Husserl’s Theory of Communication

Introduction

In this paper I outline the emergence of Husserl’s theory of ‘communication proper’ (Mitteilung or Kommunikation) in the context of his genetic analyses of intersubjectivity. I attempt to explicitly define the meaning and function of Mitteilung in contradistinction with the notion of empathy and, in this way, to demonstrate its distinct generative constitution. To this end, my exposition locates a number of ambiguities in Husserl’s attempts to draw a clear differentiation between, on the one hand, communication as a relationship constituted through conscious social acts and, on the other, communication as a form of interaction based on instincts and drives.

The argument I advance is that, when considered from the perspective of his generative analyses, the concept of Mitteilung becomes a central element to Husserl’s social ontology. It has the capacity to cancel the opposition between social acts and instinctive intersubjectivity and thus to frame a non-determinist theory of sociality. I support this claim with a systematic presentation of the constitutive connection between sociality and what Husserl identifies as ‘system of drives’ (Triebsystem) (cf. Husserl, 1973c: 594).

A major motivation for this argument is to demonstrate why eminent readers of Husserl such as Derrida have missed an important opportunity when they failed to notice the key role of Mitteilung. A widespread view within and outside the phenomenological tradition is that, in the systematic context of Husserl’s work, the concept of communication is derivative of the more fundamental category of empathy (Gallese, 2003; Schutz, 1970; Zahavi, 1996). This view, however, fails to acknowledge that, starting from the early 1920s, Husserl considered communication to be a developmental phenomenon, one whose work goes back to stages of constitutive accomplishment anterior to empathy. The theoretical potential of this concept for a non-foundational genealogy of sociality has thus been overlooked.

The problem of communication occupies a central place in two of Derrida’s four works focused on Husserl. ¹ Both these works give empathy an ontological priority over communication and both of them gear this priority toward grounding communication in the medium of writing. These early investigations proved formative for the entire project of deconstruction and, among other insights, facilitated the emergence of key concepts such as ‘différance’ and ‘archi-trace’ (Derrida, 1978, 1982, 2011).

In his ‘Introduction’ (1962) to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, Derrida validates Husserl’s account of the institution of ideal objects in documented communication by drawing on the empathic representation of another ego in inner time (1989: 86–7, n 90). This account enabled him to identify for the first time ‘writing’ as an originary economy of deferral and difference. In Voice and Phenomenon (1967) Derrida resorts to Husserl’s theory of empathy to disentangle the problem of language in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1901). There he suggests that the grammatical structure of indication, which according to him is the principle of all communication (2011: 32), is equivalent to the empathic function of what Husserl calls ‘analogical appresentation’ (2011: 33). Analogical appresentation inscribes the grapheme within the ‘solitary life of the soul’ (2011: 59; cf. Husserl, 1984: §8) and thus commences the dismantling of what Derrida has famously named ‘metaphysics of presence’. Derrida’s most explicit prioritization of Husserl’s theory of empathy, however, is tied to his early critique of Levinas. In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (Derrida, 1978 [1964]), Levinas’s concept of the face is faulted precisely for lacking a Husserlian model of empathy. Empathy must attribute to the other the sense of alter ego, if we want to secure the ethical relationship from violence and guaranty its transcendence (Derrida, 1978: 125).

But, as the subsequent developments of Derrida’s thought demonstrate, the ontological privilege of empathy and the cognate primordiality of writing lead nowhere else but to the necessary aporia obtaining between general and singular alterity, impossible and possible forgiveness, unconditional and conditional hospitality. Empathy gives us nothing but the other in abstracto. In it the other is merely an analogon and we must necessarily ‘betray’ it in order to arrive at the concrete historical others perceived as persons with race, gender, ethnicity, individual character and history. As I show below, by suspending the tension between instinctive intersubjectivity and social acts, Mitteilung offers us precisely a way out of such an aporia.

In the conclusion of the paper, I make the suggestion that Husserl’s concept of communication can throw a new light not only on ‘writing’ in the Derridean sense but on communication media in general insofar as these are considered in the context of pre-empathic sociality. Kittler’s project for a genealogy of media is thus taken as a vantage point for the extension of the argument.

