Would you please briefly retrace your “Heideggerian itinerary” since college?
At the beginning of the sixties, in the Faculté des Lettres at Toulouse, I took classes with Gérard Granel and was greatly influenced by him. His lectures on Husserl, Kant, and Hegel (I can remember a superb course on Faith and Knowledge), where he developed the Heideggerian interpretation of philosophy and of its history, seemed extraordinarily enlightening to me.
After passing the Agrégation, my first class at the Toulouse Lycée for young women in the fall of 1963 was an introduction to philosophy course devoted to What Is Called Thinking? Obviously, this was not a systematic reading of the book, but rather the sketching out of its general contours and of the questions that it suggests and generates. This did not seem to be at all inaccessible to the students, who found therein, I believe, a new world, a new questioning, and were thus placed immediately into “the matter itself” of philosophy (that was, at least, my intention, and for them I think that it was both challenging and delightful).
I entered the University of Toulouse in 1967–68 as an assistant and, at first, I taught classes in “general philosophy.” Soon thereafter, at the request of students, I taught courses in “political philosophy.” It was May 1968. I was quickly confronted with the thorny topic of “aesthetics and politics.” That was not my first encounter with aesthetics, for I had taught a class in aesthetics (on Dufrenne’s book, more specifically on the part entitled “The Aesthetic Object”) during my preparation for the Agrégation, at the request of Robert Blanché (another professor who influenced me at Toulouse but who was not at all “Heideggerian”). But the link between aesthetics and politics was new to my research. It seemed to me then, as it does now, to be of an extreme difficulty. All the cookie-cutter identifications and oppositions, which abound in this discussion, are traps whose purpose is to hide and avoid the fundamental question: the question, once again, “what is called thinking?” and above all, the genre of this fundamental question, which, strictly speaking, is not a question to be resolved, or to which we must find an answer. This question is included in the different epochal schemes, which it itself unfolds and only unfolds within them. Nevertheless, the connection between aesthetics and politics struck me as unfathomable in the terms in which it is always presented; nor do I consider myself to have found any other more satisfactory options. We must be very prudent and daring: a conjunction of prudence and daring, which does not seem to me to characterize the majority of contemporary investigations on this issue.
Let us continue then, if you like, with my “itinerary” as concerns Heidegger. At the end of the 1970s, I began to translate Husserl’s Ideas 2 (published by PUF in 1982 in the Épiméthée collection) and around 1980 I began the elaboration of my doctoral thesis—defended in 1985 and published by Galilée in 1986 under the title Imago Mundi, subtitled Topologie de l’art. My thesis, built on the two philosophical pillars Kant and Heidegger, is dedicated to what I would call a phenomenological interpretation of the work of art—and for this, my investigation chose two other pillars, painting and poetry. It was on the occasion of my thesis that I met Jacques Derrida, whose texts I had been reading for some time.
Finally, two other institutional circumstances ushered me into phenomenological and Heideggerian research. On the one hand, Jean-François Courtine and Didier Franck took over the phenomenology seminar at the CNRS, and upon its relaunching in 1986–87, they invited me to join them as an associate researcher. On the other hand, I participated in the creation of the Collège International de Philosophie from 1986 to 89, where I organized, together with Miguel Abensour, the conference Heidegger—Questions ouvertes, the proceedings of which were published under that same title (Osiris, 1988). I would also add a third institutional circumstance, which for its part is “aesthetic” above all else: the founding in 1985 of the journal La Part de l’œil (and its affiliated society) by a group of artists and researchers from Brussels who invited me to join their group—the journal has published its seventeenth annual issue.
So that is how I “received” Heidegger. Should we now move on to questions that deal with the reception of Heidegger in relationship to aesthetics in France?
In your book Imago Mundi Heidegger is doubly invoked, first with respect to “The Origin of the Work of Art” and then in view of the relation between language and poetry. What then constitutes the unity of your reading of Heidegger’s “aesthetic writings?”
The core of my book Imago Mundi consists, as I just said, in the elaboration of what I would call a phenomenological interpretation of the work of art. I describe the artwork as a “phainomenon-image,” but be careful! The phainomenon-image is not an “image” in the classical sense of the term. I aim at a sort of refoundation or transformation of aesthetics, and that is why it is necessary to rely on Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics. For Heidegger is severe with regard to aesthetics, as he also is, incidentally, with regard to linguistics—for him, they are both the result of a misunderstanding and an occultation of “the thing itself,” namely language or the artwork. Thus, I rely on this well-known Heideggerian critique, without, however, ignoring what in my opinion is secretly—or even dramatically—constituted in what we customarily refer to as aesthetics or linguistics. I do not adopt Heidegger’s rejection absolutely in this regard, because there are, in classical aesthetics and in classical linguistics, “experiences” or “experiments” that lead to radical discoveries.
