The singularity of the affective body: incorporation and orientation in the French phenomenological reception of Husserl

Abstract

Since the inception of phenomenological philosophy at the outset of the 20ieth century, it has spurred a number of responses and developments. As a supposed 'radicalisation of philosophy', in the specification of philosophy as 'practice', it set its focus with a 'return to experience'. However, as the development into various forms of phenomenology brought to light, the practice of classical phenomenology involved a 'scientism' that leads to specific impasses. Husserlian phenomenological methodology, beyond developments and differences in subject matter and emphasis between the earlier and later works, ultimately rests on problematic premises: the return to the 'experiences of thinking and knowing' relied on a supposition of rational intuitive knowledge based in a correlation of 'eidetic seeing' and a determinable essence of things. Classical phenomenology operates with an ultimately reductive account of cognition, insofar as the focus remains with the rationality of a thought in supposed adequation to itself and the essential generalities ultimately referable to it.This thesis takes up the question of the missing aspect in classical phenomenology's inadequate account of cognition and genesis. It does so by engaging with a specific response to classical phenomenology according to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry and Emmanuel Levinas's and Jacques Derrida's reading of Husserl. The thesis addresses these writers in the capacity that their work comes together in a particular approach to embodiment or corporeality, which identifies the aporias that inform the determinations and theoretical assumptions of classical phenomenology. To this extent their work represents a singular French response to Husserl, operating close to the phenomenological discourse. Bringing together these approaches to embodiment sheds light on the manner in which classical phenomenology operates with a reductive account of language and signification and allows me to ask the question of immanent genesis. A re-examination of genesis is brought about through the specific orientation pertaining to the question of genesis in the work of Deleuze, Henry, Levinas and Derrida.The re-orientation of certain premises of classical phenomenology undermines some of its central tenets and thematisation. The re-orientation demonstrates that a tradition of thought, culminating in classical phenomenology, operates according to a certain forgetfulness of the subjective body, of sensibility or the body in thought, which prevents an adequate account of genesis and language/signification. This thesis argues that these specific approaches to embodiment and language provide an adequate notion of immanent genesis, and opens up a space for a re-examination of and challenge to the orientation of T/thought with regard to its presumptions regarding genesis and meaning. The thesis concludes with a consideration of the art of Henri Michaux, and argues that this specific reception of classical phenomenology develops an understanding of genesis that is crucial to understanding this work