Flesh and

Body
 ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

The Husserl Dictionary, Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen

Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matheson Russell
Phenomenology: An Introduction, Michael Lewis and Tanja Staehler
 Flesh and
Body
On the Phenomenology of Husserl

DIDIER FRANCK
Translated by Joseph Rivera and Scott Davidson
 Bloomsbury Academic
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Originally published in French as Chair et Corps 1981 by Les Editions de Minuit

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 CONTENTS

Translators Introduction, Joseph Rivera 1

Introduction 11

1 Self-Givenness and Incarnate Givenness 17

2 Science as Egology 27
3 Flesh and Body in Perception 37
4 Constitutive Analysis 45
5 Eidetic Reduction and Archi-facticity 53
6 Phenomenological Idealism 61
7 The Objection of Solipsism 71
8 Flesh and the Sphere of Ownness 77
9 Flesh, Ego, Psyche 87
10 The Alteration of Ownness 93
11 The Incarnation of Another Body 101
12 Pairing and Resemblance 111
13 Here and There 119
14 The Dynamic of the Apperceptive Transfer 129
15 Caress and Impact 137
16 The Problem of Time 149
17 Flesh and Time 157

Notes 167
Index 217
 ,


.
* Parmenides
 Translators Introduction
Joseph Rivera

Didier Franck began a long and fruitful career upon the 1981
release of his book Chair et corps: sur la phnomnologie de
Husserl, which we translate here. Prior to this publication, and
before he began lecturing at the University of Paris X Nanterre
as a promising philosopher whose potential was evident but still
incipient, he devoted himself to studying the phenomenology of
his day in its original idiom, a necessary exercise if this German
philosophy itself was to be truly grasped in all of its teutonic
complexity. It is no surprise, then, that the occasion of his
first academic contribution was a translation of an important
collection of thematic essays written by Eugen Fink (1974) (other
than Heidegger, Fink was perhaps Husserls most accomplished
student). This book would, in the end, prove not only indicative of
the Husserlian path Franck would pursue in the ensuing decades,
but also of the phenomenological composition of all his thinking,
imparting into his work a careful and critical apprehension of
the limits and possibilities of phenomenological enquiry itself.1
Even though his doctoral advisor was Paul Ricoeur, under whose
guidance was written Chair et corps, early on Franck came under
the decisive influence of Jacques Derrida, and much later befriended
another elder statesman in the French academy, Michel Henry.2 It
is also worth noting that after 1984, when he replaced Derrida at
the cole normale suprieure (ENS), Franck shared some lecturing
responsibilities at Nanterre with a young and fledgling descendant
of Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, whose work now enjoys a wide
readership and is celebrated especially in America.3 Philosophical
discourse in France, when Franck and Marion were just appearing
2 FLESH AND BODY

on the scene, was beleaguered by the advent of structuralism, but

is in large measure today dominated by Husserl and Heidegger and
the phenomenological style of thinking they inaugurated, which
for many opened up the prospect of the renewal of continental
philosophy in France. Prior to the ascension of structuralism, the
French variety of phenomenology in particular was taken in highly
original, if divergent, directions not only by Derrida, Ricoeur and
Henry in the early 1960s, but also by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas a generation before.
It is perhaps impossible to estimate, then, just how crucially
fertile was the reception of Husserl in France just before and
after World War II. So much of the philosophical order in France
had grown weary from the excesses of either a kind of spiritu-
alism on the one hand or, on the other, a positivism intended to
rehabilitate the Cartesian paradigm of mathematics and empirical
epistemology. Taking lived experience as a departing theme,
Husserlian phenomenology functions in philosophical discourse
not as a moment of empirical deduction, nor as a speculative
narrative about the minds noetic powers, but as a return to the
philosophical promise to be realized upon thoughtful consid-
eration of the basic experience we have of things in the flesh or
in incarnate presence (leibhaftig, an expression Husserl uses that
the French translate as in flesh and bone).4 Such a movement back
to the things themselves forsakes the closure of the Cartesian
subject. This is because so much of phenomenology, indebted as it
is to Husserl, aspires to articulate the intentional structure of the
experience that is lived out in community with others who, too,
are in motion, intending and seeing objects as they are lived. As
Husserl himself stated in his well-known Cartesian Meditations,
Descartes ego, even if it is the manifestly legitimate starting point
for philosophical reflection, remains an unduly sterile subject if left
to its solitude precisely because it is in isolation, the permanent
expansion of the Cartesian subject beyond itself proposes to be the
first step in phenomenology:

The transcendental heading, ego cogito, must therefore be

broadened by adding one more member. Each cogito, each
conscious process, we may also say, means something or other
and bears in itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its
particular cogitatum.5
 Translators Introduction 3

Intentionality is the basic movement of all consciousness, an

ontological feature of the ego that enables Husserl to begin with,
but also to broaden, the metaphysics of the Cartesian cogito.
Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida all translated Husserl, introducing
key elements of his phenomenology of the cogito into the life of
the Parisian academy. And just as thraldom to the postmodern
spell and the philosophy of difference was taking hold amid
the events that unfolded in May 1968 at the University of
Paris, Husserls reception in France involved richly vertiginous
polemics about the nature of representational metaphysics and
the modern subject, controversies that were as much moral as
philosophical.
But Husserl had been embraced in France much earlier, in the
1930s and 40s. Levinas translated, in 1931, the lectures Husserl
delivered at the Sorbonne in 1929 that became the Cartesian
Meditations. Merleau-Ponty, of course, profited greatly from his
close readings of manuscripts in the Husserl archives (which
opened in 1939 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) just as
Sartre, no matter how far at a philosophical remove he was from
Husserl, considered in his 1936 work La transcendance de lego
how the Husserlian I, as an object for thought, opens up a space
that is irremediably in relation to transcendence and may well
evoke a sophisticated discourse on the self that has nothing to
do with idealism. It is in this vibrant scholarly context spanning
several decades that Francks concise, but brilliantly executed,
study of Husserls concept of the body struck a chord. Suffice it to
say, Franck attempted to bring Husserlian phenomenology more
fully into view; just so, the book was quickly recognized as both
a subtle re-reading of phenomenological enquiry more broadly
and a corrective to a construal of the Husserlian ego for which so
much Husserl scholarship in particular was culpable: flesh and the
element of the concrete, Franck contended, were not abandoned by
the transcendental ego and the phenomenological reduction, but
rather were operative at the most radical of levels of its constitution
of the world, orienting the ego fundamentally around alterity
around the poles of temporality, spatiality and intersubjectivity.
Flesh is the medium of all perception, and by force of its unity
with the exterior body incorporates under its perceptual form a
relation to the other body and ultimately the objective world that
surrounds the ego: every cogito bears a relation to something other
4 FLESH AND BODY

than itself, a cogitatum, and it does so on the basis of its flesh-body,

its Leibkrper.
Before thematizing some of the more significant interpretative
moves Franck makes in his volume on Husserl, it is important
to note that Franck appears in recent years to have withdrawn
from its principal thesis. His work as a whole circulates in a loop,
fortified by a desire to surpass phenomenology only to return to
it once more. Gaining a better appreciation of the problematic
concepts of space and spatiality in Heidegger (1986),6 Franck
finds phenomenology at that moment, as an intellectual tradition,
troubling inasmuch as it does not treat the body with the kind of
precision that it ought to have cultivated after Heidegger. Francks
publication hiatus of 12 years was suspended with the event of
his longest most theoretically demanding book, Nietzsche and
the Shadow of God (1998),7 which has just appeared in English
translation. In this varied but comprehensive study of Nietzsche,
one finds, as an accompaniment to a multitude of close readings
of Nietzsche, analyses of Heideggers concept of danger, an incisive
consideration of contemporary debates about the shifting deploy-
ments of metaphysics, an appreciation of the conceptual power of
the death of God, a critical apprehension of the Christian notion
of flesh and resurrection, and mature and concise comparisons
between Husserl and Nietzsche, among other topics, all of which
are currently debated in contemporary philosophy of religion.
There is one motif, though, that occupies the guiding theme of the
whole work, whose intelligibility lends credibility to the intellectual
unity of Nietzsches work and the Western philosophical tradition
itself: the body understood as the guiding thread (fil conducteur)
of the being of the world itself.
More recently Franck has engaged Heidegger once more, this
time on explicitly theological grounds. In a difficult, if brief, work
entitled Heidegger et le christianisme: lexplication silencieuse
(2004),8 Franck focuses on the enigmatic and opaque forays
Heidegger makes into the pre-Socratics (especially Anaximander)
and the history of Being, and perhaps the silent and indirect expli-
cation of faith and Christian experience to which that encounter
gives rise. His latest book, however, heralds a return to phenom-
enology. With a sustained reading of Levinas work, he interrogates
with Levinas the very scope of phenomenological investigation
of otherness and the body.9 Each of Francks works constitutes a
 Translators Introduction 5

re-reading of Husserl that filters the transcendental ego through

other canonical figures, whether Heidegger, Nietzsche or Levinas,
who together aid Franck in a reconsideration of the Husserlian ego
in view of otherness, and in particular of the temporal structure of
body.
With Flesh and Body Franck adopts a vantage of flesh in
Husserl that accounts for alterity, temporality and intersubjectivity,
countering the tendency to reject Husserl solely on the presumption
that the phenomenological reduction leads immediately to solipsism
or an unpalatable subjective idealism. Francks sensitive re-opening
of the Husserlian ego is on display most emphatically in the last
four chapters of this book, the climax of which is the thesis that
temporality and flesh are unified, which of necessity disposes of the
notion that the ego is in timeless isolation from the alter ego and
the temporal streaming of the world. Chapter 15 is especially rich
in analyses of the limits between my body and the others body
and the phenomenological distinctions to be made between shock
and caress, the primary concrete modes of exchange between
two bodies a fecund way of looking at the bodily dimension of
intersubjectivity that Derrida applauds and to which he devotes
some discussion in his late work on the body, On Touching
Jean-Luc Nancy.10 In the final chapter of Flesh and Body, Franck
announces the fundamental thesis of his interpretation of Husserl:
My flesh is incorporated within a body because, in itself, flesh is
affected by another flesh. Its auto-affection is immediately a hetero-
affection (p. 165). Yet in later essays on Husserl11 Franck appears
to surrender this thesis by indicating that Husserl cannot help but
root the ego in a timeless and invariable form, evident as a form
because it is pure, without taint of temporal dilution, for the self-
presence of the living-present is timeless subjective origin of all
temporal constitution.
This marked shift in emphasis regarding Francks interpretation
of Husserl is due to a more sustained encounter with Husserls On
the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, where
Franck thinks that Husserl at least hints at the possibility of a pure
and stable ego. A kind of unwarranted egoism creeps into Husserls
thinking in the form of the concept of self-impression, which is to
be associated with the transcendental form all subjectivity perhaps
Husserl is basically Cartesian (i.e. solitude) after all. Though
Husserl hardly brings to light the solitude of the primal impression
6 FLESH AND BODY

deep within the ego, and Franck admits that Husserl tends to leave
open possibilities12 in this regard, Franck nevertheless argues that
Husserl anchors the intentional life of the ego in a passive, intran-
sitive primal-presencing a living present that is invariable. For
Franck, the living present accommodates a logic perfectly suited
to explain how temporality is possible in the first place. The living
present holds within itself as its most pure inner moment the uncon-
stituted flow of temporality, the a priori form of temporality that is
immovable (like the bedrock underneath a river that supports the
fast flow of the water).13 Franck, naturally, wants to get beyond
such a phenomenological viewpoint insofar as the Husserlian living
present, where intentio and intentum exactly coincide, renders philo-
sophical discourse incapable of bringing into view the embodied
subject, and this for obvious reasons: how can I possibly engage with
the other, account for the non-ego or the givenness of the world,
if I am immovable and inside a homeland without an embodied
passageway through which I can step into the alien land?
One may challenge whether Francks paradigm shift is warranted
at all. Perhaps a closer study of the concept of world (and the
various intonations of that term in Husserls vocabulary)14 would
have certainly enriched and further corroborated his central claim
in Flesh and Body and, perhaps, prevented the move toward
his later claim (even if it is a measured claim) that egoism
pervades Husserls transcendental ego. In no way does this critique
undermine the interpretative value of Flesh and Body, but it does
call into question the completeness of its argument and highlights
the lack of appreciation it has for the complexity of Husserls
notion of the world. The world is perhaps the greatest phenomeno-
logical problem, because the phenomenologist has

to look upon the obvious as questionable, as enigmatic, and of

henceforth being unable to have any other scientific theme than
that of transforming the universal obviousness of the being of
the world for him the greatest of all enigmas into something
intelligible.15

The concept of world, the unity of the lifeworld and the transcen-
dental constitution of the world are all themes in Husserl to which
Franck does attend in his volume, and yet they are developed only
to the extent that they illumine the nature and function of the
 Translators Introduction 7

flesh-and-body composite. But the advantage of Francks singular

focus on the flesh-and-body relation, we admit, is that he grants
to his readers a focused point of entry into Husserl, and for that it
is a welcome strategy because the body is often underappreciated
or overlooked altogether in Husserl. The great value of this brief
volume, therefore, is that it fills a conspicuous gap in Husserl
scholarship in the Anglophone world, and further brings to light
for contemporary theory the importance of the body in all of its
temporal, spatial and intersubjective texture.
In reading Flesh and Body, one may well benefit from seeing
it as a companion volume of sorts to Husserls Cartesian
Meditations (and Franck explains why in the closing remarks of
his Introduction). Franck devotes considerable space to this work
throughout and engages, at key moments, in what appears to be an
incremental reading of the Meditations that culminates in a consid-
eration of the Fifth Meditation, where Husserl (in)famously brings
his philosophical acuity to bear with meticulous focus on the alter
ego. Franck engages aspects of the Fifth Meditation in Chapters
10 to 12, but especially so in Chapters 13 and 14, which are
entitled Here and There and The Dynamic of the Apperceptive
Transfer, respectively. These two chapters prepare the reader for
the perceptive and scrupulous evaluation of temporality and the
body in the last two chapters; these chapters constitute perhaps the
most fertile and original analyses of the book.
The reader will also incalculably benefit from Francks atten-
tiveness to the three volumes consecrated to the transcendental
problematic of intersubjectivity in the Husserliana series, volumes
XIIIXV. Because these invaluable manuscripts are not yet in
English, the sense of the true import of them for Husserls (and
phenomenologys) commitment to intersubjectivity is often lost on
the Anglophone reader, making their elucidation in this volume
especially enlightening. Even though Franck is to be credited for
carrying out a phenomenological analysis of flesh in view of these
three volumes, there is no inspired reason why, to put it directly,
adequate scrutiny is not paid to Husserls Ideas II. Franck may
disabuse us of the presumption that Ideas II is the absolute key to
apprehending the modes of incarnation in Husserl. He may do so by
pointing out that the most significant passages in Ideas II are only
those that treat the mechanics of touch; Franck does in fact discuss
this well-known passage derived from 36 of Ideas II (pp. 82ff. and
8 FLESH AND BODY

pp. 120ff.). But what of the way in which Husserl understood the
soul (Seele) and the spiritual world of flesh? How might an analysis
of sensation in relation to both Leib and Krper be instructive
for how we approach Husserls concept of incarnation? These
and many other questions remain outstanding precisely because
Franck does not incorporate within his analysis of flesh more
lessons on display in Ideas II. In other words, this gap in Francks
book highlights an incommensurability between the analytic of
incarnation he advances and the idiomatic arrangement of Leib
(subjective body) and Krper (objective body) that occupies so
much of Ideas II. I am not contending that if Franck highlighted
all of the key themes in Ideas II that his interpretation of Husserl
would be greatly altered, or that the analytic of incarnation would
assume a fundamentally new philosophical tone. It is, instead, to
maintain that any phenomenological examination of incarnation
will have to be fully informed by the phenomenological articulation
of the Leibkrper in Ideas II.
As we have mentioned, the final two chapters cast the flesh
body relation in a temporal light, which yields some radical results:
The flesh as both my own and not my own [propre et impropre]
gives rise to time. This signifies, at the very least, that flesh the
sense of flesh does not derive from temporality (p. 165). What
Franck indicates here, and begins to spell out only in outline form,
is that the analytic of flesh is not derivative of temporality but that
temporality, as the product of two fleshes interconnection, is deriv-
ative of flesh. Temporality, despite what Heidegger may contend,
is not most basic. In recent years there have been several secondary
studies of temporality in Husserl that could be read as supple-
ments to Francks subtle investigation of the relation that joins
together flesh and time as two mutual poles of lived experience.
Nicolas de Warrens book comes to mind, as does James Menschs
study, both released since 2009. Menschs book contains a chapter
on Embodied Temporality that may promote a fruitful contrast
between two established interpreters of Husserl.16
A final way in which one may contextualize Franck is to situate
him within the theological turn that has aroused considerable
debate since the 1990s. Named among this cadre of French intellec-
tuals are familiar figures such as Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida, Marion,
Henry, Lacoste, etc. Franck maintains a complicated relationship
with this movement in that he is specifically not interested in
 Translators Introduction 9

religious questions, even though he addresses them through study

of figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Franck, like Levinas
and Derrida, is of Jewish background, but unlike them he does
not consider his Jewishness a contributing factor to his work. Not
exactly an advocate of the theological turn, and certainly not
sympathetic to an explicitly Christian dialogue between theological
and philosophical discourse, Franck is nevertheless accommo-
dating of a basic level of communication between those two great
meta-disciplines. While personal colleagues with Marion, and at
one time with Henry, who are both adamantly Catholic, Franck
has remained committed to an open atheism that is aware of the
profound intellectual debt the West owes to Christianity but this
is an attitude that is, to be sure, interested in releasing philosophy
from its attachment to theology. This is on display best in his book
Nietzsche and the Shadow of God.
A few words about the translation itself are in order. First of all,
the many quotes from Husserl follow the standard English trans-
lation, when available. In some cases, however, we have slightly
altered those translations in an attempt to make Francks argument
more intelligible. As for citations of texts that remain untrans-
lated, we have provided our own English translations throughout.
It should also be noted that there are a number of divergences
between the French and English translations of Husserl, and we
have sought to strike a balance between them that, on the one
hand, remains close to Francks text but, on the other hand,
employs as much of the English lexicon as possible. A few terms
are worth noting here. The French translation of Husserl uses the
term donn where the English uses datum. We have translated
this usually as the given in order to highlight its connection to
givenness, but have resorted to datum whenever it helps to show
the connection to a particular passage that is being cited in the
argument. There are a couple of other divergences to mention. We
have retained the prefix archi- from Francks text, which has the
same role as the term primal in the English translation and the
prefix Ur- in the original German text. In the context of tempo-
rality, we have rendered the French coulement as flowing instead
of following the English translations expression running-off. One
final note the reader may find helpful is the convention that we
have employed when translating the French phrase propre. This
can mean many different things; however, it has been translated
10 FLESH AND BODY

here as ownness or sphere of ownness for the sake of continuity

with English translation of Husserls expression Eigenheitsphre,
to which the French expression is related.
We need to emphasize the choices made with respect to a few
key terms that are central to Francks work as a whole: incarnation,
flesh and body. Where the standard translation typically uses the
expression in person to translate the German leibhaftig, this can be
translated as in the flesh or incarnately present. Without noting
this, it can become difficult to follow the thread of Francks argument,
which is specifically based on how Husserl understands incarnation
and the role of flesh. With respect to Husserls use of the word Leib,
there is a profound difference between Husserl in the French and
English translations. Typically translated in French as la chair or flesh,
it is almost always understood in English as animate organism17 (as
in Cairns translation) or Body (with an upper-case B), while Krper
is translated as a simple lower-case body.18 We sought to maintain
this distinction between flesh [Leib] and body [Krper] rigorously in
order to make it easier to follow Francks argumentation.
This translation is due in large part to the support lent to the
project by Didier Franck himself. He has patiently and carefully
read over the manuscript in its entirety and offered invaluable
comments that have improved the translation greatly; his presence
is felt on every page of the translation itself. Thanks go to Institut
universitaire de France for the generous financial support that
hastened the translation, and to Professor Franck, who is chiefly
responsible for allocating such financial provisions. Special thanks
are due also to Professor Francks patience in answering translation
queries and in taking time to retrieve all required original texts
from Husserls manuscripts in the Husserl Archives of Paris, saving
valuable time. He has been available from the beginning until the
end and more than liberal with his time and support.
Above all, I would like express to my wife, Amanda, my
profound love and gratitude for giving me the sustained time it took
to complete this translation while simultaneously completing the
production of my doctoral dissertation. I have the deepest appre-
ciation for her unfailing support in all that I do, without which I
would not have found the fortitude to carry out this project to its
end. Finally, my thanks are due to Continuum for their support
and enthusiasm for the publication of Francks monograph, and
especially to Rachel Eisenhauer for her consistency and generosity.
 Introduction

Regardless of how one defines thought presuming that this is

even possible today and is not itself precisely the greatest difficulty
and regardless of what tasks are assigned to thought whether
this is to think that we are not yet thinking, to think that what
is most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking, or
to think that thinking means nothing the exercise of thought
presupposes a deepened, renewed and continual definition of
the essence of philosophy. Thinking can take place and will only
ever be able to take place in memory of philosophy. Even if we
go so far as to renounce or to overcome metaphysics in order to
leave thought to itself (in so doing, we still retain a relation to
metaphysics), this renunciation and abandonment do not lead
to an abandonment pure and simple, which is to say, to vacuity.
They will always entail at least some knowledge of that from
which they distance themselves. Forgetfulness here is the highest
form of memory.
In light of the end of philosophy, the closure of metaphysics, it is
necessary to recognize that thought is on its way and still to come
after the completion of modern philosophy. Modern philosophy
is originally and fundamentally Cartesian. Beyond the differences
that separate their respective concepts of history, philosophy and
the history of philosophy, Hegel and Heidegger place Descartes
at the origin of the last epoch of philosophy.1 Descartes establishes
the cogito as the absolute and certain foundation of all truth and
then elevates method to the dignity of a theme. The paradigm of
this method is mathematics, which leads modern philosophy to
take the form of a mathesis universalis that is subjectively founded:
the science of consciousness and formal mathesis. As a precon-
dition, thought demands the elucidation of this ultimate figure; it
thus requires a repetition. If Husserlian phenomenology constitutes
12 FLESH AND BODY

such a repetition the deepest and most refined one then it is

necessary to return to it continually.
Husserl too has forged his own poetic invention of the history
of philosophy,2 according to which Descartes is the primally
founding genius of all modern philosophy.3 This is the case in
two respects, due to an equivocity hidden in his thinking, which
provide the rhythm and articulation of all philosophy leading up
to the emergence of phenomenology. On the one hand, Descartes
established a systematic rationalism, one more physical than
mathematical, inasmuch as he required philosophical knowledge to
be absolutely founded and to be based on an immediate, adequate
and apodictic knowledge. By discovering a new ontological sphere,
the ego cogito, he established an absolute transcendental subjec-
tivity that precedes in principle every conceivable being. In other
words, he brought about the possibility of a transcendental
question of the world by returning and having recourse to an
origin whose mode of being is non-worldly in an unprecedented
sense. But on the other hand, by interpreting the ego as a
mens sive animus sive intellectus, as a psyche or, in short, as
being-in-the-world he gives free reign to psychologism, empir-
icism and scepticism. Descartes is at the origin of transcendental
psychologism, a displacement that falsifies everything, and this
falsification only becomes perceptible from the vantage point of
transcendental phenomenology.
This diagnosis signifies that philosophy is a theory of knowledge,
that is, of a knowing subject in its relation to a known object. But
if the soul is the residue of the abstraction from the body, then
after this abstraction it appears as a complement to the body and
its meaning retains a reference to the physical world. One is thus
led to turn the knowledge of the physical world into a physical
event itself, to grant that knowledge possesses the same mode of
being as its object: this is the sceptical bankruptcy of philosophy
and science. If Descartes gave rise to psychologism, this is not due
primarily to identifying the soul with the transcendental ego. This
identification comes from the restriction of the epoch to a doubt
that is only universal as an attempt to doubt,4 since the perceiving
ego is proved to be indubitable. And in the final analysis, this
restriction originates from the very question posed by Descartes:
how can one acquire certain knowledge of external things? Husserl
poses a question that stands prior to it: how can consciousness go
 Introduction 13

outside itself to posit things as transcendent?5 The problem is no

longer to ensure objectivity but to understand it.
The reduction becomes necessary through the central problem:
the enigma of transcendence. This problem is announced from the
very outset of descriptive phenomenology. In the context of a book
review in 1903, Husserl issued the following warning:

Phenomenology therefore must not be designated as descriptive

psychology without some further qualification. In the rigorous
and true sense it is not descriptive psychology at all. Its descrip-
tions do not concern lived experiences, or classes thereof, of
empirical persons; for of persons of myself and of others,
of lived experiences which are mine and thine it knows
nothing, assumes nothing. Concerning such matters it poses
no questions, attempts no definitions, makes no hypotheses.
In phenomenological description one views that which, in the
strongest of senses, is given: lived experience, just as it is in
itself. One analyses, for example, the thing appearance, not that
which appears via the appearance; and one refuses to consider
the apperception in virtue of which appearance and that which
appears come into correlation with the ego to which the
appearing thing appears.6

Regardless of the important nuances that the opening on to the

constitutive dimension may bring to this project, it is clear that
phenomenology reduces all factuality and describes the pure sense
of knowledge, of exteriority, etc. If one understands the theory of
knowledge in the traditional manner as a problem about the reality
of the external world, then phenomenology is its necessary precon-
dition. The metaphysical neutrality of the Logical Investigations
has the positive meaning of establishing the juridical priority of
phenomenology over all philosophy. And, as strange as it may
seem, the passage to transcendental idealism will not contradict
this antecedence; quite the contrary, it will broaden its scope and
confirm its validity.
Phenomenological description does not have to do with the
empirical, nor is its principle empirical. It involves seeing, to be
sure, but the seeing and establishing of essences; it describes the
pure sphere of the a priori. This requires a twofold broadening: (1)
a broadening of the a priori through the recognition of a material or
14 FLESH AND BODY

contingent a priori on the basis of which the restriction of mathesis

universalis solely to the domain of the formal will be able to be
raised; (2) the broadening of the concepts of intuition, perception
and the object through the discovery of categorical intuition.
In spite of the brevity of these indications, they are sufficient
to show the degree to which Husserls phenomenology fulfils
the modern philosophy which is its secret nostalgia,7 as he
says. Husserls 19234 course on first philosophy commences
legitimately with a critical history of philosophy that is teleologi-
cally guided by transcendental phenomenology. But these brief
indications also suffice to offer a sense of its limitations: the
project remains the same and the absolutization of consciousness
re-establishes a familiar metaphysical position. Far from excusing
this as a case of negligence, we see a reason to insist on this point.
Does this situation not, in effect, facilitate our comprehension of
the end of philosophy and the beginning of thought? The more
radical the knowledge of subjectivity and its epoch becomes, the
more radical the risk and the reward of leaving subjectivity behind.
And what would be a better place to acquire this knowledge than
where subjectivity is thematized in its most brilliant productions?
To put it differently, the better we read Husserl, the better we can
evaluate Heidegger. This proposition does not derive simply from
the history of philosophy as a regional discipline.
After having established the overall need for an interpretation
of phenomenology, questions of procedure now arise. How can
we embark upon such an effort? What guiding clue should be
followed? What text should be kept, if most of Husserls books
have the exemplary and programmatic status of introductions?
Nothing can be done here without making decision in advance.
The matter of phenomenology, its theme, is transcendental subjec-
tivity in the full scope of its constituting work.8 This means that the
Cartesian Meditations is the title for all of Husserls research, and
moreover, he himself regarded it as his major work.9 In a letter to
Roman Ingarden dated 19 March 1930, he states:

This is to be the main work of my life, an abridgment of my

philosophy I have developed, a fundamental work of method
and of a philosophical problematic. It is for me, at least, in light
of the conclusion and ultimate clarity that I have developed,
something with which I can die in peace.10
 Introduction 15

In fact, the whole of the transcendental sphere is very system-

atically articulated therein; its various lacunae are explored;
different reductions are practised and put into relation with one
another; the specificity of intentional analysis is clarified over the
long course of its implementation. All of the phenomenological
problems receive an architectonic and stratified delineation,
even though consideration of them could have been deferred
and referred to previous or subsequent elaborations. But, most
importantly, the phenomenology of the constitution of the ego
by and for itself coincides with phenomenology in general, and
it is never taken as far as it is there. This applies mainly to the
Fifth and final Meditation, which alone is almost as important
as the first four together. Husserl echoes this: the aim of the
Fifth Meditation is not the intentional elucidation of the other,
of Einfhlung, and it especially does not seek to demonstrate
the existence of others.11 Instead, the Fifth Meditation aims to
give meaning to the project of elevating philosophy to the rank
and dignity of a rigorous, absolutely founded science. To do
this, it deploys the reduction to its most extreme limits, which
leads to an ultimate determination of the transcendental field
and to the intentional clarification of the objectivity of the world
and of all objectivity. This commences with the objectivity of
ideal objects and of ideality in general, which are so essential to
phenomenology. In short, the Fifth Meditation deals with the
objectivity of the object, thus raising the question of the being of
intentionality.
For those reasons as well as other ones that I will bring up and
attempt to justify later, this interpretation will be centred on the
fifth and final Meditation, entitled, Uncovering of the Sphere of
Transcendental Being12 as Monadological Intersubjectivity.13
 CHAPTER ONE

Self-Givenness and
Incarnate Givenness

Here, as elsewhere generally, phenomenology is introduced in the

gap between fact and essence. This gap gives rise to and opens its
field of investigation. The initial fact is historical and describes a
particular situation: the progress of the positive sciences is hindered
due to the obscurity of their foundation; the meaning of philosophy
is its unity, but it has fragmented and lost its unity with regard to
the definition of its goals, its problems or its methods. Certainly,
the label of philosophy continues to be used, but

instead of a serious discussion among conflicting theories that,

in their very conflict, demonstrate the intimacy with which they
belong together, the commonness of their underlying convic-
tions, and the unswerving belief in a true philosophy, we have a
pseudo-reporting and a pseudo-criticizing, a mere semblance of
philosophizing seriously with and for one another.1

Moreover, if religious faith is just a lifeless convention, then a

new faith in an autonomous philosophy and science risks being
relegated to insignificance, in turn. European humanity and
Europe is the geographic name for philosophical rationality is
in crisis.
A fact has its own essence and the recognition of a fact implies
the knowledge of its essence. On the basis of what definition of
the essence of philosophy does Husserl provide this factual and
18 FLESH AND BODY

historical description? Philosophy means the universal unity of the

sciences based on an absolute foundation, that is to say, a foundation
which is immediate, apodictic and whose evidence excludes all
conceivable doubt. The intuition of an essence prescribes on its
own, so to speak, a reconstruction and requires a new beginning.
The eidos designates a telos.2 Despite its historicity, this situation
is not unique because it reproduces and repeats the situation that
Descartes faced. Husserl asks, In this unhappy present, is not
our situation similar to the one encountered by Descartes in his
youth?3 Without this repetition, perhaps there would be no way
to provide access to the eidos of historicity. This repetition proves
to be an awareness of a crisis that profoundly unites both distress
and resolve.4 The return to Descartes is not the same as a return to
Cartesianism, that is to say, to its metaphysical theses;5 instead it
is a return of the self to itself. The Meditations provides an unsur-
passable model of this return due to the radical theoretical freedom
that animates that work. The turning back to the ego cogito, a true
beginning, leads to a solipsistic way of philosophizing, as Husserl
notes from the outset. What is the meaning of this solipsism? How
can it gain the status of an objection which threatens to undermine
transcendental phenomenology as a whole? These questions must
first be elucidated by following the development of the first four
Meditations.
The ego cogito, as a beginning in principle, cannot be confused
with a factual point of departure. Its point of departure is the idea
of authentic science, which is borrowed from the actual sciences
handed down by the tradition. And, in order not to presuppose
what these sciences include, not even a scientific norm which would
refer to a system of logic or a theory of science, the idea of such
a science is to be retained only as a pure hypothesis and a pure
possibility. This conversion of fact into possibility already initiates
the series of reductions. The idea of a science with an absolute
foundation is not to be confused with a scientifically constituted
ideal, like the mathematical physics which Descartes and Kant
take as their model. From the outset, this would cover over the
transcendental motif by preventing one from seeing that, instead
of being an ultimate apodictic premise for a sequential chain of
deductions made ordine geometrico, the ego cogito is the name of
an absolute ontological sphere open to experience and to intuition.6
Having reduced facticity in this way, this sphere remains a general
 Self-Givenness and Incarnate Givenness 19

and vague idea that needs to be brought out more distinctly. No

explication in general is possible without a second act that revives
it [un revivre], that is, without a subjectivity that responds to it by
responding to itself. By excluding all speculative thinking, one must
livingly carry out this activity and determine its immanent sense
on the ground of direct analysis.7 The idea of science can only be
explicated intentionally, that is, as a noematic phenomenon.
What, in its pure sense, is the intention which traverses and
animates scientific effort? What is the teleological idea that is
constitutive of genuine science? It is the idea of a systematic series
of true judgements that are founded on each other. True judge-
ments means that they are omni-temporal and intersubjective and,
as evident, they are infinitely repeatable as the same. Evidence is
the sense of science.
The intentional analysis of evidence is not deployed immediately
for its own sake in Husserls Cartesian Meditations, which moves
rapidly toward the search for an apodictic and first evidence.
Intentional analysis only begins to become a theme with the
opening of the problem of constitution which concerns how lived
experience [le vcu] relates to its correlate: reality. By allowing
reality to be integrated into the life of the ego, evidence will
confirm simultaneously solipsism and phenomenological idealism.
The principle that guides all the analyses of evidence subsequent
to the Logical Investigations is very clearly stated in 21 of Ideas
I: Every judging process of seeing such as, in particular, seeing
unconditionally universal truths, likewise falls under the concept
of intuitive givenness .8 Intuitive givenness or the givenness
of the things themselves is the most general characteristic of
all evidence, prior to the distinction between what is adequate or
inadequate, assertoric or apodictic, pure or impure, predicative
or pre-predicative. Judiciary evidence the intuitive givenness of
a state of affairs always refers back to the evidence upon which
the judgement is made, to the evidence of substrates. This means
that the original mode of givenness of the things themselves is
ultimately perception.9 But, how should perception be described?
Perceptual evidence is, according to the Sixth Logical
Investigation, tantamount to a fulfilled intention. The definitive
and final fulfilment of the intention by intuitions thus accomplishes
the true adequatio rei et intellectus. The extension of the concepts
of intuition and perception to the categorical sphere allows, on
20 FLESH AND BODY

the basis of the sensible, categorical acts to give their objects in

the same way as sensible perceptions give theirs: in the flesh (en
chair). Any perceiving consciousness has the peculiarity of being
a consciousness of the own presence in person of an individual
Object.10 Incarnate givenness does not apply only to real objects.
Although the first edition the Logical Investigations (19001) did
not yet characterize the givenness of transcendent things in this
way and reserves adequate perception to incarnation alone, this is
one of the points that Husserl systematically modified in the second
edition (191320), which was contemporaneous with Ideas I. The
latter work affirms from the outset: Seeing an essence is therefore
intuition; and if it is seeing in the pregnant sense and not a mere
and perhaps vague making present, the seeing is an originarily
presenting intuition, seizing upon the essence in its personal
selfhood.11
The incarnate givenness that defines evidence in general (prior to
all critical reflection and thus prior to the problem of apodicticity,
for example) is not to be taken as a metaphor, a way of speaking, or
as something peculiar to Husserls style. Such a view would derive
from two presuppositions whose root is perhaps the same: (1) the
presupposition of trivial concepts of metaphor, of speaking, and
of style, each of which neglect the role of flesh in the Husserlian
analysis of language; (2) the presupposition of a phenomenological
state of affairs that exists in itself and is disconnected from any
relation to the flesh. Now, with respect to the latter presuppo-
sition, all of Husserls analyses affirm that the flesh accompanies
each perception. In incarnate givenness, the flesh is always both
given and giving [donne et donatrice]. Would an adumbration,
which characterizes perception of a transcendent thing, have its full
sense, if the subject were not an embodied subject [sujet de chair]
who is able to move around the thing, to move closer or further
away from it? Would the horizon have its full sense at least, with
respect to this level of description which excludes the constitution
of immanent temporality if the subject were not an I can and an
I can move.12 Not all self-givenness is necessarily incarnated, but
self-givenness in the flesh is its highest mode, its telos.
In one of his few analyses of Husserlian phenomenology
and more specifically to the basic constitution of intentionality,
Heidegger, with respect to the perception of a thing, carefully
distinguishes between self-givenness and incarnate self-givenness:
 Self-Givenness and Incarnate Givenness 21

The perceived as such has the feature of bodily presence

[Leibhaftigkeit]. In other words, the entity which presents itself
as perceived has the feature of being bodily-there. Not only
is it given as itself, but as itself in its bodily presence. There
is a distinction in mode of givenness to be made between the
bodily-given and the self-given. Let us clarify this distinction
for ourselves by setting it off from the way in which something
merely represented is there. Representing is here understood
in the sense of simple envisaging, simply bringing something
to mind. I can now envisage the Weidenhauser bridge; I place
myself before it, as it were. This bridge is itself given. I intend
the bridge itself and not an image of it, no fantasy, but it itself.
And yet it is not bodily given to me. It would be bodily given
if I go down the hill and place myself before the bridge itself.
This means that what is itself given need not be bodily given,
while conversely anything which is bodily given is itself given.
Bodily presence is a superlative mode of the self-givenness of
an entity.13

And a little further, he continues:

When we start from simple perception, let us reaffirm that the

authentic moment in the perceivedness of the perceived is that
in perception the perceived entity is bodily there. In addition to
this feature, another moment of every concrete perception of a
thing in regard to its perceivedness is that the perceived thing is
always presumed in its thing-totality.14

There are several factors that motivate these extended quotations

of Heideggers course in 1925.
First, based on the model of the perception of a transcendent
thing, Heidegger clearly brings to light a difference between two
modes of givenness, that is to say, a phenomenological difference.
It is, moreover, a hierarchical difference in which one of these
modes necessarily implies the other. But, as with Husserl, the
question of the sense of flesh is not posed.
Second, to affirm that the pertinent feature of perception is
incarnation note that Heidegger does not speak here of incarnate
presence amounts to aligning himself with the transcendental
idealism of Ideas I, since the perception of transcendent things was
22 FLESH AND BODY

never characterized as incarnate before then.15 This opens on to

two sets of questions.
(1) The first set of questions concerns the development of
Husserls idealism and its motivations. Is there a link between
incarnate perception and the passage to idealism, and if so, what
is it? It is commonly said that the discovery of a new sense of
immanence as intentional the discovery of the irreal inclusion
of the noema in the noesis made the objective term of the inten-
tional relation phenomenologically accessible. This subsequently
authorized a metaphysical decision and the abandonment of the
initial neutrality proposed in Logical Investigations. In what sense
is the transformation of the concept of immanence tied to incarnate
perception? How did such a transformation become necessary?
It is imposed phenomenologically, which is to say under the
pressure of the phenomena themselves. The first or traditional
sense of immanence is in me, the beginner will say at this point,
and the transcendent is outside of me.16 This definition is based
on the distinction between inside and outside and not on a
phenomenological difference between two modes of givenness. In
a very general way, it could be said that the Husserlian analysis
of consciousness replaces the concepts of internal and external
perception with those of adequate and inadequate perception
based solely on the distinction between different types of intuition.
Phenomenology begins with the domain of evidence, understood
in terms of what is actually immanent to conscious phenomena.
The criterion of immanence is incarnate presence.17 An excerpt
from the first edition of the Fifth Investigation attests to this and is
reinforced by the changes to the second edition:

The self-evidence usually attributed to inner perception, shows

it to be taken to be an adequate perception, one ascribing
nothing to its objects that is not intuitively presented, and given
as a real part (reell) of the perceptual experience, and one which,
conversely, is intuitively present and posits its objects just as
they are in fact experienced in and with their perception. Every
perception is characterized by the intention of grasping its object
as present, and in propria persona. [To this intention perception
corresponds with complete perfection, achieves adequacy, if the
object in it is itself actually present, and in the strictest sense
present in propria persona, is exhaustively apprehended as that
 Self-Givenness and Incarnate Givenness 23

which it is, and is therefore itself a real (reell) factor in our

perceiving of it].18

Actual inclusion and incarnate givenness are initially joined

together here. But after it is recognized that, in perception,
things are given to me in the flesh,19 the two notions need to be
separated and the concept of immanence must be transformed.
If the transcendent thing is given in the flesh, flesh itself cannot
be identified with the lived experience in which the transcendent
thing is adumbrated. But can one conceive the thing (res) outside
of any relation to lived experience or to consciousness? And
can one conceive this relation, in turn, as irreal? If the sceptical
tradition (essentially Hume) responds negatively to the first
question, intentionality is the solution to the second one. Put
otherwise, the thing only has a sense as something intended, as
an intentional relation to transcendence, and as a relation that
is given in the flesh within the lived-experience itself. If this
relation is identical with the lived-experience and if its objective
term the noema is intentionally included in it, then this new
sense of immanence renders the concept of incarnate perception
phenomenologically conceivable.
Flesh thus becomes the medium of the phenomenological regard,
prior to any distinction between immanence and transcendence. As
the site of all givenness, the mere recall of Husserls principle of
principles suffices to establish this point:

No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the

principles of all principles: that every original presentive
intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything
originarily (so to speak, in its incarnate actuality) offered to
us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented
as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented
there.20

The original intuition is incarnate givenness. Prior to the

opposition of immanence and transcendence that is to say, prior
to the most radical difference that exists between consciousness
and the world or between lived-experience and the thing this
is verified by an eidetic law of consciousness that guides the
reduction: Anything physical which is given in incarnate
24 FLESH AND BODY

presence can be non-existent; no mental process which is given

in the flesh can be non-existent.21 Indeed, if flesh is found
to be on both sides of this fundamental difference, then flesh
itself escapes from this difference and even makes it possible.22
Is this to say that flesh is irreducible or already reduced? Would
it be located at the origin of the world itself? Would it even be
responsible for the bringing to light of the world itself? Lets set
aside these dilemmas for the moment because they presuppose an
understanding of the unity of the different senses of flesh.
(2) The second set of questions exceeds the framework of
this study, though it indicates one of its long-range goals. These
questions concern Heidegger himself and, more specifically, the
relation between the intentional analysis of consciousness and
the existential analytic of Dasein. A brief note in Being and Time
sketches this confrontation by discretely establishing the outline
of an interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. This occurs in
69 The temporality of Being-in-the-world and the problem of
the transcendence of the world where Heidegger writes:

The thesis that all cognition has intuition as its goal, has the
temporal meaning that all cognizing is making present. Whether
every science, or even philosophical cognition, aims at a making-
present, need not be decided here. Husserl uses the expression
make present in characterizing sensory perception. Cf. his
Logische Untersuchungen, first edition, 1901, vol. II, pp. 588
and 620. This temporal way of describing this phenomenon
must have been suggested by the analysis of perception and
intuition in general in terms of the idea of intention. That the
intentionality of consciousness is grounded in the ecstatical
unity of Dasein, and how this is the case, will be shown in the
following Division.23

a. The relation between intentional consciousness and Dasein is

thus a founding relation which is revealed in the section Time
and Being that interrupts Being and Time, that is, the point
where everything turns around (umkehrt).24
b. In this context, and taking into account the necessarily radical
character of this foundation, the reference to perception
signifies that it is taken to play a decisive role in Husserls
phenomenology.
 Self-Givenness and Incarnate Givenness 25

c. The essential characteristic of sense perception is not, contrary

to what was said earlier, incarnation but the temporal deter-
mination of its presentation. Is that to say that incarnation
can be traced back to presentation, and thus that flesh can be
traced back to temporality?
d. It is thus no longer the position of Ideas I that is considered,
but that of the Logical Investigations of 1901. As such,
an interpretation of the Husserlian trajectory is suggested,
which will be explicitly formulated much later by Heidegger,
in 1962, in a seminar on Time and Being: Husserl himself
who came close to the true question of being in Logical
Investigations above all in the Sixth Investigation could
not persevere in the philosophical atmosphere of that time.
He came under the influence of Natorp and turned to
transcendental phenomenology which reached its first culmi-
nation in the Ideas. The principle of phenomenology was thus
abandoned.25 In this interpretation, it is the atmosphere and
the influences that prevent Husserl that prevent Heidegger
from raising the question of whether this turn presuming
that there was one was motived by the phenomenological
principle of a return to the things themselves.

