speaking of phenomenology

There’s scholarship, and then there are also the various attempts to be at the cutting edge. Scholarship deals with everything valuable, but the cutting edge is generally only at one place at a given moment.

If I were to say what I think the biggest problem is with present-day avant garde continental philosophy, it’s that it hasn’t really digested the legacy of phenomenology and Heidegger.

When Derrida was king (and keep in mind, I did not like that period) this accusation could not be made. Derrida knew Husserl and Heidegger and Levinas extremely well, and was very much digesting all of it and doing something new with it. You could disagree with his personal spin on it (I did) and also find his style often worse than exasperating (I did). But there was never any question that Derrida was deeply rooted in the phenomenological tradition, which –like it or not– is still the gold standard for recent continental philosophy.

The situation became more problematic on this front after Derrida’s star began to dim somewhat.

Deleuze takes off in a completely different direction, and a very refreshing direction in many respects. But he never really came to terms with the Husserl/Heidegger legacy, and the passing remarks on phenomenology are among his most impressionistic and shallow.

With Badiou and Žižek it’s a bit more complicated. They do full justice to Heidegger in terms of praising him, talking about how great and important he was, and so forth. But he leaves too little trace on their own philosophical positions, which are basically Hegelian and Lacanian and have little direct resonance with Heidegger. As for Husserl (despite Badiou’s claims to understand him well) they don’t get the point at all, though in this respect they’re no worse than most others at present.

At the top of my wish list for continental philosophy in 2030 (and no, “continental philosophy” is not a dead signifier, despite all the premature declarations of how meaningless the analytic/continental split is; there are still two completely different cultures) is that we need to get back on the Husserl/Heidegger page again and push things further, not simply pretend without proof that they are vaguely archaic figures. You have to work your way through figures of that magnitude, and at least Derrida was trying.

[ADDENDUM: I see this post is getting a lot of hits, so I’ll state the point even more concisely as follows. My view of the situation is that continental philosophy in its current form has simply done an end run around the point reached by Heidegger, rather than engaging with and overcoming Heidegger. That was probably healthy, because we were running in place by the early 1990’s and needed fresh impulses. Deleuze tends to behave as though phenomenology simply never happened –his remarks on the topic are astonishingly thin– whereas Badiou and Žižek say very warm things about Heidegger but then pretty much just change the topic of conversation. From Badiou’s Theory of the Subject we can see that he sort of makes a bit of room for the notion that Heidegger cannot be recuperated by Hegel, but it’s a minimal gesture: Heidegger is only mentioned three times in the book, and only two of the mentions are relevant. And I’ve never understood how anyone can claim that Being and Event is a serious engagement with the Heideggerian legacy, since you’d have to go about it a lot less obliquely than that. This, as I see it, is the crack in the foundation of the house at the present moment. I’m in complete agreement with Whitehead’s notion that philosophies are abandoned rather than refuted. But there is such a thing as premature abandonment.

ONE OTHER ADDENDUM: Here too is one of the disappointing things about Laruelle. For Laruelle does have a very good sense of how Heidegger’s legacy works against that of Hegel, differs from that of Derrida and Nietzsche, and so forth. Thus, he’s coming along in the Anglophone world at the perfect time to serve as a counterweight to Hegelian presuppositions run wild. But along with the painfully hermetic prose in which Laruelle shares these insights, he ruins it all in the end by concluding roughly that “the difference between all these philosophers is pointless anyway, and there’s no way to choose between them because they’re all still trapped in philosophy.” Actually, that’s not even roughly what he says: he comes right out and says it.]