In this article, the author recalls the circumstances when he first met Alexandru Dragomir, together with André Scrima and Mihai Şora, with the occasion of a conference on the phenomenology of time at the New Europe College in Bucharest. Then, the author talks about his philosophical relationship with Alexandru Dragomir during the following years, insisting upon the phenomenological debates they had and upon the specific manner of Dragomir’s thinking.

In this article, the author explains the context and circumstances in which he begun, back in the 60s, the first French translation of Sein und Zeit, in collaboration with Alphonse de Waehlens. The article describes the methods and perspectives the first French translators adopted during their work of translation. The article ends with a few considerations concerning the incompleteness of the Heideggerian’s project of Sein und Zeit, explaining this nonachievement by Heidegger’s abandonment of the existential perspective he assumed in Sein und Zeit.

The author explains in a summary way a series of aspects which point to the need, now as well as 18 years ago, of a new Italian translation of Sein und Zeit. Besides the new interpretative perspective coming from the publication of Heidegger’s Freiburg and Marburg lectures, the inaccuracies of the first Italian translation (in both editions: of 1953 and 1970; the third edition 2005 maintains the original terminology of P. Chiodi) can be resumed to the following: 1. the translation stands upon an Existentialist interpretation of the existential analytic and does not comprehend that the Heideggerian meditation of die Frage nach dem Sinn vom Sein als solchen should be understood in a radically positive direction. 2. It shows an insufficient knowledge of Dilthey and Husserl, both playing an essential role in Heidegger’s philosophical project. 3. It does not take into account that the real object of Heidegger’s meditation in Sein und Zeit is the Vorfrage des Seins and the language of metaphysics; therefore it does not acknowledge the systematic character of his terminology and makes difficult the understanding of Heidegger’s Wende (which the first translation confounds with the Kehre of the Seinsfrage).

In the beginning of this article, the author discusses the biographical context of his engagement in the French translation of Sein und Zeit in the 1980s, under the guidance of Jean Beaufret. He integrates the discussion into the general problem of philosophical translation. The author argues that one of the most important things in this matter is the decision of translating. Concerning Heidegger translations, the author – answering to some critics he received – insists upon the idea of the intimate relationship between thinking and poetry, justifying his constant appeal to examples from literature in his translator’s notes at the end of his version of Sein und Zeit.

This contribution discusses the problem of translating Heidegger. Heidegger’s „reiterative destruction“, the core of his phenomenological method in the 20s, is operating as an over-interpretative translation of a traditional text to reveal what is unwritten and unsaid in it. What does it mean, therefore, to translate Heidegger, i.e. to translate a translation? In the second part we briefly present a survey of French translations from Heidegger’s works in the last twenty years and discuss the problematic editorial situation in France.

In his first reading of Husserlian phenomenology, Levinas offered a very interesting criticism of the very notion of intuition, understood as an impossible pretension to grasp in its supposed immediacy the self-giving of the Origin. In his mature work, the role of the Husserlian intuition is played by desire: but the latter is conceived in its strong irreducibility to nostalgia. Human desire is always desire of the same for the other. This paper tries to understand the delayed temporalityof desire as rooted in the radical past of separation.

Lévinas never clarified his method himself. This article is an attempt to account for such an omission and also for the non-classical notion of method as it was constructed. By observing the originality of the means by which this philosophy operates, we come to understand that phenomenology is a necessary beginning to perceive the essential ambiguity of phenomenon and the “trace” of alterity. But since this can only be an indicative process, Lévinas must find alternative means of justification, as new forms of reduction. This contingency implies a notion of truth as testimony. The last stage in the method of alterity consists of an “ethical vigilance” in order to distinguish what in Same is Other.

