Speaking the Phenomenon
Graduate Conference in Phenomenology, University of Sussex, UK
24th & 25th
May 2012
Conference Programme
Thursday, 24th
May 2012, Room: MS 3.07A (Medical School)
09:00 - 10:00 Registration & Coffee
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10:00 - 10:15 Plenary Welcome Session
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Welcome address by the organisers and Dr. Tanja Stähler
(University of Sussex)
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10:20 - 11:40 Session 1: Phenomenology and the
Question of Method
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Chair: Christos Hadjioannou
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Speaker 1: Steven Delay (Rice University, US)
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Title of Paper: Phenomenology’s
Method and Matter: Reflection and the “Care of Self” in Husserl and Heidegger
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Speaker 2: Fintan Neylan (University College Dublin,
Ireland)
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Title of Paper: On
a Reduction without an epoche: Heidegger's Phenomenological Method
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11:40 - 11:50 BREAK
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11:50 – 13:10 Session 2: Phenomenology and
Hermeneutics
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Chair: Gabriel
Martin
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Speaker 1: Miri Mahabad Kuttin (Bar-Ilan University, Israel),
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Title of Paper: Husserl's phenomenology as
a hermeneutic stance
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Speaker 2: Sidra Shahid
(University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
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Title of Paper: Heidegger’s Transcendental
Method as a Non-Reductive Account of Phenomena
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13:10 - 14:00 LUNCH
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14:00 - 15:20 Session 3: Language, Authenticity and Integrity
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Chair: Jana Elsen
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Speaker 1: Charlotte
Knowles (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK)
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Title of Paper: Discourse
and Authentic Disclosure: The Call of Conscience in Being and Time
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Speaker 2: Peter
Hanly (Boston College, US)
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Title of Paper: The Mark of Failure: Heidegger and
Herder on Word and Origin
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15:20 - 15:30 break
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15:30 - 16:50 Session 4: Heidegger and Moods
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Chair: Dr. Zoe Sutherland
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Speaker 1: Christopher Merwin (The New School for Social
Research, US)
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Title of Paper: Between Hope & Calm: The
Question of Why Gelassenheit is not a Mood in Being & Time
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Speaker 2: Christos Hadjioannou (University of Sussex, UK
& Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
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Title of Paper: The
“binding necessity” of phenomenology: Heidegger’s turn to Stimmung
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16:50 - 17:15 break
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17:15 - 19:15
Keynote Address
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Professor Miguel de Beistegui (University of Warwick)
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Title of Paper: The
Phenomenology of Desire in France
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Chair: Dr. Paul Davies
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Conference Dinner
Friday 25th May
2012, Room: Friston 108
08:30 – 09:00 Registration and Coffee
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09:10 – 10:30 Session 5: Critical perspectives on
phenomenology
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Chair: Arthur Willemse
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Speaker 1: Danny Smith (University of Warwick, UK)
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Title of Paper: Philosophy of Experience, Philosophy of the
Concept
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Speaker 2: Rauly Nykanen (University of West England, UK)
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Title of Paper: Super‐chaos meets the
Extended Mobile: Meillasoux’s contingency and
Ravaisson’s identity
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10:30 – 10:40 BREAK
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10:40 - 12:00 Session 6 : Humanism
and Technology
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Chair: Dimitri Kladiskakis
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Speaker 1: Noah Gabriel Martin (University of Sussex, UK)
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Title of Paper: tba
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Speaker 2: Carolina
Christofidaki (University of Sussex, UK)
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Title of Paper: Being
beyond Humanism: A Phenomenological Approach on the Human Position
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12.00 – 13:00 LUNCH
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13:00 - 14.20 Session 7: Phenomenology and
Language
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Chair: Patrick Levy
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Speaker 1: Alexander Malt (University of Durham, UK)
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Title of Paper: Tearing Meaning from an Undivided Whole
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Speaker 2: Seferin James (University College Dublin, Irelands)
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Title of Paper: Derrida
and the Voice that Keeps Silence
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14:20 - 14:30 BREAK
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14:30 - 16:30 Keynote Address
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Professor Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan
University)
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Title of Paper: Phenomenology
at the limit; phenomena speaking and spoken
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Chair: Dr. Tanja Stähler.
