Este artículo propone una discusión sobre la intersección entre la filosofía francesa contemporánea y el psicoanálisis, específicamente enfocada en el tema de la “singularidad” en psicoanálisis, destacando autores como Politzer, Foucault y, especialmente, Merleau-Ponty. Se trata de pensar de qué manera estos autores buscan encauzar el tema de la singularidad en Freud. El objetivo es determinar cómo se puede definir la singularidad con la que se encontró Freud en su trabajo clínico de escucha a los pacientes y en (...) qué sentido esta singularidad no se reduce a las formulaciones teóricas posteriormente desarrolladas por el psicoanalista en los términos de un sistema psíquico – y a las que Politzer denominó de abstractas. Se tiene en cuenta, muy especialmente, los esfuerzos de Merleau-Ponty de pensar la noción freudiana de singularidad en los términos de una nueva teoría, que se volvió conocida como teoría de la otredad, en la que el filósofo aproxima la singularidad a la noción de pulsión de muerte, anticipando lo que años más tarde Lacan llamaría “extimidad”. De donde se sigue la pregunta rectora de esta investigación: ¿qué es la singularidad en la clínica psicoanalítica y en qué sentido es posible que uno la escuche del otro sin someterla a una abstracción o saber impuesto como dispositivo? (shrink)

Consiste este artigo no mapeamento dos comentários de Merleau-Ponty a respeito do conceito freudiano de inconsciente e do sentido da clínica psicanalítica. Nossa hipótese é que a consideração dos deslocamentos temáticos operados por Merleau-Ponty ao longo de sua obra pode esclarecer a mudança de avaliação que os conceitos de inconsciente e experiência clínica mereceram na passagem das primeiras para as últimas obras merleau-pontyanas.This consists in the mapping of comments by Merleau-Ponty regarding the freudian concept of unconscious (...) as well as the meaning of the psychoanalytic clinic. Our hypothesis is that the consideration of the thematic dislocations made by Merleau-Ponty throughout his work might clarify the shift in evaluation that the concepts of unconscious and clinical practice deserved between the first and last merleau-pontynian works. (shrink)

In this essay, I read Freud and Merleau-Ponty as voices for a more perceptive and nuanced discourse on the child. Their works, I suggest, contain two complementary approaches in this direction. The first approach concerns the structural asymmetry of child and adult. In his early writings, Freud assumes a radical break between the child’s and the adult’s sexualities. Taking seriously this assumption of asymmetry cautions us against the hasty application of adult standards to the child. The second approach concerns (...) what I would call a “thick description” of the child’s lived experience. Merleau-Ponty exemplifies this approach in his lectures on child psychology and the notion of institution, where he develops a concrete, phenomenologically informed account of childhood and puberty. (shrink)

Michel Foucault, no curso Em defesa da sociedade, explica a relação entre o biopoder e o racismo. Dentre as modalidades de racismo praticadas desde o século XIX, Foucault inclui o socialismo, sendo que neste há um racismo de tipo evolucionista, biológico, que funciona plenamente em relação aos doentes mentais, aos criminosos, aos adversários políticos etc., que foi necessário sempre que o socialismo teve de insistir no problema da luta contra o inimigo e da eliminação do adversário no interior (...) da sociedade capitalista, e apareceu porque foi a única maneira, nesse caso, de pensar uma razão para matar o adversário. Por outro lado, Maurice Merleau-Ponty publicou, em 1947, o livro Humanismo e Terror, no qual invoca o problema da violência praticada pela União Soviética, pondo em evidência a teoria e a prática da violência pelo regime comunista. Para Merleau-Ponty, quando se vive numa época em que a base tradicional de uma sociedade se destrói e o homem deve reconstruí-la e reconstruir também as relações humanas, a liberdade de cada um desaparece e a violência aparece. Isso seria como foi o princípio do comunismo, com Lênin. O que Merleau-Ponty questiona é se a violência praticada em 1947 pelo mesmo regime tem o mesmo sentido que tinha no leninismo. O objetivo deste trabalho é verificar se há e quais são os pontos de toque entre a visão foucaultiana do racismo de Estado praticado pela URSS e a violência revolucionária identificada por Merleau-Ponty na mesma URSS. (shrink)

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

Pretendo abordar de modo breve como, diferentemente da tradição francesa, MerleauPonty leu Proust à luz freudiana, podendo, assim, insistir num problema fundamental da sua fenomenologia: a temporalidade. Para tal abordagem, realizarei um exame da possível intersecção do caso do membro fantasma com a noção de sedimentação descrita pelo filósofo. Com esse procedimento, compreenderemos o recurso de Merleau-Ponty aos escritos de Proust, notadamente, ao conceito de “tempo”. Veremos, entretanto, que este recurso está largamente em interface com noções da clínica freudiana.

