Merleau-Ponty Research Articles

The Grip of the Past

Abstract This article explores Simone de Beauvoir’s account of old people’s relationship to time in her groundbreaking Old Age. Her dominant view is that, for the old, the past is fixed and it fixes us. Here this picture of a frozen past is contrasted with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the past is what gives “the atmosphere” to our present, providing its affective texture. This article highlights alternative and parallel strands in Beauvoir’s own thinking that challenge her dominant view.

From Respiration to Fleshpiration

In this article, I introduce a new word, the neologism “fleshpiration.” It is a word or a name in which I intertwine “flesh” and “spirit” or “spiration.” This new word is inspired by the thinking of Jesus, St. Paul, Paul Claudel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The interpretative starting point of my article is taken from Claudel, who states: “the spirit is respiration.” With Claudel’s idea, which has its roots in the etymological analysis of pneuma and spiritus, I interpret the spirit (pneuma) of Jesus and St. Paul to mean respiration in the first place. Within this respiratory interpretative context, I suggest that both Jesus and St. Paul emphasised the essentiality of breathing in their religious thinking. For St. Paul, life according to the flesh and life according to the Spirit as life according to the Respiration are opposite lifestyles. Within the context of Merleau-Ponty, it can be said that St. Paul’s dichotomy between the flesh and the Spirit can be challenged and surpassed. For Merleau-Ponty, the flesh and the Spirit can be intertwined in a paradoxical manner. Within this framework of paradoxical thinking, it becomes possible to discover this new word “fleshpiration” and initially claim that it names a new respiratory beginning for philosophy and religion.

Historical science and the visual turn: features of perception

The paper analyzes a complex of methodological problems associated with the visual turn in modern historical science, as well as the peculiarities of the perception of the historical past and the organization of history teaching in modern culture and in the system of historical education. The analysis evaluates the prospects of already existing approaches in philosophy in the development of problems of the visual. The ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of perception, with his emphasis on the “physical presence” of a body in the process of perception, are proposed as a significant source for the reflection on the visual. The involvement of visual elements in the historical narrative, as shown in the article, complicates the methodology and practice of source criticism, while at the same time allowing historical science to make its contribution to understanding the image as such.

Flourishing while withering: an explication and critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenology of aging

AbstractThis paper explores the process of aging from a phenomenological perspective. Supplementing the model of becoming old found in Simone de Beauvoir’s work with a phenomenology of human suffering and flourishing, it asks whether it is possible to lead a good life in the process of becoming old. Is it possible to flourish while experiencing bodily waning? Is it possible to flourish while experiencing the shrinking of one’s everyday world and the passing away of close others? Aging, at least in its protracted phases, appears to become full of suffering rather than flourishing. What are the prospects of finding meaningful life projects despite old age? By making use of insight found in Heidegger and other phenomenologists the paper tries to develop a slightly different view on aging than the one found in Beauvoir, stressing the importance of embodied experiences and life choices, which not only depend upon societal oppression and being objectified by others, but also upon processes of nature and the possibilities of an intergenerational intersubjectivity. Resources for this project is found in the philosophy of affectivity developed by Heidegger and other phenomenologists of facticity, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt.

The Phenomenal Atlases of Contemporary Physics: Knowing the Imperceptible

Abstract Physicists study the physical world on spatial, temporal, and complexity scales inaccessible through ordinary human perception. How, then, does a person ground their understanding of physics at these scales in the sensory impressions and emotional states made possible by their body? The author describes a framework that approaches this question by integrating artistic and intellectual methods and is informed by the history of science, theories of embodied cognition, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology. The framework’s goal is to understand the subjective, internal representations of physics concepts used by practicing physicists and to explore their impact on collective research efforts.

Life After 'Life After Kant' Other Minds with Jonas and Merleau-Ponty

This paper examines two twenty-first-century developments in the enactive approach in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. The first is the surging interest in Hans Jonas, which begins with Weber and Varela's 'Life After Kant' (2002) and continues up to the present. The second is the 'social turn' that the enactive approach has taken, especially after De Jaegher and Di Paolo's (2007) work on participatory sense-making. We look at these two developments through the lens of the problem of other minds. We argue that they are incompatible due to a residual solipsism in Jonasian phenomenology. Ultimately, this leaves enactive theory with a choice between embracing Jonas or embracing the social turn in enactive theory. We recommend replacing Jonasian influences with those from the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We argue that enactivism can evade the problem of other minds using Merleau-Ponty's discussion of 'flesh' and 'expression'.

