Charles Driker-Ohren

While phenomenologists have long emphasized the importance of the I can – the capacity to move one’s body at will – less attention has been paid to the role of incapacity in shaping embodied experience. To address this shortcoming, I first reconstruct the notion of the I can in relation to perception, practical activity, and bodily habits. Next, I consider incapacity as the limitation of a prior capacity, resulting from injury or loss. From this standpoint, incapacity appears to be something marginal and derivative vis-à-vis bodily capacity. This characterization does not explain why our capacities are subject to loss, or how they emerge in the first place. Consequently, I argue that bodily capacities rest upon a foundation of original incapacity. Original incapacity is not present as a positive feature or power of consciousness, but rather as the susceptibility to loss that inheres in our existing capacities. To conclude, I explore the social and ethical implications of original incapacity. By acknowledging incapacity as a possibility that belongs to all bodies, and not simply those deemed frail or incapacitated, we can valorize our dependence upon others and build acceptance for inevitable losses of capacity.

This article critiques Husserl’s idea of grounding through an exploration of his notion of the lifeworld. First, it sketches different senses of the lifeworld in the Crisis and explains in what sense it is taken to be a universal foundation of all sense-formation. Second, it criticizes Husserl’s idea of grounding and shows that it fails because the alleged foundation—namely, the lifeworld as a perceptual world, or rather lifeworldly experience as perception—is inadequately determined. Perception cannot function as a universal foundation because it is always already interpretation. “The groundlessness of sense” means that the process of sense-formation can in no way rest upon an ultimate ground because contingent presuppositions and historical circumstances influence it from the very beginning. The paper concludes by discussing the consequence of this view for the relation between philosophy and sciences.

This article critiques Edmund Husserl’s account of affective awakening—the process mediating between one’s present perception of objects and their retrieval through memory. I argue that Husserl’s account of affective awakening is flawed and requires a rethinking of the relation between past and present. First, I reconstruct Husserl’s account of affection, the manner in which objects are given as prominent against a background and vie with one another for the ego’s attention. Next, I turn to affective awakening, through which a present perception can bring a past perception back to intuitive clarity. I argue that Husserl’s account of affective awakening is aporetic. The deep past cannot be awakened because it lacks the very features that allow it to form an affective connection with the present. After tracing this deadlock within Husserl’s descriptions, I interrogate his assumptions concerning the priority of the present over the past. In my conclusion, I sketch an alternate line of inquiry that begins with psychological trauma. Viewing the body as a site of vulnerability provides a way to conceive the complex entanglement between present and past without subordinating one to the other.

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity.