Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Partant des débats entre « film joué » et « film non-joué » ayant entouré la sortie d’Octobre d’Eisenstein en 1927, nous interrogeons la notion de punctum de Barthes à travers le rapprochement qui a pu en être fait de celle d’attraction. Remettant en question l’existence même du punctum, d’une vérité intrinsèque de l’image, nous proposons avec Merleau-Ponty de cesser de considérer l’image cinématographique comme une « seconde chose » pour en faire valoir la rencontre, seule capable de nous en faire comprendre la réalité. Nous rappelons alors la figure de « précession réciproque » évoquée par Merleau-Ponty dans L’Œil et l’esprit, qu’il identifie à la « vision même », pour montrer combien elle peut nous aider à saisir les potentialités de l’image cinématographique déjà entrevues par Eisenstein qui voyait en elle un phénomène de « momification dynamique ».

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

"Michel Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (sous la direction de), Chromatikon III. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès — Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2007. (300 p. ; ISBN 978-2-8746-3083-5 ; 23 € ; http://www.i6doc.com/fr/livre/?GCOI=28001100028210 ; http://www.i6doc.com/en/livre/?GCOI=28001100028210; http://www.i6doc.com/doc/chromatikon3 & http://www.i6doc.com/doc/chromatikon3-eng)

Table
Michel Weber, Avant-Propos & Foreword
I. Séminaires de recherche — Research Seminars
Pierfrancesco Basile, The Reality of Forms
Jean-Marie Breuvart, Husserl et Whitehead, sur l’Intentionnalité
Didier Debaise, Life and Orders
Ronny Desmet, The Rebirth of the Ether
Guillaume Durand, Les objets perceptuels du Professeur Whitehead
Franck Robert, Penser la couleur avec Process and Reality
Xavier Verley, Sentir : Whitehead et Merleau-Ponty
II. Etudes critiques — Critical Studies
Jean-Pascal Alcantara, Le rôle des mathématiques dans la genèse whiteheadienne
Une Sœur de Saint-Jean, Un Principe que les religions appellent « Dieu »
Laura Ilinescu, Vérité et pouvoir dans le Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes
Marc Maesschalck, Raison et événement chez Jean Ladrière
Pierre Montebello, Nietzsche, une philosophie de la nature
Michel Weber, Contact Made Vision: The Apocryphal Whitehead
III. Comptes rendus — Critical Reviews
Stéphan Galetic : James, Essais d’empirisme radical
Ronny Desmet : Lacoste Lareymondie, Une philosophie pour la physique quantique
IV. Informations réticulaires — Reticular News
Discussion: David Ray Griffin, A Reply to Alexander Cockburn
Notes : Peter H. Hare, On Gertrude Stein and Mathematical Logic
Interview : Carlo Sini, Luca Gaeta and Luca Vanzago, The Milano School
Tribute: Leemon McHenry, T.L.S. Sprigge, the Last Idealist
Séminaires — Seminars
Publications
Table des matières — Table of Contents
"

"Nata per sostituire alla violenza fisica l’efficacia della comunicazione, la retorica è oggi molto conosciuta per le scuole che hanno fatto la sua storia e studiata dal punto di vista della classificazione delle figure, ma svilita nella sua specificità, quella di essere il dominio delle strategie del discorso. Argomentare il visibile è un’antologia che raccoglie i contributi di semiologi, storici dell’arte, filosofi, linguisti, teorici delle culture e si propone di mostrare il volto empirico della disciplina, territorio di contratti e di conflitti tra istanze che manipolano forze e soggetti pensati per essere trasformati: nei saperi, nei comportamenti e nelle passioni.
Tropi e tattiche trasmigrano da un sistema espressivo all’altro: non solo metafora e metonimia, ma anche chiasmo, ossimoro, ellissi, citazione, sono dispositivi rintracciabili tanto nel verbale quanto nel visivo. Può l’esplorazione della loro presenza in pittura – molto meno praticata che in letteratura – costringerci a rivedere la nostra concezione di retorica e di figure?
La prima parte del libro contiene saggi teorici sulle ragioni e sulle modalità dell’argomentazione per immagini. La seconda è un approfondimento su alcune figure alla frontiera tra parola e immagine, finora trascurate. Osservarne i principi di funzionamento serve a comprendere le dinamiche delle culture contemporanee, a nostro avviso più di quanto non facciano le abusate metafora e metonimia. Nella terza sezione, analitica, si indagano, infine, singole opere, generi, cicli, stili e motivi, intrecciandone la significazione con lo strato che riguarda la costruzione dell’interlocutore. Va ristabilito un nesso tra ciò che si apprende del contenuto dell’immagine e le strategie che essa usa per creare complicità, per farsi ricordare, per non passare indifferente."

