Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things

Introduction

This book calls for what might be termed an object-oriented philosophy, and in this way rejects both the analytic and continental traditions. The ongoing dispute between these traditions, including the sort of bridge building that starts by conceding the existence of the dispute, misses a prejudice shared by both: their primary interest lies not in objects, but in human access to them. The so-called linguistic turn is still the dominant model for the philosophy of access, but there are plenty of others—phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, philosophy of mind, pragmatism. None of these philosophical schools tells us much of anything about objects themselves; indeed, they pride themselves on avoiding all naive contact with nonhuman entities. By contrast, object-oriented philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other. For this reason, the philosophy of objects is sometimes lazily viewed as a form of scientific naturalism, since it plunges directly into the world and considers every object imaginable, avoiding any prior technical critique of the workings of human knowledge. But quite unlike naturalism, object-oriented philosophy adopts a bluntly metaphysical approach to the relations between objects rather than a familiar physical one. In fact, another term that might be employed for object-oriented philosophy is guerrilla metaphysics —a name meant to signify that the numerous present-day objections to metaphysics are not unknown to me, but also that I do not find them especially compelling.

Guerrilla Metaphysics is the sequel to my previous book, Tool-Being. The central thesis of the earlier work is that objects exist in utter isolation from all others, packed into secluded private vacuums. Obviously, this can be no better than a half-truth about the world: if it were the full story, nothing would ever happen, and every object would repose in its own intimate universe, never affecting or affected by anything else at all. Guerrilla Metaphysics is an attempt to tell the other side of the story. It needs to be shown how relations and events are possible despite the existence of vacuum-sealed objects or tool-beings. The subject matter of a carpentry of things in object-oriented philosophy is the shifting communication and collision between distinct entities. What this carpentry speaks of is not the physical but the metaphysical way in which objects are joined or pieced together, as well as the internal composition of their individual parts. But since the vacuum-sealed nature of objects makes direct communication impossible, all conjunction or coupling must occur through some outside mediator. For this reason, the classical notion of occasional cause needs to be partially rehabilitated, despite its recent centuries as an object of philosophical ridicule by scholars and novices alike. The revival is only partial insofar as I will not recommend a traditional occasionalist theory based on a God who directly intervenes in the motion of raindrops and dust—a theory in which the deity is openly invoked but the divine mechanisms are left in darkness. The new term to be used is vicarious cause, and it requires no theology to support it. Any philosophy that makes an absolute distinction between substances and relations will inevitably become a theory of vicarious causation, since there will be no way for the substances to interact directly with one another.

The first root of this book, then, is the need to complete the picture of the world sketched in Tool-Being by shifting attention from objects to their interactions. The other root lies in the intriguing possibility of a revival of phenomenology—a resurgence not of its lingering idealist biases and barren technical catechism, but of its fascination with the carnival of the world. For more than a decade I have been disappointed by the direction of recent continental philosophy, which is preoccupied almost entirely with written texts and minor modifications to historical narratives already posited by others. While the banner of phenomenology still flies here and there, it too often has the smell of mothballs about it, and is utilized more as a means of summoning forgotten terminology from the dead than as a way of returning to the things themselves.

Yet there are clear exceptions to this rule. Above all, there is the small group of figures who might be unified under the label of carnal phenomenology. Amidst all the repetitious manifestoes and dry meta-descriptions of human consciousness, we also find the works of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. In the writings of these authors, we encounter the lascivious warmth of the sun and air and the mystery of strange flashes at midnight; we adjust our postures to the resonance of bird calls and acoustic guitars; we enjoy bread or raspberries, and respond to the demands of orphans. One living author who speaks in the same style as these figures is Alphonso Lingis, who began his professional life as their translator. Almost alone among contemporary philosophers, Lingis takes us outside all academic disputes and places us amidst coral reefs, sorghum fields, paragliders, ant colonies, binary stars, sea voyages, Asian swindlers, and desolate temples. As far as I am aware, he is also the one who coined the phrase the carpentry of things, and so contributed to this book’s subtitle.

