Renaud Barbaras

Renaud Barbaras (born 27 August 1955) is a French contemporary philosopher. An École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the University of Paris 1, Sorbonne.

Work
A phenomenologist, Barbaras' works have primarily focused on the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. More recently, his readings of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka have influenced him into conceiving a phenomenology of life and accordingly, a cosmology in which man's place is to be thought anew.

In 1999, Renaud Barbaras built his philosophy in confrontation with the aporias of the philosophy of the late Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher he worked on for his PhD. His doctoral thesis, subtitled "an introduction to a phenomenology of perception" is in homage to Merleau-Ponty. Barbaras' Desire and distance addresses the consequences of the Abschattungslehre that neither Husserl nor Merleau-Ponty managed to clarify: 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 in our way of perceiving as imperfect in comparison with the supposed plenitude of the things themselves. But to be consequential would be to acknowledge the fact that nothing can appear if not to a subject. This doesn't mean that 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: "'We began our inquiry on the being of the intramondaneous subject with the relation, phenomenologically attested, between perception and movement. Now, this relation no longer represents any difficulty. It is plainly justified by the fact desire consists in experiencing its own limits. Indeed, since perception is only possible through the limitation of a totality, every perception essentially calls for its overtaking by a movement. Perceiving, in the end, is always passing to something else. And this doesn't only mean that a perception may give way to another perception, but that perception consists in giving way to something else because, since perception is desire, a reality is only to be grasped as something essentially missing.'"

Articles translated in English

 * 2012 The Phenomenology of Life: Desire as the Being of the Subject. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology


 * 2008 (with Jen McWeeny) Life, Movement, and Desire., Research in Phenomenology 38 (1):3-17.
 * 2004 Affectivity and Movement: The Sense of Sensing in Erwin Straus. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (2):215-228.
 * 2002 Francisco Varela: A New Idea of Perception and Life. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2):127-132