Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
ALEXANDER KOZIN
Abstract
In this article I examine the science of the alien, or xenology for its contri-
bution to semiotics. As a subeld of phenomenology, xenology emerged in
the Husserlian theory of intersubjectivity when, in his late period, Husserl
performed a transition from the other as an analogue of the self to the alien
as a non-analogical structure. The transition came with singling out four
alien modalities children, animals, foreigners, and the insane as the
Limit-Subjects in possession of their own liminal worlds. Following the ar-
gument for the continuous relationship between phenomenology and semiot-
ics, I examine the possibility of enriching the phenomenological theory of
the alien through a semiotic intervention. I arrange for the latter with Gilles
Deleuze who, owing to his association to both disciplines, helps me create a
semiotic theory of the alien. In this model, the original alien modalities op-
erate on the level of signication, thus building on the Husserlian investiga-
tions of how we experience alien-worlds with an elaboration of their signify-
ing eects.
Keywords: Husserl; alien; rationality; liminality; Deleuze; becoming-
Alien.
1. Introduction
The inuence of Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology on the semiotic
eld has been widely acknowledged. Umberto Eco names Husserl as the
key gure whose phenomenology helped semiotics achieve the status of
an independent discipline. According to Eco, Husserls phenomenology
was the basic drive that generated the eld and the object of semiotic
inquiry: phenomenology undertakes to rebuild from the beginning the
conditions necessary for the formation of cultural units which semiotics
Semiotica 1711/4 (2008), 171192 00371998/08/01710171
DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2008.073 6 Walter de Gruyter
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instead accept as data because communication functions on the basis of
them (Eco 1979: 167). From this denition it appears that phenomenol-
ogy provides the rst foundation for the study of the sign and sign sys-
tems. Julia Kristeva renders an equally strong endorsement: Husserlian
phenomenology . . . became the basis for this centurys theory of signica-
tion to which, consciously or not, explicitly or not, all linguistic theories
refer (1989: 223). Both Eco and Kristeva agree that the key source of the
phenomenological inuence was the timely appearance of Logical Investi-
gations, Husserls main texts on the constitutive properties of language.
Roman Jakobson, one of the founders of formalism, found this text in-
spirational enough as to extend phenomenology into the structuralist
thought, instigating the subsequent conquest of linguistics by structural-
ism.
1
In the course of this transition from phenomenology to linguis-
tics, and from linguistics to structuralism emerged a special strand of
semiotics, phenomenological semiotics. The presence of phenomenologi-
cal semiotics can be traced in the works of such phenomenological gures
as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Mi-
chel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
2
At the same time, the acknowledgment of the phenomenological inu-
ence on semiotics implies a certain nality of the phenomenological con-
tribution. The latter should not be surprising: when referencing Husserl,
semioticians tend to lean on the early period of his work, following his
preoccupation with the formal/logical side of transcendental phenomen-
ology. Understandably appealing to the linguistic scholarship of the rst
half of the twentieth century, the original denition of phenomenology
ended up dening its main contribution to semiotics as well. After semiot-
ics broke o from linguistics completely in the early nineteen seventies,
the eects of the original phenomenology have subsided, turning Husserl
into a largely historical gure. In the meantime, continuous advances in
phenomenology, together with the diversication of the phenomenolog-
ical agenda, opened widely a space for interdisciplinary cooperation,
and it is in this spirit that I would like to introduce and explore xenolog-
ical phenomenology as a way into an experience-based communication-
centered semiotic theory. In the next section, I oer a brief account of
xenological phenomenology, also known as the science of the alien.
3
2. From the other to the alien
In section 52 of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl states: The char-
acter of the existent other has its basis in this kind of veriable accessi-
bility of what is not originally accessible (1977: 144). The statement is
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enigmatic, paradoxical, and, in this way, revealing. When commenting on
the revelatory signicance of paradox for philosophy, Gilles Deleuze
writes, Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy (1994: 227,
italics added). In the context of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, the para-
dox nds its pathos in Husserls theory of intersubjectivity in general and
the relationship to the other in particular. I call the status of the other to
be the key problem in this text for two reasons: rst, phenomenologically,
I position myself next to David Carr (1973) who pointed out that the core
problem for phenomenology in Cartesian Meditations is not the problem
of the I or solipsism but the problem of understanding of the world as
objective and the accompanying understanding of the subject not as an-
other object but as precisely a subject whose experience cannot be re-
duced to that of the object, for the consciousness of the subject is a self-
reective consciousness that parallels mine. Second, from the semiotic
standpoint, I side with Yuri Lotman who names the I-Other relation to
be the most basic semiotic structure.
