1 Of Being and Danger: Jean-Yves Lacoste The recent publication of Être en danger will be a surprise for not a few of Lacoste’s readers: not only Lacoste, as he already did in Experience and the Absolute, again abandons—quite consciously—the tools of theology to advance his philosophical and phenomenological position, the book also introduces a new concept in Lacoste’s philosophical panorama: life. To be sure, mention was made, earlier, of ‘spiritual life’—which even at times risked gaining a higher pertinence than ‘the liturgical experience’—but here the emphasis was on ‘spirituality’ rather than on ‘life’ (PP 214-219). Être en Danger—a book of about 400 pages—might be considered as the optimistic counterpart of Experience and the Absolute: Lacoste goes out of his way to dispel the ‘unhappy consciousness’ cropping up so intensively in Experience and the Absolute and propagates the possibility for the subject of peace and quiet. In this way, Lacoste’ latest can be seen as the culmination of the thesis I am setting forth in this book emphasizing the shift in Lacoste’s work from the parousiacal moment in light of the horizon of the nonexperience in the earlier work to the non-experience surrounded by and embedded in multiple moments of presence, peace, and, who knows, experience in the later work 1. Life for Beginners—In the Beginning is Life Although, as usual, Lacoste does not explicitly state with whom he dialogues—Michel Henry, for instance, is mentioned only once or twice and is allotted only half of a page—the turn to the phenomenon of life can be interpreted (although it need not be the case) alongside Derrida and especially then in the addendum that Lacoste makes to one of Derrida’s (in)famous impossible statements ‘I am dead’: no one can, in his right mind, honestly state that he is dead, just as for someone to be able to see that he or she is truly living the fact that he is ‘dying’ sooner or later is somewhat like a condition of possibility for his very life. The sentence ‘I am dead’ is therefore only true or at least meaningful if it is false. But, Lacoste adds, wary as he is of all too grandiose claims, that it is just as impossible for someone to say sincerely ‘I am asleep’. The play with possibility and impossibility of such statements reaches moreover the very core of the phenomenon of life: no one can deny that he or she is alive. The negation here is eminently positive. Of course, some people might say that they do not want to live anymore and others, perhaps, are still only barely alive, but a human being is someone who somehow cannot not live. Lacoste therefore argues that “life is the non- transcendable par excellence” (ED 200), in that no one can ever or anywhere state that he is
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Of Being and Danger: Jean-Yves Lacoste
The recent publication of Être en danger will be a surprise for not a few of Lacoste’s readers:
not only Lacoste, as he already did in Experience and the Absolute, again abandons—quite
consciously—the tools of theology to advance his philosophical and phenomenological
position, the book also introduces a new concept in Lacoste’s philosophical panorama: life. To
be sure, mention was made, earlier, of ‘spiritual life’—which even at times risked gaining a
higher pertinence than ‘the liturgical experience’—but here the emphasis was on ‘spirituality’
rather than on ‘life’ (PP 214-219).
Être en Danger—a book of about 400 pages—might be considered as the optimistic
counterpart of Experience and the Absolute: Lacoste goes out of his way to dispel the
‘unhappy consciousness’ cropping up so intensively in Experience and the Absolute and
propagates the possibility for the subject of peace and quiet. In this way, Lacoste’ latest can
be seen as the culmination of the thesis I am setting forth in this book emphasizing the shift in
Lacoste’s work from the parousiacal moment in light of the horizon of the nonexperience in
the earlier work to the non-experience surrounded by and embedded in multiple moments of
presence, peace, and, who knows, experience in the later work
1. Life for Beginners—In the Beginning is Life
Although, as usual, Lacoste does not explicitly state with whom he dialogues—Michel Henry,
for instance, is mentioned only once or twice and is allotted only half of a page—the turn to
the phenomenon of life can be interpreted (although it need not be the case) alongside Derrida
and especially then in the addendum that Lacoste makes to one of Derrida’s (in)famous
impossible statements ‘I am dead’: no one can, in his right mind, honestly state that he is
dead, just as for someone to be able to see that he or she is truly living the fact that he is
‘dying’ sooner or later is somewhat like a condition of possibility for his very life. The
sentence ‘I am dead’ is therefore only true or at least meaningful if it is false.
But, Lacoste adds, wary as he is of all too grandiose claims, that it is just as impossible for
someone to say sincerely ‘I am asleep’. The play with possibility and impossibility of such
statements reaches moreover the very core of the phenomenon of life: no one can deny that he
or she is alive. The negation here is eminently positive. Of course, some people might say that
they do not want to live anymore and others, perhaps, are still only barely alive, but a human
being is someone who somehow cannot not live. Lacoste therefore argues that “life is the non-
transcendable par excellence” (ED 200), in that no one can ever or anywhere state that he is
2
not living. One cannot pass by and pass over the phenomenon of life if one wants to speaks of
the human being and others beings.
The centrality of the phenomenon of life serves as the minimum-definition of all the other
phenomena that make an appearance in Être en Danger: it is the basis and perhaps the
condition of possibility of all other phenomena meaningful for the being of the human being.
If the human being happens to live as existence or as Dasein, than one needs to say that
whereas all Dasein is also ‘life’, not all ‘life’ is immediately to be equated with Dasein.
Similarly, if I happen to live my life in the mode of the mortal, rooted in the earth and
surrounded by pagan divinities and affinities, then, too, one needs to state that mortal is only
he who already lives, but not the other way around: the one living need not be ‘mortal’—in
the Heideggerian sense.
Life, according to Lacoste, is therefore that phenomenon “that we cannot take leave of. Even
more so, it appears to us as that which no experience can de-constitute (death is not the
deconstitution of life, it is its terminus), it appears to us, ultimately, as that which no theory
can rigorously deconstruct in what one sense one may take “to deconstruct” (ibid.).
The modesty of this phenomenology, next perhaps to its banality and triviality1, should not go
unnoticed, for “it can occupy a forceful position precisely because of its modesty” (ED 135).
Why so? Because it attains the bottom-line of experience: it finds that which no one can deny
nor deconstruct. Lacoste’s quest, as Husserl’s, is a quest for the common demeanour in human
experience: that which all experiences share and in which they, perhaps, participate. In this
way, Lacoste moves towards that which Merleau-Ponty has wonderfully phrased “a
familiarity of all human activity with all human activity”.2
2. The Possibility of Peace and Quiet
Yet it is not only Derrida that one might sense in the background of Être en Danger, its theses
are crafted over and against the anti-ontological overburdening of the human being in
Levinasian ethics and Marion’s eroticism. Levinasian ethics is famous for its hyperbolic
speech: in face of the other, none of my responses suffice to attend to the other’s destitution.
My responsibility knows neither of any halts nor of any limits. Levinas writes “The subject is
the more responsible the more it answers for, as though the distance between it and the other
1 See chapter two, ‘the banality of phenomenology’ where it is stated that what Derrida writes about Husserl’s
‘imperative of triviality’ is equally true of Lacoste, see ED 154, “C’est dans sa banalité, toutefois, que la vie se
manifeste le plus exactement”. See Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie, J. Derrida, ed. (Paris, 2004) [1962].), p.
44. All page numbers of Être en Danger refer to the manuscript Laocste send me August 2010. 2 Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (Evanston, 2002), p. 20.
3
increased in the measure that proximity was increased”.3 The subject in effect must feel here
somewhat like Achilles did when approaching the turtle, seeing its distance infinitely
increased with every step closer to the turtle. This maddening movement towards the other
is,of course restless one: just as the responsibility for the other knows not of any limit, the
subject, too, “has nothing in the world to rest his head”4, his is a “quasi-hagiographic style”.
5
In Levinas’ view of the human being there is nothing the human being can do that is not
ethical. Even the most banal thing I undertake is signified fully from out of ethics. Reading
the newspaper, for instance, would be not done for Levinas simply because the times spent on
the newspaper could have, and should have been spend, on attending to the other. In Marion
similarly, my erotic—loving rather: so much eros so much agape—relation to the divine is
configured along the lines of a permanent unsettlement and an ever recurring restlessness.
There is nothing that I would do that could escapes God’s gaze: all I do is judged and
considered by God: there’s no break from all things ‘liturgical’. All my thoughts, action, and
words are signified by the most intimate relation with God.
Over and against this overburdening of the subject one in Levinas and Marion, Lacoste’s
approach is to be welcomed as one of the most modest attempts to give the human being’s its
due, if not the break it deserves: “the dialectics between quietude and inquietude” will be
identified as the most fundamental (and perhaps banal) fact of human life (and perhaps other
lives as well). Lacoste knows that the human being most often is not a saint and he knows,
too, how not to reproach the human being for this. It is only the saint for whom liturgy
becomes a way of life. And, similarly, there is no reason to identify facticity with ethics.
A frail phenomenology is thus offered in which peace and quiet only become intelligible in
relation to their counterpart and vice versa. It should be noted that although theological
discourse is mentioned here, theology is not the concern of Être en Danger. In fact, it
explicitly rejects theology’s tools if only in order to effect one of the smoothest transitions
from philosophy to theology present this day. Peace should be understood here, Lacoste
argues, in a nontheological manner, “as such distinct from the monastic quies and hèsykhia”
(ED 112). If theology there be in this book, it comes unnoticed: hence its smoothness. And if
it comes, it comes in ways unproblematic, which means that the transition from philosophy to
theology effected here might mean that at least a less ontotheological way of doing theology
might become possible.
3 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Duquesne, 2002). p. 139-140.
4 Ibid., p. 121.
5 Ibid., p. 47.
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3. Toward a Fragile Phenomenology
Le mot d’ordre of Être en danger can be summed up from out of a view on phenomenality
that is plural and thus also partial, Plural, in the sense, that the same phenomenon can appear
in multiple ways; Partial, both in the sense that my take on phenomenality and reality will
always be just my take and in the sense that my take on reality remains a take on reality:
although my experience of the world is fragmentary, it remains a valid experience of the
world, even if they do not explain and justify the very details of existence and never reach the
totality, the whole or the goal of our experiences.
However, this fragile phenomenology at the same time aims for a “first phenomenology”, for
“on the necessity of a first phenomenology [...] one can easily understand one another. The
reason for this turns out to be simple: What indeed would reveal to us that which is most
ordinary, if not that which veritably merits the epitheton ‘fundamental’? The very definition
of what is fundamental entails that the fundamental is never absent, and if so, it does so only
because it does not attract attention to itself” (ED 138).
For this return to what is most ordinary or what lies at the beginning (‘commencement’) of all
experience, Lacoste announces more than once a return to Husserl or, rather, a turn through
Heidegger back to Husserlian descriptions,6 that is “a return to the modest ambitions of
Husserlian phenomenology” (ED 120).
3.1 Être en danger: A Book of Decisions
Être en danger then is a book of decisions: first, it operates no longer in the margins of the
established philosophy of Heidegger, it occupies central stage (even if its position is
deliberately off-centre). So if, in earlier work, Lacoste was reluctant to take its distance from
Heidegger—“going any further would be to take leave of Heidegger totally” (PD 138)—the
task set forth in Être en danger, namely to think life from within the realm of possibility, is
acknowledged to be “a leave given to Heidegger” (ED 88). This leave then will consist in the
erection of a new fundamental fact of life (over and against anxiety): “if we still want to use
the language of the fundamental then it is the knot between quietude and inquietude that
would deserve it be used in its regard” (ED 177).
6 I will come back to Husserl’s “respectable objection “ to Heidegger Lacoste mentions at ED, 18 and returns
to at ED 57, 94. And the conclusion of this debate on p. 102.
5
This break with Heidegger is the opportunity for Lacoste to align himself with Husserl. Être
en danger moves from Heidegger to Husserl, granting to the latter the privilege of staying
closer to the things themselves than the former, who, as the example of Vermeer showed, was
not always justified in ranking the ability to ‘make things appear’ higher than the aptitude to
‘let things appear’. Heidegger, for Lacoste, falls prey to the risk confronting every interpreter
who makes appear more than actually shows itself.
