Emptied Worlds: Heidegger and the Animal

Emptied Worlds:

- Heidegger and the Animal -
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Heidegger’s lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1931) is a transitionary work, situated between the so-called phenomenological period of the 1920’, and the Kehre (turn) of the 1930’s in which he would expound his ‘history of being’. It also marks the point of passage between Heidegger’s initial systematic project for a fundamental ontology, beginning in the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time (where the continuity between science and philosophy was unquestioned through the elucidation of the meaning of being) and the so-called ‘poetic turn’, where the hermeneutic task becomes rather to penetrate into the manifold epochal manifestations of the truth of being. Finally, it represents one of Heidegger’s last attempts to undertake a properly phenomenological analysis, after coming to the conclusion that ontology leads to an abyss in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1928), and symptomatically attempts to elucidate the relation between human and non-human  entities, once the phenomenon of worldhood appears restricted to the disclosure of beings for temporal Dasein.

The link between being in general and Human-being had been in fact already shown to be the principal problem for the original project delineated in Being and Time, and which found its critical point in the lecture course from 1927 Basic Problems of Phenomenology. There Heidegger attempts to locate the disclosure of Being from Time (Zeit) by showing how temporality in general (Temporalitat des Seins) became the enabling condition for human temporality (Zeitlichkeit). But in attempting to draw the ontological grounds for this problematic distinction, Heidegger finally succumbed to denying the autonomy of Time itself, reducing it to our human temporality. This way the relation of human being to being through time ultimately finds itself irresolvable in the duality between human temporality or ekstatic transcendence (ekstasis) and unified but unobjectifiable Time in general (ekstema), as Heidegger hopes to avoid collapsing the latter into the former. And this insufficiency finally entails the incapacity to clarify Sein from the existential analytic of Dasein; a task which was to be propadeutic for the full-blown development of philosophical ontology proper. As Ray Brassier notes, in trying to avoid the collapse of Being into Human-being, Heidegger’s entire criticism of subjectivist philosophy becomes suddenly threatened, as is the local radicalization of the Husserlian dyad of intentional transcendence (noesis-noema), which he scolded for having been still encapsulated by the substantialist cog of representation. I quote:

“What is ironic about Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical subjectivism is that it is precisely his refusal to hypostatize the world as present-at-hand object of representation that precipitates him towards the arch-idealist conclusion according to which ‘If no Dasein exists, no world is “there” either’” (NU: Pg. 162)

And this is of course the locus for Heidegger’s development of the central concept of FCM: worldhood, and more properly, for the restriction of worldhood to the human sphere. Heidegger begins his course by emphasizing the propriety of philosophy against science, art, religion, worldview and history. Philosophy is philosophizing, he claims, and can only be carried out performatively as it wrests thought from its ‘inauthentic’ slumber amidst beings. This means that metaphysics does not concern itself with a particular a being (God, the animal, the human…), a particular domain of beings like science does (biological, physical), or even all the different beings or domains of beings. Categorical divides and typologies are delegated to the secondary and debased ontic enterprise of the sciences, while philosophy is in turn set to unearth their ‘ground’ or enabling conditions. Philosophy is said then to elucidate the phenomenon of worldhood, the understanding of being-as-a-whole, i.e. as the unified horizon from which beings are disclosed and made manifest. Since the manifestness or disclosure of beings is properly the 'human essence' as defined by Dasein’s ekstatic transcendence, it follows that philosophy as the awakening of an understanding of the disclosure, remains man’s most 'proper' activity, its ‘home’. As fundamental, metaphysics/philosophy becomes the enabling ground for the rest of the sciences or merely ontic enquiries: “there are only sciences insofar as there is philosophy”, not the other way around."

