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161. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Daniel Rosenberg Eliciting Deviation: Merleau-Ponty and Valéry on Literary Language
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In his discussions on literature, Merleau-Ponty often turns to the notion of deviation as a constitutive principle of literary language. Deviation indicates the capacity of a literary work (and other aesthetic objects) to transgress against its own limits and to offer an experience of otherness, or alterity. This alterity is not given in the work, but is constituted by the recipient through the more visceral and physical aspects of literary language. The recipient of the work thus adopts a second voice: that of the author or creator of the work, which is absent from the text yet is reconstructed by the reader in a post hoc manner. The analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas is complemented using the aesthetic insights of Paul Valéry, from which the philosopher was greatly inspired. The essay further explores the way in which the notion of literature as deviation illuminates other aspects in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of language.
162. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Ann V. Murphy Introduction: The Significance of Place
163. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
William D. Adams A Sense of Place: Cézanne and Merleau-Ponty in Le Tholonet
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Merleau-Ponty spent the summer of 1960 in the small French village of Le Tholonet writing Eye and Mind. His choice of location was no accident. Le Tholonet was the physical and emotional epicenter of Paul Cezanne’s late painting, the ultimate proving ground of his relentless quest to reveal the truth of landscape in art.It makes perfect sense that Merleau-Ponty wrote Eye and Mind in Le Tholonet. The essay is a philosophical meditation on vision and painting. But it also is a meditation on place, in the deeply saturated sense that encompasses the landscape, its natural and human history, and the history of the painter who brought this part of Provence to universal visibility in his art. Le Tholonet is the terroir of Eye and Mind, the site and soil of this final, extraordinary expression of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.
164. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Shiloh Whitney From the Body Schema to the Historical-Racial Schema: Theorizing Affect between Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and Ahmed
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What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I show that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema is already a theory of affect: one that does not oppose affects to intentionality, positioning them not only as sense but as force, cultivating affective agencies rather than constituting static sense content. Then I argue that by foregrounding the role of affect in both thinkers, we can understand the way in which the historical-racial schema innovates, anticipating and influencing feminist theories of the affective turn – especially Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The historical-racial schema posits the constitution of affective agencies on a sociogenic scale, and these affective economies in turn account for the possibility of the collapse of the body schema into a racial epidermal schema, a disjunction of affective intentionality Fanon calls “affective tetanization.”
165. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
David Morris Merleau-Ponty and Mexica Ontology: On Time as Contingent Templacement and the Beginnings of Philosophy
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Movement is crucial to Merleau-Ponty’s effort to comprehend sense, meaning as generated within being. This requires a new concept of movement, not as a dislocation within an already determinate space- or time- frame, but as a deeper, more fundamental change that first engenders space and time as determinate contexts in which movement can follow a sensible course. This poses a novel challenge: conceptualizing determinate space and time as contingently arising from a deeper sort of change, which I call templacement. I address this challenge by turning to the Mexica/Aztecs because the most basic term of their ontology is motion-change, and it is obvious to them that motion-change does not occur in an abstract space-time container. Instead, time-place is woven out of ‘prior’ motion-change. This study leads to a deeper lesson for phenomenology, regarding ‘obvious’ presuppositions about what time and philosophy obviously are – and how these presuppositions go hand in hand.
166. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Jay Worthy On the Place of Resistance in Ontology: Rereading Merleau-Ponty after Fanon and the “Flaw that Outlaws any Ontological Explanation”
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Beginning with Fanon’s challenge to the universality of the project of ontology, this paper considers whether and how Merleau-Ponty’s early and late thinking may yield a response. From the outset, Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to the materiality of the body is intended as a limit on the scope of ontology. As I argue, however, Merleau-Ponty’s early concept of ‘one’s own body’ (corps propre) suggests an “ontological equality” that would be shared among all embodied beings; implicitly, this early approach risks reinforcing Fanon’s concern that ontology is indifferent to embodied experiences of racial exclusion and oppression. Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology of the flesh, by contrast, entails a more radically differential structure of the body that troubles the notion of equality in principle, suggesting an ontology that could be more attentive to the fundamental grounds of systemic oppression.
