Browse — tag · body
Tag: body
Pages tagged with body.
92 pages
-
*Corpus corporum* (Nancy)
Latin: "corpus of corpora"; literally "body of bodies" but operatively "a collection of collections." Nancy's name (Corpus 155) for the body without organic-functional unity — zoned, acephalic and aphallic, "discontinuous, fragmentary, par…
-
*Mêlée* (Nancy)
Nancy's signature term for the event of a knot, an entanglement that is also a disentanglement. Distinct from mixture (which forms a new homogeneous compound out of two formerly distinct elements). The mêlée preserves the irreducible separ…
-
*Unum quid* (Descartes)
Latin: "one and the same thing"; "a certain something one." Descartes's name in the Sixth Meditation (AT VII 81 — the French version has "une même chose" / "un seul tout," AT IXa 12, 64) for the substantial union of the soul and the body —…
-
Agnosia (Merleau-Ponty)
Visual agnosia is the clinical condition that gives Merleau-Ponty the case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception — Schneider, the WWI veteran whose shrapnel injury produced an inability to perceive the world as a field of possibility…
-
Auguste Rodin
French sculptor (1840–1917). In "Eye and Mind" §4, Rodin is MP's primary interlocutor on the problem of movement in painting and sculpture. Rodin's theory of the "paradoxical arrangement" — depicting the body in an attitude it never at any…
-
Body Schema
Merleau-Ponty's name for the pre-reflective, practical awareness of the body's posture and configuration — not a representation of the body, but a system of postural readiness oriented toward tasks. MP takes the term from Henry Head and Pa…
-
Carnal Cogito
Saint Aubert's gloss on a Merleau-Ponty working-note formulation (November 1960): "Le « où suis-je ? » et « quelle heure est-il ? » de Claudel porte déjà la philosophie" — the carnal cogito. The phrase names MP's late re-positioning of the…
-
Cartesian Oscillation
Merleau-Ponty's name for Descartes's inability to sustain a single conception of Nature. In the 1956–57 first Nature course, MP reads Descartes as running two incompatible inspirations — Nature as exteriority (res extensa, infinite mechani…
-
Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: 2010 (English, Welsh trans.) / 2001 (Verdier French ed.) / Lectures delivered 1949–1952 Type: lecture-course
-
Chiral Reversibility
David Morris's interpretive model of Merleau-Pontian reversibility, deployed by Morin in Ch 8 §2 to block the Hegelian symmetrical-reciprocity reading of the chiasm. The model is the incongruent-counterparts image: a right-hand glove is al…
-
Christian Semantics of Chair (Flesh)
Preliminary stub (weave Pass 2, 2026-06-03) homing a HUB motif previously distributed across hand-of-god, haptocentrism, mondialisation-of-flesh, and flesh-as-element §"Positions" without a dedicated corpus-level page. The second of Derrid…
-
Co-Naissance
A portmanteau from Paul Claudel's Art poétique (1907) that fuses naissance (birth) with connaissance (knowledge): to know is to be co-born. Merleau-Ponty adopts this concept from his earliest work (The Structure of Behavior, 1942) through…
-
Coefficient of Adversity
A term coined by Bachelard (against the phenomenological tradition) for the resistance things offer to projects. The concept's genealogy is the precise pivot of Ch 5 of morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being: Bachelard's complaint that phenomenol…
-
Coexistence
Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception for the structural togetherness of bodies, points, sensations, and selves that is not built up from prior atomic units but is presupposed in the unity of any experience. Coexistence names…
-
Didier Franck
French phenomenologist (b. 1947), professor at Paris-Nanterre. Best known on the wiki for Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl (Minuit 1981) — the major French study of Husserl's phenomenology of flesh and body, which proposed…
-
Dimensional this (my body as bearer of dimensions)
A V&I working-note coinage — left in English in MP's French original — for the structure by which the body, while singular and concrete (a this), is also a dimension: a level that organizes the perceptible field. The June 1960 working note…
-
Dividuation
Carbone's coinage (2016) for the condition of screen-mediated life: since "individual" etymologically means in-dividuus, "indivisible," the self that simultaneously lives in/through many screens and windows — playing many roles, maintainin…
-
Embodied Act of Framing
Lisa van Sorge's (2025) signature concept and the constructive thesis of her synthesis of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida for a contemporary phenomenological aesthetics. Embodied act of framing names painting reread as the embodied subject's two…
-
Empiètement (Encroachment)
MP's figure for the overlap between terms that a Cartesian ontology would require to be distinct — self/other, inside/outside, flesh/being, soul/body, perception/motricity. Saint Aubert elevates the figure to method-defining status on the…
-
Essential Prematureness of Revolution
Merleau-Ponty's claim in Chapter 4 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), against Marxist theories of revolution-as-maturation: revolutions are not "anticipations" of conditions that will one day be mature; they have an essential premature…
-
Expressive Will (poussée, drive to speak)