Sigmund Freud’s biologism has historically come with a negative valence, seeming to consign us to passive determination by irrational drives. While the nonhuman turn has recently highlighted the underacknowledged creativity of animal life, this re-evaluation of biology has hardly implicated Freud. I contend that Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals a nascent ‘other Freud’ able to inform the nonhuman turn, one that sees the human animal as the basis of the free and relational psychoanalytic subject. I follow Merleau-Ponty in reading Freud (...) as engaged with the question of how a shared, intersubjective world is possible. Both thinkers realized that it is in the domain of life, not cognition, that we verify this seemingly human relational potential. Elaborating the Merleau-Pontian Freud, I argue for a psychoanalytic subject that necessitates nonhuman life as its ecstatic unmooring towards the Other and reality. Ecological thinking is not an obstacle to the relationality prized by psychoanalysis, but a necessity. (shrink)

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to outline and (...) justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to develop several implications which can be drawn from two twentieth century reflections on sexuality. It situates the meaning of human sexuality in relation to the notions of expression, Symbolic consciousness, Bodilessness, Intersubjectivity, Rationality, And finitude; through a comparison and contrast of the works of freud and merleau-Ponty. Both thinkers are viewed as philosophical mythologists who see sexuality as a peculiarly revelatory and representative feature of human existence as a whole. The article concludes (...) with a reflection on the significance human sexuality might have for philosophy's own self-Understanding. (shrink)

Le parcours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty ne peut se comprendre sans le fil rouge de la Psychanalyse : dès sa thèse, il restaure le primat de la perception et du corps sexué à la lumière de Freud et de Binswanger. A la Sorbonne, il renouvelle la Psychologie de l'enfant en y intégrant M. Klein, J. Lacan et F. Dolto. Au Collège de France plusieurs cours font des rêves et de la libido une dimension inéluctable de l'humain. De nombreux psychanalystes et (...) psychiatres se sont " laissés interroger par lui " : citons : H. Ey, A. Hesnard, P. Fédida, A. Green, J. Laplanche, J.-B. Pontalis, Luce Irigaray...Š. (shrink)

Madness can be understood as something sealed off from the intelligible human world, a way of being that has been detached and isolated from the essential elements of normative society. It can represent all that is contrary to what is rational, what is normal and even, what is human. By following this line of thinking, madness cannot be penetrated by the outside nor does it have an established internal structure, and yet it can be used to construct and form its (...) opposite—the rational, normal human. Human rationality then becomes something that can be fully deduced, explained, and understood, and anything that contains mystery or ambiguity can be relegated to the realm of madness.These are the common definitions of... (shrink)

Suggesting that phenomenology results in an “imperialism of the same” that considers the other only in terms of their effect upon the subject rather than in their genuine alterity, Levinas initiates a line of thought that can still be discerned in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Claude Lefort. However, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work is capable of avoiding this line of criticism, and that his position is an important alternative to the more dominant Derridean and Levinasian (...) conceptions of alterity. Moreover, this essay will also extricate Merleau-Ponty from Levinas’ claim that his philosophy is “sustained by an unaccountable affection”. Rather than ignoring the alterity of the other, and also without presupposing some primordial affectionate bond with the other, Merleau-Ponty explicates an interesting conception of what responsibility towards the ‘otherness of the other’ should consist in. Basically, he insists upon the way in which self and other are always already intertwined together (or reversible), and suggests that respecting the alterity of the other should involve the imperative to further immerse oneself in this transformative bond – to transform what we think of as self, and also what we think of as ‘other’. (shrink)