Systematic Considerations

The manuscript of 1921/22 titled Gemeingeist (Husserl, 1973c: 165–204) presents (in its two parts) Husserl’s first systematic exposition of a theory of communication. ² In Logical Investigations the notion of communication has already been notably discussed. This discussion, however, conceives of communication exclusively in terms of language. In it, the concept of communication is strictly derived from the linguistic (grammatical) forms of expression and indication (Ausdruck and Anzeige). ³

With the later development of Husserl’s theory of temporality and the notion of intermonadic temporalization, ⁴ the concept of communication evolved significantly to include a number of pre-linguistic elements related to intercorporeal communication. Nevertheless, partly because Gemeingeist articulates only Husserl’s initial reflections on communication proper, it remains in many respects ambiguous.

Taking into account the rich theoretical context of Husserl’s analyses of intersubjectivity by invoking a number of surrounding texts produced during the period 1920–7, we can systematically reconstruct the emergence of the specific notion of Mitteilung and establish its relative place in the broader framework of Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity. A major motivation for this task is the observation that, when Husserl uses the concept of communication, he does not always refer to processes occurring as social acts. Often, he would also refer to the implicit operation of behaviours determined by instincts and drives. Such an observation seems to overturn the predominant, though itself underdeveloped, scholarly view that Husserl’s notion of communication belongs to a higher level of intersubjective constitution, the level which Husserl designates as ‘communalization’ (Vergemeinschaftung). According to this view, communication is secondary in relation to empathy. Considered on this level of Husserl’s social ontology, what is accomplished with communication is only the constitution of the social world which would necessarily presuppose the empathic relationship between different primordial spheres (transcendental subjects). ⁵

However, a strong alternative to this view emerges as soon as we consider the thematic and methodological complexity of Husserl’s approach. Social communication seems to require empathy for the constitution of sociality only when it is laid out in the framework of the static analysis of intersubjectivity. But, in the late 1910s, as a result of his deepened studies of temporality, Husserl drew the distinction between static and genetic phenomenological methods. While the static analysis treats objects as already constituted and describes their intentional structures as complete unities (Husserl, 1966: 345; 2001b: 634), the genetic one ‘asks back’ (rückfragt) into the concrete becoming of phenomena in the temporal development of transcendental life. ⁶ Taken from a static point of view, empathy has no point of genesis in the developmental history of the social relationship. In the early 1920s, however, Husserl became interested particularly in the genesis of intersubjectivity, an area of problems he later called ‘generativity’. ⁷ As a result, he began to outline a method for the reconstruction of the concrete emergence of empathetic appresentations and the systems of habitualities generated through their accumulation.

Considered in this context, the one-sided relation of foundation obtaining between empathy and communication in static phenomenology gives way to the ‘reciprocal’ relation of genesis and generation. What is generated in the horizon of primal institution and accumulated through habitualities reveals itself as what in turn modifies, reshapes, and generates these habitualities themselves. Thus empathy and communication appear to be in a correlation of mutual foundation. This brings to the fore the possibility of a non-foundational account of communication. ⁸

Negative Definition of Communicative Acts

The focus of Husserl’s discussion in the first part of the Gemeingeist manuscript is social acts as performances of the active ego constituting concrete interpersonal unities. ⁹ The fundamental social acts are a specific kind of communicative acts (mitteilenden Akte), namely, the ones that generate social reality.

Husserl introduces communicative acts negatively, by an ad hoc distinction from instinctive behaviour. Communicative acts are not constitutive products of drive-intentionality’ (Triebintentionalität). ¹⁰ They are the necessary accomplishments of ‘communicative strivings’ (kommunizierende Streben). They are carried out not by ‘instinctual subjects’ (triebhafte Subjekte) but by ‘communal subjects’ (Gemeinschaftssubjekte). And as we know best from Ideas II, these two modes of subjectivity pertain to two different domains of constitution, the naturalistic and the personalistic.

