Reframing Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: The Roots of Desire 1793639531, 9781793639530

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Reframing Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT Series Editors: Christian Lotz, Michigan State University, and Antonio Calcagno, King’s University College at Western University Advisory Board: Smaranda Aldea, Amy Allen, Silvia Benso, Jeffrey Bloechl, Andrew Cutrofello, Marguerite La Caze, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Dermot Moran, Ann Murphy, Michael Naas, Eric Nelson, Marjolein Oele, Mariana Ortega, Elena Pulcini, Alan Schrift, Anthony Steinbock, Brad Stone The Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought series seeks to augment and amplify scholarship in continental philosophy by exploring its rich and complex relationships to figures, schools of thought, and philosophical movements that are crucial for its evolution and development. A historical focus allows potential authors to uncover important but understudied thinkers and ideas that were nonetheless foundational for various continental schools of thought. Furthermore, critical scholarship on the histories of continental philosophy will also help re-position, challenge, and even overturn dominant interpretations of established, well-known philosophical views while refining and re-interpreting them in light of new historical discoveries and textual analyses. The series seeks to publish carefully edited collections and high-quality monographs that present the best of scholarship in continental philosophy and its histories. Recent titles in series: Reframing Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: The Roots of Desire by Elodie Boublil Hegel and Heidegger on World and Nature: Reconciliation or Alienation by Raoni Padui The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier’s Philosophy by Ghislain Deslandes Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, by Hugo Moreno The Ontological Roots of Phenomenology: Rethinking the History of Phenomenology and Its Religious Turn, by Anna Jani

Reframing Twentieth-Century French Philosophy The Roots of Desire Edited by Elodie Boublil

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boublil, Elodie, editor.   Title: Reframing twentieth-century French philosophy : the roots of desire     / edited by Elodie Boublil.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Series: Continental     philosophy and the history of thought | Includes bibliographical     references and index. | Summary: "This collection renews contemporary     debates in phenomenology, ethics, social ontology, aesthetics, and     metaphysics and broadens the scope of twentieth-century French     philosophy by analyzing the works and key concepts of authors who left     their marks on its genesis"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2023002636 (print) | LCCN 2023002637 (ebook) | ISBN     9781793639523 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793639547 (paperback) | ISBN 9781793639530 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, French--20th century.  Classification: LCC B2421 .R44 2023  (print) | LCC B2421  (ebook) | DDC     194--dc23/eng/20230306  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002636 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002637 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Anthropology or Metaphysics? Another History of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy Elodie Boublil

ix

PART I: ELUCIDATING DESIRE: EMBODIMENT AND REFLEXIVITY

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Chapter 1: The Lived Body: From Maine de Biran to French Phenomenology 3 Paula Lorelle Chapter 2: Jean Nabert: A Hidden Source of French Philosophy? Scott Davidson



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Chapter 3: The Source of Desire: Individuation and Responsive Care in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s Philosophy Elodie Boublil

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PART II: DESIRE, DRIVES, AND IMAGINATION

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Chapter 4: Seize Hold of the Hunger: Simone Weil’s Ethical Eros Rebecca Rozelle-Stone



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Chapter 5: Sarah Kofman: Irony and Self-Writing as Philosophical Practice 79 Mélissa Thériault Chapter 6: Henri Maldiney’s Philosophy of Existence Till Grohmann v



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Contents

Chapter 7: Rhythm and Subjectivity in Maldiney and Deleuze Stefan Kristensen



PART III: DESIRE, COSMOLOGY, AND METAPHYSICS Chapter 8: The Reversibility of the Flesh: Jacques Garelli and Maurice Merleau-Ponty Renaud Barbaras (Translated by Elodie Boublil) Chapter 9: Phenomenological Metaphysics in Marc Richir Alexander Schnell Chapter 10: Nature as Potentiality of the World Delia Popa Index



111 127 129



141 157

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About the Contributors



179

Acknowledgments

I would like to warmly thank Prof. Antonio Calcagno and Prof. Christian Lotz—series editors—for initiating this philosophical project. I am very grateful for their trust and enthusiasm in the topic and their support during the preparation of this volume. This book would not have been possible without the patience, timeliness, and dedication of all the contributors (despite the pandemic circumstances) and without the high quality of their philosophical investigations. I am very grateful and honored to have worked with them on this project. Special thanks are due to Jana Hodges-Kluck for her support and invaluable help and understanding throughout the completion of this project, as well as to her assistants and all the editorial team at Rowman & Littlefield. Finally, I acknowledge the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the a.r.t.e.s Graduate School for the Humanities at the University of Cologne for hosting my research work from 2018 to 2020.

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Introduction Anthropology or Metaphysics? Another History of TwentiethCentury French Philosophy Elodie Boublil

“All modern philosophy derives from Descartes,” wrote Henri Bergson in a short French philosophy essay (Bergson 2017, 12). According to him, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century French philosophy inherited from Descartes its demand of clarity and rationalization and his constant dialogue with natural sciences and psychology. Most importantly, Bergson characterizes French philosophy as driven by a desire to speak to humanity at large and to conceptualize reality so that everyone could understand it in a common search for universality. A century later, while French post-structuralism and contemporary phenomenology have emphasized our philosophical reflection’s finitude, bias, and limitations, Bergson’s optimism about metaphysics and systematic philosophy seems to vanish in the haze of the overspecialization and polarization of contemporary sciences and philosophies. Thus, finding a common thread of analysis and interpretation in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy might fall into the kind of retrospective illusion, also described by Bergson, if we were to claim that there would be such constituted and unified trend as “French philosophy.” Nevertheless, history is written by the victors. The prevalence of authors such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault, Levinas, and Derrida in the analysis of contemporary continental philosophers shows the persistent influence of a line of interpretation that tends to confront and contrast the legacy of French phenomenology with the deconstruction ix

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brought about by “French thought” and post-structuralism, despite the efforts of contemporary thinkers who showed the richness of comparing and contrasting the authors of both movements (see Lawlor 2003). The ongoing development of “critical phenomenology” (Guenther 2013; Weiss, Murphy & Salamon 2019) emphasizes the opposition. On the one hand, the phenomenological description of transcendental subjectivity is disconnected from its empirical grounds, determinations, and structures of alienation. On the other hand, the post-structuralist singularity approach may well miss out the consistency of its inner experiences and the emancipatory power of its symbolic institutions. Similarly, the French debate of the late twentieth century initiated by Dominique Janicaud (2009) draws an additional line between two conceptions of phenomenology. His famous claim about the so-called “theological turn of phenomenology” stresses the ambiguous and somehow conflictual relations between phenomenology and metaphysics in the post-Heideggerian era. Moreover, French philosophers’ political and social activism, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, is also a usual trait emphasized by the literature to characterize the period. From Sartre to Fanon and Foucault, reflections on power and freedom have deeply oriented—if not divided—the French academic scene, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. The reception of Husserl and Heidegger and the constitution of a French phenomenological movement, thanks to the exploration of the works of Merleau-Ponty and his contemporary readers, constitute another room to be explored in the house of twentieth-century French philosophy. Finally, the odyssey of the body through the waves of post-structuralism and the debates between Deleuze and Derrida, on the one hand, and Levinas, on the other hand, represent another aspect frequently investigated by historians of philosophy. Considering this diversity, one may wonder: is there such thing as “French philosophy,” and what do we mean by French on this occasion? Are we referring to a specific way to phrase concepts and arguments in a specific language? Is there a French spirit that moves these philosophers beyond their irreducible and irreconcilable philosophical stances? Or, are we solely referring to a historical and cultural context? As Schrift noted, the academic and cultural context shared by these philosophers (the agrégation and the structure of the curriculum in secondary and higher education) contributed to shaping their ways of looking at problems and texts. For instance, the controversies around the reception and interpretation of Descartes and Hegel, debated at the Sorbonne in the first half of the twentieth century in Paris (Kojève, Alquié, Brunschvicg) have drawn some lines of interpretation that persisted in the subsequent period. Several volumes and anthologies (Matthews 1996; Schrift 2006) have been published over the past twenty years to list and present the works and authors

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that have played an important role in developing philosophy in France during the twentieth century. They provided an invaluable view of the richness and complexity of the various authors involved and how they engaged in a dialogue with German philosophy on the one hand and Anglo-American philosophy on the other hand. The intellectual trajectory of Ricoeur, for instance, shows this twofold influence and the way he appropriated the continental and analytic ways of thinking to rephrase them in the French context later. This volume does not aim to provide a historical and exhaustive account of the philosophies developed throughout the twentieth century, nor does it aim to develop a systematic view of works that seem irreducibly different yet in dialogue with one another. Rather, this volume presents the readers with less-known philosophers of the twentieth century that have been relegated so far in the margins of the usual canon, even if their teachings and writings have been recognized as highly influential. As Schrift noted: “the enormous popularity of the major figures in contemporary French philosophy—Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lacan, et al.—has not only led to many very influential figures from earlier in the century being largely if not totally forgotten but has also eclipsed the significant work of a range of other contemporary philosophers. These two eclipses have different causes and reflect different phenomena” (Schrift 2006, xii). The contributions gathered in this volume aim to broaden the scope of continental philosophy by analyzing the works and key concepts of authors who left their marks on its genesis and may help us renew contemporary debates in critical phenomenology, social ontology, and metaphysics. They aim to picture twentieth-century French philosophy as a constellation of authors in dialogue with one another, and to rediscover the “very influential figures” who have been tentatively left aside. The following reflections are centered on a key concept that may be used as an interpretative line to make sense of the French philosophical debate throughout the twentieth century, namely “desire.” In The Discourse on Method, the second maxim of Descartes’s provisional moral code states that “it is easier to change one’s desires rather than fortune.” The authors presented in this volume have opened new ways to characterize desire throughout the twentieth century. Whether they engaged in a dialogue with Hegelian dialectics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, or ethics, it is striking to note that their philosophies also appear as an extended conversation with Cartesian ontology, thereby confirming Bergson’s intuitions. Nonetheless, one may identify two tendencies in their reflections depending on how they tackle and describe the dynamics of desire: either from an anthropological perspective or from a metaphysical one, implying in both cases a redefinition of the subject and her sense of being.

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Indeed, depending on whether thinkers adopt an anthropological or a metaphysical point of view, desire occupies an ethical, critical, phenomenological, political, or ontological function. Whether this concept is explicitly thematized, in Nabert, Weil or Chrétien, for example, or the backdrop of a critical ontology of the flesh, life, or community (Kofman, Garelli, Dufrenne), it stands at the core of the philosopher’s reflection. It elucidates and motivates her endeavor yet constitutes the latter as an infinite task. Thus, to paraphrase the very accurate expression used by Len Lawlor (2003, 108), the concept of desire appears as a “point of diffraction” in twentieth-century French philosophy. As explored by this volume’s contributions, the concept of desire constitutes at once an anthropological answer to the existentialist and phenomenological question of subjectivity’s sense of being and the ever-open metaphysical question of the ontological roots of her relation to the world. Some authors have thus followed the anthropological paths of desire by exploring, after Descartes, the existential and ethical imports of this phenomenon. In contrast, others have reinterpreted the very structure of intentionality as desire in order precisely to move beyond the Cartesian subject and its objectifying framework. The first section of the volume (“Elucidating Desire: Embodiment, SelfAffection, and Reflexivity”) investigates the concept of desire by questioning the role played by reflexivity in embodiment and self-constitution. It examines specifically the works of three authors, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), Jean Nabert (1881–1960), and Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952–2019), to highlight their specific contribution to twentieth-century French philosophy as well as the importance of investigating their works to enrich contemporary debates on the nature of the self and embodiment. Paula Lorelle’s “The Lived Body: From Maine de Biran to French Phenomenology” (chapter 1) starts the investigation by underlining the importance of nineteenth-century French philosopher Maine de Biran on the development of French existentialism and phenomenology. The writings of Maine de Biran on psychology and his investigations of the lived body had a deep influence on Merleau-Ponty, Henry, and Ricoeur. Paula Lorelle argues that Maine de Biran’s conception of the lived body has been as important as Husserl’s concept of Leib on the philosophical analysis developed by these French authors. Moreover, Maine de Biran’s reflections on the body’s power and his concept of “continuous resistance” have been explicitly investigated by Merleau-Ponty and Henry in their respective philosophical elaboration of the lived body. However, according to Lorelle, “French phenomenologists did not only insist on the spiritual dimension of Biran’s concept of body, but they also radicalized it.” Consequently, she argues that their common philosophical gesture consists in “reducing the body to the ‘lived body’ or its sole subjective dimension; but it also consists in excluding the body’s sensitive,

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unconscious and involuntary life from its lived experience.” In other words, this first chapter shows that the Cartesian spirit of French phenomenology passes by the hidden influence of the readings of Maine de Biran and French spiritualism. Questioning desire and, more specifically, the desires of the lived body may then amount to elucidating the structural conditions of reflexivity in its relation to self-affection. According to Lorelle, the hidden influence of Maine de Biran on these authors explains what she terms the “phenomenological spiritualization” of the body. Scott Davidson’s “Jean Nabert: A Hidden Source of French Phenomenology?” (chapter 2) carries on the task of unveiling the trajectories of twentieth-century French philosophy by presenting and analyzing the works of Jean Nabert, as well as his philosophical influences on Ricoeur and Levinas. Davidson argues that Nabert’s conception of evil, the self, and his reflections on ethics have been decisive to the intellectual development of those thinkers. They also offer alternative philosophical paths to understand reflexivity and frame contemporary ethical questions. As Davidson argues: “Nabert’s work in the 1950s anticipates many themes that emerge in Levinas’s later work and, if we follow Ricoeur’s reading, the Nabertian account of testimony may be able to resolve some of the problems that result from the Levinasian account.” Consequently “Nabert deserves to be regarded as an important interlocutor in 20th century French philosophy.” Jean-Louis Chrétien’s (1952–2019) philosophy has put forward a renewed conception of interiority, which has inevitable repercussions on our conception of the subject and its relation to the world. Elodie Boublil’s “The Source of Desire: Individuation and Responsive Care in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s philosophy” (chapter 3) highlights the responsive structure of affectivity that characterizes the subject’s life, according to the French philosopher. It shows that a metaphysical conception of desire, acknowledging our finite fragility, runs through his works. The opening structure of desire shows their entanglement to the benefit of a relational conception of affectivity and desire that particularly expresses itself under the three modalities of speech, compassion, and hope. Subsequently, Chrétien sheds new light on theological and metaphysical questions (interiority, subjectivity, incarnation, transcendence, etc.) by exploring our fragility and finite condition. Interiority becomes the place where voices respond to each other, anchoring the subject in a larger historical community that precedes and exceeds her. Desire becomes a transcendental condition that shapes our relations and correlates individuation processes with our capacity for responding to ourselves and others. It entails responsibility insofar as being responsible “in the real world” means acknowledging the intertwining of our desires and responsibilities—at the ontic level of our existence—with a deeper desire that connects us with others both spatially—within a community—and temporally—throughout history.

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In such ethics, hope and responsive care become the horizons open and sustained by the infinite structure of desire, thereby implying a more positive and fruitful picture of vulnerability as a precondition for responsive care of the self, world, and others. The second part of the volume (“Desire, Drives and Imagination”) explores desire’s pre-reflective and affective dynamics that resist objectification and reflexivity. By analyzing in depth the contributions of less-known thinkers such as Simone Weil (1909–1943), Sarah Kofman (1934–1994), and Henri Maldiney (1912–2013), the contributors of this section bring to light their influence and original contribution to a French debate generally centered on the major works of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. This section draws a genealogy of French thought and post-structuralism related to psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, or phenomenological psychiatry. By investigating the relations between life and desire, these authors investigate conceptual frameworks of the self to stress the important relation of imagination, rhythm, and desire in its constitution. Exploring the self becomes an archaeological work unveiling the intersubjective dynamics and configuration of desiring bodies. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone’s “Seize Hold of the Hunger: Simone Weil’s Ethical Eros” (chapter 4) explores the “erotic dynamism” at stake in the “metaphysical and ethical articulations” of Simone Weil’s philosophy. She argues that “for Weil, the marker of a life lived in accordance with truth is the persistent seizure of longing, which serves as a reminder of the real features of human existence: limitations, creatureliness, and vulnerability.” In Weil’s philosophy, the subject is inhabited and carved by an infinite quest of the Good. While she acknowledges the influence of the Greeks in Weil’s reflections, Rozelle-Stone argues that her conception of desire shall not be limited to a kind of asceticism, an ethos of purity, or a striving for self-achievement that may alienate the subject and others. Drawing on the works of Luce Irigaray and Alexis Shotwell, Rozelle-Stone makes room for an ethical sense of desire that builds a sense of freedom that is not disconnected from the world but rather works out a free space allowing for vulnerability. In this sense, the roots of desire explored by Weil may ultimately meet the foundations of Socratic philosophy in wonder and forbearance. As Rozelle-Stone explains: “through wondering, we are moved to be ever more observant, to keep looking, listening, smelling, touching, and tasting—and receiving. In the succeeding moments of illumination that are sparked by our wonder, we discover unexpected reciprocity—that the world will reveal more of itself to us if only we wait, in recognition of the vulnerability and hunger for good that we fundamentally share with this surprising world.” Mélissa Thériault’s “Sarah Kofman: Irony and Self-Writing as Philosophical Practice” (chapter 5) presents and analyzes the personality and works of Sarah Kofman. She presents Sarah Kofman’s contribution to philosophy by

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sketching the main lines of a life marked by the Holocaust, as well as the main features of her philosophical and creative work. She outlines the main criticism that Kofman addressed to the Western philosophical tradition and her complex relationship to feminist issues. Despite her rejection of any “feminist label,” the French philosopher has denounced in her way the marginalization of women in philosophy and proposed a conception of self-writing at the service of a better understanding of the human condition. Kofman was a prolific writer in the last decades of the twentieth century, and her works showed the influences of Freud and Nietzsche, yet she radicalized and reframed their deconstruction of subjectivity. In a very original manner, Kofman draws on her analysis of the unconscious to provide a theory of narration based on the author’s style and expressivity. To Kofman, there is a strong relationship between one’s life and the philosophical system that emerges from one’s trajectory. As Theriault explains: “Objectivity and so-called rationality often hide subjective impetuses and beliefs: thus, philosophy may be seen as a process of a self-understanding that can only be achieved by autobiographical storytelling. While autobiography is generally seen as a narrative of a singular and unique subject that is described from the outside, Kofman sees the process rather as a journey towards oneself where the path is complex and marked by detours.” By reconnecting philosophy with life and personal and embodied experiences, Kofman demonstrates the paradoxical movement of self-constitution, where authenticity is about acknowledging the imaginary roles projected by our desires. In “Henri Maldiney’s Philosophy of Existence” (chapter 6), Till Grohmann introduces the phenomenological anthropology of Henri Maldiney through the key concepts around which he engages with the existentialist tradition yet builds up his framework at the intersection of phenomenology, aesthetics, and psychiatry. First, Till Grohmann shows how Maldiney recasts Heidegger’s concept of presence to anchor Dasein in its pre-theoretical, practical, and bodily relationship with the world. Maldiney insists on embodiment to underline the singularity of every human being who is also made of physiological, anthropological, and psychological dimensions. He shows that intersubjective relations shape singularity and take part in individuation processes. In this context, Grohman explains that the concept of encounter “emphasizes, as against Heidegger, that existence is fundamentally dependent on accidental relationships with others.” Our capacity for “openness,” our vulnerability to others and events, become the conditions of our self-transformation, as the concepts of “transpossibility” and “transpassibility” analyzed by Grohmann show. As the latter argues: “In the event, we are not the transcendental origin or ground of the new forms of self and world that we become. On the contrary, the ontic situation forces us to become someone else. The necessity of the situation pushes us to go beyond what we have been. It motivates us to

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a fundamental transformation and thus to a new mode of being that, before and without the event, was not a possibility for us.” Such a configuration or formation (gestalt) of the subject offers Maldiney the opportunity to reflect more broadly on art and aesthetic gestures. In “Rhythm and Subjectivity in Maldiney and Deleuze” (chapter 7), Stefan Kristensen explores further Maldiney’s conception of the event by contrasting it with Gilles Deleuze’s conception of time and differentiation. The two thinkers—who happened to be colleagues in Lyon—tackle the concept of rhythm and analyze its relation to subjectivity’s individuation. As Kristensen explains: “Both philosophers consider the subject’s receptivity to be the other side of a transcendental power granted to the rhythm. The phenomenological framework of Maldiney leads him to describe the potential transformation undergone by the subject triggered by the event of the rhythm. In contrast, Deleuze seeks to account for the autonomy of the notion, independently of its reception by a subject.” In Maldiney, perceiving rhythm amounts to self-transformation, as the philosopher’s analysis of art and aesthetic experience shows. Drawing on the work of Céezanne and Klee, Maldiney argues that rhythm is tied to perception. It configures the subject’s spatiotemporal perception while revealing the dynamics of desire that frame her relation to the world. The concept of rhythm in Deleuze’s philosophy aims to fill the gap between aesthetics and ontology, perception, and individuation. Deleuze draws on Maldiney’s analysis of rhythm in his essay on Bacon, The Logic of Sensation. As Kristensen explains: “Deleuze takes on Maldiney’s description of the beginning of the aesthetic experience. The movement of creation sets off after a collapse of the spatial coordinates of lived space, out from the experience of vertigo. Nevertheless, in Deleuze’s interpretation, the movement or rhythm setting off from this initial chaos is more than the sentient world. The rhythmic movement manifest in artworks is a vital, cosmic force, singularly captured by each painter.” Maldiney’s and Deleuze’s reflections on rhythm led them to consider desire as a “force against which the subject comes to herself and might become herself.” Consequently, their dialogue and analysis lead us to think anew about the structure of embodiment and, most importantly, to consider their critique of phenomenology as a method necessarily tied to the constituting powers of subjectivity. Contemporary attempts to investigate the roots of desire through cosmological and postmetaphysical reflections prove true the fecundity of this revaluation. The last part of the volume (“Desire, Cosmology and Metaphysics”) focuses on three philosophical endeavors that aim to rethink the foundations of phenomenology and French philosophy positively. In Signs, Merleau-Ponty explained: “in the last analysis, phenomenology is neither materialism nor a philosophy of mind. Its proper work is to unveil the pre-theoretical layer on which both of these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone

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beyond” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 165). The contributors of this section investigate these pre-theoretical and operative layers by looking at the works of Jacques Garelli (1931–2014), Marc Richir (1943–2015), and Mikel Dufrenne (1910–1995). In “The Reversibility of the Flesh. Jacques Garelli and Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (chapter 8), Renaud Barbaras goes back to the roots of his philosophical work by recalling the influence of Jacques Garelli’s thought on his interest in Merleau-Ponty. As Barbaras explains: “Merleau-Ponty’s thought is omnipresent in the work of Jacques Garelli, to the point that it can appear as a continuous dialogue with him. Jacques Garelli’s philosophy can be seen as a radicalization of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. This radicalization consists in taking seriously the heart of the ontology of the last MerleauPonty, namely the theory of the flesh as an expression of the reversibility which characterizes the relation of the body proper to the world.” Relying on Garelli’s conception of becoming as a process of individuation, Barbaras explains the philosophical project he is undertaking and ultimately argues that: “With the disappearance of the embodied subject through a process of generalization or multiplication, it is the phenomenological correlation that also disappears. So, the question now arises of the possibility of maintaining the correlation within the framework established by Jacques Garelli, the possibility of reconciling a generalized theory of the flesh with the a priori structure of correlation.” “Phenomenological Metaphysics in Marc Richir” (chapter 9) investigates how Marc Richir elaborates a new foundation of transcendental phenomenology. Alexander Schnell argues that Richir builds phenomenological metaphysics while considering the critique addressed to classical phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty. Going beyond their investigations, Richir’s works question indeed the transcendental matrix of phenomenalization, the role of imagination, and what the philosopher calls the “moment of the sublime.” As Schnell explains, “the fundamental gesture of the Richirian analysis of the phenomenon concept consists of the disconnection between phenomenality and objectivity.” In doing so, Richir digs out “the characteristic structures of meaning that are below objectifying intentionality,” and “he discovers a double dualism: that of ‘schematism’ and ‘affectivity’ (which ensures the ‘proto-ontological filling’ of phenomenological schematism), on the one hand; and that of this first dualism and ‘absolute transcendence,’ on the other.” Such an investigation unveils a post-Heideggerian approach to metaphysics that connects with Schelling or Hegel’s great philosophical enterprise. Richir’s work on phenomenalization emphasizes the metaphysical quest of contemporary French philosophy. Finally, in “Nature as Potentiality of the World” (chapter 10), Delia Popa further studies this questioning on phenomenalization by analyzing the works

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of Mikel Dufrenne and the way he reframes the concept of Nature. She explains how Mikel Dufrenne explores the materiality of an a priori grounded in Nature, allowing the subject of an experience to go over its fundamental alienation. Bringing forward the idea of an a priori understood as “potentiality of the world,” she argues indeed that Mikel Dufrenne is reflecting on possible equality between the subject and the object of intentional knowledge. However, in his perspective, being in the world does not mean conquering the world nor belonging to the world, but rather responding to a call of the world, entering a relationship whose balance is never guaranteed. This conclusive chapter shows how contemporary redefinitions of the self’s relation to the world would benefit from the reflections of these authors who reconnected metaphysical questions with the political and lived-through experiences that are constitutive of the lifeworld. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergson, Henri. (2017). La Philosophie Française. Rennes: La Part Commune. Guenther, Lisa. (2013). Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Janicaud, Dominique. 2009. La Phénoménologie dans tous ses États. Paris: Gallimard. Lawlor, Leonard. (2003). Thinking through French Philosophy. The Being of a Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Matthews, Eric. (1996). Twentieth-Century French Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. (1964). Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Schrift, Alan. D. (2006). Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon. (2019) “Introduction: Transformative Descriptions” in Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon (eds) 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

PART I

Elucidating Desire: Embodiment and Reflexivity

1

Chapter 1

The Lived Body From Maine de Biran to French Phenomenology Paula Lorelle

French phenomenologists—from the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century—have dedicated many developments to the concept of “lived body” (corps propre). These developments often refer to Husserl’s concept of Leib, defined in the Ideas II as this animated body that is the support of our localized sensations and the organ of our volitions. However, many of these phenomenological developments also refer—implicitly or explicitly, critically or positively—to Maine de Biran’s earlier concept of “corps propre.” Maine de Biran (1766–1824) is a nineteenth-century French philosopher, whose name is traditionally associated with the origin of French spiritualism. But, apart from this historical filiation, Biran also had a significant influence on French phenomenology. Long before Husserl, Biran has developed indeed a concept of “lived body” which, in opposition with Descartes’s extended substance, is experienced from within the cogito or the Self’s interior experience. A first evident manner to consider this filiation would be to question the “phenomenological” dimension of a philosophy that is often referred to as “spiritualist.” The phenomenological readings of Biran put generally the emphasis on the body in contrast with the spiritualist readings that insist on the notion of “interior fact.”1 Michel Henry, in the introduction of Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (1965), claims that it is misleading to consider Maine de Biran as the source of “a trend of spiritualist thought which would be characterized by its attention paid to the ‘interior life,’ by an ‘introspective tendency’” (Henry 1975, 9).2 According to Henry, only a phenomenological reading of Biran can unveil the groundbreaking nature of his “ontological 3

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analysis of the body” (ibid., 10). Ricoeur’s presentation of Biran, in Oneself as Another (1990), goes in the same direction. Maine de Biran “opened up this field of investigation of the lived body” and “truly gave an appropriate ontological dimension to his phenomenological discovery. . . . Maine de Biran is therefore the first philosopher to have introduced one’s own body into the region of nonrepresentative certainty” (Ricoeur 1992, 320–21). Yet, this historical filiation between Maine de Biran and French phenomenology can also be considered in the opposite sense: not by questioning the phenomenological dimension of Biran’s concept of body, but by questioning the spiritualist remnants of its French phenomenological appropriations. If the phenomenological readings of Biran mainly consist in emphasizing his analysis of the body, can’t we say likewise that they advocate for a spiritualist interpretation of the body? Phenomenologists generally agree to recognize Maine de Biran’s idealistic or Cartesian starting-point. Merleau-Ponty, in his 1947–1948 lectures on L’union de l’âme et du corps, argues against Brunschvicg’s reading of Biran—who asserted the nonphilosophical dimension of Biran’s reduction of consciousness to motion. Against this reading, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that Biran’s starting point is none other than Descartes’s cogito or Fichte and Schelling’s conceptions of the Self as a Will. Accordingly, concludes Merleau-Ponty, “Biran does not want to dismiss consciousness but to redefine it” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 58)—and he does so by conceiving motion as a certain type of consciousness. As Henry assesses as well, Biran’s starting point is not Condillac’s sensualism but Descartes’s cogito—a cogito that is extended to the body’s action and motion. Yet, French phenomenologists did not only insist on the spiritual dimension of Biran’s concept of body, they also radicalized it. Readings of Biran by Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, and Henry, despite their interpretative and philosophical discrepancies, partake in a general gesture that this chapter intends to uncover—after having exposed the ambivalence of Biran’s concept of body in the Essais sur les fondements de la psychologie. This gesture first consists in reducing the body to the “lived body” or to its sole subjective dimension— as one will see in the second part of this chapter; but it also consists—as it will be the object of our final section—in excluding the body’s sensitive, unconscious and involuntary life from its lived experience. The radical result of this twofold gesture, as one will see in conclusion, is a body that is not only lived interiorly, but that is, as such, endowed with an unlimited power, almost completely deprived of any resistance.

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THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE “LIVED BODY” IN THE ESSAI SUR LES FONDEMENTS DE LA PSYCHOLOGIE In the introduction of the second volume of the Essai sur les Fondements de la Psychologie, Maine de Biran claims that humans are made of two different systems of faculties (duplex in humanitate): the system of active and intelligent faculties and the system of passive and sensitive faculties (Maine de Biran 2001, 202).3 And, although these systems are “closely united” in humans, they first need to be exposed separately. Hence the general division of the Essai between a “pure psychology”—which, in the first volume, analyses the primitive fact of consciousness at the heart of our active and intelligent faculty—and a “mixed psychology”—which, in the second volume, analyzes our passive faculty and its various modes of relations with the active faculty. The body appears therefore at these two different levels of analysis: (1) within Biran’s pure psychology and the analysis of a primordial fact of consciousness, the body is thought in its subjective and conscious dimension—as a “lived body”; (2) within the analysis of a sensitive or animal life, made of outer impressions and reserved to a mixed psychology, the body is thought in its unconscious and involuntary dimensions. PURE PSYCHOLOGY: THE CONSCIOUS AND VOLUNTARY LIFE OF THE BODY The program of Berlin’s Academy, in 1805, questioned the possibility of “internal immediate apperceptions.” Following this question Maine de Biran, in the first volume of the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, looks for the principle of psychology and the origin of knowledge: the “primitive fact of the intimate sense” (fait primitif du sens intime) or the primitive fact of “consciousness” that is identically the “feeling” of one’s existence. Against Kant’s idealism, Biran wants to return to facts and refuses to think the principle of knowledge as a priori ideas of the soul, independent from any experience. Against Condillac’s sensualism, Biran refuses to identify this fact with an external sensation, passively received from the outside. The primitive fact of consciousness is not an external sense but an internal or intimate one. As Biran looks for an internal sense, his starting point is Descartes’s cogito. The cogito needs, for sure, to be deprived of its substantialism and cannot prove the outer existence of the soul. As such, it is reduced to a pure and interior fact of consciousness, whose evidence does not need to be demonstrated, but that is self-sufficient.4 Biran also refuses Descartes’s distinction between understanding and will. The self’s interior apperception is the apperception

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of its very activity. And this inner faculty can only perceive itself insofar as it exercises itself. Hence Biran’s conclusion according to which the primitive fact of consciousness is identically the feeling of one’s voluntary effort. But this primitive fact is a relation between two terms. It is a “primitive duality” (dualité primitive). The feeling of one’s acting force only exists insofar as it applies itself to something that resists and that Biran calls the “continuous resistance” (le continu resistant). “The Self completely identifies itself with this acting force. But the existence of the force is only a fact for the Self insofar as it exercises itself, and it exercises itself only insofar as it can direct itself to an inert or resistant term” (ibid., 9). More precisely, this force can only be perceived as that of the Self by means of a distinction between the “subject of this free effort” and the “term that immediately resists it” (ibid., 118).5 The two elements of the primitive fact are “distinct but inseparable.” They are inseparable insofar as they are distinct—the distinction of the Self from its resistant term makes the latter indispensable to the former. Therefore, the immediate term of this effort is not “exterior” to its feeling, strictly speaking. It is an interior or an intimate relation that “cannot extend itself beyond the limits of consciousness, nor can it admit any foreign element” (ibid., 7). Now, the immediate term of this effort is nothing but the body itself—as a “lived body” (corps propre). In the Prologue of the Essai, Biran already defines the voluntary effort as the act of moving one’s own body. In the chapter on “Effort,” he specifies the difference that exists between the lived body and exterior bodies. By contrast with exterior bodies, that are moved indirectly and whose resistance “can be invincible,” the lived body’s resistance is immediate, constantly surrenders to the voluntary effort, and is moved accordingly, independently from exterior causes. Therefore, the lived body is interior to the voluntary effort—the body’s muscular system is inherent to the intimate sense and partakes to its evidence. Whereas in Cartesian dualism, the evidence of the cogito is to be obtained by means of an exclusion of the body, Biran rehabilitates the evidential knowledge that one has of one’s own body, by integrating it to this active cogito. “Descartes’ doubt, that supposes the body’s annihilation while thought subsists, is absolutely opposed to the primitive fact” (ibid., 151). The section titled “Origin of the knowledge that we have of our own body” specifies the interior relation between the lived body and this primitive fact of consciousness: “The internal sense, that we call the sense of effort, extends to all the parts of the muscular and locomotor system that are subjected to the action of the will. Everything that is included in this sphere of activity in this sense, or that partakes to its exercise either directly or by association, belongs to the fact of consciousness and becomes the proper object, mediate or immediate, of the internal apperception” (ibid., 139–40). This interiority of the body involves a new concept of “extension.” Descartes, in his letter

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to Elisabeth, from June 28 1643, already consents to conceive a certain kind of extension, different from the material one: the extension of the soul in its union with the body (Descartes 1953, 1160). In a letter to Morus, from April 15 1649, Descartes even calls this other kind of extension an “extension of potentia” (étendue de puissance) in opposition with an “extension of substance” (étendue de substance) (ibid., 1334). It is this extension that Biran attributes to the lived body and considers as an “interior extension” (étendue intérieure) or a “purely interior mode of space” (Maine de Biran 2001, 141). Leibniz’s definition of extension, as “the continuity of what resists” (continuatio resistentis), does not apply anymore to an exterior extension, but to the object of an internal and immediate apperception. Here is, concludes Biran, “the entirely new perspective from which I consider the first knowledge of the lived body (la connaissance première du corps propre)” (ibid.). Or, as he writes in the Prologue, the lived body “finds itself interiorly, without having to get out of its immediate application and without admitting any element that would be foreign to our organ’s inertia” (ibid., 10). In this sense, the body is not perceived exteriorly through an image or a representation. It is lived interiorly, inseparably from the immediate feeling of the Self. Mixed Psychology: The Sensitive Life of the Body Yet, according to Biran, it is not all there is to the body. In the second volume of the Essai, Biran distinguishes this active and intelligent faculty from the sensitive, animal, and passive one. In the first volume, Biran announces these developments in terms of an analysis of our “physical” or “organic” nature, foreign to this analysis of the intimate sense which excludes “everything that comes under the jurisdiction of an exterior observation” (ibid., 119). It seems to imply that the analysis of sensitive life will be an analysis of the body’s physical and organic nature, from an exterior standpoint. Yet, if this sensitive life is thought of in organic terms by the second volume—it is in terms of the impressions that affect the organism or the sensitive system pleasantly or unpleasantly, locally or generally. And, in the first chapter on simple affections, these latter are not the object of an “exterior observation.” For sure, simple affections are defined independently from the Self’s participation, as being chronologically prior to it: as a state that “formed the origin of our whole existence”6 and that comes back every time that “thought slumbers and that will is void” (ibid., 209). Affections are “unconscious”: as “blind forces” they “melt for us into life’s general feeling, without us being able to notice them” (ibid., 213) and are “profoundly ignored by our sensibility.” And they are “involuntary”: they are “life’s invisible agent” that belongs to the “realm of instincts” and of which “we will always suffer the laws” (ibid., 214). Yet their description is not confined to an exterior observation. On the contrary,

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Biran describes the genuine “experience” that one has of these affections, despite their unconscious and involuntary dimensions. And it is precisely “our experience,” writes Biran, that can “verify” these descriptions (ibid., 213). According to these descriptions, one would not only have a “conscious” and “voluntary” experience of our own bodies, but also an “impersonal,” “unconscious,” and “involuntary” one.7 Yet, these latter descriptions are not understood as such by French phenomenologists. And the general critique of Biran’s residual objectivism will rather result in the exclusion of the lived body’s passive sensibility from its primordial experience. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITIQUES OF BIRAN’S OBJECTIVISM Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, and Henry all agree to criticize Maine de Biran’s residual form of objectivism—either in his description of the body’s voluntary effort (Ricoeur) or in his description of the body’s passive sensitivity (Merleau-Ponty, Henry). Ricoeur In the first volume of his Philosophy of the Will, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950), Ricoeur rejects Maine de Biran’s formulation of the “voluntary effort” in terms of a “hyperorganic force” that would act upon the muscular system of an organic body. According to him, this formulation rests upon a confusion between two heterogeneous realms that cannot communicate: the subjective realm of the cogito and the objective realm of physiology. The body of a subject and the body as anonymous empirical object do not coincide. We can superimpose two objects, but not a dimension of the Cogito and an object. The experienced body corresponds to a “behavior” of the will. It is thus an abstracted part, set apart from the subject as a whole. The object body, however, is not a part but itself a whole, a whole among other wholes in the uniform system of objects. It includes only lateral relations to other objects, not a subordination to a subjective realm. Hence the immanent relation of “I will” to the involuntary really has no counterpart in an objective “hierarchy.” (Ricoeur 1966, 12)

Because of this heterogeneity between the subject-body—subjected to the imperium of the will—and the object-body—that implies only lateral

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relations with other objects—there is no possible translation of the lived body’s voluntary dimension into physiological terms. Effort, for instance, finds no objective expression. Hence Ricoeur’s critique of Biran: This anomaly undoubtedly explains the difficulties encountered by authors who tried to carry over an equivalent of voluntary control to the objective terrain of biology. We can recall the famous example of Maine de Biran: this great philosopher believed that it was possible to treat the myself, as it is included and revealed in the apperception of effort, as a hyperorganic force applied to the organism. The hyperorganic force seemed to him to be to the organic center what the organic center is to organs (Maine de Biran, “Responses à Stapfer,” in Morceaux choisis, ed. Gouhier (Paris, 1942), 231–53). Such a proportional relation is totally devoid of homogeneity. Direct examination of the organic series at no point suggests such a hyperorganic force which remains a projection of Cogito’s experience on the level of objects. Even the idea of seeking a sign or a physiological symbol of willing contains an intrinsic absurdity. (ibid., 220–21)

Ricoeur’s critique focuses then on Biran’s translation of the body’s subjective experience into physiological terms.8 This, writes Ricoeur, expresses “the obstacles to conveying effort as a fact in objective empirical language, for instance as a ‘hyperorganic’ force” (ibid., 12). The effort cannot be explained in physiological terms: Will does not act on the organic center, as the organic center acts on the organs. Whereas the first relation is a hierarchical subjection of the body to the will, the second is a lateral relation of causality. The heterogeneity of these two realms forbids the confusion of the corporeal effort with an action of the will on the muscular system. And the lived body cannot be confused with a physiological body. In order to be explained as that which is moved by the will, the body must be subtracted from this objectivist conception, to be entirely integrated within the cogito and the will’s subjective dimension. In brief, the body that is subjected to the will is not—even partially—an object-body, but a subject-body entirely. While Ricoeur’s critique of Biran denounces the objectivist denaturation of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty and Henry’s critiques will focus on the objectivist description of the sensitive body. Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty, in the eighth and ninth of his 1947–1948 lectures, also criticizes Biran’s residual objectivistic position. Like Ricoeur’s, this critique first points to the “exterior” and “symbolic” exposition that Biran gave of his thought, by “translating his intuition into physiological terms” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 58). This has led to Brunschvicg’s misreading according to which Biran would have reduced consciousness to a mere “motor

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function”—while Biran, according to Merleau-Ponty, rather enlarged consciousness to motion. Biran’s mistake concerns his viewpoint on the body. Biran “remains constantly on the verge of a proper intuition of the lived body (sans cesse au bord de l’intuition authentique du corps propre)” (ibid., 67), but never reaches it completely. Because “corporeity is not considered from the inside, but from the outside (la corporéité n’intervient pas de l’intérieur, mais de l’extérieur)” (ibid.). On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty insists, in the Phenomenology of Perception, on saying that the body cannot be perceived exteriorly. There is no “removed knowledge (connaissance distante)” of the body: “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 87). Yet, Merleau-Ponty’s critique seems to go further than Biran’s physiological exposition of the primitive fact, as he also refers to the physiological explanation of the sensitive body in the second volume of the Essai (Parts II and III). Maine de Biran has sensed a corporeal spatiality, prior to the objective spatiality, a presence of the exterior from within self-consciousness. He has seen that self-consciousness is at the same time a corporeal consciousness (conscience du corps). . . . But all of this is continuously compromised. While he grounds the Self on a body close to the Self, he falls back into physiologism (Parts II and III of the Essai). He goes back to the position of an exterior observer of the Self and treats the Self as something that one can explain. He conditions the primitive fact exteriorly and goes back to the viewpoint of a stranger. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 65)9

According to this critique, Biran maintains two orders of experience and two kinds of descriptions—the internal one and the external one. If Biran rightly acknowledges the “antithetic” character of the “primitive fact” and recognizes thereby the existence of a “primitive duality,” he does not yet provide a philosophical elaboration of this notion and keeps juxtaposing the reflective and the empirical viewpoints: The Essai passes from one alternative to the other [reflection and empiricism], oscillating between the viewpoint of the primitive fact and the mere description of the “how” of consciousness. Yet, if the primitive duality is irreducible, the theory of the “primitive” and the “derivative” . . . cannot be conceived: everything is equally primitive. One cannot legitimately deduce the categories from the intimate experience in order to apply them to things: the latter cannot be explained by the former. Biran should not have adopted an exterior model, no more than an interior one. If he had sufficiently criticized these two orders of experience—external and internal—, Biran would have realized the absolute parallelism of the issues raised by both. (ibid., 55)

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In other words, Biran’s opposition between the interiority of the primitive fact and the exteriority of the body’s sensitive and animal life should have been superseded by this primitive fact—as it precedes the very opposition between interiority and exteriority and cannot be explained, neither by a reflective nor by an empiricist framework. More profoundly, Biran hesitates to confer an ontological autonomy to these two orders and to think a sensibility without a Self: When he studies the relation between psychology (in the modern sense: as a science of the subject in the world) and reflection (as he conceives it), Biran still hesitates. Should we separate the Self from sensibility? Is the Self the condition of the sense or is it posterior to the sense?—Even though he continuously quotes the cogito, sometimes Biran separates the Self from sensibility, claiming that one can speak of a “sensibility without a self”—: simple affections, obscure perceptions, pre-consciousness (cf. Mémoire sur la decomposition de la pensée). Sometimes, on the contrary, he reaffirms his principle according to which the primordial duality is irreducible and indivisible: the world and the self are two absolutely correlative perspectives. (ibid., 56–57)

The residual separation between these two orders—the reflective Self on the one hand and an impersonal sensitivity on the other—reveals Biran’s insufficient elaboration of his primitive duality. If Biran had remained attached to this duality, he would have taken the sensitive body back to this primitive fact—as being inseparable from self-consciousness. Henry In chapter 6 of Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (1965), Michel Henry criticizes Biran’s residual dualism. Henry’s project consists essentially in establishing the place of the body within his conception of an absolute subjectivity. And, even though Maine de Biran is, according to Henry, the first and only philosopher to have ever understood the necessity to conceive our body as a subjective body, he still maintains a dualism that contradicts this deepest intuition: The determination to grasp the profound intuition of Biranianism and to remain faithful thereto, therefore, implies the rejection of everything which, in Biranianism, does not really belong to it, but rather belongs to philosophical positions against which it was gradually constituted without always succeeding in eliminating them completely. (Henry 1975, 154)

This position that contradicts Biran’s intuition is that of a dualism that opposes the voluntary life to the organic one, the body’s active and voluntary

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effort to the body’s sensible form of passivity. Henry clearly refers here to Biran’s mixed psychology, developed in the second volume of the Essai (second and third sections). Since interiority is conceived by Biran as a pure voluntary activity— denuded from any passivity—the latter is rejected on the side of a sensible kind of receptivity. Biran’s complete identification of consciousness with activity forces him to reject passivity outside of consciousness, as the result of an exterior affection. Yet, according to Henry, Biran cannot account for the very ground of this opposition. One needs to conceive this interiority in terms of passivity, in order to ground this latter ontologically. Only an ontological and primordial concept of “passivity” can account for the very distinction between activity and passivity, as well as for the possibility of a passive kind of receptivity.10 Henry’s aim, therefore, is to reintroduce a form of passivity, from within the subjective body—as a modality of life’s manifestation. Henry then conceives a primordial form of passivity, immanent to the body’s voluntary effort—as this effort’s passive auto-affection. The body’s passive faculty is not autonomous and opposed to its active faculties—the former is rather grounded on the latter. The distinction between the body’s activity and passivity is not anymore a distinction between two opposed and autonomous bodies—a subjective body, lived interiorly on the one hand, and an organic body subjected to outer bodies on the other hand. It is now a distinction between two modes of the same “power”: “Activity and passivity are rather two different modalities of one and the same fundamental power which is nothing other than the original being of the subjective body” (ibid., 163). THE BODY’S RESISTANCE IN FRENCH PHENOMENOLOGY Despite their various formulations, these critiques unanimously condemn the Biranian persistence of an objectivism that either misreads the genuine nature of the lived body or that keeps opposing it to a sensitive body, neither conscious nor voluntary nor lived interiorly, and that as such can only be described exteriorly. Theses critiques then result in a first phenomenological reduction of the body to its “lived” or “subjective” dimension—of a body that can only be conceived as it is experienced interiorly. The body is not a lived experience of a physiological system, nor is it a composite of the psychical and the physiological, it is “wholly ‘psychic’”—to use Sartre’s famous expression (Sartre 1978, 305). Yet, these phenomenological critiques do not mention the descriptions that, in Biran, focus on the body’s passive, unconscious, and impersonal experience, and enlarge the lived experience of

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the body to these dimensions. As such, these critiques eventually complete the exclusion of the body’s involuntary and unconscious dimensions from its lived experience. As a matter of fact, French phenomenologists not only take the involuntary, the sensitive, and the passive dimensions of the body back to its primordial lived experience. They rather reduce these dimensions to a secondary experience of the body. This appears especially through the phenomenological becoming of the body’s “continuous resistance.” Ricoeur In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur rightly acknowledges Biran’s analysis of an inner passivity.11 Passivity is here considered as the complement of the acting self: the body’s immediate resistance to the will. Its different degrees are noticed by Ricoeur’s analysis of suffering as (1) the resistance that surrenders to the effort; (2) the inner impressions of well- or wrong-being; (3) and the resistance of exterior things. Yet, Ricoeur’s analysis of motion, in his previous Philosophy of the Will, seems to remove such a resistance from our primordial experience of the body. Ricoeur first identifies the will with the body’s action or motion. Like Biran, he insists on the “effective” dimension of the will. Will is only itself insofar as it realizes itself. It is not some abstract wish or command but a concrete “power.” And power is not an abstract project or a mere “logical possibility”—as Husserl says in the Ideas II—but an “effective possibility” that meets Husserl’s “practical possibility.” In the second section of Freedom and Nature, “Voluntary Motions and Human Capabilities,” Ricoeur claims that “the will is a power of decision only because it is a power of motion” (Ricoeur 1966, 201). Only action and motion can determine will as such: “Inasmuch as I have done nothing, I have not yet fully willed” (ibid., 202). Hence the significant part played by the body whose motion defines will itself: “A will which does not issue in a bodily movement and through it in a change in the world totters on the verge of becoming lost in sterile wishing and dreams” (ibid., 201). Now, if Ricoeur claims—with Biran—that one cannot separate corporeal motion from the voluntary experience, he goes further than Biran, claiming that one cannot even distinguish corporeal motion from the voluntary effort. The body is not the object or the term of the conscious act, that which is acted upon. It is this act itself.12 Actually, when I act I am not concerned with my body. I say rather that the action “traverses” my body. We shall presently try to recognize the meaning of the body in relation to the terminus of action when we shall have found it. I am concerned less with my body than with the product of the action: the hanged picture, the strike of the hammer on the head of the nail. (ibid., 210)

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If will is the body’s act or motion, conversely the lived body is fully identified with the subjective will. Ricoeur criticizes the duality between a “subject-will” and an “object-body” and reduces it to one and the same subjective and voluntary body. The body, claims Ricoeur, is not “the terminus of acting,” “but rather a usually unnoticed stage in my relation to things and to the world.” Or again, “the body is not the object of action but its organ” (ibid., 212). An “organ” that has to be taken here in a general sense, not in a physiological one: as an immediate and fully available “means,” not as a resistant one.13 The body as the “organ” of the will is not even conceived as an instrument that would be distinct from it. It is the will’s immediate prism or expression. Ricoeur does not remove any resistance whatsoever. He rather moves the resistance, from the primordial experience of motion to a secondary experience of effort. Motion does not primordially appear as an effort. In motion, the body is not immediately experienced as resistant: “The essence of moving is that the body ceases to will. Resistance can be understood only as a complication of the very docility of the body which, from another viewpoint, corresponds to willing (répond au vouloir)” (ibid., 214–15). The body immediately yields before even resisting. Resistance only comes after, as the “complication,” through effort, of the body’s immediate docility. In effort, the body is experienced as resistant and becomes conscious as the object or the term of the action. But it is not its primordial mode of experience in motion. The lived body is not first and foremost resistant: it is firstly available for a subject that, in normal motion, does not feel its resistance. It is first experienced as a power, before being experienced as an inner limit of our power. This description of the lived body’s primordial experience, as an “effortless” motion that does not firstly imply a felt resistance, seems to be radicalized by Merleau-Ponty’s and Henry’s descriptions of the lived body. Merleau-Ponty In his 1947–1948 lecture, Merleau-Ponty insists on the “antithetic” character of Biran’s primitive fact. The primordial fact is a primordial duality. Consciousness, says Merleau-Ponty, echoes in motion, through a relation of the Self with another term. The primitive fact of the intimate sense “is a reflection that turns to a nonreflective term (une réflexion se tournant vers l’irréfléchi)” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 62). Yet, in his own descriptions of the lived body, in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty seems rather to erase this duality that, in Biran, distinguishes a subject’s will from its corporeal resistance.

