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Chiasmi International

Volume 21, 2019
Merleau-Ponty, Literature, and Literary Language

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Displaying: 1-20 of 35 documents


1. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Galen A. Johnson

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2. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Galen A. Johnson

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3. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Galen A. Johnson

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an excerpt from the unpublished course on the problem of speech

4. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Lovisa Andén, Franck Robert

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5. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Lovisa Andén, Franck Robert

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6. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Lovisa Andén, Franck Robert

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7. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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8. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rajiv Kaushik

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9. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claudio Rozzoni Orcid-ID

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literature and literary language

10. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Galen A. Johnson

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11. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Galen A. Johnson

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12. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Galen A. Johnson

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13. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Amy A. Foley, David M. Kleinberg-Levin

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This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.
14. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Mauro Carbone Orcid-ID

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The whole path of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is crossed – some times more evidently than others – by what I propose to qualify as the idea of literature and philosophy as visual apparatuses (dispositifs), to use an expression that was born – and not by chance – in the field of Film Studies. More precisely, I aim at asserting that Merleau-Ponty sees literature and philosophy working in his epoch as convergent apparatuses of vision, in turn understood as a bodily and not merely ocular practice. Immediately after that, I should specify that such convergent visual apparatuses peculiarly function by words, and that Merleau-Ponty stresses their different efficiency in expressing his epoch. Moreover, I think that the implicit idea of philosophy as a visual apparatus working by words “like all literature” has a particularly relevant but so far not consequently developed place in in the last period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Also, I would like to stress that such a perspective is crucial in our own time too, even though I consider it to be different from Merleau-Ponty’s. Indeed, I think that both our time and Merleau-Ponty’s are characterized by a tension between the increasing importance of images and the traditional centrality of the concept in our culture.
15. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Stephen H. Watson

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This paper investigates the role of literature and, in particular, Proust in Merleau-Ponty’s late works’ rehabilitation of the ontology of the sensible. First, I trace Proust’s role in Phenomenology of Percpetion, contrasting it with the somewhat more paradigmatic status as a model it plays in the late works. Second, I compare this with the role of the novel as partial myth in Schelling, who also played an essential role in Merleau-Ponty’s refiguration of the sensible. I briefly trace his examination of the historical or “sociological meaning” of literature through works of the fifties, beginning with his Collège de France candidacy proposal and continuing through his examination of the rationality of modern disenchantment (Entzauberung) or dépoétization in the Adventures of the Dialectic. Finally, discussing the late analysis of Proust against this backdrop, I conclude with considerations concerning the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s overall analysis of Proust both in his thought and contemporary literary criticism and philosophy more generally.
16. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Federico Leoni Orcid-ID

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This article examines the place of literature in the ensemble of Merleau-Ponty’s research, comparing the function it fills in the economy of his thought to the role other practices and other disciplines such as biology and psychology play in his philosophy. Each of these “discourses” offered Merleau-Ponty access to something comparable to a common phantasmatic substance, a common metaphorical stability of Being, that the biologist, the writer, and the psychoanalyst work on, each in their own writings and categories. But here emerges also a major question. To what extent does the language of Proust reveal itself up to the task of writing the phantasm, to what extent does it respond to this challenge? In what manner are the limits of his language, which are perhaps the limits of language itself, an obstacle to his project? And what is it that permits, at times, the sciences to obtain greater success in engaging in this way? Was it precisely the structure of metaphor that hindered Proust in truly writing encroachment, and the dimension of metonymy was, on the contrary, that in which a certain scientific discourse succeeded at setting itself up on the first try? If, finally and especially, metonymy was the very heart of metaphor, with more or less success touched by one or the other of the “regional” writings of the phantasm?
17. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Franck Robert

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The commentary Merleau-Ponty offers in 1960 on Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry gives a privileged place to language, to writing: it is perhaps a great astonishment to see Merleau-Ponty, in continuity with Husserl, thinking about the genesis of geometrical ideality beginning from a meditation on literature. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on literature took a decisive ontological turn at the beginning of the 1950s, notably in the long commentary on Proust in 1953-1954. It is in this spirit that the course of 1960 grants to literature an ontological sense: the ideality of geometry can occur as ideality by the passage to speech and to writing, but the meaning of even scientific ideality can be understood only if one places it on the basis of more fundamental idealities that literature precisely reveals, idealities that are linked across time, in the connection between past and present, self and other. Literature clarifies the history of geometry in yet another manner: it brings to light the intertwining of human-language-world, condition of the emergence of a true sense, which occurs in the history of geometry, and which literature, assuming our being in speech bears more fundamentally still.
18. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Glen A. Mazis

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Merleau-Ponty characterizes the poetic or literary use of language as bringing forth of sense as if it is a being that is an interlocutor with its readers. Sense will be explored as interwoven with a deeper imagination that works within the temporality of institution to become more fully manifest. Throughout the essay will be seen the overlap with Claudel’s ontology as expressed in L’Art poetique and Claudel’s approach to language. Why Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of embodiment and perception must culminate in the poetic expression of the flesh ontology will be seen in: 1) how the phenomenology of sense leads to the flesh ontology as closely tied to the literary dimension of language (resonating with Claudel’s L’Art poetique), 2) that the analysis of sense leads to the vital importance of the physiognomic or vertical imagination as opening the latent depths of perception by its expression within poetic language, and also tracing the link between metaphor and the flesh ontology, and that 3) the expression of the latent sense of perception as the interplay of lateral relations as access to Being is the reversibility of the flesh, also articulated by Claudel as co-naissance, and calls for an “interrogative knowing,” a “question-savior.” The articulation of the texture of Being is an overlapping endeavor with Claudel as the poetic articulation of a stream of sense below our reflective life.
19. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Giuseppe Crivella

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The purpose of this paper is to study the role of language in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. In particular, our analysis will concentrate mainly on The Prose of the World and, following that, on the notes about the novels of Claude Simon. Thus, we will attempt to discern the specific nature of such language, analyzing its sources, exploring its limits, and examining in detail its potentialities.
20. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Amy A. Foley

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This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “Investigations of a Dog” in his lecture on gesture and reconciliation, “Man Seen from the Outside.” Given the centrality of gesture in Kafka’s work, this essay considers the connections between the two figures and the likely influence of Kafka on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of gesture and intentionality. It compares their respective philosophies of gesture as they relate to meaning, reliability, silence, music, and intention. Finally, Kafka’s gestural motif of the springing body is suggested as a significant example of Merleau-Ponty’s “escaping intentions,” expressing a powerful will to intend toward others.