces, appearing to possess the power, even in shock and pain, of calling upon an ethical, indeed a loving relation. Are we dealing with masks or faces, persons or persons? If faces change, how do we know which face is deepest or truest? Is it a question of which face calls for love? How do we recognize the beloveds of this earth?

In one aspect the problem of the world of the face has everything to do with persons (personae). It is the face who speaks, the face who expresses, and the manifestation of the face within the visible is only this inchoate power of dramatic expression. The face is always on the verge of saying something. But why should that something be "love me" much less "I love you"? What does the inchoate have to do with love? We risk confusing what we wish the face would say with what the face means stripped of our narcissisms—is this, though, realistic, this stripping away of narcissism from reality? Quite possibly it is. Somehow we find ourselves taking responsibility for faces as if we could love them in spite of any realities to the contrary, in spite of other feelings that more or less directly contradict love. Does the world laugh at the sense of responsibility engendered by the face of the beloved? Only love would allow such a stupidity as responsibility for an other to be tolerated, and if love didn't enable such stupidities it wouldn't be love. It should be of the utmost concern to philosophy to know whether the absence of love indicates something like a hard, cold reality or, rather, something like the blues.

Labels: Barbaras, blues, ethics, face, love

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:46 PM. 11 comments

Barbaras quotes Merleau-Ponty taking off from Malraux' idea that we hear our own voices through our throats while we hear the voices of others through our ears: "I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else" (in Being, p. 281). For my part, while cognizant of the sense in which my voice is bound to my concrete existence and my uniqueness, I feel that, as previously noted,the ear comes late to hearing, late to hearing the other as well as (if differently than) the self.

Let's talk about listening to speech in particular, recognizing speech with its implicit dimension of listening as an example of coexistential ideation, an ideation characterized by quasi-interiority, an as if quality of its inner horizon. Here I'm thinking of ideation as allusive, as governed by methectic laterality rather than being directed "from above" or from the outside. Barbaras' thinking about this topic inspires. Under the heading "Sense as Articulation" Barbaras sketches out an ontology of the sign premised on the reversibility of the voice. He says:

Nowhere are we confronted with signs that are strictly vocal; they cannot be characterized as sensible, audible atoms, as individuals situated in exteriority. Most assuredly, I do not hear anything other than sounds, and yet it is not the sounds themselves that I hear. Their relationship escapes worldly exteriority; they are not situated side by side. Rather, they bear witness to a quasi-interiority corresponding to the quasi-reflectivity of the voice. Each sound already slips into the others, makes allusions there and, by this very relationship, sketches a meaningful unity. Nevertheless, this movement does not rest on the presence of a meaning possessed elsewhere; sense is nothing other than this lateral relation between the signs. It is implicated in words and phonemes, as a coherent deformation, rather than being possessed by them. Sense remains, at the heart of expression, "organic" rather than pure meaning, a "matrix of ideas" [Signs, p. 77] rather than an idea. Thus the incarnation of sense in the voice corresponds to the quasi-exteriority of signs.

(p. 288)

Just as it's obvious that there can't be deformation without form, there can't be as if without irrealization. However, irrealization in its usual forms emerges not from an isolated "interiority" (in an Idealist acceptation) but rather from matrices of delocutary vibrations, echoes which one echoes, gnoseologically, as it were. The aesthesiologicality of the vocal recovers a meaning of the as if as coexistential resonance and at the same time cadacualtic.

The vocal, it must be added, represents only one modality of embodied sign usage. Nonvocal coherent deformations are both imaginable and empirically evident. The vocal ought not be reified, as there are other routes to irrealizing coexistential vibration.

Labels: Barbaras, form, ideation, listening, Malraux, Merleau-Ponty, vibration, voice

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:42 AM. 0 comments

Must we acknowledge the transcendence of the other person? The postulation of alterity and its attending shadow, an implicit ipseity, already prejudices the inquiry into coexistence. Is alterity perhaps then a necessary detour on the path to understanding coexistence? Is transcendence? Patočka usefully distinguishes between an abstract personal conception of the world and a concrete personal conception of the world. In the same way that we can approach the concrete personal after having discovered the abstract personal, we can approach the infrapersonal through the personal. The question arises, though, as to how the infrapersonal world connects with the world of things. Are they coextensive? Is there any continuity between them? How can we distinguish our unthinking projections of our own cherished images from our reachings towards knowledge?

"The other is not a transcendent existence, a being resting in itself," Barbaras argues from the vantage of a mature Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, "but another openness to the world" (Being, p. 243). Clearly he states that the other is not a transcendent existence; however, at other points in his exposition we are asked to acknowledge, understand and value the transcendence of the other. Are we to think of a transcendent openness in place of a transcendence existence? Or is there a troubling inconsistency in this approach to the presence of other people? Let's follow the argument through a longer passage:

The problem of the other should not be posed as the problem of the alter ego, because starting in this way from the identity of consciousnesses, one finds oneself immediately constrained to reject such consciousnesses in favor of a radical alterity. The relation to the other must be sought just short of this level, at the point where neither the other nor I are yet pure consciousnesses; that is, it must be sought on the plane of corporeity. But, on the other hand, it is nevertheless not a question of identifying the experience of the other with the revelation of this corporeity; instead of the other proceeding from the ordeal of my objectification, it is because the other first appears that I can discover for myself an objective body. Precisely insofar as it is truly the vector of the openness to the other, that is, to a determinate experience, corporeity cannot be understood as pure passivity, thrown back onto the side of the object. In short, in order that the other may remain transcendent, it is necessary that its givenness not proceed from an ego that is closed in on itself. But in order that this transcendence might be preserved, as appearing transcendence, it is necessary that the passivity to which it responds be simultaneously activity, that the movement of disappropriation, by which alone the other can advent, equally be appropriation. Incarnation is not the passage from a transparent consciousness to its other but the very modality according to which it can be in relationship with itself.

(p. 241)

Succinctly, Barbaras says that "in its carnal depth, transcendental subjectivity is truly transcendental intersubjectivity" (p. 247). My worry is that the intersubjective or the interpersonal, along with the infrapersonal, may be hastily conflated with the objective, for lack of a vocabulary for passage through various worlds. What exactly must the call to participate in the world of another person involve? What about tacit involvements, or the call to listen to a silent logos? What is our tacit relation to the other person? The obligation to question this relation is not only ethical but also internal to quest to understand the phenomenal (which may or may not constitute an ethical enterprise). We risk a deprived understanding of phenomenality if we conflate the objectivity we discover through our embodiment with any world that could possibly be discovered as coarising with coexistence, tacitly or otherwise. Infrapersonal horizons align with the depth of experience. Their extents are not measured by any euclidian geometry that would pertain to objects encountered in the natural attitude. "The other and its world are born together around a certain accent, around a certain dissonance at the heart of the spectacle. The other separates itself [s'écarter] from the world in a distance that is nevertheless not objectifiable" (p. 261).

Apparently I'm in danger of reading Barbaras, for the sake of argument, at too great a distance. True, he does say that "there is a full continuity between the thing and other, and that . . . the pertinence of a distinction between them must be called into question" (p. 264). This must be weighed against an argument for an "inner frame of intersubjectivity"(p. 253). I'll give Barbaras the last word here:

If the relation to the other has a meaning, the relation cannot be reconstituted on the basis of poles closed in on themselves, nor can it be reconceived on the basis of a neutral element within which every distinction would be abolished. The relation is this point of contact between subjectivities which is also a point of disjunction, this "surface" of separation where, finding themselves again, they are pushed back toward their difference, where the difference and the identity of consciousnesses and, consequently, the depth and the phenomenality of the world are constituted at the same time. It is necessary therefore to understand this Ineinander, this "inter" of intersubjectivity, as an ultimate, irreducible reality and finally as the fundamental Dimension of the world. There are not consciousnesses, because if the consciousnesses were truly consciousnesses, they would make one sole consciousness, and the solidity of the world would disappear in the inconsistency of a pure thought. There is no world or Being, because cut off from its phenomenalization it would not even be a world, it would disappear into nothingness. There is intersubjectivity, a hinge around which the world gains its unity, achieves a sense by dispersing itself in a plurality of experiences, thus preserving its depth and therefore also the depth of this sense. Intersubjectivity is the "field of fields" (VI 281/227) that is none other than those it articulates, the element in which the unity of carnal poles is at once both announced and differentiated.

(pp. 252-253, Barbaras' emphasis)

Labels: Barbaras, intersubjectivity, Merleau Ponty, transcendence, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:40 AM. 1 comments

Barbaras reads Merleau-Ponty as wanting "to reestablish the experience itself of ideality" (Being, p. 235). He says further, "The fidelity to experience, to which the dialectic of the visible and invisible bears witness, imposes the recognition of the intelligible as a specific experience; that is, the fidelity of experience imposes that we distinguish ideality in the strict sense from the 'ideas' that are inscribed within the heart of the sensible" (p. 236).

The irrealization of experience absent any magistral discursive function (though not deposed of all possibilities for learning), which is to say experience on an equal footing with the experience of itself, exposes variation as an element inscribed within the experiential. I want to interpret experience as it is experienced, yet I read variation into experience by the very ideation that brings it to consciousness. It appears equally true that variation was already "there" within experience as a condition for reading anything at all into experience, into indicating a movement between an experience and its other. Fidelity to whyless variation—chaosmic, spasmoreal whyless variation—is a requirement of fidelity to experience. Plurality emerges more or less suddenly in tandem with experience, which is the source of the difficulty in saying definitively "experience means p," or "experience means q."

Perhaps on a note of tension, then, I share with you Barbaras' statement that "the sensible already carries within it the entire destiny of meanings, but in it meaning remains opaque and allusive" (p. 237). Meaning doesn't stand still except by allusion. At best it sometimes plays alongside remaining in place. In its original form meaning precisely and almost at once not entirely departs. Remaining is a departure of meaning.

Labels: Barbaras, experience, imagination

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:49 AM. 0 comments

"Each experience is a modality of the expression of the world," says Barbaras (Being, p. 233). The world, he says, "is constituted around points of passage, axes of equivalence, through which every thing communicates, gaining access simultaneously to their identity and to their difference. The 'mutual expression,' the allusion that everything makes to every other, therefore precedes their distinction; rather, from this 'mutually expressive' tissue things surge forth, as things of the world, that is, as things still enveloped in what they envelop" (p. 234)

Labels: Barbaras, chiasmus, envelopment, experience, passage, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:38 PM. 0 comments

How do we share a here? Nowly? Momentaneously?

Barbaras distinguishes depth, the embeddedness of my body it the world, from the distance between things in a homogenous metrical space.

Depth, the remoteness that cannot be carried forward in the form of an outline within things, is the first dimension. Whereas height and width seem to belong to the things themselves and to owe nothing to the subject, depth corresponds to the originary unfolding of spatiality. The priority of depth does not therefore mean a privilege would be granted to it, within objective space, vis-à-vis height and width; in this space, all of the dimensions are equivalent. Depth is of another order than actual distance; it is situated just short of metrical space and reveals thereby a new sense of dimension.

(Being, pp. 209-210)

Does the space between things exist as space? If so, what kind of space? How is it presented? "The enigma of depth, Merleau-Ponty notes, is that there is a between of things" (p. 213). Is the between of between us of the same order? I feel a depth to our relationship. Do I compare this depth to the depths of my relations to other people? Do I instead operate out of a uniformal between, or, alternatively again, out of a depth belonging to a region or a modality of interrelations between people? Does the between exist polymorphously? Is it made polymorphic? Does the between have its unifocality, in its unfolding if not in its etiology? Does it at any time belong here?

Does the idea of bewteenness drive us to envisage the coexistence of things and the coexistence of people as belonging to a shared dimension? Indeed Barbaras asks us to rethink coexistence. To begin with, a question of phenomenality, he notes that "the phenomenon ascends to itself only by making itself co-present to the world and consequently to all the others" (p. 215). Does this formulation grant too much agency and ultimately too much personhood to the phenomenon in general? Again, from a different angle, do the co-presence of phenomena and the coexistence of people equally arise from depth? (Is there an implication here that depth is worldless, that things hover in a betweenness, a polymorphic being around in which if a horizon could only be discernible in an embryo?

Coexistence, Barbaras instructs, should not be bemuddled with strict contemporaneity, "which supposes precisely a space entirely unfolded. As soon as the being-together of phenomena is determined as depth, their articulation cannot go up as far as the order of the contemporaneous; their articulation cannot coincide with the axis of the "now" (p. 216). What would a loose contemporaneity resemble? Would one want not want to characterize it as coexistential? What if we initially divide the contemporaneous from the now?

Here's a thought: "The relation of the present to the past must be characterized as chiasm" (p. 224). If nothing in reality exists momentaneously in that the past is always chiasmically implicit and the "presence of depth opens the dimension of a future" (p. 216), then strict contemporaneity almost appears to be a strawman. Well, perhaps our interrelations are haunted by a ghost of contemporaneity. Perhaps we live with a spectral contemporaneity. Or else, if we are to interrogate strict contemporaneity, we could posit an irreducible plurality in the depths of coexistence. I don't know about this. We speak of having a shared history, or sharing a life together. What do these phrases mean? Is what we share enigmatically never quite here, or never quite in a here implicit in there being an us? How do we interpret our irreversibility?