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Like Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty suppresses the gap that, in Biran, was still separating the subject from its body, in order to think a genuinely subjective body. The lived body is not a term of the subject’s consciousness and will, its first and immediate object, it is this subject itself. Consciousness is not consciousness of a body; it is a body. And it isn’t therefore an “I think” but an “I can” (ibid., 159).14 Taking over Husserl’s description of the two hands in Ideas II, Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of a “touching body”: when my left hand touches the right one, this latter cannot be reduced to a “bundle of bones and muscles” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 106), insofar as it also has the property to touch the hand that touches it—or, as Husserl said, to become flesh. Yet, this touching hand is always already described by Merleau-Ponty in terms of a “power” that, like in Biran, is an act. This hand is subjective insofar as it is the subject’s very power of exploration, his/her very act in the world. Merleau-Ponty often uses the term “puissance” in French, alternately translated in English as “potentiality” or “power.” The “phenomenal body” is “the potentiality of this or that part of the world” (ibid., 121), a “fundamental power” (ibid., 169)—a “power of grasping (puissance de préhension),” a “power of locomotion (puissance ambulatoire)” (ibid.), or a “system of motor or perceptual powers” (ibid., 177). What about the body that is touched or the organic “bundle of bones and muscles?” Is it explained by Merleau-Ponty in terms of resistance? As this specific and immediate resistance that, in Biran, yields to the will? First, Merleau-Ponty insists on the touching feature of the touched: this organic body is always already a “flesh” insofar as it always shifts from the touched to the touching body. In this case, the body’s resistance vanishes as it turns into a power. The organic body’s resistance reappears in Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of corporeal deficiencies. The body of “bones and muscles” is the one that suffers a deficiency in the case of disabilities or amputations. Yet, this deficiency is only described by Merleau-Ponty insofar as it is not experienced as such by the subject. Hence the description of the “phantom limb” that is still lived as present. Merleau-Ponty chooses to approach the organic deficiency through the instance of its compensation. Indeed, the phenomenal body compensates for the organic body’s deficiency. Not only insofar as this phenomenal body is a power of grasping, moving and exploring, but insofar as this very power is enabled by a general form or structure of the world that extends the lived body and balances its deficiency. The “present” body (corps actuel)—that is conscious15—is subtended by an unconscious “habitual” body (corps habituel). The nonreflective term that subtends any reflection—and that Biran has thought according to Merleau-Ponty—points here to this corporeal unconsciousness. Not the organic resistance that meets the will, but the corporeal generality that subtends the willing, powerful or active body. The nonreflective dimension of corporeity isn’t conceived

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therefore as the organic resistance that obstructs the action of the will, but rather as the “reserve of vague power (la reserve de puissance vague)” (ibid., 115) that enables the will and permits the exercise of its power, despite the body’s deficiency. One could say that, in the case of Binswanger’s patient, suddenly stricken with aphonia, the involuntary character of the corporeal deficiency—or the sudden loss of her voice—could be thought in terms of resistance. A resistance that, in this case, does not yield to the will. Yet, associated with the general unconsciousness that subtends the conscious body, this very possibility for the body’s nonreflective dimension to impede the will, already contains the reverse possibility to overcome this deficiency: But precisely because my body can shut itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out upon the world and places me in a situation there. The momentum of existence towards others, towards the future, towards the world can be restored as a river unfreezes. The girl will recover her voice, not by an intellectual effort or by an abstract decree of the will, but through a conversion in which the whole of her body makes a concentrated effort in the form of a genuine gesture, as we seek and recover a name forgotten not “in our mind,” but “in our head” or “on the tip of our tongue.” (ibid., 191)

In brief, the body’s nonreflective dimension is not conceived by Merleau-Ponty in terms of the will’s inner resistance, but rather as the general structure that subtends its power. Henry Despite his critique of Biran’s residual dualism, Michel Henry recognizes Biran as the first and only philosopher to have ever understood the necessity to conceive our body as a subjective body: “The first and actually the only philosopher who, in the long history of human reflection, saw the necessity for originally determining our body as a subjective body is Maine de Biran” (Henry 1975, 8). And Henry’s conception of the “subjective body” results from a certain reading of Biran (1) that posits the absolute identity between the lived body and the inner mode of knowledge; (2) and that moves the body’s continuous resistance, from our primordial experience of the lived body, to a secondary experience of the organic body. Henry’s main objective in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body is to establish the complete identity between subjectivity and our body. An identity which, according to Henry, has been established by Maine de Biran: “Henceforth, the teaching of Maine de Biran may be summarized in these words: A body [that] is subjective and [that] is the ego itself (un corps qui est

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subjectif et qui est l’ego même)” (ibid., 11). Biran’s first thesis consists, for sure, in determining the mode of knowledge of the body from its inseparable belonging to the ego’s mode of knowledge and manifestation. The lived body is given through the ego’s mode of knowledge as it inseparably belongs to the effort’s inner mode of manifestation. One could say, then, that the epistemological thesis—of the body’s certain mode of knowledge—is derived from the phenomenological thesis of its inseparability with the ego’s interior mode of appearing. Yet, in this phenomenological mode of appearing, if the two terms are not separable, they are nonetheless “distinct.” The phenomenological thesis of the body’s inseparability from the ego’s mode of appearing, is not the thesis of their identity. In Biran, the lived body is not separated from the voluntary effort that moves it and belongs to its self-consciousness, but it is nonetheless given as distinct. Because it is precisely given in its resistance. In other words, the phenomenological inseparability of these two terms is not, in Biran, a phenomenological identity. Hence the duality of this primordial fact. On the contrary, Henry moves from one thesis to the other and deduces, from the body’s inseparability to the ego’s voluntary consciousness, their phenomenological identity.16 Not only does the body benefit from the absolute certainty of the ego’s mode of knowledge, but it also partakes phenomenologically of the ego’s absolute transparency. And this phenomenological identity is an ontological one: since being amounts to appearing, the being of the ego is the being of the body. The body’s inseparability to the ego’s mode of manifestation signs, according to Henry, their phenomenological and ontological identity. Hence Henry’s concept of a primordial and subjective body and his refusal to conceive the body as an “instrumental” body that would be a mere intermediate between the ego and the world. This absolute identification of the body with this active cogito, that is according to Henry, an “I can,” results in the exclusion of the body’s resistance from its primordial experience.17 The lived body is the voluntary subject, not its resistant term. Henry’s analysis of motion, in the third chapter of Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, reveals the suppression of such an inner resistance from the body’s primordial experience. Motion becomes the sole consciousness of my corporeal power. Motion, so to speak, is the “effortless” consciousness of the body’s unlimited power and capacities. The body’s resistance is not immanent to its primordial experience as a subjective body, but only comes afterwards, as the transcendent mode of manifestation of the organic body. This resistance therefore is not inner to the lived body. It is that of the “transcendent being of our body.”18 Henry does not ignore Biran’s claim according to which the primitive fact of consciousness is a primitive duality. He simply moves it, from a relation between the subject’s will and the lived body, to a relation between the subjective body and the

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transcendent or the organic body.19 His analysis of the “continuous resistance,” in the fourth chapter of Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, is an analysis of the organic body that yields to the will of the subjective body and gains, through this continuous surrender, its organic diversity and unity. While, in Biran, the resistance is inner to the interior and immediate experience of the lived body, this resistance becomes, in Henry, the secondary mode of experience of a transcendent body. And, when it becomes absolute, this resistance is the world’s very mode of phenomenality. Yet, to an all-powerful body, the world’s resistance cannot appear as invincible and becomes the sole horizon of its unlimited potentialities. The body “extends its power to everything that exists” (ibid., 97) and the world “is that which I can always attain; it is accessible to me in principle” (ibid., 96). Therefore, the resistance is not only moved by Henry from the lived body to the organic body and to the world itself. It becomes the sole horizon of the lived body’s endless conquest. These phenomenological conceptions of the lived body all posit, although differently, the complete identity between the will and the body. “My body and my will are one”—to use Schopenhauer’s famous claim (Schopenhauer 1969, 102). As a result of this identification, the body does not resist anymore—not even docilely and at least not primordially. Indeed, the body’s continuous resistance is systematically removed from our primordial experience of the lived body and postponed to a secondary experience of the body’s effort, deficiencies, or organicity.20 CONCLUSION Despite their differences, these phenomenological readings of Biran have enabled us to unveil the two correlated gestures from which results the French phenomenological concept of “lived body.” (1) The first gesture is that of a phenomenological reduction of the body to its “lived” and “subjective” dimensions, that forbids the body’s exterior descriptions. This reduction entails a general critique of Biran’s residual objectivism—be it linguistic, methodological, or philosophical. However, these critiques do not mention Biran’s attempt to describe the lived experience of impersonal, blind and involuntary affections, as well as his attempt to understand the intricate connection that exists between the voluntary self and its involuntary affections.21 (2) Hence a second gesture according to which the body’s sensitive unconscious and involuntary life is excluded, along with its exterior descriptions. Indeed, despite their respective attempts to reintegrate the involuntary (Ricoeur), sensibility (Merleau-Ponty), and passivity (Henry) to the lived body, these phenomenological descriptions remove the lived body’s inner resistance from its primordial experience. Hence the phenomenological shift

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of the concept of “continuous resistance” that is systematically moved from our primordial—effortless, normal, or subjective—body, to our secondary— striving, pathological or organic—body. If phenomenologists disagree on the status of the body’s “consciousness”—intentional in Ricoeur, made of opacity in Merleau-Ponty, non-intentional and transparent in Henry—; they all seem to agree on the status of the body’s voluntary dimension. The body is primordially experienced as voluntary, powerful and acting. And, as such, it is not impeded by its own organic weight, but is rather empowered—either by its structural background or by its absolute auto-affection. This might explain the shift that occurs in these phenomenological readings of Biran: from will to power, from the “I want” to the “I can.” This primordial body becomes therefore the infinite “I can” or capacity to explore, conquest and overcome any kind of exterior resistance. The prevalence of the body’s voluntary and powerful dimensions—that results in part from the phenomenological readings of Maine de Biran—is what we called, in introduction, its phenomenological spiritualization. As Merleau-Ponty writes, in a sentence that recaps this general gesture of French phenomenology: “the consciousness of the body invades the body, the soul spreads over all its parts” (Merleau-Ponty 2001, 87). But could another phenomenological reading of Biran not emphasize his “interior” descriptions of sensitive life? Would this not unveil this forgotten dimension of the lived body? Of a body that is not only lived as voluntary, powerful and efficient, but as implying, for a large part, unconscious and involuntary affections? The lived experience of its unknown and unintended dimensions? Such a phenomenological reading of Maine de Biran then, still remains to be made. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergson, Henri. 2014. “French Philosophy.” Translated by Claude Vischnu Spaak. Philinq II, 1–2014. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.4454​/philinq​.v2i1​.85. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Descartes, René. 1953. Œuvres et Lettres. Paris: Gallimard. Devarieux, Anne. 2018. L’intériorité réciproque. L’hérésie biranienne de Michel Henry. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon. Henry, Michel. 1975. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body. Translated by Girard Etzkorn. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Maine de Biran. 1942. Oeuvres choisies. Paris: Éditions Aubier Montaigne. ———. 2001. Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. Paris: Vrin. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson. Paris: Vrin.

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———. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Montebello, Pierre. 2000. “Le corps de la pensée.” Études Philosophiques 2000 (2): 203–20. Ravaisson, Felix. 1868. La philosophie en France au XIXè siècle. Paris: Imprimerie Impériale. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1978. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New-York: Washington Square Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. Volume 1. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications. Umbelino, Luis Antonío. 2016. “À l’école du biranisme. Paul Ricoeur et Michel Henry, lecteurs de Maine de Biran.” In Paul Ricoeur et Michel Henry. Entre héritages et destinées phénoménologiques, edited by J-S. Hardy, J. Leclercq et C. Sautereau, 185–94. Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.

NOTES 1. See for instance Ravaisson’s presentation of Maine de Biran in La philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, which emphasizes the significance of Biran’s conception of knowledge as an “activity, an effort, a willing” (Ravaisson 1868, 14–17). See also Bergson’s presentation of Maine de Biran in La philosophie française: “Maine de Biran, in opposition to Kant’s . . . judged that the human mind was capable, on one issue at least, of reaching the Absolute, and of turning it into an object of speculation. He showed that the knowledge we have of ourselves, particularly through the feeling of effort, is a distinguished kind of knowledge that goes beyond the pure ‘phenomenon’ and reaches reality ‘in itself,’ . . . In short, he conceived the idea of a metaphysics that would rise always higher, towards the mind in general, while consciousness went down, at the same time, into the depths of inner life” (Bergson, 2014, 207). Henri Gouhier comments this text in his introduction on Maine de Biran and summarizes as follow Bergson’s view of Biran’s intentions: (1) the existence of an interior fact (2) that is the subject’s activity (3) that has an ontological priority (hence its absoluteness) (4) and from which religious and mystical facts can be deduced. The corporeal dimension of this fact is not mentioned by this summary (Maine de Biran 1942, 23–24). 2. On Henry’s refusal of a neo-Kantian reading of Biran as the predecessor of a reflexive philosophy, see A. Devarieux, L’intériorité réciproque (Devarieux 2018, 20–21, 27–31). 3. If our general presentation of Biran’s concept of “body” focuses on this work in particular, it is firstly because French phenomenologists often refer to it when it

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comes to Biran’s concept of the “body,” but also because the reduction of its ambivalence by its phenomenological readings is paradigmatic of their one-sided “spiritual” direction. 4. The relation between thought and existence is “immediately given in the fact of the intimate sense; and the form of the demonstration that would establish it is not only useless but also illusory (illusoire), since, as a deduction, it represents a truly primitive fact, prior to anything, from which anything can be deduced and that cannot be concluded from anything else” (Maine de Biran, 2001, 77). 5. “The productive force only becomes the Self because of the distinction that establishes itself between the subject of this free effort and the term that immediately resists.” 6. Let us notice that if the Self’s existence, given in the fact of consciousness is prior in the order of knowledge, the outer affection is prior in a chronological order. 7. Besides this first description of the affection, considered separately from the Self’s consciousness and will, Biran then undertakes to think the various modes of their essential composition. These different modes and degrees of composition are: (1) sensations in which affections are united and related to the Self without any active participation; (2) perception through which the Self actively partakes to an affection by means of a voluntary effort; (3) apperception in which the impression is consecutive to an effort of the Self and related to its action. In this latter case, the “fact of the intimate sense” and the “objective phenomenon” are said to be united in the lived body. 8. Here Ricoeur refers to the Réponse à Stapfer in which one can find the thesis of a connection between the voluntary effort and the muscular organ, in terms of a relation between two elements of one and the same fact (Maine de Biran 1942, 236). But the notion of a “hyperorganic force” can also be found in the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie in a development where Biran posits the necessity of a physiological explanation of the voluntary effort (Maine de Biran 2001, 119–25). 9. The second and third parts of the Essai point to the second volume in which Biran focuses on the sensitive life and its different degrees of connection with the Self’s personal life. 10. According to Henry, this theory of passivity would have been sketched by Biran’s critique of Condillac according to which the statute could not receive any impression if it had not already received itself interiorly: “Henceforth, the passive life bears within it a pure and veritably transcendental element which makes it a modality of the life of an absolute subjectivity, a passive operation which takes place in a sphere of radical immanence and which allows us to say that sensing is still thinking” (ibid., 162). Henry here redefines the body’s activity beyond will and effort, in Husserlian terms of “passive synthesis.” Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, notes that this reading of Biran is probably relevant. 11. It is in this text that Ricoeur refers to Henry’s conception of passivity as well as to his reading of Biran (Ricoeur 1992, 320–22). 12. A. Devarieux (against F. Azouvi’s reading) actually nuances the Biranian status of the body as an object—even an immediate one; as well as the thesis of a Biranian distinction between the self and the resistant body. She claims that its

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“immediate” dimension abolishes its “objective” one, and quotes several texts to prove it (Devarieux 2018, 197–98). But, if it is one thing to deny the objective dimension of the body, it is another one to deny its resisting dimension—since one can think of a nonobjective and a nonrepresentative resistance. Our point here is to stress that the phenomenological readings of Biran tend to erase, not only the objectivity of the body, but also its inner resistance. 13. In his study on Ricoeur and Henry’s readings of Maine de Biran, L. A. Umbelino exposes their emphasis of the body’s primordial docility or “relative resistance” (Umbelino 2016, 191). 14. In Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida mentions the compatibility of Maine de Biran’s analysis of effort with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body as an “I can” (Derrida 2000, 169). 15. “Corps actuel” is here translated in English as the “body at this moment” which only accounts for the temporal dimension of this body’s presence—in opposition to the past dimension of the “habitual” one. But it does not account for the “conscious” dimension of the body’s presence—in contrast with the unconscious dimension of the “habitual” one. 16. It is true that A. Devarieux nuances this shift by claiming the “reflexive” dimension of the duality in Biran—while the primordial experience would already be, like in Henry, that of an identity (Devarieux 2018, 112–15). 17. On this point see again Devarieux (2018, 107–8, 135–36). 18. “The differentiation at stake here rests in Biranianism on the fact that the movement encounters in one case an absolute resistance—and this is the phenomenological foundation for the being of a foreign body—whereas the resistance yields to effort when it is a question of the transcendent being of our own body” (ibid., 122). 19. A. Devarieux, in her thorough and precious study on Henry’s reading of Biran, takes a larger view on the Biranian influence of Henry and explains that the primitive duality, to be removed from the relation between the force and the body’s inner resistance, is reestablished by Henry’s latter developments as a relation between the egological and the Absolute Life. If Michel Henry “first abolishes the relation that constitutes the primitive interior duality in Biran, in the name of a non-relation or a ‘prior relation,’ it is in order to reestablish it and claim a relation of the Self to itself, of the Self to others, of the Self to a Life which has a religious nature” (Devarieux 2018, 24–25). 20. Let’s note that Sartre’s intentional conception of consciousness and the body, in Being and Nothingness (1945), also refuses Biran’s concept of an “effort sensation” as a psychological myth: when one lifts a glass, one feels its weight, not our own effort (Sartre 1978, 324). 21. Derrida, in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, does refer to Maine de Biran’s theory of a complementarity between activity and passivity, in L’influence de l’habitude. He also thinks a genuine “experience” of passivity with the instance of the hand. But his reading still emphasizes the superiority of touch, as not being a mere passive organ of sensation (Derrida 2000, 157–75). Such a reading would need to focus for instance on Biran’s Journal. On the significance of Biran’s Journal, see Montebello 2000.

Chapter 2

Jean Nabert A Hidden Source of French Philosophy? Scott Davidson

Jean Nabert (1881–1960) would probably not appear on many short lists of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century. Nabert never held a post as a university professor, which explains in part why his work was not taken up more vigorously by the French academic establishment at the time.1 And due to the density of his prose as well as the amount of training and effort required to work through it, Nabert’s writings could not be expected to appeal to a popular audience either. Were these books, one might wonder, simply written without any to read them? Even though Nabert’s writings were never destined to attract a wide academic or public readership, they did nourish the work of a select few, among them Sartre, Ricoeur, Levinas, and Henry.2 Indeed, most anglophones have probably only heard Nabert’s name through occasional references made by these more widely read French philosophers. As a result of Nabert’s “influence” on these figures, it would be plausible to argue that he deserves a place in the footnotes of histories of twentieth-century French philosophy. But instead of simply confining oneself to that modest claim, this chapter will venture a more daring and provocative claim that overturns this hierarchy: perhaps it is sometimes the case that these more well-known figures are only “popularizers” of ideas—such as the inadequation of the self to itself, the metaphysical desire for the absolute, the excess of evil, and so on—which are already introduced and are rigorously developed in Nabert’s work. If this claim can be demonstrated, then it implies that Nabert deserves to be moved out of his place in the footnotes and treated as a vanguard who is a legitimate dialogue partner with other leading figures of twentieth-century French philosophy. This chapter will lay the groundwork for that case. 23

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Jean Nabert received his agrégation in 1910 and worked as a high school teacher at Saint-Lô and Brest prior to the Great War. Wounded in the early days of the war and after a long recovery in Switzerland, his teaching career resumed in 1919 in Metz. There he completed his doctoral work which included The Inner Experience of Freedom (1924) as his major thesis and L’expérience interne chez Kant as his minor thesis. After the completion of his doctorate, he was assigned in 1926 to Paris where he taught philosophy at several different high schools before serving as the khâgne at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV from 1931 to 1941.3 In 1943, he published his most wellknown work, Elements for an Ethic. After the war, he stepped down from his teaching post to become an “inspector general of philosophy” and later the curator (conservateur) of the Bibliothèque Victor-Cousin at the Sorbonne. While he had hoped that this new position would allow him to devote more time to his writing, it resulted only in the publication of one book—his Essai sur le Mal (1955)—a profound study that renews Kant’s question concerning the nature of radical evil. Following Nabert’s death in 1960, a special issue of Etudes Philosophiques was devoted to his work in 1962, and a set of his working notes were assembled and published under the title, Le Désir de Dieu (1966).4 New French editions of all of these books were published in the 1990s. In 2001, the Fonds Jean Nabert was established at the Institut Catholique de Paris in his honor; it houses Nabert’s lecture notes and other unpublished materials of interest. While it has already been noted that Ricoeur, Levinas, and Henry all express their high esteem for Nabert’s work,5 it is undoubtedly Ricoeur who is most influenced by Nabert and who writes about Nabert most extensively. In fact, Ricoeur was a leader in bringing increased attention to Nabert’s work in France and is almost entirely responsible for Nabert’s reputation in the English-speaking world.6 In fact, Ricoeur produced six commentaries that engage different facets of Nabert’s work.7 Read together, these essays provide a good general introduction to Nabert’s work that outlines the trajectory of the key ideas in his books. The first, published in 1957 in the French journal Esprit, is an extended book review of Nabert’s Essay on Evil (1955), which Ricoeur lauds as “the book that he wished that he himself had written.” The second is the Preface to the 1962 reissue of Nabert’s Elements for an Ethic, which Ricoeur praises “as the canonical work of the reflective method” (Ricoeur 1986, xxv). The third is a substantive interpretation of Nabert’s reflexive philosophy, “Act and Sign according to Jean Nabert” (1962) which is reprinted in Ricoeur’s book The Conflict of Interpretations. The fourth essay serves as the Preface to the posthumous work The Desire of God (1966). The fifth is a Preface, “L’arbre de la philosophie réflexive” to a new edition of Nabert’s The Inner Experience of Freedom (1994). Lastly, there is a retrospective piece, “Jean Nabert, une relecture,” which was presented at

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the inaugural ceremony of the Fonds Nabert at the Institut Catholique de Paris on March 26, 2001. In the next section, I will retrace the path of Ricoeur’s retrospective essay in order to locate some key aspects of Nabert’s influence on Ricoeur over the years. In addition to the texts that Ricoeur devotes exclusively to Nabert there are several other insightful articles in which he puts Nabert in dialogue with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Ricoeur’s essay on Nabert “The Hermeneutics of Testimony” was presented at a 1972 conference in Rome on the topic of testimony, which Levinas also attended and where he presented a paper titled “Truth as Manifestation and Truth as Testimony.”8 Levinas’s essay would later be incorporated into the argument of chapter 5 of Otherwise than Being (1974). Incidentally, although Levinas’s essay doesn’t mention Nabert’s work, Levinas does make a brief but critical reference to Nabert’s account of the inadequation of the self in chapter 4 of that book. This connection alone would surely not suffice to show that Nabert exerts an influence on Levinas’s thought. But a later essay by Ricoeur—“Levinas, a Thinker of Testimony” (1989)—provides a suggestive account of how the two thinkers can be linked productively through the notion of testimony. The latter half of this chapter will probe this purported linkage more deeply, suggesting that Nabert’s work in the 1950s anticipates many themes that emerge in Levinas’s later work and, if we follow Ricoeur’s reading, that the Nabertian account of testimony may be able to resolve some of the problems that result from the Levinasian account. Together, these two engagements—the first with Ricoeur, the second with Levinas—help to solidify my assertion that Nabert deserves to be regarded as an important interlocutor in twentieth-century French philosophy. RICOEUR’S REREADING OF NABERT Jean Nabert’s work belongs to the tradition of French reflexive philosophy, and his understanding of this tradition is conveyed clearly in an excellent 1957 encyclopedia entry about it.9 The tradition of French reflexive philosophy, of course, has roots that go all the back to Descartes, extend through many lesser-known figures in ninteenth-century French philosophy and continue to Bergson. Nabert insightfully detects two different lineages within this tradition: a Kantian path and a Biranian path. All reflexive philosophers would agree with Kant that the self—the “I think”— accompanies every representation and action. But for the Kantian path, this leads to a reflection on the conditions of the possibility of true knowledge and of the universality of reason; for the Biranian path, it is the intimacy of conscious life that prevails, however. Challenging the impersonal nature of the Kantian ego, Maine de Biran instead seeks to “promote a self-consciousness

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that does not lack the dimension of intimacy that is missing from the transcendental consciousness of criticism” (Nabert 1957, 404). Under the influence of both Kant and Biran, Nabert’s version of reflexive philosophy could be described as an attempt to reunify these two paths through a reflexive philosophy that is at once formal and concrete, universal and particular. Ricoeur aligns himself squarely with this tradition in remarking that his own philosophy “stands in the line of a reflexive philosophy; it remains within the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology; it strives to be a hermeneutical variation of this phenomenology” (Ricoeur 1991, 12; his emphasis).10 Unfortunately, Ricoeur’s own adherence to this tradition has scarcely been touched in the now voluminous secondary literature on his work.11 What exactly does it mean for him to say that his thought “stands in the line of reflexive philosophy?” In a historical sense, it is worth noting that Ricoeur’s 1934 master’s thesis is about the problem of God in two thinkers who belong to the reflexive tradition: Jules Lagneau and Jules Lachelier. But we need not go into the details of Ricoeur’s philosophical training or his earliest writings here, because the answer to this question is already evident. Ricoeur’s conception of reflexive philosophy is tied to Jean Nabert, just as much as his mention of phenomenology refers to Husserl and of hermeneutics to Heidegger and Gadamer. As a result, Nabert’s influence defines Ricoeur’s philosophical project to a degree that very few Ricoeur scholars have appreciated up to now. To appreciate the depth of Nabert’s influence on Ricoeur, it is helpful to follow the bread crumbs that Ricoeur lays out in his 2001 lecture presented at the Institut Catholique de Paris—“Jean Nabert, Une Relecture.”12 This retrospective essay identifies seven knots (noeuds) that tie him to Nabert, which are as follows: 1) the “reflexive” philosophy which takes a detour through the outside; 2) the theme of the plurality of disciplinary knowledge and the unity in the desire to be; 3) the mediation of “feeling” in joining together truth and experience; 4) the “work” in which there is a transaction between the creative intention and the situation in which it is realized; 5) the place assigned to the other in moral and political philosophy; 6) a discourse of excess from below—the unjustifiability of evil; 7) a discourse of excess from above—the absoluteness of God. The first of these knots is the one that joins the act and the sign, a topic which serves as a constant refrain throughout Ricoeur’s various discussions of Nabert. Reflexive philosophy often describes itself as an attempt to recover the subjective act that lurks behind the apparent objectivity of the world; as Jules Lagneau puts it, reflexive philosophy seeks “to rediscover thought even in the very least object” (see Nabert 1994, x). Human actions are expressed outwardly in signs and events, but these outward appearances can make subjective acts manifest but also conceal them. Nabert first becomes aware of

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this ambiguity of human action in his 1924 thesis on freedom, in which he responds to the difficulties posed by Kant’s third antinomy. Nabert’s question is: how can the apparent determinism of motives by prior causes be reconciled with the idea of a motive as a free initiative to act? The duality of the act and the sign is Nabert’s way of accounting for the fact that motives can be described at once as empirically determined events as well as a transcendental condition of freedom. Through empirical observation, our actions can always be explained as causally determined by prior events. Due to this possibility of detaching an action from its agent, we can easily lose sight of our personal connection with actions that occur in the empirical world. The role of reflection, accordingly, is to recover our personal role in our actions. Nabert describes this reflexive recovery in the following manner: In all of the domains where the spirit reveals itself as creative, reflection is called on to retrieve the acts which works conceal, because, living their own life, these works are almost detached from the operations that have produced them. It is a question of bringing to light the intimate relationship between an act and the significations in which it is objectified. (Nabert 1994, 406–7)

Reflection thereby contributes to the overcoming of self-forgetting in relation to the acts and meanings that are objectified in the world. This emphasis on recovering the personal relation to our actions remains a central theme throughout Ricoeur’s writings on the philosophy of action, from his early Freedom and Nature (1950) up to Oneself as Another (1990), where he insists that actions need to be tied back to agents. A second knot follows from the above point: in reflexive philosophy there are multiple foyers of reflection. The reflexive recovery of our power to act for Nabert ultimately leads back to an “originary affirmation” of the self. In contrast with a Sartrean understanding of the self as a negation or as nothingness, Nabert’s originary affirmation establishes the self as a positivity, and in particular, as a conatus or a desire and effort to be. Instead of seeking to secure the originary affirmation as a pure self-relation in the manner of a Cartesian cogito, the affirmation of the desire to be gets dispersed into multiple distinct foyers of reflection in which this desire is expressed, such as the desire to be knowledgeable, to be good, to be just, and so forth. Obviously, this notion that there are multiple foyers of reflection—allowing for a distinction between an objective way of knowing, an ethical way of knowing, etc.—is borrowed from Kant’s division of the three different critiques. But at the same time, it also articulates a subtle reply to Kant, for whom the transcendental procedure of the first critique holds priority and casts its shadow over the others. Nabert insists, by contrast, that each of the different foyers in which the desire to be manifests itself has its own truth, without privileging any one foyer over the

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other ones. Nabert’s idea of the different foyers of reflection carries over into Ricoeur’s account of the capable self who is defined not in terms of thought but in terms of a set of capabilities, each of which contributes to the desire for self-realization. The third knot tying Nabert to Ricoeur involves the necessity of reflection to begin with feeling, or pathos. Nabert challenges the Kantian understanding of feeling as something that is pathological and needs to be overcome by reason. Instead, feeling has a positive and necessary role in the domain of ethics for Nabert. The givens of reflection—which Nabert identifies with the negative feelings of fault, failure, and solitude—take the place of reason as the starting point for a reflection on the ethical. And likewise, the ethical project fueled by the original affirmation of a desire to be and to deepen one’s being becomes a source for positive feelings like satisfaction, enjoyment, reverence, compassion and love. This connects to the Ricoeurian idea that thought alone is not the starting point of philosophy, instead reflection begins from pre-philosophical experiences or lived experiences that motivate the search for understanding. Consequently, feelings or moods are not an obstacle to thought but rather nourish thinking. Symmetrical to the role of feeling, there is a corresponding expression of values through the accomplishment of works and deeds. Works go hand in hand with the history of desire as a practical validation of our desire and effort to be. They put this desire on display, as Nabert says, and give the self the means “to write itself in the text that it traces out with its own actions” (Nabert 1943, 77). For Nabert, this transition between intentions and works is fundamental to the realm of values. It means that values are neither simply subjective nor objective; instead they belong to the transaction that takes place between a creative intention and the network of conditions in which they are realized. It is within this middle ground that Nabert first introduces the notion of testimony. Action becomes the instrument or sign by which a “creative intention” attests to itself, and particularly to its values, in the world. This becomes a central idea in Ricoeur’s ethical and political writings, where there is a continual back-and-forth between the ethical aim to live the good life and the various rules and institutions in which that desire is embodied. Let me pause at this point to show how these first four knots can be bundled together as a philosophy of action. Ricoeur’s interpretation of Nabert places an emphasis on the back-and-forth movement that takes place between motives and the actions that express them in the world. There is a dual operation of disclosure and concealment in actions. On the one hand, actions can conceal human motives and intentions. This occurs when actions are observed as events that are detached from their agents, for instance, when an action is described as a movement of a body from one place to another. The role of reflection is to go back and discover the role of the agent of the

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action, for instance, in laying claim to the behavior in saying “It is I who moved here from there.” Through this reflexive recovery, the action no longer conceals an underlying intention but rather reveals this intention in words and deeds. Accordingly, I might explain the purpose of my behavior in terms of some value or goal that it seeks to accomplish, for example, “I moved here in order to pursue an education” or some other possible reason. As such, the action expresses a set of values that I affirm—say, educational goals—in undertaking this action as well as other actions nested under this aim—moving, studying, etc. Ricoeur does not assert that there is any sharp divide between Nabert and himself, but here is one possible way in which they may differ. Whereas Nabert’s account of this dynamic (at least in the way it is presented) is structured as a dialectical progression that moves from a stumbling block toward self-realization, for Ricoeur this movement does not arrive at such a clearly defined and resolved ending. For it is always possible to fall short of my goals by being diverted from them or failing to realize them in some way. And it is, of course, also possible to conceal one’s motives by misleading others, or perhaps even myself, about one’s reasons for action. I could turn out to be acting in bad faith and have ulterior motives, perhaps the pursuit of education is really only a pretext for escaping a given situation. Or perhaps it is only a story that I tell my neighbors when in fact I have moved there for some other purpose. In recognizing all of these different possibilities of disappointment and failure to a much greater extent than Nabert, the hermeneutic back-andforth that is opened up by Nabert becomes an endless hermeneutic in the hands of Ricoeur. While the first four knots linking Nabert to Ricoeur can be bundled together into a philosophy of action, the three remaining knots are more closely aligned with the problem of the other in ethical and theological discourse. The fifth knot concerns the place assigned to the other on the level of the givens of reflection as well. This pertains to the limit situation of solitude, which reveals the inadequation between one’s actions and one’s projects. Consider, for example, a plan to attend an event with my friends. The experience of solitude arises through the interruption of one’s life with others, for instance, when my friends become ill and are unable to attend the event. As a result of this disruption, I find myself alone and now it is up to me alone to choose whether or not to attend the event. Even if this experience of solitude might at first seem to be negative, Nabert finds it to have a redemptive quality: it establishes my uniqueness (unicité). It is only after one has become established as an individual self that one can participate in the establishment and maintenance of institutions that join people together in a true plurality. But different aspects of solitude—the solitude resulting from the suffering of evil as well as the solitude of the distance from God—are the topic of the

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sixth and seventh knots. These two knots refer to what Ricoeur calls a “hyperbolic rhetoric,” or a discourse of excess. One of these excesses comes from below, with the passage to the unjustifiability of evil, while the other excess is from above, with the passage to the testimony of the absolute. Despite their differences, what these two excesses share in common is that they push the reflexive method to its limits and introduce an absolute alterity that challenges the resources of the self. Reflection runs up against the limits of its search for justification when it encounters the question of evil. The excess of evil—which is introduced by extreme forms of cruelty, debasement or social inequality, for example—goes beyond the simple contrasts between good and bad or between the valuable and non-valuable.13 Those contrasts seek to make evil intelligible in relation to some standard of what is good or desirable. But, Nabert’s essay on evil shows in considerable detail that evil cannot be equated with a mistake or imperfection that falls short of such standards. Evil is characterized as an excess, and as such it calls into question every attempt to rationalize or justify it. The unjustifiability of evil means that there is no room for theodicy. It is not a mere coincidence that Ricoeur’s Fallible Man is dedicated to Jean Nabert. Nabert’s account of evil as the unjustifiable is indispensable to the development of Ricoeur’s analysis of evil, insofar as it indicates the insurmountable limitations of our ability to make sense of it. The excess from above, however, prevents evil from having the final word. Whereas evil is defined in terms of the unjustifiable, the excess of the good signifies an encounter with the “unverifiable.” It is associated with the notions of veneration and regeneration that accompany self-development and self-deepening. The inequality to oneself always remains, but this experience also includes the attempt to reconcile with oneself and to restore one’s own integrity. We can perhaps identify certain exemplars who arrive at the highest possible form of self-realization, such as a model citizen, a moral exemplar, a musical virtuoso, a greatest all-time athlete, etc. Their greatness can be the object of our veneration and the source of our aspirations, and they can be the basis of realizing our own desire to be and to become better. But the excess from above also applies hyperbolically to the absolute exteriority of the divine. As such, the divine comes to signify the unverifiable, which provides the basis for Nabert’s rejection of all forms of ontotheology which would define God as a necessary or supreme being or the like. But this does not entail that the divine is wholly ineffable. For Nabert the divinity of God transcends all of our God concepts, even though he also provides a criteriology that allows us to distinguish between concepts that approximate the divine to greater or lesser degrees. In what follows, I want to explore the possibility of bundling these last three knots together—the other, evil as the excess from below, and God as

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the excess from above—in a way that also brings them into contact with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Ricoeur’s essay, “Emmanuel Levinas: A Thinker of Testimony” (1989), provides a helpful indication of how a connection between Nabert and Levinas can be established. The focal point of Ricoeur’s discussion is the topic of testimony. By comparing their respective approaches to this topic, it becomes possible to appreciate important similarities and differences between their accounts.14 After this passage through Levinas, a renewed appreciation of the conceptual sophistication and overall importance of the Nabertian account of testimony will emerge. THE TRUTH OF TESTIMONY BETWEEN NABERT AND LEVINAS Ricoeur examines the stakes for Nabert’s philosophy of testimony in his 1972 essay on the hermeneutics of testimony. In response to the question of what type of philosophy encounters the problem of testimony, Ricoeur answers that testimony arises as a problem for a philosophy which takes the question of the absolute to be meaningful, a philosophy which seeks to join an experience of the absolute to the idea of the absolute, and a philosophy which is unable to plumb the depth of this experience through examples or symbols. Accordingly, the philosophy of testimony is not simply concerned with the ordinary legal sense of eyewitness testimony but more fundamentally with “the problem of the testimony of the absolute or, better, of absolute testimony of the absolute” (Ricoeur 1972). But in taking up this aspect of testimony, it immediately encounters a paradox. “Does one have the right,” as Nabert asks in L’Essai sur le mal, “to invest a moment of history with an absolute character?”3 This paradox concerning the relation between the absolute and history is precisely what a hermeneutics of testimony sets out to resolve. The interpretation of testimony, according to Ricoeur, involves “a twofold act, an act of consciousness of itself and an act of historical understanding based on the signs that the absolute gives of itself. The signs of the absolute’s self-disclosure are at the same time signs in which consciousness recognizes itself” (Ricoeur 1972). That is to say that the interplay between the act of an originary affirmation and the signs that attest to the absolute is necessary and inescapable. In testimony, there can be no witness of the absolute who is not also a witness of historic signs, just as there can be no signs without the corresponding acts that embody it. At the very same 1972 conference where Ricoeur presented “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” Levinas also presented a paper on the topic of testimony titled “The Truth of Manifestation and the Truth of Testimony.” Traditional philosophy, according to Levinas, conceives the truth in terms of

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manifestation. As such, the truth comes to be defined by what stands out there in the light and makes itself visible to consciousness as an object. It belongs, in short, to a philosophy of the visible. From the perspective of manifestation, it follows that testimony is a lesser degree of truth in which one attests to one’s personal experience or belief about the world. Such beliefs, however, need to be validated by what actually manifests itself in the external world. In contrast with the truth of manifestation, Levinas wants to uncover an aspect of testimony that overturns this conception of truth. This can be found in the absolute testimony in which one bears witness to the infinite. Just as Nabert associates testimony with the absolute, likewise Levinas asserts that the truth of testimony bears witness “only of the Infinite” (Levinas 1981, 146). The relation to the infinite does not fit within the framework of the truth of manifestation, because it exceeds anything that would confirm it in the realm of the visible world. Testimony thus introduces a unique relation to what Levinas calls “the glory of the infinite.” Glory refers to the fact that the infinite is not given as a phenomenon or a theme, instead it is “witnessed, and not thematized” (Levinas 1981, 148). What joins Nabert and Levinas, accordingly, is that they both set aside the legal concept of eyewitness testimony in order to develop a distinctive account of testimony. Building on this shared interest in testimony to the absolute, Ricoeur’s 1989 essay follows a progression of the treatment of testimony (or, attestation) that moves in sequence from Heidegger to Nabert to Levinas.15 Through this progression, Ricoeur carefully identifies increasing degrees of height and exteriority of the absolute. The concept of height, for these thinkers, is associated with “Gewissen (conscience) for Heidegger, the originary affirmation for Nabert, and the glory of the infinite for Levinas” (Ricoeur 1989, 108–9). Likewise, the concept of exteriority is expressed as “the uncanny in Being and Time, by the mediation of other consciousnesses testifying absolutely to the absolute for Nabert, and finally, for Levinas, by the assignment by the other of self-responsibility in the extreme passivity of the condition of being a hostage” (Ricoeur 1989, 109; trans. mod.).16 Given Ricoeur’s own claim that the proximity between Nabert and Levinas is greater than between Heidegger and Levinas, the discussion of Heidegger’s thought will be set aside here in order to examine the purported proximity of the Nabert-Levinas relation in greater detail.17 Nabert is unlike Levinas to the extent that for him “height and exteriority do not coincide” (Ricoeur 1989, 116). This means that for Nabert, the height of moral conscience remains on the side of reflection, while the exteriority of the absolute remains on the side of testimony. Due to this heterogeneity between the two, reflection is unable to exhaust the full depth of testimonies of the absolute. As a result, testimony divides itself up in two different kinds. First, there is testimony as act. This refers to the real actions in which real

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individuals display their devotion to an absolute. This can come about intentionally but also without intending to do so. Second, there is the testimony rendered to this testimony by other witnesses in what Nabert calls the “absolute testimony to the absolute.” This occurs when someone else interprets this action as a sign. To clarify the dialogical relationship between these two types of testimony, perhaps it is useful to consider a concrete example, say, of personal sacrifice.18 One could think about soldiers who fought in the US Civil War and lost their lives for the sake of freedom, for example. Their actions attest to the value of freedom in ways that cannot simply be captured on the level of pure reflection about freedom. They express devotion to a higher ideal. In addition to testimony as act, there is also testimony as narrative. These “absolute testimonies to the absolute” occur when others attest to something that someone else does and then interpret their deeds as a sign. Here the role of narrative can play an important role in assigning meaning to individual actions. To mention a famous example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg. There Lincoln eloquently gives voice to the great loss of life in the battle, but his narrative testimony does not give death the final word. Through sacrifice and the suffering of grief, he suggests that there comes a renewed sense of purpose: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so nobly advanced.” In so doing, his address uses the actions of the fallen soldiers and the grief that accompanies their loss to forge a continued resolve to continue to preserve the Union. Testimony as narrative thereby becomes the basis for refueling renewed acts of testimony in the future; it calls for others to take up “the unfinished work” with a sense of purpose and resolve. Between these two different types of testimony, it is thereby possible to see how a productive back-and-forth can emerge. In making a transition from the Nabertian account of testimony to that of Levinas, Ricoeur poses two important questions concerning the relation between reflection (associated with moral conscience and the search for justification) and testimony (associated with the exteriority of the absolute). The first question pertains to the epistemic status of testimony. To the extent that there are both true and false testimonies, what is the basis for placing assurance in testimonies? To believe a testimony is not to have a “belief that.” The truth of testimony does not simply reveal what is the case or what has happened. Instead, to believe a testimony is to “believe in” someone. It becomes a personal question, a question of a person’s truthfulness, sincerity, or credibility. If the basis of belief in testimony is first and foremost trust in another, it follows that false testimony does not simply entail an error about the facts. It signifies a breach of confidence and trust, a breach of a personal

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relation. Based on this account, it follows that the hermeneutics of testimony must be situated within the dynamics of interpersonal relations between the self and the other. The second question has to do with the relation between testimony and moral conscience. Ricoeur asks: Is it possible to take up the problem of the moral conscience again, but this time through the lens of testimony? For Nabert, the moral conscience emerges in relation to the search for justification. Insofar as moral ideals and principles stand above actions and measure them, they can be characterized in terms of their verticality or height. But this search for rational justification runs up against its limits in the face of extreme acts of evil which remain unjustifiable for the moral conscience. Concerning this encounter with the unjustifiable, Ricoeur observes that “The greatest proximity between Nabert and Levinas is expressed in this conjunction of ethics and the hermeneutics of testimony” (Ricoeur 1989, 118). Both thinkers, in other words, are united in their rejection of the Heideggerian attempt to detach an ontological dimension of attestation from its moral significance. In this respect, Nabert and Levinas also share an ethical vision of the world in which testimony is inseparable from moral conscience. In spite of the important points of common ground between Nabert and Levinas, Ricoeur suggest that there remains a key difference that separates them. Nabert’s hermeneutics of testimony remains linked to a reflexive philosophy, whereas Levinas breaks away from the philosophy of consciousness from the very first lines of his chapter on substitution. Through this gesture, Ricoeur observes that for Levinas “height and exteriority will be placed on the same side, that of the other” (Ricoeur 1989: 118–19). The Levinasian account of testimony thereby seals a tight unity of height and exteriority, such that both the moral conscience and testimony come to be anchored in the other. Indeed, Levinas’s notion of substitution seems to be designed precisely to challenge the role of reflection in a philosophy of consciousness like Nabert’s. The positing of consciousness, whether it is a positing of an object or a self-positing, establishes an identity only at the price of an initial forgetting. Intentional consciousness is directed toward an object or theme that remains within its grasp. Instead of being guided by an intentional relation, the Levinasian strategy is to proceed to “the hither side” of consciousness, to an arche that precedes consciousness and is forgotten by it. This reveals a pre-thematic and pre-reflective relation to the other that precedes any conscious awareness or initiative. As a result, I find myself in proximity to the other before I even become aware of myself as a self. But if this proximity precedes consciousness and precedes the self, how can it be expressed without resorting again to the language of consciousness? To accomplish this task, it is well known that Levinas employs excessive, hyperbolic phrases

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designed to shake up our ordinary discourse, but Ricoeur voices a concern that this hyperbolic discourse conceals the fact that we are never done with subjectivity. We cannot get away from the self, because ethical responsibility necessarily requires a self who can welcome and respond to the other. And even though Levina’s excessive may sometimes conceal this point, it becomes quite clear that Levinas’s own analyses do not seek to eliminate the self but to transform it. This is especially evident in his discussion of testimony. When the self attests to the infinite, it does not express this relation as a theme or a concept. This testimony does not take the form, for example, of the statement “I believe in God,” the meaning of which would refer to some purported feature of a divine being, such as being, omnipotence, benevolence, etc. Instead, in bearing witness to the glory of the infinite, the Levinasian self attests “here I am” (me voici). This mode of testimony marks a shift of emphasis both from the divine to the self and from the nominative position to the accusative case, that is, from an “I” to a “me.” This latter shift belongs to Levinas’s critique of consciousness. As an alternative to the self-reflection in which one would attest to oneself through a return to an “I” positioned in the nominative, Levinas introduces the notion of recurrence, which is understood as a “sincerity, effusion of the self, ‘extradition’ of the self to the neighbor” (Levinas 1994, 106). This recurrence of the self accomplishes a shift of emphasis from the act of taking self-possession to the dispossession of oneself that is attested by the ethical gesture. After identifying this key point of divergence between the Nabertian and Levinasian accounts of testimony, Ricoeur concludes by posing the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct a bridge between Nabert and Levinas: Is it forbidden to a reader, who is a friend of both Nabert and Levinas, to puzzle over a philosophy where the attestation of self and the glory of the absolute would be co-originary? Does not the testimony rendered by other actions, by other lives, reciprocal to the divestment of the ego speak in another way about what testimony, according to Levinas, unsays? (Ricoeur 1989, 126)

Here Ricoeur is clearly questioning whether one has to choose dichotomously either Nabert’s reflexive philosophy or Levinas’s ethics of the other. But it would seem that Levinas has already closed the door to any attempt to reconciliation between reflection and testimony, to the extent that the self is “an identity unjustifiable by itself” (Levinas 1981, 106). This is perhaps motivated by Levinas’s concern that if reflection attests to responsibility, then it is likely to justify itself by circumscribing and limiting its scope. An infinite responsibility for the other, by contrast, precedes reflection and locates the justification of freedom in the other. But Ricoeur doubts whether ethical

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responsibility can really do without a subject who is capable of responding to the other. The danger resulting from Levinas’s placement of moral conscience and exteriority wholly on the side of the other is that it leaves the self without sufficient resources to become aware of its responsibility and respond to it. Instead, it seems to require some “capacity for reception to the self that is the result of self-reflection” in order for the search for justification to be possible (Ricoeur 1992, 339).19 This explains the reason why it is necessary to return to Nabert and specifically to the last three knots that link him to Ricoeur: the other, the excess from below and the excess from above. For Levinas, testimony is unidirectional; one attests to the glory of the infinite, in short, to a God that remains absolute and beyond any conceptual grasp. And to be sure, Nabert describes the desire of the divine similarly as a metaphysical desire, a desire for the absolute. And testimony amounts to a way of bearing witness that this relation to the absolute is a relation to what is unattainable as such. But Nabertian reflection does not only encounter its limits in bearing witness to the glory of the infinite; it also attests to an evil that is “unjustifiable” and resists all attempts at justification. It thus encounters two forms of alterity that exceed reflection: an excess of the good as well as an excess of evil. If the self for Levinas has become “an identity unjustifiable by itself” (Levinas 1981, 106), then how does that compare to the Nabertian account of evil as the unjustifiable? What, then, distinguishes the suffering of evil from the doing of evil? Am I responsible, in other words, for both? And in my infinite responsibility, am I therefore responsible for both the master of justice who commands me and the other who persecutes me? While one could easily draw the conclusion that Levinas never provides a satisfactory answer to these questions, the Nabertian account of testimony adds a layer of conceptual clarity and sophistication that is nowhere to be found in Levinas. This is due to the vital role of reflection within the Nabertian account of testimony. Reflection provides what Nabert calls a “criteriology.” That is to say that it provides criteria that enable consciousness to measure or justify its concepts and actions in relation to the absolute. Without such criteria, how would we know, for example, whether our God concepts are closer or further from the divine? Likewise, without criteria, how would we know whether our actions were contributing to evil or to the good? How would we know whether the other is the master of justice or the persecutor who tortures or enslaves me? How else would we know whether our actions are justifiable? This is the reason why Ricoeur follows Nabert in calling for a “capacity of discernment and recognition” which allows such distinctions to be made (Ricoeur 1992, 339). Without such a criteriology, Levinasian ethics gives up the search for justification and the prospects of a good conscience. But for Ricoeur this Levinasian excess is simply a bridge too far. The return to Nabert is necessary,

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because it signifies a return to reflection and the search for justification. It belongs to a process through which the voice of the other becomes my own, such that the ethical command of the other becomes my own conviction as well. What makes Nabert’s reflexive philosophy essential is that it leaves open the hope for an authentic relation to the absolute and the hope for a good conscience, even if such a search remains incomplete. CONCLUSION There is perhaps an inevitable risk in any attempt to apply a debate from the past to a present situation that could not have been envisioned at that time. This chapter’s purpose was mostly historical, aiming to shed some light on an underappreciated figure in French philosophy. But I am also writing at the time of considerable political turmoil over the recent police killing of George Floyd and the video associated with the killing. It is difficult to say what their mark on history will be. They are simply one moment in a long history of such killings in America and beyond. But I wonder how Nabert’s account of testimony might speak to this event and to our times in a way that is original and insightful. During the shocking footage of the police officer leaning on Floyd’s neck and slowly suffocating him, Floyd utters the words “I can’t breathe.” This expression could be seen not simply as a statement of fact, as an act of testimony. And of course, testimonies can be either true or false, sincere or feigned. But the police officer’s actions were not simply the expression of doubt about the truth of Floyd’s claim that he couldn’t breathe; it isn’t just a skepticism about the fact of breathing. What I find compelling about Nabert’s account is that testimony turns out not to be about verifying facts of this kind. Instead, testimony reveals a relation. To accept someone’s testimony as genuine is to acknowledge a relation to someone, while to deny it is also to break that relationship. The officer’s continued violence in response to Floyd’s testimony is an effort to deny the existence of any such relationship. Accordingly, the outrage over this event is not solely directed toward the actions of the police officer; this outrage is perhaps even more fundamentally about the violation of a relationship, not to mention the long-repeated history of such violations. Both Ricoeur and Levinas emphasize the ethical dimension of the relationship that takes place in testimony. The act of bearing witness for the witness is carried up to a second level, where one does not only attest to something but also takes the further step of bearing witness for someone. This is the form of witness that is available to protesters, activists, and other concerned citizens in response to this event. It is what Levinas means by the ethics of

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substitution, that is, an act in which one substitutes oneself for the other, or in other words, stands in for the other who can no longer speak on his or her own. Ricoeur takes a step further and describes this form of testimony in terms of narration. One bears witness for the witness, as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, by telling the story of the witness and by turning it to a renewed sense of purpose for future action. In so doing, their testimonials provide hope that the sufferings of the past and present can be redeemed in the future. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amalric, Jean-Luc. 2018. In A Companion to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature. Ed. Scott Davidson. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Capelle, Philippe, ed. 2003. Jean Nabert et La Question du Divin. Paris: Cerf. Davidson, Scott, ed. 2019. A Companion to Ricoeur’s Fallible Man. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Levert, Paule. 1971. Jean Nabert ou L’exigence absolu. Paris: Seghers. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise than Being [1974]. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1996. “The Truth of Manifestation and the Truth of Testimony.” In Basic Philosophical Writings. Eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nabert, Jean. 1994. L’expérience intérieure de la liberté [1924]. Paris: PUF. ———. 1969. Elements for an Ethic [1943]. Trans. William J. Petrek. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. Essai sur le mal [1955]. ———. 1996. Le Désir de Dieu [1966]. Paris: Cerf, ———. 1962. La Rencontre de l’absolu: Le témoignage, Études Philosophiques 3 (1962): 323–38; reprinted in Le Désir de Dieu. ———. 1957. La philosophie réflexive, Encyclopédie française, XIX (1957): 19.04-14-19.06-3. Ricoeur, Paul. 1982. “The Hermeneutics of Testimony” [1972]. In Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis Mudge. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. ———. “Act and Sign according to Jean Nabert” [1962] ———. 1995. “Emmanuel Levinas: A Thinker of Testimony” [1989]. In Figuring the Sacred. Ed. Mark I Wallace. Trans. David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2017. Méthode réflexive appliquée au problème de Dieu chez Lachelier et Lagneau. Paris: Cerf. Robillard, Stéphane, and Frédéric Worms, eds. 2010. Jean Nabert, l’affirmation éthique. Paris: Beauchesne.