Lets suppose for a moment that it is not possible to found inten-

tional consciousness on ek-static temporality, which is the meaning
of the being of Dasein. And lets suppose that it is not possible
since intentional consciousness is essentially perceptual to lead
incarnation back to temporality. What would be the consequences
then? This would challenge, first of all, the original character
of the starting point of Heideggers question of being; second, it
would question his analysis of worldhood; and finally, it would
challenge the existential analytic in its entirety, both as a funda-
mental ontology and as the destruction of the history of traditional
ontology. In short, if it does not challenge the question of being as
such, at least it will challenge its form in Being and Time. Through
a very complex series of questions, all of Heideggers meditation
will gradually become involved. But to say that it is involved is
not yet to say that it is overturned, critiqued, etc.
Under what conditions could incarnation be traced back to
temporality? Lets remain within the context of the existential
analytic which Heidegger considers to be fundamental. The
26 FLESH AND BODY

incarnation of Dasein is phenomenologically inseparable from its

spatiality.26 Is it possible to derive the spatiality of Dasein from its
temporality? 70 of Being and Time is devoted to the topic, yet
it then becomes profoundly and powerfully enigmatic to note the
following later remark in Time and Being: The attempt in Being
and Time, 70, to derive human spatiality from temporality is
untenable.27
To circumscribe this question, lets note that Heideggers state-
ments about the flesh cannot easily be gathered into a unified
position. On the one hand, especially in his course on Nietzsche,
the flesh is reduced to animality28 or to subjectivity29 without
ever being thought on its own. On the other hand, the body is
distinguished from animality.30 His understanding of the flesh is
either subordinated to his understanding of life,31 or conversely,
phenomenologically, his understanding of life is guided by his
understanding of the flesh.32 Stranger yet is the following decla-
ration: The manner of understanding that accompanies it [the
animalistic in humans] is something that metaphysics up till now
has not touched upon.33 It credits metaphysics with a not yet
that can become its future, but all of his thinking of being seeks to
overcome, or even to abandon, metaphysics.
The interpretation of these texts calls for a repetition of the
existential analytic that is able to understand how and in what
sense Dasein harbours the intrinsic possibility for being factically
dispersed into bodiliness and thus into sexuality and a primordial
bestrewal [Streuung], which is in a quite definite respect a dissemi-
nation [Zerstreuung],34 once one accepts the irreducibility of
spatiality to temporality.
If transcendence discovers its origin in temporality, then this
question needs to be reopened. On the one hand, the existential
concept of transcendence seeks to unfold the radical implications
of intentionality. On the other hand, the sense of intentionality
is formed in the context of an analysis of perception, and it does
not seem like the full depth of its sense can be attained without
a thematization of the flesh. It thus appears to be necessary to
proceed with an analysis of the sense and function of the flesh.
 CHAPTER TWO

Science as Egology

The purpose of Husserls Cartesian Meditations is to elevate

philosophy to the rank and dignity of a rigorous science, that is, to
the idea of true science. If evidence and its correlate the truth
are the telos of all scientific activity in general, then it is concerned
with evidence and truths that are repeatable as the same, valid
once and for all and for everyone. To underscore a constitutive
connection of ideality, they are both omnitemporal and intersub-
jective. Even when this ideal cannot actually be attained, science as
a noematic phenomenon will still be oriented toward and by this
idea, which is its sense. The eidos of this science is a normative and
horizonal telos, one that is prescriptive. Husserl states:

According to intention, therefore, the idea of science and

philosophy involves an order of cognition, proceeding from
intrinsically earlier to intrinsically later cognitions; ultimately,
then, a beginning and a line of advance that are not to be chosen
arbitrarily but have their basis in the nature of things themselves.1

As a systematic series of statements founded and accepted on

the basis of having been, either immediately or not, drawn from
the evidence, all science in general and first of all, philosophy
must be rooted in one or more pieces of evidence that carry
the stamp of absolute priority. What, then, is evidence? What
conditions must it satisfy?
Husserl seems to follow the Cartesian path: he casts into doubt
all established knowledge and seeks an indubitable, fixed point.
28 FLESH AND BODY

The differences, though subtle, are decisive. On the one hand, the
reduction (to which we will return momentarily) does not operate
by doubt: it never implies a negation. It is definitive and universal,
inasmuch as it also includes the psyche. On the other hand, truth
and reality are the noematic correlates of evidence. According
to Husserl, evidence requires an immense work of clarification
which is the task of intentional analysis that Descartes never
undertook, given that he was overly assured about the sense of
being and of reality. This clarification begins with a distinction
between types of evidence, whose importance appears much later.
The perfection of evidence can be understood in two ways: first,
evidence is perfect when intuition comes to fill the intention, or
conversely, when the signifying intentions do not exceed intuitive
givenness; second, evidence is perfect when its object, as posited
to exist, withstands the test of imaginary annihilation. Perfection
can signify either adequation or apodicticity, though the latter
can belong to inadequate evidence as well. The question of the
beginning of science thus takes the following form: is there an
evidence that is prior in principle to all other conceivable evidence
and that possesses at least a recognizable apodictic content, which
would have to give us some being that is firmly secured once for
all, or absolutely, by virtue of its apodicticity?2 At the threshold
of the reduction, note that Husserl drops the and for everyone.
The reduction is pivotal and the permanent theme of Husserls
entire enterprise. It is the pure origin of all meaning and opens the
phenomenological domain. In contrast with other expositions of
it, here it is very rapidly introduced and put to use. This is done
under the constraints of apodicticity which can only be formulated
on the presupposition of the pre-givenness of the field of transcen-
dental experience.3 The reason for Husserls brevity here is surely
to be found in his assumption of the validity of the Cartesian
heritage.4 What is the first apodictic evidence? Is it the evidence
of what is there, constantly given in experience, the world as the
universe of objects, the world within which I exist and remain, the
world to which the established sciences continually return as their
ground? But the necessary existence of the world is not required
by its own givenness; the argument outlined in the first Meditation
faithfully reproduces the one in 49 of Ideas I. It can be the case
that the flux of lived-experiences is no longer guided by the world,
for It is quite conceivable that experience, because of conflict,
 Science as Egology 29

might dissolve into illusion not only in detail In short, that

there might no longer be any world.5 The evidence of the world
is a simple factum and thus cannot make a claim to apodicticity.
Is it the case that the entirety of being is only a coherent dream?
Husserl writes:

At this point, following Descartes, we make the great reversal

that, if made in the right manner, leads to transcendental subjec-
tivity: the turn to the ego cogito as the ultimate and apodictically
certain basis for judgements, the basis on which any radical
philosophy must be grounded.6

The natural ontological belief in the world is the object of a

suspension which turns the world into a phenomenon that claims
to exist. What is put out of play is the thesis of the natural
attitude, which is the view that the world is a reality in itself and
the root of all naturalism. At the threshold of the fundamental
phenomenological consideration, Husserl writes:

I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly

becoming and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious
of it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immedi-
ately, that I experience it. By my seeing, touching, hearing, and
so forth, and in the different modes of sensuous perception,
corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or other
are simply there for me, on hand.7

The world of the natural attitude is not a primitive world that

would precede all idealization; it cannot be confused with
the lifeworld. It is the CopernicanGalilean world made up
of material things, situated within a homogenous and infinite
spatio-temporal context. But there is also an ontology that
accompanies the natural attitude, whereby the thing perceived
refers to a physical truth that its sensible appearances signal and
dissimulate. The reduction therefore has the historical meaning
of putting out of play the traditional, modern ontology.
The first consequence of this great reversal is the ban on
speaking in the plural. The epoch:

affects the intramundane existence of all other Egos, so that

30 FLESH AND BODY

rightly we should no longer speak communicatively, in the

plural. Other men than I, and brute animals, are data of
experience for me only by virtue of my sensuous experience of
their bodily organisms; and, since the validity of this experience
too is called in question, I must not use it. Along with other
Egos, naturally, I lose all the formations pertaining to sociality
and culture. In short, not just corporeal Nature but the whole
concrete surrounding life-world is for me, from now on, only a
phenomenon of being, instead of something that is.8

What could be the sense of this ban, if language and speech, as

social and cultural formations, always point back to intersub-
jectivity and if communication is the horizon of all language?
Solipsism is a word that, in order to be understood by the one
who pronounces it as well as the one who hears it, always
involves the pregivenness of the other. To prohibit plurality, even
under the banner of a self-restriction, is to produce a statement
whose sense summons the one who it seeks to exclude. And,
broadly conceived, does not the ideality of meaning, as an
ideality, require inter-subjectivity?
This argument would lead Husserl to a form of scepticism and
cannot be maintained within phenomenology itself where, on the
one hand, the linguistic layer was never been taken as original, and
where, on the other hand, expression is seized in its purity after
reducing indication, that is to say, the relation to the other. If, for
Husserl, the basic fact of delivering a lecture or of speaking does
not undo solipsism, that is because the entire phenomenological
analysis of language is solipsistic.9
The world as a phenomenon is irreducibly mine, and it is only
on this basis that any decision about the being of the world is
possible. If the reduction is forever freed from realism, this is
because it delivers an apodictic ego, or in more precisely and
properly Husserlian terms, a transcendental field of experience.
The world as an intentional aim belongs to my pure egoic life and
is irreally included within the transcendent aim. If the question of
the world takes place in an absolute egology which is the basis for
objectivity and which forgoes the Cartesian idea of the infinite,
solipsism is the threat of a transcendental illusion and recourse to
intersubjectivity is the only counter-measure to it.10 One can thus
assess the magnitude and difficulty of the line of enquiry that has
 Science as Egology 31

to begin with a methodological exploration of the transcendental

field of the ego.
Before providing a list of the general structures of this field
of experience, Husserl raises a critical question and marks out a
distinction. The question pertains to the scope of apodicticity: if
the ego is not the premise in a chain of reasons but an ontological
sphere open to intuition, then it is necessary to know what in
this ontological sphere is apodictic and what is not. The question
surfaced in Descartes: in order for the apodicticity of the ego to
found a deductive science, it is necessary for memory to traverse
the chain of reasons without error, to be infallible, and thus claim
to be apodictic evidence.11 This is not the case. In general, the past
temporal horizon of transcendental subjectivity is not apodicti-
cally assured, at least not immediately. The past is not given in
an adequate perception, since only the core of transcendental
experience is offered adequately, the core of the living presence to
oneself, that expresses the grammatical sense of the proposition
ego cogito. By analogy with the transcendent thing that is brought
to light in perception, there in the flesh, and that is given with its
infinite horizon of potential perceptions, the apodictic I am implies
the opening of temporal horizons, by virtue of an essential law
described in great detail in the 1905 Lectures on time. The actuality
of the transcendental domain as a whole is absolutely assured,
although questions about the critique of transcendental experience
and about transcendental knowledge in general still remain open.
Transcendental phenomenology is carried out in two steps. The
first step is not philosophical yet in the full sense12 inasmuch as
the phenomenologist is devoted to the evidence of experience in
order to describe its pure essence. The second step is critical, but
as Husserl will acknowledge in the conclusion to the Cartesian
Meditations, he was only devoted to the first step here.13
Descartes neglected the question of memory in order to make
the ego the indubitable foundation of an axiomatic order of
reasons and thus missed the ontological transcendental sphere.
Put otherwise, he too quickly interpreted the ego as a psyche.
Without the distinction between the psychological ego and the
transcendental ego that phenomenology alone brings to light,
one descends into the nonsense of transcendental realism.14 This
distinction, which harbours the possibility of phenomenology as
a questioning back to the origin of the world, is just as enigmatic
32 FLESH AND BODY

as the psycho-phenomenological parallelism which stems from

it.15 What distinguishes the region of the soul, which is privi-
leged in relation to all other regions that are presented in it and
derived from it, from transcendental consciousness as an archi-
region? How can one distinguish the domain of phenomenological
psychology from that of transcendental phenomenology, if their
extension is the same? Husserls response is brief: the soul retains
within itself a relation to the world; mental life is always in the
world. In what way? If in essence, all objects of the world are
embodied [verkrpert],16 the soul is the residual result of the
abstraction of the corporeal component that is united to a psychic
component, which traditionally defines the human being and does
so for Husserl as well.17 After this abstraction, the soul remains a
component that refers to the other component and thereby to the
fundamental corporeal [Krperlichkeit] layer of the world.
To access the non-psychological consciousness that carries the
world as well as the psyche within itself, as an intentional unity of
sense, is to liberate the transcendence of the world in order to turn
it into a theme of transcendental philosophy. It is a philosophy
that does not elucidate the world by reference to a being that has
the same mode of being as the objective world.18 But what is the
egos mode of being, if the transcendental ego is not different from
the mundane ego which is its self-objectification and self-mundani-
zation? Heidegger asks: What is the mode of being of this absolute
ego in what sense is it the same as the factical I; in what sense
is it not the same?19 We will return later to this critical question
from Heidegger in order to understand the sense of the same and
this other.
The epoch has opened up a new and infinite sphere of being
that is offered to experience. Husserl writes in a marginal note:
and where there is a new experience, a new science must arise.20
But, if this science is characterized exclusively by its theme the
field of transcendental experience then it risks to give rise immedi-
ately to a transcendental empiricism that recites factual events
for an absolute ego that is factual itself. The eidetic reduction is
designed to avoid this danger. For, Husserl rightly notes, from
the beginning of the establishment of the universal structures of
subjectivity, that to each actual experience there corresponds a
pure fiction, a quasi-experience (and fiction constitutes the vital
element of phenomenology as it does for all eidetic sciences21). But
 Science as Egology 33

Husserl will only explicitly convert transcendental analysis into an

eidetic-transcendental analysis when it becomes a question of the
self-constitution of the ego. In one way, that will suffice since the
constitution of the ego by and for itself embraces all constitution
in general. But there are perhaps two other important considera-
tions: first, it is difficult to proceed to an eidetic analysis as long
as one defers the question of the limits of apodicticity, and the
Cartesian Meditations themselves are not concerned with this
problem; second, and we shall return to this later, in order to access
the eidos ego, the eidos of an ego, whose temporality has not been
shown, it would be necessary to presuppose another ego in order
to realize this variation and to escape from the solipsism to which
the reduction constrains us.
What are the structures of the transcendental field? By shifting
the centre of gravity of transcendental evidence from the ego
cogito to the multiple cogitationes, the phenomenologist brings
out the first of these structures: intentionality. I can at any moment
reflect on my conscious life, and within the reduction where all
mundane positions are suspended it remains the case that each
cogitatio carries within itself, as an aim, a relation to the world.
Each lived-experience of consciousness is a consciousness of ...,
regardless of the actual existence of its object. The relation to
the perceived, for example, is essential to perception; it includes
the cogitatum, in an irreal sense, in the cogitatio. Husserl states:
The word intentionality signifies nothing else than this universal
fundamental property of consciousness: to be consciousness of
something; as a cogito, to bear within itself its cogitatum.22 The
act of reflection no longer involves the ego exclusively but also
the noema of the world. However, does this not lead it to become
something secondary, against the whole original and archaeo-
logical intention of phenomenology? Does not reflection replace
an originally lived and spontaneous experience with a reflexive
experience that transforms what was first an act into an object?
Does this method not contradict the project? No other line of
argumentation than phenomenology can be used here, that is, the
return and recourse to the mode of givenness.
Indeed, reflexive lived experience is entirely different from
spontaneous lived experience, and reflection alters [verndere]
this is Husserls term the original lived experience. But it gives the
original lived experience as an intentional correlate of the reflexive
34 FLESH AND BODY

lived experience. Since reflection does not repeat the original but
describes it, there is nothing in reflection that would undermine
the phenomenological project at its roots, for Its beginning gives
pure expression of pure experience according to its own silent
meaning.23 The reflexive attitude yields a new intentional process,
which, with its peculiarity of relating back to the earlier process
[Rckbeziehung auf das frhere Erlebnis], is awareness, and
perhaps evidence awareness, of just that earlier process itself, and
not some other.24
From the outset, reflection has a temporal sense. The reflecting
and giving lived-experience necessarily comes after the lived-
experience that is given and reflected on. Without this delay,
no access to the origin would be possible; without this delay
that Husserl calls retention, consciousness could not be taken
as an object and phenomenology as a science could not come
into existence.25 But it also has the effect of splitting the ego
[Ichspaltung]. Under the reduction, the ego can be described in
the following way: the mundane ego has an interest in the world,
and the world can only appear as such to the transcendental ego
who regards the world as a noema. This ego, in turn, can only
escape from anonymity (Husserl thus notes the withdrawal of
the ego from its own constituting activities) through a transcen-
dental spectator who is absolutely disinterested in the world and
is attentive only to its noeses, or more precisely, attentive only
to the noema as it is intentionally included and constituted in
the noeses. In other words, transcendental reflection requires the
reduction. The problem then arises concerning the identity of
these egos, which conceals the most basic insights into the archi-
tectonic of the phenomenological system.26 We can return now to
address the question raised above by Heidegger. For Husserl, what
unifies these egos is the instance of the living present: In the living
present I coexist as a doubled I and the acts of the I [Ichaktus]
are doubled.27 It is thus necessary for retention not to alter the
living present and for it to be a perception.28 Husserl oscillates on
this decisive point. On the one hand, by contrasting the self-giving
act of perception with reproduction, he makes retention a form of
perception:

But if we call perception the act in which all origin lies, the act
that constitutes originally, then primary memory is perception.
 Science as Egology 35

For only in primary memory do we see what is past, only in it

does the past become constituted and constituted presenta-
tively, not re-presentatively.29

But, on the other hand, when analysing perception as a presen-

tation, he sets up retention as the contrary of perception:

Now if we relate the use of the word perception to the

differences in givenness with which temporal objects present
themselves, the antithesis of perception is the primary memory
and the primary expectation (retention and protention) that
occur here; in which case, perception and nonperception contin-
uously blend into one another.30

We would not insist on this point if the analogy between the

modes of givenness of the past and of the other ego were not
frequently affirmed.31 If the condition of the possibility of the
reduction is drawn from retention, does it not signify that
the alter ego is already implied in it and that there cannot be
an absolutely pure egology? Can the splitting of the ego and
its alteration be conceived without the pre-givenness of the
alter ego? How can it be established phenomenologically that
the retentional past and the other have an analogous type of
givenness? Conversely, could these questions have a sense outside
of an egological approach? Is this not to say that phenomenology
is condemned to contradict its initial premises? Can this be
explained, and if so, in a phenomenological way?
 CHAPTER THREE

Flesh and Body in

Perception

The demonstration of the intentional correlation imposes a dual

orientation, a correlative structure, on the analysis of consciousness.1
On the one side, it involves the intentional object in the quomodo
of its modes of appearing (the noema), and on the other side, it
concerns the acts of the ego (the noeses) which constitute and
bestow sense on the noemata. Each particular object refers to a
horizon that, ultimately, is the world itself; each noesis refers to the
entirety of transcendental life. Intentional analysis is an analysis of
the transcendental ego inasmuch as it includes and constitutes all
possible objectivity. Husserl states: Thus, when the phenomeno-
logical reduction is consistently executed, there is left us, on the
noetic side, the openly endless life of pure consciousness and, as its
correlate on the noematic side, the meant world, purely as meant.2
Here phenomenology is assured of its universality.
Husserl immediately provides an example of intentional
description borrowed from sensible perception. Originating from
his Logical Investigations and constantly repeated afterwards, this
analysis responds to a very profound necessity. Phenomenology
seeks to overcome transcendental psychologism, and this
endeavour is its destiny. Transcendental psychologism is rooted
in the definition of consciousness as a psyche, actually linked to
the real world. That is to say that it is rooted in a conception of
perception which is not faithful to original and intuitive givenness.
The accomplishment of phenomenology requires a new analysis of
38 FLESH AND BODY

perception and, if phenomenology is always a phenomenology of

perception, this is the case for essential and profoundly historical
reasons. Husserl acknowledges this: Involuntarily, we began with
the intentional analysis of perception (purely as perception of its
perceived object) and in fact gave privileged status thereby to intui-
tively given bodies [Krper]. Might this not also point to essential
necessities?3 Husserl adds:

For example, if I take the perceiving of this die as the theme

for my description, I see in pure reflection that this die is
given continuously as an objective unity in a multiform and
changeable multiplicity of manners of appearing, which belong
determinately to it. These, in their temporal flow, are not an
incoherent sequence of subjective processes. Rather they flow
away in the unity of a synthesis, such that in them one and the
same is intended as appearing. The one identical die appears,
now in near appearances, now in far appearances: in the
changing modes of the Here and There, over against an always
co-intended, though perhaps unheeded, absolute Here (in my
co-appearing organism.). Furthermore, each continued manner
of appearance in such a mode (for example: the die here, in
the near sphere) shows itself to be, in turn, the synthetic unity
pertaining to a multiplicity of manners of appearance belonging
to that mode. Thus the near-thing, as the same, appears now
from this side, now from that; and the visual perspectives
change also, however, the other manners of appearance
(tactual, acoustic, and so forth), as we can observe by turning
our attention in the right direction.4

The unity of the object is first dissolved into a multiplicity of

adumbrations, a concept which is at the centre of the novelty of
Husserls analysis. The adumbration is not a sensible appearance
referring to an intelligible in-itself that God, as a subject of
absolutely perfect knowledge, would be able to perceive. Such
a conception is absurd in that it neglects the essential difference
between immanence and transcendence and bypasses the horizon
structure. The adumbration gives the thing to me in its incarnate
ipseity, and the unity of the thing is based phenomenologically
on the agreement of the adumbrations. That is to say that it is
based on a synthesis of identification whose fundamental form
 Flesh and Body in Perception 39

is internal time consciousness. And, like the temporal flow, the

adequate givenness of the transcendent thing is an idea in the
Kantian sense.
This description of perception, like others elsewhere, revolves
around an absolute here, the absolute here of my flesh which is
always co-conscious but unperceived. Is this the reason why
Husserl has only discreetly and rarely analysed the role of the flesh?
The following points must be noted:
(1) The fundamental Husserlian claim about perception is that
things are given in the flesh, which is also to say that they are given
to my flesh and through my flesh. Givenness in the flesh thus refers
both to a mode of givenness and to the recipient of this givenness.
It is on the basis of this claim that Husserl is able to denounce
philosophical analyses that replace perception with a consciousness
of signs or images, and then take sensible and secondary qualities
as the signs of primary qualities.5
(2) The perception of the spatial thing is always accompanied by
the perception of my flesh. As an absolute here, my flesh is not in the
space of a relative and interchangeable here or there; it constitutes
their origin. Flesh provides the stage for [met en scne] perception.6
But, as a non-spatial origin of space, can flesh be perceived if it is
the case that Where there is no spatial being it is senseless to speak
of a seeing from different standpoints with a changing orientation
in accordance with different perceptions, appearances, adumbra-
tions?7 Does the fact that flesh cannot be perceived stricto sensu
by adumbrations imply that it has the purely temporal mode of
being of lived experiences? If, as Husserl says, flesh [der Leib] is,
in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of
perception and is necessarily involved [dabei] in all perception,8
then it seems that flesh cannot be purely temporal.
(3) Will it resolve the problem to claim that my flesh is always
also a body, one body among others? Perhaps, but this claim
cannot be made without having first, in the context of pure
egology, having retraced the constitution of my flesh as one body
among other bodies. This would force us to abandon solipsism at
a stage of the journey that still requires it.
(4) We will set aside this question and later return to it at length.
But, for the moment, lets assume that my flesh is also a body.
Does not the unity of adumbrations, the unity of the thing, depend
on the unity of my flesh even before it depends on a temporal
40 FLESH AND BODY

synthesis? Has Husserl not neglected a constitutive layer that

allows a thing to be one-and-the-same? Each adumbration gives
the thing to me in its flesh; it thus gives me what unifies it with
all the other ones. Moreover, if the adumbration depends on the
reciprocal relation between my flesh9 and the thing (inasmuch as
the flesh is a body in the same space as the thing), then any change
of this situation gives rise to a new adumbration that is unified with
the previous one due by having the same origin. None of this would
have purely and simply escaped Husserl. This is demonstrated
by his analysis of perception in The Crisis, which takes place in
the context of a questioning back to the surrounding lifeworld
as a tacit presupposition of Kantian thought. After having noted
that everything in the lifeworld is presented as a concrete thing
(including cultural and historical objects) and has a corporeality
that is given to sight and touch, Husserl writes: Obviously and
inevitably participating in this is our living body, which is never
absent from the perceptual field, and specifically its corresponding
organs of perception (eyes, hands, ears, etc.).10 The subjective
movements of these organs the kinaestheses are thus necessarily
linked to adumbrations:

Clearly the aspect-exhibitions [Aspekt-Darstellungen] of

whatever body is appearing in perception, and the kinaestheses,
are not processes [simply running] alongside each other; rather,
they work together in such a way that the aspects have the ontic
meaning of, or the validity of, aspects of the body only through
the fact that they are those aspects continually required by the
kinaestheses by the kinaesthetic-sensual total situation in each
of its working variations of the total kinaesthesis by setting in
motion this or that particular kinaesthesis and that they corre-
spondingly fulfil the requirement.11

Flesh, at least as flesh, unifies the adumbrations. But it is also a

body, extension partes extra partes, and as a body, flesh can no
longer play that role. What happens then? The adumbrations
turn into appearances that require a principle of unity that is
heterogeneous to them. The thing is no longer given in the flesh;
instead an entirely different phenomenal situation imposes its
own law. This situation is the basis for the traditional philo-
sophical analyses of perception and the Logical Investigations of
 Flesh and Body in Perception 41

1901 still refer to them. If the Logical Investigations do not reach

the descriptive evidence of incarnation, this is because that text
obeys the descriptive evidence of another phenomenal situation
with its own laws.12
After having slowed down a little bit the pace of Husserls
argument, lets again follow its own rhythm. What has just been
found in the exemplary analysis of perception which holds
mutatis mutandis for all of conscious life can be condensed in
the following manner: the intentional object as such is conscious
as an identical unity of the various modes of noeticnoematic
consciousness; conscious life is essentially synthetic. And, in the
final analysis, internal time consciousness is the fundamental form
of this synthesis. The phenomenology of perception implies a
phenomenology of temporality that joins lived experiences together
in a single and unique flow. This synthesis is not, however, a pure
and simple connection that unifies lived experiences one by one,
instead it links them all together within an entire consciousness.
This shows that the givenness of each lived experience can only
appear in attention against the background of the universal
conscious life that it presupposes (and this also holds for each
noema which ultimately refers back to a broader noema: the
world).
By making internal time consciousness the fundamental form
of synthesis, Husserl will encounter what he calls extraordinary
difficulties, though he does not address them at length. Internal
time consciousness has immanent time as its intentional correlate.
This distinction is between the intra-temporal lived experience and
its temporal modes of appearing that, as intentional lived experi-
ences, are given to reflection as temporal. In other words, the lived
experiences that constitute internal time appear within this internal
time itself. Husserl observes:

We encounter here a paradoxical fundamental property of

conscious life, which seems thus to be infected with an infinite
regress. The task of clarifying this fact and making it under-
standable presents extraordinary difficulties. Be that as it may,
the fact is evident, even apodictically evident, and indicates one
aspect of the egos marvellous being-for-himself: here, in the
first place, the being of his conscious life in the form of reflexive
intentional relatedness to itself.13
42 FLESH AND BODY

The multiplicity belonging to the intentionality of each cogito

is not exhausted solely through consideration of actual lived
experiences. In my actual perception of a cube from a particular
angle, the side of the cube that is properly perceived refers to the
other sides that are co-seen but only expected and anticipated
in a non-intuitive manner as future perceptions. My perception
would follow another course if I decided to touch the cube or
modified my position in relation to it. Each actuality implies its
own potentialities. These potentialities, to be sure, depend on
the free mobility of my flesh, and the constitution of the thing
is grounded in the constitution of my flesh. But, Husserl does
not insist on this point,14 because it raises difficulties analogous
to those of temporality. First of all, my flesh can only be consti-
tuted as a body through a kinaesthetic system, a system which
presupposes already that my flesh is an organ of perception.
Furthermore, and importantly, the constitution of original
temporality leads back to the constitution of the hyle, that is,
to the sensuous data that cannot be given to me unless the flesh
is already there. In some sense, Husserl was already aware of
this in his 1905 Lectures on internal time consciousness. In 11,
he writes: The source point from which the production
[Erzeugung] of the enduring object begins is a primal impression:
the tone-now present in incarnate presence [leibhaftig] contin-
uously changes (consciously in consciousness) into something
that has been.15 This is also attested by the frequent use of the
expression incarnate presence in Experience and Judgment.16
The horizon structure remains an essential feature of intention-
ality inasmuch as it advances a thesis about objects. In effect, every
cogitatum is given within a horizon which then gives rise to new
horizons, and thus the sense of the object or, the noema can
never be given as something complete. Instead, it is illuminated
through a continual and harmonious progression. The object is
a pole of identity, an index of noetic and constitutive intention-
alities. At the same time, intentional analysis acquires a distinctive
structure. It is not a real analysis (there is not an empiricist
sensualism of intentionality); instead it unfolds, distinguishes and
clarifies the richness of the horizons and infinite potentialities that
are harboured and concealed in each actuality.17 This means that
each cogito intends more than what is actually there and, without
this supplementary aim (Mehrmeinung), intentional analysis would
 Flesh and Body in Perception 43

not be able to take place and enquire back to the multiplicities of

noetic syntheses that continually give the object to me as the same.
But, conversely, only intentional analysis can provide access to this
state of affairs; it begins by revealing intentionality as its basis. This
strange circularity can only be accepted on two conditions, which
have the same root. It is necessary, on the one hand, for the inten-
tional object to serve as a transcendental clue for displaying the
constitutive, noetic structures. This affirms a relative and methodo-
logical privilege of the constituted (in phenomenology, the question
of method is sovereign). Without the guidance of the object simply
given and already constituted as one-and-the-same, intentional
analysis could not orient itself within the fluid multiplicity of lived
experiences and transcendental subjectivity would be given chaoti-
cally. On the other hand, it is necessary for the totality of objects,
whatever their type of objectivity (real or categorical), to form a
universal unity, a world, as the correlate of a total, infinite, and
absolute subjectivity. If each object in general is a structural rule
for the transcendental ego, the world itself must be its universal
rule. So, is phenomenology not based on a credit that is prior to
the unity of the world, that is to say, ultimately on the possibility
of a system? Without this credit would it not be bankrupt? And
does not this credit belong to the level of facticity? Nothing is
less certain. Husserl only deploys the pure sense of the idea of
an authentic science that is absolutely founded (taken solely as a
possibility); consequently, it is the idea of an essential correlation
between reason and reality that is called truth.
 CHAPTER FOUR

Constitutive Analysis

We can now approach the problematic of constitution in its

full extension and depth. As for its extension, this marvellous
operation [Leistung] brings to light the synthetic unity of the
various acts of consciousness; it delivers the object over to a pure
regard and is concerned with all possible types of objects, and first
of all, with the possibility of objects in general. The constitution
of the object, that is to say formal ontology, is the basis for the
hierarchy of the levels of the a priori; it is thus the basis for material
and regional ontologies. But constitutive analysis does not only
take real or ideal objects as its guide; it also examines the purely
subjective objects that are immanent lived experiences in which
transcendent objects, real and ideal ones, are constituted as
objects of internal time consciousness. Constitution thus extends as
far as the auto-constitution of the ego, and constitutive syntheses
define the field of all transcendental phenomenology. As for its
depth, the concept of constitution permits ontology in its tradi-
tional sense to be converted into egology in the phenomenological
sense; this conversion, needless to say, displays solipsism. The
question of the reality of objects has not been abandoned with the
reduction; it must be rediscovered there as a moment of objective
sense. If it were not possible to show that being, or reality, is
always completely reducible to sense, then phenomenological
idealism would be absurd. It is thereby necessary to demonstrate
that being and non-being, reality and irreality, are constituted in
and through intentional life, such that the idea of investigating
something outside of the parentheses cannot occur to us within
46 FLESH AND BODY

the sphere of phenomenological reduction.1 It is then a question

of knowing what eidetic characteristics of lived experience give me
reality and of phenomenologically clarifying whether the relation
to the object is valid or not. In short, it is question of clarifying the
relation between reason and reality.
Within the realm of the reduction, the question of reality is
posed first on the noematic level. What is the relation of the
noema to the object if when one speaks simply of objects, one
normally means actual, truly existing objects belonging to the
particular category of being?2 Lets return to the concept of the
noema. The noema is an intentional component of lived experience
perception, for example, has its noema, most basically its
perceptual sense, i.e. the perceived as perceived,3 which is given in
the immanence of lived experience. As a result, sense is indifferent
to the reality or non-reality of the object. Does sense henceforth
just provide a copy of reality? No. First, the noema is not a real
component of perception, nor is it a mental copy of a real object.
Second, it would be absurd to substitute the consciousness of an
image for perceptual consciousness, since the consciousness of the
image intends the object represented in the image and thus presup-
poses perception. Does the noema not have any relation to reality,
then? To claim this would be to misunderstand the sense of the
reduction: consciousness remains consciousness of the reality that
can be described in its pure appearing. The noema thus retains the
characteristic of reality.
To account for this phenomenologically, it is necessary to
conduct a more detailed analysis of the noema. The same tree can
be given in the lived experience of very different noematic states.
For example, it appears in perception as an incarnate reality, in the
imagination as a fiction, in memory as a re-presentation. The object
that is intended cannot be confused with the object as it is intended.4
The noema is broken down into a core and the characteristics of
its being. Reality, fiction and re-presentation are characteristics
that belong to the object as it is intended and that vary with the
modes of givenness by which the object of consciousness itself is
given.5 The characteristic of being are the noematic correlates of
the characteristics of belief, or doxic modalities. Reality is thus the
noematic correlate of certainty.
This initial result does not come without difficulties, however.
Besides the question of knowing what motivates and founds
 Constitutive Analysis 47

certainty, we have omitted an essential feature from the description

above: sense, the perceived as such, is related to an object and the
problem of reality is raised essentially on the level of the object.
Husserl writes:

The noema in itself has an objective relation and, more particu-

larly, by virtue of its own sense. If we ask, then, how the
consciousness-sense has access to the object which belongs
to it and can be the same in manifold acts of very different
content, how we see this in the sense, then new structures
emerge the extraordinary significance of which is evident. For,
progressing in this direction and, on the other side, reflecting
on the parallel noeses, we finally confront the question of what
the claim of consciousness actually to relate to something
objective, to be well-founded, properly signifies, of how valid
and invalid objective relations become phenomenologically
clarified according to noesis and noema: and with that we
confront the great problems of reason.6

Lets return to the analysis of the noema. Is not the noematic core
the pure objective sense for which we are searching? And is it not
through its core that the noema refers to the object? This can
be shown by transposing on to the noema, as authorized by the
noetic-noematic parallelism, an earlier distinction that emerged
in the analysis of acts in Husserls Fifth Logical Investigation.
There what Husserl calls the intentional matter of the act estab-
lishes a relation with an object, while the intentional quality
specifies whether it is a representational act, a judging act, etc.7
The matter of the noema its quid is what Ideas I later calls
its core; this is what puts it in relation to an object (whereas the
quality corresponds to the thetic modality). But the object must
be included in the noema, just as the noema is included in the
noesis. And a noematic intentionality, parallel to a noetic inten-
tionality, must be exhibited in order for the object in question to
be the same as the object of the noesis.8 A more refined analysis
of the core thus becomes necessary.
Each lived experience is directed toward an object, and every
noema has its own object. If in the description of the noema, that is
to say of the object as it is intended, I abstract everything belonging
to its mode of givenness, then an invariable content a quid (Was)
48 FLESH AND BODY

appears. It is a pure objective sense that, in turn, can be described

in the language of formal ontology and thing-determinations. This
pure sense or this objective core, properly speaking can be
explicated in a system of formal or material predicates that define
it. The predicate always signifies the predicate of something, and
this something necessarily belongs to the core as its most intimate
moment, its central point of unity, the point of junction or
bearer [Trger] of the predicates. It is necessary to distinguish this
something from the predicates, even if they cannot be separated
from it to the extent that they are its predicates.9 The object pure
and simple the point of identity must be distinguished from the
object in the how of its determinations.10 Husserl reserves the word
sense for the second of these concepts of the object; it is by means
of this X that all sense has its object, since the object in the how of
its determinations refers back to it as that which is noematically
identical within the continually changing noemas.11 In the noema,
there is an intentionality that is parallel to that of the noesis. But
this sense has been obtained by abstraction and cannot constitute
a concrete essence. The object in the how of its determinations can
be given more or less clearly; the sense can either be filled or not.
The complete core will be the sense that corresponds with its mode
of fulfilment.12
The question of reality is reopened here. On the one hand,
every intentional lived experience has a noema and the sense of
this noema puts it in relation to the object. On the other hand, no
object in general, no reality, and no world could be independent
from the consciousness in which it necessarily announces itself.13
Is the identical X that consciousness attains through the synthesis
of a multiplicity of noemas really the same? Is the object real?
Or, as Husserl puts it: When, it may everywhere be asked, is the
noematically intended-to [Vermeintes] identity of X actually
the identity of X instead of the merely intended-to identity?
And what does this merely intended-to everywhere signify?14
To speak of a real or true object signifies that everything that can
be said about it is capable of being founded and justified. Husserl
states: In the logical sphere, in the sphere of statement, being
truly or actually and being something which can be shown
rationally are necessarily correlated. This holds, moreover, for all
modalities of being, all doxastic positional modalities.15 The real
and the rational are correlative. By slightly altering its sense, here it
 Constitutive Analysis 49

is possible to reiterate the Hegelian claim: That which is rational is

real and that which is real is rational.16 What is the original form
of rational consciousness, and what is the original form of consti-
tutive consciousness?
Lets follow the details of Husserls analysis closely here. There
are two classes of positional lived experiences: one class gives
the posited thing originally (perception, vision), while the other
class gives the same posited thing re-presentatively (imagination,
memory). The analysis of the noema has already drawn a contrast
between the original and the reproduced, although it did so in
order to reveal a characteristic of the noema itself. In effect, the
objective sense (the pure X and its determinations) can enter into
consciousness through different modes of givenness that belong to
the noema, since description makes them come from the noema. In
contrasting memory with perception, Husserl noted that:

Precisely in its own peculiar essence, memory is a modification

of perception. Correlatively, what is characterized as past in
itself is presented as having been present, thus as a modifi-
cation of the present which as the unmodified, is precisely the
original, the incarnately present of the perception.17

This difference leaves the sense untouched and concerns only its
mode of fulfilment. Two types of fulfilment are thus possible:
original and non-original. They correspond with the previous
distinction between self-givenness and incarnate self-givenness. If
the fulfilment is original and intuitive first in the foundational
order then Husserl observes that

focusing on the noema we find, fused with the pure sense,

the characteristic in incarnate presence [Leibhaftigkeit] (as
original fulfilledness); and the sense, with this characteristic,
now functions as the basis for the noematic posited character-
istic or, this being the same thing here: the being-characteristic.
We find the parallel to this in focusing on the noesis.18

A position is rationally motivated if it is based on an original,

incarnate and evident givenness. Evidence is ultimately what
reason points to. The original form of constitutive rational
consciousness is evident consciousness. This allows us to respond
50 FLESH AND BODY

to two questions that have been left open: only evidence can
motivate and found the certainty for which reality is the noematic
correlate; only evidence as givenness in the flesh can assure me
that the intended object is indeed a real object.
As original givenness, evidence is an archi-phenomenon of
intentional life, the a priori structural form of consciousness.
This amounts to saying that reason is an essential and universal
structure of transcendental subjectivity and perhaps already implies
that transcendental subjectivity is intersubjective. To constitute an
object is to return it to the synthesis of the evident acts which have
given it, which do give it, and which under certain conditions will
give it in the flesh. To constitute is to provide evidence of incarnate
givenness. But this runs up against some difficulties concerning the
constitution of flesh itself. Let it be noted, for the time being, that
they are parallel to the difficulties of the constitution of time: in
both cases, what is constituting must also be what is constituted.
Constitutive analysis has a universal status and concerns all types
of objects. So it thus takes the form of a tireless differentiation of
the types of evidence that correlate with the types of objects: if the
sense of the being of real objects is not the same as that of ideal
objects, then the given evidence must be carefully distinguished
in relation to the universal definition of evidence provided by the
principle of principles:

Evidence, in a maximally broad sense, is a concept that is

correlated not only with the concepts being and non-being. It
becomes modalized also in correlation with the other modal
variants of simple being, such as being possible, probable, or
doubtful likewise, however, in correlation with variants that
do not belong in this series but have their origin in the spheres of
emotion and volition such as being valuable and being morally
good.19

Two problems emerge from this.

First, if reality is the correlate of a verification by evidence to
the extent that we would not be able to posit anything whatsoever,
if the synthesis of identity contradicted an evident given then are
we not linking evidence to a reality that is valid for me (that is, a
natural reality reduced to and by the solipsistic ego)? And does
this not put transcendental phenomenology under the strain of
 Constitutive Analysis 51

an irreducible facticity or contingency? Only the use of the eidetic

reduction would provide an escape from this problem. But this is
not yet possible: how can we reach the eidos of the world or the
eidos of reality without having reached the eidos of the ego? We
will return to this question soon. The establishment of the eidos
of the ego gives rise to a specific set of problems within the solip-
sistic attitude to which Husserl confines himself. Moreover, the
exercise of the eidetic reduction cannot occur without imaginative
variation, which presupposes that the evidence proper to the imagi-
nation has already been brought to light.20
Second, if reality is the correlate of verification by evidence,
how can its character as in itself be explained? How would it
not dissolve into the presence of a singular act of confirmation?
Husserl states that all evidence sets up or institutes for
me an abiding possession,21 since it is always possible for me
to return again to the intuited reality and to re-establish in
evidence the first and founding evidence. Without such possi-
bilities there would be for us no fixed and abiding being, no
real and no ideal world.22 Reality can indeed be independent of
actual consciousness but it cannot in any way be independent of
potential consciousness. In pointing back to the infinite field of
possible evidence, does not reality at the same time point back
to an infinite subjectivity? The passage to intersubjectivity will
perhaps transform this question.
In the case of the transcendent object and ultimately of the
world, evidence still refers to an infinity of evidence but in a more
complex way. The transcendent thing is given by adumbrations,
in a multiplicity of incarnate appearances. What is thus offered
to consciousness is always more than what appears there in the
strict sense, since it is the thing in its flesh, in it its totality, that
appears. Each presentation of the same transcendent thing refers
to a harmonious infinity of other presentations of the same thing.
In other words, the adequate givenness of the thing is an Idea in
the Kantian sense. More broadly, the world is an Idea correlative
with complete empirical evidence, evidence which is itself an Idea
in the Kantian sense. Is there an evidence of the Idea itself? Husserl
answers: The idea of an infinity motivated in conformity with its
essence is not itself an infinity; seeing intellectually that this infinity
of necessity cannot be given does not exclude, but rather requires,
the intellectually seen givenness of the idea of this infinity.23
52 FLESH AND BODY

Everything is subsequently in place to define the tasks of

transcendental self-explication of the ego, of its conscious life and
its objects, which are constituted together there. We are now in a
position to undertake a constitutive and transcendental analysis
of real objectivity and respond to the question of the origin of the
world. By taking the formal and material ontological regions as
indices for the system of evidence, there is need of a constitutional
theory of physical Nature (which is given as always existing and,
in being so given, is likewise always presupposed), a constitutional
theory of man, of human community, of culture, and so forth.24
At the same time, it should be noted that intersubjectivity is
presupposed as soon as one speaks about the real world and real
objectivity. Is it therefore necessary to think that concrete subjec-
tivity is intersubjectivity and that the monadic ego is abstracted
from it? It is still too soon to answer this question. Husserl ends
the third Meditation as follows:

As we pursue this course, an extremely complicated intentional

composition of the constituting evidences, in their synthetic
unity, becomes apparent as regards Objects for example: a
founding by levels of non-Objective (merely subjective) objects,
ascending from the lowest objective basis. To be this lowest basis
is the continual function of immanent temporality, the flowing
life that constitutes itself in and for itself. Its constitutional
clarification is undertaken by the theory of original time-
consciousness, wherein temporal data are constituted.25
 CHAPTER FIVE

Eidetic Reduction and

Archi-Facticity

The constitution of temporality leads back to the constitution of

the ego itself. Without it, the task of constitution would suffer
from lacunae. This is not self-evident, since in his 1901 Logical
Investigations Husserl refused all egological principles (on the
basis of which both solipsism and the attempt to overcome it
acquire a sense).1 So why is a transcendental ego, a transcendental
I, considered inseparable from intentional lived experiences? If,
under the reduction, we pass through the flux of lived experiences,
we will never grasp the pure I as a lived or original experience.
Husserl states:

If an intentive mental process is actional, that is, effected in

the manner of the cogito, then in that process the subject is
directing himself to the intentional Object. To the cogito itself
there belongs, as immanent in it, a regard-to the Object, which,
on the other side, wells forth from the Ego which therefore can
never be lacking.2

The ego can thus be taken as the source of this regard that
is directed to the object; it runs through every actual cogito.
Consequently, it remains identical, and, as the subject of its
own predicates, corresponds noetically to the noematic X. It
cannot be turned into a real moment of lived experience, a real
or immanent moment. Its life unfolds in each actual cogito, but
54 FLESH AND BODY

all of the lived experiences in the background belong to it, and it

belongs to them. Everything, inasmuch as it belongs to a single
flow of lived experiences, which is my own, must be able to be
converted into actual cogitationes or must be able to be included
in an immanent manner. In Kantian language (leaving aside the
question of knowing whether it is used in the Kantian sense),
The I think must accompany all my representations. Husserl
writes:

If we retain a pure Ego as a residuum after our phenomeno-

logical exclusion of the world and of the empirical subjectivity
included in it (and an essentially different pure Ego for each
stream of mental processes), then there is presented in the case
of that Ego a transcendency of a peculiar kind one which is
not constituted a transcendency within immanency. Because
of the immediately essential role played by this transcendency in
the case of any cogitation, we must not undertake its exclusion;
though in many investigations the questions concerning the pure
Ego can remain in suspense. But only insofar as its immediate,
evidently ascertainable essential peculiarity and its givenness
along with pure consciousness extend do we propose to count
the pure Ego as a phenomenological datum.3

The descriptive argument is analogous to the one which was

able to isolate the pure identical X. In both cases, it is a matter
of establishing an identity, even if it is a polar and teleological
one. It was not possible to unify intentional consciousness by
its object. First of all, this is because the object itself is the
product of a synthesis of identification, and second, because
this procedure would come down to granting a privilege to
what is constituted, thus contradicting the absolute character of
consciousness. With regard to the synthesis of identification itself
that is, the temporal synthesis it requires a unifying egological
principle, since every mental process, as temporal being, is a
mental process of its pure Ego.4 This amounts to making the ego
into the temporal form of all lived experiences and indicates, at
least, that the constitution of the ego and of time are correlative
and allied with one another.
Why did Husserl modify his position? Why has he learnt not to
be led astray from a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms
 Eidetic Reduction and Archi-Facticity 55

of ego-metaphysic?5 What makes it necessary to have a unifying

egological principle? In the Logical Investigations, lived experi-
ences are unified solely on the basis of their contents and the laws
that govern them. They were real contents. With the discovery of
the irreal inclusion of the noema which was necessary to explain
the incarnate givenness of transcendent things in perception it is
no longer possible to unify the flow of lived experiences on the basis
of these contents, a number of which must henceforth be counted
as transcendent entities that emerge and are constituted within the
flow itself. What unifies the flow cannot be unified by the flow. If
to constitute is always to unify, then the unifying principle cannot
be constituted. Instead, it will appear as something that is presup-
posed by all constitution and as something that is given in every
lived experience as being absolutely identical, namely, absolute
ipseity. To withdraw the ego from a certain type of constitution
the constitution of objects is not to withdraw it from constitution
in general. In Ideas I Husserl warns:

