This article addresses a debate in Descartes scholarship over the mind-dependence or -independence of time by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s "Nature" and "The Visible and the Invisible." In doing so, it shows that both sides of the debate ignore that time for Descartes is a measure of duration in general. The consequences to remembering what time is are that the future is shown to be the invisible of an intertwining of past and future, and that historicity is the invisible of God.

Decolonial, postcolonial, and postmodern criticism is indebted to Frantz Fanon for revealing the hegemony of vision and visual language in Western imperial discourse. Yet, the import of Fanon's critique of coloniality reaches beyond a focus on vision into the sonorous. Attending to the often overlooked auditory dimension of Fanon's work, I argue, brings attention to the role of listening as a condition of possibility of a revolutionary consciousness. Listening to Fanon's careful descriptions of the experience of many Algerians of listening (...) to the National Liberation Front's radio broadcast, The Voice of Free and Fighting Algeria in “This is the Voice of Algeria,” I propose that what makes possible the institution of a revolutionary consciousness is listening to murmurs. Listening to the materiality of voice and sound rather than the propositional content of speech is revolutionary because it challenges core values central to the project of colonial modernity: metaphysical logocentrism and the fungibility to which colonial modernity strives to reduce colonized subjects. (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a dialogue between two of the twentieth century's most important phenomenologists from the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Loughnane guides the reader through the complexities and innovations of Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of artistic expression and their rarely explored concepts of faith. The intricacies of both philosophers' views are illuminated by analyses of artists, including Cézanne, Sesshū, Rodin, Hasegawa, and other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history, who enact a radical (...) form of expression that Loughnane calls the practice of "motor-perceptual faith." He argues that the artist's motor-perceptual body, as poetically articulated in Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's early works, enacts a form of faith that can be parsed in the final writings of both philosophers. The concept of faith is enlarged through its enactment by the artist, while the concept of artistic expression is broadened by casting it as a motor-perceptual conception of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting new intercultural reading of these philosophers' writings that opens up under-explored areas of their projects. It forms an important conceptual bridge between the two, while challenging distinctions between art, philosophy, and religion, and ultimately philosophy East and West. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the way in which grief can alter temporal experience, to the extent that it is possible for the mourner to find themselves held out into the timeless time of the dead. My interpretation is informed by a close reading of poet Denise Riley’s remarkable work Time Lived, without Its Flow, which I bring into dialogue with the shifting conceptions of time put forward by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In so doing, I situate Riley’s account of the (...) limits of temporal experience in grief at the juncture of Merleau-Ponty’s turn away from the horizontal time of Phenomenology of Perception, and towards the vertical time of The Visible and the Invisible. By conceptualising Riley’s own interpretation of time in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s turn to a thicker, ontological interpretation of time, I suggest we are able to think through the limits of temporal experience in grief and see what is lit up about time, meaning, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, and life and death as a result. (shrink)