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NOTES 1. There are some more recent exceptions to this trend. In particular, the establishment of the Fonds Nabert at the Institut Catholique de Paris. And the publication of several helpful edited volumes, including Robillard and Worms (2010). 2. Nabert was once called “the French Fichte” by Jean Lacroix. 3. For valuable context of this aspect of the French education system and its profound influence on the course of French philosophy, see Alan D. Shrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2006), Appendix I. 4. Among the articles that Nabert published, his 1957 encyclopedia entry on “Reflexive Philosophy” is especially helpful toward an understanding of that movement of French philosophy. 5. I am unable to take up Henry’s relation to Nabert here, but I will cite his high praise of Nabert a note in Généalogie de la psychanalyse, 145, note 16. 6. For example, Ricoeur dedicates Fallible Man to Nabert. 7. This list is drawn from the excellent study by Phillippe Capelle, “Ethique et Religion: Jean Nabert et Paul Ricoeur,” in Jean Nabert: L’affirmation éthique, 2010, 293– 304. From his study, Capelle infers that there are four inheritances stemming from readers of Nabert and Ricoeur: finitude, mediation, resistance to evil, and testimony. 8. This article originally appeared as “L’herméneutique du temoignage,” Archivio di Filosofia (La Testimonianza) 42 (1972): 35–61. A later essay by Ricoeur has an interesting parallel with Levinas’s essay. See “Manifestation and Proclamation” in Figuring the Sacred. 9. It is noteworthy that Nabert’s essay names Ricoeur as one of the new contributors to this tradition. 10. In his “Intellectual Autobiography,” Ricoeur explains this influence in the following manner: “On the one hand, this tradition [of French reflexive philosophy] led back, through E. Boutroux and F. Ravaisson, to Maine de Biran; on the other hand, it tended toward Jean Nabert who, in 1924, had published L’expérience intérieure de la liberté . . . Jean Nabert was to have a decisive influence on me in the 1950s and 1960s.” In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. XXII, ed. L. E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 6. 11. Significantly, Ricoeur’s master’s thesis, has recently been published in France, was written on the reflexive philosophy of two ninteenth-century French thinkers: Jules Lachelier and Jules Lagneau. See Ricoeur 2017. 12. This was published in the multiauthor volume, Jean Nabert et La Question du Divin. 13. Here is a possible itinerary for a set of texts that would situate Nabert’s Essay on Evil. One could begin as far back as Augustine or Leibniz, then engage Kant’s Essay on Evil and then examine Nabert’s essay, followed by Ricoeur’s Fallible Man and other writings on evil, and then continue with Levinas’s essays on evil and culminating with Philippe Nemo’s Job and the Excess of Evil. 14. Ricoeur expresses his admiration of both Nabert and Levinas; indeed, Levinas appears more and more frequently in Ricoeur’s reflections in the 1990s as his

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references to Nabert become less frequent. Although Levinas does not frequently cite or engage Ricoeur’s work, he does express appreciation for Ricoeur’s work and owed his first university teaching position at Nanterre to Ricoeur. I am unsure about whether Levinas read Nabert or communicated with him directly. So it seems quite clear that Ricoeur is the bridge who connects these two. 15. It is noteworthy that some themes from this essay, published in 1989, are carried into the tenth study of Oneself as Another, especially the confrontation between Heidegger and Levinas. But Nabert disappears from that study, and the mediation between the two is accomplished by Ricoeur instead. 16. The original reads: “enfin chez Levinas, pas l’assignation par l’autre à la responsabilité du soi dans l’extrême passivité de la condition d’otage” (Ricoeur 1989). 17. For further discussion of the complex relationship between Heidegger and Levinas, see the collection of essays in John E. Drabinski and Eric S. Nelson, eds., Between Levinas and Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014). 18. It is often noted in discussions of testimony that the Greek word for witness was martys, which suggest a connection between the act of witness and that of martyrdom. The martyr is someone who bears witness, accordingly, to some cause or idea. 19. The broader critique of Levinas in the Tenth Study of Oneself as Another is expressed in a quite pithy manner as the mirror image of his critique of Heidegger: “To Heidegger, I objected that attestation is primordially injunction, or attestation risks losing all ethical or moral significance. To Levinas, I shall object that the injunction is primordially attestation, or the injunction risks not being heard and the self not being affected in the mode of being-enjoined” (Ricoeur 1992, 355).

Chapter 3

The Source of Desire Individuation and Responsive Care in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s Philosophy Elodie Boublil

In Phenomenology and the Theological Turn (Janicaud 2009), rench philosopher Dominique Janicaud (1937–2002) portrays Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952–2019) as a thinker whose commitment to Catholic theology has been clear enough to qualify his philosophy as first and foremost religious. Such a portray has considerably influenced the reception of Chrétien’s works, especially in North America, where the French philosopher is mostly studied in the philosophy of religion or Christian metaphysics. If Chrétien’s interests in the Fathers of the Church and medieval metaphysics are clear (Chrétien 1998, 2000, 2002, 2014, 2018), his training in phenomenology and French philosophy yet provided him with an original way of reframing ontological questions in a genuine philosophical manner that would deserve to be investigated. This chapter argues that Chrétien put forward a renewed conception of interiority, which may contribute to contemporary debates in phenomenology about subjectivity’s individuation and the structure of her relation to the lifeworld. This essay will highlight the responsive structure of affectivity that characterizes the subject’s life, according to the French philosopher. Indeed, a metaphysical conception of desire, acknowledging our finite fragility, runs through his works. In his philosophy, anthropology is not opposed to metaphysics. On the contrary, the opening structure of desire shows their entanglement to the benefit of a relational conception of individuation that particularly reveals itself under the three modalities of speech, affectivity, and hope. Jean-Louis Chrétien inherited from the French spiritualist tradition (notably Bergson and Lavelle) an interest in the question of desire and 41

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interiority. However, his phenomenological approach led him to provide an interesting and original account of our inner experience that aims to overcome a persisting philosophical divide between interiority and exteriority, or transcendence and facticity. Subsequently, Chrétien shed new light on theological and metaphysical questions (interiority, subjectivity, incarnation, transcendence, etc.) by exploring our fragility and finite condition through fruitful phenomenological investigations. The first section analyzes Chrétien’s conception of individuation as a relational process grounded in a fragile and wounded self. Chrétien displays a theory of the wounded cogito—to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur (Ricoeur 1965)—that paves the way for a renewed understanding of the subject, whose transience and vulnerability are the sources of her achievement as a relational being, living in the world with others. The second section unfolds what could paradoxically be termed “experiential metaphysics.” Interiority becomes the place where voices respond to each other, anchoring the subject in a larger historical community that precedes and exceeds her. Desire becomes a transcendental condition that shapes our relation to others and correlates individuation processes with our capacity for responding to ourselves and others. It entails responsibility insofar as being responsible “in the real world” means acknowledging the intertwining of our desires and responsibilities—at the ontic level of our individual existence—with a deeper desire that connects us with others both spatially—within a community—and temporally— throughout history. The last section explains how Chrétien’s conception of desire meets Lavelle’s understanding of interiority to draw a phenomenological ethics of the wounded self. In such ethics, hope and responsive care become the horizons open and sustained by the infinite structure of desire, thereby implying a more positive and fruitful picture of vulnerability as a precondition for responsive care of the self, world, and others. THE VULNERABLE SUBJECT: INDIVIDUATION AS DESIRE A Phenomenology of Fragility The writing style of Chrétien, whose books are often made of portraits and studies, should not hide the underlying thought that gives them their unity. In his last published work, Fragilité (2017), Chrétien introduces a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and fragility to analyze their relation to self-mastery. Drawing on a historical, philosophical, and linguistic analysis of the concept of fragility, Chrétien argues that this notion unfolds from the Latin culture and the Christian legacy of the Fathers of the Church. Chrétien’s

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emphasis on incarnation and the role taken by embodiment in the self’s relation to herself and others led him to analyze the subject’s fundamental “fragility” and the ethical consequences of her finitude. Contrary to the Greek understanding of finitude in terms of weakness and strength (a-sthenia), fragility refers to an “existential” category that stems from our human condition rather than a psychological or situational disposition. In this specific sense, it differs from vulnerability understood as what can be hurt, and it affects not only living beings but also inanimate objects. Nevertheless, as Chrétien— following Augustine—argues: However, these two terms of “fragile” and “vulnerable” have that in common that they designate a possibility inscribed in the specific constitution of the being in question, and which does not cease to belong to it even if it is not actualized or takes a long time to be so. Saint Augustine said it of vulnerability: just because you do not have to be hurt does not mean that you are not vulnerable, that is, susceptible to be so. Fragility is, therefore, a permanent condition, which certainly has varying degrees and forms. (Chrétien 2017, 7)

Vulnerability pertains to our embodied consciousness, which, according to Chrétien, does not have the self-transparency and objective constitutive power claimed by Husserl in Ideas I. Indeed, Chrétien’s understanding of vulnerability puts into question the primacy of subjectivity and its illusory will to power. Contrary to Husserl, Chrétien refers to Augustine rather than Descartes to describe the cogito and emphasize its paradoxical openness and fundamental passivity. Subjectivity’s individuation is less performed by the reflexivity of the cogito or the ego’s transcendental structure than by the operative and creative intentionality that passes through the subject’s limitations, in order to transfigure them. In this context, his analysis will directly go against Merleau-Ponty’s description of Christian metaphysics in the opening pages of The Phenomenology of Perception, in which Merleau-Ponty seems to wrongly consider Augustine’s conception of interiority as a precondition for mastery and ascetic morality: The world is there prior to every analysis that I could give of it, and it would be artificial to derive it from a series of syntheses that would first link sensations and the perspectival appearances of the object together, whereas both are, in fact, products of the analysis and must not have existed prior to it. Reflective analysis believes it moves in the reverse direction along the path of a previous constitution and meets up with—in the “inner man,” as Saint Augustine says—a constituting power that it has always been. Thus, reflection carries itself along and places itself back within an invulnerable subjectivity prior to being and time. However, this is a naïveté, or if one prefers an incomplete reflection that loses awareness of its beginning. (Merleau-Ponty 2013, xxiii)

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Chrétien explains, following Spinoza, that the “inner self” is not an “empire within an empire” or a “beginning” (Spinoza 2018, 93), but rather the space where I can define myself vis-à-vis another: “The way to interiority, to the center of the self, far from leading to recognizing oneself as a source, invites me to go beyond what I have higher or deeper, to discover myself, in the strong sense, inhabited or inhabitable by a presence other than mine” (Chrétien 2014, 60); “The path to interiority is therefore not the loss of the immense, but the plunge into an even more disconcerting immensity, because its excess is in me, it is me. The Augustinian privilege of interiority does not lie in excluding exteriority, but in including and exceeding it” (Chrétien 2007a, 37). Accordingly, interiority and exteriority are coextensive to the subject’s individuation. They are tightly intertwined (Ineinander) as they express the utmost singularity of the subject. Vulnerability allows for this movement as it becomes the other side of reflexivity, its failure as well as its force. Chrétien’s phenomenology of affectivity thus elucidates this dynamic and reciprocal constitution of self and world in our inner experience and how the latter is moved by desire. Joy as Operative Intentionality As Chrétien noticed in his essay on interiority: Not only thought, but affectivity itself can only be understood spatially: anguish constricts, contracts, and petrifies, joy and hope expand, dilate, mobilize, this being so little metaphorical that the narrow or the broad, absolutely speaking, are not physically observable (on what scale and by what measure?), but originally existential and affective terms. There is no need to want to escape our condition, any more than to see it as a degradation. Nevertheless, of course, interior space should not be hypostatized as if it always existed by itself but led back to acts of speech and consciousness that open it up to various horizons. (Chrétien 2014, 25–26)

The experience of joy allows Chrétien to provide a phenomenological description of the self-awareness that goes along with this spatiotemporal reconfiguration of subjectivity. Joy is depicted as the feeling that exceeds the apparent limitations of individuation to expand our sense of being in the world with others. In other words, the inner world points to a qualitative experience that expresses our ability to live through our individuated body and become aware of the elements that surround and affects it. In the experience of joy, one does endure what Chrétien calls a “dilation” that makes the subject realize that she is moved by a force that overwhelms her yet connects her with the world and herself:

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This act is the common act of man and the world; it cannot be folded down and boxed in psychology or the thought of the “subject.” Joy indeed gives space, field, and play; to be joyful is to be offshore in the open sea of the world suddenly revealed as such, and the test of joy is always a test of space in flood. Space of the self, space of the world? Indoor space, outdoor space? The characteristic of joy is to render this distinction obsolete and be inseparably a test of oneself and the world. (Chrétien 2007a, 7–8)

Joy acts as a form of epochè that temporarily brackets the subject’s individuated experience of the world to unveil the operative intentionality that pre-reflectively constitutes her through her relation to the lifeworld. In this sense, Chrétien’s analysis of joy opens an original way to reconcile the phenomenological concept of operative intentionality with Bergson’s concept of intuition as grounded in the vital force and creativity of the individual: “Dilation” refers to intuition, not in what it allows to reach or live, but in its mode of the constitution, in what allows it to reach or live hitherto veiled dimensions of experience. Dilation is, therefore, for Bergson, the condition of possibility of intuition. And the dilation proper to the philosopher is for him quite specific since he distinguishes it from the dilation carried out by art, to establish that it is, in fact, more universal than the latter and a source of a joy that science cannot give. (Chrétien, 2007a, 26)

As rephrased by Chrétien, the notion of dilation adds on a spatial, expressive, and embodied dimension to the temporal sense of individuation at stake in Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian descriptions of operative intentionality. This sense of dilation through our intuition and comprehension of the world simultaneously brings about joy and its very experience. It resists any grasping, yet its flow is experienced through a singular self-affection that does not merge the self into an element bigger than herself, as if individuality could be abolished. Rather, it gives her a sense of her possibilities regarding what irreducibly exceeds them. Consequently, on the existential level, joy does not amount to satisfaction. It is an upsurge of desire and vitality that rules out our plans, calculations, and expectations to disclose an unexpected source of possibilities: The essence of all high joy is to happen de surcroît. A joy that is targeted, calculated, projected, programmed, worked out, which I have taken for the end of my conduct, is commensurate with these very calculations, and therefore, in this sense, always a little or a lot disappointing, because it is never surprising. On the other hand, in its very project, it is only a distraction from my worries and a sedative of my sadness or boredom, determined, and therefore contaminated by what it undertakes to flee. . . . True joy invades me, overflows me, it makes

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me show a new face of the world, a smile passing over things as Virgil spoke of their tears. Poor is the joy that only fills a gap in me. (Chrétien 2017, 145)

Joy differs ontologically from satisfaction, as desire ontologically differs from the experience of need and lack. The joy of being does not come from a feeling of self-mastery but rather from the lived experience of our dispossession in and through our fundamental relation to the world and others. A sense of interdependency is suddenly revealed through the transfiguration of our vulnerability, which is no longer a failure but rather the joyful color of our sense of being. Such approach leads Chrétien from a phenomenology of fragility to a metaphysics of desire that originally encompasses phenomenological reflections on spiritual experiences and their ethical implications for our existential relation to the world and others. Experiential Metaphysics Chrétien’s metaphysics of desire could be paradoxically considered as an “experiential metaphysics” as it is precisely rooted in incarnation without being bound to its very facticity. Desire initiates and rekindles metaphysical aspirations as transcendence itself digs into our finitude to reveal its excess and incommensurability. As Chrétien explains: The joy of being, higher and more vivid than all happiness, is the cordial exclamation where we come to ourselves without being able to stick to it, the initial break-in where to begin is to continue—another figure in the paradoxes of giving. The excess of what it is up to metaphysics to say concerning the metaphysical world itself, the excess of the sensitive over the sensible itself, which alone gives the fire its brilliance, the excess of love over love, the past without which our promises would not open any future. (Chrétien 1990, 10)

This “initial effraction where to begin means to continue” reveals the paradoxical structure of joy. Indeed, “rejoicing” is an intentional act that presupposes the possession of its object and a sense of completion while living through that very experience. Simultaneously, in experiencing the joy of being, the self is directed toward its sense of becoming and feels a force that precedes her and moves her forward. In other words, joy manifests what Strasser would call a “transcendent sense of anticipation” (Strasser, 1977) that correlates the feeling of hope with a sense of self-realization that is yet never fulfilled. Reflective intentionality is wounded and carved, from within, by operative intentionality to expand its possibilities. Chrétien understands operative intentionality as our vulnerability’s very force (dunamis). In his analysis of the mystical experiences of Theresa of Avila (Chrétien 2014),

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Chrétien unravels the “metamorphic dynamics,” or the transformation operated by this force and the way it organizes the affective life of the subject and her own individuation processes. Like Bergson (2013), Chrétien takes seriously the descriptions provided by the mystics as they may reveal deeper layers and structure of our experiences. The experience of “deep joy” in such a case does not break our limitations but rather transfigure them through the action of a force and a movement that are responsible for the “elevation of our psychical faculties.” This desire to live is another name of “resilience” as Chrétien explains: The memory of fragility, and of the situations in which we have experienced it, can become the foundation of resistance or endurance (which it is fashionable today to call “resilience,” from a term borrowed from physics where it designates resistance to shock, but which, in Latin, meant the spring or the resource, the ability to bounce back). (Chrétien 2017, 147)

These dynamics are marked by a sense of excess and overcoming characteristic of desire. In other words, the experience of our finitude precisely consists in living through a desire that exceeds itself while sensing, at the same time, the limitations entailed by our incarnation. Consequently, from a temporal perspective living through the ontological desire that marks our individuation amounts to enduring the paradoxical condition of belonging to that we are separated from. The self is always co-constituted with an Other that exceeds her comprehension (reflective intentionality) yet sustains her desire to live (operative intentionality). As Ballan, commenting on Chrétien’s project, explains: In a 1999 retrospective covering his work of the preceding twelve years, Chrétien describes his overarching project as one of describing the “excess of the encounter with things, other, world, and God,” that is, an encounter which calls “most imperatively” for our response and “yet seems at the same time to prohibit it.” This gap between the insistence of the call and the impossibility of an adequate response is inscribed on human bodies—using the effects of beauty upon the senses as well as the shattering of the voice that endeavors to sing it—and has a name in Christian spirituality: humility, which for Chrétien is the “touchstone” of Christian mysticism. (Ballan 2010, 206)

This experiential metaphysics entails a phenomenology of the call that fleshes out the relations of interiority, transcendence, and the world. Responsivity becomes a key concept to understand and analyze how desire institutes an asymmetrical space of expression. It is simultaneously an ethical concept and a phenomenological one, describing the embodied, psychological, and spiritual experience of responding to the other that calls upon me. This

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phenomenological analysis of the dialectic between the call and its responses is also an ontogenetic one as it also unfolds from the cultural interplays at stake in the history of humankind. According to Chrétien, culture is made of a plurality of voices that echo and respond to one another in an uninterrupted yet differentiated thread of meanings that build the complexity of our identities. RESPONSIVE VOICES: FLESHING OUT INTERIORITY AND THE WORLD Desire and Responsiveness It is worth mentioning that Chrétien’s understanding of vulnerability differs from Levinas’s account as developed in Otherwise than Being, even if they both stem from a phenomenology of incompleteness and wounding, that disrupts any attempt to totalize the subject or to grasp her being in the world in the mode of presence. Surely, Chrétien sides with Levinas in saying that the responsive structure of the subject’s voice endows her with an infinite debt and a “brisure” that forbids any form of domination. The force (dunamis) that sustains the other’s vulnerability is not a will to power but a capacity to endure what cannot be endured unless a higher sense of responsibility allows for it and displays it. For Chrétien, I am not choosing what I am responsible for as if I could fully anticipate the consequences of my actions: To say that I am accountable for my actions only to the extent that their consequences are exactly those I have foreseen, and that beyond this limit, my responsibility is no longer valid: it already denies the reality of the action in the real world itself, and of an action that involves other agents, and where there are therefore always incalculable and unpredictable consequences, small or large, good, or bad. Wanting to be responsible only in a fictional world that is the world of my calculations is the same as denying responsibility in the real world. (Chrétien 2007b, 175)

Responsibility is endless because relationality and interdependency lay the grounds for any form of action. In other words, the relational and intersubjective structure of the lifeworld that constitutes itself through the pre-reflective force (dunamis) of operative intentionality precedes and precludes any attempt to initiate an autonomous and independent action one may claim as irreducibly hers. Being responsible “in the real world” means acknowledging the intertwining of our desires and responsibilities—at the ontic level of our individual existence—with a deeper desire that connects us with others both spatially—within a community—and temporally—throughout history.

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This desire takes the affective form of belonging. This belonging engages the subject in a dialogical relation with whom and what precedes her. It also entails that what the subject is responsible for is also what she is responsible for before others and what participates in her existential and spiritual individuation. Consequently, the call of the other is not only the suffering face that commands my action and requires my protection and submission, as in Levinas, but also the expression of the deeper call of Being. Chrétien’s philosophy attempts to link ethics and ontology together without falling back into the metaphysical traps of objectification and homogenization denounced by Heidegger or Levinas. Chrétien’s experiential metaphysics delineates an ethics that let emerge and appear within its foundations a sense of Being that exceeds any categories, and that does not let itself be reified by any grounds—and yet, it gives sense and direction to the subject’s existence and relations. This sense of Being is tailored upon the paradigm of incarnation, historicity, and responsivity. We are relational beings. The interdependency that results from this relational ontology bears immediate consequences for our embodied situation in the world. We need others to care for our vulnerability and help us deal with the most concrete effects of our finitude (pain, illness, suffering, etc.). We are also related to other beings in time, and Chrétien insists on the plurality of voices humanity constitutes throughout history. In this sense, the fundamentally responsive structure of intentionality affects our intercorporeal relations and—more symbolically—the way we relate to our identity and shape our sense of belonging through the mediation of others. The intersubjective genesis of meanings breaks in the self-sufficiency of the transcendental ego to uncover the wounds and tights that makes the subject’s capacity to respond and be responsible an infinite task: Every human voice responds; every inauguration is in pain and passion under an earlier voice that it hears only by answering it, which precedes it, and which exceeds it. It speaks only by listening; it listens only by answering and continues to speak only because there is no perfect plenary answer, no answer that is not at the most intimate of itself in default and behind what it alone makes heard. . . . The nudity of the voice, exposing our body and soul to being, without return, has always and forever been impossible transparency, adequacy, fullness, perfection, parousia. It is pre-empted, defeated, and this is what makes it, in every word, promise, promise what it cannot keep. To think of this gift itself given of the word, this promise which itself promised, whose identity is as if from the outset broken, imposes a critique of the philosophies of presence that make such questions inaccessible, and live to forget them. (Chrétien, 1990, 7)

The impossibility of a full presence leaves room for a genuine sense of individuation that resists appropriation. In this sense, speech is, paradoxically, not

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what covers up and masters the unheard density of operative intentionality but what truly expresses it when it is considered the fragile yet responsible endorsement of the subject’s own vulnerability. What is “proper” to the subject is then the “vital grounding” (Chrétien 2007b, 85) that affectively and dialogically shapes her response. Chrétien’s conception of responsivity relies on his understanding of communal experiences and historicity, which also contextualizes the subject’s expression and triggers her desire. The call I receive comes from within yet resonates in and from the lifeworld, I constitute with others. In this sense, it is foundational as it inaugurates a common sense of plurality: “To respond of oneself is to respond of all that we have received from so many others, it is to respond to all those others without whom we would not be what we are, or even who we are, a constant and revived thank you in us” (Chrétien 2007b, 70). Our sense of being is itself relational, and our fundamental desire to live is itself connected to other beings through a common sense of belonging shaped by historical bounds. Speech has the power to make these bounds resonate or to untie them, re-creating and reorienting thereby the sense of subjectivity’s individuation. For instance, responding to the call of one’s vocation amounts to engaging in a spiritual individuation rooted in the lifeworld. Individuation and Interiority The twofold movement of being called and responding articulates personal and collective individuation processes. Analyzing the structure of faith and the relation of call and response in the context of Christian theology, Chrétien explains that responding to a call is individuating, insofar as the call is personal and lays out a specific vocation one is meant to fulfill in a unique manner. Nonetheless, this spiritual individuation does not end in a solipsist or individualistic posture, as it takes place within a community for which the fulfillment of one’s vocation matters: “Personal spiritual individuation takes place only in the community, through it and in it, a community without measure broader than the environment in which I currently live” (Chrétien, 2014, 246–47). My voice is irreducibly mine, yet it resonates in the experiences of others as my response is related to their responses which altogether form and delineate the direction of a common history that exceeds us: “my voice always becomes mine in response and can only continue to be mine by continuing to respond. In it pass and pass many other voices. We cannot tear apart the one fabric of human voices and works, nor separate a thousand stages of the one temporal pilgrimage” (Chrétien 2007b, 237). This plurality of voices constitutes the thickness and opaqueness that foment the subject’s psychic life and interiority. Turning to interiority and discovering through memory the historical belonging we are merged into is

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not a reflective process from which the subject could gain any form of clarity and invulnerability; quite the opposite. As it expands, the inner space reveals the vulnerability and the fragility of the subject’s projects and certitudes. It dispossesses her from ready-made answers to present her with what always remains unthought and unexpected—conditions under which her vocation could resonate as a “call” rather than a projection. This openness is required by the very movement of desire that sustains and expands it. If desire could grasp what it looks for, then it would end. Our inner life would be like a Stoic fortress, untouched and invulnerable. In other words, individuation is less a movement of self-mastery than a movement through which the subject can transform and transfigure, from within, her fragility. As Chrétien explains: We may certainly be paralyzed and flabbergasted by our fragility, but the main thing is to recognize that it is not an obstacle or impediment in our struggle to accomplish our humanity—but without it, there would be no struggle, therefore, no dignity. It goes hand in hand with the agonic dimension of the human condition, and the despair at which it can throw us is because we do not see how to use it by orienting it differently. (Chrétien 2017, 205)

Desire emerges from a sense of incompleteness. Paradoxically, when one acknowledges her fragility, her inner world expands, and new possibilities and horizons emerge from it. Returning to interiority mediates our relation to the world and gives it significance. This inner experience does not involve the immediacy of self-affection but rather takes place at the junction point where the most intimate and the most common are articulated through speech, affectivity, and meaningful experiences: “The most intimate and secret experience can only be said, and therefore grasp and articulate itself, by the shared language of the common experience. . . . We must therefore say what is our own by the most common, interiority by the world and the things of the world” (Chrétien, 2014, 9). By letting itself be wounded by the world, the subject meets the constituents of her fragility as well as the unexpected resources of the capacity unfolded by her desire for the absolute. In this sense, one may say that Chrétien’s experiential metaphysics does not separate the inner life of time-consciousness and the world of sense-experience but rather interlaces the experiences conveyed by our senses—especially hearing and touch—with the desire that carves into them the meaningfulness of their manifestation. As Gshwandtner explains: “This inexhaustibility of the call and deficiency of our response, in fact, is what enables us to live, to dwell, and to create: all of our lives become a response to the call. . . . The response is a bodily experience and a vulnerable one due to the disproportion between call and response” (Gshwandtner 2013, 150–51).

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The last section of our chapter aims to show how Chrétien’s philosophy of the body sketches a phenomenological ethics of the wounded self that delineates fruitful paths for contemporary continental philosophy. Indeed, his conception of interiority—built into what we have called its experiential metaphysics—offers a way to think of the self without referring to a metaphysical subject. Consequently, it lays out an ethical understanding of vulnerability that aims to overcome the traditional opposition between the passive dimension of the wounded flesh and the active affirmation of the willing ego. It presents us with a conception of hope that originally articulates humility, desire, and self-transformation. A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS OF THE WOUNDED SELF Selves and Bodies The idea of interiority as the ground of plurality leads us to a conception of the self whose individuation is correlated with the individuation of others instead of constituting itself in opposition to them. In this sense, the paradigm of the individual as a closed-off entity whose inner world would be irreducible to others appears like fiction as we define ourselves through the world, feelings, and experiences we share with others. Consequently, individuation becomes a relational process instituting a tension between the porosity brought about by our embodied and sensitive condition and the polarity or polarization worked out by a desire that exceeds us yet sustains the call and its responses. In this dialogical and responsive framework, Chrétien develops a phenomenology of the wounded self that shows the agonistic dimension of vulnerability and its fruitfulness to define one’s singularity (Benson 2010, 214). As seen in our previous sections, Chrétien does not choose between two opposite interpretations of vulnerability: fragility and risk. Rather, he shows that they are intertwined. When one recognizes herself as fragile, she knows that she may be at risk before others, and she may also be a risk for others. Opposing these conceptions of vulnerability is a way to ignore the ambiguity and noncoincidence that comes from the very structure of the self as open and shaped by her experiences with others. By laying out a positive sense of vulnerability thanks to his understanding of desire and responsiveness as constituents of our subjective life, Chrétien resists the temptation of positing a self-mastering ego that would be able to manage all risks and reach an ideal of invulnerability. His understanding of the human body plays a crucial role in this revaluation of vulnerability and his picture of the self. The inner space, described by

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Chrétien, disrupts the well-separated and delineated frontiers of subjectivity. The body is not the envelope of our inner life. As it communicates with the world, the inner life is the condition of the body’s radiance, expressivity, and action throughout our personal and collective history. As Chrétien puts it: By making itself visible, the body does not make itself alone visible; it lets the invisible soul come to the day of the world, which, by invigorating it, is its perpetual origin, and without which it would show nothing. It is only by making the invisible visible that it can manifest itself. He gives us to see what gives him to himself. Thanks to this resource in him that is not him, but that is not without him in the world, he can never become a show. (Chrétien, 1990, 13)

This phenomenological description echoes the philosophy of action and embodiment developed by French philosopher Louis Lavelle in the first half of the twentieth century. In a book on spiritual intimacy, Lavelle described the body as a “mediator between the universe and us.” In a passage that seems to anticipate Merleau-Ponty’s rephrasing of the Ineinander, Lavelle writes: The body has a double-sided facing outwards and facing inwards. It is at the joint of the two worlds. But while by turning to the outside, he tends to make me an object that no longer has any relationship with me, by turning to the inside, he does not only participate in the intimacy of my consciousness, but he also founds it by individualizing it. Without him, my thought would remain impersonal and indeterminate: but it must still be felt like mine, and it can only be by its connection with the body which makes it a living thought, gives it an inimitable resonance, and which belongs only to me alone. Thus, according to Péguy, every real thought is indivisibly spiritual and carnal. (Lavelle 1955, 74)

Chrétien would have probably agreed with such a description. Indeed, the self is not what resists the body; it is constituted and enacted through its expressions, making it, precisely, a lived body. Its vulnerability indicates that the self is, first and foremost, corporeal. It is a dynamic entity worked out by desire. In this sense, Chrétien’s experiential metaphysics of incarnation leads us to understand our inner world as a generative interiority. The Source of Desire The responsive structure of the subject—as an incarnate subject—results from the movement and activity of what we might call a generative interiority. This concept expresses the dynamic movement of operative intentionality that plays a key role in personal and collective individuation processes, as we have seen in the previous sections. It also points to the constitutive and mutual relations of desire and interiority. Indeed, desire reveals a wound,

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an écart, in our inner life that allows us to see interiority as a dynamic and living depth. This spatial and temporal self-shift opens a breach that gives way to the welcoming of transcendence and the unfolding of desire. Based on a phenomenology of the wounded self, this conception would then consider interiority not as the enclosed space that resists the flesh or reifies it in a dualistic conception of mediation, but as the generative source that makes possible an understanding of incarnation as an active and intensive generation of what founds our common humanity, namely: a conception of the self that expresses the relational dynamic that makes all vulnerability fruitful. The relation between Lavelle’s understanding of desire and Chrétien’s analysis of interiority is worth noticing. Lavelle describes desire as a “force that we receive” (Lavelle 1936, 27). Desire is fundamentally paradoxical. It confronts us with transcendence yet presents us with what may cover it up. Freedom and responsibility occur precisely when the individuated subject does not confuse herself with the source of her own life and creativity: It is desire that associates our life with creative activity and inserts it into it. So, all the effort we are capable of is undoubtedly to descend deep enough into ourselves through reflection and recollection to discover the common root of Desire and Life. The characteristic of the will is only to regulate its use. . . . There is no other danger for her than to let herself be held back by particular objects whose insufficiency can never fail to appear to her. Therefore, what depends on us is the resistance we put up against desire or the trust we confer to it. The will must be attentive to remove before it the obstacles on which it breaks, to prevent it from dying out in transient and despicable satisfaction: it would become more modest if it learned that it borrows from it the very strength at its disposal and that it often imagines out of pride that it can substitute for its own. (Lavelle, ibid.)

Considering Lavelle’s description, one can understand Chrétien’s analysis of responsiveness as a philosophy investigating the source of desire. His emphasis on the wounded and corporeal self is a way to picture the breaches and distance introduced by the dynamics of desire. The call always precedes and exceeds any kind of response because it stems from this “common source of Desire and Life” that can never coincide with the specific objects one could look at and actions one could perform. In this sense, generative interiority is the movement through which operative intentionality institutes the self as a respondent whose creativity and singularity are revealed by its actions and relations. This conception of personal individuation correlates subjectivity with the other in an original manner that replaces Levinas’s ethical approach in terms of substitution by an understanding of care in terms of responsiveness and reciprocity. Welcoming the call becomes indeed a condition of

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possibility of welcoming others and all creatures. It becomes a precondition for responsibility (Gschwandtner 2013, 144). The temporal and existential structure of hope as a specific attitude toward the good articulates our embodied sense of responsiveness and our ethical sense of responsibility. Hope and Responsive Care Chrétien’s approach to interiority breaks into the traditional paradigm that tends to separate it from exteriority and disrupts a purely spatial conception of the inner dimension. The dynamics captured by the idea of generativity and the movement of operative intentionality refer to the spatiotemporal realm as an irreducible existential framework that colors all our perceptions. In Chrétien’s philosophy, this dimension is specifically analyzed through the lenses of two intricated phenomena: hope and dwelling. Hope proceeds from the temporal-existential mode that intertwines life and desire. It is correlated with vulnerability and fragility. For Chrétien, the wound left open by our finite condition makes room for hope and longing as temporal expressions of desire. The subject’s responsibility then consists of being able to paradoxically dwell into that spatiotemporal movement. Creativity and imagination take part in this process as they contribute to configuring the self so that she could unfold new possibilities: “To imagine oneself (in the sense of giving oneself by imagination a spatial figure), it is always also to configure, to form and to build oneself according to certain directions of meaning, to open the space for new possibilities of being” (Chrétien 2014, 12) The different layers of individuation (psychological, existential, personal) are articulated anew. Our capacity to respond to new situations and remodel our existential and intersubjective spaces testifies to the plasticity associated with vulnerability. This plasticity does not disrupt individuation. Rather it contributes to a process of unification that guarantees it. Indeed, as Chrétien argues, desire entails a lack of self-mastery that allows for one’s individuation: Unification is not the height of self-control (except when it comes to the disorder of passions), but the place where I can no longer measure my act or my being. This is certainly one of the many affirmations, as high as they are vivid, where it manifests itself that, unlike major Eastern thoughts, the summit of self-fulfillment and contact with the Absolute is not reached by the extinction or abolition of desire, but by its exacerbation. . . . This certainly mystical dimension of the altar of the heart has considerable philosophical weight because what it highlights is a model of interiority that cannot be transposed into a thought of subjectivity. (Chrétien 2014, 135–36)

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“The altar of the heart” is a metaphor Chrétien borrows from medieval mysticism. It designates the most inner dimension of the person at once, that is, the transcendent depth from which life and desire emerge and the elevation—figured by the altar—to her utmost possibility of existence, namely transfiguration. This relation between depth, elevation, and transfiguration shows the de-measure (démesure) of desire and explains how it relates to the phenomenon of true joy. Most importantly, this correlation shows that the latter does not amount to an ecstatic epiphany but rather immerges itself in the depth of the world to help it move forward. This bears consequences on the sense of dwelling mentioned earlier on. Generative interiority entails that the individualization of our body through its location does not coincide with the individuation of the embodied self through its emotions, motivations, and actions: “We are not where our body stands, we are where our dominant desire carries us.” (Chrétien 2014, 198). CONCLUSION This dual aspect of our incarnation—infused paradoxically with an inexhaustible desire and a capacity (dunamis) for individuation—proves the correlation between fragility and hope: “hope is the luminous face of fragility. For she who could give everything to herself would have no need to hope” (Chrétien 2014, 166–67). Such a philosophical approach turns Chrétien’s experiential metaphysics into a phenomenological ethics of the wounded self rooted in ontological humility. Ultimately, his contribution to contemporary phenomenology may then offer a new understanding of the concept of the “minimal self.” Far from being reduced to a logical or transcendental condition to investigate and elucidate our experiences, this minimal self surrenders to a movement of dispossession to embrace the fruitful possibilities of her vulnerability and welcome, responsively, and responsibly, the vulnerability of others. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ballan, Joseph. 2010. “Between Call and Voice—The Antiphonal Thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien.” In Words of Life. New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology. Eds. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba. New York: Fordham University Press. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2010. “Chrétien on the call that wounds.” In Words of Life. New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology. Eds. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Bergson, Henri. 2013. Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion. Paris: PUF. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 1990. La Voix Nue. Phénoménologie de la Promesse. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1998. L’Arche de la Parole. Paris: PUF. ———. 2000. Le Regard de l’Amour. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. ———. 2002. Saint Augustin et les Actes de Parole. Paris: PUF. ———. 2007a. La Joie spacieuse. Essai sur la Dilatation. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. ———. 2007b. Répondre. Figures de la Réponse et de la Responsabilité. Paris: PUF. ———. 2014. L’Espace Intérieur. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. ———. 2017. Fragilité. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Gschwantner, Christina M. 2013. Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press. Janicaud, Dominique. 2009. La Phénoménologie dans tous ses États. Paris: Gallimard. Lavelle, Louis. 1955. De l’Intimité spirituelle. Paris: Aubier. ———. 1932. Réflexions sur le Désir. In Bulletin de l’Association Fénelon. Paris. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2001. En découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin. ———. 1990. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’Extériorité. Paris: Livre de Poche. ———. 1990. Autrement qu’Être ou Au-Delà de l’Essence. Paris: Livre de Poche. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Don Landes New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. De l’Interprétation. Paris: Seuil. Spinoza, Baruch. 2018. Ethics Proved in Geometrical Order. Edited by Matthew J. Kisner. Translated by Michael Silverthorne and Matthew J. Kisner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinbock, Anthony. 2009. Phenomenology & Mysticism. The Verticality of Religious Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Strasser, Stephan. 1977. Phenomenology of Feeling. An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart. Translated by Robert E. Wood. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

PART II

Desire, Drives, and Imagination

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Seize Hold of the Hunger Simone Weil’s Ethical Eros Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Simone Weil’s life and writings are often described in terms of asceticism, stoicism, and an ethos of purity. Such qualifiers are not without merit and extensive evidence; indeed, her own premature death at age thirty-four could be considered as proof of the sort of infinite demand she placed upon herself to give her full attention to suffering others, even at the expense of her own needs and health. Yet there is also a complementary erotic dynamism that is affirmed and revealed in the metaphysical and ethical articulations of her letters and her notebooks. In fact, this chapter argues that for Weil, the marker of a life lived in accordance with truth is the persistent seizure of longing, which serves as a reminder of the real features of human existence: limitations, creatureliness, and vulnerability. Such real desire stands in contrast to the various objects of our longing, which we tend to fictionalize, according to Weil: “Hunger; we imagine different foods; but the hunger itself is real; we must seize hold of the hunger” (Weil 2004, 28). In embracing this hunger—an erotic energy that she compares to “looking”—we simultaneously consent to the inconsumable nature of the being before us; desire maintains our orientation to the Good and continues to affirm our own deficiencies. Desire humbles us. While Weil’s notion of ethical longing-as-looking can be traced to Platonic eros typified in dialogues like Symposium and Phaedrus, it is clear that her emphasis on hunger/desire (as animation for moral attention) raises difficult questions about how hungry bodies can find the energy to sustain looking; exhaustion would appear to be inevitable. Moreover, perpetual desire for the Good that is just out of reach seems to have structural similarities to contemporary neoliberal orientations internalized in the pursuit of endless “opportunities for growth.” This chapter will therefore proceed by 61

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firstly, examining the basic structure of desire in Weil’s philosophy; secondly, taking up a critical analysis of Weilian desire, especially through examining exhaustion caused by protracted desire along with the possible support such desire lends to neoliberal energies and projects; and finally, considering how Weilian desire, reformed by ideas from Alexis Shotwell and Luce Irigaray, may avoid the trappings of an ethos of purity as well as the fatigue that stems from such an ethos. Despite her own personal austerity, in the end, I propose an enlarged understanding of Weilian desire that reads ethical eros as an offspring of wonder, a mode of attentive and self-sustaining “space of freedom between the subject and the world” (Irigaray 1993, 76). WEILIAN DESIRE: EROTIC ENERGY WITHOUT CONSUMMATION It is well known that Simone Weil’s reflections on a number of concepts, such as justice, beauty, science, and mathematics, were heavily influenced by the ancient Greeks. Her descriptions of desire (eros) and its role in an ethically attuned life are likewise inspired by Greek thought, particularly Plato’s “middle dialogues” like Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus. In her view, desire is a kind of energy directed toward something which the desirer lacks, revealing an incompleteness in the lover/desirer. As Anne Carson puts it, “Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it” (Carson 2000, 11). Desire, then, is an attraction founded on a sensible void, but this pull can be in relation to objects that are more or less noble or base. For both Weil and Plato, humans fundamentally desire the kind of wholeness characterizing what is beautiful, true, and good (Weil reads this as synonymous with God); the problem is that we often confuse and conflate inferior/base objects with what is absolutely good. In her essay “God in Plato,” Weil writes, The love of God is the root and foundation of Plato’s philosophy. Fundamental idea: love oriented towards its proper object, that is to say, towards perfection, puts the lover in contact with the only absolutely real reality. . . . Symposium: “It is not true to say that a man cherishes what belongs to himself (no egoism). There is no object of desire for man except the good.” [Symposium, 205e–206a] (Weil 1968, 101)

It is constitutive of desire to seek to access and consume the objects of that desire; wanting is at least initially experienced as an urge to possess, even to incorporate into my being. Of course, the paradox with desire is that as soon as we have the object of our desire, we no longer want it, by definition.

