BERT VAN ROERMUND

BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH, DISCOURSE AND THE SUBJECT

Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity. Taking Foucault into Phenomeno-

logy (Phaenomenologica, 155). Dordrecht – Boston – London, Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1999, X – 407 pp., ISBN 0-7923-5985-2 (Hb.);
0-7932-6397-3 (Pb.).

Although announced as a collection of essays (chapters 8, 9, 10 plus

Introduction appearing here for the first time), this is in fact a full-
blown book: one that deserves to be read and, indeed, studied. Professor
Visker (research professor at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at Leuven
University (Belgium)) basically discusses the ambiguity in contemporary
philosophy named ‘the subject’. The subject is the variable term that is
commonly supposed to be both the contingent source and the necessary
ground of whatever claim one can imagine. Visker’s conviction is that, in
the final analysis, the subject can be neither of these, unless it is acknowl-
edged primarily as fading into and emerging from a silence within it, from
where it receives its attachment to being in the first place.
What can be true about something radically singular or, inversely, what
can be singular about something radically true? This rather obvious ques-
tion is not necessarily the one Visker wants to bring into focus, though
it certainly emerges on some of the side panels of his project. His main
concern is with the omnipresent ‘something’ we are attached to (or rather
attached by), such that we cannot get away from it; while at the same
time we cannot get access to it either. There is always ‘too much’ in this
attachment, as well as there is always ‘not enough’ in it. Take, for instance,
the way each of us relates to his or her proper name: a signifier which says
‘nothing’ and at the same time ‘everything’ to us in our dealings with other
people. We are forced to constantly oscillate between the universalism that
wants to do away with the ‘too much’ and the particularism that wants to
overcome the ‘not enough’. The ambiguity, thus, resides in the concept of
the subject being caught between singularity and truth, particularism and
generalism, relativism and universalism.

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 14: 263–268, 2001.
264 BERT VAN ROERMUND

At first sight these are pairs of opposites pure and clean; contemporary
thinking is hailed for having almost completed the move from a universal,
general truth to relativist, singular particularisms. According to a received
view, Foucault’s ‘post-structuralism’ has de-centred the subject, deprived
it from its claim to being the legitimate heir of the soul (‘quodammodo
omnia’), as a result of which it now lingers in ever so many particular-
isms. But there, as is equally undeniable, it regains a truth of its own: its
centre, its roots, or its ideals, under the guise of racism, ethnocentricity
or, for that matter, prematurely proclaimed ‘pluralism’. And the problem
is that we cannot disguise it as universalism after all (as did the classical
argument against relativism), because, indeed, there is truth in the singular
that escapes universal claims. From the very outset of his book, therefore,
Visker purports to argue the philosophical mirror image of these faulty
strategies to take stock of Foucault. Rather than confirming or denying
the ‘value’ of any of these particularisms, he shows that even (or, rather,
precisely) the decentred subject conceals, and thus reveals, a metaphysical
unrest which makes sense of them, deferring their truth or falsity. It takes
into account a reality it cannot account for and which therefore remains its
persistent challenge to respond to. Visker’s argument circles around this
vertical dimension, which he eventually names ‘trans-descendence’ (rather
than the Levinasian ‘trans-ascendence’). Most of it is geared to showing
that neither the political (Derrida, Rorty), nor the ethical (Levinas) account
of this metaphysical unrest does justice to its very verticality. Towards the
end, Visker points to ‘the frailty of the Good’, an expression that goes to
saying that the Good (Levinas again) is always already in jeopardy, as it
can only be pursued from something that is deeply ir-responsive (thus ir-
responsible) towards the Other. Having thus rendered the general focus of
the book, I can do only two more things within the limited framework of
this review. Firstly, I will offer a brief impression of the kind of arguments
made, and secondly I’ll explain why this book matters to legal philosophy.
The essays are grouped into three parts. Under the heading of
‘Truth and Finitude’ Visker discusses the deceivingly clear-cut distinction
between meaning and truth – truth allegedly being considered as a test
on sentences that are meaningful in the first place. Drawing from Heide-
gger’s ‘aletheia’ and Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, Visker argues for the
truth of the unthought as it reveals itself by withdrawing from the author’s
conceptual schemes. Every thinker thinks on the basis of something that
remains unthought when it comes to conceptual articulation. The reader,
if he or she is to accomplish the task of reading rather than parroting, will
perhaps be able to give an account of this unthought. But only at the cost
of thinking on the basis of a different unthought, thus excluding him- or
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herself in the end from the thinking of the author and relying on a different
fait primitif, which, one might add, is by the same token a fait accompli.
Thus, the reader, by finally gaining access to someone’s radical thinking
effort, also bounces back into the loneliness of her or his own enter-
prise. Here, the paper on ‘Raw Being and Violent Discourse. Foucault,
Merleau-Ponty and the (Dis-)order of Things’ (p. 91ff) is illuminating (and
impressive).
The second part of the book, ‘A Silence Which Escapes Intersub-
jectivity’, makes it quite clear why Visker finds himself unable to ‘return’
to Merleau-Ponty. The argument can be reconstructed as an a fortiori
deriving from his critique of Levinas. Bluntly put, to a large extent (see
however p. 315), Visker supports Derrida’s questioning of Levinas in Vio-
lence et Métaphysique: no appeal by the Other can be thought without a
subject being something for itself prior to the Other. We cannot be tied to
the Other before we are tied to ourselves. It is precisely this tie to ourselves,
which Visker attempts to analyse. He is not convinced by Merleau-Ponty,
who holds that what ties us to ourselves at the same time ties us to others:
raw being as (pre-reflexively) ‘shared’ is alleged to be a form of inter-
subjectivism. Visker does not accept a definition of the subject that is
exhausted by intersubjectivity, even if it is the intersubjectivity of ‘the
flesh of the world’ or ‘intercorporeality’ (212). Or, to put it in another way,
what Visker argues against in Merleau-Ponty’s work is the metaphysical
presupposition that ‘everything that is opaque in man somehow seems to
bear within it that inner glow which is the birthmark which Being left on
him’ (225).
As said, however, Visker’s critique of phenomenology is an a fortiori.
He wants to leave Merleau-Ponty behind because he believes that Merleau-
Ponty has also been left behind by Levinas (and Derrida) already. For
Visker the subject prior to intersubjectivity is not an origin, not even the
origin of ‘hearing’ the Other, which is the only private ‘core’ of the subject
granted by Levinas. In being de-centered, the subject is not the ‘joyeuse
force qui va’, or ‘conatus essendi’ (270; 378), or ‘nature’. If the subject can
be touched by the Other, thus touching the Other, it is in spite of this deeply
felt embarrassment regarding its very existence. But this goes for the Other
as well: ‘The misery of the Other is that he cannot be the face of which
Levinas speaks: he is too much ‘attached’ to his ‘form’ to withdraw from
it in the way the face does, but not so much that he disappears into it’ (386).
The philosophical account of this predicament is called ‘mè-ontology’,
which points to the effort to give the Levinasian ‘otherwise-than-being’
one more turn around. The critique of Levinas’s attack on ontology does
take us back to ontology, but not the one we came from; that is to say:
266 BERT VAN ROERMUND