Tiger C. Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music's rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music's pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "motor intentionality," Roholt shows that the "feel" of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to "get" a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension.

To compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s phenomenal bodies, I first examine how for Merleau-Ponty phenomena appear on the basis of three levels of integration: 1) between the parts of the world, 2) between the parts of the body, and 3) between the body and its world. I contest that Deleuze’s attacks on phenomenology can be seen as constructive critiques rather than as being expressions of an anti-phenomenological position. By building from Deleuze’s definition of the phenomenon and from his more phenomenologically relevant writings, we find that phenomena for him are given to the body under exactly the opposite conditions as for Merleau-Ponty, namely that 1) the world’s differences 2) appear to a disordered body that 3) comes into shocking affective contact with its surroundings. I argue that a Deleuzian theory of bodily-given phenomena is better suited than Merleau-Ponty’s model in the task of accounting for the intensity of phenomenal appearings.

This essay invites us to take Emmanuel Levinas’s thought in the spirit in which it was written: a profound engagement with Husserlian’s phenomenology and, secondarily, with Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Levinas’s central idea, whether called “responsibility,” “substitution,” or the “other-in-the-same,” has often been criticized as mere “smoke and mirrors”—an indemonstrable hermeneutics of ethical investiture. The purpose of this essay is to show how Levinas analyzed and exploited ambiguities in Husserl’s work on intersubjectivity and sensibility, in view of developing his own phenomenology. It is organized as follows: Following an initial discussion of Husserl’s importance as an intersubjective thinker, I situate briefly Husserl’s interest in, and his approach to ethics. I discuss his early equation of object sensations with sentiments of value. Section II turns to Husserl’s interest in “intropathy” (Einfühlung), a concept he appears to have adapted from Theodor Lipps (1851-1914). It was Einfühlung that allowed Husserl to attempt various phenomenological constitutions of the other person; just as it was Einfühlung that provided a bridge between his extensive investigations into intersubjectivity and passive synthesis. Section III develops Husserl’s phenomenology of passive synthesis in light of the evolution of his conception of the living present and of transcendental consciousness. Section IV returns to a moment (1908) when Husserl’s other, like Levinas’s other in 1961, was “absolute”. Section V discusses Einfühlung in Cartesian Meditation V and Husserl’s notes on intersubjectivity during the period 1921 and 1928. Section VI examines intropathy and pairing with the other’s body in view of self-objectification and what Husserl occasionally called Ent-fremdung (alienation). It ventures a rapprochement with concepts in Levinas’s later work (e.g., “recurrence”). Section VII explores Husserl’s approach to affective forces and a phenomenological “unconscious,” with an eye on Levinas’s 1974 resistance to the passive spontaneity of meaning-formation. Section VIII discusses Husserl’s reading of a master-servant relationship and the fusion of wills in praxis. Section IX examines his subjectivity “thrust into the interior” of another subjectivity, and the possibility that the Husserlian monad might have windows. Section X returns to Husserl’s conception of sensation, this time as originary (hyletic) contents that ‘feed’ the flow of time-consciousness. It summarizes Levinas’s interrogation of Husserl’s formalism, notably between 1905 and 1909. In each section, I emphasize ambiguities in Husserl’s thought and the way in which Levinas utilized these between 1961 and 1974. My hope is to sketch some of the lesser known, phenomenological sources of his thought, and thereby encourage discussion of Levinas as an unorthodox Husserlian.