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17:30 – 18:00 break
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18:00 - 19:30 Closing Discussion
Discussion of the themes and findings of the conference
led by Dr. Paul Davies in conversation with Professor Béatrice Han-Pile
(University of Essex).
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19:30 Closing Remarks
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Conference Dinner
Abstracts of
Graduate Speakers
Name: Steven DeLay (Rice University, US)
Title of Paper: Phenomenology’s Method and Matter: Reflection and
the “Care of Self” in Husserl and Heidegger
Abstract: This essay addresses an aporia that has long vexed the
phenomenological tradition: what is the true method and matter of
phenomenology? Taking my cue from Heidegger's early Freiburg and Marburg lecture
courses, I shall argue that the genuine sache of phenomenological
philosophy is factical life in its temporal, historical, and factical becoming.
Now, according to the early Heidegger, the philosophical tradition, including
the works of Husserl's own Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen I,
has largely failed to examine factical life adequately. Indeed, as is well
known, though Heidegger acknowledges that Husserl “gave him eyes to see,” he
nevertheless criticizes his mentor's static phenomenology for failing to
actualize the full potential of phenomenological method. And yet, though much
has been made of Heidegger's supposed repudiation of Husserlian phenomenology,
it turns out that Husserl's genetic and generative phenomenology is expressly
suited to describe the very temporal becoming of factical life and the
socio-historical world which Heidegger himself was keen to plumb. Perhaps
unexpectedly, then, the early Heidegger and later Husserl articulate an
uncannily similar view of the genuine matter of phenomenological philosophy.
The fundamental matter of phenomenology, they agree, is the investigation of
the interrelation among factical life, history, and world. Accordingly, the
method of phenomenological philosophy is one of critical reflection that deigns
to comprehend the self-movement of individual and historical existence. In
other words, on this view, because life is understood to be the genuine concern
of philosophy, the phenomenologist's existential commitment to investigate
factical life constitutes a unique intersection between method and matter. A
manner of philosophizing ever concerned with examining factical life,
phenomenology amounts to a philosophy whose raison d'être is the attempt
to uncover and understand the very Boden, concrete life, from whence it
originates.
Name: Fintan Neylan (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Title of Paper: On a Reduction without an epoche: Heidegger's Phenomenological Method
Abstract: In the lectures given in 1927, the year of Being and Time’s publication, one finds
a Heidegger somewhat polemical to the phenomenological reduction of his mentor,
Edmund Husserl: but was he on a path out of phenomenology altogether, already
making the moves toward his so-called later position?
This paper will argue that this
position is superficial and that Heidegger only wishes to expel the epoche from phenomenology: the task he
takes on is to reformulate the reduction into one which does not bracket (or in
his mind constrict) beings, but allows them to guide the apprehender back to an
originary givenness of Being. Indeed, I argue that what Heidegger wishes to
make explicit is that the reduction is not a methodological tool which the
phenomenologist happens upon, but is actually the thematic manifestation of the
“basic act”, later characterised as a decision [Entscheidung], through which Dasein primordially gained a
pre-ontological understanding of Being.
It is this basic act/decision
which makes both beings and their determination originally available to Dasein,
thus I will argue that Heidegger’s initial goal is to rekindle this act in the
terms of a reduction in order to alight from oblivious everydayness toward the
truth of Being.