This way we can approach Heidegger’s avowal of Novalis’ ascription of philosophy as homesickness. It is the manifestation of beings to Dasein that makes being intelligible, and the world is nothing but the dwelling place where being-as-a-whole becomes disclosed. Therefore, enquiring into the structure of the world is just to enquire into man’s being-in-the-world as his very essence: Dasein is in the world amidst beings (in-der-welt-sein). As such, it is constrained by finite transcendence, insofar as he is subject to the encounter of beings which are not himself and whose way of being are different than his own. So Dasein’s proper way of being in the world is not that of an substance (whatness, Was-sein), that of an intra-temporal being or entity; nor even that of the Husserlian subject of intentional consciousness or of eidetic representation, etc. Rather, as its proper way of being, Dasein is always under way towards its completion, in the process of becoming, grounded in the threefold temporal ekstases of past, present and future. Dasein is thereby only individuated insofar as it is constrained by his finitude, projected in the resolute anticipation of being’s disclosure, and towards the end of the temporal horizon as the limit of such projection. That is of course death as the 'ownmost' (im)possibility of the closure of the world in which beings are encountered.

Heidegger speaks of metaphysical comprehensive concepts as opposed to the merely scientific categories; the latter are delegated to the ambit of technical present-at-hand manipulation (Vorhandenheit). Comprehensive concepts require that philosophizing bring one closer to ‘awaken’ certain forms of attunement or dispositions (Verhalten), which reveal the fundamental features of worldhood itself. This includes the passive receptivity of being’s unconcealment (Unveborgenheit), to the active world-forming wresting of beings from concealment. The world is thus correlative to our own capability for attunement within questioning, and never just in-itself or independent our our disclosure: "The substantive content and kind of being of a being prescribe possible manifestness (truth)...if scientific knowledge is to be gained then in accordance with its intention and its possibilities is must satisfy the essential connection between being and truth".

In doing so, Heidegger inflects Being (Sein) into the disclosure for human beings (Dasein), and thus cements their indissociability. Whereas man qua man (rational animal) is but one animal amidst the ontic distribution of species/genera, the ontological ground of his essence as horizonal ekstatic transcendence is the condition for the disclosure of all beings, from rocks to spiders, from nations to black holes. As something extreme and primary, philosophy is already comprehensive of everything, so that any application of it comes too late and is a misunderstanding. But in attempting to release worldhood from the shackles of scientific reason or mere ‘idle-talk’ (Garede), it appears that Heidegger's co-appropriation of being and thought performs rather a violent anthropomorphizing of the world as such, so that it becomes strictly impossible to speak of other beings 'in themselves' without already being delivered to the ‘emptiness’ to which he reduces scientific reason: proof, determinative concepts, beings as particulars or species, chronological time, etc. All are of no peculiar ontological interest, save as derivative abstractions, progressively becoming emptier as one withdraws from the waking richness of fundamental attunements, into the blind machinic dealings with entities presence-at-hand (this is why mathematics must remain the most removed and empty form of thought for Heidegger).

It becomes thus impossible for Heidegger to think of the phenomenon of worldhood in animals from the categories or explanations given to us by the sciences, since the latter can only describe entities derivatively as belonging to some class or other, as something present-at-hand. But however much the possibility of stepping-beyond human disclosure severely limits Heidegger's capacity to provide a description of animals in-themselves, Heidegger ventures to attempt to disclose the peculiarity of animal being apart from their relation to our dealings. Apart from the abstraction of presence-at-hand categorization, animals ‘themselves’, are said properly lack the capacity to encounter beings as beings, what Heidegger calls the ‘as-structure’, required for manifestness and worldhood: “When we say the lizard is laying on the rock we ought to cross out the word rock in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock…If we cross out the word we do not merely imply something else is in question here, whatever it is it is not accessible as a being” (Pg 198). This is the poverty of all reality outside the cohort of human manifestation: animals remain closed to their ‘encircling rings’, as beings ‘without worlds’, at the most partaking as projections deprived of their own temporalization, transfixed like automata by reflex and drive. The result is clear, being, the unconcealment of beings, is relative to the structure of worldhood and thus to man, while animals must remain strictly speaking, worldless.

