Abstract
All phenomena appear to and are circumscribed by some form of conscious life – this is sine qua non of phenomenological inquiry. How then is phenomenology to account for those objects which appear to conscious life precisely in their refusal to be contained by conscious life – objects which seem to testify to that which is radically outside of and other than consciousness? This is a challenge which has haunted phenomenology from its beginning, first under the guise of psychologism as diagnosed by Frege, but more recently under the heading of correlationism as addressed by Meillassoux. Whatever its name, the problem is the same: phenomenology’s apparent inability to account for the radical alterity of certain manifest existents. This paper will examine the ways in which both Husserl and Heidegger failed to respond adequately to this problem. To illustrate this failure, the phenomenological status of the dead body of will be examined. The aim of this paper is to show that while classical phenomenology cannot account for the inhuman realty of such phenomena, the alternatives offered by Frege and the speculative realists fare no better, occulting in their solutions the inherent traumatic power of such phenomena. To explore this power, the work of Freud and Lacan will be drawn upon. Finally, this paper will conclude that it is only through a reappraisal and reinterpretation of the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas that the limitations of both phenomenology and its critics can finally be overcome.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the ontological status of hyletic data in Husserl see Dalton (2014).
- 2.
How such a phenomena is actually a manifestation of the unconscious will become clear later through a reading of Lacan, in whom, famously the unconscious, as for Freud, is linked inexorably to a manifestation of the material ground of conscious life.
- 3.
For more on the relationship of phenomenology to the “speculative turn” see Sparrow (2014).
- 4.
For more on the possibility of envisioning the foreign in Husserl see Steinbock (1995, pp. 173–186).
- 5.
Heidegger openly confesses that he is not interested in “asking about the way in which the deceased has Dasein-with or is still-a-Dasein [Nochdaseins] with those who are left behind,” but exclusively interested in how the presence of the deceased opens living Dasein up to an encounter with its own potentiality (Heidegger 1962, p. 283).
- 6.
For more on the special status of the corpse as an object of phenomenological research see: Dalton (2012).
- 7.
This reading of the dead body qua Lacanian Thing is also suggested by Zizek (2006, pp. 43–47).
- 8.
For more on Lacan’s relation to Heidegger see: Roudinesco (1997, pp. 219–231).
- 9.
One of the richest and most intriguing recent accounts of the phenomenological power of the Thing can be found in Trigg (2014).
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Dalton, D.M. (2017). Phenomenology and the Problem of the Inhuman: Psychologism, Correlationism, and the Ethics of Absolute Materiality. In: Legrand, D., Trigg, D. (eds) Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 88. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55518-8_9
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