RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

Aims & Scope

Research in Phenomenology deals with phenomenological philosophy in a broad
sense, including original phenomenological research, critical and interpretative
studies of major phenomenological thinkers, studies relating phenomenological
philosophy to other disciplines, and historical studies of special relevance to
phenomenological philosophy.

Editorial Board
Editor: John Sallis, Boston College
Associate Editor: James Risser, Seattle University

Advisory Board
Peg Birmingham, DePaul University; Walter Brogan, Villanova University; Samuel
IJsseling, University of Leuven; Joseph Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State
University; David Farrell Krell, DePaul University; Otto Pggeler, Ruhr-Universitt
Bochum; William Richardson, Boston College; Richard Rojcewicz, Point Park Col-
lege; Dennis J. Schmidt, The Pennsylvania State University; Calvin Schrag, Purdue
University; Charles E. Scott, Vanderbilt University

Manuscripts should be submitted to:

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Research in Phenomenology
Department of Philosophy
Boston College
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phies; Science of ReligionAbstracts and Index of Recent Articles.

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Research in Phenomenology
RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

Aims & Scope

Research in Phenomenology deals with phenomenological philosophy in a broad
sense, including original phenomenological research, critical and interpretative
studies of major phenomenological thinkers, studies relating phenomenological
philosophy to other disciplines, and historical studies of special relevance to
phenomenological philosophy.

Editorial Board
Editor: John Sallis, Boston College
Associate Editor: James Risser, Seattle University

Advisory Board
Peg Birmingham, DePaul University; Walter Brogan, Villanova University; Samuel
IJsseling, University of Leuven; Joseph Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State
University; David Farrell Krell, DePaul University; Otto Pggeler, Ruhr-Universitt
Bochum; William Richardson, Boston College; Richard Rojcewicz, Point Park Col-
lege; Dennis J. Schmidt, The Pennsylvania State University; Calvin Schrag, Purdue
University; Charles E. Scott, Vanderbilt University

Manuscripts should be submitted to:

Editor
Research in Phenomenology
Department of Philosophy
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
USA

Instructions for Authors

Please refer to the fourth page of the volume prelims or visit Research in Phenom-
enologys web site at www.brill.nl/rp.

Research in Phenomenology is abstracted/indexed in American Humanities Index;

Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Current Contents; Dietrichs Index Philo-
sophicus; Fanatic Reader; Humanities Index; International Bibliography of Book
Reviews of Scholarly Literature; International Philosophy Bibliography; Interna-
tionale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur aus allen Gebieten des Wissens/
International Bibliography of Periodicals from All Fields of Knowledge; Periodi-
cals Contents Index; Philosophers Index; Rpertoire International de Littrature
Musicale; Research Alert (Philadelphia); Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliogra-
phies; Science of ReligionAbstracts and Index of Recent Articles.

Research in Phenomenology (print ISSN 0085-5553, online ISSN 1569-1640) is

published 3 times a year by Brill, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Nether-
lands, tel +31 (0)71 5353500, fax +31 (0)71 5317532.

Cover design: Wim Goedhart.

Research in Phenomenology

Volume 38 (2008)

LEIDEN BOSTON
 Instructions for Authors
1. The entire manuscript, including internal block quotations and footnotes, must be
double spaced.
2. A brief 100150 word abstract and 26 keywords must be provided and placed at
the beginning of the article.
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Books:
1)
Donald N. McCloskey, Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in
Historical Economics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 54.
2)
Jacques Derrida, Lcriture et la dirence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, l967); trans-
lated by Alan Bass under the title Writing and Dierence (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, l978).
3)
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Dierence, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978).
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Nathaniel B. Shurtle, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the
Massachusetts Bay in New England (162886), 5 vols. (Boston, 185354), 1: 126
(hereafter cited as Mass. Records).
5)
William Farmwinkle, Humor of the American Midwest, vol. 2 of Survey of
American Humor (Boston: Plenum Press, l983), 132.
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John N. Hazard, The Soviet System of Government, 5th ed. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980), 25.
Chapter in an Edited Collection:
7)
Ernest Kaiser, The Literature of Harlem, in Harlem: A Community in Transition,
ed. J. H. Clarke (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 64.
Article in a Journal:
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Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Transactional Theory: Against Dualisms, College
English 54 (1993): 380.
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LEIDEN BOSTON
2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijho Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by the publisher provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,
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Printed in the Netherlands (on acid-free paper).
ARTICLES
 Research
in
Phenomenology
Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 www.brill.nl/rp