Labels: Barbaras, chiasmus, coexistence, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:10 AM. 0 comments

Allusiveness

Barbaras on language:

Against the intellectualist conception which posits the material sign and the signification side by side as positive entities, linguistics discovers that sign and signification become positive beings and are then ordered to each other only by a process of active differentiation carried out first on the signifiers themselves. It is truly by this process that the signifiers become signifiers in the strict sense, that is, carriers of significations. The signification is not attached in a univocal manner to a sign but is situated between the signs as the invisible place where the signifying acts intersect. The sense intended in speech is a "qualified nothingness" whose unity is designed by means of the incessant differentiation of spoken words. Consequently, the sign is never truly isolable and the sense never strictly present in any spoken word; it is sketched in them as their secret web and remains therefore allusive, by principle disappointing every attempt to possess it in person. The sense is reached only in a lateral fashion, beside itself, across the figures in which it is incarnated.

(Being, p. 179)

Chaosmic Metaphoricity

In my usage "spatiality" hardly ever refers to bare geometric space but rather to space as it is lived; similarly "meaning" refers not to a purely intellectual realm of displaced and displacable abstractions but to an embodied gesture towards the world, an expression of mien. The orders of extensa and cogitans are not originary. From such a viewpoint metaphor takes on an ontological and chaosmological significance. "Far from the metaphor bearing on objects already circumscribed," Barbaras explains, "things proceed from a general 'metaphoricity,' from a universal participation that they concentrate or crystallize in order to be constituted into things" (p. 195, Barbaras' emphasis, my bold). This view of a general metaphoricity apparently describes an inhabited world, a universe of life and of leeway. Can there a cosmos in which leeway as such exists without the possibility of response to leeway?

Anarchic (}∅{) Individuation

Barbaras says that "individuation does not designate an incomprehensible phase preceding the individual whose clarification then necessitates recourse to a principle" (p. 183, Barbaras' emphasis) and likewise, "individuality makes sense only insofar as it does not proceed from a principle, and . . . the individual has individuality only insofar as individuality cannot be assigned. The individuality of the thing can be maintained only by remaining unfulfilled, just short of the point where it could fixed as a principle" (p. 184). Does this argument about things also hold for persons, unique, living beings? I think it's rather meant to: "individuality is characterized by its ability to foil every search for a principle of individuation; to be attentive to the individual is to understand that the search for such a principle is meaningless. One must instead say that the individual produces its own 'principles' as asymptotic poles of its pre-individual life" (p. 186). Does }∅{ designate the total absence of principles, or the autopoetic generation of its own proper extempore "principles?" Can these be separated? Is general metaphoricity not a principle?

An errant thought: "sense at its maximum degree of errancy, nowhere gathered together, pure allusion, horizon" (p. 181). I allege that allusion is like enough to a gathering, a playing along, or a play towards. I note a tension between errancy and allusion; at the same time }∅{ means the absence of an apriori gathered; the allusive gathers up in itself even prior there being an in in itself. The allusiveness of this very concatenation of thought has not escaped my notice. Not even direct quotation erases the allusiveness of sense.

Barbaras says that the "ultimate ground of the real consists of . . . 'rays of the world' which do not lead to the rank of principles" (p. 190). To speak of the ultimate betrays a desire for principles. "Ultimate ground," "ultimate moment": }∅{ issues no ultimata. "Ultimate" must be understood figuratively. The desire for the arche is born autopoetically, in the leap. Rays of the world never arrive at the arche, but they approach the arche asymptotically. The penultimate is truer than the ultimate to chaosmic metaphoricity. It belongs with the spasmoreal, though it is "almost" ultimate. It alludes to another order.

Labels: anarchy, Barbaras, metaphor, spasmoreality, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:56 AM. 0 comments

Barbaras says that the world comes into appearance "only because it is woven from the signifying power of the body" (Being, p. 160). He then argues on the side of apprehending meaning not as something that contains, absorbs or otherwise circumscribes the world, but as an openness to the world (p. 165). Could the body be meaningfully open to anything unworldly? How do we know that openness itself is worldly? What does the elimanitivist make of openness?

Labels: Barbaras, meaning, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:32 PM. 0 comments

"What really defines a question," writes Barbaras (Being, p. 141), "is that it involves the possibility of an answer, at least as a horizon." The question springs from the tessellation of interpersonal encounters, which in disaggregate form a horizon of actuality of answers for the (possible) question, though it is nonetheless also the home of nexii of singularities, abilities (actual possibilities), ideas of abilities (and on to the "virtual"), membranes, textures, passages, and expressive gestures. The tessellation is where laterality figures, or figures as horizon. Two ideas, both connected to the emergence of the question from the tessellation of encounters: the openness of the question, and the drawing of the whole person into question (drawn not wholly, but by implicature). The person could not possibly be drawn into question given a perfect, irrefrangible solitude. However, solitude is an element of the encounter, texturally, environmentally in its paradigmatic instance, perhaps, though it could easily enough be viewed as a fundamental polarity of the encounter–here I hesitate to describe the encounter in the abstract for fear of foreclosing on any of its possibilities, or any avenues that could be strolled through its concretions. This may be a point of contention. Does the positing of the pure question rely upon the pure answer, whether given as possibility or in some other way? I am tempted to think that it does, and that therefore we must be cautious in defining the question in any such way that would discount or devalue the realities of answer. With such a caveat in mind let's follow where Barbaras goes with the idea of the openness of the question:

What defines interrogation, as pure interrogation, is that the question accepts no answer that would conlcude it. . . . Sense is precisely interrogative sense, present as something to interrogate, withdrawing itself behind the question that gains access to it. This interrogative sense is given at one and the same time as response and reenactment of the question within the response; it is present only at a distance.

(p. 141, Barbaras' emphasis).

Do we, as questioners, only accept tentative answers? (As always, although I make a rhetorical point, the question isn't entirely "rhetorical." It could be answered directly.) What directions would we give to the reenactments of "our" questions? The answers Barbaras gives, the questions he reenacts, gravitate around his ontological account of the thought of Merleau-Ponty. Here the discussion moves from the sense of vision to the body of the question, which is the body as chiasm:

[I]n order to restore the signifying and ultimately the interrogative dimension of vision, as opposed to Sartrean abstraction, Merleau-Ponty appealed to the experience of touch. Ultimately interrogation itself, at all levels including linguistic, turns out to be defined by this reference to touch. . . . [I]nsofar as it is originary interrogation, "auscultation or palpitation in thickness," our relation to Being proceeds from an originary Touching. The notion of the flesh corresponds to this originary Touching; strictly speaking, it is the body of interrogation, the body as interrogation.

(p. 144, Barbaras' emphasis).

And we see Barbaras tying the discussion of the question into his analysis of the dialectic of fact and essence: "The notion of wild essence describes this ultimate level where the fact exists only as the possibility that articulates it, where the essence makes sense only insofar as it remains caught facticity. The Being of interrogation therefore designates Mediation as the last reality, and, in a sense, there is only mediation" (p. 145). So far so good? If it is true that "interrogation proper proceeds from an act of ideation" (p. 143), then we are encouraged to approach the imagination of the question as "caught facticity." An obvious relation exists between fact and question, a relation introduced by response, whether in the form of the question (the wonderful question, always to be questioned) or the answer; less obviously there is conceivably a facticity of question and answer, or a factical background to the exchange of question and answer. There is also the fact of posing a ?-idea.

