Gesture and Art in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty Author: Gustavo Gomez Perez Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104044 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2014 Copyright is held by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy GESTURE AND ART IN HEIDEGGER AND MERLEAU-PONTY a dissertation by GUSTAVO GOMEZ PEREZ submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 © copyright by GUSTAVO GOMEZ PEREZ 2014 Gesture and Art in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty Gustavo Gómez Pérez Dissertation director: Professor John Sallis Abstract: The present dissertation explores the motif of gesture and demonstrates that it encompasses the resonances between the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. My thesis specifically is that the notion of gesture articulates the problems of art and language, revealing fundamental convergences in the ways in which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty investigate a non-metaphysical approach to the sensible and question the limits of philosophy. I develop this argument by closely following Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Heidegger’s works in the lecture-notes from his courses at the Collège de France. I also rely heavily on Heidegger’s reflections on gesture and the body as they are depicted in the Zollikon seminars, considering that some of these reflections retrieve crucial arguments from Being and Time and that they bear a significant resemblance to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body. In this way, I elucidate what may be called the gestural character of the work of art and language, establishing structural connections between the texts of these two thinkers. This dissertation is divided into three parts. I devote the first part to the themes of the body and gesture and show that the concept of form and the problem of perception lead to questions concerning the possibilities of a phenomenology of the body. I conclude this part by arguing that, for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the notion of gesture corresponds to a phenomenological approach to the body as openness to the world and as an affective milieu. Departing from the arguments and comparisons delineated in the first part, in the second and third parts I examine separately the works of Heidegger and Merleau- Ponty in order to determine the settings of the notion of gesture within their respective approaches to art and language. The second part treats problems concerning the sensible character of the work of art, arguing that gestures perform a poetical disclosure of nature. In the third part I focus on questions of language and demonstrate that gestures unfold what could be called the logos of the sensible, which constitutes the primary source of language and meaning. I conclude by interpreting Heidegger’s work as a gestural philosophy that emphasizes the performative dimension of language, an emphasis that is missing from Merleau-Ponty’s work. Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….....iv Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Gesture, Art, and the Limits of Philosophy ........................................................................................... 1 Debate Concerning the Resonances between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty ................................. 6 The Problem of the Body and the Problem of the Truth of Being ................................................ 11 Methodological Considerations ............................................................................................................ 14 Outline of the Project ............................................................................................................................. 18 Part One: The Problem of the Body and Gesture ....................................................... 24 Chapter One: The Problem of the Body from Merleau-Ponty to Heidegger ...................... 25 Phenomenology and the Roots of the Body ....................................................................................... 25 Gestalt and Comportment: Beyond Materialism and Idealism ........................................................ 27 The Concept of Form and the Notion of Body Schema .................................................................. 30 Being and Time: Perception and Gestalt Theory ................................................................................... 34 The Body and the Limits of Being and Time ......................................................................................... 39 Chapter Two: The Problem of the Body in Heidegger ....................................................... 42 The Formulation of the Problem ......................................................................................................... 42 The Body: The “Most Difficult” Problem? ........................................................................................ 44 The Lived Body ....................................................................................................................................... 47 The Body as the Threshold between Being and Beings .................................................................... 50 The Body at the Limits of Phenomenology ........................................................................................ 52 From the Lived Body to Gesture ......................................................................................................... 58 Chapter Three: The Gestural Body ...................................................................................... 60 How to Talk about the Body: Preliminary Remarks on the Rapports between Gesture and Language ................................................................................................................................................... 60 Gesture and Expression: Differences with Husserl ........................................................................... 68 The Semantic Correlations between the terms “Gebärde” and “Gesture” ...................................... 71 Gesture, Region, Intentionality ............................................................................................................. 73 i Gesture, Comportment, and the Artistic Work ................................................................................. 76 Part Two: Gesture and Art ........................................................................................... 83 Chapter Four: Body, Gesture and Art in Heidegger’s Work ............................................... 84 Preliminary Remarks on the Body in Heidegger’s Reading of Nietzsche ...................................... 84 The Being of Things and the Work of Art ......................................................................................... 90 Createdness: A Contrast with Nietzsche ............................................................................................. 94 The Shining of the Earth and Its Limits .............................................................................................. 98 Gestalt and Contemplation in the Work of Art ............................................................................... 103 Between Being and Human Being: The Ambiguous Character of the Poetic Work ................. 108 The Foundational Gesture of the Work of Art ................................................................................ 110 The Poetic Gestures of the They ........................................................................................................ 116 Chapter Five: Nature, Art and Gesture in Merleau-Ponty ................................................. 121 The Earth and the Impossible Concept of Nature .......................................................................... 121 Body and Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl .............................................................. 125 Nature and Perceptual Faith: Preliminaries to the Ontology of the Flesh ................................... 134 Sensible Being and the Lived Body .................................................................................................... 138 Flesh and Gesture ................................................................................................................................. 147 Being and the Flesh: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Heidegger ............................. 157 Art and the Gestures of Being ............................................................................................................ 160 Part III: Gesture and Language ................................................................................. 172 Chapter Six: Gesture and Language in Heidegger ............................................................ 173 Language, Gesture and Expression .................................................................................................... 173 Gesture, Voice and Stimmung in the Orbit of Being and Time ........................................................ 182 Stimmung and Body: The Lectures on Logic from 1934 .................................................................. 187 From Stimmungen to Poetry: “Hölderlin and the Essence