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Recasting Objective Thought: The Venture of Expression in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy Anna Petronella Foultier Recasting Objective Thought: The Venture of Expression in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy Anna Petronella Foultier ©Anna Petronella Foultier, Stockholm University 2015 ISBN 978-91-7649-095-2 Printed in Sweden by Holmbergs, Malmö 2015 Distributor: Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University Cover photo from an exposition by Hans Fredlund in 2007 at Örebro Castle. To my father, Hans Fredlund (1939–2009) Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Works by Merleau-Ponty ........................................................................... xi Note on the Use of Translations ...........................................................................xiii Introduction ................................................................................................ 15 Summary of the Thesis ..................................................................................... 18 Objective Thought and its Categories ............................................................ 20 The Gestalt of Behaviour .................................................................................. 23 The Body-Proper and its Schema .................................................................... 29 Phenomenological Reflection ........................................................................... 31 The Ontology of the Flesh ................................................................................ 33 Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophical Turn? .............................................................. 36 The Phenomenological Reduction .................................................................... 44 The Issue of Expression in the Literature ...................................................... 48 The Reception of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy .............................................. 52 The Essays .......................................................................................................... 58 Note on Earlier Publication ...................................................................... 61 “The First Man Speaking”: Merleau-Ponty and Expression as the Task of Phenomenology ........................................................................... 63 Painting from Nature ......................................................................................... 68 The Question of the Given ................................................................................ 70 The Cry and the Cliché ...................................................................................... 73 The Other and the Establishment of Tradition .............................................. 76 The Philosophical Function of the Doubt ........................................................ 78 Primary and Secondary Expression ................................................................ 81 Cézanne and the Deflagration of Being ......................................................... 85 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 86 Incarnated Meaning and the Notion of Gestalt in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology ......................................................................................... 89 Challenging the Elementistic Paradigm .......................................................... 93 The Origins of Gestalt Theory .......................................................................... 97 The Constancy Hypothesis Refuted .............................................................. 100 Laws of Perception and their Foundation ..................................................... 104 The Theory of Isomorphism ........................................................................... 107 Behavioural Gestalten ..................................................................................... 109 The Orders of Behaviour ................................................................................. 111 A Philosophy of Gestalt ................................................................................... 113 Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Gestalt .............................................................. 116 The Gestalt of Being ........................................................................................ 121 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 124 Merleau-Ponty’s Encounter with Saussure’s Linguistics: Misreading, Reinterpretation or Prolongation? ........................................................ 127 “Misreading” Saussure? .................................................................................. 130 “Language Is Not a Nomenclature” .............................................................. 134 The Social Nature of Language ...................................................................... 139 A Phenomenology of Speech? ........................................................................ 143 Ricœur and the Structuralist Reading .......................................................... 145 Language Is a River ......................................................................................... 147 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 149 Language and the Gendered Body: Butler’s Early Reading of Merleau-Ponty .......................................................................................... 151 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Genealogy of Objective Thinking ... 155 The Schneider Case ......................................................................................... 157 Butler’s Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty ................................................ 160 Schneider – A Feminist? ................................................................................. 164 Incarnated Effects of Discourse ..................................................................... 166 Toward a Gendered Body-Proper .................................................................. 167 Towards a Phenomenological Account of the Dancing Body: Merleau-Ponty and the Corporeal Schema ........................................ 171 The Living Body and Its World....................................................................... 173 The Habitual Body and the Corporeal Schema ........................................... 177 The Reflection of the Living Body.................................................................. 181 Bodily Signification and the Work of Art ...................................................... 184 The Spatiality of Dance ................................................................................... 187 References ................................................................................................ 191 Svensk sammanfattning ........................................................................ 207 Acknowledgements A great number of people have contributed in different ways to the writing of this thesis. First of all I want to express my sincere appreciation and thanks to my supervisors: Staffan Carlshamre has made detailed readings of the different versions of the texts, helping to track down all the abstruse wordings and giving a lot of sophisticated and valuable advice; Hans Ruin has patiently followed my work throughout the years and contributed with his vast philosophical knowledge and inspiration. Thank you both. Peter Pagin and Gunnar Svensson read the whole thesis in its near final version and gave cogent feedback, I am grateful for that and for their en- couragement throughout the project. Jon Buscall has been an indefatigable and perspicacious language check- er, mille mercis. (All remaining mistakes are of course my own.) I also owe thanks to the many people who have read and commented up- on different parts of the thesis at different stages; in particular, Sama Agahi, Gunnar Björnsson, Carl-Filip Brück, Laura Canis, Carl Cederberg, Véro- nique Fóti, Sheila Ghose, Eric Johannesson, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Lovisa Håkansson, Sören Häggqvist, Mattias Högström, Jim Jakobsson, Ivan Kasa, Johan Lindberg, Sara Packalén, Mikael Petterson, Nicolas Smith, Fredrika Spindler, Henning Strandin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Emma Wallin, Charlot- ta Weigelt and Karl Weigelt. Versions of the essays have been presented at various conferences around the US and in Europe – such as The Merleau- Ponty Circle, NOSP and SPEP – and benefited from comments from partici- pants. I also owe my warmest gratitude to Gustaf Arrhenius, Sara Heinämaa, Mikael Janvid, Paul Needham, Frans Svensson and Jonas Åkerman for their wise and amiable support over the years. One of the essays was developed under the framework of an interdiscipli- nary research project in 2010–2013 at The University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm (DOCH), founded by the Swedish Research Council. I worked together with Cecilia Roos, who directed the project, Katarina Elam, Chrysa Parkinson and Cecilia Sjöholm in a very stimulating and thought-provoking atmosphere where dance and philosophy intertwined in a fruitful way. The Sweden–America Foundation (Thanks to Scandinavia) partly funded my 15 month long stay in the Unites States, as a visiting scholar at the de- partment of philosophy, Pennsylvania State University. Thank you Charles Scott and John Stuhr for inviting me. I am
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