Quotes About Maurice Merleau-Ponty

There is no longer: consciousness, projections, In itself or object. there are fields in intersection, in a field of fields.

Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.

Esthesiological body and erotic body in a relation of intercorporeality in the biosphere with all animality and by introjection & projection.

The 'invisible world': it is given originally as non-Urprasentierbar, as the other is in his body given originally as absent--as a divergence, as a transcendence.

The body is a sensible thing, the movements of which form a...diacritical system...this system is the keystone of the world, or inversely, has the keystone in the world and opens onto the world.

Lebenswely = ...wild being and wild mind--'mute' experience that must itself speak.

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

If Nature is not an object of thought, that is, a simple correlate of a thought, it is decidedly not a subject either, and for the same reason: its opacity, its enveloping. It is an obscure principle.

Ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. Ambiguity is 'good'...In truth, we have experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience. These two faces of ambiguity are abstractions. The absolute is that which is between the two: the transformation of one into the other. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.

For us a noncommunist left is this double position, posing social problems in terms of struggle and refusing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Philosophy seeks to be philosophy while remaining non-philosophy, i.e. a 'negative philosophy' (in the sense of 'negative theology'). 'Negative philosophy' has access to the absolute, not as 'beyond,' as a positive second order, but another order which must be on this side, the double, inaccessible without being passed through. True philosophy scoffs at philosophy; true philosophy is a-philosophical. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel

In the last analysis, phenomenology is neither a materialism nor a philosophy of mind. It's proper work is to unveil the pre-theoretical layer on which both of these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone beyond.

The moment that one understands time as chiasm then past and present are Ineinaander, each enveloping-enveloped--and that itself is the flesh.

The world is originally perceived as a total, if not complete, organization where effects are still bound up with causes before all intellectual representation...In perception causality is elucidated.