Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible.

Against the assumption that aesthetic form relates to a harmonious arrangement of parts into a beautiful whole, this book argues that reason is the real theme of the Critique of Judgment as of the two earlier Critiques. Since aesthetic judgment of the beautiful becomes possible only when the mind is confronted with things of nature, for which no determined concepts of understanding are available, aesthetic judgment is involved in an epistemological or, rather, para-epistemological task. The predicate “beautiful” indicates that something (...) has minimal form and is cognizable. This book explores this concept of form, in particular the role of presentation (Darstellung) in what Kant refers to as “mere form,” which involves not only the understanding, but also reason as the faculty of ideas. Such a notion of form reveals why the beautiful can be related to the morally good. On the basis of this reinterpreted concept of form, most major concepts and themes of the Critique of Judgment—such as disinterestedness, free play, the sublime, genius, and beautiful arts—are examined by the author and shown in a new light. (shrink)

Le cannabis est envisagé ici comme un instrument de la politique d’aménagement des territoires, au sens où R. Neuburger évoque les territoires de l’intime. Ceci permet la création de nouvelles narrations qui permettent de sortir de l’impasse où le cannabis est le problème pour les parents alors que c’est la solution pour le jeune. Deux vignettes cliniques illustrent cette métaphore et les opportunités qu’elle offre pour la thérapie.

Abstract:Francesco Vitale discusses with Rodolphe Gasché the history of Heidegger reception in France and Germany, and more.

Pour Lévinas, la subjectivité – aussi bien dans sa relation avec l’être que dans sa relation avec autrui – est originairement responsable. Comment une telle responsabilité, qui n’est pas la simple conséquence de la liberté du sujet, est-elle possible ? C’est seulement à partir de l’incarnation, à partir de la pesanteur même du corps, que le sujet apparaît comme responsable en ce sens et que par conséquent prend sens chez Levinas la notion même de responsabilité.For Levinas, subjectivity – as well (...) in his relationship with the being, as with his relationship with the other – is from the beginning responsible. How is such a responsibility, which is not the mere consequence of the freedom of the subject possible ? It is only from the embodiment, from the very gravity of the body, that the subject appears as responsible in that sense and that consequently the very notion of responsibility assumes a meaning for Levinas. (shrink)

Levinas n'est pas le premier ni le seul penseur à avoir eu le souci de décrire la subjectivité pour elle-même et à partir d'elle-même. Cette subjectivation, toujours à reprendre, Levinas l'aura envisager lui-même doublement, en deux lieux distincts, l'ontologie et l'éthique. L'ontologie dans la mesure où elle se propose de déduire la signification de l'étant subjectif dans l'être, l'éthique dans la mesure où elle pense l'unicité du moi à partir de la responsabilité pour autrui. L'ontologie et l'éthique sont, pour Levinas, (...) deux figures de l'egologie, elles décrivent deux manières d'être soi. Pour le comprendre l'auteur rétablit les rapports souvent oubliés entre Levinas et Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty et Henry. (shrink)

Rodolphe Calin | : Comment rendre compte de l’articulation entre l’image et le langage, plus précisément, de la double dimension, langagière et figurative, que présente le langage dans les figures de rhétorique? L’article essaie de montrer que, pour répondre à cette question, Ricoeur n’aura pas seulement eu besoin, dans la sixième étude de La métaphore vive, de développer une sémantique de l’image consistant à penser l’image comme une dimension du procès de la prédication métaphorique, mais également, comme en témoigne (...) son article « Image et langage dans la psychanalyse », une sémiotique de l’image, une sémiotique non linguistique permettant de faire droit à la dimension « pictoriale » qu’acquiert le langage en devenant figuré. Et dans la mesure où la sémantique et la sémiotique de l’image mettent en jeu deux modèles distincts, l’un prédicatif, l’autre substitutif, qui tour à tour permettent de décrire le schématisme de l’imagination, ce sont ici deux approches de l’imagination créatrice qui sont requises pour rendre compte du langage figuré. | : How to explain the connection between images and language? More precisely, how to give an account of the double dimension, both linguistic and figurative, that language presents in rhetorical figures? The present article attempts to show that in order to answer this question, Ricoeur had to develop not only a semantics of the image in La métaphore vive, where the image is conceived as a part of the process of metaphorical predication, but also, as evidenced by his article “Image and language in psychoanalysis,” a semiotics of the image — i.e., a non-linguistic semiotics making it possible to grant the “pictorial” dimension that language acquires in becoming figurative. And to the extent that the semantics and semiotics of the image deploy two distinct models — one predicative, the other substitutive — which alternately describe the schematism of the imagination, it becomes clear that two approaches of the creative imagination are required to account for figurative language. (shrink)

Lacan fait régulièrement référence à Kierkegaard dans son enseignement et ce dernier occupe une place cruciale dans le retour à Freud. En analysant les écrits de Kierkegaard, l'auteur éclaire certains concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, remet en question le rapport de Lacan à Hegel et établit une nouvelle perspective entre psychanalyse et existentialisme.