El autor se propone, en Sartre-Foucault (una oposición tergiversada) , resolver el enigma planteado por el rechazo foucaultiano de la filosofía contemporánea . Rechazo casi endógeno y no exógeno, rechazo por conocimiento interiorizado y no desconocimiento exterior. Se analizan las dos fuentes de hostilidades flagrantes. 1) El rechazo foucaultiano de los privilegios del Cogito en beneficio de una consideración de la especialización del pensamiento. 2) La evidencia que posee de la normatividad, sin moral teorizada , de esta filosofía contemporánea (...) y particularmente en el caso de Sartre, el más existencialistamente moralista de entre todos los contemporáneos citados por Foucault: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille. «El pensamiento desde su forma más temprana es una acción – un acto peligroso» (Les Mots et les Choses , p. 339). También lo sabían Hegel, Marx, Freud, nos dice. El enigma surge precisamente del poder totalizante de comprensión que manifiesta con relación a este gran cuadro de la filosofía contemporánea. En general una oposición procede, en efecto, de una incomprensión del autor criticado o de una comprensión tergiversada. (shrink)

La relation de Foucault à Merleau-Ponty semble avant tout marquée par les critiques que le premier adresse au profil général de l’analyse phénoménologique dont le second peut apparaître au début des années soixante comme un représentant exemplaire. Nous montrons dans cet article que ces critiques concernent plus précisément la corrélation, établie « archéologiquement », entre les présupposés anthropologiques de la phénoménologie et le développement des sciences humaines. Il apparaît néanmoins qu’en contrepoint de ces critiques, une certaine équivocité définit (...) de manière persistante la relation de Foucault à Merleau-Ponty, notamment en ce qui concerne certaines analyses qu’ils consacrent au statut du corps. (shrink)

¿De qué manera el problema de la carne permite analizar el vínculo que tiene el pensamiento de Foucault con el de Merleau-Ponty? Al igual que Merleau-Ponty, Foucault piensa la carne en un modo susceptible de ser comprendido en términos de “quiasmo”. Sin embargo, a diferencia de Merleau-Ponty, la carne en las investigaciones de Foucault designa más bien un quiasmo no ontológico de la subjetividad que ilustra las dinámicas por las cuales esta es constituida y, (...) al mismo tiempo, se constituye a sí misma en la historia. De este modo, la carne aparece como un motivo o un tema clave que permite repensar la evolución de la crítica de la subjetividad que Foucault le hace a Merleau-Ponty y a la fenomenología desde muy temprano, al menos desde Phénoménologie et psychologie. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relationship between ethics and politics in relation to the problem of history. More precisely, this work is concerned with the particularly phenomenological approach to this problem demonstrated in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and to the important critique of phenomenological historicity that emerges in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault claims that there is something in the phenomenological account of history---and the attendant structure of transcendental subjectivity---that is totalizing. This thesis attempts to (...) diagnose the validity of this accusation with an eye towards its ethical implications, and point to the moments where Merleau-Ponty and Sartre may evade this criticism. (shrink)

Ya-t-il une vie après Merleau-Ponty? Peut-on considérer l'œuvre du phénoménologue français, non pas comme un objet d'exégèse, mais plutôt comme une matrice philosophique encore féconde aujourd'hui? Faut-il prendre au sérieux la synthèse attendue de l'empirique et du transcendantal, la réconciliation programmée de la philosophie et de la science, bref le géométral de l'ambiguïté? C'est le pari que lance cet ouvrage : confrontant Merleau-Ponty à d'autres qui vinrent après lui, et chez qui sa pensée mène une vie seconde, il (...) tente de montrer que le paysage conceptuel merleau-pontien est encore le nôtre, et qu'il n'a rien perdu de son relief. Merleau-Ponty et Foucault, Merleau-Ponty et Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty et les neurones miroirs... : autant de dialogues fictifs, engageant l'essentiel d'une pensée dans des prolongements inattendus, lui posant des questions qu'elle ne se posait pas forcément, la poussant sur des chemins nouveaux pour elle. Où l'on verra que l'étonnante torsion que Merleau-Ponty avait imprimée à la phénoménologie husserlienne, la subjectivité transcendantale réformée depuis les pouvoirs du corps propre, et par là délestée de ses tentations absolutisantes, représentent une véritable proposition philosophique: une proposition riche de virtualités inexplorées, et qui a tout son avenir devant elle. (shrink)

Fielding discusses how Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty view spatial and temporal bodies. Foucault dismisses the understanding of an inside soul surrounded by a body.

