Rajiv Kaushik

Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Specialist in Merleau-Ponty's ontology, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Author of Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology (SUNY Press, 2019), which develops the concept of the implex as a bodily moment of signification — "inside that signification but impossible to be directly referred by that signification" — and names the repression-expression struggle.

Key Contributions to the Wiki

• kaushik-2019-matrixed-ontology — Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology (2019). The central argument: MP's late ontology is fundamentally symbolic — the symbolic-matrix is not a regional psychoanalytic concept but the ontological tissue prior to formal ontology. Develops the concepts of matrixed-ontology, hermeneutical-reverie, and the positive symbol. Reads MP with Heraclitus and Proust, against Heidegger, Sartre, Nancy, and Barbaras.
• kaushik-2021-negation-implex — argues that the reversibility/écart tension in MP's ontology is resolved by redoubled-negation, concretized as the implex. Engages critically with renaud-barbaras's Desire and Distance.

Connections

• develops the ontology of maurice-merleau-ponty
• engages critically with renaud-barbaras, jean-luc-nancy
• draws on paul-valery, sigmund-freud, friedrich-schelling, marcel-proust
• reads MP alongside Heraclitus, John Sallis, Miguel de Beistegui