The affective and volitional substrate of lateral universality in Merleau-Ponty's account of language. Linguistic universality is not first a structural-conceptual feature shared by languages; it is a drive (poussée) of speaking subjects w…
-
Expressivity (expressivité)
Merleau-Ponty's name for the operation by which a phenomenon's internal arrangement indicates another phenomenon — at the perceptual register (the Thursday course 1953 definition: "the property that a phenomenon has through its internal ar…
-
Exscription
Nancy's neologism (ex-scription, l'exscrit) for the writing-out of the body that exceeds inscription — the moment in writing where what is written exceeds writing itself, where sense exscribes the body that writing claims to inscribe. The…
-
Eye and Mind
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Carleton Dallery) Year: 1961 (written July–August 1960; published January 1961 in Art de France vol. I, no. 1) Type: essay
-
Fait Primitif
Maine de Biran's concept from the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l'étude de la nature, retained by Merleau-Ponty from his 1947-48 ENS lectures on Biran through the November 1960 V&I working notes. The f…
-
Fragile Skin of the World
The title-figure of Nancy's last book (The Fragile Skin of the World, 2020/2021). The world is neither animal (Stoic immanent finality) nor machine (Enlightenment external causality) but us; it has no skin of its own and is "the factorial…
-
From Johann to Maurice: Science and Expression in the Philosophical Praxis of Medicine
Author(s): Timm Heinbokel Year: 2021 (Human Studies 44(4): 559–579, Open Access CC BY 4.0; accepted 3 August 2021, published online 18 October 2021) Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article; theoretical / philosophical)
-
Generative Passivity
The ontological origin of sense in nonsense — not mere inertness or absence of activity, but a "generative temporal openness" that precedes and grounds all constituting activity. Generative passivity names the emergence of activity from no…
-
Gestural Expression
Merleau-Ponty's Sorbonne-period doctrine (chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 1951–52) of the body as the medium of intersubjectivity through gesture: "the body inhabited by meaning"; "to perceive the other is to decipher a languag…
-
Granite of Fate
Nietzsche's figure from Beyond Good and Evil §231 for the uneducable bodily substratum of the individual — the fixed aspect of the self that all subsequent development can redirect but neither create nor erase. "Deep in us, really 'down th…
-
Gregarious vs. Singular
The opposition between the gregarious (grégaire — that which conserves the species: exchangeable, communicable, intelligible) and the singular (the cas singulier / fortuitous case — unexchangeable, mute, unintelligible) is the second of th…
-
Habitual Body
The habitual body (corps habituel) is Merleau-Ponty's technical term in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) for the body considered as a sedimented field of acquired postures, capacities, and orientations — the body of "I can" rather than t…
-
Haptical Différance
Derrida's positive thesis (named at On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy p. 240) for the spacing, interruption, interposition, detour constitutive of any contact. Against the haptocentric tradition's thesis of immediate self-touch, Derrida argues th…
-
Haptico-Transcendental Reduction
Derrida's diagnostic name (in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy §13) for the risk — visible most clearly in Nancy's own Corpus and Une pensée finie — of reducing sense to touch as the transcendental of all sense. The Nancean formula "Sense IS tou…
-
Haptocentrism
Haptocentrism is Derrida's diagnostic name (coined in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000, p. 52) for the philosophical tradition that privileges touch (Greek haphē) as the sense of immediacy, contact, presence, and self-relation — making tou…
-
Hinge
Merleau-Ponty's figure (charnière, gond, pivot) for a structure that articulates two terms without reducing either to the other — a structure that produces its terms as poles rather than mediating between pre-existing ones. The hinge appea…
-
Implex
A term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Paul Valéry (alongside "chiasm") to name the body's anonymous, subconscious capacity — the optic nerves, musculature, ecological systems that are not activities but potentials for difference. Valéry coins…
-
Inconscient primordial (Inconscient d'ek-stase)
The late MP's term for a carnal unconscious that replaces — not supplements — consciousness as the operator of the être à la chose par l'intermédiaire du corps. Saint Aubert's reading (E&C II Ch VI) argues that the Notes sur le corps (1956…
-
Inorganic Body of Sense (Nancy)
Nancy's name (Sense of the World 61–2) for the totality of material bodies articulated through their spacings, mutual exposures, and weighings — without organic unity or functional whole. "There are only material bodies, then, and they mak…
-
Intentional Arc
Merleau-Ponty's name for the unity that underlies perception, intelligence, memory, projection, desire, and motility — the "vector" that binds the life of consciousness into a single intending-of-the-world. Introduced in Part One Ch III.j…
-
Is Schneider a limiting case of sleep?