But because the wealth of Nature, including animals, is not just the domain of the sciences, but the offering of non-produced beings given to Dasein, Heidegger also indicates animals and Nature (phusis) are never something merely present at hand for us, but that they concern the seizure of being-as-a-whole. Dasein is split between the passive reception of the phusei onta and his co-originary disclosing attunements, which are the ground for his world-forming capabilities. In any case, the phusei onta are still disclosed by and through Dasein; while Episteme phusika is correspondingly an enquiry into first principles, whose essence is given through the Greek ousia. But as we surmised above, for Heidegger an enquiry into such essence does not concern the determination of an Aristotelian categorical genus, or the elucidation of their regional divisions and specifications. The latter now properly becomes the task of science, but it falls to philosophy to elucidate the dispositional ways in which the ontic is opened and seized. It is our task to ‘awaken’ the fundamental attunements to access the disclosure of being; not merely to make oneself conscious-of some-thing, but to prepare an disposition in Dasein taken from his everyday slumber or ‘being away’.


To review: Heidegger develops the distinctions above along three axes:

- Being at hand / not being at hand - proper to intra temporal entities, ontic domain, the stone – relative to our encounter or dealings.

- Being awake / not being awake (being away) - proper to Dasein’s own way of being

- Being there / not being there – relative to disclosure for Dasein and thus to (1).

Crucially, the stone cannot be away since it does not have a world; it does not encounter being, it has no temporalizing structure; it could only away for us, that is to say, 'not at hand' (either zuhanden/vorhanden…). More problematically, however, this would seem to apply to animals as well as stones, since the result from Heidegger’s analysis is that the animal as such remains in-itself, encircled, without direct openness to the realm of beings. This means that as long as being is not disclosed or given as being at hand, as part of Dasein’s comportments to being, particular animals or species (any way of approaching animals from the purview of the sciences or through practical dealings) simply are not there. Animals as such are worldless, while animals qua Nature as a whole are simply anonymous phantoms we find in our immersion prior to the machinic dissection of scientific reason or presence-at-hand:

"Being at hand or not being at hand decide concerning being and non being...the stone, in its being away [in its not being at hand], is precisely not there. Man, however, must be there in order to be able to be away, and only so long as he is there does he in general have the possibility of an away." (64)

Worldhood is thus neither internal (like a concept of reflection) nor external (like an objective property). It is no-where, it does not pertain to a given space or spatial determination, but is always subject to temporalizing in Dasein’s manifold attunements. In Heidegger's own words, 'attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear, Dasein is always already attuned in its very way' (Pg. 68)


This priority of temporality as the horizon for the disclosure of worldhood leads Heidegger’s enquiry into the examination of boredom, and goes from the properly ontic ‘boringness’ to profound ontological boredom where the seizure of beings-as-a-whole becomes palpable. This complicity between attunements and the temporality of Dasein is made already graspable from the etymological surface of the German words: Being bored - langeweile, means long while. The temporalizing structure of boredom thus renders transparent its link to Dasein’s co-appropriation of beings in the world. Heidegger clarifies on general terms this correlation between attunements, temporalization and Dasein, and writes: "Boredom and ultimately every attunement, is a hybrid, partly objective, partly subjective" - it plays with the thing and transfers it to it. We are seized by boredom, and delivered to an impatient dealing with beings and the temporal modifications.

There are three forms of boredom we here summarize schematically:

The first form is Being bored by - ‘ boringness’ – specifically addressed to an entity or entities. It keeps us in limbo, while time passes too slow. We try to make time pass in boredom. It is still provisionally anchored in specific knowing, on an specific entity. Dasein is said to be ‘held in limbo’.

The second form is Being bored with - 'obstructive casualness' (unconscious lingering) - unknowing ontic generality, abandoning us to ourselves, time whiles and endures, it does not release us while it leaves us empty, it is the stretching of an enduring present, or an stretched now, where we are cut off from our having-been and our future, the horizon of the earlier (the past) is closed off. (120-124)

The third form is profound boredom - whereby the world finds itself homogeneously leveled, with no specific address or duration, and where no entity or particularity seizes us, but the general wholeness of being’s offering becomes latent in time’s opening in the form of a wholesale refusal of beings. Typically, it is at the moment of greatest remove from beings that Dasein grasps more authentically the call of being as such. Not at all dissimilarly from the analysis of anxiety, such as it was approached in B&T, profound boredom becomes the sharpest index of beings-as-a-whole. Attuning oneself all the way to profound boredom represents the height of the attitude of releasement (Gelassenheit) as opposed to ekstatic concentration or objectification (making-present: Augenblink). This means that Dasein disappropriates its immediate inauthentic conceptual identifications, dealings and presuppositions, and withdraws into the passive receptacle of being’s unconcealment. It thereby lays the passive ground for what Heidegger calls the ‘world producing’ or active faculties of Dasein.

