Leonard Lawlor

After Husserl, the study of phenomenology took off in different directions. The ambiguity inherent in phenomenology - between conscious experience and structural conditions - lent itself to a range of interpretations. Many existentialists developed phenomenology as conscious experience to analyse ethics and religion. Other phenomenologists developed notions of structural conditions to explore questions of science, mathematics, and conceptualization. "Phenomenology: Responses and Developments" covers all the major innovators in phenomenology - notably Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the later Heidegger - and the major schools and issues. The volume also shows how phenomenological thinking encounters a limit, a limit most apparent in the aesthetical and hermeneutical development of phenomenology. The volume closes with an examination of the furthering of the division between analytic and continental philosophy.

In Derrida's last book (posthumously published in 2006), L'animal que donc je suis, there is a kind of refrain: “il ne suffit pas de …” (it is not sufficient or enough to . . . ). Derrida utters this refrain in relation to all the discourses on animality and animal suffering found in the Western philosophical tradition. None of these discourses are sufficient. This last book revolves then around the idea of an insufficient (not enough) response. The idea of an insufficient response is not restricted to the problem of animal suffering; it extends to what we must call, following Derrida, “the problem of the worst.” The worst is the end, in the sense of total violence or total suicide: apocalypse. In this essay, I have tried to construct the beginnings of a more sufficient response that urges us to move toward the least amount of violence towards all living beings, while recognizing nevertheless that even this response is not sufficient. The more sufficient response is based on Derrida's transformation of the concept of waiting into being late found in Aporias. This transformation is at the heart of Derrida's thought of the messianic. We are so late in relation to the problem of the apocalypse that we can no longer wait for someone else to come and save us. We are so late that we—there's no one else coming—must take action now.