Is the encounter an act? Does the word interaction hint at a beyond of action, any sort of crossing over? Does the act conceived in one domain remain an act when carried over to another? Does the encounter carry the potential to redefine action, to reenact it? Can the pure answer be any kind of reenactment, or must it be "free" to close the question?

Labels: action, answers, Barbaras, encounters, Merleau-Ponty, possibility, questions

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:15 PM. 0 comments

Barbaras carries forward Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartrean intersubjectivity, a critique which easily applies more broadly. The first point to make almost goes without saying. Barbaras writes that the reality of the other is inescapably missed "as soon as the other is understood as a unity of sense constituted in me, as an analogon of the ego" Being, p. 131). It's my feeling that the ego, rather than presenting a model or a vehicle for approaching the other, in fact distances the self from the other, conceptually at first, but with actual consequences for the relation to the other. This distance is not the distance of the detour so much as that of the wrong path. This is not to say that the goal of meeting the other is the obliteration of all distances. Nonetheless, the possibility of approach structures any encounter, and the encounter with others is no less primeval than the experience of self. The journey through the ego abridges the encounter.

Merleau-Ponty's concept of laterality corrects a theoretical misapprehension of how the encounter with the other actually plays out. As Barbaras says:

The other is given to me only laterally; it envelops me rather than looks at me. And the face-to-face from which a victor must emerge represents only the most radical modality, which is never completely realized, of this primary "laterality."

(p. 136)

Perhaps the critique goes to far, stretching the meaning of laterality to the point where it can mean just about any worldy contact. We should question the sense in which contact with other people is always mediated by the world. In any event, laterality remains a powerful conceptual corrective.

"The experience of the other is that of an encounter," Barbaras declares. "It is not to be asked then, how knowledge of the other is possible, as one need only clarify the meaning of this encounter" (p. 128). Are we allowed to ask then how it is possible to clarify meanings? Anyway, Barbaras continues his riff, asking us to "discover, in the heart of consciousness as it is lived, a dimension which throws it back out toward the exteriority of the other. Because the relation of consciousness to the other is a relation of being rather than of knowledge, its lived immanence does not entail a the negation of all transcendence" (ibid.). How do we know this? How does the body of knowledge that attests to the beingness of the relation to the other support the distinction drawn here between being and knowledge? As for the main clause, why should transcendence be affirmed or denied at the point where the actuality of the relation to the other becomes evident? Do we know that transcendence isn't an irredeemably egological concept, illsuited for a discussion of coexistential laterality?

Labels: Barbaras, encounters, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:06 AM. 0 comments

Barbaras continues a critique of Sartre:

Phenomenality is just as much negation of determination as it is negation of the in-itself. One has to say instead that phenomenality stops short of both affirmation and negation. It is a negation that not only does not dissolve into the positivity of essence but still negates every form of positivity, so that it also cannot affirm itself as pure, univocal negation nor abolish itself in favor of fully positive being.

(Being, p. 123, Barbaras' emphasis)

Instead of "phenomenality" I would say epoché. The question I'll ask relates to whether one makes a commitment to the study of, or even the worthy living of, phenomenality. Could an encounter with the phenomenal be compromised by a prior commitment to understanding the phenomenal? This goes towards a critique of the instant. How does one declare an allegiance to the instantaneous without doing violence to the instant? Conversely, how does one maintain absolutely no affinity for the instantaneous and yet be able, at the drop of a hat, to live in the instant? Must the instant be unbearable? Well, this perhaps suggests a reason why the instant is thought of as precisely not experienced in any temporal, mundane or ordinary sense. On the other hand the difficulty of sustaining an enthusiasm for the mundane suggests that duration too may be as unbearable as the instant. We live in the to-and-fro between these unbearable states, between duration and instantaneousness. If this movement is bearable, does that mean that the instantaneous as well as the mundanely temporal therefore become bearable?

Labels: Barbaras, encounters, epoché, rhythm, Sartre, temporality, the instant

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:05 AM. 0 comments

"A philosophy of nothingness," Barbaras writes (Being, p. 121), "is still not realized as long as it defines nothingness as pure nothingness. Nothingness is genuinely nothingness only if it is not nothingness through and through." What is it about nothingness that's not like itself, adulterated through and through? Say that silence is a way of experiencing nothingness. Has there ever been in your experience a moment of unadulterated silence? What would you want to say about it?

Labels: Barbaras, nothingness, philosophy, silence

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:54 PM. 6 comments

"It is a characteristic of the philosophical interrogation," Merleau-Ponty says (Visible, p. 160, in Barbaras, Being, p. 88), "that it return upon itself, that it ask itself what to question is and what to respond is." I note how Merleau-Ponty includes response in his characterization of the philosophical question. Questioning proceeds from speech, which I tentatively define as both expression and response, that is, as a modality of intersubjective life, which patterns its inner dynamic. Here's a question, then, about the definition of the question: Does the question necessarily express anything?

Is it possible that the question necessarily expresses doubt? Does doubt express anything? What does doubt have to do with the eidos of the question? Barbaras states that doubt is shown by Merleau-Ponty, in his critique of Descartes, to be "inadequate to the sense of philosophical interrogation" (Being, p. 89). He means Cartesian doubt, it must be made clear, and I reckon the meaning of "philosophical" deserves to be explored a little. We can keep the question in mind, however, redefining terms as needed.

Isn't there something deliberately weak, from a philosophical viewpoint, about inquiring into the eidos of the question? There may be some call for a defense of a postcritical eideticism, a call for some kind of philosophical statement. What do we mean, though, by philosophy? What makes a statement or a question philosophical? Philosophy is always a return from constructa to lived experience, Merleau-Ponty says ("The Philosopher and Sociology," Signsp. 112). Philosophy does not rest still with social theory but plunges into the intersubjective world–in the mode of questioning? What sort of an engagement is that? It would by the definition given above be intersubjective or coexistential. Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty continues his thought, "has a dimension of its own, the dimension of coexistence–not as a fait accompli and an object of contemplation, but as the milieu and perpetual event of the universal praxis" (p. 113). Universal praxis. Do we need to perform an eidetic reduction of the praxis of the question along the way of inquiring into eidos of the question? How do we make the return to lived experience—as if something about our reflections or our ideas hadn't been living. Curious. Did we ever leave lived experience expecting to learn something in return? Our questions inhere in ex-pectations?

Merleau-Ponty argues that Husserl's promotion of the Lebenswelt to be the central theme of phenomenology is not inconsistent with certain earlier thinking about eidetic intuition as confirmation of experience. But hasn't the eidetic shifted meaning? Should we recognize some tergiversation in phenomenology's grappling with the eidos? Would that be an adequate reason to turn our attention completely away from the eidetic?

