Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty

by Gail Weiss (Editor)

Overview

Intertwinings presents exciting interdisciplinary scholarship on twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The contributors break new ground by bringing Merleau-Ponty's work into conversation with literary theory, architecture, cultural studies, critical race studies, and current feminist theory and practice. Spanning Merleau-Ponty's early and late thought, this volume focuses on the ontological, ethical, and political implications of his unique emphasis on the constitutive intertwinings of inside and outside, self and other, language and gesture, body and world, and identity and difference. Intertwinings affirms Merleau-Ponty's insight that we should not eradicate, but rather celebrate, the corporeal differences that make our encounters with both human and nonhuman others a source of inexplicable richness and endless fascination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791477649
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	11/05/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	302
File size:	676 KB

About the Author

Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy and Human Sciences at the George Washington University. She is the coeditor (with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen) of Thinking the Limits of the Body, also published by SUNY Press, and (with Dorothea Olkowski) of Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Gail Weiss

Part I Ontological and Developmental Concerns: Difference and the Other

1. Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Ontology
Elizabeth Grosz

2. Elemental Alterity: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty
Lawrence Hass

3. The Developing Body: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of Women in the Sorbonne Lectures
Talia Welsh

Part II Feminist Possibilities: Reading Irigaray, Reading Merleau-Ponty

4. Phenomenology in the Feminine: Irigaray’s Relationship to Merleau-Ponty
Annemie Halsema

5. The Language of the Lips, Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray: Toward a Culture of Difference
Bruce Young

Part III Literary Enactments: Merleau-Ponty, Proust, and Stein

6. Among the Hawthorns: Marcel Proust and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Patricia M. Locke

7. “Mixing the Outside with the Inside”: Interior Geographies and Domestic Horizons in Gertrude Stein
Justine Dymond

Part IV Ethical Challenges: Recognition, Reciprocity, Violence, and Care

8. Beyond Recognition: Merleau-Ponty and an Ethics of Vision
Kelly Oliver

9. Ethical Reciprocity at the Interstices of Communion and Disruption
Sally Fischer

10. Merleau-Ponty, Reciprocity, and the Reversibility of Perspectives
Greg Johnson

11. Entering the Place We Already Live: A Phenomenology of Female Voice
Janice McLane

12. Resources for Feminist Care Ethics in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body
Maurice Hamington

Part V Sedimented Meanings: Conservation and Transformation

13. Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks? Habitual Horizons in James, Bourdieu, and Merleau-Ponty
Gail Weiss

14. The Borderlands of Identity and Culture
Rashmika Pandya

15. Entwining the Body and the World: Architectural Design and Experience in the Light of “Eye and Mind”
Rachel McCann

List of Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"…performs the valuable service of pointing Merleau-Ponty scholarship in a more interdisciplinary direction." — CHOICE

"This is a philosophically interesting and valuable collection. I like its broad range of topics, its interdisciplinary character, and the fact that it made me think about Merleau-Ponty in unexpected and instructive ways." — William S. Hamrick, coeditor of Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought

From the Publisher