Outside Phenomenology?

1 A cheerful phenomenology

We can only be surprised at the evidence that abounds, owing to our failure to have truly questioned it. There is a certain irenicism in contemporary phenomenology, or a kind of “cheerful phenomenology,” which allows for the event to take primacy in everything, and that what first takes on meaning is that which we can, and must, marvel at. “Wonder is the only beginning of philosophy. It is owing to their wonder (thaumazein) that men both now and at first began to philosophise.”^[9] The word of Socrates in response to Theaetetus is more than ever timely and pertinent in the mouth and pens of French-speaking phenomenologists. Whether it is the face (Levinas), the gift (Marion), the word (Chrétien), the flesh (Henry), or liturgy (Lacoste), all are syntagms of the event, momentous occurrences, which we should learn to accommodate. The diagnosis stated at the opening of L’épreuve de la limite (F.-D. Sebbah) is correct, and we can only corroborate it here: “There is a kind of “family resemblance” or a kind of “resemblance” in contemporary French phenomenology, and this is characterized by a kind of “phenomenology of excess” or the “escalating race to the originary” (surenchère de l’originaire), so that the eventing of event (l’événementialité) is set up as an absolute criterion of all phenomenality.^[10]

Let there be no confusion, however. This detour, or rather, this return to the philosophical thaumazein, ultimately more Greek than modern, was not birthed suddenly among the generation of French phenomenologists who preceded us, through a kind of ex nihilo creation. It issues, of course, from the “idea of phenomenology” – or rather, the definition and the quest for phenomenality as Husserl and Heidegger defined it. From the definition of the phenomenon as “givenness in itself” (Selbst Gegebenheit) in Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology (1907),^[11] to its recapitulation and modification as “that which shows itself by itself, the manifest” (phainesthai) in the famous paragraph seven of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), the outcome is good: “Phenomenology therefore means: apophaïnesthai ta phaïnomena: to cause to see from itself that which shows itself as it shows itself from itself.”^[12]

One could certainly retort that even if the development of phenomenology appears to be more eruptive and “fragmented,” according to the accurate diagnosis of Dominique Janicaud, it has not thereby merely remained at this excess of phenomenality, for it has at least acknowledged its limits and imposed a reflection on the “limit.” Indeed, as Immanuel Kant showed so well in his Letter to Mendelssohn dated April 8, 1766, the “limit” (Grenze) and the “boundary” (Schrenke) must not be confused: “It is important to establish (in questions of metaphysics), whether there are not indeed limits (Grenzen) that are set not by the boundaries (Schranken) of our reason, no! but by those of the experience that contains the data necessary to reason.”^[13] And perhaps a whole section of French phenomenology has, voluntarily or not, turned its back on the prohibition fixed by the Transcendental Dialectic in the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – transforming then the “limits” into “bounds,” and thus the impassable of the horizon into the pure arbitrariness of the frontier: “Instead of a sensible world, we conceive I know not what intelligible world …; instead of the limit (Grenze) of the extension, we conceive the boundaries (Schranken) of the universe, thus we get time and space out of the way.”^[14]

Certainly, and because every judgment must be nuanced, all French phenomenology has not “gone beyond the limits” (dépassé les limites) in every sense of the expression, at least in the French sense (in the double sense of sticking to a previously determined program, but also of going beyond it, or even “disregarding” everything that could be opposed to it). A detailed diagnosis, which will not be the concern here, would easily show that there are phenomenologists of excess (Levinas, Marion, Henry, Chrétien, Lacoste) and others who stick to the pure horizon of our act of existing (Deleuze, Derrida, Richir, Dastur, Escoubas, Barbaras). The gap is not only in the lineage of the Heideggerian vein of phenomenology – since one can stand in this Heideggerian heritage in order either to transgress it by way of phenomenality, or to remain circumscribed in finitude – but in the sources invoked today. Clearly, a generation that has become more Merleau-Pontian than Heideggerian will stick more to the ordinary and everyday life and will fear – even if by a reactionary but creative and inventive gesture – to go the way of the famous light dove in free flight, which “cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space (Kant).”^[15]

But that is not all. Or rather, it is necessary to proceed “otherwise,” if we really want to define the “idea” that we should have of phenomenology today. The “theological turn of French phenomenology,” as we have said, has for a certain part of contemporary phenomenology overshadowed the debates on the import and outcomes of phenomenality. Everything happens, or has happened, as if the prohibition of “going beyond the limits,” or the false operation of a “transformation of limits into bounds,” had only served theology itself – or at least the question of God and Revelation as it came to be developed and was deployed within the framework of phenomenology as such. The real turning point, however, in our eyes is not, or rather is no longer simply, the theological turn of French phenomenology, but rather the irenic turn of French phenomenology, so that a phenomenality which would totally and at the same time break, or almost break, both the phenomenalizing subject and the phenomenalized horizon is not or is rarely envisaged. Thus, Dominique Janicaud rightly asks, and asks us, the question in his famous Theological Turn. But here it is not about theology this time around but about the future and the idea of phenomenology itself: “Would not a phenomenology whose dice have not been fixed have more attention for the atrocious, despairing, unqualifiable, or even only undecidable – where our condition is also woven? Does not E. M. Cioran reveal himself, then, to be at least as phenomenological as our authors, in many of his ruthless descriptions of our human condition?”^[16]

