By drawing on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the animal question in his last seminars entitled The Beast and the Sovereign, I approach the possibilities of fraternity not only among beasts, between “the wolf and the lamb,” but also between them and humans, in terms of their differences. More precisely, while illustrating certain limits of his analysis, I look at his decisive inquiry concerning “the animal,” which goes hand in hand with political inquiry. Yet we take this path in the company of the wolf, the metaphorical wolf, and following the French expression “a pas de loup” (“stealthy as a wolf ”) as used by Derrida, in order to deconstruct the very concept of sovereignty (symbolized also by the wolf ) and thus to think of politics beyond politics or otherwise than politics. However, I also bring in Levinas, almost a “wolf ” waiting along the way, to demonstrate how, despite Derrida’s vast work on these questions, he remains imprisoned in what he wishes to deconstruct, as if he were not completely able to extract himself from it.

The aim of the present paper is to advance some considerations on the question of animism from a phenomenological perspective. Firstly, we deal with the problems of the access to the phenomenon, and of its interpretation on the part of contemporary anthropology. Both problems are connected with the gap which seems to exist between so-called primitive, animistic societies, and so-called civilized, scientific cultures. Secondly, since Husserl does not devote specific analyses to this issue, we address Dorion Cairns’ methodology and concrete investigations. Our major claim is that his reflections, largely inspired by Husserl’s notion of sense-transfer (Sinnesübertragung), may provide a better understanding of the gap mentioned above and perhaps a way to overcome it by disclosing a genetic common root not only of animistic and modern mentalities, but also of pantheism and theism. A final section is devoted to Husserl’s scattered considerations on the subject which might throw additional light on Cairns’ claims.

We respond to a phenomenological challenge set forth in Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?,” namely, to seek a method for obtaining a phenomenological description of non-human animal experience faithful to an animal’s first-person subjective perspective. First, we examine “translational” strategies employing empathy and communication with animals. Then we turn to a “transpositional” strategy from Uexkull’s Umwelt theory in which we objectively determine the components of a non-human animal’s subjective world of experience and then map those coordinates onto our own subjective world. While this method gives us partial access to the animal’s “perception-world” aspect of its Umwelt, it does not inform us about what it is like to live in the interactive, “effect-world” aspect. To better overcome this limitation, we add a “transformational” approach derived from Deleuze’s & Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal,” in which we take on an animal’s manners and capacities for interacting with the other objects and creatures in its world.

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, I elucidate Edmund Husserl’s theory of inauthentic judgments from his 1890 “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic).” It will be shown how inauthentic judgments are distinct from other signitive experiences, in such a manner that when Husserl seeks to account for them, he is forced to revise the general structure of his philosophy of meaning and in doing so, is also able to realize novel insights concerning the nature of signification. Second, these conclusions are revealed to be the foundation of Husserl’s pure logical grammar, found in the 1901 “Fourth Logical Investigation.” In his analysis of inauthentic judgments, Husserl already recognized, albeit in a problematic way and for entirely different reasons, many of the central tenets of the 1901 work concerning categoremata and syncategoremata, matter and form, and the isomorphism between them.

In this article, we evaluate Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism in general and of Heidegger’s correlationism in particular. Contrary to earlier contributions, we argue that Meillassoux’s reflections on uncorrelated being not only serve an epistemological but also an ontological interest; both Meillassoux and Heidegger are interested in the way we have access to uncorrelated being as well as in the nature of uncorrelated being itself. After introducing Meillassoux’s criticism of the correlationism of Heidegger, we reflect on three arguments of his account of planet earth as un-correlated being; the emergence of planet earth, the presupposed accessibility of un-correlated being and his criticism of Heidegger’s fideism. Although it becomes clear that Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism is not applicable in the case of Heidegger, it also helps us to articulate the relevance of Heidegger’s “realist” approach of uncorrelated being in contemporary philosophy.

The problem of accounting for the cognitively relevant relation between experience and thought is among the defining problems of modern philosophy. I suggest that addressing this problem provides an important motive for the “genealogy of logic” that Husserl outlines in his posthumously published Experience and Judgment. Arguing that the notions of “interest” and “pregivenness” are crucial to this approach, I seek to assess it through a detailed analysis of the use to which these notions are put in its most decisive part, the account of the origin of “simple predication”. I conclude that there is reason to think that the notions cannot play the roles that Husserl assigns to them, and hence that his approach fails.

