Image and ontology in Merleau-Ponty

Although better known for his phenomenology of perception and the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty’s writings also contain the outlines of a rich and unique account of the imagination and the imaginary. In this paper, I explicate the phenomenology of the image that Merleau-Ponty develops throughout his work. I show how Merleau-Ponty develops this account of the image in critical response to Sartre and in a way that follows from his own descriptions of what painters do when they paint and of what we experience when we look at their paintings. The investigation of the particular mode of being of images leads to a consideration of the body and Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology