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The New French
Philosophy

lan James
Copyright © lan James 2012

The right of Ian James to b e identified a s A uthor of this W ork has been asserted
in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents A ct 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
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M alden, M A 02148, U SA

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of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transm itted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, w ithout the prior perm ission
of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4805-7
ISBN-13: 97S-0-7456~4S06-4(pb)

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credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further inform ation on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Ac know led g eme n ts vi

Introduction: The Dem ands of Thought 1

1 Jean-Luc Marion: A ppearing and Givenness 17
2 Jean-Luc Nancy: The Infinity of Sense 39
3 B ernard Stiegler: The Time of Technics 61
4 Catherine M alabou: The Destiny of Form 83
5 Jacques Rancière: The Space of Equality 110
6 Alain Badiou: The Science of the R eal 133
7 François Laruelle: Beginning with the One 158
Conclusion: The Technique of Thought 181

Notes 189
Bibliography 200
Index 218
Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my warm thanks to all those who have helped
with the production of this work, in particular Sarah L am bert at
Polity Press. Special thanks are also due to John Thom pson, who
commissioned this project and to the three anonymous readers of the
m anuscript whose com m ents were of enorm ous help in the produc­
tion of the final draft. For the various ways in which they have helped,
supported or inspired, I would like to thank M artin Crowley, Barry
Everitt, Gail Ferguson, Alison Finch, P eter Hallward, Leslie Hill,
Michael Holland, Christina Howells, Jonathan Miles, G erald M oore,
John Mullarkey, H annes Opelz, D an Smith, Chris Watkin, James
Williams and Em m a Wilson. In particular, I would like to extend
special thanks to A ndrew Benjamin, A driana Cavarero, Griselda
Pollock, Max Silverman and Sam uel W eber for helping me to form u­
late some key issues at a decisive m om ent in the completion of this
work. I am also very grateful to the University of Cambridge and to
Downing College for the period of research leave which allowed me
to com plete this book. I would like to express my infinite gratitude
to R uth D eyerm ond, without whose support, both intellectual and
personal, it would not have been possible to research and com plete
this project. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this book to the mem ory
of A nn and A lan D eyerm ond, whose generosity, warm th and kind­
ness are greatly missed.
Introduction: The Demands
of Thought

