Justin Pearl

Heinrich Popitz’s Phenomena of Power aims to uncover power as “a universal component in the genesis and operation of human societies”. In order to uncover this “universal” concept of power, Popitz employs Husserl’s method of the “imaginative variation” [Phantasievariation]. Yet, contrary to phenomenology’s traditionally descriptive posture, Phenomena of Power’s project is at once descriptive and normative—seeking not only to describe power, but to also describe the way in which power can be remade. In the present paper it is argued that this normative component of Popitz’s project offers the burgeoning field of critical phenomenology an illustration of the way in which Husserl’s “imaginative variation” might be employed not only as a descriptive tool of pure essences, but also as an instrument in the refashioning of social reality.

Since his 1977 The Idol and Distance, Jean-Luc Marion has almost continually drawn upon the work of the 5th-6th century Christian mystic Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, not only within his explicitly theological considerations, but throughout his Cartesian and phenomenological work as well. The present essay maps out the influence of Denys upon Marion’s thinking, organizing Marion’s career into a three-part periodization, each of which corresponds to a distinct portion of the Dionysian corpus—in Marion’s work of the seventies the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy are foregrounded, in the eighties this emphasis is shifted to the The Divine Names, and in the nineties The Mystical Theology takes center stage. Insofar as these emphases directly correlate to the unique tasks that Marion has set himself in each of these various periods, Dionysius is revealed as a hermeneutical key, unlocking and clarifying crucial aspects of Marion’s theologically-inflected phenomenology.

Quentin Meillassoux’s 2006 After Finitude offered a sharp critique of the phenomenological project, charging that phenomenology was one of the “two principal media” of correlationism—ultimately reducible to an “extreme idealism.” Meillassoux grounds this accusation in an account of givenness that presupposes that “every variety of givenness” finds its genesis within the positing of the subject. However, this critique fails to hit its mark precisely because it presupposes an account of intuitive givenness that is entirely foreign to the phenomenological project. Quite against Meillassoux’s conflation of givenness, the world-for-us, and the positing subject—the very centre of the phenomenological project is the recognition that intuitive givenness cannot be reduced to the constructive activity of the subject. Givenness is marked by a heterogeneity; givenness refers to what is given to us, not to what emerges from us.

Since Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the living body (Leib) in Ideas II, the subjective experience of the body, what later French thinkers will name the flesh, has been particularly marked by its capacity for action—its potency. This privileging of the acting flesh, the potent organ, is echoed throughout the subsequent phenomenological tradition. For this tradition, from de Biran and Husserl, to Merleau‑Ponty and Henry, the flesh is distinguished from the mere body (Körper) by its unique capacity to act. For the later French tradition to be flesh is to be will, and to be will is to be action. Impotence (impuissance) appears as external resistance. In the present investigation, I challenge this trajectory of the flesh through a phenomenological investigation of the unique phenomenon of acute sexual impotence. In this way, it will be shown that l’impuissance (impotence) can be located not only in the objectivity of opposition within the world, on the organic or objective body (le corps, Körper), but within the immanence of the flesh (la chair, Leib) itself. Indeed, the experience of incarnate l’impuissance provides a unique phenomenological access to the incomplete synthesis of the carnal flesh—a synthesis that remains, by phenomenological necessity, run through with ruptures and gaps that function as its constitutive excess.