It is remarkable, however, that from the very outset of this important text Husserl implicitly uses this distinction not to differentiate the egoic ¹¹ from the communal, the nonsocial from the social realms, but to separate two distinct kinds of intersubjective relationship. He distinguishes a relationship that is ‘prior’ to empathy and one that comes ‘after’ empathy. What does this puzzling duality amount to? In fact, through this duality, Husserl demarcates two kinds of social relationship, each emerging accordingly ‘before and after empathy’ (vor und nach der Einfühlung). The former he identifies as ‘instinctual’ (triebhafte), the latter as ‘conscious’ (bewusst). The first is categorized as ‘primally social’ (ursoziale), the second, as ‘properly social’ (eigentlich soziale).

While this way of stratifying sociality remains ambiguous throughout both parts of the Gemeingeist manuscript, what is clear is that ‘before and after’ do not designate positions in the factual sequence of objective time. They refer rather to two different dimensions or moments of communal lived experience. In a certain way, we already experience other subjects ‘before empathy’. And these are experiences of full value. In this context, however, Husserl does not consider such experiences to be ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) communicative experiences. When, for example, the young child is impulsively motivated to imitate her caregiver or when an adult is urged to help a child we do not have authentic social acts. ¹² The parental (and especially the mother-child) love, familial relationships in general, ‘instinctual care’, and sexual love ¹³ are all instances of instinctive relationship and do not constitute communicative interactions. In them, we do not stricto sensu experience co-pleasure or co-pain with others. We are not pleased or displeased by something together with them. Instead, we are entirely determined by others and feel ‘pleasure because they are pleased, sadness [because] they are sad’ (Husserl, 1973c: 166, emphasis added). Since we take upon ourselves their lived experiences and do not actually coordinate ours with theirs, we do not perform authentic social acts. Quite conceivably, the inverse motivation does not lead to authentic social acts either: when I love someone, my acts proceed from my own interest, that of nourishing the pleasure and happiness of the person whom I love. When I hate someone, my acts derive from an interest in ‘harming’ and ‘annihilating’. Even when I act on the ground of ‘reason’ by taking the liberty of contemplating my drives, I still do not perform communicative acts. I am still blindly motivated by spontaneous interests, which are instinctual and rational at the same time. Regardless of their particular source, the acts which have a pre-empathic motivation ‘are not social acts and not acts of authentic social love [or other motivation]’ (Husserl, 1973c: 166).

Authentic communication involves instead ‘a conscious consideration of other subjects as targets of the action [and] as subjects who can do us “good” or “harm”’ (Husserl, 1973c: 166). Therefore, it necessarily presupposes empathy. This implies a consciousness of the ‘I can’, the capacity to comport to the surrounding world and to interact with it, to determine and be determined by others. In communicative acts we are necessarily involved as self-conscious subjects acting upon others in order to motivate them to do or to understand this or that. In instinctual behaviour this explicit purposive turning to the other is missing. The other is not consciously addressed and apprehended. In Husserl’s words, in this kind of social relations I merely ‘simulate a subject’. But what do the communicative acts properly consist in?

Positive Definition of Communicative Acts

Social acts, Husserl tells us, involve 1) doing something with the particular intention that the other person takes note of it, an expression of this very intention, and an expectation that she behaves ‘so and so’ in response, and 2) the other person’s understanding of my act as so intended; the addressee must be able to grasp my intention as particularly communicative and addressed specifically to her as well as to comprehend my expectations of a certain response.

A communicative social act is thus for Husserl not given if I am not conscious of my particularly communicative intention. Nor does it take place if I therefore omit to bring my intention to expression so the other takes it into account and acts accordingly.