In Imago Mundi, I invoke Heidegger in two ways: first, via “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and second, in reference to the relationship between language and poetry. What constitutes the unity of my reading? First, “The Origin of the Work of Art” is a text contemporary to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin. This must always be remembered when working on “The Origin” or on the texts and lectures on Hölderlin. More importantly still, these are all texts that are contemporary to the Beiträge zur Philosophie (1937–39), which I was not familiar with at the time of Imago Mundi but the reading of which confirms my interpretation of “The Origin” and of the Hölderlin texts. To such an extent that I wonder today whether the Beiträge are not the deployment of a new “aesthetics” and whether the entire terminology of the Beiträge is not, precisely, “aesthetic” in a radical sense, a sense that is completely other than the one that Heidegger critiques so severely, as I already mentioned. Such a radicality would require that aesthetics and ontology no longer be distinguished from each other—it would mean the end of aesthetics in the narrow classical sense. We would then have a thinking without qualification: neither aesthetics nor ontology (undoubtedly not “politics” either). The Beiträge would be, in a certain sense, the other side (the positive side, if you like) of the (negative) Heideggerian critique of aesthetics. This is what I meant when I spoke of a new foundation or a transformation of aesthetics.
As far as “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the texts of the late thirties on poetry are concerned, the unity of my reading is to be found in the concepts of Bild and of Einbildung—what I call the phainomenon-image. This might sound surprising insofar as Heidegger does not seem to have much interest in this notion of Bild—far from it! And yet, I think that for Heidegger, in another text, later than the ones I have mentioned (namely in “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .” from 1951), the artwork is precisely that through which he defines Bild and Einbildung as “visible inclusions of the alien [des Fremden] in the sight of the familiar.”1 It seems to me that people did not pay attention to this. If we were to pay attention to this, we might find that the Beiträge is a text on aesthetics in a radical sense, and we might also be able to establish a link with the Heideggerian explanation of the political in a very different way than what is usually said of him. We would have here a “politics of the foreign.”
What constitutes the unity of my reading of Heidegger’s texts on language and poetry, those from the 1950s, from On the Way to Language, in their relation to his earlier texts? I do not think that there is a break between Heidegger’s texts from these two periods. But perhaps we can simply state that “language” (Sprache) now explicitly plays the role that I believe to have been played by Bild in the earlier texts? This is what I would be tempted to say, but it would undoubtedly be too simple, and I would like, here, to pursue other avenues of inquiry.
Do you think that the late Merleau-Ponty was inspired by Heidegger as much in the aesthetical domain as in the ontological one?
The late Merleau-Ponty, the one of Eye and Mind, of The Visible and the Invisible, or of The Prose of the World, the author of a magnificent corpus sadly interrupted by his death, is certainly very much inspired by Heidegger in aesthetics. Not just in his analyses of the artwork, but also in his understanding of “aesthetics.” For Merleau-Ponty as for Heidegger, aesthetics is neither a region nor a part of being, neither a science nor a mode of knowledge that would be defined by its particular procedures and thus by distinction from other procedures within a regional distribution of the sciences and knowledge. Aesthetics is neither a genre nor a species: it refutes all divisions of knowledge or of sciences. I believe it belongs to that which Schelling named “identity philosophy”—and I think that there is a lot of this, I mean of the Schellingian understanding of art, in Heidegger.
Merleau-Ponty was inspired by Heidegger in aesthetics as much as he was in ontology. All the concepts of the late Merleau-Ponty are, in fact, I would say, multidimensional: both have two sides—an aesthetical and an ontological one; the two being really one, which means that we can also call them unidimensional. For example, do not the “intertwining” and the “chiasm” refer, in a singular and surprising way, both to the early Heidegger of the ontological difference as well as to the later Heidegger of Ereignis? Do they not carry the underpinnings of the artwork and the successive structures of being according to Heidegger? Intertwining and chiasm: Is this ontology? Is it aesthetics? Doubtless, they are inseparably both. Or to take another example, the “depth” superbly analyzed by Merleau-Ponty in his reflections on Cézanne, is this not the same thing as what he calls “branches of Being?” Not to mention all the explicit references to Heidegger in The Visible and the Invisible. Is this to say that Merleau-Ponty could not have written without Heidegger? But does this question have to imply a devaluation? Does it imply an epigonality and a lack of originality? Absolutely not, and we must on the contrary recognize Merleau-Ponty’s singularity. Indeed, these thinkers are themselves precisely in an intertwining, which means that the concept of influence is subverted at every level. I believe that what we call “history of philosophy” resides precisely in this subversion.
Which is why the reception of Heidegger’s aesthetics as well as his ontology in France passes through Merleau-Ponty.
How would you characterize Maldiney’s Heideggerianism, or that of Loreau?
The same thing holds for the following generation of French phenomenologists of art who contributed to the reception of Heidegger and who contributed intensively to the evolution of a Heideggerian interpretation of art, to its dynamism and its “subversion.” I am thinking here, precisely, of Henri Maldiney and of Max Loreau.
We can say that for both of them, as well as for Merleau-Ponty, the central term of aesthetics is the body—and not Dasein, if you will, as is the case for Heidegger (even if things are not that simple). The body is, in my opinion, the core that is proper to French post-Heideggerian aesthetics.
Henri Maldiney’s goal—in his principal works on art, Regard, parole, espace (L’Âge d’homme, 1973), Aîtres de la langue et demeures de la pensée (L’Âge d’homme, 1975), Art et existence (Klincksieck, 1985), L’Art, l’éclair de l’être (Éditions Comp’act, 1993), and the most recent one, Ouvrir le rien, l’art nu (Encre marine, 2000)—consists in the deployment of “the sensible,” and this precisely through the differentiation between an “aesthetics of the sensible” and an “aesthetics of art.” One of the leading threads of Maldiney’s thought consists precisely in removing art from an aesthetics of “intentionality” (which would be Husserlian), as well as from an aesthetics of “projection” (which would be Heideggerian). In contrast to this we have an artwork that “exists” under the regime of the “will to form”—whereby Maldiney joins the lineage of Worringer and Riegl. Maldiney’s Heideggerianism is visible in his many paths, as well as in the incidents provoked by those effects. But Heidegger’s texts are never made the thematic focus of his discourse, but only the confrontation with “the thing itself” of the artwork. This led Maldiney from a thinking of the “phenomenon” to the difficult thought of the “nothing,” which he elaborates in his last work, where the encounter with Heidegger is both acknowledged and overcome. To put it briefly, the “nothing” of the artwork, according to Maldiney, is an “active nothing,” and not a “no thing.” The “nothing” in the pictorial artwork (and here we find superb analyses of Kandinsky, Delaunay, Mondrian, Bazaine, Tal Coat, Nicolas de Stael, but also of Chinese painting, in his last book) is an “opening,” which is “existence”—and, to use a term that in my opinion brings Maldiney into proximity with Schelling, an “uni-multi-dimensionality” and also “simultaneity.” And this led Maldiney to think abstraction not as an emptying of everything but as reality itself.
As for Max Loreau, his principal works are La peinture à l’œuvre et l’énigme du corps (Gallimard, 1980), En quête d’un autre commencement (Lebeer-Hossmann, 1987), and La genèse du phénomène (Éditions de Minuit, 1988), a very important oeuvre that may have been only an “introduction” had the death of its author not transformed it into a testament. The reference to the “body” is as essential to Loreau as it is to Merleau-Ponty or Maldiney, as I just mentioned. But for Loreau the nodal term is not aisthesis but rather “volume.” Volume is not put into place by filling up a preexisting space, for volume is the very dynamic of existence. These complex and difficult analyses can be carried out, according to Loreau, only under the auspices of a logos that breaks with the logos that philosophy has never abandoned, from Plato to Heidegger, namely the logos of “vision.” It is thus this logos of “vision” that, according to Loreau, must be exhausted in order to produce “another beginning” (of thought, of aesthetics?), which for its part would be a logos of the pure word. This is a claim that Loreau pursued in his “critique” of Heidegger, which was undoubtedly not always accurate.
How can we identify the dominant traits of investigations in aesthetics today? Does Heidegger play a role here, perhaps indirectly?
Research in aesthetics today—which must absolutely be distinguished from the verbiage we are saturated with today, whether it might be good-natured or aggressive—can emerge only at the edges and surroundings of Heideggerian questions. That art is to be sought in the work, this is a first insight that is drawn from Heidegger’s questions, but that most people today consider a banality. And yet few people think about this. And after all, isn’t this Heidegger’s greatest “lesson,” and isn’t this what prevents aesthetic investigations from treating art like an “occupation” among others? Must we not then affirm that the “efficacity of the work” has nothing to do with the production of so-called objects “of art?” Does not Heidegger’s immense role, whether directly or indirectly, reside in this stubborn affirmation?
Are you, too, “bothered,” as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe admitted to be, by the link between “art-people-community” that still appears in the Athens lecture?
Please allow me defer this question. I just sketched out a theoretical context in my response to your first question. Furthermore, this context is not a “theoretical” one, for me, in the “untroubled” sense of the term, but rather a profoundly dramatic sign.
Do you find Heidegger’s short text “Art and Space” inspiring?
The short text “Art and Space,” which was presented as a lecture by Heidegger in 1969, does indeed inspire me. It corresponds, in my view, to Heidegger’s attempt to go against the grain of Sein und Zeit. There was a manifest tendency in Sein und Zeit to reduce spatiality to temporality. What appears in the other text is surely not the inverse tendency, but rather the possibility of deploying space beyond this sort of reduction. Thus, notions such as Gegend, already encountered in Sein und Zeit, are almost redefined. The Heideggerian Gegend in “Art and Space” must, in my opinion, be understood in terms of the “earth” of which Husserl spoke, “the earth which does not move.” Is this Gegend not the “earth which does not move?” And are not these two that which is put to work in the artwork? Or better: does Heidegger not encounter the “alien in the sight of the familiar”—this Bild and this Einbildung of which, in the end, he spoke so little? This is why, in my opinion, this little text opens many paths. It was in full knowledge of this that I tried, in my book L’Espace Pictural (Encre Marine, 1995), to elaborate on a few of these paths (among which the Gegend brings me, I think, very close today to Maldiney’s “simultaneity”).