Abstract
This chapter synthesizes findings from previous sections on Derrida and Marion’s differing conclusions on the gift and desire, then contextualizes those differences within the two thinker’s respective positions of deconstruction and phenomenology. The consequences of these distinctions bear weight on these respective methodologies or styles. For Derrida, desire runs counter to any presuppositionless grasp of things, and deconstruction is found in the intuitive disruptions of différance, the “giver” of expression. “The sign” functions independent from “intentional acts” that are tooled according to the will of the one performing the reduction. Yet for Marion the performance of bracketing and the active suspension of constitutive phenomena entail that desire actively becomes passive and receptive. This is quite distinct from Husserlian intentionality in that both givenness and desire are given their own registers or ratio, and therefore need not flow from any cognitive directedness upon things. For Marion there are “negative certainties” that provide types of assurance independent from the control of economy, possibility, or the noetic, mental activities of perceiving. The gift and desire (which are constituted by a unique “lacking”) can be thought as types of such certainties.
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Notes
- 1.
René Descartes, Passions of the Soul (London: Hackett Publishing, 1989), p. 153. (Les passions de l’âme, 1649).
- 2.
Husserl does not explicitly consider “reductions” in his earlier Logical Investigations, but begins doing so in his later Ideas I. Also, Husserl’s often repeated reference to multiple, individual reductions can at points seem misleading, as these reductions demand their interconnection. There are simply the “transcendental-phenomenological reduction” and the “eidetic reduction.” No reduction stands alone.
- 3.
One particular essence can be shared by many objects. See Dagfinn Follesdal, “Husserl’s Reductions and the Role They Play in His Phenomenology” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), p. 106.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 111.
- 5.
Yet, one should still remain aware, as Husserl demands, of that “fruitful distinction…between immanent and transcendent essence,” as it must be “perceived and consistently observed.” This distinction is observable in how consciousness (the “I think”) relates with perception. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Volume II, trans W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), pp. 180–1.
- 6.
It seems clear that for Husserl, love was a part of intentionality: “Love, in the genuine sense, is one of the chief problems of phenomenology. And that holds not merely in the abstract particularity and individuality but as a universal problem. It is a problem in its intentional foundational sources as well as in its concealed forms – a problem of a driving intentionality that makes itself felt in the depths and in the heights and in the universal expanses of intentionality.” Quoted/translated in James Hart, Who One Is (Dordrecht: Springer Press, 2009), p. 264, note 27. From Husserl’s Nachlass MS, E III 2, 36b; transcription, p. 61.
- 7.
It is still not entirely clear exactly how far Marion equates desire with love, and to what extent.
- 8.
In their debate on the gift, Derrida raises the issue of “desire” or “want” and how it falls within the realm of possibility, and thus of economy. In his reading of Heidegger, Derrida shows that “Möglichkeit does not simply mean possible or as opposed to impossible. But in German, in A Letter on Humanism, Heidegger uses mögen as desire.” Yet then Derrida enigmatically claims “what I am interested in is the experience of the desire for the impossible. That is, the impossible as the condition of desire. Desire is not perhaps the best word. I mean this quest in which we want to give, even when we realize, when we agree, if we agree, that the gift, that giving, is impossible, that it is a process of reappropriation and self-destruction. Nevertheless, we do not give up the dream of the pure gift.” If one reads this straightforwardly, one might take Derrida to mean that “we desire the impossible.” However, what Derrida is directing attention towards is that he is “interested in” how the impossible conditions desire. And in saying that “desire is not perhaps the best word” he turns to say instead that the “pure gift” (impossible, i.e.) is but a dream and something out of reach. There is no desire qua desire for the impossible, because the impossible cannot be desired. Jacques Derrida, “On the Gift” in God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 72.
- 9.
Caputo’s formulation can help here: “Is the impossible lodged in a givenness that can never be intended or in an intention that can never be given? Depending on the answer, the transgression of the old Enlightenment, the movement beyond the constraints imposed by modernity’s conditions of possibility, the apology for the impossible, will take either of two very different forms which bear the proper names Marion and Derrida.” John D. Caputo, “Introduction” to God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 7–8.
