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The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity A passing bell sounds in the word “rigor” used in the phrase borrowed from Derrida in the title of this book to perform a double service. On the one hand the title refers to the rigor mortis threatened by the rigidly rigorous pure science of representation that Husserl and the young Wittgenstein both sought as an ideal and feared as an instigator of crisis. On the other hand the title refers to a deepening of crisis, to what may be described as a hyperCritical crisis because it is a crisis provoked by a responsibility, spelled out in the second part of this book, to let the rigor of universalist Kantian humanism and Enlightenment defined as freedom (as considered in chapter 11) be contaminated by a singularity that is other than particularity and predication. For Husserl, for the young Wittgenstein, and for Kant rigor is the strict purity of the principle or law. What happens, we have asked with Levinas, when this rigor of the law of universalist humanism is crossed by the address of singularist ethical alterhumanism? What happens, we have asked with Derrida, when the rigor of the law of universalist humanism and the rigor of alterhumanism are crossed by the address of singularist ethical inhumanism? Then rigor no longer signifies purity and crystalline essence, but the hardship of the “rough ground” to which Wittgenstein urged readers of his later work to go back and the aporia that must, according to Derrida, be endured. FOURTEEN 282 | TABLE TALK In the first chapter of the second part of this study note was taken of Derrida’s reference to the many places where Levinas maintains that we have to go phenomenologically beyond phenomenology, and to Derrida’s endorsement of that assertion when he writes “That is what I am trying to do, also. I remain and want to remain a rationalist, a phenomenologist”1 and “I would like to remain phenomenological in what I say against phenomenology.”2 Further endorsement is made when in passages treating of so-called impossible possibilities he writes of their impossibility or possibility as something that “appears” and is “experienced as” an impossibility or as a possibility dependent on its impossibility.3 His going beyond phenomenology is not least but not only a going beyond the phenomenology of language investigated in the first part of this study. It is a going beyond a phenomenology of language, truth, and formal logic to a modal logic that threatens or promises to provoke a crisis in the very logicality of the phenomeno-logical. In this modal logic, instead of being simply the opposite of impossibility as it is in the modal logics alluded to toward the end of the introduction of this study, possibility presupposes an impossibility. This impossibility that is a condition underlying possibility is a condition of the possibility of being under an obligation. Put baldly, and assuming it is true that either I can do x or that I cannot do x, the “I can do x” that according to Kant is presupposed or implied by “I ought to do x” (“Ich kann, denn ich soll,” “I can because I should”), presupposes a certain “I cannot do x.” This joint assertion of “I can do x” and “I cannot do x” is by the standards of classical logic impossible. However, on closer inspection we learn that it is not directly this classical logical impossibility that Derrida has in mind when he writes of a certain impossibility that is presupposed or implied by the “I can.” What he aims to bring to our attention is an un-possibility corresponding not to an unqualified “I cannot” but to what exceeds the opposition of “I can” and “I cannot” of Kantian free choice. This un-possibility is not the modality of what I either can or cannot do, where the “or” is exclusive. It is a modality that breaks with my powers in order to make room for what is not within the realm of my power or potentiality, somewhat as the outwardly directed intentionality attributed to all consciousness in the phenomenology of Husserl is interrupted by the inwardly directed intervention and invention of what in Levinas’s quasi-phenomenology is provisionally called reversed intentionality. If the “I ought” of ethical obligation or responsibility presupposes “I can,” it does so only if “I can” presupposes a non-ability on my part. My non-ability is the condition of decidability and of givability and...

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