Xenology as Phenomenological Semiotics Alexander Kozin

Xenology as phenomenological semiotics

ALEXANDER KOZIN

Abstract

In this article I examine the science of the alien, or xenology for its contri-

bution to semiotics. As a subfield of phenomenology, xenology emerged in

the Husserlian theory of intersubjectivity when, in his late period, Husserl

performed a transition from the other as an analogue of the self to the alien

as a non-analogical structure. The transition came with singling out four

alien modalities — children, animals, foreigners, and the insane — as the

Limit-Subjects in possession of their own liminal worlds. Following the ar-

gument for the continuous relationship between phenomenology and semiot-

ics, I examine the possibility of enriching the phenomenological theory of

the alien through a semiotic intervention. I arrange for the latter with Gilles

Deleuze who, owing to his association to both disciplines, helps me create a

semiotic theory of the alien. In this model, the original alien modalities op-

erate on the level of signification, thus building on the Husserlian investiga-

tions of how we experience alien-worlds with an elaboration of their signify-

ing e¤ects.

Keywords: Husserl; alien; rationality; liminality; Deleuze; becoming-

Alien.

1. Introduction

The influence of Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology on the semiotic

field has been widely acknowledged. Umberto Eco names Husserl as the

key figure whose phenomenology helped semiotics achieve the status ofan independent discipline. According to Eco, Husserl’s phenomenology

was the basic drive that generated the field and the object of semiotic

inquiry: ‘phenomenology undertakes to rebuild from the beginning the

conditions necessary for the formation of cultural units which semiotics

Semiotica 171–1/4 (2008), 171–192 0037–1998/08/0171–0171

DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2008.073 6 Walter de Gruyter

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instead accept as data because communication functions on the basis of

them’ (Eco 1979: 167). From this definition it appears that phenomenol-

ogy provides the first foundation for the study of the sign and sign sys-

tems. Julia Kristeva renders an equally strong endorsement: ‘Husserlian

phenomenology . . . became the basis for this century’s theory of significa-

tion to which, consciously or not, explicitly or not, all linguistic theoriesrefer’ (1989: 223). Both Eco and Kristeva agree that the key source of the

phenomenological influence was the timely appearance of Logical Investi-

gations, Husserl’s main texts on the constitutive properties of language.

Roman Jakobson, one of the founders of formalism, found this text in-

spirational enough as to extend phenomenology into the structuralist

thought, instigating the subsequent conquest of linguistics by structural-

ism.1 In the course of this transition — from phenomenology to linguis-

tics, and from linguistics to structuralism — emerged a special strand ofsemiotics, phenomenological semiotics. The presence of phenomenologi-

cal semiotics can be traced in the works of such phenomenological figures

as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Mi-

chel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.2

At the same time, the acknowledgment of the phenomenological influ-

ence on semiotics implies a certain finality of the phenomenological con-

tribution. The latter should not be surprising: when referencing Husserl,

semioticians tend to lean on the early period of his work, following hispreoccupation with the formal/logical side of transcendental phenomen-

ology. Understandably appealing to the linguistic scholarship of the first

half of the twentieth century, the original definition of phenomenology

ended up defining its main contribution to semiotics as well. After semiot-

ics broke o¤ from linguistics completely in the early nineteen seventies,

the e¤ects of the original phenomenology have subsided, turning Husserl

into a largely historical figure. In the meantime, continuous advances in

phenomenology, together with the diversification of the phenomenolog-ical agenda, opened widely a space for interdisciplinary cooperation,

and it is in this spirit that I would like to introduce and explore xenolog-

ical phenomenology as a way into an experience-based communication-

centered semiotic theory. In the next section, I o¤er a brief account of

xenological phenomenology, also known as the science of the alien.3

2. From the other to the alien

In section 52 of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl states: ‘The char-

acter of the existent ‘‘other’’ has its basis in this kind of verifiable accessi-

bility of what is not originally accessible’ (1977: 144). The statement is

172 A. Kozin


enigmatic, paradoxical, and, in this way, revealing. When commenting on

the revelatory significance of paradox for philosophy, Gilles Deleuze

writes, ‘Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy’ (1994: 227,

italics added). In the context of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, the para-

dox finds its pathos in Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity in general and

the relationship to the other in particular. I call the status of the other tobe the key problem in this text for two reasons: first, phenomenologically,

I position myself next to David Carr (1973) who pointed out that the core

problem for phenomenology in Cartesian Meditations is not the problem

of the ‘I’ or solipsism but the problem of understanding of the world as

objective and the accompanying understanding of the subject not as an-

other object but as precisely a subject whose experience cannot be re-

duced to that of the object, for the consciousness of the subject is a self-

reflective consciousness that parallels mine. Second, from the semioticstandpoint, I side with Yuri Lotman who names the ‘I-Other relation’ to

be the most basic semiotic structure.4

From the latter perspective, in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl seeks

to explain how the other ego is apperceived within my sphere of ownness

(Eigenheit), or ‘the Ego in whom the center is the one identical I-myself ’

(1977: 145). The other ego is then defined as both everything alien (allem

Fremden) and yet apperceptively accessible (zuganglich) (1977: 145). Here,

the paradox is still applied reductively: Cartesian Meditations o¤ers a for-mal and not a descriptive phenomenology, which views the I-Other rela-

tionship as apophantic. The implications of this position for the semiotics

at this point are purely structural: communication never features an unin-

terrupted flow of parallel expressions; on the contrary, it is always asym-

metrical, with the foundation for this asymmetry always residing wit the

‘I,’ or the source of signifying intentionality. It is on the basis of this thesis

that Lotman first critiques and then modifies the semiotic square of Grei-

mas. By reversing the relationship of opposition and apposition he showshow collective consciousness transforms individual experiences into limit

phenomena, or limit-signs. The latter help extend the universe of signs ‘by

showing its borders’ (Lotman 1996: 175). Lotman distinguishes not only

between inner and outer borders, but recognizes that their juncture can be

meaningful in itself: there are also liminal borders or the borders that in-

corporate the elements of the outside and the inside. For an example, he

evokes the so-called ‘strange familiars,’ or those liminal groups of people

who inhabited the outer boundaries of the growing Russian empire underIvan the Terrible.

