Browse — tag · intersubjectivity

Tag: intersubjectivity

Pages tagged with intersubjectivity.

45 pages

• A-focalism

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage at Investigations into the Literary Use of Language Appendix [168]v (1953) naming the positive consciousness-structure he proposes against Sartre's centripetal cogito: "a sort of a-focalism: there is no center and p…

• Call and Vocation (l'appel)

  Mounier's structural-vertical of the personal life across Personalism. The call (l'appel) is the structure through which freedom, value, vocation, and prophetic action all operate: freedom is "always something called forth" (Ch V, p. 60);…

• Chiasm

  Merleau-Ponty's concept for the crossing, encroachment, and mutual enveloping of sensing and sensed — the central structural concept of his late ontology. Crucially, the chiasm is structural non-coincidence: "It is time to emphasize that i…

• Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2010

  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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Double-Sided Artifact

  A heuristic distinction articulated by Décarie-Daigneault (2024), drawing on Philippe Grosos's Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021): an artifact understood as combining two sides — voluntary expression + collateral trace — both of which…

• Economy of Donation

  Mounier's name in Personalism Ch II p. 22 for the anti-economic economy of the person: "The vitality of the personal impulse is to be found neither in self-defence (as in petty-bourgeois individualism) nor in life-and-death struggle (as wi…

• 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…

• 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…

• From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and *The Problem of Speech* Hayden Kee, 2025

  Author(s): Hayden Kee Year: 2025 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97)

• 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…

• Haecceity

  A scholastic term — Latin haecceitas, literally "thisness" — that Merleau-Ponty deploys throughout Phenomenology of Perception without ever defining or naming its source. In MP's hands, haecceity is the irreducibly singular pole of percept…

• Henri Wallon

  French developmental psychologist and Marxist politician (1879–1962), founder of the Enfance journal. For the purposes of this wiki, Wallon matters as the primary empirical source of Merleau-Ponty's 1950–51 Sorbonne course on The Child's R…

• 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…

• Horizons of Language (vs. Limits)

  Kee 2025's reformulation of Merleau-Ponty's anti-relativist response in the early 1950s and PbP: against Wittgenstein's "the limits of my language are the limits of my world," MP holds that the horizons of my language are the horizons of m…

• Ineinander

  German for "one inside the other" or "interleaving." In Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, the Ineinander names the fundamental ontological structure: the mutual implication, overlapping, and interlocking of self and world, visible and invis…

• Intentional Transgression

  Husserl's term (intentionales Überschreiten, from the Cartesian Meditations) as taken up and generalized by Merleau-Ponty in Signs' "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959) and "On the Phenomenology of Language" (1951). Intentional transgre…

• Interanimality

  Merleau-Ponty's working-note term (interanimalité) for intercorporeity generalized beyond the human: the species-level dimension of carnal life, in which animals of the same species — and, the later notes suggest, across species — share a…

• Intercorporeity

  Merleau-Ponty's name (intercorporéité) for the structure that makes the other accessible — not as a foreign for-itself but as another locus of the same reversibility in which I am already caught up. Intercorporeity is reversibility extende…

• Interdependence Claim

  Felipe León's signature coinage for the bidirectional reciprocal-foundation thesis Merleau-Ponty draws from Saussure: instituted language requires speaking subjects for its existence qua social institution, AND speaking subjects require an…

• Interworld

  The interworld (l'intermonde) is Merleau-Ponty's name, in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955, Ch 5), for the middle order between men and things: "history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made" (AD 200). It is the order that Sartre's ontology of cog…

• Is Ineinander the late ontology's replacement for institution, or its ontological ground?

  This is the standing Open Question recorded at institution line 271: "How does institution relate to the later concept of ineinander? The 1954–55 course develops institution; Course 10 (1958–59) first introduces Ineinander. The symbolic-ma…

• Jacques Lacan

  French psychoanalyst (1901–1981), founder of the École freudienne de Paris and of a structuralist-linguistic rereading of Freud. For the purposes of this wiki, Lacan matters primarily as the author of "Le stade du miroir comme formateur du…

• 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…

• Love as a Formative Category

  Simmel's thesis in On Love (a fragment) (1923): love is one of the great formative categories of existence, joining the object of knowledge, the object of faith, and the object of valuation as a fundamental category of the subject-world re…

• Master-Slave Dialectic

  Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit §§186–196 — the first asymmetric form of recognition (Anerkennung), in which two self-consciousnesses encounter each other in a life-and-death struggle, one becomes master (Herr) by risking life, the other s…

• Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.), 2026

  Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)

• Nascent State (état naissant)

  Merleau-Ponty's recurring formulation in Phenomenology of Perception for the moment-just-before-objectification — the layer at which sense, perception, time, language, or freedom is being born without yet having been constituted as an obje…

• Negative Reality of Love

  Merleau-Ponty's philosophical reading of Proust's Swann in Love and Albertine cycle: love is neither illusion nor positive possession but negative reality — a hollow instituted in the subject by the beloved, in which the impossibility of f…

• Paradox of Human Subjectivity

  The culminating difficulty of the Crisis's life-world way (§53): human subjectivity is at once a subject for the world (that for which the world is, and through whose accomplishments it has meaning) and an object in the world (one entity a…

• Passence

  Décarie-Daigneault's neologism (2024) for the modality of past-given-as-implicated in the present — the having-been-here of an entity disclosed by an encounter with its trace, given not as historical fact-of-presence but as a past that has…

• Passivity

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the constitutive non-coincidence of the subject with itself — "softness in the dough of consciousness," "a germ of sleep, disease, death present even within its acts." Theorized as the subject of MP's 1954–55 Collè…

• Perceptual Unconscious

  Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of the Freudian unconscious as perceptual consciousness itself rather than as a second thinking subject hidden behind consciousness. Developed in MP's 1954–55 Passivity course as a retention-and-correction…

• Reversibility

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural form of the chiasm — the reciprocal turning of seeing-seen, touching-touched, speaking-listening — and what he calls "the ultimate truth" of his late ontology (closing line of V&I Ch 4, p. 155). Cruc…

• 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…

• Symbolic Matrix

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the structured existential field that a past event leaves behind in the subject, organizing subsequent perceptions without being a "content" of consciousness. "The unconscious is the symbolic matrix left behind by…

• 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…

• The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy Don Beith, 2018

  Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)

• The Crooked Finger of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc: Retrieving the Depth of Time Through a Transtemporal Account of Parietal Art Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault, 2024

  Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article, Chiasmi International vol. 26, pp. 263–282)

• The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed. James M. Edie), 1964

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited and introduced by James M. Edie Year: 1964 (English); original pieces 1946–1961 Type: collection (book)

• 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…

• 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…

• Transtemporality

  Merleau-Ponty's late concept (occasional in the 1954–55 Institution and Passivity lectures) for the coherent coexistence of multiple heterogeneous temporalities on a single plane. MP defines it formulaically as "institution in its nascent…