Claude Romano

There is a  tension in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception between two models for thinking corporeity, which can be called « the model of the flesh » and « the model of incorporation ». The first one is inherited from Husserlian phenomenology and consists in thinking the flesh or the lived body as an outbuilding of the transcendental ego. Conceived in this way, the lived body is constituted in immanence as the support of the redoubled  tactiles sensations and has no boundaries in objective space. It can be approached according to the duality of subject and object, immanence and transcendence, and is fully determined according to these distinctions. The second model, borrowed to Gabriel Marcel, points to the fundamental ambiguity of the lived body, hovering between « being » and « having », and thereby opening up a third dimension beyond the opposition between the subject and the object. I question whether these two models are compatible and, if it is claimed, as I do, that they are not, which model is to be favored. In this manner, I try to radicalize the gesture initiated by Merleau-Ponty.

Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has been often concluded by many interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that this paper challenges. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates, more generally, any “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, as he insists on the intrinsic connection between the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. The fundamental-ontological approach of Selbstheit and Selbstsein, that is, ipseity and Being-oneself, constitutes rather a complete paradigm-shift in the history of Modern philosophy, and a complete break with the egologies as a whole, since both concepts refer only to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein. Insofar as its novelty is aknowledged, the concept of ipseity may thus also be taken as an heuristic tool to investigate the history of philosophy, and especially to reformulate in slightly different terms the problem that was at the centre of the courses on « subjectivity and truth » of the late Foucault.

This paper explores the kaleidoscopic technique that is at work in As I Lay Dying, where a familiy, made of heterogeneous members, is decomposed then recomposed as they suffer the pressure of physical and moral strain. The family members somehow evoke the glass pieces of the colourful rose. Examining the kaleidoscopic dimension of As I Lay Dying makes it possible  to grasp what is going on between the characters. Two characters, whose polarity structures the whole narrative, will more particularly be the centers of attention : on the one hand Jewel, who is fully riveted to life as he is welded to his horse ; on the other hand Darl, who is uprooted and keeps floating along the uncertainties of his own life. His words are strongly reminiscent of Hamlet's monologues. More generally, this article looks into the binary opposition between life and existence in Faulkner's writing.

What does the ostensibly innocuous phrase “das Selbst” (the self) exactly mean in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has been often concluded by many interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that the current paper attempts to challenge. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates any “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, and he insists on the intrinsic connection be- tween the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. What seems to be at stake in the fundamental-ontological approach of Sebstheit and Selbstsein, Being-oneself, is rather a complete paradigm-shift, since both concepts refer to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein, and no lon- ger at all to a self-identical being of a condition of its self-identity. In trying to investigate the economy of the related existential concepts of Jemeinigkeit, Selbstheit and Man-selbst, this article makes the claim that Heidegger’s break with egology is much deeper that it has been often thought, and that the phe- nomenologist raises a completely new question, rather than trying to give a new response to older ones.

The aim of this paper is to reassess the consistency of one of the most important concepts of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology – although an often neglected one – the concept of Selfhood (Selbstheit), or Ipseity. In emphasizing the importance of Heidegger’s claim that Selfhood refers to a way of being of Dasein, by contrast with another, the loss of oneself in the “They”, and not to an entity of any sort, I try to draw out some consequences that follow for understanding the semantic economy of this concept, especially in connection with criticisms formulated against Heideggerian selfhood by Vincent Descombes from a Wittgensteinian perspective. The last section of the paper is an attempt to reformulate this concept of Selfhood, trying both to do justice to Heidegger’s original intuitions and to avoid the grammatical “perplexities” that they are liable to elicit.

he «table of nothing» occupies a prominent role within the Critique of Pure Reason, since it is there that Kant brings into play the very meaning of transcendental philosophy. However, even though the Kantian conception of nothing marks the peculiarity of critical philosophy, the vocabu- lary that expresses it inexorably invokes the tradition in which Kant works. he text, in fact, unveils its deep bond to Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, to Wolf, as well as to Medieval Scholastics. Such a bond marks Kantian philosophy in a twofold way: it pushes it beyond and at the same time it keeps it anchored to the philosophical tradition of its time. he analysis of the «table of nothing», therefore, will ofer us the opportunity to both see to what extent the multiple senses of ‘nothing’ are the privileged place in which Kant grounds the speciicity of critical philosophy, and examine the deep bond between Kant and the philosophical tradition.

