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Book Reviews

John B. Brough a , James Phillips b , Alessio Gemma c ,

Karin Nisenbaum d & Aengus Daly e

a Georgetown University , Washington, D. C.b University of New South Wales ,c University College Dublin ,d University of Toronto ,e National University of Ireland , GalwayPublished online: 01 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: John B. Brough , James Phillips , Alessio Gemma , Karin Nisenbaum& Aengus Daly (2008) Book Reviews, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16:1,101-125, DOI: 10.1080/09672550701819668

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Vol. 16(1), 101–125

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09672550701819668

Book Reviews

Taylor and FrancisRIPH_A_282048.sgm10.1080/09672550701819668International Journal of Philosophical Studies0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online)Book Review2008Taylor & Francis1610000002008JohnBroughbroughj@georgetown.edu

Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology

By Dermot MoranPolity Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 297. ISBN 0–7456–2121–X. £55.00/$62.95 (hbk).ISBN 0–7456–2122–8. £15.99/$24.95 (pbk).

Edmund Husserl is commonly presented either as a stepping stone on thepath to other thinkers or as someone who started with great promise butsoon stumbled into an unsavoury quagmire of Cartesianism and misguidedidealism. Dermot Moran intends to remedy this situation by casting Husserl‘in the most charitable and sympathetic light’ possible (p. vii), recoveringhim ‘as an exciting and original thinker in his own right’ (p. 10). His bookaims primarily at readers coming to Husserl for the first time, but the authorhopes that it will challenge serious Husserlian scholars as well. He succeedsadmirably on both counts. The book is exhaustive in the sweep of topics itcovers and in its careful analyses, developed in close connection withHusserl’s texts and offering an invaluable trove of references to Husserl’simmense body of work. Moran sheds light on what Husserl shares and doesnot share with figures such as Descartes and Kant and with movements suchas rationalism and empiricism, and he has much of interest to say aboutHusserl’s relationships with his contemporaries, including Frege. Hestresses the liberating breadth of Husserl’s thought, embracing the myriadaspects of conscious life, and the strengths of Husserl’s way of philosophiz-ing, particularly his attention to distinctions that many philosophers haveoverlooked. ‘It is in these subtle and intricate analyses’, Moran notes, ‘thatHusserl’s genius comes to the fore’ (p. 164).

The book’s opening chapter is an informative intellectual biography thattraces Husserl’s academic career (often marked by disappointment, partic-ularly in its early stages and at its end); his personal life (one son killed andanother severely wounded in the Great War, his last years spent under theyoke of the Nazis); and the main stages of the development of his thought,which, of course, unfolded in close relationship with events in his personaland academic lives, and within the turbulent philosophical and politicalperiod that spanned the last years of the nineteenth century and first fourdecades of the twentieth. Husserl’s thought underwent significant changeand appropriated ever larger swaths of experiential territory as his careeradvanced. Moran persuasively argues, however, that this is no reason to

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claim that there are multiple Husserls. ‘There is only

one

Husserl’ (p. 12),he concludes, who remained steadily focused on the life of consciousness,and specifically on ‘the relationship between “the subjectivity of knowingand the objectivity of the content known”’ (p. 90).

In exploring that life, Husserl’s self-assigned task was the investigation ofwhat he described as the ‘ABCs’ of consciousness (p. 3). There is nothingelementary about the phenomenological alphabet, however; in fact, it offersnumerous stumbling blocks, even for those already well versed in Husserl’sthought. Some of these are peripheral, but others touch its core. Principalamong the latter are the difficulties raised by Husserl’s position, reached by1907 or so, that phenomenology is a species of transcendental idealism.Moran does a particularly good job in explaining the meaning of Husserlianidealism. At its root lies intentionality, the ‘fundamental concept ofphenomenology’ (p. 5), according to which every conscious act is directedtoward an object. Intending consciousness is

transcendental

consciousness(or ‘transcendental subjectivity’ or the ‘transcendental ego’, as Husserl willalso call it) in the sense that it is the medium through which we have a worldand objects. The ‘science’ of phenomenology is the investigation of tran-scendental subjectivity insofar as it presents objectivity. This seems straight-forward enough, but Husserl’s formulations of his position can be puzzling.He speaks of subjectivity as ‘constituting’ its objects and ‘bestowing sense’on them, and sometimes describes intended objects as products. Transcen-dental idealism might thus be taken to imply that consciousness creates ormakes its objects. In the face of such formulations, Moran cautions againstconcluding that ‘the object as such is an ideal construction’ (p. 31), a mentalproduct that appears to enjoy objective status but on closer inspectiondissolves into the conscious activities constituting it. A more felicitous wayof understanding constitution is to take it to mean that the intentional actmanifests or exhibits an object, or achieves its presentation: ‘In emphasizingthe phenomenality of the world, Husserl is putting a much greater stress onthe role of consciousness in exhibiting the world as such, in lighting theworld up’ (p. 54). Husserl does not contend that consciousness makes theworld and the objects it intends; his point is that without the manifestationthe transcendental ego accomplishes, we would have ‘no phenomenality, nogivenness, and hence no world’ (p. 229).

A related difficulty concerns the sense of immanence and transcen-dence. Husserl sometimes suggests that phenomenology is concernedexclusively with what is immanent to consciousness, since what is imma-nent – the act of consciousness and what it really contains – can be givenabsolutely to reflection. He occasionally indicates that the only transcen-dence that concerns the phenomenologist is the transcendence that isproduced

within

immanence. This might suggest that Husserl’s idealismechoes Berkeley’s, taking the object to be a set of ideas within the mind.Moran makes it clear that this is not the case. Occasional formulations

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notwithstanding, Husserl ‘thinks talk of “immanent” objectivity is mislead-ing’ (p. 52) and that all objects of thought, even those of phantasy andmemory, ‘are

mind-transcendent

’ (p. 53). Intentionality thus ‘refers to themanner in which objects disclose themselves to awareness as transcendingthe act of awareness itself’ (p. 53). Although, as Moran notes (p. 53),Husserl refers ‘somewhat paradoxically’ to ‘immanent transcendence’(one is tempted to ask: ‘only

somewhat

paradoxically?’), the sense of this‘immanence’ is not that the object is a real part of the act. Husserl is essen-tially making a methodological point: phenomenology’s aim is to describethe object precisely as it appears in the act directed toward it, not as itmight exist in itself or be the target of speculation unsupported by anykind of givenness. In carrying out this project, ‘there is no question of theworld being “swallowed up” in the subject’ (p. 200).

From Husserl’s perspective, the various flawed idealisms of the modernera arose in response to the mistaken doctrine of representationalism,which took the direct and immediate objects of experience to be imagesimmanent in the mind. Representationalism suppressed the differencebetween perception and imaging, and inevitably led to the ‘“perverselyposed”’ question of ‘how subjective representations reach outside them-selves to gain knowledge of the object’ (p. 185). Since this question couldnot really be answered, the alternative was to claim that the world is aconstruction formed from the subjective representations. In his rich analy-ses of image-consciousness, however, Husserl distinguishes unequivocallybetween perception and imagination, on the one hand, and picture-consciousness, on the other. His grasp of the distinction between these kindsof consciousness enabled him to break with a tradition that led to a greatdeal of philosophical mischief. Husserl’s own idealism is ‘primarilyconcerned with the inability to conceive of an object independent of asubject’ (p. 180). It preserves the integrity of the object precisely by showinghow the object itself and not its immanent image is presented by the subjectthrough the intentional act directed toward it.

