It is the contention of this paper that the Merleau-pontynian primacy of perception is compatible with the importance of the imagination and other dimensions of embodied existence. In spite of the fact that these dimensions have important differences, they spring from the same source: the lived body and its operative intentionality. I analyze their implications in the Merleaupontinian conception of the Flesh in order to apply his Phenomenology of the imagination to undertand the current iconic turn.

Drawing on phenomenological aesthetics and on the haptic aesthetics of eating as a form of everyday aesthetics, I examine the phenomenon of eating our own as meaningful in three dimensions: vital/natural, somatic/individual, and cross-cultural. Usually conceived as a concrete, rare, and foreign practice, I show how cannibalism is present in our daily lives, both symbolically and as a liminal possibility towards which – as Freud noticed in 1913 – we all tended as children. Cannibalism is present not only in cinematic, (...) literary, or visual art, and in anthropological research that situates it far from “us,” but through narratives and carnal dispositifs of differentiation/assimilation of the Same and the Other, fundamental for our subjective constitution. I conclude with a reflection on how the classical aesthetics of the sovereign subject develops towards alternative models like Pelluchon’s gourmet ego that re-establish the connexion and moral engagement lost by solipsism by means of alimentary metaphors, but also romanticizing them, failing to address the problem of voracity and overconsumption, both at a social and at an individual level. This is more suitably addressed by Viveiros de Castro’s idea of a cannibal cogito, but even better understood by Emmanuel Levinas’ enjoyment-contact model of subjectivity. (shrink)

Based on Merleau-Pontys’s philosophy of flesh, this paper outlines possibilities for organisational practices towards sustainability development. In order to elucidate these en-fleshed practices, the paper begins by presenting Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and perception as well as his ontology of ‘flesh’. In particular, flesh is interpreted as elemental ‘carnality’ and formative medium. As such, it is processed through sensual and reflexive doubling as a reversibility and chiasm of the sentient and the sensible. This understanding opens for the path (...) to a post-dualistic, transformative approach towards processes of post-dualistic ‘wild being and ‘inter-be(com)ing’ in organisations. These concepts of Flesh are related to affect and imagination as well as organization and sustainability. The paper then offers some practical and political as well as research implications and concludes with some final perspectives on possible enfleshed inter-practices of sustainability. (shrink)

Abstract The last two decades have witnessed a vast expansion in research and writing on the sociology of the body and on issues of embodiment. Indeed, both sociology in general and the sociology of sport specifically have well heeded the long-standing and vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to social theory. It seems particularly curious therefore that the sociology of sport has to-date addressed this primarily at a certain abstract, theoretical level, with relatively few accounts to be found (...) that are truly grounded in the corporeal realities of the lived sporting body; a ‘carnal sociology’ of sport, to borrow Crossley’s (1995) expression. To portray and understand more fully this kind of embodied perspective, it is argued, demands engaging with the phenomenology of the body, and this article seeks to contribute to a small but growing literature providing this particular form of ‘embodied’ analysis of the body in sport. Here we identify some useful intellectual resources for developing a phenomenology of sporting experience, specifically its sensory elements, and also subsequently examine the potential for its evocative portrayal and effective analysis via different kinds of textual forms. (shrink)

What is strange? Or better, who is strange? When do we encounter the strange? We encounter strangers when we are not at home: when we are in a foreign land or a foreign part of our own land. From Freud to Lacan to Kristeva to Heidegger, the feeling of strangeness--das Unheimlichkeit--has marked our encounter with the other, even the other within our self. Most philosophical attempts to understand the role of the Stranger, human or transcendent, have been limited to standard (...) epistemological problems of other minds, metaphysical substances, body/soul dualism and related issues of consciousness and cognition. This volume endeavors to take the question of hosting the stranger to the deeper level of embodied imagination and the senses. This volume plays host to a number of encounters with the strange. It asks such questions as: How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? How do we distinguish between projections of fear or fascination, leading to either violence or welcome? How do humans "sense" the dimension of the strange and alien in different religions, arts, and cultures? How do the five physical senses relate to the spiritual senses, especially the famous "sixth" sense, as portals to an encounter with the Other? Is there a carnal perception of alterity, which would operate at an affective, prereflective, preconscious level? What exactly do "embodied imaginaries" of hospitality and hostility entail, and how do they operate in language, psychology, and social interrelations? And what, finally, are the topical implications of these questions for an ethics and practice of tolerance and peace? (shrink)