When the recognition of the life-world, and thus too of language as we live it, becomes characteristic of phenomenology. . .this is only a more resolute way of saying that philosophy does not possess the the truth about language and the world from the start, but is rather the recuperation and first formulation of a Logos scattered out in our world and our life and bound to their concrete structures–that "Logos of the aesthetic world" already spoken of in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. Husserl will only be bringing the movement of all his previous thought to completion when he writes in a posthumous fragment that transitory inner phenomena are brought to ideal existences by becoming incarnate in language. Ideal existence, which at the beginning of Husserl's thought was to have been the foundation for the possibility of language, is now the most characteristic possibility of language.

(p. 105, my bold)

A warning from Barbaras, who argues that the phenomenon of speech calls for a phenomenological reduction, "a reduction that allows us to understand the world on the basis of this possibility, that is, to understand the world as sense. By characterizing sense in terms of positive meaning, however, the philosophy of essence testifies just as much to its misunderstanding of speech. It considers the expressive operation as something completed; it forgets operative speech in favor of constructed speech. Instead of interrogating the emergence of language in the world, it naively gives itself language in the form of the world" (p. 109).

If there is something circular in the idea of the philosophical question, there may equally be a circularity in the idea of the question. Well, the question does not ask itself. That too is its eidos, or an aspect of its eidos, which must be "held and understood within the openness it unfolds" (p. 106; NB, Barbaras is speaking of "the absolute" here).

Finally I'll say a word about doubt, which may pertain to Cartesian doubt, or other forms of doubt. It is possible to sustain, as a kind of doubt, a hypothesis of the hypothetical which is irreducible to a negation of any given existence, but rather simply an indifference to any secondary claim about existence that hasn't been tried; a doubt which parenthesizes in lieu of either affirmation or denial. I am aware of the criticisms of this position, but am not yet convinced by them. Perhaps we should learn what doubt really is before deciding whether or not the question necessarily expresses doubt, philosophical or otherwise. Must one detach oneself from doubt in order to study doubt? Must one negate the experience of doubt in order to ken its essence? (We would be speaking of "morphological," inexact essences; that much we take from our readings). And wouldn't we have to ken the essence of doubt in order to answer any question of its necessity as a precondition, perhaps, for the question, the experience and the idea of the question. "The very being of the question," Barbaras writes, "excludes the possibility that the question remain without a response, gaping toward a transcendence" (pp.89-90). As I interpret him, Barbaras is speaking specifically of the Cartesian question, such as it is as a kind of commonplace, the question of the existence of the world, and he means to be critical. Is it possible for a question, any question, to remain without a response? Is it possible that the question inheres in response whether or not it is possible for a question to go without a response? That I suspect is true, but to appreciate its truth one must interrogate the way of asking questions, always returning from the constructa to the lived experience, the experience of the question.

Labels: Barbaras, epoché, ideas, language, lifeworld, Merleau-Ponty, questions

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:12 PM. 3 comments

Barbaras tells us that the difference between fact and essence must be conceived as an imminent difference, "always already accomplished but also always on the way to being accomplished" (Being, p. 85). Would the difference between difference–haplopic difference?–and imminent difference be an imminent difference? Well, let's hear Barbaras out for a moment.

Taking stock of this ontological "diplopia" cannot consist only in taking note of it; one has to conceive it. Each position, that of experience or fact, as well as that of the "in-itself" or of essence, calls the other forth in the very moment when it excludes it. There is a deep-seated instability in the philosophies of essence as well as in those of existence. Neither of the two perspectives expresses the total situation, and this is why each of them is led to pass into its other. But if there is a truth of this "to and fro," of this duality, this truth does not reside in the duality itself. It is precisely the unilateral form according to which each position expresses itself that determines its reversal into its contrary, so that if there really is a truth to the duality of fact and essence, it is not expressed in the very notions of fact and essence. The to-and-fro corresponds to a more profound situation, to an original mode of the presence of Being in which the duality is rooted, which almost inevitably calls forth a rigid oppositional formulation, but whose true meaning does not reside in this duality. In order to understand the ontological "diplopia," therefore, one must return to a relation to Being that stops short of the opposition between essence and existence, a relation of which the to-and-fro is like the distorting trace. What is at issue is to rediscover the soil in which the necessity of this philosophical alternation is grounded, a soil that can only be located deeper than each of the terms, whose "unilaterality" alone determines alternation. One must therefore overcome the relation of fact and essence as an oppositional relation in favor of a plane where it will turn out to be a unity. By overcoming the fixity of the terms in which the opposition is expressed, we shall overcome the relation as oppositional relation. The notions of fact and essence lead us to conceive their very relation as an external oppositional relation rather than as movement; the point, therefore, is to overcome the antagonistic dimension of the to-and-fro in order to grasp the passage to essence as proceeding from existence itself, and the passage to existence as proceeding from essence itself. We must understand each term as its own passage into the other–that is, we must locate essence short of its opposition to existence and existence short of its opposition to essence.

(pp. 83-84)

One imagines an arrhythmia of the busy moment, the veryish moment of simultaneous exclusion and invitation, without pause, of the always, already, always again, and almost done enjambed within a single breath, the total breath, which exhales and inhales at once. Alternatively one plays with a floatier to-and-fro, a space of more emancipated movements. One leaps and swings amidst an undetermined canopy of philosophical conversations, phasing in and out like fruitions, or just words, utterances, even the most solid of them situations of near total incompleteness. One breathes. If rhythm exists–rhythmosophy must never cease to question how it is that rhythm exists–it sides with the alternation between its imaginary existence and its real essence, between its making itself appear as absence and its making itself absent. It exists thus as absurdity and ecstasy, but never already quite both at once (in any chronometric sense of happening at once; there is the phenomenon of the rhythmic happening to imagine: absurd, ecstatic, synkairotically phased). The son clave is the model of this flipendicularity. The sudden harmonziations of any two voices are the roots the bass walks, in steps unlocked, steady as freedom, measured, the pulse; yet the incomplete situation hangs on the syncopations with the three-two, steady as anything until it passes into the two-three; the conversation of any two or more voices, of many unconstricted passages.

Labels: Barbaras, breathing, dialectics, monism, rhythm

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:29 AM. 0 comments

Barbaras comments on Merleau-Ponty's "The Philosopher and His Shadow," his own commentary on his reading of Husserl:

His approach to the history of philosophy is the heir of his philosophy of perception and intersubjectivity: just as the thing is not frontally and objectively possessed but rather grasped in transcendence in a lateral way, the thought of an author is not such that one can make a precise list of what belongs to it and what it has ignored. The relation of commentary is a modality of the intersubjective relation, of linguistics in particular. In dialogical experience, I do not communicate to another a thought possessed elsewhere. I think with him and make myself in his image; moreover, his thought comes to itself only be formulating itself and offering itself to me, so that there is no clear-cut distinction between what would belong strictly to an author and what the interpretation projects into the author. What defines a thought is what is was still seeking to say, its "unthought," which can be revealed only in a reflection which, on the basis of its difference, turns itself into the echo of the thought. Therefore, the rejection of the idea that one must subject a reading to objectivity in favor of the idea that one must attempt to explicate an unthought can be a higher form of fidelity.

