Felix Ravaisson

Une réflexion sur la philosophie de la médecine de Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900), à partir de son ouvrage "De l'habitude". L'article a été publié dans L’Épistémologie française, 1830-1970, sous la direction de Michel Bitbol et Jean Gayon, Paris, P.U.F., 2006, p. 413-p. 430. Traduction en chinois en 2011, The Commercial Press, p. 451-p. 471. Réédition aux éditions Matériologiques en 2015.

Lo Sguardo, n. XXXI, 2020, pp. 403-415.
Nota di discussione su Denise Vincenti, "Abitudine e follia. Studi di storia della filosofia e della psicologia" (Mimesis, Milano 2019) e "La spontaneità malata. Fisiologia, patologia e alienazione mentale nel pensiero di Félix Ravaisson" (ETS, Pisa 2019)

This paper develops a vitalist conception of habit as a means to theorize the material capacity of art-encounters to reconfigure and reinvent the subject. Drawing principally on the innovative conceptualization of habit articulated in the philosophies of Félix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze, where it is theorized as a much more volatile and creative force of repetition that makes change possible, I first explore how habit pushes our contemporary understandings of the subject through an attentiveness to its ontogenetic emergence from material and affective processes and ecologies, as well as its plastic susceptibility to immanent disruption. Second, and through an engagement with the bioaesthetic and micropolitical thought of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that it is precisely on the ontogenetic terrain of plastic habits that art-encounters might be understood to intervene. I unpack this empirically through an engagement with the bioartistic practices of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), whose ‘semi-living’ installation art, I argue, stages a disruption of pernicious contemporary habits in favour of new and creative capacities for thinking perceiving, and relating to the nonhuman.

Today we appear to ourselves under new, immunological premises. We must learn to actively take responsibility for what we passively undergo. Plasticity, according to Malabou, forms the condition of the very coherence of thought and life. But is the concept of plasticity enough to learn from the brain? While it is clear that plasticity compels thought, it is not clear how thought matters in the becoming of the brain, nor how we can learn from the risks to which the brain is exposed. Drawing on Deleuze's concept of 'vis elastica' and two concepts in the recent work of Sloterdijk, 'elastic conservatism' and 'vertical tension', I supplement Malabou’s concept of plasticity with the concept of elasticity. To supplement plasticity with elasticity is to supplement the question ‘what to do?’ with the question ‘why here (and now)?’. While the former question belongs to knowledge and action, only the latter is capable of reorienting thought itself.

While many people remain hopeful that particular images of injustice will have the power to catalyse progressive transformation, there is also widespread belief in the inevitability of 'compassion fatigue'. Bringing philosophers of habit into conversation with contemporary scholars of affect, visual culture and digital media, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the links between images and change – one in which political feeling and political action are complexly intertwined and repeated sensation does not necessarily lead to disaffection. When affect acts as a 'binding technique' compelling us to inhabit our sensorial responses to images, I suggest, we may become better attuned to everyday patterns of seeing, feeling, thinking and interacting – and hence to the possibility of change at the level of habit. This article thus contends that thinking affect and habit together as imbricated may enable us to better understand the dynamics of both individual and socio-political change today.

RESUMO: O presente texto é uma tradução da obra de Félix Ravaisson intitulada De l'habitude, originalmente escrita em 1838 como requisito para obtenção de seu doutorado. Este breve tratado sobre o hábito foi de suma importância para o desenvolvimento da obra de Henri Bergson, que também dedicou um capítulo da obra O pensamento e o movente à vida e à obra de Ravaisson. Propomos para os fins da edição da Revista Ideação sobre Henri Bergson uma tradução desse importante tratado para o português.

ABSTRACT: The present text is a translation of one of Félix Ravaisson's major works entitled De l'habitude and originally written in 1838 as his doctoral thesis. This brief treaty was of utmost importance to the development of Henri Bergson's philosophy, who dedicated a chapter of his 1932 work La pensée et le mouvant to the life and works of Félix Ravaisson. We propose to this thematic edition of Revista Ideação on Henri Bergson a translation of this text into Portuguese.