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes (...) to Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the possibility of a dialogue between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and phenomenology, a dialogue concerning the problem of objects and relations. In the first part, the author shows what is interesting in OOO from a phenomenological perspective and why it should be considered as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The second part develops the phenomenological perspective of the author, a perspective based on Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal” phenomenology, as well as some suggestions coming from the (...) Italian school of Gaetano Kanizsa. The third part is dedicated to the objections of the author to the OOO view regarding the separation between objects and relations: a separation which leads to Harman’s quadruple object. In the concluding portion, the author shows that, despite evident differences between phenomenological and OOO’s views of relations, OOO offers new starting points for phenomenological reflections, thanks to its specific focus on objects and its pluralistic view of reality. (shrink)

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes (...) to Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin. (shrink)

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes (...) to Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin. (shrink)

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential-phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly (...) on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on some recent film- and feminist-theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts. (shrink)

This paper situates Einstein's theory of relativity within broader networks of communication. The speed of light, explained Einstein, was an unsurpassable velocity if , and only if , it was considered in terms of »arbitrary« and »voluntary« signals. Light signals in physics belong within a broader set of signs and symbols that include communication and military signals, understood by reference to Helmholtz, Saussure, media philosophies from WWII to '68 (Lavelle, Ong, McLuhan) and Derrida. Once light signals in physics are considered (...) in relation to semaphore, print, telegraph, radio, computers and tape recorders, Kittler and Habermas provide us with conflicting ways for understanding science and technology, rationality and consensus. We conclude with a study of »flash and bang« in popular accounts of relativity theory to understand the role of theoretical science in the transmission of information and violence. (shrink)

This paper explores the theme of torture in the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report, focusing on its characterization of torture as a way of annulling a person’s identity. Drawing on Jean Améry’s approach, I argue that torture destroys the victim’s world and explore the further implications of this assertion. I begin by highlighting how the history of torture distorts legal and medical practices, masquerading as a quest for truth while exercising a farce of power, disintegrating the victim’s lived body. By (...) delving into Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” I also explain how torture erodes the carnal trust that connects us to the world and enables proper communication. Consequently, torture results in an utter negation of the self and the world. In conclusion, I suggest that torture as understood as the destitution of a person’s world, can serve as a paradigm for comprehending the experiences of violence faced by victims in Colombia. (shrink)

Ortega y Gasset’s old lament that no one had so far attempted a rigorous phenomenology of pain no longer holds since the appearance of Christian Grüny’s recent monograph Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Grüny argues for the use of phenomenological categories from Merleau-Ponty in order to understand physical pain as a “blocked escape-movement” , concluding that corporeal suffering makes impossible both a clean distinction and a pure identification between the lived body and the physical body that I am. (...) In my paper, I would like to suggest some improvements to Grüny’s approach through the utilization of the category of self-affection, as the material phenomenology of Michel Henry has developed it. In addition to the radical immanence in which hyle, noesis, and noema are unified into a “carnal cogito,” however, I argue that it is necessary to describe the painful self-affection not only in terms of any sensitive excess whatever , as Grüny posits, but also in terms of a mutation of the sensitive excess into the intra-tactile sphere of sensibility. Thus I endorse the Husserlian insight that makes tactility the primordial structure of sensibility. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh of the world’ speaks to an embodied connection to the spaces we inhabit deeply, primally, elementally. Flesh suggests water and its circulations, air and its respirations, earth and its conformations, fire and its inspirations. Flesh speaks to our bodily relations with the elements of a more-than-human world. This paper explores the felt imperative to these relations where, as Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘all distance is traversed’ and wherein movement arises not specifically in the body, but in the nexus (...) and intertwining of bodily engagement with the world. There is a primacy to movement that registers in the living body in its carnal ties to the elements of the world’s flesh. The ‘radical reflection’ on the ‘flesh of the world’ to which this analysis aspires in turn bears upon the general field of gestural reciprocities and connections, providing the insight that intimate gestures of the flesh, such as the embrace, are primordial attunements, motions of rhythm and reciprocity, that emanate from the world in identification with it. The embrace is fundamentally, elementally, a gesture of landscape dwelling. A phenomenology of elemental motions provides the textual reminder that to be at home in various landscapes means to know what it is to be embraced corporeally, sensually, within the human and especially the more-than-human folds of the world. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the (...) world in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and (...) teleology are the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix. (shrink)