The Schneider case (PhP 1945) and dedifferentiation (Passivity course 1954–55) describe the same structural event at different scales:
-
Jacques Derrida
French philosopher (1930–2004), founder of deconstruction, author of Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Margins of Philosophy (1972), The Truth in Painting (1978), The Post Card (1980), Specters of Marx (1993), On Touch…
-
Jean-Louis Chrétien
French Catholic phenomenologist and poet (1952–2019). Major figure of what Dominique Janicaud (in The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology, 1991) named the "theological turn" of French phenomenology — alongside Levinas, Michel Henry, J…
-
Jean-Luc Nancy
French philosopher (1940-2021), major figure in contemporary continental philosophy. Author of works on community (The Inoperative Community), the body (Corpus, Corpus II, Sexistence, Marquage manquant), art (The Muses, Noli me tangere, Ad…
-
Lived Gestural Expression
Merleau-Ponty's most condensed Sorbonne-period statement on bodily expression as the medium of intersubjectivity, articulated in chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1951–52). The cardinal thesis: "To perceive the other is to deciph…
-
Maine de Biran
French philosopher (1766–1824) of the body's motor-evidence and of the fait primitif. Author of the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l'étude de la nature. Per Saint Aubert (2006 Ch II §2), Biran is a card…
-
Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology
Author(s): Marie-Eve Morin · Year: 2022 · Type: book
-
Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature
Author(s): Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2020 Type: Book (co-authored, Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series)
-
Metaphoricity
A term developed by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 5) to name the carnal-ontological capacity for analogy that grounds all linguistic metaphor in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Metaphor is not a semantic transfer between pr…
-
Mondialisation of Flesh
Derrida's name (at On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy p. 247) for the over-extension of Husserlian Leiblichkeit — the globalization (mondialisation) of chair / flesh — beyond the self-affecting body to "things," "essences," and modes of experience…
-
Motor Intentionality
Merleau-Ponty's name (via Husserl's Bewegungsentwurf, "motor project") for the body's pre-reflective directedness toward a practical task — the "third term" between mechanism and representation that Part One of Phenomenology of Perception…
-
Narcissism (Merleau-Ponty's Two Senses)
Merleau-Ponty's late-ontology redefinition of "narcissism" — not Freudian libidinal cathexis to the ego, but a structural-ontological name for vision's reflexivity, which operates in two senses, both running through the dehiscence of the f…
-
Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–60)
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty Compiler/editor (French): Dominique Séglard Translator: Robert Vallier Original French: La Nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France (Éditions du Seuil, 1995) English edition: Northwestern University Press, 20…
-
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
Author(s): Pierre Klossowski (trans. Daniel W. Smith) · Year: 1969 (Fr.) / 1997 (Eng.) · Type: book
-
On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy
Author(s): Jacques Derrida · Year: 2005 (orig. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Galilée 2000; v1 essay "Le toucher: Touch/To Touch Him" in Paragraph 16:2, 1993, trans. Peggy Kamuf) · Type: book
-
Painting as an Embodied Act of Framing: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
Author(s): Lisa van Sorge (Tilburg University) Year: 2025 (Accepted 22 April 2025; Published online 25 July 2025) Type: paper (Open Access, CC-BY-4.0; journal not stated in extracted PDF metadata)
-
Partage (Nancy)
Nancy's untranslatable French term partage — simultaneously sharing out, apportioning, parting, partitioning, partaking — names the structure of "participation as much as irreducible partition" (Nancy, glossed by Derrida in On Touching—Jea…
-
Phantasm
In Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, the phantasm (phantasme) is "an obsessional image produced instinctively from the life of the impulses" (Translator's Preface §4) — an involuntary formation that arises from the comb…
