Renaud Barbaras
Encyclopedia
Renaud Barbaras is a French contemporary philosopher. An École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud
alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the Sorbonne.
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
. More recently, his readings of Czech philosopher Jan Patocka
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 :
École normale supérieure lettres et sciences humaines
The École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, or ENS LSH, was an elite French grande école specialising in the arts, humanities and social sciences...
alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the Sorbonne.
Philosophy
A phenomenologist, his works have primarily focused on the philosophies of Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
. More recently, his readings of Czech philosopher Jan Patocka
Jan Patocka
Jan Patočka is considered one of the most important contributors to Czech philosophical phenomenology, as well as one of the most influential central European philosophers of the 20th century...
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.”
Selected works
- De l'être du phénomène. Sur l'ontologie de Merleau-Ponty, Grenoble, J. Millon, « Krisis », 1991.
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- english translation by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Indiana University Press, 2004.
- La Perception. Essai sur le sensible, Paris, Hatier, « Optiques, Philosophie », 1994. Rééd. Paris, Vrin, 2009.
- Merleau-Ponty, Paris, Ellipses, « Philo-Philosophes », 1997.
- Le tournant de l'expérience. Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, Paris, Vrin, « Histoire de la philosophie », 1998.
- Le désir et la distance. Introduction à une phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Vrin, « Problèmes et controverses », 1999.
- english translation by Paul B. Milan, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception, Standford University Press, 2005.
- Vie et intentionnalité. Recherches phénoménologiques, Paris, Vrin, 2003.
- Introduction à la philosophie de Husserl, Éditions de la Transparnce, 2004.
- Le mouvement de l'existence. Études sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patocka, Éditions de la Transparence, 2007.
- Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie, Paris, Vrin, 2008.
- L'ouverture du monde : Lecture de Jan Patocka, Editions de la Transparence, 25 août 2011
- La vie lacunaire, Paris, Vrin, 19 septembre 2011
- english translation by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Indiana University Press, 2004.
Articles translated in English
- Life, Movement, and Desire., Research in Phenomenology 38 (1):3-17.
- Affectivity and Movement: The Sense of Sensing in Erwin Straus. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (2):215-228.
- Francisco Varela: A New Idea of Perception and Life. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2):127-132