For Husserl, this structure is not necessarily a linguistic one. What is more, he blatantly alludes to its origin in preverbal interaction: visual, haptic, auditory, and kinaesthetic. Most of his examples testify to such a genesis: he speaks of different facial expressions and different kinds of touch; he describes how his friend silently throws a piece of wood in the fireplace in sign of agreement; he often refers to the way Romani people lay crossed branches on crossroads to let their fellows know which path to take. The examples do not necessarily need to involve a physical co-presence to convince us that, for Husserl, the primary form of communication is the face-to-face interaction. The structure, upon which all types of communication are modelled, involves embodied interactants, agents that perceive each other, are in each other’s scope of touch, hear each other or look each other in the eye. For this reason, primary communication necessarily involves a concrete other aware of and present in front of me. This structure is instituted, according to Husserl, in the original connection between I and You (the I-Thou relationship, die Ich-Du-Beziehung).

Obviously, not only speech but the whole multimodal array of sensorimotor competences is fit to draw the attention of the other and motivate her to interpret my embodied behaviour as means to address her and direct her interest to a particular (physical or ideal) object. The latter becomes the object of the I-Thou-intentionality. As an embodied interaction in ‘standing-over-against-each-other’ (Einander-gegenüberstehen), the I-Thou-relationship provides the constitutive form of every communication. But what exactly are the elements of this form?

As I would categorize it, communication for Husserl requires two structural components: 1) ‘touching’ (Berührung) in the sense of a mutual perception and a common presence; and 2) ‘turning’ (Wendung), an actually performed address and sharing a fact that affects the addressee and requests a response. In order for an interaction to qualify as communicative, first, the very intention to communicate must be communicated. This intention, for its part, must be grasped by the other. Touching and turning define, in this way, the formal structure of the communicative act.

Communicative acts, however, involve a third element, a determination of whatever is intended, expressed, and expected in the act. This determination is displayed in statements such as ‘this is so and so’ and ‘you shall do’ (Husserl, 1973c: 166). It is the communicated fact (Tatsache), about which the other is ‘called’ to take note and respond. In other words, this is the indication of the content of the communicative act: ‘A certain hand and finger movement, throwing a piece of wood in a particular direction, etc. attracts the attention and interest of the addressee to the object of my own interest. As a result, we begin to intend the same thing together’ (Husserl, 1973c: 167).

The ‘primary other’ accomplished through and defining this formal structure is the concrete embodied other. My addressee is not merely ‘the Other’ in general. She is a ‘you’. She is present ‘within the framework of reciprocally and simultaneously completed “touch”’ (Husserl, 1973c: 168). Only in this framework can I address the other; only in this way can the two of us share a concrete context and can I indicate the particular content of my communicative acts.

Given this unequivocal prioritization of embodied interaction, one may find it surprising that Husserl at the same time insists that communication with absent others can still have an I-Thou structure. An absent addressee can also be ‘You’ and also be ‘touched’. What are his grounds for raising such a claim? Wouldn’t it be necessary for such an extension of the notion of the ‘I-Thou’ that the medium is already implied in the streaming present of the lived body?

With distant and mediated communicators, Husserl reveals, touch (Berührung) must be understood to function as a simile (Gleichnis). While touch in its haptic sense remains the original form of communicative encounter, when I am in contact with absent others I reach over a temporal distance (zeitlicher Distanz). In the communicative act my present communicative will concerns a future understanding of the sense I have articulated in ‘materially lasting communicative expressions’ (Husserl, 1973c: 168). The same applies to my grasp of senses articulated in past expressions. Of course, in all these cases, ‘I’ and ‘You’ do not literally ‘touch’ each other. They are separated by a ‘stretch of time’. However, the relational structure of touch is retained. The subject of the communicative act preserves her appresentations by an institution (Stiftung) of a sense that is part of intersubjective sedimentary habitualities. In the latter, the appresented ideal meanings acquire a signifying function outside the individual living present. Husserl says of these meanings collectively that they become ‘spiritual hands’ (geistige Hände), ¹⁴ by which a present ego and an absent alter ego ‘touch’ one another. ‘Even the dead and the living spiritually shake hands’ (Husserl, 1973c: 169). ¹⁵

Now, from these brief considerations which lead us from the notion of mediated communication to the idea of intersubjective habitually, it follows that something like a sense-giving (Sinngebung) articulating the peculiar noema of the other subjects’ inherent absence must already be implied in the structure of monadic temporality even in face-to-face settings. The others who we encounter must somehow be present through a certain style of fulfilment that retains their principal (diachronic) absence. A manuscript from around 1925 gives us an exact clue as to the origin of this diachronic sense in intersubjective habitualization:

