Delia Popa

In this paper, I consider the materiality of experience as stemming from a temporal process of sense-formation (Sinnbildung), whose essence is not just formally configured, but also materially organized. In order to understand this process of sense-formation, I first examine the materiality that is intrinsic to the intentional sense and its relationship with the sensible materiality of experience brought forth by the project of hyletic phenomenology. In the second part of the paper, I propose to overcome the tension between a materiality of sense and a materiality of sensibility by reflecting on the specific materiality that is created in our experience through the dynamism of imaginative modifications. Allowing us to switch between different temporal and spatial horizons, imaginative projections and reveries reveal a hidden “reverse” side of our perceptive field, that we access only when we let go of objectifying acts and established significance. In the last part of the paper, I turn toward bodily gestures, in which I see an expression of experience that resists objectification and straightforward symbolization, attesting for the complex social inscription of our bodily existence. I end the paper with an inquiry into the specific materiality of gestures, understanding them as vanishing archives offered to the future.

Cet ouvrage cible la pratique qui est solidaire de la fondation de la connaissance realisee par la phenomenologie, en voyant dans cette pratique la condition meme de la formulation positive de son projet. Dans cette perspective, la critique sociale et la psychopathologie sont notamment les deux champs pratiques ou la phenomenologie se trouve investie, par-dela son premier elan de critique theorique, pour intervenir sur les formes de normativite qui y sont a l'oeuvre. En abordant ces champs a travers les differentes contributions qui le composent, l'ouvrage ambitionne d'analyser la portee pratique de la phenomenologie et de tester sa capacite a generer une attention au pouvoir emancipateur ou alienant des organisations sociales. L'hypothese de fond, collectivement partagee, est que la phenomenologie peut apporter une contribution a la construction d'une nouvelle posture critique a meme de participer a l'emancipation des individus en situation de souffrance et d'injustice."

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger

The three books recently published by C. Romano reconsider the phenomenological senses of world and time starting from the event as original phenomena. This review-article explores the new method that he propose, called “evenimential hermeneutics”, as applied to the relation to ourselves, to the world and to the general sense of being. These analyses lean upon an original way of thinking time, as born in each “sudden” moment. The paper also draws comparisons with Heidegger, Husserl and Lévinas, while proposing a critical point of view on Romano’s thesis, concerning the relationship between the novelty of the event and the past, and its relation with desire and otherness

Luca M. Possati, Jean Grondin, Paul Ricoeur ; Aurore Dumont, François Dosse et Catherine Goldenstein, Paul Ricoeur: penser la mémoire ; Paul-Gabriel Sandu, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Truth of Language. Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement ; Paul Marinescu, Marc-Antoine Vallée, Gadamer et Ricoeur. La conception herméneutiquedu langage ; Witold Płotka, Saulius Geniusas, Th e Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology ; Delia Popa, Annabelle Dufourcq, La dimension imaginaire du réel dans la philosophie de Husserl ; Maria GyemantDenis Seron, Ce que voir veut dire. Essai sur la perception ; Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Hans Friesen, Christian Lotz, Jakob Meier, Markus Wolf, Ding und Verdinglichung. Technik- und Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der Kritischen Th eorie ; Bogdan MincăLarisa Cercel, John Stanley, Unterwegs zu einer hermeneutischen Übersetzungswissenschaft. Radegundis Stolze zu ihrem 60. Geburtstag ; Denisa Butnaru Johann Michel, Sociologie du soi. Essai d’herméneutique appliquée ; Ovidiu Stanciu, Jan Patočka, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. Trad. fr. Erika Abrams ; Mădălina Diaconu, Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen, Phänomenologie.

In this paper I examine the relationship between promise and gesture, in order to understand how they co-participate in the configuration of our life-histories. I start by noticing the role played by promise in establishing a dialogical pact of trust, through which an experiential cohesion is maintained through time. Reflecting on the variable conditions of mutual trust, I focus on crisis-situations when we cannot keep the promises we make to others and to ourselves. Relying on the thesis of an “original forgiveness”, I argue that our promises operate beyond the initial intention that animates them and even beyond their failure. I then show that failed promises reveal a broader state of self-fragmentation, engaging the other as a mediator between segments of experience that remain otherwise difficult to bring together and to reconcile by oneself. I close by highlighting the role played by gestures in cultivating this mediation.

