ABSTRACT This paper engages in a comparative study between the vital materialism in the works of political theorist Jane Bennett (primarily, The Enchantment of Modern Life) and the ontology of flesh in the late works of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” “Eye and Mind”). There are striking echoes in their descriptions of the aesthetic experience of enchantment. I show how both thinkers reject philosophical accounts of form as extra-material. The reconfigured matter-form relationship in each onto-story leads to a phenomenology of enchantment with the world. The stakes of the latter are ethical and political for Bennett, who argues in The Enchantment of Modern Life that the mood of enchantment also applies to fetishized commodities and is necessary for more just social, political, and economic reconfigurations. Finally, I gesture towards a Merleau-Pontean intervention on this question through his analogy between works of art and commodities in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Can the ontology of flesh and its implicit theory of perception help us understand both commodity fetishism and enchantment? In reading Bennett and Merleau-Ponty alongside each other on the phenomenology of enchantment with worldly objects, my hope is to find grounds for drawing on the rich phenomenology of perception found in Merleau-Ponty’s late works as a resource for conversations around political aesthetics more broadly.

ABSTRACT An important contribution to the field of communication is François Cooren's critique of the assumption that the social and the material are entangled because this assumption reproduces the divide it claims to reject. Rather, Cooren proposes that the social and the material are properties, or (im-)properties, of one another because their relational differences bring organizations into existence. Cooren's three conclusions on this matter argue that the sociomateriality of an organization is a relational ontology. In this article, I problematize those three conclusions and suggest Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh as an alternative to overcome the problematics of each conclusion. Conclusion 1 lacks a conceptual groundwork explaining where social and material matter comes from, and I suggest flesh as the element to categorize matter. Conclusion 2 denigrates human existence to a matter of degree. I reframe this through the notion of alterity. Conclusion 3 suggests that relations and relata are the same yet theoretical support for that proposition is missing. As such, I offer the missing theoretical support through Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh. Taken together, Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh provides one coherent system and better affirms each of Cooren's conclusions of what a relational/communicative ontology of organization consists of.

In a fourteenth-century copy of Henri de Mondeville's Chirurgia (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 0.2.44), a flayed human body carries its skin on a staff, displaying the underlying fleshy tissues. The unpainted drawing illustrates Mondeville's discussion of flesh and fat. Taking this image as its main focus, this article is concerned with the fleshiness of the medieval image. It considers medieval understanding of flesh to examine the relationship between flesh and the figure in the Chirurgia. I explore closely the relationship between parchment, a support made of skin, and the pen-drawing on its surface. Moreover, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh, which postulates an association between visuality and flesh. Overall, the article argues that the drawing formulates a discourse on flesh. It is not merely a depiction of flesh but rather, I contend, becomes fleshy in the interaction with the viewer.

This paper connects Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasm with his philosophy of history. I argue that history gives us an exemplary form of a chiastic relation and that Merleau-Ponty presages his later ontology of flesh when he investigates the paradox of thinking history. In brief, the paradox is this: history takes on significance only in light of a given reflection on it (just as the world is disclosed only by means of a given body). At the same time, “the given reflection” is overlaid and shot through with historical meaning and is nothing but the result of a historical inheritance (just as the body is bound up with the world and is nothing apart from it). I claim that, for Merleau-Ponty, to think history is to think that which is external to oneself and that which one is, in a deferred simultaneity or “circularity” that can be called chiastic.

The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema, by Mauro Carbone, is his third book in a body of work interpreting Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of Flesh: The Thinking of the Sensible: M...

<p class='p1'>El propósito de este trabajo es deslindar algunos elementos propios de la Kehre heideggeriana que se presentan en la filosofía de Merleau-Ponty, con el fin de desembocar en una noción de acontecimiento latente en la ontología del fenomenólogo francés. Para ello, analizaré las concepciones del filósofo francés acerca de 1) la cuestión del ser y la nada y su sentido; 2) la temporalidad, y 3) el Ereignis. De esta manera, se prueba que, partiendo de los escritos y cursos merleau-pontianos que van desde 1958 a 1961, se puede esbozar un pensar más allá de la metafísica a partir de su ontología de la carne donde se pone de manifiesto un “Ereignissensible”.</p>

This essay outlines the transformation of the ostensibly mundane example of two hands touching each other in Husserl’s Ideas II into the pivotal concept in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh and notion of embodied subjectivity. By focusing on the contexts in which the example appears in the works of Husserl and of Merleau-Ponty, it seeks to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s fascination with Husserl’s example, its role in the development of his own thought and in the conceptual shift in his late works on the body. I explore the various stages in the metamorphosis of Husserl’s example of touching hands, originally used merely to differentiate the sense of touch from that of sight, into Merleau-Ponty’s radical concept of flesh that overturns “our idea of the thing and the world, and... results in an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible.”