Philosophical debates on habit often emphasize its ambivalent character: once habitualized, voluntary activity becomes natural. Consequently, the ambiguity of habit is the ambiguity of freedom and nature. This view was recently criticized by Claude Romano for its lack of conceptual clarity. Focusing on the phenomenology of habit as developed by Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty, and in response to Romano, this essay shows not only that habit cannot be stripped of its ambiguity, but also how this ambiguity affects our understanding of subject and freedom.

This article is one stage in an interdisciplinary research process conducted by a group of researchers, somatic practitioners, and dancers investigating uses of somatic practices1 in dance, and within contexts of social vulnerability and exclusion where such use has been less common.2
In order to carry out this research we have had to question the epistemologies of somatic practices.3 Such epistemological work is necessary, we claim, because while somatic practices are often said to lack a theory, in fact it seems to us that what we are really dealing with is an inherently diverging theory. On the one hand – and this is particularly true for the Feldenkrais method which we will be discussing here – there exists a theoretical corpus developed in texts written by the founders and their disciples. On the other hand, there is a second, implicit theoretical corpus which grounds and organises the practice itself. This second theoretical corpus is often transmitted orally during practitioners’ training, and is implicated within the practice itself. Although scarcely formulated as such, this second corpus is often infinitely more coherent and complete than the first. Furthermore, the first corpus (often taken as ‘the’ theory of the technique) sometimes contradicts the second.

L'abitudine è spesso intesa come il semplice sfondo sul quale si stagliano le date memorabili della vita di ciascuno. A uno sgardo più attento, però, le abitudini si rivelano una componente essenziale della nostra identità, poichè rivelano l'intima connessione fra ciò che ci appartiene così profondamente da non esserne consapevoli e l'alterità che ci viene incontro, popolando gli interstizi fra attività e passività, organico e inorganico, familiare ed estraneo. Molti scrittori e filosofi del secolo scorso hanno trovato nell'abitudine lo strumento adatto per mappare questo territorio, facendone uno dei più rilevanti snodi concettuali di un'epoca a sua volta tesa fra continuità e discontinuità. Il ritorno dell'abitudine quale tema privilegiato della ricerca filosofica fa dunque eco a quelle riflessioni, riprendendone le file interrotte. In questo volume, ponendo in dialogo alcuni dei capolavori della modernità letteraria con diverse prospettive filosofiche, si compongono le sfaccettature di un discorso che, mantenendo un'essenziale unità, si rifrange in diverse direzioni: Herni Bergson e lo spiritualismo francese gettano luce sulle rappresentazioni della routine in Marcel Proust e Samuel Beckett; "The Way of all Flesh" di Samuel Butler è letto come un riflesso letterario delle eterodosse teorie lamarckiane dell'autore; la nozione di habitus di Pierre Bourdieu si offre come chiave di lettura de "Il deserto dei Tartar" di Dino Buzzatii; la rappresentazione della dipendenza ne "La coscienza di Zeno" di Italo Svevo converge con il tardo pensiero di Sigmund Freud; la poetica dell'OuLiPo e l'opera di Georges Perec anticipano le teorie dell'antropologia filosofica dell'esercizio di Peter Sloterdijk. La costellazione così composta disegna uno sforzo trasversale di ripensare l'esperienza umana sotto il segno di un'identità minore, un'identità spogliata di ogni pretesa autarchica ma non per questo polverizzata o liquefatta.

This article proposes a comparison between one of the major figures of French spiritualism, Félix Ravaisson, and the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce. While there seems to be no direct historical connection between the two authors, their philosophies display striking similarities, in particular with regard to the link between the problem of habit and the problem of determinism. Both authors resort to habit when considering the role of chance, spontaneity, and final causation in nature, soon reaching the basic metaphysical issue of how to think about the relation between nature and spirit, or matter and mind. Moreover, they articulate their positions using concepts and metaphors that directly evoke the Christian notion of love. Yet Ravaisson and Peirce also appear to disagree on some fundamental issues. In particular, they have differing conceptions of the relation between habit and spontaneity. The article explores the implications of this disagreement and attempts to unearth its philosophical relevance.

