Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

"Sebbah's noteworthy book is perhaps the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between three thinkers in the French phenomenological tradition, two of whom are well known in the Anglophone world (Levinas, Derrida) and one of whom (Henry) is gradually better understood by English-speaking audiences. That all three are arrayed together in this study makes it a pioneering enterprise and one that allows the English reader to apprise the worthiness of Henry's association with his better-known compatriots." -- Jeffrey Hanson * Continental Philosophy Review * "Convincing and well executed. A wide range of texts and thinkers is treated with evident familiarity and thought. . . This book makes an important contribution to the larger debate about the contemporary status and trajectory of phenomenology." -- Christina Gschwandtner * International Philosophical Quarterly * "Francois Sebbah, who practices phenomenology above all through a testing of readings-readings that jostle each other-uses phenomenology to experience limits that he neither denounces nor overcomes. Rather, he plunges in headfirst, engulfing himself so as to better draw on that experience, an a-theological baptism of sorts." * Bernard Stiegler *

Through three different versions of phenomenological discourse (Derrida, Henry, and Levinas), this book explores the notions of excess and the excess of excess relative to conceptions of the self.