First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition of Husserl, (...) Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. While ‘being there for you’, partners take care (...) of each other in mutually dependent ways. While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and “La perception du changement,” I ask what resources are available in vision for interrupting objectifying habits of seeing. While both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty locate the possibility of seeing differently in the figure of the painter, I develop by means of their texts, and in dialogue with Iris Marion Young’s work, a more general phenomenology of hesitation that grounds what I am calling “critical-ethical vision.” Hesitation, I argue, stems from (...) affect and leads to critical memory. In hesitation, the seeming coincidence between my habits of seeing and the visible is decentered, revealing these habits and their social reference as the constitutive horizon of my field of vision. Hesitation, then, provides the phenomenological moment within which vision may become at once critically watchful, destabilizing its objectifying habits, and ethically responsive, recollecting its affective grounds. The critical and the ethical are here inseparable. Critically, this vision is an awareness of the structures of invisibility, diacritical and habitual, social and historical, to which my vision owes—dimensions which institute particular ways of seeing and being as norm while eliding others. Ethically, this is the recognition of how seeing is already seeing with others—others whose affective influence is operative within vision, even as their existence is reductively represented or denied. (shrink)

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today. “[Fanon] demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images.” — Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review.

_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally (...) fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

_Philosophers consider race and racism from the perspective of lived, bodily experience._.

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the _body_ to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others. Perhaps above all, Merleau-Ponty's (...) insights about the embodied mind are a bold and refreshing challenge to the new era of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as scientists and psychologists discover the centrality of the body to mind and intelligence. (shrink)

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

The article examines how some culturally shared and corporeally enacted beliefs and norms about sexed and racialized embodiment can form embodied agency, and this with the aid of the concepts of incorporation and excorporation. It discusses how the phenomenological concept of excorporation can help us examine painful experiences of how one's lived body breaks in the encounter with others. The article also examines how a continuous excorporation can result in bodily alienation, and what embodied resistance can mean when one has (...) undergone or undergoes excorporation. Elaborating on the work of, among others, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Drew Leder, and Sarah Ahmed, I discuss incorporation and excorporation of beliefs and norms regarding sexual difference, such as beliefs and norms regarding female and male embodiment, through a reading of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex. I also suggest that it is useful to understand the postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon's narrative of how he could not but attend to his own skin color while living in France in the 1940s and 1950s, in terms of excorporation. Whereas these are different narratives in many ways, I regard them as helpful for clarifying what excorporation implies and what analytic work this concept can enable. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Foucault's later works, experience and embodiment become important for explaining the normative constitution of the subject: for norms to be effective, discourses are insufficient – they must be experienced and embodied. Practices of “discipline” inscribe power constellations and discourses into subjective experience and bodies. In his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, he turns this “violent” form of normative embodiment into an ethical perspective by referring to the Stoic tradition. Even though Foucault never developed a notion of experience (...) and embodiment himself, his ideas can be re-read and complemented from a phenomenological perspective.The article tries to investigate the role of bodily experience and practice in Foucault's Genealogy and to bring it into dialogue with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of the lived body. It will attempt to show that concepts like sedimentation and habituality can help to explain how cultural norms not only influence the way we think abou.. (shrink)

This paper praises and criticizes Peter-Paul Verbeek's What Things Do . The four things that Verbeek does well are: remind us of the importance of technological things; bring Karl Jaspers into the conversation on technology; explain how technology "co-shapes" experience by reading Bruno Latour's actor-network theory in light of Don Ihde's post-phenomenology; develop a material aesthetics of design. The three things that Verbeek does not do well are: analyze the material conditions in which things are produced; criticize the social-political design (...) and use context of things; and appreciate how liberal moral-political theory contributes to our evaluation of technology. (shrink)

Drawing on Sara Ahmed, this article confronts the often repeated claim that feminists and/or social constructionists – even those whose work appears to focus on ‘the body’ – routinely ignore the materiality of corporeal life. This charge is often accompanied by the claim that poststructuralist feminists have, for connected reasons, also ignored ‘non-human animal’ life. This article critically interrogates the ways in which the somatechnics of perception and particular universalizing epistemic sexing practices feed into and out of one another in (...) much contemporary work on ‘animal sex’. It also aims to build on Ahmed’s critique of the founding gestures of the new materialism in and through a close engagement with the work of a small number of theorists who identify with the new materialism. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the various meanings of embodiment from a patient’s perspective. Resorting to phenomenology of health and medicine, I take the idea of ‘lived experience’ as starting point. On the basis of an analysis of phenomenology’s call for bracketing the natural attitude and its reduction to the transcendental, I will explain, however, that in medical phenomenological literature ‘lived experience’ is commonly one-sidedly interpreted. In my paper, I clarify in what way the idea of ‘lived experience’ should be (...) revisited and, subsequently, what this reconsideration means for phenomenological research on embodiment in health and medicine. The insight that the body is a condition of possibility for world-disclosing yet, at the same time, itself conditioned by this world forces us to not only zoom in on the body’s subject-side, but also on its object-side. I argue that in order to render account for this double body ontology, phenomenology should include empirical sociological analyses as well. I thus argue in favor of the idea of a socio-phenomenology. Drawing on material from my own research project on embodied self-experiences after breast surgery, I show how this approach can be fruitful in interpreting the impact of disfigurements on a person’s embodied agency, or a person’s ‘I can’. (shrink)

This book contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died.

