Yue Jennifer Wang

This paper engages in a comparative study between the vital materialism in the works of political theorist Jane Bennett (primarily, The Enchantment of Modern Life) and the ontology of flesh in the late works of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” “Eye and Mind”). There are striking echoes in their descriptions of the aesthetic experience of enchantment. I show how both thinkers reject philosophical accounts of form as extra-material. The reconfigured matter-form relationship in each onto-story leads to a phenomenology of enchantment with the world. The stakes of the latter are ethical and political for Bennett, who argues in The Enchantment of Modern Life that the mood of enchantment also applies to fetishized commodities and is necessary for more just social, political, and economic reconfigurations. Finally, I gesture towards a Merleau-Pontean intervention on this question through his analogy between works of art and commodities in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Can the ontology of flesh and its implicit theory of perception help us understand both commodity fetishism and enchantment? In reading Bennett and Merleau-Ponty alongside each other on the phenomenology of enchantment with worldly objects, my hope is to find grounds for drawing on the rich phenomenology of perception found in Merleau-Ponty’s late works as a resource for conversations around political aesthetics more broadly.

The experience of autism beginning in childhood has been described as one in which there is no cohesion to one’s body, no borders or limits. Instead, there is a porousness between oneself and the rest of material reality. At the same time, there appears to be a retreat within oneself. Such a retreat cannot, however, hold back the tide of exteriority that encroaches upon one’s body, even if the autistic person does not conceptualize a distance from the other. In this position, one cannot even fool oneself into believing in the semblance of a substantial subjectivity. The broad aim of this paper is to understand this specific conception of autistic experience, both from analytic observation and from the autistics' first-hand accounts, and then to explore phenomenological resources for an analog to that experience. The motivation of the latter aim is to determine whether the autistic experience is radically different from one that we consider that of normal subjectivity, or if it is somehow continuous with that experience. First, with these goals in mind, we will turn to the psychoanalytic literature on autism, drawing on the work of analysts from the Lacanian and Kleinian traditions, as well as on the work of neuroscientists. We will as well try to navigate out of the perilous waters of the current debate over the as yet undetermined cause of autism, whether environmental or genetic- neurobiological. Without trying to solve this debate, we will gesture toward a theoretical basis on which to ground the use of psychoanalysis in the treatment of autism; Lacan’s structure of psychosis and Francois Sauvagnat’s suggestion that autism and psychosis are continuous will guide that discussion. In order to transition to the section on phenomenology, we will turn from Lacan and try to connect the conclusions of his structural approach to the post-Kleinian analyst Thomas Ogden's claim that the autistic-contiguous position is synchronic with the other two positions. For both Lacan and Ogden, psychosis and autism respectively are not stages that one ideally grows out of never to return to again. Rather, they are pathological modes of a more universal human experience. This perspective suggests that there is not a radical break between autism and normality, and that idea is at the heart of this investigation. In the next section, we will turn to the multi- faceted thinker Julia Kristeva as a midpoint between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In particular, we will follow her suggestion that communication between the analyst-analysand, though the Kleinian phantasy, a kind of shared flesh between body, objects, the imaginary, acts and even words, can be better understood by paying attention to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of flesh. Her comments about the universality of a sensory cave prophetically anticipate Ogden's autistic- contiguous position and also allow us to transition to our final figure, Merleau-Ponty. We turn to Merleau-Ponty in order to excavate more deeply to reach some kind of ground of incarnation, enfleshment. His notion of the flesh and corporeal experience and the presentation of vision therein resonates deeply with the boundedness that is the final cause, as it were, of Ogden's autistic-contiguous position. While of course much, too much, could be said about the difference between these two modes of interrogating experience (the psychoanalytic and the phenomenological), my aim here is simply to voice the psychoanalytic insights into autism in phenomenological terms to perhaps bring into view an experience that speaks the unspoken world of the autistic, a foreignness with which we are all in some way familiar.

Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, early on, neglected music's theoretical value in favor of painting's. Later, however, he found that it is the transience of music that speaks to the phenomenological experience of Being. This transition from painting to music presents the possibility of an ontological understanding of music for psychoanalysis. For Freud, music and morality were both from a “beyond” that was an effect of neurosis. Drawing on psychoanalyst Bion's idea of container–contained, and his disciple Meltzer's application of this to art, as well as Bion's later innovation of the unknowable O, I apply Merleau-Ponty's distinction between painting and music to the therapeutic nature of art in order to see what sort of psychoanalytically significant revelation is obtained through music.

For Marx, capitalism’s division of labour between mental and mate-rial labour is the condition of possibility for the creation of its alien, out of control, and contradictory effects. This paper will analyze the proletarian class, the capitalist class, and the world market qua ef-fects of the division of labour. The division of labour conceptualized fundamentally as a dynamic division between activity and passivity informs the analysis of these contradictory effects. This conceptual-ization of the division of labour provides the framework for under-standing the striving toward activity and self-determination, de-scribed by Marx, of that which falls on the side of material labour.