After 1913 or so, Husserl regularly referred to transcendental conscious-ness under the rubric of the transcendental ego. Indeed, he often presentsphenomenology as the ego’s self-explication (p. 57), or as the investigationof the ego’s ‘self-constitution’ (p. 219). The ego lives its transcendental lifein what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude’, which is not reflective in thephilosophical sense. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is a radical reflec-tive posture that inquires into the basic structures, the ABCs, of the ego’stranscendental life. The way into the phenomenological attitude is throughthe ‘phenomenological reduction’, which ‘brackets’ the natural attitudewith its naive absorption in objects and frees the ego to reflect on itself, itsintending acts, and their intended objects just as they appear in the acts.Husserl’s notion of the reduction, with its claims about the bracketing ofexistence and the ‘annihilation of the world’, has been the source of

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controversy and criticism. Moran convincingly shows, however, that suchcriticisms are misguided, since Husserl by no means intended to turnphilosophical reflection away from the world and ordinary life. ‘It does notoccur to [Husserl’s] transcendental philosophy to dispute the world ofexperience in the least’ (p. 185). Indeed, it is precisely in order to under-stand that world as it is given to consciousness, and the consciousness thatgives it, that Husserl developed his theory of the reduction.

Among the book’s many valuable features is its comprehensive discus-sion of the various dimensions of egological life. Moran observes, forexample, that the phenomenological reduction ‘leads inevitably to a kindof “splitting of the ego”’ (p. 55), in which the ego achieves transcendentalself-consciousness by becoming reflectively aware of its own unreflectedlife. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the transcendental egocomes into being only with the advent of reflection; it is there all along inthe natural attitude. This raises the question about its relation to the empir-ical ego, to which Moran responds that the two egos are the same, but thatthe empirical ego should be understood as the ‘“self-objectification” of thetranscendental ego’ (p. 231). Moran also stresses that the Husserlian ego isnot simply a formal principle of unity, as it is in Kant, or a kind ofsubstance, even if a spiritual one, as in Descartes. The ego is instead ‘adynamic entity’, functioning ‘as a growing, developing self, with a historyand a future, in relation to other selves, possessing

life

in the fullest sense ofthe word’ (p. 203). Husserl even describes it with the Leibnizian term‘monad’, although this monad, unlike Leibniz’s, has multiple doors andwindows. A further dimension of the ego is its embodiment, and Morannotes the ‘ground-breaking’ character (p. 218) of Husserl’s account of the‘“incarnation” of the ego’, with its distinction between the body as living(

Leib

) and the body as physical corporeal thing (

Körper

).In keeping with his introductory aims, Moran announces early in the

book that he will steer away from disputes over particular Husserlianthemes. It should be clear by now that this is not possible – to explicateHusserl’s position on most issues is already to take a stand and enter thefray. In fact, it is fortunate that one can surmise just where Moran stands onany number of contested issues, since the positions he takes or implies areinteresting and usually on the mark. One of these concerns the much-discussed idea of what Husserl called, in

Ideen I

, the ‘

noema

’. There hasbeen a longstanding split between the interpreters on this issue: on the onehand, there is the view that the

noema

simply is the intended object, but theobject taken precisely as it is presented in the intending act, that is, as itpresents itself after the phenomenological reduction; on the other hand,there is the claim first advanced by Dagfinn Føllesdal that the

noema

is notthe object but something like the Fregean

sense

by means of which an actrefers to an object in a particular way. Although Moran never clearly saysthat he is taking sides in this dispute, it is plain that he does not agree with

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Føllesdal, whose position he describes in some detail. ‘The

noema

’, Moranwrites, ‘is the

object as it is intended

in the act; it is the object, not a

Sinn

or“sense” …’ (p. 137). On this reading, the

noema

is not a third item mediatingbetween act and object; it is precisely the object, but the object as reflectedupon within the phenomenological attitude.

Another issue, which has not attracted as much controversy as the

noema

but is troublesome nonetheless, is Husserl’s notion of sensations, which hethought were present as real components in any perceptual act. For thisreviewer, it is a real question whether the idea of immanent sensations isdefensible on phenomenological grounds. To see this, one need only look atMoran’s clear and accurate account of Husserl’s position. He correctlynotes that Husserl rejects ‘talk of

sense-data

or “data of sensation”’, viewingthe latter as false theoretical constructs (p. 152). We do not perceive oursensations; they are not intentional objects (p. 152). Nor are sensationsdirected toward objects; ‘they are merely “material” features of our inten-tional experience’ (p. 153), gaining reference to objects only from inten-tional apprehensions that animate or interpret them. Finally, Moranobserves that Husserl apparently thinks that ‘sensations on their own’, thatis, apart from the apprehensions that animate them, are ‘understood as rawgivens’ (p. 153). But if all of this is the case, and if ‘givens’ are, etymologi-cally, ‘data’, then one wonders just how Husserl’s sensations differ fromsense-data, those gremlins of the empiricist tradition. It is one thing forHusserl to protest that his sensations should not be confused with sense-data, and another to make it clear just what they really are. Moran doesattempt to buttress Husserl’s cause here by offering a benign reading:‘When I undergo an

Erlebnis

’, he writes, ‘it simply presents itself as havinga certain sensational coloring, its sensory “filling”’ (p. 153). One wonders,however, whether this ‘sensory coloring argument’ is enough to salvageHusserl’s view.

Moran observes that in one case – that of time-consciousness – Husserlfound the schema according to which our awareness is constituted throughthe animation of sensations by apprehensions to be unsatisfactory. Indeed,Moran is a particularly effective guide through the thickets of time-consciousness, which Husserl described as perhaps the most important andmost difficult of all phenomenological problems. Moran recognizes that forHusserl ‘the most important feature of consciousness is its temporal andsynthetic unifying character’ (p. 138). Thanks to time-consciousness, thetranscendental subject is aware of itself in its unity and identity and of itsobjects as temporal or as related to time. Moran makes the important obser-vation that for Husserl we have no direct consciousness of time apart fromappearing temporal objects (p. 139). He also sorts out the three levels oftemporality that Husserl distinguishes – the time of the intended object; thetime of the intending act that runs its course in the immanent stream ofconsciousness; and the ‘absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness’,

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the fundamental level of consciousness through which we are aware of theunity and diversity, the change and constancy, of our conscious lives. Manycommentators have failed to grasp Husserl’s position here, but Moran getsit straight. He also provides an excellent account of the sense in which thetranscendental ego is time-soaked, another theme to which commentatorsoften fail to do justice. (One might quibble with his statement that retention‘is a “just past” that is still there in a reduced or modified sense’ (p. 142),since Husserl takes retention to be the

consciousness

of what is just past, notwhat is just past itself; but that is a rare slip in an otherwise excellentaccount.)

Moran covers many more topics than the handful discussed here. Thereare illuminating presentations, for example, of Husserl’s philosophy ofarithmetic; of his defence of ideal objectivities, including categorial objectsand the categorial intuitions that intend them; and of his investigations ofintersubjectivity and of the lifeworld. Moran acknowledges that Husserl’sthought is hardly free of problems, particularly problems of clarity withrespect to certain key themes, but his conclusion is that Husserl’s concep-tion of phenomenology is profoundly valuable and, far from being ofmerely historical interest, ‘will continue to set challenges for philosophy inthe twenty-first century’ (p. 247). This excellent study amply justifies thatclaim.

Georgetown University, Washington, D. C. John B. Brough

© 2008 John B. Brough

After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy

Ed. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris VardoulakisUniversity of Delaware Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 277. ISBN 0–87413–946–5. US$30.00 (pbk).

The fourteen contributions in this anthology do not set out to clear a wayfor the French critic and writer Maurice Blanchot, to make a case for hiswork in the eyes of a suspicious Anglophone public. They are happy tocome too late for such a task, with its pretensions to transposition andaccommodation. They come after Blanchot, after the fact of his death in2003 as much as after the fact of his reception in literature departmentsacross the English-speaking world. With the translation of his critical essaysand fiction, and the appreciative discussions in Foucault, Derrida andDeleuze, Blanchot has become over the last two decades a fact of literarystudies, a fixed figure on the discipline’s horizon, indeed, a figure whothrough his interrogation of the exchanges between philosophy and litera-ture even fixes this horizon in terms of a question. If this anthology bears thetitle

After Blanchot

, it is not its contention that Blanchot is something past,

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that the dust thrown up in his wake has now settled and that the time couldfinally have come for taking stock, for cold-bloodedly appraising his workand thought. On the contrary, implicit in the essays collected here is a willto defer the moment in which the evaluative and classificatory practicesof the traditional critic might reassert themselves. The question of whereBlanchot is to be ranked goes unaddressed: as this question harks back toan age before Blanchot and the reinvention of literary criticism that heundertook, it could only be raised now in spite of him. Blanchot is the factof this anthology. But what can be done with a fact?

