The End Of Phenomenology - Expressionism In Deleuze And Merleau-Ponty.pdf - books english - to211

Continental Philosophy Review 31: 15–34, 1998.

The end of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and

Merleau-Ponty 1

LEONARD LAWLOR

Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee 38152, USA

The divine things hidden since the beginning of the world are

clearly perceived through the understanding of God’s creatures.

Romans 1:20

Probably stimulated by Levinas’s requirements for an ethics, the return to

the subject has fueled a renewed interest in classical phenomenology. As

Jean Greisch bluntly puts it, “after a period dominated by structuralism and

critique of metaphysics, a new generation of contemporary philosophers has

rediscovered phenomenology as a real possibility for thinking.” 2 Given this

“nouvelle vague phenomenologique” – Greisch includes many well-known

Merleau-Ponty scholars among his list of philosophers involved in “the new

phenomenological wave” – then what are we to make of the challenge to

phenomenology made in Sixties and Seventies in the name of structuralism

and post-structuralism? Has phenomenology met the challenge by means of

a more profound understanding of intersubjectivity, of the other? 3 Are we

now simply supposed to abandon the challenge? It seems to me that the

philosophy of Gilles Deleuze confronts phenomenology – of any ilk, from

Hegel to Maldinay – with its most powerful challenge, a challenge which

takes two forms.

On the one hand, there is the challenge of immanence. One can ﬁnd this

challenge in Deleuze’s writings as late as What is Philosophy? (1991) and

as early as Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953). The challenge of immanence

states that there is no two world ontology, that being is said in only one way,

that essence does not lie outside of appearance; in short, the challenge of

immanence eliminates transcendence: God is dead. The challenge of imma-

nence, however, appears to be nothing less than the challenge with which

phenomenology confronts traditional metaphysics; the epoche is a process

in which one switches off the belief in things in themselves in order to ar-

rive at a plane of immanence: being is phenomenon. Despite this similarity,

Deleuze argues that phenomenology reinstates a dative; it relates the plane

LEONARD LAWLOR

of immanence back to a subject that constitutes the given. So, in What is

Philosophy? , Deleuze says, “Beginning with Descartes, and then with Kant

and Husserl, the cogito makes it possible to treat the plane of immanence

as a ﬁeld of consciousness. Immanence is supposed to be immanent to a

pure consciousness, to a thinking subject.” 4 In Empiricism and Subjectivity ,

he says, “We embark upon a transcendental critique when, having situated

ourselves on a methodologically reduced plane that provides an essential

certainty...weask:howcantherebeagiven,howcansomethingbegivento

asubject,andhowcanthesubjectgivesomethingtoitself?...Thecritique

is empirical when, having situated ourselves in a purely immanent point of

view . . . we ask: how is the subject constituted in the given?” 5 The challenge

of immanence then is the challenge of empiricism, and this is why in What

is Philosophy? Deleuze suggests that the plane of immanence is a “radical

empiricism.” 6

On the other hand, there is the challenge of difference, which ﬁnds its

inspiration in Heidegger. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze says,

“According to Heidegger’s ontological intuition, difference must be articu-

lation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without

any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, analogous or the op-

posed. There must be a differentiation of difference, an in-itself which is

like a differentiator ,a Sich-unterscheidende , by virtue of which the differ-

ent is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior

resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.” 7 The challenge then amounts

to this: according to its very notion, a ground must never resemble that which

it grounds. In other words, there must be a heterogeneity between ground

and grounded, between condition and conditioned. 8 According to Deleuze,

phenomenology does not meet the challenge of difference because the reduc-

tion moves the phenomenologist from natural attitude opinions or common

sense back to Urdoxa or primal faith. In What is Philosophy? , Deleuze says,

“Phenomenology wanted to renew our concepts by giving us perceptions

and affections that would make us give birth to the world, not as babies or

hominids but as beings, by right, whose proto-opinions would be the foun-

dations of this world. But we do not ﬁght against perceptual and affective

cliches if we do not ﬁght against the machine that produces them. By invok-

ing primordial lived-experience, by turning immanence into an immanence

to a subject, phenomenology could not prevent the subject from forming no

more than opinions that would already draw the cliche from new perceptions

and promised affections.” 9 The cliche would be a generality more eminent

or primal than any particular ( Urdoxa ), but a generality nonetheless under

which particulars could be subsumed; the machine is the subject drawing

resemblances out of perceptions, listening to the sense murmured by things.

