From Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merlo-Ponty to a Critical Phenomenon of Physical Otherness

From its very earliest articulations, French existential phenomenology has proven a productive

framework for thinking about the body, other subjects, and 'bodily otherness'. With L' tre et

le n ant and the Ph nom nologie de la perception, its principal exponents, Jean-Paul Sartre

and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, laid the groundwork for much of the discussion of these themes

in philosophy and the human sciences in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arguably, in

fact, their existential phenomenologies have made the most profound and lasting impression of

any modern intellectual tradition upon such discussions, both within and without France. In a

sense, they acted as an inspiration for those who came after them. This is perhaps most true of

Merleau-Ponty, who some regard as "un passeur essentiel, entre la philosophie transcendantale

du d but de si cle et les d cennies structuraliste et post-structuraliste".1 Indeed, scholars have

suggested that at least some of the major theories put forward by French thinkers such as Paul

Ricoeur, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault should be considered an effective prolongation

of the Merleau-Pontian project.2 In another sense, however, their most significant contribution

is to be found in existentialism's emergence as the negative term in the dialectical evolution of

structuralist and post-structuralist thought. Put simply, the value of existential phenomenology

resides as much in its refutation, as in its uptake, if not even more so, notably in Sartre's case.

Many French philosophers - those above, but also Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, among

others - followed parallel trajectories from an appreciation to a condemnation of existential

phenomenology, turning away from and against Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the constitution

of their own thought.