To speak of the ‘New French Philosophy" is to m ake the claim that

thought may have decisively transform ed or renew ed itself. It affirms
a discontinuity or rupture, a break between a thinking which came
before and one which comes after. Such a claim immediately raises
a num ber of different questions which are themselves philosophical:
questions relating to the very possibility of novelty itself, to causality
and determinism , or to the nature of transform ation or change .1 It
also raises questions relating to the distinctiveness or identity of a
specifically French, rather than, say, a broader E uropean, philosophy
and to the possibility of aligning a diverse range of thinkers according
to a shared logic or paradigm of renewal.
To complicate m atters further the question of the ‘new ’ has also
been one of the central preoccupations of French philosophy itself
since at least the 1960s.2As the A m erican philosopher Dan Smith has
shown, the conditions or the production of the ‘new ’ is a key concern
of Gilles D eleuze’s philosophy of difference and, as Deleuze himself
suggested on a num ber of occasions, one of the fundam ental ques­
tions posed m ore generally by his contem poraries (Smith 2007; 1,19
n . 2). This is easily borne out with reference t o the other m ajor figures
of French philosophy who rose to prom inence in the 1960s and then
came to dom inate French thought in the decades which followed;
figures such as, for example, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques D errida
and M ichel Foucault.
Lyotard, for instance, conceived th e ‘event’ as that which contests
received modes of discourse and requires that existing ways of think­
ing be transform ed. His conception of the event has been described
as ‘the founding m om ent of any postm odernism ’ (Malpas 2003: 99).
Likewise, in one of Lyotard’s most im portant works, The Differend,
the ‘differend’ itself is understood as an instability of language and
discourse which, if we give it its due, will institute ‘new addressees,
new addressors, new significations and new. referents’ and will admit
into language ‘new phrase families and new genres of discourse’
(Lyotard 1988:13). Similarly, in D errid a’s Spectres o f Marx, the motifs
of the messianic, of the undecidable and of the incalculable are all
orientated tow ards the possibility of incorporating ‘in advance,
beyond any possible programming, new knowledge, new techniques,
new political givens’ (D errida 1994: 13). This m ajor late text of
D erridean philosophy dem onstrates clearly that one of the central
concerns of deconstruction is ‘to produce events, new effective forms
of action, practice’ (D errida 1994: 89). A t different times and in dif­
ferent works, Deleuze, Lyotard and D errida will all use the term
‘event’ in order to designate the emergence of the radically new into
the field of thought, practice or historical becoming. The ‘event’ is
also a term used by Foucault in his archaeology of knowledge and
his thinking of epistem ic breaks developed in The O rder o f Things
(Foucault 2002). For Foucault, the question of the new is posed in
term s of discontinuity, or the way in which ‘within the space of a few
years, a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up
till then, and begins to think other things in a new way’ (Foucault
2002: 56). The key question he poses is that of ‘how is it that thought
has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and
that it never ceases to begin anew ?’ (Foucault 2002: 56).
Foucault’s question is one which fram es this book and th e specific
form ulation of its title, The New French Philosophy. It is also a ques­
tion that continues to be posed in an insistent and sometimes urgent
m anner by all the thinkers who are discussed here: Jean-Luc M arion,
Jean-Luc Nancy, B ernard Stiegler, Catherine M alabou, Jacques
Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle. In different ways, all
these philosophers continue to be preoccupied with the question of
how something new might enter the world. They are concerned with
questions of transform ation and change, with the em ergence of the
unexpected, the unforeseeable or the uncategorizable. They are con­
cerned with the possibility of contesting existing form s in the name
of invention and creation, of reform ation and renewal. Posing the
question of how thought may have its place and origin in the space
of the world, and yet nevertheless may never cease to begin anew,
Foucault suggests that the process of renew al ‘probably begins with
an erosion from the outside, from a space which is, for thought, on
the other side but in which it has never ceased to think from the very
beginning’ (Foucault 2002: 56). In their different ways, each of the
philosophers discussed here seek to rethink the relation of thought
both to worldly existence or appearance and to what might be term ed
‘the outside’. In each case, albeit it still in different ways, the em er­
gence of the ‘new ’ or the possibility of change or transform ation can
be understood as an ‘erosion from the outside’, as an exposure to an
instance of excess, an excess over the finite limits of conceptual or
categorial determ ination.
Insofar as all the philosophers discussed here can be seen to con­
tinue the preoccupation with the new which is so central to the work
of Deleuze, Lyotard, D errida and Foucault, the title of this book
could be considered som ething of a misnomer. The question of the
new and its advent is itself far from new. By the same token, five out
of the seven figures discussed here began to establish their careers
in the 1970s and are not ‘new ’ in the sense of being a young genera­
tion beginning to write in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Badiou and Laruelle were both born in 1937, Nancy and Rancière
in 1940, and M arion in 1946. A ll of these five are still alive and pub­
lishing works today but all of them are, to varying degrees, in the
latter part of their careers as philosophers (and mostly retired from
their university positions). Only Stiegler (b. 1952) and M alabou
(b. 1959) are of a younger generation and, although well established,
can be placed in ‘mid career’. Perhaps most im portantly for the pur­
poses of this book and its potential readership, all these figures have
become m ore widely known in the anglophone academic community
over the past ten to fifteen years and their work has, over the past
ten years, been m ore widely available in English translation.
D espite the strong sense of continuity with the generation of phi­
losophers that can be associated with the nam es Deleuze, Lyotard,
D errida and Foucault and, very broadly, with the problem atic labels
‘post-structuralism ’ and ‘postm odernism ’, all of the thinkers discussed
here can be viewed as a successor generation. This m ight not always
be the case in strict age terms; Badiou, after all, was born only seven
years after D errida. Nevertheless, even on these terms, Deleuze,
Foucault and Lyotard (born 1925,1926 and 1924 respectively) are far
m ore clearly of an earlier generation. W hat will becom e clear through­
out this study is that the five older philosophers - Marion, Nancy,
Rancière, Badiou and Laruelle - all begin to establish their distinctive
positions in the 1970s and begin publishing their m ajor works of
philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s (and continue to do so today). The
two younger philosophers, Stiegler and M alabou, begin publishing
their m ajor works in the 1990s and their philosophical projects are
still very m uch ongoing. How ever helpful these indications may
or may not be, it should be underlined that simple calculations of
generational difference and age cannot be enough, in themselves, to
establish a plausible argum ent about the renew al or transform ation
of French thought over the past three decades.
The argum ent of this book is that, beginning in the 1970s, the
French philosophers discussed all, in different but decisive ways,
making a break from the thought of the preceding generation. The
difficulty in making such an argum ent is that attention to the differ­
ence and specificity of each thinker m ust be balanced with what they
might, how ever loosely, share. The danger, of course, will be that quite
divergent developm ents of thought will be assimilated to a unified
paradigm which in fact blurs or m isrepresents the specificity of each
thinker. A very preliminary rehearsal of this boo k ’s argum ent might
run as follows: in different and sometim es directly opposing ways, and
beginning in the 1970s, the philosophers treated in this book explicitly
distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which inform ed
much of what has gone under the nam e of structuralism and post­
structuralism and which can be associated with diverse terms: with
the order of signifiers, signifieds and of the symbolic, or with the
categories of discourse, text, and writing (or arche-writing). They do
so in the name of a systematic attem pt to radically rethink questions
of m ateriality and the concrete, together with questions of worldli­
ness, shared em bodied existence and sensible-intelligible experience.
They can all be said to rethink the status of the ‘real’, of worldly
appearance, or to re-engage in new and highly original ways with the
question of ontology.
Before pursuing a rehearsal of this argum ent in anything but the
cursory and prelim inary m anner just given, it may be useful to con­
sider some of the broad surveys of contem porary French philosophy
which have been published to date and some of the questions which
are raised by them. John M ullarkey’s Post-Continental Philosophy:
An Outline (M ullarkey 2006) is without doubt the most ambitious
and fully developed attem pt that has been made to date to argue for
a paradigm break within the developm ent of contem porary French
thought. Post-Continental Philosophy brings together four philoso­
phers, two of whom are also discussed in this book. They are Gilles
Deleuze, Michel H enry (1922-2002), Alain Badiou and François
Laruelle. As M ullarkey himself points out at the very beginning of
the introduction, his work does not address something that is, or
which has already occurred, but rather something that ‘is unfolding,
an event in the m aking’ (M ullarkey 2006: 1). M ore precisely, the
book takes as its prem ise the claim that a certain m om ent in
the ongoing developm ent of French thought might be accorded the
status of an ‘event’. The m om ent he identifies is 1988, a year which
sees the publication in French of im portant texts by each of the
philosophers he discusses: D eleuze’s The Fold (Deleuze 2006),
B adiou’s Being and Event (Badiou 1988; 2005b), H enry’s Voir
l’invisible [Seeing the Invisible] (H enry 2009), and an im portant dis­
cussion betw een Laruelle and D errida on the possibility of a science
of philosophy (M ullarkey 2006: 11). The event that he identifies is a
change in philosophical thought which is centred on the question
of immanence. M ore precisely this ‘event’ m arks an attem pt by
philosophy to articulate ‘an em brace of absolute immanence over
transcendence . . . to m ake imm anence supervene on transcendence’
(M ullarkey 2006: 1). Post-Continental Philosophy argues, both per­
suasively and powerfully, that this attem pted em brace of immanence
leads to a realignm ent of French thought with naturalism and
with the life sciences, with m athem atics and with the reaffirm ation
of ‘philosophy as a worldly and m aterialist thinking’ (M ullarkey
2006: 2 ).
As will become clear, this book broadly reaffirms M ullarkey’s argu­
m ents relating to the realignm ent of French thought with a non-
reductive naturalism and the life sciences, with m athem atics and with
a worldly and m aterialist thinking .3 Yet stark differences also present
them selves and these relate to the question of the ‘canon’ of philoso­
phers which have been chosen, to questions of periodization (i.e. the
identification of 1988 as a key date), as well as to the adoption of
im m anence as the sole principle governing the realignm ent of French
philosophy over the past thirty years. It certainly is true that nearly
(but not) all of the thinkers here can be seen to affirm what might be
called the imm anence of m aterial life and to this extent M ullarkey’s
argum ent is borne out well by many of the analyses offered h e re .4
W hether it be M arion’s thinking of givenness and the auto-affection
of the flesh, Nancy’s thinking of the ‘trans-im m anence’ of sense,
M alabou’s conception of a m aterial or m etam orphic ontology, or,
indeed, the different conceptions of immanence that can be found in
Badiou and Laruelle, the question of imm anence will be returned to
throughout this study .5
This book differs from M ullarkey insofar as it takes the idea of a
break from the linguistic, textual or discursive paradigm of (post-)
structuralism as its initial prem ise and locates the beginnings of this
break in the 1970s.6The broad shift towards a thinking of imm anence
is certainly a result of this, but not all the thinkers discussed here can
easily be said to be thinkers of radical or absolute immanence (at
least not to the sam e degree) and, as will become clear, a range of
other im portant philosophical shifts can be seen to follow on from
this break: a re-engagem ent with the question of ontology as has
already been m entioned, but also a sustained renew al with the ques­
tion of the subject and of subjectivity, with questions of community,
politics and political change, and with questions relating to the aes­
thetic and aesthetics. W ithin the logic of the break from structuralism
and/or post-structuralism, the thought of both D eleuze and H enry
arguably offer indispensable resources to some of the thinkers treated
here (e.g. the influence of D eleuze and H enry on Laruelle or of
H enry in particular on M arion ).7 To this extent, it could be argued
that they represent an im portant, and specifically French, trajectory
of thought which can be traced from Bergson which is of decisive
im portance for the generation of thinkers treated here but that they
do not belong to this generation (and have been excluded on these
grounds).
It should be clear that the question o f inclusion o r exclusion is
of central im portance w hen it comes to constructing an argum ent
relating to what may be contem porary or ‘new ’ within a body of
thought. A shorter account of this field has been given by Peter
H allw ard in his introduction to a special edition of the journal
Angelaki published in 2003 and entitled ‘The One and the Other:
French Philosophy Today’ (Hallward 2003b). A lthough shorter than
M ullarkey’s full-length work, H allw ard’s introduction is very inclu­
sive and wide-ranging and takes in thinkers from across the span of
the tw entieth century, including well-known figures such as Bergson,
Sartre, Deleuze, H enry and Levinas, and less well-known thinkers
such as H enry Corbin (1903-1978). It also includes a num ber of
thinkers who may be said to be of roughly the same generation as
those treated here but who do not feature in this study, e.g. Clément
Rosset (1939-), Christian Jam bet (1949-) and Guy Lardreau (1947-
2008). R ather than argue for a localized or specific ‘event’ within
recent French thought (as does M ullarkey) or for a break or discon­
tinuity with a preceding generation (as is the case here), Hallward
suggests that m uch philosophy in the tw entieth century is m arked by
an affirmation or privileging of the singular, of singularity, and of the
creative principle of singular individuation or becoming: ‘If anything
holds the field together, if anything (beyond the contingency of lan­
guages and institutions) allows us to speak here of a field . . . then it
is the continuous persistence of singularity as the strong polarizing
principle of the field as a whole" (Hallward 2003b: 5).
However, taking H enry’s thought as m ore or less paradigm atic of
this privileging of singularity and creativity, H allw ard goes on to
argue that this field has consistently affirmed ‘an im m ediate and non­
relational process of individuation’ and with that a ‘radical refusal of
m ediation or representation’ (Hallward 2003b: 9). This leads him to
conclude that: ‘Recent French philosophers came to em brace a sin­
gular conception of thought to the degree that they judged the world
incapable of redem ption’ (Hallward 2003b: 22). On this basis, he sug­
gests that French thought has developed a highly non-relational
m ode of thinking and has entirely lacked an account of worldly and
m ediated relationality. He therefore concludes that the task of those
wishing to continue the tradition of French thought today will be to
provide a ‘relational alternative’ (Hallward 2003b: 23). If there is to be
a break or an event within thought then, for Hallward at least, this is
one which thought m ust now anticipate and take up as a challenge in
order to re-engage with the world and its possible transform ation.
It is arguable that many, if not all, of the seven thinkers discussed
in this study have sought to take up this dem and of thought, that of
re-engaging with the world and with the question of relationality, and
have done so in various ways and at various key m om ents from the
1970s onwards .8 M ore importantly, though, what this brief survey of
M ullarkey’s and H allw ard’s accounts shows is the extent to which
any attem pt to characterize ‘French philosophy today’ and to articu­
late what is or is not ‘new ’ within this tradition is itself a philosophical
argum ent which entails philosophical decisions and judgements. As
was indicated at the beginning of this introduction, to speak of the
‘New French Philosophy’ is to raise questions which are themselves
philosophical. To do so is also implicitly to stake out a position and
m ake a series of philosophical arguments. As has been indicated, the
principal argum ent of this book is that, despite their obvious differ­
ences from each other and despite the fact that this remains a field
defined by m ajor lines of conflict, argum ent and polem ical opposi­
tion, all the thinkers treated have com e to reaffirm what one might
call the ‘m ateriality of the real’ in the wake of the preceding genera­
tion’s focus on language and signification.
Yet any attem pt to m ake such an argum ent or to characterize the
field of contem porary French philosophy m ore generally will, of
course, also define itself as much by those thinkers who have been
excluded as by those who have been included.This study,for example,
excludes a num ber of im portant philosophers who are all of the same,
or similar, generation as those who have been included. Rosset,
Jam bet and Lardreau have already been m entioned but one could
also offer a long list of other key figures,for example, E tienne Balibar
(1942-), Jacques Bouveresse (1940-), Pierre M acherey (1938-),
Michèle Ledoeff (1948-), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007) and
M onique D avid-M énard (1947-).9 Younger philosophers such as
Q uentin Meillassoux (1967-) who have m ore recently begun to
publish significant work might be m entioned .10 Im portant thinkers
who have for some time been associated with the philosophy of
science or with Science and Technology Studies are also key points
of reference here and have, to date, been accorded varying degrees
of recognition: B runo Latour (1947-) would feature m ost prom i­
nently in this regard, as would Dom inique Lecourt (1944-) and
M ichel Serres (1930-). W hat should be clear from such a long (and
far from complete) list of exclusions is that the present study makes
no attem pt whatsoever to be exhaustive in its overview of contem ­
porary French thought or, indeed, to give an account of the recent
developm ent of philosophy in France from an institutional or disci­
plinary perspective.u
W hat links all the thinkers who have been included here is a spe­
cific set of continuities and discontinuities with the work of the p re­
ceding generation of philosophers. It is on the basis of continuity
(marks of influence, continued concerns, instances of repetition) and
of discontinuity (specific gestures of critical distance, differentiation,
and ruptures or breaks) with the generation of Foucault, Deleuze,
D errida and Lyotard that this study identifies something which could
be called the ‘New French Philosophy’. In this context, the innova­
tions explored within this book can be assimilated to a broad and
shared paradigm of renew al and innovation rather than to an em er­
gence of radical novelty. By the same token, some of the thinkers
treated here (e.g. Badiou and Laruelle) do seek to proclaim their
radical novelty and these positions and their related claims are
explored critically rather than being taken at face value.
Throughout the first four chapters, the figure of D errida perhaps
looms largest. M arion’s engagem ent with, and distance from, D errida
is discussed at some length in chapter 1. Nancy, Stiegler and M alabou
were very closely associated with D errida, either as younger col­
leagues, collaborators or form er students (or, indeed, all three). The
relation of each to deconstruction is m arked in the discussions of
chapters 2, 3, and 4, as is their decisive self-distancing from key
m oments of D erridean thought. It is arguably on these key m om ents
of distancing or divergence that they all build their own highly dis­
tinctive philosophical positions and come to sharply differentiate
themselves from deconstructive or m ore broadly ‘post-structuralist’
concerns. In the final three chapters, a figure of great im portance that
has not yet been m entioned occupies a key position of influence. He
is the structuralist-M arxist philosopher Louis A lthusser (1918—
1990).12 Both R ancière and Badiou were closely associated with, and
heavily influenced by, A lthusser at the very beginning of their careers.
In different ways and to different degrees each m akes a break from
Althusserianism in the 1970s, a break which, as will becom e clear, can
also be fram ed as rejection of the linguistic paradigm that under-
pinned its structuralist orientation. Laruelle is a slightly m ore diffi­
cult figure to position in relation to the preceding generation. O n the
one hand, he is clearly m arked and form ed by philosophies of differ­
ence, and in particular by D eleuzian philosophy and D eleuze’s think­
ing of radical im m anence (but also, as m entioned earlier, by the
thought of Henry). A t the same time, he describes his thought as a
‘non-H eideggerian deconstruction 5 and, from the 1980s onwards,
develops his ‘non-philosophy’ as a radical break from the philoso­
phies of difference (e.g. Deleuze, D errida, Lyotard) of the preceding
generation and, of course, from philosophy m ore generally. Then
again, as is argued in chapter 7, L aruelle’s conception of a ‘science’
of philosophy and of science m ore generally can be aligned with an
A lthusserian structural conception of science or theory.
It should be clear, then, that the continuities and discontinuities
with which this study engages are bo th multiple and complex and,
within the context of seven short chapters being devoted to seven
individual philosophers, there is no claim to have given exhaustive
treatm ent of these. However, the key discontinuity that has been
already identified in preliminary fashion, that is to say, the break from
the linguistic paradigm of (post-)structuralism, is articulated in dif­
ferent, m ore or less explicit ways, by each of the philosophers dis­
cussed. The argum ent is m ade in a polemical m anner by Badiou in a
sem inar given originally in N ovem ber 1977 and published in French
in 1982 in The Theory o f the Subject (Badiou 1982; 2009e). He identi­
fies the anti-humanism of the 1960s generation (citing Foucault,
Lacan and Althusser) with their privileging of the category of dis­
course and their orientation according to a linguistic paradigm. He
clearly identifies the structuralist attem pt to think beyond the cate­
gory of the hum an with its claim that language is the condition of
possibility for the production of hum an subjectivity or experience per
se (i.e. with the argum ent that the hum an as a category is an ‘effect’
of discourse). It is this privileging of the paradigm of language and
discourse that Badiou directly and polemically challenges (Badiou
1982: 204; 2009e: 187-8). H e suggests that this paradigm is a form of
‘linguistic idealism ’ and states flatly: ‘the world is discourse: this argu­
m ent in contem porary philosophy would deserve to be rebaptized
ideaίm guisίely,,, (Bauiuu 1982:204,2009c. 188).The linguistic ideal­
ism of structuralist conceptions of discourse is challenged by Badiou
in the name of m aterialism and the dem and that thought re-engage
with the m aterial world: ‘it is m aterialism that we must found anew
with the renovated arsenal of our m ental pow ers’ (Badiou 1982:198;
2009e: 182).13 Arguably B adiou’s m athem atical turn, discussed in
detail in chapter 6 , is precisely the ‘renovated arsenal’ which he calls
for in this 1977 seminar which so polemically dem ands a renewed
m aterialism and a break from the linguistic idealism of structuralist
discourse.
This break from the structuralist paradigm , effected in the name
of a renew ed m aterialist thought, is also an inaugural m om ent of
R ancière’s philosophy and is discussed at length in chapter 5 (in rela­
tion to his decisive rupture with A lthusser). R ancière’s b reak from
A lthusser and the A lthusserian conception of ideology is, very much
like B adiou’s criticism of 1960s anti-humanists, fram ed in terms of a
specific rejection of the category of discourse. This is m ade explicit in
his 1974 work Althusser's Lesson: Ideology is not simply a collection
of discourses or a system of representation’ (Rancière 1974: 252-3;
2011c: 142). As chapter 5 argues, R ancière’s subsequent conceptions
of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, of historical and political agency
or community, and his thinking about art and the aesthetic, all can be
seen to follow on from this decisive break with A lthusser and with
the structuralist-linguistic paradigm.
Such a break can also be seen in key works of the 1970s written by
Nancy and Laruelle, albeit with very different outcomes. In, for
instance, Ego Sum (Nancy 1979), Nancy criticizes the return to a
dom inant position of the category of the subject and identifi
most prom inently with the privileged status enjoyed in this period
by Lacanian psychoanalysis .14 However, this return of the subject is
also identified m ore broadly with the structuralist paradigm, specifi­
cally with the instances of ‘Structure, Text, or Process’ (Nancy 1979:
11). It is identified also with the adoption by philosophy of the
notion of the symbolic and its alignment with disciplines (anthropo­
logical, sociological) exterior to philosophy (Foucault is cited in this
point; see Nancy 1979: 12 n. 2). E go Sum has as its task the attem pt
to uncover beneath the ‘anthropological profusion’ of symbolic,
textual, or structural subjects an instance that would be ‘not a subject,
nor the Subject, we will not nam e it, but this book would like it to
nam e itself: ego’ (Nancy 1979:13).The instance that Nancy identifies
in Ego Sum via a reading of D escartes’s cogito is a singular and
bodily site of enunciation and existence which is prior to, or in excess
of, the symbolic order, and in excess of any possibility of theoriza­
tion by (psychoanalytic) discourse (see James 2006: 58-62). Nancy's
philosophical argum ents relating to this bodily and ungrounded
site of exteriority, excess or exposure open the way for all his later
form ulations around questions of community, em bodim ent, shared
existence and his ontology of the singular plural (discussed in
chapter 2 ).
 By the same token a break from a linguistic or textualist paradigm
is m arked in the very title of Laruelle’s 1977 work Le Déclin de
récriture [The Decline o f Writing] (Laruelle 1977b). Laruelle, like
Badiou and Rancière, explicitly articulates the theoretical and philo­
sophical aspiration of his work around a dem and for a m aterialism
(Laruelle 1977b: 8 ). Specifically, he aligns the m otif of the ‘decline of
writing’ with ‘a m aterialist critique of textual and linguistic codes’
(Laruelle 1977b: 14). The work as a whole could be characterized as
a full-frontal attack on the very category of ‘tex t’ and th e structural-
ist paradigm which privileges such a category. This is borne out in
polem ical statem ents such as: ‘text must be stripped of the ontico-
ontological prim acy with which structuralist ideology and the m ajor­
ity of “textual” ideologues comfort them selves’ (Laruelle 1977b:
222). From this dem and, Laruelle takes as his task the attem pt to
think m ateriality as being in excess of theoretical or transcendent
criteria, and therefore as ‘m aterial im m anence’, and as an exteriority
or heteronom y ‘m ore radical than that of the symbolic chain’
(Laruelle 1977b: 43, 76). Le Déclin de l ’écriture is still heavily m arked
by L aruelle’s attachm ent to 1970s’ libidinal philosophy and a
machinic conception of desiring production (clearly dem onstrating
the influence of D eleuzian philosophy). His break from the philoso­
phies of difference in the 1980s, his shift into the register of non­
philosophy and his championing of the absolute immanence of the
O ne is, however, clearly shaped by the anti-structuralism and anti-
textualism of 1970s’ works such as Le Déclin de récriture (as dis­
cussed in chapter 7).
The three other thinkers discussed here can also very clearly be
seen to take a distance from the organizing paradigm of text or
writing which form th e objects of th e 1970s’ polemics of Badiou,
Rancière, Nancy and Laruelle. This is m ost clearly m arked in the title
of a recent work by M alabou, Plasticity at the D usk o f Writing
(M alabou 2005a; 2010b). Strongly echoing L aruelle’s form ulation
relating to the ‘decline’ of writing, M alabou’s book gives an overview
of the developm ent of her concept of plasticity from the 1990s
onw ards.The wider contem porary significance of the concept of plas­
ticity, M alabou suggests, lies in the fact that ‘writing’ is no longer the
key paradigm of our tim e (M alabou 2005a: 36; 2010b: 15). The figure
of writing, she goes on to argue, found its legitimation in structural­
ism, but also m ore generally in the linguistics, cybernetics and genet­
ics of the m id-tw entieth century (M alabou 2005a: 108; 2010b: 58).The
thinking of plasticity which is developed by M alabou is, once again,
placed in the service of the dem and to think a ‘new m aterialism ’
(Malabou 2005a: 112; 2010b: 61) (as discussed in chapter 4 ).This sense
of a shift away from the paradigm of text or writing is explored again
in the work of both M arion and Stiegler. In chapter 1, it is located
clearly in M arion’s insistence that givenness is anterior to any
economy of writing or difference (conceived in D erridean term s as
différance and as an economy of arche-writing or the inscription of
the trace ) . 15 In chapter 3, it is located in Stiegler’s argum ent that
technics and the specific m em ory traces em bodied in tools and tech­
nical prosthetics m ore generally is a ‘putting into actual play’ of
différance or of the D erridean trace (Stiegler 1994: 240; 1998: 234).
In very different ways, therefore, M alabou’s plasticity, M arion’s
unconditional givenness (in the auto-affection of flesh), and Stiegler’s
conception of the technological rooting of tem poral experience all
represent attem pts to think a fundam ental m ateriality of hum an life
which is prior to or in excess of any economy of discourse, text,
writing or of the symbolic.
The fact that an affirmation of m aterialism can be identified across
all the thinkers discussed here and aligned in each instance with an
unambiguous break with or distancing from a linguistic, structuralist,
textualist or discursive paradigm is striking. W hat might be even m ore
striking in relation to the polemics of Badiou, Rancière, Nancy and
Laruelle in the 1970s is that the questions of m aterialism and m ate­
riality were, of course, already central to the (post-)structuralism they
sought to repudiate. W hether it be the m ateriality of the signifier as
cham pioned by the Tel Q uel group (see ffrench 1995: 110,122,138),
the m ateriality of the word or of discourse posited by Lacan (Lacan
1988) or the m aterial practices of ideology thought by A lthusser
(Sharm a and G upta 2006: 103), it cannot be said that the bodies of
thought that can be associated with structuralism lacked a concern
with the ‘m aterial’. Yet, as these indications clearly show, the concern
for m ateriality in this context was often a concern for the m ateriality
of discourse, of language and of the symbolic which might then form
or inform m aterial practices. Such a linguistic m aterialism is per­
ceived by all the thinkers here to be unable to account for a m ore
fundam ental materiality: of givenness in the auto-affection of the
flesh (M arion), of sense of and em bodied existence (Nancy), of tech­
nical prosthetics and their constitution of a tem poral world (Stiegler),
of plasticity (M alabou), of the sensible and its distribution (Rancière),
of im m anent inconsistent multiplicity (Badiou) and, finally, of the
absolute im m anence of the One (Laruelle).
The call for a new m aterialism articulated in the thought of the
seven philosophers treated in this book is developed in different ways
by each. It leads to highly original attem pts to rethink the question
of ontology or of being (Nancy, Stiegler, M alabou, Badiou). It leads
to the rethinking of the status of the im m anent real as an instance
which is in excess of ontology or any horizon of being whatsoever
(M arion, Laruelle).T he dem and for a m aterial worldly thinking also
leads many of these philosophers to re-engage with the question of
political relationality and community and to rethink these instances
in new and original ways, w hether it be Nancy’s thinking of com m u­
nity and his ontology of the singular plural, R ancière’s conception of
sensible community, or B adiou’s m ore recent thinking of the logic of
worldly appearance (to name but three exam ples),The concern with
the new, with transform ation and change, is also, as was indicated at
the beginning of this introduction, a key aspect of all the thinkers
discussed here. Such a concern is most often expressed in term s of
political change and an attem pt, in the work of philosophy itself, to
think the conditions of political transform ation and to affirm, facili­
tate or bring about political change itself (this is true for all the
philosophers discussed here with the exception, perhaps, of M arion
and L aruelle ).16
Linking many of these philosophical innovations is also a sustained
attem pt to re-engage with the question of the subject and to resituate
something which might still be called subjectivity within a pre-
symbolic/linguistic and m aterial dimension. All of these philosophers
can be said to engage in diverse ways with the question posed by
Jean-Luc Nancy namely, ‘Who comes after the subject?’ (Nancy
1991f). A fter the destruction, deconstruction or dissolution of the
traditional subject of metaphysics that has been the task of so m uch
philosophy unfolding in the wake of Nietzsche, H eidegger and struc­
turalism, how is thought to reconceptualize the reality of hum an
agency and subjective consciousness? TTiis question is posed in rela­
tion to the them es of em bodim ent and bodily existence (in M arion,
Nancy, M alabou, Rancière, and in the later Badiou). It is posed also
in relation to problem s of political subjectivity or ‘subjectivation’, and
to politically inflected argum ents relating to individuation (in Stiegler,
M alabou, Rancière and Badiou). Indeed, the question of the subject,
rethought as an embodied, ‘fleshy’ instance, or as a m aterial process
of collective identification or differentiation, is posed in a m anner
which is inseparable from the wider dem and for a m aterial worldly
thought to which these philosophers in their different ways respond.
From this, it can also be argued that the philosophers discussed
here under the rubric of the ‘New French Philosophy’ are a long way
from renouncing the political radicalism which is often associated
with the 1960s generation of thinkers that preceded them .17 Indeed,
the re-engagem ent with the m aterial and with the worldly can most
often be fram ed within the context of a response to the situation of
the contem porary world in the final decades of the twentieth century
and first decade of the twenty-first. This is born out arguably in
Nancy’s thinking of community and of the political, Stiegier’s
critique of hyper-industrial society, M alabou’s questioning of the
'neuronal’ organization of contem porary capitalist culture, and
both R ancière’s and B adiou’s quite similar conceptions of political
subjectivation.
It could be argued that these philosophers do not just simply reject
the ideological orthodoxies of what might m ore or less convention­
ally be called contem porary 'neo-liberal’ capitalism and its accom pa­
nying political forms. They also reject the political ontology implicit
in these orthodoxies. They reject, of course, the conception of the
subject as an autonom ous self-grounding instance (the subject of
metaphysics so repeatedly deconstructed in the tw entieth century).
Such a conception of subjectivity could arguably be said to persist
and to inform contem porary liberal thinking about rational agency,
about ‘choice’, and about the exercise of economic and individual
freedom. They reject also the ontological assumptions regarding
worldly relationality implicit in any conception of the hum an as hom o
economicus. It is not, it should be stressed, that these philosophers
are anti-democratic. If they address the question of democracy they
m ost often argue that what we need is better or m ore fully evolved
democratic thinking and dem ocratic agency or forms (see, for
example, Nancy 2008a; 2010c; Rancière 2005a; 2006b). It may be that,
in their different ways, these thinkers understand that the ideological
orthodoxies and implicit ontology of liberal capitalism are simply not
philosophically sufficient or even plausible means to describe what
fundamentally, really and actually, unfolds in hum an agency and
shared relational existence .18 It may also be that if, in the wake of the
Cold War, the orthodoxies of liberal capitalism have enjoyed a sig­
nificant degree of global hegemony, then our future crises (political,
economic, environm ental) are likely to be crises of these ideological
and philosophical orthodoxies as well as of the political forms they
represent.
In light of this, it could be said that the task of philosophical
renewal taken up by the seven thinkers presented here is as much
orientated towards the future as it is predicated on a logic of continu­
ity and discontinuity with the past. Tiiey might all be united by a
shared sense that the destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics,
subjectivity, or traditional notions of being, truth and knowledge, is a
necessary (and unfinished) but certainly not sufficient gesture to m eet
the demands of contem porary thinking. Instead, subjectivity, ontol­
ogy, truth, epistemology, as well as questions of universality, ethics
and politics, all must be thought anew in an affirmative and construc­
tive, rather than deconstructive, m anner.
Yet, in spite of all that these thinkers might arguably be said to
share, their respective bodies of w ork are clearly m arked by strong
divergences, by incompatibilities, and by at times highly polem ical
forms of opposition. This is m ost clearly evident in the break that
Badiou and those broadly aligned with him (such as Zizek,M eillassoux,
Hallw ard) proclaim with respect to the legacy of phenom enology and
philosophies of difference or finitude. It also manifests itself in
Laruelle’s attem pt to identify an invariant structure of philosophy
per se, to assimilate all forms of (post-)phenom enology or philoso­
phies of difference to that structure, and to oppose to these his own
conception of ‘non-philosophy’.While this book accords a high degree
of innovation and originality to all of the thinkers it discusses, such
affirmations of radical novelty need to be treated with some caution
and even with a degree of critical distance or philosophical scepti­
cism. In the case of Badiou, this is because, by his own admission, his
m athem atical turn and its accompanying formalism can be placed
within a continuous trajectory of French thought that w ould take in
such figures as Jean Cavaillès, Jean-Toussaint D esanti and, m ore
immediately, Lacan and A lthusser (see chapter 6 ; in particular,
Lacan’s dem and for a m athem atical approach to the real as affirmed
in his sem inar of the 2 D ecem ber 1971 is in direct continuity with
B adiou’s approach). A t the same time, his claims relating to the
em ergence of radical novelty in contem porary philosophy need to be
understood in the context of his thinking about the need to ‘split’ any
given situation into two (again, see chapter 6 ), It is also true that
many of B adiou’s key concerns with, for instance, multiplicity, unde­
cidability, excess and the advent or the ‘event’ of the radically new
are also central preoccupations of the preceding generation of post­
structuralist thinkers he ostensibly opposes. By the same token, his
stark difference from, and polemical opposition to, a contem porary
thinker such as Jean-Luc Nancy belies key similarities between the
two philosophers: again a concern with multiplicity, but also an (albeit
very differently inflected) return to the discourse of ontology and to
the categories of, for instance, truth and universality (see Nancy
1990a: 13; 2003c: 5; 1993a: 25; 1997e: 12; 2002a: 69, 75; 2007c: 60, 62).
Similar objections could be raised in relation to Laruelle’s attem pt
to decisively oppose his non-philosophy to the work of his contem ­
poraries and their im m ediate predecessors.
It should nevertheless become clear that each of these thinkers
m eets the dem ands of contem porary thought in very different ways.
They are therefore treated separately in individual chapters and are
presented broadly speaking on their own terms. The aim of each
chapter is to give a critical-philosophical overview and interpretation
of each on the basis of close reading of texts. In each case, the pre­
sentation will aim to highlight the strengths of each philosopher, the
significance of their achievements and, in particular, their originality
and the distinctiveness of their respective philosophical innovations.
The discussion will also, however, indicate some of the problems or
limitations associated with the distinctive positions of each thinker.
The presentation aims to be accessible but, at the same time, to do
some justice to the complexity of the thought under discussion.
As Peter Hallw ard has rem arked, contem porary French philoso­
phy has all too often been associated with an excess of unnecessary
complexity, with ‘a daunting if not arcane difficulty and sophistication
which restricts access to insiders only’ (Hallward 2003b: 1). What
should become clear as these discussions unfold is that these philoso­
phers seek to renew the way in which they think, to transform the
m anner in which they come to write philosophy itself. This attem pt
to renew the style, techniques and procedures of philosophical writing
is itself intimately connected to the renewal and transform ation of
thought that each thinker pursues.The French philosophies presented
here are highly am bitious in their attem pt to renew the claims, pos­
sibilities and transform ative power of philosophical thinking. The
renewal of philosophical thinking, however, can only be achieved in
the transform ation of the techniques of thought itself.
Jean-Luc Marion: Appearing
and Givenness

