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.

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).

In this article, I will discuss the Husserlian phenomenology of animality, by focusing on several texts of the 1920s in which the animal is determined as an abnormal variation of the human being. My aim is to address the question of the abnormality of the animal by reintegrating it in its original context, which is Husserl’s theory of normality. I will sketch the general framework of this theory, its articulations and strata, in order to eventually raise some paradoxical issues, specifically in relation to how the question of animality is interpreted through the couple normality/abnormality.

The paper aims to clarify several key aspects of Alexandru Dragomir: his amazing “technique” of keeping his entire knowledge in perfect working condition, his exceptional precision of references and his continuous disregard concerning writing. The root of all these peculiarities is traced back to Plato’s cognitive and moral arguments against writing, as expressed in Phaedrus and Seventh Letter. Finally, the article brings to light what seems to be the lesson of Dragomir’s life as a thinker: to rely only on the living thought, that which is written “inside the soul”.

Après l’analyse du problème du corps dans les écrits levinassiens de jeunesse, problème que nous avons exposé dans un précédant numéro de la revue ( Les Études Philosophiques, vol. 113 (2013), n o 2, pp. 201-219), nous nous focalisons dans cet article sur la période moyenne de l’œuvre de Levinas, et notamment sur Totalité et Infini. La corporéité est ici caractérisée constamment par une sorte d’ambivalence, la dimension incarnée du sujet étant souvent placée dans une certaine ambiguïté. Nous essayerons de montrer comment la corporéité, toujours équivoque, fait intimement partie de la relation originaire du sujet avec le monde, avec soi-même et avec l’autre. Pour cela, nous étudierons plusieurs rapports essentiels où intervient le problème de la chair : entre le corps et la conscience, entre le corps et l’élément, entre le corps et l’habitation, entre le corps et le travail, et, finalement, entre le corps et l’autre.

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.