The aim of this article is to analyze the idea of the event conceived as crisis and conflict in Patočka and Maldiney’s philosophies. The event is what tears the horizon of the meaningful world apart and opens a new world: it represents the opening of a crisis in the human existence and at the same time the condition of any future crisis to come. By reading Maldiney’s texts on the “pathique” and psychosis along with Patočka’s descriptions of historical existence, we shall then discover that human existence is exposed (and responds) to this chaotic and conflictual dimension. In fact, what defines existence—the individual existence (Maldiney) as well as the historical, shared existence (Patočka)—is the exposure to such a conflict and to the critical event, i.e. to the possibility of its own shaking. Furthermore, the event appears as the root of both the krisis and the “koine”, whether in the form of the encounter (Maldiney) or the community cohesion (Patočka).

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.

This article attempts to elaborate on the Derridean idea of transcendental violence and his idea of “violence against violence.” It does this by examining the structure of the gift as Derrida presents it in Given Time. The article lays out in detail all of the conditions for the gift Derrida presents across Given Time. More precisely, it examines Derrida’s analysis of the giving of counterfeit money. The conclusion it draws is that the giving of counterfeit money comes closest to the golden mean between exchange and non-exchange (or pure gift-giving), the golden mean between violence and non-violence. But the open question is: should we prescribe the giving of counterfeit money for all gift-giving and even for human relations of friendship and love?

The aim of the present article is to offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s account of the unfolding of language by analyzing the notion of Geläut der Stille, “sounding gathering of silence.” Taking as a starting point the experience of silence described by Stefan George in his poem “The Word,” the article presents the opposition between silence and the sounding words, showing that the latter coincide with the language we speak. The passage from silence to the spoken language belongs to the unfolding of language itself, which presents itself as a translation of silence, redefining thus what translation originally is. The latter, understood as violence and harmony, gathers itself under the term of “rift,” overcoming thus the ontological difference and offering us a radically new perspective over the nature of “relation” within Heidegger’s thinking.

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a pre-eminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.

The most interesting example of all the physical images that Sartre examines in L’Imaginaire concerns a female performer’s (Franconay’s) imitation of a male performer (Chevalier). The example is a unique instance in which Sartre deals explicitly with the possibility of ambiguity and hybridity in consciousness. Sartre’s introduction of the sign into the consciousness of imitation ties the perception of Franconay with the imaged Chevalier, but it also leads to the dissemination of the sign across the entire consciousness, a consequence that runs against Sartre’s analytic tendencies. I argue that, despite Sartre’s endeavor to keep the sign separate from perception and the image, the sign is a diffuse property of the entire consciousness of imitation, penetrating and contaminating its every instant. Sartre’s account of Franconay’s imitation contains the germs of the destruction of his clear-cut analytic distinctions, revealing the irreducible hybridity of the sign with both perception and the image.

Jan Patočka is usually connected with Czech dissidence, a political movement which stood up against the communist government. We want to defend the hypothesis that the notion of dissidence is not originally a political one but, above all, a phenomenological one. Dissidence is a movement of distancing which implies a rootedness, and this movement of distancing is peculiar to human beings. Patočka calls “movement of human existence” this paradoxical rootedness which is an extramundane and mundane position. Thus, we have to review the theory of the three movements of human existence. While it is tempting to separate the third movement, as a movement of transcendence, and to describe it as a political dissidence, we would like to show that the three movements (and not only the third), have to be understood as Dissidence.