1. Introduction
This article is intended to be an exposition of Marc Richir’s
grounding of a transcendental aesthetics and his understanding of art,
which is based on the hypothesis that imagination and phantasy are
fundamental pre-intentional acts that delineate the horizons of the
relationship of human and world, hence being the source of knowledge.
From the studies of authors such as Carlson (2016, 2017), and Varela
(2017), we know that Richir’s phenomenological perspective was
influenced on the one hand by Edmund Husserl’s analysis of specific acts
of consciousness, and, on the other hand, by Kant’s transcendental
schematism. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the lack of such research in
English, my argument suggests that Richir’s perspective on a
transcendental aesthetics is particularly fertile because it
incorporates, together with Kant’s schematism and Husserl’s Aktanalyse,
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “flesh of the world” and his contribution to
the understanding of the affective, bodily nature of knowledge, which,
speaking of an original reciprocity between body and world, offers – as
Matherne (2019) explains – a new account of the transcendental.
First, it has to be stressed how Richir’s transcendental aesthetics
operates on a phenomenological basis. Husserl’s phenomenology, developed
at the beginning of the 20th century, aimed essentially at
describing the appearance of things as structures of experience,
claiming that our knowledge of the world – thanks to the complex
constitution of transcendental consciousness – is far richer than that
which sensory perception, understood in the traditional sense of
Abbildung, can deliver to us. Accordingly, with regard to aesthetics,
phenomenology appeared from its very beginning as a refutation of the
common philosophy of representation, which affirms that a phenomenon
(the appearance of a thing) is a simple reproduction, or a mental
elaboration, of externally perceived objects. In this case, any image or
object of art, as Plato was already claiming in his Republic, would be
wrongly understood as a mere copy of a pre-given reality, something with
a diminished ontological status. Husserl opened up a new way for these
investigations, distinguishing between acts of perception, imagination,
and signifying acts, pointing out that imagination
has a distinct status separate from perception: it is not a kind of
weakened perception, but has its own character, fundamental for the
eidetic constitution of the world. In this regard, the philosopher spoke
about the concept of “image consciousness”, indicating a unique kind of
experience that involves both perception and imagining.
Furthermore, as mentioned, for the Belgian philosopher, understanding
imagination and aesthetic experience meant assuming the transcendental
schematism of Kantianism – where imagination comes to play a
fundamental, strategic role in knowledge. In fact, first of all – as
Carlson correctly formulated – in Kant’s thought, imagination is
situated critically at the bifurcation between proper knowledge and
the “transcendental illusion”. On the one hand, it can
always be a source of illusion, as long as it sells as a reality what it
is merely (in Kantian terms) thinking. On the other hand, imagination
provides access to a real, vivid experience, in which knowledge is
something realized by a concrete, particular subjectivity – and, in this
sense, something necessarily connected with its schematizing work and
its articulation with the concepts of reason.
Even though Kant’s influence will not be investigated here, it is
important to stress Richir’s reception of Critique of Judgment and how
Kant’s own terminology builds a part of Richir’s conceptual apparatus,
as it can be affirmed that Kant anticipates the idea of a transcendental
aesthetics – something that will be related to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis
too. To this regard, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,
Kant affirms that: “The power of imagination (facultas imaginandi), as a
faculty of intuition without the presence of the object, is either
productive, that is, a faculty of the original presentation
[ursprüngliche Darstelung], of the object (exhibitio originaria) which
thus precedes experience; or reproductive, a faculty of derivative
presentation [abgeleitete Darstellung] of the object (exhibitio
derivativa), which brings back to the mind an intuition that it had
previously”. This means that imagination, as a
faculty of presentation, is able to give to us more than is perceptually
present and delivered through the senses, and in this regard represents
a capacity of preceding and sketching out experience.
Hence, taking inspiration from the rich field opened by Husserl’s
phenomenology and its work of unfolding the sense of all the notions and
acts implied in the human being’s relation to the world, as well as from
Kant’s transcendentalism, Richir’s work aimed at clearing the horizons
from which knowledge is arising; horizons that, in a broad sense,
coincide with the ones of the aesthetic experience: literally,
investigating the horizons at the origin of knowledge (its conditions of
possibility), and identifying them with the horizons of the aesthetic
experience, would mean nothing other than speaking about a
transcendental aesthetics.