My contribution tries to outline some of the motives that lead Husserl to genetic phenomenology. The starting point are the analyses he wrote to include in Ideas I and Ideas II, which are dedicated to the founding of human sciences during the period 1910–1916. Here we find an intertwinement of investigations concerned with an understanding of others (on lowest and higher levels) and their contribution to the constitution of objectivity, and new research of the genesis of the way in which individual experience shapes our access to the world. My main interest is to point out systematic connections between these two directions of research which are general characteristics of genetic phenomenology.

The paper discusses motivation as the inner lawfulness of consciousness and a central methodological principle of genetic phenomenology, highlighting the problem of its ambiguous status oscillating between a historical-empirical and a transcendental account of consciousness. The focus on motivation allows for the practical character of intentionality to emerge, thus presenting genetic phenomenology as a more comprehensive approach to subjective life which takes into account its constitutive indeterminacy.

The familiar Husserlian conception of fulfillment involves a contrast between the same content as being represented emptily and then (more) fully, and also the idea that the empty givenness is rightly conceived in terms of anticipations of fullness. Since perceptual experiences provide a paradigmatic case of such fulfillment, I will call it “P-fulfillment.” Additionally, there is also the fulfillment of our wants, wishes, and desires. Taking wants as the paradigmatic case, I will call it “W-fulfillment.” In this paper, I consider the applicability of these conceptions of fulfillment to Husserl’s views of instincts, and conclude that the fulfillment of instincts is best understood not as P-fulfillment or W-fulfillment, but as sui generis, “I-fulfillment,” which is distinguished by its peculiarly retrospective nature, and by the fact that when it reveals something, it can also give rise to determinacy where previously there was none.

In this paper, I examine how Merleau-Ponty develops Husserl’s genetic phenomenology through an elaboration of language, which is largely influenced by Saussure’s linguistics. Specifically, my focus will be on the unpublished notes to the course Sur le problème de la parole (On the Problem of Speech). I show how Merleau-Ponty recasts Husserl’s notion of the historicity of truth by means of an inquiry into the relation between truth and its linguistic expression. The account that Merleau-Ponty offers differs from Husserl’s in two important respects. Firstly, whereas Husserl describes a regressive inquiry of truth, Merleau-Ponty describes a regressive movement of truth, where every acquired truth seizes the tradition that precedes it. Secondly, this new notion of truth, and its dependency on its proper expression, opens up a new understanding of literature.

In this paper, I consider the idea of space-time in its philosophical specificity. Such an approach must satisfy three main conditions. First, the inquiry must meditate on the link epitomized by the hyphen in the expression “space-time”. Second, it must not reduce either space to time or time to space, but must instead explore the significance of their in-between-ness and of their interweaving reality. Third, the inquiry must rid itself of any priority of space over time or of time over space that would take place in the mediation of space-time. I explore whether there is a metaphysical approach that might be able to articulate the organic link of space-time epitomized by the hyphen in order to grasp the philosophical meaning of its irreducible, deep, and fleshly thickness. I argue that Merleau-Ponty might usher in decisive clues and some insightful tools for building such a theory. I accordingly begin by discussing his later topic of an endo-ontology, linking together concepts such as endospace and endo-time. Starting from there, I examine what he finally envisions as the chiasm and nexus of space-time.

Based on the argument that violence has a parasitic quality rather than an essence of its own, this article seeks to bring to light the conversion processes through which violence crystallises out of, as well as into, various phenomena. Violence is first examined in terms of the relation between perpetrator and victim with, however, an emphasis on the fact that violence cannot be reduced to the intention or the act of the perpetrator. On the contrary, violence is shown to have the character of pathos and to open up a dimension of which the act itself is only a part. Further, the author argues that in being directed towards the other, violence harbours a performative contradiction: by turning the addressee into a thing to be destroyed, the addressing act cancels itself. The paper also sets out to identify the breeding grounds of violence, which, due to its capacity for conversion, can be detected in various phenomena that are not necessarily linked to violence. This means that violence can resort to various mechanisms and can emerge in multiple fields of activity: in bureaucracy, economics, medicine, politics, war, and most importantly, in everyday life, hidden under inconspicuous but sometimes pervasive forms. Finally, the metamorphoses of violence are shown to ultimately rest on the temporal character of violence, which implies that violence has a time of preparation (such as in the field of politics) and an aftermath (for example, in posttraumatic disorders).

This paper provides a phenomenological exploration of the phenomenon of collective violence, specifically by following the leading clue of war from Plato to the “new wars” of late globalization. It first focuses on the genealogy of the legitimization of collective violence in terms of “counter-violence” and then demonstrates how it is mediated by constructions of “the other” in terms of “violence incarnate.” Finally, it proposes to explore such constructions—including the “barbarian” in Greek antiquity, “the cannibal” in the context of Colonialism, or the contemporary cipher of religious irrationality—as mirror effects of one’s own disavowed forms of violence.

