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.

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.

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.