The transcendentally absolute which we have brought about by

the reductions is, in truth, not what is ultimate; it is something
which constitutes itself in a certain profound and completely
peculiar sense of its own and which has its primal source in what
is ultimately and truly absolute.6

Lets repeat this: the ego lives always in these harmonious

networks of intentionality that are called objects. The ego, as the
source of constituting acts, thus exists on its own with continual
evidence. It continually constitutes itself as a central pole of
identity.7 I perceive, I imagine, I remember something these
all signify the constitution of an objective pole, and within this
constitution, the ego simultaneously constitutes itself. And it is
not constituted as an empty pole. Each act is actively born from
the ego. This presupposes that the ego has already been affected
and that a passive intentionality, which is not controlled by the
actual ego, has already delivered an object that is able to affect
the ego and lead it to act. The act that is initiated in this way
is a lived experience that takes place in the same flow as the
one to which passive lived experiences belong. This amounts to
saying that the world of objects, once constituted, can contin-
ually re-affect the ego. Given that the world is an intentional
56 FLESH AND BODY

production of the ego, it belongs to the ego under the sedimented

form of a habitus. The ego is the substrate of an abiding habitus.
Husserl writes:

But it is to be noted that this centring Ego is not an empty

pole of identity, any more than any object is such. Rather,
according to the law of transcendental generation, with every
act emanating from him and having a new objective sense, he
acquires a new abiding property. For example: if, in an act of
judgment, I decide for the first time in favour of a being and
a being-thus, the fleeting act passes; but from now on I am
abidingly the Ego who is thus and so decided, I am of this
conviction.8

How can we define more precisely the habitus? This does not
concern the noematic identity but the identity of the ego and
whether it can remain in the same aim. It concerns the identity
of an ego who is able to repeat the same acts. The habitus points
back to a first time and to the possibility of reactivating it. It
thus points back to immanent temporality. The egos own histo-
ricity emerges from its habitus. Does it also indicate its finitude?
The I has its history and on the basis of its history it creates an
I which persists for it habitually as the same I.9
If the habitus is a permanent noetic structure that is to say
freely repeatable then its noematic correlate is nothing other than
the constituted object in the entire depth of its in-itself. The in-itself
[en-soi] as a correlate of potential evidence is thus integrated into
the full concreteness of the ego. Husserl states:

From the Ego as identical pole, and as substrate of habitualities,

we distinguish the ego taken in full concreteness in that we
take, in addition, that without which the Ego cannot after all be
concrete. (The ego, taken in full concreteness, we propose to call
by the Leibnizian name: monad.) The Ego can be concrete only
in the flowing multiformity of his intentional life, along with the
objects meant and in some cases constituted as existent for
him in that life. Manifestly, in the case of an object so consti-
tuted, its abiding existence and being-thus are a correlate of the
habituality constituted in the Ego-pole himself by virtue of his
position-taking.10
 Eidetic Reduction and Archi-Facticity 57

To the degree that I am always evidently given to myself as

myself in the full extension of my actual and potential inten-
tional life, including the world manifest as a total noematic
correlate the phenomenological explication of my monad
counts as the constitutive explication of the world and its origin.
In conclusion, the phenomenology of monadic self-constitution
merges with universal phenomenology itself.
All that remains here is a project to be carried out in its infinite
detail. But only the principles of this project have been defined;
its possibility has been established only from within an egological
framework. The absolute foundation of universal science is hence-
forth assured of its sense and its possibility, of its domain and
method. However, an objection can be raised: the transcendental
monadic ego under discussion is my ego. Is this not a de facto
ego? Does it not simply describe the de facto occurrences in the
de facto transcendental ego11 and in the style of a genesis and a
history that are themselves de facto? Have we not proceeded by a
pure and simple transfer of the empirical on to the transcendental
without attaining the essential features that must be the elements
of a universal science? Is that not just a more refined reinstitution
of the transcendental psychologism that was previously denounced
by Husserl? To be sure, this would be the case if the transcendental
analysis did not become an eidetic analysis.
Why did we not have recourse to the eidetic reduction sooner?
Husserl seems to have asked that question12 and then to have offered
this response: We have delayed mentioning it only to facilitate
entrance into phenomenology.13 Pedagogical motives do not suffice
to explain this delay. First of all, Husserl paved the way for the
eidetic reduction by remarking from the outset of this exploration
of the transcendental field that a pure fiction corresponds with all
lived experiences. This correspondence opens the field of an a priori
science of possibilities. Second, all of the analyses carried out up
to now have been general analyses and, even if not all generalities
are essential generalities,14 such generalities can nonetheless lead to
what is essential. Finally, after having reduced all phenomenology
to a phenomenology of the ego and after passing from the de facto
ego to the eidetic ego, all constitutive investigations acquire eidetic
generality. There are, however, still other reasons.
How does one carry out the eidetic reduction? The point of
departure is any factual datum whatsoever, a factum, that the
58 FLESH AND BODY

imagination can freely vary. It can transform it at the same time

into an example or a model for the production of an infinite multi-
plicity of variations. Through this multiplicity, an invariant or a
general essence, an eidos, appears. It sets limits to the variations in
order for them to conserve the sense of the variation of the initial
factual example. The eidos is that without which the object in the
free play of variation can neither be thought nor given intuitively:
this a priori is accessible to intuition and does not necessarily
refer to subjectivity. This operation presupposes an active identi-
fication that can reveal what is congruent in contrast with what is
different. Such an identification can only occur under the condition
of keeping the multiple variations under the regard; it is based on
a productive, connecting unity that operates passively over the
course of variations. In other words, the eidetic reduction presup-
poses immanent temporality. To be more precise, the imagination
does not alter a self-identical datum; the imagination varies it.
Husserl makes a clear distinction between variation and alteration:
In all alteration, the individual remains identically the same. On
the other hand, variation depends precisely on this: that we drop
the identity of the individual and change it imaginatively into
another possible individual.15
These brief indications are sufficient to bring to light the diffi-
culties associated with a reduction to the eidos ego carried out
within the confines of an egology. The variation leading up to the
intuition of the eidos ego would presuppose that other egos can
be given. As a result, either solipsism is broken without phenom-
enological justification, or phenomenology as a whole falls into
the sceptical absurdity of a transcendental empiricism. This aporia
did not escape from Husserls vigilance. In one of only two notes
in the Cartesian Meditations, he proposes the following answer:
It should be noted that, in the transition from my ego to an ego
as such, neither the actuality nor the possibility of other egos is
presupposed. I phantasy only myself as if I were otherwise; I do
not phantasy others.16 This solution is impossible as long as the
immanent temporality of the ego has not been exhibited, since
self-variation [lauto-variation] cannot occur without reference to
the sphere of immanent temporality. It is here, to be sure, that we
discover the more profound reason for the late arrival of the eidetic
reduction.
Considered on its own, is this solution possible? Nothing could
 Eidetic Reduction and Archi-Facticity 59

be less sure, and Husserl was not unaware of this fact. To imagine
myself as an other might eventually be to attain my essential forms,
but certainly not those of the eidos ego. These forms remain those
of a de facto ego. More profoundly, the use of the eidetic reduction
presupposes that immanent temporality the temporality of the
ego has been constituted. It implies that an ego has been given;
without that, the reduction to the eidos could not take place. As
the condition of its possibility, the ego will always escape from
variation. It thus becomes necessary either to allow a duplication
of the temporal flow, which would amount to giving the other and
abandoning egology, or to recognize an original fact in the ego. In
a text from November 1931, Husserl explicitly recognizes that the
eidos ego implies intersubjectivity and is oriented toward an archi-
facticity.17 Husserl states:

We have here a unique and remarkable case, namely that of the

relation of factum to eidos. The being of the eidos, the being
of eidetic possibilities and the universe of these possibilities
is free from the being or non-being of the realization of such
possibilities, it is ontologically independent of all corresponding
reality. But the transcendental eidos ego is unthinkable without
the transcendental I as factual.18

What can phenomenology say about this original fact that is the
ultimate foundation of the distinction between fact and essence,
between possibility and reality in short, that is the foundation
of its discourse? At the end of its faithful descriptions, does
phenomenology not encounter something that will never be
capable of being described or reduced? Will the passage to inter-
subjectivity permit the reduction of this archi-facticity? Whatever
the answer may be, it appears that the constitution of the alter
ego will be responsible for the whole of phenomenology. Husserl
writes in the same 1931 text:

I cannot surpass my facticity and my belonging to others inten-

tionally included in it the absolute reality. The absolute has in
itself its ground, and in its being without a ground, its absolute
necessity is that of absolute substance. Its necessity is not
an eidetic necessity that leaves open contingency. Every eidetic
necessity is a moment of facticity, is a mode of its function in
60 FLESH AND BODY

relation to itself its mode that understands or is able to under-

stand itself.19

These questions, which are ultimate in more than one sense, are
not addressed in the Cartesian Meditations. After having aligned
the eidetic reduction with the necessities of an egology to which
he still holds, Husserl writes, strangely, with respect to the
phenomenological explication of the ego:

Therefore, as eidetic, the explication is valid for the universe

of these, my possibilities as essentially an ego, my possibilities
namely of being otherwise; accordingly then it is valid also for
every possible intersubjectivity related (with a corresponding
modification) to these possibilities, and valid likewise for every
world imaginable as constituted in such an intersubjectivity.20
 CHAPTER SIX

Phenomenological Idealism

In his 1930 preface to the English edition of Ideas I Husserl writes:

In this book, then, we treat of an a priori science (eidetic,

directed upon the universal in its original intuitability), which
appropriates, though as pure possibility only, the empirical field
of fact of transcendental subjectivity with its factual (faktischen)
experiences, equating these with pure intuitable possibilities that
can be modified at will, and sets out as its a priori the indis-
soluble essential structures of transcendental subjectivity, which
persists in and through all imaginable modifications.1

This quote applies as well, once the preceding questions have

been resolved, to the Cartesian Meditations (1929). By elevating
the ego to an eidos ego, phenomenology attains the universal
a priori. Neither the ego nor the world would be conceivable
without it, since the universal a priori is the condition for all that
is conceivable.2 Then and only then is it legitimate to address
the universal problems pertaining to the constitution of the
monadic ego. As the source of all possible experience, then, the
pure transcendental ego harbours an infinity of possible forms of
experience both actual and potential as well as the intentional
objects that are constituted there. These types of experience are
not all simultaneously possible. That is why, to repeat Husserls
own example, the construction of any theory whatsoever cannot
be realized through any variant whatsoever of my own ego; it
can only be constructed by a rational ego, in the mundane
62 FLESH AND BODY

sense that one speaks about the human being as a rational

animal. Moreover, this ego could not be devoted to theoretical
activity in its infancy, for the eidetic intuition of infancy excludes
actual theoretical construction but nonetheless contains its possi-
bility. Experiences are thus ordered by an essential and genetic
lawfulness in immanent temporality:

For indeed whatever occurs in my ego, and eidetically in an

ego as such in the way of intentional processes, constituted
unities, Ego habitualities has its temporality and, in this
respect, participates in the system of forms that belongs to the
all-inclusive temporality with which every imaginable ego, every
possibility-variant of my ego, constitutes himself as himself.3

Once again, imaginative variation allows time to be seen as the

universal form of all egological genesis. If one poses the question
Under what conditions is the ego a unity? then temporality
appears as the invariant form. This form is not a causal form
(which would refer to nature and to mundane positions) but
a motivation with an If then structure. This opens an
ultimate genetic dimension for a couple of reasons. First, the
constitutive system of all objects in general is based on the
constitution of the authority for which there are objects, namely,
transcendental subjectivity. Second, the genetic constitution of the
ego authorizes as far as possible an absolutely universal eidetic
phenomenology. In effect, if the beginning phenomenologist is
bound involuntarily by the circumstance that he takes himself as
his initial example,4 then one can object that the ego is always
found in a pre-constituted world, a world whose ontological
type, as Husserl curiously says, is known by all [allbekannten].
This world provides a guiding thread for the description of the
structures of transcendental subjectivity. Here again, the risk is
facticity, not in the sense of some posterior archi-facticity that
would remain after any reduction, but in the sense of the fact from
which the eidetic reduction is supposed to deliver us. As long as
the ego has not proceeded to the self-variation that gives the eidos
ego by showing that time is a universal genetic form (self-variation
is not possible without this form), the world which is a correlate
of the ego and of which the ego is conscious is not an eidos world.
To recognize the genesis of the ego is to liberate oneself from the
 Phenomenological Idealism 63

pre-constituted world and to perform the reduction to the eidos

world. Strange as this may seem, the discovery of the genetic motif
consolidates and confirms the eidetic motif, making it possible
at the same time to thematize a historicity that escapes all forms
of empiricism. If phenomenology cannot do anything otherwise
than to begin from the constituted (and did Husserl ever analyse
this constraint?) in order to go back to the original constituting
acts, then it will always have to begin with static analyses that are
analogous to those of natural history, before undertaking analyses
that are properly genetic and historical.5
What are the fundamental principles of constitutive genesis?
Husserl states: If we enquire first about principles of constitutive
genesis that have universal significance for us, as possible subjects
related to a world, we find them to be divided according to two
fundamental forms, into principles of active and principles of
passive genesis.6 In the accomplishment of certain acts, the ego
produces new objects which are offered to intuition. Starting from
the Philosophy of Arithmetic, whose analyses often transgress the
psychologism which guides them,7 Husserl considered number to
be the result of specific activities exercised over concrete contents.
In the subsequent development of phenomenology, these initial
investigations will be repeated and extended to all ideal objects,
after having been removed from their psychological dimension. In
this sense, phenomenology will describe the intentional products
of a renewed practical reason, since logical reason is derived from
it as well and the concept of constitution will have a strictly active
meaning. But, on the one hand, these objects do not belong neces-
sarily to every monadic ego at every moment in its history a child
cannot construct a theory and the field of active genesis will thus
be limited. On the other hand,

anything built by activity necessarily presupposes, as the lowest

level, a passivity that gives something beforehand; and, when
we trace anything built actively, we run into constitution by
passive generation. The ready-made object that confronts us in
life as an existent mere physical thing (when we disregard all the
spiritual or cultural characteristics that make it knowable as,
for example, a hammer, a table, an aesthetic creation) is given,
with the originality of the it itself, in the synthesis of a passive
experience.8
64 FLESH AND BODY

Every activity is based on a prior passivity, and so it is already

clear that the role of passive syntheses is decisive.
Lets clarify this by returning to perception. When I actively
perceive a thing, I explicate its horizons, take an inventory of
its properties, and proceed to inspect its details. In so doing, the
thing continues to appear to me as this thing that I examine and
recognize as being identical to the one that was given before this
examination. There is thus an intuition that precedes all expli-
cation. It gives the object to me in its entirety, as an object of
a familiar type, but with a vague sense. Given that nothing can
appear unless by way of the synthetic work of consciousness, one
must accept that a passive synthesis unifies the adumbrations,
provides the matter9 for the synthetic acts, and finally, is able to
explain my own familiarity with things. From this point of view
that makes the notion of habitus explicit, the passive syntheses as
well as the entire passive genesis perhaps play a similar role to that
of being-in-the-world in the existential analytic. Husserl provided a
very fine analysis of this simple apprehension that enables different
senses of passivity to be distinguished and the passive constitution
of temporality to be recognized as the precondition for all objective
constitution. Husserl states:

As a ready example of a simple apprehension, hearing the

continuous ringing of a sound will do. Let us suppose that it is
continually the same and remains invariable (in intensity and
pitch) in the temporal flow and continual change of the phases
of its ringing. It sounds in single phases; they are modes of
appearance of the temporal object, the sound which endures,
and whose duration extends continuously with every moment.
It appears in the form of a concrete present with the now-point,
the horizon of the continuous past, on the one side, and that of
the future on the other. This phenomenon of the present is in
a constant original flux, which goes from the now into an ever
new now and includes a corresponding change of the horizons of
the past and future. Furthermore, the sound is for the most part
also given as spatially localized; it is apprehended as sounding
in spatial proximity or remoteness determinations which have
reference to a spatial null-point (Nullpunkt), our own bodies
(Krper), on which every here and there is oriented. In this way,
the sound is passively pregiven as unity of duration.10
 Phenomenological Idealism 65

In order to understand the sense of this passive pre-givenness, it

is necessary first to contrast it with the active apprehending of
the ringing of the sound. The latter lasts as long as the sound. It
obeys the same temporal structure, because it always takes place
in a living punctual now and has a double horizon of retention
and protention. But it is not oriented toward the now of the
sound:

To lay hold of such a now, such a phase of duration, as a moment

and to make it an object for itself is rather the function of a
specific act of apprehension of another kind. If we apprehend the
sound as enduring, in short, as this sound, we are not turned
toward the momentary and yet continuously changing present
(the phase sounding now) but through and beyond this present,
in its change, toward the sound a unity which by its essence
presents itself in this change, in this flux of appearances.11

The active apprehension coming from the ego traverses the

original punctual now of the sound and extends toward the
identical sound in the flowing of nows. This implies that each
new original now continually and passively coincides with itself
in order to remain one and the same. This implies, moreover, that
this activity always maintains a hold on what is passing and what
has passed. The maintaining of the now is a passivity within
activity, an activity that becomes passivity in order to remain an
activity. The sound in its unity is thus passively constituted in
order to be given as matter for acts of synthesis.
But it is necessary to proceed further. Acts all lived experiences
in general possess a temporal form; they enter into the flow of
original temporality. This temporal form is itself constituted
the lessons on time analyse this constitution from an essentially
noematic point of view but it cannot be actively constituted,
since it is the condition of the possibility and the presupposition of
every act. Original temporality thus points back to an absolutely
passive constitution. It provides all matter in general and thus is
connected with the constitution of the hyle. Husserl concludes the
analysis in the following way:

In this activity it is necessary to make a distinction between

the active ray actually springing up continuously and a fixed,
66 FLESH AND BODY

passive regularity, which, however, is a regularity pertaining to

the activity itself. With the active apprehension there goes hand
in hand, in a double direction and according to a double form
of modification, a modified activity belonging essentially to it.
Accordingly, there is not only a passivity prior to the activity,
as passivity of the originally constitutive temporal flux, which
is only preconstitutive, but also a passivity erected on this, a
passivity which is truly objectivating, namely, one which thema-
tizes or cothematizes objects; it is a passivity which belongs to
the act, not as a base but as act, a kind of passivity in activity.12

This passive genesis is a history to which the ego can have

access. Starting from the constituted object that is described in
its structure and modes of appearing as a given meaning that
can be explicated, intentional analysis goes back to the acts
which are originally and intentionally productive of meaning. It
seeks out the origin of sense inasmuch as this act or these acts
are always present in a sedimented manner in the entire inten-
tional life correlative to the object in question. They first gave
it a sense and continue to do so in a passive manner (without
being reactivated).13 According to a genetic law, each intentional
production refers to a first time that began its history. Everything
that is known refers to an act of knowing that passively remains
in all subsequent progress in knowing. The noematic correlate of
this passive persistence is called the in itself. If passive genesis
encompasses and, in a certain manner, precedes all active genesis,
then historicity takes hold of the entirety of egological life,
including its constituted objects.14
How does passive genesis operate? Husserl states: The universal
principle of passive genesis, for the constitution of all objectivities
given completely prior to the products of activity, bears the title
association.15 What should this be taken to mean? Husserl explains
very little about this in Cartesian Meditations. After distinguishing
the phenomenological concept of association from the Humean
concept, Husserl simply notes that here belongs, for example,
sensuous configuration in coexistence and in succession.16 Once
again, lets consider perception. As an active operation of the
ego, perception refers to a field of passive pre-givenness where
something is already pre-given toward which the ego can turn.
What is pre-given affects or excites (Husserl often employs this
 Phenomenological Idealism 67

word) the ego to perceive. What is the most general structure of

this field? Consider the simplest model, a sensible field like an
array of colours. It is obtained by way of abstraction, since the
colours are always those of concrete and extended things. The very
possibility of such an abstraction signifies that the colours that
is, the sense data are constituted unities and can be thematized
on their own. They are the products of a constitutive synthesis that
points back to the synthesis of time as a universal form of order
of succession and a form of coexistence of all immanent data.17 To
echo Kant, it is a form of sensibility.18
Every form is the form of some content. We must return to the
synthesis of contents in order to understand the structure of the
sensible field. Considered on its own, it is given as a homogenous
unity in a heterogeneous relation to other fields of sensibility.
Within the field of an array of colours, the contrast between red
and white does not exclude their homogeneity as visual data to
emerge in contrast, for example, with the fields of acoustic or
tactile data. This is to say that the the most general syntheses of
sensuous data raised to prominence within a field, data which at
any given time are united in the living present of a consciousness,
are those in conformity with affinity [Verwandschaft] (homogeneity)
and strangeness [Fremdheit] (heterogeneity).19 This affinity is also
referred to as an analogy [Ahnlichkeit], and it can be displayed in
varying degrees, ranging from a contrast where two dissimilar data
appear against the background of a community (red and white as
two visual data) to the repetition of two absolutely similar data.
In both cases, a synthesis of coincidence is at work, whether it is
partial or total. Though similitude and analogy are offered to static
analysis, they are already the work of a passive synthesis of coinci-
dence: that we denote by the traditional term association, but with a
change of sense.20 When there is a synthesis of coincidence between
two contents, there is an immanent referral (renvoi) of the one to
the other and this referral is a genesis (for form of these contents
being temporal): the first content is evoked by the second. When the
contents fuse together, association produces homogeneity. When
they do not overlap with one another, association produces hetero-
geneity: Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of
two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.21
Associative genesis, as an essential law of intentionality, is
operative in all passive constitution, including the constitution of
68 FLESH AND BODY

immanent temporal objects, or, lived experiences. Consequently,

it is an a priori for all constitution of an ego. The demonstration
of this innate22 a priori enables phenomenology to accomplish its
goal, namely, to be the theory of static and genetic constitution
of the objects of all possible consciousness. In a deep sense, it
seeks to make the ego comprehensible, as an infinite nexus of
synthetically congruous performances at levels, all of which
fit the universal persisting form, temporality, because the latter
itself is built up in a continual, passive and completely universal
genesis, which, as a matter of essential necessity, embraces every-
thing new.23
To respect the egological closure, the auto-constitution of the
monad should never presuppose the alter ego and especially not on
the ultimate level of passive constitution and associative genesis.
But, if association operates by affinity and strangeness [Fremdheit],
does it not imply the other? How can the sense of this Fremdheit
be understood, if the other is not given? In the fifth of the Cartesian
Meditations Husserl will say that accordingly, the intrinsically
first other (the first non-Ego) is the other Ego.24 This statement
bears weighty consequences. It comes down to affirming that
the other operates at the deepest levels of the constitution of the
ego, since the sense of strangeness at work in association must be
derived from what is the first stranger-in-itself [ltranger-en-soi],
namely, the alter ego. More profoundly still, this perhaps implies a
definition of pure temporality as the relation to the other. In effect,
if the other ego is what is originally foreign to me, then the other
ego is what originally affects me. Does it not merge, then, with
the original temporal hyle that a 1930 manuscript describes as the
core of the other-than-me?25
Unless we were to establish that the alter ego is a moment of
the eidos ego (but what, then, would be the sense of alterity?),
we would again be led back toward an archi-facticity. Doubtless,
Husserl could only say that the particular fact is irrational; but it
is possible only in the a priori form-system pertaining to it as an
egological fact, or that the fact, with its irrationality, is itself
a structural concept within the system of the concrete Apriori.26
The system of this concrete a priori would be based on this archi-
facticity. Reason and irrationality could no longer be on the scale
of an archi-facticity. Instead, it would have to be interpreted in
the horizon of the relation between the ego and the alter ego and
 Phenomenological Idealism 69

through a development that could no longer be called phenom-

enology. We shall return to this point later.
After having thus connected all of the constitutive analyses to
the analysis of the ego and having described the style of intentional
genesis, it is possible to philosophically define phenomenology
and to phenomenologically define philosophy. As a transcendental
theory of knowledge, is phenomenology an idealism? Certainly,
but in a very novel sense. What was the theory of knowledge
for Descartes, according to Husserl? After establishing that all
evidence and justification of being and of truth is accomplished in
me, it was a matter of understanding how mental life can acquire
an objective meaning, or rather, how a clear and distinct perception
can claim to be more than and something other than a pure and
simple internal characteristic of consciousness. Divine veracity is
the Cartesian name of the solution.
Husserl writes:

What does phenomenologys transcendental self-investigation

have to say about this? Nothing less than that the whole problem
is counter-sensical [Widersinn]. It involves an inconsistency into
which Descartes necessarily fell, because he missed the genuine
sense of his reduction to the indubitable we were about to say:
his transcendental epoch and reduction to the pure ego.27

Where does this counter-sense reside? The questioning ego is

already a psyche, a mundane ego; Descartes thus accepts the
validity of the world that he attempts to question. The phenom-
enologist has access to the field of transcendental experience. In
the infinite detail of intentional analysis, the phenomenologist
shows that all beings, regardless of their type of being, are a
formation of sense from pure consciousness and that every
conceivable sense is derived from transcendental subjectivity.
Husserl states: The attempt to conceive the universe of true being
as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness,
possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to
one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical.28
Phenomenological idealism is not a psychological idealism of
Berkeleys sort; intentionality prevents this from being the case.
And, continually attentive to the horizonal aspect of all sense,
intentionality excludes the possibility the sense of an in-itself
70 FLESH AND BODY

and thus distances itself from the Kantian style of idealism.

Husserls is an idealism without limits: an absolute idealism.29
The absoluteness of this idealism is co-substantial with phenom-
enology to the point that, as Husserl writes, it is its proof. This,
of course, depends on the thesis that consciousness does not
have any exteriority. At the same time, this gives the charge of
solipsism the status of an objection that in principle threatens the
totality of the phenomenological edifice. Moreover, Husserl was
unable to stop himself, within the framework of pure egology,
from sometimes tacitly having recourse to intersubjectivity. The
problem of the intentional experience of the other is not a regional
problem. Instead, it is the greatest difficulty of phenomenology,
since it touches on its very possibility and its sense. It would be a
grave error to consider the Fifth Meditation purely and simply as
an explication of the alter ego. The question is certainly about the
sense of intersubjectivity, but it concerns whether or not this sense
is compatible with the sense of phenomenology. It is a test of both
the other and of sense, of experience and the purified expression of
its own sense, a test of phenomenology by and with itself.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

The Objection of Solipsism

The initial discussion of the problem of the other highlights the

fact that phenomenological Idealism is in question. By defining
transcendental subjectivity as something concrete, Husserl seems
to forever prohibit the positing of another ego. As a result, this
makes the objective world phenomenologically unthinkable and
thereby undermines the philosophical project itself. Objectivity can
no longer be based on divine veracity. This cause of distress1 is not
only due to the fact that divine veracity appeals to a metaphysics
that falls under the scope of the reduction but also due to the fact
that it presupposes that which is in question: the constitution of an
alien subjectivity. This occurs whether it is conceived as an infinite
subjectivity or as total and infinite subjectivity that, in a Leibnizian
manner, unifies all monadic subjectivities simultaneously. Under
the guise of the other, it is the being of objectivity and consequently
of intentionality itself that is at stake. The question is sufficiently
essential to lead Husserl to envision the following retraction:

Have we not therefore done transcendental realism an injustice?

The doctrine may lack a phenomenological foundation; but
essentially it is right in the end, since it looks for a path from
the immanencey of the ego to the transcendency of the Other.
Can we, as phenomenologists, do anything but agree with this
and say: The nature and the whole world that are constituted
immanently in the ego are only my ideas and have behind
them the world that exists in itself. The way to this world must
still be sought? Accordingly can we avoid saying likewise:
72 FLESH AND BODY

The very question of the possibility of actually transcendent

knowledge above all, that of the possibility of my going outside
my ego and reaching other egos (who, after all, as others, are
not actually in me but only consciously intended in me) this
question cannot be asked purely phenomenologically? Is it not
self-understood [selbstverstndlich] from the very beginning that
my field of transcendental knowledge does not reach beyond my
sphere of transcendental experience and what is synthetically
comprised therein? Is it not self-understood that all of that is
included without residue in my own transcendental ego?2

The first result of the reduction is to link me to the flow of my

pure, conscious-lived experiences and to the unities constituted
by their actualities and potentialities. Moreover, the reduction
ultimately allows the profound identity of the flow and the
monadic ego to appear. Henceforth, everything that can be
constituted belongs to me and is inseparable from me. Or, what
amounts to the same thing, the constituting egological life is an
infinite life under an absolute law of closure: But what about
other egos, who surely are not a mere intending and intended
in me [die doch nicht blosse Verstellung und Vorgestelltes in mir
sind], merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but
according to their sense, precisely others?3
The meaning of this question entails: (1) a certain way of under-
standing the concept of constitution. Constitution would always
have to do with the ego. In such a case, it would be necessary to
conclude that phenomenology is unable to think transcendence;
(2) an understanding of the other as an exceptional object whose
sense would come to contradict that of constitution, a sense in
rebellion against the origin of sense; (3) that the alter ego carries, in
the end, the weight of all exteriority and of all transcendence. One
should thus come to expect that the analysis of the constitution
of the alter ego is the analysis of both the original transcendence
and of the origin of transcendence. In short, it is the analysis of
the origin of the world. These remarks, in turn, call forth a few
questions. Where does this understanding of the sense of the other
come from? According to what laws can one say that the sense
of the other contradicts the sense of sense, if not the laws of pure
logical grammar? Is one thus not forced to refer to the sense-giving
of transcendental subjectivity in order to bring out the paradoxical
 The Objection of Solipsism 73

sense of the other? And does this not indicate that the other has
been constituted in me?
The only way of breaking this circle is to undertake the task
of phenomenological explication indicated in this connexion by the
alter ego and carry it through in concrete work.4 This procedure
entails at least one decision: the other can only be a sense, and as
such, can only have its origin in me. This decision repeats the one
which inaugurates phenomenology: every conceivable object in
general is a formation of sense by pure subjectivity. Does one not
risk, from the outset, missing the other as irreducible to me and
thereby risk carrying out one of the more subtle and violent reduc-
tions, the reduction of the phenomenon itself? Is not the other the
unthinkable par excellence? But, in order to be able to denounce
this operation to say that the other has been missed and that the
other is phenomenologically unthinkable must one not have had
prior access to the other? This line of thinking is based on the same
erroneous principle as the theories that replace the perception of
incarnate givenness with the consciousness of a sign or an image.5
If the others being-for-us is something very strange that we all
feel, it is only at the end of an intentional analysis that it will
be possible to recognize this strangeness in its full legitimacy. Or
rather, only a phenomenology is able to say that the other escapes
from its jurisdiction and then turn this lack of conformity into an
essential and positive structure. Husserl writes:

We must, after all, obtain for ourselves insight into the explicit
and implicit intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced
and verified in the realm of our transcendental ego; we must
discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the
sense of the other ego becomes fashioned in me and, under the
title, harmonious experience of someone else, becomes verified
as existing and even as itself there in its own manner. These
experiences and their works are facts belonging to my phenom-
enological sphere. How else than by examining them can I
explicate the sense, existing others, in all its aspects?6

The sole point of departure for phenomenology will be, as

always, the mode of givenness taken as the transcendental
guiding thread. The other is a noema who is constituted in and
through specific noeses; after a static analysis, genetic study
74 FLESH AND BODY

will be able to work back toward them. The other can only be
perceived, and regardless of the singularity of this perception
(its noema is a noesis), it does not seem to require, at this stage
of the description anyway, a transformation of principles. The
other appears on the scene of perception without contributing to
its establishment nor, so to speak, participating in its operation.
To make the other a noema amounts to excluding the other from
playing a role in the constitution of the ego. The purity of the
egologicalmonadic closure is maintained here. We are calling
attention to this point here, because it will turn out later that
Husserl will be forced to alter this purity.
Here is the first exemplary description:

In changeable harmonious multiplicities of experience I

experience others as actually existing and, on the one hand,
as world Objects not as mere physical things belonging to
Nature, though indeed as such things in respect of one side of
them. They are in fact experienced also as governing psychically
in their respective natural organisms. Thus peculiarly involved
[verflochten] with flesh, as psychophysical Objects, they are
in the world. On the other hand, I experience them at the
same time as subjects for this world, as experiencing it (this
same world that I experience) and, in so doing, experiencing me
too, even as I experience the world and others in it. Continuing
along this line, I can explicate a variety of other moments
noematically.7

The most basic characteristic of the perception of the other

described above is its ambiguity. This is the case on several
levels: (1) the other is given as an object in the world, in a
synthetic multiplicity of adumbrations, and as a subject outside
of the world derived from an entirely distinct mode of givenness.
As another origin of the world, the other is given to me in the
same way as I am given to myself. The human being that I
am is the self-objectivation of the transcendental subject that I
am. If the givenness of the other as in the world does not raise
any problems, it is clear that the others being-given as outside
of the world constitutes the entire difficulty. (2) The other is
a mundane psycho-physical object, an object with two sides.
On its physical side, the other is a thing in nature, a body
 The Objection of Solipsism 75

(Krper) that is individualized by its position in the homogenous

continuum of space and time. On the other side, the other is
manifest psychically. I cannot have direct access to that sphere,
because it would then be mine. (3) The body of the other is also
flesh. In the description cited above, Husserl does not yet mark
this difference neatly. But, stricto sensu, the psycho-physical
unity cannot be confused with the psycho-somatic unity,8 and to
return to the issue of individuation, flesh is individualized differ-
ently from the body.9
It is difficult to unify all of these ambiguities immediately and
under the same systematic law. At best, one can highlight the
ambiguities that Husserl explicitly mentions (leaving aside for now
the difference between flesh and body [chair/corps]). As an object
in the world and as a physical body, the other can be directly given
in intuition; as a transcendental subject and as a psyche, that is
excluded in principle. The phenomenon described is ambiguous
because the other is given to a fulfilled intuition in one respect
but refuses it in another aspect. This is a decisive characteristic
to which we will continually return. In this regard, the initial
description, more or less explicitly, sets in place everything that will
follow: from the operative levers to the most complex aporias. Yet,
the description was intended only to establish that, in my pure and
reduced conscious life, I do not only experience others but also I
experience the world as intersubjective. In short, the sense of my
transcendental experience of the world is an objective sense. But
this objective sense belongs to my phenomenon of the world, and
if there are others, then each of them has their own phenomenon
of the world. How can this presence in me of a sense that exceeds
me be understood and elucidated, if all sense is the work of my
intentional life?
This problem could be posed in another way. The epoch yields
an I that exists in solitude. The radicality of this solitude measures
up to the demands of philosophy itself, which is to say that it
cannot be measured by philosophy. In this sense, the I is absolutely
indeclinable. However, Husserl remarks: There still remains a diffi-
culty, an incomprehensibility wherein the I itself has appeal only to
itself, and just as I say I, all of the personal pronouns are already
there as correlates.10 What do I say when I say I? Husserl states:
In solitary speech of the meaning of I is essentially realized in
the immediate idea of ones own personality, which is also the
76 FLESH AND BODY

meaning of the word in communicated speech. Each man has his

own I-presentation (and with it his individual notion of I) and
this is why the words meaning differs from person to person.11
Husserls investigations of the ideality of meaning ought to prohibit
such a statement. If meaning is ideal, then this means that we have
to be able to understand the word I in the absence of the one who
utters it. I can only say I and understand what I am saying against
the horizon of my own death.12 If meaning is ideal, then this also
means that it is omnitemporal and intersubjective. I can only say
I and understand what I am saying against the horizon of a We,
that is, against the horizon of a declension of the I. The testimonial
value of all meaning points back to my own death and to others.
By stating the word I, I address my own death to others; I expro-
priate myself of it [en exproprie]. Should one think that the relation
to my death merges with my relation to the other? Wouldnt the
ego then be structurally expropriated from itself? What would
happen to ownness and to the egological closure?
Husserl, once again, answers as follows:

Therefore, in order to provide the basis for answering all imagi-

nable questions that can have any sense here nay, in order that,
step by step, these questions themselves may be propounded and
solved it is necessary to begin with a systematic explication of
the overt and implicit intentionality in which the being of others
for me becomes made and explicated in respect of its rightful
content that is, its fulfilment-content.13
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Flesh and the Sphere

of Ownness

The phenomenological approach always seeks to be freed from

all presuppositions. Without going into a deeper analysis of the
possibility and limitations of this requirement, lets specify here the
form that it takes at the threshold of the intentional analysis of the
other. What is interrogated is the constitution and transcendental
sense of the other, that is to say the universal stratum of the sense of
the objective world. The alter ego therefore should not be either
explicitly or implicitly presupposed at any moment. This calls for a
new epoch of a unique kind: For the present we exclude from the
thematic field everything now in question: we disregard all consti-
tutional effects of intentionality relating immediately or mediately
to other subjectivity and delimit first of all the total nexus of that
actual and potential intentionality in which the ego constitutes
within himself a peculiar ownness.1 This reduction does not put
out of play the other as posited in the natural attitude (this would
unnecessarily duplicate the phenomenological reduction), nor does
it strive for a mundane solitude that, as such, refers to others; nor is
it, more subtly, a reduction to the phenomenon of the human ego,
which, again, refers to others but reduces them to the phenomenon
of the world.
Instead, an abstraction is first made of that which gives men
and brutes their specific sense as, so to speak, Ego-like living
beings.2 For the animal has something like an I-structure;3
animals are the subjects of a conscious life to which we can have
78 FLESH AND BODY

access by an assimilating modification of inter-human empathy.4

The phenomenology of animality presupposes the phenomenology
of intersubjectivity and so the reduction to my sphere of ownness
must abstract from an egoic animality. Second, everything that
is derived from culture is abstracted. Mustnt one therefore also
reduce phenomenology itself? Is not the abstraction from culture
the most cultural gesture of all? Perhaps, but this point can only
emerge after phenomenology, that is, after the reduction. Third,
there is an abstraction of Umweltlichkeit. The surrounding world
is, according to Husserl, a concept that only has a role in the world
of spirit.5 As such, everything that depends on it must be reduced.
Husserl also has in mind the Heideggerian analysis of worldhood.
In interpreting Being and Time as a regional ontology explicating
the a priori of the surrounding world,6 Husserl maintains the
judicial priority of the universal a priori of constitution and thus is
warranted in reducing it.
Before defining positively the residue of this reduction to my
sphere of ownness [rduction au propre], still one more remark is in
order: this reduction is only possible on the condition that it can be
abstracted from the totality of intentional productions intending or
implying the other. Given that the other is not an adequate datum
capable of being abstracted from the source but a transcendence
that is constituted in a synthesis that is in principle open to the
possibility of discordance, it would be necessary to have completely
reactivated all the intentional production in question and to have
covered all of their horizons. Is this possible? Isnt it even contra-
dictory if there is no constitution of a horizon but only horizons
of constitution? Does one not run up against, in various forms, the
limits that mark the finitude of the phenomenologist?7 Husserl does
not say anything about it.
Husserl states: In this connection we note something important.
When we thus abstract, we retain a unitarily coherent stratum
of the phenomenon world, a stratum of the phenomenon that
is the correlate of continuously harmonious, continuing world-
experience.8 The reduction to my sphere of ownness is not
equivalent to the destruction of the world and of all experience.
On the contrary, this abstraction delivers, in a certain sense, the
condition of all experience of the world. In effect, no experience
of the world is possible without this experience being composed
of a certain alterity. The real world always signifies a world other
 Flesh and the Sphere of Ownness 79

than me. The syntax of this other than me [autre que moi] already
indicates that I cannot have an experience of the other (however
singular or strange this experience may be) without first having
an experience of what is ownmost to me.9 The experience of
ownness [du propre] is the essence [le propre] of experience. This
proposition is just as important for phenomenology as it is for
Kantianism, which states that: The conditions for the possibility
of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the
possibility of the objects of experience.10 The layer of ownness
is foundational (can it only be considered a layer, then?) in the
sense that no experience of transcendence is possible that does not
presuppose the experience of ownness. The condition of the possi-
bility of experience is given to experience; this, in the eyes of Kant,
would have been a monstrosity.
Husserl states: Let us observe more closely the result of
our abstraction and, accordingly, what it leaves us. From the
phenomenon world, from the world appearing with an Objective
sense, a substratum becomes separated, as the Nature included
in my ownness.11 What is this nature included in my ownness?
Since all objectivity and all idealization are put out of play, it is
not a nature in the sense of physical science which abstracts every-
thing that is mental from the lifeworld in order to deal only with
an idealized corporeality. This exposure of nature (idealization,
Husserl sometimes says, is a clothing) is of a pure multiplicity of
perceived bodies that cannot be put into the form of objective space
and time; it is a purely subjective nature. Even if it maintains the
sense of a group of extended things, it is characterized first and
foremost by its heterogeneity. Husserl again writes, and we quote
at length:

Among the bodies belonging to this Nature and included in

my peculiar ownness, I then find my flesh [Leib] as uniquely
singled out [in einziger Auszeichnung] namely as the only one
of them that is not just a body but precisely an flesh [Leib]:
the sole Object within my abstract world-stratum to which,
in accordance with experience, I ascribe [zurechne] fields of
sensation (belonging to it, however, in different manners a
field of tactual sensations, a field of warmth and coldness, and
so forth) the only Object in which I rule and govern [schalte
und walte] immediately, governing particularly in each of its
80 FLESH AND BODY

organs. Touching kinesthetically, I perceive with my hands;

seeing kinesthetically, I perceive also with my eyes; and so
forth; moreover I can perceive thus at any time. Meanwhile the
kinesthesias pertaining to the organs flow in the mode I am
doing, and are subject to my I can; furthermore, by calling
these kinesthesias into play I can push, thrust, and so forth, and
can thereby act somatically immediately, and then, mediately.
As perceptively active, I experience (or can experience) all of
Nature, including my own flesh, which therefore in the process
is reflexively related to itself. That becomes possible because I
can perceive one hand by means of the other, an eye by means
of a hand, and so forth a procedure in which the functioning
organ must become an Object and the Object a functioning
organ. And it is the same in the case of my generally possible
original dealing with Nature and with my flesh itself, by means
of this organism which therefore is reflexively related to itself
also in practice.12

Lets pay close attention to this long description that leads

further into the sphere of ownness and gives rise to some consid-
erable problems. The first thing that it is necessary to bring up
here is that the sphere of ownness anchored in my flesh and
characterized by the distinction between flesh/body is not
homogeneous. It is not homogeneous, in the first place, because
my flesh is distinct from all bodies for several reasons. We have
already made clear that no syntheses giving any body whatsoever
would be possible without a correlative system of dispositions
of my flesh (tactile movements, ocular movements, etc.). Husserl
has painstakingly analysed these dispositions ever since his 1907
course [Ding und Raum].13 In this respect, flesh is the condition
of the possibility of the thing, or better, the constitution of flesh
is presupposed by all constitution of things, that is to say, by all
constitution of worldly [mondaine] transcendence in general.
This means that flesh is the universal medium for the givenness
of bodies within the sphere of ownness. Husserl writes:

My flesh is a given thing in its original properties. I move origi-

nally, change originally in all such movements and all other
original changes for me constitute an existent unit that remains
present to me and takes on the character of self-givenness. At its
 Flesh and the Sphere of Ownness 81

base it is given as originally possible and effective for me; every

other thing of my original sphere is for me such that I have an
original foundation, but by means of my flesh and its originality,
by means of its original kinesthesis, the I is able to put into play
seeing, hearing, etc.14

Always accompanying what is given to me, flesh is what is the

ownmost most my own in the sphere of ownness. Husserl
writes:

Among all spatial things, my universal practical sphere is my

flesh, that which is most originally mine [das ursprnglichst
Meine]. That original source of that which is my own and
continuously my own, continually is my disposition and the
origin; it is that which only is immediate; it is that which stands
as my disposition. The one that I am (as a child) is the first and
is immediately appropriated, and it is now the organ designed
for the means of the appropriation of each and all.15

And what holds for ownness also holds for what is near to
me: My flesh is among all things the nearest, the nearest for
perception and the nearest for my feeling and willing.16 Is there
anything that is more originally my own, more near and more
mine than the origin of ownness, of the near and of what is
mine? Ownness, proximity, and mineness are not conceivable
prior to flesh. Nothing based on the pre-understanding of my
sphere of ownness, proximity or mineness could be thought prior
to the flesh. Flesh is their origin. If the essence of experience is
the experience of ownness, then the most essential experience of
ownness is my flesh. Without a thematization of flesh, phenom-
enology risks to lose its radicalism; it risks to contradict its most
essential vocation and to support the interpretation that it is
insufficient.
The sphere of ownness, in the second instance, is heterogeneous
because my flesh is also bodily. It is given descriptively, to be
sure, but this givenness must be explained. It is thus a question
of knowing how, in the purely egological sphere of ownness, my
flesh can acquire the sense of a body. To do this, the analysis of its
constitution as flesh is a necessary prerequisite. Husserl undertakes
this analysis in the second volume of his Ideas Pertaining to Pure
82 FLESH AND BODY

