Understanding the Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy

Abstract

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) takes a special place within the history of twentieth century European philosophy which deal with the concept of the visible, the visual, the gaze, and the eye as the most important of the five senses in culture, the arts and social phenomena. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (although his work is also not without traces of antiocularocentrism) is an attempt to lay down the foundations of an “alternative” model of perception, which stands in opposition to the Cartesian perspectival system and which attempts to integrate the eye and the gaze into a different system of perception. In the essay the authoress re-read the work of Merleau-Ponty and focused herself on the following questions: perception and gaze, the body and the embodiment of perception, the visible and invisible the relationship between the visible and the tactile and the specific definition of perception in relation to the categories of time and space and of its embodiment (with similar parallel attempts made by Scott Bukatman and Slavoj Žižek).