This article suggests that a parallel exists between the practice of tattooing and the injection of heroin as both activities are represented in a body of literature here called `Junk Narratives'. These texts include William Burroughs' Junky, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In these books, act and meaning, as in life, are inseparable: tattoos can be interpreted, but that they are tattoos, that they have been indelibly inscribed into the flesh, is also (...) stressed. In these books tattoos are represented as, in addition to whatever specific interpretive significance can be attached to them, visible markers of the hatred junkies feel for their own bodies. It will be suggested throughout the article that the body in these texts is always a source of shame and horror. Tattoos in these books do not decorate a body, rather they visibly emphasize its pathetic corporeality: no flesh, no image. The central dynamic of these texts is toward the transcendence of the body by the injection of heroin, a use of the needle which mimics the practice of tattooing and stresses the subservient, inessential nature of the body. (shrink)

This paper attempts to draw out the political import of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, by engaging the critique levelled against it by his student and literary executor Claude Lefort. In suggesting a tension in Merleau-Ponty’s work that obscures alterity, Lefort seems to miss the rich political import of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. Founded in his development of the concepts of écart and reversibility, Merleau-Ponty’s ontological position breaks with many of the standard tenets of political thinking, and offers a (...) multifaceted conception of alterity. I will suggest that Lefort’s own claim to alterity buckles under the immanent weight of his critique of Merleau-Ponty, offering at best a conception of otherness limited to a self-relational non-identity. This conception ultimately fails to adequately consider the relations existing between different beings-in-the-world. In thinking being as flesh, Merleau-Ponty offers us an ethico-political optic that attempts to think alterity and ontology in a manner that unhinges us from our closed and autonomous being, opening us to the world, others and to the non-identical becoming that characterizes being as such. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings (...) of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers. (shrink)

This article takes up the call of feminist thinkers to reconsider the importance of the utopian. I offer a view of the utopian that is situated, critical, and relevant to transformative politics, a view that is structured by embodiment. To this end, I consider some epistemological and ontological connections of situated utopian thinking that enable us to think the utopian differently. Finally, I argue that this view of the utopian can be found in the political efforts of “integrative feminisms.”.

: This article takes up the call of feminist thinkers to reconsider the importance of the utopian. I offer a view of the utopian that is situated, critical, and relevant to transformative politics, a view that is structured by embodiment. To this end, I consider some epistemological and ontological connections of situated utopian thinking that enable us to think the utopian differently. Finally, I argue that this view of the utopian can be found in the political efforts of "integrative feminisms.".

This essay takes up the claim made recently by Simon Critchley in The Companion to Continental Philosophy that a feature common to many philosophers in the Continental tradition is the utopian demand that things be otherwise. The general question I pursue has to do with whether or not such a claim includes movements within Continental philosophy that do not self-identify with the utopian (like critical theory). The particular question has to do with whether or not the movement of phenomenology is (...) utopian or does it, because of its other commitments, view the utopian as the antithesis to its orientation, which makes that claim that phenomenology is utopian seem strange. My thesis is that phenomenology can be seen as a utopian tradition but that some account must be given that demonstrates this connection to the utopian. In particular, I argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty''s phenomenology provides an understanding of the utopian, which I call a non-conventional view, that is vastly different from the one assumed by most when they see or hear the word utopian, which I label conventional. I show that such a non-conventional understanding can be developed in a way that neither requires us to view the utopian solely as opposed to finitude and contingency, nor a form of thought and action from which we necessarily need to dissociate ourselves. It is this non-conventional view of the utopian that in the end enables us to understand how Continental philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular are important bearers of the utopian demand that things be otherwise. (shrink)

In Jan Patočka’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity one can find clear influences of Merleau-Ponty. By both philosophers intersubjectivity is seen as a form of reversibility that has a primacy above personal subjectivity. But Patočka adds to this idea of reversibility the notion of surrender or dedication. In this article it is demonstrated how Patočka’s conception on surrender is developed in his idea of the three movements of human existence. Moreover, the understanding of intersubjectivity through surrender is presented as an important step (...) towards an answer to several points of critique on Merleau-Ponty’s views on intersubjectivity, that were brought to the fore by Claude Lefort. Finally, in this article several aspects of surrender are distinguished in order to give more insight in the functioning and effects of the third movement of human life. (shrink)