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However, the good, which we are sensibly drawn to via the seduction of the beautiful, is a source of our erotic energy that, for one who is attentive, simultaneously compels a detached orientation toward the beloved who reflects this good. Weil, following Plato, contends that true beauty can transform our base desires (e.g., lust for physical bodies, for monetary rewards, etc.) into noble desires for the good, and this transformation will yield a contemplative attitude in the desiring subject. In particular, the attraction we have toward pure beauty is joined with a refusal to overtake and consume it: “One is both attracted and kept at a distance,” Weil writes (Weil 1968, 124). The absolutely good/beautiful commands a reverence in the attentive subject that means keeping one’s distance for fear of damaging or polluting the purity of what is loved. For Weil, it is imperative, then, that we fasten onto this sort of attraction, for it implies moral attention and brings about behavior that respects the integrity and freedom of others. The question is whether we are able to recognize glimpses of absolute beauty or goodness in the things and beings we desire; if we do not or cannot see beauty piercing through what we love (or for Plato, if our souls have forgotten the forms of Beauty and Goodness), then there is nothing to hold us back in our quest to consume; we see only opportunities for our own gratification. It is sometimes even the case that a person seeks to consume and possess what is truly beautiful, an orientation that Plato and Weil recognized constitutes evil and depravity.1 Ann Pirruccello has helpfully described Weil’s concept of eros as a “psychic energy” that not only “long[s] for what is absent” but also “interprets the world and itself” (Pirruccello 1997, 82). In this way, our many and varied individual desires express views we hold (but may not be conscious) of ourselves and the world around us, but these views may be myopic. Weil also ascribed the First Law of Thermodynamics to the nature of eros; desire is never created or destroyed, but it changes form. For instance, if desire aims at a noble object but is frustrated in reaching that end, it often happens that the desire is “‘degraded’ or lowered in quality” (83) and aim. Consider the following illustration: a teacher begins her career with the desire to transform students through the power of attentive, passionate, liberal arts learning. She desires her students’ good, hoping that, through encouraging them to embark on a lifelong path of learning, they each discover a path to eudaimonia and come to construct meaningful lives and a more humane world. But early in her career, the teacher discovers that bureaucratic tasks required of her by the school system leave little time to prepare thoughtful lessons; she is instructed to standardize her classes and focus on preparing students for tests; her school is increasingly defunded, which means she must take on more students with fewer resources; she is discouraged from teaching subjects like literature and philosophy that are “useless” and instead to focus on skill sets to prepare

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students to be wage earners, and administrative decisions are made to reinforce this new mission. While these and other obstacles may not entirely extinguish the teacher’s desire for her students’ good, the energy focused on this more abstract and noble goal will certainly be diminished and transmuted into a different kind of energy. Perhaps this new desire is the teacher’s desire to keep her job in a climate hostile to liberal arts education, or perhaps the desire is redirected toward the improvement of her own mental health, which has deteriorated under these conditions. In any case, Weil would argue that it is unfortunate but as natural as gravity for the teacher’s desire to be redirected toward more attainable objects in the face of such ongoing, systemic, and significant challenges. Pirruccello astutely notes that “human desire degrades because desires tend to be absolute . . . instead of desiring things subject to certain conditions” (ibid.). In other words, we have a tendency to desire what is impossible to attain (which would characterize Weil’s notion of the absolute Good or God) rather than to desire things conditionally or in relation to limits. So when desire for the absolute inevitably fails to attain its object, not only does this psychic energy revert to more attainable ends at times, but it also “becomes less capable of thought and love, and more of an expression of fantasy” (ibid.). The corresponding attitude also becomes less reverential and more consumptive. It is for this reason that Weil says that we must go to the source of our desires and see them plainly in order to detach ourselves from the fantastical objects on which we are fixated. The desires, as energy, are facts, but the objects of our attraction are frequently imaginative. In the process of detaching from these falsehoods, Weil tells us that “there is an indescribable wrenching apart of the soul at the separation of a desire from its object. This wrenching apart is the condition of truth” (Weil 2004, 203–4). In saying that these objects are falsehoods, Weil means that, because of the overreaching nature of our desire (which is really aimed at a transcendent Good), we often project qualities of the absolute upon what is limited and relative; we deceive ourselves about the people, objects, etc., that we love in an effort to convince ourselves that we will have some sort of final satisfaction. Thus, we must check our attachments to the things of this world with the lucidity of mindful contextualization and proportionate thinking, insofar as our desires are infused with outsized illusions we have constructed about the value and quality of the objects of our obsessions. In the story that the comic Aristophanes told in Plato’s Symposium, when the two human “halves” find their missing half after roaming the ends of the earth, they immediately cling to one another, seem to belong to one another, and never want to be apart. “These are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another,” Plato writes through the voice of Aristophanes (Plato 2006, 192c/49). That is,

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despite having found what we believed we were ultimately searching for (e.g., that other person who perfectly “completes” us), Aristophanes notes that “it’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle” (Plato 2006, 192d/ 49–50). Weil also describes our general insatiability as humans, writing, “One always wants something more,” but also: “We have only to imagine all our desires satisfied; after a time we should become discontented. We should want something else and we should be miserable through not knowing what to want” (Weil 1968, 148). This “something else” is, for Plato and Weil, “the Good forever,” or immortality (Plato 2006, 207a/67). But again, we too often make the mistake of ascribing immortality to limited beings. Thus, Weil explains that tearing our desire away from limited beings involves knowing with our whole being that those whom we love are mortal. This strategy is representative of the kind of sober reality-checking we must continually practice to liberate eros (and our consumptive, controlling tendencies) from those objects we tend to fictionalize. It is clear, then, that Weil advocates fixating onto the desire as such, for when we really attend to the objects of our love as they are, in our unsentimental state we find that their reality is sufficient to detach us from the obsession with having. While the objects may be illusory in our way of wanting them, the desire or hunger we feel is ultimately for the good and therefore is very real. Taken to its fullest logical extent, this recommendation to “seize onto the hunger” means embracing a kind of object-less, empty desire. The following passages are representative of Weil’s notion of ideal, pure desire: “It is a question of ordering the various forms of good in relation to our desire, and to do that we have got to have fixed our attention to its fullest capacity on to our desire in its purity, in its emptiness. . . . Thus, all we can do is to detach our desire from all forms of good and wait” (Weil 2004, 550). Somewhat later in her notebooks, she continues in the same vein: “‘The extinction of desire’ (as in Buddhism); or detachment; or amor fati; or the desire for absolute good—it always amounts to the same thing: emptying desire of all content, finality of all content” (ibid.). But the problem with perpetual desire that is empty of all content is that it is not conducive to yielding a stable, peaceful subject. On the contrary, the ever-desiring subject who has renounced falsified objects of love is constantly hungering and in agon; but this is a sign of living in the truth. Weil offers an illustration: A little child who suddenly perceives that he has lost his mother in the street runs about, crying, in all directions; but he is wrong. If he had the sense and courage to stay where he is and wait, she would find him sooner. We must only

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wait and call out. Not call upon someone, while we still do not know if there is anyone; but cry out that we are hungry and want bread. . . . Before one has eaten, it is neither needful nor particularly useful to believe in bread. What is essential is to know that one is hungry; and this is not belief, it is absolutely certain knowledge which can only be obscured by lies. All those who believe that food exists, or will one day be produced, in this world, are lying. (Weil 1968, 159)

How can such a (truthful) orientation be sustainable? How can one keep going? Or rather, how can one stand still and wait? Weil admits, “Life as it is given to people is unbearable without recourse to lying” (Weil 1968, 149). Beyond the question of an ethical orientation that is feasible and sustainable, this sort of empty desire has its analogue in the unattainable career and “personal growth” goals of contemporary, late-capitalist societies which are arguably a cause of growing alienation and serve as a disguise for underlying nihilism. That is, Weil’s desiring-subject potentially has some unexpected and problematic overlaps with the neoliberal “achievement” subject, who has been described by socio-political-cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. I turn now to potential intersections between Weilian desire and neoliberal striving, as well as how the former may be extricated from conflation with the latter. In the final section of this chapter, I will consider a modification to Weil’s notion of objectless desire that could render it more sustainable and less bound to a framework of exhausting purity. DESIRE WITHOUT END IN/AND THE ACHIEVEMENT SOCIETY Protracted desire without any sort of consummation becomes exhaustion, just as hunger without feeding becomes starvation, or striving without real, meaningful accomplishment becomes burnout. Weil understood that this characteristic was endemic to desire: “Desire limited in advance by fatigue. To hook one’s desire on to what does not become fatigued. What does not become fatigued is to start with the Immobile Mover” (Weil 2004, 103). But throughout her writings, Weil establishes the essential inaccessibility of this Mover, or God, or the Good: “It is impossible for God to be present in creation except in the form of absence” (Weil 2004, 419). She also advises, “It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God. He has only to refuse his love to everything which is not God” (Weil 1968, 158). Thus, it seems that hooking our desire onto the indefatigable is in actuality an operation of unhooking our deep attachments from relative, temporary goods. In this sense, as we have already seen, Weilian desire is oriented toward absence, toward a sensible void. And while this absent Good (if it exists) may not, in itself, become

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fatigued, it is unclear how, experientially, a person who desires it with consistency will not soon become exhausted. That is, the good-desiring person, who clings to that hunger without accepting “relative” or “impure” goods to fill the void or produce contentment temporarily, is one who becomes depleted psychically, spiritually, and physically. Weil tells us, though, that there must be no compensation, for it is the void that purifies desire. The experience of the void is not sustainable for very long on our own; she admits this much when she acknowledges that orienting our desire toward an elusive but pure good is a kind of “death,” while opting for erotic investment in the things of this world is a choice for “falsehood and life” (Weil 1968, 158). The reprieve from the sense of death must therefore be one of two things: either the intervention of a moment of grace from outside ourselves that “resurrects” us—“A man has only to persist in this refusal [of things other than God], and one day or another God will come to him,” (ibid.) she promises—or a redirection of this absolute desire toward relative, “impure goods” in the world. Of course, Weil is unequivocal in her rejection of the latter as any type of real solution. To desire things in this world as if they are ultimate is to fall into the trap of illusion and idolatry. Evoking Plato, she writes, “The illusion concerning the things of this world doesn’t relate to their existence, but to their finality and their value” (Weil 2004, 549). Furthermore, when we refuse our love to “everything which is not God,” we recognize “that all the goods of this world . . . are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually within us for an infinite and perfect good” (Weil 1968, 158). This ethico-religious hunger for an elusive good/God demands an intense degree of commitment and can become a display of self-consuming devotion and abstinence. In the absence of a perceptible beloved-master who would confirm to us the value of our desire and ideally requite it, it is easy to imagine that devotees would stretch themselves indefinitely toward the mere possibility of achieving grace or spiritual blessing. In this light, such desire for the (absent) absolute can take on a similar logic as the desire that characterizes neoliberal subjects in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “achievement society.” This achievement society, according to Han, is structured around self-exploitation in our pursuit of continual development toward ever-elusive rewards. What gets normalized in the achievement subject, though, is an endless affirmation, positivity, or I can, undergirded by one’s desire for indefinite self-transformation, with opportunities for improvement that multiply at every turn. Thus, repeated self-affirmation oriented toward a positive ideal like “success” hides the fact that one is constantly at war with oneself, challenging oneself to become more. Self-fulfillment becomes self-exploitation, and vice versa. One feels they are never enough, and this essential dissatisfaction with one’s being (and being in general) founds an open-ended desire

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for growth. There is never any real satisfaction, though. In achievement society, every so-called “benchmark” turns out to be a springboard for the next (imperative) level of accomplishment. This psychic structure is, I would argue, similar in some major respects to Weilian desire, which, as we know, is oriented toward that which perpetually eludes it (the absent God or the transcendent Good) and away from what is immediate and tangible. In neither case is there possibility for decisive conclusion or consummation, even though such rewards are assured to us. Weil, for instance, tells us that “desire alone draws God down,” (Weil 2001, 61) but such an advent would not be a matter of our will or control; there is no guarantee of a result associated with our desire (despite Weil’s promises), and again, our experience of God is primarily as impersonal absence—much like a faceless, managerial bureaucracy. “Instead,” as Han notes, remarking on the achievement subject, “one works into the open” (Han 2015, 38). This means that in both cases there is “a crisis of gratification” (ibid.) wherein one cannot count on receiving meaningful reward, recognition, or sense of accomplishment; there is no final consummation for the hungering, laboring subject. This fact is integral to Weilian ethical desire; Weil is explicit in saying that we should refuse all compensations and consolations, including religion (Weil 2004, 238), that would satiate our hunger for the Good in an ephemeral and illusory way. While Weil posits an absent God to whom we should nevertheless direct our desire, Han recognizes that the achievement subject “hearkens mainly to itself” in the absence of a commanding, managing Other. He explains, “The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination [Herrschaftsinstanz] forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself” (Han 2015, 11). But rather than this absence consisting in a form of liberation, this late-modern subject “switches into narcissistic self-relation” and ironically, in the absence of external recognition or compulsion, “feels compelled to perform more and more” (Han 2015, 38). This subject is then left with a sense of inadequacy feeding an endless desire for accomplishment, while similarly, the Weilian subject acutely feels her own incompleteness and desire for a Good that she glimpses in the world but can never quite realize. Hence, there is a temptation in both contexts to contrive gratification: for the achievement subject, this tends to reside in the idea that one is progressing toward a higher plateau (like promotion and job security); for the Weilian subject, this might mean that “we manufacture for ourselves a God who smiles on us” (Weil 2004, 124). Any treat will do. In either case, the closure that is sought is not actually found, but it is fictionalized or else received on a superficial and symbolic level (e.g., one is given a “promotion” without

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a pay raise). Han explains that for the achievement subject, “The socially conditioned impossibility of objectively valid, definitive forms of closure drives the subject into narcissistic self-repetition; . . . the feeling of having achieved a goal never occurs” (Han 2015, 39–40). This absence of closure benefits free market capitalism as well as religious attention and devotion by keeping adherents invested in their own unending energetic expenditures and depletion, ultimately and ironically making them more dependent on external forces. For Weil, attachment to an object constitutes an expenditure of energy, but when the object disappears, the energy is essentially released into a vacuum, the void. This, she explains, “is a partial death” (Weil 2004, 472). This desiring-subject is hollowed out via her commitment. Similarly, in speaking of the achievement-subject, Han summarizes: The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself. (Han 2015, 42)

This final point in which the energy of the achievement-subject is characterized as being consumed in a “rat race” raises an important distinction between this subject and the Weilian desiring subject. On the surface, it would seem that both are subjects are futurally oriented, both aiming toward some distant but elusive goal. In fact, Weil describes desire as “an incoercible force springing forward towards the future; if barriers are placed in its way, it changes direction” (Weil 2004, 159). However, in actuality, the Weilian subject has no proper “goal,” and in desiring the (absent) Good, she does not seek it out, much less expend efforts in a rat race. Her approach is one of refusal, negation, and abstention of everything that is not Good, in contrast to the achievement subject’s positivity (the “I can”). While the achievement subject is oriented in a highly affirmative way toward the future, the Weilian desiring subject treats the future as one of the (falsified) objects from which we must detach. She writes: All we can do is to decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We are well aware that the good which we possess at present, in the form of wealth, power, consideration, friends, the love of those we love, the well-being of those we love, and so on, is not sufficient; yet we believe that on the day when we get a little more we shall be satisfied. We believe this because we lie to ourselves. (Weil 1968, 148)

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Consequently, we are left with the realization that divesting our emotions and attachments from future dreams is the most rational and honest disposition we could embody. Instead of futural investment, the proper comportment in desiring-withoutan-object is, for Weil, waiting (attente). She explains that one who has detached her love from false objects in favor of pure goodness will “stay motionless, without searching, waiting in immobility and without even trying to know what she awaits” (Weil 1968, 159). In doing this, Weil believes that “God will come all the way” down to such a person; we must simply wait and announce our hunger. Seen in this light, Weilian desire is strangely fixed to the present, while the future (which can only be an imaginary projection) is renounced through attentive waiting. Weil enjoins us to “apply to the present the point of that desire within us which corresponds to finality” (Weil 2004, 618). In this way, a connection with eternity can be fostered. While waiting may be antithetical to the achievement subject’s eager and invested disposition in pursuing her goals, this does not mean that waiting bears no connection to other illusory and therefore dangerous projects. That is, even though the experience of waiting often leads to frustration and fatigue, it can equally yield a doubling down on the commitment to the beloved, no matter how erroneous or falsified the object of love is. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes one’s love of nation as an idealized love that never fully reaches its object or is gratified by a reciprocal love, for the idealized nation is a fiction, and a collectivity cannot properly love. She underscores the surprising result of this unique form of unrequited love: “Even though love is a demand for reciprocity, it is also an emotion that lives with the failure of that demand often through an intensification of its affect (so, if you do not love me back, I may love you more as the pain of that non-loving is a sign of what it means not to have this love)” (Ahmed 2015, 130). Consider here how the Weilian subject who is desperate and hungering for a sign from God receives only silence2 . . . and continues to wait nonetheless. Weil admits that love signifies our finitude and even our misery, and this is a fact we must appreciate, “rejoicing” that we are “nothing” and therefore compelled to desire “something other than ourselves” (Weil 2004, 274). Beyond the intensification of affect in these cases of unrequited love, there can also be deepened attachment involved in waiting, especially as the waiting acquires a longer duration. Ahmed depicts this phenomenon with regard to love of nation, but any other object, imagined or real, could be substituted: So the failure of the nation to “give back” the subject’s love works to increase the investment in the nation. The subject ‘stays with’ the nation, despite the absence of return and the threat of violence, as leaving would mean recognizing

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that the investment of national love over a lifetime has brought no value. One loves the nation, then, out of hope and with nostalgia for how it could have been. One could even think of national love as a form of waiting. To wait is to extend one’s investment and the longer one waits the more one is invested, that is, the more time, labor and energy has been expended. The failure of return extends one’s investment. If love functions as the promise of return, then the extension of investment through the failure of return works to maintain the ideal through its deferral into the future. (Ahmed 2015, 131)

This extended investment into what does not yield anticipated results is also commonly known as a “sunk cost fallacy,” but central to this phenomenon is the erotic energy that is focused in both the past (as yearning “nostalgia”) and into the future (as hope or “deferral” of the ideal). In this sense, Ahmed’s description of national love as a form of waiting reveals the temptations that Weil understands are lurking in the periphery of detached, objectless desire. That is why Weil issues warnings such as: “Only the past and future hinder the salutary effect of affliction by offering an unlimited field for imaginary elevations. That is why the renunciation of the past and the future comes first among all renunciations” (Weil 2004, 244). We typically fall into nostalgia or hope because these serve as coping mechanisms when we feel hollowed out in our unanswered desires; they fill the void. To return to our earlier example, the well-intentioned teacher will find it extraordinarily difficult to focus on the present and challenging conditions in her classroom, especially when her desire for the students’ good begins to appear as an absurdity in the face of greater resistance to her vocation every day. It is easier for her to fall into romanticizing her own education at a young age, or imagining that reform will eventually come to her school system. What is unendurable is to contemplate that the present might stretch on forever as it is. And Weil concurs: “Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in Time. We should prevent it becoming diluted in order that it may be intolerable” (Weil 2004, 252). The idea here is that attending to the real intolerability of a set of conditions will enable us to respond more honestly, appropriately, and fiercely than we would if we were somewhat protected from the excruciating reality. Such attention and desire rooted to the present does not afford comfort or an ability to cope with the extreme psychic, moral, and possibly spiritual fatigue that would necessarily be faced. While the previously described achievement subject and the nationalist both receive supplemental energy from imagined futures or romanticized pasts to sustain their desires, thus preventing them from immediate despair, the Weilian lover has no such recourse; she is entirely vulnerable in her desire. The feasibility of this orientation thus presents itself as a serious and practical question.

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In the discourse of neoliberalism, a subject’s coping abilities, adaptation, and resiliency are extolled, particularly when it serves economic ends. As should be evident by now, these are traits that are explicitly antithetical to Weil’s ethico-religious elucidation of desire, even if at first glance it appears that neoliberal ambition and Weilian desire possess similar psychical structures. What initially appeared to be similar—the open-ended hunger for something that continually evades us and prolongs our desire—is differentiated along the lines of disparate attitudes toward vulnerability. That is, while Weilian desire reinforces a deep sense of vulnerability through attention to the present, suffering world, the achievement subject is constructed on a premise of autonomy, individual fortification, and expansiveness into future projects in an effort to shelter from the real precariousness of his current situation. Put differently, neoliberal values, energies, and aims are founded on illusion, for vulnerability is a condition of life itself. As Judith Butler has written, “The condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other, even if there is no other there, and no support for our lives, signifies a primary helplessness and need, one to which any society must attend” (Butler 2006, 31–32). EARTHLY DESIRING Let us return to the original tension that arises when we contemplate Weil’s idea of desire, so often framed as hunger: To lose somebody: we suffer at the thought that the dead one, the absent one should have become something imaginary, something false. But the longing we have for him is not imaginary. We must go down into ourselves, where the desire which is not imaginary resides. Hunger; we imagine different foods; but the hunger itself is real; we must seize hold of the hunger. (Weil 2004, 28)

As we have seen, “seizing hold of the hunger” has at least four primary conditions: First, we must recognize our innate desire for ultimate good which we find lacking in ourselves and in the world around us; second, we must loosen our attachments to objects, persons, or events that supplant pure goodness and which we tend to fictionalize as absolute; third, our resulting desire for the good will manifest as a mode of attentive waiting, having renounced distractions like nostalgia and futural projections; and fourth, such desire will be intricately connected to recognizing vulnerability3—both our own and that of others. It is only under this set of conditions that this erotic energy becomes ethical, for Weil. Under these terms it ceases to be the greedy

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and consumptive disposition typical of tyrants, abusers, and capitalists and instead becomes a posture of restraint and respect for the freedom of others. Still, while this depiction of ethical eros is theoretically sound, there remains the problem of its practical feasibility. As Weil herself acknowledges, the fatigue that coincides with detached desire is real, and it takes a toll. “We have to,” in the words of Lissa McCullough, “sustain a vulnerable emotionalintellectual response if we are to remain human and humane, yet an excess of emotion risks rendering us too traumatized to respond at all” (McCullough, 2017, 178). Desire emptied of content—the waiting for ultimate answers that too often brings only deafening silence—is self-consuming and potentially traumatizing. Moreover, the ethical choice that Weil suggests is available to us is stark and unforgiving: we can look, i.e., “seize the hunger,” or we can eat, i.e., “fill the void” with impure substitutes for the good. Weil’s notion of desire is profoundly shaped by Plato’s absolutist metaphysics; and she acknowledges, for instance, that “the path [of desire] shown in the Symposium is the quest of perfection,” (Weil 1968, 129)—while the alternative is the implicit acceptance of darkness, falsehood, and injustice. Her endorsement of this Platonic view of eros and the resulting ethos places ultimate value on the responsibility of the individual to make decisions at every turn that will, in her view, announce the subject’s freedom of consent to goodness and elevation, or else her object-like obedience to moral gravity and abasement. Any quest for perfection, though, is highly susceptible to exhaustion and defeatist attitudes. When a person cannot sustain the energy required for desiring in the void, or when they fall short, they often resign themselves to failure and give up the quest altogether. We clearly need an approach to desire that is more pragmatic and sustainable, one that takes fatigue into account. Kenneth Jason Wardley notes that reflection upon fatigue “represents a call to impurity” and is “an affirmation of life” (Wardley 2012, 135). Is there something to be said for a critical analysis of the quest for perfection and purity? Weil’s uncompromising either-or approach is firmly established within what Alexis Shotwell, in her seminal book Against Purity, calls a “metaphysics of purity” (Shotwell 2016, 16). The metaphysics of purity and its associated “purity practices” consist of several elements, but a key feature is the production of “normative formulations” that “attempt to delineate and delimit the world into something separable, disentangled, and homogeneous” (Shotwell 2016, 13–15). Purity paradigms reflect a fear of messiness, disorder, disintegration, ambiguity, complexity, multiplicity, and even interdependence of beings. Purity thinking finds itself in philosophies that operate on the grounds of strict and absolutist categories, especially with normative claims, like Weil’s dualistic notion that we either (ethically) “look” at or (unethically) “eat” beauty (Weil 2001, 105). Significantly, Shotwell notes, “The metaphysics of purity is necessarily a fragile fiction, a conceit under constant

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but disavowed threat—to affirm a commitment to purity is in one move to glance at the entanglement and coconstitution, the impurity, of everything and to pretend that things are separate and unconnected” (Shotwell 2016, 16). And beyond being a “fiction”—a charge that would undoubtedly register concern with Weil—purity thinking is problematic for Shotwell because it is a “de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair” (Shotwell 2016, 9) that effectively shuts down possibilities to engage the messy world with renewed attention and energy. It is clear that the Weilian notion of desire as an attitude of looking and waiting, which she so often opposed to a consumptive disposition toward the world, could not be possible except through a finite, vulnerable, hungering body that eats. Even though it is likely that Weil meant “looking” and “eating” on a mostly metaphorical and less literal level, her own well-documented habits of refusing food while giving attention to suffering others and declining the Eucharist out of concern for her own impurity, raise the possibility that she also saw physical eating as a barrier to goodness. Indeed, in a letter to Father Perrin, she confessed, “It is precisely the impure mixture in me of supernatural and evil that I fear,” and she followed this admission with an endorsement of her own deprivation: The relation of hunger to food is far less complete, to be sure, but just as real as is that of the act of eating. It is perhaps not inconceivable that in a being with certain natural propensities, a particular temperament, a given past, a certain vocation, and so on, the desire for and deprivation of the sacraments might constitute a contact more pure than actual participation. (Weil 2001, 13)

In passages like these, Weil seems to epitomize the purist who is terrified of her own moral contamination and the contagion that desiring participation in the world threatens. But there are other concepts in her writings that offer a much more nuanced approach to desiring the good, like metaxu—those things, people, and events that are intermediaries or bridges between us and the good. Greater emphasis on this concept, in conjunction with a disposition of wondering, might just deliver Weil’s thought from the trappings of purity thinking. Metaxu: the created, particular things and beings that Weil regards as blessings which sustain us and make human life possible—other people, animals, the glass of wine in the evening, our books, our home, our cultivated traditions, and so on. It is “evil to destroy” such things, according to her, and it is proper that “limited desire” should be directed toward them. “Limited desires are in harmony with the world; desires which contain the infinite are

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not” (Weil 2004, 38). Limited desires are those that want something in relation to, or insofar as, or on condition that. There is, then, an expression of humility inherent in desiring in this way, for it is a recognition of our own proper limitations in relation to the existence and needs of others. Weil notes, for instance, that to “desire that a human being should live is to desire that oneself should be limited” (ibid.). We can desire these metaxu insofar as they are finite, vulnerable, and impure beings, like us; under this criteria there is no self-deceit involved. We can even recall Ahmed’s point about national love as an invested waiting-upon a (fictional) future ideal. Weil acknowledges that one’s country can actually be an object of love, as metaxu, “so long as it is love for what is, not for what might be in the future; so long as it is a person’s love for the harmony which knits together the collective body of citizens, and not a participation in the love of the Great Beast for itself” (Weil 2004, 618; emphasis mine). When we have come to regard these finite, earthly objects of our desire as metaxu, we are better able to see the relationships others have with their loves, and this contextualization means that we are on our way to attentive detachment in our desire. There is a final suggestion I would offer to temper Weil’s purist tendencies in conceptualizing desire, an attitude that seems befitting of a relation to metaxu—and that is wondering. Weil did not write much, if any, about wonder as a phenomenon, although she wrote her dissertation on Descartes, who regarded wonder as “the first of all the passions” (Descartes 1985, 350). In reflecting on his remark, Luce Irigaray writes that wonder is perhaps the contemplative “moment of illumination . . . between the subject and the world” (Irigaray 1993, 77). As the initial spark of interest in what is other or unfamiliar, we might say that wonder precedes and even gives birth to desire. Alongside desire, wonder might be the intermediary “between mortal and immortal, men and gods, creatures and creators” (Irigaray 1993, 82)—in other words, with eros, it expands our senses, bringing into focus the details of the ordinary world around us that we have overlooked or tuned out. Wonder is both a response to and a stimulus for surprise, bringing us into an inquisitive and erotic relation to the present that feels “fresh.” When we wonder about something, we are focused on the particularities at hand, and there is joy in the act of wondering. Wondering does not lend itself to exhaustion, either, in the way that waiting does by itself; as we know, children can wonder endlessly about the world around them without showing signs of fatigue. To the contrary, wondering can feel energizing. Yet wondering does not consist in consuming the world, and it is not mutually exclusive with waiting. In fact, erotic waiting (in Weil’s sense) is a great partner to wondering. As Irigaray has noted, “In a way, wonder and desire remain the spaces of freedom between the subject and the world” (Irigaray 1993, 1976).

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Through wondering, we are moved to be ever more observant, to keep looking, listening, smelling, touching, and tasting—and receiving. In the succeeding moments of illumination that are sparked by our wonder, we discover an unexpected reciprocity—that the world will reveal more of itself to us if only we wait, in the recognition of the vulnerability and hunger for good that we fundamentally share with this surprising world. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Sara. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Carson, Anne. 2000. Eros the Bittersweet. Funks Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Descartes, René. 1985. “The Passions of the Soul.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I. Translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McCullough, Lissa. 2017. “Simone Weil’s Analysis of Oppression: From La Boétie to the Neoliberal Present.” In Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, edited by Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, 167–85. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International. Pirruccello, Ann. “‘Gravity’ in the Thought of Simone Weil.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LVII, No. 1 (March 1997): 73–93. Plato. 2006. Symposium. In Plato on Love, edited by C. D. C. Reeve, 26–87. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wardley, Kenneth Jason. 2012. “‘A Weariness of the Flesh’: Towards a Theology of Boredom and Fatigue.” In Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life, edited by Katherine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare, 117–36. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company. Weil, Simone. 2004. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Translated by Arthur Wills. New York: Routledge. ———. 1968. On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God. Translated by Richard Rees. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Perennial Classics.

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NOTES 11 For instance, Weil writes, “It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it.” Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 105. 22 “‘He will laugh at the trial of the innocent.’ Silence of God. The noises here below imitate this silence. They mean nothing.” Weil, Notebooks, 626. 33 I have in mind Judith Butler’s framing of vulnerability: “A vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee this will happen.” Furthermore, “vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject.” Precarious Life, 43.

Chapter 5

Sarah Kofman Irony and Self-Writing as Philosophical Practice Mélissa Thériault

How close can we link a philosopher’s life to her or his ideas? What is the impact of one’s personal path on the construction of an original philosophy? Which personal desires lay between the written lines of an abstract philosophical essay? Paris-born philosopher Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) put all those questions at the core of her original philosophy, in a net so closely connected with her exegetic work that it has long been underestimated. In the following pages, we shall sketch the main lines of her contribution to twentieth-century philosophy: 1) her early life marked by the Shoah and its influence on her exegetic work; 2) her complex relationship to the feminist issues (though she may clearly be seen as a feminist philosopher); 3) the key points of the severe criticism of the Western philosophical tradition she addresses. LIFE AND INFLUENCES Sarah Kofman grew in a family of Polish origin, with Yiddish as a mother tongue, which indeed would later influence her approach to language analysis (McDonald 1998, 186). Deeply affected by the deportation of her father she witnessed at age eight, she herself escaped death several times and lived as a Hidden Child during World War II, under the protection of her foster mother, “Mémé.” Mémé was equally inclined to make anti-Semitic comments in presence of young Sarah, as well as to be supportive of her desire to choose an intellectual life path (contrary to her biological mother). Kofman 79

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suffered permanent trauma and issues about filiation1 and cultural identification, whose impacts seem to be at the core of her work, and especially her autobiographical testament, Rue Ordener, rue Labat (1994). It is likely that her original thought grew on this experience and affected her relationship to language and writing to such an extent that it led her to develop a singular approach to philosophy: In . . . Rue Ordener, rue Labat, she returns to her childhood and the moment when her father, a rabbi, was taken from their home on rue Ordener by police and sent to Auschwitz. It chronicles her life during the war and the upheaval of a life in hiding. . . . Sarah Kofman tells of dramatic doubling that constituted her life in those years and propelled within her a search for models of understanding. (McDonald 1998, 191–92)

The precarious situation of the family led young Sarah to develop a tremendous memory: as she could not afford to buy books, she had to learn by heart those from the library in order to study. That very skill led her to stand out as a meticulous exegete of the European philosophical tradition, particularly as a specialist of Nietzsche and Freud’s work that she would know in the finest details. Enthusiastic about existentialist philosophy during her university years at prestigious École Normale Supérieure, she applied its principles in her personal and professional life. Subsequently, the influence of psychoanalysis grew on her quickly, which led her to develop through the years a new method of analysis in which she would integrate a radical Nietzschean perspectivism (in the sense that she would not only acknowledge that philosophy has always been the construction of interpretations, rather than a quest for objective truth). In an interview given a few months before her death, she proposed an overview of her trajectory and coined her contribution as a second-degree hermeneutics: What I could say after writing my nineteenth book, if I had to define myself (which I do not like to do . . .), is that my method is a second-degree hermeneutic. . . . Why second degree? Because there is already, by example, for Socrates, different authors who have already read Socrates in their own way. Socrates, who has not written himself, was therefore read through the texts of others, through Plato, Xenophon or Aristophanes, who have already made it an interpretation. Then there is my interpretation of their interpretation, which means I, in turn, have my very own Socrates. That’s why I call this method a seconddegree interpretation. (Guertin 2000, 54—my translation)

“Dynamiting from within” coins Kofman’s approach, according to Mathieu Frackowiak (2012) who sees her contribution as a counter-history of philosophy that aims to reread the history of philosophy with its own tools in order

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to show its own limits and margin of irrationality. Her “suspicious readings” (as she calls them) of canonical philosophical figures (Kant, Comte, Freud, Nietzsche) that she would read one against another, consist in considering the salient elements of their lives to reinterpret their theoretical propositions, a practice that is usually proscribed within the discipline. She spent most of her teaching career as a lecturer in the Sorbonne (where she was hired in 1971) and cofounded a new collection at Éditions Galilée, along with Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The group was united by common interests and friendship and was often referred to as “the gang of four.” For she would share many influences and ideas with her most notorious colleague, Kofman was often seen, at best, as Derrida’s “disciple”; the friendship with Derrida often overshadowed Kofman’s own work and she is often, still, perceived as an emulator, despite the marked theoretical differences with Derrida’s work. In fact, Kofman grew into the habit of questioning orthodoxies—including those of her friends. She would write with little regard to institutional constraints or habits by proposing a new narrative, a counter-history of philosophy in order to reintegrate into it the elements that are usually abstracted from it (physical and psychosomatic dimensions, laughter, and emotions). In this respect, she developed in her analysis an intuition expressed by Nietzsche according to which biographical and intellectual elements can never be clearly distinguished and are, on the contrary, intimately linked. They must, therefore, be exposed in order to access to a more accurate understanding of the subtext of any philosophical system (and most importantly: to outline the irrational margins of such systems). Kofman traveled a lot to give lectures (in the United States, namely, where her work is more studied than in her country of origin) and practiced drawing almost on a daily basis.2 Her writing could be described as “disheveled,” as it is characterized by a unique and ironic prose, as her “work weaves together philosophy and psychoanalysis, memory and history, a form of writing emerges close to literature that can be characterized as effecting selftranslation” (McDonald 1998, 186). Though an important part of it is now translated in many languages, the originality and value of her contribution remains underappreciated: it has been noted that “she had a marginal position in the French academic world” and that “even after having published nineteen books, she had no position as a tenured professor” (Hirvonen 2012, 146). Referring to a series of interviews of women philosophers led by Alice Jardine and Anne Menke, Ari Hirvonen explains that Another reason for her marginal position in French psychoanalysis was her resistance to Jacques Lacan. . . . In an interview, Kofman said that Lacan himself recognized the originality and importance of her work, but . . . the French

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Freudian school dominated by Lacan had enormous editorial power and it eliminated her works that did not quote Lacan or were not Lacanian enough. (Hirvonen 146, Jardine & Menke 1991, 109–10)

Writing was for Kofman a stressful process but that did not stop her from being very prolific, as she would publish one book a year on average for most of her career. Among her most notable philosophical essays, we may count: L’Énigme de la femme (1980), Le Respect des femmes (1982), Comment s’en sortir? (1983), Nietzsche et la métaphore (1983), L’Enfance de l’art (1985), Nietzsche et la scène philosophique (1986), Pourquoi rit-on? (1986), Socrate(s) (1989), but Explosions I & II (1992, 1993) stand out as she offers a complete and complex reading of Nietzsche’s work and intellectual offspring. As a meticulous reader of Nietzsche and Freud, she pinned numerous imprecise French translations from German and gave a more precise exegesis of their work. That expertise led her to publish Le Mépris des Juifs (1994), a bold refutation of accusations that Nietzsche was anti-Semitic, along as L’Imposture de la beauté (1995, posthumous). Some other essays differ in the approach, for instance, Autobiogriffures du Chat Murr d’Hoffmann (1984)—an analysis of a literary text—and Paroles suffoquées (1987), about writer Robert Antelme’s work, resistant and survivor of concentration camps, where she addressed a problem she was also struggling with: how can we tell the horror, when speaking hurts as much as remaining silent, when you may “die” (Rosenblum 2000, 114) for what you had to say is unbearable for the person who’s hearing the story? This very same question led her to tell her own story, that would unfortunately become her swan song, in Rue Ordener, rue Labat (1994). Indeed, her work remained overlooked or overshadowed by the autobiography she published a few months before her death by suicide on Nietzsche’s 150th anniversary. It was well known that Kofman had to struggle with chronic pain well before the release of Rue Ordener, rue Labat (1994), but it is likely that the controversy and reactions occasioned by her story added to her difficult health condition. The event struck the intellectual milieu in which many people attested her greatness, strong sense of humor, and important contribution to twentieth-century French philosophy. SARAH KOFMAN AS A “FEMINIST” Simply by her career path, Kofman offers a significant feminist contribution in a practical way, as her own Promethean route (from ward of the nation to prominent scholar) is indeed a model for young female scholars. In addition, she expressed herself transparently on her improbable social mobility in a way that could help new generations of philosophers to understand better

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existing power dynamics. However, she would not self-identify as a feminist, as she would confess in an interview, though she did put women in the core of her research. She suggested in an interview that the rejection of women from Western philosophy was there from the start, thereby stating that the problem had to be addressed in another way: I am not a committed feminist, what interests me is the woman within philosophy and the philosophers’ repression of femininity within them, and when they are no longer repressed, the transformation it brings to their own system. I show the same thing about Socrates: every time, whether it is for Nietzsche, for Kierkegaard or for Hegel, that’s what’s at stake. And then, symptomatically of this thing, it is for example already, the fate or the non-spell given to Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates. Practically none of them, except Nietzsche who gives her a role, an extremely important role in the sense that since she was a dreadful and angry woman, Socrates was running away from her and he was always out with the men and that’s how he was led to invent the dialectic. (Guertin 2000, 55–56—my translation)

If Kofman refused to call herself a feminist, she was, as recalls philosopher friend Françoise Armangaud, deeply engaged in the process to show how women were devalued in the canonical texts of Western philosophy. Also, she would stay away from essentialist perspectives (for exemple: Luce Irigaray or Hélène Cixous): while supporting feminist views and arguments, she would take her distances from the concept of écriture feminine, since she “considered herself as a devotee of clarity, a partisan of rational and well-constructed texts, which écriture féminine aimed to subvert” (Kofman 1986a, 7 / Hirvonen 2012, 147). Kofman aimed, in the end, “to demonstrate how the rational thinking and writing, the logos, of the big names in philosophy—all men—was governed by their drive and desire, by their sexual economy, and not merely by their reason and rationality” (Hirvonen 2012, 147). Even if she was rejecting the “feminist” label, her work would nonetheless put a strong focus on the unfair representation of women in the discipline. Philosophy did deny women’s agency in theoretical discourse and discredit them professionally, first by impeaching them to access the discipline as students, and then, when they finally restored their right to access education, by marginalizing them (or by putting a glass ceiling above them as they would progress through academic path). The canon had, until recently, excluded them from philosophical discourse (by omission or underrepresentation) and Kofman’s was a good example of this phenomenon, for her personal and professional experience illustrates a phenomenon that would later be identified as intersectional knot.3 As a woman of Jewish culture, she would often stand alone, without allies, not knowing which element had the greatest impact: Jewishness, social class, or womanhood (in addition to that, she was

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a minority within the minority, as she remained unmarried with her long-term partner and childless, she didn’t even fit the traditional “women” category). Refusing the feminist label has cast a shadow over the dissemination of her work. Not completely admitted to the boys’ club (Lacanian circles, namely), unfit from the point of view of feminist orthodoxy, we may nonetheless see in her work a significant feminist contribution (both practical and theoretical): She wanted to discredit the tradition of metaphysics, which sustained the binary opposition between intelligible (associated with men) and sensible (associated with women), which male philosophy pretended to transcend. . . . For her, writing was a rebellion against the authority of ultimate truths. The strange and uncanny disruption of writing effaces proper names and stable meanings. It undermines the tendency to speak once and for all. (Hirvonen 2012, 147)

However, by her vigilant and critical study of the lack of discourse on the women’s place (or rejection) in the philosophical tradition, Kofman could address misogyny from a different angle, showing where it would hide between the lines of a text that did not seem misogynist. For example, in Le respect des femmes, she argues that modesty, considered a moral quality, betrays a masculinist posture that consists, for men, in putting women at a distance and thus protecting themselves from their own desires (Kofman 1982, 76–80). The reverse is also possible: we may be easily mistaken by apparent misogyny that, in the end, disqualifies it when we give a closer look. For example, she put Nietzschean misogyny into perspective, pointing out that, contrary to appearances, there is no gender differentialism in Nietzsche (apart from the question of maternity, which has a special status) but a gameplay of gender polarized roles in which each side stands for opposite moral values. For instance, freedom versus faithfulness, strength versus care: those values are not mutually exclusive, but they differ so much that most of the time, they are not likely to be found in the same person in one moment. Consequently, acting as a man or a woman means to act according to a certain set of values and prescribed behaviour (and not according to “nature”). By her insightful reading of the German philosopher, Kofman could prevent falling in the trap set by Nietzsche, whose rhetoric often relies on provocation and caricature: What is called “the Woman” or “the Eternal feminine” is a fiction of men who at some point in history had the need to separate humanity into the strong sex and the weak sex, imaginatively attributing to themselves this strength that they no longer had. When Nietzsche asks women to be silent about women, he asks them not to be accomplices of men, metaphysicians, all dogmatists who believe in “truth.” For women, when not corrupted by men, remain skeptical. (Kofman 1992, 66—my translation)

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As she would notice, Nietzsche uses the expression “Eternal feminine” in a way that demystifies it: his genealogical and historical flair led him to detect under this pseudo-eternity an historical creation, for “the” woman is nothing but a certain type of “instinct” that had until then prevailed, but could be otherwise (Kofman 1993, 58–59). Identifying the “blind spot” in a philosophical system is a huge task. Even when rejecting the label, she conceded that her actions had, indeed, a feminist potential: What is important, and perhaps the only feminist gesture I make, is to create a work, as I have done for the last twenty years, in a rational, didactic and above all continuous way (even if my work also has a completely different aspect, autobiographical, ironic and jubilant). The metaphysical system has always put women on the side of lack of constancy, of irregularity. So women in philosophy have to mark such endurance, so that they can change something. I haven’t invented a new system, but in any case, after Nietzsche and Freud, can we still invent philosophical systems? (Kofman 1992, 71—my translation)

She also worked on an anthology of texts on women originally aimed to be published by UNESCO, an undated manuscript project stored in the archives of IMEC (Institut Mémoire de l’Édition contemporaine, located in Caen, Normandie), which tends to show how engaged she was in the pursuit of this philosophical quest. Those voluminous scrapbooks contain quotations, photocopies of dictionary entries, and handwritten quotes with precise references drawn with elegant blue ink. Though the project was not achieved, the content of those cardboard boxes indicates that she had been long working on discourses on women throughout philosophy and arts. In an interview, Kofman explained that the theme of “women” was not a subject that she wanted to deal with in the first place, but she had to do so as she was aiming to find a lead to detect, within different philosophical theory, a “blind spot” that would often be the weakest point of the system. This blind spot, argues Kofman, sheds light on what is really at stake in the system. She adds that “there is a kind of jubilation to be shown in the greatest philosophers who believe that they are pursuing a rational, pure research, independent of their impulses, that they find themselves unwittingly led by them, even if, obviously, the destiny of thought cannot be reduced to the destiny of impulses” (Kofman 1992, 65). The choice of the word “jubilation” is not innocent, since Kofman’s approach of philosophy is embodied, intuitive and aiming to a cheerful understanding, a view that enables to see how original her contribution was to twentieth-century philosophy.

