EDITORIAL

Editorial - dossier Renaud Barbaras

Claudinei Aparecido de Freitas da Silva

Editor do Dossiê

This issue of the Phenomenological Studies - Revista de Abordagem Gestáltica is pleased to bring a special Dossier to Renaud Barbaras to pay homage to the work of this remarkable French thinker. It is, in fact, a work whose thinking experience has decisively impacted, in recent times, not only the phenomenological research stricto sensu, but also a broader circuit of debate, transdisciplinary by definition, in the midst of the field of humanities and the arts in general. An important reflection of this is the living sample that this edition vigorously places, particularly in Brazil, when bringing together researchers from different institutions. After all, Renaud Barbaras is someone who, in addition to a productive intellectual interlocution, has always expressed a generous academic cooperation with countless Portuguese-speaking scholars whose research has been seminally inspired by his reflections. In this direction, the 11 texts gathered here testify, with dedication, such reconnaissance as a modest way of paying tribute to the phenomenological epicenter of its extensive production in progress.

It is in view of this general scope, that the Dossier is then opened with the text of the honoree, titled O belonging, towards a phenomenology of the flesh, Renaud Barbaras seeks, phenomenologically, to describe the legitimate sense and ontological reach of the experience of the body or of the flesh, which had even escaped Merleau-Ponty. To this end, Barbaras wonders whether this meaning of the being of the body, rather than a euphoric solution, would not indicate an ill-placed problem in order to account for its own mode of existence. Now, he argues, this fundamental experience is that of belonging: having a body means exactly belong to the world. The task here is that of a phenomenology of belonging, of which there is only the apparition of the world from within. Such is the true sense of being of the flesh: it is not body nor consciousness, but a possession (perceptive) of the world that is the counterpart of a (carnal) dispossession of this world. In the second article, The enigma of belonging to the escapee: on the a priori of the phenomenological correlation in R. Barbaras, Luís António Umbelino recognizes in the Barbarasian work theoretical possibilities of an innovative philosophical project. The originality of this project finds a first sedimentation in Introduction à une philosophie de la vie, text in which the philosopher takes up and deepens a corollary principle, that of the "a priori of phenomenological correlation" as life. It is a question of understanding the very essence of living, that is, of life as it bears the possibility of consciousness, characterizing itself fundamentally as Desire. It is from Desire that we phenomenologically recognize a transcendental field par excellence beyond any dualism between consciousness and world. In the third article, Approaches to the phenomenological and metaphysical problem of feeling in Renaud Barbaras, José Manuel Beato observes that, with Métaphysique du sentiment, of 2016, Barbaras proposes a theory of singular and radical sentiment, which, at the same time, constitutes a new stage in continuation, enlargement and deepening of its "phenomenology of life". Acknowledging his debt to Mikel Dufrenne, this theoretical elaboration, however, affirms its originality through a critical dialogue with the phenomenologists who have problematized the sensibility and affectivity. Beyond and below the subjectivist plane of affections and emotions, in the eyes of Barbaras, the feeling consists in the archi-affective experience of openness to the depth of the world. There is a situation and articulation of feeling in the context of the theory of "transcendental desire"; theory understood, therefore, as phenomenal advancement of the subject. In the fourth article, Renaud Barbaras' notion of private anthropology, Reinaldo Furlan highlights the originality of Barbaras' life philosophy, from the presentation and discussion of his notion of private anthropology. This theoretical reach constitutes, so to speak, the decisive framework of what would become his philosophical thought, a framework that becomes complete with a cosmology and metaphysics. Furlan also situates the point of eventual tension with a phenomenological perspective, ending with a question about the general barbarasian conception of life. In the fifth text, Intentionality: Merleau-Ponty and Barbaras, Mariana Cabral Tomzhinsky Scarpa intends to approach the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Barbaras by exploring some basic elements of the notion of intentionality as well as their implications in the thinking of both philosophers. Briefly recalling the notion of intentionality in Husserl, the author goes to the appropriation made by Merleau-Ponty in his initial texts, in order to describe how the intentionality appears