167. Chiasmi International: Volume > 21
Rawb Leon-Carlyle Wild Red: Synesthesia, Deuteranomaly, and Euclidean Color Space
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In a promising working note to the Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty proposes that we understand Being according to topological space – relations of proximity, distance, and envelopment – and move away from an image of Being based on homogeneous, inert Euclidean space. With reference to treatments of cross-sensory perception, color-blindness, and the concept of quale or qualia, I seek to rehearse this shift from Euclidean to topological Being by illustrating how modern science confines color itself to a Euclidean model of color space. I discuss “being as Object” in Merleau-Ponty’s later work before showing how color, and indeed all perception, is reduced to being as Object in the form of “quale”. Next, I address discussions in Merleau-Ponty’s work and contemporary research to illustrate how synesthesia and so-called color-blindness are rendered abnormal by this objectified being of color. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of synesthesia follows directly from his rejection of quale, and his use of color perception serves as a rejection of solipsism. With appeal to his proposed topological model of Being, I conclude by recognizing the problematic nature of synesthesia and color-blindness as being ontological, not psychological.
168. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Ted Toadvine Presentation
169. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Morgane Blain, Mathias Goy Introduction. Tributes to Merleau-Ponty
170. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Claude Lefort Maurice Merleau-Ponty
171. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Ferdinand Alquié, Corinne Lajoie Maurice Merleau-Ponty
172. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Jean Hyppolite, Corinne Lajoie Maurice Merleau-Ponty
173. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Maurice de Gandillac, Corinne Lajoie In memoriam Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
174. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Corinne Lajoie Introduction. Where goes critical phenomenology?
175. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Maren Wehrle Situating normality: the interrelation of lived and represented normality
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In this paper, I will investigate the potential of what I term Merleau-Ponty’s ‘situated phenomenology’ for an investigation of normality from within and from without. First, I will argue that the concept of situation in the Phenomenology of Perception demarcates Merleau-Ponty’s turn from a mere epistemological to a concrete critical phenomenology. Second, I will apply Merleau-Ponty’s concept of situation as being situated and as being in situation to an investigation of normality. In doing so, I endeavor to differentiate between lived and represented normality, a difference which in turn corresponds to an operative (immanent) and established (external) normativity. A situated account of normality thereby combines a phenomenological and a genealogical perspective. My aim is to provide a toolkit to investigate the intertwinement of represented and lived normality, that is, of being situated and being in situation.
176. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
David M. Bertet, Bettina Bergo Phenomenological aesthetics and the “Manufacture of the Guilty (Fabricación de culpables)”
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This article opens with a discussion of incarceration in the time of Covid 19. The story of one of the inmates in the high-security prison of Puente Grande (Mexico) leads us back to the beginning of the fifteen-year-long imprisonment of an innocent and, with it, to a complex narrative. The story concerns the use of the juridical concepts of delincuencia organizada (organized crime), racketeering, and kidnapping. As a charge it has been repeatedly implemented in what has come to be called la fabricaciόn de culpables (the “manufacture of the guilty”) in Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, and Brazil. Although the legal terminology changes, false incarceration is hardly limited to Central and South America. This is therefore a cautionary tale about how charges – and people – are framed, and how the latter are tried on social and corporate media, even before their official trials begin.
177. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Martina Ferrari Bearing witness beyond colonial epistemologies: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s critical phenomenology of deep silence
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This paper is one in a series of attempts on my part to think through one of the central challenges left to us by Merleau-Ponty’s sudden death in 1961: if we understand the turn, in his later writings, toward an ontology of the flesh as “a radical rethinking of the experience of belonging from within, [as] a phenomenology of being-of-the-world” (Landes 2020, 141), how are we to bear witness to such an experience? What modalities are called forth to do justice to this belonging? The task accrues existential and ethical weight when, at stake in our analyses, are historical and social structures like coloniality that normalize experience, perception, and sense-making while marginalizing others. It is my contention, in this article, that when the phenomenological inquiry becomes critical the question of modality becomes ethically central; how we bear witness to experiences of marginalization and the operations of power that produce them matters in that it risks reifying the same normative structures that predicate the oppression of many. With these questions and considerations in mind, in this article, I return to silence and propose that the mobilization of what I call “deep silences” can be a powerful tool for a critical phenomenology that bears witness without capitulating to the imperative of transparency norming the modern/colonial world system. Deep silence, in fact, designates signifying practices that do not primarily operate within the bounds of logocentrism and speech as the foundational principles of meaning, or that rely upon conceptual, analytical, and instrumental thinking, mobilizing instead the somatic, affective, and sensual dimensions of existence. In this article, I am primary concerned with the sense-making effected by the aesthetic as an instance of deep silence. Specifically, I focus on the image- and ritual-centered photographic documentaries of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, which, I suggest, challenge the hegemonic normativity of modern/colonial aesthetics, introducing the reader to other sensibilities wherein the distinction between theory and practice has no purchase and the multiplicity of creative expressions is recognized.
178. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Kris Sealey ‘Then’ and ‘now’ of mangrove time: the temporality of lived blackness in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
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Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as both ground and frame, this paper develops a notion of mangrove time as a way to think through how blackness is lived in the violent temporality of anti-blackness. Specifically, I want to suggest that, through the frame of mangrove time, an errant relationship between lived blackness and its black past inserts temporal possibility in and beyond the inertia of white supremacy’s violently anti-black temporality. In other words, contrary to Fanon’s proclamation that only black abjection is to be found in a return to the past of lived blackness, I show that, out of a mangroved conception of temporality, linkages to a black past becomes more than the ontological weight at the core of Fanon’s notion of a historico-racial schema. In foregrounding his own linkage to the past, Fanon’s historico-racial schema determines the past as fixed under the weight of an anti-black time. However, mangrove time recalls what is perhaps hastily forgotten under this schema, which is that, even as lived blackness arrives on the scene of an anti-black imaginary “too late”, it is still able to ‘time travel’ – to zigzag between present and past in a way that rescues lived blackness from the structural determination of its past. As mangroved, this temporality is still one of pain, amputation and fragmentation. But it is also one that opens up this temporality to “imaginative variability”.
179. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Sarah Fayad Shame and ethics in Merleau-Ponty’s intersubjectivity: radical responsibility of the flesh and communities of the incommensurate
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Much work has been done, recently, on the harms and benefits of shaming. One may argue, for example, that feeling shamed inherently alienates and forecloses, and thus quite harmful to a compulsorily social and futurally oriented creature. This does not, however, preclude the argument that shame is ethically useful, providing, at a very basic, felt level, the absolute prohibitions such a social, futural, creature requires. This paper does not claim to finally evaluate shame itself. Instead I look to Merleau-Ponty, seeking the fleshly and felt structures of the social world – of our innate proximity and intimacy, as well as our isolation and alienation – within the embodied phenomenon of being ashamed. From the contours of this spontaneous, yet admittedly dangerous, corporeo-social phenomenon, there is comes an intimation of an ethics of the flesh: one which compels us to at least attempt to heed the often opaque, even mysterious powers of our bodies, not only for the good of our intimate others, but for the good of entire peoples.
180. Chiasmi International: Volume > 23
Lovisa Andén Being in language: Merleau-Ponty’s ontological examinations of language at the Collège de France
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This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontological investigation of language in his recently published course notes Sur le problème de la parole of 1954. In the course notes, Merleau-Ponty approaches the relation between being and language: if our ontological thinking is thoroughly conditioned by the means of expression provided by our proper language, how are we then to understand its claims of universality? The article argues that the course notes elucidate the linguistic turn in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. In particular, this article stresses that the course notes show that Merleau-Ponty undertakes an ontological inquiry into language before his investment into Heidegger’s philosophy. Furthermore, the course notes elucidate the continuity between Merleau-Ponty’s earlier investigations into expression and the ontological inquiry into language in his later texts.