Abstract

Both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry interpreted Husserl’s account on the meaning of corporeity presented in Ideas II. The German word der Leib, translated into French, as la chair became for these philosophers the key philosophical category and, at the same time, the essential dimension of human being. Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is a description of the flesh, which is the subject, and the flesh of the world. Henry’s philosophy is in turn a description of internal and intimate experience of one’s own body. How do these two French philosophers understand the category of flesh? Henry described the immanency as closed and monadic. Doesn’t it turn out to be a contradiction of Merleau-Ponty’s open to the world subjectivity?