Ted Toadvine

Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive paradox of our own inner animality, understood in terms of the anonymous, corporeal subject of perception that lives a different temporality than that of first-person consciousness. This provides us with an entirely different context for encounter with non-human others, insofar as they speak through our own voices and gaze out through our own eyes. This position is developed through a reading, first, of the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with that of Max Scheler, who paradigmatically reduces human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler by emphasizing, in The Structure of Behavior, that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay inthe auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness.

Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive paradox of our own inner animality, understood in terms of the anonymous, corporeal subject of perception that lives a different temporality than that of first-person consciousness. This provides us with an entirely different context for encounter with non-human others, insofar as they speak through our own voices and gaze out through our own eyes. This position is developed through a reading, first, of the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with that of Max Scheler, who paradigmatically reduces human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler by emphasizing, in The Structure of Behavior, that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay inthe auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has been hailed by many as the greatest French thinker of the twentieth century. As one of the founding members of the existentialist movement in the 1940s, he played a key role in introducing the work of Husserl and Heidegger into French thought and collaborated with Jean-Paul Sartre in the founding of Les Temps Modernes. His later work laid the foundation for the development of French thought in the direction of post-structuralism and post-modernism.

Merleau-Ponty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers gathers together the best critical writing on Merleau-Ponty’s work from the last half century. The collection includes early reviews of his work and the reactions of his contemporaries both during and after his life. Also covered are examinations of his relationship with Husserl, Sartre and the phenomenological tradition, investigations of key themes from his work on ontology, expression and politics, and the ongoing application of his thinking to such contemporary areas of interest as feminist theory, psychology and child development, environmental philosophy and cognitive science.

In a move that has puzzled commentators, Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am rejects claims for continuity between the human and the animal, aligning such claims with the ideology of “biologistic continuism.” This problematization of the logic of the human-animal limit holds implications for how we are to understand life in relation to auto-affection, immanence in relation to transcendence, and naturalism in relation to phenomenology. Derrida's abyssal logic parallels the “strange kinship” described by Merleau-Ponty, though only if this strangeness is intensified as “hetero-affection” by incorporating death into life. Following Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, we locate the creative moment of this abyssal intimacy in the transformative productions of sexual difference. This positive account of the excess of hetero-affection reconciles phenomenology with evolution and offers a figure for thinking the thickening and multiplying of the differences between human and non-human, living and nonliving, corporeal and cosmic

David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World convincingly demonstrates the contribution that phenomenology, especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can make to environmental theory. But Abram’s account suffers from several limitations that are explored here. First, although Abram intends to develop an “organic” account of thinking as grounded in the sensible world, his descriptions castigate reflection and reverse, rather than rethinking, the traditional hierarchy between mind and body. Second, Abram’s emphasis on perceptual reciprocity as the basis for an environmental ethic underplays the importance of the symbolic level of our interaction with others. Merleau-Ponty’s later work, in particular his account of the reversibility of flesh, offers a fruitful alternative to Abram’s methodology.

Anglo-American and Continental accounts of interpretive practice, as developed by David Henderson and Hans-Georg Gadamer agree on interpretation's holistic character and on the necessity of a charitable initial stage of interpretation which provides a background for later disagreements or attributions of irrationality. The divergence of these accounts regarding the weighting of charitable expectations and whether interpretation aims for explicability or agreement raises questions concerning the interpreter's relation to theoretical generalizations applied in the charity stage and how interpretive practice is to be understood in cases where the subject's view entails revision of the view of the interpreter.

Western philosophy and culture have often posited a structural homology between music and nature. In a contemporary version of this association, deep ecologist Arne Naess proposes that the basic units of reality are hierarchically nested gestalts of a fundamentally relational character. I argue that Naess’s gestalt model fails to account for non-holistic or non-sensical experiences and for creative change in nature. I then suggest the concept of the “refrain”developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the basis for an alternative musical model of nature that avoids these limitations.

Véronique Fóti’s Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how the problem of expression motivates and unifies Merleau-Ponty’s investigations of art, life, nature, and ontology, culminating in a timely conception of nature as a differential expressive matrix. The key to this expressive ontology is diacritical difference. We raise three questions for this diacritical ontology: how it embodies the memory of the world, how it is interrupted by transcendence, and how it dissolves into elementality. Our inquiry points towards a diacritics of the inexpressible.

The first reader to offer a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, this selection collects in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical twentieth-century philosopher’s thought. Arranged chronologically, the essays are grouped in three sections corresponding to the major periods of Merleau-Ponty’s work: First, the years prior to his appointment to the Sorbonne in 1949, the early, existentialist period during which he wrote important works on the phenomenology of perception and the primacy of perception; second, the years of his work as professor of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne, a period especially concerned with language; and finally, his years as chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France, a time devoted to the articulation of a new ontology and philosophy of nature. The editors, who provide an interpretive introduction, also include previously unpublished working notes found in Merleau-Ponty’s papers after his death. Translations of all selections have been updated and several appear here in English for the first time. By contextualizing Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of art and politics within the overall development of his thought, this volume allows readers to see both the breadth of his contribution to twentieth-century philosophy and the convergence of the various strands of his reflection