Renaud Barbaras

In 1999, Renaud Barbaras begins to build his own philosophy as he is confronted with the apories of the philosophy of the late Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher he worked on for his PhD. Subtitled "an introduction to a phenomenology of perception" in homage to the author of Visible and invisible, Barbaras' Desire and distance addresses the consequences of the Abschattungslehre neither Husserl nor Merleau-Ponty managed to be coherent with: his idea is to be faithful to the principle according to which the fact that we only perceive one side of the things around us doesn't mean we don't perceive them as themselves. This is what he calls not submitting perception to the law of object (or objectivity): the mistake he spots is the prejudice we have to think our way of perceiving as imperfect in comparison to the supposed plenitude of the things themselves. But to be consequent would be to acknowledge the fact that nothing can appear if not to a subject. This doesn't mean the subject is constituting the object, but merely that he is a part of the process of manifestation. To be a part of and not to be constituting: this requires a new definition of subjectivity, which Barbaras tries to give through the conception of a subject based on the natural movement and what he calls desire:

Renaud Barbaras (born in 1955) is a French contemporary philosopher. An École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the Sorbonne.