L’aporie architectonique dans la phénoménologie richirienne

Marc Richir has made innumerable mentions of architectonics in most of his major works. The very name comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason where it refers to an “art of systems” which status is rather elusive. Yet, the egregious systematicity of Kant’s thought may give the feeling that it is nothing more than a monstrous theoretical construct, that which Marc Richir would denounce as Gestell. His fascination for architectonics nevertheless endures while he radicalises the dichotomy between the Gestell – a machine-like logical automaton – and a newly coined version of the Kantian sublime to locate the “phenomenon as nothing-but-phenomenon”. Phenomenology, especially in Husserl’s legacy, struggles to establish itself as a rigorous science and fails to acquire the required “transcendental theory of methodology” for doing so. Marc Richir, while tackling head on the same aporia in his Phenomenological Meditations (1992), hopes for a solution in promoting an utterly radicalised phenomenology solely concerned with nascent phenomena with no regard to epistemological concerns of methodology. I suggest that such aporia may prove indomitable as long as the phenomena which phenomenology undertakes to explore only exist as scriptural descriptions, i.e. as text(s).