As stated above, this article aims to show how Richir’s endeavor to
elaborate a possible synthesis between Kant and Husserl in order to find
a new transcendental aesthetics takes advantage of Merleau-Ponty’s
“radical reflection” and his idea of “flesh in the world”. In order to
understand properly the role of the imagination and the idea of a
transcendental aesthetic, therefore, it is necessary first of all to
deepen what Richir, referring to Merleau-Ponty, calls the
“phenomenological architectonics”: according to the philosopher, in its
regressive process phenomenology has to show the constitutive origin of
the eidos within the framework of a transcendental constitution of the
horizon; that is to say: if, as mentioned, phenomenology accomplishes
the task of overcoming the traditional philosophy of representation,
where essences are given in an ideal disincarnated world and knowledge
is a sort of reproduction of these essences (so that art remains a copy
of a pre-given world), then it has to find the original ground where the same knowledge is arising, that cannot
be given but in an original union between body and world – a union that
precedes and establish any theoretical capacity of the subject. In his
article Merleau-Ponty and the question of phenomenological
Architectonics Richir, after considering Heidegger’s attempt of showing
how Dasein’s possibilities are never possibilities of essences but of
existence, formulates the present question as following: “Why would
there not be a facticity of the Wesen in the same sense as facticity of
existence? Why would the Husserlian ‘I can’ of flesh, incarnated in a
Leib, a body of flesh, and not a pure intellectual possibility, why
would it not be an ontological ‘I can’ of existing, and simultaneously
of existing the world?”.
According to Richir, Merleu Ponty’s contribution would have been
precisely that of discovering and showing that looking for the essence
of the world, as the phenomenologist says in the Foreword to his
Phenomenology of Perception, does not mean looking for what it is in
idea, once we have reduced it to discursive theme, but it means rather
looking for what it is in fact for us before any thematization.
2. Merleau-Ponty,
Richir and the wild Wesen
As stated above, what I identify as the contribution of Merleau-Ponty
to the grounding of a transcendental aesthetics, and what in fact Richir
retains from his thought, is the idea of the
affective/imaginative/bodily nature of knowledge. This idea is based on
the assumption that, in spite of being a pure spectator of the
phenomenon of the world, the human being is originally and radically in
the world, and this by virtue of what Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptive
faith”, a rehabilitation of the Husserlian notion of Urdoxa (which
designates a primordial, unshakable certainty in the fundamental
features of the own self and the world).
It is by means of this faith that, as Richir underlines, we are always
already in the world, and “we accept it since we are ourselves set in
the world without any possibility, other than imaginary of retreating
from it”. This idea of a radical being in the
world implies, as mentioned, a rethinking of the phenomenological
concept of essences, or idealities, that, as known, were found by
Husserl thanks to the phenomenological process of epochè. The epochè, as
a technic of abstraction, aimed at disclosing the operative
consciousness of the transcendental subject and the essences correlated
to it. Merleau-Ponty assumed a critical position towards this
phenomenological procedure: opposing the “phenomenological positivism”,
whose eidetic method would base the possible on the real (the factual) –
and situating himself thereby between Heidegger’s ontic fact (the Vorhandenheit) and Husserl’s eidetic ideality (equally vorhanden
and arrived at by ideation) – promotes a new concept of Wesen: Wesen as
an “active essence”, or living essence, given in a precise moment to a
precise subject; what would invert the hierarchization between possible
and real, as all experience is built upon an ultimate radical
possibility; and what pretends to overcome an intellectualistic
conception of knowledge.
In this respect, without renouncing the idea of essence, a primary
phenomenological notion, Merleau-Ponty develops an attempt to think it
beyond the typical antithesis existence/essence or fact/essence. He
affirms in The Visible and the Invisible:
The possibilities by essence can indeed envelop and dominate the
facts; they themselves derive from another, and more fundamental,
possibility: that which works over my experience, opens it to the world
and to Being, and which, to be sure, does not find them before itself as
facts but animates and organizes their facticity.
