João Paulo Costa

Loghismoí (“intoxicating or bewildering thoughts”—that is, thoughts, feelings, and memories that assail the mind, often arising without prior warning); Evagrius Ponticus (346–399/400 CE); the Book of Revelation; Jesus Christ (1st century); and Giancarlo Pavanello—all, in different ways, speak to those of us who are visually unseeing, or who have become so. Some of these terms, works, proper names, or aesthetic-spiritual experiences may, perhaps, be almost unknown or of little relevance to many of us gathered here. What matters, however, is that each of them, in its own way and in its own time, can be understood as a kind of speleologist of the human spirit: each has mapped the anatomy of the soul—its virtues and its flaws—not as an accusatory denunciation, but through the force of word and gesture, in order to illuminate the lives of their contemporaries.

Come entrare e leggere l’opera pittorico-visiva di Giancarlo Pavanello (Carlo Pave)?¹ L’arte di Pavanello — più concretamente le sue tavole qui esposte (loghismoí e Apocalisse), più che la concisione e la precisione di un haiku — è come uno zuihitsu nipponico, che significa letteralmente “seguire il pennello”, o seguire il filo di ciò che è sfero-grafico, in un flusso e riflusso inarrestabile di scrittura, spontaneamente, senza intenzionalità oggettiva, raccogliendo liberamente, ma senza trascurare un certo rigore concettuale, pensieri, eventi o dettagli risibili che irrigano la sua poetica visiva.

Come entrare e leggere l’opera pittorico-visiva di Giancarlo Pavanello (Carlo Pave)?¹ L’arte di Pavanello — più concretamente le sue tavole qui esposte (loghismoí e Apocalisse), più che la concisione e la precisione di un haiku — è come uno zuihitsu nipponico, che significa letteralmente “seguire il pennello”, o seguire il filo di ciò che è sfero-grafico, in un flusso e riflusso inarrestabile di scrittura, spontaneamente, senza intenzionalità oggettiva, raccogliendo liberamente, ma senza trascurare un certo rigore concettuale, pensieri, eventi o dettagli risibili che irrigano la sua poetica visiva.

Considering that corporeality is central to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work, we will explore the possibility of conceiving a phenomenological aesthetic based on the haptic nature of vision, using cinematographic perception as a backdrop, understood as the "affective space" of intersubjectivity. To this end, alongside Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we will draw on other thinkers and artists who have considered or explored, through artistic means, this haptic dimension of the body, or the intrusion of vision and touch (haptic perception) into a space, an atmosphere, that is always emotional. Our goal is simply to show that, beyond more ontological, phenomenological, political, or cognitivist approaches, there can also be an aesthetic dimension in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, a dimension that has become more coherent and developed, particularly through the work of a new generation of researchers. Therefore, starting from a non-philosophy as true philosophy and arriving at the carnal body as the "exemplary sensible" of the structure of all being, we will seek to postulate the hypothesis of "haptic vision" as a fundamental expression of our being-in-the-world (ontological), as an opening, through desire, to the sensitive sense of the truth of events. Thus, our objective will simply be to see to what extent the expression "haptic vision" can inaugurate a new understanding of sensibility (aisthÄ“sis) and to what extent we can think of it philosophically from the "ontological rehabilitation of the sensible" (Merleau-Ponty). In this sense, art is an unsurpassed point of reference, for it offers us multiple "ways of seeing" (John Berg), that is, of seeing the seeing and seeing oneself (specular and reversible dimension of tactile or haptic vision), and of feeling our own existence in diverse ways, of inhabiting it beyond ourselves, not only with vision, but carnally, as the primordial revelation of human intercorporeal coexistence.

«João Costa deepens these phenomenological reflections by turning to silence as a primordial mode of our belonging to the world. He seeks to determine whether silence can be granted a genuinely philosophical status—ontological and phenomenological—rather than reduced to psychological, mystical, or merely aesthetic registers. Through Merleau-Ponty, Max Picard, and Hartmut Rosa, Costa argues that silence names the originary matrix from which perception, expression, and worldhood emerge at all. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the "monde du silence" thus frames silence not as negation, but as the pre-objective field in which the sensible and the expressive arise, while Picard’s analyses clarify how every act of speech remains rooted in a deeper, anterior silence that both precedes and exceeds it. From within this silence the world begins to resonate, and Rosa’s account of resonance—as affective openness, transformation, and indisponibilité—illuminates how our being-on-earth is shaped by the extent to which we allow ourselves to be touched, moved, and attuned. In effect, Costa shows that the human place in the world is constituted by a fundamental silence that conditions both the appearance of meaning and the possibility of genuine resonance, making silence itself an indispensable dimension of any phenomenology of world-relation.» (An Editorial Introduction).