Dans cet article, on soutient que Merleau-Ponty, à la fin de sa production philosophique, réhabilite ontologiquement le naturalisme caractéristique à la psychanalyse freudienne. Le philosophe identifie, dans le naturalisme articulé par Freud dans sa théorie, une description de la Nature qui, contrairement au subjectivisme philosophique des philosophies de la conscience, et aussi contrairement au mécanisme causal des sciences naturelles modernes, ne favorise pas une « image fantastique de l’homme, de l’esprit et de l’histoire » contraposée à l’inexorable existence d’une (...) Nature en soi. Ainsi, faire une « psychanalyse de la Nature », analyser les motifs de la réévaluation positive de la théorie freudienne dans les textes ultimes de Merleau-Ponty, implique faire ce qui a été l’intention du philosophe tout au long de la critique dirigée à la psychanalyse, c’est-à-dire : extraire de la théorie psychanalytique freudienne des conséquences philosophiques d’un certain ordre, ce que Freud n’a pas été capable de faire – et qui n’était pas non plus son but.In this article we maintain that at the end of his philosophical work, Merleau-Ponty ontologically rehabilitates the naturalism characteristic of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the naturalism articulated by Freud in his theoretical work, Merleau-Ponty identifies a description of Nature that, contrary to the subjectivism of philosophies of consciousness and also contrary to the mechanistic causality of the contemporary natural sciences, does not favor the “fantastic image of man, spirit and history,” counter-posed to the inexorable existence of Nature in itself. Consequently, to do a psychoanalysis of Nature, to analyze the motifs of a positive reevaluation of Freudian theory in Merleau-Ponty’s last works, implies fulfilling the intention he held all through his critique of psychoanalysis. That is to say, it implies extracting from Freudian psychoanalytic theory particular philosophical results, which Freud himself was not able to do—and which was not his aim.In questo articolo sosteniamo che Merleau-Ponty, al termine del suo percorso filosofico, arriva a riabilitare ontologicamente il naturalismo caratteristico della psicoanalisi freudiana. Il filosofo identifica nel naturalismo articolato da Freud una descrizione della Natura che, contrariamente al soggettivismo delle filosofie della coscienza, e, simmetricamente, al meccanicismo delle moderne scienze naturali, cessa di promuovere un’“immagine fantastica dell’uomo, dello spirito e della storia” contrapposta all’esistenza inesorabile di una Natura in sé. Così, svolgere l’idea di una “psicoanalisi della Natura”, e analizzare i motivi della rivalutazione della teoria freudiana negli ultimi testi di Merleau-Ponty, significa prolungare quella che è stata l’intenzione del filosofo lungo l’intero percorso della sua critica alla psicoanalisi: e cioè estrarre dalla teoria psicoanalitica freudiana conseguenze filosofiche appartenenti a un ordine che Freud non ha saputo raggiungere né si è dato il compito di raggiungere. (shrink)

In one of his last writings, Life: Experience and Science, Michel Foucault argued that twentieth-century French philosophy could be read as dividing itself into two divergent lines: on the one hand, we have a philosophical stream which takes individual experience as its point of departure, conceiving it as irreducible to science. On the other hand, we have an analysis of knowledge which takes into account the concrete productions of the mind, as are found in science and human practices. In (...) order to account for this division, Foucault opposed epistemologists such as Cavaillès and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincaré to Bergson. The latter was presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the ?philosophy of experience? at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fifteen years later, in his Deleuze and in the Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou again uses this dual structure in his interpretation of the past hundred years of French thought. He employs a series of oppositional couples: himself and Deleuze, Lautmann and Sartre, and, finally, Brunschvicg and Bergson. On the one hand a ?mathematical Platonism? and on the other a ?philosophy of vital interiority.? This Manichean reading of philosophy, and the strategic use of the figure of Bergson has, itself, a long tradition. It was also proposed by Althusser who, following Bachelard, opposed his standpoint to any form of ?empiricism.? Althusser developed his thought from a tradition of Marxist thinkers and ideologists, which included Politzer's and Nizan's critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. The aim of this essay is to deconstruct and to put into its precise context of production this series of genealogies which entails the mobilization of Bergsonism and of the name ?Bergson.? By doing so, I hope to weight the importance of Bergsonism in twentieth-century French philosophy, in both its ?positive? and its ?negative? aspect. The essay will proceed regressively, taking into account figures such as Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze, Foucault, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, but also Polizer, Brunschvicg and Alain. The conclusion of the essay is an attempt at reading the ?Bergson renaissance? in the light of new discoveries in genetics and the cognitive sciences and to tie it to the renewal of studies in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