neither the ontological equivalent of the good infinity that will save us in
the end, nor the ontological indifference of the ‘il y a’.
The title of the third part ‘The Loneliness of a Subject Unable to Disap-
pear’ suggests – which is to say: argues, in a persistent critique of Levinas,
Derrida, Habermas, and Rorty – that man bears something ‘other’ within
himself, hidden in the perpetual hovering between one’s being and one’s
being oneself. Therefore, man ‘is a being that has to reckon with something
that does not reckon with him’ (15; 384; 391); or even ‘already before
ethics man is a being whose being consists in caring for something that
does not care for him’ (354). This ‘something’ is not a gloomy omnipres-
ence in the sky, let alone a part of the order of meaning or the order of
being; but it is also not the ‘autrement qu’Être’ that Levinas points to.
Though again Visker takes his cue from Levinas here, he wants to turn
to what enables us, within ourselves (376; 388), to obliquely heed the
difference (or, indeed, the différance) between Being and Otherwise-than-
Being. Repeatedly, Visker calls it ‘a vague debt’, an embarrassment with
our ‘being there’ we are obliquely aware of, seeking to have it recognised
without knowing how to pay it off. It is this mode of us living the ‘il y a’
which is put in jeopardy (disturbed) by the appearance of the Other, and
whose basic affect is, therefore, panic rather than shame.
To put it otherwise: there is a set of signifiers that singularises ‘me’
without being exhaustible in properties or meanings, and which I cannot
begin to identify with or relate to without being destroyed by my own
attempt to reach out for ‘authenticity’ (Antigone). The Other cannot
elucidate this singularity to the subject, precisely because it consists of
attachments inaccessible to it. Thus, the Other, in the final analysis, can
neither pose as the complementary warrant of truth (phenomenology,
Levinas, in different ways, to be sure), nor as the supplementary chal-
lenge of truth (Derrida, Rorty, in even more different ways, perhaps). This
singularising ‘il y a’ within the subject can only be symbolised in the icons
of a public space. Prohibitions on discrimination (racism, sexism, nation-
alism) are to be understood as such icons. In a deep sense they are utterly
contradictory, in that they require us to acknowledge a difference we are
not supposed to acknowledge, or to ignore a difference we are supposed
to respect. But this is precisely why the public sphere is what allows us to
live our decentredness, or our singularity. One of Visker’s examples here is
that specific attachment which is the colour of our skin. It is ‘(. . .) because
we do not know the meaning of that colour to which we find ourselves
attached, that we do not only resent others who want to reduce us to what
in that colour is visible for them (and this is how I will define racism), but
 BOOK REVIEW 267

