The ordinary space is continuously cluttered with bodies and constantly, when we move, we must maneuver, push and shove, walk around, make space. The awareness of having to operate in a limited space, where the places are always already occupied, is sustained by a special mode of appearing of ordinary space: the occupancy field. A phenomenological analysis of the occupancy field demonstrates that: (i) the format in which space presents itself in ordinary perception is marked by our awareness of occupying space with our body and having to squeeze it somewhere each time we move; (ii) bodies and space are co-dependent on an intentional level: ordinary space has, by a sense of vacuum, a mode of appearing which is indissociable from the phenomenological structure of bodies; (iii) the presentation of space is dependent on an anticipation of possibilities: it is because the situation is considered from the opportunities and constraints on the possible set up by our body that a space presents itself to us. We could not experience space if our perceptual apparatus took a mere snapshot of the current states of aff airs, if through it we had only access to the state in which the environment is at time t. To experience space means fundamentally to be ahead of one’s time, consider the present not from the future, but from the possible.

What is the relationship between phenomenology and material reality? What would be the place of phenomenology in a discourse about material reality? This paper tries to clarify the relationship between a type of knowledge and an ontological domain which at first sight seems foreign to it. It also contains the outline of a program for future research. We will show that the relationship between phenomenology and material reality is in some sense double. Hints to this duality may already be found in Husserl’s Ideen II. Finally we will question a phenomenology that its author explicitly qualified as material: the philosophy of Michel Henry. We will investigate the possibility of a material phenomenology beyond Henry’s work in relation to material reality.

This article presents itself as an attempt to explain Proust’s expression, “The matter of experience”, from Husserl’s concept of Materie in the Logical Investigations. This Husserlian concept will enable us to rethink the “matter” of experience, as being both intrinsically determined and intrinsically “relational”. Husserl uses this concept of Materie in two main senses. In the fifth Logical Investigation, it is used in order to define the “content” (Inhalt) of the act and this concept will be explained in its own equivocation, as it both means the direction of the act (Sinn) and the ideal “signification” which prescribes this very determination (Bedeutung). The concept of Materie is also used in the third Logical Investigation to designate the “content” (Gehalt) of the object, and will also be explained in its own equivocation, as it both means the individual determination of the object and its essential determination. In the last part of this study, a few of the difficulties which are brought by this double equivocation of Husserl’s concept of Materie will be exposed, and a few programmatic solutions for its redefinition as the unique “matter” of our experience, will be proposed. This investigation might eventually imply a definition of phenomenology itself, as the very experience of this matter.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the notion of landscape is a phenomenological typical object and a perfect meeting point of different fields of study, and, in particular, a distinctive topic for a dialogue between phenomenology and human sciences. Starting from an analysis of a text of Erwin Straus, we attemptto support the view that into all kinds of landscape—sensory, perceptual, geographical, pictorial or built—we can read various ways of living, dwelling or being in the world, or in other words we can read into them some forms of the original experience. This means that within all landscapes, as embedded in these forms of experience, we can read various ways of living, dwelling or being in the world. So we believe it is possible to constitute and to think a unitary sense of landscape from a phenomenological interpretation of space and human behaviour.

A radical thinking of space remains for phenomenology a difficulty, which Heidegger has been concerned with. He developed an existential conception of the spatiality of Dasein in Being and Time, which he abandoned in his later philosophy; according to its “turn,” this philosophy proposes a notion of emptiness to describe spatial experience. The paper endorses the view that this notion makes possible a thinking of space in its essence. Pursuing further the reflection concerning the empty space, Maldiney advocates the influence of the East Asian tradition on this issue. However, given that none of these authors considers dance as an art susceptible to disclose space in its essential vacuity, this paper aims to argue that there is a true choreographic empty space.

As a development of his former researches on speech – that he distinguishes from instituted language and that he identifies to thought – the author points out a special kind of fantasy, already observed by Husserl himself: the perceptive Phantasie. Analysed here as a form of transition from perception (Perzeption) to what is impossible to be represented (l’infigurable), this form of fantasy aims at what Winnicot understood as a transitional object. Preceding any intentional and even imaginary foundation (Stiftung), the perceptive Phantasie is the very core of speech, that poetry allows us to see as the living form of transcendental interfacticity. The perceptive Phantasie is thus the concrete condition of the “reflexivity” of meaning, which is accomplished in speech by a mutual affectivity, perception nourishing itself from the virtual.