[E]very monad for itself and in itself is by its being related to the other. This grounding relationship of being in being-for-one-another is evident as a relationship of coexisting in an intersubjective time. This is not objective, but immanent-intersubjective time of coexisting according to all subjective time-modes, followed by identifiable stretches of time [Zeitstrecken] and time positionings [Zeitstellen]. This grounding relationship is the foundation for any other intersubjective relationship. (Husserl, 1973c: 360)

Once absorbed in the continuous retentions of the monad, the intersubjectively shared temporal experiences become part of the living present. And, if they are not further reawakened by new impressions and associative syntheses, they progressively lose affective vivacity and sink into the ‘dark horizon’ of the subject’s sedimented past. This decline of intuitive fullness deepens to a degree of vanishing from the range of awareness and is already registered only in a ‘limit-mode of consciousness’. This is, according to Husserl, the phenomenological analogue of ‘the so called “unconscious”’ (Husserl, 1974: 280), the zero-point of consciousness, where past experiences are deposited and held in a vague ‘distant retention’ (Husserl, 1966: 288). Now, this capacity of consciousness to forget and nonetheless retain in distance its past intersubjective experiences in the form of habitualities is instrumental for the possibility of ‘temporal touch’. It constitutes the temporal horizon of consciousness as an immanently ‘de-presentifying’ limit ¹⁶ and an implicit reference to an intersubjective horizon. It is because of this intersubjective habitualization that Husserl is able to say that ‘the institution of personal associations must be considered in mediate ways in which the persons remain “unknown”’ (1973c: 182). In other words, in the habituality of every monad there exists a layer of anonymity, which necessarily refers to a principal absence. It is this absence that makes a communicative address to an addressee possible. Through it, in the very medium of communication structurally is implied ‘an indefinitely open multiplicity of others as if I am not just “personal” in my turning […] to the other’ (Husserl, 1973c: 214). What is more, even if I know well the addressed person, my address is conditioned by this anonymous, indefinite and impersonal plurality of other subjects. This understanding of Mitteilung clearly points to the emerging generative themes in Husserl. The implicit non-personal horizon in communication at this level does not only concern contemporaries who are or are not currently present or known to me but obviously extends to the possible renewal (or reinstitution) of meanings prior to my birth or subsequent to my death.

Such problematic becomes all the more important as soon as we consider it in practical and axiological terms. The communicative relationship is a relationship of ‘practical will-community’ (praktische Willensgemeinschaft). Its practical determinations are expressed by the aspect of motivation to possible action. The communication of my will in the form of request is a type of contact (touch, Berührung) that implies an intention to determine the addressee’s volitions and actions to follow my communicative intention.

Personal Intersubjective Becoming: Empathy or Instinctual Communication

It is of central importance now to understand that, for Husserl, ‘person’ designates the ego-subject in her concrete communicative constitution. There are no persons outside the socio-communicative relationship. Personality is a self-consciousness acquired ‘within the enabled by communication striving-community and community-of-will’ (Husserl, 1973c: 171). Outside of this context, the grasp of the other is sheer empathy, that is, a sense associatively awakened by the appearance of a physical body (Körper) that indicates another living-body-thing (Leibding) like mine (Husserl, 1973a: 140–1; Husserl, 1973c: 169). Thus, the ego as a person entails a full system of volitional intentionalities in the form of practical and axiological communalities with other egos. The ego becomes a person exclusively in communication.

