Lawlor’s Attempted Neo-Vitalism

Lenoard Lawlor’s new book, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life, was promised as long ago as his Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question. In that book and in his book on Bergson he appeared to be diverging from the research of his past, which had been centred around the phenomenological tradition with special emphasis on Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty, and moving towards a post-phenomenological and post-deconstruction philosophy. Indeed, his work appeared to be shoring up for a very creative philosophy in his own voice that would take leave of phenomenology proper and construct a kind of Bergsono-Deleuzian hybrid with Merleau-Ponty – a veritable philosophical monster dripping in the memory of its flesh. The title Implications of Immanence had me hoping that this book would not be another set of close readings culled from already published journal articles, with pagination for the English and the original, and copious brackets with German or French words encased; yet, that is exactly what Lawlor has produced.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is purely negative. Lawlor’s clarity is often helpful for organizing one’s thoughts about Derrida, Husserl, or whomever. He often has genuinely brilliant insights into these thinkers and his scholarship is impeccable, beyond reproach. For all that this book, which promises to move us closer to a new concept of life, seems to fall prey to a philosophy deferred in favour of yet another history of philosophy. Beginning with Jean Hyppolite’s statement in Logic and Existence that “immanence is complete” (with regard to the death of god or the transformation of metaphysics into logic) Lawlor goes on to investigate this completion in, strangely, the work of Derrida (with one of the first and interesting readings of his On Touching), Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty. Three thinkers whose work tends not to think absolute immanence, but always complicates such categories (more so in Derrida). Indeed Lawlor tells us that Derrida’s conception of life is an ultra-transcendental that forms the ground for all experience; Merleau-Ponty’s philosopy is ‘mixtureism’; Foucault’s philosophy is a new Kantianism.

Ultimately the book is one long rumination on the theme of blindness in these three thinkers. He uses this to construct a “neo-vitalism” or, more ackwardly, “life-ism”, that locates death within life as the blindspot or double of life. For him, and he says for Derrida, it is life that is beyond being. It is hard to see how this is exactly an ‘implication of immanence’, but the notion is certainly interesting and may indeed prove fruitful if Lawlor countinues this project in his own voice. From what he has written here it seems that his notion of neo-vitalism takes its cue from Bichat and then forms an aporia around the path one can take in relation to Bichat with Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. Bichat was an 18th century biologist who straddled the classical and modern periods of medicine and famously made the definition of life is the collection of functions that resists death. Merleau-Ponty and Foucault both locate death within life (and thus don’t fall into the nihilism of simple anti-Platonism), but Merleau-Ponty on the basis of a tranquilty (a kind of Spinozism beyond Spinoza) and Foucault within conflict (Nietzscheism beyond Nietzsche). Sadly Lawlor stops short of speaking in his own voice and making a fundamental inquiry into this notion. I can only blame myself for expecting more as the title suggests this is only a work “toward a new concept of life”. I have to give Lawlor that much, this work does begin moving toward the possibility of a new conception of life.