Life, Movement, and Desire

Renaud Barbaras
University of Paris-I Panthon-Sorbonne

Abstract
In French, the verb to live designates both being alive and the experience of something. This
ambiguity has a philosophical meaning. The task of a phenomenology of life is to describe an
originary sense of living from which the very distinction between life in the intransitive sense and
life in the transitive, or intentional, sense proceeds. Hans Jonas is one of those rare authors who
has tried to give an account of the specicity of life instead of reducing life to categories that are
foreign to it. However, the concept of metabolism, by which Jonas characterizes vital activity,
attests to a presupposition as to life: life is conceived as self-preservation, that is, as negation of
death, in such a way that life is, in the end, not thought on the basis of itself. The aim of this
article is to show that life as such must be understood as movement in a radicalized sense, in
which the living being is no more the subject than the product. All living beings are in eect
characterized by a movement, which nothing can cause to cease, a movement that largely exceeds
what is required by the satisfaction of needs and that, because of this, bears witness to an essential
incompleteness. This incompleteness reveals that life is originarily bound to a world. Because the
world to which the living being relates is essentially non-totalizable and unpresentable, living
movement can not essentially complete itself. Thus, in the nal analysis, life must be dened as
desire, and in virtue of this view, life does not tend toward self-preservation, as we have almost
always thought, but toward the manifestation of the world.

Keywords
life, Hans Jonas, desire, phenomenology of life, movement

In French, the verb to live is aected by a fundamental ambiguity, since it

designates both being alive (Leben) and the feeling or the experience of some-
thing (Erleben).1 To live oscillates between the present participle (living) and

1)
Translators Note: This essay is the text of a lecture delivered at LEcole Normale Suprieure on
March 9, 2005, in the context of a seminar focused on the theme of life, which was organized by
Paul-Antoine Miquel and Michel Morange. The French text will soon appear under the title
Phnomnologie de la vie in Noesis, volume 13.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156916408X258924
4 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

the past participle (lived): the action to which the verb refers aects its subject,
and the subjects doing is passively received in the form of a feeling. However,
this ambiguity is not an accident of language but the mark of a primary sense
of life, the mark of an original unity of living, which stops short of the cleavage
between the living being and lived experience. In this sense, the task of a phe-
nomenology of life could be summed up as the need for thinking this primary
sense of living beyond active and passive, or beyond what would wrongly be
considered as literal and metaphorical. Yet, we must recognize that thought is
continually torn apart by this ambiguity.
Since life makes itself manifest in living organismsand perhaps life is
nothing other than these organisms themselveswe could be tempted, as far
as the characterization of life is concerned, to appeal to biology, since biology
takes living organisms as its object and attempts to penetrate the functioning
of this object by exposing highly complex bio-chemical processes. And yet, a
major diculty arises with the appeal to biology. In order to work on his
object, the biologist must rst recognize it, that is, distinguish it, within real-
ity; he must distinguish what is living and what is not. This discrimination is
the province of an intuition or an experience that escapes objectication,
because an intuition or experience is the condition of its possibility. Of course,
the biologist will always be able to justify his choice afterwards by the presence
of certain molecules within organisms that he recognized as living from the
start, but this justication still can only be afterwards. In short, he cannot
reintegrate the phenomenal level that gave him access to life into the objective
level of his biological analysis, insofar as knowledge presupposes a recognition
that is of a dierent order than itself and that knowledge cannot therefore
assimilate. What holds for the encounter with the living being holds a fortiori
for the choice of what, within the living being, must be studied, that is, for the
choice of what is biologically signicant. It is not molecular analysis but our
experience that allows us to discern a grasping gesture, a behavior of ight, or
an attitude of repose. As to the fundamental distinction between the normal
and the pathological, there is no other criterion for it than the self-experience
of a subject who feels himself limited in his vital activity. Thus, the condition

French words associated with life (la vie) have been translated as follows: vivre: to live; le vivre:
living (noun); ltre-en-vie: being alive; vivant: living (adjective); le vivant: living being; vcu:
lived; le vcu: lived experience; ltre vivant: living being; se maintenir en vie: to stay alive. All
other philosophically signicant words in the essay are followed by the original French term or
phrase, which appears in brackets. Lastly, in the footnotes the English translation for each refer-
ence, if it is available, has been given.
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 5

