Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena

Phenomenology and Lived Experience

in the struggle to define itself in opposition to its predecessor, the generation in France that fashioned itself as postphenomenological took special pleasure in deriding the concept of “lived experience.” Jacques Derrida, to take a salient example, charged in Of Grammatology that experience is an “unwieldy” concept that “belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure [sous rature]. ‘Experience’ has always designated the relationship with a presence , whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not.”1 the phenomenological attempt to raise it to a transcendental level, above the vagaries of historical and cultural change, was deeply problematic, he continued, because it “is governed by the theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the reduction of the trace.”2 it therefore fails to understand the temporal disunity of différance. Moreover, phenomenology naively believes that “all experience is the experience of meaning.”3 Likewise, Michel Foucault complained in The Order of Things that phenomenology was a philosophy that resolved itself into “a description—empirical despite itself—of actual experience, and into an ontology of the unthought that automatically short-circuits the primacy of the ‘i think.’”4 and in the interviews he gave in 1978 to the italian journalist Duccio trombadori, he argued that the phenomenologist’s experience is basically a way of organizing a reflective examination [regard réflexif] of any aspect of daily, lived experience in its transitory form, in order to grasp its meaning. nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot, on the contrary, try through experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the Phenomenology and Lived Experience 100 essays from the edge limit or the extreme. they attempt to gather the maximum amount of intensity and impossibility at the same time.5 Whereas phenomenology sought to find within daily experience an ultimately integrated subject, the more transgressive thinkers he preferred gave experience “the task of ‘tearing’ the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely ‘other’ than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation. it is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a ‘limit-experience’ that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson that i have learned from these authors.”6 accordingly, Gilles Deleuze could claim Foucault’s major achievement was “the conversion of phenomenology to epistemology. . . . Everything is knowledge, and this is the first reason why there is no ‘savage experience’: there is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge.”7 Jean-François Lyotard, himself an early adherent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty ’s version of phenomenology, ultimately came to similar conclusions. in The Differend, he acknowledged that “an experience can be described only by means of a phenomenological dialectic,” but then added that the idea of an experience presupposes that of an i which forms itself [Bildung ] by gathering in the properties of things that come up (events) and which constitutes reality by effectuating their temporal synthesis. it is in relation to this i that events are phenomena. Phenomenology derives its name from this. But the idea of the i and that of experience which is associated with it are not necessary for the description of reality. they come from the subordination of the question of truth to the doctrine of evidence.8 auschwitz, or more precisely the way it has become a proper name for the ineffability of history and the impossibility of its capture by speculative discourse, had given the lie to the phenomenological concept of experience, which could be traced all the way back to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. “Can one still speak of experience in the case of the ‘auschwitz’ model?,” Lyotard asked, and then, following theodor adorno, responded firmly that one could not.9 How valid, we need to ask, was this denunciation of “lived experience” so insistently leveled by postphenomenological critics? Did they do justice to the multiple ways in which experience was evoked in the phenomenological tradition ? Were perhaps some of their own alternative usages anticipated in the work of certain of their targets? to answer these questions, it will be necessary to step phenomenology and lived experience 101 back and provide a less tendentious recapitulation of the role of experience in the thought of the major phenomenological theorists. to make this dauntingly ambitious...