The essays in this collection can be split, a little forcibly, into threegroups. One group – the contributions by Eleanor Kaufman, HectorKollias, Christophe Bident, Christopher Fynsk, and Kevin Hart – takesup recognizably philosophical issues in Blanchot’s texts. A second readsBlanchot in conjunction with other writers: Alain Toumayan examines the1947 essay on Baudelaire, Robert Savage tests Blanchot against Heideggeras a claimant to Hölderlin’s language of the ‘sacred’, Elizabeth Presa bringsRilke’s observations on Rodin to play on two of Blanchot’s récits,

Thomasthe Obscure

and

Death Sentence

, and where Dimitris Vardoulakis pullsBlanchot together with Jean Paul Richter, Paolo Bartolini extrapolates theterms of an encounter with the Italian poet Giorgio Caproni. A third group-ing in the anthology can be demarcated by an undivided focus on Blanchot:Leslie Hill considers Blanchot as literary critic, Michael Holland analysesthe short story ‘The Idyll’, and Caroline Sheaffer-Jones and Chris Dantafollow Blanchot on the dead.

A review in the present journal should be forgiven for directing its atten-tion to the essays of the first group (it is for journals with different intereststo rectify the imbalance).

In her contribution, ‘Midnight, or the Inertia of Being’, Eleanor Kaufmanorients around the notion of ‘midnight’ what she discerns of an ontology inBlanchot. ‘Midnight is a unique entity that punctuates the repetitiveness,the doubling back, and the circularity of time’ (p. 224). Here midnight isconceived as a moment of suspension and interruption. But there is to benothing of the Pauline

kairos

in which grace makes its entry into one’s life.‘Midnight is not the marker of anything tangible; there is nothing out therebut darkness and night’ (p. 225) History comes to a stop under the inertia ofbeing, rather than with the coming of the Messiah. It would, however, be toattribute to Blanchot a reactive atheism if one were to interpret the apathy,boredom and immobility in his writings as elements in a soteriologicalversion of the black mass. Such a reading is unwilling to let passivity be whatit is because it integrates it into a programme of action. On similar grounds,Kaufman disagrees with Thomas Carl Wall, who, reformulating theScholastic definition of matter as indeterminate possibility, construes thebanality of the everyday as the pure possibility of history. In distinction toDeleuze’s ontology with its privileging of becoming and in defiance of a

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global culture that deprecates immobility, Kaufman wants to let passivitystand, as a fact.

Hector Kollias discusses the way in which, for both Blanchot and Paul deMan, literature has become with regard to materiality the guilty conscience,so to speak, of Hegelianism. Both writers wish to linger, to resist the concep-tual pull within language and to testify to the simultaneous independenceand illegitimacy of literature in relation to philosophy. Does such a stanceamount to a critique of Hegel? Or does it reassert an experience of resis-tance to the conceptual, a resistance that Hegel overcomes rather thandenies and without which dialectics loses its seriousness, turning into emptyplay? Kollias, unlike some hasty commentators, is not concerned to extri-cate Blanchot from Hegelianism, as the characteristically Hegelian recipro-cal implications in the following quotation make clear: ‘Blanchot’s conceptof materiality, the materiality of word and of meaning, is concomitant withthat of “life”, since materiality is the bearer, in language, of life that main-tains itself in death, meaning’s life in the word’s death, and the word’s life inmeaning’s death’ (p. 129). By ending the

Phenomenology of Spirit

with theCrucifixion, rather than the Resurrection or Ascension, Hegel declares thatmateriality has its place in Absolute Knowledge: it is the wooden cross andagonized flesh from which Spirit no longer recoils.

Christophe Bident, in ‘The Movements of the Neuter’, meticulously mapsthe unsettling trajectory on which Blanchot sets a seemingly philosophicalterm. Beginning as early as the 1930s, Blanchot makes use of the ‘neuter’,and it will remain an enigmatic constant in his fiction and criticism. Bidentcalls upon a number of interlocutors – Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault,Nancy and, most notably, Barthes – in order to tease out the lines of inquirythat are either opened up or foreclosed by Blanchot’s understanding of theneuter. The neuter – from the Latin

ne

(‘not’) +

uter

(‘either’) – is differencein its apathy. It is difference in its abdication from the status of principle ofall entities, since it is difference not as the condition of possibility of thedifferentiation of beings, but rather as the passivity and obscurity to whichan ontology of worklessness alone is able to attend. This is Blanchot at thevery limits of Hegelianism.

In ‘Blanchot’s “The Indestructible”’, Christopher Fynsk endeavours tohear what Blanchot has to say on ethics. Blanchot was a close friend ofLevinas, and Fynsk takes pains to trace their points of contact. For exam-ple, he attributes to Blanchot in

The Infinite Conversation

the followingLevinasian phraseology: ‘only the presence of

autrui

communicates anabsolute difference’ (pp. 108–9). It is hard to know what to make of suchstatements. Two human beings may be absolutely opposed on a given issue,i.e., each may represent a position or property the inverse of the other’s,but they are not absolutely opposed

tout court

; they cannot be absolutelydifferent because there is always ‘something’ shared: each, even if in differ-ent ways,

is

. A further problem with the phrase is that as the other is other

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to me

, different

from me

, for this difference to be absolute, my identitywould have to be completely determinate. I would have to be actualizedwithout remainder in all my possibilities, since absolute difference cannotestablish itself in relation to the indeterminate and undecided. But as fullyactualized (supposing, for a moment, this to be intelligible), I forgo allpossibilities, including the possibility itself of an encounter with the other.In his conclusion Fynsk similarly writes of ‘an encounter where absolutedistance is preserved in its purity’ (p. 118). Does an encounter across anabsolute distance warrant the name ‘encounter’? One might

feel

that suchphrases are profound and illuminating, but without clarification and argu-ment one is left simply with a feeling. This is no solution to the ethical fail-ures of the West. But it does allow us to perceive a dilemma. If the West hasbeen marked by a systematic failure in its relations to others, if its ethics hasbeen stillborn because it has been articulated in a logic aligned with thestatus quo, if the ethical call to change the way things are has been muffledwithin the discursive form that is the measure of the way things are, it mayseem that a renunciation of logic and rationality promises to establish ethicsin its irreducibility. But such a renunciation works in its own way to mufflethe ethical call: everything remains on the level of feeling, and the task of aphilosophically exacting critique of the logic of the status quo is no moreventured than before (in this respect, Heidegger may be called the thinkerof a future ethics, not Levinas).

In a startling, if likewise necessary conjunction, Kevin Hart placesBlanchot’s reflections on the image alongside the controversies betweeniconoclasts and anti-iconoclasts in Byzantium in the eighth and ninth centu-ries. Blanchot’s ‘Outside’ does not come from nowhere, and Hart putsforward a theological genealogy. ‘Literature (or writing) cannot circum-scribe the Outside – its anteriority forbids such a thing – but it remains theicon of the Outside’ (p. 49). What credence should therefore be granted toBlanchot’s declarations of atheism? Can atheism here distinguish itself frompositivism without reverting to theology? In defence of Blanchot, two ques-tions can be asked of Hart’s reading. Does literature, as inconvertible todescriptive discourse, have an interest in the circumscription of theOutside? And is it by means of anteriority (a theologically conceived tran-scendence) that the Outside frustrates such an aim? Literature bothpresents and fails to present. It enters an objection to its own presentations.Literature faces the Outside and the Outside is one of its faces: God is thename that a theologian might give to the Outside, whereas the incompletepresentability of the time of finitude (Heidegger’s ‘not-yet’) is the name thatan atheist might give to it.

There are readers for whom Blanchot, with his murky terminology andapocalyptic pathos, is unpleasantly redolent of the orchestral music of MaxReger. This anthology will not win them over. But there are readers forwhom Blanchot is a seminal figure in the consolidation of a new sensibility

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and critical practice. To these readers the collection, by virtue of its scholar-liness, diversity and insight, is sure to be welcome.

