Suffering the Modernist Legacy of Husserlian Phenomenology

Phenomenology has received a curiously spotty reception in the wake of the influx of Continental philosophy in language departments in North America beginning in the 1960s. Of the three major philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, Martin Heidegger remains the most widely read, yet he is also regularly discussed as though somehow beyond the context of phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961 deprived him of the opportunity to engage the emerging Anglo-American appetite for French theory in person and in "the flesh." More significantly, it denied him the chance of responding to the casual statements levied against phenomenology in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and other stars of the '68 generation. And although his voluminous and antiseptic prose has undoubtedly turned off many potential readers, Edmund Husserl's legacy has suffered from the errant impression that Jacques Derrida's most famous works from 1967—including Of Grammatology and especially Voice and Phenomenon—constitute something of a summary rejection of Husserl's project insofar as it represents the grand villain of the "metaphysics of presence." Husserl's reputation—again, within language departments and not necessarily philosophy departments—has suffered in inverse correlation with Derrida's status as perhaps the most influential and famous avatar of so-called "French theory." This situation has always been quite unfair to Husserl and phenomenology more generally.

With the rise of interest in the body, embodiment, and affect in the last two decades or so, the situation has started to change. Phenomenology has begun to achieve more critical currency. Merleau-Ponty's work has proven particularly important for the work of several influential scholars in the fields of film studies and new media studies. Beyond the work of Vivian Sobchack and Mark B. N. Hansen, however, the word phenomenology has largely become disconnected from its philosophical origins.¹ Use of the word phenomenological as a synonym for embodied experience constitutes merely the most egregious symptom of this condition. Discussion of Husserl's work, it almost goes without saying, remains marginal at best, and the very meaning of phenomenology remains unproductively elusive.

Although it is not aimed at correcting these problems of North American literary and media studies, Stephen Barker's translation of François-David Sebbah's 2001 monograph Testing the Limit offers a potent resource for those interested in not only phenomenology but in understanding its legacy for several important continental philosophers. The specific achievement of Sebbah's text lies with his careful and revealing readings of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion among a group of French philosophers whose concern with issues of givenness, time, and subjectivity all ultimately derive from Husserl and thus share a certain family resemblance. Sebbah refers to these philosophers as phenomenologists, a key decision no doubt meant to provoke. It is no surprise to discuss Henry or Marion as phenomenologists, but eyebrows might be raised with respect to Derrida and Levinas. Even though Levinas studied with both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg, and Derrida spent the first decade of his career writing about Husserl, both thinkers are generally thought of as breaking with phenomenology in order to establish their own philosophical projects. Carefully avoiding the politics of labeling philosophers as phenomenologists with a capital P, Sebbah admirably explores their work as operating within the longer tradition of phenomenology in a refreshingly nonpartisan and nongenerationalist manner.

Sebbah synthesizes the work of these often very different philosophers by devoting himself to specifying how each operates at the extreme limits of Husserlian phenomenology. To pursue this project, Sebbah explicitly suspends consideration of phenomenology's more recent theological turn (and silently suspends analysis of similarly contemporary efforts to naturalize phenomenology in concert with research in cognitive science and neuroscience).² At least in the North American context, the impact of this decision registers beyond the already significant but ultimately highly specialized payoff associated with the astute reconsideration of...