2 The case of Maldiney

Certainly, and on this point it is worth noting, the immense contribution of Henri Maldiney’s work on contemporary phenomenologists, according to a more or less recognized debt, has not left phenomenology in its blissful optimism. Emmanuel Levinas had, moreover, and in a way, preceded him on this path of thought, before his Totality and Infinity (1961) would devote everything to otherness: namely, the “horror of being” even more than the “anguish of death,” the “There is” (Il y a) as a real “place of resistance” rather than a “gift” in the astonishing translation of Es gibt. This is evidenced by the second preface of the work titled Existence and Existents (1981), written while in captivity (1944–1945), and to which the Jewish thinker would repeatedly return: “The notion of There is, developed in this 30-year-old book,” as the phenomenologist cautions, “seems to us to be the pièce de résistance …. An impersonal there is, like the statement “it is raining” or “it is night.” The term is fundamentally distinct from the Heideggerian “es gibt”. It has never been either the translation or the meaning of the German expression and its connotations of abundance and generosity.”^[17]

Henri Maldiney indeed, and to follow here the accurate diagnosis of Jocelyn Benoist, serves or has served in a way as a more or less avowed “blotter” for contemporary French phenomenology – at least the one that sets up the “grammar of the event” as “a characteristic feature of all the French phenomenology of the end of the 20th century.” They often were, and “ahead of time,” “phenomenologies of the event, of sensibility and of passivity,” that would have been developed. In short, Henri Maldiney appears today “as a precursor and a major reference point” for what constitutes the contemporary Idea of phenomenology.^[18] But by virtue of much reference to him, whether directly cited or not, Maldiney has now become for phenomenology in the French language – (following the example of Jean Beaufret who introduced Heidegger at a time when he could not be contested) – the author who is never truly interrogated and engaged with. The achievement of his “breakthrough” is certainly immense, and it needs to be underscored. The eventing of the event (l’événementialité) must take precedence over the “projected being” (l'être projété), or the capacity to receive the “event” over the “project ahead of time” (projet devançant). The “real” must be understood as “that which one did not expect and which, as soon as it appears, has always already been there.”^[19] And the “transpassibility” (transpassibilité) here designated is the capacity to be affected.^[20]

We wonder, therefore, about what is to be made of the idea of “phenomenology” today – setting it up against the “Extra phenomenon” as a new and another phenomenological way set in motion here. Is it enough to follow, as it were, the one who certainly revised from top to bottom the order of phenomenality (in the double sense of its receptivity and of the limiting experiences by which it is to be considered) and to stick always to a horizon of the order of the excess, or even to a “secularized form” of the theologization of phenomenology? For whoever is able to see it and think it, the “purely philosophical” language always upheld by Henri Maldiney does not belong any less to the order of the theological and of the religious. Thus, a kind of “theologization of phenomenology” is indeed produced not only by those who explicitly refer to theology or to the question of God (Levinas, Marion, Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste), but also by some phenomenologists of the event, Henri Maldiney, most notably (but perhaps also Merleau-Ponty), who secularize the syntagms without, however, referring to the divine content to which they ordinarily point to. For, under the pen of Henry Maldiney, the explicit and chief question is indeed of the “miracle of the encounter or of the event” in phenomenology, or of the “miracle of wonder” in aesthetics (in fact, with Merleau-Ponty, one of the incarnation of “theological structure”) – the extraordinary taking precedence over the ordinariness of existing, or the “word becoming flesh” as man’s mode of existence as such.^[21]

If the extraordinary no longer obtains on the side of transcendence, but rather belongs to the pure immanence of the subject in the mode and posture of total receptivity, then, astonishment or the thaumazein does not constitute any less, nor always, the unsurpassable mode of a phenomenology which would make welcoming and the opening the unsurpassable paradigm of any phenomenality. All appearance is made for man and addressed to man. From the “theological,” the turn here in reality has become the “teleological.” To say it with Renaud Barbaras, who correctly underscores it right at the opening of Dynamique de la Manifestation: “We thus end up [in a number of phenomenologies and not to say all of them] in the teleological and highly hypothetical schema owing to which some nature would bring about the emergence of man from within itself in order for it to appear – it would produce man in order to appear.”^[22]