In this chapter, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, giving particular attention to his claim that perception involves a lived dynamic between perceptual body and world such that aspects of the world—for example, the heavy hardness of a granite block or the cool smoothness of a chrome railing—are known because they immediately evoke in the lived body their experienced qualities.

Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly in an environment can transform that environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I consider how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world.

Note: This chapter was written in 2014 for a proposed edited collection on Merleau-Ponty and architecture. Unfortunately, the editors did not find a publisher(though I was never officially informed of this fact). The chapter has been rewritten, revised, and updated; see the above entry: "Merleau-Ponty, Environmental Embodiment, and Place" (2022)
"

Here are the preliminary materials and first two chapters from my most recent book: Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience.

All chapters of the final published manuscript are freely available via MIT Press Direct:

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5524/Grief-WorldsA-Study-of-Emotional-Experience

As you will see from other entries in this section, Oxford University Press and Palgrave/Springer now charge extortionate prices for books that I have published with them. (In all instances, I am happy to send you a PDF if you want to read them.)

In contrast, MIT Press made *Grief Worlds* freely available to all as a single PDF, without charging an open access fee. Hence, I am delighted to have published this book with them and would encourage others to consider doing the same.

La réception de l’esthétique de Maurice Merleau-Ponty est marquée par ses travaux sur la peinture et ce que cet art enseigne sur le rapport du corps et du monde. Or, en lisant les notes préparatoires de son premier cours du Collège de France intitulé « Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expres- sion » 1, on s’aperçoit que le cinéma joue un rôle essentiel également. Le pré- sent texte porte sur la phénoménologie merleau-pontienne du mouvement, ses rapports avec le cinéma, ce qui m’amènera au rapport de Jean-Luc Godard à la phénoménologie et à indiquer les prémisses d’un dialogue avec l’approche deleuzienne du cinéma. J’espère ainsi mettre en évidence les fon- dements d’une esthétique qui puisse entrer en dialogue avec les tendances principales de la réflexion esthétique contemporaine. Je défends la thèse que Merleau-Ponty avait une approche cinématographique des arts visuels en général et que si la peinture est bien le langage qui manifeste la genèse de notre rapport au monde, le cinéma est celui qui rend visible l’invisible de nos rapports avec autrui.

In phenomenology, normality is neither an objectively measurable average nor a mere historical or social construct. Rather than being understood from without, looked at from the outside of lived experiences, normality is approached from within as a condition and mode of lived experience. In the first part of the paper, I will show why it is relevant to turn to a phenomenological investigation of normality if one is interested in normativity. This perspective, so I will argue, is needed if one wants to understand not only how external norms actually become part of subjective experience but also how norms develop in the first place through repeated practices. As such, the experience of normality, understood here as consisting of selfevident feelings of orientation and familiarity, can be interpreted as the result of an operative normativity. In the second part, I will present Husserl's theory of normality in more detail in order to demonstrate how it could be applied to a more systematic investigation of normality and norms on different genetic levels. Lived normality is seen here as a dynamic and fragile system of balances; a constant attempt to achieve an equilibrium with one's environment and fellow subjects. (Re)turning to normality allows us to see normativity at work, embedded in the need for constant development, appropriation, and transformations of regular structures in experience.

Looking at the finding of several archeoastronomers, who
examine the relationship of built cultures to celestial bodies, this essay speculates on the unique relationship of the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to the earth and sky. The Anasazi who populated this region suddenly disappeared around 1000 A.D. and little is known about their culture, religion, and world except by studying the structures
they left behind. Th is essay looks at their kivas, dwellings, the puzzling “Sun dagger” monument, and the petroglyphs throughout the canyon to understand the many ways that each structure through use of light and space marked the occurrence of a surprising number of celestial events. There is good evidence that the Anasazi dwelled within the sky and felt a
continuity between earth and sky in a way to which postmodern cultures have little access. The unity of body and surround, especially as ascending into the sky from the earth, is linked to a spirituality at odds with the legacy of Plato and others, who oppose the celestial to the earthly, as aninferior realm.

