Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen A. Johnson ◽  
Mauro Carbone ◽  
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Francis Ponge ◽  
Claude Simon ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
André Breton ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Apparatus ◽  
The Invisible

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. xx-15
Author(s):  
Galen A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Francis Ponge ◽  
Claude Simon ◽  
Paul Claudel ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
The World

Merleau-Ponty’s profound engagement with literary writers is readily apparent: Proust and Valéry, also Stendhal, Paul Claudel, Claude Simon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Balzac, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France as well as the course of 1953–54 all address questions of expression and literary language: The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Research on the Literary Usage of Language, and The Problem of Speech. Recent transcription and publication of these new resources lend urgency to this project. Our use of the term “poet” includes literary authors in general, be they novelists or “poets” in the narrower sense, and our focus is on the writers of “modernity” or “modernism.” The meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics opens with reflections on philosophy of language in sharp contrast with Sartre’s What is Literature? It studies four paradoxes of literary expression: the paradox of the true and the imaginary, of speech and silence, of the subjective (the most secret) and the objective, and of the relation of the author and the person who lives. These are the “surprises,” the “traps,” that make literature appear as a problem to itself and cause the writer himself or herself to ask: “what is literature?”

“The Proustian Corporeity” and “The True Hawthorns”

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-30
Author(s):  
Mauro Carbone
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Involuntary Memory ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
The Invisible

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty famously wrote: “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible.” To gain a fresh and original access to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Proust, this chapter places his views alongside those of another of Proust’s great interpreters, Walter Benjamin. In spite of the absence of explicit references to Benjamin in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, certain intersections are clear. For one thing, we find the originating importance of Husserl for Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin. Though they make reference to very distant periods of Husserlian thought, they share at least a distrust with regard to experience understood as Erlebnis. Second, they each give attention to the theme of essence and ideas, which, concerning artistic and literary works, are considered by the two thinkers as immanent within the works themselves. This suggests one of the most important contributions of Proust to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the concept of “sensible ideas.” Third, both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin demonstrate their common interest in perception and memory, sometimes focusing on the very same pages of Recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] to deepen, through the character of Marcel, the concept of “involuntary memory.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Philosophy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Froman ◽  
Meirav Almog
Keyword(s):  
Editorial Board Member ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Phenomenology Of Perception ◽  
The World ◽  
Gestural Analysis ◽  
The Invisible

Merleau-Ponty (b. 1908–d. 1961) was a major 20th-century French philosopher and contributor to phenomenology. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, received the aggrégation in philosophy in 1930 and the Docteur ès lettres in 1945. After early teaching largely in psychology, culminating with a Sorbonne appointment as professor of child psychology and pedagogy, he was elected in 1952 to the Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, as the youngest philosopher ever in this position, which he held until his death. His inaugural lecture was published as Éloge de la philosophie (In Praise of Philosophy). In 1945, Merleau-Ponty became, along with Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a founding editorial board member as well as political editor of Les temps modernes, a journal devoted to “la philosophie engagée.” In 1953 he resigned from the journal. After the Korean conflict, Merleau-Ponty’s political difference with Sartre was acute, and in Les aventures de la dialectique (Adventures of the Dialectic) Merleau-Ponty characterizes Sartre’s position as “ultra-bolshevism.” Eventually, Merleau-Ponty would relinquish Marxist tenets. Merleau-Ponty’s first book, La structure du comportement (The Structure of Behavior), from 1942, is largely a critique of behavioral psychology as lacking a-propos, his stated goal, understanding the relation between nature and consciousness. His second and major completed book is La phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception). In this work Merleau-Ponty undermines classical theories of perception, which rely on “sense data”; introduces his understanding of the “lived body”; accentuates Husserl’s remark that consciousness is initially a matter of an “I can,” not an “I think”; and introduces a gestural analysis of language. While affirming Eugen Fink’s observation that there is no total “reduction” phenomenologically, Merleau-Ponty proceeds under the “epochē,” nonetheless. When he died, Merleau-Ponty was writing what would have been a book of major proportions. The material that he completed was posthumously published as Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible), a title from working notes that were published with it. Critical discussions of reflective philosophy, dialectic, and intuition precede a decidedly ontological project involving: “la chair” (the “flesh”), successor to Phenomenology of Perception’s “lived body,” through which “I live the world”; “reversibility,” the perceptual dynamic operative in our habitation of the world; and “the chiasm” or “intertwining” of different contexts, such as vision and motility. L’oeil et l’esprit (Eye and Mind), intended for inclusion in The Visible and the Invisible but published separately, addresses exploration of these factors in painting.