In her introduction to this collection, Tymieniecka presents her phenomenology of life - the leitmotif of the three-volume anniversary publication of Analecta Husserliana - as something that stands out from preceding historical attempts to investigate life in an 'integral' or 'scientific' way. After an incubation lasting throughout the 2000 years of Occidental philosophy, this scientific phenomenology/philosophy of life at last uncovers the entire area of the 'inner workings of Nature', exposing the way in which the 'sufficient reason' and (...) the 'ground' of beingness as such crystallise out of the 'onto poietic' process. This onto-poietic process, continuing as it does in the human creative condition, also reveals the authentic genius of the works of the human spirit. This new and original philosophy, free of fallacious simplifications, speculations and reductionism, opens up a basic starting point for all philosophy. Life, 'the theme of our times', at last receives a profound philosophical treatment. (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted (...) fantasy, and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s career is often seen as a progressive development: he begins by analyzing scientific consciousness in The Structure of Behavior, complements that account with a phenomenological analysis of behavior as lived in Phenomenology of Perception, and then overcomes the “philosophy of consciousness” to which the earlier texts are committed in the turn toward an ontology of flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. Through close readings of Merleau-Ponty’s engagements with Gestalt psychology in The Structure of Behavior, (...) I argue that the immanent critique of Gestalt theory in that text already anticipates the chiasmic logic of flesh. This challenges the idea of a turn in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I begin by outlining the elemental, carnal, and reversible status of flesh. With careful attention to his source materials, I then distinguish Merleau-Ponty’s appropriations of Gestalt theoretical insights from his critical adaptations, defending three claims: (1) The Structure of Behavior borrows insights from Gestalt theorists that are undermined by their own, realistic ontology; (2) it modifies those insights to explicitly acknowledge the elemental status of nature; and (3) those modifications enable Merleau-Ponty to re-interpret Gestalt psychologists’ empirical findings, outlining how consciousness must emerge from nature as both carnal and reversible. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray has devoted considerable energy to wrestling with some key figures in twentieth-century phenomenology. Since the topic for this special issue is the relationship between phenomenology and ancient philosophy, I plan in the following to look at Irigaray’s reading of Plato, given the centrality of carnality, sexuation and embodiment, not just to her own project, but the manner in which she invokes the same notions as part of her critique of Plato along with a number of twentieth-century (...) phenomenologists. (shrink)

Since Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the living body (Leib) in Ideas II, the subjective experience of the body, what later French thinkers will name the flesh, has been particularly marked by its capacity for action—its potency. This privileging of the acting flesh, the potent organ, is echoed throughout the subsequent phenomenological tradition. For this tradition, from de Biran and Husserl, to Merleau‑Ponty and Henry, the flesh is distinguished from the mere body (Körper) by its unique capacity to act. For the (...) later French tradition to be flesh is to be will, and to be will is to be action. Impotence (impuissance) appears as external resistance. In the present investigation, I challenge this trajectory of the flesh through a phenomenological investigation of the unique phenomenon of acute sexual impotence. In this way, it will be shown that l’impuissance (impotence) can be located not only in the objectivity of opposition within the world, on the organic or objective body (le corps, Körper), but within the immanence of the flesh (la chair, Leib) itself. Indeed, the experience of incarnate l’impuissance provides a unique phenomenological access to the incomplete synthesis of the carnal flesh—a synthesis that remains, by phenomenological necessity, run through with ruptures and gaps that function as its constitutive excess. (shrink)

Ego sum moribundus, or Heidegger's call -- I am the dead person I see in the mirror, or Lacan's subject -- Return to Descartes -- the equivocations of phenomenology -- The field of immanence -- The carnal synthesis, the chiasm -- How touching touches itself touching : the (im)possibility of the chiasm -- In contact with the untouchable : the remainder -- This is (not) my body : the remainder of incorporation -- Beyond the other -- The crisis (...) of the chiasm -- From hatred to love -- From archi-agony to resurrection -- Toward deliverance (instasy). (shrink)