Lacoste’s phenomenology, then, only seeks confirmation and recognition that this indeed is
characteristic of experience, that it is fragmentary, fragile, feeble and ultimately fatal. There is
indeed no other term to life than death. But we do not know what is possible and Être en
danger is a praise of possibility. As we have seen, Être en danger privileges the joy of the
presence and the presencing of beings over the absence confronted with in a non-experience
and will acknowledge that even in the case of a divine presence more needs to be shown than
a non-experience.
3.2 Of a Not So Dangerous Forgetting of Being
Être en danger’s phenomenological modesty begins by affirming that we only know of beings
and that the question of being itself has to be postponed, to get phenomenology going. If
Lacoste decides “to practice the forgetting of being a bit” (ED 17), then this is so because
what being might mean we can only know through beings. These beings ‘without being’
differ from the without or otherwise than being of Marion and Levinas. Whereas for the latter
two, it is a matter to take leave of the question of being, for Lacoste the methodical forgetting
of being only serves to better take into view what it is, for us, to be, and, quite simply, that it
are beings which occupy the foreground of our dealings with life.
This primacy of beings is therefore such that some sort of forgetting of being in which
Heidegger saw ‘the origin’ of metaphysics is inevitable and, all in all, not that grave. It is
simply the case because, whether we want it or not, we are always and already surrounded by
beings:
Each being refers us to itself and to itself as being [like] this or [like] that. If
metaphysics thought it was good to ask the question ‘what is a being,’ [...] it
is that everyday experience always and already has grasped a/the being as
such, in the ‘how’ of its appearing (and never outside of its/this ‘how’). [...]
before being a theoretical reality, the forgetting of being in favour of beings
is an experiential reality (ED 209)
6
Insofar as it always are beings which show themselves to us and enter into commerce with us,
the human being can, and indeed must, remain indifferent to the question of being.7 Thus
insofar a primacy of beings is present, all there is to say about being (in Heidegger’s sense),
is, for the time being at least, that there are beings.
3.3 Saving the Being: épargner les choses (ED 56)
The primacy of beings is, for Lacoste, a way to turn to the things themselves. But
phenomenology’s most famous slogan gets a peculiar twist in Lacoste’s recent book: turning
to the things themselves, is at the same time to save these things and these beings. Saving
beings is to preserve and to shelter them from the dangers of technology and its tendency to
reduce everything it encounters to the contours of an object (ED 212): it is, in short, to respect
the things themselves (ED 44) and keep them safe from the petrification and mortification that
is the reduction to the object issuing from the threat of technology. The object, offered solely
to the gaze and to perception, has no secrets: it is fully at the human being’s disposal and its
very life, if any, consists in its availability.
The object, for Lacoste, is defined as the appearance of a being solely to perception and no
longer to both perception and affection. The piece of music moves me when I listen to it, it
does not move me when I distractedly regard its score. Saving the being is to save the thing
(in its Heideggerian sense) as a symbolic gathering of all that matters for the human being
and, in this way, this is also to save and guard the human being itself. For Lacoste, te realg
danger is that technology ultimately extends its realm even to the life of the human being (ED
96).
Yet the object is only a small part of our lives and cannot prevent beings to appear otherwise
than as an object. Things (in the Heideggerian sense) appear to both perception and affection.
To be affected by a thing is not simply being moved by this or that; it is rather the cognitive
power of affectivity that is of interest to Lacoste; that is, to observe just how affection shows
us our place in the world, and how the world shows itself to the human being as the place in
which beings and things appear and make their presence known to us by just such an
appearing.
It falls then to the phenomenologist to take the human being out of the world of
objectification and representation and throw him back into the world of life. In this world, it is
7 It should be noted that with this ‘beings without being’ or rather beings without a view on being, Lacoste is
not only at a distance from Levinas and Marion, but also from Heidegger. See Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?
(Frankfurt a. M, 1998), p. 49, “dass das Sein nie west ohne das Seiende, dass niemals ein Seiendes ist ohne das
Sein’.
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not so much being that is in danger, but rather the human being, and along with him, all others
beings, that is an endangered being. To save the being, then, amounts to showing the multiple
ways and modes in which one sole being can appear rather than remain with the reiteration
and the reproduction restricted to the object. Of an object, indeed, one may legitimately say
that if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, but no such thing, obviously, is valid for the
human life surrounded and immersed as it is by the events of life and world. Such a saving of
beings, however, will in the end reflect upon the question of being, for if the the question
concerning technology as raised by Heidegegr shows us something, then it is that this saving
power and the accompanying danger are matters pertaining to ontology rather than to our
ontic dealings with beings. Consider the following quote:
For the enframing of the world by technology, obviously no one is responsable: such a
thing happens with our collaboration but not under our control; one therefore must
conclude that the world is in danger rather than that we put it in danger […] The
reduction to objectity is not primarily a violence we inflict [upon the world] or in
which we participate, but a process that cannot not advene as soon as we gain
knowledge of things all the while perceiving therein only objects. On this point, it is
useless to interrogate what ‘modernity’ has done or not. Our familiarity with the object
is, in effect, of all times (ED 46-47).
The total reduction of beings to object is therefore an ontological possibility, ‘objectively’—
if one may say so—belonging to the properties of the world. If, for instance, a work of art can
appear as an ordinary object—to the distracted observer or to the one repairing it—then this is
so not because we project objectity onto the artwork but rather because “the reduction to
objectity is a possibility inscribed in (almost) every being” and so manifests that “objectity is
a truth of the thing” or the being(ED 33 and 35).
It makes no sense then to blame modernity (or another epoch) for all the misgivings
happening to our age—as not a few theologians these days are attempting to do. The
possibility of a complete disenchantment of the world—resulting not only in a world without
God but also without a human being—was a possibility present ever since a human being
reduced this or that being to its objective contours.8 The particularity and newness of our
8 One should note that with “this total mainmise on all beings” (ED 47) Lacoste perceives a difference with
Heidegger, for whom, the notion of Gestell would only be introduced to save beings but not the human being.
The latter, according to Lacoste, would in Heidegger not be in danger: “the idea that technology has a grip on the
humanity of man was evidently foreign to Heidegger” (ED 96). Here one can distinguish a sort of undertow of
8
postmodern situation is however that now, as if for the first time, “the reduction to objectness
of the totality of beings” (ED 46) is a genuine possibility.
Having delineated the main themes of Être en danger, it now is necessary to focus in on a few
more specific themes in order to see how exactly the human being itself becomes what one
could call an endangered being.
4. From Heidegger to Husserl: a Question of Being
4.1 A Sample of Beings
We have yet to understand just how the methodical forgetting of being gives way to the
primacy of beings in ways not immediately complicated by metaphysical and ontotheological
thinking. The shortest definition of metaphysics and ontotheology possible is perhaps that it is
the forgetting of being in favour of beings. But such forgetting is a rather peculiar one: it
substitutes the event of being for the controllable and foreseeable aspects of beings. And this
tendency towards control has a particular relation to time as well: just as it forgets being in
order to deal only with beings, so too it forgets the futurity of (our) being in order to deal only
with beings in the present of lived experiences. And such a present shows itself to be more at
our disposal than the future ever will do.
Yet Lacoste argues for a methodical forgetting of being, not in order to “liquidate the question
of being as superfluous or as sterile” (ED 24) but in order to get ‘being’ better into view from
out of the multiple ways and modes of appearing of beings. Or, in the more existential terms
that will be developed later in Lacoste’s book, in order to get into view, for the human being,
what it is to be. Being, for Lacoste, only ever appears in and through the mediation of beings,
that is, through the mediating appearance of a being.
This is why the descriptions of the fragile phenomenology Lacoste is proposing revolve
around three catch-words: plurality, partiality, and particularity (Cf. ED 4): it is by paying
attention to the appearance of this particular being here that, knowing all too well that this
being here might just as well appear otherwise, that one gains sight, first, of the multiple and
plural ways of appearing of this one being, and, second, of the fact that whatever sight one
pessimism in the task that Lacoste sets for thinking, for if this task is indeed to save beings then it is, first,
necessary to will and desire such a saving and, second, to have observed that the desert is, in effect, growing (ED
212). It is however open to question whether the idea mentioned is absent in Heidegger’s work, see for instance
The Question Concerning Technology, p. 18 where Heidegger in effect discusses this theme and answers it in the
negative “precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e. into the
process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve”. The Gestell, precisely because it is a
sending of being—sent to the human being, but never made by him and under his control, challenges the human
being to control precisely everything else, i.e. all beings. Yet, in another passage (p. 26-27) that is possible for
man “ to come “to the very brink of a precipitous fall, that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to
be taken as standing-reserve”.
9
has thus gained this view on the being’s appearance will always remains partial and
fragmentary. No one will ever fully know what it is, for the human being, to be. To be sure,
finite being-in-the-world, and its stress on anxiety and mortality, might be quite real and
weigh on us a little more than the serenity that is allowed to the mortals (Cf. ED 89). But why
would this mean that being-in-the-world tells the whole story of what it is to be human? It
does not, Lacoste argues, simply because it is impossible to delineate the whole of the human
being and to say once for all what or who the human being in its entirety is.
Such a phenomenological stance obviously complicates the question of being. For, although it
starts from out of beings—being only ever appears from out the appearance of beings—the
question of being “remains” (ED 24). The question only is with which being one has to begin
to answer such a question, that is, which being might be the good sample of all other beings.
Lacoste outlines two theories or two approaches to the question of being: the first, the theory
of inflation, states that no being as such is of particular importance and that all beings answer,
in principle, the whole of the question of being—a simple stone (Gilson), an elephant, or an
explosion on Mars (Heidegger) can tell us all we need to know about being. The deflation
theory argues for the opposite: all beings are of importance for the question of being not only
because every different being would answer the question of being differently but also because
the question of being can only be answered minimally: everything equally deserves to be
called a being and all beings give way to a different set of ontological claims—Lacoste
mentions the work of Quine. If the first approach somewhat exaggerates the appearance of
‘being’ in and through particular beings—beings tell everything about being—then the latter
definitely underestimates the importance of being for beings—beings would show nothing in
particular of being or, at least, no being in particular would show anything of importance oof
being.
Lacoste goes on to argue that both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s work are somewhere in between
these two approaches. Heidegger, however, most often privileges one or the other being as the
passageway to the question of being, whether it be Dasein in Being and Time or the word in
the later Heidegger. Husserl, on the other hand, does not know such a privilege and every
being, equally, deserves the attention of the phenomenologist. And even though Heidegger,
too affirms that an explosion, an elephant, and no matter which work of art would show the
same ontological results, it is obvious that some beings are to be privileged in Heidegger’s
work. Lacoste puts it thus, punning on George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “all phenomena are
equal and there no phenomena which would be more equal than others” (ED 57). Here then
the question of the fair sample return in full force: why indeed privilege this being rather than
10
this being? And would not the privilege accorded to this being occlude what another being
could possible show even better? Here one can sense already the different ring that Lacoste’s
fragile phenomenology of the fragmentary gives to ontology.
4.2 Plural Phenomenology
Such a privileging of one class of beings over other beings, Lacoste argues, is absent from
Husserlian phenomenology: neither a distinction between everydayness and an authentic
heroics nor a being that renders ‘all beings more being-ful’9 is found there. This is yet another
reason why Lacoste in Être en danger decides phenomenology in favour of Husserl. In
Husserl, a passage-way to the plural appearances of one sole being is opened: it is not that one
privileged being decides over all the others, it is rather that a plurality of modes of appearing
is present in all beings.10
This plurality, it seems, has three main categories and are portrayed mostly in chapter two and
three of the book under discussion. It is, obvious, in a phenomenology that would not want to
judge over appearance nor prescribe for whatever appears its being that there might be more
than three such modes or ways. The three modes beings described, then, stem from the main
portion of phenomenologies of the last century. Lacoste mentions objecticty, beingness, and
thingness. The first mode of appearing was described by Husserl, the latter two by Heidegger:
beingness is close to beings ready-to hand (in their difference from the ‘objectity’ of beings
present-at-hand). It is not all that important here to describes these three various modes in
detail, but it is of importance to state once more that a same being can appear from out of
these three modes: as an object (of and for science), as a being ready-to-hand (appearing from
out of its use for the human being) and as a thing (as a symbolic or even sacred gathering of
the human being and its land).