Yet Husserl’s account remains somewhat obscure regarding the exact features of this process of becoming as well as regarding the specific characteristics of the person as a product of communicative development. In order to illuminate this obscurity, we need to first consider the fact that the subject as an ego-pole and the subject as a person are two irreducible modes of transcendental subjectivity. In other words, they cannot be ordered in a foundational hierarchy. Through them Husserl grasps two incomparable dimensions of constitution. These dimensions give rise, on one hand, to empathy and, on the other, to communication. By virtue of their constitutional difference the latter can by no means be derived from the former. But does not this indicate a deeper contrast between them? If we consider statements like the following one, we would have to answer this question in the positive: ‘It is not sufficient for personality that the subject itself is held as a pole of her acts. It [personality] is constituted only through the subject that occurs in social relationship with other subjects’ (Husserl, 1973c: 175). In other words, I can encounter the other as ‘You’ only in an already presupposed developmental context. But, in this precise sense, it is not empathy that grounds the I-Thou relationship. The latter must have a different and parallel origin that goes back to the transcendental-genetic communicative history. Only if the I and the other are in development can they encounter each other as these particular ones.

Gemeingeist gives us only a broad direction regarding this separate origin. Husserl, however, lays out its elements in various other texts. We can review two categories that encompass these elements: ‘intuitive flair’ (Intuition) and ‘overlaying’ (Deckung).

For the sake of juxtaposition let us first recapitulate Husserl’s ‘standard’ account of empathy. It is fair to say that this account hinges on the concept of ‘primal institution’ (Urstiftung). All original experiences, be they of oneself, objects or other subjects are, according to Husserl, events of primal institution. In primal institution a certain (noematic) sense becomes initiated. Henceforth, every time we have an experience of a similar kind the same sense becomes affectively reawakened (wiedererweckt, also in the sense of ‘reinstitution’, Nachstiftung, cf. Husserl, 1966: 172; 2001: 221). When I empathize, I apprehend the other in terms of the universal typicality of her corporeality. The primal institution of this typicality, however, does not originate from the other herself. It comes from the self’s own kinaesthetic awareness and habitualities, or what today cognitive scientists would call ‘proprioception’. Whenever the physical body of another subject presents itself, a kinaesthetic process of transfer of the sense ‘living body’ occurs – from the experience of my own body to the perceived other body. Since the other’s embodied life is in principle inaccessible to me, I represent it in an intentional act. Husserl defines this intentional act as ‘analogical appresentation’ and describes its key component as ‘associative pairing’: the association, based on similarity, between my body and that of the other (1970b: 112; 1973a: 142). Put in psychological terms, in associative pairing we have a cross-modal transmission stimulated by similarity, from proprioceptive to exteroceptive sensory perception. This synesthetic transmission conveys the awareness of the primally instituted unity of my own body over to the object-unity that appears to be similar to it.

We can grasp the concept of ‘intuitive flair’ precisely in contradistinction to this account of empathy. In Ideen II, where he devotes special attention to the primal institution of the sense of other people’s singular character, Husserl distinguishes between ‘individual’ and ‘general types of understanding persons’ (1952: 270; 1989: 282). Empathy is clearly the constitutive principle of the general type. The constitution of the individual type takes place in the mode of intuitive flair. This mode is brought about by the experience of the other person not on the basis of similarity but on the basis of difference. It presents the other without referring back to the same and thus is also open to characteristics such as race, gender, religion, personal style, etc.

Husserl depicts the grasp of the other’s individual type as a ‘“gaze into an abyss”; when the “soul” of the [other] person suddenly “opens itself up”; when we “fathom wondrous depths”’ (1952: 273; 1989: 286). Such an experience has nothing to do with empathizing. It proceeds from the irreducible manifestation of the other’s singularity. In it the primal institution of the sense of ‘another individual person’ is not ‘pregiven’ in my own kinaesthetic experiences. It is originally impressed (imprinted, prägt) by the very encounter of the other:

I enter into relationships with various ego-subjects and come to know the typical moments of their pregivennesses, of their actions, etc., and I apprehend the latter according to these types, but it is not as though I first had the types in abstracto […]; instead, the type becomes pronounced and gets impressed [prägt] on us in multiple experiences. (Husserl, 1952: 273; 1989: 285)