A partir de la lectura de Une mort très douce, novela autobiográfica de Simone De Beauvoir, me propondré en este trabajo reflexionar sobre la noción merleau-pontiana de cuerpo vivido, particularmente en la experiencia del dolor. Más allá de las diferencias filosóficas específicas que la autora posee con Merleau-Ponty, me centraré en los préstamos que, efectivamente, ha tomado del fenomenólogo francés. Considero que Une mort très douce es un relato ejemplar que permite iluminar y profundizar algunas cuestiones que no (...) han sido lo suficientemente desarrolladas por Merleau-Ponty, a saber, la especificidad del estatus del cuerpo fenoménico sufriente hospitalizado, en una situación de enfermedad terminal. A su vez, la novela invita a reflexionar a partir de los límites establecidos entre normalidad/patología, y saber vulgar/saber científico presentados por Georges Canguilhem, que se articulan con la dimensión económica y política de la medicina como institución, señalada por Michel Foucault. Asimismo, en este texto la situación experiencial de la enfermedad permite a la filósofa revisitar su propio pensamiento desde una perspectiva más empática respecto de ciertas cuestiones sobre la maternidad sostenidas en Le deuxième sexe. De algún modo, el proceso de agonía de una persona se extiende intercorporalmente a quien está bajo su cuidado: así, este relato sobre el dolor es especialmente ilustrativo para señalar, con Merleau-Ponty, la imposibilidad de reducir el cuerpo a una descripción en tercera persona. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s attitude to psychoanalysis was ambiguous. On the one hand, he realized that the phenomena psychoanalysis deals with require to go beyond the area of ​​act intentionality, and that, from a different angle, psychoanalysis addresses the same problem as Gestalt psychology, which played the central role in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project. On the other hand, he explicitly rejected the terms used by Freud for conveying his discoveries. Merleau-Ponty replaced unconscious mental contents, which act on conscious behavior, by ambiguous (...) consciousness. In the Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, he used the terms “habit,” “bad faith,” “bodily expression,” “affective intentionality,” and “body schema” to specify his notion of experiential “ambiguity.” This paper aims to present the key concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s early interpretation of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. A partial task is to show how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of bad faith differs from that of Sartre, and to distinguish existential ambiguity from the psychoanalytic concept of overdetermination. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty finds a philosophical interest in the psychoanalytical clinic, especially in the the clinic of children and hallucinating people, which can support the concepts of flesh and Ineinander. But in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty there is also a clinical interest, residing in the link he establishes between the flesh, conceived as the origin of existence, and the pathologies that Freud described as “narcissistic” and nowadays called “psychotic” or “borderline” states. To support this hypothesis, we will link Merleau-Ponty’s (...) own “clinic of the origins” and Harold Searles’ theory of narcissistic pathologies based on his clinical experience with schizophrenics. This confrontation will reveal how a philosophy of flesh provides us not only with theoretical points of reference relevant to the clinic of schizophrenia, but also fruitful technical indications regarding the direction towards a cure of such a pathology, indications that join those provided by Searles. (shrink)

Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, early on, neglected music's theoretical value in favor of painting's. Later, however, he found that it is the transience of music that speaks to the phenomenological experience of Being. This transition from painting to music presents the possibility of an ontological understanding of music for psychoanalysis. For Freud, music and morality were both from a “beyond” that was an effect of neurosis. Drawing on psychoanalyst Bion's idea of container–contained, and his disciple Meltzer's application of this to art, (...) as well as Bion's later innovation of the unknowable O, I apply Merleau-Ponty's distinction between painting and music to the therapeutic nature of art in order to see what sort of psychoanalytically significant revelation is obtained through music. (shrink)

In his notes for the course entitled “The Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the Unconscious, Memory,” Merleau-Ponty describe the notion of “negative hallucination” as “a perception, but not recognized for what it is.” This essay analyses this figure as it is taken up by Merleau-Ponty in direct dialogue with Freud’s work. To begin, through the double category of the “negative” and the “perceived,” Merleau-Ponty broaches the question of the “place” of dreams by adopting an eccentric position that sheds (...) light on an unexplored pathway of Freudian theory. Moreover, a crucial point can be found in the idea of a negative margin, that appears to implicitly configure a redefinition of the hallucinatory in the direction of chiasm. To highlight this aspect, I review in a preliminary manner some passages of Phenomenology of Perception in which the question of the “place” of negative hallucination emerges in particularly dramatic terms. (shrink)