In all three of these authors, we find ourselves mesmerized by the objects in the world, rooted in a carnal setting where our bodies meet with the voluptuous textures of entities. Their similarity of intellectual style is easily sensed by any reader. All of them work within a phenomenological idiom, and all follow an insight of Husserl with which he is too rarely credited: namely, objects always lie beyond any possibility of total presence. And for this reason, the carnal medium in which we dwell can only be some sort of elusive ether or medium of nonobjective qualities, though not just of raw sense data. Merleau-Ponty calls this medium the flesh; Levinas calls it the elemental; Lingis calls it the levels. Each of these conceptions has its own virtues and its own possible drawbacks. By discovering an apparent nonobjective realm in which objects nonetheless sparkle and recede, all of them shed some light on the glue that binds the material of perception.

But over the past few years, it gradually became clear to me that this sensual medium of the carnal phenomenologists is really just the human face of a wider medium that must exist between all the objects of the world. If the intentional objects of perception are linked with their qualities by means of this ether of loose carnal properties, the same turns out to be true of the relation of an inanimate substance with its own qualities, and of all such substances with each other.

The fleshly enjoyment described by the carnal phenomenologists is not just the poignant arena of sensitive human experience, but evidence of a global ether that makes the entire network of entities possible. And the same problems posed by the interaction of two vacuum-sealed objects or tool-beings can already be found in the relation between an object of perception and its various profiles and shadows. The twin themes of vicarious causation and carnal phenomenology had previously been confined to two distinct manuscripts, but I no longer find it possible to separate them. The carpentry of perception is only a special case of the carpentry of things.

Part One of this book follows the carnal phenomenologists at work, charting their most general breakthroughs and shortcomings.

Chapter 1 disputes the claim of Dominique Janicaud that phenomenology becomes concrete only by remaining on the surface of experience and not postulating depths beneath the phenomenal world. Although phenomenology likes to regard the dispute between realism and antirealism as both fruitless and passé, it is fully implicated in one side of this conflict—the wrong side, in fact.

Chapter 2 follows Husserl’s paradoxical insight that what we encounter directly in perception is neither objects nor raw qualities. Intentional objects never become fully manifest, and therefore never enter perception in the flesh. Yet sheer perceptual quality never exists without some sort of object-oriented form. For this reason it remains unclear what the stuff of perception really is, since it is neither form nor matter, neither object nor quality. Whatever this carnal ether may be, Husserl places us squarely in its midst, though without ever letting it extend above or beneath the phenomenal world experienced by humans.

Chapter 3 shifts to Levinas, who establishes an elemental medium of enjoyment—one that never disappears into some remote equipmental purpose, and which for him is made up of pure qualities without objects. Yet enjoyment is always enjoyment of something specific: we do not bask in a shapeless medium of qualities, but rather amidst sunlight or the company of an old friend. In this way, even enjoyment is unable to escape the link to objects. On a related note, Levinas strikes me as too willing to grant human beings the exclusive right to break the anonymous rumble of being into specific parts, as though the world in itself without humans were a single massive chunk—much as with Anaxagoras, for whom only nous could break the apeiron, into pieces.

Chapter 4 considers Merleau-Ponty, whose concept of the flesh is meant to disintegrate the distinction between subject and object: as he famously puts it, the world looks at me just as I look at it. Unfortunately, there is always a human being involved in Merleau-Ponty’s description of flesh, which makes no allowance for any interaction of pine trees with snowflakes when there happen to be no humans in the vicinity. Indeed, he often shows flashes of explicit contempt for any possibility of a world without humans. To this extent, his model of the flesh remains trapped in a philosophy of access that it otherwise helps us to escape.

Chapter 5 considers the recent work of Lingis, perhaps the sole living representative of the carnal school, and probably the most colorful personality and most talented stylist of his generation of philosophers. In his marvellous book The Imperative, Lingis begins by fusing Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception with the ethics of Levinas, showing that both are essentially structured by imperatives. But of even greater interest for the present book, Lingis also pushes carnal phenomenology in a tentatively realist direction with his conception of the levels of the world. For Lingis, the carnal medium is not something permanently fixed along a thin wedge between human self and inanimate world, as remains the case even in Merleau-Ponty’s later work. For Lingis, carnality exists less between myself and the things than in the things themselves—and always at a very specific level to which I must adjust myself. Humans are not the preciously unique site of carnal reality, but only supple vehicles built to explore the various levels on which carnality is found. With our tools and bodily organs we explore the levels of a conversation, a dangerous forest, a seedy waterfront, the Karakoram Range, the works of a poet, the keys of a saxophone, or the patterns on a fish. These levels fill up the world with or without my permission, and merely summon me to enter them—just as any given restaurant or opium den enacts its style in the world even when I refuse to enter. The flesh does not first appear when humans arrive on the scene, but is already there linking the parts of the forest to one another as they invite me into their midst.

