Thomas sabourin

The aim of my article is to establish a concept of the border, as a particular schema of intersubjectivity, capable of welcoming others better than the conception of a world without borders could. The border is conceived in terms of power through the critique of the “principle of charity” (Quine, Davidson). This point must be understood in terms of the phenomenological paradox of transcendence (Lavigne). The border can thus be conceived by analogy with the phenomenological concept of intentionality, using the concept of phenomenological life as subjective power (Henry), which allows us to establish a coherent and legitimate concept of the border.

The paper explores the concept of artistic exercise and its ambivalence. It aims to warrant its intelligibility through a phenomenology of habits formation. To start with, we will look into the close connection between exercise and habit. This will lead us to underscore the inherent polysemy of the latter as well. We will delve accordingly into the problem of the genesis of habits in terms of transcendental structures of intentionality along the lines of a phenomenology of habit fixation aware of Sartre’s and Henry’s criticism of going-through-the- motions-like routines. As a result, habit will be conceived of as rooted in a horizon of possibilities whose fixation makes both the object’s constitution and its perception possible. A phenomenological approach along these lines will highlight the dimension of acquired contingent feature inherent to perceptual habits and will help us understand artistical exercise as a reinforcement through a process of repeated activation of the same structures which, for the same reason, become habits. Finally, we will show how artistic exercise is possible and why it involves an affective conditioning which generates new habits. Therefore, the very possibility of art – as we conceive it – has little to do with detachment and everything to do with a “floating interest” of sorts, which enables a habit-driven perceptual renewal.

Henry held Scheler’s thought for a breakthrough as he revalued affectivity, and the two authors shared a same goal: upgrading the concept of subjectivity against its objectivist and rationalist conceptions. Nevertheless, the divergence between henry’s and Scheler’s philosophical purposes led them to conceive affectivity in quite different ways, and Henry assessed that Scheler had have failed in thinking the ontological nature of it. In “Scheler’s critic by Henry in The Essence of Manifestation”, Thomas Sabourin supports the idea that Henry misjudged the originality of Scheler’s conception of affectivity and subjectivity, and relies on his theory of “stratified affectivity” to reasses Henry’s conception of auto-affection as unequivocal.