Name: Miri Mahabad Kuttin (Bar-Ilan University, Israel),
Title of Paper: Husserl's phenomenology as a hermeneutic stance
Abstract: Heidegger, a prominent student of Husserl’s school, described his work Being
and time as both phenomenology and hermeneutics. The second literature
emphasizes that Heidegger differs from Husserl by adding the concept of
interpretation and highlighting it. However, I hold a broad view of
hermeneutics, which does not see it as contrary to phenomenology. As part
of my PhD I embody the hermeneutic implications of the Husserlian
phenomenological method. I assert that it is not enough to distinguish
between Heidegger's manner of investigation in Being and time and
Husserl's manner of investigation only by adding the adjective
"hermeneutic' to Heidegger's investigation because the difference from
Husserl does not lie only in what Heidegger ‘adds’ to phenomenology, i.e.,
hermeneutics, but in the character of his hermeneutics.
Indeed, Husserl characterized phenomenology as the science of phenomena
and not referred explicitly to hermeneutics. He did not perceive
phenomenology as hermeneutics but as a strict philosophical
method. However, during his investigations of meanings, Husserl used the
terms understanding and interpretation. For interpretation is part of the
act of granting meaning. Husserl did not constitute an interpretive method
but studied the constitution of objects and aspired to describe the way to
reach an ultimate understanding. A hermeneutic stance can be extracted from his
writings although Husserl himself did not discuss the matter of
hermeneutics. For example, according to Husserl, description is a decisive part of understanding the phenomena. The phenomenology as Husserl's hermeneutic
stance outlines what we understand as a phenomenon as well as how we examine
the phenomenon and try to understand it.
The phenomenological hermeneutic stance strives to make the implicit
explicit. This position aims to reach a faithful expression of the
phenomenon, clarity and distinction in its presentation, which are obtained
from devotion to the givenness of the phenomenon and from reflection. This
hermeneutical position is distinguished by the relying on the immediate
experience and the phenomenon in its usual modus. The criterion for
understanding in this position is the point of convergence between the
intention and the given.
Name: Sidra Shahid (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Title of Paper: Heidegger’s
Transcendental Method as a Non-Reductive Account of Phenomena
Abstract: This paper addresses the possibility of providing a
non-reductive account of phenomena through an examination of the transcendental
and pragmatic strands of Heidegger’s philosophy. It has been argued that
Heidegger’s early philosophy presents an ontological project that is at once
pragmatic and transcendental. A pragmatic construal of experience seems
irreconcilable with a transcendental outlook. After all, one of the central
ideas underpinning Heidegger’s account of being is the primacy of practice which
places precognitive skills and capacities at the heart of intelligibility and
cognition and is, seemingly, at odds with transcendental philosophy, which
rejects the practical nature of such claims. Transcendental philosophy,
generally conceived, disavows pragmatic justifications, since it seeks out the
indispensable and necessary conditions for phenomena. However, Heidegger
maintains an apparently transcendental stance arguing that understanding is a
necessary condition for the possibility of interpretation and that, broadly,
the primordial orientation of being-in-the-world is a necessary condition for
the possibility of intentionality. Heidegger’s position emerges as partially
pragmatic and partially transcendental. Can these strands be reconciled?
I argue that these
seemingly opposing strands can be reconciled by acknowledging that Heidegger is
not a full-fledged pragmatist and that, further, he offers a unique conception
of transcendental inquiry best characterized as transcendental- hermeneutic.
Heidegger’s transcendental inquiry already presupposes the primacy of practice
and, as such, is not at odds with the practical thrust of his work. I argue
this is largely due to his unique conception of the transcendental method,
which, in beginning with experience, is an account that instead of subsuming
phenomena to their conditions illuminates the interdependence of ontological
structures and their elements. As such, Heidegger’s transcendental method
functions from within phenomena and by appealing to the phenomena itself and in
this sense accommodates practices. Such an account does not distort phenomena
by breaking experience down to its bare components; on the contrary, it
attempts to lay bare the grounds of experience through the experience itself.
An examination of how the practical and transcendental come together in
Heidegger’s philosophy brings to light the capacity of a
transcendental-hermeneutic project to investigate phenomena while leaving its
richness intact.
