Testing the Limit Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition [Paperback]

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit,Testing the Limitclaims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that the self is given ? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgressor hover around and therefore withinthe threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain family resemblance, the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form.Fran?ois-David Sebbah is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Compi?gne in France and was Program Director at the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is the author ofLevinas: Ambigu?t?s de l'alt?rit?(2000).Through three different versions of phenomenological discourse (Derrida, Henry, and Levinas), this book explores the notions ofexcessand theexcess of excessrelative to conceptions of the self. Sebbah's noteworthy book is perhaps the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between three thinkers in the French phenomenological tradition, two of whom are well known in the Anglophone world (Levinas, Derrida) and one oflc/