This indicates indeed that a fundamental possibility, more primary
than “the logico-eidetic possibility of ideations and the variations
based on facts” exists, such that eidetic possibilities “appear
themselves like factual possibilities of existing that are organized by
the possibility which opens my experience to the world and to Being.”
This is the idea of a Wild Being, “that pre-spiritual milieu without
which nothing is thinkable”. For Merleau-Ponty,
essences “overtly refer to our acts of ideation which have lifted them
from a brute being, wherein we must find again in their wild state what
answers to our essences and our significations”.
In this sense, the essences are not positive, but rather “articulations
or hinges of Being”. As a matter of fact, even in the phenomenological
process of epochè the revealed essences show themselves as “removed” or
abstracted from a brute and wild being that preceded them and is
“non-coincident with them”. That’s why according to Richir, if it is
possible at all to speak about a transcendental eidetic (of which, as
the Belgian philosopher underlines, Eugen Fink spoke extensively in his
VI Cartesian Meditation), then man should speak about a “transcendental
eidetic of the wild Wesen”. That is to say, assuming that life is an
original structure of being – which brings Merleau-Ponty to the
formulation of an ontology based on the ideas of process, event, and
temporality – essences will be understood, using Richir’s term, as
incarnate existentials. They will be Wesens of flesh, of the
body-of-flesh and of the world. All essences are
given in fact thanks and in the lived experience of a living body open
to the world.
To explain further the idea of a wild wesen and the primordial
reciprocity of Leib and world, Richir takes up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
recouvrement (coincidence) and elaborates on the idea of an original
distortion of the phenomenon. This means generally that in order to
avoid conceiving of the intuition of essences as a frontal and
disincarnate vision, it is necessary to understand the
“pure difference” (the on-coincidence with itself) of the phenomenalization of phenomena, which at the same time speaks for
this original complicity between body and world, more original than what
we filter and interpret in the phases of presence of consciousness. This
is Merlaeu-Ponty’s idea of a “flesh of the world”, which according to
Richir would remove the barrier between phenomenology and metaphysics: the idea of essence is here not
simply the object of a disembodied eidetic intuition to which pure
individuals, “indivisible glaciers of being”, would be opposed. Rather,
the “flesh” (chair) designates a pregiven ontological texture that
supports both perception and world, prior to the subject–object
division. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “The flesh of the world is (…) a
pregnancy of possibles (...) absolutely not an object (…) it is by the
flesh of the world that in the last analysis one can understand the
lived body (…) The flesh of the world is of the Being-seen, and it is by
it that we can understand the percipere”.
According to this, for Richir, both essence and individual appear as
having been intrinsically tied together “as brute essence and brute
existence, which are the nodes and the antinodes of the same ontological
vibration”. In this sense, as the philosopher
specifies, the field of ideality itself belongs to the phenomenological
field: “It is neither another world nor a ‘hinter-world’, but a
dimension (which has itself been put in a phenomenal sense into a lower
gear) of the phenomenon”. In this regard,
Richir quotes a passage of Merleau-Ponty’s famous work The Visible and
the Invisible that considers the body self-relation as making possible
the “overlaying-at- a-distance” of consciousness to things:
When I find the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my
eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of
which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations of my
acts. But this does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me
with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens
my body in two, and because between my body touched and my body touching
there is an overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that things
pass into us as well as we into the things.
This would mean, as Costello underlines, that a distance or
deflection is the opening of the body to itself, of the body onto the
thing, which speaks for a proximity of the body to the thing, that is never a full coincidence, but rather a
unity, without which a transcendental phenomenology could not work at
all. As mentioned, Merleau-Ponty
himself was not averse to calling his phenomenology a “transcendental
philosophy”, being his transcendental philosophy, as Matherne argues,
the proper subject matter of his phenomenological method, the method of
“radical reflection”, which refers to the a priori as
the still unreflective, bodily experience of the world.
Thus, this kind of cohesion constitutes the basis of a transcendental
aesthetics, where body and world are taken in the same original
facticity, no longer being two separated entities: so, the images are no
longer understood as mere representations of things, but much more as
constitutive processes of our intercourse with the world.