Note, also, that it is precisely because of this plurality that the question of being must indeed
remain, for “being can, as such, be in danger: in danger of being restricted to the dimension of
9 The formula is inspired by Heidegger’s, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Polt and G. Freid (New
Haven/London, 2000), p. 196, “what is most in being about beings”. The German has ‘das Seiendste am
Seienden,’ see Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen, 1958), p. 140. 10
More than one mode of appearing belongs “au même étant”—to the same being (ED 57). This is, possibly,
the end of all dualism or at least of an all too rigid distinction between different “classes of beings” (ibid.), be
they authentic or inauthentic, ordinary or extraordinary. It might be here the promise of much of French
phenomenology lies, for it is here, first (or finally) that the distinction between the empirical and the
eschatological ego of Experience and the Absolute or between idolatrous and iconic appearance, not as two
different beings or as two classes of being but as two “manners of being for beings” finally becomes evident.
One might also be reminded of Being Given’s formula: “two phenomenalities of a single phenomenon”, see EA,
p. 152, Marion, God without Being, p. 7 and Being Given, p. 350n.5
11
the being[ness] of a being, in danger, too, because nothing is given to us (and the gift is)
without being reduced to that which we can receive of the given” (ED 3).11
The gift of appearance—I will return to the topic of the gift below—will therefore always be
reduced either to beingness or to objectness, the former being the ‘normal’ way of the
forgetting of being—being disappears in the appearance of beings in their beingness,—the
latter being constituted according to the measure of the receiver of the phenomena who, most
often, reduces all beings to an object. Yet the question of being ‘remains’ because being is
that which escapes both beingness and objectness all the while being forgotten in and through
the reduction to these two modes of appearing. All this, of course, shows that there is no
‘without being’ for Lacoste.
The plurality of modes of appearing gives way to a careful exposition of each being
separately: if the question of being is bracketed and practiced by Lacoste in favour of a
temporary primacy of beings, this is so only because it is easier “to overturn the primacy of
the ontological over the ontic” (ED 17). Lacoste’s phenomenology of the ontic and of beings,
already announced in La phénoménalité de Dieu (PD 116), will turn into a phenomenology of
the different ways of appearing of one single being. Although one can distinguish between
three main modes, one will not succeed in delimiting and delineating strict lines of division
between such diverse modes of appearing.
Plurality forbids all too neat lines of demarcation between phenomena. A great deal of
Lacoste’s latest work is indeed dedicated to substitute a phenomenology of what one could
call the either/or for a phenomenology of the and/and. It is not that one would choose this
being or this phenomenon over that being or phenomena, it is rather that the different modes
of appearing—as objectness, beingness or thingness—always and already intertwine. It is this
intertwinement that makes Lacoste’s phenomenology move in the direction of Husserl rather
than that of Heidegger.
The plurality of possible appearances already hints at the partiality of all phenomena: if I see
the phenomenon as an object, I cannot see it as a thing. If the pen is used to write, I cannot
inspect it as I would do with an object, and so on. All experience is necessarily fragmentary.
4.3 Partial Phenomenology
One might argue that both on what once called the ‘objective’ side and the ‘subjective’ side of
phenomena, Lacoste sticks to the merely partial givenness of phenomena to its receiver. I
have already argued that objectness, for Lacoste, belongs to the very nature of beings rather 11
See on this danger also PD 135.
12
than that it would be merely added on to them by the human being. Beings, Lacoste writes,
are in danger rather than that the human being puts them in danger. This is one reason why
alongside and underneath thingness, one might also surmise the presence of objectness, and
similarly, where one encounters beingness, there too some or other thingness might be
present.
Two examples guide Lacoste’s dialogue with Heidegger here: on the one hand, a
phenomenological description of Heidegger’s notion of the thing reveals that some sort of
instrumentality and finality is present even in thingness. On the other hand, and in a definitive
shift from Heidegger’s (all too) rural and provincial approach, Lacoste argues that “on top of
that the moment in effect will come, a moment on which Heidegger remains mute, in which
the technical object is able to appear as beautiful, and where we will cease to have to deal
only with objects” (ED 49). So that which Heidegger repelled the most, the typewriters and
illustrated magazines12
, that is, all form of technical objects, who are for Heidegger beyond
the beautiful and the ugly will in post-Heideggerian times appear as designer objects or as
vintage nevertheless: “this is thus to say that between a thing and an object we cannot draw a
limit” (ibid.)
The first example remains closer to Heidegger’s description and interpretation of the thing. If
it is true that around the jug here, the mortals and the divine gather, as Heidegger argued, and
the playful battle between the world and the earth is erected to show the heavens as the
dwelling place of gods and perhaps mortals, then, Lacoste asks, it is not incorrect to state that
things like these appear in order to let the gods manifest themselves. Ironically, the thing in
Heidegger becomes “a factor of a transaction” (ED 53): it is there to mediate between the
mortals and the gods and to forge the alliance between them so that the former may become
the messengers of the latter. This is, however, not the only instance of Beingness (and its
concomitant instrumentality) Lacoste detects in Heidegger’s thinking of the thing, for if
thingness might reveal a sort of beingness, than similarly the instrumentality of beings ready-
to-hand might (later) turn into a proper thing. It is through advocating such a blurring of the
boundaries that Lacoste now moves beyond Heidegger.
But let us turn first to the second infiltration of instrumentality in thingness, for not only the
thing mediates between the gods and the mortals, it also mediates and connects the mortals
among one another. More so indeed than the somewhat egoistic heroics one may perceive in
Being and Time—if one does not except the sheer fact of but rather scarce dealings with
12
For Heidegger’s (in)famous aversion for typewriters, see e.g. Parmenides (Frankfurt a. M, 1992), p. 119 and
Wass heisst Denken?
13
coexistence or Mitsein already—the later thought of Heidegger concerns the community of
mortals. Lacoste is keen to point out that “one has not remarked enough” (ED 56) that the
mortals are, in Heidegger, are never mentioned in the singular: the thing is therefore that
instance that gathers and unites the humans. In this sense, it does not serve me, it rather serves
us.
This deconstruction of the difference between the thing and beings ready-to-hand is however
but the first step in Lacoste’s reconfiguring of Heidegger’s description of the thing, for even if
one can describe the evolution from the zuhandene to the thing (and back again), one still has
to understand just what the thing precisely adds to our understanding of the usefulness of
things-ready-to-hand. It is this difference, ultimately, which matters for Lacoste, and for
which the term ‘saving the thing themselves’ might be used (ED 53). This also explains why
Lacoste is in the end reluctant to employ the terminology of deconstruction for this thinking:
it is not a matter of erasing the difference between beings ready-to-hand and the thing, it is a
matter of understanding precisely where the difference between them in reality lies and so to
save the latter from the former.
From this, then, Lacoste will be lead to propose a different ontology than the one Heidegger
was advancing, for even though “we can content ourselves with signaling” (ED 54) a simple
distinction and rupture between thingness and beingness——as Lacoste for a long time seems
to have done—to the point that one must simply state that “where things appear, we have
taken leave of the [horizon of] the world” (ibid.) and vice versa. By doing so, however, one
can in fact “guard [oneself] from giving a name to that region of experience” (ibid.) where
beings and things intertwine and simply proceed to underscore the ontology of rupture of
Heidegger.13
Heidegger indeed seems to have hold on to the strict separation of the thinking
of the world (and therefore of beings and beingness) and the thinking of the earth (and
therefore of things). Consider, for instance, the following crucial passage from Heidegger’s
famous essay on art—where the artwork plays the role of a thing: “”It is due to art’s poetic
essence that, in the midst of beings, art breaks open an open place in which everything is other
than usual [alles anders ist wie sonst] [...] and everything ordinary and hitherto existing
becomes an unbeing”.14 The work of art is so extraordinary that it renders all other beings
ordinary, if not all too ordinary. This rupture for Heidegger is not merely a different way of
seeing these beings—a matter of phenomenology if you like,—for not seeing this difference
13
It may be obvious for the reader that Lacoste’s thinking of the liturgical experience for a long time sought to
separate itself, as precisely such a rupture, from the Heideggerian thinking of world and earth. Consider, PP, 69. 14
Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, p. 197. For the German, see Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M, 2003), p.
59-60.
14
between the thing and beingness is a grave ontological matter: it is to be mistaken about the
truth of being and beings. To describe the thing as a being ready-to-hand “would be an error
against what is” (ED 57). The rupture between thingness and beingness gives way, in
Heidegger, to a mutual exclusion.
In Lacoste, then, the interplay between thingness and beingness gives way to the doubling of
the truth: one single being can appear as both a thing and a being ready-to-hand. The truth of
beings no longer lies in being the one or the other, but rather in its plural appearance as this
(thing) or that (being). For this truth to be described phenomenologically, then, one would
need to describe a flux and a fluency of appearances, in short, a rhythm which, if one would
no longer guard oneself of naming this region of experience, would have to be called: life.
By naming this region of experience, in which the human being has to deal both with things,
beings and object, life, we have obviously arrived at the ‘subjective’ side of Lacoste’s new
phenomenology. Lacoste’s turn to Husserl is most clear in his adoption of the latter’s concept
of “die Enge des Bewusstseins”—consciousness’ narrowness (ED 133).15
The concept for
Lacoste is valid both for my experience of the world and of myself (ED 133). Lacoste
describes the limits and the narrowness of the human being’s consciousness by stating, first,
that the ‘consciousness of’ with which phenomenology begins is obviously not a
consciousness of all beings (ED 21)—while typing this text on my computer, I of course do
not notice all the books and pencils laying on my desk,—it also means, and in the terms I
have been using thus far, that a being, each time it appears, has only one mode of appearing.
But the same being might have, on a different occasion, a different mode of appearing (ED
22).
Thus is the fragmentary character of Lacoste’s phenomenology: not only the common sense
of the fact that my experience of my world is limited to this small bit of world here in
Belgium and that all generalizations of this experience here to an experience of others is
always a bit risky but also the awareness that if indeed this being here now appears to me in
this way it might just as well, on another time, appear in a different way. I therefore need not,
if I rely on Husserl more than on Heidegger, exclude that the truth of being pertains to only
one mode of appearing and may rightfully assume that it may be the truth of beings to appear
in more than one mode and that these diverse modes are all equally true of what it is for a
being to be and for me, as a human being, to experience what experiencing is.
15
Lacoste references Husserl, Wahrnehmung und aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass(1893-1912), hrsg.
T. Vongehr and R. Guiliani (Dordrecht, 2004) , p. 98-101
15
Not to exclude one experience by another or one mode of appearing by another, is to
acknowledge this appearance of a being here unconceals as much as it conceals, and not, as
Heidegger would have it, that the appearance of this thing here accounts for the
unconcealment of all there is to say of being and beings or that the appearance of this one
thing here renders the appearance of all other beings superfluous. It is to admit the
fragmentary character of experience starting from the narrowness of consciousness: this being
here may well tell us something crucial about being, but, precisely, by occupying
consciousness, this being here occludes what other beings over there might instruct us about
being. Saving the being means: one cannot a priori exclude any being from the question of
being.
But this fragmentariness is no other than life. It is to come close to that region in which more
than one experience and more than one appearance of a particular being account for the
meaning of being. It is being well aware that describing this one being here is to exclude
others but it is, simultaneously, knowing all too well that, if we are to aim for the truth of
being and beings, these others ought to be included.16
This is life: a “fundamental rhythm” (ED 49) of experiences and of appearances in which
constitutions of objectity, deconstitutions through the event and appearance of a thing, and
reconstitution of objects succeed one another in a history and event of the self that is always
and already unavailable for itself.17
Life, as Lacoste describes it, is perhaps the only thing that
I, while leading it, I never ‘lead’: it remains out of control and subject to whatever happens to
it. Or, as Lacoste defines it: life “as the primordial rhythm of affectivity is [the name] for the
minimal and therefore ‘fundamental’ presence of a self” (ED 154-155). It is thus crucial to
understand the event-like character of both self and world: there is no appearance or
experience that would be at our disposal.
