Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World

Author: Galen A. Johnson

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0823288145

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Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. 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.” Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or “figuratives” 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.


The Rhythm of Thought

The Rhythm of Thought

Author: Jessica Wiskus

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-03-05

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 022627425X

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Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.


The Prose of the World

The Prose of the World

Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780810106154

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The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.


Phenomenology of Perception

Phenomenology of Perception

Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 9788120813465

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Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and


Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception

Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception

Author: Duane H. Davis

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1438459599

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Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.


Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Author: Glen A. Mazis

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2016-09-21

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 143846231X

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Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas.


Philosophy and Poetry

Philosophy and Poetry

Author: Ranjan Ghosh

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0231547242

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Ever since Plato’s Socrates exiled the poets from the ideal city in The Republic, Western thought has insisted on a strict demarcation between philosophy and poetry. Yet might their long-standing quarrel hide deeper affinities? This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry. In wide-ranging reflections on thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, distinguished contributors consider how different philosophers encountered the force and intensity of poetry and the negotiations that took place as they sought resolutions of the quarrel. Instead of a clash between competing worldviews, they figured the relationship between philosophy and poetry as one of productive mutuality, leading toward new modes of thinking and understanding. Spanning a range of issues with nuance and rigor, this compelling and comprehensive book opens new possibilities for philosophical poetry and the poetics of philosophy.


Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World

Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World

Author: Dorothea Olkowski

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1999-09-02

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1438415028

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This book demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the continuity of inner and psychological life (interiority) and the material world (exteriority) has broad implications for philosophy, the physical and human sciences, and health studies. By taking the phenomenon of the body out of the dualistic constraints of interior and exterior, idealism and empiricism, Merleau-Ponty shows us the possibility of a fresh vantage point for future research and therapeutic application, linking philosophy more closely to the study of nature, the psyche, and social phenomena. Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World is proof of the power and creative energy of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Contributors include Edward S. Casey; Helen A. Fielding; Elizabeth Grosz; Lawrence Hass; Galen A. Johnson; Nobuo Kazashi; Alphonso Lingis; Glen A. Mazis; James Morley; Dorothea Olkowski; David E. Pettigrew; James Phillips; Michael B. Smith; Gail Weiss; and Wilhelm S. Wurtzer.


Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty

Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty

Author: Galen A. Johnson

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13:

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McAllestar (computer science, MIT) describes ONTIC, the interactive system for verifying represents a significant change of direction in the field of mechanical deduction, a key area in computer science and artificial intelligence. Fourteen interrelated essays comprise a multifaceted dialogue about intersubjectivity, reciprocity, and the nature of self and other, especially as these themes are developed in Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the invisible. The question they explore is whether the reversible alterity of sensing and being sensed, a theme at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's thought, is sufficient for understanding the alterity of other persons and of nature. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


The Ecstatic Quotidian

The Ecstatic Quotidian

Author: Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0271045833

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Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.