Working within the tradition of continental philosophy, this article argues in favour of a phenomenological understanding of language as a crucial component of bioethical inquiry. The authors challenge the ‘commonsense’ view of language, in which thinking appears as prior to speaking, and speech the straightforward vehicle of pre-existing thoughts. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908–1961) phenomenology of language, the authors claim that thinking takes place in and through the spoken word, in and through embodied language. This view resituates bioethics as (...) a matter of bodies that speak. It also refigures the meaning of ethical self-reflexion, and in so doing offers an alternative view on reflexivity and critique. Referring to the Kantian critical tradition and its reception by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, we advance a position we call ‘critical ethical reflexivity’. We contend that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of language offers valuable insight into ethical reflexivity and subject formation. Moreover, his understanding of language may foster new qualitative empirical research in bioethics, lead to more nuanced methods for interpreting personal narratives, and promote critical self-reflexion as necessary for bioethical inquiry. (shrink)

Resumen: Ofreceré un análisis de la célebre crítica de la fenomenología de Merleau-Ponty en términos de una presunta oscilación entre “positivismo” y “escatología”. Como intentaré demostrar, atribuir al fenomenólogo francés una reducción “positivista” de la epistemología equivaldría a pasar por alto su insistencia en que nos apartemos de la autocomprensión que las ciencias empíricas ofrecen de sus propios resultados; esto es, a pasar por alto sus objeciones fenomenológicas a los marcos ontológicos ingenuos del “pensamiento objetivo”. En cuanto al cargo (...) de “escatología”, al parecer en virtud de sus deudas con el pensamiento marxista, intentaré probar que, no se puede sostener una vez que se toma en consideración el carácter matizado de su aceptación de ciertos aspectos del materialismo histórico.: I will attempt to analyze Foucault’s famous critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in terms of an alleged oscillation between “positivism” and “eschatology”. As I will try to prove, attributing to Merleau-Ponty a “positivistic” reduction of epistemology would amount to overlooking his insistence on moving away from the self-interpretations that empirical sciences offer of their own results; that is to say, overlooking his phenomenological objections against the naïve ontological frames of “objective thinking”. As for the charge of “eschatology”, presumably applied to the phenomenologist by virtue of his debts to Marxist thought, I will try to show that -either understood in a strictly epistemological sense or in connection with an alleged Merleau-Pontyan adhesion to a philosophy of history- it proves untenable once we take into consideration the nuanced character of his acceptance of certain aspects of historical materialism. (shrink)

In Opacidad y relativismo. La situacionalidad del conocimiento en tensión entre Merleau-Ponty y Foucault, Claudio Cormick introduces Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies as attempts to face two possible obstacles for human knowledge : on the one hand, the opacity of consciousness with regard to the foundations of its own positions; on the other, the relative, non-absolute character of our claims to truth, inasmuch as they are formulated within concrete social and historical conditions.

