AUC INTERPRETATIONES
AUC INTERPRETATIONES
AUC Interpretationes (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Interpretationes Studia Philosophica Europeanea) is a philosophical journal focusing on 20th-century European philosophy, particularly French and German philosophy, and phenomenology.

AUC INTERPRETATIONES, Vol 10 No 1 (2020), 97–116

En deçà de la tautologie symbolique du cogito Variations sur Descartes et Augustin à travers Levinas et Marion

[Below the symbolic tautology of the cogito Variations on Descartes and Augustine through Levinas and Marion]

István Fazakas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646504.2021.15
published online: 10. 01. 2022

abstract

In this paper, I explore the thesis according to which ipseity cannot be conceived of without acknowledging a radical absence and alterity in its very core that makes it possible. To develop this thesis, I draw on Levinas’ reading of Descartes and Marion’s reading of Augustine. After a brief introductory part on what we could call, with Marc Richir’s term, the symbolic tautology of ipseity, I show how such a tautology is deconstructed by Levinas’ interpretation of the idea of the infinite in Descartes’ Third Meditation. I then proceed to contrast the results of this reading with Marion’s take on the problem of the memoria in Augustin’s Confessions. Both readings point towards a radical and immemorial dimension of absence that – by impeding the self from fully possessing itself – makes paradoxically ipseity possible in the first place. In the conclusion, I pose the question of whether – in order to account for this absence that reveals a transcendence in the most inner intimate of the self – one has to abandon phenomenology for ethics or some kind of new theology or if a strictly phenomenological description of this dimension of the experience of ipseity is possible.

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En deçà de la tautologie symbolique du cogito Variations sur Descartes et Augustin à travers Levinas et Marion is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

148 x 210 mm
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ISSN: 1804-624X
E-ISSN: 2464-6504

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