Part Two of the book links carnal phenomenology with the general standpoint developed in Tool-Being.

Chapter 6 reviews the basic features of objects or tool-beings as identified in the previous book. Objects withdraw absolutely from all interaction with both humans and nonhumans, creating a split between the tool-being itself and the tool-being as manifested in any relation. And along with this rift between objects and relations, objects are also split in themselves between their sheer unity as one object and their multiplicity of traits. The intersection of these two axes in the world leads to a quadruple structure whose mechanics have never even been suspected, let alone carefully mapped.

Chapter 7 reviews four basic problems that Tool-Being noted in object-oriented philosophy. Three of these can easily be unified under the broader theme of occasional cause, renamed vicarious cause, so as to avoid the inevitable connotation that occasionalism means God intervening everywhere at every second. The fourth problem concerns what separates genuine entities from any bizarre and arbitrary conglomerate of things that someone might dream up; in classical terms, it is the problem of substance and aggregate. More generally, since it is possible to identify four separate and noncommunicating poles of being, it is necessary to describe how crossovers between these poles do occur.

Chapter 8 takes Metaphor as a starting point to study the interrelation between unified perceptual objects and their numerous tangible properties. By examining the theories of Ortega y Gasset and Black, we find that metaphor creates a strange tension between the two chief moments of the sensual thing.

Chapter 9 does much the same thing with humor, through an examination of Bergson’s essay on laughter. Metaphor, humor, and several other types of experiences are all seen to belong under the more general heading of allure. Allure differs from normal perception by somehow putting the relation of the two moments of the thing at issue for us, by openly severing a thing from its qualities.

Part Three marks the conclusion of the book, and unites the carnal ether from Part One with the vicarious causation of allure from Part Two.

Chapter 10 reviews the most crucial features of the preceding discussions. First, what we are looking for is the mechanism by which a thing becomes severed from its qualities, whether in the allure of beauty, the elusiveness of objects for perception, or the simple strife between an object and its own properties. Second, the world is not naturally carved up into one fixed layer of objects and another permanent space of qualities; the space of perception, like the space of the world itself, is filled with numerous different levels, each of them filled entirely with objects. Finally, the key question must be asked: if the world is made up solely of objects, how do interactions occur at all, given that an object has been defined as that which resists and exceeds interaction?

Chapter 11 considers the three different sorts of metaphysical bond that result from the four poles of objects. The sensual bond marks the tension between the unified object of our experience and the numerous sensuous qualities that seem enslaved to it at any given moment. The physical, bond is the same tension insofar as it plays out in the heart of things themselves rather than in the things as relative to perception. The causal bond concerns the interaction that occurs between separate objects despite their ultimate withdrawal from one another. But all three of these bonds are nothing other than forms of vicarious causation, since all are concerned with links between isolated poles of reality.

Chapter 12 examines the question of whether the sensual world belongs only to humans and the higher animals, or whether it is present for plants and inanimate objects as well. It also makes an initial effort to apply the results of this book to the problem of space and time. This brief effort works in the shadow of a more comprehensive book on object-oriented philosophy, which will consider many of the traditional problems of metaphysics.

The vast majority of this book was written between the summer of 2001 and the fall of 2003. For reasons still unknown, it was written most easily at dusk, which may help to explain the general tone of its most prominent passages. Electronic mail sent to the author at toolbeing@yahoo.com is guaranteed a response.

PART ONE

The Carnal Phenomenologists

A thing exists in the midst of its wastes.

—EMMANUEL LEVINAS,

Totality and Infinity

[1]

Concreteness in the Depths

The carnival tent rustles in the evening breeze, disturbing the moods of those who approach. Inside the tent are swarms of humans and trained animals; there are jarring sounds, strange ethnic foods, and shadows. For a few moments the music of a concealed organ is countered by the rumble of thunder, as emaciated dogs begin to whine. A small fight breaks out, soon to be halted by a sneering, scar-faced man. Suddenly, hailstones strike the roof of the tent like bullets, frightening everyone: the visitors, the fortunetellers, the unkempt and corrupted security guards, the monkeys sparkling with costume jewelry. At long last, the organ player’s morbid inner anger takes command, and he begins an atonal dirge that will last throughout the storm.

