Rudolf Bernet

A clarification of Husserl's changing conceptions of imaginary consciousness ( phantasy ) and memory, especially at the level of auto-affective time-consciousness, suggests an interpretation of Freud's concept of the Unconscious. Phenomenology of consciousness can show how it is possible that consciousness can bring to present appearance something unconscious, that is, something foreign or absent to consciousness, without incorporating it into or subordinating it to the conscious present. This phenomenological analysis of Freud's concept of the Unconscious leads to a partial critique of Freud's metapsychological determination of the Unconscious as a simple, internally unperceived representational consciousness. It also suggests an account of how a reproductive inner consciousness can free the subject from the experience of anxiety by allowing for possibilities of self-distanciation and symbolic self-representation that protect the subject from traumatic affection by and through its own instinctual drives

In Matter and Memory, Bergson examines the relationship between perception and memory, the status of consciousness in its relation to the brain, and more generally, a possible conjunction of matter and mind. Our reading focuses in particular on his understanding of the evanescent presence of the present and of its debt vis-à-vis the "unconscious" consciousness of a "virtual" past. We wish to show that the Bergsonian version of a critique of "the metaphysics of presence" is, for all that, an offshoot of a Platonic type of metaphysics. It is true that Bergson departs from traditional standpoints on the side of a self-sufficient and original present and a form of presence to which the transparency of consciousness would confer the character of immediate evidence. All the same, it can hardly be claimed that his rehabilitation of the past and the unconscious opens up new perspectives on how forgetting and death are bound up with the work of memory.

Husserl's phenomenology of the body constantly faces issues of demarcation: between phenomenology and ontology, soul and spirit, consciousness and brain, conditionality and causality. It also shows that Husserl was eager to cross the borders of transcendental phenomenology when the phenomena under investigation made it necessary. Considering the details of his description of bodily sensations and bodily behaviour from a Merleau-Pontian perspective allows one also to realise how Husserl (unlike Heidegger) fruitfully explores a phenomenological field located between a science of pure consciousness and the natural sciences. A phenomenological discussion of naturalism thus cannot limit itself to the task of discrimination, it must attempt to integrate what an eidetic analysis has separated: inside and outside, here and there, first-person and third-person perspective, motivation and causality. Husserl's phenomenology of the body thus shows that dualism is at best a methodological but never an ontological option for the mind-body problem

The major part of this paper is devoted to the task of showing that Husserl's account of knowledge and truth in terms of a synthesis of fulfilment falls prey neither to a form of “metaphysics of presence” nor to a “myth of interiority” or mentalism. Husserl's presentation of the desire to know, his awareness of irreducible forms of absence at the heart of the intuitive presence of the object of knowledge and his formulation of general rules concerning the possible accomplishment of a synthesis of fulfilment are therefore carefully examined. Special attention is also given to the fact that the determination of knowledge and truth provided by the Sixth Logical Investigation rests on an account of an original interweaving between the thing, consciousness, and language. Unlike in Husserl's earlier and later works, no attempt is thereby made to subordinate any of these three elements involved in all knowledge to one of the others.

Philosophers have thought more about the nature of thinking than about anything else. After Plato and Aristotle, philosophers’ main concern was to promote good, that is, correct, thinking. Because correct thinking was achieved best in propositional statements, thinking became a matter of logic, and logic became a discipline dealing with the formulation of true predicative sentences.In the twentieth century, many philosophers expressed their dissatisfaction with this view. Some, such as Heidegger, have pointed to the ontological presuppositions of a logic that makes truth a matter of correspondence between predicative sentences and the reality of states of affairs. Other philosophers, such as Deleuze, have ..

Relying on Husserl as well as on the reflections by Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne, Henry on Kandinsky and Deleuze on Bacon, this essay sketches some basic problems that arise in a phenomenological account of non-figurative painting. An investigation of the distinction between phenomenological and pictorial perception, of the transposition of the painter’s mode of perception into a painted image, and of the expressive force of paintings inevitably confronts one with the enigma of the appearing of something invisible. The essay proceeds in three steps. The first step describes pictorial perception in terms of a ‘seeing according to’. Such a mode of perception pays attention to visual ambiguities, to the ‘gaze of things’ and to the conditions of visibility that are ordinarily overlooked. The second step moves on to the issue of the transposition of a pictorial perception in a painted image. Deleuze’s account of “manipulated chance” proves to be very helpful here. In the final step, Henry’s and Deleuze’s emphasis on the painting’s expression of totally invisible ‘forces’ is discussed.

