Abstract

The author draws a contrast between a classical realism, that of the Moderns, which consists in affirming the objectivity of our representations as far as we use them correctly, and a realism that situates reality upstream of representation and makes the variety of relations that we entertain with it a condition of the representational set-ups themselves. The criticism of representationalism, however, is not enough to make sense of reality. Beyond representationalism, we need a criticism of phenomenology as that thousand-year-old structure of Western thought that consists in treating sensible reality as “appearanceµ (phenomenon), for better or for worse, and, by this very fact, results in losing its sense of “realityµ. The way of realism passes therefore primarily by reformulating in terms other than phenomenological the traditional question of the relation of the discourses and sensible things