Jean Améry’s memoir of his imprisonment and torture by the Nazis links the loss of “trust in the world” to the violence he experienced. The loss of trust makes him feel homeless. He can no longer find a place in the intersubjective world, the world for everyone. What is this “trust in the world” (Weltvertrauen)? How does violence destroy it? In this article, I use Améry’s remarks as guide for understanding the relation of violence, trust, and homelessness. Trust, I argue, is crucial to the constitution of the intersubjective world. Violence, by undermining trust in Others, destroys the sense that this world is “for everyone.” In excluding the victim from its “for everyone,” it enforces a homelessness that transforms the victim’s very being-in-the-world.

Acts of violence develop in relation to place and involve the violation of its very limits. Every significant place is a scene of history, its limits embrace presence and sense. As such, it is the life-worldly home of memory. In this article, I will retrieve the bodily affective dimension of the phenomenon of place memory in instances of public commemoration. Drawing on different philosophical horizons like those of mainly Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Adorno, Ricoeur and Bataille, I’ll contrast their different perspectives on the question of the intertwining of violence, place and memory and refer them to the narrative work of memorials (e.g. Libeskind’s and Eisenman’s for Berlin). Insofar violence has been traditionally represented and thereby obliterated by architecture, we may ask how should genocide, as the unspeakable and ungraspable be expressed? I’ll suggest that it can only be attained by the suspension of meaning and presence: A narrative of bodily affections, of pathos, suffering and excess that accounts for what in itself remains beyond expression.

The paper aims to rectify the reception of Heidegger’s so-called “hermeneutic violence,” by addressing the under-investigated issue of its actual target and rationale. Since the publication of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, some of Heidegger’s contemporary readers, such as Cassirer, as well as more recent commentators, accused Heidegger of doing violence to Kant’s and other philosophers’ texts. I show how the rationale of Heidegger’s self-acknowledged violence becomes tenable in light of his personal notes on his Kant book, and of several hermeneutic tenets from Being and Time. The violence at stake turns out to be a genuine method, involving the appropriation (Zueignen) and the elaboration (Ausarbeiten) of an interpreted text. Its target, I argue, is not the text itself, as it was often assumed, but its reception by a community or tradition. Thus, that violence may well instill interpretive conflict, yet its purpose is to salvage a text from a conventional and ossified reception, namely, from what Heidegger regards as the authoritarianism of idle talk (Gerede) in a philosophical milieu.

This essay demonstrates Ricoeur’s explication of the various roles religion can play especially in regards to acts of collective violence, and also how his conceptions take us beyond the traditional dichotomies of religion as necessarily violent, or necessarily peaceful. It focuses on three essays where his most formidable reflections on religion and violence can be found: “Religion and Symbolic Violence” (1999), “Power and Violence” (first published 1989), and “State and Violence” (first published 1955). First, the essay hermeneutically describes the intricate relationship between violence and religion within these three essays, pointing to (i) three perils of religion especially regarding communities, (ii) the figure of the magistrate within some religiously motivated political revolutions, and (iii) the danger of ecclesiastical orders demonstrating not only authority but also forms of domination. The essay then phenomenologically ties these three threads together, demonstrating a way of understanding both the promises and perils of religion as it relates to violence, both in the work of Ricoeur and beyond it.

Eddo Evink criticizes Emmanuel Levinas’s supposed view that all acts of intentionality and rationality commit transcendental violence against their objects, including the Other. If this is so, Levinas undermines the possibility of his own philosophy. Evink further argues: that there are non-violent forms of intentionality and so intentionality is only potentially violent; that some non-violent counter-pole is needed to define violence; that there are contradictions in Levinas’s notion of violence; that Levinas, like empiricists, aspires to a metaphysical absolute untainted by language; and that he presupposes the philosophical, ontological, and linguistic frameworks he criticizes. However, to answer these objections, one must understand Levinas as developing two distinct modalities of relationship: Being and Otherwise than Being. These modalities clash in the face-to-face relationship when the phenomenon of the face defects into responsibility for the Other. The epistemology and ontology of Being involve distinctive acts, affects, forms of temporality, and experiences of self that undergo a tectonic shift in confrontation with the ethically obligating Other. Here the focus is not on the violence of concepts ever seeking to subjugate the Other but rather on the Other whose summons both provokes knowledge to retreat and is able to be shown in a philosophy, even if that philosophy betrays the saying in the said, while also having the potential to reduce that betrayal. The focus should not be on transcendental violence tracking down and cornering the Other but on the Other ethically disrupting Being. With that focus, it becomes clear that concentrating on transcendental violence is a kind of violence.