In the I-Thou relationship the transcendental monad does not simply constitute itself in the constancy of the form of its unity throughout the flow of its lived experiences. The monad is accumulated in a habitualizing process which Husserl describes as intersubjective ‘overlaying’. Overlaying is a constitutive element for both the communicative process and the communicating monads themselves. The first trait differentiating overlaying from empathy is that it necessarily presupposes reciprocity. The representation of the other’s transcendental sphere in empathy does not create a mutual relationship. Monads may appresent each other simultaneously and still remain isolated. Reciprocity in overlaying is not mutual empathizing. It is not a representational relationship at all. It is rather a passive simultaneous occurrence and layering into each other of my lived experiences and those of the other. Overlaying is a general principle in the regularities of passive synthesis and Husserl often uses the analogy between subjective-temporal and intersubjective-temporal overlaying. In associative remembering the similarity between a present and a past experience awakens a memorial representation in an association. By virtue of the established dynamic correlation the contents of the memorial and the perceptual intentions overlay each other. However, Husserl also makes a clear distinction between the subjective and the intersubjective overlayings. Unlike the subjective overlaying, the intersubjective one is based on ‘compresent givennesses’ (Husserl, 1973c: 530). He details the implications of this co-presence in a manuscript of 1921:

The coexistence of a plurality of subjects implies initially ‘simultaneity’, even if we know nothing yet of a common world: co-there-being with [Mitdasein mit] a subject, the being of the two is equivalent to the possibility of a ‘perception’ that both perceive. (Husserl, 1973c: 103)

The monad becomes a personal subject. But this does not occur prior to the overlaying in the I-Thou connection. The mutual determination wherein the specifics of the particular egos are accomplished seems to have a ‘primally social’ (ursoziale) history independent of empathy. It is obvious that we should understand this genetic dynamics in a strictly developmental sense. And in Gemeingeist II Husserl is already able to reflect this independent (generative) line of origin. Only in the mutual determination between I and You can the I become fully identified as this particular I with this particular history and individuality. One can be a personal I and be conscious of this fact only in a practical relation to a You. This also entails a communicative process of ‘mundanization’. By recognizing each other’s communicative intentions, motivating each other, and fulfilling each other’s claims, the communicators mutually thematize and summon themselves into a common interactive surrounding world. This results in a structure of joint intentionality which institutes the objective, worldly side of the interaction. Thus, the possibility of conflict between my claim and the other’s way of taking over it refers me back to myself as a practically objective communicating person. I become conscious of myself as a subject in the world, a person, and a social agent. The human subject is a life and striving not only as self-preservation of its world of things (Sachenwelt) but also, equiprimordially, a life and striving as a communicating person in a personal world (Personenwelt).

Despite the apparent ambiguity of Husserl’s statements regarding the autonomy of communicative acts, it is clear now that he retains a notion of a primal level of sociality. It is also obvious that this level is not based on conscious social acts but is rather constituted through ‘unconscious’ ¹⁷ instincts and drives. Its precedence signifies a priority in the generation of the different social connections. In Gemeingeist II Husserl still does not give us a clear indication about the structural differences between these connections. A manuscript of the same period, however, addresses precisely the question of the ‘different possibilities and ways of combining monads through combining their ego-subjects’ (1973c: 270). Here we see precisely the parallel developmental communicative history he omits in Gemeingeist. We have passive and active modes of intersubjective connection where the passive underlies the active one and constitutes an absolute intermonadic reality. ¹⁸ Husserl explains this ultimate transcendental horizon in a passage whose phenomenological and metaphysical significance can hardly be overestimated:

This whole monadic process is under universal laws of genesis […]. The elaboration of these laws is the greatest task of phenomenology. Every monad has its own immanent developmental laws […]. But the commecium of monads as such also has its fundamental laws of genesis, and it is a conscious commercium, a social community […] in its history and its essential law of history. The task is here to show that monads are only compossible as monadic through being developmental laws in accordance to a uniquely determined whole, a whole of community development. (Husserl, 1973c: 271, emphasis added)