C'est "par ce qu'elle sous-entend ou dévoile à sa limite - par son contenu latent ou inconscient - que la phénoménologie est en consonance avec la psychanalyse", écrit Maurice Merleau-Ponty en 1960, dans la préface à l'ouvrage de Angelo Hesnard L'Oeuvre et l'esprit de Freud. Singulière euphonie, que celle ici entendue entre deux disciplines habituellement opposées dans leurs définitions : l'une centre en effet ses recherches sur la conscience, l'autre sur l'inconscient ; la première s'en tient à la description (...) la plus fidèle de ce qui apparaît, la seconde accorde le primat aux "tendances supposées" sur les "phénomènes perçus" ; celle-là radicalise le partage diltheyen des sciences de la nature et de l'esprit, et se positionne résolument du côté des secondes, celle-ci puise à la biologie ou à la thermodynamique tout autant qu'à l'herméneutique. Quelle serait donc cette harmonie entre phénoménologie et psychanalyse, dans quel système tonal se définit-elle et quelles modulations connaît l'intervalle mélodique entre les deux? Philosophie de la forme, existentialisme, phénoménologie de la perception, de l'inapparent, puis philosophie de la chair, le parcours de Merleau-Ponty semble poser, de manière à chaque fois plus fine, la question d'une paradoxale phénoménologie de l'inconscient, située à la double orée de la phénoménologie et de la psychanalyse. Il semble pertinent d'analyser ici cette traversée de la phénoménologie et de tenter de voir ce qu'elle trouve à ses confins - psychanalyse, ontologie ou métaphysique? Si la relecture merleau-pontyenne de la phénoménologie s'accompagne d'une lecture inédite de la psychanalyse, ce double remaniement ne manque pas de faire surgir bien des questions. C'est probablement là le sens des commentaires que quatre psychanalystes, J.-B. Pontalis, André Green, Jacques Lacan et Cornélius Castoriadis formulent à l'endroit de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty. Ces quatre critiques soulignent la grande proximité du philosophe avec la psychanalyse, mais n'en mettent pas moins en exergue les limites d'un abord phénoménologique de l'inconscient. En effet, si la démarche de la phénoménologie consiste à aller de l'indéterminé vers plus de détermination, à instituer le sens de ce qui auparavant restait inconscient, comment appliquer cette visée à l'inconscient psychanalytique sans le réduire par là même? Que signifie alors un "inconscient" paradoxalement thématisé à partir de la perception? Cette étude propose de confronter les lectures respectives qu'effectuent Merleau-Ponty de la psychanalyse puis ces quatre psychanalystes de l'oeuvre du philosophe. Un examen des positions originales de Merleau-Ponty permet de mesurer l'incontestable rapprochement esquissé avec l'oeuvre de Freud. La réponse des psychanalystes à cet appel pointe toutefois les limites d'une lecture résolument philosophique de la psychanalyse, n'instaurant, entre les deux, qu'une cadence évitée : à l'issue de ce dialogue, nulle impression de repos, et la phrase musicale semble relancée sur d'autres lignes harmoniques. (shrink)

Postmodern methodology in the human sciences and philosophy reverses the Aristotelian laws of thought such that (1) non-contradiction, (2) excluded middle, (3) contradiction, and (4) identity become the ground for analysis. The illustration of the postmodern logic is Peirce’s (1) interpretant, (2) symbol, (3) index, and (4) icon. The thesis is illustrated using the work of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and the le même et l’autre discourse sign where the ratio [Self:Same :: Other:Different] explicates the communicology of Roman Jakobson (...) in the conjunctions and disjunctions, appositions and oppositions of discours, parole, langue, and langage. (shrink)

Argues that modernism can be seen as a therapeutic project for transforming human experience, and draws from Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf's criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.

L’association systématique des sciences humaines au discours philosophique s’accomplit, dans l’œuvre de Merleau-Ponty, selon un dispositif original. Philosophie et sciences humaines se rencontrent ici autour du caractère problématique de l’humain, tel que Descartes l’avait défini. Le problème de l’union de l’âme et du corps revient alors à la philosophie sous la forme d’une antinomie, opposant le point de vue subjectif de la réflexion et le point de vue objectif du savoir empirique, et y induit un questionnement de type ontologique. (...) Mais ce même problème traverse les sciences humaines, et y prend la forme d’une crise qui les affecte de l’intérieur : parce qu’elles visent un être qui est à la fois l’objet d’un savoir positif, et le sujet fondateur de ce savoir, ces sciences sont vouées à une instabilité et à une critique perpétuelle de leurs propres principes. À l’ontologie interrogative répond ainsi l’autocritique du scientifique, selon une configuration à laquelle l’œuvre de Foucault nous aura rendu familiers. Mais alors que Les mots et les choses décident finalement, sous le chef de la « mort de l’homme », d’en finir avec un dispositif jugé stérile, le même dispositif trouve chez Merleau-Ponty à s’enraciner dans l’être, et à s’attester phénoménologiquement à travers une pensée de l’avènement. (shrink)

This article is meant to give psychotherapists a glimpse of the clinical implications of Merleau-Ponty's approach to unconscious thought and insight. Freud found evidence of consciousness and intentionality in processes that were understood in terms of coincidence or biological automata. Phenomenology has demonstrated that intentionality is an attribute of the entire embodied subjectivity. Both approaches point to the fact that the sphere of lived intentions is much larger than that of conscious thought. The article includes clinical examples.

