Abstract

I begin by reviewing recent research by Merleau-Ponty scholars opposing aspects of the critique of Merleau-Ponty made by Meltzoff and colleagues based on their studies of neonate imitation. I conclude the need for reopening the case for infant self-other indistinction, starting with a re-examination of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of indistinction in the Sorbonne lectures, and attending especially to the role of affect and to the non-exclusivity of self-other distinction and indistinction. In undertaking that study, I discover the importance of understanding self-other distinction and indistinction in terms of their affective significance. For Merleau-Ponty, self-other indistinction is a virtual or imaginary participation in others’ orientations that he defines as an affective phenomenon. Further, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the advent of the body proper—the aspect of the body image that circumscribes the body as a distinct and private space—theorizes it as an affective innovation. Rather than being a fact of which we at first are ignorant and gradually grow to recognize, distinction from others in the sense that is important to Merleau-Ponty is a situation that must be cultivated and maintained through the negotiation of affective intimacy. Understanding indistinction and distinction in terms of the affective forces that sustain them explains how it is possible for them to coexist.

Highlights

  • The critique of indistinction and its opposition Since Shaun Gallagher collaborated with empirical psychologist Andrew Meltzoff on their 1996 article on Merleau-Ponty and recent development studies, it has become commonplace in Anglophone scholarship on Merleau-Ponty to question or even dismiss his claim in the Sorbonne lectures that the sense of self is developmentally acquired

  • Sympathy is indistinction operating as an affective force that lends movement its infectious or contagious potency, allowing the infant to participate in what she sees, to see things in terms of how they feel

  • One part of what Merleau-Ponty means by this is that an affective force must be mobilized in order for the child to invest her embodied perspective in a body image

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Summary

Introduction

The critique of indistinction and its opposition Since Shaun Gallagher collaborated with empirical psychologist Andrew Meltzoff on their 1996 article on Merleau-Ponty and recent development studies, it has become commonplace in Anglophone scholarship on Merleau-Ponty to question or even dismiss his claim in the Sorbonne lectures that the sense of self is developmentally acquired. Sympathy is indistinction operating as an affective force that lends movement its infectious or contagious potency, allowing the infant to participate in what she sees, to see things in terms of how they feel It is precisely because the body schema functions as a sympathetic indistinction of interoception and exteroception that no side-by-side, self-other comparison between the visual and motor smile is necessary. A body schema is needed to explain infant imitation, Merleau-Ponty argues, insofar as a body schema conducts a motor equivalency between perception and movement, including what will later be distinguished as interoception and exteroception, self and other, such that no effort of translation is initially necessary. - 201 Shiloh Whitney between interoception and exteroception the body schema performs in adult perception functions as proprioception, the interocepted feeling of my surroundings in terms of potential positions and movements is sharply distinguished from my sense of my actual position and movements. This is why “even for the adult the image is never a simple reflection of the model; it is, rather, its ‘quasi-presence’” (PP 133), animated with interoceptive feelings, that mobilize its affective force and let it appear as a kind of physiognomy

Conclusion
Works Cited

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