Abstract
This work proposes a phenomenological study of language, and articulates three questions: first, the question of the status and the fruitfulness of a phenomenology of language. This is a complex question, since it already requires to understand to what extent language can be approached as one continent among others of human experience: should we not on the contrary suppose that language penetrates all registers of experience, and that there is not, for instance, even sensitive experience that is not magnetized-and so to speak transited from one side to the other-by the experience of the word? This first question, as we shall see, also leads to question the relation of language with the other expressive modalities, and to understand, in this way, in a true phenomenological anthropology, what constitutes the specificity of language as a human phenomenon, beyond the multiplicity of languages and cultures.
The second question concerns phenomenology itself. It seeks to clarify the relation of phenomenology as a practice to language: how does the phenomenologist solicit language to say the phenomenon-whether this phenomenon is a phenomenon of language or a supposedly mute phenomenon? This is also a delicate matter, since it questions at its root the relation between phenomenon and language: does the language used by the phenomenologist in his practice not distort the phenomenon, which it would perhaps be above all a question of seeing? Or should we suppose that the saying of the phenomenon already belongs itself to the essence of the phenomenon-that the phenomenon always implies already in itself the possibility of its expression? The third question can then extend the previous one, by seeking to probe the specificity of the phenomenologist's use of language in relation to the poet.
This question, which also presupposes a phenomenological analysis of poetry, is today made inescapable, especially after Heidegger's use of philosophical language, also assuming that poetic meditation should take over from philosophical analysis. But it is in fact the whole of contemporary phenomenological production that should be astonished by the different modalities of writing that are brought into play, which sometimes constitutes a constitutive element of the thought: let us just think here of philosophical styles [and therefore discursive] as different as those of Derrida, Levinas, Maldiney, Ricoeur, Henry, Richir or Marion.