also those who tend to think that they can share that invisibility with us
(and this is perhaps the saddest form of a well-meaning anti-racism)’ (16).
Why, one can ask, would this book offer good reading for students in
philosophy of law? To start with a caveat: I am not saying that it would
fascinate all students in philosophy of law (sensu lato). In all probability,
it would only fascinate those who are interested in the most pertinent (thus
most abstract) philosophical roots of discussions like those about racism
and nationalism, liberalism and communitarianism, universalism and
particularism, European integration, allegedly ‘European’ values (human
rights), globalisation and multiculturalism, the boundaries of ‘communica-
tion’ as a basis for legal theory, the concepts of law, rights and obligations,
and a few other things . . . In other words, no student of legal philosophy can
afford to ignore the issues dealt with in these essays. So the caveat goes to
the level of abstraction, not to the relevance of the topics. But although
he is not a specialist in legal philosophy, Visker makes a laudable effort to
apply various registers while playing his majestic organ: a sustained line of
argument is accompanied not only by a dazzling amount of references to
the texts he is discussing, but also by perceptive analyses of politico-legal
examples with which we are all familiar. In return, the legal philosopher
may well feel obliged to try and follow the philosophical insight Visker
wants to convey. And precisely with regard to that main insight, I believe –
referring for brevity’s sake to my Themis’ terzijde (Nijmegen, 1990, ch. 2
and 3) – that it goes to the heart of philosophy of law. Like Visker, I think
that a philosophical response to Levinas (and thus, to Levinas’s critique
of phenomenology and Heideggerianism, as well as to Derrida’s critique
of Levinas) must be the very aim of any attempt to develop a theory of
justice. Two major attempts to develop such a theory in our day I regard as
profoundly insufficient (though interesting and pertinent in their own right
and as far as they go). Firstly, the Rawlsian exercise to articulate a ‘sense
of justice’ under the veil of ignorance, which then has to be put at work
in ‘reflective equilibrium’, suffers from an important petitio principii: it
presupposes the ‘sense’ of justice as an unproblematic intuition on the part
of the subject divorced from its Other, as it discusses just laws within an
already self-contained society (be it an international one since The Law
of the Peoples). Secondly, the Habermasian attempt to develop a theory
of law on the basis of the discourse principle, on the other hand, seems
to overlook that the inclusiveness of the formula ‘all those involved’ [sc.
in the distribution of collective goods in the broad sense] is evasive: it
evades the political issue who is to be regarded by whom as ‘involved’? In
other words, both of these contractarian theories ignore the problem that
the contract model can only work on the basis of a specific presupposition:
268 BERT VAN ROERMUND

the presupposition of a prior, non-contractual event that determines who

are parties to the contract (cf. also Waldenfels’s recent four volume book
Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden). It is this very presupposition
that is scrutinised on nearly every page of Visker’s book.
Nothing left for criticism? This review is certainly a bad place to launch
it, as it may play down what should be played up first and foremost. As
said, I believe that Visker asks the right questions and that his argument is
not just bold and courageous, but well-founded, intruiging and relevant to
contemporary socio-political problems. Where I get lost is probably where
a new book should start – which does not necessarily mean: towards the
end of this one. The question which is not very explicitly dealt with in
philosophical terms by Visker is why singularity means unrest, disturbance
and, indeed, panic? Why do we want to be acknowledged by something
we do not even recognise? What kind of acknowledgement hides already
in this ‘want’ or desire? Does singularity amount to ‘narcism’? Is that why
the Other is disturbing? But then, what is already uneasy in narcism, such
that it can be reinforced by the appearance of the Other? Visker’s refer-
ences to Lacan (many of these remaining philosophically implicit, in spite
of the notorious difficulties in Lacan’s writings) are expected to do more
work here that this reader was able to hold track of. It is not always clear
what their psycho-analytical context contributes to philosophical content
(as Visker himself will probably be the first to admit). The second set of
questions pertains to the place (of birth) of the ‘public sphere’, which
– to be sure – is only hinted at rather than argued for. Granting that
this public sphere is, first and foremost, a symbolic order, why would it
‘provide’ anything that enables the subject to survive its own singularity?
Why would it not downright ignore this singularity, rather than suppress
(criminalise) or protect it? How do the symbolic signifiers of this order
relate to its institutional character? But enough: Let’s first read and re-read
this book.

Bert van Roermund

Tilburg University (NL)
E-mail: G.C.G.J. van Roermund@kub.nl