Merleau-Ponty propone en su Fenomenología de la percepción la "Teoría
existencial de la historia" con la cual busca sacar al materialismo histórico de un reduccionismo, el de pretender definir el drama de la existencia por medio de significaciones puramente económicas. Para el autor francés existe un importante ámbito de libertad y de intereses individuales que también pueden influir en el rumbo histórico. Este ensayo hace un análisis histórico del siglo XX sobre el sentido económico e ideológico a partir de dicha teoría.

This paper discusses the discursive significance of the body in Dalton Trumbo’s classic anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. With its political rants, depictions of working-class life, symbolic imagery, and vivid descriptions of the dismembered torso of its protagonist, Johnny invokes many questions concerning the role that historical forces play in influencing the way we conceptualize the body, as well as how one might use the image of the body to subvert oppressive hierarchies of power.
    The novel, which is said to have been based on the true story of a World War I amputee, tells the story of Joe Bonham, a working-class soldier who survives an explosion that costs him his arms, legs and face; as well as his ability to see, speak, hear, eat and breath for himself. As Joe struggles to regain a sense of agency and autonomy in the world, he begins identifying himself as part of a long tradition of “little guys” who are exploited and silenced by those in power. Through a series of stream of consciousness rants, hallucinations and flashbacks, the human body emerges as our primary vehicle for being-in-the-world, as well as the figurative weight that grounds us in it. Following this logic, human freedom and autonomy appear to be curtailed by our own corporeal limitations, coupled with our involvement in a world of oppressive hierarchal systems and reified social relations.
    Building on the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs and others, this paper will reveal a dialectic at work within Johnny between what can best be described as the phenomenal, reified, and grotesque bodies. While the phenomenal (or lived) body of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy emphasizes relative autonomy and embodied subjectivity, the reified body represents humankind in a completely objectified state. My analysis will illustrate how Johnny Got His Gun creates a tension between these two conceptions of corporeity, while employing grotesque realism—a subversive literary mode utilizing the degraded image of the body—to inspire change in the real world. In doing so, I hope to emphasize how Joe Bonham’s final wish—to use his war ravaged flesh as a subversive tool, thus becoming “the new messiah of the battlefields”— is fulfilled as the text enters the social sphere.

Phenomenology is often criticized as a philosophy that mistakenly privileges consciousness and subjectivity.  If phenomenology presupposes subjectivity, then it must be either supplemented or supplanted by a more comprehensive ontology.  In this paper, I argue that such a bifurcation of phenomenological and ontological methods is itself ultimately premised on a kind of mind-body dualism, or the idea that consciousness is a world constituting activity.  By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s 1954-5 lectures on Institution and Passivity, recently translated into English by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey, I develop the resources to explain how consciousness is not a meaning-constituting activity but rather an instituting-instituted synthesis, that is, the expressive inheritance and transformation of different developmental institutions of meaning.    The paper proceeds by introducing the phenomenological method, dealing with three antinomies that the idea of constitution cannot resolve (a problem of conscious passivity, the problem of the existence of the pre-conscious past, and the problem of other minds).  I elaborate the concept of institution by drawing on three levels of institution which I present through the examples of organic sensori-motor development, expressive human habituation and learning (particularly writing), and the experience of shared social spaces and gestures.  After exploring these organic, personal, and social institutions, I will briefly develop the implications institution has for, on the one hand, attempts to naturalize phenomenology, and on the other, how we should rethink individual responsibility on the basis of institution.

Talk given at University of Alberta philosophy colloquium series, 27 November 2015.

Czech translation of two Merleau-Ponty's texts linked to the Visible and the Inivisible: the median part of his "Preface" to Signs, and the first version of the chapter "Interrogation and Intuition" from the Visible and the Invisible. The volume is prefaced by the translator, Jan Halák.

