The aim of this paper is to highlight the main features of Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger in his 1964–65 lecture series Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’histoire. Taking the issue of historicity as the main interpretive thread, the paper argues that, in Derrida’s view, Heidegger’s position constitutes a significant progress with regard to mainstream philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, historicity is originary and non-ontic; conceiving of it in this way enables us to overcome the primacy of the present and the subjectivist metaphysical approach which authors such as Hegel and Husserl still display. The paper then reconstructs Derrida’s critique of the chapter on the historicity of Dasein in Being and Time, as well as his approach to the history of Being through the topic of the metaphor. The critical force of this reading will be supported by an analysis of some of Derrida’s later writings, which also enable us to sketch some possible avenues for future research, in particular on the relationships between writing and history and on Heidegger’s concept of Versammlung.

If the idea of a phenomenological aesthetic evidence is far from being obvious, it may yet become necessary in the description of the aesthetic experience. For the way a work of art can imperiously impose on the viewer reveals a kind of power that may suggests that this evidence is more than just a subjective feeling. Although Husserl’s phenomenology doesn’t consider such an evidence, and although this concept may even be regarded as a contradiction—since evidence particularly characterizes the givenness of perceptive objects—we may yet find the conditions of possibility of such an aesthetic evidence in Husserl’s work.

There are three possible ways of access to phenomena of suffered violence: the first is the experience of those who have suffered violence themselves; the second is the experience of eyewitnesses; the third, which is the most frequent one, is an indirect access through the testimony of people belonging to the first two categories. Each way of access has advantages but also serious difficulties, both in terms of the objectivity of the experience and of the possibility to express it in language. No one is free from an affective and a normative dimension; this implies that there is a certain tension with regard to the phenomenological reduction. The paper offers an analysis of these ways of access.

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.

The aim of this article is to analyze the idea of the event conceived as crisis and conflict in Patočka and Maldiney’s philosophies. The event is what tears the horizon of the meaningful world apart and opens a new world: it represents the opening of a crisis in the human existence and at the same time the condition of any future crisis to come. By reading Maldiney’s texts on the “pathique” and psychosis along with Patočka’s descriptions of historical existence, we shall then discover that human existence is exposed (and responds) to this chaotic and conflictual dimension. In fact, what defines existence—the individual existence (Maldiney) as well as the historical, shared existence (Patočka)—is the exposure to such a conflict and to the critical event, i.e. to the possibility of its own shaking. Furthermore, the event appears as the root of both the krisis and the “koine”, whether in the form of the encounter (Maldiney) or the community cohesion (Patočka).

The aim of the present article is to offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s account of the unfolding of language by analyzing the notion of Geläut der Stille, “sounding gathering of silence.” Taking as a starting point the experience of silence described by Stefan George in his poem “The Word,” the article presents the opposition between silence and the sounding words, showing that the latter coincide with the language we speak. The passage from silence to the spoken language belongs to the unfolding of language itself, which presents itself as a translation of silence, redefining thus what translation originally is. The latter, understood as violence and harmony, gathers itself under the term of “rift,” overcoming thus the ontological difference and offering us a radically new perspective over the nature of “relation” within Heidegger’s thinking.

Jan Patočka is usually connected with Czech dissidence, a political movement which stood up against the communist government. We want to defend the hypothesis that the notion of dissidence is not originally a political one but, above all, a phenomenological one. Dissidence is a movement of distancing which implies a rootedness, and this movement of distancing is peculiar to human beings. Patočka calls “movement of human existence” this paradoxical rootedness which is an extramundane and mundane position. Thus, we have to review the theory of the three movements of human existence. While it is tempting to separate the third movement, as a movement of transcendence, and to describe it as a political dissidence, we would like to show that the three movements (and not only the third), have to be understood as Dissidence.