Jean-Luc M arion’s philosophy of givennness stands as perhaps one

of the m ost im portant recent and contem porary contributions to
phenom enology in France. Along with the thought of M ichel H enry
(1922-2002), M arion’s work has radicalized key aspects of Husserlian
and post-Husserlian philosophy. It has also opened up new and
original, albeit highly disputed, possibilities for phenom enology
in the wake of structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of phe­
nom enological thought. His publications since the 1970s can be
divided into three separate but closely interrelated areas: besides the
phenom enological work already m entioned, he is an im portant, and
in France widely recognized, D escartes scholar, and he is also
the author of a num ber of works of theology. In 2008, he was elected
to a chair at the Académ ie Française. Outside of France, however,
it was as a theologian that M arion first becam e widely know n .1
U ntil recently, his work on Descartes has been less recognized in the
anglophone academic world and he has been best known as an
im portant figure working at the intersection of phenom enology and
theology.
Yet, as Christina G schw andtner has persuasively argued, M arion’s
work on Descartes is of great im portance for b o th his theological and
phenom enological writing and shapes the concerns of both in deci­
sive ways .2 In this context, the overall scope of his philosophical
output needs to be assessed in term s of his position both within a
specifically French scholarly and philosophical tradition as well as
within a broader French appropriation and transform ation of G erm an
thought. M arion was schooled in philosophy under Jean Beaufret at
the Lycée C ondorcet ,3 he studied at the École N orm ale Supérieure,
and then at Paris IV-Paris-Sorbonne under Ferdinand Alquié (1906-
1985). Alquié was an im portant philosophical com m entator on
D escartes as well as a thinker who engaged with a wide range of
m odern philosophy. M arion’s writings on Descartes are clearly influ­
enced by Alquié, as they are by Etienne Gilson (1884-1978), another
key French scholar of Descartes and of m edieval and early m odern
thought m ore generally. A t the same time, M arion’s thinking emerges
from within the context and milieu of French engagem ents with
Nietzsche and H eidegger in the 1970s and, decisively, from his sus­
tained engagem ent with Husserl.
M uch of the m ore negative criticism of M arion’s work to date has
com e either from theologians unhappy with the way in which his
theology deviates from more orthodox strands of the discipline -
deviations which arise largely from his philosophical engagem ents -
or from phenom enologists who perceive his work in this area to be
too contam inated by his theological concerns. D errida also responded,
directly but m ore indirectly as well, to aspects of M arion’s theological
and phenom enological w riting .4 M ost prominently, M arion was one
of a num ber of figures (including, amongst others, Michel Henry, Paul
R icoeur and E m m anuel Lévinas) accused by D om inique Janicaud of
aligning phenom enology too closely with theology in a ‘theological
tu rn ’ which, Janicaud polemically asserted, threatened to underm ine
the true m ethod and scope of phenom enological thought.^
While what follows will seek to relate the core of M arion’s philo­
sophical concerns to both his com m entaries on Descartes and his
theological writing, it will focus first and forem ost on his phenom eno­
logical thought such as it emerges in three key works: Reduction and
Givenness (M arion 1989; 1998), Being Given (M arion 1997; 2002c),
and In Excess (M arion 2001; 2002a). It will argue that M arion’s
achievement and the originality of his transform ation of phenom e­
nology lie in the specific ways in which he assimilates the diverse
anti-foundationalist critiques levelled at phenom enological thought
by structuralism and post-structuralism. The critique of presence, of
the phenom enological reduction and of the transcendental ego, for
instance, are all accepted by M arion, but in rereading Husserlian
thought as a thought of givenness, he aims to move phenomenology
beyond its metaphysical foundations while at the same time widening
the scope of what might be considered as a phenom enon per se. In
redefining the scope of phenom enality itself, and in assimilating the
aim of an ‘overcom ing’ of metaphysics, M arion has in many ways
helped redefine the term s of philosophical debate in France in the
wake of deconstruction and the ‘death of the subject’.
The overcoming of metaphysics

M arion’s concern to situate his thought within what one might broadly
term a post-Heideggerian and post-Nietzschean overcoming of m eta­
physics can be traced back to his earliest publications of the 1970s,
most notably his first m ajor com m entary on Descartes, Sur l’ontologie
grise de Descartes [On Descartes's Grey Ontology] (M arion 1975),
and his first im portant work of theology, The Idol and Distance
(M arion 1977; 2001b).
H eidegger’s conception of metaphysics as a history of ontotheol-
ogy and Nietzsche’s framing of the philosophical tradition as a history
of Christian-Platonism are of decisive im portance for M arion in this
period. In each case, what is at stake is the tendency of the tradition
of metaphysics to think first and forem ost of being in general in
term s of the totality of beings, and then to view those beings in term s
of foundations, grounding, or causal principles (timeless essences or
identities, notions of foundational substance, of a grounding subject
of knowledge, a priori conditions of possibility, or, perhaps most
im portantly for M arion, the idea of G od as the Supreme Being who
would act as the first cause and creator of all beings).
In the earlier text, M arion uncovers, with considerable patience
and scholarly attention, D escartes’s debt to, and close engagem ent
with, the philosophy of A ristotle in the Regulations for the Direction
o f the Mind. W hat he discovers is that the seemingly epistemological
concerns of Cartesian thought conceal an ontology. Descartes appears
to reject the A ristotelian category of substance (thought as an o nto­
logical ground, or as the being of beings) in favour of the ego that
knows things through the criteria of evidence and certainty. This
epistemological gesture in fact dissimulates an ontology, since the
being of beings now finds itself grounded in that ego, and, in a rather
equivocal gesture, the solidity and identity of that ego also finds itself
grounded, according to M arion’s reading of Descartes, in the exis­
tence of God. D escartes’s ontology is therefore ‘grey’, because con­
cealed, and ambivalent or equivocal because it relies on a twofold
metaphysical foundation of the ego and of the traditional notion of
G od as C reator and Suprem e Being (M arion 1971:186-90).
This concern with ontology and metaphysical grounding is deve­
loped further in M arion’s slightly later theological text. The Idol and
Distance argues that when we think of God in term s of a fixed iden­
tity or presence or as an entity or Suprem e Being, then we are caught
up within a metaphysical m ode of thinking par excellence, and firmly
inscribe ourselves within an ontotheological fram ew ork (as described
by Heidegger). Indeed, viewing God in this way, we only view an
all-too-human image; we create an idol of God, refuse the distance
and withdrawal of the divine, and fall into- idolatry or, indeed, blas­
phemy .6 The work then stages an opposition betw een a metaphysical
notion of God as Being, substance or presence, and a notion of G od
as infinite distance, separation and withdrawal from, or excess over,
Being. The form er m om ent is fram ed in our gaze upon G od con­
ceived as an idol, which fixes divine presence, the latter in our con­
tem plation of what M arion term s the ‘icon’. The icon, for M arion, is
an image which internalizes within itself the separation, absolute
distance and non-being of the divine (M arion 1977:25; 2001b: 8 ). Not
surprisingly, The Idol and Distance contains a detailed engagem ent
with the tradition of negative theology (in the figure of Pseudo-
Dionysius the A reopagite whose works were w ritten in the late fifth
and early sixth century c e ). Perhaps m ore unexpectedly for a work
of theology, it also contains a sustained reading of the Nietzschean
m otif of the D eath of God. Here, M arion argues that Nietzsche
announces only the death of the God of metaphysics (the God of
being, substance, etc.), and that the N ietzschean twilight and demise
of idols leaves open a space of absence which, in its very absence
and withdrawal, can all the m ore properly be called divine. This
persistence of the divine in Nietzschean thought is m arked most
clearly, according to M arion, in the way in which it is haunted by
Christ and Christ-like figures: the A nti-Christ, Dionysus, Z arathustra
and so on.
Both these early works open up philosophical concerns and lines
of argum ent which will prove to be decisive for M arion’s later phe­
nomenology of givenness. His critique of D escartes allows him to
delineate very clearly an understanding of metaphysics and ontothe-
ology as a logic of the foundation of beings and their grounding in
causal principles. His theology of distance allows him to pose the
question of a conception of the divine which would situate itself
beyond any horizon of being (M arion 1977: 294; 2001b: 233). In this
respect, his thinking at this point quite closely aligns itself with the
philosophical concerns of both Jacques D errida and E m m anuel
Lévinas (M arion 1977: 286, 226; 2001b: 298, 237). Perhaps most sig­
nificantly, The Idol and Distance allows M arion, like D errida and
Lévinas, to pose the problem of exactly how thought might extricate
itself from, or think beyond, the horizon of being, to think in excess
of ontotheology, or otherwise than being. M arion suggests the follow­
ing: T h e re rem ains therefore only one path: to travel through
ontotheology itself all along its limits, its marches. . . . To take onto-
theology tangentially, from the angle o f its lines o f defence, and thus
to expose oneself to what already no longer belongs to it’ (M arion
1977: 37-8; 2001b: 19). This way or path of thought arguably defines
the philosophical strategy that informs M arion’s reading of Husserl
and Heidegger in his later m ore strictly phenom enological work.

