KnowledgeInSight
Phenomenology for Consciousness Studies
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Course 3 · Module 3

Merleau-Ponty: Others, Language, and Art

Follow Merleau-Ponty's body-subject into our relations with other people, language, and art, and into its uses in critical phenomenology. You'll learn how we perceive others through intercorporeality, why speech is a kind of bodily gesture, what painting reveals about vision and expression, and how Fanon, Young, and Ahmed extend these ideas to race, gender, and orientation. These accounts shape current research on social cognition, language, aesthetics, and the lived experience of social difference.

Module objectives

  • Explain Merleau-Ponty's account of intercorporeality and the perception of other people
  • Describe speech as gesture and the distinction between speaking speech and spoken speech
  • Interpret Merleau-Ponty's essays on painting as an account of expression and vision
  • Evaluate critical phenomenology's extensions of the body-subject to gender and race

4 lessons · 37 items · 4h 42m

Lessons

  1. Lesson 1 Others, Language, Art: Intercorporeality This lesson explains Merleau-Ponty's account of how we perceive other people. We don't infer minds from behavior; one body-subject responds directly to another, a relation later… 61111h 3m
  2. Lesson 2 Others, Language, Art: Speech as Gesture This lesson explains Merleau-Ponty's account of the body as expressive, from its sexual being to speech, and his claim that speaking doesn't translate ready-made thoughts but… 61111h 3m
  3. Lesson 3 Others, Language, Art: Painting and Vision This lesson interprets Merleau-Ponty's essays on painting, "Cézanne's Doubt," "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," and "Eye and Mind," as accounts of how vision and… 61111h 3m
  4. Lesson 4 Others, Language, Art: Critical Phenomenology This lesson examines how Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young, and Sara Ahmed extend and challenge Merleau-Ponty's body-subject to show how race, gender, and orientation shape lived… 611111h 33m

Further reading

These are the primary texts behind the ideas in this module. Reading them is optional: explore the ones that match your interests. You don't need them to complete the module, which explains their key ideas. Each entry gives the recommended edition, free options where they exist, and where to buy or borrow it.

  • Ahmed, Sara. 2006a. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Module focus: Introduction and chapter 1, "Orientations toward Objects"
    • Free: None for the book; see Ahmed 2006b for a free article version of its argument.
    • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Ahmed, Sara. 2006b. "Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 (4): 543–74.
  • Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
    • Module focus: Chapter 5, "The Lived Experience of the Black Man"
    • Free: None. Chapter 5 is titled "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" (Markmann's 1967 translation: "The Fact of Blackness").
    • Publisher: Grove Atlantic
    • Free companion: SEP, "Frantz Fanon" (Drabinski), §1
  • Johnson, Galen A., ed. 1993. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Translation edited by Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1960) 1964. Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
    • Module focus: "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" and "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (optional if you have the Aesthetics Reader)
    • Free: None.
    • Publisher: Northwestern University Press
  • Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, eds. 2019. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
  • Young, Iris Marion. (1980) 2005. "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality." In On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.