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KOFMAN’S ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION Kofman’s most interesting and original contribution lays in the autobiographical function she sees in writing (even when it is intended to be neutral and abstract), an approach that shifts from the habitual conception of philosophy as metaphysical systems. If there is no “system” possible after Freud and Nietzsche (that is: it would be naive to pretend we may formulate an ensemble of principles that explain the totality of the world and give answers to any existential inquiry), we may however say that “philosophical ecosystems” still grow and interact. Old and new ideas are still proposed and transformed in order to help us make sense of contemporary challenges and interrogation and the “non-system” of Sarah Kofman should take a bigger place in this ecosystem. Her refusal to propose a precise system does not imply not proposing original ideas: in Kofman’s case, the stunt lies precisely in the use of forbidden or suspect concepts or methods, especially the ones that are usually excluded from philosophical practice. The use of autobiographic process is one of them, as well as humor and reference to body experience. As stated earlier, the existentialist background lead Kofman to consider a person as the sum of her or his actions. Consequently, a person’s life is part of her or his philosophy and may never be abstracted from it and the telling of such life is also part of this life: what I tell (to myself or to others) about my life constructs the reality of it (Kofman, along with Nietzsche, would consider that the only reality we may be certain about is the perspective that is offered to one’s subjective understanding). In her essays, Kofman would link “abstract” concepts to the personal issues Auguste Comte, Sigmund Freud or Friedrich Nietzsche had to deal with in order to show what instinct underlaid their statements. Could Nietzsche’s difficulties with variety of feminine figures (mother, sister, lover) explain why he was so harsh on them and saw them as cruel soldiers in the “guerre mortelle des sexes” (as he would put it so dramatically in the very beginning of The Birth of Tragedy)? Maybe partially. Kofman states that discourses are never “sexually neutral,” as they are influenced by its author’s gender in the sense that gender affects daily experience. Consequently, any theory is culturally and politically influenced by its author standpoint. In Auguste Comte’s specific case, the demonstration is quite impressive. On the contrary of his German colleague, Comte was quite confident about the strength of his rationality and though scholars had already “attempted to relate positivism to his emotional life,” as noted by Wendy Deutelbaum, “Kofman’s innovation is to make his philosophy into an arena for psychic drama.” By an analysis of personal documents (namely letters), she reconstructs how the “melodrama of Comte’s private life- his struggle

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with a disapproving mother, his ‘wicked wife’ Caroline, and his ‘good angel’ Clotilde is doubled by a more subtle, internal struggle between his desire to be feminine and his terror of femininity” in order to show “the unconscious, subjective motives which thread Comte’s philosophy.” Kofman does not aim to “reduce the philosophical to the pathological, nor the systematic to the biographical,” but is looking for “a certain relationship between the system and the life: not to see what the work owes to the life, but what the work brings back to the life” (Deutelbaum 1979, 213). She did not attempt to reduce the philosophical to subjective or personal issues but was curious about a certain relationship of the abstract system to its author life: the idea was not to look for what the work owed to life, but to look for what the philosophical work could bring to life. In other words, Kofman stated that the personal experience of a philosopher is carved in the concepts he or she crafts, and she aimed to demonstrate that even the most rigorous systems of thought (such as that of Kant or Comte) are imbued with subjective and impulsive elements. It is, consequently, never possible for any thinker to write from a completely “abstract” point of view.4 Objectivity and so-called rationality often hide subjective impetuses and beliefs: thus, philosophy may be seen as a process of a self-understanding that can only be achieved by autobiographical storytelling. While autobiography is generally seen as a narrative of a singular and unique subject that is described from the outside, Kofman sees the process rather as a journey toward oneself where the path is complex and marked by detours: For Kofman, there is no coherent and linear autobiography. Instead of a master subject, who would retrospectively reveal and represent the truth of one’s life and self, there is the impossibility of consistent and coherent self-representation. This impossibility does not mean that autobiography is impossible. Instead, in its impossibility there is its possibility. (Hirvonen 2012, 154)

It is through these detours that the subject constructs itself through narration; without a narrative, there is no real subject, as the process of autobiography alone allows the “I” to become “itself” “in a gesture of selective and discriminative reaffirmation”: It is only the rebirth of each of his works in an after-the-fact rereading, which reshapes and re-translates them, eliminating all the anecdotal and the accidental, a rereading guided by the will to unify the work and to erect it as a work, which makes it possible to establish from the beginning to the end a continuity without solution, ensuring the author’s identity and unity, his true “birth.” (Kofman 1993, 130—my translation)

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Kofman’s rejection of the myth of stable subject may have originated from her traumatic childhood experience (where she had two mothers fighting over her, in addition to the guilt of having survived the war): Kofman moves toward Nietzsche in rejecting the biological maternal side. But who is she? The ‘I’ exists through the mother and the father, as always already divided. The father is dead. The mother is living. . . . Since the mother gives life, is Sarah refusing life? Yes and no. Yes, because in being saved, she was forced to displace her original mother. No, because in accepting a substitute she was given life. If her vehemence like Nietzsche’s betrays proximity to the mother, the unanswerable question here is proximity to which one? Because there is proximity to both. (McDonald 1998, 193)

The basic idea was to show how a philosophical system may take the place of irrationality (or “delirium,” as she puts it) and how the construction of a philosophical system allows its author to overcome her or his own irrationality by reorganizing it into a rational narrative structure in which the other can find her or his own place. Kofman was also interested in seeing how the subject’s irrationality—which corresponds to a singular story—could meet a wider audience than the mere author.5 Following Freud’s reading, her analysis shows that the text speaks for the author and presents itself as an enigma that brings the reader to reconstruct an abstract subject (which is not necessarily identical to the physical subject, but a reconstruction of it).6 She would see the philosophical text as a mask that shows and hides the pathologies of its author at the same time, saying indirectly what could not be said openly (Kofman 1985, 80). Kofman’s original contribution lays also in a methodological schism, in the sense that she proposes to practice philosophy without the traditional “disconnection principle”: she rejects disembodied philosophy and develops a method of analysis that links the author’s experience to her or his ideas, passed bodily experience (including trauma). Indeed, since Plato and even more so with the hegemonic influence of Christianism, Western philosophical tradition had prohibited from the start the use of biographical elements; even though they have a strong influence on the writing process and the formation of theses, but they do affect one’s thoughts and beliefs, as we learn from past experiences. For Kofman, a text is a “living, breathing fabric” and on the reverse, any reader or writer should see “life as a text” (Ullern 2019). For example, her reading of Nietzsche’s Ecce homo (1888) suggests, instead on dismissing it on the basis of its author mental condition, an interpretation of its rich (but overlooked) content. Ecce Homo is a lot more than a delusional narrative by a sick philosopher: the authentic voice of delirium speaks for itself and offers its reader a privileged access to the author’s

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deepest thoughts, as they are raw and free from any censorship or alterations due to cultural background. However, the philosophical content has to be picked between the lines: the reader has to provide a supplementary attention in order to grasp—craft?—sense among the appearances of nonsense. By posing himself as the antithesis of Socrates, (the one who does not write, therefore does not really exist), Nietzsche establishes with his autobiography a breach in the history of philosophy (and Kofman followed this path by writing an autobiography, Rue Ordener, rue Labat, as her ultimate contribution). SETTING THINGS STRAIGHT BUT GIVING LAUGHTER ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE Kofman has to be credited for necessary corrections on a delicate subject: she put Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism suspicions into context in Nietzsche ou le mépris des juifs (1994), pursuing her reflection on a theme already present in Paroles suffoquées and Conversions, both published in 1987. Addressing that very sensitive subject required a lot of courage due to her personal situation: one could consider that a woman with a personal background like hers would have more urgent projects than to stand out for an author that indeed made despicable comments on Jewish people. This is one significant example of her intellectual rigor and taste for bold topics: Kofman was daring and willing to provoke in both content and form of her writings. Ari Hirvonen describes an encounter with Kofman that gave the impression of a person “both extremely strong and fragile at the same time,” with a “paradoxical nature where laughter and tears mingle constantly.”7 If Kofman indeed granted laughter a great importance in both the content and form of her thinking, it was for her the most serious phenomenon, as it is a powerful response to threat and death, for it is often the only option left. Practicing herself a striking self-derision (as would recall her former students), she would also make stylistic explorations that are almost heretical in philosophical practice (that has the reputation to be quite stern), following Nietzsche on that aspect. She would also refer to symbolic figures associated with laughter, such as Baubô, the goddess associated with orphic myths (to which refers Nietzsche in The Gay Science), the one that achieved to wrest Demeter from grief, as she had lost her beloved daughter, Persephone. In a way, we could see Kofman as a modern version of Baubô as she dared to talk about and make fun—in academic papers—of things that would normally be taboo (intimate life, sexual fantasies, digestion issues, etc.). Humor is however the place where lays the most serious questions: in Pourquoi rit-on (1986), Kofman proposed an analysis of the role and

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meaning of laughter in Freudian theory. We laugh to protect ourselves from dangers and fears, we laugh as a way to deal with issues that are unbearable. As a Freudian scholar, she is well informed of the varieties of functions that laughter may serve in everyday circumstances: “Life, without any guarantor (the artist) or guarantees (a life beyond), consists of all that is joyous and with all that is intolerable” (McDonald 1998, 189). But her interest in humor and laughter is much broader, as she dug into the avatars of the founding mythical figure of occidental philosophy in her Socrate(s), published in 1989. In this essay, she sketched various portraits of Socrates (after doing the same for Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel), in which irony always play a focus role. Irony is what bothered all major philosophers who wrote on Socrates (Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), because it remains unclassifiable (Guertin 2000, 56). How come philosophy took so much from Socrate’s figure, but let aside the humoristic dimension is, indeed, one question that should be addressed more frequently. In an interview, she explained that: This book isn’t really just about Socrates, but on the different readings of Socrates in the course of history made by philosophers. It is as much a book about Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard than about Socrates and Plato. It’s Socrates reinterpreted. And what I’m interested in Socrates, it is above all the reappropriation that the philosophy over time. This is not very new . . . in my house, this book report, since from the beginning, . . . I’ve always done a rereading of Freud’s readings. In fact, I’ve titled this book—which is called Four Analytical Novels—precisely to show how Freud, instead of explaining included sources, appropriated them to make them into real novels.” (Guertin, 53–54—my translation)

CONCLUSION Françoise Duroux sums up brilliantly why Sarah Kofman is so irritant whereas so important to philosophy: she followed a path that disrupted the well-established balance between the scholastic exercise of reading and the boldness of the creator of philosophic system; as a reader, she did not pretend to build any system or antisystem. She never, however, renounced to philosophy and therefore read, but in a different way, a disturbing way that made her a little unpleasant to the philosophical community (Duroux 1997, 92). If Socrates had been a woman, he would have shared an uncanny family resemblance with her. Urging us to learn how to read a text as life and to live by telling is one of Sarah Kofman’s most insightful proposition, as this is the only way to remain

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connected to a meaningful existence. More importantly than looking for the truth, she “often deconstructed the sense of the strict opposition between truth and lies” (McDonald 1998, 185). She proposed an alternative view of what is the “truth content” of a text, and especially of autobiography, that is always false from the start (as it is almost impossible for anyone to have an “objective” self-understanding because of the lack of perspective). But a false starting point is the only way we may approach a version of truth, as we move toward a story that tells, ironically, some important truths by the means of falsification.8 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bilge, Sirma. “Feminist theories of intersectionality,” Diogenes 1 no. 225 (2009): 70–88. Deutelbaum, Wendy. SubStance 8, no. 2/3 (1979): 213–15. Duroux, Françoise. 1997. “Comment philosophe une femme,” Les Cahiers du GRIF, Hors-Série, n°3: 87–105. Guertin, Ghyslaine. 2000. “Autour de Socrate(s). Rencontre avec Sarah Kofman,” Horizons philosophiques 10, no. 2: 53–64. Hirvonen, Ari J. 2012. “The Ethics of Testimony: Trauma, Body and Justice in Sarah Kofman’s Autobiography.” No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 9: 144–72. Kofman, Sarah. 1978. Aberrations: le devenir-femme d’Auguste Comte. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1985. L’enfance de l’art: une interprétation de l’esthétique freudienne. Paris: Galilée. ———. 1986a. Nietzsche et la scène philosophique. Paris: Gallilée. ———. 1992. Explosion I: De l’Ecce Homo de Nietzsche. Paris: Galilée. ———. 1993. Explosion II: Les enfants de Nietzsche. Paris: Galilée. ———. 1982. Le respect des femmes. Paris: Galilée. McDonald, Christie. 1998. “Sarah Kofman: Effecting Self Translation” TTR 11, no. 2: 185–97. Michaud, Ginette &Ullern, Isabelle. 2018. Sarah Kofman et Jacques Derrida. Croisements, écarts, différences. Paris: Hermann. Morar, Cristina. 2018. “Femme et philosophe: texte, image, vie chez Sarah Kofman” Recherches féministes 31, no. 2: 51–70. Rosenblum, Rachel. 2000. “Peut-on mourir de dire? Sarah Kofman, Primo Levi,” Revue française de psychanalyse 64, no. 1: 113–38. Ullern, Isabelle. 2019. “La philosophie ‘biographée’ selon Sarah Kofman,” L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques 21. http:​//​journals​.openedition​.org​/acrh​ /9933;  DOI: https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.4000​/acrh​.9933.

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NOTES 1. “Mémé, despite her courageous act of salvation, was not without ambivalence concerning Sarah’s Jewish identity: pointing out a Jewish nose, the stereotype of greediness, and speaking against Jewish religious dietary restrictions. Yet it is also Mémé who introduces the names of geniuses of Jewish descent: Spinoza, Bergson, Einstein, Marx. The transformation of Sarah is necessary for the duration of the war: to wipe out the family’s past making what is Jewish Christian” (McDonald 1998, 192). It is to be noted that ironically, Mémé, who renamed young Sarah “Suzanne” for security reasons, is herself rarely (if ever) identified by Kofman through her civic name. For biographical details, see: Ginette Michaud & Isabelle Ullern, 2018. 2. “These are mouths, disproportionate, drawn in large strokes, sometimes with erasures, which stand out from the many faces that Kofman’s drawings highlight. The drawings, . . . often unsigned and undated, convey a sense of awe and amazement, and have the value of awakening.” Cristina Morar, “Femme et philosophe: texte, image, vie chez Sarah Kofman,” Recherches féministes 31, no. 2 (2018): 51—my translation. 3. Intersectionality can be broadly understood as a combination of different forms of oppression or discrimination experienced by a person, based on criterion such as race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, class, physical ability. See: Bilge, Sirma. “Feminist theories of intersectionality,” Diogenes 1 no. 225 (2009): 70–88. 4. This intuition was developed at the same time, on the other side of the ocean, on very different grounds, but in an insightful perspective by intellectual and activists as the standpoint theory. 5. “For me, it is not a question of trying to reduce the philosophical to the pathological nor the systematic to the biographical. I am still interested in a certain relationship of the system to life: to see, not what the work owes to life, but what the work relates to life; to understand how a philosophical system can take the place of delirium. But I am also interested in seeing how a singular ‘delirium’—which corresponds to a singular story and which differs from other types of delirium—can meet a wider audience than the mere subject of the delirium” (Kofman 1978, 41)—my translation. 6. “The text of art is the very text of life, which is why it is not necessary to refer to the ‘declared intentions’ of the authors to decipher the riddle and to understand what they mean. The text saying less says much more” (Kofman 1985, 140)—my translation. 7. Hirvonen, “The Ethics of Testimony,”145. On the tight link between trauma, creation and laughter as an act of resistance during the Shoah, see also: Despoix Philippe, Benoit-Otis Marie-Hélène, Maazouzi Djemaa  et al., “Chanter, rire et résister à Ravensbrück. Autour de Germaine Tillion et du Verfügbar aux Enfers,” Le Genre humain 1, no. 59: 16–21. 8. The author would like to acknowledge the support of SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) for this article that is part of the funded project “Un autre discours de la méthode: l’autofiction comme réponse à l’exclusion générique des femmes en philosophie.” Many thanks to Alexis Lambert for helpful reading of the first draft and assistance in the layout of this text.

Chapter 6

Henri Maldiney’s Philosophy of Existence Till Grohmann

HENRI MALDINEY’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF EXISTENCE Henri Maldiney (1912–2013) worked and taught at the Universities of Gent (Belgium) and Lyon. He influenced various important thinkers (philosophers, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and artists) in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Jacques Schotte, Ludwig Binswanger, Jean Oury, Roland Kuhn, Gilles Deleuze, Marc Richir, and André du Bouchet. His thinking is eclectic and multilayered. He did not produce a primary systematic work that lays the foundations for his subsequent publications or provides the key to understanding his thought as a whole. His books are mostly collections of articles and essays, often dedicated to diverse topics ranging from aesthetics, linguistics, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as well as the history of art, existential philosophy and phenomenology. Each of his papers constitutes a singular philosophical excursion into a very specific problem that typically calls for a specific methodology. For this reason, a presentation of Maldiney’s philosophy cannot cover the entire range of ideas with which he was concerned throughout his long life. In the limited scope of this chapter, I will therefore focus on a number of concepts and problems that in my eyes introduce the general lines of his thinking.

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PRESENCE A very central philosophical concept for Maldiney is the French word “présence,” used as a synonym for the Heideggerian Dasein. The concept of presence was commonly used by all post–World War II French thinkers who belonged to the movement of phenomenological anthropology, in which Maldiney was a prominent figure. These thinkers explicitly refer to the Heideggerian idea of existence but—as against Heidegger—they strongly emphasize its human dimension. Like the Heideggerian Dasein, présence describes the openness of a being (Seiendes) toward the twofold disclosure of Being (Sein) and world. The one who is “present” is thus irreducible to an autonomous and self-sufficient entity. Presence is essentially relational: it is necessarily presence toward . . . (présence à . . . ). But instead of focusing on the absolute locative of the German da, Maldiney’s présence refers to the anticipatory movement of sense and meaning (prae-sense). It underlines the Heideggerian primacy of the temporal ecstasis of the future as well as the necessity to inaugurate the future through a hermeneutic understanding of one’s own situation. Presence is thus always presence of a sense, of an attempt to understand. To be pre-sent (lat. prae-sens) is to be in front of oneself (à l’avant de soi). Imminent to oneself, presence is precession of oneself. (Maldiney 2007, 61)

The sense within which presence is engaged is not primarily theoretical. As a matter of fact, Maldiney’s concept of presence reiterates Heidegger’s critique of traditional approaches to subjectivity that tend to reduce the subject to a mere cognitive agent. Like the concept of Dasein, Maldiney’s own concept of présence emphases a pre-theoretical, practical and bodily relationship to the world. Nevertheless, two misunderstandings must be avoided. First, under no circumstances should Maldiney’s presence be misunderstood as what Heidegger calls Präsenz, which latter refers to the ontological mode of that which is “present at hand” (vorhanden), controllable and available for theoretical contemplation and cognitive domination. Second, Maldiney’s presence is entirely sensuous; it is bodily and it is incarnated. Unlike the Heideggerian Dasein, it does not refer to the abstract idea of a being (Seiendes) whose physiological, anthropological and psychological nature is never clearly characterized. Right from the outset, it is the presence of a human being—and, as we will see, not just of a generic human being, but of a singular human being. Maldiney develops his philosophical understanding of presence in two important essays: “Psychosis and presence” (Maldiney 2007, 7–62) (Psychose et présence) and “Drive and Presence” (Maldiney 2007, 107–36) (Pulsion et

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présence). The two titles already suggest the intimate link—constitutive for Maldiney’s phenomenological anthropology—between, on the one hand, a philosophy of existence and, on the other, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. Whereas “Psychosis and Presence” investigates into the possibility of a psychotic transformation of presence, “Drive and Presence” focuses on the theoretical compatibility between the psychoanalytic concept of drive (Trieb, pulsion) and existential philosophy. In both cases, Maldiney’s arguments draw on psychopathological cases—and namely psychosis: melancholia, schizophrenia, mania—that occupy a central role in his understanding of the human existence. In Maldiney, psychopathological cases do not simply serve as illustrations and concrete examples for a preceding theoretical elaboration of the “normal” structure of human existence. Nor are they seen as deviations from a non-pathological structure of being in the world. According to Maldiney, psychosis (and not simply neurosis!) reveals the “irreducible in men” (Maldiney 2007, 7). It lays bare and uncovers in a dramatic fashion the fundamental anthropological trait that defines psychotic and non-psychotic existence alike. In his essay on “Psychosis and presence,” Maldiney says: We try to grasp, within psychotic existence, the human existential which makes it possible, at the very moment in which psychosis constitutes a form of impossibility of it. (ibid.)

We should pay particular attention to the modal words “possible” and “impossibility” in this quotation. These terms lead us to Maldiney’s critique of transcendentalism, which is intimately connected to his understanding of existence. But before doing this, let us dwell a little while with more general issues. I want to mention the tension, or the paradox, that Maldiney’s philosophy of existence leads to through the integration of psychopathological problems. As we already mentioned, Maldiney retains the Heideggerian idea of existence as an autopoietic hermeneutic process. For Heidegger, being in the world, existence is constantly engaged in processes of understanding (Verstehen). And all understanding of its world ultimately comes down to an understanding of its own. In other words, every new aspect of the world, every new encounter in the world, adds a new dimension to the self and the way Dasein understands itself. Furthermore, every transformation that takes place in one’s existence (and in one’s world) is ultimately grounded on a new self-understanding. Even though Maldiney is largely inspired by this train of thought, it has aspects that he cannot accept. For it brings with it the danger of imprisoning existence in a form of narcissist selfhood in which it is only concerned with itself, and which thereby dismisses alterity. Hence two problems must be solved. First, if every new person, object, or situation we

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face is nothing but the sense we attribute to it, how, then, are we able to ever encounter something else than ourselves? Second, if every transformation of our existence originates in an act of (self) understanding—if, in other words, it is left to us to transform into whoever we want to be—what are the limits of our capacity for (self-)transformation? Is existence free to choose whatever it wants to be? And is it true that the fundamental motor of our becoming a person relies on such an autonomous activity? According to Maldiney, Heidegger’s hermeneutic model of existence leads not only to a philosophical solipsism but also to a transcendental omnipotence of an absolute subject (Maldiney 2007, 286). ENCOUNTER AND EVENT Maldiney’s concept of the “encounter” (rencontre) is very important in this context. The encounter emphasizes, as against Heidegger, that existence is fundamentally dependent on accidental relationships with others. Maldiney describes the encounter as a fundamental event for existence: But the event is a challenge to destiny. I am not thrown into it. It takes place . . . “through encounter.” . . . The other is always new—and new is the event. An encounter is to be justified not by making it possible, but by making it real. (Maldiney 2007, 306)

The “encounter” stresses the constitutive importance of alterity for our becoming a person. According to Maldiney, existence is constantly determined by the “outside” (dehors), by the unforeseeable, by that what it cannot anticipate or project as a possibility of its own. Moreover, what existence is authentically is not the result of an autonomous decision, made in a “moment of vision” (Augenblick), in which existence autonomously and freely decides what it wants to be. Existence, on the contrary, is structured and defined by “events” (événements) in which the motor of the self-transformation is fundamentally heteronomic. Does this mean that Maldiney defends a determinist conception of existence? On the contrary. But we have to understand the sense in which Maldiney’s criticism of Heidegger is still internal to Heidegger’s thought. Through a paradoxical theoretical movement, he radicalizes both the ideas of existence’s thrownness as well as its dimension of freedom. The key for understanding this radicalization consists in his theory of the “event,” which I will illustrate by way of comparison with Heidegger’s understanding of death. As I stated above, what must be borne in mind is how Maldiney uses the Heideggerian framework in an unorthodox way in order to transform it

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internally. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, Dasein’s freedom proves itself in the very moment in which it faces its own nothingness in the possibility of death. In the face of death, Dasein, Heidegger says, is concerned with “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all” (Heidegger 1962, 307). What do “possibility” and “impossibility” here mean? “The possibility of the impossibility” disclosed in death reveals the very sense and essence of Dasein’s existence. Heidegger’s idea is not simply that in the face of death we access a more authentic appreciation of ourselves and of what we really are over and beyond our everyday narcissist self-betrayal. Such a Sartrean interpretation of death is not incorrect, but it misses Heidegger’s central point which instead focuses on existence’s transcendental dimension. In the very moment in which death withdraws Dasein from all actual, ontic possibilities, it reveals Dasein’s pure capacity to project itself onto new possibilities. It discloses Dasein’s “possibilizing” (vermöglichend) dimension. As a matter of fact, “death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’ (nichts zu Verwirklichendes), nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be” (ibid.). It reveals the transcendental dimension of existence, consisting in pure possibility, before and beyond any ontic or empiric realization: “Being-towardsdeath, as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility” (ibid.). We therefore have to distinguish in Heidegger’s work between an ontic, or empirical, sense of death and an ontological or transcendental one. On the ontic level, death is the impossibility of any concrete, actual possibility. On the transcendental or ontological level, death leads to pure possibility. And since both levels are interwoven, the ontic dimension entails and leads to the ontological dimension: in as much as death renders all ontic projects impossible, it discloses existence’s dimension of pure possibility. The problem of such an understanding is that it completely neglects the ontic level of death, the concrete suffering related to it, in favor of a transcendental understanding of existence. Only a romantic outlook on death could be so blind to the real tragedy that it entails for concrete human existence. This is precisely the point where Maldiney breaks with the Heideggerian approach. He seeks to return to the concrete experience of death and impossibility. This does not open a new form of possibility, but confronts us with a radical ontic impasse. Death is the dead end of existence and it does not give rise to a transcendental renewal of oneself in a more authentic mode of being. In focusing on the ontic sense of death, Maldiney gives a curious twist to the whole ontic-ontological framework. More precisely, he goes beyond the sharp distinctions between the transcendental and the empirical, the ontological and the ontic, the possible and the actual, etc.—all of which are bound

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to a classic and traditional philosophical understanding that conforms to the metaphysical tradition. In Maldiney’s reading, the impossibility disclosed in the ontic sense of death (but also, as we will see, of any other “event” or “encounter”) is not just a new possibility in the ontological understanding of the word. It is the negation of possibility and of Dasein’s potentiality-for-being (Seinkönnen) as such. The ontic impossibility constitutes an insurmountable limit for Dasein’s transcendental power to project itself into any understanding of its own. Instead of revealing its own transcendental ground (Grund) and thus becoming pure possibility, Dasein suffers in death a radical necessity. It is confronted with a situation that it can neither master nor escape. This is why, in Maldiney, the ontic impossibility has always the modal character of necessity. And this necessity is not only experienced in death, but, according to Maldiney, throughout life as a whole in certain limit-situations, in transformative “events,” such as, for instance, the loss of a loved one, the birth of one’s child, the “encounter” with a new love or even a move to a new apartment. In all these cases, the world confronts us with ontic situations in which our previous potentiality-for-Being reaches its limits. In these situations, we face the impossible, since no previously possible understanding of ourselves could have prepared us for them. Mastering them requires from us a completely new sense, meaning or understanding that we did not previously possess. The novelty of the event, disclosed in the ontic situation, consists precisely in the fact that we were not able to anticipate it. Moreover, in finally “existing” this new situation (Maldiney uses the verb “to exist” in a transitive sense)—in finding a way of dealing with it—we have to reinvent ourselves according to the unforeseeable demands of the world and its constraints. In the event, we are not the transcendental origin or ground of the new forms of self and world that we become. On the contrary, it is the ontic situation that forces us to become someone else. It is the necessity of the situation that pushes us to go beyond what we have been. It motivates us to a fundamental transformation and thus to a new mode of being that, before and without the event, was not a possibility for us. This is why Maldiney equates the impossible with the “transpossible” and impossibility with “transpossibility”: “The absolute impossible expresses, on the level of being (étant), the transpossibility of Dasein” (Maldiney 2007, 286). The notion of transpossibility is one of Maldiney’s most significant conceptual achievements. It is a neologism that refers to a sphere of virtuality in our existence. It points to the origin of any true novelty, over and beyond everything that is possible for us.

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TRANSPOSSIBILITY, TRANSPASSIBILITY AND CRISIS Whereas in Heidegger it is always existence, and thus Dasein as a transcendental power, that transcends the world and all concrete situations, in Maldiney it is the world itself that presents us with (ontic) situations that transcend our capacity to understand them. Transpossibility thus inverses the direction of the phenomenological constitution of meaning (we will discuss this point later in more detail). Instead of departing from a transcendental subject and culminating in an operation of sense-giving (Sinngebung)—as it is the case in the early Husserl and in a modified way also in Heidegger’s Being and Time—the transpossible is disclosed to the subject that occupies merely the place of a recipient of the event. According to Maldiney, every event is experienced in the form of a “crisis.” He calls “crisis” (crise) the specific moment of the event in which existence is confronted with the necessity of transforming itself. The notion of crisis goes back to the German physician and philosopher Viktor von Weizsäcker, who uses the term to refer to the moment in which an organism has to creatively adapt to fundamental transformations of its environment (Weizsäcker 1973, 250). In order to survive, the living being has to undergo substantial changes in its behavior. And it is interesting to notice that von Weizsäcker had already characterized the crisis as a “compulsion to the impossible” (Weizsäcker 1973, 251) (Zwang zum Unmöglichen). As we saw, Maldiney takes over this idea, but applies it not to the living but to the existing (Maldiney 2007, 279). The notion of “crisis” in von Weizsäcker clearly indicates the traumatic potential of the event. In the context of such a crisis, psychopathologies reveal their exceptional anthropological status. They not only show the vital necessity of the event, but also its dangerousness and destructive force for human existence. Psychopathologies show that the transpossible—and events in general—are a task, a burden, a danger, and a risk for human existence. We might fail in the transformative process that is required by the event. Psychopathologies highlight the fragility, the vulnerability of existence—as well as the creative potential related to the event. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework in which Maldiney construes anthropological relevance of psychopathology also has its limits. For instance, his approach is incapable of yielding a truly positive understanding of psychoses, which latter are ultimately seen as limited to a simple “failure” (échec) of human existence. In Maldiney’s reading, psychoses amount to a general incapacity for transformation and are a mere deficiency. Hence, on the one hand, Maldiney elevates psychopathology to the rank of an important philosophical theme that reveals the fundamental trait of human existence. But on the other hand, he nevertheless conceives it as the result of an existential deficit. This certainly

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constitutes a limit to his theory. And it also contradicts with his fundamentally ethical approach to philosophy. But there is yet another aspect to transpossibility that has not been mentioned. As was explained above, Maldiney’s radicalization of Heidegger not only emphasizes the dimension of Dasein’s thrownness; the fact that existence is not the master of its own transformation. Paradoxically, transpossibility restricts Dasein’s freedom only insofar as it announces a new dimension of this freedom, as I will now explain. The crisis constitutes a moment of irreversibility. It has a before and an after. Psychosis is only one possible outcome to a crisis. Another is a successful transformation. Such a mastery of the crisis shows that the existent is capable of enduring beyond the limits of what initially seemed unbearable to him or her. It makes clear that I was able to suffer an existential blow without going to pieces, in other words, that I was prepared for the unpreparable, the imprevisible. This is the reason for Maldiney’s second fundamental notion: transpassibility. In his essay “On transpassibility” (Maldiney 2007, 263–308) (De la transpassibilité), Maldiney discusses in detail both the notions of transpassibility and transpossibility. Transpassibility, he says, refers to an “infinite capacity for openness” (capacité infinie d’ouverture) (Maldiney, 2007, 304). It enables the existent to suffer over and beyond the limits of what had seemed a priori unbearable. It is a capacity for suffering the unforeseeable. We are subject (passible) to the unexpected. It is this infinite capacity for openness . . . that we call transpassibility. (Maldiney 2007, 304)

Transpassibility and transpossibility constitute a conceptual pair that are reciprocally related. Together they unfold the logic of the event, i.e., the rationality of existence’s transformative process. Maldiney mentions two philosophical forerunners to his notion of “transpassibility”: Aristotle and Kant (Maldiney 2007, 265). In very different ways, both philosophers refer to processes which are active and passive at the same time and that make comprehensible what Maldiney refers to when he talks about a “capacity” “to endure” or “to suffer.” In Kant, the senses with their a priori forms are in-formative. They are “active” despite their “passivity.” The Kantian term “receptivity” (Rezeptivität) of the senses does not refer to a mere passive imprinting but implies a certain determination of the sense-material through the senses—namely its temporal and spatial configuration. If Kant already provides a first hint as to how we are to understand transpassibility’s strange capacity to suffer and to endure, it is, however, Aristotle who constitutes Maldiney’s main philosophical inspiration as regards this point. The terminology already betrays that Maldiney associates transpassibility with the Aristotelian νοῡς παθητικός (nous pathetikos)—the “potential

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intellect,” or literally, the “suffering” intellect. In Aristotle, specifically in De anima, the νοῡς παθητικός (in Latin the intellectus possibilis) answers the question of how empirical knowledge is possible. Aristotle seeks to understand how the intellect is able to extract intelligible forms from sensible matter. The Aristotelian forms (εἴδη) do not exist realized and hypostasized in the world. They are not graspable as empirical things. There must be a procedure, hence, through which the intellect is able to recognize and extract these forms out of the sensible. A simple act of in-formation that takes place between the empirical object and the intellectual understanding is not a solution, Aristotle maintains, since this would be no more than a mere sensible imprint, which contradicts the intelligible nature of the νοῡς. Aristotle’s way out of this paradox consists in a distinction between two intellects, the νοῡς ποιητικός (nous poietikos) and the νοῡς παθητικός. Whereas the νοῡς ποιητικός, the “active” intellect, illuminates the intelligible forms within the sensible and thus frees them from their entrenchment within the φάντασμα (phantasma), the νοῡς παθητικός (which then became the “passive” intellect) becomes these forms in the concrete act of knowledge. However, the νοῡς παθητικός is not merely passive in the sense of having a total lack of agency because it actively becomes the form in the act of knowledge—in its “suffering.” The Aristotelian νοῡς παθητικός clarifies Maldiney’s concept of existence in an important respect: existence can relate to something else (to something “other”) without compromising its own essence precisely insofar as it transforms itself according to the demand of this otherness. In the contact with this otherness, existence, like the Aristotelian νοῡς παθητικός, is not a mere passive patient that endures the imprint of an exterior agent. It rather generates the required changes from out of itself. Hence, on the one hand, it is true that existence can only change through its own attempts of (self-)understanding, but on the other hand, every substantial change of existence requires a foreign impetus, a trigger or an impulse, which not only “motivates,” but “forces” or “obliges” existence to undergo such a transformation. In other words, whereas existence is in charge of the way it understands a certain situation, it is not free to choose which situations it has to “endure” or to “suffer.” Dasein is not in the mastery of the blows that transform and structure its life. Transpassibility is thus existence’s capacity to be open and available for any kind of blows, misfortunes or strokes of luck. It refers to a completely unconditioned openness that does not impose any precondition on the event. It is in stark opposition to any a priori determination. Transpassibility . . . is an opening, without previous outlines or drafts, to what we are not a priori liable to. It is the opposite of care (souci, Sorge). (Maldiney 2007, 306)

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EVENT AND SINGULARITY The preceding considerations made clear the very specific approach to existence that Maldiney defends. He not only dismisses a transcendental thinking of possibility, but he even rejects the idea of existence as an a priori determined entity or process. In close connection to these systematic issues, I would now like to show how Maldiney radicalizes the idea of existence’s “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) by developing a philosophical perspective that I will call a “phenomenology of singularity.” Maldiney says that “the suffering and the personal are united.” (Maldiney 2007, 306) I will interpret this as an attempt to theorize the singular dimension of existence through its exposure to the event. In my view, there lies therein a very important achievement in the phenomenological tradition for Maldiney’s approach thereby remedies a speculative problem that has burdened Western philosophy since the modernity and that arose with the disclosure of subjectivity in Cartesian philosophy. The problem is the following. The notion of subjectivity generally refers to self-consciousness, i.e., to a reflexive and/or pre-reflexive realm in which a relationship to “myself” can take place. Subjectivity is the ground of the “I-ness” (or “Me-ness”) of all experience, of the fact that I am present to myself as a subject. Furthermore, if self-consciousness means I am conscious of “myself” and my own experience, it also implies that experience is always indexed with the personal pronoun “me”: every experience is personalized. And “me” here not simply refers to a generic entity, but to the concrete singularity I experience myself as. However, instead of investigating the connection between self-consciousness and singularity, philosophical discourse on subjectivity mostly focuses on the eidetic and generic aspects of subjectivity (and this even holds for a large part of the phenomenological tradition, namely for Husserl and to some extent also for Heidegger). As philosophers, we quite naturally tend to theorize about self-consciousness as if it could be understood through the simple enumeration of universal predicates, “in general,” i.e., through determinations, which also hold for any other subjectivity. We inquire into subjectivity as a general “kind,” into its “essence” and thereby leave aside the concrete subjectivity in its singularity.1 Hence the paradox of subjectivity is that it is on the one hand supposed to be the ground of my me-ness, of the fact that I experience myself as a singularity, but that, as soon as we try to thematize it philosophically, we on the other hand understand it only through general determinations that I share with all other beings of the same kind. There is an explanatory gap between the fact that on the one hand self-consciousness or reflexivity is understood as a mere formal, pre-individual phenomenon and on the other hand the fact

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that the one who is conscious of her experiences does experience herself as a singularity. Maldiney’s theory of the event (with its operational structure that is thematized in terms of transpassibility and transpossibility) seeks to go beyond the general—eidetic—level of inquiry. He elaborates conceptual tools in order to think the singular dimension of our selfhood. At the core of this elaboration is the idea that “presence” only becomes itself through its exposure to alterity, i.e., through its enduring and suffering of the event. According to Maldiney, a human being’s self does not consist in the autonomous unfolding of an essential core that was there at the outset. We do not become a singular existence through the activation of a pre-given set of transcendental and a priori operators that constitute a stock of universal determinations and that we share with all other existences. On the contrary, Maldiney’s idea is that we become a singularity only through the contingent events we undergo. As he says: “The relationship to the event is for the existent a relationship to itself” (Maldiney 2007, 307). And Maldiney often plays with the two notions of “event” (événement) and “advent” (avènement): “It is one and the same thing to receive the event and to become an existent” (Maldiney 2007, 306). Furthermore: The pathetic dimension of existence as such links these two characteristic dimensions: it happens (s’advient) in person. (Maldiney 2007, 307)

This brings us back to psychosis, which shows that existence’s becoming a singularity necessarily implies the risk of a destruction or of a failure of its becoming. As we saw, the event always reveals itself in the form of a “crisis,” a situation of impossibility, in which the existent faces the dangerous alternative of becoming someone else—or drowning into psychosis. Existence is the integration of novelty at the risk of the rift between self and self, the overcoming of which consists in deciding for oneself. (Maldiney 2007, 54)

Facing the danger of psychosis—expressed in this quotation through the metaphor of an inner distantiation, a “rift (faille) between self and self” (a metaphor originally used by Von Weizsäcker in the Gestaltkreis)—is the price to pay for becoming a singularity. As we said, the relationship of Dasein to itself and to its own Being, is in a constant relationship with its outside. Existence is heteronomously conditioned—not autonomously monitored. By localizing a fundamental relationship to otherness within the core of existence’s authenticity, Maldiney takes up a popular theme in contemporary French philosophy: the constitutive role of “otherness” for selfhood. The specificity of his own approach can be seen in the fact that he elaborates such a relationship within the framework of existential phenomenology. And

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it is interesting and important to notice how close Maldiney is to Levinas with respect to this question. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas 1991), Levinas defends similar ideas about the prevalence of alterity over authenticity. He unfolds a thinking of existence’s singularity through its responsiveness to the Other. And like the event in Maldiney, Levinas’ Otherness is revealed in a moment of passivity2 (as we have seen Maldiney uses the notion of “passibility”). Moreover, given the fact that the Other’s otherness requires its independence and even resistance to my mastery, the relationship to the other cannot be that of a simple Sinngebung, a meaning-donation, in which the transcendental subject freely assigns the sense and meaning that the other represents. For both, Maldiney and Levinas, the Other’s otherness can only be maintained through an inversion of the constitution of intentional meaning. In the experience of a real otherness, it is not the subject but the Other that provides the sense and meaning of the encounter. And it is interesting to notice that both authors refer to psychopathological ideas in their criticism of the classic Husserlian theme of Sinngebung. In Levinas, for instance, the confrontation with the Other leads to a “trauma” for the subject which is “obsessed” and “persecuted.” We already elucidated the close link in Maldiney between existence’s confrontation with Otherness and the danger of psychosis. I do not want to return to these points. But it might nonetheless be useful to add that Maldiney takes up the idea of an “inversion of intentionality” from the Swiss psychiatrist Roland Kuhn (with whom he had a lifelong friendship [cf. the published exchange of letters in the collected works of Kuhn3]). Kuhn expressed the idea that in paranoid experience the patients might face situations of an “inversed intentionality where it is the thing that stares at me” (Maldiney 2007, 12). As a matter of fact, the possibility of projecting intentional experience onto the outside provides a suitable explanation for various psychopathological experiences such as, for instance, that of delusions of persecution. In psychosis, patients often feel observed, stared at, persecuted or mysteriously experience themselves as being the “center of the world.” Phenomenologically inspired psychiatrists often interpret these experiences as a pathological deformation of the original experiential framework—and namely as an inversion of the intentional direction (See Conrad 1966). Intentional activity suddenly lacks the subjective integration; it loses its embeddedness and its essential link to the pre-reflective experience of me-ness.4 The outcome of such processes of de-subjectification is that patients undergo experiences that seem to be performed and controlled by the other—often a completely anonymous other. The strength of Maldiney’s account lies in the fact that for him such inversions of intentional experience is not just the pathological counterpart to an original non-pathological function (namely intentionality). As everywhere in

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Maldiney’s thinking, the pathological experiences are not explained through a transformation of or a deviation from a previously posited “healthy” experience. He rather claims a deeper unitary source of both pathological and non-pathological experience that yields the possibility for both and thus also for their division. More precisely, instead of transforming a “healthy” or “normal” experiential setting into a pathological one, psychopathologies rather export the “normal” functioning of the “event” into experience as a whole. They multiply, so to speak, the experience of the event and thus export existential limit-situations into moments that are usually reckoned as everyday life situations. In the event, “presence” is never in mastery of the sense it experiences. In everyday life situations, on the contrary, it is confronted with known objects and experiential settings that it fully “understands.” Psychopathology breaks out when the experiential setting of the event becomes manifest even in everyday life situations and renders common experience unbearable, transforming every innocent moment into a major crisis and a psychopathological limit-situation. This is the reason why in psychosis the original event that caused the crisis and pushed the patient into his or her delusional world becomes omnipresent. It permeates the entire experiential field. Maldiney says that in psychosis, “there is no event anymore, except the one, unique and non-transformed, which existence endlessly reiterates, and which multiplies endlessly in himself” (Maldiney 2007, 308). Hence, strictly speaking, patients with psychosis do not suffer from a loss of otherness, but rather from its multiplication and random propagation. In psychosis, the other is omnipresent, but in a neutralized and homogenized form. It takes possession of the entire experiential horizon, but in an impersonal and abstract way, leaving the patient with no possibility of becoming a singularity by confronting it. Maldiney expresses this by saying that in psychosis, the true experiencing subject is the impersonal other who now lives the patient’s life “on his behalf.” (Maldiney 2007, 148) In psychosis, the true, authentic self loses the opportunity to build its singularity by suffering through events. RHYTHM AND ART Another important concept in Maldiney is the notion of “rhythm.” Rhythm is connected to the way events structure and configure our existence. It provides insight into how events determine the world we “exist.” It defines our being in the world through processes of temporalization and spatialization. Maldiney draws a parallel with art in order to fully understand the worldly configuration of our existence and the style in which we concretely temporalize and spatialize our experience in order to emerge as a singularity. The concept of rhythm is operative in this parallel investigation of art and existence.

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According to Maldiney, what existence and artworks both have in common is rhythm as their articulating principle: they both unfold through spatiotemporal processes. Hence, what Maldiney says about art always echoes his philosophy of existence. Concerning the artwork, he says, for instance: Its organization consists in the temporal and spatial organization of space and time, [and] its nodal moments are in each case critical sites and instants in which every work, every form, is exposed to be—or rather to ex-ist. (Maldiney 2012, 223)

According to Maldiney, “rhythm,” understood as a genetic process, is the common operative principle in existence and art. But what is rhythm? Rhythm is more fundamental than space and time respectively, since it provides their common genesis. As Maldiney emphasizes: “it is the genesis of the fullness of time within the self-movement of space” (Maldiney 2012, 215). But it would be wrong to understand rhythm as a simple spatiotemporal pattern of movement. As against Plato,5 who subjugates rhythm to number and interprets it in a Pythagorean way as a metric—from which the subsequently canonical Aristotelian definition of rhythm through number6—Maldiney suggests (following here the French linguist Emile Benveniste) returning to the atomist’s understanding of rhythm. In Democritus, rhythm is not identical with metric, but intimately related to form (as σχῆμα (schema)). Water and air ῥυθμῶ διαϕέρειν (rythmo diaphérein), i.e., they are distinguished with respect to the forms of combination of their atoms (Benveniste 1985, 329). Hence, rhythm is the form considered under the aspect of its spatiotemporal becoming. Rhythm shows how a concrete form comes into being through the creative composition of its critical moments. “Rhythm takes place in the Open” (Maldiney 2012, 227), says Maldiney in his essay “Esthetics of Rhythm” (Maldiney 2012, 201–30) (Esthétique des rythmes). It is the first step out of nothingness and chaos and thus the first creative moment in the overcoming of a crisis. It refers to the way in which a shock, a crisis, an event is integrated into a new gestalt and transformed into a concrete existential setting. A rhythm is not objectifiable in space. It cannot be perceived in the literal sense of the word. . . . This form only exists in formation. It consists in its own genesis. Its rhythmic self-genesis gives rise to the space and time (space-time) of its manifestation. . . . Rhythm is the self-movement of space-time whose genesis of form is the moving articulation. (Maldiney 2007, 151)

Maldiney often quotes Paul Klee, who says that a form (gestalt) is not an inert entity, but an active “formation” (Gestaltung) (Maldiney 2012, 211). To what he adds: “A form is not a being (étant). It exists” (Maldiney 2007, 152). Whereas the gestalt merely refers to the fixed result of a

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genetic process, Gestaltung is the genesis itself. This is why, according to Maldiney, “Gestaltung and rhythm are related” (Maldiney 2012, 212). They both express the very act of formation of a form; the form’s “auto-genesis” (Maldiney 2012, 211). Rhythm. It is through this that the passage from chaos to order operates. . . . In rhythm, the Open (l’Ouvert) is not hollowness (béance) but patency (patence). The movement is not the sort of engulfment (engloutissement) but of emergence. (Maldiney 2012, 206)

Through rhythm’s spatiotemporal configuration, existence and artworks come into being—and into a world. But this process of becoming (a world) cannot be conceived in mere abstraction. It implies, for Maldiney, a certain concreteness and it has to be analyzed on the ground of sensuous experience. As a matter of fact, existence’s—and art’s (!)—modes of spatialization and temporalization engage first and foremost processes of sensible and sensuous experience. They refer to the vast realm of moods, affects, feelings and sensations, which Maldiney subsumes under the heading of the “pathic.” We already met the “pathic” in the context of transpassibility, crisis and Maldiney’s interpretation of von Weizsäcker. It referred to the unconditioned openness toward the event, the non-anticipable capacity to suffer the crisis. We now approach the second source of Maldiney’s concept of “pathic,” which is Erwin Straus. Straus, like von Weizsäcker, was a German physician, philosopher and a pioneer of anthropological medicine and psychiatry. In his major work Vom Sinn der Sinne (On the Sense of Senses) (Straus 1978), Straus distinguishes the “pathic” from the “gnosic” and thereby opposes the theoretical attitude toward the world to the preconceptual attitude of a sensuous and sensible communication with the world. His deep and exhaustive analyses of our pre-theoretical acquaintance with the world and its nonverbal organization were already a great source of inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The Strausian “pathic” is in Maldiney synonymous with what he calls the “feel” (le sentir), in which, as he says, “I and the world . . . are intrinsically related” (Maldiney 2007, 139): In the feel (sentir), the becoming of the subject and the event of the world are deployed at the same time: I only become insofar as something happens (quelque chose arrive), and something happens, for me, only insofar as I become. (Maldiney 2007, 140)

In Maldiney, the Strausian “pathic” becomes a rhythmic organization of our sensible encounter with the world. Rhythm operates within the “feel” (le sentir) and its relationship to movement. It structures our bodily position

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within the horizon of the world, defines our movement anticipations and even influences the attunement and the mood of a certain situation. But at the same time, rhythm is the way in which artworks appear and affect us in our contemplation of them. Artworks are themselves rhythmical configurations that invite us to share a certain mode of openness to the world. They are not simply objects within the world (simple beings [Seiendes]), but they indicate a certain access to beings and have thus an ontological meaning. They reveal to us the rhythmical ground of the world’s constitution. This is why, according to Maldiney, rhythm elucidates the meaning of the Greek term aesthesis (αἴσθησις), which refers indistinctly to the common origin of sensuous experience and art. Rhythm is the truth of this first communication with the world, which essentially consists of the αἴσθησις from which aesthetics takes its name, the sensation in which the feel (le sentir) is articulated with movement (se mouvoir). (Maldiney 2012, 207)

Maldiney here radicalizes the Kantian idea of aesthetics as a twofold investigation into the sensible conditions of objective knowledge (as thematized in Kant’s first Critique) and into the sensible foundation of our evaluation and contemplation of artworks (the third Critique). He does not simply assert, as Kant did, that an inquiry into our sensible condition leads to the truth of art. But he reverses the constitutive direction in saying that it is the artwork that reveals the truth of our sensible condition: “Art is the truth of the sensible because rhythm is the truth of αἴσθησις” (Maldiney 2012, 208). Art reveals the truth about our sensible condition, because it provides an insight into the ontological functioning of rhythm. Maldiney’s definition of art had a huge impact on his younger colleague in Lyon: Gilles Deleuze. When Deleuze wrote his 1981 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, he returned to Maldiney’s notion of the rhythm and applied it to his twofold investigation into Bacon’s paintings and our bodily acquaintance with the word. What is the “logic of sensation” according to Deleuze? Nothing else than rhythm: a systolic-diastolic movement that unfolds space and time together and in which the self experiences the opening and the disclosure of the world. These rhythmic processes of opening and disclosure are first and foremost sensuous experiences. It is in sensuous experience that the world attracts or repulses, envelops or excludes us. Deleuze lucidly grasps Maldiney’s main point when he says: What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music. It is

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diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself. (Deleuze 2003, 42)

Deleuze captures very well Maldiney’s idea of rhythm as the common structure of all our senses. Beyond the usual physiological distinction between different sense organs, rhythm is the common operating element that relates the different senses to each other. It is the true sensus communis, the way in which all senses interact. Synesthetic experiences testify to the possibility of a general transposition between objectively distinguished sensory fields. A certain color, for instance, can trigger a certain sound, or a taste, since the way in which our living body is affected in these experiences is identical. What is identical is thus not the objectified result of these experiences, but, as Merleau-Ponty says, the “vibration” of our body in the “feel” of these objects (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 273). But rhythm does not only unify the different sensuous fields of our body. It furthermore constitutes the interface between my experiencing body and the experienced world. It is the active element in the living exchange between world and body. Deleuze points precisely to rhythm’s central position when he says: Between a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an existential communication that would constitute the “pathic” (nonrepresentative) moment of the sensation. (Deleuze 2003, 42)

CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter was to introduce the anthropological phenomenology of Henri Maldiney. We approached Maldiney’s thinking through several of his fundamental concepts such as presence, encounter, event, transpassibility and transpossibility, crisis and rhythm. It became clear that Maldiney elaborates his thinking of human existence in close dialogue with Heidegger. However, this is not to say that his work should be understood as a mere commentary on or a simple but ingenious exegesis of the famous German philosopher. Maldiney’s thinking follows its own path in a very independent manner. It is free and creative and completely unorthodox. The free combination of different fields of research and disciplines shows the liberty that Maldiney takes with the common understanding of philosophy and the human sciences in general. His unorthodox theoretical elaborations require the reader to subtly move between generally well-distinguished topics and fields. This unorthodoxy is also the reason why his work often resists against attempts of systematization.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. 1955. Poetics. Longinus: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style. Translated by Stephen Halliwell, W. Hamilton Fyfe, Doreen C. Ines, W. Rhys Roberts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benveniste, Emile. 1985. Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard. Conrad, Klaus. 1966. Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Stuttgart: Thieme. Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London, New York: Continuum. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher. Maldiney, Henri.2007. Penser l’homme et la folie. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 2012. Regard Parole Espace. Edited by Christian Chaput and Philippe Grosos. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. Maldiney, Henri and Kuhn, Roland. Rencontre. Begegnung. Au péril d’exister. Briefwechsel. Correspondance. Français. Deutsch. 1953–2004. Edited by Liselotte Rutishauser and Robert Christe. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Phénomenologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard. Parnas, Joseph. 2003. “Self and Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Perspective,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tile Kircher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–41. Straus, Erwin. 1978. Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie Heidelberg, Berlin, New York: Springer. Weizsäcker (von), Viktor. 1973. Der Gestaltkreis. Stuttgart: Suhrkamp.

NOTES 1. It is true that Heidegger was one of the first to underline the intimate relationship between self-consciousness and the singular being that is conscious of itself. The concept of Jemeinigkeit underlines the “me-ness” of all experience. However, also in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Dasein and Jemeinigkeit are considered as eidetic aspects of existence. 2. “Subjectivity . . . comes to pass as a passivity more passive than all passivity” (Levinas 1991, 14). 3. Henri Maldiney, Roland Kuhn, Rencontre. Begegnung. Au péril d’exister. Briefwechsel. Correspondance. Français. Deutsch. 1953–2004, eds. Liselotte Rutishauser and Robert Christe (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017). 4. See Parnas 2003. 5. See Plato’s Symposium (187b) or Laws (665a). 6. In Book 3, Chapter 8 (1–3) of Rhetoric Aristotle writes for instance: “Now all things are limited by number, and the number belonging to the form of diction is rhythm” (Aristotle 1955). See also Book 4 of his Physics.

