Conversions of Ambiguity

Penelope Deutscher

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490507.002

Chapter 1 - Conversions of Ambiguity

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009

Penelope Deutscher

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Penelope Deutscher: Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois

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Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a personal transformation [eine völlige personale Wandlung], comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion [einer religiösen Umkehrung], which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation [der größten existenziellen Wandlung] which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, #35

In [Beauvoir's] The Blood of Others … we are present at an evolution [une évolution] – more than that, at a veritable overturning [une véritable retournement], a conversion [une conversion]. And everything makes us believe that this conversion [cette conversion] will be definitive, it has ‘value’, it designates itself to us as a solution and an end, announcing the deplorable appearance of the Sollen, of that Sollen for which Hegel condemned Fichte to philosophical calamity.

Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire

Between Edmund Husserl's description in 1937 of the phenomenological epoché as possibly involving a personal transformation, and Maurice Blanchot's disparaging description in 1949 of an ideal of conversion that he identified in the work of Sartre and Beauvoir, a transformation of phenomenology had taken place. Husserlian intentionality had been converted to Heideggerian being-in-the-world, and in turn to the freedom of French existentialism. Husserl's natural attitude – with few implications for ethics or politics – had been converted to Heidegger's fallenness.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance
, pp. 19 - 58

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511490507.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2008

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Chapter 1 - Conversions of Ambiguity

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