"L'Entre-deux," A Bridging Concept for Literature, Philosophy, and Science

Abstract

THE NOTION OF ENTRE-DEUX caught my attention in 1989, when I read and heard about it in two completely different contexts. The first was in a text by Laurent Jenny, Professor of French Literature at the University of Geneva, L'Ev6nement figural, published in the journal Poesie No. 40 (1987).' The second was in a seminar entitled Cognitive Sciences and the Human Experience, given at the CREA by Biologist Francisco Varela, who is also a professor of epistemology at the Fondation de France.2 Both Jenny and Varela made up this hyphenated word for a concept which has the quality of an image. Both referred, implicitly or explicitly, to MerleauPonty's work: La Prose du monde in the case of Laurent Jenny, and La Phinomenologie de la perception in the case of Francisco Varela. The term Entre-deux does not appear in La Phinometnologie de la perception, as far as I know, but the notion is ever-present, and underlies the whole phenomenological project. This notion is common to various twentieth-century theories in the field of literature and philosophy (Bakhtine, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Lotman), as well as biophysics (Henri Atlan) epistemology (Michel Serres, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Edgar Morin), biology (Varela) and mathematics, with the concept of fractal dimension developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. It is also the seed for all the theories that have developed over the last twenty years in the areas of complexity (Atlan, Morin, Lotman) order and disorder (Dupuy, Hayles) third-space or third-place (Serres), and it seems only right to give it the recognition it deserves.