What is here traced or intimated is nothing less than an appeal to another imagination of time, space, relation, the body, community, knowledge, belief, the work of art, poetry, and the world—in short, of our entire existence as sentient beings, as beings of astonishment . The human being is, in the first and most eminent sense, homo admirans: a being of admiration, who stands in wonder before the mystery of the world, before oneself and others, and—if one is a believer—before God in the world. In this wonder, the human responds to the morning birth of life, for the human is also homo respondans (Bernhard Waldenfels): responsorial and relational, dwelling in a permanent openness to a call that summons one to be and to come into oneself in the body of the voice and in the voice of the body. Astonishment or wonder before anything or anyone is precisely the “manifestation that surprises” (Silvano Petrosino): the moment of luminosity from which the word emerges, which incites poetic imagination and the transformation of the self within the spiritual exercise of everyday life.

«So too the words of this dense book arrange themselves into sudden and unexpected forms—lines, filaments, verses drawn by an invisible attractor, a pivotal voice which, in motion, draws everything to itself: ideas, fragments of memory, sensations and captured desires, fixed in the very instant of their dispersal; thoughts calling to one another, flows of impressions—at last, a living voice crossing the light thickness and the roughness of the world, making the experience of dwelling within it, in the affirmation of habience (poem I).» [From the preface by Carlos Poças Falcão]

Language is the house of being, says Heidegger. It turns out that silence is the primordial, original, and originating phenomenon of language. It seems we are facing a contradiction in action. Is not language what is said or written? How can silence also be language, and in a radical way, language par excellence, without which every sign, signal, written or spoken word becomes irrelevant? If silence is a phenomenon – in the phenomenological sense of the term – insofar as it shows or manifests itself and the way in which it shows itself, then it is in the saying of silence, in its multiple expression, that we find being itself, in general, and the being of language, in particular.

Refletindo a genealogia do ressentimento em Friedrich Nietzsche, procurando ver até que ponto é o conceito fundamental ou o prisma originário a partir do qual toda a obra de Nietzsche se expressa, atendendo à sua receção crítica por parte de Max Scheler e Merleau-Ponty, pretende-se mostrar que o ressentimento se constitui um conceito heurístico e um afeto ancestral do ser humano relevante para a compreensão da sociedade e da cultura humana contemporânea. Essa pertinência ética expõe-se com clareza na efervescência atual de fenómenos sociais violentos e de radicalização de posicionamentos políticos extremados que visam a inibição, ou até a morte, do outro.

The shadow gives birth to the capillary form of things, their epiphany or unveiling, through which something manifests itself to us and appears in its own way and time, “in the flesh”. It is the invisible as a doubling of the visible that makes us see more than what we see at first glance, that intuits in the inspection of the gaze the timbral touch of truth that manifests itself and shows itself to our perceptive-affective faith. Throughout this heuristic journey in the shadow of the Invisible, we will evoke rather than demonstrate, not for the sake of literary style, but because this is our own way of being. We think the scripture in dialogue with our time and with the multiple existential grammars to express the common human condition and its possible relationship with the Transcendent. As humans, we always seek the unheard-of experience of the mystery that poetically inhabits us. This essay is moving, albeit only tenuously for now, towards a sapiential and apophatic hermeneutics of reality, which encompasses many of the artistic and thinking grammars of our time. What better image than that of the shadow to enter into this mystery of invisibility, in the presence of Absence? The shadow holds within itself the seamless presence of mystery, the presence of an absence and the absence of a presence. Desire is the driving force behind all spiritual or intellectual seeking, for, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote, "it is the desire for desire that takes hold of knowing, wanting, doing and being."