Phenomenology and its phantoms: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Leiris

My essay focuses on the figure of the phantom in the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ethnographer Michel Leiris. I study their evocation of gestures as a site of communication and argue that within the colonial situation all communication—including the gestural—is ghosted by histories and cultural understandings that remain opaque.

Ecologies of Scale in the Age of Satellites and Television

This essay presents a theory of scale as a nonrepresentational interface, or crossing-point, to reappraise distance in approaches to remote viewing. To do so, it turns to the idea of “action at a distance,” particularly as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as to the year 1968, when the photograph Earthrise, the Whole Earth Catalog, and shouts of “the whole world is watching” put a fine point on matters of scale for media such as satellites and television. Variously revered or reviled in this historical moment, these devices implied totalities for some and total fields for others, though in either case, it was distance that assured hierarchy and homogeny, according to critics and scholars. In the years since 1968, this distrust has typically held sway, shaping calls for immediacy as opposed to abstract distance in most accounts of scale. By contrast, this essay argues that distance preserves difference and, emphatically, dependence across vast and variegated milieus, making scale a site for mutual responsibility in addition to variance or invariance. Bearing this out, the essay concludes with considerations of scale in the films Medium Cool and 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein distance ensures the entangled conditions by which just and unjust circumstances are made and unmade.

From substitute to supplement: towards a normative reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Schneider case

How do philosophers and psychologists receive paradigmatic cases from pathology? More specifically, how are some essential features of ‘normal’ cognitive, affective or perceptual functions derived these pathological cases? In this paper, I argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a fecund answer to this question by putting forth a logic of supplementation in pathology that distinguishes the coping behavior of the organic world in contrast to an inorganic one. Supplementation, instead of substitution, marks the world of the living, particularly in its higher forms, as it denotes a persistence through impairment governed by an organic norm. A prominent example of this appears in his reading of the patient Schneider case, a classic example from Goldstein and Gelb’s Gestalt psychology. While earlier commentators were interested in underlying whether or not Merleau-Ponty used this example to denote the persistence of a key function or the disruption of another, what has been missed, on my view, is a far more consequential point about pathologies and how they structure our relation to our world.

The Body in Pain and Pleasure

Abstract Women’s bodily experiences, radically stigmatized in Persian culture, have barely been approached in the literature of Iran. However, Rosa Jamali, an eminent postmodern poet in contemporary Iran, mobilizes her poetic palette with a phenomenological perception of pain and pleasure in the female body as a means of self-expression. For her, the female body can be portrayed via indirection and insinuation through which bodily dys-appearance (pain) and eu-appearance (pleasure) are invoked. Resonating with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of “body-subject” alongside Farzaneh Milani’s “neotraditional feminism,” Jamali’s oeuvre conceptualizes the body of a Persian woman in proximity to deeply entrenched values in Persian culture so as to transgress them. By displaying a poetic performance of intercorporeality, Jamali encounters the inscrutable female body and draws it within the contours of manifold intersomatic connections with the surrounding world, cultural memories, and archetypal images.

The Flesh of History – Re-Enlivening the History of Textile Industries Through the Work of Kristina Müntzing

Swedish artist Kristina Müntzing physically engages with archives of textile industries through manipulating, enlarging, fragmenting and re-constructing (re-weaving) photographs that she finds, as well as creating performances that explore the carnal aspects of this history. In this way, she makes connections between such embodied understandings and the political struggles of the time, which continues in different manifestations yet today. In this article, I make use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of the flesh to discuss how Müntzing’s work brings embodied understandings to the remnants of this history. I also introduce the reflections of Walter Benjamin on relating to history through re-enlivening the past in the present. As Müntzing invigorates the somatic aspects of this history through her works, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology adds flesh to Benjamin’s discussion about the importance of re-enlivening history – and retaining those remnants of the past that contain the seeds of resistance against oppression.