Merleau-Ponty insists on this in his Eye and Mind:
The word ‘image’ is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly
believed that a design was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that
the mental image was such a design, belonging among our private
bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the
design nor the painting belongs to the in-itself any more than the image
does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside,
which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and without
which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent
visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.
So, the problem of the imaginary concerns the visibility of which
both body and world are made of: if I see to the extent that I can
project my body into the world it is nonetheless true that “my body can
see only to the extent that it is itself part of the visible.” As
Merleau-Ponty says in the Eye and the Mind, it is by lending his body to
the world that the artist changes the world into paintings, which
presupposes that the artist’s body is immersed in and made of the same
stuff as the world: to touch, one must be tangible, and to see, visible.
Merleau-Ponty describes this as an “intertwining” or “overlapping”, in
which the artist’s situated embodiment is the other side of its opening
to the world. There is yet no sharp division between the sensing and the
sensed, between body and things as one common “flesh”, and painting
arises as the expression of this relation: it is a “visible to the
second power, a carnal essence or icon” of embodied vision. Having said that, it is necessary
to better understand how for Merleau-Ponty the body assumes the function
of a “schema”, that is something that, constituting one’s perspective on
the world, articulates the whole space of possibilities of
experience.
3. Merleau
Ponty’s transcendental claim: body as schema
As Merleau-Ponty insists on in the Phenomenology of perception, the
horizons of all possible perceptual experience are functions of the body
in which it is realized.
The simple fact of the asymmetry existing between bodily perspective
and objective observation points to the way in which the structure of
perception is not just caused or conditioned but constituted by the
structure of the body. As Husserl already observed,
perception is not just the presence of objects to a subject, but it is
always given in a horizontal structure, specifically the visual field
that relates to the body – that’s why seeing a photograph is something
very different than seeing the object itself. In this regard, as Carman
underlines, all perception has a figure/ground contrast, which is not
merely a physiological fact, corresponding to the physiological
structure of the eye, but part of an a priori structure of perception,
and this in the sense that it provides a stable framework within which
we are able to recognize the element of our experience. To this respect,
the phenomenal field is not just a bundle of sensory facts, but instead
it constitutes a “transcendental field”,
a space of abiding perceptual possibilities;
and – what is of great importance for the subject matter of this article
– Merleau-Ponty affirms that this space of possibilities is articulated
by what he calls the body schema (schéma corporel), a concept he
develops notably in Phenomenology of Perception, where he defines it as
“a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal
‘place’ in the world. As he explains, the body does not occupy space as
an object among others, but opens a spatiality of situation, where it
appears “as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible
task”, and thus articulates perceptual experience through the body
schema (schéma corporel).
It is precisely the notion of schema, whose philosophical relevance
can be traced back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that accounts for
the new transcendentalism we are describing here. So, what is the body
schema? Kant, with his idea of schematism, intended to resolve the
problem of applying the categories of the intellect to the empirical
intuitions: if the categories, qua pure concepts and mediate universal
representations, are heterogeneous with respect to intuitions, qua
immediate empirical representations, and if we cannot literally see (or
feel or hear) such things as number, possibility, causality, or
substance, and yet we perceive things as exhibiting those concepts, then
a “third thing” (ein Drittes) must be found, homogeneous with both the
concept and the intuition. This third thing appears to be the
transcendental schemata:
There must be some third thing (ein Drittes), which must stand in
homogeneity (Gleichartigkeit) with the category on the one hand and the
appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the
former to the latter. This mediating representation must be intellectual
on the one hand and sensible on the other. Such a representation is the
transcendental schema.
The schema of a concept, therefore, is a procedure by which the
imagination provides the concept with an image. Consequently, the schema
is to be distinguished from an image, for whereas images are always concrete particulars,
schemata must anticipate in advance an indefinitely wide range of
possible applications of the concept. It is therefore the imagination,
and not the intellect, which shapes the space of possibilities in which
we can apprehend objects as falling under concepts.
The body schema represents thus the structure which sketches out in
advance our awareness of things, the ability – as Carman affirms – to
anticipate and incorporate the world prior to applying concepts of
objects. This is a “dynamic” capacity, in as much as my body appears to
me as a posture with a view to a certain actual or possible task. “...
