Home 9 Passage 9 Writing

Writing is the way that phenomenology is practised. Phenomenologists like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Levinas, Bachelard were not only scholars but also and especially they were gifted authors. Phenomenological research does not merely involve writing: research is the work of writing–writing is at the very heart of the process. For scholars such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty the activities of researching and reflecting on the one hand, and reading and writing on the other hand, are indeed quite indistinguishable. When one visits the Husserl archives at the University of Louvain this close connection between research and writing becomes evident in the symbolic value of Husserl’s desk which occupies a prominent place in the archival room. It is at this desk where phenomenology received its fundamental impetus. And, yet, interestingly, Husserl himself has had little to say about written language and the actual process of phenomenological writing. What is involved in phenomenological writing? Strangely perhaps, the practice of phenomenological writing is quite difficult to articulate. Writing is not the practice of some clever technique; neither is writing restricted to the moment where one sets pen to paper, or the fingers to the keyboard. Writing has already begun, so to speak, when one has managed to enter the space of the text, the textorium. The space of the text is what we create in writing but it is also in some sense already there.