for the possibility of biology is a set of acts of recognition and understanding

that take root in my own life inasmuch as I constantly undergo them. As Can-
guilhem puts it, thought of the living being must get the idea of the living
being from the living being.2 The life that is the object of biology refers to the
life that I live. Therefore, a chemist/physicist god who could penetrate all
physico-chemical processes would be incapable of circumscribing living beings
in the tissue of reality. This god would also be quite incapable of distinguish-
ing a normal process from a pathological process, because all processes follow
universal laws of physics and chemistry. The conclusion is harsh, but inescap-
able: we must not look for life on the side of biology, for the simple reason that
life is not biologys object. Biology speaks not of life but of the mode of func-
tioning of organisms recognized as living. As Canguilhem again points out, we
cannot pride ourselves in discovering by physico-chemical methods things
other than the physico-chemical content of phenomena, whose biological
sense escapes any reductive technique.3 In other words, life escapes the reign
of exteriority; and any attempt to give an account of life in terms of objective
processes amounts to describing life on the basis of what is not life, to wanting
to rejoin life on the basis of what is without life [le sans-vie] and to inscribing
life in an ontology of death.
The living being thus seems to refer us back inescapably to lived experience:
I know myself as living insofar as I feel myself, and it is on this condition that
I can recognize living beings. Such is the evidence for which phenomenology
is responsible. Phenomenology is rst a philosophy of life insofar as phenom-
enology is an analysis of lived experiences. The phenomenology of Michel
Henry, in particular, attempts to think this identity of life and lived experience
as radically as possible. We know that Husserl bases phenomenality on inten-
tionality, which is aimed at the object (Gegen-stand ) in its exteriority, that is,
intentionality is putting-at-a-distance, ex-positioning. Now, if intentionality
makes all things appear, we still have to understand how intentionality appears
to itself and whether it appears to itself in the way that it makes things appear,

2)
Georges Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1975), 13. This work has not yet
been translated into English in its entirety, although excerpts appear in A Vital Rationalist:
Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, ed. Franois Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(New York: Zone Books, 1994). Cf. also Hans Jonas, Le phnomne de la vie: Vers une biologie
philosophique, translated from English by Danielle Lories (Wesmael: De Boeck Universit,
2000), 99; The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1966), 91: life can be known only by life.
3)
Canguilhem,La connaissance de la vie, 32.
6 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

that is, in the distance. This question is all the more decisive as intentionality
confers objectivity only on what it aims at, but never on existence. The func-
tion of giving to the appearing world the reality that its phenomenological
structure as intentional object does not confer on it falls to the impression.
Yet, this impression itself appears in a mode that is not that of intentionality.
The impression is not its own object, but it feels itself; the impression does not
expose itself in the distance but it is exposed to itself. We have here the answer
to the question posed above: the impression is precisely the modality under
which intentionality is given to itself, namely, non-intentionally. Thus, the
phenomenological determination of appearing as putting-at-a-distance, or
ob-jectication, should itself be subordinated to a more original modality of
appearing as impressionality. Impressionality appears without distance: it
touches itself in each point of its being in such a way that, in this original
embrace with self, it auto-impressions itself, and in such a way that its impres-
sionable character consists in nothing other than this primary impressionality,
which does not cease.4 It is suitable to oppose the absolute immanence in and
by which something can be originally given, where the appearing is invisible
because it is felt, to the transcendence that characterizes the phenomenality of
Husserlian phenomenology. Appearing is, in its essence, pure auto-aection,
Aectivity.
Now, if the impression is its own appearing, it is not its own source. It is an
auto-impression, but it nevertheless does not have the power to impress itself,
that is, it is not able to produce itself or to found itself. In fact, not one impres-
sion has chosen to be an impression any more than an impression has chosen
to be the impression that it is. According to Michel Henry, in the impression,
insofar as it auto-impresses but is not the origin of itself, Life itself appears.
The impression as auto-aection is Lifes coming to self; it is Lifes phenome-
nalization. Life is thus what makes itself manifest in the impression as that in
which the impression resides, that is, as the reverse of its fundamental passiv-
ity. We can simply say that there is life only as self-experience in aection, that
therefore there is life only as invisible, and that what is apprehended under the
term life within exteriority is fundamentally foreign to life. Not only does
the life of living beings refer, as does any external appearing, to life lived, but
life only exists as life lived (in auto-aection). This is why Henry is led to think
the living body itself as this very auto-aection. Since life only possesses reality
as the life of a esh (eshLeibis what is capable of being aliveLeben),
it is precisely in self-aection that we will discover the essence of esh: self-

