Call for Papers | BACHELARD STUDIES - ÉTUDES BACHELARDIENNES

Call for Papers

Bachelard Studies

Etudes Bachelardiennes

Studi Bachelardiani

02/2025

Imagination, language, action: the relationship between Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricœur

Directed by Cristina Henrique da Costa (cristinahenriquedacosta@hotmail.fr)

A number of recent works seem to indicate that it is possible, even desirable, to bring the two philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricœur closer together. For example, Jean-Luc Amalric's Paul Ricœur, l'imagination vive, a follow-up to his pioneering doctoral thesis, highlights the centrality of imagination in Ricœur’s philosophy of action, and shows how, from the Philosophie de la volonté onwards, a close relationship between Ricœur and Bachelard develops around the question of linguistic creativity

Similarly, in his 2012 book Les puissances de l'imagination, Jean-Philippe Pierron makes much of Bachelardian and Ricœurian concepts. He argues that imagination, by linking us poetically to the world, is also the faculty of practical possibility and human action.

Spurred on by these and other works, it turns out that the rapprochement between Bachelard and Ricoeur goes beyond the simple comparison of texts, for it allows us to glimpse new directions for certain major axes of contemporary philosophical research: the theory of imagination, ethics, the place of perception in its relationship to reality, or the articulation between freedom and truth.

Such rapprochement also provides a more precise critical philosophical perspective for certain multidisciplinary research areas, and makes it easier to tackle certain problems. For example, the relationship between language and the visual image, or between the word, the sentence, and narrative. This rapprochement also provides an opportunity to clarify the meaning of the sacred, to assign an original place to myth and symbols, to reflect on the importance of literature in the production of linguistic meaning, to take charge of the objectification of culture and so on.

Insofar as both these philosophers borrowed from phenomenology while also deploying hermeneutic tools, it seems remarkable to note how the relations between the second Bachelard (from 1938, date of the publication of La psychanalyse du feu) and the first Ricoeur (until 1985, date of the complete publication of the Time and Narrative trilogy) are likely to create a space in which other contemporary thinkers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mircea Eliade, Henri Corbin and Gilbert Durand, can address a number of fundamental ethical, aesthetic and ontological issues.

If such a comparison is a priori indisputably justified by the fact that Ricoeur, in his own texts, often refers to Bachelard to show his agreement with the latter's ideas and to express his indebtedness—particularly in La symbolique du mal and in La métaphore vive, but also in L'imagination dans le discours et dans l'action (an article reprinted in Du texte à l'action)—he never produced a « hermeneutic » specifically devoted to Bachelard’s work, Ricoeur’s accustomed approach when it came to marking his position in relation to his many interlocutors, philosophers and otherwise.

It remains to be seen, then, to what extent Ricoeur's testimony enables us to reach a root common to both thinkers, and to what extent conversely Bachelard's text offers points of resistance to Ricoeur, or even exposes divergences that may not yet have been sufficiently thought through.

For its issue 2, to be published in 2025, Bachelard Studies (Études bachelardiennes) will therefore insist on the fruitfulness of such a rapprochement in order to :

- Bring to light concerns shared by Bachelard and Ricoeur, notably on the question of language creativity and the relationship between the poetic and the practical.

- Highlight the productivity of a cross-reading, in which Ricoeur's philosophical elaboration opens up promising conceptual perspectives for Bachelard's text, and in which, conversely, Bachelard's philosophical inventiveness sheds light on decisive articulations of Ricoeurian

- Confront the possible differences between these two thinkers, whether simply lexical (e.g., image or metaphor? reading or hermeneutics?), more particularly conceptual (e.g., what about the problem of time and space for each of the two philosophers?), or whether they more radically engage distinct ways of conceiving philosophical writing, the subject's relationship to the body and the world, the meaning of matter, the place of the poetic imagination in philosophy, and finally the role of history, historical epistemology, religion, theology or anthropology in the elaboration of the concept of

Submission Standards for English-language Texts:

- Texts will be submitted to the following online address:

https://www.mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/bachelardstudies/about/submissions

- Texts received will be submitted for a double-blind peer review.