This then paves the way for Heidegger's description of the phenomenon of worldhood itself, in which the comportments towards beings is elucidated, elliptically extending on the very distinctions made in B&T. Dasein is world producing, it encounters beings, and doing so it must encounter them as something. This structure of the ‘as’ is prerequisite for the determination of beings as beings, and their subsequent explication of the pre-logical logos in the spoken word (legein). We wrest beings from their removal or concealmente precisely through the logos and its disclosing capabilities. This does not yet presuppose the apophantic disclosure of propositional discursivity (logos apophantikos), but it already determines a ‘pre-ontological’ understanding in givenness, which is co-constituted by Dasein and his apprehending (Vernehmen). More fundamentally, Dasein finds the horizonal disclosure of worldhood seized in the threefold temporal ekstases:

Being-with - respect - present

Being already - retrospect -having being (past)

Being towards - project - future

The play of these temporal dimensions of Dasein in attunements allows us to understand how the categorical abstraction undertaken by the sciences constitute a reduction of temporality into mere endurance, or being-present. This is already the derivation of what Heidegger calls presence-at-hand, in which the individual categorical divides of entities occur, already derived from the primary engaged practice with the world of equipment (Zeug) or readiness-to-hand (275)

"And yet here the beings that surround us are uniformly manifest as simply something present at hand in the broadest sense- the presence of land and sea, the mountains and forests, and within this the presence of animals and plants and the presence of human beings and the products of human work, and amongst all this the presence of ourselves as well" (275)

But because presence at hand is merely an 'uprooted', technical grasp on beings, it is debased into the mere object for human calculation, void of ontological value. At a loss for any further ontological insight into animals, Heidegger finds the barren lands of metaphysics projecting an image of an equally barren non-human world: ‘animals are not merely present at hand’, he strives to say in a sophistic move to grant them independence, but find themselves encapsulated without exit (transcendence) in the 'encircling struggle of encircling rings'. This is not a mere fixation on enduring presence, for presence is only ever a derivative comportment relative to the pre-logical logos and thus already pressuposing the temporalizing horizon of Dasein. Rather, the animal is fixed by reiterative behavior, with no capacity to alter his drive or 'attune' his dispositions. This is also why Heidegger conveniently excludes from his analysis mammals and other animals which would intuitively exhibit more dynamic capacities to deal with things, and constricts himself to insects. Animality becomes thus reduced to the descriptive poverty of the phenomenological exile, that is, the leftovers of human existential richness. Behavior and environment do not show a comportments or worldhood respectively; the animal essence is only to remain within the encircling ring of captivation. So Heidegger rejects the thesis that:

"Beings as such are given to all animals'…the concept of world we have indicated... means the accessibility of beings as such rather than beings in themselves. according to this, beings do indeed also belong to world, but only insofar as they are accessible, insofar as beings themselves allow and enable something.”

And this subordination of beings to conditions of access should be read analogously to the subordination of ontic time to ontological time, or human temporality, Sein to Dasein, which fatally seals the fate of fundamental ontology into the explication of human temporality itself. As Heidegger makes clear in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935):

”[S]trictly speaking we cannot say: there was a time when there were no human beings. At every time, there were and are and will be human beings, because time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings. There is no time in which there were no human beings, not because there are human beings from all eternity, but because time is not eternity, and time always temporalizes itself only at one time, as human, historical Dasein”

But if so it is clear that Heidegger’s attempt to draw crucial distinction among beings which are non Dasein, such as stones and animals, faces a fundamental irresolvable difficulty. Heidegger tries to assuage the explanatory poverty induced by his ontological commitments by saying that while stones are worldless animals are ‘poor in the world’. But this is a copout, since it is made abundantly clear that only within the temporalizing structure of Dasein’s transcendence beings as such become manifest, and that worldhood indeed admits of no degrees. To this end, Brassier concludes:

“Heidegger’s attempt to wriggle out of this dichotomy by claiming that the distinction at issue is not between having or not having a world but rather between entities that are ‘rich in world’ (i.e. human beings) and those that are ‘poor in world’ (such as animals) is a desperate sophism since he makes it perfectly clear that there can be no common measure for degrees of ‘richness’ or ‘poverty’ in world and hence no possible transition from one to the other.”