The purpose of our article is to provide a brief introduction to the philosophical-theological thought of the French thinker Emmanuel Falque by showing how the human experience of God is the substratum of the double movement of his method. This method aims to interrogate and essentially overcome the traditional boundaries between theology and philosophy. In this sense, we can say that his project is clearly and primarily a philosophical questioning of the fundamental contents of Christian religious experience. Thus, according to Falque, it is a matter of beginning from the “homme tout court”, in which everyone is anthropologically “always a believer” (in man or in the world) before deciding on a specific belief or faith, glimpsing here the “common ground” of our incarnate being. But, ultimately, is not the “flesh of God” (theology) the ground and foundation, the beginning and the end of the flesh of man and the world (phenomenology)? In Falque, it is perhaps a whole other metaphysics of the crossing, of dwelling and of the transformation of finitude that is inaugurated.

Signs: listening to the traces of God in contemporary sensibility is still a scattered fragment, perhaps even spring-like, awaiting further conceptual maturation of the intuitions that have merely been invoked. Our primary intention here is to welcome/listen to the event of aesthetic creation in its self-manifestation of meaning. These Traces are therefore presented as sketches which, even in their incompleteness, seek to be the self-manifestation of something profoundly significant. Divided into Impressions, Visions and Re-inscriptions, Traces seeks to highlight the multiplicity and polyphony of rumours about God, in the particular way of the cultural presence of the “Word that became flesh and dwelt among us”. Traces and traces that often remain invisible to our eyes, so saturated with objectivity and beliefs that they make us unavailable for admiration, for the attentiveness of the paradox of reality. From various scriptures to cinematic images, from pictorial murals to poetic invocation, from philosophical reason to theological knowledge, everything here is a possible indication of the invisible presence of God, sensitive to the heart.

Our article seeks to show that Maine de Biran is at the centre of the debate linked to Derrida’s reading, notably in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, of Merleau-Ponty’s commentary on the problem of de Biran’s dissonant existence, the primordial and original feeling of astonishment at oneself. Derrida thus seeks to affirm that the entire phenomenology of perception is inspired by the philosopher of Bergerac. He surreptitiously places him at the origin of the phenomenological tradition and of a whole modern tradition that privileges the sense of touch over the sense of the senses. However, we cannot help but suggest that this Derridean interpretation of Merleau-Ponty and de Biran seems somewhat limited, even though it is legitimate, not because of Derrida’s hermeneutic limitations, but because of his approach to the authors in terms of his own thinking and conceptual lexicon. In this sense, we will endeavour to open up another possible horizon, which is not strictly Derridean, but which is based on the very idea of feeling, of being astonished and of existing, as a primitive form of access, adherence and resistance to oneself, to others and to the world. The astonishment of feeling oneself to exist will thus prove to be the condition for perceiving and embracing transcendence, in other words, the so-called Biranian “third life”.

In this study, we seek to interrogate and delve into the enigma of the sensitive body conceiving affectivity as the foundational way of being in the world in Merleau‑Ponty’s philosophy. Our study aims to demonstrate that the flesh acts as the in‑between (“entre‑deux”) of the sensitive body, which we term the affective‑lived body (affective‑bodily resonance of the world in us), crystallized in the fundamental affective tone of astonishment. This affective dimension of human thought and being constitutes the foundation and meaning of the entire life‑world experience. We explore affectivity as a non‑objectifying intentionality, a universal form of brute being, and an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible. This journey takes us from the esthesiological body to the libidinal, opening up to another understanding of feeling, desire, love, and thought. We further extend this exploration of the sensible into the realms of art, literature, and theology, envisioning the possibilities of an alternative metaphysics and an anonymous force at the heart of the world. Our research uncovers unthought aspects within Merleau‑Ponty’s philosophy, suggesting a renewed perspective on metaphysical categories and, in this way, perhaps revealing his own unthought. Throughout this work of reflection, we trace the path of a thinking sentient body, sensing infinite astonishment before “the strangeness of the world and things” and the enigma of our own incarnation.

King Abdullah insists that "There is no change to the Arab Peace Initiative, and there is no need to amend it. Any talk about amending it, is baseless". Abbas, regularly described as the president of the Palestinian Authority, firmly agrees. The Arab Peace Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus that Israel must withdraw to the international border, perhaps with "minor and mutual adjustments," to adopt official US terminology before it departed sharply from world opinion in 1971, endorsing Israel 's rejection of peace with Egypt in favor of settlement expansion. Furthermore, the consensus calls for a Palestinian state to be established in Gaza and the West Bank after Israel 's withdrawal. The Arab Initiative adds that the Arab states should then normalize relations with Israel.