Phenomenology. There, after having noted that flesh is the organ

of all perception and that it necessarily accompanies the experience
of spatio-temporal objects, he turns toward the constitution of
flesh itself. As his exemplar and guiding thread, he takes the
perception that flesh has of itself as a corporeal flesh. The choice of
this example seems to indicate that the question of incorporation
[lincorporation] is considered to be resolved.
First of all, lets set aside that which, in the perception of the flesh
(as a genitive object), does not distinguish it from any other body
whatsoever. For example, the seeing of my hand can be described in
the same way as the seeing of the table in front of me. But it is no
longer the same when it is a question of how things appear to me in
tactile form. When I touch my left hand with my right hand, I have
sensations of movement and tactile sensations that objectify my left
hand as a thing. These sensations belong to my right hand. Yet,
my left hand also experiences tactile sensations that, without being
constitutive, are localized there. The physical thing left hand is
what I obtain after these sensations are abstracted. If I take them
into account, the physical thing is not enriched, for it becomes
flesh, it senses (es wird Leib, es empfindet).17 The respective roles
of the right and left hands are reversible, and they can be reversed
constantly. What is important here is the self-relation of touch, the
endless exchange between the organ and the object in which they
can no longer be distinguished from one another. If touch is privi-
leged, it is due to this double sensation [sentance].18 What touches
is also touched, whereas what sees is not seen and what hears is
not heard. That said, we can eliminate any reference to the physical
thing, to the body, and to exteriority. Flesh is pure auto-affection.
Husserl says: The touch-sensing is not a state of the material thing,
hand, but is precisely the hand itself, which for us is more than a
material thing.19 He adds: If I convince myself that a perceived
thing does not exist, that I am subject to an illusion, then, along
with the thing, everything extended in its extension is stricken out
too. But the sensings [Empfindnisse] do not disappear.20
It is Husserls conviction that this constitution of flesh through
touch in which flesh appears as the basis of Empfindnisse as well
as an organ of the will and the basis of free movement can be
achieved within the egological sphere of ownness. The same does
not hold for its constitution as a material thing, as a body, that is
to say, as a res extensa.21 In Ideas II, when Husserl describes the
 Flesh and the Sphere of Ownness 83

constitution of a centre of orientation in space an absolute here

he is not describing the body but the flesh. Bodies, by definition,
occupy some place within an isotopic, homogeneous and inter-
subjective space. When Husserl proceeds to claim that flesh is
constituted as a body in a multiplicity of concordant adumbrations
but that this constitution is strangely incomplete, does he not still
presuppose the other? Does he not presuppose the others point of
view from which this completeness can be accessed and to which
he refers negatively in calling it incomplete? Husserl contends,
My flesh, in its physical truth, is a unity of possible perceptions
that all others could have of my flesh.22 Finally, to make the flesh
into the turning point [Umschlagpunkt] in the causal nexus where
free conditionality is inserted into causality is to withdraw the flesh
from corporeality. If, in the closure of a reduction to the sphere of
ownness, no constitution of flesh as body seems possible, then this
is because the union of flesh and body [lincorporation] presup-
poses intersubjectivity.
Aware of this, Husserl continually returns to this question of
incorporation in the manuscripts devoted to intersubjectivity. After
1921, the constitution of flesh as a physical thing is considered to
be problematic when viewed from the solipsistic attitude.23 The
analysis, in short, is as follows: each member of my flesh appears to
be moving freely, but it can always appear to be moved mechani-
cally by another member. My right hand can lift my left hand. The
two types of movement (subjective movement and mechanical
movement) coincide and are identified with each other, such that
my flesh is constituted both as flesh and as a physical thing. But
what entitles the passive movement of my left hand to be called
mechanical?24 Above all, it is not the relation of these organs to
one another that needs to be constituted as a body but the flesh for
which they are organs (this is why the concept of organs needs to
be renounced). After having shown that the movement of my flesh
can never be confused with the movement of a thing, Husserl ends
with the following remark: Thus it is a fundamental problem to
think through and clearly define how flesh is also constituted as
physical flesh.25 In some sense, what will follow afterward will be
nothing more than the development of the consequences of this
fundamental aporia.
What is the sense of this demonstration of my flesh inside the
sphere of ownness? Bringing to light my flesh, reduced to what
84 FLESH AND BODY

is included in my ownness, is itself part of bringing to light the

ownness-essence of the Objective phenomenon: I as this man.26
In effect, within the transcendental reduction, I carry out a further
reduction to my sphere of ownness, and other people become
nothing more than bodies. By contrast, the person that I am is soul
and flesh [me et chair], a psycho-physical unity in the latter, my
personal Ego, who operates in this flesh and, by means of it, in
the external world, who is affected by this world, and who thus
in all respects, by virtue of the continual experience of such unique
modes of Ego- and life-relatedness, is constituted as psychophysi-
cally united with the animate corporeal organism.27 Let that be the
case. But: (1) how can I know and say that my flesh is a component
of the proper essence of the objective phenomenon I-the human,
without intending this phenomenon and without it being given to
me? And how can that be done when all phenomenal objectivity
in general has been put out of play? Must not the other already
be given, then? (2) This can be verified a second time. To identify,
as Husserl does, the soulflesh compound (in Ideas III he gives
the name somatology to the analysis of flesh) with the psycho-
physical compound is to take for granted the incorporation of
flesh within the sphere of ownness. (3) This can be observed, once
again. If in the sphere of ownness flesh cannot be body, this implies
that the limits of my flesh are not those of the body. What could
those limits be? We will not respond immediately to this question
that Husserl never posed, because another question is preliminary:
can my flesh possess, in the sphere of ownness, other limits than
those of the world of the sphere of ownness, limits that may make
it possible to talk about an external world, of a world external
to flesh [ausserleibliche Welt], and of things external to flesh
[ausserleiblichen Dinge]?28 Nothing is less sure. As the organ of all
perception, as the site and means of all perception, my flesh extends
as far as my perception extends: all the way to the stars.29 Flesh is
co-extensive with the world of ownness, and without its incorpo-
ration, it is very difficult to understand the possible meaning of an
outside-of-flesh [hors-chair].
Of course, Husserl does not raise these questions in the course
pursued in his Cartesian Meditations. If some of these questions
emerge in the unpublished manuscripts devoted to intersubjec-
tivity, they all lead phenomenology, directly or indirectly, toward
its condition of impossibility. So, henceforth, our approach will
 Flesh and the Sphere of Ownness 85

be twofold: on the one hand, we will force ourselves to follow the

winding path of Husserls descriptions, and, on the other, we will
lay out the consequences of the impossibility of incorporation.
Inasmuch as Husserl himself admits that incorporation is the
precondition for all Einfhlung,30 we will continually have to
undo what Husserl seeks to constitute. This work would have only
a limited interest, if it did not progressively point to the need for
an analysis of flesh and of the carnal difference (by this we mean
the flesh/body difference). If our attention is focused on the Fifth
Meditation, this is due to its essential and decisive position within
the phenomenological system as well as the permanent appeal that
it makes to flesh and body. Without this conjunction that we shall
attempt to analyse, no interpretation of phenomenology within the
horizon of carnal difference would be possible. There would then
be nothing more here than a monograph with almost no philo-
sophical value.
The result of the reduction to ownness comes down to this:
there is a world of ownness in which the psycho-physical ego
is integrated by virtue of its corporeal flesh, and this world is
the noematic correlate of a transcendental ego. What is attained,
then, is monadic subjectivity in its full concreteness. My own
world conserves, says Husserl, the personal who displays value
predicates and predicates of works [Wert und Werkprdikate]
as such and remains within a spatio-temporal form reduced
to ownness in which Objects the physical things, the
psychophysical Ego are likewise outside one another.31 This
expression is surprising. What sense can a personal ego have in a
world without others? What sense can there be in positing a value
or recognizing the value of work? Are not the axiological world
and the world of work essentially intersubjective? But, even more
seriously, what can be the sense of a spatio-temporal form reduced
to ownness? If, at least before any deeper explication of tempo-
rality, one can accept provisionally the reduction of temporal form
to the sphere of ownness, it is not possible to say that the sphere
of ownness, as fundamentally heterogeneous, is also subject to the
same spatial form. Either the spatial form is one and the same and
intersubjectivity is given, or homogeneous space is not constituted
and it is impossible to say, for example, that things are external to
the incarnate ego. Husserl returns frequently to this question. We
cite, among other examples, a very short text dated from March
86 FLESH AND BODY

or April 1934 that is entitled The problem of the constitution of

homogenous and objective space in primordiality and through
Einfhlung. It begins by asking: Is it even conceivable, setting
aside others, to constitute space, in the full sense, as a form of
corporeality, and to do so in such a way that my flesh has the
properties of corporeality, that is, the same properties as external
bodies?32 He then quickly distinguishes between the immobility
of the flesh and the body at rest, and he concludes: My corporeal
flesh [Leibkrper] in its primordiality (and has in consequence
an exclusive meaning) is so constituted that the claim that it has
locomotion, including location in space, has no meaning.33 This
response troubles him enough that he seeks in vain to resolve it by
announcing analyses that are not very easy to pursue.
 CHAPTER NINE

Flesh, Ego, Psyche

The world of ownness is the world of purely original experience,

that is, of incarnate experiences and data. It includes nothing that is
other in the strong sense, and this is the case for the following reason:
the other acquires its sense in relation to the ego. That is, there can
only be an alter ego in relation to my ego reduced to the sphere of
ownness. The other can only be constituted in my own world; every
other world already presupposes the constitution of the other:

It is clear that this sphere, the sphere of my transcendental egos

primordial ownness, must contain the motivational foundation
for the constitution of those transcendencies that are genuine,
that go beyond it, and originate first of all as others (other
psychophysical beings and other transcendental egos), the
transcendencies that, thus mediated, make possible the consti-
tution of an Objective world in the everyday sense: a world
of the non-Ego, of what is other than my Egos own. All
Objectivity in this sense, is related back constitutionally to the
first affair that is other than my Egos own, the other-than-
my-Egos-own in the form, someone else that is to say: the
non-Ego in the form, another Ego.1

The analysis of my own world is thus a necessary prerequisite.

My psychic life remains an intentional psychic life that experi-
ences the world. This means in particular that the putting out of
play of what is foreign to me does not prevent me from having
and being able to have the experience of something foreign
88 FLESH AND BODY

to me: my consciousness of the foreign is not foreign to my

consciousness. This experience rightfully belongs to it. Or rather,
all of the constitution of the world is inherent to my psyche
(including, as a result, the systems that constitute the foreign).
The reduction to the sphere of ownness does not undermine
the possibility, within my psyche, of having an experience of
the other or of constituting the other. However, this can occur
only in a psychological sense, unless it can be shown that my
psychic life is itself integrally constituted by my transcendental
ego and thereby belongs to it. The transcendental ego would
then constitute the world that is internal to it, a world where the
psychophysical ego would be able to have experiences of external
things, of the other, and with others.
We have already confronted the problem of the relation between
the transcendental ego and the psychological ego between
phenomenology and psychology the problem concerning the
mundanization and humanization of the absolute ego. And we left
unanswered Heideggers (and Ingardens) question about whether
the ego could be transcendental and/or psychological as well as
the question about the play between identity and difference that is
concealed under the form of this and/or. The elegance of Husserls
solution barely conceals (even from Husserls own eyes, to begin
with2) its obscurity. In constituting the world as the absolute
transcendental ego, I continually have a worldly apperception
of myself [eine verweltlichende Selbstapperzeption] or rather a
self-objectivation [Selbstobjecktivierung].3 This self-apperception is
always already accomplished, since the reduction begins precisely
by inhibiting it. In some sense, the proof of this apperception
resides in the possibility of putting it out of play. Through this
strange circularity, the reduction brings to light the difference
between the transcendental ego and the psychological ego, and in
so doing, goes on to confirm this apperception.
Lets try to analyse more finely this apperception though which
my consciousness takes on the sense of a mundane, psychological
consciousness. The mundane ego designates a consciousness
and a mental life that are localized in a corporeal flesh. One
can indeed ask, as Husserl does, Why do we not say: the body
reigns [waltet] over the soul, instead we always say: the soul
reigns over the body?4 Also, by qualifying the primordial human
ego as a concretely incarnated I or an egoic corporeal flesh,5
 FLESH, EGO, PSYCHE 89

the traditional definition of the human being as a union of soul

and body, of soul and flesh, is nonetheless presupposed. My
mundane experience of myself is an experience of an incarnated
and incorporated psychological ego. Through this, I have and
am able to have a mundane experience of the world. Inasmuch
as this experience does not resist the thought experiment of the
annihilation of the world,6 it appears that a consciousness without
flesh and without body is possible. It is also possible without a
soul, since the soul is correlative with corporeal flesh and founded
on it.7 Transcendental consciousness is thereby given as radically
disincarnated and decorporealized. The worldly apperception of
myself would signify incarnation and incorporation. We cannot,
however, stop there. Transcendental consciousness remains an
intentional consciousness related to the phenomenon of the world;
it remains a perceiving consciousness. But no perception is possible
without my flesh. It is thus necessary to admit that flesh belongs
to transcendental subjectivity. This is the only way, besides, to
give the expression incarnate givenness its full weight and its
enigmatic sense. Worldly apperception thus cannot be confused
with incarnation.
Once again, flesh is not something material or corporeal
that would be linked to conscious phenomena by a functional
dependence. Husserl indicates as much in a curious fictitious
example:

Let us imagine a consciousness (whether something psychi-

cally real belongs to it or not), my consciousness, say, which
would stand in relation to a locomotive, so that if the
locomotive were given water, this consciousness would have
the pleasant feeling that we call satiety; if the locomotive were
heated, it would have the feeling of warmth, etc. Obviously,
the locomotive would not, because of the make-up of such
relationships, become flesh for this consciousness. If, instead
of the thing that I at the time call my flesh, the locomotive
stood in my consciousness as the field of my pure Ego, then
I could not call it flesh also, for it simply would not be a
flesh.8

If it were mechanically united with the locomotive, my

consciousness would not be able to perceive. What sense would
90 FLESH AND BODY

the concept of adumbration, for instance, have under this

hypothesis? Could one speak of incarnate givenness? Under
no circumstances, but it remains true that my flesh is always
also constituted as a body and that corporeality is the layer of
the world that founds all others. Husserl writes, All objects in
the world are in essence embodied.9 Through incorporation,
flesh enworlds [mondanise] transcendental consciousness. This
also implies since incorporation refers to intersubjectivity
that neither the worldly apperception of oneself nor the
reduction can take place without the other. Besides, is not the
expression self-objectification a tacit confession of this? Why
does intersubjectivity increasingly appear to be primary in a
framework that was initially an egology? What is it that animates
phenomenology in this contradictory way? The impossibility
of constituting flesh as a body within the egological sphere of
ownness provides a first, but negative, indication. It requires us
to investigate the positive meaning of this impossible incorpo-
ration, that is, to interrogate the sense of flesh.
When Heidegger, in the aforementioned letter dated 22 October
1927, states that the pure psyche does not result from an ontology
of the human as a whole, he at the same time reproaches Husserl
for holding on to the traditional concept of the human being.
Heidegger thus holds psychology and somatology to be derivative
from the concrete totality of Dasein. But (1) since it is a question
of determining the place of the transcendental and of analysing
the mode of being of the being in which the world is constituted,
absolute constitutive subjectivity remains untouched by this line
of argumentation, unless it is identified straightaway with pure
psychological subjectivity. But that would amount to misun-
derstanding the sense of the reduction (a reproach that Husserl
continually directed against Heidegger) by interpreting the being of
transcendental subjectivity only within the horizon of subsistence
[Vorhandenheit]. For transcendental subjectivity is essentially
temporal, a temporality that Heidegger claims in Being and Time is
the first to break with the vulgar concept of time that accompanies
Vorhandenheit.10 And (2), the question is to know whether one
can reduce the soulflesh relation to the soulbody relation coming
from the Cartesian tradition and if one can identify flesh and body.
Nothing is less sure, even for Heidegger. One could object that flesh
is a living body, but the problem would not be advanced much.
 FLESH, EGO, PSYCHE 91

Phenomenologically, no analysis of life is possible without first

accounting for flesh, through which life is shown and given. One
could object further, and more pointedly, by recusing the question
itself. The fact that Husserl maintains a distinction between two
regions, the soul and flesh, changes nothing because flesh alone,
and not the soul, belongs de jure to the constituting transcendental
subjectivity, and consequently cannot be taken as regional. So, as
strange as it may seem, flesh, in the sense that it is in question here
(as non-corporeal), is not correlative to the psyche.11 In response to
the question posed by Heidegger in the letter above, if the absolute
ego is in one sense identical to and, in another sense, different from
the de facto ego, it is due to the dual phenomenal status of the flesh.
It is because the flesh is always also a body.
In virtue of psycho-phenomenological parallelism and worldly
apperception, everything that belongs to my transcendental egos
sphere of ownness belongs equally to my psychological ego.
Conversely and in the Fifth Meditation Husserl often employs
this approach, which pursues an analytic sequence in two opposite
directions starting from the soul, I can return to the transcen-
dental ego. Everything that belongs properly to the soul will be
rediscovered to belong to the ownness of transcendental subjec-
tivity. So when, as the transcendental ego, I reduce the phenomena
of the objective and intersubjective world to my ownness, and
add to it what is absolutely my own the absolute ego all of
this property, within the phenomenon of the reduced world,
becomes the property of my soul. This psychological property, the
mundanization of the transcendental ego, is a secondary transcen-
dental phenomenon precisely due to this mundanization. This
secondary transcendental phenomenon, however, is constituted by
the absolute ego, and, if the sphere of this experience is split into
a sphere of ownness and a sphere of the alien, then this division
must belong immediately to the sphere of the experience of the
constituting ego. The constitution of other transcendental egos is
thus possible.
 CHAPTER TEN

The Alteration of Ownness

The concept of ownness employed thus far has signified that

which is not-alien [non-tranger]. This negative characterization
depended on (and thus presupposed) the other and alterity in
general. It thus becomes necessary to elaborate a positive and
autonomous concept of the proper [proprit], in order to
accomplish the reduction to ownness [au propre] rigorously.
Again, it is by returning to the phenomenology of perception that
Husserl achieves or at least seeks to achieve this. What happens
in perception that might lead to a proper conception of ownness?
An object, first of all, is passively pre-given. This means that it
is given to intuition as the indeterminate object of empirical
intuition. We have already analysed this pre-givenness or simple
apprehension that founds active perception. This perception
enters into the horizons of the object and leads to a pure expli-
cation of it.
Lets describe this. Phenomenologically, every conceivable object
is a structural rule for the modes of givenness. This means that
single apprehensions are ordered in relation to each other as appre-
hensions of the same object. In perceiving an object, I link up on
the basis of an identity continually given and constituted the
determinations that belong to the object itself to those which are
anticipated on the horizon. So, perceiving is never merely expli-
cating what is there, as intentional analysis reveals. Yet, how can
we account for the fact that the apprehension of a new property is
not the apprehension of a different object but rather of a property
belonging to the same object? The structure of explication must
94 FLESH AND BODY

be one that constitutes in a double sense: the sense of the object

substrate and the sense of the qualities. In other words, the logical
categories of subject and quality must derive their origin from
explication. Husserl writes:

We observe, for example, a copper bowl which is before us:

our glance runs over it, remains fixed for a moment on the
roundness, and returns to it again, attracted by a spot which
stands out, a variation from the uniform roundness. Then our
glance jumps to a large shiny spot and goes on a bit farther,
following the shimmering glitter; then it is struck by the bosses;
the cluster is thrown into relief as a unity; we run over these
bosses one by one, etc.1

In so doing, the I is always oriented toward the object as

a whole and each particular orientation coincides partially
with the overall aim. It produces a synthesis of overlapping
and coincidence. But for such a synthesis to take place, it is
necessary for the I to keep the total apprehension in view and
maintain the whole as something more than what is actually
perceived, inasmuch the whole encroaches on this or that current
perception. The presence of the thing is not to be confused
with the present of giving perceptions. Having-in-grasp, as an
enduring activity, constitutes the substrate, on the contrary,
thanks to constantly new partial coincidences, it is an always
different having-in-grasp. In every step, what is gotten hold of
as singular is incorporated [enverleibt] by the coincidence in the
sense content of the substrate.2
Ownness is what is explicated. That is to say that it is what
is displayed by the intentional analysis of the actualities and
potentialities of the flow of lived experiences. The brief analysis
undertaken above focuses on the object and presupposes the
identity of the ego performing the apprehension of the whole and
of the ego absorbed by the progressive inspection of details. A
parallel analysis is possible that touches on the ego itself, and it
can provide us with the concept of ownness that is necessary for
the constitution of the other. By performing the reduction, I am
given to myself in a perceptual manner. It is part of the sense of this
auto-perception to make me appear as given prior to this actual,
intuitive and apodictic apprehension. The reduction opens me
 The Alteration of Ownness 95

onto the infinite horizon of my properties that intentional analysis

tirelessly explores. Husserl writes:

My own too is discovered by explication and gets its original

sense by virtue thereof. It becomes uncovered originaliter when
my experiencing-explicating regard is directed to myself, to my
perceptually and even apodictically given I-am and its abiding
identity with itself in the continuous unitary synthesis of original
self-experience. Whatever is included in this identical beings
own essence is characterized as its actual or possible explicatum,
as a respect in which I merely unfold my own identical being as
what it, as identical, is in particular; it in itself.3

In the case of the object, if each new explication is a new

perception, the same does not follow for the ego. The explication
of the ego is carried out largely in acts of consciousness that
are not perceptions of the own-essential moments it discovers.4
For, when reduced to the mode of givenness that is, to what
is phenomenologically determined the essential feature of
ownness can be described as such: what is ones own is what
is given to oneself in an apodictic perception. Rigorously, does
this not amount to defining the property of ownness temporally,
since an apodictic perception of oneself can only take place in the
incarnate living present? Shouldnt one exclude from the sphere
of ownness both the past and the future of transcendental subjec-
tivity, then? Doesnt the immanent temporality of the ego the
form in which lived experiences are ordered contradict the very
project of a reduction to the sphere of ownness? If that were the
case, then what relations would there be between temporality
and alterity? Wouldnt one have to recognize the relation to the
other in temporality? We will return to these themes, which do
not belong solely to the Husserlian horizon.
How does Husserl fend off the objection that threatens the
establishment of philosophy as a rigorous science by restricting
considerably the scope of apodicticity? He responds with a line
of argumentation that privileges original givenness over apodictic
givenness. In this sense, he is faithful to the apodictic naivet
that is deliberately adopted by the Cartesian Meditations, whose
objective is to provide a pure description of experience rather
than a critique of it. In essence, the past is only given in memory.
96 FLESH AND BODY

Memory is the most original mode of access to the past. Memory

is, in fact, always a possibility for me, an I can derived from the
proper essence of my ego. In other words, the evidence of the I was
or of the I will be participates in the apodictic evidence of the I
am: memory and expectation are lived experiences with a complex
temporal structure that is rooted in the living present. For this
reason, all explication participates in apodicticity, according to a
formal law (which is itself apodictic): so much appearing [Schein],
so much being which is only covered up and falsified thereby,5
on the condition of being as original as possible, that is to say, of
bringing to light what is experienced in the type of self-givenness
appropriate to it.
The fact remains that this positive characterization of ownness
on the basis of intentional analysis precludes, from the outset, a
question like the following one: does intentionality not receive its
innermost and deepest sense from the intersubjective relation? This
is the question that we just raised with regard to time. The reasons
that have paved the way for this rapprochement and this question
are altogether decisive. Lets pursue them further.
If the sphere of ownness is the sphere of the flux of actual and
potential lived experiences, then it also contains intentional lived
experiences, which intend and constitute objective unities, that
is, lived experiences with a noetic-noematic structure. The noema
is inseparable from the noesis, and so the intentional object also
belongs to the sphere of ownness. Husserl contends: not only
the constitutive perceiving but also the perceived existent belongs
to my concrete very-ownness6 on the condition that they are
concretely connected there and that the intentional explication of
the one immediately implies the other. This has to do, first of all,
with the pure sensible data that are constituted properly within me
as immanent temporalities, and then with my habitus, and last
but not least with transcendent objects, for example the objects
of external sensibility, as Husserl says. These objects must be
constituted through my own sensibility, and as such, they are
always given through the mediation of flesh. What indeed would
be the sense of an external sensibility if flesh did not receive any
assignable limits in the sphere of ownness? What indeed would be
the sense of ones own sensibility if sensibility always implies the
relation to an exteriority? By extending the sphere of ownness to
transcendent objects, does Husserl not open it up to alterity?
 The Alteration of Ownness 97

The intentional ego is not conceivable without the non-ego.

Despite its Fichtean resonances, this can be found in Husserl. In
a text edited sometime between 1925 and 1928, on the concept
of originality or rather primordiality, Husserl splits the original
experience of oneself into that which is specifically egoic and
the hyle that is foreign to the ego [der ichfremden Hyle]: The I
and consciousness are not thinkable without unity, without a
subjective substrate, without a hyle .7 Husserl continues: the
concrete I continually has in its life as consciousness life a kernel
of hyle, of a non-I but which essentially belongs to the I. No I is
possible without a domain of pre-givenness, a constituted domain
of unity that is constituted as the not-I.8 For, and this is perhaps the
most important statement in the Cartesian Meditations, accord-
ingly the intrinsically first other (the first non-Ego) is the other
Ego.9 How, then, are we not led to define the being of the ego and
of intentionality by the relation to the alter ego? And, to the extent
that the hyle that is foreign to the ego is temporal, should not the
analysis of temporality take place within the same horizon? Does
not thinking the ego and time on the basis of the other take us to
the limits of phenomenology, to the point of turning against its
own principles? Is there a phenomenal given capable of explaining
this? What is there in the intentional analysis of the other that leads
phenomenology to go beyond itself? All of these questions show
that it would be a mistake to regard the problem of the other solely
as a regional problem.
The broadening of the sphere of ownness to transcendent
objects can be considered the final preparatory stage on the way
to an explication of intersubjectivity. It is the last, but not the least,
because by bringing to light an immanent transcendence that
characterizes intramonadic objects, it will shift the balance of the
relation between immanence and transcendence. It was actually
long before the Cartesian Meditations that Husserl came across this
concept. In a course from the winter semester of 191011 Basic
Problems of Phenomenology Husserl described how phenom-
enology necessarily exceeds the domain of what is absolutely given.
This opened the path for a critique of pure experience and a deline-
ation of the field of apodicticity.10 Phenomenological perception
is temporal and only the present now is given absolutely; this
now is subjected to a law of retentional modification. The past
transcends the present now. Is it thereby necessary to reduce this
98 FLESH AND BODY

transcendence? If so, the reduction would be absolutely radical, but

phenomenology would vanish for lack of a theme: Nevertheless, we
are not deterred!11 When we doubt a memory, we place in doubt
the actuality of the past to which we are returned. This presup-
poses that we are absolutely given what is subject to doubt. In
other words, the givenness of the past is also an absolute givenness.
Husserl writes: In every case, doubt is the structural givenness of
the intention, which is put in doubt. Thus, this perception, this
lasting empirical phenomenon of givenness is given, and absolutely
given, in its own individuality and duration.12 It is thus necessary
to admit a transcendence within phenomenological immanence,
for it is not only the retention as such that is received phenomeno-
logically, but also that which is retained: Each now of a retention
is a retention of a not-now.13 This transcendence in immanence is
irreducible; any attempt to reduce it at the same time presupposes
it. If I want to exclude the not-now from the field of phenomenal
givenness, then I can only do so by knowing what the now is and
by knowing that it is the fluid limit between two not-nows: the past
and the future. This knowledge, in turn, implies that the not-now
is given to me. And how could it be given to me if retention as
retention of were put out of play? How could I reach the field of
phenomenal givenness if transcendence in immanence fell under
the reduction?
What does Husserl do by going back to this concept in order
to characterize the objects that are reduced to ownness? Just as he
included a not-now in a now broadened to absolute givenness, so
he includes a not-me in a monadic ego. This is both an intentional
inclusion as well as a real inclusion, since placing the object or the
past on the side of the non-me as what is foreign to the ego is
to place them on the side of the hyle. That is, it establishes them
as the non-intentional component of the act, as its real component
(at least on the level of constituted temporality).14 Here inclusion
is both intentional and real. Without inclusion, transcendence
in immanence (which also characterizes, to recall, the self in its
relation to the lived experiences in the temporal flow) would not
be conceivable. Ultimately, phenomenology as a science would not
be possible, since this transcendence gives it a field of objects.
But, at the same time, the entire system of relations between
immanence and transcendence indeed, intentionality itself is
being sought.
 The Alteration of Ownness 99

Lets show this. In the same course in 191011, Husserl insists

on the plurivocity of the concepts of immanence and transcendence
and attempts to determine their phenomenological sense. First
of all, he characterizes the object of knowledge as transcendent,
inasmuch as it is not present in the act of knowing. This applies to
phenomenological seeing, since that which is seen is not in the act
of seeing. Husserl writes, But in in this respect, one does not speak
of transcendence because then the contrast with immanence has no
meaning.15 This is not the case, if one contrasts being present in
the flesh for consciousness with what is purely and simply intended
(for example, memory as such and that which is remembered in
it). The criterion of this first difference is incarnate presence. One
might come to wonder if the incarnate present does not reproduce
the difference between real immanence and intentional immanence.
What, then would transcendence be? Can one distinguish between
intentional immanence and intentional transcendence?
Transcendence and immanence can be understood in another
sense. It has to do with a division of individual objects, depending
on whether they are given in an absolute self-presence or through
appearances and presentations. If the immanence of the former is
self-evident, then the transcendence of the latter is not immediately
evident. Husserl affirms that, in this case, every phenomenological
consciousness refers to immanence.16 In effect, consciousness
intends the adumbration and not what natural consciousness posits
as the thing. The transcendent, as we have already seen, is thus
the object offered in a multiplicity of harmonized adumbrations.
Later, Husserl will tie this notion of transcendence back to a form
of immanence: Transcendence of intuitive things, of that which is
given to me in perception in the flesh, is, we can now say, only
a form of immanence, an immanence in a good sense.17 Once
more, we now have two types of immanence. There is nonetheless
a difference between these two pairs of concepts: the second is
founded on the first. To distinguish immanence from transcendence
on the basis of a distinction between objects is to presuppose the
possibility of these objects themselves. Without the transcendence
in immanence that belongs to retentions, no object at all could be
given. The concepts used here are those of the first pair. It is too
early to comprehend why and how the concept of transcendence in
immanence comes to dismantle all of the conceptuality from which
it originates. Here we can offer one indication of this, however: the
100 FLESH AND BODY

identification of intentional inclusion with real inclusion presup-

poses a unity of the hyle and the morph prior to their separation.
Consequently, it points back to the original role of constitutive
temporality.
The primordial world belonging to the egos sphere of ownness
does not have the sense of an objective and intersubjective world.
The task is thus to understand how, at the founded higher level,
the sense-bestowal pertaining to transcendency proper, to consti-
tutionally secondary Objective transcendency, comes about and
does so as an experience.18 Of course, it is not a question here of
temporal genesis but of a purely static analysis of experience. This
experience of the objective world always occurs and always has the
sense of an experience of something that is other than me and that
totally transcends my own being. The analysis of the constitution
of the other must be able to answer the question of the origin of
experience in general. It is, in the most basic sense, a transcendental
analysis.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Incarnation of
Another Body

Husserl begins by indicating, in a programmatic way, the approach

that must be taken in order to arrive at an intentional elucidation
of the other and of the objective world. This analysis will be strat-
ified, and the preceding analyses have already allowed for an initial
separation of the constitutive levels of the sense of the objective
world. Husserl states,

As the first of these, there is to be distinguished the constitu-

tional level pertaining to the other ego or to any other egos
whatever that is: to egos excluded from my own concrete being
(from me as the primordial ego). In connexion with that and,
indeed, motivated by it, there occurs a universal superaddition
of sense to my primordial world, whereby the latter becomes the
appearance of a determinate Objective world, as the identical
world for everyone, myself included.1

From this distinction of different layers of meaning, Husserl

draws a consequence that we have already noted: Accordingly,
the intrinsically first other (the first non-Ego) is the other
Ego.2 From this is derived the constitution of an objective world
by a monadic community that is intentionally harmonious.
The possibility of an experience of the other has been established
but what would this experience be, if it were not an experience
of alterity? Is alterity not the most profound sense of experience? Is
102 FLESH AND BODY

experience not essentially a movement toward alterity? The fact that

the ego can constitute other egos signifies that my own modes of
consciousness are not all modes of self-consciousness or that there
are constitutive intentionalities that exceed the sphere of ownness.
The first task will thus be to describe the intentionality specific
to the experience of the other. This description does not happen
without what Husserl acknowledges to be considerable difficulties.
Phenomenologically, experience is an original consciousness
that gives the object immediately, in its ipseity, in the flesh. When I
have an experience of the other, the other is there incarnate, before
me. But this incarnation does not signify that the other is given to
me in itself. The incarnate presence of the other, as first descrip-
tively given, does not have the same sense as it does for things: a
direct and immediate access to the being of what is given. If the
being of the other the others lived experience and the others
own essence were given to me immediately, then the other would
be given to me in the same way as I am given to myself. The other
would be nothing more than a moment of my own essence and
inseparable from me. The givenness of the other, in its essence,
cannot be immediate. There is no original intuition of the other.
This negative definition of the others being contradicts phenom-
enological intuitionism. So, how can the other, in its sense, refuse
to become the object of an original giving intuition but nonetheless
be described and analysed in a phenomenology for which original
intuition is the ultimate basis and has the status of a principle of
principles? Under these conditions, is there even any sense in trying
to provide an intentional analysis of the other?
To renounce this would be to renounce phenomenology itself,
since the constitution of the alter ego occupies an important place
within the problem of constitution, namely, the constitution of
objectivity. If that were not necessary, it would only be in virtue of
a phenomenological reason. To say that the other, by virtue of its
very sense, cannot be given in an original intuition, it is necessary
to have accessed its sense somehow. The other is a phenomeno-
logically given sense, but, if all immediacy is excluded, then how is
it given intentionally? Husserl addresses this:

A certain mediacy of intentionality must be present here, going

out from the substratum, primordial world, (which in any
case is the incessantly underlying basis) and making present to
 The Incarnation of Another Body 103

consciousness a there too, which nevertheless is not itself there

and can never become an itself-there. We have here, accord-
ingly, a kind of making co-present, a kind of appresentation.3

How can this possibility be shown? Does appresentation only

characterize the phenomenon of the alter ego? No, appresentation
is already at work in the perception of the transcendent thing. In
1909, in one of the older manuscripts dealing with the question
of intersubjectivity, Husserl remarks: It is from the perception
of the body that we know the difference between impres-
sional presentation and compresentation (perception of properly
original and perception non-properly original: co-perception).4
The body that I perceive is not given to me in full originality; I
just originally see a face of it. It alone is impressionally present.
Nevertheless, it is not simply a fragment on the surface of the
body that is perceived but the body itself: What does this mean?
It means that the body gives itself (how I used to express myself)
as present in incarnate presence, it stands in the original before
my eyes, not as merely remembered, merely re-presented.5 It thus
becomes necessary to differentiate between two types of original
givenness: primary originality (appearing) and secondary origi-
nality (non-appearing, co-present, appresent).6
This distinction, however, does not destroy the original at
its root. Everything that is co-present can, in principle, become
present; the hidden side can become manifest. But, if the givenness
of the thing is only an Idea in the Kantian sense, does this not
signify that total presence is only a purely juridical possibility? In
the end, is this not to admit that nothing perceived is adequately
perceived and that nothing presented is purely present? Beside the
fact that the sense of such statements presupposes what they just
called into question in this case, the possibility of presence is
the possibility of sense there is a phenomenal right to speak in
this way. Flesh is the condition for the possibility of things, and
considered solely within the horizon of egology, flesh is always
incompletely constituted. And so, this is why it is always appre-
sented with what it contributes to presentation, and this is why
presentation and perception are always altered.7
This argument, however, does not apply to the other, since
appresentation will never be convertible into an originally giving
presentation. Husserl asks, How can appresentation of another
104 FLESH AND BODY

original sphere, and thereby the sense someone else be motivated

in my original sphere and, in fact, motivated as experience as the
word appresentation (making intended as co-present) already
indicates?8 From the outset, the problem is temporal and so we will
have to explain the crossing (in a sense that is also genetic) between
temporality and alterity.9 An appresentation is a lived experienced
belonging to the class of re-presentations [Vergegenwrtigung].
Here it is a matter of knowing how an appresentation can play the
role of presentation [Gegenwrtigung], which is an act that belongs
essentially to a radically different (if not opposed) class of lived
experiences. An appresentation co-presents, which is to say that
it refers to a presentation. To what presentation does the appre-
sentation of the other refer? And how so? More precisely: to what
presentation of the world does the appresentation of the other refer,
assuming that we can speak of referring? In fact, this cannot be the
case, because it would be to identify the consciousness of the other
with the consciousness of a sign. After all, it is indeed the other that
I perceive and not a re-presentation of the other. One of the diffi-
culties of the analysis of the consciousness of the other stems from
the fact that it cannot be confused with the type of consciousness
that gives things to me, nor with the consciousness of signs or
images. It is neither purely presented nor purely re-presented.
Does it make possible the principal opposition that is consti-
tutive of temporality itself? We will return to this issue, but first we
must distinguish more finely the consciousness of the other from
the consciousness of an image. In the consciousness of an image,
an object appears to me in the flesh that supports an analogical
relation to the subject of the image. The consciousness of an
image implies a basis. The immanent analysis of the consciousness
of an image shows that a consciousness that is present to itself
provides an object for another consciousness. If one were to
identify the consciousness of the other with the consciousness
of the image, it would be necessary to admit that my own lived
experiences function as the bases and as analoga for those of the
other. For example, I experience anger by perceiving it in the other.
Beyond the fact that this contradicts every descriptive given, how
then will I be able to distinguish myself from the other?10
Lets restate the question. To what presentation of the world is
the appresentation of the other linked, and how, to adopt Husserls
terminology, are they interconnected [entrelace]? The other is the
 The Incarnation of Another Body 105

alter ego, and the term ego here refers to myself. In what sense
and in what way? First of all, as an ego constituted within its own
world, as a psychophysical unity, as an ego ruling over its own
flesh and through it ruling over its own primordial world, and
secondly, as an absolute constituting ego. The appresentation of
the other must therefore be interconnected first with a presentation
of myself. But also, and secondly, it must be interconnected with a
presentation of the others body as a bodily ownness like any other
one. We quote Husserl at length here on this very point:

Let us assume that another man enters our perceptual sphere.

Primordially reduced, that signifies: In the perceptual sphere
pertaining to my primordial Nature, a body is presented, which,
as primordial, is of course only a determining part of myself: an
immanent transcendency. Since, in this Nature and this world,
my flesh is the only body that is or can be constituted originally
as an flesh (a functioning organ), the body over there, which
is nevertheless apprehended as an flesh, must have derived this
sense by an apperceptive transfer from my flesh, and done so in
a manner that excludes an actually direct, and hence primordial,
showing of the predicates belonging to an flesh specifically [der
Prdikate der spezifischen Leiblichkeit], a showing of them in
perception proper. It is clear from the very beginning that only
a similarity [Ahnlichkeit] connecting, within my primordial
sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the
motivational basis for the analogizing apprehension of that
body as another flesh.11

All the difficulties are concentrated in this excerpt. To begin, lets

enumerate them. (1) To bring another human being into my field
of perception is to admit that the other can also not be there.
Such a scenario is possible so long as I consider only the actual
and present field, but it is no longer possible once I take into
account its horizons. The field of experience, in all of its horizons,
necessarily implies the other. Husserl repeatedly emphasizes that
nothing, in fact, can precede the experience of the other, and he
states:

A priori, my ego, given to me apodictically the only thing

I can posit in absolute apodicticity as existing can be a
106 FLESH AND BODY

world-experiencing ego only by being in communion with

others like himself: a member of a community of monads, which
is given orientedly, starting from himself. In that the Objective
world of experience shows itself consistently, other monads
show themselves consistently to be existent.12

Isnt this to recognize, considering the intentional structure of

the ego, that the ego is not possible without an alter ego and
that the alter ego is the condition for the possibility of an ego
that is intentionally connected to the world? As a result, doesnt
the restriction of the field of perception to the field of what is
actual and present reduce perception to nothing? Appresentation
(which includes retention and protention, that is, the whole of
temporality)13 is already at work in the perception of trans-
cendent things. Moreover, if the sphere of ownness is the sphere
as egological temporality, to reduce the field of perception to the
actual present is to completely abandon the positive definition of
ownness that was previously outlined. Afterwards, what sense
can the rest of the analysis have? (2) In the primordial sphere,
the other appears as a body. Or rather, since the sense of the
other is not yet constituted, a body appears which, like all other
bodies, is a component of myself, a transcendence in immanence.
But Husserl should not have the right to say that in the world
and in nature, where, by definition, every egoic living essence is
excluded, the body over there is grasped as flesh; if it can be,
it is only after the other is given and not beforehand. (3) The
over there [dort] can have a sense only in relation to a here
and only in a homogeneous space. The constitution of this space
requires the presence of the other, if only because it involves the
incorporation of my flesh. We have shown that this cannot take
place within the egological sphere of ownness. (4) To contrast a
here with an over there can only occur in simultaneity, which
is to say in the framework of a temporality that is common to
the here and the over there, in other words, an objective and
intersubjective temporality. (5) If the body over there acquires
the sense of flesh through an apperceptive transfer issuing from
my ownness, then this is because it resembles my body. But,
and not taking account of the problem of incorporation, what
can be the sense of this resemblance between two bodies, if
by body one means a res extensa? At this level, all bodies are
 The Incarnation of Another Body 107

alike and nothing can differentiate them qualitatively. All these

difficulties can be reduced to this question: does not the consti-
tution of the alter ego presuppose itself? These difficulties point
to the question of incorporation, to the flesh/body relation [des
rapports chair/corps].
So, we shall attempt to trace their effects, as well as the efforts
that Husserl made to master them, by asking if it is not possible to
answer them on the basis of flesh itself. At the same time, we will
also try to show which is the primary intention of this work the
need and the importance of an analytic of incarnation.
Husserls description sought to show what presentation of
myself is interconnected with the appresentation of the other and
how this takes place. We know, from this point onward, that it is
the presentation of my flesh. It then becomes a matter of under-
standing how, and why, a body over there, which is presented as
an immanent transcendence, can acquire the sense of flesh, and
through this sense appresent another ego whose transcendence is
of a higher order. Since all sense originates in my own intentional
life, it is necessary to describe the operation of consciousness
whereby the body over there acquires this sense, and it is also
necessary to describe its modes of confirmation, given that they
do not appear directly or immediately. Husserl calls this operation
an apperceptive transfer or analogical apprehension and the
analysis of this operation will merge with the consciousness of the
other.
Recall that analogy and similitude were already at work in
passive synthesis, that is, in the pre-constitution of objects.14
Husserl begins by going back to this in order to establish the
difference between two types of apperception: those which belong
to the primordial sphere of ownness and those, in contrast, that
appear with the sense of the alter ego. If this division were not
acceptable, this would signify, once more, the impossibility of a
reduction to the sphere of ownness or that the sphere of ownness is
always open to alterity [le propre est toujours impropre]. It would
then be necessary to determine which phenomena impose this state
of affairs. Of course, they could no longer function as phenomena
in the phenomenological sense: The phenomena that are in a
context of closed foreign subjectivity that are to be additionally
apprehended as foreign flesh, are not phenomena in the sense of
phenomenology.15
108 FLESH AND BODY

Every perception of an object in the everyday world refers

intentionally to an archi-foundation, to a first institution of sense
that is not empirical but refers to a historicity of sense.16 In the
familiar world, objects are recognized as much as perceived, if not
individually at least typologically. And how can we explain this
descriptive given, if not by admitting that each everyday experience
involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective
sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the
object as having a similar sense?17 In a certain manner, this
analogizing transfer constitutes the possession of a habitus. The
original objective sense is evoked and reactivated by that which,
in a new objective sense, coincides with it, at least partially. The
recalling of a sense that was previously constituted applies to the
anticipation of a new objective sense. The analogical transfer thus
presupposes the passive syntheses of association as the purely
immanent connection of this recalls that, one calls attention to
the other.18
We can now describe more carefully analogy and similitude, as
noematic correlates of a comparing consciousness. I compare two
objects: this means that, in grasping the first object and passing on
to the second one, what is similar in the second object to the first
is united to it by an overlapping of objective sense. As a result, it
brings forth their similitude. This consciousness of similitude is
not to be confused with a consciousness of unity in the sense of a
unified apprehension of a multiplicity of objects (such an appre-
hension would presuppose a keeping-hold and not an overlapping
of objective sense). Nor should it be confused, obviously, with the
reciprocal overlapping of various moments of the sense of the same
object that are apprehended as being inherent to it. Yet, similitude
is not the same as analogy. How, then, do we distinguish them? We
do so by recourse to the presence or absence of what Husserl calls a
gap [Abstand]. Two objects are similar when their objective sense
overlaps without any gap between them, and they are analogous
when one presents a gap in relation to the other one.19 But
what motivates the movement of consciousness through which I
compare the two objects? Only a sensible analogy or similitude that
passively affects the ego can orient it toward an act of comparison.
And we are thus led back to the passive syntheses of sensible data
as the basis of all analogy and similitude in general. As we have
already seen, with regard to content the most general syntheses of
 The Incarnation of Another Body 109

sensuous data raised to prominence within a field, data which at

any given time are united in the living present of a consciousness,
are those in conformity with affinity (homogeneity) and strangeness
(heterogeneity).20 Could one speak about strangeness [Fremdheit]
if the other or alterity in general were not presupposed? Would
there be a passive synthesis of sense data without alterity?21 And, to
return to the Cartesian Meditations, is it not contradictory to claim
that the concept of apperception belongs to the sphere of ownness?
It can be taken in this way once it has been established that it is
not only the passive synthesis of sense data but also their form
temporality that evokes alterity. We will not engage that topic
immediately. What does form really mean with regard to time?
Form designates here the character which necessarily precedes
all others in the possibility of an intuitive unity.22 Is this not to say
that the presupposition of all unification the archi-unification that
in fact precedes all possible unity is the unification of the present
and non-present, of the now and the not-now as a past or future
now? And, is it not this unity that is in question in the intentional
analysis of the other that is given in the interconnection of presen-
tation and re-presentation? We shall pursue these questions all the
way to their end.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

Pairing and Resemblance

If we attempt to indicate the peculiar nature of that analogizing

apprehension whereby a body within my primordial sphere,
being similar to my own animate body, becomes apprehended
as likewise flesh, we encounter: first, the circumstance that
here the primally institutive original is always livingly present,
and the primal instituting itself is therefore always going on
in a livingly effective manner; secondly, the peculiarity we
already know to be necessary, namely that what is appresented
by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never attain actual
presence, never become an object of perception proper. Closely
connected with the first peculiarity is the circumstance that ego
and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original
pairing.1