We would wager, however, that Henri Maldiney surely “looked away from” but did not entirely “turn his back” on the event. His main achievement is to have conceived the characteristics of the eventing of the event from the position of “non-eventing.” To put it differently, the default of the event, or rather in the capacity to receive the event, describes what eventing or transpassibility really is. For once, Maldiney would not, or no longer, take refuge in a kind of Dasein that towers “above the fray” looking down – or in a kind of “hovering transcendence,” to put it like Maurice Merleau-Ponty – upon the rest of the “other” disciplines with which phenomenology must enter into engagement. Instead of sticking only to the existential following which the ontological alone would take precedence over the ontic – [a rejection which indeed was beneficial to a certain generation of phenomenologists who, probably with good reason, saw with a bad eye the loss of philosophy to sociology, psychoanalysis or linguistics in the wake of May 68] – the reinvestment of phenomenological psychiatry in the wake of a Binswanger, or even of Karl Jaspers, obliges us to revise the categories of “appearance” and of phenomenology itself. The recurrent use of the case of Suzanne Urban, repeatedly brought up in Penser l’homme et la folie, therefore sets up psychosis, and in particular schizophrenia, as the closing of what should be an opening: “The most remarkable thing about psychosis is the closure to the event. One day, an event took place which was never taken up and received, and which, not exceeded, obstructs all the horizon of a person.”^[23]

Contrary to all phenomenological irenicism, it is from “extreme situations,” to use Karl Jaspers’ formula,^[24] that phenomenology and the idea of phenomenology itself must be rethought and renewed. Hence, the very numerous works in France, and in this respect quite justified (Eliane Escoubas, Natalie Depraz, Philippe Cabestan, and many others) projects to reinvest phenomenological psychiatry certainly, but also to question the limits of phenomenology itself – which, perhaps, has not yet been carried out to the end, or in a more radical way. It is not enough, at least in our eyes, to describe what is at play in the “closing of the opening,” or to speak about the opening itself (transpassibility). Still, it is necessary to question the syntagm, and the presupposition of “openness” (Erschlossenheit), which, for its part, is never submitted to question, nor even debated as not (or no longer) being self-evident. The a priori of self-disclosure (l’a priori de l’apérité) is never questioned in phenomenology, except to reinforce it by analyzing it in an inverted way (psychoses), and probably, it is here that the Extra phenomenon has been partly missed.

One could certainly argue that self-disclosure is no longer the opening “of” Dasein in its projecting but the opening “to” Dasein in its capacity to receive the event by way of transpassibility (Maldiney). And we can also demonstrate that true opening is no longer that of the opening “to” the world, but the opening “of” the world (Patočka), in an analysis that is certainly and rightly “polemological” but that does not fundamentally question the very idea of opening; on the contrary, it instead redirects it in order to reorient it afresh and differently.^[25] In both cases, and as in all cases, the evidence of a sort of trace of the Dasein remains and can be read in the background, for it makes the human being to already be, from the outset, defined as Erschlossenheit or “Opening.” Such that all that contravenes it should fall either in a destitute humanity or one that has fallen out from normality (schizophrenia in Maldiney), or in a “poverty in world,” which, this time, would be of the order of animality rather than of humanity (the animal that is poor in world, according to Heidegger).

3 The opening under consideration

That there is an “openness,” or rather that the very modality of openness is self-evident, is precisely what the Extra phenomenon (Hors phénomène) challenges. In the face of “illness,” “separation,” the “death of a child,” “natural disaster,” or a “pandemic” – the many paradigms that are present like a leitmotiv throughout the work Hors Phénomène (Extra Phenomenon), or like a refrain, it is the very idea of the opening “of” Dasein to the world (Heidegger), of the opening “to” Dasein by the event (Maldiney), and of the opening “of” the world to Dasein (Patočka), which is contested here. It is not enough indeed to be astonished (and rightly so as does R. Barbaras) at the teleological character of the phenomenon such as it is thought in the ordinary framework of phenomenology, as if it (the phenomenon) always had to appear for man or to address itself to man – whether this is a question not only of theology, but also of aesthetics, or even of nature itself. Still, it is necessary to radicalize the thought and to ask ourselves, after all, whether there always is the “manifest(ing)” (du manifester), both with reference to the phenomenalizing subject and the phenomenalized horizon; and in what sense the “non-manifest” would not be a lack to phenomenality by way of privation or of a negative theology, but be an “hole,” or rather a “gaping void,” even “chaos” (a fullness rather than an emptiness, that which is one in a different way than merely open or closed), by which the existent is newly oriented.

Henri Maldiney certainly suggests in his Crise et création that the “expression of the doctor [in the case of Suzanne Urban] has, for her, replaced the old world which had collapsed. It was the key event of a new world. The world was reduced to this expression.”^[26] But this new world in reality remains only the negation, or rather the “privation,” of the old world. Here, following a psychiatric analysis that is surely and rightly concerned with bringing a cure, the pathological is still and always only the reverse of the normal, or sickness as only the loss of health. But, as we shall see further, the Extra phenomenon is not negation, and even less so privation (of a phenomenological opening, or of a physiological or psychic health). Trauma is other and makes us always other – to ourselves certainly, but also to the world and to those whom we say constitute our otherness. We will not recover it only through the “care” that will require us “to do the work” (as it is said in psychology or psychoanalysis). For us, in trauma, there is neither resilience nor work of mourning, but at most bearing and containing;^[27] but we will let trauma freeze like a “hole” in our existence, never just merely open nor closed, but rather as “outside” the categories that we had previously constituted. Thinking “under the pressure of illness” and asking oneself “if illness was not what inspired the philosopher,” and following Nietzsche’s example in the Foreword to The Gay Science,^[28] this is what will guide the quest for extra-phenomenality, but this not so much to regain good health, which in reality one never recovers, but to tread other lands of a “strangeness to oneself” that most often remains unsuspected.

