Continental Philosophy Research Group Talk (Sophie-Jan Arrien, Laval)

The Continental Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Sophie-Jan Arrien, a professor of Philosophy at the Université Laval. Her research focuses on phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, German, and French philosophy, with a particular interest in the work of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Paul Ricoeur. Dr. Arrien won the Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize in 2015 and the  Excellence in Teaching Prize for graduate supervision in November 2018. Her books include Heidegger aujourd’hui: Actualité et postérité de sa pensée de l’événement (Paris: Hermann, 2021; with Christian Sommer) and the award-winning L’inquiétude de la pensée: L’herméneutique de la vie du jeune Heidegger (Paris: PUF, 2014).

Dr. Arrien will give a lecture on April 11, as well as an all-day workshop on April 12. Please contact Tarek Dika to register and for more information.

Talk Title

From Facticity to Event: The Transformation of Hermeneutics in Heidegger’s Philosophy

Talk Abstract

In this paper, I examine the transformation of the Heideggerian interpretative gesture in relation to philosophical texts. Using the concepts of hermeneutics and destruction, I attempt to see what links Heidegger’s thinking before Being and Time to his thinking on the Event in the 1930s, while identifying what has been philosophically lost in this evolution. I argue that it moves from being a “phenomenological destruction” (in the 1920s), where interpretation is linked to the experience of positive phenomena (history, self, faith, existence) to a “poïetical destruction” (in the 1930s) turned towards a history “to come” and linked to an “original experience of the people” that disregards the positivity of phenomena. From then on, Heidegger’s philosophy threatens to sink into a form of hybris (or excess) by overstepping the constitutive finitude of any hermeneutics worthy of the name.

About the Continental Philosophy Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Continental Philosophy Group works in the traditions of textual interpretation of human consciousness, phenomenology, and post-structuralist critical theory, among other related traditions of thought.