All of this can be explained by atoms. Each of the human and inhuman objects in this scene is made of physical material integrated into ever larger units that generate new emergent properties. Weave enough of the right molecules together and you have a durable canvas tent, strong enough to resist the force of iceballs from the sky. The taste and smell of the food are easily explained as the action of physical particles upon the human or animal nervous systems, which send chemical signals through the spine, transmitting useful information about the external world. Ultimately, perhaps all of the living creatures in the tent are nothing more than complicated tools, products of the hidden genes that build up entire organisms so as to compete for survival and reproduction with the rival organisms that house competitor genes. The fear felt by everyone during the hailstorm would simply be an inherited reflex mechanism that enhances the probability of our taking shelter, preserving our genes and allowing them to survive into the next generation. Everything that happens in the tent can be explained quite naturally. Even the storm had been predicted by meteorologists several hours ahead of time, and should have been no surprise to any but the leastinformed. Moreover, the apparently ominous situation I have described did not unfold in some nameless fantasy space of German Expressionism, but a few miles east of Geneva, Ohio, late in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, across the street from a bakery and an insurance agent, in a dull vacant lot of three-dimensional geometric space no different from any other. It is a completely natural event.

But phenomenology forbids us to describe the carnival in this way. For this philosophical school, the dark circus of Geneva is not primarily a natural set of atoms and chemicals and genetic codes and geometric locations that could be used to cut more complicated aspects of the experience down to size. Before explaining the elements of our world by means of any favorite theory, we are supposed to focus diligently on the only thing that is truly given: the experience as such. What I feel at the carnival is a numbing fear, not the movement of chemicals through my nerves. What I hear is the lumbering melody of the organ, not sound waves traveling through space and causing my eardrum to vibrate. We are asked to suspend belief in any hidden causes or secret powers, to focus only on what immediately shows itself when we are trapped in the carnival tent in the storm. We are asked, in other words, to let the phenomena speak for themselves. Whereas science seeks to explain the world by way of natural objects that bump into other natural objects, phenomenology recommends a step backwards into the world as it appears, prior to the employment of any such theories. This raises a key philosophical problem, one that puts at stake the relation of philosophy not just to the sciences, but to realism in general. Namely, when phenomenology replaces natural objects with phenomena, we should ask whether it thereby reduces the world to appearance alone, bracketing any deeper reality out of existence. We need to know if it is possible to speak of a layer of the world that eludes appearance, or whether this is merely a relapse into the sort of theory that phenomenology must always oppose.

Dominique Janicaud considers this issue in his dispute with those French phenomenologists who attempt a kind of theological turn.¹ For these theologians, some element of the Beyond must penetrate the closed circle of visible phenomena. But for Janicaud this is anathema—as he sees it, the theologians have abandoned intellectual rigor and kidnapped Husserl’s philosophy to serve their own dogmatic plans. When Janicaud insists that phenomenology must remain concrete, what he means is that it must stay confined to what verifiably appears, or at most to those general conditions that make all appearance possible. In his own words: phenomenology and theology make two.² And: between the unconditional affirmation of Transcendence and the patient interrogation of the visible, the incompatibility cries out; we must choose.³

In what follows, it will become necessary to refuse both of these options, inasmuch as they share a fundamental mistake. When Janicaud replaces the object with the phenomenon, when the theologians replace it with a barely effable Beyond, both wrongly agrees that the individual object is something that needs to be replaced. What disappears in both of these standpoints is any reality of entities as genuine forces to reckon with in the world, as real players exerting influence outside themselves even while hiding behind their exposed surfaces. That is to say, both Janicaud and the theologians see no way to preserve objects at the center of philosophy without delivering the world to reductive scientific explanations. For this reason, both begin by checkmating the reality of objects in favor of dogmatic assumptions of their own. If phenomenology and theology make two, I propose that we add a third: an object-oriented philosophy. I only regret that Dominique Janicaud, who listened generously to the first version of my argument at a conference in Rotterdam, is no longer able to make counterarguments to this final version.