The contemporary concept of place rests on a paradox: in order to move seamlessly within and between places (real and virtual), one must possess a secure—primarily, legal and economic—connection to a place. Without this secure connection, being-in-the-world means being displaced. By drawing on examples in literature, anthropology, and the testimonies of displaced persons, this chapter illustrates that an over-insistence on the ontological primordiality of place potentially aligns phenomenology with the exclusionary dimension of place in the globalized 21st century. In response, I construct a critical phenomenology of forced displacement that is at once critical of the phenomenology of place, but also views phenomenology as critical to overcoming the contemporary paradox of place.

In the interest of exploring the relationship between soteriology and philosophy in the Bodhicaryāvatāra, and hoping to counterbalance the tendency to read it as a source for normative ethics, this paper compares Śantideva's text in comparison with elements of philosophical phenomenology (found primarily within Husserl and Heidegger). I aim to use this comparison to show both how the Bodhicaryāvatāra has important simmilarities to Husserl and Heidegger in its philosophical aims and conclusions, as well as how the philosophical arguments in the Bodhicaryāvatāra can only make sense in the light of the text's implicit acknowledgement of a profound phenomenological transformation that goes beyond anything the European phenomenologists considered.

In the most wide-ranging history of phenomenology since Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement over fifty years ago, Baring uncovers a new and unexpected force―Catholic intellectuals―behind the growth of phenomenology in the early twentieth century, and makes the case for the movement’s catalytic intellectual and social impact.

Of all modern schools of thought, phenomenology has the strongest claim to the mantle of “continental” philosophy. In the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology expanded from a few German towns into a movement spanning Europe. Edward Baring shows that credit for this prodigious growth goes to a surprising group of early enthusiasts: Catholic intellectuals. Placing phenomenology in historical context, Baring reveals the enduring influence of Catholicism in twentieth-century intellectual thought.

Converts to the Real argues that Catholic scholars allied with phenomenology because they thought it mapped a path out of modern idealism―which they associated with Protestantism and secularization―and back to Catholic metaphysics. Seeing in this unfulfilled promise a bridge to Europe’s secular academy, Catholics set to work extending phenomenology’s reach, writing many of the first phenomenological publications in languages other than German and organizing the first international conferences on phenomenology. The Church even helped rescue Edmund Husserl’s papers from Nazi Germany in 1938. But phenomenology proved to be an unreliable ally, and in debates over its meaning and development, Catholic intellectuals contemplated the ways it might threaten the faith. As a result, Catholics showed that phenomenology could be useful for secular projects, and encouraged its adoption by the philosophical establishment in countries across Europe and beyond.

Baring traces the resonances of these Catholic debates in postwar Europe. From existentialism, through the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to the speculative realism of the present, European thought bears the mark of Catholicism, the original continental philosophy.

This work aims to present a summary of the ideas contained in the complementary teaching material of the elective class Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, in the form of asynchronous classes recorded by Prof. Marcos José Müller on the article by Merleau-Ponty entitled “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), from the point of view of the undergraduate student in Philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in the ninth term, as a form of semester evaluation of the discipline, as preparatory part of the studies of Merleau-Ponty's reading of metapsychology, dream theory, among other concepts that are the object of his study of Freud's work.

Em As aventuras da dialética (1955) Merleau-Ponty cunhou o termo "Marxismo Ocidental" para designar certa perspectiva do materialismo histórico que afastava-se de leituras dogmáticas provenientes, principalmente, do partido soviético. Dessa forma, o artigo pretende, em primeiro lugar, revisitar a defesa que Merleau-Ponty faz da noção de práxis na década de 1940 ao apontá-la como conceito fundamental na articulação entre lógica e contingência na filosofia da história marxista. Em seguida, veremos como a aproximação inicial de Merleau-Ponty ao marxismo, na qual considerava-se o materialismo histórico como esquema teórico fundamental para desvelar a cadeia causal da história, ganha novos contornos durante os anos de 1950, quando uma reavaliação de suas posições (a partir do estruturalismo de Saussure) acaba por indicar o marxismo não como a única lente interpretativa da história, mas sim como uma perspectiva dentre outras, por mais privilegiada que seja. Dito isso, o artigo pretende, em sua conclusão, esboçar uma crítica a tal mudança de pensamento em Merleau-Ponty ao defendermos o materialismo histórico como a melhor teoria disponível para o desvelamento da causalidade histórica. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Marxismo. Marxismo Ocidental. Merleau-Ponty. ABSTRACT In The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) Merleau-Ponty coined the term "Western Marxism" to designate certain perspective of the historical materialism that distinguish itself of dogmatic positions coming, mostly, from the soviet party. Thus, the article aims to, first of all, revisitate Merleau-Ponty's defense of the notion of praxis during the 1940's as the core concept for articulating logic and contingency within the marxist philosophy of history. Then, we'll demonstrate that this initial approach to marxism by Merleau-Ponty, where the historical materialism was considered as the fundamental theoretical scheme to unveil the causal chain of history, shifts during the 1950's, when a revaluation of his positions (mostly because of Saussure's structuralism) ends up indicating marxism not as the only interpretive lens of history, but as a perspective among many others, however privileged it may be. That being said, the article tries, in its conclusion, to sketch a critique of such change of position by defending historical materialism as the best available theory for the unveil of history's causality.

