The chiasm is usually considered the key notion for Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. I argue against a common conclusion, namely that ‘the chiasm’ is equivalent to ‘reversibility’. Even when the two terms are not taken as interchangeable, the precise nature of their relation has not been adequately established. Focusing exclusively on ‘reversibility’ has implications for a range of philosophical issues, including relations between self and other. The danger of substituting one term for the other is that existential relations are construed as (...) inversions, rather than as genuine exchanges. I examine two trajectories that can be discovered in ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’. The first is the inclusion of difference within a peculiar, extended sense of ‘reversibility’. The second is the development of a plurality of expressions, among which ‘reversibility’ is necessary but not sufficient. I go on to argue that Merleau-Ponty secures difference within the chiasm by supplementing the notion of reversibility with ‘imminence’, the idea that something has not yet occurred. I also propose that the figure of a threshold illuminates how the chiasm operates as a transition where both joining and differentiation occur. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Intentaremos completar el análisis de la relación entre Merleau-Ponty y distintas posiciones escépticas -típicamente restringido a textos más “canónicos” - a partir de su conferencia sobre Le primat de la perception. El fenomenólogo argumenta allí contra la “inducción pesimista” según la cual podemos, a la luz de la refutación de las hipótesis científicas pasadas, prever que las actuales son también falsas: invirtiendo la conclusión de esta inducción, afirma que las transformaciones de nuestro conocimiento son un proceso autocorrectivo, tal que ninguna (...) hipótesis es abandonada sino en la medida en que otra aparece como mejor. Esto nos hará problematizar la noción de refutación científica en Merleau-Ponty, quien ofrece como modelo del progreso epistémico la mutua sustitución de creencias perceptivas, que no involucra la consideración consciente de criterios racionales. Según señalaremos, este punto de partida no puede extrapolarse al caso de hipótesis sopesadas según sus respectivas virtudes. (shrink)

This essay explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh as it applies within the Community of Philosophical Inquiry, the pedagogical method developed by philosopher Matthew Lipman to foster young people’s multidimensional thinking—critical, creative and caring—through collaborative dialogue. Using a phenomenological framework, the essay aims to extend Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasmatic relations between self and other by appealing to the account of intersubjective dialogue presented in the work of phenomenologist and CPI scholar David Kennedy. The guiding question focuses on hostility expressed corporeally (...) in dialogue: How might the phenomenological experience of individual inquirers within a CPI be affected by the hostile interventions of body language? The essay introduces the notion of body taunting as the combined “vocabulary” of flesh—gestural, postural, physiognomic, kinetic expression—with which inquirers both deliberately and inadvertently provoke, dismiss, intimidate or alienate one another as they attempt to co-construct meaning. Building on what Kennedy calls “the lived experience of preverbal dialogue”, the essay argues that body taunting poses a threat to the CPI’s emerging intersubjectivity by changing the chiasmatic relations between inquirers, making boundaries between self and other seem more pronounced, notably in moments when disagreement is communicated nonverbally in antagonistic ways that betray or contradict voiced arguments. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty, in his well-known essay, "Eye and Mind," startlingly comments: "A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an 'outside,' which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh." This essay opens up a discourse on this very problem: the question of what one sees when looks at oneself in the mirror. As well, (...) the now-common assumption that we have arrived at a postmodern condition of experience, knowledge, and interpretation comes into question when we consider the possibility that the human sciences have not sufficiently embraced a post-Cartesian perspective on mind, body, self, and vision. The essay closes with a reflection on the contact of the self and the other in vision. The self and the other are not "signs" that are "read" in the context of a perceptual field. Rather, the interpersonal world embodied through the vital flesh of self in communion with other is reflected to the eye only if the observer cares to take note, to imaginatively flesh-out the world embodied in the moment of a thoughtful glance. (shrink)