Journal Article

Politics and Commonality of Sensation From a Reading of Merleau-Ponty

Pigeon, Louis-Étienne, Amironesei, Razvan

2017

Overview

[...]our concept of politics is understood here as the domain of concerted actions of a plurality of actors who articulate a lived experiential relation of power that enable a collective subject that gives form to itself via definite strategic objectives, which are particular in their nature. According to Merleau-Ponty, one perceives its bodily presence through a personal corporeal schema that appears as “the summary of our corporeal experience,” but also as a conscious realization of my posture in the intersensorial world, a ‘form’ as defined by Gestaltpsychology” (PP 129).10 The bodily schema forms the unity of the body for the following two reasons. [...]this phenomenological order of things organizes the immediate perception of meaning and value in such a way that they are necessarily dependent upon a notion of the whole irreducible to its parts and is positively understood in terms of perceptual field and figure against a background. 11. According to Merleau-Ponty, these theories fail because isolated and elementary sensible qualities/punctual impressions are: a) not de facto “objects of experience,” and b) they are not relational.

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press,Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Demonstrations & protests / Dialectics / Feminism / Humanism / Interiority / Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908-1961) / Phenomenology / Philosophy / Politics / Reference (Semantic) / Social criticism & satire / Translations