- The Author may propose an article of a maximum of 7,000 words in English for the sections on The Letter or Spirit, accompanied by an Abstract (150 words) and followed by five keywords in English.

- The Author may also propose a review of a maximum of 1,400 words in French.

- Manuscripts submitted anonymously must be uploaded no later than the 30^th of November 2025 in .doc format directly from the site, with a separate document containing the author’s contact details (CV and affiliation).

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with the editorial norms: http://mimesisinternational.com/editorial-norms.pdf

01/2026

Gaston Bachelard and Asian Aesthetics

Directed by

Kuan – Min HUANG (huangkm@sinica.edu.tw) and Makoto SEKIMURA (makotosekimura@gmail.com)

The increasingly active comparative research between East and West is contributing to the clarification and sharing of commonalities and correspondences between these two aesthetic experiences of the world. As a matter of fact, the works of Gaston Bachelard, which are widely known in Asia, offer a source of inspiration for the reflections of philosophers and artists. The two sides - epistemological and poetic - of Bachelard's philosophy, however, give rise to a non-symmetrical reception. Although the epistemological figure of Bachelard is known in Asia through the group of French philosophers such as Althusser, Foucault, Serres, and others, his poetics has not been introduced as a part of the French Theory.

Far from being a philosophical and scientific invention at odds with common sense, the material imagination is easily found in every culture and tradition. The poetics of the body, the elements, and the cosmos have notoriously aroused unexpected interest in the Chinese world, an interest that has also been acknowledged by Western interpreters. On the one hand, the four pre-scientific elements (earth, water, fire, and air), part of a model to account for natural phenomena, were inherited from the ancient Greeks and Orientals. The Chinese classified five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth), explaining the origin, and meaning of the world and providing a link between the microcosm and the macrocosm. On the other hand, Bachelard's attention to the moment in the theory of time, as opposed to Bergson's duration, finds echoes in Asian or Buddhist sensibilities focused on precariousness. Such correspondences are naively rooted in the work of poets, artists, and musicians. Despite the differences between civilizations, however, we must admit that the poetic images that drive and modify the human imagination "speak" a similar aesthetic language. The proximity of the Asian tradition to Bachelard's poetics can be seen in various aspects of aesthetic sensibility. It is therefore possible to evoke a specific theme around Bachelard's aesthetics in Asia.

The main interest is to assess the impact of Bachelard's poetics in the process of receiving his works, either through translation or direct reading. Furthermore, it is important to understand how Bachelard is integrated into the transmission of Western philosophy, French literature, and modern aesthetic criticism. In receiving Bachelard's poetics, each language (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) tries to find its own way of appropriating his linguistic taste. In doing so, it creates a new way of aesthetic and artistic synthesis.

Through reference to Bachelard's thought, it will be possible to explore in greater depth the similarities and correspondences between the West and Asia in regard to the concepts of space and time, bodily sensibility, the elements of nature, the archetypes and myths of nature, imagination and memory, and so on. Bachelard's texts will also be compared to Asian traditions such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen.

Contributions may address the following topics:

Bachelard's reception and influence in the intellectual circles of Asian poets, artists, architects, musicians, and philosophers.
The relevance of Bachelardian poetics to poetic, artistic, and philosophical studies in Asia.
The divergence and critique of Bachelardian aesthetics in reception.
The explicit or implicit reception of Bachelard by philosophers and artists in relation to the poetics of nature in Asia.
Bachelard's relationship to other thinkers of nature and art in every civilization.
A comparison of Bachelard's poetics with Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. perspectives.
Artists’ interpretations of Bachelard based on art (calligraphy, landscape, poetry) and cultural traditions.