Al-Qur’an Portrays Women’s Bodies: Critical interpretation of verses on existence, freedom, and morality

The oppression of women often stems from the body and the way a person or tradition interprets it. From ancient times to the present, the history of women's bodies has always been about the history of oppression; that is, about the fate of women's bodies in the face of patriarchal culture. When women's bodies often become symbols of various forms of oppression, then liberating women must start from their liberation efforts that are embodied in patriarchal biased interpretations, both formal and cultural interpretations. At this point, there is a need for an interpretation that departs from other possibilities in understanding verses related to women. The focus of the study presented in this paper is trying to criticize the interpretations related to the verses of existence, freedom and morality of women interpreted through Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of perception. This stems from the author's basic assumption, when the Qur'an is understood as rahmatan lil alamin, it is impossible for the Qur'an to produce discriminatory interpretations.

The Chiasm: The Inverse Parallel of Le Corbusier

The “axis” is ubiquitous in Le Corbusier’s architectural oeuvre. “The Chiasm: The Inverse Parallel of Le Corbusier” examines the concept of the axis in the essays, “Architecture, Pure Creation of the Mind,” and “Architecture, The Illusion of the Plan,” published in Vers une architecture (1923). Le Corbusier writes: “…a sense of the harmonious that gives rise to a resonance…” and “…the trace of an indefinable absolute preexisting at the core of our being.” And decisively, “This must be the axis along which man is organized…”. The axis Le Corbusier described is, in fact, a chiastic device he employed in his writings, drawings and architecture. Chiasmus, conceptually defined, is the “inverted repetition of grammatical structure.” Inversion, as two sides of the axis, identifies representations of things related and simultaneously different. The twentieth century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies the chiasm as a concept to describe the body as sensible and sentient, a reflection in relation to the self, others, and the perceived world. Merleau-Ponty uses the chiasm to clarify reversibility and the phenomenological experience. Merleau-Ponty’s theories of chiastic inversion substantiate the chiastic structure that supports Le Corbusier’s ideology and his search for a harmonious milieu that is based in the axis.

Language as Gesture and Giggling Rats

The use of language is frequently cited as a metric for moral consideration. This metric is typically a tool to exclude animal being from the realm of ethics or to promote human exceptionalism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims language is a gesture with varying degrees of complexity. Many animal beings use gesture to convey meaning complex and abstract enough to qualify as language according to Merleau-Ponty’s parameters. Rats, despite being thought of as vermin and of a lower order, are some of the beings that convey abstract and complex meaning through gesture. Rats play, work, socialize, communicate meaning, and even laugh. Rats, along with human and many other animal beings use language and should be usured into the realm of moral consideration with any and all language using beings. If not, some other metric for exclusion would have to be adopted.

Bursting into the Image: Towards De-automatization in VR

The art installation Osmose (1995) by Char Davies, one of the most widely discussed media art projects, will be explored in relation to the notion of de-automatization. The de-automatized experience in Osmose will be developed by looking at theories of perception by Arthur Deikman and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as George Stratton’s inverse goggle experiment, Bernard Stiegler’s account of automation, and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the virtual. The article traces a double act of de-automatization in Davies’ Osmose that occurs due to the indeterminate object relations in the multi-media installation on the one hand, and their intertwinement with the organic sensing body on the other. This leads to an ungearing of one’s habitual perception, that produces a particular relation with the virtual dimension. By outlining the theoretical framework of the intertwining between technical object and bodily experience in Osmose, it becomes possible to speculate on the trajectory of contemporary VR experiences. Whilst the contemporary VR scene still relies heavily on the privileging of the visual dimension, the project We Live in an Ocean of Air by Marshmallow Laser Feast shows how VR environments can ‘leverage on’ emerging technologies to re-produce nuanced deautomatized experiences. De-automatization unravels how the reception of the deautomatized VR image reframes relations between actual and virtual.

Where Merleau-Ponty Meets Dewey: Habit, Embodiment, and Education

This paper utilises selective writings by John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the conceptual basis for considering how an enhanced synergistic focus on habit and embodiment could support practice gains in schools. The paper focuses on Dewey’s belief that established habits can help students to incorporate experiences into evaluations of educational progress and Merleau-Ponty’s spotlight on the body-subject, and how it provides a holistic way of conceiving relations that avoid over privileging abstraction and cognition and under-representing the centrality of the body in human experience. We then evaluate the role of language and reflection in relation to habit, embodiment, and education before discussing some of the general educational practice considerations which might improve the quality of students learning experiences. In conclusion, we consider the possibilities for Dewey’s pragmatism to function as a theoretical bridge to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the nature of experience. We argue that while it is important to recognise points of difference, in relation to philosophical treatments of habit and embodiment, it is also important to consider the overlap and new connections between Merleau-Ponty and Dewey which are valuable to take forward in contemporary education.

