Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Another thing that's consistent in some of this radical thinking at this time that is going to be developed by other thinkers in the 70s is this critique of kind of visuality and the idea of the visual as kind of, the sense which is associated with authoritarianism, with the control of women, with objectification, etc.

And it is interesting, and you can partly trace it back to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and his philosophy of the senses in the 30s and 40s, although I don't think he makes the same kind of political claims, but...

All these guys, they see themselves as making a break with this long tradition, which you can trace all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, which says, well, actually, the vision is the highest sense.

It's obviously the purest sense, and it's the one that's the most important.

Constructivism, land art, all those have sort of fed into my kind of cultural consciousness and the writings of all those that would play into that kind of understanding of modernity and contemporary modernity.

But then, of course, Merleau-Ponty would be somebody who was very influential in how I'm viewing the work at the moment in terms of experience and perception of our human body in the environment that we find ourselves in and how that kind of translates back to our perception of ourselves.

Current

events are making me look at political philosophy.

But in my greater trajectory as an artist, I've Been really interested in the experiential and its relationship to politics and social movements.

Does that make sense? It does.

This was the Hannah Arendt and Merleau-Ponty.

When you consider where they came from and what they had to solve, we somehow seem back at that point, which is probably very shocking to us.

I'm trying to show the differences and certain aspects of their work which are not comparable.

In Merleau-Ponty's course on Husserl's origin of geometry, we note that he is following up on the importance that late Husserl, and especially Heidegger, accords to language and the determination of language as the abgrund, the groundless ground.

The famous reflection on the interweaving in English in is advanced and recognized as the interweaving between man, world, and writing.

This is kind of the position that Marleau-Ponty takes up in this course.

Obviously, the similarities with Derrida's early works on Husserl seem evident in the light of this course on the origin of geometry.

And one could be forgiven for noticing a certain continuity between Merleau-Ponty's existentialist phenomenology and Derrida's development of deconstruction.

Yet what we would like to demonstrate in this text is that the perspective, method, and interest pursued by Derrida in his, one might say, heretical interpretation of phenomenology, is not simply different from Marleau-Ponty's work, but in many ways opposes itself to what becomes possible through existentialist phenomenology and the phenomenology of the body, ,, in French.

He opposes it, we would add, without abandoning the problem of the body.

As with many Alzheimer's patients, they don't believe they're changing, which intensifies the heartbreak of those who love and care for them.

The symptoms of FTD speak directly to questions of consciousness that have been investigated and debated by neurologists and psychiatrists for more than a century and by philosophers for far longer.

It's the mystery of the self.

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As we said, the title of this talk is Tracing Inscriptions Can Signs Be Embodied? In Critical Phenomenology, works by Iris Marion Young and Frantz Fanon have explored the inhibiting effects of being seen as gendered or racialized against the normalized backdrop of the supposed neutral, which turns out to be masculine and white.

Both have appealed to Merleau-Ponty's body schema and intentionality to articulate ways of being seen and how this inhibits bodily movement.

This paper examines the structuralist implications of critical phenomenology and proposes a post-structuralist analysis of the inhibiting effects described by Jung and Fanon.

The point of the analysis is to dissect the linguistic implications of what it means to describe bodies as inscripted.

Critical phenomenology on inscription.

Although Young and Fanon do not use the term inscription, Much critical phenomenological literature that takes their cue from their texts do so.

For example, Scott Marato explains Merleau-Ponty's notion of incorporeality by appealing to an understanding of the body as inscribed within a living nexus of significance.

Elizabeth Gross employs the concept inscription in phenomenological accounts of the politicized body in order to emphasize the tension between the body as lived experience and the body as a surface of inscription.

It's a, it's a part of what it is to be a human.

Um, so I think, you know, there's phenomenology of everything, you know, you can study anything from a phenomenological perspective, um, perception, um, like there's A lot of people think of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was a French phenomenologist from the mid-20th century.

And his major work was phenomenology perception.

And he was looking at, you know, what does it mean to perceive? And the basic idea is that you perceive with your entire being and not just with your, you know, just with your senses, for example.