Name: Charlotte Knowles (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK)
Title of Paper: Discourse and Authentic Disclosure: The Call of
Conscience in Being and Time
Abstract: In Being and Time
Dasein comes to understand itself authentically through hearing and
understanding the call of conscience. But Dasein not only hears the call, it is
also the caller. This may appear contradictory and some have even argued it
constitutes an ‘incoherent process of internal bootstrapping’. However, I hope
to show that for Heidegger the call of conscience exemplifies discourse as a
mode of authentic disclosure and can be explained in Heidegger’s own terms
without contradiction. I argue that with regard to conscience, the question is
not how Dasein can call to itself from its lostness in the “they”, but rather
how Dasein can come to hear itself. Through analogy with Heidegger’s discussion
of the circle of understanding in division one, I argue that the call of conscience
manifests as a hermeneutic circle and that hearing is key to finding a way into
this circle. I suggest that Dasein is constantly calling, always understanding
and has the possibility to be always hearing, but that this possibility must
first be ‘awakened’ in Dasein. I suggest that the “they” prevents Dasein from
hearing, but that it is also through an encounter with the “they”, in terms of
its inability to capture Dasein in the fullness of its Being, that Dasein’s
ability to hear itself is unlocked. The call of conscience is at once a
speaking, a hearing and an understanding of the phenomena. It discloses to
Dasein its ownmost authentic potentiality for Being and as such helps to
suggest a way in which we can avoid misunderstanding ourselves, Others and the
world around us. The call of conscience ultimately endorses and reflects the
phenomenological method, letting the Being of entities, and indeed of one’s own
Dasein, ‘show[]-itself-in-itself’.
Name: Peter Hanly (Boston College, US)
Title of Paper: The
Mark of Failure: Heidegger and Herder on Word and Origin
Abstract: It is clear that the question of language is of utmost
importance to Heidegger’s work of the late 1930’s, the period of the so-called seynsgeschichtlich treatises. This
preoccupation is increasingly evident
thematically – as the recent publication of GA 74, Zum Wesen zur Sprache attests – but is equally apparent in the
interruptive and fragmentary presentation of the writing itself, a writing
which seems to seek to bring into question the very possibility of
philosophical discourse.
This paper will argue that
decisive to the unfolding of the question of language in Heidegger’s work, both
in this period and beyond, is the confrontation with Herder, as evidenced in
the 1939 seminar on the latter’s ‘Treatise
on the Origin of Language.’ It is the notion of originary ‘mark’ that
Herder develops here that enables Heidegger to conceive of the word as
dislocating, as disruptive in its very essence. In addition, Herder’s
multi-layered centralization of listening allows for a re-configuration of the
discourse of subjectivity in terms of a ‘gathering’ towards a listening which
is always grounded in, and directed towards, this disruption. If Heidegger is
able to write, in the Beiträge zur
Philosophie, that ‘the word fails, not as an occasional occurrence…but
originarily,’ this originary failure must be understood not as the index of the
unreachable plenitude of the phenomenon, but as a break, an interruption that
belongs to the word itself. An interruptive and fragmentary discourse will thus
become not merely the paradigm for an address to the question of language.
Rather, the interruption will represent – paradoxically – the very core of our
experience of language itself.
Name: Christopher Merwin (The New School for Social Research, US)
Title of Paper: Between
Hope & Calm: The Question of Why Gelassenheit is not a Mood in Being &
Time
Abstract: This paper seeks to interrogate the complex relationship
between hope and calm or ‘releasement’ (gelassenheit)
in Heidegger’s Being and Time and to
the special phenomenological way that both of these concepts relate to
anticipation, futurity, and time.