M. Merleau-Ponty, The Transformation of Perception and the Experience of Truth. Materials for Merleau-Ponty’s Candidature to the Collège de France.

Merleau-Ponty was elected to the Collège de France in 1952 and stayed there until his death in 1961. The preparatory notes for his teaching, which have been successively published since the end of the 1990s, helped to bring an increased attention to his work and transformed his position in contemporary philosophical thought. This volume comprises two of Merleau-Ponty’s texts from 1951 which are directly related to his candidature to the Collège: Publications and Working Projects – Teaching Plan and An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s main goal for his teaching at the Collège was to reform our idea of the subject and, correlatively, of being. In these texts for the candidature, Merleau-Ponty firstly summarizes his previous works (Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception) and explains how the phenomenology of perception and embodiment has to be complemented with a study of pre-linguistic expression (Prose of the World). Only with the help of such an analysis, claims Merleau-Ponty, will we understand how a situated, perceiving bodily subject can transcend her particular perspective and gain access to a meaning valid not only for herself, but for everyone. Pre-linguistic expression, such as painting or bodily gesture, is still a perceptible phenomenon, but it already frees us from the limitations of our individual situation by articulating a meaning not accessible in simply passive perception. Moreover, if this phenomenological interpretation of perception and expression is valid, we must transform our idea of subjectivity in general, because we are forced no longer to consider these experiences as a kind of rudimentary rational knowledge and, in turn, to change our idea of rational understanding or “intelligence”. The role of the latter in our experience must be understood, Merleau-Ponty believes, as a “transformation” of our perceptual experience, i.e. it must be situated on the same continuum as perception, but also considered as a specific form of our access to meaning. It must be shown more precisely that the relationship between rational understanding and language is analogical to the relationship between the body and perceptual understanding, and that each of these agents of meaning mediate it in a different way. The texts for the candidature thus link Merleau-Ponty’s early and later ambitions and clearly show how different and often seemingly unconnected aspects of his work form an integrated system of philosophical thought. The two texts by Merleau-Ponty are preceded by an introduction by Jan Halák, the translator, in which the historico-philosophical context of his candidature is explained.

La comprensión del mundo nunca puede conseguirse desde una sola perspectiva y el manejo de una red sofisticada de multiplicidades y mediaciones es fundamental en cualquier intento de entendimiento.
Las«cosas»—en entornos físicos o psíquicos—, los signos de esas cosas y las interpretaciones de esos signos constituyen una urdimbre triádica que supera cualquier aproximación unaria, fundamentalista o dogmática. De esta manera, los dogmas religiosos de una metafísica acotada, los dogmas cientistas del empirismo o los dogmas lingüísticos de la filosofía analítica han llevado,
inevitablemente, a fracasos parciales del saber. Solo algunas perspectivas plurales —donde se combinen: (1) matemáticas y arte, (2) teoría y experiencia, (3)
idealidad y realidad, (4) imaginación y lenguaje, (5) invisibilidad y visibilidad, entre otras muchas polaridades— tienen alguna esperanza de poder cubrir la
complejidad del mundo.