Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question

Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question

by Leonard Lawlor
Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question

Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question

by Leonard Lawlor

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Overview

". . . no other book undertakes to relate all these French philosophers to each other the way that [Lawlor] does, brilliantly." —François Raffoul

For many, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze represent one of the greatest movements in French philosophy. But these philosophers and their works did not materialize without a philosophical heritage. In Thinking through French Philosophy, Leonard Lawlor shows how the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty formed an important current in sustaining the development of structuralism and post-structuralism. Seeking the "point of diffraction," or the specific ideas and concepts that link Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, Lawlor discovers differences and convergences in these thinkers who worked the same terrain. Major themes include metaphysics, archaeology, language and documentation, expression and interrogation, and the very experience of thinking. Lawlor's focus on the experience of the question brings out critical differences in immanence and transcendence. This illuminating and provocative book brings new vitality to debates on contemporary French philosophy.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253215918
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 06/20/2003
Series: Studies in Continental Thought
Pages: 232
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range: 18 Years

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Thinking Through French Philosophy

The Being of the Question


By Leonard Lawlor

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2003 Leonard Lawlor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21591-8



CHAPTER 1

"If Theory Is Gray, Green Is the Golden Tree of Life"

Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Hyppolite


Derrida's claim that "the problem of language will never [be] simply one problem among others" (DLG 15/6) could be used to define what we are calling "French philosophy of the Sixties." In the Fifties, however, there were three signs heralding the approach of this philosophical movement. The first sign is Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence, which being a book on Hegel's logic begins with philosophy of language; indeed, Hyppolite calls Hegel's logic a "logic of sense" (LE 221/170, 228/175). The second sign is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," which being one of the first discussions of Saussure's linguistics ends up investigating silence; indeed, Merleau-Ponty claims that language expresses as much by what it does not say as by what it does say (S 56/45). Lastly, there is Martial Gueroult's Descartes's Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, which aiming to respect both the soul and style of Descartes's Meditations ends up analyzing the structure of the work; indeed, Gueroult calls the work a "monument." Hyppolite's book, Merleau-Ponty's essay, and Gueroult's study, all three of which appeared in 1952, provided a spectrum of philosophical possibilities. In 1969 Michel Foucault places Hyppolite in the middle of it:

Hyppolite intentionally put his own project into confrontation with two of the great works which were contemporaneous with him ...: that of Merleau-Ponty, which was the investigation of the originary articulation of sense and existence and that of Gueroult, which was the axiomatic analysis of coherence and philosophical structures. Between these two benchmarks, Hyppolite's work has always been, from the beginning, the attempt to name and to bring to light — in a discourse at once philosophical and historical — the point where the tragedy of life makes sense in a Logos, where the genesis of a thought becomes the structure of a system, where existence finds itself articulated in a Logic. Between a phenomenology of pre-discursive experience — a la Merleau-Ponty — and an epistemology of philosophical systems — as we find in Gueroult — Hyppolite's work can be read as a phenomenology of philosophical rigor as well as an epistemology of philosophically reflected existence. (EU 782-83)


Foucault is giving us here a spectrum, a diffraction, of philosophical options with Hyppolite in the middle. The "middle" that Hyppolites name represents is expressed by one comment from Logic and Existence: "immanence is complete" (LE 230/176). The announcement of the completion of immanence is why Foucault states (again in 1969) that Hyppolite's Logic and Existence formulates "all the problems which are ours" (EU 785). The most basic problem is this: how to conceive, within immanence, the difference between logic and existence (the Logos and time), structure and genesis, thought and experience, the said and the unsaid, monument and soul, philosophy and non-philosophy. All of the great French philosophy from the Sixties amounts to a series of solutions to this most basic problem. Therefore, while in the Fifties Hyppolite occupied a middle between a phenomenology of pre-discursive experience and an epistemology of philosophical systems, in the the Sixties, the spectrum, so to speak, narrows to a point with the result that Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault themselves form a spectrum across the "middle" called "Hyppolite." Thirty years later, our task is clear: in order to construct new philosophical concepts — beyond différance, the trace, and deconstruction; beyond difference, repetition, and construction; beyond the statement, force, and genealogy — we must determine the philosophical options that expand across the "Hyppolite" middle. We are going to begin with Foucault.