Chapter 7

Rhythm and Subjectivity in Maldiney and Deleuze Stefan Kristensen

Henri Maldiney and Gilles Deleuze were colleagues in Lyon from 1964 to 1969 and relatively close personally.1 Between the phenomenologist “to the impossible”2 and the philosopher of the event and difference, there was a deep affinity that became philosophically productive. Back in Paris after his teaching years in Lyon at the end of the 1960s, Deleuze started working on aesthetic issues, a new realm for him, alongside his collaborative works with Guattari. His aesthetic thinking relies essentially on the notion of the rhythm inherited from Maldiney, particularly in his works on film and painting. There are not so many notions passing from the phenomenological field into a rather metaphysical one, to be used mostly against the phenomenological project. The notion of rhythm is one of those. The issue at stake in this Deleuzian appropriation of the rhythm concerns the status of subjectivity and the correlation between the autonomous power of the rhythm and the subject’s receptivity. Both philosophers consider the subject’s receptivity to be the other side of a transcendental power granted to the rhythm. The phenomenological framework of Maldiney leads him to describe the potential transformation undergone by the subject triggered by the event of the rhythm. In contrast, Deleuze seeks to account for the autonomy of the notion, independently of its reception by a subject. This essay aims to outline these issues and show how close one can get to the ridge between phenomenological and speculative thinking.

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RHYTHM AND SUBJECTIVITY In Maldiney’s philosophy, the rhythm refers to a visual artwork, or to the appearance in the perceptual field of a natural phenomenon, such as the Matterhorn Mountain while hiking in the valley of Zermatt in the Swiss Alps (Maldiney 2000, 31). It refers to the specific event of the appearing of the aesthetic form and to the unforeseeable transformation of the subject, which happens to resonate with this event. To Maldiney, the rhythm involves a transcendental dimension since it constitutes the condition of possibility of lived spatiality as such. The perception of the rhythm by the subject and its transformation in and through this very act are the two faces of the same process. The artwork’s rhythmic temporality is its way to expand in the space of perception and, beyond that, to lend form to space itself, since the appearing of a figure transforms the ground upon which it appears. When Maldiney introduces and explains the notion in his essay “The Aesthetics of Rhythm,”3 he refers, first of all, to the writings of Paul Klee and the words of Cézanne and stresses that the issue at stake is the constitution of the structure of lived space, according to the fundamental dimensions: up and down, left and right, back and front. How does this process unfold? It starts with the chaos (Klee), or with the abyss (Cézanne), and the correlate of this shapeless spatiality is vertigo, i.e., the loss (or absence) of bodily anchor points: “the sky topples with the earth in a whirling without grip” (Maldiney 1973, 150).4 The rhythm’s movement sets in when a gray point is drawn on the canvas, or in the perceptual field whenever a shape appears and transforms the field’s overall figure-ground structure. Klee’s gray point is the emblematic origin of lived space because it is a minimal shape allowing the sentient body to relate to an anchor in front of itself. The movement that takes shape from there opens up the space of a possible existence.5 This is the reason why the void in which the gray point appears is an “Openness” (Ouvert), “not a gap, rather a patency” (Maldiney 1973, 151).6 Maldiney describes a space of possibilities where the unforeseen might emerge; the question of the subject’s mode of existence is all the more relevant, as the subject tends to disappear and to be absorbed in such an invasive whirling space, as he writes about the painting of Jan Van Goyen, “Polder Landscape” (1644).7 Here is how he describes the position of a human subject in such a canvas: “What is a human when she experiences herself in her environment?—One individual overwhelmed by the space which envelops and traverses her from all sides, and which she haunts with all her presence, lost between the uncovered immensity of the sky and the radiant expanse of the earth off the coast of her steps” (151). Maldiney stresses that this person will only be able to experience her powerlessness, her “failed presence” (présence en échec), since “space is impossible to parallel” (152).8

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There is a strong asymmetry in this description of the encounter between the human subject and the open landscape. The subject experiences powerlessness and a failure as the enveloping space surrounds it, but this experience is the original state from which the subject will let herself be transformed. To be transformed is conditioned by the complete dismantling of the habitual space, being overwhelmed by the openness and then being taken away by the emerging shapes’ rhythm. However, what is the rhythm in itself? Here is a summary of the concept,9 as Maldiney uses it: rhythm is not to be confused with cadence, it is not a regular pulsation that could be mathematically formalized, but rather a spatiotemporal singularity; the rhythm is inseparable from the act of its perception, what Maldiney names the encounter, in other words, it consists in the event of the encounter where the subject is more or less overwhelmed by its presence; rhythm unites space and time so that one can say that it is the structuring movement of lived space. As Jean-Christophe Goddard explains about the Greek term rhythmos, “Ruthmos means shape (forme). In the precise sense of this shape in the process of formation, in a perpetual transformation in the return of the same. . . . The rhythm refers to . . . the shape at the moment where it is taken up by what is moving and liquid. More precisely: to this instantaneous configuration, the rhythmic form adds the internal continuity of duration (durée), in order to suppress the distinction between instant and time in it” (Goddard 2009; my translation). Maldiney insists on this processual dimension of the rhythm, in consistently using the German term Gestaltung, the suffix -ung being the expression of an ongoing movement, a process; the rhythm sets a mode of perception, a mood that makes possible and at the same time colors what is perceived or the image. “The rhythm, because it is a form of presence, an existential, is by itself a warrant of reality” (Maldiney 1973, 165); the rhythm draws a “hearth of human existence” (174), by giving form to our relationship with the world. In sum, the rhythm is an aesthetic notion, in both senses, that is, a notion concerning the presence and appearance of artworks, and a notion concerning our very opening to the world. The rhythm is the condition of possibility that the Open doesn’t remain chaos, but possibility, the inauguration of an order. The encounter with an artwork is the paradigm of the wonder of our encounter with the world. But the issue is not limited to art; it is about our relations with the world and other forms of life. Since such relations expose us to the unpredictable, the opening made by the rhythm prepares us paradoxically to this unpredictable dimension. This is why Maldiney insists so strongly on the experience of the impossible: if the real is understood as “what we didn’t expect,” our attitude toward it is necessarily paradoxical. We prepare ourselves for what appears unexpectedly, and the idea that the rhythm would produce subjectivity comes out of that

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paradox. This is precisely the issue at stake with the notion of transpassibility to which he devotes an essay in Thinking Man and Madness (Penser l’homme et la folie).10 Deleuze was interested in the concept of rhythm for that specific reason, and his appropriation of the concept aims to account for the moment when space produces subjectivity. FROM MALDINEY TO DELEUZE As has become clear from this reading of Maldiney, the significance of the concept of rhythm goes beyond the realm of aesthetics; Jean-Christophe Goddard stresses this point in his article already quoted above.11 He emphasizes the proximity of Deleuze’s aesthetic thinking with his former colleague from Lyon. Goddard defines the idea of the artwork as, primarily, a monument, and compares and contrasts the thinking of both philosophers on this topic. In this context, he discusses, in particular, the approach of the artist Alberto Giacometti, and the perception of the ground, of the space between things as a “space proper to the hysterical station of the body” (Goddard 2009). He shows that the essence of the rhythm for both philosophers consists in the simultaneity of a movement of systole and diastole, dilatation and contraction, of centrifugal and centripetal dynamics. Space becomes structured thanks to such tension and provides a ground in which the subject finds her integrity. In his comment of Giacometti’s account from his experience as a sculptor facing emptiness, Goddard emphasizes the simultaneity of the experience of annihilation of subjectivity and the gap of unlimited space: “This subsistence in disappearance is thus jointly the subsistence of the artwork and of the transpassible subject, as long as they stand together in the Open through their rhythmic station” (Goddard 2009). The term “transpassible” could be translated by “trans-liable”; Maldiney introduces this term in his works from the 1980s and 1990s in order to account for the subject’s ability to face the impossible in the event: it is not only “passible” (liable) to the event, but “trans-passible” because the event is deemed impossible before it happens. The “trans-liable” subject is precisely the subject of the event, the subject able to be surprised and overwhelmed by the rhythm’s movement. Goddard reads this trans-liable subject as being attracted by the immensity of the ground, but at the same time, the subject comes to herself in this very movement of disappearance. The subject’s existence is paradoxical since it is in the event of her disappearance that she experiences herself as a desiring subject. Indeed, the desiring movement sucks the subject into the emptiness of space and grants her the experience, in the same movement, of her disappearance and of her reconstitution. This reading is true to what Maldiney himself

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says about the deployment of space: he writes, in the very passage I quoted above about the Van Goyen painting in the text from 1969, that the “failure is overcome,” since the presence of space all around the subject is revealing the subject’s presence, and this copresence of subject and space is captured for Maldiney in the Husserlian concept of Urdoxa, the “originary belief in the real,” in other words the simultaneity of “there is” and “I’m there” (Maldiney 1973, 152).12 The further developments on “transpassibility” in Thinking Man and Madness are essentially ways of deepening this fundamental structure, for example, when he writes that the “acceptance of the event and the advent of the existing are one” (Maldiney 2007, 306).13 The subject is already there but ignores herself; the infinite space abducts her from herself because of her aspiration for the impossible, and in this and in the very experience of this self-disappearance, failure is overcome, and the subject emerges transformed from the ordeal. To sum up, the event of the rhythm is identical to the advent of the subject.14 Such a thought structure also characterizes Deleuze’s essay on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, in which Maldiney’s concept of rhythm plays a central role. In the third chapter, for example, concerning the relation of the Figure and the structure, Deleuze writes that the Figure “is no longer simply isolated, but deformed; sometimes contracted and aspirated, sometimes stretched and dilated” (Deleuze 2003, 18). This passage is also quoted by Goddard (2008, 99); a little bit further down in the text, one reads, “The Figure is not simply the isolated body, but also the deformed body that escapes from itself” (Deleuze 2003, 18). These quotes fit Maldiney’s description of the rhythm perfectly as the tension between two opposing movements in the image, creating a vibration that the subject can resonate with. Further, when he introduces the notion of rhythm at the end of chapter 5, Deleuze describes a work by Bacon, Painting (1978), in terms of an oscillation between systole and diastole: “The systole, which contracts the body, goes from the structure to the Figure, while the diastole, which extends and dissipates it, goes from the Figure to the structure” (33). Such an oscillating and vibrating movement is precisely the emergence of the form, the process of gestalt-ung of the gestalt, a process consisting in a more or less complex web of tensions making up for the painting itself. Or, as he sums it up in the very last lines of the chapter, “The coexistence of all these movements in the painting . . . is rhythm” (33). This process is taking place in the background of the Open, that is, the world as a source of the forms and not as a mere abyss. This holds, first and foremost, for painting since Deleuze uses these notions in his analysis of Francis Bacon’s paintings, but he also uses the notion of the Open in the introductory chapter of The Movement-Image, the first volume on cinema.15 I focus here on painting, simply because it suits better my intention

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to bring Deleuze and Maldiney back together, and Maldiney did not write about film.16 Bacon is, for Deleuze, the painter who recapitulates the history of Western painting and plays for him the paradigmatic role that Cézanne and Klee play for Maldiney. He searches with Bacon for a figuration of inhumane forces that go through being, and structure being out from an indeterminate emptiness. Deleuze takes the same point of departure for the aesthetic experience than Maldiney with Klee’s chaos or Cézanne’s abyss. The introduction of Cezanne’s notion of sensation in the sixth chapter shows an efficient way out of the alternative between figurative painting (as an illustration of narration) and abstract painting. Sensation is the moment of an encounter between the sentient and the sensing, or as Deleuze writes while quoting both Maldiney and Merleau-Ponty in a footnote, “I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other” (Deleuze 2003, 35). But the sensation is essentially a movement; there are different “levels” in a figure, and the sensation is nothing else than the sensation of movement or the tension from one level to the other. The sensation is the “master of deformations, the agent of bodily deformations” (36) because it is the concomitance of two contradictory movements. Thus, every painting is made of “shifting sequences,” and sensation possesses an “irreducibly synthetic character” (37). Deleuze examines then four hypotheses in order to explain what the unity of this synthesis consists in, but then joins, at least provisionally, the hypothesis that he calls “the most ‘phenomenological’ one.” According to this hypothesis, the levels of sensation correspond to different senses (vision, hearing, touching), inasmuch as they are in relation with the other senses. As he sums it up at the end of this chapter, “Between a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an existential communication that would constitute the ‘pathic’ (nonrepresentative) moment of the sensation” (42). At this point, Deleuze departs from the phenomenological perspective: this principle of the originary unity of sensations, this moment of “intersensoriality” is precisely an effect of rhythm. Deleuze grasps the notion as a “vital power that exceeds every domain and goes through them all” (42), and not as a principle of translatability proper to bodily subjectivity through the body schema. Maldiney takes over Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the body;17 In these analyses, intersensoriality is the testimony of the unity of the living body, the fact that perception is first unitary before it is divided in different sensory channels, and the rhythm of a perceptual configuration is precisely what is given in an intersensorial manner, since the rhythm is the autogenesis of a form, and as it solicits the motility of the entire body. On the other hand, Deleuze takes the rhythm as the manifestation of more fundamental power,

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independent from the body, with the ability even to break up its unity. In a footnote at the beginning of chapter 6, he characterizes rhythm as a power at work in the world that takes over subject and object, but that cannot be reduced to one or the other. At the start of the following chapter, his hesitation about phenomenology (he seemed to embrace the phenomenological “hypothesis” about sensation in chapter 6) is over: in order to account for the “rhythmic unity of the senses,” “the phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient” (44), because it relies on the unity of the body, be it an organism or a living body. The unity of the rhythm can only lie in the originary movement of chaos, where “the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed” (44). This “rhythmic unity of the senses” is, according to Deleuze, dependent on a power surpassing the organism, surpassing the unity of a living body; consequently, the correlate, on the subjective side, of the rhythm is the body without organs, and not a body unified by its postural schema and by the regulated cooperation of its organs. My interpretation of the body without organs is that it is essentially a conductor of energy fluxes. It is the notion of the body that allows Deleuze to set the rhythm as the manifestation of a power independent from the correlation between a subject and a perceived world. This image of chaos or catastrophe as points of departure of the act of painting is to be found again in the twelfth chapter on “The Diagram,” where Deleuze again mentions Maldiney, and precisely the passage about Klee’s chaos and Cézanne’s abyss from “The Aesthetics of Rhythm” mentioned above. In the experience of the painter, Deleuze writes, there is always this “experience of the chaos-germ,” that is at the same time a “collapse of visual coordinates” and a “germ of order or rhythm” (102). The function of the diagram in Bacon’s method is to undo the structures of perception in order to allow for new patterns to emerge rhythmically in the work of painting. In sum, Deleuze takes on Maldiney’s description of the beginning of aesthetic experience. The movement of creation sets off after a collapse of the spatial coordinates of lived space, out from the experience of vertigo. But in Deleuze’s interpretation, the movement or rhythm setting off from this initial chaos is more than the sentient world. The rhythmic movement manifest in artworks is a vital, cosmic force, captured by each painter in a singular way. The more the painter succeeds in creating a vibrant form, the more the artwork appears as a bloc, as an event. For the subject to receive the work’s event, it occurs (like the example of the Matterhorn Mountain suggests) against a background that is nothing, not even the background of a figure. Deleuze radicalizes this idea and draws its consequences by claiming that the subject receiving the artwork is as much the result of the image’s appearing as the image itself is born out of the rhythm of perception. Subject and object are on the same plane of immanence, and the ontological gap between them is bridged since they are both subordinate to the irruption of the vital force of

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the rhythm. The question one may ask at this point is the following: is there a more fundamental power than the subject-object polarity, a power at the origin of this opposition? If it exists, is it enough to deny that a form of subjectivity exists before the event of the rhythm? If it is the case that a certain form of primitive subjectivity does exist, what is its form? ON THE THRESHOLD OF PHENOMENOLOGY In his critical commentary, Renaud Barbaras suspects Maldiney of remaining paralyzed on the threshold of a “sort of radical empiricism,” without however getting rid of the “eventful empiricism” (Barbaras 2014, 27, 28). He recognizes that according to Maldiney, the appearing of an artwork produces the very space of its reception and thus also the subject receiving it. If it holds that the event’s arising is completely unpredictable, that nothing allows the subject to foresee anything about it, then receptivity cannot precede the event either. We will have to conclude that subjectivity, even as the simple opening of sentience, is produced by the event, proceeds from the event; but then, how can the subject’s permanence be preserved, a necessity for any phenomenological philosophy? What kind of thing is subjectivity latent, contingent, and liable to the event? Barbaras notes that the subject’s opening toward the event and the event itself constitutes one and the same moment. If the event is unpredictable, its reception can only be unexpected as well, and the pathic subject must be the result of the event. According to Barbaras, it would make no sense to speak of an expectation in the pathic realm since what happens occurs unexpectedly. On the other hand, if the pathic subject would expect the event, the experienced sensation could not be distinguished from the conscious anticipation and thus from intentionality. The problem is, therefore, a serious one: either the pathic subject expects the event, but then she is too active, and activity and passivity cannot be distinguished anymore, or the subject is necessarily surprised by the event, and then she cannot rigorously preexist the event and must appear as a product of the event. In this last horn of the alternative, the phenomenological method loses its foundation, or in Barbaras’s terms: “If the event is really unpredictable, the capacity of receiving it is unpredictable too, so that the reception of the event and the existing who receives it, proceed both from the event itself” (Barbaras 2014, 26). This demonstration is as much a test for the consistency of Maldiney’s position as it is key to understand Deleuze’s point of view on the status of subjectivity. I mentioned above the fact that Deleuze had, in a certain sense, radicalized Maldiney’s position; one could say, about Barbaras’s critical argument, that Deleuze also considers the subject as a product of the event and

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claims the kind of “radical empiricism” that Barbaras ascribes to Maldiney. This type of radical empiricism consists of affirming that subjectivity is a product of the forces that precede and go beyond her. This amounts to claiming that nothing determined preexists the event of the rhythm; no structured and receptive being can exist before the event. It is the event that gives rise to the subject by its power and its form. Indeed, one can understand Deleuze’s “body without organs” as an answer to the question of what there is “before” the body-subject; since it cannot be a sort of subjectivity, but still has to give rise to subjectivity, Deleuze’s solution is a theoretical fiction meant to simply conduct energy all the while being itself void of any kind of organization. The “body without organs” is the body’s state as it is carried by forces, by intensities, before any kind of awareness or reflexivity. The body without organs is the place where the rhythm reveals itself as “vital power that exceeds every domain and transcends them all” (Deleuze 2003, 42), as Deleuze formulates it. At the beginning of chapter 7, he mentions the body without organs as the instance that gives access to the experience of the rhythm: the point “where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed” (44) is where the body without organs lies. From the event of the rhythm, the body can gather and form a subjective gestalt, a reflective totality. Deleuze focuses on the forms of the rhythm as a power independent from its effects on the perceiving subject. If we look at Maldiney’s argument from this point of view of autonomy of the rhythmic movements of the artwork, Barbaras’s criticism becomes all the more significant: we have a setting where a “vital force” circulates with the power of triggering the organization of “bodies without organs.” And such bodies are no subjects (yet). Following this argument, the phenomenological approach is short-circuited since the emergence of subjectivity is explained by an external event that happens unexpectedly. For Maldiney to remain a phenomenologist and maintain “a gap between what is open and what is received” (Barbaras 2014, 29), Barbaras offers one solution: the dynamics of desire. According to Barbaras, desire is the only mode of relation with the world in which the perceiving and the perceived are distinguished in a non-intentional, noncognitive way. Desire is a fundamental openness toward the world, whose satisfaction only rekindles its dynamics, only “reactivates the desire at the moment when it extinguishes it.” (Barbaras 2014, 30) Thus, desire is turned toward the unknown since it is relentlessly and unexpectedly reborn. Only desire can correspond to the requirement according to which the pathic should be without expectation and anticipation. However, a difficulty emerges concerning the question of the origin of desire; if it holds that desire is experienced, or felt, by a subject, then the subject is in a passive stance in relation to it. We must admit that there is indeed something animating the subject “before” the event, and in this sense, we can state that the event of the rhythm doesn’t happen on the background

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of a pure void (i.e., the absence of a background). But desire as such doesn’t belong to the subject, not any more than the other drives; one can say that desire, just like the other drives is a kind of alterity constitutive of the subject itself. My claim is that desire is a force against which the subject comes to herself and might become herself. On this basis, it is clear that if Maldiney’s trans-liability shall remain on the side of phenomenology, and not tilt over to a form of transcendental empiricism, it would imply a conception of drives as forces that are required in order to let the subject become itself. According to Barbaras, “Maldiney pushes the passivity of receptivity to the point of tilting towards empiricism,” inasmuch as the expectation of the event is experienced only in retrospect, once the event has taken place. An expectation that doesn’t expect anything, a pure receptivity “has nothing to do with expectation, has only the name of it” (Barbaras 2014, 28). Maldiney’s involuntary empiricism is then quite clear: since he “dismisses resolutely any form of intentionality or project” (29), he doesn’t have the conceptual means to think about the gap between what is open and what is received. Everything is born out of the event of an opening, including also the subject. Barbaras pushes Maldiney toward the Deleuzian position, toward a conception of rhythm and sensation as autonomous forces producing the world as much as the subject perceiving the world. The difficulty of Maldiney’s position as a phenomenologist is precisely to show that an unforeseen event, or an independent “vital force,” or a drive overwhelming the subject, are factors needed for the subject to become itself. In the beginning, there is only chaos, but the subject becomes in the structuring process triggered by the rhythmic event. Now the question remains if Maldiney might evade Barbaras’s objection: if the subject doesn’t exist before the event, is there any receptive instance able to give rise to a subject in the full sense? RHYTHM AND DRIVE In a passage taken from “Aesthetics of the Rhythm,” Maldiney stresses that rhythm defines the space of sentience, in contrast with perception, understood as a cognitive practice of recognition. Perception implies that the subject-object polarity is already constituted; however, believing that “all human experience is structured” by this polarity constitutes the “theoretical illusion” par excellence (Maldiney 1973, 164). Such differentiation between two levels of subjective experience points to two fundamentally different configurations of the relation between self and the world: perception has to do with objectivation, and sensation has to do with communication. “The founding elements of rhythm” belong to sensation (le sentir), and “sensation is fundamentally a mode of communication,” relation with the world in which

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“we live our being-with-the-world in a pathic mode” (ibid.). Communication is understood here as an experience of being in common and not as an act of conveying information content. At this level of experience, Maldiney claims that there is no subject-object polarity; the experience of rhythm is an experience of common belonging of the ego and the world. The sensation is also the place of a primitive certainty, of the undeniable (but of course also unprovable) presence of the world, what Maldiney calls the “dimension of the real.” How does Maldiney then describe this “Ego-world relation” that “doesn’t undergo the possibility of the No” (165), and whose experience is characterized as the experience of primitive certainty? Clearly, it cannot be an organized ego, but rather a self with no conscious reflexivity, a “primitive subject,” or an “eternal under-lying” (éternel sous-jacent), as he calls it in Art and Existence (Maldiney 1985, 68). This “primitive subject” whose posture is pure receptivity, of an expectation with no anticipation, is already the subject of a presence but no activity itself. It is nothing else than the underlying support of a tension of contradictory drives, as he explains in his essay “Drive and presence.”18 He draws on Leopold Szondi’s theory of drives, according to which the ego is not a being existing in advance before the drives pull through, but rather the result of a proper drive, the so-called “ego drive.” The ego drive is one of the four fundamental drive vectors which are all divided into two opposing tendencies: for example, the Ego drive is split into the ego-systole and the ego-diastole, the tendency for the ego to concentrate on oneself or to spread out in the world. The ego emerges not as a substantial being, but as the point of balance between contradictory drive tensions, as a structure whose stability and shape depend upon the stability of opposing drives, the ego is essentially a “pontifex,” a bridge builder; it has the ambiguous role of being at the same time the agent of its actions and the results of them. Maldiney asserts this twofold role of the ego while quoting Fichte and referring Szondi’s conception to Schiller: “The Ego poses itself, and it is in virtue of its mere being. It is at the same time the acting and the product of the act, the active and what is produced by this very activity. Act and fact are the same” (Maldiney 2007, 114).19 The asubjective drive and the presence in the world of a subject are two aspects of the same reality; Fichte’s Ego, at once “acting and production of the act,” corresponds to the self’s unconscious ground, where the energy of the drives circulates. Where the energy of the drives circulate, they carry the subject ahead of itself, toward the world, and “as soon as they are in the world, they have already crossed the threshold separating the living and the existing” (130), he writes in the same text. Since the drives are energetic movements directed toward the world, movements pushing the subject to a specific attitude toward the world and others, Maldiney can write that drive and presence always go together: “There is no drive vector in which presence doesn’t emerge through the tendency of the

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drive” (130). The experience of the drive (in the sense of the drive as being experienced) and what makes it present to the world and others carries the subject ahead of herself and makes her present to herself and the others. Without delving into the details of Maldiney’s reception of Szondi’s rather complex system,20 I simply want to emphasize two things: on the one hand, the drives go by pairs of opposed drives, such as ego-systole and ego-diastole, that is, the tendency of feeling invaded by the world and the tendency of colonizing the world. On the other hand, the ego doesn’t consist of a substance; in essence, the ego is an “Ego pontifex,” that is a link between two opposed drives and the gap between them. The presence in the world, or intentionality, is always already included in the drive. “Szondi’s drive system makes sense only through presence. . . . presence announces itself in the gap (faille), the crossing of which is its resource. Presence grounds the internal dynamics of the system” (132). In other words, according to Maldiney, the drives are the movements that make the subject present to the world in a conscious manner. In his perspective, there is no production of subjectivity by the event since the underlying primitive subject is already liable to (passible) drive movements, but there is indeed the product of the ego through the balance between conflicting drive tendencies. Thus, the question of the body’s organization doesn’t arise for Maldiney; the body is available for the awakening induced by the event of the rhythm and acquires its structure from that moment. However, it is more relevant to think about desire and drives in the framework of a bodily conception of subjectivity. Only a living body is liable to the event, able to be put in motion and transform itself. Maldiney’s challenge would be to think about the human existing from the perspective of her corporeality, and this would imply replacing the void with the indeterminate and bridge the distance between human existence and the other living. The very fact that the human subject is pathic in certain situations, liable to being transformed by an aesthetic experience, implies a certain type of political, psychic, and biological disposition, corresponding precisely to the machinic transversality in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense. One must be made of certain stuff in order to experience the void, or in Maldiney’s terms, if being liable to emptiness is a specific feature of the human existing, if the human is “the only being able to feel anxiety” (Maldiney 2007, 280),21 her existence must rely on a ground making such an experience possible. In other words, if the human is an existing, and not merely a living, it is because she experiences emptiness, and from there the call to be the proper place of her own existence, her “here” (là), as he writes while translating the Heideggerian Da-sein, “being-here literally.” However, this ability to hear the call requires a certain bodily apparatus to be translated into real human life.

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CONCLUSION The situation is the following: Maldiney considers the human subject as being able to be disrupted by the experience of the abyss, but that a subjective entity, or at least a subjective instance, exists before this disruption, but not in the form of a subject in correlation with an object. Such an instance preexisting the event of the rhythm is not an ego able to correlate the objects of the world, but a primitive subjectivity analogous to the subjectivity of a schizophrenic with catatonic symptoms, a simple “under-lying”; Deleuze, for his part, finds in the phenomenon of the rhythm an autonomous cosmic force capable of opening and giving rise to the subject-object correlation, and thus to produce subjectivity in the first place. The body receiving the disruption of the rhythm is called by Deleuze a “body without organs,” a body with no organization, no structure, no vital autonomy, and this body is put in motion by the “vital power” of the rhythm that animates and puts it in motion. A Deleuzian stance is a form of transcendental empiricism; Barbaras questions Maldiney’s ability to remain in the phenomenological (correlational) perspective since the event seems to produce the subject in the full sense. The “underlying” is not in the correlation; it is simply a receptive instance that gives rise to a subject with objects in front of her. Barbaras relies on this argument to point to the absence in Maldiney of a clear conception of the “activity of passivity” that is the power of desire. However, it seems to me regarding Maldiney’s developments on the drives that this criticism is not fully justified. The power of the rhythm understood as the drives’ structure is precisely an account of such an activity in passivity, and in Maldiney’s terms, the rhythm is as much a movement belonging to the subject as it is apparent in the visual form. Maldiney’s philosophy’s limitation lies in another realm: the notion of the body as a receptive-active and organized being remains unthought. The process of becoming subject through the disruptive encounter with a rhythmic artwork is not described as a bodily process but rather as a mental process. This is what allowed Deleuze to introduce the body without organs as a correlate for the event of the rhythm. The unity of the artwork corresponds to the unity of the human body’s structure and its aspiration at the unity of life’s source. Deleuze is also taken in this aspiration toward unity; he aims to unite the rhythmic power since it crosses through all manifestations of life. It would, however, be possible to understand the human body as trans-liable, as able to develop more or less complex forms of subjectivity, depending on its environment.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barbaras, Renaud. 2014. “L’essence de la réceptivité: transpassibilité ou désir?,” in Maldiney, une singulière présence. Paris, Belles Lettres, 15–31. ———. 2016. Métaphysique du sentiment. Paris: Cerf. Cazal, Raphaëlle. 2016. “L’héritage de la conception riegélienne de la forme et du rythme dans l’esthétique phénoménologique d’Henri Maldiney.” Philosophie, 130, 38–55. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by D. W. Smith. London and New York: Continuum. Goddard, Jean-Christophe. 2008. Violence et subjectivité. Derrida, Deleuze, Maldiney. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2009. “Henri Maldiney et Gilles Deleuze. La station rythmique de l’œuvre d’art,” Deleuze International. https:​//​deleuze​.online​/2009​/02​/16​/jean​-christophe​ -goddard​-henri​-maldiney​-et​-gilles​-deleuze​-la​-station​-rythmique​-de​-l’oeuvre​-d’art​/ Jacquet, François. 2016. “Du sens du sentir: figures de l’être. Maldiney et Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophie, 130, 70–91. Kristensen, Stefan. 2012. “Le primat du performatif. Pour une esthétique politique du corps contemporain.” In E. Alloa & A. Jdey (eds), Du sensible à l’œuvre. Esthétiques de Merleau-Ponty. Bruxelles, La Lettre Volée, 297–316. ———. 2017. La Machine sensible. Paris: Hermann. Maldiney, Henri. 1973. Regard Parole Espace. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme. ———. 1985. Art et existence. Paris: Klincksieck. ———. 1988. “Chair et verbe dans la philosophie de M. Merleau-Ponty.” In: A.-T. Tymienecka (ed.), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, le psychique et le corporel. Paris, Aubier, 55–88. ———. 1993. L’art, l’éclair de l’être. Seyssel: Comp’act. ———. 2000. Ouvrir le rien, l’art nu. La Versanne: Encre Marine. ———. 2007. Penser l’homme et la folie (1991). Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Rodrigo, Pierre. 2017. Les Montages du sens. Philosophie, cinéma et arts plastiques. Belval: Circé. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2013. Deleuze and Art (2005). Translated by S. Bankston. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Serban, Claudia. 2016. “Du possible au transpossible.” Philosophie, 130, 56–69.

NOTES 1. According to François Dosse in his biography of Deleuze and Guattari (Dosse 2010). The personal account of Bernard Rordorf, who was a student of Maldiney in Lyon in the same period, concords. 2. This expression is in the title of an article by Maldiney, “Une phénoménologie à l’impossible: la poésie.”

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3. This essay is the written version of a presentation at an interdisciplinary conference (linguistics, biology, medicine, pedagogy, aesthetics) on the concept of rhythm, held in Lyon in December 1967. The proceedings were published in 1968 as a supplement of the French Journal of Otorhinolaryngology. It was then included in the volume Regard Parole Espace (Maldiney 1973), edited by Bernard Rordorf and Jean-Pierre Charcosset; in the following, all translations are mine. 4. The issue of bodily anchor points as conditions of possibility of the shaping of lived space is at the core of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on space in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945, 290–303). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body lies in the background of Maldiney’s aesthetics. 5. It is important to note that Maldiney makes a sharp distinction between life and existence; existence is a being in the world able to let itself be transformed, whereas life is mere receptivity. 6. Maldiney contrasts two terms: “béance” and “patence,” translated here by “gap” and “patency,” the latter term sounds as artificial as the French one. What is patent is available, whereas the gap is a shapeless void without any potentiality. 7. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 8. Maldiney’s French word is “inégalable,” impossible to equal, which refers to a failed correlation of subject and space, namely a structural incommensurability. 9. Apart from the linguist Emile Benveniste and his analyses of the word “rhythmos” in ancient Greek, the concept is rooted in the history of German philosophy of the early 20th century, starting with the art historian Alois Riegl, the vitalist philosopher Ludwid Klages, and the neo-Kantian philosopher Ludwig Hönigswald; on the relation between Maldiney and Riegl, see Cazal 2016. 10. Maldiney 2007, 263–308. To be “transpassible” means for the human subject to be passible (i.e., liable) of the impossible, able to face and be transformed by the unexpected. 11. As well as in Goddard 2008, in particular, 96–116. By contrast, the complete absence of Maldiney in Sauvagnargues’ book Deleuze and art (2013) is stunning. 12. The original text reads “la simultanéité du ‘il y a’ et du ‘j’y suis.’” 13. In French: “l’accueil de l’événement et l’avènement de l’existant sont un.” 14. This is what Frédéric Jacquet emphasizes in a recent article about the “co-birth” of the subject and the artwork in the event of the rhythm (Jacquet 2016). 15. Deleuze 1986, 17. Also quoted by Goddard 2008, 101f. Deleuze himself refers to the Open with reference to Bergson’s notion (1986, 20), but he must have been very well aware of Maldiney’s use of the notion too. 16. Concerning the relation between painting and film, see Kristensen, 2012; For further discussions about Deleuze’s position in the history of aesthetics, see, for example, Rodrigo 2017. 17. This is what Jacquet suggests (2016) before explaining Maldiney’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty. Maldiney’s reading is from his essay on “Flesh and Word in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy” (Maldiney 1988). 18. Maldiney 2007, 107–35. This essay was first published in 1976 and can be read as an answer to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Maldiney presents an interpretation of Oedipus that is completely different from the familial Oedipus of Freudian

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psychoanalysis, in love with his mom and rival with his dad, since he describes the doomed and wandering Oedipus after discovering his curse. On this comparison, see my Machine sensible (Kristensen 2017, 109–17). 19. The passage quoted by Maldiney is from Fichte’s Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Berlin, 1971, I), 96. 20. An Introduction to Fate Analysis (Szondi 1972) was published in the early 1970s, originally collecting a series of lectures given at the University of Zurich. 21. Significantly, Claudia Serban’s essay (Serban 2016) on the notions of “transpassibility” and “transpossibility” never mentions the question of the body. Not because it is flawed in any way, but because the question of the body is indeed absent in Maldiney.

PART III

Desire, Cosmology, and Metaphysics

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The Reversibility of the Flesh Jacques Garelli and Maurice Merleau-Ponty Renaud Barbaras (Translated by Elodie Boublil)

I met Jacques Garelli at the end of the 1980s, when I was a high school teacher near the Belgian border. I was concurrently lecturing at the University of Amiens, where Jacques Garelli was a professor. When I told him that I was doing my PhD thesis on Merleau-Ponty, he showed a completely unexpected enthusiasm, at a time when Merleau-Ponty was ignored or even despised. This meeting was decisive for me. It allowed me to come out of the complete intellectual isolation in which I found myself at that time and to benefit from the insights of someone who knew the thought of Merleau-Ponty very deeply. But, most importantly, it was the beginning of a long friendship. In memory of this first meeting, this essay focuses on Jacques Garelli and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The thought of Merleau-Ponty is omnipresent in the work of Jacques Garelli, to the point that the latter can appear as an ongoing dialogue with him. However, the obvious proximity of the two philosophies has obscured the true nature of their relation. This essay aims to introduce and analyze the latter, without claiming to exhaust a topic, which is as big as the work of Jacques Garelli itself. The philosophy of Jacques Garelli can be characterized as a kind of radicalization of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. However, this radicalization consists in taking seriously—and, so to speak, literally— what constitutes the core of the ontology of the last Merleau-Ponty, namely the theory of the flesh as an expression of the reversibility which characterizes the relation of one’s own body to the world. 129

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More precisely, Merleau-Ponty’s position is characterized by a kind of inconsistency, insofar as he does not follow his intuition to the end; Jacques Garelli aims to fulfill the latter. Garelli’s question is indeed: under what conditions is the reversibility of the flesh thinkable? The answer is that the conditions for a phenomenology of the flesh are not phenomenological, and this is undoubtedly the reason why Merleau-Ponty found himself in a philosophical dead end. In this sense, Garelli’s radicalization of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty appears as a superior form of loyalty. As we know, Merleau-Ponty’s starting point is the famous paragraph 36 of Husserl’s Ideen II on the constitution of one’s own body in touch, as a medium for localized sensations. The reversibility that characterizes touch, according to which any part of the body affected is always itself capable of touching, of being in touch, leads us to stop thinking of sensing as a faculty that would be added to the objective body. In truth, sensitivity is constitutive of corporeality, which means that the body is essentially capable of experiencing itself. It is a corporeal body (Leibkörper) against which the objective body appears as an abstraction. Of course, it follows that we must reject the idea of a​​ subjectivity which would be, de jure, distinct from a body: there is sensitivity only when it comes up to the surface of a corporeal body—incarnation is constitutive of its essence. Therefore, since sensing necessarily implies incarnation, and since each body comprises sensing on its very surface, we have to conclude that the flesh is neither feeling nor felt, that “the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 167). Merleau-Ponty makes this claim as of The Phenomenology of Perception. However, the reversibility granted to one’s own body in this work acquires ontological significance in the final phase of his thought. Indeed, because of the constitutive belonging of the incarnate subject to the world—belonging without which one cannot think phenomenalization—we have to conclude that what is valid for my flesh is valid for the world, or rather that the singular mode of being that emerges in my flesh necessarily precedes itself in a singular constitution of the being that it comes to reveal. Insofar as I am made of the world, insofar as the border between my body and the world has no meaning or reality on the ontological level, to say that my body is animated by sensing is to assert that “space itself is known through my body” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 167). Consequently, the test of tactile reversibility acquires an ontological significance and must henceforth be described as follows: “the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 134). In other words, by an ontologically legitimate extension, the real source of sensing is no longer my flesh, of which one wonders in fact by what right it should be circumscribed to the limits of my body,

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but the world itself, which will be thereby promoted to the rank of flesh: it is no longer I who feel myself but the world which feels itself in me. In other words, the blurring of the subjective and the objective that manifests itself in my body extends to the world’s dimensions to the point of characterizing the ontological sense of Being. We are therefore witnessing a kind of intentional inversion, or, rather, a duplication: the perceptual sight that goes from the subject to the world is only thinkable if the world lends itself, so to speak, to this perception by making itself sensitive; the movement which carries the subject toward the world is coupled with a movement in the opposite direction which goes from the world to the subject and these two movements are one. In short, saying that sensing is incarnate amounts to admitting that the subject can only feel the world because the world feels itself in her. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “the thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is, on the contrary, the sole means I have to go into the heart of the things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 135). Thus, strictly speaking, the becoming world of the flesh (in the sense of my own body) is the becoming flesh of the world. The concept of flesh then proceeds from this fundamental reversibility and is just its other name. Based on a primary ontological kinship designated by the concept of belonging, what applies to my body and defines it as flesh, namely the emergence of immanent sensing, must apply to the world, which must therefore be characterized as flesh: this corporeal body (Leibkörper) which is mine refers to an ontological flesh of which it is now just a modality. Nevertheless, we should take a closer look and ask what kind of flesh is exactly involved on the side of the world and, therefore, if speaking of flesh has the same meaning on both sides. There is a gap between what is implied by the extension of my flesh and what Merleau-Ponty says. The extension of my flesh based on the ontological kinship of the body and the world implies that the world feels itself just like my body does, that there is, therefore, a sensing of the world which can occur within the world itself, and which is immanent in the beings of the world. Consequently, sensing becomes de-subjectivated. It is taken off the subject to become an event that occurs from within mundane beings. However, this is not what Merleau-Ponty means when he describes the flesh of the world. To him, sensing can only occur in this fragment of the world that is my body and, when we speak of the flesh of the world, we only mean that the world is not an in-itself that the sensing subject would come to draw from the night, but that it is already on the side of phenomenality, that it is its visibility, a “scattered” visibility that the subject aims to gather. Thus, the mode of being of my flesh is not transposed into the dimension of exteriority because, according to Merleau-Ponty, ultimately, it does not make sense to say that the world is present to itself, as my flesh is. Therefore,

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this transposition induces a reformulation: the flesh of the world means that being is always on the side of phenomenality and that a being which would be foreign to phenomenality has no more meaning than a body that would be foreign to sensibility, that would be incapable of feeling itself. Therefore, it is the subject of sensing—or the subject of appearing—that disappears in this ontological transposition. In other words, the descent of subjectivity into the world through the body corresponds to a rise of the world toward phenomenality, but never toward subjectivity. These two opposite movements do not coincide; the starting point of the one (the subject of sensing) cannot be the ending point of the other, for one does not understand how the world’s phenomenality could tip over to the side of a vision. However, the attachment of Merleau-Ponty to the philosophy of consciousness, despite his repeated claims, prevents what one could call a radical reversibility, that is to say, a real univocity of the flesh. Therefore, the flesh is ultimately not a unitary concept since it is only by metaphor or analogy that we can speak of the world’s flesh. Merleau-Ponty is explicit on this point: “The flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh—It is sensible and not sentient” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 250). In other words, what seems to have been won has, in fact, been forever lost: the presumed unequivocal flesh is now torn by the division between consciousness—even if it is embodied—and the object—even if it embraces its appearance. As some notes show, the result of a true univocity of the flesh would be hylozoism, which Merleau-Ponty obviously could not accept. But the question is now whether the relevant alternative is between the philosophy of consciousness and hylozoism. It is at this point that Jacques Garelli’s philosophy can be recaptured in its originality. For him, it is precisely a question of taking Merleau-Ponty’s ontology seriously, more than he did, by assuming to the end the consequence of the inscription of the incarnate subject in the world, namely the reversibility of sensing and what is sensed at the very level of exteriority, in other words, a true univocity of the flesh. Jacques Garelli’s philosophical question would therefore be the following: under what conditions can we truly speak of the world’s flesh, that is to say of a sensing of the world? Of course, this perspective goes hand in hand with a true overcoming of the philosophy of consciousness, which one could call a de-immanentization of sensing. Garelli’s perspective is not hylozoist. So, it is now a question of knowing under what conditions one can transcend the already mentioned alternative between philosophy of consciousness and hylozoism. What could it mean to speak of the flesh of the world while naturally refusing to grant life or a soul to things? Jacques Garelli’s gesture will consist of reversing the transcendental relationship between the subject and sensible phenomenality by situating the subject on the very side of phenomenality and consequently, showing that

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phenomenalization is already a process of subjectivation. For Jacques Garelli, the subject of appearing is inscribed in that which appears and proceeds from its very appearance. It amounts to recognizing that there is a sensing in the world itself but that the subjectivation of this sensing is inseparable from this inscription. However, it was in Merleau-Ponty’s works that Jacques Garelli himself discovered the path to this radicalization. Indeed, we remember that the analysis of the work of art and the pictorial work in the last Merleau-Ponty functions as a kind of phenomenological reduction. The point is, indeed, to grasp, in the work of art, the very truth of perception, since the meanings that emerge directly from the canvas remain caught in its sensitive materiality and therefore do not go beyond themselves toward the ideality of the object, as our perception always tends to do so. Thus, the pictorial work manages to represent meaning in the nascent state and, consequently, to show the world in its native state, that is to say, in its original appearing, before any objectification or idealization. As Jacques Garelli writes, “one can affirm, according to the very spirit of Merleau-Ponty, that the field in which the experience of being is uttered is, par excellence, the field where the creative journey of the work of art is unfolding” (Garelli 2000, 453). But what could it mean to say that the “experience of being is uttered in the work of art” if not to indicate that the work of art makes the world appear? Thus, what in Merleau-Ponty was only a figuration of perception— the painter showing the pre-objective world through her work—becomes, in Jacques Garelli’s philosophy, a perception of the world. Indeed, saying that the work of art shows the world in its originary appearing amounts exactly to recognizing that the work of art functions as a perception: by bringing to light a new face of the world, it perceives it. The work of art, therefore, plays a decisive role for Jacques Garelli, insofar as it blurs the Merleau-Pontian division of consciousness and the world, as it remains halfway between consciousness and the object, like a perception already inscribed in things, in this case, the canvas, or, which amounts to the same thing, like an intramundane being revealing the world. Under this intermediate status, at least from the perspective of this traditional division, the work of art renders possible to give sense to the idea of the world appearing within the world. Thus, it allows us to conceive of the univocity of the flesh. More deeply than sensing and what is sensed, there is this very singular mode of being that is the work of art, in which undoubtedly resides the truth of appearing, and against which the self-sensing of my flesh just like the sensed being of the world will appear as secondary and abstract compared to this originary mode of being. In Jacques Garelli’s own words, the task of the work of art consists of a “self-figuration of the world,” and this is why he calls it an “incarnate transcendental”:

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What the work of art and particularly that of the painter invites us to recognize, is that there is an incarnate transcendental, insofar as the painting makes ‘visible’ the very process which renders things visible—a process that we would not be able to see if the work of the art, through its presence, would not make it appear by emerging before our eyes. Open world, because it is an opening world, the painting makes the world present by offering itself as a world to contemplate. (Garelli 1991, 348)

By speaking of the “incarnate transcendental,” Jacques Garelli gets closer to the Merleau-Pontian flesh. Indeed, such a concept amounts to asserting that the world’s appearance takes place within the world and can only take place in this way; in other words, the transcendentality of the transcendental necessarily envelops its empirical nature. We should not hastily conclude from this that sensing leaves the subjective site which still placed it in front of the world to merge with the world. In fact, Merleau-Ponty was not able to follow his intuition until the end, because he was still relying on this naive version of the flesh, namely the incarnate transcendental. When Jacques Garelli speaks of the incarnate transcendental, he does not mean that the painting feels as we do, that subjectivity has migrated to the side of the world, which would indeed be completely incomprehensible. On the contrary, Garelli means that the opening of the world takes place directly from the painting, that, consequently, the appearing of the world can only take place in the world, that any appearing is a self-appearing of the world and that it is precisely in this new modality of the transcendental that the true status of subjectivity resides. The subject is not the truth of the incarnate transcendental [truth], but the incarnate transcendental is the truth of the subject. In other words: incarnation commands subjectivation. Therefore, Jacques Garelli deliberately overcomes the division to which Merleau-Ponty remains tied by bringing to light a mode of appearing which is only likely to occur in the world itself and, which, consequently, can no longer be contingent on a subjective activity. Jacques Garelli designates this discovery with the oxymoronic concept of “thinking place.” This concept is primarily used in relation to the work of art but is not exclusive to it. You have to take it literally. It is not a question of a place in the world to which thinking would be added, a characterization which in truth only suits our body as the bearer of sensitivity, but of a place where thinking displays itself, a place that thinks in its place and as place. Therefore, we are witnessing here, through this concept, the same reversal: if the flesh, as it reveals itself in tactile reversibility, is thinkable, if at the very place of its body sensing and therefore thinking can arise, it is primarily because there are thinking places, places whose possibility is eminently attested by the work of art.

