Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference as the primary difference arises out of a phenomenological perception of nature. Drawing on Heidegger's insights into physis, she begins with his critique of the nature/culture binary. Both philosophers maintain that nature is not matter to be ordered by technical know-how; yet Irigaray reveals that although Heidegger distinguishes physis from techn in his work, his forgetting of the potentiality of matter, the maternal-feminine, and the two-fold essence of being as sexual difference means that his own (...) concept of physis can be understood as another techn. Focussing in particular upon Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle's privileging of morphé over hylé as a description of presencing into appearance, I show that for Irigaray the movements of presencing and absencing emerge out of a metaphysics that does not take into account the fluidity, the mixtures and interpenetrations of a nature that is limited by fecundity not by death. Our oblivion to nature is the greatest danger, and thus attending to our embodied and hence sexuate nature holds the promise of a new age, since it is rooted in the possibilities of the flesh revealed through the cultivated perception of sexual difference. (shrink)

"Disillusioned with life as a literary publicist in London, as well as with her hotshot, unevolved TV presenter boyfriend, Rosie Richardson chucks the glitz and escapes to run a refugee camp in the African desert. When famine strikes and a massive refugee influx threatens to overwhelm the camp... Richardson returns to London to organize a star-studded and risky emergency appeal."--Front jacket.

While poststructuralist feminist theorists have clarified our understanding of the gendered subject as produced through a matrix of language, culture, and psycho-sexual affects, they have found agency difficult to ground. I argue that this is because in these theories the body has served primarily as an inscribed surface. In response to this surface body, particular to this age, I have turned to Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth which allows us to theorize the agency crucial to feminist politics. While the poststructuralists' rejection (...) of depth is largely due to its roots in Cartesian rationality, depth is much more than this. Rather than allowing for the impossibility of political action, depth means that as bodily moving and acting subjects we are part of Being, and thus part of the questions raised in this age, even if it is a mark of this age that this tends to be forgotten. (shrink)

What are the ethical, political and cultural consequences of forgetting how to trust our senses? How can artworks help us see, sense, think, and interact in ways that are outside of the systems of convention and order that frame so much of our lives? In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Helen Fielding challenges us to think alongside and according to artworks, cultivating a perception of what is really there and being expressed by them. Drawing from and expanding on the work of (...) philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fielding urges us to trust our senses and engage relationally with works of art in the here and now rather than distancing and systematizing them as aesthetic objects. Cultivating Perception through Artworks examines examples as diverse as a Rembrandt painting, M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry, and Louise Bourgeois' public sculpture, to demonstrate how artworks enact ethics, politics, or culture. By engaging with different art forms and discovering the unique way that each opens us to the world in a new and unexpected ways, Fielding reveals the importance of our moral, political, and cultural lives. (shrink)

Fielding discusses how Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty view spatial and temporal bodies. Foucault dismisses the understanding of an inside soul surrounded by a body.

Fielding discusses how Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty view spatial and temporal bodies. Foucault dismisses the understanding of an inside soul surrounded by a body.

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of their field and chart its political and ethical course in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the (...) female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Arendt are evident and reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this work represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research. (shrink)

This paper considers the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan in terms of vision and intersubjectivity.

The western philosophical tradition, with its focus on universal concepts and a presumed neuter, but ultimately male subject, has only relatively recently become open to the question of alterity, in particular the alterity of woman as the other of man. The essays of this volume reflect in particular on the ethical implications of taking the feminine other into account. This necessitates a rethinking of the implicit structures of Western philosophy which continue to exclude women as subjects who contribute to the (...) conceptualization of world and society. This volume, which gives voice to women philosophers, is a contribution to that task. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 134-135 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 'The Visible and the Invisible Douglas Low. Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 'The Visible and the Invisible.' Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 124. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $19.95. Low sets himself an impossible task, that of completing the (...) uncompleted work of a philosopher whose untimely decease prevented him from doing so himself. What he does succeed in providing is a systematic commentary and a rich integration of Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy. This task itself is important since it is believed by many that Merleau-Ponty's premature death prevented the completion of a book that would have altered the philosophical scene of Paris in the 1960s, and that, moreover, even in its incomplete form, speaks to pressing contemporary philosophical debates on such issues as mind/body dualism, and our relation to nature.The main focus of Low's reading is Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language, which Low appropriately situates as a mediation between a modernist philosophy of presence and a postmodern Derridean approach to language as the constant deferral of meaning. Language is not the repository for ideal essences, nor do existents have an immediate [End Page 134] coincidence or fusion with things or the world. Indeed, the strength of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is that he begins with an understanding of human action as meaningfully orientated; to move in the world is to interpretatively encounter it. As Low points out, "an ontological priority [is] granted to the body and the world upon which it opens, for together in lived experience they sustain a field of stable meanings, meanings that are then sublimated in the bodily gesture called speech" (22). Low differs from most Merleau-Ponty scholars in his assumption that there is no significant break between the earlier Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty carefully worked out his descriptions of embodied perception, and the later work that lays out the ontology. Indeed, one accomplishment of Low's book is to show how they fit together, explaining how the insights of the first work are necessary for grounding the ontology Merleau-Ponty began to work out in the later one.Low's book is divided into two sections. The first section, "The Visible and Nature," focuses on how we encounter the world, concluding with a helpful summary and assessment of Merleau-Ponty's ontology. Drawing upon the late essay "Eye and Mind," Low lays out Merleau-Ponty's ontology through his intuition that modern art, unlike the representational focus of Renaissance art, reveals our contact with the world as a "system of exchanges between the sensing and the sensible" (56). Perceiving the artwork is not an intellectual computation of a second-order representation of the world; rather, we see according to the work. It is a bodily process that reveals a reversibility between the viewer and the world. The second section, "The Invisible and Logos," focuses on how these encounters are sublimated or taken up in language. Language is, for Merleau-Ponty, first speech since it relies upon a speaker to take it up, "to sustain and modify it." Signs, gestures, and meaning are folded into one another. As embodied beings, we literally grasp meaning (89).This book would be of enormous benefit to scholars embarking on a reading of Merleau-Ponty's works, and it is one I highly recommend for that purpose. Although it is not original in its interpretations, its value lies in its gathering and integration of complex themes that provide an important introduction to Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy. The book maps out, moreover, a chronology of these themes and the specifics of where to find them; it also shows how the fragments fit together, indicating directions in which they might lead. His writing style is accessible without being simplistic. By interweaving his interpretations with long quotes from... (shrink)