Abstract

In marked contrast to Husserlian “unities of sense” that structure consciousness around egoic ideal-meaning intention, contemporary phenomenology orders sense according to an excess of givenness – a surfeit of presence – that surpasses this intentional relation. But Emmanuel Falque argues that there is a resistance that precedes the phenomenological order of givenness and sense. Before the saturated phenomena (Marion), the pathos of the flesh (Henry), and the irruption of the Other (Levinas), there is a resistance of presence that is not sensu stricto given at all. Falque turns to the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas on trauma and insomnia and the hum and buzz of the il y a (the “there is …”) that precedes the order of givenness and sense, including the Levinasian Other, in order to make sense of this a priori resistance. There is a presence of the body, experienced in some sense via trauma, insomnia, and Falque’s own notion of the “spread body” that is not given yet constitutes an integral part of embodied experience. The way Falque engages with these bodily experiences reformulates the phenomenological limit, not in terms of excess and givenness, but in terms of resistance and the “extra-phenomenon.” Phenomenological engagement with resistance thus becomes a wager on meaning and sense, the outcome of which cannot be known in advance, that is, cannot be always and already ordered to phenomenological givenness.