Emmanuel de Saint Aubert

French philosopher and leading contemporary interpreter of Merleau-Ponty. Affiliated with the Husserl Archives in Paris (UMR 8547 ENS/CNRS). Author of a five-volume sequence that has systematically reconstructed MP's thought from the unpublished B.N.F. archive (the dons 92-21 and 93-03). Co-editor of the recent MP course publications (Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression 2011 with Stefan Kristensen; Le problème de la parole 2020 with Lovisa Andrén and Franck Robert). Co-editor with Galen Johnson and Mauro Carbone of Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World (Fordham 2020).

Role in the Wiki

Saint Aubert is the wiki's primary authority on the archival reconstruction of MP's late ontology (1953-1961). His five-volume project is the scholarly scaffolding behind the Notes sur le corps, Être et Monde, DESC, and OntoCart materials that shape the late-ontology concept pages.

Key concepts for which Saint Aubert is the wiki's primary source:

Five-volume project

  1. Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l'être. Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945-1951. Paris: Vrin, 2004. — The Sartre scenario's genesis.
  2. Le scénario cartésien. Recherches sur la formation et la cohérence de l'intention philosophique de Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Vrin, 2005. — The Descartes scenario. Centrally mines DESC 84.
  3. *Vers une ontologie indirecte. Sources et enjeux critiques de l'appel à l'ontologie chez Merleau-Ponty*. Paris: Vrin, 2006. — The "Heidegger scenario," but the volume's load-bearing thesis is that there is no genuine Heideggerian turn in late MP: MP's reading of Heidegger was archivally thin (~14 paragraphs underlined in Sein und Zeit, sparse reading-notes on Identität und Differenz, 80% of MP's Heidegger references in 1958-61); the actual genealogy of MP's ontologie indirecte runs through Blondel's L'Être et les êtres (1935), Maine de Biran's fait primitif via the 1947-48 ENS lectures, Schilder's body-image, and Piaget's La représentation de l'espace chez l'enfant (1948). Ingested 2026-05-05.
  4. Être et chair I. Du corps au désir : l'habilitation ontologique de la chair. Paris: Vrin, 2013. — The body-to-desire trajectory.
  5. *Être et chair II. L'épreuve perceptive de l'être : Avancées ultimes de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty*. Paris: Vrin, 2021. — The flesh-being mutual testing.

A sixth volume is announced for a post-exegetical portance project beyond MP.

Public-facing summary article

*Être et chair chez Merleau-Ponty* (Ágora Filosófica 23(3), 2023, pp. 5–35; HAL hal-04284557, CC BY-NC-ND). The lecture-derived condensation of the five-volume project — a programmatic-pedagogical-polemical article that states the anti-monism reading of MP's late ontology in summary form. Two distinctive features not present in this exact form in the books: (1) a clean four-misreadings typology (chair-without-body, chair-as-être, anonymous chair, chair-as- animated-body); (2) a systematic four-gestures decomposition of being's portance (résistant / ouvrant / écartant / reliant). The 2023 paper gives the wiki its single open-access anchor for Saint Aubert's positions and is the right-citable source when concept pages need a public-facing reference.

Method

Archival close-reading plus philological philology-of-concepts:

  • Systematic survey of all known occurrences of a term across the MP corpus, published and unpublished, in chronological order of writing (not publication).
  • Respect for the BNF cataloguing (donné définitive 1992-1998 microfilmage).
  • Re-transcription of unpublished feuillets where published editions are "parfois fautives".
  • Tracking of subsequently-separated folios (NP = non publié) within ensembles otherwise known through published transcriptions.

Connections

  • builds on archival work of Lefort (MP's literary executor) and S. Ménasé (editor of Notes de cours 1959-1961).
  • co-edits with mauro-carbone — carbone-2019-philosophy-screens and carbone-2015-flesh-of-images share archival sensibility.
  • co-edits with Galen Johnson — johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world.
  • collaborates with Stefan Kristensen, Franck Robert, Lovisa Andrén, Maria Gyemant, Délia Popa, Dorothée Legrand, Dylan Trigg (see Ch VI fn 1 p. 211).
  • converges with rajiv-kaushik on the refusal of monisme de la chair — different vocabularies (Kaushik: matrix; Saint Aubert: épreuve mutuelle) but structurally parallel readings.
  • converges with frank-chouraqui on the late MP as neither positivist nor nihilist — but Saint Aubert's route is carnal- psychoanalytic where Chouraqui's is Nietzschean-truth-theoretic.