On an interview published on the 46° issue of La Quinzaine littéraire (march of 1968), Michel Foucaultmade himself a part of “a generation whose horizon was defined by Husserl”, and, on a very specific way, because of the reception of the phenomenology of Husserl in France by Sartre and Merleau Ponty. Nevertheless, on the first decade of the 50´ -says Foucault- that horizon was taken down by an afluence of worries of “political, ideological, and scientific order”, as well as a diversification of the philosophical subjects; issues on that phenomenology seemed to insufficient, and even -says Foucault- too uncaring, in confrontation of other more specific theorical themes. About this, works like the ones from Roman Jakobson or Georges Dumézil did notice the defficiency, and at the same time, they show the path to follow.

 

        But besides of showing the necessity of stablishing a rapture point from phenomenology, Foucault will point out as one of its many side effects, the effort of some comunist intelectuals to review again some concepts of Marx, to reevaluate and define them; a political effort that can't be detached of a scientific effort, given that, like Foucault points out, in the time that the aforementioned interview was given, “every political action” can not be conceibed if it's not bounded "with a rigourus theoric reflection".

 

        In this sense, we could precise that, according to Foucault, a rigorous lecture of Marx's works should depend, at least on one point, about a rapture from phenomenological philosophy. Nevertheless, a rapture between phenomenology and marxist theory was something that in the french context of the 50´ and 60´ was very far away.

 

      A highpoint in this scenario is the publication of Tran Duc Thao, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (1951), result of a memoire presented to Jean Cavaillès; this work, now we know better, was a great influence on the early works of authors such as: Jean-François Lyotard (La phénoménologie, 1954), and Jacques Derrida (Le problème de la gènese dans la philosophie de Husserl, 1953/54, and Introduction à "L'Origine de la Géométrie" de Husserl, 1961)

 

        Beyond the recognition that Tran Duc Thao recieved from Cavaillès and Merleau-Ponty, which, among other things, alouded him to publish perdiodically on Temps modernes (and even having a controversy with Sartre about the relationship between phenomenology and marxism) and the ecco made of Phénoménologie and matérialisme dialectique on authors such as Paul Ricoeur (the chronicle pubilshed on Espirit - Sur la phénoménologie"- on december of 1953) or Ronald Barthes (who published a review of Thao's book on Combat on octuber of 1951), we could stablish, in a problematic way, that the marxist lecture of Tran Duc Thao of Husserl's phenomenology, and we could affirm the same about what Derrida point out as a difficulty that himslef was driven to in De la grammatologie (1967), this is, to the impossibility of “breaking with a trascendental phenomenology” at the same time that it's not possible to be “reduce to it”. But if Tran Duc Thao was able to stablish a rapture point with phenomenology through Marx, and he wans't able to do it but being true to the phenomenological trasncendentalism, this could show that Tran Duc Thao has wanted, precisely, to break with the trasncendentalism in genetic phenomenology as a post-trascendentalism. Derrida's rupture with transcendentalism, on the other side, seems to be of another kind. A kind that is even possible to mantain a relationship with Hegel, although through Marx, and him through Tran Duc Thao, but not withouth the aknowledge the necessity of assuming some dialectic consequences in Husserl, this is, to disregard the husserlian trascendentalism. Many years later, on a book about Marx (1993) Derrida recognize the maxist heritage as something determinative -it can be understood as a breaking up with the relationship with Tran Duc Thao-, but somewhere the dialectic in Husserl has given him something to think about the complication relationship of a trascendentalism whose spectres are the ones of Marx. All this, forgeting that the “irregionality” or “anarchy” of the noema is announced by Derrida in Spectres de Marx as the “radical possibility of every spectrality”.

 

        In the same sense, we could ask some other issues between the relationship of phenomenology and marxism. For example, about Gaston Bachelard and Louis Althusser, there where Althusser takes from Bachelard the important notion of “epistemologic rupture” to read marx, it has been elaborated by him from a complex implication from phenomenology that has worked since Nouvel esprit scientifique (1934) to the Poétique de l'espace (1957). From there it could be possible to ask ourselves -and this is one question among many other possibles- what kind of things were involved when in 1968, in Lenine et la philosophie, Althusser point to Husserl as the “objective ally of Lenin... against the historicism and empiricism”.