I. Only If Theory Is Gray, Then the Golden Tree of Life Is Green

It is possible to determine with some confidence the philosophical connection between Foucault and Hyppolite since Foucault has written, at least briefly, about Hyppolite explicitly: his 1969 eulogy "Jean Hyppolite. 1907-1968" (from which I quoted above) and the end of his 1970 inaugural address at the Collège de France, L'Ordre du discourse. These two works reinforce one another in their attempt to define Hyppolite's "philosophical and historical discourse." Hyppolite's enterprise, according to Foucault, is not that of a historian of philosophy (EU 780) and not that of a historian of Hegel's philosophy (OD 76/236). Instead, Hyppolite is a historian of "philosophic thought" (EU 780); as such, he brings about "displacements" in Hegel's philosophy (OD 77/236). The displacements come about as responses to the one question that guides this history of philosophic thought: "what is philosophical finitude?" (EU 781). For Foucault, philosophical finitude refers to the limits that particular philosophies fix and always trangress, the limits of their beginnings and of their ends (EU 781). Hegel's philosophy, in particular, marks for Hyppolite the moment when philosophy "became entitled to the problem of its beginning and its completion" (achèvement) (EU 784). Particular philosophies always transgress the limits of beginning and end because of the type of relation that philosophy has with non-philosophy. Foucault claims that philosophy maintains a relation with what it is not — science or everyday life, religion or justice, desire or death (EU 783) — that is at once interior, already there silently inhabiting non-philosophy, and exterior, never necessarily implicated by any science or practice (EU 783). This very specific sort of relation means that philosophy itself never actualizes itself in any discourse or system (EU 780). Either a philosophic discourse is interior to non-philosophy and therefore is not yet itself but still death; or it is exterior to non-philosophy, and therefore it is itself, but as philosophy it loses contact with what gave it life (EU 784). Since philosophy itself never actualizes itself in any particular discourse or work, philosophy for Hyppolite becomes a "task without endpoint [sans terme]" (OD 77/236). Never complete, philosophic thought is devoted to the "paradox of repetition," and the paradox, according to Foucault, takes the form of a "question that is constantly taken up again in life, death, and memory" (OD 77/236). According to Foucault, therefore, Hyppolite transforms "the Hegelian theme of the completion of self-consciousness into a theme of repetitive interrogation" (OD 77/236).

When Foucault states that Hyppolite transforms Hegel's conception of philosophy into a "task without endpoint," Foucault interprets this task as "a task always rebegun [recommencée]" (OD 77/236). Moreover, he says that philosophy in Hyppolite "re-establishes contact with non-philosophy," approaches "as close as possible not to what completes it but to what precedes" (OD 78/236; cf. EU 782). What is at issue, therefore, in Foucault's own philosophy is the re-beginning of philosophy (and not its end or ends); hence the importance of the word "archeology" in Foucault (and not eschatology). The archeological concern is why he asks, "What is the beginning of philosophy?" (OD 78/236). In the eulogy, Foucault answers this question by saying that philosophic thought in Hyppolite is the "moment when philosophic discourse makes up its mind, uproots itself from its refusal to speak [mutism], and distances itself from what henceforth is going to appear as non-philosophy" (EU 780, cf. 783). What the historian of philosophic thought must do is enter into this moment. When that happens, one enters into the space of philosophy itself, which systematically erases one's own subjectivity (EU 781). The historian of philosophic thought remembers in the Bergsonian sense; "one has to form the sharp point, actual and free, of a past which has lost nothing of its being; one regrasps one's shadow by a sort of self-torsion" (EU 782). This memorial moment, in which one loses one's subjectivity and thus turns this memorial moment into a moment of counter-memory, is when discourse becomes the voice of no one (personne) (EU 779; OD 7/215, 81/237; LE 6/5); it becomes gray, and then it is possible "to open [a philosophic work up and] ... deploy it" so that it lives (EU 781). Foucault therefore concludes his eulogy by saying that, with Hyppolite, it is always necessary to recall that "if theory is gray, green is the golden tree of life" (EU 785).