But if there is no standard to measure intra-temporal beings except from the worldly disclosure for human being, then how can Heidegger's correlationism explain the scientific fact of the fossil record: that there existed life and a world prior to the possibility of conditions of manifestation? Heidegger subjects ontic or metric time (of boringness) to ontological time, which is relative to the manifestation to Dasein. But if ontic time is only ever understandable as presupposing the time for manifestation, how can Heidegger explain that there was a time prior to even the possibility of manifestation? For if what science tells us is correct, then human time emerges within ontic time, at one point; it is relative to ontic time. But if there is no time except for Dasein, then how does the idea of a time or a reality independent of ourselves, and which will endure after we are gone become intelligible? This is precisely the problem Quentin Meillassoux raises against correlationism through the challenge of the ‘arche-fossil’. And this is perhaps the crucial question for phenomenological accounts which begin from the primacy of experience or to access the world, i.e. what Graham Harman has called ‘philosophies of access’. Correlationism results in the impossibility of thinking a world independently of ourselves and forces the denial of the independent being of all intra-temporal beings. As Heidegger puts it, ‘an eye taken independently is not an eye at all’. It thus firmly establishes the grounds for a prolonged noocentrism, which clogs philosophical thought in drawing its entire stock from the straightjacket of the post-Kantian aftermath and its obsession with finitude.

Alien Theory -Chapter II (Henry's Material Phenomenology)

- ALIEN THEORY: CHAPTER II -

MICHEL HENRY'S MATERIAL PHENOMENOLOGY
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Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1928) equates the transcendental imagination’s schematizing temporal synthesis of concept-intuition with the temporalizing function of Dasein’s ekstatico-horizonal transcendence:

Transcendental split: phenomenon / in-itself = Ontico-Ontological split: entity / being

Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation questions that this allocation of the transcendental within ekstatico-horizonal temporality misses the radically transcendental atemporal essence of phenomenological being. Like Husserl, Heidegger situates the phenomenon within the worldly ascription in which the asymmetry of ideal ekstatic temporality apprehension and givenness to consciousness; and absolute immanence-to-itself as en-static auto-affection as real but non-intentional essence of phenomenalisation. Henry maintains that ekstatic transcendence distinguishes itself unilaterally from enstatic immanence, while the latter does not distinguish itself in return, it remains plainly indifferent. So ekstatic-visibility is constituted by enstatik invisibility, never disclosed within ekstasis: “It is only as an un-seeing, in not relating to itself in a seeing, in not revealing itself through a seeing, and thus as un-seen, as invisible, that seeing effectuates itself.” (Henry, 1990, p.111) This seems at this point all too reminiscent of the traditional Kantian appeal to a noumenal beyond which lays outside the causal realm of phenomenal experience; in an updated phenomenological register. But the idea is that this unilateral differentiation does not allow to posit the immanence of enstasis as that which is showing-itself, given to apprehension even as the backdrop of ekstatic phenomenal sense. However, as Brassier remarks, enstasis is auto-affecting and constitutes the phenomenon all the same, so it still functions in some way as a background, sense-giving constitutive split. Phenomenality in itself, as material real condition, is occluded by ekstatic differentiation; the former is nothing but auto-affecting absolved of empirical externality. It is auto-position and self-impressing, indistinguishing of given and givenness. But in order to reach these scandalous conclusions, we need some serious clarification, which leads the way to old Husserl’s theses on internal temporal consciousness.

For Husserl, consciousness temporalizes itself automatically, rendering all immanent flux intrinsic to the phenomenological and transcendental subjectivity of consciousness, the given coincides with the givenness, constituted with constituting, insofar as they are in and as consciousness of the living present. But this auto-temporalizing has three modalities of givenness:

1) The ‘now’ or punctual present.

