This essay deals with Jean-Luc Nancy’s ambivalent philosophical relationship to the phenomenological perspective on the problem of corporeity. The present analysis aims to point out how within the framework of a critical rejection of some of the fundamental elements of the phenomenological tradition, Nancy adopts some of its other elements in order to forge his own approach to corporeity. While traversing Nancy’s thinking from his critique of the Leib to his concept of technique and ecotechnics, the essay engages in a critical discussion of diverse phenomenological motifs from Husserl’s, Merleau-Ponty’s and Heidegger’s oeuvre.

For Husserl, kinaesthetic capability is a key piece of the process of perception. By ensuring the junction between the actual and the potential, it allows the exhibition of an object that is always more than what appears. Kinaesthetic capability preserves the transcendence of the object by preventing the phenomenon from being confined to pure actuality. This idea, however, poses significant challenges when one questions the nature of the possibilities that are at stake here. Especially, the perceived seems to enjoy a kind of emancipation from these capabilities as they actually are. How can one justify that the structures of the perceived world are the intentional correlate of the kinaesthetic skills of the subject if such structures continue to regulate the sense of the appearing objects when those skills are neutralized? We will see that only a genetic perspective, assuming the intrinsically historical character of the subject, provides a satisfactory answer to this question, and that this perspective leads to placing into question the actualist position that Husserl sometimes tends to adopt.

The paper here presented deals with ethical signifying as happening in corporeity. The starting point is a provisional definition of ethical signifying as a process and a relation to the other. In the first part I attempt to describe precisely this process and distinguish two aspects: concretization and hyperbole. In the second and main part I try to outline concretization and hyperbole in the corporeal relation to the other. The modalities of ethical signifying are caress, vulnerability, maternity and last but not least the voice of the self.

The purpose of this article is to show that in Merleau-Ponty’s lesser known works, one can find a path leading toward a phenomenology of the body that would not risk the “ambiguity of the flesh,” as The Visible and the Invisible is often charged with, but instead would sustain the ontology of nature that one finds in the “Working Notes” added to Merleau-Ponty’s last writings. Analyzing first his concept of nature, as it was developed in his courses at the Collège de France, the proposed aim of this text is to question anthropological difference by focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the contemporary sciences, whereby the Ineinander between the physical, living, and human orders is re-founded by a new, negative concept of nature. By deconstructing classical ontology and its understanding of space, time, and objectivity, and by returning to the domain of perception, this new concept offers a novel way to reveal the advent of life in nature, its institution, and the emergence of a new corporeity in life itself. The model of Merleau-Ponty’s essential concept of institution becomes birth, and therefore the human body will no longer be interpreted as “one’s own body,” but rather will be understood, in a radically a-subjective way, as from, and based on, the participation of our perception with animality. Thereby, the concept of “ownness” becomes secondary; however, the notion of institution, established against the lexicon of consciousness and subjectivity, opens another sense of anthropological difference, one that is based only on the experiences of corporeity.

Following Derrida’s late analysis of the multifarious concept of resistance, this article aims at detecting the motives that lead him to install from the start a tension between two methods of analysis of consciousness (phenomenological and psychoanalytical), that many would have considered, if not affectively unbearable, at least logically unsustainable. Yet this general logical and affective attitude remains describable, and in order to do so, the author proposesto delve into some underestimated and hence underexploited resources of transcendental phenomenology, particularly those related to the analysis of affectivesyntaxes of consciousness, which are part of the “realm of positionality”.

In this essay I revisit Ricœur’s famous greffe in light of Husserl’s method. In other words, I try to highlight the anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology exposed by Ricœur in his early project (Philosophie de la volonté) and in some later works, in order to present the necessity of the graft of hermeneutics onto the worn out body of western reflexive philosophy. This surgery has a radical effect on the “Subject”: far from provoking a “rejection crisis”, the hermeneutical graft provides the Cogito with a new heart, and gives new life to Ricœur’s homme capable – the ultimate character of his long philosophical journey. The essay closes with an alternative interpretation of this “capability”.