University of New South Wales James Phillips

© 2008 James Phillips

Hilary Putnam

By Maximilian de GaynesfordAcumen Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 235. ISBN 1–84465–040–5. £45.00 (hbk).£14.99 (pbk).

Writing a book on the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam is by any stan-dard a daunting and complex task. Different factors are responsible forsuch difficulties, but here I want to highlight only three of them. First,Putnam has made contributions in an extraordinarily wide range of areasof philosophy, from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of mind,language, mathematics, and metaphysics; and he has done so over a longstretch of time, from the 1950s to the present. Anyone who wants topresent Putnam’s ideas must therefore assess the several contributions hehas made individually and then see how they all hang together, bothconceptually and chronologically. She must resist easy temptations tosystematize and must give equal relevance to the multiple aspects ofPutnam’s thought. Secondly, Putnam has embarked on a self-critical andinterpretive analysis of his own philosophical development, trying to clarifyaspects of his intellectual biography that he believes have been misunder-stood. (See, for instance, ‘Sense, Nonsense and the Senses: An Inquiry intothe Power of the Human Mind’,

Journal of Philosophy

, 91 (September1994), pp. 445–517.) The author must therefore distinguish Putnam’s ideasas they evolve over time while taking into account what Putnam himselfsays about his ideas, thus attempting to reconcile these accounts whilemarking the due differences. Finally, Putnam has changed his mind (or soat least many of his critics believe) on many topics such as

functionalism

,

the causal/externalist theory of reference

,

ontological and epistemic realism

,and the

notion of truth

. Therefore, anyone attempting to write a book onPutnam must take into account his changing philosophy and then make aneffort to distinguish what Putnam has said over the years from what we oreven he would like to have said.

Hilary Putnam

by Maximilian de Gaynesford aims to give an introductionto and interpretation of Putnam’s philosophy by focusing on the sourcesthat lie behind Putnam’s ideas and the influences his work has had oncontemporary philosophy. Despite the fact that the book is mainly aboutPutnam, it aims to accomplish two different tasks, as the author clearlystates at the outset.

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On the one hand, de Gaynesford wants to offer an accurate and originalinterpretation of Putnam’s philosophy as a whole, one which – contrary tostandard readings – stresses the structural continuity of Putnam’s views andinterests rather than focusing on the alleged changes in view. Traditionalinterpretations of Putnam’s work (as, for example, by M. Devitt, H. Field,or E. Sosa) mainly focus on the topic of realism in the attempt to understandthe development of Putnam’s philosophy. Such views normally emphasizethree main stages in Putnam’s thought, along the following lines. First, thereis an epistemic and ontological realist phase from the 1950s to the mid 1970sin which Putnam supports, among other things, a correspondence notion oftruth via a causal theory of reference, as well as defending the notion ofconvergence and progress in science. Secondly, there is an anti-realistperiod from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, during which Putnam endorsesa strong form of verificationism and conceptual relativity/pluralism. Finally,there is a common-sense/pragmatic-realist stage from the early 1990s to thepresent. De Gaynesford argues on the contrary that, despite there havingbeen some changes in view, there is indeed a line of continuity runningthrough Putnam’s philosophy, and this is to be found in the topic of inten-tionality. As he writes:

The main argument of the book is that we should interpret Putnam ina new way. Current debates place undue emphasis on peripheralmatters, tending to distort, ignore or hide his most significant contri-butions. His principal concern is with the question of how it is possiblefor our thought and talk to be about reality. This venerable issue, theproblem of intentionality, constantly recurs in Putnam’s range ofimmediate concerns, unifies his work, and provides the considerablevariety of his writings with a central and dominant theme.

(p. vii)

On the other hand, the author also wants to provide the reader with amap of the contemporary philosophical landscape, focusing on some of itsmain developments and turning points from the 1950s to the present. As heputs it, ‘This book is principally for readers interested in modern philoso-phy who may know little about what precise developments have character-ised the subject in the past fifty years but who wish to learn more, and areprepared to do so via engagement with the writings of a leading and repre-sentative figure’ (p. vii). The book is divided into four parts. Part I sketchesthe philosophical landscape in the 1950s, focusing the reader’s attention onthe influence that European philosophy (mainly neo-positivism) had onPutnam’s philosophy at this early stage of his development. Part II focusesinstead on a number of central topics in Putnam’s philosophy that theauthor groups into

structural

and

core influences

according to the overall

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importance they play within the development of Putnam’s philosophy.Here is how de Gaynesford puts the difference between ‘structural’ and‘core’ influences:

In retrospect, Putnam’s thinking has been susceptible to two kinds ofbasic stimulus and inspiration. What we may call the ‘core influences’were positions taken on basic issues that affect his thinking at its heart;‘structural influences’ were positions taken on basic issues that shapeand organised his influences, but not in quite so fundamental a way.

(p. 32)

Parts III and IV explain, finally, how Putnam has developed the abovetopics by contrasting the differences and the continuity between his earlyperspectives and his later ones, and emphasizing how the topic of intention-ality represents a dominant theme that confers unity and coherence onPutnam’s different philosophical discussions.

Generally speaking, the book is of interest both to scholars who mightseek a more integrated perspective on Putnam’s views (with an eye towardsexploring them within their chronological development) and to the layper-son who may not know a lot about Putnam but who is nonetheless inter-ested in the development of contemporary analytic philosophy. Anotherinteresting aspect of this book is that the author tries to put Putnam incontext by revealing the sources that lie behind his ideas and their develop-ment both in his early and his later stages. This is particularly relevant whende Gaynesford discusses the influence that neo-positivism (throughReichenbach) had on Putnam’s early ideas on matters such as realism,theory of meaning, and anti-verificationism, and also the later pragmatistinfluence on his views on truth, pluralism, and the fact/value dichotomy.Finally, I am deeply sympathetic with the author’s attempt to find asynthetic perspective on Putnam’s overall philosophy that focuses not onlyon his changes of mind but also on the lines of continuity and commonthemes which run through almost four decades.

Some concerns, however, arise in relation to de Gaynesford’s overallreading of Putnam’s philosophy. Here I shall discuss two of these problems.

The first problem relates to the centrality de Gaynesford assigns to theproblem of intentionality within Putnam’s philosophy. The general impres-sion one gets by reading this book is that (a) Putnam since the early 1950shas set himself to solve the problem of intentionality (‘what must be true ofus, of the world, and of the intentional relation, that it is possible for it tohold between us?’, p. 58); and that (b) the various topics he has addressedover the years mostly relate to (or are even reducible to) questions aboutour intentional relation to the world. (For a summary of these sorts of ques-tions, see p. 59.) Now, the topic of intentionality surely plays an important

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role within Putnam’s philosophy. However, to say that intentionality is the

central

topic and that it represents a common denominator throughoutPutnam’s work seems to me to offer an interpretation that is too rigid, onewhich on the whole gives an artificially linear understanding both ofPutnam’s philosophical style and of the development of his different inter-ests over the years. The result of this accentuated interest in the problem ofintentionality is that de Gaynesford arguably reduces the complexity ofPutnam’s views and to that extent fails to transmit to the reader both thepeculiar sense of depth and the broadness so characteristic of Putnam’sphilosophy. Moreover, although he does valuable work in underlining theelements of continuity in Putnam’s philosophical development, he ends updownplaying the important changes in interests, ideas, and conceptualinfluences within that development.

This is especially evident in relation to some later themes in Putnam’sphilosophy such as his epistemic theory of truth, the relation between factsand values, anti-reductionism, conceptual pluralism, and objectivism inethics, which do not find as much space in this book as his ideas concerningintentionality or his theory of reference. This is not to say that the authordoes not attempt to back up his reading with textual evidence; and he alsosoftens his interpretation at the end of the book by remarking on howPutnam might not agree with his reading (p. 183). However, these acknowl-edgements arguably do not go far enough, and de Gaynesford’s interpreta-tion remains to some extent one-dimensional. Textual evidence isimportant, of course, but readers of Putnam’s work know too well howisolated quotations from his writings can be used to back up widely diverg-ing interpretations of his views. For instance, one could propose, with atleast as much support in the texts and independent plausibility as for thesupposedly dominant role of intentionality, that the main topic withinPutnam’s philosophy has always been the reformulation of realism, or theattack on reductionism, or the epistemic pluralism; and one could thereafterfind a variety of supporting quotations for each reading. Furthermore,Putnam has always been keen to emphasize his pragmatic and pluralisticattitude towards philosophical problems, and so it seems misleading,especially in an introduction to Putnam’s philosophy, to understand histhought in such a streamlined fashion.