If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my
hands are accentuated and the whole of my body trails behind them like
the tail of a comet”. It has to be stressed that, by
doing this, Merleau-Ponty is not just offering – as it could be
interpreted from some passages and as Carman himself seems to argue – a
theory of perception, but is developing a pre-cognitive account of
understanding that serves as an alternative to the intellectualist view,
and in which the imagination assumes the role of conditioning the
possibility of experience. In this sense, the
traditional idea of understanding has to be rethought in a way that
acknowledges that it has its basis not in cognition or judgment, but
rather in our bodily engagement with the world. According to this,
Merleau-Ponty indicates that the bodily understanding accounts for both
the “real” and the “virtual” engagement with the world, as “… the normal
subject’s body is not merely ready to be mobilized by real situations
that draw it toward themselves, it can also turn away from the world…
and be situated in the virtual… the normal person reckons with the
possible”.
That this transcendental function of the body is something more
complex than the role played by the simple structure of human perception
– and that it can be claimed that it works properly as Kantian
schematism (but, we can say, in an “incarnate” way) – is testified by
what Merleau-Ponty calls the function of projection,
a fundamental function lying beneath intelligence and perception, namely
the general power of placing oneself in a situation,
[the] the same ability to mark out boundaries and directions in the
given world, to establish lines of force, to keep perspectives in view,
in a world, to organize the given world in accordance with the projects
of the present moment, to build into the geographical setting a
behavioural one, a system of meanings outwardly expressive of the
subject’s internal activity.
Again, it is the body, the origin of all expressive spaces,
projecting significations on the outside by giving them a place
and sees to it that they begin to exist as things, beneath our hands and
before our eyes. Thus, the expression, at the
origin of which is the body, or, in other words, these “bodily
projections”, is what literally makes significations exist, and be
perceptually present to us.
Returning to the transcendental claim and its relation to
imagination, the way in which Merleau-Ponty himself points out the
continuity between his view and Kant’s should be stressed, as Matherne
shows. In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
affirms:
Kant himself shows in the Critique of Judgement that there exists a
unity of the imagination and the understanding (…) which is itself
without any concept. Here the subject is no longer the universal thinker
of a system of objects rigorously interrelated, the positing power who
subjects the manifold to the law of the understanding, in so far as he
is to be able to put together a world–he discovers and enjoys his own
nature as spontaneously in harmony with the law of the understanding.
But if the subject has a nature, then the hidden art of the imagination
must condition the categorial activity. It is no longer merely the
aesthetic judgement, but knowledge too which rests upon this art, an art
which forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and of
consciousness.
In this passage, Merleau-Ponty insists on how Kant, by demonstrating
the union of imagination and understanding that “precedes” experience,
shows how this union is indeed pre-conceptual. By doing this, as
Matherne notes, he suggests that Kant is thereby recognizing that
imagination underwrites not only reflective and aesthetic judgment, but
also serves as the condition of possibility of both knowledge and the
unity of consciousness – with the latter referring not just to the unity
of all subjective intentional acts, but to that fungierende
Intentionalität that concerns our pre-predicative relation to the world,
through imagination, perception, affect, etc.
Hence, if already in Kant we can find the idea that imagination involves
our power to figure any intention whatever in the world, Merleau-Ponty
adds the important condition that this just happens thanks to the
function of the body schema, and its capacity of sketching out in
advance all possibility of experience and all awareness of things.