4)
Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 74.
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 7

experience in the immanence of self-aection is the advent of an original

esh. Here, we are exactly on the opposite side of the biological perspective
that looks for life in the living being rather than in lived experience. However,
when we reduce life to auto-aection, do we not encounter a symmetrical
diculty? In fact, it is undeniableand this is what grounds the possibility of
biologythat we recognize bodies as living beings precisely within exteriority.
Henry asks the question: if the only real body is my invisible esh, then must
we not say that our objective body is only an empty shell? In fact, this asser-
tion would follow: that my esh grasped in the world is no longer my body but
a body, that is, a fragment of area like the others, since, in essence, no life can
live in it. Yet, this is not what Henry does: The most ordinary experience
shows the contrary. Consider the objective bodies of other people. If, in our
eyes, their bodies contrast with the inert bodies of the material universe, it is
because we perceive them as inhabited by a esh.5 Obviously, this does not
mean that the reality of esh could appear to us in the worldin the appear-
ing of the world, esh de-realizes itselfbut it does mean that, in the absence
of all esh, we attribute meanings aiming at a esh to the bodies of other
people or to our own. This is why I do not see a mass of inert matter in the
mirror, but an expressive face. But, Michel Henry opens himself to a major
diculty here. If I attribute a carnal meaning to others or to my face, it is
because something within exteriority urges me to do that, without which I would
aim at any material reality as if it were esh. But this amounts to saying that
there is a mode of presence of living interiority within exteriority, which directly
conicts with the division of appearing that Henry establishes: if life were
truly invisible, life could in no way descend into the visible. Thus, lived expe-
rience cannot exhaust the sense of life, for then it would be impossible to
recognize living beings (and to recognize myself as a living being in the world).
We are sent back from lived experience to the living being, not in the sense
where biology would give us the essence of life, but insofar as life necessarily
contains a relation to exteriority, which grounds the apprehension of a living
being in the world.
The problem of a phenomenology of life begins to take shape. We have seen
that if life does not coincide with the functioning of the living being, because
the recognition of life refers to my life, then my life also does not reside in the
invisible of pure auto-aection but rather contains a relation to exteriority. To
understand life as the original unity of the living being and lived experience,
therefore, is to discover a unique mode of being that gives itself in exteriority

5)
Ibid., 218.
8 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

without being developed as an object, that aects itself without nevertheless

enclosing itself within immanenceand whose interiority calls for, rather
than excludes, an exteriorization. In other words, it is a question of a mode of
being that is neutral in relation to the division between interior and exterior,
that is, it is a question of a mode of being that is perhaps identically grasped
in me or outside of me, since its immanence contains an exteriorization and
its being within the world manifests an interior. The recognition of lifes phe-
nomenological uniqueness leads to a genuine ontological reform because, with
this recognition, the divide between subjective and objective, consciousness
and matter, is indeed put into question. If phenomenology is still at a loss
before life, it is precisely because phenomenology does not go so far as to
abandon these categories. If there is a genuine unity of life, it must take root
in a third kind of being, the ignorance of which leads inescapably to the schism
of the living being and lived experience.
This allows us to specify the problem that a phenomenology of life must
confront. The immediate consequence of the ontological duality of interior
and exterior within what gives itself as a living being is the cleavage between
the animal kingdom and man, that is, the schism within life between, on the
one hand, what can be described, in principle at least, on the basis of laws that
govern exteriority and, on the other hand, the human order, which is charac-
terized by consciousness, thought, or mind. As Hans Jonas has shown, such an
attitude, which probably characterizes the modern era, amounts to exceeding,
and therefore denying, life as such, denying it in the characterization of animal
as machine and exceeding it in that of man as res cogitans or mind. Ontological
dualism cannot be separated from the failure to recognize the phenomenon of
life insofar as it is essentially unitary: life is absent from a living being described
in physico-chemical terms and, albeit dierently so, from a consciousness that
is pure immanence. It follows that a phenomenology of life that intends to
think the genuine unity of life must grasp it in its eective continuity, as that
from which animal as well as man arises. The unity of life as such must over-
come the distinction between animal and human. This in no way means that
we must embark upon a reductive path, but on the contrary, this means that
an adequate determination of life must also be able to account for its highest
forms and, notably, for the dimension of knowledge peculiar to the human
order. For this kind of phenomenology, the organic even in its lowest forms
pregures mind, and mind, even on its highest reaches, remains part of the
organic.6

6)
Jonas, Le phnomne de la vie, 13; The Phenomenon of Life, 1.
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 9

