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. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of the relationship between corporeality and the ordinary in the works of François Laruelle. This is done through the formulation of the ‘ordinary body’ that draws from across Laruelle's work on the ordinary, corporeality and photography in order to outline Laruelle's radically immanent account of embodiment. The critical outline of Laruellean corporeality and the ordinary body is drawn out via a critical posing of Laruelle in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari. In doing so, the article (...) indicates the singular difference between Laruelle, on one side, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, with respect to corporeal immanence and the usage of the everyday and ordinary. The article concludes with an argument that the relationship between the body and the ordinary in Laruelle's thought implies a novel non-philosophical or non-standard ‘poetics’ and usage of the ordinary. (shrink)