The constitution of the other is the centrepiece of the constitution

of the objective world, which is given as a world that is always
there and constantly present. So, in analysing the intentional
constitution of the alter ego, one also needs to be able to determine
the origin of this permanence. Husserl locates this in the constancy
of the living present of my own flesh. In order for the flesh to fulfil
its assigned role, then, several presuppositions must be admitted
here. (1) If my flesh must be given in the constancy of a living
present, then it is necessary that it is fully there and that none
of it is appresented or co-presented. For, what is constantly and
permanently as both living and present is my body-flesh, not simply
my flesh. The presentation of a body does not ever occur without
112 FLESH AND BODY

an appresentation. Certainly, this type of appresentation can be

converted, in principle, into a presentation, but the situation of the
bodyflesh is an exception in this regard. It is not possible for me to
modify my position in relation to my body, for example, by trying
to see originally what I have anticipated. Even if flesh were only
understood as a basis for the various Empfindnisse, nothing about
it would be changed, since it is always and essentially incompletely
constituted. (2) In order for my bodyflesh to play its assigned role,
it is necessary to suppose that it can neither be born nor die. As a
general and explicit rule, Husserl always considered death to be a
mundane accident. He devotes very few pages to the issue because,
understood in this way, death does not affect the possibility of the
constitution of the world. But, if that is the case, it certainly also
has some relation to the absence of a thematization of flesh. In
effect, after our interpretation insists on the flesh, it is no longer
possible to take what Husserl calls the problems of generativity as
something secondary,2 or to leave the question of finitude outside
the domain of phenomenology. In a note written between 1915
and 1917, Husserl defines death as the decay [Zerfall] of flesh, that
is, the dissolution of the type of appearing of the thingly material.3
That said, Husserl recognizes that death belongs to the sense of
flesh, but at the same time he also recognizes that the egological
constitution of the world is affected by contingency, since flesh is
the zero-object [Nullobjekt], the condition for the possibility of
all other objects.4 A fortiori, the disappearance of flesh annuls the
appearing of an intersubjective world, because flesh performs the
constitution of that world. If no constitution in the world or of
the world is conceivable without flesh, doesnt this also apply to
the self-constitution of the intentional ego that contains the world
as a noematic correlate within itself? And doesnt it also apply to
the ultimate constitution of temporality?5 (3) The objective world
is a common world where each thing is the same for all; it has
the sense of a normal world. It is thus necessary for my flesh
from which comes the apperceptive transfer that constitutes the
other to be a normal flesh. If the determination of a transcen-
dental intersubjective normality already gives rise to formidable
problems (problems Husserl engaged increasingly as he showed the
historicity of intentional genesis), those that derive from an intra-
egological norm may well be insoluble. For it is difficult to grant
a sense to the very idea of an egological normality. Normality is
 Pairing and Resemblance 113

a certain ideal possibility that thinks of two normal individuals

who exchange or can exchange their place and who are in a bodily
ideal-normal state. They each discover the same appearances in
his consciousness that were previously in the consciousness of the
other.6 This awkward definition, first, makes reference to intersub-
jectivity and then appeals to a bodily normality of the individual
that is prior to any relation to the other. And, in the end, the
latter is understood in relation to objectivity (my normal vision
of a thing is the one I have when I take the place of the other in
an objective space that presupposes the other and I see the same
thing as the other). What can egological bodily normality mean?
How can it explain anomalies in solipsistic experiences? Under
what conditions is it possible? Husserl has posed these questions
and answered that normal experience is a harmonious experience
of the same world, while an anomaly is a discordant experience.7
If the harmony in question is one that prevails over my various
kinaesthetic systems I see what I touch and it is the same thing
then the established norm is the norm of my flesh. This does not
imply that my flesh itself is normal. With regard to the kinaesthetic
system as a whole, this harmony can only signify a harmonizing
with itself. That is to say that it is a constancy in the functioning
of my flesh. In this case, the result is the same. I never achieve a
norm, and moreover, birth and death become unthinkable. When
the objective world is normalized, it is not possible to define the
normality of flesh within the sphere of ownness. My flesh becomes
the norm.8 To posit my flesh as the norm for all other fleshes, is this
not, once again, to expose the phenomenology of intersubjectivity
to contingency? Do we not rediscover, by another path, this archi-
facticity that the paradoxes of the reduction to the eidos ego forced
us to admit? Can we understand this on the basis of the flesh?
The other acquires its sense from an apperceptive transfer
coming from myself; a bodily ownness (later, that of the other,
says Husserl in a strange parenthesis that intensifies the difficulty,
for how can I know that the body over there can become the
body of an other?9) resembles my own body, and for this reason,
acquires the sense of flesh that belongs only to me. For the moment,
lets keep only the following point from the above analysis: that the
ego and the alter ego are always given in an original pairing.
First of all, let us elucidate the essential nature of any pairing.10
This is an original form of passive and associative synthesis by
114 FLESH AND BODY

which two distinct data are offered as a unity within the same
consciousness. This is the basis of a unity of resemblance and
constitutes them as a couple or pair. When two analogous bodies
are perceived simultaneously in the same space, consciousness
is conscious of a type of unity in which one is not without
the other, the similar refers to similar, or, to borrow a word
frequently employed by Husserl in this context, the one awakens
(weckt) the other. When I am affected by the one, this reinforces
an affection by the other and vice versa. In other words, this mode
of consciousness has an essential tendency of passing from the one
to the other, an intentional overreaching [Ubergriefen], coming
about genetically (and by essential necessity) as soon as the data
that undergo pairing have become prominent and simultaneously
intended.11 The members of the couple exchange their sense, the
one is apprehended in conformity with the sense of the other.
Two conditions are required for this pairing to take place: (1) the
preliminary constitution of the objective sense of each member of
the couple; (2) the purely egological constitution of temporality
through associative and passive syntheses (within which a genesis
is possible); for if, in passing from one objective sense to the other,
I could not maintain a retentional hold on the first one, then no
coincidence of sense (not even a partial one) could appear to me.
In the case of the pairing association of the ego and the alter
ego, can these conditions be fulfilled? To answer this question, it
is necessary to commence by highlighting the constituting apper-
ception of the other. The description of it is perhaps not always as
accurate as it should be. It begins as follows: pairing first comes
about when the Other enters my field of perception.12 If the other
can enter into my perceptual field, then it is not a permanent and
constitutive structure. How would I be able to know that it is the
other that appears to me and not just any body whatsoever, unless
I were to abandon the regime of the transcendental reduction and
the reduction to the sphere of ownness in order to return to the
natural attitude where the other is already constituted? And if the
description is carried out in a more rigorous way, it presupposes
nevertheless that the flesh was able to be incorporated (to possess
the sense of body) within the sphere of ownness where my live
body (Leibkrper) is always there and sensuously prominent; but,
in addition to that and likewise with primordial originariness, it is
equipped with the specific sense of an flesh.13
 Pairing and Resemblance 115

When a body that resembles my own body is presented in my

primordial sphere of ownness, it should at the same time acquire
the sense of flesh by way of transfer, that is to say, it is a second
flesh within my sphere of ownness. No alterity could thus be
constituted, without considering the second property of the analo-
gizing experience of the other flesh: that which is appresented can
never, in principle, be presented. (For this argument to be wholly
valid, it must presuppose that my own flesh, in contrast with the
others flesh, can be intuitively and completely given to me, and
thus fully constituted. That is not the case, however.)
To be sure, in the series of intentional analyses of the other,
there is no point on which Husserl insists more than the following
one: the givenness of the other is irreducibly mediated; it cannot
be offered in a direct intuition; it cannot present itself. The
phenomenon of the other is a non-phenomenon. This is why the
Fifth Meditation leads to the limits of phenomenology, and this
is also the reason why we have undertaken an interpretation of
it. Nevertheless, this non-phenomenality that characterizes the
phenomenon of the alter ego appears and has its own style of
confirmation. But confirmation generally means evidence and
intuitive fulfilment. An intention is confirmed when its aim is
given in an incarnate intuition. Such givenness is the basis of a
rational positing and a value of being. So, in order to respect the
non-phenomenality of the other, the transfer of sense must be done
in such a way that the transferred sense the sense of the flesh
and of the ego acquires a value of existence without becoming
the object of an original giving intuition positing and motivating
this value of being. In other words, it is a question of knowing
how the analogizing apperception of the other is possible. And
why does it not get crossed out or annulled by the non-intuition
that defines it?
There is no phenomenological difficulty here that a careful
description cannot, in principle, resolve, or at least elucidate. So,
Husserl states,

let us look at the intentional situation more closely. The appre-

sentation which gives that component of the Other which is not
accessible originaliter is combined with an original presentation
(of his body as part of the Nature given as included in my
ownness). In this combination, moreover, the Others animate
116 FLESH AND BODY

body and his governing Ego are given in the manner that charac-
terizes a unitary transcending experience.14

This is a strange description, for how can the body of the other
his body be a part of my sphere of ownness? How can the
body that is presented to me be a bodyflesh, since it is through
apperception that it must acquire the sense of flesh? Everything
happens here as if respect for alterity were incompatible with
respect for the closure of egology, which was the required point
of departure for a transcendental phenomenology.
Provisionally, lets accept what Husserl says for the sole purpose
of determining the mode of confirmation of analogical apperception.
The presented body is given in a series of concordant adumbrations
and is confirmed by them. In virtue of the resemblance that pairs it
with my flesh, it thus receives its sense as flesh and thus appresents
an egoic life, another I. The harmony of presentations establishes,
or indicates, a harmony of appresentations. The experience of the
other is the experience of an indication; what gets confirmed here
is an index, but not what it indicates. The experience of the other
obtains the status of an experience through interpretation.15 It thus
comes under the broadest definition of indication furnished by the
first Logical Investigation:

that certain objects or states of affairs of whose reality someone

has actual knowledge indicate to him the reality of certain other
objects or states of affairs, in the sense that his belief in the
reality of the one is experienced (though not at all evidently) as
motivating belief or surmise in the reality of the other.16

In phenomenology, it is absolutely exceptional that an experience

can interpret its object. One might be tempted (and here we
announce the direction in which we are progressively heading)
to turn the exception into the basis of the rule and thus to
raise the question of whether the relation to the alter ego and
more precisely, the relation of one flesh to another (which is the
first constitutive layer of intersubjectivity) is what animates
and mobilizes Husserls entire enterprise, but at the same time
escapes it. How, then, could we think a carnal relation? The
scope of this question extends beyond phenomenology, if one
grants that phenomenology is prior to all philosophy. If what sets
 Pairing and Resemblance 117

phenomenology into motion remains outside of its grasp, then

this applies a fortiori to philosophy understood as metaphysics.
Under such conditions, if this thought attempts to step outside
of philosophy and metaphysics, then why did it not pursue an
analysis of flesh? Doesnt thought receive its vocation from the
carnal relation?17 All of these questions belong to the field of an
analytic of incarnation.
The apperception of the other finds its confirmation in a presen-
tation that functions as an indication of something that cannot be
presented [un imprsentable]. Husserl asserts: The character of
the existent other has its basis in this kind of verifiable accessi-
bility of what is not originally accessible.18 The other is henceforth
determined phenomenologically by its mode of givenness. Before
pursuing an analysis in which the possibility and scope of a
transcendental constitution of the Objective world can become
evident and transcendental-phenomenological idealism can thus
become entirely manifest19 it is necessary to make two additional
remarks. First, to define the other by a mode of givenness that is not
original but rather originally modified amounts to turning the other
into an intentional modification of myself. This is an intentional
but not a real modification, since, in the latter case, the other would
be purely and simply in me, as me. Second, intentionality itself
carries the burden of alteriy and the intentional modification is an
element that composes its sense. The same goes for my relation,
within the sphere of ownness, with the past. The past is given to me
through memory, that is to say, through a present lived experience
that points back within itself to the past as a modified present.
Husserl underscores the analogy of the other: Somewhat as my
memorial past, as a modification of my living present, transcends
my present, the apprehended other being transcends my own
being (in the pure and most fundamental sense: what is included
in my primordial ownness).20 But there is nevertheless a difference:
the past that is mine was once necessarily a non-modified present
offered to a direct intuition, whereas the other has never been and
never will be offered in this way. In this regard, the modification
is more complex when it comes to alterity. So, although Husserl
frequently associated the past with intersubjectivity, this does not
signify that the transcendence of the other is of the same order as
the transcendence of the past. To the contrary, it is more radical
and, for this reason, risks to be more fundamental. Is this to say,
118 FLESH AND BODY

in spite of all appearances, that the past comes to the ego through
its relation to the other? We have already encountered this question
earlier, when we asked whether temporality was not defined as a
relation to the other.21
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Here and There

Lets return to the explication of the sense of a giving appresen-

tation by analysing what has been set aside up to now, namely,
the system of potentialities in the sphere of ownness. This is a
necessary task because the relativity of the world to consciousness
(and thus of the other ego as a mundane ego who is appresented
as another absolute origin) only has a sense in relation to a
consciousness comprised of all the richness of its horizons and
potentiality. As long as their role in the constitution of the other
has not been made precise, the analysis will not have attained yet
the status of an intentional analysis. The potentialities of my sphere
of ownness that are at work in the constitution of the other are
essentially spatial. In spite of his reprisal and broadening of Kants
transcendental aesthetic, Husserl, at least in his published works,1
is rarely concerned with the constitution of space. This is surprising
given that extension is an essential feature of the material thing and
given that the material thing is a guiding thread and an exemplary
model for the eidetic analysis of perception.
Husserl writes: as reflexively related to itself, my animate bodily
organism (in my primordial sphere) has the central Here as its
mode of givenness; every other body, and accordingly the others
body, has the mode There.2 Before questioning what seems to
be only a pure observation, lets first try to understand how, and in
what sense, the ego and its lived experiences are localized by or
in the flesh. In this context, localization does not mean anything
objectively spatial: This localization is very specific compared
to every other localization, for it has the intuitive thingly parts
120 FLESH AND BODY

and movements of a thing. It is sensuously intuitive or physi-

cally determined. Just as joy and sorrow are not in the heart as
blood is, so is tactile sensation not in the skin as fragments of
organic tissue.3 That said, how can localization be understood
positively? First of all, the localization of the ego is the localization
of its sensible lived experiences, its sense data and hyletic data.
Husserl confirms: All the sensations thus produced have their
localization, i.e. they are distinguished by means of their place on
the appearing Corporeality and belong phenomenally to it.4 This
applies to all types of sensation, except for tactile sensations which
can be localized throughout the flesh. Consequently, when flesh is
defined as the basis for localized sensation, this definition excludes
the sensation of touch. Should this lead one to think that touch,
initially as the contact of the self with itself, constitutes this basis?
Perhaps. Husserl often returns to this point, since flesh is consti-
tuted originally in touch.5 Without this contact, no localization
in general could take place. This pure proximity is at the origin
of all space and distance. In other words, if the sphere of lived
experience that unifies the pure ego transcendence in immanence
is localized, then this must be due to its hyletic substrate (which
is essentially the tactile data).6
From the localization of the ego by the flesh, lets now pass
to the localization of flesh itself within the world of ownness. It
is given in the mode of a centralized here, as an absolute here,
while all other bodies are given in the mode of a there. On this
point, Husserls terminology fluctuates for essential reasons, but,
as a general rule, the absolute here characterizes the flesh and
the central here characterizes corporeal flesh. So what does the
absolute here signify? It is a here by which any here and there in
space can make sense. Consequently, it does not belong to the
space where here and there can always be exchanged. In short, it is
a here that is not within an objective and intersubjective space that
is homogeneous and isotopic. Husserl confirms: But flesh and its
fleshly space break through homogeneity.7
This non-spatiality of flesh is without doubt most clearly
demonstrated in that great text from 1934 entitled Foundational
Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of
Nature: The Original Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move.8 Husserl,
who seeks to go back to the origin of spatiality in the sense it has
for the natural sciences, writes:
 HERE AND THERE 121

Consider my flesh. In primordial experience, the flesh has no

moving away and no rest, only inner motion and inner rest,
unlike the outer bodies I stand still or go; thus my flesh is
the centre and ... My flesh has extension, etc., but no change
and nonchange of location in the sense that an outer body is
presented as in moving, coming closer or moving farther away,
or as not in motion, near, far away.9

It is even necessary to radicalize this description: in my own

world, my flesh is always here; it is this absolutely unique
here, such that I am an archi-immobility. To be here means to
be absolutely close to oneself and no extension can be given
to it. The concept of internal movement should not even be
employed, because it is impossible to think of movement without
implying space in some way. All internal movement is described
by analogy with external movement. But, in the world of
ownness, flesh does not have any exteriority, because it has not
been incorporated and because no limit has been assigned to it.
This amounts to saying that the world of ownness is, rigorously
speaking, a world without space.10
What, then, are the phenomenological characteristics of the
absolute here? If every body in general is given as the unity of a
multiplicity of perspectives, then the absolute here is the cancel-
lation of all perspectives. And, if every body is given within an
orientation, then the absolute here is also the cancellation of
all orientations. These cancellations are necessarily presupposed
by every particular orientation and perspective. To be given as
an absolute here and as flesh is to be given as a cancelled-body
[Nullkorper].11 To the essence of the original perception of flesh,
and to the immediate intuition (self-given) of flesh and the
empirical Subject belongs the cancelled-appearance of flesh-bodies
[Liebkrpers].12 Flesh is the cancelled-body. Without it, no body
and no world could ever appear. At the same time, the problem of
the constitution of the other can take the following form: how can
another flesh another cancelled-body appear to me? Formulated
in this way, does this question risk being insoluble?
This is surely the case, unless my flesh is also a body. And we
thereby come back to something that is constantly admitted by
Husserl without ever being phenomenologically justified. Lets
thus take incorporation for granted and continue. If my corporeal
122 FLESH AND BODY

flesh is given in the mode of a central here, then other bodies are
given in the mode of there. Here and there are relative, and there is
determined in terms of here. The orientation of there with respect
to here can change if I change my here:

Now the fact that my bodily organism can be (and is) appre-
hended as a natural body existing and movable in space like any
other is manifestly connected with the possibility expressed in
the words: By free modification of my kinesthesias, particularly
those of locomotion, I can change my position in such a manner
that I convert any There into a here that is to say, I could
occupy any spatial locus with my organism.13

It is not carnally but physically that I can occupy any place

whatsoever within a homogeneous space. By carrying out this
unwarranted shift in meaning, Husserl presupposes everything
that is supposed to be constituted: the apprehension of my
flesh as being like any body whatsoever, the homogenous space
where here and there are equivalent, where I move myself is
no different from this body is moving and where subjective
movement (if it has any sense) is conceived as an objective
movement like any other one. The rest of the analysis will verify
this in multiple ways.
If my flesh can occupy any place physically, this means that if I
no longer perceive from my here where I am, but from over there,
where I could be, then I would perceive the same thing through
different modes of appearing centred around the over there (but
corresponding to and agreeing with the ones here). In addition,
thanks to the possibility of changing points of view, this means that
the system of appearances from here and the system of appearances
from over there (any over there can be replaced by any other one)
belong constitutively to each thing. In a very Leibnizian manner,
the thing can be defined as a harmonized system within an infinite
number of systems of possible perspectives toward spatial appear-
ances and also, in principle, temporal appearances.
The function of these results in the associative constitution of
the alter ego will emerge immediately if it is added that I do not
apperceive the other as another me my double who has the
same system of appearances that I do and who is oriented around
my own here. The other is over there, at a distance and separate.
 HERE AND THERE 123

The other is given to me as seeing the same thing that I see, because
if I were over there, in the others place, I would see the same thing
as the other. The presupposition of a common and intersubjective
space is thus fully in play here.
Manifestly what has just now been brought to light points to
the course of the association constituting the mode of Other.14
How does this occur? First of all, in order to respect alterity as
much as possible, this association cannot be direct or immediate.
As a result, it cannot take place between a body in my world which
is over there and my flesh which, in the same world, is here. Such
an association would have the sense of an association with myself
(the monad) and would only ever constitute a copy of myself.
Generally speaking, this is the risk that Husserl tirelessly seeks to
avert, although, as we will see, he is perhaps unable to do so. What
appearances are associated, then? Husserl writes:

The body that is a member of my primordial world (the body

subsequently of the other ego) is for me a body in the mode
There. Its manner of appearance does not become paired in
a direct association with the manner of appearance actually
belonging at the time to my flesh (in the mode Here); rather
it awakens reproductively another, an immediately similar
appearance included in the system constitutive of my flesh as a
body in space. It brings to mind the way my body would look
if I were there.15

The pairing association that gives the other has a very complex
structure that we will try to untangle.
Unless one grants that flesh can be separated from its corporeal
aspect, the association will take place between a body over there
and my corporeal flesh as if I were over there. Two questions are
thus opened. (1) How, and in virtue of what, can a body over
there evoke and awaken my corporeal flesh to appear as if I were
over there? And (2), prior to this, how can my own corporeal
flesh appear to me as if I were over there? It is only on the basis
of my here that my corporeal flesh can appear to me as if I were
over there. I must then be simultaneously here and over there; I
am both seeing from here and seen over there. But in seeing, my
corporeal flesh must be able to duplicate itself and perceive itself as
something outside of itself. But, as Husserl indicates, it is absurd
124 FLESH AND BODY

to say that I see my flesh from the outside.16 The hypothesis of

a spectator ego who is completely disincarnated and who can
perceive its own flesh from an external point of view would not
solve anything. What would its organ of perception be? For, as we
have already indicated, any splitting of the ego (and to begin with,
the one at work in the reduction) implies intersubjectivity.17
If it is impossible to see ones flesh from the outside, would it
nevertheless be possible, in the world of ownness, to re-present it
as something external? Although an original and intuitive presen-
tation seems to be excluded, is there any place for a re-presentation
here? To re-present my flesh from the outside is to re-present it as
an external physical body that is analogous to all other bodies in
one and the same homogenous space.18 In one sense, this is always
the case: flesh is constituted in touch as pure contact; only touch
gives flesh to itself. But it is also constituted visually, except for the
fact that I cannot always see what I touch. The coincidence between
tactile data and visual data is necessarily partial and incomplete:
I can see my hand that I touch and touch my back that I cannot
see. This incompleteness of the constitution of my own flesh can
only appear in relation to the completeness of the constitution of
bodies where the data of sight and touch can, and must, coincide
in principle. No complete constitution of my flesh is possible, and
later we will explain why this is so. It is not only the case that
the re-presentation of my flesh as body entails intersubjectivity;
moreover by representing it to me as a corporeal flesh over there,
everything that is specific to flesh and provides the basis for the
resemblance that gives rise to association disappears. If association
no longer occurs between bodies that are reduced to the common
denominator of extended things, then how is it even possible for
intersubjectivity to appear?
This leads to the second question: in virtue of what can the body
over there evoke my body-flesh as if it were over there? A body
that resembles my flesh-body [Leibkrper] is evoked by virtue of
its similarity [hnlichkeit] made possible by the representation
[Vorstellung] as if I were there.19 Lets analyse this resemblance,
because it is one of the major presuppositions of the entire
constitution of the alter ego and because it motivates the apper-
ceptive transfer. Can this resemblance appear without resorting
to a comparison between the bodyflesh of the other and my
own bodyflesh, as something prior to what it resembles? Husserl
 HERE AND THERE 125

frequently returns to this major difficulty, and it seems that he

was regularly forced to presuppose objective space both in order
to assure the identity of my corporeal flesh and to provide a place
of comparison between bodies. When he addresses the problem of
the apprehension of the resemblance between my own body-flesh
and the alien body-flesh in 1914 or 1915, he initially affirms that
the identity of my corporeal flesh here and over there is a necessary
prerequisite for this resemblance. Indeed, if my bodyflesh over
there were not identical to my bodyflesh here, what possible
interest would there be in the resemblance between a body over
there and my body-flesh as if it were over there? This identity, we
have seen, can appear only in objectivity, that is to say, for the
other. And does Husserl not confirm our critical analyses when he
writes:

But each alteration of my flesh corresponds also to my body-

flesh because it is an objectively constituted body, in the world
of things, giving rise to the possibility of my flesh appearing,
thanks to the constitution, of flesh being able to be seen from
any place and from an objective position. I can also say: if I
think of my flesh as just any there, then it seems like any body.20

This implies that an imaginative variation of my own flesh

which it is always in my power to carry out gives my flesh to
me as a body. I can vary the kinaesthetic system of appearances
of my flesh but only in a very limited manner. For there is no
sense in varying the absolute and unique here or of representing
this here in another place. One rediscovers, under a different
form, the aporias of the reduction to the eidos ego. As Husserl
remarks,21 flesh is an obstacle to the full constitution of space and
without space, no variation of the here is thinkable. Of course,
nothing prevents me from imagining contradictory possibilities
(those that are contradictory within the sphere of ownness) and
from pretending to be elsewhere, that is to say, from pretending
to be anywhere else. This would be a good example of what Fink
identified under the name of a merely signitive re-presentation
which concerns the phenomena of representing something
as-if. These re-representations constitute the horizon of
intuitive impossibilities.22 They would produce a resemblance
between an intuitive given (the system of appearances of the
126 FLESH AND BODY

body over there) and a fiction, a re-representation-as-if that

no intuition could ever confirm or deny. Consequently, it would
be an absurd re-presentation, if absurdity is, phenomenologi-
cally speaking, the impossibility of an intuitive fulfilment. Does
Husserl not admit this when he indicates that the memory of
my body-flesh as if it were over there is not intuitive?23 The
risk, then, would be to see the entire constitution of the alter
ego, and with it all objectivity, fall into the as-if, an infinite
regress of doubles, or fiction. This would mark the triumph of
scepticism over its most powerful denunciation. In this intuitive
impossibility, however, can one not recognize the presence of the
other at the heart of the ego? And, by anchoring resemblance on
a signitive re-presentation that no intention will ever fulfil, does
Husserl not give himself the phenomenological right to describe
the other as such? In so doing, is he not forced to grant prece-
dence to the other over myself? If phenomenology had to lead
into scepticism, would this be due to having respected alterity
more and better than had ever been done before it? Even at the
price of its fundamental project?
As his manuscripts on intersubjectivity show, the questions raised
by the concept of resemblance did not escape Husserl. There is,
however, one question that does not seem to have been addressed
and that might have allowed us to understand and to explain the
incorporation of my flesh. There is a condition of the possibility
for the constitution of the other that is stated as follows: Each
flesh in a community of subjects must be apriori the same sensible
type, for this is a condition for the possibility of empathy.24 So the
flesh of a child or a fool (flesh is the index of normality and abnor-
mality)25 cannot become the object of an apperceptive transfer,
unless it is considered to be a modification of adult normality. This
would only have a secondary importance, if the norm which
always precedes abnormality could be constituted egologically.
We will not insist on this point. But what happens when one intro-
duces sexual difference, which is not an abnormality but which
prevents one from considering all flesh from having a priori the
same sensible type? Sexual difference implies the relation of one
flesh to another (for it is not the body that is gendered); it helps us
to understand how the relation to the other flesh is a component
of the sense of my own flesh. At the same time, when two fleshes
are given, incorporation can take place. Incorporation is also the
 HERE AND THERE 127

reduction of sexual difference. And it is probably because Husserl

always considered incorporation to be self-evident that he never
had recourse to sexual difference. For him, sexual difference could
only be a mundane characteristic, and the mundanization of the
ego is based precisely on the possibility of flesh to become body.26
To summarize, when resemblance takes place between two
bodies in the physical sense, it is without interest. For, it presup-
poses that my body-flesh has been reduced to pure corporeality
through an abstraction of my ego. In this case, the constitution
of the other is impossible. If the presentation of a body over
there resembles the re-presentation of my body-flesh over there,
the constitution of the other is presupposed in advance. But, if
the intuitive presentation of a body over there evokes, by way of
resemblance, the signitive re-presentation of my body-flesh as if it
were over there, then the other is my fictive double27 and phenom-
enology is led outside of itself. In any case, the unity of resemblance
required by constitutive pairing with the other does not seem to be
attainable. Two body-fleshes can never be perceived in the unity of
the same consciousness, because, in the sphere of ownness, there
is no means of incorporating flesh and because, by definition, no
other body can be presented with the sense of flesh. As a result,
one of the two conditions identified above with pairing28 the
prior constitution of the identical sense of the members cannot
be fulfilled. After we have shown that the constitution of the
temporality presupposes alterity, we will have to conclude that
the project of the constitution of objectivity is a failure and then
attempt an interpretation of why that is the case.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Dynamic of the

Apperceptive Transfer

Here we will re-establish contact with Husserls text in order to

follow his analysis of associative pairing the apperception that
gives the other. We pick up at the point where what Husserl writes
will confirm and verify our analyses:

The first-awakened manner of appearance of my body is not

the only thing that enters into a pairing; my body itself does so
likewise: as the synthetic unity pertaining to this mode, and the
many other familiar modes, of its appearance. Thus the assimi-
lative apperception becomes possible and established, by which
the external body over there receives analogically from mine
the sense, flesh, and consequently the sense, organism belong to
another world, analogous to my primordial world.1

If one maintains firmly the difference between the sense of flesh

and body and if one sticks to the letter of this description, then it
is hard to see where the sense of flesh comes from, since its origin
cannot derive from my body. It follows that the other body cannot
have another sense from the sense of my own body and thus that
the constitution of the other cannot take place. Husserls use of the
words Krper and Leib takes on its full sense here, even though
he initially distinguished their meanings and later used them
interchangeably. Further, if by receiving the sense of flesh, a body
acquires the sense of being flesh in a world as well as being flesh in
130 FLESH AND BODY

another world, then this signifies that it is through the incarnation

of a body and the incorporation of flesh that there is a world.2
Once we have determined the condition of the possibility of this
incarnation and of this incorporation, we will have reached the
origin of the world.
The analysis of the apperception that gives the other has already
been initiated by the analysis of pairing as the original form of
passive synthesis and by the analysis of resemblance. Husserl
returns to them in order to determine the general style of an apper-
ception resulting from association and then to specify the original
traits of the apperception that constitutes the alter ego. Husserl
writes:

The general style of this and every other apperception that

arises associatively is therefore to be described as follows:
With the associative overlapping of the data founding the
apperception, there takes place an association at a higher
level. If the one datum is a particular mode of appearance
of an intentional object, which is itself an index pointing to
an associatively awakened system of manifold appearances
wherein it would show itself, then the other datum is supple-
mented to become likewise an appearance of something,
namely an analogous object. But it is not as though the unity
and multiplicity thrust upon the latter datum merely supple-
mented it with modes of appearance taken from these others.
On the contrary, the analogically apprehended object and
its indicated system of appearances are indeed analogically
adapted to the analogous appearance, which has awakened
this whole system too. Every overlapping-at-a-distance, which
occurs by virtue of associative pairing, is at the same time a
fusion and therein, so far as incompatibilities do not interfere,
an assimilation, an accommodation of the sense of the one
member to that of the other.3

Two resembling data are given at the same time, or at least in the
same time, and they are associated by the partial coinciding of
their objective sense. It must be emphasized that no associative
synthesis can occur without presupposing the syntheses of the
original consciousness of time. The data can only be associated
within a single temporality. The first datum belongs to a system
 The Dynamic of the Apperceptive Transfer 131

of multiple appearances of an intentional object, a system whose

actualization gives the thing itself in its incarnate presence. The
second datum is only characterized by its resemblance with the
first one; as such, it does not refer to a system of multiple and
unified appearances that would be directly accessible. The first
appearance is an appearance of some object, while the second
one is not. On the basis of resemblance and by virtue of the
intentional structure of the first datum, a transfer, a sliding of
meaning, takes place by which the second given receives the
sense of being the givenness of an object (it acquires a sense as
such, one could say). It has a relation with the first object that is
analogous to the relation between two singular data. The second
datum which was initially isolated and did not belong to a
complete and identifiable system of givenness is thus comple-
mented by such a system.
What is the principle behind this sliding of sense? How can sense
pass from one given to the other? And how can it undergo a modifi-
cation in this passage? The question becomes all the more difficult
due to the fact that Husserl takes care to clarify that the second
datum is not completed by the potential system of the first datum
which would then only be assigned to it but by an analogically
modified system. How would the second system not be purely and
simply fictive? One might sum up this entire set of questions under
the following formulation: what is the dynamic of the transfer of
sense? In the context of a brief analysis of the constitution of the
other whose psychic life I can see expressed without, however,
being able to perceive it in the proper sense Husserl came to
write: There is here, as we know, a kind of original indication that
draws its force [Kraft] from the perceptive presence of my flesh
inasmuch as it interconnects with my psychic life, as well as with
the typical resemblance of the foreign flesh, first as a corporeal
being, with my corporeality.4 What is this force? How should one
understand the link between incarnate presence and this force? Is
there any way at all to answer these questions in phenomenology?
This is not certain.
In 1927 a description of the pairing of two perceived objects
clarifies:

A pair has its own unity and has its peculiar unity simply as
a pair. It is a subjective mode, a subjectivity that links into a
132 FLESH AND BODY

unity of the thing perceived, as the appearance: one points to

the other, or as we say, from one proceeds the other by way of
an awakening or evocation. The one affects me, or so goes the
affection in the way in which I encounter the other, such that the
affection from the other is reinforced and vice versa.5

There is thus indeed a certain force at work in the transfer of

meaning that proceeds from one perceived object to another, or
more precisely, from one datum of something to another datum
that does not give the same thing. Lets try here to determine the
nature of this transfer. Husserl observes: The objectivity of flesh
is the foundation of all objectivity.6 Flesh is only objective on
the condition of being essentially related to another flesh. Here
we rediscover the problem of incorporation that we proposed
to resolve through an appeal to sexual difference. Although
Husserl did not have the same recourse, some of his later notes
could have authorized it, nonetheless. In a text from September
1933, entitled Universal Teleology, one can read the following
observation about the sexual drives: There is in the drive
[Trieb] itself a relatedness to the Other as the Other and his
correlative drive.7 Can one then legitimately say that my flesh as
sexualized refers to another flesh, that this constitutive reference
is dynamic, and that no objectivity in general is possible without
these drives that relate two fleshes to one another through the
medium of their difference? If no objectivity is possible without
this carnal relation, then must one not put this relation ahead of
intentionality?
Lets return to the question of the transfer of meaning, which
transforms an isolated given into the givenness of an object, that is,
into intentional givenness. Here, it is necessary to reverse the order
followed by Husserl and to no longer consider the apperception
of the other as a particular case of apperception but as its most
general rule. This is necessary because the flesh of the other is the
first object. If the constitution of objectivity itself depends on a
transfer of meaning that a force sets in motion, then a fortiori this
same force is at work in the constitution of every object, and more
precisely, in the pairing or association of objects.8 And if that is the
mechanism of transfer, one can understand why the paired datum
which seems to function as a non-intentional hyle in relation to the
original datum that would play the role of the intentional morph
 The Dynamic of the Apperceptive Transfer 133

is completed by an analogous system of appearing that is adjusted

to it and not by the correlative system of appearing of the original
datum. In effect, the force in question does not proceed without
a correlative force that is different from it. Husserl says this with
respect to the drives, and in a general manner, every thought
about force one is a thought about the difference of forces. To say
that one force is behind the transfer is necessarily to introduce
difference here and to make difference control the transfer. What is
transferred is thus necessarily altered.
Husserl does not say that the most general structure of apper-
ception is constituted by the relation to the other, instead for him
the apperception of the alter ego remains a particular case that he
goes on to describe as follows:

If we return to our case, that of apperception of the alter

ego, it is now self-understood that what is appresented by the
body over there, in my primordial surrounding world, is
not something psychic of mine, nor anything else in my sphere
of ownness. I am here somatically, the centre of a primordial
world oriented around me. Consequently my entire primordial
ownness, proper to me as a monad, has the content of the Here
not the content of varying with some I can and do, which
might set in, and belonging to some There or other; accordingly,
not the content belonging to that definite There. Each of these
contents excludes the other; they cannot both exist in my sphere
of ownness at the same time [zugleich]. But, since the other body
there enters into a pairing association with my body here and,
being given perceptually, becomes the core of an appresentation,
the core of my experience of a coexisting ego [mitdaseiender
ego], that ego, according to the whole sense-giving course of the
association, must be appresented as an ego now coexisting in
the mode There, such as I should be if I were there. My own
ego, however, the ego given in constant self-perception, is actual
now with the content belonging to his Here. Therefore an ego
is appresented, as other than mine. That which is primordially
incompatible, in simultaneous coexistence, becomes compatible:
because my primordial ego constitutes the ego who is other for
him by an appresentative apperception, which, according to its
intrinsic nature, never demands and never is open to fulfilment
by presentation.9
134 FLESH AND BODY

Here we will not insist again on the aporias whose development

we have followed; nothing in this analysis has enabled us to
resolve them. Instead, lets focus our attention on the intercon-
nection [Verflechtung] between presentation and appresentation.
If no presentation were introduced in the constitution of the other,
then Husserl would have to abandon all intuition, that is to say,
the principle of principles of phenomenology. If appresentation
played no role, then Husserl would have to give up constituting
the other as other and give up objectivity, that is, philosophy as
a rigorous science. So, this interconnection takes on a vital role in
the encounter between phenomenology and alterity. A body over
there is presented. In virtue of its resemblance with my body, it
receives from my body the sense of being a body-flesh inhabited
by another ego who is appresented. The presentation of the
body-flesh over there is the appresentation of the ego who rules
it; the presentation of the body-flesh over there refers to another
ego associated with it. The interconnection here is a form of
association and, more precisely, a form of association between
the present and non-present.10 Without it, the other could not
appear in the flow of my lived experience. That is to say that this
interconnection presupposes the other before even contributing
to its appearing, since there is no association that, either directly
or indirectly, does not refer to a principle of alteration whose
ultimate origin is the other.
This can be verified quickly by reading Husserls clarifications
and explanations of it. Due to the interconnection between presen-
tation and appresentation, appresented data are able to emerge
and be continually renewed. They allow both for a confirmation
through harmony and for an increased awareness of the alter ego.
Husserl writes:

The first determinate content obviously must be formed by

the understanding of the others organism and specifically
organismal conduct: the understanding of the members as
hands groping or functioning in pushing, as feet functioning in
walking, as eyes functioning in seeing, and so forth. With this
the Ego at first is determined only as governing thus somati-
cally [so leiblich waltendes] and, in a familiar manner, proves
himself continually, so far as the whole stylistic form of the
sensible processes manifest to me primordially must correspond
 The Dynamic of the Apperceptive Transfer 135

to the form whose type is familiar from my own organismal

governing [leibliches Walten]. It is quite comprehensible that,
as a further consequence, an empathizing of definite contents
belonging to the higher psychic sphere arises. Such contents
too are indicated somatically and in the conduct of the organism
toward the outside world for example: as the outward conduct
of someone who is angry or cheerful, which I easily understand
from my own conduct under similar circumstances.11

What, then, is interconnected here? From the presentation of

the body over there to the appresentation of the alter ego, there
is a transfer of meaning from the self-presentation of my flesh
to the presentation of the body over there. Appresentation thus
refers to two presentations, and association turns the second
of them into an appresentation. This association, as we have
shown, is founded on a resemblance that presupposes the other.
This implies that the self-presentation of my flesh cannot occur
without a re-presentation of it as body. Lets consider one of
Husserls examples for an instant: I cannot identify the behaviour
of the other as angry without first taking an external point of
view toward my own affects, that is to say, taking them from the
others point of view. It is on this basis that I can comprehend
the carnal manifestation of the other as indicating anger. This
signifies that the self-presentation of my flesh is interconnected
with a re-presentation of it once again, this is the question
of incorporation. This interconnection marks the impossibility
of a pure presentation, or rather, the presence of the alter ego
at the very heart of the ego. In this regard, phenomenology is
obligated to disentangle itself from the alter ego and to reduce it.
Interconnection is thus both the resource for a phenomenology
faced with alterity and the threat of an original and primary
alteration of the egological sphere of ownness.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Caress and Impact

The essential objective of the Fifth Meditation is the constitution

of objectivity itself, understood as monadic intersubjectivity. After
having elucidated the constitution of the alter ego by my own ego,
Husserl proceeds to explicate the constitution of the transcendental
community of monads and the first form of objectivity: the inter-
subjective nature on which the higher objective levels are based,
such as the world of culture, science, and philosophy as a rigorous
and first science. Husserl writes:

But it is more important to clarify the community, developing

at various levels, which is produced forthwith by virtue of
experiencing someone else: the community between me, the
primordial psychophysical Ego governing in and by means of
my primordial organism, and the appresentatively experienced
Other; then, considered more concretely and radically, between
my monadic ego and his. The first thing constituted in the form
of community, and the foundation for all other intersubjectively
common things, is the commonness of Nature, along with that
of the Others organism and his psychophysical Ego, as paired
with my own psychophysical Ego.1

By questioning back to the constitutive origin of this first form of

objectivity, Husserl opens the way for a definition of intention-
ality as such, that is, of the being of intentionality. The analysis
of the community of monads is thus the culminating point of the
Cartesian Meditations.
138 FLESH AND BODY

This analysis seems to run immediately into a difficulty with

regard to what has been established up to now. The alien subject
has the sense and validity of being another subjectivity thanks to
an appresentation occurring within the limits of my own being.
What, then, could be the meaning of any form of community
whatsoever? More precisely: if the alien flesh that appears in my
primordial sphere as a body is (as a noematic unity that is insepa-
rable from myself as a concrete monad) only an element essentially
determined within my own primordial nature, then how is the
constitution of an intersubjective nature possible? When this body
functions appresentively, I am conscious of the other, and first of
all, I am conscious of how the others flesh appears to the other
as an absolute here. Husserl asks: How can I speak at all of the
same body, as appearing within my primordial sphere in the mode
There and within his and to him in the mode Here?2 Once again,
the problem of a common nature brings into play the problem of
incorporation. The constitution of the alter ego has continually
struggled with the impossible incorporation of my flesh. Here too
it is a question of incorporation, but in the opposite sense: how can
the flesh of the other also be a body? How can the others absolute
here also, simultaneously, be my relative there? How can a body
appear differently in two primordial spheres that are separated by
an abyss and nevertheless be given as the same? Is it because the
two spheres are actually merged? What would happen then to the
alterity of the other?
The difficulty would disappear if the others body were given
as an index of the other, as indicating and referring to the other.
From this perspective, the body over there could never be given
to the other as an absolute here. The other would remain, so to
speak, beyond its own body. But this goes against all descriptive
givenness: the experience of the other is constantly experienced
in a way that attests to the fact that what I see is the other in its
incarnate plenitude and not merely an index. This state of affairs,
is it not an enigma?
If there is an enigma, it resides in the identification of the body
over there in my original sphere with the body of the other consti-
tuted separately and given to the other as flesh in an absolute here.
Put otherwise, the enigma presupposes the distinction between two
spheres of ownness, that is to say, the experience of the other. But
an explication of intentionality should allow us to solve this aporia.
 Caress and Impact 139

To do this, Husserl proceeds again in two phases: he commences by

repeating the analysis of perception in general and then returns to
the perception of the other. Lets follow this order.
Appresentation presupposes a core of presentation. It is a
re-presentation which is founded with presentation in order to
play the role of a co-presentation. This fusion is of such a nature
that presentation and re-presentation stand within the functional
community of one perception, which simultaneously presents and
appresents, and yet furnishes for the total object a consciousness
of its being itself there.3 What does this fusion (Verschmelzung)
which we have waited to examine signify?4 Husserl defines it
in the context of an analysis of homogeneity and heterogeneity to
which we have already called attention.5 Homogeneity, or analogy,
can have different degrees; its limit is a similarity without any gap
or deviation. Husserl elaborates:

At any moment where there is not a perfect similarity, the

contrast is consistent with analogy (relation): the non-similarity
is removed from the ground of a common element. If we pass
from similarity to similarity, the new semblance is given as
repetition. Its content comes into perfect coincidence, without
deviation, with that of the first semblance. It is what we call
fusion. Even when we pass from analogy to analogy, it also
produces a kind of coincidence (Deckung), but that which is
only partial, and, even in times of coincidence, there is a conflict
with non-similarity. Thus, in this shift by analogy, there is also
something like a fusion, but relative only to the moment which
is similar: it is thus not a pure and perfect fusion as with a
complete likeness.6

This fusion does not take place between the acts themselves
but between their noematic correlates. The presented object
merges with the appresented object without the presentive and
appresentive acts themselves overlapping and coinciding. And
yet Husserl mentions a presentation which is at the same time
(zugleich) presentation and appresentation (that is to say, a
re-presentation). If the pure temporal flow unifies a presentation
and re-presentation in succession, it is difficult to understand how
the acts that phenomenology posits as irreducible to each other
(presentation and appresentation) can be united in simultaneity.
140 FLESH AND BODY

Lets return to this difference, still remaining within the

framework of an analysis of perception. Presentation is the
incarnate givenness of the thing itself, while re-presentation is a
modification which dis-incarnates it. That was already one of the
findings of Heideggers analysis that we commented on earlier in
this work.7 This sole text from 99 of Husserls Ideas I suffices to
confirm this by explicating their difference in great detail:

On the one hand, we have the simply reproductive modification:

the re-presentation simpliciter, which in its own essence, in a
way sufficiently characterized, is given as a modification of
another thing. Re-presentation returns us to perception as it
is in its peculiar phenomenological essence: for example, the
memory of the past implies, as we have already remarked, the
having perceived; consequently, the perception corresponds
(the perception of the same sense core) is intended to in the
consciousness of memory, although it is not actually contained
in it. The memory is precisely in its own essence a modification
of perception. Correlatively, the thing characterized as past
gives itself in itself as having been present, thus as a modifi-
cation of the present; as unmodified the thing is precisely the
original element, or the incarnate present of perception.8

In perception, the object is given in the flesh, in an incarnate

present. In the modification of memory i.e. re-presentation
the object is still there and present, but as having been
perceived. The object is no longer given in the flesh, which is to
say that my flesh is no longer directly co-perceived with it. To
be sure, one of the aims of this work is to show that one should
no longer conceive the two terms in expressions like the living
present and the incarnate present as one single feature. We will
come back to this point.
If incarnation differentiates presentation from re-presentation, it
is thus possible to understand that presentation taken in a broad
sense is constituted of both presentation and appresentation. In
effect, the flesh is never completely constituted, which signifies that
it is both presented and appresented. This holds a fortiori for all
of the types of constitution in which it intervenes, commencing
with transcendent objects. Does not the incompleteness of all
constitutive analysis, in turn, come to be clarified? Positively,
 Caress and Impact 141

this incompleteness signifies the infinite openness of constitution.