For Hans Jonas, it is precisely a matter of recognizing the irreducibility of

life as it attests to itself in our psycho-physical unity; it is a matter of describ-
ing the constitutive moments of life and of drawing the ontological conse-
quences from them, notably as to the status of matter, insofar as life is able to
appear within it. He therefore intends to do a genuine phenomenology of life,
since he claims to describe life on the basis of itself instead of attempting to
reconstitute it within a dualistic framework. The central concept is that of
metabolism, unceasing movement by which one same individual, that is, one
same form, remains identical through an unceasing renewal of its material
parts, a renewal of which this form is not the result but rather the cause. The
form is therefore, at once in a relation of freedom and dependence in respect
to its matter, since it only distinguishes itself, as form, from its current matter
by giving itself another matter. This movement of self-perpetuation of the liv-
ing being implies that the movement is turned toward the external, that is,
that it goes to look for the matter that is necessary for it in the world. The
temporal transcendence of the form in relation to its current matter calls for a
spatial transcendence. Finally, this movement toward the external by which
the organism satises its needs presupposes something like an interiority or
a subjectivity that, by feeling frustration or satisfaction, tells the dierence
between what suits it and what does not. The vital self-preoccupation calls
for a consciousness of self, as faint as its voice may be. The living being is
therefore characterized by the need for an unceasing self-renewal,7 and this
is why it is endowed with motility: movement, which is appropriation of an
external matter, is exclusively in the service of need. Perception and desire then
take on sense from this movement of satisfaction. Perception puts the living
being in touch with what is spatially at a distance and desire puts the living
being in touch with what is temporally far away. As Jonas writes, the spatial
breach between subject and object, which is provisionally crossed by percep-
tion, is at the same time the temporal breach between need and satisfaction,
which is provisionally crossed by emotion (desire) and is practically lled in by
movement.8
Jonas merit consists in trying to describe vital activity on the basis of itself,
in its specicity, that is, without recourse to ontological categories that are
external to life. But does he succeed? In truth, insofar as metabolism refers to
nothing other than self-preservation, life is absent at the very moment when it

7)
Jonas, Les fondements biologiques de lindividualit, in Vie et libert: Phnomnologie, nature
et thique chez Hans Jonas, ed. Danielle Lories and Olivier Depr (Paris: Vrin, 2003), 193.
8)
Ibid., 206.
10 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

is recognized. Life, that is, vital activity, is dened as preservation of the living
being, that is, as the renewal of life itself: living is staying alive, it is preserving
life as living. But what is it to be living? The only possible answer will once
again be: it is to preserve itself. In short, in a kind of innite regress, that which
preserves itself is not dened otherwise than as this very power for preserving
itself. We see the strange circularity of this very classic characterization of life:
as preservation, life is what always presupposes itself. This perspective comes
directly from Bernardian physiology, for which life is the maintaining of the
constancy of the internal milieu, and which therefore understands life in terms
of the living being. It is because life is not thought in terms of itself but as
property of a living being that it is reduced to the act of the satisfaction of
needs. This perspective apprehends life in terms of the living being and misses
life thereby, while always presupposing it, instead of apprehending the living
being in terms of its life. If life is thought on the basis of the living being, as
the act of the satisfaction of needs that enables the living being to stay alive, it
is because life is approached in terms of what denies it, that is, it is approached
in terms of death. In fact, insofar as we situate the living being in a universe
that is foreign to it and that represents for it a constant threat of extinction, we
are led to characterize the living being as the preservation of self. The unceas-
ing tendency to preservation is the measure of the constant threat of destruc-
tion, and there is only the threat of destruction insofar as we grasp the living
being as a kind of intruder in a universe of inert matter. Here, once again, life
is not thought on the basis of itself biologically, because life is understood
from the risk of its own death, and it is not thought in terms of itself onto-
logically, because life is approached from the point of view of a material world
that is fundamentally without life. This set of presuppositions directs Jonas
thought about life. This is particularly clear in Evolution et libert :

Described more intimately by the threat of its negation, being must here assert itself, and
being that asserts itself is existence as long as it asks for it. Thus, being itself, instead of being
a given state, became a possibility to continuously realize and to continually regain ground
on its continually present opposite, non-being, which will eventually swallow it up. . . . Life
is mortal, not although, but because it is life, and therefore by order of its most original
constitution, for the relation between the form and the material on which it rests arises
from this revocable nature that is not guaranteed. Lifes reality, paradoxical and in constant
contradiction with mechanical nature, is at base a prolonged crisis, the mastery of which,
never certain, is each time only its continuation (insofar as it is a crisis).9

9)
Hans Jonas, Evolution et libert, translated from German by Sabinne Cornille and Philippe
Ivernel (Paris: Rivages, 2000), 3031. Jonas refers this fundamental position to Heidegger, for
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 11

