Jack Reynolds

Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event

Deleuzes oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound synonymous with a philosophy of the event. The philosophy of his immediate predecessors in the phenomenological tradition can thus be envisaged as constituting a philosophy of the scar, with phenomenological and embodied intentionality (including the significance given to habit, coping, etc.) resulting in a concomitant refusal to privilege the event as wound. Various consequences hang on this difference, but primarily it results in a very different ethico-political orientation in Deleuzes work in comparison to the tacit ethics of phronesis that can be ascribed to much of the post-Husserlian phenomenological tradition. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuzes texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his...

Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty’s work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty’s thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies and feminism.

Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty : Immanence, univocity and phenomenology

Introduction Essays that employ a ‘compare and contrast’ methodology can be tedious, sometimes even spurious, but they can also produce a third event that is more than merely the sum of its parts. It is particularly worthwhile to try for that in regard to the work of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, because of myriad oppositions that surround and confound their reception: most obviously, the too prevalent post-structuralist vs. phenomenologist paradigm (which is also often accompanied by an epochal successor/predecessor pre-determination of the substance of any argument), but also the bifurcation between philosophers of transcendence and philosophers of immanence that it has been argued afflicts contemporary European thought. In this latter respect, Deleuze, who is heavily indebted to Spinoza and Nietzsche, and advocates pure immanence and poststructuralist ‘difference’, is considered to be on one side of the paradigm, whereas the sometimes existentialist (read transcendence) and phenomenologist of consciousness (read sameness), Merleau-Ponty, is on the other. While there is some truth to both of these broad sketches as a means of understanding aspects of contemporary European philosophy, they are far more problematic when Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are taken as sitting on opposing sides. Ultimately we will argue that something like a coexistence of planes obtains between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, notwithstanding some initial appearances to the contrary and the fact that there has been very little secondary work examining their inter-relation. This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology (which are at least as cutting as Derrida’s more famous and prolonged engagement with phenomenology), particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze and Guattari directly engage with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that MerleauPonty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and

Dreyfus and deleuze on L'habitude, coping, and trauma in skill acquisition

Abstract One of the more important and under‐thematized philosophical disputes in contemporary European philosophy pertains to the significance that is given to the inter‐related phenomena of habituality, skilful coping, and learning. This paper examines this dispute by focusing on the work of the Merleau‐Ponty and Heidegger‐inspired phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, and contrasting his analyses with those of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in Difference and Repetition. Both Deleuze and Dreyfus pay a lot of attention to learning and coping, while arriving at distinct conclusions about these phenomena with a quite different ethico‐political force. By getting to the bottom of the former, my hope is to problematize aspects of the latter in both philosophers’ work. In Deleuze’s case, it will be argued that he adopts a problematic position on learning that is aptly termed ‘empirico‐romanticism’. While I will agree with the general thrust of Dreyfus’ foregrounding of habit and skilful coping, even in the political realm, it will also be argued that there are some risks associated with his view, notably of devolving into a conservative communitarianism.

Phenomenology and naturalism: a hybrid and heretical proposal

Abstract In this paper I aim to develop a largely non-empirical case for the compatibility of phenomenology and naturalism. To do so, I will criticise what I take to be the standard construal of the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and naturalism, and defend a ‘minimal’ version of phenomenology that is compatible with liberal naturalism in the ontological register (but incompatible with scientific naturalism) and with weak forms of methodological naturalism, the latter of which is understood as advocating ‘results continuity’, over the long haul, with the relevant empirical sciences. Far from such a trajectory amounting to a Faustian pact in which phenomenology sacrifices its soul, I contend that insofar as phenomenologists care about reigning in the excesses of reductive versions of naturalism, the only viable way for this to be done is via the impure and hybrid account of phenomenology I outline here.

Derrida, friendship and the transcendental priority of the ‘untimely’

This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’ friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense of ‘touched’ that connotes affected and wounded. Derrida’s work instantiates what Husserl might call a transcendental pathology, in that it intermittently instantiates an ethics of non-presentist time (the time which is also the transcendental condition for the event of friendship), and, by contrast, disparages the significance of what we might call an ethics of phronesis, a ‘lived’ friendship of ‘omni-temporal’ dispositions, and embodied and habitual patterns. I end this article by proposing a dialectic between the disjunctive and conjunctive aspects of time that does not accord any kind of a priori privilege to the one over the other.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty : life and works

In many respects Merleau-Ponty is the unknown man of the twentieth centurys major European philosophers. This is not to deny that he has been widely read and influential – in fact, there is good reason to agree with Paul Ricoeur that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists – but simply to observe that his life and personality have not been examined, some might say fetishized, in the manner that might be expected for a French academic philosopher of significant public repute. Certainly, he did not initially receive the same amount of attention as his contemporaries and sometimes friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He has not had biographies written about him as they have, nor had photographic diaries and movies devoted to him, as have Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, and he never courted the media in the manner of, say, Sartre, and more recently, Bernard-Henri Levy. In fact, the life of Merleau-Ponty and the force of his personality remain something of a mystery. He seems to personify what Heidegger is reputed to have said of Aristotle: that he lived, he worked, and he died, and that was all that needed to be said about the relation between a philosopher and their biography. On the other hand, perhaps this mystery and this anonymity that surround Merleau-Ponty partly reveal his personality. At least according to Sartres remarkable, heartfelt eulogy, “Merleau-Ponty Vivant” (Stewart 1998), one never felt wholly familiar with Merleau-Ponty.

The master–slave dialectic and the “sado-masochistic entity”

Hegels famous descriptions of the “master–slave dialectic,” and the more general analysis of the struggle for recognition that it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nine...

Philosophy and/or Politics? Two Trajectories of Philosophy After the Great War and Their Contamination

In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the same in philosophy (as elsewhere). On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental ‘divide’ is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands.

“Intrinsic Time” and the Minimal Self: Reflections on the Methodological and Metaphysical Significance of Temporal Experience

Philosophy of time is notoriously perplexing terrain, even if we bracket for the moment the complexities of contemporary physics. As Thomas Metzinger puts it: “the phenomenal texture of time is a paradigmatic example of a feature governed by the ‘principle of evasiveness.’ It is a feature that instantly recedes or dissolves if introspective, cognitive, or even attentional processing is directed at it” (Metzinger 2004, 153). Thousands of years earlier, St Augustine also famously captured this when he said: “What then is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me: but if I am asked what it is and try to explain it, I am baffled” (Augustine 1992, book 11, ch. xiv). Augustine claims to understand time from within lived experience and what we might today call the first-person perspective, but he also admits he is baffled if asked to theorise about time metaphysically and offer an explanation (rather than a description) of this lived time for a third party and from an atemporal perspective, as the question “what is time?” seems to necessarily involve. I think we remain heirs to this neo-Augustinian dilemma, both in regard to the philosophical significance to be accorded to our lived experience of time, and in regard to the connected issue of the role of the first-person perspective in philosophical theorising more generally. At the very least, it is directly relevant to the question of the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism, and between phenomenology and empirical science, which are my concerns here.