In his later works, Husserl anticipated the emergence of liminality as

a semiotic theme by expanding his theory of intersubjectivity to the phe-

nomenology of the alien. In the manuscripts on intersubjectivity that

Xenology 173


embrace the period from 1929 to 1935 he takes great care in both posing

and reformulating the problem of the inaccessibly accessible other. The

new formulation, albeit nearly identical to the previous one, is given

with an entirely di¤erent emphasis. Husserl writes: ‘In mediate horizons

there are heterogeneous communities and cultures, they belong to them

as alien and heterogeneous, but alienness means accessibility in genuine in-

accessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility’ (1973b: 631, italics added,

my translation). The content of the above quote clearly situates the en-

counter with the other in the broad socio-cultural context — the connec-

tion that prompted Ludwig Landgrebe to suggest that the development of

Husserl’s thought since Cartesian Meditations had been progressively

tending toward ‘the social plurality within the life-world’ (Landgrebe

1981: 133). The acknowledgment of this plurality for Husserl meant a re-

turn to the concept of the alien. Upon numerous deliberations, the alienwas no longer conceived as everything alien to the ego constituted within

this ego’s sphere of ownness, but as a community whose experience could

simultaneously engage several spheres and dimensions. To put this insight

in the semiotic terms, Husserl presumed the possibility that there were

many di¤erent ‘systems of experience,’ or, to borrow from Lotman,

‘semiospheres.’ Some of these spheres coalesce, while others do not. In ei-

ther case, liminal systems are generative because they ‘possess transfor-

mative potential’ (Lotman 1996: 183).The transition to an examination of alien-worlds implied moving away

from considering inaccessible accessibility on the conceptual level as the

formal prerequisite for communication to the level of proximally interact-

ing heterogeneous beings whose experiences of the shared world are de-

limited from each other by respective generative terrains. The move from

the other to the alien implied neither a loss, nor a substitution. Within the

specificity of the Fifth Cartesian Mediation, the other was employed to-

ward finding the solution of the ‘solipsism’ question. In his subsequentinvestigations Husserl introduced the alien on the strength of a di¤erent

question: ‘There are problems emerging here of creating concrete under-

standing and mutual understanding; at issue is to somehow accomplish a

making home of the alien, as if it were home. Of course, there is also the

question of the limits of such knowledge and the question of justifying the

idea of complete understanding’ (1973b: 625, my translation). It is this

line of thinking that allowed some contemporary phenomenologists to

propose that in the last period of work Husserl had turned to a particularkind of phenomenology that aspired to provide a connection between two

phenomenological realms, transcendental and empirical.5 The latter im-

plied an interrelation between two phenomenological methods, transcen-

dental and eidetic. In The Crisis, the last manuscript that Husserl saw

174 A. Kozin


published while still alive, he explains that ‘through an eidetic method we

investigate the essential form of transcendental accomplishments in all

their individual and transcendental types, that is, the total essential form

of transcendentally accomplishing subjectivity in all its social forms’

(1970: 178). As a result of this merger, transcendental phenomenology

was expected to extend the theory of intersubjectivity based on the expe-rience of the other into the theory of interculturality based on the encoun-

ter with the alien. In this essay, I would like to examine the implications

of this development for the semiotic theory. For my starting point, I sug-

gest that we review the Husserlian concept of the alien.

3. Two senses of the alien

When Husserl refers to the alien in various later manuscripts, he gives it

two senses: a) as the transcendental structure ‘home-world/alien-world’

(Heimwelt/Fremdwelt); and b) as the empirical modality ‘the Alien’ (das

Fremde).6 Concerning the former, the structure ‘home-world/alien-world’

is singled out as one of the two most basic or elementary transcendental

structures which participate in the foundational constitution of experi-

ence. The other one is defined as ‘earth-as-ground/world-as-horizon.’

Both structures are essential for the experience of the life-world. How-ever, due to my emphasis and the space restrictions of this essay, I would

like to entertain only the first structure. The structure consists of two un-

equally distributed components: ‘home-world’ and ‘alien-world.’ The re-

lationship between the home-world and the alien-world is a relationship

between what belongs to the recognizable ‘home’ and the experience of

the unrecognizable ‘alien’ that encompasses everything that is consti-

tuted by a world other than my home-world. The primacy in this relation-

ship belongs to the ‘home.’ It is only from the ‘home’ that I can observeand thus experience the alien. At the same time, the alien-experience is

inaccessible to me. We can say, at this point, that the alien-world co-

constitutes the home-world. Simultaneously transcendental and non-

foundational, the co-determinate structure alien-world/home-world

presents the relationship between the home and the alien as the su‰cient

and necessary condition for understanding the genesis of all, but espe-

cially social experience.

At this juncture, I would like to suggest that we take the relationshipbetween the home and the alien as a particular kind of semiosis that takes

place, according to Lotman, in a certain symbolic space. In phenomeno-

logical terms, this space can be defined as a liminal space which consists

of limits, borders, and boundaries that prevent complete experience of the

Xenology 175


world. The relationship between the home and the alien is conducted in

the liminal realm. The question that arises in this regard is, How shall we

understand this realm? Most generally, liminality is what delimits us from

the outside and therefore reaches inside. Waldenfels calls liminality ‘in-

between’ (Zwischen), or new logos: ‘We encounter the alien as something

that can not be said or done within our order. The extraordinary makesits appearance as an order existing elsewhere’ (Waldenfels 1996: 115).

This extraordinary order resides in the twilight and feeds on ambiguity.

This is the reason why limit-phenomena cannot be appropriated, assimi-

lated, brought home, made united: ‘Alienness then does not proceed from

a division but consists in a division’ (Waldenfels 1990: 21). At the same

time, the alien cannot be ignored: as a generative phenomenon, it gives

rise to ‘those mythical narratives which give an account of a ‘‘genesis’’

that is genetically impossible to know, but generatively possible to experi-ence in the generative density of a cultural tradition’ (Steinbock 1995:

219). Hence, the ethical dimension that stimulates the encounter with the

alien; one meets the alien by crossing over from within, and that means,

from within your own order. In this formulation, both terms, ‘within’ and

‘over’ are essential: when crossing, one must carry their world with them

‘from within,’ and, at the same time, must separate from the home at

large by ‘moving over.’ In short, it is the liminal realm that features both

transcendental and ontological structures.Detailed investigations of this sphere led Husserl to propose that the

liminal sphere di¤ered from the normative one because it was founded

on abnormality which signified itself through their subjects, or ‘allon.’

