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47Grounding agency in depth: The implications of Merleau-ponty's thought for the politics of feminismHuman Studies 19 (2): 175-184. 1996.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.…Read more
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22A Phenomenology of “The Other World”Chiasmi International 9 221-234. 2007.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 t…Read more
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57The Poetry of Habit: Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Aging EmbodimentIn Silvia Stoller (ed.), Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age: Gender, Ethics, De Gruyter. pp. 69-82. 2014.As people age their actions often become entrenched—we might say they are not open to the new; they are less able to adapt; they are stuck in a rut. Indeed, in The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) Simone de Beauvoir writes that to be old is to be condemned neither to freedom nor to meaning, but rather to boredom (Beauvoir 1996, 461; 486). While in many ways a very pessimistic account of ageing, the text does provide promising moments where her descriptions do capture other possibilities for aged ex…Read more
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30“Only Blood would be More Red”: Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Sexual DifferenceJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 32 (2): 147-159. 2001.Irigaray turns to Merleau-Ponty's intuitions about the perception of color to develop her own insights into the creative emergence of sexuate identity. As a quality of the flesh, color cannot be reduced to formal codes. The privileging of word and text inherent to Western culture suppresses the coming into being of the embodied subject in his or her own situated context. Color, tied as it is to a corporeal creativity could provide an important link since it facilitates reflection, and a re-enfle…Read more
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50Depth of Embodiment: Spatial and Temporal Bodies in Foucault and Merleau-PontyPhilosophy Today 43 (1): 73-85. 1999.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.
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66Lacan and Merleau-Ponty on IntersubjectivityIn Dorothea Olkowski James Morley (ed.), Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, . 1999.This paper considers the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan in terms of vision and intersubjectivity.
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22A Phenomenology of 'The Other World': On Irigaray's' To Paint the Invisible'Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty's Thought 9 518-534. 2008.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. In her essay on “Eye and Mind”, “To Paint the Invisible”, Luce Irigaray argues that Merleau-Ponty was not yet ready to address this q…Read more
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14" The Sum of What She Is Saying": Bringing Essentials Back to the BodyIn Dorothea Olkowski (ed.), Resistance, flight, creation: feminist enactments of French philosophy, Cornell University Press. pp. 124. 2000.This chapter is an examination of the debate around essences in feminist philosophy and theorizing. Here, essences are rethought through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as carnal or embodied essences. As such, embodied essences are found at the joints, the hollows that are not inside us but that connect us, so that we are not isolated within cultural and historical zones. Embodied essences can be taken up in language as idealities
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21Questioning “Homeland” through Yael Bartana's Wild SeedsIn Christina Schües, Dorothea Olkowski & Helen Fielding (eds.), Time in Feminist Phenomenology, Indiana University Press. pp. 149. 2011.Helen Fielding, in examining Yael Bartana’s video art works, in particular, Wild Seeds (2005), argues that politics seem to privilege the temporal, and video art thus lends itself to this enactment. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, she concludes that the in-between, while a space and not a territory, is more a spacing, a taking place between people “no matter where they happen to be” than a place as such. In Bartana’s works, the temporal aspect of video allows her to open up a time-space, or rather …Read more
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25Depth of Embodiment: Spatial and Temporal Bodies in Foucault and Merleau-PontyPhilosophy Today 43 (1): 73-85. 1999.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.
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611Cultivating Perception: Phenomenological Encounters with ArtworksSigns 40 (2): 280-289. 2015.Phenomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in reality and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter things and others. In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, thinking grounded in embodied experience can…Read more
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516This Body of Art: The Singular Plural of the FeminineJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 36 (3): 277-292. 2005.I explore the possibility that the feminine, like art, can be thought in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural. In Les Muses, Nancy claims that art provides for the rethinking of a technë not ruled by instrumentality. Specifically, in rethinking aesthetics in terms of the debates laid out by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, he resituates the ontological in terms of the specificity of the techniques of each particular artwork; each artwork establishes relations particular to its worl…Read more
London, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |