This essay tries to show how Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of Life can be understood as a valuable criticism of hermeneutical philosophy and especially of hermeneutical phenomenology in the manner Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur had conceptualized it. Using Michel Henry’s concept of phenomenological distance, it will be shown here that on the basis of every hermeneutics there lies the classical topos of the auctorial intention that was once gained by the interpretation of texts and is simply ontologized by hermeneutical philosophers. (...) What follows from such a perspective is that human life seems to be ontologically separated form itself, against which Michel Henry tries to show that each life can only be humane, both in relation to itself as well as to others, if it affects itself without any distance. (shrink)

In 1962, Ernst Scheidegger published his first book using his own name as an imprint. This book was the German edition of Jean Genet's essay on Alberto Giacometti. The great artist and close personal friend of Ernst Scheidegger has been subject of a number of books published by Verlag Ernst Scheidegger and Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess since. The most successful of them has been "Traces of a Friendship - Alberto Giacometti", first published in 1990 and reprinted several times. To mark (...) the 50th anniversary of Verlag Ernst Scheidegger / Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess present a new, completely revised and expanded edition of this classic. It includes around 40 previously unpublished colour images which have recently been discovered in Ernst Scheidegger's archive. (shrink)

Photographs by Ernst Scheidegger of Alberto Giacometti and his art work.