Prologue: Toward a
Poststructuralist Phenomenology

Here, at the beginning, I will not, as is so often done nowadays, in this uncertain time, dwell on the problems of beginning, of prefacing a book. I would like simply, in the few pages of this prologue, to speak in my own name, that of the “I” who is the author of a prologue which seeks to set the stage for what is to come after, to the present reader of this book (at whatever time in the future he or she might be reading what I am writing “now”). It seems to me that every author has the right, at least from time to time, to address the reader directly, without having to sort out all the layered levels of imbricated authors (or narrators) and implied readers. If an author cannot speak directly to the reader in a prologue (when the author is writing it), where else could an author do so, and when? Where, if not in a prologue, outside of the book proper, can an author say what he or she means and say what he or she is going to do? So I shall tell you here, Dear Reader (to speak like Montaigne), directly, something about what is to follow and will reveal to you (in a somewhat indirect fashion) some of the circumstances presiding over the origin of this (these) text(s).

What you, Dear Reader, are about to embark upon is a smorgasbord of ideas. Not just any old smorgasbord, however. Most certainly not one of those which advertise themselves to the unwary customer as offering 250 different specialties “from around the world.” No, the smorgasbord offered up here for your delectation is a coherent and consistent one, including only a few select items, like an all-Chinese or all-Swedish one. All the dishes have been prepared in the same mental kitchen, with the same, or complementary, spices and seasonings, and prepared with the same, or complementary, cooking techniques. However, just as some people are not attracted to spicy foods, so some people won’t care for what is served up to them here. If, though, you believe that it is high time that philosophy abandoned the stock, fatty concoctions it has traditionally served up in its metaphysical soup kitchens (as William James referred to them), then you should definitely appreciate what is here offered for your dégustation.

This book, I say, is like a smorgasbord—in that it is not like a formal, six-course dinner; there is no special order in which the dishes need be consumed. The essays may be read in whatever order the reader pleases, according to his or her reading pleasure, for this is not a book in the traditional metaphysical sense of the term: It is not a systematic monograph embodying an imperious logic to which the reader must submit. Being without a fixed beginning, middle, and end, this book is not only about postmodernism, it is also postmodern; it is devoid of metaphysical closure.

This is not to say that it is devoid of meaning, or that its meaning is undecidable. Unlike a lot of postmodernist narratives, it most definitely does have a story to tell—and there is a plot to it. This, though, is a plot without a dénouement, since the story does not have an end, being, as it is, the story of our times, whose outcome or sens (meaning/direction) is as yet undecided. The story is one which is increasingly encountered in a number of different versions, depending on who it is who is doing the telling. It is the story of postmodernism, which is to say, of the end of modernism—even more, of the end of metaphysics (the “metaphysics of presence”), the end (according to some) of philosophy itself.

I owe it to the reader to say what I mean by postmodernism/the-end-of-modernism. Although in essay 4, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity,” I make a distinction between “postmodern” and “postmodernist” (or “postmodernistic”) thinkers, and although the distinction is an important one in the context of that particular story, it can no doubt be glossed over here.¹ Just what is postmodernism? There seems to be no canonical answer to this question. As one writer pertinently observes: “Every student of modern culture is evidently required to state a position on modernism and postmodernism, even though it is not clear what these words denote. They mean, it appears, whatever we want them to mean.”²

While “modernism” does indeed mean different things to different people, to architects and to literary theorists, for instance, its meaning for philosophers can be pinned down fairly neatly. “Modernism” denotes what the traditional term “modern philosophy” denotes: that movement of thought which originates with Descartes and which has perpetuated itself up to and into the twentieth century. The term has definite connotations as well. It connotes all the concerns which were constitutive of modern philosophy. These concerns were, basically, of a dual nature; epistemological and foundationalist. What above all characterizes that form of the logocentric metaphysics of presence known as modern philosophy is that it seeks to realize philosophy’s traditional goal of achieving a basic, fundamental knowledge (epistemē, Wissenschaft) of what is (taonta) by turning inward, into the knowing subject himself (conceived of either psychologistically or transcendentally), where it seeks to discover grounds which will allow for certainty in our “knowledge” of what, henceforth, is called “the external world.” As I say below in essay 11, the methodological conviction of the modern philosopher is that he may come to know truly that reality which is only indirectly present (re-presented) to him by the senses if only he can order his own “ideas” (cogitationes) in accordance with the unquestionable laws of logic (vide, for instance, Leibniz’s ars combinatoria). If only he can string his ideas together in the right way, the result supposedly will be that they will form a true “representation” or likeness of “objective” reality. Representationalism has been the name of the game from Descartes up to our twentieth-century positivists and analysts. As Heidegger observed in his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” the two ontological characteristics of modernity are the world’s becoming a picture or representation and, simultaneously, man’s becoming a representing subject in the midst of mere objects. Or, in Merleau-Ponty’s phraseology, man becomes a kosmotheoros, a pure Spectator, at the same time that the world becomes le Grand Objet.