4
From the latter perspective, in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl seeks
to explain how the other ego is apperceived within my sphere of ownness
(Eigenheit), or the Ego in whom the center is the one identical I-myself
(1977: 145). The other ego is then dened as both everything alien (allem
Fremden) and yet apperceptively accessible (zuganglich) (1977: 145). Here,
the paradox is still applied reductively: Cartesian Meditations oers a for-
mal and not a descriptive phenomenology, which views the I-Other rela-
tionship as apophantic. The implications of this position for the semiotics
at this point are purely structural: communication never features an unin-
terrupted ow of parallel expressions; on the contrary, it is always asym-
metrical, with the foundation for this asymmetry always residing wit the
I, or the source of signifying intentionality. It is on the basis of this thesis
that Lotman rst critiques and then modies the semiotic square of Grei-
mas. By reversing the relationship of opposition and apposition he shows
how collective consciousness transforms individual experiences into limit
phenomena, or limit-signs. The latter help extend the universe of signs by
showing its borders (Lotman 1996: 175). Lotman distinguishes not only
between inner and outer borders, but recognizes that their juncture can be
meaningful in itself: there are also liminal borders or the borders that in-
corporate the elements of the outside and the inside. For an example, he
evokes the so-called strange familiars, or those liminal groups of people
who inhabited the outer boundaries of the growing Russian empire under
Ivan the Terrible.
In his later works, Husserl anticipated the emergence of liminality as
a semiotic theme by expanding his theory of intersubjectivity to the phe-
nomenology of the alien. In the manuscripts on intersubjectivity that
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embrace the period from 1929 to 1935 he takes great care in both posing
and reformulating the problem of the inaccessibly accessible other. The
new formulation, albeit nearly identical to the previous one, is given
with an entirely dierent emphasis. Husserl writes: In mediate horizons
there are heterogeneous communities and cultures, they belong to them
as alien and heterogeneous, but alienness means accessibility in genuine in-
accessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility (1973b: 631, italics added,
my translation). The content of the above quote clearly situates the en-
counter with the other in the broad socio-cultural context the connec-
tion that prompted Ludwig Landgrebe to suggest that the development of
Husserls thought since Cartesian Meditations had been progressively
tending toward the social plurality within the life-world (Landgrebe
1981: 133). The acknowledgment of this plurality for Husserl meant a re-
turn to the concept of the alien. Upon numerous deliberations, the alien
was no longer conceived as everything alien to the ego constituted within
this egos sphere of ownness, but as a community whose experience could
simultaneously engage several spheres and dimensions. To put this insight
in the semiotic terms, Husserl presumed the possibility that there were
many dierent systems of experience, or, to borrow from Lotman,
semiospheres. Some of these spheres coalesce, while others do not. In ei-
ther case, liminal systems are generative because they possess transfor-
mative potential (Lotman 1996: 183).
The transition to an examination of alien-worlds implied moving away
from considering inaccessible accessibility on the conceptual level as the
formal prerequisite for communication to the level of proximally interact-
ing heterogeneous beings whose experiences of the shared world are de-
limited from each other by respective generative terrains. The move from
the other to the alien implied neither a loss, nor a substitution. Within the
specicity of the Fifth Cartesian Mediation, the other was employed to-
ward nding the solution of the solipsism question. In his subsequent
investigations Husserl introduced the alien on the strength of a dierent
question: There are problems emerging here of creating concrete under-
standing and mutual understanding; at issue is to somehow accomplish a
making home of the alien, as if it were home. Of course, there is also the
question of the limits of such knowledge and the question of justifying the
idea of complete understanding (1973b: 625, my translation). It is this
line of thinking that allowed some contemporary phenomenologists to
propose that in the last period of work Husserl had turned to a particular
kind of phenomenology that aspired to provide a connection between two
phenomenological realms, transcendental and empirical.
5
The latter im-
plied an interrelation between two phenomenological methods, transcen-
dental and eidetic. In The Crisis, the last manuscript that Husserl saw
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published while still alive, he explains that through an eidetic method we
investigate the essential form of transcendental accomplishments in all
their individual and transcendental types, that is, the total essential form
of transcendentally accomplishing subjectivity in all its social forms
(1970: 178). As a result of this merger, transcendental phenomenology
was expected to extend the theory of intersubjectivity based on the expe-
rience of the other into the theory of interculturality based on the encoun-
ter with the alien. In this essay, I would like to examine the implications
of this development for the semiotic theory. For my starting point, I sug-
gest that we review the Husserlian concept of the alien.