THE END OF PHENOMENOLOGY

If we combine the two challenges, we must characterize Deleuze’s philos-

ophy, as he himself does in Difference and Repetition , with an oxymoronic

expression: “transcendental empiricism.” 10 Although this characterization sug-

gests a contradiction, in fact it does not. It is nothing less than the paradox of

expression. In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968), Deleuze says,

“The paradox is that at once ‘the expressed’ does not exist outside of the

expression and yet bears no resemblance to it, but is essentially related to

what expresses itself as distinct from the expression itself.” 11 Expression

is the plane of immanence, which implies that the expressed does not exist

outside of it. But, having no resemblance to expression, the expressed, as the

essence of what expresses itself, is distinct from expression itself. According

to Deleuze, the expressed is “sense” ( sens ). 12 If sense is the key to Deleuze’s

double challenge to phenomenology, then we must privilege his 1969 Logic

of Sense . 13 In fact, Michel Foucault has already privileged this text, when he

says, in “Theatrum Philosophicum,” that “ The Logic of Sense can be read as

the most alien book imaginable from [Merleau-Ponty’s] The Phenomenology

of Perception .” 14 Foucault is undoubtedly correct. In The Phenomenology of

Perception , Merleau-Ponty deﬁnes the phenomenology of The Phenomenol-

ogy of Perception as “a study of the appearance of being to consciousness”; 15

thereby, he introduces the dative and relates the plane of immanence back to

consciousness. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty repeatedly appeals to a primordial

faith in order to ground knowledge; for instance, he says in “Others and the

Human World,” “My consciousness of constructing an objective truth would

never provide me with anything more than an objective truth for me, and

my greatest attempt at impartiality would never enable me to overcome my

subjectivity (as Descartes so well expresses it by the hypothesis of the evil

genius), if I had not, below my judgments, the primordial certainty of being

in contact with being itself, if, before any willful taking up of a position I

were not already situated in an intersubjective world, and if science too were

not supported by this originary doxa ” (PP 408/355). Nevertheless, The Phe-

nomenology of Perception isthetextinwhichMerleau-Pontysays,“...what

we have discovered through the study of motility is a new sense for the word

“sense.” The great strength of intellectualist psychology and idealist philos-

ophy comes from their having no difﬁculty in showing that perception and

thought have an intrinsic sense. ...The Cogito was the prise de conscience

of this inferiority. But all meaning was thereby conceived as an act of thought,

as the work of a pure I, and although rationalism easily refuted empiricism,

it was itself unable to account for the variety of experiences, for the element

of nonsense it, for the contingency of content” (PP 171–172/146–147). In

order to determine how alien The Logic of Sense is from The Phenomenology

of Perception , we must examine the relation of sense to nonsense in each. In

LEONARD LAWLOR

other words, in order to determine whether phenomenology – taking The Phe-

nomenology of Perception as an exemplary case – withstands the Deleuzian

double challenge, we must examine expression.

1. The transcendental ﬁeld in Deleuze

The title, The Logic of Sense , comes from Hyppolite’s 1952 Logique et exis-

tence , which is a study of Hegel’s logic. 16 In Logique et existence , equating

the Hegelian concept with sense, Hyppolite explicitly deﬁnes Hegel’s logic as

a logic of sense. Recognizing the dependence of Hegel’s Logic on the earlier

Phenomenology of Spirit , Hyppolite describes Hegel’s phenomenology as the

generation of sense from the sensible. And ﬁnally, trying to demonstrate the

relevance of Hegel’s thought to the then contemporary philosophy, Hyppolite

describes the movement that leads to the logic of sense in Hegel as a “reduc-

tion” or as a process of “bracketing.” This is an obvious allusion to Husserl.

