Search Results (19)

Although there has been an increasing focus on religious and spiritual experience in literary studies within the context of post-critical and post-secular movements, much of the research is framed around the idea of “upward transcendence” in redemption narratives. This focus tends to overlook the negative aspects of life, such as absurdity, meaninglessness, and existential anxiety. Furthermore, it frequently resonates with capitalist ideals that champion a “seamless existence” while dismissing the unrefined essence of materiality. This article engages in two main tasks: First, it emphasizes the negative dimensions of religious and spiritual experience, drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of theological and non-theological literature. Second, it expands the definition and scope of religious and spiritual experience, proposing an alternative paradigm based on absurdity and meaninglessness. This paradigm, “downward transcendence,” rejects the redemptive promise of “ascension” and redefines the sacred by engaging with the disruptive and unsettling fabric of existence, reconstructing the coordinates of the sacred within the fissures of reality. Through the case study of Sartre’s Nausea, the article explores how existential absurdity and meaninglessness can reconfigure the sacred, particularly through marginality and the transformative potential of negative experiences. It ultimately proposes downward transcendence as a radical reimagining of spiritual and existential freedom. Full article

Merleau-Ponty’s specific theory of negation has received surprisingly little attention within the literature. Given his engagement with Sartre, not to mention Hegel and Marx, one would think that this concept and its surrounding issues and problems would occupy a more central place within various readings and interpretations. This essay attempts to give some indications of how to think about a Merleau-Pontian theory of negativity specifically. By re-reading the “Temporality” chapter from Phenomenology of Perception in dialogue with later writings and lectures, I propose a theory of “integration” and “disintegration” of temporal passage in place of a dialectic of pure being and nothingness. This theory organizes various themes in Merleau-Ponty’s work, including sense-genesis and his references to the “scream of light”. Full article

As Sartre pointed out, philosophical questions are questions that each generation must ask themselves because only this promotes the feeling of being alive, which is especially true for existential questions closely related to time–space, the moment, and our society. Sartre placed his philosophy of existentialism in wartime and the social conditions of the time at the beginning of the 20th century. We can equate these conditions with today’s conditions; we are once again facing threats of war, and once again, we are facing chaotic conditions that increasingly lead to absurdity but are also entirely different. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the clarity and disambiguation of the 20th century no longer exist, as the relationships between beings and the world have drastically changed. We can observe that (1) the world is not one; there are two worlds, the physical and the cyber world and (2) being is not one; there are two beings (entities), human and AI-based forms of artificial life (ALF), between which there is a permanent tension. We advocate the thesis that in the society of the future, man must still play a master role; he must still be the being who will guide this society. Also, as Sartre claimed, each era must create its philosophy and consider real time–space. Responses to changes in this time–space also relate to existentialism in the 21st century. In this context, it is necessary to redefine the view of the future and the guidelines for the development of future society. Full article

Immediately after the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre offered a history of literature as part of his project to launch a new era of literary activity guided by his concept of littérature engagée or committed literature. This article examines Sartre’s approach to the construction of literary history, highlighting his use of periodisation, a thematics of shifting relationships between writers and readers, and frequent deployment of gendered rhetoric to support his arguments. It shows that Sartre repeatedly used gendered tropes that worked to associate women, females and/or femininity with characteristics generally devalued in European and other Western societies, such as passivity, ignorance and indecision. It is argued that the touchstone to which Sartre continually referred in formulating his literary history was Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs (Treason of the Intellectuals). The argument to be developed takes broad inspiration from the work of Hayden White on the analysis of historical texts, and follows his injunction that historians and readers of history need to become more conscious of how histories are made. Full article

Subsurface engineering projects with high socio-environmental impacts raise strong controversies among stakeholders, which often affects the projects’ implementation. These controversies originate from a loss of public confidence in the decision-making process, lack of information about new technologies, and the desire of some promoters to avoid conflict. The lack of methodologies to structure each stage of the debate can, in this context, lead to the crystallization of the stakeholders’ positions and to the failure of the project. To promote mutual understanding and constructive exchanges, this article presents a combination of methods based on psychosocial engineering principles to support debate and encourage stakeholders to participate with an openness posture. The method is based on a set of studies conducted as part of the “Social Governance for Subsurface Engineering” project and includes three stages: (1) develop stakeholders’ knowledge so that they are able to participate in the debate with an informed viewpoint; (2) commit stakeholders to participate in the debate by adopting a posture conducive to constructive exchanges; and (3) structure exchanges between stakeholders through the use of cooperative methods facilitating the adoption of an openness posture. Full article

This article provides the existential and phenomenological conditions for addiction by applying the concepts of lack, escape and ‘hypervirtuality’ in new ways to the subject matter. There are five sections. The first is a brief review of some of the most relevant literature. The second lists the main general characteristics of addiction, gleaned from the literature, as well as discussing a possible general definition, namely wants that have become (damaging) needs. The third provides the existential conditions required for addiction to be understood as a human phenomenon to which we are all susceptible, albeit to greatly differing degrees and objects. Here I stress the ideas of transcendence, desire, lack and escape one finds in the early writings of Sartre and Levinas. The fourth fills this idea out with a key phenomenological notion of hypervirtuality, inspired by Husserl. This latter, fifthly and finally, explains the rising power of new technologies and how many are increasing and providing new opportunities for addictive behaviour. Full article

Writing offers a privileged access to the culture of revolt, a kind of radical questioning that has the potential to unsettle illegitimate forms of authority and sense. Writing bequeaths a future and a society capable of creative thought, and this is all important in societies where questioning and critical thought is increasingly under threat. This work explores the importance of writing in relation to questioning and revolt in two markedly different contexts: in Julia Kristeva’s celebration of the European tradition of revolt and dissent, and in Behrouz Boochani’s literary revolt against the illegitimate incarceration of refugees in Manus Prison. If Kristeva is correct and European culture is, in part, a culture of the question and of revolt, then what does this mean for the non-European world? Boochani’s writing offers a powerful contemporary response to this question, a response that positions the suffering body as a locus of protest and resistance. Full article

This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key mood in ontology as argued by Malabou? This article contends that bright metaphors and magic realism are at least as fundamental, but under one condition: ontology must come to terms with what the author has coined as the “Chandos complex”, namely a form of ambivalence and oscillation between Gnosticism and holism that makes both positions fake and hollow. Dreaming of being one with the world and fantasizing an estrangement from nature work hand in hand and are equally staged. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy occasionally falls prey to the Chandos complex, which makes his concept of the flesh of the world vulnerable to criticism. This article examines the claim put forward by Renaud Barbaras that “the flesh of the world” is a failed metaphor. It argues that this blissful metaphor is ontologically fundamental as soon as its intrinsic paradoxes are recognized and accepted: the Chandos complex then becomes the key to an ontology that recognizes the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. At stake is an essential link between ontology on the one hand and, on the other hand, metaphors as well as myth-building and narrative-building processes. Full article

This article offers an English translation of an essay published in 1946 by Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), a Russian-Jewish philosopher of religion, who is considered the founding figure of the postwar Paris School of Jewish Thought (École de pensée juive de Paris). In “The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought”, Gordin presented a sweeping meta-narrative of the history of Jewish thought, formulated as a history of repeated “religious crises”, both existential and intellectual. In Gordin’s condensed narrative, these crises could be detected in the life and philosophy of the most canonical Jewish thinkers inside and outside the tradition: from Abraham the biblical patriarch to Hermann Cohen, through a diverse list including the rabbinical sage Elisha Ben-Abuyah, Philo, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza. In an introduction to Gordin’s text, I provide a brief biography, locate Gordin in existentialist discourse of the early postwar years, and discuss the affinities between Gordin’s “The Religious Crisis” and Levinas’s and Sartre’s early reflections on the Jewish question. Full article

Douglas Harding developed a unique first-person experimental approach for investigating consciousness that is still relatively unknown in academia. In this paper, I present a critical dialogue between Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of the body and intersubjectivity. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Harding observes that from the first-person perspective, I cannot see my own head. He points out that visually speaking nothing gets in the way of others. I am radically open to others and the world. Neither does my somatic experience establish a boundary between me and the world. Rather to experience these sensations as part of a bounded, shaped thing (a body), already involves bringing in the perspectives of others. The reader is guided through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments to test these phenomenological claims for themselves. For Sartre, the other’s subjectivity is known through The Look, which makes me into a mere object for them. Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre for making intersubjective relations primarily ones of conflict. Rather he held that the intentionality of my body is primordially interconnected with that of others’ bodies. We are already situated in a shared social world. For Harding, like Sartre, my consciousness is a form of nothingness; however, in contrast to Sartre, it does not negate the world, but is absolutely united with it. Confrontation is a delusion that comes from imagining that I am behind a face. Rather in lived personal relationships, I become the other. I conclude by arguing that for Harding all self-awareness is a form of other-awareness, and vice versa. Full article

This article investigates the utopian visions of extreme sports as a postwar phenomenon by contrasting it to the violence of the extreme sport practitioner par excellence in postwar/cold war cinema: James Bond. Continental philosophy and cultural studies furnish extreme sport as a manifold of wholesome, meaningful, sustainable, life-enhancing, and environmentally intimate practices, less orientated toward human rivalry than its traditional namesake. Certain attention is thus paid to the movement of sliding in extreme sports that thrive on powerful natural forces such as air, wind, snowy slopes, and big waves, creating an ambivalent field between mastery and letting oneself go. Sliding, or glissade, is treated as a “figure of thought” that Bond is mustered to embody and enact with his extreme athletic repertoire. The analysis of James Bond’s extreme sport sliding is contrasted to the musings of glissade philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres. It is concluded that if there is utopianism in James Bond’s extreme sport performances, it is in the sliding itself, while the attaining of that state is paved with violence towards everything material. The article reinforces the concept of the extreme in relation to sport as a processual tool, rather than a category describing a fixed set of characteristics adhering to a certain practice. Full article

The central philosophical problem of birth concerns the fact that it is an event necessary for all events. As such, it is the nihilated a priori of itself—in short, it is lost in an abyss of consciousness. The article engages with the thoughts of Sartre, Ricoeur, Henry, Romano, Marion, and Husserl to explain some facets of abyssal birth. It argues that family genealogy may contribute to the philosophical dialogue about birth. Family genealogy is usually practiced with a methodology oriented to epistemology. At times, however, genealogical research may bring the historical ancestral past to presence as a lived experience, thus grounding birth in transgenerational intersubjectivity. To explain this more fully, the article compares this presence affect with similar affects in history, art, and psychoanalysis. The article does not make the birth-as-abyssal problem—as framed by philosophers—vanish, but it questions considering one’s birth exclusively as epistemological. Presence, though closer to ontology than epistemology, is more accurately classified as phenomenological, being as event rather than event as being. Full article

“Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. I am all of this for the Other with no hope of changing it.” Thus wrote Sartre in his Being and Nothingness. But was not Sartre the major advocate of existential freedom, with the tenet that “we are condemned to be free”—no matter what our situation might be? The question hence arises: How free are we from the facticity of situations, particularly ones in which we are subject to collective identification? How free are we to change the situations—places, environments, histories, others—that we inevitably belong to and which subject us to collective identities? How free are we from identification in terms of others? How free are we to transform such identification? These questions are of particular relevance given the harmful effects of collective ascriptions and the currently pressing demand to transform them. In an attempt to address these questions, I offer as alternative to Sartre’s concept of the “facticity of freedom” what I would like to call the “freedom of facticity”. Full article

This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundation of authoritarian governments. As such, the article seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to show that Sartre’s depiction of sovereign decisionism directly parallels how modern democratic governments conduct themselves during a state of emergency. The second is to show that Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity models, what Agamben calls, secularized theism. Through an ontotheological critique of Sartre’s professed atheism, the article concludes that an existential belief in sovereign decision represses, rather than profanes, the divine origins of authoritarian law. I frame the argument with a reading of Sartre’s 1943 play The Flies, which models the repressed theological underpinnings of Sartre’s theory. Full article