Consequently, Husserl entertained four types of alien-subjects (Fremde-

Subjecte): animals, children, foreigners, and the insane. He was explicit

about their common genealogy: when discussing the correlation between

the world and transcendental subjectivity in The Crisis, Husserl asked

himself

. . . are the insane also objectifications of the subjects being discussed in connection

with the accomplishment of world-constitution? . . . And what about children who

already have a certain amount of world-consciousness? . . . And what about ani-

mals? There arise problems of intentional modifications through which we can

and must attribute to all these conscious subjects — those that do not co-function

in respect to the world understood in the hitherto accepted (and always funda-

mental) sense, that is, the world which has truth through ‘reason’ — their manner

of transcendentality, precisely as ‘analogues’ to ourselves. (Husserl 1970: 187)

Husserl’s inquiry as well as his solution have far-fetching implications for

all human studies: first, he discovered a sphere of experience that came

pre-separated from the normal and therefore acceptably foundational

176 A. Kozin


sphere. Second, he discovered that this liminal sphere houses fundamen-

tally di¤erent social worlds. Third, he chose to associate these worlds

with specific empirical modalities, namely, children, animals, foreigners,

and the insane. For Husserl, the four alien modalities are predicated on

abnormality which is a constitutional category, in accordance with which

the alien is conceived as abnormal, i.e., ‘discordant, non-optimal, atypi-cal, and unfamiliar’ (Husserl 1973a: 225, my translation). In the phenom-

enological context, abnormality is a neutral term; it means an experience

of the Alien as a being, who is completely on its own, reflectively outside

of our constitutive comprehension, in other words, radically di¤erent.

Coming from and with a world of their own that is delimited from our

own world, the Alien types are shadowy or, to put it in phenomenological

terms, liminal phenomena. Husserl calls them Limes-Subjekte. All limit-

subjects reside in the liminal sphere. Like all other subjects, let it be nor-mal or abnormal, limit-subjects are social subjects. At the same time, they

possess their own worlds. These worlds di¤er from the normative worlds

because their communities act in accordance with the modified rational-

ity. It is through their worlds that we access the liminal sphere.7

In the next sections I would like to build on this deliberation by exam-

ining the alien subjects in terms of a) their specific communities and b) the

relationships between and among these communities, and c) the composi-

tion of the liminal sphere as a relational network that engages contribu-tions from all the alien-worlds. In other words, I expect that by following

Limit-Subjects to their alien-worlds, one can penetrate the liminal sphere

within a particular configuration of its experience at the limits of its pos-

sibilities. A semiotic analysis would examine the limits to experience as

signifying limits. By addressing the signifying potential of liminality, one

could disclose the workings of intersemiosis, or complex coding. There-

fore, in the remainder of this article I o¤er two parallel interpretations of

the children, animals, foreigners, and the insane. In the beginning I showhow Husserl treated each individual alien; then I make an attempt to sys-

tematize his insights. Next, I give a semiotic reading of the alien modal-

ities. For the main semiotic figure that guides me in this project I choose

Gilles Deleuze. The choice of Deleuze is stipulated by several reasons. I

present those in the next section.

4. The semiotic phenomenology of Gilles Deleuze

Situated at the crossroads of several philosophical traditions, Gilles Dele-

uze’s philosophy is way too complex to be referenced in a single defini-

tion. However, in his early overview of French philosophy Bernhard

Xenology 177


Waldenfels describes Deleuze as a second-generation phenomenologist,

who is no longer attached to the phenomenological foundation directly

but is attached to it via numerous associations and dissociations.8 More

specifically, Waldenfels grounds his view of Deleuze in the fact that the

latter was highly influenced by the radical turn in phenomenology in the

late 1960’s and followed that turn toward ‘transformation of phenomen-ology’ (Waldenfels 1983: 488). Initiated by Derrida, this turn retains the

elements of both the empirical world and its modes of constitution, or

transcendentals, neither of which can be fully accessible to philosophical

inquiry on their own. This position zeroes in on the notion of radical dif-

ference, or di¤erance, which is essentially a Kantian legacy. Unlike Der-

rida, who coins the term and so incorporates it in his philosophy explicitly,

Deleuze has never acknowledged the impact of di¤erance on his thought

beyond a mere motivation past Kant. However, it is precisely in the mo-tivation that we find a continuous association with phenomenology.

The latter comes about in two ways: by way of his on-going argument

vis-a-vis Bergson with the key phenomenological figures, such as Husserl,

Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Derrida, and by his philosophical por-

traits, that is, ‘analyses of concept-making’ (Deleuze 1990: 177). In Dele-

uze’s own words, ‘Husserl thought a decisive step forward when he

discovered a region of vague and material essences (in other words, es-

sences that are vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing themfrom fixed, metric and formal essences’ (Deleuze 1994: 78). In his most

technical treatise, Di¤erence and Repetition, Deleuze makes one step fur-

ther as he conducts his argument in an implicitly phenomenological vein

that can be traced in both the set-up and the trajectory of his delibera-

tions: he begins with the analysis of representation (phenomenon) as it

was introduced by Plato and ends in the realm of social phenomenology

with the question of the Other and the third. He is more explicit about

his commitments in the more recent Logic of Sensation, whose aim andpurpose is at the core transcendental and phenomenological; an examina-

tion of how Bacon could paint ‘the scream more than the horror’ situates

Deleuze alongside with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Levinas, who discuss

the possibility of givenness being a phenomenon in itself rather than a

mode of constitution for what is being given.