Not satisfied to think psychoses as the “closure of an openness,” following Henri Maldiney’s example – melancholy as “closure” upon the past, mania as “obsession” with the present, and schizophrenia as “closure” of all future^[29] – Ludwig Binswanger rather wants to see, and surprisingly, a certain form of creativity. Analyzing the same case of Suzanne Urban, his interpretation is rather different, even though we know how much the psychiatrist depends upon yet resists the thought of Martin Heidegger and admits to the great conflict between them. Further, nothing guaranties, at least in his own eyes, that the Openness or the self-disclosure of Dasein is self-evident – a point that Henri Maldiney for his part never contested, safe to orientate it differently (no longer an openness “of” Dasein as a projected being, but openness “to” Dasein as a capacity to receive the event or transpassibility). Hence, the different but correct comment of Binswanger, of the fear aroused in Suzanne Urban at the announcement of her husband’s illness. Understood positively as the “existential power to exist” (Binswanger), and not negatively defined as the always presupposed “closing of an opening” (Maldiney), trauma does not merely redirect, nor does it simply wait to redirect one to an always predetermined disclosure. Instead, it imposes the exigency to “otherwise” and in a “new way” exist according, certainly, to a mode of creativity that would no longer have anything to do with a “being-there” (something of which we know ahead of time what it always must consist of). “Moreover, here and as usual,” underlines Binswanger in his preface to the French translation of The Case Susanne Urban (1957), “we do not take the term “being-in-the-world” in the (ontological) sense of Heidegger, that is to say, in the sense of an immutable existential, but in the empirical and phenomenological sense that authorizes us to discuss modes, forms and well-defined modifications of this existential …. Thus, we have, if not discovered, at least glimpsed the fundamental character of the existential power of the terrifying.”^[30]

Thus, the psychiatrist, to quote the poet Baudelaire as example – as one could also do with a Rimbaud, a Nietzsche, or an Antonin Artaud – along with the psychic, implies a “being-there-differently,” including from the point of view of what one ordinarily calls “good health.” Certainly, the point is not to be in an ordinary way “sick” in order to show proof of creativity, and even less to contest forms of therapy, where getting better restores one to the “living” that he had in most cases forgotten. But we shall at least have to recognize that there are certain forms of metamorphoses, certainly not always desirable, that create new perspectives on the world that point to a radical “otherwise” – so that in the light of trauma, we do not merely live as if we were dead, but we are totally “changed” to the point of no longer recognizing ourselves, and sometimes, no longer being recognized by others either.

There is therefore – to follow the very words of Ludwig Binswanger distancing himself here from Martin Heidegger, and also from Henri Maldiney, the latter who only reverses the meaning of disclosure without ever ceasing to preserve it – a new and other “existential power” discovered in the instance of the sick or traumatized man – that is to say, the imperious necessity to invent oneself otherwise from and around the “hole” that constitutes the Extra phenomenon, rather than to restore an “opening” that would have been obstructed. “Madness” is not only a “closing” of the world, but the “creation” of another and new world – according to a perspective that is actually more Nietzschean than Heideggerian, but which, still today, has something to teach us. “Whatever description we give to the ‘terrifying’,” as continues Binswanger, with the relentless rigor of his thinking, “perfectly corresponds with the vision of this existential power and its ‘metamorphoses,’ such as the poets have described it, and as we have shown it with the example of Baudelaire’s poem titled, ‘Destruction’.”^[31]

4 For what real?

We will, therefore, ask what “real” is to be aimed at in phenomenology – even if to reach the limits of phenomenality. The “real,” as we have said, and if such a word still has a meaning in the mode of reduction, is today commonly defined as “event” in phenomenology – that is to say, as “that which one did not expect and which, as soon as it appears, has always already been there,” to follow here the root of its definition in Penser l’homme et la folie (Maldiney).^[32] Within such a massive scheme of the eventing, it is not so much a question of not expecting or no longer expecting anything – which would effectively be to destroy the phenomenalizing subject and the phenomenalized horizon under the effect of trauma (Hors phénomène) – but rather to “expect” what one does not expect. In the contemporary idea of phenomenology, at least if we take it in its French version as it has been deployed over the last few years, the horizon of expectation is certainly always thwarted by eventing (the face, the gift, auto-affection, the word, or liturgy), but not destroyed to the point of annihilating all transcendentality.