Given the inﬂuence that Hyppolite exerts on Deleuze – Deleuze, for instance,

dedicates his ﬁrst book on Hume to Hyppolite 17 – we can see that, while

Deleuze does not call his philosophy a phenomenology (cf. LS 33/21), The

Logic of Sense takes place entirely under the sign of the phenomenological

reduction (cf. LS 123/101). Without the reduction, it would be impossible

for Deleuze to return to the surface, in other words, to the sensible, to the

appearances, to the phenomena, to the plane of immanence. As in all phe-

nomenology, Deleuze’s return to the surface does not imply the complete

elimination of the difference between appearance and essence; instead, as

Hyppolite would say, there is sense within the sensible. As Deleuze says,

“sense is the characteristic discovery of transcendental philosophy . . . it

replaces the old metaphysical Essences” (LS 128/105). 18 Deleuze’s project

therefore in The Logic of Sense is the determination of the donation of sense,

Husserl’s Sinngebung or sense-bestowal (LS 117/96, 87/69, 94/76; cf. DR

201/155). But unlike phenomenology, which turns the plane of immanence

into an immanence to consciousness which consists in an Urdoxa or gener-

alities through which the different kinds of belief are generated (LS 119/97),

Deleuze’s logic of sense is “inspired in its entirety by empiricism” (LS 32/20).

It is Sartre’s notion of an impersonal transcendental ﬁeld that, according

to Deleuze, “restores the rights of immanence,” frees immanence from being

immanent to something other than itself, and turns phenomenology into “a

radical empiricism.” 19 The transcendental ﬁeld therefore, must correspond,

Deleuze says, to the conditions that Sartre laid down in his “decisive” 1936

The Transcendence of the Ego (LS 120/98–99). 20 The transcendental ego,

according to Sartre, is unnecessary for the uniﬁcation of objects, 21

for the

uniﬁcation and individuation of consciousness, 22

and is itself moreover a

THE END OF PHENOMENOLOGY

constituted object. 23 Therefore the transcendental ﬁeld must be conceived

as an absolutely impersonal or non-personal consciousness; 24 it would be

equivalent to what Hyppolite in 1957 would call a “subjectless transcendental

ﬁeld.” 25 As impersonal and non-individuated, the transcendental ﬁeld, for

Deleuze, consists in the “they” or the “one” ( l’on ) (LS 178/152). But this

“das Man” is not equivalent to what is expressed in common sense or in

doxa . The phrase “everyone recognizes that,” for example, does not express

Deleuze’s “they,” because there is always, according to Deleuze, a “profound,

sensitive conscience” who does not recognize what everyone else claims to

recognize (DR 74/52). This sensitive conscience is a “sensitive point,” a point

of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, a turning point, a bot-

tleneck, a boiling point. The transcendental ﬁeld, therefore, consists in such

sensitive points, in what Deleuze calls “singularities” or “anti-generalities”

(LS 121/99).

Because of the connection to Merleau-Ponty, which we are trying to pre-

pare, it is important here to note what Deleuze (and Guattari) say in A Thou-

sand Plateaus : “It seems to us that Husserl brought thought a decisive step

forward when he discovered a region of vague and material essences (in other

words, essences that are vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous).” 26 Immediately

after this comment Deleuze (and Guattari) connect Husserl’s vague morpho-

logical essences to their own notion of singularities. This connection implies

that what Deleuze calls singularities in The Logic of Sense are at least related

to if not equivalent to what Husserl calls “eidetic singularities” in Ideas I ;

eidetic singularities are material essences, which have species and genera

(and thus generality) over them, but have no particularizations under them

(see Ideas I , #12). In other words, eidetic singularities are essences of, that is,

generated from, facts. This connection between Deleuzian singularities and

Husserlian eidetic singularities is signiﬁcant for our purposes because Husserl

utilizes the notion of an eidetic singularity in his late fragment The Origin of

Geometry , a text which Merleau-Ponty studied carefully.

The most precise deﬁnition of singularities, however for Deleuze, lies in

the context of expression, which in The Logic of Sense refers to Husserl

as well, Husserl’s Ideas I , paragraph #124: 27 singularities are that which is

expressed in an expression or that which is perceived in a perception, in a

word, sense (LS 32/20). From Husserl’s notion of sense, Deleuze extracts

two characteristics: neutrality and sterility. A singularity is sterile because,

as Husserl says, and Deleuze quotes this from paragraph 124, “the stratum of

expression is not productive.” Sterility then means that a singularity is nothing

more than an incorporeal double of the expression or of what is perceived (LS

97–98/78–79, 146–151/122–125). Describing the existence of such idealities,

Deleuze says that sense is an “extra-being” or a “phantasm” (LS 17/7). To

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