-
Phantom Limb
Merleau-Ponty's central case in Part One of Phenomenology of Perception for the irreducibility of bodily being to either objective causality (physiology) or cogitation (psychology). The amputee experiences the missing limb as present — can…
-
Phenomenology of Perception
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1945 (this reading: Donald A. Landes translation, Routledge 2012, with Foreword by Taylor Carman and Claude Lefort's 1974 essay "Maurice Merleau-Ponty") Type: Book (Merleau-Ponty's Docteur ès lettres maj…
-
Portance
Saint Aubert's philosophical concept — effleurée but not thématisée in MP's late manuscripts — for the modality of being that bears and supports flesh while flesh surges from it. Announced as the subject of Saint Aubert's future post-exege…
-
Pregnancy (Prägnanz)
Borrowed from Gestalt psychology but radically redefined. For the Gestalt psychologists, Prägnanz names the tendency of perception toward "good forms" (symmetry, closure, regularity). For Merleau-Ponty, pregnancy means something ontologica…
-
Primacy of Perception
Merleau-Ponty's signature doctrine and the name of his 1946 address to the Société française de philosophie, the most compressed in-print statement of the Phenomenology of Perception's thesis. The "primacy" is neither a reduction of knowle…
-
Primordial Expression
Every human use of the body is already expression. This thesis, stated most explicitly in The Prose of the World, grounds Merleau-Ponty's entire theory of creative expression — painting, literature, speech, philosophy — in the body's capac…
-
Se toucher toi (To Self-Touch You)
Nancy's grammatical-philosophical figure (from Corpus p. 36) for the constitutive failure of pure self-touch — and one of Derrida's master-concepts in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Part III, §§12–13). The French phrase se toucher toi — "to s…
-
Semiotic of Impulses
The semiotic of impulses is the organizing concept of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (its longest chapter is titled "The Valetudinary States at the Origin of a Semiotic of Impulses"). The impulses (impulsions) are "in…
-
Specular Image
The child's image of his or her own body in the mirror, taken by Merleau-Ponty in the 1950–51 Sorbonne lectures as the site where self-awareness, alienation, and the symbolic function converge. MP's treatment (Ch 4 §3 of Primacy of Percept…
-
Spontaneous Structuration
Merleau-Ponty's name in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures for the body's positive-organisational power — neither innate idea, nor intellectual schema imposed on data, nor classical-physics composition of forces, but immanent self-organization…
-
Surrection
A metaphorical figure developed in Merleau-Ponty's late work and analyzed extensively by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 2). Surrection names the vertical emergence through which desire's insurrections and resurrections d…
-
Syncope (Nancy)
Nancy's figure (developed across Le discours de la syncope: Logodaedalus (1976), Ego sum (1979), Corpus (1992), Une pensée finie (1990)) for the interruption-at-the-heart-of-contact — the rhythmic break, the cut, the gap, the diastolic/sys…
-
Syncretic Sociability
The pre-individual intercorporeal field that precedes and grounds personal existence. In Merleau-Ponty's 1950–51 Sorbonne course (The Child's Relations with Others, Ch 4 of Primacy of Perception) and the Institution course (1954–55), syncr…
-
Technē of Bodies
Nancy's phrase (from Corpus and L'intrus, both 2000) for the technical-prosthetic-supplementary structure of any body — the technē (Greek technē: art, craft, skill, technics) that constitutes the body rather than supervening upon it. The p…
-
The Agent (suppôt)
The agent is Daniel W. Smith's rendering of Klossowski's suppôt — a term retrieved from scholastic philosophy (Latin suppositum, "that which is placed under," linked to substantia and subjectum) and applied to a Nietzschean problem. In Nie…
-
The Anonymous Temporality of Animal Life: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze on the Passive Syntheses of the Organic
Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2025 Type: paper (journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58:445–467)
