Knowledge means getting behind appearances by deriving the principles that give rise to them. But knowledge is itself an appearance and for every unmasking there is a knower behind the scene, implicit in the very act. A phenomenology that attempts to save the appearances is therefore not an optional addition to knowledge - doomed and best abandoned - but a necessary horizon of any stab at knowing or exposing any reality or field of being or experience. As much as you mean to exclude yourself from the picture, making or assuming the picture is contaminated by its performativity. So the phenomenology that accompanies knowledge as its horizon is equally its ground and is not itself a knowledge. What is it then? The objective's failure to be objective just as much as the subjective's failure to be subjective, and the impossibility of mapping these two failures onto each other.