Such an event not only is true of the experience of the self, it even pertains to the experience
of objectity; the event is what will ultimately account for the (real) difference between
thingness and beingness or objectness.18
16
One might note that both what I call here ‘an ontology of rupture’ and the inclusive ontology Lacoste is
advancing might be found in Heidegger. For the latter in Heidegger’s work, consult Heidegger, Parmenides, p.
151, “das Geheure selbst […] ist das Ungeheure”, which, roughly, could be translated as ‘the ordinary is the
awesome’. See also Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M., 1992), p. 166ff on how the
ordinary itself becomes extraordinary through the mood of surprise and wonder, erstaunen. 17
The attentive reader will notice here that which Le monde et l’absence d’oeuvre perhaps a bit too hastily
announced as a ‘play’. 18
Beingness and objectity are obviously not the same. The former, for instance, is most often invisible and
assumed in and through our dealings and preoccupations with all things worldly and the latter is often the result
of a conscious constituting act. If, however, I confuse the two modes of being in this text, it is mainly because
both converge in their being at-the-disposal-of-the-human being.
16
4.4 Particular Phenomenology
The very fact that even the object is an event might come as a surprise. For many readers of
French phenomenology, and especially Marion’s who is Lacoste’s adversary here, indeed
might be accustomed to the distinction between the object and the event. Nevertheless,
Lacoste deems such a distinction, although at times “elegant” (ED 25), merely “rhetorical”
(ibid.). For even the object
once constituted, does not cease to appear to us in the mode of an event of a
sequence of events: we perceive the rose bush without sensing it, but our
perception […] occurs at the rhythm of our steps […] and through a givenness
which cannot be fixed […]. The fact that the object itself each time appears to
us in the mode of the event forces us therefore to admit that the object, too, is
not at our disposal: what now appears as an object may well, within a few
instants, not appear as such” (ED 106)
But the rhetoric of the distinction mentioned lies similarly in the fact that one should not
overestimate or romanticise (as is the case in some French phenomenology as well) the
importance of the event, for “the event is never the irruption of an absolute newness” (ED 25):
“what distinguishes one even from another, its haeccitas in a certain way, does not forbid that
it can be ranked among all other possible events. The conditions of possibility of experience
[...] are well respected. The once and for all, the ephapax, is ultimately the condition of all
appearances” (ibid.).
Just as I live my life only once, so too I encounter the objects and the events I perceive and
experience just once. The event of ‘the once and for all’ pertains to my self and to the
phenomenon of the world. And just as the object is therefore never the eternal repetition of the
same so too the event is never simply the interruption of the new. If then the event-like
character of appearances should be distributed to just about everything that appears then the
most pertinent distinction, for Lacoste, lies in the difference between “what is available and
what is not available”—le disponible and l’indisponible (ED 26)—to the point that one might
wonder whether anything truly is ever at our disposal. If Lacoste rejects Marion’s distinction
between the event and the object here, it is because he is closer to Heidegger’s distinction
between that which is made and produced by human beings and that which escapes all human
making: if the former is indeed at our disposal, the latter pertains to what Heidegger’s early
17
phenomenology called the worlding of the world, the later Heidegger ‘Ereignis’ and current
French phenomenology: the appearing of appearing—I can decide to perform a reduction and
make this or that side of a cube appear but that I am here, in the world, at all and able to
perform such a reduction is, of course, not of my own accord. This is why Lacoste writes that
the once and for all of the world “transcends” (ED 25) all discourse of conditions of
possibility: such conditions do not even apply, since this event is itself what conditions all
else.
One should however not overstate the obvious: most often, we deal only with what is at our
disposal and what is available. If we encounter a thing, in its difference from the obviousness
of objects, it is always “by chance or, who knows, by grace” (ED 60). If the thing differs from
an object, it is according to Lacoste, because of “the excess of appearance” (ED 60) it brings
along: it shows something different and something else than that which appears out of the
horizon of world and finitude. The phenomenological description of the “affective flux in
which the thing becomes an object and the object a thing” is obviously “to quit the familiar
terrain of Heideggerian interpretation” (ED 49).
In this way, the different ontology which Lacoste is proposing, and the tertium datur it entails,
through the movement between objectness and thingness, allows for an other and perhaps
even richer description than the ontology of rupture Heidegger was advancing. One might
therefore conclude that just as a modest and fragile phenomenology can be powerful, so too a
phenomenology of the fragmentary might allow a far more rich description of what it is to
live than the ones who make a clear-cut distinction between the extraordinariness of certain
experiences and their (supposed) counterpart. Avoiding such sudden ruptures and opting for
the inclusion of all sorts of beings and experiences is then to admit that, however fragmentary
the description, “from one phenomenon to the next, the oscillation goes from one mode of
rich experience, full of meaning [...] to a manner of being just as rich and meaningful” (ED
65).
This different ontology, then, does not opt for one or the other figure of the human being.19
It
knows of Marion’s adonné, but recognizes just as well that at times nothing seems to be given
to the human; it knows Romano’s advenant but recognizes just the same that nothing may
happen to the human being and that the event is not all there is; it, of course, knows what
Dasein is, but is already on the verge of describing phenomena that no longer pertain to such
an ‘existence’, it knows that one does not speak of the mortals in the singular but knows, too,
that the only experience I know of is the experience that I myself continuously undergo. All 19
The following sentences are roughly based on ED 119.
18
these reasons make for the fact that the only valid way to speak of the human being, in ways
valid for all human beings, is to speak out of the fact that all human beings share in common,
namely that they all live. Therefore Lacoste, nodding to Henry, writes that in effect one would
not only wish that the latter is right when arguing that the correct translation of the Cartesian
cogito would indeed be ‘I live’ but also that one can agree with Henry when he states that the
concept of a ‘subject’, ‘existing’ solely facing objects, does in fact describe nothing real (ED
38). The living human being only knows a temporary reduction to such ‘subjectity’—as long
as it thinks an object—but a permanent reduction is unthinkable. Lacoste thus concludes that
the living being’s “subjectivity is not in danger of being reduced to subjectity” (ED 39).20
If such a life, then, is not necessarily unfamiliar with something like grace, then it is perhaps
not all that superfluous to ask in what sense something like a theology might enter the debate
on life.
5. Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Theology: Otherwise than the Thing
If it perhaps was impossible for Heidegger to distinguish between metaphysics and theology
then the ontology of Lacoste, acknowledging the equal presence of objects, beings and things
might give the existence of objectness (and thus of metaphysics) its due. Once again it is not a
matter for Lacoste to deconstruct metaphysics, for it matters not to erase all differences
between objectness and thingness which would result in seeing either objects or things
everywhere and would therefore lose track of ‘the fair sample’. It matters rather to assign to
those differences its proper (and real) place, which is to say that there are regions of
experience which are metaphysical21
just as there are regions in which metaphysics plays only
a regional role and in which therefore something other than ontotheology might be detected.
This also means that the overcoming of metaphysics, which in our age is perhaps a bit too
desperately sought for, is certainly not to be seen as a rupture with a mistake made by past
epochs of thinking. The overcoming of metaphysics is to acknowledge that metaphysics might
still be present in our present age and that such a presence therefore is not necessarily to be
avoided or overcome even. For if one may equate objectness and the presence of metaphysics,
20
Although one might agree with this statement, it is difficult to combine it with the somewhat (and perhaps
exaggerating) apocalyptical overtones advancing the human being’s incorporation into Bestand of the opening
pages of Être en danger. 21
Apart from technology, one might think of certain regions of cultural life and of politics. For metaphysics’s
presence in culturural circles, see PD 125. For its presence in politics, see my ‘Marion, Levinas, and Heidegger
on The Question concerning Ontotheology’, Continental Philosophy Review, 43 (2010): 207-239. What else is a
hype in culture than a temporary highest being, which makes for the fact that all different regions of culture are
to be interpreted from out of the one single phenomenon of the hype.
19
it is good that an artwork can be an object too or that a human being is a body (instead of
flesh): how else would be we repair the former and heal the latter (ED 47)?
The common sense Lacoste is imposing here must be noted, for even if “the beyond of
metaphysics cannot arrive once and for all”, simply because of “the omnipresent possibility of
metaphysics”—where an object is, a metaphysical operation has taken place—it is no less true
“that metaphysics is only a partial thought” (ED 50-51) and that most of our experiences
know not of any metaphysics. The common sense here is, in fact, that most of our life we do
not deal with objects only: beings and things are present to consciousness too. And if Lacoste
notes in our experience something else than metaphysics, the reason for this lies in the ‘how
of the appearing’ of these beings and these things. For, just as there three mains modes of
appearing for beings, so too there are three ways of experiencing the pressure of these beings
on consciousness. Metaphysics and objectness may therefore be only one, and thus a regional,
experience of the living human being.
If the world (and a fortiori the earth) make their presence known to me, it is because I know
of them from out of my own experience and my, own albeit narrow, consciousness. The ‘how
of appearing’ of beings are, according to Lacoste, three: objects and beings ready-to-hand
appear only to perception, things appears to perception and affection and the third way of the
sacrament appears to affection only. The three modes of appearing to consciousness thus
differ in their ‘how’ of appearing, but this very ‘how’ of appearing pertains to my own
consciousness: I cannot bracket the fact that my consciousness is, almost always,
consciousness of something.
The relation and rapport to beings itself is never put in parentheses, although such a relation at
times may be attenuated and alleviated somewhat. Lacoste is here, as in other
phenomenological descriptions, looking for a “non-vulgar presence of the present, a present
which is not lived as ‘ständige Anwesenheit’ [permanent presence]” (ED 112). ‘Permanent
presence’ is a Heideggerian term which might be used for the how of metaphysical
experience: a being is gathered and held present in my present experience. There is nothing
that escapes this present experience: the being is held (captive, one might add) in the present
of my consciousness until all of this being is known to me and controlled by me.
Lacoste’s description of the narrowness of consciousness, on the contrary, points to the limits
of such an enterprise: although nothing escapes being present to my consciousness—I cannot
not be consciousness of (something)—a lot of such presencing is not controlled by and
contained in my present consciousness: although I master the object, I never master the whole
of my experience.
20
So although the three modes of appearing differ in the how of appearing, they all share the
fact that they appear to my consciousness and to the present of my experience. Let us, first,
turn, to the object. Objectness results from a conscious decision: the decision to perform a
reduction on this or that being. I can reduce this cube here to one side of it. I can look at the
side of this car here and forget the whole three-dimensional being it is and set for the two-
dimensional side. And although a spontaneous reduction (PD 57-61) might occasionally
occur—it is probably the way in which someone later on turns out to be a phenomenologist—
most of these reductions result from a decision. I want to see this being in a particular way,
and I end up seeing it in this particular way: this being here is no longer ready-to-hand, it has
become the object aimed at and I can perceive all sides of it at command. This is, therefore,
the object: all perception, no affection.
Beings ready-to hand differ little from objects. If the latter result from a conscious decision to
reduce this or that being to this or that side of it, the former surround us quite unconsciously.
The main difference, as is known since Heidegger, is that if of the former everything is
visible, the latter are, for the most part, unnoticed but not invisible: although I do not notice
the pen and the computer while writing with it, I, obviously, see them. They are present to
perception but do not stir up any particular perception or affection.
The tendency towards invisibility should, however, not go unnoticed for these gradients of
in/visibility are quite crucial to understand the invisibility proper to a theological
understanding. The problem for a truly contemporary theology as well as of a genuine
phenomenology these days is that of a “phenomenology of the unapparent” (ED 70) for “the
dimension of being for us is the play between the apparent and the unapparent” (ED 29). It is
on this question that theology, for Lacoste, has a bit more to say than philosophy, for the
former knows not only of a perhaps permanent relation between the visible and the invisible
but also of a critique of the visible by way of the invisible (ED 70).
