I advance the notion of generative passivity by exploring Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of "institution" through the movement of spiralic temporality. By navigating Merleau-Ponty’s elusive remarks on "permanent revolution" and the concept of the implex, I reframe development not as a predetermined series, but as a generative tension between past and future. I trace this self-transformative, silent logos of nature across three core dimensions: biological (finding in evolutionary biology and embryology a spiralic time), psychological (examining the spiralic sense of child development and puberty), and political (the idea of revolution as dynamic auto-critique). Ultimately, I demonstrate that this spiralic logos is both a decisive ontological concept as well as an ethical mandate. By harmonizing the silent logic of nature with human expression, I explore critical implications for how we might conceive of generative phenomenology as a transformative method of rebirth.
The invitation to continue a discussion of this intriguing and disruptive book is irresistible, for its potential in exploring a multiplicity of vocalisations as responses to the challenge of the imposing and many layered writings of Martin Heidegger. The great and enduring appeal of those writings is their disruption and displacement of two commonly reaffirmed distinctions: that between emotion and reason, or affect and concept; and that between poetics and aesthetics, with more than a suggestion of connections between the two disruptions and displacements. The former distinctions are reconfigured through the relations sketched in Being and Time between Befindlichkeit, perhaps better translated as dispositionality, and Stimmung, and Verstimmung, attunement and disharmony, which alas remain obscure for Anglophone readers by the decision in the otherwise excellent and indispensable translation by Macquarrie and Robinson to translate Stimmung as ‘mood’, Verstimmung as ‘bad mood’, and Befindlichkeit as ‘state of mind’. For Eng, the resonances between Bestimmung, Stimmung and Verstimmung ring out clearly. Four key themes are taken up here: multiple vocalisations, scene setting, variant lines of descent and a questioning of mothers.
This is a response to Joanna Hodge’s and Lynne Huffer’s critical commentaries on my book The Scene of the Voice: Thinking Language after Affect. My remarks focus on both the book’s central argument, as well as peripheral ones found in its endnotes. The former includes the claim that the figure of the voice in Martin Heidegger’s reflections on language and in post-Heideggerian thought can be read first as correcting the dismissal of the question of language by the affective and aesthetic turns in contemporary theory and secondly, as exposing these turns’ unreflective reliance on figuration, which The Scene of the Voice connects to the problem of mimesis and the threat of specular capture by the figure. Noted at various points in the book, but not developed at length, is the fact that the Western philosophical tradition has typically attempted to master mimesis through mastering the feminine. Both Hodge and Huffer seize on this history and pause over the way The Scene of the Voice consigns it to what they respectively call the “off-stage” or “the archive,” and which I have chosen to name the “ob skenē” (the ob-scene). This response takes their question of whether The Scene of the Voice repeats the suppression of the feminine in the form of its argument as an opportunity to dwell upon the text’s unconscious.
This essay reflects on Michael Eng’s book, The Scene of the Voice: Thinking Language After Affect (2023). The first part of the essay clarifies Eng’s use of Heidegger to articulate what is meant by the “scene of the voice” in its relation to the “affective turn” in recent critical thought. The second part of the essay clarifies the stakes of Eng’s book in the post-Heideggerian French philosophy Eng discusses, with a particular focus on his use of Blanchot. The essay asks critical questions about the problem of difference, with a focus on the feminine, the “other of the other,” as articulated by Luce Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman and Anne Carson in “The Gender of Sound.”