(Being, p. 69)

I think with him and make myself in his image. Merleau-Ponty says, "I borrow myself from others; I create others from my own thoughts. This is no failure to perceive others; it is the perception of others" (159). The quotidian personalistic attitude towards the world, which we hope to be able to understand rhythmosophically, via reductions by a method of improvisatory rhythmic variation, does not in the first place imagine other people as other minds and then more or less as an addendum supply bodies and a sense of concrete material horizons to the image of the other. There is no constituting of a mind for a mind but of a person for a person. We imagine whole persons. If we were to follow Merleau-Ponty's lead, we'd find that the body, in particular, its status as "the viniculum of self and things" (p. 166), holds the key to grasping the intersubjective dimension of the personalistic imagination. On the model of touch, physical and personal at once, "[t]he physical thing becomes animate. Or, more precisely, it remains what it was (the event does not enrich it), but an exploratory power comes to rest upon or dwell in it" (ibid., my emphasis). If we grasp such an exploratory power through the grasp of the experience of our own free hands, are we thus employing a metonymic relation necessarily mediated by explicit cognitions? The question is that of imagining the whole person. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of shaking hands as a knowledge of the other, reasoning:

[W]e have here neither comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or "introjection." The reason why I have evidence of the other man's being-there when I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person in that "sort of reflection" it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands "coexist" and are "compresent" because they are one single body's hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality. For Husserl the experience of others is first of all "esthesiological," and must be if the other person exists effectively and not as the ideal terminus or fourth term of a proportion which supposedly would come to complete my consciousness' relationships to my objective body and his. What I perceive to begin with is a different "sensibility" (Empfindbarkeit), and only subsequently a different man and a different thought.

(p. 168)

The ability to feel, the exploratory power of the other person: these are vitally of the tactile; one almost has the sense reading these words that the whole person is composited from an imagination that is primarily sensual, rather than being abstracted from ways of being a person, sensuous, embodied, but irreducible to any single faculty, ability or organ. "Other persons. . . . are not there as minds, as "psychisms," but such for example as we face them in anger or love–faces, gestures, spoken words to which our own respond without thoughts intervening, to the point that we sometimes turn their words back upon them even before they have reached us, as surely as, more surely than, if we had understood–each one of us pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body" (p. 181). Well, here are some words I find difficult to absorb (which means I'll get back to them in some fashion, perhaps through Barbaras once again):

"Animalia are realities which cannot be given in a fundamental and original presence to several subjects; they enclose subjectivities. They are the very special sort of objects which are fundamentally and originally given in such a way that they presuppose fundamental and original presences without being able to be given in a fundamental and original presence themselves." This is what animalia and men are: absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative. A perceiving body that I see is also a certain absence that is hollowed out and tactfully dealt with behind that body by its behavior. But absence is itself rooted in presence; it is through his body that the other person's soul is soul in my eyes. "Negativities" also count in the sensible world, which is decidedly the universal one.

(p. 172)

Imagine that instead of simply carrying a wake of the negative as some necessary property or attribute, the person essentially puts negativity into play in the form of irrealizations which matter in the sensible world. So let's get back to this idea of making myself in the image of the other. I imagine meontically rather than mimetically, or, better said, the image of the image does not originate in mimesis, which nevertheless runs parallel with some kinds of thinking. Further, there is a methectic aspect to my irrealizations of animalia, one might even speak of an intermethexis. I can discern the interpersonal as a horizon of imagination, yet the image of the image eludes my grasp. It is not there fully for me. Not to too quickly shirk responsibility, but are these thoughts then by which I create others my own?

Labels: Barbaras, body, dialogism, Husserl, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, personhood, reading

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:07 AM. 3 comments

Barbaras interprets Merleau-Ponty's turn to speech:

[B]y returning to the world from the phenomenon of expression, by grasping the very birth of sense instead of referring it straightaway to a perceptual ground, Merleau-Ponty gains access to the genuine figure of the world as soil or source of expression. Then, to the infinity of the telos brought to light in the expressive act, there corresponds the infinity of an archē. Insofar as it is the soil of the expressive movement, the world will have this infinite depth inherent in the fact that sense is never completely fulfilled. Because no expression erases itself in the face of a pure sense, because expression cannot claim to be nailed down in a full meaning, the world will be given only as withdrawal, as this "presence" which, through its obscurity, gives birth to expression without ever being absorbed in the expressed. Considered on the basis of expression, the world can no longer be defined through presence but as that whose being consists in exceeding every presentation.

(p.60, Barbaras' emphasis)

The rhythmosophic engagement with the expressive means this: the breach –}∅{, the sign which evades the instant archive–the improvisation of improvisations, does not wait outside correspondence. Its infinities do not hang around. (Infinities of broken limits.) The evanescence of infinities may touch on the teleological, or anyway feel the repercussions of telic logoi, without in any way ceding the power to onset radical causalities, causalities of middle voices and otherwise, harmolodically apperceived, that is, given a harmolodic temporality, as extensions of expressive movement. This is the grasp. It is the grasp where the grasp isn't everything. The door opened up by the breach, is it divarication itself? Straddle? It remains to rhythmosophy to describe the givenness of the world as plunge, and not to be submerged in this description.

Labels: anarchy, Barbaras, improvisation, infintity, Merleau-Ponty

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:12 AM. 0 comments

Barbaras interprets Merleau-Ponty's grappling with the experience of the other: "the other is a being who is present only as absent, is given only as its own withdrawal, and, because of that is not given to a consciousness. The experience of the other is, par excellence, the 'presentation of the unpresentable'" (Being of the Phenomenon, p. 40). The paradoxes bother me. Perhaps they were already latent within the phenomena of coexistence and did not arise as the result of a philosophical error such as the entification of experience. I say that cautiously, not least because of my own inclinations to entify experience. In fact the "not given to a consciousness" of the other is not easily interpreted. Does "consciousness" mean primarily "self-relation," as Barbaras says at one point? Does it mean specifically a being capable of forming or having an experience? Does it primarily mean an insular subjectivity?