The point shared by phenomenology and the French Nouveau Roman is that they both confer great importance to description. But is it philosophically interesting to compare the works of authors like Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon (which relate to details in the material world) with the works of Husserl (whose object is the eidos)? In this article, we first study in what way the method suggested by Husserl was innovative and in what way it influenced his examples and style in the Ideen. We then examine how the fact that this operation no longer relates to beings could be construed as progress in relation to Heidegger. Finally, we study the reasons why this mode of speech was favoured in the novels of the 1960s. Our assumption, as the later writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty show, is that this literary move­ment tried to achieve in the field of fiction the same breakthrough and to give description a scientific quality.

In this article, the author analyses Cernuda’s long poem “Lazaro”, in order to elucidate the inner relation between desire and reality that is central in his entire work. That relation is important not only in order to understand how imagination influences poetical creation, but also how poetical creativity acquires its autonomy and independency.

The poetic image results from the effort undertaken by affectivity to express itself in a language that is not originally its very own, but that holds the advantage of being communicable not only at the level of representation, but at the level of feeling as well. The image is not considered, therefore, to be a synthesis of true and false. In the process of creation, the affect is the material principle of the image as an ideal unity of syntheses. It is implied here that poetic writing is not about a content of internal aiming, previously possessed by consciousness, that is made to correspond with an element of the world, even­tually represented by means of sensible intuition. In order to illustrate this, the author interprets a poem by Nadia Tueni, showing that it is essentially about its own production.

In his novels B. E. Ellis depicts a generation of bewildered rich young people, who live the easiest of lives, in a wealthy background as one can see in everyday American shows. But they actually suffer from the excess of things, products, luxury; the result for them is that the overall meaning of life is lost. Fink’s phenomenology gives us the interpretation for this nihilistic experience. Humanity is depressed as far as the world is forgotten. Forgetting the world is even more scandalous and serious than the disregard of Being that Heidegger condemns. B. E. Ellis applies the method of reduction: he makes the epoché of the container-world. Consequently, we learn that the idea of the world is the condition for unity, coherence and direction as shows Fink’s Welt und Endlichkeit: Humanity when devoid of the totality (as a synonym for world) is absolutely devoid of meaning. The Cosmos-container comes before Being or the beings (as simple contents). World is the radical source for all data. With the arguments of Fink’s book Spiel als Weltsymbol, we may understand why Ellis’ characters strain to rebuild a world, with their new religion of trade marks and name dropping. But holy objects of consumption and luxury can’t produce an authentic world.

This paper tries to explore the legitimacy of applying the phenomenological approach to poems, novels, to all that we classify, too conveniently, under the term “literature.” Such an approach is grounded in one claim: the literary text opens up to a world that is its “thing itself”. The thing of the text is not the text as a thing, in its linguistic and formal properties, no more than the thing of the painting is the canvas coated with pigments. However, what is the status of such a “world”? Is this “opening of a world” only a metaphor? Is the world of the literary work only an imaginary one? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the limits of the structuralist claim that the object of literature is only literature as an object, that is as a linguistic construction and, secondly, to be aware of what is specific to the phenomenological account of the imaginary, in contrast with alternative accounts, such as the one grounded in the theory of speech acts and developed, among others, by Searle.

Relaying reflections from Les Mouches, Morts sans sépulture, Les mains sales and Huis-clos to some important arguments concerning death in L’Etre et le néant, the author discusses the relation between death and freedom. Criticizing Martin Heidegger’s views on Sein zum Tode, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that one’s relation to death deeply implies relations with the others, the living, but also the dead ones. The experience of death being absurd, the others are those who can make it meaningful, in the same way that I do for their own death. Sartre’s philosophy of freedom defends the original choice of the ones that I will remember and cherish, in a community that is more important than the living one: the community established beyond death.