Phenomenology and givenness

Reduction and Givenness begins, perhaps surprisingly, by aligning

the beginnings of Husserlian phenom enology with the final accom­
plishments of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought. In late 1887, just as
H usserl gives his inaugural lecture at the University of Halle (‘The
Goals and Tasks of M etaphysics’), so Nietzsche em barks on the final
period of his writing, m arked by works such as On the Genealogy o f
M orals, Twilight o f the Idols, and Ecce H om o. As Nietzsche dies
after a decade of paralysis in 1900, so Husserl publishes the first
volume of the Logical Investigations (M arion 1989: 7; 1998:1). W hat
the two share, M arion claims, is a question posed in relation to p he­
nom enal appearance and the possibility of thinking the presence of
phenom ena in the absence of any hidden supra-reality of essences
or grounding principles: ‘Can the givenness in presence of each thing
be realized without any condition or restriction? This question m arks
Nietzsche’s last advance and H usserl’s first point of arrival’ (M arion
1989: 7; 1998: 1). N ietzsche’s affirmation in The Gay Science that
there is appearance only and ‘nothing m ore’ could be cited in this
regard, as could his assertion in Twilight o f the Idols that the opposi­
tion between the Platonic ‘tru e’ world of ideal essences and the
world of ‘false’ appearances has been abolished (Nietzsche 1974:
116; 1990: 51). Husserlian phenomenology, for its part, is concerned
to describe the character of consciousness in the most clear and
systematic way and addresses that which appears to consciousness
in lived experience alone. The existence of a supra-phenom enal
realm of ‘real’ entities existing independently of our consciousness
of them is not posed, nor, indeed, is it thought to be a viable philo­
sophical question. In each case and in different ways, M arion under­
lines, both Nietzsche and Husserl seek to liberate thought from
metaphysical prejudices by affirming a field of appearance which is
to be thought outside of any reference to a hidden or higher realm
of reality
This alignment of H usserl with Nietzsche, however surprising it
may be, is decisive for the way in which the argum ents of Reduction
and Givenness unfold. According to M arion the philosophical break­
through m ade by Husserlian phenom enology lies in its reduction of
lived experience to that which manifests itself in the im m anent realm
of consciousness alone. It is only that which is given immanently in
sensible intuition or perception that will be described by the phe-
nomenologist, with all else being ‘bracketed off’. As M arion puts it:
‘the phenom enological breakthrough is accomplished by leading
back to intuition everything that claims to be constituted as a phe~
nom enon’ (M arion 1989: 17; 1998: 8 ). In describing the character of
phenom enal appearance as given to consciousness, the phenom enol-
ogist refers, first and foremost, not to any form of a priori category,
nor to any notion of sensible experience or reality which would tran­
scend that which is given im m anently in intuition, nor, indeed, to any
other form of presupposition of any kind. Nor, M arion insists still
further, can intuition itself be seen in this context as a founding prin­
ciple: ‘Intuition itself cannot be understood as a last presupposition,
since it is neither presupposed nor posited, nor given, but originally
giving’ (M arion 1989: 19; 1998: 9). In what will becom e a central
prem ise of all of M arion’s phenom enology after Reduction and
Givenness, he insists on the primacy of givenness over all the other
key instances which underpin H usserlian phenom enological thought.
The intentional directedness of consciousness towards the perceived
phenom enon, the act of sense constitution, the phenom enological or
transcendental ego, and even the im m anent intuitions and percep­
tions of consciousness itself all, without exception, are posterior to,
or result from, an originary giving. If intuition is ‘originally giving’, if
it gives the world of phenom ena to us, that is only because something
is given, in and to intuition: ‘Intuition results from givenness without
exception’ (M arion 1989: 27; 1998:15).
It is this anteriority of givenness or giving which allows M arion to
read Husserl as liberating phenom enal presence from any anterior
condition or grounding principle. This is because the givenness or the
giving of phenom ena to the im m anence of sensory intuition does not
found or ground anything; it simply makes manifest that which is
given and does so in the absence of any prior principle. It is this asser­
tion of the absolute unconditionality of phenom enological givenness
that allows M arion to claim that H usserl’s wider project can and m ust
be viewed as a post-Nietzschean liberation from the tradition of
metaphysics. Indeed, this is the key point with which Reduction and
Givenness begins and which is pursued throughout the work as a
whole: ‘In undertaking to free presence from any condition or p re­
condition for receiving what gives itself as it gives itself, phenom enol­
ogy therefore seeks to complete metaphysics and, indissolubly, to
bring it to an end’ (M arion 1989: 8 ; 1998:1). A nd yet, as will become
clear, M arion’s position relies on a very specific reading of Husserl,
a reading which is perhaps as disputable as it is both forceful and
original.
As the title of Reduction and Givenness plainly suggests, it is, for
M arion, the phenom enological reduction itself which plays a key role
in the unfolding of his argum ent. For the phenom enologist, the
‘bracketing off’ of the empirical referent (and the concomitant isola­
tion of the phenom enon in the immanence of consciousness alone)
allows for its appearance to be rigorously described and circum­
scribed according to the key instances alluded to above: the presen­
tation of the phenom enon in sensible intuition, the directedness of
intentional consciousness towards it, and, as a result of both intuition
and intention, the constitution of the meaningfulness or signification
of the phenom enon. In this context, M arion’s argum ent unfolds as a
radicalization of H usserl’s thought in the most proper sense, that is
to say, as a return to what is perceived to be the root or most fun­
dam ental m om ent of phenomenology: givenness itself. M arion radi­
calizes the H usserlian reduction by showing that all the instances
which inform its operation except givenness alone can them selves be
reduced or bracketed off. C entral to this argum ent is a double
m eaning of the term ‘givenness’ (donation in French): the term refers
to the fact that something is given and to the act of giving and there­
fore has both a substantive and verbal meaning. In relation to
phenom enal appearance, donation articulates a strict correlation or
identity betw een th e giving (appearing) and th e given (that which
appears). Husserl is directly cited on this point: that which is given
is so in an act of appearing which gives the given (M arion 1989: 52;
1998: 32). TTiis correlation betw een the appearing and th at which
appears, betw een the giving and the given, confirms for M arion the
primacy of givenness over the categories of sensible intuition, inten-
tionality, and signification or sense constitution. The breakthrough of
Husserlian phenom enology lies in the way in which it insists that
givenness precedes, and is not conditioned by, all other instances
(M arion 1989,53; 1998:32). W ithout the giving of that which is given,
none of the other instances would function as such: intuition would
be em pty of content, intentionality would have nothing to direct
itself towards and there would be no apparent or sensible form for
which sense could be constituted as such. It is from this anteriority
of giving and givenness over all other instances which are engaged
in the operation of the phenom enological reduction that M arion
derives the axiom with which his argum ent concludes: ‘so much
reduction, so much givenness’ (M arion 1989: 303; 1998: 203). The
m ore one reduces or brackets off, the m ore one isolates that which
is given and the giving of the given as irreducible, unconditional and
absolute: ‘Givenness alone is absolute, free and without condition,
precisely because it gives’ (M arion 1989: 53-4; 1998: 33).
It is at this point that the Cartesian dimension of M arion’s thought
perhaps makes itself most clearly felt and that his radicalization of
Husserl appears more as a radicalization of that which is most
Cartesian in Husserl (Husserl 1999). Givenness, like the Cartesian
cogito, emerges here as that which resists all possibility of negation
or doubt, as that which will necessarily be affirmed as a certainty or
evidence when all else can be dismissed as illusion (for even an illu­
sion, falsity, absence, or void must be given in order to be perceived
as such ).7 It is because of its absolute irreducibility, unconditionality
and indubitability that givenness both precedes and succeeds any
other instance or operation of thought. It is also this irreducibility
and unconditionality that leads M arion to argue that Husserl, and in
his wake Heidegger also, fail to properly pursue the radicality of
givenness in their respective phenom enological projects. In each case,
M arion argues, both Husserl and H eidegger stop short of fully
embracing the full implications of the giving of appearing, the form er
by inscribing phenom enality within the horizon of objects or ‘objec-
tality’, the latter by inscribing it within the horizon of being, th at is
to say, of Dasein and its worldly, t em poralizing disclosure of beings.
M uch of the main body of Reduction and Givenness is taken up with
close readings of Husserl and H eidegger in order to show that given­
ness is not only anterior to and not conditioned by the instances of
intuition, intention and signification, but is prior also to the horizons
of objectality and being.
It is here that the radical nature of M arion’s phenom enology of
givenness really asserts itself. This is radicality understood now, not
just as a return to the root or originary m om ent of phenomenology,
but rather as a thoroughgoing and fundam ental transform ation of its
scope and possibilities. The argum ents of Reduction and Givenness
culminate with an identification of what M arion dubs the ‘third reduc-
tion’. Husserlian phenomenology carries out a first reduction accord­
ing to which phenom ena are reduced in the last instance to their
being as objects constituted by the transcendental ego. H eideggerian
existential phenom enology carries out the second reduction accord­
ing to which phenom ena are reduced to their disclosure as beings in
the ecstatic tem porality of Dasein. Carrying the reduction still further
to a third degree, M arion discovers that, in its non-negatability,
unconditionality and therefore absolute anteriority, the givenness of
phenom ena cannot be subsumed into any form al ontology or any
horizon of being. As he puts it: Ί η the realm of reduction it is no
longer a question of Being. . . . Because being never intervenes in
o rd er to perm it the aboslute givenness in which it plays not the slight­
est ro le ’ (M arion 1989: 69; 1998: 43). In this light, givenness would,
for M arion, be prior to and not conditioned by any form of category
or relation of any kind whatsoever including, it should be noted, the
category of presence. M arion’s third reduction, it will become clear,
has enorm ous implications both for the way in which he assimilates
key anti-foundationalist critiques of phenomenology, such as D erri-
dean deconstruction, and for the way in which the scope of phenom -
enality itself is widened to include what he will come to call ‘saturated
phenom ena’. It is this widening of the scope of phenem onality which,
in turn, allows his thought to open onto, but (M arion would insist)
rem ain distinct from, theological concerns and the discourse of theol­
ogy m ore generally.

Objections and responses: Being Given and saturated

phenomena

Being Given was published eight years after the appearance of

Reduction and Givenness and its opening pages, entitled ‘Preliminary
R esponses’, indicate the extent to which the work is, at least in part,
intended to respond to the debate which was provoked by the earlier
work. In this context, Being Given can be seen as a re-engagem ent
with, or repetition of, some of the key concerns of Reduction and
Givenness, as a response to some of the m ore or less polemical objec­
tions raised to it, and as an attem pt to develop further the radicality
of its insights. M arion begins by claiming for the earlier work a rather
m odest ambition: ‘A t that time, I thought only to proceed with a
simple historical exam ination of the developm ent of the phenom eno­
logical m ethod’ (M arion 1997:7; 2002c: 2). Readers familiar with the
technical detail and scope of H usserlian and Heideggerian thought
may find such a protest unconvincing, given the objections which can
and, as will becom e clear, were raised in relation to his reading of
Husserl in particular.
Yet, as has been indicated, ii would be wrong to suggest that Being
Given is a purely reactive text. In particular, M arion explores m ore
fully the implications of the third reduction and does so in relation
to the question of being. H e begins by reiterating a num ber of key
points: that the third reduction has led to a new definition of the
phenom enon, ‘no longer as object or being, but as given’ (M arion
1997: 8 ; 2002c: 3), that it returns phenom ena to their "pure given
status, according to radically non-m etaphysical determ inations’
(M arion 1997: 8-9; 2002c: 3), and that the pure givenness of the phe­
nom enon is freed from ‘the limits of every other authority including
those of intuition’ (M arion 1997: 28; 2002c: 17). These reiterations
lead to a more pointed reform ulation of the question of being in
relation to givenness. Marion underlines, for instance, that the pure
givenness of phenom enal appearance abolishes the traditional oppo­
sition betw een existence and essence (since that which appears does
so in the absence of any preceding essence) (M arion 1997: 35; 2002c:
22). He also emphasizes that, if all that appears m ust nevertheless in
some sense be said ‘to b e ’, this is only because it is given: ‘A ppearing
itself is, in the end, equivalent to being, but being presupposes given
being’ (M arion 1997: 40; 2002c: 26; translation modified). Nothing is
unless it is first given as being in the giving of its appearance and
therefore once again being is necessarily posed as conditioned by an
anterior instance of giving, itself absolute, irreducible and uncondi­
tioned. In this context, Heideggerian ontological difference - that is,
the difference betw een beings and the horizon of being - emerges
secondarily from givenness: ‘Being, insofar as it differs from beings,
appears imm ediately in terms of givenness’ (M arion 1997: 53; 2002c:
34). Being is, then, always and only an event of being given and
nothing can appear, affect us, or be accomplished other than by its
being given (M arion 1997: 79; 2002c: 53).
These instances of reiteration and further elaboration of givenness
in relation to the question of being are worth highlighting because
they are developed in various ways throughout Being Given and, in
particular, prepare the way for one of its most im portant philosophi­
cal engagements, that is, M arion’s critical reading of D errida, and of
D errida’s thinking of the gift as elaborated in Given Time (D errida
1991; 1992). D espite the specificity of this reading, it should not be
viewed in narrow term s since the relation of M arion’s thought to
deconstruction m ore generally is certainly at stake, as is the status of
givenness within phenom enology as a whole.
Given Time, published in 1991, had its origin in a seminar given by
D errida betw een 1977 and 1978. As such, it preceded M arion's
Reduction and Givennness by over a decade and cannot be read as
an explicit response to it, although D errida does respond to M arion
directly in one specific and rather dense footnote added at the tim e
of publication (D errida 1991: 72; 1992: 50-2, n. 10). Nevertheless, his
argum ents relating to the impossibility of ‘pure giving’ or of an abso­
lutely pure gift cannot but directly call into question the fundam ental
term s of M arion’s broader innovation within phenomenology. For
both, the exact status of the gift and the possibility or otherwise of
its purity and unconditionality are decisive for the possibility of phe­
nom enology itself. D errida’s argum ent is well known: if an act
of giving is to be pure, then there m ust be no return to the giver, no
debt of recognition may occur in relation to the giver, nothing may
be accrued as a result, either in the short term or through some
process of deferral. Otherwise, the gift is not a gift but functions as a
m ode of exchange (D errida 1991:18-19; 1992:7). The presence of the
pure gift is withdrawn as it is subsumed into an economy of deferral,
a wider circle of exchange and recognition in which no gift is ever
purely given. Of course, D errida argues that a gift can only ever
present itself in such an economy of exchange and that: ‘the gift is
annulled . . . as soon as it appears as gift or as soon as it signifies itself
as gift, there is no longer any “logic of the gift’” (D errida 1991: 39;
1992:24). If this argum ent is followed through in relation to the giving
of appearance or phenomenality, then it becomes clear th at M arion
is profoundly m istaken to claim that ‘givenness’ can be irreducible or
unconditional. The appearing or m anifestation of phenom ena would
always be conditioned by some kind of economy or process of
exchange. D errida’s argum ent in relation to the gift here is, of course,
consistent w ith his deconstruction of phenom enal presence according
to the logic of différance, whereby presence only manifests itself as
such insofar as it is produced in relation to, and m arked or divided
by, the trace of an im m em orial past (D errida 1976: 65-73). The tem ­
poral economy of différance always precedes, conditions and p ro ­
duces presence; therefore presence is always deferred, contam inated
by its other and by alterity in general: the gift of appearing is never
pure.
Not surprisingly, M arion takes considerable pains to reject any
D erridean inspired objections to his phenom enology of giving based
on the argum ents of Given Time. Indeed, the greater p art of the
second book of Being Given is devoted to showing that D errida’s
analysis of the impossible gift cannot apply to phenom enological
givenness. D errida’s key mistake, he argues, is to conflate phenom ­
enal giving or appearing with a m odel of giving derived from anthro­
pology and sociology .8 The latter, of course, cannot but function
according to an economy of recognition, whereby to give is to receive
within a broader system of exchange. Yet, for M arion, phenom enal
giving is in no way economic, since the gift is given according to a
fundam ental asymmetry or paradoxical logic which he describes in
the following terms: ‘the given, issued from the process of givenness,
appears but leaves concealed givenness itself, which becomes enig­
m atic’ (M arion 1997:100; 2002c: 6 8 ).This perhaps rather Heideggerian
form ulation describes a mode of giving which would be extracted
from any economy of exchange or recognition because the giving
itself is absolutely anonymous and without identifiable origin. It may
be received and may even incur a sense of debt, but without any
identifiable giver the circle of exchange which is so decisive for
D errida is broken. In order to dem onstrate that phenom enal giving
is different from an economy of giving in this crucial regard, M arion
takes each term of the gift in economic exchange, the ‘giver’, the
‘receiver’ and the ‘exchanged object’, and shows that each can be
bracketed off o r suspended when it is a question of appearance or
appearing. His response to D errida hinges essentially on the possibil­
ity of carrying out further operations of the reduction, ‘a triple
epokhë of the transcendental conditions of economic exchange’
(M arion 1997:122; 2002c: 84), in order to show that the phenom enal
gift can be coherently thought in the absence of each of the three
term s (M arion 1997: 124-60; 2002c: 85-113). Once again, the pure
givenness of phenom enal appearance emerges as that which cannot
be reduced after all else has been suspended or bracketed off. Once
again, the gift is shown to be absolute and unconditioned by any
other instance, in this case economic.'This leads M arion to conclude
decisively against D errida that: ‘the g i f t . . . gets its “given” character
from givenness, that is to say, from itself. The gift gives itself intrinsi­
cally from a self giving’ (M arion 1997: 161; 2002c: 113). If the p he­
nom enological gift is viewed properly and phenomenologically
according to the operations of the reduction, then it will become
clear that it ‘owes nothing to any anthropological or sociological
m odel’ (M arion 1997:161; 2002c: 113).
The ambition and daring of M arion’s argum ents in Being Given
are very striking, for they underline what has been m ore or less
implicit from the opening chapters of Reduction and Givenness:
namely, that all of D errid a’s patient and careful readings of Husserl,
including his earliest readings of 4rThe Origin of G eom etry’ and of
voice,sign and signification in Speech and Phenom ena (D errida 1996)
- indeed, the entire deconstruction of presence throughout the
D erridean corpus - none of this can deconstruct phenom enal given­
ness, the irreducible, absolute and unconditional giving of appear­
ance. In response to the D erridean challenge to a phenom enology of
givenness, M arion simply develops the scope and the force of the
third reduction even further. Yet, despite the ambition and daring of
these arguments, what emerges perhaps most strongly from this
encounter betw een M arion and D errida is the extent to which their
difference from each other hinges on the divergence of their respec­
tive readings of Husserl. M arion situates the giving of appearance as
prim ary and unconditioned in his radicalized reading of Husserlian
Gegebenheit. D errida argues that phenom enality is produced via the
tem poral and tem poralizing econom y of différance. M arion would
accuse D errida of a metaphysical gesture insofar as he understands
appearance to be conditioned by this prior tem poral economy (since
appearance is referred to an anterior instance). D errida would accuse
Marion of the same insofar as givenness is endowed with an immediacy,
a proximity and continuity with the immanence of the consciousness
to which it is given (therefore reproducing a logic of presence despite
itself ).9 The question perhaps comes down to a question of tem pora­
lity. In a perhaps rather cursory and underdeveloped m om ent of
Being Given, M arion suggests that tem porality can only be produced
from the event of phenom enal appearance, or from the rhythm ic
succession of such events. D errida, of course, would suggest the oppo­
site: that it is an econom y of spatializing and tem poralizing inscrip­
tion of the trace that gives appearance and, m oreover, that such an
economy cannot be reduced to a metaphysical grounding principle
since it exceeds all ontological disclosure or possibility of reduction,
and therefore all logic of foundation or ground. The question then
would be: does the giving of appearance give tem porality (M arion)
or does tem porality give appearance (D errida)?
It is arguable that the lim itations of M arion’s phenom enology can
begin to be discerned here. His affirmation of givenness as an instance
prior to any economy (of the trace, of différance) perhaps relies too
heavily on an overly formalistic radicalization of the Husserlian p h e ­
nom enological reduction and in so doing fails to satisfactorily pose
the question of the genesis or production of presence, intuition, sig­
nification, conceptuality, etc. The m anner in which this question of
genesis or origin is posed by D errida is arguably one of the m ost
singular and im portant achievem ents of deconstruction in relation to
the H usserlian legacy and M arion’s work is, by contrast, lim ited by
its insistence on an originary anonymity of the giver and of giving
and the absolute and unconditioned givenness of the given (and this,
as will become clear, is also what opens his thought most directly
onto theology and allows for a problem atic blurring of the lines
which separate phenom enological and theological discourse).
Nevertheless, what is im portant to note at this stage in the argum ent
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as a m eans of developing and radicalizing his thought further. The