L’admiration de Paul Ricoeur pour Merleau-Ponty est connue, lui qui entendait donner à la Phénoménologie de la perception sa « contrepartie pratique » avec le premier tome de la Philosophie de la volonté, Le Volontaire et l’involontaire. Il faut d’emblée s’étonner que celui-ci n’ait pas reconnu la teneur pratique de la philosophie de son aîné, dont les diverses analyses au Collège de France, et en particulier l’intérêt marqué de Merleau-Ponty pour la pensée marxiste comme philosophie de l’homme charnel, et le (...) motif naturaliste de l’être agissant et souffrant à partir de 1956, font état. Car c’est bien depuis ce motif que Ricoeur, en 2004, expose le parcours de la reconnaissance : de l’homme agissant et souffrant, à l’homme capable. L’enjeu, nous semble-t-il alors, de ces deux philosophies en leur dimension pratique se résume aisément par les exigences formulées par Paul Ricoeur dans l’ouvrage Soi-même comme un autre, en particulier lorsque celui-ci se donne pour but de « déterminer les traits nouveaux de l’ipséité correspondant à la pratique politique » – détermination du Soi agent qui se dessine, au dire même de l’auteur, à la croisée d’une phénoménologie de l’agir et d’une ontologie du Soi. En effet, comme le souligne Ricoeur, l’effacement paradoxal de la question de l’ipséité dans la philosophie morale kantienne, entre autres, s’explique par l’absence d’une telle théorie de l’action. En bref, le « Je veux » analysé en 1950 par Ricoeur s’ancre dans un « Je peux », qui ne se limite jamais au seul plan spatial chez Merleau-Ponty. Ainsi, à la figure phénoménologique de nos expériences de la passivité correspond la catégorie ontologique de l’altérité, mentionnée par l’expression du Visible et de l’invisible reprise en titre de cet article et dont l’attribution à Ricoeur ne choquerait pas.Paul Ricoeur’s admiration for Merleau-Ponty is well-known given that he presented his “practical counterpart” to the Phenomenology of Perception in the form of his Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. One is immediately surprised that this is not recognized as the practical content of his predecessor’s philosophy given the diverse analyses at the Collège de France of which, in particular, the marked interest Merleau-Ponty had in Marxist thought as the philosophy of the fleshly human being, as well as the naturalist motif of the active and suffering being beginning in 1956, are part. For, it is due to this motif that Ricoeur, in 2004, presents the trajectory of recognition: from the active and suffering human being to the capable human being. As we see them, the stakes in these two philosophies, as far as their practical dimensions are concerned, are easily summarized by the requirements Paul Ricoeur formulated in his work, Oneself as Another. This is particularly the case given that this text has for its aim, “determining the new traits of individual identity which correspond to practical politics” – the determination of Self as a self-designing agent, which, according to the author, lies at the intersection of a phenomenology of action and an ontology of the Self. In fact, as Ricoeur himself underlines, the paradoxical effacement of the question of ipseity in Kantian moral philosophy, among others, is explained by the absence of just such a theory of action. Briefly, the “I want” analysis by Ricoeur in 1950 is anchored in the “I can,” which is never limited to the single spatial outline we find in Merleau-Ponty. Thus, to the phenomenological figure of our experiences of passivity correspond the ontological category of alterity, as mentioned in the phrase from The Visible and the Invisible taken up in the title of this article and which it would not be shocking to attribute to Ricoeur.È ben nota l’ammirazione di Paul Ricoeur per Merleau-Ponty: col primo tomo della Philosophie de la volonté, intitolato Le Volontaire et l’involontaire, Paul Ricoeur intendeva offrire alla Fenomenologia della percezione una vera e propria “contropartita pratica”. Ma è singolare il fatto che Ricoeur non abbia riconosciuto il risvolto pratico presente nella filosofia del suo predecessore, risvolto ampiamente attestato nei corsi merleau-pontyani al Collège de France e in particolare nelle lezioni che pongono al centro delle loro analisi il pensiero marxista come filosofia dell’uomo carnale e il motivo naturalistico dell’uomo agente e dell’uomo sofferente almeno a partire dal 1956. È proprio prendendo le mosse da questo motivo che Ricoeur nel 2004 espone quanto definisce come il percorso del riconoscimento: dall’uomo agente e dall’uomo sofferente all’uomo “capace”. La posta in gioco, ci sembra, di queste due filosofie, considerate nella loro dimensione pratica, si riassume facilmente nelle esigenze che Ricoeur formula nel suo libro Sé come un altro, in particolare quando si assegna il compito di “determinare i tratti peculiari dell’ipseità corrispondente alla pratica politica” – cioè di determinare i tratti di quel Sé agente che si delinea, a dire dell’autore stesso, al crocevia tra una fenomenologia dell’agire e un’ontologia del Sé. In effetti, come sottolinea Ricoeur, la paradossale cancellazione dell’ipseità operata dalla filosofia morale kantiana si spiega tra l’altro con l’assenza di una adeguata teoria dell’azione. In breve, l’“Io voglio” analizzato da Ricoeur nel 1950 si àncora in un “Io posso” che non si limita mai, in Merleau-Ponty, al solo piano spaziale. Così, alla figura fenomenologica delle nostre esperienze di passività, corrisponde la categoria ontologica dell’alterità, che proprio Il visibile e l’invisibile menziona con l’espressione che noi riprendiamo nel titolo di questo articolo e che ci si aspetterebbe essere anzitutto ricoeuriana. (shrink)

To avoid the difficulties that follow from essentialism in ethics, a new account of generality is required. The first half of this paper develops such an account by considering the work of Levinas and of Merleau-Ponty who turn to the incarnate subject as expressing a mode of generality of which universals and essences are derivative types. I call this kind of generality “carnal generality” and the context-specific complexes that exhibit it “carnal generals.” In the second part I turn (...) to paradigmatic lives both within and outside of religious tradition to show how such lives function as carnal generals. I examine some competing claims, Nelson Goodman’s account of samples and Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of the virtues as they bear on resolving ethical disputes, and suggest reasons for preferring a phenomenological view of paradigmatic lives. (shrink)