Silvia Stoller

This essay argues that despite of the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty his phenomenology can be positively appropriated to the theory of sexual difference. It focuses on three issues: the first one is closely linked to the Phenomenology of Perception and introduces a concept of "difference as differentiation". The second one is concerned with the intersubjective dimension of sexuality and will be called a "sexual syncretism". Finally, I’m referring to Merleau-Ponty's notion of "chiasm" in his late work The Visible and the Invisible in order to apply it to the theory of sexual difference. At this point, the difference between sexual beings will be conceptualized as "chiasmatic intertwining". In doing so, I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful resource for philosophical research that is mainly concerned with the questions of sexuality and sexual difference

Der französische Phänomenologe Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) hat sich sein ganzes Oeuvre hindurch mit der Wahrnehmung auseinandergesetzt. Diesseits von empiristischen und rationalistischen Vorurteilen versucht er, der Eigenlogik der Wahrnehmung gerecht zu werden. Seine Interpretation mündet in die These vom Primat der Wahrnehmung, wonach die Wahrnehmung Grundphänomen ist. Die Autorin widmet sich in ihrer Studie der Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (1945), worin Merleau-Pontys Wahrnehmungstheorie grundgelegt ist, indem sie die fundamentale Bedeutung der Wahrnehmung in diesem Werk herausarbeitet.

Until now post-structuralism is widely regarded as an opposite to phenomenology. This is also true for the relation of Butler’s post-structuralism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to show how close they are to each other. For this purpose, I will focus on Butler’s poststructuralist theory of performativity to confront it with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of expression. While Butler accuses theories of expression of being essentialist, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of experience resists such a criticism. “Expressivity” and “performativity”, and thus phenomenology and post-structuralism, are not opposites but partners in the search for an anti-essentialist concept.