Tampere University / University of Tampere

Faculty Member, Dept. of History and Philosophy

Other Affiliations: University of Helsinki, Department of History, Philosophy, Culture and Art Studies

Lecturer of philosophy

Thesis Title: Heidegger avec Hegel : une explication philosophique

About

I defended my thesis "Heidegger avec Hegel : une explication philosophique" (on Heidegger's confrontation with Hegel) in the Université Marc Bloch de Strasbourg in 2000. My supervisor was prof. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and the jury of my thesis consisted of professors Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Courtine and Jacques Taminiaux. The thesis was accepted with the mention "très honorable avec les félicitations du jury". Later, I have acquired the french "qualification pour les fonctions de maître de conférences".

After my dissertation, I have worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki working on projects financed mainly by the Academy of Finland and the University of Helsinki. This is also where I have acquired the title of docent of theoretical philosophy.

In 2007, I have also spent a one-term research visit at the department of philosophy of the Universität Wuppertal.

My doctoral thesis was on Heidegger's confrontation with Hegel. I examined their entire debate (on the problematics of being, time, subjectivity and history) from the particular point of view of the question of the philosophical debate. I showed why Hegel and Heidegger are so "irreconcilable" and they cannot share a common "cause". I used their discord in order to bring light to obscure zones of their philosophies: this is how I provoked a kind of a "double deconstruction" in which I brought out Hegel's answer to Heidegger's question of the finitude, and Heidegger's answer to Hegel's question of recognition. Accompanying these investigations with constant methodological interrogations, I examined Heidegger's different types of dialogue with Hegel, as well as their debt to Hegel's own conception of the philosophical dialogue. Finally I showed how the diverse dialogues point towards a renewed conception of historiality, which came out as the most risky and implicit theme of Heidegger's readings of Hegel.

A book written after the dissertation – "Les Irréconciliables : Heidegger contre Hegel" – is forthcoming this year at L'Harmattan. Another book, "L'être comme phusis et l'être comme vie" is forthcoming at L'Harmattan soon after.

My postdoctoral research projects have been on the subjects of "life" and "the elemental". Their starting point was the discord between Hegel and Heidegger concerning the essence of being, when Hegel interprets being as "life" and Heidegger indicates his opposition to this idea by studying being as "physis". In my forthcoming book I show how this insurmontable discord between dialectical and onto-phenomenological conceptions of being actually defines the scope of contemporary continental theories of existence and being.
On this background, turning against a strong tendency within contemporary phenomenology of interpreting "living being" within a theological framework, I have rather interpreted being in the framework of the philosophy of nature. This is because I believe that for us today nature is a most crucial existential and political problem, that we cannot face only by means of classical epistemology, esthetics and economics, which mainly they study nature as an object. Instead, I study nature that appears as the basis of our existence and lifeworld; this is complicated, because, as I have shown, nature is precisely what does not appear in existence except as its withdrawn ground (the animality in the human being, the elemental ground of the world).

In a number of articles I have shown how contemporary phenomenological and deconstructive philosophy carries a strong but often ignored inheritance of German Idealist and Romantic philosophy of nature and in particular of Schelling and Hegel. No doubt, their "Naturphilosophie" is scientifically outdated, but it remains existentially and ontologically fascinating, as its reflections in Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Jonas, Agamben, Merleau-Ponty etc have shown. I have studied these passages in particular in terms of animality and ot the elemental.

My new research project on Globalisation and Cosmopolitanism also grows from my work on the philosophy of nature. I examine "nature" as the only truly global, elemental ground of political life. I will show how contemporary "globalisation" prevents human beings from being citizens belonging to a political community, and reduces them, instead, into their pure "animality", abandoned directly on the "elemental ground"  of the community. I will then confront this description to the ideal of cosmopolitanism.

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