We see now that the fundamental decision here concerns the status of death,
which is integrated into the very denition of life: life is from the start
approached as mortal life. This is a strange decision. Why must the vitality of
life be understood in terms of what threatens it rather than as a dynamism of
its own? Why must the living-beings being alive be apprehended from the
perspective of its annihilation? The fact of death does not force us to grant it
the status of livings essential core. Such a decision, which probably refers ulti-
mately to a gnosticism that Jonas criticizes in Heidegger, but from which he
does not completely free himself, is ontologically inconsistent, since the deci-
sion again amounts, in some respects, to taking up the ontology of death that
Jonas denounces: the living being is situated in an adverse nature and grasped
as an exception within matter, which is a thesis that a materialist biologist
would not disavow.
It follows nally from this analysis that movement, which is the fundamen-
tal descriptive feature of the living being, is still essentially incomprehensible.
In fact, for Jonas, movement is the act of the satisfaction of needs, the act by
which the individual goes to the external to look for the elements that are
necessary for it. The individual turns toward certain worldly beings according
to what it is missing, and the movement then aims at its own cessation. Yet, if
we understand from the point of view of metabolism why movement toward
the external is necessary, we do not necessarily understand how it is possible.
Movement serves the act of satisfaction and is the mediation between two
states of completeness. Movement does not take root in life itself but in what
puts life in danger. The living being is in movement, not insofar as it is living,
but rather insofar as it is likely to cease living. Movement is the reply to an
external threat, and as long as it is such, it is external to the essence of life.
Consequently, if movement does not express life as much as the situation of
precariousness in which life nds itself, we are led to wonder how movement
is possible. How can a being that strives for self-preservation, which is repeti-
tion, be a mobile being? In truth, only a being that is originally capable of
moving itself, that is essentially movement, is able to act to satisfy its needs;
only a being that is originally in touch with exteriority is able to discover what
is likely to suit it there. The empirical movement of the living being as dis-
placement in space therefore refers to an essential mobility that is not explained
by need but, on the contrary, makes its satisfaction possible.

whom the being-nal [ltre-nal] of being-there [ltre-l: Dasein] answers to its being-threatened
[tre-menac]. Cf. Hans Jonas, Pour une thique du futur, translated from German by Sabine
Cornille and Philippe Ivernel (Paris: Rivages, 1998), 35.
12 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

Thus, in spite of his concern for faithfulness to life, Hans Jonas is a prisoner
of presuppositions, which are shared by most of the philosophies of life and
which lead him to miss lifes vitality and thus lifes essential mobility. An
authentic phenomenology of life that really thinks life on the basis of itself
must therefore start by giving up these presuppositions. As Goldstein, in par-
ticular, has shown, life cannot be dened as preservation. The observation of
patients shows that simple preservation is a sign of abnormal life, a sign of life
in decline. . . .The driving force of normal life is the organisms tendency to
activity, to the development of its capacities, to the highest possible realization
of its essence.10 We must not understand life as preservation of a living being,
but on the contrary, we should apprehend the living being in terms of its life.
However, and this is the decisive point, to apprehend the living being in terms
of its life is to understand it no longer as the set of acts proceeding from a
constituted subject and aiming at perpetuating life, but as the very movement
by which the living being constitutes itself. Life is accomplishment, not preserva-
tion; it is creation, not repetition. It follows from this that movement in space
with a view to satisfying needs refers itself back to a more fundamental move-
ment, in which life ultimately consists.
We are now in a position to answer the question that we rst posed. We
asked what the third kind of being is, to which the phenomenology of life is
led, beyond the abstract alternative of the objective living being and lived
experience: this third kind of being is movement. We need to see movement
not as a journey but as a genuine change, as a process by which something
advents [advient] and is accomplished, as a movement that is not displacement
but realization. Such a movement is not what happens to a material (or spiri-
tual) being; it is rather that by which a being happens or advents; it is not the
property of a being but its coming to being. Displacement toward what is
vitally signicant, which we could term approach, following Erwin Straus, is
at once a dimension and a manifestation of a more fundamental movement by
which the living being continually makes itself be what it is. This more funda-
mental movement is a movement that is the living beings adventing to itself,
and that is, if you will, the temporal (temporalizing) side of a life whose
approach, that is, entry into the world, was the spatial side. We could name
this movement becoming [devenir]. Of courseand this is what distin-
guishes phenomenology from any form of vitalismthis living movement is

10)
Kurt Goldstein, La structure de lorganisme, translated from German by E. Burckardt and
J. Kuntz (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 170; translated as The Organism (New York: Zone Books,
1995), 162 (modied).
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 13

not the sum of particular acts but is not other than them. We can, following
Patoka, turn to a musical comparison: each element is only a part of some-
thing that exceeds it and that is, from the start, not there within a completed
gure, it is something that instead, present in all the singularities, still remains,
in a certain sense to-come [-venir], as long as the composition makes itself
heard.11 The important thing here is that this movement is not a process that
would have the living organism as its unchanging subject. That would again
amount to referring life to things other than itself and to ignoring the ultimate
ontological character of the category of movement. Living movement must be
interpreted as the process by which the subject that is itself in motion advents
or creates itself, not as the passage from the potential to the actual of the sub-
strates determinations, but as the realization of what was not even potential.
Living movement should be interpreted as ontogenetic movement, which
does not receive its unity from a substrate, that is, from the living being, but
which constitutes its own unity and, in doing so, constitutes the unity of the
living being. Such a movement must not be considered

as something that always already presupposes a constituted being, but rather as what con-
stitutes the being, what makes manifest any being by making it express itself in a manner
that is originally its own. Movement is what reveals [fait apparatre] that there is, for a
determinate time, a place in the world for a unique determinate reality among other unique
realities.12

