Nicolas De Warren

This essay examines dreaming as a challenge to the dichotomy between narrative and episodic conceptions of the self. Drawing on Sartre’s phenomenology of the imaginary, it argues that dreams elude both accounts: dream consciousness is episodic and pre-reflective – reflective awareness that one is dreaming would annihilate the dream – yet dreams are experienced, on Sartre’s insight, as “a story that I am reading or being told.” Refining this claim through Genette’s distinction between récit and histoire, the essay proposes that a dream is a non-narrative storied phenomenon: a wordless récit without plot, author, or narrative distance, experienced in the “pure belief” of a consciousness closed upon itself. Upon waking, the dream solicits narrative configuration, though a fissure persists between the dreaming “me” and the remembering “I.” Literary works by Proust, Queneau, Schnitzler, and Han Kang illustrate this entanglement of dreaming, storytelling, and selfhood.

This paper examines the different ways in which the metaphor and concept of sedimentation play a decisive function in Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness. Through an examination of the different layers and implications of meaning in Husserl’s image of sedimentation, the entangled significance of this crucial metaphor is connected to other metaphors in Husserl’s thinking, including, most significantly, the master-metaphor of “stream.” The argument of this paper consists in developing the claim that sedimentation and other cognate senses in which the pastness of consciousness abides in the living present contributes to a phenomenological understanding of having a life rather than merely being alive. The life of consciousness, on this argument, is impossible without the constitutive sense in which consciousness possesses a life of its own becoming.

The aim of this paper is to critically situate and engage Glissant and Levinas within the hermeneutical heterotopia of the anarchist imaginary. With this orchestrated confrontation between Glissant and Levinas, I look to engage the issue of otherness as an errant—and not simply “open”—question. Despite discernible resonances between Glissant and Levinas, I argue that there exists a salient divergence between their respective ways of thinking within the anarchist imaginary. This divergence can be spelled out in terms of a difference between ethnographic opacity and ethical otherness. The “right to opacity” (le droit à l’opacité) in Glissant is not synonymous with nor equivalent to the command of and responsibility for “another” (l’Autrui) in Levinas. With these considerations, I recast le droit à l’opacité as the “right to refuse” forms of interpellation and over-determined chains of signifiers. Le droit à l’opacité is ultimately a demand for multilingualism. In a similar vein, I propose to re-think the ethical command of another (l’Autrui), in its accusation and address, as provoking an interruption of forms of interpellation and chains of signifiers.

Rather than propose a unified concept of noise, this chapter examines the complexity of noise and the fluctuating indeterminacy of its conceptualization through different registers of analysis—music, semiotics, literary, philosophical, cultural, historical—for the purpose of mapping conceptual transformations without arriving at a definitive concept called “noise.” The range of aspects and authors covered in this chapter—including musical examples such as Joy Division, Roland Barthes and Michel Serres, the epics of Homer and Gilgamesh, and literary references in Kafka and Rilke—is deliberately fashioned to represent so many tunings on a valve-radio-set, turning the frequency knob left and right, moving up and down across a spectrum of live transmissions, not to capture the Noise and so still the noise, but always still to hear noise, and still some more.

Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money is a unique philosophical attempt to understand the complex ways in which money shapes modern social existence. In this seminal work, Simmel seeks to understand the social and psychological conditions of possibility for money while at the same time arguing that the pervasive monetization of valuation in turn conditions modern life. This chapter explores Simmel’s rich analysis of money as fundamentally a social interaction; the relation between desire, valuation, and economic exchange; and the paramount significance of social trust for the efficacy of money. On the basis of this exploration, the chapter further examines how money serves as an optic for a penetrating analysis of the contradictions of modern life, where money has arguably attained an historically unprecedented “divine” status.

The development of phenomenological philosophy in Japan is a well-established tradition that reaches back to the early 20th-century. The past decades have witnessed significant contributions and advances in different areas of phenomenological thought in Japan that remain unknown, or only partially known, to an international philosophical public. This volume offers a selection of original phenomenological research in Japan to an international audience in the form of an English language publication. The contributions in this volume range over classical figures in the phenomenological movement, recent trends in French phenomenology, and contemporary inter-disciplinary approaches. In addition to this diverse engagement with European thinkers, many of the contributions in this volume establish critical and complimentary discussions with 20th-century Japanese philosophers.

In this paper, I propose an exploration of the question of trash and garbage, of what, in other words, we unthinkingly throw away and discard, individual and collectively. What is this thing called trash and garbage? What phenomenological resources—where I understand phenomenology as centered on an analysis of the “look” of things (their visibility and invisibility) and on how we speak about things (or fail to speak, the silences)—are available for learning how to question what is trash and garbage? In developing my analysis, I draw on the notions of sedimentation, temporality, and technology in the writings of Husserl, Stiegler, and others.

