Emmanuel Alloa

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726-842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental 'iconic identity', iconophile philosophy defends the idea of'iconic difference'. And while the reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, reexamining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today's 'pictorial turn' reveals its striking modernity.

A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be a turning point that announced the structuralist revolution by introducing a reflection on the historicity and the materiality of impersonal idealities. And yet, the 1998 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from his Collège de France lecture course on the same topic make manifest that he was already taking phenomenology in another direction. His 1959 reading of The Origin of Geometry shows how unexpectedly close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. By identifying the tension between archaeology and teleology as the basic problem of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida each disclose the fundamental importance of history and of writing. Comparing the two readings in their specific context not only brings about a more complex picture of the intellectual debates of the time, but also shows how, with Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of The Origin of Geometry, Derrida’s “différance” predates itself and receives another genealogy.

Die elf Beiträge dieses Bandes gehen aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln dem Problem der Verkörperung von Sinn nach: phänomenologische, psychoanalytische und sprachwissenschaftliche Ansätze bilden dabei den Schwerpunkt; sie werden aber durch Studien aus der Literaturtheorie, der politischen Theorie und der Filmwissenschaft ergänzt. Was heißt es – das ist die zentrale Frage –, den Körper als leibliches Medium aufzufassen, welches Sinn nicht nur verkörpert, sondern überhaupt erst entstehen lässt? Gibt es bereits eine Sprache des Leibes diesseits der Ebene ausdrücklicher Rede?

Depuis la renaissance des études aristotéliciennes avec Werner Jaeger, on a souvent observé la fréquence lexicographique des termes dénotant la médiété et la médiation dans le corpus aristotélicien. Cette récurrence a cependant généralement été traitée comme un effet homonymique, rien ne permettant de relier a priori la médiété éthique, le terme intermédiaire en logique ou encore le milieu perceptif. Et pourtant, le fait qu'Aristote s'interroge lui-même sur cette « plurivocité » du médium peut être lu comme une indication que, sous le couvert d'une apparente homonymie, il y a bien un problème de la médialité qui traverse la pensée du Stagirite. L'article se propose de recenser les figures majeures de cette médialité dans ses déclinaisons éthiques, logiques et aïsthétiques, afin de déterminer dans quelle mesure une relecture du corpus à l'aune de la médialité permet de dépasser l'alternative entre une lecture fonctionnaliste et une lecture naturaliste d'Aristote

Although in the modern age there were plenty of attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism, its philosophical theories of language reintroduced it in a subtle but not less effective way.In this article several theorems to think on the materiality of the sign are discussed, and, from Kierkegaard to the post-Saussurean structuralism, the prominent role of thinking the materialization as something necessary but arbitrary in its modality is shown. The body of language under this understanding is not only that which can be modified, but that which must be modifiable: the corporeality of the utterance must be substitutable in order to preserve the unit of meaning. Nevertheless, in many cases, the meaning comes precisely from the unsubstitutable singularity, from the configuration of the signs in poetry or from the inimitable actor’s gestures.The article argues for introducing in this discussion the phenomenological distinction between Körper and Leib , which – as Husserl suggested – may also be thought from the difference between what can be represented and what cannot be represented, between what does not have a constituent role and hence can be substituted, and what allows to be represented by another because it is irreplaceable.

Das 20. Jahrhundert war durch eine radikale Rückbesinnung auf die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Sprache gekennzeichnet. Der neuzeitliche Traum einer restlosen Benennung des Weltganzen wird fraglich, wenn ihr Medium – die propositionale Aussagelogik – unter Verdacht gerät. Der Band wirft die brisante Frage auf, ob der für das Jahrhundert prägende linguistic turn nicht so sehr in einer Hinwendung, als vielmehr in einer »Abwendung« vom Sagen besteht, die sich in der Entsagungsgeste von Melvilles Bartleby emblematisch verkörpert. Einzelanalysen zu literarischen Strategien bei Mallarmé, Wittgenstein, Celan, Foucault, Adorno, Derrida, Lévinas u.a.m. führen vor, wie Unterlassen nicht nur ein kritisches, sondern auch stets ein schöpferisches Moment in sich birgt.

“What we have learned from Saussure” affirms Merleau-Ponty “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.” While it has often been stressed that Merleau-Ponty was arguably among the earliest philosophical readers of Saussure, the real impact of this reading on Merleau-Ponty’s thinking has rarely been assessed in detail. By focusing on the middle period – the years between the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception and the abandonment of the book project The Prose of the World – a special interest in language and its ideality becomes all the more evident. Now this period is crucial for understanding the turn of the later years: similarly to Saussure, who shifted the problem of meaning from a problem of referentiality to an issue of self-differentiation of the linguistic field, Merleau-Ponty shifts his account of perception from a relationship based on sensory subjects and perceived objects to an immanent differentiation of the sensible world. The genesis ofan articulated world can be conceptualized with the experience of children’s language acquisition and the phenomenon of “deflation.” At a certain point in her development, the child interrupts her incessant babbling and learns to shape pauses and silences, which are the precondition for meaningful sounds. Learning how to speak – as it were – would thus be learning how not to speak. The child may only enter a specific language by means of a phonematic restriction; to become a member of a language community is to lose the capacity to speak all languages.

The category of « postmemory » has been invoked by Marianne Hirsch to refer to a traumatic past which is not directly remembered in first person, but is handed down to later generations and is recalled through the mediation of narratives and images which become “prostheses” for a lack of direct memory. But how is it that these prosthetic recollections do not simply substitute for what lacks but seem to shape the very events they are meant to reproduce ? How come an event continues to haunt the memories of the present, even when no immediate remembrance of it is left ? How to think of an “afterimage” of something that was never seen in the first place? It is only quite recently that the role of prosthetic images has been more widely acknowledged in the construction and creation of memories of collective trauma. The paper will focus on the role of photographic images played in remembrance of the Armenian genocide. It shall be shown how the few pictures that were taken by witnesses of the deportations had an afterlife of their own, being reframed and receiving specific interpretations. In particular, the paper will discuss the case of Armin T. Wegner, a German voluntary serving as Sanitary Officer in the Turkish army who, during his fieldwork in 1915/16 in Anatolia and on the Euphrates in Syria, documented the final stages of deportation, taking pictures of the camps at the desert’s fringes. His photos, which are among the most important visual testimonies of the extermination, only belatedly later made Wegner aware of what he had been witnessing, turning him into a witness après coup and to a defender of the Armenian cause.