Helen A. Fielding

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 134-135 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 'The Visible and the Invisible Douglas Low. Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 'The Visible and the Invisible.' Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 124. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $19.95. Low sets himself an impossible task, that of completing the uncompleted work of a philosopher whose untimely decease prevented him from doing so himself. What he does succeed in providing is a systematic commentary and a rich integration of Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy. This task itself is important since it is believed by many that Merleau-Ponty's premature death prevented the completion of a book that would have altered the philosophical scene of Paris in the 1960s, and that, moreover, even in its incomplete form, speaks to pressing contemporary philosophical debates on such issues as mind/body dualism, and our relation to nature.The main focus of Low's reading is Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language, which Low appropriately situates as a mediation between a modernist philosophy of presence and a postmodern Derridean approach to language as the constant deferral of meaning. Language is not the repository for ideal essences, nor do existents have an immediate [End Page 134] coincidence or fusion with things or the world. Indeed, the strength of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is that he begins with an understanding of human action as meaningfully orientated; to move in the world is to interpretatively encounter it. As Low points out, "an ontological priority [is] granted to the body and the world upon which it opens, for together in lived experience they sustain a field of stable meanings, meanings that are then sublimated in the bodily gesture called speech" (22). Low differs from most Merleau-Ponty scholars in his assumption that there is no significant break between the earlier Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty carefully worked out his descriptions of embodied perception, and the later work that lays out the ontology. Indeed, one accomplishment of Low's book is to show how they fit together, explaining how the insights of the first work are necessary for grounding the ontology Merleau-Ponty began to work out in the later one.Low's book is divided into two sections. The first section, "The Visible and Nature," focuses on how we encounter the world, concluding with a helpful summary and assessment of Merleau-Ponty's ontology. Drawing upon the late essay "Eye and Mind," Low lays out Merleau-Ponty's ontology through his intuition that modern art, unlike the representational focus of Renaissance art, reveals our contact with the world as a "system of exchanges between the sensing and the sensible" (56). Perceiving the artwork is not an intellectual computation of a second-order representation of the world; rather, we see according to the work. It is a bodily process that reveals a reversibility between the viewer and the world. The second section, "The Invisible and Logos," focuses on how these encounters are sublimated or taken up in language. Language is, for Merleau-Ponty, first speech since it relies upon a speaker to take it up, "to sustain and modify it." Signs, gestures, and meaning are folded into one another. As embodied beings, we literally grasp meaning (89).This book would be of enormous benefit to scholars embarking on a reading of Merleau-Ponty's works, and it is one I highly recommend for that purpose. Although it is not original in its interpretations, its value lies in its gathering and integration of complex themes that provide an important introduction to Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy. The book maps out, moreover, a chronology of these themes and the specifics of where to find them; it also shows how the fragments fit together, indicating directions in which they might lead. His writing style is accessible without being simplistic. By interweaving his interpretations with long quotes from...

Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference as the primary difference arises out of a phenomenological perception of nature. Drawing on Heidegger's insights into physis, she begins with his critique of the nature/culture binary. Both philosophers maintain that nature is not matter to be ordered by technical know-how; yet Irigaray reveals that although Heidegger distinguishes physis from techn in his work, his forgetting of the potentiality of matter, the maternal-feminine, and the two-fold essence of being as sexual difference means that his own concept of physis can be understood as another techn. Focussing in particular upon Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle's privileging of morphé over hylé as a description of presencing into appearance, I show that for Irigaray the movements of presencing and absencing emerge out of a metaphysics that does not take into account the fluidity, the mixtures and interpenetrations of a nature that is limited by fecundity not by death. Our oblivion to nature is the greatest danger, and thus attending to our embodied and hence sexuate nature holds the promise of a new age, since it is rooted in the possibilities of the flesh revealed through the cultivated perception of sexual difference.

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is directed towards the future.

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal schema.