This volume explores the broad and rich spectrum of contemporary phenomenological engagement with digital technologies. By focusing on plural forms of the digital, it offers a robust and flexible framework for contemporary phenomenological investigations in the digital age. It contends that the impact of digital technologies on the lifeworld involves both the emergence of novel fields of lived experience in need of phenomenological analysis and the transformation of the method and attitude of phenomenologically oriented philosophers towards the world. The chapters cover topics including immersion in virtual environments, the impact of digital cognitive devices on our perception of time, the invisibility of digital technologies in the lifeworld, the new extension of reality rendered possible by the employment of digital devices, how new technologies affect our intimacy and sexual body, the new methodological paradigm for phenomenological research prompted by digital technologies, the additive upshot of virtual imaginary, the intersection of the real and the virtual in augmented reality experiences, the structures of perception in the regime of digitally generated environments, how it feels like to empathize with others in a regime of virtual reality, process of en-rolling in the constitution of a virtual subject, the transformation of virtual reality into conspiratorial reality by means of on-line media platforms, and the problem of the extent to which technological environments impact human cognitive and perceptual experience. Phenomenologies of the Digital Age will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of technology, science & technology studies, and media studies.

That the presence of others, after their death, continues to resonate within our own lives, that, in other words, death does not rob the other of their meaning for us, as if the meaning of their lives for us would suddenly become extinguished upon their death, is revealing of who we are, of how I am constituted in relation to others. The question of life after death is thus inseparable from the question of life before death, of what it is to have a life in concert, communication, and consort with others. How does the other, whose actual presence in the world is no longer, remain present to those who continue to exist in the world? In this paper, it is argued that the intimacy of disappearance attests to the singular quality of another’s existence in terms of the value, or meaningfulness, their existence had, and continues to have, for the value of my own life. In this manner, the intimacy of another’s disappearance for us is inseparable from an intimacy of our own disappearance from ourselves. We are touched, as never before, besides ourselves in grief for a disappearance from our lives that never lets us go.

In this chapter, I propose to examine a specific form of self-awareness in which we become aware of our existence in a problematic sense: wistfulness. In thinking about what it means to have a life, one is often haunted by different senses of possibility: of what could or should be, of what might have been, but just as well, of what could never have been. In such latter instances, we become aware of ourselves not in terms of actuality (who I am) or possibility (who I can or could become), but in terms of impossibility, namely, as the impossible selves that nonetheless, in some sense, define and hence belong to us, as attested to in the experience of regret and remorse, not for what we did (or who we have been) but for what was impossible for us to be (or do). Drawing on Georg Simmel’s philosophy of life, I shall explore various senses in which we are responsible for ourselves, of who we have been and could yet be, as well as who it was impossible for us to once have been. In this regard, what Simmel calls the meta-ethical significance of death refers to the responsibility we have for ourselves in terms of what was both possible and impossible for us.

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher.

An exceptional collection of letters, postcards, original writings, and photographs The First World War witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of philosophers and their families: as soldiers at the front; as public figures on the home front; as nurses in field hospitals; as mothers and wives; as sons and fathers. In Germany, the war irrupted in the midst of the rapid growth of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological movement – widely considered one of the most significant philosophical movements in twentieth century thought. Philosophers at the Frontoffers a documentary history of phenomenology in the First World War. Through an exceptional collection of primary source materials (letters, postcards, original writings, photographs) from the Husserl Archives in Leuven, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Archives of the University of Göttingen, the complex narratives of how the war affected the lives and thought of central figures in the phenomenological movement are charted. Key figures such as Edmund Husserl, his sons Wolfgang and Gerhart, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Adolf Reinach, Martin Heidegger, and others are included in this collection of materials. The volume includes reproductions of original material, as well as German transcription of all texts and their English translation.

Il n’est pas inhabituel de considérer l’imagination comme une conscience d’objets non réels, ayant la forme d’images internes ou de représentations privées de toute incarnation spatiale. Dans cet article j’interroge la phénoménologie de l’imagination de Husserl à partir de deux questions : l’imagination est-elle un type de conscience d’image? L’imagination, est-elle privée de toute incarnation spatiale? Après avoir reconstruit la distinction nette opérée par Husserl entre imagination et conscience d’image (l’imaginaire n’est pas une image mentale interne), j’explore la thèse de Husserl, fort suggestive, selon laquelle toute imagination implique la projection du corps vécu. Loin d’être entièrement dépourvu de spatialité, l’imaginaire exhibe des caractéristiques quasi-spatiales, et il est fondé sur ce qui est « le plus propre » de mon corps vécu – cela même que, pour ainsi dire, j’amène toujours avec moi, même dans les envols les plus éloignés de mon imagination.

The aim of this paper is three-fold. First: to outline the characteristic features of a dynamic that works itself through and shapes the philosophical landscape in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, and which Heidegger, in his own manner, channels and re-configures. Second: to explore the sense in which the “great war” for Heidegger as a spiritual conflict did not end in 1918. My argument here is that Heidegger internalizes this continuation of the war by other, philosophical means into his own thinking such that his own search for another beginning for thinking during the 1930s understands itself as the pursuit of the great war by other means, namely, through the means of a thinking of being. Third: to demonstrate that it is in this dual context, the first internalized within the second, and the second the externalization of the first, that Heidegger’s confrontation with Judaism and his anti-Semitism must be situated. Heidegger’s thinking repeats in his own way of historical repetition the confrontation between Judentum and Deutschtum during the First World War, and that this repetition structures Heidegger’s Davos Disputation with Cassirer. The confrontation at Davos, as the failure to confront explicitly the question of Judentum and Deutschtum, represents an after-effect of the First World War: the dynamic of a violent confrontation without genuine encounter.