The emphasis on threshold phenomena leads Deleuze to a philosophi-

cal method that Slavoj Zizek calls dialectical materialism in its fullest

sense. With Marx, explains Zizek, Deleuze understands philosophy asnecessarily critical, an inquiry that seeks to subvert sedentiary thinking

via nomadic interventions. The latter presupposes a di¤erent kind of dia-

lectical intervention. This intervention engages other than traditional du-

alities o¤ered by Hegel, for example, abstract/concrete, or by Husserl, to

178 A. Kozin


that matter, such as eidos and hyle, but introduces dual liminal categories

as the Sense-Event, which express themselves di¤erently when engaged in

either the empirical or the transcendental realms. According to Zizek,

these categories have two faces: ‘one face is turned toward things — that

is, it is the pure, non-substantial surface of Becoming, of Events heteroge-

neous with regard to substantial things with regard to which these Eventshappen; the other face is turned toward Language — that is, the pure flux

of Sense in contrast to representational Signification, to the referring of a

sign to bodily object’ (Zizek 1993: 123).

It is from the dialectical perspective that Deleuze asks himself the most

basic phenomenological question: What makes the appearance of various

phenomena possible if one accepts the possibility that their phenomenologi-

cal field exceeds the sensual, and extends directly into the transcendental?

The answer to this question is sought out in the liminal realm, on thesurface of the matter. Thus, for the object of his phenomenologically-

oriented philosophy Deleuze takes a liminal phenomenon, or what fol-

lows from the collision between matter and force, inserting the thread

that marks the division between the organic and the non-organic, image

and e¤ect to the point of their indistinguishibility, or, in Leibniz’s words,

incompossibility that proceeds from the possible without denying it, al-

lowing for the actual and the virtual to co-exist. Deleuze describes this di-

alectical relation in the body without organs, which subsists and consistsof ‘nothing but flesh and meat’ (Deleuze 2004: 22). As a common zone

for man and beast, the body without organs circumvents the human cog-

ito, making it fall back on the pre-reflective way of dwelling in this world.

Regardless of the kinds of phenomena Deleuze examines in his work, his

focus inevitably falls on those phenomena that belong to liminal fields,

whether it is aesthetic cinematography, or Francis Bacon’s art, or the his-

torical period of Baroque. The importance of these fields is not in them-

selves but in that they are capable of revealing liminality, which eventual-izes itself in nomadic event-objects.

It is therefore as a semiotic phenomenologist whose thought developed

on the edge and in-between the two disciplines, phenomenology and semi-

otics, that I engage Deleuze in this study. Since what is at stake here is

an understanding of the social world at the limit of its comprehension,

I suspect that Deleuze’s phenomenological semiotics would double the

strength of penetrating the liminal sphere, exposing, or shall we say, dis-

closing its limits in both phenomenological and semiotic terms. In this re-lationship, phenomenology will be guiding semiotics. In what follows I

examine the four Alien modalities first with Husserl and then with Dele-

uze. My aim is to connect the two approaches and their respective models

in a xenological theory of the alien.

Xenology 179


5. Husserl: Experiencing the alien

In his writings on intersubjective constitution, Husserl does not o¤er a

systematic theory of the alien. However, there are three concepts that

make consistent appearance throughout his investigations: abnormality,

rationality, and community. The relations between and among the threeconcepts is systemic. For Husserl, the Alien modality is abnormal on the

level of community which is defined by a particular kind of rationality. In

other words, we experience the Alien beings as strange because their com-

munities are rational but in an odd manner. The degree of strangeness de-

pends on the distance of a particular normal world from the threshold

that separates the liminal sphere from the normative one. When de-

scribing the alien-world, Landgrebe, with Husserl, establishes the con-

tinuum for their inaccessibility by distinguishing between ‘far-worlds’and ‘near-worlds’ (Landgrebe 1981: 132). Furthering this distinction,

Waldenfels notes that if one is to take the experience of the alien as

the experience of the own in the process of its transformation, two

types of experiencing the alien would be possible. One is the experience

of the alien from within. The other is the experience on the outskirts.

Close alien-worlds evolve from within, while far alien-worlds dwell on

the outskirts. In other words, the far-world is the world most removed

from our familiar experience, while the near-world borders on compre-hensibility. The operations of inner borders and outer borders as well as

far and near worlds will serve as the static grid for the subsequent genetic

analysis.

The farthest of the alien-worlds known to humans is possessed by the

animal. This might explain why Husserl consistently refers to the animal

as ‘dark.’ In several texts that specifically address the issue of monadic

constitution of the animal Husserl posits two theses aimed at explaining

how the experience of the animal can be understood as communal. First,he states that the animal di¤ers from the human because it ‘appears to be

irrational, not making sense’ (Husserl 1973b: 622, my translation). In

fact, argues Husserl, rationality of the animal being develops on the plane

that is not operational for the human. Husserl calls this plane Instinct. The

normalizing force of the Instinct optimalizes the animal’s behaviour, ‘gives

the animal a purpose that directs its ego-acts’ (1970: 227). Importantly,

emphasizes Husserl, no individual animal exists separately from it species.

The collective of a particular species forms a community, a form of so-ciality. The animal must have relations to subsist and traditions to uphold

if it means to survive as a species within a specific environment of its own.

Husserl forewarns against hasty distinctions based on sheer appearances.

In comparison to the human body, a di¤erent bodily comportment of the

180 A. Kozin


animal does not su‰ce as a primal distinction simply because a rational

animal would be a di¤erent kind of being, which would not be experi-

enced as an animal but as a foreigner. For an illustration, Husserl refers

to the Horse People from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Husserl

1973b: 625, my translation). If we encounter dressed up horses who can

speak and reason, we cannot help but accept them as our analogues.Thus, and this is Husserl’s second thesis, the animal is a social being in

the same way as a human, that is, it has a community; and if it has a

community, it has a ‘home.’ In this home, the foundational structure is

Instinct-rationality.

