1 - Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Homme, libre penseur! te crois-tu seul pensant Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose? Des forces que tu tiens ta liberté dispose, Mais de tous tes conseils l'univers est absent.
Gérard de Nerval, ‘Vers dorés’In recent years, two trends have coincided in French thought. First, a number of authors have taken it upon themselves to assess the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and secondly in the same period a renewed and growing interest has been shown in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The two tendencies are by no means independent, for Merleau-Ponty's work is often cited in relation to deconstructive concerns, either as a precursor or as an antagonist. It appears that the moment has come to assess, if not settle, the ontological accounts between Merleau-Ponty and deconstruction.
A text which by any reckoning constitutes one of the most decisive interventions in this debate is Jacques Derrida's Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy. In Le Toucher, Derrida stages the most significant of his engagements with Merleau-Ponty's thought, both in terms of its length – he devotes an entire chapter, ‘Tangente III’, to a discussion of Merleau- Ponty, in addition to a number of references elsewhere in the text – and its subject matter – he sets out in an extended series of readings his main concerns with Merleau-Ponty's thought. This makes Le Toucher a privileged text for considering the relation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to deconstruction.
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- Phenomenology or Deconstruction?The Question of Ontology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy, pp. 13 - 44Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009