Katharina D. Martin introduces Henri Maldiney (1912–2013) as a figure of twentieth-century French phenomenology, whose work unites ontology, aesthetics, and psychopathology. Moving beyond Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness, Maldiney develops an existential phenomenology focused on being-in-the-world, openness, and the genesis of form. Drawing on Ludwig Binswanger and he reconceives the unconscious as a creative, pre-personal domain rather than a fixed symbolic structure. His concept of transpassibility describes the human capacity to be affected by unforeseen events and transformed through encounters with otherness, highlighting both vulnerability and creative potential.
Maldiney’s aesthetics interprets artworks as events that generate worlds rather than represent them. Paintings that maintain the productive tension between sense and non-sense reveal their rhythm as their own becoming. Rhythm in particular, functions as a fundamental ontological principle that organizes space, time, and experience while mediating between chaos and order. Across art and psychoanalysis, Maldiney emphasizes dialogue, affectivity, and receptivity as conditions for transformation and for restoring a person’s relation to the world, especially in cases of psychosis.
Combining Maldiney’s ideas on psychoanalysis with his writings on art reveals the ontological dimension of his thinking. Maldiney's theory of form and rhythm refers to a concept of individuation as a formation of time and space. With recourse to Deleuze's philosophy, Maldiney can be used to develop a phenomenology of becoming. The presentation thus not only introduces Maldiney but also extends his concepts to a broader interdisciplinary framework.