third reduction is tested against the deconstruction of the gift and
strengthens further M arion’s claim that phenom enality m ust be
viewed as pure unconditioned giving prior to any other horizon,
economic, ontological or otherwise. W hat is true for M arion’s
response to D errida is true also for his response to Dom inique
Janicaud whose objection to the phenom enology of givenness M arion
addresses directly over a num ber of pages just before he comes to
his m ore extended discussion of Given Time (M arion 1997: 104-8;
2002c: 71-4).
The objection of The Theological Turn to M arion’s work is, as
M arion himself presents it, twofold: firstly Janicaud accuses the p he­
nomenology of givenness of being too em pty and abstract in its
understanding of the phenom enon itself.The phenom enon is stripped
down to a thin or minimal given and is so to th e point th a t M arion’s
thinking as a whole emerges as a ‘negative’ phenom enology (M arion
1997: 104; 2002c: 72). Secondly, this minimalism works in favour of,
and prepares the way for, a m ore maximalist or excessive investm ent
in an overall schema of m eaning which allows phenom enality to be
invested with theological motifs and concerns (M arion 1997: 104;
2002c: 72). In short, M arion’s phenom enology is, as Christina
G schw andtner puts it in sum m ary of Janicaud’s position ‘a m ere
negative propaedeutic for his theology’ (G schw andtner 2007: xiv).
In a later work which responds to the debate provoked by The
Theological Turn, Janicaud himself summarizes the criticisms of the
earlier book, suggesting that his broader target was the ‘m ethodolo­
gical displacements or even m ethodological drifting’ of certain con­
tem porary phenomenologists, a drifting which allowed theological
transcendence to enter into phenomenology, thereby betraying it and
decisively deviating from its legitim ate concerns (Janicaud 2005:14).
Thus, while these so-called phenom enologists ‘believe they have
founded the phenom enon and to have enriched phenomenality, they
either overload or bar access to it’ (Janicaud 2005: 15). The essence
of Janicaud’s criticism throughout his debate with M arion is that the
latter grossly misreads and m isrepresents Husserlian thought .10
M arion’s response to Janicaud in Being Given takes the form of a
robust and localized rebuttal of the specific points m entioned above,
but arguably also manifests itself in his wider re-elaboration of the
phenom enology of givenness. On the specific point relating to the
supposed ‘thinness’ or abstraction of the ‘given’ phenom enon, he
notes pointedly that the given can neither be overly abstract nor ‘thin’
since it ‘gives all that is and appears’ (M arion 1997: 104; 2002c: 72).
There is no attem pt here to reduce the richness or density of phe­
nom enality since, if such richness is given, it will necessarily be
accounted for in the operation of the third reduction. On the question
of theology somehow being smuggled into the phenom enology of
givenness, M arion is no less firm: ‘the notion of givenness’, he asserts,
‘has no need, since Husserl, of a theological weight to intervene in
phenom enology’ (M arion 1997:105; 2002c: 72). In each case, he m ain­
tains, his argum ents are grounded in a dem onstrable fidelity to
Husserl rather than in a deviation or ‘m ethodological drifting’ from
him.
Throughout both Reduction and Givenness and Being Given,
M arion takes great pains both to underline this fidelity to Husserlian
phenomenology and to m aintain a clear line of distinction betw een
his phenom enological and theological concerns. Yet, arguably, the
broader argum ents of Being Given relating to ‘saturated’ phenom e-
nality do quite unequivocally both deviate from key aspects of
Husserlian thought and, in part at least, align themselves with theo­
logical motifs.
If the discovery of the third reduction represents the climax of
Reduction and Givenness then the identification and detailed speci­
fication of saturated phenom ena certainly provide the key focus for
the final chapters of Being Given. T he central im portance M arion
comes to confer upon saturated phenom ena and the m anner in which
they come to be characterized is entirely consistent with his radical-
ization of givenness more generally. It will be recalled that in
Reduction and Givenness M arion identified intuition as ‘originally
giving’ and, of course, the giving of appearing as that which gives
intuition its content prior to all other phenomenologically identifi­
able instances such as intentionality or signification. In Being Given,
M arion describes the m ajority of phenom ena as being separable into
two distinct categories: those ‘poor’ in intuition and those said to be
‘common-law’ phenom ena. The form er are found, for example, in
phenom ena such as m athem atical form ulae or abstract ideas and are
constituted according to an excess of concept or signifying intention
over sensible intuition (which is either minimal or absent). Common-
law phenom ena are found, for instance, in technical or m anufactured
objects and are constituted according to a form alized lack of equiva­
lence or inadéquation betw een intuition and intention: the idea or
abstract design of a technical object (intention) will always precede,
and lack exact correspondence with, its m anufacture or presentation
(in sensible intuition). TTie fact that, according to the third reduction,
givenness can be shown to be anterior to intention, signification and
any kind of category or concept whatsoever m eans, for M arion, that
one can think of a third type of phenom enon which would be consti­
tuted in the reverse m anner according to an excess of purely intuitive
givenness over any horizon of intentionality or concept. Indeed,
M arion wants to argue for the necessary ‘possibility of a phenom e­
non where intuition would give m ore, indeed immeasurably m ore,
than intention would ever have aimed at or foreseen’ (M arion 1997:
277; 2002c: 197). Being absolutely unconditioned and prior to inten­
tion or signification, it is entirely possible that the intuitive givenness
of a phenom enon could give itself in excess of these m om ents and in
an unlim ited saturation of intuition. If this is possible, then the phe-
nom enologist has every duty to describe such a phenom enon since,
as M arion writes elsewhere, ‘in phenom enology the least possibility
is binding’ (M arion 2005: 57; 2008b: 34).
The principal characteristic of saturated phenom ena according to
M arion is one of surprise, unexpectedness or unpredictability: ‘First,
the saturated phenom enon cannot be aim ed at [ne peut se viser]. This
impossibility stems from its essentially unforeseeable character’
(M arion 1997: 280; 2002c: 199). A saturated phenom enon is not
something that can appear according to the intentional directedness
of consciousness nor within the horizon of any anticipation or
purposiveness. It is not something that can be adequately described
or prescribed according to categories, concepts or fixed signifying
forms, and certainly it is not something that gives itself up for m ea­
surem ent, verifiable experim entation or scientific determ ination.
Indeed, M arion comes to characterize the saturated phenom enon as
an absolute givenness to and of intuition in excess of all determ inate
or delimiting horizon whatsoever. The saturated phenom enon gives
itself, as it were, absolutely and free from any conditioning by or
analogy with already understood, lived experience. It does not
depend on any existing horizon and is thus an entirely unconditioned
phenom enon (M arion 1997: 296; 2002c: 212). Much of the detailed
phenom enological description of the saturated phenom enon in Being
Given aims at a dem onstration of this excessive character of absolute
givenness. M arion shows, for instance, how such phenom ena would
appear or give themselves outside of K antian categories of under­
standing (of quality, quantity, relation and analogy) (M arion 1997:
280-95; 2002c: 199-212).11 In excess of any horizon or phenom eno­
logical condition of possibility, the saturated phenom enon is p a ra ­
doxical in the sense of being both impossible and possible at the
same time. It is also endowed with a certain ipseity or selfhood: it
gives itself autonom ously as itself and by itself. Giving itself as and
by itself, it is not limited or delim ited eith er by a phenom enological
horizon nor by the limits of an I. It is, as it were, self-constituting
(M arion 1997: 305; 2002c: 219). The characterization of the saturated
phenom enon in these terms is, as has been indicated, entirely consis­
tent with M arion’s account of the anteriority and unconditionality of
givenness and with his discovery of the third reduction .12 Indeed,
such a characterization confers upon the saturated phenom enon an
exemplary and privileged status insofar as it is the autonom ous self­
giving givenness of the phenom enon which is foregrounded above
any other instance. This is phenom enality par excellence, or, as
Marion puts it: ‘The saturated phenom enon in the end establishes the
truth of all phenom enality because it marks, m ore than any other
phenom enon, the givenness from which it comes’ (M arion 1997: 317;
2 0 0 2 c: 227).
Yet in strict H usserlian term s M arion’s form ulations here are
at best unorthodox and at worst un- or supra-phenomenological.
As Janicaud rightly points out, endowing the phenom enon with
an ipseity or selfhood is against both the letter and the spirit of
the Husserlian text (Janicaud 2005: 36-7). Perhaps m ore im por­
tantly, the notion of horizon and the dependency of phenom enal
appearing upon a horizon are indispensable for H usserl’s thinking
and for phenom enology m ore generally. For a phenom enon to
appear and be constituted as such, it must do so and against the
backdrop of a horizon of referential implications that are drawn
in its wake. W ithout horizonality, one could argue, there is no
phenom enality .13
M arion’s attem pt to unbind the saturated phenom enon from its
dependence upon any delimiting horizon and his conferral upon it of
an ipseity or selfhood appear then to give som e reasonable grounds
for the charge of ‘m ethodological displacem ent’ or drift levelled by
Janicaud in relation to phenom enological orthodoxy. Certainly, his
assertions of fidelity to H usserl’s text need to be viewed critically and
not taken at face value.The question arises here as to w hether objects
or phenom ena are still constituted by pure or transcendental con­
sciousness, as the post-K antian inflection of Husserlian phenom enol­
ogy would insist, or whether, in a surprising reversal of the spirit and
letter of H usserl’s text, it is now the case that givenness itself is con­
stitutive.The implication of M arion’s argum ents is that it is conscious­
ness that is now constituted in and by the ipseity and unconditioned
givenness of the given. This is arguably a reversal or inversion of the
post-K antian emphasis on the constitutive natu re of the subject, of
consciousness, or of the transcendental ego. D espite the prim ary
emphasis here on the originary or sensible intuition, there is som e­
thing in this reversal of the constitutive and the constituted which
resem bles or echoes the anti-Kantianism of Badiou and Laruelle
discussed in chapters 6 and 7. The implicatioris of this will be assessed
m ore fully in the conclusion.
In light of this, it is arguable that the persuasiveness of Janicaud’s
objections is less apparent when the critical question posed to M arion
relates less to phenom enological fidelity and m ore to the innovative
force of his overall transform ation of Husserlian thought. R ather
than objecting to M arion’s lack of fidelity to Husserl, his phenom e­
nology of givenness should perhaps best be judged in term s of the
originality of what it allows him to think.

Saturation and the self

Saturated phenom ena in M arion are divided into four distinct m odal­
ities: the event, the idol, flesh, and the icon. D espite this apparently
categorizing gesture, M arion argues that what characterizes each of
the moments phenomenologically speaking is an excess of appearing
or givenness over all intentional directedness and categorial determ i­
nation. Each of the four modalities is schematically characterized in
the following terms:

1 In the case of the event, something occurs which is not limited to

or determ inable by a specific instant or place, n o r limited to the
experience of any one individual. The event here is the historic
event, one whose impact will be felt by an entire population and
whose meaning cannot be grasped with the scope of any one
interpretative gesture. Indeed, it is the very ongoing and non-
finite process of deciding upon or interpreting an event which
constitutes historical community as such. The event imposes itself
upon a collectivity of individuals in excess of any singular inten­
tional directedness or horizon of expectation (M arion 1997:
318-19; 2002c: 228-9).
2 M arion gives the work of art, and m ore specifically painting, as
the privileged exam ple of an idol. A painting gives a sensible
intuition or sensory perception which is in excess of any determ i­
nate meaning, concept, category or classification. We might bring
categories or concepts to the painting but, as with the historical
event, no such category will be able definitively to account for the
surfeit of sensible (visual) intuition the painting makes manifest
(M arion 2005: 158; 2008b: 128); any such definitive accounting of
m eaning is deferred or rendered non-identical with the excess of
phenom enal appearance for which it seeks to account (subject to
a logic of différance).
3 Prior to any intentional directedness of consciousness to an object,
the experience of flesh is one of auto-affection or originary sense
impression. Pain, suffering, joy, pleasure, indeed sensation of any
kind are all auto-affections of the flesh. In this context, flesh needs
 to be understood as the fundam ental medium of givenness itself:
only in the auto-affection of flesh, in excess of all intention and
signification, is any intuition given at all, and perhaps most im por­
tantly, the flesh gives the self to itself: 4flesh shows itself only in
giving itself - and, in this first “self,” it gives me to m yself (M arion
1997: 323; 2002c: 232).
4 M arion describes the icon as that which offers nothing to the gaze
and which, inaccessible to the gaze of a spectator, nevertheless
imposes its own gaze upon the spectator. The icon is the gaze of
the other upon the self: 4it resides precisely in the black holes of
two pupils, in the sole and minuscule space where, on the surface
of the bodies of others, there is nothing to see . .. in the gaze
facing me. The gaze that others cast and make weigh on me th e re ­
fore does not give itself to my gaze’ (M arion 1997: 323-4; 2002c:
232). The icon then is the face of the other; it is not constituted
by intentional consciousness but rather imposes itself upon it in
and of itself.

Readers familiar with the broader field of recent French thought

will no doubt recognize echoes of other thinkers in each of these
characterizations. The description of the event may recall Paul
R icoeur’s collective herm eneutics of history (R icoeur 1992; 2006) or
even A lain B adiou’s conception of the event (discussed in chapter 6 ).
The description of painting by which M arion characterizes the idol
strongly resonates with a D erridean thinking of différance and
perhaps m ore specifically with Nancy’s account of the artw ork in
texts such as The Muses and The G round o f the Im age. M arion’s
characterization of flesh recalls M erleau-Ponty’s thinking in The
Visible and the Invisible and, much m ore directly and specifically,
Michel H enry’s phenom enology of auto-affective im m anent life
(M erleau-Ponty 1968; H enry 1973). Likewise, the description of the
icon clearly repeats the Lévinassian m otif of the face of the O ther.
D espite these resonances, echoes or repetitions, it would be w rong to
dismiss M arion’s thinking of saturated phenom ena as m erely deriva­
tive. R ather, what he can be said to have achieved is m ore of an
original synthesis of a num ber of the key advances in recent French
phenomenological and post-phenom enological thought: herm eneu-
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auto-affection (H enry), and the gaze of the other (Lévinas). The