The second issue arises in connection with the way in which deGaynesford understands the problem of intentionality within Putnam’sphilosophy. The author writes as if Putnam had explicitly been concernedwith the problem of providing a justification for the idea that we languageusers are intentionally connected to the world (‘what must be true of us,of the world, and of the intentional relation, that it is possible for it tohold between us?’, p. 58). However, I am doubtful that Putnam has everformulated the question of intentionality in this way for two reasons. First,the question that de Gaynesford puts at the core of the intentionality

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problem (‘How must we and the world be, if we are to perceive it, thinkabout it, talk about it?’, p. 48) has an accentuated metaphysical flavour inthat it seems to ask something about the world and ourselves

indepen-dently

of how we interact and deal with the world. The question impliesthat we can give a sort of transcendental foundation for the problem ofintentionality by outlining the conditions which should obtain in order forlanguage users to talk about/refer to/represent the world. These condi-tions are both ontological and semantical, for they relate both to theworld and to our semantic connection with it. However, this metaphysicaltone clashes with Putnam’s attitude towards a priori questions and meta-physics in general, which can be rather dismissive at times. This is mainlydue to the influence of pragmatic thinkers such as James or Dewey, but itis also due to Putnam’s idea that philosophical problems cannot beaddressed independently of scientific or even social ones. Secondly, thequestion reflects a certain scepticism in relation to our ability to talk andthink about the world, for it opens up the possibility that we might notreally be in touch with the world. More specifically, the question of inten-tionality as framed by de Gaynesford asks us to provide a justification forthe belief that we are indeed in contact with the world by asking underwhat possible conditions we might say that language users do refer to theworld. This emphasis, however, does not fit well with Putnam’s generalattitude to these topics since in a variety of important contexts he isinclined to reject such imagined possibilities as uninteresting. Overall, theauthor seems here to over-emphasize the early influences (neo-positivism)without paying enough attention to the pragmatic influences from Jamesand Dewey to the later Wittgenstein, without which I believe one cannotproperly understand Putnam’s later philosophy.

In conclusion, I am ambivalent about this book. On the one hand and asI said before, I appreciate the author’s attempt to put Putnam’s thought incontext by highlighting some of the European sources behind his ideas andby giving the reader a sense of his ‘philosophy in the making’. On the otherhand, I think that the author has stretched his interpretation too far, priori-tizing Putnam’s interest in the topic of intentionality while downplaying therole that other important sources, ideas, and interests have played inPutnam’s philosophical development.

University College Dublin Alessio Gemma

© 2008 Alessio Gemma

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On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

By Eric L. SantnerUniversity of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xxii + 219. ISBN 0–226–73503–6. US$20.00 (pbk).

Eric Santner’s

On Creaturely Life

is a challenging and timely inquiry intowhat it may mean, in contemporary life and politics, to retain a messianicdimension in thought and action. Engaging his three main interlocutors,Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald, in a fruitful conver-sation, Santner arrives at an understanding of creaturely life as life captivatedby the compulsive repetition of and immersion in historically constitutednormative structures. In Santner’s reading, psychoanalysis and aesthetic orliterary encounters potentially interrupt our creaturely captivation, grantingus the receptivity and attentiveness that are required to welcome alternativestructures or spaces of possibility, to engage in acts of neighbourly love.

Santner opens his work with a perspicacious reading of Rilke’s eighth

Duino Elegy

, drawing on Martin Heidegger’s critical response to Rilke’selegy and on Giorgio Agamben’s furthering of Heidegger’s critique. In hiseighth elegy Rilke distinguishes human life from that of

the creature

bydescribing the creature’s unmediated absorption in what he calls

the Open

.Still inheriting the ‘metaphysical’, post-Cartesian conception of the humanas abysmally separated from the world by its mediating consciousness andby representational thought, Rilke conjoins consciousness and self-consciousness to a sense of alienation, homesickness, and spectatorship.Only animals, or creatures, are blissfully at home in the world. Yet, inHeidegger’s ‘postmetaphysical’ appraisal of Rilke, the distinction betweenhuman and animal life, the ontological distinction, is drawn along differentlines. Humans, too, are in the Open, absorbed in the world. Yet our worldis ‘an articulated space of possibilities’. And these possibilities are embodiedin ‘the forms of life into which one contingently comes to be initiated’, para-digmatically in human speech, and delimited by ‘the practices that defineone’s historical community’ (p. 7). Thus, only human beings are answerable;only we can be held accountable for our absorption in the world.

At this juncture Santner introduces Agamben’s contribution to thepolemic between Rilke and Heidegger regarding the distinction betweenhuman and creaturely life. Agamben highlights the ways in which Heideg-ger’s understanding of human immersion in the Open, or in historicallyconstituted fields of understanding, brings human and animal life ‘into anuncanny proximity’; there is an aspect of human immersion ‘that renders him,in a certain sense, creaturely’ (p. 10). Through Santner’s work it becomesevident that this aspect is a certain blindness to or captivation by a ‘traumatickernel’ (p. xiii), ‘opacity’ (p. 9), or ‘enigmatic signifier’ (p. 34), around whichbodies, individual psyches, states, and, more generally, normative andsymbolic structures of understanding become ‘(dis)organized’ (p. xiii). And,

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with the assistance of his various literary and philosophical interlocutors –Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Heidegger, Agamben, Rosenzweig, Freud, andLacan – one of the central points Santner elaborates is that a human beingis distinguished by the possibility of awakening ‘

from

its own captivation

to

its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-capti-vated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human’ (p. 12).

Santner’s most timely and challenging venture is to bring these consider-ations into the ethico-political realm, developing a ‘

biopolitical

approach tocreaturely life’ (p. 25) and bringing it in line with the ‘modernist messianism’(p. xii) of various twentieth-century German-Jewish thinkers. The concep-tion of the creaturely that is central to the writings of the thinkers engagingSantner’s attention elaborates an aspect of ‘human life under conditions ofmodernity’, where the structures of ‘political power and social bonds … haveundergone radical transformation’ (p. 12). That is, the ‘breakdown and reifi-cation of the normative structures of human life and mindedness’ (p. 16)characteristic of modernity places modern man in a position to attend to hiscreatureliness in the domain of the political. To state it more pointedly:modern man is in a privileged position to attend to the ways in which ‘a spaceof juridical normativity – a space where the rule of law is in effect’ is consti-tuted around a ‘friend/enemy distinction’ (p. 13) in turn constituted by‘historical trauma’ (p. 36). Furthermore, drawing on Carl Schmitt’s claimthat the central concepts of modern theories of the state are ‘secularizedtheological concepts’ (p. 15), Santner, like Benjamin, links the theologicalconcepts of miracle (p. 15) and of the coming of the messiah to the interrup-tion of the compulsive repetition of normative structures of meaning and ofjuridical spaces. As Santner phrases this: ‘if one can speak of a dimension ofthe miraculous (in the ethicopolitical realm), it will pertain … to some wayof uncoupling from [modes] of subjectivity/subjectivization’ (p. 15). Whatthis uncoupling enables comes to the fore towards the end of Santner’s book.