(Some free e-prints of the published version are available at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/verifyEmail?activationCode=IBQXBwrNwytbiCa45NeVQktHD5PvXVNa)

Laruelle's first book Phenomenon and Difference: An Essay on Ravaisson's Ontology (1971) is unanimously overlooked as having little relevance to his later non-philosophy. On the contrary, this paper analyses Laruelle's dissertation and Ravaisson's writings to show how Ravaisson enables Laruelle to develop non-philosophy's three central ideas of decision, radical immanence, and cloning. Firstly, Laruelle inherits Ravaisson's critique of Platonism and anti-Platonism as dividing the unity of being between two terms, of which one alone is conflated with being to the detriment of the other as non-being. Moreover, Laruelle follows Ravaisson's third way of envisioning being as a radical immanence, which philosophy presupposes to constitute its dualisms by dividing being into opposed terms. Finally, Laruelle's cloning adheres to Ravaisson's eclectic method of expressing being's true immanence through his cohering of all philosophies, as well as disciplines like art and religion, into a single narrative of one and the same being's self-unfolding.

In the present chapter, I wish to explore the correspondence at work between the anthropological notion of habit [Gewhonheit] and the ontological notion of immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit] in Hegel's philosophy. Nonetheless, I will deliberately not define the specific type of correspondence at work-that is, whether habit and immediacy are identical or equivalent, or whether habit is a paradigm of immediacy. Those questions go beyond the aim of this chapter, which is to clarify the function of immediacy as absolute secondarity. I believe this enables us to grasp the speculative nature of the relation between being and thought, and understand the spiral structure of spirit [Geist] and thus its absolute negativity.

The self-help genre dominates the space for shaping and changing habits at the individual scale. The individual and the personal-where many self-help books end-is where Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, begins. The book builds a theoretical manifesto, inspiring thought on the "immanent process" of social change, its non-linearity, its continuing nature, and the significance of minor gestures or habits.

In this paper I present and reflect upon an audio-visual ethnographic engagement with a group of subvertising practitioners. Subvertisers are artists/activists attacking and altering urban media spaces; both physically and virtually, both playfully and critically. Drawing on the recently coming to the fore of Felix Ravaisson's vitalist conception of habit (2008) and plastic habits (Dewsbury, 2011) in geographical scholarship, this paper positions subvertising as an attempted intervention into habit-bodies where it may function as an external 'event that undoes the holding together that habit performs' and may offer the ground from which habitual actions 'can resurface in consciousness where action can be evaluated and recalibrated' (Bissell, 2012: unpaginated). The activist logic of subvertising through the lens of 'habit' is investigated on two levels. First, on the level of the urban body, the legal and often physical state of outdoor media advertising as 'untouchable', and its resonance with urban bodies that have been argued to be characterised by a 'blasé attitude' (1971), is potentially disrupted through the artful practice. As such, subvertising practices seek to re-formulate habituated modes of interaction between body and urban advertising matter. Second, on the level of the consuming body, the subvert may enact the displacement of an already-established disposition (previously maintained within the passive registers of the body) towards a certain good, brand, product category or way of consuming. However, although habits are radically volatile in their entanglement with more-than-individual urban presences, this is not to imply any sense of simple calculated convergence of fluid bodies. Taking urban bodies as 'habit-bodies' seriously then, means to offer a novel modest, yet hopeful account of the potential of artful urban subversions and has implications for their position within broader urban politics.

This article discusses microaggressions as new political material for feminist scholars and activists. The article asks how the new materialisms may contribute to the conceptualisation and operationalisation of microaggressions. After all, and taking them at face value, the ontological status of microaggressions and their modes of operation are fascinating: what are these allegedly infinitesimal hostilities? How do they reach their target and, once they have arrived there, how do they take effect? What assumptions about the constituents of the world do scholars and activists make when, through language they imply that microaggressions are indeed ‘out there’ and therefore researchable? Case studies around micropsychological dynamics that have come to my attention through National Public Radio’s podcast Invisibilia as well as the French philosophical work of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) will help to unfold my argument. Invisibilia is here taken to be an instance of new materialist popular culture, and whilst Ravaissonian philosophy has influenced the philosophical work of Bergson, the work of both men contributes to the continental philosophical impetus of the new materialisms.