 

        Same things can be said about another author, not less relevant to clear this situation: Jean-Toussaint Desanti. Already on his articles Le 'jeune Marx' et la métaphysique (1947) or in bigger works like Phénoménologie et praxis (1963) and Les idéalités mathématiques (1968), even where, from a certain dialectic, it could be stablished a discussion about the historicity in relationship to Husserl. It's played here also a theorical inflection where a marxism problem is not absent, and that an article like Jean Hypoolite's one "Le scientifique et l'ideologique dans une perspective marxiste" (1968) details with precision.

 

        Being confirmed a coexistance between a “communist world... with a capitalist world” (that appear on its on specificity respecto the previous century), Hyppolite shows the “new questions about marxism”, the “return on the works and fundamental texts of Marx that can't be separated from Lenin's interpretations”, that by Althusser's hand could be now understand about a “new science” (the historical materialism that in Marx and Lenin has been developed philosophically from a materialistic dialectic prism). Thus it would be, according to Hyppolite, about an option that cannot become conceivable without the renovation of the epistemology of Bachelard “upon the form of a phenomenotechnique”, conceibed as a theoric practic. On this boundaries, says Hyppolite -following an almost inevitable phenomenological reverb- “this theoric practic (expression that Althusser applies to the scientific work of Marx), this new scientific spirit pretends to differentiate itself from an “empiricism and a positivism”, being “the contrary of a lecture or a direct translation of the lived experience, of what in every day life we call real”. This new “theoric practic” -as in Bachelard as in Althusser, if we follow Hyppolite- demands to recognize the obstacles “that a scientist always find in was it is taken as a inmediate experience”.

 

        Now, upon this motives, that traspassed the 60´ decade, we should highlight the work of Michel Henry. From 1969 (Introduction à la pensée de Marx) and until 1984 (La Vie, la mort. Marx et le marxisme), Henry elaborates a series of writings upon the relationship of phenomenology and the texts of Marx. In between, in 1975, he published two volumes about Marx (I: Une Philosophie de la réalité and II: Une philosophie de l'économie). After that, even when the recurrence of the subject is not so explicit, Henry don't stop working of Marx and phenomenology, as the in the case of a conference in Montpellier in 1996 ("Phénoménologie et sciences humaines. De Descartes à Marx"). In fact, pointing to the inefficiency of the economist -noted by Marx- in relationship to their understandung of what is work relies on their definition of work as “something that doesn't exist in reality”, Henry will say that Marx has “geniusly understood that the objects of the sciences do not exist in reality and that there must be a trascendental genesis of their posibility, in the same way as the origin of geometry is the logical possibility of the constitution of an ideal object that do not exist in nature”.

 

        The labour that Henry takes around phenomenology and the work of Marx -that it will imply another philosophical emphasis, which can be appreciated on his publication Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, from 1965- it is vinculated with a renewal of the french interest on phenomenology, that can be seen since the end of the 60'. Among others, we could mention Gérard Granel, from Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl, from 1969 (text that can be found in seed on a class dictated between 1962 and 1963). Of Granel we could mention a series of text where the problems of phenomenology are widely compromised. We can see this on Kant (L'équivoque ontologique de la pensée kantienne (1970)), Derrida (“Jacques Derrida et la rature de l’origine” (1967)), Heidegger (“Remarques sur le rapport de Sein und Zeit de la phénoménologie husserlienne” (1970)) or Marx (“L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la ‘coupure’” (1969)). Also, we could remark the works of Jean-Luc Marion (from Marion, as an example, L’idole et la distance (1977), Dieu sans l’être (1982), Réduction et donation. Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (1989) or Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (1997)); Didier Franck (Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl (1981)); Rudolf Bernet (La vie du sujet. Recherches sur l 'interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie (1994) o Conscience et existence. Perspectives phénoménologiques (2004)); Natalie Depraz (Transcendance et incarnation, le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Edmund Husserl (1995) or Lucidité du corps. De l’empirisme transcendantal en phénoménologie (2001)); Claude Romano (L’événement et le monde (1998), L’événemet et le temps (1999) or Il y a (2003)); Françoise Dastur (Husserl. Des mathématiques à l’histoire (1995)) or Jocelyn Benoist (Autour de Husserl : l'ego et la raison (1994), Intentionalité et langage dans les Recherches logiques de Husserl (2001) o Sens et sensibilité. L’intentionalité en contexte (2009)). Benoist has published also reciently, along with Michel Espagne, a volume dedicated to Tran Duc Thao, that includes a new edition of Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (L’itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels (2013)). In this same net we could put Marc Richir, with works as Au-delà du renversement copernicien. La question de la phénoménologie et de son fondament (1976) or Phénoménologie et Institution Symbolique (1988).

