The Impossible Completion of Immanence

In the context of increasing attentiveness to notions of biopower, Lawlor’s work provides a forceful intervention through Husserlian phenomenology and post-phenomenological thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Giles Deleuze. Given that one of phenomenology’s key principles is the notion of Erlebnis (“lived experience,” or vécu), a study of the kind that Lawlor offers has been urgently needed to renew the question of life through the specific idioms of continental philosophy, of which phenomenology is a dominant strand. Taking his point of departure from current “political signs” of paradoxical natures—where the preservation of a single life in the case of Terry Schiavo in the United States lies alongside the destruction of the multiple in the case of Arab suicide bombers and the Darfur crisis—Lawlor shows that attempts to overcome Western metaphysics have generated “philosophical signs” of no less paradoxical natures, which rethink life from the notion of a miniscule hiatus, un écart infime. Lawlor adapts this notion of un écart infime from Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966), where it operates as the leverage for dissociating the empirical and transcendental doubles in the well-known “end of man” section (149 fn. 19; 9). The notion is then more broadly extended to refer to the division of the living present, the blind spot in the visual field, as well as to the nonplace of death in Derrida and Merleau-Ponty’s works.

Since his early text Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (2002), Lawlor has been guided by Jean Hyppolite’s phrase that “immanence is complete” (4). The greatest challenge that the present work faces is how to continue pursuing a “completion” of immanence without thereby returning life to the metaphysical privilege; that is, to a thought of the transcendent. For if a philosophy of immanence situates death, powerlessness, or finitude in the conception of life, its so-called completion is not only impossible; such an impossibility is structurally necessary. Hence, the title of Lawlor’s work, by highlighting the implications inherent in any project of immanence, bespeaks of its own risk. As the author admits from the outset, independent thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze “diffract” in the “completion of immanence,” and therefore in “the overcoming of metaphysics as Platonism” (8). If, according to Lawlor, the “completion of immanence” can be sought only from the nonplace or the zone of un écart infime, which characterizes the “mixing” of what metaphysics determines as dualisms, then such a project ought to demonstrate at the level of its own critical limits another structure of the écart infime that permits the mixing of distinct post-phenomenological viewpoints. Hence, the ambitiousness of Lawlor’s work lies in having to traverse a range of thinkers without reductively organizing each of their specific works around a mere thematics of life: what is at stake is not a simple matter of studying the term or workings of un écart infime as it appears variably in Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Merleau-Ponty. Yet, on the other hand, if what does lie at stake is a question of “immanent” methodology, of mixing as method in order to show the concept of this radical mixing, then the absence of such a method in the work unexpectedly bears its sobering achievement: the impossibility of a “completion” of immanence for a philosophy of life.

The first four chapters focus on Foucault and Derrida’s employment of the term “miniscule hiatus” or un écart infime for the critique of phenomenological lived experience as hetero-affection whereby sensing is always contaminated by difference and alterity. Chapters 5–10 extend Foucault’s critique of lived experience to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “mixturism” and in doing so present different views on the position of death in life. Lawlor concludes the first chapter by arguing that the dissociation of finitude between positivism and eschatology as discussed in Foucault’s Words and Things (Lawlor’s...