The other appears as such, and, to this extent, its givenness does not refer to an insular consciousness; however, if the relation to the other were based truly on an anonymous subjectivity, it would lose all meaning because there would be no distinction within this anonymity, that is, because finally there would be no consciousness to which the other could appear. The ego and the alter ego have parallel destinies: the moment the ego vanishes into the anonymity of being-in-the-world, the other undergoes the same fate and stops being other because it is not a consciousness. Just when the experience of the other appears possible, since the abyss between insular subjectivities can be bridged, the experience loses all meaning, for along with their differences, the consciousnesses themselves disappear. Alterity and egoity are not opposed. On the contrary, because a consciousness is endowed with identity, because it is self-consciousness, it can be other, that is, differ from an other. Therefore, if the relation to the other excludes self-transparent consciousnesses, the relation also challenges the idea of an undifferentiated psychic current–only a consciousness, a self-relation, can engender a difference, a divergence in the heart of this current. The move critical of Husserl's egology, which is based on the discovery of the [wild] anonymity of being-in-the-world and which eventually converges with Scheler's perspective, calls now for an opposite move that leads to a revindication of one of Husserl's truths against Scheler. The existence of the other makes sense only insofar as it is reconceived from the viewpoint of an ego, to which it can appear and from which it can be distinguished as an alter ego. At this point, the problem is posed in a way that conforms to all the dimensions of the experience. There is certainly an originary anonymity, but this anonymity must at the same time be rejected since it is experienced and consequently divided up by the consciousnesses which are fused in it. There is, then, a solipsism which cannot be overcome, and yet this solipsism must also be rejected, since the experience that consciousness has of its solitude presupposes a prior background of communication with the other. In fact, the solitude of consciousness is the experience of the absence of others, and it refers consequently to an originary relation with them against whose background this absence can be experienced as such. All absence is a modality of presence.

(pp. 35-36)

Would the withdrawal of the other from owned phenomenality follow the same path as the withdrawal of the imaginary from the real? Is there anything to this withdrawal besides withdrawal? Anything like a habitus? Anything like an eidos of experience, even an unthinkable eidos, one that appears only in withdrawing from thought? Is ideation thought in every possible sense? What is my image of phenomenality?

The other appears; its transcendence, therefore, could not correspond to the factual presence of something transcendent. But it appears in such a way as not to give itself in this appearing; it remains transcendent to its givenness. Or rather, it gives itself as this very transcendence. It is precisely the presence of a non-presence. This claim does not mean that the other's absence conceals another presence–that would be to fall back into the aporias of objective thought and to look for the signs of a consciousness in a corporeal presence–it means instead that the other presents itself as absent, that manifestation and withdrawal are identical in it.

(pp. 25-26)

Is it ever the case that another person gives herself against the background of originary solitude (as the transcendence of her givenness)? What makes this thought nearly unimaginable? A thought that belongs to solitude, the exile within, exiled even from ownness.

Labels: Barbaras, coexistence, ideation, imagination, Merleau-Ponty

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:52 PM. 0 comments

Barbaras offers a critique of Merleau-Ponty's concept of existence, first as it appears in The Structure of Behavior, then in Phenomenology of Perception. I need to quote at length before commenting on Barbaras' criticisms.

. . .Merleau-Ponty must show in a descending movement that if the notion of form grounds a critique of naturalism, it allows us just as much, and for the same reasons, to call intellectualism into question. The meaningful relation of the organism to its environment is still a relation to a reality, to a transcendence, and is not therefore based on a consciousness transparent to itself; it is not based on an act of knowledge. The study of behavior reveals what Merleau-Ponty calls an existence, a being-in-the-world, a tacit relation to a presence rather than a possession of something in a representation. The Structure of Behavior therefore concludes: "The natural 'thing,' the organism, the behaviors of others and my own behavior exist not only by their sense; but this sense which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the intentional life which constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the 'understanding' which gives access to them is not yet an intellection" (SC 241/225).

(The Being of the Phenomenon (hereafter Being), pp. 4-5, my bold)

Let's push aside the question of whether my philodendron relates to a transcendence (whatever that means) in the same way as organism that are typically thought to behave, which happens to coincide with the class of organisms that typically display motility, such the amoeba, the anole lizard or the elephant who sees itself in mirrors, and also the question of whether organisms ever meaningfully relate to irrealities, or relate without meaning (or form)–we are after all not really doing biology at this juncture, though we are on the verge of Barbaras' cosmobiology–so we can focus on the idea of consciousness which Barbaras seems to believe ought to have been jettisoned early on in the development of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Consciousnesses transparent to themselves are not the only kind of consciousnesses, and transparency is not the only imaginable mode of a reflexive relation of consciousness. (I realize an idea of the cogito is being implicitly criticized, fairly or unfairly; the criticism is itself an idea offered in a specific form and it will be tested.) Furthermore, a preintellectual or prerepresentational intentional life is not completely at odds with knowledge or acts of knowledge. Merleau-Ponty doesn't say as much. Why should he? He proposes another kind of "understanding," but he still conceives of it as understanding, a praktognosis he will go on to say in Phenomenology. In fact we might think that understanding is the inflected form of "understanding," once the latter concept has been established in our thinking, without then really doing away with either or being stuck with some antiquated (and derivative, ever problematic) notion of existence which witholds more than it emancipates.

Before carrying on let's look at another passage dealing with Merleau-Ponty's concept of existence as presented in Phenomenology. Barbaras notes that the concept of existence is omnipresent in Phenomenology but disappears in later works.

Existence designates the movement by which the body, which is irreducible, as we have seen, to a pure object, gives sense. In fact, "the human body is defined in terms of its property of appropriating, in an indefinite series of discontinuous acts, meaningful kernels which overcome and transfigure its natural abilities" (PHP 226/193). Existence is thus "this open and indefinite power of meaning–that is, simultaneously of grasping and communicating a sense–by which man transcends himself toward a new behavior or toward others, or toward his own thought, across his body and his speech" (PHP 226/194). The central intention of Phenomenology of Perception is this power of escape, this sense always already at work, which is not distinguished from its own accomplishment, and which, in this way, cannot be opposed to the factical foundation from which it would emerge. But by grasping this power by means of the notion of existence, Merleau-Ponty does not allow himself in Phenomenology of Perception to understand what he has discovered, for existence is conceived as human existence, that is, as the subject of the movement of transcendence rather than as the very advent of sense. It is finally "man" who "transcends himself toward a new behavior." Existence is grasped as man's facticity, even though the experience to which it refers leads us to overcome the frontal relation of man to being, to overcome the duality of subject and object. Prisoner of a dualist framework, Merleau-Ponty can therefore describe it only in a negative way: it coincides neither with the passivity of the anthropological subject situated in the objective world nor with the pure activity of the constituting subject. But existence is still really that of a subject, or rather is the subject itself, so that the fullness of the experience to which it refers cannot be attained. The notion of pre-personal consciousness, which is a term synonymous with existence, crystallizes the ambiguity. Even though Merleau-Ponty discovers an experience that is no longer personal, an experience in which the category of the person finds itself contested, he grasps it still on the basis of the personal subject, as a negation that is already its affirmation.

