Imitation and Individuation

A crucial feature of our individual biography is grounded in our common corporeal structure. Our life begins with a strong bodily intertwining that has an essential biographical and existential meaning. To elucidate this pre-egological form of connection between subjects, I refer to a peculiar form of sympathetical experience which precedes the intersubjective experience proper. From the genetic phenomenological point of view, sympathetical experience is characterized by a prereflective form of intentionality, which I describe as trans-bodily intentionality, as well as by fusional dynamics realised through a special kind of immediate corporeal fantasy. Focusing on the individuation processes of personal life, I show to which degree trans-bodily intentional dynamics result in the dissolution of the subject’s centricity or at least in its fluidification. Such a fluidification, moreover, should be systematically understood as a condition of possibility for the very process of becoming a Self. In my contribution, I discuss to which degree the corporeal phantasy plays a decisive rule in the creative process of becoming a Self.

The Anonymous Intentions of Transactional Bodies

This review offers a critical analysis of Shannon Sullivan's “feminist pragmatist standpoint theory” as a framework for thinking about issues of identity and truth. Sullivan claims that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on an anonymous or pre-personal quality to bodily experience commits him to a false universality and that his understanding of bodily intentionality traps him in a subjectivist philosophy that is incapable of doing justice to difference. She suggests that phenomenology in general is theoretically limited because of its alleged subjectivism and universalism, and she turns to Dewey's pragmatism to develop a “transactional model” of identity and truth. In response, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of anonymity and intentionality do not entail either subjectivism or a false universality. I also challenge Sullivan's conception of truth as transactional flourishing by appealing to the “terrible truths” of violence and oppression.