Perception

This chapter deals with the ‘first phase’, placed under the general concern with ‘perception’ as the key to embodied existence. It highlights Merleau-Ponty early engagement with the empirical sciences, psychology and biology, retraces the evolution from The Structure of Behavior to the Phenomenology of Perception and focuses on the discovery that the body is not a thing in the world, but a medium to the world. Subchapters: (Dis)avowal of Science, Between the Mechanical and Gestalt, Milieu, From the Milieu to the World, The Problem of Transcendence

Return to the Obvious

Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology is that of a return to the obvious: as that which is deemed trivial and therefore escapes reflection. Merleau-Ponty’s ethical imperative – learning to see anew what one habitually overlooks – has to be applied to his own philosophy, which has become too ‘obvious’ today. Subchapters: The Science of the Obvious. Adversity: What is in the Way. How to read Merleau-Ponty?

Toward Dia-Phenomenology

The conclusion speculates about what it would mean to continue where Merleau-Ponty left off. If throughout his writings, he criticized all ideologies of transparency (the self’s transparency to itself, the transparency of knowledge to the self, or the transparency to the self of others), this also entails to accept that to return to the things themselves doesn’t mean that there could be an immediacy of things. To take the entangled, perceptual situation seriously means to rebuke all dreams of full transparency, and to accept that what is only ever exists in a field in and through which it appears. The sensible is of diaphanous nature.

Ontology of the Visible

This chapter deals with the ‘late’ phase, associated with the ‘ontological turn’. It explains the reasons for this turn, gives a precise account of complex concepts such as ‘flesh’ and ‘chiasmus’, and of the crucial importance dialogue with visual arts. By spelling out what ‘proximity in distance’ means, it shows the implications of an aesthesiology of sensible difference. Subchapters: Thinking According to the Image, The Styles of the World, Ontology of the Flesh, Touching the Visible, Diplopia

Language

This chapter deals with the ‘middle phase’, and reconstructs the progressive broadening of Merleau-Ponty’s scope from the situation of the embodied, kinesthetic self to the problem of expression. As it becomes clear, expression cannot be derived from perception, and requires, as a transindividual phenomenon, some kind of ideality. The chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty came to solve the conceptual impasse he was in in 1945, through a confrontation with Saussure and structural linguistics more generally. It is only on this background, and through the discovery of the concept of the ‘diacritical’ that the later ontological turn might be understood. Subchapters: Expression, The Specter of a Pure Language, The Diacritical, Embodiment and Effacement, From the Literal to the Lateral