Only one person in fact saw it – paradoxically the inventor of the transcendental himself who, discovering an exception to transcendentality, quite unbeknownst to him, states what according to us must become the rule of extra-phenomenality: namely, Immanuel Kant’s own “Cinnabar,” in the “Transcendental Analytics” of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). (The Cinnabar that, moreover, would vanish in the second edition (1787) in favor of the “Synthesis of the I-think.”) Thus, “If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the colour red.”^[33]

The hypothesis seems certainly absurd but is nevertheless very real. It could indeed happen, with regards to trauma, and thus within the framework of the Extra phenomenon, that the very possibility of synthesizing is itself annihilated. In the face of illness, separation, the death of a child, a natural disaster, or a pandemic, a “rupture of synthesis” occurs which, like a “rupture of fatigue,” no longer allows us to move forward, or even to take a step to continue. I don’t just have “severed legs” because I’m exhausted, but it is as if I “no longer had legs” in a kind of curse of existing. Survival is worse than life, as we have said, as soon as the horror of being outweighs the anguish of death. It is through such exceptional cases – but which in reality reveal what we have always been, that is to say, beings with “holes” (Lacan) or “cracks” (Deleuze) – that Kant leads us into the pure chaos of a world and of ourselves, where the synthesis of experience itself is no longer carried out. This, either in the total confusion of the “vermilion color” or of the Cinnabar that has become “sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy,” as in the incredible pre-Kafkaesque metamorphosis of man transformed “sometimes into an animal, sometimes into another (man),” or again on this country region as if radiating a land that is “covered sometimes with fruit, sometimes with ice and snow.” Chaos here no longer designates an openness to what one could expect in a kind of infra-phenomenality, nor the remainder of what is always given by way of supra-phenomenality, but rather designates the full and the jumbled (pêle-mêle) of what invades me by way of extra-phenomenality.

What we have elsewhere called “The expansion of the psyche” (pensée épandue),^[34] making it the complementing counterpart to the expansion of the body (corps épandu),^[35] gestures toward this “plenitude of thought,” such that I am myself invaded by myself, to the point of recognizing that “one thinks me” (on me pense) (Rimbaud), that I have become a “something that thinks – Es denkt” (Nietzsche), or that there is in me “a something that in its substance increasingly destroys the weight of my thought” (Artaud). A kind of anonymity of the ego which thus requires of me to “de-think” (dé-penser) – in a thing unthinkable (un impensable), which not only remains to be thought because we are not yet thinking of it, but one that destroys the very capacities of thinking and requires an alternative renewal of itself. The “existential power of the schizophrenic,” as required by Binswanger, is certainly not to be envied. But it also creates other possibilities that are not exclusively derived either from the norm, or from a pre-given openness (phenomenology), or from the ideal of good health based on the criterion of sociality (psychiatry). There is an “internal logic of madness,” the matter is well known (Lacan), even if it cannot be upheld as a norm of every form of existentiality.

In reality, we never get out of the trauma by which we have “fallen” – hence the false appeals, as we have said, to a “resilience” so vulgarized that it becomes understood as the requisite of an existence that is always assumed able to bounce back and pull itself up. At most, we “go around the hole,” we go around it, but without ever really entering it, at the risk, on the contrary, of rushing into it. “Troumatism” and not only “traumatisme” (“trauma”), as Jacques Lacan expressed it during a seminar dated February 19, 1974, using a “wordplay” that certainly makes us smile, but nonetheless has the merit of underscoring the necessary consideration that must be made of the Extra, or of the extra-phenomenal, particularly in phenomenology itself. Far from either the already prepared phenomenon (infra-phenomenal), or a cheerful phenomenology (supra-phenomenal), the task of the “break of phenomenality” (illness, separation, death of a child, natural disaster, pandemic) requires us today to ontologically revise the very initial act and starting point in phenomenology, in what we here call extra-phenomenality: “But we all know, because we all invent something to fill the hole in the Real. Where there is no sexual relation, the result is a “troumatisme”. We invent! We invent what we can, of course.”^[36]

In light of the Extra phenomenon, and thus of an idea of phenomenology where it is not first of all a question of “showing oneself” nor of “signifying,” we could no longer define the real as “that which one did not expect and which, as soon as it appears, has always already been there” (Maldiney). Whoever says “real,” and even “reality,” understood within phenomenology as the “lived” and not as a mode of objectivity, will now rather see in it the unassimilable, the infrangible that is impossible to synthesize, and from whence we would have to reinvent ourselves anew. Once again, Jacques Lacan shows the way in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, this time in the seminar of 1964 – even if it would now be up to phenomenology to try to think along with this proposal, so as not to leave its formulas up to the private preserve of some initiates willing defend it at all cost: “Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real presents itself in the form of that which in it is unassimilable – in the form of the trauma, determining its entire course and imposing upon it an apparently accidental origin?”^[37]

5 Trans-modifiability

“As much exception, so also, much modification,” such will become, following the proposal of the Cinnabar (which, though, is often misappropriated), the new leitmotiv of said phenomenology of the Extra phenomenon. There is certainly always a certain impudence in wanting to finish what others have started so well. It is tiresome to add reductions to reductions, or imperatives to other imperatives, believing, or making believe, that one is the last born. The fact remains that the logic of the phenomenological development, or at least of its radicalization, is pushed to the limit here. For if the interrogative syntagm “Outside phenomenology?” designates less the borders between disciplines than the effort to reach the “things themselves,” including in the limits of their “unattainable” and of their “unthinkable” dimensions (what we have called the “confines of phenomenality”), then, the “Extra phenomenon,” in the light of trauma, de facto imposes upon us the need to rethink.