The paradigm for such a relation and criticism is of course the sacrament and the relation
between the visible sacramentum and the invisible res playing there. Yet the question equally
pertains to Heidegger’s description of the thing: the problem posing itself is indeed quite
simple and can be summed up by asking whether the thing or thingness does appear at all. For
Heidegger, the question seems to be answered in the negative since the thinking of being does
no longer allow for a phenomenology of sorts. Aletheia, Lacoste writes, knows not of any
particular phenomenon.22
But, instead of opting for a rupture between phenomenology and
22
Lacoste seems to depart here from an earlier statement in PP 25, “Heidegger persists in doing
phenomenology even in the later work”.
21
the thinking of being, it is for Lacoste a matter of conceiving the passageway between these
two strands of (contemporary) thought between the phenomenon and that which is
un/concealed in this way, for:
Not all logic of the apparent […] permits one to enter into the logic of the
unapparent. The unapparent only ever appears, hidden or masked, there where
we know of its presence. The apparent can always mislead us, if only because
of its symbolic weightiness or its sensible glory. If we persist then in speaking
of a phenomenology of the unapparent, it is only to assign ourselves to a field:
[a dimension] wherein the unapparent effectively appears but does so only if
we let those signs of presence disappear which would claim our attention [all
too exclusively] (ED 71-72)
It is with a logic of hiddenness then that one has to deal once one encounters the thing and the
sacrament: what is most important about their appearance masks itself in the extravaganza
with which it possibly appears. The res of the sacraments, too, loves to hide itself.
Such a phenomenology of the unapparent is possible, however, because of the peculiar ‘how’
of the thing’s appearing. For, over and against objectness, the thing has two distinctive marks:
first, it appears of itself and does not require any active decision or act of constitution on the
part of the human being (ED 60) and, second, it appears with a solemnity and seriousness
usually lacking in objects (ED 55, 66 and 67).23
The thing therefore appeals to affectivity far
more than does the object.
Its phenomenality—the ‘how’ of its appearing—is such that it makes the human being enter
into a region which is larger than the horizon described by the world. As the sacrament will
do, the thing will operate a decentring of the human being. The thing itself will occupy the
centre and gather all other appearances, even that of the human being, around itself (ED 61).
Yet, as we have seen, if it is the same being which is able to appear both as an object and as a
thing, one can no longer maintain that a totally horizon than the world substitutes itself for
such a Heideggerian world, rather one will need to say that the world already differs from the
world as described by Heidegger in 1927 (ED 59). Once again, it is a matter of rejecting the
ontology of rupture which would opt for either the world and the accompanying presence-at-
hand or to-hand or the earth and its concomitant thingness. If things appear, the philosopher’s
task is: 23
The distinction between what is important and what is not is present also PP 106-108.
22
To enlarge the horizon [of appearing] or to substitute the one for the other. It
seems that a thing is not in the world […] There are things, and as soon as we
perceive them as such, a displacement advenes: either we persist in seeing the
world as the horizon of all phenomenality and we would need to manage a
place somehow for strange phenomena such as the divinities (ED 55)
In short, we would need to speak as Lacoste has done for a long time of the earth next to the
world or of liturgical experience in the margins of the world.
Or we would admit that those phenomena, those beings rather, do not really
have a proper place in the world, and that, by making them appear, we are
forced to interpret the world as not being the horizon of all appearing (ibid.)
in which case, one can readily admit that the liturgical experience, for instance, is one of those
possibilities offered to the region of experience called life. And in life, one might just as
easily be confronted with things, beings ready-to-hand and objects: all these diverse beings
are part of experience of life even if not all of them are part and parcel of the world. In this
way, the phenomenality of human experience harbours more phenomena than a simple
reduction of experience to the horizon of the world or to the earth for that matter allows.
One might wonder then whether this enlarged horizon of phenomenality does not in effect
alter the phenomena Heidegger taught and thought able to appear there. This is ultimately
why Lacoste is led to a redefinition of human facticity: “if such a thing as ‘facticity’ exists,
the fact of existing, its fundamental logic consists in nothing else then the play between
constitution, deconstitution, and reconstitution” (ED 85) which throws our lives in
experiencing this time the thing, another time objectness, and back again.
Issuing from this enlarged phenomenality, is then not only a renewed definition of human
facticity but also an enlarged conception of everydayness (ED 49): no longer the everydayness
that one, as Heidegger, would want to oppose to authentic and heroic life, but an
everydayness which includes the highest and the lowest of experiences. It is not that Lacoste
denies the fact that some experiences shows us more of and better than others what being is—
anxiety for instance—it is rather that Lacoste disagrees with Heidegger when it comes to
stating that these experiences make appear the totality—Ganzheit—of human experience by
relegating all other experiences to a degree inferior to the fundamental experience.
23
The question only is—and if one leaves Heidegger once one might just as well abandon his
interpretations once more—whether one should accept the battle between the world and the
earth (or between beingness and thingness) as the ultimate or whether one should not try to
redescribe the very appearance of the thing by scrutinizing the myriad of mythologies
Heidegger saw appearing around its appearance. If the thing truly appears of itself, one might
easily diverge from one or the other Heideggerian “dictate” (ED 130). For if thingness truly
exceeds beingness and instrumentality, an appearance still other than the thing is possible.
This phenomenon ‘other than the thing’ is what will put Lacoste on the way towards a
thinking of a phenomenology and theology of the invisible and of sacramentality. Once more
Lacoste will play on the dis-jointure between perception and affection, by imaging a third
mode of appearing: not solely to perception (objectness) or mainly to affection (thingness) but
solely to affection (sacramentality).
The question Lacoste raises is quite simple: do we really need to go along with Heidegger’s
mythology of the thing (ED 62)? Could one not use the means of phenomenology to retrieve a
more common and commonsensical understanding of the thing’s appearance? For, if the later
Heidegger privileged the unconcealment or aletheia of das Ding at the expense of the
phenomenon in the how of its appearing—which is minimally: to perception and/or affection,
in short: to some kind of subjectivity—the latter might return with somewhat of a vengeance:
showing that Heidegger’s interpretation, in fact, downplayed the role of the phenomenon
actually showing itself to subjectivity.24
Lacoste then proceeds towards an Entmythologisierung of the things’s appearance: not only is
its appearance not absolutely different from the object—any being can become a thing and an
object—but there is also nothing in its appearance that necessitates the sacral interpretation
Heidegger offers. Lacoste argues that Heidegger in a way too easily left phenomenology
behind and that, by offering these pagan accents, Heidegger in fact was mistaken on the logic
of the phenomenology of the unapparent, for that which does not appear when one is
confronted with beingness and objectness is not necessarily to be described as the thing in its
Heideggerian sense: that which the instrument conceals is not necessarily that which the thing
unconceals (ED 64).
There are two ways of criticising Heidegger here: the first is philosophical and consists in a
sort of sobering up Heidegger by pointing to a different interpretation of paintings. In Être en
24
The reader will know that questions such as these occupied Lacoste since the publication of the text Le monde et l’absence d’oeuvre—first published in 1996—asking whether Heidegger did not make appear more
than what actually appears there.
24
danger, Lacoste focuses on Vermeer’s Milkmaid. One might indeed argue that some sort of
libation is at issue in this painting, but it is not that the woman offers this milk to one or the
other divinity but rather gives the impression of gently preparing a daily meal for her man or
master returning from working on the land. And if there is a sense in saying that the painting
conveys a sense of weight and gravity25
, this is because the thing appearing here in this small
offering tears us to the land in which the social bond between us mortal human beings appears
without Heidegger’s heavy overtones of the ‘capability to die’—Sterbenkönnen—appearing.
If such a drama does not appear here, what appears is the daily business of a woman caring
for and concerned with the ritual of a rich but nonetheless daily life. One might argue in effect
that the work praises the rituality that is part of our daily life and enlightens, quite literally,
precisely this daily rituality rather than advancing the sacrality Heidegger was imposing on
the dirt of the peasant’s shoes in his study of Van Gogh. Two different interpretations of the
thing, then: one should say, modestly, that “from one phenomenon to the next, the oscillation
goes from one rich and meaningful mode of experience, and of which one must admit that it
can be my experience, to a mode of being just as rich and bearer of meaning” (ED 65). The
“peaceful comfort of the home” (ibid.), depicted by Vermeer, is just as ‘true’ and important as
the pagan earth that Heidegger saw arising and appearing from out of Van Gogh’s painting.
Another way of criticising Heidegger’s mythomania does not pass through the conflict of
interpretations but starts form that which does not allow that much, if any, human
interpretation: the appearance of Christ in and through the sacraments. And it is here that
Lacoste hints as phenomenology of the unapparent proper to theology, although it would not
be foreign to the more down-to-earth phenomenology which is advanced in the earlier
discussion with Heidegger. It is not foreign to phenomenology proper because sacramentality
for Lacoste shares in the fact that it escapes human interpretation and production as much as
the simple appearing of appearing. If the latter, for the philosopher, would be the sole thing
that amongst all the historical construct is just one more historical construct, then, the
sacraments for the theologian, as that point of contact between God and the human being,
defy interpretation: in the Eucharist for instance, the theologian is instructed by God rather
than that he or she would instruct us about the sacraments. The sacrament, in this way, is at a
distance both from the experience of the profane (Vermeer) and of the sacred (Van Gogh)
(ED 66). It is not less than a thing, but instructs about something other: if the thing decentres
the human being and makes the latter enter into a region in which something other-than-world
25
See for instance Karen Rosenberg’s piece in The New York Times ,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/arts/design/11vermeer.html
25
appears, the sacrament proposes a region solely centred around and in Christ: the space of the
liturgical experience is delineated entirely “by the Absolute itself” (ED 67).
It is with the sacraments and the Eucharist, then, that Lacoste discover the third way of
relation of perception to affection. The sacraments instruct about a mode of appearing that
appeals almost solely to affection. It is here then that one finds the startling statement that the
encounter with God in and through the sacraments has to be “more than a non-experience”
(ED 68).
There is, however, no visible difference between the liturgical things and the things issuing
from Heideggerian philosophy: the wine poured for a guest does not visibly differ from the
wine of the Eucharist. Liturgical experience denotes a difference in feeling and or sensation:
one must “learn to feel” (ED 67) what it is for a thing to have liturgical significance. This
difference, then, does not show itself objectively nor visibly: it is not something ‘about’ the
thing that makes it liturgical, it is rather the way in which these things are ‘subjectively’
perceived that makes the difference. It is by faith alone that one is able to sense the difference
and such a liturgical experience is by no means an experience that “would bracket all
appearing for the senses” (ibid.).
On the contrary: it is an experience which is well aware of its peculiar status and in which
absence, if absence there need be, is felt more vividly than ever. In this regard, the liturgical
experience is one in which “I sense that I do not sense” (ibid.). This experience is twofold: on
the one hand, I experience my non-experience through experiencing a certain lack, and on the
other, I experience that which is lacking from this non-experience. I experience a lack of
experience and that which is lacking from experience. In other words, I experience
simultaneously that God does not come to experience and I experience that what I am
experiencing is not God.
It is the latter which makes for the somewhat awkward character of liturgical experience, for I
might be seduced by that which I am nevertheless experiencing to the point of forgetting to
feel that I am not feeling God. In short, that which occupies consciousness in non-experience
might be such that its presence as a presence of absence, wrongly, takes precedence over
God’s presence. I might, for instance, take and interpret God’s absence from experience so
absolutely that I simply proclaim God to be absent or non-existent even. Or the other way
around: I take what I nevertheless experience as God’s absolute and final presence and would
deem all other possible presences (in other religions, for example) to be of an inferior kind. In
both cases, that which occupies consciousness (as at once too present (of absence) or too
26
absent (of a presence) takes precedence over the object of this intentional aim and I no longer
‘feel that I do not feel’ or I no longer, if you like, lack the lack.
Both examples would be mistaken about the lack that is non-experience, though, not seeing
that it is this very lack which constitutes it as the experience of the non-experience or the
feeling of not-feeling. This lack in effect does not differ from any other absence. With any
other lack or privation of the object desired, one might start to value the lack rather than the
object lacking: one might think of some tragic hero’s here. If I no longer feel that I do not feel
then something has somewhat inappropriately interposed itself between myself and the object
of my desire: either the absence has asserted itself as a presence in itself or the presence of the
absence of the desired object is mistakenly seen as sufficiently present.
