. Books Received. Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 295-297.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh of the world’ speaks to an embodied connection to the spaces we inhabit deeply, primally, elementally. Flesh suggests water and its circulations, air and its respirations, earth and its conformations, fire and its inspirations. Flesh speaks to our bodily relations with the elements of a more-than-human world. This paper explores the felt imperative to these relations where, as Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘all distance is traversed’ and wherein movement arises not specifically in the body, but in the nexus (...) and intertwining of bodily engagement with the world. There is a primacy to movement that registers in the living body in its carnal ties to the elements of the world’s flesh. The ‘radical reflection’ on the ‘flesh of the world’ to which this analysis aspires in turn bears upon the general field of gestural reciprocities and connections, providing the insight that intimate gestures of the flesh, such as the embrace, are primordial attunements, motions of rhythm and reciprocity, that emanate from the world in identification with it. The embrace is fundamentally, elementally, a gesture of landscape dwelling. A phenomenology of elemental motions provides the textual reminder that to be at home in various landscapes means to know what it is to be embraced corporeally, sensually, within the human and especially the more-than-human folds of the world. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

This essay outlines how Western culture, and in particular the practice of architecture, has failed to develop a nuanced and ethical approach to alterity. It examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of the flesh as a process of continual self-interrogation through perceptual acts that intertwine communality and difference, establishing a shared world through interlocution, and explores how the work of Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray augment each other to deepen our understanding of alterity. It then examines architectural design as an intercorporeal and intersubjective (...) act that creatively refigures sedimented spatial and social habits. Using the example of an architectural design studio, it demonstrates how designers can critically confront nuances of alterity through investigating the corporeal and social depths of architecture. (shrink)

The critique of tourism as being only a distanced, detached, and consumerist passing through of foreign landscapes and cultures isdisputed in this essay. The idea that tourism necessarily fits the paradigm of inauthenticity as the tranquilized and alienated hopping from spot to spot in prepackaged, superficial presentations is contrasted with another sense of tourism as drawing upon the potential power of the glance to disrupt the everyday, to focus on the particular, to be surprised by the new, and to bodily (...) join up with the rhythms of place being as shifting. Authenticity is seen in both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to be primarily about a greater bodily awareness of surround and transformation of the self as an ongoing process of “selving” that yields a more singular sense of who one is in relationship to places and their interconnectedness. To gain a better sense of oneself in one own being or uniqueness is to gain more meaning through emplacement within the surround. The glance at a new world can open up an “interplace” which expands anddeepens the sense of who we are in the interconnection and reverberations among places. (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenology of affect and discusses its relevance for organizational life-worlds. With Merleau-Ponty, affects are interpreted as bodily and embodied inter-relational phenomena, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and emotional qualities. Relationally, they will be situated as “inter-affection” that are part of the inter-corporeality of the “Flesh” of wild be(com)ing. Affect and inter-affectivity are then related to organizational life-worlds, through a critical exploration of different phenomena and effects generated by positive, negative and ambiguous dimensions. Finally, the potentials of (...) affects and affection as part of the nexus of an embodied responsive responsibility and sustainability are discussed and critical perspectives on affective becoming outlined. (shrink)

The technological virtual converges with our contemporary existence in a multitude of ways, which suggests a need to interrogate the question of the virtual existentially. Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenological account of embodiment is invaluable in this regard because the virtual is encountered from the basis of the facticity of the embodied individual – a facticity that is closely related to perception and motor intentionality. The current article argues that these characteristics of the body-subject should be taken into consideration in order to (...) develop a clearer description of the virtual. However, beyond an embodied account that relates to early technologies, Merleau-Ponty also presents through his concept of the flesh a novel avenue for the ontological investigation of the virtual. The flesh describes the intertwining of the body-subject and the world, which is suggestive of a new account of the individual’s sensibility in relation to the virtual. An original concept is suggested to describe the existential-ontological structure of the virtual: The embodied screen. The embodied screen as neologism presents an alternative conceptualisation of the coincidence of the body-subject (who understands the world spatially) with the virtual (as non-spatial). By tracing imaginative signification and embodied habitude in terms of the virtual, this article suggests certain existential implications of the virtual for contemporary being. (shrink)

The critique of tourism as being only a distanced, detached, and consumerist passing through of foreign landscapes and cultures isdisputed in this essay. The idea that tourism necessarily fits the paradigm of inauthenticity as the tranquilized and alienated hopping from spot to spot in prepackaged, superficial presentations is contrasted with another sense of tourism as drawing upon the potential power of the glance to disrupt the everyday, to focus on the particular, to be surprised by the new, and to bodily (...) join up with the rhythms of place being as shifting. Authenticity is seen in both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to be primarily about a greater bodily awareness of surround and transformation of the self as an ongoing process of “selving” that yields a more singular sense of who one is in relationship to places and their interconnectedness. To gain a better sense of oneself in one own being or uniqueness is to gain more meaning through emplacement within the surround. The glance at a new world can open up an “interplace” which expands anddeepens the sense of who we are in the interconnection and reverberations among places. (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende demonstrar uma relação, um quiasma entre a filosofia de Merleau-Ponty e as teorizações do ecofeminismo, que afirmam que a natureza assim como a mulher foram subjugadas pelo homem. Para tanto, em um primeiro momento mostra-se a evolução do movimento ecofeminista e seus fundamentos, delineando suas principais correntes. Em seguida, passa-se à análise da filosofia de Merleau-Ponty, dando especial atenção às suas fases de estudo da natureza e da ontologia, na qual enunciou o conceito de carne de (...) mundo, que serve de substrato para a relação entre o homem e a natureza, bem como os homens entre si. É o elemento que permite a sensação de pertencimento e cuidado com a natureza em busca de uma relação mais sustentável com o meio onde se vive. Além disso, faz-se uma leitura feminista de Merleau-Ponty, rebatendo alguns aspectos nos quais Irigaray critica indevidamente o autor. Por fim, busca-se demonstrar o quiasma entre a filosofia de Merleau-Ponty e o movimento ecofeminista, que tenta resgatar o sentimento de conexão com o meio ambiente em busca de um desenvolvimento sustentável e harmonizado. (shrink)