This discussion study addresses the debate concerning phenomenology from the opportune problem of the intencional, which Martin Ritter and Mar¬tin Nitsche have conducted on the pages of Filosofický časopis. The theme of the discussion is the contribution of Heidegger to philosophy and the possibilities of a “transformative phenomenology”. The authors are, above all, concerned with the question of whether it is possible to treat transforma¬tive phenomenology as phenomenology, or rather as a narrative construct. In my contribution I show that the position of Martin Nitsche is certainly phenomenological, nevertheless that it would be helpful to moderate some aspects of his argument (and the arguments of M. Heidegger) in view of the objections of M. Ritter. I attempt to prove the existence of the intencional in the context of the natural world. To this end I draw on the examples of
G. Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination; Krtoušová interpretation of quantum mechanics; and Agamben’s description of friendship. With the help of Bachelard’s theory I then attempt to present Heidegger’s interpreta¬tion as the phenomenological picture of the hidden and to thus prove its phe¬nomenological relevance. Finally, drawing on Elberfeld’s interpretation of transformative phenomenology, I defend the possibility of phenomenology as a performative and as a “training” into the connectedness of the person and the world.
The experience of pregnancy during which one human body lives inside another human body can provide an unconventional way of making some aspects of human subjectivity and embodiment stand out. This article arises from a phenomenological analysis of the living body and through a comparative analysis of two philosophical descriptions of pregnancy (N. Depraz a I. Young) it arrives at an alternative understanding of the duality which characterises this experience. Instead of the duality of self and the other in myself – of identity and inner alterity – it offers a topological duality of excessive closeness and distance from one’s own interpretation of reality. The article draws, in this, on the account of friendship in G. Agamben, well-being in G. Bachelard and the world outside the world of J. Derrida. In this way there is not constituted some kind of more powerful female subjectivity, but conduct on the basis of tact with respect to the hiddenness of reality. With reference to a question of J. Butler, the final part of the article deals with the possibilities of ethics in a subject that is not transparent to itself, something which flows from the experience just analysed.
In this article I describe experience which I call experience of the maternal-child body and which is primarily happy and problem-free. I then develop, in more detail, ideas which are born of this experience. Next I attempt to argue that the ideas in question offer a way of thinking the production of sense which eschews the metaphysics of presence, as well as the Lacanian-inspired idea of infinite movement in the order of the symbolic, and perhaps eventually eschews the post-structuralist thought of the infinite reference to significants without any kind of relation to a transcendent significant. I point to aspects that are in common between this description and the ideas of D. Winnicott, and I also put forward two moments in which this description clearly differs from Winnicott’s conception.