Mon chemin vers Marc Richir

Abstract

I met Marc Richir’s thought around 1990, about two years after defending my thesis on “desymbolization in contemporary culture”. This story tries to show how my ideas that had gradually taken shape between 1973 and 1988 have truly found, after reading Marc Richir’ texts, the precise concepts to which all my thoughts seemed to lead. This research was punctuated by the "ʺdiscovery"ʺ of conceptual pairs that seemed to constitute organizing poles of two kinds of "ʺrepresentations’modes"ʺ or significance, irreducible to one another: meaning / significance, allegory / symbol, socio-‐‑cultural space / psychical space, mimecry / mimisme, semiotic / symbolic etc ... It seemed to me that the high polarity symbolic / phenomenological (symbolique et phénoménologique) as Marc Richir designs it, give a new light on these conceptual pairs, without necessarily be equivalent. I also had the opportunity in this work to question the relevance of certain oppositions that appear to be self-‐evident, for example, realism / idealism or realism / nominalism. But I did not join the deconstructive thought. It seemed to me that the opposition could only be valid within the context of a thought that use already built up concepts. I'ʹve long been in search of a “third way” and the discovery of the "ʺnon-‐‑object reference"ʺ with Maldiney and Bonnefoy (among others) was a decisive step in the evolution of my work. But again, the concepts of “phénomènes de monde hors langage” and “phénomènes de langage,” as Marc Richir conceives them, helped me after my theses and up to today, to better understand and go deeper into the idea that there is a tendency in contemporary culture to undermine the symbolization. Now, I would say it was the concepts of phenomenalisation, and thus dé-‐‑phenomenalisation, concepts that had not been yet thought in my work.