La lecture de Husserl proposée par Jacques Derrida s'inspire avant tout de Heidegger. Si Husserl s'intéresse au phénomène dans sa fonction constituante, Heidegger interroge plutôt ce qui constitue le phénomène. Le présupposé ou l'impensé majeur de toute philosophie de la subjectivité constituante et, plus largement, de la tradition dite onto-théologique, c'est le dévoilement de l'Etre entendu comme présence. Une philosophie nouvelle qui se veut attentive à la conjonction de l'Etre et du Temps et qui se laisse solliciter par la différence ontologique doit surmonter cette tradition en la soumettant à une répétition critique, à une „destruction”. L'œuvre de Derrida chemine entre la tradition et une pensée différente. Ce chemin ne mène cependant ni à un au-delà ni à un en-deça de la tradition métaphysique. Une philosophie de la différance ne naît pas des cendres d'une métaphysique à jamais détruite, elle s'embarque plutôt pour une traversée sans fin des textes de la tradition. Une telle lecture se laisse dériver par les textes pour mieux en surprendre les courants capricieux. Elle ne cherche cependant pas à les canaliser vers un sens unique, elle s'abandonne aux jeux du non-sens, c'est-à-dire à tout ce qui doit être méconnu, écarté, oublié, refoulé pour qu'un texte puisse être lu comme le reflet d'un même sens. Derrida appelle cette lecture paradoxale une „déconstruction”. Celle-ci renverse et déplace les valeurs manifestes du texte métaphysique. Cette lecture est une écriture dont le texte s'inscrit dans la marge d'un autre texte pour en souligner la „clôture”. Ce travail d'une déconstruction de la métaphysique de la présence forme la trame de la plupart des textes que Derrida a consacrés à Husserl. Examinant ce que Husserl a écrit du langage, de la conscience du temps et de l'origine de l'histoire, Derrida y déchiffre les traces d'un même désir de la présence absolue. Une philosophie de la présence pense à partir d'un hypothétique assouvissement de ce désir. Cela la conduit à méconnaître que le signe linguistique est „trace”, que le maintenant présent n'est donné que dans „l'après-coup” et que l'origine de l'histoire se perd dans la contingence des histoires. Les textes de Husserl portent l'empreinte de la force de ce désir de la présence absolue et ils nous enseignent en même temps son impossible accomplissement. C'est à travers l'articulation de cette tension et à partir du déplacement de ses effets que le texte de Derrida s'est greffé sur celui de Husserl

L'auteur cherche à montrer que ce sont les événements exigeant une réponse qui donnent naissance au sujet. Parmi ces événements, le trauma occupe une place insigne car, mieux que tout autre événement, il manifeste la priorité de l'événement sur le sujet et la vulnérabilité de toute réponse subjective. S'appuyant tour à tour sur l'analyse du trauma chez Freud, Lacan et Lévinas, l'auteur interroge plus particulièrement la structure temporelle d'un événement traumatisant auquel le sujet ne fait face que dans l'après-coup et sans pouvoir conjurer la menace de son anéantissement futur. This article aims to show that the subject is born out of events which require a response. Among the events of this sort, trauma is a most significant example because, more than any other, it manifests the pre-eminence of the event over the subject, and the vulnerability of all subjective responses. Using the analysis of trauma found in Freud, Lacan and Lévinas, the author investigates more particularly the temporality of a traumatic event to which the response of the subject always comes too late. As well the response cannot do away with the threat of the subject's future disappearance.

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity.

This article begins by presenting the two most important transformations that establish a genuine Husserlian approach to the imagination: the first lies in the grasping of imagination, despite its essential differences with perception and hallucination, as an intuitive, or sensuous consciousness ; the second lies in the insight that imagination, or better – phantasy –, requires no images, mental or otherwise. Further, the distinction between pure and perceptual phantasies and their respective fictional objects is drawn out. A comparison between pure phantasy and memory, then leads to a closer look at the role of inner consciousness in pure phantasy and to a clarification of the ‘splitting of the subject’. The exploration of this split allows us to trace the role of the real-ego and the phantasy-ego in pure phantasy, which opens the exploration of phantasy as a consciousness of possibilities. This helps us gain clarity about the nature of both real and ideal possibilities and the respective modes of phantasy. Objects of phantasy also most easily lend themselves to an eidetic variation and to an insight into essences. Phenomenological essences concern the ideal possibility of real and ideal objects and of their experience. It is through their contribution to insight into the real and ideal conditions of possibility of different forms of intentional acts that acts of phantasy best show their potential for Husserl’s project of philosophy as a rigorous science. Imagination or fiction becomes, in his own words, the ‘vital element of phenomenology.’

Heidegger’s lecture course on “Parmenides” lays strong emphasis on the dimension of lethe in truth . Such a withdrawal belonging to unconcealment should not be confused with a dissembling or hiding . A concealment pertaining to the presence of a thing can be illustrated by means of a phenomenological description of oblivion, anamnesis, the rare, the gift and the secret. Especially Heidegger’s account of an “open secret” lends itself to a philosophical interpretation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. Dupin recurrently meditates on the right way of keeping a secret and mocks the police for confusing lethe with pseudos. Incidentally, stealing is shown to be no less a form of unconcealment than the gift. Poe’s description of how and where The Purloined Letter is openly present in the minister’s study sheds light on how a thing can remain secret by giving way to other things