For example, the ripening of an apple must not be interpreted as the progres-
sive deterioration of a given substrate. It is instead the ripening of the apple
that occasions the encounter of this softness, this color, this scent, and this
shape and unies them that way in the same substrate. The only authentic
thought of life is that which recognizes its movement as the third fundamental
and irreducible kind of being, so that far from movement being an expression
of life, it is instead life that is a modality or a category of movement.13 It is

11)
Jan Patoka, Papiers phnomnologiques, translated from Czech by Erika Abrams (Grenoble:
Millon, 1995), 108.
12)
Jan Patoka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de lexistence humaine, translated from Czech
by Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 103.
13)
Cf. Erwin Straus, Du sens des sens. Contribution de ltude des fondements de la psychologie,
translated from German by G. Thines and J.P. Legrand (Grenoble: Millon, 1989), 49; translated
by Jacob Needleman as The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience (London:
The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 19: If sensing is neither knowledge, nor a mechanical event
but a mode of being alive, it must be understood as a category of becoming.
14 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

clear to us that this movement escapes the separation of interior and exterior,
of lived experience and the living being. Movement is neither consciousness
nor matter but another mode of being on the basis of which a fragment of
matter present to itself, that is, a esh, can probably constitute itself. This is
why life can be equally grasped from the interior and from the exterior. The
act of the living being manifests its life insofar as it is the moment of an
accomplishment, and my movement of accomplishment passes into exterior-
ity because it is only realized through concrete movements.
The meaning of this fundamental characterization of life remains to be
considered. We cannot help but be struck by the fact that living beings are
constantly in motion, that in exploration or play, for example, their mobility
widely exceeds what is required for the satisfaction of needs, and that rest
is therefore a moment of movement instead of its negation. If living move-
ments appear as constitutive moments of an accomplishment, of a process of
realizationwhat has often been described in terms of immanent nality
then their unceasing rebirth, their volubility, moreover, reveals an essential
incompleteness of the living being. The distinctive feature of the living being
is that nothing appeases its vital tension, as if any realization were at the same
time a failure and as if any point of arrival were at the same time a point of
departure. The indenite reopening of vital movements, which could be
described in terms of the indeterminate excess of the potential over the actual,
reveals a fundamental incompleteness at the heart of the living being. This
incompleteness is not that of a lack that could be lled in, as the classic con-
ception of life would have it, because then living would be nothing other than
a succession of deaths and rebirths. Lifes unceasing mobility refers to an
absence that cannot be lled in and to a lack of being that is like the very
denition of the living being. Here, it is therefore necessary to reverse the
concepts implemented by Jonas. Desire is not an emotion subordinate to
need, which allows need to be satised with maintaining the tension toward
the future [lavenir]. Desire denes the very essence of the living being. If the
distinctive feature of desire is that the desired fuels it as much as it satises it,
and if what it desires is always beyond that toward which it carries itself, so
that nothing lls it in since it is not desire of anything positive, then desire
exactly describes the mode of being of the living being as long as it manifests
itself through a fundamental mobility. We must understand that here desire is,
not a psychological concept designating the movement that pushes us towards
what is other, but the ontological concept adequate to this constitutive insa-
tiability of life and this excess of potential, which is the reverse of a lack of
being, and to which any living being attests. To say that the living being is
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 15

