Fictions of Phenomenology: Husserl and Musil
Abstract Despite the express intentions of his phenomenological investigations, the radical significance of Edmund Husserl’s discussions of signs and meaning may reside in their exposure of the ways in which language remains structurally alien to the field of subjectivity and cognition. If this would mean that a phenomenological theory of cognition could not guide the study of literary language, however, fiction may nonetheless turn out to be one of the most important sources for phenomenological »Erkenntnis«, albeit in a different way than Husserl could have meant in his famous affirmation of fiction in phenomenological research: as the exposure of its limits, and as the further explication of a field where, as Jacques Derrida would write, »every present subject can be absent.« This possibility is explored in the present contribution through an analysis of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.