{"id":12047,"date":"2020-05-07T12:05:07","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T16:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=12047"},"modified":"2020-06-17T09:29:53","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T13:29:53","slug":"francoise-dastur-questions-of-phenomenology-language-alterity-temporality-finitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2020\/05\/07\/francoise-dastur-questions-of-phenomenology-language-alterity-temporality-finitude","title":{"rendered":"Fran\u00e7oise Dastur, Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fran\u00e7oise Dastur, Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude<\/em>. Robert Vallier tr. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017; 249 pages. ISBN: 978-0823233748. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alexandra Morrison, Michigan Technological University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7oise Dastur, a philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Nice, is a scholar steeped in the phenomenological tradition, who also frequently introduces timely philosophical issues to a wider public audience. Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude<\/em> is a collection of sixteen essays, first published in French in 2004. The essays, written between the late 1980s to 2000, provide a glimpse into Dastur\u2019s philosophical preoccupations while simultaneously sketching an introduction to the significant and central themes of the phenomenological movement. The thematic sections correspond to four major areas of phenomenological inquiry, beginning with language and logic and ranging through self and other, temporality and history, and finally, finitude and mortality.<\/p>\n

While Dastur does not confine herself to a single thinker in any of these essays, the first three draw mainly on Edmund Husserl\u2019s work. While this section demonstrates Dastur\u2019s considerable erudition, it gives the reader less a sense of her unique voice than do the other three sections. The first essay traces R. H. Lotze\u2019s formative influence on the development of Husserlian phenomenology; the next addresses Husserl\u2019s account of the a priori<\/em> foundations of language, briefly addressing Heidegger\u2019s movement away from Aristotelian syllogistic logic toward an apophantic logic; while the third deals with the pre-predicative and passive foundations of logic. Dastur then explores the practice of phenomenological seeing, addressing Heidegger\u2019s and Merleau-Ponty\u2019s move away from Husserl\u2019s \u201cphilosophy of the pure gaze\u201d while still marking the ways in which Husserl\u2019s contributions helped to steer philosophy away from the intellectualist tradition by wedding the subject to the sensuous world. (51)<\/p>\n

In the second section, Dastur\u2019s focus is alterity. \u201cTime and the Other: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas,\u201d owes its title to Levinas\u2019s well known 1948 collection of lectures dealing with our relation to the other in terms of time. Dastur argues for the general claim that, \u201cPluralism requires mortality\u2014that is, the finitude of time\u2014and this is why the question of time is revealed as decisive for the question of the other.\u201d (70) Dastur draws on the early works of both Husserl and Heidegger, showing how both clearly understand that thinking the alterity of the other demands that we think the alterity of time itself. For instance, Husserl\u2019s description of the experience of the foreign (die Fremderfahrung<\/em>) demonstrates that the experience of a mortal other cannot be some sort of fusion or synchrony. (70) Dastur also carefully defends Husserl from Heidegger\u2019s ungenerous interpretation in Being and Time<\/em>, laying out how the pure ego in Ideas I<\/em> cannot be thought of as something substantial nor psychical, but is rather the flow of lived-experience \u201cconstituted only in<\/em> time and as<\/em> time.\u201d (71)<\/p>\n

Dastur\u2019s argument highlights the Husserlian transcendental ego precisely as \u201cekstatic and as advent\u201d and consequently brings it very close to Heideggerian Dasein<\/em>. (71) Dastur also narrows in on Heidegger\u2019s thinking of the distributive and temporal structure of Jemeinigkeit<\/em> (or \u201cmineness,\u201d although Dastur is helpful in pointing out the superiority of the French translation \u201c\u00eatre-\u00e0-chaque-fois-\u00e0-moi\u201d or \u201cbeing-each-time-my-own\u201d) and reveals how it implies the plurality of Dasein, thus contesting the tired trend of interpreting \u201cmineness\u201d as voluntaristic and egoistic. Rather, Dastur emphasizes that \u201cbeing-in-the-world and being-with are cooriginal existentials\u201d making \u201cmineness\u201d inextricable from being-with-others. (77) This strongly suggests, contra Levinas, that the death analysis in Being and Time<\/em> is not solipsistic, but rather is the ontological basis for equality and justice. As Dastur emphasizes: \u201cIt is therefore not at all a paradox to claim that in<\/em> Being and Time, the question of the other is posed everywhere.<\/em>\u201d (77) While Dastur begins this chapter drawing out the similarities between Husserl and Heidegger\u2019s thought, in the final analysis she stresses the particular importance of Heidegger\u2019s approach, arguing that Levinas and Husserl still \u201cseek victory over death\u201d while Heidegger\u2019s thinking of death-toward-death genuinely grapples with our relation to the essential finitude of time and being. (81)<\/p>\n

