A conference was held in Prague, Czech Republic, in November 2002 that was entitled
“Issues Confronting the Post-European World” and that was dedicated to Jan Patočka
(1907-1977). The Organization of Phenomenological Organizations was founded on
that occasion. The following essay is published in celebration of that event.
Essay 48
Sur le concept de pulsion (Trieb) chez Heidegger
© Cristian Ciocan
Université de Bucarest
Centre d’études phénoménologiques
cristiciocan@xnet.ro
Société Roumaine de Phénoménologie
www.culture.ro/srf
Abstract
In this essay I discuss the functions of the concept of drive (Trieb) in the
work of Martin Heidegger (in Being and time and in GA 29/30). This
problematic seems directly dependent on the questions of (animal) life,
animality, bodily nature and their difficult connection to the being of Dasein.
The problem of Trieb is structured on two dimensions, which I analyze in
the two parts of this article. 1) The fundamental ontology approaches the
problem of drive in the context of the definition of Dasein as care (Sorge).
This existential structure cannot be reconstructed out of drives like addiction
(Hang) or compulsion (Drang). I argue that by means of these problems,
Heidegger attains a certain limit of the existential analytic, i.e., the boundary
between Dasein and the essence of pure life. 2) On the other hand, the
problem of drive determines essentially the phenomenological elaboration of
the being of the animal (GA 29/30). I therefore underline the manner in
which drive constitutes the auto-regulative character of the animal organism
and also of its behavior toward its environment. Finally, I consider the way
in which drive constitutes the proto-spatiality and the proto-temporality of
the animal “poor in world.”
Le concept de pulsion (Trieb) n’a pas attiré beaucoup d’attention dans
l’exégèse heideggérienne. Que le thème possède une certaine importance pour la
phénoménologie, cela a été pleinement démontré dans un riche numéro de la
revue de phénoménologie Alter focalisé sur le problème de la pulsion, où on peut
The copyright on this text belongs to the author. The work is published here by
permission of the author and can be cited as “Essays in Celebration of the Founding of
the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Ed. CHEUNG, Chan-Fai, Ivan
Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne, & Hans Rainer Sepp. Web-
Published at www.o-p-o.net , 2003.”