The “phenomenological” method according to Emmanuel Lévinas consists of two steps: first, reducing the said (le dit) to the saying (le dire); and second, “hyperbole” in his own words. Reducing the said to the saying, in itself, means in this context of the methodology a method to escape from ontology and cognitive philosophy, and to discover the dimension of inter-human facticity. In the second step of “hyperbole”, Lévinas outlines the horizon of this inter-human facticity as that of affectivity. In this horizon (of ethics), the self is defined as phenomena containing the affectivity related to the two extreme situations: personal (physical and mental) suffering and that of the other. Ultimately, the death of the other person and a person’s own possible death limit the internal structure of this horizon.

In this contribution the author tries to show the relation between Lévinas and Husserl regarding the question of language and tongue. He begins by explaining what is the conception of language in the Logical Investigations and of tongue in Ideas II. The former allows Husserl to develop a univocal language, whereas the second reinscribes the tongue in the body with his intersubjective dimension. Husserl will have an influence on Lévinas, but the latter will reject his conception of language, for being too formal, and hold Husserl’s concept of the tongue to be a presupposition. Thus, the tongue becomes the way the alterity of the other expresses itself, the way a meaning appears independently from the subject.

This text offers an analysis of the first French reaction to the thought of Heidegger as undertaken by Lévinas. It also seeks to highlight the roots of the uneasy dialogue that Lévinas had with a work which he considered to be at one and the same time “imprescriptible” and answerable for its ambiguities. Indeed, a reading of Lévinas’ pre-war texts demonstrates how his initial interpretation of the core concepts of Sein und Zeit, stretched to the limits by ambiguities, led him to deny the question of being any access to a genuine transcendence: contrary to its explicit treatment by Heidegger. Being itself, understood in the first instance by Lévinas as “determinism of being”, demands the movement of “escape” and the assumption of a truly ethical position, the latter in the early stages of his work remaining almost entirely implicit.

The identification of a post-modern art requires the determination of its implicit patterns of signification, as is the case with the modern art’s patterns of signification. In fact, the mere formal and stylistic analyses are not able to distinguish the post-modern art from the modern art. Actually, the specificity of minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture is founded on a phenomenological interpretation of subjective aesthetic experience (the reciprocal glance between who regards and what is regarded) and on a phenomenological interpretation of significance. In other words, this phenomenological interpretation gives a positive content to the concept of post-modern art.

This review-article aims to present the inner structure of J.-L. Marion’s book of 2003, Le phénomène érotique. Although closely related to the former development of the phenomenology of donation, his analysis of the concept of love discloses significantly new philosophical elements as it shows the pre-eminence, own rationality and univocity of this concept. My paper basically takes into account the question of the individuation of the other and of the self within the saturated phenomenon of love. I discuss the coherence and conceptual consistency of its “figures” and description. I also try to suggest the possibility to question further in the direction of God as “the third” who grants or attests the individuation of the lovers in a unique common erotic phenomenon. Eventually, I claim that his overwhelming importance might affect the “two-entrance” phenomenon of love and the definition of the lover whose figure he is supposed to assume in his manifestation.

Derrida’s intellectual itinerary shows a progressive reconciliation with Lévinas’ ethical thinking. “Violence and Metaphysics”, one of Derrida’s earlier essays, was highly critical of Lévinas’ “phallotheology”, whereas his later works were more receptive to the Levinasian analysis on hospitality, “cities of refuge” (villes-refuges) and justice. This essay will discuss the mutual terminological exchanges between Derrida and Lévinas as well as some divergences between the two thinkersregarding the deconstruction project. Finally, we will see how Derrida distinguishes himself from Lévinas’ ethics by bringing an end to the search for the conditions of possibility of experience in favour of a more radical experience of the impossible and the inconditional.

This paper attempts to show that the diachronic temporality introduced in the second major work of Levinas is profoundly influenced by the genetic dimension of the Husserlian account of time. It is argued that the different phenomena of this genetic-diachronic temporality, like the past which was never present, the originary retention, and the unpredictable present, are sustaining not just the central idea of Otherwise than being, that of an originary ethical subject, but alsothe description of the relation with the other, and the phenomenology of language present in this work.