scope of the phenom enon has been extended by th e thought of given­
ness and saturation in order to incorporate the otherwise elusive and
excessive phenomenality of these m om ents or, as M arion puts it, 4Far
from underestim ating the most recent advances in phenom enol­
ogy . . . I am only trying to confirm them by assigning each a precise
site within givenness’ (M arion 1997: 441; 2002c: 321-2).
With th e exception of the idol which manifests a surfeit of visible
intuition, M arion’s thinking of saturation allows for the incorpora·*
tion (within the phenom enological scope of the third reduction) of
phenom ena which cannot appear as visible objects, entities or beings,
but which nevertheless dem onstrably do make themselves m anifest
and therefore do require to be thought phenomenologically. None of
the four modalities of saturation - event, idol, flesh and icon - can
be reduced to a horizon of objectality or beingness (étantité); there­
fore, all four require M arion’s broadened notion of the phenom enon
as first and forem ost that which is given in order to be thought.
It is here that the phenom enology of givenness edges m ost proxi-
mally towards theological concerns. Having outlined the different
modalities of saturation, the text of Being Given immediately moves
on to what M arion calls the phenom enon of ‘revelation’. Since the
space of phenom enality has now been extended to encompass experi­
ences of the invisible and the objectively unpresentable, it is perhaps
only logical that revelation should be welcomed into the fold of
legitim ate phenom enological concerns. With all due probity, M arion
insists that phenom enology cannot be the arbiter of w hether the
experience of revelation can, has or will occur; it can only circum­
scribe or describe the phenom enality of such an occurrence in term s
of how it would occur were it so to do. Yet despite such care, it could
be asked, as Janicaud repeatedly does, w hether M arion’s phenom eno­
logical thought does not too neatly prepare the way for Christian,
and specifically R om an Catholic, modes of religious experience
or theological form. It is true that, when M arion does stray into
direct religious references of any kind in his phenom enological
writing, they are all without exception references to the Christian
Bible and the Christian theological tradition .14 O ne m ight therefore
question the extent to which his descriptions of saturated phenom ena
such as revelation are compatible with non-Christian and/or non-
m onotheistic religious experience. Alternatively, and given the im por­
tance of these issues for the entirety of M arion’s phenom enological
and theological output, one might w onder how far he is able to
account for the fact that what is perhaps most strikingly given 111
religious experience is its cultural specificity and its conditioning or
shaping by contingent cultural and historical horizons or forms. Once
again, the question of the production or genesis of the gift needs to
be posed, together with the specifically D erridean question of w hether
absolute unconditionality is at all possible and whether the gift is not
always an economized (and therefore spatio-tem porally contingent
and conditioned) instance.
Yet if one decides to be generous and to give M arion the benefit
of the doubt here, then his attem pt in Being Given to rigorously
dem arcate and keep separate phenomenological and theological con­
cerns needs to be taken seriously. W hat then emerges as perhaps most
interesting and original in the phenom enology of givenness is not its
opening onto theological concerns or religious experience, but rather
the account M arion gives of the ‘self’ of givenness.
It is here that the phenom enon of flesh, rather than that of revela­
tion, comes into greater prominence. Flesh, it was noted earlier, is the
originary medium of auto-affection and ‘gives me to m yself (M arion
1997: 323; 2002c: 232). Yet M arion argues that the self of givenness,
that to which giving is given, is no form of grounding or foundational
‘subject’ (such as emerges in the Cartesian cogito for example). Nor
is it a transcendental unity of apperception (Kant), nor still a
Husserlian transcendental ego or Heideggerian Dasein. Since giving
is given in excess of objectality and being and in the absence of all
metaphysical ground, the self to which it is given in the auto-affection
of the flesh is itself also ungrounded and irreducible to any logic of
causation or foundation. Across the pages of both Reduction and
Givenness and Being Given, this self which is given to itself only in
and through the receipt of givenness is nam ed in a num ber of differ­
ent ways: as the interloqué, as the ‘receiver’ (Γ attributaire) (M arion
1997: 343; 2002c: 249), and also finally as the ‘gifted’ (l’adonné)
(M arion 1997: 369; 2002c: 268). M arion repeatedly and explicitly
returns to the question posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, namely ‘Who comes
after the subject ? ’15 A fter the subject, he repeatedly answers, comes
the self that receives givenness and is constituted by its reception
of, or ‘devotion’ to, givenness. The radicalization of Husserlian
Gegebenheit allows for the broadening of phenom enality and the
rigorous description of a range of invisible, excessive or resolutely
paradoxical phenom ena but, M arion insists: ‘A t the centre stands no
“subject”, but a gifted, he whose function consists in receiving what
is imm easurably given to him, and whose privilege is confined to the
fact that he is him self received from what he receives’ (M arion 1997:
442; 2002c: 322).
A s was indicated in a preliminary fashion earlier, the ipseity of the
given phenom enon, the fact that it gives itself by and of itself, m eans
that a crucial reversal in the constitution of phenom enality has
occurred. To repeat, whereas in H usserl consciousness or the tra n ­
scendental ego is constitutive, in the auto-affection of the flesh which
gives the self to itself in its receipt of the self-giving phenom enon, the
self is now constituted (M arion 1997: 369; 2002c: 268). Flesh gives the
self to itself but only insofar as something is given in and to the flesh.
Once again, one can begin to discern a wider reversal in the direction
of constitution which is m arked in different ways in all the thinkers
discussed in this book. Badiou and Laruelle have already been m en­
tioned, but a similar case can also be m ade for other thinkers dis­
cussed here, such as Stiegler and M alabou.
In the context of M arion’s thinking of saturated phenomenality, of
flesh and of self, a num ber of conclusions can be drawn with regard
to the originality or im portance of his formulations. Firstly, in his
attem pt to integrate an overcom ing of metaphysics with a philosophy
of the unconditional given, M arion, like Michel H enry before him,
has created a phenomenology of m ateriality or of m aterial im m a­
nence. For all the alignment of his thinking with theological questions,
his thought, and all possibilities of thinking for which it allows, remains
rooted in the m ateriality of the flesh, in affect and in ungrounded
auto-affection. Secondly, M arion has at the very same time developed
a phenom enological account of finite existence which nevertheless
thinks of finitude as constituted only in and through a de-lim itation
of the finite. The saturated phenom enon, that which ‘establishes the
truth of all phenom enality’ (M arion 1997: 317; 2002c: 227), appears
unconditionally and in excess of any dependence upon a finite horizon
or upon any bounded condition of possibility. Finitude, here, can only
be thought in terms of the infinitization of finite existence (and in this
respect M arion can interestingly be com pared to Nancy’s thinking of
‘infinitude’ as discussed in the next chapter). Thirdly, M arion devel­
ops a notion of the self to whom givenness is given which transform s
traditional metaphysical notions of subjectivity viewed as a founda­
tion or ground of knowledge, as well as post-K antian and phenom ­
enological notions of consciousness as constitutive.
These motifs of materiality, infinity, and of an ungrounded self
will be repeated and transform ed in diverse ways in the thinking of
the other philosophers treated by this study. W hether one embraces
or refuses the alignment with theology that M arion’s philosophy
offers, his thinking of givenness, of saturation, of flesh and of self
undoubtedly articulates an original post-deconstructive and post­
metaphysical reform ulation of phenom enology and a powerful rein-
vigoration of the phenomenological method.
JeanLu Nancy: The infinity
of Sense

Jean-Luc Nancy has published over sixty books and over four hundred
articles in a career which has spanned just over four decades. Although
he was initially best known in the anglophone academic world for his
work on community published in the 1980s, since the late 1990s there
has been a burgeoning interest in his philosophy as a whole and he
has emerged as the most prominent and influential French philosopher
working in the wake of D erridean deconstruction .1Yet, while Nancy’s
philosophy is certainly a deconstructive or post-deconstructive think­
ing, it also, and from a very early stage, decisively diverges from
D errida. Nancy’s ‘singular-plural’ ontology, his thinking of finitude, of
shared finite existence, sense and world, uses philosophical term s and
figures which would be placed under erasure or arouse a high degree
of suspicion when seen from a deconstructive perspective: terms such
as ‘being’, ‘presence’, ‘experience’, ‘existence’, ‘tru th ’, ‘touch’ and
even, m ore recently, theological term s such as ‘incarnation’ and the
‘divine’.
Nancy has sometimes b e e n characterized as a thinker of finitude
whose philosophy is m ost indebted to Heideggerian thought .2 Yet
such a characterization does not do justice to the diversity and
breadth of his thinking. O n the one hand, it is m ore true to say that,
like D errida’s thought, Nancy’s philosophy grows out of phenom e­
nology in general and could more properly be characterized as post-
phenomenological. On the other hand, reducing Nancy simply to a
thinker of ‘finitude’ in the H eideggerian mould does not take into
account the extent to which he is also, and at the same tim e, a thinker
of infinity, or what one m ight call the ‘infinitude’ of finitude. Taken in
this light, Nancy should be aligned far m ore with figures such as
M aurice Blanchot or even Em m anuel Levinas rather than solely or
straightforwardly with Heidegger. The diversity of his thought is
reflected in its successive periods of developm ent. In the 1970s, Nancy
(often with his friend and colleague the late Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe) publishes what are principally philosophical com m entar­
ies, on, for instance, Lacan, Hegel, K ant and Descartes. In the 1980s,
he begins to develop his im portant thinking around the question of
the political and of comm unity (again with Lacoue-L abarthe ).3 This
decade also begins to see the em ergence of a m ore ambitious philo­
sophical thinking in m ajor works such as The Experience o f Freedom
(Nancy 1988a; 1993c). In the 1990s, Nancy publishes the principal
works upon which his status as an im portant philosopher of the late
tw entieth and early twenty-first century rests. 'These include a major
work of ontology, Being Singular Plural (Nancy 1996a; 2000c) and
also works which engage am bitiously with the question of thought
itself, and with questions of em bodim ent, world disclosure and sense
constitution (A Finite Thinking (Nancy 1990a; 2003c), Corpus (Nancy
1992a; 2008b), and The Sense o f the World (Nancy 1993a; 1997e)).
From th e middle of the 1990s through to the first decade of this
century, Nancy develops a sustained engagem ent with the question
of art and with aesthetics. Finally, from the late 1990s onwards, he has
also pursued what he calls a ‘deconstruction of C hristianity’, a project
which has continued right up to the time of writing this study with
the publication of the second of two volumes in early 2010 (Nancy
2005a; 2008c; 2010b). Throughout all these successive stages of his
career, Nancy has returned to and rew orked elem ents of his previous
work such that, taken as a whole, his philosophy emerges as a complex
and sustained engagem ent with a num ber of fundam ental concerns.
'These concerns could be characterized, albeit rather broadly and
schematically, as follows. Nancy’s philosophy aims to develop an
ontology, to think being as coexistence and as a singular plural ‘being-
w ith\ It engages in a sustained m anner with the interrelated ques­
tions of comm unity and of the political It aims to pose the question
of the subject and of a post-deconstructive subjectivity and does so
in relation to the questions of em bodim ent, shared worldly existence,
sense perception and sense itself, understood broadly speaking as the
pre-symbolic meaningfulness of a shared bodily exposure to the
world. It engages with what one might call the Uechnicity’ of worldly
existence and sensory experience and on this basis develops a sus­
tained m editation on the status of the arts. Finally, it aims to think
the spacing, sharing and coming to presence of the world in terms of
an exposure to/of an infinite excess of sense. There is something in
this exposure of worldly existence to, or as, infinite excess that Nancy
will come to call divine and to think in his deconstruction of
Christianity. W hat follows here will seek to explore these interrelated
concerns further and show that, despite the diversity of Nancy’s phil­
osophical corpus, it nevertheless does form a corpus, albeit one which
insists on its own fragm entary status, on its status as philosophy which
is itself exposed to infinite excess.

Infinitude

Finite thought em bodim ent and sense

Finitude could perhaps be m ost easily understood in term s of limits,

that is, as the state of being finite, bounded or limited. The task of a
finite thinking, then, would be to think thought itself as that which,
without renouncing the values of truth or universality, can only think
within and at its own limit, touching at its limit and at its own singu­
larity of thought (Nancy 1990a: 13; 2003c: 5). Towards the beginning
of A Finite Thinking, Nancy argues that this task is inseparable from
the question of ‘sense’ and of the finitude of sense: ‘it could be a
question of sense’s essential finitude - something that would, in turn,
dem and an essential finitude of thinking’ (Nancy 1990a: 13; 2003c: 4).
The use of the term ‘sense’ here is by no means straightforward and,
arguably, the entirety of Nancy’s philosophy from th e beginning
of the 1990s onwards can, in one way or another, be viewed as an
attem pt to elaborate upon its complex status and meaning. N ever­
theless, A Finite Thinking does begin within an attem pt to give an
initial definition of this difficult term: ‘By “sense” I mean sense in the
singular sense taken absolutely: the sense of life, of Man, of the world,
the sense of existence; the sense of existence which is or which m akes
sense, which without sense would not exist’ (Nancy 1990a: 10-11;
2003c: 3). W hat is clear from the outset is that sense, here, has an
ontological or existential status. If a world or anything in it can be
said to be or to exist, if it can be perceived, taken as an object of
thought or simply experienced as such, then that is because it in some
way always already makes sense, and does so before or prior to con­
ceptual determ ination, and prior to our giving it a fixed signification,
or attributing to it predicates or characteristics. The implications of
the ontological status of sense will be explored further as this discus­
sion progresses.
W hat is worth underlining at this stage is that finitude, for Nancy,
is not conceived as a kind of enclosure of thought within its own
limits. He is not trying to argue that finite thinking is some kind of
prison house which would deprive thought of any access to truth, or
condem n it to be rooted in determ inable specificities of historical
context or situation. Nancy’s finite thinking is not a relativism or
perspectivism where one point of view has exactly the same value as
any other. Nor is finitude here a lim itation of thought which would
imply an existence, beyond the limit, of a limitlessness or of an infi­
nite (and therefore theological) transcendence. A lready in A Finite
Thinking Nancy understands finitude in term s of a lim itation which
is always, one might say always already, delimited or exposed to a
certain limitlessness of actual and m aterial worldly existence. Finite
thinking is ‘not a thinking of limitation, which implies the unlimited«
ness of a beyond, but a thinking of the limit as that on which, infi­
nitely finite, existence arises [s'enlève] and to which it is exposed
[s'expose]* (Nancy 1990a: 48-9; 2003c: 27). A ny understanding of
Nancy as a thinker of finitude needs to engage with the difficult logic
of the limit which is being articulated here and, in particular, needs
to engage with the force and implications of the form ulation ‘infi­
nitely finite’ {infiniment finie). Such a form ulation is no doubt highly
indebted to the thought and writing of Blanchot in texts such as The
Infinite Conversation (Blanchot 1993) and clearly signals that Nancy’s
thinking of finitude is in no way reducible to the thought of an exis­
tence which would simply be enclosed within finite limits (e.g. those
of contingency, mortality, language). A t the same time, Nancy’s use
of French reflexive verb form s such as s ’enlever and s'exposer can
appear to be rather opaque, particularly to those unfamiliar with his
thought.
The best way to tease out what might be at stake in these perhaps
elliptical form ulations is to turn to Nancy’s thinking of sense and
em bodim ent such as it is developed in texts such as Corpus, The
Sense o f the World and elsewhere. As has already been indicated,
sense, for Nancy, has an ontological status: sense is always the sense
of an existence which in some way always already m akes sense. Yet,
as the sense o/existence, sense here is always engaged with a certain
kind of m ateriality or concreteness. This m ateriality is, first and fore­
most, that of sensing bodies which perceive a world through the
senses and through sensory experience m ore generally. Nancy is
interested m the way that the spatiality of worldly existence is dis­
closed to us through situated and em bodied being. In this context,
his ontology of sense is also and at the same tim e an ontology of
bodies. Sense and bodies are co-articulated in a fundam ental way
which discloses the world to us as existing. In Corpus, Nancy speaks
of an O ntology of the body’ and argues that ‘bodies are existence,
the very act of ex-istence, being" (Nancy 1992a: 20; 2008b: 19). A t the
same time, he also speaks of the body as a ‘body of sense' (Nancy
1992a: 24; 2008b: 25) and argues that "The body is the architectonics
o f sense' (Nancy 1992a: 25; 2008b: 25). Being, then, is disclosed in an
organization or structure in which sense and bodies are engaged to
form the elem ent in which the existence of a spatial, m aterial world
can be experienced as such.
These points are developed further in The Sense o f the World
where Nancy argues that this co-articulation of sense and bodies
needs to be understood as ‘being-toward-the-world’. The original
French term etre-au-monde can translate both as being-in-the-world
and as being-toward-the-world, depending on what kind of inflection
one gives to the preposition à which can have many meanings, includ­
ing ‘a t y t o y with’ and ‘in’. Nancy is trying to think sense as a horizon
of shared meaningfulness to which bodies are exposed in their appre­
hension or perception of a world and in the interaction of bodies
with the world and each other: their touching, their contact, their
m utual spacing and crossing. In this context the co-articulation of
sense and bodies is always a ‘tow ard’ rather than simply an ‘in ’,
insofar as the meaningfulness of the world is experienced always in
a projection of bodily sensory experience tow ards the w orld and
others or, in Nancy’s preferred term, its ‘exposure’ to them. It should
be underlined that sense, here, is not yet signification in any fixed or
determ inable form; it is not articulated in a relation of signifier to
signified or in a symbolic order in the structuralist/Lacanian sense:
‘“being-toward-the-world”, if it takes place (and it does take place),
is caught up in sense well before all signification. It makes, demands
or proposes sense this side of or beyond all signification . . . Thus,
world is not m erely the correlative of sense; it is structured as sense,
and reciprocally, sense is structured as world' (Nancy 1993a: 17-18;
1997e: 7-8). Understanding the way in which sense, for Nancy, is a
horizon of meaningfulness ‘well before all signification’ is central to
understanding his philosophy as a whole .4 Proposing the sense of the
world as an instance which is prior or anterior to any symbolic order
or signifying process is also to confer upon it a certain m ateriality or
concreteness, a m ateriality which is of a different order than any
‘m ateriality of the signifier’ or of discourse as m aterial practice.
Nancy is trying to think about the way our embodied sense percep­
tion and bodily engagem ents with a world are always caught up in
sense such that something always already m akes sense in the very
m om ent that it is sensed or perceived. He articulates this engage­
m ent of the senses with sense using the figure of ‘touch’: ‘It is not
a m atter of signification, but of the sense of the world as its very
concreteness, that on which our existence touches and by which it is
touched, in all possible senses 5 (Nancy 1993a: 22; 1997e: 10). As is
often the case, Nancy is using an apparently straightforw ard every­
day term in a way which is in fact very complex and which resonates
with a philosophical register which has a long history within the
canon of E uropean philosophy .5
It is impossible, within the context of this short discussion, to do
full justice to the richness and complexity of Nancy’s use of the figure
of touch. Nevertheless, some insight can be gleaned from an impor­
tant passage in The Muses, Nancy’s first m ajor book on art published
in 1994: ‘Touch is nothing other than the touch of sense altogether
and of all the senses. It is their sensuality as such . . . touch presents
the proper m om ent of sensible exteriority, it presents it as such and
as sensible’ (Nancy 1994: 35; 1996b: 17). ‘Touch form s one body with
sensing, or it m akes of sensing a body, it is simply the corpus of the
senses’ (Nancy 1994: 35-6; 1996b: 17). It is the figure of touch here
which acts as the hinge or point of articulation betw een sense under­
stood as a horizon of meaningfulness and the senses understood in
term s of the different forms of bodily sense perception (hearing,
seeing, touch, taste, etc.). Touch at once becomes the privileged sense
of all the five senses insofar as all five could be said to be a kind of
contact or proximity in distance with a sensible exteriority. A t the
same time, touch becomes the figure by which the always already
meaningful dim ension of sensible experience can be thought: when
we perceive or sense something, we ‘touch on’ or ‘a t’ its sense in a
way which is not yet a determ ined or determ inable signification. O ne
can perhaps begin to see here the way in which Nancy uses the term
‘touch’ to describe, one might say post-phenomenologically, the sense
of the world, the sense which the world is insofar as it is both m ean­
ingful and at the same time embodied, m aterial or concrete. In the
figure of touch, Nancy is decisively shifting away from the figures of
seeing, viewing and other optical m etaphors which ru n through p h e ­
nom enological discourse: ‘world invites us to no longer think on the
level of the phenom enon (as surging forth, appearing, becoming
visible, brilliance, occurrence, event), but on the level, let us say for
the m oment, of disposition (spacing, touching, contact, crossing)’
(Nancy 1993a: 34, n. 19; 1997e: 176). The figure of touch, then, reor­
ganizes ilie phenomenological discourse of world disclosure and
sense constitution around a language of spacing and the m utual
contact of bodies in a shared m aterial world. In this manner, the
question of phenom enality gives way to the question of shared m ate­
rial existence.
Being singular plural