In this paper I address the question of what it is to be alienated from nature. The focus is alienation in the sense of estrangement, a ‘being cut off from’ a wider world. That we are so estranged is a claim associated with ecological critique of contemporary society. But what is it to be estranged from nature given that everything we are, do and produce, always remains within a wider nature? I explore the possibility that this might be understood with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’. I set the scene for this with some discussion of Honneth’s recent account of reification as a ‘distorted praxis’ and then, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and especially his later ontology of flesh, develop the idea of estrangement from the natural world as an inadequate participation in a ‘primordial’ perceptual relation. This idea of estrangement brings together various elements of ecological critique. However, I argue that although this idea of estrangement might inform and help to articulate such a critique, it cannot be the sole concern of an environmental political philosophy: other kinds of alienation within the humanised environmental context need to be considered too.

Culture and dialogue: Positioning, mediation or style?

Understanding the Education of Caring through the Ontology of Flesh in Merleau-Ponty

The Ontology of Flesh toward the Freedom in Merleau-Ponty and the Bioethics Education

The imagination is a central theme in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. is by means of the imagination that we are able to free ourselves from ordinary experience and explore a world of possibility. The artist creates new structures and symbols that allow the audience to see reality in a new way. Likewise the phenomenal body develops habits of motility and perception into new structures that endow our world with a dimension of possibility. From the most mundane experience to the most sublime aesthetic creation, the body is at work in transforming ordinary experience into a world of human freedom and personal expression. Traditional interpretations of MerleauPonty's early philosophy suggest that he considers imagination to be secondary to perception. The few explicit references to imagination in The Structure of Behavior1 and Phenomenology of Perception2 tend to endorse the theory of imagination presented by JeanPaul Sartre in his two books, L'imagination and L'imaginaire,3 in the imagination is described as an escape from reality and as the full expression of the freedom of consciousness from the limitations of the body. MerleauPonty's focus on perception as a fundamental mode of existence may also suggest that he is more concerned for reality than the imaginary, and thus continuing the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl in his attempt to uncover the roots of intentionality. Although Merleau-Ponty later claims that the imagination and perception are mutually engaged in ordinary and aesthetic experience (in such works as Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible),4 he is seen by many scholars in his earlier works to hold to a philosophy of presence based on the fundamental experience of perception. This essay challenges the traditional interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of imagination by focusing on the way that he describes perception and embodiment. The phenomenal body involves a dialectic between habitual behavior and what Merleau-Ponty calls the virtual body, the ability to imagine alternative perspectives and modes of embodiment and to use that ability to develop habits into symbolic activity. The to and fro movement between acquired and creative modes of embodiment underlies both ordinary perception and aesthetic activity, instilling in the heart of embodied existence an element of creativity and imagination. Perception is also shown to involve a complex structure of absence and presence when reinterpreted on the basis of the virtual body. The traditional interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's theory of imagination overlooks the essential link that the virtual body provides between his texts on perception at the beginning of his career and his later work on the ontology of flesh. Sartre and Imagination as Fancy is quite common to think of the imagination as an escape from reality. While viewing a film or reading a novel, we are able to lose ourselves in the world of fiction, leaving everyday concerns behind. This attitude can lead to the view that the imagination is at best an entertainment, and at worst a means for avoiding the harsh realities of life. In his voluminous study of the imagination, Sartre claims that it is a fundamental mode of human existence. is by means of the imagination, he claims, that we are able to best experience the freedom of consciousness. Since the imagination surpasses the confines of perceptual experience, it allows consciousness to freely explore new meanings. In the free play of imagining, we are able to discover what is involved in negating reality as in-itself and in being the nothingness by a meaning for reality is constituted-the nothingness that, in Being and Nothingness, is identical to consciousness.5 It is the appearance of the imaginary before consciousness, he says, which permits the grasping of the process of turning the world into nothingness as its essential condition and as its primary structure. …