Ao reatar o elo mais profundo entre a psicologia e a filosofia, Merleau-Ponty revisita a obra clínica de Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), reavivando, em especial, seu contributo fenomenológico. As noções de "estrutura" (Gestalt) e "sentido" são, aqui, agenciadas quanto a uma compreensão mais integral do comportamento, da vida e da linguagem; alcance que Goldstein obtém, ao estudar os diferentes distúrbios linguísticos, na contramão das teorias intelectualistas e empiristas, essencialmente causais. Ao retomar esse inventário crítico, Merleau-Ponty atenta para o caráter (...) original, dinâmico e, sobretudo, ontológico dessa proposta. (shrink)

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort (...) the meaning of May 1968 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, and others in his report on 'The State and Subject Today'. Finally he examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and even Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a very different (...) idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the 'three H's' - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the 'three masters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The 'internal' intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character. (shrink)

Contents INTRODUCTION: PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE POLITICAL IN PATOČKA AND MERLEAU-PONTY 11 1. Memory and community 11 2. Patočka 18 3. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and institution 22 4. The political context 28 5. Status of the current research 32 6. Overview of the chapters 34 CHAPTER 1: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL EPOCHĒ AND THE POLITICAL 39 1. Introduction 39 2. Criticism of Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld 46 3. The a priori of the World 49 4. The subject and the epochē (...) 56 5. Epochē to polis 61 6. Two ways into the epochē: myth and “le bouc émissaire” 76 7. A “public/private” distinction in the performing of the epochē 84 CHAPTER 2: THE BODY AT THE FRONT: CORPOREITY AND COMMUNITY IN JAN PATOČKA’S HERETICAL ESSAYS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 89 1. Introduction 89 2. The front 94 3. The double determination of life: Patočka and Foucault on “war” 98 4. Rooting 126 5. The body at the front 135 CHAPTER 3: LOOKING-IN ON EUROPE 145 1. Introduction 145 2. Post-Europe 147 3. Globalization as shaking 157 4. The idea of culture 162 5. Looking-in on Europe 164 6. The borders of Europe: towards a post-European democracy 175 a. Polemos and boundary 175 b. The skin and the soul 178 c. Europe and the boundary 190 CHAPTER 4: HUSSERL ON STIFTUNG AND STYLE 201 1. Introduction 201 2. Husserl’s concepts of retention institution and the possibility of an “institutional unconscious” 202 a. Retention 202 b. Husserl’s notion of institution in §50 of the Cartesian Meditations 210 c. Difficulties 220 d. Retention as unconscious 221 3. Husserl´s concept of style in Ideas II 236 a. Introduction 236 b. Institution and style 237 c. Style 243 d. Style and intersubjectivity 248 e. Style and politics in Merleau-Ponty 254 4. §15 of the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: “Reflection on the method of our historical manner of investigation” 259 a. Stiftung as the task of history 259 b. Endstiftung 269 c. Endstiftung and Style 272 5. Community and surrounding world in section three of Ideas II 274 6. “The Origin of Geometry” 291 CHAPTER 5: STIFTUNG AND STYLE IN MERLEAU-PONTY 303 1. Introduction 303 2. Institution and Style 304 a. event/advent 304 b. The opening of a field 308 c. The relation to the past, or subterranean communication across time: Urstiftung—Nachstiftung—Endstiftung 310 d. Style 312 e. Latency 314 3. Three painters: Matisse, Cézanne, and Vermeer 319 a. Matisse 319 b. Cézanne 325 c. Vermeer 337 4. The historical field 344 a. The field of praxis 344 b. Symbolic matrices 355 c. Matrix institutions 361 CHAPTER 6: THE NOBLE MEMORY: SURVIVAL, DEMOCRACY AND RESISTANCE 371 1. Introduction 371 a. “Resistance” and “survival” 371 b. The plaque 372 c. “Inertia” and “movement” 378 d. Difficulties 383 e. Vulnerability 385 2. Institution and parliamentary democracy 391 a. Merleau-Ponty’s support for parliamentary democracy 391 b. An institution of institutions 396 c. “Regime” and “corps de l’État” 400 d. Survival 406 e. Institution and reparation 421 f. Institution and revolution 423 g. Democracy, epochē, and virtù 424 h. Concrete political action 429 3. Resistance 430 a. The “mythical” past and the “verbal-Wesen of society” 432 b. The generality of freedom and the unconscious 441 c. Endstiftung, Telos and Truth 442 CONCLUSIONS 451 BIBLIOGRAPHY 471. (shrink)