Rewriting the flesh of the world for the new human: Merleau-Ponty,Fanon, and Wynter on the ethics of futurity

This article reads Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the “flesh of the world” alongside the ontology that seems to undergird Frantz Fanon's sociodiagnostics as well as his theory of sociogeny. It argues that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the ambiguity and intercorporeality of the flesh of the world renders the ethical and political imperatives of Fanon's decolonial project all the more pressing, since the “new human” is prefigured—if not totally determined—in the national consciousness obtained by “les damnés” through the decolonization process. It then examines how Sylvia Wynter's Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness through (re)conceptualizing “being human as praxis,” also seems to rely on this ontology of the flesh of the world. Bringing these arguments together, the article suggests that the conceptual content of the new human can be found in the liberation struggles of les damnés across what Wynter calls the “poverty archipelagos” wrought by colonial humanism. Hence, the “new skin” for which Fanon calls is fashioned through forming international solidarity with les damnés, with the conceptual content of the new humanism emerging sociogenically—and autopoetically—from those struggles themselves.     

The politics of the gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Theory and Society seminars, University of Sheffield, England, on 7th February 1992. Thanks are due to all participants for their helpful comments, especially Nick Stevenson. Thanks also to Maurice Roche and Michele Davies for their help and comments.     

The end of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.     

Buddha,being and the black forest 1

Abstract

While Martin Heidegger is commonly acknowledged as having a significant influence on contemporary philosophy and psychology, there have been comments made about his being a ‘closet Buddhist,’ and many of his later ideas are perceived as mystical. It is argued in this paper that this is because Heidegger is usually understood through a Western framework, whereas many of his later ideas move closer to Eastern thinking.

This paper revisits Heidegger via Buddhism. It examines important parallels and differences between Heideggerian and Buddhist ideas, such as “openness” and “non‐self,” “letting be” and “letting go,” “fourfold” and “inter‐relatedness. This comparison is undertaken against the backdrop of Medard Boss's psychotherapy, daseinsanalysis (Existential Analysis), which Heidegger engaged with extensively. Overall, the analysis illuminates the pragmatics and psychological underpinnings of Heideggerian and Buddhist philosophy, and elucidates the contributions that this understanding can make to contemporary psychology.     

The secondary passivity: Merleau-Ponty at the limit of phenomenology

Continental Philosophy Review - This paper considers the move from passivity to a generative passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty calls this...     

The antinomy of perception: Merleau-Ponty and causal representation theory

This essay has benefited from discussions with Arthur Melnick, Frederick Schmitt, and Richard Schacht — all of whom had helpful and insightful suggestions at various stages of its conceptualization. I am also particularly indebted to Marjorie Hass who has repeatedly listened to it with a keen philosophical ear and significantly guided its formation.     

The enigma of reversibility and the genesis of sense in Merleau-Ponty

This article clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic, later concept of reversibility by showing how it is connected to the theme of the genesis of sense. The article first traces reversibility through “Eye and Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible, in ways that link reversibility to a theme of the earlier philosophy, namely an interrelation in which activity and passivity reverse to one another. This linkage is deepened through a detailed study of a passage on touch in the Phenomenology’s chapter on “Sensing,” which shows how reversibility is important to the genesis of sense, not from some already given origin, but through a creative operation within being, beyond the perceiver, wherein the field of perception internally diverges into active and passive moments. The article connects this point about the genesis of sense to themes in Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and passivity. Altogether the article shows how reversibility is a sign of a divergence and thence of a sort of gap or excess in being that allows for a genesis of sense within being itself.     

Merleau-Ponty,Marx, and Marxism: The problem of history

At the present time, Europe, particularly eastern Europe, is still immersed in a major political transformation, the most significant such change since the Second World War, arising out of the rejection of official Marxism. This unforeseen rejection requires meditation by all those concerned with the relation of philosophy to the historical context. Marxism, that follows Marx’s insistence on the link between a theory and the context in which it arises, cannot be indifferent to the rejection of Marxist theory in practice. In respect to the usual tendency to pass rapidly over practice for a theoretical analysis of social theory, Merleau-Ponty stands out for his concern to evaluate the theoretical claims of Marx and Marxism against practice.     

Our element: Flesh and democracy in Merleau-Ponty

Although Merleau-Ponty??s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty??s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty??s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a ??no that is a yes????i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power??he would politically embrace the Weberian ??heroic liberalism????or his ??non-communist left????of parliamentary democracy.     

The development of the political philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

This article follows the development of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy from his 1947 text, Humanism and Terror, through a number of essays in the Adventures of the Dialectic, to the Preface to Signs published in 1959. It shows the process by which Merleau-Ponty escaped the “grip of marxism” as a philosophy of history. It notes the link between his philosophy of history and the concrete historical events of his times, particularly the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into Stalinism. It suggests a certain analogy between Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on the October Revolution and Kant’s reflection on the French Revolution. The notion of the universal class of the proletariat is the guiding thread in the analyses of both Merleau-Ponty’s proximity to marxism and the process by which he frees himself from its grip. We observe the role that this concept plays in Humanism and Terror and in the essays on Weber and Lukacs in the Adventure of the Dialectic where we eventually see its dissolution. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty arrives at a new conception of historical meaning which is neither totalizing or empiricist. The paper concludes by presenting an outline of the direction that his philosophy of history took after he extricated himself from marxism. This new philosophy took the form of a critical reflection on the role of the “notion of the hero” in 20th century political philosophy in general, particularly in Heidegger and Sartre.

Phenomenology-Friendly Neuroscience: The Return To Merleau-Ponty As Psychologist

This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology – the “enactive” approach to the mind-body relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from passivity, that the mental be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century ago.