The nearest world on the ‘far-near’ alien continuum and simultane-

ously the deepest alien-world belongs to the child. The child too is experi-

enced as irrational. Following the psychology of his times, Husserl defines

the experience of the infant (child) as that of ‘the non-recognition of tem-porality and spatiality and a unique mode of connecting to the others

through fulfillment’ (Husserl 1973b: 605, my translation). The object of

fulfillment for this primordial mode is the mother, the first relation. For

the infant, the mother constitutes the entire world. At the times of Hus-

serl, it was customary to associate the primary caretaker with the mother;

for the contemporary sensibilities, the Husserlian mother would be any

primary caretaker. This way to the social, through the Other, situates the

child firmly inside the other’s sphere of ownness, makes it a cultural beingpar excellence, for the child symbolizes the beginning of the social. There-

fore, in contrast to the animal, the inaccessible child poses the limit not at

the point of rationality but at the point of origin. The child’s corporeality

contributes to the experience of originarity: the child is not a miniature

adult, its originary ways of constituting its world resist an analogy with

the adult body; its motility is optimal for the relation with the ‘world’

that defines the child as child. This world is the first world; constantly

growing into the world of the adults, the child does not perform a quali-tative leap of any kind but remains connected to the first world by adher-

ing to the originary experiences. These experiences are di¤erent from the

adult experiences in that they serve as the conditions for them. The Other

is no longer just the mother; however, the mother continues to retain the

primordial status. According to Zahavi, the first experiences do not only

‘make the constitution of the objectivity, reality, and transcendence pos-

sible, thus permanently transforming our categories of experience,’ more

importantly, ‘they continue to participate in the ongoing transformationof all subsequent experiences’ (Zahavi 2003: 116). They are therefore the

primers for the experience of the experiencing subject. The limit posed by

the child and its experiences is the limit of conditions and consequences:

the child’s experiences are the primers for the subsequent experiences. We

Xenology 181


thus may define the foundational structure of the child’s alien-word as

Ur-rationality.

Husserl’s writings on madness are scattered in a variety of texts, most

notably, in Husserliana Volume 13 as well as The Analyses Concerning

Passive and Active Synthesis. In the latter text Husserl writes, ‘Isn’t it pos-

sible that we all become insane and that many subjects live without rely-ing on a life-world, without any communal experience’ (Husserl 2003:

32). As the quote indicates, for Husserl, madness is a paradoxical form

of sociality. The madman is without community at the same time as he

remains within the community. One can say that, in comparison to the

other three Alien modalities, the madman resides on the margins of a

community. Not properly communal, the madman is an alien other, who

is inaccessible in the familiar constitutive order; yet, she is formerly famil-

iar. Attentive to the familiar culture, albeit to an extent, and speaking afamiliar language, albeit in an incomprehensible fashion, the madman is

an inaccessible deviant. He is a homeless ex-patriot. Constituting the

moral order in ab-normal ways, the madman nonetheless constitutes its

rupture, something that is always in need of repair. Experienced on the

side of their former home, the insane are properly liminal beings since

their own abnormalities are not of the reparable order. At the same

time, the insane constitute an order of their own, the order of unmaking,

which cuts across the other three categories: an insane child or a mad an-imal are mad in the same way: by no longer adhering to the familiar ways

of constitution any longer. The non-adherence or Ir-rationality is the pri-

mary mode in which the insane constitute their communal world.

For Husserl, the foreigner is a special kind of subject because she epit-

omizes community as a human sociality. In addition to natural sciences

and psychology, Husserl’s other non-philosophical academic interest was

anthropology. In line with the anthropological thinking of the time, he

often models his alien on the exotic alien, the savage (das Wilde). The co-incident use of the two terms (das Fremde and das Wilde) is significant as

it points to the extreme end of the position that Husserl assumes toward

the foreigner. The foreigner is someone whose home is founded on myths

and rituals, in other words, special social activities that engage an entire

community of people identifying it not just as a form of sociality, but as

a culture, meaning that this community is not homogenous but is seg-

mented into multiple parallel worlds. As long as a foreigner is separated

from another foreigner by language, territory and customs, she may em-brace a wide range of manifestations, from another European to a pre-

historical humanoid. The unifying principle for these manifestations is

rationality predicated on the logical schema of language. Husserl writes,

‘The world of humans is fundamentally and essentially determined by

182 A. Kozin


language’ (Husserl 1973b: 224–225, my translation). Our experiences

with foreign languages and travels to foreign countries strongly testify to

the generative powers of language. Speaking in a foreign tongue or par-

ticipating in a foreign custom often feels like an actual limit being im-

posed on the self. No matter how advanced we may be in communicating

our original selves otherwise than in our home language; no matter howmuch at home we feel in a foreign country; when abroad, we are savages

crippled by the force that continuously pulls us back to the primordial

home, that terrain which constituted the beginning and continues to do

so even after we physically place ourselves in a foreign world. The for-

eigner is the paradigmatic Alien other who is always in a relationship

with other alien Others. In comparison to the animal and the child, Alien

foreigner designates multiplicity within the species, forwarding language

as the mediating type of rationality, Language-rationality.In the beginning of this article, I argued that after Cartesian Medita-

tions, in his late period, Husserl continued his work on the intersubjective

dimension of the other. One of the results of this work was an extension

of the original definition of the I-other relation into the home-alien rela-

tion. The latter prompted Husserl to state that the encounter with the

alien-world takes place in the liminal sphere, on the border of experience.

For the guiding figures into that world, Husserl singled out the child, the

animal, the madman, and the foreigner. He identified them as regionalbeings, that is, those beings who possess their unique worlds, alien-

worlds, all of which belong to the liminal sphere of experience. Husserl

further indicated that by constituting their specific alien communities the

above Limit-Subjects emerge as rational subjects; yet, to the normal sub-

ject, their specific type of rationality — Instinct-Rationality for the ani-

mal, Ur-Rationality for the child, Language-Rationality for the foreigner,

and Ir-Rationality for the insane — will appear as abnormal. Normal

communities consist of fully-rational adults who are rational in the moralsense. According to Husserl, a normal adult behaves and experiences in

the manner of consequentionality, which is but an awareness of certain

societal prohibitions. Most often, the latter come under the theme of

moral values.

In contrast, the liminal sphere which accommodates di¤erent Alien

types and their respective worlds di¤er from the normative sphere not by

giving its opposite but rather by varying its foundation, which, for Hus-

serl, happens to be rationality. We can therefore claim that, in the Hus-serlian interpretation, rationality is the su‰cient and necessary condition

for any form of sociality. In the case of the four Alien modalities ratio-

nality manifests itself in di¤erent modes. The animal’s Instinct-rationality

is completely inaccessible to the fully-rational human, who sees animal

Xenology 183


behavior as chaotic and irregular. In fact, according to Husserl, the ani-

mal proves its sociality by pursuing a communal purpose albeit it in a

primitive, for the fully-rational human, fashion. The Instinct-rationality

is engaged entirely in the name of survival, showing it as an every day

drive. Unlike normal human communities, animal communities persist

by completely attending to surviving. It is easy to imagine how a humanbecomes an animal if only she starts dedicating herself to nothing else

but survival. A more comprehensible alien experience the fully-rational

adult find in the child, who provides a historical connection to those ex-

periences that once formed the basis for further experiences. The Ur-

rationality creates the ground, so to speak, for the development of moral

rationality. Yet, as the foundation, it is completely covered by the sub-

sequent structures.

