Trans-Religious Dancing Dialogues: Michel Henry on Dionysus and the Crucified

Perhaps owing to frictions between his Christological worldview and the dominant secularism of contemporary French thought as taken up in the U.S., and persistent worries about a seeming solipsism in his phenomenology, Michel Henry’s innovative contributions to aesthetics have received unfortunately little attention in English. The present investigation addresses both issues simultaneously with a new interpretation of his recently-translated 1996 interview, “Art and Phenomenology.” Inspired by this special issue’s theme, “French Thought in Dialogue,” it emphasizes four levels of dialogue in the interview, as follows: (1) the interview as such, with Jean-Marie Brohm; (2) its titular dialogue between art and phenomenology; (3) what I term a “trans-religious” dialogue between Christianity’s Jesus and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysus; and (4) a related dialogue between painting (Henry’s favored genre) and dance that is “Dionysian” (in Nietzsche’s sense). It concludes with new phenomenological accounts of a literal and a figurative dance, namely the social Latin dance called bachata, and an improvised musical dialogue with the mockingbirds of my hometown. In sum, thanks to Henry’s engagement with various forms of dialogue, including with Brohm, the arts, paganism, and dance, one can find room in his transcendental subjectivity of Life for others, dancingly transcending even humanity.

The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference in French Reproductive Politics

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform to reproductive technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women.

A Century of Dialogue around Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Social Sciences

In 2012 social scientists, philosophers and religious scientists celebrated the centennial of the publication of one of the most seminal books in the modern study of religion, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, by the then leading French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s (1858–1917); in 2017, we commemorated that author’s untimely death at age 59, broken by World War I in which he lost his only son and many of his beloved students. Educated, first as a Rabinnical student then as a modern philosopher, Durkheim earned his place among French thinkers primarily as a “founding father” of the social sciences. Having recently (on the basis of a life-long preoccupation) devoted a book-length study to Durkheim’s religion theory, I intend in this essay to highlight major aspects of Durkheim as an exponent of French thought. I shall first briefly situate Durkheim in his time and age, with special emphasis on his political views and his ethnic identity as a secularised Jew. Then I turn to Durkheim’s relation with the discipline in which he was originally trained, philosophy. I shall pay attention to the complex relationship between Durkheim and Kant and further highlight his dualism, epistemology, and views on primitive classification, as well as his puzzling realism, the place of emergence in his thought, and his moralist tendencies. I shall finally articulate Durkheim’s transition to sociology and how he gave over the torch of emerging sociology to his main students, having thus created an adequate context in which to discuss Durkheim’s final masterpiece (Les formes) and the still dominant theory of religion it expounds.

Foucault and Chomsky on Grammar and Governmentality

This essay explores the use of the notions of grammar and governmentality in the work of Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. The goal is to exhibit the contrast but also mutual influence of these thinkers. Chomsky places his own linguistic theory in what he calls a tradition of Cartesian linguistics. Foucault’s presents an archaeology of general grammar in the French Classical Era. Chomsky and Foucault equally posit principles of governmentality. Both differ in terms of what they think the study of language brings to our understanding of ethical and political freedom. Governmental structure and grammatical structure, for Foucault, are always conventional, rather than essential – merely expressions of power dynamics. For Chomsky, the innate and natural human universality implied by underlying structures, in contrast, intimates a path to freedom from governmental coercion and oppression.

La nouvelle image de l’homme dans la philosophie franco-allemande du XVIIe à la fin du XXe siècle

Résumé Ce qui est en marche en France du XVIIe au XVIIIe siècle, c’est le processus en quelque sorte irréversible de l’émancipation de l’homme, par la conquête de la liberté intérieure avec Descartes et son cogito, puis par la conquête de la liberté politique avec la révolution de 1789. Mais c’est en Allemagne avec Marx, Nietzsche et Freud que cette centration excessive de l’homme sur lui-même va se voir profondément mise en question. Le culte ainsi rendu à la raison humaine a en effet conduit à un développement des techniques et des sciences qui a permis à l’être humain de s’arracher de manière progressive à l’ordre de la nature, comme le montrent ces grands critiques de la technique moderne que sont Martin Heidegger en Allemagne et Jacques Ellul en France. A l’individualisme qui s’est largement répandu dans les sociétés démocratiques s’oppose dans la philosophie franco-allemande du XXe siècle l’accent mis sur la nécessité pour l’être humain d’être en rapport avec ses semblables, comme le montrent les œuvres de trois philosophes français, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty et Levinas, qui se fondent tous trois sur l’œuvre fondatrice du philosophe allemand Edmund Husserl. C’est à partir de là que l’on peut voir apparaître une nouvelle et paradoxale image du sacré, comme en atteste en Allemagne la poésie de Hölderlin et en France la pensée de Levinas. La perspective anthropocentriste qui a guidé le développement de l’homme occidental depuis la Renaissance se voit ainsi radicalement mise en question. Le dialogue franco-allemand qui a marqué le développement de la pensée philosophique doit par conséquent aujourd’hui s’ouvrir à des influences plus lointaines, à la fois occidentales et orientales, qui sont celles des penseurs écologiques du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle.

COVID-19 Viral Logics, Social Inequality and Hegemonic Mimicry: Deconstructing the Language of Cultural Parasite

Drawing on Michel Serres’ philosophical notion of the parasite, this essay examines human responses to COVID-19 that mimic parasitic behavior and uncovers social inequalities by exploring the cultural hegemony of viral logics perpetuated by the media. How can Serres’ notion of the parasite help us reconfigure structural inequalities experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic? First, the essay examines the viral logic of internalization, which seeks to normalize, if not appropriate, the impact of the pandemic through the rhetoric of togetherness. This particular viral logic induces people to internalize the coronavirus pandemic’s illusion as a crisis shared equally by all. The essay argues that this viral logic of internationalization resonates with the French philosopher’s parasite logic, which, in Serres’s words, “expresses a new epistemology, another theory of equilibrium.” Second, this study examines the viral logic of correlation, which designates certain marginalized cultural groups as infected, and therefore regarded and (mis)treated like the virus itself. This blame-game behavior mimics the parasite’s violation of the host’s chain of order and the creation of a new order that is self-serving. Hence, the parasite becomes, according to Serres, “an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information.” The essay argues that although mimicry becomes the theatre of cultural inequality that dominates communication for the parasitic operator, both viral logics of parasitic mimicry eventually slip into mockery.

Perspective, the Visible and the Invisible in Chinese Paintings: A Response to Jean-Luc Marion

In the Chinese translation of The Crossing of the Visible, French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, raised a question about the nature of Chinese paintings: does the relationship between the visible and the invisible commonly found in the Western painting play the same role in Chinese paintings? This essay aims to answer this question. Chinese paintings maintain the acceptance that the sense of perspective is the implementation of the invisible by the varieties of perspective, the invisible vanishing point and the poem. My response to Marion’s call opens a fresh dialogue between the French thought and the Chinese thought.