3. Two senses of the alien
When Husserl refers to the alien in various later manuscripts, he gives it
two senses: a) as the transcendental structure home-world/alien-world
(Heimwelt/Fremdwelt); and b) as the empirical modality the Alien (das
Fremde).
6
Concerning the former, the structure home-world/alien-world
is singled out as one of the two most basic or elementary transcendental
structures which participate in the foundational constitution of experi-
ence. The other one is dened as earth-as-ground/world-as-horizon.
Both structures are essential for the experience of the life-world. How-
ever, due to my emphasis and the space restrictions of this essay, I would
like to entertain only the rst structure. The structure consists of two un-
equally distributed components: home-world and alien-world. The re-
lationship between the home-world and the alien-world is a relationship
between what belongs to the recognizable home and the experience of
the unrecognizable alien that encompasses everything that is consti-
tuted by a world other than my home-world. The primacy in this relation-
ship belongs to the home. It is only from the home that I can observe
and thus experience the alien. At the same time, the alien-experience is
inaccessible to me. We can say, at this point, that the alien-world co-
constitutes the home-world. Simultaneously transcendental and non-
foundational, the co-determinate structure alien-world/home-world
presents the relationship between the home and the alien as the sucient
and necessary condition for understanding the genesis of all, but espe-
cially social experience.
At this juncture, I would like to suggest that we take the relationship
between the home and the alien as a particular kind of semiosis that takes
place, according to Lotman, in a certain symbolic space. In phenomeno-
logical terms, this space can be dened as a liminal space which consists
of limits, borders, and boundaries that prevent complete experience of the
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world. The relationship between the home and the alien is conducted in
the liminal realm. The question that arises in this regard is, How shall we
understand this realm? Most generally, liminality is what delimits us from
the outside and therefore reaches inside. Waldenfels calls liminality in-
between (Zwischen), or new logos: We encounter the alien as something
that can not be said or done within our order. The extraordinary makes
its appearance as an order existing elsewhere (Waldenfels 1996: 115).
This extraordinary order resides in the twilight and feeds on ambiguity.
This is the reason why limit-phenomena cannot be appropriated, assimi-
lated, brought home, made united: Alienness then does not proceed from
a division but consists in a division (Waldenfels 1990: 21). At the same
time, the alien cannot be ignored: as a generative phenomenon, it gives
rise to those mythical narratives which give an account of a genesis
that is genetically impossible to know, but generatively possible to experi-
ence in the generative density of a cultural tradition (Steinbock 1995:
219). Hence, the ethical dimension that stimulates the encounter with the
alien; one meets the alien by crossing over from within, and that means,
from within your own order. In this formulation, both terms, within and
over are essential: when crossing, one must carry their world with them
from within, and, at the same time, must separate from the home at
large by moving over. In short, it is the liminal realm that features both
transcendental and ontological structures.
Detailed investigations of this sphere led Husserl to propose that the
liminal sphere diered from the normative one because it was founded
on abnormality which signied itself through their subjects, or allon.
Consequently, Husserl entertained four types of alien-subjects (Fremde-
Subjecte): animals, children, foreigners, and the insane. He was explicit
about their common genealogy: when discussing the correlation between
the world and transcendental subjectivity in The Crisis, Husserl asked
himself
. . . are the insane also objectications of the subjects being discussed in connection
with the accomplishment of world-constitution? . . . And what about children who
already have a certain amount of world-consciousness? . . . And what about ani-
mals? There arise problems of intentional modications through which we can
and must attribute to all these conscious subjects those that do not co-function
in respect to the world understood in the hitherto accepted (and always funda-
mental) sense, that is, the world which has truth through reason their manner
of transcendentality, precisely as analogues to ourselves. (Husserl 1970: 187)
Husserls inquiry as well as his solution have far-fetching implications for
all human studies: rst, he discovered a sphere of experience that came
pre-separated from the normal and therefore acceptably foundational
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sphere. Second, he discovered that this liminal sphere houses fundamen-
tally dierent social worlds. Third, he chose to associate these worlds
with specic empirical modalities, namely, children, animals, foreigners,
and the insane. For Husserl, the four alien modalities are predicated on
abnormality which is a constitutional category, in accordance with which
the alien is conceived as abnormal, i.e., discordant, non-optimal, atypi-
cal, and unfamiliar (Husserl 1973a: 225, my translation). In the phenom-
enological context, abnormality is a neutral term; it means an experience
of the Alien as a being, who is completely on its own, reectively outside
of our constitutive comprehension, in other words, radically dierent.