4. Richir and the
transcendental aesthetics
Returning to Richir, as said above, the Belgian philosopher proposes
an architectonic regrounding of phenomenology, which is not based
anymore, as in Husserl’s, on the intentional experiences of
consciousness – where the objectifying acts of perception define man’s
definitive relationship to things – but rather in the type of
“pre-intentional knowledge” where the body schema and the imagination
play the most fundamental role. It can be therefore affirmed that,
starting from (and at the same time buildig on) the works of Husserl,
Kant, and Merleau-Ponty, the aim of Richir’s philosophy consists in
exploring the imaginative and bodily basis of intentionality underlying
all objectivization. Richir’s phenomenology holds therefore a
transcendental claim, not in the traditional sense of the transcendental
ego, but rather in the transcendental sense of the “power of the
phenomenalization” that imagination (and phantasy, to use another, wider concept of it) consists in. With this, Richir, as we’ll now
illustrate, purports on the one hand to offer a better account of human
experience, and on the other hand to elucidate the problem of
appearance, or, better said, of phenomena as appearance. The former
point implies a rethinking of Kantian schematism that would consider the
basic human experience of man, endowed with a live body and projecting
himself in the world; the second one implies a radicalization of the
husserlian concept of epoché, which would mean not just suspending the
thesis about the existence of the natural world in order to regain its
modalities of appearance to consciousness, but rather considering what
Husserl himself called the “institution of sense” (Sinnstiftung) as a
proper “sense-formation” (Sinnbildung), that is something of a
fashioning – impersonal, “asubjective” – of sense.
This would necessarily imply thinking appearance as having radical
no-identity with itself, that is, as fundamentally indeterminate. With
Richir’s words:
Appearance only appears, classically, as generating interferences, as
a factor of instability for precise measurement, precisely resulting
unapparent in the order of being (if it is not in a determinate
disorder…), it disorders and disturbs it in virtue of the multiplicity
of origins of its appearing, and thanks to its strange powers of
duplicity, ubiquity, or, better said, of multi-locality, which merges
with its ungraspable character.
Richir’s insistence on appearances as something fundamentally plural,
not- identical with themselves and indeterminate (and even “absent”) – a
no-identity that speaks for a new “impersonal” grounding of
phenomenology – clearly owes a debt to Merleau-Ponty. As the French
philosopher already saw – as shown in §1 – the world, and human
experience itself, are characterized by what he calls the reversibility
of flesh; there is a not-identity of appearance with itself, as there is
a not-identity of oneself with himself; there is an original distance, a
deflection, an opening of the body to itself and to the things. The
reversibility of the flesh suggests that, as Merleau- Ponty affirms in
his late essay on Husserlian phenomenology, The Philosopher and his
Shadows, my body and the body of the other are like organs of one single
intercorporeality. From here, all phenomenon is understood as a
phenomenon of the “body of the flesh” (phénomène de corps-de-chair),
hence being constituted by a sensibility which is not the sensibility of
the mere sensation, but rather a “spiritual sensibility”, in the sense
given to it by Kant in his third Critique by speaking of imagination. Richir clarifies his vision of
phenomenology in the following way:
Our consideration of the phenomenon as nothing but phenomenon thus
amounts to radicalizing the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, and
to giving it a new meaning: it is a matter of considering (by bracketing
or putting out of play) the phenomenon outside
of all positivity and all determinacy that, for us, can only come
from elsewhere and otherwise, of which it nonetheless constitutes… the
transcendental matrix.
As we can read, the object of this “phenomenology as phenomenology”
is not this or that phenomenon, but what makes it so that the phenomenon
occurs – what Richir calls “phenomenalization”. This implies that in any
case the phenomenon in its phenomenalization starts from or relies on a
pre-given concept, and that’s why precisely imagination (schematism)
plays a decisive role. Therefore, as Schnell affirms, using Kant’s terms
in the Critique of Judgement, it is not “determinate”, but rather
“reflective”:
This aesthetic reflection without a pre-given concept, as Kant has
rigorously demonstrated, requires a free and productive schematism where
the imagination in its freedom, as the power of constituting and
gathering intuitions, finds itself subsumed by the understanding in its
legality (as the power of unifying what is understood in the
phenomenon): thus, there is in this ‘schematism without a (determinate)
concept’ an intimate union between a diversity already tending towards
unity and a unity already open to receiving this diversity. So, we
recognize in it what we call the transcendental schematism of
phenomenalization, where thought (understanding) and sensibility
(imagination) are indiscernible, where imagination thinks and thinking
imagines, and where, consequently, thinking is appropriated into the
phenomenality of the phenomenon so constituted.