The reflection that we propose here is only a brief introductory note to the thought of the French philosopher Emmanuel Falque, based on his last work Hors ph nom ne: Essai aux confins de la ph nom nalit . As such, we will take as our starting point the fundamental ideas of his book, placing the work in the wider context of his already vast, robust and mature philosophical project. Thus, we hope to show not only the genesis of Falque’s dense and creative thinking within the scope of phenomenological philosophy, and possibly beyond it (towards a relational ontology), but also to highlight some horizons that this work can open in the context of contemporary thought (psychoanalysis, psychopathology, aesthetics, theology…). We propose here the hypothesis that Hors phénomène constitutes, in a certain sense, a pivotal moment or a fundamental inflection in the philosophical and intellectual path of its author. It articulates a philosophical concept thought and forged from the lived experience of the radical human finitude, or rather, within the confines of all phenomenality (sickness, separation, death of a child, natural disaster, pandemic).

In this article we will try to elaborate a reflection around aesthetic experience, more specifically a phenomenology of artwork (Soutine/de Kooning), in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought. Even if the French philosopher has not yet dedicated an autonomous work to the aesthetic question, such reflection appears abundantly dispersed and sparse in his various writings. Among others, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were Falque's artists of choice, their work most closely reflected his underlying philosophical thesis. The preference for the figurative, that which in us resists phenomenology, the incarnation as such, would thus bring the philosophical concept and the artistic intuition closer together. However, between figurative and non-figurative or abstract thought, is there not another possibility of thinking them together, without necessarily having to give primacy to one or the other or opposing them? The idea of an oblique incarnate thought (figuration-abstraction, resistance-deflagration, word-silence), or of the diagonal/oblique impastoed being (presence in absence, metamorphosed transcendental materiality, indirect ontology), might also be a third way of thinking about the great philosophical questions between realism and idealism, immanence and transcendence, visible and invisible, metaphysics and phenomenology. In this sense, the artistic work of Chaïm Soutine and de Kooning may be the aesthetic expression of incarnate thought, as a way of primordial access to being, to the world and to another, in the joining in act of the figurative and the abstract, as if multiple possibilities or dimensions of being inhabited in the same being (the articulation of the in-itself and the outside of the self, madness and normality, dream and reality...). Not by chance both were the subject of a recent joint exhibition, from which we propose this reflection, in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought on finitude, which his most recent book radicalises. Our thesis, based on these two artists, aims to affirm that art, whether figurative or abstract, starts from an inalienable material dimension, that is to say, a sensitive dimension, the impasted (body) being, to the point that we may say that Hors phénomène maintains in itself this possibility of articulation between presence to the self and the outside of the self, distance and proximity, immanence and transcendence, even if here and there one can glimpse in its philosophical project an ontological preference for the figurative. However, in our view, what brings together Falque’s philosophy and the work of both artists is the fact that they are the expression of an embodied thought, whether through conceptual experience (philosophy) or through perceptual experience (aesthetics).

An interview with the professor and philosopher Emmanuel Falque, in the context of his passage through the University of Coimbra, in the context of the Journée Internationale d’études philosophiques, which will take place on 26 May 2022, at the Faculty of Letters, entitled: «L’im‑pensable : Aux confins de la phénoménalité». In this interview, In this interview, our author coming to his entire philosophical project, from its origins to his most recent scientific production. The philosopher tells us about the provenance of his thought through his main philosophical works and his existential interpretation and phenomenological reading of patristic and medieval philosophy as well as his debates with phenomenology and contemporary philosophy, particularly French philosophy. Here the epistemological and metaphysical question between philosophy and theology, literature and aesthetics, psychoanalysis and phenomenology is also addressed; the concept of «corps épandu», the corporeality or the embodiment as the cardinal point of human finitude and its incessant search to think our «humanity in common». Emmanuel Falque also presents us in this interview the genesis and the fundamental idea of Hors phénomène, as the central axis of his global philosophical project, but also as the revelation of a certain «turning point», inflexion or even of «radicalization» of his démarche, as well as its possible consequences to rethink aesthetics, ethics, politics and theology. The French thinker also talks to us here about the future of philosophy and the new horizons of his reflection (the new triptych...), about the authors and figures in the history of thought (philosophers or others) who have influenced and impacted his own philosophical‑existential path. Thus, the work of a thinker-philosopher is always an ex-position of himself to others, permanently thinking the world of life, the embodiment of reason in the folds of history.