Fait et eidos : Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Richir

The reworking and the renewal of the eidetic project and method is at the very heart of Marc Richir’s phenomenology. Our paper examines his close reading of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, paying attention to the directions that the German and the French phenomenologist assigned to the consideration of the eidos and to that of the distinction between essence and fact. After having identified, in Husserl, two senses of facticity that imply a different relation to the eidos, we focus on Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the “indivision” between the essential and the factual, and on his conception of a wild Wesen or of a “raw Being (Être brut)”. At last and in connection with these previous elements of analysis, we provide an overview of Richir’s main contributions to a phenomenological eidetics, highlighting, in particular, the importance that he attaches to the irreducible indeterminacy of the eidos, to its ever-unfinished genesis and to the impossibility of its totalization or its complete unification.