Cristian Ciocan

In this article, the author unveils the play between visibility and invisibility as it is captured in a phenomenology of the gift. The first part of the essay explores the tension between the fact of being given and the forgetting of its characters as a gift: its donor and the circumstances of it being given. In the process of becoming autonomous, free of its provenance, the gift loses its character of being given and becomes no more than a simple thing in someone’s possession. Subsequently, the essay draws on the figure of Christ as gift of God, illustrating this interpretation with particular reference to several illuminating passages from the Gospel of John. The central image is the phenomenon of gift as given in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Finally, this image is used to define the task of a hermeneutical approach to the gift.

Our most current experience of violence is not predominantly violence “given in the flesh,” but violence given through the mediation of the image. The phenomenon of real violence is therefore modified through the imagistic experience, involving first of all its emotional, embodied and intersubjective dimensions. How is the emotion constituted in the face of depicted violence, in contrast to the lived experience of real violence? Is the intersubjectivity modified when violence appears pictorially? What specific embodied dimensions are particularly engaged when violence is lived as an image, and not as a real phenomenon? The phenomenon of imagistic violence can also be understood in contrast with the experience of violence lived in phantasy, memory, or dreaming. Also, since each type of image puts into play certain possibilities of depicting violence, making possible various subjective experiences of violence, it crucial to explore how this experience fundamentally depends on the type of image by which the phenomenon of violence is depicted, be it painting, photography, fiction film, documentary or media image.

The aim of this article is to explore the emotional dimensions involved in the phenomenon of interpersonal violence, identifying various modalizations of affectivity occurring in the architectonics of this phenomenon. I will first concentrate on symmetrical violence, namely, on the emergence of irritation, annoyance, anger, and fury leading to fierce confrontation. Next I will explore asymmetrical violence, where the passive pole experiences the imminence of the other’s violence in fear and in being terrified. I will then focus on the experience of the third in the face of violence, showing that here the affectivity is differently constituted each time, depending on the various situations of symmetrical and asymmetrical violence that the third witnesses. Finally, I will contrast the experience of real violence with the experience of violence-as-image, and I will pose several questions regarding the modifications of the affective experience of the third in the face of depicted violence.

The aim of this article is to examine the problematic frontier that separates the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of animality. The main difficulty is to differentiate phenomenologically not only between embodiment and animality, but also between specifically human embodied experience and what is accessible to us through empathy in relation to the corporeality of the animal. I will tackle these questions by considering relevant textual material from the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. On the one hand, I will show that although embodiment and animality are convergent on the level of the naturalistic attitude in Husserl’s Ideas II, they are divergent as soon as we place ourselves in the personalistic attitude, where the body enters into a different conjunction—namely, with the idea of person and of the spiritual world. On the other hand, Heidegger claims that, in spite of the abysmal bodily kinship with the animal, there is an essential difference between the human body and the animal organism, thus opposing the tendencies to humanize the animal and to animalize the human.

Dacă cercetarea fenomenologică are o anumită intuiţie mai mult sau mai puţin vagă a direcţiei în care se îndreaptă, ea nu ştie dintru început unde anume va ajunge, unde anume o vor ghida întrebările. Ca în Călăuza lui Tarkovski, cercetătorul aruncă înaintea sa întrebarea şi apoi o urmează, înaintând oarecum în necunoscut, în orizontul neştiut pe care întrebarea îl deschide. Tocmai de aceea cercetarea fenomenologică este o explorare, o înaintare în necunoscut, fără o hartă sigură, fără o busolă infailibilă, alta decât cea a propriei pre-înţelegeri, care poate fi confirmată sau infirmată pe parcurs. Spre deosebire de alte tipuri de cercetare, care pornesc de la un dat pozitiv deja disponibil, deja asigurat, în fenomenologie cercetătorul trebuie să îşi obţină datul originar, să şi-l asigure constant, să-l extragă din contexte fenomenale în care el este de cele mai multe ori ocultat, mascat şi obturat. Tot aşa şi noi, întrebându-ne dacă şi cum ar putea fi conceput un sens originar şi integrator al trupului, unul care să premeargă şi totodată să cuprindă diversele forme de expresie corporală a existenţei umane, noi nu presupunem că îl avem deja, gata dat, disponibil, apt de a fi arătat cu degetul: iată-l! Dimpotrivă, este mult mai plauzibil ca acest sens originar să ne fie dat întâi de toate prin ocultările sale, prin formele sale derivate, privative sau sărăcite. Explorarea fenomenologică ia atunci chipul unei operaţii de desfoliere, de recuperare a unui strat de sens originar, ascuns în spatele unor aluviuni care îl acoperă şi, uneori, îl fac de nerecunoscut.

This work is the first Levinas Concordance. The particularity of this index is that it covers on all the 28 books published by Levinas in French. The Levinas Concordance comprises the complete list of meaningful words of Levinas’ oeuvre and their corresponding occurrences, indicated by book, page and line. The Levinas Concordance contains eight specific indexes: General Index of French Terms; General Index of Proper Names; Index of Hebrew, Biblical and Talmudic Proper Names; Index of Hebrew Terms; Index of Greek Terms; Index of Latin Terms; Index of German Terms; Index of Works.

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 57 - 76 The aim of this article is to address the question of the anthropological difference by focusing on the intersubjective relation between the human and the animal in the context of a phenomenological analysis of violence. Following some Levinasian and Derridian insights, my goal is to analyze the structural differences between interspecific and intraspecific violence by asking how the generic phenomenon of violence is modalized across various levels: from human to human, from human to animal, from animal to human, from animal to animal. I will address questions of incarnated vulnerability and altered states of affectivity, and I will relate the various forms of violence emerging in the context of the anthropological difference to the question of territoriality, arguing that violence is structurally modified in relation to particular articulations of our worldly spatiality.

