Jonathan L. Dronsfield

Before the Camera

So let’s begin with an interview. Or rather, a seemingly offhand remark in an incidental text devoted to a relatively undeveloped subject in Derrida’s work – what it is to be before the camera, before the camera in the sense of in front of its lens, and before it in the sense of in a time prior to its event – if, that is, one can begin at all with a margin of this sort. Not with the above epigraph, which is anyway far more than a remark and closer to an endpoint than a beginning, and which because it touches on images (but which texts do not?) and in any case is not a text proper, twice rules itself out and from the start, as a beginning, but with a comment made in passing during the course of an interview with Derrida conducted by artists and published in an art journal, about a role, neither a leading role nor an extra, played by Derrida in the film Ghost Dance, one of two parts that, as far as I know, Derrida has performed in artworks of the moving image, the other being in the video art piece Disturbance (Among the Jars). Derrida describes both parts as primarily improvisations. Interviews too for Derrida have always been the occasion for improvisation. And improvising in this regard has always meant operating according to a time and a rhythm at the very least ill-suited to and perhaps even in contradistinction to the work of a philosopher. (Another reason not to begin with our epigraph, which we would be wrong to take as a basso continuo running throughout this essay: on such lines are improvisations built; in the present case the epigraph is more like a syncopation demanding metric regularity.) So we begin in a space which is not properly philosophical, one which is overly determined temporally by the requirements and needs of a medium inimical to philosophy. Derrida accords a certain derivative, supplementary space for interviews and we must ask why and what sorts of presuppositions underpin it. And we begin with this remark not because it is an interview but because to take it as a ‘mere’ improvisation would be to cover over what it is about it that helps reveal Derrida’s understanding of what it frames.

The Resistance of the Question to Phenomenological Reduction: Husserl, Fink and the Adequacy of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation as a Response to Heidegger

It is no exaggeration to say that before it is anything else phenomenology is questioning, and that there would be no phenomenological reduction without the question. Perhaps we could go further and say that to question is phenomenological in principle. But can we say that Husserl knows what a question is for phenomenology? Husserl seems to be caught in a double bind, for at the same time he is committed to the thought that with the phenomenological reduction even questioning can be suspended, ‘put into question’, and that methodologically this is necessary for the attainment of transcendental questioning, which is why he affirms that what transcendental questioning is cannot be said. Then in what sense can a transcendental question be put at all? But perhaps this double bind, if it is a double bind, is necessary for phenomenology, or at least for a phenomenology carried out responsibly in the name of questioning. To my knowledge Husserl nowhere reflects on what exactly a question is, despite his arguing that transcendental phenomenology is a radically new way of questioning. However, with the comparatively recent (1986/1995) publication of Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation (1932) we are provided with Husserl’s thoughts, in the form of his annotations and amendments to Fink’s text and appendices attached to it a little more than a year later, on precisely in what sense the phenomenological reduction can lead to a new way of questioning, that is on the relation between the phenomenologist as questioner and the questioning that phenomenology is.1 To this extent Fink’s text and Husserl’s additions and alterations to it can be seen as a response to and rebuttal of Heidegger’s existential analytic, published five years earlier, which famously begins by distinguishing Dasein as the being for whom above all its being is an issue in the form of a question, the question of being.2 It can be argued that Fink’s text is a response to the way in which Heidegger unfolds the question of being, perhaps even an answer to the questions Heidegger raises. But in this paper I shall want to say that if the question is necessary