If there is epochê or reduction, then, nothing or nothing more would resist it – including the ego or God, at that moment where everything is erased or gets “out of control” (outside all signification and outside the gift), with regard to the “hole of aspiration” produced by trauma within the framework of extra-phenomenality (disease, separation, death of a child, natural disaster, pandemic). A “something” certainly remains, but which is like a “me without me” in its pure neutrality; a “deep gap” ever remains there, resisting me, but in the guise this time of “chaos” which makes that the “full” (plein), far from being a vacuum or an openness that is always ready to welcome everything, even if to be transformed by it;^[38] “radical phenomenology” is not a phenomenology of the affected or self-affected subject, but on the contrary of the ego that has lost everything, even its egoism and the very capacity to experience. Pathei mathos – learning by trial, according to Aeschylus, is not always possible, far from it. But to say that “experiencing” does not occur does not necessarily suggest that we are “closed” to a pre-given opening, but rather that we must now create “another way of existing” that we had not previously imagined.

“A-experience” (“l’an-expérience”) is not “in-experience” (“l’inexpérience”), and even less is it the “experience of inexperience,” which still remains an experience. A-experience, in trauma, for example, is to no longer have the capacity to make and say the experience. And a-experience, in psychic illness, amounts to the need to reconfigure other possibilities of living or of experiencing. Here, it is not simply to lose the capacity for eventing (événementialiser) through “privation,” but by “creation” to produce a new point of view on how to constitute – following the example of Gregor Samsa who was transformed into a cockroach in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

“The possible, the possible, otherwise I’ll suffocate!,” exclaimed Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death, or rather Deleuze and Maldiney about Kierkegaard (a formula that was never really written by the pen of the Danish philosopher, even if we can deduce in order to think it)^[39]. It is not there simply to await new possibilities upon a pre-determined horizon, even if overwhelmed by the “miracle of the event” (Maldiney) – according to a scope of meaning that is both theological and teleological, as previously indicated. It is also “to make its possible,” in the strict sense of the term; that is, to create new possibilities starting from and around a broken existence whose wound is never closed. An “otherwise possible” is so not in the sense that another person comes to join me in this deep gap of my existentiality where I remain forever “alone.” But the “otherwise possible” in the sense that the other, aiming and reaching toward their own horizon, that of health, for example, makes me see that my way of existing is not the only one by which to subsist. A phenomenology a minima does not come to console me, but to tell me that where I am, it is precisely there, and first of all myself that I must inhabit – even if it is only so that another, one day, might come alongside me.

Following the imperative, “as much appearance, so, much being” (Heidegger), or the other leitmotiv, “as much reduction, so, much donation” (Marion), there is now the new antiphon from which phenomenology will have to take its starting point: “as much exception, so, much modification.” Within the framework of the Extra phenomenon, the exception becomes the rule – the Cinnabar or the rupture of synthesis becomes the true event that breaks any possibility of eventing and event, or trauma which, within the framework of the extra-phenomenal, makes that one can remain neither at the infra-phenomenal (propaedeutic to phenomenality) nor at the supra-phenomenal (phenomenologies of the excess or of overflow).

But the exception – the not so rare case by which, being all “traumatizable” as we are, we also become “traumatized” when “it befalls us” (illness, separation, death of a child, natural disaster, pandemic) – makes us lose our identity, and also the very substance by which we believed ourselves to still exist. Worse than the “living-not-yet-dead” (anguish of death) is the “living dead” (horror of being), which we sometimes become in certain borderline situations. The corpse of an existence that no longer belongs to itself becomes more unbearable than death itself, which would reduce it to nothingness. Such is, in a unique way in the history of philosophy, the observation that Spinoza makes about the poet Gongora who seems to have totally lost his memory (probably Alzheimer’s). He is no longer the same, the author certainly notes in Book IV of the Ethics (On the Bondage of Man). But there is more. He has also lost his nature, as if he had destroyed his substance, not only to lose all substance, but to become another substance, totally “different” and therefore called to exist differently. The exception – the Cinnabar or trauma – is not only a place of loss, but also a call to a complete metamorphosis or modification: “For I dare not deny,” Spinoza writes boldly, alluding to Gongora’s psychic illness,

that – even though the circulation of the blood is maintained, as well as the other [signs] on account of which the Body is thought to be alive – the human Body can nevertheless be changed into another nature (aliam naturam) entirely different from its own (a sua prorsus diversam mutari). For no reason compels me to maintain that the Body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse. And, indeed, experience seems to urge a different conclusion. Sometimes a man undergoes such changes (tales patiatur mutationes) that I should hardly have said he was the same man (eumdem illum esse).^[40]

