An Absence that Counts in the World: Merleau-Ponty's Later Philosophy of Time in Light of Bernet's “Einleitung”

Abstract

In his “Einleitung” to Edmund Husserl’s Texte zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), translated for the first time in this volume, Rudolf Bernet convincingly argues for an alternative order and grouping of Husserl’s early texts on time — texts originally published as “Supplementary Texts” (Part B) in the critical edition of Husserl’s Time Lectures in Husserliana X: Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Most significantly, Bernet situates these texts within the context of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology and brings to light not only their philosophical import but also their limitations and blind spots. By means of Bernet’s re-reading and reconstruction, Husserl’s early analyses of time come to reveal tendencies and directions of thought that are otherwise obscured by the organization of the Time Lectures themselves. As is now well known, the “Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time” (originally published in 1928 and republished as Part A of the critical edition in 1966) were edited by Edith Stein and nominally by Martin Heidegger and juxtapose texts from different periods of Husserl’s thought on time between 1893 and 1917; this collage effectively masks the philosophical and terminological shifts within Husserl’s phenomenology of timeconsciousness. What is masked is precisely that “unthought-of element” of Husserl’s analyses that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was to find so productive; this is Husserl’s constant self-questioning and rethinking of earlier positions, the divergence and revision that reveal his thought as a process in the making. In taking up and re-ordering the “Supplementary Texts” from Husserliana X, Bernet’s “Einleitung” makes visible the stakes implicit in the movement of Husserl’s thought on time, both in the continuities upon which it insists and in the transformations it enacts. The “Einleitung” reveals reiterations but also differences within Husserl’s own thinking of time; it exposes the articulations, hesitations and sometimes even the worries that make the concepts central to Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness — concepts of retention, primal impression and absolute consciousness — what they have become for us. As Bernet notes, Husserl’s time-analyses have been a generative, albeit contested, ground for later French phenomenologists for whom the critique of these analyses has constituted an indispensable point of departure in their own thinking of time (“Einleitung,” lxiii). Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a curious case