This sentence — "If theory is gray, green is the golden tree of life" — alludes to lines 2038-39 from Goethe's Faust (Part I, "Study"). Hegel quotes these lines in the chapter on Reason in The Phenomenology of Spirit (in particular, paragraph 360), and Hyppolite emphasizes them in his analysis of Hegel's so-called "philosophy of language" in Logic and Existence, Part 1. But, what is most important is that Foucault changes the structure of the sentence. In the Goethe original and in Hegel and in Hyppolite, the sentence is a conjunction: "theory is gray and green is the golden tree of life"; in Foucault's reformulation, it is a conditional: "if theory is gray, green is the golden tree of life." For Hyppolite, interpreting Hegel, this sentence, uttered by Faust, represents a decision to attempt "a turn back" (un retour en arrière) from knowledge, mediation, and language to experience, immediacy, and silence (LE 19-21/16-18). Gretchen and Faust, in other words, represent the type of consciousness that despises "the understanding and science, the supreme gifts of man" (lines 1850-51). For Hyppolite, by "turning back" to the immediacy of pleasure, as Mephisto recommends, this type of consciousness thinks that it is plunging headfirst from dead theory into life itself, but, as Hegel shows, actually it is rushing straight into mute experience, into the ineffable, into indeterminateness. In short, this consciousness goes into the ground: zu Grande gehen. Instead of plunging into concrete particularity, this consciousness ends up in abstract universality; instead of ending up in life, it ends up in death. For Foucault, however, changing the structure from a conjunction to a conditional, this sentence represents a necessity to attempt to re-begin, to return (cf. PD 534/34). For Foucault, it is necessary that theory be gray; if theory is gray, then the golden tree of life is green. In other words, in this formulation, life's enhancement depends necessarily on theory being gray; theory must become gray. In order for theory to become gray, for Foucault, one must enter into the ineffable experience that Foucault in Histoire de la folie à Vâge classique called madness. The truth of Hegel's discussion, as presented by Hyppolite, is that the subject goes into the ground in such a moment of pleasure. In his 1966 essay on Blanchot, "The Thought from the Outside," Foucault, speaking of Ulysses, describes the moment in the following way:

In order for the narrative that will never die to be born, one must listen but remain at the mast, wrists and ankles tied; one must vanquish all desire by a ruse that does violence to itself; one must experience all suffering by remaining at the threshold of the alluring abyss; one must finally find oneself beyond song, as if one had crossed death while still alive only to restore it in a second language. (PD 538/42)


Madness alone occurs if one only rushes to the sirens and does not remain tied to the mast; not to remain tied is stupidity and even suicide (cf. DR 19798/152). What Ulysses experiences instead, as he remains tied to the mast and listening, is madness bent into thought. He experiences philosophic thought or the thought from the outside. The silence into which Ulysses enters is not subjective and interior; it is a "mutism," a refusal to speak, which allows one to listen. This "ruse" or experiment which problematizes desire places one "this side" (not beyond) the limit of discourse, in "the placeless place" (PD 537/52), in "the interstices" (OD 7/215), in forces (PD 525/27), in what must be called the "informal" (informel) (F 120/112-13, 129/121). In the placeless place, death is partial and continuous with life; here, one dies, on meurt (F 102/95). Only by crossing death in this sense, only by living as the set of functions which resist death (RR 71/54; F 102/95), can one hear the voice of "no one," personne (which is not the voice of the subject called "Ulysses"). Only then will the narrative that will never die be born. Only then, subjectless, does discourse become a monument of this singular moment; only then do forces get folded, pleasure used, ethics invented. Only if theory is gray, then the golden tree of life is green.