(pp. 8-9, Barbaras' emphasis, my bold)

I don't believe Barbaras has adequately established that for Merleau-Ponty human existence, much less existence, equates to the subject, though it is of course attestable. (One should give Merleau-Ponty a chance to explain what he means by "subject," and how he is intending us to understand the concept, for it is not after all transparent.) Additionally, it would be helpful to have an exact citation to Merleau-Ponty's discovery of prepersonal consciousness, because, off the top of my head, that could mean a few things other than what Barbaras' interpretation would have us believe. Prepersonal consciousness could be imminently personal, for instance, pregnant with the who, or with the existence through-sound, or with the sense-giving subject.

If I had to choose between existence and the very advent of sense I would choose existence. However, I'm not sure I have to choose. In what essential way is the very advent of sense not existential? We need to hear more from the anti-existential ontologist before we decide this point. For the moment, let's take a peek at Merleau-Ponty's thoughts on communication (which has perhaps been glossed over), on the existential meaning of words beneath the conceptual meanings of words, a "primordial" silence and the act that breaks the silence, simultaneously an expression and a grasping of a sense. He says:

What I communicate with primarily is not 'representations' or thought, but a speaking subject, with a certain style of being and with the 'world' at which he directs his aim. Just as the sense-giving intention which has set in motion the other person's speech is not an explicit thought, but a certain lack which is asking to be made good, so my taking up this intention is not a process of thinking on my part, but a synchronizing change of my own existence, a transformation of my being.

(Phenomenology, p. 183-184)

"I communicate with . . . a speaking subject." This is not an equation, but neither is it properly prepersonal (though logically one might think a preperson is implied). As I interpret it, nonetheless, it is precisely a with. Even if it is intended to simply state that the speaking subject is the instrument of an ego's communication, the with holds the meaning of a togetherness. Communication–synkairoticized, perhaps, with the advent of sense, a transfiguration and a trajectory–is existential through and through. What reason have we been given for thinking otherwise? Primordial silence, by which the body is refered to, its taking up of meaning prior to representation? But the body is enigmatic, which is far from saying that the body can never be understood. It secretes in itself a "significance" (p. 197, the quotes are Merleau-Ponty's). Our idea of "sense-giving" should have been transformed by Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the body as expression; the idea of significance has been challenged. The "disclosure of an immanent or incipient significance in the living body extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other 'objects' the miracle of expression" (ibid., Merleau-Ponty's quotes, my bold.) It is Merleau-Ponty who has problematized the object and by implication its other pole, the subject. Barbaras would hardly disagree. Incipience, however, rather than contestation, is the key to Merleau-Ponty's thinking here. To the extent that Merleau-Ponty did abandon existence, there might be other explanations for that besides the concept being superseded by the development of a superior ontology. That said, Barbaras' reading is certainly meritorious and thought-provoking.

Labels: Barbaras, cosmobiology, existence, Merleau-Ponty, signification, subject

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:11 AM. 7 comments

When we speak of classicism, we also mean that we want to read Merleau-Ponty just as one reads a classic author. Commentators insist on the fact that Merleau-Ponty teaches us the way in which he must be read. Because the truth of an author is not an object that can be circumscribed, because it resides in an unthought which inhabits it through and through without being formulated anywhere, the reading must be an interpretive appropriation, an active intersubjectivity, an echo. If this means simply that no interpretation is a mere repetition, that the reader reconceives the work on the basis of its own difference without anyone being able to say that this is an arbitrary projection, this is obvious. But the risk is that by means of the authority of this obvious fact, we dispense with a scrupulous reading and go straight to an 'intuition' of Merleau-Ponty that would only need to be reactivated differentially, instead of paying careful attention to the movement and concepts across which this intuition is elaborated. In our eyes, Merleau-Ponty's always luminous thought is still arduous, sinuous, and dense. By remaining as attentive as possible to the text, we propose simply to try to explicate it, just as one explicates a classic author; no one would think of exercising this dimension of active appropriation first in relation to a classic author. It seems to us not only that the richness of the texts at our disposal justifies a work of reconstitution but also, because of their density and their incompleteness, that they require such a work of reconstitution.

(Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, pp. xxxii-xxxiii), my emphasis

That there is an unscruple at the heart of the scrupulous reading, reading which demands giving the best of yourself, that is, reading which requires, among other things, creativity and a genuine practice of freedom, is obvious. Scrupulous reading, however, is not defined by any one scruple or its other–ah, but there's the rub. Is the unscruple also a scruple? Now it appears to be neither scruple nor unscruple. It's as if the scruple always had to be decided phronetically, as would then the unscruple. Can this pass as definition? Can we ever precisely know what a scruple is with respect to reading or any other pursuit? A scrupulous reading of Barbaras' text also requires that the reader be free to interrogate Barbaras' reading of Merleau-Ponty, which means of course putting into question Barbaras' readerly scruples. Scruples? What kind of reader am I after all? A man whose intelligence and creativity I admire puts years of study into a reading of an oeuvre and yet I would dare to question his scruples? But he gave me the idea? It's completely juvenile, I know. Asinine. Please forgive me.

Labels: Barbaras, echo, intersubjectivity, reading

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:58 AM. 0 comments

Rhythmosophy, in its phenomenological mode, presupposes no being. Saying "consciousness" is not in fact tantamount to making a naive metaphysical claim about being. On the contrary, being is a cogitatum before it is anything else. Saying "the being of consciousness" is as good as understanding consciousness through an als etwas, an "as" structure, in this case "being," which rather resembles a category. "Being" is intentional before it is anything–so far as we know apodictically. Of course one is free to speculate. (This argument by the way should be taken as a rejoinder to all ontologies, not merely those that posit sentient rocks). Rhythmosophy is a practical adventure before it is a speculative one, though its adherent so far knows very little and asks many questions. Missteps will surely be part of its developmental process. For now, for all he knows esse est percipi. Or not. Rhythmosophy makes no claims about being. (It's understanding of "existence," i.e. embodied sentient existence, could well be problematical.) Rhythmosophy begins with an intuition–I think we can call it that, though it may also be an inference one makes–that consciousness vibrates at different frequencies, or, more rudimentarily, that consciousness gives itself periodically, if not completely (different people sleep differently, it might be assumed), then to a sensible measure. Consciousness appears to have various intensities. Moreover, in daily life there is an inconstant, variable pace of consciousness, or there are various paces of the consciousness of the living subject, in Barbaras' sense of the term "living subject." The consciousness who moves, which means any consciousness that we know of, moves in rhythm. Well, I have Barbaras' Being of the Phenomenon lying around. I suppose I'll start reading that in late March. In the interim, concerning the being of the rhythmic subject, the living subject in this one sense, no initial claim, naive or otherwise, is made about its status, nature, or meaning. Obviously it's not plain stupid to talk about the existence of the living subject, or "the being of the existential subject of consciousness." It's rather a question of how one knows what one is talking about, or how one accounts for the abstractions one uses in order to intelligently talk about such things.

Labels: Barbaras, consciousness, epoché, ontology, rhythm

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:27 AM. 0 comments