Those who knew the disarming gentleness of Janicaud the man might be surprised at the biting edge of his polemic against the theologians. Polemical writing in philosophy no longer enjoys its previous level of acceptance, and is now often dismissed as the product of incivility, aggression, even jealousy. Against this attitude, we should appreciate the clarifying tendencies of polemic—always the favored genre of authors frustrated by the continued clouding of an important decision, whether through fashionable cliché or dubious conceptual maneuvers. In Janicaud’s monograph The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology, a gracious personality speaks in tongues of fire. And not against minor opponents: Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Michel Henry are the primary targets of his annoyance. While phenomenology can exist only as a patient interrogation of the visible, the impatient theologians are accused of firing off wild rounds of pistol shots, importing metaphysical baggage and even religious prejudice into what ought to be a remorseless intellectual pursuit. Each of Janicaud’s critiques sheds different light on the choice he demands from us: phenomenology or theology. For the purposes of this book, it will be enough to consider his criticism of Levinas.

A. The Most High

In claiming that phenomenology has been hijacked by the theological turn, Janicaud points to Levinas as the mastermind of this operation: "Totality and Infinity is the first major work of French philosophy in which [the] theological turn is not only discernible, but explicitly taken up within a phenomenological inspiration."⁴ He will eventually deny Levinas’s claim to be a phenomenologist at all, arguing that this philosopher’s obvious apprenticeship to Husserl is outweighed by his apparent relapse into the very positions that phenomenology overcomes. What he most objects to in Levinas is an impatience to attain the beyond, expressing his astonishment before [the] metaphysical flight⁵ of an author quick to abandon the promise of the phenomena themselves. Whereas phenomenology tried to subordinate hidden natural causes to the lush particularity of the visible world, Levinas seems nostalgic for the world-in-itself of metaphysics. As Janicaud cites him: "All knowledge, as intentionality, already presupposes the idea of the infinite, the nonadequation par excellence.⁶ For Levinas, any human encounter with reality fails to exhaust the fullness of that reality, and cannot avoid reducing it to its own terms, the terms of the Same. The space of nonadequation is that of a reality forever eluding the kingdom of presence: it is the Infinite, the Other. But for Janicaud, phenomenon and infinity make two; there is no real world to which the phenomenon ought to be adequate in the first place. On this basis he views Levinasian infinity as a reactionary concept, one that summons up all the ghastly phantoms of naive realism: What strikes us as [Levinas’s] essential violence . . . is the act or surplus of the idea of the infinite."⁷

Clearly annoyed, Janicaud can barely tolerate Levinas’s claim that intentionality in Husserl is a kind of adequation. This claim, he says, leads us to question the very coherence of [Levinas’s] thought,⁸ since it seems that Levinas is accusing Husserl of the kind of realism that phenomenology has already left in the dust. For Husserl, the suspension of the natural attitude implies leaving behind all ontological realism . . . intentionality in Husserl is not at all reducible to the adequation of thought and object.⁹ In passing, it should be said that this is a clear misreading. When Levinas sings the praises of nonadequation, he is not accusing Husserl of holding that the phenomenon is adequate to some sort of external object, but rather that it is adequate to itself. In other words, Levinasian Infinity is designed not to outsmart a realism falsely imputed to Husserl, but to undercut a phenomenalism ascribed to him quite understandably.

But Janicaud wants to have it both ways. Even while lamenting the violence of any surplus beyond appearance, he also decries the claim that Husserl is trapped within appearance at all: "This is an artificial operation, one that Descartes and Husserl were able to do without: for these thinkers, in discovering in me the idea of the infinite, I discover also that my subjectivity exceeds the representation I have of it."¹⁰ I place the phrase my subjectivity in italics because it gives away the game so early. Levinas simply asks us to note the insufficiency of phenomena and recognize the surplus that lies beyond them. Janicaud sidesteps this request by claiming that the sought-after surplus can be found only in the transcendental conditions of intentionality, which hide from view in overflowing all that is immediately visible. But this only proves Levinas right: what Janicaud wants to do is to strip all surplus from the outer world and pack it into the living room of the human subject, even if part of it always remains hidden behind the furniture. The world’s pulsating landscape of palm trees, lizards, obsidian, salt, motorboats, and viruses is granted no hidden layer whatsoever. For Janicaud, it is true that the human perception of these things may contain layers and horizons hidden from view, but any claim that the salt has an inner life apart from its series of appearances can only be a relapse into realism—also known as metaphysics. The present book waves the flag of metaphysics proudly and openly, rejecting the misgivings of Janicaud and others.