- 10.
Derrida even considers deserting the word “Gift,” “since this word finally is self-contradictory, I am ready to give up this word at some point.” Jacques Derrida, “On the Gift” in God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 67.
- 11.
It is important to recall, also, the role of “the other” in the coming/stalling of the gift. For Derrida, “the other” is another cause for the ruptures between gift and desire, while for Marion, though the other plays an important role in phenomenology, it is givenness – not the other – that causes the “first” rupture. Recall that the gift need not have a giver (nor does it always need a recipient).
- 12.
Recall here in Rogues where Derrida refers to Husserlian phenomenology as reflective of the Kantian “conditioning” of theoretical reason with the duty of practical reason. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin, 1965), pp. 126–28.
- 13.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 10.
- 14.
Reflective of her Lacanian influence, Kristeva holds that language is not operative according to a system of socially constructed signs, as in the case of Derrida, but comes about through a “signifying process,” namely, through desire. This lends to the understanding that one is affected both by one’s social structures, as well as one’s unconscious drives and desires. Certainly Derrida was well aware of these critiques, but it is yet to be determined as to whether or not he escapes them. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York, NY: Columbia Press, 1986), p. 26.
- 15.
As Derrida contends, in Husserl’s Investigations “expression is a voluntary exteriorization; it is meant, conscious through and through, and intentional. There is no expression without the intention of a subject animating the sign, giving it a Geistigkeit.” Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 33.
- 16.
Recall Derrida’s claim that under Husserl’s thesis “expression” becomes an intentional, entirely voluntaristic movement that takes place in consciousness: “..the concept of intentionality remains caught up in the tradition of a voluntaristic metaphysics – that is, perhaps, in metaphysics as such.” Ibid., p. 34.
- 17.
Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul Deman. (New York: Columbia University press, 1986), p. 73.
- 18.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 30.
- 19.
And Derrida continues: “Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the word are stressed. It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological “metaphor” that seems necessarily attached to the very word deconstruction has been able to seduce or lead astray. Hence the debate that has developed in these circles: Can deconstruction become a methodology for reading and for interpretation? Can it thus be allowed to be reappropriated and domesticated by academic institutions?” Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend” in Derrida and Différance, eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia, 1985), p. 4. As one commentator puts it concerning this rejection of “method,” Derrida is “careful to avoid this term because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgment. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed.” Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), p. 4.
- 20.
Deconstuction is about openings of expression and “releasing” possibilities. Jacques Derrida, Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994. ed Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 429.
- 21.
And Derrida continues: “It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures. Nor will it do to claim that each deconstructive “event” remains singular or, in any case, as close as possible to something like an idiom or a signature. It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an operation. Not only because there would be something “patient” or “passive” about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity). Not only because it does not return to an individual or collective subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc.” Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend” in Derrida and Différance eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia, 1985), p. 4.
- 22.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 3. Though there is some debate concerning the significance of the transitions Husserl makes in his thought between the two flagship collections of the 1901 Investigations and the 1913 Ideas, neither Marion nor Derrida signal to any importance of what some have named the “early” and “late” Husserl. Those who have expressed any need for imagining this distinction suggest that it is rooted within Husserl’s emphasis upon “transcendental idealism,” which Husserl espouses in the 1913 Ideas, yet does not raise as a topic in his Investigations 13 years earlier. Thus, many suggest that there is a kind of “transcendental turn” in his thinking.
- 23.
Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William Alston and Georege Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), Ibid., p. 43, cf. 46. In general, Husserl’s Ideas I is arguably the more influential of the two volumes of the Ideas, and is, it seems, the volume Marion appears to privilege. Yet in general, Marion often relies more closely on The Idea of Phenomenology.
- 24.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Volume II, trans W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 11.
- 25.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 164.
- 26.
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 324.
- 27.
See also Marion’s “The Banality of Saturation” in Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina Gschwandtner and others (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2008).
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Alvis, J.W. (2016). Conclusion: The Generosity of Things: Between Phenomenology and Deconstruction. In: Marion and Derrida on The Gift and Desire: Debating the Generosity of Things. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 85. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27942-8_9
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