Abstract

In a posthumously published prospectus of his work, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty made the claim that a closer investigation into the phenomenon of expression would yield the principle of an ethics. That investigation never took place. Merleau-Ponty's premature death in 1961 precluded him from the task of fully developing this thought, and to date no thinker has articulated a truly phenomenological account of ethics. My dissertation, entitled "Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Expression" is an attempt to articulate this ethical principle for which Merleau-Ponty could only make a gesture, and to offer it as an alternative to the contemporary poststructural claim for the "impossibility of ethics." ;Articulating an ethical principle requires both a prescriptive element , and a foundation or ground from which to deploy that element. Ethics are "impossible" for poststructural thinkers because poststructuralism is essentially anti-foundational, i.e., it is a critique that claims to demonstrate the wholesale impossibility of philosophical grounds. Thus for the poststructural thinker, insofar as ethical principles require a ground to assert their efficacy, they too must be impossible. ;Developing of an ethical principle based on Merleau-Ponty's notion of expression challenges the assertion of the "impossibility of ethics," because the ontology from which it emerges reshapes the notion of ground. Through the articulation of such ideas as the reversibility thesis, the concept of the flesh of the world, and ecart, I argue that the kind of phenomenological ground Merleau-Ponty offers as the foundation in an ethical principle of expression allows him to effectively refute the poststructural claim for the impossibility of ethics, and in doing so, re-invigorate ethics both as a theoretical discipline and as a lived experience