The debt and responsibility toward what thus withholds itself in any heritage will become clearer once we focus on the irreducible remainder in the double memory of Europe, in particular, within its Greek memory. Indeed, in the context of Derrida elucidation in “Faith and Knowledge” of the notion of the “most barren and desert‐like” abstraction, two names are invoked, the Greek name “khōra,” and the Jewish name of the “messianic”. This chapter reconstructs, at least in a very succinct manner, the (...) arguments that impel the invocation of these two names. Like “the messianic without messianicity” in one part of the double memory of Europe, khōra in its Greek part is an immemorial remainder that withdraws from what it renders possible. According to “Faith and Knowledge,” “this Greek noun [khōra] says in our memory that which is not reappropriable, even by our memory, even by our ‘Greek’ memory. (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s elaborations in ‘Europe after Europe’ concern a kind of irrationalism and nativism proper to European thought that has prohibited the embryonic core of the idea of Europe, namely, the renewed Socratic-Platonic motif of the ‘care of the soul’ in Christian Europe, to unfold its full potential. The article investigates a further ‘irrationalism’ that narrows the universalist thrust of the idea of Europe, precisely, by conceiving of it in terms of the Greek concept of an idea. This article draws (...) on the inner resources of the notion of the idea in order to recast Europe as a Europe beyond the idea. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the gesture confronted with its own impossibility, in situations that open the gesture to a dimension of transcendence. Focusing first on the event of beauty, as it is discussed by Jean‑Louis Chrétien, and on the encountering of the face, as it is considered by Emmanuel Lévinas, this paper envisions a “below” and a “beyond” of the gesture, in exceptional situations where the gesture is faced with an excess, acquiring a dimension of a theopathy. Subsequently, I (...) emphasize that the transcendence that takes gesture beyond itself can inhabit and nourish the daily gestures, and this can be an occasion of pain and difficulties. In this perspective, Simone Weil shows how the repeated gestures of manual labour can become the mirror of supernatural beauty. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl. Infinite tasks -- Universality and spatial form -- Universality in the making -- Martin Heidegger. Singular essence -- The strangeness of beginnings -- The originary world of tragedy -- Jan Patoka. Care of the soul -- The genealogy of Europe-responsibility -- Jacques Derrida. European memories -- This little thing that is Europe -- De-closing the horizon.

"This book in the main consists of lectures that I first delivered in 2010 at the Collegium Phenomenologicum at Citta di Castello, Italy, and subsequently expanded for a three-day seminar at the Universidad Diego Portales at Santiago, Chile, in 2011. In spring 2012 my graduate lecture course in the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo was devoted to the subject "geophilosophy." It was on this occasion that I expanded the earlier lectures to the (...) dimensions of the book in its present form.". (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant, despite his strong condemnation of rhetoric, introduces the figure of hypotyposis at the very moment he sets out to tackle the philosophical problem of presentation as such. This study holds that this choice of the rhetorical term is not fortuitous. Its connotations of vivid illustration, synopsis, and moral grandeur serve Kant in arguing that, on a transcendental level, presentation secures the mind's life, unity, and self-affection. Although of rhetorical origin, hypotyposis is thus shown to (...) link up with a specifically philosophical meaning of the term in the writings of Aristotle. (shrink)

At first sight, “theory” does not seem to be a major issue in Heidegger's thought. Yet, as his early Freiburg lectures from 1919 demonstrate, Heidegger's development of a phenomenological method of his own required a systematic debate with the neo-Kantians and the philosophical privilege they accorded to theoretization. While laying the foundation for a phenomenological method whose prime object is the lived experience of the surrounding world, Heidegger sketches out a double concept of theorization, one which, through a process of (...) successive stages of unliving, culminates in the objectified conception of an empty “something,” and another concept of theoretization for which the “something” is “the experienceable in general,” and which guides the a-theoretical encounter of phenomenology as an “archontic form of life” with the world, the other, and the “not yet.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWith few exceptions, the prominent role of the Stranger in Plato’s late dialogue on the Sophist has drawn little attention in Plato scholarship. Yet, in this dialogue Plato charges the expatriated Stranger, who, furthermore, lacks a patronym and thus is not identifiable, remaining a stranger to the end, with the task not only of rejecting all philosophy hitherto as nothing more than a kind of storytelling about Being, but also of committing the parricide of Parmenides, the father of Greek philosophy (...) itself. By refuting Parmenides’ thesis on Being, including the claim that Non-being is unthinkable and unsayable, the Stranger develops a philosophy that for the first time merits this title. The core of his doctrine of the “greatest kinds” consists in recasting Non-being in terms of otherness, thus unseating the priority of the principle of opposition that, until then, dominated philosophical thinking. This paper delves into what it means for Greek philosophy to invite a stranger to uproot its foundin... (shrink)