This logic of the lack, according to Lacoste, is “universally valid” but is felt “all the more
brutally” (ED 68) when it comes to the logic of the sacraments. How so? Because, in liturgy,
that which gives itself to be seen and felt precisely gives itself not to be seen: the bread and
the wine should diffract all attention that they would call to themselves (ED 69). In a certain
sense, one might say that, in liturgy, the danger to forget about a phenomenology of the
unapparent and the simple settling for a phenomenology of the apparent is much greater than
in would be a mundane matters. In this sense, the fact that one would forget about being
because of the presence of beings is similar to forgetting about Christ in and through the
simple phenomenality of bread and wine, but the bread and the wine occasion to forget about
Christ even easier than to forget about being.
How, then, should I endure sensing that I do not sense God instead of opting for not sensing at
all—atheism if you like—or sensing too much—a certain way of religious experience. This
endurance is only possible by appropriately perceiving the passage-way from the liturgical
things to the liturgical gift or to what exactly is being given in liturgy: bread and wine appear
appropriately only if we no longer care for the bread and wine per se but only for the
givenness of Christ through these mediations. What matters is not these ontic realities but
rather the primacy of the divine gift over all ontic givens.
This is therefore why a different phenomenology of the unapparent announces itself in
liturgical experience: “whereas the thing, as interpreted by Heidegger, is visible all the way,
the ‘thing’ which participates in the liturgy is not there to be seen: its visibility misleads, and
it is of the invisible that the believer says that it is present. He says so, or can say so, of
course, because the invisible appears to him while affecting him” (ED 70). The believer
therefore finds a way to a phenomenology of the unapparent proper: not all visible thing refer
to an/the invisible in the same way and in ways that would be appropriate. It is only by calling
27
the least bit of attention to themselves, by distracting as much as possible from the visible
glory, that the invisible might appear. Christ comes, if He comes, incognito. But, for this, it is
necessary that the believer balances between feeling that he does not feel and no longer
feeling that he does not feel: only in and through this balance the believer can know that and
how the sacramentum refers to the res.
Here faith, one might add, is exposed to a double risk: the risk of not noting the Messiah since
he will come incognito and as a thief in the night—sticking to the sacramentum while not
noting the res—or the other way around believing too soon that this here is indeed the
Messiah and no longer noticing the mediations that only deliver the res, in wich case the res
would thus be received at the expense of all sacramentum.
It is mid-way feeling and non-feeling, Lacoste believes, that a “new chapter of
phenomenology” can be written, one which aims at “elucidating an original situation of
sensation” (ED 73). Liturgical experience, then, more than any other, might instruct us about
what it is to receive ‘things’ through affective media. If it is in and through everyday life that
we are immersed in experiencing objects, things, beings, and even, who knows, something of
a divine presence, than it is about time to see just how this life is to be conceived.
In what follows, then, the focus will be not on that which is encountered on life (things and so
on) but on the question how our lives encounter that which it encounters. The question thus
once again is: what is life? And how is it lived? This will occasion us to speak about the
dialectics between quietude and inquietude and to understand this dialectic both in its
philosophical and in its theological version.
6. The Life of Dasein: First Phenomenology
How to imagine situations and experiences in which that which determines the human as
Dasein—the Dasein in the human being Heidegger liked to say—no longer solely constitutes
our being. It are these experiences here labels as counter-existentials: experiences in which
that which pertains to the structure of Dasein is reduced to the utter minimum.26
These
phenomena “which counter the logic of existence [of Dasein, JS] and keep us in a relation of
inexperience with regard to existence” (ED 95) are perhaps plenty: Lacoste first mentions the
possibility of a sleep without dream, in which our relation to whatever kind of world almost
seems to disappear in order to then move on to being-at-peace and the phenomenon of joy.
26
Although the term is, I believe, first coined by Marion, Réduction et donation. , p. 188. For Heidegger on
‘the awakening of Dasein in the human being, see for instance Metaphysik und Nihilismus (Frankfürt a. M, 1999)
p. 60 and also Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit (Frankfürt a. M, 2004), p. 215, on
“the Dasein within me”.
28
All these phenomena, however, presuppose a different kind of phenomenological ontology
than the ontology outlined by Heidegger.
6.1 Phenomenological Ontology Revisited: Between Husserl and Heidegger
Lacoste’s ontology starts from a minimum of experience. The phenomenon of life, for
instance, is the condition of possibility of something like Dasein rather than the other way
around: if Dasein is alive, the living being is not necessarily a Dasein. The phenomena of
world and earth are, in one way or another, conditioned by subjectivity, for these phenomena
always and already appear to someone experiencing them: without an aptitude to experience,
one would not even speak of the world and the earth.
This is one way to make one’s perplexity about Heidegger’s change or turn more fruitful: if it
is obvious that the one experiencing anxiety and the concomitant homelessness of Dasein is
not simultaneously experiencing the dwelling on the earth, and if the disenchanted world
without God of Being and Time contradicts the enchanted earth of the later Heidegger, then it
seems better to accept the two experiences as ever so many partial and possible experiences of
subjectivity. If Heidegger’s descriptions of what it is to be human are only partial, it is not
totally aberrant to assume that other experiences and other horizons than Heidegger
envisioned might be possible just the same.
For these experiences as ever so many experiences for and appearances to a conscious subject
exceed perhaps Heidegger’s contempt for experiences restricted to the present. It is, in other
words, to privilege Husserl over Heidegger by being faithful to the view that not one
experience deserves to be labelled and conceived as more fundamental than others, not,
however, by arguing that all experiences are as valid for phenomenology as others but by
arguing for the fact that it might be just these contradictory experiences which unfold properly
what it is to be human (ED 100). This is ultimately what Goodman’s idea of the fair sample
does in ontological matters: the sample is fair and good if and only if actual and real
experiences—finitude for instance—do not relegate other experiences to the realm of the non-
existent—peace and joy for example. This is also why, in Lacoste’s ontology, “the primacy of
the possible over the real” (ibid.) is maintained.
The praise of possibility is a praise of plurality: if I (am able to) experience only one
experience at a time, it is obvious too that the sum of my experience is, in principle, limitless.
If the fair sample, on the other hand, also prescribes that not all experiences are as important
as others, than it is perhaps fair to state that what is most important shows itself in and to a
plurality of experiences and not in this or that particular experience but rather in ‘the
29
transition of experiences’ (Cf. ED 85). This transition itself is what is important if one wants
to decide over what it is be human. It is the givenness, the flux, in short the event of this
transition that the phenomenologist should seek to describe. Phenomenology opens up as it
were to what Lacoste terms “a plural anarchy” (ED 99).27
To describe this flux phenomenologically, it is necessary to combine, if one may say so,
Husserl and Heidegger. From Heidegger, one needs the stress on what exceeds objectity and
the unavailability of thingness. From Husserl, one feeds from the phenomenological masterful
description of phenomena to subjectivity. One might add even that if Husserl focused on the
‘how’ of each appearing and Heidegger’s wager was ultimately on the appearing of appearing
itself—the phainomenon versus aletheia,—then a contemporary phenomenology seeking to
retain the best of both should try to find a passage-way from out of appearances to the
appearing of appearing or from what is given to givenness. If Heidegger’s phenomenology
risked focusing too much on what is unavailable and what is not man-made, Husserl’s
remained too close to that which the subject could constitute and control. If the former let
appear too much—seeing for instance divinities there where need not be one,—the latter
made appear too much—extending the realm of objectity to regions inappropriate. It is in such
a combination that the two major phenomenologies of our times indeed converge: Husserl’s
phainomenon and Heidegger’s aletheia agree in seeing that the unconcealing of the
phenomenon is possible only because it first appears from out of a region of concealment and
non-phenomenality (ED 103). For both thinkers, in effect, the wresting of the phenomenon
out of its non-phenomenality is to be considered as the task—the métier, Beruf or work—of
phenomenology
6.2 Phenomenology of Peace and Joy
It is such a combination of the (available) given and the (unavailable) givenness then one can
find in the phenomenon of peace. If we may return to the play between objects and things of
the previous sections here, then it is easy to shows that the flux in which these phenomena are
experienced is more fundamental than these experiences themselves:
Between thingness and objecticity we cannot trace a limit […] Most of
beings can appear as objects and as things, but they can also appear in
experiential confines where it is simply impossible to decide whether it is a
27
On anarchy in comteporary philosophy, see my ‘Anarchistic Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy. R.
Schürmann and the Hybris of Philosophy’, Research in Phenomenology, 37 (2007): 417-439.
30
thing which appears or whether it is an object. We can describe the
appearance of a thing and of an object. But we cannot do so without taking
into account the affective flux in which the thing becomes an object and the
object a thing” (ED 49)
The affective flux happens to me as an event: its givenness is the conditio sine qua non of the
appearance of the thing and of the object. The flux of experience itself, however, is for the
most part undetermined and open to whatever experience: from the most banal to the most
important. It is the minimum-definition of life: the flux shows itself as an event and is “a
priori indeterminate” (ED 107)—if everything happens once and for all no single experience
will tell us, however, once and for all what it is to be.
Peace combines both the indeterminate and unavailable givenness of the experience of the
flux and the given character of the phenomenon, because time and again it is from out of the
indeterminacy of the flux that something determinate does appear. Peace, then, happens and
appears to a subjectivity as a happy present which renews itself and has a certain lasting
character about it: it is not a vulgar present of ständige Anwesenheit since it is not confined to
solely the present. The fact that it lasts, even though for a while, accounts for the present of
peace’s openness to the future and to the past. What makes it differ from Heidegger’s concern
or care is that the future here does not appear as a threat—death no longer looms over this
present—and the past is not something over which one feels remorse. The present of peace,
rather, is such that hope issues from it: both the hope for this moment to last and the hope for
something of an absolute future in which this peace would never disappear. Yet the
phenomenon of peace is such that it cannot be denied to anyone at any time. In this sense, it
has a transcendental character and belongs to everyone’s aptitude for experience (ED 123).
On the other hand, the phenomenon of peace, although appearing to subjectivity and to
someone’s present, escapes all control. Its givenness lies in the fact that if it is present to
consciousness, this presence has to be a gift: I do not choose to be peaceful, it is rather
something that happens to me (ED 114-115).
One cannot but conclude that, just as a sleep without dream, the phenomenon of peace
somewhat contradicts the horizon of the Heideggerian world: not only there is the experience
of a presence in my present which would not be vulgar, the experience of self that is the
experience of peace is such that the world no longer disturbs this kind of experience. The
“extraterritoriality” (ED 123) of the experience of peace and of similar ones such as the
phenomenon of joy, which cannot be accommodated in the horizon of the world are thus
31
pleasantly anarchic and cause a “fruitful disorder” (ED 118) in the map of existence that
Heidegger drew. Such a stirring up trouble results for Lacoste both in the fact that the human
being cannot be reduced to Dasein and in the fact that life will turn out to be greater than
existence.
Just as being-at-peace knows not of death, or at least is not all that concerned about it, it
temporarily appeases “the conflict inscribed in the being of the existent” (ED 117). This
conflict, for Lacoste, is multiple: it concerns consciousness’ narrowness in the very precise
sense that one experience always hides other experiences and that, most often, one does not
control one’s experience: if one wants to experience the presence of the thing in and through
affectivity, it is likely that one nevertheless ends up only with an object. “Often,” Lacoste
writes “such a doubling of experience leads to an unhappy consciousness” (ibid.).
One might compare the one-sidedness of experience with the manner in which Heidegger
described the phenomenon of zapping. In his Einleitung in der Philosophie, Heidegger
analyzed what in his time—the lecture dates from 1928—must have been quite a new
phenomenon: the experience of the one listening to radio broadcasts. Heidegger’s analysis is
quite keen to point out the finitude which opens up with the new possibility of listening to
worldwide broadcasts. Not only “must one say that [the one listening] must choose: one must
pick a particular program and a particular song to listen too. One cannot hear everything [...]
