Abstract

This essay offers a new understanding of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the Other, the problem that revolves around it, and its far-reaching repercussions by shedding light on aspects that usually go unnoticed in the interpretation of his late thought in these regards. I show how Merleau-Ponty's emerging ontology in his late writings opens anew, in a complex manner, the problem of the Other, transforming it in a way that dismantles, to begin with, traditional epistemological questions regarding the Other, as well as principal difficulties regarding the Other's appearance within the realm of phenomena which have occupied phenomenology from its very beginning. I demonstrate how Merleau-Ponty's late writings in fact bind the problem of the Other with the question regarding the very limits of phenomenology and the realm of meaning as a whole.