Region Western Philosophy | Role Philosopher Name Renaud Barbaras | |
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Areas of interest Perception, Philosophy of life, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, World, Metaphysics Books La Perception, Desire and Distance, Le désir et la distance Influenced by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patocka, Henri Bergson, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger Similar People Leonard Lawlor, Mauro Carbone, Jocelyn Benoist, Jean‑Francois Courtine | ||
Philosophical era Contemporary philosophy | ||
Merleau ponty patocka phenomenologie de l intimite renaud barbaras
Renaud Barbaras (born in 1955) is a French contemporary philosopher. An École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the Sorbonne.
Contents
- Merleau ponty patocka phenomenologie de l intimite renaud barbaras
- Renaud Barbaras Introduction la philosophie de Husserl
- Philosophy
- Selected works
- Articles translated in English
- References
Renaud Barbaras, Introduction à la philosophie de Husserl.
Philosophy
A phenomenologist, his works have primarily focused on the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. More recently, his readings of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka have influenced him into conceiving a phenomenology of life and accordingly, a cosmology in which man's place is to be thought anew.
In 1999, Renaud Barbaras begins to build his own philosophy as he is confronted with the apories of the philosophy of the late Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher he worked on for his PhD. Subtitled "an introduction to a phenomenology of perception" in homage to the author of Visible and invisible, Barbaras' Desire and distance addresses the consequences of the Abschattungslehre neither Husserl nor Merleau-Ponty managed to be coherent with: his idea is to be faithful to the principle according to which the fact that we only perceive one side of the things around us doesn't mean we don't perceive them as themselves. This is what he calls not submitting perception to the law of object (or objectivity): the mistake he spots is the prejudice we have to think our way of perceiving as imperfect in comparison to the supposed plenitude of the things themselves. But to be consequent would be to acknowledge the fact that nothing can appear if not to a subject. This doesn't mean the subject is constituting the object, but merely that he is a part of the process of manifestation. To be a part of and not to be constituting: this requires a new definition of subjectivity, which Barbaras tries to give through the conception of a subject based on the natural movement and what he calls desire:
"We began our inquiry on the being of the intramondaneous subject with the relation, phenomenologically attested, between perception and movement. Now, this relation no longer represents any difficulty. It is plainly justified by the fact desire consists in experiencing its own limits. Indeed, since perception is only possible through the limitation of a totality, every perception essentially calls for its overtaking by a movement. Perceiving, in the end, is always passing to something else. And this doesn't only mean that a perception may give way to another perception, but that perception consists in giving way to something else because, since perception is desire, a reality is only to be grasped as something essentially missing."