Imagination vs. the world: The many facets of world phenomena in Marc Richir’s phenomenology
Imagination vs. the world: The many facets of world phenomena in Marc Richir’s phenomenology

Summary/Abstract: The talk explores Marc Richir’s revised account of the world as phenomena, its relation to the phenomena of language and the importance of the innovative Richirian idea of the “phenomena as nothing but phenomena” (phénomène comme rien que phénomène). I will extend my approach to the field of psychoanalytic theory, on the basis of Richir’s equation of phenomena as nothing but phenomena and the Lacanian concept of the real (Richir 2002: 36). My aim is to demonstrate that both the Richirian and the Lacanian theory are embedded in a vision of the world as essentially anarchic, namely, as lacking the unity of a unifying principle. I will argue that, because of this lack, sense-making is unfulfilled (i.e. unfinished, non-exhaustive) for Richir (hence, language as phenomena) and, at the same time, impossible for Lacan. Finally, I will show that the world as phenomena is always pluralistic in Richir’s view. In this sense, we can no longer speak of one origin of (our) common world, but about origins (plural) of the shared worlds (plural). However, because of its unifying workings, imagination distorts the world as phenomena and sustains the “transcendental illusion” of the “eidetic fog”, as Richir puts it. Hence, this opposition between imagination and the world translates into a unifying principle prone to overcome the singularity of each and every phenomenon as lived by a unique subject.

• Details
• Contents