Rereading the Later Merleau-Ponty in the Light of his Unpublished Work
Résumé
Access to a large number of unpublished manuscripts allows us to follow the continuity of Merleau-Ponty’s thought from his first to his last writings, to uncover its double critical constitution, anti-Cartesian and anti-Sartrean, and to understand the status of this philosophy of the flesh as it establishes itself as ontology. This philosophy is geared toward a never-abandoned methodological challenge to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body, the challenge of thinking a corporeity which is always already, in the very principle of its animation, intercorporeity. Through his continual pursuit of a phenomenology of perception, its insistence on the motifs of depth, the inexhaustible, the invisible, and incompletion, Merleau-Ponty’s carnal ontology proceeds in the discovery of the common negativity of human beings and the world, of myself and others, which affects its conception of being.