The Disqualification of Intentionality

Abstract

After metaphysics came to an end-positively in Hegel, negatively in Nietzsche -it was phenomenology that inspired a new beginning of philosophy. For better of worse, this fact cannot be denied. Phenomenology initiated this new beginning by laying bare not simply a new region of beings or objects of experience, but the necessary beginning of any and all experience. As opposed to particular regional sciences, phenomenology, and the reduction which was its royal road, claimed to lay bare the appearing of all that appears-beings, objects, or whatever else one wants to call what appears in experience. As such, the phenomenological breakthrough represented a radical attempt to extend the possibility of appearing to all beings.1 This attempt to embrace the appearing of each and every implies a radical redefinition of possibility such that the possibility of appearing is extended to all that appears, even what appears as the impossible. As Jean-Luc Marion has argued, the phenomenological redefinition of possibility marks a radical departure from previous figures in the history of philosophy. In Kant, for instance, "that which agrees with the formal conditions of experience, that is, with the conditions of intuition and of concepts, is possible."2 In this definition, possibility is determined not simply by the appearing of phenomena, but by the conditions for experience. The field of phenomenality is thus limited to what is embraced by these conditions, and only those phenomena which admit these conditions are allowed the right to appear. More specifically, these conditions-intuition and concepts-are identified with the power of knowing in and through a finite mind. In Kant, at the least, what appears owes the possibility of its appearance to the power of knowing that alone can legitimate, justify, grant that appearance. Thus, anything is possible, so long as it submits to the conditions of knowing. But one might well wonder: Doesn't the meaning of appearance imply precisely to appear with or without justification, indeed before there is any question of conforming to conditions which would justify its possibility? Such a question gives voice to the insight driving the phenomenological breakthrough. It motivates the most famous of the principles put forth by the inaugural figures of phenomenology-Husserl and Heidegger. First, Husserl's principle of principles: "every originarily donating intuition is a source of right for cognition, that everything that offers itself to us originarily in intuition is to be taken quite simply as it gives itself out to be" (Ideen I, 24, cited in PS, 84). All that appears has the right to appear. The appearing of phenomena is no longer justified by submitting to the conditions of the finite mind that thinks or experiences, but simply by appearing in intuition. This corresponds to the declaration thirteen years earlier in the Logical lnvestigations of "the principle of the absence of presupposition." And it reappears fourteen years later in Heidegger's famous definition of the phenomenon as "that which shows itself in itself from itself" (Sein und Zeit, 7). Phenomenologically speaking then, for a phenomenon to be possible, it has only to appear, and this appearing arises at the initiative of the phenomenon without regard for the determinations that knowing might impose on it. If phenomena appear for phenomenology without submitting to conditions, the possibility of appearing will have been extended to each and every phenomen.on As such, phenomenology ought to be able to describe a phenomenon such as the gift. In fact, however, the analysis of the gift proposed by Jacques Derrida has shown that the gift represents an impossible phenomenon, one that does not appear. The gift then is a test or rather an ordeal for phenomenology: as a phenomenological impossibility, the gift, more than posing a question for phenomenology, poses the question of phenomenology itself, of its limits and its faithfulness to its original insight-and perhaps even the way back to this insight. …