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In this sense, my flesh unquestionably refers to the world’s flesh, or rather to this constellation of mundane fleshes that are the thinking places. Jacques Garelli reaches this level of radicality when he writes, for example, that there is “a way in which the world opens up on itself by widening itself, from a place internal to its overall structure. This means that the creative exchange, that questions and that configurates forms, deploys the order of thought in the very arrangement of the place of the canvas, in which it takes place and where the metamorphosis of the world takes place, through a work that thinks itself” (Garelli 1991, 347). From this site of the work of art, which is a real modality of the Merleau-Pontian idea of ​​a flesh that is no longer mine but that of the world, an authentic ontological reconfiguration becomes possible. Indeed, insofar as the work of art is a being of the world, so to speak, open before being able to open (even if it is truly open only insofar as it is able to open), it becomes possible to extend this description and to conclude that every being can exist in the mode of the work of art and that, strictly speaking, the work of art displays the mode of being of that which is within the world. This is why Jacques Garelli will speak of a place that thinks, when he talks about realities other than the work of art, particularly sensitive realities. He takes advantage of the concepts of “dimensions” or “rays of the world” that Merleau-Ponty elaborates to account for the mode of relationship between such and such quality and the world in which it is inscribed, to criticize, of course, the empiricist idea of an atomic sensation, closed in on itself and deprived of meaning. As inscribed in the world and opening up to it, any quality communicates with all the others, it comprises a generality in its very singularity, it exceeds itself as a determined quality. As Merleau-Ponty says in some notes that Jacques Garelli particularly liked to quote: Sensoriality: for example, a color, yellow; it surpasses itself of itself: as soon as it becomes the color of the illumination, the dominant color of the field, it ceases to be such or such a color, it has therefore of itself an ontological function, it becomes apt to represent all things. . . . The “World” is this whole where each “part,” when one takes it for itself, suddenly opens unlimited dimensions— be­comes a total part. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 217–18)

This mode of being of color is homogeneous with that of the painting: in it, the world itself is open, the world is thought and spoken. Thus, if the modality of being of the flesh is achieved in a privileged way in the work of art, the fact remains that this mode of being can be attributed to everything that appears in the world: everything that is found in the world is appearing of the world, every place is a thinking place, and this is why we can speak of the flesh of the world. However, this extension of the flesh to

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the side of the world is not without consequences for the status of our own flesh and, therefore, for the status of subjectivity itself. It only makes sense to speak of the incarnate transcendental if the latter no longer coincides with consciousness; the thinking place is only thinkable if this thinking process is no longer that of a subject. And it is because he did not fully appreciate this requirement that Merleau-Ponty remains stuck within a subjectivist philosophy which was the only way to think about the flesh without falling into hylozoism. Quite consistently, Jacques Garelli’s philosophy, therefore, implies a radical desubjectivation of appearing, to the point that one could speak of it as an asubjective phenomenology, obviously in a different meaning than the one given by Patočka. Indeed, the thinking place is not a thinking subject, the thought that emerges from it is not the thought of a subject but a thought that could be qualified as impersonal or anonymous. To put it another way, we are witnessing a generalization of the mode of being of our flesh, the possibility of which highlights, retroactively, the true meaning of our so-called subjectivity: just like the other carnal beings of the world, we do not exist as centered subjects, closed in on themselves and present to themselves; the flesh cannot be that of the ego. As Jacques Garelli remarkably says, there is no island subject constituting the egological pole of the representation of the world, which would hold the objectivity of the thing grasped in a fixed, stable and universal identity. The seer’s body is fully itself only by never being present to itself, for its destiny is to be elsewhere, while being inscribed in the world, sprayed on its surroundings, only fulfilling itself by radiating on its edges, whose depth of radius of the world prohibits granting an assignable limit to what it awakens by its listening and its gaze. (Garelli 2000, 455)

To say therefore that the subject is inscribed in the world, because she has a body, leads us to recognize that she is absent from herself, therefore projected outside herself and pulverized into the world as a multitude of openings or places of the world, which are these thinking places. There is no subject except where the world appears within her; her subjectivity is exhausted in the “self” of this self-figuration of the world: the subject is in the world’s place where the world thinks itself. However, the fact that thinking occurs in a place does not mean that it ceases to be a thought, even if it is no longer that of a subject: when Jacques Garelli speaks of a thinking place, it must be understood literally. If it is easy to understand how this thought articulates itself in a place, it is not easy to understand how we can still speak of a thought. However, Jacques Garelli’s radicalization is based on the possibility to consider thinking as the thought

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of this world’s opening that occurs in a privileged way in the work of art; the phenomenology of the flesh necessarily calls for a theory of thought. We find this theory in the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, which deeply influenced the work of Jacques Garelli, to the point that it could be described as a transplant of Simondon’s philosophy of the pre-individual on a Merleau-Pontian kind of phenomenology. By radicalizing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, along the lines that we have just presented, Garelli’s theory escapes the transcendental and subjectivist perspective, which was still that of Merleau-Ponty, to draw what we could call a cosmology. Indeed, Jacques Garelli is led to highlight the subject’s belonging to the world to the point that it is the subjectivity of this subject, henceforth understood in terms of thinking, which must now be ascribed to the world. It is now the world that appears as the real subject, which means, first of all, that it is the source of the intramundane beings it is made of. However, Jacques Garelli finds in Simondon’s theory of individuation the elements of a cosmology that precisely fit with the scope of the phenomenology he is developing. Considered from the opening that it is, every being, as we have seen with color, is characterized by the fact that it is general in its very singularity, that, insofar as it surpasses itself for the benefit of the world, it is more than itself, larger or deeper than itself. We can only account for this situation if we understand this ostension of the world in beings, first and foremost in the work of art, as the other side of a production of beings by the world, or, rather, as a self-production of the world in beings. This self-production is the process of individuation from which Simondon understands the individual, a process which merges with becoming as a dimension of being itself. This individuating becoming is the becoming of a being which is more than unity and more than identity, which is infinitely richer than itself. This being is characterized by a state of tension which calls for a resolution, that is to say, a new structuring, but this resolution, which is the other name of individuation, never exhausts the pre-individual potential, which amounts to saying that every individual remains transfixed by the pre-individual charge from which it proceeds, that it is therefore never fully individuated and is consequently doomed to becoming. This movement of propagation occurs step by step by resolving tensions within a state of pre-individual tension that Simondon calls transduction. However, it is indisputable that Jacques Garelli takes entirely on his account this theoretical framework that allows him to find, within what must be called a cosmology, the mode of relation between beings and the world that emerges in his description of phenomenality. He puts it clearly: The character of the pre-objective and pre-subjective totality of this field of experience, which is none other than the setting of our life, that engages the

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being of man, always and already crossed, in the chiasm, on his horizon of the world, leads us to speak not of a series of subjects located in front of a series of objects to be handled and inspected, but of a place that one cannot name better than “trans-individual,” of a “there is” neither clearly nor distinctly “individuated” of which the I, the other and the things are distinguished by progressive differentiations without never breaking their ties with this ground. (Garelli 2000, 427)

We then understand better why Jacques Garelli can reduce to nothing the gap between my flesh and the flesh of the world, between my own body and the other beings of the world, that is to say, the other bodies: they are all modalities of individuation of the same pre-individual world. Jacques Garelli then solves the issue of the flesh, by attributing to Merleau-Ponty what only belongs to Simondon: “We might as well recognize that there is, for Merleau-Ponty, a pre-individual dimension of the world, of which each body is only a process of individuation in progress” (ibid.). Be that as it may, only this new theoretical framework renders it possible to cross the abyss which, in Merleau-Ponty’s works, separates my flesh from that of the world. But we only have half of the truth here: we still need to show that what has been brought to light at the level of my body, namely this sensing which allows it to be characterized as flesh, is valid for all the other bodies. In other words, it is a matter of showing that individuation is not at the cost of manifestation, that the process of individuation of the world in singular beings is the other side of a process of phenomenalization of the world by these same beings. In Garelli’s terms, it must be established that these places in which the world crystallizes itself are the same places in which the world thinks itself. At this point, the reference to Simondon is decisive, in so far as it provides a theory of thought that complements the theory of transduction. As Simondon writes at the beginning of his major work, transduction consists in “following the being from the moment of its genesis, to see the genesis of the thought through to its completion at the same time as the genesis of the object reaches its own completion” (Simondon 1992, 314). Therefore, we must show how the genesis of the individual is the genesis of the thought, in what sense (of thought) the genesis of the individual expresses the thought of the pre-individual background from which it proceeds. The decisive point here is to understand that the development by which the tensions within the metastable system are resolved is at the same time “discovery of meanings, structural and functional realization of meanings. The being contains in the form of pairs of disparate elements an implicit information which is realized and discovered in its development” (Simondon 2005, 207–8). Thus, an individuation process can only be understood as a thought in the light of an information theory, a theory which includes the resolution of the tension in

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the initial metastable system as the resolution of a problem by the discovery of a meaning, in which “all information is both informative and informed” (Simondon 2005, 329). We can take the example, dear to Merleau-Ponty, of monocular images. For the perception of relief to be possible, the two monocular images must be different, but conversely, they cannot be completely independent either because, otherwise, no common point would appear. They must therefore be nonsuperimposable, but their difference must be small. The relief appears then as the mode of resolution of this tension: “the relief acts as a signification of this duality of the images; the duality of the images is neither felt nor perceived; only the relief is perceived: it is the meaning of the difference between the two data” (Simondon 2005, 223). Thus, within the framework of the theory of individuation endorsed by Jacques Garelli, the thought which is that of the thinking place must be understood as meaning and the thought itself as information, that is to say as a way to solve the tension within a pre-individual metastable system. Consequently, as we sensed above, it follows from there that the dimension of true subjectivity, which was still the starting point of Merleau-Ponty, must be subordinated to that of thinking, if not merged with it, as it clearly cannot be its source. The subject is no longer the condition of meaning but what emerges with it, which means that it never emerges completely, that subjectivation is as incomplete as is the process of individuation of which it is the other side. Note that Simondon’s definition of the psychic as “the activity of building integration systems within which the disappearance of pairs of elements makes sense” (Simondon 2005, 209) is perfectly consistent with this conclusion. Therefore, the flesh can only be understood univocally, if and only if, it is nobody’s flesh, if it is spread in and out the multiplicity of the incarnate transcendentals. We have brought to light all the conditions under which the Merleau-Pontian theory of the flesh can be rigorously thought out and we have shown that these conditions are ipso facto the very frame of Jacques Garelli’s philosophy. This philosophy manages to think of the flesh as the identity of being and thinking, in light of a theory of becoming as a process of individuation. However, this is not a dialectical philosophy because, as Simondon well said, “it is what is most positive in the state of the pre-individual being, namely the existence of potentials, which is also the cause of the incompatibility and the non-stability of this state; the negative is first as ontogenetic incompatibility, but it is the other side of the richness in potentials; it is therefore not a substantial negative” (Simondon 2005, 34). But if Jacques Garelli’s philosophy is not dialectical, one can wonder if it is still phenomenological. This is not sure. Indeed, with the disappearance of the embodied subject through a process of generalization or multiplication, it is the phenomenological correlation that

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also disappears. So, the question which now arises is that of the possibility of maintaining the correlation within the framework established by Jacques Garelli, the possibility of reconciling a generalized theory of the flesh with the a priori structure of correlation. That is the philosophical project I am undertaking, and that is why I endorse Jacques Garelli’s legacy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Garelli, Jacques. 1991. Rythmes et Mondes. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. ———. 2000. Introduction au logos du monde esthétique. Paris: Beauchesne. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 159–81. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. 1992. “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. New York: Zone books. ———. 2005. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Préface de Jacques Garelli. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon.

Chapter 9

Phenomenological Metaphysics in Marc Richir Alexander Schnell

What is the status of metaphysics within Marc Richir’s project of a “refoundation of phenomenology?” In this project, one can identify different meanings of metaphysics—in particular a deliberately critical and an implicitly operative meaning; however, nowhere Richir has devoted himself to a synthetic and complete presentation of this concept. It will be a matter of clarifying this point in this contribution. PHENOMENA AND PHENOMENALIZATION In his first systematic study—“Le rien enroulé” (1969–1970)—which surprisingly predraws and anticipates all subsequent work, the young Richir (who at the time was not yet twenty-seven years old) characterized his own elaboration as a “metaphysical theory” (Richir 1970, 3). Several of his articles are titled (or subtitled) “Metaphysics and Phenomenology” (Richir 1987; Richir 2000). And it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that his last two works (Richir 2014; 2016) (which constitute his phenomenological testament) are his most “metaphysical” books. What does Richir see as the need for a “refoundation” of phenomenology, and what idea of metaphysics is reflected in it? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to return to various motives that concern the (very original) determination of phenomenality and phenomenalization. What specifically characterizes the concept of “phenomenon” (that designates the correlativity of the process of appearing, on the one hand, and of the appearing itself, on the other)? According to Richir, the very nature of the phenomenon, 141

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and here the Heideggerian heritage is obvious, is what makes it possible for it to appear, even though it does not manifest itself in turn. Richir always thinks of phenomenality dynamically in its relation to phenomenalization—what makes a phenomenon a phenomenon and underlies its appearance in general. Now, what does this new determination of phenomenality require more specifically, according to Richir? The fundamental gesture of the Richirian analysis of the concept of phenomenon consists in the disconnection between phenomenality and objectivity. Phenomenality is “phenomenon as ‘nothing but phenomenon’” (Richir 2018, 13–20). This means that the phenomenalization of a phenomenon as a phenomenon is not dependent (as for example in Kant’s work) on a constitution of objectivity based on an activity of synthesis of the understanding considered as predestined, but rather that the unity of the phenomenon “appears within the phenomenon” (Richir 2018, 16). Phenomenalization considers it as appearing as appearing, and not as appearing of objects. Objectification is not the fundamental subject of Richirian transcendental phenomenology. And this means at the same time that phenomenalization (of this or that phenomenon) is profoundly precarious and even at risk of failure, insofar as the phenomenon is always accompanied by its “simulacrum” (as a “phenomenon of appearance”). That the precariousness of phenomenalization is expressed through the fact that, in the archaic architectural register, the phenomenon and the simulacrum are entangled in each other is a major thesis of Richir’s that needs to be explored further. Using the concept of “appearance” (or “simulacrum”), Richir thinks together two fundamental determinations. On the one hand, the original transcendental a priori that transcendental phenomenology aims at cannot be grasped directly (it does not manifest itself),but is only accessible from its “appearance” a posteriori. The transcendental constitution thus proves to be a “retro-jection.” On the other hand, its phenomenalizing and constitutive function lies precisely in this “appearance” of the a priori—which is therefore only accessible in retro-jection. Since “appearance” is at the same time an “appearing” that falls within transcendental phenomenology (taking into account its accessibility “in retrospect”), the two determinations must indeed be considered together. The “simulacrum” designates the specific dimension of the constituent phenomenality that integrates this determination of “appearance.” Thus, a certain non-metaphysical stance (to which we shall return) within phenomenalization is brought to its climax here: not only is there no object that can serve as a measure of truth for the phenomenon taken as “pure phenomenon” (i.e., for the “phenomenon as ‘nothing but phenomenon’”), but the phenomenon in its distortion as “simulacrum,” as

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“appearance,” is both in truth and untruth (cf. the late Heidegger who was also very important for the young Richir). RICHIR’S CONCEPT OF WORLD This has repercussions on the Richirian conception of the world. To be able to show this, another determination must be added. Richir’s view of the world is fundamentally different from that of Heidegger. On the one hand, in his enumeration of the various possible meanings of the “world,” Heidegger defined it (among other things) as the “totality of beings” or as the Being of beings characterized in this way (Heidegger 1977, 87). On the other hand, the “world” is also always “world of the Dasein,” inasmuch as the Dasein itself is determined as a being in the world and is in some way characterized by its specific “unity” with the world—with “its” own world. But the question then arises as to how the unitary world can (and should) be understood in view of this plurality of “worlds of Dasein.” Richir answers: to be able to have access to the world (and not to a multiplicity of worlds of Dasein), one must be able to situate oneself below the relationship between the references of significance that is constitutive of the total world (so it is at the same time a criticism of the world understood as “totality”). The “world-phenomena” that Richir takes up in Fink (Fink 1988,11) are understood differently from the Heideggerian characterization of the phenomenon of the world. For Richir, “world-phenomena” are chaotic, ephemeral, disordered, protean, shimmering, discontinuous, contingent, unstable. In his own words: “Phenomena-ofthe-world, not phenomena of beings or things. Therefore not phenomena of the world as a totality of beings and things, but phenomena, originally plural, which, as nothing but phenomena, are stretched over nothing, the world as a plurality of horizons where men come to be” (Richier 1991, 14). He expresses by this that what constitutes “worldliness” has nothing to do with “totality” or “wholeness,” but rather aims at what is intramundane and effective. The “world” or that which relates to the “relation to the world” is what makes the phenomenon not purely “fictional” and, as a “simulacrum,” it does not lose all relation to actual reality. THE NEGATIVE CONCEPT OF “METAPHYSICS” AND THE “SENSE IN THE MAKING” Before a positive explanation of Richir’s operative concept of metaphysics can be given, its critical aspects must first be examined in greater depth.

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Generally speaking, the metaphysical process is characterized, according to him, by two fundamental tendencies, namely, the assumption of an idea of the “absolute” and the tendency to “fixation.” The first characterization, which is oriented toward the Heideggerian conception of metaphysics in terms of “onto-theo-logy,” is well known and does not need to be developed further here (Tengelyi 2014). The second, on the other hand, merits further examination. This requires recourse to the Richirian conception of “sense in the making (sens se faisant).” This expression echoes the Husserlian “Sinnbildung” (literally: “formation of sense”). Husserl had suggested in § 49 of the Krisis that Sinnbildung is below the distinction between “Sinngebung” (donation of sense) and “Sinnstiftung” (institution of sense). Richir follows him on this point. “Sense in the making” has several meanings. First of all, it should be remembered that, for Richir, it is all about the “mobility” proper to the sense in the making: sense is always inchoate, projecting itself, apart, and when it is grasped, therefore “immobilized” in some way, it is only possible by virtue of a “transposition” that ultimately causes it to lose its vivacity and mobility. In Richir’s eyes, to bring sense back to an ideal, extra-temporal carrier would be a “metaphysical” gesture. However, this “fixation” also has a truly phenomenological dimension. For—and here important achievements of structuralism or “poststructuralism” have also left their mark on Richir (see in this regard the fundamental works of Alexander [2013] and Flock [2021])—it also belongs to “sense in the making” to be structured and articulated in order to make its own comprehensibility possible, which again requires that the signified always be accompanied by a signifier. Since all sense is “expressed” in some way (not necessarily orally), it has a kind of “material” carrier, which, for its part, has no dimension of sense, but “poses,” so to speak, the dimension of sense, while “distorting” it. Following Derrida, Richir sees in this aspect a fundamental dimension of the creation of sense that completely escapes “consciousness.” Richir calls it “symbolic.” This is opposed to the “phenomenological,” which refers to non-fixability, mobility, and especially to “inappearance.” Insofar as this moment that “fixes” is characterized by this ambiguity, while constituting a fundamental aspect of the Richirian conception of metaphysics, the latter is in turn equivocal, having a “negative” moment and a “positive” moment. In order to fully grasp the latter, other complements are still necessary. We find the clearest indication of how Richir intends to distance himself (from the negative concept) from metaphysics in L’écart et le rien (2015). The reader will see that, at heart, Richir considers as “metaphysical” any gesture that proceeds from a “symbolic tautology,” i.e., that establishes an identity of this or that determinism and to make it be (or exist, even as a possibility) (Richir 2015, 70). Fichte’s Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre

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(1794/1795) would be the most striking example of this: “Making” a determination of thought “to be”—this is what metaphysics consists of (which Richir, for his part, rejects, at least in his mature work). In his writings of the 1980s and 1990s, Richir still used the expressions “phenomenon as nothing but a phenomenon” and “world-phenomenon” in order to characterize phenomenalization adequately, but from the 2000s onward he turned to the register of sense that he had discovered in Husserl and that he gradually appropriated afterwards—namely that of phantasia (Richir 2000). Given the above-mentioned “deformation” of phenomenology in the symbolically instituted, it is no longer perception—the paradigm of objectifying intentionality—that constitutes the adequate origin of phenomenology. Contrary to Husserl, the starting point of phenomenological research is no longer to be found in the intentional experiences of consciousness, that is to say in the objectifying acts for which perception would provide the scale against which any relation to the object would be measured, but in the “representations” of pre-intentional phantasia below any objectifying perception. These non-figurative “phantasíai” appear only in the form of “inchoate silhouettes” or “shadows” that cannot be directly grasped and cannot be fixed (and it is also by this that the lines linking these ideas to previous works—and in particular to the concept of “world-phenomenon”—can be established). These phantasíai are best able to account for the “original gap to itself” that characterizes all experience—and especially all human experience. The new starting point of Richirian phenomenology thus consists in exploring the basis—belonging to phantasía—of intentionality below any objectification. This is, in Richirian terms, a “theater of shadows” (another word for the field of phenomenalization) whose phenomena, and this is the fundamental intention of all his work, can be grasped by virtue of an “unstable mathesis of instabilities” (Richir 2011, 125, 129). THE POSITIVE CONCEPT OF “METAPHYSICS”: THE “TRANSCENDENTAL MATRIX” AND THE “DOUBLE MOVEMENT” OF PHENOMENALIZATION In order to be able to define this “unstable mathesis of instabilities,” it is necessary to highlight the fundamental configuration (or schema) that carries Richir’s thinking. There are indeed beginnings of this in his work—for example in Phenomena, Time and Beings, when it is a question of a “transcendental matrix” (Richir 2018, 14) of the phenomenon. The first consistent and systematic presentation of the “place of comprehensibility” where the multiple Richirian outlines of a “refoundation of transcendental phenomenology” unfold was given—as we have already mentioned—in one of the first

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doctoral theses devoted to this “refoundation of phenomenology” (Alexander 2013, 29). Robert Alexander apprehends this “fundamental philosophical element,” this “fundamental structure” as a “pulsating mass” or as a “volume pulsation” (Alexander 2013, 31). This rhythmic, flashing, vibrating “density” constitutes the paradigm of the comprehensibility of phenomenalization and is captured by Alexander through the term “ogkorythm” (inspired by Richir, but not found as such in his work). Whether this term alone can capture the full scope and methodical extension of Richir’s work is debatable and disputable—what is certain is that the great merit of Alexander’s reading lies in the fact that he has masterfully clarified the “double movement” (which structures this “ogkorythm” (Alexander 2013, 350)), and which allows us to pinpoint the fundamental schema underlying Richir’s work (first elaborated in “Le rien enroulé” [The Wound Nothingness]). Its importance justifies taking a closer look at it. The essay “Le rien enroulé” opens with a quotation from Maurice Blanchot’s L’entretien infini: “To write: to draw a circle within which the outside of any circle would be inscribed” (Blanchot 1969, 112; Richir 1970, 3). This expresses two decisive aspects of Richir’s (phenomenological) “metaphysical theory.” On the one hand, it deals with the relationship to writing in general and to Derridian “archi-writing” in particular—that is to say, to what Richir calls the “schematism” (taken up in Kant and Heidegger) of phenomenalization; on the other hand, Blanchot anticipates very precisely what Richir considers to be a “double movement of phenomenalization.” This belongs to a complexion of five fundamental motifs of Richir’s phenomenological-metaphysical project that are developed in this article (precisely anticipating Richir’s later path of thought). These motives are: 1) the endogenization of the phenomenological field; 2) the “re-entry into oneself” which is an “exit out of oneself” (= first double movement of phenomenalization); 3) the “winding up and unwinding” (= second double movement of phenomenalization); 4) the double-movement of the unwinding and winding and of the deposit of the Being of the beings (= double double-movement of phenomenalization); 5) the “language turn” (in poetic writing) as a specific form of expression of metaphysical phenomenology. 1.  Richir takes up the first fundamental motif in what he identifies as “Husserl’s problem” and then characterizes—as he did in his early reflections sketched in “Notes on Phenomenalization” (1969–1970)— as a “phenomenological problem” in general. “Alterity,” the “Other,” that has become alienated must be brought back to his place of origin—to interiority. The main function of this return to interiority, which obviously echoes Husserl’s “transcendental reduction,” is to bring out the generative and sense-configuring (sinnbildend) dimension of

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phenomenology. The concept of “endogenization” (Schnell 2011, 25; 211sq.) lends itself well to highlight this double meaning (internalizing genetization or generative interiority). 2.  It is important not to identify this “endogenization” with a simple “immanentisation” (thus with a pure internalization) following the example of Henry’s reconduction to the immanent, self-affective life. Richir to insist: “Phenomenalizing means bringing the Same out into the Other (opening the Same to the Other) in order to bring the Other into the Same. The outside is the inside of the inside, the Other is the Same of the Same. Exit from oneself is a re-entry into oneself” (Richir 1970, 7). The first double movement refers here to the mutual return of opening (“outside”) and grasping of meaning (“inside”). However, the “inside” has priority over the “outside” since this generatization is only possible “internally” and the outside is in some way a “forgotten” inside (indeterminate, not present). Richir calls it the “specific ‘reflexivity’ of the Same” (Richir 1970, 6) which implies that the “outside” is precisely nothing other than “the Same of the Same” (which recalls at the same time Fichte’s conception of being as “reflection of reflection”). 3.  This first double movement is then specified in a second one which specifies the first one at the same time. How can we understand exactly this intimate “movement” of phenomenalization—from the Same to the Other (or from the Other to the Same), from the “I” to the “Non-I,” from the consciousness to the being, etc. (and vice versa)? This is nothing less than a new way of conceiving of the intentional relationship and— as Levinas would say (cf. “The Ruin of Representation” Levinas 1988, 30–134)—of its “ontological foundation.” The movement goes both inwards and outwards—it is, in Richir’s terms, reminiscent of those of Maine de Biran, an effort that holds back or a restraint that strives. In doing so, Richir emphasizes, on the one hand, that this double movement avoids the erroneous positions of realism and idealism (i.e., losing oneself in the Other and “imploding” in the Self); and, on the other hand, that it implies an affective and “bodily” (leiblich) dimension of phenomenalization (on which Richir will focus later—see in particular Richir 1993—; 2000; 2004). For the movement that is restrained by striving—the one toward the “outside”—Richir uses the term “unwinding” (déroulement), for the one toward the “inside” he speaks of “winding” (enroulement). Their unity describes a (second) double movement, precisely that of “winding and unwinding.” 4.  This original understanding of the concept of intentionality is not limited to a purely epistemological dimension, but also has a very important ontological implication. Through the opposition between a tense effort and a retention of oneself, an inner resistance is expressed that Richir

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apprehends as “Dif-ference of the movement in its counter-movement” (the relationship to Derrida is obvious here). This resistance, which is felt between the two opposing movements of winding and unwinding (which in reality return to one and the same movement), gives rise to an inaudible “creaking” (grincement) from which “beings like sparks ejected from the double movement” (Richir 1970, 9) spring. This suggests that “Being” (of beings) is—as we have already said with Fichte and Derrida—a phenomenon of deposition of the double movement of phenomenalization. We are thus in the presence of a double double movement (at a meta-level, so to speak) that concerns respectively the winding and unwinding and the source of being. 5.  How can one “conceive” these motifs which constitute a global movement within which one can distinguish different moments (of varying complexity) or, if the “concept” is impotent here, how can they be apprehended “in language”? Richir shows the way right from the beginning of “Le rien enroulé.” (Phenomenological) metaphysics can only be understood as “entering into itself to dissolve.” Thus, it does not “speak” of “nothing.” Phenomenologizing it plunges into “nothingness.” For Richir, metaphysics must borrow its “dictability”—which is asserted in writing—from poetry. Richir takes up this idea again in Phénoménologie en esquisses (2000) when, in linking “poetry” and “fiction,” he speaks of a “metaphysics fiction,” that is, a “rigorous” and “coherent” “fiction of metaphysics” that is completely opposed to simple “metaphysics fiction” (Richir 2000, 24) (understood critically). We find this idea in his last writings (Richir 2010; 2011; 2016). In order to be able to grasp the “phenomenological,” phenomenological “metaphysics” must develop a form of expression that comes close to its content, because otherwise, as we have seen, it slips away. PHENOMENON AND APPEARANCE Let us now return in more detail to the relationship between “phenomenality” and “appearance” to see what fate will be reserved for “double movement” in Richir’s later elaborations. In 1981, Recherches phénoménologiques (Phenomenological investigations) was brought out, after Richir published his doctoral thesis in the 1970s in two separate books (Richir 1976; 1979). In the first Investigation, Richir provides the speculative basis for his own refoundation of phenomenology.The decisive text in this respect is § 3 of the first Investigation. There he develops his main ideas concerning “phenomenalization” and “double

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movement.” It is a question of thinking together about the concept of the “transcendental” and the “phenomenal dimension in general and as such” (Richir 1981, 29). Richir’s argumentation is divided into four points, the three main stages of which we will retain here for our purpose: 1.  What does phenomenological-transcendental reduction consist of? Not in the fact of making the “fake” subject-object correlation appear, but the “phenomena in their purity” (ibid.). This opens up the “purely phenomenal sphere” (ibid.) characterized by the correlation of (pre-factual) appearances and the (pre-factual) appearing. And Richir underlines the fundamental equivocity of the gesture of reduction: on the one hand, the “ontic positivity” of the object and the subject is put in brackets; but on the other hand, this reduction is only carried out as if the subject-object structure were absent from the phenomenon, whereas in reality it never ceases to act “in a way laterally” (Richir 1981, 30). Thus, in Richir’s eyes, reduction is only a “simulation” (ibid.): “one acts as if the ontic fact of the object were absent in order to search for the conditions of possibility or the a priori genesis of the object, which are supposed to be provided by the purely phenomenological sphere” (ibid.). Phenomenological reduction thus does not completely disregard the ontic factuality, but is rather characterized by the tension between onticity (factuality) and transcendentality (genesis). Richir shows that at the basis of this equivocity there is another—that of appearance as radical appearance and withdrawal. 2.  The phenomenon thus designates a transcendental a priori with respect to which the subject-object structure presents only an a posteriori reflection. The “purely phenomenal sphere” is thus at the same time a “transcendental sphere” (Richir 1981, 31). The pure phenomenon “has only transcendental status,” it is “transcendental principle of reflection” (ibid.). 3.  But how can pure phenomenon be the a priori condition of possibility or the transcendental principle of the subject-object structure a posteriori? How can we avoid a simple (admittedly necessary) “parallelism” (Richir 1981, 12) between the two? This is only possible by virtue of an “internal reflexivity” (Richir 1981, 31) that constitutes a constitutive faculty of both the object and the subject poles, and “of the strict transcendental autonomy of the phenomenon as such.” What does this “autonomy” mean? It is not an originally constitutive instance that would allow us to go back in a linear way from this origin to what is progressively constituted, but the opening of a sphere in which the phenomenon is reflected as a “pure phenomenon” or as a “pure appearance.” Richir asserts that it is here that the phenomenon phenomenalizes itself as an “illusion”

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or “simulacrum.” It is therefore a question of better understanding and justifying the meaning of this simulacrum. “Or as ‘pure appearance’”—the meaning of this “or” must first be elucidated. The difficulties of phenomenalization can only be overcome if we see that, in the archaic register, it is an opening to indeterminacy. Heidegger had already come close to this through the concept of “withdrawal.” From an epistemological perspective, Richir also reflects on the Kantian idea that the very thing that makes knowledge and experience possible withdraws from all possible experience. The modality for dealing with the properly phenomenal (and therefore strictly phenomenological) dimension of this character of withdrawal is that of appearance (which is, as we have seen, plurivocal). Appearance designates first of all a possible appearance as well as simple appearance in the sense of illusion. At the source of phenomenalization, Richir thus places this gush of appearing and the appearance—that is to say, the transcendental constitution (original appearance, becoming-phenomenon) and withdrawal (illusion, simple appearance) form a conceptual couple. Now, what exactly is the meaning of this “internal reflexivity” and what does it imply? On the one hand, the “strict autonomy” of the phenomenon disconnects it from any form of objectivity. The only determination that can then be attributed to the phenomenon is that of pure “appearance”—of “appearing pure” in its phenomenal purity. On the other hand, and at the same time, it is associated with a constitutive function. But how can something be constitutive while being only an appearance? In order to answer this, the content of appearance must be clarified. Appearance refers to what it is appearance. What appearance is appearance of is the constitutive a priori of the subject-object structure (a posteriori). Thus, in the face of this a priori, appearance is only the a posteriori, it is the a posteriori of this a priori—which explains why Richir can say that “internal reflexivity” accounts for the fact that the subject-object structure and appearance are “at the same time,” “at one and the same time.” But then, the a priori is never directly accessible—and it somehow becomes itself an appearance or illusion. We insist: it is precisely to the extent that the constitutive a priori is characterized by withdrawal or by the impossibility of experiencing it that it turns out to be, strictly speaking, an appearance or an illusion. It is simply an illusion to pretend to apprehend directly the constitutive a priori—when this is precisely what transcendental phenomenology is constantly striving for. Richir calls this apparent character of the constitutive a priori a “transcendental illusion.” Yet, it would have been useful to distinguish terminologically these two kinds of appearance or illusion, because their essence of appearance is of course not the same: the transcendental illusion (of the constitutive a priori) is an absolute illusion, per se and in itself, because this a priori can never be grasped in an original

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way, it does not provide any direct access; on the other hand, the a posteriori appearance is appearance or illusion in the very measure that it is appearance or illusion of the constitutive a priori. Consequently, Richir’s idea that the phenomenon is phenomenalized “a posteriori as the appearance or illusion of an a priori appearance or illusion” could be reformulated by saying: the phenomenon is phenomenalized as the appearance or illusion of a constitutive structure a priori which is at the same time inaccessible (or withdraws itself). This means that the a priori phenomenon never constitutes itself a priori but only a posteriori, or to put it another way: phenomenalization is always a phenomenalization of appearance, and this in such a way that the latter appears to itself as an a posteriori appearance of the a priori constitutive structure, which does not appear but only gives itself in an a posteriori appearance. Thus, phenomenalization is the self-appearance of appearance as appearance of appearance; or to put it in a less equivocal way (and taking into account the distinction made above): it is self-appearance of appearance as appearance of the a priori that withdraws itself. We can thus see that the linear movement of the constitution—from the most original a priori to what is constituted and phenomenalized—is reinterpreted by Richir in such a way that the phenomenological analysis of appearance makes it necessary to explain the constitution a priori through the constituted (which is a posteriori) and that, consequently, the a priori can only be revealed through the a posteriori. This means that phenomenalization, insofar as it contains within itself the transcendental principle of reflection, cannot be developed (as in Fichte, Schelling or Hegel) from the principle, but proceeds fundamentally by “retro-jections.” Indeed, the a priori is phenomenalized in and by retrojection from the a posteriori (phenomenalized) appearance which, itself, is then inevitably characterized as an appearance “in retrospect.” The direct inaccessibility of the a priori that Richir unshakably maintains is at the center of his refoundation of transcendental phenomenology. Here he goes beyond Heidegger’s sketch inasmuch as he highlights the transcendental and phenomenal dimension of the relationship between the a priori and its dimension of withdrawal. FROM THE “DOUBLE MOVEMENT OF PHENOMENALIZATION” TO THE “INSTANTANEOUS VIBRATION” Let us now build a bridge between Richir’s early writings and his later works. To do so, we must highlight the concept of “transcendental matrix.” Throughout his work, Richir identifies different kinds of “transcendental matrices.” The “moment of the sublime” dominates his later writings in this

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regard. To our knowledge, the “moment of the sublime” was first mentioned in Phenomenology and Symbolic Institution (Richir 2018). The “moment of the sublime” is conceived there as the unit 1) of the “phenomenological encounter . . . of the symbolic and the phenomenological” (Richir 2018, 349) 2) of the “symbolic instituting as a deadly power . . . apprehended as such” (Richir 2018, 352 sq.) (this idea is taken up again in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit) and 3) of the institution of self-consciousness (cf. Fichte’s Naturrecht and especially the “dialectic of master and slave” in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, where this figure of death also intervenes) (Richir 2018, 353). It is thus quite remarkable that there is already 1) the articulation, around a meeting point, of the affective, the phenomenological (“systolè”), on the one hand, and the schematic, the symbolic (“diastole”), on the other, 2) a reference to transcendence (“death”) and 3) the relationship to the “self.” In Du sublime en politique (Richir 1991), the “moment of the sublime” then designates the “meeting point” “between radical indeterminacy and determinacy (at least relative or apparent), between the logological and the tautological, between the indefinite and the definite” (Richir 1991, sq.). In this work, Richir underlines once again that the “sublime,” the “self,” is already at stake. This aspect comes back strongly in Variations I and II. Richir characterizes the “moment of the sublime” as the instant outside of time (= the exaiphnes of Plato’s Parmenides) where a “hyper-densification,” that is to say an intensification to the infinite, of affectivity bursts, to give rise both to an infinite flight from absolute transcendence and to an affective relaxation unfolding in the form of a plurality of “affections.” Richir calls “systole” the side “before” the exaiphnes, and “diastole” the side “after” this same exaiphnes. The systolè, entirely “affective,” is extra-schematic, while the diastole consists of a “restart” of the schematism. At the “moment of the sublime,” affectivity comes into contact with itself (in a kind of “proto-reflexivity”) and originally institutes the “self” which “must be able to accompany” every sense in the making. Here we are witnessing the opening up of sense, which thus brings into play an “absolute transcendence” that, it should be noted, is in turn differentiated: into “absolute transcendence” in short, which preserves the sense in the making from its own “implosion” (by virtue of a “flight to infinity”); and into “physico-cosmic transcendence,” which constitutes the “reference” of language (and which once again allows us to make the link with “world phenomena”). This “physico-cosmic transcendence” is the horizon or the element at the basis of the “creaking” of phenomenalization that Richir had not yet grasped in “Le rien enroulé” in its “mundane” dimension (and that means each time in connection with an “effective” intramundane). In the “moment of the sublime,” “endogeneity” is preserved. We will therefore remember that the “double movement” is brought back to its fundamental systolic and

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diastolic matrix and that the “sparks,” the “chips,” the “slag” of the “Being” of the beings are related to the “physico-cosmic transcendence.” By taking a reflexive look (in retrospect) at these elaborations, Richir himself puts into perspective the “moment of the sublime” in relation to the “double movement” of his essay “Le rien enroulé.” He actually makes the following remark about the latter: A double movement is that: it is what is always already “inertizing,” within what is never “inertizing”—one and the other rather than one or the other, inasmuch as there is always already resistance: as it moves forward, it moves backward. On this point, I refer to Robert Alexander’s beautiful article in the Annales (Alexander 2011). But what finally bothered me in this conception of the double movement is that it remains quite metaphysical. What is a double movement? It’s a movement that has its resistance in itself: it has really fascinated me since “Le Rien enroulé,” and for years. Now, I won’t say things in those terms anymore, which seem to me much too speculative. (Richir 2015, 64)

The “moment of the sublime” consists in a hyper-dense in-tensification of affectivity which, in the exaiphnes, “ab-solves” itself in a discharge of absolute trans-cendence on the run to infinity. Whereas in “Le rien enroulé” the “double movement” consisted in an unwinding winding—or in a winding unwinding—the analyses of the “moment of the sublime” establish that the winding is expressed in terms of “hyperdense systolic intensification” and the unwinding in those of “absolute transcendence on the run to infinity.” For Richir, the analysis of the 1969–1970 study—which puts forward a movement that is at the same time counter-movement—is metaphysical, whereas that of the “moment of the sublime”—which does not associate absolute transcendence with any form of exteriority but rather integrates it, so to speak, into the “moment of the sublime”—allows us to get out of it. In Richir’s work, “endogenization” ultimately prevails over “exogenization.” In his latest work—Propositions buissonnières—Richir will make a final modification to the “moment of the sublime” by identifying a “vibration” “before” any flickering, and that means: “below” any “pole.” The conclusions will be drawn in the chapter “Differential Gap and Instantaneous Vibration.” We can already see what subtleties affect the “metaphysical” status of his analyses: faithful to his rejection of any ontologization (and that means: of any stabilization or fixation), he can contest the validity of the analyses of “Le rien enroulé” in the name of a certain (what we have called “negative”) acceptance of metaphysics. But this does not prevent his analyses from remaining metaphysical (in his “positive” sense) in the final elaborations of his work.

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RICHIR’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL DUALISM This is the basis on which Richir aims to “re-found” transcendental phenomenology. By digging out the characteristic structures of meaning that are below objectifying intentionality, he discovers a double dualism: that of “schematism” and “affectivity” (which ensures the “proto-ontological filling” of phenomenological schematism), on the one hand; and that of this first dualism and “absolute transcendence,” on the other. It then appears that Richir, contrary to Merleau-Ponty for example, does not defend a monism, but that he transforms classical dualism (of mind and matter, of understanding and sensibility, etc.) by integrating the relationship of “immanence” and “transcendence” in the sense that it is made and by adapting it to its phenomenological parameters. In doing so, the “limits of description” are constantly being questioned, which is by no means to say that Richir does not follow the “phenomenological zigzag” movements between the phenomenal content and the highlighting of the specifically “phenomenological” processualities that are supposed to make it understandable (even if one does not arrive here, in the end, at an adequate donation). CONCLUSION What, then, in summing up, is Richir’s contribution to a “phenomenological metaphysics?” Its fundamental objective lies in the clarification of the status and essence of phenomenalization. This involves in particular 1) the backward questioning of pre-intentional processes at the basis of objectification, 2) the highlighting of the meaning-making processes that are partly carried out anonymously, 3) the emphasis—and this is crucial—on the “appearance” and on the way in which the “constitutive a priori” is only accessible through “retro-jections,” and 4) the elucidations of the phenomenological status of reflection. In the background of all this is the question of how the phenomenological “self” can be apprehended below the transcendental “ego.” Richir’s “style” (here there is a closeness with Husserl) consists—and this does not facilitate the comprehension of his texts—in the self-accomplishment of the “language” proper to the meaning being made (thus “thinking” in the Cartesian sense, which encompasses all modes of accomplishment of a cognitive, volitional and affective nature). As this self-accomplishment phenomenalizes—this is obviously a major idea of Richir’s—it involves a “transcendental matrix” that produces its “effects” beyond phenomenological description. This “matrix” is at the heart of the “unstable mathesis of instabilities.” Beyond the “double movement of phenomenalization” and the

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“moment of the sublime,” there are still other variants (Richir 1981; 1992; 2018). What we will retain here is that the relationship between “thinking” and “being” is approached with regard to the way in which this relationship itself, the question of meaning (in particular meaning as it is “made”) and properly phenomenological reflection are examined with regard to their phenomenalizing functionality and questioned again and again in their phenomenological genesis. It is to the extent that the self-reflective structure of meaning as it is made becomes a phenomenological phenomenon that it is rigorously “genetic.” In this way, “phenomenological metaphysics” is faithful to the legacy of classical German philosophy, whose three protagonists (Fichte, Hegel and Schelling) were permanent interlocutors of Richir. BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Robert. 2011. “La question du mouvement dans la phénoménologie de Marc Richir.” Annales de Phénoménologie 2011, no. 10: 133–42. ———. 2013. Phénoménologie de l’espace-temps chez Marc Richir. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. Blanchot, Maurice. 1969. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Fink, Eugen. 1988. VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1: Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre. Eds. Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl and Guy van Kerckhoven. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Flock, Philip. 2021. Das Phänomenologische und das Symbolische. New York: Springer. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Sein und Zeit. HGA 2. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin. Richir, Marc. 1970. “Le Rien enroulé: Esquisse d’une pensée de la phénoménalisation.” Textures, no. 70/7.8, 3–24. ———. 1976. Au-delà du renversement Copernicien: La question de la phénoménologie et de son fondement. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1979. Le rien et son apparence: Fondements pour la phénoménologie (Fichte: Doctrine de la Science 1794/95). Brussels: Ousia. ———. 1981. Recherches phénoménologiques (I, II, III): Fondation pour la phénoménologie transcendantale. Brussels: Ousia. ———. 1987. “Métaphysique et Phénoménologie: Sur le sens du renversement critique kantien.” La liberté de l’esprit, no. 14: Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?, 99–155. ———.1991. Du sublime en politique. Paris: Payot. ———. 1992. Méditations phénoménologiques: Phénoménologie et phénoménologie du langage. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 1993. Le corps: Essai sur l’intériorité. Paris: Hachette.

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———. 2000. Phénoménologie en esquisses: Nouvelles fondations. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2000. “Métaphysique et phénoménologie: Prolégomènes pour une anthropologie phénoménologique.” In Phénoménologie française et Phénoménologie allemande: Deutsche und französische Phänomenologie. Eds. Eliane Escoubas and Bernard Waldenfels, 103–28. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 2004. Phantasía, imagination, affectivité: Phénoménologie et anthropologie phénoménologique. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2010. Variations sur le sublime et le soi. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2011. Sur le sublime et le soi: Variations II. Mémoires des Annales de phénoménologie IX. Amiens: Association pour la promotion de la phénoménologie. ———. 2014. De la négativité en phénoménologie. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2015. L’écart et le rien: Conversation avec Sacha Carlson. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2016. Propositions buissonnières. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2018. Phénomènes, temps et êtres I: Ontologie et phénoménologie. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. ———. 2018. Phénomènes, temps et êtres II: Phénoménologie et institution symbolique. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. Schnell, Alexander. 2011. Le sens se faisant: Marc Richir et la refondation de la phénoménologie transcendantale. Brussels: Ousia. Tengelyi, László. 2014. Welt und Unendlichkeit: Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik. Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber.

Chapter 10

Nature as Potentiality of the World Delia Popa

Mikel Dufrenne’s cosmological phenomenology articulates the necessity of a principle of nature, despite the fact that phenomenology has traditionally situated itself against a “natural” attitude and despite transcendental philosophy’s denunciation of epistemological “naturalism.”1 While Dufrenne’s phenomenology of Nature2 exposes itself to various forms of criticism, it also offers an original response to the strong objections raised against Husserl’s theory of constitution, according to which the transcendental subject is exclusively responsible for the sense-givenness (Sinngebung) of experience while supposedly minimizing or denying its attachments to the world, to its being, and to the history in which its experience of sense is inscribed. This distorted interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological project can be substantially modified and overcome only by an approach that goes “back to the things themselves,” investigating the experiential matter supporting “sense-givenness” and the history of its formation.3 Throughout his work,4 Mikel Dufrenne offers such an approach, centered not on the transcendental subject, but on Nature understood as an all-encompassing principle guiding our aesthetic experience and the genesis of our knowledge, before being objectified by it. While his important contribution to twentieth-century French phenomenology has been analyzed so far mainly in regard to his aesthetic theory,5 this chapter discusses some of its most important epistemological claims. The first two sections offer an analysis of the relationship between intentionality and nature, examining its consequences on the way in which knowledge relates to experience. The last three sections are devoted to an exploration of the role of imagination in regard to Dufrenne’s philosophical account of finitude, alienation, and reality. Questioning the difference between Nature and reality, I end with a reflection on Dufrenne’s humanism. 157

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INTENTIONALITY AND NATURE In Dufrenne’s phenomenology, the necessity of affirming Nature as a grounding principle for our epistemic and aesthetic experience is rooted in a reflection on the laws according to which subject and object, consciousness and world, and knowledge and sense mutually determine each other. Without being themselves ontologically predetermined, these laws emerge within the material connections, concrete relationships and contingent contacts that orient experience. Accordingly, instead of searching for an ideal of an already given adequacy, Dufrenne’s phenomenology studies the possibility of a material resonance and affinity between the subject and its world. If this resonance finds its highest expression in the sensible level of our knowledge and in aesthetic experience, it also offers precious resources for the theory of intentionality understood as a system of correlations with the world. Against naturalism, according to which the subject is produced, as it were, by the natural world, and against idealism, for which the world is produced by the transcendental subject, Dufrenne highlights that “something of the object is present to the subject before any experience and in return something of the subject belongs to the structure of the object prior to any project of the subject (Dufrenne 1976, 60).” The mutual belonging between subject and object is effectively experienced in presence understood as resonance with the world. Dufrenne’s phenomenology is openly a phenomenology of presence—to oneself, to the others, and, most importantly, to the world. However, Dufrenne also offers a unique theory of imagination as “the common root of under­standing and sensibility” and as a “synthetic power” (Dufrenne 1966, 157). From his perspective, our experience is first and foremost sensible because it is made possible through a synthesis of imagination, and it becomes intelligible thanks to fundamental connections the imagination has already established. Sensible presence thus finds an unexpected and paradoxical foundation in our imaginative experience. My aim is to question the phenomenological role of presence in relation to the work of imagination, confronting Dufrenne’s perspective with epistemological problems emerging from phenomenological analyses of imagination.6 Generally considered, imagination is the modality of our knowledge through which the evidence of presence is suspended and postponed, inviting us to consider elements of experience where presence is lacking, withdrawn from both our sensible grasp and our intellectual understanding. As a mediator between presence and absence, imagination deals with appearances, foregrounding the problem of what is real and what is unreal in our experience, while questioning the latter’s truthfulness. Thanks to its privileged

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relationship to the absence at work in every act of presence, imagination also plays a critical role within sensible experience, initiating a special type of reflexivity.7 Dufrenne’s epistemology seems to be a perfect illustration of Louise Glück’s poetic vision in Averno when she writes: “The soul ended and the world began/They were of equal size,/commensurate,/one mirrored the other (Glück 2006, 26).” However, if we follow Dufrenne in accepting that we need to be “equal to the object in order for it to be equal to itself” (Dufrenne 1976, 63), does this imply a full copresence we can rely upon at each moment of our experience? How is this epistemological and aesthetic equality distributed? Does this powerful subjective-objective copresence leave room for absence? In Dufrenne’s phenomenology, these questions are ultimately related to the materiality of Nature understood as the potency of the world (puissance du monde) (Dufrenne 1959, 235–36), and described both as a ubiquitous power and as a discrete form of energy. Is Nature’s power an uninterrupted source of energy held by our constant presence to ourselves? Shouldn’t Nature’s materiality ultimately be thought of as withdrawn from subjective understanding, deflecting its expectations and unsettling its grounds? Instead of a nature that is available and open, “always ready for appearing” (Dufrenne 1981, 229) as Dufrenne puts it, I would like to consider the hypothesis of a nature that resists appearing, especially if appearing implies perfect presence to oneself.8 Following this conception of nature, our presence to the world is paradoxically characterized by a tenuous grasp, the projection of undetermined horizons, and absence. Absence in particular is a mark of the historicity of our experience, as it evolves in a perpetual disconnection from itself, constantly anticipating and retrospectively catching up with itself, in a temporal regime that is never perfectly fulfilled. Instead of being reduced to a supposedly full presence to the world, human nature needs to be understood on the background of this historical displacement affecting our experience of sensemaking. How does the historicity of our experience relate to the process of sense-formation (Sinnbildung), and how does this sense relate to Nature? EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE The correlation between the subjective and the objective sphere, of which Husserlian phenomenology established the a priori character,9 is at the center of Dufrenne’s phenomenological cosmology. Moreover, in a Schellingian note, Nature is understood as the “a priori of the a priori,” as it precedes the subject-object correlation (Dufrenne 1959, 236). Accordingly, being in the world does not mean conquering the world, nor belonging to the world, but being called by the world, and responding to an all-encompassing alterity.