 

        They are, without a doubt, things of diverse deepness that we should treat on their own specificity. Nevertheless, if we give credit to the aforementioned Foucault's dictums, we could say that is is a confluence (this is, not a coincidence) between the irruption of the so-called human sciences and a certain rupture with husserlian phenomenology (and we shouldn't let unheard the claim from Francois Dosse in Histoire du structuralisme (1991), about that the separation of Foucault from phenomenologywould be a solidary of a separation of the marxist problematic). In the same direction is that Maurice Blanchot in 1969 (L'entretien infini) will point that is “the slippery ambiguity of a trascendence or an a priori (that doesn't want to be declared) and of a positivity (that doesn't want to be condemn) the one that constitute the originality of the new human sciences where the man is searched as absent”.

 

        Besides it could be indicated that this same renewal questioning about the trascendental can be found on Levinas and Derrida, but aso from Granel and Marion, whereas authors as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy or Catherine Malabou have a lot to say too.

 

        On the other hand, in the complexity of all this borders, la question for a “post-trascdendental” or “post-phenomenological” problematic deserves more than just one review. Some consequences of what this type of margin could mean have been elaborated by Éric Alliez in De l'impossibilité de la phénomenologie (1995) or Dominique Janicaud in La phénoménoligie éclatée (1998). Anyway, que problem of a post-trascendentalism can be found on a close relationship with a marxism problematic. In this perspective, it could be search certain relation, by a phenomenological method, between the notion of meta-structure of Jacques Bidet (Théorie générale (1999); Explication et reconstruction du Capital (2004) and the notion of spectrality of Jacques Derrida on Spectres de Marx (1993)). On a similar fashion we could ask what is the sense of the problem of the genesis (or, rather, the genesis/structure problem) is what could have raised Lucien Goldmann's attribution, in Marxisme et sciences humaines (1970), to Althusser, about a "static structuralism", where Goldmann points out that to conceive the productive relations in Marx according to Althusser as an "absolute starting" would imply the outline of a structure without genesis. By the way, it is Vittorio Morfino who has stressed this point, in a lecture given in Buenos Aires in 2011 (Individuation and trans-individual in Simondon and Althusser) has put emphasis on this point, showing that the problem of the genesis in Althusser needs to be specified according to the structural causality, whose attempts try to define the specfic forms of a materialist dialectic. Morfino has showed this problem from the concept of “transindividual” of Gilbert Simondon (L'Individuation psychique et collective (1954 an 1989)). Read in Althusser, such concept will deliver a key, according to Morfino, to think the “non contemporaneity, the plural temporality... the mark of the contingency of the structure”. By the way, here, according to Simondon, it would be a “metastable structure”, and if we recall Bidet we could make reverb his approach of his “meta-structure”. That such an approach cannot be unbounded to a phenomenological complication is something that we left open to debate. As Morfino puts it: “the time of the transindividual cannot be the contemporary. The bloßes Zugleichsein of the monads that Husserl says the time of the history is founded, but the non-contemporary".

 

        Without trying to restric other lines of approaching the statement that join us, we invite anyone who would like to considerate these subjects, to send us their propposals to be read in this colloquium.

 

        For this, we ask you to look, in this webpage, the window called “sending of summaries” where you can find all the needed information.