-
The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)
-
The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide
Author(s): Frank Chouraqui Year: 2021 Type: book (philosophical guide / textbook, Rowman & Littlefield)
-
The Hand of God
The theologized organ that, on Derrida's reading in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (esp. §§7, 11), haunts the haptocentric tradition of touch. The figure runs from the biblical hand of God (Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms) through Aquinas's mutuus…
-
The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited and introduced by James M. Edie Year: 1964 (English); original pieces 1946–1961 Type: collection (book)
-
The Prose of the World
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Claude Lefort; translated by John O'Neill Year: Written ~1950-52; published posthumously 1969 (French) / 1973 (English) Type: book (unfinished)
-
The Schneider Case
The clinical case of Johann Schneider — a German soldier who sustained a brain injury from shrapnel in 1915 — that Merleau-Ponty uses as the methodological engine of Part One of Phenomenology of Perception. Schneider was studied from 1918…
-
The Sensible World and the World of Expression
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; translated with introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth Year: 1953 (course delivered); 2011 (French publication); 2020 (English translation) Type: Course notes (personal lecture notes + working notes)
-
The Third-Year Crisis
Merleau-Ponty's developmental account, in chapter 5 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1950–51), of the moment when the spectator-spectacle pair (formed in 6m–3yr syncretic-sociability) internalizes and the child becomes capable of represen…
-
Tonality of the Soul
The tonality of the soul (tonalité de l'âme) is Pierre Klossowski's term — retained by Daniel W. Smith as "tonality" because the usage "is as unusual in French as it is in English" (Translator's Preface §3) — for the fluctuating intensitie…
-
Transitivism
Wallon's term, adopted by Merleau-Ponty in the 1950–51 Sorbonne lectures, for the child's (and, residually, the adult's) attribution to others of what belongs to oneself — or vice versa. The classic example: a child slaps her companion, th…
-
Valetudinary States
In Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Nietzsche's valetudinary states — his recurrent, incapacitating illness (the migraine/convalescence cycles of roughly 1877–1881, with their alternations of collapse and euphoric luci…
-
Volant (flywheel-of-inertia)
MP's figure for the flesh that conjoins passivity and activity: a mass-in-rotation whose inertia sustains and relaunches a movement, with passivity in the service of élan. Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch I § 1b) excavates the figure as systematica…
-
What happens to Descartes's oscillation in the late ontology?
Query: Does V&I resolve the Cartesian oscillation that Nature Course 1 identifies, or does the chiasm inherit it as a structural feature?
-
Where Is Negation in Merleau-Ponty's Ontology? Symbolic Formation and the Implex
Author: Rajiv Kaushik Year: 2021 Type: Journal article (Research in Phenomenology 51: 372–393)
-
Épreuve mutuelle de la chair et de l'être
Saint Aubert's organizing concept for MP's late ontology: perception is not a one-way relation (observer → observed) nor a bilateral relation (subject ↔ object) but a reciprocal testing (épreuve mutuelle) in which flesh and being evaluate…
-
Être et chair chez Merleau-Ponty
Author: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2023 Type: Paper (lecture-derived article, French) Publication: Ágora Filosófica 23(3), pp. 5–35. DOI: 10.25247/P1982-999X.2023.v23n3.p05-35 HAL: hal-04284557 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
-
Être et chair II. L'épreuve perceptive de l'être
Author: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2021 Type: Book (French, untranslated) Publisher: Paris: Vrin, « Bibliothèque d'histoire de la philosophie » ISBN: 978-2-7116-3021-9
-
Œuvres II (Pléiade)
Author(s): Paul Valéry (1871–1945) Year: 1960 (Pléiade composite; constituent works span 1894–1946) Type: book (Pléiade composite volume of dialogues, Cahier recueils, prose pieces, and essays) Editor: Jean Hytier Edition: Bibliothèque de…