Jan Patocka and French Phenomenology

In his phenomenological works-works that are thematically centered above all around the question of the natural world-Jan Patocka increasingly referred to movement and lived/physical corporeality [Leib-Korperlichkeit], precisely because he conceived the concept of the world in terms of the correlation of life with its milieu.1 Patocka developed his phenomenology, in conjunction with Edmund Husserl's late phenomenology of the lifeworld, 2 by taking lived corporeality as his starting point and guiding motif in a way that is parallel to Merleau-Ponty's work. Patocka himself saw that this accent on corporeality indicated a kinship with French phenomenology. 3 In our opinion, such an emphasis was also one of the reasons why he kept his distance from Eugen Fink's philosophical cosmology. And it is Patocka's reference to this cosmological project that has had, and keeps on having, an important impact on the recent reception of his work in France. Thus not only does Patocica's understanding of the lifeworld display the influence of French thinkers, but his work has become important for the development of phenomenological philosophy in France, particularly in one respect to which we shall limit ourself here: by virtue of his critical engagement with Eugen Fink, Patocka has become one source of the turn toward philosophical cosmology in French phenomenology, above all in the works of Renaud Barbaras, as well as in the work of authors he has influenced, like Pierre Rodrigo, and of some of their former PhD students working on Patocka.(4) This is, of course, merely one moment in the abundant development of phenomenology in France, but it is an important moment that greatly enhanced the reception of Patocka's work in general, and not only in France itself.