Leonard Lawlor

This essay is part of an attempt to determine a new mode of existence, an ethics, for humans. It consists in reversing the idea of the worst, which is unconditional “impassage”: “don’t let anyone in; don’t let anyone out!” As a reversal, the new mode of existence turns us into friends of passage, a people who love the world so much that they will let everyone without exception enter and let everyone without exception exit. They say, “Let’s tear down all the wall and open all the doors!” The reversal comes about by focusing on the transcendental experience of powerlessness

This essay pursues a double strategy to transform our human collective relation to animal life. On the one hand, and this strategy is due to Derrida’s thought, it attempts to criticize the belief that humans have a kind of subjectivity that is substantially different from that of animals, the belief that humans have in their self-relation (called auto-affection) a relation of pure self-presence. On the other hand, the essay attempts to enlarge the idea of auto-affection to include the voices and looks of animals in us. Being in us, the image of animal suffering changes who we are. Hence the subtitle. This second strategy is due to Deleuze’s (or more precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s) thought. In fact, a large portion of this essay is devoted to a conceptual reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s important concept of becoming. I argue that there are two central features of this concept. First, the concept of becoming involves a process of desubjectification which allows for the image of animal suffering to inhabit our consciousness as a “feverish thought.” Second, the outcome of becoming is not only that, due to the feverish thought, we change, but also that we write about this experience in order to lead others to it. The essay ends therefore by invoking a kind of writing—folktales—as a way of calling for a “people to come” (Deleuze) or a “democracy to come” (Derrida).

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.

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.

"... no other book undertakes to relate all these French philosophers to each other the way that [Lawlor] does, brilliantly." —François Raffoul For many, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze represent one of the greatest movements in French philosophy. But these philosophers and their works did not materialize without a philosophical heritage. In Thinking through French Philosophy, Leonard Lawlor shows how the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty formed an important current in sustaining the development of structuralism and post-structuralism. Seeking the "point of diffraction," or the specific ideas and concepts that link Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, Lawlor discovers differences and convergences in these thinkers who worked the same terrain. Major themes include metaphysics, archaeology, language and documentation, expression and interrogation, and the very experience of thinking. Lawlor’s focus on the experience of the question brings out critical differences in immanence and transcendence. This illuminating and provocative book brings new vitality to debates on contemporary French philosophy