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Studia Phaenomenologica

Volume 9, 2009
Michel Henry's Radical Phenomenology

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Displaying: 1-20 of 43 documents


1. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Cristian Ciocan Orcid-ID

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2. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Jad Hatem, Rolf Kühn

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3. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Jean-Luc Marion, Adina Bozga, Cristian Ciocan Orcid-ID

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In this article, the author unveils the play between visibility and invisibility as it is captured in a phenomenology of the gift. The first part of the essay explores the tension between the fact of being given and the forgetting of its characters as a gift: its donor and the circumstances of it being given. In the process of becoming autonomous, free of its provenance, the gift loses its character of being given and becomes no more than a simple thing in someone’s possession. Subsequently, the essay draws on the figure of Christ as gift of God, illustrating this interpretation with particular reference to several illuminating passages from the Gospel of John. The central image is the phenomenon of gift as given in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Finally, this image is used to define the task of a hermeneutical approach to the gift.

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4. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Michel Henry

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This previously unpublished text of Michel Henry’s was written during the preparation of his first major work published in 1963: The Essence of Manifestation. Being devoted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this extensive text could be as well integrated in the above mentioned book, namely in the context where the author criticizes the ontological monism privileged by the strong tradition of German philosophy, from Jacob Boehme and Kant to Heidegger. Starting from the topic of self-knowledge, this text focuses on an internal division of Being, namely on the separation between consciousness and existence, an opposition that will take the form of a phenomenological distance. The author argues thus that the above mentioned German philosophical tradition is not able to grasp in its primordial nature the essence of the self, covered by the representation.

5. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Jean-Yves Lacoste

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This essays deals with Heidegger’s concept of “Thing”, as sketched in the 1950 lecture Das Ding.In Being and Time, Heidegger had worked out a concept of “tool”, Zeug, which vanished in later works. The Heideggerian “thing” is undeniably more than a “tool”. The author argues than beings viz. phenomena are actually given to us which oppose the logic of “thinghood” while transcending the logic of “toolhood”: Flemish painting is used as an example of phenomena which overcome the affective reality of being-in-the-world without respecting the mode of appearing proper to things. Another witness is summoned, sacramental experience: a phenomenological description of what is given to see and feel during the Eucharistic liturgy aims at showing that being-in-the-world and “being in the Fourfold” can be put into brackets in such an event, and that it must be the case for such an event to be understood.

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6. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Michel Henry

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radical phenomenology and first philosophy

7. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Julia Scheidegger

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This essay tries to show how Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of Life can be understood as a valuable criticism of hermeneutical philosophy and especially of hermeneutical phenomenology in the manner Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur had conceptualized it. Using Michel Henry’s concept of phenomenological distance, it will be shown here that on the basis of every hermeneutics there lies the classical topos of the auctorial intention that was once gained by the interpretation of texts and is simply ontologized by hermeneutical philosophers. What follows from such a perspective is that human life seems to be ontologically separated form itself, against which Michel Henry tries to show that each life can only be humane, both in relation to itself as well as to others, if it affects itself without any distance.

8. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Jad Hatem

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The discourse on truth rarely takes into account the claim made by a few minds of being themselves not only in truth, or expressing the truth, but of being also truth itself. We seek first to demonstrate the phenomenological significance of this proposition. We then examine the divergent meanings this claim undertakes in three prominent figures: Jesus, Çankara and Hallâj. At this occasion, an investigation is conducted on the meaning of the copula in the formula: I am the truth, in dogmatic, philosophical and mystical realms.

radical phenomenology and first philosophy

9. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
José Ruiz Fernández

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In this paper, I will reflect on the place of language within Michel Henry’s phenomenology. I will claim that Michel Henry’s position provokes an architectonic problem in his conception of phenomenology and I will discuss how he tried to solve it. At the end of the essay, I will try to clarify what I believe to be the ultimate root of that problem involving language.

10. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Rolf Kühn

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As any science presupposes a certain “something” for its constitution as a discipline, the same applies also for philosophy and theology as discourses of a specific intentionality. However, pure phenomenological life relies on an originary self-donation, which precedes any manifestation of language or scientific knowledge, and implies a practical “original intelligibility”, pertaining to any human being as his “transcendental birth”. Relating to Michel Henry, this circumstance will be confronted with the self-revelation in Christianity, involving a discussion of the phenomenological status of the Scripture, as well as a delimitation from any Gnosis. Hence, the “word of life” (of God), preceding any manifestation of language, coincides with an immediate ethos, that can be illustrated by the “acts of compassion”. The text conceives itself as a preliminary work for a religious philosophy founded in the phenomenology of life.

radical phenomenology and first philosophy

11. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Jeffrey Hanson

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Intuition is surely a theme of singular importance to phenomenology, and Henry writes sometimes as if intuition should receive extensive attention from phenomenologists. However, he devotes relatively little attention to the problem of intuition himself. Instead he off ers a complex critique of intuition and the central place it enjoys in phenomenological speculation. This article reconstructs Henry’s critique and raises some questions for his counterintuitive theory of intuition. While Henry cannot make a place for the traditional sort of intuition given his commitment to the primacy of life as the natural and spontaneous habitation of consciousness, an abode entirely outside the world, there nevertheless with some modification to Henry’s thinking could be a role for intuition to play in discerning the traces of life in the world.
12. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Benoît Ghislain Kanabus

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This article assumes that the Henryan concept of Archi-Ipseity is, in its internal unique structure, divided in two modalities — one potential and one actual — and that it derives from the organic concatenation of the transcendental process of the self-engendering of absolute Life. This hypothesis of an inner division of the Archi-Ipseity solves several textual ambiguities present Henry’s works, for exemple the fact that Henry’s text plays between antecedence and co-presence of hyper-power life and Archi-Ipseity: the Archi-Ipseity, although engendered by life, is simultaneously the condition and the accomplishment of this process.

13. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Michael Purcell

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“Sacramenta propter homines.” This classic statement situates sacraments within a human existential in which meaning and reality consort. Sacramental reality is meaningful reality. Sacraments signify, but they signify in an ecclesial or intersubjective context. Sacraments phenomenalise themselves ecclesially. Apposing Marion and Derrida on the nature of sign and signification gives the possibility of considering sacramental reality on the basis of ecclesial exteriority.

radical phenomenology and first philosophy

14. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Antoine Vidalin

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The question of action or praxis has not been treated in particular by Michel Henry in his works. However, this subject is present at each step of his reflexion. This article makes a synthesis on this matter, taking into account all of his works, especially the last books on Christianity (which, in our view, fulfill the phenomenology of life). Having determined the immanent dialectic of action (from the gift of the power in the generation and the in-carnation of the First Living), we can understand, following Michel Henry, the ethics of Life as the Commandment of Love. From such a perspective, the sin and the salvation can be reconnected to the native relation of the living with the Life.

15. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Javier Bassas Vila

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This paper intends to identify the functions of the French particle “comme” (“like” in opposition to “as”) and “comme si” (“as if”) in the work of French contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, especially in L’idole et la distance (American translation: The Idol and Distance), Dieu sans l’être (American translation: God without Being), Étant donné (American translation: Being given) and De surcroît (American translation: In excess). The author of this paper focuses on the relation between phenomenology and theology in order to demonstrate its complexity by an analysis of linguistic phenomenology. At the end of this analysis, the “saturated phenomenon”, as proposed by Jean-Luc Marion, becomes an important notion to understand the boundaries of both disciplines, phenomenology and theology.

confrontations

16. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Christoph Moonen

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In elaborating his phenomenological project, Michel Henry refers to Søren Kierkegaard. After a brief survey of Henry’s phenomenology of the self, we will inquire whether this appropriation is accurate. It will be argued that Kierkegaard’s dialectics of existence can operate as a therapy or corrective in order to save Henry’s project of a radical immanent and passive self. If not, it suffers from incoherence both from a phenomenological as well as from a theological perspective. Each self-consciousness, even in its most extreme aff ective states, cannot dispose itself of refl ective remnants. On the contrary, it is precisely Kierkegaard’s proposition that refl ection intensifi es pathos. What appears as most near and dear to us, be it God, self or life, always touches from a distance.
17. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Camille Riquier

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Michel Henry recognized himself within Maine de Biran’s work, while rejecting the French spiritualistic tradition to which this one was attached. However, without occulting the great differences which separate him from this tradition, it seems that we find in Bergson’s first book, more than in Maine de Biran, the premises of an ontological dualism, such as he supported, which announces an authentic philosophy of the conscience, beyond any intentionality. In return, as if Michel Henry had emphasized a tendency already present in Time and Free Will, we could read again Bergson’s first book in the light of material phenomenology itself.

18. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Sylvain Camilleri

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Augustine is one of the favorite ancient thinkers of philosophical modernity. This statement proves itself to be true especially in the phenomenological field where two main thinkers seem to have developed a specific interest in Augustine: Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien. The question will be asked what characterizes each phenomenological reception of the Bishop of Hippo. Our thesis will be that those receptions both are in the same time interpretations which are built on a very specific process of metaphorization. This process — in its various forms — will be the object of a dissection in order to understand what the Augustinian message undergoes and why it does it in such or such way.

confrontations

19. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9
Raphaël Gély

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The aim of this paper is to offer a Henrian interpretation of the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty concerning the place of the imaginary in the perceptive life. The hypothesis is that in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Henry, the role of the imaginary in the original affective experience which the perceptive life has of its own intrinsic vulnerability can be investigated on three levels: the articulation between the absolute dimension and the egological dimension of consciousness in Sartre, the genesis of perception in the body in Merleau-Ponty, and the immanent adherence of the perceptive act to the radical suffering of its own force in Henry. From each of these three levels, the paper shows that without an imaginary in charge of bringing it back constantly to the experience of its own original vulnerability, the perceptive life is bound to lose the aff ective density of its relation to the perceived, and therefore is bound to become disincarnate.

20. Studia Phaenomenologica: Volume > 9 > Issue: Special
Cristian Ciocan Orcid-ID

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At the beginning of his philosophical career (between 1918 and 1921), the young Heidegger analyzed various texts belonging to the field of the religious tradition: the Pauline Epistles, Augustinian writings and texts of the medieval mystics. Through these analyses, Heidegger formalized certain phenomena that we can find, a few years later, in Being and Time, illustrating the “warm” line of the existential analytic, the pathetic level of the ontology of Dasein: anxiety, death, consciousness, and guilt. My paper focuses on this process of ontologization of phenomena belonging to religious life, namely on the awaiting of Parousia which is used to elaborate the futural structure of being towards death. I finally argue that the keyword for the understanding of the phenomenological transfer from the religious life to the ontology of Dasein is the methodological idea of “formal indication”, whose meaning and role must be clarified.