The breaking of those structures characterizes the experience of the in-sane. Those do not go outside of themselves in committing irrational acts,

as our mundane experiences often intuit. As an Alien-species they do so

by systematically and thus rationally un-making the super-structures of

their fully-rational self. The end result of this process is sedimentation

of irrational rationality in its consistent performance. In contrast to the

above three Alien-modalities, the foreigner is delimited from the fully-

rational human by being its subcategory that made it to the liminal side

by virtue of a technicality. This technicality is the tradition which is up-held by the language and its use for narrating a specific history. Called

Language-rationality, this kind of rationality is also moral. That is why

various foreigner communities comprise the fully-rational normative

world, or, from a di¤erent perspective, as liminal communities, they over-

lap with it. At the same time, the other three liminal communities are lo-

cated in di¤erent degrees of proximity from the world of the fully-rational

adult, without creating as much as some form of parallelism. From this,

we can deduce the componential make-up of the liminal sphere; however,its relational necessity remains unclear. I therefore suggest that we take

the Husserlian model as provisional and, on its basis, attempt a semiotic

theory of the alien which would endow this model with the density and

texture of signification.

6. Deleuze: The signifying alien

In the previous section, I presented Gilles Deleuze as a semiotic phenom-

enologist. I also defined the di¤erence between traditional Husserlian phe-

nomenology and semiotic phenomenology in terms of the phenomenolog-

ical focus. In the case of Husserl, the focus is on the alien-experience. The

184 A. Kozin


level on which Husserl conducts his xenological investigation is therefore

transcendental-ontological. Deleuze, on the other hand, approaches the

alien-experience and the experience of the Alien on the plane of significa-

tion. This means attending to the conditions that allow certain Alien

modalities to appear as significant, that is, meaningful-in-themselves and

also as the conditions for the meaningfulness of the liminal sphere. Theshift of focus redefines the liminal sphere as a signifying terrain. The limits

of signification di¤er from those of experience for they are located on the

surface, or the skin of the matter which blurs the distinction ‘between the

container and the contained’ (Deleuze 1990: 100). In turn, the Alien mod-

alities are addressed as signifying modalities, or ‘surface e¤ects’ (Deleuze

1990: 83). Although they can be easily taken for ideal entities, and Dele-

uze even calls them incorporeal entities, the Alien modalities are firmly

connected to the empirical sphere: ‘Only the empiricism knows how totranscend experiential dimensions of the visible without falling into Ideas,

and how to track down, invoke, and perhaps produce a phantom at the

limit of a lengthened or unfolded experience’ (Deleuze 1990: 22).

The first alien modality, the animal, is approached by Deleuze in terms

of the line of flight. For Deleuze, the line of flight does not signify the es-

cape path. The animal does not just run away; nor does it run around

without purpose or determination. The animal rather runs to disappear.

Its path is thus the path of disappearance. The animal disappearing signi-fies the spatial distribution of the liminal sphere. According to Deleuze,

the line of flight has a special logic determined by the relationship be-

tween code and territorialization: ‘populations that are deterrioriolized

and reterritorialized and also coded and decoded’ (Deleuze and Guattari

1987: 54). This is to say that the animal makes the space, ‘which is consti-

tuted, marked o¤ by signs that divide it into zones, mobilizes special or-

gans, and corresponds to fragments of code’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:

55). The line of flight bestows meaning by producing the division as a re-sult of which the limit-world becomes divided into the inner and the outer

structure. The inner structure is coded in an emotional state of the anxiety

before the open; the outer boundary or the associated milieu are deter-

mined by the maintenance of what is own, in the most primitive sense of

possession, the one that signifies nothing more than belonging. The super

nomad, the animal belongs to the world in a loose fashion; as loosely dis-

persed are its constitutive e¤ects because animal territorialities are formed

by incessant wandering: ‘their epistrata are constantly shifting, moving,and sliding, creating cracking and rupture’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:

55). The only stable, the only prominent feature about the animal itself

is its belonging. Deleuze characterizes the nomadic structure as ‘without

property, enclosure or measure’ (Deleuze 1994: 36). Nomads are the

Xenology 185


ones who distribute nothing but themselves. This distribution creates the

space for becoming: by having the previously drawn boundaries con-

stantly redrawn, ‘thereby confounding these boundaries’ (Deleuze 1994:

37). In short, the animal is the becoming-animal, who signifies space.

According to Deleuze, Alfred Hitchcock endows the line of flight with

the specificity of an overlap between the animal world and the humanworld (Deleuze 1989: 34). In his film, The Birds, the most innocuous ani-

mal creature, who also happens to be the one most removed from the hu-

man reach, turns against the human being and begins falling on the heads

of hysterical humans like the Biblical plague. The birds attack in mass, as

a population. The explicitly stated conflict between the animal world and

the human world gives Hitchcock an opportunity of disclosing both the

hysterical condition of the human and the nomadic (becoming) nature of

the animal. The attack of the humans by the birds makes nomadism ac-cessible to the humans as a liminal structure, shows it in its line of flight,

as it were. The image of the birds pursuing the running people in flight

forms the backdrop for the erratic movements of the humans and, simul-

taneously, shows the birds being united by a common purpose, however

unknown this purpose would be. Like with any other animal, you cannot

reason with the birds, even if reason is just a rational form of emotional

response. As a genre, the horror film has a history of capitalizing on that

property by having the shark, or the snake to be the ultimate horror ani-mal. By appearing rationally motivated, the birds appear mad. They are

animals only when they are becoming-animals, that is, the nomads of the

liminal sphere.