This article examines the concept of "madness" in Ravaisson's philosophy, especially in his Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIX e siècle (1867). The aim of this analysis is to highlight the influence of mid-nineteenth century French Psychiatry, particularly Alienism, on Ravaisson's conception of lunacy. While earlier spiritualist accounts described the lunatic as a being without rationality and an automaton without consciousness, Ravaisson instead tries to thematize the role of reason and rationality in the various morbid states of the soul (such as delirium, hallucination, alterations of sensibility, etc.).

The object of our reflections is to determine what conditions create a ‘true surprise’. We believe that its meaning is to be found in the difference between the “unexpected” and the “unpredictable”. This paper examines different examples of events and phenomena that all contain elements of either the unexpected or the unpredictable. The unexpected is different from the unpredictable because it calls into question every form of anticipation; its event is discovered only because it ignores all pre-existing potentials. It is thus surprising not because it has no relation to the conditions and characteristics of a potential event but because the conditions themselves return and renew the initial situation without its previous predictable potentials.  It would thus appear that the reason that the true surprise in the unexpected is that the surprise creates an situation in Act that was previously without potential.

L'objet de notre réflexion est de déterminer ce que peut être et signifier une vraie surprise. Nous pensons qu'elle se détermine à partir de la différence entre l'imprévisible et l'inattendu. Nous portons donc notre examen avec différents exemples d'événements et de phénomènes d'où dérivent ces constats ayant le qualificatif "inattendu" ou "imprévisible". L'inattendu semble se distinguer de l'imprévisible parce qu'il met en cause toute forme d'anticipation ; son événement ne se découvre que parce qu'il prend par surprise toutes les virtualités préalables. L'inattendu est surprenant non parce qu'il viendrait de l'extérieur, sans rapport avec les conditions de possibilité d'un événement, mais parce qu'il retourne ces conditions et s'actualise sans virtualité préalable, il apparaît alors comme surprise, une sorte d'acte sans puissance. http://www.implications-philosophiques.org/inattendu-et-imprevisible/

It is acommonplaceamongst neuroscientists and philosopherstocon-sider habit to be a 'naturalization' of the mind, in which ways of thinkinga nd ways of acting sink below the level of conscious reflection and become thoughtless , blind, uncritical and unthinking.This paper seeks to challenget hatv iew, not by rejectingthe idea of habit as naturalization of the mind, but by challenging the receivedview of what such naturalization entails. Drawing on the work of Felix Ravaisson, and more specificallyp henomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty,PaulRicoeur and Gaston Bachelard, the paper argues that close attention to the role of embodiment and temporal unfolding in habitual acting demand a more nuanced understanding of habit as well as of the relationship between mind and nature generally. In ar ecent article on the neuroscienceo fh abits in Scientific American,t he following standard test for establishingt he presenceo fh abits is described:¹ Agroup of rats is placed in an experimentalbox,and trained to press alever,which releases food as areward. When the rats arereturned to their cages, the experimenters 'devalue' the rewardinthe boxeither by arranging it such that the rats can eat to oversatiation,orby injectingt hem with ad rugt hat induces nausea when they eat the food. When the rats are then returned to the experimentalbox,the presenceofahabitisidentified on the basis of whether the ratcontinues to pressthe lever and eat the food or not.Ifthey do so, in spiteof the fact that the rewardisnow unpleasant,they aresaid to have formed ahabit.If, on the other hand, they do not,they aresaid to be 'mindful' of the alteration in the situation and ares aid not to be actingh abitually. Researchers then studied the neurological processes in playinthe rats acting ha-bituallyi no rder to gain insight into the neuroscienceo fh abits generally. While there is much of interestthatcan be said about the details of this research, it is not something we can go into in anyd etail here. What is striking,h owever,i st hat this experiment or versions thereof, remains the standard wayinwhich habits are assessed in neuroscientific research  Research carried out at the Graybiel laboratory at MIT(Graybiel &S mith ) Brought to you by | University of Queensland-UQ Library Authenticated Download Date | 3/23/18 3:03 AM

This article puts Emile Boutroux's philosophy in the context of French philosophy of the second half of the 19th Century. It circumscribes Boutroux's relationships to spiritualism and his neo-Kantianism. This essay also puts in perspective Boutroux's relevance for past and present epistemological inquiries.