Exteriority and Immanence 2. Existence and Incarnation 3. The Absolute Domains of Survey 2. Metabolism 3. Desire as the Essence of Being-Alive 2. Desire and the Correlation 3. The Subject and the World Conclusion Index. Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life is a major work that recasts phenomenology as a phenomenology of life. The phenomenology of life is replaced by something I would call a speculative genealogy of life. We can see this, for instance, in the way Barbaras deals with the anthropological difference.
The difference between the human and the non-human form of life is explained in terms of a differentiation from a common origin or—as Barbaras puts it—« au sein de la vie, » that is, a differentiation within life Barbaras, , Human consciousness proceeds from this common and undifferentiated life by way of a gradual limitation. Whereas life as such is opened to the world, human consciousness is object directed. The infinitely rich and original relation of life to the world gets replaced, when it comes to human beings, by the limited and narrow relation of consciousness to its object.
First, we arrive at the human being by taking away certain features of life as such, and, second, the anthropological difference is stated not as a part of a descriptive or comparative phenomenology which compares man, animal, vegetable, and mineral, but as a part of the dynamic idea of life as a process of differentiation from a single common ground or within one common ground. The obvious question is what kind of becoming does Barbaras have in mind.
Or is this some other kind of becoming? Nevertheless, this time it is an appearing in a more radical sense, not becoming manifest for somebody, but the very process of individuation. It is impossible to cover here all aspects of this original and rich work. Yet he substantiates this move by his own reading of some decisive Husserlian passages, especially the ones on the perceptual appearing of things.
They are never fully given to us in particular appearances, yet there is no sense to posit them as existing independently from these appearances: things exist as appearing.
Our experience of this or that thing can continue, because a new appearance of the same thing—i. Barbaras epitomizes this Husserlian description of the process of appearing as follows: the givenness by adumbrations [« la donation par esquisses »], the capacity that I have to continue the course of perception in the light of the actual aspects of the object presupposes that the possibility to continue my experience is, so to say, warranted [« garantie »].
This warranty cannot be based on the givenness of the object, because it is precisely the continuation of experience that, on the contrary, will constitute the object. In other words, if the scene or the prerequisite framework, within which the experience can take place, were not given in advance, I could have never moved forward in the course of adumbrations: the continuation of the experience, which is itself a condition of the object, presupposes the pre-givenness of the continuability of this experience.
Barbaras seems to restate the idea elaborated by Husserl, i. In Husserl, we cannot localize the structure of the horizon simply and exclusively on the side of the world. It is always the structure of an individual thing as it appears to somebody, to a perceiving subject. On the on hand, there is the internal horizon of other possible experiences in which the same thing can be given to me, and, on the other hand, there is the external horizon of my exploration of the surroundings of the same thing.
It is thanks to this double horizon that my experience can carry on and continuously reveal what is real see also Merleau-Ponty, , The experience is inconceivable without its counterpart the object and its horizons , but it is no less true that the horizon prefigures the possibilities of the subject of experience.
This is a decisive point. Barbaras himself would not qualify this step as an abandon of the idea of correlation and of phenomenology as such.
Moreover, when replying to the objection, Barbaras suggests that it presupposes a mistaken concept of appearing. Th is is an interesting point: when trying to prove his point, Barbaras makes the phenomenological concept of appearing even more subjective that it has to be. As I suggested in the first section of this article, the fact, that we experience something e. The need for another concept of manifestation might be but a result of a mistaken over-subjectification of the phenomenological concept of manifestation.
The prominent example of such a movement is the human existence: a human being does not pre-exist to its possible actualizations, moreover, it exists in the way it grasps and carries out its possibilities. Everything which exists is in movement: there is not an apple that ripens i.
Barbaras incorporates this into his own philosophical project by stating: after we have taken into account the special mode of being which is our own existence, we are led to recognize that it makes part of a more general process of manifestation, of an ontogenetic movement, in relation to which the movement of our own existence is but a privileged attestation. Since the individuation represents the most fundamental feature of the world, it is ultimately to the world that the life should be attributed.
Barbaras explores this idea that life—in the most fundamental sense—is life of the world, both in La dynamique de la manifestation Barbaras, , and, earlier in the article « Vie de la conscience et vie du monde » Barbaras, a, — which is basically a brief sketch of what would became the book.
It is here that the shift from the life of consciousness and of organisms to the life of the world gets accomplished: the life which is attested by our own movements is never a life of one particular living being; it is always already the life of the world itself. Consequently, we belong to the world not because we are living beings; on the contrary, we are alive because we belong to the world, as far as it holds true that—phenomenologically understood—the being of the world is the being of the process in which the original meaning of life becomes manifest.
The physei onta are defined by the capacity of spontaneous movement. Again, certain objections can reasonably be summoned. Let us mention but two of them. First, it is a different concept of life than the concepts Barbaras has referred to thus far. At this stage, life is—conceptually—identified with the spontaneity of movement. And second, if we take life as a feature of the world than the concept of life loses its discriminative capacity to set apart what is living from what is not.
Life is the life of things, « la vie des choses » Barbaras, a, , be they animate or inanimate. The animate and the inanimate beings differ in the way they relate to the originating archi-life: the inanimate being are completely dependent on the archi- life, while the animate beings are capable to separate themselves. Barbaras is not afraid to draw radical conclusions which comprise also the re-definition of the concept of death.
From these highly original observations, there is one conclusion we may draw for the purpose of our article: when responding to the charge of animism, Barbaras introduces a separation of two distinct concepts of life, the archi-life the life of the world and the organic life being alive.
Moreover, he radicalizes the distinction by articulating it in terms as life and death, i. His phenomenological and cosmological account avoids the charge of subjectivism by claiming the subjective concept of phenomenon to be a derivative one. I cannot deal in detail with the charge of anthropocentrism, but one thing seems to be clear: it is weakened, or at least modified by the fact that Barbaras has introduced a negative anthropology.
All in all, Barbaras develops an impressive philosophy of life that is less vulnerable to the charge of subjectivism and anthropocentrism than the phenomenology of life which can be drawn from Husserl, Heidegger or even Merleau-Ponty. Nevertheless, there are questions that remain and that can be articulated by means of the double plurality that I described at the beginning of this article. In the works of Renaud Barbaras, we find the plurality of attribution: life is attributed to organisms, consciousness the subject that stands in correlation to something , and, lastly, the world.
And there is also the plurality of meaning. The ambition of Barbaras is to show the unity of these levels and meanings of life. If I hesitate to follow Barbaras in his attempt, it is for two reasons. First, Barbaras himself is at certain points compelled to acknowledge that there is a discontinuity between a certain concept of life e. Secondly, I believe that phenomenology does not need to be supplemented by a cosmology. Phenomenology is not bound to be a way to a unifying theory of the different forms and meanings of life.
Certainly, there is life—our own life—in our perceiving of things in our surroundings. And there is life—our own life—when we understand our own existence as a task. Possibly in this gaze of an animal, to which we can be exposed, the boundary between man and animal starts to tremble, as Derrida suggests.
These are diverse experiences of life in a different sense. Still such a statement can be developed into a phenomenological analysis of the way life is indeed experienced in different meanings.
Paris: Vrin, Barbaras, R. Desire and Distance. Introduction to a Phenomenology of perception. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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The Structure of Behavior. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Phenomenology of Perception. London, New York: Routledge. Schrader Eds. Berlinger, — Amsterdam: Rodopi. Body, Community, Language, World. Portman, A.
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