Husserl attempts to think this incompleteness through the concept
of a surplus:

Therefore, in the object of such a presentiveappresentive

perception (an object making its appearance in the mode, itself-
there), we must distinguish noematically between that part
which is genuinely perceived and the rest (Uberschuss), which is
not strictly perceived and yet is indeed there too (Mitdaseinden).
Thus every perception of this type is transcending: it posits more
as itself-there than it makes actually present at any time. Every
external perception belongs here for example, perception of a
house (front rear); but at bottom absolutely every perception,
indeed every evidence, is thus described in respect of a most
general feature, provided only that we understand presenting
in a broader sense.9

If each adumbration of a transcendent object posits more than

what is actually present, this is because it is linked to the entire
kinaesthetic system that is, to other possible adumbrations10
of my flesh. The flesh is the source of this surplus. Yet, this source
always exceeds itself, since its constitution is always incomplete.
If each perception transcends itself, is this not due to the fact that
flesh is always involved in it?
This surplus is also introduced at another site of phenom-
enology, where according to Heidegger Husserl touches upon or
struggles with the question of being.11 The sixth chapter of the last
of the Logical Investigations is devoted to categorical intuition: I
see the white paper, and I say the white paper; I express that which
I see precisely by taking measure of it.12 The word white intends
something about the paper, and the perception of its whiteness is
able to fill this intention. The expression white paper, or rather
the signification white paper, is not as such fully filled. Husserl
explains: The paper is known as white, or rather as white paper
whenever, expressing our perception, we say: of the white paper.
The intention of the word white coincides only partially with the
moment of the colour of the object appearing, it functions to exceed
the signification, a form, which is never found in the appearance
itself which it confirms. Of the white paper, that is tantamount to
saying of the paper being white.13 If the total meaning can be filled,
142 FLESH AND BODY

then it is necessary for the being [tant], the surplus, to become

the object of an intuition extending to the categorical sphere.
The relation between these two types of intuition is one of
foundation the categorical object is founded on the sensible
object and of community. Husserl writes:

The relation between the broad concept and the narrow concept,
the suprasensible concept (that is to say that which is constructed
beyond sensibility, or the categorical concept) and the sensible
concept of perception, is visibly not an extrinsic or contingent
relation, but a relation which finds its founding in the thing
(Sache). It is comprised within the grand class of acts located in
the sphere of ownness, a sphere in which something appears as
effective and as truly given itself.14

What the two types of intuition share in common is that they

give an object itself, in the flesh, as Husserl will say after the
Logical Investigations.15 If sensible objects were never given (and
in order for them to be given, the flesh must be given), then
no ideal object, category or essence (formal or material) could
be given. To put it another way, if there were no surplus in
sensible perception, then there would be no surplus to sensible
perception; if this perception did not transcend itself, no category
could appear. And being would not be given.16 Considering the
importance, in phenomenology, of the mode of givenness, it
is surprising that Heidegger never interrogated the flesh as an
essential characteristic of intuitive givenness. Without doubt, this
is due to the fact that in Being and Time (contrary to some of his
courses)17 he no longer considers intuition and perception as the
only ways of presenting.
Husserl took up again the analysis of perception in order to
try to understand how the body which is both presented as over
there and appresented as flesh absolutely here can be one and
the same. Phenomenologically reduced to an analysis of its type
of givenness, the question here is to know how presentation and
appresentation are fused together in order to carry out a shared
role in presentation. We have sought to answer this question by
claiming that it is due to the role of flesh in perception that each
presentation is necessarily linked to an appresentation. Lets return
now to the case of the experience of the other. If appresentation
 Caress and Impact 143

can take place in a functional community with presentation, from

the very beginning, what this experience presents must belong to
the unity of the very object appresented.18 And conversely: what is
appresented must belong to the unity of the same object as the one
that is presented. The body over there appresents the other, and
this appresentation does not take place without the presentation
of the other. Consequently, the body over there is the flesh of the
other which is given to the other in an absolute here. There is thus
no separation between the ownness of the body over there and the
corporeal flesh of the other. And what I see is not a sign, a portrait,
or any other indirect given, instead it is the other in the flesh.19
It is therefore legitimate to speak of the same body in reference to
the one which appears to me in my sphere of ownness from over
there and the one which appears to the other as flesh in the mode
of here.20 The enigma of intersubjective nature the first form of
objectivity is in principle resolved: when the body over there
appresents the other ego, this other appears to me as immediately
ruling over its own body-flesh and mediately over a corporeal
nature which is given to the other through perception. This nature
is the very same one that belongs to the body over there, and
consequently it is the same as my own nature. As Husserl puts
it, It is the same Nature, but in the mode of appearance: as
if I were standing over there, where the Others body is.21 If
the possibility of this substitution had never been presupposed,
if homogeneous space had never been implied by the preceding
moments of intentional analysis, then one could, perhaps, concede
that the Fifth Meditation had indeed arrived at the constitution of
objectivity.
The noema objective nature is thus constituted by two layers:
the first is my own nature constituted by my ego, while the second
layer comes from the experience of the other. By providing an
intentional explication of all natural objects (and thus of all objects
on a higher level, up to and including ideal objects), I must be able
to bring out these two constitutive layers. Obviously, Husserl says,
first of all, the Others animate bodily organism [Leibkrper],
which is, so to speak, the intrinsically first Object, just as the other
man is constitutionally the intrinsically first Objective man.22
Lets dwell on this statement, because its importance cannot be
underestimated. To turn the other flesh, the alien body-flesh, into
the first object, is something that should be understood in the
144 FLESH AND BODY

strongest sense of primacy, namely, as a foundation. A text from

NovemberDecember of 1932 confirms this point. One of its
paragraphs is entitled The objectivity of the flesh as the foundation
of all objectivity.23 Objectivity signifies intersubjectivity. It is the
others body-flesh that appears to me in the first place, and it is
only through it that I can have any indirect access to the others
egoity (or in other words, the others alterity). The other has no
other sense than as other than me. And if the other did not appear
for me or in me as a monad, it could not be an existing other. For,
each being is a sense-formation of my constituting transcendental
subjectivity. But, if the others body-flesh is constituted in me, it is
there as constituted by the other. The first objectivity constituted in
this way is the alien body-flesh.
My own world extends as far as my flesh, since everything
that is given to me is mediated by my flesh. Yet, there exists
within me another flesh which sets a limit to my own incarnate
world. Repeatedly, we have raised the question of the limits of
my flesh. The response is henceforth established: the limit of my
flesh is another flesh. This limit is not extrinsic to my flesh; on the
contrary, it comes from my flesh. The entire egological constitution
of alterity comes up against the notion of incorporation. Positively,
this signifies that the relation to the other flesh is a component of
the sense of my own flesh. It is also the only manner of resolving
the difficulties of incorporation and at the same time respecting
the dual phenomenal status of a flesh which is also a body. Sexual
difference can thus be a name for this limit, or, for this reference of
my flesh to another flesh.24
Henceforth, it is plain to see that Husserl could never confine
himself to the reduction to the sphere of ownness. As we have
seen, there is not a moment of the intentional analysis of the other
which does not presuppose the other; there is not a single concept
employed to describe the sphere of ownness which does not already
refer to the other. Does not Husserl tacitly recognize this when he
states that the Other is phenomenologically a modification of
myself (which, for its part, gets this character of being my self
by virtue of the contrastive pairing that necessarily takes place)?25
If the sense of mineness is drawn from a relation of contrast with
the other, the point of departure for transcendental phenomenology
my ego and the concept of an absolute sphere that is my own
are essentially altered.26 Flesh as original ownness and as the origin
 Caress and Impact 145

of ownness is originally not mine [impropre] and originates from

what is not my own [limpropre].27
More precisely, if my flesh is constituted originally by way of
touch which is the first stratum in the order of constitution
then this holds a fortiori for the other flesh. The carnal relation
the reference of one flesh to another is first a con-tact. Where
does my own flesh end, if not where the others own flesh is felt?
The question Where does it end? can also signify Where does it
begin? My flesh is at its limit, at the point of being exceeded, when
it is at the border of the other. That is to say the border of the other
is the border of myself. Husserl grasped this co-belonging of two
fleshes: the apperception of my own flesh and the alien flesh belong
essentially together.28 The contact of oneself with oneself as ones
contact with an other (pure auto-affection as pure hetero-affection)
is the contact of one flesh with another one. Lets call this contact
a caress, where incorporation is not introduced. But incorporation
is necessarily derived from this relation between two fleshes, or
the caress. Lets call the encounter of bodies an impact [choc]. The
caress is also an impact. This helps to explain the ambiguity of
phenomenology, that is, the phenomenal duality that it describes
and tirelessly seeks to master and to reduce.29
All flesh is constituted by a contact with the other; in other
words, flesh is essentially con-tingent. This contingency has reper-
cussions on the higher-level constitution of intersubjectivity and
objectivity. Is this not the underlying reason why Husserl moves
toward the archi-facticity that we already identified concerning the
reduction to the eidos ego? If flesh is contingent and if facticity is
its essence (and thus as invariant, it resists variation),30 then does
it not impede the eidetic pretention of constitutive analysis, to the
extent that it plays a part in the constitution of all transcendence
(setting aside for now the problem of temporality)? Does phenom-
enology not thus require an interpretation of this archi-facticity
from which Heidegger began?31 This holds for the being of inten-
tionality as well as the being of transcendence.
What does the intentional structure of consciousness mean if not
the impossibility of conceiving an ego outside of any connection
to the non-ego, that is, the impossibility of conceiving a subject
outside of its relation with an object?32 The first non-me is the other
me, and, from the other me, the flesh is the first given. If the proto-
typical intentional object is the flesh of the other, then the original
146 FLESH AND BODY

intentional subject is my own flesh. Intentionality is originally a

carnal pairing; sexual difference, the caress, and impact define its
most general structure. This definition of intentionality provides a
clarification of the status of transcendence. The phenomenon in the
phenomenological sense is an intuitive, incarnate and immanent
given.33 Here it would not be unjustified to reproach Husserl
for remaining stuck in immanence,34 at least insofar as he does
not place an emphasis on incarnation. Yet, if it can be admitted
that my flesh is essentially related to alterity, then it must be said
that Husserl shows the utmost respect for transcendence, since
transcendence is situated at the heart of the phenomenon itself.
The notion of transcendence in immanence thus acquires its full
sense here. To be sure, one could object that he fails to constitute
transcendence, that alterity is not a phenomenon in the phenom-
enological sense,35 and then conclude that transcendence is missed.
But the entire question is to understand why.
Sexual difference, in referring one flesh to another, incorporates
them and then cancels itself out. This incorporation, however, is not
symmetrical. If the flesh of the other is nothing more than a body,
my flesh still remains flesh in a sense. My flesh is the medium that
gives all bodies, starting with my own body and is thus coextensive
with my own world. Here the phenomenal situation described by
Husserl where a body that is also flesh is presented to a flesh
is simply turned around: a body appears to a flesh that is also a
body. This helps us to understand the dissolution of all exteriority
and transcendence. The origin of transcendence is the caress, but
by turning immediately into impact, it is also the reduction of
transcendence. Does this not provide a means of understanding
why the origin of the world is in the world and why psychology
comes to cover over phenomenology? Just as the asymmetry of
incorporation leaves open the possibility of a reincarnation of the
other body, so too it preserves the possibility of a return to the
origin of transcendence and to the origin of the world. In short, it
is the possibility of phenomenology itself.
Since the objectivity of the object is based on the carnal relation,
phenomenology can give rise to what Husserl once called a
transcendental deduction of flesh.36 The task of this deduction
would be to analyse the limits of flesh (in this regard, finitude
would be its centre), and the typical system of possible references
from one flesh to the other. It would need to proceed in at least
 Caress and Impact 147

the following two directions: the deduction of sexual difference as

a reference from one flesh to another flesh; the deduction of the
political body as the reference from one flesh to the community
of all flesh. Its significance would thus be analogous to the Kantian
deduction: it provides an analysis of the conditions of the possi-
bility of the objectivity of the object. Yet Husserl never undertook
this deduction, and the programme that we have outlined which
is in part an analytic of incarnation exceeds phenomenology. One
might also be surprised that the existential analytic which, among
other things, unfolds the radical implications of intentionality,37
does not include any analysis of the carnal relation. It is confined
to a gender-neutral Dasein.38 Could this be due to the fact that the
space inhabited by the flesh is irreducible to time? Once again, it is
necessary to recall that one of the reasons behind the interruption
of Being and Time at the threshold of the section which was
supposed to base intentional consciousness on ecstatic temporality
was precisely this irreduciblity of space to temporality.39 If flesh
is absent from the existential analytic, is this not because flesh
poses a threat to the privilege of temporality, and everything that
derives from it? This question will, in a certain sense, occupy us
from now on.
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Problem of Time

The synthesis that identifies the body presented over there with the
other flesh appresented in an absolute here also identifies my own
nature with the others own nature. This give rise to the consti-
tution of an objective nature. Husserl observes:

In that way the coexistence of my polar Ego and the other

Ego, of my whole concrete ego and his, my intentional life
and his, my realities and his in short, a common time-form
is primally instituted; and thus every primordial temporality
automatically acquires the significance of being merely an
original mode of appearance of Objective temporality to a
particular subject.1

Shared temporality, which presupposes an objective nature and

objective world, appears to stem from the constitution of the alter
ego. By following the explicit course of Husserls analysis, it would
seem impossible that such a temporality would precede this consti-
tution. We have repeatedly suggested, nonetheless, this possibility
by raising the question of whether the other has not already been
introduced into the self-constitution of the incarnate living present,
and moreover, whether original temporality was not a relation to
the other. This relation has now come to signify a carnal relation,
sexual difference, caress and impact.
Lets begin by fleshing out this hypothesis. The whole intentional
analysis of the other is introduced through the distinction between
the here and the there. We have already tried to demonstrate the
150 FLESH AND BODY

difficulties that this distinction raises, but we have reserved an

examination of the most serious one. Here and there designate a
relation in a spatial situation. For, as Husserl observes, individual
objects of perception have their reciprocal spatial position on the
basis of their being-together in a single time.2 What can this mean
except that a shared time must be already constituted so that my
flesh that is absolutely here can appear to a body that is over
there, and on this basis, so that the apperceptive transfer which
constitutes the other can take place? How do we reconcile what
Husserl says about this shared time namely, that it is constituted
after the other and in a non-genetic sense with the requirement
of synchrony that is implied by the distribution of the places here
and there? If the constitution of the alter ego already presupposes
itself (a claim which we have repeatedly verified), would it not be
the case that this alterity already operates more deeply within the
self-constitution of time? Does not the incarnate living present,
by virtue of its incarnation, refer to a carnal relation, that is, to
carnal difference? It is thus necessary (due to Husserls insistence on
bringing together the modes of givenness of the other and the past)
to enquire into the original and temporal hyle. By turning toward
Husserls lectures in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness
of Internal Time, we will descend into the obscure depths of the
ultimate consciousness which constitutes all such temporality as
belongs to mental processes.3 Without doing so, any interpretation
of phenomenology runs the risk of being criticized as insufficient,
since temporality plays the role of an archi-foundation for all inten-
tional analyses.
Husserl opens his lectures by putting objective time out of play,
and in so doing he appears to exclude any implication of the other
in temporality. Lets first determine the sense and the residue of this
epoch. Since the goal is to provide an analysis of the consciousness
of time, the exclusion in question is the complete exclusion of
all transcending presuppositions concerning what exists.4 More
precisely, Husserl does not allow a pre-given objective time, for
which one would then seek to establish the subjective conditions
of its appearing. The problem is not to know how a constituted
time appears5 but to constitute an appearing time, an appearing
duration, as appearing.6 The phenomenological given is the
immanent time of the flowing of consciousness. The plurivocity of
the concept of immanence, however, makes it important to specify
 The Problem of Time 151

in what sense the term is being employed here. At the same time,
we will define positively the residue of the reduction of objective
time, that is, the phenomenological datum.
What the suspension of objective time involves will perhaps
become clearer still if we work out a parallel with space, since
space and time exhibit such significant and much-noted analogies.7
To be conscious of space is to have the contents of visual sensations
[Empfindungsinhalte] that found the appearing of things situated
in space. After abstracting every transcendent signification, what
remains are the primary contents8 that Husserl in Ideas I calls
the hyle. The analogy with the reduction of qualities becomes even
more explicit:

The sensed red is a phenomenological datum that, animated by

a certain apprehension-function, presents an objective quality;
it is not itself a quality. The perceived red, not the sensed red,
is a quality in the proper sense, that is, a determination of the
appearing thing. The sensed red is called red only equivocally,
for red is the name of a real quality.9

If the temporal given that the analysis takes as its theme is a

hyletic given, then this means that immanence is understood in
the sense of actual immanence.
Heidegger, in his brief preface to the German edition of On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, confirms
this definition of the theme: The theme that led to the present
research is the temporal constitution of the pure given of sensation
and, underlying it, the auto-constitution of phenomenological
time. That which is decisive in this work is the throwing into
relief the intentional character of the consciousness of time, and, in
a general manner, the increasing clarity that intentionality receives
as its principle. Husserl confirms this as well:

If we give the name sense to a phenomenological datum that

by means of apprehension makes us conscious of something
objective as given incarnately present, which is then said to
be objectively perceived, we must likewise distinguish between
something temporal that is sensed and something temporal
that is perceived. The latter refers to objective time. The
former, however, is not itself objective time (or position in
152 FLESH AND BODY

objective time) but the phenomenological datum through whose

empirical apperception the relation to objective time becomes
constituted.10

In other words, if the objectivity of the object (the perceived) is

not constituted in the hyle, then it depends on incarnation.
Intentionality has a twofold correlative structure: noetic-
noematic and hyle-morphic. Lets clarify the latter correlation.
There are two classes of lived experiences: (1) sensual lived
experiences, which are the contents of sensation or hyletic data
such as they are given through sound, touch, etc. Although they
are not moments of the perceived, they are adumbrations of
these moments. They are the actual but non-intentional compo-
nents of lived experience. (2) The lived experiences that bestow
meaning [morph-noesis] and that inform matter are the ones that
introduce intentionality.11 As a result, the flow of lived experi-
ences the stream of phenomenological being has a stuff-stratum
and a noetic stratum.12 Phenomenology is split into a hyletic and
a noetic phenomenology. In Ideas I Husserl affirms that hyletic
phenomenology is subordinated to noetic phenomenology.13 But,
then, how can we understand the fact that it is nevertheless
within the hyle that the auto-constitution of time, as an absolute
instance, takes place? The analyses of Ideas I unfold on the level
of constituted temporality and only enquire into noetic acts. On
this level, the hyletic is necessarily subordinate to the noetic. But,
while these acts accomplish their work of unification, the passive
syntheses, which are the hyle for these acts, continue to take
place. If one wants to give constitution its full and radical sense
as a phenomenological Idealism, then it is necessary to proceed
to the constitution of a hyle that is no longer relative: an archi-
hyle, a temporal hyle.14 If the hyle is a non-intentional passivity
that enables consciousness to be intentional,15 that is to say a
consciousness of something other than itself that enables inten-
tionality to emerge; and if it is the ultimate presupposition of all
active constitution, then it is from the archi-original hyle that the
intentional morph emerges. Where and how does the hyle give
rise to the morph? Where and how does this distinction between
the intentional and what is non-intentional, between the ego and
the non-ego, between the ego and what originally affects it get
embodied? What is the origin of intentionality?
 The Problem of Time 153

This question is answered by the central question of On the

Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, namely,
the question of the origin, the essence and the possibility of a pure
experience of time as the form of all experience in general. This is
not a mere repetition of the Kantian approach; in Husserls eyes,
Kant is still guided by a pre-constituted given. Nor is it a regression
toward the psychological origin of the representation of time, in
search of the original materials of sensation from which the objective
intuition of space and time would emerge. Husserl explains:

What does interest us are experiences [Erlebnisse] with respect to

their objective sense and descriptive content We seek to bring
the a priori of time to clarity by exploring the consciousness
of time, by bringing its essential constitution to light, and by
exhibiting the apprehension-contents and act-characters that
pertain perhaps specifically to time and to which the a priori
temporal laws essentially belong.16

In order to highlight the specificity of phenomenological analysis,

Husserl begins with a critical exposition of Brentanos view.17
Brentano believes to have discovered the origin of time in
original associations. Consider the flow of a melody: when one
tone is succeeded by another, the first one does not purely and
simply disappear. Otherwise, we could only ever be conscious of
one tone and then another tone or even of a pause in between them.
But we would never have the melody itself or as such. It is thus
necessary for there to be a specific modification in virtue of which
each sensation of a tone, after the stimulus fades away, awakens
a similar representation that is enriched with a temporal determi-
nation, and does so continuously. Husserl writes:

The stimulus generates the present sensation-content. If the

stimulus disappears, the sensation also disappears. But then
the sensation itself becomes productive: it produces for itself a
phantasy-representation the same or almost the same in content
and enriched by the temporal character. This representation in
turn awakens a new one, which is joined to it in continuous
fashion, and so on. Brentano calls this continuous annexation of
a temporally modified representation to the given representation
original association.18
154 FLESH AND BODY

This analysis turns the imagination into the origin of time, but
its result is that there is no perception of succession and change.
We believe that we hear a melody and therefore that we still hear
what is just past, but this is only an illusion [Schein] proceeding
from the vivacity [Lebhaftigkeit] of the original association.19
Whatever may be the psychological character of this theory,
Husserl recognizes the presence of a phenomenological core within
it, before going on to criticize it. Succession and duration do
appear; in other words, the unity of the consciousness that
encompasses intentionally what is present and what is past is a
phenomenological datum.20 But do the past, and more generally,
time, appear in the mode of the imagination, as Brentano believes?
If that were the case, then one would not be able to differentiate
between the perception of a succession and the memory of the
perception of a succession at some other time, or even an imagined
succession. This difficulty suffices to call into question Brentanos
entire analysis of the original consciousness of time, and it calls
for a phenomenology of time consciousness which, as always,
begins by disentangling the equivocations resulting from the lack
of necessary distinctions and by further scrutinizing its presupposi-
tions. Brentanos basic presupposition is that the apprehension of
a temporal succession can only be non-temporal [intemporelle] or
that the intuition of a lapse of time can only be a fixed point, but
this is contradicted by what is given phenomenologically:

It is certainly evident that the perception of a temporal object

itself has temporality, that the perception of duration itself
presupposes the duration of perception, that the perception of
any temporal form itself has its temporal form. If we disregard
all transcendencies, there remains to perception in all of its
phenomenological constituents the phenomenological tempo-
rality that belongs to its irreducible essence.21

There is no better example to demonstrate the phenomenological

constitution of temporality and to bring out the temporality of
consciousness than a temporal object (Zeitobjekt), an object with
its own temporal extension and that is spread out temporally.
Lets return again to a succession of tones in a melody.
Husserl writes: We now exclude all transcendent apprehension
and positing and take the tone purely as a hyletic datum.22 The
 The Problem of Time 155

phenomenological reduction is accompanied here by a reduction

that abstracts the objectifying apprehension the morph since
it seeks to describe its temporal constitution. But, in a movement
that evokes the Cartesian Meditations in which Husserl abstracted
from the alter ego in order to investigate its origin in constitution,
the 1905 lectures on time go back to the hyle in order to show
the phenomenological temporality of acts. However, Husserl does
not, at least not thematically, enquire into the passive constitution
of the hyle. Given that the passage to idealism has not yet been
accomplished, the radicalization of constitution has yet to be
required.
The pure hyletic given is descriptively given in two manners.
I can focus my attention on the tone itself the tone aimed at
which commences, remains and then ceases; it gradually fades
away with the weakening of the retention into the past. The tone
has its own temporality; it is the same. In other words, its temporal
unity is presupposed and the function of the apprehension is not
truly inhibited. But I can also direct my attention toward the mode
of givenness of the tone the tone as it is intended which appears
to be continually different. Husserl observes: I am conscious of
the tone and of the duration it fills in a continuity of modes in
a continual flow.23 When the tone commences, I am conscious
of the tone as present. This continues as long as I am conscious
of one of its phases as present. Throughout this whole flow of
consciousness, one and the same tone is intended as enduring, as
now enduring.24 When the tone ceases, I am still conscious of it in
retention. I am still conscious of the tone in the full extension of
its duration, but it then stands before me as something dead, so to
speak something no longer being vitally generated, a formation
no longer animated by the generative point of the now but continu-
ously modified and sinking back into emptiness.25 It is thus
necessary to distinguish the object that endures and flows the
tone from the object in its mode of flowing. Husserl hesitates to
call the latter consciousness of the tone because it is precisely what
authorizes the relation of consciousness to an object:

We will not be able to term this appearance the object in its

mode of running off consciousness (any more than we will
give the name consciousness to the spatial phenomenon, the
body in its way of appearing from this die or that, from near or
156 FLESH AND BODY

far). The consciousness, the experience, is related to its object

by means of an appearance in which precisely the object in its
way of appearing [Objekt im Wie] stands before us.26

The appearance of the object in its mode of flowing is

analogous to the adumbration of a transcendent body; it is not a
consciousness of , since it lacks the moment of the unity. Nor,
for the same reason, is it even an appearance27 in the sense of an
objective appearance.28 Instead, it is an immanent diversity that
is given in a continual modification: a phenomenon of flowing.
To describe how this diversity is unified is to describe the consti-
tution of temporality and to seek the origin of form in the hyle.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Flesh and Time

Phenomenological time is constituted within the flowing of

phenomena, that is, by their modes of appearing in the
consciousness of time. The description here is therefore essen-
tially noematic it describes the acts constituting time without
ever becoming noetic and thematizing the temporal constitution
of these acts themselves. This will turn out to be one of the
principal difficulties raised by the lectures on time. What can one
say about the object in its mode of flowing, about the flowing of
the phenomena?

We know that the running-off phenomenon is a continuity of

constant changes. This continuity forms an inseparable unity,
inseparable into extended sections that could exist by themselves
and inseparable into phases that could exist by themselves,
into points of the continuity. The parts that we single out by
abstraction can exist only in the whole running-off; and this is
equally true of the phases, the points that belong to the running-
off continuity. We can also say of this continuity, with evidence,
that in a certain sense it is immutable; that is, with regard
to its form. It is inconceivable that the continuity of phases
would contain the same phase-mode twice or even contain it as
stretched over an entire component section. Just as each point of
time (and each extent of time) differs individually, so to speak,
from every other one and just as no one of them can occur twice,
so no running-off mode can occur twice.1
158 FLESH AND BODY

The demonstration of the continuity of the flowing of

phenomena is the first step on the way toward answering
the question of knowing how, from the diversity of modes of
flowing [hyle], the unity of the flowing continuity [morph]
can emerge. But, without knowing the whole of the temporal
constitution of acts, how as Husserl says, can we know that
the flowing of the phenomena that constitute temporal objects
is continuous? Necessarily, this would come from the temporal
objects themselves, whose unity is thus presupposed.2 This
attests to a methodological privileging of the constituted. Can
this privilege be maintained, however, on the most radical level
of constitutive analysis? When it is a question of the consti-
tution of the transcendental absolute, does one have the right
to consider the object as a structural rule for a noetic series of
acts? Or more precisely, can one consider the temporal object as
a structural law for a multiplicity of noeses, when it is subjected
to the very same temporal form that is being constituted? Does
not the constitution of temporality, as the constitution of the
alter ego, already presuppose itself?3 And if that is the case, how
can it be explained?
Lets continue by picking up the thread of Husserls analysis.
What must the modes of flowing be in order to provide this conti-
nuity? Husserl explains:

First of all, we emphasize that the running-off modes of an

immanent temporal object have a beginning, a source-point,
so to speak. This is the running-off mode with which the
immanent object begins to exist. It is characterized as now. In
the steady progression of the running-off modes we then find
the remarkable circumstance that each later running-off phase
is itself a continuity, a continuity that constantly expands a
continuity of pasts. To the continuity of running-off modes of
the objects duration, we contrast the continuity of running-off
modes belonging to each point of the duration. This second
continuity is obviously included in the first, the continuity of
running-off modes of the objects duration. The running-off
continuity of an enduring object is therefore a continuum
whose phases are the continua of the running-off modes
belonging to the different time-points of the duration of the
object.4
 Flesh and Time 159

What is remarkable about the structure described above is that

the continuity of the modes of flowing of the duration of the
object the constituted duration [la dure constitue] includes
the continuity of these modes of flowing at each point of this
duration, that is, the continuity of its own constituting phases.
The constitutive hyletic diversity is included in the constituted
unity of the object that endures; to put it differently, it is because
the phases of the continuity are themselves in continuity that the
opposition between the hyletic diversity and the intentional unity
is overcome within the hyle itself. Thus, the hyle constitutes the
morph.
Where does this continuity come from and how can it be expli-
cated? Husserl answers:

The source-point with which the production of the enduring

object begins is a primal impression. This consciousness is
in a state of constant change: the tone-now present incar-
nately present continuously changes (scil. consciously, in
consciousness) into something that has been; an always new
tone-now continuously relieves the one that has passed over
into modification. But when the consciousness of the tone-now,
the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention
itself is a now in turn, something actually existing. While it
is actually present itself (but not an actually present tone), it
is retention of the tone that has been. A ray of meaning can
be directed towards the now: toward the retention; but it can
also be directed towards what is retentionally intended: toward
the past tone. Every actually present now of consciousness,
however, is subject to the law of modification. It changes into
retention of retention and does so continuously. Accordingly, a
fixed continuum of retention arises in such a way that each later
point is retention for every earlier point. And each retention is
already a continuum.5

Retention should not be understood in an empiricist manner as

a weakening of the first impression, as a kind of echo. The echo
of a tone is certainly a muffled sound, but it is actually given in
a now. This signifies that the tone given in the retention the
past tone as such is not included in the now as a primary
content. Husserl writes: The retentional tone is not a present
160 FLESH AND BODY

tone but precisely a tone primarily remembered in the now:

it is not really on hand [reell vorhanden] in the retentional
consciousness.6 Retention is the original consciousness of the
just passed, and thus is the consciousness of time: it includes both
the present and the past as such. This unity of the present and
past is not actual then there would be no consciousness of time
but intentional. Retention is a specific kind of intentionality in
that it does not proceed from the activity of the ego and in that
it is not an intentionality of the will but (to employ concepts
that Husserl will develop after 1905) an intentional modification
taking place within the framework of pure passivity.7 How could
retention be taken as an act,8 since it is constitutive of immanent
temporality and thus constitutes the universal form of all acts in
general?
The retention thus refers to an archi-impression that precedes
it. The gap between the aim itself (the retention) and that which
it intends (the impression) is the gap that constitutes immanent
time itself, a phase-shift [dephasage] which enables the phases
of the flux to give rise to temporality. What is the nature of this
archi-impression that orders the whole retentional continuum and
that continually produces modifications of modifications? Husserl
answers: The primal impression is something absolutely unmod-
ified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being.
Primal impression has as its content that which the word now
signifies, insofar as it is taken in the strictest sense. Each new now
is the content of a new primal impression.9 And further:

The primal impression is the absolute beginning of this

production, the primal source, that from which everything else
is continuously produced. But it itself is not produced; it does
not arise as something produced but through genesis spontanea;
it is primal generation. It does not spring from anything (it has
no seed); it is primal creation. If it is said: A new now continu-
ously forms on the now that becomes modified into a not-now,
or a source quite suddenly engenders it or originates it, these
are metaphors. It can only be said: Consciousness is nothing
without the impression.10

The retentional modification of an original impression the way

in which the pure data of sensation is experienced describes
 Flesh and Time 161

the fundamental structure of temporality. And Husserls lectures

on time will continually exploit its resources. Its power and
fecundity will be shown through the analyses of recollection,
waiting, simultaneity and objective time. It is not necessary to
pursue every detail of these analyses in order to shed light on
the essential difficulties faced by the constitution of temporality.
Lets begin with the difficulty tied to the noematic point of view
adopted by the lectures on time. Husserl brings out the essence
of the lived experiences of consciousness, and temporal objects,
starting with immanent temporality, are their noematic correlates.
The analysis does not ever become noetic and orient itself toward
the temporal constitution of the flux. And it even appears that it
cannot do so. For, in the flux of lived experiences that constitute
time, in the flux of the noeses of duration, there is no duration.11
Duration is the form of something, the form of a constancy, and
by definition, there is no constancy in the flux. By identifying this
flux with absolute subjectivity,12 does Husserl not run the risk
of succumbing to an a-temporal conception of consciousness13
analogous to the one he denounced in Brentano? This is not so
certain, mainly because the a-temporality in question (assuming
that it were governed by the same concept of time, which is not the
case) does not concern the same type of consciousness and conse-
quently does not have the same meaning. A-temporality is real for
Brentano, whereas the a-temporality of absolute consciousness first
signifies negatively that it is not intratemporal, and second signifies
positively this too is a problem, but for other reasons that it is
the original time [Urzeit] which is not yet truly time.14
This first difficulty is linked to another one, namely, the diffi-
culty of the unity of the flux, or better, the duplication of it. By
remaining exclusively within a noematic orientation, it is perhaps
possible to unify the flux on its own, on the basis of the double
intentionality of retention (the retention of an impression and
the retention of a retention) without passing through an ego who
performs syntheses.15 But if the analysis turns toward the lived
experiences themselves and toward the temporal constitution
of the flux of lived experience that constitutes time, then the
question of the unity of the flux is raised again. First of all, it is
raised because the lived experiences that constitute the flux should
also be ordered in a flux; the first flux thus becomes a unity that
is constituted by a second constituting flux. The danger is thus
162 FLESH AND BODY

twofold: either the constituting and the constituted coincide in

the flux in such a way that the constitutive analysis is no longer
possible; or, it is necessary to infinitely multiply the flux in such
a way that the constitutive analysis becomes interminable. These
two hypotheses attest to the impossibility of any constitution of
an absolutely original temporality. From the outset, they destroy
any possibility of an absolute origin and instead lead back to an
archi-facticity. The question of the unity of the flux is raised a
second time after we move, as the Cartesian Meditations require,
to a genetic phenomenology that recognizes time as the universal
form of all egological genesis and as the universal a priori of all
experience.16 It is thereby necessary for the ego to constitute the
time (passive constitution only has the sense of a constitution in
which the ego does not actively and reflexively take part) that
constitutes the ego. In other words, it is necessary for the ego to be
derived from the ego that originates. Husserl clearly articulates this
aporia in a manuscript from 1932: The flux must be a temporal
apriori in relation to the functioning ego; this temporality is itself
flowing. The flow is always anterior [im Voraus] but the ego is also
anterior .17
These difficulties can be reduced to difficulties concerning the
constitution of temporal hyle to the extent that all lived experi-
ences are impressional and are given first as impressions.18 In a
manuscript from 1932, Husserl states:

However, I need two things all the time: on the one hand, the
flowing field of lived experiences which constantly is linked
to an Ur-impression, which vanishes in the retention and
before, the protention; and on the other, the I is affected by and
motivated toward action. But is the Ur-impression not already
an apperceptive unity, something noematic coming from the
I, and does the regressive inquiry not always lead back to an
apperceptive unity?19

Is this not to say that the flux of hyletic data refers to another
flux, and that this is iterated infinitely? Without, once and for all,
deciding these dilemmas through which phenomenology tries to
recapture its proper origin, it is possible to trace them back to a
common root, to provide an account of them, and to interpret
them.
 Flesh and Time 163

The hyle is not conceivable without reference to flesh, since it

is through flesh that consciousness is linked to its hyletic infra-
structure.20 This applies to human-mundane consciousness as
well as to absolute transcendental consciousness. In contrast with
psychological sensualism, Husserl was tempted to conceive the
hyletic data independently from flesh.21 But (1) in distinguishing
between Empfindung (sensation) and Empfindnis (feeling), he
transformed the traditional concept of sensation as the effect of
an external body.22 Subsequently, the rejection of empiricist sensu-
alism is not equivalent to a rejection of all sensualism in general;
and (2) flesh must always be given in the temporal flux. Without
this flux, the now of the tone would never be incarnated, as his
lectures say. And, moreover, flesh must precede temporality if
temporality is constituted in a hyletic flux.
As strange as this priority of flesh over immanent time may
seem, it is even stranger that it did not escape Husserl. It is already
implied in the text23 in which Husserl critiques his own analysis
of internal time consciousness and asks himself whether he should
posit a universal intentional drive [pulsionnelle] that constitutes
the original present and ensures the unity of the flux. This priority
of flesh over time is expressly taken up and recognized in a
manuscript from 1930: In the streaming archi-presence we have
an always invariable perception of flesh, and so in the temporali-
zation of immanent time, the perception of my flesh goes through
continuously this time in its entirety, constituting synthetically,
identically and omnitemporally this flesh.24 If the perception of my
flesh which can only signify here the perception of my flesh by
itself (ultimately, contact) traverses continuously and completely
through time, then it is the very movement of temporalization. It
would be an absolute movement that is not temporal, because time
originates from it. Flesh constitutes time. But, since all flesh refers
to another flesh, this means that difference and the carnal relation
temporalize time.
We can thereby attempt to fill two lacunae in Husserls analysis
of time. The first concerns the original protention. It is remarkable
that the protention that constitutes the horizon of the impressional
now is only introduced in the context of a description of recol-
lection.25 This evades, however, the problem of an actual original
protention, that is, the problem of the opening of a temporal
horizon prior in time to the archi-impression, which is purportedly
164 FLESH AND BODY

the origin of time. If Husserl never provides a genuine description

of the protention, is this not due to the fact that the demonstration
of an archi-protention runs the risk of invalidating the fundamental
structure of temporality that nevertheless demands and requires
this protention? Does not conceiving the original protention
without contradiction presuppose an intentional drive that aims
to enter into another flux and that predisposes one toward this
goal? Does this not establish the carnal relation as the principle of
temporality? According to this hypothesis that there is a double
origin or a duplicated origin of time, there is nothing absurd about
thinking that the temporal horizon of my sensation is opened by
the other. It also becomes possible to account for the second lacuna
that Husserl will increasingly assign to life. The vivacity of a life
can never be thematized, namely, the constitution of a new now,
the constant wellspring of novelty, and the infinite originality of the
now. If a new now always succeeds the now that has just passed
and if in each now there is always another now that is constituted,
and if the Absolute is present only in being deferred-delayed
[diffrant],26 this is because flesh, which is originally altered, is
constitutive. The archi-source is the source of another source. This
original differentiation27 is the work of carnal difference. Does
Husserl not accept this claim when he writes, The data of sensation
themselves are not egoic, but are foreign to the ego [Ich-fremd],28
or in other words, that the archi-impression comes from the other?
Perhaps there is no longer a contradiction in the relation between
the ego and time, nor an infinite regress in the constitution of the
flux. The ego can draw its origin from time, even though it is the
origin of time. The same flux can be both constituting and consti-
tuted, assuming that two egos are carnally linked and that absolute
transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity.29
By defining time as a relation of the ego to the alter ego, as a
carnal relation, we have only unpacked the sense of flesh. We have
spelled out the consequences of the solidarity and reciprocal impli-
cation of the constitution of my flesh and another flesh, or more
precisely, of the fact that the constitution of my flesh is immediately
the constitution of another flesh and that the constitution of my
own flesh [propre] is always the constitution of what is not my own
[impropre]. This definition contradicts the principle of the closure
of the ego, as long as transcendental subjectivity is not understood
as intersubjectivity. But the carnal relation is also the relation of
 Flesh and Time 165

flesh to the body. My flesh is incorporated because it is affected

by another flesh. Its auto-affection is thus immediately a hetero-
affection. Husserl observes that The functioning of my flesh is
my being-actively [Ttigsein] in operation and my being-affected
[Affiziertwerden].30 Doesnt Husserl describe the temporalization
of time here, since what originally affects me is the original hyle as
the core of what is alien to the I, a core which is the first non-me,
the other flesh? To conceive time as a carnal relation is to conceive
it as the incorporation of my flesh. Through its incorporation, flesh
gives rise to time [donne le temps].
If flesh as the carnal relation and carnal difference gives
rise to time, then the second of the two necessary conditions
for the pairing that constitutes the other the purely egological
constitution of temporality cannot be fulfilled.31 So, all of the
difficulties encountered by Husserl in his constitutive analyses of
the alter ego and of time arise from the origin of all constitution
in general. The universal a priori of constitution is precisely the
relation to the other. And, if that is the case, it is because flesh
which, to recall, is the site of all givenness cannot be conceived in
isolation, that is, outside of an interconnection with another flesh
or other fleshes. The absolute of constitution is thus con-tingent.
And, to the extent that it leads to a reactivating unearthing
of the most archaic layers of constitution, it moves toward its
proper foundation. Phenomenology gives rise to an adversarial
and anarchic foundation, a phenomenon whose phenomenality it
no longer recognizes. It exposes an archi-facticity that it claimed
to reduce.
This archi-facticity the original con-tingency of flesh will
never be derived from an intentional analysis. Yet, at the same
time, it does seem that it can be the theme of an existential analytic
understood as a hermeneutics of facticity that seeks, through an
ek-static interpretation of intentionality, to displace radically the
primacy of the subjectivity of consciousness. The flesh as both
my own and not my own [propre et impropre] gives rise to
time. This signifies, at the very least, that flesh the sense of flesh
does not derive from temporality. The foundation of perceptual
consciousness in Dasein which required the temporal sense of
the presentation to be retained as a characteristic of perception32
cannot be realized. Not only does incarnation constitute the
essential feature of perception but also flesh cannot be traced back
166 FLESH AND BODY

to temporality as its principle. Flesh thus cannot find a place within

the analytic of Dasein precisely because the latter is oriented by and
dominated by temporality.
We have sought to establish the necessity of an analytic of incar-
nation and to indicate its task. It cannot take place in the space of
the subjectobject relationship, since we have established that the
flesh belongs as much, or as little, to the side of the object as it
does to the side of the subject. Without this analytic, it will not be
possible to determine the deep sense of phenomenology, which is
also to say the sense and the essence of modern metaphysics. And,
the period of subjectivity has been named and conceived as such
ever since the question of being and the call for thinking. So, this
passage or leap from philosophy to thinking and from thinking
back to philosophy defines more than a historical situation.
Without this analytic, it runs the risk of remaining, in turn, insuf-
ficiently understood.

Did Husserl ever reach this ultimate clarity that would allow
him to die in peace? Did he ever have to acknowledge that
philosophy as a rigorous science, even apodictically rigorous:
the dream is over?33 But what awakening led philosophy to
appear as a dream? Husserls wife reports that, when he was on
his deathbed, she came to him one morning. He seemed to have
awoken from a deep sleep. With a striking expression of joy on
his face and his arms wide open, he said: Ich habe etwas ganz
Wunderbares gesehen. Nein ich kann es Dir nicht sagen. Nein!
[I have seen something very wonderful. No, I cannot tell you.
No!]34
 NOTES

Translators Introduction
1 See Eugen Fink, De la phnomnologie, trans. Didier Franck (Paris:
Les ditions de Minuit, 1974).
2 It is interesting to note here that a question from Franck to Henry
about the nature of the relation between Henrys phenomenology of
life and Husserls phenomenology of the impression gave rise to
Henrys fascinating 1990 critical study of Husserl entitled Material
Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), p. xii.
3 The biographical details of Francks academic career as well as his
perceptions about the Catholic phenomenology I discuss below
have been obtained from conversations with Franck himself.
A collection of interviews with Jean-Luc Marion in which his
relationship with Franck is briefly discussed has just been released:
see Jean-Luc Marion, La rigueur des choses: Entretiens avec Dan
Arbib (Paris: Flammarion, 2012).
4 See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second
Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andr Schuwer (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1989), 40. Also, see that the French version of
the Cartesian Meditations translates the expression leibhaftig as en
chair et en os (in flesh and bone), while the English translates it as in
person. The French rendering better preserves the idiomatic emphasis
of Leib in German. See Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 139; Mditations
cartsiennes et les confrences de Paris, trans. Marc de Launay (Pairs:
PUF, 1994), p. 157; the first translation of the Meditations into French
was undertaken by Emmanuel Levinas in 1930, see Mditations
cartsiennes Introduction la phenomenology, trans. Gabrielle Pfeiffer
and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Vrin, 1930). For the English, see
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.
Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 109.
168 Notes

5 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 14, p. 33.

6 Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problme de lespace (Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1986).
7 Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina
Bergo and Philippe Farah (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2012).
8 Didier Franck, Heidegger et le christianisme: lexplication silencieuse
(Paris: PUF, 2004).
9 Didier Franck, Lun-pour-lautre: Levinas et la signification (Paris:
PUF, 2008).
10 See Jacques Derrida, On Touching Jean-Luc Nancy, trans.
Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005),
p. 226ff.
11 See especially the two essays Au-del de la phnomnologie and La
dramatique des phnomnes both in Didier Franck, Dramatique des
phnomnes (Paris: PUF, 2001).
12 Ibid., p. 119.
13 Husserl appears to intimate that time, as the universal form of all
egological genesis, is absolutely static: see for example Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations, 37, Time as the Universal Form of all
Egological Genesis. He writes, The phenomenology developed at
first is merely static (p. 76).
14 See Bernet for a subtle reading of the various manifestations of world
in Husserl: Rudolf Bernet, Husserls Concept of the World, Crises
in Continental Philosophy, Arleen Dallery, Charles E. Scott and P.
Holley Roberts (eds) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 321.
15 Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), 53, p. 180.
16 See Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time:
Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009); James Mensch, Husserls
Account of Our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
University Press, 2010).
17 For example, Cairns translates the German einer apperzeptiven
bertragung von meinem Leib her haben as must have derived
this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my animate organism.
Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 140; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50, p. 110.
18 For this distinction, see Translators Introduction, in Husserl, Ideas
II, p. xiv.
 Notes 169

Introduction
1 Hegel writes, With Descartes the culture of modern times, the
thought of modern Philosophy, really begins to appear and With
him the new epoch in Philosophy begins. See G. W. F. Hegel,
Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and
Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson
(Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 217 and
223 respectively. Similarly, Heidegger writes The whole of modern
metaphysics, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the
interpretation of the being and of truth opened up by Descartes.
He continues, With Descartes, there begins the completion of
Western metaphysics. See Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track,
trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), pp. 66 and 75 respectively.
2 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 395.
3 Ibid., 16, p. 73. Husserl also writes, Though in a very general
sense, all modern philosophy is Cartesian, and similarly, all physics
is Galilean. Husserliana, Bd. VI, p. 425.
4 See Husserl, Ideas II, 32, p. 58.
5 See Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), passim.
6 Edmund Husserl, Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and
Mathematics, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
1993), p. 251.
7 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten
(Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983).
8 Heidegger writes, And what is the matter at stake in philosophical
investigation? In accordance with the same tradition, it is for
Husserl as for Hegel the subjectivity of consciousness. For Husserl,
the Cartesian Meditations were not only the topic of the Paris
lectures in February of 1929. Rather, from the time following the
Logical Investigations, their spirit accompanied the impassioned
course of his philosophical investigations to the end. See Martin
Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking
in Basic Writings: from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of
Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell, expanded edn (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 439.
9 Husserl writes, A work currently in preparation that is to appear,
170 Notes

I hope, at the beginning of next year, which in this time of haste

characterized by a theory ordered by a tedious and sober objectivity,
proves that a transcendental phenomenology, in my mind, embraces
the universal horizon of problems of philosophy and holds the
proper method. Husserliana, Bd. V, pp. 1401.
10 Edmund Husserl, Briefe an Roman Ingarden: Mit Erluterungen
und Erinnerungen an Husserl, ed. Roman Ingarden (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 59.
11 In 1933, Fink warns in an essay endorsed by Husserl:
The analysis of the experience of the other in the Fifth
Meditation is only a development of the reduction, and not
a thematic interpretation of empathy. See Eugen Fink,
The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and
Contemporary Criticism, in The Phenomenology of Husserl:
Selected Critical Readings, ed. and trans. R. O. Elveton (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 116.
12 Translators note: Francks version of this heading varies from
the English translation, which we have followed here. In place of
Sphere of Transcendental Being, the French heading literally reads
La sphre ontologique [Seinsphre].
13 Throughout I am constantly referring to the German text,
Cartesianische Meditationen, published in 1950 as the first volume
of Husserliana, Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke. The French
translation of G. Pfeiffer and E. Levinas, which I have not failed to
consult, was published in 1931 and was not based on this definitive
edition. Also, I will cite only the section numbers (). Finally, here
let it be noted once and for all that I (Franck) have often modified
the available French translations, and especially the themes that are
essential to the intention of my work.