Coming from and with a world of their own that is delimited from our
own world, the Alien types are shadowy or, to put it in phenomenological
terms, liminal phenomena. Husserl calls them Limes-Subjekte. All limit-
subjects reside in the liminal sphere. Like all other subjects, let it be nor-
mal or abnormal, limit-subjects are social subjects. At the same time, they
possess their own worlds. These worlds dier from the normative worlds
because their communities act in accordance with the modied rational-
ity. It is through their worlds that we access the liminal sphere.
7
In the next sections I would like to build on this deliberation by exam-
ining the alien subjects in terms of a) their specic communities and b) the
relationships between and among these communities, and c) the composi-
tion of the liminal sphere as a relational network that engages contribu-
tions from all the alien-worlds. In other words, I expect that by following
Limit-Subjects to their alien-worlds, one can penetrate the liminal sphere
within a particular conguration of its experience at the limits of its pos-
sibilities. A semiotic analysis would examine the limits to experience as
signifying limits. By addressing the signifying potential of liminality, one
could disclose the workings of intersemiosis, or complex coding. There-
fore, in the remainder of this article I oer two parallel interpretations of
the children, animals, foreigners, and the insane. In the beginning I show
how Husserl treated each individual alien; then I make an attempt to sys-
tematize his insights. Next, I give a semiotic reading of the alien modal-
ities. For the main semiotic gure that guides me in this project I choose
Gilles Deleuze. The choice of Deleuze is stipulated by several reasons. I
present those in the next section.
4. The semiotic phenomenology of Gilles Deleuze
Situated at the crossroads of several philosophical traditions, Gilles Dele-
uzes philosophy is way too complex to be referenced in a single deni-
tion. However, in his early overview of French philosophy Bernhard
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Waldenfels describes Deleuze as a second-generation phenomenologist,
who is no longer attached to the phenomenological foundation directly
but is attached to it via numerous associations and dissociations.
8
More
specically, Waldenfels grounds his view of Deleuze in the fact that the
latter was highly inuenced by the radical turn in phenomenology in the
late 1960s and followed that turn toward transformation of phenomen-
ology (Waldenfels 1983: 488). Initiated by Derrida, this turn retains the
elements of both the empirical world and its modes of constitution, or
transcendentals, neither of which can be fully accessible to philosophical
inquiry on their own. This position zeroes in on the notion of radical dif-
ference, or dierance, which is essentially a Kantian legacy. Unlike Der-
rida, who coins the term and so incorporates it in his philosophy explicitly,
Deleuze has never acknowledged the impact of dierance on his thought
beyond a mere motivation past Kant. However, it is precisely in the mo-
tivation that we nd a continuous association with phenomenology.
The latter comes about in two ways: by way of his on-going argument
vis-a`-vis Bergson with the key phenomenological gures, such as Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Derrida, and by his philosophical por-
traits, that is, analyses of concept-making (Deleuze 1990: 177). In Dele-
uzes own words, Husserl thought a decisive step forward when he
discovered a region of vague and material essences (in other words, es-
sences that are vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them
from xed, metric and formal essences (Deleuze 1994: 78). In his most
technical treatise, Dierence and Repetition, Deleuze makes one step fur-
ther as he conducts his argument in an implicitly phenomenological vein
that can be traced in both the set-up and the trajectory of his delibera-
tions: he begins with the analysis of representation (phenomenon) as it
was introduced by Plato and ends in the realm of social phenomenology
with the question of the Other and the third. He is more explicit about
his commitments in the more recent Logic of Sensation, whose aim and
purpose is at the core transcendental and phenomenological; an examina-
tion of how Bacon could paint the scream more than the horror situates
Deleuze alongside with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Levinas, who discuss
the possibility of givenness being a phenomenon in itself rather than a
mode of constitution for what is being given.
The emphasis on threshold phenomena leads Deleuze to a philosophi-
cal method that Slavoj Z
izek,
these categories have two faces: one face is turned toward things that
is, it is the pure, non-substantial surface of Becoming, of Events heteroge-
neous with regard to substantial things with regard to which these Events
happen; the other face is turned toward Language that is, the pure ux
of Sense in contrast to representational Signication, to the referring of a
sign to bodily object (Z