In this paper, I will discuss the Heideggerian interpretation of death in relation with two fundamental structures of the existential analysis: understanding and state-of-mind. In the first part, I will highlight how the understanding opens the phenomenon of death as a possibility: this possibility will prove to be a specific imminence, in that it must be assumed by the Dasein in itself, as Dasein’s ownmost and non-relational possibility that cannot be outstripped. In the second part, I will analyse the relation between death and the affectivity, emphasizing the contrast between the traditional position on this subject – which involves the philosophical neutralization of a natural fear of death – and Heidegger’s position, suggesting a dynamic tension between the fear and anxiety, where anxiety is not an annihilation of fear, but its existential radicalization.

Le § 45 de Sein und Zeit met en relation la totalité et la mort. En fait, il y a chez Heidegger, trois concepts de totalité : 1 / la totalité ontologico-existentiale et a priori de l'êtreau-monde et du souci ; 2 /la totalité a posteriori des choses intramondaines composées de parties ; 3 / la totalité existentielle temporelle de l'existence « entre » la naissance et la mort. Heidegger essaie de résoudre la tension entre un moment essentiel de la totalité ontologique (notamment de l' « en avant de soi » ) et la totalité existentielle qui est constituée par le ne-pas-encore qui sépare le Dasein de sa mort. Cela s'accomplit par la modification du concept de totalité (Ganzheit) comme être-tout (Ganzsein), être-tout possible (mögliche Ganzsein) et pouvoir d'être-tout (Ganzseinkönnen), mais aussi par l'élaboration des rapports structurels entre l'idée de totalité et l'idée de fin, ce qui implique l'analyse détaillée de plusieurs variations structurelles de ces notions. Traitant cette question, Heidegger se réfère aux analyses platoniciennes, aristotéliciennes et husserliennes. Sein und Zeit's paragraph 45 relates totality and death. In fact, with Heidegger there are three concepts of totality : 1 / an existential-ontological totality which is a priori of the being-in-the world and care ; 2 / an a posteriori totality of intra-mundane things made of parts ; and 3 / a time existential totality of existence lying « between » birth and death. Heidegger tries to solve the tension between an essential moment of the ontological totality (namely the « afore one's self » ) and the existential totality composed of the not-yet which separates the Dasein from death. It occurs through the change of the concept of totality (Ganzheit) as all-being (Ganzsein), all-possible being (mögliche Ganzsein) and power to be all (Ganzseinkönnen), but also through the elaboration of the structural relationships between the idea of a totality and the idea of end, which implies a detailed analysis of several structural variations of such notions. While dealing with these matters, Heidegger refers to Plato's, Aristotle's and Husserl's analyses.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the significance of the absence of the problem of living body in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein. In order to evaluate the occurrences of the problem of the body in Being and Time, I also refer to the context of some of Heidegger's later work where there is to be found a sketch of an ontological investigation of the living body. I analyze then in detail the scarce occurrences of body in the fundamental ontology, showing finally that the lack of a proper phenomenological examination of living body generates a series of conceptual difficulties for the problem of Dasein's death, precisely when the issue of dead body is at stake.

This study intends to provide some benchmarks for a full analysis of the evolution of the problem of death in Heidegger ’s thought developed after Sein und Zeit. The question that guides our investigation is how the phenomenology of death is still the center of Heidegger ’s philosophical interest, after the analytic of Dasein. Our discussion focuses on the period 1931–1935, following a chronological order, in order to call attention to some of the distinct stages of the thought on death after Sein und Zeit. We begin by analyzing the reactions of Heidegger himself on the reception of the problem of death in the first period after the publication of Sein und Zeit. After that, we analyze the emergence of the subject of death in three courses: the course of the winter semester 1931–1932, the lecture from 1934/1935 on Hölderlin, and the lecture in the summer of 1935 – An Introduction to Metaphysics.

In this article, I focus on the problem of body as it is developed in Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, in contrast with its enigmatic concealment in Being and Time. In the first part, I emphasize the implicit connection of Heidegger’s approach of body with Husserl’s problematic of Leib and Körper, and with his phenomenological analyses of tactility. In the second part, I focus on Heidegger’s distinction between the limits of the lived body and the limits of the corresponding corporeal thing, opening to an ontological understanding of the ecstatic bodying forth of the body. In the third part, I analyse this ecstatic bodiliness in relation to the problem of spatiality, exploring the tension between the here and the over there in the experience of the embodiment. Heidegger not only refuses to understand the space starting from the here of the body, but he also refuses to understand the body starting from the here of the space. Thus, there are two interconnected inversions that Heidegger operates in relation to Husserl: In the topic of spatiality, he rejects the pre-eminence of the here; in relation to the body, he contests the primacy of tactility. Finally, the conclusion stresses that, even if the bodying forth penetrates almost all behaviour of Dasein in the world, there is however a limit of embodiment, an unreachable frontier beyond any possibility of the bodying forth, namely the understanding of being. This also implies that the problem of body needs be understood in the context of the ontological difference.

Dans cet article, nous allons analyser le surgissement et l’évolution du problème de la corporéité dans les écrits de jeunesse d’Emmanuel Levinas, notamment de 1935 à 1947. Dans ces textes, le moi se constitue comme cohésion avec soi et comme enchaînement à son propre corps. L’altérité brise cette adhésion charnelle à soi et rompt la cohérence du moi. Mais cette rupture a elle aussi une dimension charnelle : l’altérité est comprise ici non seulement sous le paradigme de la nudité, comme ce qui se soustrait aux formes, mais aussi comme visage (chair expressive), féminité (chair vulnérable) et éros (chair voluptueuse et tendre).