A review of Reading Merleau-Ponty: On the Phenomenology of Perception

This excellent volume contains most of the papers read at an Anglo-French colloquium on Merleau-Ponty held at the Collège de France in the summer of 2005, plus two additional essays (by Sean Kelly and Mark Wrathall) not presented there. The colloquium itself may have been Anglo-French, but the authors are overwhelmingly Anglo. The book is neither an introduction for beginners wholly unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty’s thought nor an academic exercise exclusively for specialists. Instead, the collection offers an engaging mixture of textual interpretation and critical argument to those who already have at least a rough sense of what Phenomenology of Perception is all about.

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Description of Rethinking Facticity, eds, Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson

The concept of facticity has undergone crucial transformations over the last century in hermeneutics and phenomenology, but it has not yet received the attention that it warrants. Following a suggestion by Merleau-Ponty that philosophy is not about essences but rather the facticity of existence, prominent philosophers examine the significance of facticity in its historical context and reflect on its contemporary relevance. Focusing on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, and Fanon, among others, they trace its significance from life-philosophy to contemporary European thought and explore its philosophical implications. The following questions are addressed: What thoughts of experience, of subjectivity, of finitude, of nature, of the body, of racial and sexual difference does facticity provoke? What thinking of language, of history, of birth and death, of our ethical being-in-the-world does it mobilize? Exploring these questions, the contributors offer new interpretations of facticity.

See the publisher’s site for more details, such as the table of contents and the pdf of the introduction.

Derrida’s Dissemination.
Merleau-Ponty’s Le visible and l’invisible
And some Wittgenstein and Jean-Luc Nancy

Click here for part two

MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND RUDOLF CARNAP: RADICAL PHENOMENOLOGY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, AND THE ROOTS OF THE CONTINENTAL/ANALYTIC DIVIDE — James Luchte. Philosophy

REPRESENTATION AND POIESIS: THE IMAGINATION IN THE LATER HEIDEGGER — John W M Krummel
           
HEIDEGGER'S ETYMOLOGICAL METHOD: DISCOVERING BEING BY RECOVERING THE RICHNESS OF THE WORD — Matthew King

THOUGHTS IN POTENTIALITY: PROVISIONAL REFLECTIONS ON AGAMBEN'S UNDERSTANDING OF POTENTIALITY AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR THEOLOGY AND POLITICS — Alberto Bertozzi.       

A CRITIQUE OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR'S EXISTENTIAL ETHICS — Matthew Braddock

TWO NOTIONS OF OBJECTIFICATION — Iddo Landau.

COMMITTED PERCEPTION: MERLEAU-PONTY, CARROLL, AND IRANIAN CINEMA — Farhang Erfani

ON GIVING HEGEL HIS DUE: THE "END OF HISTORY" AND THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF POSTMODERN THOUGHT — Jere O'Neill Surber

INNOCENCE, PERVERSION, AND ABU GHRAIB — Kelly Oliver

"OURS IS NOT A TERRIBLE SITUATION" — Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley

The 33rd Annual Conference of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, marking the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, will take place at Ryerson University, Toronto, September 18—20, 2008. The topic is “Time, Memory and the Self: Remembering Merleau-Ponty at 100.” Keynote speakers are Bernhard Waldenfels, Edward S. Casey, and Elizabeth Behnke.

In addition to papers on the topics of time, memory and the self, we would be interested in papers, appropriate to this centenary occasion, that critically appraise Merleau-Ponty’s significance or reception in various areas of philosophy or related disciplines. But papers on any area of current research in Merleau-Ponty studies will also be considered for inclusion in the program. We may also consider including one or two panels, appropriate to the centenary occasion, geared to critical appraisal of Merleau-Ponty’s significance or reception.

Papers: Submit completed papers (maximum 4,000 words/30 minutes reading time) with 100-150 word abstracts. The conference features the annual M. C. Dillon Memorial Lecture, an honor and monetary award for the best graduate student submission. Graduate students who wish to be considered for the Dillon award should indicate this in their cover letter.

