Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: Controversies of the French Interpretation

The author of the article focuses on the matter of Wittgenstein's philosophy reception in France. The reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy was quite late and led to different, sometimes opposite interpretations of his thought, even among French analytical philosophers. Applying a sociological approach to the problem of reception, the author identifies factors that hindered the penetration of the ideas of analytical philosophy in France, including the powerful institutionalization of philosophy in France with its inherent traditionalism and conservatism, fully expressed national character of French philosophy, as well as the extremely polemical character of French analytical philosophy, the transformation of the choice of this tradition of philosophizing into an ethical and political choice. These factors are illustrated by an analysis of Wittgenstein's conflicting interpretation of Jacques Bouveresse and Sandra Laugier. If the first creates an image of Wittgenstein as Anti-Husserl, blaming the phenomenologist for ignoring ordinary language, the second proposes a phenomenological reading of Wittgenstein's ideas using the philosophy of ordinary language. The article shows how opposing interpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy reproduce the internal conflicts of the French philosophical field.

So Near, So Far: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch

The purpose of my article is to shed light on the relationship of proximity and distance that linked two major figures of 20th-century French philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. This article presents a comparative study of their respective views on Metaphysics and Ethics. It also deals with their contribution to the reflection on the fact of “Being Jewish”, the theme that was at the center of the preoccupations of these two artisans of the renewal of Jewish thought in France after the Shoah. I conduct a comparative analysis between the key concepts of their philosophy: Levinas’ “There is” and “Otherness” and Jankélévitch’s “I-know-not-what” and “Ipseity”. I point out the difference between Levinas’ ethics of Otherness and Jankélévitch’s morality of paradox. In the section on “Being Jewish”, I highlight the crucial distinction they both made between racism and anti-Semitism and the very different meaning they gave to it.

Parables for the Virtual

Since its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi's pioneering Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, “Keywords for Affect” and “Missed Conceptions about Affect,” in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.

„Werde, der du bist!“. Selbsterkenntnis, Handeln und Selbstgestaltung bei Nietzsche in einem Ineditum von Georges Canguilhem

In an unpublished text from the early postwar period, Georges Canguilhem deals with Nietzsche’s maxim “Become who you are!” Is this “apparently contradictory formula of a philosopher full of contradictions” really only seemingly inconsistent? Canguilhem regards it as a norm whose supposed metaphysical or objective content dissolves upon further analysis. So he here discerns a new instance of the same potential confusion he had already addressed in his classical essay on The Normal and the Pathological (1943). According to him, the formula “become who you are!” must not be misunderstood in a naturalistic sense, a tendency from which not even Nietzsche himself, Canguilhem thinks, was entirely free. Besides the French philosophy of his time, his philosophical inquiry into “Become who you are!” critically engages two classic German Nietzsche scholars, Ernst Bertram and Karl Jaspers, as well as the French interpreters of the latter’s philosophy of Existenz, Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur. Finally, the paper highlights Nietzsche’s specific importance for Canguilhem and the ambivalence in his privileged relationship to the German thinker.

„Werde, der du bist!“. Selbsterkenntnis, Handeln und Selbstgestaltung bei Nietzsche in einem Ineditum von Georges Canguilhem

In an unpublished text from the early postwar period, Georges Canguilhem deals with Nietzsche’s maxim “Become who you are!” Is this “apparently contradictory formula of a philosopher full of contradictions” really only seemingly inconsistent? Canguilhem regards it as a norm whose supposed metaphysical or objective content dissolves upon further analysis. So he here discerns a new instance of the same potential confusion he had already addressed in his classical essay on The Normal and the Pathological (1943). According to him, the formula “become who you are!” must not be misunderstood in a naturalistic sense, a tendency from which not even Nietzsche himself, Canguilhem thinks, was entirely free. Besides the French philosophy of his time, his philosophical inquiry into “Become who you are!” critically engages two classic German Nietzsche scholars, Ernst Bertram and Karl Jaspers, as well as the French interpreters of the latter’s philosophy of Existenz, Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricœur. Finally, the paper highlights Nietzsche’s specific importance for Canguilhem and the ambivalence in his privileged relationship to the German thinker.