But this is not to say that Levinas gets it entirely right, either. Janicaud is certainly correct in sensing a duplicity in his rival’s position: "Levinas specifies [that] ‘The infinite does not first exist and then reveal itself. Its infinition produces itself as revelation, as positing its idea in me.’ But if this revelation is subjectivity . . . what sense does it make to claim that it does not involve, precisely, intentionality?" ¹¹ It is strange indeed that Levinas both points to an infinity outside all appearance while also implying that this infinity has no independent life and exists only within appearance. If the infinite exceeds the specific visible contours of the world, then it also ought to inhabit some part of the world outside the restricted circle of human being; otherwise, the Infinite remains within the loop of intentionality, and Janicaud is right to question its value. Although I would not join with Janicaud in questioning the coherence of Levinas’s thought, a certain ambiguity is present here concerning the status of any extrahuman world, as will be described in chapter 3 below. For Levinas, the drama of finite and infinite takes place solely at the intersection between human intentionality and whatever lies beyond it. There are passages in his writings which state that individual things have a substance that our perceptions or uses of them fail to exhaust, but no passages where he speaks of an Infinity in the relations of these things to one another. For Levinas, Infinity is never an issue between the forest and the flames that burn it, or even the rotten pineapple and the birds that devour it. Infinity is a uniquely human burden, one that does not belong to relationality in general.

At this point, a related problem catches Janicaud’s eye. Insofar as Levinas tends to bring Infinity back into the human fold, downplaying the notion of manifold individual surpluses lying in various individual things, he tends to regard Infinity as a single Holy Other. It is not just that appearances are inadequate to a reality lying behind them: for Levinas, they are inadequate in comparison with a "Most High, which Janicaud is obviously right to identify with the God of the Biblical tradition."¹² As might be expected, this only adds fuel to his polemic: [Levinas] supposes a metaphysico-theological montage, prior to philosophical writing. The dice are loaded and choices are made; faith rises majestically in the background.¹³ When the Other and the Most High are joined by Desire, Levinas is accused of trying to intimidate philosophy with capital letters. Rejecting the all-or-nothing choice that seems to be in the air, Janicaud denounces the defection from phenomenality¹⁴ that sent Levinas, lickety-split, all the way to God: His phenomenology is then above all negative, but ultimately precious—precious for its sense of passivity irreducible to all apophantic discourse and representation.¹⁵ In many ways this is an oversimplification. Among other things, Janicaud’s critique shows no trace of the Levinas of the 1940s and his masterful descriptions of concrete phenomena, descriptions often found in the later work as well. But by the same token, Janicaud is not just drawing caricatures: it is clearly the case that Levinas tends to make Infinity a One, and that all routes toward the One quickly seem to be headed for a Highest One. Although I have always been an admirer of Levinas, there are long stretches of Janicaud’s polemic where it is hard to disagree.

We should join with Janicaud in remaining wary of the single De Profundis of Levinasian theology. When Levinas undercuts the presence of all phenomena with a single mighty stroke of divine Infinity, once and for all, this maneuver certainly ought to disappoint us. But there is little to be said for Janicaud’s alternative, which merely flattens the world into what we see of the world: epistemology by another name, at the expense of all metaphysics. It is no more convincing when he tries to increase the sophistication of this move by avowing (with Jan Patočka¹⁶) that there is indeed something beyond appearance, but that it lies entirely within the hidden conditions of possibility of the human observer. While the stark disparity between Levinas and Janicaud becomes obvious from all the fusillades of the latter, there is one point on which they could hardly agree more: their conviction, adopted from Husserl, that an object can mean nothing other than a natural empirical object as described by the sciences. For both of them, with the occasional exception of Levinas, individual objects are only phenomenal silhouettes, not real entities with autonomous power and quality. Janicaud is so good as to admit this openly. But even for Levinas, it turns out most of the time that no specific entity may lay claim to infinity: the single Most High sits upon a single throne. Notice that whichever of these two camps one enters, phenomenology or theology, objects are reduced to the lackeys and menials of a unified lofty power. Even if this power allows for a bit of concealment beneath the phenomenal realm, it is never a hidden layer of the things themselves—it is either God, or the transcendental conditions of the human subject. There may be times when phenomenology and theology make two, but in this respect they are blood brothers. And on this score at least, both are equally worthy of rejection.

B. A Hidden Agreement

The discord between Janicaud and the theologians should not obscure their shared basic suppositions. At the outset, the theologians want to point us toward a transcendence beyond the phenomenal sphere, while Janicaud resists this attempted hijacking (his word) and tries to prevent his adversaries from wringing phenomenology’s neck (his phrase). But scratch the surface of both positions, and we find a striking coincidence of views: for there is a sense in which the theologians do not want transcendence at all. Michel Henry openly admits this, with his claim to a theology of radical immanence. In similar fashion, Levinas often suggests that the infinite exists only through its intrusion into consciousness, while Marion tends to seek pure giving in an internal saturation of phenomena rather than in a transcendent space beyond them.