In another particularly engaging essay, Dastur recalls the eminent Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger\u2019s interest in working the existentials of Being and Time<\/em> into psychiatric practice. Despite his engagement with fundamental ontology, Binswanger nevertheless accused Heidegger of falling prey to solipsism and gloominess. In response, Dastur draws on Heidegger\u2019s Zollikon Seminars<\/em> as well as Swiss psychoanalytic psychiatrist Medard Boss\u2019s 1971 Grundriss der Medizin und der Psychologie<\/em> in order to make her own case for the merging of phenomenological philosophy and therapy. It was at Boss\u2019s home, with a group of medical students and young psychiatrists, that the annual seminars were held for a decade up to the year preceding Heidegger\u2019s death. With these seminars, Dastur argues for the practical and transformative possibilities of Heidegger\u2019s thought, by making connections between the notion of therapy generated there alongside the idea of \u201ctrue pedagogy\u201d in Heidegger\u2019s What is Called Thinking?<\/em> (1952). She maintains also that the pedagogical relation and the therapeutic relation are the same in kind. What this means for the practice of therapy and teaching, then, is that the psychiatrist or the teacher needs to engage with the patient (or student) in such a manner that the doctor resists thinking of herself as the efficient cause of the cure, but rather as simply the occasion for it. The teacher, for instance, then becomes the motive for student transformation by focusing on letting herself learn how to let her students learn. It is in this way, according to Dastur, that the pedagogical or psychiatric transformation requires a \u201cconversion\u201d of the doctor that involves learning to treat the patient as Dasein<\/em> rather than as a collection of biological or psychological processes.<\/p>\n

In \u201cConscience the Most Intimate Alterity,\u201d Dastur challenges both Levinas\u2019 and Ricoeur\u2019s suggestions that ontology and ethics are incompatible or, to borrow Ricoeur\u2019s language, that Heidegger\u2019s philosophy is an \u201celision of ethics.\u201d (97) Dastur argues, on the contrary, that if ethics concerns our dwelling, then ethics is at the heart of Heidegger\u2019s concerns. And, if fundamental ontology demands that we think of the human being as the being for whom being is a matter of concern, then ontology is always intrinsically ethical, perhaps even \u201cpractical.\u201d Dastur spends much of the remainder of the essay demonstrating how, on the matter of ethicality, Ricoeur, Heidegger and Kant share a vision of moral conscience as a kind of alterity, a passivity or a \u201cbeing affected\u201d that is experienced as a asymmetry in our experience of self. This asymmetry is often described as a silent and disorienting \u201ccall\u201d that strangely comes from myself and yet nevertheless calls me to myself, urging me to respond. The argument on this point is a little unsatisfying, because while Dastur notes that the alterity of conscience is not precisely the same as the alterity of the Other, she does not take the time to flesh out the character and importance of this distinction.<\/p>\n

In the first essay in the temporality and history section, Dastur argues that Merleau-Ponty\u2019s approach to temporality has him merging the different phenomenological styles of Husserl and Heidegger in such a way that he is able to accomplish the \u201cdialectical sublation [la r\u00e9l\u00e8ve<\/em>] of the positive content of realism and idealism.\u201d (107) Dastur sets herself the task of drawing out the mediating position of Merleau-Ponty\u2019s Phenomenology of Perception<\/em> with regard to temporality, showing how this work is both the accomplishment of Husserl\u2019s transcendental phenomenology and the \u201cnew beginning for thought\u201d that Heidegger\u2019s philosophy championed. Dastur demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty\u2019s understanding of temporality transforms the realist position that locates the subject in<\/em> time, and the idealist one that positions the subject outside<\/em> of time into a coherent phenomenological description of the lived present, that is, of the subject as<\/em> time. (107)<\/p>\n