“As much exception, so also, much modification.” This is the leitmotiv of a phenomenology which comes (finally) to take up extra-phenomenality, or the Extra, according to which we can no longer remain only within the frame of the infra or of supra phenomenality. It requires, therefore, not only to vary the categories of transcendentality – a radicalizing within finitude [Heidegger], disproportion within fallibility [Ricœur], or inversion within the saturated phenomenon [Marion] – but to allow oneself be undone so as to constitute again, differently. Certainly, at the instance of the Extra phenomenon, the subject is totally made nothing (néantisé) and even placed “outside the I” (outside itself) and “out of play” (outside the I; Hors je(u)) in the double sense of the term: as an ego, he no longer recognizes himself according to a “shock,” or even a “crack,” which had been in him for a long time (hors Je); and as a participant and actor, he sometimes falls out of the space or the game of communal sociality (off-side; hors-jeu). He thus becomes other – “other from himself,” in fact, “other to ourselves” but not “other than oneself,” or “oneself as another,” including to ourselves. In annihilation (de-subjectivation under the shock of trauma), the subject becomes paradoxically encumbered by itself (hyper-subjectivation by way of the “living dead” who nevertheless is always there), to be completely modified (metamorphosis or transformation by which he is called to totally reinvent himself).

There is here no intentionality because Chaos, or the hypothesis of the “annihilation of the world,” is in reality unattainable, contrary to what Husserl would have had us believe with regards to “absolute consciousness as a residue of the annihilation of the world.”^[41] And there is no phenomenality there either, as if, according to Heidegger in his course on Nietzsche, the “occurring phenomenon” by the word Chaos had to tell us also “what was previously fixed.”^[42] To whomever has fallen into the un-world, the world no longer appears, and he can no longer make any world. Even his trauma is no longer there, or rather what remains of the subject exists only through it, so that his psyche is invaded by this “thought (that is) object,” from which he cannot detach himself (The expansion of the psyche). No end here, nor disappearance of the subject, in a phenomenology of extra-phenomenality; but on the contrary, there is hyper-subjectivation which imposes itself now as always in the mode of transformation. Trans-modifiability here takes precedence over transpassibility; and it is through being ever changed by way of creativity, rather than being affected by way of receptivity, that the subject (as otherwise) will produce “new syntheses” that until now had never been invented. Along with Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1968), we must say that “the self does not have modifications,” for, “it is itself a modification.”^[43] In this sense, if “all the differences are borne by the individual, the differences are not for that individual.”^[44]

6 Crisis and extra-phenomenality

The crisis of philosophy, but perhaps also of phenomenology (less in its lack of thought but rather in its very “fragmented” character), is thus no longer a “crisis of meaning,” as if this latter had always to be expected or presupposed [Krisis, Husserl]. The crisis must certainly be taken in its etymological sense (krinein), bearing its “judgment” upon that which is happening to us, but also and especially in its medical origin, without knowing on which side we are going to fall: “krisis, in the Hippocratic tradition, means that decisive moment of a disease where one does not know yet whether the patient is going to tip over to the side of death or of recovery.”^[45]

A “pandemic and health crisis” proves it. It is not only philosophy that is at stake, even though everything has to be thought or rethought afresh. It is about existence, life or death, presence or absence – at a time when “death” with its sickle could take everything away, and when the trumpet of the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse, or of Ingmar Bergman’s film, could well have sounded. Trauma could have taken everything away, and me with it, and me first: this illness from which I strangely escaped, this separation from which I never thought I would recover and continue to exist, this death of my child for which I would have liked so much to substitute myself to allow him to continue to live this life that was stolen from him, the destruction of my house and my world the day I thought I would never have a real place to live, the virus and the pandemic crisis where every day I wondered if I would be the next one to go through it, suspecting the slightest sign of illness and telling myself that my turn has come without knowing where or how I might have caught it. To philosophize is not only to think, but also to rise to that “vertiginous height” of existence, where everything could crumble, or in the least, topple over.

Hence, the strangest part of the “crisis,” precisely in the context of the Extra phenomenon – namely, that I continue to exist most of the time – even in trauma where everything, myself and the world, should have collapsed – and that in this “being-there,” no longer open (Dasein) but simply present or “there” (There is), something is said about a world, and about myself, which is changing. To still stand when one should be dead: such is the “crisis” of extra-phenomenality. Not the one that seeks or will find a lost meaning in the nostalgia of an age where phenomenology still had something “gentle and cozy” to it (from birth as receptivity to gift as pure given). Not even the one that is reduced to the absolute absurdity of a life that feeds only on “the inconvenience of being born” (Cioran). But the one that makes of the “outside,” or of the “out of category,” the deepest reason of the act of existing, or at least the necessity to develop now a phenomenology a minima by which “I” persist in standing there, even if not to be able to say me anymore, and by which the “other” will perhaps stand “at my side,” but without meeting me nor joining me in this trauma – at the bottom of this hole to which I myself would not know how to reach.