Panel proposals: Submit a panel title, a proposal of 500 words for the panel as a whole, and, for each paper in the panel, either a) a complete paper or b) long abstract (minimum 750 words) and CV of the participant. Also include a short (100-150 word) abstract for each paper in the panel. Panels would be scheduled for 90 minute slots, with either two 30 minute papers, three 20 minute papers, or four 15 minute papers.

Submit materials to the address below. Submissions by email attachment (in RTF or PDF) are preferred. Hardcopy must be submitted in triplicate.

Deadline for submissions: March 17th 2008

Kym Maclaren and David Morris
Merleau-Ponty Circle Conference
Department of Philosophy, Ryerson University
350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario
CANADA M5B 2K3
mpc2008@trentu.ca

Further information & updates: www.trentu.ca/philosophy/mpc2008

Kevin Winters points out that Sean Kelley is working on a new translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The “Preface: is out on his blog. Here is the link.

Cross X Forum has posted some etexts: Derrida’s Ear of the Other, MP’s Phenomenology of Perception, and Deleuze’s Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities.

I have not checked them out but the poster on the forum warns that they are large files. Update: I am told that this is not the newest edition of the Phenomenology of Perception.

Russ Ford reviews Len Lawler’s Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question

This is not merely a good book, it is a necessary one, for the following reasons. First, it provides a detailed and persuasive account of the connection between the French philosophy of the 1960s and the phenomenological tradition that begins with Husserl and continues in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Second, in making this connection clear Lawlor is able to argue that rather than constituting a confusion or abandonment of the philosophical tradition, the philosophies of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, when read against the backdrop of Merleau-Ponty, constitute new trajectories for what appears as the decisive problem of twentieth-century philosophy: the question of the transcendental reduction. Third, the identification of the reduction as a question fosters a recognition of the necessity of the change in style that so strongly characterizes postwar French philosophy. This is a change demanded by the transformation of the question of a proper description of the phenomenological reduction into a questioning of the very philosophical program that generates such a question. Thus, Lawlor’s book argues pointedly for the necessity of an engagement with the work of the French philosophers of the sixties insofar as they constitute not an exception to but a furthering of the philosophical project of classical phenomenology.

The crux of Lawlor’s argument is the centrality of the phenomenological reduction for the direction of philosophical inquiry in the twentieth century. As formulated by Husserl in Ideas I, the phenomenological reduction, or epoche, is a methodological step that exposes transcendental subjectivity in the midst of the immanent world that it grounds. Heidegger’s ontology, insofar as it can be read as a development and enrichment of Husserl’s phenomenology, implicitly challenges the latter insofar as it presents the interrelationship of subjectivity and the world as a question. The subtitle of Lawlor’s book indicates the importance that Heidegger’s questioning ontology has for the French philosophers of the sixties, as well as the peculiar “refraction” that occurs through the work of Eugen Fink and Merleau-Ponty. Fink’s 1939 essay on Husserl—a pivotal essay for Lawlor, both in this book and in his Derrida and Husserl—contests the purity of the transcendental subjectivity exposed by the reduction and simultaneously emphasizes the impossibility of merely asserting an unproblematic correspondence between this subjectivity and the world (and even its worldly self, as Lawlor emphasizes in his discussion of the conception of the unconscious and its impact on classical phenomenology in the second of the essays in his book, “The Chiasm and the Fold”). Along with the work of Heidegger and Fink, Merleau-Ponty’s later ontological work is read by Lawlor as the persistence of the phenomenological breakthrough that followed the formulation of the reduction as the pervading question of twentieth-century philosophy. “The Being of the Question” that provides the subtitle for Lawlor’s book is the reduction conceived as a problematic dissimilarity between pure subjectivity and the world, and it is this dissimilarity, “figured” in Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, that provides what Lawlor calls the “point of diffraction” for the philosophies of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault.

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