In this paper I argue that we need to analyze ‘religious violence’ in the ‘post-secular context’ in a twofold way: rather than simply viewing it in terms of mere irrationality, senselessness, atavism, or monstrosity – terms which, as we witness today on an immense scale, are strongly endorsed by the contemporary theater of cruelty committed in the name of religion – we also need to understand it in terms of an ‘originary supplement’ of ‘disengaged reason’. In order to confront its (...) specificity beyond traditional explanations of violence, I propose an integrated phenomenological account of religion that traces the phenomenality of religion in terms of a correlation between the originary givenness of transcendence and capable man’s creative capacities to respond to it. Following Ricœur, I discuss ‘religious violence’ in terms of a monopolizing appropriation of the originary source of givenness that conflates man’s freedom to poetically respond to the appeal of the foundational with the surreptitiously claimed sovereignty to make it happen in a practical transfiguration of the everyday. (shrink)

Is the phenomenological concept of “body” not, in general, an ideal? The purpose of this article is to defend this thesis within the scope of the French phenomenological tradition. The French phenomenological concept of “lived body” points to an ideal, rather than to our actual experience of the body; and this ideal is none other than that of the soul. The Cartesian ideal of the soul becomes, in the French phenomenological tradition, the ideal of the body—of a body that is (...) determined, in return, by the soul’s properties. The French concept of “lived body” results indeed from two forms of idealization that will be exposed successively: the epistemological idealization that consists in attributing, to the body, the soul’s mode of knowledge as a cogito; the practical idealization that consists in attributing, to the body, the soul’s mode of power and action as an unlimited will. This twofold gesture finds its paradigmatic expression in Michel Henry’s phenomenology of the body, but can also be seen at work in Sartre, Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the discourse around evil from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Through an analysis of the religious symbolism of evil and an associated quest for a complete study of being, I intend in this article to explore fresh ways of establishing the relation between our rhetorical practices of evil and moral responsibility. I draw on Ricoeur’s work on the primary symbols of evil, which can be seen as a means for clarifying and extending our understanding of (...) evil and moral responsibility. I employ the concept of “the double intentionality of symbol” to advance an expressive-performative model of speaking about the full shape of moral responsibility. At stake in my paper is the possibility of recognizing the need to valorise subordinate resources of knowledge that might prevent us from studying and responding to the elusive reality of evil in intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

Le besoin de narrer a non seulement créé des poèmes épiques et de nombreuses mythologies, il est, selon P. Ricoeur, le noyau même de la création de la connaissance de soi. Le processus d’identification à travers la narration ne nous amène pas à nous focaliser sur notre propre narration. Nous rencontrons toujours d’abord les narrations des autres puis commençons seulement à raconter l’histoire de notre vie. À travers le processus d’imitation, la mimesis, comme l’entend Ricoeur, nous pouvons en même temps (...) apprendre tant l’éthique que la morale. Le monde global, avec ses narrations simplifiées du marché, tente de rester proche de la première et la deuxième mimesis et ne peut accéder à la troisième, à partir de laquelle seulement on peut commencer à parler de créativité. L’auteur compare les points de vue philosophiques de Ricoeur sur l’identité à l’expérience littéraire de Frisch dans l’ouvrage Je ne suis pas Stiller. Les deux sont l’exemple d’un entrelacement herméneutique qui mène à l’identité naturelle. Dans ce processus herméneutique, nous pouvons nous redécouvrir dans un monde où nous respecterons notre propre identité en étant ouverts à ses transformations créatives. (shrink)

Contemporary studies of the phenomenon of attention uncritically suppose that the only way to go about observing attention is as a modification of consciousness. Consciousness is taken to be always intentional, i.e., distinguished by reference to an object-whether physical or not-toward which it is directed. Observers of attention therefore assume that attention is an intentional modification of consciousness. Such practices of observation, in virtue of the kinds of practices that they are, take for granted that the fundamental constituents of reality (...) are subjects and objects. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger discovered that belief in the world as divided into subjects and objects is merely a convenience designed for the purpose of making a certain kind of sense of experience intelligible-a belief that operates as a controlling assumption which forces the world, if it is to be intelligible, to show up under the oppressively confined ontology that was originally introduced merely as an observational convenience. My work contributes to the prevalent literature an examination of these presuppositions by reconsidering what the landscape of attention studies would look like without the importation of the confinement of a world reduced to subjects in interaction with objects. I do this first by returning to the fundamental and yet strangely forgotten insights into the question that Husserl and Heidegger provided. Then I explore through some of the autobiographical work of Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Pascal a pathway by which we might think differently about what it is to pay attention. I conclude that attention might also be understood as a kind of waiting that does not specify an object, but rather a posture, a way of being that necessarily manifests itself prior to any sort of prejudged or anticipated object. The contribution of my work will serve the community of observers of attention by forcing them to explain what it is to pay attention without reliance on the subject-object distinction. (shrink)