on Levi’s response to my response

Levi has a response up to my response, and I mostly like it, except that I cannot remotely agree with this one sentence:

“There Graham reiterates the claim that Derrida is not a realist. I agree, Derrida is as little a realist as is Heidegger or Husserl.”

I don’t see how it’s at all possible to mention Heidegger and Husserl in the same breath on the topic of realism. That’s the sort of thing that rabid Husserlians do (I know Levi isn’t one) in order to claim that Husserl with his concept of “horizon” already anticipated Heidegger’s critique of phenomena as present-at-hand in consciousness. But there is in fact a huge difference between Husserl and Heidegger on the realism question, despite Heidegger’s claim that the whole problem is a pseudo-problem (he merely echoes Husserl there, yes).

Husserl is simply and purely not a realist. Some people fall for the “we’re always already outside ourselves in aiming at an object” notion as being the most realism we’re ever going to get. But it’s not. That’s an idealist position.

With Heidegger it’s a bit trickier, but if you don’t call him a realist, then the critique of Vorhandenheit would never get off the ground. But it does get off the ground, because the hammer has a reality quite apart from my current use of it. That’s why it can break, and that’s why Heidegger isn’t only a phenomenologist. Husserl never gives us a depth beneath all possible access, because he thinks the very notion is absurd. He’s more like Picasso, flattening everything onto one surface but multiplying indefinitely the number of angles from which it can be seen: the blackbird, the mailbox, “my friend Hans.”

By the same token, one also shouldn’t mention Heidegger and Derrida in the same breath on the realism question. There is Entzug (withdrawal of the real) in Heidegger, but I don’t see it in Derrida. In fact, that’s exactly the notion that Derrida dislikes, to such an extent that he tries to claim that Heidegger himself has no such notion (even though it’s the very heart of Heidegger’s philosophy). Somewhat paradoxically, if something is claimed to be withdrawn from all access, Derrida would call that presence, in the sense of the self-presence of a reality in its own right. I (like Heidegger) would call it an absence, and for me (though not quite for Heidegger) what generates presence is relationality of any sort.

Interestingly enough, we see both gestures going on simultaneously in Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, but you can read about that when my essay on it comes out in 2012.