Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology by Tarek R. Dika, W. Chris Hackett (review)

If the first generation of phenomenology — a philosophy whose fundamental principle resides in an attention to ‘things themselves’ (Husserl, Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 168) — was definitively German, the second, represented across a wide swathe of thinkers including Sartre, Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Irigaray, was predominantly French. This volume is a substantial introduction and survey, via a series of interviews, of a subsequent generation whose work represents a significant dimension of contemporary philosophy in the French language. The authors’ claim that the volume is ‘the most systematic English-language survey of contemporary French phenomenology to date’ (p. 22) is amply justified, bearing in mind that the contemporaneity at stake is broadly construed. Of the philosophers who feature in the book (Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Luc Marion, Claude Romano, Jocelyn Benoist, Michel Henry, Renaud Barbarus, Françoise Dastur, Jean- Yves Lacoste, Emmanuel Falque, and Jean-Louis Chrétien) probably the best known — Henry and Marion—began writing in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. However, the generation represented here is chronologically coherent insofar as all of those concerned participated in discussions at the Archives Husserl de Paris in the early 1980s. Henry and Marion’s influence on the younger figures is decisive; despite divergent areas of focus much of the discussion revolves around the key notions of ‘givenness’ (Marion) and ‘auto-affection’ (Henry). While the concept of givenness subsumes the distinction between intuition and signification in the notion of what is given to consciousness, it also opens the door to a consideration of the ‘phenomenon of revelation’ (p. 57), and thus to the religious dimension. This angle has been foremost in the reception of phenomenology since Dominique Janicaud’s diagnosis of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology (Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: L’Éclat, 1991)). Tarek Dika and Chris Hackett’s volume embraces this debate while also side-stepping it by comprising a sustained attention to other no less prominent dimensions: the substantial engagement on the part of Romano and Benoist, for example, with analytic philosophy of mind and of language, on the one hand, and the legacy of Henry for phenomenological philosophies of life, on the other. For Henry, the starting point is the ‘immediate experience’ of life: ‘life is never given as other or external to itself; instead, it feels itself in an auto-affection in the strict sense’ (p. 125; original emphases). This paves the way for a ‘material phenomenology’ (p. 117), subtly expressed in what Henry calls the ‘flesh’ of an ‘embrace of oneself ’ (p. 125). After a synthesizing Introduction the volume begins with a useful consideration of the historical context for French phenomenology by Courtine, and closes with a short interview with Chrétien, a thinker slightly outside the main branch of phenomenology, who in his attempt to ‘think beyond subjectivity’ (p. 232) stands out among those featured here in his attention to the particular grasp of interiority given in literature and in the novel specifically. This suggests the extent to which Dika and Hackett’s volume constitutes a substantial resource not only for an ‘inside’ knowledge of contemporary French philosophy, but also for ongoing engagements with the nature of the literary.