The western philosophical tradition, with its focus on universal concepts and a presumed neuter, but ultimately male subject, has only relatively recently become open to the question of alterity, in particular the alterity of woman as the other of man. The essays of this volume reflect in particular on the ethical implications of taking the feminine other into account. This necessitates a rethinking of the implicit structures of Western philosophy which continue to exclude women as subjects who contribute to the conceptualization of world and society. This volume, which gives voice to women philosophers, is a contribution to that task

This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality

The development of bioethics primarily at the cognitive level further perpetuates the tendency to construe all aspects of our lives, including our bodies, as technical systems. For example, if we consider the moral issue of organ sales without taking our embodiment into account, there appear to be no sound arguments for opposing such sales. However, it is important to consider the aspects of the phenomenal body that challenge rational deliberation by exploring an embodied approach to the ethical dilemma produced by a proposed kidney exchange as presented in one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog films. What is sought is a description of a body-measure that would serve as a critique of strictly cognitive bioethical deliberations.

In order to open new possibilities for bioethics, I argue that we need to rethink our concept of nature. The established cognitive framework determines in advance how new technologies will become visible. Indeed, in this dualistic approach of metaphysics, nature is posited as limitless, as material endowed with force which causes us to lose the sense of nature as arising out of itself, of having limits, an end. In contrast, drawing upon the example of the gender assignment and construction of intersexed infants, I want to suggest for bioethics an understanding of nature that arises not from our scientific explorations, but rather from attending to our situated perceptual encounters with the world which underlie such experimentation; these encounters are too easily overlooked, and yet they are crucial for opening up new ways of thinking

While poststructuralist feminist theorists have clarified our understanding of the gendered subject as produced through a matrix of language, culture, and psycho-sexual affects, they have found agency difficult to ground. I argue that this is because in these theories the body has served primarily as an inscribed surface. In response to this surface body, particular to this age, I have turned to Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth which allows us to theorize the agency crucial to feminist politics. While the poststructuralists' rejection of depth is largely due to its roots in Cartesian rationality, depth is much more than this. Rather than allowing for the impossibility of political action, depth means that as bodily moving and acting subjects we are part of Being, and thus part of the questions raised in this age, even if it is a mark of this age that this tends to be forgotten.

As we know, Merleau-Ponty was struggling with a dynamic shift in his thinking at the premature end of his life. In those last notes he raises the question of how to elaborate a phenomenology of “’the other world’, as the limit of a phenomenology of the imaginary and the ‘hidden’”—a phenomenology that would open onto an invisible life, community, other and culture (VI, Jan. 1960). In her essay on “Eye and Mind”, “To Paint the Invisible”, Luce Irigaray shows why Merleau-Ponty was not yet ready to address this question, why he was not yet ready to engage the limits of his vision posed by the presence of an other. Against Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the artist has no other task than to bring to appearance the world in the way he corporeally encounters it employing no “other technique than what his eyes and hands discover in seeing and painting”, Irigaray argues that the painter as phenomenologist then appropriates what is other to his vision without reflecting upon a limit to vision, as well as the limit provided by the invisible of an other, an other world. This is not to say that there are no intertwinings with this other, for there are other metabolisms with which we engage the world. Moreover, the sharing of vision with an other can alter the ways I see, challenging cultural complicity, rather than providing evidence that we share the same world. Irigaray is of course not the first to challenge a phenomenological approach to art and to vision—and here I turn specifically to Gilles Deleuze—who is critical of the phenomenological tendency to take on a world given to us by others. His artist, Francis Bacon, focuses on the sensation, which remains unmediated by narration or the feelings of others. Finally, the artworks of abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell are considered in the ways that they open up a different time-space; they suggest an other world with which we intertwine without appropriation. Her works, I argue, defy reduction to essences, but also do not rely merely on sensation—for this reason they point in the direction of how to think phenomenology anew. For I do think Merleau-Ponty would be open to these conversations, to these other worlds and other visions.