A highly original and interdisciplinary study of the philosophy of the everyday.

Dans cet article, je montre que le concept du double joue un rôle crucial, mais secret dans le Moïse de Freud. Freud prétend que Moïse a été assassiné par son peuple pour être remplacé ultérieurement par un autre Moïse. Cependant, je soutiens que cette logique d’assassinat et de dédoublement caractérise toutes les figures héroïques qui ne sont que des doubles les unes des autres. Le véritable objectif de Freud est de s’établir lui-même comme le double héroïque de Moïse. De cette (...) manière, il tente de garantir la survie de son héritage puisque, même s’il meurt, d’autres doubles viendraient pour continuer son œuvre. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the role of naturalism and objectivism in everyday life according to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Husserl attributes the naturalistic attitude mainly to science, he defines the objectivist attitude as a naiveté which equally applies to the natural attitude of everyday life. I analyse the relationship between the natural attitude and lived experience and show Husserl's hesitation regarding the task of phenomenology in describing the lived experience of everyday life, since he considers this experience to be (...) too objectivistic. I use Merleau-Ponty's work to argue that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and that phenomenology should therefore find ways to integrate it into its descriptions while simultaneously suggesting ways to overcome its rigidity in order to renew perception. I finally propose that the project of the naturalisation of phenomenology could be one of the ways to connect lived experience to the objectivism of everyday life. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two limit cases in which the body is threatened: the experience of emergency as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras, and the experience of illness as described by Jean-Luc Nancy in his autobiographical essay The Intruder. In the first case, the everyday relationship to the body is revealed to be illusionary; the body becomes a powerful yet obedient machine. In the second case, the everyday relationship to the body is also suspended, but this (...) time in favor of a weak and objectified body. I argue that these apparently opposite experiences actually presuppose a similar notion of the everyday body, which I further conceptualize, through Merleau-Ponty and his analysis of the body, as deficient and therefore inherently repressed. The paper concludes with the suggestion that writing about one’s own body may be seen as a way to fight the everyday tendency towards repression, and I propose overwriting as a term that can capture this process. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the role the double plays in the constitution of identity, focusing on the movement between the individual and the collective level. Notably, the latter today is often considered through the lens of identity politics. The double, I argue, poses an alternative to this type of politics, by showing the interdependence of groups. As a case study, this paper focuses on the complex relationship between the anti-Semite and the Jew as depicted by Sartre. I begin with (...) a psychoanalytical examination of the figure of the double,follow on with an analysis of Sartre's work in the light of the double, and conclude with Girard's theory of mimetic desire. (shrink)

In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, the famous sophist recounts the myth of how mortal creatures were created. The gods, he says, gave the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus the task to deal out to each creature the equipment of its proper faculty. Yet Epimetheus, literally the afterthinker, asked Prometheus, the forethinker, to distribute the qualities himself: “‘And when I have dealt,’ he said, ‘you shall examine’”. So Epimetheus distributed to each animal qualities according to a principle of equilibrium and compensation, each becoming (...) either swift or strong, skilled or large, and thereafter he provided all creatures with their appropriate food and clothing. Only then, however, did he realize that, lacking... (shrink)