Special emphasis will be placed on a proper phenomenological distinction
between mere hope and gelassenheit as
a privative characteristic of Daseins possibility to be. More broadly, we must first understand the
complex way in which gelassenheit
relates to Dasein with a view toward the relation of mood to Dasein’s other
existential structures. As a terminus technicus Heidegger’s usage of gelassenheit acts already as a
construction, harkening back to Meister Eckhart’s rhetorical usage of the terms
and a similar conception within Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Yet the question must be begged of Heidegger
as to why gelassenheit is not a mood
of Dasein when mood itself inhabits
understanding, speech, and a mode of being-in.
Final attention will placed on the way in which gelassenheit relates to Dasein’s future and a formal Heideggerian
means to understand the phenomenological differences implicit between hope on
the one hand, and the calmness of anticipation on the other.
Name: Christos Hadjioannou (University of Sussex, UK
& Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Title of Paper: The “binding necessity” of phenomenology:
Heidegger’s turn to Stimmung
Abstract: One significant characteristic that marks out Heidegger’s
phenomenology is the central role he ascribes to mood [Stimmung], which he sees
as the main way that Dasein is brought before its facticity. The operation of
mood also figures prominently in late Heidegger, for example in the lecture What is Philosophy? (1955), where
Heidegger, following Plato and Aristotle, determines mood as the archē of philosophy. Before that, in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowing) (1936-38), Heidegger
envisioned a cultural transformation that would constitute a “new beginning” of
thinking, whose beginning he connected with a Grundstimmung. In this context, it has been argued that moods
supply the “binding necessity” for the cultural transformation that Heidegger
himself envisioned.
Because of this central role that
Heidegger ascribes to moods, he has been accused of reducing philosophy to mere
feeling or sheer irrationalism. In order to respond to these issues, it is
necessary to see how and why Heidegger himself turns to mood.
The first time that Heidegger
used the notion Befindlichkeit was in his 1924 lectures on Aristotle, as
rendering the word διαθεσις; it is
in this encounter of Heidegger with Aristotle that moods acquire their
ontological significance in Heidegger’s own thought. But what is it that
compelled Heidegger to return to Aristotle in this way and appropriate these
notions? A return to the debates and problems that predominated Heidegger’s
thought at that time seems unavoidable.
In this paper I will argue that
Heidegger’s initial turn to mood was his attempt to ground transcendental
philosophy back to facticity. This was Heidegger’s philosophical response to
the neo-Kantian predicament (as Heidegger saw it), whereby transcendental
philosophy was left with an unbridgeable cleft between “being” (the reality of
the cognitive act) and ideal “logic” (value). This gulf was especially
exacerbated by the epistemology of the so-called Southwest School of
neo-Kantians which maintained a gap between forms of judgment of traditional
logic and the unsynthesized manifold of sensation.
The problem that persisted was
that of articulating a binding necessity between transcendental judgment (ideal
realm of logic) and the real world of temporal being. Heidegger thought that
Husserl’s phenomenology offered a way of grounding transcendentally these “two
realms” through his notion of categorial intuition; however, Heidegger thought
that Husserl’s phenomenology relied too much on reflective intuition and that
his notion of epoché was not binding, or grounding transcendental philosophy to
real existence (being).
In this context, Heidegger
re-anchored philosophy back to
concrete, practical comportment [Verhalten], primarily manifested as mood,
which enabled him to account for the pre-reflective aspect of all intentional
(and categorial) relations while maintaining the dynamic aspect of the act.
Name: Danny Smith (University of Warwick, UK)
Title of Paper: Philosophy of Experience, Philosophy of the
Concept
Abstract: In his text ‘Life: Experience and Science’, Michel
Foucault famously divides French philosophy of the twentieth century into two
camps, the ‘philosophy of experience’ on the one side, and the ‘philosophy of
the concept’ on the other. On the one side, thinkers such as Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty, who investigated life as it is lived, taken to be irreducible to
scientific description. On the other, the ‘épistémologistes’:
Cavaillès, Bachelard, Canguilhem. Almost twenty years later, in ‘The
Adventure of French Philosophy’, Badiou repeats Foucault’s gesture, opposing
the ‘existential vitalism’ of Bergson, Sartre and Deleuze to the ‘conceptual
formalism’ of Brunschvicg, Althusser and Lacan. These divisions are perhaps
more strategic and polemical interventions than strictly accurate
characterisations, but I would like to argue, nonetheless, that this
‘philosophy of the concept’ offers an important and often-neglected alternative
to phenomenological methodology.