Having mapped out the central themes of his study, in the second chapter,‘The Vicissitudes of Melancholy’, Santner turns to the role of melancholy inSebald’s works. Ultimately, Santner’s aim is to specify the relation betweenthe knowledge afforded by this mood and the understanding of creaturelylife and redemption elaborated in the first chapter. To this end, Santnerjuxtaposes a number of themes running through Sebald’s and Benjamin’sworks, key among which is that of ‘spectral materialism’ (p. 52). This termdesignates a way of observing surrounding objects and of being with themwhich is famously depicted in Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut

Melancholia

,where, in Benjamin’s words, ‘the utensils of active life are lying aroundunused on the floor, as objects of contemplation’ (p. 20). The objectssurrounding the figure in Dürer’s woodcut seem de-signified, emptied of allconventional meaning (p. 20). The main characters in Sebald’s works arefrequently researching sites of ‘architectonic destitution’ (p. 60); theirprojects and the stance they take towards their surrounding world can be

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understood in similar terms. Likewise, Benjamin’s monumental study of theParis arcades and of the figure of the

flaneur

, as well as his analysis of mate-rial culture under capitalist modes of production and consumption – morespecifically, his analysis of ‘outmoded’ objects and ‘junk’ (p. 60) – can beunderstood in terms of the knowledge afforded by the melancholic stance.

Yet, as Santner is quick to add, both in Sebald’s and Benjamin’s works,the gaze of melancholia is more politically inflected. The practice of spectralmaterialism involves both the capacity to discern ‘the ways divergent objects,institutions, epochs, and destinies are

similarly distorted

by the pressure oftraumatic events’ (p. 55) and the capacity to ‘register the persistence of pastsuffering that has in some sense been absorbed into the substance of livedspace’ (p. 57), into the ‘institutional concretions of moral and political life’(p. 58). At this stage, a crucial ambiguity emerges in Sebald’s use of melan-choly, as well as in his affinity with Benjamin. For, as Santner highlights, inBenjamin’s work the melancholic stance is ultimately ‘sustained by a visionof political acts that would interrupt the course of history’ (p. 60), by the‘transformative’ or ‘revolutionary’ potential inherent in objects emptied of

conventional

meaning. The question Santner asks pertains to the relation, inSebald’s work, between melancholia and historical or political redemption:‘Our question with regard to Sebald will ultimately concern the nature of therelation between … melancholic immersion into the past … and the sphereof ethical and political agency and production’ (p. 62).

In the third chapter, ‘Toward a Natural History of the Present’, Santneraddresses this question through a discussion of the Benjaminian under-standing of ‘natural history’. As Santner points out, many of the ‘privilegedsubstances’ (p. 106) that are at the centre of Sebald’s works – dust, ashes,bones, or flayed skin – can be seen as tokens of what Benjamin calls ‘naturalhistory’. This term designates an understanding of historical processes anti-thetical to the modern faith in progress: the rhythms of natural history don’tattend an ‘ever widening, more and more wonderful arc’ (p. 107); rather,Santner clarifies, ‘natural history ultimately names the ceaseless repetitionof … cycles of emergence and decay of human orders of meaning, cyclesthat are, for [Benjamin] … always connected to violence’ (p. 17). This bringsinto relief the relation between ‘natural history’ and the more politicallyinflected melancholic stance. Sebald’s ‘material deposits’ (p. 103) are notonly substances or objects emptied of meaning; they attest to or becomeindexes of the violence required to defend the normative structures theyoriginally composed. As Santner indicates, these substances ‘bear witness’to the ‘[violence] that attends the foundation, preservation, and augmenta-tion of institutions in the human world’ (p. 114). Santner’s question regard-ing the relation between melancholia and a redemptive opening in Sebald’sworks thus becomes a question of what could interrupt this violent cyclicalrepetition.

To address this question, Santner adds a further Benjaminian concept tothe already lengthy list: what Santner calls ‘undeadness’, or what Benjamin

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refers to as ‘petrified unrest’ (p. 118). This term indicates a combination ofanimation and constriction, a ‘pattern of constrained though agitated mobil-ity’ (p. 118). It is analogous to the rhythms of ‘natural history’. In Sebald’swork, ‘petrified unrest’ is most frequently embodied in compulsive actionsor thoughts, as well as in the seemingly compulsive urge to wander sodistinctive of his characters. What is peculiar about this kind of movementis both its ‘drivenness’ and its apparent lack of justification. This brings usback to Santner’s understanding of creaturely life, of life (dis)organizedaround a traumatic kernel or enigmatic signifier (p. 155). And, as seenabove, Santner is quick to emphasize that this dimension of life is notlimited to the individual; it extends to states, to political institutions, andmore specifically to the law. This extension of the creaturely is suggested inAusterliz’s depiction of the Palace of Justice in Brussels: ‘corridors andstairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no onewould ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the

innermost secret of all sanctioned authority

’ (p. 132). This passage intimatesthat the law, too, can be (dis)organized around enigmatic signifiers, thatthere is a ‘dimension of the law that “cringes” the subject, renders him orher “creaturely”’ (p. 95).

Ultimately, Santner resolves his question regarding the ambiguity, inSebald’s works, in the relation between melancholia and a redemptivedimension by elaborating the ways in which a specific form of attentionmakes room for what he calls ‘neighbor-love’ (p. 206). Benjamin famouslystates that ‘the Messiah … will not wish to change the world by force but willmerely make a slight adjustment in it’ (p. 130). Drawing on the works ofKafka, Benjamin, and Sebald, Santner interprets this slight adjustment as ‘acorrection to the absence of mind … a shift of optics, the assumption of anew perspective or mode of attention’ (p. 131). The correction that is atstake here is one where attention is drawn inwards, to the blind-spots, enig-matic signifiers, or ‘internal aliens’ (p. 33) that drive our compulsive behav-iour; that make both our movements and the violent cycles of naturalhistorical processes a form of ‘petrified unrest’. What is at stake is, in fact,‘self-analysis’ (p. 132).

Drawing on Jonathan Lear’s understanding of happiness as happen-stance, or chance, Santner contends that this form of attention makes roomfor ‘neighbour-love’ because it gives us an ‘existential sabbath’ (p. 136). Byinterrupting our compulsive attempts to ‘construct a teleology’, it places usin a position to take advantage of the ‘possibilities for new possibilities,[which are] breaking out all the time’ (p. 136). Again returning to his

biopolitical

understanding of creaturely life, Santner emphasizes that thesenew possibilities are primarily ‘new possibilities for collective life’ (p. 133),possibilities for the creation of ‘new social bonds’ (p. 196) and ‘forms of soli-darity’ (p. xiii) which our neighbours afford us, when we can be attentive tothem. Yet, in Sebald’s literary project, these new social bonds or links do not

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become concretized at the institutional level. Santner nonetheless clarifiesthat this is not ‘a substitution of memory-work for politics’ (p. 141). Rather,it is ‘the imaginative construction of the kind of sites where such encounters[of neighbour-love] might take place; it is furthermore an ambitious andexemplary performance of the specific forms of

labor

– of

study

– involvedin sustaining fidelity to such encounters’ (p. 141). This gets to the heart ofthe ethical function of narrative: the space of narrative is one where we‘work to make room in the world’ (p. xii) for neighbour-love. In theEpilogue to his book, Santner elaborates this point, interpreting the ethicalinjunction ‘You must change your life’ (p. 200) that concludes Rilke’s poem‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo’, and which is the culmination of an aestheticencounter.

Santner’s final chapter, ‘On the Sexual Lives of Creatures and OtherMatters’, is divided into two main parts. The first part addresses the role ofhumour in Sebald’s works, as well as his use of photography in attending toquestions of ‘postmemory’. The second part addresses the ‘sexual dimen-sion of creaturely life’ (p. 184), or the relation between sexuality, creaturelylife, and the uncanny. Because the topics linked to questions of ‘postmem-ory’ depart to some extent from what I have been emphasizing so far andare beyond the scope of this review, I will focus on the second part of thefinal chapter.

At first blush, Santner contends, it is difficult to place the frequent refer-ences to sexuality and homosexuality in Sebald’s work in relation to the setof themes discussed above: ‘creatureliness’, ‘melancholia’, ‘natural history’,and ‘petrified unrest’. Yet, when probed, Sebald’s depiction of heterosexualcoupling seems to encapsulate most of these themes. For, as Santnersuggests, there is always an aspect of the ‘uncanny’ in Sebald’s portrayal ofsexuality. In Freud’s account the ‘uncanny’ comes to designate the ‘demonicagency encountered in the compulsion to repeat’; in Ernst Jentsch’saccount, it indicates ‘uncertainty whether a particular figure … is a humanbeing or an automaton’ (p. 189). Santner uncovers the affinity betweenthese two accounts, for as he states: ‘there is nothing that throws more intoquestion our status as living beings than the sheer, quasi-mechanical auto-maticity of the compulsion to repeat’ (p. 191). In Sebald’s works, there isalways an aspect of automaticity, animality and violence to heterosexualcoupling; it is, in other words, always marked by ‘creatureliness’, driven bysomething that haunts it and consequently lacking in attention and love.

In the Epilogue, Santner brings these remarks to a head, employingLacan’s difficult distinction between masculine and feminine forms of ‘sexu-ation’ (p. 202) and returning to one of Rilke’s later poems, ‘The ArchaicTorso of Apollo’. What is relevant to Lacan’s distinction is the link betweenforms of enjoyment or ‘jouissance’ (p. 197) and forms of relating to symbolicstructures of meaning. Masculine enjoyment is structured around the‘fantasy of no limit’ (p. 198), of one who ‘has it all’ (p. 203); at the symbolic

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level, this means that while he is ‘wholly subject “to”, and hence “in”, thesymbolic, he … “takes exception” to it in some way’ (p. 198). The structureof feminine enjoyment, for Lacan, is not ‘haunted’ (p. 205) by this fantasy;at the symbolic level, this means that while she accepts the inevitability ofsymbolic mediation, she is ‘not wholly determined by it’ (p. 203). In otherwords, while accepting that our world is an articulated space of possibilitiesdelimited by our historical community, she is also receptive to possibilitiesfor new possibilities, to neighbourly love. The possibility for this receptivityis what the ‘aesthetic encounter’ (p. 200) in Rilke’s poem suggests. For, thetorso of Apollo, the aesthetic object encountered in the poem, is a symbol,but it is also a fragment, partial: the head is missing. And it is the attentive-ness to this partiality, both as fragment and as bias, that seems to evoke theethical injunction ‘You must change your life.’ If this is the conclusion towhich Santner’s work leads us, he is precisely the kind of reader we canimagine Rilke, Benjamin, and Sebald would have hoped for.

University of Toronto Karin Nisenbaum© 2008 Karin Nisenbaum

Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to the GodsBy Ben VedderDuquesne University Press, 2007. Pp. vii + 336. ISBN 978–0–8207–0389–3.!15.50, $21.50, £11.55 (pbk).

Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods charts MartinHeidegger’s understandings of religion from his earliest dogmatic Catholi-cism through the breakthrough of the 1920s to his later poetic polytheism.Heidegger’s relationship to religion is at best complex. On the one hand, heprofesses that philosophy must be ‘in principle atheistic’ or ‘a God-lessthinking’, emphasizing that ontology is not religion: ‘Being – that is notGod.’ Yet the religious studies of the 1920s are decisive for understandinghis treatment of Dasein’s temporality in Being and Time, and later essaysfrequently refer to ‘the holy’, ‘the piety of thought’ and ‘the divine’.

Ben Vedder attempts to clarify the philosophy in which these apparentparadoxes arise. ‘My aim is to unfold Heidegger’s implicit thinking on reli-gion from out of his own philosophy: first by working through Heidegger’swritings in order to uncover his thinking on religion; second by asking whatconsequences such thinking has for constructing a philosophy of religion’(p. 2). The first task of unfolding is, for Vedder, hermeneutically prior tounderstanding Heidegger’s relationship to the traditional rubrics of atheist,theist, deist and pantheist (pp. 8, 9). The second reflects Vedder’s Kantianconcern with the conditions of the possibility for meaningful religiousdiscourse. He will find in Heidegger’s philosophy ‘a concept of religion in

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which truth is a given that moderates religion’s principal truth claims’ (p. 1).This concept will show that Heidegger’s later poetry of religion is not amatter of indifference for philosophy. Rather it points to an understandingof religion beyond both dogmatic ontotheology and the swamp of charis-matic subjectivism (pp. 10, 92).

Vedder proceeds through the key movements of Heidegger’s thoughtchronologically. Heidegger’s earliest writings are designated ‘prehistoric’ inthe sense that we speak of Kant’s ‘pre-critical’ work. They show an emerg-ing understanding of historicity as the condition for religious intelligibility(p. 11). For Vedder this, together with facticity, will remain Heidegger’smajor breakthrough. He discusses Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift on DonScotus, where he argues that a complete account of medieval categorytheory must see it as the expression of an inner life that unfolds in a culturalhistory. Consequently its logic cannot be isolated from its mysticism andtheology (p. 17). Heidegger’s rejection of Scholastic Catholicism’s claim totimeless truths is ascribed to his having uncovered the lived and historicaldimension to religion (p. 24). Yet while Heidegger turns away from a whollytheoretical approach to religion, his philosophy preserves its pious orienta-tion. It is transformed into a precondition of phenomenological research –the philosopher becomes ‘the devoted ascetic who understands his object asit demands to be understood, i.e. from out of its factical character’ (p. 32).But this devotion, even to the study of religion, has an atheistic character.To understand the phenomena of factical and historical life we must letthem be seen within this life.

The second chapter turns to a discussion of Heidegger’s method. Methodis understood in the original Greek sense as finding a way somewhere. Thequestion of method is the question of how philosophical understandingarises from life (p. 41). Heidegger’s 1920s lectures on the philosophy ofreligion develop a formal indicative approach to phenomenology. SaintPaul’s Letter to the Thessalonians indicates how temporality can be experi-enced in terms of an unexpected future (kairos). This indication is formal asit shows the possibility of experiencing temporality as uncertain whileremaining neutral with regard to its religious content, the coming of Christ(pp. 51, 54). The phenomenologist can thus see how ontological determina-tions are implicit in life as lived, prior to theorizing. Heidegger thendiscusses how factical life has a tendency to obstruct its own temporal self-understanding. In Book X of Augustine’s Confessions we see how life canforget its temporality by falling into the presence of sensuality, curiosity orthe desire for praise (pp. 62–4). Yet this tendency, according to Heidegger,belongs to philosophy also. Augustine falls in seeking a future presence ofhappiness (p. 61). Heidegger emphasizes that both everyday life andphilosophical concepts tend to fall away from factical life.

The formal structures of religious life show the philosopher ways ofreturning concepts to their factical origins. The third chapter clarifies

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Heidegger’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy andtheology at the time of Being and Time. The 1927 lecture ‘Phenomenologyand Theology’ deals with the question of whether philosophy is in somesense dependent on religion. Don’t concepts such as that of the kairos findtheir historical condition in Christianity (p. 88)? Heidegger argues,however, that the ontological validity of concepts doesn’t depend on theirhistorical genesis: ‘[i]n themselves, such structures have nothing to do withreligion’ (p. 87). The kairos, for example, is not specific to Christianity – itcan also be detected in Aristotle. Further, the regional ontology of religionpresupposes a more general ontological understanding. Philosophy uncov-ers the ontological conditions within which religious discourse can makesense. ‘If theology wants to belong to the facticity of Dasein, then it muststay within the ontology of philosophy’ (p. 89). As contemporary theologytends to seek self-understanding from philosophy, this testifies to its ownlack of faith (pp. 88, 91). Vedder detects a shortcoming in Heidegger’s anal-ysis here. Heidegger implies that religion would be better without theology– but this would seem to reduce religious understanding to charismaticsubjectivism (p. 92).