7 Conclusion: A “core of solitude”

Paradoxically, and precisely by reason of the trauma within which existing is revealed in me, even while pretending to ignore it, it is thus like an “original” or rather an “originary solitude,” of which each one of us is constituted, and which could perhaps, and strangely, bind us. Far from the “solitary” (Rousseau), or “solipsism” (Husserl, Descartes), or far from the “esseulement” (Heidegger), “solitude” stands as this original and originary sphere, from myself to myself, that trauma comes if not to awaken at least to indicate. The “mystics of the other,” even if most often they come from erroneous interpretations (in particular from Levinas), have today become the panacea of a phenomenology, indeed, of an ego that is in need of being saved. Whether in philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, or theology, the other is always there to save me, and not to recognize it, and even more not to welcome it, is to commit a crime of lèse-majesté. At the instance of the primacy of eventing over the brute fact, of openness over creativity, or of the world over the un-world, there now comes, as we announced, the absolute privilege of otherness over solitude. But this is to miss, at least in our eyes, the irrefragable “nucleus of solitude” which constitutes each one of us, impossible to overcome, and even less to share.

Within the framework of the Extra phenomenon, trauma does not cease to remind us of this fact. We are “alone” and “always alone” in the double collapse of the phenomenalizing subject and of the phenomenalized horizon: illness, separation, death of a child, natural disaster, pandemic. The solitude is here “originary” and not only “original,” in the sense that it constitutes the depth of my existentiality, which my unimpartable trauma comes to remind me. To say, then, “that it is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18) does not simply make of solitude a “beginning” state that awaits completion (Levinas). In solitude, in my solitude, there stands my originary being which will never be transcended. This is not simply a “mystery” never totally elucidated (Edith Stein), nor a “secret” where my intimate good in hidden (Romano), but a core “kernel,” with its strongest and most infrangible bark, impossible to crush. “Solitude” is synonymous with “impenetrability,” both to myself and to others. And it is in recognizing this that my trauma will have, if not a name, at least a place where it “makes its hole,” without my ever being able to join it and descend into it without definitively being made nothing (néantisé).

I am to myself and for myself totally unknowable in this “hole” or this “kernel of solitude,” which trauma, by way of a “crack” always already there (Deleuze), has come to awaken. Not of a theophanic “unknowability,” where solitude would only be the “remainder” of an always already shared otherness, but of a thing unknowable, forever sealed off because it is inaccessible to language as well as to any possibly shared experience. But the other, too, as I can at least suppose, is always alone with this “originary solitude,” which he himself cannot reach either. He is unknowable to himself as I am to myself, in particular under the effect of the trauma where I am always astonished to see myself, or at least to live out myself (me vivre). “So alone” in this undertaking, where none other than myself seems to be able to help me, but no longer myself.

Let the other then come forth, and he will stand, at most, “by my side.” That which is true of death, according to Martin Heidegger’s apt formula, is also true of existence in general, and more particularly of trauma: “We do not really experience the death [the trauma] of others, at most we always and only ‘assist’ them.”^[46] The shoulder of others is certainly not nothing, but it is far from being everything. I am not and never will be “with the other” in his trauma but will simply be “there” – not to penetrate but to stand by his side. I am and always will be a “stranger to myself” in the Extra phenomenon. To be consoled is not to break such an impenetrability or “core of solitude,” but on the contrary to refer oneself to it, and even to feel bound to it.

The whole paradox, in fact, is here. The unshareable nature of our solitude is precisely what we have in common with others, and even more with the one we say we “love.” I do not reach to my core of solitude, which constitutes the strongest of my beingness; you do not reach your core of solitude, which defines your existentiality; you do not reach my core of solitude so that you will have to get out of the lure of wanting to share everything, and I do not reach your core of solitude so that I will have to have lived enough, and perhaps also philosophized, to finally recognize in you an egoism which, forever, will escape me.

There is here neither the tragic nor tragedy, quite the contrary. To substitute a “drama of the phenomena” to the irenicism of the phenomenology previously denounced certainly has its sense, but rather in such a way that “drama” here is understood as a new scene upon which to play, rather than to sound the end of a comedy that would have already lasted too long. For, in this “common inaccessibility” of our core of solitude – of myself to myself, of the other to himself, of the other to myself, and of myself to the other – stands the strongest, and the deepest, of our act of loving. In the shared inaccessible, there remains the link, and by this “vinculum substantiale,” we remain forever knotted. Love will not be, or will no longer be an “empty word” or a flatus vocis, if we recognize that the solidarity of others is held less in the sharing of that which would be held hidden, than in the existential abyss which allows each of us to exist, or at least to stand upright without collapsing or being damaged: “To love is nothing at first which means to dissolve, to give oneself and to unite with a second person,” one must conclude according to the remarkable formula of Rainer Maria Rilke addressed to Mr. Kappus on May 14, 1904 (Letters to a young poet). “Love consists in the fact that two solitudes protect each other, delimit each other, and greet each other.”^[47]