The critique provided by these authors,
in short, is that phenomenology only deals with one aspect of subjectivity, remaining constitutively blind to the
effect of structure. This argument
takes different forms in different authors: for the épistémologistes, phenomenology does not grasp the specificity of
science, only interpreting it as only one ‘ontic’ discourse among many; for
Althusser, its ignorance of structure means that phenomenology cannot see when
it is captured by ideological mechanisms; for Lacan, phenomenology can give us
a rigorous description of the Imaginary order, but is unable to think the
Symbolic. This paper will explore some of these arguments, trying to show that
this other neglected strand of twentieth-century French philosophy offers us a
genuine methodological alternative to phenomenology which works with
innovations in formal logic, mathematics and the sciences whilst remaining as
implacably opposed to positivism and scientism as phenomenology.
Name: Rauly Nykanen (University of West England, UK)
Title of Paper: Super‐chaos
meets the Extended Mobile: Meillasoux’s contingency and Ravaisson’s identity
Abstract: In this paper we wish to
draw attention to the phenomenologist aspect in the speculative materialist
enquiry by Meillasoux in After Finitude, namely his correlationist
critique of absolute facticity that he terms unreason. The aim is to give a
reading of this unreason in relation to Felix Ravaisson’s Of Habit which
we see as containing an argument as to the inseparability of mind and body such
that mind or reason is in no way some necessary correlate with body, or the
outside, nor is it impossible to surpass the limit that mind is argued since
the transcendental critique to entail as to its access to its surroundings. On
the contrary, it is the very fact that mind cannot explain itself that gives
rise to its finitude and that as such it is clear that nature comes first.
Thus, the argument which would have it that unreason is reason is suspicious
since the argument of reason presupposes that since unreason is not manifest to
reason because it is but a concept of reason itself, there is no ground or
truth‐ maker for unreason. As Meillasoux criticises, the argument of reason
denies the reality of the intelligibility of an open possibility, an outside
not correlated to us, making an open possibility subject to our reason. It
seems to us that unreason has no need to appeal to any identity for its
validity, whereas reason entails an identity as ground if it is to criticise
unreason. This notion of unreason then has a veritable hold over any
phenomenologies of identity. It is the illegitimacy of any argument of reason
which at the same time would maintain the openness of the outside which
suggests that phenomenology and metaphysics should not be treated as separate
fields.
Name: Gabriel Martin (University of Sussex, UK),
Title of Paper: tba
Abstract: tba
Name: Carolina Christofidaki (University of Sussex)
Title of Paper: Being beyond
Humanism: A Phenomenological Approach on the Human Position.
Abstract: “The need is for the truth of being to be preserved”.
This quote could be the
categorical imperative of all Heideggerian philosophy. If we are not to lose
our essential humanity we have to remember being. We are the only being who can
access the truth of being and we must not forget this “gift” of ours.
In this paper I will attempt to
reinterpret the concept of humanism drawing from Heidegger's discussion of the
term, primarily in his 'Letter on Humanism'. I will argue that this reinvention
is to a great degree conditioned by the the ontological position that Heidegger
reserves for the human being (Dasein) as thrown among beings and in-between
beings and being. It is precisely this throwness that grounds human
ek-sistance, that is, the attentiveness to the truth of being, in
contradistinction to the human priority over beings that traditional humanism
announces.
