Figures of Appearance: Richir between Husserl and Heidegger around the notion of phenomenon

Abstract

This paper seeks to clarify Marc Richir’s notion of phenomenon, showing its originality in relation to the classical phenomenological tradition and highlighting his attempt to access “phenomenon as nothing more than phenomenon.” To achieve this goal, this text will briefly examine the notions of phenomenon in Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. For Husserl, phenomena are experiences. Experiences that are situated in the unity of the self, a unity that is in turn constituted by the “temporal flow of the living present,” that is, the internal flow of consciousness. This starting point privileges intentional experience, especially perceptual experience, as the basis of objectivity (Husserl, 2013, p. 301). On the other hand, Heidegger, in §7 of Being and Time, distinguishes between vulgar phenomenon (what appears) and phenomenological phenomenon (showing itself), differentiating it from appearance and manifestation. In this way, phenomenology, according to Heidegger, seeks to bring to the fore (phenomenalize) that which has always been implicitly and concomitantly present (vorgänig und mitgängig). Richir transforms both perspectives by giving primacy to fantasy, understood as the original act of experience, rather than perception. Furthermore, he asserts that the given never appears in its pure form, but rather intertwined with “symbolic institutions” that fix and petrify meaning. Experience, therefore, is shown to be stratified. In response to this, phenomenology must liberate the phenomenon from these determinations, descending toward the unapparent and a-subjective through a “hyperbolic” reduction. In this way, Richir reconfigures phenomenology as an exploration of anonymous processes (phenomena) of “meaning becoming” in language, expanding the horizon of the phenomenological beyond classical subjectivity. We believe that answering the question of the status of the “phenomenon as nothing more than phenomenon” will allow us to make a preliminary distinction between subjective phenomenologies (Heidegger, Husserl) and a-subjective phenomenologies (Richir). We therefore also aim to show the radical nature of Richir's approach in relation to the phenomenological tradition.