The experience of pregnancy during which one human body lives inside another human body can provide an unconventional way of making some aspects of human subjectivity and embodiment stand out. This article arises from a phenomenological analysis of the living body and through a comparative analysis of two philosophical descriptions of pregnancy (N. Depraz a I. Young) it arrives at an alternative understanding of the duality which characterises this experience. Instead of the duality of self and the other in myself – of identity and inner alterity – it offers a topological duality of excessive closeness and distance from one’s own interpretation of reality. The article draws, in this, on the account of friendship in G. Agamben, well-being in G. Bachelard and the world outside the world of J. Derrida. In this way there is not constituted some kind of more powerful female subjectivity, but conduct on the basis of tact with respect to the hiddenness of reality. With reference to a question of J. Butler, the final part of the article deals with the possibilities of ethics in a subject that is not transparent to itself, something which flows from the experience just analysed.
“What is experience?” asks phenomenology, so as to uncover the essential structure of experiencing, and founding experience, from which true and philosophically defensible thinking may be derived. “What is dream?” asks Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible so that he may complicate the first question of phenomenology and sketch an absolutely non-trivial topology of the experiential field. A partial description of this topology will be the theoretical starting point of my reflection. From this point of departure I will embark on a phenomenological analysis of the concrete experience of dreaming and of falling asleep. On the basis of this analysis I will then follow the implications – backwards so to speak – to the consequences for the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s topology of experience. At the same time I would like to show how the phenomenon of dreaming and the imaginary has a central place in the description of the structure of experience, because without it we cannot give a description of the chiasm of the soul (consciousness) nor of the perceiving and the perceived body. I present dreaming as a phenomenon that unfolds at the blind spot of the waking self-concious consciousness and embodiment, and thus also as a specific basis (Stiftung) of Being, which is the concern of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.
The aim of this article is to think through the relation between the structure of play and the constitution of sociality, particularly in the light of the work of the key theoretician of play, Johan Huizinga, but also with reference to other authors such as D. W. Winnicott, T. S. Henricks and J. Butler. In view of the extensive field covered by the study of the conduct of play and of the heterogeneity of the phenomenon of play, this study confines itself to an inquiry into the complex character of the ambivalent relation between rationality and irrationality; goal-directedness and the internality of goals; playfulness and responsibility; the individual and the society in the context of play. The study argues that play is a space of ambivalence which enables the cultivation of the creative negotiation of the relations of power, including subversive acts and transformation, the ability to combine the attitude of dependence with authority, the sacred with the everyday, the abilities of communication with otherness. Out of this space there is also born sociality.
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Le but du présent article est de penser le rapport entre la structure du jeu et la constitution de la socialité en utilisant essentiellement l’oeuvre du théoricien clé du jeu Johan Huizinga, mais en se référant aussi à d’autres auteurs comme D. W. Winnicott, T. S. Henricks et J. Butler. Etant données l’étendue de la sphère thématique que couvrent les études du comportement ludique et la diversité des approches selon lesquelles on peut déterminer le phénomène du jeu, notre étude se limite à l’investigation de la nature complexe du rapport d’ambivalence entre rationalité et irrationalité, finalité et autotélisme, frivolité et responsabilité, individu et société, dans le cadre du jeu. Nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle le jeu est un espace de l’ambivalence, qui permet la cultivation d’une négociation créatrice des rapports de pouvoir, dont les actes subversifs et la transformation, de la capacité de combiner l’attitude la dépendance et de la souveraineté, du sacré et du quotidien, de la capacité de communiquer avec l’altérité. C’est également dans cet espace que naît la socialité.
In this article I describe experience which I call experience of the maternal-child body and which is primarily happy and problem-free. I then develop, in more detail, ideas which are born of this experience. Next I attempt to argue that the ideas in question offer a way of thinking the production of sense which eschews the metaphysics of presence, as well as the Lacanian-inspired idea of infinite movement in the order of the symbolic, and perhaps eventually eschews the post-structuralist thought of the infinite reference to significants without any kind of relation to a transcendent significant. I point to aspects that are in common between this description and the ideas of D. Winnicott, and I also put forward two moments in which this description clearly differs from Winnicott’s conception.
This discussion study addresses the debate concerning phenomenology from the opportune problem of the intencional, which Martin Ritter and Mar¬tin Nitsche have conducted on the pages of Filosofický časopis. The theme of the discussion is the contribution of Heidegger to philosophy and the possibilities of a “transformative phenomenology”. The authors are, above all, concerned with the question of whether it is possible to treat transforma¬tive phenomenology as phenomenology, or rather as a narrative construct. In my contribution I show that the position of Martin Nitsche is certainly phenomenological, nevertheless that it would be helpful to moderate some aspects of his argument (and the arguments of M. Heidegger) in view of the objections of M. Ritter. I attempt to prove the existence of the intencional in the context of the natural world. To this end I draw on the examples of G. Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination; Krtoušová interpretation of quantum mechanics; and Agamben’s description of friendship. With the help of Bachelard’s theory I then attempt to present Heidegger’s interpreta¬tion as the phenomenological picture of the hidden and to thus prove its phe¬nomenological relevance. Finally, drawing on Elberfeld’s interpretation of transformative phenomenology, I defend the possibility of phenomenology as a performative and as a “training” into the connectedness of the person and the world.
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