desire is to insist on the fact that the dynamism of its life constantly exceeds
the circle of needs. It is because of and in view of this insatiable mobility that
the living being must satisfy its needs, and this is why those needs are, in real-
ity, subordinate to desire.
However, if life can no longer be characterized by survival, if the sense of
lifes acts does not exhaust itself in the simple satisfaction of needs, what does
life strive for, and in what does its fundamental dynamism consist? It follows
from lifes essential mobility that life is from the start in touch with things
other than itself. In the classic conception, the living being was exclusively
turned toward itself, its activity consisted in restoring an accepted complete-
ness, and the world was only a mediation between the living being and itself.
On the contrary, from the perspective that we are outlining, the incomplete-
ness of the living being reveals an original relationship to an alterity that, in
serving the living beings survival, separates it, so to speak, from itself and
polarizes its fundamental mobility. Yet, the irreducible character of living
desire and the insatiability of desires life reveal that that with which it is in
relation is always lacking in this relation and that it absents itself from what is
supposed to make it present. In other words, if the living being cannot enclose
itself, it is because that to which it relates cannot totalize itself from the start.
Lifes temporal openness refers to the unpresentable or non-totalizable charac-
ter of that toward which life advances. The life of the living being lives on [se
nourrir de] a fundamental lack of being, but this lack of being roots itself in an
original relation to what is necessarily lacking. Life is not the satisfaction of
needs but the experience of dispossession.
We can draw two consequences from this, which, as surprising as they are,
are necessary. The World is that to which life relates and that at which life is
aimed, while it remains, however, unpresentable. Of course, the World is not
the sum of beings but that which, manifest in each of them, is nevertheless
irreducible to them and is the common element into which beings plunge,
which unies them and which, for this very reason, is not other than them.
The World is a non-totalizable totality or a container that gives capacity, that
is, consistency, to all that it contains. Life, in its essential mobility, is relation
to the totality of the world or to the world as totality. It is insofar as life is from
the start in touch with a world that only presents itself in the mode of absence
that life can be described as Desire. The dissatisfaction that characterizes life
and that founds its unceasing advance correlates with the withdrawal of the
world in each being that the living being can rejoin. In addition, it is necessary
to accept that life does not strive for satisfaction but rather for manifestation.
In fact, if the non-presentation of the world reopens the life of the living being,
16 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317

it is because life is the tendency to presentation; if nothing fullls living Desire,

if the satisfaction of needs does not appease vital movement, it is because its
acting is at the same time a Seeing. In living, there is a fundamental searching
or an ontological curiosity that widely exceeds any aim for appropriation.
Patoka speaks of a seeing force14 in regard to our existence, meaning that
there is no alternative between force and vision and that the movement of life
is at the same time a movement of phenomenalization. Essentially, insofar as
it always wants to go beyond what it possesses, Desire is always epistemo-
logical desire. The opposition between acting and knowing, or between the
theoretical and the practical, is dissolved in the desire to which life attests.15
This description of life corresponds well to the requirement of a necessary
continuity between animal and man that we have emphasized. Insofar as it is
Desire, that is, movement toward manifestation, life is situated more deeply
than the cleavage of animal behavior and human knowing, and thus founds its
possibility. This is probably what Erwin Straus sensed when he wrote: Being-
incomplete in the particularity of the present moment constitutes the onto-
logical ground of the possibility of a transition from a here to a there, from one
particularity to another. This existential character alone makes spontaneous
movement, that is, animal exploration and human questioning, possible.16
Thus we must recognize an original relation between Life and world. Lifes
insatiability correlates with the worlds inescapable withdrawal; the living of
life is the reverse of the leaving of All. We must substitute the constitutive rela-
tion between two negativities under the law of manifestation, that is, between
lifes dissatisfaction and the worlds irreducible depth, for the encounter of two
positivities, that is, of the constituted living being and easily assimilated mat-
ter, under the constraint of need.
What then is the living being, since we know that it is not the subject of
life? The unique living being is itself only an echo of the totality of the world,
just as the Leibnizian monad is a mirror of the universe, and it exists in the
temporal mode, that is, unnished, exactly insofar as it advances toward a
non-totalizable totality. The unique living being is thus a product of life as the
dynamic opening to the world. However, as we have seen, lifes movement is
only accomplished through concrete movements within the world. Through
these movements, the world crystallizes into unique beings who dene the

14)
Patoka, Papiers phnomnolgiques, 60, 66, 72.
15)
An opposition that Heidegger claims to overcome, without success in my opinion, through
Besorgen [concern or taking care].
16)
Straus, Du sens des sens, 428; The Primary World of Senses, 270 (modied).
 R. Barbaras / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 317 17

world of this living being. Therefore, by specifying and limiting the totality of
the world into nite beings that the totality makes appear in the world, life
constitutes itself as the life of a unique living being. The individuation of life
in the form of a concrete living being correlates with the worlds limitation in
the form of appearing beings. By going toward the world, the living being goes
toward itself; insofar as the world is essentially inaccessible, the living being is,
on the other hand, still always separated from itself. Thus, the relation of the
world to the beings who appear in the world correlates exactly with the rela-
tion of the movement of existence to the acts in which this movement is
accomplished. The world makes itself a nite appearance precisely inasmuch
as life nitizes itself in a unique living being. Livings descent into concrete
movements is as well an access of the world to the manifestation, which
amounts to saying that there is a place where things can appear only because
there is a spatialization of life. Thus, the accomplishment of life, as it is carried
out in the form of concrete movements, correlates with a movement of mani-
festation that is still more originary, by which the totality gains access to appear-
ing. In this sense, the phenomenology of life opens the way for an ontology.

Translated by Jen McWeeny

John Carroll University