Delia Popa

Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the importance of otherness and community for phenomenology’s critical orientation, we reconsider the importance of eidetics from the standpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, highlighting its historical and contingent character. Contrary to the received view of Husserl’s classical phenomenology as an idealistic and rigid undertaking, we show that his genetic phenomenology is interested in the material formation of meaning (Sinnbildung), offering resources for a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory. Keywords: critical phenomenology, critical theory, genetic phenomenology, community, normativity

Does the object of the phenomenological description exist independently or is it produced by it? Are we allowed to lean on a field of phenomena ingeniously discovered by the description, and never modified by its operation? Or should we rather speak about a field that appears progressively with each descriptive act and continuously strengthened by it? The paper answers these questions by confronting the neutrality of the description with the neutrality of the imagination, and by exploring the meaning of the experience that they bring to light

Beginning with Freud’s treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification’s polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence of identification, we review Freud’s discussion of mass formations as group identifications, arguing that the work of facilitating a productive sublimation of the drives cannot be reduced to a strengthening of the artificial masses represented by social institutions such as the church and the educational system. Instead, the difference between mass formations allowing for collective sublimation and those suffering from narcissistic or melancholic blockages must be found in the productive qualities of the mass itself. In closing, we outline a few ways in which we might begin to understand the political contribution of masses to the maturation of human drives.

Les thèses freudiennes appuyées par la clinique ont requalifié ce que l’on entendait traditionnellement par « psychique », ainsi que la ségrégation entre conscience et inconscient thématisée dans le champ de la philosophie moderne. Alors que l’inconscient avait été conçu comme une négation ponctuelle de la conscience, Freud opère un renversement radical de situation en soutenant que le psychique est de part en part inconscient, alors que la conscience n’est qu’une qualité ponctuelle et intermittente de celui-ci. Dès lors, une philosophie centrée sur la vie de la conscience, telle la phénoménologie, loin de pouvoir faire abstraction de cette révolution freudienne, doit, au contraire, en prendre pleinement la mesure. Les textes réunis dans ce volume cherchent à montrer que la phénoménologie est susceptible de trouver dans la question de l’inconscient non seulement une limite, mais aussi un lieu inédit de réflexion à partir duquel bon nombre de ses propres questions peuvent être relancées et réélaborées. Die auf die Klinik gestützten Thesen Freuds haben das traditionelle Verständnis des „Psychischen“ ebenso neu bestimmt wie die strikte Trennung zwischen Bewusstsein und Unbewusstem, die auf dem Gebiet der modernen Philosophie thematisiert wird. Während bis dahin das Unbewusste als eine punktuelle Negation des Bewusstseins verstanden wurde, führt Freud eine radikale Umkehrung der Situation herbei, indem er die Auffassung vertritt, dass das Psychische durch und durch unbewusst ist, während das Bewusstsein nur eine punktuelle und intermittierende Eigenschaft des Unbewussten ist. Folglich kann eine Philosophie wie die Phänomenologie, die das Leben des Bewusstseins zum Gegenstand hat, auf keinen Fall von dieser Freud’schen Revolution absehen, im Gegenteil, sie muss sie voll und ganz zum Maßstab nehmen. Die im vorliegenden Band vereinigten Texte versuchen zu zeigen, dass die Phänomenologie imstande ist, in der Frage des Unbewussten nicht nur eine Grenze, sondern auch einen noch unerforschten Ort der Reflexion zu finden, von dem ausgehend eine beträchtliche Anzahl ihrer eigenen Fragen neu aufgeworfen und erarbeitet werden können.

The article follows the mutation suffered by the issue of alterity from Husserl to Heidegger and from Heidegger to Lévinas, envisaging it starting from temporality. We aim at replacing the question “Where is the other?” – that betrays the spatializing presuppositions of description – with “When is the other?” that can be clarified starting from the question “When are we together?”. Rather than deducing from the issue of co-presence, the final postponement of all attempt to conceive intersubjectivity in terms of contemporaneity, we subject it to an analysis that raises again the theme of world-time starting from an attention that testifies to the multiple layers that constitute temporality and the plurality of durations that intertwine in it

Dan ZAHAVI, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity. A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique ; Françoise DASTUR, Chair et langage. Essais sur Merleau-Ponty ; Jean GREISCH, Michel Henry et l’épreuve de la vie ; Elisabeth STRÖKER, The Husserlian Foundations of Science ; John McCUMBER, Metaphysics and Oppression, Heidegger’s Challenge to Western Philosophy ; Marc RICHIR, Phénoménologie en esquisses. Nouvelles fondations ; Raphaël GÉLY, La genèse du sentir. Essai sur Merleau-Ponty ; John SALLIS, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental ; Bin KIMURA, L’entre. Une approche phénoménologique de la schizophrénie ; Dermot MORAN, Tim MOONEY, The Phenomenology Reader ; Ion COPOERU, Structuri ale constituirii ; Fabio CIARAMELLI, La distruzione del’desiderio. Il narcisismo nell’epoca di consumo di massa ; Pierre KELLER, Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience