Events, ruptures, durations
Événements, ruptures, durées
"Chiasmi International" journal n°27
Revue « Chiasmi International » n°27
Published on Thursday, February 27, 2025
Abstract
This dossier will explore the various fields of Merleau-Ponty's thought in which his notions of event, rupture and duration are at work or can become fertile and operative. This means exploring not only Merleau-Ponty's work, but also the thought of other authors in the phenomenological tradition or the structuralist and post-structuralist currents. Finally, it means looking at contemporary philosophy and theoretical thinking, to understand how various traditions of thought in the humanities and social sciences are responding today to the challenges posed by events (from the events of 11 September 2001 to pandemics and global ecological issues) and how they thematise notions of duration and rupture in public and private life.
Announcement
Argument
Although he is almost never thought of as an “event philosopher,” the term “event” appears and reappears in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. For example, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty remarks that objective thought thinks the “world ready-made, as the middle of every possible event and treats perception as one of these events.” In doing so, he says, perception “does not present itself first as an event in the world” but as a “re-creation or re-constitution of the world at each moment.” In the passivity course, attempting to place thinking back into the middle of things, he describes passivity as “an event-based thought.” In fact, the word “event” appears many times in those notes and is profoundly connected to the institution course, which famously precedes them. Here is a paradox characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s way of philosophizing: to endeavour to think the event of reflection is to think a certain passivity within reflection. It is, in other words, to think what remains unreflective inside reflection yet instituting reflection. In his later thought, Heidegger famously moves to Ereignis, the event of being that shows itself as the structure of phenomena’s presentation and as the origin and structure of all phenomena. In doing so, he inaugurates a trajectory of event evident in the works of various phenomenologists after him (e.g., Nancy, Romano, Raffoul, Dastur). Taking a different route outside ontology, Alain Badiou calls the event a “pure inconsistent multiplicity.” He means something that stands apart from coherence, but which ruptures into it, destabilizes it, without uniformity of its own. Here, event removes the transcendental conditions for thought. We want to draw out Merleau-Ponty’s different and unique sense of “event” which moves between these two possibilities. In one sense, the event is for Merleau-Ponty ontological and conceived as the structure of the phenomenon. In another sense, it is not an origin whatsoever, but both ruptures into things and endures there. In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of event is not instantaneous but survives and endures in time, and even may be nothing more than what survives in time. It is at once discontinuous and continuous, disarticulated and articulated. One could say that, in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of event, we have a notion of the transcendental which incorporates, without superseding, the dis-contiguous.
There is a methodological issue: to think the event is to always think in the concrete because any other approach risks turning it into something of a referent and therefore something uneventful. It would be to misapprehend the very transcendental character of event. For example, historical or political revolutions are surely not single moments, but they are indeed events. Does Merleau-Ponty have a notion of revolution that does not rely on the instant of rupture? Merleau-Ponty also describes sleep as an event, and here the event is not one thing but the very site of symbolization or symbolizations. Perhaps even personal “trauma” could be understood in this more ontological discontinuous sense, a site which is at once paradigmatically both singular and plural? Once again in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty notes objective thought turns perception into “stimuli as described by physics” or in terms of “the organs of the senses as described by biology.” But is there a biological notion of event in, say, Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of animal morphology, embryology, or mimicry? That Merleau-Ponty thinks from the point of view of event is evidenced by the fact that, for him, the event is not one thing but rather, it has certain material specificities: an event can be years, centuries, millennia, or eight hours a night. Such considerations and others would be most welcome.
In this dossier, we would like to explore the various fields of Merleau-Ponty's thought in which his notions of event, rupture and duration are at work or can become fertile and operative. This means exploring not only Merleau-Ponty's work, but also the thought of other authors in the phenomenological tradition or the structuralist and post-structuralist currents. Finally, it means looking at contemporary philosophy and theoretical thinking, to understand how various traditions of thought in the humanities and social sciences are responding today to the challenges posed by events (from the events of 11 September 2001 to pandemics and global ecological issues) and how they thematise notions of duration and rupture in public and private life.
Submission guidelines
Abstracts (4000 characters maximum) in French, English or Italian, should be submitted to Rajiv Kaushik (rkaushik@brocku.ca)
by 14 March 2025
and be accompanied by brief biobibliographies of the author(s).
Then, the proposals selected after evaluation will have to be developed as an article and sent before 23 June 2025 on the basis of the editorial standards of Chiasmi International to allow their publication in issue 27 of the journal.
A peer-reviewed academic journal, Chiasmi International publishes original research on or inspired by the thought of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The contributions submitted to Chiasmi International must be original, with no simultaneous submission to other periodicals.
All submissions are subject to double blind peer-review and, if accepted, authors may be required to make revisions, based on feedback from the reviewers. The journal welcomes submissions in French, English, and Italian.
The submissions must follow the editorial standards of Chiasmi International:
http://chiasmi.unimi.it/CHIASMI_guidelines.pdf
Abstract and article length
- Abstract proposal: 4.000 signs, spaces included.
- Final Article: 40.000 characters, spaces included.
Scientific editor
- Rajiv Kaushik (Brock University)
Subjects
Date(s)
- Friday, March 14, 2025
Keywords
- phenomenology, history, epistemology, politics, ontology, Merleau-Ponty
Contact(s)
- Rajiv Kaushik
courriel : rkaushik [at] brocku [dot] ca
Reference Urls
Information source
- Gael Caignard
courriel : rivistakaiak [at] libero [dot] it
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Events, ruptures, durations », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Thursday, February 27, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/13e5r