2) Retention

3) Protention

Husserl acknowledges that this tripartite structure is interiorly implying instances of a noetic (constituted, thus not purely noematic) intra-temporal distinction in logical-order or sequence (a before and after) of these modalities (what is protended is after the pure now); and that which is given through the synthesis and that which does the synthesizing. But Henry identifies this latter divide as phenomenological-transcendental rather than logico-temporal, and acknowledging this fully makes impossible a logical-consecutive temporal articulation of the three synthesis as explained by Husserl. For to assume the logico-temporal ordering is to relapse to a ‘worldly’ transcendental-empiricism rather than transcendental immanent phenomenology: empirical consciousness retains synthetically in succession that which is given to consciousness in the present in succession; the noetic synthesis of ideas succeed the noematic impressions.

Husserl does this reinserting a continuous flux of undetermined ‘nows’ to be re-retained in the living present by retention in the form of a ‘noematic impression’. So he must presuppose the already constituted synthesis of the ‘now’, what does the constitutive is rather anonymous in this regard. In this sense, it is hard to make sense of Husserl’s insistence that the structures of givenness and those of the given cannot be isomorphic. This is so since the given presupposes its constitution or givenness in the immediate contraction of the punctual present, seized by retention continuously, and so transcendentally-reintegrated folded into what is always-already empirically pre-given in synthesis, rather than guaranteeing the gap and the immanent’s independence: “Husserl carefully traces the genesis of the given back to the originary noetic syntheses of givenness, only to collapse the genesis of givenness qua givenness back into the realm of the given.” (Pg. 39) This circularity conceals the auto-positioning essence of transcendental consciousness, shifting between phenomenological-transcendental conditioning and the worldly-empirical condition. Because it remains constrained to the punctual now qua ‘what’, constituted form of Oneness, rather than the pure ‘how’ of phenomenalization, of givenness as givenness, the absolute auto-position of the phenomenon’s enstatic immanence.

- Ur-Impression as Coincidence of Phenomenon and Phenomenality -

Henry detects the clue out of this circularity in Husserl’s own appeal to the Ur-impression as the non-intentional, sub-representational condition for ekstatico-horizonal transcendence and phenomenality: “Why impression is continuously there anew is something we have begun to understand: because nothing comes into being unless it be in the site wherein being first grasps itself in the pathos of its original Parousia. Because the origin is a pathos, because the latter is always in effect as such, nothing comes forth unless it be as an impression, which for that reason ‘is always there’” (Henry, ibid, p.49) Pure affectivity is an absolute pathos, the self-impressing, self-giving, and thus auto-affecting enstatic immanence which conditions intentional ekstatic time consciousness. The ‘how’ and ‘what’ achieve perfect synchrony in their auto-affecting ipseity, givenness is self-positing or self-impressing as the essence of the phenomenon and giving ekstasis the material background for its passive intentional syntheses and the temporal articulation of phenomena.

Heidegger failed to spot the true dichotomy was not between temporalized phenomenon (ontic time) and temporalizing phenomenality (ontological temporality). Rather, the real difference according to Henry is in the asymmetry of:

1) Temporalized and temporalizing ekstasis (ontological) vs. 2) Atemporal enstasis (ontic)

In Henry’s estimation, both Husserl and Heidegger fall to the trap of the circular, bilateral co-constitution of ekstatic conditioning temporalization and temporalized condition, where givenness is ultimately refurnished by the tropes of the given. Both in noetic-noematic intentional consciousness transcendence-in-immanence, and Dasein’s horizonal projection standing-out-of-himself are caught in the straightjacket of ekstasis in their hybridization of phenomenon and phenomenality. Additionally, Henry remarks this auto-affectivity is essentially subjective, an original Ipseity of self-feeling and absolute infinite enstatic Life in its immanent self-development, underlying finite ekstatic transcendence. It grounds the historic development of absolute Life, its non-spatio-temporal ‘kinematicity’ or perpetual self-impressing. Henry thus strives to root the finitude of Dasein’s ekstatico-horizonal transcendence and projection and the privilege granted to the future in the eternal affect of absolute immanence as unrepresentable past.