The books of Pascal Quignard present themselves as a hunt for the invisible. The ambition that lies at their heart seems particularly compatible with a phenomenological approach. Indeed, this literary intuition – this “suspicion” in the words of Quignard – hinges on the nature and value of representation. This article tries to read the entire work of Quignard through the phenomenological lens. The elucidation of phenomenality is accomplished here through the steps of a process that leads to the very condition of vision. Once the essence of representation is established as a “predation”, the literary writing of the author reveals it as related to an absent, invisible prey. Through the successive and ascending figures of idolatry, love, art and contemplation, can then start a route to invisibility, which is a true pedagogy of seeing. This quest, conceivable as a learning process through which literature finds its ultimate aim, finally leads to a renewed understanding of the concept of representation.

The essay is an examination of two models that have been used to think what “meaning” or “sense” is. Husserl offers the first model in which there is an exchange between the sense that is made in experience and the meaning that is articulated at the linguistic or logical level. The second model is offered by Paul Ricoeur in his theory of narratives. A narrative has a link to what took place that Ricoeur calls “représentance” or “lieutenance”: the narrative configures but at the same time does justice to what took place. The fiction involved in the “as” of “such as it was” is necessary for the “such” that guarantees an adequacy between the narrative and the action or event. I expand on these two models and offer a model of meaning that I call “translatability”.

Lotze’s influence on the development of the XIXth and XXth century philosophy and psychology remains largely neglected still today. In this paper, I examine some Lotzean elements in Husserl’s early conception of intentionality, and more specifically in his rejection of the Brentanian concept of intentionality. I argue that Husserl and Lotze, pace Brentano, share a qualitative conception of experiences, what they both call the Zumutesein of experiences. Furthermore, I discuss other issues upon which Husserl and Lotze share common intuitions: the perception of space, the theory of local signs, the realisations of thinking (Leistungen des Denkens) and phenomenology.

This article inquires into that which articulates the two texts brought together by Heidegger in Identity and Difference. It sets out from the indications provided in the Preface of the work concerning the “harmony” that reigns between what is at stake at the heart of the two texts, namely what Heidegger respectively calls the Ereignis (event of appropriation) and the Austrag (reconciling difference). The understanding of this harmony makes it possible to approach that which unveils itself as the articulation of Being, but in so doing also raises the difficult problem of the very possibility of thinking Being setting out from its essential withdrawal.

Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life or radical phenomenology understands life as immanent and transcendental affectivity. From this point of view, ethics can be characterized as the ethics of affectivity, the central stake of which lies in the recognition of life. However, the question is to what extent a philosophical discourse can be held on a reality that, being immanent, is principally inaccessible for intentionality and how such discourse is in fact possible. As radical phenomenology relies on certainty opposed to evidence, it can be shown that both the possibility and the practical effectiveness of its discourse are ultimately rooted in life’s self-revelation. Henry’s works may then be understood as mediation towards the recognition of life, especially through the concepts of quasi-performativity and translation.

The objective of this article is to reflect on the impact that Ricoeur’s work on psychoanalysis (following his book on Freud) might have on his concept of narrative identity. In these texts, one of the points he draws from psychoanalysis is that resistance mechanisms can hamper the process of self-recognition of the subject through the story that he tells himself about himself. These resistance mechanisms cannot be put to an end simply by understanding them intellectually. These writings teach us that, in order to be brought to an end, these resistance mechanisms require more than the willingness to appropriate one’s own narrative identity. An appropriate technique to handle energies must be put into place. This explains why the production of a narrative identity can sometimes take the form of a real work.

Showing a very early interest in Descartes, after having first considered him as a Christian thinker in the perspective of a deconstruction of religious life, Heidegger soon regards him as the major obstacle to the phenomenological analyses he wants to develop, as part of the first ontological search he gave himself: that of a hermeneutics of facticity. Therefore, the latter immediately takes in his work the shape of a hermeneutics of the I think, therefore I am, its author being blamed for having entirely ignored the sense of being in the I am, focused as he is on the thinking ego, the ins and outs of which he develops. But the criticism also applying to Husserl, it is by laying the blame on his master, that Heidegger intends to radicalize the project of his own master, hence the necessity to throw light on the origin and the foundations of what we can call the Cartesian question in Heidegger.