The Courtesy of Phenomenology

Speaker: Jocelyn Benoist, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

Phenomenology starts from a presupposition: that it is meaningful to treat everything as “appearing.” This postulate is, of course, linked to the Western metaphysics of subjectivity, of which phenomenology is the ultimate product—even if phenomenologists claim regularly to overcome it. This unconditional application of the notion of “appearing” raises a grammatical problem, for the verb “to appear” seems to have quite specific conditions of use that are incompatible with any absolutization. A self-sufficiency of appearing is just inconceivable. In other words, there are ontological conditions to phenomenology. Highlighting these, however, will only be the first step of my analysis. These ontological conditions would not make it possible by themselves to understand the need and necessity for the language game of “appearing.” A second critical step has therefore to be made, which, by way of a certain linguistic and anthropological comparativism, may disclose the logic underlying the discourse of “appearing.” This logic, as we shall see, is essentially social. Thus, we must return its “courtesy” to phenomenology finally.