Beata Stawarska

The major thesis developed in Sartre's L'imaginaire is that all imaginary acts can be subsumed under the heading of one "image family" and, therefore, that imagination as a whole can be theorized in terms of pictorial representation. Yet this theory fails to meet the objective of Sartre's study, to demonstrate that imaginary activity is not a derivative of perception but an attitude with a character and dignity of its own. The subsidiary account of imagination in terms of neutralization of belief has the advantage of not being constrained by the requirement that imaginary activity serve a purely reproductive function of bringing an absent "original" into a quasi presence and, thus, leaves room for free creativity and fiction. It also points to a concrete lived experience of alterity at the heart of subjective life where the subject stages its life as if it were the life of an other, putting pressure onto Sartre's contention that the cogito defines subjectivity.

I examine the phenomenological philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as possible responses to contemporary studies of interpersonal relatedness in cognitive science, especially the experimental studies of infant's imitating simple facial gestures of adults. I discuss the implications and the challenges raised by the experimental studies to the dominant phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, but also envision how phenomenology may help to interpret the findings about infantile imitation in ways that favor the embodied perceptual connectedness between the self and the other, without recourse to the inner private mind postulate endorsed by the theory of mind and shared by the experimental researchers of imitation.

In this essay I address Derrida’s influential readings of the Course in General Linguistics attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure in Of Grammatology and Glas. I complicate Derrida’s charge of phonocentrism, that is, the charge that Saussure privileges the medium of sound and/or speech as a site of unmediated signifying presence, by re-examining the relevant sections from the Course in light of the materials related to Saussure’s linguistics from the Nachlass, some of them recently discovered. I document especially the extent of editorial involvement in the sections discussed by Derrida that deal with the purportedly ‘natural’ expressions like onomatopoeias and interjections, and with the relation between speech and writing. I make the case that ultimately Derrida’s charge that Saussure’s linguistics is burdened by an allegiance to the metaphysics of presence carries limited force, and that Derrida’s and Saussure’s understanding of signification turn out to be closer related than previously thought: they share the view that entrainment and contamination are inevitable

Stawarska considers the ambiguities surrounding the antagonism between the phenomenological and the structuralist traditions by pointing out that the supposed foundation of structuralism, the Course in General Linguistics, was ghostwritten posthumously by two editors who projected a dogmatic doctrine onto Saussure’s lectures, while the authentic materials related to Saussure’s linguistics are teeming with phenomenological references. She then narrows the focus to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Saussure’s linguistics and argues that it offers an unusual, if not an uncanny, reading of the Course, in that it identifies a phenomenological dimension within the text, against the grain of the dominant structuralist claim. This phenomenological dimension is corroborated by the authentic sources of Saussure’s linguistics, even though the latter were beyond the philosopher’s own power to know. Merleau-Ponty’s unorthodox reading of the Course as being broadly compatible with the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology has been dismissed as an error and a contresens , but Stawarska proposes that such deviant appropriations of foundational texts are the ones to cherish the most, since they effectively dismantle the received dogmas and official doctrines stuffing the cabinets of canonical philosophy. She argues specifically that Merleau-Ponty’s contested distinction between “a synchronic linguistics of speech ” and “a diachronic linguistics of language ” , which gives primacy to la parole over la langue, and raises the possibility of a systematic study of la parole, contains a more faithful response to Saussure’s own project than the received structuralist view that la langue alone constitutes the proper object of linguistic study

Dans ce travail, je souligne l’importance du phénomène de la parole vivante et de la dimension communicative de l’expérience dans la recherche phénoménologique. Spécifiquement, je considère de manière critique l’accusation de phonocentrisme adressée par Derrida à la phénoménologie, qui semble avoir discrédité toute tentative d’aborder le phénomène de la vocalité par peur de privilégier la présence et la subjectivité atomiste. Il est peut-être vrai que la phénoménologie classique de la conscience privilégie le point de vue de la première personne et qu’elle est coupable d’un biais subjectiviste, mais il y a des ressources riches dans la tradiction dialogique, notamment chez Buber, de même que chez Humboldt et Platon, qui permettent de souligner la dualité fondamentale du soi et de l’autre, qui se déploie entre moi et toi dans la parole vivante et de corriger la position individualiste de la phénoménologie classique.

Philosophia means love of wisdom. If the way of access to wisdom is love, then the quest for wisdom does not appear as a purely cognitive enterprise but also and primarily as an affective one. Rather than reducing the one who searches for wisdom to a pure contemplative mind, it engages the entire person in the inquiry; the affective, and correlatively, sensitive and corporeal being of the self are put into play. Put simply and naïvely, one needs to be implicated in the philo-sophical quest with one’s heart and one’s body. Still, does not such implication prevent this quest from being “scientific”? Should not the inquiry be dispassionate if it is to remain “objective”, for otherwise it may obscure the hypotheses we formulate and the experiments we perform with subjective, personal input and cloud them with a halo of affective indeterminacy? After all, the thesis of objectivism stipulates that we should efface not only all preconceptions andpresuppositions in order to have an unprejudiced view of the matter in hand, but also dispose of the entire affective baggage of the individual engaged in a scientific enterprise. This procedure of bracketing of affectivity allows one to scrutinize the object of study from the standpoint of an external observer who adds nothing to the object in order to let its inherent character manifest itself. Hence the supposed detachment and disinterest typical of the strategies employed by science, living and inanimate beings alike being all ranked amongst possible objects for study

I engage phenomenological and empirical perspectives on dialogical relations in infancy in a mutually enlightening and challenging relation. On the one hand, the empirical contributions provide evidence for the primacy of first-to-second person interrelatedness in human sociality, as opposed to the claim of primary syncretism heralded by Merleau-Ponty, and also in distinction from the ego-alter ego model routinely used in phenomenology. On the other hand, phenomenological considerations regarding the lived affective experience of dialogical relatedness enrich and render intelligible the psychological accounts of dialogue in terms of observable behavior. Phenomenological and empirical perspectives on dialogical relatedness thus combine to offer an affectively charged and conversationally patterned notion of primary intersubjectivity in the I-you mode.

In the prospectus for his later work pronounced in 1952, Merleau-Ponty announced that his move beyond the phenomenological to the ontological level of analysis is motivated by issues of sociality, notably communication with others.' I propose to interrogate this priority attributed by the author to this interpersonal bond in his reflections on corporeality in general, marking a departure from The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception, which privileged the starting point of consciousness and the body proper. My interest lies particularly in exposing the psychological sources of Merleau-Ponty's thinking about the primacy of sociality. Referring to his lectures on Child Psychology and Pedagogy, which he delivered as Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1949-52,2 I will develop the contention that the developmental psychology of child sociality significantly informed his understanding of relations between self and other laid out in the later texts, and henceforth informed also his conception of the flesh. Specifically, the psychological hypotheses about the anonymous and fusional form initially taken by human sociality appears to play a determining role in his conception of interpersonal life formulated on the ontological plane. I will then point to the internal tensions involved in the theory of sociality based on the thesis of anonymity and disclose an alternative theoretical account, which has the merit of preserving the advantages of the anonymity thesis while avoiding its drawbacks; it also facilitates continued dialogue between Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and recent developmental psychology.