The two great theoretical by-products of modern, epistemologically centered philosophy which places all the emphasis on method (as opposed to insight [noesis], as in the case of the ancient metaphysics of presence), are the notions of subjectivity and a fully objective, determinate world—the essential business of the “knowing subject” (“man”) being that of forming true “representations” of so-called objective reality. The end of modernism means, accordingly, the end of epistemologically centered philosophy (as Richard Rorty has remarked). It means the end of what modernism understood by “the subject,” and it means as well the end of the “objective world” (a world which is fully what it is in itself and which simply waits around for a cognizing subject to come along and form a “mental representation” of it).

What are we left with after the demise of the epistemological subject and the objective world—after the demise of the very ideas of “knowledge” and “truth” (the “true representation of objective reality”)? The attempt to spell out the consequences of the end of modernism, of metaphysics in general (modernism being the “metaphysics of representation”)—Nietzsche’s “death of God”—is what postmodernism is all about.

On this subject, a number of stories could be told, and in fact are told. The distinctive mark of the story that I shall be telling—not in the form of one grand, interconnected narrative, to be sure, but in many different, partial, overlapping versions—is that it is not the same as all the others. It is different, above all, from the kind of story that would likely be told by poststructuralists of various assorted stripes and colors. For these, postmodernism would have its origins in the various backlashes against phenomenology (the quintessence, according to them, of the metaphysics of presence or of “humanism”) that started to make their appearance after the death of Merleau-Ponty. In their rush to bury their philosophical progenitor and to liquidate his intellectual estate, these writers turned a conscientiously blind eye to the decisive contribution that Merleau-Ponty had made toward dissolving the epistemological-metaphysical project. What is important for us to keep in mind, with our conscientiously clearer hindsight, is that Merleau-Ponty himself was simply radicalizing a beginning that had already been made.

Whereas in the English-speaking world the beginning of the end of modernism has only begun to be made with the emergence of what is now known as “postanalytic philosophy,” the beginning of the end of modernism began much earlier on the Continent. One thinks naturally of Nietzsche’s devastatingly deconstructive critique of the entire metaphysical-Platonic tradition (“Philosophy,” in Rorty’s sense of the term). Nietzsche is indeed the great “prophet of extremity,”³ but, as is generally the case with prophets, his message at the time fell on ears which were mainly deaf. Were one seeking to elaborate a grand narrative, Nietzsche’s place in this récit would have to be dictated not by chronology but by his effective history (as Gadamer would say), the history of his influence. Nietzsche makes his effective entry into the history of postmodernism only with Heidegger’s problematic reading of him and with the cult erected in his honor by the French post–Merleau-Pontyian Nietzscheans.

The real beginning of postmodernism in the (academic) philosophical world must be looked for elsewhere. James’s Pragmatism was a genuine beginning. But it was a beginning without a follow-up and without an effective history (James’s radical critique of epistemological philosophy having been thoroughly ignored by the metaphysical positivism and analyticism which later occupied central stage in America). The beginning, both genuine and real, of postmodern philosophy occurs with the promotion of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl. (The year 1900 witnessed both the death of Nietzsche and the birth of phenomenology in the form of Husserl’s Logical Investigations.) Any detailed history of postmodern thought would have to begin here, with a detailed sorting out of what is new and what is old in Husserl’s creative reappropriation of the Tradition. A key text to reexamine in this regard would be The Idea of Phenomenology. In attempting in this work to overcome decisively what Alexandre Lowit, in his remarkable preface to the French translation of the text, calls “la situation phénoménale du clivage”—in other words, the subject-object split which is at the origin of modern philosophy—Husserl effectively deconstructed both the “epistemological subject” and the “objective world.”

Like many a pivotal thinker, Husserl is an ambiguous figure, and thus the beginning he inaugurated is ambiguous also—as is only fitting, since in human affairs there is never any such thing as an absolute beginning anyway. Husserl’s express, intended goal was metaphysical through and through: His lifelong ambition was to bring to fulfillment the innermost yearnings of the Platonic-metaphysical traditon by finally putting, by means of phenomenology, philosophy into a position to become what it had always sought to be: a strenge Wissenschaft. The irony (for us who come afterward and thus find ourselves in a position to understand) is that in seeking to realize the inner teleology of metaphysics Husserl at the same time realized its telos, brought it to its end. From one point of view, it makes perfectly good sense to say, as Derrida in fact does, that “ . . . in criticizing classical metaphysics, phenomenology accomplishes the most profound project of metaphysics.”⁴ However, it would make even better sense, hermeneutically speaking, to say, instead, that in seeking to accomplish the most profound project of classical metaphysics, Husserl’s phenomenology actually results in its most devastating critique.

Viewed in this way, the beginning of philosophical postmodernism coincides with the end of modernism and is inseparable from it, as inseparable as Saussure’s signifiant and signifié. This is something that one of Husserl’s own assistants and philosophical heirs, Ludwig Landgrebe, saw quite clearly and said in 1962. With unrivaled hermeneutical perspicuity, Landgrebe wrote (I quote in extenso).

A number of the essays included in this volume consider, accordingly, Husserl’s contributions to the development of a postmodern, postmetaphysical hermeneutical philosophy. If I differ with certain poststructuralists—and, above all, with their epigones—on where to locate the beginning of philosophical postmodernism, I differ with them also, necessarily, on the meaning of subsequent developments and on the direction in which these developments point—or, should I say, on the direction in which they should point us. There can be no doubt that many of the deconstructions of modernism—“objectivism,” in Richard Bernstein’s sense⁶—point only in the direction of relativism and, even more, of nihilism, the kind of nihilism which Nietzsche prophesied and which he and his philosophical heirs have sought—vainly—to conjure away by means of a joyful affirmation of the pointlessness of our effective history. This is a direction that I find neither desirable nor inevitable. Thus, as I said above, the multivalent story I wish to tell in this book has a definite plot to it. There is, as I also said, no dénouement, since the full story remains to be told and will be told only when, through our continued rereading of the texts of our tradition, we will have made the history of postmodernity become what it then will be.

The story I shall be telling has for its express purpose to point us—in our collective endeavors to overcome definitively modernism and the logocentric metaphysics of presence—in a certain direction. If I locate the beginning of philosophical postmodernism in Husserl, it is because it seems to me that the enterprise that he instituted—phenomenology—points us in the right direction, beyond both objectivism and relativism. The history of the phenomenological movement is the history of the progressive attempt to eradicate the traces still present within it of the very resilient metaphysics of presence, to exorcise the metaphysical ghosts that continue to haunt our discourse, the house of being, as Heidegger called it. “Existential phenomenology” was the name, at one point, for this endeavor; “phenomenological hermeneutics” is the current one. Merleau-Ponty’s radicalization of the phenomenological critique of the Tradition was one of the most significant of them all. We have yet to appreciate fully all that here genuinely begins (and ends)—a task not made easier by the obstinate silence that most of the post—Merleau-Pontyians in France have maintained in his regard. But the (often only insinuated) criticisms that these writers have made of what they consider to be “phenomenology” are of great hermeneutical worth. Deconstruction in particular has—to a large extent with unacknowledged borrowing from Merleau-Ponty himself—exposed in a ruthless fashion the unacknowledged metaphysical inheritances off of which we still to some extent tend to live. What remains in the history still to be told—and, in the telling, to be made—is the story of poststructuralist phenomenology,⁷ a phenomenology which will have made profitable use of the many pertinent criticisms that poststructuralism has addressed not only to the Tradition but also to phenomenology itself. This is the conclusion the essays gathered together in this book collectively aim at—but which, it goes without saying, is still outstanding. If the author does not get around actually to writing it, he hopes that his readers will.

