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Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida

Online ISBN:
9780823252749
Print ISBN:
9780823244645
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida

Neal DeRoo
Neal DeRoo

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Dordt College
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Published:
1 February 2013
Online ISBN:
9780823252749
Print ISBN:
9780823244645
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

The future figures prominently in much phenomenological work, but the methodological significance of the future for the discipline of phenomenology is rarely (if ever) the subject of direct inquiry. This book seeks to remedy that by showing the key role that futurity (the subject’s relation to the future) plays in two key elements of the phenomenological method: constitution and intentionality. It begins by examining the role that the future plays in Husserl’s phenomenological account of the meaning- and world-constituting function of consciousness. It then shows thatLevinas’ critique of this account of phenomenology is based on a distinct account of futurity: eschatology. This notion of eschatology is essential to Levinas’s attempt to reimagine phenomenology as an essentially intentional and ethical enterprise. Finally, the book explores Derrida’s reconciliation of the phenomenologies of Husserl and Levinas in a “phenomenology of tension” that is characteristic of deconstruction. Central to this project is the role of the future, especially as it manifests itself in the notions of differance and the messianic. By highlighting the role of the future in the phenomenological method, this book reveals the necessary intertwining of intentionality and constitution at the heart of phenomenology: the subject is always constituted and constituting. This two-fold sense of phenomenology is best understood via the notion of the promise, thereby establishing phenomenology as the essentially promissory discipline.

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