What shows itself is, in effect, the necessity of a limitation, the necessity of untruth in the
sense of concealment of what cannot be assumed”. Yet, Heidegger says, “this is not what is
decisive: what we see, rather, is that many people do not even choose one particular
possibility of hearing but prefers to jump from one source to the next. The ones listening to
the radio make themselves slaves of their apparatus”.28
Such ‘slaves’, Heidegger then argues,
open a very particular openness towards beings: they open a possibility that the one not
owning a radio does not even know of, and by doing so, “they bring an un untruth and a
seeming into Dasein”.29
Lacoste’s description of being-at peace, by contrast, does not judge one phenomenon over the
other: the fair sample distinguishes between what is important and what is not, it does not
differentiate between authentic and less authentic modes of being one’s being. It also knows
how to live consciousness’s narrowness “without drama” (ED 178) and intimates how
contradictory experiences and moods may be lived “without any unhappy consciousness” (ED
117).
28
Heidegger, Einleitung in der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M, 1996), p.335. 29
Ibid., p. 335.
32
Just how being-at-peace extends the affirmation of self (ED 114) and the concomitant
meaningfulness of being (ED 122) to life itself will be discussed below. First we need to see
how one moves from existence as Dasein to life, for if counterexistentials tell us one thing it
is that they need to be considered as “contesting the reduction of the human being to measures
of Dasein” (ED 128)
6.3 Phenomenology of the Beginnings
In just what then, would the human being differ from Dasein? Once more it is the logic of a
modest and minimal phenomenology that can contain a wealth of experiences that gains the
upperhand over an all too improper reduction of the human being to this or that experience.
Lacoste proceeds in a double manner: if all experiences depicted until now whether it be
angst, peace or joy have in common that they all show themselves to affectivity, should one
then not simply state that it is affectivity what is most fundamental? And, second, is our
primordial openness towards things not simply an affective openness in which the beginnings
of life are shown before they take the contours of world and earth?
In order to answer these questions, Lacoste somewhat abandons the phenomena of joy and
peace and proceeds towards those phenomena in which the human being deliberately
attenuates the connection with world, namely awakening, sleeping and resting. These
phenomena show, that, although the connection to world and to others may indeed be
reduced, it never disappears completely: the world is present in and through the dream for
instance. In awakening, I do encounter myself but the world, too, insists on becoming-present:
I have to wake up in order to do this or that. The mix between the intentionality and the
ecstasy towards the world and the inward experience of self is even more visible in the
experience of resting: even though this rest is not without world, the care for others and for
the world is substituted for the simple “concern for oneself as flesh” (ED 152).
Here the reduction to affectivity or to the affective encounter between my self and the world
show themselves more primordial: the truth is in the mix rather than what is mixed. Or, in
Lacoste’s words: “the being-flesh here attenuates being-in-the-world; being-in-the-world is
reduced to being-flesh” (ibid.). This reduction therefore names the simple joy of being alive
and one in effect may “retain the possibility to push back ek-stasis in favour of what we name
here, for lack of a better word: life. The one resting is ‘living’ more than he is existing”
(ibid.).
The “first phenomenology” (ED 138) Lacoste proposes shows that at the beginning is the
possibility of a plurality of experiences. It describes the possibility of diverse experience
33
before actual experience turns the possibility of experience into an actual be experience. In
this sense, the first phenomenology is not only playing with a long tradition of determining
what is first philosophy, as in deciding which kind of philosophy is most important, it is also,
and primordially, trying to delineate that region of experience that precedes any determinate
experience:
[this] concerns us all and what we are at “base”: of aptitudes to experience
which reveal themselves only in and through [an] experience, but which
constitute the a priori of experience. And because this a priori is always
there, we can speak of it […] independent of all individual phenomena in
which it shows itself (ibid.)
This logic of the basics of experience is a logic of possibility: the one experience constituted,
entails that another one is deconstituted. What first appeared as an object, now shows itself as
a thing, and so on. This flux shows the a priori character of our sein-können or our ability to
be and shows it as indeed higher than actuality: if that which pertains to human facticity,
namely mortality and finitude can in fact be deconstituted through the possibility of rest and
peace “we discover that [this facticity] is not our fate [...] but a mere possibility itself” (ED
147).
In the beginning—to put the a priori biblically—is only “subjectivity, its flesh and its world”
(ibid.).
7. Towards an “Otherwise than Existence”: Desire and its Dialectics
One might interpret the beginning of chapter 6, ‘From existence to life’, as a temporary
relapse of Lacoste when stating that “the logic of existence [...] is not torn to pieces by
counter-existential phenomena, of which we might say that they do not manifest an otherwise
than existence but, at best, the margins of existence” (ED 129). By placing life next to
existence, Lacoste falls prey again to the logic of the earlier work where the liturgical
experience and other experiences were considered in almost dualistic way: either the world or
the liturgy. One of the aims of this text, however, was to show that it is difficult indeed to
combine such a dualism with the idea of the fair sample proposed by Être en Danger, in
which no experience takes precedence over another—neither de facto nor de iure.
Yet something other than existence—than Dasein—is intimated in those passages that argue
for a complete abandonment of the distinction between the existentiell and the existential (ED
34
91/158), that is, once existence is to be considered as but one region of life. If we are to
equate life with “the almost anarchic domain of the existentiell” (ED 158) we are still thinking
along too Heideggerian lines and do not yet see who just how the thought of life totally
disrupts the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. ‘Life’ has ontic and ontological
characteristics: ontic, in the sense that it allows one to focus on other ‘ontic’ experiences than
Heidegger; and ontological because all these experiences would need to be integrated in the
transcendentality of the human being’s aptitude for experience. Both the ontic and the
ontological therefore obtain a different signification than it has in Heideggerian thinking.
In this way, it is fair to say that Lacoste no longer operates in the margins of Heideggerian
thought but interjects his own thinking of phenomenological ontology between the
Heideggerian and Husserlian branches of phenomenology. It is in this sense that the question
needs to be posed how ‘life’ relates to those instances that imposed itself on the existential
analytic perhaps a bit too much and those that were present in that very analytic too little,
respectively death and the Absolute (ED 161)
In life, Dasein dies by desire, for desire, according to Lacoste, lives from a lack that may not
be confused with finitude. On the contrary, if it is true that satisfaction is the death of desire
then the critique of any satisfaction by desire accounts for the “original omnipresence” (ED
167) of desire. It is through this critique that desire introduces infinitude into the realm of
finite life (ED 169). As long as I live, I will not stop desiring. Desire is ek-stasis: it testifies to
my ever-present longing for the other, whether this otherness is human or not.
It is with this interplay between rest and restlessness, peace and desire that Lacoste moves
most decidedly beyond Heidegger. This dialectics between quietude and inquietude therefore
can count as the “crucial experience” (ED 173) of all “experiences in danger” (ED 127) if not
somewhat dangerous experiences. Restlessness here is, obviously, all that unsettles the
experience of peace and that re-launches common experience. In Lacoste’s words, unrest is
used here for “all which conveys to experience an ecstatic character” (ED 173) for all that
makes us reach out to others, that turns consciousness into a consciousness of something other
than ourselves, in short, for all that throws us back into a world.
7.1 Of an Experience at once Banal and Important
The curiousness of this crucial experience and its dialectics between quietude and inquietude
is multiple: it allows for a theological as well as a secular reading. And if one of the shortest
definitions of ontotheology would be that the transition from the philosophical—secular—to
the theological has become if not impossible than at least improbable, the oddness of
35
Lacoste’s latest is that this transition occurs somehow à l’insu: the transition from a secular
reading of this dialectics to a theological interpretation can be made but it need not be the
case. Here is the reason why we would argue for the fact that what we have here is a less
ontotheological state of affairs than is usually the case in most of French phenomenology. If
there still is a locus theologicus, it is that we can no longer assign God to one particular place.
To start with the secular reading of the dialectics between inquietude or ecstacy and quietude
and rest is to start with the curious fact that the being who is destined to die finds the time to
rest at all. For a being advancing towards its death, it is quite awkward to find time for
boredom and similar experiences. If ‘life really is too short’, one could have expected that
boredom would be absent from the map of existence. Similarly, if death is the only fact of
life, a permanent state of restlessness would be what could be expected. From this
perspective, the longing for some repose and relaxation, in effect, can only seem somewhat
ridiculous. “The paradox,” Lacoste argues, is quite well-known to theology. Even if in
philosophy, too, the care for one’s death can appear a bit comical30
, the desire for God and the
concomitant restlessness turns all temporary all too temporary micro-eschatologies of peace
and rest in which the infinite supposedly crosses the finite into a “parody” (ED 173).
And yet nothing, perhaps, is more common to life—our lives—than such a back and forth
between rest and restlessness. One could, of course, argue that for a thought like Lacoste’s, in
which everydayness and ontic experiences are valued as high as they possibly can be, it is
quite easy to repeat that first and foremost—zunächst and zumeist—finitude is not a question
of life as it is lived, the fact remains, of course, that in the most part of our daily dealings the
question of death does not come to mind and the question of finitude itself can, at times, seem
somewhat banal (ED 163).
Less banal, however, is that inquietude today, even if its “purest case” (ED 173) pertains to
theology, takes on the contours of the phenomenon of stress as one of those peculiar modes in
which the future announces itself to the present and shows how the pure en-stasis of rest and
peace is impossible. The dialectics between rest and restlessness, even for secular mind-sets,
becomes even less banal if one realizes just how Lacoste stretches the concept of
everydayness up to the contours of life and therefore needs to refrain from distinguishing
between authentic and less authentic modes of being. There is, for Lacoste, no such thing as
an authentic way of being: there are only important and less important states of being our
being. It is in this way then that one may propose a phenomenology of life. Life here is an
30
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 129, “No doubt nothing is more comical than the concern that a being has
for an existence that it could not save from its destruction”.
36
openness towards the future which differs both from mainstream philosophy—for Heidegger,
this openness would have to be named care and it would ultimately be an openness towards
the nothingness of my death—and from theology—for our contemporaries know little of a
desire for God.
Most frequently, the dialectics between rest and restlessness, in effect, takes on the contours
between relaxation and stress.31
Stress is obviously one way of relating to what is other than
yourself. The ‘how’ of stress, its peculiarity, is such that the future—the demand that some
things be done in the future—takes hold of the present. This taking possession of the
present—Heidegger speaks of Benommenheit: nehmen means to take—is such that it is
indifferent which task is to be performed and also when it is to be performed: the object
causing stress might be anything whatsoever and the demand that it be done might pertain
both to the near and to the distant future. What makes a difference, rather, is that the future
takes hold of the present in such a way that the one stressed can become almost immobilized
in his present: nothing other is ‘there’ than the task to be performed—whenever and
whichever task. There are, surely, gradients in stress: from total immobilization, to the
minimum of intentionality that is needed to think about this one sole task to be performed up
to the ‘everyday’ stress that can be accompanied with any other thing to do: as when I relax
with some friends, knowing all too well about the tasks that I actually should be doing.
One might argue that the case of deep stress—in ways similar to what Heidegger call deep
boredom—is that extreme a phenomenon that it paralyzes the one enduring it and reduces him
or her to the solitude experienced through such an experience: no one can stress in your place
just as no one can die in your place. Here stress, just as the experience of anxiety, throws one
somewhat ‘outside’ of the world, in that one can no longer partake in everyday-business, even
though still experiencing, although in a particular way, one’s own particular being-thrown ‘in’
the world. Being-in-the-world only ever stops at death. That is why Heidegger stated that a
corpse does not have any being-in-the-world and why only humans are ‘able’ to die—they
have a world to die of and from—and animals are not.
Yet some degree of stress seems more familiar to our times and could be accommodated to
the presence of rest and relaxation: in this particular case, the future, and the tasks to be
performed, would not stand in the way of everyday preoccupation. Here it is some particular
task that causes stress: this text needing to be finished or that class that needs to be prepared
31
Lacoste mentions stress at ED 84n65 but was already concerned with it MO 93, where stress is regarded as
one of those experiences in which “the weight of things” is felt the most. Heidegger talks about stress in his
Zollikoner Seminäre, ed. M. Boss (Frankfürt a. M., 1987), 174-188.