Conclusion

We can confidently draw the conclusion that, in the I-Thou relationship, there is always a singular ‘You’ originally accompanying the general grasp of another subject as a living body in empathy. It is not that we first experience the other subject as ‘another living body like mine’ and then we encounter her as a specific ‘You’. We grasp immediately the other in the peculiar style of ‘her entire conduct, in her passive and active comportment toward her surrounding world, in the expression of her individuality’ (Husserl, 1973c: 319). The other is originally as much ‘another living body like mine’ as she is this particular ‘You’. Five years after he drafted Gemeingeist II Husserl writes:

[S]ocial connectedness […] can be produced not only by social acts. As individual subjects exert their activity on the basis of a dark, blind passivity, so the same applies to social activity. But already passivity, the instinctive drive-life [instinktive Triebleben] can produce intersubjective connection [intersubjektiven Zusammenhang]. (Husserl, 1973c: 405)

It was this shift in the idea of communication that Derrida and other readers of Husserl overlooked. Derrida favoured Husserl’s theory of empathy because it provided him with a procedure to conceive the alterity of the other in terms of mediation. The other’s lived experiences, he writes in 1964, ‘can never be given to me in an original way […] but only through analogical appresentation [which] confirms separation, the unsurpassable necessity of […] mediation’ (Derrida, 1978: 124).

The premise of this argument – a premise which Derrida assumed Husserl shared through and through – was that all kinds of alterity belong to ‘alterity in general’, a category comprising ‘[b]odies, transcendent and natural things’ (Derrida, 1978: 124). Other persons are first and foremost empirical bodies. What constitutes them as the subclass ‘living bodies’ is the subsequent intentional act that re-presents them phenomenally as what is non-phenomenal. ‘[W]ithout the first alterity, the alterity of bodies’, Derrida postulates, ‘the second alterity could never emerge’ (1978: 124). The second alterity is thus inscribed in, made possible, and regulated by, the first one. This system of alterities, which Derrida conformed with Husserl’s earlier account of indication, became the prototype for the concepts of ‘archi-trace’ and ‘différance’ (2011: 58–9).

But Derrida’s argument turns out to be one-sided as soon as we consider what the present paper has demonstrated. His idea that the signification in general and the concrete experience of the other have a ‘common root’ in the function of repetition (2011: 58) suppresses Husserl’s original distinction between the transcendence within the sole monad and the communicative other. As we saw, however, Husserl employed analogical apperception to account for the other only as a general type. There is no logic according to which one can derive (by way of repetition or otherwise) from the category of alter ego an individuated other present in a second-person mode.

More recently, Kittler described the general alterity of the medium in its full determination. Prompted by modern information technologies, he dissociated it from all meaning-bestowing mental processes and thus ruled out any origin in subjectivity or intersubjectivity. What he called Aufschreibesysteme (inscription systems or discourse networks) is not limited to the Derridean exteriority of the sign. Modelled on the Lacanian feedback-circuit unconscious and Shannon’s ‘mathematical theory of communication’, it selects, stores, and processes data beyond human perception or symbolic representation (Kittler, 1990: 369; 1997: 145). We have sufficient grounds to hypothesize then that this concept brings to its logical conclusion what lay dormant in Husserl’s empathetic schema of alterity: ultimately, the analogical apperception does not open us to the alterity of the other; it reveals the material exteriority of the medium. The latter is, moreover, not an extension of the embodied subject but its autonomously progressing condition.

What seems to make Kittler’s media theory broadly relevant to Husserl’s generative concept of communication is its genealogical focus on relationality in terms of mutual foundation. Kittler’s genealogy traces the event that establishes a mediatic form which, for its part, articulates further events. We should emphasize in this respect that at the bottom of Husserl’s developmental account of communication there lies an intersubjective materiality that is primally mediatic. In his later manuscripts he defines this mediatic materiality as a ‘hyletic underground’ that provides ‘the first share in the world […] of living ego-subjects who are in a living connection which each other’ (1973d: 604). In the social genealogy Husserl called ‘monadology’, this material mediatedness is to be found at every stage of development, starting from the ‘concealed history’ of ‘instinctive communication’ (instinktive Kommunikation) and arriving at the social world of ‘rational self- and humanity-consciousness’ (1973d: 609).