The next three chapters show how Heidegger’s later work implicitlyrethinks this position by uncovering the historical conditions for the intelli-gibility of subjectivism in a theological orientation. Chapter 4 begins withHeidegger’s analysis of Western philosophy as a theological ontology (pp.94–5). The motive of philosophy in the Aristotelian inquiry into being quabeing was ontological. But the factical tendency of this inquiry was theolog-ical: it explained being through a primary being determined as the highestand most authentic (p. 103). Vedder argues Heidegger’s own position withregard to ontology changes. In the 1920s he sought an a-theological ontol-ogy. In the 1930s the ‘the truth of being’ was understood as a theologicalunity of ground and being. The later ‘thinking without why’ turned awayfrom Western metaphysics’ theological tendency to ground being in a firstentity (pp. 107–12). Chapter 5 then charts how this ontotheological struc-ture was reworked in early modernity: the first and grounding entity becamethe human being. In the move from Descartes through Leibniz to Kant,subjective logic becomes increasingly that to which an understanding of thereal appeals (pp. 119–20). Being is confined to the limits and projects of thehuman. ‘This is the ideal of a completely undetermined human subjectisolated from history, shaped in modernity, who is able to place realityopposite him as an object’ (p. 124).

The thoroughgoing subjectification of not just present reality but theentire history of being is treated in a discussion of Heidegger’s Nietzscheinterpretation in Chapter 6. Nietzsche’s radical turn in the history of meta-physics was the abolition of the basic condition of metaphysics, the gapbetween the true and the apparent worlds (p. 138). The end of the trueworld, the supersensible authorities of God, conscience, reason and

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progress, is expressed in Nietzsche’s aphorism ‘God is dead.’ But the deathof god is not a simple fact about a past event. Rather, as we killed god weourselves are responsible for our present being without grounds: ‘Themessage says that an event that took place in the past must become an actof man. What took place without man’s knowledge must be transformedinto “I wanted it that way”’ (p. 150). The doctrine of the will to powerremains a theological doctrine and intensifies nihilism. It takes up the posi-tion of grounding being in itself – so it assumes that ‘being is in itself noth-ing’ (p. 149). Heidegger himself understands the death of god otherwisethan as the metaphysical denial of god: ‘god is shown to be historical by hismortality’ (p. 156). Here the figure of the poet becomes crucial for Heideg-ger’s understanding of religion. The poet remains near to the absence ofground and ‘live[s] in a domain of decision where ontology is not necessarilytheologically structured’ (p. 155).

In Chapter 7 Vedder develops this when he turns to the ‘Contributions toPhilosophy (From Enowing)’, a notoriously difficult private manuscriptwritten between 1936 and 1938 (p. 157). The death of god suggests thatdivinity is finite: gods as much as humans are mortal and subject to history.Central to this work is the notion of the passing of the last god. Here,Vedder argues, is Heidegger’s attempt to think the historicality of Daseinmore radically than in terms of its mortality. Just as in Being and Time deathdiscloses being as possibility, so too the passing of the last god shows ‘“theother beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history”’ (p. 177). Thelast god is a transitional concept which responds to the historical possibilityof understanding being differently from the way we do today: ‘The hint ofthe last god springs from a moment that is beyond calculative thinking’ (p.176). It doesn’t determine what the future will be, but is a weak and provi-sional experience of possibilities that could be (p. 181). It points to acompletely historical theology (p. 174).

Chapter 8 discusses how Heidegger’s 1947 ‘Letter on Humanism’ pointstowards a post-subjectivist theology. How does the thinking of being makepossible the thinking of the divine (p. 189)? Being is not itself god, butallows the space in which the thought of god can arise. ‘“Only from thetruth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from theessence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought”’ (pp. 191–2).The holy stands outside the subject. Therefore it shows the possibility ofescaping the limits of our historical ‘anthropological project of reality’shared by metaphysics, psychology and existentialist theology (pp. 198,202). A radical rejection of subjectivism is contained in Heidegger’s notionof the fourfold. This ‘unity of earth and sky, divinities and mortals’ signalsHeidegger’s resistance to thinking in which human beings are the measureof all things (p. 211).

Chapter 9 asks if there can be a phenomenology of the holy, linking thelater discussions of the fourfold to Heidegger’s earlier work on kairological

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temporality. If a kairological moment can be detected in the later Heideg-ger, it refers to the possible arrival of the fourfold (pp. 222–3). This notionalso marks a break with the idea of hope: hope ‘presupposes an absence thathas to be filled’, whereas the arrival of the fourfold ‘is the coming of some-thing that is concealed in the beginning’ (p. 223). The thought of the holyalso points to this time older than the ages of history. This time is not thesupertemporal but a natural time ‘more primordial, earlier, and moretemporal than the time man calculates and reckons with’ (p. 217). Both theholy and the fourfold call man into ‘the unfinished course of his history’: theholy is that wherein he finds himself as a whole and can become attuned tothe arrival of the future (p. 236).

Chapter 10 discusses the transformed understanding of theology thatemerges from Heidegger’s later work. Vedder argues that Heidegger is bothan atheist and a theologian. ‘Atheistic’ isn’t understood as the metaphysicaldenial of god’s existence. Rather it means an atheistic openness with noprior commitment to metaphysical, ecumenical or subjective determina-tions of divinity. Heidegger’s theology is a mythic-poetic speaking. Herelogos is not reason or logic. The original, pre-metaphysical meaning as theplace where a gathering happens is intended. This meaning is faintly presentbut subjectively indicated in the later concept ‘synthesis’ (pp. 248–9). Wecan note a parallel here between the receptive spontaneous structure of theKantian imagination and the listening and responding which Heideggerascribes to the poetic and philosophical gathering of what language bringsto presence. Heidegger’s poetry of religion doesn’t originate in subjectivity:‘poetic desire looks for the right attunement to say the right word, but theright word is difficult to find’ (pp. 252, 261, 282). Yet this naming is equallyfar from dogmatism: it listens to what precedes the present ossification ofwords and attunement to see what responses may be possible. A significantcontribution is made in Vedder’s study of desire in Heidegger. He arguesthat although this notion is superficially absent from his thoughts it actuallyunderpins the emphasis on the primacy of the possible throughout his work(pp. 239–41). Desire, in responding to possibilities, acts ‘as the light in whichentities can appear’ (p. 240). Important parallels are drawn with Aristote-lian Oreksis and Kantian respect.

How are we to assess Vedder’s contribution to debate on Heidegger’swork? Commentators like William McNeill in his The Time of Life (2006)have drawn attention to the Aristotelian background of the notion of thekairos. Vedder’s treatment can claim novelty as he uses the figures of Pauland Augustine not just to indicate the emergence of the kairos from facticallife but also to suggest how an ascetics stands behind it. He provides awelcome emphasis on the lecture course The Phenomenology of ReligiousLife, which has only recently been translated into English. And althoughthe place of desire in Heidegger’s thought is beginning to be recognized –Georgio Agamben in Potentialities (2000) argues for the centrality of love in

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Heidegger’s work – Vedder’s analyses span the breadth of Heidegger’scareer, from the analytic of willing in Being and Time to the theme of lovein What is Called Thinking?

How far is Vedder’s overall project of unfolding the conditions fortheological intelligibility in Heidegger’s thought successful? Behind thisquestion stands the figure of Kant, and Vedder’s reading of Heideggerimplicitly and plausibly draws out the strong Kantianism of his work. Thelegitimating conditions for theological discourse are to be found in a respon-sive engagement with history – this saves it from both arbitrariness anddogmatism. Yet Vedder also provides an important indication of the tran-shistorical dimension to theological thinking, drawing our attention to thetime of nature, earlier than history, disclosed by the experience of the holy.However, and this is a minor point, it is for this reason that I would questionVedder’s dismissal of Heidegger’s suggestion in Being and Time of a possi-ble primordial understanding of infinity as a mere ‘remnant of [his] piouspre-history’ (p. 31; cf. Being and Time H. 427 xiii). I’m not sure that this iscorrect – the ‘infinity’ spoken of here breaks with the vulgar understandingof time as endless, the determination of eternity as ‘standing now’ in Scho-lastic metaphysics and the claim of the historical to be the sole ground of theunderstanding of being. This is not so much a criticism as an extension ofVedder’s indication of the transhistorical dimension to the thinking of beingbeneath the historical legitimating conditions for religious discourse.

Overall Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion provides a lucid account of adifficult field, providing a robust case for reading Heidegger as a post-metaphysical and atheistic theologian.

National University of Ireland, Galway Aengus Daly© 2008 Aengus Daly

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