Neither the Third Nor the Fourth Age: Viewing Old Age Through the Philosophical Lens of Ambiguity.

This paper argues that the philosophy of ambiguity, associated with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, provides a helpful framework for understanding the complex and paradoxical nature of old age outside the dominant categories of the "third" and "fourth" ages. Building on philosophical literature in cultural gerontology including that focused on the "art of living" and other approaches that draw on existentialist thought, it suggests "ambiguity" as a theme that has been overlooked in such literature. The advantage of this approach is that it can accommodate contradictory elements and thus underpin an integrated approach to old age. At the same time, in distinguishing between ontological and social dimensions of ambiguity, the conceptual framework offers a new perspective on ageism that can help clarify the distinction between ageism as oppression and the negative aspects of deep old age itself. The paper is structured as follows. After making the case for the value and importance of "ambiguity" as a framework for viewing old age, I set out the key aspects of this philosophy as found in the work of Merleau-Ponty and particularly Beauvoir. I then apply this framework to a discussion of 2 literary memoirs of deep old age, by Diana Athill and Florida Scott-Maxwell, respectively. I argue that the picture of old age that emerges contrasts with the hegemonic discourses enframed by successful aging and frailed old age and offers the possibility not only of a true appreciation of old age but also of a more meaningful life course itself.

Embodying architectures Body extensions and forms in hybrid environments


 
 
 This article aims to describe the situated interactions between humans and hybrid architectures composed of physical and digital elements. Using a post-phenomenological perspective and drawing on case studies from everyday life and contemporary new media art, the paper will first discuss the limits and possibilities of this philosophical approach. Specifically, post-phenomenology has limitations in describing the technologies present in hybrid architecture that are becoming increasingly transparent and capable of manipulating the habitat while being embodied in the user and widespread in the environment. Through a genealogical reconstruction of the concept of form in Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Goldstein, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the article will explore the continuity between endosomatic and esosomatic space, providing new tools for the post- phenomenological debate.
 
 

Religion in the Folded City: Origami and the Boundaries of the Chronotope

AbstractIn this article we rethink the chronotope approach by examining what happened to religious space-times in a Chinese urban development project that completely transformed what had once been five relatively rural townships. What happens to chronotopes when a place is so completely transformed? We focus on multiple chronotopic dimensions in the religious experience of those villagers whose families had long occupied this land, but who now live separated from their old neighbors, without their old livelihoods, having lost their old temples, and surrounded by new migrants who are generally wealthier and better educated. Building on recent anthropological work on chronotopes, coupled with insights taken from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, this article explores the complex interrelationships and workings of chronotopes through the idea of the fold. This approach reconsiders what the boundaries between chronotopes might look like—not necessarily straight lines that are difficult to cross, but more like the infinite inflections of curves as those curves intersect and interact with each other. Rather than thinking of chronotopes as structured wholes separated by clear boundaries—much as we also tend to think about “states,” “cultures,” or “ontologies”—folding allows us to reconceptualize the kinds of interactions that take place when one space-time touches another. We examine in particular three ways in which folding elucidates how chronotopic boundaries can work: they can make the distant near, separate inside from outside, and complicate the boundary by interdigitating.

Doing a Psychoanalysis of Nature: Freud and Merleau-Ponty after the Nonhuman Turn

Sigmund Freud’s biologism has historically come with a negative valence, seeming to consign us to passive determination by irrational drives. While the nonhuman turn has recently highlighted the underacknowledged creativity of animal life, this re-evaluation of biology has hardly implicated Freud. I contend that Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals a nascent ‘other Freud’ able to inform the nonhuman turn, one that sees the human animal as the basis of the free and relational psychoanalytic subject. I follow Merleau-Ponty in reading Freud as engaged with the question of how a shared, intersubjective world is possible. Both thinkers realized that it is in the domain of life, not cognition, that we verify this seemingly human relational potential. Elaborating the Merleau-Pontian Freud, I argue for a psychoanalytic subject that necessitates nonhuman life as its ecstatic unmooring towards the Other and reality. Ecological thinking is not an obstacle to the relationality prized by psychoanalysis, but a necessity.