Leonard Lawlor - Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

John Sallis, editor

CONSULTING EDITORS

Leonard Lawlor

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2012 by Leonard Lawlor
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lawlor, Leonard, [date]

Early twentieth-century Continental philosophy / Leonard Lawlor.

p. cm. (Studies in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35702-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-253-22372-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-253-00516-8 (electronic book) 1. Continental philosophyHistory20th century. I. Title.

B804.L35 2012

190.904dc23

2011027334

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

The book you are about to read concerns early twentieth-century continental philosophy, that is, French and German philosophy from 1903, the original publication date of Bergsons Introduction to Metaphysics, to 1966, the original publication date of Foucaults The Thought of the Outside. This book aims to be a general introduction to continental philosophy. It should enable one to study, with insight, not only the figures covered here (Bergson, Freud, Husserl, early Heidegger, later Heidegger, later Merleau-Ponty, and early Foucault), but also most of the central texts written after the 1950s by Derrida, Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, Lyotard, Gadamer, and the so-called French feminists such as Irigaray and Kristeva. Although one strain of European thought has usually defined continental philosophy, that is, phenomenology (both its German and French versions)and we shall spend a significant amount of time discussing phenomenologywe shall consider three other strains: Bergsonism, psychoanalysis, and then finally what is commonly called structuralism (although we shall not use the word structuralism below).

In a survey of early twentieth-century continental philosophy, more could be said here; we could have included a discussion of the Frankfurt school (Adorno, for example), Levinas, or Sartre. These exclusions indicate that there is an idiosyncratic reason for the selection of the figures examined here. It seems to me that the specific figures selected set up what I have called the great French philosophy of the Sixties.two ways, which overlap and intersect. On the one hand, the outside is the external as opposed to the internal; for example, the unconscious as opposed to consciousness. On the other, the outside is the difference between oppositions such as the conscious and the unconscious, psychological consciousness and transcendental consciousness, being and beings, the visible and the invisible. In this sense, the between is a fold, a gap, a minuscule hiatus, un cart infime (MC: 351/OT: 340). The minuscule hiatus joins as it disjoins events and repetitions; below the difference therefore a multiplicity of traits swarms. We must not underestimate the importance of this comment from Deleuzes 1968 Difference and Repetition:

There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences, a properly differential and original space and time, all of which persist across the simplification of limitation and opposition.

Or this one, ten years later, from Foucaults 1978 course Security, Territory, Population:

Must intelligibility arise in no other way than through the search for the one that splits into two or produces the two? Could we not, for example, start not from the unity, and not even from [the] nature-state duality, but from the multiplicity of extraordinarily diverse processes?

Or finally, this one, more than twenty years later, from Derridas 2001 course The Beast and the Sovereign:

Every time one puts an oppositional limit in question, far from concluding that there is identity, we must on the contrary multiply attention to differences, refine the analysis in a restructured field.

Derrida and Foucault would call these untamed differences a murmur; Deleuze says clamor. Thoughtor philosophytherefore consists in listening to this clamoring murmur. Late in his career, in his 1984 What Is Enlightenment? essay, Foucault laid out a project for philosophizing: to separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. He called this transformative project the indefinite work of freedom. That the work of freedom is indefinite means that it is always incomplete, that freedom is always still to come, that the work always raises further questions. It is these further questions that define and drive, that must drive, still today, what we call continental philosophy.

The fact that Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault are no longer with us should make us consider the condition of what we call continental philosophy. The immense popularity of the term cannot be denied, and yet, as so many recent attempts have demonstrated, it seems virtually undefinable. Or at best it is defined as a catchall phrase for all the kinds of philosophy that analytic philosophy does not welcome, from mystical discourse to race theory. At worst, it refers to the exposition of the ideas of French and German philosophers, most of whom, like Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, are now dead. What future can there be for continental philosophy when it is nothing more than exposition? What future can a hodgepodge of ideas have? Is it possible to determine something like a project for continental philosophy? Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy attempts to answer this question. Indeed, the selection of the figures discussed in this book arose from the attempt, my attempt, to conceive continental philosophy as a philosophical project (or a philosophical research agenda). In other words, if it is true that the great diversity of texts and authors usually associated with continental philosophy seems not to constitute anything remotely like a tradition, then by selecting certain philosophers (and not others) I am attempting to show that a tradition can be constituted.