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. (shrink)

This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuze's notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ parallel Bakhtin's idea of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’. Clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin leads directly to the second of my two other goals. I will argue (...) that an important difference in their characterisation of voice reveals a strong point in Deleuze's philosophy, one related to the political sphere. At the same time, however, Deleuze's particular way of articulating this point conceals a weakness, one related to the idea of the subject. I will conclude my paper by suggesting a way to address this weakness. (shrink)

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel draws out the interdependency of unity and difference. In order to have a unity, there must be differences that compose it, as a unity unifies different elements. At the same time, in unifying these elements, they must not cease to be different from one another, as that would reduce the unity to a simple singularity.In this paper, I take up this interdependency of unity and difference, applying it to gender identities. I follow the psychoanalytically (...) oriented exchange between Judith Butler and Adam Phillips, in which they agree that gender identities are a farce, superimposed upon ungendered subjects, but disagree about the extent to which this artificial binary should be disassembled. Picking up their conversation at this point, I investigate how binary systems of identity can be both injurious and useful. Should they be cast off or does it make sense to keep them? Following this vein of thought, I end with a discussion of good and bad hate, arguing that there is an inescapable need for psychologically productive hate neutralized through empathy. (shrink)

This chapter explores the personal and professional obstacles faced by Humanities and Social Science scholars contemplating pre-publication of their scholarly work in an on-line network. Borrowing a theoretical framework from the radical educational theorist Ivan Illich, it also develops the idea that pre-publication networks offer higher education a bottom-up, decentralized alternative to business-modeled e-learning. If learners would only embrace this more anarchical medium, appreciating writing for pre-publication as a process of open-ended discovery rather than product delivery, then the prospect of (...) deinstitutionalizing e-learning could become an exciting new reality. The chapter’s methodology is a combination of normative-theoretical analysis and small sample (n=2) case study based on the author’s personal and professional experiences. While the generalizability (or external validity) of the conclusions is limited, the author hopes to motivate further inquiry into the connection between on-line pre-publication and e-learning. (shrink)