Deleuze chooses to define the mode of signification for the child in the

Freudian terms as a relation of the body to its organs. It seems that the

connection to Husserl at this point is particularly strong. If we assume

the body for the world and the organs for its constituents, we would

have to admit that the child indeed does not experience the world as acombination of things. Coming in close proximity to Lacan, Deleuze

claims that the child experiences the world as a plurality of possible and

seemingly incommensurable attributes that nonetheless form meaningful

assemblages, except that their meaning would always escape an adult be-

cause it would be given in the mode of appearing for the first time. These

assemblages are not Freudian displaced signifieds but beginnings. Incapa-

ble of separating the components from each other, whether in perception

or in expression, the child is equally incapable of conceiving of the worldas finite. From the temporal perspective, the child is closer to the animal

than it is to the adult. Its original experiences are inaccessible because

they are continuously interrupted by the world and its a¤ects. Deleuze

writes, ‘These a¤ects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage

186 A. Kozin


. . . they indeed have an optimal limit’ (Deleuze 1986: 257). Through

his perception of the world as an endless gathering, the child is the

becoming-of the world. If consciousness is always the consciousness of

something, as Husserl taught us, an experience of the child allows the

adult to perceive the becoming-of the world as that very something;

hence, the modification to the child’s consciousness in the future, and,through this modification, a particular signification for the world. Ac-

cording to Deleuze, Freud missed this very point: ‘psychoanalysis has

no feeling for unnatural participations, nor for the assemblages a child

can mount in order to solve a problem from which all exits are barred

him: a plan(e), not a phantasy’ (Deleuze 1986: 259–260). From the inter-

semiotic perspective, with its experiences, the child compliments the expe-

rience of the animal by associating the limits of comprehension as a spa-

tial structure with the structure of time. The child discloses the time of theliminal sphere as experiential primordiality.

In his discussing the child, Deleuze often references Marcel Proust who

shows the significance of childhood for the experience of the world. In

Search of Lost Time is permeated by the ‘presence of madness’ (2006:

30). The notion of time as it is linked to madness is of course a well tread-

ed philosophical theme: Plato discusses it in his dialogue Phaedrus, St.

Augustine examines this connection in his Confessions, Nietzsche elabo-

rates on time and insanity in Ecce Homo; finally Foucault gives thistheme a new and inspiring spin in Madness and Civilization. Each of these

interpretations, although very di¤erent in both methodology and empha-

sis, yields the third, connecting, relation between time and madness: pro-

phetic vision for Plato; divinity for St. Augustine; politics for Nietzsche;

power for Foucault. For Deleuze, the theme of madness as a category of

time dovetails into the pre-original experience of the child. He therefore

particularly appreciates Proust’s descriptions of childhood because they

show original primordiality as the perception of time. In Swann’s Way,this perception is described as collapsing the world to a singularity,

whether it is the original sexual desire, or, more primordially, the experi-

ence of the world in its original mode. Deleuze calls this mode ‘haecceity,’

or the becoming-one: ‘Individuation proceeds by haecceity, pure haecce-

ity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 271). The haecceic experience presup-

poses nothing ‘but the relations of movement’ (Deleuze and Guattari

1987: 266). Children are thus fugitive beings, nomads in a similar way as

the animals. ‘Note,’ writes Deleuze, ‘how children talk to the animalsand are moved by them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257). Semiotically

speaking, the animals and children form a relational pair, a dual Alien

structure. Their signifying liminal space and time, respectively, makes

this pair precede, as it were, the modalities of the insane and the foreigner

Xenology 187


because both of them signify a di¤erent aspect of the Limit-world expres-

sion. In the next section I examine the two remaining Alien modalities.

I have already mentioned Deleuze’s use of the term ‘madness’ as the

‘becoming-mad.’ Madness is an indispensable component of his organic

theory designed to show the instability of the self-contained system by

exposing its organic flow which is but ‘the desire itself: non-figurative ab-stract lines of escape, that is, deterritorialization; lines of segmentaries,

whether supple or hard, in which one gets entangled, or which one

evades, moving beneath the horizon of one’s abstract line; and how con-

versions happen from one line to the others’ (Deleuze 2006: 13). Here, we

see the same emphases: the line of flight, plan(e) of consistency, haecceity,

and stratification. It is therefore in this capacity, as a mode of significa-

tion for the liminal sphere, madness emerges as a unifying theme for the

other two modalities. However, it might be worth reminding ourselvesthat, for Deleuze, madness is much more than just a theme. It is the mat-

ter that Deleuze chose to use for his challenge to psychoanalysis. In the

Anti-Oedipus, he is explicit about this connection. The schizophrenia is a

result of self alienation but not in the inward, rather in the outward sense.

The Marxist take on madness by Deleuze shows the outward area as pol-

itics: the madman is alienated not from the self but from the other in the

self. The natural outcome of this condition is madness or doubling, or

fold; hence, Deleuze’s second correction for Freud: the desire for theOther does not find the Other but runs into the other self, alter ego, over

and over again (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 298). The correction leads us

back to Husserl: the madman provides the limit to any self-generating

community by way of separating the content from expression.

The foreigner comes into play for the final round. It is with the for-

eigner that the concept of liminal expression receives its definition. As

with Husserl, the foreigner constitutes a separate category. Despite his

strong interest in structural anthropology and especially Levi-Strauss,Deleuze never addresses the foreigner as an empirical modality but ap-

proaches him through the question of the Other. This de-emphasis does

not signify the lack of attention but rather a special overreaching status

of the Alien who surpasses the Other by going beyond both its structure

and its experience. This explains the frame which serves as the foundation

for the Deleuzian elaboration: Michel Tournier’s Robinson. The novel is

significant in its key question: What kind of the world is the world without

Others? Following the plot of the novel, Deleuze begins with a critiqueof the Other: first, the Other ‘organizes a marginal world, a mantle, or a

background’ (Deleuze 1990: 344). The limits posed by the Other are

therefore structural: they allow for the objective world to appear as objec-

tive. As a result of this structural position, the Other becomes the cause of

188 A. Kozin


our desire for the objects. The second e¤ect of the Other comes from the

same direction: the Other as the condition for the possibility of the objec-

tive world can also be desired. This prompts Deleuze to state that ‘the

Other as a structure is the expression of a possible world; it is the ex-

pressed, grasped as not yet existing outside of that which expresses it’