Creation and passibility sketch the new phenomenological style present in the Henri Maldiney’s descriptions. Yet it would be impossible to find a way in the aperture made possible by this new phenomenological practice if some returns weren’t operated towards the first places where phenomenology was born. This paper aims to underline some crossings between the phenomenology of Henri Maldiney and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl in order to think over about the task of the phenomenological description. Following Maldiney’s example, the construction of a method which occupied Husserl’s main work must be completed by its transformations, to be discovered in its application.

Following Freud’s suggestion that we are able to recognize in the others some parts of our unconscious life that we are not keen to admit as our owns, this paper draws a theory of empathy understood as a double intention affecting the self and the other, each of them being connected indirectly to an unconscious phantasm sustaining the social relations. The subjectivation is to be described as a process driving the self from what is seen in the other towards some parts of his unconscious that remain unknown. Violence and freedom in the social field are to be examined in relation to this difficult self-knowledge that we may access when the other is not only a limit, but also an indicating sign of what we are, without knowing it.

Quelle est la matière propre à l’activité imaginaire ? S’il est entendu que la perception va « aux choses mêmes » moyennant des impressions sensitives et que la signification les identifie en restant vide de contenu, avec quoi et en vue de quoi l’imagination opère-t-elle ? L’appartenance de l’imagination — depuis toujours reconnue par Husserl — à la famille des actes intentionnels intuitifs nous fournit l’indice que l’imagination ne saurait fonctionner sans un contenu sensible. Mais de quelle nature est-il ? Peut-on parler, dans son cas, d’un simple remplissement d’acte intentionnel, par lequel son sens spécifique est constitué ? Les approches que Michel Henry et Edmund Husserl ont eues de ces questions seront confrontées afin de dégager le spécifique de l’imagination tel qu’il se présente dans son rapport au sens de l’expérience

De Husserl à Henry, l’essence de la phénoménalité a changé de lieu, quittant le monde de la manifestation dans lequel l’être est à la fois caché et livré par des apparences, pour la pureté d’une auto-affection qui ne saurait s’y révéler comme telle, étant donné que son déploiement est purement immanent. Si la phénoménologie husserlienne ne peut, selon Michel Henry, que contribuer à « étendre le règne de l’apparence », la philosophie henryenne ira jusqu’à remettre en question le statut de la phénoménalité à partir de la vie transcendantale incarnée. Le paraître se videra ainsi progressivement de la vie transcendantale dont il s’était fait l’expression sensible chez Husserl. En revenant de Henry à Husserl, nous essayons de montrer que si l’apparence est considérée comme la voix sensible de l’apparaître, ce dernier ne cesse pas pour autant de vivre.

Why do we dream? What is the relation between dreaming and being aware? Following Walter Benjamin’s and Maria Zambrano’s approach, the paper will focus on an analysis of dream that takes some distance from the phenomenological description made by some of the most known Husserl’s followers, such as Fink, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. While the phenomenological description investigates the dreaming experience proceeding from the state of being awake and aware, our analysis will look at the latter from the point of view opened by the state we are in when we are dreaming. This perspective brings out some new questions about the importance of dreams in the present-past connexion and about the relation between dream and history.

How can phenomenology help address the problem of social violence? Can phenomenology provide an adequate description of its essence? Is the phenomenological method able to deepen and transform its comprehension? The paper is an attempt to answer these questions through an analysis of three different testimonies of social violence entailing elements of phenomenological description. Starting with a minimal definition of the phenomenological description, understood as search for a meaning for a lived experience and substitution with those who suffer, the article discusses several issues raised by a phenomenological description of social violence, such as the danger of justifying it when searching for its meaning, of blaming the victims who suffered from it or of prolonging its traumatizing effects. The paper ends by questioning the ways in which the phenomenological method can offer support for resilience and inspire resistance to social violence.

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