Such, at the least, she maintains, is the critique aimed at Merleau-Ponty by Emmanual Levinas and Luce Irigaray. Yet Merleau-Ponty, she believes, will not be the right target of such a critique insofar as in his descriptions, the relation between self and different is at all times rendered by way of alterity and dispersion. In “Care for the Flesh: Gilligan, Merleau-Ponty, and Corporeal Styles,” David Brubaker immediately addresses and defends the ethics of care, making use of the idea of embodiment as flesh to justify it. Following from this, the subjective injunction to care for the material basis of one’s personal distinctive existence may then be universalized as well, making attainable the switch of care for self to care for others, inside the realm of visibility and tactility. As Shannon Sullivan has noted, these include “the primacy given to bodily existence; the eye paid to the pre-reflective facets of human life, including its indeterminacy and ambiguity; the importance of state of affairs and situatedness for understanding our engagement with/on this planet; and the essential function that habit plays in corporeal existence,” all inside the context of creating sense of lived experience in an intersubjective world of shared meaning. The scope of those chapters confirms that numerous elements of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy are valued by feminist theory.
Nevertheless, if there is far here for feminist theories to build on, there could even be controversies giving rise to a name for brand spanking new conceptions of human existence. It may be the case, then, that the way forward for feminist interpretations of Merleau-Ponty as well as the working out of feminist questions relating to embodiment shall be situated precisely right here on this nexus between generality and specificity, between the construction of nameless, prepersonal, embodied existence and that of gendered, personal life in order to find some structure which may account for both whereas privileging neither. Carol Gilligan’s care ethics is well-known for its empirically gendered “different voice,” which strikes away from the frameworks of disinterested reason and impartial justice and toward the concreteness of noticing the non-public wants of distinctive individuals. Flesh, it’s argued, entails most of the traits and relations of care insofar because it first serves as a subjective or private precept of the self-affirmation of one’s own distinctive existence, which is then universalized to the flesh of the hand grasping one’s personal and so to all. Brubaker argues that the ethics of care demands a private principle that however specifies a repeatable context associated with the concrete individuality of every moral agent.
If gender and care are causally related either to the social milieu or to biological factors, then care can’t be a common precept of morality upholding private autonomy. Several of the contributors to this volume argue that the idea of flesh describes the final atmosphere of intersubjective communication previous to cognition and so previous to social or gender stratification. Certainly, as has been stated above, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the physique is that as embodied, topics inhabit an anonymous or prepersonal realm, later referred to as flesh, which includes both the flesh of bodies and the flesh of the world. Ultimately, Brubaker concludes, the moral perspective of care for the flesh is not the same as an empirical understanding of the structural relations that trigger social and economic inequality in society. This same interpretation of the chiasm guides Doyle’s studying of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, whose protagonist suffers immeasurably from a life in which the very persons, objects, and events that open the world to her also make doable her abject condition.
Ann Murphy captures this identical tension in her examination of the want to unveil a “wild” or originary experience and the sedimentation of language and culture in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. What’s at stake here is the concern that if Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can’t sufficiently theorize alterity, it’s neither politically nor ethically viable. Here is a well known instance from pea plants that helps understand how pairs of genes can interact. The relation between morality and freedom is the topic of Johanna Oksala’s chapter, “Female Freedom: Can the Lived Body Be Emancipated? I tried to determine some order in the image which at first appeared to me utterly incoherent; in each case, man put himself forward as the subject and thought of the lady as an object, as the other. And so it’s that a French philosopher selected to stand by her man slightly than to claim her personal mental inheritance as a rogue free agent. I’d stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners’ retailers, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops – red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me.
