Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition

by François-David Sebbah, Stephen Barker (Translator)

Overview

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, Testing the Limit claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804772747
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	05/09/2012
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

François-David Sebbah is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Compiègne in France and was Program Director at the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is the author of Levinas: Ambiguïtés de l'altérité (2000).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I Toward a Critique of Phenomenological Rationality 15

1 Research 17

2 Intentionality and Non-Givenness 34

3 The Question of the Limit 58

Part II The Frontier of Time 67

1 At the Limits of Intentionality: Michel Henry and Emmanuel Levinas as Readers of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time 75

2 Anticipating Phenomenology: Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the Impossible and Possibility 88

1 The Time of Ordinary Phenomena and Phantoms (Jean-Toussaint Desanti; Jacques Derrida) 88

2 The Impossibility of the Gift: Within the Extreme Possibility of Givenness (Jacques Derrida; Jean-Luc Marion) 104

Part III The Test of Subjectivity 123

1 Subjectivity in Contemporary French Phenomenology 127

2 The Birth of Subjectivity in Levinas 142

3 Born to Life, Born to Oneself: The Birth of Subjectivity in Michel Henry 156

4 Spectral Subjectivity According to Jacques Derrida 174

Part IV Phenomenological Discourse and Subjectification 191

1 The Rhythm of Otherwise Than Being According to Levinas 202

1 Reading Levinas and Thinking Entirely Otherwise 202

2 Rhythm as the Question of Intentionality in Levinas 212

2 The Rhythm of Life According to Michel Henry 219

Conclusion 243

Abbreviations 257

Notes 261

Bibliography 313

Editorial Reviews

"François Sebbah, who practices phenomenology above all through a testing of readings—readings that jostle each other—uses phenomenology to experience limits that he neither denounces nor overcomes. Rather, he plunges in headfirst, engulfing himself so as to better draw on that experience, an a-theological baptism of sorts."

Bernard Stiegler

"Convincing and well executed. A wide range of texts and thinkers is treated with evident familiarity and thought. . . This book makes an important contribution to the larger debate about the contemporary status and trajectory of phenomenology."

International Philosophical Quarterly - Christina Gschwandtner

"Sebbah's noteworthy book is perhaps the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between three thinkers in the French phenomenological tradition, two of whom are well known in the Anglophone world (Levinas, Derrida) and one of whom (Henry) is gradually better understood by English-speaking audiences. That all three are arrayed together in this study makes it a pioneering enterprise and one that allows the English reader to apprise the worthiness of Henry's association with his better-known compatriots."

Continental Philosophy Review - Jeffrey Hanson

"Sebbah's noteworthy book is perhaps the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between three thinkers in the French phenomenological tradition, two of whom are well known in the Anglophone world (Levinas, Derrida) and one of whom (Henry) is gradually better understood by English-speaking audiences. That all three are arrayed together in this study makes it a pioneering enterprise and one that allows the English reader to apprise the worthiness of Henry's association with his better-known compatriots."—Jeffrey Hanson, Continental Philosophy Review

"Convincing and well executed. A wide range of texts and thinkers is treated with evident familiarity and thought. . . This book makes an important contribution to the larger debate about the contemporary status and trajectory of phenomenology."—Christina Gschwandtner, International Philosophical Quarterly

"François Sebbah, who practices phenomenology above all through a testing of readings—readings that jostle each other—uses phenomenology to experience limits that he neither denounces nor overcomes. Rather, he plunges in headfirst, engulfing himself so as to better draw on that experience, an a-theological baptism of sorts."—Bernard Stiegler

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