Abstract
Despite over 100 years having passed since the challenges of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who took aim at systematic and overly abstract philosophy in favour of a vulnerable and impassioned cogito, the intimate link between our mortality and our subjectivity (reflective, bodily, emotional) has not been sufficiently explored. At least this is what Christina Howells avers in Mortal Subjects. The late twentieth-century French thinkers, who can be seen as the direct heirs of the philosophy of finitude and mortality via the appropriation of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, can perhaps provide answers and therefore constitute the focus of Howells’ dual type of investigation. On the one hand, Howell proposes to ‘see whether they deal any more convincingly with the ultimate questions of subjectivity and mortality’ (p. 94). On the other hand, her undertaking is motivated by an ‘impulse’ arising from ‘an acute personal experience of love and death’ (p. 1).
The book is arranged in four sections, with an introduction and an epilogue. The sections deal respectively with phenomenology (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir), religious philosophy (Marcel, Ricœur, Jankélévitch, Levinas), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Anzieu, Kristeva) and deconstruction (Derrida and Nancy).
The opening discussion of the mind–body dualism in Aristotle and Descartes provides a clear indication of Howells’ erudition in this area of the history of philosophy, nicely demonstrating how Aristotle’s conception of soul is not as dualistic as we often assume. With her discussion moving to Descartes and early and late modern thought, Howells conveys the sense of a historical discourse that has been fragmented by significant shifts within the history of philosophy – in particular, ‘the death of the Subject’ (p. 21). Howells thus responds that she will attempt ‘to offer a reflection on the implications of human mortality for our understanding of the human subject’ (p. 22). Indeed, her criticisms of earlier attempts to resolve the mind–body dualism, as well as what is to come in her discussion of French thought, lead one to think that the book will make significant theoretical advances, if not provide resolution.
As one would suspect, given her earlier work, Howells provides fruitful analyses of Sartre, Lacan, Derrida and Nancy. She offers important clarifications of their thought in relation to both the aim of the book and wider critical debate. It is for this reason that her treatment of the other thinkers is surprising and begins to confirm a worry that there is simply not enough room in the book for discussion of difficult subject matter and the complexity of the various thinkers. While attempts to compensate for this absence appear in more localized criticisms concerning inconsistencies and even at one point a muted charge of plagiarism, the reader is left more with snippets of French thought on the subject than a sustained commentary. The first section on phenomenology is, for example, entirely dominated by a defence of Sartre’s philosophy against the criticisms of Marcel and Merleau-Ponty. The sections devoted to the latter two are overshadowed by the persistent counter-claim that Marcel and Merleau-Ponty have misunderstood Sartre. There is also the curious selection of texts to which Howells refers when analysing Ricœur’s contribution; notably absent is any sustained discussion of Le Volontaire et l’involontaire (1950) which deals with subjectivity, the body and emotion. Howells’ concluding remarks on the religious philosophers (p. 126) are so generalized that specific comments about each thinker can almost be applied to all three without distinction. A similar account occurs in relation to psychoanalysis (pp. 173–4) where theoretical complexity is reduced to an almost bullet-point format.
Given the expectations set up by the introduction and the unevenness of the critical discussion, the book wavers in presenting a convincing reflection on the subject matter. The epilogue attempts to provide some closure, but can do so in only the most general sense. Howells states that ‘Subjectivity and mortality are then linked in an aporetic structure in which subjectivity is simultaneously created and abolished by mortality’ (p. 221). Yet this point elucidates neither something new nor something that cannot be gleaned from reading any one of the thinkers she examines. Despite these shortcomings, the book has the virtue of providing an introductory discussion of the historical origin of the philosophical trajectory of the mind–body problem and an indication of the complexities one would need to navigate in understanding French philosophy on mortality and the body. In this sense, the book remains a welcome general resource for both student and scholar.