Heidegger reproaches Western
metaphysics for the oblivion and abandonment of being. This indifference
towards being leaves the human being deprived from any authentic relation to
beings, yet this relation is constitutive for his very human essence. Dasein's
essential distinctiveness from others beings consists precisely into that it is
concerned with being and essentially related to beings. What makes us properly
human is our access to the being of beings. Therefore the oblivion of being
attacks the very essence of humanity per se. In this sense, we could argue that
traditional humanism, under a Heideggerian reading is essentially in-human.
Human being is placed (“thrown”)
freely into the clearing of being which is the world; this is ek-sistance. To
attain their proper humanitas human beings need to remember that they are not
the master of beings but the shepherd of being—whose care is the preservation
of being's truth. For this to happen we need to understand our essential
position in the crossroad where our being-in-the-world, beings and being
debouch.
Name: Alexander Malt (University of Durham, UK)
Title of Paper: Tearing
Meaning from an Undivided Whole
Abstract: Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Speech is a way of tearing out a
meaning from an undivided whole.” This paper takes up the theme of the logos as
‘torn’ from an ‘undivided whole’, but does so in light of the significant
research carried out in biolinguistics and syntactic theory after
Merleau-Ponty’s death. I follow Merleau-Ponty in arguing – against Cartesian
Linguists – that speech and thought are not analogous to smoke and fire.
However, I also point to the force of Cartesian criticisms of viewing language purely as an ‘external’/social artefact.
Such criticisms –lack of individuation criteria, historical contingency, and
lack of (symmetrical) intelligibility – seem also to apply to Merleau-Ponty’s
characterisation of languages as ‘gestalts’. Instead, I argue Merleau-Ponty’s
concept of ‘chiasm’ should be employed to identify a grammatical intertwining of speaker and world where linguistic acts are reconceived as gestalts, i.e.
where each ‘sign’ receives its meaning through its position in a complete
syntactic structure. I suggest that: first, an appropriately structured
linguistic expression can tear a meaning from a unified whole by serving to
draw attention to one of its parts; second, that such a grammatical chiasm is
syntactically structured with embedded determiner phrases, performing a deictic
function; finally, a further conjecture is that these logoi, once grammatically
constituted, can then be successfully used – in a Promethean style – by other
animals who are, in themselves, incapable of producing them (as experiments
with Chimpanzees have shown).
Name: Seferin James (University College Dublin, Irelands)
Title of Paper: Derrida and the Voice that Keeps Silence
Abstract: Jacques Derrida's La
voix et le phénomène has a new title in English. Formerly Speech and Phenomena, Leonard Lawlor has
retranslated the text as Voice and
Phenomenon. The question of how to translate the title – the difference
between voice and speech – is crucial to the whole sense of the text. Lawlor
argues that Derrida's title reverses the priority between the logos and the
phenomenon as it is usually encountered in the term “phenomeno-logy.” Is there
an ordered relation in Husserl's work between the logos and the phenomenon that
Derrida reverses? Adopting an aspect of Foucault's 1961 thesis, Derrida
challenges Husserl's participation in the decision
to determine logos as logic and exclude a broader sense of language from the
logos. This exclusion is why Derrida asserts that Husserl never posed the
question of the transcendental logos. The exclusion can be linked to the
rejection of psychologism in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations and the preparation of a phenomenology that
would always conform to the demands of its logical necessity through an idea in
the Kantian sense. The idea determines experience as the experience of
experience, which is to say that it is the eidetic intuition of appearance
itself in general and hence the phenomenality of the phenomena as such. Husserl
prioritises logic over the phenomenon but only in a restricted sense of the
logos. This paper will argue that Derrida involves the logos in both senses as la voix qui garde le silence. It is both
the intimate duration of the voice that introduces the écart that constitutes the ideality of presence (that is, voice as
a pre-phenomenological phenomenon that “constitutes” through différance the logic of the idea in a
Kantian sense) and the intimate otherness of the voice that reveals the
modulation of our ownmost “absolute passage” of phenomenological experience by
language (the contamination of the voice by speech).
