When Derrida translated and commented on Husserl’s manuscript The Origin of Geometry in 1962, he gave a central place to what Husserl called the Idea “in the Kantian sense”. This article reflects on the use and function of this Idea in Derrida’s reading of Husserl. It critically interrogates the relationship between the Idea in the Kantian sense and mathematical ideality, as well as the use of this Idea in the interpretation of the Thing (Ding) and the stream of experience (Erlebnisstrom). (...) In the centre of the discussion stands what Derrida calls “pure thinking”, on which he tries to ground the Idea in the Kantian sense. (shrink)

As is well known, Deleuze reproaches Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and other classical phenomenologists for having burdened their descriptions of experience with structures derived from the empirical (in which the world is differentiated into objects of consciousness). His transcendental empiricism, by contrast, investigates the very genesis of the empirical within the immediate flow of an asubjective transcendental field. However, both Deleuze in his texts and Deleuzian literature dealing with his relationship with phenomenology almost completely ignore contemporary French phenomenology focusing, similarly to (...) Deleuze, on the dynamic or eventful dimension of reality. This article examines some of the intersections between contemporary phenomenology in France (Maldiney, Richir, Marion) and Deleuze’s metaphysics with regard to the question common both to phenomenology and Deleuze: that of the crisis of humanity, especially with regard to its social aspect. The article’s main thesis is that the only possible solution to the crisis is an ethics of events, which includes a description of the deepest existential basis of social bonds, that is, the ‘common presence’ or ‘transcendental interfacticity’. (shrink)

In the final years of his life, the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir started to question if philosophical writing would become pointless when artists, great poets for example, have already achieved so well what philosophers have always aspired to achieve. There is no doubt that Richir considers himself in alliance with artists, since he basically believes that “phenomenology is trying to say the same thing as poets or musicians, or even possibly painters, but with philosophical language”. He seems thereby to imply (...) that phenomenology is destined to become self-aware as a sort of art. There is no surprise in this regard if we notice how frequently, throughout his entire career of philosophical production, he employs the Kantian term of the sublime to express what constitutes the phenomenon as nothing but phenomenon. This article goes through his phenomenological interpretation of Kantian aesthetics, his elaboration of the affinity between phenomenology and art, and then his genealogical conception of art, in order to introduce an original thought on what he calls “the moment of the sublime”. (shrink)