One afternoon, back in the early 1970s when poststructuralism itself was only beginning, after a lengthy conversation in the rue Michelange, Emmanuel Lévinas presented a copy of one of his books to me and inscribed it thus: “Pour Monsieur Madison, / qui fait sans doute la philosophie d’après-demain / En vive sympathie / E. L.” If not me, then, I sympathetically hope, you, Dear Reader. One simply can no longer do philosophy as it was done yesterday, nor can we be satisfied with what is going on today, which resembles a kind of Rimbaudian dérèglement systématique de tous les sens (where sens would be best [freely] translated as “meanings” rather than as “senses”). Nor can we be satisfied with what tomorrow will bring, since it will likely be more of the same, pushed to its absurd limits—a problematic time for philosophy which will not know how, or even if, it differs in any significant way from “literature,” i.e., as Roland Barthes would have it, a language which says nothing other than itself, which is dense and opaque, which expresses neither “facts” nor “thoughts” nor “truth.” No, we must look forward to the day after tomorrow when we may finally attain to a poststructuralist phenomenology and we will have witnessed, after the end of metaphysics, the end of “the end of philosophy.”

The essays to follow are all original texts. By that I do not mean that what they say is completely inédit, that they say something never before said. A genuine “original thought” is, as we now know, a metaphysical fiction. A whole host of other texts speak in these texts, and there is little, if anything, that they say which has not already been said in one form or another, to one degree or another. But this cannot be grounds for criticism.

Long before people had become conscientiously aware of the diacritical nature of meaning and the bricolage nature of writing, of the fact that, as Italo Calvino puts it, “writing is purely and simply a process of combination among given elements,”⁸ Pascal remarked: “Different arrangements of words make different meanings, and different arrangements of meanings produce different effects.”⁹ Accordingly, when his critics accused him of a lack of originality he replied:

These essays are original, not in that they say something completely new,¹¹ but in that the arrangement of their material is new; they were all specific responses to the original contexts which called them forth in the first place. They are not simply set pieces, but were deliberately addressed to their specific audiences, listeners or readers, as the case may be. No attempt has been made here to obscure this fact, to make what was, for instance, meant to be a spoken text into a merely written text. As a member of the rhetorical countertradition who believes in the difference between the two genres, who believes that one shouldn’t present written texts to audiences which can only hear (one can, of course, always afterward read a paper which was read), I have, while retouching some of the pieces somewhat for their appearance in this volume, made no attempt to make them out to be anything other than what they were when they first saw the light of day.

These pieces are therefore context-specific, as the reader will readily notice. In editing this volume I have deliberately avoided the metaphysical conceit of affecting an atemporal mode of discourse, pretending to a temporally and culturally invariant truth- and relevancy-status for what I have to say. Any such pretension is incompatible with the historicity of human understanding that postmodernism has so much emphasized. And yet, it would be my hope that there is something in these pieces that transcends their immediate context and that they will have something to say to all those who, wherever and whoever they be, are struggling to think the death of metaphysics and what this means for the furture of philosophy.

I will not comment here on the various essays, but I should say a word about the first of them, “A Critique of Hirsch’s Validity.” The oldest of the lot by far, dating from the early 1970s, it was written before Gadamer’s Truth and Method made its appearance in English and began to exercise fully its effectivity on philosophy in North America. It was composed before there was any talk (reaching me, at least) of philosophical postmodernism. The interest it can have for readers today stems precisely from that fact. This essay quite nicely sets the stage for the ones which follow it. Written in reply to E. D. Hirsch’s critique of Gadamerian hermeneutics, this critique of Hirsch’s own modernist, objectivistic hermeneutics points, by means of this critique, to the need to work out a decisive alternative to the traditional epistemological paradigm, to articulate alternatives to the traditional metaphysical conceptions of truth and reality. The essays which follow it attempt, in small steps, to do just that.

The philosophical interest of this essay lies, therefore, in the fact that it is not simply a reply to one particular individual but is—through this—a reply to modernistic thinking in general; Hirsch is, indeed, a superb, made-to-measure exemplification of modern objectivism. This critique of modernism in the person of Hirsch serves, as it should, to situate properly phenomenological hermeneutics in the overall spectrum of human understanding; as a thoroughgoing critique of objectivism, phenomenological hermeneutics is fully a form of postmodern thinking. As subsequent essays will show, however, phenomenological hermeneutics differs from other forms of postmodernism in that it does not seek merely to deconstruct the traditional, metaphysical notions of “knowledge” and “truth”; it seeks to provide alternatives to them.

With the publication of these texts in book form, they are set free to drift where they will and to enter into other, newer contexts. Their proper addressee is, as Ricoeur would say, anyone who knows how to read. Or as Calvino says: “ . . . the spirit in which one reads is decisive: it is up to the reader to see to it that literature exerts its critical force, and this can occur independently of the author’s intentions.”¹²