Now, Janicaud is clearly wrong to imply that these authors are not real phenomenologists. In their shared wariness toward any independent extraphenomenal things, they are actually too loyal to Husserl, and nothing like the realist Neanderthals Janicaud imagines. Even when they do approach something like transcendence, it is not a transcendence of the things, but more like an inarticulate lump of infinity, a brooding concealed monolith that dwarfs the nullities known as specific entities. Infinity has little actual role in these philosophies besides haunting our awareness, and seems largely inoperative outside the sphere of human consciousness. Indeed, as soon as we arrive at the point of reflecting on particular cigars or mangoes, the theologians think that philosophy has already been lost. In a word, the theologians are loyal adherents of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy, reducing all of reality to the terms of human access to it. From time to time they reach vaguely for a Godbeyond-access, but even their fleeting successes give us a single triumphant Infinite rather than a plural reality of individual things. Hurricanes, whips, zebras, chemicals, and weddings are still permitted to be individuals only within the phenomenal sphere. Any attempt to step outside this sphere is assumed to give us only the single pistol shot of the Infinite Other.

Janicaud offers equally rough treatment to the things. Even while crying out against the neglect of the phenomenal sphere, even while praising en passant the lascivious delights of Merleau-Ponty’s prose, his real interests lie elsewhere. What Janicaud presents as the true path of phenomenology is really just a program for further technical description of the conditions of possibility of human access, possibly spiced up with historical accounts of the metaphysical biases of the Western tradition—which all starts to sound an awful lot like mainstream Heidegger scholarship. In a sense this actually makes Janicaud more conservative than the theologians, who at least try to inject their amorphous Infinite directly into the things, thereby gaining at least a fighting chance of invigorating them. But on the whole, both camps leave the phenomena as dust in the wind. Phenomena do nothing but sit around in a floodlit human space, passively encountered by pure observers or, at best, handled by engaged historical agents. For fear of regressing into scientific naturalism, fire loses its power to burn houses and melt ore, and the moon is reduced to the literary descriptions of poseurs. For fear of scientific reductionism, gravity loses all power over bodies, and brains lose all power over minds. The natural object disappears from philosophy, just as Husserl demanded. Janicaud and the theologians are united in compliance with this demand before their quarrel even begins. They should at least stop accusing one another of not being real phenomenologists; everyone’s loyalty to the cause is perfectly clear from the start.

C. Unnatural Objects

Phenomenology asks us to retreat to a point of neutral description, setting aside all explanatory theories of atoms, chemicals, and waves of sound. Given that no direct access is possible to the scientific objects just mentioned, we confine ourselves instead to the manifest properties of the world as it appears. The object is stripped of all independent power and considered only insofar as it flares into human view. Both Janicaud and the theologians embrace this procedure, and in this respect they are one. But they also resemble each other in a less fortunate respect: namely, both groups offer a primarily negative concept of phenomena. For we might ask what is actually accomplished by the return to phenomena in both groups. Regrettably, the central purpose of the turn toward the phenomena is apparently nothing more than to suppress all extraphenomenal aspects of the things. Almonds and rain are no longer secret powers lurking behind appearance, as they still are for science and metaphysics, but only luminous personae crowding a narrowly human space. At the very moment that concrete phenomena attain their apparent philosophic triumph, they are abandoned by both of the camps that claimed to defend them.

This having been done, the scene of philosophy is shifted elsewhere. Maybe it shifts toward a single infinite Other that outstrips all specific phenomena, as with Levinas in his less interesting moments. Maybe it moves toward a single pure call prior to all determination, or a radically immanent life that weaves through the phenomena even while trumping them, as with Marion and Henry, respectively. Maybe it rejects the infinite altogether, and turns back toward the very conditions of human access to the world, or toward the encrustations of history that shape our view of the world, as Janicaud recommends. But in all such cases, the status of concrete things is eroded. And although Janicaud is weary of those who claim to be truer to the spirit of phenomenology than Husserl himself, it is not hard to be truer to its spirit than these self-proclaimed phenomenologists, who place themselves anywhere but in the things themselves. It is high time that the phenomena be treated as something more than polemical