If this thinking of sense and bodies represents a decisive shift away

from a phenom enological discourse, it does not, as has already been
emphasized, attem pt to break with ontology, as would, in different
ways, Levinas, Blanchot and D errida. Again, though, care needs to be
taken to understand the way in which Nancy uses the language of
being, since, as before, his ontology of finitude is inseparable from a
thinking of the infinite. If, for Levinas, ontology and finitude rep re ­
sent a gesture of enclosure (of existence) and, indeed, of violent
foreclosure (of the ethical m om ent), this is decisively not the case for
Nancy .6 This is m ade very clear in a text such as Being Singular Plural
where, as the title suggests, ontology occupies a central position.
Building upon previous works and, in particular, upon A Finite
Thinking and The Sense o f the World, Nancy reiterates the ontologi­
cal status conferred on sense: ‘Being itself is given to us as sense’
(Nancy 1996a: 20; 2000c: 2; translation modified). The language of
being is used here without inverted commas and without being sub­
jected to any irony or erasure. Yet being is thought in Being Singular
Plural strictly and rigorously in term s of the infinite and irreducible
excess of being over itself. The language Nancy uses to describe this
excess of being over itself is that of being-with, coexistence, and the
singular plurality of origins deployed within the logic of thinking at
the limit of thought discussed above. Despite the lines of polemical
opposition that separate the two philosophers, there is much that is
shared here with A lain B adiou’s ontology of inconsistent multiplicity
elaborated in chapter 6 . Nancy’s thinking of em bodim ent and sense
is clearly unequivocally and diametrically opposed to B adiou’s sub­
tractive approach to ontology and to his affirmation of a certain
Platonism. However, N äncean singular plurality and B adiou’s incon­
sistent m ultiplicity both affirm the actual infinity of being, its irreduc­
ible excess over itself, and its irreducibility to any horizon of unity, or
any mode of substance or ground. G ranted, Badiou would say that
the N ancean discourse of thinking at the limit is not an adequate
means to think the infinite excess of being over itself (this is reserved
for the discourse of m athematics alone) but this should not detract
from the similarity of their respective positions in this regard.
Nancy’s argum ents run broadly as follows: if being is given to us
as sense, this is so only insofar as a fundam ental privilege is accorded
to the ‘us’ or the ‘we’ of this donation and only insofar as sense is
always and only an elem ent which is shared. As Nancy himself puts
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populace. There were mechanical imperfections of many kinds, but
progress is made always through experimentation.
Certainly a great many of the people gathered that day had never
before seen an aeroplane. The planes mostly were old war material,
Jennys and Canucks. The Army and Navy were represented with the
planes available at that time—Standards, D. H.’s, Douglasses,
Martins, etc. None of the ships stand out distinctly in my mind as
types. I imagine there were some bombing planes and pursuit jobs,
but they all seemed to my untrained eye more or less routine two-
seaters. Of course at that time I knew somewhat less than I do now.
However, one thing I did know that day. I wanted to fly. I was
there with my father, who, I fear, wasn’t having a very good time. As
the dust blew in his eyes, and his collar wilted, I think his
enthusiasm for aviation, such as it was, waned. He was slightly non-
plussed, therefore, when I said:
“Dad, you know, I think I’d like to fly.”
Heretofore we had been milling about behind the ropes which
lined the field. At my suggestion we invited ourselves into the arena
and looked about. I saw a man tagged “official” and asked my father
to talk with him about instruction. I felt suddenly shy about making
inquiries myself, lest the idea of a woman’s being interested in trying
to fly be too hilarious a thought for the official.
My father was game; he even went so far as to make an
appointment for me to have a trial hop at what was then Rogers
Airport. I am sure he thought one ride would be enough for me, and
he might as well act to cure me promptly.
Next day was characteristically fair and we arrived early on the
field. There was no crowd, but several planes stood ready to go.
A pilot came forward and shook hands.
“A good day to go up,” he said, pleasantly.
My father raised an inexperienced eye to the sky and agreed.
Agreeing verbally is as far as he went, or has ever gone, for he has
not yet found a day good enough for a first flight.
The pilot nodded to another flyer. “He’ll go up with us.”
“Why?” I asked.
The pair exchanged grins. Then I understood. I was a girl—a
“nervous lady.” I might jump out. There had to be somebody on
hand to grab my ankle as I went over. It was no use to explain I had
seen aeroplanes before and wasn’t excitable. I was not to be
permitted to go alone in the front cockpit.
The familiar “contact” was spoken and the motor came to life. I
suppose there must be emotion with all new experiences, but I can’t
remember any but a feeling of interest on this occasion. The noise of
the motor seemed very loud—I think it seems so to most people on
their first flight.
The plane rose quickly over some nearby oil derricks which are
part of the flora in Southern California. I was surprised to be able to
see the sea after a few moments of climbing. At 2,000 feet the pilot
idled the motor and called out the altitude for me. The sensation of
speed is of course absent, and I had no idea of the duration of the
hop. When descent was made I know the field looked totally
unfamiliar. I could not have picked it out from among the hundreds
of little squares into which populated areas are divided. One of the
senses which must be developed in flying is an acuteness in
recognizing characteristics of the terrain, a sense seldom possessed
by a novice.
Lessons in flying cost twice as much in 1920 as they do now. Five
hundred dollars was the price for ten or twelve hours instruction,
and that was just half what had been charged a few years before.
When I came down I was ready to sign up at any price to have a
try at the air myself. Two things deterred me at that moment. One
was the tuition fee to be wrung from my father, and the other the
determination to look up a woman flyer who, I had heard, had just
come to another field. I felt I should be less self-conscious taking
lessons with her, than with the men who overwhelmed me with their
capabilities. Neta Snook, the first woman to be graduated from the
Curtiss School of Aviation, had a Canuck—an easier plane to fly than
a Jenny, whose Canadian sister it was. Neta was good enough to
take payments for time in the air, when I could make them, so in a
few days I began hopping about on credit with her. I had failed to
convince my father of the necessity of my flying, so my economic
status itself remained a bit in the air.
I had opportunity to get a fair amount of information about
details of flying despite my erratic finances. In Northampton, where
I had stayed a while after the war, I had taken a course in
automobile repair with a group of girls from Smith College. To me
the motor was as interesting as flying itself, and I welcomed a
chance to help in the frequent pulling down and putting together
which it required.
MY FIRST TRAINING SHIP, 1920
 A. E., 1928

New students were instructed in planes with dual controls; the

rudder and stick in the front cockpit are connected with those in the
rear so that any false move the student makes can be corrected by
the instructor. Every move is duplicated and can be felt by both
flyers. One lands, takes off, turns, all with an experienced
companion in command. When passengers are carried these controls
are removed for safety’s sake with little trouble. If there is telephone
connection, communication and explanation are much easier than by
any methods of signs or shouting. This telephone equipment, by the
way, seems to be more usual in England than here.
I am glad I didn’t start flying in the days of the “grass cutters,”
which exemplified an earlier method of flying instruction. One of the
amusing sights of the war training period was that of the novices
hopping about the countryside in these penguin planes. They could
fly only a few feet from the ground and had to be forced off to do
that. The theory had been that such activity offered maximum
practice in taking off and landing. In addition it was a sort of Roman
holiday for the instructors—they had nothing much to do but, so to
speak, wind up their play-things and start them off. And nothing very
serious could happen one way or the other.
It was really necessary for a woman to wear breeks and leather
coats in these old days of aviation. The fields were dirty and planes
hard to enter. People dressed the part in a semi-military khaki outfit,
and in order to be as inconspicuous as possible I fell into the same
styles. A leather coat I had then, I wore across the Atlantic, eight
years later.
Neta sold her plane and I bought one and changed instructors
after a few hours’ work. John Montijo, an ex-army instructor, took
charge of me and soloed me after some strenuous times together. I
refused to fly alone until I knew some stunting. It seemed foolhardy
to try to go up alone without the ability to recognize and recover
quickly from any position the plane might assume, a reaction only
possible with practice. In short, to become thoroughly at home in
the air, stunting is as necessary as, and comparable to, the ability to
drive an automobile in traffic. I was then introduced to aerobatics
and felt not a bit afraid when sent “upstairs” alone for the first time.
Usually a student takes off nonchalantly enough but doesn’t dare
land until his gas supply fails. Any field is familiar with the sight of
beginners circling about overhead, staying up solely because they
can’t bear to come down. The thought of landing without their
instructors to help them, if need be, becomes torture, which is only
terminated by the force of gravity.
 In soloing—as in other activities—it is far easier to start
something than it is to finish it. Almost every beginner hops off with
a whoop of joy, though he is likely to end his flight with something
akin to D. T.’s.
I reversed the process. In taking off for the first time alone, one
of the shock absorbers broke, causing the left wing to sag just as I
was leaving the ground. I didn’t know just what had happened, but I
did know something was wrong and wondered what I had done. The
mental agony of starting the plane had just been gone through and I
was suddenly faced with the agony of stopping it. It was all in a
matter of seconds, of course, and somehow I contrived to do the
proper thing. My brief “penguin” flight came to a prompt conclusion
without further mishap.
When the damage had been repaired, I took courage to try again,
this time climbing about 5,000 feet, playing around a little, and
returning to make a thoroughly rotten landing. At once I had my
picture taken by a gentleman from Iowa who happened to be
touring California and wanted a few rare sights for the album back
home.
 © Keystone Views
SOUTHAMPTON—MRS. GUEST, GORDON, A. E., STULTZ, MRS. FOSTER
WELCH
AFTER MY FIRST “SOLO,” 1921
 CHAPTER III
MY OWN PLANE

IN the war some students were soloed with as little as four hours’
training. That meant they were considered competent to go up in
their planes alone after this amount of instruction. Obviously these
were exceptional students. In civilian flying, ten or twelve hours, I
imagine, would be about the minimum training. But these hours
usually mean simply routine instruction in straight flying, comparable
to the novice driving his automobile along the level uncrowded
country highway. For the automobilist beginner the problem comes
when he first meets traffic, and a big truck, say, suddenly cuts in
ahead of him. Can he handle the emergency, or will he crash? And
what will the beginner do when his car, or the other fellow’s, skids
on the wet pavement for the first time? The answer is that good
driving results from experience and the requisite of having met many
varied situations.
And so with planes. Straight flying is, of course, the necessary
basis; but it is the ability to meet crises, large and small, which
counts. And the only way to train for that is, as I have said, to have
actual instruction in stunting and in meeting emergencies. To gain
experience after the beginner has soloed, and while he is at home in
a plane he knows intimately and upon a field familiar to him, he
should play around in the air for four or five hours alone, practising
landings, take-offs, turns and all the rest of it where he is perfectly
safe and can come down easily any time.
Then he should have three or four more hours’ instruction in
emergency situations. This feature is too often overlooked. As I
visualize it, the beginner should go up with an instructor with dual
controls again and should get himself into—and out of—one scrape
after another, including forced landings. After he has done so
repeatedly, he will have confidence and a real feeling of what must
be done, and done instantly, under any given set of circumstances.
More of this sort of follow-through training and there would probably
be fewer of the accidents which too often are beginners’ bad luck.
I had rolled up the tremendous total of two and one-half hours’
instruction when I decided that life was incomplete unless I owned
my own plane. Those were the days of rather heavy, under-powered
ships which lifted themselves from the ground with a lumbering
effort. The small sport planes were just beginning to appear, most of
them in experimental stages. The field where I flew was owned by
W. G. Kinner of the Kinner Aeroplane and Motor Corporation, who
was then developing one of the first sport planes made.
I watched that plane at work in those days when I was cutting
my aviation eye teeth. Little by little I became able to distinguish the
different makes of planes, and the finer points of their performance.
I realized that the small plane took off more quickly, climbed more
steeply, was faster and easier to handle than its bigger brothers with
their greater horse power and wing spread.
After two and one-half hours I really felt myself a competent
judge of planes! A few hundred solo hours since then have modified
greatly that initial self-confidence! The fact that wise pilots with a
thousand hours or so warned me against this little fellow, influenced
me not. I wanted that sport plane that hopped off like a sandpiper
and actually seemed to like it. And I set about buying it. My pilot
friends came to me quietly. “Look out for the motor,” they said.
Power was the thing, they assured me, and the paltry 60 horse
power of the little Lawrence air-cooled motor simply didn’t measure
up to commonsense requirements. It is interesting to realize that the
plane in which Lady Heath made her famous solo flight from
Croydon to South Africa and back, the lovely little Avian which I
bought from her, actually has little more horse power than this first
love of mine.
MY CABBAGE PATCH LANDING, CALIFORNIA, 1921
 “I WAS FOND OF AUTOMOBILES, HORSEBACK RIDING, AND ALMOST
ANYTHING ELSE THAT IS ACTIVE AND CARRIED ON IN THE OPEN”