linked to the movement of the body itself in the world. In the sequence, she reconstitutes some Barbarasian texts that expand the meanings of a correlational a priori indicating to the limits opened by a phenomenology of life. The sixth article, Sartre by Barbaras: movements of a critical reading, Fernanda Alt focuses on some aspects that outline the barbarasian critic of Sartre. In this direction, the author reconstitutes as conducting wire thread the restitution that Barbaras undertakes about the fundamental dualism of Sartre's philosophy, in continuity with the critic of Merleau-Ponty, in order, of course, to open other reflective perspectives. Amongst some of the Sartrean themes that will compose this colloquium stand out the question of the other and desire. The title of the seventh text is Desire and negation - the fault located in the heart of being (a homage to Barbaras). In it, Luciano Donizetti da Silva seeks to return to the Sartrian problem of desire and its relation to negation. It is a question of thinking about the phenomenon of lack in the heart of being. It is, therefore, in the context of this theme that the fundamental question posed by Barbaras arises: "How can there be desire, if the desired one cannot be in any way?" Luciano Donizetti then argues that, beyond a certain naive realism Sartrean, there is a difference between a phenomenological ontology not idealistic and realistic ingenuity. A naivete insists on reading the ontology of Being and nothingness. Thus, instead of the identification between desire and lack, Sartre's ontology is - without more - ontology of negativity: Being and Nothing refer to being categorial, being-for-itself and being-in-itself are existing - phenomena at last - but not in the purely phenomenological sense. The eighth article, On the interpolation of innerity and exteriority: Barbaras' critique of the phenomenology of Hans Jonas's life, Jelson R. de Oliveira restores Barbaras's critique of the phenomenology of Hans Jonas's life as presented in his work Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie. In order to do so, it is necessary to raise, among other arguments, the problem of the interpolation between interiority and exteriority, which would have remained an unresolved problem in Jonas's thesis. This would lead him to the impossibility of his phenomenology of life, stricto sensu. Oliveira then tries to evaluate, however, Hans Jonas's possible answer through the concept of "expressive life", which indicates the insistence on relation and inter-understanding as the most original phenomenon of life. The ninth article, On ethics, Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology: echoes of a dialogue with Renaud Barbaras, Vânia Vicente retakes a dialogue with Barbaras in which they talk about the research project around an ethics, via the thought of Merleau-Ponty. From this point of view, exploring the difficulties of thinking about an ethics from a philosophy whose soil is phenomenological and therefore descriptive, opposing the proper prescriptive perspective of ethics, the author demarcates, throughout the text, three traits that give the tone of this contour. Are they: (i) the approximations and dissonances between ethics and phenomenology, (ii) the ethics that derive from it - or at least some of its features and (iii) the flow of a friendship - in the sense of the ancients - lived in the debate of these questions. The tenth article, Fernando Pessoa's poetic-philosophical experiences and Alberto Caeiro''s non-philosophy, Gisele Batista Candido explores, via Caeiro's poems, a profound phenomenological echo. This resonance takes shape from the way Renaud Barbaras reconstitutes Fernando Pessoa's poetry as an expression of a "non-philosophy" capable of, so to speak, a radical perspective on thought and existence. The Dossier closes with the text - The praise of the poetic in Renaud Barbaras - in which Claudinei Aparecido de Freitas da Silva rehearses a phenomenological balance about the statute of the poetic under the lenses of Barbaras. Like the previous text, the article examines the fundamental critic by which the French philosopher, taking Merleau-Ponty's works as a front line, sees another possible horizon beyond the usual division between philosophy and literature. Claudinei Silva then shows that other writers also saw this horizon, once perpassed by the poetic work of Fernando Pessoa that gathers poetry and metaphysics. such as Clarice Lispector and the poetic-philosophical essayism of Bento Prado Jr.

Finally, through this editorial launch, the Portuguese-speaking reader has first-hand access to another vigorous work on Renaud Barbaras's fecund work in recent phenomenological studies. This project seeks, as far as possible, to pay due attention to an author who has always devoted, especially in Brazilian culture, the highest appreciation and colloquium.

To the reader, therefore, a profitable and pleasurable foray!

(This issue was finished at March 2019)