From the World of Silence to Poetic Language

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-99
Author(s):  
Galen A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Francis Ponge ◽  
Paul Valery ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
Personal Crisis ◽  
The World ◽  
Paul Valéry ◽  
Work And Life ◽  
The Invisible

This chapter makes explicit the influence of Valéry whose poem La Pythie [The Pythoness] is quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the penultimate sentence of The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty discussed the work and life of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) for the entire first half of the first course of 1953, Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. After early poetic successes, Valéry experienced a deep personal crisis that led him to impose a silence upon himself, which lasted for a period of twenty-five years from 1892 until 1917, after which he emerged reborn as a writer. Merleau-Ponty recognizes the power of silence to nourish both poetic and philosophical language in relation to three orders or dimensions: “the horizon of the visible, the horizon of the nameable, and the horizon of the thinkable.” The notions of the “chiasma of two destinies” and the “implex of words” derive directly from Valéry, who leads on to Mallarmé and Baudelaire together with Edgar Allan Poe, as well as to Francis Ponge, who captured this overlapping exchange among the dimensions of Being in Taking the Side of Things [Le parti pris des choses].

A Poetics of Co-Naissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-67
Author(s):  
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
Claude Simon ◽  
Work Site ◽  
Paul Claudel ◽  
André Breton ◽  
The Invisible

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon allows us to shed some light on the relations between Being and Flesh in his philosophy, as well as how these relations promise a genuine poetic art. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh (poetic of the body and desire), a poetic of mystery (which is not primarily what is hidden, but what expresses itself inexhaustibly), and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. These three dimensions touch respectively on the overdetermination Merleau-Ponty gives to the questions of desire, expression, and perception—and are deployed in their corresponding horizons, the first more anthropological, the next more epistemological, and the last more ontological. The bold and broad inspiration that Merleau-Ponty finds in André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon is a particularly rich leading thread in the exploration of this poetic, which plunges us into the heart of the unfinished work site of the philosopher’s last manuscripts, some of which are not yet published.

Everyday Catastrophes: Gender, Labour and Power in Beckett's Theatre

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Trish McTighe
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Gender Boundaries ◽  
The Invisible ◽  
Making Art

In an era of public consciousness about gendered inequalities in the world of work, as well as recent revelations of sexual harassment and abuse in theatre and film production, Beckett's Catastrophe (1982) bears striking resonances. This article will suggest that, through the figure of its Assistant, the play stages the gendered nature of the labour of making art, and, in her actions, shows the kind of complicit disgust familiar to many who work in the entertainment industry, especially women. In unpacking this idea, I conceptualise the distinction between the everyday and ‘the event’, as in, between modes of quotidian labour and the attention-grabbing moment of art, between the invisible foundations of representation and the spectacle of that representation. It is my thesis that this play stages exactly this tension and that deploying a discourse of maintenance art allows the play to be read in the context of the labour of theatre-making. Highlighting the Assistant's labour becomes a way of making visible the structures of authority that are invested in maintaining gender boundaries and showing how art is too often complicit in the maintenance of social hierarchies.

Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Prime Elements ◽  
Cultural Turn

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

Kenotic hospitality and the Eucharist: an alternative economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 000332862110288
Author(s):  
Shauna Kubossek
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
The Invisible ◽  
Sallie Mcfague ◽  
Alternative Economy

This essay discusses the Eucharist as an enactment of kenotic hospitality and the alternative economy of God. It explores kenosis and hospitality as important practices for Christians, and reflects on how they are linked and embodied in the sensuous experience of the Eucharist. I explore kenotic acts of self-limitation as an antidote to consumption, drawing upon the work of Sallie McFague. Balanced with an embodied understanding of mutuality, enactments of kenosis proclaim the abundance of God. Using the work of Christine D. Pohl, I explore the practice of hospitality as a mandate for Christians. Hospitality makes the invisible visible, and creates opportunity for connection and mutuality. The Eucharist, a liturgical expression of kenotic hospitality, engages participants in deep forms of connection to creation, to God, and to one another. I argue that kenosis and hospitality, in the light of the Eucharist, are illustrative of God’s alternative economy. As we engage the practices of limitation and hospitality that the Eucharist embodies, we are transformed by the abundance of God, for the sake of the world.

Page, Stage, Location

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-313
Author(s):  
David Damrosch
Keyword(s):  
Home Country ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Cinema

Abstract The growth of globalization has greatly expanded the exposure of writers and now filmmakers to the wider world beyond their home country or region, offering new opportunities to bring elements of the outside world into their works, and in turn to take their works out to distant audiences. This essay discusses the increasing presence of foreign cultures in the progression from the literary detail to the stage prop and then the movie location, and then focuses on three films based on literary works, films that display the growing presence of the world in contemporary cinema and of the films in the world.

Some Thoughts About Genre in Old Javanese Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter John Worsley
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Work

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.

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