In order to identify the role that temporality plays for Ricœur’s view on the spiritual life, I will start my analysis from his interpretation of the Augustinian Confessions (book XI, ch. XXX). In his reading, Ricoeur makes use of the notion of extension to which he accords multiples meanings (spatial, categorical and existential) and he also points out the conceptual couple of distensio / extensio. I will bring forth Ricoeur’s misinterpretation that consists in strongly relating the discovery of this conceptual couple to the distinction between the three inner dimensions of time. I will end with a discussion of Heidegger’s analysis of the Confessions and his tentative to temporalize Dasein starting from the future.

I would like to propose an interpretation of Ricœur’s first phenomenological works in the light of what I call an “experiential phenomenology”, by answeringthree important questions. The first is a factual and historical interrogation: why has Ricœur abandoned his project of a descriptive phenomenology after publishing his first volume of the The Voluntary and the Involuntary and why did he afterwards direct his philosophical research towards the problem of interpretation? The second interrogation is an epistemological and a methodological one: in what way is the Husserlian phenomenology a first-person approach and how does Ricœur’s phenomenology of the will lead us towards an experiential phenomenology in first person? The final question is heuristical: what criteria should we point out in order to establish a phenomenological science that is 1) descriptive and 2) approaching the experience in first-person?

I examine the problem of what Ricœur calls représentance, which is a stand-in narratives offer of what took place (in the case of historical narratives) or actions (in the case of the re-telling of what people did). Ricœur rejects as insufficient two naive options: first, a simple adequacy between what took place and the historical narrative about it and, second, a simple heterogeneity between them so that historical narratives would be mere “possible versions” of what took place. I explore further why Ricœur brought into consideration the attitude of the one offering the narrative, what he calls a “being-in-debt” or “attestation”. I then offer an assessment of Ricœur’s success in still claiming that what actually happened serves as the ultimate referent of the narratives given of the past event or the action.

The hermeneutic turn in Ricœur’s phenomenological ontology of the 1960 cannot be considered a break with his methodological approach of philosophy. In fact, as early as 1950 he had already initiated a first attempt to conjoin phenomenology and hermeneutics by relating eidetic description and explanation. The main purpose of the present analysis is to clarify the constellations constituting the structure of mutual determination between phenomenology and hermeneutics. The paper will focus on the question of the Lebenswelt, as reserve of meaning, a concept requiring a structural conjunction of the phenomenological (perception, imagination, re-presentation) and hermeneutical arcs (explication, interpretation, understanding).

This paper aims to reflect on the possibilities of approaching the phenomenon of memory in relation to space. In order to approach memory on “the side ofspace”, we will find our first decisive guidelines in M. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of habit developed in Phenomenology of Perception. Starting from there, we will then try to show in what way memory, in a way, can be said to belong to places. The final point of the discussion is Ricœur’s investigation of architecture and urbanism’s analogies with narrative, as they allow us to consider a hermeneutic approach to the spatial fabric of time.

Without having directly tackled the question of ecology, the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricœur offers nevertheless an original treatment of the phenomenological theme of “dwelling”. His hermeneutics of the “long path” underscores the fact that our environment is given to us in the form of tools, institutions and the values of historical communities. Whereas the global ecological crisis could easily give rise to a response that is inattentive to cultural diversity, Ricœur’s explicit attention to the question of what it means to dwell on the earth within the symbolic universe of a culture invites us to think quite differently. Phenomenology makes possible a condensation of the human meaning of our belonging to the Earth; hermeneutics shows how this belonging can only take place within instituted environments.

At the end of the Second World War, the figure of Gandhi haunts political philosophy as it wrestles with the task of justifying violence in the name of history. The story begins with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at noon in 1938. Gandhi’s name appears during a discussion between Roubachof and Ivanof. A few years later (1946), Koestler publishes in French a book entitled Le Yogi et le commissaire, analysed by Merleau-Ponty in Humanisme et terreur (1946–1947). Camus replies in L’Homme révolté (1951). Ricœur’s thinking, examined in the present article, has its own place in this debate. At stake is our own knowledge of the conditions under which the rejection and condemnation of violence might, in fact, accommodate violence.

Does Ricœur’s approach of language enter in contradiction with Husserl’s phenomenological legacy? In response to Claude Romano’s criticisms of the hermeneutical approach of language sustained by Ricœur, this paper intends to shed light on the complex connections between Husserl and Ricœur on the relations between language and experience. It aims to show, against what Romano suggests, that Ricœur’s thinking never leads to a linguistic idealism,but follows effectively a phenomenological exigency through his hermeneutical project.

In later, retrospective texts where he explained his hermeneutical turn, Paul Ricoeur claimed that this turn was due to the impossibility of knowing oneself directly, through introspection, and the necessity to undertake the detour of interpretation with regard to knowledge of oneself. By going back to the first occurrences of this hermeneutical turn in his work of 1960, The Symbolism of Evil, this paper argues that other motives, which were later forgotten, were also at play and perhaps more instrumental, most notably the intention of salvaging modernity against itself and of curing it of its forgetfulness of the sacred.

We publish here the letters between Gadamer and Ricoeur, as they are found in the Archives of the two philosophers (Gadamer-Archiv in Marbach and Fonds Ricoeur in Paris). Starting from February 1964 and ending on October 2000, the thirty-five letters reproduced here cannot give a complete picture of their much richer correspondence and relations, because it seems that neither Ricoeur, nor Gadamer kept all the letters they received from one another. But altogether, they document their common concerns, their mutual respect, even their intellectual solidarity and finally the particular context that brought them to write to one another, i.e. Ricoeur’s intention to publish a translation of Gadamer’s book, Truth and Method, in a new series he edited for the Seuil Publisher. This publishing and translation project will mark their entire correspondence.

Paul Ricœur held the conference on attention at Rennes, on the 2nd of March 1939, before the Philosophical Circle of the West. At the time, Ricœur, aged 26, was a teacher of philosophy at Lorient, in the south of Brittany. The text published here, which is available in the Paris Archives, is Ricœur’s extended version of this conference. His careful analysis of attention is impressive in its phenomenological emphasis: from the first lines, he draws relations between attention and perception, considering their intentional character, and continues by distinguishing attention from anticipation, preperception and waiting. A particular concern is given to the relation between attention and temporal duration – a question that will be reworked later in his philosophy of the will. After questioning how attention implies the notion of truth (not without reminding the contributions of Descartes, Thomas, Malebranche and Berkeley), he concludes by meditating upon the relation between attention and liberty.

Animality is a central issue in phenomenology. If the core of the phenomenological approach is the investigation into the correlation between subject and object, what are we talking about when we talk about animal subjectivity? Is it possible to include the notion of animal being in the category of subject? What kind of intentionality does it possess? Our article will analyse the pathic dimension in order to track down some indications about animal subjectivity. Particular emphasis shall be placed on Weizsacker and Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives. Both call into question the definition of subjectivity as an absolute and neutral gaze, exclusively attributed to human being. By contrast, by analysing sensitivity as the common background between animal and human beings, it will be possible to introduce the subject into biology, as explicitly stated by Weizsacker. Subjectivity lies at the intersection between passivity and activity, between perception and movement, between passion and revolution.

The goal of this article is to demonstrate that, following Derrida, in order to develop a theory of animality it is necessary to renounce to the implicit use of concepts related to subjectivity (such as “ego,” “ipse,” or “Dasein”). The deconstruction of subjectivity is thus the only way to establish an ethical requirement concerning animals, a requirement which is no longer conceived from the point of view of our “humanity.” In the first part of the paper, I attempt to locate Derridean ethics within phenomenology in a way which situates ethics in relation to the experience of aporia. In the second part, I focus on what Derrida calls the “carnivorous sacrifice” and try to outline a concretization of the ethics of hospitality and of responsibility that reconfigures our relationships with animals.

What does the ostensibly innocuous phrase “das Selbst” (the self ) exactly mean in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has been often concluded by many interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that the current paper attempts to challenge. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates any “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, and he insists on the intrinsic connection between the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. What seems to be at stake in the fundamental-ontological approach of Sebstheit and Selbstsein, Being-oneself, is rather a complete paradigm-shift, since both concepts refer to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein, and no longer at all to a self-identical being of a condition of its self-identity. In trying to investigate the economy of the related existential concepts of Jemeinigkeit, Selbstheit and Man-selbst, this article makes the claim that Heidegger’s break with egology is much deeper that it has been often thought, and that the phenomenologist raises a completely new question, rather than trying to give a new response to older ones.