En mis dos obras consagradas al problema del acontecimiento siempre he formulado mi pensar en los términos de un pensamiento de la ipseidad y no del yo (moi). Hoy son numerosos los autores que emplean estos dos conceptos como cuasisinónimos. Sin embargo, pienso que ambos conceptos responden a un tipo diferente de preguntas y que deben ser distinguidos. Este es el punto que quisiera aclarar en las reflexiones siguientes retomando al primer autor que ha hecho un uso peculiar de un concepto que en francés se traduce usualmente por «ipseidad», a saber, el concepto heideggeriano de Selbstheit. Por tanto, la siguiente exposición será una tentativa de explicación del concepto de ipseidad partiendo de Heidegger, y una defensa en favor de este concepto, como una alternativa a aquel –mucho más problemático a mis ojos– de yo (moi); una alternativa al camino de las egologías que han triunfado en la filosofía desde Descartes hasta Husserl.

The aim of this paper is to provide an outline of a position that, until now, hasn't been much considered in the debates between idealism and realism, namely the position that is labelled by the author “realism of the life-world”. This realism claims that our experience opens onto the world itself, that is, the world in its independence with respect to our mind – an independence resting on the material a priori structures that govern this world ; but it also claims that this phenomenal world, as the place of our lives, remains nonetheless different from physical reality as it is conceived of and determined by the scientist. Inspired by Husserl's critique of objectivism in the Krisis, such a realism gives a different status to the life-world than the one it has in Husserl's view, since it dismisses the transcendental turn and, along with it, the concept of “constitution”. It underscores the tension and even the contradiction taking place between Husserl's ideal- ism (the claim of a complete dependency of the world with respect to consciousness, based on the hypothesis of a world-annihilation expressed in § 49 of Ideas I) and the claim of material a priori that give to this world its absolutely necessary structures, independently of the subject experiencing it.

Taking the problem of perception and illusion as a leading clue, this article presents a new phenomenological approach to perception and the world: “holism of experience.” It challenges not only Husserl’s transcendentalism, but also what remains of it in Heidegger’s early thought, on the grounds that it is committed to the skeptical inference: “Since we can always doubt any perception, we can always doubt perception as a whole.” The rejection of such an implicit inference leads to a relational paradigm of Being-in-the-World that differs from Heidegger’s on many points.

Riproporre oggi il problema dell'attualità del gesto fenomenologico, o, per riprendere la domanda di Croce a proposito di Hegel, di "ciò che è vivo e di ciò che è morto" nella fenomenologia, presuppone di collocare quest'ultima nel contesto della filosofia nel suo complesso, e quindi di confrontarla con altre correnti e altri metodi. Questo è il pro-getto del libro di Claude Romano, unico nel suo genere. La tesi è che la fenomenologia non può essere compresa solo come un ri-torno all'esperienza, o una filosofia descrit-tiva; ciò che è in gioco in essa è la questione dei rapporti tra linguaggio ed esperienza, la messa in luce di strutture prelinguistiche im-manenti all'esperienza stessa e di significati "muti" che la attraversano. In poche parole, la riproposizione del problema della ragione. La fenomenologia ha infatti opposto a una razionalità striminzita (quella della logica e della matematica) quel che Husserl chiama-va una razionalità "di gran cuore", capace di accogliere in sé il suo altro, cioè la sensibili-tà. Quello che la fenomenologia ha elabora-to prevalentemente è una nuova immagine della ragione. In questo lavoro di ridefinizione della feno-menologia e dei suoi compiti, tramite un dia-logo sostenuto tra filosofia analitica e conti-nentale, Romano ci propone una traversata dell'intero pensiero contemporaneo.



"Lo scopo di questo libro è quello di elaborare i problemi che stanno alla base della fenomenologia storica, o meglio, di elevare la fenomenologia stessa al rango di un problema. Se, in filosofia, la precisione delle domande ha la meglio sulla certezza delle risposte, e se dietro ogni affermazione si nasconde una domanda che spesso bisogna scoprire, elevare la fenomenologia al rango di problema non è un'impresa così facile come la coscienza comune potrebbe credere. In ogni momento, in ogni tappa, abbiamo cercato non soltanto di ricostruire quel che la fenomenologia è stata, ma ci siamo anche domandati quel che dovrebbe essere".

Dans cet ouvrage, Claude Romano cherche à penser à nouveaux frais la méthode phénoménologique en dialogue avec d’autres courants de la philosophie contemporaine et notamment la philosophie analytique.
Cette réflexion s’ordonne autour de trois axes principaux. Tout d’abord, la question des rapports entre langage et expérience qui a eu tendance à être reléguée au second plan par le linguistic turn, à partir des années 70, et qui resurgit aujourd’hui dans le sillage des recherches empiriques en linguistique et dans les sciences de l’esprit : le langage n’exige-t-il pas, pour pouvoir être compris dans sa spécificité, que l’on interroge ses liens avec des significations pré-linguistiques qui se font jour au niveau de notre expérience même du monde ? Ensuite, la question du réalisme : la phénoménologie entretient-elle une affinité nécessaire avec l’idéalisme, comme ont eu tendance à le croire un certain nombre de disciples de Husserl, ou ne nous met-elle pas plutôt sur la voie d’un réalisme qui demanderait à être reformulé ? Enfin, comment une phénoménologie réaliste et soucieuse d’une articulation plus fine entre expérience et langage permet-elle d’approcher de manière renouvelée des phénomènes « classiques », par exemple le corps (qui n’est plus une chair acosmique), les émotions (qui ne sont plus de simples vécus de conscience), ou encore l’habitude ?

L’Odyssée, le plus ancien poème de la culture occidentale, met en scène la métamorphose qui change Ulysse en lui-même sous les yeux dessillés de ceux qui échouaient jusque-là à le reconnaître.
Ulysse constitue ainsi la première d’une longue série de figures donnant corps à cette opération mystérieuse : le passage de l’existence en régime d’obscurité à l’existence « en personne », dans une forme de vérité. Que signifie un tel passage ? Comment s’opère cette transition? Quelles formes cette idée d’existence en personne a-t-elle pu revêtir dans la pensée occidentale ?
Claude Romano interroge les sources, y compris lointaines, de cette idée d’« existence en vérité » telle qu’elle sous-tend notamment l’idéal moderne d’authenticité personnelle, en retraçant la généalogie de cet idéal et en exhumant certaines de ses formes plus anciennes. Chemin faisant, le lecteur découvre différents types et régimes de discours, philosophique, mais aussi théologique, spirituel, rhétorique, littéraire, esthétique. Romano esquisse ainsi une histoire de la philosophie occidentale aux contours bien différents de ceux qu’on lui prête généralement : à l’écart des grandes métaphysiques du moi et de la subjectivité, il emprunte les chemins de traverse d’une enquête sur les formes de vie et les modes d’existence.

On connaît de Charles Larmore (1950), philosophe moral américain contemporain, ses célèbres objections à John Rawls, mais peu de travaux se concentrent sur sa philosophie: son réalisme moral, sa réhabilitation partielle de l’idéal d’authenticité, sa version du libéralisme politique ou encore à sa théorie normativiste du moi. Ce sont ces différents aspects de sa pensée que les études contenues dans ce volume, premier ouvrage entièrement consacré à l’œuvre de Charles Larmore, interrogent et mettent en perspective. Un essai inédit du philosophe américain ainsi qu’un débat entre Charles Larmore et Alain Renaut autour de la controverse réalisme-idéalisme y figurent également, en guise de conclusion.

In At the Heart of Reason, Claude Romano boldly calls for a reformulation of the phenomenological project. He contends that the main concern of phenomenology, and its originality with respect to other philosophical movements of the last century, such as logical empiricism, the grammatical philosophy of Wittgenstein, and varieties of neo-Kantianism, was to provide a "new image of Reason."
Against the common view, which restricts the range of reason to logic and truth-theory alone, Romano advocates "big-hearted rationality," including in it what is only ostensibly its opposite, that is, sensibility, and locating in sensibility itself the roots of the categorical forms of thought. Contrary to what was claimed by the "linguistic turn," language is not a self-enclosed domain; it cannot be conceived in its specificity unless it is led back to its origin in the pre-predicative or pre-linguistic structures of experience itself.


REVIEWS :
"Claude Romano, one of the leading phenomenologists of his generation, takes on a crucial challenge: to compare so-called continental phenomenology and its analytic opponents. Very well aware of both traditions, his impressive scholarship explains why phenomenology, if revisited and revised, may remain the living heart of rationality for the future."
--Jean-Luc Marion, author of Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology

Claude Romano's magnificent book comes as a breath of fresh air. Not content to interpret the texts of this or that great phenomenologist of the past, Romano’s concern is to return phenomenology to its original ambition of describing "the things themselves," the essential features of human experience. He focuses on the underlying assumptions that have always animated the phenomenological movement, then revises and enriches them by way of a dialogue with opposing views that are current today. The result is a book that all philosophers will read with interest and profit, whatever their philosophical affiliation.
--Charles Larmore, author of The Practices of the Self