Renaud Barbaras

French phenomenologist (b. 1955), Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Largely credited with sparking the Merleau-Ponty "renaissance" in French phenomenology in the early 1990s. Author of The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (2004), Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception (2005), and Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (forthcoming in English). Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2010-2015); awarded the Grand Prix in Philosophy of the French Academy (2014).

Key Points

  • Argues that MP's ontology begins from "not nothing" — a being that negates absolute nothingness (following Bergson's critique of "false problems") — and develops this into a phenomenology of desire
  • His most developed critique of MP: flesh has three senses, not one. (1) Ontic flesh = corps propre (reversibility of touch). (2) Ontological flesh = world as non-being totality, the element of originarity — flesh as world, not of the world. (3) Transcendental flesh = desire, "the essence of life" — the only mode of phenomenalization whose indefinite advance matches the world's withdrawal
  • Central objection: MP illegitimately moves from ontic to ontological flesh by presupposing spatial continuity of body with world. He "forgets phenomenology twice" — first by treating the corps propre as continuous with the objective world it was supposed to transcend, then by treating the world as mere extension
  • The transcendental flesh (desire) satisfies two conditions: it delivers the invisible background of ontological flesh (because desire's reach exceeds intuition), and it is characterized by a fundamental iteration or "originary advance" (because desire projects toward what evades givenness)
  • Equally distant from MP and from Michel Henry: Henry's transcendental flesh (pure auto-affection) lacks any relation to externality, while MP's flesh-of-the-world lacks the subject

Connections

  • is a major interpreter of maurice-merleau-ponty
  • critiques flesh-as-element — argues MP's univocal flesh is inconsistent; proposes three-sense distinction
  • is engaged critically by kaushik-2021-negation-implex on the being/negation question
  • is responded to by McWeeny (2019) who argues the opposite direction — toward panpsychism
  • draws on Bergson's critique of "false problems" of metaphysics
  • draws on Patočka's account of non-intuitive givenness for the ontological sense of flesh

Sources