However, Brassier reminds us, we cannot simply compare enstasis and ekstasis as two metaphysical principles on account of the purported unilaterality separating only the latter from the former. So we must stipulate the dual hypothesis that even if one must ultimately agree in that the unobjectifiable withdrawal of ekstatic transcendence is distinguishable from the withdrawal of enstatic immanence, they are indiscernible. Brassier will retain the reworking of the transcendental distinction between real and ideal in terms of indiscernible difference or unilateral duality.

The Idealisation of Immanence: Laruelle’s Critique of Henry

Laruelle imputes Henry for phenomenologizing and thus ontologising immanence as absolute auto-affection, which devolves in an ‘ultra-phenomenological vitalism’. It thereby re-idealises immanence and re-envelops matter in-itself to the transcendence of the ‘as such’. Auto-position creates a transcendent hybridization of the immanence to itself which reproduces the transcendental coup on immanence. Brassier isolates two aspects in this idealisation:

1) Ideological/Superstructural – The arbitrary equation of matter with affect. This equation between matter and subjective pathos makes his ‘materialism’ suspect, insofar as it spiritualizes matter to the point where it’s irrecognizeable and insensitive to any the natural sciences might say of it.

2) Substantive/Structural – The ultimate complicity and inseparability between immanence and transcendence in the triadic structure of Decision. This is so since it is simultaneously autonomous and coordinated within the dyad constituting/constituted, absolute non-relation and the relation between invisible immanent essence and visible eksistence. The indivisible immanence in-itself is divided by the transcendental dyadic division between visible and invisible.

But of course, this seems sloppily argued at this point; since it is not clear how Henry’s appeal to unilateral distinction between immanence/transcendence becomes vitiated so that there is an idealizing ‘sub-division’ or bilateral determination of immanence. Brassier argues that the exteriority of ekstasis vis its ultimate exclusion from enstasis generates this bilaterality between immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative. In excluding itself from ekstasis it becomes relative to it again:

“Absolute immanence bears a latent, implicitly constitutive reference to transcendence within itself by very virtue of the fact that it expels it. As a result, Henry’s phenomenology of absolute immanence does not succeed in interrupting the quintessentially philosophical (or quasi-Hegelian) circle that always posits the relation of relation (transcendence) and non-relation (immanence); the ultimate relativity of absolute and relative.” (Pg. 47)

However, it seems strange to say that ‘the appeal to exteriority’ suffices to idealize Henry’s purported materialism. For it seems that there is no substantive distinction in saying real immanence is foreclosed to ideal transcendence and to say real immanence is not ideal transcendence. So when Brassier avows Laruelle’s construction of radical immanence around its foreclosure or indifference rather than exclusion or opposition to all dyadic oppositions: immanence/transcendence, thinkable/unthinkable, absolute/relative, unilateral/bilateral, asymmetry/symmetry, identity/difference; one can’t help but wonder how exactly this foreclosure can be effected whilst saving the possibility of distinguishing a real and ideal realm, or speaking of immanence at all. For such indifference, in not excluding itself from transcendence, would seem to risk its utter indistinguishability from it, not just unilateral distinction of the kind Henry proposes. This should lead us to anticipate the much hyped difference-without-distinction and givenness-without-givenness proper to Laruelle’s non-philosophical maneuver. Radical immanence, says Laruelle, must be neither thinkable nor unthinkable, it’s foreclosure must not determine its immanence. The nominal characterization of immanence as foreclosed to Decision does not retroactively constitute immanence qua immanence. The description cannot be held as constitutive without relapsing into idealism; not even the differance between the two terms. The immanent must remain indifferent to all nomination to break free of ideality. Presumably, it is this indifference which furthermore guarantees the possibility of adequation between ideal nomination and the real of immanence, although the explanation is left for later.