The originality of Richir consists thus precisely in the introduction
of a phenomenological schematism which is not conceivable without the
body and its being one flesh with the world, inverting thereby the
constitutive relationship between the opening to the world and its
understanding, or reflexive appropriation by the subject: “It is the
(...) ek-stasis of the phenomenon of phenomenon, coextensive to the
originary distortion of phenomenon, to the inscription that is always
already carried out in the transcendental schematisms of the
phenomenalization, that constitutes the conditions of possibility and
the transcendental matrix of the worldly ek-stasis (in the Heideggerian
sense) rather than the opposite”. This would allow, as
Carlson observes, a coping with a phenomenon as a concrete one, far away
from being an appearance of what is reflected in and by a cogito, a
phenomenon as the appearance (parution) of a “place in the world”:
Insofar as strictly co-extensive of a phase of presence that, for its
part, is necessarily incarnated in a sort of constitutive excavation
(trouée), in virtue of its horizons, incarnated in a sort of concrete
world, one isn’t dealing, strictly speaking, with only this concrete and
incarnated world, correlative of a scheme-organ: it can be addressing
such vision, such sensation (…) such thought, such dream, such
phantasma, such artwork (a canvas, a musical work, a poem, a book), such
‘global situation’ in the world, and of the world where the whole
lived-body is involved.
In fact, vision, sensation, thought, dream, this excavation of the
world never corresponds to the sum or to the delimitation of what one
actually sees, feels, thinks, dreams. The actual, as actually present,
is never but “the shadow that the concept projects on the phase of
presence, which is in turn coextensive of the world phenomenon and of
the phenomenon in the world, as incarnated one”.
What is a phenomenon also? According to Richir, painters have always
been conscious of it. Constable, for example, knew it well when he said
that it is not about a house, but it is about a summer morning in which
there is a house. A phenomenon, in this sense, is nothing but a phase of
the world.
With this, as seen, Richir is explicitly moving a critique to the
traditional philosophy of representation, but also to the idea that the
image, imago is something that refers to the “fixed” domain of the
visual and aims to cover the entire field of imagination (or even of
human experience in general). With his philosophy, Richir is looking for
a deeper dimension, a dimension “beyond the image” – something that
would be witnessed for example by the fact that someone unable to see
can demonstrate the same capacity for imagining and phantasizing as
anyone else. In fact, imagination, which at its
foundation is essentially “unfigurable”, belongs to the order of
affectivity–that ground of life not yet marked by what we understand by
“subject”, “consciousness” etc., in the classical senses of these words.
Accordingly, as Richir affirms, it is possible to admit a “human
glance”, proper to the perceptive imagination, where–“in an exchange of
glances”–each one perceives in the other this “original unfigurable”,
beyond the bodily limits, where a reciprocal “dwelling” is possible
(even if not a “coincidence”, to use Merleau-Ponty’s words). In fact, a
glance that crosses another glance does not properly see “anything”, but
rather sees in it “something unfigurable, like his life, or the
modulations, in the form of affections, of his affectivity”. If a glance
were properly speaking a vision, one would see in the other eye just
one’s own pupil, as Hegel already stated in his Phenomenology of the
Spirit.
This is also the task of painting: it tries, “perceiving in
phantasy”, to grasp something transcendent. In fact, it is not that the
painter tries to reproduce faithfully and according to his own talent
something that he sees in the real world; rather he tries, so to say, to
both unravel and enable by the means at his disposal (his abilities and
the rules and materials of painting in a given historical moment) access
to this unfigurable present in the figurable–and this, according to the
gestures of his Leibkörper and his affections. Artists create out of
their Leiblichkeit, but this Leiblichkeit itself cannot be represented
voluntarily and directly: it remains in its undefined vagueness and may
only be felt during its unintentional activity.
In this sense, artistic creation has its telos neither in convincing
illusions (recognizable and confirming fictions) nor in rhetorical
effects, but in opening our minds to the unconceivable: its telos lies
in activating non-intentional phantasy and as-yet unshaped affect.
This means, according to Richir, that artistic creation consists in
looking for the true self through an image that has to “remove” or
“suspend” itself, in order to give access to the perceptive imagination and its operativity: the true
self present in the image will be the same thing that the spectator (if
he is not “dazzled” by what the painting supposedly represents) will
perceive, in his radical singularity.
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