In \u201cPhenomenology of the Event,\u201d Dastur argues that the task for a \u201ctrue philosophy\u201d is to account for the discontinuous structure of time that makes events possible for us. Dastur refers to this structure, thematized by phenomenology, as time\u2019s \u201ceventuality\u201d, a structure that reveals itself as a temporal interruption, or caesura<\/em>, that alone is able to account for the contingency and chance-like character of our lived experience. For Dastur, this structure of time entails that, strictly speaking, events cannot be said to be produced <\/em>in the world, but rather should be more accurately described as the experience of the noncoincidence of time with itself, an experience that essentially opens a world for us. Interestingly, this suggests a conversation with Derrida\u2019s work of the same period, in particular his reference, in Specters of Marx<\/em>, to Hamlet\u2019s famous line that \u201ctime is out of joint\u201d to open his reflection on the asynchrony of time. (Specters<\/em>, 27) Dastur here draws on Husserl\u2019s early discussion of the temporality of advent (av\u00e8nement<\/em>) and Heidegger\u2019s description of time\u2019s dehiscence or ekstasis<\/em> and argues that it is the work of these two philosophers, and their thematization of the future\u2019s indeterminacy, that has made something like a phenomenology of the event possible.<\/p>\n

The last two brief papers make simple arguments, but give a good introduction to the phenomenological sense of history and the relation between narrative and history. In the first paper, Dastur argues that while Dilthey and Husserl\u2019s philosophies make room for finitude, that it wasn\u2019t until Heidegger that finitude and historicity were thought of as intrinsically linked. In the second paper, which focuses on Ricoeur, she picks up a thread from a lecture given by David Carr in the eighties, where he argued that it is not possible to separate life from the activity of narrating it. Dastur follows this thread, demonstrating that since human existence is such that we must become ourselves over time, taking up our inheritance, the very structure of being is historical.<\/p>\n

In the background of the previous three sections, the finitude of existence has loomed large, and so it gives the book a sense of unity to have a concluding section devoted to this critical phenomenological topic. It is certainly a very familiar theme for Dastur. One might well think of these essays as the theoretical background for her more recent and less scholarly monograph, \u201cHow Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy\u201d (2012). Near the end of that book, for instance, Dastur argues, \u201cFor it is this relation with its own always imminent death that makes the human being something other than a mere living being, that is, a mere particularization of universal life. This relation to death grants it a history and makes of its existence something other than the predictable unfolding of a program, and it is this singular history that finds its \u2018end\u2019 in death.\u201d (Death<\/em>, 45) This sentence nicely sums up the crux of the content of the final section, but Dastur lays out the argument in two of the essays through an engagement with the work of Eugen Fink and Jan Pato\u010dka, philosophers who are perhaps lesser known in the English-speaking world. In particular, the essay \u201cPhenomenology and Finitude\u201d is a short but wonderful introduction to the work of Czech philosopher and founding member and architect of the pre-Velvet Revolution resistance movement Charta 77, Jan Pato\u010dka. In this essay, we encounter a philosopher who is, like Dastur herself, profoundly influenced by Heidegger. However, Dastur deftly reveals Pato\u010dka not as a mere acolyte, but as a thinker whose interpretations of \u201cthe master\u201d are transposed into novel formulations that awaken us to the brilliance of the original, again, much like Dastur herself. For example, Pato\u010dka\u2019s own thought of the finitude of existence is transformed into the ontological sense of a \u201ccall to sacrifice\u201d through which we are led to rethink Heidegger\u2019s controversial notion of \u201cauthenticity.\u201d Sacrifice is thought as a mode of giving oneself up to the alterity of time in a way that resists, as Dastur argues, \u201cthe integral calculability reigning today and thus brings the limits of technology to light.\u201d (165)<\/p>\n

A main argument that the book makes implicitly is that the themes it treats\u2014language and logic, self and other, temporality and history, finitude and mortality\u2014need to be grasped as a nexus; each is the key to the other. This collection gives us a reprise of Dastur\u2019s treatment of these themes as they have developed over the course of a long and distinguished career, shedding light on the integrity of her philosophical project.<\/p>\n

Additional Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7oise Dastur (2012), How Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy<\/em>, Robert Vallier tr. (New York: Fordham University Press).<\/p>\n

Jacques Derrida (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International<\/em>, Peggy Kamuf tr. (New York: Routledge).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fran\u00e7oise Dastur, Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude. Robert Vallier tr. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017; 249 pages. ISBN: 978-0823233748. Reviewed by Alexandra Morrison, Michigan Technological University. Fran\u00e7oise Dastur, a philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Nice, is a scholar steeped in the phenomenological tradition, who also frequently introduces timely philosophical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10,65,38],"class_list":["post-12047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-heidegger","tag-husserl","tag-phenomenology","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 08:30:26","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12047"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12051,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12047\/revisions\/12051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}