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The Free Body. Notes on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Movement

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2015

Abstract

It is precisely through movement that the subject inscribes himself into the world and becomes visible to others. The subject is a movement directed to the outside, that is to say, the subject is desire.

The desire is the "tension" towards the "extrême dehors" (Edmund Husserl) that we call the world. In all of his works Maurice Merleau-Ponty reaffirms, without thematizing it, a conception of life as movement, and of body as action and desire: man is "un certain manque de...".

In other words, it is the distance between myself and the absent that drives me to move, to annul the distance through motion. Thus life is nothing but the unfinished act of moving into space and thereby creating space - the space in which we, as desire and movement, encounter both others and the world.

As the action is the way one appears to another, every relationship is based on appearing. In short, life is the movement that leads us towards the world and coincides with our desire to make it appear.