II. Foucault's Three Great Concepts: Metaphysics, the Actual, and Genealogy

Any attempt to determine the Foucaultian option of the "Hyppolite" middle must include a discussion of Foucault's famous 1971 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," which was first published in a volume entitled Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. In fact, the color gray can be used to define the three great concepts that Foucault presents in this essay. The first great concept is that of metaphysics. Metaphysics is not gray; it is blue. To say that the color of metaphysics is blue for Foucault means that its gaze is skyward, "lofty and profound" (NGH 146/140), toward "distances and heights" (NGH 162/155). In regard to history, metaphysics adopts a supra-historical perspective (NGH 159/152,167/160). Foucault provides two names for the supra-historical perspective: Platonism (NGH 167/160) and Egyptianism (NGH 159/152, 163/ 156). What joins these two together, for Foucault (following Nietzsche), is Socrates. Egyptianism is the belief in the immortality of the soul, the proclamation of the existence of a "beyond" as a promise of a reward (NGH 162/156), a "millennial end" (NGH 160/154). Socrates accepts this Egyptian religious belief. What then defines Platonism, according to Foucault, is its success in "founding" the religious belief (d'êtreparvenu à la [la croyance à l'immortalité] fonder) (NGH 167/160). Platonism founds the belief in the immortality of the soul by means of universals (NGH 165/158), objectivity (NGH 165/158), and the certainty of absolutes (NGH 159/153). Relying on universals, objectivity, and the certainty of absolutes, metaphysics conceives history in a number of ways: "the meta-historical deployment of ideal meaning and indefinite teleologies" (NGH 146/140); "monotonous purposiveness" (NHG 145/139); "to bring to light slowly a meaning buried within the origin (NGH 158/151); "a teleological movement or natural structuration" (NGH 161/154); "the obscure work of a destination ... the anticipatory power of sense" (NGH 155/148). Foucault specifies these formulations by examining the historian's concept of origin (exact essence or identity of things, greatest perfection, purest possibility, site where truth corresponded to discourse) (NGH 148-49/142-43), the historian's concepts of event (recognition, reconciliation, successive forms of a primordial intention, and ideal continuity) (NGH 159/152, 161/154), and the historians conception of end (result, totality fully closed in on itself) (NGH 161/154, 159/152). These conceptions of origin, event, and end imply what Foucault calls an "inversion of the relationship of will and knowledge" (NGH 165/158). This inversion is "hypocritical" because it hides a perspective behind a fiction or lie of eternal truth. The inversion takes place by "bridling," "by fighting relentlessly against" ones individual will (silencing preferences, surmounting distaste, miming death) in order to show to others the inevitable law of a superior will (NGH 165/ 158). This inevitable law of a superior will — "Providence,... final causes" (NGH 165/158) — is that toward which metaphysics gazes. Metaphysics therefore for Foucault supports history with an "apocalyptic objectivity"; in other words, it gives support to history from "outside of time" (NGH 159/152).

Foucault's second great concept is what Nietzsche calls the "historical sense" or "actual history" (l'histoire effective, wirkliche Historie). Actual history takes no support from the outside of time; it is, as the phrase suggests, actual, not ideal or possible or universal history. Insofar as actual, this history without support from the outside of time "can escape from metaphysics" (NGH 159/152-53; cf. also NGH 167/160). In other words, actual history is history without a foundation and in this regard is anti-Platonistic; actual history, Foucault says, "hollows out that upon which we like to make history rest" (NGH 160/154). It inserts all of what we believed immortal in man back into mortality and in this regard is anti-Egyptianistic (NGH 159/160). Lacking a foundation and the immortality of the soul, actual history, for Foucault, allows for no consoling play of self-recognitions (reconnaissances, nous retrouver) (NGH 160/153). Rather than understanding (Verstehen), actual history is concerned with "slicing," that is, with making discontinuities. The traditional relation between necessary continuity and the irruption of an event then is inverted in actual history; an event is always a reversal of the relations of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who used it: events are chance, accidental, or aleatory conflicts and not modifications of an ideal meaning (NGH 161/154). The result of the inversion in favor of chance events is that actual history consists, instead of origin, in descent — unentangleable systems of racial traits and inscribed bodies — and, instead of end, it consists in emergence — the current episode in a series of subjugations or in diverse systems of subjugation. Actual history also inverts the relation of distance and proximity. Actual history consists in the close — the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies. Like a doctor, it has no fear of looking down, instead of gazing upward like the metaphysician (NGH 162/155-56). Being unafraid of looking down, actual history is also unafraid of being perspectival knowledge (NGH 163/156-57). Unlike the historian influenced by metaphysics, the historical sense in Nietzsche, according to Foucault, does not "bridle" its will in favor of the form of an eternal will. It looks from a certain angle, with the deliberate purpose of appreciating, of saying "yes" or "no." It does not reject the system of its own injustice (NGH 163/157). Supporting itself therefore on no constants, actual history, for Foucault, systematically shatters all of that with which we back ourselves in order to grasp history in its totality (NGH 160/153; cf. also NGH 167/160).


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Thinking Through French Philosophy by Leonard Lawlor. Copyright © 2003 Leonard Lawlor. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Being of the Question
1. "If Theory is Gray, Green is the Golden Tree of Life": Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hyppolite
2. The Chiasm and the Fold: An Introduction to the Philosophical Concept of Archeology
3. Eliminating Some Confusion: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Being and Writing
4. The Legacy of Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry": The Limits of Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
5. The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
6. The End of Ontology: Interrogation in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
7. The Beginnings of Post-Modernism: Phenomenology and Bergsonism, Derrida and Deleuze
8. The Beginnings of Thought: The Fundamental Experience in Derrida and Deleuze
Conclusion:The Point of Diffraction
Appendix Interview for Journal Phänomenologie
Notes
Index

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