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Understanding a priori correlation as the potentiality of the world, rather than as a pure law of consciousness formally applied to it, allows us discuss the equality between the subjective and the objective poles of intentionality, opening another perspective on the genesis of the sense of our experience and on its historical formation. In order to clarify this point, we shall return to the phenomenological problem of the relation between experience and knowledge. While the formal level of knowledge requires a priori correlations, at the material level, the same correlations can only be experienced through a challenging historical process irreducible to a pre-given ontological identity (Dufrenne 1973, 208). The reciprocity between subject and object is thus considered from the standpoint of the experience that it generates and supports and grounded in an irreducible tension of encounter and mutual discovery. As a consequence, the equality between the subjective and the objective sphere that Dufrenne’s phenomenology seeks to reveal can only be obtained through struggle and tested at a level that is not merely formal, but also (and always) experiential. Dufrenne thus contributes to the original project of phenomenology understood as a practice, meaning a call for an effective experience that grounds knowledge and allows it to be transmitted and shared.10 Rather than opposing experience and knowledge, however, the phenomenological tradition helps us think about two different levels of knowledge, one at which effective experience is decisive for a consciousness caught in a process of sensemaking, and another guided by concepts that allow us to grasp this process. Dufrenne’s phenomenology orients the latter toward the former when it discusses the relationship between the empirical and the transcendental, with the scope of thinking what transcendental knowledge means from the perspective of our effective experience. Far from reducing transcendental phenomenology to empirical naturalism, this view follows the modifications Husserlian phenomenology initiated in regard to the Kantian philosophy, anchoring its notion of the transcendental in the active and passive syntheses of lived experience. This is how, in Eugen Fink’s terms, Husserlian phenomenology transformed the critical grasp of the conditions of possibility of knowledge, displacing it toward the problem of the world’s origin.11 In the wake of Husserl’s reform of the transcendental, Dufrenne understands Nature as the origin of the world and as the principle of the subject’s birth. In Dufrenne’s work, transforming the way we envision the transcendental syntheses that precede experience necessarily calls for an understanding of the transcendental role played by Nature itself. Yet, this attempt to establish new phenomenological foundations also requires us to conceive of a presence that is continuously confronted with and conditioned by absence. This

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is why the imagination at work in sensible appearances, fantasy projections, and changing images guides the exploration of the materiality of Dufrenne’s a priori. When Dufrenne calls for an “empiricism of the transcendental” (Dufrenne 1981, 41), he thus foregrounds a phenomenology of the forms of imagination responsible for the material genesis of our knowledge. Stressing the latter’s dependency on an experiential reality whose potentialities are constantly multiplied and amplified, he also relates imagination to an epistemological alterity which is necessarily involved in the process of making sense of our lived experience. FINITUDE AND PASSIVITY How is the mutual codetermination of the subject and the object generated within a field of experience that is often framed as asymmetrical, being driven either by subjective constitution, or by objective truth? Between these different poles of our experience, I suggest that historical materiality can be seen as a third term. Nevertheless, Dufrenne’s explores the materiality of experience with regard to its objectivity, searching for an alternative to the analysis that allows the subject to entirely determine the field of knowledge of its experience, through a formal approach absorbing all experiential intelligibility. The problem Dufrenne sees with this subjective approach is that it misses those dimensions of our experience of sensemaking that are not formal. Hence, investigating an objective a priori next to the subjective a priori leads to a robust account of a material a priori of experience. As Jean-Claude Gens noticed, nature is “one of the most essential modalities of alterity for spirit” (Gens 2008, 10—my translation). For Dufrenne, this alterity is imposed on human experience before we can grasp a clear idea of it. Therefore, any idea we end up forming is derived from an initial passivity we need to endure in order to be able to approach the ultimate foundations of our experience of the world. In the movement from nature to Nature,12 the goal is to acknowledge an encompassing alterity, preceding and challenging the subject’s epistemological position. The idealist polarization of our understanding is insufficient because of an operative Nature that is prior to our subjective intelligence and sensibility. The pre-subjective alterity of nature confronts knowledge with its own finitude. According to Dufrenne, Nature is neither the mere extension parte extra partes from which spirit dissociates itself, nor the growing principle of a natura naturans as an infinite source of production and creation, but an energetic potentiality that both defies and inspires our subjective life, creating a basis for its correlation with the world. Too external to be assimilated by the transcendental regime of consciousness, too intimate to be restrained to the

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realm of mere objectivity, Nature is the ultimate ground knowledge requires in order to understand its own operativity. Epistemologically speaking, however, this ground can only be revealed negatively, starting from a reflection on the finitude of the subject.13 Instead of being related to limitation and death, finitude is the mark of our birth within Nature (Dufrenne 1981, 14). Following Empedocles’s fragments on death and birth,14 Dufrenne examines human finitude not as restraining the possibilities of knowledge, but rather as a condition of its expansion through human activity.15 Human knowledge is finite because it cannot find direct access to its own production. Yet, this production is also made possible by our finitude, understood as a source of inspiration and a motivation for our will. Dufrenne writes: “Hence we need to descend into the depths where sense is elaborated. But there the gaze loses itself” (Dufrenne 1981, 39). Questioning the epistemological genesis of human meaning, Dufrenne identifies Nature with “the real beneath-consciousness” (Dufrenne 1973, 203). Conceiving nature together with unconscious reality introduces an element of radical alterity into the a priori principle of correlation discussed above. Nature’s perseverance and consistency therefore remain foreign to subjective intelligibility, while at the same time depending on human activity to realize themselves in the world. In order to understand this double dimension of Nature, which finds its finality in human activity while opposing it to an irreducible exteriority, we need to further explore the relationship between experience and sensemaking, which is ultimately a historical process of sense-formation (Sinnbildung). How is this historical process engendered in Nature? While acknowledging the fact that “Nature has a history” (Dufrenne 1959, 195), Dufrenne seems to suggest that this history is not fully real, because it cannot be experienced as such: “its past has ceased to be real because there is no memory to retain or transmit it” (ibid.). Conversely, the historicity of the human condition is inseparable from the process of sense-formation orienting it. Indeed, the experience of sensemaking bears the principle of humanization at the same time as it forces us to give up a world before human meaning—that is to say Nature. Given the fact that the human being “seems to have to choose between the Day where it finds itself while losing the world and the Night where it loses itself without finding anything,” the question Dufrenne asks is how “we can lose ourselves by finding ourselves” (Dufrenne 1973, 169). From this perspective, human sensemaking appears to respond to a Nature that both ignores it and provokes it. One could say that Nature can be thought but not known, carrying humans as agents of a truth that searches for itself through them (Dufrenne 1981, 37). At the same time, being part of Nature is “being rooted in the real” (Dufrenne 1973, 208), beyond any positivist objectification and beyond the idealism of subjective constitution, connected to a

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concrete ground that supports phenomenological knowledge. However, while Husserl separated (ideal) possibility from (real) effectivity on the one hand, and (conscious) effectivity from (objective) reality on the other, Dufrenne is interested in unveiling the possibilities of the real, in order to underscore its constitutive materiality. Here, the force of what is possible is intimately related to a reality that awakens our sensibility, as a potentiality that cannot be isolated from activity: The possible means the plenitude of the real, its authority and its efficiency: this negentropy at work in the matter, and in life, that cannot stop fighting against chance. The possible we have in mind is no more contingent than it is non-contradictory. . . . And Nature is not a sum of chances, but a reserve, a resource animated by the “silent force of the possible.” Nature is principle, the Spring of life. (Dufrenne 1973, 215)

Through Nature, the real presents itself as exceeding the sphere of conscious acts and as potentiality of an inscription in the process of historical becoming (Dufrenne 1968, 203). If Husserl emphasized the resonant associations between heterogeneous elements of our experience in order to explain the internal cohesion of the phenomenon,16 and Merleau-Ponty showed that “wild essences” (essences sauvages) are formed in the margins of the general concepts guiding intentional acts (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 117–19), Dufrenne relies on a form of knowledge inherent to aesthetic perception to express the original cohesion that makes it possible. Emerging from a reciprocal action between the subject and its world, “great images” (grandes images) are brought to our attention, received and elaborated through aesthetic experience, such as the solemn verticality of the tree, the blossoming of the flower or the movement of the wind in the grass. Unlike an object to which the subject can refer without questioning the birth of its own position and the source of its certainties, Nature only appears as a grounding principle when a thorough investigation on the genesis of the subject is undertaken. While examining the passivity of aesthetic receptivity, Dufrenne describes Nature as an epistemic principle preceding the subjective institution of knowledge. As a power of cohesion, Nature provides an intuitive basis that is neither the result of our efforts of knowing nor the fruit of active invention. Owing to its pre-subjective character, this principle of cohesion resists theoretical determination; the exploration of its workings requires the gathering of signs and images, as well as an art of interpretation whose goal is not only aesthetic but also political.

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IMAGINATION AND ALIENATION When he highlights the importance of objective materiality, Dufrenne reorients the question of the genesis of knowledge, joining other proponents of phenomenological materialism such as Michel Henry, Gaston Bachelard, and Tran Duc Thao. Yet, instead of the self-affection of life, rational materialism, or the social infrastructures guiding these philosophical theories, Dufrenne searches for a profound connection between the subject and the world, a connection neither initiated nor fully known by the subject itself.17 From this perspective, the task of imagination is analyzed in relationship to a Nature that reveals the imagination’s specific ability to work with a sense that precedes knowledge. This is why imagination is that which is least human in man. As in a Pythic delirium, it wrenches man away from himself and plunges him into ecstasy; it puts him into secret communion with the powers of Nature: “Who speaks to me, with my own voice?” The genius yielding to inspiration no longer belongs to himself; he is a force of nature; his “I” is an other. (Dufrenne 1959, 35)

How are we to understand the human alienation specific to the experience of imagination? In order to answer this question, we first need to distinguish between imagination as an active power of invention and imagination as the passive awakening of our sensibility. It is the passive dimension that is at stake in the epistemological transgression described by Dufrenne, inasmuch as it provides access to a phenomenal materiality that cannot be intellectually deciphered. Separating himself from the phenomenological lineage that privileges the transcendental power of fantasy (Phantasia) over the consciousness of the image (Bildbewusstsein),18 Dufrenne is interested in the passivity present in imaginative experiences guided by images. At this level, the empirical power of subjective imagination is related non only to mere images that are already made, but also to a creativity that does not depend on the subject: the “imagination of Nature” (Dufrenne 1981, 167). The relationship between transcendental and empirical imagination is thus inverted, with the latter reflecting the work of the creative imagination of Nature that no subjective power could produce or repeat. Hence, we are invited to account for a form of imagination that belongs to Nature before being experienced as a subjective faculty. The nature of our imagination itself can only be understood from the point of view of this imagination of Nature, which bears an alterity that gestures toward our sensibility in multiple and unpredictable ways. Since “Nature imagines in man when man imagines” (Dufrenne 1981, 270), our subjective creativity depends on a primary receptivity to which we owe the best of our inspiration. This “creative fantasy

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that unpredictably multiplies images of the real” (Dufrenne 1981, 167), is an imagination that does not belong to us, yet affirms itself in our aesthetic experience and provides our sensibility with inspiring images. In welcoming the proliferating images of the real, receptivity is more important than activity, since our receptive capacity is in touch with a resource that exceeds and preceeds subjectivity itself. Instead of giving imagination the role of restoring subjective freedom in the face of the indomitable force of nature, as in Kant, Dufrenne understands human creativity as induced by the “great images” provided by Nature. The role of these images of Nature is to allow things to enjoy a fuller presence than what conceptual knowledge is ready to recognize as being possible or graspable. But this full presence is also the presence of a “real” whose potentiality can only be positively unveiled by the work of imagination. Imagination is thus presented as our most alienating faculty, as it helps us explore the deeper state of alienation characterizing the human condition. Through imagination, we relate to the loss that haunts all our accomplishments: The exotic, the unusual, the strange are so attractive to us because sometimes we dream of getting lost without being able to, unless we transgress an invisible line beyond which the consciousness of losing oneself is lost itself; thus consciousness is destined to self-deception if not to bad faith . . .: if it ceases to play, as it plays, it would abolish itself. It can only operate in a world that is familiar; if something unpredictable shows up, it disappears. (Dufrenne 1968, 133)

Of this double constraint of human knowledge we can be freed only by a praxis that awakens reciprocity from within the antagonisms in which we are easily caught. The role of this liberatory practice is to revive the affinity at work in all worldly correlation, resisting the temptation of divisive polarizations and reductionist dualisms. However, like intellectual knowledge, which loses its meaning when it disconnects itself from the search motivating it, praxis becomes alienated when it “pushes me to become the instrument of all instrumentality, to be inert in order to act on the inert” (Dufrenne 1968, 142). Yet, for Dufrenne this state of alienation still leaves “a chance for freedom” (Dufrenne 1968, 137), to be found in human complicity and shared responsibility. While sketching the social conditions for this freedom, Dufrenne also expresses skepticism regarding its practical realization. In order to understand the exact meaning of this “chance for freedom,” we have to return to an analysis of the way in which the unpredictable force coming from Nature displaces subjective positions.

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NATURE AND REALITY If passivity is present in the epistemological and practical alienation that blocks human potentiality, how is this alienated passivity distinguished from the aesthetic receptivity at work in imagination? I would like to answer this question by discussing the problem of alienated passivity in relation to Nature understood, as in Dufrenne, as full presence. My thesis is that, rather than offering a way out of human alienation, Nature can embody its most horrifying form when it is understood as total presence that determines the orientation of subjective acts. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, a contradiction seems to persist between Nature understood as the ultimate condition for the possibility of intentional correlations and aesthetic affinities on the one hand, and Nature understood as the radical alterity of the reality of our experience on the other. Regarding the reality of experience, Laszlo Tengelyi has shown that “it prevails in opposition to the interplay of the intentions of consciousness, thwarting all expectations, countering all designs” (Tengelyi 2004, 72), while Nature grounds the pact of resonance that dissolves all oppositions and divisions. If Nature and experiential reality are not distinct, the access to the phenomenological critique of subjectivity that Dufrenne has opened is too rapidly obstructed. Indeed, the material abundance of Nature does not leave room for a real reform of the structures of our knowledge, nor does it allow us to understand the existential situations of deprivation and dehumanization experienced by so many. In my perspective, this critique can only be pursued by following the disruptions of lived experience as they are expressed in the contingency and blunt truth of sensible appearance.19 But at this level of experience, presence to ourselves is never fully guaranteed, being rather intermittent, interrupted and disturbed by gaps and shadows, ghostly reminiscences and vague anticipations. While for Dufrenne, “a relationship becomes antagonistic on the basis of a reciprocity between the self and the other” (Dufrenne 1981, 143), I argue that a discord should also precede reciprocity itself, transforming it into a mutual search exposed to risks and adventures. Indeed, if no tension intervenes between what is expected from presence and what is really experienced of it, we are doomed to sacrifice this “chance for freedom” before even looking for it. The passivity of a subject blindly following the potentiality of Nature compromises the possibility of the social encounters and lived transformations on which this freedom depends. Conversely, the constant displacement of the subject in regard to his human condition should entail a freedom—meaning also negativity and critical distance—regarding the power of Nature itself.

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If Nature is defined as “the abundance of presence (le plein de la présence)” (Dufrenne 1981, 226), how should we understand its disguise and its dissimulation? Isn’t there a resistance of Nature we should also take into consideration as being part of its powerful manifestation? The hypothesis I would like to discuss in closing is that Dufrenne’s material a priori is related to a Nature whose real character is not fully elucidated. Interestingly, for Dufrenne, the real appears as surreal, always adding something to its power in order to affect us, and always exceeding the subjective perception that reveals it. Through a passive imagination, the obscure folds of presence are filled with sense, every void promising a meaning that is wider than we have ever known, as imagination, is nothing else than a way to experience the presence of the sensible, to manifest the possible of which the real is charged, an invisible that announces itself in the depths of the visible, giving it sense: an art that perfectly hidden in the body, is not artifice, but an echo of Nature within nature. (Dufrenne 1981, 272)

Following Clément Rosset, nature, matter, and artifice are the three genres that impose their rules independently of human activity.20 Within this triad, matter is a passive principle indifferent to human making and artifice results from human activity, while nature remains heterogeneous to material inertia and to human activity as well. Silent, invisible, unknowable, its inaccessibility should then be understood as a privative stage of knowledge that no a priori correlation is able to render fully present. In Dufrenne, this epistemic privation is not absent, being reflected in the unpredictable ways in which the real affects conscious perception. Yet, if we follow the idea that “the reality of the real predominantly manifests itself by breaking through the ‘glacial surface’ of our habitual expectations, ready-made ideas, and routine practices” (Tengelyi 2004, 39), we need to review the ideal of full presence to which Dufrenne subscribes. Collapsing the reality of experience into Nature, Dufrenne seems to undermine Nature’s inaccessible, constraining, and surprising aspects. This is why our relationship to Nature is for him ultimately absorbed into appearances and images through which its resistance to our attempts at understanding and domination cannot be grasped. However, our resonant relationship to Nature should not suspend the radical alterity at work in those moments of crisis when the sense of experience itself must be reconsidered and transformed. As an expression of the alterity at work in every process of sense-formation, the real is understood as a force of opposition and tension that cannot be neutralized within an a priori correlation. In a certain sense, we could say that the materiality of the real exceeds the materiality of the a priori described by Dufrenne, bringing an uncanny surplus into any pact that we could establish

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with the world and with ourselves. Inversely, the a priori connection we have with the world cannot guarantee real contact with it. As a consequence, the real preceding consciousness is incompatible with Nature understood as the ultimate source of intelligibility. The way in which Dufrenne addresses the problem of absence is significant in this regard. First, as the condition of both our sense of spatiality and of order in the world, absence is both the distance between the subject and the object, and that between the objects themselves.21 Yet, given the fact that distance thus understood connects objects together, instead of dividing them, the absence it contains cannot be a source of a true separation. Rather, it seems to offer a widening of mutual presence, wherein “what hides from my gaze [is] still situated in the field of presence” (Dufrenne 1973, 45). Second, absence is understood as the negation of an expectation or as a crossing out of an intentional act, as a disappointment (Enttäuschung) that in Husserl stands for the inadequacy of sensible perception to its objects. However, for Dufrenne this absence is not a real withdrawal from presence, but rather a way to better participate in it. The most significant example of this form of absence is the sleeper for whom nothing is absent, as “he is the one that went absent” (Dufrenne 1973, 46). Absence as inadequacy seems to result from a transitory subjective failure to acknowledge the full presence of the world. Third, absence is loss, understood by Dufrenne as an object’s lack of availability or as the nostalgia for an original plenitude, constantly confronting the subject with its desire to accomplish itself in it. Narcissistic suffering results from the subject’s temporary isolation from an object or totality. In relationship to an absence that is never too abrupt, appearance itself can only be accidental, reduced to the function of motivating an ineradicable hunger for presence. Against this perspective, I argue that appearance can also be understood differently, as a mediator between the radical contingency of the real and the harmony of Nature, calling for a community of resonance that is not ontologically pre-given, resulting rather from political education. However, it is impossible to think rigorously this displacement between radical contingency and harmony without also taking into account a risk of losing the self and the world, as it often happens to so many. Meditating on his clinical practice with autistic children, Fernand Deligny has remarkably shown that “the humans-that-we-are” are tempted to violently project and impose their own “nature” on others who cannot relate to humanity in the same way.22 Presence to human nature conceals from itself the liminary (liminaire) and the refractory (réfractaire)23 condition of a larger community with those whose humanity is declared deficient, denied or impossible to bear. Through this illusion of presence to itself, humanity becomes not only exclusive and oppressive, but also condemned to constantly misunderstand the deficiencies and unbearable aspects of its own condition.24

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In my perspective, these negative dimensions are revealed in the gaps and the blurs of the process of sense-formation that guides human experience. Completing Dufrenne’s triadic typology of absence—distance, inadequacy, loss—I suggest we understand absence more radically, as a mark of the historicity of our experience, as it evolves in a perpetual disconnection from itself. In human experience, what is expected is always somehow lacking, whether in regard to where we belong, or to what we accomplish. Experience itself, when it makes sense for a human, is often at risk of losing its coherence,25 while at the same time being disposed to finding new sources of meaning. Constantly anticipating itself and retrospectively catching up with itself, the temporal regime of human experience is never perfectly fulfilled, but suffers from an internal dissociation. Joining Mikel Dufrenne’s and Marc Richir’s anthropological reflections,26 human nature appears to be the result of the constant oscillation in and out of a presence to ourselves that remains impossible to maintain, without ever being totally unthinkable or inaccessible. All the same, the thought of common presence and the praxis that renders it possible should rely upon a mere affinity with Nature, but on the liminary and the refractory struggle of human encounter and companionship. BIBLIOGRAPHY Blankenburg, Wolfgang. 1971. Der Verlust der natuerlichen Selbstverstaendlichkeit, Ein Beitrag zur Psycopathologiesymptomarmen Schizophrenien. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag. Carr, David. 1974. Phenomenology and the Problem of History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1987. Interpreting Husserl. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhof Publishers. Deligny, Fernand. 2015. The Arachnean and Other Texts. Tr. D. S. Burk and C. Porter. Minneapolis: Univocal. Dufrenne, Mikel. 1953. Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique, Paris: PUF; Eng. tr.  The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. 1973. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1959. La Notion d’a priori. Paris: PUF; Engl. tr. The Notion of the A Priori. 1966. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. Pour l’homme, Paris: Seuil. ———. 1973. Le Poétique, Paris: PUF. ———. 1976. Esthétique et philosophie, Paris: Klincksieck. ———. 1981. L’Inventaire des a priori: Recherche de l’originaire, Paris: Ch. Bourgois. Dussert, Jean-Baptiste, and Adnen Jdey (ed.). 2016. Mikel Dufrenne et l’esthétique: entre phénoménologie et philosophie de la Nature. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

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Empedocles. 1981. The Extant Fragments. Edited, with an introduction, commentary, and concordance, by M. R. Wright. Yale University Press. Fink, Eugen. 2000. “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism.” In The Phenomenology of Husserl. Selected Critical and Contemporary Readings. Translated and edited by R. Elveton. Seattle: Noesis Press. Gens, Jean-Claude. 2008. Éléments pour une herméneutique de la nature. Paris: Cerf. Glück, Louise. 2006. Averno. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Husserl, Edmund. 2000. Logical Investigations. Tr. J. N. Findley. New York: Prometheus Books. ———. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, And Memory (1898–1925). Tr. John B. Brough. New York: Springer. ———. Analyses Concerning Passive And Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic. 2001.Tr. A. Steinbock. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Tr. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Magliola, Robert. 1978. “Part II, Chapter 3: Mikel Dufrenne.” In Phenomenology and Literature. Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, Tr. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ogilvie, Bertrand. 2012. La seconde nature du politique. Essai d’anthropologie negative. Paris, L’Harmattan. Popa, Delia. “La dimension phénoménologique de la poétique bachelardienne.” In Bachelardiana, 6, 2011, 109–22. ———. 2012. Apparence et réalité. Phénoménologie et psychologie de l’imagination. Hildesheim: Olms. ———. 2017. “Aliéné, autre, étranger?” In Idéologies de l’enfance et éducation dans l’œuvre de Fernand Deligny. Anthropologie, pédagogie, politique. Edited by P. Verdeau, A. Janvier. Toulouse: EuroPhilosophie Editions, Contre/Champs (http:​//​ books​.openedition​.org​/europhilosophie​/441). Richir, Marc. 1990. La crise du sens et la phénoménologie. Autour de la Krisis de Husserl. Grenoble: Millon. ———. 2002. L’institution de l’idéalité. Des schématismes phénoménologiques. Beauvais: Association pour la Promotion de la Phénoménologie. ———. 2000. Phénoménologie en esquisses. Nouvelles Fondations. Grenoble: Million. ———. 2014. La contingence du despote. Paris: Payot et Rivages. Rosset, Clément. 1973. L’anti-nature. Paris: PUF. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2002. The Imaginary. Tr. J. Webber. London: Routledge. Tengelyi, Laszlo. 2004. The Wild Region in Life-History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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NOTES 1. I am deeply thankful to Iaan Reynolds for his careful proofreading of this text and for his suggestions. 2. This term is capitalized in order to stress nature’s anteriority and exteriority to the subject, as well as its transcendental functions. See Dufrenne 1981, 164. 3. See Carr (1974; 1987); Richir (1990; 2002); Tengelyi (2004). 4. His most important philosophical contributions to which we will refer in this chapter are: Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (1953); Eng. tr., The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1973); La Notion d’a priori, (1959); Engl. tr.,  The Notion of the A Priori (1966); Pour l’homme (1968); Le Poétique (1973); Esthétique et philosophie (1976); L’Inventaire des a priori (1981). All quotes from texts not yet translated into English are my own translation. 5. See Robert Magliola, Part II, “Chapter 3: Mikel Dufrenne” in Phenomenology and Literature (Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1978); Dussert and Jdey (ed.) (2016). 6. See Husserl (2005); Sartre (2002); Richir (2000). 7. See Popa (2012). 8. Those who have criticized Dufrenne’s dualism and the limits of the material a priori have not yet discussed the evidence of the presence to oneself that makes this a priori knowable. See P. Ricoeur’s Preface to the Inventaire des a priori, 11–13. 9. See Husserl (1970), #46. 10. See Husserl (2000), 263–66. 11. See Fink (2000), 70–139. 12. See the second footnote at the beginning of this chapter. 13. As we will see, aesthetic experience and poetics are the fields that can positively address it as a guiding principle. 14. See Empedocles (1981), Fragment 12 (“of all mortal things no one has birth, or any end in pernicious death, but there is only mixing, and separating of what has been mixed, and to these men give the name “birth”), 174–75. 15.“Finitude is the condition under which the subject undertakes her activity, but it is this activity which defines her as transcendental insofar as, while animated by some a priori, it grounds her experience of the world while being.” (Dufrenne 1968, 141—my translation). 16. See Husserl (2001), # 34. 17. Among the three authors mentioned here, Dufrenne is probably closest to Bachelard, mainly in regard to his analysis of material imagination. Bachelard’s investigations of poetic daydreaming (rêverie) lead to questions that are very similar to the ones Dufrenne asks. See my paper “La dimension phénoménologique de la poétique bachelardienne” in Bachelardiana, 6, 2011, 109–22. 18. See Richir (2000), 61–93. 19. See Popa (2012), 282–328. 20. See Rosset (1973), 11. 21. “Distance is given in perception as a property of things” (Dufrenne 1973, 44—my translation).

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22. See Deligny (2015), 201–27; Popa (2017). 23. “The common is liminary; while I have occasionally called it refractory” (Deligny 2015, 224). 24. See Ogilvie (2012). 25. See Blankenburg (1971). 26. For Richir, human nature is defined by an impossibility to coincide with itself. See Richir (2014).

Index

Absolute, 11, 18, 23, 26, 30–33, 36, 37, 51, 55, 64, 67, 144, 152–53 Action, 4, 7, 9, 13–16, 21, 25, 27–29, 33, 38, 47, 48, 53, 163 Advent, 68, 103, 115 Agon, 65 Aesthesis, 108 Ahmed, Sara, 70–71, 75 Alienation, 66, 157, 164–66 Alterity, 30, 36, 95, 96, 103, 120, 146, 159–67 Antelme, Robert, 82 Antisemitism, 82, 89 A priori, 5, 100–3, 140, 142, 149–51, 154, 159, 160–63, 167–68 Aristotle, 100–1 Autopoietic, 95 Affectivity, 41, 44, 51, 152–54 Alienation, 66, 157, 164–66 Alquié, Ferdinand, x Anticipation, 46, 97, 108, 118, 119, 121, 166 Appearance, 27, 43, 84, 89, 112, 114–15, 132–34 Appearing, 17, 112, 118, 132, 133–36 Art, 45, 93, 105–8, 113, 121, 133– 35, 163, 167 Asceticism, 61 Asubjective phenomenology, 121, 136

Autogenesis, 116 Autonomy, 11, 72, 119, 123, 149–50 Awareness, 34, 43–44, 119 Bachelard, Gaston, 164 Bacon, Francis, 108, 115–17 Beauty, 47, 62, 63, 74 Being, 17, 30, 32, 35, 42, 44, 46, 49–50, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 67, 94, 97, 98, 103, 106, 119, 121, 130, 131–33, 136–39, 143–48, 153, 155 Being in the world, 95, 105 Belief, 32–34, 66, 87, 88, 115 Belonging, 17, 47, 49, 50, 121, 123, 130, 131, 137, 145, 158, 159 Bergson, Henri, ix, xi, 20n1, 25, 41, 45, 47, 92 Binswanger, Ludwig, 16, 93 Body, 1–19, 22, 44, 49, 52, 53, 56, 74, 75, 86, 109, 112, 114, 115–17, 119, 122, 123, 126n21, 130–38, 167; Lived body, 1–19; embodiment, 43, 53; Leib, 3, 130–31, 147 Brunschvicg, Léon, 4, 10 Buddhism, 65 Byung-Chul, 66–67 Capable/capabilities, 13, 28, 69, 130 173

174

Index

Call, 6, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 65, 73, 100, 122, 160 Care, 41–56 Chiasm, 138 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 41–58 Cixous, Hélène, 83 Cogito, 3–11, 17, 27, 42–43 Communication, 47, 107–9, 120–21 Community, 42, 48–50, 90, 168 Compassion, 28 Comte, Auguste, 81, 86–87 Conatus, 27 Conscience (moral), 32–37 Consciousness, 4–6, 10–19, 22n20, 26, 31–36, 43, 44, 51, 53, 102, 132, 133, 136, 144, 145, 147, 158, 160–68; self-consciousness, 10, 11, 17, 26, 102, 152 Condillac, 4, 5, 21n10 Configuration, 44, 100, 105, 107, 108, 113, 116, 120, 135, 145 Consummation, 62, 66, 68 Contingency, 166, 168 Corporeality, 122, 130 Correlation (phenomenological), 117, 123, 140, 149, 158, 159–62, 165–66, 167 Cosmology, 137, 159 Creativity, 45, 54–55, 164–65 Crisis, 68, 99–109, 167 Culture, 42, 48, 83 Dasein, 94–103, 143 Death, 33, 67–69, 89, 96–98, 152, 162, 171n14 Deleuze, 93, 108–9, 111–23 Descartes, ix–xii, 3–7, 25, 43, 75; Cartesian ontology, xi, xii, 4, 6n 27, 102, 155 Desire, ix–xvi, 23, 28, 30, 36, 41–56, 61–75, 83, 84, 87, 119, 120, 122, 123, 129, 130, 168 Depth, 26, 31, 33, 54, 56, 136, 143, 162, 167 Derrida, 22, 81, 144, 148

Differentiation, 22n18, 120, 138 Dilation, 44–45 Dualism, 6, 11–12, 154, 165, 171n8 Dufrenne, 157–69 Dunamis, 46, 48, 56 Drive, 69, 83, 94, 95, 120–23 Dwelling, 51, 55, 56, 95 Ecstasis, 94 Ego, 16, 17, 26, 35, 49, 52, 121, 122, 123, 136, 154 Ehrenberg, Alain, 66 Encounter, 9, 22, 30, 31, 34, 36, 47, 77n33, 89, 95, 96, 98, 104, 107, 109, 113, 116, 123, 160, 166, 169 Endogeneity, 153 Endogenization, 146–47 Empiricism, 10, 118–20, 123, 161 Epochè, 45 Eros/Erotic, 61–76 Eternity, 70, 85 Equivocity, 149 Eudaimonia, 63 Event, 27, 29, 37, 38, 72, 74, 96–99, 98–109, 111–23, 131 Evil, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 34, 36, 40n13, 73, 74 Excess, 26, 30, 35–37 Exhaustion, 44, 46, 47 Exogenization, 153 Experience, 3–19, 22n16, 26–32, 42–47, 51, 52, 56, 67, 68, 70, 80, 83, 86, 87, 88, 97, 98, 99, 102–9, 112–23, 133, 138, 145, 150, 157–69 Exteriority, 11, 32, 33, 34, 36, 42, 44, 55, 131, 132, 153, 162 Facticity, 42, 46 Factuality, 149 Failure, 28, 29, 44, 46, 70, 71, 73, 99, 103, 113, 115, 142, 168 Faith, 29, 50, 84, 165 Fanon, x Fatigue, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 73, 76 Fault, 28

Index

Fear, 63, 73, 74, 90 Feeling, 5, 7, 20n1, 26, 28, 30, 44, 46, 52, 69, 107, 122, 130, 132 Fichte, 4, 121, 147, 148, 151, 152, 155 Fiction, 48, 52, 61, 65, 68, 70, 72–75, 84, 92, 119, 143, 148 Figure, 23, 55, 89, 112–17 Finality, 65, 67, 70, 162 Finite/infinite, 19, 32, 35, 36, 41, 42, 48, 49, 55, 61, 67, 74, 75, 100, 115, 152, 161–62 Finitude, 43–49, 70, 157, 161–64, 171n15 Flesh, 15, 47, 48, 52, 54, 129–40 Force, 6, 8, 9, 21, 22n19, 44–48, 54, 69, 99, 117, 119, 120, 123, 163, 164, 165, 167; continuous resistance, 6, 13, 16, 18, 19; organic force, 9, 12, 15–19; vital force, 45, 117, 119, 120 Formation (Gestalt), 106, 115, 119 Foucault, 66 Fragility, 42, 43, 47, 51, 52, 55, 56, 99 Freedom, 27, 33, 36, 54, 62, 63, 73, 84, 96, 100, 165, 166 Freud, 80–90, 126n18 Future, 16, 33, 38, 46, 69–72, 75, 94 Gadamer, 26 Garelli, 129–40 Generativity, 53–56, 146–47 Generatization, 147 Genesis, 106–7, 116, 138, 149, 155, 157, 160–64 Gewissen (conscience), 32 Giacometti, 114 God, 26, 30, 31, 35, 36, 47, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 Good, 28, 30, 36, 37, 48, 57, 61–76 Gnosic, 107 Grace, 67 Guattari, 111, 122 Health, 61, 64, 105 Heart, 55, 56 Hegel, 83, 90, 151, 152, 155

175

Heidegger, 28, 32, 34, 49, 94–109, 122, 142, 143, 144, 146, 150, 151 Height, 32–34 Henry, 3–19, 23, 24, 147n2, 164 History, 31, 37, 42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 80, 81, 84, 89, 157, 162 Hope, 37, 38, 41, 44, 46, 52, 55, 56, 71 Humanism, 157 Humility, 47, 52, 56, 75 Humor, 82, 86, 89, 90 Hunger, 61–78, 168 Husserl, 3, 13, 15, 26, 43, 45, 99, 102, 104, 115, 130, 144, 145, 146, 155, 157, 159, 160, 163, 168 Hylozoism, 132, 136 Idealization, 133 Identity, 16–18, 34–36, 49, 87, 136, 137, 144, 160 Idolatry, 67 Illusion, 64, 67, 72, 120, 150, 151, 168 Imagination, 55, 155–68 Immanence, 21, 117, 154 Immortality, 65 Implosion, 153 Incarnate transcendental, 134–36 Incarnation, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 53, 54, 130–34 Indeterminacy, 150–52 Individuation, 42–56, 137–39 Ineinander, 44, 53 Information, 121, 138–39 Inside/outside, 10, 12, 26, 53, 67, 69, 96, 103, 104, 136, 146–47, 152 Institution, 28, 30, 81, 144, 152, 163 Intention, 26, 28, 29, 116 Intentionality, 104, 118, 120, 122, 145, 147, 154, 157, 158–61 Intentionality (operative), 44–46, 50–55 Interiority, 6, 11, 12, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50–56, 146, 147 Intersensoriality, 116 Irigaray, Luce, 62, 75, 83 Irony, 79–91 Irreversibility, 100

176

Index

Janicaud, Dominique, 41 Joy, 44–56, 75 Kant, 5, 20, 24–28, 40n13, 81, 87, 100, 108, 142, 146, 150, 160, 165 Kierkegaard, Soren, 83, 90 Klee, Paul, 106, 112, 116, 117 Lacan, Jacques, 81, 82, 84 Lachelier, Jules, 26 Lagneau, Jules, 26, 27 Lavelle, Louis, 41, 42, 53, 54 Laughter, 81, 89, 90, 92n7 Levinas, Emmanuel, 23–25, 31–38 Life, 3, 5, 7–12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22n19, 26–29, 33, 41, 47, 51–56, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 88, 90, 110n5, 101, 105, 113, 122, 123, 132, 138, 147, 161, 163, 164 Lifeworld, 41, 45, 48, 50 Limit-situation, 98, 105 Lived experience, 4, 12, 13, 18, 19, 46, 160–61, 166 Longing, 55, 61, 72 Love, 28, 46, 62–71, 75, 98 Maine de Biran, Pierre, 3–22, 147 Maldiney, Henri, 93–125 Mania, 95 Manifestation, 12, 17, 25, 32, 51, 106, 116, 117, 123, 167 Materiality, 133, 159, 161, 163, 164, 167 Mathesis, 145, 155 Meaning, 13, 27, 31, 33, 35, 48, 49, 51, 55, 63, 66, 68, 84, 90, 91, 94, 98, 99, 104, 108, 130, 131–39, 141, 143, 144, 147, 150, 154–55, 160–62, 165–67, 169 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 8–10, 14–19, 43, 53, 107, 109, 116, 129– 40, 154, 163 Metaphysics, 20, 41–52, 53, 56, 73, 84, 141–55 Metastable/metastability, 138–39

Metaxu, 74–75 Mineness, 102 Misogyny, 84 Monism, 154 Nabert, Jean, 23–40 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 81 Narrative, 33, 81, 85, 88 Naturalism, 157–60 Nature, 7, 13, 84, 94, 157–69 Neurosis, 95 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 80–90 Nihilism, 66 Nostalgia, 71, 72, 168 Nothingness, 97, 106, 146 Nous pathetikos, 100 Nous poiètikos, 101 Objectification, 49, 133, 142, 145, 154 Objectivity, 22n12, 26, 87, 136, 142, 150, 161–62 Objectifying intentionality, 145, 154 Ontotheology, 30 Openness/Open, 43, 51, 52, 94, 100–101, 106–8, 112–15, 119, 120, 125n15, 134, 135, 159 Otherness, 101–5 Oury, Jean, 95 Organic, 7–9, 12–19, 21n8 Pathos, 28 Passive/Passivity, 5–8, 12, 13, 18, 21n10, 22n21, 32, 43, 52, 100, 101, 104, 118–20, 123, 160, 161– 64, 166, 167 Passion, 49, 55, 75 Pathic, 107, 109, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122 Patočka, Jan, 136 Phantasia, 163–64 Phantasma, 101 Péguy, Charles, 53 Perception, 21, 112–14, 116, 117, 120, 131, 133, 139, 145, 163, 167, 168 Perfection, 62, 73

Index

Perspectivism, 98 Person, 56, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 100, 86, 89, 92n3, 95, 96, 103, 112 Phenomenalization, 130, 133, 138, 141–55 Phenomenality, 18, 131–33, 141, 142, 148 Phenomenological reduction, 18, 133, 149 Plasticity, 55 Plato, 61–67, 73, 80, 88, 90, 106, 152 Plurality, 26, 30, 48–52, 143–52 Poetry, 148 Potentiality, 15, 98, 125n6, 157–69 Praxis, 165–69 Precariousness, 72, 142 Presence, 10, 22, 44, 48, 49, 79, 94–96, 103, 105, 109, 112, 113, 115, 121, 122, 134, 148, 158–59, 165–69 Primordial/Primordial experience, 5, 8, 11–19, 22n13, 40 Purity, 61–66, 74, 149, 150 Psychoanalysis, 81, 95, 126n18 Psychology, 5, 7, 11, 12, 45, 93, 95 Psychosis, 95, 100, 103–5 Rationality, 81, 83, 86, 87, 88, 100 Receptivity, 12, 100, 111, 118, 120, 121, 125n5, 163, 165, 166 Reciprocity, 54, 70, 76, 160, 165, 166 Reflexive philosophy, 22n16, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 102 Reflexivity, 43, 44, 102, 119, 121, 147, 149, 152, 159 Resilience, 47 Resistance, 4, 6, 12–19, 22n12, 47, 54, 71, 91, 104, 148, 153, 167 Responsibility, 32, 35–36, 42, 48, 54, 55, 73 Responsive/ness, Responsivity, 41–56, 104 Retention, 148 Retrojection, 151 Reversibility, 129–40 Ricoeur, 23–38, 42

177

Rhythm, 105–9, 111–26, 146 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12, 22n20, 23, 27, 97 Satisfaction, 28, 45, 46, 54, 67, 68, 119 Schelling, Friedrich, 4, 151, 155, 159 Schema, 106, 116–17, 145, 146, 152, 154 Schematism, 146, 152, 154 Schiller, Friedrich, 121 Schizophrenia, 95 Seiendes, 94, 108 Sein, 94 Seinkönnen, 98 Self, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 36, 42, 44–47, 52–56, 67–69, 81, 87, 95–98, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 120, 121, 136, 154, 166, 168 Self-affection, 45, 51, 164 Self-production, 137 Self-transformation, 52, 67, 96 Sensation, 5, 22n20, 22n21, 108–9, 116–21, 135 Sense, 5, 6, 11, 49, 51, 89, 94, 95, 99, 100, 104–7, 109, 113, 116, 117, 133, 143–46, 152, 157, 158, 159, 162, 164, 167, 169 Sensing, 47, 116, 130, 131–38 Sensitivity, 8, 11, 130, 134 Sensoriality, 135 Sentir, 107, 108, 132 Sign, 9, 17, 26–28, 31, 33, 65, 70, 75, 163 Singularity, 44, 52, 54, 102–5, 113, 135, 137 Sinnbildung, 144, 159, 162 Sinngebung, 99, 104, 144, 157 Sinnstiftung, 144 Shoah, 79 Socrates, 14, 80, 83, 89, 90 Speech, 41, 44, 49–51 Spinoza, Baruch, 44, 92n1 Spiritualism, 3 Spiritualization, 19 Solipsism, 96

178

Index

Solitude, 28–30 Sorge, 101 Soul, 5, 7, 19, 49, 53, 63–65, 132, 159 Space, 7, 44–55, 62, 106, 108, 112– 18, 120, 130 Stoicism, 61 Straus, Erwin, 107 Subject, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 36, 42, 44, 45, 47–54, 62–72, 75, 85–89, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107, 111, 113–23, 130–40, 142, 149, 150, 157–66, 168 Subjectivation, 133–34, 139 Subjectivity, 11, 16, 35, 42–44, 53, 54, 94, 102, 111–23, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 165 Sublime, 152, 153, 155 Substitution, 34, 38, 54 Szondi, Léopold, 121–22 Suffering, 13, 30, 33, 36, 38, 49, 61, 72, 74, 97, 100–105, 168 Tautology, 144 Testimony, 25–38, 116 Time, 7, 10, 24, 28, 30, 31, 43, 51, 65, 71, 90, 106, 113, 152 “Thinking place,” 134, 136, 139 Thrownness, 96, 100 Totality, 86, 119, 138, 143, 168 Touch, 15, 72, 76, 109, 116, 130, 165 Tran Duc Thao, 164 Transcendence, 42, 46, 47, 54, 152–54 Transcendentalism, 95 Transduction, 137–38 Transfiguration, 46, 56 Transpassibility, 99–107, 114, 115 Transpossibility, 98–109, 126n21

Trauma, 73, 80, 88, 92n7, 99, 104 Truth, 25, 28, 31–34, 37, 61, 64–66, 80, 84, 87, 91, 108, 130, 133, 134, 138, 142, 143, 158, 161, 162, 166 Unconscious, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 16, 18, 22n15, 87, 121, 162 Univocity, 132–33 Uniqueness, 29 Urdoxa, 115 Verstehen, 95 Vibration, 109, 115, 152–54 Virtuality, 98 Visibility, 131 Vocation, 50–51, 74 Value, 28, 29, 33, 64, 71–73, 81, 84 Voluntary/unvoluntary, 4–9, 12–13, 16–19, 21n7, 120 Vulnerability, 42–56, 61, 72, 76, 77n33, 99 Waiting, 70–75 Weil, Simone, 61–76 Weizsäcker, Viktor von, 99, 103, 107 Will, 4–9, 13–19, 43, 48, 54, 68, 72, 73, 162 Withdrawal, 149–51, 168 Wonder, 62, 74–76, 113, 130, 139 World, 10–18, 26–28, 32, 34, 42–56, 62–69, 72–76, 86, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 107–9, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 129–38, 143, 145, 153, 157–69 Wound, 24, 42, 46–56, 146

About the Contributors

Renaud Barbaras is professor of philosophy at the University Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), and member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). In 2014, he has been awarded the “grand prix de philosophie” of the Académie Française for his works. Recent publications include: Métaphysique du sentiment (Paris: Cerf, 2016), Le désir et le monde (Paris: Hermann, 2016), L’appartenance, vers une cosmologie phénoménologique (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2019). Elodie Boublil is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Paris XII (UPEC, France). Her areas of research are phenomenology, philosophy of health, French and German philosophy, and social and political philosophy. She is the editor of Vulnérabilité et Empathie: Approches Phénoménologiques (Paris: Hermann 2018); the coeditor of Nietzsche & Phenomenology: Power, Life and Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) and the author of Individuation et Vision du Monde: Enquête sur l’Héritage Ontologique de la Phénoménologie (Zeta Books, 2014). She has published articles and contributions on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, political philosophy, and philosophy of health. She is currently working on a book project on the phenomenology of the heart at the crossroads of philosophical anthropology, clinical ethics, and critical phenomenology. Scott Davidson is professor of philosophy at West Virginia University. His research focuses on leading figures in contemporary French philosophy, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, and Paul Ricoeur, to name a few. He has translated four books and numerous articles by Michel Henry into English, and he has recently published The Michel Henry Reader. In addition, he has edited five books on the work of Paul Ricoeur, including most recently a three-part series on Ricoeur’s early philosophy of the will. He also serves as editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Recent publications include The Michel Henry Reader, Northwestern University Press, 2019; A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, Lexington Books, 2020; and A Companion to 179

180

About the Contributors

Ricoeur’s “Fallible Man,” Lexington Books, 2019. A Companion to Ricoeur’s “Freedom and Nature,” Lexington Books, 2018. Till Grohmann is professor for contemporary philosophy at the Philosophical Institute of the KU Leuven (Belgium). He published mainly in the field of phenomenology, psychopathology and French philosophy. Stefan Kristensen is currently professor of aesthetics and art theory at the faculty of arts of the University of Strasbourg (France). His interests lie particularly in the theory of subjectivity, psychoanalytical psychosomatics, and the phenomenology of the body. Among his publications are Parole et subjectivité (2010), Jean-Luc Godard philosophe (2014), and La Machine sensible (2017). Paula Lorelle is an invited lecturer at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) where she works at the Fonds Michel Henry. Specialized in phenomenology, she has published Le sensible ou l’épreuve de la raison. Une étude phénoménologique (Mimesis, 2019) and has recently coedited a volume  Considérations Phénoménologiques sur le monde. Entre théorie et pratique (Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2020). Delia Popa is assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Villanova University. Her main areas of research are classical phenomenology, aesthetics, and psychopathology, on which she published numerous papers. Her first book was on Emmanuel Levinas: Les aventures de l’économie subjective et son ouverture à l’altérité (Lumen, 2007). She is the author of Apparence et réalité. Phénoménologie et psychologie de l’imagination (Olms, 2012) and co-editor of Person, Community and Identity (2003), La portée pratique de la phénoménologie. Normativité, critique sociale et psychopathologie (2014), Approches phénoménologiques de l’inconscient (2015) and Describing the Unconscious. Phenomenological Perspectives on the Subject of Psychoanalysis (2020). She is currently working on a book project on the phenomenology of the stranger, alongside other collaborative projects on imagination and social community. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone is director of the University Honors Program and associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Dakota. She earned her BA in philosophy at Birmingham-Southern College (2000) and her MA (2002) and PhD (2009) in philosophy, with emphasis in American and Continental philosophy respectively, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She served as the Vice President (2012–2014) and then President (2014–2016) of the American Weil Society, and has coedited The Relevance

About the Contributors

181

of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, coauthored Simone Weil and Theology, and edited Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy. Aside from Simone Weil, her research interests include phenomenology, feminism, the ethics of attention, and the growing field of fatigue studies. Alexander Schnell is professor of philosophy and phenomenology at the University of Wuppertal (Germany). He is the director of the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology (ITP) which includes the Internationales Fichte-Forschungszentrum (IFF), the Eugen Fink Zentrum Wuppertal (EFZW) and the Archives Marc Richir (MRA). Recent publications include: La déhiscence du sens, (Hermann 2015); Was ist Phänomenologie?, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 2019; Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie transcendantale?, coll. Krisis, Grenoble, J. Millon. 2020; Seinsschwingungen, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck (Philosophische Untersuchungen 50), 2020; Phénoménalisation et transcendance.  La métaphysique phénomenologique de Marc Richir, Mémoires des Annales de Phénoménologie (vol. XVI), Dixmont, Association Internationale de Phénoménologie, 2020; Die phänomenologische Metaphysik Marc Richirs, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 2020; Le clignotement de l’être, coll. Le bel aujourd’hui, Paris, Hermann, 2021; Der frühe Derrida und die Phänomenologie, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 2021. Mélissa Thériault is professor of philosophy at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (Canada). Her research interests include philosophy of art, pop culture, history of aesthetics, philosophy of literature, feminist and decolonial studies. Among her publications: Autres voix. Textes en Philosophies de l’Existence, M. Theriault et al. (Trois-Rivières: Éditions DL&DR, 2019); Le “vrai” et le reste. Plaidoyer pour les arts populaires (Éditions Nota Bene, 2015), and Arthur Danto ou l’art en boîte (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010).