The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life

2. With My Hand over My Heart, Looking You Right in the Eyes, I Promise Myself to You...: Reflections on Derrida's Interpretation of Husserl

2 With My Hand over My Heart, Looking You Right in the Eyes, I Promise Myself to You . . . Reflections on Derrida’s Interpretation of Husserl We should never forget that Foucault’s Words and Things is contemporaneous with Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon. We should never overlook the similarity in the two titles, with their little ‘‘and.’’ What does this ‘‘and’’ mean? In chapter 9 of Words and Things, ‘‘Man and His Doubles,’’ Foucault speaks of ‘‘a hiatus, minuscule and yet invincible , which resides in the ‘and’’’ of all doubles, such as ‘‘the empirical and the transcendental’’ (MC 351 / 340). Indeed, whereas in the classical epoch time became the foundation of space, in the modern epoch—that is, for Foucault, our present time—space, a ‘‘profound spatiality,’’ a distance, has become the foundation of time. All of the thought that evolves from this moment—the moment, we might say, called ‘‘1968’’1 —evolves from this distance. Therefore there is, of course, more than one way to conceive this distance. The most fundamental principle of Derrida’s thought is the phenomenological principle of Fremderfahrung, from Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation: I can never have a presentation (a Gegenwärtigung ) of the interior life, the inside, of another; I can only ever have a representation of it (a Vergegenwärtigung). Derrida conceives the profound spatiality, the distance, the écart through Vergegenwärtigung. In Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida uses this phenomenological principle of intersubjectivity to contest the implicit ‘‘metaphysics of presence ’’ in Husserl’s phenomenology. In other words, the necessary possibility of representation in the experience of the alien always 15 contests phenomenology’s ‘‘principle of all principles,’’ that is, the principle that ‘‘every originary donative intuition, everything [in other words] that is given originarily in person [leibhaftig], is a legitimating source of knowledge’’ (Ideas I, § 24).2 For Derrida, there is no pure intuition, not even in my own lived-experience. Even in my solipsistic sphere of ownness, there is only ever a Vergegenwärtigung, and therefore some sort of nonpresence and nonbeing. Derrida has generalized Vergegenwärtigung to all experience, indeed, to all life. This ‘‘deconstruction of phenomenology as the metaphysics of presence,’’ as Derrida himself would say, is still at work in his most recent writings , in, for instance, his 2000 Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy (Touch, to Touch Him—Jean-Luc Nancy).3 Within the context of a lengthy discussion of Nancy’s ‘‘philosophy of touch,’’4 Derrida, for the first time since 1967, revisits Husserl’s phenomenology. Here I intend to examine the new ‘‘deconstruction of phenomenology ’’ found in Le Toucher, in the chapter called ‘‘Tangent II.’’ I hope to show the continuity between this recent text and Voice and Phenomenon . As in chapter 6 of Voice and Phenomenon, in ‘‘Tangent II’’ of Le Toucher there is a critique of the idea that one can have ‘‘a pure experience of one’s own body’’ (LT 201). We should note that, throughout Le Toucher, Derrida renders German Leib as le corps propre (‘‘one’s own body’’), although Leib is commonly translated into French as la chair (‘‘flesh’’). Derrida’s translation shows us what is at stake here. Inside of my own, proper body, there is the contamination of the improper , of what is not my own; there is the contamination of others. Or, as the French would say, ‘‘au cœur même de ce qui est de mon propre, les intrus me touchent.’’ Thus, more generally, I want to come to understand the philosophy of the heart that animates this entire book (cf. LT 47–48). This ‘‘cardiology’’ is connected to the movement in Derrida’s thinking from a thought of the question (as in the question of being) to the promise (as in the promise of justice), from, in other words, ontology (or phenomenological ontology) to eschatology. Indeed, we are going to say that Derrida’s kind of critique of phenomenology always results in eschatology.5 Presence and Spacing The new direction appears already in Derrida’s 1962 Introduction to his French translation of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry.6 In his Introduction, Derrida stresses that the mathematical object has always been Husserl’s ‘‘privileged example’’ of an object (LOG 6 / 27). 16 The Implications of Immanence The mathematical object (and thus the geometrical object; cf. LOG 79n2 / 83n87) holds a privileged position for Husserl because it is what it appears to...