Dinesh's photos with the keyword: Merleau Ponty

In which Merleau-Ponty has a chapter himself. plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty

The requisite discussion of the relationship of the reader to the text could consist of a development of some key points of Sartre's study of literature. For example, Sartre contends in 'What is Literature?' that reading is neither a mechanical registering nor an impartial contemplation of marks printed on paper. Thus if one were to read each word of a text separately, its meaning would fail to emerge because the latter is not the sum of words but rather, the organic whole. Writing and reading are dialectically correlated and constitute the two moments of what is effectively a joint venture. In seeking to disclose some truth, the prose-writers embarks on a project of communication which requires the reader's participation for its realization. Only writing and reading together can bring it about that something as revealed, as a revelation is only such for someone. Consequently, the writer implicitly appeals for the reader's collaboration. In order to comply, the reader must go beyond a merely 'abstract consciousness' or what the writer is saying. Reading is therefore 'directed creation'; but the reader is free to reject the writer's appeal by refusing to take part. Such a refusal prevents the text from actually becoming a disclosure -- at least as far as that reader is concerned. As Sartre puts it, 'to write is thus both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader.

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Space has traditionally been considered to be a form generated by the subject as the condition of there being any objects at all; or, on the realist side, that it has been regarded as a giant container in which things are located. Merleau-Ponty rejected both these traditional conceptions of space and described the genesis of space in the dynamic pre-objective, pre-logical interaction of body-subject of the wold. The foundation or ground of spatiality therefore shifted from the constituting activity of a transcendental ego posited by intellectualism, to the reciprocal hold of the phenomenal body and world as described by phenomenology. It emerged that objects are neither purely constructed by the subject nor simply encountered as absolutely independent existents. Rather, there is a genesis of objectivity in an anonymous body-world dialectic, such that objectivity comes to be only as orientated being for a bodily gaze or 'grip'. In short we saw that lived spatiality is inseparable from objectivity, since such spatiality is the means whereby we recognize and are aware of objects as objects. We saw that objects are always objects for us -- but that this 'us' refers first and foremost to the body as natural self and subject of perception, through whose activity objects come into being.