(Deleuze 1990: 347).According to Deleuze, the Other becomes a tool for psychiatry which

implicates the Other in the works of perversion. The desire of an object

qua the Other turns into a perversion when the Other becomes an object

of desire. It is only if one is to imagine the world without the Other that

perversion finds its object elsewhere. However, what the structure of de-

sire shows and rea‰rms is not that the Other can be objectified, but,

more importantly, that if the Other disappears, the desire will fail to di-

rect itself to the world of objects. The latter will simply collapse underthe weight of the elementals which are going to replace the Other with a

di¤erent set of the conditions for the possibility of experiencing the world:

earth, air, fire, water, they all are going to take over: ‘the Other fabricates

bodies out of the elements, without the Other, the world returns to what

is properly own’ (Deleuze 1990: 351). In this world, the Alien replaces the

Other as one of the elemental forces; hence, the importance of Friday. In

Tournier’s interpretation of the encounter between Robinson and Friday,

the latter is not conceived as the Other. By the time Friday arrives, Rob-inson had already lost the Other. The main role of Friday-the-savage,

who is untamed by the Other, is to complete the metamorphosis that

Robinson began and to reveal to him its sense and its aim. This function

determines his status: ‘Friday is not another, but something wholly other

than the Other; not a replica, but a Double: one who reveals pure ele-

ments and dissolves objects, bodies, and the earth’ (Deleuze 1990: 355).

For Robinson, the savage is just a being; his language, customs, are irrel-

evant for he belongs to a totally di¤erent regime which knows no consti-tutive limits, only constitutive conditions.

The Alien who is not the Other opens the transcendental dimension of

a di¤erent order, that of the divine. In that dimension, the Alien has a dif-

ferent face. Not that of savage, but that of angel. It is the face of angel

that calls to me and thus binds me to the world in the absolute welcome.

According to Deleuze, the angel is ‘a Double without resemblance, an ele-

ment without constraint: it is a phantasm’ (Deleuze 1990: 354). As a mo-

dality of its own, the angelic stranger tops the quartet formed by the ani-mal, the child, the insane, and the foreigner. At the same time, it has the

intrinsic connection to the child and the animal since, like them, it is un-

able to express itself by human means; it can only express itself by the

means which are liminal.9 The angel’s speech is not hearable; it is pure

Xenology 189


signified, the message without the expression. The angel is the body of the

message. The messenger is the message. The angel is all expression. This is

why, according to Dionisius Areopagus, the angel cannot be experienced

by the human in any other way but divine madness. Possessing nothing of

the human world and belonging to the heavenly world, ‘the angel is light,

wisdom and essence’ (Areopagus 2005: 122). This is how the angel comesto serve as the paradigm for the entire Alien world.

The quasi-empirical figure of the angel situates the four empirical

Alien-modalities in a three-dimensional space. In this space, the angel

sets the direction for reading the relations between and among the modal-

ities. Its role is testifying to the code which explains the Alien modal-

ities as elementals whose language is that of divination. For the ‘silent’

angel to speak the language of the divine means to reveal the transcenden-

tal structures of the alien (divine) world in their signifying expressions. Thebecoming-of-expression that characterizes the angel institutes ‘becoming’

as the primary mode of existence for liminality, an analogue of the Hus-

serlian limits to rationality. Under the transcendental guise of the angel,

becoming as a signifying structure manifests its temporality in the figure

of the child and spatiality in the figure of the animal. Between the animal

whose line of flight territorializes being and the child whose primordiality

contains all beginnings, stands the madman whose being is pluralized by

way of singularity. On the very surface of this structure one finds the for-eigner, whose ‘normality’ conceals the alien in the exotic Other. Outside

of the analytical reflection, only when it gets compromised by the experi-

ence of profound traumatism, the liminal sphere reveals one of its elemen-

tals or unconceals itself as itself. In itself the sphere does not have any

limits and is not dependent on limit subjects. Its sole purpose is to gener-

ate limit-worlds and limit-subjects, of which the Alien modalities are but

nomads. Unlike the Husserlian view of the liminal sphere that holds the

alien modalities, Deleuze makes sure as to leave the system open. Thelimit-less, subject-less liminality allow us to see the Other as a pure possi-

bility, a phantasm, an enigma, and xenos.

On the basis of these findings, I would like to rea‰rm the productive

union of phenomenology and semiotics and suggest that it should see fur-

ther expansions and refinements of the Husserlian theory of the alien, or

xenology.

Notes

1. For an expose about the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology on Jakobson, see Holen-

stein (1974).

190 A. Kozin


2. Lanigan (1989, 1992) makes a strong case for the semiotic allegiances of Merleau-Ponty

and Foucault. For an argument about the influence of semiotics on Levinas, see Kozin

(2004).

3. The term ‘science of the alien’ was coined by Waldenfels (2006).

4. In this article, Lotman functions as a guiding figure, a semiotic interpreter of Husserl.

5. Zahavi (2003) is particularly convincing in showing that the movement of Husserl’s

thought allowed for both realms to form a symbiotic relationship.

6. Following the conventions that concern the distinction between the ‘other’ and the

‘Other,’ I use the small case ‘alien’ when referring to alienness more generally,

while the capital case ‘Alien’ refers to the Alien being, which is a psychophysical

entity.

7. An example of a phenomenology of Limit-Subjects is o¤ered by Natalie Depraz who

adopts the Alien modalities — the animal, the child, the foreigner, and the insane —

toward arguing for the ability of all alien modalities to elicit from other human

beings hyper empathetic response, providing access to the liminal sphere (Depraz 2001:

171).

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Alexander Kozin (b. 1964) is a post-doctoral research fellow at Freie Universitat Berlin

[email protected]. His research interests include phenomenology, semiotics, and trans-

lation theory. His recent publications include ‘Crossing over with the angel. A visual semi-

otic analysis of Genesis 32: 22–32’ (2005); ‘Subversive neutrality. An interactional phenom-

enon of translation-in-talk’ (2006); ‘The legal file. Folding law: Folded law’ (2007); and

‘Unsettled facts. On the transformational dynamism of an object in legal discourse’ (2008).

192 A. Kozin


Xenology as Phenomenological Semiotics Alexander Kozin

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