Chapter one
1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 2, p. 5.
2 This is to say a non-empirical historicity, as is shown in the Crisis
of European Sciences: To bring latent reason to the understanding
of its possibilities and thus to bring to insight the possibility of
metaphysics as a true possibility this is the only way to put
metaphysics or universal philosophy on the strenuous road to
realization. It is the only way to decide whether the telos which
was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy
 Notes 171

that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible,

through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to
manifest reason and forever seeking its own norms through this, its
truth and genuine human nature whether this telos, then, is merely
a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely
one among many other civilizations and histories, or whether Greek
humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential
to humans as such, its entelechy Philosophy and science would
accordingly be the historical movement through which universal
reason, inborn in humanity as such, is revealed. Husserl, Crisis of
European Sciences, 6, pp. 1516.
3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 2, p. 5.
4 Husserl writes, Each time, while situated in its cultural domain,
there is a radical and universal reform in which resides a driving
force that gives way to a deep spiritual crisis. Husserliana, Bd. VII,
p. 7.
5 It is only because the philosophical epoch precedes the
transcendental reduction: The epoch that we are undertaking shall
consist of our completely abstaining from any judgment regarding
the doctrinal content of any previous philosophy and effecting all of
our demonstrations within the limits set by this abstention. Husserl,
Ideas I, 18, p. 34.
6 Husserl writes, Descartes himself presupposed an ideal of science,
the ideal approximated by geometry and mathematical natural
science. As a fateful prejudice this ideal determines philosophies
for centuries and hiddenly determines the Meditations themselves.
Obviously it was, for Descartes, a truism from the start that the
all-embracing science must have the form of a deductive system, in
which the whole structure rests, ordine geometrico, on an axiomatic
foundation that grounds the deduction absolutely. For him a role
similar to that of geometrical axioms in geometry is played in the
all-embracing science by the axiom of the egos absolute certainty
of himself, along with the axiomatic principles innate in the ego
only this axiomatic foundation lies even deeper than that of
geometry and is called on to participate in the ultimate grounding
even of geometrical knowledge. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 3,
pp. 78. See also Husserliana, Bd. VI, pp. 406ff.
7 Husserl, Ideas I, 25, p. 46 (translation modified).
8 Ibid., 21, p. 39 (translation modified). Translators note: here there
is a significant gap between the English and French translations of
Husserl. The French text utilizes the expression intuition donatrice,
while the English text employs the phrase presentive intuition. To
172 Notes

come closer to the French text which shapes Francks analysis, then,
we have opted for the phrase intuitive givenness.
9 In 59 of Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl writes:
Evidence, as has already become apparent to us by the above
explanations, designates that performance on the part of
intentionality which consists in the giving of something-itself [die
intentionale Leistung der Selbstgebung]. More precisely, it is the
universal pre-eminent form of intentionality, of consciousness
of something, in which there is consciousness of the intended-to
objective affair in the mode itself-seized-upon, itself-seen
correlatively, in the mode: being with itself in the manner peculiar
to consciousness. We can also say that it is the primal consciousness:
I am seizing upon it itself originaliter, as contrasted with
seizing upon it in an image or as some other, intuitional or empty,
fore-meaning. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic,
trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 59,
pp. 1578.
10 Husserl, Ideas I, 39, p. 83. Translators note: the French reads
auto-prsence incarne for the English own presence in person.
To remain close to Francks claim, we render this in his text as
incarnate presence.
11 Ibid., 3, p. 10. Translators note: Francks text renders personal as
incarnate, thus explaining the transition to the next paragraph.
12 Husserl writes, Originally, the I move, I do, precedes the I
can do. See Husserl, Ideas II, 60a, p. 273.
13 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena,
trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1985), pp. 401.
14 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, p. 43. Also, Heidegger
writes, What is characteristic of perception? A participant says,
, and is then told that with the Greeks, and precisely in the
distinction between and , hell has already begun.
What is important is the notion of corporeality [Leibhaftigkeit]: in
perception what presences is bodily [leibhaftig]. The translation is
here from the seminar on Thor dated 8 September 1968. See Martin
Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and Franois
Raffoul (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 31.
15 We stick here to the texts published by Husserl himself. We know
now that, from this point of view, the essential is acquired after the
five lectures of 1907 published in his The Idea of Phenomenology.
16 Ibid., p. 63.
 Notes 173

17 This amounts to saying that initially phenomenology is hyletic and

noetic without ever being noematic. The first edition of Logical
Investigations distinguishes between real or phenomenological
content (descriptive psychology) of an act and its intentional
content. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II,
trans. J. N. Findlay (New York and London: Routledge, 1970)
p. 112. Husserl added a note in the second edition: In the First
Edition I wrote real or phenomenological for real. The word
phenomenological like the word descriptive was used in
the First Edition only in connection with real [reelle] elements
of experience, and in the present edition it has so far been used
predominately in this sense. This corresponds to ones natural
starting with the psychological point of view. It became plainer
and plainer, however, as I reviewed the completed Investigations
and pondered on their themes more deeply particularly from
this point onwards that the description of intentional objectivity
as such, as we are conscious of it in the concrete act-experience,
represents a distinct descriptive dimension where purely intuitive
description may be adequately practised, a dimension opposed to
that of real [reellen] act-constituents, but which also deserves to be
called phenomenological. These methodological extensions lead
to important extensions of the field of problems now opening before
us and considerable improvement due to a fully conscious separation
of descriptive levels. Cf. my Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie,
Book I, and particularly what is said of Noesis and Noema in Section
III. See Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 354, fn. 24.
18 Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 86. The variation between
the editions is between brackets.
19 We shall see later why Husserl has not reached this descriptive
evidence in the Logical Investigations.
20 Husserl, Ideas I, 24, p. 44.
21 Ibid., 46, p. 102 (translation modified), where he says any
experience, however extensive, leaves open the possibility that what
is given does not exist in spite of the continual consciousness of its
own presence incarnately present.
22 A later specification of incarnate donation permits us to distinguish
between immanence and transcendence: that which is given by
adumbrations or not.
23 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 498, fn. xxiii.
24 Heidegger writes of this in his Letter on Humanism when he
reflects: The adequate execution and completion of this other
174 Notes

thinking that abandons subjectivity is surely made more difficult by

the fact that in the publication of Being and Time the third division
of the first part, Time and Being, was held back (see p. 87 in this
same volume of essays). Here everything is reversed. The division
in question was held back because thinking failed in the adequate
saying of this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of
the language of metaphysics. See Heidegger, Letter on Humanism,
in Basic Writings, p. 231.
25 Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 44. Heidegger also
writes, Phenomenology consciously and decidedly moved
into the tradition of modern philosophy but in such a way that
transcendental subjectivity attains a more original and universal
determination through phenomenology. See Heidegger, My Way to
Phenomenology, in Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political
Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen and trans. Joan Stambaugh (New
York and London: Continuum, 2003), p. 72.
26 Heidegger writes, Daseins spatialization in its bodily nature
is likewise marked out in accordance with these directions. (This
bodily nature hides a whole problematic of its own, though we
shall not treat it here.) See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 143.
27 Ibid., p. 23.
28 Heidegger writes: Nietzsche declares often enough in his later years
that the body must be made the guideline of observation not only
of human beings but of the world: the projection of the world from
the perspective of the animal and animality. Martin Heidegger,
Nietzsche vol. III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as
Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell and Frank
A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1987) p. 80.
29 Heidegger observes, For Nietzsche, subjectivity is absolute as
subjectivity of the body; that is, of drives and affects; that is to say,
of will to power. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. IV: Nihilism,
trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row 1982), p. 147.
30 Heidegger writes, The bodily in the human is not something
animalistic. HeideggerFink, Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans.
Charles Seibert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979),
p. 146.
31 Heidegger writes, A human is embodied [liebt] only when he lives
[lebt]. See ibid., p. 146.
32 Heidegger writes, human being is a , a living being that lives
only inasmuch as it is a body [leibt]. See Martin Heidegger,
 Notes 175

Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Thomas Sheenan

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 196. Heidegger
also says: We are not first of all alive, only then getting an
apparatus to sustain our living which we call the body, but we are
some body who is alive. Our being embodied is essentially other than
merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know
from the natural science about the body and the way it embodies are
specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body
as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of
things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our
vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when
we subsequently search for the psychical which pertains to the
body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body. Martin
Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, the Will to Power as Art, trans. David
Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 99100; see also The
concept of chaos in vol. III of Heideggers Nietzsche lectures.
33 See Heidegger, Heraclitus, p. 146.
34 Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael
Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 1378.

Chapter two
1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 5, p. 12.
2 Ibid., 6, p. 16.
3 Husserl writes, I distinguish between this transcendental reduction
or phenomenological reduction from the apodictic reduction which
is linked to it. The latter has the task of making possible the
phenomenological reduction. Before I put into practice the apodictic
critique, I must open up a field of critique, here a sphere of experience,
and this transcendental self-experience, I have it thanks to the method
of the phenomenological reduction. Husserliana, Bd. VIII, p. 80.
4 I note in passing that the much shorter way to the transcendental
epoch in my Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy, which I call the Cartesian way
(since it is thought of as being attained merely by reflectively
engrossing oneself in the Cartesian epoch of the Meditations while
critically purifying it of Descartes prejudices and confusions), has
a great shortcoming: while it leads to the transcendental ego in one
leap, as it were, it brings this ego into view as apparently empty
of content, since there can be no preparatory explication; so one
176 Notes

is at a loss, at first, to know what has been gained by it, much

less how, starting with this, a completely new sort of fundamental
science, decisive for philosophy, has been attained. Husserl,
Crisis of European Sciences, 43, p. 155. The distinction between
different paths of the reduction occupies, in addition to the
Crisis, many unpublished manuscripts. One should not forget that,
fundamentally, the principle of a reduction belongs to the Cartesian
epoch of metaphysics.
5 Husserl, Ideas I, 49, p. 109.
6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 8, p. 18.
7 Husserl, Ideas I, 27, p. 51.
8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 8, p. 19.
9 Jacques Derrida collects and analyses the relevant texts in
Husserl in order to show how indication and alterity work from
an original non-presence into pure self-presence and recognize
the phenomenological voice in this pure self-presence as an
auto-affection. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and
Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), Chapter 3,
Meaning as Soliloquy.
10 Husserl writes, Apparently my (the philosophizers) transcendental
ego is, and must be, not only its initial but its sole theme. Without
doubt the sense of the transcendental reduction implies that, at
the beginning, this science can posit nothing but the ego and what
is included in the ego himself, with a horizon of undetermined
determinability. Without doubt [it must at first parenthesize the
distinction (evinced within the ego) between me myself with my
life, my appearances, etc.; and thus, in a certain sense,] it begins
accordingly as a pure egology and as a science that apparently
condemns us to a solipsism, albeit a transcendental solipsism. As
beginning philosophers we must not let ourselves be frightened
by such considerations. Perhaps reduction to the transcendental
ego only seems to entail a permanently solipsistic science; whereas
the consequential elaboration of this science, in accordance with
its own sense, leads over to a phenomenology of transcendental
intersubjectivity, and by means of this, to a universal transcendental
philosophy. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 13, p. 30.
11 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, pp. 33940.
12 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 13, p. 29.
13 Husserl writes, Meanwhile we have lost sight of the demand,
so seriously made at the beginning namely that an apodictic
 Notes 177

knowledge, as the only genuinely scientific knowledge, be

achieved; but we have by no means dropped it. Only we preferred
to sketch in outline the tremendous wealth of problems belonging
to the first stage of phenomenology a stage which in its own
manner is itself still infected with a certain navet (the navet
of apodicticity) but contains the great and most characteristic
accomplishment of phenomenology, as a refashioning of science
on a higher level instead of entering into the further and ultimate
problems of phenomenology: those pertaining to its self-criticism,
which aims at determining not only the range and limits but also
the modes of apodicticity. At least a preliminary idea of the kind of
criticism of transcendentalphenomenological knowledge required
here is given by our earlier indications of how, for example, a
criticism of transcendental recollection discovers in it an apodictic
content. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 63, pp. 1512. G. Berger
in Le cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl makes an allusion to
a text in the Sixth Meditation drafted by Fink and treats it as the
phenomenological theory of knowledge. See G. Berger, Le cogito
dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Aubier, 1941), p. 115.
14 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 10, p. 24.
15 Husserl writes, To be sure, pure psychology of consciousness is a
precise parallel to transcendental phenomenology of consciousness.
Nevertheless, the two must at first be kept strictly separate, since
failure to distinguish them, which is characteristic of transcendental
psychology, makes a genuine philosophy impossible. We have here
on of those seemingly trivial nuances that make a decisive difference
between right and wrong paths of philosophy. Ibid., 14, p. 32.
16 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 62, p. 216.
17 Husserl says, Psychology takes itself to be at the base of the
objective apperception of man, and assumes an abstract stance in
which he has a purely physical component of corporeality is posited,
and inversely, then a component of a pure soul is posited, but as a
component only. Husserliana, Bd. VIII, pp. 1401.
18 When Husserl was editing his article Phenomenology for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Heidegger wrote him a letter on 22
October 1922 that gives the opportunity to outline the basic trend
of Being and Time as it pertains to transcendental problems: The
consensus is that the being which you name the world cannot be
elucidated by transcendental constitution, which is due to the fact
that beings cannot be reduced to this type of being. But this is not
to say that the place of the transcendental has nothing to do with
Being on the contrary, it gives rise to the problem: what is the
178 Notes

being of beings in world constitution? This is the central problem

of Being and Time that is, the fundamental ontology of Dasein. It
intends to show that the mode of being of human Dasein is totally
different from all other beings, and that as such it involves precisely
the possibility of transcendental constitution. Transcendental
constitution is a central possibility of existence in its facticity
as a self. Concrete man as such never is a real worldly fact
because he is never present, but rather exists. And the marvel
consists in this constitution of existence [Existenzverfassung] of
Dasein who renders possible the transcendental constitution of
all that is positive. The unilateral considerations of somatology
and pure psychology are only possible on the basis of concrete
totality of man, and this determines the primary mode of being
of man. The pure psyche as such is precisely not a part of the
ontology of man in his totality. That is to say man does not emerge
from a psychology but from it is rooted, from the outset, and
since Descartes, in the consideration of a theory of knowledge.
Husserliana, Bd. IX, pp. 6002.
19 Ibid., p. 602. We note that Roman Ingarden poses the same
question in his remarks that accompany the German edition of the
Cartesianische Meditationen: But there remains a great difficulty
linked to the ego, that to my knowledge, has not been signalled:
how can the ego be at once a pure constituting I and real constituted
I? Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 213.
20 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 27, fn.
21 Husserl, Ideas I, 70, p. 160.
22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 14, p. 33.
23 Ibid., 16, p. 38.
24 Ibid., 15, p. 34.
25 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time (18931917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1980), p. 122.
26 Fink, The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl,
p. 116.
27 Husserliana, Bd. VIII, p. 89.
28 Husserl states, In it [the primordial concrete present] arise
perceptions; even better, it itself is, in a sense, a perception in its
totality and in every moment which constitutes its being, in the
upsurge of its lived experience and of their moments. Manuscript
C 2 I, 19323, cited by Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and
 Notes 179

Dialectical Materialism, trans. Daniel J. Herman and Donald V.

Morano (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1986), p. 229.
29 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 43. Husserl also says, Certainly, when I am in a situation
where I use reflexion, it is the nave perception of the self-absorbed I
already passed. This I apprehend, now reflective, by resorting to that
which is still present in consciousness held there by the so-called
retention. It is the retentional memory [Nacherinnerung] of the
original lived experience. Now in this way, through the retaining-
reflexive I can perceive the nave perception and the self-absorbed
I. This is a perception that is truly a retentional perception, and not
quite a perception that actually records, though it is nevertheless one
that records. Husserliana, Bd. VIII, pp. 889.
30 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 41. See also Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 64ff.
31 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 52; see also, Husserl, Crisis of
European Sciences, 54b.

Chapter three
1 Husserl writes, The first breakthrough of this universal a priori of
correlation between experienced object and manners of givenness
(which occurred during work on my Logical Investigations around
1898) affected me so deeply that my whole subsequent life-work
has been dominated by the task of systematically elaborating on
this apriori of correlation. See Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences,
48, p. 166, fn.
2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 15, p. 37.
3 Husserl, Crisis, 46, p. 160.
4 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 17, pp. 3940.
5 Husserl, Ideas I, 40 and 43.
6 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1968), pp. 9ff.
7 Husserl, Ideas I, 42, p. 91.
8 Husserl, Ideas II, 18, p. 61.
9 The description in Ideas I commences: Constantly seeing this
table and meanwhile walking around it, changing my position,
180 Notes

changing my position in space in whatever way, I have continually

the consciousness of this one identical table as factually existing in
person and remaining quite unchanged. See Husserl, Ideas I, 41,
p. 86.
10 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 28, p. 106.
11 Ibid., 28, p. 106. The text continues: Thus sensibility, the egos
active functioning of the living body or the bodily organs, belongs in
a fundamental, essential way to all experience of bodies. It proceeds
in consciousness not as a mere series of body-appearances, as if these
in themselves, through themselves alone and their coalescences, were
appearance of bodies; rather, they are such in consciousness only
in combination with the kinaesthetically functioning living body
[Leiblichkeit], the ego functioning here in a peculiar sort of activity
and habituality. In a quite unique way the living body is constantly
in the perceptual field quite immediately, with a completely unique
ontic meaning, precisely the meaning indicated by the word organ
(here used in its most primitive sense). Husserl, Crisis of European
Sciences, 28, pp. 1067; see also 1078.
12 A. Lowit, in the preface to the translation of Husserls Lide de la
phnomnologie, highlights this double situation. He first shows
that there is no doubt that the ignorance of the leibhaftig selbst of
things in perception are tied to the reasons that maintain constitutive
analysis of the Logical Investigations in its metaphysical indecision
(p. 13). Then he highlights that it is not only my descriptive
judgment in perception, it is not only my attention to the descriptive
structure of perceptive presence of things that are changing: it is this
structure of perceptive presence itself that is transformed. Such is, in
effect, the discovery before which I am placed: what is in play here
is a difference and an upheaval of the entire phenomenal situation
(p. 18). If we cannot accept the interpretation that he proposes
(by a process which one can analyse the motives and the phases,
philosophical reflection on perception tends to provoke within the
perceptive situation, and inevitably provoking, an upheaval that is
lost to things perceives, the primary character of which things are
described in flesh and bone. This leads the phenomenal presence
of things to be downgraded from a simple phenomenal presence
into something else or less than it perceived of things themselves in
flesh and bone (pp. 1819), it is because it implies that it has clearly
established the difference between philosophical reflection and
phenomenological reflection, between philosophical consciousness
(worldlypsychological) and constituting consciousness, that is to
say, step by step that all constituting phenomenology is given in the
 Notes 181

very moment where one seeks to comprehend the origin. See also by
the same author, Do vient lambigut de la phnomnologie? in
Bulletin de la Socit franaise de philosophie 2 (1971).
13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 18, p. 43.
14 Merleau-Ponty writes, The body is nothing less but nothing more
than the things condition of possibility. (Body here translates the
German Leib translators note). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs,
trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), p. 173.
15 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, pp. 301. Husserl characterizes the primal impression as
something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further
consciousness and being and further as the living source-point of
being. See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time, pp. 70 and 71 respectively.
16 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James Churchill
and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1973), pp. 71 and 82 where leibhafte Gegenwart is translated as
living present.
17 Phenomenological explication [Auslegung] makes clear what is
included and only non-intuitively co-intended in the sense of the
cogitatum (for example, the other side), by making present in
phantasy the potential perceptions that would make the invisible
visible. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 20, p. 48.

Chapter four
1 Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, p. 10.
2 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 326. (Chapter introduction).
3 Ibid., p. 214.
4 Husserl contends, We must distinguish, in relation to the intentional
content taken as object of the act, between the object as it is
intended, and the object (period) which is intended. Husserl,
Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 113.
5 See Husserl, Ideas I, 91 and 99.
6 Ibid., 128, p. 308.
7 Husserl states, Quality only determines whether what is already
presented in definite fashion is intentionally present as wished,
182 Notes

asked, posited in judgment, etc. The matter, therefore, must be that

element in an act which first gives it reference to an object, and
reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant
in a general way, but also the precise way in which it is meant. The
matter to carry clearness a little further is that peculiar side of
an acts phenomenological content that not only determines that
it grasps the object but also as what it grasps it, the properties,
relations, categorical forms that it itself attributes to it. It is the
acts matter that makes its object count as this object and no other,
it is the objective, the interpretive sense [Sinn der gegenstndlichen
Auffassung, Auffassungssinn] which serves as basis for the acts
quality (while indifferent to such qualitative differences). Identical
matters can never yield distinct objective references, as the above
examples prove. Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, pp. 1212.
8 Husserl writes, Thus the noema too is related to an object and
possesses a content by means of which it relates to the object;
in which case the object is the same as that of the noesis; as then
the parallelism again completely confirms itself. Husserl, Ideas I,
129, p. 311.
9 Ibid., 129, p. 310; 131, p. 313. In 131 Husserl writes, The
identical intentional object becomes evidently distinguished from
the changing and alterable predicates. It becomes separated as
central noematic moment; the object [Gegenstand], the Object
[Objekt], the Identical the determinable subject of its possible
predicates the pure X in abstraction from all predicates and it
becomes separated from these predicates or, more precisely, from the
predicate-noemas. Husserl, Ideas I, 131, p. 313. See also Husserl,
Experience and Judgment, 69, pp. 2856.
10 Husserl, Ideas I, 131, pp. 31315.
11 Fink, Husserls Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism, p. 124.
12 Husserl, Ideas I, 132, p. 316.
13 W. Biemel writes, The equating, in the Lecture on the Thing
from 1907, of the term referring to what is constituted with
what is self-manifesting also throws light on this matter (sich
bekunden). (F I 13, p. 17). See W. Biemel, The Decisive Phases in
the Development of Husserls Philosophy, in Husserl, trans. R. O.
Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangel Books, 1970), p. 158.
14 Husserl, Ideas I, 135, p. 325.
15 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 326 (chapter introduction).
16 Husserl writes, It has not mattered up to now, whether the objects
in question were truly existent or non-existent, or whether they
 Notes 183

were possible or impossible. These differences are not perchance

excluded from the field of enquiry by abstaining from decision
about the being or non-being of the world (and, consequently,
of other already-given objectivities). On the contrary, under the
broadly understood titles, reason and unreason, as correlative
titles for being and non-being, they are an all-embracing theme for
phenomenology. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 23, p. 56.
17 Husserl, Ideas I, 99, pp. 2445.
18 Ibid., 136, p. 327. Husserl continues: Position belongs to any
appearing in incarnate presence on the part of a physical thing;
it is not just somehow one with the appearing (perhaps even as
merely a universal fact this being out of the question here); it is
one with it in a peculiar manner: it is motivated by the appearing
and again, not just somehow, but rationally motivated. That is to
say, position has its original legitimizing basis in original givenness.
Husserl, Ideas I, 132, p. 328.
19 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 24, p. 58.
20 Husserl writes, When we take it into consideration that, for each
kind of actual experience and for each of its universal variant modes
(perception, retention, recollection, etc.), there is a corresponding
pure phantasy, an as-if experience with parallel modes (as-if
perception, as-if retention, as-if recollection, etc.), we surmise that
there is also an apriori science, which confines itself to the realm
of pure possibility (pure imaginableness) and, instead of judging
about actualities of transcendental being, judges about its apriori
possibilities and thus at the same time prescribes rules apriori for
actualities. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 12, pp. 278.
21 Ibid., 27, p. 60.
22 Ibid. Husserl also writes, Only an uncovering of the horizon
of experience ultimately clarifies the actuality and the
transcendency of the world, at the same time showing the world
to be inseparable from transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes
actuality of being and sense. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations,
28, p. 62.
23 Husserl, Ideas I, 143, p. 343. Also see Jacques Derrida, Husserls
Origin of Geometry: An Introduction and Translation, trans. John
P. Leavey Jr (Stony Brook, NY: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 137ff.
24 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 29, p. 63; also see 22.
25 Ibid., 29, p. 64.
184 Notes

Chapter five
1 Husserl writes, These contents have, as contents generally have, their
own law-bound ways of coming together, of losing themselves in more
comprehensive unities and, in so far as they thus become and are
one, the phenomenological ego or unity of consciousness is already
constituted, without need of an additional, peculiar ego-principle
which supports all contents and unites them all once again. Here as
elsewhere it is not clear what such a principle would effect. Husserl,
Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 86. In the second edition, he writes,
The opposition to the doctrine of a pure ego, already expressed
in this paragraph, is one that the author no longer approves of, as is
plain from his Ideas cited above (see ibid., 57, p. 107; 80, p. 159).
Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 352, fn. 5.
2 Husserl, Ideas I, 37, pp. 756.
3 Ibid., 57, p. 133. Also see Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II,
8ff.
4 Husserl, Ideas I, 81, p. 194. Sartre notably writes on this issue:
But it is characteristic that Husserl, who studies this subjective
unification of consciousness in Vorlesungen Zur Phanomenologie
Des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, never had recourse to a synthetic
power of the I. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego,
trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1960), p. 39. Certainly Husserl affirms that As shocking
(when not initially even absurd) as it may seem to say that the flow
of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is nonetheless the case
that it does. And this can be made intelligible on the basis of the
flows essential constitution. He then immediately adds, Our regard
can be directed, in the one case, through the phases that coincide
in the continuous progression of the flow and that function as
intentionalities of the tone. But our regard can also be aimed at
the flow, at a section of the flow, at the passage of the flowing
consciousness from the beginning of the tone to its end. Husserl,
On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp.
845. It is on the basis of this regard that Husserl will arrive at the
pure ego in Ideas I.
5 Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 353, fn. 8.
6 Husserl, Ideas I, 81, p. 193. He continues immediately
afterwards: Fortunately we can leave out of account the enigma
of the consciousness of time in our preliminary analyses without
endangering their rigour.
 Notes 185

7 Husserl employs the following image and asks if it possesses an original

meaning and expresses an original analogy. He writes, The structure
of acts which radiate out from the Ego-Centre, or, the Ego itself, is a
form which has an analogon in the centralizing of all sense-phenomena
in reference to the Body [Leib]. Husserl, Ideas II, 25, p. 112.
8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 32, p. 66.
9 Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, Lectures, Summer Semester;
1925, trans. John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p.
161.
10 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 33, p. 68.
11 Ibid., 34, p. 70.
12 See the note cited in the manuscript of Cartesian Meditations in
Husserliana, Band I, p. 240.
13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 34, p. 69.
14 An excerpt from Ideas I clearly shows this as well as the link
between the eidetic reduction and the transcendental reduction:
The unrestricted universality of natural laws must not be mistaken
for eidetic universality. To be sure, the proposition All bodies are
heavy posits no definite physical affair as factually existing within
the totality of Nature. Still it does not have the unconditional
universality of eidetically universal propositions because, according
to its sense as a law of Nature, it carries with it a positing of
factual existence, that is to say, of Nature itself, of spatiotemporal
actuality: All bodies in Nature, all actual bodies are heavy. In
contradistinction, the proposition All material things are extended
has eidetic validity and can be understood as a purely eidetic
proposition provided that the positing of factual existence, carried
out on the side of the subject, is suspended. It states something
that is grounded purely in the essence of a material thing and in
the essence of extension and that we can make evident as having
unconditional universal validity. See Ideas I, 6, p. 15. Elsewhere
Husserl also writes: First of all, it is necessary to point out that even
totally free variation is not enough to actually give us the universal
as pure. Even the universal acquired by variation must not yet be
called pure in the true sense of the word, i.e. free from all positing of
actuality. See Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 89, p. 350.
15 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 87, pp. 3478.
16 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 34, p. 72.
17 See the text entitled Teleology. The implication of the eidos of
transcendental intersubjectivity in the transcendental eidos ego.
186 Notes

Factum and Eidos. This text was published in the third and
final volume of Husserliana devoted to the phenomenology of
intersubjectivity. Husserliana, Bd. XV, pp. 37886.
18 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 385. Also see 95 of Formal and
Transcendental Logic, where Husserl characterizes the I am as an
arch-facticity (Urtatsache). See Husserl, Formal and Transcendental
Logic, p. 237.
19 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 386. At the same time, it is the question
of history that is raised if History is the grand fact [Faktum]
of absolute being and the ultimate question, metaphysically
or teleologically ultimate, or only founded with questions of
the absolute meaning of history. Husserliana, Bd. VIII, p. 506
(texts from 1921 or 1924). Jacques Derrida notes, We pass from
phenomenology to ontology (in the non-Husserlian sense) when we
silently question the upsurge of the stark fact and cease to consider
the Fact in its phenomenological function. Then the latter can no
longer be exhausted and reduced to its sense by a phenomenological
operation, even were it pursued ad infinitum. The Fact is always
more or always less, always other, in any case, than what Husserl
defines it as when he writes, for example, in a formula which marks
the highest ambition of his project: fact, with its irrationality, is
itself a structural concept within the system of the concrete Apriori
(Cartesian Meditations, 39, Husserls emphasis). See Derrida,
Origin of Geometry, pp. 1512, n. 184.
20 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 41, p. 85.

Chapter six
1 Husserl, Authors Preface to the English Edition, in Ideas: General
Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London and New York:
Routledge Classics, 2012), p. xxxv.
2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 41.
3 Ibid., 36, pp. 745.
4 Ibid., 37, p. 76.
5 Derrida writes, For, of course, the reactivating reduction supposes
the iterative reduction of the static and structural analysis, which
teaches us once and for all what the geometrical phenomenon is
and when its possibility is constituted. This means by a necessity
 Notes 187

which is no less than an accidental and exterior fate that I must

start with ready-made geometry, such as it is now in circulation and
which I can always phenomenologically read, in order to go back
through it and question the sense of its origin. Thus, both thanks to
and despite the sedimentations, I can restore history to its traditional
diaphaneity. Husserl here speaks of Rckfrage, a notion no doubt
current enough, but which now takes on a sharp and precise sense.
We have translated it by return enquiry (question en retour). Like its
German synonym, return enquiry (and question en retour as well)
is marked by the postal and epistolary reference or resonance of a
communication from a distance. Like Rckfrage, return enquiry is
asked on the basis of a first posting. Derrida, Origin of Geometry,
p. 50.
6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 38, p. 77.
7 Husserl maintains that I had already acquired the definite direction
of regard to the formal and a first understanding of its sense
by my Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891), which, in spite of its
immaturity as a first book, presented an initial attempt to go back
to the spontaneous activities of collecting and counting, in which
collections (sums, sets) and cardinal numbers are given in
the manner characteristic of something that is being generated
originaliter, and thereby to gain clarity respecting the proper, the
authentic, sense of the concepts fundamental to the theory of sets
and the theory of cardinal numbers. It was therefore, in my later
terminology, a phenomenologico-constitutional investigation; and
at the same time it was the first investigation that sought to make
categorical objectivities of the first level and of higher levels (sets
and cardinal numbers of a higher ordinal level) understandable
on the basis of the constituting intentional activities, as whose
productions they make their appearance originaliter, accordingly
with full originality of their sense. Husserl, Formal and
Transcendental Logic, 27, pp. 867.
8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 38, p. 78.
9 Husserl writes, While these are making their synthetic products, the
passive synthesis that supplies all their material still goes on. See
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 38, p. 78.
10 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 23, pp. 1067.
11 Ibid., 23, p. 107.
12 Ibid., 23, p. 108. Husserl immediately follows with: This
formulation shows that the distinction between passivity and
activity is not inflexible, that it is not a matter here of terms which
188 Notes

can be established definitively for all time, but only of means of

description and contrast, whose sense must in each case be recreated
originally with reference to the concrete situation of the analysis
an observation which holds true for every description of intentional
phenomena.
13 Husserl writes, Static analysis is guided by the unity of the
supposed object. It starts from the unclear manners of givenness and,
following the reference made by them as intentional modifications,
it strives toward what is clear. Genetical intentional analysis, on the
other hand, is directed to the whole concrete nexus in which each
particular consciousness stands, along with its intentional object as
intentional. Immediately the problem becomes extended to include
the other intentional references, those belonging to the situation
in which, for example, the subject exercising the judicative activity
is standing, and to include, therefore, the immanent unity of the
temporality of the life that has its history that is: its temporal
genesis. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, appendix II, 2,
p. 316.
14 Husserl writes, Because with the transcendental reduction I
am convinced that the ultimately real and concrete subjectivity
was won in the fullness of its being and life, in it is the universal
accomplishing and not merely theoretical accomplishing life:
absolute subjectivity in its historicity. See Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed.
Karl Schumann and Elisabeth Schumann, Husserliana Dokumente,
vol. 3/6 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).
15 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 39, p. 80.
16 Ibid.
17 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 16, p. 73.
18 Husserl states for example, We now understand the inner truth of
the Kantian thesis: time is the form of sensibility, and thus it is the
form of every possible world of objective experience. Prior to all
questions about objective reality prior to the question concerning
what gives priority to certain appearances, to intentional objects
which are self-giving in intuitive experiences, by reason of which we
bestow on them the predicate true or real object is the fact
of the essential characteristic of all appearances, of the true as
well as those shown to be null, namely, that they are time-giving,
and this in such a way that all given times become part of one time.
Thus, all perceived, all perceptible, individuals have the common
form of time. It is the first and fundamental form, the form of
all forms, the presupposition of all other connections capable of
establishing unity At the same time, the expression form of
 Notes 189

intuition has still a second sense: every individual intuited in the

unity of an intuition is given in a temporal orientation, which is the
form of the givenness of all that is present (Prsent) in one presence
(Prsenz). Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 38, 1645.
19 Ibid., 16, p. 74.
20 Ibid.
21 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 16, p. 75. Husserl also
indicates another type of associative unification, to which we shall
return in due course: the unification of the present (Prsent) and the
not present (nicht-prsent).
22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 39, p. 81. Also see Husserl, Formal
and Transcendental Logic, 6, p. 30.
23 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 39, p. 81.
24 Ibid.
25 Manuscript C 6, p. 5 (August 1930).
26 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 39, p. 81. Husserl also writes
elsewhere, For phenomenology, the singular is eternally the apeiron.
Phenomenology can recognize with objective validity only essences
and essential relations. See Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous
Science, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans.
Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 116.
27 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 41, p. 83.
28 Ibid., 41, p. 84. We recall here that the laws of pure grammar,
which govern the sphere of complex meanings, and whose role it is
to divide sense from nonsense, are not yet the so-called laws of logic
in the pregnant sense of this term: they provide pure logic with the
possible meaning-forms, i.e. the a priori forms of complex meanings
significant as wholes, whose formal truth or objectivity
then depends on these pregnantly described logical laws. The
former laws guard against senselessness [Unsinn], the latter against
formal or analytic nonsense [Widersinn] or formal absurdity.
See Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 49. Husserl would
surely have found insufficient the concept of grammar at work in
the Nietzschean critique of the cogito. See Friedrich Nietzsche, La
volont de puissance, trad. Bianquis, I (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1947),
pp. 656.
29 Phenomenological idealism is without doubt closer to Hegelian
idealism than Husserl himself would like to admit. Husserl would
have refused to subscribe to the following proposition from Hegel:
Philosophy is a knowledge through notions because it sees that what
190 Notes

on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being, and to be

naturally or immediately independent, is but a constituent stage in
the Idea. See G. F. W. Hegel, Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William
Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 160, p. 223.

Chapter seven
1 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 294.
2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 42, pp. 8990. Husserl is aware
of this in connection with the exposition of idealism in the preface
to the English edition of Ideas I: The account given in the chapter
indicated suffers, as the author confesses, from lack of completeness.
Although it is in all real essentials unassailable, it lacks what is
certainly important to the foundation of this Idealism, the proper
consideration of the problem of transcendental solipsism or of
transcendental intersubjectivity, of the essential relationship of the
objective world, that is valid for me, to others which are valid for
me and with me. And yet, I must not hesitate, however, to state
quite explicitly that in regard to transcendental-phenomenological
Idealism, I have nothing whatsoever to take back, that now
as ever I hold every form of current philosophical realism to
be in principle absurd, as no less every idealism to which in its
own arguments that realism stands contrasted, and which in fact
it refutes. Given a deeper understanding of my exposition, the
solipsistic objection should never have been raised as an objection
against phenomenological idealism, but only as an objection to
the incompleteness of my exposition. Husserl, Ideas: General
Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, pp. xlxli.
3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 42, p. 89.
4 Ibid., 42, p. 90.
5 On the difference between Einfhlung and image consciousness, see
Husserliana, Bd. XIII, pp. 1878 and Chapter 11 in this book.
6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 42, p. 90.
7 Ibid., 43, p. 91.
8 To designate the perception of the flesh by itself, Husserl speaks
of somatic perception. See Husserl, Phenomenology and the
Foundations of the Sciences: Third Book of Ideas Pertaining to a
Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans.
 Notes 191

Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,

1980), p. 7. In a text from 1921, he shows that somatic perception
precedes in principle the physical perception of my flesh. See
Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 60ff.
9 This could only be the case because flesh is the origin of space, the
centre of all spatial orientation.
10 Husserliana, Bd. VI, p. 415.
11 Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. I, p. 219. Here we are following
the analyses of Derrida, who is surprised precisely by this individual
concept, this meaning that differs from person to person. This
should probably be seen as the first attempt of a reduction to the
eidos ego. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 945.
12 Derrida writes: My death is structurally necessary to the
pronouncing of the I. That I am also alive and certain about it
figures as something that comes over and above the appearance of
the meaning. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 96.
13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 43, pp. 912.

Chapter eight
1 Ibid., 44, p. 93.
2 Ibid., 44, p. 95. Husserl says elsewhere: Here I mention distinctions
such as living vs. lifeless things and, within the sphere of living things,
the animals, i.e. those living not merely according to drives but also
constantly through ego-acts, as opposed to those living only according
to drives (such as plants). Among animals, human beings stand out, so
much so, in fact, that mere animals have ontic meaning as such only
by comparison to them, as variations of them. Among lifeless things,
humanized things are distinguished, things that have signification (e.g.
cultural meaning) through human beings. Further, as a variation on this,
there are things which refer meaningfully in a similar way to animal
existence, as opposed to things that are without signification in this
sense. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 66, p. 227. We will return
to the relation between drives and intentionality in Chapter 14, n. 7.
3 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 177.
4 Ibid., p. 182.
5 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 272.
6 To this end, Husserl writes: As regards this, nothing prevents
starting at first quite concretely with the human life-world
192 Notes

around us, and with man himself as essentially related to this

our surrounding world, and exploring, indeed purely intuitively,
the extremely copious and never-discovered Apriori of any such
surrounding world whatever, taking this Apriori as the point of
departure for a systematic explication of human existence and of
world strata that disclose themselves correlatively in the latter. But
what is acquired there straightforwardly, though it is a system of the
Apriori, becomes philosophically intelligible and (according to what
was said just now) an Apriori related back to the ultimate sources
of understanding, only when problems of constitution, as problems
of the specifically philosophical level, become disclosed and the
natural realm of knowledge is at the same time exchanged for the
transcendental. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 59, p. 138.
7 When intersubjectivity is reduced, one cannot appeal to a
community of phenomenologists pursuing the endless work of
intentional explication.
8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 44, p. 96.
9 Husserl contends, The second ego, however, is not simply there
and strictly presented; rather is he constituted as alter ego the
ego indicated as one moment by this expression being I myself in
my ownness. The Other, according to his own constituted sense,
points to me myself; the other is a mirroring [Spiegelung] of my
own self and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self
and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense. Husserl, Cartesian
Meditations, 44, p. 94. In a brief analysis dated 7 February 1927
Husserl shows that any visual apprehension of myself presupposes
intersubjectivity; see Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 5089. The Leibnizian
term of mirroring must be denounced as soon as it is stated (by an
approach that evokes negative theology), both in order to respect
alterity and to maintain the propriety of my sphere of ownness. If
every mirroring of myself implies the other, to define the other as a
reflection of myself amounts either to dissolving the sphere of ownness
or to deriving egological subjectivity from monadic intersubjectivity.
10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and
Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), A158/
B197, p. 283. Heidegger writes that Whoever understands this
principle understands Kants Critique of Pure Reason. Whoever
understands this does not only know one book among the writings
of philosophy, but masters a fundamental posture of man, which we
can neither avoid, leap over, nor deny in any way. See Heidegger,
What is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967), p. 183.
 Notes 193

11 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 44, p. 96.

12 Ibid., 44, p. 97. This text clearly shows the absurdity of translating,
as is often done for very different and divergent reasons, the word
Leib as corps propre (my own body). In the sphere of ownness, all
bodies are an own body [corps propre], and the difference is thus
not between two types of body but between the body in general and
the Leib. (In English, Dorion Cairns has typically translated Leib
as my animate organism, which Franck would want to translate
simply as flesh or chair in French trans. note).
13 See Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans.
Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997).
14 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 567.
15 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 58.
16 Ibid.
17 Husserl, Ideas II, 36, p. 152.
18 Husserl calls these sensible events that belong to flesh Empfindnisse
and not Empfindungen. It is difficult to render this difference in
French. Levinas has translated Empfindnis as feeling. See Levinas,
Discovering Existence with Husserl, p. 145, fn. 25.
19 Husserl, Ideas II, 37, p. 157.
20 Ibid., 37, pp. 1578.
21 Husserl writes The material thing is essentially res extensa. Husserl,
Ideas I, 9, p. 19.
22 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 64. Husserl also writes The same Body
[Leib] which serves me as a means for all my perception obstructs
me in the perception of it itself and is a remarkably imperfectly
constituted thing. Husserl, Ideas II, 41b, p. 167.
23 See Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 75ff. See also Husserliana, Bd. XIII,
pp. 282ff. and 331ff.; Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 515ff.; Husserliana,
Bd. XV, pp. 259ff., 277ff., 295ff., 648ff. and 659ff.
24 Husserl states: Sheer material things are only moveable
mechanically. See Husserl, Ideas II, 38, p. 159. See also Husserl,
Thing and Space, pp. 339ff.
25 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 77. More convincing would be,
perhaps, an analysis that takes forces into account. But when did
phenomenology ever provide the means for describing and thinking
about forces?
26 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 44, p. 97.
27 Ibid., 44, pp. 978.
194 Notes

28 The expression comes up frequently in the manuscripts from

group D. See also Die Welt der Lebendigen Gegenwart und Die
Konstitution der Ausserleiblichen Umwelt (D 12 IV), Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1946): 32343.
29 Bergson, in another context, has remarked: What is the I?
Something which appears, rightly or wrongly, to overflow every
part of the body which is joined to it, passing beyond it in space
as well as in time. In space, for the body of each of us is confined
within the distinct surfaces which bound it, whilst by our faculty of
perception, and more especially of seeing, we radiate far beyond our
bodies, even to the stars. See Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy, trans. H.
Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 30.
30 See Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 515ff; Husserliana, Bd. XV, pp. 648ff.
and 660ff.
31 For both quotes, see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 44, p. 98.
32 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 659. The primordial world is equivalent to
the world of ownness.
33 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 659.

Chapter nine
1 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 96a, p. 241. We
quote here an interleaved sheet concerning 44 of the Cartesian
Meditations and we take it from the critical apparatus of the
German edition: The question is not one of other people but of
how we can, as the ego who is the transcendental spectator that
learns transcendentally, is constituted in the distinction between
the I and the other-I a divorce that occurs in the first place in
the phenomenon of the world, as a difference between my human
I, the I in the ordinary sense, and the other human I, the other I.
Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 241.
2 Husserl observes, If even the self-constitution of the ego as a
spatialized, a psychophysical, being is a very obscure matter, then
it is much more obscure, and a downright tormenting enigma,
how, in the ego, an other psychophysical Ego with an other psyche
can be constituted; since his sense as other involves the essential
impossibility of my experiencing his own essential psychic contents
with actual originality, as I do my own. Husserl, Formal and
Transcendental Logic, p. 239.
 Notes 195

3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 57.