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing (...) and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

In discussions concerning intersubjectivity the notion of expression has come to play a part of increasing significance. Expression shifts our point of departure away from subjectivity as something mysterious hidden within the body to subjectivity as altogether embodied and embedded in the world. In this article I engage writings by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that expression is essentially something that happens in a communicative space in between self and other while at the same time giving rise to both. I show (...) how locating expression in a shared space between self and other is a way of emphasizing that self and other are not only expressive of selfhood, but are also expressed by one another and emerge in relation to one another. I point to this understanding of expression as a way of recognizing that there is both a fundamental reciprocity and asymmetry between self and other. (shrink)

We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body is absent—forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured.

This book investigates the concept of body shame and explores its significance when considering philosophical accounts of embodied subjectivity, providing phenomenological reflections on how the body is shaped by social forces.

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. "Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts" presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of (...) philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies, feminism and race theory. (shrink)

Putting the ethical tools of philosophy to work, Ellen K. Feder seeks to clarify how we should understand "the problem" of intersex. Adults often report that medical interventions they underwent as children to "correct" atypical sex anatomies caused them physical and psychological harm. Proposing a philosophical framework for the treatment of children with intersex conditions—one that acknowledges the intertwined identities of parents, children, and their doctors—Feder presents a persuasive moral argument for collective responsibility to these children and their families.

By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.

Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

Maps the future of phenomenological thought, accounting for how technology expands our means of experiencing the world.

Pain research is still dominated by biomedical perspectives and the need to articulate pain in ways other than those offered by evidence based medical models is pressing. Examining closely subjective experiences of pain, this book explores the way in which pain is situated, communicated and formed in a larger cultural and social context. Dimensions of Pain explores the lived experience of pain, and questions of identity and pain, from a range of different disciplinary perspectives within the humanities and social sciences. (...) Discussing the acuity and temporality of pain, its isolating impact, the embodied expression of pain, pain and sexuality, gender and ethnicity, it also includes a cluster of three chapters discusses the phenomenon and experience of labour pains. This volume revitalizes the study of pain, offering productive ways of carefully thinking through its different aspects and exploring the positive and enriching side of world-forming pain as well as its limiting aspects. It will be of interest to academics and students interested in pain from a range of backgrounds, including philosophy, sociology, nursing, midwifery, medicine and gender studies. (shrink)

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that (...) continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education. (shrink)

Presents a guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a range of disciplines. This book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and society.

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

Introduction: find your way -- Orientations toward objects -- Sexual orientation -- The orient and other others -- Conclusion: disorientation and queer objects.

Philosophy has much to offer psychiatry, not least regarding ethical issues, but also issues regarding the mind, identity, values, and volition. This has become only more important as we have witnessed the growth and power of the pharmaceutical industry, accompanied by developments in the neurosciences. However, too few practising psychiatrists are familiar with the literature in this area. -/- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry offers the most comprehensive reference resource for this area ever published. It assembles challenging and (...) insightful contributions from key philosophers and others to the interactive fields of philosophy and psychiatry. Each contributions is original, stimulating, thorough, and clearly and engagingly written - with no potentially significant philosophical stone left unturned. Broad in scope, the book includes coverage of several areas of philosophy, including philosophy of mind, science, and ethics. For philosophers and psychiatrists, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry is a landmark publication in the field - one that will be of value to both students and researchers in this rapidly growing area. (shrink)

This paper praises and criticizes Peter-Paul Verbeek's What Things Do. The four things that Verbeek does well are: remind us of the importance of technological things; bring Karl Jaspers into the conversation on technology; explain how technology "co-shapes" experience by reading Bruno Latour's actor-network theory in light of Don Ihde's post-phenomenology; develop a material aesthetics of design. The three things that Verbeek does not do well are: analyze the material conditions in which things are produced; criticize the social-political design and (...) use context of things; and appreciate how liberal moral-political theory contributes to our evaluation of technology. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, this article presents an overview of some of the diverse approaches to intersubjectivity that can be found in the phenomenological tradition. Starting with a brief description of Scheler's criticism of the argument from analogy, the article continues by showing that the phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity involve much more than a 'solution' to the 'traditional' problem of other minds. Intersubjectivity doesn't merely concern concrete face-to-face encounters between individuals. It is also (...) something that is at play in simple perception, in tool-use, in emotions, drives and different types of self-awareness. Ultimately, the phenomenologists would argue that a treatment of intersubjectivity requires a simultaneous analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and world. It is not possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere within an already established ontology; rather, the three regions 'self', 'others', and 'world' belong together; they reciprocally illuminate one another, and can only be understood in their interconnection. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, this article presents an overview of some of the diverse approaches to intersubjectivity that can be found in the phenomenological tradition. Starting with a brief description of Scheler’s criticism of the argument from analogy, the article continues by showing that the phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity involve much more than a ‘solution’ to the ‘traditional’ problem of other minds. Intersubjectivity doesn’t merely concern concrete faceto-face encounters between individuals. It is also (...) something that is at play in simple perception, in tool-use, in emotions, drives and different types of self-awareness. Ultimately, the phenomenologists would argue that a treatment of intersubjectivity requires a simultaneous analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and world. It is not possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere within an already established ontology; rather, the three regions ‘self’, ‘others’, and ‘world’ belong together; they reciprocally illuminate one another, and can only be understood in their interconnection. (shrink)

Over the last decade, the international media has devoted increasing attention to operations that separate conjoined twins. Despite the fairly low odds that a child or adult will survive the operation with all of their vital organs intact, most people fail to question the urgency of being physically separated from one’s identical twin. The drive to surgically tear asunder that which was originally joined, I suggest, is motivated in part by a refusal to acknowledge intercorporeality as a basic condition of (...) human existence that doesn’t undermine identity but makes it possible in the first place. (shrink)