Henry’s absolute immanence, on the other hand and in spite of its unilaterality, is esteemed to crush the dyads together in mediation at the point of their enstatic ground. The problem seems to be that enstatic immediacy becomes co-constituted by dyadic mediation where immanence is unthinkable as thinkable and thinkable as unthinkable. This reproduces idealism, for Laruelle, since immanence is constituted as unthinkable through thought, as thought is constituted by unthinkable immanence (thus the alleged circular bilaterality inherent in all materiological efforts remains present). But this still seems quite unclear, since Henry is steadfast to point out that the unilateral distinction of immanence from transcendence is not reproduced in the distinction of transcendence from immanence. Here Brassier turns to Henry’s reconstruction of Descartes, and the appeal to a ‘primal sensing of thought to itself’ which opposes mere intuition. Accordingly, for Henry, thought’s self-sensing excludes ekstatic intuiting and by excluding it determines immanence as immediacy: “Thought’s essential self-sensing is not merely different from ek-static sensing; it excludes it, and precisely this exclusion determines the concept of immediacy.” (Henry, 1993, p.22). So enstasis constitutes thought’s immediate self-sensing and is construed as unthinkable as unrepresentable and invisible from the ekstatic realm, inhering in it as its invisible essence which remains excluded from it. It is this negative coincidence or inherence intrinsic to thought, insofar as it mixes together the self-affecting of matter with the self-affecting of thought that ultimately phenomenologizes matter and folds it back into idealism. Real immanence is only separable as unthinkable through and in thought; it is absolved by a transcendent operation. This ‘ideal inseparability’ is the negative exteriorization of the immanent in relation to thought; it is as thought’s putative exterior than immanence posits itself transcendentally as exterior to thought, and at the same time claims to be constituted by this immanence in return, effecting the bilateral determination Brassier and Laruelle deem responsible for the idealist coup. The positioning of immanence outside transcendence through thought’s purchase on the unthinkable qua exterior thereby co-constitutes the real immanence with transcendent ideality. Henry’s immanence-to-itself , self-inherent split of the immanent itself into its immanent and transcendental part- is thus vitiating the sought for materialism. Immanence phenomenalizes itself so it becomes the phenomenality of immanence as such and not immanence itself. Thought has ‘always already’ begun to think this immanence, tied to it inseparably as it is thought as unthinkable and external. So Brassier can conclude thus:

“Henry’s phenomenological immanence is posited as the absolute immediation of given and givenness; it is posited as absolute in virtue of a transcendent Decision through which the unilateral asymmetry between enstatic immediation and ekstatic mediation is surveyed from above, seen from a viewpoint of transcendent exteriority and circumscribed within an encompassing reversibility, an ultimately bi-lateral symmetry… Henry conflates the phenomenon of immanence as radically separate (but separate-without separation) and foreclosed to transcendence, with the phenomenality of immanence as absolute distinction that repels transcendence. The latter leads to an absolutisation of immanence through the expulsion of transcendence, but an absolutisation which merely reinforces the reciprocal co-dependence between immanence and transcendence; a reciprocity inscribed within the intrinsically circular structure of philosophical Decision as relation of relation and non-relation.” (AT: Pg, 49)

In contrast, Laruelle’s concept of immanence promises to be without all relation to self, with a phenomenal identity outside all mixture or hybrid: purely ontic and not an ontic-ontological hybrid. This it does by constructing a concept of immanence which does not exclude but gives-without-givenness transcendence’s relative autonomy and giving Identity without synthesis and Duality without distinction. The phenomenon without phenomenality unilaterally determines the Decisional mixture of phenomenon and phenomenality, the Real without givenness unilaterally determines the Ideal self-positing dual circularity between given and givenness. So it is capable of subverting the tripartite materiological crime mentioned above, to which Henry falls inevitably: “It deliberately synthesizes the real phenomenon of immanence ‘itself’ with the ideal phenomenality of immanence ‘as such’; it substitutes an ultimately bilateral co-determination of the ontologically ideal and the ontically real for the strictly unilateral determination of the ideal by the real; finally, it roots the unobjectifiable transcendence of ekstasis in the unobjectifiable immanence of enstasis only to render the ontological absolutisation of the latter constitutively inseparable from the former.” Interestingly, Laruelle detects here a development from vulgar Marxism in which the exteriority of being is posited at an empirical or ontic level. Henry instead posits the exteriority as the point of immediation of phenomenon and phenomenality, the essential ground of thought which is external to ekstasis and immediately grounds being and thinking as the self-sensing of thought.