4 Manuscript K III, 18 (1936), p. 89.
5 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 287.
6 This is an allusion to Husserls concept of the annihilation of the
world in Ideas I, 49 trans. note.
7 Husserl writes: The psychic reality is founded in the organismal
matter, but this is not conversely founded in the psyche. Husserl,
Ideas III, p. 104.
8 Husserl, Ideas III, p. 104. (Trans. note: it is again worth noting that
the English translation of Leib is animate organism whereas the
French is flesh or chair.)
9 Husserl, Crisis, 62, p. 216.
10 Heidegger writes: So far as anything essential has been achieved in
to-days analyses which will take us beyond Aristotle and Kant, it
pertains more to the way time is grasped and to our consciousness
of time. (We shall come back to this in the first and third divisions
of Part Two, as the first edition in 1927 indicated.) Heidegger, Being
and Time, p. 501, fn. xxx.
11 The question is thus opened about whether what has always been
called the soul or the mind does not occupy the place of carnal
difference. It should also be noted that Husserl gradually comes
to renew the transcendental aesthetic [The extraordinarily vast
complex of researches pertaining to the primordial world makes
up a whole discipline, which we may designate as transcendental
aesthetics in a very much broadened sense. We adopt the Kantian
title here because the space and time arguments of the critique
of reason obviously, though in an extraordinarily restricted
and unclarified manner, have in view a noematic Apriori of
sensuous intuition. Broadened to comprise the concrete Apriori of
(primordial) Nature, as given in purely sensuous intuition, it then
requires phenomenological transcendental supplementation by
incorporation into a complex of constitutional problems. Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations, 61, p. 146.] Husserl speaks more and more
of flesh and less and less of soul. The collection of manuscripts of
group D sufficiently testify to this. Finally, note that a text from
JulyAugust of 1927 is entitled The Confusion (Verwechslung)
of original self-experience and the objective-psychological
self-experience at the ground of metaphysical dualism. See
Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 418ff.
196 Notes

Chapter ten
1 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 24c, p. 117.
2 Ibid., 24c, p. 118.
3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 46, p. 102.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 46, p. 103. (Translation modified.)
6 Ibid., 47, p. 104
7 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 379.
8 From JanuaryFebruary of 1922 Husserl declared, The ego
is not thinkable without the non-ego, through which it relates
intentionally. Ibid., p. 244.
9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 49, p. 107, already cited.
10 Long extracts of this course have been published in volume XIII of
Husserliana, pp. 11094.
11 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 160.
12 Ibid., p. 161.
13 Ibid., p. 162.
14 See Husserl, Ideas I, 85 and 97. Husserl writes: Everything
hyletic belongs in the concretemental process as a really inherent
component .... Husserl, Ideas I, p. 238.
15 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 170.
16 Ibid., p. 171.
17 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 246.
18 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 48, p. 106.

Chapter eleven
1 Ibid., 49, p. 107.
2 Husserl writes: Consequently, the constitution of the world
essentially involves a harmony of the monads: precisely this
harmony among particular constitutions in the particular monads;
and accordingly it involves also a harmonious generation that goes
on in each particular monad. That is not meant, however, as a
metaphysical hypothesizing of monadic harmony, any more than
the monads themselves are metaphysical inventions or hypotheses.
On the contrary, it is itself part of the explication of the intentional
 Notes 197

components implicit in the fact of the experiential world that exists

for us. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 49, p. 108.
3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50, p. 109.
4 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 25. In a manuscript from around
1916 in this volume Husserl replaced compresentation with
appresentation.
5 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 25.
6 Husserl writes, If we consider the non-visible components of
the object, then we must say that they are consciousness in a
reproductive manner (though not in an intuitive mode). But in the
unity of the perception of the body, the body is perceived and not
simply present originally, primarily originated as appearing. As
perceived, it is the perception of it as it is in itself, as it is intended
in incarnate presence, and not merely as an actual perception.
The other sides, those which are invisible, are there-with,
present-with, consist of a compresence that belongs essentially
to the perception of the body; and in this function is created a
consciousness of the perception of the body. Here is an originally
imparting consciousness of the body, one that necessarily divides
itself in primary and secondary components, or present in the
source [ursprnglich prsentierende] and present after the source
[nachsprnglich], which is precisely a compresenting givenness. In
this motivational context, a representation assumes the function of a
presentation, and even the function of permitting a present to arrive
as presence of perception. See Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 26.
7 See Chapter 8, n. 22. We will later attempt to account for this alteration.
8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50, p. 109.
9 Derrida observes: One would have to show, on the basis of
the Cartesian Meditations, and given the reduction of every
problem of factual genesis, how the question of anteriority in
the relation between the constitution of other as other present
and the constitution of the other as Others is a false question,
which must refer to a common structural root. Although in the
Cartesian Meditations Husserl evokes only the analogy of the two
movements (52), in many of the unpublished works he seems to hold
them to be inseparable. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 165.
10 The above analysis followed Husserls text from 191011. See
Husserliana, Bd.XIII, pp. 187ff. On the consciousness of images, see
Fink, De la phnomnologie, pp. 81ff.
11 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50, pp. 11011.
12 Ibid., 60, p. 139.
198 Notes

13 The argument is only valid if temporality implies the other. We will

show this later.
14 For more on this, see Chapter 6 in this book.
15 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 433 (text is from 1918).
16 Derrida states: there is no concrete historicity which does not
necessarily implicate in itself the reference to an Erstmaligkeit.
We said, a moment ago, that it would be impossible to substitute
another fact for the unique fact of the first time. Undoubtedly. But
only if other is meant to qualify essence and not empirical existence
as such. Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p. 48.
17 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50, p. 110.
18 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 16, p. 75.
19 Husserl writes, and we quote at length: However, the coincidence of
likeness must be distinguished from that of similarity [what Franck
translates as analogy trans. note]. Let us first remain with the
former: if I apprehend A and then go to B, what in B is said to be
like A is united with A in such a way that the feature [Moment]
of B in question is marked out, made prominent; this takes place
because the feature of B coincides with the corresponding feature of
A, and coincides without any gap, is completely one with it, so
that what is covered [in the coincidence] is seen entirely through the
covering. The distinct duality of A and B, and also what they have
in common, is changed into a unity, which preserves a doubling
in consciousness but materially is not a separation or duality of
elements outside one another. The two are within each other,
and only to this extent are they two. They constitute a unique
assemblage, which, so to speak, is present in two editions. On
the other hand, if the relation is one of mere similarity, then there
is certainly still coincidence; the feature of B in question, which is
perceived originally, coincides with the corresponding feature of
A, still retained in the consciousness of the still. But the feature
of similarity of A which is seen through the feature of similarity
of B, and coincides with it, has a gap. The two features are
blended in a community; yet there also remains a duality of material
separation, which is the separation and coincidence of what is
akin. They do not go together to form a like but to form a pair,
where the one is certainly like the other but stands off from it.
This duality, with its unity of community, can approach more and
more the unity of perfect community, which is precisely likeness and
essential coincidence without disparity, and can come so close that
we speak of an approximate likeness, of a similarity which is almost
complete likeness, only with slight deviations. But the difference
 Notes 199

still remains extant, despite the continuous transitions. Husserl,

Experience and Judgment, 44, pp. 1901.
20 Ibid., 16, p. 74. This has already been cited, see Chapter 6, n. 19.
21 Husserl writes, Thus, the sensuous data, on which we can always
turn our regard as toward the abstract stratum of concrete
things, are themselves also already the product of a constitutive
synthesis, which, as the lowest level, presupposes the operations
of the synthesis in internal time-consciousness. These operations,
as belonging to the lowest level, necessarily link all others.
Time-consciousness is the original seat of the constitution of the
unity of identity in general. But it is a consciousness producing only
a general form. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 16, p. 74.
22 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 38, p. 74. This was already
cited at some length in Chapter 6, n. 18.

Chapter twelve
1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 51, p. 112.
2 Husserl indicates this when he writes: But then new questions
impose themselves in regard to this mankind: are the insane also
objectifications of the subjects being discussed in connection
with the accomplishment of world-constitution? And what
about children, even those who already have a certain amount
of world-consciousness? After all, it is only from the mature and
normal human beings who bring them up that they first become
acquainted with the world in the full sense of the world-for-all,
that is, the world of culture. And what about animals? There
arise problems of intentional modifications through which we can
and must attribute to all these conscious subjects those that do
not cofunction in respect to the world understood in the hitherto
accepted (and always fundamental) sense, that is, the world which
has truth through reason their manner of transcendentality,
precisely as analogues of ourselves. The meaning of this analogy
will then itself represent a transcendental problem. This naturally
extends into the realm of the transcendental problems which finally
encompass all living beings insofar as they have, even indirectly
but still verifiably, something like life, and even communal life
in the spiritual sense. Also appearing thereby, in different steps,
first in respect to human beings and then universally, are the
problems of genesis [Generativitt], the problems of transcendental
200 Notes

historicity [Geschichtlichkeit], the problems of the transcendental

enquiry which starts from the essential forms of human existence
in society, in personalities of a higher order, and proceeds back to
their transcendental and thus absolute signification; further, there
are the problems of birth and death and of the transcendental
constitution of their meaning as world occurrences, and there is the
problem of the sexes. And finally, concerning the problem of the
unconscious that is so much discussed today dreamless sleep,
loss of consciousness, and whatever else of the same or similar
nature may be included under this title this is in any case a matter
of occurrences in the pregiven world, and they naturally come under
the transcendental problem of constitution, as do birth and death.
Husserl, Crises of European Sciences, 55, pp. 1878.
3 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 399.
4 Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 540.
5 Husserl once attempted to conceive of a world without flesh, but
he did not do so without difficulty and some contradictions. A
note from February 1927 entitled disembodied world [Leiblose
Welt] indicates the following: The kinestheses are factical in my
localized corporeal flesh and my flesh is necessarily bound to a
zero there. It is thus the support of the tactile field, etc. But it
is thinkable that I indeed have no flesh, that a nature, without
flesh, is constituted through kinesthesis, both close and remote
types of kinesthesis. I cannot see why this is not possible. And
why then not each body everywhere, even in its zero point could
appear perspectivally (here the zero of all perspectives) and can be
given originally in a tactile way. It could even be the zero that is
constituted purely kinesthetically. Certainly this question is posed
outside of knowing whether I could be condemned to the state of
solus. Empathy presupposes fleshly corporeality. Husserliana, Bd.
XIV, p. 547. Beside the question of knowing whether one can think
of kinestheses without flesh, there is the question of how nature,
that is to say as an ensemble of bodies, could be constituted without
flesh. A number of texts affirm that flesh, and we cite one here, is
the universal medium of the original givenness of all things (see
Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 567). Moreover, Husserl has shown that
distance (Entfernung), and consequently proximity, has the sense
of a distance (Abstand) in relation to my flesh (see Husserliana, Bd.
XIV, p. 556). And finally, a text from January 1934 affirms that it
is clear that a nature without flesh and thus without humans is not
thinkable. Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 639.
6 Ibid., Bd. XIII, p. 117.
 Notes 201

7 Husserl writes, What is normal experience other than the

permanent and legitimate identity of the experienced thingness
as it is inserted enduringly within the experience. Ibid., Bd. XIII,
p. 364. From this point of view, one could reopen the question
of the hypothesis of the annihilation of the world through the
discord of the flux of lived experiences, and bring to light a
normative prescription, starting from the first static descriptions
of transcendental phenomenology. But the question would be
raised principally in order to know whether the world can be
both relative to absolute consciousness and normal for this
consciousness.
8 Husserl writes: My flesh in its inner experience, in a solipsistic
sphere, is thus an arch-apperception and provides the necessary
norm. Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 126.
9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54.
10 Ibid., 51, p. 112.
11 Ibid., 51, pp. 11213.
12 Ibid., 51, p. 113.
13 Ibid., 51, p. 113.
14 Ibid., Husserl, 52, p. 114.
15 Husserl states: In a manner well-understood, it is also correct
to say: it is only in interpretation that I can capture the foreign
flesh, one as flesh, that is similar to my corporeal body and so as a
support of an I (one similar to mine). Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 267.
16 Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. 1, p. 184. Derrida writes: in
the relation to the other perhaps there is something that makes
indication irreducible. And he thinks that this something could
be called the immediate non self-presence of the living present.
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 37.
17 Here, we cite Fragment 16 from Parmenides, which appears in the
exergue: For as each person has a mixture of much-wandering
limbs, so is thought present to humans. For that which thinks the
constitution of the limbs is the same in all humans and every one;
for which is more is thought. Translators note: we follow here the
McKirihan translation.
18 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 52, p. 114.
19 Ibid., 52, p. 116.
20 Ibid., 52, p. 114. See also this excerpt from the Crisis: The
self-temporalization through depresentation [Ent-Gegenwrtigung],
so to speak (through recollection), has its analogue in my
202 Notes

self-alienation [Engt-Fremdung] (empathy as depresentation of a

higher level depresentation of my primal presence [Urprsenz] into
a merely presentified [vergegenwrtigte] primal presence). Husserl,
Crisis, 54b, p. 185. For more on this de-presentation, see Eugen
Fink, De la phnomnologie, trans. Didier Franck (Paris: ditions de
Minuit, 1975), pp. 37ff.
21 See Chapter 6.

Chapter thirteen
1 This issue is discussed, however, in great depth in the group D
manuscripts and in the course from 1907, Ding und Raum, now
published as BD XVI in Husserliana. (The 1907 course has been
since translated into English: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907,
trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997)
trans. note).
2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 53, p. 116.
3 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 115.
4 Husserl, Ideas II, 36, p. 153.
5 Husserl writes: The flesh [Leib] as such can be constituted
originarily only in tactuality. Husserl, Ideas II, 37, p. 158.
In a brief not from February 1927 entitled Empathy. A
principle that indicates each flesh as my flesh, each I as myself
Husserl characterizes the tactile level as the archi-nodal point
[Urkernschichte]. Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 4834.
6 Husserl writes: Hence in this way a human beings total
consciousness is in a certain sense, by means of its hyletic substrate,
bound to the Body. Husserl, Ideas II, 39, p. 160.
7 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 239.
8 See Husserl, Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological
Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Original Ark, the Earth,
Does Not Move, in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, eds.
Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2001), pp. 11731. See Derrida, The Origin of
Geometry, pp. 82ff. and Merleau-Ponty, Rsums de cours: Collge
de France, 195260 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 168ff.
9 Husserl, At the Limits of Phenomenology, p. 123.
10 The Heideggerian analysis of the spatiality of Dasein, founded
on remoteness and orientation, could be without doubt closer, in
 Notes 203

spite the deliberate absence of any reference to flesh (see Chapter

1, n. 26), and of what could and should be an analysis of the
spatiality of flesh. The course of 1925, Prolegomena zur Geschichte
Zeitbegriffs, permits this to be seen: Dasein is oriented as corporeal,
as corporeal it is in each instance its right and left, and that is why
the parts of the body are also right and left parts. Accordingly, it
belongs to the being of bodily things that they are co-constituted
by orientation. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time:
Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1985), p. 232.
11 We (Franck) are translating the expression in this way to avoid all
reference to the zero, which, as a number (and in the Philosophy
of Arithmetic Husserl took it in this way), necessarily implies
intersubjectivity.
12 Husserl, Bd. XIII, p. 276.
13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 53, p. 116.
14 Ibid., 54, p. 117.
15 Ibid., 54, pp. 11718. The French translation says: Il veille et
reproduit un autre mode dapparatre immdiatement analogue .
The words other and immediately are not in the German text,
nor in the critical notes that are adjoined, but are in typescript C
in possession of Dorion Cairns, who has translated the English
edition (it is important to note that Cartesian Meditations was first
published only in French before the German edition arrived years
later, after Husserls death translators note.).
16 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 256.
17 Husserl states: The I would be over there, I would be looking as
if I were over there, the I should be me over there assuming such
and such a sight is a contradictory representation and thus has as
similar contradictory representations a good sense (for example, in
Geometry). Namely, to have a good sense is a doubling of the
I such that it is possible only as a doubling of an other real thing.
Namely: it is by way of the accomplishment of this contradictory
representation that the possibility of two subjects with two bodies
becomes clear. Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 263.
18 See Chapter 8, fn. 22.
19 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 498.
20 Ibid., p. 275 (Francks emphasis).
21 Rather, flesh presents a restriction to the full and free constitution
of space. Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 258.
204 Notes

22 See Fink, De la phnomnologie, pp. 74ff. Fink refuses to consider

all purely signitive representations as pure and simple intuitive
impossibilities. He divides them into finite re-presentations
(an absurdity like a colour without extension) and transfinite
re-representations (an absurdity which holds a determinate meaning:
the world outside of our world, the Cartesian deus malignus).
Clearly, it is to this latter group that the re-presentation as if I were
over there belongs.
23 Husserl writes: In this case too, although the awakening does not
become a memory intuition, pairing takes place. Husserl, Cartesian
Meditations, 54, p. 118.
24 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 378.
25 Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 67.
26 See Chapter 9. If it is flesh that is sexually differentiated, and not
the body, then should one not admit, contrary to what we have
said above, a certain precedence of carnal difference over sexual
difference? Is there a way to determine sexual difference as a
structure of flesh as long as the difference between flesh/body is not
given? These questions are derived from an analytic of incarnation
that our work seeks to make necessary.
27 A text from February 1927 speaks of the other as a re-presenting
variation of my I in reflection Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 498. For all
reflection or specularization of myself refers to another. See Chapter
8, n. 9. Also, Husserl notes, Obviously, it cannot be said that I see
my eye in the mirror, for my eye, that which sees qua seeing, I do
not perceive. I see something, of which I judge indirectly, by way
of empathy, that it is identical with my eye as a thing (the one
constituted by touch, for example) in the same way that I see the eye
of an other. Husserl, Ideas II, p. 155, fn.
28 See Chapter 12.

Chapter fourteen
1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54, p. 118.
2 Dorion Cairns, in recording his interviews with Husserl, notes: I
asked Husserl whether, if, were it impossible for the body to have
reflex perception of itself (one hand touch the other, the eye see the
hand, etc.) there would then be the possibility of the constitution
of a world, or a body He answered no. See Dorion Cairns,
 Notes 205

Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,

1976), p. 4; also see p. 6.
3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54, p. 118.
4 Husserliana, Bd. VIII, pp. 1345.
5 Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 530.
6 Ibid., Bd. XV, p. 490. We will come back soon to this crucial
statement in the Cartesian Meditations, where Husserl says:
The Others animate bodily organism, which is, so to speak, the
intrinsically first Object. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54,
p. 124.
7 Husserliana, XV, pp. 5934. Husserl writes the following: the
primordiality is a drive-system. When we understand it as a constant
original stream, then it shall also penetrate other streams, and
possibly, other ego subjects and their drives. This intentionality
has its transcendent goal, transcendence introduced as a foreign
element, and thus in the primordiality of its own goal. Also, this
element is an arch-modal core of the intention that simply uplifts
and fulfils it. In my old doctrine of consciousness of internal time
I have assigned intentionality precisely as egoic, as anticipating
protention and as modifying retention, but preserving unity. But I
did not speak of an I nor did I characterize intentionality as egoic (in
the broadest sense the intentionality of the will). Later I introduced
this egoic intentionality as founded in a non-ego (passivity).
But is the I of acts that springs from the acts of habit not itself in
development? We may not or should not assume we have a universal
drive intentionality that accounts for each primitive presence as
permanent temporalization and from driving concretely from
presence to presence. All content is content of fulfilment of drive,
and is intended as its goal; even so in every primordial presence,
drives are transcending higher levels and extend into every other
presence, thereby combining together all monads, so that all are
implied in one another and intentionally? Husserliana, Bd. XV,
pp. 5945.
8 Recall that apperception is at work in all perception, whether it is
the perception of a transcendent object or of an immanent lived
experience (retention and protention).
9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54, pp. 11819.
10 See Chapter 6, n. 21. In Experience and Judgment Husserl writes:
Beyond this function of unification within a presence, association
has a broader one, namely, that of uniting what is separated,
insofar as this was ever at all constituted within a single stream of
206 Notes

consciousness, thus, of uniting the present with the not-present,

the presently perceived with remote memories separated from it,
and even with imaginary objects: the like here recalls what is like
there, the similar recalls what is similar. Husserl, Experience and
Judgment, 42b, p. 177.
11 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54, pp. 11920.

Chapter fifteen
1 Ibid., 55, p. 120.
2 Ibid., 55, p. 121.
3 Ibid., 55, p. 122.
4 See Chapter 14, n. 3.
5 See Chapter 6, n. 19.
6 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 16, p. 74.
7 See Chapter 1.
8 Husserl, Ideas I, 99, p. 244. See also 43, p. 93: In perception
the same object is still described as specifically incarnate by
opposition to the modified character of floating before us or
re-presented.
9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 55, p. 122.
10 See Chapter 3. Also see Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 19,
pp. 834: Every perception which presents the object to me in this
orientation leaves open the practical transition to other appearances
of the same object, specifically to certain groups of appearances. The
possibilities of transition are practical possibilities, at least when it is
a question of an object which is given as enduring without change.
There is thus a freedom to run through the appearances in such a
way that I move my eyes, my head, alter the posture of my body, go
around the object, direct my regard toward it, and so on. We call
these movements, which belong to the essence of perception and
serve to bring the object of perception to givenness from all sides
insofar as possible, kinaestheses.
11 Heidegger, Four Seminars, p. 65.
12 Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. II, p. 775.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 788.
 Notes 207

15 See Ideas, I, already cited above: The vision of the essence is thus an
intuition; and, if it is a vision of a strong meaning and not a simple
and perhaps vague re-presentation, it is an intuition given originarily
which seizes the essence in its incarnate ipseity. 3, p. 9.
16 Heidegger writes: In order to unfold the question concerning the
meaning of being, being must be given in order to enquire after its
meaning. Husserls achievement consists in just this making present
of being, which is phenomenally present in the category. Through
this achievement, Heidegger adds, I finally had the ground:
being is no mere concept, no pure abstraction arising by way of
deduction. Heidegger, Four Seminars, p. 67.
17 In the 19278 course devoted to the Critique of Pure Reason
Heidegger defines intuition thus: What does intuitio mean?
Intuition means the manner by which something is represented to
me concretely [leibhaftig] as something. To interpret it briefly, to
intuit means to allow something to give itself as the concrete thing
that it is. See Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kants
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 58.
18 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 55, p. 122.
19 It is not, and cannot be, the case that the body belonging to my
primordial sphere and indicating to me the other Ego (and, with
him, the whole of the other primordial sphere or the other concrete
ego) could appresent his factual existence and being-there-too, unless
this primordial body acquired the sense, a body belonging to the
other ego, and, according to the whole associative-apperceptive
performance, the sense: someone elses flesh itself. Ibid.
20 Provided, of course, that one assumes to have resolved all the
difficulties that intentional analysis of the other has put before us.
21 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 55, p. 123. Husserl resumes the
constitution of objectivity by saying: On the contrary, the identity-
sense of my primordial Nature and the presentiated other
primordial Nature is necessarily produced by the appresentation
and the unity that it, as appresentation, necessarily has with the
presentation co-functioning for it this appresentation by virtue
of which an Other and, consequently, his concrete ego are there
for me in the first place. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 55,
p.124.
22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 55, p. 124. See also Husserl,
Formal and Transcendental Logic, 96a, p. 241: All Objectivity, in
this sense, is related back constitutionally to the first affair that is
208 Notes

other than my Egos own, the other-than-my-Egos-own in the form,

someone else that is to say: the non-Ego in the form, another
Ego.
23 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 490.
24 See Chapter 13.
25 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 52, p. 115.
26 It is without doubt possible to say the same thing with regard to
Jemeinigkeit, which at the outset of Being and Time articulates the
existential analytic of Dasein in light of the question of being.
27 See Chapter 8.
28 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 344.
29 See Chapter 3. We establish then that the flesh that sets into
operation the synthesis of adumbrations could not do so as a body.
Now, by being flesh in and through another flesh (caress), then it
is immediately a body. And the body, whose parts are exterior to
one another, cannot unify the adumbrations. Another principle of
unification is thus required. In a short note from the 1920s, Husserl
writes: So much of the flesh for oneself is an object and so is
considered as res extensa, it is nevertheless not yet fully a meaning
of nature it is presupposition of any being-in-itself and not a self
who is an it-self in the original sphere of experience. Ibid., Bd. XIV,
p. 454.
30 The eidetic determination of historicity poses the same problem. In a
footnote in the Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty writes: What is
meant is that it [history] exists in the manner of the body, that it is
more like body. See Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, trans. John
ONeill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p.
81. Moreover, in the case of flesh, one cannot simply set the noetic
reactivations against the noematic iterations in order to determine
the invariant, since the subjective is specifically united by way of
flesh to an object, and since flesh is a link [Verknpfung] of the
subject and object. See Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 237.
31 Heidegger writes: The author may remark that this analysis of
the environment and in general the hermeneutic of facticity of
Dasein, have been presented repeatedly in lectures since the winter
semester of 19191920. See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 490,
division one, Chapter 3. Husserl, in spite of his misunderstanding
of it, characterized the Heideggerian interpretation of Aristotle as
a return to Aristotle by way of a response to a question that first
came from Husserlian philosophy. See Cairns, Conversations with
Fink and Husserl, pp. 5ff. If there is indeed a passage from Husserl
 Notes 209

to Heidegger, did it not take place when, renouncing to take facts as

an exemplar of essence, it is subjected to the work of interpretation.
Why, then, did it not interrogate the incarnate archi-facticity? Is it
because temporality is held to be the unique horizon of the question
of being?
32 See the texts cited in Chapter 10, n. 7.
33 It has for its own eidetic meaning to show itself from itself
(: the thing-perceived leibhaftig) is yet the foundation
produced by the interconnection of the adumbrations of lived
experiences, of which it is the immanent correlate, writes G. Granel.
He never interrogates this Leibhaftigkeit in his work. See Granel, Le
sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris: Gallimard,
1968), p. 179.
34 On this point, see Heidegger, Four Seminars, p. 65.
35 See Chapter 11, fn. 15.
36 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 375.
37 See Heidegger, Four Seminars, pp. 64ff.
38 Heidegger writes: In its neutrality Dasein is not the indifferent
nobody and everybody, but the primordial positivity and potency
of essence. Neutrality is not the voidness of an abstraction, but
precisely the potency of the origin, which bears in itself the
intrinsic possibility of every concrete factual humanity. See Martin
Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael
Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 1367.
39 Otto Pggeler, La pense de Heidegger (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne,
1967), pp. 867.

Chapter sixteen
1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 55, p. 128.
2 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 36, p. 158.
3 Husserl, Ideas I, 85, p. 203.
4 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 4.
5 Dorion Cairns reports this statement by Husserl: Heideggers
analysis [of time] is ontological, not constitutive. The acts he speaks
of are not zeitigende Akte (temporalizing acts) but possible ways
of coming to a temporality which is already there as otherwise
210 Notes

constituted. See Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and

Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 29.
6 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 5. Husserl goes on to say: What we accept, however, is not
the existence of a world time, the existence of a physical duration
and the like, but appearing time, appearing duration, as appearing.
These are absolute data that it would be meaningless to doubt. To
be sure, we do assume an existing time in this case, but the time we
assume is the immanent time of the flow of consciousness, not the
time of the experienced world.
7 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 5.
8 Husserl states, These latter would be the contents of external
sensibility, which is here plainly not defined in terms of some
metaphysical distinction of outward and inward, but through the
nature of its representing contents, as being ultimately foundational,
phenomenologically lived-through contents. Husserl, Logical
Investigations, vol. II, p. 304. See also Husserl, Ideas I, 85, p. 204.
9 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 6.
10 Ibid., p. 7.
11 Husserl writes: What forms the stuff into intentive mental processes
and what brings in that which is specific to intentionality is precisely
the same thing as what gives the locution, consciousness, its specific
sense: precisely according to which consciousness eo ipso indicates
something of which it is conscious. Because, now, the locutions,
moments of consciousness, awareness, and similar constructions,
and likewise because the locution, intentive moments, are made
quite unusable by the many different equivocations which will be
distinctly brought out in what follows, we introduce the term noetic
moment or, in short, noesis. See Husserl, Ideas I, 85, p. 205.
12 See Husserl, Ideas I, 85, p. 207.
13 He writes: Naturally, the pure hyletic is subordinated to the
phenomenology of transcendental consciousness. In addition, it has
the characteristic of a self-contained discipline; as a self-contained
discipline it has a value in itself; on the other hand, but from a
functional point of view, it has signification by the fact that it
provides possible guests in the intentional weave, possible stuffs for
intentive formations. Not only with regard to the difficulties which it
arrives at, but also with regard to the ranking of problems from the
standpoint of the idea of an absolute cognition, it obviously stands
 Notes 211

far below the noetic and functional phenomenology (both of which,

moreover, are properly not to be separated). See Husserl, Ideas I,
86, p. 210.
14 See Fink, Husserls Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism,
pp. 134ff. Fink writes: In truth, however, there is no dualism of
heterological moments in the phenomenological idea of constitution
but only relative strata within the unified constitutive disclosure
of the worlds origin from within the depths of the transcendental
subjects life. Both the hyle, which is first exhibited as the acts
non-intentional moment, and the totality-form of the act itself are
constituted within the depths of the intentional self-constitution
of phenomenological time, a constitution which, however, does
not proceed by means of acts. Fink, Husserls Philosophy and
Contemporary Criticism, pp. 1367.
15 Husserl writes: that intentionality, disregarding its enigmatic forms
and levels, is also like a universal medium which ultimately bears
in itself all mental processes, even those which are not themselves
characterised as intentive. Husserl, Ideas I, 85, p. 203.
16 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 10.
17 In this regard, he writes: An exposition of Brentanos analysis
of time can serve as the point of departure for our investigation.
Unfortunately, Brentano never published his analysis,
communicating it only in lectures. Marty has described it quite
briefly in his work on the development of the sense of colour, which
appeared at the end of the seventies, and Stumpf has also devoted
a few words to it in his psychology of sound. Husserl, On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 4.
18 Ibid., pp. 1314.
19 Ibid., p. 14.
20 Ibid., p. 16.
21 Ibid., p. 24.
22 Ibid., p. 25.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p. 26.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 28.
27 Husserl writes: We would prefer to avoid, then, the use of the word
appearances for the phenomena that constitute immanent temporal
212 Notes

objects; for these phenomena are themselves immanent objects and

are appearances in an entirely different sense. Ibid., p. 29.
28 Husserl states: Sensations, and the acts interpreting them or
apperceiving them, are alike experienced, but they do not appear
as objects: they are not seen, heard or perceived by a sense. Objects
on the other hand, appear and are perceived, but they are not
experienced. Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 105.

Chapter seventeen
1 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 29.
2 In 8 of ibid., entitled Immanent temporal objects and their modes
of appearance, Husserl writes: What we have described here is
the manner in which the object in immanent time appears in a
continual flow, the manner in which it is given. To describe this
manner does not mean to describe the appearing temporal duration
itself, for it is the same tone with the duration belonging to it that,
indeed, was not described but presupposed in the description. See
ibid., p. 26. If the temporal identity of the tone can be given only
by multiple modes of appearing, one can understand in depth what
motivates the choice of example of an analysis of the constituting
consciousness of time. Husserl also writes later: Temporal objects
and this pertains to their essence spread their matter over an
extent of time, and such objects can become constituted only in acts
that constitute the very differences belonging to time. See ibid., p.
41. G. Granel also writes: The melody is thus an example that bears
an evident philosophical signification: in the melody the moment of
identity does not cease to be carried on the waves of its constitution,
in the very time that the stream continually deploys as identity. See
Granel, Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl, p. 57.
We note, however, that the example possesses a phenomenological
signification before having a philosophical one.
3 See Chapter 3, n. 13.
4 See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time, pp. 2930.
5 See ibid., pp. 301.
6 See ibid., p. 33.
7 Husserl writes: Retention is not a modification in which
impressional data are really preserved, only in modified form: on
 Notes 213

the contrary, it is an intentionality indeed, an intentionality with

a specific character of its own. When a primal datum, a new phase,
emerges, the preceding phase does not vanish but is kept in grip
(that is to say, precisely retained); and thanks to this retention,
a looking-back at what has elapsed is possible. The retention itself
is not a looking-back that makes the elapsed phase into an object:
while I have the elapsed phase in my grip, I live through the present
phase, take it thanks to retention in addition to the elapsed
phase; and I am directed towards what is coming (in a protention).
Ibid., p. 122. In 23b of Experience and Judgment Husserl was
precise about the structure of fresh remembrance, or retention:
[Fresh remembrance] is an intentional modification in the realm
of pure passivity; it takes place according to an absolutely fixed
law without any participation of the activity radiating from the
ego-centre. This modification belongs to the regularity of the original
constitution of immanent temporality, in which every impressional
having-consciousness of an original momentary now is constantly
changed into the still-having-in-consciousness of the same in the
mode of the just-past (the just-having-been-now). This retention is
in turn itself subject to retentional modification, and so on. Husserl,
Experience and Judgment, 23, pp. 11011.
8 Husserl writes, Retention itself is not an act (that is, an immanent
duration-unity constituted in a series of retentional phases) but a
momentary consciousness of the elapsed phase and at the same time
a foundation for the retentional consciousness of the next phase.
Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 122.
9 Ibid., p. 70.
10 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, p. 106. See also where Husserl writes: We regard sensing
as the original consciousness of time ... Sensation is presenting
time-consciousness. Ibid., p. 112.
11 Ibid., p. 118.
12 We cite this remarkable passage from 36 of the lectures on time,
entitled The Time-Constituting Flow as Absolute Subjectivity,
which gathers together all the aporias of the self-constitution of the
absolute: Time-constituting phenomena, therefore, are evidently
objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time.
They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and
the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully
ascribed to them. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them
(and to say with the same signification) that they exist in the now
214 Notes

and did exist previously, that they succeed one another in time or
are simultaneous with one another, and so on. But no doubt we
can and must say: A certain continuity of appearance that is, a
continuity that is a phase of the time-constituting flow belongs
to a now, namely, to the now that it constitutes; and to a before,
namely, as that which is constitutive (we cannot say was) of the
before. But is not the flow a succession, does it not have a now,
an actually present phase, and a continuity of pasts of which I am
now conscious in retentions? We can say nothing other than the
following: This flow is something we speak of in conformity with
what is constituted, but it is not something in objective time. It is
absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to
be designated metaphorically as flow; of something that originates
in a point of actuality, in a primal source-point, the now, and so
on. In the actuality-experience we have the primal source-point and
a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all of this, we lack
names. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time, p. 79.
13 Husserl says: Subjective time becomes constituted in the absolute
timeless consciousness, which is not an object. Ibid., p. 117.
14 Manuscript C 7 I, p. 17.
15 See Chapter 5, n. 4.
16 For more on this see Chapter 6, n. 23.
17 Manuscript C 17 I, p. 18. (Translators note: this text was translated
from the French because the citation here is incorrect; however,
Franck was unable find the proper manuscript bibliographic data).
18 Husserl writes: In a certain sense, therefore, all experiences are
intended through impressions or are impressed. Husserl, On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 93.
19 Manuscript C 7 I, p. 18.
20 See Chapter 13, n. 6.
21 Husserl states: Hyletic data are data of colour, data of tone,
data of smell, data of pain, etc., considered purely subjectively,
therefore here without thinking of the bodily organs or of anything
psychophysical. Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, p. 128.
22 John Locke, for example, states, Our Senses, conversant about
particular sensible Objects, do convey into the Mind several distinct
Perceptions of things, according to those various ways, wherein
those Objects do affect them: and thus we come by those Ideas,
we have of Yellow, White, Heat, Cold, Soft, Hard, Bitter, Sweet,
 Notes 215

and all of those which we call sensible qualities, which when I say
the sense convey into the mind, I mean, they from external Objects
convey into the mind what produces there those Perceptions. This
great Source, of most of the Ideas we have, depending wholly
upon our Senses, and derived by them to the Understanding,
I call SENSATION. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979) book II, 3, p. 105.
23 See Chapter 14, n. 7.
24 Manuscript C 6, p. 7.
25 See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time, 24.
26 Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p. 153.
27 Husserl writes: But ever new now is precisely new and is
characterized as new phenomenologically. Even if the tone continues
so utterly unchanged that not the least alteration is apparent
to us, hence even if each new now possesses precisely the same
apprehension-content with respect to moments of quality, intensity,
etc., and carries precisely the same apprehension even if all of this
is the case, an original difference [ursprngliche Verschiedenheit]
nevertheless presents itself, a difference that belongs to a new
dimension. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness
of Internal Time, p. 67.
28 Manuscript C 6, p. 10.
29 See Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 16.
30 Manuscript B III 2, p. 20 (1931).
31 See Chapter 12.
32 See Chapter 1.
33 Husserl, Crisis, p. 389.
34 Cited in K. Schumann, Husserl-Chronik, p. 489.
 INDEX
active genesis 636
adumbration 20, 23, 3840, 51,
64, 74, 83, 90, 99, 116, 141,
152, 156, 208n. 29, 209n.
33
alien, sphere of 71, 91, 125, 138,
1435, 165
analogical apperception 1078,
116
analogical modification 1301
analytic of incarnation 107, 117,
147, 204n. 26
anarchic foundation of
phenomenology 165
animality 26, 30, 77, 78, 174n. 28,
174n. 30, 191n. 2, 199n. 2
apperceptive transfer 1057,
11213, 124, 126, 12935,
150
apperceptive unity 162
appresentation 103, 135
and the body 133, 149
interconnection with
presentation 1047, 11112,
134, 13943
of the other 11516, 119, 135,
1378
similar to compresentation
197n. 4
archi-facticity 59, 62, 68, 145,
162, 165
archi-immobility 121
association and associative
synthesis or constitution
668, 108, 11314, 1224,
134, 205n. 10, 189n. 21
associative pairing 12930
auto-affection,
and caress 145
and hetero-affection 145, 165
and pure flesh 82, 176n.9
body
the body over there 1057,
113, 1227, 1335, 138,
1423, 14950, 203n. 17
my own body 40, 75, 113, 115,
1245, 129, 138, 142, 146,
193n. 12
Brentano 1534, 161, 211n. 17
carnal relation 11617, 145
caress and impact 149
existential analytic absent of
147
foundation of temporalization
1635
and the object 132, 146
cogitatio 33, 54
cogitatum 33, 42, 181n. 17
cogito 1112, 18, 29, 31, 33, 42,
53, 189n. 28
consciousness of an image 39, 46,
73, 104, 172n. 9, 190n. 5,
197n. 10
consciousness of internal time
218 Index
flow of time 3841, 547, 59,
645, 72, 94, 134, 139,
1526, 1589, 162, 184n.
4, 213n. 12
immanent time 41, 150, 160,
163, 210n. 6, 212n. 2
intentionality of 42, 67, 97,
117, 14953, 160, 163,
188n. 13, 205n. 7, 211n.
14
original time-consciousness 42,
52, 645, 102, 130, 149,
154, 1612, 179n. 29
consciousness of the other vs.
consciousness of the sign or
image 104
constitution of objectivity 55,
102, 127, 132, 143, 207n.
21
in relation to the Fifth
Meditation 137, 142,
constitution of the other, a priori
126
constitutive genesis 63
crossing between temporality and
alterity 104
death 76, 11213
Derrida, Jacques 176n. 9, 179n.
30, 183n. 23, 186n. 19,
186n. 5, 191nn. 11, 12,
197n. 9, 198n. 16, 201n.
16, 202n. 8, 215n. 26
Descartes 11, 18, 28, 29, 31, 69,
171n. 6, 175n. 4
origin of modernity 12, 169n.
2 of the other 102, 115, 121,
eidos ego 33, 589, 61, 62, 68,
113, 125, 145, 185n. 17,
191n. 11
Empfindnisse 82, 112, 163, 193n.
18
existential analytic 246, 64, 147,
165, 208n. 26
extension partes extra partes 40
Fink, Eugen 125, 170n. 12, 177n.
13, 178n. 26, 183n. 11,
197n. 10, 202n. 20, 204nn.
22, 2, 211n. 14
flesh
as absolute here 39, 83, 1201,
138, 143, 149
constituted originally in touch
120, 145
and Dasein, 1656
does not derive from
temporality 165
incompletely constituted 103
as medium of all perception
23, 39, 80, 146, 200n. 5
non-spatiality of 1201
process of enworlding 90
in relation to temporality
1635
flesh of the other as first object
68, 87, 97, 101, 132, 145,
207n. 22
Foundational Investigations of the
Phenomenological Origin
of the Spatiality of Nature:
The Original Ark, the Earth,
Does Not Move 120
givenness 1726
immediate 29, 54, 77, 80, 102,
107, 121
mediate 77, 80, 87, 115, 144
1645
Granel, G. 209n. 33, 212n. 2
habitus 56, 64, 96, 108
Hegel, G. F. 49, 169n. 2, 169n. 9,
189n. 29
 Index 219
Heidegger, Martin 11, 14, 20,
21, 246, 32, 34, 88, 901,
1402, 145, 151
hetero-affection 145, 165
historicity of intentional genesis
56, 66, 112, 188n. 14,
199n. 2, 208n. 30
Hume, David 23, 66
hyle 42, 65, 68, 97100, 1506,
159, 162, 163, 165, 173n.
17, 211n. 14, 214n. 21
hyletic substrate 120, 202n. 6
imaginative variation 51, 62, 125,
185n. 14
immediacy of the other excluded
102
impact (choc) 1457, 149
impressional data 162, 212n. 7
archi or Ur-impression 160,
162, 164
living present 31, 34, 67,
95, 109, 111, 117, 140,
14950, 181n. 16, 214n. 13
primal impression 42, 159,
160, 181n. 15
related to the now 103, 163,
213n. 7
incarnate presence (leibhaftig) 21,
42, 49, 99, 1023, 131,
172n. 10, 183n. 18, 197n. 6
incorporation 825, 8990,
1067, 121, 126, 130, 135,
138, 1446
infinity 51, 61
Ingarden, Roman 14, 88, 178n.
19
interconnected (entrelacs) 104
of appresentation and
presentation 105, 107, 134
of flesh and body 135, 165
and impossibility of pure
presentation 135
interconnection between
present and non-present
134
interpretation of the other 68, 85,
116
intersubjectivity 27, 30, 502, 59,
70, 78, 96, 126, 164, 186n.
17, 192n. 9
caress and impact 13747
incorporation refers to 90
and temporality 106, 117,
165
union of flesh and body
presupposes 83, 103, 113,
124
intuition 1820, 234, 28, 58,
64, 93, 121, 134, 171n. 8,
189n. 18, 207n. 17
categorical 1412
eidetic intuition 62
of the other 75, 102, 115, 117,
204n. 23
two types of 142
intuitive fulfilment 115, 126
Kant, Immanuel (and Kantianism)
18, 40, 54, 67, 70, 79, 119,
147, 153, 188n. 18, 192n.
10, 195n. 10
kinaesthetic system 42, 113, 125,
141
lifeworld 29, 40, 79
lived experience 13, 19, 23, 33,
42, 469, 179n. 29, 201n. 7
as immanent temporal objects
68
of the other 102, 104, 134
reflexive 334
sensuous 120
temporal modes 39, 41, 43,
54, 65, 946, 117, 16152
two classes of 152
220 Index
living present see impressional
data
localization 11920
Locke, John 214n. 22
mathesis universalis 11
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 179n. 6,
181n. 14, 202n. 8, 208n.30
metaphysics 11, 14, 18, 26, 71,
117, 166, 169 n. 2, 170n.
2, 175n. 4, 195n. 10, 196n.
2, 210n. 8
monadic community 101, 196n. 2
morph 100, 132, 152, 155,
1589
mundane ego 32, 34, 69, 88, 119
natural attitude 299, 77, 114
noema 34, 412, 4650, 55, 57,
65, 143, 173n. 17, 182n. 8
as other 734, 139
and time 1602
as world 33, 85, 112
noesis 22, 37, 479, 74, 96, 210n.
11
noetic-noematic structure 41, 53,
96, 152
non-intentional passivity 98, 132,
152, 211n. 14
non-temporal sphere 154, 214n.
13
pairing 11117, 127, 12933, 165
original pairing 113
passive genesis 636
passive synthesis or
pre-constitution of objects
64, 67, 1079, 130, 152,
187n. 9
physical nature 30, 52
primordial sphere 1057, 111,
115, 119, 138, 207n. 19
protention 35, 65, 106, 1624
psychological idealism 69
pyschologism 12, 37, 57, 63
real world 37, 52, 78, 177n. 18
reduction
eidetic 32, 51, 5760, 185n. 14
phenomenological 37, 46, 77,
155, 175n. 3
pranscendental 84, 114, 171n.
5, 176n. 10, 188n. 14,
resemblance 106, 11118, 1247,
130, 1345
retention 345, 65, 979, 155,
159, 179n. 29, 205n. 7,
212n. 7, 213n. 8
double intentionality 161
related to appresentation 106
as a specific kind of
intentionality 160
Sartre, Jean-Paul 184n. 4
self-objectivation of
transcendental subject 74,
88
sensation 79, 82, 120, 1513,
160, 163, 164, 212n. 28,
213n. 10, 214n. 22
sexual difference 1267, 132, 144,
1467, 149, 204n. 26
solipsism 189, 30, 33, 39, 45,
50, 53, 58, 716, 83, 113,
176n. 10, 190n. 2, 201n. 8
soul 12, 32, 84, 8891, 177n. 17,
195n. 10
source-point or the now
15860, 181n. 15, 213n. 12
primal datum 212n. 7
spatial null-point (Nullpunkt) 64,
112
spatiality 26, 29, 122, 150, 155,
174n. 26, 194n. 1, 202n. 10
sphere of ownness 7786, 90,
957, 102, 133
 Index 221
and alterity 1067, 109,
11316, 119, 127, 133,
1424, 192n. 9
splitting the ego 345
and intersubjectivity 124
strangeness (Fremdheit) 678, 73,
109
tactility 80, 82, 120, 124, 200n.
5, 202n. 5
temporality 256, 41, 52, 53, 56,
62, 645, 68, 90, 97, 104,
106, 112, 114, 127, 130,
147, 14965
archi-foundation of all
intentional analysis 150
temporalization 163, 165, 201n.
20, 205n. 7
time
a priori of 153
flow of a melody 1535
temporal object (Zeitobjekt)
154
touch 29, 40, 802, 113, 120,
152, 204n. 27,
that which gives flesh to itself
124, 145
Tran-Duc-Thao 178n. 28
transcendence in immanence 98,
99, 106, 120, 146
universal teleology 132
universal a priori of constitution,
relation to the other 165,
179n. 1
world 51
objective world 32, 71, 77,
87, 100, 101, 106, 11113,
117, 149, 190n. 2
origin of 24, 31, 52, 72, 130,
146 146
preconstituted 623
primordial world 1002, 105,
123, 129, 194n. 32, 195n.
10
surrounding world
(Umweltlichkeit) 78, 133,
191n. 6
world of the other 74, 129,
130, 144