37
by tomorrow. Most often indeed, this kind of stress does not make for a paralyzed present. I
can settle for a normal working-experience and work, say, until five. No doubt the fact that
this text is not finished by then, will cause some stress—the future will visit my present—but
it is not stress of such a kind that it keeps me from resting—my present will not possessed by
the stressful future.
It is this dialectics then that is close to the life that Lacoste is intuiting: a back and forth
between rest and restlessness which cannot be reduced to the dual logic of existence: either an
inauthentic present or an authentic openness towards the future. Life wavers between a
peaceful dwelling in one’s present and the (more often than not) fruitful disorder brought
about by restlessness caused by one’s future.
If then the “knot” between rest and restlessness sounds familiar, it is because this knot and
this dialectics, according to Lacoste, makes for “one of the most originary rhythms of life”
(ED 173). Originary, because the reconciliation between “the emergence of desire and the
obtainment of peace is nothing that we have to aim for, for the simple reason that, in one way
or another, this conciliation has always and already taken place” (ibid.). It is this conciliation
that would need, for Lacoste, to be described phenomenologically. For, if one needs another
account of facticity and existence than Heidegger has given us, one needs to say that “while
describing it, we discover nothing other than a ‘fact’. The referral of peace and inquietude and
of inquietude and peace is a matter of fact [‘de fait’] just as affectivity is” (ibid.) It is this tie
or knot “between quietude and inquietude that, if we want to maintain the language of the
fundamental, deserves we use it in its regard” (ED 177).
It is, moreover, this knot and this dialectics that, basically, knows how to weave together
contradictory experience ‘without drama’. Life, as we know it, knows all too well that some
experiences are conflictual and that the longing for one experience can exclude others. But
life knows, too, how to survive such conflicts not only without drama but also without
frustration: nothing really demands that desire is an unfortunate event (ED 176). On the
contrary, desire is what keeps life going, so to say, by perpetually launching experience
towards its other (ED 167). And it is in this re-launching, in this flux, that a great many of
even contradictory experiences can be contained: contrary to anxiety, stress, and boredom the
simultaneity of rest and restlessness is not all that rare (ED 177). It is in our very lives that the
simultaneity of lack—unrest—and pleasure is always and already familiar and reconciled: “a
happy present” is possible even if one senses loss and lack (ED 175).
38
7.2 Vita Philosophica—Vita Teologica
If the experience of life, then, combines the most banal and the most solemn of experiences,
there seems to be nothing preventing us from inquiring whether a relations of sorts exists
between what matters in life and what matters for God. The infinity and indeterminacy of
desire and inquitude is, in effect, a desire coming from God knows where: one does not know
the stakes of its never-ending character. Its whence and its whither, as Heidegger already
argued for Dasein, remain in darkness.32
The impossibility to overcome ontotheology in one stroke thus amounts to a sort of
theological agnosticism. Agnosticism, in the sense that one does not really know whether or
not God is involved in the play between rest and restlessness although it cannot be excluded.
Theological, though, because nothing forbids one to discern in the infinity of desire a stake of
sorts for theology, if only because “the desire for the Absolute shares the infinite proper to all
play of desire, whatever the term of this desire may be” (ED 174). Theological agnosticism
means than that it is of God, that we know nothing, but also that it is of God that we know
nothing.
The rupture with ontotheology consists in the fact that an ontotheological way of thinking
necessarily would have find a way from this knot between rest and restlesnees to a theological
Aufhebung but that here the path towards theology remains absolutely free. This is the
prohibition of any realized eschatology—proclaimed and prescribed already by La
phénoménalité de Dieu33: even the place one would like to relate to all things theological need
not be brought in relation to the divine. One might argue that the dialectics of life and its
unrest is guided by God, directed by the will to power or even issued by a unconscious
instance, it matters little. None of these will offer the ultimate experience and unsettle the ride
from rest to unrest and back again which accompanies us all until our respective deaths.
But it might be clear just the same that an affirmation of life unsettles not only the horizon of
the Heideggerian world but also the accompanying horizon of finitude. If there is no
philosophical reason why one should stick to just those experiences Heidegger had traced and
if other experiences show us perhaps even better than Heidegger what it is for the human
being to live, then, similarly, there is no reason not to suspect that the anarchic horizon of life
and the disorder it brings to the existential analytic intimates a horizon other than finitude or
32
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 173 in anxiety, “The pure ‘that it is’ shows itself, but the “whence” and the
“whither” remain in darkness”. 33
See PD, 53 and 160, “ all realized eschatology might very well be culpable of idolatry”. On the absence of
any ultimate experience, see also ED 180-181.
39
the universe which perhaps at times can seem permeated with death.34
If the phenomenon of
life shatters the contours of existence and disrupts the neat distinction between ontic and
ontological experience, the horizon of life might be other than the one in which our existence
as Dasein plays and therefore indicate “a beyond of the finite and the infinite” (ED 175), a
beyond of rest and unrest.
In this way, it dawns upon the experience of our selves that experience need not be limited to
the debate between being and not-being or between Dasein and death. Life, as it is lived, first
knows not of finitude and if it does, second, it does not rank it any higher than it does with the
experiences of peace and joy. However, it would not be wise to conclude from the
phenomenon of life and its beginning to the ends and the eschatology of experience. For
Lacoste, it is not only that realized eschatology is idolatrous, it is also the case that an ultimate
experience, giving us the totality and the truth of life and existence, would be a plain and
simple philosophical error: it is better to know how not to know than to claim to be ‘in the
know’. The only thing we know with certitude of the phenomenon of life is that it “opens onto
an uncontrollable future, of which no experience [...] permits to say whether [this future] is
finite or infinite” (ED 178). Desire and restlessness thus open “a being-other of which we can
know nothing a priori” (ED 179).
7.3 From Life to Spirit: the Sacrament
If that which put us on track of a desire for the Infinite, namely the desire of and for worldly
beings, than the latter is simultaneously that which ‘demythologizes’ everything that even
remotely resembles an ultimate experience, in this case the experience of peace and quiet. The
latter indeed risks to postulate itself to be another avatar of whatever ‘ultimate’ experience
philosophy may propose. The micro-eschatology of peace might easily turn into a macro-
eschatology.
It is to sacramentality that Lacoste points to indicate the instance “in which one is allowed to
experience more exactly” and precisely the knot between quietude and inquietude, for it is in
sacramental experience that the term of desire, God, constantly critiques both the one who
thinks to have taken possession of the object of his desire—privileging of quietude—and the
one who thinks that any such rest would be impossible—privileging of inquietude. The
dialectics of rest and unrest, in Christian theology, is in effect such that no one may lay claim
on God—no experience is to be equated with God—but, simultaneously, no one can deny
34
One may think here of those “terrible deaths”, Quentin Meillassoux mentions in ‘Spectral Dilemma’ in
Collapse, 4 (2010): 261-275, p. 262. “premature deaths, odious deaths, the death of a child”.
40
God to right to show up in experience if God should so choose—no experience need be
abandoned by God.
In Lacoste’s words, theology knows best how the relation between rest and unrest “shows the
unlimited character of a transcendence which does not forbid the o/One who is ‘beyond’ to be
also ‘down here’ as the one whose presence offers itself to a peaceful enjoyment” (ED 183).
By definition, divine transcendence is that instance that denies all limits: ‘God’ can be here
and there, now and then, if, of course, God would so choose.
It is in this sense that Lacoste proposes to study here but the sacrament’s “contribution to
phenomenology” (ED 183): the sacrament may propose itself as the experience of the
ultimate, because of the Absolute’s supposed presence and yet it is this presence that turns it
into a less-than-ultimate or ‘pre-eschatological’ experience. Even this experience therefore is
at a distance from the Ultimate and remains fragmentary. In this sense, it can be for Lacoste,
the example par excellence of a fragile phenomenology.
The sacrament critiques all experiences of the Absolute in several ways: not only is it possible
that I simply do not experience what I am supposed to experience there—I can miss God’s
presence by being bored or distracted—but even if I, quite piously, would remain ready for
God’s passing I still would not experience any theophany—if God is indeed present there,
then this mode of presence is not one of immediacy. In both case, it must be said that
givenness—God’s presence—exceeds what is effectively given—at best the sacrament, at
worst distraction.
Lacoste repeats that the experience of sacramentality need not be unhappy but will
undoubtedly stir up restlessness by the excess of givenness (ED 184-185). Yet the givenness
does not harm the integrity what is given there. Sacramentality, then, is precisely this crossing
of givenness and the given: it offers for thought an experience in which the ultimate
simultaneously unsettles all present experience and allows all present experience to be an
anticipation of the ultimate. Sacramental experience is an experience in which finitude
touches infinitude and rest and restlessness meet even though it shares with the phenomenon
of life that this experience, too, is an experience in and through time and conditioned by
historicity.
Yet the experience of the sacrament is not conditioned by the world only: its restlessness only
pertains to life. However, the sacrament risks not only to abandon life but also historicity. For
the one supplementing the lack of sensorial presence with faith, the conditions are met in
which the believer will link this historical experience with that which is, ultimately, beyond
history. The difference between living being and the believer is that the former knows of a
41
restlessness because of the infinity of his desire and the latter turns the infinity of his desire
into a never-ending and promising event: “the promise of infinity given to a unlimited life”
through which life itself may appear as “infinite” (ED 186 and 185 resp.). If life shows itself
to be infinite to the believer, this is because in sacramental experience the believer encounters
the crossing of historical and other-than-historical experiences, and issuing from it, a promise
and a givenness no longer measured by life, history and world.
It is obvious that one crosses some of the more conventional borders of phenomenology here.
It matters, however, that Lacoste tries to describe the sacrament both from the inside and from
the outside as it were. The latter uses the sacraments as an example of the crossing of rest and
restlessness to explain the stake of our lives. The former understands the sacrament as the
believer does and therefore sees that in life something might be detected that points even
beyond life or that the event of the self knows an other terminus than the one destined to the
event of the existence and the event of life.
For the sake of completeness, one needs to add that even if there be such an intimation of
immortality, this phenomenon itself is a “fugitive” (ED 186) one and dissolves in the
messiness of historicity. And yet at the moment one demythologizes the sacramental
experience one comes close to the logic of its crossing again: even if the experience itself is to
be understood as but one more event of historicity—from without—the event itself, from the
inside if you like, teaches that one can reach the “otherwise than history” (ED 188) only from
within history, or “from the inside of history” (ED 187).
It is from within life and from within our dealings with beings that one may find, if any, that
which is ‘beyond life’ or ‘beyond being’. Even if one crosses the border of phenomenology
here, the incarnational logic one encounters here—quite close to the logic of the ‘au-dela
dans’, ‘the beyond down here’, Derrida detected in Levinas’ oeuvre35
—remains nevertheless
“a philosophical enigma” (ED 187). It is, one might add, nothing less than an aporia: it will
never be certain whether this incarnational logic led to the Incarnation or whether it is because
of the Incarnation that one can find such an incarnational logic.
It is this logic nevertheless that forces Lacoste to introduce again the vocabulary of the spirit,
whose name in Présence et Parousie already was necessary to mark the terrain where
philosophy and theology can meet and at times can even hardly be distinguished (PP, 219).
The concept of spirit names “not a being” but that “mode of being in which existence is
exceeded and carries with it the ultimate stakes of life” (ED 188): life might be spiritual,
35
Derrida, A-dieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris,1998), passim.
42
something might be breathed into it unbeknownst to life itself. Lacoste agrees with de Lubac,
the desire for the Absolute need not be a conscious one (ED 145n.99)
This concept, and that of spiritual life, is, obviously, not a strong one and “all that we say of
it”—Of Spirit (Derrida)—“can surely be destructed, deconstructed or demolished” (ibid.). If
Lacoste uses it, then, it is only because it is the one concept available, for him, to “render
more precise what life might ultimately mean” (ED 188), that is, one might not have said all
there is to say about life—and no one can say everything about life—if one does not at least
state the possibility that life might be infinite or, even less, at times might encounter the
Infinite.
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