The theatre of a certain living pulsation: A study of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy

I undertake two tasks in my dissertation. One is to contend against certain postmodern accounts of meaning and the nature of personal existence as effects of discourse. I examine in some detail Judith Butler's emphasis on the performative character of language in contrast with its descriptive function as one way to circumvent the difficulty of explaining somatic response-ability while also preserving the socially constructed character of subjectivity.

My second task is the critical development of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical account of the chiasm through a phenomenology of art dance. I argue in favour of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical concept of presence as a fully embodied, temporal modality of existence. Using a phenomenological methodology, I claim that the self-world relationship is a temporal, fully embodied knitting of the person into existence. I describe this temporal knitting as rhythm and claim that, as a phenomenon of human experience, it is phenomenologically accessible to philosophy

By developing Merleau-Ponty's project, I make explicit his alternative to prevailing intellectualist accounts of subject identity which neglect the relevance of embodiment not only to their explanations of being, but also to philosophy's self-understanding.