The small air-cooled motor I speak of was the first in this country.
The man who had built it was not well known then. He was one of a
number of able experimenters who were working out their own
private ideas, often in the face of all sorts of sacrifices. The name of
the builder of this original air-cooled engine is Charles L. Lawrence,
famous today as the creator of the Wright Whirlwind which carried
Lindbergh, Byrd, Chamberlin, Maitland and others on their famous
flights, and with which our own Friendship was equipped.
The idea of an air-cooled engine appealed to me. The elimination
of the water cooling system meant simplification and a notable
decrease in weight. Thanks largely to the lightness of the engine and
resulting light plane, it was possible for me to pick it up by the tail
and move it around the field easily, whereas with the Canucks and
the others it took at least a man, or a dolly, and great effort. I was
won by the motor, despite some weaknesses, and I have never
regretted that first enthusiasm. So I said “no” to my pessimistic
pilots, and “yes” to Mr. Kinner.
The price was $2000. After talking it over with my father he
agreed that I needed the plane and that I should have it, and
promised to help out in paying for it. But I am afraid my
salesmanship was faulty for he did not stay “sold.” I signed the sales
contract and plunked down all my available capital to seal the
bargain before I knew of his indecision. Consequently, there wasn’t
any backing out even if I had wanted to—which I emphatically did
not.
To pay for that plane I got the first job I ever had, the telephone
company taking me on as unskilled labor. I was associated with the
office boys at the back of the office, an association which I was told
was one of the worst in the organization. We did things to the mail,
opened it, sorted it, distributed it. I also filed letters and then tried
to find them again. I liked the job and the boys, who were very
funny and not the criminals they were pictured.
Perhaps this move on my part doesn’t seem very convincing, for
obviously my salary as playmate of office boys would have to run on
for a long time before it would wipe out the balance of the $2000.
But it did help my credit immensely! I think it made my flying
companions believe I was in earnest.
It also affected mother to the extent that she finally wiped out my
indebtedness, on condition I resign and stay home a little. By the
way, she has remained sold, and it was her regret she wasn’t with
me on the trans-Atlantic flight, if I would go.
There was a partnership of interest, and of near poverty, between
many of us in those days. Aviation demanded much from its
devotees—and there was plenty of opportunity for sacrifice. Many of
the pioneers sank their teeth into aviation’s problems at the very
beginning—or was it the other way about?—and simply wouldn’t let
go.
 So I owned my own plane. Immediately I found that my whole
feeling toward flying had changed. An added confidence and
satisfaction came. If I crashed, it was my own responsibility and it
was my own property that was being injured. It is the same sort of
feeling that obtains, I think, in driving. There is a freedom in
ownership which is not possible with a borrowed car.
Of course I had shouldered a new responsibility. I had an
expensive, inanimate object on my hands. I wanted it to look all
right on the outside and be all right on the inside. Few words are
more expressive than “care and upkeep.” Fortunately in their
obligations I was remarkably lucky. The plane was an experiment for
Kinner, a model for production. Obviously he wanted to have
demonstrated exactly what it could do. When I was around, I was
informally a sort of demonstrator—we agreed that he could use it for
demonstration in return for free hangar space, and I was given
much mechanical help, and other assistance in addition to hangar
space. It was this situation, I suppose, which really made it possible
for a “telephone girl” to carry on. At any rate, to me the important
fact is, that I secured many free hours in the air and much kindly
help.
Demonstrating has other advantages; it means an effort to sell
someone something. And selling involves debating the virtues of the
thing to be sold, the prospective purchaser usually being on the
silent end of the debate. So I found myself studying the virtues of
my plane, and in so doing, those of others.
The first thing most people want to do when they get a new car is
to take someone out driving in it; a desire which seems to apply
equally to a plane. Somehow I have always felt a little differently. It
isn’t that I am not proud of my possession, but that I always have a
suspicion that my pride may run away with my prudence. If it be car
or plane, my inclination is to be absolutely sure of myself before I
whisk anybody else’s body around in it. Consequently my air
passengers were few.
 As a matter of fact, I have never asked any men to take a ride. I
think I have always feared that some sense of gallantry would make
them accept, even though they did not trust me. So my male
passengers have always had to do the asking.
There were plenty of potential joy riders around the fields in
those days. Many of them had drifted into aviation after the war—or
rather had not drifted out. They wanted to be near planes, and
accepted any opportunity to take a ride no matter who the pilot or
what the machine. From this gang have graduated many of the men
who are today the real working human backbone of the industry.
From them were recruited the gypsy flyers who barnstormed their
way around the country and whose activities actually figured largely
in the development of American aviation. It was they who kept alive
public interest. Mostly they flew wrecks, old war crates tied together
with baling wire. Anything that would get off the ground—most of
the time—was good enough for them. Many of them, of course, paid
a heavy price for their devotion.
I didn’t like public flying. It didn’t coincide with my ideas of what I
wished to do with my plane. It was hard enough to keep out of the
papers anyway in those days if one flew. The slightest mishap was
called a crash and disasters were played up lugubriously.
For me flying was a sport and not a circus—I used to sneak away
to a secluded field and practise, with no one to bother. I appeared in
public only on special occasions. For instance once I was invited to
take part in a meet held by the Aero Club of Southern California at
Pasadena. It was purely a public demonstration, a sort of circus, yet
it was for a purpose—to raise money for the Club and to arouse local
interest in flying.
I was asked to do a little stunting, the usual thing on occasions of
this kind. The little plane looked well in the air, so I accepted. The
minute I flew up to the field I began to feel like a clown, although
happily there were two of us female freaks to divide the honors and
the odium.
 “LADIES’ DAY”
Sykes in the New York Evening Post
 BRYNJULF STRANDENAES PAINTS A PORTRAIT

There was plenty of chatter about two “aviatrixes,” but the

chatterers never knew that they came near having something
actually to talk about. For, as I reached the field, after flying from my
own hangar, a spark plug blew out. Luckily I was over the field just
then as otherwise I might have made my landing in a treetop. One
cylinder dead in eight is not so serious a matter as one in three. I
had only three and wished for eight just then.
It happened that my own engine was on the repair bench and the
boys at the field, determined to get me to the meet, had worked all
night switching the motor from the Goodyear pony blimp over to my
plane. In the blimp the motor had been run at a low speed and as a
result when I turned it up to my requirements one of the spark plugs
could not stand the strain. After a new extra long plug was inserted I
started out again.
It was a beautiful day with splashes of clouds which sailed up
over the mountains from the desert westward. They made a perfect
background for the audience below and a perfect playground for
anyone in the sky. Speaking seriously, the most effective stunting,
from an artistic point of view, should be staged against just such a
sky. Alternate white and blue with irregular outline brings out the full
grace of the maneuvering plane.
A good deal of air racing was going on then all over the country.
But my feeling toward it was similar to my feeling toward any other
public flying. It was not for me. I wasn’t good enough. I remember
one funny offer. A group of people, wanted to stage a race and
seemed to think that I was timid about entering. So they suggested
that I let their own pilot fly most of the race, then come down and
let me get aboard, out of sight of the audience, and finish up as the
“lady flyer” who had piloted the plane to victory.
Another proposal I remember.
“How would you like to make some easy money?” I was asked.
“How?”
“Bringing some stuff across the border.”
Stuff—liquor, aliens or dope?
“Liquor?” I guessed.
My philanthropic friend shrugged his shoulders. “A woman can get
by where a man can’t. No one would ever suspect you. There’s not a
thing to be afraid of. You could do it easy.”
It was a pretty compliment, but I declined.
One day I went up with my plane to establish its ceiling—that is,
to see how high it would go.
 There is a point in altitude beyond which, of course, a given plane
cannot climb, just as with automobiles, there is a limit to the grade
that can be negotiated and a speed that can be attained. In flying,
an added factor is entailed, in the rarification of atmosphere with
height, which affects plane, motor and personnel.
To make the record official I asked the representative of the Aero
Club of Southern California to seal my barograph. This instrument
records altitude in ink on a revolving drum. When sealed it is
impossible for the flyer to alter it.
It was a good day and I climbed easily for about 13,000 feet.
Thereafter I began to have trouble. My spark control lever became
disconnected and I could not regulate the spark in my engine. As a
result a terrific vibration and knocking started. I thought the engine
would jump out of its frame. There wasn’t anything to do but come
down, although I was still climbing fifty feet a minute.
As soon as the official read my barograph there was great
rejoicing, for apparently I had established a woman’s altitude record.
The news got in the papers. One clipping read:
Miss Amelia Earhart, local aviatrix, established a new
altitude record for women yesterday under the auspices of
the Aero Club of Southern California.
Flying her own Kinner Airster, containing a 60-foot
power motor, she ascended more than 14,000 feet.
Her sealed barograph registered little vibration until
about 12,000 feet, where Miss Earhart said something
went wrong with the motor. At the time she was climbing
easily, about 50 feet a minute, which would have
continued perhaps for several thousand feet more if the
engine difficulty had not arisen.
Although my figure of 14,000 feet was not extraordinary, the
performance of my engine was interesting. With the little Lawrence
power plant of less than 60 h.p. I had gone up much farther than
some of the higher powered planes which should have been more
efficient.
A little while later I made another attempt. The weather was
pretty good at the start. At 10,000 feet I ran into clouds. At 11,000
feet sleet, and at about 12,000 feet dense fog. This was an entirely
new experience, and very disquieting. For the first time in my life, I
had that strange feeling experienced by the flyer in fog.
Under such circumstances it is impossible to tell what the plane is
doing. It may be upside down or turning giant circles. Without
instruments the pilot simply does not know his position in space—
there are no outside landmarks with which to check. Of course, if
one is really upside down for any length of time one’s feet drop back
from the rudder and the safety belt tightens; or if in a skid a side
blast of wind gives a belated warning, etc.
It was extraordinarily confusing and, realizing I could not go
farther, I kicked the ship into a tail spin and came down to 3000 feet
where I emerged from the fog and landed.
I remembered one of the old-timers came up and looked at my
barograph record. His eyes fixed on a vertical line just before the
record ended. “What does that mean,” he asked. “Did you go to
sleep along in there?”
I told him about getting out of the fog by way of a tail spin.
He certainly wasn’t impressed favorably. “Suppose the fog had
lasted all the way to the ground?” he asked.
I bring this experience up because of its important bearing both
on the training of pilots and on flying in general; especially schedule
flying. It is immensely important for a pilot to learn to fly by
instruments, as distinct from flying “by horizon.” The night flyer or
the avigator in fog must depend upon his instruments to keep his
course, equilibrium and altitude. It did not require the flight of the
Friendship through long hours of fog and cloud to teach me the
profound necessity of this.
 CHAPTER IV
EAST TO BOSTON

CRASHES were frequent enough in these earlier days. I had one

myself, during my instruction period. Owing to carelessness in not
refuelling, the motor cut out on the take-off, when the plane was
about 40 or 50 feet in the air. Neta Snook was with me, but she
couldn’t help depositing us in a cabbage patch nearby. The propeller
and landing gear suffered and I bit my tongue.
 © P. & A. Photos
FLYERS ALL EIELSON, WILKINS, BYRD, CHAMBERLIN, BALCHEN, STULTZ,
EARHART, GORDON
 BOSTON, JUNE 9

The crash was an interesting experience. In such a crisis the

passage of time is very slow. I remember it seemed minutes while
we were approaching the inevitable cabbages, although of course it
was only a few seconds. I had leisure to reach over and turn off the
switch before we hit.
More than once I have nosed over. Whenever a plane is
compelled to stop suddenly there is danger of so doing. I have come
down in a muddy field where the wheels stuck. On one occasion I
landed in a mattress of dried weeds five or six feet high which
stopped me so suddenly that the plane went over on its back with
enough force to break my safety belt and throw me out. These are
the flat tires of flying and are only as incidental. But real trouble did
come to my plane eventually.
I had decided to leave Los Angeles and to sell it, much as I
disliked the parting. A young man who had done some flying during
the war liked the little sandpiper and eventually purchased it.
After the new owner took possession the first thing he did was to
ask a friend to go up with him. At a few hundred feet he began
some figure eights, banking vertically and working between a gas
station and telegraph pole. All on the field stood rooted to the spot.
They knew what chances he was taking. As I remember it, Kinner
sent for an ambulance. Suddenly, on one vertical bank the plane
slipped. That was the end of it. Both men were killed. It was a
sickening sort of thing because it was so unnecessary.
I lingered on in California, another sunkist victim of inertia—or
was it the siren song of the realtors? I bought a new plane. Or
rather I collected it, because I found I could not buy it all together.
At this time there were few who believed that an air cooled motor
for planes would become practical. Human nature normally
condemns anything new. The complaint of many pilots was that a
multiple cylinder radial motor would be too clumsy to sit on the nose
of a plane and would cause too much “head resistance.” So why
bother with one or two cylinder motors which developed little power
comparatively? Kinner had a dream. He built one of his own. It had
been bought by the man who financed one of the first planes built,
in the west, by Donald Douglas, designer of the Round the World
Cruisers. Mr. Davis and Mr. Douglas at the time were planning a
trans-continental non-stop hop, using a big Liberty engine. But the
P.2 flown by Macready and Kelly to San Diego, in the first coast to
coast flight, got across first. I bought the Kinner engine from Davis,
who was not ready to use it just then. It was the first engine that
Kinner turned out.
Of course it was full of “bugs”—no degree of mechanical
perfection is ever attained without successive stages of
development. Each improvement is a result of many practical
working tests. Human intelligence seems to grasp ideas in steps and
must work through complicated details to efficient simplicity. The
first automobiles had whip holders on the dash, remember. The
planes and motors which we see today are the results of evolution.
There was a preliminary design of the now famous Wright Whirlwind
motor as early as 1917 and it, in turn, had grown from models of
air-cooled radials begun by Mr. Lawrence in 1914.
The greatest pleasure I found in my experience with Kinner’s
motor was that of perhaps having a small part in its development.
Its many little ailments had to be diagnosed and cured later. It
smoked and spattered oil. Adjustment of a proper propeller was
difficult. One of its eccentricities was an excessive vibration which
tickled the soles of the feet when they rested on the rudder bar,
putting a new meaning into joy ride. Such was the hilarious
beginning of one of a group of motors which are being developed in
the United States.
The idea of returning to the east, and doing it by air, had been
simmering in my mind. Maps and data were all pretty well prepared.
Then the old infection, incurred in the Toronto Hospital work,
returned, and I was forced to abandon the hop, to the satisfaction of
my parents.
My health was so precarious that, disappointed in my intention to
fly, I exchanged my plane for a car and drove across the continent.
Mother went with me to remind me I was too ill to fly, and together
we covered more than 7000 miles before we reached Boston.
I enjoyed three days in Boston before entering Massachusetts
General Hospital for a short stay. After convalescing a while I set off
for New York, to re-enter Columbia. The next summer was spent at
Harvard and the following autumn I began to look about for a job.
My sister was teaching, so I indulged in it too. Teaching and
settlement work filled the following years—filled them very full, for
both occupations require much of one’s life. All these other activities
allowed little or no time for aviation.
 Inevitably certain contacts had persisted from the California days
so it was no surprise to hear from Mr. Kinner. He asked me whether I
knew anyone in Boston who would take the agency for his planes
and motors. I dropped in on the Chamber of Commerce for
information. It was evident from the facts gathered from Bernard
Wiesman, secretary of the committee on aviation, that the town
could struggle along for a while without the additional luxury of a
new plane. The air-mail industry seemed to be as strong a dose of
aviation as Boston could stand at the time, and Sumner Sewall was
having to hold her nose while he spooned that in.
I joined the Boston chapter of the National Aeronautic Association
as a reawakening of my active interest in aviation. Ultimately I was
made Vice-President (perhaps to get rid of me) serving under Mr.
Sewall. Subsequently his activities took him to New York and when I
returned from the trans-Atlantic flight I found myself the first woman
President of a body of the N. A. A.
Several months later Mr. Kinner wrote again and said he himself
had found an agent, who would communicate with me. The hand of
Allah had thrown Harold T. Dennison, a young architect of Quincy, in
Mr. Kinner’s way in California. Mr. Dennison came home determined
to build an airport. He owned enough land for an emergency field on
the marshes from which Beachey flew to Boston Light in 1910 to win
$10,000.
I gathered a few dollars together and became one of five
incorporators of a commercial aeronautical concern. Today Dennison
Aircraft Corporation is working to create a commercial airport
adjoining the naval air base at Squantum.
There is so much to be done in aviation and so much fun to be
got from it, that I had become increasingly involved before the flight
of the Friendship. I was busy, too, with Miss Ruth Nichols of Rye in
trying to work out some means of gathering more women into the
fold. The National Playground Association had asked me to be on
their Boston committee and judge in the model airplane tournament
they were sponsoring in September, 1928. The tournament
combined my two greatest interests, aviation and social work, in an
unusual way, and I was very glad to serve. Unfortunately the social
worker became submerged in the aerial joy-rider and the latter has
been too much occupied since her return to be of any use
whatsoever.

© Wide World Photos

AT BOSTON WITH HER MOTHER AND MAJOR
WOOLLEY, WHOSE FLYING COAT MISS EARHART
WORE ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
 © International Photos
“THE YELLOW PERIL” AND HER DRIVER BACK IN BOSTON, BEFORE
DENISON HOUSE
 CHAPTER V
PREPARATIONS

WHEN it was all over I read in the papers that I had been planning a
trans-Atlantic flight for a year. I read much else that was equally
imaginative. In fact, the press introduced me to an entirely new
person. It appeared that I was a demi-orphan; my father, I learned,
had been dead four years—I saved that clipping for him. One day I
read that I was wealthy, the next that the sole purpose of my flight
was to lift the mortgage from the old homestead—which there isn’t
any—I mean homestead.
The truth about the chance to fly was as amusing as the
journalistic scenarios. The opportunity came as casually as an
invitation to a matinee, and it came by telephone. As a matter of
fact, the three of us who made the Atlantic crossing together all
were similarly collected by telephone.
Commander Byrd telephoned Stultz, suggesting the possibility.
Stultz then communicated, by telephone again, with those
organizing the flight. Tentative arrangements were made as
regarded himself. They asked him to choose his flying mechanic. On
April 7, via long distance telephone, he reached Slim Gordon, then at
Monroe, La., with the “Voice of the Sky” Corporation. “Meet me at
the Cadillac Hotel in Detroit on the 9th, if you want to fly the
Atlantic.” “Sure,” said Gordon.
So next morning Slim serviced his ship; told the boys he wasn’t
taking off with them that day and left to keep his appointment.
It was settled in no time at all—certainly within the limits of the
conventional three minute telephone conversation.