Ontotheological Turnings?: The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology

Conclusion

208 Ontotheological Turnings? or a community. Furthermore, one should not pass easily over the fact that in the account of the third party, ontotheology is linked to politics, for is it not in the latter that divine power is all too readily turned into a power over the divine? It remains to be seen just how or even if Levinas differs from Heidegger on this matter of the ontotheological operations of thought and thinking. Let me just note a few striking similarities. First, just as we have seen Heidegger contending that metaphysical thinking—a pleonasm—separates that which properly belongs together, for instance being and time, so for Levinas thinking, when and if it thinks, will separate between being and otherwise than being to the point of irreparable cleavage: it is impossible, contradictory even, to speak of something else than being from out of being—as if es kein Anderes als Sein gibt. Second, when Levinas comments upon the nominalization of the verb to be to such a point that being (in its verbal sense) becomes represented and thought of from out of a being that, in a way, distributes beingness to all beings, one might again be reminded of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s ‘error,’ for this nominalization seems to correspond exactly to how Heidegger understands the ‘beginning’ of metaphysics in Plato. According to Heidegger, Plato interpreted the presencing of a particular being as something present-at-hand, which is the same for (and present in) every particular being. Presencing as a mode of being—verbal—is then itself taken as a present-at-hand property of any particular being. This is why I will discuss such a phenomenology of presencing in the conclusion, for it is precisely such a phenomenology that seems compatible with the turn to the individual being. Insofar as such an attentiveness to the appearing and presencing of a particular being would elude the permanent presence characteristic of all metaphysics—since presencing is in each case different—it remains to be considered whether an overcoming of metaphysics would be a possibility. When it comes to the ontotheological operations of thought, Levinas’ account of what thought does when it thinks might give us the opportunity to answer the question I raised earlier against Marion: for if it is, for Marion, with the anamorphosis really a question of ‘two phenomenalities in a single phenomenon,’ and if Levinas states that the Other is always and already— simultaneously—an apparition and an epiphany, the correction I would like to advance against Marion would be simply this: it is not a matter of the object or the saturated phenomenon; it is rather that one should try to understand how, when confronted with a saturated phenomenon, objectness nevertheless remains there. The question, then, is how diverse appearances can appear at once. For this, I would suggest returning to Heidegger’s account 209 Marion and Levinas on Metaphysics of the worldling of the world—after all, it is a good philosophical question to ask in consideration of whether things might actually exist outside the (my) ego or even why the worldling of the world did not await me for its actual happening and occurs independently of every position we all would take in its regard. In a certain way, we might be back at square one, back to Heidegger that is, for Being, in Heidegger, is named already in its difference with beings; we come across, and encounter beings always out of the twofold (‘Zweifalt’), the between of being and beings.62 To conclude, then, it might not come as a surprise that Marion’s account of Pascal does not answer the question of the recurrence of the subject-object distinction in French phenomenology. In fact, it simply prolongs the problem. Marion’s account of Pascal seems to be, first, a theological usurpation of the question of metaphysics, and this usurpation, second, seems to proceed in an entirely metaphysical manner. This is obvious in Pascal’s portrayal of what looks like Descartes’ version of the bad infinite. Marion comments that “the infinite requires an absence of limits in an infinity of parameters and not simply in just a single one of them. In the latter case, nonfinitude results directly from the conditions for the exercise of our finite mind, which privileges this or that parameter” (DMP, 290). This latter case, then, is what Descartes would name ‘the indefinite’—as opposed to the ‘good’ infinite—and resembles the mathematical infinite of n...